Yohuru Williams and Carol Burris assess the expressed views of the Democratic candidates—thus far—on K-12 education.
One hopes that the other candidates will soon state or clarify their views about privatization, testing, funding, and other important issues that the president can change.
They should all be asked at town halls whether they will kill the federal Charter Schools Program slush fund, which is now $440 million a year and is being used by DeVos to expand corporate chains.
Let me make clear that I have enormous respect for Senator Warren. I met her in her office in 2015, gave her a copy of my book, Reign of Error, and was greatly impressed by her thoughtfulness and intellect. A few months ago, I attended a fundraiser for her at the home of a mutual friend in Manhattan and was again wowed by her fierce intellect and passionate critique of the status quo.
But I want her now to come out strongly against every aspect of the Trump-DeVos education agenda of privatization, including both charters and vouchers. I want her to support the right of teachers to bargain collectively. I want her to endorse the importance of having well-prepared, credentialed teachers in every classroom.
In this post, Steven Singer criticizes Senator Elizabeth Warren for her unclear signals about K-12 education policy.
When she recently spoke in Oakland, she was introduced by a former charter school teacher who was affiliated with an anti-union, pro-charter group (ironically) called GO Public. Oakland had just gone through a teachers’ strike, prompted in part by the rapid proliferation of charters supported by that same deceptively named organization.
Some defenders on Twitter said that Warren didn’t decide who introduced her.
True. But more worrisome is that her senior policy advisor is a TFA alum with two years of teaching experience.
Teachers don’t want a Michelle Rhee or John White as Secretary of Education. They want someone who supports them, not chastises them as “bad” because they teach the most vulnerable students.
In 2016, Senator Warren supported the “No on 2” campaign to block charter expansion, but she did so while praising charters.
She said at that time:
””In a statement sent out by the campaign organized against the question, Warren, a Cambridge Democrat, praised charter schools in general while expressing concern about the proposed charter expansion’s effect on school districts’ bottom lines.”
If she thought well of charters “in general,” why oppose their expansion?
Please, Senator Warren, make clear that you stand with fully public schools, not privately managed charters funded by the Walton-Gates-Broad combine, and professional teachers.
Politico Morning Education reports:
BANNING TEACHER STRIKES?: West Virginia’s GOP-led Senate approved the ban on teacher strikes 17-14 as an amendment to broad education reform legislation that DeVos urged the lawmakers to pass. The amendment was approved with “heavy opposition” from Democrats, the Associated Press reported.
— GOP Sen. Charles Trump, who sponsored the amendment, said it’s meant to keep schools running and not as retaliation for two teacher walkouts since last year, according to the AP. But Fred Albert, the president of the state’s American Federation of Teachers chapter, told POLITICO Pro “it’s pure retribution, retaliation.”
—”Already, we don’t have collective bargaining. It’s a right-to-work state,” Albert said, acknowledging that work stoppages in the past have been “truly illegal.” “This is just I think another stab at trying to punish us, making the law perhaps a little more severe with such language,” but he said such measures aren’t likely to float in the House.
— The chamber will continue its work today on education legislation, which would allow for the creation of state charter school and education savings account programs that are opposed by teachers unions who have been protesting at the state Capitol. The GOP-led House will reconvene on June 17.
— In February, the unions waged a two-day strike over a contentious education bill that would have brought education savings accounts and charter schools to West Virginia. The state started the wave of teacher strikes in 2018, helping create a #RedforEd teacher strike movement that continues today.
— DeVos’s push for school choice runs directly counter to what the state’s teachers unions want. She tweeted on Friday, “West Virginia has an opportunity to improve education for all & put the needs of students first. Looking forward to seeing bold moves to offer robust options like charter schools & ESAs and support great teachers. Let’s get it done.”
I am very excited!
My new book was just announced!
The title is: SLAYING GOLIATH: The Impassioned Fight to Defeat the Privatization Movement and to Save America’s Public Schools.
It will be published on January 14, 2020, by Knopf, the most prestigious publisher in America. The editor is the brilliant Victoria Wilson, who is also an author, having written the definitive biography of Barbara Stanwyck.
In Slaying Goliath, you will read about the heroes of the Resistance, those who stood up to Big Money and defeated disruption in their schools, their communities, their cities, their states.
It is a book of inspiration and hope.
It shows how determined citizens—parents, students, teachers, everyone—can stand up for democracy, can stand up to the billionaires, and win.
Please consider pre-ordering your copy so you can be sure to get the first edition.
