Archives for the month of: June, 2019
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Michigan: Governor Whitmer Tells Benton Harbor that “Doing Nothing Is Not an Option”

By dianeravitch
June 20, 2019 //
7

Governor Gretchen Whitmer wrote a letter to the Benton Harbor school board, letting them know that it was up to them to accept the state’s offer, which meant the state would forgive the district’s debts and the district would close its beloved high school.

Excuse me, Governor Whitmer, but why doesn’t the state offer to send support to this impoverished school district, not just forgive its debts. It does not have the tax base to support its schools. Doesn’t the state has a legal obligation to secure equal educational opportunity for every child, regardless of zip code?

Is Governor Whitmer relying on the same education advisors as those who counseled Rick Snyder and John Engler?

Categories Closing schools, Funding, Michigan

Civil Rights Leader Jitu Brown Speaks Out Against Privatization by Charters and Vouchers

By dianeravitch
June 20, 2019 //
6

 

Jitu Brown is leader of the Journey for Justice and a national civil rights leader.

In this interview, he explains why he opposes school closings, charter schools, and vouchers, which have been disproportionately imposed on communities of color.

Don’t believe the claims by corporate reformers that black and brown parents want privately managed charters where they have no voice. They want well-funded public schools with experienced teachers and a full array of programs and services, where their voice matters.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Closing schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization, Vouchers

Anna Clark: The Public Schools of Benton Harbor, Michigan, Deserve Support, Not Closing

By dianeravitch
June 20, 2019 //
0

 

Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer is poised to close the high school of Benton Harbor instead of giving it the resources and support it needs. Perhaps it is time to review the state’s funding formula, created by a generation of Republican legislator, Gov. Engler, Gov. Snyder, and Betsy DeVos.

In this article, journalist Anna Clark describes what the public schools of St. Joseph, the twin city of Benton Harbor, meant to her.

It begins:

Over on Court Street in St. Joseph, Michigan, one mile from the little bridge to Benton Harbor, my hardworking family struggled to make do. We poured milk over broken Saltines and called it cereal. I tried, in a thousand obnoxious ways, to persuade my parents to buy food they couldn’t afford, not least in a choreographed song-anddance routine with my siblings titled “The There’s-No-Food Blues.”

We had one big advantage: terrific public schools.

For all the separateness between St. Joseph and Benton Harbor – one whiter and richer, the other poorer and mostly African American, with the St. Joseph River curving between them, doomed to be a perpetual metaphor – these are small communities. For many of us, our roots span both sides. I grew up in St. Joseph, but Benton Harbor is where my mother was raised, where relatives live, where our family church is, where I worked part-time jobs in high school and college, and where I run a 5K on Thanksgiving mornings. It, too, is home.

Yet the differences between our so-called “Twin Cities” grow ever more serious. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has proposed closing Benton Harbor High School for at least a few years, to get the distressed school district out of the death spiral of debt, following a consent agreement that gave the state oversight of the schools for years; it was lifted last November in favor of a financial plan that has, apparently, been scrapped. Benton Harbor’s enrollment may be lower than it used to be, but the prospect of shuttering the community’s single public high school – one that many still take pride in – is a blow.

St. Joe schools gave me the chance to thrive. Besides classes with experienced teachers, I edited a newsmagazine, performed in plays, went out for speech competitions, and failed to make many, many athletic teams. The first time I traveled out of the country was on a class trip for fourth-year Spanish students. I worked constant extra hours to pay the bill, but I got to spend two wide-eyed weeks in Spain.

I didn’t have a conversation with someone my own age from Benton Harbor until I was a freshman at the University of Michigan, leading creative writing workshops at a juvenile detention center. He was in the workshop. We traded joyful memories of the beach at Jean Klock Park and brown bag lunches at Henry’s Hamburgers, while the gulf between us loomed. We had grown up as veritable neighbors, both in working- class families, and here I was, a college student, and there he was, incarcerated.

