You know the story: Trump brought thousands of government documents to his home at Mar-A-Lago, his resort in Florida, where security is very lax. That trove of documents included many that were Top Secret or otherwise classified. He appealed to a judge he appointed and she granted his desire to have the trove reviewed by a “special master,” which will delay the process of retrieving the documents by many months. The judge was confirmed one week after Trump’s election loss in 2020.
Public Citizen, a nonpartisan ethics advocacy group, sent out the following request:
Donald Trump got caught hoarding government documents at his compound in Florida.
As we saw throughout his presidency, Trump has difficulty understanding the distinction between what belongs to him and what belongs to the American people.
Yesterday, a judge who was appointed by Trump ruled that all 11,000 documents recovered in the FBI’s lawful search of Mar-a-Lago must be reviewed by a “special master” before the Department of Justice can use them in its criminal investigation of Trump’s improper paper grab.
Our friends Norman L. Eisen and Fred Wertheimer have an excellent article in Slate today that explains this “incredibly flawed” ruling.
One crucial point they make is that it is impossible that documents stamped “top secret” or “classified” belong to Trump personally or are protected by attorney-client privilege.
More generally, presidential records belong to the U.S. government, not an individual president.
Jessica Winter is a staff writer for The New Yorker and the parent of a student in a New York City public school. When schools were closed during the pandemic, she found herself teaching her child how to read. She followed the precepts of whole language/balanced literacy and became increasingly frustrated. This led her to write an in-depth review of the age-old battle between whole language and phonics. It is an excellent article. She interviewed me, and I told her that the debate began in the early 19th century, when Horace Mann disagreed with the Boston schoolmasters, who were devoted to phonetic methods. The same division of opinion flares up again and again, as it did in the 1950s when Rudolf Flesch’s pro-phonics book Why Johnny Can’t Read became a bestseller.
My own view is that phonics is a beginning method, and that teachers should know how and when to teach decoding. But I was convinced by Jeanne Chall’s monumental 1967 book Learning to Read that phonics is a first step, not the only step. Children need to learn the connections between letters and sounds, then move on to reading enjoyable books.
It is fair to say that Winter has some strong words about Lucy Calkins and her domination of the reading field.
But while I am a “both-and” person, I dislike the term “the science of reading.” Some children start school knowing how to read, having absorbed both phonics and a love of reading; they are exceptions, it is true. But I don’t think there is one method that is always right. There is no “science of teaching history” or teaching any other subject.
Where we can all agree, I think, is that children need to learn to connect letters to their sounds and to sound out unfamiliar words.
Good teachers are equipped to meet children where they are and to teach them what they need to know.
For the majority of human history, most people didn’t go to school. Formal education was a privilege for the Alexander the Greats of the world, who could hire Aristotles as private tutors.
Starting in the mid-19th century, the United States began to establish truly universal, compulsory education. It was a social compact: The state provides public schools that are free and open to all. And children, for most of their childhood, are required to receive an education. Today, nine out of 10do so in public schools.
To an astonishing degree, one person, Horace Mann, the nation’s first state secretary of education, forged this reciprocal commitment. The Constitution doesn’t mention education. In Southern colonies, rich white children had tutors or were sent overseas to learn. Teaching enslaved people to read was outlawed. Those who learned did so by luck, in defiance or in secret.
But Mann came from Massachusetts, the birthplace of the “common school” in the 1600s, where schoolmasters were paid by taking up a collection from each group of households. Mann expanded on that tradition. He crossed the state on horseback to visit every schoolhouse, finding mostly neglected, drafty old wrecks. He championed schools as the crucible of democracy — his guiding principle, following Thomas Jefferson, was that citizens cannot sustain both ignorance and freedom.
An essential part of Mann’s vision was that public schools should be for everyone and that children of different class backgrounds should learn together. He pushed to draw wealthier students away from private schools, establish “normal schools” to train teachers (primarily women), have the state take over charitable schools and increase taxes to pay for it all.
He largely succeeded. By the early 20th century all states had free primary schools, underwritten by taxpayers, that students were required to attend.
