I wrote recently about Amanda Jones, the librarian in Louisiana who is fighting back against censorship and harassment in court.
One of our regular readers said she belongs on the honor roll of this blog. He’s right.
Amanda Jones joins the honor roll for her courage and integrity in fighting censorship!
Her GoFundMe page is raising money for her legal defense. Consider helping her fight for free thought!
Jeff Bryant, a veteran education journalist, writes here about the exciting promise of community schools as a meaningful reform.
Jeff writes about a parent who was reluctant to send her child to a Title 1 school. But she gave it a try and was delighted when she discovered it was a community school.
He writes:
As the 2022-2023 school year approaches, both her daughters are enrolled in Wheaton Woods, and Allen has had a change of heart about the school.
“I’m grateful now that we gave Wheaton Woods a try. I now feel we have our kids in the best school for them, and I always advocate for the school,” she said.
What helped turn around Allen’s attitude toward Wheaton Woods had much to do with a recent state-mandated Blueprint in Montgomery County and across Maryland to implement an education approach called community schools.
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The Blueprint calls for designating schools that serve highly concentrated populations of impoverished families as “community schools” and providing these schools with extra funding and support.
The extra funding is supposed to be used to hire a health practitioner and a school-based staff person who conducts a needs assessment of the school, and based on that assessment, coordinates and manages a wide range of services—including academic, health, mental, and other services—to help address the negative impact that concentrated poverty often has on children and families.
Nineteen schools in Montgomery County, including Wheaton Woods, have been designated as community schools, according to the district’s website.
Now in its third year of implementing the approach, Wheaton Woods has poured new energy and resources to engage families more deeply in the operations of the school and respond to their needs by providing them with access to new programs and services….
After-school activities are important to Allen’s family because both she and her husband work full time. “Our daily schedules are tight,” she said.
A great deal of the school’s outreach effort is due to the work of Daysi Castro, who serves as the school’s community school coordinator called “liaisons” in Montgomery County.
“We haven’t had the opportunity to offer the services we can now give our families because we are a community school,” Castro told Our Schools.
Many of the services offered by Wheaton Woods are the result of Castro and the school forming partnerships with local nonprofits and county agencies. The Excel Beyond the Bell after-school program Allen mentioned is the result of a partnershipwith a local community organization Action in Montgomery. The school also collaborates with a local charity, the Children’s Opportunity Fund, to bring soccer, art, and Spanish language classes to students, along with the opportunity to participate in school clubs for homework and cooking classes. Other partnerships offer parents driving classes, English language classes, and food safety classes. The Montgomery County Recreation collaborates with Wheaton Woods to offer after-school activities as well
Two prominent Pennsylvanians complain that the legislature dropped the ball again on charter reform.
Rob Gleason chaired the @PAGOP for 10 years prior to becoming Westmont Hilltop school board president. Democrat Eugene DePasquale was PA Auditor General for two terms. They get it.
They write:
As longtime public servants representing both major political parties and as concerned citizens who care about public education in the commonwealth, we are writing to express our great disappointment and frustration with the continued inaction by our state legislature despite broad-based, statewide, bipartisan support for charter school reform. The fact that more than 85% of locally elected school boards (434 of 500), in a state as diverse as ours, have passed formal resolutions calling for a substantive charter school law overhaul should send a clear message to policymakers — it is time for reform.
Carol Burris writes in The Progressive about the alarming rate with which charters close. Parents should know this before enrolling their children and taking a chance.
She writes:
In May, a study by the National Center for Research on Education Access and Choice (REACH) at Tulane University found that charter schools close at much higher rates than public schools, even when controlling for factors such as enrollment and test scores. Each year, roughly 5 percent of charters close, compared with 1 percent of public schools.
But REACH’s data likely underestimates the problem. Because so many new charter schools open each year, the closure rate is offset by the overall growth of the industry. And a new charter opening in Columbus, Ohio, is of little help to a student whose charter just closed in Memphis, Tennessee.
