Steven Singer writes that Linda Darling-Hammond was one of his heroes. But after reading the new report from the Learning Policy Institute, with its benign embrace of choice, he is disappointed.
Perhaps what he sees is the difference between Linda writing in her own voice and Linda writing as part of a team. I wonder who wrote the first draft.
Congratulations to public school advocates in Indianapolis, who were vastly outspent by the “School Choice Trust” (Mind Trust and Stand for Children), yet still managed to win two out of three seats on the school board!
The Indianapolis story is here.
Vocal critics of the Indianapolis Public Schools administration looked poised to unseat two incumbents in Tuesday’s school board election. The results signal opposition to sweeping moves that have reshaped the district, such as high school closings and partnerships with charter school operators.
The race for the at-large seat remained close as the final votes were tallied Wednesday night, with retired IPS teacher Susan Collins taking 43.7 percent of votes over incumbent Mary Ann Sullivan, a former board president. Collins led by about 600 votes — Sullivan held 42.4 percent of the vote, and Joanna Krumel, another challenger, had about 14 percent.
Taria Slack, a federal worker, defeated incumbent Dorene Rodriguez Hoops with 59 percent of the vote to represent the northwest side of the district.
The third seat was won by a proponent of school choice, a policy usually associated with conservatives and opponents of public education.
Bill Lee, the newly elected Republican Governor of Tennessee, appears to be bad news for public schools.
“A product of public schools who chose a mix of public, private, and homeschooling for his own kids, Lee also talked about giving parents more choices for their children. He bolstered that talk — and raised eyebrows among traditional public education diehards — with his pick of Tony Niknejad as policy director for his campaign. Niknejad is the former state director of the American Federation for Children, a pro-school voucher group once chaired by former U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.
“Still, Lee offered few outright promises or details on such policies during his months of campaigning.”
I hope I’m wrong.
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.’”
Sue Legg was assessment and evaluation contractor for the Fl. DOE for twenty years while on the faculty at the University of Florida. She recently stepped down as Education Director of the Florida League of Women Voters.
This is the first of a series on the effects of school choice, which she wrote at my request.
Florida Twenty Years Later: Undermining Public Schools
Florida has a long track record in school privatization.
Consequently, I recently had the sobering charge to help Louisville citizens understand what lies ahead if their new charter school enabling law is funded. Florida has 655 charters enrolling nearly 300,000 students, the third largest number in the U.S., and it also spends over a billion dollars per year in tax credit scholarships to 2800 private schools. What does Florida have to show for it?
Privatizing schools was sold to the public as a money saving policy. Education, after all, is the second largest Florida state budget item.
Competition from the private sector, it was argued, would increase quality and save money. State assessment scores would grade students, schools and teachers to assure the public that the ever-increasing education standards were met. This competition myth imploded. Education became a battleground over funding, support for teachers, and the impact of parental choice on neighborhoods.
Twenty years later, Florida schools are nearing a fiscal and social crisis. Not only did the legislature cut funding in 2008, it reallocated money to charter and private schools and put a cap on local property tax revenue for public schools.
Student enrollment grew, and the Hispanic population doubled.
A forest of temporary buildings sprouted on playgrounds to add classrooms.
In my district alone, $168 million has been lost in facility funding. Some of our schools have buckets in classrooms to catch the rainfall and use sandbags to block water from entering hallways. Others are so crowded that lunch begins at 9:30 a.m. Many districts are asking for increases in local sales and property taxes to support schools; others already have. Opponents, however, want to prevent communities from increasing taxes.
Building maintenance is only part of the problem facing Florida’s schools. Its per student funding to support instruction is among the lowest in the nation. Its teacher attrition rate is high. The PTA reports that there were 1482 teaching positions still vacant in January 2018. Two thirds of teachers who leave are for reasons other than retirement. One clue is that the NEA ranks Florida 46th in average teacher salary. As a result, Florida now ranks first in the nation (25%) in inexperienced teachers.
