Charter school executives in Philadelphia are very well compensated indeed, write the leaders of the Alliance for Philadelphia Public Schools, Lisa Haver, Deborah Grill, and Lynda Rubin.
They write:
Three of the six most highly paid administrators identified in String Theory’s most recent tax information are members of the Corosanite family: Chief Executive Officer Angela Corosanite, Chief Information Officer Jason Corosanite, and Director of Facilities Thomas Corosanite. Their total salary and compensation, as listed in the charter management organization’s 2021 IRS 990, comes to almost $900,000. String Theory manages only two schools in the city, but the company has six administrators making over $100,000 in salary and compensation. In addition, each school has its own CEO. Why does a network of only two schools need so many highly-paid administrators?
There are no guidelines for charter compensation, that is, no schedule of salary steps as there is for district principals and administrators. Ad Prima charter, a small charter school with 600 students, has a CEO, a principal and a “site director” on staff, all paid over $100,000.00 in salary and compensation. Community Academy charter has a CEO, deputy CEO, a Chief Academic Officer and deputy CAO. Pan American, an elementary school with 750 students, lists eight administrators. Folk Arts Cultural Treasures (FACTS), on the other hand, has one administrator making over $100,000. Global Leadership Academy is a two-school network. Each school has its own CEO–one making more than the district’s superintendent, the other making slightly less. GLA’s principal made over $11,000 more than a district principal with seven years or more of principal experience.
The question is: What does a charter CEO do? In charter schools with a principal, school leader, several assistant principals and a cultural director, what duties are left for a CEO? One superintendent oversees the 217 public schools in the School District of Philadelphia, at a salary of $335,000. Based on most recent federal tax information, the total salary and compensation paid to the city’s charter CEOs is over $10 million. The individual boards of each charter school, or the board of a charter chain, decides on the salary of the CEO and other administrators. There is no uniform system that takes into account years of experience. Charter schools are publicly funded; all charter administrators are paid with tax dollars.
How can charter schools afford so many highly-paid administrators? A 2016 report by City Controller Alan Butkovitz showed that the district spends more of its per-pupil funding on classroom instruction than charters, who spend a higher percentage on administration.
Please open the link and read the rest of the report, which lists the compensation at every charter school in Philadelphia.
In what way is it efficient to pay so many executives?
Overall, the 400 richest billionaires in America are worth $4.5 trillion, tying a record set in 2021. Overall, they are about $500 billion richer than they were a year ago, in large part because of rebounding stock markets and an AI-driven tech boom, Forbes said.
NEW YORK — Billionaire Michael Bloomberg is the wealthiest person in New York, according to The Forbes 400, an annual ranking of America’s super rich released Tuesday.
Billionaires had to have a net worth at least $2.9 billion to be included on the prestigious list, up from $2.7 billion a year ago. Forbes said its net worth calculations use stock prices from Sept. 8.
New York’s former mayor Michael Bloomberg, 81, of Bloomberg LP and the richest person in New York, is worth an estimated $96.3 billion. He is ranked the 10th most wealthy man nationwide.
Inequality may well be at its worst point in our history. A handful of people have as much wealth as the lower 50%. This is unhealthy for our society.
If you want to know more about the consequences of intense inequality, I recommend a book by two British sociologists, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, called The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger.
Their thesis is that the more equality a society is, the happier it is.
Recently the Network for Public Education and the Education Law Center sponsored a zoom conversation with Nick Surgey. Nick is an experienced investigative journalist who works with an organization called Documented, which digs into the Dark Money groups undermining Public schools and other democratic institutions. Nick has done the legwork that identified the money and people behind the home schooling movement, as well as the rightwing Alliance for Defending Freedom. He has worked with the Center for Media and Democracy and other pro-democracy organizations.
This is a discussion you should definitely tune into.
Governor Greg Abbott and his State Commissioner Mike Morath hand-picked Mike Miles as Houston’s superintendent, based on the alleged failure of one school, Wheatley High School. In fact, Wheatley had made significant progress and was no longer a “failing” school, and HISD was a B-rated district.
