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Houston: New Superintendent Unleashes Chaos, Fear, Uncertainty

By dianeravitch
June 19, 2023 //
10

Military man Mike Miles has launched his overhaul of Houston’s public schools, and parents and teachers are alarmed. Miles previously failed in Dallas, but that has not dimmed his authoritarian style. Trained for school leadership by the Broad Academy, which admires authoritarian style, Miles was imposed on Houston as part of a state takeover.

The state education department is led by non-educator Mike Morath but controlled by Governor Greg Abbott. Abbott hates Houston, because its a Democratic city. The takeover was triggered by the “failure” of one high school, Wheatley, which enrolls higher proportions of students with disabilities than other high schools. Miles, however, has far exceeded his mandate by firing the staff at 29 schools—not just Wheatley—and telling staff to re-apply for their jobs. Miles now sees himself as an education expert and has declared his grandiose ambition to create a “New Education System” (NES), to show the nation how it’s done.

Parents, teachers, and students at the schools that Miles is disrupting are outraged.

The Houston Chronicle reports:

Elmore Elementary School was never perfect, but Kourtney Revels felt prospects were improving for the northeast Houston campus. A new principal, Tanya Webb, had taken the helm in December, and while Revels didn’t approve of every move she made, she admired the newcomer’s initiative.

Revels and other parents had long been frustrated, for example, that the school bus would often arrive late in the afternoon because kids would act up on board. So the principal took matters into her own hands — she, or another staff member, began riding the bus home with students, to make sure their behavior stayed in line. Now, Revels’ third grader, Judith, arrives home faster from school.

“Going that one extra mile took a burden off of parents who were waiting an hour, two hours, three hours for their kid to come from down the street,” Revels said.

It remains to be seen if Elmore parents can count on the practice to continue. Webb, along with the majority of staff members at 28 other schools in northeast Houston, has to reapply for her job as part of a major shakeupannounced by new Superintendent Mike Miles on his first day in office. 

“I do see a little bit of turnaround since she came in this year but she’s only been here since December,” Revels said. “And now she has to reapply for her job.”

Parents, students and community activists gather near Pugh Elementary School to protest the potential replacement of their children’s teachers by HISD on Thursday, June 15, 2023 in Houston.
Nallely Garza make a sign as she joins parents, students and community activists near Pugh Elementary School to protest the potential replacement of their children’s teachers by HISD on Thursday, June 15, 2023 in Houston.

Radical changes

The 29 schools in the New Education System program that Miles announced on June 1 will likely look radically different when doors open to students on Aug. 28. For starters, kids might be greeted by an entirely new roster of teachers, administrators and support staff; all employees besides custodians, cafeteria workers, bus drivers and nurses have to reapply for their jobs.

Miles has already said that librarians will likely be removed from NES schools, though he promised that they, along with all other teachers, principals, assistant principals and counselors who are already under contract, will be guaranteed similar jobs with the same salary at other schools if they are not brought back. Other staff members have received no such guarantees.

Teachers who do return will make over $90,000 after factoring in various stipends offered for teaching at high-need schools, and be supported by teaching apprentices and learning coaches who will handle much of the supplementary work such as grading and classroom preparation.

The application process is already underway for principals and teachers. NES principals will be selected by June 23, and teachers by July 3.

But staffing changes are just part of the transformation coming to NES schools. Curriculum will be standardized across campuses and lesson plans prepared for teachers in advance. Classes will be recorded via webcam, and students who are pulled from class for disruptive behavior will be sent to another room to watch the streamed class. Magnet offerings such as STEM and dual language programs “will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis” and may be cut.

Emails shared with the Houston Chronicle from principals to their staff suggest school leaders will be observing teachers every day, and that schools will be open from 6:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. each day for free childcare before and after school, with teachers serving four supervisory shifts per month. Miles is also bringing the Dyad program that he had introduced at his charter school network, Third Future Schools, to the NES schools, in which community members will teach students in extra-curriculars, such as sports or arts twice a week, according to emails shared with the Chronicle.

Miles says the changes put students’ most fundamental needs at the forefront by allowing teachers to focus purely on instruction.

“We will be aligning our resources—especially our most effective teachers and principals—to better serve students in underserved communities,” Miles said. “For students who need to catch up and in schools that have failed for years, we will be offering more instructional time.”

Miles has repeatedly stated that he understands the concerns emanating from many in the HISD community, but that he hopes improvements at the schools will eventually win their trust.

“Change brings some anxiety, and there will be some anxiety most of the summer, probably, but we will keep putting information out there so that we can turn that anxiety into hope,” Miles said during his first week in office.

‘Pugh es nuestra familia’

Several parents at Pugh, Martinez and other northeast Houston elementary schools gathered Thursday morning with their children at the Denver Harbor Multi-Service Center to protest the potential removal of teachers from their A-rated schools, before traveling to HISD headquarters to bring their complaints to the district. Children held signs with their teachers’ names — Ms. Rodriguez, Ms. Arguelles, Mr. Infante — and pleas to keep them in place. “Pugh es nuestra familia,” one sign read.

