For those of us who are nervous about what President-Elect Biden will do in education, specifically, whether he will revive the failed ideas of Race to the Top, this interview should be comforting. It is a report on a webinar in which Stef Feldman, Biden’s national policy director, spoke to members of the Education Writers Association. It was reported by Erik Robelin in Education Week.
There are many different topics addressed.
This is what she said about charter schools:
“As President, Biden will ban for-profit charter schools from receiving federal funding because he just fundamentally believes that if they aren’t doing right by their students, no one should be getting rich by taking advantage of our kids. He will also, for nonprofit charters, Biden will make sure that we stop funding for charter schools that don’t provide results. Biden believes we shouldn’t be wasting the scarce resources that our public schools need so badly. And we’ll require every charter school, including online schools, to be authorized and held accountable by democratically-elected bodies like school boards and also hold to the same standards of transparency and accountability as all public schools. That means things like regular public board meetings and meeting all the same civil rights, employment, health, labor, safety and educator requirements that public schools must. That’s the fundamental premise of the vice president’s belief that every child, regardless of zip code or parent’s income, race or disability, should have equal access to a high-quality public neighborhood education in their school.”
[Asked to define what “results” charters would need to demonstrate, Feldman said “that would be an important priority for a Biden/Harris Department of Education at the beginning of an administration to figure out some rules to set standards that would measure that.”]
“Vice President Biden doesn’t think that we need to do away with all charter schools. He absolutely wants to support our traditional public schools. But … he feels that the way in which he has designed his policy will allow for charter schools that are delivering results to continue, while also making sure that our funding is focused on our traditional neighborhood public schools.”
On the subject of turning around low-performing schools:
“The first step is to make sure that we are providing these schools with the resources they need to provide a high-quality education to our students. Many times, Title I schools are disproportionately serving students who come from low-income communities. And the schools themselves are under-resourced. Oftentimes, they do not have the basic funding needed to make sure that you have enough teachers, to make sure you have school supplies. … These are schools where they probably have no mental health provider. … They might not even have a school nurse.”
You can watch the video and see the whole interview.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This all sounds great, but my Angst is heightened when I look closely at the composition of the transition task force on education. There are a lot of people in there who would ignore and undermine every word of this interview.
crucial truth
What a concept: 1. Ban for-profit charter schools. 2. Hold all charter schools to the same accountability as traditional charter schools. 3. Require board meetings that must meet the open meetings acts for each state. 4. Maintain transparency. 5. Be authorized by democratically elected officials.
Damn!! What is this world of education coming to? Sane, rationale, proven concepts. All this should have happened since the day the first charter school was opened its doors. Never to late.
Having a Vice -President elect who is a school teacher was a total smart move.
What is the reason for having an independent, non-elected board in between state/local money & the charter school? Just open more schools within the public system. Public schools can open specialized schools and try new curricula and then share it with other schools and with more schools class sizes would be lowered.
If charter authorization is up to local boards of education, it would be a big improvement. I would assume that opening a local charter would be based more need than politicking and money. It would avoid the continuous loss public schools face every time charter schools open. Does the federal government have the authority to do this or would it be up to the states? In Florida DeSantis is trying to take away any say that local school boards have to say about authorizing new charter schools. DeSantis wants to have the power to send charter schools wherever the state decides to put them. He appoints most of the state superintendents that are on board with undermining pubic education.
Biden can’t tell states what to do but he can definitely change the requirements for access to the $440 million spent each year for new charter schools by the federal government.
Maybe some states will follow. Those where the legislatures have not been bought by hedge fund managers (DFER) or billionaires or both.
The overwhelming majority of charter schools are non-profit, so the first point is meaningless. Many are managed by for-profit companies, but note that nothing was said about that and that’s deliberate.
“Results” will mean test scores or some other measure that will have schools jumping through hoops, just like RttT. The other possible measures might just be worse because they’ll be both performance-based and “standardized” – think EdTPA for students. Rephormers have learned to speak the language of progressive education (such as “performance-based assessment”) while retaining the comparative and competitive aspects of traditional models.
Agree, dienne77, those are two glaring omissions which cover between them most of our problems with charter schools!
They’re going to go from annual testing to constant testing through CBE programs like Schoology and Google Classroom. That’s worse, not better. “Beginning of Instruction” assessments, “Middle of Instruction” assessments, Interim Assessments, Performance Assessments, “End of Instruction” assessments… and they will still also keep the mandatory state summative assessments we’ve endured since 2002. All curricula will continue to be standardized, corporate product-based, scripted test prep, online everything, collecting data at every turn. Websites like GreatSchools will continue to receive data they can use to publish school ratings and encourage privatization. There will be hoops. We will jump through them like dogs. The oligarchs of the tech industry haven’t missed a beat.
I recall a meeting with New York State Commissioner MaryEllen Elia, early in her tenure (she has moved on). She said that in the future there would be no need for annual assessments. Assessments would be continuous, ongoing and embedded in instruction. Nonstop assessment.
Covid has exposed the nation’s families in a big way to the inferiority of online teaching. Boosted by Reps’ [who never cared before] new mantra that online sucks, in-person is the only way to go. All that’s needed is for the rest of us, post-covid, to connect the dots between “testing” & online instruction [because that’s all these CBE programs are]. Maybe no need to even get into the testing battle: just publicize widely how many hrs/ day of “in-person teaching” our children are spending at laptops filling in blanks.
From my perspective “in the trenches”, what Elia described is already starting to happen and hybrid models are the way they intend to make it permanent.
People need to actually listen to what people like Gates, Coleman, Elia etc say because they telegraph their end game quite clearly.
Too many people assume that folks like Gates are simply exaggerating when they imply that the purpose of the national standards is essentially to make schools into markets (for hardware and software)
Or that David Coleman exaggerates when he says that “teachers will teach to the test” and indicates that that is actually the very goal of testing.
It remains to be seen whether the ban on “for profit charters” means a ban on charters managed by for profit corporations.
Don’t jump to conclusions.
It’s nonetheless worth pointing out now because it makes it very clear that some of us understand that the terminology “for profit charters” can potentially be employed as a ruse.
It’s up to the Biden team to remove the ambiguity.
Ambiguity
Ambiguity
Not your pal
Seldom true to thee
Two-faced gal
Ambiguity
Not your love
Seldom true to thee
OJ’s glove
This is how Oregon handled charter schools from the very start.
Without a majority of Democrat’s in both Houses of Congress, Biden’s administration will have a difficult up-hill battle meeting any of those goals.
Agreed, but I, for one, do not wish to hear that from the Democrats in charge. If we try and don’t succeed, that’s one thing. If we don’t try, that’s a horse of a different color — not blue.
A hor$e is a hor$e, of cour$e, of cour$e
(Aka, The Stable Genius Song)
Never look a gift hor$e in the mouth
Let’s just get the House-passed bills on the books, for starters.
Well, this is better than the full throated advocacy of the Obama administration. That said, I think public support for an alternative school system is fundamentally inequitable. I know they exist and meet a current demand and so cannot be eliminated easily. However, a plan should be developed to phase them out. I would have felt better also if Biden also specifically addressed for-profit management organizations.
I am not encouraged by the education “experts” Biden has listed.
I hope to have more background information on all of them tomorrow. I would love to see a written statement showing Biden’s education priorities and plans. Long videos and interviews on policy issues are not as good for thinking as print that you can easily return to and annotate.
I’m not so sure this isn’t a repeat of the Obama/Duncan policy. Look at Center for American Progress (CAP)’s Public Education Opportunity Grants. Race to the top by any other name is still Race to the Top.
Race to the CAP?