Let’s get something clear. Pittsburgh Public Schools are NOT in an education emergency, and the district certainly is not failing – though the students, teachers and administrators do have very real problems.
Yet Burgess and Lavelle – who aren’t even on the school board (and Bugress’ kids and grandkids attend or attended parochial schools) – want to continually characterize this as something the district is doing wrong.
Fellas, it’s not a matter of the district willfully withholding anything from students. It’s the district not having the resources to provide every student with the help they need.
The district spends about the same on every child regardless of their needs, according to A+ Schools data. However, students with greater needs require more funding to keep up with those who have fewer academic deficits.
It’s like if you have two cars, one already with half its tank full and the other running on fumes. If you give them both an additional half a tank of gasoline, one car is going to go much further than the other one.
That doesn’t mean one car is better than the other. It simply means, you didn’t give BOTH what they needed.
Burgess and Lavelle like grand standing on this issue every few months despite the fact that running the district isn’t in their job description. That’s for the school board to do.
However, as luck would have it, there is something these two City Council Members could do to make a real difference in the lives of students at Pittsburgh Public Schools.
Pay back the $20 million in wage taxes that city schools loaned city government every year since 2004.
That’s right. The City of Pittsburgh continues to take money from the district that the city didn’t get originally and that it doesn’t need.
Now that the city is out of financial distress (and has been since 2018), some folks such as Superintendent Dr. Anthony Hamlet have suggested the city should return that money – not back payments, just stop taking the additional tax revenue. Administrators estimate that would bring in another $20 million for the city school district.
It wouldn’t solve all the district’s financial shortfalls, but it would certainly make a difference.
So Burgess and Lavelle don’t have to continue making these symbolic resolutions. Just do your job and stop the City of Pittsburgh from leeching off of school children.
They could do it today. They could do it tomorrow. They could have done it years ago. But they didn’t. They don’t. They won’t.
Why?
Because they aren’t interested in helping the schools.
They just want an opportunity to hear themselves speak.
“I want to be able to come in and begin to build a relationship where we’re working together and we’re building a level of cohesiveness. You can’t build if you’re not talking and so that’s one of the major issues … let’s talk and find out how we can help each other.”
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Right-wingers claim public schools are indoctrinating America’s youth in lies and deception about race and racism – namely the “lie” that these things remain problems.
They grudgingly concede that racism was a (slight) problem in this country before the civil rights movement, but then Rosa sat down and Martin stood up and – POOF – racism was over.
End of story. Let’s move on.
However, there are several things wrong with this besides its basic reductivism.
First, no public school actually teaches Critical Race Theory.
Second, racism is not over in the US, and talking about the facts of history and how they led to our current situation is not indoctrination. It’s education – the job of public schools.
It is entirely absent from public school curriculum.
Laughably so.
Critical Race Theory is a legal framework that’s been taught for decades in law schools around the country. And just like torts, contract law, civil forfeiture and a host of other valid topics in law school, the K-12 public schools really don’t cover them much.
One out of every three Black boys born today can expect to be sentenced to prison, compared to 1 out 6 for Latino boys, and one out of 17 for White boys.
Black people are convicted at higher rates and given longer sentences than white people for the same crimes – 5% of illicit drug users are African American, yet Black people represent 29% of those arrested and 33% of those incarcerated for drug offenses. Moreover, African Americans and White people use drugs at similar rates, but the imprisonment rate of African Americans for drug charges is almost 6 times that of White people.
And on and on.
One has to live in a factually neutral bubble to insist that racism no longer exists in this country, but that’s exactly where these right wing lawmakers are coming from.
After all, their base is almost exclusively White. If they can’t find something to rile up these people and make them feel unduly put upon, they won’t come to the polls. And nothing gets people more eager to vote than fear and anger.
The last decade has seen a steady, incremental increase in taxpayer funding in most states for private and parochial schools as public school budgets have been robbed and raided to pay for it.
“The slave who knew Christ had more freedom than a free person who did not know the Savior…”
“…Although the slaves faced great difficulties, many found faith in Christ and learned to look to God for strength. By 1860, most slaveholders provided Christian instruction on their plantations.”
“To help them endure the difficulties of slavery, God gave Christian slaves the ability to combine the African heritage of song with the dignity of Christian praise. Through the Negro spiritual, the slaves developed the patience to wait on the Lord and discovered that the truest freedom is from the bondage of sin…”
“A few slave holders were undeniably cruel. Examples of slaves beaten to death were not common, neither were they unknown. The majority of slave holders treated their slaves well.”