Nonetheless, the state took control of HISD, ousted the elected board and a well-qualified superintendent. Mike Miles took control with a puppet board, charged with “fixing” 28 schools. The 28 quickly turned into 85 schools, all required to submit to Miles’ authoritarian “New Education System.” He pledged to leave the district’s other 190 schools alone. Miles has never been a teacher or a principal. His tenure as superintendent in Dallas was cut short after multiple controversies.
Houston ISD English teacher Karen Calhoun enjoyed short-lived relief this summer when her principal at Askew Elementary School opted not to join the dozens of campuses getting overhauled by the district’s new superintendent, Mike Miles.
Despite the decision, Calhoun has watched in recent weeks as her beloved school seemed to morph into a version of the turnaround initiative, known as the “New Education System,” that she hoped to avoid.
Less than a week before classes began, Askew’s principal told reading and math teachers they had to use the same curriculums as NES schools, Calhoun said. The principal also directed all staff to check that students understood the lesson every four minutes or so using “multiple response strategies” — the same techniques that teachers at NES schools are required to use, Calhoun said.
The orders deflated the spirits of many teachers at Askew, a B-rated campus on Houston’s west side, she said.
“The bulk of our teachers have taught 10-plus years. So that means that everybody in that room pretty much knows what they’re doing,” Calhoun said. “You can do multiple strategies in a lesson, but it’s authentic, it’s not mandated. It’s not like, ‘Every three minutes you have to do something. Every four minutes you have to do something.’”
One month into HISD’s school year, significant curriculum and instructional changes have crept into campuses that were supposed to be exempt from Miles’ overhaul, teachers and families at 15 non-NES schools told the Houston Landing in recent weeks. The new practices appear to contradict comments made earlier this summer by Miles, who said he planned to largely leave most schools to operate as they were while he transformed 85 other campuses under the NES umbrella.
In interviews, the educators and parents said many of the changes they’re seeing include elements initially advertised as only for NES schools. Thirteen of their 15 schools scored A or B ratings under the state’s academic accountability system in 2022.
For teachers, the new requirements include removing classroom decor, writing daily lesson objectives on whiteboards at the front of the classroom and repeatedly incorporating the every-four-minute learning checks into their lessons.
In addition, principals leading nearly two-thirds of non-NES schools are choosing to use new reading and math curriculums, Amplify and Eureka, that are mandated in the overhauled campuses, HISD officials confirmed Thursday. Educators at those schools must use the teaching practices recommended by the curriculum providers, such as a daily quiz, called a Demonstration of Learning.
“It sure does feel like NES,” said Melissa Yarborough, an English teacher at the non-NES Navarro Middle School, who now has to use the new curriculum after her principal chose to adopt it this year. “If you don’t get to that Demonstration of Learning by the time you’re supposed to get to it, then that administrator is going to be telling you your pacing is wrong.”
Houston Independent School District, the largest school district in Texas, is at the center of a controversial state takeover by the Texas Education Agency. After working its way through the legal system for several years, last winter the Texas Supreme Court greenlit the replacement of district superintendent and the locally elected board of trustees by the head of the TEA, appointed directly by the Republican governor of Texas, Greg Abbott. And last month, school was back in session under the newly appointed superintendent, Mike Miles – former US State Department ambassador, charter school CEO, and scandal-ridden Dallas ISD superintendent – amid dozens of pedagogical and policy changes that left teachers, parents, and students confused, frustrated, and afraid.
Among the most troubling changes is a strict “multiple-response strategy” where teachers must adhere to a four-minute timer to pause instruction and assess students for understanding – an intervention with seemingly no pedagogical justification. These strategies are paired with heavily scripted activities that are centered on drill and kill: repeat information over and over to memorize content. There has also been an increase in invasive admin walkthroughs to check for compliance with the scripted methods, which teachers and students have described as a distraction from learning. Teachers are required to keep a webcam on in their classroom at all times and their door must remain open. Defending these changes, Miles stated:
“Every classroom has a webcam and a Zoom link, and it’s on 24/7, if a kid is disruptive, we pull that student out of class. We put them in what we call a team center, and they’re being monitored by a learning coach, and they Zoom right back into the class they get pulled from.”