I began to see how segregation is not only bizarre but sinister. If you grow up on the St. Joe side of the river, even in a family that is poor, you have opportunities your peers in Benton Harbor don’t have.

I’ve often heard people in St. Joe blame Ben- ton Harbor parents for the school system’s woes: “They could have fixed it. They just don’t care,” they say, pointing to empty seats at PTA meetings and sporting events. I understand the value of loving parents, but I had a great public education because my schools were supported by the taxes of people far richer than my family. Until the passage of Proposal A in 1994 (most of my student years), property taxes were the main source of school funding. Unequal schools were a matter of policy.

Even now, in the era of per-pupil funding, schools with a disproportionate number of poor students must meet disproportionate needs, but with few resources.

Michigan ranks 50th for funding growth in public education, with total revenue declining 30% since 2002. Not coincidentally, it also ranks low for math and reading proficiency. But in St. Joseph, millages help. In May, my hometown renewed a millage for support services, technology, transportation and maintenance. The levy only applies to second homes and commercial properties, but it’ll generate $5.8 million.

Poverty is concentrated in Benton Harbor. Second-home millages aren’t an option. It’s a challenge to keep teachers, when salaries are among the lowest in the state. Average annual pay was $34,761 for the 2016-2017 school year, and fell during a statewide teacher shortage. In St. Joseph and nearby Stevensville, average salaries increased to more than $63,000.

I’m proud that I come from a community that prizes public education. But it is outrageously painful that some look across the river and suggest that Benton Harbor’s children don’t have the same advantages because their parents love them less.

It also misses the obvious: Inequality perpetuates itself. It can’t be forgotten that in living memory, segregation was law. Through redlining and racially restrictive deeds, enforced by every level of government and private enterprise, we designed a system where homes owned by African Americans were worth less. Then we tied school funding to property values.

Open the link and read the rest.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Funding, Michigan

BREAKING NEWS: West Virginia Republicans Pass Charter Bill, With Every Democrat Opposed

By dianeravitch
June 20, 2019 //
19

 

The West Virginia Republican members of the House rammed through an omnibus education bill that authorized charters for the first time in the state. Every Democrat opposed the bill, and seven Republicans broke ranks to oppose it. It passed 51-47.

The West Virginia House of Delegates passed Wednesday its education omnibus bill (House Bill 206), after replacing its cap of 10 charter schools statewide with a cap of three until July 1, 2023.

But the bill would allow three more charter schools every three years after that.

The number allowed as the years roll by would be unlimited. If the bill ultimately becomes law, these would be the state’s first charter schools.

The final passage vote, after 11 p.m. Wednesday, was 51-47, largely with Republicans for it and Democrats against.

The House then recessed its side of the special legislative session on education. The state Senate, which is also led by Republicans, will now have to decide what to do with the bill.

Both chambers must agree on the same version to send it to Republican Gov. Jim Justice for his signature or veto.

The deal was strongly opposed by teachers even though it included pay raises and new money for counselors and other support staff.

West Virginia’s teachers struck twice, with opposition to charters one of their demands.

Governor Jim Justice pledged to block charters. Let’s see if he betrays the teachers as the Legislature did. After the bill passed, he congratulated the House, so a veto is unlikely. 

West Virginia is a rural state. It does not need two parallel publicly funded school systems. It does not need charter schools. It needs investment in public schools, which are underfunded.

Betsy DeVos must be sipping champagne.

 

Categories Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Privatization, West Virginia

Benton Harbor: Residents See Possible Closing of Beloved High School as Racism, Despite Low Test Scores

By dianeravitch
June 20, 2019 //
10

 

Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitme campaigned in Benton Harbor, promising to invest in schools and to reverse Republican Rick Snyder’s ruinous policies of state takeover and school closings. Once elected, she offered Benton Harbor a deal: the state will forgive your debts if you close the high school to cut costs. If you don’t take the deal, the whole district may be closed. The residents felt betrayed.