“Every morning, everyone from the principal to the office staff, custodians and cafeteria workers, they greet our children with a smile. I think the kids forget the problems they have at home when they go to school. We don’t want new teachers, we want the same teachers because they’ve been our second family at Pugh,” said Nancy Coronado, a parent volunteer at Pugh for 13 years, in Spanish.

Her son, Ricardo Delgado, graduated from fifth grade at Pugh this year. He discussed his favorite teacher, Ms. Lopez, and how she was a warm, familiar presence to him even before he’d ever taken her class. Now set to start at the Baylor College of Medicine Academy at Ryan Middle School in the fall, Delgado credits Ms. Lopez with teaching him the reading skills he’ll need in middle school.

“If other teachers come, it wouldn’t be the same because she’s been there since I was 6 years old,” Delgado said.

The plan to have teachers reapply for their job has left other Houston parents with mixed feelings. Karmell Johnson, a Fifth Ward mother of three students at NES schools, said there are “pros and cons” to the situation. She welcomes the opportunity to remove under-performing teachers, but worries that some effective teachers, who understand the community they’re serving in and may have formed bonds with students, may be caught up in the mix.

“It’s an emotional roller coaster. Once a bond is established and they rip that out, the kids have to get used to their teachers, the teachers have to get used to the schools, and it’s going to take some time. It’s going to be uncomfortable for everybody,” Johnson said.

Uncertain future for teachers, staff

At many NES schools, however, teacher and principal turnover has already become a fact of life. It was only 10 years ago that North Forest High School was completely reconstituted when the Texas Education Agency ordered North Forest ISD to be absorbed into Houston ISD, and after a brief upswing, it has failed 80 percent of its TEA evaluations since (it passed this year with a C). Wheatley High School replaced a significant portion of their teachers just last year.

Ainhoa Donat, a bilingual fourth grade teacher at Paige Elementary, said she worked with a different fourth-grade colleague in each of her six years at the Eastex/Jensen school.

Donat said she was told by her principal that the school would no longer offer a bilingual program, and that she was welcome to apply for a standard teaching position at the school (the district, in a statement, said that NES schools “will now have a dedicated English Language Arts block for English language development,” which “includes bilingual support for emerging English speakers based on their proficiency level”).

With 16 years of experience at HISD under her belt, the extra money being offered wasn’t enough for Donat to overcome the indignity of being blamed for the school’s low performance. She’s currently in the process of applying for a bilingual job at another HISD campus.

“I have a lot of experience and I work super hard, so when I went to that meeting and the superintendent (basically) said ‘you didn’t do your job,’ I felt really humiliated,” Donat said.

One longtime teacher at Martinez Elementary School, who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of retribution, said she worries that the financial incentives may “entice the wrong people.”

“I would give it back to stay at Martinez,” she said. “There are some teachers who are all about the money… but not at our school.”

The fear is even more acute for support staff, who aren’t guaranteed positions.

One administrative assistant, who has worked for over 20 years at an NES elementary school and also asked to remain anonymous, said she may be forced to retire early if she isn’t rehired. The assistant has spent almost her entire career with HISD and doesn’t know what else she could do.

She wonders who will manage the payroll, procure supplies for teachers, plan field trips and do all the other unseen tasks that keep a school running if support staff are eliminated.

“All I’ve ever known is HISD, getting up and going to work at these schools. We’re not here for the money, we’re here for the children,” she said. “You talk about the children but what are you doing for them? You’re taking their teachers away, and its very upsetting.”Parents, students and community activists gather near Pugh Elementary to protest the potential replacement of their children’s teachers by HISD on Thursday, June 15, 2023 in Houston.Brett Coomer/Houston Chronicle

Photo of Sam González Kelly

Written By 

Sam González Kell

Sam González Kelly is a reporter for the Houston Chronicle.

You can reach Sam at sam.kelly@chron.comVIEW COMMENTS

Categories Administrators, superintendents, Broad Foundation, Disruption, Education Industry, Extremism, Houston, Parents, Students, Teachers, Texas

Kathryn Joyce: How Sarasota County Became Florida’s Laboratory for Far-Right Extremism

By dianeravitch
June 13, 2023 //
7

If you read one article today, make it this one.

Kathryn Joyce is an outstanding journalist who has written several excellent articles about the far-right conspiracy to destroy public education. In this important article, published by both the Hechinger Report and Vanity Fair, she examines the rightwing takeover of public schools in Sarasota, Florida, by the extremist Moms for Liberty and their hero Governor DeSantis.

Joyce begins:

SARASOTA COUNTY, Fla. — On a Sunday afternoon in late May 2022, Zander Moricz, then class president of Sarasota County’s Pine View School, spent the moments before his graduation speech sitting outside the auditorium, on the phone with his lawyers. Over the previous month, the question of what he’d say when he stepped to the podium had become national news. That March, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis had signed the Parental Rights in Education Act, quickly dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” law for its ban on all mention of gender identity and sexuality in K–3 classrooms and restriction of those discussions in higher grades as well. Moricz, a student LGBTQ+ activist, had led several protests against the act that spring and joined a high-profile lawsuit against the state. In early May, he charged on Twitter that Pine View’s administration had warned that if he mentioned his activism or the lawsuit at graduation, his microphone would be cut. (In a statement released last year, the school district confirmed that students are told not to express political views in their speeches.)

