Federal or State Legislatures May Raise Teacher Salaries so Schools Have Enough Staff to Reopen

June 8, 2022 stevenmsinger academic freedom, Accountability, AFT, Budget, capitalism, Cory Booker, COVID-19, Data, Democrat, Education, history, Labor, NEA, Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh, Politics, Republican, school closings, School Funding, Schools, small class size, Students, teacher autonomy, Teachers, Technology, Uncategorized, Unions Congress, education, Politics, public schools, salary, schools, teacher exodus, teacher salary, teacher shortage, teachers

What will we do when schools reopen and there aren’t enough teachers to instruct our kids?

People complain when there aren’t enough servers at restaurants or baggers at the grocery store.

What will they say in August if school buildings in many districts remain closed or the only viable option is online remote schooling?

Lawmakers at the state and federal level are taking the matter seriously with measures to increase teacher salary or provide one-time bonuses.

Alabama, New Mexico, and Mississippi have already boosted teacher pay, with Florida, Iowa and Kentucky potentially set to do the same. Meanwhile, even US Congress could pass a nationwide measure to heighten teacher salary and encourage educators to stay in the classroom.

After decades of neglect only made worse by Covid-19, we’re missing almost a million teachers.

And we only have about 3.2 million teachers nationwide!

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are 567,000 fewer educators in our public schools today than there were before the pandemic. And that’s on top of already losing 250,000 school employees during the recession of 2008-09 most of whom were never replaced. All while enrollment increased by 800,000 students.

Meanwhile, finding replacements has been difficult. Across the country, an average of one educator is hired for every two jobs available.

So what are we doing about it?

Surprisingly, something!

Congress has at least one bill under consideration that would raise teacher salaries nationwide.

The Respect, Advancement, and Increasing Support for Educators (RAISE) Act would provide teachers with a minimum of $1,000 in refundable tax credits and as much as $15,000.

The more impoverished the school where teachers work, the higher the tax credit available to increase their salaries. The bill would also double the educator tax deduction to offset the cost of school supplies, and expand eligibility to early childhood educators.

The bill was introduced by Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) and U.S. Representatives Adam Schiff (D-CA), Jahana Hayes (D-CT), John Larson (D-CT), and Mark Takano (D-CA). It is supported by a broad coalition of organizations including the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Education Association (NEA).

Such a measure is long overdue.

Teachers are paid 20% less than other college-educated workers with similar experience. A 2020 survey found that 67% of teachers have or had a second job to make ends meet.

Why would you go into debt earning a four year degree in education and serve an (often unpaid) internship in the classroom just to earn little more than a fry chef or Walmart greeter?

Why enter a field where you can’t buy a home or even rent an apartment in most metropolitan areas? Why volunteer for a job where you won’t be able to afford to marry, raise children, or eke out a middle class existence?

Thankfully, Congressional proposals aren’t the only attempt to make teaching more attractive.

Some states have already taken action.

The Alabama Senate passed a budget that would raise minimum salaries for teachers with nine or more years experience. The raises would range from 5% to nearly 21%, depending on years of experience.

A teacher with a bachelor’s degree and 20 years of experience would see their salary rise from $51,810 to $57,214. A teacher with a master’s degree and 25 years experience would see their pay rise from $61,987 to $69,151.

In New Mexico, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham signed a bill that would increase base salary levels by an average of 20 percent. This advances minimum salary tiers for educators by $10,000 to $50,000, $60,000 and $70,000.

In Mississippi, Gov. Tate Reeves signed off on an average increase of $5,100 that will raise educator salaries by more than 10 percent.

According to Politico, both Republican and Democratic Governors are proposing teacher salary increases or one-time bonuses as part of budget proposals and legislative priorities.

Even Governors like Iowa’s Kim Reynolds and Florida’s Ron DeSantis are promoting teacher bonuses while also stoking classroom culture wars. On the other side of the aisle, Kentucky’s Democratic governor Andy Beshear is trying to push through a teacher pay plan through opposition by the state’s GOP-controlled legislature.

Such measures are even being proposed in Pennsylvania. Sen. Judith Schwank (D-Berks) recently introduced Senate Bill 1211 to boost starting pay for teachers from the current minimum of $18,500 listed in state law. She proposes increasing it to $45,000 a year. However, the bill sent to the Senate Education Committee has several Democratic co-sponsors but no Republicans, making it doubtful it will progress anytime soon.