And that’s more or less how America became the nation we recognize today. The United States soon boasted one of the world’s highest literacy rates among white people. It is hard to imagine how we could have established our industrial and scientific might, welcomed newcomers from all over the world, knit our democracy back together after the Civil War and become a wealthy nation with high living standards without schoolhouses.
The consensus on schooling has never been perfect. Private schools older than the nation continue to draw the elite. Public schools in many parts of the country were segregated by law until the mid-20th century, and they are racially and economically segregated to this day.
But Mann’s inclusive vision is under particular threat right now. Extended school closures during the coronavirus pandemic effectively broke the social compact of universal, compulsory schooling.
School closures threw our country back into the educational atomization that characterized the pre-Mann era. Wealthy parents hired tutors for their children; others opted for private and religious schools that reopened sooner; some had no choice but to leave their children alone in the house all day or send them to work for wages while the schoolhouse doors were closed….
Meanwhile, a well-funded, decades-old movement that wants to do away with public school as we know it is in ascendance.
This movement rejects Mann’s vision that schools should be the common ground where a diverse society discovers how to live together. Instead, it believes families should educate their children however they wish, or however they can. It sees no problem with Republican schools for Republican students, Black schools for Black students, Christian schools for Christian students and so on, as long as those schools are freely chosen. Recent Supreme Court decisions open the door to both prayer in schools and public funding of religious education, breaking with Mann’s nonsectarian ideal.
If we want to renewthe benefits that public schools have brought to America, we need to recommit to the vision Mann advocated. Our democracy sprouts in the nursery of public schools — where students grapple together with our messy history and learn to negotiate differences of race, class, gender and sexual orientation. Freedom of thought will wilt if schools foist religious doctrine of any kind onto students. And schools need to be enrichedplaces, full of caring adults who have the support and resources they need to teach effectively.
Without public education delivered as a public good, the asylum seeker in detention, the teenager in jail, not to mention millions of children growing up in poverty, will have no realistic way to get the instruction they need to participate in democracy or support themselves. And students of privilegewill stay confined in their bubbles. Americans will lose the most powerful social innovation that helps us construct a common reality and try, imperfectly, to understand one another.
On August 21, 1831, enslaved American Nat Turner led about 70 of his enslaved and free Black neighbors in a rebellion to awaken his white neighbors to the inherent brutality of slaveholding and the dangers it presented to their own safety. Turner and his friends traveled from house to house in their neighborhood in Southampton County, Virginia, freeing enslaved people and murdering about 60 of the white men, women, and children they encountered. Their goal, Turner later told an interviewer, was “to carry terror and devastation wherever we went.”
State militia put down the rebellion in a couple of days, and both the legal system and white vigilantes killed at least 200 Black Virginians, many of whom were not involved in Turner’s bid to end enslavement. Turner himself was captured in October, tried in November, sentenced to death, and hanged.
But white Virginians, and white folks in neighboring southern states, remained frightened. Turner had been, in their minds, a well-treated, educated enslaved man, who knew his Bible well and seemed the very last sort of person they would have expected to revolt. And so they responded to the rebellion in two ways. They turned against the idea that enslavement was a bad thing and instead began to argue that human enslavement was a positive good.
And states across the South passed laws making it a crime to teach enslaved Americans to read and write.
Denying enslaved Black Americans access to education exiled them from a place in the nation. The Framers had quite explicitly organized the United States not on the principles of religion or tradition, but rather on the principles of the Enlightenment: the idea that, by applying knowledge and reasoning to the natural world, men could figure out the best way to order society. Someone excluded from access to education could not participate in that national project. Instead, that person was read out of society, doomed to be controlled by leaders who marshaled propaganda and religion to defend their dominance.
In 1858, South Carolina Senator James Henry Hammond explained that society needed “a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life. That is, a class requiring but a low order of intellect and but little skill.”
