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David Berliner Comments on Gloomy Report by Kane and Reardon About Learning Loss

By dianeravitch
May 18, 2023 //
28

The New York Times recently published an article by Thomas Kane of Harvard and Sean Reardon of Stanford lamenting that parents had no idea how much the pandemic had set back their children’s education. (“Parents Don’t Understand How Far Behind Their Kids Are in School”). Most parents, when asked, respond optimistically that they expect their children to bounce back from whatever academic losses they suffered.

Kane and Reardon think it’s time to dash their optimism. First, there are the NAEP scores showing setbacks in reading, math, and history. “By the spring of 2022, according to our calculations, the average student was half a year behind in math and a third of a year behind in reading.”

Working with researchers from other institutions, they reviewed data from 7,800 communities in 41 states, where 26 million students are enrolled, about 80% of all students in public K-8 schools.

Their biggest conclusion: “The pandemic exacerbated economic and racial educational inequality.” Also: “test scores declined more in districts where schools were closed longer” but “Students fell behind even in places where schools closed very briefly…” However, “the educational impacts of the pandemic were not driven solely by what was happening (or not happening) in schools. The disruption in children’s lives outside of school also mattered: the constriction of their social lives, the stress their parents were feeling, the death of family members, the signals that the world was not safe and the very real fear that you or someone you love might get very sick and die.”

There is much more to read and ponder in the article.

I sent the article to my esteemed friend David Berliner, who is widely recognized as the nation’s pre-eminent education research expert.

Dr. Berliner kindly replied:

Dear Diane,

I am afraid that medical issues for both me and my wife will keep me from a formal response to the nonsense that was produced by two extraordinary researchers. Their credentials and analysis are perfect. I respect their analytic skills—but if you’ll excuse my Yiddish, they have no sechel. [Editor’s note: “sechel,” roughly translated, is common sense.] Let’s look at what they conclude.

 

 

  1. Kids who miss a lot of school do less well on tests of what they learned in school. DUH! I really think I could have predicted that!
  1. Parents who are with their kids many hours per week think their kids are recovering nicely, but these researchers, who never assess a real live kid, say the parents are wrong. That is not wise, if you ask me.

 

  1. Given the history of NAEP, it appears that the kids today will be back where kids were a few years back on tests like NAEP, and the loss probably extends to all the state tests and even PISA may show it. But,…. those kids who scored lower a few years ago, and whose todays’ kids match by their lower test scores, have helped the US economy remain one of the strongest in the world. Those lower test scoring kids of the previous decades helped make America hum. Why won’t today’s kids, with the same level of formal school knowledge, do the same?

Furthermore, we have the Flynn effect in IQ—today’s kids are well above their grandparents in IQ and their grandparent didn’t have nearly as much schooling as today’s kids. And still the economy hummed. American kids are “smarter” than ever if you believe that is what is measured with IQ tests.

Furthermore again, the wonderful 8-year study, which you know quite well, showed that kids who missed a lot of their traditional high school education not only did fine in college but excelled. The kids of many families, surely the better educated families, who missed a lot of formal schooling did not miss all of their education—they just got a different one, and it is not clear that they will be hampered forever because of that.

Among the authors speculations, is raised the question of a 13th high school year. But public schools are terribly underfunded now, so where the hell is there going to be money for a 13th year, or for an additional year of junior high, or more days of schooling per year, or summer school for all? More days of school means more expenditure of funds and I don’t think America has the money, or the will, to allocate such money.

And would colleges reject this generation of kids, as the authors worry about? Naw! The elites are always rejecting the talented but lower scoring kids as well as the kids whose families can’t make some part of the tuition. These two researchers are at Harvard and Stanford, and I seriously doubt if their freshman classes will be “less” smart. Getting full tuition out of parents, not just assessing student credentials, seems to have a lot more sway in the decisions of many higher education institutions than we want to admit. It is also quite noticeable that college enrollments have been falling dramatically over the last few years, so the way I see it is that if you take the time and put in the energy to apply to a college, you stand a really good chance of getting into some place reputable, even if your SATS or GRE’s are few points lower on average than the freshman class of, say, 2018.

Diane, you and I both remember when Ivan was going to wipe the economic floor with the progeny of Joe six-pack. Or when Akito in Japan was going to wipe the same economic floor with Joe’s progeny. Now its Li in China who will do so. But somehow, we Americans muddle through. I bet we will again.

Should we worry. Sure. But I just can’t get excited about this creative, well-done study, with zero policy options that make sense.

My conclusion is that American kids are behind where they were. OK. Attending school again will catch them up. No big deal.

The real issue is that many kids were already way behind, and they seem to almost all have a major character flaw…. they are poor! That’s Americas’ real problem, not a slightly lower score on a current state test whose predictive power of future achievements and earnings is quite limited.

Categories Accountability, Data, Disruption, Education Reform, Health, Inequality, Poverty, Research, Science, Standardized Testing

Resistance to The Brown Decision Launched the Voucher Movement

By dianeravitch
May 17, 2023 //
24

The Brown Decision was released by the U.S. Supreme Court on May 17, 1954, precisely sixty-nine years ago. It was a historic decision in many ways. It was the beginning of the end of de jure segregation in every aspect of American society. Of course, de facto segregation persists in schools, housing, and in many aspects of life. It would have been impossible to imagine in 1954 that the nation would elect a Black man as President in 2008 and again in 2012.

The decision was unanimous. America could not claim to be a nation of freedom, liberty, democracy, and equality when people of color were excluded from full participation in every aspect of public life and walled off from the mainstream of American society in their private lives. Segregation and discrimination were hallmarks of the American way. Black people were not only restricted in the right to vote, were not only underrepresented in legislatures and other decision-making bodies, but were excluded from restaurants, hotels, movie theaters, public transport, public beaches, and from all other places of public accommodation, as well as private commerce. Segregation was imposed by law in the South and some border states, and by custom in northern, western, and midwestern states.