In the tumultuous weeks leading up to the ceremony, Pine View — Sarasota’s “gifted” magnet institution, consistently ranked one of the top 25 public high schools in the country — was besieged with angry calls and news coverage. Moricz stayed home for three weeks, he said, thanks to the rvolume of death threats he received, and people showed up at his parents’ work. When a rumor started that Pine View’s principal would have to wear a bulletproof vest to graduation, he recalled, “the entire campus lost their minds,” thinking “everyone’s going to die” and warning relatives not to come. His parents worried he’d be killed.

But after all the controversy, graduation day was a success. Moricz, now 19, delivered a pointedly coded speech about the travails of being born with curly hair in Florida’s humid climate: how he worried about the “thousands of curly-haired kids who are going to be forced to speak like this” — like he was, in code — “for their entire lives as students.” Videos of the speech went viral. Donations poured into Moricz’s youth-led nonprofit. That summer, he left to study government at Harvard.

Half-a-year later though, when Moricz came home, Sarasota felt darker.

“I’m wearing this hat for a reason,” he said when we met for coffee in a strip mall near his alma mater in early March. “Two years ago, if I was bullied due to my queerness, the school would have rallied around me and shut it down. If it happened today, I believe everyone would act like it wasn’t happening.”

These days, he said, queer kids sit in the back of class and don’t tell teachers they’re being harassed. A student at Pine View was told, Moricz said, that he couldn’t finish his senior thesis researching other states’ copycat “Don’t Say Gay” laws. (The school did not respond to a request for comment through a district spokesperson.) When Moricz’s nonprofit found a building to house a new youth LGBTQ+ center — since schools were emphatically no longer safe spaces — they budgeted for bulletproof glass.

“The culture of fear that’s being created is doing exactly what it’s supposed to do,” he said. And much of it was thanks to the Sarasota County School Board.

Over the last two years, education culture wars have become the engine of Republican politics nationwide, with DeSantis’s Florida serving as the vanguard of the movement. But within the state, Sarasota is more central still.

Its school board chair, Bridget Ziegler, cofounded the conservative activist group Moms for Liberty and helped lay the groundwork for “Don’t Say Gay.” After a uniquely ugly school board race last summer, conservatives flipped the board and promptly forced out the district’s popular superintendent. In early January, when DeSantis appointed a series of right-wing activists to transform Florida’s progressive New College into a “Hillsdale of the South” — emulating the private Christian college in Michigan that has become a trendsetting force on the right — that was in Sarasota too. In February, DeSantis sat alongside Ziegler’s husband and Moms for Liberty’s other cofounders to announce a list of 14 school board members he intends to help oust in 2024—Sarasota’s sole remaining Democrat and LGBTQ+ board member, Tom Edwards, among them. The next month, Ziegler proposed that the board hire a newly created education consultancy group with ties to Hillsdale College for what she later called a “‘WOKE’ Audit.” (Ziegler did not respond to interview requests for this article.)

The dizzying number of attacks has led to staffing and hiring challenges, the cancelation of a class, a budding exodus of liberals from the county, and fears that destroying public education is the ultimate endgame. In January, Ziegler’s husband, Christian — who chairs the Florida Republican Party — tweeted a celebratory declaration: “SARASOTA IS GROUND ZERO FOR CONSERVATIVE EDUCATION.”

It wasn’t hyperbole, said Moricz. “We say that Sarasota is Florida’s underground lab, and we’re its non-consenting lab rats.”

For as long as Florida has been grading schools and school districts — a late 1990s innovation that helped spark the “school reform” movement — Sarasota, with its 62 schools and nearly 43,000 students, has enjoyed an “A” rating. Perched on the Gulf Coast just south of Tampa, the county’s mix of powder-soft beaches and high-culture amenities — including an opera house, ballet and museums — have made it a destination for vacationers and retirees. And that influx has made Sarasota one of the richest counties in the state.

Since many of those retirees, dating back to the 1950s, have been white Midwestern transplants, it’s also made Sarasota a Republican stronghold and top fundraising destination for would-be presidential candidates. Both the last and current chairs of the state GOP — first State Senator Joe Gruters and now Christian Ziegler — live in the county. Sarasota arguably launched Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign, thanks to Gruters’s early support. These days, though, Sarasota isn’t just conservative, but at the leading edge of Florida’s turn to the hard right.

Partly that’s thanks to the Zieglers, who have become one of Florida’s premier power couples, with close ties to both Trump world and the DeSantis administration and a trio of daughters enrolled in local private schools. As founder of the digital marketing company Microtargeted Media, Christian did hundreds of thousands of dollars of work for pro-Trump PACs in 2021, the Sarasota Herald-Tribune reported. After being elected state GOP chair this February, he announced his goal was “to crush these leftist in-state Democrats” so thoroughly that “no Democrat considers running for office.” Although Bridget stepped down from Moms for Liberty shortly after its founding, she subsequently helped draftFlorida’s Parents’ Bill of Rights, which helped pave the way for DeSantis’s 2021 ban on mask mandates and ultimately last year’s “Don’t Say Gay” law. In 2022, the right-wing Leadership Institute hired her as director of school board programs, and built a 6,000-square-foot headquarters in Sarasota to serve as a national hub for conservative education activism. This winter, DeSantis also appointed her to a new board designed to punish the Disney Company for criticizing his anti-LGBTQ laws….