To more accurately capture the big picture, we at the Network for Public Education published a report on the long-term viability of charter schools. We looked at seventeen cohorts, each composed of all U.S. charters that opened in a given year, beginning in 1998 and ending in 2014. Our goal was to track these schools over time and see how they fared when compared with one another. We found that, by year three, an average of 18 percent of charters had closed. By year ten, the proportion of failed charters topped 40 percent.
Enrollment data for the year before each school closed indicated that charter schools opening between 1999 and 2017 have collectively displaced upwards of one million students—often with almost no warning.
The alarming rate of charter school closures prompted the U.S. Department of Education to direct federal startup funding to schools more likely to succeed. But even modest proposals have met stiff resistance from the charter lobby. For them, the closures are seen positively: It is “the sector working as intended,” Chalkbeat reported, citing National Alliance for Public Charter Schools Chief Executive Officer Nina Rees.
And she’s right—charter churn, including abrupt closures, is baked into the marketplace model that believes only the most popular performers should survive. The three recent closings in North Carolina, however, were not based on popularity, or even low test scores—they were the result of greed and fraud.
To prevent this, government officials at all levels need to tighten regulations and hold charter school boards accountable. Until government officials get serious about charter school reform, each parent or guardian who enrolls their child in a charter school deserves a notice that says, “Caution: This school could close with little to no warning.”
Nearly two dozen states have moved to restrict abortion or ban it altogether since the reversal of Roe v. Wade — meaning more people, especially those with low incomes and from marginalized communities, will be forced to carry unwanted pregnancies to term.
So are states prepared to pay for the infrastructure needed to support these parents and children? The data paints a grim picture for many families: Mothers and children in states with the toughest abortion restrictions tend to have less access to health care and financial assistance, as well as worse health outcomes.
Stuart Butler, a senior fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution, calls the end of Roe “a double whammy” for people who live in these states, which are mostly in the South.
“They are far less likely to have assistance for themselves and their children, and they are far less likely to have health care available to them when they are pregnant and for their children,” he tells Morning Edition. “And that means that there’s going to be not only more hardship, but greater health problems and maternal deaths and so on … unless there is a fundamental change in political behavior in those states.”
As NPR has reported, a large body of research shows that being denied an abortion limits peoples’ education, time in the workforce and wages, with the economic consequences extending well into the lives of their children. One groundbreaking project called The Turnaway Study spent a decade comparing the experiences of people who had abortions with those who wanted abortions but were denied them, and found that those who were denied treatment experienced worse economic and mental health outcomes than those who received care.
Dr. Diana Greene Foster, the demographer behind the study, told NPR in May that the findings show that pregnant people who are unable to get a safe, legal abortion and end up carrying the pregnancy to term will experience long-term physical and economic harm.
“We haven’t become a more generous country that supports low-income mothers,” she added. “And so those outcomes are still the outcomes that people will experience when they are denied a wanted abortion.”
M. Yvonne Taylor taught AP English in Texas, where she was one of the few–if not the only–Black AP English teacher. In this post, she explains how Toni Morrison’s books changed her life. Morrison’s books are frequently banned in red states, but Taylor discovered that they were not only important to her but to black students, even to white students. The lesson, she implies, is that students may get excited about reading if they are allowed to read the books that are likeliest to be banned.
Read her article in full. The following is an excerpt.
She writes:
It was 2009. The country had just elected its first actual black president. (A famous quote from Morrison, often misunderstood, has her naming Bill Clinton as our first black president.) I was teaching high school AP English. The school was diverse, but as is common even in diverse schools, the AP English classes were not. And I was the sole black teacher of AP English at the high school. The sole black AP English teacher in the district. And when I attended an AP English conference at Rice University earlier in the year, I was the lone black AP English teacher out of at least 100 teachers from across the state of Texas. When I’d attended that conference, the sole Latina in the group rushed over to me, “I’ve been coming to these conferences for eight years. This is the first time I’ve seen another teacher of color,” she said, quickly exchanging information with me and inviting me to lunch.