The Brown Decision struck a blow against this cruel reign of prejudice and bigotry in American life. We are far, very far, from fulfilling the promise of the Brown Decision. To make progress, we must be willing to look deeply into the roots of systemic racism and dismantle the structures that condemn disproportionate numbers of Black families to live in poverty and in segregated neighborhoods. A number of Republican-led states have made such inquiries illegal.

The present movement for vouchers, which is strongest in Republican-dominated states, will not move us closer to the egalitarian goals of the Brown Decision. Vouchers are inherently a divisive concept. They encourage people to congregate with people just like themselves. Heightened segregation along lines of race, religion, social class, and ethnicity are a predictable result of vouchers.

The voucher movement began as a hostile response to the Brown decision, led by racist governors, members of Congress, legislatures, White Citizens Councils, parents who did not want their children to attend schools with Black children, and white supremacists who wanted to protect their “way of life.” They refused to comply with the Supreme Court decision. They called Earl Warren a Communist. They engaged in “massive resistance.” They quickly figured out that they could fund private academies for whites only, and some Southern states did. And they figured out that they could offer “vouchers” or “scholarships” to white students to attend white private and religious schools.

I recommend three books about the history of the ties between segregationists, the religious right, and vouchers. I reviewed all three in an article called “The Dark History of School Choice” in The New York Review of Books. Although it is behind a paywall, you can read one article for free or subscribe for a modest fee.

The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism, by Katherine Stewart

Overturning Brown: The Segregationist Legacy of the Modern School Choice Movement, by Steve Suitts

Schoolhouse Burning: Public Education and the Assault on American Democracy, by Derek W. Black

In addition, I recommend Nancy MacLean’s superb Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America. It links the voucher moment to the Koch brothers and other libertarians, including Milton Friedman. I reviewed it in the same journal. MacLean is the William H. Chafe Professor of History and Public Policy at Duke University.

Nancy MacLean wrote the following article for The Washington Post nearly two years ago. In the past two years, the voucher movement has gained even more ground in Republican-dominated states. If it is behind a paywall, you can read it here.

She wrote:

The year 2021 has proved a landmark for the “school choice” cause — a movement committed to the idea of providing public money for parents to use to pay for private schooling.

Republican control of a majority of state legislatures, combined with pandemic learning disruptions, set the stage for multiple victories. Seven states have created new school choice programs, and 11 others have expanded current programs through laws that offer taxpayer-funded vouchers for private schooling and authorize tax credits and educational savings accounts that incentivize parents moving their children out of public schools.

On its face, this new legislation may sound like a win for families seeking more school options. But the roots of the school choice movement are more sinister.

White Southerners first fought for “freedom of choice” in the mid-1950s as a means of defying the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, which mandated the desegregation of public schools. Their goal was to create pathways for White families to remove their children from classrooms facing integration.

Prominent libertarians then took advantage of this idea, seeing it not only as a means of providing private options, but also as a tool in their crusade to dismantle public schools altogether. This history reveals that rather than giving families more school options, school choice became a tool intended to give most families far fewer in the end.

School choice had its roots in a crucial detail of the Brown decision: The ruling only applied to public schools. White Southerners viewed this as a loophole for evading desegregated schools.

In 1955 and 1956, conservative White leaders in Virginia devised a regionwide strategy of “massive resistance” to the high court’s desegregation mandate that hinged on state-funded school vouchers. The State Board of Education provided vouchers, then called tuition grants, of $250 ($2,514 in 2021 dollars) to parents who wanted to keep their children from attending integrated schools. The resistance leaders understood that most Southern White families could not afford private school tuition — and many who could afford it lacked the ideological commitment to segregation to justify the cost. The vouchers, combined with private donations to the new schools in counties facing desegregation mandates, would enable all but a handful of the poorest Whites to evade compliance.

Other Southern states soon adopted voucher programs like the one in Virginia to facilitate the creation of private schools called “segregation academies,” despite opposition from Black families and civil rights leaders. Oliver Hill, an NAACP attorney key to the Virginia case against “separate but equal” education that was folded into Brown, explained their position this way: “No one in a democratic society has a right to have his private prejudices financed at public expense.”

Despite such objections, key conservative and libertarian thinkers and foundations, including economists Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek, Human Events editor Felix Morley and publisher Henry Regnery, backed the White Southern cause. They recognized that White Southerners’ push for “freedom of choice” presented an opportunity to advance their goal of privatizing government services and resources, starting with primary and secondary education. They barely, if ever, addressed racism and segregation; instead, they spoke of freedom (implicitly, White freedom).

Friedman began promoting “educational freedom” in 1955, just as Southern states prepared to resist Brown. And he praised the Virginia voucher plan in his 1962 book, “Capitalism and Freedom,” holding it up as a model for school choice everywhere. “Whether the school is integrated or not,” he wrote, should have no bearing on eligibility for the vouchers. In other words, he knew the program was designed to fund segregation academies and saw it as no barrier to receiving state financing.

Friedman was far from alone. His fellow libertarians, including those on the staff of the William Volker Fund, a leading funder on the right, saw no problem with state governments providing tax subsidies to White families who chose segregation academies, even as these states disenfranchised Black voters, blocking them from having a say in these policies.

Libertarians understood that while abolishing the social safety net and other policies constructed during the Progressive era and the New Deal was wildly unpopular, even among White Southerners, school choice could win converts.

These conservative and libertarian thinkers offered up ostensibly race-neutral arguments in favor of the tax subsidies for private schooling sought by white supremacists. In doing so, they taught defenders of segregation a crucial new tactic — abandon overtly racist rationales and instead tout liberty, competition and market choice while embracing an anti-government stance. These race-neutral rationales for private school subsidies gave segregationists a justification that could survive court review — and did, for more than a decade before the Supreme Court ruled them unconstitutional.

When challenged, Friedman and his allies denied that they were motivated by racial bigotry. Yet, they had enough in common ideologically with the segregationists for the partnership to work. Both groups placed a premium on the liberty of those who had long profited from white-supremacist policies and sought to shield their freedom of action from the courts, liberal government policies and civil rights activists.

