Below is a letter to the editor published in the Akron Beacon Journal by a long-term suburban board of education member.
February 1, 2014 – 10:54 PM
“High cost of choice.”
In response to the Jan. 30 letter “Thanks for the choice,” I’m pleased that the writer’s children “thrive in the home-school environment.”
I firmly believe, however, that most young people would benefit more from interacting with a variety of students, educationally and socially.
“Choice” sounds wonderful, but that depends on who’s paying for it – and there’s no question that our system of truly public schools is footing much of the bill for the largely unproductive charter-school program.
Whether providing instruction online or face-to-face, Ohio’s so-called community schools are seldom operated by members of the local community.
Moreover, these supposedly public schools are distinctly private where finances are concerned. Most are productive only when it comes to profits. Meanwhile, the real public school systems see far too much of their limited resources diverted to a failed and misleading experiment of “choice.”
Richard V. Levin
Fairlawn
Editor’s note: The writer is a 20-year member of the Copley-Fairlawn Board of Education.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Well, what we ran into in Ohio is what everyone will run into under ed reform. Who defines a “great school”?
Parents in our huge (and very profitable) cynercharter sector claim these are “great schools”, because they chose them. They also claim these are “community schools” – Ohio rebranded charters and named them ‘community schools’.
We now have vouchers in Ohio, and I live here so I can tell you private schools are not necessarily “great schools” (if I use the ed reformer definition, which is test scores) and we’re now funding private schools with public money too.
In the meantime, as the writer notes, our public schools have been completely abandoned as no longer valuable.
The end result of this seems inevitable to me. We’ll have a system of weakened and maligned publicly-run schools that are in worse shape than when ed reformers arrived, and we’ll also be funding a privately-run charter system that is no more “great” than the public system it replaced and a private voucher system of undetermined value.
No one wins. There will be individual “winners” in the charter and private school sectors, but those will be more than eclipsed by the damage they’ve done to public schools. No net gain.
The fact is ed reformers didn’t value the public schools that were here when this started. It’s easy to throw something away if you don’t value it.
My advice would be to ask every state and school district hire “do you value our existing public schools? What do you value about them?” We’re handing existing public schools to people who see no value in them. They’ve done nothing to improve existing public schools, because public schools were never the focus. They’re still not the focus.
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You know, President Obama doesn’t see any value to a local publicly-funded run like mine other than test scores. He was asked why he opposes vouchers (which are the logical and inevitable result of his ed reform policies) and he said because vouchers “don’t work”.
But people don’t “choose” the Catholic school here based on that value. If they did, it would be empty, because the public schools here outperform the Catholic school on that measure. I assume people use vouchers for religious schools based on some other measure than that of President Obama. They value the school for some other reason.
Using his logic, there’s no reason to retain or value publicly-run schools at all. We simply have to create or find schools with higher test scores, and give everyone a “choice” between those schools.
The whole basis of ed reform seems to me to be flawed. It doesn’t hang together. The fact is we CAN’T have it all. We can’t have “choice” AND “great schools” because existing public schools are damaged under ed reform policies, making them “less great” and people will “choose” schools that are NOT great.
It was a fairy tale, a market system where everyone wins, no one loses! That’s just a fantasy. It was never going to work out like that. I can say that because public schools are the big losers in Ohio under “reform”. No one cared how any of this affected our existing public schools. There wasn’t any consideration given to that at all.
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The Catch 22 on choice is that many parents who send their children to parochial or private schools, or home school, have long claimed that they pay twice for “educational services.” They pay for the children of other people to send their children to public school, and again for their “choice” to opt out of the public school system. Of course, the tax base for public schools has eroded by: a) various abatements awarded to businesses (in theory these boost the economy and ultimately increase the taxes raised) and b) by vouchers, which directly pay for “education service providers other than public schools. The promotors of choice routinely subvert the meaning of public calling public schools “government-run.” Unfortunately, that has also become an accurate phrase by virtue of federal efforts to micro-manage schools, teachers, and students. There are more of these Catch 22s lurking for everyone who is working to improve and preserve a great institution, one essential for a democracy.
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I’ve noticed “privately-run” schools (charters, vouchers) versus “publicly-run” (public schools) has caught on in Ohio media. That’s good. It’s accurate.
