Archives for the month of: December, 2022
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Texas: Battle Over Vouchers Looms in Legislature

By dianeravitch
December 18, 2022 //
31

Texas Governor Greg Abbott is determined to pass a voucher bill in the upcoming legislative session, along with voucher zealot Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick. They hope to use the culture war nonsense about public schools “indoctrinating” students on race and gender issues. They pay no attention to the research showing that students who use vouchers are likely to lose ground, academically, and learn less than in public school. Does the legislature really want to harm the state’s public schools while sending kids off to religious and private schools where they are likely to get a worse education than in public schools?

Edward McKinley of the Houston Chronicle wrote recently:

Private school vouchers were within a handful of votes of becoming Texas law in May 2005. Former Rep. Carter Casteel still remembers the constituent who confronted her in her office that day.

“He kind of threatened me, not to harm me, but that I wouldn’t be reelected if I didn’t vote for the vouchers,” Casteel, a New Braunfels Republican, said in an interview. A public school teacher and school board member before she served in the Legislature, Casteel is and was a staunch opponent of private school vouchers.

“I explained to him my position, and he wasn’t very happy, I remember that,” she said. “If you want your child to go to a private school, then that’s your choice and you spend your money, but you don’t take taxpayer dollars away.”

Debate on the floor of the Texas House stretched on for hours, and the voucher bill was gutted following a series of back-and-forth, close votes. Casteel voted no, saying publicly that she was willing to lose her House seat over it.

In a dramatic capstone to the proceedings, Rep. Senfronia Thompson ran across the floor and yanked the microphone out of the bill author’s hand, yelling for attention to a procedural mistake in the bill that led to its death.

That day was the high-water mark in efforts to pass private school vouchers in Texas.

They have been blocked by a powerful coalition of Democrats and rural Republicans in the House. In fact, the House has routinely and overwhelmingly supported a statement policy that outright bans taxpayer funds from going to private schools in sessions since.

But advocates for vouchers believe that those legislative dynamics that have been frozen for the last 17 years may finally be thawing.

As Republicans for the past year have raised alarms over what they see as liberal indoctrination in the public school curriculum — especially in the way racism and LGBT issues are taught — they’ve chalked up victories in statehouses across the country. Texas parents have carried that same fight to school board meetings, their local libraries and trustee elections. Now, Gov. Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick are calling for more of the same in the upcoming legislative session, with pledges to back ‘parents matter’ initiatives that include another voucher push.

“Families started to see there’s another dimension to school quality that’s arguably more important, which is whether the school’s curriculum aligns with their values,” said Corey DeAngelis, senior fellow with the American Federation for Children, which advocates for vouchers. “And I think that’s sparked a wave of support for school choice around the country.”

Abbott earlier this year announced his support for a policy that would allow public funds to follow students, regardless of whether they attend public schools or private schools. Shortly after, DeAngelis posted a photo of himself meeting with the governor, and “it’s happening, Texas,” has become a refrain on his popular Twitter account.

“With all the national momentum, I think a lot of people are looking toward Texas as the next step,” DeAngelis said. “It’s going to be all eyes on Texas coming up this session. And people are going to be watching.”

Eyes on Arizona, Virginia

The argument for vouchers has traditionally been that children, particularly in urban areas, are forced to attend struggling schools, when the state could instead subsidize them attending private schools nearby. One problem with this argument is that polling has often found that while people have critical views of public schools generally, they often like their own public schools just fine.

“In the past, they’ve tried to get vouchers by saying we’ve got to do something about kids trapped in failing schools. And so we’d say we’ve got all these failing schools. And then you’d look at the data and you have about 80 campuses out of about 8,500 or so that were ‘improvement required.’ So you’re looking at 1 percent,” said Charles Luke, head of the Coalition for Public Schools, which represents education groups opposing voucher policies.

“So when you’re talking about how horrible the public school system is, 99 percent of them are doing fine,” he said. “A kid takes a test and he gets a 99 on it, you wouldn’t say ‘he’s failing, I’m failing him, The system is failing him.’ You’d say, he’s doing great!”

But instead of school budgets or test scores, this time it’s culture war issues with spinoffs that include whether teachings on racism damage the self-esteem of white kids, and if it’s OK for young children to see a drag show or discuss gender identity.

“There’s this misalignment to what parents thought was going on in their schools and now their eyes have been opened, and now they say hey, hey lets fix this,” said Mandy Drogin, with the Texas Public Policy Foundation. “No more of this social justice warrior, whatever the teacher or administrator feels about pushing into our classrooms. I think that’s where you see so much momentum, and everybody feels and sees that momentum.”

The issue of private school vouchers has historically hewn closely to the culture war issues of the day. The modern voucher advocacy movement has roots connecting to efforts to resist racial integrationafter the Brown v Board of Education U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1954.

In the 1950s and ‘60s, supporters of vouchers wanted to leave “government schools” because they argued such schools were experimenting with “social engineering” and radical ideologies, education historian Jon Hale has noted, particularly desegregation. The debates from yesterday over leaving public schools because of their values mirror contemporary political arguments over how LGBTQ+ issues are discussed or the children who are undocumented immigrants attending American public schools.

One question legislative observers have had is whether those pushing vouchers will attempt to pass a universal program or a more limited one.

