Jeff Bryant recounts the story of the revival of Erie, Pennsylvania, which was in the depths of despair, both as a city and as a school district.
Manufacturing was leaving the city, white- and blue-collar jobs were disappearing, poverty levels were rising, the public schools were losing enrollment, and the city and its schools were in deep deficit.
He writes:
As good-paying jobs left Erie, families increasingly left the local schools. By the 2016-2017 school year, the district estimated its schools were 5,000 students below capacity, reported the Erie Times-News, which meant less money was coming into the district from the state, compounding the district’s long-standing funding deprivation from the state—among the lowest in Pennsylvania, according to the Erie City School District’s assessment.
Asking local taxpayers to dig deeper was not an option in a city where almost 28 percent of residents lived below the poverty level, the median home value was significantly below the state average, and an abundance of government-related buildings made almost a third of the real estate tax-exempt.
Erie’s school district was also bleeding money to an expanding charter school sector, one of the largest in the state. In the 2015-2016 school year alone, Erie paid more than $22 million to charter schools.
Students remaining in district schools tended to be the ones who were the costliest to teach. In a 2016 report using data from the 2014-2015 school year, 80 percent of Erie K-12 students were classified as poor, and 17.6 percent qualified for special education services. The district was also in the top 3 percent among Pennsylvania school districts for the number of English language learners.
Jeff explains how a bold superintendent won emergency fiscal aid from the state and launched community schools, before he moved on.
The funding, of course, was crucial, and the community school modeled transformed relations among parents, teachers, students, and schools. As the model become established, it brought hope to a community that had been battered by years of bad news.
Read Jeff’s article to learn how the community schools work in Erie.
Gary Rubinstein, a math teacher at Stuyvesant High School, has no patience for overblown claims. For a few years, he maintained a website devoted to debunking the spurious claims of “miracle schools,” such as those that claimed 100% graduation rates of their seniors but neglected to admit the high attrition that occurred before senior year.
He inevitably had to review the chain called Eagle Academy, which was founded by David Banks, who is Mayor-elect Eric Adams’ choice to be Chancellor of the New York City public schools. The Eagle Academy has six schools, one in each of the city’s five boroughs, and one in Newark.
Gary reviewed public records for the data, and he wondered why none of the city’s media had done what he did.
He writes:
Before Eric Adams was the next mayor of New York City, he was the borough president of Brooklyn. In that capacity, he worked with David Banks to create ‘The Brooklyn Nine’ where Banks would share some of the best practices from Eagle Academy to improve nine schools in Brooklyn. There is a short documentary about Eagle Academy on HBO currently called ‘The Infamous Future’ , similar to Waiting For Superman, made a few years ago in which Eric Adams says that the practices of Eagle Academy should be used in more schools so that they become ‘The Brooklyn 90’ and then ‘The Brooklyn 900′ and eventually the entire school system can replicate the success of Banks’ Eagle Academies. So this gives us some idea of what to expect in the next 4 or 8 years with Adams as Mayor and Banks as Chancellor.
The New York Board of Regents, which is the state’s Board of Education, has begun the process of eliminating the controversial edTPA as a requirement for certification.
The New York State United Teachers applauded the decision, which is almost certain. Theres no evidence that the test is weeding out people who would not be good teachers. It has had a disparate racial impact. At a time of teacher shortages, there’s a need to hire more teachers, not fewer.
Chicago was the starting place for Arne Duncan’s very bad ideas about school reform. Duncan boasted about how many schools he closed, working on the theory that the students would transfer to a better school or a charter school. As Eve Ewing documented in her book, Ghosts in the Schoolyard, Duncan’s punitive approach wreaked havoc on black and LatinX students, communities, and of course, neighborhood schools. Arne Duncan, the President who appointed him (Obama), and the mayor who followed his failing model (Rahm Emanuel), pushed policies that hurt children and educators. The mainstream media has not yet held them accountable. Perhaps this settlement will. Meanwhile, the thousands of African American teachers who were fired in New Orleans lost their court battle and will never receive either compensation or acknowledgement of the injustice done to them.
Mayor’s Board of Ed to vote on compensating Black educators harmed by racially disparate ‘turn-arounds’
CHICAGO, Dec. 13, 2021 — The Chicago Teachers Union issued the following statement today in wake of CPS’ statement on the Board of Education’s upcoming consideration this Wednesday of a settlement agreement related to the racially disproportionate layoffs and terminations of Black teachers and paraprofessionals in ‘turned-around’ schools in 2012, 2013 and 2014.
