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Jan Resseger: How Privatization Of Public Services Undermines Democracy

By dianeravitch
December 16, 2024 //
8

Jan Resseger lives in Ohio. Before retiring, Jan staffed advocacy and programming to support public education justice in the national setting of the United Church of Christ—working to improve the public schools that serve 50 million of our children; reduce standardized testing; ensure attention to vast opportunity gaps; advocate for schools that welcome all children; and speak for the public role of public education.  Jan chaired the National Council of Churches Committee on Public Education for a dozen of those years.

Jan recently wrote this post for the National Center on Education Policy at the University of Colorado.

She writes:

I suppose many of us think about the classes we wish we had signed up for in college.  Right now, as somebody who believes public schools are among our nation’s most important and most threatened public institutions, I wish that in addition to enrolling in The Philosophy of Education, I had also taken a class in political philosophy—or at least Political Science 101. How have groups like the Heritage Foundation, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, Betsy DeVos’s American Federation of Children and their proxies like Moms for Liberty managed to discredit public schooling and at the same time spawn an explosion of vouchers, which, according to the editors of last year’s excellent analysis, The School Voucher Illusion: Exposing the Pretense of Equity, are failing to serve our society’s poorest children even as they are destroying the institution of public schooling?

Here are that book’s conclusions: “As currently structured, voucher policies in the United States are unlikely to help the students they claim to support. Instead, these policies have often served as a facade for the far less popular reality of funding relatively advantaged (and largely White) families, many of whom already attended—or would attend—private schools without subsidies. Although vouchers are presented as helping parents choose schools, often the arrangements permit the private schools to do the choosing… Advocacy that began with a focus on equity must not become a justification for increasing inequity. Today’s voucher policies have, by design, created growing financial commitments of taxpayer money to serve a constituency of the relatively advantaged that is redefining their subsidies as rights—often in jurisdictions where neighborhood public schools do not have the resources they need.” (The School Voucher Illusion: Exposing the Pretense of Equity, p. 290)

As I watch the wave of school privatization washing across conservative states and read about universal school choice as one of the priorities of presidential candidate Donald Trump as well as a goal of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, I find myself wishing I had a better grasp of how our society has gone off the rails.  I wonder what I would have learned about the difference between democracy and extreme individualism in that political theory class I missed, and I find myself trying to catch up by reading—for example—on the difference between a society defined by individualist consumerism and a society defined by citizenship.

Back in 1984, the late political theorist Benjamin Barber published Strong Democracy, a book defining the principles our federal and state constitutions and laws are presumed to protect:  “Strong democracy … rests on the idea of a self-governing community of citizens who are united less by homogeneous interests than by civic education and who are made capable of common purpose and mutual action by virtue of their civic attitudes and participatory institutions rather than their altruism or their good nature. Strong democracy is consonant with—indeed depends upon—the politics of conflict, the sociology of pluralism, and the separation of private and public realms of action… The theory of strong democracy… envisions… politics as… the way that human beings with variable but malleable natures and with competing but overlapping interests can contrive to live together communally not only to their mutual advantage but also to the advantage of their mutuality…  It seeks to create a public language that will help reformulate private interests in terms susceptible to public accommodation… and it aims at understanding individuals not as abstract persons but as citizens, so that commonality and equality rather than separateness are the defining traits of human society.” (Strong Democracy, pp 117-119)

In that same book, Barber describes the consumer as a representative of extreme individualism—the opposite of the public citizen: “The modern consumer is the… last in a long train of models that depict man as a greedy, self-interested, acquisitive survivor who is capable nonetheless of the most self-denying deferrals of gratification for the sake of ultimate material satisfaction. The consumer is a creature of great reason devoted to small ends… He uses the gift of choice to multiply his options in and to transform the material conditions of the world, but never to transform himself or to create a world of mutuality with his fellow humans.” (Strong Democracy, p. 22)

Two decades later, Barber published Consumed, in which he explores in far more detail the danger of a society defined by consumerism rather than strong democracy. As his case study he contrasts parent-consumers who prioritize personal choice to shape their children’s education and parent-citizens: “Through vouchers we are able as individuals, through private choosing, to shape institutions and policies that are useful to our own interests but corrupting to the public goods that give private choosing its meaning.  I want a school system where my kid gets the very best; you want a school system where your kid is not slowed down by those less gifted or less adequately prepared; she wants a school system where children whose ‘disadvantaged backgrounds’ (often kids of color) won’t stand in the way of her daughter’s learning; he (a person of color) wants a school system where he has the maximum choice to move his kid out of ‘failing schools’ and into successful ones. What do we get?  The incomplete satisfaction of those private wants through a fragmented system in which individuals secede from the public realm, undermining the public system to which we can subscribe in common. Of course no one really wants a country defined by deep educational injustice and the surrender of a public and civic pedagogy whose absence will ultimately impact even our own private choices… Yet aggregating our private choices as educational consumers in fact yields an inegalitarian and highly segmented society in which the least advantaged are further disadvantaged as the wealthy retreat ever further from the public sector.  As citizens, we would never consciously select such an outcome, but in practice what is good for ‘me,’ the educational consumer, turns out to be a disaster for ‘us’ as citizens and civic educators—and thus for me the denizen of an American commons (or what’s left of it).” (Consumed, p. 132)