A veteran Houston ISD teacher, who asked to remain anonymous due to fear of administrative backlash, reached out to back up these claims, describing the impact these reforms have had on teachers and students:
…I left to teach at a Title 1 Houston ISD campus, so I’m getting the luxury to watch this mess unfold, and I assure you, there’s definitely ‘something rotten in Denmark” with what’s happening to us.
My school is not NES nor NES-aligned, but Miles has carved his path in such a way that we’re being evaluated multiple times a day, being forced to follow this horrible curriculum in a lesson cycle that as far as my research has found–has no pedagogical roots. It’s literally drill and kill. Apparently this is a trend or something. Miles is something else and when you Google him or any of the administrations around him calling the shots, you’ll not see any pedigree of education, but multi-millionaire board members whose backgrounds are in gentrification projects and such.
I’m exhausted by the end of the day. Texas teachers are evaluated all the same, using the T-Tess system–well except us now. Their move to push through that District of Innovation leads me to believe they simply want to weed anyone who was part of the old system out. It absolutely feels like he’s pushing to make us all quit. We were notified that although we’re given 10 sick days for the year, if we’ve taken 4 days leave by November or so, we will be terminated. We had an impromptu faculty meeting and had to sign that we’d gotten notification of this. Plus that we’ll be evaluated different.
Before the takeover, HISD was told to shape up or that’s the end of the line. We scored a “B” as a district in the last ratings and still are being taken over. The Abbot/Morath/Miles steamroller is moving right along.
Being a District of Innovation will be the coup de gras for us, really. He wants to add weeks to the school year, he’s already firing any teachers who simply ask questions, and he’s even gaming the system in many ways to ensure that he’ll have “results.” Special Education? Accommodations? Support structures for at-risk students? All gutted. It’s hard to believe this stuff is legal.
I’m stressed and miserable. It’s hard to believe some of the insane stories about his demands–but I assure you they are true. Teaching with doors open, such a security risk. Stuff like no snack time in elementary if it’s not tied to a Texas standard. I at least teach…But we all were forced to watch an hour or so musical he put on that would rival anything out of North Korea.
At this pace and the way things are going, I just can’t sustain it. I can’t stand seeing such a grift ruin education as it’s doing. We definitely had issues as a district but this can’t be the best solution. I’ll try to make it this year, but I’m beginning to apply elsewhere. My students were often successful at the state test, but it’s a crazy world when I teach…and am afraid to ask to take a class day to show my students the library and have them check out books. It’s nuts.
Of course please don’t use my name or anything that might come back to bite me… As Miles promised in his introduction to us that “he’d find out whose spreading dissent and act” and by most accounts that’s exactly what’s been occurring.
Parents and community members have flooded school board meetings with accounts from teachers who are similarly afraid to speak out, for fear of losing their jobs, as teachers who question the changes have been labeled “insubordinate” and had their jobs threatened. Parents have also spoken publicly about how the changes have affected their own children, as one mother recounted to the board before having her mic cut-off:
“For the last week, I’ve had a kid that cries every morning and every evening. Crying not to go to school, and beginning not to go in the morning. She says school’s boring, she’s not learning, and she’d rather be homeschooled at this point…She’s miserable. Her confidence is plummeting, and she’s starting to lose her joy for learning.”
At a board meeting on September 14th, a 12-year-old HISD student delivered prepared remarks about the disruptive timers, distracting admin walkthroughs, and palpable teacher stress. The board cut her mic, too:
“Due to the new open door policy, I and many other students have a hard time concentrating due to the many distractions in the hallways. Isn’t it your first priority to have kids in HISD like me learn? Students should be in a place they want to go to inst- (mic is cut off)”
Please open the link and finish reading. Miles apparently wants to turn HISD into a “no-excuses” district.