Teachers unions, Democrats and other public school advocates have traditionally opposed any voucher program, no matter how small, but voucher advocates have seen success in other states starting small and building out from there.

This year, however, Arizona passed a universal program, and advocates say that should be the goal in Texas.

Mayes Middleton, who served in the House in the 2019 and 2021 sessions and was elected this year to the state Senate, has filed one such bill. His would create education savings accounts, a form of vouchers, that could be used by anyone to send their kids to public school, private school, community college classes, virtual schools or home school.

This approach is the best way to maximize “parental empowerment,” he said in a Friday interview, and to capitalize on the momentum behind that movement that helped carry Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin to victory last year. There were also Republicans unseated in the primaries earlier this year across the state who were less supportive of voucher policies, Middleton said, which could help win additional support.

He says his bill could be particularly helpful for rural Texans who want their kids to access more flexible, hybrid home school models, as well as for people who want to send their kids to private Catholic schools but cannot afford it, many of whom he said are Hispanic. Those are groups who would need to support voucher policies for them to win passage in the Legislature.

“Look in Arizona what they did it with one-seat GOP majority in their house and senate,” DeAngelis said. “If every Republican in Arizona can show up for their platform issue, other red states should be able to follow suit as well.”

Vouchers fell far short in 2021

Public school advocates and opponents of vouchers acknowledge that the fight is going to be tighter and more intense than it has been in many years, but they feel that even with intense lobbying in support, the policies will ultimately fall short.

“These are the same issues that raised their ugly head in past sessions,” said Rep. Harold Dutton, a Houston Democrat who chaired the House Public Education Committee last session, noting that more than 100 of the 150 House members voted in favor of an amendment last year barring the state from spending public funds on private schools. “I don’t see that changing a whole lot, and certainly not being able to get a majority.”

Members of the GOP’s right wing have called for House Speaker Dade Phelan to end the practice of naming Democrats to head a limited number of committees. Some have named Dutton in particular as an obstacle last session to school choice legislation.

Dutton said he hadn’t thought about whether or not he’ll be chair again, but noted: “When vouchers failed before, the person in the chair of public education was a Republican, so what does that tell you?”

Several Republican members of Public Education, who might be in line for the chairmanship if Dutton is not selected again, have also expressed skepticism or opposition to voucher proposals. Rep. Ken King from Canadian has said, “If I have anything to say about it, it’s dead on arrival. It’s horrible for rural Texas. It’s horrible for all of Texas,” while Rep. Gary VanDeaver has said, “This sense of community is what makes Texas great, and I would hate to see anything like a voucher program destroy this community spirit.”

As promised, after Casteel’s role in the demise of the voucher bill in 2005, she lost her seat in 2006.

She noted that a prominent San Antonio businessman and GOP donor who was present in the House the day of the vote and advocated strongly for vouchers donated more than $1 million to her opponent, as the donor did for other Republicans who opposed the voucher bill that day.

“I’ve got a great family, I’ve got a great law profession, and whether I’m (there) or I go home it doesn’t make a bit of difference to me. I didn’t go there to do nothing but what’s right,” Casteel said.

“And I did. I went home. And it never came back up — until this year.”

edward.mckinley@chron.com

Categories Education Industry, Privatization, Propaganda, Religion, Separation of church and state, Texas, Vouchers

Julia Davis Watches Russian Television to Learn What the Russian People Are Told

By dianeravitch
December 18, 2022 //
13

I know that many readers of this blog are not on Twitter. One of the reasons I remain there is Julia Davis. She watches Russian television and reports on what she sees, with video clips. She writes for The Daily Beast and is creator of The Russian Media Monitor. @JuliaDavisNews

A few days ago, she wrote this:

Meanwhile in Russia: the host and his guest concur that Ukraine should be erased off the map and even the memory that it existed should be destroyed. The host says that Russia will always be an empire and being in a state of war is only natural for any empire of Russia’s size.

The text is accompanied by a video clip.

And this:

Meanwhile in Russia: in all seriousness, pundits and experts on Russian state TV argue whether President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky is the Antichrist or just a small demon.

And she retweeted a photo of Kiev last Christmas, two months before Putin’s brutal, pointless invasion:

She also retweeted a video of Mariupol last winter, its trees and buildings bedecked with festive lights, completely unaware that the city would be reduced to rubble in two months, all that beauty utterly destroyed, its people dead or dispersed.

Categories Accountability, Cruelty, International, Media

The Schools That Indoctrinate Students

By dianeravitch
December 18, 2022 //
53

The claim that public schools “indoctrinate” their students is an integral part of the rightwing attack on public schools . This is a canard, a bald-faced lie.

The rightwingers insist that any efforts to teach tolerance and acceptance of others is “indoctrination.” Teaching children the importance of justice, they say, is “woke.”

This is the mission of public schools: to teach children academic skills and knowledge, of course, but also to teach them to work with people who are different from them and their family.

Teaching children to live, work, and play with others and to respect others is important to the functioning of our democracy. We are a people of many diverse origins, different nationalities, different religions. One of the implicit functions of public schools is to help bind us together as one nation, one people who share civic values.

Do you know which schools truly indoctrinate students? Religious schools. That is one of the essential goals of religious schools. They teach the doctrines of their faith. That is why they exist.

Yet, driven by religious zealots, red states are draining public money from public schools for religious schools.

