Archives for category: Teachers and Teaching
« Older Entries

Jan Resseger: Rebuffing the Attacks on Teachers and Public Schools

By dianeravitch
May 13, 2026 //
4

Jan Resseger is a careful researcher in Ohio who tracks education issues with careful attention to facts, details, and context. In this post, she notes that public schools have become the targets of ideologues in state legislatures and even the U.S. Department of Education. All too often, politicians use the public schools as a punching bag, but know nothing of their work or their accomplishments. werethe fsmiliar with the work and the accomplishments of teachers, she believes, state and federal officials would thank teachers instead disparaging them.

In recent local elections, voters in nearly 2/3 of school districts turned down relatively small property tax increases to fund the schools, usually repairs and physical upgrades. Legislators said this proved that voters are not happy with public schools, but Jan believes the election results reflect the squeeze of inflation and affordability caused by Trump’s policies and by the state’s failure to fund public schools adequately as it continues to expand charters and vouchers. Ohio has a Republican supermajority in both houses of its legislature, and they are eagerly funding charters and vouchers despite disappointing results.

As Jan writes, if the critics were familiar with the daily work of teachers, they would be champions of public schools, not critics.

She writes:

Attacks on the nation’s public schools fill the news. After last week’s May primary election in Ohio, the chair of the Senate Finance Committee reportedly blamed public schools for a statewide property tax revolt: “(T)hrowing money at schools stuck in an old way of thinking won’t solve any problems.”

And at the federal level at the end of April, the U.S. Department of Education, by amending federal guidance, stopped defining public school teachers and administrators as professionals by setting formal regulations that will mean graduate students in education cannot borrow as much money to pay for graduate school as others the Trump administration defines as professionals.  Education Week’s Evie Blad reports that a new federal regulation finalized by the U.S. Department of Education would “exclude education from a list of  ‘professional’ graduate degrees subjected to higher loan limits… The final rule lists the following graduate degrees as ‘professional’: pharmacy, dentistry, veterinary medicine, chiropractic, law, medicine, optometry, osteopathic medicine, podiatry, theology, and clinical psychology.”  The new rule will make it harder for educators to afford graduate school by setting “new limits on federal student loans” for teachers and school administrators seeking advanced degrees to enhance their content knowledge and meet requirements for licensure.

The Department of Education must publish in the Federal Register new rules that are being proposed, and receive public comments prior to making the new rules final.  In the case of redefining graduate programs in education as non-professional, there was considerable pushback from the public. Secretary McMahon’s department ignored the comments.  For K-12 Dive, Anna Merod and Ben Unglesbee report: “Commenters told the department that impacted degree programs include master of arts in teaching, master of education, education specialist, master of library sciences, and doctor of education… The department’s final rule said the agency received many public comments calling for including education as a professional degree or to otherwise allow higher borrowing levels for students pursuing advanced education degrees.  In their arguments, commenters cited teacher shortages and the importance of graduate programs for licensure advancement… Additionally commenters noted that career changers who want to enter the profession pursue master’s degrees in education for certification, especially in high-need areas.”

Many of us value public education, but increasingly we take these institutions for granted. While schools are essential to our neighborhoods, our communities and our children, most of us have not been inside a school for years due to lockdowns during our society’s epidemic of gun violence. Constitutional law professor, Derek W. Black recently shared some statistics which ought to remind us why public schools are so essential and at the same time so vulnerable to politics: “(A)s the largest government institution in the United States, public education is an obvious potential target of those aiming to undermine faith in government institutions. Public education is twice the size of the entire federal government. More important, it represents the most extensive and persistent relationship that citizens ever have with government. Public schools educate roughly ninety percent of Americans for more than a decade during their formative years.”

The Attack on Public Schools

The late Mike Rose, who devoted his long career at UCLA to preparing future members of the teaching profession, worried about what has, since the Reagan administration’s 1983 report, A Nation at Risk, been a political attack on the nation’s public schools: “Citizens in a democracy must continually assess the performance of their public institutions. But the quality and language of that evaluation matter. Before we can evaluate, we need to be clear about what it is that we’re evaluating, what the nature of the thing is: its components and intricacies, its goals and purpose…. Neither the sweeping rhetoric of public school failure nor the narrow focus on test scores helps us here.  Both exclude the important, challenging work done daily in schools across the country, thereby limiting the educational vocabulary and imagery available to us. This way of talking about schools constrains the way we frame problems and blinkers our imagination…”   (Why School? 2014 edition, pp 203-204)

Rose responded with a three year series of visits across the United States to the classrooms of excellent teachers identified by academics, by their peers, and by school district leaders. In the book which grew out of his school visits, Possible Lives, Rose described teachers at work and reflected on what school teachers do: “Our national discussion about public schools is despairing and dismissive, and it is shutting down our civic imagination. I visited schools for three and a half years, and what struck me early on—and began to define my journey—was how rarely the kind of intellectual and social richness I was finding was reflected in the public sphere… We hear—daily, it seems—that our students don’t measure up, either to their predecessors in the United States or to their peers in other countries… We are offered, by both entertainment and news media, depictions of schools as mediocre places, where students are vacuous and teachers are not so bright; or as violent and chaotic places, places where order has fled and civility has been lost.  It’s hard to imagine anything good in all this.” (Possible Lives, p. 1)

What do teachers do?

Here instead, however, is what those three years showed Rose about school teachers and the complexity of their work: “To begin, the teachers we spent time with were knowledgeable. They knew subject matter or languages or technologies, which they acquired in a variety of ways: from formal schooling to curriculum-development projects to individual practice and study. In most cases, this acquisition of knowledge was ongoing, developing; they were still learning and their pursuits were a source of excitement and renewal… As one teaches, one’s knowledge plays out in social space, and this is one of the things that makes teaching such a complex activity… The teachers we observed operate with a knowledge of individual students’ lives, of local history and economy, and of social-cultural traditions and practices… A teacher must use these various kind of knowledge—knowledge of subject matter, of practice, of one’s students, of relation—within the institutional confines of mass education. The teachers I visited had, over time, developed ways to act with some effectiveness within these constraints… At heart, the teachers in Possible Lives were able to affirm in a deep and comprehensive way the capability of the students in their classrooms. Thus the high expectations they held for what their students could accomplish… Such affirmation of intellectual and civic potential, particularly within populations that have been historically devalued in our society gives to these teachers’ work a dimension of advocacy, a moral and political purpose.”  (Possible Lives, pp. 418-423)

In a comprehensive 2014 summary, Rose defines what teachers do:  “Some of the teachers I visited were new, and some had taught for decades. Some organized their classrooms with desks in rows, and others turned their rooms into hives of activity. Some were real performers, and some were serious and proper. For all the variation, however, the classrooms shared certain qualities… The classrooms were safe. They provided physical safety…. but there was also safety from insult and diminishment…. Intimately related to safety is respect…. Talking about safety and respect leads to a consideration of authority…. A teacher’s authority came not just with age or with the role, but from multiple sources—knowing the subject, appreciating students’ backgrounds, and providing a safe and respectful space. And even in traditionally run classrooms, authority was distributed…. These classrooms, then, were places of expectation and responsibility…. Overall the students I talked to, from primary-grade children to graduating seniors, had the sense that their teachers had their best interests at heart and their classrooms were good places to be.”

