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Stephen Dyer: Most Charter Schools in Ohio Are Failing

By dianeravitch
August 31, 2023 //
34

Stephen Dyer is a former Ohio legislator who keeps track of education policy in his state. He reports frequently on scandals in charter schools, Cybercharters, and voucher schools. Every state should have a watchdog like him.

In his latest post, he writes about the failure of most of Ohio’s charter schools. Remember, they were supposed to “save” students from low-performing public schools? Instead, they offer an inferior choice, which coincidentally defunds higher-performing public schools. Who will save the children of Ohio from failing charter schools?

He writes:

In its latest national rankings, U.S. News & World Report pointed out that generally, charter schools around the country are disproportionately doing well on their national ratings. “Charters show up in disproportionately high rates among the top schools,” according to the report. And I’m sure charter proponents will take off and run with that.

But that ain’t happening in Ohio.

According to the rankings released today, only 5 of 44 ranked Ohio Charter Schools rate outside the bottom 25 percent nationally. U.S. News doesn’t rank high schools lower than 13,261st. They just put the worst performers in a single band.

And only 5 Ohio Charter High Schools are NOT in that band.

Saying that nearly 9 in 10 Ohio Charter High Schools rank in the bottom 25 percent of all High Schools in the country is a terrible black eye for our state. Especially as the Ohio General Assembly continues to dump more than $1 billion a year into these schools.

And even the 5 that do better than the bottom 25 percent nationally still don’t do awesome.

For example, the top ranked school — KIPP Columbus — ranked lower than two Akron Public Schools, two Cincinnati Public Schools, three Cleveland Municipal schools, a Columbus City school, and a Dayton City school.

That’s not great, especially when Charter Schools were promised as rescue vehicles for kids in urban public schools.

House Bill 2 was supposed to save Ohio’s Charter Schools from being the “wild, wild west” of the nation’s charter schools. But clearly it’s not working. If only 5 of Ohio’s 44 ranked Charter High Schools are not ranked in the bottom 25% nationally, then perhaps it’s time to re-examine our $1 billion a year commitment to these privately run, publicly funded schools.

Just saying.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Disruption, Education Industry, Failure, Ohio

The Man Who Won Billions of Tax Dollars for Home Schoolers

By dianeravitch
August 30, 2023 //
18

Emma Brown and Peter Jamison wrote in The Washington Post about Michael Farris, the conservative Christian lawyer who led the campaign to spend tax dollars on home schooling and prevailed. The reporters got hold of a recorded phone call in which Farris told his funders that the time has come to take down public education. The recording was obtained by an organization called “Documented.”

The message Michael Farris had come to deliver was a simple one: The time to act was now.

For decades, Farris — a conservative Christian lawyer who is the most influential leader of the modern home-schooling movement — had toiled at the margins of American politics. His arguments about the harms of public education and the divinely endowed rights of parents had left many unconvinced.

Now, speaking on a confidential conference call to a secretive group of Christian millionaires seeking, in the words of one member, to “take down the education system as we know it today,” Farris made the same points he had made in courtrooms since the 1980s. Public schools were indoctrinating children with a secular worldview that amounted to a godless religion, he said.

The solution: lawsuits alleging that schools’ teachings about gender identity and race are unconstitutional, leading to a Supreme Court decision that would mandate the right of parents to claim billions of tax dollars for private education or home schooling.

“We’ve got to recognize that we’re swinging for the fences here, that any time you try to take down a giant of this nature, it’s an uphill battle,” Farris said on the previously undisclosed July 2021 call, a recording of which was obtained by the watchdog group Documented and shared with The Washington Post. “And the teachers union, the education establishment and everybody associated with the education establishment will be there in full array against us — just as they were against home-schoolers.”

“We’ve got to recognize that we’re swinging for the fences here, that any time you try to take down a giant of this nature, it’s an uphill battle,” Farris said on the previously undisclosed July 2021 call, a recording of which was obtained by the watchdog group Documented and shared with The Washington Post. “And the teachers union, the education establishment and everybody associated with the education establishment will be there in full array against us — just as they were against home-schoolers.”

The 50-minute recording, whose details Farris did not dispute in a series of interviews with The Post, is a remarkable demonstration of how the ideology he has long championed has moved from the partisan fringe to the center of the nation’s bitter debates over public education.

A deeply religious evangelical from Washington state, Farris began his career facing off with social workers over the rights of home-schoolers and representing Christian parents who objected to “Rumpelstiltskin” being read in class.

In recent years, he has reached the pinnacle of the conservative legal establishment. From 2017 to 2022, he was the president and chief executive of the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a powerhouse Christian legal groupthat helped draft and defend the restrictive Mississippi abortion law that led to the overturning of Roe v. Wade. ADF and its allieshave filed a flurry of state and federal lawsuits over the past two years alleging that public schools are violating parental and religious rights.

Yet it is outside the courtroom that Farris’s influence has arguably been most profound. No single figure has been more instrumental in transforming the parental rights cause from an obscure concern of Christian home-schoolers into a GOP rallying cry.

When former president Donald Trump called for a federal parental bill of rights in a 2023 campaign video, saying secular public school instruction had become a “new religion,” he was invoking arguments Farris first made 40 years ago. The executive order targeting school mask mandates that Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) signed on his first day in office cited a 2013 state law guaranteeing “fundamental” parental rights that Farris helped write.

In Florida, a home-schooling mom introduced Farris’s ideas to a state lawmaker, setting in motion the passage of the state’s Parents’ Bill of Rights in 2021. The law, repeatedly touted by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) on the presidential campaign trail, laid the groundwork for the state’s controversial Parental Rights in Education Act, dubbed by its critics the “don’t say gay” bill.

