Archives for category: Education Reform
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Arizona SOS Files Signatures to Block Universal Vouchers

By dianeravitch
September 24, 2022 //
13

Arizona voters blocked vouchers in 2018 by a 2-1 margin. The Koch-DeVos machine came back with an even bigger voucher proposal this year. Save Our Schols Arizona, a grassroots group of volunteers once more gathered signatures to compel a state referendum to block vouchers. The billionaires hate democracy and will try to stop the referendum.

The Arizona Republic reported:

A school voucher program scheduled to become law Saturday is on hold after public-school advocates gathered enough citizen signatures to temporarily block the controversial program.

On Friday, the Save Our Schools movement submitted 141,714 signatures to the Arizona secretary of state as volunteers concluded a drive to refer the voucher program to the 2024 ballot for voters to decide.

The law, authorized by the GOP majority in the Legislature and signed by Republican Gov. Doug Ducey, would be the first universal voucher program in the nation, using taxpayer dollars for private education efforts.

It would expand the state’s Empowerment Scholarship Account program to every Arizona schoolchild, providing an estimated $7,000 of taxpayer money per child for a range of educational services, from private school tuition to tutors to support for parents who opt to teach their children at home…

Raquel Mamani, an educator and parent, celebrated the petition drive, saying it puts on hold “the anti-public education, anti-parent, anti-student agenda forced into our state by extremists.”

Volunteers gathered signatures from all 15 counties in 80 days, a sign of widespread support, said Nicky Indicavitch, outreach director for Save Our Schools Arizona.

“Arizonans want top quality, fully funded public schools in every neighborhood,” she said.

This is the second time in five years public-school proponents have taken to the streets to block voucher expansion. In 2017, a similar referendum drive sent an expansion of the ESA program to ballot, where voters in 2018 rejected it by a margin of nearly 2 to 1.

Friday’s filing had echoes of the 2017 effort, but both supporters and opponents of the ESA program expect a more robust, heavily funded fight this time around.

The American Federation for Children [the DeVos organization] has signaled its support for the expanded program, and a “decline to sign” movement that tried to discourage people from signing the referendum petitions said it has proof of illegal signature efforts…

After the universal expansion passed in June, the state started taking preliminary applications. Data released last month showed 6,500 families had applied in just two weeks. Of those families, about 75% indicated they did not have a child previously in public school.

Those early findings solidified opposition from public-school advocates, who argued that the numbers showed the beneficiaries were likely people already paying private tuition and looking to cash in on a hefty state subsidy.

Categories Accountability, Arizona, Betsy DeVos, Billionaires, Democracy, Education Reform, Extremism, Koch Brothers, Vouchers

Steve Nelson: The Beatings Will Continue…

By dianeravitch
September 23, 2022 //
20

Steve Nelson is a retired educator. He was headmaster of The Calhoun School in New York City. He writes here about the reactions to the decline of NAEP scores since the onset of the pandemic.

He writes:

“The beatings will continue until morale improves” is a rather familiar quip of unknown origin.  Two recent news stories remind of just how apt the saying remains.

The first was an astonishing New York Times report on the reinstitution of paddling as a disciplinary tool in a Missouri school district. Surprisingly, paddling children in school remains legal in 19 states, although the practice is not widespread. Paddling children is barbaric, humiliating and utterly ineffective. Corporal punishment makes children more aggressive and disruptive. The Missouri abusers attempt to mitigate their own cruelty by saying they only whack kids whose parents give permission. It takes little imagination to understand why a child of such parents would have difficulty in school and draw more negative attention.

Few readers will disagree with my condemnation of beating childen. I suspect the rest of this post will be more controversial.

The educational world was aghast at the news this week of the “alarming” results from the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). NAEP is the supposed gold standard of measurement, also called the nation’s report card. The 2022 tests of reading and math were conducted to assess pandemic “learning loss” and produced the data that researchers anticipated. Reading scores were down 5 points and math scores down 7 points compared to 2020 levels.

“The beatings will continue until scores improve” is the nearly inevitable consequence as education pundits, economists, policy-makers and most parents, wax apoplectic over the “precipitous” drop.

“I was taken aback by the scope and the magnitude of the decline!”