Last year, when Ziegler was up for reelection and two other board members were terming out, she ran as a unified slate with former school resource officer Tim Enos and retired district employee Robyn Marinelli. The candidates drew support from both DeSantis’s administration — which unprecedentedly endorseddozens of school board candidates across the state — and local members of the far-right. A PAC partially funded by The Hollow’s owner campaigned for the “ZEM” slate (a shorthand for the candidates’ surnames) by driving a mobile billboard around the county, calling one of their opponents a “LIAR” and “BABY KILLER” because she’d once worked for Planned Parenthood. Proud Boys hoisted ZEM signs on county streets and a mailer was sent out, castigating the liberal candidates as “BLM/PSL [Party of Socialism and Liberation]/ANTIFA RIOTERS, PLANNED PARENTHOOD BABY KILLERS, [who] WANT GROOMING AND PORNOGRAPHY IN OUR SCHOOLS.” (Enos and Marinelli did not respond to requests for comment for this article.)

Open the link and read all of the article. It is a devastating article about the takeover of the school board by hateful extremists whose tools are fear and divisiveness.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Censorship, Corruption, Cruelty, Curriculum, Democracy, DeSantis, Disruption, Education Industry, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Florida, Freedom, Freedom of Speech, Freedom to Read, Gender, Injustice, Lies, Parent Groups, Politics, Privatization, Propaganda, Safety, Shame, Students

NYC: Asian-Americans Dominate Admissions to Specialized High Schools

By dianeravitch
June 3, 2023 //
63

The New York Times reported on the annual competition for admission to New York City’s most selective high schools, where about 26,000 eighth-grade students competed for some 4,000 openings. Admission is based on a single standardized test, offered only once. Although two-thirds of the city’s students are Black or Latino, about 10% of offers went to students from these groups. More than half the acceptance offers (53%) went to Asian-American students.

Latino students were 26% of the test-takers and received 6.7% of the offers. White students were 17% of the students who took the test and received 27% of the offers. Asian-American students were 32% of test-takers and received 53% of the offers. Black students were 19% of the test-takers and received 3% of the offers.

Admission to the selective high schools is considered a ticket to the best colleges (but students have to work hard in high school to earn that ticket).

It should be noted that New York City has dozens of excellent high schools that do not require students to take the Specialized High School Admissions Test that is required by the elite high schools.

Former Mayor Bill de Blasio tried to change the admissions criteria to increase the proportion of Black and Latino students to 40%, but any change in the testing requirement must be approved by the State Legislature. That body includes graduates of the elite schools, who protect the status quo. Also, Asian-Americans fiercely oppose any change in the admissions process. All proposals for change have failed.

At Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan, the most selective of the city’s so-called specialized schools, seven of the 762 offers made went to Black students, down from 11 last year and eight in 2021. Twenty Latino students were offered spots at Stuyvesant, as were 489 Asian students and 158 white students. The rest went to multiracial students and students whose race was unknown.

Gaps at many of the other schools were also stark: Out of 287 offers made at Staten Island Technical High School, for example, two Black students were accepted — up from zero last year — along with seven Latino students….

The schools also represent perhaps the highest-profile symbol of segregation across the system, where over the last decade, Black and Latino students have never received more than 12 percent of offers.

Decades ago, the specialized schools tended to serve much larger proportions of Black and Latino students. And a handful of elite schools, like the Brooklyn Latin School — where 73 Black and Latino teenagers were accepted in a class of 388 this year — are somewhat more reflective of the city’s demographics….

The Adams administration has not made school integration a top priority, quieting the public and political attention on the issue after years of intense fights.

The system’s chancellor, David C. Banks, has argued that many Black and Latino families care more about school quality than who their children’s classmates are.

He has aimed to overhaul how students are taught to read, and supported increasing seats in the city’s selective gifted and talented program for elementary students, reversing Mr. de Blasio’s plan to eliminate it.

Categories Equity, Inequity, New York City, Standardized Testing, Students

Why NAEP Scores in History and Civics Are Meaningless in These Times

By dianeravitch
May 22, 2023 //
47

I served on the governing board of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) for seven years. I was appointed by President Clinton. I learned quite a lot about standardized testing during that time. I enjoyed reading test questions and finding a few that had two right answers. Two subjects where I felt confident as a reviewer, in addition to reading, were history and civics.

I was momentarily dismayed, but not surprised, to learn that the NAEP scores in history and civics had declined, as they had in reading and math, after the disruptions and closings caused by the pandemic. This is not surprising, because fewer days of instruction translates into less learning.

So we know for sure that instructional time matters. You can’t learn what you weren’t taught.

But on second thought, I realized that in these days it is almost impossible to test history and civics and get a meaningful result.

