Charter and voucher schools, while touted as panaceas for the “sorry state” of America’s education system, don’t do any better than public schools when based on similar populations of students. In fact, the so-called “sorry state” of our public education system is pretty darn good when you realize that we work to educate everyone who walks in our public school doors.
We have made a commitment to every single child regardless of what their parents can afford to pay, regardless of their access to transportation, regardless of whether they can afford uniforms, lunch or even if they have a home. Heck! We even provide education to children who are here illegally.
Now is a good time to remind ourselves of that fact…especially after the difficult experience of “pandemic education” (or are we still “during?”).
We should also remember that private, voucher schools don’t have to accept everyone. They can pick and choose who gets to attend their school. In Indiana, more than 95% of our voucher schools are run by religious organizations. They can refuse service to religious “others”, low achievers, and students with special needs.
And they can do all that while still filling their sectarian wallets with your money…and my money…which, in the past, had been earmarked for public schools, for the common good.
In other words, when supporters say that they need vouchers so they can “choose” private schools, what they mean is, they’ll take our public education tax dollars and let private, religious schools “choose” which students get to attend. Your children might be able to attend because they’re white, they have high test scores, or they belong to the same religion. Someone else’s children, on the other hand, might not be able to attend because they are not the same religion, not white, or are more expensive to teach because they have some high-cost learning need.
Public education reflects society. The so-called “sorry state” of public education is not in our schools, it’s in our commitment to the support of the public good.
Schools in traditionally operated school districts are not allowed to violate Maine’s anti-discrimination laws, but a school run privately by a religious organization may be able to under such a ruling. The Supreme Court has in recent years laid the legal groundwork for courts to require authorizers of charter schools to allow religious organizations to be granted charters without regard to their religious status.
“The Supreme Court is just a few small steps away from transforming every charter school law in the U.S. into a private-school voucher policy,” [Kevin Welner, director of the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder’s School of Education] writes. “Further, the nation may be facing a future of religious organizations proselytizing through charter schools that have been freed from obeying anti-discrimination laws — with LGBTQ+ community members being the most likely victims.”
The particulars of the case before the Supreme Court underscore why we need to prioritize public education. When a state, Maine in this case, doesn’t support a system of public education (in direct violation of their state constitution), substituting private, religious schools, does not necessarily support the common good.
That all citizens will be given an equal start through a sound education is one of the most basic, promised rights of our democracy. Our chronic refusal as a nation to guarantee that right for all children, including poor children, is a national disgrace. It is rooted in a kind of moral blindness, or at least a failure of moral imagination, that we do not see that meeting the most basic needs of so many of our children condemns them to lives and futures of frustration, chronic underachievement, poverty, crime and violence. It is a failure which threatens our future as a nation of citizens called to a common purpose, allied with one another in a common enterprise, tied to one another by a common bond. — 3/31/2000
The primary mission of public schools is not to teach individual students what their parents want them to learn. It’s to prepare the next generation for the task of running our society. It’s for the benefit of all of us…the common good.
Lead Poisoning, Segregation, Charters are a Waste of Money, Fearing Small Children, Testing, Telling ADHD Kids to Try Harder, Is it Achievement or Ability?
IT COSTS A LOT TO POISON OUR CHILDREN
American children are regularly exposed to lead at higher than safe levels, which, according to the Centers for Disease Control is ZERO [emphasis added]!
…There are approximately half a million U.S. children ages 1-5 with blood lead levels above 5 micrograms per deciliter (µg/dL), the reference level at which CDC recommends public health actions be initiated. No safe blood lead level in children has been identified.
In some places, the exposure is long term due to governmental neglect.
Kids living in two of the contaminated neighborhoods actually were nearly three times more likely to suffer lead poisoning during the past decade than if they lived in other parts of the heavily industrialized northwest Indiana city, according to a report unveiled last week by an arm of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Written in dry, bureaucratic language, the mea culpa is the latest acknowledgement that federal and state officials repeatedly failed to protect residents in the low-income, predominantly Hispanic and African-American city, despite more than three decades of warnings about toxic pollution left by the USS Lead smelter and other abandoned factories.