There is no other sector where “publicly-funded” is conflated with “public” other than in ed reform. The two things are not the same.
The health insurance exchange under health reform has some nonprofit insurance companies. They’re “mutuals” which is a kind of co-op. No one in their right mind would call those companies “public” yet that’s exactly what ed reformers are doing with charter schools.
Publicly-funded doesn’t mean “public” and it NEVER has. If it did, every defense contractor would be deemed “public”.
They’ve taken the word “public” and rendered it meaningless. Now it means “publicly-funded” but ONLY in K12 education. This redefinition of “public” doesn’t apply anywhere else other than in ed reform.
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Good comment. I hadn’t thought about it that way, but you’re right. Let’s call them what they really are: taxpayer-funded private schools.
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The other thing about ed reform in Ohio is, ed reformers consider it a huge success. The head of the charter school sector in this state came from K12, the failing cybercharter school corporation.
This is an interview with him. There is absolutely no recognition that charters don’t “outperform” public schools in this state, nor is there any recognition that ed reformers like him have harmed the existing public schools in this state.
That’s the level of disconnect we’re talking about, the level of pure fantasy. He thinks he’s a big success. That his work has harmed every public school kid in the state simply doesn’t register, and remember, public schools take the VAST majority of kids. It’s 1.7 million versus 1k.
Existing public schools simply aren’t a concern of his. It’s as our schools don’t exist.
http://stateimpact.npr.org/ohio/2013/12/05/why-ohios-early-charter-school-era-was-kind-of-like-medieval-times/
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I only can wonder why “choice” advocates eschew freedom and democracy. After all, isn’t an elected school board more American than a Wall Street firm to run our schools? If the choice crowd really wants to empower parents, then why not housing vouchers so people can live in any district?
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They prefer to “help” those people from afar not actually live near the commoners. It’s noble to talk about at cocktail parties. See..we’re helping some of them.
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In the State of the Union the President said that in a republic like ours “it is of the greatest importance that all should be possessed of education and intelligence enough to cast a vote with a right understanding of its meaning…” Accordingly he proposed a constitutional amendment making it the “duty of every state to establish and forever maintain free public schools adequate to the education of all children”, and forbidding both religious teaching in the public schools and tax support of religious schools.
No, you didn’t hear that from Pres. Obama this year; that was Pres. Grant on Dec. 7, 1875.
I will grant that the Republicans have done everything in their power to stop Obama from doing what he could for the poor and oppressed in this country, but he still has the bully pulpit and his greatest failure, it seems to me, is in not listening to Bernie Sanders when he told him 5 years ago, be a Franklin Roosevelt, not a Bill Clinton. Obama didn’t listen, and he has turned out to be not even a U.S. Grant, let alone a Clinton. When it comes to public education, support for teachers, support for unions, support for our students, he is a sellout.
Judging by Pres. Grant’s sentiments from 1875 we have come a long way since then but not always in the right direction.
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If one says the only reason they don’t support vouchers is because they “don’t work”, as President Obama did in an interview, then I have to conclude that one doesn’t see any democratic value at all to publicly-run schools.
Arne Duncan pushes the same theme. Duncan says parents “don’t care” whether their schools are privately-run or publicly-run. Now, I don’t think that’s accurate. I think they DO care whether they lose publicly-run local schools. But this is what he believes.
They’re not assigning any value to “public schools” other than test scores.
This is a fundamental difference in how they, and we, value publicly-run schools. It isn’t minor.
Under the Obama/Duncan theory, we could close down all the publicly-run schools and simply have a system of privately-run charters and vouchers. There would be no difference to them. This isn’t a small difference of opinion. It’s a yawning gap.
We value publicly-run schools for reasons other than test scores. They don’t. They can finesse this all they want with the “great schools!” nonsense, but that isn’t going to cut it.
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Akron and the Copley-Fairlawn (suburban) district are great example of the differences in “public” education. According to Ohio Department of Education report cards:
Akron has 100% “economic disadvantaged” students, Copley has 21%
Akron has 39% white, non/hispanic, Copley has 73%
Akron has 45.9% African American, Copley has 15.4%
These are two different worlds. I salute urban educators who are trying very hard to help inner city youngsters, whether through district or charter public schools.
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So what does this have to do with ed reformers weakening public schools and setting up a second system of charters that don’t “perform” any better than the schools they replaced?