Former Vice President Joe Biden released his education plan yesterday.
He pledges a dramatic increase in federal funding for education.
The plan is notable for what it does not say.
It does not say anything about the failed strategies of Race to the Top.
It does not say anything about charter schools, which was a major focus for the Obama-Duncan program. Will he repeal the failed federal Charter Schools Program or will he give his approval to continue funding corporate charter chains like KIPP, IDEA, and Success Academy?
It does not say anything about testing, nor does it say anything about revising the federal “Every Student Succeeds Act,” which mandates annual testing. Will Biden support the continuation of the ESSA law?
It does not say anything about evaluating teachers by the test scores of their students, which was a favorite Duncan policy. States bidding for Race to the Top billions changed their laws to adopt this punitive and wrong-headed policy. Will he oppose this practice or let it slide?
It makes no reference to the Common Core, which had the enthusiastic support of the Obama administration, which was legally prohibited from funding it, but which supplied $360 million to create two Common Core testing programs, PARCC and Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium. Is Biden for or against it.
In sum, I like everything he said. But I wonder about what he didn’t say. He ducked all the tough issues, most of which are the legacy of the Bush-Obama era, of which he was a part.
Biden clearly prefers to duck the contentious issues. I hope that they will be posed to him in town halls.
We need to know where he stands on all the issues that matter to students, parents, teachers, and schools.
Steven Singer doesn’t research or data to describe what is happening to his school district. He sees it. It is being gobbled up outsiders intent on turning public schools into charter schools and voucher schools.
The state auditor of Pennsylvania said a few years ago that the Pennsylvania charter law is”the worst in the nation.”
Singer shows why.
Our middle school-high school complex is located at the top of a hill. At the bottom of the hill in our most impoverished neighborhood sits one of the Propel network of charter schools.
Our district is so poor we can’t even afford to bus our kids to school. So Propel tempts kids who don’t feel like making the long walk to our door.
Institutions like Propel are publicly funded but privately operated. That means they take our tax dollars but don’t have to be as accountable, transparent or sensible in how they spend them.
And like McDonalds, KFC or Walmart, they take in a lot of money.
Just three years ago, the Propel franchise siphoned away $3.5 million from our district annually. This year, they took $5 million, and next year they’re projected to get away with $6 million. That’s about 16% of our entire $37 million yearly budget.
Do we have a mass exodus of children from Steel Valley to the neighboring charter schools?
No.
Enrollment at Propel has stayed constant at about 260-270 students a year since 2015-16. It’s only the amount of money that we have to pay them that has increased.
The state funding formula is a mess. It gives charter schools almost the same amount per regular education student that my district spends but doesn’t require that all of that money actually be used to educate these children.
If you’re a charter school operator and you want to increase your salary, you can do that. Just make sure to cut student services an equal amount.
Want to buy a piece of property and pay yourself to lease it? Fine. Just take another slice of student funding.
Want to grab a handful of cash and put it in your briefcase, stuff it down your pants, hide it in your shoes? Go right ahead! It’s not like anyone’s actually looking over your shoulder. It’s not like your documents are routinely audited or you have to explain yourself at monthly school board meetings – all of which authentic public schools like mine have to do or else.
Furthermore, for every student we lose to charters, we do not lose any of the costs of overhead. The costs of running our buildings, electricity, water, maintenance, etc. are the same. We just have less money with which to pay them.
Read his post in full. You will understand.
Rob Levine, a critic of Ed Deform, created a website called edhivemn.com that tracks funding of education reform orgs in MN – and it has a feature called Charter School Scandals of the Day
Levine created a graphic to demonstrate the damage that charters do to public schools. He focuses on the charter schools in Minneapolis, which are well funded and highly segregated. Defenders of charters in Minneapolis actually think that racial and ethnic segregation is a good thing. They think that as long as families choose segregation, it is okay. George Wallace would have agreed with them.
The cycle of destruction begins as the districts loses students and money to charters. The district must cut programs and increase class sizes. When they cut programs and class sizes grow, they lose more students to charters. The cycle continues until the district shrivels to insignificance or disappears.
Rob writes:
Though specifics vary, across the nation charter schools are draining the students and finances of public school districts, creating distress in many. In Minneapolis, the Minneapolis Foundation is trying this very strategy with its created entity, Minnesota Comeback, whose goal is 30,000 new charter seats in the city.
Does the Minneapolis Foundation want to destroy public schools in Minneapolis? Look at its partners: all the same “reform” groups that are working with DeVos, the Waltons, and the Koch brothers.
