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New York: Regents Board Debates Future of Graduation Exams

By dianeravitch
November 17, 2022 //
58

The “Regents Exams” in New York State were once a mark of accomplishment for students who chose to take them. They were considered rigorous and prestigious. But sometime in the 1990s, State Commissioner Richard Mills decided that all students should pass the Regents to get a high school diploma. The standards had to be lowered, so that there was not massive failure. Passing the Regents was no longer a badge of high accomplishment.

Now the Regents are debating whether to keep, change, or dump the high school exit exams. Research shows that high school exit exams lead to decreased graduation rates and dropouts. Not surprisingly.

The Albany Times-Union reported:

ALBANY – Members of the Board of Regents debated the value of the Regents exams Monday as part of an overall planned examination of the state testing system and graduation requirements that had been delayed due to the pandemic.

“Maybe the Regents exams are not the be-all and end-all,” said Regent Roger Tilles during a meeting that also included a presentation about how students graduate high school in other states and countries. “We have kids that can’t pass a Regents exam but pass all their courses. Should they be denied a future because they can’t pass a Regents test in one area?”

But the rigorous exams get students prepared for the future, argued Regent Catherine Collins.

“I hope the state does not get rid of the Regents,” she said. “I was fortunate enough to have the Regents science diploma, which gave me the foundation to go into health care.”

The discussion comes after graduation rates increased during two years without Regents exams, due to the pandemic. For now, the Regents are back, but a Blue Ribbon Commission is expected to weigh in on new high school diploma requirements next year. The commission was announced in 2019, but the pandemic led to a slowdown and the commission wasn’t named until last year.

The state Education Department said in an email to the Times Union later Monday afternoon that “the Board was not debating whether to eliminate Regents exams. Rather, they were discussing a 166-page report that has been in the making for three years and heard a presentation based on (the) report’s literature review, policy scan and stakeholder feedback….”

In 2019, Education Commissioner Betty Rosa made it clear that she did not think the Regents exams are “working” for every student, and questioned whether the tests improved college readiness, among other factors. She has pressed for alternative paths to a high school diploma, including career and technical programs.

At Monday’s meeting, she urged the Regents to have an open mind.

“We really have to take into account not what worked for us, but what will work down the road,” she said. “At the end of the day, our job is to keep in mind what our students need for the future.”

Chancellor of the Board Lester Young, Jr. was adamant that the board make no decision right now.

Categories Education Reform, Graduation rates, High School Graduation, New York, Standardized Testing

David Kirp: Schools Can Improve Without Disruption

By dianeravitch
November 13, 2022 //
47

Valerie Strauss published an article by David Kirp about his new book, Disrupting Disruption. Kirp is one of my favorite education thinkers because he doesn’t believe in miracles or instant success. He believes in commitment and steady work. His new book describes three districts that have applied that formula successfully.

Valerie Strauss begins:

We live in an era where public school districts are routinely slammed for being hidebound and resistant to change. Some are, but others make changes all the time, sometimes with success. This post looks at a few districts that have done just that.


It was written by David Kirp, a professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and co-author of “Disrupting Disruption: The Steady Work of Transforming Schools.” A senior fellow at the Learning Policy Institute, a nonprofit education think tank based in California, Kirp has written more than 15 other books and dozens of articles about social issues and have been focused on education and children’s policy. He was the founding director of the Harvard Center for Law and Education, a national support center and advocacy organization that offers help to people experiencing difficulty in the implementation of key education programs and initiatives.


By David Kirp


Public schools are frequently in the news these days, and seldom is the news good. The spotlight is on ideological donnybrooks over how race and gender-related topics are discussed in classrooms; the growing demand that parents, not teachers, decide what their children should be taught; assaults on the system by opportunistic politicians; and the learning loss blame game, with schools faulted for keeping schools closed during the pandemic. Some state lawmakers have proposed junking the common school and replacing it with a market-based regime.


The good news is that it doesn’t have to be this way.

In “Disrupting Disruption,” my co-authors and I shine a light on three racially and ethnically diverse school systems: Roanoke, nestled in Virginia’s Shenandoah mountains; Union, Okla., Tulsa’s neighbor; and Union City, N.J., across the Hudson River from Manhattan. Their students don’t resemble those in highflying places like Wilmette, Ill., or Lexington, Mass., predominantly White and well-off, with their off-the-charts test scores and graduation rates, and they do not appear on any list of the nation’s highest-performing districts. But they look like much of America, where White students don’t constitute a majority, and many come from low-income families.


