This teacher in Wisconsin disagrees.
When your class sizes grow larger, it’s personal.
When the classroom lacks the resources it needs, it’s personal.
When this teacher’s family must make do with less, it’s personal.
When the governor takes advice from businessmen but not educators about how to fix schools, it’s personal.
It just isn’t personal for Governor Walker.
Have you ever wondered what would happen if a state offered vouchers to more than half its students?
The Louisiana Department of Education just learned the answer to that question. It made the offer to 450,000 students. Not quite 9,000 students applied to enroll in the voucher program that begins in September. That’s 2% of the eligibles.
That means that 98% of the 450,000 students who were eligible declined to apply.
Not exactly a stampede for the exits. No big rush to enroll in the little church schools that are supposedly better than the public schools that John White supervises.
The State Department of Education tried to spin it differently. At first, they said that 10,000 applied, which far exceeded their expectations. But it turned out that 1,000 of the applicants already had vouchers in New Orleans. As usual, they were playing the media for headlines.
To date, the nonpublic schools of the state have offered to enroll only 5,000 students, so some decisions will have to be made about how to handle the mismatch.
Meanwhile Commissioner White announced some loose regulations about enrollment and financial reporting that will apply to the voucher schools, but nothing about academic expectations. According to the story in the New Orleans Times-Picayune, the statewide voucher program is supposed to be modeled along the lines of a New Orleans pilot program that has been running since 2008, with varied results:
“As originally envisioned in legislation championed by Gov. Bobby Jindal, the statewide expansion of vouchers this year would have mirrored the pilot program that’s been up and running in New Orleans since 2008. In the pilot, students on vouchers take the state’s LEAP exams, but, unlike charter schools, they don’t face any particular consequences for poor results. Test scores at the roughly two dozen private schools already in the program have varied widely.”
It is not clear whether the private and religious schools that accept public money will be required to meet academic standards set by the state, whether the voucher students will take the state tests, and whether there will be “any particular consequences for poor results.”
One of the prime movers of the “reform” movement in Louisiana, Leslie Jacobs, complained a year ago that the voucher schools in New Orleans were getting poor results. She called for performance standards for the voucher schools. But it doesn’t seem likely to happen on a state level. The governor and the commissioner don’t want to interfere in the private schools, other than to send money. They want to hold the public schools accountable to standards, but allow students leave for nonpublic schools with no standards or accountability.
It is also unclear whether the state will expect the voucher schools to teach modern science or will be content to see thousands of public school students taught Creationism.
In a close vote, teachers at the Green Dot charter school chain endorsed a merit pay plan tied to test scores.
Although test score-based evaluation is highly unstable, the teachers decided to go along in hopes of qualifying for a bonus.
A teacher rated effective one year may be rated ineffective the next year, because there are so many factors beyond the teacher’s control that affect student scores.
The National Council on Teacher Quality thought this was a good move. So did Green Dot CEO, Marco Petruzzi, who previously worked as a management consultant at McKinsey and Bain Capital.
Some teachers were not happy with the decision. Some were suspended or fired for fighting it. Students joined with teachers to protest, and the administration said the whole thing was blown out of proportion.
Scholars have warned that this method of evaluating teachers encourages teaching to the test, narrowing the curriculum, and other negative behaviors. Teachers who teach special education or English language learners will see the smallest gains. If these groups are underrepresented at Green Dot, as they are in many charter schools, that won’t be a problem.
The city of New York appealed to a judge to overturn the the decision of an independent arbitrator, who said that the city should keep open 24 schools it planned to close.
After only 40 minutes, the judge said that she would not enjoin the arbitrator’s ruling.
This means, for now, that the city must reinstate the hundreds or thousands of teachers who were fired at the “turnaround” schools.
If you read the article, you will see that the city is not at all happy and is mulling other ways to get free of the “binding” arbitration.
A little while ago, I posted a statement by a mother of a high-functioning autistic child who said she did not want him to be in a cyber charter; she wanted him to be in a school to have contact with other children and to learn social skills.
Bear in mind that cybercharters have a record for getting terrible academic results, in terms of test scores, retention, and graduation rates. The fact that most of them are for-profit makes it even worse because their sponsors are profiting as children don’t learn. This is one of the reforms of our day that is an unalloyed scam.
I mentioned that I have gotten emails from boosters of e-learning who claim that cyber charters are especially valuable for children who are sick or have disabilities. When K12, the behemoth of the for-profit online learning world, was founded, Bill Bennett said it would be especially valuable for children who had been bullied.
Here is another good comment on this topic:
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The question often arises: Who are cyber charters for?
I have gotten emails from people in the industry saying that children with special needs should be home in front of a computer, where a parent can help them.
Or they say that cyber charters are good for sick children.
Certainly they are attractive to home schoolers, who suddenly become eligible for state tuition money (which is paid to the corporation, not the student or family).
But this mother disagrees about who should stay at home to be educated in front of a computer:
| As the mom of a teenager with high-functioning autism, I can tell you that you are absolutely wrong that cyberschool would be good for children on the spectrum. What they need most of all is to strengthen their social skills and you certainly can’t do that sitting all by yourself in front of a computer screen. |
A while back, a reader wrote that we should try to be like Sweden, because it is among the “best in the world.” Sweden now has for-profit schools and choice, so presumably the choice-based reforms of our day will make us more like Sweden.
