Jan Resseger, now retired, spent her career as an activist for social justice. Her recent essay was reposted by the Network for Public Education. It seemed appropriate to post it on the 68th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education Decision of 1954. In trying to assess the meager progress towards the ideals of Brown—specifically, equality of educational opportunity—she lays some of the blame on No Child Left Behind and the corporate school reform movement,
Jan Resseger attended the recent Network for Public Education conference, where she took inspiration from speaker Jitu Brown, director of the Journey for Justice Alliance. Reposted with permission.
She wrote:
A highlight of the Network for Public Education’s recent national conference was the keynote from Jitu Brown, a gifted and dedicated Chicago community organizer and the national director of the Journey for Justice Alliance. His remarks made me think about the meaning of the last two decades of corporate school reform and the conditions today in his city and here where I live in greater Cleveland, Ohio. It is a sad story.
Brown reflected on his childhood experience at a West Side Chicago elementary school, a place where he remembers being exposed to a wide range of information and experience including the study of a foreign language. He wondered, “Why did we have good neighborhood schools when I went to school but our kids don’t have them anymore? For children in poor neighborhoods, their education is not better.”
Brown described how No Child Left Behind’s basic drilling and test prep in the two subjects for which NCLB demands testing—math and language arts—eat up up more and more of the school day. We can consult Harvard University expert on testing, Daniel Koretz, for the details about why the testing regime has been particularly hard on children in schools where poverty is concentrated: “Inappropriate test preparation… is more severe in some places than in others. Teachers of high-achieving students have less reason to indulge in bad preparation for high-stakes tests because the majority of their students will score adequately without it—in particular, above the ‘proficient’ cut score that counts for accountability purposes. So one would expect that test preparation would be a more severe problem in schools serving high concentrations of disadvantaged students, and it is.” (The Testing Charade, pp. 116-117)
Of course, a narrowed curriculum is only one factor in today’s inequity. Derek W. Black and Axton Crolley explain: “(A) 2018 report revealed, school districts enrolling ‘the most students of color receive about $1,800 or 13% less per student’ than districts serving the fewest students of color… Most school funding gaps have a simple explanation: Public school budgets rely heavily on local property taxes. Communities with low property values can tax themselves at much higher rates than others but still fail to generate anywhere near the same level of resources as other communities. In fact, in 46 of 50 states, local school funding schemes drive more resources to middle-income students than poor students.”
Again and again in his recent keynote address, Jitu Brown described the consequences of Chicago’s experiment with corporate accountability-based school reform. Chicago is a city still coping with the effect of the closure of 50 neighborhood schools in June of 2013—part of the collateral damage of the Renaissance 2010 charter school expansion—a portfolio school reform program administered by Arne Duncan to open charter schools and close neighborhood schools deemed “failing,” as measured by standardized test scores. On top of the charter expansion, Chicago instituted student-based-budgeting, which has trapped a number of Chicago public schools in a downward spiral as students experiment with charter schools and as enrollment diminishes, both of which spawn staffing and program cuts and put the school on a path toward closure.
As Jitu Brown reflected on his inspiring elementary school experience a long time ago, I thought about a moving recent article by Carolyn Cooper, a long time resident of Cleveland, Ohio’s East Glenville neighborhood: “I received a stellar education in elementary, junior high, and high school from the… Cleveland Public School system… All of the schools I attended were within walking distance, or only a few miles from my home. And at Iowa-Maple Elementary School, a K-6 school at the time, I was able to join the French Club and study abroad for months in both Paris and Lyon, France… Flash forward to this present day… To fight the closure of both Iowa-Maple and Collinwood High School, a few alumni attended a school facilities meeting held in October 2019 at Glenville High School… Despite our best efforts, Collinwood remained open but Iowa-Maple still closed down… Several generations of my family, as well as the families of other people who lived on my street, were alumni there. I felt it should have remained open because it was a 5-Star school, offering a variety of programs including gifted and advanced courses, special education, preschool offerings, and Individualized Education Programs (IEPs).”