The latest movement is to allow religious schools to become charter schools, enabling them to access public funds for teaching their doctrine.

Politico wrote:

CHURCH V. STATE — Oklahoma’s departing attorney general just took a big step toward achieving a conservative education milestone.

— A state law that blocks religious institutions and private sectarian schools from public charter school programs is likely unconstitutional and should not be enforced, Attorney General John O’Connor and Solicitor General Zach West wrote in a non-binding legal opinion this month .

— Their 15-page memo leans on a trio of recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions that favored religious schools and won rapt attention from conservative school choice advocates and faith groups. Oklahoma Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt said the advisory opinion “rightfully defends parents, education freedom, and religious liberty in Oklahoma.” Newly-elected state Superintendent Ryan Walters called it “the right decision for Oklahomans.”

— “The policy implications are huge because this is the first state that is going to allow religious charter schools,” said Nicole Stelle Garnett , a University of Notre Dame law professor and influential religious charter school supporter who wants other states to follow Oklahoma’s lead . “The legal implications are huge because this is the first state that says that they have to,” she told Weekly Education.

— Now it’s time to see if faith-based Oklahoma institutions successfully apply for taxpayer support to create charter schools that teach religion as a doctrinal truth just like private schools do today, and if legislators will push to change state law.Also watch if legal authorities in other Republican-led states pen similar opinions.

— Those looming decisions and court fights will set the stage for renewed constitutional debates about the line between church and state.

Make no mistake: the bogus claim that public schools “indoctrinate” students is being used to advance the public funding of religious schools whose very mission is indoctrination.

Categories Bigotry, Education Industry, Extremism, Hoax, Privatization, Religion, Separation of church and state

Mississippi: Ethics Commission Rules that State Legislature Is Not a “Public Body”

By dianeravitch
December 17, 2022 //
20

Imagine a crusading news site in Mississippi, one of the poorest and most corrupt states in the nation. That news site is the Mississippi Free Press. It recently filed a complaint with the state ethics commission after it was excluded from a meeting of the GOP caucus, which is so large that it constitutes a quorum.

The ethics commission ruled that the state legislature is not a “public body.”

The Mississippi Ethics Commission held its likely final discussion on the Mississippi Free Press’ complaint against the State House of Representatives today, restating their disagreements over the commission’s decision to declare the Mississippi Legislature not a public body under the Open Meetings Act. The Zoom stream of today’s meeting had high attendance of up to 70 viewers at one time, including representatives of multiple media outlets.

The Mississippi Free Press first filed a complaint in April 2022, after this reporter was barred from a meeting of the House GOP Caucus at the Mississippi Legislature. The caucus, which contains 75 of the 122 members of the chamber, represents a quorum of the Legislature, and is a powerful, secretive driver of key legislative agendas. Later, attorney Rob McDuff filed an additional complaint on behalf of the Mississippi Free Press.

Last week, Ethics Commission Executive Director Tom Hood recommended that the commission rule in favor of the Mississippi Free Press, writing that “it is essential to the fundamental philosophy of the American constitutional form of representative government and to the maintenance of a democratic society that public business undertaken by a quorum of the House of Representatives be performed in an open and public manner.”

But the commission overruled his recommendation 5-3, substantially rejecting the argument that the House of Representatives constituted a public body, but pushing off a final decision to the debate this week.

Stephen Burrow, who argued against the Legislature’s inclusion in the Open Meetings Act, summed up the perspective of his five fellow commission members who voted against the Mississippi Free Press’ complaint. “(The Legislature is) constitutionally obligated to keep (its) doors open,” Burrow said, referring to Section 58 of the Mississippi Constitution. It states: “The doors of each House, when in session, or in committee of the whole, shall be kept open, except in cases which may require secrecy.”

Furthermore, Burrow said, he agreed with this reporter’s complaint in principle. “I think I speak for every member of this commission that we believe that the Legislature should be open, is required to be open and that meetings of the (House Republican) caucus should be open, but that’s not what’s before us.”

“What is before us is whether or not the Legislature chose to include itself within the definition of a public body, and it’s very plain to me that while they included (legislative) committees, they excluded other committees from this for whatever reason. When the Open Meetings Act was passed in 1975, they chose not to include themselves.”

Apparently, in the view of the Ethics Commission, the State Legislature is a private club. Sounds about right seeing how they take care of public needs.

Categories Accountability, Mississippi

Activists to Denver School Board: Grow Up and Take Charge!

By dianeravitch
December 17, 2022 //
1

Jeannie Kaplan is a former elected board member of the Denver Public Schools and a supporter of public schools. Alan Gottllieb is a journalist and a supporter of school choice.

They write:

A piece co-authored by the two of us will undoubtedly shock many people in the Denver education community because we frequently fall on opposite sides of the local education debate.

For example, Jeannie believes that the proliferation of charter schools is directly responsible for many of the challenges facing Denver Public Schools today. Alan sees charter schools as a net benefit to Denver’s families and students. Jeannie believes former superintendents Michael Bennet and Tom Boasberg did deep and permanent damage to DPS, with growing achievement gaps and too much emphasis placed on high-stakes testing. Alan counters that the district improved steadily, across all student groups, during their regimes.

But we, as Denver grandparents, are putting our differences aside for now because we agree on one key issue: DPS is seriously adrift, and it is time for the school board and the administration to get their acts together.