The point of all this? By not spending the time and money to clean up lead contamination in our cities and neighborhoods we’re losing money. We’re losing money in increased crime and decreased academic productivity. What are we waiting for?
Three recent papers consider the effects of lead exposure on juvenile delinquency and crime rates, using three very different empirical approaches and social contexts. All have plausible (but very different) control groups, and all point to the same conclusion: lead exposure leads to big increases in criminal behavior.
Candidates nominated by the current administration for Federal Judicial posts — and this administration is nominating judges at a fast pace — don’t seem to endorse the 1954 school desegregation decision in Brown vs. Board of Education.
Schools are more segregated today then they have been at any time since the 1960s. We have yet to fulfill the promise of Brown v. Board of Education. Segregated schools mean segregated opportunities. There is a $23 billion racial funding gap between schools serving students of color and school districts serving predominantly white students.
But the Federal judges now being appointed by the current administration decline to endorse Brown v. Board of Education. In fact, most of the entire country apparently disagrees with Brown…given the segregation present in our public schools.
The matter was especially pronounced in the nomination of Wendy Vitter, who was confirmed Thursday as a federal district judge in Louisiana without the vote of a single Democratic senator. “I don’t mean to be coy, but I think I get into a difficult, difficult area when I start commenting on Supreme Court decisions — which are correctly decided and which I may disagree with,” Vitter said during her confirmation hearing. “If I start commenting on, ‘I agree with this case,’ or ‘don’t agree with this case,’ I think we get into a slippery slope.” “I was stunned by her answer,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), who posed the question, said this week on the Senate floor. “Brown is woven into the fabric of our nation. How could anyone suggest disagreeing with Brown, as she did?”
Rucker C. Johnson is a professor of Public Policy at UC-Berkeley. His new book, Children of the Dream, explains how the school integration efforts of the 1970s and 1980s were not a “social experiment doomed from the start”. Instead, the integration of public schools in the 70s and 80s was overwhelmingly successful…until the advent of Reagan Conservatism which reversed the process.
The main argument of Johnson’s book is much bigger than racial integration. He says three things are essential for schools to give poor kids a chance to break out of poverty: money, preschool and desegregation. Johnson finds that black children make much larger academic gains when integration is accompanied by more funding for low-income schools. Similarly, the benefits of early child education endure when they’re followed by well-resourced schools. All three — money, preschool and desegregation — are a powerful combination in which the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. “Synergy has the power to take two policies that in isolation seem flat and transform them into one package of policies with profound promise,” Johnson wrote in his book.
An acclaimed economist reveals that school integration efforts in the 1970s and 1980s were overwhelmingly successful — and argues that we must renew our commitment to integration for the sake of all Americans
We are frequently told that school integration was a social experiment doomed from the start. But as Rucker C. Johnson demonstrates in Children of the Dream, it was, in fact, a spectacular achievement. Drawing on longitudinal studies going back to the 1960s, he shows that students who attended integrated and well-funded schools were more successful in life than those who did not — and this held true for children of all races.
Yet as a society we have given up on integration. Since the high point of integration in 1988, we have regressed and segregation again prevails. Contending that integrated, well-funded schools are the primary engine of social mobility, Children of the Dream offers a radical new take on social policy. It is essential reading in our divided times.
We live in a throw-away civilization. When something doesn’t work, we throw it away and get a new one. That throw-away attitude has found its way to the issue of the public schools. When public schools aren’t working, we abandon them and get new schools in the form of charters and vouchers. Instead of spending money to improve the schools we have, our money goes to privatized schools which don’t do any better than public schools.
Steven Singer also reminds us that most charter schools aren’t really needed…they’re not opened because public schools can’t handle the number of students in a district. They’re not opened because schools are overcrowded. They’re opened because someone decided to use public education as a money-making venture.
When a district’s public schools aren’t performing well, instead of abandoning them and opening charter schools, we need to spend the time and effort it would take to improve.
You can’t save money buying more of what you already have.
Constructing two fire departments serving the same community will never be as cheap as having one.
Empowering two police departments to patrol the same neighborhoods will never be as economical as one.
Building two roads parallel to each other that go to exactly the same places will never be as cost effective as one.
