Indiana blogger Steve Hinnefeld reviews the damage left behind when charter schools close, often mid-year. The possibility of a sudden closing is an unadvertised disadvantage of charters. If they don’t have enough students, if there’s a financial scandal, if lots of other things, the school abruptly closes, leaving students and parents to find another school. Charter school advocates think it’s commendable when the schools close, as that is the market at work. Not so good for the students.
He writes:
Regardless of what you think about charter schools, it’s bad news when one closes unexpectedly. It’s bad for the staff. It’s bad for the people who were committed to the project. It’s especially bad for the students, who will have to find a new school, learn their way around and make new friends.
And it’s not a rare occurrence here in Indiana. A list provided by the Indiana Department of Education includes 50 charter schools that have closed or merged since Indiana began allowing charters in 2002. An analysis by Chalkbeat Indiana found at least 29 charter schools in Marion County have closed.
The latest to fold was Vanguard Collegiate, an Indianapolis middle school that opened with big plans in 2018 but struggled to enroll students. It had only 71 students in grades 5-8 last year, according to Indiana Department of Education data, and was down to about 40 this fall.
Vanguard announced two weeks ago in a letter to parents that it would close Oct. 1. “Please know that we fought hard for you, our beloved school community,” executive director Robert Marshall wrote.
In January, another Indianapolis charter school, HIM by HER, closed abruptly, sending its 200 students scrambling with three months left in the school year. The school, which launched during the COVID-19 pandemic, was authorized by Ball State University and operated for 2½ years.
One charter-school supporter commented online that Vanguard Collegiate shouldn’t have been allowed to open in the first place, Ball State shouldn’t have extended its charter last year, and it shouldn’t have been allowed to close mid-semester. Certainly, the situation could have been handled better.
The fact that the school, over five years, never managed to enroll 100 students should have been a red flag. It reported good attendance rates for a high-poverty school, but its academic performance wasn’t stellar: Only two of 61 test-takers scored proficient on both the math and English/language arts ILEARN assessments in 2023. It’s not clear what the school’s board was doing about this; board minutes haven’t been posted to the school’s website since June 2022.
Then there was the school’s most recent posted audit, covering the 2020-21 school year and submitted to the State Board of Accounts in March 2022. The audit concluded that “substantial doubt continues to exist about the ability of the school to continue as a going concern.”
Nevertheless, the school’s authorizer, the Indiana Charter School Board, approved a 5-year extension of its charter late last year. If the board had rejected the renewal request, the school could have shut down in May in an orderly fashion and its students would have had the summer to find a new school. On the other hand, it might have gone shopping for a different authorizer. That’s what happened with HIM by HER: the Indiana Charter School Board rejected its initial application, but Ball State approved it.
What happens to students when their schools close unexpectedly? Research is mixed, but there’s strong evidence that switching schools has negative academic and behavioral impacts, especially on students of color and students from low-income families – like those at Vanguard and HIM by HER.
The U.S. Department of Education awarded $35 million to St. Louis from the federal Charter Schools Program despite the city’s checkered history with charters. The public schools sure could have used that money to reduce class sizes and improve their offerings. Republicans and DFER-funded Democrats protect the federal charter money from cuts, even though charter expansion harms public schools. (DFER=Democrats for Education Reform, a group of hedge fund managers who support charters, high-stakes testing and other corporate “reforms,” but never support public schools).
ST. LOUIS — The Opportunity Trust education reform group has been awarded a $35.6 million federal grant to expand and open new charter schools across Missouri over the next five years.
The money will be used for 16 charter schools to serve 5,000 additional students, according to the group’s application to the U.S. Department of Education. The federal agency granted a total of $147 million to education departments and reform groups in 10 states for more charter school seats…
The Opportunity Trust launched in 2018 and has helped fund the Leadership School and several other new charters, including Atlas, Kairos Academies and Voices Academy, which opened this fall in downtown St. Louis.
Charters have had a mixed record since they first opened in the city in 2000 with a promise to improve student performance through innovation and independence. More than half of the 37 charter school operators that came to the city have folded due to financial or academic failures, including La Salle and Hawthorn schools this year.
Leonie Haimson is executive director of Class Size Matters. She has worked tirelessly to persuade legislators in New York State to limit class sizes. Her efforts were successful in the latest legislative session when both houses passed limits on class sizes.
However billionaire Michael Bloomberg, who was mayor of New York City for 12 years, has been an outspoken critic of class size reduction. In this article that appeared on Valerie Strauss’s “Answer Sheet,” Haimson explains why Bloomberg is wrong.
Strauss writes:
In 2014, I wrote this: “Every now and then someone in education policy (Arne Duncan) or education philanthropy (Bill Gates) …. will say something about why class size isn’t really very important because a great teacher can handle a boatload of kids.”
Well, some can do that, but anybody who has been in a classroom knows the virtues of classes that are smaller rather than larger even without the research that has been shown to bear that out.