These districts have earned the support of their communities. Parents have not fled to charter schools because (as their surveys show) they trust their schools to do the right thing. Rather than engaging in school-bashing, local politicians take pride in generously funding their schools, and taxpayers vote for school bonds.


There’s good reason for this vote of confidence — in each instance, the graduation rate is substantially higher than in school systems with similar demographic characteristics; what’s more, the opportunity gap that in most places separates minority students from their classmates is at or near the vanishing point. In other words, they have managed to combine excellence and equality of opportunity.


There is nothing fantastical about what is taking place, no feats of legerdemain, no superman or superwoman running the show. What they are doing to overcome the demographic odds sounds dishwater-dull, no match for the livelier terminology of markets and choice. But genuine reform isn’t sexy, and the “secret sauce” isn’t much of a secret. Here’s their “to do” list.

● Meet the diverse needs of the students; don’t batch-process them.
● Make equity a priority.
● Deliver high-quality early education.
● Fixate on maintaining high-quality education systemwide, rather than islands of excellence, while constantly seeking ways to do better.
● Beware of fads.
● Help teachers become more effective through mentoring and coaching.
● Use data to drive decisions.
● Engage teachers and parents in decision-making.
● Build an administrative structure that incorporates networks of teachers.
● Forge ties with local organizations and the political system.
● Maintain stable leadership and minimize teacher turnover.
Everything on this list will be familiar to any educator with a pulse. The hard part is getting it right.

There’s more. Open the link. This is a realistic, upbeat book that you will want to read. It describes school reforms built on professional knowledge, not hat tricks. If only Arne Duncan had asked David Kirp to advise him, instead of the crew from the Gates and Broad Foundations.

Categories Accountability, Education Reform

Congratulations, Mitchell Robinson on Election to the Michigan State Board of Ed

By dianeravitch
November 13, 2022 //
3

Dear Mitchell,

I want to congratulate you for your courage in running for the Michigan State Board of Education and double-congratulate you for winning! You have been a faithful member of the Network for Public Education, and I have been proud to post your writings here.

You entered the race knowing that it was supposed to be a bad year for Democrats. You jumped in anyway because you thought you could make a difference. You will!

You entered knowing that you, a professor of music education at Michigan State University, would be pitted against the billionaire DeVos machine. I’m thrilled to see that the entire Democratic ticket swept the State Board of Education and both houses of the Legislature.

You beat Betsy DeVos!

When frustated educators ask me what they can do, I tell them I can think of two options: join your state union (if you have one) and fight back or run for office, for local board, state board or the legislature.

You did it and you won! I know you are thrilled to be part of Michigan’s blue wave. You inspire the rest of us.

I am happy to add you to the honor roll of this blog for your courage, your persistence, and your devotion to Michigan’s children and their public schools.

Diane

Categories Betsy DeVos, Courage, Democracy, Education Reform, Elections, Honor Roll, Michigan

It Won’t Be Easy for Republicans to Dump Trump

By dianeravitch
November 12, 2022 //
14

I was thinking about how the Republican Party has a major internal battle brewing between Trump and DeSantis. The GOP establishment knows that Trump and Trumpism is a drag on the party and the last election demonstrated that Trump lunatics are likely to lose. Party leaders and major conservative media have been expressing their desire to move past Trump and eyeing Ron DeSantis as their Savior. Of course, DeSantis sees himself as God’s anointed one; he had a commercial during his campaign showing himself as God’s Creation on the Eighth Day.

So in my imagination, I see an epic battle brewing. Trump will not go easily. His ego won’t allow it.

My hope is that he will fight DeSantis in the primaries, and if he loses, he will launch his own third party, to punish the Republicans who abandoned him. He has his fanatical base, and they will not easily transfer their affection to another candidate, even one who is more far-right than Trump.

So my fantasy scenario is that the 2024 elections will feature a Democratic candidate, the Republican candidate Ron DeSantis, and Donald Trump of the Patriot Party.

Having thought this through, I was delighted to discover that Jamelle Bouie of the New York Times was thinking along the same lines. He wrote:

The idea that Republican elites could simply swap Trump for another candidate without incurring any serious damage rests on two assumptions: First, that Trump’s supporters are more committed to the Republican Party than they are to him, and second, that Trump himself will give up the fight if he isn’t able to win the party’s nomination.