This is the only post today. Read as much of it as you have time for. The report is a valuable reminder that Ed-tech is oversold and even dangerous. It has its uses, for sure. But it should never replace teachers or parents.
The puzzle at the heart of the document is the clash between learned experience and the imperatives of greed. We learned during the pandemic about the risks of becoming dependent on ed-technology as the main driver of instruction. As we reflect on the period from March 2020 to now, we can discern the damage that occurred to students when their teachers were replaced by virtual instruction: boredom, learning loss, mental health issues, loneliness, lack of socialization with their peers, lack of personal interaction with teachers.
Yet with most people believing that the pandemic (or the worst of it) lies in the past, ed-tech corporations are focused on selling more of what has already failed. Why would we want to expand what has demonstrably proved inadequate and harmful to students?
You probably will take a long while to read the full report, but do read the summary and conclusions to whet your appetite. The overview concludes that the global reliance on ed-tech was necessary in the circumstances, but was a tragedy. Children need human teachers. They need people who look them in the eye and encourage them. Education is not a mechanical process; people are not widgets.
The UNESCO report reviews the global evidence of the harm caused by dependence on ed-tech:
[The report] exposes the ways unprecedented educational dependence on technology often resulted in unchecked exclusion, staggering inequality, inadvertent harm and the elevation of learning models that place machines and profit before people.
The summary says:
An Ed-Tech Tragedy? documents how widespread school closures and the hard pivot to remote learning with connected technology during the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in numerous unintended and undesirable consequences.
Although connected technology supported the continuation of education for many learners, many more were left behind. Exclusion soared and inequities widened. Achievement levels fell, even for those with access to distance learning. Educational experiences narrowed. Physical and mental health declined. Privatization accelerated, threatening education’s unique standing as a public good and human right. Invasive surveillance endangered the free and open exchange of ideas and undermined trust. Automation replaced human interactions with machine-mediated experiences. And technology production and disposal placed new strains on the environment.
Visions that technology could form the backbone of education and supplant school-based learning – in wide circulation at the outset of the health crisis – had promised better outcomes. Ed-tech proponents held that the immense challenges of school closures could be met with technology and that deeper technology integration would transform education for the better. But these high hopes and expectations unraveled when ed-tech was hurriedly deployed to maintain formal education as COVID-19 tore across countries.
An Ed-Tech Tragedy? recounts this tumultuous period, documenting the actions and decisions taken by governments, schools and technology companies. The publication contrasts the promises of ed-tech with the realities of what ed-tech delivered as a response to school closures that impacted over 1.6 billion learners and stretched intermittently from the beginning of 2020 to the end of 2022. The evidence and analysis highlight trends observed across countries and zoom in on the specificities of local experiences, creating a global mosaic of what students, teachers and families experienced when connected technology was elevated as a singular portal to teaching and learning.
Aimed at general and specialist audiences alike, this publication shows how the abrupt and deep changes brought about by the recourse to remote digital learning during the pandemic continue to ripple through the education sector even as schools have fully reopened. It questions whether more and faster integration of technology is desirable for learners, teachers and schools and if ed-tech is, as it is often billed, a key ingredient of educational resilience.
An Ed-Tech Tragedy? posits that new principles are needed to forge more humanistic directions for ed-tech development and use. In-person schooling and teaching should be guaranteed even as technologies improve and connectivity becomes more ubiquitous. Governments need to anchor this guarantee in the legal architecture upholding the right to education, especially for young learners. Moreover, future applications of ed-tech must show greater concern for holistic student well-being. While academic learning is central to education, it is not the only component. Ed-tech needs to support the multiple individual and collective purposes of education, from socio-emotional and personal development, to learning to live together, with the planet, as well as with technology.
