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National Education Leaders Worry That Students Will Fall Behind During School Closures

By dianeravitch
April 13, 2020 //
44

The Washington Post reports that education leaders are worried that students are falling behind due to school closures and extraordinary measures must be taken so they can “catch up.”

Of course, there is good reason to worry about children who have experienced months without formal schooling. Many, however, do have access to emergency remote teaching. The children likeliest you have no educational opportunities are those who are already farthest behind, those with no access to a computer or the internet, those who get no academic support or direction at home.

When school ultimately reopens, the children who need the most help should have extra-small classes and intensive time with experienced teachers. That requires more money, however, and states are unlikely to increase spending when their revenues are plummeting. The poor kids are likely to get testing and lamentations, not the small classes and instruction they need.

Here is the latest:

Only weeks after the coronavirus pandemic forced American schools online, education leaders across the country have concluded that millions of children’s learning will be severely stunted, and are planning unprecedented steps to help them catch up.

In Miami, school will extend into the summer and start earlier in the fall, at least for some students.

In Cleveland, schools may shrink the curriculum to cover only core subjects. In Columbia, Mo., this year’s lessons will be woven into next year’s.


Some experts [i.e. Mike Petrilli of the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute] suggest holding back more kids, a controversial idea, while others propose a half-grade step-up for some students, an unconventional one. A national teachers union [i.e., the AFT] is proposing a massive national summer school program.




Graduates from the Class of 2020 shared how they’re coping after the coronavirus outbreak brought senior year to an abrupt ending.

The ideas being considered will require political will and logistical savvy, and they are already facing resistance from teachers and parents. They’ll also require money, and lots of it, at a time when a cratering economy is devastating state and local budgets, with plunging tax collections and rising costs.

As Congress considers another coronavirus spending package, schools’ ability to make up ground may hinge on how much more they can pry from Washington.


The $2.2 trillion stimulus package approved last month included $13.5 billion for K-12 education. In the next round, a coalition of school administrators and teachers unions is seeking more than $200 billion, citing those depleted state budgets.

In New York state, for instance, schools were poised for deep cuts, with the state anticipating revenue losses as high as $10 billion. The stimulus package will reverse those cuts, but without more bailout money, schools won’t get any extra funding to deal with the crisis.


Just a month ago, most American children were attending school as normal. Today, virtually every U.S. school building is closed. Seventeen states have ordered campuses shuttered through this academic year, another three recommend it, and educators and parents across the country are bracing for a lost spring — and maybe more.



Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said last week that he expects schools can reopen in the fall. But he can’t be sure, he said.


Whenever schools return, researchers say, the likely result is a generation of students forced to play catch-up, perhaps for years to come. Most vulnerable are those who are always the most vulnerable: homeless children, those living in deep poverty and students with disabilities. While some students are adapting to distance learning, others are struggling to find quiet spaces to study, lack reliable Internet access or must care for younger siblings during the day, among other barriers.


“ This may be the biggest challenge public education has had to face in the four-plus decades I’ve been doing this work,” said Michael Casserly, executive director of the Council of the Great City Schools, a nonprofit coalition of 76 of the nation’s largest urban public school systems. He said that online learning is likely failing many low-income families and that without “substantial” new spending, schools won’t have the money to reverse the damage. “We are facing an educational catastrophe.”


In some districts, the problem is just getting kids to show up.
In the Los Angeles Unified School District, the country’s second-largest system, 1 in 4 students has not logged on at all. Older students were more likely than elementary children to be connected, but on any given day in one recent week, a quarter of high school students didn’t log in.




Before the coronavirus crisis, only about 1 in 4 students in the high-poverty Baltimore City Public Schools had computers. More Chromebooks are on order, but for now teachers are trying to reach families by phone and Instagram, and the district is broadcasting lessons over its television station.
“What we are providing now is not going to make up fully for all of the time lost,” chief executive Sonja Brookins Santelises said.


In Atlanta’s public schools, about 6,000 children still don’t have computers, and about 10 percent of students have not yet logged in to the remote-learning system, Superintendent Meria Joel Carstarphen said.
One recent day, Carstarphen visited the home of a family whose children had not logged in. She found their mother struggling to provide food, and discovered the house was in an Internet “dead zone.” She also realized she knew the family’s oldest child, a “super sweet kid,” from her visits to his high school football team.
“He’s the man of the house and he’s only a junior right now,” Carstarphen said. “He has not been doing his work and neither have his siblings for three weeks.”