And here’s another excerpt from the same book teaching that black people were just as responsible for slavery as white people and that white people suffered from slavery just as much:
“The story of slavery in America is an excellent example of the far-reaching consequences of sin. The sin in this case was greed – greed on the part of the African tribal leaders, on the part of the slave traders, and on the part of slave owners, all of whom allowed their love for profit to outweigh their love for their fellow man. The consequences of such greed and racism extended across society and far into the future. It resulted in untold suffering – most obviously for the black race but for the white race as well.” (emphasis mine)
Here’s another excerpt from the same book about the benefits of the KKK:
“[The Ku Klux] Klan in some areas of the country tried to be a means of reform, fighting the decline in morality and using the symbol of the cross. Klan targets were bootleggers, wife-beaters, and immoral movies. In some communities it achieved a certain respectability as it worked with politicians.”
“While the end was a noble one – ending discrimination in schools – the means were troublesome. Liberals were not willing to wait for a political solution.”
As bad as these excerpt are, they focus only on racism.
The books are riddled with counter factual claims and political bias in every subject imaginable such as abortion, gay rights and the Endangered Species Act, which one labels a “radical social agenda.” They disparage religions other than Protestant Christianity and cultures other than those descended from White Europeans.
Nearly 80 percent of scholarship students attend religious schools, and most of those institutions are Christian, according to an investigation by the Orlando Sentinel. The books mentioned above all come from a Protestant point of view. However, roughly 16 percent of scholarship schools are Catholic and use their own curriculum as do other schools including Islamic or Jewish institutions (which combined make up about 5 percent of the schools).
It is clear then that this controversy is worse than a tempest in a teacup.
It’s misdirected anger.
Political indoctrination IS going on in the United States, but it is not happening at our public schools.
It is happening at our private and parochial schools through school voucher programs.
If we ban anything, it shouldn’t be Critical Race Theory – It should be school vouchers.
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Hopefully sometime next school year when more teens are vaccinated and mask restrictions disappear, no one will be able to take advantage of pandemic safety precautions to sneak into classes.
Don’t get me wrong, teachers should have caught Garcia last week long before the end of the day, but the El Paso parent did more to prove the necessity of smaller class sizes than additional security.
You can pay millions of dollars on new complicated and time wasting screening processes to enter the building, or you can simply have teachers responsible for fewer kids so they can actually give them all more attention. It’s less costly and would reap educational benefits along with improving safety.
The fact is, we already spend an awful lot on school security. And often those measures and the costs to enact them directly impede teachers ability to teach and students willingness to learn.
Let’s start with cost.
The United States is one of the richest countries in the world. You’d expect that we could afford to buy BOTH security AND education for our students.
Right wing pundits love to quote exorbitant figures of how much the US spends per student as compared with the rest of the world.
However, they neglect to mention (1) this money is spent unevenly so that we spend much more on rich kids versus poor kids, and (2) we spend that money on services in this country that most other nations do not.
One of those things is security.
It’s not that schools in Europe and other comparable nations don’t concern themselves with keeping students safe. But they typically don’t have metal detectors, armed police, and high tech security systems. While secondary entrances and exits tend to be locked, main entrances usually remain open and unmonitored throughout the day.
Nor do they have the same dangers as we do. In the US, there are more firearms – roughly 400 million – than people. Not true in other countries.
Moreover, even in other nations like Switzerland where gun ownership is high, they have comprehensive background checks that make it much more difficult for criminals or the mentally ill to get a hold of a gun.
In the US, we have a large population that is racially diverse, a history of social strife, runaway income inequality, and a crumbling social safety net. All of which, when mixed together, are a recipe for conflict.
Not so in most other countries.
Moreover, the way most European nations, for example, have addressed safety is completely opposite to the way we do it in the US.
School shootings were on the rise in Europe in the early 2000s, but instead of buying security systems to stop shooters from entering the building, most schools focused on prevention. They realized that the overwhelming majority of shooters were not interlopers from outside but were disgruntled students. So these schools invested in more psychologists, social workers and resources to help children navigate the turmoil of growing up. The result was an almost complete disappearance of shootings.
If you ask me, a similar investment in the US would have similar success. However, given the differences in our societies, I don’t expect it would solve all of our problems.
In fact, emphasis on security certainly hasn’t.
