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The forces of privatization are rising up, making promises and failing to keep any of those promises.
Public schools are the bedrock of democracy, doors open to all. Certified teachers in every classroom. Public schools strive for equality of educational opportunity, not privilege for the few.
Get involved. Do yourpart as a citizen.
Whose schools? Our schools!
The Education Law Center is one of the nation’s leading legal organizations defending the civil rights of students.
In this important new report, it presents a critical analysis of Philadelphia’s charter sector and its indifference to the civil rights of students.
I urge you to read the report in full.
When charters take the students who are least challenging to educate, the traditional public schools are overburdened with the neediest students but stripped of the resources required to educate them. It is neither efficient nor wise to maintain two publicly funded school systems, one of which can choose its students, leaving the other with the students it doesn’t want.
Once again, we are reminded that charter schools ignore equity concerns in their pursuit of test scores, that they enroll proportionately few of the neediest students, and that they intensify segregation even in cities that are already segregated.
Here is a summary of its findings:
We know from other research that certain underserved student populations – such as students experiencing homelessness and students in foster care – are underserved by charter schools. For example, Philadelphia’s traditional charter schools serve
only one third the number of students experiencing homelessness compared with district schools.iv
Both the district’s own Charter School Performance Framework and national research point to systemic practices that contribute to these inequities. Among them are enrollment and other school-level practices that keep out or push out students with the greatest educational needs.
A charter authorizing system that focuses attention on academic and financial performance to the exclusion of equity incentivizes charters to continue to underserve students with the greatest educational needs. To improve equity, the Education Law Center recommends that the Philadelphia Board of Education do the following:
• Ensure that its evaluation of new and existing charters includes and monitors equitable access findings.
• Direct the Charter School Office to build upon the existing Charter School Performance Framework to better center issues of equity during the application and renewal processes, including collecting and reporting key data elements regarding equitable access.
• Grant the Charter School Office additional capacity to provide appropriate oversight, including serving as a recognized resource for parent complaints and reviewing each charter school’s policies and practices.
“Education is not like chess or dice or the stock market. It is not about outsmarting an opponent. So, enough with all the talk about students and schools who excel by beating the odds.
“We don’t need a few more opportunities for students to beat the odds. We need to eliminate odds– a euphemism for inequality– as the primary determinant in whether or not young people get a high quality education. That is a far larger project than choosing schools, designing the right standards and tests, hiring and firing teachers, or giving parents the ability to opt out of struggling local public schools. It is a systemic project, not an individual child project, and just about schools. It is what we need to do. It is what we can do.
“Better yet, we need to drop the gambling metaphor entirely. Getting a high-quality education to prepare for life, work, and citizenship should not be a game of chance. It should be a guaranteed right for all students, regardless of the level of their parent’s income, social status, education background, or race.”
Want to meet Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez? So do I. If you are in New York City or its environs, here is your chance.
Public Education Town Hall
A conversation on a bold new vision for public school justice and equity
Featured speaker: Diane Ravitch with education advocates
With responses from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and NYS Senator Jessica Ramos
Panel and discussion followed by audience Q&A
Saturday, March 16
2:00-4:30PM
Fiesta Hall
37-62 89th Street, Jackson Heights
Subway: 7 train to 90th Street
Participating Organizations:
Alliance for Quality Education
Class Size Matters
Network for Public Education
NYC Opt Out
NYS Association for Bilingual Education
Sponsored by Jackson Heights People for Public Schools
RSVP at: jhschools..org/events
Seating will be on a “first come first served” basis
Statement by John Affeldt on Governor Newsom’s State of the State Education Priorities
On the occasion of Governor Gavin Newsom’s first State of the State address, Public Advocates is issuing the following statement commenting on the Governor’s remarks on public education. Quotes from the statement are to be attributed to John Affeldt, Public Advocates Managing Attorney for Education.
On funding for California’s public schools:
We are thrilled to have a governor finally willing to have the long overdue conversation about sufficient funding for our public schools. The Local Control Funding Formula has made school funding much more equitable but did not address funding adequacy. Despite being the world’s fifth largest economy, California drags along the bottom of states in per pupil expenditures and has fewer adults per student ratios than all but two other states. From Los Angeles to Oakland to Sacramento, our schools are having to choose unfairly between paying teachers living wages, or delivering core services like reasonable class sizes, nurses, counselors and librarians or paying extra attention to students with the greatest needs. These are necessities our public schools must provide to close persistent opportunity and achievement gaps, and which can be met by using the resources our wealthy state possesses. We have offered thoughts for reaching funding adequacy over the years, most recently in an October EdSource op-ed, and we look forward to being part of the urgent conversation on how to fully and fairly fund our schools.