The main factor behind these plans seems to be the $350 billion in state and local recovery funds under the American Rescue Plan. These federal dollars have few strings attached and only about half of the money has been spent so far.

After decades of neglect, these plans may not be enough and they may not even come to fruition. However, at least lawmakers seem to understand the problem exists.

It’s gratifying that politicians finally seem to feel a sense of urgency here.

Because this problem didn’t spring up overnight and it won’t go away in a flash.

If we don’t do something to make teaching more attractive, the problem will only be compounded in coming years.

Not only are we having a hard time keeping the teachers we have, few college students want to enter the field.

Over the past decade, there’s been a major decline in enrollment in bachelor’s degree programs in education.

Beginning in 2011, enrollment in such programs and new education certifications in Pennsylvania — my home state— started to decline. Today, only about a third as many students are enrolled in teacher prep programs in the Commonwealth as there were 10 years ago. And state records show new certifications are down by two-thirds over that period.

And it’s not just classroom teachers – substitutes are even harder to find.

The shortage of substitute teachers has gotten so bad in 2021-22, it forced some schools across the country to temporarily move to remote learning. Even Pittsburgh Public Schools was forced to go to cyber learning on Nov. 29 because of a staffing shortage and a lack of substitute teachers.

And it doesn’t look to get better next year.

Last June almost a third of working educators expressed a desire to leave the profession.

According to a survey in June of 2,690 members of the National Education Association, 32% said the pandemic was likely to make them leave the profession earlier than expected. So we don’t have enough teachers now and one in three educators we do have are ready to walk out the door.

What could we do about it?

In the long term, we need structural solutions to the problem:

Money.

Autonomy.

Respect.

And in the short term we need:

Less Paperwork.

Reduced case load.

Dedicated planning periods.

But don’t take my word for it.

A survey by the RAND Corp. reported that the pandemic has increased teacher attrition, burnout and stress. In fact, educators were almost twice as likely as other adult workers to have frequent job-related stress and almost three times more likely to experience depression.

The CDC Foundation in May released similar results – 27% of teachers reporting depression and 37% reporting anxiety.

However, the RAND survey went even deeper pinpointing several causes of stressful working conditions. These were (1) a mismatch between actual and preferred mode of instruction, (2) lack of administrator and technical support, (3) technical issues with remote teaching, and (4) lack of implementation of COVID-19 safety measures.

It’s a problem of exploitation and normalization.

Exploitation is when you treat someone unfairly for your own benefit.

Our schools have been doing that to teachers for decades – underpaying them for the high responsibilities they have, expecting each individual to do the work of multiple people and when anything goes wrong, blaming them for it.

We piled on so many extra duties – online teaching, hybrid learning, ever changing safety precautions – these became the proverbial straw that broke educators’ backs.

There are things we can do to alleviate this situation – reducing nonessential tasks, eliminating unnecessary paperwork, refraining from excess staff meetings, forgoing new initiatives, letting teachers work from home on professional development days – anything to give them a break and an opportunity to heal from the years of overburdening.

But we also have to start paying teachers more.

Thankfully our lawmakers are taking this matter to heart and actually getting some results.

Hopefully this trend will continue until every teacher in the nation is adequately, equitably and sustainably compensated for the work done in the classroom.

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‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ is Still Relevant Because it Forces Us to Confront Ourselves

June 2, 2022 stevenmsinger academic freedom, Censorship, Civil Rights, Democrat, Education, history, Learning, literature, Local Control, Media, Parents, Philosophy, Politics, Prejudice, Racism, Republican, Schools, Social Justice, student teacher relationship, Students, teacher autonomy, Teachers, Whiteness anti-racism, banned books, books, education, Harper Lee, literature, Politics, prejudice, public schools, racism, Students, teachers, To Kill a Mockingbird

Parris is peering into a crumpled paperback with a huge smile on his face.

“Mr. Singer, I love this book…” he says.

He stops, pauses and adds, “I hate what’s happening, but I love the book.”

In my middle school classroom, that’s a pretty routine reaction to Harper Lee’s classic, “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

My 8th grade students approach the climax and resolution with equal parts dread and delight.

But it doesn’t always start that way.

No book I teach has gone through a greater change in cultural opinion than “Mockingbird.”

It used to be considered a bastion of anti-racism. Now some folks actually consider it to be racist.