Crucially, freedom wasn’t the ultimate goal for either group of voucher supporters. White Southerners wielded colorblind language about freedom of choice to help preserve racial segregation and to keep Black children from schools with more resources.

Friedman, too, was interested in far more than school choice. He and his libertarian allies saw vouchers as a temporary first step on the path to school privatization. He didn’t intend for governments to subsidize private education forever. Rather, once the public schools were gone, Friedman envisioned parents eventually shouldering the full cost of private schooling without support from taxpayers. Only in some “charity” cases might governments still provide funding for tuition.

Friedman first articulated this outlook in his 1955 manifesto, but he clung to it for half a century, explaining in 2004, “In my ideal world, government would not be responsible for providing education any more than it is for providing food and clothing.” Four months before his death in 2006, when he spoke to a meeting of the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), he was especially frank. Addressing how to give parents control of their children’s education, Friedman said, “The ideal way would be to abolish the public school system and eliminate all the taxes that pay for it.”

Today, the ultrawealthy backers of school choice are cagey about this long-term goal, knowing that care is required to win the support of parents who want the best for their children. Indeed, in a sad irony, decades after helping to impede Brown’s implementation, school choice advocates on the right targeted families of color for what one libertarian legal strategist called “forging nontraditional alliances.” They won over some parents of color, who came to see vouchers and charter schools as a way to escape the racial and class inequalities that stemmed from White flight out of urban centers and the Supreme Court’s willingness to allow White Americans to avoid integrating schools.

But the history behind vouchers reveals that the rhetoric of “choice” and “freedom” stands in stark contrast to the real goals sought by conservative and libertarian advocates. The system they dream of would produce staggering inequalities, far more severe than the disparities that already exist today. Wealthy and upper-middle-class families would have their pick of schools, while those with far fewer resources — disproportionately families of color — might struggle to pay to educate their children, leaving them with far fewer options or dependent on private charity. Instead of offering an improvement over underfunded schools, school choice might lead to something far worse.

As Maya Angelou wisely counseled in another context, “When people show you who they are, believe them the first time.” If we fail to recognize the right’s true end game for public education, it could soon be too late to reverse course.

Update: According to Future-Ed, citing pro-voucher EdChoice (which used to be the Milton and Rose Friedman Foundation), “Currently, 32 states provide an estimated $4 billion in subsidies to some 690,000 students through tuition vouchers, education savings accounts, and tax-credit scholarships.” Several Republican-led states are considering or have already universal vouchers, which would subsidize the tuition of all students in private schools, including the children of wealthy families. Currently, most students who use vouchers were already enrolled in private and religious schools. In one state alone, Florida, the added cost of vouchers might be as much as $4 billion a year, just for the children already in private schools.

Categories Bigotry, Charters, Civil Rights, Democracy, Education Industry, Education Reform, Equity, Extremism, History, Privatization, Race, Racism, Religion, Segregation , Racial Isolation and Integration, Vouchers

John Merrow: There Are No Alphabet Wars

By dianeravitch
May 12, 2023 //
36

John Merrow is sick of the “reading wars.” So am I. I studied them intensively and wrote about their history in my book Left Back: A Century of Battles Over School Reform (2000).

In my opinion, Jeanne Chall (kindergarten teacher turned Harvard professor of literacy) settled the issues in her book called Learning to Read: The Great Debate. Her authoritative book, commissioned by the Carnegie Corporation, was published in 1967. She came out in favor of both early phonics and a rapid transition to children’s literature. She insisted that learning to read was never either-or. I wish she were alive to slap down the journalists and pundits who are now insisting that phonics and phonics alone is “the science of reading.” I feel sure she would laugh and say there is no science of reading. She warned that if we didn’t avoid either-or thinking, we would continue to swing from one extreme to another.

I am patiently waiting for evidence of any district (not counting affluent suburban districts) where “the science of reading” brought every child of every demographic and economic group to proficiency (not grade level, proficiency). The New York City Department of Education recently announced that it was mandating “the science of reading” across the entire city school system. We will be sure to check back in a few years and see how that worked out. Under Michael Bloomberg, Chancellor Joel Klein mandated “balanced literacy” (specifically, the work of Lucy Calkins of Teachers College, Columbia University, which was heavy on “whole word” and light on phonics). Phonics advocates were outraged, but they were ignored. Now the NYC Department of Education is swinging to the other extreme; balanced literacy is out, phonics is in.

John Merrow’s recent post about the “reading wars” reminded me of Jeanne Chall, who was a good friend.

I will post here a bit of it and urge you to open the link and read it all.

Learning the alphabet is a straightforward 2-step process: Shapes and Sounds. One must learn to recognize the shapes of the 26 letters and what each letter sounds like. There’s no argument about this, and certainly there has never been and never will be an “Alphabet War.”

The same rule–Shapes and Sounds–applies to reading. Would-be readers must apply what they learned about Sounds–formally called Phonics and Phonemic Awareness–to combinations of letters–i.e., words. They must also learn to recognize some words by their Shapes, because many English words do not follow the rules of Phonics. (One quick example: By the rules of Phonics, ‘Here’ and ‘There’ should rhyme; they do not, and readers must learn how to pronounce both.) To become a competent, confident reader, one must rely on both Phonics and Word Recognition.

Ergo, there’s absolutely no need, justification, or excuse for “Reading Wars” between Phonics and Word Recognition. None! And yet American educators, policy-makers, and politicians have been waging their “Reading Crusades” for close to 200 years. As a consequence, uncounted millions of adults have lived their lives in the darkness of functional illiteracy and semi-literacy.

Here’s something most Reading Crusaders don’t understand: Almost without exception, every first grader wants to be able to read, because they understand that reading gives them some measure of control over their world, in the same way walking does. And skilled teachers can teach almost all children–including the 5-20 percent who are dyslexic–to become confident readers.