Reacquainting ourselves with Mike Rose’s thinking is one way for us all to consider the complexity of public schools as institutions and the challenges faced by the professionals who spend six or seven hours every day working with our children.  I fear that few of the state legislators and federal officials who deride teachers, who insult teachers by denying their professional status, and who chronically underfund public schools have recently spent much time visiting a public school.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Education Industry, Ethics, Extremism, Failure, Ohio, Teachers, Teachers and Teaching, Teaching, Tennessee

John Merrow: AI Didn’t Kill Writing. The Testing Regime is the Culprit!

By dianeravitch
May 12, 2026 //
6

John Merrow was the education correspondent for the PBS Newshour for many years. Some people never forgave him for his many episodes lionizing Michelle Rhee. I forgave him when he filmed a final episode thoroughly exposing her cruel methods and her indifference to allegations of cheating.

John’s latest post seeks to correct the record, with reference to Dana Goldstein’s article in The New York Times blaming AI (artificial intelligence) for killing the teaching of writing.

No, says John, AI didn’t do it. Our hyper-focus on standardized testing and standardized writing and standardized thinking did it.

He writes:

This week the New York Times turned over a significant portion of its front page to a long piece headlined “How A.I. Killed Student Writing (And Revived It).”

In the piece, the usually reliable Dana Goldstein puts forth sweeping generalizations based on what about 400 teachers volunteered. This, in a nation with nearly 4 million public school teachers and another 1.5 million college faculty! Granted, most of these 5.5 million teachers probably aren’t teaching writing, but relying on self-selected sources seems dubious, especially for the front page. What we learn is that a few creative and dedicated teachers, frustrated by their students’ reliance on A.I., are having the kids write in class, on paper, with pens or pencils. That’s not really news, although Goldstein, a very good writer, brings their stories to life…and may make you wish you could be in their classes.

More than a year earlier Ben Cohen reported about the dramatic rise in the sale of ‘blue books’ on college campuses: Sales of blue books this school year were up more than 30% at Texas A&M University and nearly 50% at the University of Florida. The improbable growth was even more impressive at the University of California, Berkeley. Over the past two academic years, blue-book sales at the Cal Student Store were up 80%.

Both of these news reports hang on the same premise: Student writing is dead, and A.I. is the killer. I think that’s flat out false. Our obsession with test scores and our prioritizing quantity over quality are the culprits. Most education systems stopped trying to teach writing back when Artificial Intelligence was the stuff of science fiction, unfortunately. Playing up to politicians, the education bureaucrats (who generally don’t trust teachers) decided to ‘raise standards,’ which to them meant having students write more papers and read more books and plays. Any suggestion that writing one outstanding paper would be better than six or a dozen so-so papers fell on deaf ears.

And because writing skills can’t be tested by a machine, why bother? Since we don’t trust teachers, it would be foolish to rely on their evaluation of their students’ writing skills.

Happily, I know in my bones that lots of teachers have not given up. A quick Google search turns up a treasure trove of ideas for improving student writing, starting in the elementary years. Writing thank you notes, keeping a journal, and so on. Here’s one I think you will enjoy (and might want to share with teachers in your world).

It’s not semantics to assert that the goal is to develop writers, not “teach writing.” That’s an important distinction.

So what can teachers who want to develop writers in their classes do in 2026? First of all, take a deep breath because we’ve been through this before–back when the internet emerged. Soon some students discovered that they could download papers and submit them as their own. Next came profit-making companies offering papers written to order. While small-minded bureaucrats thought they could win that struggle by spending millions on technology that supposedly could scan papers and detect plagiarism, thoughtful teachers won that struggle by 1) reducing the number of papers assigned, and 2 )working with individual students as they developed their ideas and wrote drafts. It’s harder to cheat when the teacher is overseeing the process and when kids are writing about something they genuinely care about.

What’s called for now is emulating what my high school English teacher, William Sullivan, did nearly 70 years ago. Two or three times every week he would tell us to clear our desks of everything except for a single sheet of paper and a pencil. What followed was what he called a “2-8-2,” meaning that we had two minutes to think–no writing allowed–followed by eight minutes to write, and then two more minutes to read what we had written and correct any errors. He would put our writing assignment on the blackboard. Sometimes we would have to include a certain sentence, such as “I wish I had missed that train.” Or “I still wish I hadn’t missed that flight.”

Even today I still remember one particular assignment: “Turn out the light; I don’t want to go home in the dark,” which Mr. Sullivan told us were the dying words of William Sydney Porter and challenged us to explain the contradiction. After we turned in our papers, Mr. Sullivan told us that we knew William Sydney Porter as the writer O. Henry.

(Fun fact: Some forty or fifty years later I discovered that Porter actually did not contradict himself. His dying words were “Turn up the lights. I don’t want to go home in the dark.” Apparently Mr. Sullivan changed his words to create a challenging paradox for us to try to explain.)

Although I went to a private school with small classes and privileged students, Mr. Sullivan’s approach can work at all levels. I know this to be true because I taught working-class kids in a public high school, first generation African American college students in an HBCU, and young men serving sentences in a federal prison.

I used Mr. Sullivan’s “2-8-2” all the time. I got to know my students’ writing, and I’m convinced that their writing skills improved. They became writers, confident in their voices.

Frequent in-class writing worked then, and it should work in the age of Artificial Intelligence and with all the other ‘advances’ in our future.

However, policymakers and administrators have to behave sensibly and understand that ‘less is more.’ That means smaller classes, fewer students per teacher, and heightened trust in teachers. Those shouldn’t be a bridge too far, if we really want our young people to be thoughtful and capable citizens.

You can stop here if you wish. What follows is the story of my own dabbling in A.I., printed in my blog in April 2023, more than three years ago.

If you’re at all like me, you’re curious about Artificial Intelligence and new applications like ChatGPT and Bard. The brilliant Thomas Friedman of the New York Times says the world will never be the same again, but my interest is narrower: If students can simply ask Bard or ChatGPT to write their papers for them, how can teachers prevent this?

So, naturally, I turned to Bard, which told me (within seconds) that, while it can help students generate ideas, do research, improve their writing, and learn about different writing genres, it’s not supposed to be a substitute for original research and writing. Then it warned me to “Monitor students’ use of Bard to make sure that they are not plagiarizing or engaging in other forms of academic misconduct.”

Yeah, right. If I’m teaching English in a public high school, I probably have between 100 and 125 students! There aren’t enough hours in the day….

Second question: Can Bard help identify cheaters and plagiarists? Within seconds, I received an answer:

“There are a few things you can look for to tell the difference between original writing and prose provided by Bard.