The story is about Scout and her brother Jem as they grow up in Alabama during the Great Depression. Most of the drama centers on their father, Atticus, who defends a black man, Tom Robinson, in court against trumped up charges of raping a white woman.

Ever since its publication in 1960, people have tried to ban the book from school libraries and from school curriculum.

And that’s still true today. However, this used to be the work of the far right. Today there are almost as many objections from the far left – though for very different reasons.

For 50 years, the biggest complaints came from conservatives about the book’s strong language, discussion of sexuality, rape, and use of the n-word. Though today you’ll find almost as many on the left proclaiming that the book actually perpetuates the racial intolerance it purports to be against.

Republicans have become more extreme than ever. They see any discussion of race as “Critical Race Theory” – a conflation of a legal framework not actually taught in K-12 schools with any substantive discussion of racial inequality. It’s really just a simple dog whistle to try and shut down any discussion of the racial status quo.

Teachers have become accustomed to conservatives hyperventilating that discussing racism and prejudice might mean having to admit these things still exist and therefore requiring us to do something about them. They’re terrified their kids might come to different conclusions about the world than their parents, and instead of confronting their own views with the facts, they prefer to sweep reality under the rug to preserve the fictions underlying their ideologies.

These sort of complaints are typified by the Biloxi Public School Board in Mississippi which in 2017 removed Lee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel from its curriculum because, “It makes people uncomfortable.”

What they don’t seem to realize is that the discomfort is part of the point.

On the other side of the coin are people on the other pole of the political spectrum. Writers like Kristian Wilson Colyard don’t object to a discussion of racism and prejudice. They think “Mockingbird” doesn’t go far enough – or at least that the discussion it has is framed incorrectly.

Colyard doesn’t think the book should be banned or removed from libraries, but instead insists it isn’t a good teaching tool.

She writes:

“Lee’s is not the best book to teach white kids about racism, because it grounds its narrative in the experiences of a white narrator and presents her father as the white savior.”

While I think Colyard has a fair point of literary analysis, I don’t agree with her conclusion.

At first glance, there is something strange about approaching racism through the lens of white people, but that doesn’t make it invalid. In fact, racism is a product of whiteness. In this country, white people are the ones doing it. Therefore, it makes sense to speak directly to and from the experience of white people.

Oppression, after all, is relational. It takes both the experience of the oppressed and the oppressor to fully understand it. And if we want to help end the cycle, it makes sense to show the oppressor how to bring that about.

Moreover, the book sneaks up on its themes. There’s very little about outright intolerance on the first page or even the first few chapters. The idea creeps up on you as the narrator slowly becomes aware of the prejudices around her and the trial comes deeper into focus.

As to the question of white saviorism, I think this is more often a buzzword than a legitimate criticism. White people are not heroes for attempting to put right something they put wrong. It is their responsibility, and seeing someone do that in fiction is a really powerful thing.

Atticus doesn’t think he’s saving his client Tom Robinson. He doesn’t think he’s special for doing so. He’s doing what he thinks is right. Now Scout certainly views this through rose-colored glasses and lionizes him for it, but that’s a character’s point of view. It’s up to the reader to look at all this critically and come to your own judgement about it.

Frankly, I think that’s one of the real values of the book. It provides a deep narrative, well told, for readers to examine and discuss very complex issues.

If you think Atticus is given too much credit for what he does, that’s something you can discuss with other readers. I don’t see how doing so cheapens or hurts the cause of antiracism.

In addition, the problem of centering the story on the white people is rectified by reading more widely in the literature. “Mockingbird” shouldn’t be the only book on the topic you read. To be well-rounded, you should read more from the point of view of people of color subjected to white people’s intolerance. And there are so many wonderful books to choose from – Toni Morrison’s “Beloved,” Ralph Ellison’s “The Invisible Man,” Alice Walker’s “The Color Purple,” etc.

However, teachers shouldn’t be made to feel like they’ve wasted an opportunity by using “Mockingbird” in the classroom – even if it’s the only book that year they read on this topic. There must be more opportunities in years to come. Racism and prejudice should not be a one-and-done topic in US schools. It is too important for that.

In my classroom, this book is far from our first discussion of the issue.

We talk about Fred Hampton and the Black Panther Party. We talk about the 1968 Olympics Black power fist. We talk about Black cowboys like Bass Reeves. We talk about Bessie Coleman, Angela Davis, James Baldwin, and so many others.

