SCOTUS Takes on Vouchers

AMERICA’S PUBLIC SCHOOLS ARE (STILL) NOT FAILING

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.

Back in 2017 Steven Singer, who blogs at Gadfly on the Wall, told us that our public schools are among the best in the world. He wrote…

Let me repeat that in no uncertain terms – America’s public schools are NOT failing. They are among the best in the world. Really!

Here’s why: the United States educates everyone. Most other countries do not.

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.

Supreme Court likely to drop school voucher bombshell

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.

PAUL WELLSTONE ON EDUCATION

The late Minnesota Senator Paul Wellstone spoke to the concept of the common good when he said…(emphasis added)

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.

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2021 Medley #11 – Surprise, there’s a teacher shortage

The teacher shortage continues,

COVID losses, PDK poll,

High-achieving schools, Evolution

 

TEACHER SHORTAGE? SURPRISE!

Four reasons why schools are facing crippling shortages

Chalkbeat, whose “supporters” include privatizers like the Walton Family, the Gates Foundation, and EdChoice, report here on the ongoing teacher shortage made worse by the pandemic. Their explanation focuses on the combination of low pay and the weak economy — which are, indeed, part of the problem. I think that a more important set of reasons, however, are how teachers have been treated due to lack of respect by the public (and politicians…and the media), and the impact of privatization on public education. After you read this, check out the next article on the same topic.

The staffing shortage has become a defining feature of this school year. Non-teaching, often lower-paid roles seem to have been particularly hard to fill.

“It is affecting the whole climate of the schools,” said Sabine Phillips, whose middle school in Broward County, Florida has buses regularly arriving late and few substitute teachers. “It’s just hard to keep people in a positive mood.”

So what is going on here? There’s no one answer, according to a range of experts watching these shortages nationwide, but a constellation of potential explanations. Some are exacerbated versions of old problems: schools need people to choose challenging roles with relatively low pay. Other explanations are new, like federal money boosting demand for educators, the continued disruption to childcare, and COVID-related health concerns.

‘Exhausted and underpaid’: teachers across the US are leaving their jobs in numbers

Quoted here is Steven Singer, blogger at Gadfly on the Wall Blog (and author of the next post as well). As an actual, current, real-life, teacher, he has a good handle on the reasons for the teacher shortage — the pandemic, of course, is one, but also, he says, we need to remember low pay, low respect, low autonomy, and lack of a professional voice. All these are part of teaching in Indiana and the supermajority of privatizers in the state’s General Assembly guarantees that it will stay that way. Chalkbeat, take note.

“They don’t give us numbers or report it but we see in our buildings how we’re all needed to sub for missing teachers. It’s way more than normal,” said Steven Singer, a middle school teacher in western Pennsylvania. “I, myself, was in and out of the hospital last week due to my Crohn’s disease. The stress of the pandemic is taking a toll on me and all of us. We’re just at a breaking point. This crisis for teachers didn’t start with Covid. We have low pay, low respect, low autonomy, and no one listens to us. Now we’re being forced to risk our lives and our health.”

At least 378 active teachers have died from Covid-19 since the beginning of the pandemic, along with hundreds of other school workers. Several surveys have shown teachers are more likely to leave the profession because of worsening stressand burnout during the pandemic, coupled with pre-existing issues such as a lack of resources and low pay.

COVID LOSSES

My Students Haven’t Lost Learning. They’ve Lost Social and Emotional Development

Teachers have been telling the public for years that there’s more to education than “reading, writing, and ‘rithmetic.” There are things that go on in classrooms that are more important than test scores. The “loss” caused by the COVID-19 pandemic is more than just content area loss, which can be made up. The loss is emotional…parents, relatives, and friends lost to COVID-19. The loss is social isolation from being quarantined. Students have to learn to deal with those losses before so-called “learning loss.”

According to the CDC, more than 140,000 children in the U.S. lost a primary or secondary caregiver such as a live-in grandparent or another family member to the virus.

Globally, that’s more than 1.5 million kids who have lost a parent, guardian or live-in relative to the pandemic, according to the Lancet.

