Someday soon, when dispassionate observers write about the pandemic, the biggest question will be why so many people fought to remain unprotected from the deadly virus. Rational explanations don’t work. Why would parents insist on their children’s “right” to catch the virus? Why would state governors and legislatures oppose life-saving mandates?
Here is an analysis of COVID death rates.
The issue of parent rights has emerged as part of a larger strategy to control what topics can be taught in school and which books students can read. Teacher professionalism has been pushed aside as Republican politicians advance legislation to protect parent rights.
Jan Resseger points out that basic parent rights already exist: parents can decide whether to enroll their child in a public or private school. But the issue becomes heated when politicians seek to give parents power over curriculum, reading lists, and teaching.
The issue of parent rights is directly related to the manufactured controversy of “critical race theory” and conflicts over COVID protocols. “Parent rights” politicizes decisions about mask mandates and vaccinations. Some very noisy parents insist that they can send their children to school without masks or vaccines. Their “right” to ignore public health requirements puts other children’s safety at risk. Similarly, rightwing ideologues are using the CRT issue to claim that parents have the right to control or censor what their children are taught.
Children too have rights, she maintains, and among them are the right to learn free of outside political interference.
The Network for Public Education created a website where. Parents could express their views about their schools. This post was written by Jessica Piper, a mom and a farmer in rural Missouri.
She writes:
I am a rural woman. I am a subsistence farmer raising hogs and chickens in Northwest Missouri in a town of 480 people. I live in a century-old farmhouse on a few acres on the Iowa border that we purchased for less than the price of a new car. I was also an American Literature teacher for sixteen years, and my children are all products of rural schools. Our youngest is still in school and her class, the entire fourth grade, consists of 16 children.
Public schools are the heart of rural Missouri. The school bus picks up my daughter at the end of our driveway every morning, avoiding the chickens pecking in the gravel. She arrives at a tiny school that supports her and knows her well. She eats in the cafeteria that also serves as the gym. We mark the cafeteria Thanksgiving meal on our calendars to eat lunch with our kids—the turkey is pretty good but we really come for the annual tradition and because our kids expect us. Entire communities gather for Christmas pageants and band and choir concerts in our rural schools. We attend Friday night football and basketball games and reserve the rest of the evenings for softball or baseball. We know the teachers and we support schools with raffles and by buying apples and beef jerky from the yearly FFA sales. Nearly every event in our small community revolves around our school.
I tell you the story of rural schools because we are in a fight to keep our public schools funded and open in Missouri. In my state, we are 49th in funding for public schools. We don’t provide public schools with enough for the basics. The state funds just 32% of schools’ budgets, which means that residents must pay for the bulk of their local school expenses through property taxes. That means that our system is highly inequitable. The defunding of Missouri public schools has happened over the last decade, but has been on warp speed in the last five years. The school funding formula was adjusted to lower the amount a few years back, meaning we lowered the funding bar to be able to claim we met the bar. And now, even more bad news for Missouri rural schools: a voucher scheme.
In 2021, Missouri Republicans devised and signed into law a system for vouchers that will further defund public schools. This is how it works: Missouri taxpayers can receive a dollar-for-dollar tax credit that will pay for private school vouchers. In essence, public tax funds will be diverted to private or religious schools with no oversight or accountability for student performance. Missouri will allow folks to essentially pay their taxes directly to the private school of their choice, defunding public schools in the process. In rural Missouri, our schools are already strapped for resources. Diverting money away to any fly-by-night charter, or a private school that accepts vouchers will devastate our rural schools.
When schools are defunded, the next move is often consolidation. When a school consolidates, students may be travelling to and from school for over an hour a day. School consolidations also ravage small communities and often cause ripples that can be felt for years. In my town, the school is the largest employer. Community members who work for the school district receive health insurance through their employer, while disadvantaged children are fed through the school year through the school free lunch program. School closures cripple small businesses and decrease property values. Our main streets empty out with the loss of a local school. When schools consolidate, rural communities lose their economic epicenter.
We must fully-fund public schools in an equitable way for all children to have the opportunity that a public education promises. Rural students and our small communities count on public schools. Charter and privatization schemes purposely funnel public tax money into private hands. That’s harmful to rural Missouri public schools and to our kids.
Jessica Piper is a candidate for state representative in rural Northwest Missouri. She received her BA in English and her MA from the University of Arkansas at Monticello. She was a tenured American Literature teacher and frequently writes about rural schools and school funding. She lives on the Missouri/Iowa border with her husband, children, and two dogs. Piper is a farmer who raises hogs and chickens.