When we read S.E. Hinton’s “The Outsiders,” – a book that almost entirely eschews the topic – I make sure to point out that the narrative takes place in and around Tulsa, Oklahoma, and we discuss Black Wall Street and the massacre of Black people perpetrated by their White neighbors.

And so when we get to “Mockingbird,” the discussions we have of the text is rich and deep. Students of color feel seen because of the book’s portrayal of the kind of racial injustice they experience in their own lives. Likewise, white students feel empowered to join in the struggle against it.

When the verdict of the trial comes down, there are real tears and stares of disbelief.

One of my students this year, Mya said, “I shouldn’t be surprised, but I thought it was going to turn out differently.”

Me, too. Every time I read it.

The book confronts students with the world as it is and challenges them to do something about it.

White or Black, it holds up the reality of injustice and demands we take a side.

And that’s why this book remains relevant and just as important today as it ever was.

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Holtzman Resigns as MASD Superintendent After Questions Over Contract Shenanigans

May 26, 2022 stevenmsinger Accountability, Allegheny County, Child Safety, Civil Rights, COVID-19, Credibility, Data, Education, Election, history, home school, Journalism, Labor, Local Control, McKeesport Area School District, Parents, Pennsylvania, Politics, school closings, Schools, Social Justice, Student Mobility, Students, Uncategorized contract, controversy, education, Local Control, Mark Holtzman, McKeesport, McKeesport Area School District, Politics, schools, superintendent

For the second time in a year, McKeesport Area School Directors accepted the resignation of Superintendent Dr. Mark Holtzman.

However, this time his resignation appears to be permanent.

At a special meeting in July of 2021, the board both accepted Holtzman’s resignation and then immediately gave him a new 5-year contract.

However, after months of controversy over the legality of the move, at last night’s special meeting, the board voted to let him go FOR REAL.

Holtzman has accepted a new position at Beaver Area School District, approximately 50 miles northwest of McKeesport.

His last day is June 30. Assistant Superintendent Dr. Tia Wanzo will serve as Acting Superintendent immediately upon his departure.

The controversy stems from a move last year by the outgoing board to retain Hotlzman in McKeesport when he had been poised to accept a new superintendents position at Kiski Area School District. He resigned and was rehired at MASD in order to secure him a new contract with a competitive salary and years of service.

But this didn’t sit well with three board members (Steven Kondrosky, James Brown and Mindy Sturgess) who walked out of the meeting before it was officially called to order.

Then in January – a month after three new board members were sworn in following the election – the board voted 5-4 to look into whether Holtzman’s resignation and subsequent rehire were enforceable.

Lawyer William C. Andrews wrote a letter stating that the measure could be viewed as circumventing the intent of the Pennsylvania school code. The law does not allow such contracts to be extended with more than a year left before they expire. Holtzman still had two years left on his contract.

Holtzman’s own legal council, Mark E. Scott, wrote that the move was, in fact, legal and that it was common practice at other districts.

At a February board meeting where letters from both lawyers were read into the record, Holtzman offered to resign, then and there:

“I will clearly state if they want me to move on, and I’ve said it to them in private, I want a year’s salary and benefits and I will resign tonight. This witch hunt and issue is over, overdone, overstated and we need to move on and once I’m compensated for my attorney fees.”

At the time, it was unclear whether the board could move forward with Holtzman at the head of the district or not.

Apparently Holtzman couldn’t continue to work with them.

A mere three months later, he put in his current resignation.

Holtzman’s tenure at McKeesport was fraught with controversy from the beginning.

He was hired as high school principal without any principal experience while his own father, Mark Holzman, Sr., was on the school board.

Before this, he had been dean of discipline at McKeesport’s vocational department for two years before taking a similar role at West Mifflin Area High School. However, he was mostly known in MASD for his years on the high school football team when he had been a student there (he graduated in 1997) and then at Syracuse University.

His family also had a close relationship with one of the most controversial figures in the Mon-Valley, Pat Risha. The late Risha, who had been a superintendent, himself, at McKeesport, West Mifflin and South Allegheny districts, could have opened many doors, and was heralded as a “power broker” in his obituary.

Holtzman was originally hired as MASD superintendent at a special meeting on March 29, 2017, at a salary of $140,000, according to minutes from that meeting.

His time as superintendent was rocky, to say the least.

The Covid-19 pandemic offered hard challenges for every district, but Holtzman often made decisions that put students and staff at risk, keeping buildings open during times of high community spread and often with mask optional policies. The result was hundreds of people testing positive for the disease who might not have otherwise.

