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Jan Resseger: Disappointed That Darling-Hammond Spoke in Ohio about Social-Emotional Learning While Ignoring State Takeovers, Inequitable Policy

By dianeravitch
January 29, 2019 //
33

 

 

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.

Jan was disappointed. 

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:

  • Under a Jeb Bush-style Third Grade Guarantee, Ohio still retains third graders for another year of third grade when their reading test scores are too low. This is despite years of academic research demonstrating that retaining children in a grade for an additional year smashes their self esteem and exacerbates the chance they will later drop out of school without graduating.  This policy runs counter to anything resembling social-emotional learning.
  • Even though the federal government has ended the Arne Duncan requirement that states use students’ standardized test scores to evaluate teachers, in Ohio, students’ standardized test scores continue to be used for the formal evaluations of their teachers.  The state has reduced the percentage of weight students’ test scores play in teachers’ formal evaluations, but students’ test scores continue to play a role.
  • Aggregate student test scores remain the basis of the state’s branding and ranking of our public schools and school districts with letter grades—A-F,  with attendant punishments for the schools and school districts that get Fs.
  • When a public school is branded with an F, the students in that so-called “failing” school qualify for an Ed Choice Voucher to be used for private school tuition. And the way Ohio schools are funded ensures that in most cases, local levy money in addition to state basic aid follows that child.
  • Ohio permits charter school sponsors to site privately managed charter schools in so-called “failing” school districts. The number of these privatized schools is expected to rise next year when a safe-harbor period (that followed the introduction of a new Common Core test) ends.  Earlier this month, the Plain Dealer reported: “Next school year, that list of ineffective schools (where students will qualify for Ed Choice Vouchers) balloons to more than 475… The growth of charter-eligible districts grew even more, from 38 statewide to 217 for next school year. Once restricted to only urban and the most-struggling districts in Ohio, charter schools can now open in more than a third of the districts in the state.”
  •  If a school district is rated “F” for three consecutive years, a law pushed through in the middle of the night by former Governor John Kasich and his allies subjects the district to state takeover. The school board is replaced with an appointed Academic Distress Commission which replaces the superintendent with an appointed CEO.  East Cleveland this year will join Youngstown and Lorain, now three years into their state takeovers—without academic improvement in either case.
  • All this punitive policy sits on top of what many Ohioans and their representatives in both political parties agree has become an increasingly inequitable school funding distribution formula. Last August, after he completed a new study of the state’s funding formula, Columbus school finance expert, Howard Fleeter described Ohio’s current method of funding schools to the Columbus Dispatch: “The formula itself is kind of just spraying money in a not-very-targeted way.”

“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.”

 

 

 

Categories Accountability, Equity, Ohio, Poverty, Racism

Chicago: CTU on Meaning of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Day Today

By dianeravitch
January 21, 2019 //
7

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.”

Categories Chicago, Civil Rights, Equity

Mercedes Schneider: Reflecting on MAGA on Martin Luther King, Jr., Day

By dianeravitch
January 21, 2019 //
20

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.

Categories Accountability, Civil Rights, Democracy, Education Reform, Equity

Jill Lepore: Is Education a Fundamental Right?

By dianeravitch
December 30, 2018 //
19

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.

Categories Civil Rights, Equity, Justice

Harold Meyerson: David Leonhardt Forgot to Mention the Role of Unions

By dianeravitch
December 7, 2018 //
18

Harold Meyerson of The American Prospect read the preceding column by David Leonhardt about the big-hearted corporations is postwar Americans and pointed out that Leonhardt omitted the importance of unions.

Meyerson wrote:

The Myth of the Benevolent Postwar Corporation.

Much as the presidency of Donald Trump has contributed to the retrospective appreciations of George H.W. Bush, so the conduct of American corporations over the past four decades—not to put too fine a point on it: pocketing revenues for their shareholders while stiffing, if not altogether abandoning, their workers—has cast a rosy glow over the American corporations of the post-World War II era.