In his keynote address last week, Jitu Brown explained: “Justice and opportunity depend on the institutions to which children have access.” Brown’s words brought to my mind another part of Cleveland’s Glenville neighborhood less than a mile from Iowa-Maple Elementary School. If you drive along Lakeview Road between Superior and St. Clair Avenues, you see a neighborhood with older homes of a size comfortable for families and scattered newer rental housing built about twenty years ago with support from tax credits. You also see many empty lots where houses were abandoned and later demolished in the years following the 2008 foreclosure crisis. Separated by several blocks, you pass two large weedy tracts of land which were once the sites of two different public elementary schools—abandoned by the school district and boarded up for years before they were demolished. You pass by a convenience store surrounded by cracked asphalt and gravel. Finally you pass a dilapidated, abandoned nursing home which for several years housed the Virtual Schoolhouse, a charter school that advertised on the back of Regional Transit Authority buses until it shut down in 2018.
My children went to school in Cleveland Heights, only a couple of miles from Glenville. Cleveland Heights-University Heights is a mixed income, racially integrated, majority African American, inner-ring suburban school district. Our children can walk to neighborhood public schools that are a great source of community pride. Our community is not wealthy, but we have managed to pass our school levies to support our children with strong academics. We recently passed a bond issue to update and repair our old high school, where my children had the opportunity to play in a symphony orchestra, and play sports in addition to the excellent academic program.
Jitu Brown helped organize and lead the 2015 Dyett Hunger Strike, which forced the Chicago Public Schools to reopen a shuttered South Side Chicago high school. Brown does not believe that charter schools and vouchers are the way to increase opportunity for children in places like Chicago’s South and West Sides and Cleveland’s Glenville and Collinwood neighborhoods. He explains: “When you go to a middle-class white community you don’t see charter schools…. You see effective, K-12 systems of education in their neighborhoods. Our children deserve the same.”
In the powerful final essay in the new book, Public Education: Defending a Cornerstone of American Democracy, Bill Ayers, a retired professor of education at the University of Illinois, Chicago, agrees with Jitu Brown about what ought to be the promise of public education for every child in America:
“Let’s move forward guided by an unshakable first principle: Public education is a human right and a basic community responsibility… Every child has the right to a free, high-quality education. A decent, generously staffed school facility must be in easy reach for every family… What the most privileged parents have for their public school children right now—small class sizes, fully trained and well compensated teachers, physics and chemistry labs, sports teams, physical education and athletic fields and gymnasiums, after-school and summer programs, generous arts programs that include music, theater, and fine arts—is the baseline for what we want for all children.” (Public Education: Defending a Cornerstone of American Democracy, pp. 314-315) (emphasis in the original)
I have no idea how Bill Ayer managed to become a highly respected man.
This Bill Ayer?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Ayer
No it is this guy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Ayers
Autocorrect and typos shred at least one item in 90% of my comments.
Autocorrect and typos shred at least one item in 90% of my comments. I meant the one who participated in the bombing of the U.S. Capitol (among other bombings).
Microsoft has the worst autocorrect of all of them, so my school district uses Microsoft, of course. Billy H. Gates sees too it.
I attended a talk given by Bill Ayers at a local bookstore here in Buffalo a few years ago and most of the crowd was comprised of Boomers who were enthralled to see him and to listen to his tales of being in the WUO and thereafter. As a Gen Xer, I kept thinking to myself, “he was one of many privileged, affluent, wealthy/upper-middle-class white kids who, through their own brand of violence, wanted to foist their own ideas and version of America on, essentially, the rest of the nation via some type of government overthrow.” In 2022, gee whiz, doesn’t this latter methodology sound familiar and recent?
I respected him when he was a leader the the Students for a Democratic Society. I know to some that sounds evil but I believe in democracy. His academic and professional career has been exemplary. So, yes Bill Ayer is a highly respected man.
