Archives for category: School Choice
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Renegade Teacher: Does Metro Detroit Care About Segregated Schools?

By dianeravitch
January 17, 2018 //
22

A new blogger, a teacher in Detroit who has taught in both charter and public schools, ponders here why it is so hard to desegregate the public schools in Detroit.

Detroit has lots of segregated schools and lots of choice.

He notes:

“Thus, a problem with school of choice is that many White parents simply remove their children from schools with increasingly Black student populations, either taking them to Whiter public school districts Whiter charter schools, or Whiter private schools. Regardless if this is the intention, the result is the same: students are losing out on the valuable opportunity to learn next to students that don’t look like them.”

Categories Detroit, School Choice, Segregation , Racial Isolation and Integration

North Carolina: How a Once Great State Destroyed Its Public Schools

By dianeravitch
January 8, 2018 //
11

This Report was written by Kris Nordstrom, who works for the North Carolina Justice Center. He previously was a research analyst for the North Carolina General Assembly. The report tells the story of a state that was once the envy of the South for its education policies, but is now in rapid decline, copying failed policies from other states,

Home

PRESS RELEASE and SUMMARY

By Kris Nordstrom
Contracting Analyst, Education & Law Project

North Carolina was once viewed as the shining light for progressive education policy in the South. State leaders—often with the support of the business community—were able to develop bipartisan support for public schools, and implement popular, effective programs. North Carolina was among the first states to explicitly monitor the performance of student subgroups in an effort to address racial achievement gaps. The state made great strides to professionalizing the teaching force, bringing the state’s average teacher salary nearly up to the national average even as the state was forced to hire many novice teachers to keep pace with enrollment increases. In addition, North Carolina focused on developing and retaining its teaching force by investing in teacher scholarship programs and mentoring programs for beginning teachers.

North Carolina innovated at all ends of the education spectrum. The state was one of the first in the nation to create a statewide pre-kindergarten program with rigorous quality standards. At the secondary level, North Carolina was at the forefront of dual credit programs for high school students, and the Learn & Earn model (now known as Cooperative Innovative High Schools) became a national model, allowing students to graduate with both a high school diploma and an associate’s degree in five years. Students graduating from North Carolina public schools could enroll in the state’s admired, low-cost community college system or its strong university system, most notably UNC Chapel Hill. For much of the 1990s through early 2000s, policymakers in other states often looked to North Carolina’s public schools as an example of sound, thoughtful policy aiming to broadly uplift student performance.

Unfortunately, over the past seven years, North Carolina has lost its reputation for educational excellence. Since the Republican takeover of the General Assembly following the 2010 election, the state has become more infamous for bitter partisanship and divisiveness, as reflected in education policies. Lawmakers have passed a number of controversial, partisan measures, rapidly expanding school choice, cutting school resources, and eliminating job protections for teachers.

Less discussed, however, has been degradation in the quality of North Carolina’s education policies. General Assembly leadership has focused on replicating a number of education initiatives from other states, most lacking any research-based evidence of delivering successful results to students. The General Assembly has compounded the problems though by consistently delivering exceptionally poorly-crafted versions of these initiatives.

Sadly, these controversial, poorly-executed efforts have failed to deliver positive results for North Carolina’s students. Performance in our schools has suffered, particularly for the state’s low-income and minority children.

So how did we get here? How is it affecting our students?

Lack of transparency leads to poor legislation

The past seven years of education policy have been dominated by a series of not just bad policies, but bad policies that are incredibly poorly crafted. This report provides a review of the major education initiatives of this seven-year period. In every case, the major initiatives are both:

Based on very questionable evidence; and
Crafted haphazardly, ignoring best practices or lessons learned from other states.
These problems almost certainly stem from the General Assembly’s approach to policymaking. Over the past seven years, almost all major education initiatives were moved through the legislature in a way to avoid debate and outside input. At the same time, the General Assembly has abandoned its oversight responsibilities and avoided public input from education stakeholders. The net result has been stagnant student performance, and increased achievement gaps for minority and low-income students.