Since 2012, US schools spending on high tech security programs has increased by at least $3 billion – not counting the billions more spent on armed campus police officers — with very little research proving these measures are at all effective, according to the Washington Post.
In fact, there is evidence that these measures don’t work. A federally funded 2016 study by Johns Hopkins University, for instance, concluded there was “limited and conflicting evidence in the literature on the short- and long-term effectiveness of school safety technology.”
But in the United States, when there’s an entire industry lobbying to take advantage of a crisis, that industry will likely be seen as the solution. It might not actually work, but at least huge corporations are making a profit. That’s often enough to justify spending more and more.
Security firms tout their products as the solution just as hammers scream we need more nails. Never mind that buying them will impede our progress and bankrupt us in the process.
Which brings me to education.
Even if heightened security was 100% effective against violence, it has a negative impact on learning.
Prisons are not welcoming environments. Children don’t want armed guards watching their every move. They want empathetic teachers and adults to help them understand their world.
This is especially true for low income and students of color. There is already a tendency among white faculty (and others) to criminalize their behaviors. In a punitive environment, this is even more so. Children become not something precious to be protected but the inmates, themselves, whose adolescent behaviors become the excuse for treating them like suspects and criminals.
Even preparing for violent situations can have negative impacts.
Active shooter drills – especially those from the ALICE Training Institute — do more to traumatize students than make them safer. The increasingly popular ALICE program teaches kids to physically confront gunmen under any circumstances. Consultants, school psychologists, safety experts and parents say this is dangerous and irresponsible.
“There is no research/evidence . . . that teaching students to attack a shooter is either effective or safe,” Katherine C. Cowan, spokeswoman for the National Association of School Psychologists, says. “It presumes an ability to transform psychologically from a frightened kid to an attacker in the moment of crisis, the ability to successfully execute the attack on the shooter (e.g., hit the shooter with the book or rock, knock them down, etc.) again in a crisis situation, the ability to not accidentally hurt a classmate, the reality that unsuccessfully going on the attack might make that student a more likely target of the shooter.”
However, the feeling that we are doing SOMETHING that we are at least preparing for a crisis is what keeps programs like this viable.
It’s also why Home Depot and Walmart market $150 bulletproof backpacks to parents. They may not actually help in a real life emergency, but they give the illusion of safety.
Moreover, the risk of being a victim of gun violence is the same in the US whether you’re in school or not. And it’s higher in this country than in most others. A 2016 study in the American Journal of Medicine found that, among high-income nations, 91 percent of children younger than 15 who were killed by guns lived in the United States. Schools cannot solve that problem. We need sensible gun regulations and background checks in combination with measures for universal healthcare, racial equity and a reduction in income inequality.
However, our public schools are so often left to solve the problems our policymakers refuse to tackle.
If our teachers and administrators weren’t tasked with such a heavy burden and were actually given the funding and support they needed, perhaps they could better do the job of educating students.
That is the central purpose of public schools, after all.
Not gratifying parents to make points on the internet.
Not even security or profiting huge corporations.
It’s to teach kids.
We’d do best to remember that.
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Mr. Singer, you are the best ELA teacher I’ve ever had. I’ve always loved ELA but for years now I started not enjoying [it] anymore mostly because of the teachers. But you changed my whole view about ELA. You made me enjoy these classes, the books, and even the Zooms. You taught me that teachers can have fun in classes, too. Thank you for not giving up on me, for always trying to help me, for showing me the books at school are interesting. THANK YOU FOR TEACHING ME!”
These words were written on a folded up piece of paper handed to me by an 8th grade English Language Arts (ELA) student the day before school let out this year.
On the last day of class, I invariably give my students a survey about how things went. I tell them I’ve graded them all year. This is their chance to grade me.
I tell them the surveys are not part of their grade and they can even turn them in anonymously if they choose – or not at all.
But most turn them in – many with their names clearly visible.
After a year like this one, you might expect the comments to be more variable than usual. You might expect them to go on about the difficulties, the problems, all the things they didn’t learn but hoped they would.
Instead, I got mostly gratitude.
And if you haven’t taught middle school, let me tell you, that can be rare for teenagers:
“He was the best ELA teacher I’ve ever had… [He} Never stopped helping me [on] every assignment I didn’t do. He would comment on it. He would always try to help me on it.’
And:
“I think you are a kind teacher and you should keep it up so more kids can like you like me :)… When I didn’t catch on to something and I asked what we’re doing, you didn’t get upset. Instead you announced politely what we had to do and I liked that about you because most teachers would yell at me for not paying attention.”
