Advocates for fair funding for public schools in New York have pursued a remedy from the state for years. They finally won a big increase in the budget, but were shocked to discover that almost the entire increase in funding will be diverted to charter schools, which enroll 14% of the state’s students. Either coincidentally or not, Governor Hochul’s election campaign is heavily funded by charter school advocates from the financial industry.
CHARTER SCHOOL FUNDING INCREASE WIPES OUT STATE FORMULA AID BOOST FOR NYC DISTRICT SCHOOLS
February 2, 2022
In testimony on Governor Kathy Hochul’s FY23 Executive Budget, Education Law Center warned New York lawmakers that a proposed increase in state aid to charter schools in New York City will nearly offset the aid increase to district schools under lawmakers’ promised phase-in to reach full funding of the State’s Foundation Aid Formula.
Last year, after over a decade of resistance, New York elected officials committed to fully funding the Foundation Aid Formula enacted in 2007, with a three-year phase-in. After Andrew Cuomo’s resignation, Governor Hochul declared her intention to fulfill this commitment. Her administration also reached a settlement agreement with the plaintiffs in NYSER v. State, a school funding lawsuit by public school parents in New York City and Schenectady, which conditions ultimate dismissal of the case on reaching full formula funding by 2024. The Governor’s proposed FY23 budget provides for a $1.6 billion increase in Foundation Aid, as required to meet the planned phase-in.
In testimony on the proposed FY23 State Budget, ELC underscored to legislators that the Governor’s proposed 4.7% increase in state aid to New York City charter schools will effectively negate the phase-in of formula funding to the City’s district schools. If the Governor’s proposed budget is enacted, New York City charter schools would receive an increase of $300 million this year, while the City’s district schools will be allocated an increase of approximately $345 million in Foundation Aid. Under state law, New York City is the only district that receives no transitional state aid to offset what the district is required to pay in charter school tuition.
“The math is simple and shocking,” said ELC senior attorney Wendy Lecker. “The increase in tuition payments to charter schools, which enroll just 14% of New York City students, will consume the entire increase in Foundation Aid intended for the almost one million City students enrolled in district schools. Even worse, the City is also mandated by state law to provide space or pay rent for charter schools.”
The ELC testimony also calls out the Executive Budget’s failure to make any additional investments in New York’s preschool program. In a May 2021 ruling, in the “Small Cities” school funding case, a New York Appellate Court recognized preschool as an essential element of a sound basic education guaranteed students under the State Constitution.
It is undisputed that high quality preschool provides a host of academic and life benefits, such as decreased placement in special education, decreased suspension rates, higher educational attainment, higher income, and decreased contact with the criminal justice system. Yet, tens of thousands of four-year-olds across New York lack access to any preschool classes, let alone a high-quality program. ELC is urging the Legislature to invest an additional $500 million to help ensure all four-year-olds access to this essential resource.
ELC also pressed the New York Legislature to maintain and strengthen the Contracts for Excellence (C4E) Law. This law was enacted in 2007 to ensure that struggling school districts receiving additional Foundation Aid would spend those funds on programs proven to improve student outcomes. As districts across the state finally receive these long-awaited increases in funding, it is crucial to have a strong framework for directing the funding to essential resources, including class size reduction in New York City district schools.
Sustained grassroots advocacy – coupled with strategic litigation – has moved New York to make important strides toward providing all students, including students of color, the essential resources required for a constitutional sound basic education. Lawmakers must revise Governor Hochul’s proposed budget to ensure the equitable distribution of increased funding, especially in New York City.
Daniel Dale is CNN’s fact-checker, and he identified a huge blunder by Representative Tom Massie, a Republican from Kentucky. Earlier this week, a reader asked whether anyone should trust a person who declares “I am science,” and I didn’t know that he was referring to the tweet cited here. I thought it was a real question, not an unsubtle way of slamming Dr. Fauci.
Daniel Dale writes:
Rep. Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican, has been a vocal critic of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director, who also serves as President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser.On Sunday, Massie sarcastically tweeted, “You mustn’t question Fauci, for he is science.” Under those words, Massie posted an image that featured a giant hand crushing a group of much smaller people. The image includes a quote it attributed to Voltaire, the 18th-century Enlightenment writer and philosopher: “To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.” Facts First: There is no record of Voltaire ever uttering these words. The quote is commonly attributed to Kevin Alfred Strom, a neo-Nazi who pleaded guilty in 2008 to possession of child pornography. Strom uttered a similar quote during a virulently antisemitic 1993 radio broadcast.
Strom said in the 1993 broadcast: “To determine the true rulers of any society, all you must do is ask yourself this question: Who is it that I am not permitted to criticize?” The context in which he posed the question made clear that this was a reference to Jewish people.
