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.
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.
Mike Petrilli, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, published an article in the New York Times yesterday in which he lamented the “learning loss” caused by the pandemic and called for a new national effort, like No Child Left Behind, to instill rigor and accountability, which he says will raise test scores. Time to bring back tough love, he wrote.
I have a hard time criticizing Mike Petrilli because I like him. When I was on the board of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation/Institute, I got to know Mike, and he’s a genuinely good guy. But when I left the board of the TBF Institute in 2009, it was because I no longer shared its beliefs and values. I concluded as early as 2007 that No Child Left Behind was a failure. I wrote an article in the conservative journal EdNext in 2008 about NCLB, saying “End It,” paired with an article by the late John Chubb saying, “Mend It.”TBF sponsored charter schools in Ohio—a move I opposed because think tanks should be evaluating policy, not implementing it; also, during the time I was on the board, the charters sponsored by TBF failed.
By the time I left, I had concluded that the NCLB emphasis on high-stakes standardized testing was a disaster. It caused narrowing the curriculum, gaming the system, cheating, excessive test prep, and squeezed the joy of teaching and learning out of classrooms.
Furthermore, the very idea that Congress and the U.S. Department of Education were stigmatizing schools as failures and closing them was outrageous. I worked in the US ED. There are many very fine career civil servants there, but very few educators. In Congress, the number of experienced educators is tiny. Schools can’t be reformed or fixed by the President, Congress, and the Department of Education.
NCLB and Race to the Top were cut from the same cloth: Contempt for professional educators, indifference to the well-established fact that test scores are highly correlated with family income, and a deep but misguided belief that punishing educators and closing schools were cures for low test scores. Both the law (NCLB) and the program (RTTT) were based on the assumption that rewards and punishments directed at teachers and principals would bring about an educational renaissance. They were wrong. On the day that the Obama administration left office, the U.S. Department of Education quietly released a study acknowledging that Race to the Top, having spent billions on “test-and-punish” strategies, had no significant impact on test scores.
And as icing on the cake, Mike Petrilli wrote an article in 2017 about the latest disappointing NAEP scores, lamenting “a lost decade.” That “lost decade” was 2007-2017, which included a large chunk of NCLB and RTTT. In addition, the Common Core standards, released in 2010, were a huge flop. TBF was paid millions by the Gates Foundation both to evaluate them and to promote them. The NAEP scores remained flat after their introduction. Please, no more Common Core.
I wrote two books about the failure of NCLB and RTTT: The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education (2010) and Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools.
Mercedes Schneider and I both wrote posts commending Mike Petrilli in 2019 when he wrote about the “dramatic achievement gains” of the 1990s and early 2000s before NCLB kicked in. He attributed those gains to improving economic conditions for families and declining child poverty rates. I wanted to give him a big kiss for recognizing that students do better in school when they are healthy and well-nourished.
So, what did No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top produce? A series of disasters, such as the Tennessee Achievement School District and Michigan’s Educational Achievement Authority, both gone. A landscape of corporate charter chains, for-profit charters, for-profit online charters, and now vouchers, in which red states commit to pay the tuition of students in religious schools and fly-by-night private schools. A national teacher shortage; a sharp decline in people entering the teaching profession.
Please, no more tough love. No more punishment for students, teachers, principals, and schools. Let bad ideas die.
John Thompson, historian and retired teacher, believes that Ryan Walters, the state superintendent, may take control of Tulsa Public Schools, despite the fact that he has no idea how to improve them and that state takeovers have seldom (if ever) improved any schools. It’s ironic that Walters is eager to fire Tulsa superintendent Deborah Gist, since Gist received national plaudits for threatening to seize control of the impoverished Central Falls school district in 2010 when she was state superintendent in Rhode Island.
Thompson writes:
We’ve known that State Superintendent Ryan Walters was rapidly ramping up his attacks on public education, especially the Tulsa Public Schools (TPS), but the intensity of his assaults keeps growing at a frightening rate. Even though I’ve been worrying that Walters would combine the destructive rightwing extremists’ venom with the worst of the discredited neo-liberal corporate privatization reforms, it sounds like on August 24, he may do it in the worse possible way. Rather than remove the TPS’s accreditation and/or its superintendent, Walters may order a rushed takeover of the district patterned after the recent takeover of Houston’s schools.