Barber concludes: “It is the peculiar toxicity of privatization ideology that it rationalizes corrosive private choosing as a surrogate for the public good.  It enthuses about consumers as the new citizens who can do more with their dollars… than they ever did with their votes. It associates the privileged market sector with liberty as private choice while it condemns democratic government as coercive.” (Consumed, p. 143)  “The consumer’s republic is quite simply an oxymoron… Public liberty demands public institutions that permit citizens to address the public consequences of private market choices… Asking what “I want’ and asking what ‘we as a community to which I belong need’ are two different questions, though neither is altruistic and both involve ‘my’ interests: the first is ideally answered by the market; the second must be answered by democratic politics.” “Citizens cannot be understood as mere consumers because individual desire is not the same thing as common ground and public goods are always something more than an aggregation of private wants…. (W)hat is public cannot be determined by consulting or aggregating private desires.” (Consumed, p. 126)

So that is today’s lesson from the political philosophy class I was never able to fit into my schedule in college: “Freedom is not just about standing alone and saying no. As a usable ideal, it turns out to be a public rather than a private notion… (N)owadays, the idea that only private persons are free, and that only personal choices of the kind consumers make count as autonomous, turns out to be an assault not on tyranny but on democracy. It challenges not the illegitimate power by which tyrants once ruled us but the legitimate power by which we try to rule ourselves in common. Where once this notion of liberty challenged corrupt power, today it undermines legitimate power… It forgets the very meaning of the social contract, a covenant in which individuals agree to give up unsecured private liberty in exchange for the blessings of public liberty and common security.” (Consumed, pp.119-123)

Categories Bigotry, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Citizenship, Democracy, Deregulation, Education Reform, Ethics, Inequity, Privatization, Vouchers

John Thompson: Steve Brill’s Destructive Attacks on Teachers Did Real Damage

By dianeravitch
November 18, 2024 //
8

Retired Oklahoma City teacher John Thompson wrote in The Oklahoman about the early days of the teacher-bashing movement. At its center he found a journalist-entrepreneur named Steve Brill, who wrote a slashing attack on teachers, tenure, and teacher unions in The New Yorker. Even in Oklahoma, Brill’s article was big news, because it identified the scapegoat that legislators wanted: teachers. Brill subsequently wrote a book celebrating charter schools, called Class Warfare. In that book, he falsely claimed that I had been bribed by teachers’ unions to become pro-union and pro-public school. So, as you might imagine, he is not a friend of mine.

John Thompson wrote:

In 2010, I attended an Oklahoma legislative committee meeting where most lawmakers were reading a New Yorker article, Steve Brill’s “The Rubber Room.”  It was full of attacks on teachers. Legislators found his narrative persuasive, and it contributed to the passage of the most destructive education bill I ever witnessed.

I then reached out to Brill, trying to share the social and cognitive science that explained why he was using invalid and unreliable data in support of a blame game that would undermine teaching and learning.

So, I was curious about what he now believes. After all, the subtitle for a recent interview with him was:

New York repealed measures that made it easier to fire ineffective teachers. The veteran journalist wonders if they ever mattered.

But, Brill, a non-educator, still sticks with an anti-teacher ideology, propagated by “astro-turf think tanks” that rejected the scientific method when trying to use venture capitalism procedures for transforming traditional public schools. Even after those reward-and-punish policies demonstrably failed, Brill says, “in public education, I think there’s a pretty good argument that the people abusing and undermining the system are actually the teachers.” 

“The Rubber Room” presented little evidence that teachers were to blame. His sources focused on “the twentieth of one percent of all New York City teachers” who had been removed from the classroom, but not fired. He believed the PR from corporate reformers like The New Teacher Project (TNTP) and the New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein who thought “tenure is ridiculous.” 

Although value-added models (VAMs) were the foundation for holding teachers accountable for test score growth, Brill only used the term “value-added” once, and he didn’t bother to address that statistical model’s flawed methodology for evaluating individual teachers. (Some of those models even held teachers accountable for outcomes of students they never met!)

Brill merely wrote that the “value-added scores” was “a phrase that sends chills down the spine of most teachers’ union officials.”

Brill didn’t understand why it was impossible to recruit top teachers to highest-poverty schools using evaluation metrics that were biased against inner city teachers. Neither did he understand why these data-driven evaluations would prioritize “jukin the stats” and drill-and-kill instruction that would undermine holistic and meaningful teaching and learning. Brill certainly didn’t understand that teachers and unions also fought against VAMs in order to protect their students from teach-to-the-test malpractice which they would incentivize.

Brill was also dismissive of peer review, which the teachers union supported, and which was a constructive and efficient method of removing ineffective teachers from the classroom. (In my experience, union leaders invested a great deal of political capital in removing ineffective teachers; it was administrators that would lose their nerve and not exit those teachers.)  

Brill drew upon the anti-union TNTP, which spread inaccurate information on the Toledo Plan, where districts and unions worked together to efficiently remove ineffective teachers. The TNTP claimed that the Toledo peer review program only removed .7% of probationary teachers over a five-year period.  In fact, 12.9% of teachers in the plan were removed from the classroom in 2009. The percentages of 2008 probationary teachers removed from the classroom in Syracuse (9.7%), Rochester (7%), Montgomery County (10.5%), and Minneapolis (37%) were far greater than outcomes that VAMs produced.

And that brings us to today’s attacks on education. After a history of failure, corporate reformers have moved away from teacher evaluation systems that rely on test score growth, even though they still tend to blame teachers and unions. But state schools Superintendent Ryan Walters now represents today’s version of disempowering teachers.