Now the issue is back in the spotlight, this time in New York City, where a new state law requires the public school system — the largest in the country — to reduce class sizes over five years. Opponents of the law are pushing back, especially Mike Bloomberg, mayor of New York City from 2002 to 2013. He called for smaller class sizes in his first mayoral campaign but has now changed his mind.
In an op-ed in several publications, Bloomberg says students don’t need smaller classes but better schools — as if the two were entirely unrelated — and he ignores research, such as a 2014 review of major research that found class size matters a lot, especially for low-income and minority students.
This post, written by Leonie Haimson, looks at the issue, and Bloomberg’s position. Haimson is executive director of Class Size Matters, a nonprofit organization that advocates for smaller classes in New York City and across the nation as a key driver of education equity.
By Leonie Haimson
The knives are out against the new class size law, overwhelmingly passed in the New York State Legislature in June 2022, requiring New York City schools to phase in smaller classes over five years, starting this school year. The law calls for class sizes in grades K-3 to be limited to no more than twenty students; 23 students in grades 4-8, and 25 in core high school classes, to be achieved by the end of the 2027 school year. The law was passed despite the opposition of the city’s Department of Education officials, who insist that it will be too expensive, and somehow inequitable, because, they say, the highest-need students already have small enough classes.
Most recently, Mike Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York City and an adviser to Mayor Eric Adams, published identical opinion pieces in three major outlets: Bloomberg News (which he owns), The Washington Post, and the New York Post, inveighing against the goal of lowering class sizes. His piece is clearly meant to sway opinion leaders and legislators to repeal the law, and because of his prominent position, some may listen without knowing about fundamental problems in his op-ed.
Class size reduction has been shown as an effective way to improve learning and engagement for all students, especially those who are disadvantaged, and thus is a key driver of education equity. The Institute of Education Sciences cites lowering class size as one of only four education interventions proven to work through rigorous evidence; and multiple studies show that it narrows the achievement or opportunity gap between income and racial groups.
Bloomberg claims that because of the initiative, “City officials say they’ll have to hire 17,700 new teachers by 2028.” Actually, the estimate from the New York City Department of Education (DOE) itself is far smaller. In their draft class size reduction plan, posted on July 21, DOE officials estimated that 9,000 more teachers would be required over five years. While it’s true that the Independent Budget Office estimated the figure cited by Bloomberg, this large disparity between the two figures appears to stem from the fact that, as the IBO pointed out, the DOE’s budget already includes 7,500 unfilled teaching positions, which schools have not been allowed to fill. While Bloomberg claims the cost will be $1.9 billion for staffing, the DOE’s own plan estimates $1.3 billion — and these costs could be considerably lower if they redeployed teachers who are currently assigned to out-of-classroom positions to the classroom to lower class size.
The legislature passed the new law in recognition that the city’s DOE is now receiving $1.6 billion in additional state aid to finally settle the Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit launched more than 20 years ago. In that case, the state’s highest court found that, because of excessive class sizes, the city’s children were deprived of their constitutional right to a sound, basic education.
Yet since his election, Adams has repeatedly cut education spending, and now threatens to cut it even more, by another 15 percent. As a result of these cuts, class sizes increased last year and will likely be larger this year. Hiring enough teachers to meet the law’s requirements will be a challenge in any case, but it will be impossible to achieve if the administration’s repeated cuts and hiring freezes are implemented.
Yet in the end, smaller classes would likely strengthen teacher quality by lowering teacher attrition rates, especially at our highest-need schools, as studies have shown.
In his op-ed, Bloomberg claims that creating the additional space necessary to lower class size will cost $35 billion, which is misleading. DOE did include this estimate in its original May 2023 draft class size plan. However following pushback by critics who pointed out that this figure bore no relation to reality, they deleted that inflated estimate in their more recent July class size plan. If DOE equalized or redistributed enrollment across schools, this would likely save billions of dollars in capital expenses. Right now, there are hundreds of underutilized public schools, sitting close by overcrowded schools that lack the space to lower class size.
Bloomberg, echoing an erroneous DOE claim that funds spent on lowering class size will not help the highest-need students, wrote: “Under the new mandate, only 38 percent of the highest-poverty schools would see class sizes shrink, compared to nearly 70 percent of medium- to low-poverty schools … it won’t help the students who need it most.”
Actually, only 8 percent of schools with the highest poverty levels (with 90 percent or more low-income students) fully complied with the class size caps last year, according to an analysis by Class Size Matters. Thus, 92 percent of these schools would see their class sizes shrink if DOE complied with the law, rather than the 38 percent that Bloomberg claims.
Moreover, by solely focusing on schools with 90 percent poverty levels or more, his claims are misleading. A piece in the education publication Chalkbeat attempted to make a similar argument, by using class size data provided by DOE that shows that 68 percent of classes in the highest-poverty schools met the class size limit. This is far different than Bloomberg’s claim that 68 percent of these schools are achieving the limits in all of their classes.
In addition, the class size data, analyzed in conjunction with DOE demographic data, shows that there are many more NYC public schools in the other two categories summarized by Chalkbeat, “Low-to-Mid Poverty” (schools with 0-75 percent low-income students) and “High Poverty” (schools with 75 percent to 90 percent low-income students), than those in their “Highest Poverty” category. Most importantly, these two categories of schools enroll a supermajority of our highest-needs students.