  • Original writing is typically more creative and original than prose provided by Bard. Bard is trained on a massive dataset of text, so it can be very good at generating text that is grammatically correct and factually accurate. However, it is not always able to generate text that is creative or original.
  • Original writing is typically more personal and engaging than prose provided by Bard. Bard is a machine learning model, so it does not have the same level of understanding of human emotions and experiences as a human writer. As a result, its writing can be dry and impersonal.
  • Original writing is typically more nuanced and complex than prose provided by Bard. Bard is a large language model, but it is still under development. As a result, it can sometimes struggle to understand the nuances of human language. This can lead to writing that is simplistic or even nonsensical.

……

  • Ask yourself if the writing sounds like it was written by a human. Bard-generated text can sometimes sound robotic or unnatural. Original writing should sound like it was written by a human.

To put this the test, I gave Bard the following task:

I am one of six children, the second oldest and the first-born son. We grew up on a small farm with chickens, a few cows, a few pigs, and one goat. I’m now 81. Please write a short memoir of no more than 200 words about my childhood.

Within seconds, Bard spit out this:

“I was born in 1942, the second oldest of six children. We grew up on a small farm in the Midwest. My father worked hard to provide for our family, and my mother took care of the house and the children. We didn’t have much money, but we were happy.

I loved growing up on the farm. I spent my days playing with my siblings, helping my father with the chores, and exploring the woods behind our house. We had chickens, a few cows, a few pigs, and one goat. I loved taking care of the animals, and I learned a lot about hard work and responsibility.

I also learned a lot about nature on the farm. I spent hours watching the birds and the animals, and I learned to identify all the different plants. I loved being surrounded by nature, and it helped me to appreciate the beauty of the world.

I had a wonderful childhood on the farm. It was a time of innocence and discovery, and I will always cherish those memories.

Now that I am 81 years old, I still look back on my childhood with fondness. I am grateful for the opportunities I had, and I am proud of the person I have become. I know that my experiences on the farm helped to shape me into the man I am today.

Boring, and also wrong, and so I responded:

This is inaccurate. I was born in 1941, and our farm was in Connecticut. Worse, however, it does not capture either the small pleasures of collecting the eggs every morning or learning to milk cows, and it also does not capture the deep pain of watching a pig or steer that I raised being slaughtered. Please rewrite.

In just a few seconds, Bard responded by adding a few paragraphs, highlighted below to make it easier for you to read: “Sure, here is a more accurate and detailed memoir:

I was born in 1941, the second oldest of six children. We grew up on a small farm in Connecticut. My father worked hard to provide for our family, and my mother took care of the house and the children. We didn’t have much money, but we were happy.

I loved growing up on the farm. I spent my days playing with my siblings, helping my father with the chores, and exploring the woods behind our house. We had chickens, a few cows, a few pigs, and one goat. I loved taking care of the animals, and I learned a lot about hard work and responsibility.

I also learned a lot about nature on the farm. I spent hours watching the birds and the animals, and I learned to identify all the different plants. I loved being surrounded by nature, and it helped me to appreciate the beauty of the world.

One of my favorite things to do was collect the eggs every morning. I would wake up early and go to the chicken coop, where I would find a dozen or so eggs waiting for me. I would carefully collect the eggs and put them in a basket, then bring them back to the house. My mother would use the eggs to make breakfast, and I would always get to eat one of the freshest eggs in the world.

Another thing I loved to do was milk the cows. I would go to the barn in the evening and bring the cows into the milking parlor. I would sit on a stool and milk each cow in turn, collecting the milk in a bucket. The milk would then be used to make butter, cheese, and ice cream.

Of course, there were also some challenges growing up on a farm. One of the hardest things was watching the animals being slaughtered. I knew that it was necessary to eat meat, but I still felt bad for the animals. I would often cry when I saw them being killed.

Overall, though, I had a wonderful childhood on the farm. It was a time of innocence and discovery, and I will always cherish those memories. I am grateful for the opportunities I had, and I am proud of the person I have become. I know that my experiences on the farm helped to shape me into the man I am today.

OK, but even with this information, the writing remains pedestrian and without emotion. Human writers would know not to begin with their birthday, for one thing. They might lead with a sentence designed to keep the reader’s interest. Something like, “70 years later, at age 81, I can still hear the terrified squealing of the hog as it was strung up by its hind feet to be slaughtered….”

John Merrow

former Education Correspondent, PBS NewsHour

My blog: themerrowreport.com

“I don’t want to BE old when I am old.”  Jack LaLanne

Categories Literacy, Teachers and Teaching, Technology

Andy Spears: The Dangers of AI Schools

By dianeravitch
January 7, 2026 //
6

Andy Spears continues to raise the alarm about the drive by tech companies to replace teachers with some version of AI, or teaching machines. Think how much money can be saved after buying the machines! Machines don’t get salaries or pensions or healthcare.

The tech titans prefer to ignore the fact that humans learn best when they engage with other humans, who can express human approval or disappointment, can offer encouragement or a pat on the back.

Andy writes on his blog The Education Report:

two hands touching each other in front of a pink background

Photo by Igor Omilaev on Unsplash

I’ve written before about a network of private (and now charter) schools that use AI to drive instruction. To be clear: In these schools, students learn using laptops and AI, no teacher needed. 

Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano Nightmare Is Here

Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano Nightmare Is Here

ANDY SPEARS

OCTOBER 29, 2025

Read full story

Katya Schwenk takes a deeper dive into this horror-scape.

Academic instruction in Price’s schools is delivered via a suite of online education apps for two hours per day, leaving the afternoons free for Cybertruck construction and tech CEO make-believe. This is the brand around which her work revolves: 2 Hour Learning, which is billedas an “AI tutor” that can entirely replace all classroom teachers via a few hours spent glued to a laptop screen.

Peter Greene takes a look at recent research on AI and young users. The findings should raise alarms about using AI as the primary source of instruction. 

Curmudgucation 

Studies Show Issues With Students And AI Companions

Since the moment that large language models (LLM) and chatbots became available for students who wanted them to churn out serviceable schoolwork, schools have been concerned about the effect of AI on academic integrity. But an assortment of studies suggest there are other concerns that schools must reckon with…

Read more

Aura found that kids use AI for companionship 42% of the time, and over a third of those interactions involve talk about violence. Half of those interactions combine violence with sexual role-play. A study by Common Sense Media finds larger numbers, with 72% of teens reporting they have used an AI companion and 52% saying they use AI companions a few times a month or more.

Humans are built for connection. With other humans.

Children crave companionship – and they are finding it in AI bots. 

There are all sorts of issues with this, including the creation of a fantasy world in which one’s companion is always available and ready to meet the immediate needs of the human. 

There’s also the inability to develop the skills that allow for real human connection – listening to understand, nonverbal interactions, and managing emotions when things don’t go your way. 