But when they organized in the 1850s to push back against the efforts of elite enslavers like Hammond to take over the national government, members of the fledgling Republican Party recognized the importance of education. In 1859, Illinois lawyer Abraham Lincoln explained that those who adhered to the “mud-sill” theory “assumed that labor and education are incompatible; and any practical combination of them impossible…. According to that theory, the education of laborers, is not only useless, but pernicious, and dangerous.”
Lincoln argued that workers were not simply drudges but rather were the heart of the economy. “The prudent, penniless beginner in the world, labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land, for himself; then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him.” He tied the political vision of the Framers to this economic vision. In order to prosper, he argued, men needed “book-learning,” and he called for universal education. An educated community, he said, “will be alike independent of crowned-kings, money-kings, and land-kings.”
When they were in control of the federal government in the 1860s, Republicans passed the Land Grant College Act, funding public universities so that men without wealthy fathers might have access to higher education. In the aftermath of the Civil War, Republicans also tried to use the federal government to fund public schools for poor Black and white Americans, dividing money up according to illiteracy rates.
But President Andrew Johnson vetoed that bill on the grounds that the federal government had no business protecting Black education; that process, he said, belonged to the states—which for the next century denied Black and Brown people equal access to schools, excluding them from full participation in American society and condemning them to menial labor.
Then, in 1954, after decades of pressure from Black and Brown Americans for equal access to public schools, the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren, a former Republican governor of California, unanimously agreed that separate schools were inherently unequal, and thus unconstitutional. The federal government stepped in to make sure the states could not deny education to the children who lived within their boundaries.
And now, in 2022, we are in a new educational moment. Between January 2021 and January 2022, the legislatures of 35 states introduced 137 bills to keep students from learning about issues of race, LBGTQ+ issues, politics, and American history. More recently, the Republican-dominated legislature of Florida passed the Stop the Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees (Stop WOKE) Act, tightly controlling how schools and employee training can talk about race or gender discrimination.
Republican-dominated legislatures and school districts are also purging books from school libraries and notifying parents each time a child checks out a book. Most of the books removed are by or about Black people, people of color, or LGBTQ+ individuals.
Both sets of laws are likely to result in teachers censoring themselves or leaving the profession out of concern they will inadvertently run afoul of the new laws, a disastrous outcome when the nation’s teaching profession is already in crisis. School districts facing catastrophic teacher shortages are trying to keep classrooms open by doubling up classes, cutting the school week down to four days, and permitting veterans without educational training to teach—all of which will likely hurt students trying to regain their educational footing after the worst of the pandemic.
This, in turn, adds weight to the move to divert public money from the public schools into private schools that are not overseen by state authorities. In Florida, the Republican-controlled legislature has dramatically expanded the state’s use of vouchers recently, arguing that tying money to students rather than schools expands parents’ choices while leaving unspoken that defunded public schools will be less and less attractive. In June, in Carson v. Makin, the Supreme Court expanded the voucher system to include religious schools, ruling that Maine, which provides vouchers in towns that don’t have public high schools, must allow those vouchers to go to religious schools as well as secular ones. Thus tax dollars will support religious schools.
In 2022, it seems worth remembering that in 1831, lawmakers afraid that Black Americans exposed to the ideas in books and schools would claim the equality that was their birthright under the Declaration of Independence made sure their Black neighbors could not get an education.
Teachers are not just retiring and leaving for good. They’re part of the great occupational heave happening because of the COVID pandemic—people looking for better jobs, demanding more pay, in a tight labor market.
Public schools are now competing to hire smart and dedicated young people who want to be professionally paid and supported, especially in their early careers. When you’ve got student loans, higher starting pay is a big deal. And loan forgiveness if you teach for a specified number of years might make a huge difference.
Once you’ve filled classrooms with untrained non-professionals, you can cut pay like a hot knife through cheap margarine. It’s really a two-fer–you both erode the power of teachers unions and your Teacher Lite staff cost you less, boosting your profit margin for the education-flavored business that you started to grab some of those sweet, sweet tax dollars. And as an added bonus, filling up public schools with a Teacher Lite staff means you can keep taxes low (why hand over your hard-earned money just to educate Those Peoples’ children).
Attention MUST turn to an overhaul of how we recruit, train and sustain a teaching force.