One commentator bathed in that glow, based on the evidence of his column Monday in The New York Times is David Leonhardt. His column quite rightly bangs the drum for Elizabeth Warren’s bill to require corporations to set aside 40 percent of their board seats for representatives selected by their workers—a slightly watered-down version of German co-determination, but a significant step forward, if ever enacted, in the battle to make corporations responsible not just to their largest shareholders (among whom are their top executives, who are usually compensated in stock).

Leonhardt correctly notes that it was only in the late 1970s that American corporations began hording their proceeds for their shareholders and managers. For the preceding 30 years, by contrast, workers’ income rose at the identical rate that productivity did and corporations provided health insurance and pensions.

Why was that? According to Leonhardt, that was because “most executives behaved as if they cared about their workers and communities.” He quotes a famous article by Bill Benton of the ad agency Benton and Bowles that appeared in 1944, suggesting that American business had a higher mission than enriching the rich, and suggests that this became a widely accepted viewpoint in corporate boardrooms.

What you won’t find in Leonhardt’s column is any mention of unions, which renders this analysis akin to Hamlet without the prince.

The fact that unions represented one-third of the American workforce when Benton penned his piece, and a good deal more than one-third at major corporations, was overwhelmingly the main reason why corporations compensated their workers more fairly then than they have in recent decades. The contract that General Motors signed with the United Auto Workers in 1950, which set the template for the more equitable contracts of that period, came out of GM’s fear that it might have to endure another 100-plus-day shutdown that the UAW had inflicted on the company in its epochal 1946 strike. And as Jack Metzger has documented in his marvelous book Striking Steel, the 1950s were a decade suffused with major strikes as unions successfully fought to thwart corporations’ proposals that would have pared back the wage and benefit gains that workers had made. (Metzger’s book takes its title from the 1959 Steelworker strike against U.S. Steel, when close to half-a-million workers stayed off the job for 116 days, ultimately compelling the company to maintain and even increase its worker benefits.)

So let’s be clear about what the French call les trente glorieuses—the 30 years after World War II when worker income increased and a mass middle class emerged. It wasn’t the Golden Age of Benevolent Corporations. It was the Golden Age of Unions. ~ HAROLD MEYERSON

Categories Equity

New Orleans: Selective Charter Schools Win Equity Award from State

By dianeravitch
December 1, 2018 //
6

In a bizarre decision, the Louisiana Department of Education honored some highly selective charter schools in New Orleans for Equity.

https://www.nola.com/opinions/2018/11/how-did-schools-known-for-their-gatekeeping-get-designated-equity-honorees.html

“Lusher Charter School is selective admission and, on top of that, has a notoriously complex application process. Lake Forest Elementary Charter School’s application process is also hard by design. Benjamin Franklin High School is highly selective. Neither do those schools provide bus transportation, opting instead to offer bus tokens that can be used to take RTA.”

Andre Perry, former charter leader in NOLA, now at the Brookings Institution, said:

“There is no way,” he said, “that a school that has a history of not accepting everyone should get an equity award. C’mon, it makes no sense.”

“Based on the criteria for the award,” Perry said, “schools with a sordid history of exclusionary practices can qualify for an equity award. That’s just backwards.” He said that, instead, the selective admissions schools should be praised based on “how rapidly their populations are moving to look like the number of school-age children in the city.”

Maybe the state meant to commend these selective schools for high test scores and mistakenly put them on the Equity list.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Reform, Equity, New Orleans

Jan Resseger: Bruce Baker’s New Book is a Must-Read! “Educational Inequality and School Finance: Why Money Matters for America’s Students”

By dianeravitch
November 28, 2018 //
12

Most people, even educators, don’t pay close attention to school finance because the aid formulas get arcane quickly and the eyes glaze over. But nothing is more important to providing good schooling than having the resources to take care of students, teachers, and facilities. In the past two decades, many states have ignored equitable school funding and have chosen to offer “school choice” instead of paying teachers a living wage. As we learned from the widely circulated report of the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, a large number of states are spending less on their schools today than they did a decade ago. The states that have starved public schools of adequate funding are the same states that have provided choice. It’s a sort of “Let them eat cake” response when people don’t have bread.