The district offered a cyber option for students whose parents wanted to keep them safely at home during the worst of the pandemic. Many districts were able to provide live teachers from the child’s grade level to instruct through on-line services like Zoom. However, MASD used the corporate Edmentum program to provide academics. The problem is it wasn’t created for that purpose. It was created for credit recovery, not robust academics. As a result, the district cyber program was developmentally inappropriate, and full of typos and inaccuracies.

It was no better for students who came to school in-person. Thousands of children were unable to get to school because bus routes were cancelled daily over the last year.

Holtzman blamed the problem on a contract with bus company, PA Coach Lines, which didn’t have enough drivers and would cancel the routes just hours before the buses were set to arrive.

The district had to go to court to break the contract and just entered into a new 6-year contract with Krise Transportation out of Penn Hills starting next year.

Holtzman’s controversies predate the pandemic.

In 2019, he refused to allow 11 high school students to create a Black Student Union. He claimed his objection wasn’t due to the organization’s content but the participation of one of the student’s mothers – Fawn Montgomery Walker who was running for McKeesport Mayor at the time and who is lead organizer of Take Action Mon Valley, a community action group.

The district eventually reached a settlement agreement with the American Civil Liberties Union and the students who had filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the district and Holtzman.

The students were allowed to create the club as long as no “non-school persons or entities” are named as advisors or participants of the club.

Not everything Holtzman did in the district was contentious.

He had a talent for getting donations from large companies.

Last year, he was instrumental in getting Comcast to provided 2,500 free laptops for students, teachers and staff in the middle and high school. The gift also included one year of free high-speed internet access for eligible families – services that can be extended annually.

The news was broadcast live on NBC’s “Today” show.

Around the same time, Holtzman helped broker a partnership with The DICK’S Sporting Goods Foundation and MASD for investment in students at Twin Rivers Elementary School. The agreement is supposed to involve co-designing a new school model and wrap-around services for the community.

Here’s hoping MASD has success with Dr. Wanzo or whoever eventually takes the Superintendent’s position on a permanent basis.

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If You Don’t Support Gun Control, You Support School Shootings

May 25, 2022 stevenmsinger Accountability, capitalism, Child Predators, Child Safety, Civil Rights, Compassion, Congress, Data, Education, Gun Control, Guns, history, Learning, Mass Shooting, New Zealand, nonviolence, Parents, Police, Politics, Prejudice, protest, school violence, Schools, security, Shooting, Students, Teachers, Uncategorized, Violence Against Children active shooter drill, Australia, education reform, firearms, Gun Control, Gun Violence, Guns, Guns in Schools, Mass Shooting, Politics, school shootings, schools, Scotland, Uk

I drove my daughter to school today.

She thanked me for the ride, I wished her a good day, and she toddled off to the middle school doors.

Her khaki pants needed ironing, her pony tail was coming loose and she hefted her backpack onto her shoulder like a sack of potatoes.

All I could do was smile wistfully.

Parents and guardians know that feeling – a little piece of your heart walking away from you.

Imagine what the parents of the 19 children who were killed yesterday at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, might have felt.

I wonder if the parents of the two adults killed in the shooting gave a thought to their grown children during what may have seemed like just another busy day at the end of the academic year.

We’re all so preoccupied. We tend to forget that every goodbye could be our last.

This marks the 27th school shooting with injuries or deaths so far in 2022.

It comes just 10 days after a shooting at a Tops supermarket in Buffalo, N.Y., where 10 people were killed.

There’s hardly enough time anymore to mourn one disaster before the next one hits.

One would think we would have done something about these tragedies by now.

After all, they aren’t unpredictable. They aren’t inevitable. They’re man-made.

There have been 119 school shootings since 2018, according to Education Week, a publication that has been tracking such events for the last four years.

This only includes incidents that happen on K-12 school property or on a school bus or during a school sponsored event when classes are in session.

If we broaden our definition, there is much more gun violence in our communities every day.

According to The Gun Violence Archive, an independent data collection organization, there have been 212 mass shootings so far this year.

There were 693 mass shootings last year, 611 the year before and 417 the year before that.

Why don’t we do anything about this?

In Scotland 26 years ago, a gunman killed 16 kids and a teacher in Dunblane Primary School. The United Kingdom (UK) responded by enacting tight gun control legislation. There hasn’t been a school shooting in the UK since.