Nancy Flanagan, a retired teacher in Michigan and expert blogger, asks rhetorically, “Who is to blame?” Obviously the shooter and his parents, who bought the murder weapon and did not lock it away.
But there are other causes of the senseless killings, she writes.
Two things—true things—are repeated endlessly in these dialogues. The first is that the nation exposed its true values nine years ago after the slaughter at Sandy Hook Elementary, choosing unrestricted gun ownership over the lives of children. The second is that we need a greater understanding and focus on mental health. In our schools, of course.
What is often missing from these heart-wrenching discussions is the fact that schools are just like malls and movie theatres and churches and political rallies—stages for playing out what it means to be an American citizen in 2021, our deepest principles and beliefs.
Despite selfless and heroic actions, despite good parenting and good teaching and due diligence on the part of school administrators and counselors—we live in a pretty ugly country right now.
We live in a country where Kyle Rittenhouse walked free. Where senators and governors boldly lie about election results. Where parents, urged by astro-turf organizations, mob board meetings to protest the teaching of facts and requiring masks in a deadly pandemic. Where thousands of brutal insurrectionists attacked our most sacred building and democratic processes, led by the President of the United States.
Also this: the Oxford HS shooter lives in a state where a gang of angry young men conspired to kidnap and execute the Governor, fantasizing about taking her to a remote location and ‘putting her on trial.’
None of this mitigates the reprehensible behavior of this teenager. He is fully responsible for what he did. But it’s worth thinking about the unique context of growing up in America, the people respected as leaders in this nation, the ruthless tactics used to acquire and maintain power and ‘freedom.’
She discusses answers like school counselors, mental health programs, social-emotional learning, and the backlash against them.
It might help to pay as much attention to individual children and their problems as we pay to their test scores.
If we were truly a nation that cared about life, we would enact gun control laws and stop the slaughter of children.
Samuel Abrams is the Director of the National Center for the Study of Privaization in Education. He writes here about his recent work on education issues in France. France has a long history of public schools, but it also subsidizes religious schools. A candidate for President proposed. That France should authorize charter schools. Her reasoning was similar to that of charter proponents in the U.S., that charter schools of the “no-excuses” type would improve the academic skills of the poorest children.
Abrams wrote the following introduction to an article he co-authored with a French political scientist, published in Le Monde.
Abrams wrote:
France is widely known as a country with a strong commitment to public education. Unlike the United States, which makes no mention of education in its Constitution, France has made education a centerpiece of each iteration of its five constitutions. In its Constitution of 1791, the nation’s first, the commitment was frank: “There will be established a system of uniform and free public education in subjects indispensable for all citizens, with the organization to take place gradually in concert with the division of the kingdom.”
Yet since 1959, France has funded education at private schools—which are primarily Catholic—through a system called sous contrat (“under contract”), whereby the government covers about 90 percent of tuition, and schools, in turn, must hire only state-certified teachers and follow the national curriculum. About 15 percent of France’s primary and secondary schools fall into this category.
During the current presidential campaign, one candidate, Valérie Pécresse, proposed vastly expanding the sous contrat system to include charter schools. Pécresse called specifically for charter schools of the “no-excuses” ilk to address underperformance in such marginalized regions as the banlieues surrounding major cities and declared that she would like 10 percent of the nation’s public schools to function in this manner by 2027.
In a lecture on educational privatization that I gave in October as a visiting scholar at the Institute of Advanced Studies at CY Cergy Paris University, I addressed Pécresse’s proposal and its implications. My host, a political scientist named Philippe Bongrand, afterward suggested we co-author an op-ed on this topic. Our op-ed appeared in Le Monde on November 30. Below is my English translation, followed by the original.
Samuel E. Abrams
Director, NCSPE
Abrams translated the article: into English:
Public Contract Schools Risk Exacerbating the Problem of Segregation
Samuel E. Abrams and Philippe Bongrand
English translation
Le Monde, November 30, 2021
In outlining the educational platform for her presidential candidacy in a speech in Venoy (Yonne) on October 12, Valérie Pécresse proposed transforming 10 percent of the nation’s public schools into “a new kind of public school under contract, inspired by ‘charter schools’ found in England and Sweden.” These schools, which would be primarily located in marginalized neighborhoods, would benefit, Pécresse declared, from the managerial autonomy currently exercised in France by private schools under contract, which account for 15 percent of the nation’s 60,000 primary and secondary schools. In these charter schools, “enrollment will depend on parents and students abiding by a charter of commitment.”