In fact, 79 percent of low-income students, 78 percent of Black students, 74 percent of Hispanic students, and 74 percent of English-language learners are enrolled in these other two categories of schools, while only 21 percent to 26 percent of these students are enrolled in the “Highest Poverty” category.
This further indicates that without a citywide mandate to lower class size, smaller classes would likely never reach most of our most disadvantaged students.
Indeed, the highest-needs students, including students of color, low-income students, and English-language learners, have been shown to gain twice the benefits from smaller classes in terms of higher achievement rates, more engagement, and eventual success in school and beyond, which is why class size reduction is one of very few education reforms proven to narrow the achievement or opportunity gap. Thus, by its very nature, lowering class size is a key driver of education equity.
There is also no guarantee that the smaller classes in our highest poverty schools will be sustained without a legal mandate to do so. In July, DOE officials omitted the promise in their May class size plan that schools that had already achieved the caps would continue to do so, as pointed out by a letter signed by over 230 advocates, parents, and teachers. In fact, we found that fewer of the schools in every category achieved the class size caps last year compared to the year before.
Only 69 schools citywide fully met the caps in the fall of 2022, compared to 89 in the fall of 2021, and the number of students enrolled in those schools declined from 18,248 to only 13,905, a decrease of nearly 25 percent. Fewer still will likely do so this year.
So given that the data does not back up his claims, why is Bloomberg so apparently enraged at the notion that public school students would be provided the opportunity to benefit from smaller classes.
One should recall that when he first ran for mayor more than 20 years ago, Bloomberg himself promised to lower class size, especially in the early grades. His 2002 campaign kit put it this way: “Studies confirm one of the greatest detriments to learning is an overcrowded classroom … For students a loud packed classroom means greater chance of falling behind. For teachers, class overcrowding means a tougher time teaching & giving students attention they need.”
Yet class sizes increased sharply during the Bloomberg years, and by 2013, his last year in office, class sizes in the early grades in public schools had risen to the highest levels in 15 years. By that time, he had long renounced his earlier pledge, and had proclaimed in a 2011 speech that he would fire half the teachers and double class sizes if he could, and this would be a “good deal for the students.”
Bloomberg’s main educational legacy in New York City was a huge increase in the number of charter schools as a result of his decision to provide them free space in public school buildings, and his successful effort to persuade state legislators to raise the charter cap. During his three terms in office, the number of charter schools in the city exploded from 19 to 183.
Since leaving office, Bloomberg has continued to express his preference for charter schools, and has pledged $750 million for their further expansion in the city and beyond. A close reading of his op-ed suggests that one of the main reasons for his vehement opposition to the new law is because lowering class size may take classroom space in our public schools that, in his view, should be used instead for charter schools.
Indeed, he concludes the op-ed by saying “it would help if Democratic leaders were more supportive of high-quality public charter schools,” and goes on to rail against a recent lawsuit to block the Adams administration’s decision to co-locate two Success charter schools in public school buildings in Brooklyn and Queens — a lawsuit filed on the basis that it would diminish the space available to lower class size for existing public school students.
Of the $750 million Bloomberg pledged for charter expansion, $100 million was specifically earmarked for Success Academy. Regarding the lawsuit, launched by the teachers union along with parents and educators in the affected schools, Bloomberg writes, “It was an outrageous attack on children, and thankfully, it failed.”
Misleading people about the value of small classes to teachers and students as well as about class size data seems to be an attack on opportunities for New York City public school children, who deserve better. Class Size Matters hopes these efforts fail.
“Co-location” of charters inserts a charter school into the space of an existing public school, causing the public school to lose space for resource rooms, computer rooms, and other non-classroom uses. California has a law requiring public schools to make room for charters, no matter how crowded one or both schools may be.
Long plagued with bad feeling between public schools and charter schools, the elected board of the Los Angeles Unified School District will vote tomorrow on co-location policy.
MEDIA ADVISORY
For Immediate Release – September 25, 2023
Media Contact:
Alex McElvain, (630) 881-0545, cp-a.mcelvain@lausd.net
Los Angeles Unified Board of Education to Vote on Creating a Charter Schools
Co-Location Policy to Mitigate Impacts Caused by Proposition 39
A long overdue resolution seeks to protect innovative programs and prevent the worst impacts of
co-locations on vulnerable students and schools.
What: The Board of Education will vote on whether to adopt Resolution 026-22/23 “Creating a Charter Schools Co-Location Policy to Mitigate Impacts Caused by Proposition 39”. The resolution authors, Board President Jackie Goldberg and Board Member Dr. Rocío Rivas, along with parents and educators, will be available for media following the event.