Skilled teachers understand what the Reading Crusaders do not: Reading–again like walking–is not the goal. It’s the means to understanding, confidence, and control. Children don’t “first learn to read and then read to learn,” as some pedants maintain. That’s a false dichotomy: they learn to read to learn. And so skilled teachers use whatever strategies are called for: Phonics, Word Recognition, what one might call Reading as Liberation, and more.

Categories Education Reform, Extremism, Language, Literacy, Literature

Nikhil Goyal: Helen Gym Has a Plan to Make Philadelphia Safe

By dianeravitch
May 11, 2023 //
10

Nikhil Goyal works on the staff of Senator Bernie Sanders. His new book is about Philadelphia, which will hold the Democratic primary for Mayor on May 16. He writes in the Nation about why he supports Helen Gym.

Goyal begins by explaining why Brandon Johnson beat Paul Vallas in the Chicago mayoral election. He highlighted Vallas’ destructive record as a school privatizer in Chicago, Philadelphia, and other cities.

He writes:

A key critic of this scheme was Helen Gym, founder of Parents United for Public Education, who lamented the violence of underfunded, understaffed schools that were falling apart and mold-ridden and argued that children’s pronounced social and emotional needs were not served by zero-tolerance punishment. “We have policies to suspend, arrest, punish, and potentially imprison our children,” she wrote in the Philadelphia Public School Notebook in 2007, “but we can’t have a policy for reduced class size or textbooks or open libraries in our schools.… So what’s really violent here?”

Today, Gym is one of the leading candidates for mayor of Philadelphia and hoping to join a new class of progressive urban mayors: Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, and Boston Mayor Michelle Wu. (Disclosure: I have known Gym for several years through organizing and policy work, and she is discussed in my forthcoming book about Philadelphia, Live to See the Day: Coming of Age in American Poverty.)

A zigzag line can be drawn from social movements such as Occupy Wall Street, Fight for 15, Black Lives Matter, teachers’ strikes, and Sanders’s presidential campaigns to the rise of these mayors. Together, with the backing of organized labor, they have an opportunity to reverse austerity, invest in public goods, reimagine and strengthen public safety, and save lives in American metropolises.

The next mayor of Philadelphia, the poorest large city in the country, will face daunting challenges: joblessness; poverty; gun violence; inequitable, unsafe publicschools; an opioid epidemic; and substandard, unaffordable housing. The past three years have been the deadliest in the history of the city, with some 500 killings annually—the highest per capita homicide rate among large US cities. Recently, the school district announcedthat 100 students have already been shot, including 20 killed, this year. A recent survey found that two-thirds of residents said Philadelphia is on the wrong track and identified crime as their top issue.

With election day next week, the first independent public poll shows a dead heat between the top five candidates. There’s ShopRite oligarch and chauvinist Jeff Brown, who owns a chain of supermarkets and was recently accused by the city’s ethics board of violating campaign finance law for colluding with an affiliated super PAC and a nonprofit. Real estate mogul and former city councilman Allan Domb is largely self-funded to the tune of more than $7 million. Former city controller Rebecca Rhynhart is running as a pro-charter technocrat, in the style of former mayors John Street and Michael Nutter, who have both endorsed her. Former city councilwoman and lobbyist Cherelle Parker, who backs stop-and-frisk policing, rounds out the top tier.

Like Brandon Johnson, Gym is a former public-school teacher and came of age organizing against the market-based urban school reform project. Pick virtually any social justice fight in the city since the 1990s: the closures and privatization of public schools, budget cuts, school funding lawsuits, the eviction crisis, the fight for a $15 minimum wage, the closure of Hahnemann Hospital, and the abuse scandal at the reformatory Glen Mills Schools, and one will find that Gym, who served as a city councilwoman for six years, was on the picket line, getting arrested for civil disobedience, building coalitions, testifying at or organizing hearings, or drafting and passing legislation.

As mayor, she pledges to advance an agenda that would “restore the village to our city.” Her policy platform is, naturally, centered on education, and she calls for turning every school into a community school with wraparound and trauma-informed supports; providing after-school and summer programming in schools, recreation centers, and libraries; modernizing school infrastructure; creating playgrounds for every school; and expanding youth employment. Not only will these investments improve educational outcomes, but research indicates that they will also reduce crimeand other social dislocations. Gym released a comprehensive anti-violence plan that would invest in mental health crisis response units, violence interrupters, an improved 911 response system, more detectives to improve homicide clearance rates, and other ideas. She and Johnson share a recognition that the hackneyed tactic of simply hiring more cops cannot slow the bloodshed. Gym and several candidates are also pushing for place-based interventions, such as cleaning up vacant lots, rehabilitating abandoned houses, and improving street lighting, all of which have been found to cut down on crime.

Recently, hundreds of youth engaged in raucous flash mobs and violent skirmishes in downtown Chicago and Philadelphia. Immediately, there were calls to impose a curfew, despite little to no data validating the efficacy of the measure. Mayor-elect Johnson condemned the unrest while acknowledging that we should not “demonize youth who have otherwise been starved of opportunities in their own communities.” In Philadelphia, it was telling that Gym was the only mayoral candidate to firmly oppose the new ban on unaccompanied minors after 2 PM at the Fashion District shopping mall. “We cannot criminalize young people,” she said. “There is nothing for young people to do. We actually have to go out and create some of these things for young people to go to.”

The American Rescue Plan poured billions into Philadelphia, including historic sums for public education and before-school, after-school, and summer programs. Philadelphia’s next mayor must prepare for the imminent fiscal cliffs as those Covid-19 federal relief dollars dry up in the next year or two. Pennsylvania’s regressive uniformity clause mandates flat local and state taxes, where low-income earners are effectively charged higher tax rates than the wealthiest. So the mayor will need to be creative and bold to raise new revenue—push Harrisburg for fair funding, identify and divert wasteful spending into productive programs, and crack down on corporate welfare.