This isn’t exactly rocket science. In fact, it’s an axiom of efficiency and sound financial planning. It’s more practical and productive to create one robust service instead of two redundant ones.
However, when it comes to education, a lot of so-called fiscal conservatives will try to convince us that we should erect two separate school systems – a public one and a privatized one.
The duplicate may be a voucher system where we use public tax dollars to fund private and parochial schools. It may be charter schools where public money is used to finance systems run by private organizations. Or it may be some combination of the two.
But no matter what they’re suggesting, it’s a duplication of services.
And it’s a huge waste of money.
THE ONLY THING WE HAVE TO FEAR…ARE SMALL CHILDREN?
We have become a nation of cowardly, selfish, small-minded, ignorant, fools.
“By eliminating English classes and legal aid that are critical to ensuring children successfully navigate the asylum process, the Trump Administration is essentially condemning children to prison and throwing away the key until their imminent deportation,” Grijalva, who represents a district on the border, said in a statement.
I began teaching long enough ago to remember when the Big Standardized Test wasn’t so big. In the school system I worked in, we tested students in grades 3, 6, 8, and 10 instead of all of them. Back in 1976, I taught third grade. Our students’ scores were compared with other students around the country. Not only that, as the classroom teacher, I received a complete analysis of how each student did…and I got it a week or two after the test was taken. Yet, like tests today, the ones I gave didn’t really tell me anything that I didn’t already know. John couldn’t read but could add and subtract. Annie had to count on her fingers but was reading at a 9th-grade level. Michelle was an excellent all-around student. Paul and Stan probably needed special education services. The important information was not how each individual student scored. It was my understanding that the tests were used to help us determine if our curriculum was adequate. Were we teaching our kids things they needed to know? How did we compare to other schools around the country?
One big difference…we were told, specifically, not to teach to the test. In fact, as I recall, “teaching to the test” was a serious breach of testing etiquette. Our school district had developed a well-rounded curriculum and we wanted to see if teaching our curriculum yielded good scores. My classrooms of middle-class white kids generally did average to above average…just like today’s middle-class white kids.
It was interesting to see my students’ scores each year. But it was interesting because it reinforced what I already knew. Rarely did I see anything that surprised me. You could have ranked the report cards I made out for my class…and their standardized tests…and the rankings would have had a nearly perfect correlation.
One important difference compared to today’s tests; The tests didn’t determine student grade placement, school “grades,” teacher cash bonuses, or teacher evaluations. Standardized achievement tests — then and now — weren’t made to do those things. The tests were designed to test certain aspects of student achievement and nothing more. Misusing tests by using them to measure things they weren’t designed to measure invalidates the test. You wouldn’t use a teaspoon to measure the temperature. You shouldn’t use a student achievement test to measure teacher competence.
Imagine that you are a basketball coach, tasked with training your team for great things. Imagine that when game day comes, you are not allowed to be in the gym with your team to see them play, and that they are forbidden to tell you anything about how the game went. You aren’t even allowed to know about the opposing team. All you are allowed to know is how many points your team scored. And yet, somehow, you are to make efficient use of practice time to strengthen their weaknesses. You can practice the kinds of skills that you imagine probably factor in a game, but you have no way of knowing how they use those skills in a game situation, or what specifically you should try to fix.
That’s the situation with the standardized test. (Well, actually, it’s worse. To really get the analogy right, we’d also have to imagine that as soon as the ball left the players’ hands, a blindfold slammed down over their eyes, so they don’t really know how they’re doing, either.)
I grew up hearing this. No matter how hard I tried my efforts were rarely recognized. I was always “lazy” and “unmotivated.”
After struggling through four years of high school my senior English teacher told me “You have so much potential if only you’d put forth some effort.” She obviously cared about my success, but couldn’t see the effort that I was already putting forth.
One of my professors in college suggested that I stick to retail, at which I was very successful, by the way. After I graduated (before I went back for my teaching credentials), I made a mark in the retail business I worked at. Each month, it seemed I was given more and more responsibility. The difference was that the work was hands-on, and didn’t take the same kind of mental concentration that school work (K-12 or college) took. By the time I left my first job after two years, I had been given the responsibility of an entire sales department.
If you have a child or student who you suspect of having ADHD, saying, “just try harder” doesn’t help. Instead, help them “try different.”