“He is our hero,” Patti Sullivan, the home-schooler involved in Florida’s 2021 law, said of Farris. “He is the father of the modern movement in parental rights.”

Fundamental parental rights measures have been proposed or enacted this year in more than two dozen other states, according to a Post analysis using the legislation-tracking database Quorum, and in March, a federal parents’ bill of rights passed the Republican-controlled House.

Farris has not been personally involved in pushing the most recent bills, which have been fueled by anger over covid-19 mask mandates and how schools are handling Black history, sexual orientation and gender identity. Tiffany Justice, co-founder of the right-wing groupMoms for Liberty, which has become a powerful force in the parental rights movement since its launch less than three years ago, said it would be a mistake to overemphasize the impact of conservative Christian home-schoolers on the battles now playing out across the country.

Justice said she has met Farris but that the arguments he was making in the 1980s haven’t strongly influenced her organization, whose members have pushed to remove some books with LGBTQ+ themes from schools and to restrict what teachers can say about race and gender.

“It’s 2023,” she said. “There are a lot of things that people thought 40 years ago.”

Yet to those who have followed Farris’s career, the adoption of his arguments by so many families unconnected to home schooling is a measure of his success. In the eyes of his critics, he has masterfully imported an extreme religious agenda into the heart of the nation’s politics through the seemingly unobjectionable language of parents’ rights. Some argue that it has always been the goal of the most radical Christian home-schoolers not merely to opt out of the public schools but to transform them, either by diverting their funding or allowing religion back into the classroom.

“Everyone should be aware of Michael Farris and his influence on the Christian right,” said R.L. Stollar, a children’s rights advocate who was home-schooled and has long warned of the conservative home-schooling movement’s political goals. “To Farris’s credit, he is really good at what he does. He is really good at taking these more extreme positions and presenting them as if they are something that would just be based on common sense.”

The story continues in extensive detail about Farris’s battles to win acceptance and public funding for home schooling.

He tried but failed to criminalize gay sex. His biggest victories have been in his demands to expand home schooling. He and his wife have 10 children. They enrolled her in a public school, bur removed her after two months. They put her in a Christian school but withdrew her after concluding she was being influenced by other 6-year-olds.

Farris wrote that public schools are “a godless monstrosity.”

And he wrote that by their very nature, public schools indoctrinate:

“Inculcation of values is inherently a religious act,” he said. “What the public schools are doing is indoctrinating your children in religion, no matter what.”

My view: public schools unite us as a nation, a people, and a democracy. While there are some highly-educated people like Michael Farris who homeschool their children, many uneducated people are following their lead and their children will be indoctrinated into their religion and be poorly educated.

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Funding, Home Schooling, Religion, Republicans

Josh Cowen: The Latest Research on Vouchers

By dianeravitch
August 29, 2023 //
6

Josh Cowen, professor of education policy at Michigan State University, summarizes the latest research on vouchers for the Brown Center Chalkboard, a publication of the Brookings Institution.

He finds several salient points:

  • In 2023 alone, seven states passed new school voucher programs and nine expanded existing plans—highlighting a push that is largely coming from red states.
  • The last decade of achievement studies have shown negative voucher impacts, with more mixed or inconclusive results on attainment.
  • Data from traditional voucher programs has indicated that the larger the program, the worse the results tend to be.
  • Most students who use vouchers never attended public schools.
  • Many private schools raise their tuition to take advantage of voucher funding.
  • Many pop-up schools of dubious quality are created to receive voucher money.

Please open the link and read the rest of the article.

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Privatization, Religion, Research, Vouchers

Mercedes Schneider: Mike Miles, Master of Chaos, Takes Charge of Houston Public Schools

By dianeravitch
August 29, 2023 //
7

Mercedes Schneider summarizes the checkered career of Mike Miles, who was put in charge of the Houston Independent School District by State Commissioner Mike Morath, who was appointed by hard-right Republican Governor Greg Abbott. Abbott wants to punish Houston for not voting for him. What better punishment than to install Mike Miles as superintendent?

Schneider writes:

In June 2023, the Houston Independent School District (HISD) became the latest major school district to experience a top-down, ed-reform tactic that largely ignores community investment and fail to deliver on promised academic gains: the state takeover of a school district.

On June 01, 2023, the Texas Education Agency (TEA) appointed Mike Miles as the new HISD superintendent.

Miles is the golden-child product of market-based, ed-reform leadership. As reported in his LinkedIn bio, Miles holds no college degrees in teaching (engineering; slavic languages and literature; international affairs and policy). He has never been a classroom teacher, never a site-based administrator, yet he was a district superintendent in Colorado for six years (2006-11) and superintendent of Dallas ISD for three.

Though he does not mention it in his LinkedIn bio, Miles was a member of the Class of 2011 at the Broad Superintendents Academy A 2011 EdWeek article on Broad superintendents includes the criticism that they “use corporate-management techniques to consolidate power, weaken teachers’ job protections, cut parents out of decisionmaking, and introduce unproven reform measures.”

Indeed.

In 2015, Miles abruptly resigned from Dallas ISD amid being, as WFAA.com states, “at the center of controversy since he took the position nearly three years ago,” which apparently included questions about misdirecting funding intended for at-risk students and the subsequent exit of the Dallas ISD budget director. (Also calling Miles “a lightening rod for controversy,” WFAA.com offers this timeline of Miles’ unsettling tenure in Dallas.)