If Gym is also elected, the question will be: How can Johnson and Gym wield their power to benefit working people in the face of expected relentless obstruction by corporate interests, real estate, anti-public education billionaires, and police unions? Seventy years ago, Joseph S. Clark Jr., a postwar mayor of Philadelphia, describedNew Deal/Fair Deal liberalism as “utilizing the full force of government for the advancement of social, political, and economic justice at the municipal, state, national, and international levels.” This is the vision the next mayors of Chicago and Philadelphia should renew.

Categories Education Reform, Elections, Philadelphia, Safety

Colorado: What Happened When MAGA Extremists Gained Control of a School District

By dianeravitch
May 11, 2023 //
27

NBC News reported on the takeover of Woodland Park, Colorado, by rightwing extremists. Woodland Park is a mostly white district with 8,000 residents. Colorado is a bluish state. The governor is a Democrat, as are the two Senators. But the state, like other states, has deep red districts. The new board wasted no time in pushing their ideological agenda, which apparently concerns even some Republicans.

WOODLAND PARK, Colo. — When a conservative slate of candidates won control of the school board here 18 months ago, they began making big changes to reshape the district.

Woodland Park, a small mountain town that overlooks Pikes Peak, became the first — and, so far, only — district in the country to adopt the American Birthright social studies standard, created by a right-wing advocacy group that warns of the “steady whittling away of American liberty.” The new board hired a superintendent who was previously recalled from a nearby school board after pushing for a curriculum that would “promote positive aspects of the United States.” The board approved the community’s first charter school without public notice and gave the charter a third of the middle school building.

As teachers, students and parents began protesting these decisions, the administration barred employees from discussing the district on social media. At least two staff members who objected to the board’s decisions were later forced out of their jobs, while another was fired for allegedly encouraging protests.

These rapid and sweeping shifts weren’t coincidental — instead it was a plan ripped from the MAGA playbook designed to catch opponents off guard, according to a board member’s email released through an open records request.

“This is the flood the zone tactic, and the idea is if you advance on many fronts at the same time, then the enemy cannot fortify, defend, effectively counter-attack at any one front,” David Illingworth, one of the new conservative school board members, wrote to another on Dec. 9, 2021, weeks after they were elected. “Divide, scatter, conquer. Trump was great at this in his first 100 days.”

The leaders of the Woodland Park School District are enacting an experiment in conservative governance in the middle of a state controlled by Democrats, with little in the way so far to slow them down. The school board’s decisions have won some praise in heavily Republican Teller County, but opposition is growing, including from conservative Christians and lifelong GOP voters who say the board has made too many ill-advised decisions and lacks transparency.

“I think they look at us as this petri dish where they can really push all their agenda and theories,” said Joe Dohrn, a Woodland Park father who described himself as a staunch Republican and “very capitalistic.” “They clearly are willing to sacrifice the public school and to put students presently in the public school through years of disarray to drive home their ideological beliefs. It’s a travesty.”

Teachers grew particularly alarmed early this year when word spread that Ken Witt, the new superintendent, did not plan to reapply for grants that covered the salaries of counselors and social workers.

At Gateway Elementary School in March, Witt told staff members he prioritized academic achievement, not students’ emotions. “We are not the department of health and human services,” he said, as teachers angrily objected, according to two recordings of the meeting made by staff members and shared with NBC News.

Someone in the meeting asked if taxpayers would get a say in these changes, and Witt said that they already did — when they elected the school board.

Over the past two years, school districts nationwide have become the center of culture war battles over race and LGBTQ rights. Conservative groups have made a concerted effort to fill school boards with ideologically aligned members and notched dozens of wins last fall.

In Colorado, conservatives started making gains earlier because school board elections are held in off years. Woodland Park offers a preview of how quickly a new majority can move to reshape a district — and how those battles can ripple outward into the community. Some longtime residents say that the situation has grown so tense, they now look over their shoulder when discussing the school board in public to avoid confrontation or professional consequences.

David Rusterholtz, the board’s president, believes that chasm predates his election in November 2021.

“This division is much more than political — this is a clash of worldviews,” Rusterholtz said at a board meeting in January. He concluded his remarks with a prayer for the district: “May the Lord bless us and keep us, may His face shine upon us and be gracious to us…”

When asked to respond to criticism from school personnel and parents, Illingworth, the board’s vice president, replied in an email: “I wasn’t elected to please the teacher’s union and their psycho agenda against academic rigor, family values, and even capitalism itself. I was elected to bring a parent’s voice and a little common sense to the school district, and voters in Woodland Park can see I’ve kept my promises.”

As the school year winds down, many of the Woodland Park School District’s employees are heading for the exit, despite recently receiving an 8% raise. At least four of the district’s top administrators have quit because of the board’s policy changes, according to interviews and emails obtained through records requests. Nearly 40% of the high school’s professional staff have said they will not return next school year, according to an administrator in the district.

The board’s critics have pinned their hopes on the next election in November — when three of the five school board members are up for a vote — to claw back control of the community’s schools.

“This is an active case study on what will happen if we allow extremist policies to start to take over our public education system,” said David Graf, an English teacher who recently resigned after 17 years in the district. “And the scariest part about it, they knew that this community would bite on it.”

The new board approved the district’s first charter school without any public notice. The approval of Merit Academy was listed on the board agenda as “board housekeeping.”

The district’s teachers union complained in an email to middle school staff that the board’s action was “underhanded, and at worst illegal.” A parent sued, aiming to force the board to follow open meetings law. A trial court judge did not rule on the legality of the board’s actions but ordered the board to list agenda items “clearly, honestly and forthrightly.”

In response to the teachers’ complaints, Illingworth accused the union of attempting to organize a “coup,” and instructed then-Superintendent Mathew Neal to make “a list of positions in which a change in personnel would be beneficial to our kids” and “help the union see the wisdom in cooperation rather than conflict.”

Illingworth’s emails spread after parents obtained them through open records requests. Subsequent board meetings attracted boisterous crowds, as teachers accused board members of creating a hostile environment, while other community members spoke in favor of the board for supporting “school choice” and quoted Scripture. A handful of parents, including some lifelong Republicans, tried to organize a recall, but failed to get enough signatures to force a vote.