Walters pushed for and succeeded in getting the Oklahoma State Board of Education to revoke the license of Norman High School’s Summer Boismier, who “covered her bookshelves with red paper, [with] the words ‘books the state doesn’t want you to read,’ and a QR code to the Brooklyn Public Library, which offers any student free access to banned books.” 

She has asked an Oklahoma County judge to review and reverse the revocation order, saying it was unlawful, frivilous and without a legitimate cause.

Also, Edmond’s Regan Killackey is fighting against Walters’ effort to revoke his teaching license for a photo showing him playing with his kids at a Halloween supply store in September 2019. His daughter was wearing a mask of Donald Trump and his son held up a plastic sword, and Killackey had a grimaced look on his face.

If teachers lose their due process rights, who will be able to resist Walters’ civics curriculum committee which includes the Heritage Foundation’s Kevin Roberts, a key sponsor of Project 2025?

Categories Failure, Inequity, Injustice, New York City, Teachers

Jan Resseger: Two Decades of Tax-Cutting in Ohio Have Helped the Rich and Harmed Public Services

By dianeravitch
October 5, 2024 //
4

Jan Resseger writes here about Ohio’s passion for cutting taxes, which benefits the wealthiest Ohioans and diminishes public services.

She writes:

As we head toward the November election, Policy Matters Ohio’s Bailey Williams exposes recent history that has been little reported.  In The Great Ohio Tax Shift, Williams explores simply and clearly the data showing that Ohio’s new billion dollar private school tuition voucher expansion is not the only factor that has threatened public school funding.  For two decades now, legislators have been cutting taxes and reducing investment in public services, including public schools. And Ohio’s legislature has increased the tax burden on Ohio’s poorest citizens and made life easier for our state’s wealthiest citizens.

Even though Ohioans have watched the legislature toss a tax cut into budget after budget instead of funding needed services, the cumulative effects Baily presents in the new report are astounding:

  • “Ohio families with the least resources—those making less than $24,000—pay more annual taxes on average today than they did before 2005.
  • The average household among the top 1 of Ohio earners, with incomes above $647,000, now contribute over $52,000 per year less than they once did.
  • The result is a loss of about $12.8 billion a year in revenue….
  • Ohioans of color are significantly more likely to pay a higher share of their incomes in taxes… while white Ohioans are more likely to have benefited….
  • 71% of the total value of personal income tax cuts has gone to the richest 20% of households….
  • Changes to sales taxes, excise taxes, and business taxes have, on average, increased taxes for the bottom 99% of Ohio’s households.
  • Changes to sales taxes, excise taxes, and business taxes have, on average, allowed the richest 1% of Ohio tax filers to pay nearly $600 per year less than they did before 2005.”

Bailey reminds us why we pay taxes and explains what has been sacrificed in Ohio: “Through the state tax system, Ohio can ensure every child gets a world-class education, every community is vibrant and healthy, and every Ohioan, of every race and gender, has a secure economic foundation on which to build our futures. But for a generation, lawmakers have instead used tax policy to create loopholes for the wealthy and influential, and provide special treatment for powerful corporations… The politicians who write state tax policy often justify their decisions with promises that when billionaires’ pockets overflow with profits, the benefits will trickle down to working families. Year after year—now decade after decade—the consequences have been clear: The people with the lowest incomes are paying a little more, the wealthy are paying much less, and Ohio has too few resources to serve its purpose: creating a state where everyone has what they need to live a good life.”

Ohio’s legislature has reduced progressive taxation as it has reduced dependence on income taxes and increased regressive sales, excise and business taxes: “Ohio policymakers have made significant changes to personal income taxes over the two decades, lowering rates and making our tax structure more regressive. Since 2005, almost every biennial budget passed by the Ohio state general assembly has included some form of reduction to the personal income tax, generally through broad tax rate cuts and elimination of top tax brackets.  Some changes have benefited low-paid Ohioans: Increasing the threshold at which households begin to pay taxes means households with income below $26,050 don’t pay state income tax…. The creation of a 30% Earned Income Tax Credit has helped low-paid Ohioans.” However, “Other regressive changes in the tax code have completely erased the meager benefits of income tax cuts for the lowest-paid Ohioans. In fact, the lowest-income 20% now pay more on average in taxes than they did before the legislature began its tax cutting spree in 2005. Sales, excise, and business taxes now cost that group more each year on average—more than cancelling out the annual average $122 in income tax cuts this group benefits from….”

Most Ohioans are not prepared to gather and analyze this kind of technical information. Thanks to Bailey Williams and Policy Matters Ohio for this technical analysis. We have spent this year learning about the fiscal implications of the Legislature’s voucher expansion in the current biennial budget; now we are better prepared to understand why, in addition to perpetual voucher expansion, it has been such a struggle to press the Legislature to enact Ohio’s new public school funding formula, the Fair School Funding Plan, to rectify years of inadequate and inequitably distributed public school funding. Legislators have insisted on a slow, three-budget phase-in of the new formula and even now have been unwilling to commit to completing the full launch of the new plan in the budget they will begin negotiating in January.  Many of us have realized that the Fair School Funding Plan’s delayed rollout has derived from perennial tax cutting in addition to the enactment of what’s turning out to be an annual billion dollar voucher explosion. Williams’ analysis, released last week, provides information essential to our grasping the complex fiscal realities that will be part of the upcoming state budget debate.