“No more of the arguments, and the back and forth and the vitriol and the finger pointing. Everybody should be treating this like the crisis that it is.”

Pity the children, especially poor children of color for whom the results were somewhat more statistically “significant.” This is a tempest in a teapot and the solution will be far more damaging than the problem.

It is likely to be a reprise of the reaction to A Nation at Risk, a 1983 report that allegedly showed educational achievement in serious decline. It was not true – a statistical phenomenon led to misinterpretation of the data – but the report drove a frenetic response of testing and accountability that continues until today. And here we go again.

Read on to learn Nelson’s response to the doom-and-gloom prescriptions for the nation’s children: longer days, longer weeks, longer years.

Steve Nelson disagrees.

Categories Discipline, Education Reform, Technology

Jitu Brown: A Civil Rights Leader at the Forefront of the Fight for Equity in Education

By dianeravitch
September 19, 2022 //
2

Jitu Brown has built a national civil rights organization called Journey for Justice, with chapters in 38 cities. He is a large and powerful man who speaks from personal experience and brings a message of determination and hope.

Jitu Brown is leading a national equity campaign based on a Quality of Life agenda that will be released with congressional members, union leaders, and others in Washington D.C. on September 22, 2022. This will be part of an Advocacy Day with hundreds of leaders from across the country supporting this platform.

Brown, a member of the board of the Network for Public Education, was recently profiled by The Hill, an influential publication in D.C. He spoke at the annual NPE conference in Philadelphia and challenged the audience to commit themselves to equity in education.

On Saturday, September 24, 2024 there will be a Quality of Life Festival held in D.C. with speakers and music, attended by thousands of people from across the country.

Most recently, Jitu and his team brought clean water to the people of Jackson, Mississippi, where the municipal water is unsafe.

The Hill wrote about him:

Speaking to The Hill from a Chicago office adorned with posters screaming “Equality or Else” and “Water Is a Human Right,” Brown talked about growing up in the Rosemoor neighborhood of Chicago’s Far South Side during the 1970s.

The son of a nurse and a steelworker, Brown was the beneficiary of the civil rights movement: He lived in a working-class, Black community and had educators who looked like him and a school that encouraged cultural awareness.

“I remember growing up as a child, feeling very warm, feeling protected, not being afraid to walk, catching the bus all over the city,” Brown said.

That didn’t mean there weren’t issues in his community. Brown’s neighborhood was straddled by two of the city’s most prominent rival gangs: the Gangster Disciples and the Vice Lords.

Brown said he could have easily become wrapped up in the gangs, but he had the support of his family and friends.

Jitu had his own personal struggles, but then joined a hip-hop musical group that was signed by a major label.

He left the music industry to become a community organizer with the Kenwood Oakland Community Organization in Chicago.

Brown started KOCO’s youth development and youth leadership programs. As he worked with the students, schools began to take an interest. They wanted, in particular, Black men to bring their experience and knowledge into the classrooms. So Brown did.

And as he did, the inequity in the schools became quite clear.

“You’re working with these young people, but you’re noticing that at this school, there’s one computer in the entire class and there’s no air conditioning,” he recalled. “Then I’m also going to schools and other communities and I’m working with student councils. You walk in and the school is bright. The classrooms are small. They got world language. They have counselors. They have teacher aides in every class.”

Brown began to realize the discrepancies between the schools were systemic. KOCO started organizing more and more, working to stop the city from closing more than 20 schools serving predominantly Black and Brown students and conducting sit-ins at City Hall for more youth job opportunities.

The goal was — and remains — to create an equitable schooling system regardless of the students’ races, leading to the founding of the Journey for Justice Alliance in 2012.

The Alliance focuses on enacting a “sustainable community school village.”

Sustainable community schools are rooted in the principles that everybody in the school community should have input on what an engaging and relevant and rigorous curriculum looks like, schools should offer high-quality and culturally competent teaching, and wraparound supports should be available to each child.

Wraparound supports are a big focus for the Journey for Justice Alliance, Brown said.

Keep your eyes on Jitu Brown and Journey for Justice. They are on the ground and teaching people how to speak, get active, and advocate for equity.