The district’s superintendent resigned and was replaced by Ken Witt, who had been active in conservative politics in Jefferson County, CO., schools.

A week before Witt was hired, on Dec. 13, students in a class called Sources of Strength, which is part of a national suicide prevention program, asked their teacher what should they know about him as the sole finalist for the superintendent job.

Sara Lee, a longtime teacher at Woodland Park High School, responded, “You should Google him.”

The students did, and they didn’t like what they learned.

They discovered that Witt, as president of the school board in neighboring Jefferson County, supported a plan in 2014 to ensure the district’s curricula would promote patriotism and not encourage “social strife.” Witt said students who protested the board policies at the time were “pawns” of the teachers union. After he and two other conservative members of the board were recalled, Witt became executive director of an organization that oversees charter, online and other schools and helped launch Merit Academy.

The teacher, Sara Lee, had taught high school for 25 years, 18 of them in the district. The board reassigned her to an elementary school to punish her for sharing information about Witt. She resigned and was promptly hired by another district.

Please open the link and keep reading. The story gets worse. Parents and teachers tried to persuade Witt to reapply for mental health funds to support counselors and social workers. He refused, insisting that such problems should be handled by parents, not schools. The district’s mental health supervisor, unable to persuade him to ask for the funds, submitted her resignation.

Categories Censorship, Charter Schools, Colorado, Curriculum, Democracy, Education Reform, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Failure, Ignorance, Teachers, Trump

Denis Smith: Public Schools Unite Us. Private Schools Divide Us.

By dianeravitch
May 8, 2023 //
41

Denis Smith, a former advisor to the Ohio State Department of Education, explains the important role that public schools play in a diverse, democratic society.

He writes in the Ohio Capital Journal:

In 2011, on the 150th anniversary of the outbreak of the Civil War, the New York Times initiated a series of essays entitled “Disunion“ about a conflict the newspaper described as the time when “Americans went to war with themselves.” The series ran periodically for four years as an attempt to mirror what the paper characterized as “America’s most perilous period.”

Those who pay attention to prevailing norms and the constitutional health of our society might update those two phrases to serve as a warning for describing the present.

If Ohio residents have read the opinions of Republicans ranging from state Senators Matt Huffman and Sandra O’Brien about educational vouchers, that ominous word disunion might inevitably come to mind. In the campaign to destroy our public education system by using public funds to finance private and religious schools through vouchers, these politicians disingenuously throw out such terms as “choice” and “freedom,” seemingly innocuous words that instead have the potential to fracture our national unity.

Yet when the subject is choice and freedom, however disingenuously those words might be used, we don’t need to look any further for guidance in identifying the glue that keeps us in a state of union rather than the disunion a profligate use of public funds will bring if educational voucher legislation is approved.

That glue is the public school, whose importance is enshrined in the language of Article VI, Section 2 of the Ohio Constitution:

The General Assembly shall … secure a thorough and efficient system of common schools throughout the state; but no religious or other sect, or sects, shall ever have any exclusive right to, or control of, any part of the school funds . …

Lest we be confused by politicians spouting their favorite hyperbolic buzzwords like choice and freedom, our constitution contains clear language, including the use of the singular form: a system of common schools, not systems. It is one educational system that the state is mandated to support, not thousands of private and religious schools that clearly aren’t eligible for public support through vouchers or other means.

Such a scheme to support private and religious schools with public funds might also be construed as socialism, as another Ohio senator, Andrew Brenner, disingenuously described public education in 2014, a classic statement that gained him national attention – and notoriety.

More than twenty years ago, one observer described the dangers of fragmenting the delivery of education in a society, as a universal educational voucher scheme would achieve. Dr. Kenneth Conklin, a professor of philosophy and educational theory, provided this warning that should be heeded by Republicans like Hoffman, O’Brien, and Brenner:

If an educational system is altered, its transmission of culture will be distorted. The easiest way to break apart a society long-term without using violence is to establish separate educational systems for the groups to be broken apart.

Note the use of the plural: systems.

Conklin provides some additional advice for us to consider as Ohio and other red states make plans to fracture the public school system, satisfy their ideological yen and garner a twofer by also destroying public employee unions in the process. He also considers the importance of culture in providing societal cohesion:

A society’s culture can survive far longer than the lifespan of any of its members, because its educational system passes down the folkways and knowledge of one generation to subsequent generations. A culture changes over time, but has a recognizable continuity of basic values and behavioral patterns that distinguishes it from other cultures. That continuity is provided by the educational system.

Note the use of the singular: system.

Make no mistake. The educational voucher scheme, fueled by dark money groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which itself helps to fuel astroturf groups nationwide that are intent on undermining public education, has enabled the pro-voucher and school privatization movement to achieve critical mass in the last few years. Currently, at least 15 states have some type of voucher program in place, and the number is expected to rise dramatically in the next few months as red state legislatures also bundle together other extreme measures, including abortion bans and voting restrictions, to further erode democracy and one of its symbols, our neighborhood public school.

If we are to continue as one society (note again the singular form), we must have one publicly funded educational system, and not thousands of other types of schools similarly funded. After all, this nation’s motto is e pluribus unum – from many, one. The Republican voucher scheme violates that very motto, in addition to not ensuring oversight and accountability for how scare public funds are spent in the task of investing in the future. Common civic values and traditions ensure the continuity of this republic as one people, with a common heritage provided by the common school.

In an essay, Senator O’Brien asks: “Why can’t parents spend their tax dollars at the school they choose for their children?”

Really? The answer is quite simple.

It’s about the constitution. It’s about the meaning of a “system” of common schools,” of e pluribus unum. It’s about democracy, where we elect our neighbors to oversee our public schools and ensure that public funds are spent for public, and not for individual, private purposes, as vouchers are purposely designed to accomplish.

Republicans: it should not be about disunion. But your promotion of educational vouchers and the erosion of the common school, the symbol and glue that brings together each community, will have that effect.