One commonality of nearly all of the initiatives highlighted in this report is that they were folded into omnibus budget bills, rather than moved through a deliberative committee process. Including major initiatives in the budget, rather than as stand-alone bills, is problematic for three reasons:

Stand-alone bills are required to be debated in at least one committee prior to being heard on the floor. Committee hearings allow public debate and bill modifications from General Assembly members with subject-area knowledge, and can permit public input from stakeholders and other outside experts.
Stand-alone bills require majority of support to become law. While the budget bill also requires majority support to become law, there is great pressure on members to vote for a budget bill, particularly one crafted by their own party. Budget bills are filled with hundreds of policy provisions. As a result, members might vote for controversial programs that are incorporated into the budget that they would not support if presented as a standalone vote.

Budget bills are very large, and members are often provided limited time to review the lengthy documents. For example, the 2017 budget bill was made public just before midnight on June 19 and presented on the Senate floor for debate and vote by 4 PM on June 20. As a result, members are unable to adequately review programs and craft amendments that could improve program delivery.
Compounding matters, the General Assembly has effectively dismantled the Joint Legislative Education Oversight Committee (Ed Oversight), while joint meetings of the House and Senate Education Appropriation subcommittees (Ed Appropriations) are becoming increasingly rare. In the past, these two committees were integral to the creation and oversight of new initiatives.

From its formation in 1990 through 2015, Ed Oversight regularly met during the legislative interim to recommend ways to improve education in the state. However, the committee met just once in the 2015-16 interim, and not at all during the 2016-17 interim.

Similarly, Ed Appropriations—which is responsible for crafting the state budget for public schools, the community college system, and state universities—is meeting less often. Historically, Ed Appropriations meetings during long sessions have been the venue through which General Assembly members undertake detailed, line-item reviews of each state agency’s budget.

2017 marked the first time in known history that Ed Appropriations meetings featured zero in-depth presentations of K-12 funding issues. The General Assembly’s education leaders stood out for their lack of effort. Every other budget subcommittee received detailed presentations covering all, or nearly all, agency budgets.

North Carolina’s teachers, Department of Public Instruction employees, and the academic community are an incredibly valuable resource that should be drawn upon to strengthen our state educational policy. Instead, these voices have increasingly been ignored. As shown below, the net result has been a series of poorly-crafted policies that are harming North Carolina’s children.​

Categories ALEC, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Failure, Hoax, North Carolina, School Choice

Kevin Welner and William Mathis: School Choice Promotes Segregation, Which is Bad for Our Society

By dianeravitch
January 6, 2018 //
29

 

In an important article, Kevin Welner and William Mathis of the National Education Policy Center argue that school choice is not “the civil rights issue of our time,” as Betsy DeVos and Trump (and before them, Arne Duncan) maintain.

School choice was devised by southern segregationists to fight the Brown decision of 1954, and school choice today is promoting racial and economic segregation.

Segregation is bad for students and for our society.

As they show, Jeanne Allen and other charter and voucher zealots attacked not only Randi Weingarten for accurately describing the history of school choice, they even attacked the NAACP for calling for a moratorium on new charters.

Choice is a consumer good but not a social good.

They write:

”When schools shift from democratically run to privately run institutions, their very purpose itself can shift toward merely serving the private interests of customer parents. In that context, success is often realized by wooing more students who are lower-cost and higher-achieving.

“Contrast this with the purposes of education memorialized in states’ constitutional provisions. To advance the common good, Massachusetts speaks to wisdom, knowledge and virtue among all groups of people. New Hampshire says that knowledge and learning must be spread throughout the various parts of the land. Vermont speaks of expanding virtue and preventing vice. The private benefits of an education received by individual children are valuable, but so are the societal benefits of a thoughtful, informed and united popu-lace.