In detailing what happened when ed-tech was deployed in response to pandemic school closures, as well as questioning why ed-tech was often elevated as a singular solution, this publication clarifies how the education community can move beyond merely reacting to technological change and instead play a more assertive role steering the digitalization of education towards the more holistic goals of education to shape inclusive, just and sustainable futures.
The future of education needs to be a humanistic one. The lessons extracted from what is premised here as an ed-tech tragedy illuminate the ways technology can better foster education that teaches and revitalizes human values, strengthens human relationships and upholds human rights.…
Ed-tech was supposed to solve a problem but it created other problems.
An Ed-Tech Tragedy? examines the many ways that the hurried embrace of technology solutionism steered responses to a global education challenge directly towards ed-tech. Along the way, the logic of technology solutionism changed understandings of educational problems to be solved. The analysis presented here helps reveal, for example, how technological solutions deployed during school closures took a narrow view of education and focused almost exclusively on furthering the academic progress of students in pared-down curricular subjects. This meant that little attention was paid to other education goals, such as fostering curiosity and inquiry and supporting physical health, mental well-being and social and emotional learning. This analysis also shows how ed-tech, originally cast as a solution to maintain learning continuity in the face of widespread disruptions to schooling, has more recently been positioned as a tool to help reverse learning loss. This ‘loss’, however, grew out of the deficiencies of technology-dependent remote learning to preserve the pace of academic learning that would have been typical without school closures stemming from the pandemic. The problem that ed-tech initially set out to solve morphed from assuring the continuity of learning to remedying lost learning. The way the problem was reframed while maintaining connected technology as the centrepiece of the solution is an example of technology solutionism at work.…
Recognizing the chaotic pivot from in-school learning to technology-facilitated distance learning as having a tragic arc provides a forceful rebuttal to a growing consensus that the education sector somehow ‘advanced’, ‘leapfrogged’, ‘catapulted’ or ‘disrupted’ itself to a better future when it deployed technology on a massive scale as an interim measure to confront a crisis. The evidence overwhelmingly points in the opposite direction: education became less accessible, less effective and less engaging when it pivoted away from physical schools and teachers and towards technology exclusively. ‘Tragedy’ in this sense signals regression – a denigration of the status quo,rather than a desired evolution. The narrative that ed-tech should be or must be a central component of ‘building education back better’ warrants new scrutiny after a careful examination of the experiences during the pandemic.
The invocation of tragedy also facilitates awareness that connected technologies, despite their growing reach, power and potential, remain tools in a repertoire of many others to construct stronger, more agile and more flexible education systems that can respond and adapt to disruption. Other tools include strengthened teacher training and support; enhanced school leadership and pedagogical management of schools; curricular renewal; smaller class sizes; and improved physical resources and infrastructure for schools and classrooms. Crises that necessitate the prolonged closure of schools and demand heavy or total reliance on technology have been exceedingly rare historically. Future crises may present entirely different challenges. The trauma of the pandemic has, in many circles, functioned to elevate technology as an almost singular solution to assure educational resilience by providing flexibility in times of disruption. Investments to protect education wrongly shifted away from people and towards machines, digital connections and platforms. This elevation of the technical over the human is contradictory to education’s aim to further human development and cultivate humanistic values. It is human capacity, rather than technological capacity, that is central to ensuring greater resilience of education systems to withstand shocks and manage crises.
Overall, the pandemic is a case study in how technology in its current iterations is not yet a suitable foundation for actualizing the diverse goals that communities assign to education. Expectations that technology may, in time, help further increase the reach, improve the quality and strengthen the agility of education are valid. For now, though, the experiences since early 2020 have shown it to be an alarmingly brittle solution – one incapable of effectively responding to widespread and extended school shutdowns. For far too many students, it was a solution that either never started in earnest or quickly broke down. The sudden shift to ed-tech also accelerated a concerning transfer of authority away from teachers, schools and communities and towards private, for-profit interests. Additionally, the censorship, data extraction, advertising, top-down control, intimidation and surveillance that so often characterize current models of digital transformation have made education less free and, arguably, less capable of facilitating critiques of and positive changes to the status quo. [emphasis added by DR.]