Even when students have computers, parents and caregivers fear that minimal learning is underway. Billie Stewart is raising her 8-year-old grandson, Tony, on Detroit’s east side. She’s received little direction from his school, she said, and trying to keep up with the school’s online offerings has been “almost overwhelming.”
Stewart, 73, has worked hard to lay out a daily schedule for Tony but finds herself unable to keep up. “If I get asked for another password, I don’t know what I’ll do.”




In Philadelphia’s public schools, teachers have been told not to teach new material, due to concerns that lessons cannot be equitably provided to all. Philadelphia plans to begin remote education later this month, but for weeks families have been left largely on their own.


“

We’ve been looking for guidance from teachers, but they don’t really know what they’re supposed to be doing,” said Stacy Stewart, who has two children in a North Philadelphia elementary school, plus 1-year-old twins. “Ever since they’ve been out of school, there’s been no structured virtual learning. It’s just been flying by the seat of their pants.”
The school provided a study packet for Mikail, a second-grader, but no direction for Abdul Malik, who’s in kindergarten, other than links to a few education websites. There’s only one computer in the house, which Stewart needs for work, and it’s been a struggle to keep her kids engaged in anything that looks like learning. “I mean, I’m not really a teacher,” she said.


To understand how deep the setbacks may be, researchers are examining data on the so-called “summer slide,” in which students, particularly those in low-income families, lose months of reading and math knowledge. Research differs on the magnitude of the loss, but there’s broad agreement that this year’s losses will be greater than normal.

Categories Accountability, Education Reform, Testing

Los Angeles: No Student Will Get an F and Schools Will be Closed Until the Fall

By dianeravitch
April 13, 2020 //
6

Howard Blume of the Los Angeles Times reports that no student will get an F grade during the coronavirus closure, and schools will remain closed this summer.

Blume writes:

No student will receive a failing grade on their spring report card and Los Angeles campuses will be closed not only for the remainder of the academic year, but throughout the summer as well, the district announced Monday.

The actions are the latest sweeping measures taken by the nation’s second-largest school system in response to the coronavirus pandemic.

“There is still no clear picture in testing, treatments or vaccines and we will not reopen school facilities until state authorities tell us it is safe and appropriate to do so,” L.A. schools Supt. Austin Beutner said during a Monday video briefing. “The remainder of the school year … will be completed in the current, remote fashion and we will have a summer session in a similar manner.”

The no-fail policy was posted in a late morning bulletin and confirmed by Chief Academic Officer Alison Yoshimoto-Towery, who spoke of educators’ concerns about the family hardships that are likely to limit students’ ability to learn in the district, where 80% of them come from low-income families.

Beutner praised the work of all district staff, especially teachers, during his video briefing, but acknowledged that all students have not had the same access to academic work since campuses closed on March 16.

“Many of the examples we see of successful video learning have a significant selection bias,” Beutner said. “Affluent families with resources at home, schools with years of training and limitless budgets and students with demonstrated aptitude to learn independently. Public schools have in their DNA the commitment to serve all students, irrespective of circumstance, and it will not be so simple.”

The state did not issue a universal mandate on grading, but California Department of Education guidelines say that schools should “enable students to complete state graduation requirements with needed flexibilities” associated with online learning. In their briefings, state officials have stressed that local educators intend to be understanding of students’ situations.

The state guidelines say that schools “should weigh their policies with the lens of equity and with the primary goal of doing no harm to students.”

Categories Closing schools, Education Reform, Health, Los Angeles

Tom Ultican: Billionaire-Funded Group Claims Progressive Are Most Inequitable

By dianeravitch
April 13, 2020 //
37

Tom Ultican reports on a billionaire-funded paper that makes the strange claim that the most progressive cities are the most inequitable. The “study,” he points out, was not peer-reviewed nor was it written by scholars with academic credentials. Its central thesis is that progressive cities are less able to educate students of color than conservative cities.

Since conservative cities spend less than progressive ones, is the underlying message that we should spend less on schools?