The false Voltaire attribution for the quote has circulated online for years. The attribution has been debunked in numerouspreviousfact checks and in a 2017 blog post by scholar Nicholas Cronk, director of Oxford University’s Voltaire Foundation. Edward Langille, a St. Francis Xavier University professor of French and co-author of the book “The Quotable Voltaire,” also told CNN on Monday that the quote did not come from Voltaire.
Massie’s office didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on Monday. As of Monday afternoon, his tweet had been retweeted more than 6,800 times. It remained online without any correction, even though others had been replying for more than 22 hours to note that the attribution was wrong.
The citizens’ group “Public Schools First NC” has published a scathing critique of the double standards that the General Assembly has inserted into the laws that govern education.
Double Standard!
Proponents of school choice, especially voucher program supporters, are often the most committed to holding public schools accountable for how public funds are spent. They point to the need to monitor the value provided by our tax dollars. Yet these same choice proponents are remarkably silent when asked to apply similar standards to the private schools receiving public tax dollars.
There are many notable contrasts (or rather, contradictions) evident in the 2021-23 budget when it comes to spending on education. The accountability double standard for public dollars spent on public schools versus private schools is especially glaring. For public schools, NC has a well-established NC Report Card that provides a range of information about academic performance and school statistics such as class size and teacher qualifications. In addition, the NC School Finance Dashboard, launched in 2019, provides basic financial information about public schools such as the source of funding and how the funding is spent. For private schools receiving public funds through the school voucher programs (e.g. Opportunity Scholarships), there is no school report card or other public-facing accountability mechanisms. Nothing.
The NC, A-F grading program, one component of the NC Report Card, assigns every NC public school a letter grade. Widely disparaged for their outsized reliance on student achievement test scores, the A-F grades were first assigned to NC public schools in the 2013-14 school year. Each school’s grade is based on a formula where 80% of the grade is based on achievement and 20% on growth. The data used to calculate the achievement scores vary by grade and include end-of-grade and end-of-course test scores, passing rates for Algebra II or Integrated Math III, ACT scores, and graduation rates, There have been a number of bipartisan proposals to change the formula to 50% achievement and 50% growth, but no change has yet been made. NC is an outlier among states with letter grading systems in the resistance to developing a more balanced approach. Kris Nordstrom’s report School Performance Grades: A Legislative Tool for Stigmatizing Non-White Schools describes the grading system and some of its problems in detail.
As NC legislators funnel more money to private schools through voucher programs they are failing to require of private schools similar levels of transparency about student achievement and school finances as contained in the NC School Report Card and School Finance Dashboard. For example, although private schools are required to test students in grades 3, 6, 9, and 11, there is no mandatory public reporting requirement. In addition, individual schools select which test to administer, which creates a system where there is no standardized way to compare student achievement across schools or to public school student achievement. Interestingly, for 11th grade, the guidelines state that “Each private school should establish a minimum score on an achievement test to be administered on or before 11th grade which ensures students possess a minimum of skills for high school graduation.” In other words, each school sets its own passing standard. In the public school setting, this is equivalent to allowing each school to determine its own passing (Level 3) score on an EOG or EOC test.
In addition, private schools are not required to share information about their curriculum, qualifications of instructional staff (teachers are not required to hold a college degree or be certified) , or even basic information such as class size and technology resources. This chart showing the essential differences further illustrates the striking contrast.
Yet with the 2021-23 budget, even though in previous years, demand for Opportunity Scholarships has lagged behind the funds allocated to them, with millions left unspent, the legislature allocated even more money to this unaccountable voucher program. By law, funding for Opportunity Scholarships was set to grow by $10 million each year (on top of base funding) regardless of whether the money was spent. With the 2021-23 budget, the increase was bumped to $15 million each year. More than 3.1 billion will be spent on the program over the next 15 years. To drum up demand, they earmarked $500,000 to market the Opportunity Scholarships. At the same time, the legislature failed in its constitutional obligations to fully fund public schools. Members of legislative leadership have even taken the extreme measure of filing an appeal to stop the courts from requiring that dollars are allocated to fund education at the minimum required by the NC constitution.
So why is there such a double standard?Why are our legislators so resistant to an equal evaluation of public and private schools when private schools are spending public tax dollars? Are they concerned that the private school sector won’t hold up to a fair comparison? Ask your legislator! With the abundant unspent voucher school funds, they could build a private school online dashboard just like the public school dashboards so taxpayers can see all aspects of how tax dollars are being used for education. Better yet, let’s put the public taxpayer funds back into our public schools where it belongs.
A reader who identifies as Quickwrit posted the following comment about the filibuster. For most of our history, debates in the Senate could be used to delay consideration of a bill, even to kill it. But the filibuster was not written into law until 1917.