3) “He just needs to try harder.” If you’ve ever worked one-on-one with a child who suffers from ADHD and who is trying to complete a homework task that they find challenging or tedious, you will see just how hard these kids try. It is a heartbreaking thing to witness.
Streaming is what we used to call tracking…grouping kids by their class achievement. Years and years of research has shown that, while it’s more convenient for teachers, it doesn’t really help students achieve higher…and the author acknowledges that in the second paragraph below.
In the first paragraph, the author quoted British PM David Cameron who said, “Parents know it works. Teachers know it works.” I’m not sure about parents, but teachers know it’s easier. What teacher wouldn’t like a fourth-grade class, for example, where the range of reading levels is grade 4 through 6, instead of a class with reading levels from first-grade through ninth-grade. Planning would be easier, teaching would be easier. But, as already mentioned, the evidence doesn’t support doing that.
My main focus for this article is the tendency of education writers and teachers to conflate ability with achievement. Once in a while, the difference is understood, such as this explanation from the NWEA Map Test,
MAP Growth tests measure a student’s academic achievement, not his or her ability.
But in the article below, and in so many more discussions among educators, the difference is either not understood or just plain ignored and the words are used interchangeably. In the first paragraph below the author refers to mixed-ability classes, while in the third paragraph he refers to the meta-analysis of student achievement.
Here is what we need to remember. Ability refers to one’s potential, whereas achievement reflects what one actually does.
Mixed-ability classes bore students, frustrate parents, and burn out teachers. The brightest will never summit Everest, and the laggers won’t enjoy the lovely stroll in the park they are perhaps more suited to. Individuals suffer at the demands of the collective, mediocrity prevails. In 2014, the UK Education Secretary called for streaming to be made compulsory. And as the former British prime minister David Cameron said in 2006: ‘I want to see it in every single school. Parents know it works. Teachers know it works.’ According to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, 98 percent of Australian schools use some form of streaming.
Despite all this, there is limited empirical evidence to suggest that streaming results in better outcomes for students. Professor John Hattie, director of the Melbourne Education Research Institute, notes that ‘tracking has minimal effects on learning outcomes and profound negative equity effects’. Streaming significantly – and negatively – affects those students placed in the bottom sets. These students tend to have much higher representation of low socioeconomic backgrounds. Less significant is the small benefit for those lucky clever students in the higher sets. The overall result is relative inequality. The smart stay smart, and the dumb get dumber, further entrenching social disadvantage.
In the latest update of Hattie’s influential meta-analysis of factors influencing student achievement, one of the most significant factors – far more than reducing class size (effect: 0.21) or even providing feedback on student work (0.7) – is the teachers’ estimate of achievement (1.57). Streaming students by diagnosed achievement automatically restricts teacher expectations. Meanwhile, in a mixed environment, teacher expectations have to be more diverse and flexible.
Steven Singer (Gadflyonthewall Blog) has found the perfect label to describe what’s happening to America’s public education system. So-called “reformers” aren’t reforming anything. They’re destroying public education through starvation. Singer’s title, “School Sabotage” is perfect.
n. Destruction of property or obstruction of normal operations, as by civilians or enemy agents in time of war.
n. Treacherous action to defeat or hinder a cause or an endeavor; deliberate subversion.
v. To commit sabotage against.
The second meaning is the one that’s most apropos for what’s happening to public education. It’s deliberate and treacherous. It’s aim is to destroy public education.
The saboteurs of public education
claim that public schools are failing and that teachers are at fault.
then, use the false narrative of failing public schools to pass laws which damage public education further and make the teaching profession less attractive.
then, because of the resulting teacher shortage, lower the qualifications for teachers in order to find enough bodies to fill classroom positions.
then, redirect tax dollars from public schools to private and privately run schools, further starving public schools.
then, support tax cuts which benefit the wealthy and reduce the amount of money available for public services, like public education.
then, blame the decimated and demoralized teaching force for not increasing student achievement in underfunded and under-resourced schools.
“…Education Sabotage – because that’s really what it is.”