“The genius of the American educational system is not just in what it gives to the individual. It is in what it provides to society as a whole. We face the great challenge of providing equal opportunities and common values to an increasingly fragmented society. Can we sustain and transmit this democratic covenant of rights and responsibilities to a new generation? Can we do this in a society with increasing levels of privately run choice schools?”

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Democracy, Education Industry, Privatization, School Choice, Segregation , Racial Isolation and Integration, Vouchers

Most Educators, including Conservatives, Oppose School Choice

By dianeravitch
December 26, 2017 //
12

[A NOTE TO READERS:I am posting on a limited schedule for the next week.]

A poll conducted by Education Week found that most educators—including those who voted for Trump—oppose school choice.

Opposition to vouchers is stronger than to charters, but both are opposed.

“Overall, however, charters were viewed almost as negatively as private school vouchers by the educators who participated in the October survey of 1,122 educators conducted by the Education Week Research Center.

“A plurality of those surveyed—45 percent—“fully oppose” charter schools, while another 26 percent “somewhat oppose” them. And 58 percent don’t support using government funds to help students cover the cost of private school, while 19 percent said they “somewhat oppose” vouchers. Meanwhile, about half oppose or “somewhat oppose” tax-credit scholarships, which give individuals and corporations a tax break for donating to scholarship-granting organizations.”

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, Opinion Polling, Privatization, School Choice

How the Tax Bill Helps the Student Loan Industry

By dianeravitch
December 23, 2017 //
14

All sorts of bad things are buried in the new tax law. Here’s one: a huge payday for the student loan industry, as described in an Alternet post by Mary Ann Schlegel Ruegger.

“The GOP tax bill’s inclusion of 529 plans for K-12 private tuition has been widely criticized as yet one more provision that aids the wealthy. That’s because only wealthy families have enough money on hand to sock away $10,000 a year toward each child’s K-12 private school tuition. There’s been little mention of what these plans could mean for middle and lower-income families. By discouraging them from using 529 accounts for long-term college savings, these families are being set up for a future of indebtedness.

“Here’s the problem. These savings accounts were meant to offer tax advantages to families in order to help them to put money away for college. Expanding the use of 529 accounts to cover K-12 expenses encourages families to spend money on private schools now. When it’s time for those families to pay for college, their 529s or other college savings will be less— or nonexistent. Worse, GOP policy makers are providing just the “nudge” to convince these families to enroll in or justify staying in private schools they really can’t afford (even with vouchers), and make up the gap with private loans. The 529 provision in the tax bill is more than anything else a boon to the growing K-12 private school loan industry.

“Unlike higher education, where a student borrower’s financial relationship with colleges and lenders is well defined by federal and state laws, K-12 private education is a largely unprotected landscape.

“Take Indiana, for instance, home of the largest private school voucher program in the nation. Despite paying out $146 million last year in publicly funded tuition vouchers for private schools, the Indiana Department of Education doesn’t even have the right to see the enrollment contracts or student handbooks that govern the payment policies on that money, let alone provide any consumer protections to students who attend those schools. Unlike colleges, private schools at the K-12 level are almost completely free to impose whatever enrollment and financial policies they please. Lenders for K-12 also face far fewer restrictions than lenders for higher education.”

Read on, there is more, and you will learn who benefits.

Categories Hoax, School Choice, Student Financial Aid and Student Debt

ProPublica: Have Alternative Schools Become Dumping Grounds for Difficult Students?

By dianeravitch
December 19, 2017 //
13

In an article by veteran journalist Heather Vogell, ProPublica asks hard questions about alternative schools.

The word “alternative” implies a choice. But in an era when the freedom to pick your school is trumpeted by advocates and politicians, students don’t choose the alternative schools to which districts send them for breaking the rules: They’re sentenced to them. Of 39 state education departments that responded to a ProPublica survey last year, 29, or about three-quarters, said school districts could transfer students involuntarily to alternative programs for disciplinary reasons…

Thousands of students are involuntarily reassigned to these schools each year, often for a seemingly minor offense, and never get back on track, a ProPublica investigation has found. Alternative schools are often located in crumbling buildings or trailers, with classes taught largely by computers and little in the way of counseling services or extracurricular activities.