Nothing less will do.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Chicago, Civil Rights, Courage, Democracy, Education Reform, Equity

Illinois Dark Money Tries to Intervene in School Board Races

By dianeravitch
September 17, 2022 //
3

Illinois Families for Public Schools is up against some of the biggest oligarchs in the country, who are firing off tweets against this grassroots group.

On Tuesday our Twitter account urged people to start paying attention to the upcoming 2023 school board elections across the state. Something about “bad actors who espouse ugly agendas” got the attention of one of the worst actors in the state, the Illinois Policy Institute. This organization, funded by millions of dollars from right-wing oligarchs like the Koch Family, Dick Uihlein, and Bruce Rauner, has a history of spreading lies about progressive policies. 

IPI’s twitter account went on the attack, sending dozens of tweets attacking us. Some tweets were attempts to tar us with our support of an elected school board and opting out of standardized tests (guilty as charged!), while others were outright lies. 

As you may know, we’re a very small, volunteer-led organization with only part-time staff, while IPI has a budget at least 100 times our own, and dozens of employees ready to attack at any moment—for something as minor as urging people to look up who’s running for their school boards. 

Can you please make a donation to help us keep standing up to the pro-privatization billionaires and their radical supporters?

DONATE

Thanks for continuing to help us fight the good fight!

–-Team IL-FPS


PS On Twitter? Retweet some of our debunkings of IPI’s disinformation, here and here!

Categories Education Reform

Florida: DeSantis’ Phony Crackdown on “Voter Fraud”

By dianeravitch
September 17, 2022 //
26

The Washington Post editorial board wrote a scathing critique of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ expensive and ineffective effort to prevent voter fraud. In 2018, Florida voters passed a state referendum to restore the voting rights of felons. It passed with nearly 65% of the vote. Those convicted of murder or sex crimes would not have their voting rights restored. Governor Ron DeSantis, never missing an opportunity to grandstand and toot his own horn, recently announced that he had caught cheaters! Twenty of them! These sad souls, having paid their debt to society in prison, voted in error. They are now facing hefty fines and another prison sentence.

This is what the Washington Post reported in its editorial:

As Republican activists waved signs saying “My Vote Counts,” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) stood in a Broward County courtroom last month to tout the first deliverables from the state’s controversial election police squad. “They did not go through any process. They did not get their rights restored, and yet they went ahead and voted anyways. … And now they’re going to pay the price,” he said of the 20 people arrested and charged with voting illegally in the 2020 elections. Mr. DeSantis revealed little about the individual cases — and no wonder. Many of those charged had no idea they were unable to vote; some had even received official government notifications that they were eligible. None of that seemed to matter to Mr. DeSantis, whose crackdown on voter fraud isn’t about a real threat to election integrity but rather his desire to score political points as he runs for reelection and considers a possible 2024 presidential bid.

Since Mr. DeSantis’s stage-managed news conference on Aug. 18, details about the people caught up in his cynical campaign have emerged. Many, as Politico reported, have little education and few financial resources and believed, based on interactions with election or other officials, that they were allowed to vote. Romona Oliver, newly released from prison after serving a 20-year murder sentence, went to the Hillsborough tax collector’s office to register to vote. She admitted to having a felony conviction when asked, but the official helping her submitted an application, and she soon received a voter card in the mail. Peter Washington, nearing the end of his 10-year sentence in 2006 for attempted sexual battery, was enrolled in a class to ease his reentry into society when he said a probation officer told him his civil rights would be automatically restored upon his release from prison. Once home years later, he received a voter registration form in the mail in 2019, filled it out and received a voter card from the Orange County supervisor of elections.

Florida voters passed a state constitutional amendment permitting felons to regain their voting rights, but it doesn’t apply to those convicted of murder or sex crimes. Ignorance or confusion about the law doesn’t mean it was permissible for these people to vote. But it is a gross overreaction for them to be dragged from their homes in handcuffs at the crack of dawn, thrown into jail and publicly vilified. They face up to $5,000 in fines and up to five years in prison.