Mistakenly attributed to Sweden and England by Pécresse, charter schools, in fact, originated in the United States in 1992. Charter schools benefit from exemptions from conventional rules governing administration and curriculum in exchange for exhibiting a certain level of performance by their students on state-mandated tests. They now constitute 7 percent of American public schools. Sweden’s free schools (friskolor), also launched in 1992, and England’s academies, established a decade later, comport far more with the ideals of a free market in education than with the concept of posting specific results for their students on standardized tests.
In her speech, Pécresse echoed the typical arguments of charter school advocates, vowing to “combine the best of public and private teaching methods” to increase the effectiveness of teachers and to narrow the achievement gap for disadvantaged children. However, the research accumulated over the past thirty years calls for vigilance, to say the least.
First, rigid contracts at charter schools for parents and students have had perverse effects. Not all families have the necessary resources to commit to and abide by such contracts. The rigidity of these contracts alone discourages many parents from entering lotteries to enroll their children in such schools. For many of the students who do enroll, the steep academic and behavioral expectations prove to be too much, leading to high levels of attrition. Conventional neighborhood public schools then find themselves with even higher concentrations of struggling students, which, in turn, reinforces the desire of many parents to avoid them. Such charter schools in France would accordingly risk compounding the problem of segregation already present due to many selective pathways [including those created by the private schools under contract].
Second, the highly directive pedagogical methods that define such charter schools cultivate mechanical compliance rather than nurture the agency necessary for students to become independent learners. These charter schools, commonly referred to as “no-excuses” schools because of their quasi-military code of behavior, share a telling acronym, SLANT: Sit up; Listen; Ask and answer questions; Nod in acknowledgment of understanding a point or lesson; and Track the eyes of the speaker. In Scripting the Moves (Princeton University Press, 2021), the sociologist Joanne W. Golann documents how this strict approach to instruction undermines authentic learning.
Third, the arrangement whereby charter contracts hinge on student results on state-mandated tests can place untenable pressure on staff. Such pressure engenders relentless teaching to the test and leads administrators to quantify the “added value” of teachers. The leading network of “no-excuses” schools (named KIPP for Knowledge Is Power Program) loses a third of its teachers each year. Such turnover over time compromises pedagogical continuity and thus the quality of instruction.
Foreign policy borrowing should derive from substantial academic research. There are far better lessons to be learned from looking abroad. Academic progress in Finland, for example, has not been the result of rigid contracts with parents and students, nor, more generally, from the privatization of schooling. The Finnish model is based on better training and pay for teachers along with a more holistic approach to learning, involving many classes in music, art, carpentry, and cooking, all of which make school more enticing for students while implicitly teaching important lessons in math and science.
Skeptics reflexively reject the example of Finland because the country is small and homogeneous. Yet Finland’s Nordic neighbors—Denmark, Norway and Sweden—are similar in size and composition. For the seven administrations of the OECD’s Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), [administered every three years] from 2000 to 2018, the mean score for all OECD students in science was 497. [One year of learning corresponds to about 35 points.] The mean score for students in France was 499; in Denmark, 492; in Norway, 493; in Sweden, 499; and in Finland, 543.
Coming soon: Priyadarshani Joshi, “Perspectives from Principals in Nepal on What Motivates and Constrains Public Schools from Instituting Changes to Compete with Private Schools,” NCSPE Working Paper No. 246; Joanna Härmä, Low-fee Private Schooling and Poverty in Developing Countries (Bloomsbury, 2021), NCSPE Book Excerpt No. 4. Visit our Website
Andre Perry, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, urges parents to speak out against fake conspiracy theories that are being cynically used to undermine public schools, their teachers, and freedom to teach and learn.
Perry writes:
Power-hungry politicians and bigots have always appealed to white supremacist values to achieve their political goals. In the 1950s, politicians latched onto white resistance to desegregation by turning busing into a trigger for white aggression. Children had been bused since the 1920s. But after the landmark Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education and the subsequent rulings to enforce it, busing became synonymous with a court-ordered invasion of white privilege. White women fought on the frontlines of the racist resistance to Black families integrating white schools. Politicians and right-wing activists amplified their fury and turned it into a movement.