Who: Resolution co-authors Board President Jackie Goldberg (LAUSD District 5) and Board Member Dr. Rocío Rivas (LAUSD District 2)
When: Tuesday, September 26
· 1:00 pm Regular Board Meeting
· 3:15 pmAgenda Item will be heard
· 4:00 pm Press Availability
Approved in 2000, Proposition 39 imposed mandates on California schools based on its obligations to share space with charter schools. Co-locations—where district-led schools are required to share space with charter operated schools—have raised myriad educational, operational, safety, financial, and legal challenges. Parents, educators, and students have described how co-locations have syphoned away needed resources from neighborhood schools, such as parent centers, computer labs, and even space for electives. Many are concerned that co-locations undermine District-led initiatives to support students and schools, such as Priority Schools, Black Student Achievement Plan (BSAP) schools, and Community Schools. This resolution calls for improvements, transparency, and accountability in the charter co-location process. The lack of clear guidance from prior Boards has resulted in co-locations on numerous Priority, BSAP, and Community Schools, and “charter pipelines” that actively encourage students to leave the District for middle and high school charters on their campus. Today’s resolution will not undo any of the District’s current co-locations, but will provide guidance in the future for new co-locations, and those where a charter school moves due to growth or other material revisions.
When an Oklahoma state school board approved what would become the nation’s first taxpayer-funded religious charter school, opponents of the proposal called it “deeply un-American” and “a flagrant violation of long-standing constitutional law.” An Oklahoma parents group and a handful of state and national civil organizations filed a pair of lawsuits to block the new school. Creating a taxpayer-funded religious school “turns on its head the concept that charter schools were supposed to be public schools,” American Federation of Teacher president Randi Weingarten argued.
Indeed, they were supposed to be public schools. But anyone who has been watching the devolution of charter schools could see this coming from a mile away.
The magical transformation of what should be a public school to a taxpayer-funded private school is not a trick confined to Oklahoma.
From charter schools in churches with websites displaying crosses to “faith-friendly” charters, the charter industry has been flirting with religiosity for years. Under former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, the federal Charter School Programs were given the green light to award grants to religious organizations that own or operate charter schools.
During the 2021-2022 school year, 20 percent of all charter school students were enrolled in a school run by a for-profit company. This allowed these companies to evade laws and regulations by using a nonprofit school as a facade. And it is but a small hop over a line drawn in the sand to move from the federal government funding a religious organization to run charters, to funding charters that provide religious instruction in classrooms. It only takes a strong breeze, and the sand lines disappear altogether.
The magical transformation of what should be a public school to a taxpayer-funded private school is not a trick confined to Oklahoma, nor does the hocus-pocus turn solely on the question of religion.
Even as quasi-religious and perhaps overtly religious charter schools are on the rise, there is another effort intent on blurring the line between public and private.
A recent bill passed in North Carolina, a state in which a large proportion of charters run by for-profits, dismisses other features that determine whether or not charter schools, in fact, deserve the title “public.”
Charter schools are supposed to be “free and open to all” without discrimination or favor. But HB 219, passed by a Republican supermajority legislature over the veto of Democrat Governor Roy Cooper, allows charter schools to charge tuition and grant enrollment privileges to certain students. With the bill’s passage, North Carolina’s under-enrolled charter schools can now enlist both foreign and out-of-state students on a tuition basis. How will under-enrollment be defined?
Since the bill also allows nearly uncontrolled expansion of existing charter schools, finding space for tuition-paying students will not be difficult. Who will pay the tuition bill—the state, the foreign nation, or the family? North Carolina left that question unaddressed, but the likely outcome will be families, which favors the wealthy.
Not only does North Carolina challenge the definition of a charter school as a free school, but it also flaunts the idea that charters are open to all. The new law erodes equal access to charter schools in the state by giving enrollment privileges to special groups, allowing charter schools to shape their student bodies.
Please open the link and continue reading this important story.
The Republican leadership of the House Education Committee held hearings on the threat posed by Communist China to American public and private schools. Read the summary and ask yourself the following questions: Would red states grant the Confucius Classrooms a charter to run their own schools? Would they let a school organized by the Confucius Classrooms accept voucher students? Are they equally concerned about the scores of Gulen schools that receive public funds and operate as charter schools? Gulen is a Turkish imam who lives in seclusion in Pennsylvania; the board of trustees of his schools are led by Turkish men; the Gulen schools have a large number of Turkish teachers on staff. When will the House Committee on Education investigate the Gulen schools?
Today’s Early Childhood, Elementary, and Secondary Education (ECESE) Subcommittee hearing, led by Chairman Aaron Bean (R-FL), investigated the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) efforts to infiltrate America’s K-12 schools.
In postsecondary education, the CCP exerts soft power on the American education system through cultural exchange outposts known as Confucius Institutes. The K-12 arms of this propaganda machine, called Confucius Classrooms, were under the microscope today for their potential malignant influence.
Chairman Bean opened the hearing by pointing out, “The risk posed by the proliferation of Confucius Classrooms is threefold, threatening America’s national, geopolitical, and academic interests.”
Expert witnesses testifying today included Mike Gonzalez, Senior Fellow at the Heritage Foundation; Nicole Neily, President of Parents Defending Education (PDE); and Ryan Walters, State Superintendent of Public Instruction at the Oklahoma State Department of Education.