Hiding behind the notion of so-called choice is racism. Charter schools provide a separate and unequal education for mostly black and brown students. I keep waiting for black parents to file a lawsuit against a system that hustles poor students of color into separate and unequal schools. Students in public schools are covered by civil rights protections. Forcing students to give up these protections should be grounds for a civil rights case, but I am not a lawyer.
When charters take over a failing school, they should have show academic improvement or lose the contract. Privatization has failed to deliver on its promises. Why do poor communities continue to be exploited by charter school companies? Shifting public money into private pockets is their main interest, not the quality of education in most of the charter schools. We would be wiser to invest in neighborhood schools.
Many years ago I attended integrated schools in Philadelphia. I also received a good education at that time. My old Jr. high school is now a charter middle school in which 13% of the students are proficient in reading and 4% are proficient in math. How is this progress?
Charters can raise test scores by cherry-picking students.
Our school recently opened its doors to a student that got kicked out of Aspire right before testing. Third grade ELL, reading at K level, Aspire teacher claimed everything was “fine”, and yet Aspire clearly has no interest in educating this person. You can be sure that it isn’t just one student, and this is what they get away with and how they market “quality schools”. But only for the families they choose.
Oakland_mom,
This is so appalling and so true.
And if we had education reporters who were journalists and not stenographers they would notice the glaring evidence of this since it is right in front of their face:
The REAL public schools that supposedly have the best academic outcomes (i.e. their students have high test scores ) have the LOWEST attrition rates when compared to other public schools.
The charter schools that supposedly have the best academic outcomes (i.e. their students have high test scores) have the HIGHEST attrition rates when compared to other charter schools.
When it comes to public schools, parents are highly unlikely to pull their kid from a high performing public school. Attrition rates are low, and they are ESPECIALLY low when compared to public schools with lower test scores.
When it comes to charter schools, parents are VERY likely to pull their kid from a high performing charter school. Attrition rates are high, and they are ESPECIALLY high when compared to charter schools with lower test scores.
How do charters get away with this? I will tell you how.
The stenographers in the educational media have decided that the above information is irrelevant. They have decided — because charters have told them — that attrition is irrelevant. So it is irrelevant to the stenographers in the education media!
The highest performing charters have told education stenographers that their charter’s high attrition should NOT ever be compared to the attrition rates of lower performing charters. And education stenographers follow their orders. Education stenographers do not believe it is at all suspicious that poor parents would choose a high performing charter and then abandon it at rates significantly higher than they abandon charters that are much lower-performing.
Why don’t education stenographers find that suspicious? My theory is their implicit racism. Those parents leaving high performing charters at much higher rates than they leave lower performing charters are primarily African American and Latinx.
Can you imagine an education reporter, upon seeing that the attrition rate for a high performing free school serving white middle class students was significantly higher than the attrition rate for a mediocre free school serving white middle class students not being curious as to why that would be?
Can you imagine an education reporter believing it when the high performing free school told them that it was simply because so many white middle class parents who jumped through hoops to send their kid to a very high performing free school decides that they wanted their kid to get a lousy education at a lower performing school instead.
Sure, nothing to see here. No reporter would buy it if these were white parents whose kids were leaving a high performing school at a suspiciously high rate – especially if they were switching them to a school with worse academic outcomes. No reporter would embrace the high performing school’s narrative that white parents just don’t like high performing schools very much so it’s not surprising so mamyu would leave after they tried them.
The failure of the education media is astonishing. And they continue to do this. An extremely high performing charter can graduate a class of 20, and their stenographers in the education media never ask where all the other students went. The fact the disappearing students aren’t white has nothing to do with reporters’ lack of curiosity, I’m sure.
It has everything to do with their lack of curiosity. I am positive that reporters would never have accepted the ridiculous false narrative that the parents of the students who disappeared just didn’t want their kid to have an excellent education if those parents were white.