From Steven Singer
Henceforth, “Education Reform” shall be Education Sabotage – because that’s really what it is. It is about deliberately obstructing goods and services that otherwise would help kids learn and repurposing them for corporate benefit. Likewise, I propose we stop using the term “School choice.” Instead, call it what it is – School Privatization.
HYPOCRISY AWARD
The second award goes to the NRA…for flagrant and unadulterated hypocrisy.
The NRA Convention, set to convene this week in Dallas, has gone along with the Secret Service requirement to ban weapons during Vice President Pence’s visit.
The teens at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, have called them out for their hypocrisy.
Teens who survived the Feb. 14 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, where 17 people were killed, are wondering why the NRA fiercely resists extending the same safety considerations to other areas to safeguard children. The NRA wants “guns everywhere” when it comes to kids, tweeted Matt Deitsch, a Parkland student who helped organize the March for Our Lives rally for stricter gun laws in Washington.
Arming teachers seems to be the most popular NRA-backed “solution” to mass school shootings. The Trump administration wants to “harden school security” with
“rigorous” firearms training for “specially qualified” school personnel
The only way to stop s bad guy with a gun is with a good guy with a gun.
Did anyone in the NRA notice that they’re not allowed to take guns into their own convention? The children at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School noticed.
In the 1990s my school system demanded that our teaching be research-based. This was pre-NCLB, so the purpose had nothing to do with “the test.” Rather the goal was to make sure all teachers were using “best practices” for their teaching. I was reminded of this recently when I read this post by Russ Walsh…
…as I have talked to teachers over the years about instructional practice, I have heard a lot of faith-based language.
“I don’t believe in homework.”
“I believe in phonics.”
“I don’t believe in teaching to the test.”
“I believe in independent reading.”
“I believe in using round robin and popcorn reading.”
For about 2,000 years doctors “believed” that blood-letting was an effective treatment for a wide variety of ailments. Today, I would bet if you encountered a doctor who recommended blood-letting for your flu symptoms, you would run, not walk, out the office door screaming. Science, and mounting numbers of dead patients, caught up with blood-letting. So, as professionals, we need to hold ourselves to the same standards. We need to follow the science and stop talking about our beliefs and start talking about the scientific research behind our instructional decision making.
Scientists understand that science isn’t static. It changes as knowledge increases. We know now that the Earth revolves around the Sun…that germs, rather than demons, cause disease… and that we had better find alternatives to our current energy sources before we choke the breath out of life on Earth. Our understanding grows. Our knowledge grows.
The same is true with learning. As teachers, our understanding of child development, pedagogy, and the impact of the outside world on our students must grow and change as our understanding of those concepts changes based on new research. We need to alter our presentation and adapt our instruction to incorporate new information and techniques as they become available.
A teacher who thinks she knows everything there is to know about teaching and learning will not be effective for long, because what she needs to know will likely change throughout her career. Teachers must be the life-long learners we wish our students to become…we must continue to be students…if we want to grow in our knowledge and ability.
There are, however, times when a teacher’s attempts to use “best practices” and a well-researched basis for teaching is thwarted by outside forces. For example, the out-of-school factors associated with child poverty interfere with learning and achievement. Even the most well-trained, up-to-date, and knowledgable teacher will have difficulty reaching students who come to school traumatized, hungry, or sick.
In addition to social factors interfering with teaching and learning, the government can be a hindrance to good, research-based education. Two ways government interference prevents schools from doing what is best for students are 1) inadequate funding, resulting in large class sizes, and 2) the requirement that students either pass a test or repeat a grade.
LEGISLATIVE INTERFERENCE: CLASS SIZE
We know that class size has an impact on student achievement and learning, especially with young, poor, and minority students. Smaller class sizes work because students are more engaged, they spend more time on task, and instruction can be customized to better meet their needs.
So why don’t we reduce class sizes?
It costs too much.
Legislators don’t want to spend the money to reduce class sizes. State legislatures around the country are generally filled with adults who have never taught and don’t know anything about education or education research. Instead of learning about the research into class size, (or listening to teachers) they simply look at the cost. Smaller class sizes means higher costs…and with the obsessive, anti-tax atmosphere in most states, legislators don’t want to increase funding for public schools just to make classes smaller.