Turning instruction over to AI means kids will spend even more hours of the day disconnected from other humans. It also seemingly increases reliance on AI tools to manage even basic tasks. 

Greene highlights the potential pitfalls of turning over academic instruction to an AI bot. It’s not clear whether any perceived rewards from doing so outweigh these enormous drawbacks.

Categories Curriculum, Online Education, Teachers and Teaching, Technology

Kathleen West: I’m Having Some Thoughts About Teaching

By dianeravitch
September 17, 2025 //
5

Thanks to Robert Reich, who posted this excellent commentary by veteran Minneapolis teacher Kathleen West. In addition to teaching, West is a novelist.

I start school tomorrow with 150 new students. Although I don’t know them yet, I’ll protect them with my life if/when a shooter decides we’re the target.

I decided to be an English teacher when I was in seventh grade. I’ve never really wavered in my vocation. I started volunteering in schools as a seventeen-year-old college freshman. I student-taught at twenty-one, the same semester in which I graduated Phi Beta Kappa from my elite liberal arts college. (There were only four of us teachers in my class at Macalester, and the school has since stopped offering teacher training because no one wants to do this job anymore.)

In my career, I’ve switched positions more than teachers usually do, I think because I keep hoping that there’s a utopian school community that embodies what I feel is possible in K-12 education. Maybe I can find the right grade level, I tell myself, the right school policies, the right leaders, that will make me feel at home. A parent of a student once told me I was born to be a teacher. It was a compliment — I’d done well for her kids. I do think I’m born for it, but I don’t really want to do it this year.

It’s my twenty-fourth year. Because I’ve taken three years off along the way, the math works out like this:

The Columbine shooting happened while I was student teaching at Tartan High School in 1999. The school had been designed in the 1960s progressive era, and the classrooms were situated in circles with a common space in the middle of each loop. The classrooms didn’t have doors.

The teachers sat in the auditorium on the afternoon of the first school massacre. Was it even safe to go to the auditorium, all together like sitting ducks? We teachers wondered this that day. We discussed how shooters in our school could just stand in the middle of our department areas and hit people in each room around the circle without even moving their feet.

The very next year, or soon after that, I started practicing active shooter drills with students. In the beginning, we all did the same things — turn off the lights, pull the shades, hide in the corner.

At one school, they wouldn’t tell us if the drill was a drill because they didn’t think we’d try hard enough to enact the protocols if we knew we weren’t actually going to get shot. Kids would always ask, “Is this real?”

“Probably not,” I told them. “Listen for the sirens. If we don’t hear them, it’s not real.” And then, we’d go back to talking about characters or commas, or whatever we were doing before the alarm sounded.

There was a big kerfuffle the year I was teaching third grade (I had decided maybe elementary was the utopia I sought) because the school moved to a run-hide-fight model where you trained children to throw scissors and staplers at the shooters who came to their classroom doors. Some of us thought that it was inappropriate to teach them to expect to be shot.

At my next school, we started table-top drills during which we discussed shooting scenarios. It was a Catholic high school (also not the utopia I imagined), and the kids were empowered to make their own decisions during attacks. I imagine this is because of liability? Like, if I, the teacher, decided to go out the window, and we all got obliterated that way, then at least the girls had had the choice to run down the hallway instead?

Anyway, you get the idea. My new school does the I Love U Guys model. We teach with our doors locked and closed all the time. We stay and barricade. We practice the system a bunch of times per year and assure the children that we’ll protect them with our lives if necessary.
Last week, my brother’s and my sister’s kids’ school was the latest site of a school shooting.

My brother was there, as was my sister’s husband. They all saw it. They were all there at Mass, not a location we normally practice in, by the way. We don’t practice escaping shooters at lunch or recess or in the auditorium because it’s super logistically hard to do. I think today’s shooters know that. All of today’s madmen and women have been through the same drills I just described for the last twenty-six years themselves.

So… in addition to being in a job where, despite my talents and qualifications and dedication to the craft, my earnings are capped in the five figures…

… in addition to being in a job where all/most/some parents think they know more than I do about how to teach…

…in addition to being in a job that suffers the whims of public opinion about our lack of quality and suitability as professionals…

…in addition to being in a job where successfully writing and publishing four novels makes me LESS employable (thanks to the snobbery of high school English departments??)…

I also have to be ready to die at work.

I already thought about it a lot, and now that six of my family members have actually been shot at in school, I’ll think about it more. I’ll go back tomorrow because I have to (I need a full-time income, I have a life and family), and also because it’s my vocation. I’ve always wanted to be a teacher.

But I don’t want to do it tomorrow.

Categories Guns in Schools, Teachers and Teaching

Denis Smith: What I Learned at the NPE Conference in Ohio

By dianeravitch
April 16, 2025 //
6

Denis Smith retired from his position at the Ohio Department of Education, where he oversaw charter schools (which are called “community schools” in Ohio). In this post, he describes what he saw at the Network for Public Education Conference in Columbus, Ohio, in early April.

He wrote:

When It’s About Hands Off! That Also Applies to Public Schools

The Hands Off! demonstrations at the Ohio Statehouse that drew thousands of protestors wasn’t the only gathering of activists last weekend in downtown Columbus. Just a short distance away at the Hyatt Regency Hotel, a smaller but equally passionate gathering of concerned citizens from across the nation came to Ohio’s capital city to attend the Network for Public Education’s National Conference and affirm their support for the common school, the very symbol of democracy in this increasingly divided nation.

That disunion is driven in part by the rapid growth of universal educational vouchers and charter schools, where public funds flow to private and religious schools as well as privately operated charter schools and where public accountability and oversight of taxpayer funds is limited or even absent. In many states, including Ohio, those public funds in the form of vouchers are drawn from the very state budget line item that is earmarked for public schools.

Of particular concern to the conference attendees is the division in communities fueled by vouchers, which have been shown in some states to subsidize private and religious school tuition exceeding 80% of those enrolled. In Ohio, according to research conducted by former Ohio legislator Stephen Dyer, the figure is 91%.Several speakers referred to this situation as “welfare for the rich” and “an entitlement for the wealthy.” 

The research shared at the conference also confirmed the findings of the National Coalition for Public Education that “most recipients of private school vouchers in universal programs are wealthy families whose children never attended public schools in the first place.” So much for the tired Republican rhetoric of vouchers being a lifeline of escape from “failing schools” for poor inner-city children.

Another strong area of concern shared at the NPE event was the growing intrusion of religious organizations like Life Wise Academy which recruit students for release time Bible study during the school day. While attendees were told that school guidelines direct that such activities are to be scheduled during electives and lunch, the programs still conflict with the normal school routine and put a burden on school resources, where time is needed for separating release time students and adjusting the instructional routine because of the arrival and departure of a group within the classroom.

One presenter, concerned about students receiving conflicting information, said that his experience as a science teacher found situations where there was a disconnect between what he termed “Biblical stories and objective facts.” In addition, he shared that a group of LifeWise students missed a solar eclipse because of their time in religious instruction.  