The Chicago Teachers Union aims to defend public education in the City of Chicago for staff and students—including for the vast majority of Black and LatinX people in the city.
On Wednesday, the Chicago Board of Education will vote on a settlement between the Chicago Teachers Union, Local 1, and CPS relating to layoffs and terminations from their positions that had a disparate racial impact on African American teachers and paraprofessionals resulting from the Board’s turnaround policies and in certain CPS schools in 2012, 2013, and 2014.
The agreement concludes nearly 10 years of litigation and will result in the creation and distribution of a settlement fund to benefit those staff members affected by the turnarounds. Resolving this matter is in CPS students’ best interest and will allow the District to move forward while the impacted teachers and staff will receive some compensation for the harm that was done to them. As a union, we have fought for increased funding for schools, adequate staffing and fair treatment of all teachers, regardless of race.
The cases settled are Chicago Teachers Union et al. v. Board of Education of the City of Chicago (Case Nos. 12-cv-10311 and 15-cv-8149), both pending in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. The CTU will issue further statements once the final terms of the settlement are documented and submitted to thecourt for approval.”
###
The Chicago Teachers Union represents more than 25,000 teachers and educational support personnel working in schools funded by City of Chicago School District 299, and by extension, over 350,000 students and families they serve. The CTU is an affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers and the Illinois Federation of Teachers and is the third-largest teachers local in the United States. For more information, please visit the CTU website at www.ctulocal1.org.Sent via ActionNetwork.org. To update your email address, change your name or address, or to stop receiving emails from CTU Press, please click here.
Teachers in New Hampshire, along with parents, sued the state to block a new law that bars teaching “divisive concepts.” This law is part of the backlash against critical race theory, which is understood by Republicans to mean anything about racism or any subject that makes students uncomfortable. I am not a lawyer, but it seems to me that such lawsuits should add the law’s infringement on the First Amendment rights of teachers and students to teach and learn without infringement on their speech. No doubt there may soon be state legislatures banning specific books, which is also a direct violation of theFirst Amendment.
For Immediate Release Dec. 13, 2021
Contact: Deb Howes President@aft-nh.org 603-930-9248
AFT-NH, Teachers, Parents File Lawsuit Against ‘Divisive Concepts’ Law Unconstitutional Law Puts Teachers in Untenable Situation and ‘Chokes off Learning’
CONCORD, N.H.—In a federal lawsuit filed today, educators and parents are taking a stand against New Hampshire’s attempt to implement a vague and punishing law that makes it impossible for public school teachers to know what and how to teach, as a result of a new law commonly known as the “divisive concepts” law. By attempting to restrict the way discrimination, diversity, bias, justice and struggle is viewed or taught, the measure puts educators at the center of a nightmare scenario: They would be required to comply with a law that appears to be at odds with the state’s constitution and its law mandating a robust and well-rounded public school education—an education that includes the teaching of accurate, honest history and current events.
The federal lawsuit, brought by AFT-New Hampshire, three N.H. public school teachers and two parents, aims to protect educators from this politically motivated new state law that put teachers at risk simply for discussing accurate historical concepts in their classrooms. At last count, New Hampshire has become one of eight Republican-controlled states that have passed laws aimed at censoring discussions around race and gender in classrooms, prompted by a conservative-led and -manufactured “crisis” over critical race theory. Dozens more are considering similar legislation.
The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for the District of New Hampshire in Concord, N.H., names the state attorney general, state Education Commissioner Frank Edelblut and the state Commission for Human Rights. It asks that the court rule the divisive concepts statute is unconstitutionally vague, making it impossible for educators to teach their students.
As the suit notes, the law is so hopelessly vague and broad that the New Hampshire attorney general and state Human Rights Commission have already had to clarify it, but their clarifications have not resolved the issues and are nonbinding, putting educators in the difficult position of having to interpret several different directives to educate their students. Teachers are at risk for not knowing what they’re legally allowed to teach in their own classrooms; they fear that if they get it wrong, they run the risk of public shaming, reputational damage, or discipline, including loss of license or termination.
In evident contrast to the divisive concept statute, New Hampshire’s uniform educational standards require that all public and private schools teach about “intolerance, antisemitism and national, ethnic, racial or religious hatred and discrimination that have evolved in the past” and that students learn about controversial events from multiple perspectives and ideologies.