The paper is titled: “The Secret Shame: How America’s Most Progressive Cities Betray Their Commitment to Educational Opportunity for All.”

Was it produced by a right wing think tank? No, it came from the media website Education Post, which regularly touts school choice and critiques public schools.

As you will see, the methodology and the conclusions are strained, if not downright bizarre. as Ultican puts it, the paper is a polemic, a word salad, not a study.

The billionaires funding the organization called Brightbeam that produced this paper are Michael Bloomberg, the Waltons, Mark Zuckerberg, and Laurene Powell Jobs.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization

David Berliner: How “Successful” Charter Schools Cull and Skim Students They Don’t Want

By dianeravitch
April 13, 2020 //
33

I recently wrote an article that referred to charter schools that succeed by excluding students with disabilities, English learners, and others unlikely to get high scores. The editor questioned if this claim was accurate. I turned to several expert researchers to ask their view, and they all agreed with my assertion. David Berliner of Arizona State University—one of the nation’s pre-eminent researchers and statisticians—had data to back it up, and I invited him to write an essay addressing this issue.

He wrote:

Culling, Creaming, Skimming, Thinning: Things We Do to Herds and School Children

To cull is to select things you intend to reject, often in reference to a group of animals. An outbreak of hoof-and-mouth disease can cause authorities to order a cull of farm pigs. An outbreak of low-test scores or a meeting with undesirable parents can promote the culling of charter students. To cream is to remove something choice from an aggregate, such as selecting the best and the brightest appearing students and families for acceptance to a charter or private school.

Diane Ravitch was recently criticized for writing that charter schools, supported by public tax money, engage in skimming and creaming students and families. Ravitch, however is right! Public charter schools, and private schools that accept public monies through vouchers, admit only certain students, often those predicted most likely to succeed and whose parents are “acceptable.” And, if these schools choose “wrong,” they cull the herd later. Between selective admissions and culling the student body, the data ordinarily used to describe a school’s accomplishments will make charter and voucher schools look quite good.

Let me illustrate with data collected by my wife, Dr. Ursula Casanova, by a former student (Assistant Professor Amanda Potterton, of the University of Kentucky), and from the ACLU of Arizona.

Dr. Casanova wrote in the Washington Post about the Basis (charter) school in Scottsdale, Arizona, enrolling students in grades 5-12. Based on its test scores that year, it was named the top high school in Arizona. But the year it was so honored, Casanova found enrollments from 5th to 8th grade to be 152, 138, 110, and 94. Then, the high school enrollments, in grades 9-11, were 42, 30, and 23. Finally, the 12th grade graduating class had 8 students! With no shame whatsoever the Basis school was able to claim they graduated 100% of their seniors and that all were accepted at college!

The Basis school of Tucson, part of the same chain of about a dozen charter schools, mostly in Arizona, presented data with a similar pattern. In the year for which Casanova reported, the school started out with 127 students in the fifth grade. But they had only 100 students in eighth grade, 69 in the 9th grade, 45 in 10th grade, and 27 in 11th grade. At the end of 12th grade they had only 24 seniors left at graduation. The graduating class was only 35% of the ninth-grade cohort, and they were less than 20% of that fifth -grade cohort. Culling the herd seems to describe school policy.

Potterton wrote in Teachers College Record about four highly rated charter schools in Arizona, the two Basis schools reported on above, and two other schools from the Great Hearts Academy chain, which run more than 20 schools in the Phoenix area.

In the year of her study she found that the average rate for free and reduced lunch in Arizona schools was 35%. The average for free and reduced lunch in these the four charter schools? 0%, 0%, 0%, 0%. Highly selective admissions and culling work quite well. That same year the state average for English language learners in our schools was 7.5%. The English language learners in these four schools? 0%, 0%, 0%, 0%. The percent of students with IEPs in the state was about 12%. But the percent of such students in these four schools was between, .6% and 3.5%.

Arizona is not unique. In a recent year the federal government reported in the Common Core of data that in 2014 the Boston public schools graduated 85% of its grade 9 students. But the “City on A Hill” Charter school graduated 46% of its grade 9 class; while the “Boston Preparatory Academy,” “Boston Collegiate Charter,” and “Academy of the Pacific Rim Charter” each graduated about 60% of its 9th grade class. Culling in charters seems to be widespread.