Upcoming on the syllabus for 12th grade AP English that spring were two books, Pride and Prejudice and Wuthering Heights. Students would have a choice between them. I sighed. We’d read no books by people of color at all. I scanned the list of approved AP English texts. I spotted Morrison’s name, and though at the time The Bluest Eye wasn’t listed among them, I felt compelled to teach it. I believed the story would be accessible to high school students. I believed it was also important, as Americans were so quick to see the election of Barack Obama as the beginning of a post-racial era, to show a history that was not so far from, and still influencing, the present.
I petitioned to have the book included on our reading list, and though it was permitted, I was the only one who felt comfortable teaching it. The white teachers felt they couldn’t tackle the subject matter and because the book, which has been banned by school districts in various parts of the country at one time or another, dealt with issues of abuse, I had to allow students to opt out if they chose and get permission slips signed from parents if they wanted to dive in.
As I’d expected, black and brown students flocked to my class to read it. However, unexpectedly the controversy had an interesting consequence. White teenage boys, uninterested in what they saw as sappy 19th-century love stories, chose to read The Bluest Eye in droves. Conversations in class were fruitful, layered, nuanced, and complex. I explained colorism to them, brought in my parents’ high-school yearbooks to show them how close segregation and Jim Crow actually were to me and to them. We dissected the book as a literary work and shared empathy over the sadness of an innocent black girl whose only desire was to be seen and loved by a society that refuses to recognize her humanity.
Texas is a state where anyone can carry a gun without a permit, thanks to Governor Greg Abbott.
The right to life is precious for a fetus but not for anyone else.
In recognition of the lawlessness and easy access to guns in the state, teachers of preschoolers in Houston are now getting trained on how to respond to an active shooter. This is training that would also be useful in shopping centers, movie theaters, concert venues, grocery stores, and wherever people gather.
Everyone from lunchroom staff to administrators from 31 southwest Houston preschools gathered Monday to learn about how to prepare themselves and the children for an active shooter.
About 500 staff from the nonprofit BakerRipley gathered in a cavernous conference room at the NRG Center to learn a protocol for responding to active shooters in the wake of the Uvalde school massacre. Teachers had spent much of the day on training, including how to confront an armed attacker, before returning to their classrooms later this month.
The nonprofit has been preparing “age appropriate” language and visual aids for its charges, who range in age from 6 weeks to five years, said Cimberli Darrough, BakerRipley’s senior director of Head Start programs.
“If you hear ‘pop pop,’ hide,” said Darrough, explaining how the preschoolers will be taught active shooter protocols. “When we say it is time to hide, you need to hide. You need to stay still. We are turning the lights out, barricading the door.”
Sounding practical rather than alarmist, Alvin ISD Sgt. Jermaine Jackson, instructed the preschool workers on avoidance and defense tactics he said would help them react quickly during a school shooting.
“Run, hide, fight,” he repeated, citing the basic tenets of active shooter protocols promoted by the FBI. “You want to be a moving target instead of a stationary target.”
Arming the teachers and training the students how to hide must be a whole lot easier than banning assault weapons and limiting access to deadly firearms.
Better Bowers is an on-line comedian with a very funny Twitter account. In this short video, she hands out awards for the Stupidest Members of Congress.
Thanks to Ed Johnson for the link.
In Louisiana, a middle school librarian has said. “Enough is enough.” She is standing up and fighting against the vigilantes who have targeted school libraries.
Amanda Jones has filed a lawsuit against two men who have harassed her and other librarians.
Amanda Jones, a librarian at a middle school in Denham Springs, Louisiana, filed a defamation lawsuit Wednesday, arguing that Facebook pages run by Michael Lunsford and Ryan Thames falsely labeled her a pedophile who wants to teach 11-year-olds about anal sex.
Jones, the president of the Louisiana Association of School Librarians, was alarmed and outraged by the verbal attacks, which came after she spoke against censorship at a Livingston Parish Library Board of Control meeting. She said she’s suing the two men because she’s exhausted with the insults hurled at educators and librarians over LGBTQ materials.
“I’ve had enough for everybody,” Jones said in an interview. “Nobody stands up to these people. They just say what they want and there are no repercussions and they ruin people’s reputations and there’s no consequences.”