After 51 worshippers were killed in mass shootings at Christchurch and Canterbury in New Zealand in 2019, the government outlawed most military style semiautomatic weapons, assault rifles like AK15’s, and initiated a buyback program. There hasn’t been a mass shooting there since.

In Australia, following a 1996 mass shooting in which 35 people were killed in Tasmania, Australian states and territories banned several types of firearms and bought back hundreds of thousands of banned weapons from their owners. Gun homicides, suicides, and mass shootings are now much less common in the country.

This is not hard.

The rest of the world has cracked the code. Just not us.

Not the U.S.

Guns are the leading cause of death for American children – 1 out of 10 people who die from guns in this country are 19 or younger.

Firearm deaths are more than 5 times higher than drownings.

But still we do nothing.

There have been 2,032 school shootings in the US since 1970, and these incidents are increasing. We’ve had 948 school shootings since the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012.

And those who were killed or physically injured aren’t the only young people affected by this. Since the shooting at Columbine High School in 1999, nearly 300,000 students have been on campus during a school shooting.

Imagine what that does to a child.

Imagine what it would do to an adult.

Since Sandy Hook, the only change in policy has been to have lockdowns and school shooter drills in our classrooms. Children have been instructed to throw books at would-be-attackers and cause a distraction so some of them might have a greater chance of escaping.

We’re told to buy bullet-proof backpacks, arm school teachers, and have gun-wielding police patrol our buildings – but our lawmakers refuse to do anything about the firearms, themselves.

The gun industry is making billions of dollars off this cycle of gun violence: mass shooting, fear of regulation, increase in sales. Repeat ad infinitum.

We’re told that gun control is useless because new laws will just be pieces of paper that criminals will ignore. However, by the same logic, why have any laws at all? Congress should just pack it in, the courts should close up. Criminals will do what they please.

We may never be able to stop all gun violence, but we can take steps to make it more unlikely. We can at least make it more difficult for people to die by firearm. And this doesn’t have to mean getting rid of all guns. Just regulate them.

According to the Pew Research Center, when you ask people about specific firearm regulations, the majority is in favor of most of them – both Republicans and Democrats.

We don’t want the mentally ill to be able to buy guns. We don’t want suspected terrorists to be able to purchase guns. We don’t want convicted criminals to be able to buy guns. We want mandatory background checks for private sales at gun shows.

Yet our lawmakers stand by helpless whenever these tragedies occur because they are at the mercy of their donors. The gun industry owns too many elected officials.

In short, we need lawmakers willing to make laws. We need legislators who will represent the overwhelming majority of the public and take sensible action to protect the people of this country.

What we need is real gun control legislation. We need an assault weapons ban. We need to close the gun show loophole. We need buyback programs to get the mountains of firearms off the streets and out of the arsenals of a handful of paranoid “survivalists”.

We don’t need anyone’s thoughts and prayers.

We need action.

And we need it yesterday.

At this point there is simply no excuse.

If you don’t support gun control, you support school shootings.

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Social-Emotional Learning vs. Classroom Culture

May 18, 2022 stevenmsinger academic freedom, Accountability, Art, Child Safety, Compassion, COVID-19, Education, history, Labor, Learning, LGBT, Local Control, Parents, Philosophy, Politics, Prejudice, Republican, Schools, security, Standardized Testing, Student Mobility, student teacher relationship, Students, teacher autonomy, Teachers, Technology, Uncategorized behavior, buzzword, controversy, education, public schools, SEL, social-emotional learning, Students, teachers strike

A student accidentally drops her books in the hall.

Another student stops and helps her pick them up.

Then a teacher homes in on the two and gives the helper a little yellow card which can be redeemed for candy.

This is what social-emotional learning (SEL) looks like in my school.

Teachers instruct on proper behaviors and then reward students they see going above and beyond to achieve them.

Here’s another example.

A student at his lunch table is yelling and throwing food. Nearby another student is sitting quietly and reading a book.

Then a teacher walks over and gives the quiet child a yellow card which can be used to enter a raffle for a special prize. He might win an Oculus VR game system or tickets to a baseball game.

That’s social-emotion learning, too.

Instead of just cracking down on the negative behaviors, we try to reward the positive ones.

To be fair, it works to a degree.

But most of the time, it doesn’t.