Many states, all Republican-dominated, have censored history teaching. The legislatures don’t want students to learn “divisive concepts.” They don’t want anything taught that will make students “uncomfortable.” They don’t want “critical race theory” to be taught. These ideas have been spun out at length with other vague descriptions of what teachers are NOT allowed to teach.

The people who write test questions for NAEP history are not bound by these restrictions. They are most likely writing questions about “divisive concepts” and “uncomfortable” topics. They might even ask questions that legislators might think are tinged or saturated by critical race theory.

Given the number of states that ban the teaching of accurate, factual history, it’s seems to me impossible to expect students to be prepared to take an American history test.

Even more complicated is civics. A good civics exam might ask questions about the importance of the right to vote. It might ask questions written on the assumption that vote suppression and gerrymandering are undemocratic practices that were long ago banned by the courts. Yet courts are now allowing these baleful practices to stand. How can a student understand that a discredited practice is now openly endorsed in various state laws and have not been discredited by the courts?

Civics classes typically teach that one of the great strengths of American democracy is the peaceful transition of power from one President to another. How can they teach that idea when Trump partisans insist that he won the last election and was ousted in a coup? How can teachers explain the election process when Trump says it’s rigged (he said it before the 2016 election as well)? How can students answer questions about elections and the Electoral College when Trumpers believe they were corrupted in 2020?

How can teachers teach civics when almost every GOP leader asserts that the election was stolen?

How can civics be taught when public officials defy public opinion to allow any individual to buy guns without a background check or a permit. Having bought a gun, they may wear it openly in some states and carry it concealed in some other states. Students have been practicing in case an armed killer walks into their school during the day. They need only google to learn that a majority of the public favors gun control of varying kinds. Why, they might ask their teacher, doesn’t the legislature and Congress act to protect the lives of children?

Is it worse to teach lies or to teach the truth?

Categories Accountability, Censorship, Civics, Corruption, Curriculum, Elections, Extremism, History, Lies, NAEP, Racism, Religion, Segregation, Separation of church and state, Standardized Testing, Students, Teachers and Teaching

Research: Children Need Stability to Do Well in School

By dianeravitch
May 4, 2023 //
15

A reader shared a link to an important study of the damaging effects of student mobility. The more students changed schools, the more negative effects on them.

Too bad Margaret Spellings and Arne Duncan didn’t know about this research when they decided that the best way to help low-scoring students was to close their schools. Too bad Rahm Emanuel didn’t know about it when he closed 50 public schools in a single day.

School mobility has been shown to increase the risk of poor achievement, behavior problems, grade retention, and high school drop-out. Using data over 25 years from the Chicago Longitudinal Study, we investigated the unique risk of school moves on a variety of young adult outcomes including educational attainment, occupational prestige, depression symptoms, and criminal arrests. We also investigated how the timing of school mobility, whether earlier or later in the academic career, may differentially predict these outcomes over and above associated risks. Results indicate that students who experience more school changes between kindergarten and twelfth grade are less likely to complete high school on time, complete fewer years of school, attain lower levels of occupational prestige, are more likely to experience symptoms of depression, and are more likely to be arrested as adults. Furthermore, the number of school moves predicted above and beyond associated risks such as residential mobility and family poverty. When timing of school mobility was examined, results indicated more negative outcomes associated with moves later in the grade school career, particularly between fourth and eighth grade.

Doesn’t this seem like common sense? Your child is in a school where he or she makes friends and has a good relationship with teachers. You take the child out, and he or she has some trouble readjusting. Maybe the family moved, and it was necessary. But why would the government inflict it on children, call it “reform,” and celebrate the harm to the children?

Categories Accountability, Chicago, Closing schools, Cruelty, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, Emanuel, Rahm, Failure, Ignorance, Inequity, Innovation, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top, Students, Stupid

Chicago Will End Reliance on Standardized Test Scores to Rate School Quality

By dianeravitch
May 2, 2023 //
20

Here’s a sign of hopeful change. The federal government has used standardized tests as valid measures of school quality for the past decade. The Chicago Board of Education has decided to discontinue the practice. Accountability experts have cautioned against rating schools by test scores for years. The test scores are highly correlated with family income. Schools in affluent districts getvhigh ratings, while schools enrolling the poorest kids get low ratings and are likely to be punished instead of helped.

Sarah Macaraeg of the Chicago Tribune wrote:


The Chicago Board of Education has voted to adopt a more “effective and fair” approach to assessing the performance of schools, replacing the district’s School Quality Rating Policy with a framework shaped by input from more than 20,000 members of school communities.

The previous method, relying largely on standardized test results to judge schools’ performance, penalized schools serving predominantly disadvantaged students, district officials and research partners said.

“Part of what started this was our communities being very clear about the harm that they felt from a ranking and ratings system that didn’t just make them feel like it was something about their schools, but something deficient with them as people, as communities, as parents,” board member Elizabeth Todd-Breland said of schools issued low ratings under the prior system, which was in effect from 2013-20.

Shifting toward a model of shared responsibility, district CEO Pedro Martinez said the new policy will be more responsive to the needs of school communities.