It’s irrelevant at this point to argue over which individual board members or district leaders are to blame for the current mess. The indisputable fact is that until the board can begin acting professionally, which includes providing clear direction to the superintendent, DPS will continue being a national embarrassment that gives the city as a whole a black eye.

No city in this country can hope to grow and thrive without at least a functioning public education system. Denver faces a host of challenges, to be sure, ranging from its failure to deal with the explosion in the number of people experiencing homelessness to crime to economic inequality.

But we believe that no issue is of greater consequence at this moment than the unraveling of DPS. To be sure, educators across the city are performing heroically on a daily basis. But given persistent dysfunction at the top, those educators are succeeding in spite of rather than because of district leadership.

Who could blame anyone a year after the current Denver school board took office for saying they’ve seen enough to have concluded the situation is hopeless with the current cast of characters in place?

There have been multiple instances of dysfunction, incompetence, and unseemly infighting. The board more often than not has proved unable to perform its core functions.

Combine this mess with the inept moves and general tone-deafness of Superintendent Alex Marrero and his team and what you’ve got is a school district in crisis, and distracted from addressing its most glaring issues.

But hope springs eternal. So, rather than despairing, we are going to suggest some ways out of the current morass.

One glimmer of hope is that we have a school board election coming up next November, in which three seats are up. Elections have a way of focusing incumbents’ attention. It gives them an opportunity to reflect upon, if not their shortcomings (that’s probably wishful thinking), at least their electoral vulnerabilities.

The public at large, as well as influential advocacy groups, need to make it crystal clear to the board that any incumbent who continues to feed the dysfunction without offering constructive solutions to the board and district’s issues will not be reelected.

They need to deliver those messages in stark terms beginning right now.

Next, individuals and groups on both sides of the Denver education ideological divide need to join forces, as we are doing here, to deliver a clear message to all board members, including those not up for reelection.

It’s a simple message:  Your behavior is unacceptable. You are not  serving our children. You are embarrassing yourselves and us. Get to work on what matters.

Surely there are enough shared interests that people passionate about public education can bridge their differences to deliver this message. It’s no exaggeration to say the future of the city hinges on its public education system improving, not spiraling into deep and permanent dysfunction.

Finally, Marrero needs to step forward and lead. This includes meeting one-on-one with his bosses, the seven board members, to tell them their behavior is making it all but impossible for him to get anything done.

Marrero has some public apologizing of his own to do as well. His mishandling of the school closure conversation last month left the district with no plan for addressing declining enrollment and related budget challenges. While some schools undoubtedly will have to close, it’s unclear how this will happen or when the decisions will be made. This uncertainty puts enormous stress on potentially affected communities.

Pressure on the district and board members over the lack of community closure conversations led six of seven board members to vote down Marrero’s ever-dwindling number of closure recommendations.

This provides a blueprint for how the citizens of Denver could force the board and the district to change course. Withering criticism from a diverse collection of voices could eventually prove too much for DPS to withstand.

People need to keep up the unrelenting pressure strategy across a host of issues. It is clear the board and the district aren’t going to fix themselves.

We’re going to have to show them the way. Or show them the door.

Categories Education Reform

David Herman: What If a Machine Writes a Better Essay Than a Student?

By dianeravitch
December 17, 2022 //
187

David Herman is a high school teacher. He wrote an essay in The Atlantic that asks whether the English essay is obsolete, replaced by a computer that does it better. The machine may write a well-worded essay, but we should not forget the warning from MIT Professor Les Perelman, who has studied writing machines extensively. The computers don’t have any knowledge. They don’t know any history. They ignore factual errors. Here is one of his critiques of the SAT essay, titled “Mass-Market Writing Assessments as Bullshit.” Or there is this nonsensical essay that he wrote for a machine. Is ChatGPT superior to the SAT machine reader? I will ask Dr. Perelman.

Teenagers have always found ways around doing the hard work of actual learning. CliffsNotes date back to the 1950s, “No Fear Shakespeare” puts the playwright into modern English, YouTube offers literary analysis and historical explication from numerous amateurs and professionals, and so on. For as long as those shortcuts have existed, however, one big part of education has remained inescapable: writing. Barring outright plagiarism, students have always arrived at that moment when they’re on their own with a blank page, staring down a blinking cursor, the essay waiting to be written.

Now that might be about to change. The arrival of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, a program that generates sophisticated text in response to any prompt you can imagine, may signal the end of writing assignments altogether—and maybe even the end of writing as a gatekeeper, a metric for intelligence, a teachable skill.

If you’re looking for historical analogues, this would be like the printing press, the steam drill, and the light bulb having a baby, and that baby having access to the entire corpus of human knowledge and understanding. My life—and the lives of thousands of other teachers and professors, tutors and administrators—is about to drastically change.

I teach a variety of humanities classes (literature, philosophy, religion, history) at a small independent high school in the San Francisco Bay Area. My classes tend to have about 15 students, their ages ranging from 16 to 18. This semester I am lucky enough to be teaching writers like James Baldwin, Gloria Anzaldúa, Herman Melville, Mohsin Hamid, Virginia Held. I recognize that it’s a privilege to have relatively small classes that can explore material like this at all. But at the end of the day, kids are always kids. I’m sure you will be absolutely shocked to hear that not all teenagers are, in fact, so interested in having their mind lit on fire by Anzaldúa’s radical ideas about transcending binaries, or Ishmael’s metaphysics in Moby-Dick.

