Archives for category: Segregation
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New Era of Segregation Expands in Mississippi as Legislature Endorses More School Choice

By dianeravitch
April 15, 2016 //
16

The segregated states of the Deep South fought desegregation tooth-and-nail for years after the 1954 Brown decision. The white leadership did not want white children to go to school with black children, period. Their first response was to declare that they would never desegregate: never, never, never. As pressure from the federal government and the courts accelerated, southern officials found a new tactic to preserve segregation: school choice. School choice, they knew, would protect the status quo: White children would “choose” to stay in white schools, and black children would “choose” to stay in black schools. Eventually the federal courts struck down every school choice plan, recognizing that it was a blatant effort to avoid the letter and spirit of the Brown decision.

 

But here we are, eighty years later, with segregation on the rise and school choice in the ascendancy as its vehicle.

 

Southern states are adopting charters and vouchers because their long-frustrated effort to return to segregated schools is at last feasible. Not only is it feasible, in some circles, it is fashionable. Now the media celebrates all-black schools and ignores the fact that they are segregated. The subtext is: Look at this! An all-black school with high test scores! Isn’t that great?

 

Mississippi just passed legislation to establish vouchers for children with special needs and to permit more charters. The “vouchers for children with special needs” is a first step towards a broader voucher plan that grows to include low-income children; then to include children in schools that have low test scores; then to include more and more children, until everyone gets a voucher. The not-so-subtle joke is that the voucher is not large enough to pay the tuition at a first-rate private school, so most of the children will have a voucher to go to a religious school whose teachers are uncertified and whose resources are meager. Worse, the children with special needs abandon the legal protections that the public school guarantees when they leave the public system.

 

Other states, such as Ohio, Nevada, Indiana, Louisiana, Florida, and Maryland, have endorsed voucher plans (which are never called vouchers but some euphemism, like “opportunity scholarships.) The irony in these states is that their constitutions explicitly prohibits the diversion of public school funds to religious schools, yet legislators proclaim their fealty to constitutional principles even as they pass laws to send public money to religious schools. Vouchers for children with disabilities is the camel’s nose under the tent, to get the movement started.

 

The rise of vouchers is not a response to popular demand. Vouchers have been put to voters in several states, and every time they have been soundly defeated, even in red state Utah. The revival of the voucher movement is nothing more than ideology and politics taking charge of schooling. School choice is not the “civil rights issue of our time,” as its proponents claim; it is the predictable way to roll back civil rights in our time.

 

After 25 years of experimentation with charters and vouchers, we know that they do not get better results than public schools unless they choose their students and kick out the ones who don’t have high test scores and don’t adhere to strict requirements for obedience. Charters and vouchers drain money from public schools, which still educate the vast majority of children. Once school choice gets rooted in a state, the subject consumes all the energy of legislators. It is as if the 90% who attend real public schools became invisible.

 

Despite the absence of any advantages and the presence of scandals, frauds, and discrimination, more and more states are falling victim to the false promise of “school choice.” As one Florida superintendent explained it to me, charters enable parents to keep their children away from “those children.” Both charters and vouchers increase racial segregation, religious segregation, and economic segregation.

 

These trends are ominous for our democracy.

 

 

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, Mississippi, Privatization, School Choice, Segregation, Vouchers

Daniel Denvir: It is Time for Bernie Sanders to Speak Out on Education

By dianeravitch
April 8, 2016 //
14

Daniel Denvir in Salon writes that it is time for candidate Bernie Sanders to wade into the education issues.

 

Sanders is speaking in Philadelphia, a city whose public schools have been ravaged by failed reforms for more than a decade under state control.

 

Denvir interviews a variety of experts about why neither Sanders nor Clinton has taken on education.

 

He points out that Sanders did call for an end to relying on property tax as a basic funding mechanism, since it is inherently inequitable.

 

But Denvir hopes that Sanders will attack the segregation that is at the root of so many urban problems today.

 

He writes:

 

 

The best case to make for ending housing and school segregation is in reality a populist one: segregation will continue to harm and destabilize communities nationwide because as long as poor people of color are forced to live in a small number of municipalities most communities risk being upended by demographic change. Sanders, who prioritized affordable housing as mayor of Burlington, likely understands this. Clinton, who lives in the might-as-well-be-gated community of Westchester, which has been subject to a fierce desegregation campaign, likely does not.