Despite all of his Dallas ISD controversy, TEA– which is no stranger to stepping into its own controversy— chose to hire Miles to lead its newly-state-snatched HISD.

Following his Dallas ISD exit, in 2016, he founded a charter school chain, Third Future Schools, which has locations in Colorado, Texas, and Louisiana. For two years (2017-19), Miles was a senior associate in an education consulting firm, FourPoint Education Partners.

And according to his LinkedIn bio, Miles is/was on a number of ed-reform organization boards, including Teach for America (TFA) Colorado (2017-20); National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) (2013-present), and Chiefs for Change (2015-present).

Please open the link to finish reading the post.

Categories Accountability, Broad Foundation, Chiefs for Change, Corporate Reform, Cruelty, Democracy, Discipline, Disruption, Education Industry, Elections, Extremism, Failure, Houston, Libraries, Shame, State Takeover, Teachers, Texas

Nancy Bailey: The Continuing Assault on Public Education

By dianeravitch
August 28, 2023 //
24

Nancy Bailey, retired teacher, has been blogging for ten years. She reflects on the continuing efforts to destroy public education, based on a false narrative, hubris, and in some cases, the profit motive.

Nancy and I co-authored a book that serves as a glossary about fads and “reforms.”

She begins her new article:

School reform continues to privatize and destroy public schools. August marks ten years since I began blogging. Within that time I have written two books and co-authored a third with Diane Ravitch. I’m proud of all this writing but Losing America’s Schools: The Fight to Reclaim Public Education is the book title that especially stands out today.

Many Americans still don’t understand or value their ownership of public schools, and how they’re losing one of the country’s great democraticinstitutions. Instead of working together to build up local schools, to iron out difficulties, they’re willing to end them.

Thank you for reading my blog, commenting, and for those of you who have written posts. I am amazed at the wonderful educators, parents, students, and policymakers I have met. I have appreciated debate.

Here are some of the main education issues still of concern.

The Arts

School arts programs help children thrive. Those with mental health challenges benefit. Students might find art jobs. Sadly, many poor public schools ditched the arts. Some schools might get Arts Partnerships or entrepreneurships (Hansen, 2019). These programs aren’t always consistent. Public schools must offer well-rounded and fully resourced K-12 arts programs.

Assessment

Assessment is important for teachers to understand students. But high-stakes standardized tests push a narrow, one-size-fits-all agenda used to drive parents to private schools which, on the other extreme, have little accountability. Tests have been harmful to students.

Class Size

Children deserve manageable class sizes, especially for K-3rd grade (STAR Study), and for inclusion andschool safety.

Common Core State Standards

Controversy originally surrounded Common Core State Standards, promoted by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in 2010, but Common Core continues to drive profiteering, especially in online programs.

Stan Karp of Rethinking Schoolssaid CCSS are:

A massively well-financed campaign of billionaires and politically powerful advocacy organizations that seeks to replace our current system of public education which, for all its many flaws, is probably the most democratic institution we have and one that has done far more to address inequality, offers hope, and provide opportunity than the country’s financial, economic, political, and media institutions with a market-based, non-unionized, privately managed system.

Corporations and Politicians

Corporations and politicians continue to work to end public schools and drive teachers out, transferring tax dollars to nonprofit and for-profit entities.

Nancy covers many more topics that have been harmful to public education.

Open the link and read her article in its entirety.

Categories Accountability, Arts Education, Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Class size, Common Core, Corporate Reform, Corruption, Curriculum, Data and Data Mining, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Ethics, Extremism, For-Profit, History, Inequity, Injustice, Teach for America, Vouchers

Texas: Vouchers Would Spell the End of Local Communities

By dianeravitch
August 27, 2023 //
14

Steffen E. Polko is a retired professor of education at TCU in Texas. He wrote the following commentary for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Vouchers, he says, will doom community rituals, like Friday night football. Dividing students up by religion and other grounds will divide our communities and our country even more than at present.

He writes:

There appears to be some confusion regarding rural Texans’ opposition to school choice and vouchers. I think I may know why.

Gov. Greg Abbott’s espoused principal reason for promoting vouchers is to protect Texas children from the “woke” propaganda being disseminated by public school teachers. Let me assure the governor that teachers in upstanding, God-fearing communities such as Mineral Wells and Hico are not subjecting their students to “woke” ideology. In these communities, “woke” still means not asleep. This is not something that’s broken in small-town Texas, so it doesn’t need fixing.

Now, onto the most important reason. Vouchers pose a threat to high school football and could turn out Friday Night Lights. An education savings account program will reduce funding levels for public schools as students leave. The first thing to be hit will be athletic budgets.

Proponents note that there are few private school options in rural Texas. So, where will these students go? There are no options yet, but this will change with vouchers. Many churches face declining attendance and financial difficulty. If $8,000 per year vouchers are available a minister with 20 or more school-age children in the congregation will find it rational and financially prudent to start a school.

Let’s say I have 40 such children. If the state sends me $320,000 per year and I can keep expenses at $160,000, I will net $160,000 for my church. How do I keep my expenses so low? The key is technology. High-quality learning systems produced by nationally recognized educational providers such as Pearson are readily available over the Internet. The cost of learning management systems currently averages around $5 per student per month.

The state will require me to have two “teachers” for 40 students. No problem; this can be anyone in my congregation with a college degree and some time on their hands. Getting alternative certification from the state is relatively easy. My teachers need not be education experts because the learning management system does the heavy lifting. It provides instruction and creates and grades the homework and tests. The latest systems even use artificial intelligence to answer student questions.