This is a subject where legislators, parents, and even many educators, don’t know, or refuse to accept the research. If a child doesn’t learn the material required for a certain grade, then the impulse is to “give him another chance” by retaining him. I’ve heard parents and teachers claim that retention in grade gives a child “the chance to grow another year,” or “catch up.” None of those statements are based on research. Retention does not help students, and often causes harm.
Legislatures in many states, including Indiana, have chosen third grade as the year in which students must either “be average” in reading or repeat the grade. The legislature, in other words, has decided that, if students cannot reach an arbitrary cut-score on an arbitrary reading test in third grade, they will not be allowed to move on to fourth grade. The cause of the failure is often not taken into consideration. Students have trouble learning to read for a variety of reasons, yet legislatures apply the single intervention of retention in grade to reading difficulties no matter what the cause. Unfortunately, this has no basis in educational research.
Students are punished by legislative decree for not learning to read soon enough or well enough.
Recently Michigan joined the “punish third graders” club.
In an effort to boost reading achievement in the early stages of elementary school education, public schools across the state of Michigan are conducting universal screening and diagnostic testing of kindergarten through third grade students. The testing is in response to Public Act 306, passed in October 2016 by Michigan lawmakers, called the Third Grade Retention Law. The law was passed to ensure that students exiting third grade are reading at or above grade level requirements. All students in grades K-3 will be assessed three times per year, fall winter and spring. The assessments will identify students who need intensive reading instruction and provide useful information to help teachers tailor instruction to meet individual student needs. The law also states that a child may be retained in third grade if he or she is one of more grade levels behind in reading at the end of the third grade.
Florida is another one of the states which punishes children for not reading well enough. In this article Nancy Bailey takes the state to task.
If they aren’t reading well enough, they will have to remain in third grade–so they will do more reading remediation! They will watch as their classmates leave them behind. At this point, how much do you think children like to read? The Florida plague, the undeniably ugly and stupid practice of flunking children if they are not reading well by third grade, is now a reform across the country.
ACCOUNTABILITY
Legislatures force teachers and schools to accept practices which we know through research are detrimental to student learning. We’re forced to accept responsibility for working conditions which interfere with achievement, and then we are held accountable when the practices fail.
Teachers (and schools) should be accountable for understanding the
scientific research behind our instructional decision making.
But policy makers should also be held accountable for the instructional restrictions they place on public schools.
Most of my 35 years as a teacher was spent with students in grades K through 3. The quote below from Nancy Bailey suggests that it was difficult because of the strong-willed women I worked with. I can think of only one or two cases where I was made to feel unwelcome at the primary level from my colleagues.
It was much more difficult to deal with parents who were skeptical that a man could give their child the nurturing education necessary in the primary grades. Even worse, were those (few times) when parents actually requested another teacher because they didn’t want their daughters in my class. I understand the fear that makes a parent do that. The news stories of teachers who betray the trust parents have put in them and abuse children are frequent enough that there are some parents who would be scared to take a chance. I understood the parent request…but it saddened me.
From Nancy Bailey
Men who teach early childhood education have a lot of moxie. It can’t be easy to walk into an elementary school of strong-willed women who know the craft of teaching.
Some of my third grade students during recess on the last day of school, 1976-1977.
Normally, I like to keep quotes short…one or two sentences, or a paragraph at the most. With this quote from Peter Greene, however, I felt like I needed to include two paragraphs.
Americans United for Separation of Church and State listed ten reasons for rejecting vouchers. At the top of the list…Vouchers Undermine Religious Liberty. They wrote,
…vouchers force Americans to pay taxes to support religion. This runs counter to the First Amendment’s guarantee of religious liberty. In America, all religious activities should be supported with voluntary contributions.
James Madison, Thomas Jefferson and other Founders strongly supported the separation of church and state and opposed taxation to support religion. As Ben Franklin succinctly put it: “When a religion is good, I conceive it will support itself; and when it does not support itself, and God does not care to support it, so that its professors are obliged to call for the help of the civil power, ‘tis a sign, I apprehend, of its being a bad one.”
Somebody is going to try to cash in on voucher money or make a point or indulge in performance art, and taxpayers will be horrified to learn that their tax dollars are going to support a school that promotes satanism or pushes sharia law or teaches that all white folks are evil (I am confining myself to outrageous things that will outrage people– the list of outrageous things that people will happily put up with is a longer list).