But we are stuck where we are. Let’s talk about Bill Ayers instead!
Charter schools do not want to pay for specialized staff that serve special needs including ELLs. That is why they select the cheapest and easiest to education. It’s all part of the scam.
Once students attend a charter school, the low performance of students sometimes go unnoticed since some states do not require annual standardized tests for charter schools. When charter schools absorb entire low performing public schools, they do not perform miracles. The students would get a better education resourced public school with smaller classes and without the threat of constant closure.
retired teacher,
The problem is that charters would be easily rejected by the public – as would the entire privatizer agenda – if it wasn’t for the existence of charters that cherry-pick students in urban areas.
Middle class white parents are NOT demanding that their suburban public school system give up some of their space and take funding out of their public school system to give to a charter that will “compete” with their public school and make it better.
Because they know that it would do just the opposite.
But they are swayed by the endless news reports that focus only on pro-charter parents — the ones whose kids do well and are allowed to remain in charters. Those news reports don’t mention that charters exclude difficult to teach kids, often using the most ruthless methods to exclude those kids.
This narrative is helped by reporters like Erica Green at the NYT who ONLY talk to the parents with kids that the charters want to teach. The fact that a reporter at the Washington Post and NYT both happened upon the same charter parent to talk to among the supposedly thousands of parents at a rally is not a coincidence. Those seem to be the only parents reporters believe are worth talking to.
The parents in public school are invisible to them. The parents with kids drummed out of charters, the parents who were discouraged from enrolling a kid after the charter decided the kid didn’t meet standards, the parents whose kids are thriving academically in public schools despite that public school also teaching students who struggle — those parents are all invisible to education reporters.
Echo from Los Angeles of Oakland Mom.
Agree on NYT especially, nycpsp. For a few years I’ve been following WaPo ed articles regularly. They have more ed articles in a week than NYT in two-three months. Sure, they have some clunker pro-charter articles by ‘ed stenographers’ [love that term!], but lots more aren’t. Especially valuable are the Carol Burris articles posted by Valerie Strauss – lots & lots of data, as opposed to NYT cut&paste press releases by charter advocates. WaPo commenters are not as perspicacious, & sprinkled with more knee-jerk conservatives than you’ll ever read in NYT comments—but they have more & better material to learn from. Now, just 3 yrs since I’ve been closely following WaPo ed articles, Jay Mathews gets roundly lambasted by 90% of comments every time he makes goo-goo eyes at charters.
bethree5,
I agree with you about the Wash Post being better. It’s just depressing it is such a low bar to be better.
Glad you read the comments here!
“Jitu Brown does not believe that charter schools and vouchers are the way to increase opportunity for children in places like Chicago’s… Cleveland’s…neighborhoods. “When you go to a middle-class white community you don’t see charter schools…. You see effective, K-12 systems of education in their neighborhoods. Our children deserve the same.” ”
Yes all children deserve the same, but–year after year and decade after decade–that continues to be denied to them. Is it any wonder that some disadvantaged families get tired of waiting and complaining and pleading, and decide to try alternative schools?
Is it any wonder that some will even demand control over what they conclude is THEIR portion of public ed funds so THEY can try to provide the education for THEIR children that “their” public school will NOT provide?
So what you are saying is that the Republican plan is working?
Undermine a public good so that SOME people — the ones with more resources who don’t need as much — can find a private operator to provide it as long as it is profitable to provide it to them? If not, tough.
“Is at any wonder that SOME disadvantaged families get tired of waiting….”
Is it any wonder that Republicans don’t care about the OTHER disadvantaged families who are also tired of waiting but who aren’t profitable for those “alternative” schools to teach?
Is it any wonder that the Republicans care about those OTHER kids so little that their mantra seems to be “let them rot because if our charters don’t want to teach them, then they deserve to rot?”