The only job for the “teachers” would be to manage classroom behavior and help students use the software. A student leaving the public schools will probably get a fairly good Christian education. The public school will lose funding for athletic programs and perhaps a potential star quarterback. Ouch! For-profit schools will emerge employing a similar model. Using a hybrid instructional model and current costs, I calculate that a 200-student high school would bring cashflow of about $800,000 a year. Start 10 of

those and you have a nice chain of businesses. Could this be the real driving force behind vouchers? To recruit students, such schools could promise to teach artificial intelligence and the Python programming language to prepare students for a promising future in technology — or use some other clever hook. Texas has about 8,000 schools. The Texas Education Agency employs 1,000 people and spends around $2 billion per year to monitor the schools and hold them accountable.

I predict that vouchers will increase the number of schools in Texas four-fold. Will the Legislature increase funding by a factor of four to monitor this many schools? I think not. It will be a long time before state officials figure out if for-profit schools are delivering on their promise, and the owners will be very rich before they do. Good luck getting them and their money back from Barbados. Not only would church and for-profit schools poach rural athletes, but specialized voucher- and donor-funded sports academies could emerge. Let’s say someone starts a Dallas Football Academy. It could use an entrance exam similar to the NFL combine to assure it got the best athletes. The best coaches, fitness trainers, and other staff would be recruited.

These schools would have a direct connection to universities to give their athletes the best shot at a top-level scholarship. Such schools would dominate small-town teams and end the reign of, for example, the Aledo Bearcats. The state championship game would probably feature the Dallas and Houston football academies.

Rural Texas is our best bet to keep the state from making a huge mistake that is little more than a political stunt to get votes. Small communities have nothing to gain from vouchers and a lot to potentially lose, as does the rest of the state.

Steffen E. Palko is a retired associate professor of education at TCU. He lives in Fort Worth.

Read more at: https://www.star-telegram.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/other-voices/article277689198.html#storylink=cpy

Categories Disruption, Education Industry, Funding, Parents, Privatization, Resistance, Rural Schools, Sports, Supporting public schools, Texas, Vouchers

Michael Hiltzik: The Republican Plan to Dumb Down America’s Youth

By dianeravitch
August 27, 2023 //
24

Michael Hiltzik, columnist for the Los Angeles Times, finds a pattern in the Republican attacks on the schools and universities. Their hostility to teaching Black history, their encouragement of book banning, their strategic defunding of higher education, their treatment of teaching about race, gender, and climate change as “indoctrination”—together point to a goal: the dumbing down of American young people.

Republicans say they want to get rid of “indoctrination” but they are busily erasing free inquiry and critical thinking. What do they actually want? Indoctrination.

He reminds us of the immortal words of former President Donald J. Trump: “I love the uneducated.” Republicans do not want students to think critically about racism or the past. They do not want them to reflect on anything that makes them “uncomfortable.” They want to shield them from “divisive concerns.” They want them to imbibe a candy-coated version of the past, not wrestle with hard truths.

He writes:

For reasons that may not be too hard to understand, Republicans and conservatives seem to be intent on turning their K-12 schools, colleges and universities into plantations for raising a crop of ignorant and unthinking students.

Donald Trump set forth the principle during his 2016 primary campaign, when he declared, “I love the poorly educated.”

In recent months, the right-wing attack on public education has intensified. The epicenter of the movement is Florida under Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, where the faculty and course offerings of one of America’s leading liberal arts colleges, New College, have been eviscerated purportedly to wipe out what DeSantis calls “ideological indoctrination.”

The state’s K-12 schools have been authorized to supplement their curricula with animated cartoons developed by the far-right Prager University Foundation that flagrantly distort climate science and America’s racial history, the better to promote fossil fuels, undermine the use of renewable energy and paint a lily-white picture of America’s past.

Then there’s West Virginia, which is proposing to shut down nearly 10% of its academic offerings, including all its foreign language programs. The supposed reason is a huge budget deficit, the harvest of a systematic cutback in state funding.

In Texas, the State Library and Archives Commission is quitting the American Library Assn., after a complaint by a Republican state legislator accusing the association of pushing “socialism and Marxist ideology.”

In Arkansas, state education officials told schools that they may not award credit for the Advanced Placement course in African American history. (Several school districts said they’d offer students the course anyway.) This is the course that Florida forced the College Board to water down earlier this year by alleging, falsely, that it promoted “critical race theory.”

I must interject here that I’m of two minds about this effort. On the one hand, an ignorant young electorate can’t be good for the republic; on the other, filling the workforce with graduates incapable of critical thinking and weighed down by a distorted conception of the real world will reduce competition for my kids and grandkids for jobs that require knowledge and brains.

Let’s examine some of these cases in greater depth.

Prager University, or PragerU, isn’t an accredited institution of higher learning. It’s a dispenser of right-wing charlatanism founded by Dennis Prager, a right-wing radio host. The material approved for use in the schools includes a series of five- to 10-minute animated videos featuring the fictional Leo and Layla, school-age siblings who travel back in time to meet historical figures.

One encounter is with Frederick Douglass, the Black abolitionist. The goal of the video is to depict “Black lives matter” demonstrations as unrestrained and violent — “Why are they burning a car?” Leo asks while viewing a televised news report. The animated Douglass speaks up for change achieved through “patience and compromise.”

This depiction of Douglass leaves experts in his life and times aghast. Douglass consistently railed against such counsel. Of the Compromise of 1850, which brought California into the union but strengthened the Fugitive Slave Act — arguably the most detested federal law in American history — he stated that it illustrated how “slavery has shot its leprous distillment through the life blood of the nation.” In 1861, he thundered that “all compromises now are but as new wine to old bottles, new cloth to old garments. To attempt them as a means of peace between freedom and slavery, is as to attempt to reverse irreversible law.”