How does that benefit kids in Akron or anywhere else?
This was sold in Ohio as “improving public schools”. It was not sold as “opening charter schools”. We have a public system. Whatever the charter operators do affects the rest of the kids in the system.
If the objective was to set up a separate system, with absolutely no regard for the effect of this “reform” on the existing public schools that serve 90% of children, it should have been sold like that. It wasn’t.
What is the benefit of ed reform for existing public schools? We’ve had it for a decade now. Our public schools are weaker than when it began.
You know, Joe, the writer is an advocate. That’s his job. He’s paid by the public to maintain and improve the public schools he runs. He’s not an “agnostic” or a “relinquisher”. I for one am glad that those schools have him, because goodness knows ed reformers aren’t advocating for public schools in this state. They could care less what happens to these districts under their policies. It’s ALL charters and vouchers.
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Let’s be clear that the writer represents a district that serves relatively few low income students or students of color.
There are a variety of people advocating for better public schools in Ohio not just school boards, supts, teacher unions and Fordham.
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I laugh too, when the national ed reform lobbyists parachute into our statehouse and set this up as “sainted ed reformers versus evil teachers unions”.
There are two groups who advocate on behalf of public schools in this state under ed reform leadership. One of them is the local, elected school board and the other is teachers unions.
It’s not a real hard decision for me, choosing between the evil unions and the saintly Fordham Institute. The Fordham folks have HARMED our rural district, and the unions have DEFENDED our rural district. I’m not an idiot. I’m going with the group who value my public schools and advocate in Columbus on behalf of our local schools, and that isn’t ed reformers.
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Chiara, am I correct that you are an attorney and practice in the Bryan, Ohio district?
http://www.dugganlawoffice.com/Welcome.html You’ve alluded to this several times. If I’m mistaken I apologize.
That district is (90.8)% white.
That’s of course your choice. But I think low income and families of color also should have choices too.
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The choice that low income families and families of color repeatedly demonstrate that they want is the choice for a good, local, public (not charter) school. Parents in Chicago, Philly, New Orleans, Detroit and other urban districts across the country have turned out in droves to support/save public education. The only ones who show up in favor of charter schools are charter school parents who are required to do that kind of work and who are usually found reading identical printed statements that they can’t translate into their own words.
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Charter parents all over the country have showed up at state legislatures – not because they are required to do so but because they value what’s happening with their kids.
The same is true of some district parents.
Joe
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WOW. This ALMOST restores my faith in boards of education. So VERY glad that there is at least one who has his/her head on straight.
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Here’s some people in North Carolina who supported ed reform until they realized what it meant for existing public schools:
“The Republican education agenda also violates the constitutional mandate for a “uniform system of free public schools.” It embraces untrammeled expansion of charters with no concern for their effect on existing schools or minimum standards of accountability. Moreover, their actions will put millions of public dollars into the pockets of entrepreneurs whose ultimate responsibility is to a bottom line, not to quality education. The new voucher program – marketed as “Opportunity Scholarships” – diverts much-needed money from traditional public schools to largely unaccountable private schools, a majority of which are religious.”
This is exactly how ed reform has played out IN REALITY in Ohio, and it will happen in your state, too.
Pay particular attention to “no concern for existing public schools”
That’s the part you weren’t told when you were sold this snake oil. Get ready for a 100% charter/voucher agenda, North Carolina, because that’s what happens when you hire “agnostics” and “relinquishers” to run public schools.
Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/2014/02/08/3600562/in-nc-a-gop-assault-with-intent.html?utm_content=buffer25ecb&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer#storylink=cpy
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Colleagues and friends…please watch the video link below to see what we in LA are up against. Deasy, the LAUSD Superintendent, who is supposed to work with and support his teachers, expresses his real agenda while testifying for the plaintiffs in the landmark Vergara case…and then, being interviewed by the PBS reporter, he shows his real colors and supports the charter schools he is embedding at record pace.
http://video.pbssocal.org/video/2365173174/
This photo op event staged at Union Station, like the one staged in front of the Ed building before his contract renewal last Oct. 29, features all the carfed actors who again were probably bussed in for this show. The yellow scarves took the place of the yellow daisies…as in Deasy/daisy, but the Broad/Deasy lawyers hang out in the background.