I think these assumptions show a fundamental misunderstanding of the world Republican elites brought into being when they finally bent the knee to Trump in the summer and fall of 2016. Trump isn’t simply a popular (with Republicans) politician with an unusually enthusiastic group of supporters. No, he leads a cult of personality, in which he is an almost messianic figure, practically sent by God himself to purge the United States of liberals (and other assorted enemies) and restore the nation to greatness. He is practically worshiped by a large and politically influential group of Americans, who describe him as “anointed.”

It is one thing for Republican elites to try to break a political fandom. It is another thing entirely to try to break the influence of a man whose strongest, most devoted supporters were willing to sack the Capitol or sacrifice their lives in an attack on an F.B.I. office. Some Trump supporters will leave the fold for an alternative like DeSantis, but there will be a hard-core group who came to the Republican Party for Trump, and won’t settle for another candidate.

This gets to the second assumption: the idea that Trump would go quietly if he lost the nomination to DeSantis or another rival. Donald Trump might have been a Republican president, but he isn’t really a Republican. What I mean is that he shows no particular commitment to the fortunes of the party as an institution. His relationship to the Republican Party is purely instrumental. He also cannot admit defeat, as you may have noticed.

There is a real chance that Trump, if he loses the nomination, decides to run for president anyway. And if he pulls any fraction of his supporters away from the Republican Party, he would play the spoiler, no matter who the party tried to elevate against him. Republican elites might be done with Trump, but Trump is not done with the Republican Party.

Categories Education Reform

Carol Burris: How the Election Affected Education

By dianeravitch
November 12, 2022 //
10

It will take a while to get a full picture of how public education was affected by the election, but Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, sums up some of the highlights (and lowlights) here. we will keep reporting as we gather more information.

Carol writes:

The two foremost issues on voters’ minds this election were the economy and reproductive choice. The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools’s “parent power” push poll earlier this year and Jeanne Allen’s (Center for Education Reform) claim that privatized school choice was responsible for some candidates’ victories are two thinly veiled attempts to ingratiate their organizations with those elected.

Nevertheless, who won and who lost will influence education policy. Below are some notable outcomes as well as what we are watching that is still underdetermined.

State Legislatures

When it comes to charters and vouchers, the state level is most important. Resistance to both consistently comes from Democrats, at times, with rural Republican support. For example, the wild expansion of vouchers coincided with former Republican sweeps in state legislatures in 2020. There was no red wave through most state houses, which is good news.

Although we still await vote counts in some states, Republicans have not flipped any state legislatures their way so far, and there have been some realized and still possible victories for Democrats that can bode well for public education.

Michigan:

Michigan is the brightest spot of all. Democrats now have control of the governorship and both houses of the legislature in a state where they have not controlled either chamber since 1984. This provides a long-awaited opportunity to pass laws to make that state’s low-quality charter schools, run predominantly by for-profit operators, more transparent and accountable.

NPE Board member Cassandra Ulbrich retired from the Michigan State Board of Education. However, a great long-time friend of NPE, Mitchell Robinson, was elected, which is wonderful news.

And what about that voucher bill that Betsy De Vos attempted to push through a super-majority? Unless the Secretary of State goes through all of those signatures by the end of the year, it will go to the next legislature, which will not push it through. It will then go on the ballot where just as before, it will fail.

Pennsylvania:

Although Josh Shapiro voiced some support for private-school vouchers on the campaign trail, it is doubtful he will follow through, especially since the House will flip to the Democrats when all the votes are counted. In any case, the super-majority that held school funding increases hostage when the former Governor attempted modest charter reforms is now gone. School board members, teachers, and superintendents who have long fought for reforms to the charter funding system will now have a fighting chance.

And the state’s newest Senator, John Fetterman, is not only opposed to vouchers, he strongly supports Governor Wolf’s charter reforms.

Arizona

While the House will likely remain under Republican control, there is an outside chance that the Senate will split and the Governor will be Democrat Katie Hobbs. If that were to happen, there might be a respite from dismantling the public school system in that state by Republicans.

Federal

The House of Representatives:

Rosa De Lauro is one of the strongest friends of public education in the House of Representatives. She has kept the federal Charter Schools Program in check during her tenure as the leader of the House Appropriations Committee. While Rosa easily won re-election, if control shifts again to the Republicans, education budget priorities will likely change. There will be an attempt to overturn the Charter School Program reform regulations of the Education Department.

