Governor Gregg Abbott of Texas is totally opposed to any mandate for masks or vaccinations. He insists that such decisions should be made solely by parents, not by the school or district or state. Major urban districts are defying Governor Abbott’s irresponsible views. The Houston superintendent, Millard House II, imposed a mask mandate, and the city’s teachers unions thanked him.

Jan Resseger writes here about the importance of honing the message about the importance of public schools. She refers to an article previously posted here by Chris Lubienski and colleagues about the language that reaches the public. You can be sure, she says, that the far-right is working day and night to advance the destruction of public schools. She notes with disappointment that Secretary of Education Cardona has not laid out his vision for public schools (he was even the main speaker for the national charter schools conference, which simultaneously compete with public schools and claim to be public schools). We can’t wait for him to do it.

She writes, in part:

In some states, the new school year has already begun, the COVID Delta Variant is surging, and already everybody is worrying, and legitimately so, about whether and how public schools will reopen. But that is not really the deepest concern for many of us who care about the future of public schools.

Certainly far-right ideologues investing millions of dollars to push corporate school reform and promote school privatization are messaging their own agenda instead of focusing on whether or not schools reopen in person or whether students and/or teachers are required to vaccinate or wear masks. Newspapers, many of which are losing their education reporters to collapsing advertising budgets, have pretty much opted for the obvious topic—school reopening and masking requirements.  You can be sure, however, that ALEC is instead doggedly promoting the expansion of vouchers as its members lobby inside state legislatures, and Nina Rees, who leads the National Association of Public Charter Schools, is ignoring the effects of COVID-19 while she loudly demandsthat Congress continue to fund charter schools operated by for-profit charter management companies.

Message discipline is a priority for the far right, and, when Betsy DeVos was Trump’s education secretary, her consistent framing was, in one respect, a plus for public school advocates. She was the perfect foil we could attack week after week as she harangued against “government schools,” rejected the need for a “system” of education, and enthused about serving the needs of individual children and catering to the taste of individual parents. Not once did DeVos acknowledge the benefit of public schooling as the center of the social contract.

We could thank Betsy DeVos for keeping us on message, but Chris Lubienski of Indiana University, Amanda Potterson of the University of Kentucky, and Joel Malin of Miami University in Ohio worry about the longer term impact of the language of the far fight on public education policy. These education policy researchers remind us: “Language shapes the ways we think and feel about ourselves and others, institutions such as our schools, and (more generally) about our world. As applied to education policy, it matters whether our nation’s public schools are described as such, or if instead they are framed as ‘failing government schools,’ like they were by President Trump in his 2020 State of the Union Address. Accepting this truth about the power of language holds many implications. So what happens when language is used to build up narratives that contradict accumulating evidence? Can language reconfigure our perceptions of schools in ways that re-orient their purpose?  More specifically, we assert that disparaging language about our schools unhelpfully limits our policy imaginations. Likewise, we show how casting schools as ‘businesses’— and parents as ‘customers’—shapes commonsensical assumptions about the purposes of public schools, but ignores much of the research evidence about how public schools function…  Regarding this language and imagery, for educational leaders and community stakeholders, we encourage vigilant critical analysis of the language used regarding education.”

Certainly under President Biden, the situation for public schools has improved. Biden has articulated support for public schools and public school teachers. And apart from the language he uses, he has made a lot more federal funding available through COVID-relief.  He has promoted—in his FY22 federal budget proposal—investing in Title I with significantly more money for schools in America’s poorest communities, addressing the federal government’s decades-old failure to fund the requirements of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, and radically expanding federal investment in wraparound Full Service Community Schools.  But Miguel Cardona, Biden’s Education Secretary, has failed to use language to frame a well conceptualized public school agenda. So far, he has chosen not to speak much at all about the past 20 years of corporate, high-stakes-test-based school accountability.

In the absence of vision from Secretary Cardona and with the rapid decline of sufficient exploration of the key issues in the press, it seems important to devote some serious attention to framing a disciplined set of principles. Lubienski, Potterson, and Malin’s article challenged me clearly to name the principles by which I frame this blog. That way, I’ll be able to check back every week or so to be sure I’m staying on-message.

Here are five principles which, I believe, make up the foundation of this blog.

1. An equitable and comprehensive system of public schools—publicly operated and regulated by law—is essential for protecting the right of every child to appropriate and equitable services and for ensuring an educated public.
2. School privatization threatens our public schools, threatens educational equity, and threatens who we are as a nation. No state can afford to support three education sectors—traditional public schools, charter schools, and publicly funded private schools.
3. Rejecting high-stakes, test-based public school accountability is essential for the future of public education. High-stakes testing has narrowed and undermined what our teachers can do in America’s classrooms, undermined the reputation of public schools and public school teachers, driven privatization and public school closures, exacerbated racial and economic segregation, and undermined the future of children and adolescents living in concentrated poverty.
4. Our society must ameliorate the effects of past and ongoing racial and economic injustice and aggressively support the public schools that serve our nation’s poorest children.
5. Public school funding across America’s schools is urgently important. Taxation ought to be progressive and must raise enough money to pay for essential basic services including small classes and necessities like libraries and music and art programs. State and federal funding must be distributed equitably to compensate for the alarming disparities in local taxing capacity across America’s public school districts.

Please open the link and read the rest of her excellent post.

Kristen Take of the San Diego Union-Tribune reports on a setback for online charter schools. A judge ruled against their class-action lawsuit that sought more funding from the state. The judge cited the online charters’ history of fraud and abuse. Earlier this year, the owners of the A3 online charter chain pled guilty to charges against them for self-dealing and agreed to repay the state $215 million dollars for falsely inflating their enrollment.