Ellen Lubic
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Joe Nathan
February 9, 2014 at 2:37 pm
Chiara, am I correct that you are an attorney and practice in the Bryan, Ohio district?
http://www.dugganlawoffice.com/Welcome.html You’ve alluded to this several times. If I’m mistaken I apologize.
That district is (90.8)% white.
That’s of course your choice. But I think low income and families of color also should have choices too.”
The district isn’t high income, Joe. It’s rural and working class. All our kids go to public school together, the lawyers kids and the Wal Mart workers kids. That’s how rural districts work. I’m not clear on what “choice” you’re talking about.
You shouldn’t make assumptions about income based on race, by the way. Your assumption that because it’s majority white it’s also high income is wrong.
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Funding for Joe Nathan’s center for school change:
Funding for the Center has come from Cargill, Gates, Annenberg, Blandin, General Mills, St. Paul, St. Paul Companies, Peters, Minneapolis, TCF, Joyce, Bradley and Rockefeller Foundations, the U.S. Department of Education, the University of Minnesota, the Minnesota Initiative Funds, Best Buy, Pohlad, and Wallin Foundation.
Do We Need More Heroes?
by JOHN MERROW on 25. SEP, 2013 in 2013 BLOGS
http://takingnote.learningmatters.tv/?p=6556
Joe Nathan 25. Sep, 2013 at 5:04 pm
Well done, John.
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I’m fine with Joe Nathan advocating for “choice”, no matter who is paying him. The difference is, I’m ALSO fine with public school superintendents and parents advocating for the existing public schools that the policies that Joe supports have harmed.
Ed reform isn’t a “win/win” in Ohio. Public schools lose and lose and lose. I would argue charter schools lose too, because eventually the public ed cuts will reach them. Whether they admit it or not, they’re in the same funding system I am.
I’m asking whether what we’re losing justifies the benefit of “choice”.
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The “choice” is whether or not they want you/your child.
And when a student doesn’t “fit”, they’ll find a way to get the student/family to leave.
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One of the central principles of a democracy is the ability to make choices.
But here’s a concrete opportunity for those who say they support district schools and their students. We’re helping some low income students whose cars were towed (inappropriately, we and the school’s principal believe) near their school.
The tow truck driver demanded that the principal and students give him $80 or he would take the car (and it would cost the students $250 to get it back). The principal and student raised $60 (with the principal taking some of the $ from his wallet). They asked for a few more minutes & the driver said he would wait 5 minutes. The principal and student returned a few minutes later with the $ but the driver had left.
Several of us have raised about $200 toward the $750 that the tows cost these youngsters ($250 X 3). Would any of you care to contribute? The school involved is Harding High School in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Here’s another example: some of us are trying to raise $ to help a homeless senior at another district high school St. Paul, Minnesota.
If either of these opportunities interests any of you. I can give you the name & address of the relevant principals.
Thanks for considering these opportunities.
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Sounds like you are confirming that you are in Bryan. Having worked extensively with rural districts, I don’t assume that because students are white they are affluent. According to ODE, 43.6% are economically disadvantaged.
All over California, Colorado and Minnesota rural poor families are welcoming new options – some created by school districts, some created by charters.
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But that’s what you wrote, Joe. You wrote that poor people and people of color “deserve the same choices” people here have.
Your assumption was there aren’t poor people here who attend public schools, because you wanted to launch into the same “zip code” argument that national ed reform groups apply to the whole country. Which is not true here. Actually, we all share the same “zip code”.
The policies of ed reformers affect every public school kid in this state, including the 50% of kids in this district who are economically disadvantaged. How do you justify cutting their funding and harming their schools in pursuit of “choice”? They’re just the designated losers in this “choice” market? How do kids in public schools in Ohio benefit from ed reform?
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Wise educators look at why some families are selecting other options. That’s what some educators did when Minnesota students were allowed to take courses on college campuses, with state funds following them, paying tuition and other fees.
While some educators fought the law, others developed new partnerships with colleges to offer dual (high school/College) credit courses in high schools. Win-win. Students had more options. Also some high school teachers really enjoyed teaching more challenging classes.
Here in St. Paul the district has responded to charters by
a. Replicating a successful Montessori district school
b. Creating a Chinese immersion elementary school
c. Creating a Core Knowledge district school
So often people writing here assume that choice is win lose. It does not have to be.