On the appointment of Linda Darling-Hammond to the State Board of Education:
Governor Newsom could not have made a better appointment to the State Board of Education than Dr. Linda Darling-Hammond. Dr. Darling-Hammond is the foremost authority on equity and teacher quality in our public schools in the country. More than a brilliant academic she also has shown herself an astute policymaker and public administrator in her time advising the Obama Campaign, Governor Brown and serving as Chair of the state’s Commission on Teacher Credentialing for the past six years. We look forward to working with Dr. Darling-Hammond on the State Board and to seeing her influence that body to make even greater strides to improve the educational system for all California students.
On plans to increase accountability and transparency in public education, including charter schools:
We also applaud Governor Newsom’s proposal to increase accountability and transparency in public education. For starters, we need a much clearer picture of how $6 billion in supplemental and concentration dollars for high-need students are being spent by districts and schools. Murkiness in charter spending is even worse. In August 2018, Public Advocates published the first study of how well charter schools are performing in terms of being transparent and accountable for public dollars in their required Local Control Accountability Plans (LCAP). We found a shocking lack of public accountability for hundreds of millions of dollars reviewed in the sample. A third of charters failed to even present an LCAP at all. Of those that did, only $15.8 million out of $48.6 million dollars supposed to be dedicated to low-income, English learner and foster students were identified as having been expended and none of those dollars were actually properly justified as having been lawfully spent to serve high need students. We look forward to working with the Administration to further strengthen charter school accountability.
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Public Advocates Inc. is a nonprofit law firm and advocacy organization that challenges the systemic causes of poverty and racial discrimination by strengthening community voices in public policy and achieving tangible legal victories advancing education, housing, transportation equity, and climate justice. www.publicadvocates.org
Harold Meyerson of The American Prospect writes about the unique power of the youngest freshman in Congress:
AOC’s Achievement: Making Americans’ Progressive Beliefs Politically Acceptable. Of all the reasons that Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is driving the right crazy, one of the most important is this: She’s advancing presumably radical ideas (by the right’s standards, anyway) that actually have massive public support.
Green New Deal? Fuzzy though its meanings may be, it brings together regional development policies for the huge region of the country that private capital has long since abandoned, climate change policies in a nation where climate-change apprehension is at an all-time high, full employment and decent wage policies for a nation where even voters in Republican states are casting ballots for higher wages and better jobs. Before AOC, whose radar was a Green New Deal even on? Since she joined the protestors in Nancy Pelosi’s office, a far-flung majority of Americans now see it as a way to address all manner of problems.
Likewise with taxing the rich. When AOC made the case for a 70 percent tax rate on annual income over the $10 million threshold, CNN’s Anderson Cooper responded as if she’d just called for collective farms. Now that Senator Elizabeth Warren is proposing a wealth tax that would compel the rich to pay an even fairer share of their bounty to support the common good, pundits are beginning to notice that the public has been supporting much higher taxes on the rich for a very long time. Since 2003, Gallup has annually asked the public whether they believe the level of taxes the rich pay is too high, too low or just right. The percentage saying “too low” has been in the 60-percent-to-70-percent range every year.
So it’s not hard to see why AOC is driving the right crazy. Forget the dancing, not to mention the racism and sexism that underpins many of the right’s complaints. It’s that she’s giving voice to progressive ideas that the public actually supports but that have long gone unvoiced by nearly everyone in power who has a megaphone they could use. She’s game-changingly brilliant at promoting progressive public policy. To the right, if I may steal from the Bard, such women are dangerous. ~ HAROLD MEYERSON
Jan Resseger spent her professional life as a social justice crusader in Ohio, fighting for equitable treatment of all children, especially the most vulnerable. Since her retirement, she has written powerful and significant posts about children, education, and equity. Ohio and the nation needs to hear her clear voice.
She attended a session at the Cleveland City Club to hear Linda Darling-Hammond speak. The Cleveland City Club is one of the most prestigious speaking platforms in the country. The civic and political elite gather to listen.
Jan expected to hear LDH speak about equity, racism, about policies that harm children of color and punish them for being poor. For someone like Jan, LDH is an icon, a clarion voice for the children left behind.
Jan expected that LDH would talk about equity, racism, and the policies needed to create a fairer education policy for all children.
What she heard instead was a lecture on social-emotional learning.
LDH expressed her confidence that the harsh accountability measures of NCLB were fading away, replaced by ESSA.