The seminal report on Confucius Classrooms, and therefore the spark for congressional investigation, was led by Nicole Neily and PDE. In her opening testimony, Ms. Neily laid out the key findings of her organization’s report: “Our research found that over the past decade, over $17 million has been given to 143 school districts and private K-12 schools across 34 states (plus DC) – impacting over 170,000 students in 182 schools.” Furthermore, these classrooms were identified near 20 U.S. military bases, posing a potential national security threat.
As a state education officer, Mr. Walters offered a perspective on the impact of these donations in Oklahoma schools. After one of his school districts was named in the PDE report, Mr. Walters ordered a further investigation, which uncovered that, “Through a series of non-profits, that school district maintains an active connection with the CCP through a program called Confucius Classrooms, even after the federal government cracked down on similar programs in 2020.”
This is strange, he notes, because its graduation rate is one of the lowest in the state and the nation.
For all the schools in the top 80 in New York state, the second lowest graduation rate was 92%. The first lowest was Success Academy with a 75% graduation rate.
On this graduation rate statistic, Success Academy is actually in the bottom 10% in the state and also in the bottom 10% in the country. Nationally it is number 16,468 out of 17,680.
How is it possible that a high school with such a low graduation rate is ranked as 12th best in the state?
Politico’s education writer, Juan Perez Jr., interviewed Democrats who are well known as advocates for charter schools as proof that Democrats must support choice policies.
He begins:
MINNEAPOLIS — President Joe Biden’s education chief believes public schools are facing a “make or break moment.” The rescue plan coming from some Democrats, however, rings of policies that have already landed wins for conservatives.
Political skirmishes over classrooms have left Democrats underwater, or dead even, with Republicans among voters in a clutch of battleground states. And as they worried their party has not honed a strategy to reverse declining test scores, enrollment and trust in public schools, liberals watched Republican governors sign historic private school choice laws this year.
The GOP wins and a generational crisis in schooling has convinced some Democrats that the Biden administration needs to promote a liberal version of public school choice in the 2024 campaign, or risk losing votes.
“We’ve lost our advantage on education because I think that we’ve failed to fully acknowledge that choice resonates deeply with families and with voters,” said Jorge Elorza, the CEO of Democrats for Education Reform and its affiliate Education Reform Now think tank.
Please open the link. It doesn’t get any better. Not only does he quote DFER, the hedge managers group that does not support public schools, he also quotes Kerri Rodrigues of the “National Parents Union,” funded by the billionaire Waltons as a leader of the 2016 failed campaign to increase charters in Massachusetts.
Not exactly typical Democrats. More like charter advocates.
I sent Mr. Perez the following email:
Dear Mr. Perez,
I am writing to express my strong disagreement with your article today about Democrats and schools. Democrats will not improve their popularity by acting more like Republicans.
Republicans are on a mission to transfer public funds to nonpublic schools. Whenever vouchers have been put to a state referendum, they are defeated by large margins, as they were in Florida, Arizona, and Utah. The Republicans leaders of those states ignored the will of the voters and authorized vouchers.
In every state with vouchers, 70-80% are claimed by students who never attended public schools. Vouchers are a giveaway to families who already put their kids in private and religious schools.
Nearly 90% of the parents in this country send their children to public schools.
The most recent Gallup Poll showed that the overwhelming majority of parents are happy with their public schools.
For decades, Republicans have promoted school choice by attacking public schools.
The way forward for the Democratic Party is not to embrace GOP policies but to support the adequate and equitable funding of public schools and to stand against the privatization of public schools.
Volumes of research show that charter schools on average do no better than public schools, even though they admit whom they want and oust whoever has low scores or is disruptive. The Network for Public Education, in which I am involved, reports frequently on the high rates of closings by charter schools, as well as the scandals that occur almost daily due to embezzlement and other financial misdeeds.
Voucher students do not take state tests. Their schools are not accountable. Their teachers need not be certified. They may discriminate against students and families on grounds of religion, LGBT, or any other reason. They are not required to accept students with disabilities. Students who leave public schools for voucher schools typically fall behind their public school peers, and many drop out and return to public school.
Why in the world should Democrats support schools that are free to discriminate, free to hire uncertified and unqualified staff, managed by for-profit entities, and are not as successful as public schools?
That is bad political advice, which you got by interviewing people whose organizations advocate for charter schools (DFER and the so-called “National Parents Union”). The only pro-public school voices in your article were Randi Weingarten and Miguel Cardona, a union leader and the Secretary of Education.
Why didn’t you interview parents engaged in the fight to keep public education public? They are in every state, fighting billionaire-funded organizations like DFER and Moms for Liberty.
Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, could introduce you to them. Why don’t you come to our 10th annual national conference, which will be held at the Capitol Hilton in DC on October 28-29. You would meet parents from every state who are working to preserve their public schools and keep them safe from entrepreneurs, grifters, corporate chains, and religious interests.