Categories Democracy, Education Reform, Ohio, Privatization, Propaganda, Vouchers

Bob Shepherd: What If States Banned Gay Authors from Schools and Libraries?

By dianeravitch
May 8, 2023 //
37

Bob Shepherd lives in Florida and has watched Governor DeSantis’s effort to ban and demonize anything associated with gays: books, entertainment, cultural events, everything. Bob, who has a long career in education publishing, explains what we would lose if DeSantis has his bigoted way:

I have long loved theatre. When I was a young man, up until my thirties, I did a LOT of acting, and I have been a director, drama coach, playwright, screenwriter, and teacher of theatre and film at various times throughout my life. A couple years ago, I volunteered to do some work on stage sets at a local theatre company. Then, when one of the actors dropped out of the play that was underway, I was recruited to take his part. Fine. It was fun. But this was in Flor-uh-duh, where events often take a strange turn.

First, one day I was backstage painting a scrim. Next to me was another local, who had climbed a ladder to hang a light when, out of his back pocket fell his handgun, which dropped 15 feet or so and clattered to the stage. Well. How about that. This is Flor-uh-duh, in which random people are packing. Recently, in this stage, one of the workers slipped and fell on the gravel at a house construction site, and his gun accidentally went off and shot and killed a fellow worker up on the rooftop.

Second, I was warned by fellow actors to be mum about LGBTQ+ issues around the theater’s director, who was virulently anti LGBTQ+. This woman, who called all the shots at this small theatre company and appointed herself to direct all the plays, had stopped speaking to or seeing her own sister when the sister came out as lesbian. That seemed totally bizarre to me. An anti-LGBTQ+ THEATRE PERSON sounded, to me, like a a Jewish Nazi or a field mouse with a love for feral cats.

But there are, of course, such bizarre creatures. Consider, for example, former White House Propaganda Minister and creator of policies to separate babies from their parents, Stephen “Goebbels” Miller. When I was first told of this director’s opinions, I said, “But doesn’t she understand that this is a theatre company and ALMOST EVERYONE HERE is LGBTQ+ or as fluid as a river?” Evidently not. People attached to the company were so afraid of this woman that they tried to hide these things from her so that she would continue to cast them.

And I thought of Texas, back in my textbook editing and writing days, where the local Christian version of the Taliban morality police had suggested at several textbook adoption hearings banning “queer authors” from all K-12 literature textbooks. Which would have made for some pretty thin literature textbooks. There would be in them, for example, and in no particular order, NO James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, Oscar Wilde, Federico Garcia Lorca, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes, Carson McCullers, E. M. Forster, Gore Vidal, Horace, Walter Pater, Lord Byron, Harvey Fierstein, Paul Goodman, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Noel Coward, Willa Cather, Petronius, Thornton Wilder, Evelyn Waugh, Gertrude Stein, Christopher Isherwood, Susan Sontag, Jeanette Winterson, Nikolai Gogol, Hilda Doolittle, Edna St. Vincent Millary, Elizabeth Bishop, Sarah Orne Jewett, David Sedaris, Edith Sitwell, Maurice Sendak, Arthur Rimbault, Mary Renault, Plato, Plutarch, Audre Lorde, Paul Verlaine, Stephen Spender, A. E. Housman, Thomas Mann, Aphra Behn, James Merrill, Marguerie Yourcenar, Terrance McNally, Virgil, Lytton Strachey, Michel Foucault, Samuel Delany, Jeremy Bentham, Anais Nin, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Howard Sturgis, Catullus, Adrienne Rich, John Donne, Colette, Daphne du Maurier, George Santayana, Mary Sarton, Frank O’Hara, Joe Orton, Wilfred Owen, Fran Lebowitz, Andre Gide, Allen Ginsberg, Alice Walker, Sir Francis Bacon, Virginia Woolf, Lord Tennyson, Alan Locke, Jack Kerouac, Countee Cullen, Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, Yukio Mishima, F. O. Mattheissen, D. H. Lawrence, John Milton, Sara Teasdale, Patricia Highsmith, Angela Davis, Thomas Gray, Sappho, Edward Albee, Hans Christian Andersen, Jean Genet, John Ashbery, W. H. Auden, Honore de Balzac, Djuna barnes, Roland Barthes, John Cheever, Helene Cixous.

Which might be fine with the likes of DeStalinist and the many nonreaders among Repugnican standouts these days. What would be left? The collected poems of Jerry Fallwell? The essays on what a man he is of Josh Hawley? The treatises in metaphysics and epistemology of Ted Cruz and Margorie Taylor Greene?

Categories Education Reform, Gender, Literature

Indianapolis: 1/3 of All Charters Closed. It’s a Feature, Not a Bug

By dianeravitch
May 6, 2023 //
4

A few days ago, I published a post about a longitudinal research study about the importance of stability in children’s lives. Changing schools may sometimes be necessary, but it is not optimal. The charter industry believes that the frequent opening and closing of schools is a demonstration of accountability.

Caroline Beck of the Indianapolis Star reported on the high closure rate of the city’s charter schools.

When Lindsay Holley heard that her son’s charter school would be closing in the middle of the school year, she was at work.

“I couldn’t even focus because I was like, Oh is my gosh, I can’t have him sitting out of school for too long,” the east side resident said.

Holley had to scramble to find a new school for her son, Jhace Moore, a second grader who had attended the HIM by HER Collegiate School for the Arts since it opened three years ago. The Martindale-Brightwood school closed suddenly in January, citing low enrollment that led to financial woes. The closure left Jhace and about 200 other students in the lurch.

While it’s rare to see a school close mid-year, it’s not uncommon for charters to close their doors. Out of the nearly 100 charters that have opened in the county since 2001, when the state passed a law allowing charters, 31 have closed. More than half of those, including HIM by HER, closed because of financial concerns and or low enrollment, an IndyStar analysis found.

And while no one likes school closures, charter school advocates often highlight closures as a sign that the accountability process is working.

“It’s hard to say this when you get a school that closes in the middle of the year, but charter schools closing is a feature of the system, not a bug,” Marcie Carter-Brown, the director for the Indiana Charter School Network, told IndyStar.