To those students, I have always said: You may not be interested in poetry or civics, but no matter what you end up doing with your life, a basic competence in writing is an absolutely essential skill—whether it’s for college admissions, writing a cover letter when applying for a job, or just writing an email to your boss.

I’ve also long held, for those who are interested in writing, that you need to learn the basic rules of good writing before you can start breaking them—that, like Picasso, you have to learn how to reliably fulfill an audience’s expectations before you get to start putting eyeballs in people’s ears and things.I don’t know if either of those things is true anymore. It’s no longer obvious to me that my teenagers actually will need to develop this basic skill, or if the logic still holds that the fundamentals are necessary for experimentation.

Let me be candid (with apologies to all of my current and former students): What GPT can produce right now is better than the large majority of writing seen by your average teacher or professor. Over the past few days, I’ve given it a number of different prompts. And even if the bot’s results don’t exactly give you goosebumps, they do a more-than-adequate job of fulfilling a task.

Herman goes on, adding examples of essays that the writing machine produced.

What do you think?

Categories Creativity, Education Industry, Literacy

NYC: There IS a Better Way to Support Students with Disabilities

By dianeravitch
December 16, 2022 //
8

The effects of the pandemic show themselves in every survey of post-pandemic behavior, among students and adults. The pandemic isn’t over but the isolation and anxiety it produced had long-lasting effects.

Dorothy Siegel, Elise Cappella and Kristie Patten describe what they call “a better way” to help students with disabilities.

On December 1, 2022, New York City Schools Chancellor David Banks announced a path forward for transforming and rebuilding trust in the city’s programs serving students with disabilities. This plan includes the sustaining and scaling of four successful and innovative programs serving students with disabilities across the city, the creation of a new paid internship program for high school students in Occupational, Physical and Speech Therapy for students with IEPs, as well as the empowerment of families and community through a new advisory council that will make bold recommendations on reimagining special education in the New York City Public Schools.

This announcement demonstrates the city’s commitment to address the systemic and historic marginalization of students with IEPs, a marginalization that has disproportionately impacted the city’s Black and Brown students with IEPs.

A recent Chalkbeat article, “Public schools are NYC’s main youth mental health system. Where kids land often depends on what their parents can pay,” exposed to public view the growing number of New York City students with serious mental healthissues and behavioral problems that get in the way of their education. Because New York State has inadequately funded mental health services, the onus falls on local school districts, which don’t have the option to turn students away. “The entire state of New York has shifted the burden of mental health to the school districts,” said a social worker quoted in the article.

Under federal law, school districts must provide all students with disabilities, including those with mental health and behavioral problems, a “free and appropriate public education.” And many such students in New York City do receive a high-quality education with therapeutic supports in the public schools.

But serious inequities abound. As Chalkbeat noted, in the New York City public schools,

“Black boys get classified with emotional disabilities at a far higher rate than other kids. In the 2020-2021 school year . . . Black students made up less than a quarter of students overall, yet they accounted for nearly half of students classified as having an emotional disability. White students, who made up 15% of all students in New York City public schools, accounted for just 8% of emotional disability classifications.”

As we can see, Black students, especially boys, are overwhelmingly overrepresented in the emotional disability classification. This matters because students with this classification have much worse outcomes than other students. As per Chalkbeat, in 2020-21 only 12% of students classified with an emotional disability received a Regents diploma in four years, compared to 73% of all New York City students.

For decades, New York City students who are classified with an emotional disability have found themselves on a path to highly segregated classrooms and schools, and, ultimately, limited life options. Neighborhood schools are not able to meet the needs of such challenging students, especially in inclusive settings. A recent report by NYU Research Alliance for NYC Schoolsstated that in 2016-17 only 33% of students with an emotional disability were served in an inclusive setting, compared to 66% of students with all disabilities. These young people often drop out and may fall into the juvenile justice system.

In the past few years, an increasing number of students with mental health and behavioral problems, no doubt exacerbated by two years of Covid, are showing up at the schoolhouse door. Of these, some find their way to private schools whose tuitions arepaid by the public school system – close to $1 billion in the last school year alone for students with autism, learning disabilities or mental health/behavioral issues.

Predictably, the overwhelming majority of these private school students are White and hail from more advantaged backgrounds. According to the Chalkbeat analysis, most students who are able to attend private schools on the public dime “live in just four of the richest and whitest districts,” including the Upper East Side and the Upper West Side of Manhattan and Park Slope in Brooklyn. As noted above, racially disparate classification is onemajor inequity in the system. But another is family wealth.

Clearly, New York State can and must do more, especially the restoration and rebuilding of mental health services for children and adolescents with mental health and behavioral issues.

But there is much that the New York City public school system can do as well, in particular at the beginning of a child’s educational journey. Students at risk of being classified with an emotional disability can and should be diverted from that drop-out/juvenile justice path onto a much better life path, as early as possible.

There IS a better way: The Path Program.

The New York City Department of Education (DOE), in close collaboration with researchers at New York University’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development (NYU), have developed a better way to educate these students: the Path program, which is based on the highly successful ASD Nest Program for autistic students. Path, like Nest, is a comprehensive, cohesive, collaborative, fully inclusive program that serves students at risk of an emotional disability (ED) classification. Path redirects these students onto a more hopeful path.