Teaching and learning also have changed in many ways. ‘Test Prep’ begins in February for April state assessments. The districts’ versions of choice include magnet schools and student placement based on test scores within and across schools. The increasing lament is that there are ‘schools within schools’ where some students have access to high quality programs and teachers and others do not.
Choice fragments neighborhoods.
Think, for example, of the charter school in south Florida that opened across the street from an excellent public school, thus reducing its enrollment and funding but not its overhead expenses. An ‘A’ school became a ‘C’ school. Schools in south Pinellas County declined and were labeled ‘Failure Factories’ drawing national attention.
What changed? The choice movement adopted a ‘separate but equal’ philosophy undermining the integration reform from the 1970s through the 90s. Charter and private schools siphoned off the higher achieving students. Other parents who could, moved away leaving under enrolled schools with insufficient funds to support needed equity programs for children in poverty.
Florida educators and parents are fighting back. Lawsuits reflect the issues: vouchers, school funding, tax credit scholarships, invalid teacher evaluation system, local district control over school funding and charter authorization, ‘union busting’, merit pay, third grade retention, students with disabilities, state take-over of local schools, teacher certification, and a proposed separate educational system for charters.
Vouchers are a zombie idea. They don’t help poor kids. The kids who use them fall farther behind in school.
Voters have turned them down again and again, as happened yesterday in Arizona.
Laurie Roberts of the Arizona Republic tells the story here about how vouchers became roadkill at the ballot box.
“Gov. Doug Ducey may have gotten a second term but he also took a powerful punch to the gut as his plan for a massive expansion of school vouchers was killed.
“Arizona voters didn’t just defeat Proposition 305. They stoned the thing, then they tossed it into the street and ran over it.
“Then they backed up and ran over it again.
“Voters defeated Ducey’s voucher plan by more than 2-1.
“Ouch.”
She goes on to warn that the pro-voucher billionaires are not finished. They are not swayed by the popular vote. They will be back.
During this past two decades of “reform,” there has been a concerted effort to minimize or eliminate democratic control of public schools. Egged on by No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, states and districts initiated state takeovers of entire school districts, which typically failed, and mayoral control, which substituted the singular judgment of the mayor for elected school boards. John Chubb and Terry Moe wrote a book in 1990, “Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools,” in which they argued that school choice was a panacea, and that democracy was the most essential obstacle to achieving that nirvana.
In this article, posted at Valerie Strauss’s “Answer Sheet,” Carol Burris and I argue that governance matters, and that democratic governance is a fundamental tenet of public education.
We have learned from the repeated errors of state takeovers and mayoral control, as well as charter school failures and voucher scams, that democratic accountability is essential to public education. The schools belong to the public, and they must not be handed off to grifters, celebrities, religious groups, or corporate charter chains.
Governance matters.
This is our article:
The National Education Policy Center interviewed Bruce Baker about his review of a much-ballyhooed study of the impact of market forces in the New Orleans schools.
The Education Research Alliance at Tulane University released a study last July declaring that the privatization of almost every school in New Orleans was a great success. That very day, Betsy DeVos gave $10 Million to ERA to become a federally-funded National Center on School Choice. The report was written by Douglas Harris and Matthew Larsen.
Bruce Baker, a researcher at Rutgers University, has studied charter schools, school funding and equity for years. He was commissioned by NPE to review the ERA study.
His conclusion: Harris and Larsen had minimized the importance of demographic changes following the hurricane and the enormous influx of new funding. These changes alone, he said, could have accounted for the effects in New Orleans documented by the ERA.
During her confirmation hearings, Betsy DeVos pledged not to make political contributions while she was Secretary of Education.
But, knowing her penchant for parsing words, we may now assume that she was not covering the political donations of her family, which continue.
This latest review of political donations by Ulrich Boser and Perpetual Baffour of the Center for American Progress shows that the DeVos family gave $2 Million to far-right candidates.