Senate:

Continued control of the Senate by Democrats means that even if the House flips, there will be some check on Republican attempts. And if Bernie Sanders assumes control of the HELP committee, that will mean good news for public schools.

But if the Republicans prevail, there is a strong possibility that Rand Paul will lead HELP. Libertarian Paul makes his disdain for public education apparent, and his leadership would lead to constant battles over the education budget and the Department of Education itself, which he would like to abolish.

Propositions

Finally, in some states, voters passed propositions for which we should cheer.

For example, California’s Proposition 28 passed with overwhelming support. The state will now put in about one billion dollars a year to support education in music and the arts, ensuring that arts education will not be dependent on where a child lives. And in Colorado, with the passage of Proposition FF,all children will now receive free lunch in schools even as they did during the Pandemic.

If you have more information about your district and state, please send it to me or to Carol, or both.

cburris@networkforpubliceducation.org

Categories Education Industry, Education Reform, Elections

North Carolina: Major Victory for Public School Funding!

By dianeravitch
November 11, 2022 //
7

For the past dozen years, the General Assembly of North Carolina has been relentless in its efforts to crush the state’s public schools and their teachers. This period began with the ascendancy of the Tea Party in what was once the most progressive state in the South. Parents, students, and teachers got good news from the State Supreme Court on November 4. The following description of the decision was written by the Center for Educational Equity at Teachers College, Columbia University.

NORTH CAROLINA SUPREME COURT ISSUES BLOCKBUSTER SCHOOL-FUNDING DECISION

On November 4th, in a stunning 227-page decision, the North Carolina Supreme Court ordered the state controller and other state officials to transfer approximately $800 million from state budget reserves to the state educational budgets to fund a comprehensive compliance plan in the long-pending Leandro litigation.  The decision comes after the state legislature refused to appropriate the full amount required to implement the second and third years of the eight-year phase-in of the compliance plan.

The 1997 Leandro case affirmed NC students’ constitutional right to the opportunity for a sound basic education and recognized the duty of the state government to provide adequate funding to guarantee that right to all students. 

In its 4-2 decision on Friday, the state supreme court refused to permit further delay in fully vindicating the state students’ constitutional right. It remanded the case to the trial court to recalculate the exact amount of funds required for the transfer and ordered that the trial court to retain jurisdiction to ensure that the plan is fully implemented in the years to come.

The court stated the significance of the case in potent language:

A quarter-century ago, this Court recognized that the North Carolina Constitution vests in all children of this state the right to the opportunity to receive a sound basic education and that it is the constitutional duty of the State to uphold that right. Leandro v. State , 346 N.C. 336, 345 (1997). … In 2004, we affirmed the trial court’s determination “that the State had failed in its constitutional duty to provide certain students with the opportunity to attain a sound basic education,” and that “the State must act to correct those deficiencies.”… At that still-early stage of the litigation, this Court deferred to the legislative and executive branches to craft and implement a remedy to this failure. 

In the eighteen years since, despite some steps forward and back, the foundational basis for the ruling of Leandro … has remained unchanged: today, as in 2004, far too many North Carolina schoolchildren … are not afforded their constitutional right to the opportunity to a sound basic education. …

Now, this Court must determine whether [the state’s constitutional] duty is a binding obligation or an unenforceable suggestion. We hold the former: the State may not indefinitely violate the constitutional rights of North Carolina schoolchildren without consequence. Our Constitution is the supreme law of the land; it is not optional. In exercising its powers under the Appropriations Clause, the General Assembly must also comply with its duties under the Education Provisions. 

Rejecting the legislature’s separation of powers objections, the court held:

[W]hen inaction by those exercising legislative authority threatens fiscally to undermine the integrity of the judiciary, a court may invoke its inherent power to do what is reasonably necessary for the orderly and efficient administration of justice.”… Although “Article V prohibits the judiciary from taking public monies without statutory authorization [,]” when the exercise of remedial power “necessarily includes safeguarding the constitutional rights of the parties [,] … the court has the inherent authority to direct local authorities to perform that duty. …

For our Constitution to retain its integrity and legitimacy, the fundamental rights enshrined therein must be “guarded and maintained.” When other branches indefinitely abdicate this constitutional obligation, the judiciary must fill the void.