And rightly so. Poor communities can’t raise as much revenue as rich districts. The state has a responsibility to step in and assure equal educational opportunity, especially for the neediest communities.

 

BENTON HARBOR, Mich. — In Benton Harbor, a small city beside Lake Michigan, the high school binds generations and strangers. This is a place where basketball games are a highlight of the social calendar, where signs celebrating state championships are placed at the edge of city limits, where residents say what year they graduated when they introduce themselves.

For years, Benton Harbor’s school system had faced dismal fiscal conditions, miserable academic rankings and intense scrutiny from the state. But when Michigan voters chose a new governor last November, it was seen as a hopeful sign in Benton Harbor. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat who won more than 90 percent of the vote in this city, presented herself as a supporter of investment in struggling places, a defender of public schools, someone who cared about Benton Harbor.

But in May, Ms. Whitmer brought a grim message: Benton Harbor should close its high school and the state could forgive the district millions of dollars in debts. Otherwise, the entire school district was at risk of shutting down.

The proposal was seen as a betrayal in Benton Harbor, a predominantly black city where the high school has operated since the 1870s. What would it say to the children, residents asked, if their hometown was deemed unfit for a high school? And without Benton Harbor High School — without Tiger football games and the robotics team and the marching band — what would be left of Benton Harbor?

“It would kill the whole community,” said Greg Hill, 18, who graduated from Benton Harbor High this month and said he hoped to eventually return to the school as a history teacher. He called Ms. Whitmer’s plan “educational genocide.”

Michigan has a uniquely troubled history of state intervention in financially struggling cities with mostly African-American residents. In Inkster, where 72 percent of residents are black, the school district dissolved six years ago after the state deemed it financially unviable. In Detroit, where the population is 79 percent black, the state seized control of the school system and took the municipal government through bankruptcy. In Flint, 54 percent black, a state-appointed emergency manager changed the drinking water source and touched off the city’s water crisis.

So in Benton Harbor, where 86 percent of the 10,000 residents are black, many people saw Ms. Whitmer’s proposal not as an unavoidable end to longstanding academic and fiscal problems with the high school, but as the racist result of years of state meddling and disinvestment.

Categories Budget Cuts, Closing schools, Michigan, Racism

The Nation: The Charter Industry’s Dishonest Attack on Bernie Sanders

By dianeravitch
June 20, 2019 //
36

Adolph Reed Jr. and Cornel West blast the charter school advocates who dishonestly attacked Bernie Sanders’ plan for charter accountability as racist.

This is an amazing article. Please read it in full. I am not supposed to quote more than 300 words without violating copyright law. I would love to post it all, but I can’t. You have got to open it and read it.

Reed and West write:

During the Reagan era, ultraconservative columnist James Kilpatrick, a notorious segregationist since the southern Massive Resistance campaign against the 1954 Brown decision, took up the right-wing attack on Social Security from a novel angle. He opposed the program as discriminatory against African Americans because black men were statistically less likely than whites to live long enough to receive the old-age benefits. That was likely the only time in his public life Kilpatrick expressed anything that might seem like sympathy for black Americans.

A decade or so later, many advocates of the welfare “reform” that ended the federal government’s 60-year commitment to provide income support for the indigent similarly couched their efforts in feigned concern to help poor black people break a supposedly distinctive “cycle of poverty.” Similar disingenuous tears have accompanied the federal government’s retreat since the 1990s from direct provision of affordable housing for the poor. Thus, a racist premise that there’s a special sort of black poverty became a way to spin cutting public benefits for poor people as a supposedly anti-racist, anti-poverty strategy.