Patience? The video depicts Douglass quoting from an 1852 speech to a Rochester anti-slavery society in which he said “great streams are not easily turned from channels, worn deep in the course of ages.”

But it doesn’t include lines from later in the speech, reproaching his audience for prematurely celebrating the progress of abolition: “Your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; … all your religious parade and solemnity, … mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.”

Another video in the series parrots the fossil fuel industry’s talking points against wind and solar power: Standing over the corpse of a bird supposedly slain by flying into a wind turbine, the schoolkids’ interlocutor states, “Like many people … you’ve been misled about renewable energy, and their impact on the environment…. Windmills kill so many birds, it’s hard to track how many…. Wind farms and solar farms disrupt huge amounts of natural habitat.”

Acid rain, pollution, global warming — those consequences of fossil fuel energy aren’t mentioned. The video ends with a pitch for nuclear power, never mind the unsolved question of what to do with its radioactive waste products.

PragerU’s sedulous attack on renewables perhaps shouldn’t be much a surprise: Among its big donors is the Wilks family, which derives its fortune from fracking and which approved “future payment” of $6.25 million to PragerU in 2013.

As for New College, its travails under the DeSantis regime have been documented by my colleague Jenny Jarvie, among many others.

In a nutshell, the Sarasota institution possessed a well-deserved reputation as one of the nation’s outstanding havens for talented, independent-minded students. Then came DeSantis. He summarily replaced its board of trustees with a clutch of right-wing stooges including Christopher Rufo, known for having concocted the panic over critical race theory out of thin air and then marketed it as a useful culture war weapon to unscrupulous conservative politicians, including DeSantis.

Rufo and his fellows fired the university president and installed a sub-replacement-level GOP timeserver, Richard Corcoran, in her place. Faculty and students have fled. Students who stayed behind and were in the process of assembling their course schedules for the coming year are discovering at the last minute that the courses are no longer offered because their teachers have been fired or quit.

Instead of ambitious scholars committed to open inquiry, Corcoran has recruited athletes to fill out the student body, even though the college has no athletic fields for many of them to play on. According to USA Today, New College now has 70 baseball players, nearly twice as many as the University of Florida’s Division I NCAA team.

More to the point, the average SAT and ACT scores and high-school grade point averages have fallen from the pre-Corcoran level, while most of the school’s merit-based scholarships have gone to athletes. New College, in other words, has transitioned from a top liberal arts institution into a school that places muscle-bound underachievers on a pedestal. DeSantis calls this “succeeding in its mission to eliminate indoctrination and re-focus higher education on its classical mission.”

Finally, West Virginia University. Under its president, Gordon Gee — who previously worked his dubious magic at Brown Universityand Ohio State University, among other places — the school built lavish facilities despite declining enrollments. The construction program at the land grant university contributed to a $45-million deficit for the coming year, with expectations that it would rise to $75 million by 2028.

But the main problem was one shared by many other public universities — the erosion of public funding. As the West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy points out, “if West Virginia lawmakers had simply kept higher education funding at the same levels as a decade ago, West Virginia University would have an estimated additional $37.6 million in state funding for [fiscal year] 2024, closing the majority of this year’s budget gap.”

The decision on which programs to shutter at WVU points to a shift in how public university trustees see the purpose of their schools, trying to align them more with economic goals set by local industries rather than the goal of providing a well-rounded education to a state’s students. Trustees in some states, including North Carolina and Texas, have injected themselves into academic decisions traditionally left to administrators, often for partisan political reasons.

When it comes to interference in educational policies by conservatives, such as what’s happened in Florida, Texas and Arkansas, there’s no justification for taking these measures at face value — that is, as efforts to remove “indoctrination” from the schools. The truth is that the right-wing effort serves the purposes of white supremacists and advocates of anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination — they’re moving to inject indoctrination that conforms more to their own ideologies.

Take the attack on critical race theory, or at least the version retailed by Rufo and his ilk. “The right has reduced CRT to an incendiary dog whistle,” the Black scholar Robin D.G. Kelley of UCLA has observed, by caricaturing a four-decade-long scholarly effort to analyze “why antidiscrimination law not only fails to remedy structural racism but further entrenches racial inequality” into “a racist plot to teach white children to hate themselves, their country, and their ‘race.’”

(The inclusion of Kelley’s work in the AP African American Studies course was cited as a “concern” by Florida officials in their rationale for rejecting the course; Kelley’s work was suppressed by the College Board in its effort to make the course more acceptable to the state Department of Education.)

These attacks are couched in the vocabulary of “parents’ rights” and student freedom, but they don’t serve the students at all, nor do they advance the rights of parents interested in a good, comprehensive education for their children, as opposed to one dictated by the most narrow-minded ideologues in their state.

Where will it end? Florida’s ham-fisted educational policies won’t produce graduates with the intellectual equipment to succeed in legitimate universities, much less in the world at large. The only university many will be qualified to attend will be Prager U, and that won’t be good for anyone.

Categories Academic Freedom, Bigotry, Censorship, Citizenship, Curriculum, Democracy, DeSantis, Disruption, Education Industry, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Florida, Freedom of Speech, Freedom to Read, Funding, Gender, Higher Education, History, Ignorance, Lies, Propaganda, Racism, Stupid, Trump

Heather Cox Richardson: Biden’s Struggle to Reduce Student Debt

By dianeravitch
August 27, 2023 //
102

President Biden has repeatedly tried to reduce the debt that college students incurred and that remains a financial burden for years after they finish college. Republicans have adamantly opposed any effort to relieve millions of students of their college debt, which some have been paying off for decades.