The forced placements have persisted even though the Obama administration in 2014 told schools they should suspend, expel or transfer students to alternative schools only as a last resort — and warned them that they risked a federal civil rights investigation if their disciplinary actions reflected discrimination based on race. Federal data shows that black and Hispanic students are often punished more than white students for similar violations.

Moreover, despite legal protections afforded students with disabilities, a disproportionate number of those exiled in some districts have special education plans…

Now, the Trump administration is being pressed to view such removals more favorably. In November, a group of teachers and conservative education advocates met with aides to Education Secretary Betsy DeVos to express concerns about the 2014 guidance. The group said the Obama-era approach made schools less safe, allowing disruptive students to hijack classrooms.

That meeting has raised fears among civil rights advocates that the Trump administration will rescind the guidance, prompting schools to increase the number of children excluded from regular classrooms. “We’re deeply concerned this administration is not committed to protecting the civil rights of students,” says Elizabeth Olsson, senior policy associate for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. She cited reports that DeVos may scrap a rule aimed at preventing schools from unnecessarily placing minority students in special education.

A federal education spokesman on Nov. 29 declined to comment on the issue.

To be sure, many students are sent to alternative schools for major offenses involving drugs, alcohol, weapons or violence. But others are forced to go for reasons that include rudeness, using their cellphones at inappropriate times, or — in about half of the states ProPublica surveyed — nondisciplinary problems such as bad grades. In states like Florida, students who fall academically have been pushed to transfer to alternative schools as a way to game the state’s accountability system. Pennsylvania law lets school officials relegate students to that state’s Alternative Education for Disruptive Youth program for showing “disregard for school authority.” In Aiken, about 40 percent of transfers in 2014-2015, the year Logan was reassigned, were for lesser offenses, including 13 for using profanity, 27 for truancy, 28 for not following an adult’s instructions and 18 for showing disrespect.

Categories Discipline and Suspensions, School Choice, Special Education

Christine Langhoff: Boston Parents Mobilize to Fight Stealth Charters and Vouchers

By dianeravitch
December 16, 2017 //
3

Retired teacher Christine Langhoff reports that Boston parents are organizing to fight the new assault on public schools.”Unified enrollment” and the Gates Compact are both intended to confuse parents and put charter schools on an equal footing.

She writes:


Parents called a meeting on Sunday afternoon, organized on FaceBook, and with a few hours’ notice, some 150 people were in attendance. A previously scheduled School Committee hearing strected to 7 hours on Wednesday, as an overfilled meeting room spilled out into adjacent corridors with parents and teachers (many who are also parents) giving voice to their anger. The various excuses coming from the mayor and the superintendent’s offices have pacified no one.

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Here’s a parent’s report: https://schoolyardnews.com/parents-say-no-to-new-start-times-at-marathon-school-committee-meeting-e9489b794c94

Behind all of this is the Gates-funded Boston Compact, which seeks Unified Enrollment that would put charter and Catholic schools on the form parents must use for enrollment in public schools, and seems to be a piece of the transportation issue given as a rationale for all these schedule changes.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ODfIL1gGu8DiHan87MPE2azE6IM3ynSN/view

Thomas Birmingham is credited in the lore of ed reform as the legislator who put Massachusetts on the shining path to glory with his 1993 legislation. It gave more state money to public schools, and grew out of a lawsuit about equity. It also allowed the first charters to open in the state. Now Birmingham is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Pioneer Institute, which is a proponent of directing public money to charters and religious schools. On Friday, Birmingham published an article in a Boston Catholic paper proposing that Catholic schools receive public money. He claims that because the Blaine Amendment was founded on anti-Catholic bigotry of the 1850’s, it should be overturned.

https://www.thebostonpilot.com/opinion/article.asp?ID=181036

Remember, the Catholic Church in Boston not only failed to protect children from sexual abuse at the hands of its pedophile priests, but in a conspiracy that led all the way to the Cardinal, they hid the truth, allowing rape and abuse to continue as they moved offenders from one parish to another. Perhaps in an era where Betsy DeVos seeks to destroy that wall between church and state in our public schools, it seems an opportune moment to push for public funding of Catholic education. The #MeToo movement ought to be a reminder that it is not.