All three are important—and have been so for decades. We’ve been talking about improving the teacher force, from selection of candidates to effective professional learning, for decades. As Ann Lutz Fernandez notes, in an outstanding piece at the Hechinger Report, there is a surfeit of bad ideas for re-building the teacher workforce, and not enough coherent, over-time plans to put well-prepared teachers into classrooms, and keep them there.
That professional learning has to include a college degree, and field experience. Many high-profile charters advertise the percentage of students who are accepted into colleges. There’s been a longtime push to mandate challenging, college-prep courses at public high schools, and send larger numbers of students to post-secondary education.
Teachers need to be credentialed to demand respect from the education community, plain and simple, no matter what Ron DeSantis says. It’s past 50 years since bachelors degrees were the required norm for teachers in all states. Backing away from that is egregiously foolish—and almost certainly politically motivated.
If we were serious about making more *good* teachers, we’d need two core resources: money and time. Money to effect a significant nationwide boost in salaries, loan forgiveness programs, student teaching stipends, scholarships, plus the development of more alternate-entry and Masters in Teaching programs that include both coursework and an authentic, mentored student teaching experience.
This would also take time—but it absolutely could be done. Would-be teachers should have to invest some skin in the game—not because traditionally trained teachers had to jump through hoops, but because teaching involves commitment to an important mission. Done well, it’s professional work. We can argue about teacher preparation programs, but nobody should be going into a classroom, alone, without training and support. It’s bad for everyone—teachers, communities and especially kids.
Alternative routes have sprung up all over the country, some unworthy, others better. All are stopgaps, but some of those teachers will continue to grow and excel in the classroom. And I agree with Michael Rice, MI State Superintendent of Schools:
“If the question is whether we have a teacher that is certified through (an alternative route) or have Mikey from the curb teaching a child — a person who has no experience whatsoever and is simply an adult substituting in a classroom for a long period of time because there isn’t a math teacher, there isn’t a social studies teacher, there isn’t a science teacher — the teacher that is developed through an alternative route program or expedited program is going to be preferable.”
It’s worth mentioning that this shortage has been visible, coming down the road, for years. The pandemic and that great occupational upheaval have merely brought it into focus.
It’s past time to get the teacher pipeline under control. This will take good policy.
The Brookings Institution reported on a big increase in federal funding for technical assistance for community schools along with the priorities for funding. Unlike charter schools, community schools operate under the supervision of public school boards; they are not operated or owned by private entrepreneurs; they seek to strengthen public educations, not compete with it or replace it. Unlike the federal Charter Schools Program, which provides $400 million + in start-up funds, the funding for community schools is for technical assistance, not basic costs. The CSP has been riddled by waste, fraud, and abuse, and many federally funded charters never open.
The U.S. Department of Education recently announced a notice inviting applications for the Full-Service Community Schools Program to provide high-quality academic, integrated health and social service, and engagement support for all students. The grant program continues to reflect steady increases in the federal appropriations process from an initial $5 million in fiscal year 2009, to $25 million in 2020, $30 million in 2021, $75 million in 2022, and a proposed substantial increase of $468 million in 2023. The exponential growth in investments signals a consistent interest and confidence in community school strategies as a powerful approach to whole-child educational transformation of schools and communities. Similarly, dedicated state funding opportunities in Maryland, New York, and Californiareflect a growing body of evidence from decades of implementation expertise about how community school strategies—when supported and sustained—can leverage the assets and voices of the full community to support student success.
The Community School Forward national task force welcomes this support of community schools as a strategy to increase youth and community voice, ensure rigorous community-connected instruction, extend learning opportunities and improve school climate, health, and mental health, and college and post-secondary student outcomes. The task force recognizes that while funding is necessary to continue to accelerate the growth of community schools, increasing it alone will not directly result in effective community school partnerships and strategies. High-quality technical assistance must be provided to practitioners. The task force project team developed a national needs assessment to gain a clearer picture of what type of community school technical assistance is needed across the country.
WHAT DOES COMMUNITY SCHOOL TECHNICAL ASSISTANCE ENTAIL?