Please open the link to get the full picture of the tax-cutting that has helped the richest Ohioans, hurt the poorest, and undermined public services.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Education Industry, Elections, Equity, Ethics, Extremism, Funding, Health, Inequity, Injustice, Ohio

New Hampshire: Voucher Program Aims to Destroy Public Schools

By dianeravitch
August 5, 2024 //
12

Veteran journalist Garry Rayno wrote a passionate editorial about the destructive voucher program in New Hampshire, promoted by out-of-state billionaires. Ninety percent of the students in the state attend public schools, but Republicans have diverted taxpayer dollars to private and religious schools. Their goal is a universal voucher program, where every student in the state is eligible for a voucher, with no income limits.

Rayno wrote at InDepthNH.org:

America’s traditional institutions, the foundation for the greatest political experiment in history, are under attack from the social safety net to food regulations, and from the court system to environmental protection.

The drive to create doubt and even rejection of these long-standing pillars of our society is to eventually destroy the underpinnings of government to create a new order where the rich will flourish even more with all the advantages, while everyone else will fight over the crumbs of the plutocrats.

The current large target in this fight to turn democracy into an oligarchy is the public school system.

The first blow to the public school system in New Hampshire was the push for charter schools, which are still public schools but without the regulations and requirements traditional public schools must meet.

Charter schools have had to ask the state for more and more per pupil money to stay afloat, about double the per pupil adequacy grant amount for traditional schools.

The charter schools that found a niche have been successful, but many have fallen by the wayside over the years even with federal grant money approved during the Trump administration for start-ups and expansions.

And until recently, they have not strayed into the Christian Nationalist area that has been widely promoted by Hinsdale College in Michigan and adopted by some states.

Then came the voucher push sold as a way of helping low-income families find a more suitable education environment for students who do not do well in the public-school setting.

After several unsuccessful attempts, proponents, who include Education Commissioner Frank Edelblut and State School Board Chairman Drew Cline, lawmakers successfully approved the Education Freedom Account program as a rider to the 2022-2023 biennial operating budget after it failed to pass the House and was retained.

Since then attempts to expand the eligibility of parents by raising the income cap passed two sessions ago, but failed in the recently completed session.

Instead of helping the low-income families with educational options the program has largely been a subsidy program for parents with children who were already in religious or private schools and homeschooling. 

Only about 10 to 15 percent of the increasingly expensive draw on the Education Trust Fund have left public schools for alternative education programs.

What proponents ultimately seek is a “universal program” which would be open to any New Hampshire student regardless of his or her parents’ income, although a similar program has nearly bankrupted Arizona and put public education at risk in Ohio, where it is being litigated.

New Hampshire is not alone in the push to do away with public education as we know it.

A letter from many national figures seeking to privatize education like Betsy DeVos and Edward Bennett; the CEOs of organizations pushing for privatization; former federal and state governors; sitting governors from almost all southern states; two state education commissioners including Edelblut, and state elected officials most from Republican controlled states was sent to Republican Congressional leaders saying, “The task before the next Congress is clear and unambiguous: bring education freedom to millions of students across America who desperately need it!”

The letter also touts the GOP’s platform approved at its recent national convention “to cultivate great K-12 schools, ensure safe learning environments free from political meddling, and restore Parental Rights. We commit to an Education System that empowers students, supports families, and promotes American Values… Republicans believe families should be empowered to choose the best Education for their children. We support Universal School Choice in every State in America.”

The political meddling the platform contends is that “Lessons about American values have been displaced by political or cultural trends of the day,” without noting several states have recently required the Bible be taught in public schools. 

Children whose faith is Muslim or Buddhism or are Native Americans may believe those state’s Biblical requirement is political meddling.

What the proponents of universal vouchers seek is to have Congress do what some state legislators, including Texas, have failed to do and that is approve universal private or religious education on the public’s dime.

This push to do away with public education has attempted to tarnish what has always been the great equalizer, by saying schools are failing, teachers are indoctrinating students and withholding information from parents. 

You would think public schools are a far-reaching conspiracy to destroy family values, while ignoring the fact that 90 percent of students are in public schools and many are very successful.

New Hampshire public schools ranked sixth in the nation this year, down from the number two spots five years ago.

The number ranking was before the push to privatize education became successful with the help of Gov. Chris Sununu who put both Edelblut and Cline where they are, in charge of the public education system in the state, although both seek to diminish its reach.

Edelblut focuses on the learning disparity between well to do school districts and the poorly performing ones that lack the property values to support schools in the same way property wealthy communities do as the reason to seek alternatives.

Yet when the state education funding system is raised as a possible culprit for the disparity, Edelblut is quick to dismiss that as a different issue when it isn’t.

One of the major concerns about the Education Freedom Program, the Business Tax Scholarship Program and charter schools, is the lack of accountability.

How do taxpayers know their money is being used wisely if there is no way to determine those students are receiving “an adequate education,” as the state Supreme Court ruled?
Attempts to bring more accountability have failed in the Republican controlled legislature.

At the same time, Cline this week in his column “The Broadside” touts the state as doing pretty well for educational entrepreneurs according to a recent ranking.

“There’s more that can be done to make New Hampshire a freer state for education entrepreneurs looking to start small, decentralized, and unconventional educational environments, but so far the state is doing better than most,” according to Cline.

He cites the Education Entrepreneur Freedom Index released by the yes.every kid.foundation for the ranking.