 

Americans have a lot in common when it comes to getting fleeced by the billionaire ruling class, which only a populist multi-racial movement can overthrow. But inequality also has a geography, and that grim map is chiseled into America’s separate and unequal neighborhoods and schools. Sanders would do well to make note of that in Philly.

Categories Funding, Politics, Segregation

Southern Education Foundation: Charters and Vouchers Increase Segregation, Decrease Opportunity for Neediest

By dianeravitch
March 31, 2016 //
28

The Southern Education Foundation has released a new report that explodes the myth that charters and vouchers increase opportunity for students of color and low-income students. Far from it. Privatization via charters and vouchers has intensified racial segregation and is reversing the Brown Decision of 1954. The disreputable concept of “separate but equal” is returning under the guise of “school choice.”

 

 

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT: Autumn Blanchard
ablanchard@southerneducation.org
404.991.6766

 

PRIVATE SCHOOL SEGREGATION: OLD NEWS, NEW PITCH
State-funded “separate but unequal” education billed as opportunity for underrepresented

 

MARCH 29, 2016 – The Southern Education Foundation (SEF), an advocate for equity in education, releases Race & Ethnicity in a New Era of Public Funding of Private Schools: Private School Enrollment in the South and the Nation. This report explores the phenomenon of publicly funded private school segregation occurring more than 60 years after the Brown v. Board of Education verdict declared segregated public schools unconstitutional. It closely examines racial demographics in contemporary private schools and finds that they remain segregated, with white students significantly overrepresented as compared to public school populations.

 

Currently, 19 states have programs that provide public funding to support children’s attendance in private schools. Last year alone, approximately $1 billion was diverted to private schools from state treasuries across the country, spreading thinner already limited resources. Though such state initiatives exist in each region of the nation, they are especially concentrated in the South.

 

“The prevailing message is that these voucher and neo-voucher tax credit scholarship programs offer better or more opportunities to students of color and low-income students…the data does not reflect that story,” said Dr. Kent McGuire, president of SEF. In reality, it perpetuates a trend of financially supporting private schools that as a whole remain overwhelming white – no less than 75 percent of all white students in private schools attend schools where 90 percent or more of the student body is white. As segregation persists in private schools, the demographics of public schools shift toward an increasingly diverse student body – fertile ground for the reemergence of a “separate but unequal” education system.

 

Using data from the National Center for Education Statistics from 1998 and 2012, this brief and the accompanying Southern state profiles review several indicators of racial demographics and segregation in public and private schools including: overrepresentation of white students, disproportionate white enrollment rates, virtual segregation (90% or more white student population), and virtual exclusion of students of color. All of which suggest that segregation persists in private schools across the country and especially in the South.

 

The six Deep South states, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, and South Carolina, which resisted the constitutional mandate for school desegregation the longest are the worst offenders in the nation by far – demonstrating that state support of private schooling does not appear to have led to greater access for students of color. These six states had a considerably higher rate of overrepresentation among white students in private schools than any other section or region in 2012. Five of the six states were at the top of the state rankings in 2012 and the sixth, Alabama, was ranked tenth.

 

 

Despite laws against segregation and in contrast to public schools, private schools with and without public funding continue to select which students they will admit. As long as the private school adopts a non-discriminatory policy and publicly declares that they do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, or national origin they are eligible to receive public funds in states with programs that allow for the shifting of funds to private institutions. However, enrollment patterns show that this measure primarily gives only lip service to a commitment to diversity. Despite these trends, black students can still often be found on promotional materials produced by private schools and scholarship organizations. This leaves the false impression that primarily students of color are served by such voucher initiatives and supports the oft-championed messaging that greater access to private institutions is available for students of color, which is often not the case.

 

The study’s findings and analysis are reminiscent of the overall patterns and conditions of attendance in private schools in the South that the authors of The Schools That Fear Built found in 1976 in the aftermath of massive resistance to desegregation: “These are schools for whites. The common thread that runs through them all, Christian, secular, or otherwise, is that they provide white ground to which blacks are admitted only on the school’s terms if at all.” This study suggests that today’s “common thread” also encompasses the exclusion of Hispanic and Native American students, as well as African American students.