Of course, their “let them rot” philosophy is entirely dependent on lies. Do you also support those lies? Do you also believe that “some” families could not benefit if the anti-public school movement did not lie about the others and blame them to justify why they believe it’s fine for them to rot?
There is a simple truth, Mark. That simple truth is that the people who run charter schools could tell the truth. Telling the truth doesn’t hurt the kids who benefit from their alternative schools and lying doesn’t help those kids. Lying helps only the adults whose lucrative compensation depends on lying. Lying helps only the folks whose political agenda is to let public schools rot because the students who are left behind do not matter to them.
There are quite a few “alternative schools” that are part of the NYC public school system, and I have not seen any of their leaders lying to justify taking more resources out of the public schools that teach all students.
There are also quite a few privately operated charter schools and they either blatantly push those lies or they are complicit, the way Susan Collins is, choosing to remain silent instead of calling out the lies because they don’t mind sacrificing the students in public schools for their own benefit. And they rationalize their complicity by telling themselves that the kids their school helps makes it okay that they remain silent as the lies of other charters hurt the students left behind.
But they are lying to themselves because they could be teaching “some” students without hurting the others.
Telling the truth doesn’t hurt anyone. Telling lies hurts many students and helps some ruthless and greedy adults. So why do they choose the false narratives? What is wrong with these people and when did they lose their moral compasses?
oops left out “are spot om” on in 3rd sentence.
Families that live in an area zoned for schools that are truly bad (educationally, &/or unsafe &/or poor physical facility) are being cheated by the system [govt, politics & policy]. Of course they will seek whatever alternatives are available to them. Stats say a charter is likely to be the same on those scores or worse, besides which just during their children’s K12 span 1 in 4 is likely to fold. Maybe they get lucky but chances are not good. Stats also say one or more of their [poor] children is likely to be learning-disabled &/or ESL, but charters are excused from providing SpEd or ESL services. So they keep him/ her/ them in zoned school – where SpEd/ ESL services have gone downhill because of losing seats to area charter(s). Add vouchers to the picture [even less likely to be same or better than zoned school] and chances worsen. These families are being cheated by the system. Period.
bethree5,
The stats on charters that exclude the students who make their stats look bad are – and this is going to definitely shock you — pretty good!
The stats on charters that RUTHLESSLY cull the students who make their stats look bad are very, very good!
FYI – educational journalists are certain that the reason that charters that MOST ruthlessly cull their student population have better stats than charters that don’t do much culling of their student population has nothing to do with the ruthless culling. Why? Because charters told them so, and that’s all the evidence they need!
Whodathunk it? It’s a miracle! It’s amazing! It’s an accomplishment that every single education reporter at the NYT is awed about! They know that it must be some “secret sauce” and those education reporters are so impressed and delighted that the charter spends millions of dollars for a “center” (named after a right wing anti-public school hedge fund billionaire) that can teach other schools their special recipe of the best way to ruthlessly shed the students who make their stats look bad! Hint: It depends on implicitly racist reporters embracing the narrative that the students they ruthlessly cull are violent 5 year olds or they have uncaring or lazy parents who decided they preferred their kid to be a failure than a scholar.
When Mark’s vision of a society where all students who underperform are ruthlessly culled from public schools, 100% of public schools will be amazing! What happens to the other students has never been a concern of those folks. They offer nothing for them at all. They certainly don’t want them in schools, because according to their very warped logic, those schools would no longer be excellent.
What is implied, of course, is that the students left behind should rot because it’s no longer worth spending any money to teach them.
This was in reply to Mark
bethree5,
Yes, I knew that. I was just trying (and obviously failing!) to use sarcasm because everything you posted should be the starting point of all discussion and it’s not!
The privatizers succeed in undermining public schools to make them even worse, and instead of Mark recognizing that the public schools are being cheated by the system, with the students left behind suffering the most, Mark tells us that the result of the privatizers undermining and hurting public schools is that parents will seek alternatives! Thanks, Captain Obvious! (I mean Mark, not you bethree5).