It shouldn’t be surprising that according to Wikipedia,  “Yes. every kid. (YEK) is a 501(c)(4) advocacy group that is a part of the Koch Network. Launched by the Charles Koch-funded Stand Together in June of 2019, YEK supports the privatization of education. The organization is a proponent of the school choice movement, advocating for subsidized private school vouchers and charter schools.”
The Koch Foundation has long advocated for ending public education and installing a private education system where you pay for what you get. Not exactly the great equalizer.

Cline argues New Hampshire should be looking to encourage more private education.

“States with more relaxed homeschool and nonpublic school laws/regulations score higher, as entrepreneurs have an easier time getting started in these states,” he notes.

Cline and the Koch organization suggest relaxing state requirements for non-public schools and also zoning regulations to make it easier to locate educational facilities including child care businesses by allowing education in all zoning districts in a municipality.

“Though New Hampshire lost a point for rules requiring state approval for non-public schools, the state could become much more friendly to education entrepreneurs, the study’s authors conclude, primarily by relaxing some child-care rules and local regulations,” Cline writes.

Supporters of Education Freedom Accounts are fond of saying the best accountability is if parents are satisfied with the education their children receive, which you would hope is the case or why would you leave your child in an unsatisfactory educational environment?

But that is not what the state Supreme Court said in its Claremont I decision. It said the state has a responsibility to provide an adequate education to every student in the state and to pay for it. Parents have choices but the state defines an adequate education.

The state legislature has yet to live up to its responsibility and allowing a bypass through religious and private schools and homeschooling is not constitutionally fair to those children.

If you believe public education is failing in this state, you should begin looking at the top: the governor, the commissioner and to the state board of education chair.

Their priority is not public education.

Garry Rayno may be reached at garry.rayno@yahoo.com.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Catholic Schools, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Funding, Inequity, New Hampshire, Privatization, Religion, School Choice, Separation of church and state

North Carolina: Republican Leaders Ask High Court to Reverse Decision Funding Public Schools

By dianeravitch
February 26, 2024 //
11

Public school parents and concerned citizens in North Carolina have hoped that the General Assembly (legislature) would fully fund the Leandro decision of 2022, which requires full funding of public schools. The original Leandro case was decided thirty years ago!

But the leaders of the General Assembly, which has a veto-proof majority, went to court to ask the new members of the court to overturn the Leandro decision.

The GOP majority is committed to charter schools and vouchers, not public schools, even though the vast majority of children in the state are enrolled in public schools.

The North Carolina Supreme Court is weighing whether to reverse a 2022 decision that allows judges to order the transfer of hundreds of millions — and potentially billions — of dollars to fund public schools. In November 2022, the Supreme Court’s former Democratic majority ruled that the courts can order state officials to transfer funds to try to provide students their constitutional right to a sound basic education. During oral arguments Thursday, an attorney for Republican legislative leaders Sen. Phil Berger and House Speaker Tim Moore asked the court’s current 5-2 GOP majority to overturn that 2022 ruling. “The court has recognized time and time again that if a decision is wrongly decided, if it conflicts with the constitution, if it conflicts with prior precedent …. then it should be overturned and corrected at the next possible moment,” said attorney Matthew Tilley. “This is the next possible.” WILL COURT OVERTURN PRECEDENT? But attorneys representing school districts, the State Board of Education and the state urged the justices to stand by the 2022 decision. “It has been the rule of this court for over 100 years that the court will not disturb its prior holding in the same case, even if it would have overturned that holding on a properly presented petition for rehearing,” said attorney Melanie Dubis. “We do not have a properly presented petition for rehearing in this case.

“Nevertheless, that is what the defendant-intervenors are blatantly asking this court to do, to go back and overturn Leandro IV, which is binding precedent cited merely 14 months ago.” That view was echoed Thursday at a rally held across the street from the court hearing and in statements from Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper and the state’s Democratic legislative delegation. “Public school children are at the most important crossroads in our history,” Cooper said in a statement Thursday. “Will our Supreme Court be courageous enough to protect those children, or will it once again protect the power of the politicians who would rather give billions in tax breaks and private school vouchers for the wealthy?” The court is expected to issue a ruling this year.

This week’s court hearing is the latest chapter in the now 30-year-old Leandro school funding lawsuit that was initially filed in 1994 by low-wealth school districts to get more state funding. Over the years, the state Supreme Court has ruled that the state constitution guarantees every child “an opportunity to receive a sound basic education” and that the state was failing to meet that obligation. In November 2021, Superior Court Judge David Lee ordered the state treasurer, controller and budget director to transfer $1.75 billion to fund the second and third years of an eight-year plan developed by a consultant. The plan is meant to try to provide every student with high-quality teachers and principals. The eight-year plan is estimated to cost at least $5.6 billion. Just days before the 2022 midterm elections flipped the court from Democratic to Republican control, the Supreme Court upheld Lee’s order. The Democratic justices said that the courts had deferred long enough for the state to implement a plan to provide a sound basic education. Soon after taking control, the court’s GOP majority blocked enforcement of Lee’s order.

Read more at: https://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/education/article285710266.html#storylink=cpy

Read more at: https://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/education/article285710266.html#storylink=cpy

Read more at: https://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/education/article285710266.html#storylink=cpy

Categories Education Industry, Elections, Extremism, Funding, Inequity, North Carolina, Privatization, Republicans, Vouchers

Watch This! Gloria Ladson-Billings Speaks at NPE Conference about Attacks on Public Schools

By dianeravitch
November 15, 2023 //
6

If you missed the 10th annual conference of the Network for Public Education, you missed some of the best presentations in our ten years of holding conferences.