Categories Boston, Charter Schools, Democracy, Education Industry, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, School Choice, Separation of church and state, Vouchers

Watch Out, Boston: Here Comes School Choice, Whether You Want It or Not

By dianeravitch
December 15, 2017 //
14

Christine Langhoff, retired educator, wrote the following information about the corporate reform assault on Boston Public Schools. Voters overwhelmingly rejected expansion of charter school, but the privatization movement is never dissuaded by public opposition. They think democracy is the problem and have no qualms about ignoring the will of the people when it conflicts with their ambition.

Langhoff writes:

Last week, this rather odd Tweet appeared from the Boston Public Schools Twitter account:

The language about “choice” made me remember that NPR featured this article about how “coaches” are helping parents choose schools for their children.

https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2017/11/27/551853951/confused-by-your-public-school-choices-hire-a-coach?utm_source=twitter.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=npr&utm_term=nprnews&utm_content=2055

Of course, most BPS parents don’t have money for this sort of help. No worries! There’s an edu-business non-profit for that: EdNavigator https://www.ednavigator.com

And they’re coming to Boston! After a successful run in – New Orleans?

So who is behind EdNavigator? The “leadership” page shows a bunch of folks from TNTP and some KIPPsters

https://www.ednavigator.com/who-we-are/leadership

And the Board of Directors is full of a bunch more charteristas, including Chris Stewart, aka @CitizenStewart, as Director of Outreach and External Affairs:

https://www.ednavigator.com/who-we-are/board-of-directors

Their partners page shows many hotels, i.e. low income workers. Remember that the Pritzker hedge fund family of Chicago own Hyatt Hotels :

https://www.ednavigator.com/who-we-are/our-partners

The plan is to offer school choice counseling as a “benefit” to low income workers and by developing this “trust” in their workers, the public school system is supplanted as the knowledgeable entity on education.

“Our Navigators combine expert knowledge of schools with a deep understanding of our communities. Most are accomplished former teachers, school leaders, or counselors, and all have passed a background check, received privacy training and adhere to a strict code of confidentiality.

They’re like pediatricians for your educational health, and they’re always ready to answer questions, troubleshoot problems, and get things done. In a recent survey, 95 percent of EdNavigator members said that their Navigator is “the person I trust most for information and advice about education issues.”

https://www.ednavigator.com/how-we-help

Here in Boston, EdNavigator goes by the name of Boston School Finder
https://www.bostonschoolfinder.org/about

About Boston School Finder
“Boston School Finder is being developed and distributed by a committed and diverse team of Parent Ambassadors supported by local non-profits. These parents and guardians represent nearly all the neighborhoods of Boston, and enroll their children in BPS, charter, Catholic, and private schools.
Funding for Boston School Finder was provided through the Boston Schools Fund and the Barr Foundation, two local non-profit organizations. Web design and development was provided by a team of volunteers who work at Wayfair, a Boston-based e-commerce company specializing in home goods.
Many other organizations, including the City of Boston, Boston Public Schools, the Boston Charter Alliance, the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston, and community organizations from all around the city are providing guidance and input on the site.”