Countries made massive investments to digitalize education through much of the COVID-19 pandemic. But it remains far from clear whether these investments will improve education over the longer term and make it an engine of just, inclusive and sustainable development, especially when compared with conventional school-based and teacher-facilitated education. The digital transformation of education may yet be a force for beneficial change. But the logic of technological solutionism and its associated business models currently steering this transformation, led largely by the commercial technology entities that are remaking so many aspects of society, tend to treat education and knowledge as private commodities and not as global public goods that provide collective as well as individual benefits.
It is hoped that this analysis and its use of tragedy as a metaphor might moderate the discourse and popular view that the pandemic has ‘unshackled’ education systems and ‘launched’ them into desirable futures characterized by greater technology use. Documenting the severity and scope of the many negative consequences of ed-tech responses during the health crisis inverts the triumphalist narratives that accompany many descriptions of technology deployments to address the educational disruption caused by school closures. A critical examination of the assumptions of technology solutionism and a review of the existing evidence provide a corrective and a counterargument to notions that more, deeper and accelerated use of technology is uniformly positive for education…
Throughout the review that follows, considerable evidence illustrates how the rush to distance and remote learning with ed-tech accelerated the privatization of education in many contexts. While some countries and localities managed a shift to digital learning with limited privatization of the educational experience, a defining characteristic of the technology-centric response to the educational disruptions of the pandemic tended to be the elevation of for-profit, private ed-tech companies. In addition to considering the ways reliance on ed-tech impacted educational inclusion, equity and quality, this publication also explores the complex and often symbiotic links between ed-tech and the privatization of education during the pandemic.The rush to distance and remote learning with ed-tech accelerated the privatization of education.
Most such reports tend to summarize the status quo. This one challenges it. It’s time to take stock before the Ed-tech industry takes control of our most precious asset: our children.
Mike Miles, the state-imposed superintendent of the Houston Independent School District, has never been a teacher, but he thinks he knows exactly what teachers should do. He has dubbed his behaviorist program the “New Education System.” Those teaching in certain designated schools are required to do it his way or get out. Clearly he has never read the research on motivation (Edward Deci, Dan Ariely, Daniel Pink), or he would know that forced compliance depresses motivation.
Teachers called to a last-minute after school meeting at Chrysalis Middle School Friday afternoon were told to get with the New Education System program instituted by Houston ISD Superintendent Mike Miles or get gone. And that they had until 6 p.m. Sunday to let the district know whether they’d be staying or wanted to be moved to another school.
Dr. Luz Martinez, the Central Division superintendent (previously at Midland in 2021 and Round Rock in January 2023 before moving to HISD this June), minced no words in making it clear that there wasn’t to be any more questioning of the new policies at the NES-Aligned schools, part of the Miles plan after the state takeover of HISD.
By Saturday, two teachers who tried to ask questions — one of whom was thrown out of the meeting — received letters that the district was beginning the process of terminating their employment and they were barred from campus. “Insubordination” was cited as the precipitating factor in Carr’s case.
“We are not going back. We are not compromising,” Martinez had told the teachers at the meeting while Principal Mary Lou Walter stood by, “All this noise that is going on, that’s in the past. We are moving forward. We are NES-Aligned.” She went on to insist that the NES program was “never intended to be rigid, never intended to be mechanical.”
At the same time, Martinez told teachers she’d be bringing more outsiders into the schools who would be in the teachers’ classrooms “all the time” to ensure they are “implementing the model with fidelity.”
Science teacher Teresa Carr said she attempted to ask in what way the teachers at Chrysalis were supposedly falling short. “[Martinez] said we were not implementing with fidelity,” said Carr but when the district superintendent was pressed, the only example she came up with was three elementary students she’d spotted on their way to the office because they’d had bathroom accidents. Pointing out that involved Cage and not the middle school or its teachers, Carr said she was unable to get Martinez to give any specific examples involving Chrysalis.