I can’t help but remember my visit to Finland, where I learned that all education, at every level, is tuition-free. How is this possible, I asked. I was told that education is a human right, and no one should pay for a human right. From an economic point of view, the entire nation benefits when more people get a college education. Yet over the past few decades, state governments have reduced their support of public higher education, shifting the burden to individual students.

Heather Cox Richardson wrote about the political dimensions of the student debt issue:

Rising costs of college and cuts to government support for education mean that more than 45 million people across the country owe more than $1.6 trillion in federal loans, an amount equal to the size of the Australian economy. That debt absorbs money people at the lower end of the economic scale would otherwise invest in homes, consumer goods, and so on, and the Biden administration has made it a priority to relieve some of that debt.


When she was the California attorney general, Vice President Kamala Harris took on predatory for-profit colleges and won $1 billion for defrauded veterans and students, and when he ran for office, Biden promised to forgive federal student debt for those earning less than $125,000.


Since the Supreme Court on June 30, 2023, rejected the administration’s plan to forgive more than $400 billion in student debt borrowed through government programs, the administration has turned to other approaches.


In April it began to fix the administrative errors that had kept borrowers from receiving relief through income-driven repayment plans and the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program under which they borrowed the money. Those plans were always intended to offer a way to eliminate student debt, but the Government Accountability Office in 2022 found that poor record keeping meant that that promise had not been honored. On July 14 the administration announced that fixes to those programs would relieve more than 800,000 borrowers of more than $39 billion in student debt.

At the time, Biden did not mince words. “Republican lawmakers—who had no problem with the government forgiving millions of dollars of their own business loans—have tried everything they can to stop me from providing relief to hardworking Americans. Some are even objecting to the actions we announced today, which follows through on relief borrowers were promised, but never given, even when they had been making payments for decades. The hypocrisy is stunning, and the disregard for working and middle-class families is outrageous.”


Since then, the administration has provided relief to others caught in the system as well, including relief of $45.7 billion for 662,000 public service workers, $10.5 billion for 491,000 borrowers with a total and permanent disability, and $22 billion for nearly 1.3 million borrowers who were cheated by their schools, saw their schools close, or are covered by a related court settlement.


Today the administration released the Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) plan, a new repayment plan to bring order and relief to federal student borrowers. It is an income-driven repayment plan that is based on a borrower’s income and family size rather than their loan balance, prevents the balance from growing because of unpaid interest, and forgives the remaining balance after a number of years. “The benefits of the SAVE plan will be particularly critical for low- and middle-income borrowers, community college students, and borrowers who work in public service,” the White House said.


Relieving student debt helps those at the lower end of the economy, which will boost economic growth, but there is also a political payoff in these efforts for the administration. As Democratic strategist and pollster Celinda Lake and documentary filmmaker Mac Heller pointed out in the Washington Post in July, in the eight years between the 2016 and 2024 elections, 32 million Americans have become eligible to vote. In the same eight years, as many as 20 million older voters have died.


Lake and Heller note that younger Americans are focused on issues, rather than individuals, and skew progressive (prompting some Republicans to talk about raising the voting age to 25). Fulfilling a campaign promise that overwhelmingly benefits those under 50—parents as well as students—is good politics, blending in with the members of Gen Z (the generation born between the mid to late 1990s and early 2010s) forming political PACs of their own and running for office.

Categories Biden, Education Industry, Higher Education, Student Financial Aid and Student Debt

West Virginia U.: Students Angrily Protest Deep Cuts to Programs and Faculty

By dianeravitch
August 26, 2023 //
25

West Virginia is one of the poorest states in the nation, yet it has a billionaire governor (Jim Justice) and a billionaire senator (Joe Manchin), who pretend to serve their constituents by doing nothing for them. It is a deep red state. The legislature authorized charter schools and vouchers; the governor promised to veto both but he didn’t. Manchin continually blocks Biden programs that would help his constituents (like the Child Tax Credit) but protects the coal industry.

West Virginia University recently announced deep cuts to its programs and faculty, and students are angry.

Inside Higher Education reported:

MORGANTOWN, W.Va.—West Virginia University’s proposal to eliminate nearly a 10th of its majors and 169 full-time faculty positions from its flagship campus led hundreds of students to protest Monday, as a student union’s organizing power added volume to the online employee protestations and national media coverage that’s been buffeting the institution for more than a week.

Pressure on the administration to reverse its recommended cuts is growing as the WVU Board of Governors’ Sept. 15 vote on the proposals nears. The suggested cuts—not the first in recent years at West Virginia—were discussed around the end of the spring and through the summer, but WVU’s big reveal of how extensive the proposed layoffs and degree reductions would be didn’t come until Aug. 11.

“Stop the Cuts!” was students’ first chant outside the Mountainlair student union Monday, followed by “Hey hey, ho ho, Gordon Gee has got to go!”

Multiple chants, signs and a flame-bedecked “Fire Gee” banner that students held in front of the entrance to the Stewart Hall administration building all targeted Gee, the university’s two-time president whose current run has lasted nearly a decade. Chants and signs said, “Stop the Gee-llotine!” while other signs said, “Gee can take home 800K but we can’t take Spanish?” and “Cut Gee’s Pay, Not Our Programs!…”

WVU has proposed axing, among other degree offerings, its Ed.D. in higher education administration; Ph.D. in higher education; master of public administration; Ph.D. and master’s in math; bachelor’s in environmental and community planning; bachelor degree in recreation, parks and tourism resources; doctor of musical arts in composition; master of music in composition; and master’s in jazz pedagogy, acting and creative writing.