Doing away with summative ratings, the “Continuous Improvement and Data Transparency” policy will instead measure a range of “indicators of success.” Those include not only academic progress but also student well-being, quality of daily learning experiences, school inclusivity and the capacity of staff to collaborate in teacher learning.

“We are really focusing on what matters most: what’s happening in our schools and filling out the gaps to ensure that our educators have the resources and the support that they need, so that we can get the student outcomes that we all want for our babies in Chicago,” Chief Portfolio Officer and CPS parent Alfonso Carmona said at Wednesday’s school board meeting, where the vote to do away with the SQRP system was taken.

How the policy was developed also matters, in fulfilling the district’s stated commitment to equity, said Natalie Neris, chief of community engagement for the nonprofit Kids First Chicago, which partnered with CPS in engaging parents, students, experts, the Chicago Principals and Administrators Association, the Chicago Teachers Union and others in the school accountability redesign.

“We can’t continue to say that we want to create systems that are fair and then not include the people who are part of those systems in co-creating and co-producing the policy that they’re impacted by,” she said.

Categories Chicago, Education Reform, Hope, Standardized Testing, Students

TIME: How Voucher Programs Hurt Students

By dianeravitch
April 21, 2023 //
8

Joshua Cowen, Professor of Education Policy at Michigan State University, wrote the following article for TIME magazine:

In recent months, state legislatures across the country have broadened efforts to subsidize private school tuition with taxpayer dollars. New proposals for these programs—collectively called school vouchers—have appeared in more than a dozen states and passed as major priorities for Republican governors like Kim Reynolds in Iowa and Sarah Huckabee Sanders in Arkansas. Since 2021, Arizona, Florida, Utah and West Virginia have also created or expanded voucher plans. Meanwhile, a handful states like Indiana, Louisiana, Ohio and Wisconsin have run voucher programs for years. But do school vouchers actually work? We need to focus on what research shows, and what that means for kids moving forward.

As an analyst who has studied these and other forms of school choice for nearly two decades, I’m in a good position to give an answer. And based on data from existing voucher programs, the answer is almost unambiguously negative.

Let’s start with who benefits. First and foremost, the answer is: existing private school students. Small, pilot voucher programs with income limits have been around since the early 1990s, but over the last decade they have expanded to larger statewide initiatives with few if any income-eligibility requirements. Florida just passed its version of such a universal voucher program, following Arizona’s passage in the fall of 2022. In Arizona, more than 75% of initial voucher applicants had never been in public school—either because they were new kindergartners or already in private school before getting a voucher. That’s a problem because many voucher advocatesmarket these plans as ways to improve educational opportunities for public school children.

And what about the students who do leave public schools? Some plans, like the currently proposed bill in Texas, restrict eligibility to students in public school for at least one year. But for the children who do transfer using a voucher, the academic results in the recent scaled-up statewide programs are catastrophic. Although small, pilot-phase programs showed some promise two decades ago, new evaluations of vouchers in Washington, D.C.,Indiana, Louisiana, and Ohio show some of the largest test score drops ever seen in the research record—between -0.15 and -0.50 standard deviations of learning loss. That’s on par with what the COVID-19 pandemic did to test scores, and larger than Hurricane Katrina’s impacts on academics in New Orleans.

And these harmful voucher impacts from existing statewide vouchers lasted for years, with little else on balance to show for it.

What explains these extraordinarily large voucher-induced declines? Aren’t private schools supposed to be elite educational opportunities? When it comes to private schools accepting voucher payments, the answer is clearly no. That’s because elite private schools with strong academics and large endowments often decline to participate in voucher plans. Instead the typical voucher school is a financially distressed, sub-prime private provider often jumping at the chance for a tax bailout to stay open a few extra years.

In Wisconsin, 41% of voucher schools have closed since the program’s inception in 1990. And that includes the large number of pop-up schools opening just to cash in on the new voucher pay-out. For those pop-up schools, average survival time is just 4 years before their doors close for good.

Here’s another problem: for most students, using a voucher is a temporary choice to begin with. In states that have reported data on the question–Indiana, Louisiana, and Wisconsin—roughly 20% of students leave voucher programs each year, either because they give up the payment or because schools push them out. In Florida, where vouchers just expanded, that number is even higher: around 30% per year in pre-expansion data.

That kind of turnover is bad for kids, even when they’re leaving under-performing voucher schools. Not least because kids who leave voucher programs tend to be students of color, lower income children, and kids struggling academically in the first place.

And it’s not just the academic results that call into question any rhetoric around opportunities created by vouchers. Private schools can decline to admit children for any reason. One example of that is tied to the latest culture wars around LGBTQ youth, and strengthened in current voucher legislation. In Florida, a voucher-funded school made national news last summer when it banned LGBTQ children. In Indiana, pre-pandemic estimates showed that more than $16 million in taxpayer funding had already gone to voucher schools with explicit anti-LGBTQ admissions rules.

Voucher schools also rarely enroll children with special academic needs. Special education children tend to need more resources than vouchers provide, which can be a problem in public schools too. But public schools are at least obliged under federal law to enroll and assist special needs children—something private schools can and do avoid.

When we look at all the challenges to accessing education with these programs it’s clear that actually winning admission to a particular private school is not about parental school choice. It’s the school’s choice.