You missed the brilliant Gloria Ladson-Billings, Professor Emerita and formerly the Kellner Family Distinguished Professor of Urban Education in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Ladson-Billings gave an outstanding speech that brought an enthusiastic audience to its feet. She spoke about controversial topics with wit, charm, wisdom, and insight.

Fortunately, her presentation was videotaped. If you were there, you will enjoy watching it again. If you were not there, you have a treat in store.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Corporate Reform, Cruelty, Curriculum, Dark Money, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Equity, Extremism, For-Profit, Fraud, Freedom, Freedom to Read, Funding, Inequity, Injustice, Network for Public Education, Parents, Privatization, Racism, Supporting public schools, Teachers and Teaching

Forbes on the 400 Richest People in the World

By dianeravitch
October 14, 2023 //
12

Forbes magazine released its annual list of the 400 richest people in the world, called the Forbes 400. This article includes a link to the 400.

In New York State, Michael Blooomberg is the richest. He is a huge supporter of charter schools, as are many other billionaires.

Lisa Finn of the Patch for the North Fork of Long Island writes:

Overall, the 400 richest billionaires in America are worth $4.5 trillion, tying a record set in 2021. Overall, they are about $500 billion richer than they were a year ago, in large part because of rebounding stock markets and an AI-driven tech boom, Forbes said.

NEW YORK — Billionaire Michael Bloomberg is the wealthiest person in New York, according to The Forbes 400, an annual ranking of America’s super rich released Tuesday.

Billionaires had to have a net worth at least $2.9 billion to be included on the prestigious list, up from $2.7 billion a year ago. Forbes said its net worth calculations use stock prices from Sept. 8.

New York’s former mayor Michael Bloomberg, 81, of Bloomberg LP and the richest person in New York, is worth an estimated $96.3 billion. He is ranked the 10th most wealthy man nationwide.

In April, he was ranked the 7th richest person in the world, according to Forbes.

Inequality may well be at its worst point in our history. A handful of people have as much wealth as the lower 50%. This is unhealthy for our society.

If you want to know more about the consequences of intense inequality, I recommend a book by two British sociologists, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, called The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger.

Their thesis is that the more equality a society is, the happier it is.

Categories Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Democracy, Economy, Inequity

The Plot to Take Down Public Schools

By dianeravitch
October 11, 2023 //
9

Recently the Network for Public Education and the Education Law Center sponsored a zoom conversation with Nick Surgey. Nick is an experienced investigative journalist who works with an organization called Documented, which digs into the Dark Money groups undermining Public schools and other democratic institutions. Nick has done the legwork that identified the money and people behind the home schooling movement, as well as the rightwing Alliance for Defending Freedom. He has worked with the Center for Media and Democracy and other pro-democracy organizations.

This is a discussion you should definitely tune into.

Categories Billionaires, Corporate Reform, Corruption, Democracy, Education Industry, Education Reform, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Hoax, Inequity, Koch Brothers

UNESCO Report: The Dangers of Ed-Technology!

By dianeravitch
September 25, 2023 //
33

This is the only post today. Read as much of it as you have time for. The report is a valuable reminder that Ed-tech is oversold and even dangerous. It has its uses, for sure. But it should never replace teachers or parents.

UNESCO released a major blockbuster report warning about the dangers of relying too much on education technology. The author of the report was Mark West. The title of the report is An Ed-Tech Tragedy? Educational Technologies and School Closures in the Time of COVID-19.

An alternate link: https://teachertaskforce.org/sites/default/files/2023-09/2023_UNESCO_An-ed-tech-tragedy_Educational-technologies-and-school-closures-in-the-time-of-COVID19_EN_.pdf

The puzzle at the heart of the document is the clash between learned experience and the imperatives of greed. We learned during the pandemic about the risks of becoming dependent on ed-technology as the main driver of instruction. As we reflect on the period from March 2020 to now, we can discern the damage that occurred to students when their teachers were replaced by virtual instruction: boredom, learning loss, mental health issues, loneliness, lack of socialization with their peers, lack of personal interaction with teachers.

Yet with most people believing that the pandemic (or the worst of it) lies in the past, ed-tech corporations are focused on selling more of what has already failed. Why would we want to expand what has demonstrably proved inadequate and harmful to students?

You probably will take a long while to read the full report, but do read the summary and conclusions to whet your appetite. The overview concludes that the global reliance on ed-tech was necessary in the circumstances, but was a tragedy. Children need human teachers. They need people who look them in the eye and encourage them. Education is not a mechanical process; people are not widgets.

The UNESCO report reviews the global evidence of the harm caused by dependence on ed-tech:

[The report] exposes the ways unprecedented educational dependence on technology often resulted in unchecked exclusion, staggering inequality, inadvertent harm and the elevation of learning models that place machines and profit before people.

The summary says:

An Ed-Tech Tragedy? documents how widespread school closures and the hard pivot to remote learning with connected technology during the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in numerous unintended and undesirable consequences.

Although connected technology supported the continuation of education for many learners, many more were left behind. Exclusion soared and inequities widened. Achievement levels fell, even for those with access to distance learning. Educational experiences narrowed. Physical and mental health declined. Privatization accelerated, threatening education’s unique standing as a public good and human right. Invasive surveillance endangered the free and open exchange of ideas and undermined trust. Automation replaced human interactions with machine-mediated experiences. And technology production and disposal placed new strains on the environment.