Our Founding Fathers would agree that “contemptible” aptly describes Manchin, Sinema, and each of the other Democrats who oppose ending the filibuster because our Founding Fathers during the 1787 Constitutional Convention flatly rejected the idea of allowing a minority to block the will of the majority by filibustering — that’s because our well-read Founding Fathers knew how the practice of the filibuster in the Roman Senate had eventually brought down the Roman Republic by allowing a minority of reactionary senators to block the will of the majority of Romans in a process that ultimately led to one-person rule by dictatorial emperors.
Founding Father and President James Madison whom we revere as “The Father of the Constitution” disgustedly called the filibuster extortion, pointing out that “In all cases where justice or the general good might require new laws to be passed…the fundamental [majority rule] principle of free government would be reversed. It would no longer be the majority that would rule: The power would be transferred to the minority…to extort.”
Alexander Hamilton angrily denounced the filibuster, declaring that “To give a minority a negative upon the majority is…to subject the sense of the greater number to that of the lesser…[resulting in] contemptible compromises of the public good.”
Two words of our Founding Fathers that stand out in regard to how they felt about the filibuster are: “EXTORT” and “CONTEMPTIBLE”.
Anyone who supports the filibuster betrays our Founding Fathers and the majority-rule system of government that they established in our Constitution.
As Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) and Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) defend the filibuster and block voting rights legislation, corporate media keeps repeating the lie that the two are doing so because they care deeply about Senate rules and tradition. By doing so, news outlets are refusing to admit the obvious: Sinema and Manchin are just the latest of the Senate’s many corrupt puppets who want to help corporate lobbyists preserve their legislative kill switch.
Amid the high-concept discourse about voting rights, historical precedent, and The Greatest Deliberative Body In The World™, big business has been telegraphing what the filibuster actually is. It is not about democracy or minority rights or any other maudlin subplot from a West Wing episode — it is about something much more raw and ugly. It is about giving capital veto power over the economy, as the most powerful corporate lobby group in Washington effectively admits.Tip Jar
Indeed, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has publicly opposed filibuster reform for this very reason. Last year, the organization gloated to its members that the rule would prevent Democrats from passing a minimum wage hike or legislation to make it easier for workers to form a union.
Stephen Sawchuk wrote in Education Week about the ways that public controversy about “critical race theory” is affecting the drafting and revision of state history standards. He looks closely at three states that revised their history standards in 2021: Louisiana, New Mexico, and South Dakota.
For months, GOP officials and FOX news kept up a steady and alarming drumbeat, falsely claiming that public schools were indoctrinating white students to hate America and to be ashamed of their race. This weird notion was suddenly discovered in the last year of the Trump regime, when beating up on public schools became a cultural wedge issue. The governor’s race in Virginia showed that the campaign against CRT was effective in rousing people’s fears.
As Sawchuk shows, the effort to twist U.S. history to leave out anything bad that happened in the past is working its way into state standards. Message from the GOP, FOX News, and Chris Rufo: Teach lies about U.S. history!
He writes:
Spiked drafts. Allegations of political interference. Confusing terminology. And thousands of angry comments: The volatile debate over how to teach about America’s racist past is wreaking havoc on states’ processes for deciding what students will learn about history and social studies.
In state after state, commentators and politicians contended that proposed expectations for social studies embedded “critical race theory”—even as the educators sitting on the panels writing the new standards defended them for providing an honest, if sometimes challenging, view of America.
Education Week reviewed hundreds of standards and thousands of pages of public comment relating to the standards-writing processes in South Dakota, Louisiana, and New Mexico, all of which took up revisions in 2021, and interviewed writers, educators, and state officials. Across the three states, we found:
None of the three states’ drafts mentioned the term critical race theory, but in written comments, people attacked dozens of standards in Louisiana’s and New Mexico’s drafts for purportedly embedding it.
In South Dakota, state officials removed about 20 references to Native Americans from the draft submitted by the standards-writing panel—then scotched the draft altogether.
The critiques about CRT in Louisiana led the writers to recast some standards and to delete others. And public comment protocols in Louisiana were changed out of fear for the writers’ physical safety.
The teaching method of having students take civic action to address classroom and local problems—an approach some conservatives contend is indoctrination—was mysteriously cut from both Louisiana’s and South Dakota’s drafts.
About 1 in 10 of some 2,900 pages of comments on the New Mexico standards referenced CRT, often citing language in the draft about “social justice,” “group identity,” and “critical consciousness.” Those terms also attracted confusion from district leaders wondering how those tenets should be taught.
The findings illustrate how the fallout from the confusing and often misleading debate about CRT stands to alter history education in U.S. schools through subtle—but material—changes to day-to-day teaching expectations.