Jan Resseger recently reviewed Bruce Baker’s book on school finance and found it to be important and accessible to lay readers. Baker writes clearly and he knows school finance.

Rutgers University school finance professor, Bruce Baker’s new book, Educational Inequality and School Finance: Why Money Matters for America’s Students, covers the basics—how school finance formulas are supposed to work to ensure that funding for schools is adequate, equitable, and stable.

Baker also carefully refutes some persistent myths—Eric Hanushek’s claim that money doesn’t really make a difference when it comes to raising student achievement, for example, and the contention that public schools’ expenditures have skyrocketed over the decades while achievement as measured by test scores has remained flat.

Baker does an excellent job of demonstrating that far more will be needed for our society appropriately to support school districts segregated not only by race, but also by poverty. The final sections of the book are a little technical. They explain the construction of a more equitable system that would drive enough funding to come closer to what is really needed in school districts serving concentrations of children in poverty.

Baker’s book is especially important for updating a discussion of basic school finance theory to account for today’s realities. He shows, for example, how the Great Recession undermined adequate and equitable funding of public schools despite that states had formulas in place that were supposed to have protected children and their teachers: “The sharp economic downturn following the collapse of the housing market in 2007-08, and persisting through about 2011, provided state and federal elected officials a pulpit from which to argue that our public school systems must learn how to do more with less… Meanwhile, governors on both sides of the aisle, facing tight budgets and the end of federal aid that had been distributed to temporarily plug state budget holes, ramped up their rhetoric for even deeper cuts to education spending… Notably, the attack on public school funding was driven largely by preferences for conservative tax policies at a time when state budgets experienced unprecedented drops in income and sales tax revenue.” (p. 4)

And for the first time in a school finance book, Baker explores the impact of two decades of charter school expansion on the funding of public schools. Although the conventional wisdom promoted by the corporate reformers has said that competition from independent charter school operators would introduce innovation and thereby stimulate academic improvement in public schools, not enough people have seriously considered the fiscal implications of slicing a fixed school funding pie into more pieces. Baker examines these fiscal implications of charter school expansion from many perspectives.

Charters are, first, one of those “false promises of cost-free solutions”: “The theory of action guiding these remedies and elixirs is that public, government-run schooling can be forced to operate more productively and efficiently if it can be reshaped and reformed to operate more like privately run, profit-driven corporations/businesses… Broadly, popular reforms have been built on the beliefs that the private sector is necessarily more efficient; that competition spurs innovation (and that there may be technological solutions to human capital costs); that data driven human capital policies can increase efficiency/productivity by improving the overall quality of the teacher workforce. One core element of such reform posits that US schools need market competition to spur innovation and that market competition should include government-operated schools, government-sanctioned (charter) privately operated schools, and private schools…. (T)here is little reason to believe that these magic elixirs will significantly change the productivity/efficiency equation or address issues of equity, adequacy, and equal opportunity.” (pp. 6-7)

Baker also speaks to the philosophical justification frequently offered to justify the rapid expansion of school choice—that justice can be defined by offering more choices for those who have few: “Liberty and equality are desirable policy outcomes. Thus, it would be convenient if policies simultaneously advanced both. But it’s never that simple. A large body of literature on political theory explains that liberty and equality are preferences that most often operate in tension with one another. While not mutually exclusive, they are certainly not one and the same. Preferences for and expansion of liberties often lead to greater inequality and division among members of society, whereas preferences for equality moderate those divisions. The only way expanded liberty can lead to greater equality is if available choices are substantively equal, conforming to a common set of societal standards. But if available choices are substantively equal, then why choose one over another. Systems of choice and competition rely on differentiation, inequality, and both winners and losers.” (p. 28)