Visions that technology could form the backbone of education and supplant school-based learning – in wide circulation at the outset of the health crisis – had promised better outcomes. Ed-tech proponents held that the immense challenges of school closures could be met with technology and that deeper technology integration would transform education for the better. But these high hopes and expectations unraveled when ed-tech was hurriedly deployed to maintain formal education as COVID-19 tore across countries.

An Ed-Tech Tragedy? recounts this tumultuous period, documenting the actions and decisions taken by governments, schools and technology companies. The publication contrasts the promises of ed-tech with the realities of what ed-tech delivered as a response to school closures that impacted over 1.6 billion learners and stretched intermittently from the beginning of 2020 to the end of 2022. The evidence and analysis highlight trends observed across countries and zoom in on the specificities of local experiences, creating a global mosaic of what students, teachers and families experienced when connected technology was elevated as a singular portal to teaching and learning.

Aimed at general and specialist audiences alike, this publication shows how the abrupt and deep changes brought about by the recourse to remote digital learning during the pandemic continue to ripple through the education sector even as schools have fully reopened. It questions whether more and faster integration of technology is desirable for learners, teachers and schools and if ed-tech is, as it is often billed, a key ingredient of educational resilience.

An Ed-Tech Tragedy? posits that new principles are needed to forge more humanistic directions for ed-tech development and use. In-person schooling and teaching should be guaranteed even as technologies improve and connectivity becomes more ubiquitous. Governments need to anchor this guarantee in the legal architecture upholding the right to education, especially for young learners. Moreover, future applications of ed-tech must show greater concern for holistic student well-being. While academic learning is central to education, it is not the only component. Ed-tech needs to support the multiple individual and collective purposes of education, from socio-emotional and personal development, to learning to live together, with the planet, as well as with technology.

In detailing what happened when ed-tech was deployed in response to pandemic school closures, as well as questioning why ed-tech was often elevated as a singular solution, this publication clarifies how the education community can move beyond merely reacting to technological change and instead play a more assertive role steering the digitalization of education towards the more holistic goals of education to shape inclusive, just and sustainable futures.

The future of education needs to be a humanistic one. The lessons extracted from what is premised here as an ed-tech tragedy illuminate the ways technology can better foster education that teaches and revitalizes human values, strengthens human relationships and upholds human rights.…

Ed-tech was supposed to solve a problem but it created other problems.

An Ed-Tech Tragedy? examines the many ways that the hurried embrace of technology solutionism steered responses to a global education challenge directly towards ed-tech. Along the way, the logic of technology solutionism changed understandings of educational problems to be solved. The analysis presented here helps reveal, for example, how technological solutions deployed during school closures took a narrow view of education and focused almost exclusively on furthering the academic progress of students in pared-down curricular subjects. This meant that little attention was paid to other education goals, such as fostering curiosity and inquiry and supporting physical health, mental well-being and social and emotional learning. This analysis also shows how ed-tech, originally cast as a solution to maintain learning continuity in the face of widespread disruptions to schooling, has more recently been positioned as a tool to help reverse learning loss. This ‘loss’, however, grew out of the deficiencies of technology-dependent remote learning to preserve the pace of academic learning that would have been typical without school closures stemming from the pandemic. The problem that ed-tech initially set out to solve morphed from assuring the continuity of learning to remedying lost learning. The way the problem was reframed while maintaining connected technology as the centrepiece of the solution is an example of technology solutionism at work.…

Recognizing the chaotic pivot from in-school learning to technology-facilitated distance learning as having a tragic arc provides a forceful rebuttal to a growing consensus that the education sector somehow ‘advanced’, ‘leapfrogged’, ‘catapulted’ or ‘disrupted’ itself to a better future when it deployed technology on a massive scale as an interim measure to confront a crisis. The evidence overwhelmingly points in the opposite direction: education became less accessible, less effective and less engaging when it pivoted away from physical schools and teachers and towards technology exclusively. ‘Tragedy’ in this sense signals regression – a denigration of the status quo,rather than a desired evolution. The narrative that ed-tech should be or must be a central component of ‘building education back better’ warrants new scrutiny after a careful examination of the experiences during the pandemic.

The invocation of tragedy also facilitates awareness that connected technologies, despite their growing reach, power and potential, remain tools in a repertoire of many others to construct stronger, more agile and more flexible education systems that can respond and adapt to disruption. Other tools include strengthened teacher training and support; enhanced school leadership and pedagogical management of schools; curricular renewal; smaller class sizes; and improved physical resources and infrastructure for schools and classrooms. Crises that necessitate the prolonged closure of schools and demand heavy or total reliance on technology have been exceedingly rare historically. Future crises may present entirely different challenges. The trauma of the pandemic has, in many circles, functioned to elevate technology as an almost singular solution to assure educational resilience by providing flexibility in times of disruption. Investments to protect education wrongly shifted away from people and towards machines, digital connections and platforms. This elevation of the technical over the human is contradictory to education’s aim to further human development and cultivate humanistic values. It is human capacity, rather than technological capacity, that is central to ensuring greater resilience of education systems to withstand shocks and manage crises.

