Arthur Camins writes that in the wake of the election, with a public deeply divided, it is time to unify and organize around our public schools. Although the future of K-12 education was not part of the national election, it appeared on many state ballots, where significant majorities rejected privatization and voted to support their public schools.
He writes:
For many of us, our hopes and dreams are bound up with our expectations for our children. For that reason, it is ripe with potential for organizing to pressure our government to be more responsive to the needs of folks without privilege and to regain social trust.
Take a deep breath because now it is the time for a protracted struggle to revitalize the struggle for democratic, equitable education. Now is the time to reassert an ethos of citizen’s responsibility for one another in education policy and practice. Now is the time to reassert an ethos of improvement for all over the restrictive idea of improvement for a few. Now is the time to utilize the revitalizing power of collaboration instead of the divisiveness of competition as the primary lever to advance the academic, social and emotional learning of all students. Now is the time to advance the broad promises of education to prepare every student for life, work, and citizenship.
Several decades of a myopic bipartisan focus on the imposition of test-based accountability and punishment systems has failed to significantly narrow race and class-based opportunity and achievement gaps. Several decades of effort to create privately-controlled, but taxpayer-funded, charter schools and to provide tuition vouchers for private schools to compete with democratically funded public schools have increased segregation without achieving widespread improvement. Several decades of purposeful ideological propaganda and on-the-cheap silver-bullet solutions have undermined public confidence in democratic government as a problem-solving mechanism.
Public education remains as a commitment to the commons. Obviously, most of what we do is outside the commons. But the commons must be strengthened, preserved, transformed to represent the community’s commitment to its children, all of them.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I think the biggest threat to public schools right now is replacing teachers with cheap online garbage. This is only happening in low and middle income public schools.
If you’re on a school board or a public school parent please, please look this gift horse in the mouth. If you’re spending a bundle on tech based on marketing from the ed reform movement and politicians, you will regret that decision. If you lose staff and money is shifted from staff to devices and programs you won’t get funding for staff back.
Don’t be fooled. Do your own homework. 90% of this stuff is crap. You know better than to believe the marketing and hype. Trust yourselves.
And for God’s sake don’t hire consultants who parrot ridiculous slogans like “21st century learners” or “digital natives”. You know better than to fall for that.
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Also not addressed: much of the cheap online garbage will be coming into schools with pages-long fine-print user contracts….
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Trump doesn’t even mention public schools, except to bellow about their replacement.
Maybe that could work out okay. Public schools will continue to be ignored but at least they won’t have 15 new and ever-shifting mandates every year. Maybe they can just go back to being schools instead of data collection centers or experimental sites where lower and middle class children are treated like lab rats.
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If Trump views himself as a populist, he would do well to look at the results of state elections. The public is weary of test and punish. Charters have mostly failed, and they have offered no real scalable solutions. They provide a negative drain on the economy. It is time to return to supporting public education. This is what the voters want, not cyber charters or any cheap, commercial applications.
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It just amazes me that all these really smart people and political strategists still don’t get it. Ed reform became “choice”. That’s a problem if 93% of the kids you’re supposedly serving attend public schools!
They abandoned every public school in the country.
No one told them we all wanted to privatize public schools. That was NEVER what we hired them to do. They just completely forgot what they were hired for. They still don’t get it. They can’t be “people working on public education” if they oppose the public schools 93% of kids attend. That’s ludicrous. We’re surely not going to hire people who oppose our schools to come into our communities and run our schools. That would be nuts.
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“Parents and educators in Ohio want fewer standardized tests in schools.
They have concerns about charter school quality.
And they want a break from all the changing learning standards and tests.
The state school board heard summaries Monday morning of statewide surveys and community meetings the state held this fall as it gathered public views on education across the state. ”
I;m cautiously hopeful that state leaders in Ohio are finally, finally listening to us.
Ohio public schools were ignored for the last 15 years. It seemed we were paying a group of ideologues and zealots who set out to privatize every school in the state. Public schools in this state have been harmed as a result of that. They’ve slipped rank nationally. Finally, we seem to have broken thru the national ed reform echo chamber.
They stopped taking direction from Fordham and started listening to the people who pay their salaries. Thank God.
http://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2016/11/too_much_testing_charter_schoo.html
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I am reposting Camins’ points for improvement as they represent a template of common sense and achievable objectives. Local communities should consider the value and impact the implementation would have on the quality of education. We need real solutions to real problems, not market based distractions or magic bullets.
1) Shift school funding from inequitable local property taxes to progressive income and corporate taxes to mediate resource inequality.
2) Incentivize integrated neighborhoods and schools. Separate education remains unequal education and undermines democracy.
3) Fully fund special education without compromising funding for all children.
4) Fully fund and prioritize class-size reduction.
5) Fully fund services for children and their families so that every student arrives in the classroom ready to learn.
6) Defund periodic consequential standardized assessments and instead, support efforts to increase educators’ expertise to learn to move learning forward from collaborative analysis of well-designed everyday student work.
7) Defund short-term and prescriptive professional development and instead support sustained professional growth through collaboration and targeted access to expertise.
8) Defund local, state, and federal support for privately governed charters schools and vouchers and instead support innovation, professional autonomy and responsibility in democratically governed public schools that address the needs of all children.
9) Defund “alternative” short-term teacher development and instead, support university-based professional preparation that includes long-term supervised pre-service internships and in-service mentorship.
10) Fund tuition reimbursement, competitive salaries, and supportive working conditions to incentivize entry and retention in the teaching profession.
11) Support the development of school administrators who lead collaborative learning organizations rather than hierarchical command and control bureaucracies.
We need to end the corporate vice grip that has stymied any improvement in public schools for the past twenty years. We need to fully support our democratic public schools, and stop trying to destroy them. We need to stop diluting and diminishing our collective efforts, and work to provide quality public education for all.
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Cross-posted at http://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/All-We-Have-is-Struggle-b-in-Best_Web_OpEds-Accountability_Children_Education_Election-161115-136.html
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Truthout published an article, within the past couple of days, “Are Wealthy Donors Influencing the Public School Agenda?”. Thinking it odd that the article didn’t reference the major “wealthy donors”, Gates and the Walton’s, I checked the original source for the article, which was The Conversation. Drumroll…..the “strategic partner” of The Conversation, is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The Conversation is looking to hire a new education editor and a new editor for a section on Philanthropy and Non-Profits.
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The editorial board of The Conversation includes a professor from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and advisors, include a couple of people from Columbia University’s School of Journalism.
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Linda,
I would say the name “Truth Out” describes the article.
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Agree…. the big truth is “out” the door. The number of universities that are listed as affiliated, is rant-provoking.
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Jeffrey Henig co-wrote an article, published recently, which stated in its summary, “The old-fashioned school boards….” In 2013-14, there were 13,500 school districts. Without substantiation, IMO, research does not accept pejorative generalizations. Research examines and corrects.
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