Another example comes from Philadelphia’s Boys Latin Charter, as analyzed by Jersey Jazzman in his column of July 28th, 2017. Boys Latin proudly boasted that 98% of its students were accepted into college. But in the years 2011-2015 the school graduated about 60% of its 9th grade class, culling approximately 40% of its student body, and thus allowing the school to make a claim that 98% of its students are accepted to college.

Charter schools cull families with special needs too. Arizona’s ACLU in 2017 noted that state law forbade charter schools from limiting the number of special education students they accept. But “The Rising School” in Tucson advertised blatantly that the school’s special education and resources department “is currently full.… Thus, any student with an IEP will be put on our waiting list.” Also in apparent defiance of the law, “AmeriSchools Academy” (in Phoenix, Tucson, and Yuma) blatantly noted that “Special Education placements are limited to a capacity of ten (10) students for each school site. Students in excess of this number are to be wait listed with provisional registration.”

Further, by state law, Arizona’s charter schools may not require students or their parents to complete pre-enrollment activities, such as essays, interviews or school tours. Nor can charter schools use students’ performance on interviews or essays, or the student’s decision not to complete requested pre-enrollment activities, to determine which students to accept. But the ACLU found that at the “Flagstaff Arts and Leadership Academy” students must write a one-page essay as part of their enrollment application. As part of the enrollment process at the “Satori Charter School” in Tucson, parents and students must meet with a school administrator. These are all excellent, though illegal ways to cull potentially undesirable families.

State law also directs charter schools not to require parental involvement as a condition of admission. And furthermore, charter schools must not pressure parents into donating money. As in many states, the Arizona Constitution guarantees students the right to a free public education, and charter schools are supposed to be public schools. Yet the same Great Hearts Academy charter schools reported on above asked each family to contribute $1,500 per student per year. Parents were also encouraged to donate anywhere from $200 to $2,000 to the school. The “Mission Montessori Academy” of Scottsdale asked parents to volunteer 15 hours every year per child enrolled, or make a contribution of $150 to the school in lieu of volunteer hours. The “Montessori Day Public School” chain noted that “All parents are expected to contribute 40 hours of volunteer time per family, per year.” The “Freedom Academy” in Phoenix and Scottsdale required a non-refundable $300 “Extracurricular Arts Fee,” due at enrollment. The “San Tan Charter School (in Gilbert, AZ)” required parents to provide a credit card the school can keep on file to pay several fees, including a $250 technology rental fee for grades 9-12. These are all great ways to cull families, illegality be damned!!

In many states, private schools receive public monies through vouchers, and still discriminate against certain children and families, culling them as needed! One of the most blatant examples I know of is the Fayetteville Christian School in North Carolina, a recipient, in a recent school year, of $495,966 of public money. But it is not open to the public! It says, up front, that it doesn’t want Jews, Muslims, Hindu’s and many others. At this school a student, and at least one parent, have to have taken Jesus Christ as their personal savior, or they cannot be admitted. They also cannot engage in sexual promiscuity, illicit drug use and homosexuality—or anything else that scripture defines as deviate or perverted. Any report of such activities by parents or the students is grounds for expulsion. This is culling of the student body by religion and life style, in a school receiving about a half million dollars of public funds per year!

Many of the schools I mentioned above, are considered great public and/or great private schools. Creaming and culling really do pay off in terms of a school’s reputation, as long as the schools’ policies are not examined too closely. But Dr. Casanova asked an excellent question of our citizenry when she reported on the graduation rates of various charters and private schools, and compared them to the reports from San Luis High School, in San Luis, AZ, on the Mexican border, part of the Yuma, Arizona school system. Data from different sources informs us that in recent years this public high school serves almost 3,000 students a year, almost 100% of whom are Hispanic, half of whom are limited English proficient, and most are classified as economically disadvantaged. But this public high school manages to graduate over 80 percent of their freshman class, and almost 90 percent of its senior class. They also do this with a teacher/pupil ratio well in excess of the U.S. average, and working with Arizona’s per pupil school funding formula, which is among the lowest in the nation. Why isn’t San Luis High School, and others like it, compared to the culling and creaming charters and voucher schools, considered among our great American high schools?