 

“Because we must preserve the fundamental democratic principle that each child in this nation should have an opportunity for a good education, schools funded by tax dollars – be they private or public – should not be allowed to pick and choose only the students they wish to admit and educate. We know from this report the consequences: most unregulated private schools, left on their own in the South and the nation, have failed to admit any significant number of students of color,” said Steve Suitts, adjunct lecturer of Emory University who developed and wrote the report while serving at the Southern Education Foundation in his last year as a senior fellow. The prospect for better academic opportunity for students sounds attractive but in reality it manifests into an age-old practice that perpetuates a racial divide between children before they ever even learn their ABCs. Currently, these initiatives show no sign of slowing and in many cases are on the upswing. Now more than ever, our scarce public resources should be used to invest in public schools that operate under an obligation to serve any and all students.

 

 

About Southern Education Foundation
The Southern Education Foundation (SEF), founded in 1867, is an Atlanta-based research institution and policy advocate whose mission is to advance equity and excellence in education for all students in the South, particularly low-income students and students of color. SEF uses collaboration, advocacy, and research to improve outcomes from early childhood to adulthood. Our core belief is that education is the vehicle by which all students get fair chances to develop their talents and contribute to the common good. SEF has published a host of impactful reports including “A New Majority” & “Performance Funding at MSIs” as featured in The Washington Post and Inside Higher Ed, respectively. For more information, visit http://www.SouthernEducation.org.

For the full report visit www.SouthernEducation.org/PubliclyFundedPrivateSchoolSegregation

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Privatization, Segregation, Vouchers

Paul Thomas: “Turnaround Districts” are a Hoax

By dianeravitch
March 17, 2016 //
15

Paul Thomas of Furman University in South Carolina knows that elected officials are intrigued with the idea of “turnaround districts,” although they know surprisingly little about the research or experience associated with such districts. The idea is simple: if a school has low test scores for x number of years in a row, or if it ranks in the bottom x% of all schools in the state, fire the principal and the teachers and give the community’s public school to a private charter operator. Kind of like declaring bankruptcy, but forgetting that a school is not a business like a chain store.

 

Thomas points out that there are good reasons to be wary of turnaround districts. He cites research about what has happened to them.

 

First, advocacy for takeovers is mostly political cheerleading, and second, a growing body of research has revealed that takeovers have not achieved what advocates claim and often have replicated or even increased the exact problems they were designed to solve, such as race and class segregation and inequitable educational opportunities.

 

New Orleans is a low-performing district that has become even more segregated and stratified than it was before the takeover.

 

He writes:

 

Takeovers in several states—similar to embracing charter schools and Teach For America—have simply shuffled funding, wasted time, and failed to address the root causes of struggling schools: concentrated poverty and social inequity.

 

Yes, SC must reform our public schools, and we should shift gears to address our vulnerable populations of students first. But charter takeover approaches are yet more political faddism that our state and children cannot afford.

 

Continuing to double-down on accountability based on standards and high-stakes testing as well as rushing to join the political reform-of-the-moment with clever names is inexcusable since we have decades of evidence about what works, and what hasn’t.

 

SC must embrace a new way—one committed to social policies addressing food security for the poor, stable work throughout the state, and healthcare for all, and then a new vision for education reform built on equity.

 

All SC students deserve experienced and certified teachers, access to challenging courses, low class sizes, fully funded schools, safe school buildings and cultures, and equitable disciplinary policies and practices. These are reforms that must be guarantees for every public school student regardless of zip code, and they need not be part of complex but cleverly named programs.

 

You will want to read the post in full to gain access to its many excellent links to news and research.

 

Those who continue to advocate for already failed fixes are stalling, delaying the day that we must address the root causes of educational failure. They should be held accountable for their neglect of the real needs of children, families, and communities. And some day, they will.

 

Categories Michigan, New Orleans, Poverty, Race, Segregation, Tennessee

Red Queen in L.A.: What’s Wrong with Charter Schools?

By dianeravitch
March 11, 2016 //
8

Blogger Red Queen in L.A. has observed the rapid expansion of charter schools in Los Angeles. She knows that billionaire Eli Broad wants to put fully half the public school children in the city into privately managed charters.

 

 

In this post, she answers the question “What’s Wrong with Charter Schools?”

 

She begins:

 

“They foster segregation.

 
“Charter schools are in fact the new face of segregation, the enabling excuse for exclusivity and alienation. The Charter School movement glorifies the illusion of “choice” even while entitling homogeneity.