Baker addresses Betsy DeVos’s contention that, “Choice in education is good politics because it’s good policy. It’s good policy because it comes from good parents who want better for their children. Families are on the front lines of this fight; let’s stand with them…This isn’t about school ‘systems.’ This is about individual students, parents, and families. Schools are at the service of students. Not the other way around.” Here is Baker’s answer: “The ‘money belongs to the child’ claim also falsely assumes that the only expenses associated with each individual’s education choices are the current annual expenses of educating that individual…. It ignores entirely marginal costs and economies of scale, foundational elements of origins of public institutions. We collect tax dollars and provide public goods and services because it allows us to do so at an efficient scale of operations… Public spending does not matter only to those using it here and now. These dollars don’t just belong to parents of children presently attending the schools, and the assets acquired with public funding… do not belong exclusively to those parents.” (p. 30)

Are charter schools more efficient at improving school achievement measured by test scores and are they fiscally efficient? “(A) close look at high-profile charters in New York City indicates that their success reflects their access to additional resources and a fairly traditional approach to leveraging them… For each of these major operators… the share of low-income (those who qualified for free or reduced-price lunch ), English language learners, and children with disabilities is lower than for district schools, in some cases quite substantially. On average, these schools are serving far less needy and thus less costly student populations than are the district schools.” Baker provides details of major New York City charter networks’ expenditure patterns; what he finds is that the best-funded allocate their instructional expenses in a similar way to traditional public schools: “Collectively, these figures tell a story of high-profile, well-funded CMOs in New York City leveraging their additional resources in three logical and rather traditional ways by hiring more staff per pupil… by paying their teachers more at any given level of experience and degree; and… by paying them more to work longer school hours, days, and years. In other words, they pay more people for more time.” He concludes: “Researchers, policy makers, pundits, pontificators, and even self-proclaimed thought leaders have yet to conjure some new ‘secret sauce’ or technological innovation that will greatly improve equity, adequacy, and efficiency. Human resources matter, and equitable and adequate financial resources are necessary for hiring and retaining the teachers and other school staff necessary to achieve equal educational opportunity for all children.” (pp. 68-79)

Resseger has more to say about Baker’s analysis of the inadequacy of charter schools as a means to promote equity or even innovation (unless that you think that strict discipline and harsh punishment is innovative).

Based on her incisive review, I am ordering Bruce Baker’s book now. I hope you will do the same.

The name of the game in education is money, and we can’t allow the Reformers to give us the Old Razzle-Dazzle to distract us from what matters most, the money to reduce class sizes, the money to pay teachers a professional salary, the money to have a robust arts program, the money to have up-to-date technology, the money to have a librarian, a school nurse, a social worker, and a psychologist. Money matters. Don’t be fooled into thinking that choice is a substitute!

Those who say that “money doesn’t matter” are always people who already have plenty of money. Bruce Baker explains why it does matter and why we must not be fooled anymore. Every child in this nation should get a good education and that requires money.

Categories Equity, Funding, School Choice

Jan Resseger: School Choice Fails to Provide Equity for the Neediest Children

By dianeravitch
November 9, 2018 //
17

Jan Resseger reviews the evidence about the “portfolio” model of school choice and weighs in on the Burris-Ravitch critique of the recent paper from the Learning Policy Institute that supported that model.

She writes:

“The Learning Policy Institute’s report, The Tapestry of American Public Education, promotes a lovely metaphor, a tapestry of school options woven together—open enrollment, magnet schools, charter schools, and specialty schools based on distinct educational models. The Learning Policy Institute declares: “The goal and challenge of school choice is to create a system in which all children choose and are chosen by a good school that serves them well and is easily accessible. The central lesson from decades of experience and research is that choice alone does not accomplish this goal. Simply creating new options does not lead automatically to greater access, quality or equity.” Here is how the Learning Policy Institute proposes that such fair and equal choice might be accomplished: “Focus on educational opportunities for children, not governance structures. Too often, questions related to the number of charters a district should have address school governance preferences, rather than the needs of children… Work to ensure equity and access for all. Expanding choice can increase opportunities, or it can complicate or restrict access to convenient and appropriate opportunities, most often for the neediest students… Create transparency at every stage about outcomes, opportunities, and resources to inform decision making for families, communities, and policymakers… Build a system of schools that meets all students’ needs.”

