I said I would not reproduce blogs, with rare exceptions. Jan Resseger is that one rare exception.
In this post, she explains how the costs of vouchers are destroying and defunding Ohio’s public schools.
Archives for category: Education Reform
I originally posted this commentary in December 2020. It has since been opened by readers more than 600,000 times. It struck a chord with teachers and parents. It still does.
In recent months, we have heard a crescendo of recommendations for what to do with the children. “Test them!” “Quantify the learning loss!” “Let no child go untested!” Those clamoring for testing are well-funded, usually by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. They have big megaphones. Here and there, other voices have spoken with quiet authority about what children need when they are back in school. They need social and emotional support. Some have lost parents, grandparents, siblings, cousins to the virus. Some have experienced intense loneliness and sadness.
Theresa Thayer Snyder offers different advice, based on her long experience as an educator. She was superintendent in the Voorheesville, New York, district. As more and more schools begin to reopen, it is time to read it again.
Teresa Thayer Snyder was superintendent of the Voorheesville district in upstate New York. She wrote this wise and insightful essay on her Facebook page. A friend sent it to me.
Dear Friends and Colleagues:
I am writing today about the children of this pandemic. After a lifetime of working among the young, I feel compelled to address the concerns that are being expressed by so many of my peers about the deficits the children will demonstrate when they finally return to school. My goodness, what a disconcerting thing to be concerned about in the face of a pandemic which is affecting millions of people around the country and the world. It speaks to one of my biggest fears for the children when they return. In our determination to “catch them up,” I fear that we will lose who they are and what they have learned during this unprecedented era. What on earth are we trying to catch them up on? The models no longer apply, the benchmarks are no longer valid, the trend analyses have been interrupted. We must not forget that those arbitrary measures were established by people, not ordained by God. We can make those invalid measures as obsolete as a crank up telephone! They simply do not apply.
When the children return to school, they will have returned with a new history that we will need to help them identify and make sense of. When the children return to school, we will need to listen to them. Let their stories be told. They have endured a year that has no parallel in modern times. There is no assessment that applies to who they are or what they have learned. Remember, their brains did not go into hibernation during this year. Their brains may not have been focused on traditional school material, but they did not stop either. Their brains may have been focused on where their next meal is coming from, or how to care for a younger sibling, or how to deal with missing grandma, or how it feels to have to surrender a beloved pet, or how to deal with death. Our job is to welcome them back and help them write that history.
I sincerely plead with my colleagues, to surrender the artificial constructs that measure achievement and greet the children where they are, not where we think they “should be.” Greet them with art supplies and writing materials, and music and dance and so many other avenues to help them express what has happened to them in their lives during this horrific year. Greet them with stories and books that will help them make sense of an upside-down world. They missed you. They did not miss the test prep. They did not miss the worksheets. They did not miss the reading groups. They did not miss the homework. They missed you.
Resist the pressure from whatever ‘powers that be’ who are in a hurry to “fix” kids and make up for the “lost” time. The time was not lost, it was invested in surviving an historic period of time in their lives—in our lives. The children do not need to be fixed. They are not broken. They need to be heard. They need be given as many tools as we can provide to nurture resilience and help them adjust to a post pandemic world.
Being a teacher is an essential connection between what is and what can be. Please, let what can be demonstrate that our children have so much to share about the world they live in and in helping them make sense of what, for all of us has been unimaginable. This will help them– and us– achieve a lot more than can be measured by any assessment tool ever devised. Peace to all who work with the children!
As an added bonus, here is a video featuring the author of this wonderful article. Her title: “Children. Cherished and Challenged.”
I recently starting subscribing to a blog by Robert Hubbell because it has interesting takes on the day’s news. This post from yesterday puts the news into context. If you want to subscribe, here is the link.
McConnell’s Ugly (and Empty) Threat
On Tuesday, Mitch McConnell issued an ugly threat that was vintage Mitch McConnell. In a sign of desperation and fear, McConnell warned Democrats not to eliminate the filibuster, saying:
Nobody serving in this chamber can even begin, even begin to imagine what a completely scorched-earth Senate would look like.
Okay, Mitch! Challenge accepted! I will try to imagine what a ‘scorched-earth Senate’ would look like.
My first idea is that if you ever become Majority Leader again, you will refuse to allow any Democratic bill to be brought to the Senate floor for a vote. Oh, wait! You already used that technique from 2017 through 2020, so we can ‘imagine’ what that version of a ‘scorched earth Senate’ looks like. Darn!
Here’s another idea: Republicans should agree that no matter what legislation Democrats propose, every Republican will vote against every Democratic bill—regardless of how popular the bill is with the American public. Oops! That’s what Republicans are doing now, so we can ‘imagine’ what that version of a ‘scorched-earth Senate’ looks like. Fudge!