The suit comes after Gov. Chris Sununu signed the New Hampshire budget bill—which included the divisive concepts provision—into law in June and the education commissioner created a webpage to facilitate third-party actions where the public could file complaints against teachers. That, in turn, led an extremist group known as Moms for Liberty to put a $500 bounty on the head of any N.H. teacher, offering cash to any informant who successfully lodges a complaint. Since then, educators report online harassment, obscenities and vicious attacks as a direct result of this political intimidation.
Because the law is vague and ambiguous, the suit states, it is nearly impossible for teachers to follow it, making them “highly susceptible” to arbitrary and discriminatory enforcement.
AFT-New Hampshire President Deb Howes decried the law. “This law has created fear among teachers who are not actually violating any New Hampshire law, but fear they could be targeted without evidence by people with a political agenda. Educators are terrified of losing their teaching license over simply trying to teach. This is something I never thought would happen in America,” Howes said.
Ryan Richman, a high school teacher in Plaistow, N.H., teaches world history and is a named plaintiff in the suit:
“I ask students to discuss events in the news and their connections with the past. Nine times out of 10, they want to discuss stories about oppression and how they’ve observed or experienced it—the Rohingya genocide, the Uyghur genocide, the Black Lives Matter movement. I shouldn’t lose my license for honestly discussing current events in my classroom,” Richman said. He also questions how, under the law’s prohibitions, he and his students can honestly discuss the Nazi philosophy that the Aryan race was superior to all others, the history of human chattel slavery in the American South and its impact on African Americans, or the deep-seated racial and cultural biases of the Conquistadores toward indigenous peoples.
American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, a former civics teacher, called the law “chilling and untenable.”
“Either teachers attempt to follow a law so defectively vague and broad that they can’t fulfill their instructional duties to adequately educate their students, or they choose to teach as they have and as the state law has long required, and risk career-ending repercussions,” Weingarten said.
“These educators are faced with an excruciating Hobson’s choice, all at the hands of this effort to smear and shame educators, divide our communities, and deny our kids opportunities to learn and thrive.
“Public education is the lifeblood of our democracy; its purpose is to prepare our children for life, including college, career and civic participation. The core of our job as educators is to teach critical thinking and the ability to freely evaluate ideas—that’s what helps students learn, particularly when it comes to the history of our country. We must teach both our triumphs and our mistakes, whether it’s enslavement, Japanese internment or the treatment of those with disabilities. We teach so we can help students create a better future, and that requires us to learn from the past. But this flawed law aims instead to stop that, and to politicize our schools and scapegoat the people who work in them.
“To meet the needs of every child, educators need resources, support and clarity, not further blaming and shaming codified into law. This untenable law—and the danger it poses to educators and the kids they teach—must be struck down.”
# # #
The American Federation of Teachers is a union of 1.7 million professionals that champions fairness; democracy; economic opportunity; and high-quality public education, healthcare and public services for our students, their families and our communities. We are committed to advancing these principles through community engagement, organizing, collective bargaining and political activism, and especially through the work our members do.
If you would rather not receive future communications from AFT, let us know by clicking here. AFT, 555 New Jersey Ave NW, Washington, DC 20001 United States
Mother’s first class, around 1950, at Skabersjöskolan, where I myself also went to school.
A friend in Sweden sent this article via Twitter. It was written by Jenny Maria Nilsson. I went to Google and asked for a translation from Swedish to English. Sweden is even farther down the road to privatization than we are. A conservative government in the early 1990s opened the way to public funding of independent schools, many of which operate for profit.
She writes:
The goal for primary school is not millions of different things but first and foremost education. If that goal is achieved, it certainly also provides other things: life opportunities, education and freedom, social interaction, a place for children to be and so on, but the school’s goal is teaching a basic curriculum.
In the book about the digitalisation of the Swedish school, which I have contributed to, I write: “What is the school’s task? To be a marketplace for all kinds of commerce, an arena for the edtech industry, a pseudo-market for welfare entrepreneurs and consultants, an advertising opportunity for municipalities, schools and individual teachers, a leisure center where children can thrive while parents are at work, an institution that organizes social support, a place where educators are responsible for identifying and developing great talent, an organization that will kick-start your child’s career, rank your child and let it make contacts with others in its social group, a place for admiration and curling of young people or vice versa a place where you put children in place and so on. ”
Tax-financed primary school is none of this but a “room” organized by us where previous generations through teachers and other school staff strive to convey the basic practical and theoretical knowledge that has been accumulated in various fields. The goal often seems to me to be distorted, the school system has increasingly been characterized by what I call the era of panic, where more people are looking for things that have nothing to do at school. The school has become a means for various special interests rather than a goal in itself.