Some Ohio school districts, including Westerville and Worthington in Franklin County, had to amend their policies in the wake of HB 8, which mandated that districts have religious instruction release time policies in place. The district policies had been written as an attempt to lessen the possibility of other religious programs wanting access to students and the further disruption that would cause to the school routine. 

The recent legislative activity about accommodating religious groups like Life Wise is at variance with history, as conference chair and Network for Public Education founder Dr. Diane Ravitch pointed out in her remarks about the founding of Ohio. As part of the Northwest Territory, she noted that Ohio was originally divided into 32 plots, with plot 16, being reserved for a public school. No plot was set aside for a religious school.

Ohio became the first state to be formed from the Northwest Territory, and its provision for public education would become a prototype for the young republic. The common school, an idea central to the founders of the state, would be located such “that local schools would have an income and that the community schoolhouses would be centrally located for all children.”

Unfortunately, the idea of the common school being centrally located in every community is an idea not centrally located within the minds of right-wing Republican legislators. From the information exchanged at the conference, that is the case in the great majority of statehouses, and a matter of great concern for continuing national cohesiveness.

The theme of the NPE National Conference, Public Schools – Where All Students Are Welcome, stands in marked contrast with the exclusionary practices of private and religious schools where, unlike public schools, there are no requirements to accept and enroll every student interested in attending. While these schools are reluctant to accept students who may need additional instructional support, they show no reluctance in accepting state voucher payments.

Texas Rep. Gina Hinojosa. Photo: Texas House of Representatives

Texas State Representative Gina Hinojosa, one of the keynote speakers, told the audience about her experience in fighting Gov. Greg Abbott’s voucher scheme and the double meaning of the term school choice. “School choice is also the school’s choice,” she told the audience, as she estimated that 80% or more of state funds will go to kids who are already enrolled in private and religious schools.

Her battle with the Texas governor, who has defined the passage of voucher legislation in the Lone Star State as his “urgent priority,” is a tale of his alliance with Jeff Yass, a pro-voucher Pennsylvania billionaire who has donated $12 million so far to Abbott’s voucher crusade. 

Hinojosa was scathing in her criticism of Abbott and his fellow Republicans and of a party that once “worshipped at the altar of accountability.” Now, she told the attendees, “they want free cash money, with no strings attached.” 

“Grift, graft, and greed” is the narrative of appropriating public funds for private purposes, Hinojosa believes, a tale of supporting “free taxpayer money with no accountability.”

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. Photo: Denis Smith

The NPE conference ended with an address by Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, the 2024 Democratic Vice-Presidential nominee. With his background as a former teacher and coach, Walz had a strong connect with an audience comprised mostly of educators and public school advocates. His folksy language and sense of humor further endeared him to the conference attendees.

Based on the continuing bad behavior of Jeff Yass and other affluent actors in the voucher and charter wars, greedy bastards is a better descriptor than oligarchs, he observed. From the reaction of the audience and what they heard previously from Gina Hinojosa and other presenters, the language offered by Walz was a more accurate definition of welfare for the wealthy. 

At the end of his remarks, Walz encouraged educators not to despair but to accept their key place in society. “There is a sense that servant leadership comes out of serving in public education.”

Attendees at the NPE conference included educators, school board members, attorneys, legislators, clergy, and policy makers – a cross-section of America. Their presence affirmed a core belief that the public school, open to all, represents the very essence of a democratic society. And there is no debate about whether or notthose schools are under attack by right-wing legislatures intent on rewarding higher-income constituents with tuition support to schools that choose their students as they exercise the “school’s choice.”(As a devotee of the Apostrophe Protection Society, I applaud this distinction.)

So what are we going to do about this? Attendees left the conference with some strong themes.

The choir needs to sing louder.

Hope over fear. Aspiration over despair.

The road to totalitarianism is littered with people who say you’re overreacting.

Who are the leaders of the Democratic Party? They’re out there. On the streets.

It’s not just don’t give up. Be an activist.

As the loudness about the subject of what is more aptly described as “the school’s choice” gets louder,” you can bet that servant leaders like Diane Ravitch, Gina Hinojosa, Tim Walz and others are making a difference in responding to the challenge of servant leadership to ensure that the common school, so central to 19th century communities in the Northwest Territory and beyond, continues to be the choice of every community for defining America and the democracy it represents.

                                                                   

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Education Reform, Freedom to Learn, Freedom to Read, Funding, Network for Public Education, Networkfor Public Education Action Fund, Ohio, Supporting public schools, Teachers and Teaching, Vouchers

Nancy Flanagan: Teachers Must Be Heard!

By dianeravitch
April 12, 2025 //
3

Nancy Flanagan is a retired veteran teacher. Her blogs are always insightful because she sees the issues from the perspective of her long career in the classroom. In this post, she explains why some conferences work and some don’t. She wrote it after returning home from the Network for Public Education conference.

She writes:

I am just back from the Network for Public Education conference, held this year in Columbus, Ohio. Columbus is an eight-hour drive from my house, and we arrived at the same time as ongoing flood warnings. But—as usual—it was well worth the time and effort expended.

For most of my career—35 years—I was a classroom teacher. Garden-variety teachers are lucky to get out of Dodge and attend a conference with their peers maybe once a year. Teachers don’t get airfare for conferences in other states and often end up sharing rides and rooms, splitting pizzas for dinner. They go with the intention of getting many new ideas for their practice toolboxes—lesson plans, subject discipline trends and tips, cool new materials—and to connect with people who do what they do. Be inspired, maybe, or just to commiserate with others who totally get it.

In the real world (meaning: not schools), this is called networking. Also in the real world—there’s comp time for days missed at a weekend conference, and an expense form for reimbursements. Conversely, in schools, lucky teachers get a flat grant to partially compensate for registration, mileage, hotel and meals. In many other schools, nobody goes to a conference, because there’s just not enough money, period.

When you hear teachers complaining about meaningless professional development, it’s often because of that very reason—there’s not enough money to custom-tailor professional learning, so everyone ends up in the auditorium watching a PowerPoint and wishing they were back in their classrooms.

Back in 1993, when Richard Riley was Secretary of Education, his special assistant, Terry Dozier, a former National Teacher of the Year, established the first National Teacher Forum. (In case you’re wondering, the Forums lasted just as long as the Clinton administration, and Riley, were in the WH.) Teachers of the Year from all 50 states attended. The purpose of the conference was to engage these recognized teachers in the decision-making that impacted their practice. In other words, policy.

It was probably the most memorable conference I ever attended. I took nothing home to use in my band classroom, but left with an imaginary soapbox and new ideas about how I could speak out on education issues, engage policymakers, and assign value to my experience as a successful teacher. The National Teacher Forum literally changed my life, over the following decades.