No wonder kids are having trouble dealing with their emotions! Their support systems are shot!

My students are bright, caring, energetic and creative people. They have the same wants and needs as children always have. They just have fewer tools with which to meet them.

Administrators often focus on academic deficits.

They worry about learning loss and what the kids can’t do today versus students in the same grades before the pandemic. But I think this is a huge mistake.

My students are not suffering from a lack of academics. They’re suffering from a lack of social and emotional development.

PARENTS APPRECIATE THEIR LOCAL SCHOOLS

PDK Poll of the Public’s Attitudes Toward the Public Schools
A supplement to Kappan magazine

Every time the PDK poll is released we learn that the majority of Americans (and even more public school parents) love their local schools…it’s “those other schools” elsewhere in the country that are, apparently, terrible. This year is no different. Why is that? Could it be that we are being given poor quality information about schools in other places? Could it be that we know our own children’s schools and appreciate the work that is done there?

Majorities of Americans give high marks to their community’s public schools and public school teachers for their handling of the coronavirus pandemic during the 2020-21 school year. Further, the public is broadly confident in schools’ preparedness to handle the challenges ahead in 2021-22.
Teachers fare especially well in these assessments. About two-thirds of adults overall, and as many K-12 public school parents, give their community’s public school teachers an A or B grade for their pandemic response. Parents are almost as positive about their community’s public schools more generally, giving 63% A’s or B’s, though the positive rating slips to 54% among all Americans.

As is customarily the case, public schools nationally — as opposed to schools or teachers in one’s own community — fare less well, with about 4 in 10 adults overall, and parents in particular, giving them A or B grades for their pandemic response.

HIGH ACHIEVING SCHOOLS MAY BE TOXIC

The Toxic Consequences of Attending a High-Achieving School

Toxic high-achieving schools…

Students at high-achieving schools exhibit much higher rates of anxiety, depression, and substance abuse than those at lower achieving schools…

The harmful effects of attending a high-achieving school are long-lasting…

The toxic achievement pressure for HAS students comes from parents, teachers, peers, and ultimately from within the student.

US ACCEPTANCE OF EVOLUTION PASSES FIFTY PERCENT

Evolution now accepted by a majority of Americans

Science, not religion, ought to be the determining factor in what’s taught in our public schools. But citizens of the US have always had a difficult time separating church and state, despite the protections of the First Amendment. Included among the topics attacked by the science-deniers is evolution. Education is the key. [Note: I added the link in the quote below]

Examining data over 35 years, the study consistently identified aspects of education — civic science literacy, taking college courses in science, and having a college degree — as the strongest factors leading to the acceptance of evolution.

“The more education you have, the more likely you are to accept evolution,” observed co-author Glenn Branch, deputy director of NCSE, adding, “The proportion of Americans with a college degree almost doubled between 1988 and 2018.”

The researchers analyzed a collection of biennial surveys from the National Science Board, several national surveys funded by units of the National Science Foundations, and a series focused on adult civic literacy funded by NASA. Beginning in 1985, these national samples of U.S. adults were asked to agree or disagree with this statement: “Human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals.”

The series of surveys showed that Americans were evenly divided on the question of evolution from 1985 to 2007. According to a 2005 study of the acceptance of evolution in 34 developed nations, led by Miller, only Turkey, at 27%, scored lower than the United States. But over the last decade, until 2019, the percentage of American adults who agreed with this statement increased from 40% to 54%.

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Blogoversary #15 – Ignorance, Allied With Power, is a Ferocious Enemy

Today marks the fifteenth blogoversary of this blog. When I began it on September 14, 2006, I was in my late 50s, teaching Reading Recovery in a small public school in northeast Indiana (which has since closed), the US was at war in Iraq and Afghanistan, there had just been a mass shooting at Dawson College in Montreal, and George W. Bush was the US President.

In September of 2006, Beyoncé and Justin Timberlake released their second albums and Elton John released his 29th; naturalist Steve Irwin and former Texas governor Ann Richards died; the Cubs finished last in the National League Central (a year later they would finish first); and Star Trek celebrated 40 years of television and movies (premier Sept 8, 1966).

