Tomorrow the US Senate will vote on the appointment of John King as Secretary of Education. He failed as the Commissioner of Education in Néw York. His rapid adoption of Common Core and teacher evaluation based on test scores led to a massive parent opt out. He battled parents to impose his agenda. He is no different from Arne Duncan.
The Network for Public Education urges you to contact your senators and be heard.
The Network for Public Education is now legally constituted as two organizations.
The Network is a c(3), which means it is a charitable organization. Any donations are tax-deductible. Carol Burris is the executive director. It published the 50-state report judging states by their support for children, teachers, and public schools.
C3 Donation link:
http://networkforpubliceducation.org/about-npe/donate/
Or:
The Network for Public Education
PO BOX 150266
Kew Gardens, NY 11415-0266
The other organization is the NPE Action Fund. It is political. It endorses candidates and lobbies for legislative changes. Donations are not tax-deductible. It is recognized by the IRS as a c(4). Robin Hiller is the executive director.
Here is the snail mail address for the c(4):
NPE Action
P.O. Box 44200
Tucson, AZ 85733
Here is the donation page link:
http://npeaction.org/2016/02/19/donate/
As Julian Vasquez Heilig notes in his new article in The Nation, public policy groups have recently gotten into the business of ranking states by criteria that reflect their own political or ideological biases.
Thus, the far-right ALEC rates states by their willingness to privatize public schools and to lower standards for teachers, because ALEC believes in privatization and the elimination of government regulations. StudentsFirst put out a state report card that ranked states by similar criteria, the ones that reflected Michelle Rhee’s policy preferences: reducing the rights and status of teachers, promoting charters and vouchers, and–no surprise–Louisiana and Florida came out as best in the nation, although these states are usually noted for their low quality of education. The Brookings Institution has recently ranked districts by their embrace of school choice, not surprising because the director of research for the George W. Bush administration–Grover Whitehurst–created the report card. The conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute and the journal Education Next have their report cards, too, giving plaudits to states that prioritize privatization and rigorous tests.
Heilig, who is a member of the board of directors of NPE, contrasted these report cards–all emanating from rightwing sources–with the NPE 50-state (plus DC) report card:
NPE’s report card evaluates all 50 states and the District of Columbia according to six research-based criteria: support of high-stakes testing, professionalization of teaching, resistance to privatization, equity in school finance, spending taxpayer resources wisely and student chance for success.
The bad news is that most states are not doing very well. NPE were tough graders as no state received more than a “C”. However, the new NPE report card isn’t distracting us with a pleasing facade covering up a lack of what’s important.
Understanding that the closing of the achievement gap in our nation considerably slowed during the No Child Left Behind era of testing and accountability, NPE did not prioritize performance on standardized exams for students or high-stakes testing evaluating teacher performance.
Contrary to previous report cards, NPE agreed with the American Educational Research Association and rewarded states with demanding certification requirements, lower attrition, higher pay, and the support of teachers with certification and experience.
Instead of an emphasis on top-down, private control, and privatization, NPE’s report card rewarded states that protect neighborhood community schools and disallow the use of public money for private and religious schools.
NPE’s report also gave “high grades to states that implemented the most adequate and equitable funding” across communities. Equitable funding in the Student First report cards, in contrast, means that charter schools received funding priority—including resources for facilities that corporations or individuals would ultimately own even though the property was purchased by the public (as is the case in Arizona).
NPE’s report card prioritized investments in community-based solutions, including Pre-K and class size reduction—reforms that make the gold standard in the research literature in terms of student success.
The NPE report card also included measures of child poverty and school segregation across states—“chance for success” metrics that neither ALEC nor Students First included in recent report cards.
– See more at: http://www.progressive.org/pss/most-state-education-report-cards-miss-critical-ingredients#sthash.CwetviuY.dpuf
If you open this link, you can see every state’s report card. This shows which states value their public schools. It shows which states resist privatization, which states finance their public schools adequately and equitably, which states encourage teacher professionalism, which states promote opportunity for all students.