That is what research on school vouchers tells us. Vouchers are largely tax subsidies for existing private school families, and a tax bailout for struggling private schools. They have harmful test score impacts that persist for years, and they’re a revolving door of school enrollment. They’re public funds that support a financially desperate group of private schools, including some with active discriminatory admissions in place.

And public support for these programs is tenuous at best, highly dependent on state contexts. Recent media reports indicate that the latest voucher push is at least partly the result of well-funded campaigns led by Betsy DeVos, the conservative billionaire and U.S. Education Secretary under Donald Trump. DeVos has championed vouchers for decades as an alternative to traditional public education in what she, Trump, and other supporters call “government schools.”

But DeVos has acknowledged the poor track record for vouchers—at least when it comes to academic impacts. Asked about the dismal results of the Louisiana voucher plan while she was a public official, DeVos avoided detailed comment, but her answer back then was as good a summary as any that a voucher expert like me could provide. That program, she said, was “not very well-conceived.”

That goes for school voucher plans today, currently spreading across the country.

Categories Accountability, Civil Rights, Democracy, Education Industry, Failure, Hoax, Inequity, Privatization, School Choice, Students, Vouchers

Sara Stevenson: Texas GOP Would Criminalize Librarians

By dianeravitch
April 7, 2023 //
14

There is a popular stereotype of librarians: Mild-mannered, quiet, unassuming, and of course, bookish. But the Republicans in the Texas legislature seem to think that behind that compliant demeanor lies a sinister purveyor of dangerous ideas and books. What other explanation can there be for proposed legislation that would place book selection in the hands of a parent committee? And why strip away the legal protections accorded to librarians doing their job?

Sara Stevenson, a retired middle school librarian in Austin, wrote the following article, which was published in the Dallas Morning News.

As a former school librarian and mother, I have always believed parents have total control over what their children select to read from the school library.

However, Senate Bill 13 goes too far. Between July 2021 and June 2022, only 22 of 1,650 Texas school districts experienced formal book challenges in the past school year, less than 2%. All school districts already have formal challenge and reconsideration policies in place.

SB 13 transfers the decisions for acquiring library materials into the hands of a council of parents, the majority of whom do not work for the district but only have children attending. What possible experience or credentials or rights does this committee have to make decisions on what children can and can’t read in an entire school district? After a long, convoluted process spelled out in the bill, the school board must then approve the list of library books before they may be purchased.

First of all, it is clear the authors of this bill have a poor understanding of school library programs. In Austin ISD, there are 116 schools. This Local School Library Advisory Council, appointed by the school board, is required to meet only twice a year to decide on the library collections for all 116 schools. A single campus librarian purchases materials throughout the year. It’s not a one and done process.

This bill will greatly delay the timeline between ordering books and getting them into the hands of children. The additional 30-day waiting period further impedes the process. As a librarian, I had the freedom to pre-order the next book in a popular series so that I could add it to our collection the very day it was published. Kids clamoring for the next book in a beloved series will now have to wait for months if not all year.

The bill also invites parents to opt in to a program in which the librarian emails them each time their child checks out a book, including the book’s title and author. One elementary school in south Austin averages 196 checkouts per day. How is it possible for the librarian to send these emails while also running her library program? Instead, why not integrate the library catalog information into the parent portal, the website which parents already access to see their child’s grades? Parents can then look up their students’ library records. It would even help librarians with the bane of our existence: long overdue books.

The portion of the bill that enables anyone to prosecute individual librarians for distributing “harmful material” under the Texas penal code (Sec. 43.24) is the most shocking and destructive piece in this bill. It removes affirmative defenses for educational purposes. Does this also remove legal protections from members of the advisory council if a “bad” book slips through the cracks?

I can’t believe the state of Texas wants to allow frivolous lawsuits against librarians, school boards, principals, and teachers. We are already experiencing a teacher shortage, with at least 59 districts switching to four-day weeks.

If passed, this bill will bring a culture of fear and intimidation to our schools.

The men and women who choose to serve as school librarians are among the most intelligent and ethical people I know. They are not just serving the children of the five parents on the Local School Advisory Committee; they are representing the interests of all children and the parental rights of all families at their schools, upholding their First Amendment Rights to read.

If the Senate Public Education Committee had only consulted in good faith with the vast majority of school librarians whose patrons are extremely satisfied with the library collections they curate, this bill would have been able to find a balance between respecting parental rights and ensuring better oversight in purchasing materials without adding unwieldy, impractical layers of bureaucracy and red tape that will prevent children from having ready access to the books they want and need to read.

Sara Stevenson is a former school librarian in Austin ISD. She wrote this column for The Dallas Morning News.

Categories Accountability, Censorship, Disruption, Ethics, Extremism, Freedom to Read, Librarians, Libraries, Lies, Literacy, Literature, Students, Stupid, Texas

Idaho: Bill Would Allow Parents to Sue Libraries and School Districts

By dianeravitch
April 5, 2023 //
17

Republicans have gone stark raving mad. They are terrified that their children might read a book that will turn them gay or transgender or might make them feel bad about racism. of course, their children have access to the internet, where they can see stuff far more sensational than anything in a book.