ASD Nest Program

The ASD Nest Program has developed over the past twenty years as a collaboration between the DoE and NYU. Launched in 2003, the DoE’s ASD Nest Program works with autisticstudents who are capable of doing grade-level academic work. The goal is to help these students develop competence in their academic, social and behavioral functioning, in order to realize their full, unique potential as independent and fulfilled adults.

In the 2022-23 school year, 69 New York City public schools are educating approximately 1,700 ASD students in 350+ integrated co-taught K-12 classrooms. The vast majority of Nest students stay in the program through twelfth grade, where 95% of Nest high schoolers graduate with a Regents diploma.

Path Program:

The Path program promotes the inclusion of students with emotional disabilities within community schools and strives to disrupt the historical segregation of Black and brown children in restrictive special education settings. The program employs many of the same evidence-based principles, practices, and structures developed for the Nest program, with the addition ofevidence-based trauma-informed and social-emotional learning strategies known to work well for students with this classification. Path classes are small co-taught integrated classes, with no more than four students classified with ED in each class, alongside twelve to twenty typically developing peers. Teachers provide the general education curriculum, using specialized supports and a variety of co-teaching models. With related services integrated into the day, Path classrooms incorporate supports typically provided by outside therapists to foster a safe environment in which Path students can comfortably interact with peers. Whole-class social, sensory, behavioral and academic strategies form a foundational level of support, consistent across all settings.

All school staff – teachers, therapists and administrators — receive high-quality pre- and in-service training and on-site support. Path staff meet weekly as a team to create comprehensive support plans for each student, which involve classroom and individual supports and family partnership.

The DoE piloted the model in one District 9 school in 2021-22 with a grant through the Fund for Public Schools. In 2022-23, the DoE opened four Path classrooms in three District 9 neighborhood schools: three kindergartens and one first grade class. Three more kindergarten classes will open this year in three other districts in Manhattan, Queens and Brooklyn, with the goal to eventually have Path programs in most NYC neighborhoods.

Path and Nest are two examples of the DoE’s “specialized programs,” differentiated program models for different disability categories. So far, the DoE has created specialized programs for students with autism (Nest and Horizon), emotional disabilities (Path), and intellectual disabilities (ACES). Importantly, all specialized programs – and their students — are fully integrated into their neighborhood school communities.

Over time, the ASD Nest Program has proven to be the program of choice for many, if not most, parents of autistic students, even those with the means to go to private school. The main admission requirement for Nest is an autism classification.

Similarly, Path is intended to level the playing field for Black and Brown students at risk of an emotional disability who don’t come from advantaged backgrounds. It is commendable that the DOE has chosen to invest in this research-based model – in some of the poorest community school districts in the city – to create inclusive pathways to school and life success.

With the chancellor’s commitment to the expansion of the ASD Nest and Path programs, the future looks much brighter for New York City’s students with significant disabilities.

Dorothy Siegel, Co-founder, ASD Nest Program

Elise Cappella, Professor of Applied Psychology, PI of NYU Path Program, NYU Steinhardt School

Kristie Patten, Professor, Department of Occupational Therapy,PI of NYU ASD Nest Support Project, Co-Investigator of NYU Path Program, NYU Steinhardt School

Categories Education Reform, New York City, Special Education

Ed Johnson: Atlanta Schoools Could Be the Linchpin for Reducing Crime and Violence

By dianeravitch
December 16, 2022 //
4

Ed Johnson is an Atlantan who acts as a watchdog for the Atlanta Public Schools. He is also a systems thinker, influenced by the seminal work of W. Edwards Deming.

He recently wrote about how the Atlanta pPublic Schools could help revitalize the city by thinking systematically instead of following its course of jumping from reform to reform.

His post begins:

Loopy APS is my mental model of interrelated causal factors exposed for all to see, question, and critique in a spirit of collaborative discourse. It began as a visual representation of my thinking about why Atlanta Public Schools cannot improve and why it can improve dumped out onto paper, static. The 2009 APS cheating scandal prompted doing so.

Then, during April 2017, by chance I discovered the cleverly named Loopy™ and promptly rendered my mental model in it. Hence the name Loopy APS.

Created by systems thinker Nicky Case, Loopy™ is “a tool for thinking in systems” and for simulating systems. It is highly effective and simple but not simplistic to use. If you can think, you can use Loopy™. It is freely available.

Loopy APS allowed seeing the dynamic behavior of a vicious causal loop that went unnoticed on paper. The vicious causal loop simulates interrelated factors influencing violence and crime in Atlanta to continually worsen amid a great deal of systemic instability.

It wasn’t clear at first why the vicious causal loop was in Loopy APS, as I did not knowingly model it. It was only after being able to see my thinking play out dynamically in Loopy APS did I notice it. So, to find out why, I ran Loopy APS, time and again, observing its behavior until a particular story became clear.

Reading from the snapshot image, in Figure 1, below, the story, told tersely, goes like this:

Greatly influenced by Partner Purposes, Atlanta BoE (Board of Education) and APS Superintendency provide for frustrating Authentic Education by employing SEL & Police (behavioristic practices) to favor inculcating routinized Teacher Learning and Student Leaning that obviate Wisdom, so as to obscure Democracy to allow Selfishness to flourish as Violence & Crimeto entangle Civil Society, while Atlanta BoE (Board of Education) and APS Superintendency are ever more greatly influenced by Partner Purposes.