The implication is this sort of crazy logic where Mark points out that parents will seek out alternatives if their public schools are made bad enough, as if that exonerates the privatizers instead of incriminates them.
And you rightly point out that the “alternatives” are not for all students.
And public schools can’t abandon the other students. I don’t understand what Mark thinks is the solution for those kids. What is the solution for those students?
I wish Mark would address that, instead of pointing out the obvious.
Yup, nycpsp. I wrote ‘intended for Mark before you posted. As always your comments on charters & especially media [NYT!] coverage.
Inquiring minds want to know: what is the center named for a right wing anti-public school hedge fund billionaire? [is it Bloomberg?]
Not Bloomberg, even more right wing than Bloomberg. Julian Robertson.
I love the quote from him:
“I’ve been an investor for a long time; there’s no better investment than the education of [all] SOME of our children,” said Robertson.”
I fixed his quote since he obviously didn’t mean ALL of our children, he meant the ones who made the charters he donated to look good. And he definitely donates a lot..
And like most billionaires (MacKenzie Scott is a rare exception), a donation is not properly “charitable” unless their name is plastered on some building or center and can be included in every article about their self-named center for PR purposes.
From their own PR:
“The Robertson Center brings together a state-of-the-art training facility with Success Academy’s first K-8 Lab School, providing a one-of-a-kind setting to innovate and reimagine pre-K-12 public education. Located in New York’s Hudson Yards neighborhood, the Robertson Center serves as the main headquarters for the Success Academy Education Institute, which provides the comprehensive training and professional development that drives our excellence and sets SA apart.”
Do they train in how to make students they put on the (now invisible) got to go lists feel their patented misery so they can leave?
As I mentioned in another post where certain unnamed folks posted the link to the NYT article on declining enrollment in public schools, by some mysterious circumstances, no NYT reporter was even the least bit curious about the declining enrollment in Success Academy High School, where a 9th grade class of 46 only graduated 26 seniors, and the following 9th grade class of 191 only graduated 98 seniors.
Declining enrollment indeed. I can only surmise that the Robertson Center is teaching professionals how to achieve that declining enrollment that is an important part of their professional training to achieve excellence. And presumably teaching how to train their media lapdogs to view the “enrollment decline” as a positive when it comes to charters and a negative when it comes to public schools.
Never mind. The media lapdogs are already very well trained in that. It’s almost an embarrassment for them.
If nearly half a 9th grade class leaves a charter before graduation, that’s excellence that must be rewarded by many tens of millions of dollars in extra funding. To expand so there are more charter schools where students disappear.
But when public schools have enrollment declines, it means their budgets must be cut and schools must figure out how to make do with less.
Possibly related.
This article shows exactly what is wrong with always reporting stories using the right wing narrative.
“With Plunging Enrollment, Schools Now Have the Space for Smaller Class Sizes like the Students who Leave for Privates Get, but Republicans Tell Middle Class Families Their Kids Don’t Deserve It”
“Plunging Enrollment Proves Parents Want the Smaller Class Sizes of Privates But Republicans Say Only Rich Students Deserve That.”
“Parents Question Why They Can’t Have Small Class Sizes With Enrollment Decreases, But Republicans Tell Them Their Kids Don’t Deserve It”.
“Parents Angry as Republicans Refuse Small Class Sizes – Parents Ask Republican Congressmen Why Only Billionaires’ Kids Matter to Them?”
But of course what is accepted as “truth” is that school budgets would be cut instead of remaining the same so that students affected by the pandemic can have small class sizes.
This is also an unintentionally hilarious article that reveals the lack of journalism practiced by NYT education reporters.
I wonder how the mom who only sent her two (favorite?) kids to private school and left the other 2 in the public school she disliked so much made her decision.
It is interesting that in anti-masking pro-school opening rural Iowa, a school district lost a higher percentage of their students than the NYC public schools did.