This forceful order reminds us that, at a time when the U.S. Supreme Court seems bent on abolishing or reducing important constitutional guarantees, state courts can play a critical role in upholding and fully enforcing important constitutional rights.

Note: The Center for Educational Equity helped draft the brief, amicus curiae, of the “Professors and Long-Time Practitioners of Constitutional and Educational Law” that was submitted in support of the plaintiffs’ position on this appeal.

Categories Education Reform, Funding, North Carolina

Good News from Ohio!

By dianeravitch
November 11, 2022 //
15

With the help of the teachers’ unions, the people of Ohio elected three new members of the state board of education who support public schools. This is great news because the politicians in the State House and the Legislature have been frantically diverting public funds to charter schools and vouchers, as well as endorsing extremist policies on race and gender. The state constitution explicitly authorizes a system of public schools and forbids public funding of religious schools. Ohio’s charter schools are among the lowest-performing in the nation and are lower performing than the state’s public schools. Half of those authorized by the state have closed.

 

Anti-culture war candidates win three seats on Ohio State Board of Education, with big boost from teachers’ unions

By Laura Hancock, cleveland.com

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Voters elected three candidates to the Ohio State Board of Education on Tuesday who oppose fights over LGBTQ students in bathrooms and attempts to control how American racism is discussed in social studies classes. The Ohio Federation of Teachers and the Ohio Education Association contributed tens of thousands of dollars to help the campaigns of former state senator Teresa Fedor of Toledo, Tom Jackson of Solon and Katie Hofmann of Cincinnati, who each won their races against more conservative candidates. Candidates the unions did not support, including one who ran unopposed, won races in two districts.

The unions were involved in recruiting the three candidates. Fedor and Hofmann are each former teachers and members of OFT. Jackson, a businessman, is a volunteer coach at Solon High School and serves on the Solon City Schools Strategic Planning Team. Their members volunteered to knock on doors and spread the word about the candidates.

They also gave their candidates a big fundraising boost. In addition to writing checks for each candidate’s campaign — OEA gave $13,700 to each candidate’s campaign and the OFT gave $12,000 to Fedor and Jackson and $13,700 to Hofmann — the unions spent at least $100,000 to get them elected through an independent super PAC called Educators for Ohio. The PAC is normally controlled by OEA, but OFT this year was also involved in it, said Melissa Cropper, president of the OFT.

The super PAC spent money only on the three state school board candidates, said Scott DiMauro, president of the OEA. “The three individuals who won those contested races are all strong advocates of public education, they have strong records on that,” DiMauro said. “I would anticipate they would work closely with other members of the state board who have been pushing back on some of those (culture wars) attacks. How everything is going to play out still remains to be seen, because you still have an extremist faction that is pushing some of those resolutions. Some of those members are still there.”

Fedor defeated Sarah McGervey, a Catholic school teacher who talked about parental rights against perceived liberal bias in education and keeping LGBTQ protections out of Title IX. Jackson defeated incumbent Tim Miller and Cierra Lynch Shehorn, who was ran further to the right of Miller. Hofmann defeated conservative incumbent Jenny Kilgore.

Hoffman, Jackson and Fedor vastly outraised their opponents. Kilgore individually raised $5,800 in 2022. Hofmann raised nearly $44,000. Jackson raised $53,000 this year, compared to Miller’s $7,600 and Lynch Shehorn’s $4,800.

Fedor’s and McGervey’s campaign finance reports are more complicated. McGervey ran for the Ohio House in August. After she lost that race she ran for the state board. Her total fundraising haul was $15,000. Fedor was a sitting senator in 2021, the beginning of the two-year funding cycle, and she raised $95,000 during the two-year period.

Other candidates who won but were not supported by the unions include incumbent member John P. Hagan, a conservative on the board, who beat a challenge from Robert R. Fulton. Neither candidate in that race received the unions’ endorsement. Ohio State Board of Education President Charlotte McGuire won reelection unopposed. Ohio Value Voters, a conservative Christian organization, backed the conservative slate of candidates, including Hagan.

As Ohio students fell academically behind from remote learning during the pandemic and Ohio has been without a permanent state superintendent for more than a year, conservatives on the state school board pressed to take on several controversial issues over the last year.