School busing — not the fact that adults were attacking school buses with rocks and spitting on children — became the supposed threat to democracy. The practice of manufacturing fear around integration has been repeated ever since, with every advance in the Civil Rights Movement facing a racist backlash, including the current uproar over critical race theory, as inaccurately depicted, following the Black Lives Matter protests of the last two years.
Many of the mama bears coming out to protest now are direct political descendants of the white evangelicals who felt embittered about Supreme Court decisions and state policies around school desegregation, the teaching of evolution, the expansion of the curriculum to include multicultural voices, comprehensive sex ed, and the removal of compulsory, school sanctioned prayer. A recent article in the Christian Post lists the grievances for these parents: “We’re fed up with the pollution of our children’s minds with LGBT pedophilia and porn, racism, colorism, anti-capitalism, religious bigotry, anti-free speech, and other anti-American propaganda.”
Expanding civil rights isn’t anti-American. Discriminating against Black people, curtailing the pursuit of truth by Black students and scholars and maintaining a racial hierarchy are the actions that undermine our nation’s ideals — especially when these hateful acts are wrapped in democratic terms like “school choice” and “parent rights.”
Conservatives are currently using bans on critical race theory — a term they inaccurately define as any effort to teach about systemic racism or cultural sensitivity — as a pretext for eliminating from history lessons topics like slavery, Jim Crow racism, voter suppression, and housing and school segregation — all significant aspects of American history with long-lasting impact. In addition, conservatives are attempting to assuage or eliminate any feelings of guilt or accountability their white followers might have for this troubling past: White politicians seemingly don’t dare allow children to know that their ancestors and the U.S. government created these policies…
Steven Greehouse, a veteran journalist, wrote an article for The American Prospect that demonstrates the power of unions to improve the lives of workers. The story includes vignettes of workers in different fields who describe how joining a union has raised their salaries, cut the cost of healthcare, and created a workplace where their voices are heard.
He tells the stories of the following working people, whose lives were changed by organizing or joining a union.
More than 14 million workers across the United States—carpenters, steelworkers, nurses, teachers, truck drivers, and many others—are union members, but rarely does one read how unions have improved workers’ jobs and lives.
Homi Kharas of the Brookings Institution writes about ways that the world’s billionaires could solve persistent global problems by paying an annual tax of 1% of their wealth.
He writes:
Until recently, even the wealthiest individuals did not have enough money to make a material dent in global problems, let alone “solve” them. Compared to the size of national economies, or the budgets of the governments of national economies, their wealth appeared small.
This is no longer the case. There are 2,755 billionaires in the world today, with an estimated wealth of $13.2 trillion. Even just 1 percent of this wealth (equivalent to a tax rate of 15-20 percent on the accrued income that billionaires have received with returns of 5-7 percent per year) would yield a flow of $130 billion per year. This can be compared with annual official aid (net ODA) of roughly $160 billion from all countries and multilateral institutions combined. Looking for contributions from billionaires has moved from a nice-to-have niche improvement to becoming part of the conversation on financing to solve large-scale global issues.
What could be done with $130 billion each year?
Figure 1 below provides some estimates of the cost of solving selected global problems. For example, updating previous work, I estimate that $95 billion would be enough to eradicate extreme poverty for all the 708 million people in the world living below the international threshold of $1.90 per person per day. Yes, a 1 percent contribution from the world’s billionaires would provide more than enough resources to end extreme poverty today.
Other major global issues have less precise costing estimates but paint a similar picture. The issue of “solving” world hunger has a range of estimates, partly because solving hunger is not simply about having enough food, but about having consistent access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food, often in conflict-prone, or climate change-affected areas. Preferably, the food should also be grown in a sustainable way and the food system changes required depend on simultaneous system changes in health, energy, and transport. The U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) nevertheless estimates that annual investments of $39 billion to $50 billion would be required to achieve a world without hunger by 2030. This includes both the 800 million people suffering from acute food insecurity, as well as the 1.5 billion additional people suffering from moderate food insecurity.
If you were a billionaire, wouldn’t you be willing to support a 1% tax on your wealth that would save the lives of millions of people living in desperate conditions?
Michael Bloomberg, former mayor of New York City, announced yesterday that Bloomberg Philanthropies will spend $750 million to expand the charter school sector. Declaring that “the American public education system is tragically broken,” Bloomberg pledged to add 150,000 seats in “high-quality charter schools” over five years, with the intention of “closing the achievement gap.”