Now, despite abundant evidence to the contrary, the charter-school industry and its advocates also make such claims, asserting that charters offer unique opportunities for poor African-American children. On those grounds, for example, The Washington Post recently attacked the Bernie Sanders campaign’s Thurgood Marshall Plan for Public Education, which, among other features, supports the NAACP’s call for a “moratorium on public funds for charter school expansion until a national audit has been conducted to determine the impact of charter growth in each state.” In a May 27 masthead editorial, the Post described charterization as a civil-rights issue, claiming that charter schools can remedy the “most enduring—and unforgivable—civil rights offense in our country today [which] is the consigning of so many poor, often minority children to failing schools.” To justify that claim, the editorial cites research indicating that black students in charter schools “gained an additional 59 days of learning in math and 44 days in reading per year compared with traditional school counterparts.”

Reed and West demonstrate that multiple studies show that charter schools do not outperform public schools, and they are more segregated than public schools.

They write:

As is a common occurrence in the privatization of public functions, lack of effective public oversight has provided the charter-school industry great opportunities for fraud and corruption. A 2019 national study by the Network for Public Education concluded among its findings that “Hundreds of millions of federal taxpayer dollars have been awarded to charter schools that never opened or opened and then shut down. Only a few months before the Washington Post editorial attacking Senator Sanders’s support for the NAACP’s call for a moratorium on charters, the newspaper published an investigative article exploring the nightmarish uncertainty that sudden closure of fly-by-night charter schools can inflict upon students and their parents…

The charter industry is about profiting off education. In addition to the officially for-profit companies involved, even many charter nonprofits are structured in ways that enable people and businesses to make money off them. Charter operators and affiliated entities have used public funds to obtain and privately own valuable urban real estate.

Moreover, administrative overhead for charter schools is often more than twice that of district schools, and charter executive salaries far exceed those of district administrators. A 2017 report found that in post-Katrina New Orleans, long touted as the Shangri-la of charterization, administrative spending per pupil had increased by 66 percent, while instructional spending had declined by 10 percent.

Bad as the out-and-out fraudsters and get-rich-quick schemers are, the most dangerous and destructive elements in the charter-school industry are the billionaire “philanthropists” like Bill Gates, Walmart’s Walton family, and Eli Broad, the hedge-fund operators, corporate chains, and their minions in think tanks and on op-ed pages, who, out of ideological and commercial motives, have for some time been plotting the privatization of public schools and the destruction of public education as anything more than an underfunded holding pen for the least profitable students….

Of course, teachers’ unions are the charter industry’s bête noire for a more old-school reason as well: There is no place for them in the business model. Charter-school teachers are paid less than teachers at traditional public schools, are less experienced, less likely to be certified, less satisfied with their jobs, have higher rates of turnover, and most important, are much more likely to be at-will employees who can be dismissed without cause. The charter-school industry has been able to impose these clearly less-desirable working conditions on teachers partly through taking advantage of young, idealistic people funneled from outfits like Teach For America. And the long campaign stigmatizing public-school teachers, as well as other public workers, and their unions as the equivalent of lazy welfare queens has enabled propagation of a narrative projecting the image of fresh-faced, energetic young elite-college graduates as more effective and desirable than experienced teachers…

Simply put, charter advocates’ sanctimonious bluster about charterization as a civil-rights issue is deeply disingenuous, and the attacks on Bernie Sanders as racist for joining the NAACP in opposing it are repugnant.

 

 

 

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Hypocrisy, Privatization, Propaganda, Racism, School Choice, Segregation

Biden and the Problem of Bipartisanship

By dianeravitch
June 20, 2019 //
72

This column by Paul Waldman was published by the Washington Post, where he is a columnist.

At a fundraiser in New York attended by the usual Wall Street types, Joe Biden said some things that are raising eyebrows, for good reason, on two subjects. His comments on his friendly relations with segregationists are getting the most attention, but he also said something important about the wealthy people whose dollars he was seeking.