My next idea is crazy, but stick with me: What if Republicans refuse to grant a hearing for a Supreme Court nominee of a Democratic president (on the theory that there might be an election in the future), but rush through the Supreme Court nominee of a Republican president in two weeks? Argh! I forgot! We can ‘imagine’ what that looks like because you crammed through the confirmation of Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett in two weeks after Trump was defeated. Shut the front door!
Okay, Mitch. I am not giving up. No one in their right mind would ever do this: What if Republicans attempted to overturn the vote of the Electoral College by objecting to the counting of those votes because of baseless claims of election fraud that were rejected by the U.S. Attorney General, sixty-two state and federal courts, and Republican state election officials? Oh, shoot! We can ‘imagine’ what that looks like because that is what Republicans did to incite the January 6th Capitol Insurrection.
So, Mitch. You are wrong. We can ‘imagine’ what a ‘scorched-earth Senate’ looks like. It looks like the current Senate. It looks like unbridled obstructionism. It looks like bad-faith manipulation of Senate rules to pervert the process of elevating justice to the Supreme Court. It looks like an attempt to overthrow the government of the United States. We can imagine what a scorched-earth Senate looks like because we believe your depravity is bottomless. We get it. Whatever you can do, you will do—without hesitation or remorse. So, Mitch, don’t try to sweet-talk us out of eliminating the filibuster. We will—as soon as we can. Hold that thought, Mitch. Democracy will catch up with you. It’s just a matter of time.
Kathleen Oropeza, parent activist in Florida, explains in The Progressive how Republicans intend to destroy public schools and turn the state into a publicly-funded voucher haven. Governor Ron DeSantis is accomplishing Betsy DeVos’s dream while tossing aside the future of the state’s children. In Florida, public schools are held accountable for students and teachers but in private and religious schools, no accountability or standards are required.
Oropeza writes:
In what state Senator Perry Thurston calls a “death knell,” the 2021 Florida House and Senate are fast-tracking the passage of SB 48. This bill will convert the state’s five vouchers into two Education Savings Account/Debit Cards paid, for the first time, with public school tax dollars and a spending flexibility so wide that parents are not even required to pay for teachers or tuition.
Vouchers provide parents with public money to pay for private, often religious schools, with little accountability or guarantee of quality, in eighteen states. Florida leads the way, ahead of other states like Arizona, in how to “choice” parents out of public education and into private school voucher programs. Today, Florida operates two Exceptional Student Educationvouchers, the McKay and Gardiner, plus the Corporate Tax Credit, Hope and Family Empowerment, for a total of five vouchers. The goal has always been to significantly expand the base of students giving up their right to a free public education in exchange for granting parents the freedom to spend their child’s money as they see fit.
To accelerate the growth of vouchers, Florida seeks to convert all five programs into Education Savings Account/Debit Cards, funded directly by state general revenues. This money will not be spent on public schools. Instead, “parents can use the funds to pay for a variety of educational services, including private school tuition, tutoring, online education, home education, curriculum, therapy, postsecondary educational institutions in Florida and other defined educational services.
The bill, modeled after legislation created by the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, represents the unfinished business of former U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, the late libertarian economist Milton Friedman, and a host of rightwing philanthropists from the Waltons to the Kochs.
Reema Amin, a reporter for Chalkbeat in New York, wrote on Twitter that the Success Academy charter chain will not administer the state tests this year. Do you think that any public school superintendents or principals will make the same decision and get away with it? Nah, we won’t take the state tests this year.
Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, authored this powerful exposé of for-profit charter schools. The report names the nation’s largest for-profit charter chains, which profit not only from skimming tuition money, but from lucrative real estate deals and financial dealings with related for-profit corporations owned by the charter operator.
Between September 2020 and February, 2021, The Network for Public Education identified more than 1,100 charter schools that have contracts with one of 138 for-profit organizations to control the schools’ critical or complete operations, including
- management, personnel, and/or curriculum. Patterns of for-profit management companies directing schools to their related real estate and service corporations is more the rule than the exception among these schools. Chartered for Profit: The Hidden World of Charter Schools Operated For Financial Gain exposes how for profit education management organizations use charter schools to direct funds away from children to the pockets of profiteers.
As the report shows, a significant number of “nonprofit” charter schools are operated by for-profit entrepreneurs.
For-profit charters operate with minimal oversight, transparency, and accountability. Like other businesses, they cultivate relationships with politicians to maintain their favored status.
Meanwhile they siphon away money needed by public schools for their high salaries, generous expense accounts, and handsome profits.
#Chartered4Profit exposes that for-profit EMOs like Academica do not exist to support the charter schools… charter schools exist to help Academica’s real estate ventures.
#Chartered4Profit One of the largest EMOs, National Heritage Academies locks schools in with sweeps contracts. All revenue is passed to the for-profit management corporation.