To leave the era of panic, we need to navigate an era where school and school institutions and administration can maintain integrity. An era where the school is a cohesive unit that honors its knowledge and education mission – what I call the era of the monolith.
Steven J. Koutsavlis, a research associate at the National Center on Privatization in Education reviews Audrey Watters’ new book on the history of education technology in schools. Its title is Teaching Machines: The History of Personalized Learning.
Koutsavlis writes:
On account of the pandemic, there has been a seismic shift to remote or hybrid instruction. However, long before COVID-19, forces to harness instruction to technology were at play within the American school system. In Teaching Machines: The History of Personalized Learning (MIT Press, 2021), Audrey Watters masterfully explores this story and explains the consequences technology has had on the nature and architecture of American schooling.
In this NCSPE excerpt, in particular, Watters establishes the foundation for her analysis with a depiction of the first efforts of the Harvard psychology professor B.F. Skinner to mechanize learning. Skinner would go on to develop several teaching machines during the Sputnik era and beyond. Watters explains how he incorporated his work as a behaviorist into the design of these learning devices.
Skinner, along with other progenitors of teaching machines such as education psychologist Sidney Pressey, aimed to pioneer the automation of pedagogy, “freeing the teacher from the drudgeries of her work so that she may do more real teaching, giving to the pupil more adequate guidance in his learning,” Watters writes. In doing so, they prioritized the interests of private entities looking to engineer systems of learning at the expense of teachers and school leaders who aimed to engender more democratic modes of education.
The posture of automated learning presumes that the work of evaluating student responses and guiding them to new levels of understanding can simply be outsourced to a programmed device and does not require the nuanced touch of a seasoned practitioner with deep content knowledge. Yet the word “assessment” itself derives from the Latin assidēre, meaning “to sit down to.” The role of the teacher to sit beside children and listen deeply and intently, not only to learn how students are approaching a particular task, question, or problem, but also to hear from them about what piques their curiosity about the work at hand and motivates them to persevere. Watters deftly details how even the most well-designed or well-intentioned teaching machines fail to achieve this. She moreover describes how critics of Skinner such as Paul Goodman raised these concerns as they saw these devices dehumanizing the educational process.
“Who, then, will watch the puzzlement on a child’s face and suddenly guess what it is that he really doesn’t understand, that has apparently nothing to do with the present problem, nor even the present subject matter?” Watters quotes approvingly from Goodman’s 1960 book, Growing Up Absurd. “And who will notice the light in his eyes and seize the opportunity to spread the glorious clarity over the whole range of knowledge; for instance, the nature of succession and series, or what grammar really is: the insightful moments that are worth years of ordinary teaching.”
Even with advanced programming and interactive computer displays, personalized teaching machines or programs may not be able to elucidate nuanced understandings of difficult concepts with struggling learners. Independent work with these programs is often unsupervised, and students may receive unauthorized assistance to particular questions instead of actually supplying their own authentic response. A recurring issue with struggling learners is also the motivation to complete the tasks themselves. Extended independent assignments often, in fact, result in fatigue and non-completion for students who are still building task stamina.
Watters also writes about the very challenges of implementing such programs, where private demands for technocratic control over the levers of schooling have clashed with the needs of actual practitioners and students. As we see in contemporary education settings, Watters documents that programs were often rolled out in a hasty and haphazard fashion, unsupported by research evidence demonstrating their effectiveness or appropriateness for students and without adequate levels of teaching training or adoption.
Programmed instruction in the form of teaching machines as well as the modern incarnation of computerized learning engines, Watters likewise makes clear, represent a highly systematized and standardized form of education that collides with more progressive, constructivist, and student-led pedagogical methods. They also reify practices and norms within school systems that promote a highly functionalist model of education, where students are fed bits of information as they are trained to complete discrete tasks serving little more than the informational needs of private companies.
While programmed learning systems and algorithms aim to provide individualization and personalized learning, Watters demonstrates how they can conversely serve to stifle creativity and individual expression, on the student, teacher, school, and system level. “These technologies foreclose rather than foster possibilities,” Watters writes.
For longtime followers of Watters’s blog, which is now on hiatus, Learning Machines will fulfill all expectations. For those who haven’t read Watters’s blog, this excerpt should pave the way to reading the book. Agree or not with Watters, readers will be glued and challenged.