She wrote:

A California Superior Court judge ruled against hundreds of online and other non-classroom based charter schools in a class-action lawsuit last week, declaring that the state did not wrongfully deprive the schools of education funding during the pandemic.

The ruling, handed down July 27, was a blow to the schools, which are called non-classroom-based charter schools because at least 20 percent of the learning occurs off campus, often online or at home.

Three San Diego-based charter school networks — The Classical Academies, The Learning Choice Academy and Springs Charter Schools — and the parents of several enrolled and waitlisted students sued the state of California last fall, saying the state did not equitably fund their charter schools by accounting for the new students they enrolled during the last school year.

The lawsuit was deemed a class-action petition representing about 300 non-classroom based charter schools across California that enrolled about 200,000 students, said Lee Rosenberg, attorney for the plaintiffs.

Those schools took on about 25,000 new students last school year that weren’t paid for by the state, he said.

The state typically funds all public schools, including charter schools, on a per-student basis, which means the more students a school enrolls, the higher its state funding.

Last year, because of the pandemic and related school closures, the state initially froze public school funding levels to stabilize schools’ and districts’ finances.

Then state officials unfroze the funding and gave K-12 public schools funding for their existing and newly enrolled new students last year — except for non-classroom based charter schools, which provided mostly online, home school and non-traditional education services. Their funding remained frozen for existing students.

State leaders chose not to fund new students at those non-classroom based charter schools because there is a history of fraud and abuse by some of those kinds of schools, the state attorney general wrote in a recent court filing.

“The state determined that (non-classroom based charter schools) raised major concerns for fraud and abuse and inferior education and decided to limit the incentive for expanding that model of education during the pandemic while the state considered the underlying policy around (non-classroom based charter schools),” Attorney General Rob Bonta wrote in a June court filing signed by him and others in his office.

NPR reports that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is prepared to act against school districts that require their students to wear race masks, despite the fact that the coronavirus is surging in almost every county in the state.

A battle is brewing in Florida over whether students will have to wear masks when they return to the classroom this fall.

Several Florida school districts are keeping their mask mandates in place for the upcoming school year, despite an executive order by Gov. Ron DeSantis that leaves it up to parents to decide whether their children wear face coverings in school. School boards that don’t eliminate mask mandates could face the loss of state funding.

South Florida’s Broward County Public Schools, the second-largest district in Florida, cited safety as its top priority announcing the decision to maintain its mask requirement pending further guidance from the state as coronavirus cases surge in Florida.

The Sunshine State has seen a rash of new COVID-19 infections in recent weeks. On Saturday, it recorded 21,683 new coronavirus cases, its highest single-day total since the pandemic began.

But DeSantis, a Republican, said that because vaccines are now prevalent, the decision to mask students should be up to their parents — not the school district.

In other words, school districts that act to protect students and staff will be punished.

Governor Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas called a special session of the legislature to throw out the law he signed that forbade mask mandates. The legislature refused to do it. A judge acted and issued a preliminary injunction against the ban.

Florida offered vouchers to students forced to wear a mask. Parents sued the state for banning masks in public schools.

From the Washington Post:

In Arkansas, Gov. Asa Hutchinson (R) had signed the ban against mask mandates in April but later supported rolling it back for schools. He argued that allowing individual school districts to make this decision was a conservative approach that boosted local control.

Hutchinson called the legislature back for a special session to reconsider the law, but lawmakers declined to make changes. The governor told reporters Friday that he was disappointed in the legislature and criticized some who he described as having a “casual if not cavalier attitude toward this public health emergency and toward this remedy that I suggested to them.”

Hutchinson’s comments came after a judge temporarily blocked the state from enforcing the law. The governor said the judge had properly ruled that the law “is unconstitutional and an overreach of authority.”

Friday’s order, issued by Pulaski County Circuit Judge Tim Fox, ruled against the state on several grounds. The judge ruled that such intrusions into another branch of government’s actions amounted to an unconstitutional breach on the separation of powers. He also noted that while public schools were barred from mandating masks, private schools were not.

Tom Mars, attorney for two mothers who challenged the ban, noted that under the law, the court itself was prohibited from ordering those at the hearing to don masks — something that Fox himself had in fact ordered.

Back in Florida, opponents to DeSantis’s order have pointed to skyrocketing coronavirus cases in the state in recent weeks. Florida reported 22,783 new cases Thursday, the highest single-day count since the start of the pandemic in 2020.

Several districts have threatened to defy the order. Alachua County, where the University of Florida is located, is mandating masks for the first two weeks of school amid a rise in coronavirus cases. Two school custodians in the district had recently died of covid-19.

Broward County had imposed a mask mandate but put it on pause after DeSantis threatened to withhold state funding from districts that required masks. Now it has reversed itself again. Masks must be worn by everyone in Broward public schools, the school board decided this week.

DeSantis faced another challenge to his order Friday, as the parents of 15 children with disabilities who attend Florida public schools filed suit, saying his executive order barring mask mandates interfered with their rights under federal disability rights laws. The suit says the children are at severe health risk if they get covid-19 and want to be protected in schools every possible way, including with everyone wearing masks.

Under Friday’s action by the state board, children in districts with mandates could qualify for vouchers to attend private schools, though it was not clear how much money would be dedicated to the program or how many students might benefit.

The Florida state school board did not respond to a woman who spoke in the public comments section of the meeting to ask whether the vouchers would be available for students who want mask mandates and attend districts that do not require them.

The program, called the Hope Scholarship, normally is available to students who have been harassed or bullied in their public schools. Under the emergency order, the vouchers are available “when a school district’s COVID-19 health protocols, including masking, pose a health or educational danger to their child.”