“The Learning Policy Institute’s recommendations sound familiar. They are the same arguments made by the Center on Reinventing Public Education as it describes its theory of “portfolio school reform.” Portfolio school reform imagines an amicable, collaborative mix of many different schools: “A great school for every child in every neighborhood. The portfolio strategy is a problem-solving framework through which education and civic leaders develop a citywide system of high-quality, diverse, autonomous public schools. It moves past the one-size-fits-all approach to education. Portfolio systems place educators directly in charge of their schools, empower parents to choose the right schools for their children, and focus school system leaders—such as school authorizers or those in a district central office—on overseeing school success.”

“Under portfolio school reform, a school district manages traditional neighborhood schools and charter schools like a stock portfolio—opening new schools all the time and closing so-called “failing” schools. CRPE says that portfolio school reform operates as a cycle: “give families choice; give schools autonomy; assess school performance; schools improve or get intervention; and expand or replace schools.”

“This rhetoric is all very nice. But the realities on the ground in the portfolio school districts I know fail to embody equity and justice. I believe it is a pipe dream to promise a great school choice for every child in every neighborhood. For one thing, there are the political and economic realities, beginning with the operation of power politics which is always part of the mayoral governance that is at the heart of this theory. There is also the unequal access parents have to information, and the unequal political, economic, and social position of parents. And finally there is the devastating impact of the ongoing expansion of school choice on the traditional public schools in the school districts where charters are proliferating. CRPE calls its governance theory “portfolio school reform.” Many critics instead describe parasitic school reform.”

Resseger cites studies by Gordon Lafer and Bruce Baker that show the harm the portfolio model inflicts on public schools.

And she concludes:

“The public schools are our mutual responsibility through public governance—paid for and operated by government on behalf of he public. We have a lot of work to do to realize this promise for all children. Bruce Baker describes our responsibility: ‘More than anything else, our system of public schooling requires renewed emphasis on equitable, adequate, and economically sustainable public financing at a level that will provide all children equal opportunity to achieve the outcomes we, as a society, desire for them.’”

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Equity, Justice, Privatization, School Choice

Peter Greene: Society Is Failing Our Children and Their Schools

By dianeravitch
November 7, 2018 //
12

Recently, a commenter on this blog wrote that he finally understood why some schools are succeeding and others are failing. He said he realized that children in affluent communities have well-resourced and successful schools, while children in impoverished communities have terrible schools. I tried for the umpteenth time to explain to him that he was reaching the wrong conclusion. The only measure he was using was test scores, which reflect family income. I suggested he consider that the schools in poor communities did not get the same resources as those in affluent communities. The schools he called “failing” very likely have dedicated teachers who are working hard despite large classes and inadequate support. The problem is not the schools, but society’s refusal to pay the cost of making every school a good school.

Peter Greene explains the point in more detail in this post about the Journey for Justice Alliance.

He begins:

“If you’re not regularly exposed to the problem, you might think that finding the ways in which non-white non-wealthy students are shortchanged would require deep and nuanced research. As it turns out, finding the ways in which education fails to serve those students requires no more careful research than finding the nose on the front of your face.

“The Journey For Justice Alliance is based in Chicago, but it’s an alliance of grassroots community, youth, and parent-led organizations in 24 cities across the country. They are working and organizing for community-driven alternatives to the privatization of and dismantling of public school systems. They’re the folks behind the #WeChoose movement (as in “we choose education equity, not the illusion of school choice.” Look at their member groups and you’ll find honest-to-goodness community grass roots organizations, not just one more astroturf group funded by Gates, Walton, et al. Their director, Jitu Brown, is one of the most powerful speakers for education and equity it has ever been my pleasure to hear.

“Last spring they issued a report– “Failing Brown v. Board”– that looks at the gap between the schools that serve primarily wealthy white families and those that serve non-wealthy families of color. Their findings are not encouraging.

“The report says: The fact is, public schools in Black and Latino communities are not “failing.” They have been failed. More accurately, these schools have been sabotaged for years by policy-makers who fail to fully fund them, by ideologues who choose to experiment with them, by “entrepreneurs” who choose to extract public taxpayer dollars from education systems for their own pockets.