Instead of spending $1.1 million on a special police unit to root out a problem that doesn’t exist — the 20 votes of those arrested last month — most of whom are Black — account for 0.00018 percent of the 11 million ballots cast in Florida in 2020 — the state would be better off using its money to create a system that can easily verify whether someone has the right to vote after serving time for a felony conviction. Yet Mr. DeSantis, who tried to thwart passage of the Florida constitutional amendment restoring many felons’ voting rights, clearly is not interested in making it easier for these people to vote. He would rather scare them away.

Categories Education Reform

Idaho: 18-Year-Old Activist Defeats Far-Right Candidate for Boise School Board

By dianeravitch
September 16, 2022 //
27

This is a thrilling story, reported by The Intercept.

THE NATIONWIDE CAMPAIGN to stifle discussions of race and gender in public schools through misinformation and bullying suffered a reversal in Idaho on Monday, when a high school senior vocally opposed to book bans and smears against LGBTQ+ youth took a seat on the Boise school board.

The student, Shiva Rajbhandari, was elected to the position by voters in Idaho’s capital last week, defeating an incumbent board member who had refused to reject an endorsement from a local extremist group that has harassed students and pushed to censor local libraries.

Rajbhandari, who turned 18 days before the election, was already well-known in the school district as a student organizer on climate, environmental, voting rights, and gun control issues. But in the closing days of the campaign, his opponent, Steve Schmidt, wasendorsed by the far-right Idaho Liberty Dogs, which in response helped Rajbhandari win the endorsement of Boise’s leading newspaper, the Idaho Statesman.

Rajbhandari, a third-generation Idahoan whose father is from Nepal, was elected to a two-year term with 56 percent of the vote.

In an interview, Rajbhandari told The Intercept that although he had hoped people would vote for him rather than against his opponent — “My campaign was not against Steve Schmidt,” he said — he was nonetheless shocked that Schmidt did not immediately reject the far-right group’s endorsement. “I think that’s what the majority of voters took issue with,” Rajbhandari said.

The Idaho Liberty Dogs, which attacked Rajbhandari on Facebook for being “Pro Masks/Vaccines” and leading protests “which created traffic jams and costed [sic] tax payers money,” spent the summer agitating to have books removed from public libraries in Nampa and Meridian, two cities in the Boise metro area.

But, Rajbhandari said, “that’s the least of what they’ve done. Last year, there was a kid who brought a gun to Boise High, which is my school, and he got suspended and they organized an armed protest outside our school.”

Rajbhandari, who started leading Extinction Rebellion climate protests in Boise when he was 15, is familiar with the group’s tactics. “We used to have climate strikes, like back in ninth grade, and they would come with AR-15s,” he said, bringing rifles to intimidate “a bunch of kids protesting for a livable future.”

So when the Idaho Liberty Dogs called on Boise voters to support Schmidt — and a slate of other candidates for the school board who, ultimately, all lost — Rajbhandari told me he texted his rival to say, “You need to immediately disavow this.”

“This is a hate group,” Rajbhandari says he told Schmidt. “They intimidate teachers, they are a stain on our schools, and their involvement in this election is a stain on your candidacy.” Schmidt, however, refused to clearly reject the group, even after the Idaho Liberty Dogs lashed out at a local rabbi who criticized the endorsement by comparing the rabbi to Hitler and claiming that he harbored “an unrelenting hatred for white Christians.”

While the school board election was a hyperlocal one, Rajbhandari is aware that the forces he is battling operate at the state and national level. “Idaho is at the center of this out-of-state-funded far-right attack to try to undermine schools, with the end goal of actually abolishing public education,” Rajbhandari told me. “There’s a group, they’re called the Idaho Freedom Foundation, and they actually control a lot of the political discourse in our legislature. Their primary goal is to get rid of public education and disburse the money to charter schools or get rid of that funding entirely.”

For his courage and candor, he won the endorsement of The Idaho Statesman.

This is a remarkable young man with a bright future ahead of him. I am happy to add him to the honor roll of this blog.

Read the rest of the story by opening the link. Rajbhandari is a force to be reckoned with. He is a good omen of the bright, dedicated young people who stand up for their teachers and for environmental activism, who fight for gun control and against censorship. Best wishes to him!