Last year, conservatives on the board successfully overturned an anti-racism resolution that the board had previously passed in the wake of George Floyd’s death. Two members of the state board who voted to overturn the anti-racism measure were defeated Tuesday night: Miller, of Akron, and Kilgore, of Hamilton County. A third supporter of the resolution, Kirsten Hill – who organized a bus from Lorain County to attend the “Stop the Steal” rally on Jan. 6 but said she never entered the U.S. Capitol – opted not to seek reelection.

More recently, conservatives on the board have been pushing a resolution that would urge local school districts to defy Title IX protections for LGBTQ students that are being proposed by President Joe Biden’s administration, potentially putting federal money for free and reduced lunch and special education in jeopardy. The resolution remains under consideration. Board members have spent 10 hours taking public testimony and discussing it since September.

Most of the state school board campaigning and fundraising took place in just the past two months, Cropper said.

“Remember, this election cycle, no one knew what the lines were going to be,” she said. Every 10 years, the boundaries for the Ohio State Board of Education shift when Ohio Senate boundaries are redrawn. Gov. Mike DeWine changed state school board boundaries Jan. 31, a move panned by critics as gerrymandering. DeWine didn’t change the school board map, even as state mapmakers shifted the Senate’s boundaries found to violate the Ohio Constitution, and on July 14, Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose notified county boards of election to use the Jan. 31 changes DeWine made. Candidates for the state school board, which are nonpartisan, had to file to run for the seats Aug. 10, which left just a few months to campaign.

“It really was a crunch in trying to get quality candidates to run,” Cropper said. “We had incumbents we know that were not pro-public education, who were in my opinion, pushing these culture war issues at the state board level. And it was just critical to us that we could get them out of there. So we definitely were looking for people who understand public education, who have been engaged in conversations about equity, social-emotional learning, the whole child approach, all the things that are really important to us.”

The whole child approach refers to the state board’s 2019-2024 strategic plan that says the state is concerned with the “whole child,” not just academics but stressors children experience at home that can influence learning. In 2019, the Ohio Department of Education unveiled social-emotional learning standards that aim to help children become successful in their interactions with others, to establish positive relationships, manage their emotions, and make healthy, drug-free choices in life.

“My estimation is that people rejected extremists and the extreme issues that they’re bringing to the table and children are caught in the middle,” Fedor said Wednesday. “I believe this is an overall rejection of using our children as political fodder.” Fedor had the most name recognition among the state school board candidates. In addition to her legislative career, she was on the Democratic gubernatorial ticket this spring with former Cincinnati Mayor John Cranley. Fedor said that as she campaigned, she talked about reducing the number of standardized tests kids have to take. She talked about her own time in the classroom, when she worked an additional part-time job at the Toledo Zoo to make money for classroom materials.

She said she learned that people were horrified that Hill led Ohioans to the Jan. 6 rally. “There was a flood of different ideas and thoughts about what’s going on,” she said. “And they did not support the extremists who are bringing the extreme issues forward. The culture wars in the classrooms have to end so we can get to the business of educating our children with quality public education.”

Billionaires have been pouring millions of dollars into state and local school board races for at least the last dozen years. These elections are often flooded with money from out-of-state billionaires who support expansion of charter schools and invalid ways of evaluating teachers.

It’s great to see the unions step up and support state school board members who care about public schools and teachers and care about issues that matter, rather than divisive conflicts that don’t help anyone. The amount of money spent by the unions was small compared to what the billionaires spend, but it made a difference.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Democracy, Education Reform, Elections, Ohio, Unions, Vouchers

Randi Weingarten on the Election

By dianeravitch
November 9, 2022 //
26

Randi Weingarten, president of the AFT, campaigned across the country for candidates who support public schools and their teachers. She released the following statement:

American Voters Reject Extremism in Win for Democracy and Freedom

WASHINGTON—AFT President Randi Weingarten issued the following statement on the emerging results of the 2022 midterm elections:
“In a year when democracy, freedom, public education, public safety and economic security were on the ballot, voters overwhelmingly rejected MAGA extremism and fear.


“They stood up for who we are as a country. They stood up for democracy and against election deniers. They stood up for the right of women to make decisions about their reproductive health, and against chaos and hate.


“Our country remains deeply divided—and there were many heartbreaking losses. But voters in so many close races elected problem solvers rather than problem makers.


“When public education was on the ballot, public education mainly won. Dynamic, progressive governors who ran on a positive agenda focused on the promise and potential of public schools prevailed. Ballot initiatives in California, Massachusetts and New Mexico passed. Even in Florida, against millions spent by Ron DeSantis, levies boosting funding for schools saw widespread success.