 
“This is borne out in the numbers and confessed every day via parent-to-parent euphemisms: “this school is a better ‘fit’”, “‘safety’ is my top priority”, “my child only responds to a ‘nurturing environment’”, “smaller class sizes are necessary for my child”, “I want my child immersed in a specialized program”.

 
“So much sorting and selecting sets up a double whammy for segregation. On one level families self-select according to like-mindedness and socioeconomic comfort level. At the same time the very process of school selection siphons highly involved families away from public district schools.”

 

 

 

 

Categories Charter Schools, Los Angeles, Segregation

Kern Alexander: Why School Choice Will Never Succeed and Harms Our Society

By dianeravitch
February 15, 2016 //
27

Thanks to reader Jon Lubar for bringing this important article by Kern Alexander of the University of Illinois about the dangers of school choice to my attention. It appeared first in the Journal of Education Finance and was reprinted by the Horace Mann League. School choice is bad for society and bad for education, Alexander argues. Those who say that parents should choose assume that parents are making informed choices. We know that many parents choose truly dreadful voucher schools and charter schools. We know that parents will stay in those schools despite the school’s failure to meet the needs of their children. The usual argument against charters and vouchers, which I often make, is that they do not “save poor kids from failing schools” because they do not have higher test scores. Alexander does not even refer to test scores. He makes a principled argument, based on economics, sociology, psychology, and logic.

 

 

Here are a few excerpts:

 

 

The story goes that tuition voucher schools and charter schools are creatures of the spirit of capitalism1 and that public funding of them will increase competition, making all schools more efficient and academically better, especially public schools. For that theory to work it is hypothesized that parents as “rational people will make choices as to the education of their children in perfect markets.” In the realm of economics, this reasoning is called the “rational expectations hypothesis” or the “efficient markets hypothesis.”

 

 

The “efficient markets” notion applied to schools via parental choice means that parents will, in their wisdom, utilize public money to send their children to private schools and that ipso facto the education level of the nation rises commensurate with the level and intensity of competition among parents in choosing private, clerical and/or corporate charter schools. For the education level to rise requires, of course, that parents will make rational decisions relative to quality education. Essential to the concept is that parents have the knowledge necessary to make informed educational choices. In a perfect market, information is presumed to “flow like water–faster than water,”3 and it is necessary that those things irrelevant to quality education, or even detrimental to it, are not present in parental decision making. If parental choice is not based on quality education and instead the school choices are rooted in race, religion, wealth, ethnicity, etc., then you will have “imperfect competition.” Imperfect competition would result in the overall decline in the quality of education…..

 

 

Thus, the basic voucher and charter school theory is that the nation will improve its standard of living by having parents use public tax money to make choices of schools based on their own information, knowledge, and perceptions of educational reality. It assumes that parents know what constitutes quality education, and that they have rational expectations as to the quality of science programs, mathematics, reading, political thought, literature, and all the liberal arts.

 

 

However, unfortunately, experience indicates that parental choices are ensnared and limited by the parents’ own limited experiences, level of learning, ignorance, biases, and mythology on which they depend to make educational choices for their children and is, thus, in most cases, highly suspect.5 Such problems with rational choices are recognized by a school of economics known as “behavioral economics” that attempts to enter into the economic equation the actual motivations of individuals in the marketplace….

 

 

Behaviorists also argue that the summation of individual choices, in totality, cannot be relied upon to ensure the progress of mankind and the enhancement of the public good. The aggregate does not necessarily produce rationality; rather, it is more likely to result in inefficiency and inequality.6 The behaviorists maintain that forces, riding the rationale of the grail of competition, tend to warp the public good causing both inefficiency and inequality. Put simply, the public good is more than the sum of individual preferences and choices. The public good is beyond the exercise of self-interests. It is a great misunderstanding, indeed, a fallacy, to assume that people acting individually in their own self-interest can achieve the public good. We have known this since it was explained to us by Rousseau in 1758, as a cornBeerstone of democratic thought, that “personal interest is always in inverse ratio” to the common interest. Thus, a system where parents take public money and indulge their self-interests is highly problematic for the education policy of a state or nation.

 

 

Similar problems of quality and consumer protection exist in education. In education, as in medicine, imperfect information decreases and distorts the “effective degree of competition.”12 With education, the conditions of the marketplace do not exist. Parents are all, to a greater or lesser degree, ill informed about the qualifications of teachers, their expertise, certifications, and are usually poorly informed about the subject matter conveyed and the teaching techniques required. That is why states require public school teachers to follow strict and complex educational processes to be certified. Such, however, is not normally required of private voucher schools or charter schools.13 Therefore, parental choice and market competition in the realm of education, as in medicine, is uniquely suspect, and in the case of tuition vouchers and charter schools, is normally reduced to a condition of state subsidized legal segregation.