Categories Academic Freedom, Censorship, Citizenship, Courage, Education Reform, Environment, Guns, Honor Roll, Idaho, Students, Teachers

Jacob Goodwin: The Best Cure for the Teacher Shortage Is Union Power

By dianeravitch
September 13, 2022 //
13

Jacob Goodwin writes in The Progressive that the best solution to the teacher shortage is to strengthen teacher unions, assuring teachers of working conditions, job security, and benefits at a time when the teaching profession and public schools are under attack by rightwing nuts.

Goodwin writes:

In February, the National Education Association conducted a survey of its three million members and found that 90 percent of respondents felt that burnout was a “serious problem,” while more than half of members reported thinking about leaving the profession “earlier than planned.”

This immediate shortage of teachers is paired with long-term concerns, with the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics predicting that there will be an 8 percent increase in the number of high school teachers that are needed by 2030. But more immediately, the current teacher shortage is the product of an orchestrated attack on public spaces that, unfortunately, gained momentum during the COVID-19 pandemic.

I teach social studies to six graders at a public school in New Hampshire, which in July 2021 joined the ranks of at least five other states that have restricted classroom conversations about race and gender. Despite what their proponents claim, these laws are clear political ploys designed with the express purpose of stopping honest conversations about history in schools by intimidating teachers….

Teachers need to come together to revitalize associations from the ground up and push back on attacks on our public schools. Local teachers can find power by volunteering to participate in union actions and strengthening relationships across district boundaries. Educators who rise to this challenge will be following the work of generations past who fought to establish labor rights.

After all, unions are an iteration of the long American tradition of citizens coming together for a common civic purpose. As an essential part of each community, union members must demand democratic reforms internally as well. Challenging existing union leadership leads to increased ferment and dialogue within the union. The best ideas often bubble to the surface in spaces that embrace purposeful debate.

Unions also help to institutionalize civic norms and practices. To be leaders in the broader community, unions must demand democratic reforms internally. The practice of openness serves as a buttress against organizational rigor mortis. Creating an internal culture of openness and support will help empower members of diverse backgrounds and experiences and act as a safeguard against cliques and narrowness. This can be reinforced through adopting term limits for officers and establishing leadership development programs that increase the capacity of the next generation of labor leaders and local stewards.

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

Categories Education Reform, Teacher Shortage, Unions

Stephen Dyer: Why Ohio Spent Only $8 Million of Its Federal Funding of $71 Million for Charters in Seven Years

By dianeravitch
September 12, 2022 //
11

In 2015, educators and fiscal watchdogs in Ohio were outraged to learn that Ohio had won a federal grant of $71 million from the Obama administration to expand its “high-quality” charter schools. At the time, Ohio was known for its many low-quality charter schools. However, seven years later, the state has spent only $8 million of that $71 million.

Why?

Stephen Dyer explains: Ohio has so few high-quality charter schools that it can’t spend the money it won.

Seven years after that grant, Ohio’s had to send back a bunch of the money and has only spent $8 million of it.

Unsurprisingly, Ohio’s had a really tough time handing out money to this ill-fated program. Why? Because the money has to go to “high-performing” charter schools — of which Ohio has precious few.…

Only 5 of the approximately 330 Charter Schools that were in operation during any one of those grant years, received federal money to expand because of their quality. Only 26 would even qualify for the money today. Out of 331 Ohio Charter Schools. 

One would think after 25 years, you’d get more than 7.9% of these schools annually to be “High Quality”...

Curious about what percentage of Ohio’s local public schools would qualify as “High Quality” under the state’s Charter School definition?

Me too. 

It’s about 3 out of every 5 Ohio public school buildings. Ohio’s major urban districts? Try more than 1 in 5 of those buildings. In Akron, it’s nearly 1 in 3 buildings.

Again, by comparison, only 1 in 13 Ohio Charter Schools qualify. 

Ohio’s had 638 Charter Schools that have operated at any time in this state. And only 5 of those got any of the $71 million in federal money designated in 2015 to expand the state’s “high-quality” Charter Schools.

Incredible.

Categories Education Reform

Jan Resseger: NAEP Scores Show the Toll of the Pandemic—But It’s Temporary

By dianeravitch
September 12, 2022 //
57

Jan Resseger is consistently the voice of wisdom on anything related to children and young people. In this post, she explains why we should not be panicked by the decline of NAEP scores. The scores reflected the toll that the pandemic exacted. But now that children are back in school, we can expect learning to proceed without major disruption.