But—the idea that teachers would start speaking out, having their ideas get as much traction as novice legislators’ or Gates-funded researchers, was a hard sell. Education thinkers aren’t in the habit of recognizing teacher wisdom, except on a semi-insulting surface level. In the hierarchy of public education workers, teachers are at the lowest level of the pyramid, subject to legislative whims, accrued data and faulty analyses, and malign forces of privatization.

Which is why it was heartening to see so many teachers (most from Ohio) at the NPE conference. The vibe was big-picture: Saving public education. Debunking current myths about things like AI and silver-bullet reading programs. Discussing how churches are now part of the push to destabilize public schools. New organizations and elected leaders popping up to defend democracy, school by school and state by state.  An accurate history of how public education has been re-shaped by politics. The resurgence of unions as defenders of public education.

Saving public education.  A phrase that has taken on new and urgent meaning, in the last three months. Every single one of the keynote speakers was somewhere between on-point and flat-out inspirational.

Here’s the phrase that kept ringing in my head: We’re in this together.

The last two speakers were AFT President Randi Weingarten and MN Governor Tim Walz. I’ve heard Weingarten speak a dozen times or more, and she’s always articulate and fired-up. But it was Walz, speaking to his people, who made us laugh and cry, and believe that there’s hope in these dark times.

He remarked that his HS government teacher—class of 24 students, very rural school—would never have believed that Tim Walz would one day be a congressman, a successful governor and candidate for Vice-President. It was funny—but also another reason to believe that public schools are pumping out leaders every day, even in dark times.

In an age where we can hear a speaker or transmit handouts digitally—we still need real-time conferences. We need motivation and personal connections. Places where true-blue believers in the power of public education can gather, have a conversation over coffee, hear some provocative ideas and exchange business cards. Network.

Then go home–and fight. 

Categories Courage, Creativity, Education Reform, Network for Public Education, Networkfor Public Education Action Fund, Resistance, Supporting public schools, Teachers and Teaching

John Thompson: This Worked in My Classroom

By dianeravitch
January 2, 2025 //
6

John Thompson retired after many years as a teacher in Oklahoma. Although he usually writes about politics, he has recently been writing about what he learned in the classroom.

He wrote:

If we want to prepare our students for the 21stcentury, educators, patrons, and politicians should relearn the lessons of history as to why classroom instruction is only one of the education tools we need to develop. 

After more than two decades of failures, the corporate reform belief that individual teachers can transform public schools has been disproven. But, holistic learning requires a team effort where we bring students out of the school, as well as bringing members of diverse communities into the school. This narrative describes the learning that my young friends and I shared when exploring nature.

The first time I took inner city kids camping and fossil hunting, a couple of minutes into the first lesson I became hooked by my new career. A third grader shouted that she had found a “real live dinosaur nose! It still has blood on it!” 

Sleepy Hollow Camp was the type of progressive institution you would expect from the veterans of the civil rights campaign “Freedom Summer” who helped lead the program. Sleepy Hollow was committed to positive behavioral reinforcement.  We received marvelous professional development for picking up on warning signs before misbehavior escalated, for disengaging when necessary, and for re-engaging kids in a constructive manner. The data from the families’ applications for the program gave us extremely valuable information. Outstanding social workers helped us to interpret the students’ records.  Professional development included cooperative games and culminated in a “ropes course” for building teamwork. 

Sleepy Hollow’s professional development for environmental education was fantastic.  We were provided the hands-on materials about our camp in the Arbuckle Mountains, where “twice this ancient mountain range had been worn away.  But three times it rose from the sea.” We identified plants and animals that flourished “where the American South met the West, and as a result we had as much biodiversity as anywhere in the United States.” 

When teaching such lessons to adolescents, it did not take long for them to recognize them as metaphors for their lives. The children first raised the issue of respecting the diversity of people, as well as biomes. And kids sought the reassurance that people who have been beaten down, like mountain ranges, can rise again. 

After each long day of adventures, an evening campfire was always perfect for celebrating new friendships, reflecting on the day’s discoveries, and contemplating the meaning of life.  

Rashad, one of the teen leaders at camp who was well-known at his middle school for political protests involving Black Nationalism, took charge of the evening talent shows. He excelled at satire, and my lessons often inspired the jokes and dance numbers. In such a setting, the power of children’s moral consciousness in driving the intentionality required for deep learning was clearly illuminated.    

August offered extraordinary meteorite showers as the campfires were dimming.  Walking back to the cabin or the tent, the kids were quiet and contemplative knowing that they were sharing something profound. Those night- time reflections borrowed the language of the Black church.  We were all lying silently in our bunks one night when the cabin’s leader, Tyson, volunteered an account of a family tragedy.  He asked if we knew the story behind the song “Amazing Grace,” and told his cabin mates about the slave trader, John Newton’s, conversion at sea and his becoming an abolitionist.  Tyson then sang for us an incredibly beautiful version of the hymn.

I came to know Richard a bit more intimately after violence broke out after a turtle was killed. Members from another street gang knew how devoted Richard was to wildlife, so they provoked a fight by killing a turtle he had adopted. 

The wiry and high-strung 8th grader began our most intense conversation with a calm account of the death of his grandmother along with six others in a boiler explosion at an Oklahoma City school. Summing up the lessons he learned through mourning, he spoke in a low voice, “I think about things – deep things,” while his eyes darted back and forth, frantically, on high alert for danger.

Richard switched the subject to tales about his days in California living with a rich uncle, an “O.G.” (Old-time Gangsta.) Richard talked about how he would plan ways to invest the family’s wealth to help the underprivileged.  Pumping his fists and striking out for emphasis, Richard repeated again, “I think of things – deep things.”

But everything changed for Richard when his uncle was busted on drug charges and all their money was lost.  He claimed to not being upset by all of that. It brought him closer to real suffering and prompted new ideas for helping the poor.  By this point in our conversation, he exhibited the explosive force of a television evangelist, proclaiming, “I think of things – deep things!”

Back home, his once-powerful uncle still had enemies, and Richard was now more vulnerable and afraid. But that just made him identify more with people who never had power and made him wish he could do good – not just for people, but for all of the earth.  That is why the turtle’s death upset him so much. Again subdued, Richard wrapped up his sermon, “I think of things – deep things.”

Richard’s peers confirmed that his uncle had had money, power, and a reputation, and that I would understand when we returned to the city and saw his family.  It was on the bus ride home that I fully grasped the trauma and fearfulness that dominated Richard’s home life. In those two weeks away, the camp had become a safe zone for him and he grew more and more agitated the closer we got to the inner city.  He sat pensively, practically glued to me for the ride home.  

Richard’s suffering was also apparent to the other students and I was struck by the empathy that they expressed. Even the kids who were the most “down” with the “Crips” — the gang that rivalled his uncle’s “Bloods” — started to treat him with kindness. Something transformative had happened over the course of the two weeks at camp.  

Richard was picked up by his uncle. Someone who had once displayed power and inspired fear was now a broken man and clearly an alcoholic. Richard made a point of introducing me as his friend, and the uncle earnestly voiced appreciation. Though we had just met, the former gang leader grasped my hand and forearm and made it clear that he needed to communicate his deep appreciation for helping his nephew. Like many others, O.G. grieved for the pain he had inflicted upon his family.