Read about your state. It is on one page. Share it with your elected officials and school leaders.
The most important goal of the NPE report is to get the public and policymakers to understand what matters most in improving schools.
Our nation has pursued failed market-based policies for 15 years. It is time to do what works, based on evidence and experience.
I am re-posting this article because I neglected to insert the correct link on the first go-round.
It is an excellent job of reporting by Kristina Rizga, who has been writing about education for several years and spent four years embedded in a high school in San Francisco, which became an excellent book titled “Mission High.”
The purpose of the NPE report card is to change the conversation about how to rate schools. The important point is to hold states and districts accountable for making sure schools have the resources they need to be successful with their students. If they underfund the schools, if they focus too much on high-stakes testing, if they divert precious resources to privatization via charters and vouchers, they are not valuing public education.
And that is the point: Which states value public education? Which have resisted the fads and terrible policies pushed by the federal government?
The NPE report stands in sharp contrast to reports by ALEC, StudentsFirst, and the recent Brookings report giving stars to states that embrace privatization. We value public education. We think it is a pillar of our democracy. We expect states to prioritize public education, not to cut the budget of public schools or lower their standards for teachers and treat them poorly.
As Carol Burris and I were on the train to Washington, DC, to release the NPE report card, we had a phone conversation with Kristina Rizga of Mother Jones. Here is the article that resulted.
Rizga is no ordinary journalist. She recently published an excellent book called “Mission High,” about the four years she spent embedded at a so-called “failing school” in California, where extraordinary teachers and an excellent principal were performing daily miracles for kids from many countries. She knows schools.
Dear Friends,
This year’s Network for Public Education Conference in Raleigh, North Carolina, on April 16-17 will be a unique opportunity to show a strong and united front in the battle to promote and defend our public schools.
We’ll hear from exciting keynote speakers such as NPE Founder Diane Ravitch, the Rev. William Barber, and Bob Herbert. Workshops will be run by activists doing the work as we address our theme: And Justice for All: Strengthening Public Education for Each Child.
If you have not registered, please do so now while our Early Bird special is still on. Register here.
Do you need financial help in order to attend? Apply for our limited scholarships here.
If you cannot attend make a tax deductible donation to our scholarship fund here. Just scroll down to sponsor an advocate.
Do you want to present a workshop? We would love to hear your idea. To apply to present go here.
Diane needs you. Public Education needs you. And most important of all, our students need you.
Visit our new website and join our new Facebook page. Make a tax deductible donation. Get a friend to join NPE. We have exciting plans for 2016 as we continue to fight for public education. But we cannot succeed without your help.
Thanks for all you do and I hope to see you in Raleigh!
Carol
This article by Andrew Ujifusa in Education Week is a good summary of where the opt out movement stands today. In addition, it describes the Network for Public Education’s 50-state report card, which will be released in D.C. on February 2 at the National Press Club at 1:30 pm. If you are in the area, plan to attend and learn which states support and value public education.
Ujifusa writes:
Activists driving the resistance to state exams are attempting to build on their state-level momentum over the past year, while also venturing into a new political landscape that will test whether the energy behind their initial victories will last.
And they say they’re forging ahead with their plans regardless of how much support they get from traditional education advocacy groups, including teachers’ unions.
Several leaders within the so-called testing opt-out movement, which has gained considerable traction in New York and also found a foothold in states like Colorado and Connecticut, say they will continue to push parents to refuse to allow their children to take standardized exams, particularly state tests, for as long as it’s necessary.
They’ll stop, they say, when states adopt accountability policies that prevent tests from being used to rank, sort, and impose what opponents consider unfair consequences on students, teachers, and schools.
Some groups also are looking to extend their influence beyond testing fights to push in states for higher and more equitable levels of school funding and changes to K-12 governance to increase what they say is more local and more democratic control.
The Chicago Sun-Times published an article with astonishing news. The Chicago Teachers Union gives money to groups that support public education, including the Network for Public Education.