“Standards provide teachers with cover to teach hard things—controversial things,” noted Lynn Walters-Rauenhorst, an instructor and student-teaching supervisor at the University of New Orleans, who was among the writers of Louisiana’s draft. “If we don’t have standards that support deep inquiry about things that may not be the easy topics to cover, then teachers aren’t going to do it.”
And the discord stands as another testament to how the country’s polarization has affected K-12 policymaking at large.
“The uncivil discourse centering around these issues is detrimental not only to the process, but really, it’s also detrimental to these embedded ideas in our constitutional democracy of compromise, of listening to each other, not always agreeing,” said Tammy Waller, the director for K-12 social studies at the Arizona education department.
Arizonans, she noted, faced some controversies over topics like civil rights and the LGBTQ movement when completing the state’s 2018 social studies revisions, but ultimately officials were able to complete a set everyone could live with. That is getting harder.
“In the past I feel like we could have disagreements, and even really intense disagreements, but in the end, it wasn’t a zero-sum game,” Waller said. “We felt like we had something bigger that we were responsible for.”
Those are important stories. But states’ revisions to history standards have attracted far less attention, even though they stand to affect millions more students.
That question is especially relevant for K-12 students, who are now 54 percent Asian, Black, Latino, and Native American. Where—and how—are these students reflected in this complex story? What does their inclusion or erasure mean for their understanding of who they are as Americans? To what extent should K-12 teaching reflect academic scholarship, which has produced increasingly rich insights over the past three decades about cultural history, especially the experiences of women, Black Americans, and immigrants?
States update teaching standards—the key guide for the content and skills that teachers must cover—about once every seven years. Teachers are legally and professionally obligated to cover these standards, which are usually drafted by panels of teachers, content experts, and lay people. The public also offers feedback before final versions are adopted by state boards of education. …Read more
To illustrate these complex issues, take one representative standard currently under debate in Louisiana in grade 7. The standard, a broad one, directs teachers to explain events and ideas in U.S. history between 1789 and 1877, “including, but not limited to, the Whiskey Rebellion, Indian Removal Act, Fugitive Slavery [sic] Act, Reconstruction amendments.”
As currently written, the standard highlights uneven progress towards true participation in the American democratic experiment. But several commentators in the state suggested replacing those examples with touchstones emphasizing expansion and enfranchisement, though mainly of white Americans: “Jacksonian democracy, Texan independence, Manifest Destiny, and Reconstruction,” they wrote.
“Teachers are not going to stick their neck out to teach something they think they ethically should talk about, but isn’t going to be assessed,” said Walters-Rauenhorst. “There’s no upside for them.”
EdWeek selected the three states—Louisiana, South Dakota, and New Mexico—for analysis because all three issued at least one draft set of standards in 2021, and received public feedback on that draft.
Other states in the beginning of rewriting their standards are already starting to see the same sort of contention. Minnesota, midway through its own process, has faced tensions over an ethnic-studies portion of its standards; in Mississippi, legislators filed a bill in November to outlaw critical race theory just weeks before the state education department posted a history draft for review….
LOUISIANA: A CRT Reckoning Awaits
One by one, the commentators stood up at a June public meeting, one of three that the standards-writing committee held to present updates. And one by one, they condemned the state’s draft history standards for purportedly including critical race theory or indoctrinating students.
A typical example: “There is no reason to make students feel guilty,” one speaker said. “We should teach the good things about this country.”
Another: “If you want to continue to talk about slavery, [you should] go to China now…”
Now it’s unclear what will happen to the draft, which is set to be taken up by the state board of education in March.
“I went to law school; I learned critical race theory in law school; I have a Ph.D. This is not something we use in K-12,” said Belinda Cambre, a social studies instructor at a lab school located at Louisiana State University who contributed to the draft. “Really the whole issue saddened me more than anything else, that it could be so weaponized to turn people against talk of diversity.”
The criticism took its toll. Even before the Louisiana department opened up an online public-comment portal, the writers had made significant changes in response to the bruising June feedback.
Some revisions reframed a standard in a more optimistic way: One in the high school civics course originally called for students to “examine issues of inequity in the United States with respect to traditionally marginalized groups.” In its rewritten form, it calls on them to “analyze the progression and expansion of civil rights, liberties, social and economic equality, and opportunities for groups experiencing discrimination.”
By far, the most substantive revision to the draft was the deletion of one of the overarching skills for students—meant to be embedded across the grade levels and courses—called “taking informed action.”
Louisiana’s board-appointed State Superintendent Cade Brumley, a former social studies teacher, wrote in a July op-ed that the standards should strike a balance between critique and patriotism, but should not include critical race theory, which he defined as “suggest[ing] America was intentionally founded on racism, oppression, supremacy.” By October, he said that he could not recommend the draft as written.
Diane Ravitch's blog 