This, and countless other poignant conversations, illustrates the challenges faced by children and educators alike in trying to overcome the legacy of poverty. But it also points to solutions. Simply put, there is no substitute for honest and painful discussions with young people about the troubles and transgressions of their past, and often grim and anxious aspects of their present. Long after high-profile tragedies are forgotten by society, trauma endures for many survivors. Despite such stress and tragedy, Richard, his friends, and even his uncle, managed to hold onto their moral core. 

This could be the rock upon which school improvement in the inner city is founded. 

Categories Character, Creativity, Education Reform, Students, Teachers and Teaching

John Thompson: Will We Ever Get Free of NCLB’s Mandates and Let Teachers Teach?

By dianeravitch
December 6, 2024 //
36

John Thompson, historian and retired teacher in Oklahoma, wonders if the days of authentic teaching and learning will ever return. After a quarter-century of NCLB mandates, are there still teachers who remember what it was like in the pre-NCLB days. John does.

He writes:

Our public schools are facing unbelievable threats. We need to unite and fight for culturally meaningful, holistic, teaching and learning. To do so, I believe educators must remember the divisions that took off after the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB), which mandated test-driven, competition-driven instruction. So, I believe we need cross-generational discussions about both – the weaknesses and strengths of urban districts before the NCLB.

Corporate school reformers used top-down, accountability mandates to rapidly transform schools serving our poorest children of color, but in my experience, those were the students who were most damaged by their output-driven reforms that forced teachers to be “on the same page” when teaching the same lessons.

However, thirty-plus years ago when I started teaching in the Oklahoma City Public Schools, teachers’ autonomy was respected. Teachers in our 80% Black John Marshall High School were urged to build on students’ strengths, not just remediation. Many teachers failed to use that freedom, but we were encouraged to frontload the semester with lessons the students would love in order to turn them onto “learning how to learn.”

On the first day of school in the mid-1990s, I held up a copy of the old Oklahoma history textbook, Panorama of Oklahoma.. The book wasn’t as bad as the curriculum and the video that State Superintendent Ryan Walters is now mandating. But it pushed “inspiring” passages about our state. According to the curriculum guide, the book could be used to explore themes such as “The Spirit of Oklahoma” and “Oklahoma as the Heartland.” One suggested lesson was watching the video Oklahoma by the Department of Tourism.

When the laughter subsided, I showed my students the newly approved book we would use, The Story of Oklahoma, by the late Danney Goble and James Scales.  My job was to help the students “read the authors’ minds” and understand the most important information and concepts that they sought to communicate. I explained Goble’s sales pitch to the OKCPS where he admitted that his book was written on a higher level than other texts, but he demonstrated how students would be able to follow a lesson if it were told as a compelling story.

Goble chose the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 (as it was called back then) as one of the pivotal moments in the book. This massacre happened during the post-World War I panic known as “the Red Scare,” when immigrants and people of color were often seen as threats to America’s way of life, and when up to 300 died as a white mob burned the section of town known as “Black Wall Street.”  The text included a photograph of the burning of Mount Zion Baptist.

The lesson concluded with Goble’s closing words on Mount Zion:

All that was left was a shattered hull, an ugly hole – and an $84,000 mortgage that would have to be repaid … In a remarkable display of courage, tenacity, and will, Mount Zion’s congregation proceeded to rebuild the church.  Not only did they rebuild the church structure but they also paid off the original mortgage. …”

Goble concluded:

“Let that serve as our point. Those anonymous black Oklahomans endured and triumphed over momentous times.  Like others – nameless roustabouts, oil millionaires, tired housewives, …, even Tulsa’s white rioters – their lives were the stuff of which history was made.”

The end-of-class bell rang. Nobody moved or made a sound. Will, a baritone in his church choir, stood solemnly and said, “Please tell your friend, Dr. Goble, that we appreciate what he is doing.” The rest of the class remained seated, watching Will clasp my hand as if I were a preacher after a Sunday sermon and, then, the entire class lined up and shook my hand as each filed out of our room.

Similarly, our curriculum director encouraged me to start classes with the 20th century to get the kids hooked on history, and then double back to the first years covered in the classes. In World History, that meant we started with a scene from Cry Freedom with Denzel Washington, playing the role of the South African hero Stephen Biko, explaining imperialism.

As required, I would put each day’s learning standards on the blackboard, in addition to the day’s “History in the News.”  That meant that students would come in early to see what  contemporary topic would be discussed, and make suggestions for other topics, as well as report on conversations they had had at lunch about yesterday’s lessons. This was doubly meaningful when seniors visited when younger students were coming to class and got sucked into these higher level conversations.

One day, the older students previewed scenes in Marc Levin’s award-winning movie, Slam. It portrayed a Black rapper who used poetry to defuse conflict in the inner city. Before the start of the first-hour class, a crowd gathered to watch a gripping scene where the rapper used free verse to extract himself from a jailhouse situation.  As older students crowded around the television, the freshmen had to squeeze in closer to see.

Mike, a tall, impressive senior, was a perfect role model. His first-hour teacher knew he would quickly catch up on whatever he might miss in class, and freed him to guest-teach a lesson on Slam.  He gave a motivational lecture on the power of satire and metaphors.  He closed, as usual, by citing a line from Dalton Trumbo’s Spartacus, “I’d rather be here, a free man among brothers, facing a long march and a hard fight, than to be the richest citizen of Rome.”

We should remember the lessons learned by listening to students, and together building a culture where they share insights about topics ranging from Keynesian economics to Ralph Ellison’s childhood in Oklahoma City’s “Deep Deuce,” to Clara Luper leading the 1969 Oklahoma City Sanitation Strike march. They saw those lessons as a sign of respect. For example, a militant Black Nationalist and I got caught up in an after-school discussion of a New York Review of Books article on the history of Black families. When we realized that more than two hours had passed, he said, “You are the coolest white man I’ve ever known. You respect my brain.”

Again, I want us to move beyond the last two decades of teach-to-the-test, which almost all of my students saw as a sign of disrespect, treating them like a test score. We all need to participate in cross-generational conversations on how we can do both  – defeat the attempts by Ryan Walters to impose rightwing ideologies on our students, and build on their strengths and moral compass in order to prepare our kids for the 21stcentury.    

Categories Accountability, Creativity, Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Oklahoma, Race to the Top, Teachers and Teaching

John Thompson: How the Federal Mandate for Testing Destroyed Teaching and Learning

By dianeravitch
October 3, 2024 //
24

John Thompson is a historian and retired teacher in Oklahoma. He remembers the time before George W. Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” took control of the schools away from educators. Data-driven accountability, he writes, polluted the culture of learning. After more than two decades of failure, educators and students need a better way forward.

He writes in Oklahoma Voice:

When I first walked into John Marshall High School in 1992, I was stunned by the exceptional quality of so many teachers.