Alana Semuels writes for TIME magazine, where this article appeared. She rightly notes that dollars spent at Walmart hurt locally-owned businesses. In many parts of the country, you can drive through small towns and see empty stores that used to be owned by local folk. They couldn’t compete with Walmart’s low prices. Maybe mom-and-pop got a job as greeters at the Walmart twenty miles away. Walmart keeps its prices low not only by its buying power but by prohibiting its workers from forming unions.
Walmart destroys small towns and communities by killing their local economy. if Walmart finds that its super store is not profitable, it will close it and move on, leaving behind devastated towns and communities.
But that’s not the only reason to avoid Walmart. Its owners, the Walton family, are avid supports of school choice. They are the biggest supporters of charter schools, other than the federal government, which dutifully spends $440 million every year to expand new charters, mostly corporate chains like Walmart. Did you ever imagine that your local public school would be replaced by a chain school? Of course, members of the Walton family top the list of America’s billionaires. With a combined wealth of more than $240 billion, they are America’s richest family. Don’t make them richer.
Ironically, Sam Walton, the founding father, graduated from public schools. He graduated from the David H. Hickman High School in Columbia, Missouri. Unlike his descendants, he did not hate public schools; he did not want to privatize and destroy them.
Alana Semuels wrote:
Every week, I go onto Walmart’s website and order a bunch of groceries to be delivered to my house and then feel a little bit guilty.
Walmart is a multi-billion dollar corporation with headquarters more than 1,000 miles from my home; the money I spend there goes to shareholders and executives who live far away, instead of to my local grocery store, Key Food, an 86-year-old co-op of independently owned stores based near my home in New York. By shopping at Walmart, I am likely contributing to the demise of the independently-owned grocery store, which is disappearing across the country.
But the prices make the choice easy. On a recent day, the 42-oz tub of Quaker Oats I get each week was $9.99 at Key Foods and $5.68 at Walmart; a 500 ml bottle of California Olive Ranch olive oil was $14.49 at Key Foods and $8.37 at Walmart; Rao’s homemade tomato sauce was $9.99, while I could have gotten the exact same item on Walmart for $6.88. On these three items alone, I saved $14 by shopping at Walmart.
These prices are one reason that Walmart captures one in four grocery dollars in America, but there’s an argument to be made that Walmart and other big chains including Dollar General, which is expanding at a rapid clip across the country, come by those prices unfairly because of their market power.
There’s a law on the books—1936’s Robinson-Patman Act—that essentially says suppliers in any industry can’t give lower prices and special deals to big chain stores if it costs the same to serve them as other stores. The law also says retailers can’t try and bully suppliers into giving those discounts.
But because Walmart and dollar stores are so huge, representing a big part of a supplier’s business, they’re able to extract deals and low prices from suppliers, according to Small Business Rising and the Main Street Competition Coalition, two groups of independent business owners making their case in Congressional hearings and television ads. The pandemic highlighted just how unfairly Walmart can wield its power, the small businesses are telling regulators, because it was able to demand that suppliers stock its shelves when competitors weren’t able to get the same products for weeks or months. It’s not just groceries; independent pharmacies, book stores, auto parts stores, and other types of retailers are also struggling on an uneven playing field, they say.
Mike Petrilli, head honcho of the right-tilted Fordham Institute thinky tank, made it into the New York Times today to do some chicken littling about Learning Loss and suggest a bold solution. Don’t have a NYT subscription? That’s okay– let me walk you through the highlights of this festival of Things We Can Stop Saying About Education Right Now, Please.
Let’s start by invoking general Learning Loss panic. Petrilli points out that students “lost significant ground” during covid, and now NWEA says that students continue “backsliding” and “falling further behind.” People, in Petrilli’s view, are not panicking enough about “America’s massive learning loss.”
First, let’s use some more precise language, please. In all discussions of learning loss, we are actually talking about scores on a Big Standardized Test of reading and math going down. We will never, ever know how much of the slippage in tests scores is the result of students going a year or two without practicing for the BS Test. But in the meantime, it would be great if we stopped talking about test scores as if they were infallible equivalents of learning and achievement.
Second, “learning loss” is a misnomer. I’m willing to bet that verrrrrrry tiny number of students in this country actually lost learning. I’m equally certain that the vast majority of students did not learn as much as they would have in a non-pandemic year, but that’s not the same.
Think of it this way. It’s budget time, and the Mugwumps’ proposed budget increases spending on widgets from $500 to $600. The Wombats say, “Let’s only increase widget spending to $550.” That gets us to the part where the Mugwump talking point is “The Wombats want to cut spending on widgets.” When in fact everybody wants widget spending to go up.
That’s where we are. During the pandemic, learning occurred–just not as much as might have been expected in a normal-ish year. And this looks most like a crisis if you think of test scores like stock prices and focus on data rather than individual human students. (Petrilli does not invoke the baloney about impact on future earnings, so we’ll not go there right now.)
And, it should also be pointed out, it is where we were for a decade before covid even hit.