So many of our public schools deserve our gratitude for doing such a good job educating all our citizenry, many under difficult conditions. The Darwinian approach, to push the weakest students out of school, to cull the herd, should not be tolerated in a democracy, and therefore is absolutely inappropriate behavior for a school receiving public money. But Darwinism really is the philosophy guiding some of the highest rated charters. A respondent to a blog by my colleague Gene Glass, where he too criticized the culling and creaming practices of charters, stated the following: “Basis schools does not engage in any form of thinning across any grade. Students do drop out because they are not fit to thrive in the difficult curriculum ….”

Let’s think about what “not fit to thrive” might look like as a guiding philosophy for our public schools. We could do away with special education, bilingual education, counseling and guidance, transportation, free and reduced breakfasts and lunches, school nurses, etc. The Darwinian approach to schooling is not merely undemocratic,….. it is evil! If it were me, I wouldn’t give another public dollar to any charter or voucher school that culls, skims, or creams. They are all patently undemocratic.

David C. Berliner
Regents’ Professor Emeritus
Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College
Arizona State University

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Reform, English Language Learners, Privatization, School Choice, Special Education

L.A. Times: Trump Scrambling to Restore Budget Cuts to Health Agencies

By dianeravitch
April 12, 2020 //
25

Trump and his merry band of budget cutters thought the federal government spent too much on public health. Year after year, they have slashed agencies whose mission was to protect the public from pandemics.

The Los Angeles Times has the story:


It’s an obscure U.S. government bureau with many missions, including this vital one: hunting down viral diseases like COVID-19 that spill over from animals to the human world.

But in late 2019 it found itself without a permanent leader, and squarely in the Trump administration’s budget-slashing sights.

That all changed with the coronavirus pandemic that has killed more than 20,000 Americans and more than 100,000 people across the world.

Now, the Global Health Bureau, part of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), has abundant government support. Congress and President Trump have agreed to multiply the budget for the bureau’s activities that can support “global health security” and related efforts as much as fivefold, to more than half a billion dollars. And its top leadership position — left empty for three years by the White House and a plodding Senate confirmation process — finally was filled in late March.

The funding boost, along with new leadership, will enhance the agency’s ability to respond to the immediate crisis and bolster foreign health systems to protect against future outbreaks. It also could reboot stalled efforts to have the U.S. help lead a global quest to corral an estimated 1.6 million animal-borne viruses that threaten to leap to human hosts.

“With support from policymakers and the scientific community, we can do this — we have all of the tools and just need to harness the energy and the resources to get it done,” said Jonna Mazet, executive director of the One Health Institute at the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine, who headed USAID’s previous initiative to track dangerous viruses.

Outside experts caution that they have seen the U.S. beef up global health programs during past emergencies, like the 2014-16 Ebola epidemic, only to see funding wither when the crises subsided. “The U.S. government funding for this kind of work is completely episodic. There will be another outbreak — that’s a given — and funding that comes in fits and starts doesn’t allow for any real preparations,” said Jennifer Kates, who heads global health policy research at the Kaiser Family Foundation. “Right now, we’re just in response mode. The money is really important, but if the outbreak is as devastating as it could be, it won’t go very far.”

The injection of new funds increases the budget USAID devotes to this work to as much as $535 million, dwarfing 2019 funding of roughly $100 million for the programs. (It’s unclear how much of the $535 million will be spent in the coming year.) That advance is even more notable given that the Trump administration’s budget team previously proposed trimming global health security funding at USAID by 10% to a maximum of $90 million, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.

The new money would be enough to allow the agency to extend the kind of work done by one of its key virus-hunting programs, called PREDICT. That program to allow early warnings about dangerous viruses had been allowed to go fallow, just two months before the deadly new coronavirus burst onto the world stage.

The failure to fully renew PREDICT dismayed infectious disease experts, who said chasing down the pathogens was a key to preventing future pandemics.

A Times story reporting on the demise of PREDICT created a furor and, like much of the responses to the coronavirus pandemic, quickly took on political overtones. Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden tweeted that the ending of the PREDICT program had been a mistake, adding: “Donald Trump’s shortsighted actions left our nation ill-prepared to deal with this outbreak.”