After Carr left the meeting, another teacher attempted to continue with follow up questions, Carr said. That teacher also received a letter of reprimand and notice that termination proceedings were beginning against her, Carr said.
The holder of a BA in science education and a master’s in English education, Carr said she had never been in trouble with the district before and clearly by Sunday was still very unsettled by what had happened. One bright spot was that she had joined the Houston Federation of Teachers union for the first time before the start of school this year and had already talked with her union rep.
A group of parents at Cage Elementary and Chrysalis — they share the campus and principal with Chrysalis — have planned a protest at 7:30 a.m. Monday about what happened Friday and the NESA program in general. Parent Mayra Lemus echoed the bewilderment of many when she pointed out that Cage has been an A level Blue Ribbon School, so why were the more rigid educational approaches that are part of NES instituted there.
Naturally enough, given the times in which we live, someone recorded part of Martinez’s speech.
Carr said when she asked again for an answer to her questions, Martinez walked toward her saying “You can leave. You can leave. You can leave.”
In her written reprimand to Carr, Martinez wrote that the science teacher had “acted in a highly unprofessional manner” in the meeting and was “insubordinate.” According to Martinez, Carr yelled during the exchange and talked over her. Carr insists that it was Martinez who did the yelling.
“As a result, I will move forward with an immediate recommendation to terminate your contract effective 9/16/2023,” Martinez wrote. She also notified Carr that she was not allowed on the Cage/Chrysalis campus for any reason and that she would have to make arrangements to have her personal items picked up after 5:30 p.m.
“If you’re one of those teachers who don’t want to do the model, that is fine. But you will not be here,” Martinez had told teachers assembled Friday. She gave them the weekend to think it over, but later that was shortened to 6 p.m. Sunday.
It is as timely now as it was then. Reformers worked with communications specialists to develop language that conceals its true meaning.
For example, reformers today don’t want to improve public schools. They want to defund them. Some want to destroy them. They think that public money should go to anyone, any organization that claims they are educating young people. They are fine with funding religious schools. No doubt, they would have no objection to funding Satanic schools, for fairness sake.
These reformers believe in tight accountability for public schools, their principal, their teachers, their students.
They believe in zero accountability for anyone taking public money for nonpublic schools. In most states with vouchers, voucher schools do not require students to take state tests. Students can’t be judged by test scores as public school students are; their teachers can’t be evaluated by test scores. Their schools can’t be closed because of test scores. There are no test scores.
Teachers in public schools must be college graduates who have studied education and who are certified. Teachers in voucher schools do not need to be college graduates or have certification.
Hundreds of millions, maybe billions, now fund homeschooling. With well-educated parents, home schooling may be okay, although the children do miss the positive aspects of meeting children from different backgrounds, working in teams, and learning how to get along with others. But let’s face it: not all home schoolers are well-educated. Poorly educated parents will teach their children misinformation and limit them to what they know, and no more.
Then there is the blessing that the US Supreme Court gave to public funding for religious schools. The purpose of most religious schools is to teach their religion. The long word for that is indoctrination. We have a long history of not funding religious schools. But now all of us are expected to foot the bill for children to learn the prayers and rituals of every religion. I don’t want to pay taxes for someone else’s religion to be inculcated. I also don’t want to pay taxes to inculcate my own religion.
But the Supreme Court has step by step moved us to a point where the government’s refusal to pay for Catholic schools, Muslim schools, Jewish schools, and evangelical schools—with no regulation, no accountability, and no oversight—violates freedom of religion. That’s where we are going.
Ninety percent of the people in this country graduated from public schols. Those who sent their children to private or religious school paid their own tuition. That arrangement worked. Over time, we became the leading nation on earth in many fields of endeavor. Our education system surely had something to do with our national success.