As Nondoc reported on Tuesday, on Saturday Walters said at a Moms for Liberty event, “Tulsa Public Schools is getting money from the Chinese communist government,” He said, “They funneled it through a nonprofit — I mean, money-laundered it through a nonprofit in Texas.” On Monday, “Walters appeared at the Tulsa County Republican Party headquarters to discuss the district,” saying that it must “Reorient finances to serve students, increase reading proficiency scores to the state average, and lift its schools off of the state F-list.” “Now,” Nondoc reports, “state board members could choose to place TPS on full probation.” Moreover, Walters has “also declined to rule out a non-accreditation vote on TPS, though it is unclear how that action would play out for a district of 33,000 students after the school year has already started.”
Clearly, the removal of Superintendent Deborah Gist is a major priority. Ironically, Walters is challenging the honesty of TPS administrators as his “administration of federal GEER funds is being investigated by FBI agents and the Oklahoma Attorney General’s Office, according to people with direct knowledge of the inquiry.”
Even worse, Walters says he is regularly consulting with the Texas education commissioner, Mike Morath, about “strategies Texas used in its takeover of HISD.” The new Houston superintendent, Mike Miles, has long relied on mass exiting of teachers, and he’s already ordered educators at 28 schools to reapply for their jobs, and ordered the closures of many “reformed” schools’ libraries. So, it is no surprise that the President of the Tulsa Classroom Teachers Association, Shawna Mott-Wright, says that “the uncertainty over the district’s future already has some teachers stepping away from their jobs.”
In response, TPS board member, Jennettie Marshall, “said during the board’s 90-minute discussion of the district’s accreditation status. ‘We are under attack. If you’re not keeping up with Houston, … if we continue the course we’re on, that’s where we’re headed. That shouldn’t be.’” She warned, “We can’t afford to lose our educators, support groups and people who provide wraparound services. We can’t afford for this district to lose its accreditation.”
To understand why Walters’ new attack could be an existential threat to public education in Tulsa, one should listen to Nancy Bailey’s analysis of such takeovers:
State takeovers aren’t new. Nor are they known for innovation, but for creating school voids, cutting services, and firing key staff, promising to close learning gaps. Takeovers usually only weaken schools, breaking them up and leaving communities with fewer and poorer schools.
Moreover, the Hechinger Report cited a study by Brown University and the University of Virginia which “looked at all 35 state takeovers between 2011 and 2016. ‘On average, we find no evidence that takeover generates academic benefits.’” But the Hechinger Report added, “Race, meanwhile, plays a role in the likelihood of a district being taken over.”
The HIDC takeover campaign sped up in 2018 when “four of Houston’s 274 schools, all of them in the city’s economically distressed north and east sides, hadn’t met the standards for four years running.” By the time the takeover was ordered, “all but one of the district’s four failing schools was meeting state standards” but a rule change caused Phillis Wheatley High School to “narrowly” miss the mark. By 2021-22, Phyllis Wheatley had already improved from an F to a high C grade. Persisting in the takeover thus added support to researchers who concluded, “Now red-state governors increasingly use the takeovers to undermine the political power of cities, particularly those governed by Black and Hispanic leaders.”
We must also remember the history of the disastrous reigns of non-educator Mike Miles, a Broad Foundation corporate reform trainee, who Texas commissioner Morath placed in charge of Houston. When Miles was selected, apparently nobody asked about “the 26% drop in high school enrollment during the 6 years he was superintendent over Harrison School District Two in Colorado.” In Dallas, Miles set a target of “at least 75 percent of the schools are ‘partially proficient’ in four areas that focus on classroom instruction.” One of many reasons why that goal was impossible was “the loss of 6000 teachers in just three years.” His dictatorial mindset was illustrated by Miles ordering the removal by the police of a board member visiting a middle school where he had “replaced the principal, two assistant principals and 10 teachers.”