And:
“You actually want to teach the class!”
The biggest thing they singled out about my teaching was the way I interacted with them:
“My teacher helped me with something that helped me succeed this year, and that was patience. Mr. Singer was patient with me this year and worked through what I didn’t understand.”
And:
“He helped with turning in assignments late and explaining how it works. He also explains when and what everyone needs to do it on time.”
I even had students who were thankful for the difficulty of the work:
“I liked how we did essays to get us ready for next year. I also liked how we did essays along with the short stories.”
And far from low academic scores, I had students who earned better grades than ever before:
“This is my first class in ELA when I have gotten a C or higher [in] the past 9 years.”
All of those comments were from my regular language arts students. However, I also taught two sections of a creative writing class for the same age group.
They particularly liked my comments on their written work:
“[You] gave descriptive details on what I was doing right and wrong in my writing. It helped me understand and then improve my writing skills.”
And:
“[You did well] With helping people and not being mean about what we got wrong. That actually helps by telling us the mistakes that we did. I think that helps us get better.”
They also singled out my interactions:
“You’re nice and don’t harshly judge us or yell. You’re always willing to help.”
And:
“Our teacher helped us understand that there are many ways to improve writing.”
Of course, more of them had ideas for ways I could improve:
“…I actually like your class. It’s just sometimes there could be hand injuries [from overwriting]. Also, you can sometimes [let us] make up our own [prompts].”
And this from an honors student:
“The writing prompts were good and challenging. I like how unique they were. Overall, the instruction was good, but after I finished writing my journal, I found myself sitting around with nothing to do for about 15 minutes. Maybe provide extra assignments to keep us busy.”
And that about wraps up another year.
I hope things will be different at the end of August when we return to class.
This 2020-21 has been a year like no other. But reading through these comments it’s clear it wasn’t a waste.
My students learned something.
They learned a lot of somethings.
Like every year, I gave them my all.
And like every year, it was worth it.
And to prove it, here’s one more student response from a child I had in 7th grade and in this year’s 8th grade. He also was in my creative writing class where responses had to be a minimum of 5 sentences:
Dear Mr. Singer,
I never liked reading class. I have had you for two years now and you have made me like it. You helped me to write even though I don’t like it. You push me to write when I didn’t give details to my stories. You made me read books and I enjoyed them. Every book you picked this year I liked. I even would tell my parents and my sister about them. And since she read them we could talk about them. I enjoyed watching the movies, too. I even did well with you with Zoom classes and that wasn’t easy at times. Thanks for being my favorite teacher in middle school. by the way, I wrote more than 5 sentences.”
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The basic thrust of the story is captured in the headline. It says that public schools throughout Pennsylvania have received an influx of funding to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic but school directors are unnecessarily planning to increase taxes anyway.
For example, Pittsburgh Public Schools has received $161 million in three rounds of federal disaster funding. Yet the district is still projecting a $38 million deficit this year.
Ideologues at the Harrisburg based Commonwealth Foundation don’t understand how that’s possible. They want to know why districts can’t just use the disaster funding to pay for continuing expenses?
Because it’s illegal. Duh.
Pittsburgh Superintendent Dr. Anthony Hamlet explains:
“That’s one-time dollars. That money cannot supplant the general fund so the general fund is different. These are supplementary dollars that can’t be used for personnel or anything like that.”
Most of those funds will go to pay for after-school or summer school programs to help students with declining academics after they spent much of the past year at home, he continues.
Moreover, if districts spent that money (illegally) to fill pre-existing budget holes, all they’d be doing is kicking the can of funding deficits down the road a year or two.
Ideologues at the Commonwealth Foundation know that.
In fact, later on in the exact same story, they worry about this very thing.
At the beginning of the story, Elizabeth Stelle, Director of Policy Analysis for the Commonwealth Foundation, says, “We see no reason why the federal funding is not more than enough to cover the needs of districts today.”
But then later in the same story she says, “I’m very concerned they’re going to spend that money on ongoing needs and we’ll be in a very difficult situation a couple years from now.”
Well, which is it Stelle? Are you worried about districts REFUSING to use disaster funds to pay for ongoing needs or are you worried that they WILL use disaster funds for this exact purpose?
WTAE should have had the journalistic integrity to ask her about her blatant contradiction in this story and her reprehensible positions on record. Or perhaps have the integrity not to invite such members of the lunatic fringe on their network and legitimize her position with coverage.