As mayor, Bloomberg had total control of the New York City public school system, which he reorganized and disrupted repeatedly. His first pick for chancellor of the schools was antitrust corporate lawyer Joel Klein, who distrusted experienced educators and turned to McKinsey and Goldman Sachs for advice. Bloomberg’s second pick for chancellor was a magazine publisher with no experience in education; she lasted just 90 days.
Bloomberg apparently decided that he couldn’t achieve sweeping change in the public schools, so he became a champion for outsourcing students to privately managed charter schools. As his press release shows, he continues to believe his own puffery. The NYC public schools continue to be plagued with crowded classrooms, while charter schools enjoy privileged status, such as co-locations inside public schools, depriving them of facilities, and rent in private spaces paid by the city.
Although the press release claims that Bloomberg’s decision is based on “evidence,” it completely ignores the large number of charter schools that close every year, the high attrition rates of charter students and teachers, and the multiple studies showing that charter schools are outperformed by public schools, except when the charters curate their enrollment to exclude students who are unlikely to succeed or conform.
One of the richest men in the world, Bloomberg loves market solutions to public problems. In his 12 years as mayor, he did not transform the public school system that he controlled. Evidently he has learned nothing about education in the eight years since he left office.
How does it help the 85-90% of students in public schools to invest in a privately run sector that, contrary to his claims, has not demonstrated success in closing the achievement gap and that poaches students and resources from public schools?
How will it “close the achievement gap” to spend $750 million to add 150,000 seats to the charter sector?
You read the news: another school shooting. This time in Michigan. Students and teachers in most schools have drills to practice defense against a shooter, in this case, a sophomore in the high school. Why did he have a gun? Why did he shoot? What will the country do to prevent future school shootings? Will we ever have gun control? After Columbine, Sandy Hook, Parkland, and countless other such massacres, we know the answer. It’s not the answer that one would expect in a civilized country. Next time you hear a politician spouting off about being pro-life, ask him or her how they can be pro-life and pro-gun.
A sixth-grade teacher, Melissa McMullan, shared her reaction to the latest tragedy:
She writes:
Today, I am deeply saddened by the loss of lives, injuries sustained, and emotional trauma that will all reside permanently with those impacted by the actions of a child compelled to bring a gun to school in order to kill. I am also struck by the heroism of teachers.
I find myself thinking about the promise of public education. Education is our society’s most potent weapon. It has the potential to be the great equalizer, eradicating poverty and fostering independence. This drives me to love my students fiercely and continually strive to offer better instruction than the day before. I am not alone. My building and school district are filled to the brim with teachers who pour everything they have into their classrooms every day. We are not alone. Across the country, teachers go into their classrooms every day to give their students everything they have. And then some.
But we are suffering. Our students are suffering. We are asked to keep our students seated three feet apart, make sure they are wearing masks, monitor mask breaks, teach outside, make sure we are simultaneously offering virtual instruction to students who cannot come to school, manage the continual flood of absences and find ways to keep our instruction moving forward. We counsel students, their families, and our colleagues about the uncertainties of living through a pandemic that no one has a handle on. How our students learn, and what they need from us have vastly changed. Yet, as always, we are asked to comply with an antiquated (and irrelevant) teacher evaluation system.
What happened on Tuesday, at a school outside of Detroit, is a sickening reminder of what matters. People sent their children to school and three will never come home. Some were injured, and the scars from those injuries will never leave them. While many others, albeit physically unscathed, will never get over the trauma of having the safety of their school violated in such a manner. And a child had access to a gun, knew how to use it, and used it to injure and kill students and teachers in his school community.
What struck me is that teachers, as always, stepped in and did exactly what they needed to do to protect their students. I am in awe reading about the teacher who heard gunshots and quickly responded. The teacher was able to get all of the students in the room, lock and barricade the door with desks, and ask students to arm themselves with objects to throw should the door be breached. Ultimately the teacher had the students jump out the window for safety.
I am left wondering how many more responsibilities can we give teachers? How long will our leaders ignore the overwhelming list of responsibilities that have been added to our plates, while continuing to evaluate us based upon metrics that have no relevance? We have to ask ourselves:
What do our nation’s children need from public education?
How do we support teachers in meeting our children’s needs?
Our current metrics are not only costing valuable time, energy, and resources, but they are part of a system that is failing teachers and the students they love. What took place in Michigan is not the canary in the coal mine, it’s the mushroom cloud. We need leaders to stand up now.
Melissa McMullan, PhD, 6th Grade Teacher
John F. Kennedy Middle School
Port Jefferson Station, NY 11776
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