Dallas student outcomes had been increasing before Miles took over but student performance largely stagnated during his administration. As the Dallas Morning News reported, his tenure was marked by “disruptions, scandals, clashes.”
Now, Houston is facing the same situation where “sweeping changes include longer instructional days, lessons scripted by planners, not teachers, and new evaluations for educators that tie pay to academic performance.” The focus will be on math and reading. Cameras will be placed in each classroom to monitor behavior. Not surprisingly, Nancy Bailey notes that as the “HISD is losing qualified teachers, school libraries, and librarians,” it is “advertising for 350 long-term substitutes who don’t require a college degree.” She presciently concludes, “Watch as these kinds of reforms become prevalent in other school districts if they haven’t already.”
I have long had serious problems with Superintendent Gist, but I would have never called her “Woke Barbie” as her opponents have. To me, this is similar to the situation when Democrats joined with former Rep. Liz Cheney in defending our democracy. And, if we unite, the damage that Walters is promising to inflict on the TPS, and the Tulsa metropolitan area as a whole, could undermine his extremist campaigns. On the other hand, if we don’t recognize the extent of the threats of a HISD-style takeover, he might unite the worst of the corporate reform privatizers, with his Moms for Liberty extremism, and impose irreparable damage on the TPS and other school systems.
John Thompson, historian and retired teacher in Oklahoma, reacts to an article in the Washington Post.
He writes:
I agree with Perry Bacon’s excellent and optimistic Washington Post analysis and its new path for improving America’s schools – with the possible exception of his first sentence and the first sentence of his last paragraph. After decades of working for the education policies and principles he supports, I’ve become too pessimistic to not doubt his title, “‘Education reform’ is dying. Now we can actually reform education.” I sure hope I’m wrong and he’s right.
Bacon writes, “Joe Biden is the first president in decades not aggressively pushing an education agenda that casts American schools and students as struggling and in desperate need of fixing.” Biden offers a 21st century path away from the 40-year “education gospel” launched by the 1983 Reagan administration’s “A Nation at Risk,” which was joined by presidents of both parties. Bacon then described the bipartisan “fixation” which:
Included the expansion of charter and magnet schools as an alternative to traditional public schools; an obsession with improving student test scores; accountability systems that punished schools and teachers if their kids didn’t score well.
“By 2001 and the passage of No Child Left Behind,” Shelton further explains, “Democrats and Republicans competed with each other to remake our education system under the pretext that our schools needed to be held accountable to the long-term economic fortunes of American workers.” Since they could only agree on making education a priority, Bacon added, the Republicans adopted the Democrats’ “view that education was the main way for Black people to make up for the effects of racism.”
Based on decades of experience teaching in the inner city, and studying what it would have actually taken to achieve equity, I’ve seen the way that the students who were supposed to be the main beneficiaries of accountability-driven, competition-driven mandates, were damaged the most. And on-the-cheap, quick fixes hurt these kids in the way educators and education research predicted. Even worse, I would add, the Billionaires Boys Club turned education into a reward-and-punish, data-driven privatization campaign based on the neoliberal venture capitalist model.
Having seen how worksheet-driven “accountability” and segregation by choice reforms drove our school into the lowest-performing mid-high in Oklahoma, and hearing my students protest that they had been completely robbed of an education, I thoroughly support Bacon’s vision of education. He writes:
Our education system should be about learning, not job credentialing. Schools and universities should teach Americans to be critical thinkers, not automatically believing whatever they heard from a friend or favorite news source. They should make sure Americans have enough understanding of economics, history and science to be good citizens, able to discern which candidate in an election has a better plan to, say, deal with a deadly pandemic. They should foster interest and appreciation of music, arts and literature.
They should be places where people meet and learn from others who might not share their race, class, religion or ideology. … They should provide a path to becoming a doctor, lawyer, professor or any profession that requires specialized training without going into debt.