Categories Education Reform

Garrison Keillor on Easter

By dianeravitch
April 12, 2020 //
22

This is from Garrison Keillor’s “The Writer’s Almanac”:

Today is the Christian holiday of Easter Sunday, the celebration of Jesus’ resurrection from the dead three days after his crucifixion. Easter is a moveable feast; in other words, it’s one of the few floating holidays in the calendar year, because it’s based on the cycles of the moon. Jesus was said to have risen from the dead on the first Sunday after the first full moon of spring. For that reason, Easter can fall as early as March 22nd and as late as April 25th. Easter also marks the end of the 40-day period of Lent and the beginning of Eastertide; the week before Easter is known as Holy Week and includes the religious holidays Maundy Thursday and Good Friday.

The word “Easter” and most of the secular celebrations of the holiday come from pagan traditions. Anglo Saxons worshipped Eostre, the goddess of springtime and the return of the sun after the long winter. According to legend, Eostre once saved a bird whose wings had frozen during the winter by turning it into a rabbit. Because the rabbit had once been a bird, it could still lay eggs, and that rabbit became our Easter Bunny. Eggs were a symbol of fertility in part because they used to be so scarce during the winter. There are records of people giving each other decorated eggs at Easter as far back as the 11th century.

Categories Education Reform

A Special Message to the Readers of This Blog

By dianeravitch
April 12, 2020 //
53

This blog was started on April 12, 2012.

Today is its 8th anniversary.

During that time, you have been wonderful readers. Your support has kept me going. I’ve shared with you the news stories, posts by bloggers I respect, occasional humor, and even some personal advice.

My goal for eight years has been to create a broad awareness of the failure of privatization and standardized testing to improve education. The movement to save and improve our nation’s public schools is strong and getting stronger. When someday this terrible pandemic ends, we will continue our struggle for better education for all.

The blog is closing in on 36 million page views. There have been more than 600,000 comments by you.

All in all, the blog has given me a great opportunity to speak my mind and to engage in lively conversation every day with you and to learn from you, not only your views but what’s happening in your community and state.

Here is my gift to you. Open and enjoy.

If you want to show your appreciation for my work, send a copy of SLAYING GOLIATH to a legislator or school board member.

Thank you!

Categories Education Reform

William Doyle and Pasi Sahlberg: This Is What Should Change After the Pandemic

By dianeravitch
April 11, 2020 //
25

The standards and testing cabal wants to preserve the status quo ante and double down on accountability and NCLB-style measures after the pandemic. The choice crowd wants to push their agendas subsidizing anything and everything while slashing public schools.

William Doyle and Pasi Sahlberg have a different vision. They want learning to be creative and joyful. They describe their ideas on Valerie Strauss’s “Answer Sheet” blog:

William Doyle and Pasi Sahlberg, public school fathers in New York City and Sydney, respectively, are co-authors of “Let the Children Play: How More Play Will Save our Schools and Help Children Thrive.”

The coronavirus crisis has shattered one of the most dysfunctional pillars of childhood education. On March 20, U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos suspended the federal requirement for the mass standardized testing of children, announcing “Neither students nor teachers need to be focused on high-stakes tests during this difficult time.” Other countries, including England and Australia, are doing the same. These decisions should be made permanent, and the job of assessing learning should be returned to classroom teachers, not politicians and for-profit testing companies.

More than 1.5 billion young people around the world have been affected by school closures due to the covid-19 pandemic. Our own young children are among them. Like countless other parents, we now have to home-school, remotely work, and keep our families safe in an atmosphere of uncertainty about the future.

Some day, hopefully in the not-too distant future, our schools will open their doors again. When they do, we should give our children a much better education system. To do this, we should build our schools upon a foundation of what the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) calls “the ideal educational and developmental milieu for children”: play, in all of its forms.

The evidence is clear. A wide range of research indicates that intellectual and physical play confers a host of cognitive, social, emotional and health benefits. Play is the learning language of children, and pediatricians know it has the power to supercharge more conventional, and equally necessary, forms of academic instruction.