Note the end of the story goes right back to its beginning. This makes the story a closed loop. Being a closed loop means every “thing” in the loop represents a causal factor that influences the behavior of every other “thing” or casual factor in the loop, including itself.

In other words, influence that goes around, comes around, whether directly or indirectly. Or, as Martin Luther King Jr tried to help us know and understand: “What affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

Systems thinker Nick Chase did this short video honoring systems thinker Martin Luther King Jr. But, alas, I guess it takes one to know one, because being a systems thinker is not ordinarily ascribed to Dr. King. To many, he remains the guy who had a dream.

The overall, systemic behavior of a causal loop may be vicious or virtuous, or status quo-keeping. In the story above, pulled from Figure 1, it is vicious systemic behavior influencing violence and crime in Atlanta to continually worsen.

Now, given that story, the question becomes: What needs to change, so as to transform the closed loop of causal factors influencing violence and crime in Atlanta to continually worsen into one influencing violence and crime in Atlanta to continually lessen?

This question, of course, comes from recognizing that every vicious cycle holds the potential to reverse and become virtuous and, conversely, every virtuous cycle holds the potential to reverse and become vicious.

To follow Ed Johnson’s analysis, open the link and view his graphs and finish reading.

Categories Atlanta, Education Reform, Georgia

U.S. Senate Rejects GOP Effort to Overturn Biden Administration Charter Regulations

By dianeravitch
December 16, 2022 //
10

Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina offered a resolution to overturn the Biden administration’s new regulations on federal funding of charter schools. The vote was 49-49, strictly on party lines. Even charter school supporters like Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey and Senator Michael Bennett of Colorado voted to sustain the new rules.

Every Republican voted to reject the rules. The charter lobby was not at all pleased.

The Network for Public Education has worked very hard to persuade the Department of Education and Congress to regulate the federal Charter Schools Program. When Betsy DeVos was Secretary of Education, there was no chance that the Department would try to regulate the $440 million handed out to new charter schools every year. The federal government was the single biggest contributor to new charter schools.

NPE published reports about the large number of charter schools that closed or never opened. It wrote about for-profit charters that were enjoying federal largesse. It drew attention to charter school scandals, including white flight academies subsidized by federal funds.

Not until the Biden administration took office did anyone in the Department take seriously its responsibility to oversee federal funding of charters.

What do the new regulations require? What did every single Republican Senator try to block? We’re they upset about the limits on for-profit operators? Or did they object to transparency and accountability for federally funded charters?

NPE executive director Carol Burris explained in this article published at Valerie Strauss’s Answer Sheet blog:

For those who have long advocated for overhauling the CSP program, here are the significant gains.

Schools managed by for-profits will have a difficult time securing CSP grants and, in some cases, will be excluded from funding.

If an applicant has or will have a contract with a for-profit management company (or a “nonprofit management organization operated by or on behalf of a for-profit entity”), they must provide extensive information, including a copy or description of the contract, comprehensive leadership personnel reporting and the identification of possible related party transactions. Real estate contracts must be reported, and “evergreen contracts” in which there is automatic contract renewal are prohibited.

The school cannot share legal, accounting or auditing services with the for-profit. The state entity that awards the grant must publish the for-profit management contract between the awardee and the school.
The final regulations also include the reporting and exposure of the for-profit’s related entities. The Network for Public Education recommended the addition of “related entities” in its comments to the department. Our report, “Chartered for Profit,” explains how for-profit owners create separate corporations with different names to mask the complete control of the for-profit over operations of the school.

Finally, the applicant must assure that “the [for-profit] management company does not exercise full or substantial control over the charter school,” thereby barring any charter school operated by a for-profit with a “sweeps contract” from obtaining CSP funds.

There will be greater transparency and accountability for charter schools, State Entities, and CMOs that apply for grants.

This is probably the most underreported win for those who support charter school reform.

Transparency gains include:

• An assurance that the grantee holds a public hearing on the proposed or expanded charter school. These hearings must be well advertised and include information on how the school will increase diversity and not promote segregation. Schools are obligated to reach out to the community to encourage attendance and then provide a summary of the hearing as part of the application. These public hearings are required of direct grantees and subgrantees — both SE and CMO.
• The publication of for-profit management contracts.
• The publication of the names of awardee schools and their peer-reviewed applications by states and CMOs.
• A requirement that the school publish information for prospective parents, including fees, uniform requirements, disciplinary practices, transportation plans, and whether the school participates in the national free or reduced-price lunch program.

Accountability gains include:

• More substantial supervision by state entities of the schools that are awarded grants, including in-depth descriptions of how they will review applications, the peer review process they will use, and how they will select grantees for in-depth monitoring.
• Restrictions regarding the spending of grants by unauthorized schools. Charter schools not yet approved by an authorizer will be eligible to use planning grant funds; however, they cannot dip into any implementation funds until they are approved and have secured a facility. This new regulation will limit, though not prevent, all funding that goes to charter schools that never open.

Regulations to stop White-flight charters from receiving CSP funding and ensure the charter is needed in the community.