They’ve hired “Parent Ambassadors”
https://www.bostonschoolfinder.org/about/contact

And have detailed information about enrollment for public, private, charter and religious schools
https://www.bostonschoolfinder.org/about/enrollment

Since November 29, some pages for the website have been removed, but here’s some of the information that has gone missing:

2017 Barrr Foundation grants:
Ed Navigator Inc.
To support the EdNavigator expansion to Boston.
• Year Awarded: 2017

• Amount: $500,000

• Term: 24 months

• Program: Education


Boston Schools Fund Inc. To support the development and implementation of the Boston School Finder Family Information Tool.
• Year Awarded: 2017
• Amount: $300,000
Term: 12 months

The Barr Foundation is also a champion of Unified Enrollment, which in turn is part of CRPE’s Gates Compact, all of which will have a detrimental effect on Boston’s public schools.

http://www.bostonschoolsfund.org/boston-compact/

Also in the missing link from November 29, was this list of Board members

PRESIDENT WILLIAM F. AUSTIN
TREASURER WILLIAM F. AUSTIN
CLERK JILL SHAH
DIRECTOR WILLIAM F. AUSTIN
DIRECTOR JILL SHAH
DIRECTOR KATHRYN EVERETT

Austin taught math at Roxbury Prep, which is the charter where John King was a founding teacher before he moved on to New York state and then to replace Arne Duncan. (It is also the school with the persistently highest suspension rate in the state of Massachusetts.) Austin has overseen its four-campus expansion. Shah and her husband own the on-line furniture store Wayfair; her husband is a director of the Federal Reserve Bank.

On Tuesday, Austin confirmed to a member of the Boston Teachers Union that the above is accurate.

So, charteristas and billionaires. Color me skeptical that these organizations are well suited to helping Boston parents choose public schools for their children. It seems, too, that the parents most likely to utilize the bostonschoolfinder.org website are the best educated and most advantaged to begin with.

The Boston City Council held a hearing on Tuesday evening, December 5, which I attended, with the purpose of getting this information on the record. The hearing was on the school assignment process, which has been a colossal boondoggle, featuring algorithms written by MIT students. The current plan was enacted in 2013, and there were supposed to be yearly reports about progress, or lack of and necessary improvements along the way. No reports have been issued over the past four years.

When Councilor Tito Jackson (who supported the “No” position on last year’s charter expansion ballot question) probed for a reason for the lack of reporting, the School Department’s answer was that we’ve had three different standardized state tests, so no judgments can be made about the quality of the schools, information parents need to choose a school. When Jackson asked about Unified Enrollment, the School Department claimed to know nothing about it, that there had been no meetings on the topic. But Mayor Marty Walsh has filed legislation to fast track Unified Enrollment, then later denied he did so after reports became public.

“Currently, students have a list of school options comprising only district schools and can apply also to as many charters as desired. Under unified enrollment, unless school list lengths are expanded, the presence of any charter school on the list necessarily will bump a district school off of it, reducing district school options, states QUEST in its report published on Sept. 18, 2017. Under bill H.2876 filed by Rep. Alice Peisch and co-sponsored by Walsh, Carvalho and Rep. Dan Hunt, charter schools could elect to give enrollment preference to students living near the school.”

http://baystatebanner.com/news/2017/oct/11/quiet-push-unified-enrollment/

(Rep. Alice Peisch, by the way, has been a staunch supporter of charter expansion and was one of their spokespeople during last year’s Question 2.)

On Friday, December 8, the School Department released another plan informed by an MIT algorithm for start times for our schools. Ostensibly, the goal was later start times for high schools, many of which begin now at 7:15. There are no school buses for high schools, which means kids often need to leave home by about 6:00 to arrive at school on public transportation. There has been an uprising among parents since new times were revealed because they have changed start times in 105 of 125 schools (84% of all BPS schools) ostensibly in order to change 21 high school start times.