Over the last 20 years, politicians in the United States and elsewhere and have tried to improve public schools with policies based on the high-pressure standardized testing of children. Instead of improving learning, these policies have demoralized teachers and students, pushed out the arts, recess and learning through play, and wasted billions of dollars for marginal gains, by doing little to relieve the inequities, segregation and student disengagement that plague many of our schools.

In the United States, for example, recess in public schools is widely restricted, and even denied as a punishment for wiggling in class or late homework — despite the scientific evidence that physical activity improves behavior and academic performance. Before the school shutdowns, millions of American children were already spending their days in cruel, unnatural conditions of forced physical restraint in our public schools. According to one report, 30 percent of American kindergartners have no recess anymore, due to academic pressure on 4-, 5- and 6 -year-olds.

Now, well over a billion children will be almost totally cooped up indoors at home, perhaps for months to come.
“We have to assume that the incidence of PTSD and anxiety disorders as a function of what we are as a society going through, for both parents and children, is going to be huge,” pediatrician Michael Yogman told us. “ … We need to think about how are we going to help children recover from the trauma of this experience.”

According to Yogman, principal author of the American Academy of Pediatrics 2018 landmark report “The Power of Play,” a worst-case scenario would be for schools to say, “We missed four months of academic subjects and tests, so we’re going to compress it all into a month and catch up.” He considers this kind of thinking a terrible idea, since “it would just accentuate the stress children are already experiencing and undermine their capacity for productive learning.”

Representing the nation’s 67,000 children’s doctors, the American Academy of Pediatrics has declared that “the importance of playful learning for children cannot be overemphasized.” In fact, the doctors assert, “It could be argued that active play is so central to child development that it should be included in the very definition of childhood. Play offers more than cherished memories of growing up, it allows children to develop creativity and imagination while developing physical, cognitive and emotional strengths.”

In direct opposition to the prevailing wisdom of some American self-styled “education reformers” who have slashed recess and play in inner-city schools, the AAP has noted that for children in poverty, “play should be an integral component of school engagement.” According to the pediatricians, “the lifelong success of children is based on their ability to be creative and to apply the lessons learned from playing.”

Play is urgently relevant to the new education world that will emerge from the coronavirus pandemic. “Play can mitigate stress,” Dr. Yogman tells us. “The executive function skills that kids develop through play can promote resilience, and play can restore safe and nurturing relationships with parents, teachers and other children, which also promotes resilience. That’s got to be our goal when kids get back to school. At every level, in our schools, homes, and communities, our social structures have to acknowledge the magnitude of stress all families, especially those with young children will experience, and design programs that mitigate that, including lots of physical activity and play.”

In these times of uncertainty, pain and fear, play can be a big part of the cure. During this crisis, parents should resist the temptation to overstress their children with excessive, often screen-based “remote at-home learning” in an attempt to “not fall behind.” In this bizarre, tragic chapter in world history, children need parental attention and love, comfort, safety, nondigital play, healthy routines, songs, books, blocks, basic art supplies, and, whenever possible, physical activity, much more than they need academic pressure, graded assignments and excessive screen time. We recently asked our own children, age 8 and 12, what they think their own weekday study schedule at home should look like during the crisis. They sketched out time for learning, practice and rest, and also blocked out slots of time through the day for recess, play and physical activity breaks — just as pediatricians recommend. We should listen carefully to both children and their doctors, who together represent qualified experts on childhood.

In this health emergency, government leaders around the world are urgently seeking the advice of medical and scientific experts. They should do the same when it comes to education. When the covid-19 pandemic passes and the world opens up again, we should redesign our schools using the best expert evidence, just as we are doing in response to the global health pandemic. We should give our children schools that follow doctor’s orders, by giving them lots of physical activity and play to energize learning and boost health and happiness.
The mission of childhood education can no longer be the generation of standardized test data, but learning powered by the physical, mental and emotional health and well being of every child and every teacher.
Schools should be the favorite place of every child. It’s time we made them so.

Categories Creativity, Education Reform, Joy, Play

Is Distance Learning the Wave of the Future?

By dianeravitch
April 11, 2020 //
23

We have known for a long while that the worst scandals in the charter sector are intertwined with online learning and cyber charters. Consider the bankruptcy last year of ECOT (the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow) in Ohio, whose owner collected $1 billion from the state over nearly 20 years, but declared bankruptcy rather than pay the state $60 million for inflated enrollments.