Unfortunately, producers are content to broadcast clickbait to get low information voters agitated against schools without any good reason.
I suppose it gets ratings.
If it bleeds it leads, and if it antagonizes it televises.
Sadly, WTAE wasn’t the only local television station to do so.
This at least was a more skeptical look at the same Commonwealth Foundation report.
But why run anything on the report to begin with?
Were the Flat Earthers busy? Was Q-anon out of conspiracies? Has no one spotted the Illuminati lately?
WPXI characterized the report less about COVID funding misuse than additional funds being unnecessary to begin with.
Reporters said the Commonwealth Foundation report concluded that state districts were not hurting from the pandemic in the first place. And then journalists went to local districts who flatly contradicted that statement with facts.
Gateway School Board President Brian Goppman, for example, said the district cut $3 million from its operating budget due to the pandemic. Moreover, the tax base, itself, has suffered from COVID. When businesses close, that’s less tax revenue to fund social programs like schools.
“Monroeville and especially our district… we get a lot of money from the businesses. Every day that we’re in the pandemic with these restrictions is another day we’re wondering if that business will be around tomorrow,” Goppman said.
And this doesn’t even factor in additional costs to hire more teachers and support staff to help students deal with a year and a half of less than ideal academics caused by quarantines and other safety measures.
They had on Jennifer Stefano, Chief Strategist and Vice President at the Commonwealth Foundation, to talk about public school funding. Stefano is a former Tea Party member and frequent talking head on Fox News and other radical right propaganda networks who famously attacked the Head Start Program that provides early childhood education, health, nutrition, and parent services for low-income families.
She could not have found a more friendly audience in Richert and Battle.
Richert and Battle were pathetically begging for relevance and ratings while letting Stefano spout nonsense statistics about public schools for 8 minutes.
This may come as a shock, but a group like the Commonwealth Foundation that advocates for cutting governmental services doesn’t like public schools.
A real investigative journalist might have just walked into an inner city school to check it out. She would have seen that many schools are literally falling apart.
Or she could look up actual statistics. A full 35 states provide less overall state funding for education today than they did in 2008. Most states still haven’t recovered from George W. Bush’s Great Recession and the subsequent state and local budget cuts it caused. And schools in 27 of those states actually saw per pupil funding fall even further.
Moreover, Pennsylvania is one of the worst. The state government pays only 38% of the cost to educate children leaving the majority up to local communities to make up the difference. That’s the 46th lowest in the country. The national average is 51%.
In fact, our funding inequality is the worst in the nation. According to the U.S. Department of Education, poor schools in the Commonwealth spend 33 percent less on their students than rich ones.
Not because public schools are “flush with cash” – a characterization right out of the mouth of Donald Trump.
However, the Commonwealth Foundation plays with the numbers to mask this reality.
For example, they claim the US spends more per student than nearly any other country in the developed world. But that figure varies tremendously by state with some spending much more than others. Moreover, American schools have costs educational institutions in other countries don’t have such as security and other non-instructional costs.
As we’ve seen, even when you look at per pupil spending across the state, you’re masking funding inequalities from district to district. You’re looking at an average of all spending, which ignores how little we spend at lower income schools and how much we spend at districts catering to rich communities.
Moreover, if we compare the percentage of GDP spent on education with other countries, you’ll see the US spends much less than comparable nations. For example, we spend about 5% of our GDP on schools compared with 6.4% in New Zealand, 6.9% in Finland, 7.5% in Iceland and 7.6% in Denmark.
If you live in a rich neighborhood, your kids get all the best. If you live in a poor one, you don’t get comparable services.
Trolls like the Commonwealth Foundation feed off this burning dumpster fire by covering the inequity of our taxing system which relies too heavily on the poor and middle class and lets the wealthy get by without paying their fair share.
Instead of pointing out the real problem and demanding the rich do their part, the Commonwealth Foundation covers for their billionaire masters. Partisans at the foundation ignore low taxes on the wealthy and blame high taxes on the poor and middle class on things like public schools.
And stories like these only go to further enrage taxpayers so that they’ll support tearing down the very systems that help keep them and their kids afloat.
No news organization should be falling for these lies.
WTAE, KDKA and WPXI should know better.
They are helping tear down media trust in this post truth age.
How ironic that in doing so they are helping destroy education – the one tool essential to navigating through such a landscape.
Find out more about state education funding shortfalls HERE.
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