But Ohio, writes Jan, is still locked in the NCLB era.
She wrote:
“Despite that Darling-Hammond told us she believes the kind of punitive high-stakes school accountability prescribed by No Child Left Behind is fading, state-imposed sanctions based on aggregate standardized test scores remain the drivers of Ohio public school policy. Here are some of our greatest challenges:
“Forty-two minutes into the video of last Friday’s City Club address by Darling-Hammond, when a member of the Ohio State Board of Education, Meryl Johnson [a member of the State Board of Education] asked the speaker to comment on Ohio’s state takeovers of so called “failing” school districts, Darling-Hammond briefly addressed the tragedy of the kind of punitive systems that now dominate Ohio’s public school policy: “We have been criminalizing poverty in a lot of different ways, and that is one of them… There’s about a .9 correlation between the level of poverty and test scores. So, if the only thing you measure is the absolute test score, then you’re always going to have the high poverty communities at the bottom and then they can be taken over.” But rather than address Ohio’s situation directly, Darling-Hammond continued by describing value-added ratings of schools which she implied could instead be used to measure what the particular school contributes to learning, and then she described the educational practices in other countries she has studied.”
STATEMENT:
For Immediate Release| ctulocal1.org
CONTACT: Chris Geovanis, 312-329-6250, 312-446-4939 (m), ChrisGeovanis@ctulocal1.org
CTU calls on Mayor, CPS to honor MLK by ending educational apartheid
50 years after Dr. King died defending human rights for Black workers and youth, CPS still perpetuates separate and unequal public schools for Black and Brown students, charges CTU.
CHICAGO, January 21, 2019—CTU President Jesse Sharkey released the following statement today marking MLK Day – and the ongoing movement to make Dr. King’s life’s mission of peace with justice a reality.
“50 years after Dr. King died defending human rights for Black workers and youth, we are still battling separate and unequal public schools for Black and Brown students, and separate and unequal neighborhoods for Chicago’s Black and Latinx families.”
“Dr. King was assassinated in Memphis defending the rights of striking workers – and working to expand his Poor People’s Campaign. At the heart of his work was the demand for economic and social justice for Blacks and other oppressed people in this nation. He would be horrified by the treatment of Chicago’s Black and Brown students and their families today – segregated into under-resourced public schools, embedded in neighborhoods neglected by generations of disinvestment and economic starvation.
“We saw a glimpse of the consequences of that negligence and dispossession just this weekend, when CPS quietly disclosed that nearly a thousand schoolchildren will be denied entry into the high schools they ‘chose’, in a school district that the mayor and his CPS bureaucrats claim offers ‘choice’. What they really offer is strangled opportunities, limited options and separate and unequal schools in a system of educational hunger games that leaves working class and low income families – particularly Black and Latinx families – in the lurch.
“Yet Dr. King’s mission lives on, in every Chicago student, parent, educator, neighborhood resident and community activist who continues to fight to affirm Dr. King’s demands for equity, dignity and respect for working class families – particularly Black and Latinx families who have been abandoned by the elites who run this city. These people, including CTU educators, are the leading edge of this battle, in our classrooms, our school communities, our unions and our city.
“True peace is not the absence of tension: it is the presence of justice,” wrote Dr. King in 1955, when he was accused of ‘disturbing the peace’ during his organizing around the Montgomery bus boycott. And Chicagoans continue to ‘disturb the peace’ in our struggles for justice in education, housing, living wage work and neighborhood safety. Our work in the CTU has exposed the hypocrisy of a mayoral-controlled school district, and set the stage for contract fights for more equity and dignity for our students.
“Dr. King embraced and lifted up the power of the picket line, the boycott and the organizing that built a mass movement for racial and economic equity. The Chicago Teachers Union has embraced Dr. King’s strategy, which is as vital today as it was decades ago. His strategy is embedded in our civic movement for educational justice in Chicago, and has swept the nation in grassroots struggles for police accountability, educational equity, affordable housing and living wage work. Now, more than ever, people understand the forces that are arrayed against real justice for working class families. This city’s residents stand with our struggle as we take aim at the very infrastructure of institutional racism and inequity in Chicago.
“Today, we renew our commitment to organize, mobilize and agitate for real justice – the movement for justice that Dr. King led, and the movement that will shatter the discrimination and disenfranchisement that continues to plague our neighborhoods.”
Mercedes Schneider ponders the meaning of Make America Great Again. MAGA.
What does Trump mean by “great?”
What does he mean by “again?”
She thinks she knows.
It’s a loaded phrase. It causes trouble because people understand what it means.