But, I’ve also seen the rightwing attacks on public schools. And these assaults come after decades of destructive, neoliberal corporate reforms. The difference was that they sought to “blow up” the education system so that entrepreneurs could rebuild it. Today, we have to resist extremist and conservative privatizers who are going for the kill while education is on the ropes.
And that gets me back to Bacon’s optimistic introduction and conclusion. Yes, he is correct in beginning, “America’s decades-long, bipartisan ‘education reform’ movement, defined by an obsession with test scores and by viewing education largely as a tool for getting people higher-paying jobs, is finally in decline.” The vast majority of the people I know agree that these reforms failed, and “what should replace it is an education system that values learning, creativity, integration and citizenship.” I hope I’m being too pessimistic because of my state’s rightwing minority’s assaults on democracy, but I don’t see evidence that the majority of parents and educators, as well as researchers, will be listened to.
Similarly, his last sentence is true, “Now we can reform our schools and colleges in a way that actually improves teaching and learning.” Yes, we can, but what will we be able to do as we again go up against market-driven elites and, worse, MAGA zealots?
I must emphasize that I have always been an optimist so, ordinarily, I would celebrate his sentence, “Blessedly, education reform is dying.” But after four decades of undermining the principles of public education, I worry that its decline has come too late, and I see no sign of progress in my state. Even so, regardless of the odds we face, we must draw upon the wisdom of Jon Shelton and Perry Bacon, and that requires us to keep our hopes up.
The enactment of No Child Left Behind in 2001 (signed into law on January 8, 2002) and the imposition of Race to the Top (a more punitive version of NCLB) created an era of bipartisanship based on testing, punishment, and privatization. The Democratic Party in DC abandoned its historic commitment to public schools.
Those closest to the classroom understand that the Bush-Obama program of 2002- ) was a disaster. After an initial increase in scores, the lines went flat about 2010; there is only so much that test prep can do to lift scores. Many schools were closed, many charters opened (and many swiftly closed), corporate charter chains thrived, teachers left in large numbers, enrollment in teacher education programs plummeted, now vouchers are subsidizing subprime religious schools.
Based on the evidence, the past two decades have been a disaster for American education.
Yet, as Peter Greene explains, a new third party, which calls itself “No Labels,” offers up an education platform that is a rehash of the Bush-Obama agenda. On education “No Labels” repackages the failed ideas of the past 20 years.
Know this about “No Labels”: it is targeting independent voters and will throw the election to Trump, if the election is close, as is likely. It is funded by rightwing billionaires. Caveat emptor.
Greene writes:
No Labels is supposed to be some sort of centrist break from the raging politics of left and right as a champion of “common sense,” and I’m not going to wander down that political rabbit hole (other than to note that saying you’re all about common sense while seriously considering Joe Manchin as a Presidential candidate plays about like a vegan eating a hamburger).
Idea 11: As a matter of decency, dignity, and morality, no child in America should go to bed or go to school hungry.
The basic idea is solid enough– it’s a bad thing for children to go hungry. Some of the rationale is …odd? …off the point?
Undernourished children “Make smaller gains in math and reading, repeat grades more, and are less likely to graduate from high school, which means they’re more likely to end up in prison.” That’s an interesting chain of causes and effects. Also, they disrupt classrooms more, interfering with other children’s education.
Despite the heading, there’s not a moral argument in sight. And we still have to insert “even though Washington must reduce spending” we wave at some sort of significant expansion of funding or tax credits so children are fed. So nothing systemic about child hunger or poverty, I guess.
Idea 12: Every child in America should have the right to a high-quality education. No child should be forced to go to a failing school.
There is not a molecule of air between these “centrists” and the usual crowd of school privatizers.
Rich kids get great schools and poor kids get terrible ones, so the solution is NOT to fix or supplement funding, but to push down the pedal on charters and vouchers. Because, hey– America spends “more on education per school-aged child than any country in the world, with worse results.” Let’s also throw in some bogus testing results, and the usual claims about charter school waiting lists.