The Children’s Aid National Center for Community Schools (NCCS) is a practice-based technical assistance provider that has supported the startup, scaling, and sustainability of community school initiatives across the country and internationally, NCCS has seen what happens with (and without) strong and consistent guidance and capacity building. We define technical assistance as the process of building the capacity of community school stakeholders to start, scale, and sustain transformational community schools. Informed by a comprehensive needs and assets assessment and guided by a plan jointly developed with the client, technical assistance includes organizing communities of action, facilitating connections, and providing the relevant tools and skills.
In early 2022, in anticipation of technical assistance needs of new and developing community school practitioners, NCCS—in partnership with the Brookings Institution, the Learning Policy Institute, and the Coalition for Community Schools—conducted an assessment of community school practitioners and experts to gauge emerging needs and best practices in implementing community schools and technical assistance. The findings of our inquiry provide important guidance for the Full-Service Community Schools program and other initiatives focused on expanding and deepening effective community school strategies. In our report, “Community Schools Forward: Technical assistance needs assessment,” we summarize the findings of a national study exploring community school technical assistance needs and assets and recommend that technical assistance providers prioritize:
Model clarity for all stakeholders – ensuring all stakeholders have the same conceptual understanding of community schools and their role within the model.
Structures and systems for community voices – developing mechanisms that invite democratic processes within a community school.
Structures and systems for collaborativeleadership – systems and processes that reinforce distributed leadership and collaborative decisionmaking.
Asset-based thinking – cultivating a perspective that focuses on the strengths of the students, families, and community.
Sustainability – navigating braided funding and “telling the story” to public and private funders in a way that accurately reflects the work; developing a model or network that is supported by the community and leadership, and not vulnerable to leadership changes.
Reimagining systems for equity – reviewing existing school processes and structures to determine if the current approach is meeting all student, family, and community needs. Changing those systems that are not meeting the needs of all stakeholders.
Data systems – developing systems for data collection and analysis that capture accurate data that is connected to identified outcomes and is aligned with a logic model.
Data culture and continuous improvement – creating a positive and collaborative environment where problems can be identified and solved using data and inquiry.
Additionally in our report, practitioners shared the most impactful strategies that community school decisionmakers and partners can prioritize as part of their developmental process.
Connecticut Member of Congress Rosa De Lauro is chair of the House Appropriations Committee, one of the most powerful members of Congress. She is a staunch friend of working people and public schools.
WASHINGTON, DC – Chair of the House Appropriations Committee Rosa DeLauro (CT-03) today released a statement following President Biden’s announcement of his student debt plan.
“Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. The biggest corporations are using their money to rig the game, and costs are on the rise.
“I applaud President Biden for taking a necessary step today to level the playing field for working Americans by cancelling $10,000 in student debt for borrowers who earn under $125,000 a year and up to $20,000 for Pell Grant recipients. This will completely wipe out debt for millions of borrowers and give many the economic security they need to invest in a small business, buy a home, or simply just take care of their families.
“Today’s announcement builds on historic actions by the Biden administration to provide student debt relief to borrowers in need. By discharging loans for borrowers ripped off by for-profit colleges, making administrative improvements to the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program, and canceling loans for permanently disabled borrowers, the President has already approved $36 billion in student loan relief. In addition, the Biden administration is drafting improvements to income-driven repayment programs, including proposals I have pushed for in my Affordable Loans for Any Student Act, so that no borrower has to struggle to make monthly payments.
“Democrats in Congress and President Biden are delivering on commitments to make college more affordable, make student loan repayment manageable, provide relief for those in need, and hold predatory colleges accountable for ripping off students. Americans need a government that works for working families and the vulnerable – not one that answers to the wealthiest and biggest corporations. Today’s announcement is a huge step toward dealing working Americans back in.”
Stephen Dyer, a former state legislator in Ohio, keeps track of school choice in his state, which has been a costly disaster for students and taxpayers.
He writes in this post that charters and vouchers are actually more expensive than public schools.