“These results show a deep reservoir of support for public schools and for the sustained investment that parents want to help their kids thrive. And the endorsement of collective bargaining provisions in multiple states and cities comes at a time when the labor movement—including unions representing educators—maintains strong and enduring approval. AFT members—educators, healthcare workers, public employees, and retirees—campaigned relentlessly for what our kids and communities need, and those efforts made a difference.


“The final picture will emerge in the coming days. Still, one thing is already clear: Last night, Americans boldly asserted their rights and freedoms and rallied around the democratic institutions that give our country meaning and hope for the future.”

Categories Accountability, Education Reform, Supporting public schools

Charter Schools Worsen the Teacher Shortage

By dianeravitch
November 6, 2022 //
10

The more charter schools, the worse the shortage of teachers prepared in university education programs. Those in university programs intend to be career educators, and their numbers are shrinking. Thus concludes a new study from a federal research center created to study choice and its effects.

When Betsy DeVos was Secretary of Education, she awarded $10 million to create the National Center for Research on Education Access and Choice (REACH). The research group is headed by Douglas Harris, and DeVos assumed that he was pro-choice.

While Harris has written papers favorable to choice, he is an independent scholar and follows the data where it leads. In this paper, he and his co-author Mary Penn conclude that charter schools contribute to the teacher shortage.

On its face, the proposition makes sense. If a young person wants to teach, they can get a job in a charter school without a teacher education degree. They can join Teach for America and become a teacher with only weeks of preparation. Or in some states, they can teach with no certification or degrees. Why bother going through the process of professional education and certification when charter schools will hire without any prerequisites?

The summary of the study concludes:

Debates about charter schools center on their immediate effects on students who attend them and how charter schools affect nearby traditional public schools. However, as the charter sector has continued to grow, a broader range of possibly unintended effects become relevant. This study is one of the first to examine the possibility that
charter schools affect the teacher pipeline. We focus specifically on how charter schools affect the number of traditionally prepared teachers who receive a bachelor’s in education.

Using data from 290 school districts with at least one commuter college nearby, we analyze the effect on the traditional teacher pipeline from schools of education. We draw the following conclusions:

Increasing district charter school enrollment by 10% decreases the supply of teachers traditionally prepared with a bachelor’s in education by 13.5-15.2% on average.

Charter-driven reductions in the supply of traditionally prepared teachers are most apparent in elementary, special education, and math education degrees.

This is consistent with the fact that charter schools mostly serve elementary grades, express interest in subject matter experts (e.g., math majors), and are less likely to assign students to special education.

These charter-driven reductions are concentrated in metropolitan areas and are largest among Black teachers.

Given how central teachers are to the educational process, any effect on the teacher pipeline is important. The vast majority of U.S. teachers still come from university-based schools of education, and these teachers stay in the profession longer than those who are not traditionally prepared, which makes these declines note worthy. A larger
point is that charter schools change the entire schooling market in ways we are only beginning to recognize.

The National Education Policy Center reviewed the study here.

Categories Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Research, School Choice, Teacher Shortage, U.S. Department of Education

How Elite Colleges Restricted the Number of Jewish Students

By dianeravitch
November 5, 2022 //
31

Journalist Mark Oppenheimer wrote an opinion article in the New York Times, describing the long history of antiSemitism at elite colleges. Stanford University apologized for its limited enrollment of Jews in the 1950. The apology came at a time when anti-Semitism is surging on college campuses and in society.

But restricting the number of Jews admitted to Ivy League campuses is nothing new. The top Ivy League colleges introduced strict quotas in the 1920s, fearful of being overwhelmed by Jewish students.

To anyone who understands the history of Jewish exclusion on elite campuses, the central findings of a recently released, long-awaited report from Stanford University were no shock. The report confirmed that Stanford admissions officers purposefully limited the enrollment of Jewish students in the 1950s, in part by greatly reducing the number of applicants admitted from heavily Jewish public high schools.

What’s surprising is that these discriminatory measures were, comparatively, so mild and so late to come about. Elite Northeastern schools perfected Jewish exclusion decades before Stanford got in on the act.

In the 1920s, Columbia and Harvard began seeking students from the South and West as a means of limiting the number of students from more Jewish school systems in the Northeast — the very idea of “geographical diversity” was invented to keep out Jews. From 1928 through 1938, Columbia operated Seth Low Junior College, a two-year school in Brooklyn to which Jews were relegated to keep the student body of its Manhattan campus more Protestant. And Yale decided, in 1922, to restrict Jewish enrollment, which it did until the 1960s.