Also, still waiting to see if any readers want to help the district kids I mentioned.
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Joe Nathan
February 9, 2014 at 2:37 pm
Chiara, am I correct that you are an attorney and practice in the Bryan, Ohio district?
So, two things. When ed reformers run states, ALL schools are affected by their policies.
That’s why the advocate at the top of the page is as justified opposing these policies as anyone else who lives here.
Your assumption that ed reform is limited to urban districts is just flat-out wrong. You can’t cordon off charter schools and vouchers because they’re not limited to urban districts and this we have a STATE education policy. Supposedly, ed reformers are working to “improve public schools”. If his schools are harmed, he has a duty to say that.
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“Linda
February 9, 2014 at 4:02 pm
The “choice” is whether or not they want you/your child.
And when a student doesn’t “fit”, they’ll find a way to get the student/family to leave.”
We didn’t have charters here because there’s only 30k people in the county, and the public schools are really the centers of the communitie(s). Everything revolves around the public schools.
I think we have a charter now, because it is my understanding that a small Christian school that was started by a local dentist and real estate broker has now become a charter.
So we’ll be paying for a school that a small group of parents who didn’t want their kids in the public schools started, a school that was never publicly-funded before, and a school that was designed originally to exclude public school kids, based on religion.
Yet, I’m told again and again that this is “about” equity for poor kids. The poor kids here attend our public schools, right along with the rich kids 🙂
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I too live in a school district whose borders lie in farm fields in every direction, but even here there is substantial SES segregation in elementary schools where the value of the neighborhood trumps the value of integration. Even at the high school level, there is a “rich” high school with only about a quarter of the students eligable for free or reduced price lunch and a poor high school with about fourth percent eligable.
My town also has a private Montessori school, a private progressive school, a private Waldorf school along with a catholic school and a small private high school. The poor kids in my town don’t sit next to the relatively affluent and get a Waldorf education or a Montessori education. Perhaps only the affluent can benefit from those types of educations, or these approaches to education are best understood as the whims of the families involved and having little merit, so taxpayers should not be forced to pay for these types of schools.
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There are moderate size communities all over America where families have public school options, either via the district, or via charters, or both. Here are 2 of many, many examples:
Forest Lake Minnesota decided to listen to parents eager to have a public district Montessori option. One elementary school has two wings – a traditional self-contained classroom program in one wing, a Montessori district option in another.
International Falls Mn offers two elementary options, in two sections of their building. Again, one is the traditional self contained classroom options. The other is a cross age, more “open” option.
Some felt that offering options would hurt the districts. In fact, offering options drew some families into the district.
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“teachingeconomisot
February 9, 2014 at 6:23 pm
I too live in a school district whose borders lie in farm fields in every direction, but even here there is substantial SES segregation in elementary schools where the value of the neighborhood trumps the value of integration. ”
Yeah, again, this simply isn’t true here. We don’t have a “rich” high school and a poor high school. We have a high school where both rich and poor kids go.
My grown children believe that the economic diversity benefitted them. They believe they benefited from attending public schools with people of who had less than they did.
There’s an assumption here too that doesn’t seem to be playing out with charters, that the schools will somehow be more “diverse”. That doesn’t appear to be coming true.
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The original intent when the district went to two high schools was to have equal SES levels in each high school. New housing development, however, as resulted in the relatively uneven enrollment now.
Does your district have multiple high schools?
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No. We have a small chronically under enrolled Catholic school that is K thru 8. It’s whole focus is religion, which is fine, of course, but it’s not considered “better” than the public schools. The draw for the school, the reason parents value it, is religion.
The other public schools in the county (different districts than mine) all have different identities, different strengths. We have a very small rural district that is low income and doesn’t score that well on tests, but people are devoted to it because it’s so small that parents feel their kids are really cared for. Ohio debated “consolidation” at one point and the small rural high school parents went bananas. They opposed it more than anyone. The value their schools for reasons other than test scores or facilities or resources or course offerings. They don’t want a larger school.
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Joe Nathan
February 9, 2014 at 8:10 pm
I think it’s folly to believe that people can “have it all”, that they can have strong public schools and unlimited options for “choice”.