Because “we like competition too,” their common sense solution is to add 10,000 charter schools in the next ten years, to offer a “lifeline” to some students “trapped in failing traditional public schools.” I’m not going to take the time to argue any of this (just go looking through the posts on this blog). Let’s just note that there’s nothing here that Betsy DeVos or Jeb Bush would object to, other than they’d rather see more vouchers. This is standard rightwing fare.
Idea 13: America should make a national commitment that our students will be number one in reading and math globally within a decade.
You know-number one in the international rankings based on Big Standardized Test results, a position and ranking that the United States has never held ever. And yet somehow, leading nations like Estonia have failed to kick our butt. These guys invoke China’s test results, when even a rudimentary check would let you know that China doesn’t test all of its students.
If America wants to maintain our lead in the technologies of tomorrow, we’d better spend less time on waging culture wars in our schools and more time focusing on promoting, rewarding, and reaching for excellence.
Remember that, so far, we have maintained that lead without improving our test score ranking.
But if excellence in education is the goal, maybe rethink voucher-based subsidies for schools that mostly are religious and teach creationism and reading only “proper” stuff and just generally waging those same culture wars. Or starting up 10,000 charter schools that don’t necessarily do anything better than a public (and who may soon also have the chance to operate in a narrow, myopic, discriminatory religious framework).
Idea 14: Financial literacy is essential for all Americans striving to get ahead
Oh, lordy. Remember all those poor kids in Idea 11? Well, No Labels has an explanation.
Almost six in 10 Americans say they are living paycheck to paycheck. Inflation is arguably the biggest driver of this insecurity, but far too many Americans also lack the knowledge and tools to become financially independent and get ahead.
Inflation and bad accounting. You know what helps people become financially independent? Money.
So let’s have financial literacy classes so people can get better credit scores.
Also, in Idea 22, they want civics education so people will be proud of America. Idea 24– “No American should face discrimination at school or at work because of their political view,” and I’m going to send them right back to their support for vouchers and charters that are working hard to be free to do exactly that.
Look, I feel the frustration over education’s status as a political orphan, an important sector that neither party stands up for. But if you’re looking for someone who understands some of the nuances of education and wants to stand up for the institution of public education, No Labels are not the party, either.
This sounds mostly like right-tilted Chamber of Commerce-style reformsterism from a decade ago. Even in a world in which both parties have lurched to the right, this is not a centrist approach to education. It’s the same privatizing reformster baloney we’ve been hearing since the Reagan administration drew a target on public education’s back. If you’re looking for the vegan candidate, this burger is not for you.
Too bad Margaret Spellings and Arne Duncan didn’t know about this research when they decided that the best way to help low-scoring students was to close their schools. Too bad Rahm Emanuel didn’t know about it when he closed 50 public schools in a single day.
School mobility has been shown to increase the risk of poor achievement, behavior problems, grade retention, and high school drop-out. Using data over 25 years from the Chicago Longitudinal Study, we investigated the unique risk of school moves on a variety of young adult outcomes including educational attainment, occupational prestige, depression symptoms, and criminal arrests. We also investigated how the timing of school mobility, whether earlier or later in the academic career, may differentially predict these outcomes over and above associated risks. Results indicate that students who experience more school changes between kindergarten and twelfth grade are less likely to complete high school on time, complete fewer years of school, attain lower levels of occupational prestige, are more likely to experience symptoms of depression, and are more likely to be arrested as adults. Furthermore, the number of school moves predicted above and beyond associated risks such as residential mobility and family poverty. When timing of school mobility was examined, results indicated more negative outcomes associated with moves later in the grade school career, particularly between fourth and eighth grade.
Doesn’t this seem like common sense? Your child is in a school where he or she makes friends and has a good relationship with teachers. You take the child out, and he or she has some trouble readjusting. Maybe the family moved, and it was necessary. But why would the government inflict it on children, call it “reform,” and celebrate the harm to the children?
Vallas’s solution for struggling schools was a corporate-style, top-down accountability system of high-stakes tests, test-prep teaching and punishment for failure — an experiment on Chicago’s Black and Brown children that set the stage for national education policy under George W. Bush. Schools that failed to meet test score targets were put on a warning list, on probation, or reconstituted by Vallas’s central office.