Overall, the pandemic is a case study in how technology in its current iterations is not yet a suitable foundation for actualizing the diverse goals that communities assign to education. Expectations that technology may, in time, help further increase the reach, improve the quality and strengthen the agility of education are valid. For now, though, the experiences since early 2020 have shown it to be an alarmingly brittle solution – one incapable of effectively responding to widespread and extended school shutdowns. For far too many students, it was a solution that either never started in earnest or quickly broke down. The sudden shift to ed-tech also accelerated a concerning transfer of authority away from teachers, schools and communities and towards private, for-profit interests. Additionally, the censorship, data extraction, advertising, top-down control, intimidation and surveillance that so often characterize current models of digital transformation have made education less free and, arguably, less capable of facilitating critiques of and positive changes to the status quo. [emphasis added by DR.]

Countries made massive investments to digitalize education through much of the COVID-19 pandemic. But it remains far from clear whether these investments will improve education over the longer term and make it an engine of just, inclusive and sustainable development, especially when compared with conventional school-based and teacher-facilitated education. The digital transformation of education may yet be a force for beneficial change. But the logic of technological solutionism and its associated business models currently steering this transformation, led largely by the commercial technology entities that are remaking so many aspects of society, tend to treat education and knowledge as private commodities and not as global public goods that provide collective as well as individual benefits.

It is hoped that this analysis and its use of tragedy as a metaphor might moderate the discourse and popular view that the pandemic has ‘unshackled’ education systems and ‘launched’ them into desirable futures characterized by greater technology use. Documenting the severity and scope of the many negative consequences of ed-tech responses during the health crisis inverts the triumphalist narratives that accompany many descriptions of technology deployments to address the educational disruption caused by school closures. A critical examination of the assumptions of technology solutionism and a review of the existing evidence provide a corrective and a counterargument to notions that more, deeper and accelerated use of technology is uniformly positive for education…

Throughout the review that follows, considerable evidence illustrates how the rush to distance and remote learning with ed-tech accelerated the privatization of education in many contexts. While some countries and localities managed a shift to digital learning with limited privatization of the educational experience, a defining characteristic of the technology-centric response to the educational disruptions of the pandemic tended to be the elevation of for-profit, private ed-tech companies. In addition to considering the ways reliance on ed-tech impacted educational inclusion, equity and quality, this publication also explores the complex and often symbiotic links between ed-tech and the privatization of education during the pandemic.The rush to distance and remote learning with ed-tech accelerated the privatization of education.

Most such reports tend to summarize the status quo. This one challenges it. It’s time to take stock before the Ed-tech industry takes control of our most precious asset: our children.

Categories Childhood, Corporate Reform, Curriculum, Data and Data Mining, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Ethics, Failure, For-Profit, Global Education Reform Movement (GERM), Hoax, Inequity, International, Online Learning, Privacy and Privacy Rights, Privatization, Propaganda, Technology

Nikhil Goyal’s Stunning New Book About How Poverty Damages Lives

By dianeravitch
September 13, 2023 //
25

Nikhil Goyal has written an alarming book about the effects of poverty on young people. His book Live to See the Day: Coming of Age in American Poverty documents the lives of three teenagers in Philadelphia, all of whom live in poverty.

The book is an implicit rebuke of the “reformers” who insisted that schools were the root cause of inequality, not poverty. They liked to say, “fix schools, and that will fix poverty.”

Goyal describes the obstacles in these young people’s lives, and it’s clear that the “reformers” had it backwards.

A recent review by Julia Craven in The Washington Post raves about the book.

Each of the three protagonists in sociologist Nikhil Goyal’s new book, “Live to See the Day: Coming of Age in American Poverty,” is navigating a pivotal juncture: adolescence, that unique and universally exhausting stage of human development when one moment can sometimes change the trajectory of life. For Ryan Rivera, that moment is being among a group of preteen boys who set fire to a trash can near their middle school’s atrium, a childish mistake that cast him into the school-to-prison pipeline. Corem Coreano, who came out as queer, and then changed their name and pronouns, ultimately made the difficult choice to leave home because of their mother’s refusal to leave an abusive relationship. And Giancarlos Rodriguez was — puzzlingly — thrown out of Philadelphia’s education system after fighting to protect his and his peers’ future by leading student walkouts to protest school closures and educational budget cuts.

Rooted in almost a decade of reporting, “Live to See the Day” is a sweeping indictment of poverty, America’s educational system, and how comfortably they both interact with the criminal justice system to upend the lives of young people and underprivileged families of color. All three protagonists hail from Kensington, an impoverished neighborhood in North Philadelphia.

According to Goyal, babies born with an address in Kensington aren’t expected to live beyond their 71st birthday — a staggering 17 years less than children born to families in Society Hill, less than four miles away.

A chunk of the book is spent world-building so readers can grasp the muddy terrain these children navigate, and Goyal does so by layering social systems atop one another so readers can draw connections. As Goyal explains it, underfunded public schools are at the heart of the issue. Schools are governed by racist educational policies that push students into the criminal system through the use of metal detectors, zero-tolerance rules and temperamental resource officers. Children leave the schoolyard and return home to families drowning because of crippling poverty, food insecurity, chronic joblessness, inequitable access to physical and mental health care, domestic violence, evictions, and addiction. In their social interactions, anything perceived as “soft” — whether it be snitching or queerness — doesn’t align with survival.

Goyal, who is on the staff of Senator Bernie Sanders, makes clear why programs like No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top were destined to fail. They ignored the conditions in which young people live. Evaluating their teachers by test scores, firing them, closing their schools, turning their schools over to entrepreneurs and corporate chains do nothing to change their lives.

Categories Corporate Reform, Inequity, Injustice, Philadelphia, Poverty, Students
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