“And cause trouble, it does, because those “good old days” tend to be days in which life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness were chiefly available to whites– and particularly white males– with varying degrees of economic and social exclusion/oppression for women and people of color.”
That America—the era of white supremacy—is gone forever. It’s time to acknowledge and embrace a new and better America.
Jill Lepore, a professor of history at Harvard and a staff writer for the New Yorker, wrote this interesting essay, which appeared in the New Yorker on September 10, 2018. The essay explains the history of the Plyler v. Doe decision, which defined the rights of undocumented children to an education. This required the U.S. Supreme Court to weave its way through other decisions, because the Constitution does not include the word “education,” but other contemporaneous documents (the Northwest Ordinance) stress the importance of education.
The case is about to become a notable precedent, she writes, because it bears on important decisions today.
Some Supreme Court decisions are famous. Some are infamous. Brown v. Board, Roe v. Wade. But Plyler v. Doe? It’s not any kind of famous. Outside the legal academy, where it is generally deemed to be of limited significance, the case is little known. (Earlier this year, during testimony before Congress, Betsy DeVos, the Secretary of Education, appeared not to have heard of it.) The obscurity of the case might end soon, though, not least because the Court’s opinion in Plyler v. Doe addressed questions that are central to ongoing debates about both education and immigration and that get to the heart of what schoolchildren and undocumented migrants have in common: vulnerability.
Plyler is arguably a controlling case in Gary B. v. Snyder, a lawsuit filed against the governor of Michigan, Rick Snyder, by seven Detroit schoolchildren, for violating their constitutional right to an education. According to the complaint, “illiteracy is the norm” in the Detroit public schools; they are the most economically and racially segregated schools in the country and, in formal assessments of student proficiency, have been rated close to zero. In Brown, the Court had described an education as “a right which must be made available to all on equal terms.” But the Detroit plaintiffs also cite Plyler, in which the majority deemed illiteracy to be “an enduring disability,” identified the absolute denial of education as a violation of the equal-protection clause, and ruled that no state can “deny a discrete group of innocent children the free public education that it offers to other children residing within its borders.” Dismissed by a district court in June, the case is now headed to the Sixth Circuit on appeal.
Plyler’s reach extends, too, to lawsuits filed this summer on behalf of immigrant children who were separated from their families at the U.S.-Mexico border. In June, the Texas State Teachers Association called on the governor of the state to make provisions for the education of the detained children, before the beginning of the school year, but has so far received no reply. Thousands of children are being held in more than a hundred detention centers around the country, many run by for-profit contractors. Conditions vary, but, on the whole, instruction is limited and supplies are few. “The kids barely learn anything,” a former social worker reported from Arizona.
The federal district judge who ruled in their case was named Justice.
She writes:
[Justice] Justice skirted the questions of whether education is a fundamental right and whether undocumented immigrants are a suspect class. Instead of applying the standard of “strict scrutiny” to the Texas law, he applied the lowest level of scrutiny to the law, which is known as the “rational basis test.” He decided that the Texas law failed this test. The State of Texas had argued that the law was rational because undocumented children are expensive to educate—they often require bilingual education, free meals, and even free clothing. But, Justice noted, so are other children, including native-born children, and children who have immigrated legally, and their families are not asked to bear the cost of their special education. As to why Texas had even passed such a law, he had two explanations, both cynical: “Children of illegal aliens had never been explicitly afforded any judicial protection, and little political uproar was likely to be raised in their behalf.”
In 1978, Justice Justice ruled in favor of the children. The state of Texas appealed the case to the Supreme Court.
As she explains in her review of important Supreme Court decisions defining the rights of students, the Supreme Court ultimately crafted a decision in Plyler v. Doe that assured the right of the children of undocumented immigrants to education while avoiding any commitment to education as a fundamental right guaranteed by the Constitution.
And yet its interpretation remains limited. “Powell wanted the case to be about the education of children, not the equal protection rights of immigrants, and so the decision was,” Linda Greenhouse remarked in a careful study of the Court’s deliberations, published a decade ago. For many legal scholars, Plyler looks like a dead end. It didn’t cut through any constitutional thickets; it opened no new road to equal rights for undocumented immigrants, and no new road to the right to an education. It simply meant that no state could pass a law barring undocumented children from public schools. But that is exactly why Driver thinks that Plyler was so significant: without it, states would have passed those laws, and millions of children would have been saddled with the disability of illiteracy.
The children who received an education because of this decision are now gainfully employed and are citizens.
This is an article you should read and a decision that you should be aware of.
Diane Ravitch's blog 