Having sounded the alarm, Petrilli bemoans the surfeit of leaders willing to make alarmy noises.The country is in desperate need of leaders who will speak the truth about what’s happening in our K-12 schools, and are willing to make the hard choices to fix it. Simply put, we need to bring some tough love back to American education.
Tough love? Back? Petrilli doesn’t really explain how the pandemic led to a loss of tough love in education. But that’s the dog we’re going to try to hunt with.
He cites Michael Bloomberg, who is ceaselessly alarmed about anything going on in public schools. Bloomberg wants a plan from Washington, a joint session of Congress, a Presidential address.
Ah, says Petrilli–you know when politicians were on the same page about education, presumably flinging tough love around with wild abandon.
We’re talking, of course, about the golden days of No Child Left Behind.
Petrilli remembers it fondly, citing how we saw “significant progress” which of course means “test scores went up,” which they did, at first, for a few years. Anyone who was in a classroom, especially a math or reading classroom, can tell you why. Within a couple of years, schools figured out what test prep would be most effective. Then they targeted students who were teetering on the line between High Enough Scores and Not High Enough Scores, especially the ones in special subgroups, and test prepped the hell out of those kids. At which point scores started stagnating because schools had done all they could do.
The Average Yearly Progress requirements were set up as a bomb that would go off during the next administration. Again, if you were working in a school at the time, you remember that chart, showing a gentle upward glide for a bit before jutting upward to 2014, the magical year in which 100% of students were to score above average on the BS Test. Oh, Congress will fix that before it happens, we were told. They did not. By the early 20-teens, there were two types of school districts–those that were failing, and those that were cheating.
Petrilli claims maybe success probably, saying NCLB “likely contributed” to graduation rates (no, schools just learned how to game those), college attainment rates (eh, maybe, but correlation is not causation) and “possibly” future real-life outcomes (absolutely not a shred of evidence–even reformster Jay Greene said as much).”It’s true that No Child Left Behind was imperfect,” says Petrilli. No. It stunk. But Petrilli has quite the tale here.There were fierce debates over “teaching to the test” and “drill and kill” instruction; about closing low-performing schools versus trying to fix them; and about the link between student achievement and family poverty. But once the law’s shortcomings became apparent, policymakers responded by adopting common standards and improving standardized tests, so as to encourage higher-level teaching. They poured billions into school turnarounds, invested in stronger instructional materials and started grading schools on how much progress their kids made from year to year, rather than focusing on one snapshot in time — an approach that is markedly fairer to high-poverty campuses. Still, the bipartisan effort that was No Child Left Behind ultimately fell apart as our politics fractured.
That’s quite the load. There was no debate about teaching to the test or drill and kill, because nobody was in favor of it except shrugging administrators who were staring at 2014. Petrilli also forgets that “teach to the test” ended up meaning “cut out any other classes–or recess–that does not appear on the test.” Arts slashed. History and science cut (at least for those teetering students). Closing low-performing schools was, in fact, the quickest way for a district to free itself of the low scores; who knows how many districts were restructured to put predictably low 8th grade scores under the same roof as better scores from lower or higher grades. And yes, poverty affects scores, despite all the No Excusing in the world.
What came next did not address any of these issues, The Common Core was an amateur hour fiasco. Were standardized tests improved? Not really (as witnessed by the fact that states dumped the SBA and PARCC as quickly as they could)–but it made a lucrative contract for some test manufacturers. Including progress in scores is great–unless you’re teaching kids who are already scoring at the top. School turnarounds have consistently failed (e.g. Tennessee’s failed Achievement School District).
But he’s right that Trump’s election and appointment of Betsy DeVos hurt the reformster alliance (despite the fact that DeVos had long been part of the club). But then, so was the increasing split between the social justice wing of reform and the free marketeer AEI-Fordham wing.
But look– NCLB and the sequel, Race to the Top, were just bad. They started from bad premises: 1) US education is failing because 2) teachers either don’t care or don’t know what they’re doing. They rest on a foundation of using a mediocre BS Test as an unquestioned proxy for student learning and teacher effectiveness, creating a perfect stage on which to conduct a national field test of Campbell’s Law (when you make a measure a proxy for the real thing, you encourage people to mess with the measure instead of the real thing, and it gets worse if the measure isn’t very good). And none of the “policymakers” who championed this mess ever came up with a single solitary idea of how to Fix Things that actually worked on either a local or macro scale.
The pandemic did not help anything in education. But it did lead to some flaming prose, like Petrilli’s assertion that “here we are, with decades of academic progress washed away and achievement trends still moving in the wrong direction.” This kind of overheated rhetoric is nothing new from the folks who gave us The Pandemic Erased Two Decades of Progress in Math and Reading as a headline. But what does it even mean? Washed away to where? Did knowledge dribble out of students’ heads? Did the learning of the past several years retroactively vanish with former students waking up across America feeling a little bit dumber somehow? Did teachers forget everything they knew about how to teach students, so they have to start over? Or do we just mean “test scores are down”?