It hasn’t come true in Ohio. Charter schools have been promoted to the detriment of public schools, which is exactly what the superintendent is saying.
Again, I would hope my superintendent would act as an advocate for our public schools. I applaud this guy for doing it. His job is not to promote “choice”. His job is to run a strong public school system. Charter schools and vouchers affect his schools, negatively. That’s reality.
I think at some point ed reformers have to address the issue of the effects of ed reform on public schools. Again, MOST children attend these schools. We simply can’t have a national and state education policy that ignores them. It’s nonsensical. It’ll never work.
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Actually, I’ve just given examples of where it has worked.
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But the post at the top of the page is about Ohio schools. The superintendent is telling you his public schools have been harmed by these policies. I’m telling you the same thing. Are those kids just the big losers in all this? Does he just suck it up in the name of “choice” and hope markets sort it out?
If the ed reform objective was to “improve public schools” (which is what was sold to the public) then one would hope there would be a net gain for “public schools”. That hasn’t happened in this state. I don’t think the public would have supported ed reform in this state had they known “choice” would be pursued at the expense and to the detriment of existing public schools. That’s his complaint, and it’s valid, whether he’s running a suburban district or not. Ed reformers are ignoring the effect of their policies on existing public schools, and whether it’s a working class district like mine or a suburban school like his shouldn’t matter at all, nor should the race of the students.
The objective of ed reform was to improve public schools, or that’s what we were sold by ed reformers. If that’s not true, if the objective is instead “choice”, well, sell it honestly.
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The object is to help more students succeed. I’ve given you examples of how this can be done.
For more than 40 years I’ve watched some educator insist that having new options will hurt existing schools. The same argument was made by some when a group of parents & educators urged that St. Paul create new options within the district. Later people found that more students succeeded when everyone was not expected to attend this same kind of school.
There are educators in Ohio who “get it.” It was great to work with district educators in Cincy who saw the value of creating new options within the district.
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Copley-Fairlawn, why does that ring a bell? Oh, right. This is the district that pressed felony charges against Kelley Williams-Bolar, sending her to prison for 9 days and two years’ worth of drug tests, parole visits, financial restitution, etc. They’ve opted out of Ohio’s open-enrollment law and they back that up by hiring private detectives to verify the residency of hundreds of students.
That’s as American as apple pie, defending school zone borders with an almost militaristic zeal, but there aren’t any charters in Copley-Fairlawn as far as I can tell, or any plans to open ones.
I don’t get it. I’m sure there are more than a handful of Copley-Fairlawn residents who are drawing a paycheck from Akron Public Schools whose jobs might indirectly be jeopardized by charters, but certainly that couldn’t inspire such a pathological opposition to choice. Could it?
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If I posted this twice, I apologize. My computer is having issues.
This was posted by the Ohio Education Association on February 8.
It is from an article in TIME from 2011.
~Why Are the Rich so Interested in Public School Reform? ~
“It was perhaps inevitable that the political moment that has given birth to the Occupy movement, pitting Main Street against Wall Street and the 99% against the financial elite, would eventually succeed in making some chinks in the armor of the 1%’s favorite feel-good hobby: the school reform movement.
It’s been a good decade now that the direction of school reform has been greatly influenced by a number of highly effective Master (and Mistress) of the Universe types: men and women like Princeton grad Wendy Kopp, the founder of the Teach for America program, her husband, Harvard graduate Richard Barth, who heads up the charter school Knowledge Is Power Program, the hard-charging former D.C. schools chancellor (and Cornell and Harvard grad) Michelle Rhee and the many hedge fund founders who are now investing significant resources in the cause of expanding charter schools.
Excoriating the state of America’s union-protected teaching profession and allegedly ossified education schools, they’ve prided themselves upon attracting “the best and the brightest” to the education reform cause, whether by luring recent top college graduates into challenging classrooms or by seducing Harvard Business School or McKinsey-trained numbers-crunchers away from Wall Street to newly lucrative executive positions in educationally themed social entrepreneurship.
The chief promise of their brand of reform — the results of which have been mixed, at best — seems to be that they can remake America’s students in their own high-achieving image. By evaluating all students according to the same sort of testable rubrics that, when aced, propelled the reformers into the Ivy League and beyond, society’s winners seem to believe they can inspire and guide society’s losers, inoculating them against failure with their own habits of success, and forever disproving the depressingly fatalistic ’70s-style liberal idea that things like poverty and poor health care and hunger and a chaotic family life can, indeed, condemn children to school failure.