Maurice Cunningham, a professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts, is a specialist in exposing the influence of “dark money” in our political life, especially in the area of education politics. In this post, he explores the connections among Christian conservatives, economic royalists like the Waltons and Charles Koch, and the so-called “National Parents Union,” which enjoys Walton funding.
The same people now running the NPU were funded by the Waltons, Mike Bloomberg, and other billionaires in 2016 to press for unlimited charter expansion in Massachusetts. When Cunningham exposed the money behind the “Yes on 2” campaign, the wind went out of its sails. Voters realized that the campaign was intended to divert money from their public schools to billionaire hobbies. I wrote about the fight over Proposition 2 in Massachusetts in my latest book Slaying Goliath as an example of successful parent-teacher resistance to the billionaires.
From the earliest days of corporate reform, which is now generally recognized to have been a failed effort to “reform” schools by privatizing them and by making standardized testing the focal point of education, we heard again and again that a child’s zip code should not be his or her destiny. Sometimes, in the evolving debates, I got the sense that some people thought that zip codes themselves were a problem. If only we eliminated zip codes! But the reality is that zip codes are a synonym for poverty. So what the reformers meant was that poverty should not be destiny.
Would it were so! If only it were true that a child raised in an impoverished home had the same life chances as children brought up in affluent homes, where food, medical care, and personal security are never in doubt.
But “reformers” insisted that they could overcome poverty by putting Teach for America inexperienced teachers in classrooms, because they (unlike teachers who had been professionally prepared) “believed” in their students and by opening charter schools staffed by TFA teachers. Some went further and said that vouchers would solve the problem of poverty. All of this was nonsense, and thirty years later, poverty and inequality remain persistent, unaffected by thousands of charter schools and TFA.
In effect, the reformers held out the illusion that testing, competition, and choice would level the playing field and life chances of rich and poor kids. After 30 or more years of corporate reform, it is clear that the reform message diverted our attention from the wealth gap and the income gap, which define the significant differences among children who have everything and children who have very little.
Imagine the cost of assuring that every school in the nation were equitably and adequately funded. Imagine if all students had small classes in a school with beautiful facilities, healthy play spaces, the best technology, and well-paid teachers. That would go a long way towards eliminating the differences between rich schools and poor schools, but our society has not taxed itself to make sure that all kids have great schools.
None of the promises of “reform” have been fulfilled. The cynical among us think that the beneficiaries of reform have been the billionaires, who were never willing to pay the taxes necessary to narrow income and wealth inequality or to fund good schools in every neighborhood. They gladly fund “reforms” that require chicken feed, as compared to the taxes necessary to truly make zip codes irrelevant.
Valerie Strauss writes about the dramatic effect that the Biden COVID relief plan will have on children. The effects will last only for one year, but Democrats hope to make the family income provision permanent. To do that, they need to retain a majority in 2022 because the GQP doesn’t believe in direct cash benefits to families. They prefer tax cuts for the rich, which might (or might not) incentivize them to create new jobs. That’s trickle-down economics. The late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan called it “feeding the sparrows by feeding the horses.”
Valerie Strauss suggests that the plan
President Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan is aimed at helping the country recover from the coronavirus pandemic — but it is another thing, as well: a major federal school reform unlike those we’ve seen in the past few decades.
While the new law is aimed at helping families get back on their feet and helping businesses and schools reopen after a year of turmoil, it includes measures that together have the potential to slash poverty among the 12 million students who live in low-income households.
Biden himself tweeted recently: “No child should grow up in poverty. The American Rescue Plan will expand the child tax credit and cut the child poverty rate in half.”
Outside estimates on its impact have come to the same conclusion, including one from the nonprofit Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, which said that two key tax credit provisions could “together lift more children above the poverty line, 5.5 million, than any other economic support program.” An Urban Institute analysis of the plan said the child poverty rate in 2021 will fall by more than 52 percent, largely from changes in tax law and the $1,400 stimulus checks that are part of the relief package.
It should be noted that most of the provisions in this new law will remain in effect only for a year or two — and there is no guarantee what will happen beyond then. But directly aiming to reduce child poverty is exactly what many advocates for children have long said is needed.
Policymakers have been focused for decades on improving public schools with a culture based on standardized testing, the expansion of charter schools and other “school choice” measures, and, in some places, the demonization of teachers. Child poverty, they said, was an excuse for poor performance by adults.
But the testing/choice/big data approach has not closed the achievement gap, and on some measures, it has barely moved.
Critics say research clearly shows that standardized test scores are fundamentally a metric of the state of child poverty in America, not of school quality. Students who live in low-income Zip codes virtually always have lower test scores than those who don’t.
While conditions inside many schools do need to be overhauled — and some teachers need better training — what happens to children outside of school has a far larger effect on their performance than what happens in class, researchers have said.