Both comments are deeply problematic, and both stem from the same misconception Biden holds. Let’s start here:

You know, what I’ve found is rich people are just as patriotic as poor people. Not a joke. I mean, we may not want to demonize anybody who has made money. The truth of the matter is, you all, you all know, you all know in your gut what has to be done. We can disagree in the margins but the truth of the matter is it’s all within our wheelhouse and nobody has to be punished. No one’s standard of living will change, nothing would fundamentally change. Because when we have income inequality as large as we have in the United States today, it brews and ferments political discord and basic revolution. […] It allows demagogues to step in and say the reason where we are is because of the other, the other. You’re not the other. I need you very badly. I hope if I win this nomination, I won’t let you down.

Biden knows his audience. His pitch to them is not that we must reduce inequality because it’s a fundamental wrong, but because if we don’t, the masses will rise up in anger and you never know what might happen then.

If you want to be generous, you could argue that when he assured the well-heeled donors that “No one’s standard of living will change,” he was telling them that they have so much money that no matter how much we raised their taxes they’d barely notice it. After all, if you have a billion dollars in assets and Elizabeth Warren’s 2 percent wealth tax took effect, your taxes would go up by $20 million, which would leave you with $980 million in assets. You wouldn’t have to cut back on dinners out or start buying the generic toilet paper.

But Biden’s actual ideas about policy change are far more modest, and so are the arguments he wants to make to the public. He believes that you can govern well without attacking the wealthy or big corporations, in both substance and rhetoric. We can all get along if we assume everyone is operating out of good will.

But are they? The problems we’re facing right now didn’t happen by accident. Biden says he’s a great friend to labor unions, but does he think that the Republicans and their corporate partners can be persuaded to abandon their war on collective bargaining with enough backslapping and reassurances that “nothing would fundamentally change”? Or do you have to fight and defeat them because fundamental change is exactly what’s necessary and they’ll never agree to it? If you’re maintaining good relations with the billionaire class, might that be evidence that you’ve already committed to not changing the status quo?

Now let’s look at the even more startling thing Biden said at the fundraiser.

First, Biden recounted being at a caucus with the late Mississippi Sen. James O. Eastland. Imitating his southern drawl, Biden said: “He never called me ‘boy,’ he always called me ‘son’.”

There’s a reason Eastland didn’t call Biden “boy.” That’s what racists like Eastland called black men, and Biden is white. In fact, Eastland was friendly toward Biden in no small part because at the time Biden was an opponent of busing.

Biden then brought up deceased Georgia Sen. Herman Talmadge and called him “one of the meanest guys I ever knew.” Biden added:

Well guess what? At least there was some civility. We got things done. We didn’t agree on much of anything. We got things done. We got it finished. But today, you look at the other side and you’re the enemy. Not the opposition, the enemy. We don’t talk to each other anymore.

One reason all this is so objectionable is that much of Biden’s career was built on him being the kind of Democrat who could speak to and for white people who felt dispossessed by societal change, particularly around issues of race. That’s also a key building block (though it goes unstated) of the suggestion that he’s “electable” in ways other Democrats might not be.

Which means that when he’s running to be the presidential nominee of the party that represents pretty much all nonwhite Americans, Biden needs to be especially thoughtful about how he talks about his friendships with people like Eastland.

If you aren’t familiar with that history, Eastland was one of the most prominent segregationists in America. Here’s an excerpt from Robert A. Caro’s “Master of the Senate” about the Montgomery bus boycott (h/t Tim Dickinson):

Montgomery’s blacks kept on walking even when ten thousand people attended a White Citizens Council rally in the Montgomery Coliseum — “the largest pro-segregation rally in history” — to hear Mississippi’s senior United States Senator, James O. Eastland, shout that “In every stage of the bus boycott we have been oppressed and degraded because of black, slimy, juicy, unbearably stinking n—— … African flesh-eaters. When in the course of human events it becomes necessary to abolish the Negro race, proper methods should be used. Among these are guns, bows and arrows, slingshots and knives … All whites are created equal with certain rights, among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of dead n——.”