Public education in the US was deep into the mess of No Child Left Behind. Testing defined everything taught in America’s public schools. In Indiana, we hadn’t started spending millions of dollars of tax money on vouchers and charter schools. Hoosier teachers still had seniority rights, the right to due process before getting fired, and collective bargaining for things like prep time and class size.

My blog’s focus was on 1) the overuse and misuse of standardized testing, 2) the overwhelming intrusion of politics and politicians into public education, 3) my students, and small, occasional forays into music and baseball. I was reading education authors like Richard Allington, Gerald Bracey, Susan Ohanian, and Alfie Kohn.

I taught part-time for a few years, and then retired in 2010, taught a semester at a community college, volunteered in three different elementary schools after retirement, and joined with others to advocate for public education. Since retirement, and in no particular order, I moved to a new house; made a few trips to the hospital; fought and beat cancer (so far); voted in seven elections; watched the Cubs win the World Series (Bucket List item #1); signed up for Social Security and Medicare; welcomed two more grandchildren, a grandchild-in-law, and a great-grandchild into my life; made new friendships and said good-bye to some old friends and family members; drove Route 66 from California to Illinois; celebrated a fifty-first wedding anniversary; reached half-a-gross years in age, and written 1423 blog posts (this one is #1424).

Here are some quotes about life and education that I’ve gathered the last year.

EDUCATION

“Three years ago, we started to learn how to run from armed intruders. Last year we learned how to pack bullet wounds. This year, we’re trying to figure out how to bring back learning in a pandemic.” — St. Louis psychology teacher Amanda Kaupp

“We live in a country where the state legislature must mandate play but congress doesn’t need to approve a war.” — Tweet by Fred Klonsky

“Public education isn’t important because it serves the public, it is important because it creates the public.” — [Attributed to] Neil Postman, former chairman, Department of Culture and Communication, New York University

“I have stayed true to my own memories of childhood, which are not different in many ways from those of children today. Although their circumstances have changed, I don’t think children’s inner feelings have changed.” — Beverly Cleary, 1916-2021

APHORISMS

“Don’t be afraid of walking away from a mistake just because you took a long time making it.” — Unknown

“The moment you’re in now is the moment that matters.” — Don Lemon in This is the Fire.

“Silence in the face of evil, is itself, evil…Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.” — Misattributed to Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“The secret of freedom lies in educating people, whereas the secret of tyranny is in keeping them ignorant.” — Maximilien Robespierre

“Don’t be in such a hurry to condemn a person because he doesn’t do
what you do, or think as you think or as fast. There was a time when you
didn’t know what you know today.” — Quoted by Maya Angelou
(quote reproduced in James L. Conyers, Andrew P. Smallwood, Malcolm X: A
Historical Reader, Carolina Academic Press, 2008, p. 181 and Elaine
Slivinski Lisandrelli, Maya Angelou: More than a poet, Enslow
Publishers, 1996, p. 90)

“You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.” ― Misattributed to C. S. Lewis

POLITICS, RACISM, AMERICAN HISTORY, AND THE AMERICAN EXPERIMENT

“You can’t teach American history without talking about race, it’s impossible. If you do that, what are you really teaching your students?” -— Rodney D. Pierce

“Assertions that CRT is being taught in America’s elementary and high schools is ludicrous–as I have been complaining pretty much forever, schools aren’t even teaching the most basic concepts required for civic literacy, let alone a theory that requires a familiarity not just with the Constitution and Bill of Rights, but with significant elements of America’s legal structures.” — Sheila Kennedy

[Frederick] Douglass announced that the abolition of war and peace he envisioned, would never “be completed until the black men of the south and the black men of the north shall have been admitted fully and completely into the body politic of America.” — Race and Reunion by David W. Blight.