The same kids end up with huge stacks of yellow cards and the rest get just one or two. Few students actually change their behavior. They just become virtue signalers whenever an adult is present.

Moreover, there’s an incredible amount of pressure on teachers to not just instruct but to closely observe every student’s behavior and constantly give positive reinforcement to those doing what should be the norm.

And that’s not even mentioning the frequent disruptions necessary to reward those children who can best navigate the system.

But that’s only one way of addressing the problem of bad behavior.

Especially now (most student’s first full year of in-person classes after the worst of the Covid-19 pandemic), students don’t seem to know how to interact.

Snubs, insults and instigation seem to be their defaults ways of relating to each other. Some definitely need explicit boundaries and reinforcement.

But it only goes so far in the halls, the cafeteria and during unstructured times.

Inside the classroom is another beast altogether – as it always has been.

Ever since I first started teaching more than two decades ago, it’s been necessary to work to achieve a classroom culture.

The teacher has to expend significant time and energy with the students as a whole and each student individually to set up a mini-society where each member gets respect by giving respect.

We try to set up the environment so everyone feels safe and involved, everyone is accepted for who they are, comfortable to be themselves and feels empowered to take the chances necessary to learn.

It’s not easy, but it’s more about relationships than behaviorism. The reward isn’t something extrinsic – it’s participation in the classroom culture, itself.

Both approaches attempt to do the same thing – create an environment in which learning is possible.

It reminds me of the famous quote by conductor Leopold Stokowski:

“A painter paints pictures on canvas. But musicians paint their pictures on silence.”

In the same way, you might say that learning in a group requires a canvass of positive behaviors or beneficial social interaction.

This has always been the case, though today the concept has become elevated to buzzword status – SEL.

It’s not so much a single program but a loose conglomeration of ideas that have been around forever.

However, like so much about school these days, the work of teachers and students has become both monetized and demonized.

For those on the far right, SEL is code for teaching kids how to think and feel.

They fear leftwing teachers will instill the values of accepting LGBTQ people, different races and cultures. Why that’s something to be avoided, I don’t know. Perhaps if you want your child to share your own bigotries, public school isn’t for you, no matter what you call the offending programs.

However, for me the worst part is monetization.

An army of corporate education consultants are looking for ways to give shallow professional development to teachers (at a cost to the district) and then run complicated programs from afar.

This means: (1) testing students’ abilities in SEL, (2) holding teachers accountable for student behaviors, and (3) pretending educators are developmental psychologists.

The problem with testing is multifaceted. First, it almost always comes down to more standardized assessments. Nothing is easier to measure but less accurate than multiple choice assessment created by psychometricians far removed from the reality of the classroom. Kids hate it, this wastes class time and makes the entire educational experience sterile and bland.

Holding teachers responsible for the way 20 or more kids act at one time is ridiculous. Even parents with one or two children can’t control how they act – nor should that be the ultimate goal. School isn’t the military. It shouldn’t be about obedience. It should be about critical thinking and cognitive growth.

Finally, there is something incredibly unfair about expecting teachers who are already overloaded with jobs and responsibilities to suddenly become psychologists, too. Sure, we have some training in childhood psychology as part of our coursework to get our degrees, but we aren’t experts. We’re practitioners. We’re like auto-mechanics at your local garage. We can fix your car if something’s busted, but we can’t rewire the whole thing for greater efficiency.

So when it comes to SEL, educators role should be focused and limited.

We should be fully engaged in the creation of classroom culture.

That is where we can have the greatest impact in the construction of our own interpersonal relationships with classes and students.

When it comes to the way students interact outside of the class, teachers should be part of the planning process but the main responsibility of conducting it should be with administrators.

And, finally, we mustn’t ignore the responsibility of parents and guardians.

Roughly 60% of academic achievement can be explained by family background – things like income and poverty level. School factors only account for 20% – and of that, teachers account for 15%.

We must free parents from overwork and professional pressures so they can do more to teach their children how to interact with others.

It takes a village to raise a child – a village that knows how to communicate with each other and respect each member’s role.

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Back to the Past with the US Supreme Court

May 3, 2022 stevenmsinger Accountability, Bernie Sanders, Civil Rights, Compassion, Congress, Democrat, Feminism, Healthcare, history, Local Control, Parents, Politics, Prejudice, protest, Racism, Republican, Sexism, Social Justice, Uncategorized, voting abortion, feminism, history, interracial marriage, marriage, marriage equality, patriarchy, Politics, progress, regressive, religious fanaticism, reproductive rights, Roe v Wade, sexism, Supreme Court, white supremacy, women, women's rights

“Daddy, are gay people not allowed to get married?”