Petrilli breaks this down to some other issues. His first point starts out fine– there’s an attendance problem right now. But he tries to set that beside an alleged nationwide move to lower standards. I’m not sure what basis there is for that assertion. He points to the “no zeros” rule used in some schools, but that rule existed in many places (like my old district) for ages. Maybe it’s letting slackers slide through in other places, but my own experience with no zeros policy is that it merely kept students working who would otherwise have given up–kind of the opposite of encouraging slacking.
But then he’s slicing NCLB-style baloney again:Virtually all schools and districts have enjoyed a vacation from accountability. Almost nobody is worried about state officials shutting their campuses because of low performance, or forcing district schools to replace their principals or teachers.
You say that like it’s a bad thing, Mike.
Embedded here are many of the same bad assumptions that have driven ed reform for decades. Teachers and schools have no motivation to do their jobs unless they have some kind of threat of punishment hanging over their heads. This isn’t just bad education policy–it’s bad management. As management which W. Edwards Deming pointed out often, fear should be driven out of the workplace. But NCLB and RttT were always all stick, no carrot, always starting out with the worst possible assumptions about the people who had chosen education as their life’s work (assumptions made largely by people who had never actually worked in a school).
And even if you don’t dig Deming, there’s another thing to consider–none of the stuff Petrilli misses actually worked (which was Deming’s point). He points out that the kind of thing being done in Houston right now has become rare, to which I say “Good,” because Houston is a nightmare and it will end just like all the other similar attempts–no actual success, but lots of disruption and dismay and upheaval of children’s education.
Petrilli will now argue for NCLB 3.0. We need “action at scale,” but we can’t ignore “the support and assistance schools require.” Holding schools accountable wasn’t enough because– wait for it– if NCLB failed it was because schools lacked the expertise and know-how to do it right. And now Petrilli almost–but not quite–gets it.“Teaching to the test” and other problems with No Child Left Behind stemmed from schools resorting to misguided practices to meet requirements. Under pressure to boost scores, but without the training to know what to do, some educators engaged in endless practice testing, and stopped instruction in any subject that was unlikely to be on the state assessment. In a few places, educators even resorted to outright cheating. They likely felt they had no choice, because they hadn’t been given the tools to succeed.
Nope. Close but no cigar. No, the reason all those things happened was because, as NCLB 1.0 and 2.0 were designed, those things were the tools to “succeed.” Because “success” was defined as “get maximum number of kids to score well on a poorly-designed multiple-choice math and reading test.” Granted, when most of us think about “success” in education, we have a whole list of other things in mind–but none of those things were valued by NCLB or RttT.
But we’re rolling up to the finish now. But after a decade of building capacity, offering helping hands and adding funds, it’s time once again to couple skill-building with will-building.
That is a great line. But what capacity-building? More seats in unregulated charters and voucher-accepting schools? Which helping hands? And exactly whose will needs to be built? Parents? Children? Teachers? Policymakers? I’m seriously asking, because I think a hell of a lot of will was involved in slogging through the last couple of years.
Petrilli calls on schools to spend their “federal largesse” to “catch their kids up”–and I think the call to accelerate education is one of the most infuriating calls of the last few years. Sure– because all along teachers have known how to educate children faster but they just haven’t bothered to do it, but hey, now that we have certified lower test scores, teachers will all bust the super-secret Faster Learning plans out of their file cabinets.
Petrillii says we don’t actually need to bring back NCLB, though he seems to have been talking about nothing else– just let’s get out those big sticks and get back to (threats of) “tough interventions for persistent underperformance,” because that has totally worked in the past. No, wait. It hasn’t actually worked ever. Kids, too, should know that it’s time to hit the books again. We need to rethink our lax grading policies, make clear to parents that their children need to be at school and bring back high school graduation exams and the like to ensure that students buckle down.
Also, get those kids off our lawns. And while you’re making sure parents know their kids should be in school, maybe talk to all the reform crowd that has been working hard to build distrust of public schools and deepen disrespect of educators.
And the big finish:Education matters. Achievement matters. We need leaders who are willing to say so, and educators who are willing to act like these simple propositions are true.
This seems straightforward enough, though if you replace “achievement matters” with “standardized test scores matter,” which is what he really means, it doesn’t sound quite as compelling. And it’s insulting as hell to suggest that the ranks of educators are filled with people who are unwilling to act as if education matters.
Well, the piece is completely on brand for the New York Times, and it certainly echoes the refrain of that certain brand of reformster whose response to their own policy failures has been, “Well, get in there and fail harder.” No Child Left Behind failed, and it not only failed but left some of its worst policy ideas embedded in the new status quo, continuing to do damage to public education right through today.
The pandemic did many things, and one thing it did was panic the testing industry, which faced an existential threat that everyone might realize that school without the BS Test, or NWEA’s lovely test-prep tests, might actually be okay. It’s no wonder that they feel a special nostalgia for the days when the entire weight of the government reinforced their importance. So here we are, painting low reading and math tests scores as an educational crisis whose only solution is to get more fear, more threats, and especially more testing back into schools.
I’m sorry if this assessment of some reformsters, their policies, and their motives seems harsh, but, you know– tough love.
Diane Ravitch's blog 