“On nearly every single outcome that we can assess, public schools have a marginal impact that is really small relative to the impact of families,” said Robert Pianta, dean of the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia and founding director of the university’s Center for Advanced Study of Teaching and Learning.
Many schools nationwide have attempted to address the out-of-school lives of students, including “community schools” that forge partnerships with local agencies and organizations to provide wraparound services for children.
But federal policy has been focused on other things since 2002′s No Child Left Behind law ushered in an era of standardized-testing accountability systems for schools and districts. While running for president, Biden had said he wants to make education equity a top priority.
Biden’s rescue plan will, among other things, send direct cash payments of $1,400 to more than 85 percent of U.S. households, make health care more affordable and extend unemployment benefits.
It will also make key changes in federal tax law, including with the child tax credit, which until now has largely helped middle- and high-income families. Under the new law, many more low-income families will be eligible for the credit, which will rise from $2,000 to $3,600 per child every year. The money will be sent to families over the course of the year in installments — essentially a guaranteed income.
Biden has said he wants the changes in the child tax credit to be permanent, which would have a lasting effect on the child poverty rate. At this time, they aren’t.
In 2011, writer Sarah Garland said in the Hechinger Report,“Increasingly, educators and experts are questioning the reformers’ tactics and asking whether the single-minded focus on schools has become an excuse to avoid the hard work of addressing poverty.”
The American Rescue Plan seems to be a start.
Scores of education deans signed a letter to Rep. Bobby Scott (D-VA), chair of the House Education Committee, in opposition to the recent announcement by the Biden administration that it would not grant waivers to states from the annual testing mandate in the Every Student Succeeds Act, which originated as part of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002. The letter was written before the confirmation of Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona. The signatures were gathered by Kevin Kumashiro as spokesman for the group.
Dear Chairman Scott,
I am writing as a leader of Education Deans for Justice and Equity (https://educationdeans.org), an alliance of hundreds of education deans across the country with expertise in educational equity and civil rights.
We, in EDJE, are deeply concerned by the recent announcement by the U.S. Department of Education that it will not grant state waivers of ESSA mandates for 2021 student testing, as it did in 2020. Two weeks ago, we sent the attached letter to Secretary-Designate Miguel Cardona, signed by over 200 deans and other leaders, that outlines what we believe the research makes clear, namely, that there are fundamental problems with these tests, that the administration and use of these tests widen (not remediate) inequities, and that these problems are exacerbated in the midst of the pandemic.
We agree that we need data to make informed decisions and to address long-standing and emergent challenges, but to do so, we describe the different types of data that are needed and the assessments–other than state testing–that are more appropriate for such purposes. We urge you and Congress to act quickly and forcefully to insist that the Department waive mandates for 2021 student testing, and we are available to work and meet with you in support of this change.
The letter, included in the link below, begins:
As the nation struggles to address the impact of the pandemic on public schools, we urge the U.S. Department of Education to waive federal ESSA student-testing requirements for all states for 2020-2021 (as was done for 2019-2020).
We, Education Deans for Justice and Equity (EDJE), are an alliance of hundreds of deans of schools and colleges of education across the country who draw on our expertise as researchers and leaders to highlight three research findings to support our request.
First, problems abound with high-stakes standardized testing of students, particularly regarding validity, reliability, fairness, bias, and cost. National research centers and organizations have synthesized these findings about standardized testing, including the National Educational Policy Center and FairTest. For example, some of the harmful impacts of high-stakes testing include: distorted and less rigorous curriculum; the misuse of test scores, including grade retention, tracking, and teacher evaluation; deficit framing (blaming) of students and their families and ineffective remedial interventions, particularly for communities of color and communities in poverty; and heightened anxiety and shame for teachers and students. Researchers have also spoken specifically about annual state testing, like in California and Texas, arguing that such assessments should not be administered, much less be the basis for high-stakes decision making.
Second, these problems are amplified during the pandemic. The research brief, The Shift to Online Education During and Beyond the Pandemic, describes the “law of amplification” and ways that the shift to online education widens long-standing inequities and injustices in education, particularly for groups already disadvantaged in schools. These challenges with technology, logistics, and safety would unquestionably apply to testing, whether in-person or online. For example, districts that administer computer-based tests in-person are now trying to determine how to recall computers that were loaned to students in order to have enough computers in school, which in effect, means that those students will not have computers for remote learning for weeks. In fact, with the vast changes and differences in curriculum and instruction that resulted from the shift to online education over the past year—that is, the reduction in opportunities to learn, particularly in schools that were already under-resourced—the content validity of the tests is almost certainly compromised, as described by the National Education Policy Center. Furthermore, with so much trauma in the lives of students and families, schools need to invest all they can into quality time with students, supplemental tutoring, and enrichment and wellness programs, not stress-inducing, time-consuming tests that provide narrow data of limited use.
Diane Ravitch's blog 