The final regulations are good, but not as strong as initially proposed.
One of the more controversial aspects of the new regulations was the need for the school to conduct a community impact analysis. The charter lobby focused on one example by which a school could show need (district over-enrollment) and used it as a rallying cry to garner opposition to the regulations. In the new regulations, the department clarifies that there are other ways to demonstrate need, including wait lists and offering a unique program. It also eliminated the need for the applicant to provide a district enrollment projection.

The community impact analysis is now called a needs analysis. That analysis must include evidence of community desire for the school; documentation of the school’s enrollment projection and how it was derived; a comparison of the demographics of the school with the area where the students are likely to be drawn; the projected impact of the school on racial and socio-economic district diversity; and an assurance that the school would not “hamper, delay or negatively affect” district desegregation efforts. Applicants would also have to submit their plan to ensure that the charter school does not increase racial segregation and isolation in the school district from which the charter would draw its students.

The department went to great pains to reassure applicants that schools in racially isolated districts would not need to show diversity (this straw man argument had been used by the charter lobby and even some editorial boards to fight the regulations, although the original rules had made that clear). Those schools that are unlikely to be diverse due to the school’s special mission would also have to submit an explanation.
Still, there are some concerns about unintended consequences of the regulations.

With the additional caveat regarding “special mission,” the department is trying to preserve grants to schools that are themed to promote, for example, Native American culture in an area where Native American students are a minority population in the district. That is understandable.
However, White-flight charter schools could skirt the regulation by arguing that their mission is to provide a Eurocentric, classical curriculum.

For example, charter schools opened by Hillsdale College — a small Christian college in Michigan that promotes a “classical” curriculum — are disproportionately White. These schools could claim that their mission appeals to students with European backgrounds and that the strong “anti-CRT” message in their “1776 curriculum” does not appeal to Black families. Although Hillsdale College does not take federal funds, Hillsdale charter schools do. We have identified nearly $7 million awarded to Hillsdale member charter schools up to April 2021. Newer schools have likely secured CSP grants as well.

Priority 2 — which encouraged charter/public school cooperation — was retained but categorized as “invitational” for the 2022 cycle.
The second straw man argument the National Alliance for Public Charters used to fuel their #backoff campaign on the regulations was the claim that charter/public school district cooperative projects were required. They were not. They were a priority, and priorities can be mandated, competitive (assigned a few points), or invitational (looked up favorably but no point value).

As I explained here, it is rare for a priority to be mandated. For example, of the six priorities for the 2022 State Entities grants, only one is required, which is that authorizers use best practices. The department now makes it clear that it is unlikely that charter/district cooperative activity will ever be a mandated priority while leaving the door open to it becoming a competitive priority after the 2022 award cycle.

All regulations, priorities and assurances go into effect for this 2022 grant cycle with one exception: Developer grant applicants, a small program in which individual schools apply, do not have to submit a needs analysis in 2022 only. That is because applications are due shortly.

Summary

Since 2019 when the Network for Public Education issued its reports on the federal Charter School Program, the program has come under increased congressional scrutiny. We have followed up by submitting letters to the department, often co-signed by other groups, demanding reform and exposing abuses of the program.

These new regulations are an essential first step in making sure that fewer tax dollars go to schools that never open, schools that quickly close, and for-profit operators. Unscrupulous individuals who used the program for their enrichment will find it more difficult to do so. State Entities that have pushed money out the door will now be forced to provide more oversight and supervision. And so they should. State Entities get 10 percent of every grant, representing millions of federal dollars, to use for such supervision.

We do not doubt that some applicants will still provide false information, as we found time and time again, but now as all peer-reviewed applications go online, groups such as ours will serve as watchdogs and report falsehoods and misrepresentations to the Office of the Inspector General.

And for all of the charter schools that are fronts for for-profit organizations, the Education Department just put a big sign on the door that says “you need not apply.”

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Democracy, Democrats, Education Industry, For-Profit, Republicans

Heather Cox Richardson: Trump’s Major Announcement

By dianeravitch
December 15, 2022 //
33

Heather Cox Richardson has a very funny post about Trump’s big surprise announcement and the reactions to it. you have to open the link and scroll to the bottom to see her choice selection of tweets. One came from an insurrectionist who said, “And I’m going to jail for this?”

Yesterday, former president Trump took to his Truth Social media platform to announce that he would be making “a MAJOR ANNOUNCEMENT” today. Since he recently threw his hat in the ring for president in 2024, there was a great deal of speculation about what political move this would be.

When it came today, it turned out that his announcement was for digital trading cards with images of him as a superhero…available for $99 apiece. Radio personality John Melendez promptly called them “Broke’mon cards.”

Ron Filipkowski, a former federal prosecutor and Republican who now monitors right-wing extremism, tweeted: “All I can say is that those of us who have lost friends, fought with relatives, resigned positions, been called traitor, left our party, all because we saw very clearly what a con-man, huckster and fraud this man is, have never felt more vindicated.”

The reduction of the former president to a cartoon grifter seems likely to have political repercussions. Right-wing media personality Baked Alaska, who is facing six months in jail after pleading guilty to parading, demonstrating or picketing inside a Capitol building for his participation in the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, tweeted: “i can’t believe i’m going to jail for an nft salesman,” with a sad face emoji.

You gotta read the rest.

Categories Biden, Elections, Humor, Trump
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »