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Four Views: Why Mayoral Control of the NYC Schools Should Be Ended or Modified or…..?

By dianeravitch
December 21, 2019 //
9

Attached are four statements that were delivered (in person or by email in my case) to the New York State Assembly Education Committee Hearing on Mayoral Control. The hearings won’t result in immediate action since mayoral control was recently renewed for three years.

It is hard to believe but there was a time, about a decade ago, when corporate reformers believed that mayoral control would lead to a dramatic transformation of schools. The problem, they believed, was democracy. When people have a chance to elect a board, the “reformers” said, they make bad choices, the unions have too much power, and the result is stasis. Chicago has had mayoral control since 1995, and the newly elected Mayor Lori Lightfoot has agreed that the city should have an elected board. Here is a list of mayoral-controlled school systems.

In New York City, Michael Bloomberg asked the Legislature to give him complete and unfettered control of the New York City public schools in 2002, soon after his election in 2001. He received it, and he promised sweeping changes. He closed scores of large schools and broke them up into four or five or six schools in the same building (escalating the cost of administration). Parents, students, and teachers objected passionately, but the mayor’s “Panel on Education Policy” ignored them. Bloomberg favored charter schools over the public schools he controlled, and their number multiplied. He tightly centralized the operations of the system and appointed a lawyer with no education experience (Joel Klein) to be his chancellor. Bloomberg was all about test scores and data and privatization.

When Bill de Blasio was elected in 2013, he embraced mayoral control.

What follows are three views, all concluding that mayoral control as presently designed should end.

And here is a fourth view, a dissent from the other three, by veteran education watcher Peter Goodman, who wonders whether an elected school board would be controlled by parents or captured by a billionaire, or by charter advocates (the latter two have far more money to spend than parents).

 

To see Kemala Karmen’s footnotes and the other two views (including mine), open the PDF files attached.

TESTIMONY submitted by KEMALA KARMEN on 12/16/2019 

For NYS ASSEMBLY EDUCATION COMMITTEE HEARING ON MAYORAL CONTROL

My older child, who just returned home from her first semester of college, was five years old when I attended my first city council hearing. Michael Bloomberg was mayor and Joel Klein was his chancellor, and a fellow kindergarten parent had encouraged me to attend the hearing. I no longer remember the precise topic of the hearing. What I do remember is that council member after council member spoke passionately and convincingly against some DOE policy, and yet, when all was said and done, and the mayor’s “accountability czar” had spoken, it was clear that the chancellor would do exactly what he had wanted to do all along, undeterred by the opposition of a room full of people who had been directly elected by their constituents. 

I was floored.

I am a relatively privileged person in terms of my class and education, and while my color, gender, cultural, and religious background have marked me as “other” for most of my life, I had never felt as disenfranchised as I did at that moment, when I realized that when it came to my children’s public school education, I had NO voice, and neither did anyone I could vote for, apart from the mayor, whom one must vote for based on an array of issues in addition to education.

In fact, even if you were a single-issue voter, investing all of your hopes in a candidate based on that candidate’s professed positions on education, you could still find yourself unrepresented. Take our current mayor.  At an education forum held in 2013, at the time of his initial run, Candidate de Blasio said, among other things, that he opposed high-stakes standardized testing and its stranglehold on our schools. As mayor, he would stand with parents like me who called for more teaching and less testing. 

In reality, our now second-term mayor, presides over a Department of Education that has recently instituted even more tests for our city’s public school children. Facing mounting evidence that a generation of test-based “reform” has not improved the academic standing of America’s students, other municipalities, including Boston, are starting to cut back on the number and frequency of tests they impose on students. Here, however, mayoral control lets the mayor and his representatives do whatever they want, even if it flies in the face of evidence or reason. The city council can ask questions about NYCDOE policies, but they are powerless to actually do anything other than ask questions, collect data, and maybe bring to light what otherwise might be happening without public awareness, never mind input. 

As a parent stakeholder in the schools, I find mayoral control, as currently practiced, and as outlined above, profoundly undemocratic. At this particular moment in our country’s history, that is especially demoralizing. Moreover, it makes a mockery of the supposed progressivism of our city. Here again, I can use high-stakes testing to illustrate that point, this time referring to the annual state testing of 3rd-8th graders. Rates of state test refusal or “opt out” are in the double digits or even high double digits in most of the rest of the state, but in NYC, although opt out rates have doubled over the last few years, they still remain in the low single digits. Why is that? Do parents in NYC just love standardized testing more than their counterparts elsewhere? Or could it be that everywhere else in the state elected school boards are responsive to the parents who elect them, so when parents make it clear to their boards that they reject a test-centric focus their boards actually listen, and do things like send home form letters where a parent can check a box that says, “Yes, my child will take the state test” or “No, my child will not take the test?” In NYC, by contrast, many parents don’t even know they have a right to refuse and those of us grassroots-organizing against the tests must contend with directives from the DOE that tell would-be test refusers that they need to meet with their principals if they want to opt out. This is little more than intimidation and it works; parents are reluctant to go against the authority figure who controls their child’s day-to-day environment. The City Council tried to counter this in 2015 by unanimously passing a resolution that called on the NYCDOE to inform parents of their opt out rights. Again, because of mayoral control, the NYCDOE can, and did, ignore the wishes of every single council member elected by the people of NYC, from the Bronx to Staten Island. To this day, almost 5 years later, the NYCDOE has failed to implement the resolution.

I’ve focused on the suppression of parent voice under mayoral control, but there are so many more problems I could list. For example, as a tax-paying citizen, I believe the system of mayoral control leads to a lack of transparency in financial matters, which could mean that my tax dollars are being spent unwisely or even fraudulently. I serve on the steering committee of New York State Allies for Public Education, and when I mentioned the new NYCDOE tests in an email to my fellow committee members, some of whom are elected school board members or trustees in their districts elsewhere in the state, the very first reply I received was, “How will they pay for that?” Indeed, how will they? Or even how much will it cost to administer computer-based tests multiple times a year to tens of thousands of students–or perhaps hundreds of thousands? What other things is NYCDOE forfeiting for our children that could have been paid for with that money? And why does no one know the answers to any of these questions?

We have no avenue for objecting if the mayor decides to appoint a chancellor who has never worked a day of their lives in a school, or that chancellor appoints a superintendent who has never been a principal. We have no protection from a mayor who might go so far as to hand over our schools to the opaque private management of the charter sector. 

I am a parent, not an expert in governance, and I realize that school boards aren’t perfect. All over the country, we are seeing money from outside a district swoop in, essentially buying seats, often to advance a school privatization agenda. That’s twisted, and if we did go back to an elected  school board, we’d have to be attentive to things like that, perhaps strictly regulating campaign contributions. 

I can’t wrap this up with a neat solution as to what the best course of action forward is. Nonetheless, I do know that the mayoral control that we have now is fundamentally flawed, and should not continue in its present form if we value democracy.

 

For Leonie’s statement click here.

For Kemala’s statement click here.

For my statement click here.

 

Categories Accountability, Bloomberg, Michael, Democracy, Education Reform, New York City, Testing

Nancy Bailey: Students Should Sue Betsy DeVos and the Other “Reformers” Who Ruined or Closed Their Schools

By dianeravitch
December 21, 2019 //
26

Nancy Bailey explains here that if you are dissatisfied with your public school, blame the Disruption Machine, the ones who call themselves “reformers,” like Betsy DeVos.

They have run public schools into the ground for the decades.

They have imposed their malevolent ideas and policies on public schools, with no accountability for their mistakes.

She writes:

Frustrated by public schools? Look no further than the corporate education reformers and what they have done to public education.

Education Secretary DeVos and her corporate billionaire friends have been chipping away at the fabric of democratic public schools for over thirty years!

The problems we see in public schools today are largely a result of what they did to schools, the high-stakes testing and school closures, intentional defunding, ugly treatment of teachers, lack of support staff, segregated charter schools, vouchers that benefit the wealthy, Common Core State Standards, intrusive online data collection, and diminishing special education services.

Big business waged a battle on teachers and their schools years ago. The drive was to create a business model to profit from tax dollars. Now they want to blame teachers for their corporate-misguided blunders! It’s part of their plan to make schools so unpleasant, parents will have no choice but to leave….

I student taught in an elementary school in Detroit, in 1973. Schools were certainly not perfect, but my modest school did a good job.

The third-grade teachers were excellent reading teachers. They organized rotating small groups of students based on their skill needs decoding letters and words. There were no data walls. No child appeared to compare themselves unfavorably to other children.

Students were encouraged to read, did free reading, lots of writing, and had access to plenty of books. The school had a nice library with a librarian who often read beautiful and funny stories to the class. They spent time studying social studies, science, and art and music. Teachers worked closely with the PTA and reached out to parents.

There was no testing obsession. Students didn’t fear failing third grade. They were continually learning, and most liked school. There were twenty-two students in the class.

Teachers did their own assessment, and they discussed the results with each other at their grade level meetings. The school had a counselor and I believe a nurse stationed at the school. We worried about the students and addressed concerns about issues like why some showed up without mittens in the cold weather.

Students did class projects to help remember what they learned in their subjects. For science, we created a rocket out of a huge cardboard box. We painted it and spent time studying the solar system. Children took turns sitting in the rocket pretending they were astronauts.

This school had an excellent Learning Center where teachers could share materials to cut down on costs. They had a nice collection of resources for every subject.

My supervising teacher was kind, well-prepared, and tough. She expected daily written lesson plans which she reviewed with me before I taught. She was an excellent mentor!

Where’s that school today? I wish I could go back and visit, but it closed years ago, razed and turned into a housing development. It was shuttered like 225 other public schools in Detroit!

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Detroit, Education Industry, Failure, Fraud, Privatization, Testing

The Most Important Article Written about Common Core

By dianeravitch
December 20, 2019 //
94

Lyndsey Layton of the Washington Post interviewed Bill Gates in 2014 and told the full story of the origin of the Common Core “State” Standards.

In case the Washington Post is behind a paywall, the full text of the Layton article is here.

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and other friends of the CCSS insisted that the standards were developed by governors, state superintendents, education experts, and teachers. No, they were developed by David Coleman, formerly of McKinsey, now CEO of the College Board, and a committee whose members included no working teachers but a full complement of testing experts from ACT and SAT. Google David Coleman and “architect” and you will see that he is widely credited with shepherding the CCSS to completion.

It would not have happened without the enthusiastic support and funding of Bill Gates.

Layton writes:

On a summer day in 2008, Gene Wilhoit, director of a national group of state school chiefs, and David Coleman, an emerging evangelist for the standards movement, spent hours in Bill Gates’s sleek headquarters near Seattle, trying to persuade him and his wife, Melinda, to turn their idea into reality.

Coleman and Wilhoit told the Gateses that academic standards varied so wildly between states that high school diplomas had lost all meaning, that as many as 40 percent of college freshmen needed remedial classes and that U.S. students were falling behind their foreign competitors.

The pair also argued that a fragmented education system stifled innovation because textbook publishers and software developers were catering to a large number of small markets instead of exploring breakthrough products. That seemed to resonate with the man who led the creation of the world’s dominant computer operating system.

“Can you do this?” Wilhoit recalled being asked. “Is there any proof that states are serious about this, because they haven’t been in the past?”

Wilhoit responded that he and Coleman could make no guarantees but that “we were going to give it the best shot we could.”

After the meeting, weeks passed with no word. Then Wilhoit got a call: Gates was in.

What followed was one of the swiftest and most remarkable shifts in education policy in U.S. history.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation didn’t just bankroll the development of what became known as the Common Core State Standards. With more than $200 million, the foundation also built political support across the country, persuading state governments to make systemic and costly changes.

Bill Gates was de facto organizer, providing the money and structure for states to work together on common standards in a way that avoided the usual collision between states’ rights and national interests that had undercut every previous effort, dating from the Eisenhower administration.

The Gates Foundation spread money across the political spectrum, to entities including the big teachers unions, the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association, and business organizations such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — groups that have clashed in the past but became vocal backers of the standards.

Money flowed to policy groups on the right and left, funding research by scholars of varying political persuasions who promoted the idea of common standards. Liberals at the Center for American Progress and conservatives affiliated with the American Legislative Exchange Council who routinely disagree on nearly every issue accepted Gates money and found common ground on the Common Core.

One 2009 study, conducted by the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute with a $959,116 Gates grant, described the proposed standards as being “very, very strong” and “clearly superior” to many existing state standards.

Gates money went to state and local groups, as well, to help influence policymakers and civic leaders. And the idea found a major booster in President Obama, whose new administration was populated by former Gates Foundation staffers and associates. The administration designed a special contest using economic stimulus funds to reward states that accepted the standards.

The result was astounding: Within just two years of the 2008 Seattle meeting, 45 states and the District of Columbia had fully adopted the Common Core State Standards.

Even Massachusetts, the state with the highest academic performance in the nation, replaced its excellent standards with CCSS and won a federal grant for doing so.

Some states adopted Common Core before it was publicly released. The state chief in Texas, Robert Scott, refused to adopt the CCSS sight unseen, but he was a rarity.

Without Gates’ money, there would be no Common Core.

Opposition came from Tea Party groups, then from independent teacher groups like the BadAss Teachers Association.

The promise of the Common Core was that it would lift student test scores across the board and at the same time, would close achievement gaps.

The Common Core was rolled out in 2010 and adopted widely in 2011 and 2012.

Districts and states spent billions of dollars on new textbooks, new tests, new software and hardware, new professional development, all aligned to the CCSS.

This was money that the districts and states did not spend to reduce class sizes or to raise teachers’ salaries.

Test scores on NAEP and on international tests have been stagnant since the rollout of the Common Core.

Teacher morale down. New entries into teaching down. Test scores flat. Achievement gaps larger.

Edu-entrepreneurs enriched. Testing industry happy. Tech industry satisfied.

Disruption achieved.

If you want to read more about the origins of the Common Core, read Mercedes Schneider’s Common Core Dilemma: Who Owns Our Schools? and Nicholas Tampio’s https://www.amazon.com/Common-Core-Nicholas-Tampio-ebook/dp/B079S2627M/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_1?keywords=nicholas+campion+common+core&qid=1575909356&s=books&sr=1-1-fkmr0Common Core: National Education Standards and the Threat to Our Democracy.

Bottom line: What the Gates’ billions spent on Common Core proved was that the basic problem in American education is not the lack of common standards and common tests, but the growing numbers of children who live in poverty,  who come to school (or miss school) ill-nourished and lacking regular medical care and a decent standard of living.

He spent more than $4 billion on failed experiments in education over the past 20 years. Wouldn’t it be great if he invested in children, families, and communities and improved their standard of living?

 

 

 

Categories Accountability, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Poverty, Resistance, Technology, Testing

Jan Resseger: Are the Common Core Standards Dead or Alive?

By dianeravitch
December 20, 2019 //
39

Jan Resseger is upset that the New York Times posted an article seeking to revive the moribund Common Core standards.

Some states dropped the CC standards; some kept them but gave them a new name. Most dropped the CC-aligned tests.

In her view, the CCSS died because it was hated by significant numbers of teachers and parents. It launched the Opt Out movement in New York State, which annually enlists the non-cooperation of nearly 20 percent of the state’s test-eligible students.

They were hated because it was not “developed by governors, educational experts, state superintendents, and teachers,” as the founding myth claims, but by a small number of people who wrote them with minimal consultation of classroom teachers.

They were hated because they were funded by one man–Bill Gates–and never validated by any field trial in real classrooms.

They were pushed on the states not by consent but by the lure of $5 billion in Race to the Top funding. The only state officials who had to agree were the governor and the state superintendent, and most of those have since moved on. The states that did not agree to accept the CCSS were not eligible to compete for RTTT billions

They fell into disfavor because activists on the right saw them as federal overreach and activists among teachers and parents in the center and on the left disliked the standards and hated the tests.

They lost support when the testing consortia that Arne Duncan funded with $360 million arbitrarily decided to align the CCSS test standards with those of the NAEP, which was totally inappropriate. The NAEP standard for “proficiency” is not grade-level, nor is it pass-fail. It represents a high level of achievement, like a B+ or an A-. Massachusetts is the only state in the nation where as much as 50% of students score NAEP proficient, yet the Common Core testing groups expected that most American students would reach that high mark. They did not, and the CCSS tests wrongly generated headlines that inaccurately labeled students, schools, and districts as “failing” when they did not reach an impossible benchmark.

 

Categories Accountability, Common Core, Education Reform, Testing

Houston: Founder of Houston Charter Chain Indicted and Arrested

By dianeravitch
December 20, 2019 //
7

For the fourth time in only five years, the leader of a charter school has been arrested for siphoning money away from the school.

The Houston Chronicle reports:

The founder of a now-closed Houston charter school network failed to properly disclose more than $1 million in payments to his brother’s companies and used taxpayer funds to cover costs associated with a timeshare in Hawaii, federal prosecutors said Wednesday.

Richard S. Rose, who served as superintendent, CEO and chief financial officer of Zoe Learning Academy, was arrested Monday after a grand jury returned an 18-count indictment against him. The charter school enrolled several hundred students per year at campuses in Houston’s Third Ward and Duncanville, a city south of Dallas, prior to its abrupt closure in 2017.

Rose is the fourth Houston-area charter leader in the past five years arrested on charges related to illegally taking money from a school.

The Varnett Public School founders Alsie and Marian Cluff were charged in 2015, and sentenced to prison last year for spending more than $4 million in campus funds to support their lavish lifestyle. Houston Gateway Academy Richard Garza awaits sentencing after pleading guilty in October to participating in a $160,000 kickback scheme involving an information technology contractor.

Investigators said Zoe Learning Academy paid bus service fees totaling more than $1 million over four years to companies owned by his brother, as well as about $60,000 to Rose’s wife and a company the couple owned. Rose failed to disclose the payments to the Texas Education Agency on annual governance forms, violating a state law that requires charter leaders to detail any school funds paid to their relatives, federal officials said.

Investigators also said Rose withdrew money from Zoe Learning Academy accounts and used the charter’s credit card to pay for a Honolulu timeshare, a $75,000 personal legal settlement and $30,000 in fees to a lawyer who represented him in matters unrelated to the school. Rose’s indictment did not detail the amount paid for the timeshare.

The charges against Rose include money laundering, conspiracy and theft from programs receiving federal funds. Rose did not have a defense lawyer listed in court records Wednesday. Efforts to reach him were unsuccessful.

The charter elementary opened in 2001 and shuttered in September 2017, weeks after Hurricane Harvey landed in Houston. At the time, Rose said the school’s enrollment was too low to generate enough revenue to remain open.

Zoe Learning Academy received a failing grade on the 2017 state financial integrity rating scale for schools, one of four Texas charters to receive the designation. The charter district also failed to meet state academic standards in 2013, 2015 and 2017.

Will Betsy DeVos and other charter cheerleaders claim that the parents chose Zoe Learning Academy and we should respect their choices regardless of its academic ratings or its founder’s financial practices?

After all, it is the parents’ choice and we should respect that choice, right? Even if the founder has been indicted and arrested.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corruption, Education Industry, Education Reform, Failure, Fraud, Houston, Privatization

Politico: Who Is Raising Money for Mayor Pete?

By dianeravitch
December 19, 2019 //
12

In response to challenges from Elizabeth Warren about his funders, Mayor Pete Buttigieg released a list of his major donors, including his “bundlers,” the people who raise money from others for him.

The list included some interesting names.

One of them was Wall Street hedge fund manager John Pertry, who serves on the board of Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academy charter chain in New York City.

Petry was one of the original founders of DFER (Democrats for Education Reform), the organization of hedge fund managers that funds charter supporters across the nation.

While Buttigieg published a list of bundlers on his website last week, the campaign privately circulated the names of people in its “Investors Circle” — fundraisers who had raised at least $25,000 — in a finance update this summer. The 20 people and couples on that document who weren’t on Buttigieg’s public bundler list last week are: Andrew Tobias of New York; Barbara and Rodge Cohen of Irvington, N.Y.; David Winter of New York; Didem Nisanci of Washington; Eli Cohen of Chevy Chase, Md.; Eric Schieber of Chicago; Freddy Balsera of Miami; Genevieve and Robert Lynch of New York; Hamilton South of Cornwall, Conn.; Jack Connors of Boston; John Petry of New York; John Phillips of Washington; Jordan Horowitz of Los Angeles; Kelly Bavor of Atherton, Calif.; Kyle Keyser of Atlanta; Nicole Avant of Los Angeles; Stephen Patton of Chicago; Ted Dintersmith of Charleston, S.C.; Tom Gearen of Chicago; and William Rahm of New York.

Buttigieg has combined the power of low-dollar online fundraising and big events with wealthy supporters to become one of the most successful fundraisers in the Democratic field. He has raised $51 million in his bid for president as of Sept. 30, the most recent fundraising deadline, with 47 percent of the contributions coming from donors who gave less than $200.

But as Buttigieg’s poll numbers have risen in Iowa and New Hampshire, critics on the left are accusing the South Bend, Ind., mayor of failing to live up to Democratic Party ideals. Protesters picketed outside a Buttigieg fundraiser in New York last week, chanting “Wall Street Pete.” Warren, who is competing with Buttigieg for the top spot in February’s Iowa caucuses, has been particularly critical, calling out Buttigieg for offering donors “regular phone calls and special access.”

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Buttigieg recently began allowing media access to his campaign fundraisers in response to some of that criticism.

Buttigieg, who like other candidates is racing to bank millions of dollars to spend on television and field staff in Iowa and other early voting states, has continued hitting high-dollar fundraisers at breakneck speed between his campaign stops. On Monday morning, the families of several of Silicon Valley’s biggest executives — including spouses and relatives of Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg — assembled in Palo Alto, Calif., for an event supporting Buttigieg.

The night before, Buttigieg was in Napa Valley, where Buttigieg and donors dined under a chandelier adorned with 1,500 Swarovski crystals in cavernous room known as a “wine cave.” “Needless to say, we will never have a fundraiser at a wine cave,” Sanders’ campaign wrote Monday in a fundraising email to supporters.

Speaking to the crowd in Napa, Buttigieg urged his donors to redouble their work.

“I’m asking to you to work to share whatever it is that brought you here to those that may have gotten a little more cynical about the whole thing,” Buttigieg told the donors. “If we do that, as bleak as things are in our country circa December 2019, my hope and my faith is that, in a few years, we’ll be able to look back on 2020 with pride.”

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Democrats, Democrats for Education Reform, Education Industry, Privatization

Miami: A School Choice Dream or Nightmare?

By dianeravitch
December 19, 2019 //
2

Sue Legg is a leader of the League of Women Voters in Florida and a member of the board of the Network for Public Education.

She writes here about Miami, a district that is “all in” for school choice. 

Miami seems to have taken the place of Denver as their favorite district, now that the choice Majority was booted out of power.

Legg writes:

Miami is the school choice capital!  According to this EducationNext article, 20% of Miami’s public schools are charters.  Another 20% of students are in private schools, and approximately half of those are paid for with vouchers and tax credit scholarships.  It does not stop there.  District-run choice programs now enroll 61% of public school children.  Is this a school choice dream or a nightmare?

Dade County schools tout high academic achievement.  The district receives an ‘A’ grade from the state and no failing school grades.  Of course, there are only 15 schools in the state that have an ‘F’ rating, so Miami is not unique there.  An ‘A’ school only has to earn 62% of the possible points based on state assessment test scores etc.  Over one-half of all Florida’s schools earn an ‘A’ or ‘B’ grade.

Miami’s  fourth grade students rank above the national average on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reading test, but there is no statistically significant difference between Duval, Hillsborough and Dade Counties’ scores.  Could it be that third grade retention pushes Florida scores up because so many fourth graders were retained?

The Dade County eighth grade NAEP scores also seem to be higher in comparison to other cities.  Yet, the average Miami-Dade score is right at the national average.  Miami’s high school graduation rate is just below the national average.  It would seem that Miami-Dade is good at hype.  The reality is quite different on the ground.

According to the report ‘Tough Choices‘, Miami is the second most segregated district in the state.  Of 460 schools in Miami, 214 are considered isolated.  They are more than 85% single race.   Miami’s lowest performing schools are overwhelmingly black.  Hispanic students also tend to be enrolled in segregated schools.

Is this what Florida is striving for?  Our schools are driven by grades which are easy to manipulate.  Yet, Florida, the third largest state in the nation, is just average in student achievement and children are increasingly separated by race and economic status.

Florida is ground zero for school choice, since it has been controlled by Jeb Bush and his allies since 1998. By now, it should have surpassed Massachusetts on the NAEP, but its eighth grade scores continue to be mediocre.

 

Categories Accountability, Bush, Jeb, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Florida, For-Profit, Privatization, Testing, Vouchers

Nashville: Amy Frogge Tells the Chamber of Commerce Why Public Schools Are Great!

By dianeravitch
December 19, 2019 //
11

Amy Frogge is a member of the elected school board in Metro Nashville. She is a parent activist and a lawyer. She is also one of the heroes of my new book SLAYING GOLIATH: THE PASSIONATE RESISTANCE TO PRIVATIZATION AND THE FIGHT TO SAVE AMERICA’S PUBLIC SCHOOLS (Knopf), which will be published January 21.

When Amy ran for the school board, the Disruption movement funded her opponents. Groups like Democrats for Education Reform and Stand for Children poured money into the race to beat her, and she won. They outspent her, but she had troops, volunteers, parents as passionate as she was.

Amy recently spoke to the Nashville Chamber of Commerce about public education in Nashville.

This is what she told them:

Good morning. I would like to start out this morning with a confession, speaking only on my own behalf: Since I was first elected, I’ve bristled at the very idea of the business community grading the school system with a yearly report card. If I, as a school board member, decided to “grade” the Nashville Chamber for the dismal state of Metro’s finances and offered suggestions as to how you might better conduct your business dealings to avoid such poor outcomes, I’d wager that you would take offense. You would likely respond that I’m not qualified to make such an assessment, since I have no background in business, and you’d be right.

 

This is how our educators feel. Our teachers and public schools are continually scapegoated for the societal ills that impact student learning. Our schools and teachers are often labeled as “failing,” which destroys morale and is an entirely inaccurate statement. They are faced with a constant barrage of new policies, procedures, assessments, and ratings tools crafted by those with no real expertise in education- by politicians, by lawyers (like me), and by business leaders. The metrics used to assess our teachers and students are often deeply flawed and ever-changing. We must begin to respect our teachers, grant them the autonomy they need to succeed, and pay them handsomely. They are our true experts. Our school staff members best understand how to reach students and how to help them grow academically. They often give of their own limited resources to ensure that our children have what they need- food, clothing, shoes, supplies, etc., and even the love and care many do not receive at home.

 

That said, I want to commend you today for the general focus of this year’s Report Card: investment, equity and support. These are the true keys to success in public education. It’s become painfully obvious that Nashville schools and teachers are underfunded and that there exist vast inequities within our school system. As a city and larger community, we must ensure that every child in Nashville has access to an excellent, well-rounded education. ALL children- not just those in private schools or wealthy neighborhoods- should have access to the arts, to physical activity (recess, PE, athletics), to proper nutrition, to time in nature, to books and school libraries, to learning through play when they are young, to enrichment activities that spark their creativity and interests as they grow, and to healthy, evidence-based educational practices. So many of Nashville’s students come to school having experienced trauma and adverse childhood experiences, which impact their ability to focus on learning. That’s why the Chamber’s emphasis on social emotional learning has been so very important. We must also maintain focus on whole child education. We need more school counselors, social workers, and nurses. MNPS needs greater support and increased partnerships from our larger community.

 

But our current national fixation on ridiculous amounts of flawed standardized testing, which ultimately measures little, has impeded progress toward these goals. The number one factor impacting a child’s test scores is the socioeconomic status of the child’s family. This does not mean, of course, that children who come from impoverished backgrounds cannot succeed; it simply means that we as a community must provide the extra support to help these children thrive. School privatization efforts also impede progress toward these goals. Conversations about vouchers and charter schools are ultimately about equity- whether we want to fund the few at the expense of the many and whether we can continue to support a parallel, competing set of school systems when we cannot afford to support our existing schools. These conversations are also about accountability, the need for public regulation and transparency, the misuse of tax dollars intended for children, and school segregation- again issues of equity and fairness. Ultimately, though, these issues are a distraction from the hard work at hand- a band-aid on a much larger problem. It is a sad day when we all rally around the idea of “Adopting a Teacher” in a city as rich and thriving as Nashville. It’s embarrassing that we have come to this point.

 

I’ll close today by adding to this Report Card a few ways that you, sitting here in this room, can help MNPS succeed:

 

First, I invite each of you to tour your zoned schools before deciding where to enroll your own child. My husband and I opted to send our children to our zoned schools, and it has been an excellent choice for our family. We have utilized schools that our neighbors once warned us against, those with poor ratings on sites like greatschools.org- and yet, my children are both thriving, academically and otherwise. Their test scores are just as high as those of their friends who have attended elite private schools, and my children have benefitted from diverse learning environments. It saddens me that we in Nashville have somehow come to view our public schools as charities meant to serve only those without means. Children in our public schools shouldn’t be viewed as future worker bees for businesses, and our city’s schools are not just for other people’s children. Public schools are the very hearts of our community, and if everyone in Nashville actually utilized our public schools, we would have very different outcomes. Socioeconomic diversity, as well as racial diversity, in schools are proven drivers of success.

 

And when we all get involved in public schools, small miracles happen. When I was PTO President at our local, Title I elementary school, I helped bring in community partnerships and local support for the school. As a result, test scores went up, the school’s culture improved, and a waiting list developed at that school. This could happen throughout the whole city with your support.

 

On a related note, please do not recruit businesses to Nashville with the promise that they can live in surrounding counties and send their children to school in places like Williamson County. This increases the divide between the haves and the have-nots and paints a misleading picture of our city.     

 

Second, in addition to the suggestions you’ve made in this year’s Report Card, I hope that you will consider a greater investment in MNPS’s Community School programs, which provide wrap-around services to children and families in need. Businesses could partner with local schools to meet student needs and provide community volunteers. This would absolutely change a school’s outcomes.

 

Third, please help us advocate at the state level for our needs- increased funding, greater teacher pay and autonomy, and local control of schools so that Nashville can make the best decisions for our community.

 

Finally, I hope that you, as leaders in our business community, will put effort into advocating for larger changes in our city that will have the greatest impact on our schools and children. We need more affordable housing. Last year, over 3,400 of the children in our school system qualified as homeless. And as you are aware, our teachers and support staff desperately need better pay. Many can no longer afford to live in the New Nashville. We must stop investing in shiny things at the expense of infrastructure and community needs. When our city becomes more equitable, this will be reflected in our schools.