Somebody has to be punished for the racy books in the libraries.

In Idaho, parents will be able to sue libraries and school districts if they find an inappropriate book on their shelves. The fine would be $10,000 for each time a dangerous book is accessed.

A bill that would allow parents to sue libraries and school districts for allowing books containing material considered “obscene” on their shelves is one step closer to becoming law.

The “Children’s School and Library Protection Act” passed the Idaho House on a 40-30 vote Monday afternoon.

The bill lays out a proposed definition for what it calls material that is “harmful to minors,” including material that contains description or representation of nudity, sexual conduct, sexual excitement or “sado-masochistic abuse.”

The bill also specifically mentions representations of “intimate sexual acts, normal or perverted” along with descriptions of “masturbation, excretory functions, or lewd exhibition of the genitals or genital area.”…

One legislator made a good point:

A representative from Latah County says libraries are not the main place where kids are being exposed to mature content.

“This telephone and this computer has more damage than any library is ever going to have to our children,” Lori McCann (R), representative of Legislative District Six, said.

How many of those voting went home to watch porn on their phone or computer?

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Censorship, Democracy, Extremism, Fascism, Freedom, Freedom to Read, Idaho, Librarians, Libraries, Literacy, Literature, Students, Stupid

Katherine Marsh: Why Children Don’t Fall in Love with Reading

By dianeravitch
April 3, 2023 //
37

Katherine Marsh is an award-winning novelist who writes for children in grades fifth-through-eighth. At that age in the 1980s, she remembers falling in love with books. But she knows that children today are not reading for fun as much as they used to. NAEP data say so; parents as well. She knows that the ubiquity of cell phones, the Internet, abd television explain some of that decline in reading.

But she believes there is a problem with the way children are taught reading. No, she’s not talking about phonics and how children learn to read. She refers to the pedagogical approach that is required by the Common Core. children in school are taught to analyze what they read. This technical mindset, she believes, kills the joy of reading.

She writes in The Atlantic:

What I remember most about reading in childhood was falling in love with characters and stories; I adored Judy Blume’s Margaret and Beverly Cleary’s Ralph S. Mouse. In New York, where I was in public elementary school in the early ’80s, we did have state assessments that tested reading level and comprehension, but the focus was on reading as many books as possible and engaging emotionally with them as a way to develop the requisite skills. Now the focus on reading analytically seems to be squashing that organic enjoyment. Critical reading is an important skill, especially for a generation bombarded with information, much of it unreliable or deceptive. But this hyperfocus on analysis comes at a steep price: The love of books and storytelling is being lost.

This disregard for story starts as early as elementary school. Take this requirement from the third-grade English-language-arts Common Core standard, used widely across the U.S.: “Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text, distinguishing literal from nonliteral language.” There is a fun, easy way to introduce this concept: reading Peggy Parish’s classic, Amelia Bedelia, in which the eponymous maid follows commands such as “Draw the drapes when the sun comes in” by drawing a picture of the curtains. But here’s how one educatorexperienced in writing Common Core–aligned curricula proposes this be taught: First, teachers introduce the concepts of nonliteral and figurative language. Then, kids read a single paragraph from Amelia Bedelia and answer written questions.

For anyone who knows children, this is the opposite of engaging: The best way to present an abstract idea to kids is by hooking them on a story. “Nonliteral language” becomes a whole lot more interesting and comprehensible, especially to an 8-year-old, when they’ve gotten to laugh at Amelia’s antics first. The process of meeting a character and following them through a series of conflicts is the fun part of reading. Jumping into a paragraph in the middle of a book is about as appealing for most kids as cleaning their room.

But as several educators explained to me, the advent of accountability laws and policies, starting with No Child Left Behind in 2001, and accompanying high-stakes assessments based on standards, be they Common Core or similar state alternatives, has put enormous pressure on instructors to teach to these tests at the expense of best practices. Jennifer LaGarde, who has more than 20 years of experience as a public-school teacher and librarian, described how one such practice—the class read-aloud—invariably resulted in kids asking her for comparable titles. But read-alouds are now imperiled by the need to make sure that kids have mastered all the standards that await them in evaluation, an even more daunting task since the start of the pandemic. “There’s a whole generation of kids who associate reading with assessment now,” LaGarde said.

Under the duress of Commin Core, students are analyzing passages without reading the whole book. They are getting read to do the same on the tests. This is a sure fire way to make reading a chore, not a pleasure.

The architect of the Common Core standards, David Coleman, used to claim all sorts of miraculous things that would happen, if everyone taught the way he wanted. Test scores would rise, achievement gaps would close, etc. in the decade after Commin Core was introduced in 2010, none of those miracles came to pass.

Coleman believed that children needed to interpret what was put in front of them, without context. Understand the four corners of the text in front of them. This may make sense for a test, where the only thing in front of the student is a short passage, but it’s no way to read for pleasure.

Worse, this approach is a sure fire way to turn reading into a dull exegesis of language, not into a source of joy.

Categories Childhood, Common Core, Creativity, Curriculum, Education Reform, Failure, Literacy, Literature, Real Education, Students
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