“The report also rejects the notion that money doesn’t matter, or that somehow the children and their families are responsible. And they know what successful, fully-resourced schools look like

They offer a culturally relevant, engaging and challenging curriculum, smaller class sizes, more experienced teachers, wrap-around emotional and academic supports, a student-centered school climate and meaningful parent and community engagement. These are the hallmarks of what Journey for Justice calls sustainable community schools.

“J4J performed a fairly simple piece of research– looking at course offerings in various schools across twelve cities. They acknowledge that such a comparison isn’t perfect, that schools may offer courses that are never actually taught, that the course offering list doesn’t tell you about the quality of those courses. But the findings are still pretty stark.”

In every pairing of black and white schools, “majority white schools offered both more academic subjects and more “enrichment” subjects in the arts than majority Black and/or Brown schools. Majority white schools offered more foreign languages, more high-level math options, more AP courses. The range of offerings in arts, music, dance and theater was far greater in majority white schools…

“Charter fans are going to say, “See? That’s why we need to build more charters, so we can get some of those children of color out of there,” but why should those children have to sacrifice the other big benefit that majority white schools enjoy– a school in their own community that they can attend with their neighbors? And why do we need a complicated web of privatized schools to fix the problem. We know how to fix the problem, as witnessed by the fact that politicians and leaders have fixed the problem for each of the affluent majority white schools.

“It’s like you have twenty kids in a cafeteria, and ten sit down with a steak dinner and the other ten get bowls of cold oatmeal, and when someone complains about it, a bunch of folks pop up to propose some complex system by which one of the oatmeal kids will be sent out to a restaurant across town. No! Just get back out in the kitchen and use the same tools and supplies that you demonstrably already have to make steak dinners for the rest of the kids.”

Categories Charter Schools, Education Reform, Equity, Funding, Inequality, Injustice, Racism

Arthur Camins: Education is Everyone’s Business, But Not a Commodity

By dianeravitch
October 20, 2018 //
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Arthur Camins explains why we all have a stake in the success of public schools.

I wish I had a dollar for every parent who has said, “I’d love to sent my child to a public school, but …” The but is invariably related to real and perceived deficiencies in zoned schools and by race and class prejudices insidiously driven and reinforced by persistently unaddressed planned inequity. The sequel to the but is always a justification for opting out of public schools and enrollment in a charter or private education. Some parents add, “I’m the product of public schools. I support public schools, but I’m not going to sacrifice my children.” Such are the inevitable responses to our country’s acceptance of inequality and scarcity as unalterable. The sum of thousands of these personal choices for some children– increasingly supported by tax revenues– undermines the education of all children. The blame is not on parent choices but on the politicians who refuse to address inequity, while funding policies that undermine public education. If we want a different outcome, we need to vote for politicians who represent different values.

Education in the United States is contentious. It always has been because personal and societal decisions are inextricably interwoven. Now, we are at an inflection point in which consequential questions about education are hotly debated. Consider these for the November elections.

Whose business is the education of students in the United States?

Who should get to make decisions about where, what, with whom, and how children learn?

If our nation values democracy and the common good, the answer to both questions is:

Of course, every parent cares about where, what, with whom, and how their children learn. However, decisions about education affect everyone, not just school attendees and their families. Their education is everyone’s business– but not in the mercantile sense of the word. Other people’s children grow up to be our neighbors, co-workers, and citizens (who vote or do not). Their subsequent behaviors and decisions as adults touch us all, whether or not we have school-age children. That is why decisions about education– a common good– should be made democratically on behalf of all children and not just by individual parents.

Unfortunately, the idea that education is a common good, not a commodity, and should be governed democratically is under assault.

Should decisions about education be made by and for all of us through locally elected school boards? Or, by unelected private boards? Is education literally the business of the eight families who have collectively spent over $35.5 million to influence the outcomes of local school board elections? Is it the business of would-be entrepreneurs out to make a buck?

Once again, if our nation values democracy and the common good the answers are clear:

Yes, no, no, and no.

Read on as Camins explains why Education is our responsibility, not to be handed off to the private sector.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Education Industry, Education Reform, Equity, Supporting public schools
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