Under the new plan, many elementary schools are scheduled to begin at 7:15, with afternoon dismissals as early as 1:15. Adding before and after school care to schedules for the littles could mean an 11 hour day away from home. When parents began to push back, asking how they could be expected to juggle work schedules with these new school hours, these pieces of advice were offered:

“My new bell time doesn’t work for me, what can I do?
• For students who are eligible for transportation and where we have capacity on our buses, BPS will provide transportation from off-site, before-school programs to school; and from school to off-site, after-school programs.
• Your school likely has before- or after- school programming. More than 90% of all BPS schools have after-school programing and 90% of BPS schools starting after 9:00 AM have a before-school program. Additionally, we will continue to work with programs and schools to expand available before- and after-school programming across BPS.
• BPS is happy to provide parents, guardians, and students with letters to employers notifying them of a school scheduling change and explaining why this may necessitate a change of working hours. For this, please email starttimes@bostonpublicschools.org.
• We realize that in some cases, the only option for families may be to change schools. For more information on this process, please visit a BPS Welcome Center, its website, bostonpublicschools.org/welcomeservices, or call 617-635-9010. Please also consider attending the BPS School Showcase on Saturday, December 9, at TD Garden; the event begins at 9:00 am and ends at 1:00 pm. For more information, visit bostonpublicschools.org/registrationevents.”

https://www.bostonpublicschools.org/Page/7016

The Boston Globe weighed in, essentially telling parents to suck it up:

http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/editorials/2017/12/09/new-school-schedules-are-worth-hassle/tjfhF0WLfE6O1Et90SW7vL/story.html?camp=bg%3Abrief%3Arss%3Afeedly&rss_id=feedly_rss_brief&s_campaign=bostonglobe%3Asocialflow%3Atwitter#comments

Parents have posted a petition which has garnered over 4,700 signatures since Saturday.

https://www.change.org/p/tommy-chang-and-mayor-walsh-stop-immediate-changes-on-school-start-times-in-boston

When I start to add up all this chaos, I come to one conclusion: it’s deliberate.

It makes enrollment in traditional schools more difficult.

It makes school schedules more onerous for parents and kids.

It will destabilize the entire school system.

It will drive families away.

It will make the privatizers gleeful.

It will subvert the voters’ emphatic NO to an expansion of the charter industry.

Right here in the cradle of public education.

Categories Boston, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization, School Choice

North Carolina: The News-Observer Opposes GOP Tax Plan Because It Will Harm Public Education

By dianeravitch
December 11, 2017 //
61

North Carolina is one of the states where the legislature has been working overtime to pass programs to harm public schools. Charters, vouchers, cybercharters, Teach for America, and regular assaults on the teaching profession.

That context makes it especially surprising and gratifying to see that the editorial board of the News-Observer wrote a strong critique of the GOP Tax Plan because it hurts public education.

This is a fantastic editorial:

There’s no doubt that tax-cut proposals in the House and Senate will increase income inequality today, but provisions in the bills could also weaken the earning power of many in the future by eroding the quality and the diversity of public schools.

One change that as approved by the Senate and also found in the House bill extends a tax benefit for college savings accounts to cover tuition for private elementary and secondary education. The change means that those who can afford to save money for non-public school tuition will be able to see that money grow tax-free.

Extending the tax break won’t mean much for families of modest incomes since they can’t afford to save large amounts for pre-college schooling, but it will have the effect of making high-priced private schools less costly to the wealthy. The Senate version of the change offered by Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas even allows those who home school to draw up to $10,000 annually out of the tax-favored accounts to cover loosely defined school expenses. In the end, the change reduces tax revenue to give the wealthy a break on private education costs.

This relatively narrow adjustment will be joined by sweeping proposals in both the House and Senate tax bills that limit federal deductions for state and local taxes. Those changes will make it harder for local and state governments to raise taxes to support public schools. Together, the changes will lighten the tuition bill at private schools while adding to the tax burden that supports public schools.

Of course, higher education is also threatened by provisions in the tax plans that would include levies on endowments and on tuition benefits provided to graduate students and children of college employees. But the plans’ broader threats are to public schools, which are already being undermined by Republican-backed efforts to increase the number of charter schools – publicly funded but privately run – and to expand the use of tax funds for private schools through voucher programs. Now that “school choice” movement has gained support at the federal level with the appointment of Betsy DeVos – a charter and private school advocate – as the U.S. education secretary.