I believe that people should have choices. Most public schools offer more curricular choices than charter schools, private schools, or religious schools. Anyone may choose to leave the public school to attend a nonpublic school, but they should not ask the taxpayers to underwrite their private choice.
The public pays for a police force, but it does not pay for private security guards. The public pays for firefighters, highways, beaches, parks, and many other public services. Why should the public pay for your decision to choose a private service?
Saddest of all, the current trend toward school choice will lower the overall quality of education. The children of the affluent who attend elite private schools will get a great education, although they will not get exposed to real life on their $60,000 a year campus. None of those campuses will get poor voucher kids because all they bring is a pittance.
We are now learning that most public schools are superior to most of the voucher schools. Many charter schools are low-performing.
On average, school choice will dumb down our rising generation. It will deepen social and religious divisions. It will not produce better education or a better-educated society. It will widen pre-existing inequalities.
Books have been and will be written about this fateful time, when we abandoned one of our most important, most democratic institutions. Libertarians and religious zealots have worked for years, decades, on this project. By convincing leaders of both parties to follow them, they have betrayed the rest of us. They have lost sight of the common good.
Those two words are key. The “common good.” With them, we as a society can conquer any goal, realize any ideal. Without them, we are reduced to squabbling tribes, cliques, factions. We are becoming what the Founding Fathers warned about.
If it’s not too late, that is the banner behind which we should rally: the common good. An understanding that we are all in the same boat, and we must take care of others.
Nikhil Goyal has written an alarming book about the effects of poverty on young people. His book Live to See the Day: Coming of Age in American Poverty documents the lives of three teenagers in Philadelphia, all of whom live in poverty.
The book is an implicit rebuke of the “reformers” who insisted that schools were the root cause of inequality, not poverty. They liked to say, “fix schools, and that will fix poverty.”
Goyal describes the obstacles in these young people’s lives, and it’s clear that the “reformers” had it backwards.
Each of the three protagonists in sociologist Nikhil Goyal’s new book, “Live to See the Day: Coming of Age in American Poverty,” is navigating a pivotal juncture: adolescence, that unique and universally exhausting stage of human development when one moment can sometimes change the trajectory of life. For Ryan Rivera, that moment is being among a group of preteen boys who set fire to a trash can near their middle school’s atrium, a childish mistake that cast him into the school-to-prison pipeline. Corem Coreano, who came out as queer, and then changed their name and pronouns, ultimately made the difficult choice to leave home because of their mother’s refusal to leave an abusive relationship. And Giancarlos Rodriguez was — puzzlingly — thrown out of Philadelphia’s education system after fighting to protect his and his peers’ future by leading student walkouts to protest school closures and educational budget cuts.
Rooted in almost a decade of reporting, “Live to See the Day” is a sweeping indictment of poverty, America’s educational system, and how comfortably they both interact with the criminal justice system to upend the lives of young people and underprivileged families of color. All three protagonists hail from Kensington, an impoverished neighborhood in North Philadelphia.
According to Goyal, babies born with an address in Kensington aren’t expected to live beyond their 71st birthday — a staggering 17 years less than children born to families in Society Hill, less than four miles away.
A chunk of the book is spent world-building so readers can grasp the muddy terrain these children navigate, and Goyal does so by layering social systems atop one another so readers can draw connections. As Goyal explains it, underfunded public schools are at the heart of the issue. Schools are governed by racist educational policies that push students into the criminal system through the use of metal detectors, zero-tolerance rules and temperamental resource officers. Children leave the schoolyard and return home to families drowning because of crippling poverty, food insecurity, chronic joblessness, inequitable access to physical and mental health care, domestic violence, evictions, and addiction. In their social interactions, anything perceived as “soft” — whether it be snitching or queerness — doesn’t align with survival.
Goyal, who is on the staff of Senator Bernie Sanders, makes clear why programs like No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top were destined to fail. They ignored the conditions in which young people live. Evaluating their teachers by test scores, firing them, closing their schools, turning their schools over to entrepreneurs and corporate chains do nothing to change their lives.
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 