Then there is the infamous A-1 scandal in California, where the owners and several cooperating school districts were indicted in San Diego nearly a year ago for the theft of $50 million from the state, a scheme that involved phantom students.

Yet here we are in the midst of a pandemic and most schools have been shutdown to protect students and staff from exposure to the coronavirus. Almost overnight, millions of students were required to continue learning by going online. The platforms are different, but tens of millions of students are engaged in distance learning.

Kathleen Porter-Magee of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute sees this asa fortuitous moment, an opportunity to revolutionize education. She calls it “A Revolution in Education, Born of a Necessity.”

She says, seize the moment.

She writes:

Said more simply: Those working “in the arena” to run great schools and support great teachers are charging full steam ahead to make the most of this period of remote learning. Those who have been quick to dismiss distance learning as “ineffective” are looking in the rearview mirror and imagining a world where past must be prologue, rather than embracing the innovation that this moment may well have sparked.

You will not be surprised to learn that I disagree. From what I see and read and hear, I believe that parents want to get back to their own work. They don’t want their children home all the time, learning at a screen. Those who want to home school are already doing it. More important, I think that students must miss their friends, their teachers, their social life, their teams and activities. Home Alone is a drag.

And then there is the inconvenient CREDO study of 2015, which found that students in virtual charter schools fell behind their peers in brick-and-mortar public schools. In a school year of 180 days, the online students lost 44 days in reading and 180 days in math.

If you want our whole society to go backwards, distance learning and cyber schooling will do it.

Categories Education Reform, Online Education, Technology, Virtual Charter Schools

World Bank Changes Policy on For-Profit Privatized Schools

By dianeravitch
April 10, 2020 //
19

Until recently, the World Bank has been a vocal supporter of for-profit privatized education such as that offered by Bridge International, which had been expanding rapidly in Africa.

Thanks in large part to the work of Education International, a world confederation of teachers’ unions, the World Bank has changed its policy.

In a sudden and far-reaching policy shift, World Bank President David Malpass has agreed to major reforms that include officially freezing any direct or indirect investments in private for-profit pre-primary, primary and secondary schools. This has been a critical issue for Education International for many years and has been the key focus of our interactions with the Bank.

It has also been a major thrust of our Global Response campaign, where member organisations, regions and the EI secretariat have worked together to research and expose the activities of private, for-profit firms. Examples of that work include Uganda and Kenya, where illegal operations took place or labour standards and regulations were violated by Bridge International Academies.

Given that the World Bank is the largest funder of education in the developing world, EI has been keeping a close eye on their work. We have repeatedly and publicly challenged them for promoting privatisation, attacking teachers and undermining quality education systems and have tried to engage in dialogue – in meetings, including with EI officers and through letters, reports, and other methods. Not only did policy and financial support for private, for-profit, education operators like Bridge International Academies continue, but it increased. Some national foreign assistance agencies, including the UKs Dfid and USAID as well as private funders joined the parade. It was an ideological and profit-driven attack on public education.

Two things altered the situation. First, a pro-labour majority was elected in the US House of Representatives in the 2018 mid-term elections. That shifted leadership of key committees to members who were friendlier to trade union views. Second, the COVID-19 crisis required a broad consensus among the House, the Senate, and the White House to adopt a 2-trillion-dollar relief package. The positions of the World Bank evolved in discussions between the House Financial Services Committee chaired by Maxine Waters (D-California), and US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin.

These actions built on growing global recognition of the damage done by private, for-profit education. That increasing concern includes a decision by the European Parliament and an agreement by the Board of the Global Partnership for Education (GPE).

World Bank polices and advice to many countries have long supported private delivery of education and other public services. Although it has officially committed to support the Sustainable Development Goals, much of its policy and actions run counter to that global consensus.

Financial support for private, for-profit education firms came largely from the World Bank Group’s International Finance Corporation (IFC), which is charged with making loans to the private sector. Under the agreement with the US, the IFC will freeze all support to private, for profit schools, including through direct investment, indirect investment and advisory services

EI continues to pressure the Workd Bank to adopt progressive policies that recognize workers’ rights and the need to regulate businesses practices.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, For-Profit, International, Privatization, Vouchers
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