It had never occurred to me that such great teaching and learning was being done in high schools. Yes, there were problems, but each year, our school would make incremental improvements.

Then, the Oklahoma City Public Schools system (OKCPS) would bow to pressure and implement disastrous policies that would wipe out those gains — or worse.

I remember when OKCPS was first forced into policies that were later dubbed “corporate school reform.”

The No Child Left Behind Act, which was signed into law in 2002 by former Republican President George W. Bush, increased the federal government’s influence in holding schools accountable for student performance.

During the first years after the passage, local and state leaders often had some success in minimizing the damage done by school “choice” and high stakes testing. But, as in the rest of the nation, that resistance angered market-driven reformers who then doubled-down on harsher, more punitive policies.

They ordered everyone to “be on the same page,” and even today press educators to “teach to the test.”

I quickly discovered that this one-size-fits-all philosophy was disastrous for schools, teachers and students. And decades later, it still remains so.

It doesn’t take into account the difference between situational and generational poverty. It ignores that some students are seriously emotionally disturbed and/or burdened by multiple traumatic experiences, now known as Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs). And, it fails to factor in that children, who may have reading or math disabilities, have the potential to become student leaders.

The tipping point for me was when school staffing became driven by a primitive statistical model that could not distinguish between low income students and children of situational poverty receiving free and reduced price lunches as opposed to children living in extreme poverty with multiple ACEs.

Because of the additional costs of providing services for the most emotionally disturbed students, teachers in “regular” classrooms were assigned up to 250 students.

I had classes with 60 students.

Data-driven accountability pollutes our learning cultures.

School segregation by choice combined with test-driven accountability creates a culture of competition, winners and losers, and simplistic policies that ignore poverty and Adverse Childhood Experiences.

It is a policy imposed mostly by non-educators who ignore educational and cognitive scientific research.

As these quick fixes failed — just like educators and social scientists predicted they would — the “blame game” took off, fueling an exodus of teachers and driving out the joy of teaching and learning. The change in culture particularly affected the poorest children of color.

In order to improve our learning environment and our children’s outcomes, we must first get back to building on our strengths rather than weaknesses.

For instance, if we agree on a culture where we use tests for diagnostic purposes, rather than determining winners and losers, we could go back to the time when our curriculum committees included teachers, assistant principals, and parents.

Those meetings frequently ended in compromises that brought out the best in all sides and made our schools a desired place to learn and work.

Categories Accountability, Competition, Curriculum, Deregulation, Disruption, Education Industry, Education Reform, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Oklahoma, Standardized Testing, Teachers and Teaching

Washington Post: A Biased View of Tim Walz’s Record on Education

By dianeravitch
August 14, 2024 //
11

Laura Meckler and Hannah Natanson wrote about Governor Tim Walz’s record on education in Minnesota. In making decisions, Walz relied on his own knowledge as a veteran public school teacher and very likely on research, but The Washington Post misleadingly attributed his views to “the teachers’ union,” the bugbear of the far-right.

The article is saturated with bias against teachers unions and presents the pro-education Walz as a tool of the union, not as a veteran educator who knows the importance of public schools. Walz grew up and taught in small towns. They don’t want or need “choice.” They love their public schools, which are often the central public institution in their community.

The 2019 state budget negotiations in Minnesota were tense, with a deadline looming, when the speaker of the House offered Gov. Tim Walz a suggestion for breaking the impasse.

They both knew that the Republicans’ top priority was to create a school voucher-type program that would direct tax dollars to help families pay for private schools. House Speaker Melissa Hortman, a Democrat, floated an idea: What if they offered the Republicans a pared-down version of the voucher plan, some sort of “fig leaf,” that could help them claim a symbolic victory in trade for big wins on the Democratic side? In the past, on other issues, Walz had been open to that kind of compromise, Hortman said.

This time, it was a “hard no.”

He used his position’s formidable sway over education to push for more funding for schools and backed positions taken by Education Minnesota, the state’s teachers union of which he was once a member. His record on education will probably excite Democrats but provide grist for Republicans who have in recent years gained political ground with complaints about how liberals have managed schools.

Teachers and their unions consistently supported Walz’s Minnesota campaigns with donations, records show. And in the first 24 hours after he was selected as Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate, teachers were the most common profession in the flood of donations to the Democratic ticket, according to the campaign.

During the chaotic 2020-21 pandemic-rattled school year, Walz took a cautious approach toward school reopening that was largely in line with teachers, who were resisting a return to in-person learning, fearful of contracting covid.

Critics say that as a result, Minnesota schools stayed closed far too long — longer than the typical state — inflicting lasting academic and social emotional damage on students.

As a former teacher, Walz knew that teachers were reluctant to return to the classroom until safety protocols were in place.

Walz also advanced his own robust and liberal education agenda. He fought to increase K-12 education spending in 2019, when he won increases in negotiations with Republicans, and more dramatically in 2023, when he worked with the Democratic majority in the state House and Senate. He won funding to provide free meals to all schoolchildren, regardless of income, and free college tuition for students — including undocumented immigrants — whose families earn less than $80,000 per year. He also called out racial gaps in achievement and discipline in schools and tried to address them…

And as culture war debates raged across the country in recent years, Walz pushed Minnesota to adopt policies in support of LGBTQ+ rights…

In the 2022 elections, Walz was reelected, and Minnesota Democrats took control of the Senate. Democrats now had a “trifecta” — governor, House and Senate — and a $17.6 billion budget surplus.

After taking his oath of office in January 2023, Walz said Minnesota had a historic opportunity to become the best state in the nation for children and families. His proposals included a huge increase in K-12 education spending.

“Now is the time to be bold,” he said.

The final budget agreement in 2023 increased education spending by nearly $2.3 billion, including a significant boost to the per-pupil funding formula that would be tied to inflation, ensuring growth in the coming years. Total formula funding for schools would climb from about $9.9 billion in 2023 to $11.4 billion in 2025, according to North Star Policy Action. The budget also included targeted money for special education, pre-K programs, mental health and community schools.

Walz also signed legislation providing free school meals for all students — a signature achievement — not just those in low-income families who are eligible under the federal program…

In his 2023 State of the State address, Walz drew a pointed contrast between the culture wars raging in states such as Florida and the situation in Minnesota.

“The forces of hatred and bigotry are on the march in states across this country and around the world,” Walz said. “But let me say this now and be very clear about this: That march stops at Minnesota’s borders.”

Through his tenure, he repeatedly took up the causes of LGBTQ+ rights and racial justice.

He signed a measure prohibiting public and school libraries from banning books due to their messages or opinions, and another granting legal protection to children who travel to Minnesota for gender-affirming care.

Categories Bigotry, Character, Democracy, Education Reform, Elections, Ethics, Freedom to Read, Funding, Health, Minnesota, Teacher Pay, Teachers and Teaching, Unions, Vouchers, Walz, Tim
« Older Entries