It takes more than calling a segregationist “mean” to assure us that Biden really gets that these men he worked with didn’t just have political differences with him and weren’t just personally unpleasant, but had devoted their lives to a project of monstrous evil, the subjugation of millions of Americans because of their race.

But let’s try again to be generous to Biden. The point he was trying to make is that if he could work with a racist like Eastland to “get things done,” surely he can convince Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to do the same.

But there’s a problem with this logic, which is that Eastland and other segregationists were perfectly happy to pass legislation on any number of issues that didn’t impede their agenda of white supremacy.

Today’s Republican Party is not. If there’s a Democrat in the White House in 2021 they will employ the same strategy they did under Barack Obama of obstructing everything that president wants to do, as Biden ought to remember.

Categories Education Reform

The Tide Is Turning! We Need Your Help!

By dianeravitch
June 19, 2019 //
6

NPE Action is helping allies fight for their public schools across the country!

We are turning the tide against privatization!

We need your help!

The Tide is Turning But We Need Your Help

The narrative is shifting.

As candidates jockey for position, public education issues are no longer relegated to soundbites. Major media outlets are reaching out to NPE Action to better understand why candidates are backing away from charters schools. Our NPE Action articles about the role of education policy in the 2020 election have run in The New York Daily News and The Progressive.

We need your support to continue to change the conversation and move our issues forward.

Donate Now!

A donation of $20 helps us update the 2020 Presidential Candidates Project. Reporters have used the report as a resource to track the candidates’ positions on our issues.

A donation of $50 helps NPE Action continue to endorse candidates who will fight for our issues at the federal, state and local levels.

A donation of $100 helps us produce reports like Hijacked by Billionaires: How the Super Rich Buy Elections to Undermine Our Public Schools. That report exposed how money floods into elections to subvert the democratic process and spread corporate education reform.

A donation of $250 or more will help us bring advocates from coast to coast together in Philadelphia for our 6th National Conference. We hope you’ll join us for that conference and that you’ll consider submitting a panel to share the work you are doing in yourcommunity to keep your public schools alive.

And a recurring monthly donation of any amount becomes the income we can depend on to issue Action Alerts when we need to let our legislators know where we stand.

Donate Now!

In her new book, Slaying Goliath, Diane has called us “the Resisters,” the volunteer army “fighting back to successfully keep alive their public schools.” 

We simply can’t continue this work without contributions from “resisters” like you. Please give what you can today.

Categories NPE Action Fund, Resistance

Pennsylvania: Governor Wolf Vetoes Doubling of Voucher Funds

By dianeravitch
June 19, 2019 //
6

 

As promised, Governor Tom Wolf vetoed legislation to double the funding for vouchers.

In his veto message, he said:

“We have public schools that are structurally deteriorating, contaminated by lead, and staffed by teachers who are not appropriately paid and overstretched in their responsibilities. Tackling these challenges, and others, should be our collective priority,” the governor said in his message.

Categories Accountability, Funding, Pennsylvania, Vouchers

Paul Thomas on the Media’s Search for Scapegoats in Education

By dianeravitch
June 19, 2019 //
58

 

Paul Thomas Taught for nearly 20 years, then became a teacher educator at Furman University in South Carolina. He often writes about the media and its misperceptions of teaching. In this post, he laments the fact that the media is constantly in search of a scapegoat for whatever goes wrong in education.

The latest scapegoat, he writes, is teacher education, and the latest lamentation is that teacher educators fail to teach the “science” of education.

The scapegoating deepened because of Bush’s No Child Left Behind and Obama’s Race to the Top. If every child was not 100% proficient, someone must be blamed. First, the outcry was “blame the teacher,” but when VAM backfired, it became blame the teacher educator.

 

Categories Education Reform, NCLB, Race to the Top, Teacher Education, Teachers and Teaching
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