The university’s enrollment has declined 10 percent since 2015, far worse than the national average. In April, WVU leaders, projecting a further 5,000-student plunge over the next decade, said they needed to slash $75 million from the budget.

The university has pointed to low enrollments in certain programs to justify cuts, including a lightning rod proposal to eliminate the entirety of the department of world languages, literatures and linguistics. But Lisa Di Bartolomeo, a teaching professor of Russian studies at West Virginia, has retorted that WVU isn’t counting all students who are double majoring in languages.

“Cost-to-deliver is one of the metrics considered in the preliminary recommendations,” Kaull wrote in an email. “The data reflect students’ primary majors as they are the best reflection of the cost-to-deliver. Dual majors and minors don’t generate revenue like primary majors. Further, the cost and effort of supporting students (e.g., advising) is typically carried by the primary major.” 

WVU’s Aug. 11 news release announcing the proposed cuts said it was “exploring alternative methods of delivery” for languages, “such as a partnership with an online language app.” A sign on Monday called the university “Duolingo U,” complete with the green bird mascot of that phone app.

“We’re pissed,” Sadler said. “We’re losing languages; we’re losing departments; we’re losing faculty and friends.”

Gee told Inside Higher Ed Friday, “What we’re doing is that we’re really looking at the numbers and we realize that our students have spoken to us. And our students have said that offering languages the way that we are is just not something that they want.” 

Asked about the calls to reduce his salary, which were happening online before Monday’s protest, Gee said he contributes about 15 percent of his salary every year to student scholarships. 

John Fox, who just started his master’s degree in creative writing, one of the programs to be cut under the proposal, carried water bottles for the protesters. He’s from Morgantown.

“We’re losing out on the culture of West Virginia,” he said, “like a voice to the culture of West Virginia.”

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corruption, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Extremism, Higher Education, Students, Vouchers, West Virginia

Houston: Here Were Mike Miles’ Goals for Dallas in 2012

By dianeravitch
August 25, 2023 //
11

While browsing through some old posts, I stumbled upon this one, which is a story that appeared in the Dallas Morning News in 2012, shortly after Mike Miles took charge of the Dallas public schools. It gives valuable insight into Mike Miles’ thinking. Miles was appointed to lead the Houston Independent School District by State Commissioner Mike Morath after the state of Texas took control of Houston, fired its elected board and their superintendent. Miles is a military man who learned about education at the Broad Academy. Military men give orders; so do Broadies.

Please note that nothing in Miles’ goals addresses early childhood education, class size, medical clinics, or nutrition. Miles believes in metrics, the coin of the conservative, neoliberal realm.

Matthew Haag and Tawnell D. Hobbs wrote this story for the Dallas Morning News. It appeared May 10, 2102.

Dallas ISD Superintendent Mike Miles outlines ambitious plan to help make district one of the nation’s best

Mike Miles not only wants to boost graduation rates but also wants to see more high school graduates go straight into the workforce. To achieve that, he wants to create a “career-ready” certificate that would give eligible students priority for entry-level jobs at area businesses.

 

Dallas ISD Superintendent Mike Miles on Thursday unveiled a slew of ambitious goals, proposals and recommendations designed to turn around the school district and make it one of the nation’s best.

In his first presentation to trustees as the district’s new leader, Miles spent nearly two hours laying out his vision for the district in a presentation that both excited and overwhelmed the board members.

Under the plan, teachers would be under more scrutiny. Principals would have one year to prove their worth. And the business community would be asked to step up.

If the road map is followed, Miles said, Dallas ISD is bound to become a premier school district.

“We are going to raise expectations for our staff,” said Miles, who earned a reputation for disrupting the status quo in the school district he will soon leave in Colorado Springs, Colo. “If you cannot tell that from the presentation, you have to know it from what you heard about me.”

He said DISD will begin rolling out some changes next school year, while other changes will span several years. The most immediate change, he said, will be a philosophical one. The district must embrace a vision and mission of raising academic achievement, improving instruction and not accepting excuses.

“We cannot just post it and market it and put it in little brochures. We have to practice this,” said Miles, adding that he wants 80 percent of DISD employees to be “proficient” on those beliefs in a year.

Many of the changes Miles laid out Thursday mirror those he implemented while in Harrison School District 2 in Colorado Springs.

A seemingly small change he suggested — one he said stirred outrage among teachers in Harrison — is to keep classroom doors open all day.

With the doors open, principals and administrators can move freely into classrooms to observe teachers. Under Miles’ plan, every Dallas teacher would be observed up to 10 times a year. In three years, those observations will contribute to teachers’ grades and factor into their salaries, as part of a pay-for-performance evaluation system.

Rena Honea, president of the teachers group Alliance-AFT, said “people are going to be in shock” with Miles’ proposals. “I envision it will be very different from what DISD has seen and experienced,” she said.

Miles has said change will be hard, but it’s necessary.

“If you cannot raise student achievement or have high quality of instruction, you cannot be a teacher in Dallas,” he said Thursday.

90% grad rate by 2020.

If the changes are successful, Miles said, the district will see skyrocketing graduation rates and achieve goals former superintendents promised but failed to reach.

Only three-quarters of DISD students currently graduate in four years of high school — a number Miles wants to see hit 90 percent by 2020. He also wants student SAT scores to jump nearly 30 percent over that time.

“Even if the district was in the best position possible, we would have to change things,” Miles said. “There is growing belief that children need more education after high school. High school is not the end point anymore.”