 

 

Government funding of vouchers and charter schools would, if widespread, contribute to social disunity and inequality. The Wall Street desire to make significant privatization incursions into the areas of public goods, human needs, health, education and welfare, and to correspondingly avoid government regulation is a strong laissez faire profit motivation. To deregulate these normally governmental functions leaves Wall Street in the enviable position of near total discretion in raising “transaction costs” that assure profit maximization…..

 

 

[Joseph] Stiglitz quotes Alexis de Tocqueville who said that the main element of the “peculiar genius of American society” is “self-interest properly understood.” The last two words, “properly understood,” are the key, says Stiglitz. According to Stiglitz, everyone possesses self-interest in the “narrow sense.” This “narrow sense” with regard to educational choice is usually exercised for reasons other than educational quality, the chief reasons being race, religion, economic and social status, and similarity with persons with comparable information, biases and prejudices. But Stiglitz interprets Tocqueville’s “properly understood” to mean a much broader and more desirable and moral objective, that of “appreciating” and paying attention to everyone else’s self-interest. In other words, the common welfare is, in fact, “a precondition for one’s own ultimate well being.”17 Such commonality in the advancement of the public good is lost by the narrow self-interest. School tuition vouchers and charter schools are the operational models for implementation of the “narrow self-interest.” It is easy to recognize, but difficult to justify.

Categories Charter Schools, Education Reform, School Choice, Segregation, Vouchers

New Jersey: Christie Administration Sets a Goal of 50,000 Charter Seats

By dianeravitch
January 31, 2016 //
25

New Jersey’s Governor Chris Christie is devoted to charter schools. As he has repeatedly demonstrated, he despises the New Jersey Education Association, and charters seldom are unionized. So he gets a twofer: he can privatize and bust the union at the same time. In his state of the state speech, he said he would expand the charter sector. No surprise. But David Hespe, the state commissioner of education, made the goal concrete: 50,000 charter “seats.” 

 

Hespe’s remarks at the state’s annual School Choice Summit at Saint Peter’s University in Jersey City echoed Christie’s Jan. 12 speech. The governor called charter schools a resounding success for the state and said he would “aggressively prioritize” regulatory relief for charter schools.

 

Charter schools are public schools that operate independently from traditional school districts. If a student leaves their home district to attend a charter school, that district must send a portion of it’s average per-pull funding to the charter school.

 

Christie has authorized dozens of new charter schools since taking office but the initial flood of new schools has slowed in recent years. Overall, Christie has added 39 new charter schools while closing 17 charter schools for poor academic performance or organizational and fiscal issues.

 

The state has about 41,500 students enrolled in charter schools and the number will expand to 46,000 as existing charter schools add more grade levels, according to the state Department of Education. The state has not identified a specific timeline for the 50,000 seat goal.

 

In total, New Jersey more than 1.3 million public school students, Department of Education spokesman David Saenz said.

 

Christie said his administration will explore ways to create greater flexibility in the teacher certification for charter schools and ways to make it easier for charter schools to find buildings.

 

To sum it up, the charters take money away from public schools, causing them to lose teachers, increase class size, and cut back programs. This is odd because the state has 1.3 million students, but not quite 50,000 in charters. So the vast majority of students will suffer harm so that the small number in charters can get some of the money the district schools need.

 

The state will lower standards for teachers in charter schools, thus providing greater flexibility.

 

The state will seek ways to fund the construction of charter schools or give them  public space. One way to ease that problem would be to seek contributions from the New Jersey hedge fund managers who are strong supporters of charter schools.

 

The strangest thing about this scenario is that New Jersey is one of the highest performing states on the NAEP, usually scoring either second or their behind Massachusetts. At the same time, it has some cities that contain desperately impoverished families. Charter schools will not diminish their poverty nor will it alleviate the segregation that characterizes these districts, like Newark, Camden, and Paterson.

 

What Governor Christie’s plan will do is to damage the overall condition of public education, in order to push forward his goal of more “charter seats.”

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, Funding, New Jersey, Poverty, Privatization, Segregation
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