And I am really fascinated by the excellent reporting where a random mother can “estimate” that her son entered Kindergarten last year and now in first grade 30 of his classmates are already gone! Do we think only 10 kids are left? Or was his Kindergarten class 50 students? In which case it certainly explains why so many parents would leave.
Whatever you think of the framing or the reporting of the article, enrollment declines are not good for public schools.
FLERP!,
But there were already enrollment declines because of demographic declines. This COULD be used as a chance to reduce class size. Because enrollment increases always lead to larger class sizes.
So now there is more space. And if we lived in a society where we didn’t just accept that small class sizes were reserved for students who were so rich and were already lavished with so many advantages — if we weren’t brainwashed by the far right billionaires and the unethical ed reformers who depend on their largess to believe that small classes were only “necessary” for the kids who had every other advantage — then that would be what this story is about. All the good things that could be done if there are fewer students enrolled and there is space to give kids back their school libraries and gymnasiums and computer rooms and lounges and STILL have class sizes that are under 20 and sometimes under 15.
Do you think that is impossible? That’s what private schools do.
If we had real journalists, journalists would have already asked Emma Bloomberg why her Center for Access and Opportunity doesn’t lobby for the SAME small class size that she got in her private schools.
A journalist would already have demanded answers from Emma Bloomberg about why she isn’t spending her money fighting for kids to have the small class sizes she got. Does she really want to help them? Or does she just want to deny them what she got because she just doesn’t think they deserve as much as she got?
But instead, like other privileged ed reformers, she never has to explain the inconsistencies between her claims to care, and her refusal to fight for those students to get what she got. The Bloombergs seem to believe that charity means giving students what the Bloombergs believe those students deserve and not one thing more — and the fact that those students don’t get the small class sizes of privates is because folks like the Bloombergs seem to believe in their heart of hearts that they just aren’t worth it.
Enrollment being down is an OPPORTUNITY for billionaires to step up and fight for small class sizes in public schools. But since they don’t believe poor kids are really worth it, they won’t.
FLERP– “And since school funding is tied to enrollment, cities that have lost many students — including Denver, Albuquerque and Oakland — are now considering combining classrooms, laying off teachers or shutting down entire schools.” Why even say “since school funding is tied to enrollment”? [duh] The question is, why the decline in enrollment?
The US birth rate went down nearly 2% per year or 5 yrs in a row: ’09 [students entering 8th grade next Fall], ’10, ’11, ’12, ’13. Then it went back to the recently-typical decline of nearly 1% per year for ’14 and ’15 [students entering 2nd grade next Fall]. Now compare the CA example from the article: enrollment dropped nearly 2% from last schyr to this schyr, and a total of 4.4% over last 4 years…
I am a math-challenged person, so please correct me if this is some big goof… but don’t the numbers suggest that nearly all of the issue here is declining birth rate?
The author tosses in various stats from the last two years in widely-dispersed areas in an attempt to convince us that pandemic changes are the driving factor here, but to me they raise more questions than they answer. IMHO it’s way to soon to draw long-term conclusions based on this year and last year’s enrollment figures. She is correct that the % loss of curriculum during 2 pandemic yrs presents a problem that means a bumpy ride for a few years, considering extra efforts are needed in a climate of steady, incremental effects of declining birth rate.
I know you weren’t replying to me, but just wanted to thank you for those good points.
bethree5 wrote: “don’t the numbers suggest that nearly all of the issue here is declining birth rate?”
Not just that, but the NYT did include a pandemic related reason that could account for the decline that isn’t due to birthrate:
“this year’s decline was tens of thousands of students larger than could be explained by demographic trends, relocations or defections to home-schooling or private schools.”
“We’re seeing a huge influx of people who’ve lost housing,” said Cyndee Albertson, executive director of Family Promise of Orange County, which helped place Ms. Parish and her children in an extended-stay hotel room and enrolled them in nearby schools.”