But others say these closures can be a disruptive force for a group of students that are already vulnerable to low student outcomes, particularly students of color.

When the HIM by HER school closed, the IPS Community Coalition, Baptist Minister’s Alliance and Concerned Clergy of Indianapolis called for a pause in approving more charter schools in Indianapolis.

“It’s high time to stop this insane experiment in letting almost anybody with some idea about how to educate children to be legally authorized to do so,” Concerned Clergy said in a statement. “Taxpayers are throwing good money after bad.”

Categories Education Reform

Florida Bans Restrictions on Fertilizer Despite Risk to Water Quality

By dianeravitch
May 4, 2023 //
31

Florida’s lakes, ponds, and rivers have been plagued by red tide and green algae, which grows faster because of fertilizer runoff from the grounds near the water. Many localities have banned the use of fertilizer near vulnerable water during the rainy season to protect water quality. The fertilizer encourages the growth of the slime in the water.

However, the legislature has passed a bill to stop these restrictions on fertilizer. The bill was based on research funded by the fertilizer industry. The legislative majority is destroying the environment, because the fertilizer industry can pay out more than environmental activists.

The Miami Herald reported:

Florida legislators are poised to block one of the most effective tools local governments say they have to protect water quality in their communities in the face of red tide and blue-green algae outbreaks by banning rainy season restrictions on fertilizer use.

A measure quietly tucked into a budget proposal over the weekend, would prohibit at least 117 local governments from “adopting or amending a fertilizer management ordinance” during the 2023-24 budget year, requiring them to rely on less restrictive regulations developed by the University of Florida, which are supported by the state’s phosphate industry, the producers of fertilizer.

Legislative leaders tentatively agreed to a $116 billion budget on Monday and, with no public debate or discussion, included the fertilizer language that emerged late Sunday.

Categories Accountability, DeSantis, Education Reform, Environment, Florida, For-Profit

LeBron James Is the Greatest Citizen-Educator of Our Time

By dianeravitch
May 4, 2023 //
24

The basketball superstar LeBron James grew up in Akron. He wanted to help children in Akron, so he funded a school. It is not a charter school. It is a community school that operates as part of the Akron public schools. Unlike most charter schools, it doesn’t choose the top-performing kids; it chooses the kids who need help the most, those with the lowest scores. It provides a range of services for them and their families. It offers a food pantry for families, for instance.

Now the LeBron James Family Foundation is reaching out to offer services to the entire community. This family foundation has some valuable lessons for the Walton Family Foundation, which uses its billions to destroy public schools and communities; it could teach lessons to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which has imposed a series of failed programs on schools, dreamed up by consultants who never asked students, parents, or school staff what they wanted or needed.

Now, in a story told by Tawney Beans of the Akron Beacon Journal, the Lebron James program is expanding to offer job training and other services for community members.

It was quite the opening day for House Three Thirty.

The space, formerly home to Tangier restaurant, has almost concluded its two-year transformation into a retail, dining and event community center spearheaded by the LeBron James Family Foundation.

After the complex opened at 6 a.m. Thursday, a steady trickle people made their way through the space. Some simply wanted a hot cup of joe from the first-of-its kind Starbucks Community Store, others couldn’t wait to peek inside and scope out where to have their next church event, and still more came to see just how much impact a self-proclaimed “kid from Akron” could really have.

Some of the first visitors included LeBron James’ mother, Gloria, as well as former St. Vincent-St. Mary basketball teammate and LeBron James Family Foundation employee Willie McGee.

While touring the space, Gloria spoke about her pride in her son for creating House Three Thirty.

“I’m really proud of this venture, especially because it opens the doors to so many opportunities for our community — job training, employment, [Chase] bank being here and helping our community with their banking needs,” she said. “Then a huge ball area where lifelong memories can be made like weddings and receptions and birthday parties, bar mitzvahs and all that goes with that.”

McGee shares that pride and hopes that the new facility, coupled with the nearby I Promise School, I Promise Village and soon to be HealthQuarters, will have a substantial impact on the Akron community.

“We’re offering them the ability to come into a safe space where they feel comfortable, that they can receive resources,” he said. “We’re trying to build something to where whatever you need, you’re able to get in this area, and by being centrally located we want all of Akron to be able to come and join in.”

DeLondia Feaster of Akron had her 45th birthday party in Tangier and was pleased to see that the foundation kept much of the historic building’s integrity. One detail she admired were the picture frames in the main hallway, which were once adorned with photos and posters of entertainers who performed at the previous Akron restaurant and cabaret.

“I feel like I’m in Vegas, somewhere where you can go in somewhere and everything is in one shop,” she said. “It should bring some pride. A kid from the projects bringing something like this to a city is huge, you know, it’s really huge for the city, and I just hope people take advantage of that.”

Another spectator, Karon Boston of Akron, enjoyed the history within House Three Thirty — specifically, the portions depicting James’ progression from his time at St. Vincent-St. Mary to the NBA.

Highland Square resident Barbara Kemper and friend Cheryl Renick took in the new space from its sitting area near Starbucks.

“It’s nice to have something in this area besides bars,” Kemper said.

Sundae Davinport, a barista at House Three Thirty’s Starbucks, said that the family atmosphere of the place has given her a reason to wake up in the morning and be happy to go to work.

Davinport is the mother to a previous I Promise Program student and has spent the last eight weeks training in the facility’s kitchens. She’s learned everything from how to properly cut chicken and fish to ways to cook steaks and vegetables.

“We learned a lot,” she said. “I never knew there was 100 or more ways to cook an egg.”

That happiness to go into work was also influenced by the support she has received from the foundation, even something small like getting her hair braided for free at House Three Thirty’s in-house barber and beauty shop.

Contact Beacon Journal reporter Tawney Beans at tbeans@gannett.com and on Twitter @TawneyBeans.

Categories Community Schools, Creativity, Education Reform, Funding, Ohio, Parents
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