Counter to research consensus, based on their scores on a single test, tens of thousands of students were sent to summer school, held back a grade for as long as three years, prevented from 8th grade graduation, or assigned to remedial transition high schools where a pared-down curriculum of math, English and world studies revolved around intensive test preparation.
It was typical for schools, particularly in Black communities, to spend up to one quarter of the school year drilling for tests in reading and math. Music and art were cancelled and social studies began in May — after testing. Engaging, culturally relevant classes were turned into test prep. In some schools, Test Best and Test Ready booklets were the curriculum for weeks. CPS Office of Accountability staff told me that when Vallas left in 2001, 59 schools — mostly Black — were using mandated Direct Instruction, in which teachers read scripts and students respond with scripted answers. Not surprisingly, under this regime test scores went up. However, a 1999 National Research Council assessment expert “concluded that Chicago’s regular year and summer school curricula were so closely geared to the [standardized test] that it was impossible to distinguish real subject mastery from mastery of skills and knowledge useful for passing this particular test.”
Turning schools into test prep factories — and punishing and publicly shaming “failing” schools, students, teachers and parents in Black communities — took a toll. Some of the most dedicated and revered teachers left the system. For example, in one Black elementary school Lipman worked with, from 1997-2000, 26 of 37 teachers left, to be replaced by a succession of inexperienced teachers and interns. An award-winning teacher at the school explained that they couldn’t live with the ethical crisis of Vallas’s policies; for both teachers and students “it’s like a hammer just knocking them down.” A 2000 University of Chicago study reported nearly one-third of eighth graders retained in 1997 dropped out by fall 1999. In 2000, Parents United for Responsible Education won a civil rights complaint against CPS under Vallas for adverse discriminatory impact of the retention policy on Black and Latinx students. Expulsions, particularly of Black students, also surged, as documented in a 2001 Chicago Reporter article titled “Alternative education: Segregation or solution?”
When test scores flattened in 2001, Vallas left. But the system he set up of ranking and sorting schools based on an inappropriate use of standardized tests, and disregarding the historical disinvestment and racism schools had suffered, laid thefoundation for almost 200 school closings and turn-arounds and the education market that followed. These school closings, 90 percent predominantly Black, devastated Black communities in particular. Vallas’s electoral campaign focuses on fighting crime, but the disruptions from the school closings that were a major factor in the destabilization of Black communities can be traced back to Vallas’s reign at CPS.
Please open the link and read the full article.
If Vallas should win, the students and teachers of Chicago will endure the failed policies of the past two decades.
Julie Vassilatos, a parent activist and blogger in Chicago, writes here about the case for Brandon Johnson. She and others have written passionately against Paul Vallas, but here she explains why Brandon Johnson is well prepared to serve as Mayor. Because of his knowledge and experience, he not only knows the city’s budgetary issues well, but he is able to address the root causes of crime and the real needs of students.
She writes:
Friends, so many of us have been carrying on about the dangers of Paul Vallas so incessantly, you’d be forgiven for thinking that he’s running for mayor of Chicago unopposed.
But Vallas does have an opponent—one who is talented, thoughtful, experienced, and a real true Chicagoan raising his family on the west side: Brandon Johnson.
Johnson is getting a lot of heat from Vallas and his supporters right now. No lesser a personage than Darren Bailey, defeated far-right candidate for IL governor and unofficial endorser of Vallas, has announced that if Johnson is elected, it will be a “dark day” for Chicago. Yes. A dark day indeed. Get it?
I’m pretty sure Darren Bailey fans get it.
Then there’s FOP president/disgraced cop John Catanzara, who foresees that 1000 cops will walk off the job if Johnson wins, and there will be blood in the streets.
Truth to tell, at the outset of the race I was slow to warm up to Johnson the candidate. But then I remembered that he was at the front lines of a struggle I will never forget—the 2013 mass school closures. So many folks did all we could do to try and stop that, well, generationally damaging policy. And those who led the way in that effort? I’d probably follow them into a fire.