My hunch is that they gave far more than $2 million, through Dark Money PACs that do not disclose the names of their donors.
The report finds:
“Even by the loose standards of U.S. campaign finance laws—and President Donald Trump’s blatant corruption—the donations by the family members of a Cabinet official have been brazen. In February 2018, Richard DeVos, Secretary DeVos’ father-in-law, gave $1 million to the Freedom Partners Action Fund—a political action fund that has long been associated with far-right causes. Over the past year, the DeVos family has also given $350,000 to the Republican Congressional Leadership Fund and another $400,000 to the Republican National Committee.
“The DeVoses have also donated to specific candidates for federal and state office. Wisconsin’s far-right firebrand, Gov. Scott Walker (R), for example, has received more than $635,000 over the past decade from the DeVos family—including $30,000 in 2018. Bill Schuette, Michigan’s Republican attorney general who is running for governor, received almost $40,000 over the past year.
“But it seems that the state of Arizona is of particular interest to the DeVos family’s political agenda. Rep. Martha McSally (R), who is in a tight race for a U.S. Senate seat, landed $54,000 in contributions from the family this cycle—more than any other U.S. Senate candidate received from the DeVoses. Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey (R) has likewise received more in campaign contributions from the DeVos family than any gubernatorial candidate across the country this election cycle, raking in $50,500 in donations.”
In Wisconsin, a vote for Scott Walker is a vote for Betsy DeVos.
In Michigan, a vote for Bill Schuette is a vote for Betsy DeVos.
In Arizona, a vote for Martha McSally is a vote for Betsy DeVos.
A vote for these candidates is a vote for charter schools and vouchers.
A vote for these candidates is a vote to privatize public schools.
Amy Lueck writes in this article about the role of the high school in shaping American society and building a sense of community, an understanding that these children are OUR children.
She begins:
In 2016, shortly after she was appointed to the position, U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos declared American public schools a “dead end.” Instead, DeVos advocates for “school choice,” code for charter schools, vouchers, and other privatization efforts.
Families who have watched their local schools struggle might agree with DeVos, but her characterization is still troubling. It reflects a distrust of education as a communal goal, not just an individual one. That’s a big change from the objective of American public schools during their first two centuries. Far from being a “dead end,” for a long time the public school—particularly the public high school—served an important civic purpose: not only as an academic training ground, but also as a center for community and activity in American cities.
From curricular offerings to extracurricular activities, shared milestones to cultural traditions, high schools have been remarkably consistent across the country and even across generations. Many Americans can remember the awkward school dances that memorialized the best (and worst) music of the day. Or bumping past different teenage archetypes on their way to classes. Or the pep fests and rallies they may have loved, or loved to hate. Football games that captured the attention of entire towns.
Public schools have also perpetuated racial and economic inequity. But the high school still galvanized a shared, American society. It helped people aspire toward greater equality together, and it used education to bring together diverse interests and people to forge social bonds of support. That effort shaped the American city of the 19th and early-20th centuries. High schools can continue to do this, so long as they can resist being dismantled.
She traces the history of the high school, and the departure of affluent white families for the suburbs, which has affected desegregation and funding.
She concludes:
As Americans face a new era of educational reform and broad societal change, they might do well to heed a lesson from the first two centuries of public education: As an institution, the fate of the high school cannot be detached from the community of which it is a part. Like all educational institutions, it is inextricably wrapped up with the goals and values of the town, city, and nation in which it is located, reflecting and perpetuating them.
Those values include Americans’ attitude to the very schools that would pass them along, too. If, as a nation, we decide that the public schools are a “dead end” for students, we should not be surprised if they become so—and along with them, the cities, towns, and communities they once built together.
Yes, we are trying to hold on to something important: community, democracy, the common good. Are we prepared to junk them in exchange for “choice?”
Diane Ravitch's blog 