Rob’s graphic shows that tens of millions spent by “Reformers” to disrupt and destroy public schools in Minneapolis.
Lauren Steiner is an activist who is actively engaged in fighting privatization in California. She has a regular program on Facebook, where she interviews people like me.
She interviewed me yesterday about charters, billionaires, neoliberalism, and other issues. The California Legislature is deciding right now about bills to regulate charters and make them accountable.
I reactivated my FB account for this interview. You don’t have to be on FB to watch as it is posted on YouTube and easily available.
Rucker Johnson, economist and professor of public policy at Berkeley, has written an important new book called Children of the Dream: Why School Integration Works.
It arrives at an opportune moment, as the Disruption Movement (AKA Reformers, Deformers) has decided that school segregation is a very good thing indeed, because charters are more segregated than public schools. A charter operator in Minnesota recently argued in comments here that segregation was just fine so long as it was voluntary. That was to rationalize the fact that Minneapolis has purposely segregated charters for children who are black, white (“German immersion”), Hmong, Hispanic, and Somali. Most recently, a charter supporter said that it was time to abandon the promise of the Brown decision, because it had not been realized.
In short, embrace the status quo, don’t fight it.
It is thus refreshing to read Rucker Johnson, who briefly summarizes his findings in an article at Valerie Strauss’s “Answer Sheet.”
Do not be content with reading the summary. The book is rich with history and anecdote, as well as Johnson’s meticulous research about the long-term and significant benefits of school integration.
He writes:
How did we get here? How has de facto Jim Crow been nurtured back to health?
Policy amnesia. We have forgotten the efficacy of the boldest suite of education policies this country has ever tried: school desegregation, school funding reform and Head Start.
School desegregation and related policies are commonly misperceived as failed social engineering that shuffled children around for many years, with no real benefit. The truth is that significant efforts to integrate schools occurred only for about 15 years, and peaked in 1988. In this period, we witnessed the greatest racial convergence of achievement gaps, educational attainment, earnings and health status.
Using nationally representative longitudinal data spanning more than four decades, I analyze the life outcomes of cohorts tracked from birth to adulthood across several generations, from the children of Brown to Brown’s grandchildren. The slow and uneven pace of desegregation, school funding reforms, and Head Start programs across the country created a natural “policy lab,” that allowed for rigorous, empirical evaluation of integration, school funding and Head Start.
The research findings are clear: African Americans experienced dramatic improvements in educational attainment, earnings and health status — and this improvement that did not come at the expense of whites.
Sixty-five years after the Brown decision, our nation is at an inflection point. Do we intend to pursue the goal of equal educational opportunity for all or do we want to cling to the discredited policies of our apartheid past?
Do we listen to those with a vision for progress or to those who embrace a failed and corrosive status quo?
Rucker Johnson explains the way forward. Read his book. Send a copy to your members of Congress.
You may hear choice zealots boasting about Jeb Bush’s “Florida Model.” As Tom Ultican explains here, they are delusional or just making stuff up (to put it politely).
Ultican relies on Sue Legg’s excellent report and digs down to show that the motivation behind Jeb’s so-called A+ plan was profits and religion, not education.
Jeb Bush and his friends have made Florida into a low-performing mess that can’t attract or retain teachers. But it has become a magnet for profiteers, grifters, and fundamentalists.
Ultican writes:
When the A+ Program was adopted in 1999, Florida had consistently scored among the bottom third of US states on standardized testing. The following two data sets indicate no improvement and Florida now scoring in the bottom fourth…
Last year, 21 percent of Florida’s students were enrolled in private and charter schools. The Florida tax credit scholarships (FTCS) went to 1,700 private schools and were awarded to over 100,000 students. Most of those students are in religious schools. Splitting public funding between three systems – public, charter and private – has insured mediocrity in all three systems.
Privatization Politics and Profiteering
To understand Florida’s education reform, it is important to realize that its father, Jeb Bush, is the most doctrinal conservative in the Bush family. He fought for six years to keep feeding tubes inserted into Terri Schiavo, a woman in a persistently vegetative state. Jeb was the Governor who signed the nation’s first “Stand Your Ground” self-defense law. During his first unsuccessful run for governor in 1994, Bush ‘“declared himself a ‘head-banging conservative’; vowed to ‘club this government into submission’; and warned that ‘we are transforming our society to a collectivist policy.”’
This is a deeply researched and eye-popping post.
Read it to arm yourself against rightwing propaganda.
The Florida Model is an abject failure.
Diane Ravitch's blog 