“It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.” — James Baldwin

“It is possible to read the history of this country as one long struggle to extend the liberties established in our Constitution to everyone in America.” — Molly Ivins, great American newspaperwoman

“This country once led the global effort to eradicate deadly diseases for the benefit of all.
“It’s a sad testament of our decline as a nation and the selfishness of who we’ve become as a people that we no longer lead the way in something as easy to do as getting a vaccine.” — Jim Wright

“We must all live together and work together no matter what race or nationality. If you have an opportunity to accomplish something that will make things better for someone coming behind you, and you don’t do that, you are wasting your time on this earth.” — Roberto Clemente

“We either overcome our innate tribalism and learn to live amicably together, or this experiment we call America is over.” — Sheila Kennedy

 

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Educational Mansplaining

As an American male, I’m an experienced mansplainer. My former teacher colleagues (mostly female) would surely be able to give you an example or two of my tendency to “help them understand” something that they probably understood as well or better than I did. I remember once, at a meeting discussing psychometric testing of a student, I started explaining percentiles to another teacher. With a look of pity and loathing, she said to me, “I understand what percentiles are.” What she likely left unsaid was, “I have an education degree, too, you obnoxious, insulting POS!” Out loud she added, “It’s ok. I’m used to you.”

Now that I have established my mansplaining credentials, I’d like to comment on a thread I read on Twitter this morning. The thread consisted of women giving examples of someone like me mansplaining something that they already knew.

I must admit…while reading the thread I felt the urge to add my own tweet explaining how Twitter threads work…

…but I digress.

A FLASH OF INSIGHT

The thread that I read included a tweet from Dr. Jessica McCarty, whose Miami University (Ohio) bio reads,

Dr. McCarty has a PhD in Geography from University of Maryland at College Park. Expertise in remote sensing, GIS, data mining, natural resources, agricultural & food security, land-use/land-cover change, fire, air quality, GHG emissions, black carbon, climate, app development, and UAVs. She is a PI and/or Co-I on NASA, EPA, NSF, USDA, and UN projects that focus on using remote sensing of food security, fire, emissions, & air quality. She has presented at NASA, AGU, IIASA , WMO & UN meetings.

I have no idea what most of that bio means, so I’ll assume that Dr. McCarty is a fully qualified professional. Her tweet about mansplaining…

Dr. Jessica McCarty (‪@jmccarty_geo‬)

At a NASA Earth meeting 10 years ago, a white male post doc interrupted me to tell me that I didn’t understand human drivers of fire, that I def needed to read McCarty et al.

Looked him in the eye, pulled my long hair back so he could read my name tag. “I’m McCarty et al.”

At that point, I had a blinding flash of insight…

For the last few decades, politicians in the U.S. (mostly male) have been mansplaining education to American teachers (mostly female).

Think of politicians as the “white male post doc” and think of teachers as Dr. McCarty. For years they’ve been telling us “what’s wrong with education” and “how to fix education” but the teachers are the real experts.

MANSPLAINING EDUCATION

Let’s see some examples…first, George W. Bush’s “signature” education policy, No Child Left Behind.

Were there any teachers, anywhere in the country, who believed that it was possible to have all students score “proficient” on standardized tests within a dozen years?

Of course not. The politicians who wrote NCLB had absolutely no clue what proficient actually means. Nor did they realize that standardized testing was an excellent method of determining a student’s family income, but not much else.

And then we had Race to the Top. Not to be outdone, the Democratic designed education plan begun eight years later included evaluating teachers using student test scores. Were there teachers anywhere in the country who didn’t understand that those teachers who taught in wealthy schools would get better “evaluations” than teachers who taught in high-poverty schools?

Once again, the answer is no. Politicians didn’t notice that “good” teachers (by their definition) seemed to congregate at schools with children from wealthy families while poor kids always seemed to have the “bad” teachers. They didn’t understand that correlation is not causation. They didn’t understand that there are out-of-school factors that have an impact on a child’s school achievement and that test scores do not define quality schools or quality teachers. David Berliner explained this well in Poverty and Potential: Out-of-School Factors and School Success. American schools are set up to reward students who come from wealthy families.