NPE has used the contribution from CTU to give scholarships to parents, students, and educators to attend our annual national conferences, as well as to fund the development of a state-by-state report card that will be released on February 10, evaluating the states by their support for their public schools.
I pointed out to the reporter that CTU’s support for allies of public education must be seen in the context of billionaires who allot hundreds of millions of dollars every single year to privatize public education. It is not a fair fight, to be sure.
I wish the teachers’ unions and other civic-minded groups had many millions more to invest in pushing back against privatization, union busting, and high-stakes testing and fighting for early childhood education, equitable funding, smaller classes, and well-prepared teachers.
In 2010, Republicans swept control of the Legislature in North Carolina for the first time in a century. Two years later, a Republican governor was elected. Since then, the Republicans have sought to shred any safety net for anyone who needed it.
In this post, Chris Fitzsimon details the determined and successful efforts of the Republican majority to destroy public education and every other public institution in the state, turning the clock back many decades.
He writes:
With all three branches of government securely under their control, the ideological shift left few areas of state policy untouched. People who were already struggling have been hurt the most — low-wage workers, single mothers, people of color and immigrants. Vital life supports, such as child care subsidies, pre-K programs, unemployment insurance and food stamps, have been slashed.
And there’s been more than a loss of basic benefits. People living on the margins have been demonized in the last five years too, blamed for their struggles, penalized for their inability to find jobs that don’t exist, and cruelly stereotyped for political gain. The folks now in charge of Raleigh haven’t just made government smaller, they have also made it meaner.
Most of the money they saved from slashing safety net programs hasn’t been reinvested in education or job training or infrastructure. Instead, even as tax revenue has risen as the state recovers from the Great Recession, the savings have been given to corporations and the wealthy in a series of massive tax breaks.
Thanks to the anemic budgets of the last five years, North Carolina now spends almost 6 percent less on state services than in 2008 in inflation-adjusted dollars.
Now the folks in charge are pushing to lock in the woeful recession-era level of public investment by adding arbitrary spending limits to the state constitution in the misnamed Taxpayer Bill of Rights. In Colorado, the only state that has adopted it, it has been a disaster.
Nowhere have the cuts hit harder than in public schools, where rankings in teacher pay and per-pupil funding have spiraled toward the bottom of the 50 states.
Once recognized across the country for its commitment to public education, North Carolina now is making headlines for how much of it is being dismantled, with teachers fleeing to other states because of low salaries and the culture of animosity and disrespect from state leaders.
The meanness is evident here too. The nationally recognized Teaching Fellows program has been abolished, even as the state struggles to recruit bright students into the profession, merely because of its ties to prominent Democrats like former Gov. Jim Hunt.
Low-income kids and their families are the biggest losers in the attacks on public schools, but there are winners in the ideological assault: new for-profit companies that run charter schools, private and religious academies that now receive taxpayer funding and sketchy online institutions that are raking in state dollars.
The new ruling class in Raleigh, while professing a commitment to reduce the scope of government, increased its role in people’s personal lives and health care decisions, interfered with local issues in communities across the state, and pushed to resume executions even as two men were freed from prison, one from death row, after serving for more than 30 years for a murder they did not commit.
They made it harder for some people to vote but easier for many people to get a gun and take it into more places — bars, restaurants, parks and playgrounds. They have systematically rolled back important environmental protections, undeterred by the massive coal ash spill into the Dan River in 2014, the worst environmental disaster in the state’s history.
The radical transformation of North Carolina has prompted a passionate response in protest, as thousands have marched in Raleigh and across the state in the NAACP-led Moral Monday movement.
For all these reasons, the Network for Public Education will hold its third annual conference in Raleigh on April 16-17. Our keynote speakers include the leader of the Moral Mondays movement, Rev. Dr. William Barber. There is some scholarship money available for teachers and student activists.
Join us to speak out against the destruction of public education and the denial of basic human rights, in North Carolina and across the nation.
Diane Ravitch's blog 