Lunsford did not respond to requests for comment. Thames declined to comment.
Nationwide, school districts have been bombarded by conservative activists and parents over the past year demanding that books with sexual references or that discuss racial conflict, often by authors of color or those who are LGBTQ, be purged from campuses. Those demands have slowly moved toward public libraries in recent months.
Thank you, Amanda Jones!
Writing in The Nation, David Kirp reviewed a book about the college rating system devised by US News and finds it to be as ridiculous as we have long believed. The book is BREAKING RANKS: HOW THE RANKINGS INDUSTRY RULES HIGHER EDUCATION AND WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT by Colin Diver, former president of Reed College.
Which are the “best” colleges and universities, according to the rankers? The most selective. The richest. The ones that have their pick of the most gifted students. The ones with the money to have fabulous student centers, libraries, gyms, etc.
This is nuts.
Kirp writes:
A few years back, the “Varsity Blues” scandal made front-page news. Rich parents, desperate to ensure that their offspring were accepted by an elite university, paid huge sums of money to an entrepreneur who promised “side door” admissions. Over the course of nearly a decade, athletic records were faked, bribes were paid to university staffers, and hired experts took the SAT instead of the students. To the public, the perp-walk treatment received by these parents and those who abetted them was a justified comeuppance for those who cheated the system.
But did the prosecution of these cheaters really solve the problem? Hardly. The titillating story about entitled parents, far from being an isolated scandal, was just the proverbial tip of the iceberg: It illustrated how the college admissions system in the United States is systemically broken. With places in top-rung schools almost as rare as the Hope Diamond, affluent parents scramble for every advantage. But universities made this system what it is today: They are these parents’ eager enablers, competing fiercely for the prestige and money that comes with success in the rankings game.
In Breaking Ranks, Colin Diver, a former president of Reed College, details how the rankings industry—most notoriously, U.S. News & World Report—powers this unvirtuous cycle. If you are buying a car or a refrigerator, a Consumer Reports–style rankings system works just fine. But, as Diver points out, there is no right answer when it comes to choosing a college—for all the fancy formulas the rankings companies trot out, they offer faux science. When the powerhouses, like U.S. News and its ilk, weigh competing values—selectivity versus affordability, reputation versus higher-than-predicted graduation rates—they are making an ideological judgment about what really matters in a college education. (The Washington Monthly’s formula emphasizes a college’s contribution to the public good, focusing on social mobility, research, and promoting public service. It’s a fine, if imperfectly executed, idea, but there is scant evidence that the magazine has much of an impact on students’ choices.) Thus, it’s apparent from the results that what counts most in these calculations is the wealth of the institution and, indirectly, the wealth of its students. Were it otherwise, would all of the top 20 universities be wealthy private schools?
The rankings game is a high-stakes affair. Where an institution stands in the U.S. News pecking order affects the number and credentials of its applicants, whose decisions are heavily influenced by a school’s prestige; the generosity of its donors, who like to give to the winners; the bragging rights of its trustees; and its appeal to the professoriate. It’s a perpetual cycle: A college that admits more well-credentialed students, has a growing endowment, and boasts a more highly regarded faculty receives a higher ranking, which in turn generates greater selectivity, bigger donations, happier trustees, and more-pedigreed professors. Because rankings are a zero-sum game, an institution that doesn’t do as well slips in the charts, and all hell breaks loose on the campus.
Kirp can imagine a fairer ratings system: one that credits colleges and universities for improving the life chances of their students:
A fairer rankings system would highlight universities like Georgia State and CUNY, whose mission is to help students from poor families enter the middle class, rather than fixating on institutions like Yale and Princeton, which burnish the prone-to-success credentials of their students. It would give a shout-out to colleges where the teaching is first-rate, the students are engaged in learning, and the alumni describe themselves as living a fulfilling life. But such an approach is unlikely to gain traction in this hyper-competitive society, where the meritocratic myth prevails and prestige is all that matters.
Diane Ravitch's blog 