THE STATUS OF TEACHERS

By now it should be no secret why teachers are “mansplained” about education — aka treated with less respect than other professionals. Teaching is still seen as “women’s work” and those who hold control of the funding in education are mostly men.

In a field so dominated by women, it’s not surprising that, in our patriarchal society, teachers are devalued and disrespected. Women still earn less than men. Women still have trouble reaching the highest levels of societal status (outliers notwithstanding). And women are still objectified in popular culture.

Money and status are still the most reliable paths to respect in our culture. The relatively low pay of the teaching profession and the fact that women make up the majority of educators, tends to lower the status of other teaching when compared to other professions.

In societies where education is more successful teachers are paid more and afforded higher status.

Now, the next time you hear a politician talk to a teacher or a group of teachers (or the general public) about “…what’s wrong with education in this country” you’ll know what’s really going on.

And to my former colleagues (mostly female)…Thanks for reading. I really needed to explain this.

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Indiana Vouchers Set to Expand Again

FOLLOWING IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF DANIELS, BENNETT, AND PENCE

Ten years ago the Indiana General Assembly established the state’s voucher program to “provide children who attend failing schools grants to attend a school of choice.” At that time, the state provided tuition help for low-income students to attend religious schools (it’s actually “private” schools, but nearly all are religious). Families earning more than $60,000 were not included. The inflation rate over the last ten years has been about 16% so that $60,000 cap would be about $70,000 today. The General Assembly, however, wants to double that and the Indiana House will vote on the bill tomorrow (February 15).

We’ve spent more than half a billion dollars on vouchers since 2011. Has it helped poor students? Has it improved learning? Has it improved public schools as voucher proponents claimed it would? The state has yet to evaluate the program for anything other than political contributions. As with other voucher programs around the country, the voters have never directly chosen to spend all that money.

In 2011 the goal of the voucher program was to help poor students “escape” from “failing” [read: high-poverty] schools. Now the program goal is to provide “choice” for private and religious schools to accept middle-class families who would have sent their kids to their schools anyway.

The money for vouchers comes from the state’s education budget, so the voucher students in one county are draining away public funds that could be used for public school students in other counties around the state. The money also goes to mostly religious schools despite the state constitution prohibition (Article 1, Section 6). How does that pass legal muster? The state Supreme Court agreed to allow the state to launder the money through parents. Parents choose the voucher recipient (assuming that the school accepts their child, of course), and the state sends the cash directly to the school — state funds, directly from tax dollars to religious schools. It doesn’t matter if the school discriminates against certain students, hires unqualified teachers, or teaches religious doctrine as scientific fact.

Meanwhile, funds for high poverty public schools are being capped, public school teacher salaries are ignored again, and charter schools are also getting a budget boost.

How does this keep happening? The Indiana electorate, including the parents and caretakers of the 90% of students who attend public schools, continue to vote for people who hate public schools.

Betsy would be proud.

Bill lavishes more money on favored private schools

Freshman state lawmaker Jake Teshka was incredulous. He had just listened to the president of the Indiana School Board Association criticize a sweeping expansion of the school voucher program as benefiting wealthy families.

“Do you believe, that in 2021, $140,000 in a family of four is considered wealthy?” the South Bend Republican asked Robert Stwalley during Feb. 3 testimony on House Bill 1005.

“I would certainly consider it to be wealthier than the original program was designed – for the low income. Absolutely,” the Purdue University engineering professor replied. “For a family of five, that brings you up to $160,000 a year in income. That’s pretty wealthy, sir.”

Median household income in Indiana is $57,603, according to census data. For a family of four, it is $90,654.

Teshka isn’t the only House Republican out of touch with Hoosier families. His colleagues on the House Education Committee, as well as all Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee, voted unanimously to support HB 1005. The bill goes to the full House on Monday, where the super-majority caucus appears dead set on removing already-generous income limits on vouchers and adding education savings accounts, a costly program with an extensive record of abuse in other states.

Hoosiers should demand to know the justification for handing millions in tax dollars to high-income households and private and parochial schools. How many more ways can GOP lawmakers find to take money from the schools serving 90% of Indiana’s students, including the neediest?

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