The IDEA charter chain is one of the largest and most aggressive in Texas. Betsy DeVos showered more than $200 million on IDEA to help it grow faster and to expand in other states. But IDEA, with so much state and federal money coming in, developed a taste for luxury. Its executives and board planned to lease a private jet for $2 million a year, but the publicity put the kibosh on that plan. The company also had box seats for professional basketball games in San Antonio. In the wake of bad publicity, the founder of IDEA decided it was time to mosey on, and he did so with a $1 million golden parachute. The corporation was taken over by the other co-founder and a new chief financial officer, but the board asked them to resign and they did.
Recently, Texans learned that IDEA bought a hotel for about $1 million. The state Attorney General was looking into this, and the press wanted more information about why a charter chain bought a hotel. A local newspaper–the Progress Times in Mission, Texas– reached out to IDEA and asked for copies of the documents involved in the purchase of the hotel.
IDEA claimed it had identified 56,386 documents responsive to the request.
To process the request, IDEA asked the Progress Times to pay $5,830.60. The total included $5,638.60 for copies, $160 for labor and $32 for overhead.
To avoid paying thousands for copies, the Progress Times asked to view the documents. IDEA responded by requesting a decision from the Attorney General’s Office.
The Attorney General said that some of those documents could be released to the newspaper. But now IDEA is suing the Attorney General to block the release of the documents.
Do you know of any school districts that bought a hotel? Business as usual for IDEA.
Robert Kuttner wrote the following for The American Prospect, which he co-founded and where he is co-editor. It is “the authoritative magazine of liberal ideas.” I urge you to subscribe.
As the EU provides rules for gig workers, young people foul up Kellogg’s strikebreaking plans. The certification of one Starbucks out of the thousands in the U.S. is getting an appropriate amount of attention—the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single latte. My colleague Harold Meyerson has further thoughts on how to organize fed-up workers who haven’t been reached before. But that wasn’t the only interesting development in worker organizing this week.
After 1,400 striking workers at four Kellogg plants rejected the latest contract offer, the company made plans to hire replacement scabs. There was just one problem: organized discontent. A poster on the popular Reddit community r/antiwork, which has 1.3 million members, got members to surge fake applications to the online hiring portal. Then a young TikTok user created a codeto automatically fill out fake applications for the jobs perpetually. Kellogg may find it impossible to distinguish the real applications from the bogus ones. The kids are all right.
Meanwhile, in Brussels, the EU has proposed regulations that will give gig workers, an estimated four million in the 27-nation federation, most of the same rights as payroll workers. That would include minimum-wage protections, vacation pay, unemployment benefits, and protections against misclassification.
If it can happen there, it can happen here. Biden’s Labor Department has begun a major offensive against employers who try to classify regular workers as contractors to deny them benefits and the right to unionize. And if the platform model of exploiting workers can be shown to be vulnerable in Europe, that makes it easier to restore worker rights here.
Europe, incidentally, is not experiencing a Great Resignation, because workers there are treated better to begin with. Credit the pandemic or credit a shift in consciousness, but we are seeing definite gains to worker power on both sides of the Atlantic.
Blog reader Kathy Irwin sent the following comment, which shows how important publicschools are as the heart of their communities. This shows why we fight against privatization of public assets, of which public schools are the most important.
She wrote:
A “pioneer” in the Community School Movement was 1929 Elsie Ripley Clapp when she took John Dewey’s thinking on democracy into The Ballard Memorial School in Jefferson County Kentucky. Not all that far from Mayfield, Kentucky where today the public high school is still standing after last night’s devastating series of tornadoes.
Mayfield High School has been turned into a shelter. People are taking refuge there. They are being fed, treated for injuries, fed nourishing, cafeteria meals. Clothing is provided, WiFi, relocation services, even transportation to another safe destination.
It does not take much to imagine this as an example of a community school IN ACTION. No one chose this weather catastrophe but it serves to remind us of what resources community schools can coordinate when administering to The Moment.
Elsie Clapp later ran a community school in FDR’s industrially ravaged Arthurdale, West Virginia. Starving families were literally selling body & soul just to stay alive when this Great Depression era school sprang up from a buckwheat farm and began demonstrating how public schools can enter a crisis and become the HUB and the ❤️ HEART of people-directed restoration and recovery.
Charter schools are in no position to do any of this work. It is not in their “DNA”. But it is the genetic makeup of community schools and there is plenty of crisis at hand. The Pandemic is the monster opportunity but so is the climate crisis headed our way.
Elsie Ripley Clapp learned how to enter, enjoy and energize the very humane energy stream of people-powered problem-solving. Community schools walk right into the middle of the fray, facing it head-on because they are the practical embodiment of We The People.
Diane Ravitch's blog 