I’ve helped document for years how Ohio’s charter schools and voucher program doesn’t lead to better educational outcomes, while it harms the educational opportunities for the 90% of Ohio students who are educated in local public school districts and leads to greater racial segregation.
However, the pro-privatization folks seemed to always have this in their quiver: At least charters and vouchers are cheaper for Ohio’ taxpayers.
Even after a massive overhaul of the school funding system, Ohio charter schools are still shortchanged, receiving about 75 cents on the dollar compared to their traditional public school counterparts.
So I decided to check out their claim. And it appears that the state’s charter and voucher programs cost about 5-10% more than it would to just have all those students return to their resident public school district.…
That’s right. It’s cheaper for Ohio taxpayers to keep all those charter and voucher students in local public schools. And they’ll do better academically. And we’ll have a more integrated public school system. And kids in public schools won’t have to do with fewer opportunities so privately run educational options can receive public subsidies.
Other than that…
So, let’s see. Students in charter schools and in voucher schools do worse academically than their peers in public schools. And it costs more to fund three school sectors.
Ohio spent more than $1.5 billion on charters and vouchers this year and the cost continues to rise.
So, if you’re keeping score at home, these programs do the following:
provide inferior overall student performance
limit public school students’ educational opportunities
worsen school segregation
cost taxpayers significantly more money than the students would need to be educated their local public school districts.
Now why is it that Ohio lawmakers keep pouring money into these programs again?
Now here is a surprise: Paul Petersen, editor of the conservative journal Education Next and leader of Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance, published an article with his postdoctoral student M. Danish Shakeel demonstrating the steady and impressive progress of American public schools over the past half century.
They write:
Contrary to what you may have heard, average student achievement has been increasing for half a century. Across 7 million tests taken by U.S. students born between 1954 and 2007, math scores have grown by 95 percent of a standard deviation, or nearly four years’ worth of learning. Reading scores have grown by 20 percent of a standard deviation per decade during that time, nearly one year’s worth of learning.
When we examine differences by student race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status, longstanding assumptions about educational inequality start to falter. Black, Hispanic, and Asian students are improving far more quickly than their white classmates in elementary, middle, and high school. In elementary school, for example, reading scores for white students have grown by 9 percent of a standard deviation each decade, compared to 28 percent for Asian students, 19 percent for Black students, and 13 percent for Hispanic students. Students from low socioeconomic backgrounds also are progressing more quickly than their more advantaged peers in elementary and middle school. And for the most part, growth rates have remained steady throughout the past five decades.
Conventional wisdom downplays student progress and laments increasing achievement gaps between the have and have-nots. But as of 2017, steady growth was evident in reading and especially in math. While the seismic disruptions to young people’s development and education due to the Covid-19 pandemic have placed schools and communities in distress, the successes of the past may give educators confidence that today’s challenges can be overcome.
This article contradicts the foundation of the rightwing-conservative narrative that “our schools are failing,” which is the rationale for school choice and harsh treatment of teachers.
As Petersen and Shakeel show, the conventional wisdom among the “blow up public education” sect is wrong. Public schools are not failing. They are succeeding.
I made the same argument in my book Reign of Error. I showed that test scores and graduation rates for all groups are at an all-time high.
But more importantly, Paul Petersen made the same assertions in 1983, when he was the staff director for a Twentieth Century Fund commission on education. I was a member of the commission, as was Albert Shanker of the AFT, Dean Patricia A. Graham of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and other luminaries.
The commission issued a report called “Making the Grade,” which lamented the woeful state of the schools. But our staff director Paul Petersen insisted that the commission was wrong in its dire conclusion and wrote a separate statement, expressing his dissent, in which he defended the schools.
I have served on many commissions and task forces but that was the only time that the staff director dissented from the group for whom he worked.
Paul Petersen was right in 1983.
He is right now.
Our public schools are not failing.
They have been a great success.
The attacks on them by Christian nationalists, billionaires, Catholic champions of vouchers, racists, extremists, and zealots for school choice is completely unjustified.
Their attack on the schools is an attack on our democracy.
Diane Ravitch's blog 