Given that history, and the increase in antisemitism today in the United States, the most noteworthy aspect of the Stanford report is its long list of proposed steps for atonement, or teshuvah, to use the Hebrew word invoked by its authors. The recommendations show noble intentions, but they also reveal the limitations of official university action in fighting what may be the world’s most enduring prejudice.

How universities balance the ethnic compositions of their student bodies is an urgent question right now, as the Supreme Court on Monday heard arguments on two cases challenging affirmative action, at Harvard and the University of North Carolina. In several months, when it rules on the legality of their admissions practices, the court may forbid the use of race or ethnicity as considerations. If so, partisans on both sides will argue about what such a change means for “diversity,” especially the imperative to admit historically underrepresented people of color, like Black and Hispanic Americans.

These fights are nothing new. As the plaintiffs note in their brief on the Harvard case, in 1922 Harvard began to suss out which applicants were Jewish, in part by asking questions like, “What change, if any, has been made since birth in your own name or that of your father? (Explain fully.)” Indeed, as scholars like Jerome Karabel and Robert McCaughey haveshown, the modern college application process, from the form to the interview, were developed to weed out Jews.

Stanford adopted some of this playbook midway through the last century, so its reckoning is welcome. Some of its report’s recommended steps for atonement are symbolic, like issuing an official apology (which Stanford just did). Other steps are more concrete, like better accommodating students who need kosher food or don’t use technology on the Sabbath, and thus can’t use electronic key cards on Saturday. The report recommends paying better attention to the Jewish calendar, so the start of school does not conflict with Jewish holidays — as it did this year, when first-quarter classes started on Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year….

Jewish students today are faced with a growing antisemitism that is rooted in widespread ignorance. In September, the Wellesley student newspaper published an editorial that relied on the blatantly antisemitic Mapping Project, a crude website that implies that institutions in Massachusetts including Emerson, Tufts and Harvard, a Boston-area Jewish high school, and even a public school system (Newton) are part of a web of conspiratorial Zionism. (The newspaper later said it did not “endorse” the Mapping Project.) Other institutions, like Northwestern, near Chicago, have seen incidents of swastika graffiti on their campuses.

And this year, students at a Jewish fraternity at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo told me that fellow students regularly shouted anti-Jewish slurs at them when they walked by the fraternity house. The Cal Poly students told me the hate speech is so common that they don’t even bother to report it.

College campuses are merely reflections of the national mood. The Anti-Defamation Leaguesays there was a 167 percent increase in antisemitic assaults from 2020 to 2021. But given that context, what might address the problem at schools?

Leadership, for one thing — like the kind modeled by Wellesley’s president, Paula Johnson, who condemned the Mapping Project as promoting antisemitism. A renewed focus on the humanities is another part of the solution. As students rush to major in subjects deemed useful — fields like economics and computer science — they are leaving history and philosophy in the dust.

As a college lecturer, most recently for 15 years at Yale, I have been surprised by the gaps in students’ historical knowledge. I’ve had students who thought that President John F. Kennedy had email and that American slavery ended in the 20th century. Some students didn’t realize Holocaust survivors still walk the earth, and many knew nothing of other genocides, from Rwanda to Cambodia.

Paradoxically, ignorance is flourishing at a time when many students seem more interested than ever in history. They are dismayed that their dormitories and classroom buildings are named after slaveholders, and they know that there is something problematic about Christopher Columbus, even if they can’t always say what. These students are ill served by curriculums that have downgraded the study of history, literature and philosophy.

Narrow-mindedness hurts us all, not only Jews. But encouraging and empowering students to discuss the history of Jews — to know anything about Jews — is the one indispensable way for schools to atone for their antisemitic past. I suspect that more Stanford students have learned about antisemitism from their school’s mea culpa than from classes they’ve taken there.

I am a graduate of Wellesley College, and I was very proud when the College’s President Paula Johnson called out the student newspaper for supporting The Mapping Project, an attempt to name and shame Jews who did not follow the newspaper’s politically correct views. Dr. Johnson did not interfere with the publication, but she said forcefully that there’s no room on campus for bigotry.

Categories Accountability, Bias, Bigotry, Education Reform, Higher Education, History
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