“The parents are afraid if they seek services the protective services will take away their children and the children don’t want to go to school when they can’t wash their clothes or shower…”
Isn’t the real problem that money shouldn’t be tied to enrollment but need? It seems that privatizers have always taken advantage of the gap between what an “average” student needs and the students who need significantly less or significantly more.
And it seems that regardless of enrollment, post-pandemic the percentage of students who are higher needs is increasing. And that doesn’t just mean some documented learning issue – it means the percentage of students who are able to come to school “ready to learn” versus the percentage of students who need a lot of extra resources to get them to that point.
100 ready to learn students are much less expensive to teach than 50 ready to learn students and 50 who aren’t. Regardless of family income.
And teaching 100 students if 80 of them come ready to learn and 20 of them need more attention is going to be a lot less expensive than teaching “only” 80 students if only 20 of them come ready to learn and 60 of them need more resources.
Yes, good points, nycpsp. I get to see every year a live illustration of the “cheaper to teach” theory in our town’s annual school budget. People complain like hell about the property taxes, and they are crazy-high. That’s mainly about NJ’s ‘robin hood’ school funding that pools the state’s property taxes and redistributes most to the neediest districts. Going on for about 40 yrs. We get about 6% state aid, vs nearby Newark’s 80%. Until 2010, the town just kept raising its local taxes to keep the school budget intact. Since the 2% REcap, it’s become tricky, and perhaps we’re slower to add the latest bell or whistle. But still top-notch. The punch line: our per pupil spending is several thousand dollars below the state average.
The NYT article about declining enrollment is a heartbreaking account of the families who suffer the most because of Republican policies.
“And other families were thrown into such turmoil by pandemic-related job losses, homelessness and school closures that their children simply dropped out.”
“this year’s decline was tens of thousands of students larger than could be explained by demographic trends, relocations or defections to home-schooling or private schools.”
“We’re seeing a huge influx of people who’ve lost housing,” said Cyndee Albertson, executive director of Family Promise of Orange County, which helped place Ms. Parish and her children in an extended-stay hotel room and enrolled them in nearby schools.”
“The parents are afraid if they seek services the protective services will take away their children and the children don’t want to go to school when they can’t wash their clothes or shower,” Ms. Albertson said. “These situations are nothing new, but since the pandemic, they’ve gotten a lot more frequent and a lot worse.”
There should be a billionaire tax specifically to provide all students in this country the same education that billionaires give their own kids.
Some community schools have washers and dryers available to families that are homeless or assigned to temporary housing. With ever increasing poor students in public schools, it makes sense to have services including doctors and dentists on site.
Retired teacher
I started teaching at 48. I had a few good principals. The last one I had at the first school I began teaching at came from a very wealthy family. I always worked in low-income schools by choice. He was Republican. One day he asked me what I thought of “No child left behind.” I told him, “unfortunately, we are leaving many children behind.” This was in the spring. In the fall, it was very obvious that I was given many children with behavior and learning issues. I eventually asked the school secretary how I got this class. She told me that he took my class roster and stacked it. Every time I tried to bring a child up to be evaluated to receive help, I was denied a meeting or any help. Lots of other bullying techniques were used by him. I eventually had a lawyer file a formal complaint against him. I found out a few years later that 12 teachers filed complaints against him. The only punishment he received by the district was to not be given an administrative position, so he went to another district and was hired for an administrative position. I was moved to two other schools. I retired early because I wasn’t allowed to do things I knew were good for the students—like classroom meetings to help them learn to get along better and keep the bullying down. I look back now and realize I was correct in what I was doing. Last week I attended the graduation of one of my former students from ASU Cum Laude, who had come from the Sudan. I had him as a 4th grade student for math. He ended up coming to my church with other Sudanese adults and children, and I became his Godmother. At graduation, he thanked me for helping him and told me he loved me.