 

Thank you for your time this morning and for your commitment to public education. I know that a lot of hard, thoughtful work goes into your Report Card each year. I will leave you with the encouragement that Dr. Battle, Mayor Cooper, and the board are already working on the issues that your Report Card Committee has identified. It’s a new day for Nashville, and I hope we can all work together in partnership to make a difference for Nashville’s children.

Categories Accountability, Education Reform, Nashville, Supporting public schools, Teachers

Andrea Gabor: How Schools Can Help In Getting an Accurate Census Count in 2020

By dianeravitch
December 19, 2019 //
1

Andrea Gabor writes here about the importance of an accurate Census in apportioning Congressional representatives and federal resources. She shows that California leads the way in relying on schools to make sure there is an accurate head count of those who live in the state. 

Fears are running high that the 2020 U.S. census could result in a costly undercount in a number of states and communities. Politicians and policy makers in the parts of the country with large hard-to-count immigrant and minority populations are particularly worried.

They should be. This will be the first time that the census, carried out every 10 years, is conducted online. Court battles and funding cuts have delayed the production of backup paper forms and shortened the time for testing online portals and rural surveys. Although the courts blocked the administration’s efforts to include a citizenship question, President Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric and orders to round up undocumented residents may discourage many from taking part in the census.

California is especially aware of these challenges. With both vast rural areas and a large immigrant population, the nation’s most populous state faces an undercount that is projected to be as high as 2%, close to double the national average. That could cost the state a seat in the House of Representatives during the next reapportionment process, as well as federal funding for everything from schools to infrastructure.

The U.S. Census Bureau estimated that in the 1990 survey, California missed more people than any other state — about 2.7% of its population. The undercount cost the state one House seat and an estimated $2 billion in federal funding during the 1990s.

To ensure an accurate count in 2020, California has developed an aggressive strategy that includes enlisting help from the public schools, including teachers, parents and students. It’s an example other states and localities with similar populations should follow, especially because children are among the groups at greatest risk of being undercounted.

Federal law makes it a serious crime to share information provided by individuals to the Census Bureau, but noncitizens still need assurance that participating in the survey won’t bring immigration enforcement agents to their doors.

Neighborhood schools are ideally positioned to tackle the census challenges, because local residents are more likely to trust them than they are other government entities. Schools can also provide the computers and internet connections that hard-to-count areas often lack, a resource that will be particularly important next year.

California has spent at least $100 million since 2017 to ensure an accurate count, and much of that money is going to schools. Thirty-two county offices are funding school-based efforts to reach the targeted populations.

Los Angeles County alone — identified as the nation’s “hardest to count” county — will get $2 million for a range of activities, from training parents and administrators about the importance of the census to setting up kiosks where families can fill out survey forms.

Neighboring Orange County has allocated funds to a school district in Anaheim, which has a large Latino and Asian population, to train parents to operate school-based centers where families can get information and help in filling out the online surveys. Student groups are involved, and there is curriculum training for teachers who want to do census-related units in their classes.

As an example of these grass-roots efforts, the superintendent of the Anaheim Union High School District, Michael Matsuda, last spring enlisted the help of the leader of the Vietnamese students’ association at one school. Anika Nguyenkhoa, 17, developed a Ted talk-like speech that she has presented to hundreds of parents and county educators. She is teaming up with the heads of Vietnamese groups at other Anaheim high schools for two news conferences in February, one for the general public and the other targeting Vietnamese students.

The school district has also enlisted the Anaheim Bros, a civic fraternity founded, initially, to give young Latinos an alternative to gangs. By connecting the census to political representation and to local funding, Anaheim’s push is part of a district-wide civics-awareness effort that Matsuda sees as essential for engaging immigrant students and their families.

Categories Accountability

“Democracy Now” on the Public Education Forum

By dianeravitch
December 19, 2019 //
13

Amy Goodman, host of “Democracy Now,” interviews Carol Burris, Keron Blair, and Jitu Brown about the Public Education Forum and the fight for equity and justice.

We are educating the public about the importance of changing the status quo.

Ahead of the last Democratic presidential debate of the year this Thursday, seven candidates appeared Saturday at the historic Democratic Presidential Forum on Public Education in Pittsburgh, an event organized by public education organizations, unions, civil rights organizations and community groups. We play highlights from the forum and get response from Keron Blair, director of the Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools in Atlanta; Jitu Brown, national director of the Journey for Justice Alliance; and Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education Action. She recently authored a report titled “Still Asleep at the Wheel: How the Federal Charter Schools Program Results in a Pileup of Fraud and Waste.”

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Equity, Justice, Privatization
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