And yet as schools scramble to keep up with these narrow demands, voices are emerging to suggest that perhaps the rubric-obsessed school reform game, as it’s been played in the Bush and Obama years and funded and dressed-up by the well-heeled Organization Kids, is itself perhaps due for a philosophical shake-up.
Earlier this year, S. Paul Reville, the Massachusetts Secretary of Education, blogged in Education Week that reformers need now to think beyond the numbers and “admit that closing achievement gaps is not as simple as adopting a set of standards, accountability and instructional improvement strategies.”
In Massachusetts, he wrote, “We have set the nation’s highest standards, been tough on accountability and invested billions in building school capacity, yet we still see a very strong correlation between socioeconomic background and educational achievement and attainment. It is now clear that unless and until we make a more active effort to mitigate the impediments to learning that are commonly associated with poverty, we will still be faced with large numbers of children who are either unable to come to school or so distracted as not to be able to be attentive and supply effort when they get there.”
Reville called for “wraparound services” that would allow schools to provide students with a “healthy platform” from which they could begin to work on learning.
Diane Ravitch, the education policy specialist and reformed charter school advocate, made the same argument in a trenchant New York Review of Books article this fall, where she enumerated the many reasons that school reform as we’ve come to know it needs to be called into question. For one thing, like so much else “the best and the brightest” have brought us in recent years, many of the reform movement’s results don’t stand up to scrutiny.
After reviewing the data, she writes: “Most research studies agree that charter schools are, on average, no more successful than regular public schools; that evaluating teachers on the basis of their students’ test scores is fraught with inaccuracy and promotes narrowing of the curriculum to only the subjects tested, encouraging some districts to drop the arts or other nontested subjects; and that the strategy of closing schools disrupts communities without necessarily producing better schools.”
Striking a serious blow to the contention that it’s bad teaching — not bad luck in life — that makes some American students perform much worse than others (and all of them much worse than students in other countries), Ravitch noted that on a recent international test, the Program for International Student Assessment, “American schools in which fewer than 10% of the students were poor outperformed the schools of Finland, Japan and Korea. Even when as many as 25% of the students were poor, American schools performed as well as the top-scoring nations. As the proportion of poor students rises, the scores of U.S. schools drop.”
In other words, more than good teachers, more than targeted testing, more than careful calibrations of performance measures and metrics that can standardize and quantify every aspect of learning, it’s the messy business of life — where a child comes from and what he or she goes home to at the end of the day — that really determines success in school.
This message flies in the face of the pull-yourself-up-by-your-boostrap individualism, the extreme emphasis on private (read: teacher) responsibility that has animated the school reform movement in recent years. It demands a complete rethinking now of what our public response to the perennial crisis of public education in America should be.
Fortunately, there are some programs in place that have had real success in providing “wraparound services” that help children come to school ready to learn. In Northern California, for example, the Making Waves Foundation has for decades run a program providing tutoring, academic advising, college counseling, after school enrichment programs, mental health services, nutritional food, transportation and parent education to more than a thousand low-income children, selected by lottery.
In Cincinnati, where more than 70% of children live in low-income households, a program called the Strive Partnership coordinates services and support for school children that include mentoring, health care, arts programs, quality preschool and financial aid for college — and the result, according to a new report from the independent think tank Education Sector, is that, over the last four years, Cincinnati schools have made greater gains than any other urban district in Ohio and have had the most success in reducing the percentage of its students who score at the very bottom on achievement tests.
The Obama Administration hasn’t been blind to these initiatives, and has committed $40 million to a new Promise Neighborhoods program that seeks to link family support services to schools. But, the Education Sector report notes, that initiative is unlikely to receive the $150 million the Administration requested for 2012, given that its 2011 budget request of $210 million was cut down to $30 million.
Thinking structurally about social ills, rejecting excessive individualism for community-based, it-takes-a-village-style responsibility, has been out of favor in America for a long time. In education reform, what’s been in style instead is vilifying teachers and their unions. For some schools, making the grade has meant cooking the books to show results. Let’s hope that the time to reform this business-modeled mindset has finally come.”