But what about Brandon Johnson now? What are his credentials? Haven’t you, like me, read all that stuff about how he has no experience? How he’s never managed a budget? How he seems (unfathomably) to like crime and together with CTU wants our city to be unsafe, because….because….well, because reasons?
Well, maybe we need to look a little deeper than the media/social media blah blah blah.
The Cook County Board of Commissioners oversees County operations and approves the budget of elected County officials including the Assessor, Board of Review Commissioners, County Clerk, Clerk of the Circuit Court, Recorder of Deeds, Sheriff, States Attorney and Treasurer.
The Commissioners also serve as the Board of the Cook County Forest Preserve District, a special purpose taxing district. The Board also sets policy, levies taxes, passes ordinances, approves all county purchases over $10,000, and adopts the annual budget for the entire county government.
The Civic Federation supports the Cook County FY2023 Executive Budget Recommendation of $8.75 billion because it reflects strong financial management and puts the County in a good position moving forward post-pandemic. The County’s FY2023 proposed budget includes a strong level of reserves and positive revenue projections, without any increases in taxes or fees.
The budget gap is smaller than it’s been in years, supplemental payments to the pension fund have been made for the eighth year in a row, and the County’s fiscal position is “strong…following robust revenue performance and built-up reserves.” And observe that there are in this budget, no tax increases. (Here I note we can be grateful to Board President Toni Preckwinkle who has shepherded this budget for 13 years. And I note further, she has endorsed Johnson.)
Now let’s review the budgets Vallas has overseen.
In Philadelphia, Vallas managed a $2B budget and left a surprise $73M deficit on his way out the door. In the Louisiana Recovery District his budget was $176M. He got an extra $1.8B to work with from FEMA, and before he was done with the NOLA job he wandered repeatedly over to Haiti, missing weeks at a time of work in New Orleans (that’s beside the point, but I just thought you should know). And in Bridgeport CT, his budget was $232M. Of course he was pushed out of that job before he could really do much financial damage there.
For those of you keeping score, Vallas hasn’t ever drafted, managed, or implemented a budget even close to the size that Brandon Johnson has worked with as a member of the Cook County Board.
Before his County Board days, Johnson was a teacher. He taught middle school social studies at Jenner from 2007 to 2010 (years when most of his students were able to watch, right from school windows, wrecking balls demolishing their homes as the city brought down public housing), and then at Westinghouse for a year. He then became a CTU organizer and the leader of its Black Caucus. In those years he had a front row view on lots of turmoil in the district: school closures and turnarounds via the failed Renaissance 2010 initiative, the loss of Black teachers in the classroom as a result of closures and CPS policy choices, the 2012 teacher strike, the 2013 mass school closures, a churn of district CEOs, some of whom ended up in prison, illegal special education cuts, and rapid charter expansion.
While Johnson was organizing teachers and collaborating with parents in response to district policies that were crushing schools and services (and I do mean that literally, with at least one occasion of bulldozers bringing down a school library on a day when parents were instead expecting a meeting), he lived the experience of the folks who’ve been at the mercy of “education reform” for decades. He saw first hand what disinvestment has done to CPS students—resulting in teacher cuts, special ed cuts, after-school cuts, nursing cuts, and the whittling away of libraries, down to only 90 remaining in a total of 513 schools. He’s seen the violent legacy of closing the community anchor that is a public school. He’s watched, along with all of us, poor choices at the top—everything from grifting, self-dealing, and bribery, to no-bid contracts and cronyism—and how those things bust budgets and destroy trust. He stood with community members on a hunger strike to save a school, then joined in it himself. He’s seen the negative academic and social impacts of excessive testing, privatization, and vouchers. He’s seen these things from the perspective of 25,000 teachers and hundreds of thousands of public school families.
Vallas, meanwhile, has been the man who set those policies. He set them in motion right here in Chicago in 1995, and traveled the country and globe continuing to implement them from then until now.