She writes:

I think this year’s NAEP scores—considerably lower than pre-pandemic scores—should be understood as a marker that helps us define the magnitude of the disruption for our children during this time of COVID. The losses are academic, emotional, and social, and they all make learning harder….

Education Week’s Sarah Schwartz asked Stanford University professor Sean Reardon (whose research tracks the connection of poverty and race to educational achievement) whether “it will take another 20 years to raise scores once again.” Reardon responded: “That’s the wrong question…. The question is: What’s going to happen for these (9-year-old) kids over the next years of their lives.” Schwartz describes more of Reardon’s response: “Children born now will, hopefully, attend school without the kinds of major, national disruptions that children who were in school during the pandemic faced. Most likely, scores for 9-year-olds, will be back to normal relatively soon, Reardon said. Instead, he said, we should look to future scores for 13-year-olds, which will present a better sense of how much ground these current students have gained.”

Categories Accountability, Education Reform, Health, NAEP, Testing

New York: Parents and Teachers Thank Gov. Hochul for Signing Class Size Reduction Law

By dianeravitch
September 11, 2022 //
19

Leonie Haimson has been leading the campaign for class size reduction (CSR) for more than 20 years. When I first met her in 2010, she convinced me that the research on class size reduction was overwhelming. It also happens to be the most important priority for parents. She is relentless. I am proud to be a board member of Class Size Matters, the small but mighty organization that Leonie founded and leads, on a budget that is a shoestring. For her dedication, hard work, and persistence, I add Leonie Haimson to the blog’s honor roll.

The campaign for CSR achieved its greatest success when the state legislature passed legislation to reduce class size, and after weeks of wondering, Governor Kathy Hochul signed the law.

Class Size Matters issued the following press release.

For immediate release: September 9, 2022

Contacts: Leonie Haimson: 917-435-9329; leoniehaimson@gmail.com
Julia Watson: 978.518.0729; julia@aqeny.org
Randi Garay and Shirley Aubin: infocpacnyc@gmail.com

Yesterday, Governor Hochul signed the class size bill passed overwhelmingly last June by the Legislature that would require NYC to phase in smaller classes over five years. The only change from the original bill is that the implementation will now begin in the fall of 2023, rather than this September.

Leonie Haimson, Executive Director of Class Size Matters, said, “Thank you, Governor Hochul, for listening to the research showing that class size matters, especially for kids who need help the most, and for heeding the pleas of parents and teachers that it’s time to provide true equity to our students, who have long suffered from the largest class sizes in the state. We are eager to help the Chancellor, the UFT and the CSA put together an action plan to make sure that the implementation of this necessary improvement in our schools goes forward in an effective and workable manner.”

“For years, New York city parents, teachers and advocates have demanded smaller class sizes to benefit all public school students,” said Wendy Lecker, Education Law Center Senior Attorney. “Now that Governor Hochul has signed the class size reduction bill championed by Senators Robert Jackson and John Liu, City schools finally have another important tool to ensure their students receive a constitutional sound basic education.”

Parent leaders Randi Garay and Shirley Aubin said, “As the co-chairs of the Chancellor’s Parent Advisory Council, which represents all the Parent Associations and Parent Teacher Associations in the city’s public schools, we know that smaller classes have been a top priority of NYC parents for decades and how desperately they are needed. In the wake of the pandemic and with the infusion of new state and federal funds, we believe that smaller classes are not only more critical than ever, but more achievable as well. Thank you to the Governor for seeing the importance of smaller class sizes and signing the bill into law.”

“Students in New York’s public schools will be better off thanks to the class size reduction bill that Gov. Hochul signed yesterday. By signing this bill into law, she is sending a clear and important signal that she is on students’ side. We applaud the Governor for her commitment to New York’s students, especially as we are moving toward the third and final year of the State’s Foundation Aid commitment,” said Marina Marcou-O’Malley, Operations and Policy Director, Alliance for Quality Education.

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Categories Class size, Class Size Matters Org, Education Reform, New York
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