~Judith Warner @judithwarner~
TIME Magazine, Dec. 2011
Read more: http://ideas.time.com/2011/12/09/why-are-the-rich-so-interested-in-public-school-reform/#ixzz2Z7UjG5RV
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Deb, having spent 7 years in Cincy working closely with the district, teacher’s union, faith and social service community and other groups, I can tell you there are a lot more good things going on in Cincinnati than schools sharing space with other schools. It’s certainly one of the good things happening. Here’s a brief column describing 10 things that people in Cincy think have contributed to their gains:
http://www.startribune.com/opinion/commentaries/11150746.html
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Curious, Joe, what you have to say about the “other” Cincinnati school district you spent time in. West Clermont is currently a district in desperate financial straits. We are certainly not better off than we were before Gates came to town.
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Hi Katie,
Before answering, here is my brief summary which you may want to respond to of what was attempted: My major memories of West Clermont (from working with folks there from 2000-2007) are:
1. Supt eager to move ahead with creating small schools in two moderately sized district high school buildings. One building had reputation among some as the “better” school; the other was viewed by some as not so attractive. Amelia & Glen Este.
2. Major recollections: many terrific teachers including some of the most creative I’ve met anywhere, very far-sighted union president, supt who was there when small schools project started was very eager, next supt not so eager to move ahead; huge interest on the part of families in having options within buildings. I remember a snowy night in which hundreds of parents showed up to find out more about the different small schools. Lots of exciting connections between schools and community groups. Quality of principals varied.
3. After new supt came in, not so much support.
4. There were a few decisions that were made by central office folks that I wished had not been made (I would have allowed students to take 1 or 2 courses in another small school, for example)
What are your recollections/observations?
Joe
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Well, it was definitely an exciting time to be a teacher. I was one of the original teacher “coordinators” (The School of American Studies on the Glen Este campus). I’ll just say that I believe we accomplished a lot of great things – mainly because Supt. Ward allowed a considerable amount of teacher leadership and autonomy. Although the concept was driven from the top down, the details were left up to those closest to the classroom :). There was truly a lot of potential in my particular small school (might be a little biased there, of course, lol).
I can’t really speak to why they “failed” in the end. By that time I had stepped down as coordinator for personal reasons. In addition to limited support from the new superintendent, I believe they were not financially self sufficient and many in the community did not want to increase tax support. When the Gates Foundation ended their contributions and support (we were never privy to why that happened) the end was imminent. As a teacher who invested so much in the project, I felt (and still do) quite abandoned by Gates, you, Knowledgeworks, etc. I don’t know if that’s fair or not, but many of us feel a little like lab rats tossed aside when we didn’t give the outcomes expected or wanted. The only outside organization that hasn’t left us is the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. Their philanthropy is truly inspired by a desire to help teachers instill in students a love of learning American History.
Since I am not an administrator I am sure there is much to the story I don’t know. I have to believe our administration made the best decisions they could for our kids, our schools and our community. Nevertheless, today things are very bleak politically and financially today. Much of it is fallout from the “small schools” debacle. I am in year 25 there. I love the kids every bit as much as I did in year one. The current “reforms” which seem largely out of everyone’s control on the local level make the job incredibly difficult.
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Katie, the Gates $ were always intended to be “start-up” funds. The expectation was that the high schools would operate on the same level of funding as before. So, for example, we said “no” to using Gates dollars to hire additional staff.
We tried hard to say that the Gates dollars could be used for retraining faculty, for visiting other places to get ideas, for some limited amount of new equipment, etc. The Gates $ were not intended as additional operating funds. I said that at many meetings.
I’m sorry you felt abandoned. Gates actually made additional investments in West Clermont because faculty were doing a lot of terrific things. At the same time, as you may recall, there were challenges – such as some male teachers taking advantage of some young women at one of the high schools, and one small school wanting to have admissions tests for its students.
I thought the vast majority of teachers did a very fine job.
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Yes, we knew it was “start up” money. Still, all that upheaval and change – a community conflicted and pulled apart…I wonder if the Foundation hadn’t abandoned the concept to move on to bigger and better (insert eye roll here) things what might have happened…
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It’s a fair question, Katie. I want to go back over some materials to see what I can find about the outcomes of the work. Do you have anything that was produced?
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