I pointed out that on the latest PISA, Sweden does not outperform the U.S.. Its ranking are virtually identical, despite the fact that Sweden does not have our high rate of child poverty, nor our demographic diversity.
A reader commented today:
| Facts: Sweden’s education system gained high quality outcomes as an almost completely public system. Sweden has steadily dropped in education output rankings since introducing the public/private hybrid. |
There is one fact about America today that has not been mentioned in the political debates: nearly 25% of our nation’s children are growing up in poverty.
This nation leads the advanced nations of the world in child poverty.
Two articles today by conservative writers suggest that some hint of realism may enter the national discourse.
David Brooks wrote a column today expressing alarm about the growing inequality of opportunity among children, as affluent parents invest more in their children and lower-income parents have not. There is some hope here that Brooks is beginning to think that the large and widening opportunity gap is a social problem, not a result of bad teachers and bad schools. He concludes by saying that liberals are going to have to voice more support for two-parent families, as though their not voicing support affected the behavior of lower-income families. More impressively, he concluded that “Conservatives are going to have to be willing to accept tax increases or benefit cuts so that more can be spent on the earned-income tax credit and other programs that benefit the working class.” Whether that will be adequate to stem the rising tide of poverty is unclear, but it’s a start.
Minutes after I read Brooks’ column, I received a post by Mike Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, in which he questions whether school reform would have much affect on social mobility. He begins thus: “Voucher supporters, charter advocates, standards nuts, teacher-effectiveness fanatics—we all fundamentally believe that fantastic schools staffed by dedicated educators can help poor kids climb out of poverty and compete with their affluent peers.” But then Charles Murray came to the Fordham offices and told them that it wasn’t happening and it wasn’t going to happen.
Murray told the assembled listeners that ““The better the meritocracy, the more efficiently you identify and reward talent, the faster that social mobility will decline over time.” According to Petrilli, the audience was taken aback.
The theory behind the current school reform movement is that by pushing school choice, there will be greater social mobility and more poor kids will enter Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. Murray pointed out that the doors of the elite institution are now wide open to highly talented students from “backwaters,” more than ever. But that does not change his view that class lines are hardening.
The point that I think Mike Petrilli and other reformers don’t get is that the pie is not expanding and the division of the “pie” is more unequal than ever, and nothing they do now to “reform” schools will change those facts. There may be more poor kids gaining admission to college, but the number and proportion of poor kids is not declining. It is increasing.
And this is where Brooks and Petrilli and Murray converge. The opportunity gap is growing; if we do nothing, it will continue to grow. Social mobility is declining as more tests and hurdles limit access to the top. Vouchers and charters may (or may not) boost a few more children up the ladder, but the distribution of rich and poor remains unchanged. The meritocracy, as Murray put it, gets “better” and consequently less welcoming to those without the high test scores and privileges of the elite.
As we Race to the Top, the number of places as the Top does not increase. And the proportion of children in poverty continues to rise. These are not school problems. Brooks and Murray are right to recognize that our society is hardening its social and economic arteries. The rich are getting richer, the poor are growing more numerous, the middle class is shrinking, and the working class is losing hope.
This is not a formula of which we can be proud. It demands new social policies. Who is thinking about where we go from here?
Peter DeWitt, who is an elementary school principal in upstate New York, got very ticked off by a column written by David Brooks in the New York Times.
DeWitt has written a post in which he takes Brooks to task for his confusion and ignorance about schools today. He sees it as just another example of school-bashing by an uninformed critic, the sort that is making teachers and administrators feel shell-shocked.
Brooks blames schools for being too feminized, too collaborative, too sensitive, too eager to medicate rambunctious boys, and thereby turning boys off. Boys are falling behind girls in academic achievement, he says, because of the schools.
Boys need competition, says Brooks, as though the testing regime is not competitive enough for him. Boys need boot camp, he says, echoing one of the themes of the “no excuses” wing of the charter school movement, which Brooks admires. Boys need military virtues, he says, not more environmentalist sentimentality.
I have no idea what Brooks’ evidence is, but I suspect he is just spouting off. He recently returned from the Aspen Ideas Festival, and he seems to be recycling some opinion he picked up there.
Brooks is not a tough guy, at least not in appearance, and he appears to be the sort of kid who would have been bullied by the sort of boys he thinks we need more of.
Judging from our nation’s performance on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, I don’t think our society is in any danger of being too soft and too sensitive. We appear to have an adequate supply of warriors to fight all over the world.
What in the world is David Brooks worried about?
Judge Tim Kelly turned down a request to block the implementation of Governor Bobby Jindal’s voucher plan.
The judge said that Commissioner John White and Commissioner of Administration both said in affidavits that an injection would blow a $3.4 billion deficit in the state budget. So the case will proceed as will the vouchers, charters, cyber charters and every other kind of raid on the minimum foundation funding for Louisiana public schools.
According to local sources, Judge Kelly just happens to be the spouse of the former Commissioner of Administration (Angele Davis) in the Jindal administration.
Lucky break for the Governor!
Diane Ravitch's blog 