Throughout Miles’ presentation, trustees said little as they absorbed details of the 29-page plan and asked only a handful of questions. At one point, trustee Nancy Bingham, who appeared in favor of the goals, said Miles had caused her heartburn. Other trustees wondered how he would pay for everything.

Miles told trustees that he will spend the next few weeks finding money to cover new programs and initiatives. He said he would have to cut elsewhere to make room for his plans.

Miles’ plan would allow principals more control over their campuses, but they would also be required to meet higher expectations, such as improving communication with parents and the community. If the principals fail, others will be waiting for their jobs.

Starting next school year, Miles wants to create a leadership academy for 50 or 60 educators who want to become principals. They would spend the entire year in training and will vie for open positions.

The idea brought nods and smiles from some board members, but trustee Carla Ranger questioned the program. She hinted that the people who go through the yearlong training lab would have an unfair advantage to land the jobs over existing principals.

“If the notion is that there is an unfair advantage, welcome to principalship,” Miles told her. “You have to compete. That’s the way the world works.”

Miles said he will be open to tweaking his action plan, called “Destination 2020,” but remained unapologetic about his ambitious goals and plans.

Previous downfalls

Lofty expectations for DISD have been mentioned before.

Former DISD Superintendent Michael Hinojosa rolled out an ambitious reform plan when he arrived in 2005. A major component was to reach a 90 percent passing rate on state exams by 2010 for all student groups.

The ultimate goal, Hinojosa said, was for Dallas to be the top urban district in the nation within five years, culminating by winning the coveted Broad Prize for Urban Education. While test scores improved under Hinojosa’s watch, DISD did not come close to winning the Broad Prize.

Hinojosa also set goals for the district’s graduation rate. Before his arrival, the graduation rate was 81 percent in 2003-04. He had set a 93 percent graduation rate goal for 2009-10. But the goal wasn’t met. The Class of 2010 had a graduation rate of about 75 percent.

Miles not only wants to boost graduation rates but also wants to see more high school graduates go straight into the workforce. To achieve that, he wants to create a “career-ready” certificate that would give eligible students priority for entry-level jobs at area businesses.

Starting next school year, Miles wants 1,000 entry-level jobs for students with the certificates. And he wants the certificate program to grow in the coming years — with 3,000 jobs by 2015.

Miles said he will go to the business community, ask for their support and urge them to focus their efforts on helping DISD students. He said he also wants the business community to help define what it means to be career-ready.

“Let’s let them put their money where their mouth is,” he said.

At a glance: The superintendent’s plan

In his first presentation to the Dallas ISD trustees, new Superintendent Mike Miles unveiled “Destination 2020,” a plan that sets goals for the district. Here are parts of that plan.

STUDENT ACHIEVEMENT GOALS FOR 2020

Graduation: 90 percent of students will graduate on time. [The Class of 2010 had a graduation rate of about 75 percent, which is the percentage of ninth-graders who graduated in four years, according to Texas Education Agency records.]

Test scores: 60 percent of students will receive a 21 or higher composite score on the ACT out of a possible score of 36, or 1110 on the reading and math portions of the SAT out of a possible score of 1600. [For the Class of 2010, the average ACT score was 17.1; the average SAT score was 860, according to Texas Education Agency records.]

Workplace ready: 80 percent of student will be proficient on the “Year 2020 workplace readiness assessments.” According to the plan, “These assessments will be designed by the business and nonprofit communities and will include critical thinking, communications, teamwork, information literacy, technology skills, and worth ethic.”

College and careers: 90 percent of students will enter college, the military or a “career-ready job” right out of high school. A career-ready certificate will be created for students who meet certain goals. Businesses will be asked to commit to providing entry jobs for those students.

AREAS OF FOCUS

Some areas of focus for the next three years:

Effective teachers: “While teachers in DISD are working hard and are committed to children, a quick review of instruction and discussions with instructional leaders in Dallas reveals that the quality of instruction is inconsistent and that good instruction is not pervasive in many schools.”

Effective principals: “While we will provide the best support and professional development any principal in the state could hope to receive, they will have only one year to demonstrate that they have the capacity and what it takes to lead change and to improve the quality of instruction.”

Professional and high-functioning central office: “The entire central office system will be designed to support schools as teachers and principals try to accomplish three main goals: 1) Improve the quality of instruction; 2) Raise student achievement; 3) Create a positive school culture and climate.”

Engaging parents and the community: “We will be much more purposeful in helping community supporters work in reinforcing ways. … We cannot have 100 different partners spraying reform initiative on our schools. That would diffuse the efforts and take us off our direction. Thus, we will help channel the support and ensure the major educational initiatives work in reinforcing ways.”

KEY TARGETS FOR AUGUST 2015

At least 75 percent of the staff and 70 percent of community members agree or strongly agree with the direction of the district.

At least 80 percent of all classroom teachers and 100 percent of principals are placed on a pay-for-performance evaluation system.

At least 60 percent of teachers on the pay-for-performance evaluation system and 75 percent of principals agree that the system is “fair, accurate and rigorous.”

Create a rubric to assess the professional behavior and effectiveness of each major central office department.

For 90 percent of new hires, the maximum length of the hiring process will be less than five weeks.

The community provides 3,000 jobs for graduates who have “career-ready” certificates.

 

SOURCES: Destination 2020; Texas Education Agency

Miles started in Dallas with a five-year contract. He resigned after three years.

Categories Administrators, superintendents, Broad Foundation, Dallas, Disruption, Education Industry, Education Reform, History, Houston
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