Brandon Johnson has large scale urban management experience with a Board that’s closing budget gaps and overseeing a vast array of county services. He manages a bigger budget right now than Vallas ever has. And Johnson has face-to-face, personal experience with the folks who live and work and raise their children in Chicago. His years as a teacher and with CTU have given him the perspective of individuals and families on a hyper-local basis. His work has encompassed both the broad span of countywide planning and management, and the particular lens on particular people and particular struggles.
Brandon Johnson is obviously qualified for the job.
You can check out how his qualifications and vision work themselves into a platform on his website. It’s practical and passionate and outlines a vision for the city that benefits everyone, even those struggling folks who never seem to catch a break from city leaders.
Johnson understands we cannot solve violence without dealing with its root causes; more policing, surveilling, and arresting alone won’t do the trick. We can’t fix the schools without listening to communities, parents, and educators; we must reject the failed status quo of Vallas’s “education reform.” And we can’t expect our teachers and police to solve poverty and homelessness all on their own.
The choice we have before us, it seems to me, is whether we’re going to listen to the incessant hype about a “fix-it man”—who has never fixed anything. Or dig a little deeper ourselves and see that the mayor we need has been here all along, working to make our city better for his entire career, with poise and passion.
Are we going to listen to voices that allude to “dark days” and blood baths in the streets? Or are we going to listen to a man who has a vision for his city rooted in love and practical experience?
Contact: Cassie Creswell, Illinois Families for Public Schools,773-916-7794
BETSY DEVOS’ SUPER PAC SPENDING THOUSANDS TO ELECT PAUL VALLAS MAYOR OF CHICAGO
VALLAS’ EDUCATION PLATFORM PULLED FROM DEVOS’ PRIVATIZATION PLAYBOOK
CHICAGO – Last week ex-President Trump’s former Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos made a $59,000 independent expenditure in support of mayoral candidate Paul Vallas’ campaign from a Super PAC she funds, the Illinois Federation for Children PAC.
The Illinois Federation for Children PAC was established in March 2022 and has received $465,000 in total from DeVos’ American Federation for Children Action Fund, a national 527 PAC. The Illinois Federation PAC’s chair, Nathan Hoffman, was a registered contract lobbyist in Springfield for the American Federation for Children until January this year.
Although DeVos has not endorsed Vallas, Vallas’ education plans for Chicago’s school system are directly aligned with DeVos agenda of school privatization, one she supported as Secretary of Education and promotes through her national network of advocacy organizations and PACs: defunding and dismantling public school systems and redirecting public funds via programs like vouchers for private schools.
In a little-noticed February 2022 op-ed in the Chicago Tribune, Vallas laid out a radical plan for privatizing Chicago Public Schools (CPS). In addition to supporting Illinois’ existing Invest in Kids tax credit scholarship voucher program, which already diverts millions to pay for vouchers for more than 4000 Chicago children, Vallas would create a city-funded voucher program and pay for it with funds from the CPS operating budget earmarked for teacher pensions. The pension payments would then instead be covered by surplus Tax Increment Financing dollars.
In that same op-ed, Vallas also proposes allowing religious private schools to become district-funded charter (or “contract”) schools, a policy so extreme that it was recently rejected by the conservative Republican attorney general of Oklahoma as “state-funded religion.”
Vallas also voices his support for “a reconstituted system in which parents get to direct the per-pupil public dollars to the school (or education model) of their choosing.” More recently, Vallas told WBEZ that “money should follow the students” and “we should be running districts of schools, not school districts.” The education platform on Vallas’ website calls for “dismantling the central administration” of CPS. These are exactly the policies that DeVos and American Federation for Children are advocating: funding students not systems and that dollars must follow students. In June 2022, Vallas appeared on a panel with keynote speaker Corey DeAngelis, senior fellow at American Federation for Children. The panel, organized by extremist anti-LGBTQ+ parent group, Awake Illinois. Vallas later denounced Awake Illinois, but did not dissociate himself from DeAngelis or American Federation for Children.
Secretary DeVos’ education agenda was harmful to public schools on a national scale. Chicago voters should know that DeVos supports Vallas’ candidacy and that there is no daylight between DeVos and Vallas’ education policies.
Diane Ravitch's blog 