So in the storm of outrage, taxpayers will demand that government make sure not to send voucher dollars to That School That Teaches Those Awful Things. Politicians will ride that wave, and before you know it, we will have a government agency whose mandate is to decide which churches are “legitimate” and voila– the Government Bureau of Church Regulation.
Instead of throwing more money at this unproven two-system approach, Indiana legislators should use Indiana’s resources on proven strategies that will improve public education, including early childhood education, reducing class size, investing in professional development for educators, and assisting students who live in poverty. These are the strategies the best education systems in the world have implemented to become the best.
Indiana, North Carolina, Arizona, Ohio…all the states in which wealthy privateers are doing damage to public education…don’t reach the heights of damage done to the public schools and public school children of Florida, according to Peter Greene at Curmudgucation. And Florida is, frankly, a terrible place to be a public school student right now. In this post, Greene lists many of the things that Florida has done to support privatization while neglecting or punishing public schools. The third paragraph in the article contains a list of actions so despicable that only the most ardent “reformer” would fail to see the damage done to children.
The most recent legislation diverts millions of dollars from public schools to charter schools.
From Florida State Senator Linda Stewart quoted by Peter Greene (Curmudgucation)
The legislation you signed today gives to the charter school industry a free hand and promises them a bountiful reward. It allows corporations with no track record of success, no obligation to struggling students, and no mandated standards of accountability to flourish, with the sole obligation to their shareholders. Not the public. Not to well-intentioned parents desperate to see their children succeed – but to a group of investors who have made a business decision to add these companies to their portfolios because they are interested in making money.
The entire “reform” movement – the obsession with standardized tests, the growth of charters and vouchers – has grown up and taken over as the status quo of American education with virtually no input from professional educators.
Have teachers been left out because teaching is a traditionally female dominated profession so the good-old-boys in state legislatures and board rooms across the country disrespect teachers as easily as they disrespect women in general?
Have teachers been ignored because “reformers” assume that going to school is enough “experience” to dictate how education ought to be?
Have teachers been silenced because millionaires and billionaires must be smart or they wouldn’t be rich, so we must listen to their “new” ideas for education?
Teachers comprise the last and largest labor unions left in the U.S. Are teachers shunned because destroying America’s unions in order to raise up the oligarchy won’t be complete until the NEA and AFT are relegated to the ineffectual level of other unions?
The hypocritical conflicts of interest within the political system are rampant, in which legislators and policy makers with economic and political ties to textbook and testing companies, charter management companies, and parochial schools, make policy for public education. Yet teachers aren’t consulted about public education policy because they might be “biased.”
For some people, my position as an educator discredits my knowledge of schools. Yet getting paid by huge testing corporations doesn’t discredit journalists!?
The status quo in American education is testing and punishing children, teachers, and schools.
The status quo in American education is diverting public tax dollars from public schools to religious, private, and privately owned schools.
The status quo in American education is requiring “accountability” from public schools, while charters and voucher schools need not be transparent.
The status quo in American education is closing public schools and replacing them with charters instead of fixing them.
The status quo in American education is blaming teachers for student low achievement without society accepting a share of the responsibility for communities struggling with gun violence, drug and alcohol abuse, toxic environments, lack of health care facilities, and other effects of poverty.
From Russ Walsh
Those of us who continue to point out that poverty is the real issue in education are accused of using poverty as an excuse to do nothing. Right up front let me say I am against the status quo and I have spent a lifetime in education trying to improve teacher instruction and educational opportunities for the struggling readers and writers I have worked with. To point out the obvious, that poverty is the number one cause of educational inequity, does not make me a champion for the status quo. It simply means that I will not fall prey to the false promise of super-teachers, standardized test driven accountability, merit pay, charter schools, and vouchers, all of which are futile efforts to put a thumb in the overflowing dyke that is systematic discrimination, segregation, income inequity, and, yes, poverty.
Today’s Republicans and Democrats do not share a belief in the nature of the common good. Democrats believe that government has a responsibility to ensure access to healthcare. Republicans don’t.
Live Long and Prosper 