Fueling re-segregation

As Republicans cut away at the financial foundation of public schools they are also accelerating the re-segregation of all schools at the elementary and secondary levels. Adding charters and using tax dollars to subsidize private and sectarian school tuition is leading to a great sorting by race. And that, rather than enhancing education, deprives children of learning through exposure to classmates of different racial groups and economic backgrounds.

In a recent report on charter schools, The Associated Press found the number of charter schools has tripled over the last decade and racial isolation has grown with them. Charters tend to be overwhelmingly white, or overwhelming one minority. The AP reported: “While 4 percent of traditional public schools are 99 percent minority, the figure is 17 percent for charters. In cities, where most charters are located, 25 percent of charters are over 99 percent nonwhite, compared to 10 percent for traditional schools.”

The trend worries even some charter school advocates. Pascual Rodriguez, principal of a Milwaukee charter where nearly all the students are Hispanic, told the AP: “The beauty of our school is we’re 97 percent Latino. The drawback is we’re 97 percent Latino … Well, what happens when they go off into the real world where you may be part of an institution that’s not 97 percent Latino?”

The AP report mirrors what an October News & Observer report found about racial segregation in North Carolina charter schools. The report found that the schools are more segregated and have more affluent students than traditional public schools.

Christine Kushner, a member of the Wake County Board of Education and a former chair of the panel, said that despite efforts to foster diversity in the Wake County school system, the state’s largest, minorities are the majority, largely because of an increase in Hispanic students and more white students enrolling in schools outside of the system. She said Wake schools remain strong, but their reduced diversity both in race and income is a setback.

“It’s troubling to me that we are going backward because I think diverse schools are what’s best for all children and economics and history affirm that,” she said. School choice is fine, she said, but public schools need to have the resources “to be the first choice for all parents.”

Good public schools and strong support through taxes are inseparable. But the tax bills in Congress are adding to the forces that are splitting that bond and jeopardizing public education.

Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/opinion/editorials/article188972429.html#storylink=cpy

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Funding, North Carolina, Privatization, Republicans, School Choice, Segregation, Supporting public schools

Mercedes Schneider: Betsy DeVos Discovers “A Nation at Risk” and Claims That Choice is The Answer

By dianeravitch
December 5, 2017 //
14

Mercedes Schneider’s reviews Betsy DeVos’s speech to her friend Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Educational Excellence.

Betsy and Jeb have this in common: They both hate public schools and have devoted their life to demeaning, belittling, and attacking the schools that 85-90% of American children attend. They are in love with consumer choice, and they would like nothing better than to direct public funds to religious schools, for-profit schools, cyber schools, and homeschooling.

As Mercedes notes, Betsy (or more likely, a speechwriter) discovered “A Nation at Risk,” The 1983 jeremiad that blamed public schools for the loss of industries to Germany and Japan. The report was written in the midst of the 1982 recession, and the commissioners decided that the schools were to blame for the downturn. When the economy recovered, no one bothered to thank the schools.

Betsy devoutly believes that choice will fix everything, but “A Nation at Risk” didn’t mention choice.

And she continues to ignore the evidence of the past 25 years of choice. Her home state of Michigan is overrun with charter schools, and its standing on NAEP fell from the middle of the 50 States to the bottom 10 from 2003 to 2013. The news out of the New Orleans all-Charter District throws cold water on the Charter Movement, as New Orleans continues to be a low-performing District in a low-performing State. The evidence on vouchers continues to accumulate, and it is not promising. In the most recent voucher studies, students actually lose ground. After three or four years, those who have not left to return to public schools catch up with their peers who stayed in public schools, but that’s probably because the weakest students left.

Now that Betsy is talking numbers, maybe she will pay attention to the research on charters and vouchers and admit that her favorite panacea is not working.

But I’m not holding my breath.

Categories Accountability, ALEC, Betsy DeVos, Bush, Jeb, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Michigan, New Orleans, School Choice, Vouchers
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