My daughter was looking at me in confusion as we sat together on the couch watching an old episode of “Top Chef.”

In Season 6, episode two, the chefs were asked to cook for a bachelor party. One of the contestants, Ashley, was indignant that she had to participate in a challenge centered on marriage when she, herself, couldn’t marry another woman.

I was surprised.

It hadn’t occurred to me that the show was so old. It first aired in 2009. Was that really so long ago?

We’ve only had marriage equality in all 50 states since 2015. That’s just seven years ago.

So I explained to my daughter that gay people can marry today, but that it wasn’t always the case.

My 13-year-old thought the idea that people couldn’t marry whoever they wanted to was just too crazy to be believed. And I agreed.

It was later that night that I read the article in Politico about Roe v. Wade.

Apparently, the landmark 1973 decision that expanded access to abortion nationwide is about to be overturned by the Republican majority on the Supreme Court.

Some folks are even speculating that this could mean the roll back of similar rulings such as ones allowing same sex marriage and even interracial marriage.

What the heck!?

Did I just sleep through a monologue by Rod Serling?

I’m still seeing things in color but they’re starting to feel very black and white.

These are issues of settled law.

Roe v. Wade is older than I am. Women have been able to terminate unwanted pregnancies for my entire life and the world hasn’t come to an end. In fact, if you read about what life was like before this decision, things have improved.

Women have freedom over their own bodies. They aren’t trapped by the Catch 22 of whether to submit to a forced birth or risk their lives with a back alley procedure.

I remember having a similar moment of cognitive dissonance as my daughter did when I was in high school.

I read the book “An American Tragedy” by Theodore Dreiser and was shocked at what life was like in the 1920s before women had such freedoms. In the book, a couple get pregnant and have to choose between an unwanted marriage while raising an unwanted child or a black market abortion and the freedom to move on. When they can’t agree, the protagonist, Clyde, murders the poor woman.

At the time, the whole situation seemed entirely quaint. It was a series of arguments, examples, and counter examples on an issue that had been decided long ago.

That anyone could think differently struck me as absurd.

In my high school public speaking class, we debated the issue. I argued in favor of reproductive rights, and a girl I had a crush on argued against them.

She was certainly passionate about the rights of the unborn. But she seemed startlingly unconcerned with the rights of the already born.

She wasn’t concerned about the child’s welfare or even the rights of a woman to make decisions about her own body – assuming those decisions were different than those my crush might make for herself.

As I got older, I met others who felt the same way. For them the guiding principle was a religious fairy tale that didn’t even connect with the Bible but instead some fundamentalists view of gender politics.

That’s fine if you want it to be the deciding factor in your own life, I guess. But leave the rest of us out of your faith-based world view.

That such folderol is actually being considered by the highest court in the land is hard to believe.

This is not the future I imagined back in high school when it occurred to me that I’d probably live into the sci-fi era of the 2000s.

It’s more like getting stuck in Doc Brown’s Delorean and sent back to the past.

And that’s exactly what it is.

So-called conservatives want to return us to a mythical time when all was good with America.

It says so on their precious red hats.

But things were never that good in America for most people – unless you were white, Protestant and male.

Let’s cut to the chase. None of this really is about stopping abortions. (If that was the concern, we’d be talking about free birth control, neonatal care and making a better world to raise children in.) Nor is it about safeguarding marriage between a man and a woman – or a white man and a white woman.

It’s about strengthening white supremacy. It’s about bolstering the patriarchy.

This is politics – pure politics.

And there is a political solution.

As Sen. Bernie Sanders has already suggested, Congress can codify reproductive rights into the law. There’s nothing the courts could do about it then.

Democrats have a majority in both the House and the Senate and we have the Presidency.

If we can’t get 60 votes in the Senate (and we probably can’t) we can end the filibuster and pass it with 50 votes.

I hope with all my heart that we do this.

I will push and organize and protest and electioneer. But I fear it will not be enough.

Just making it to this regressive moment in time seems to indicate that our system is too broken to be fixed that way.

This is not the world I wanted for my daughter. I fear it is the world she will have to fight to overcome.

The battles of our grandparents have become our inheritance to our posterity.

They deserve a much better world.

But all we seem to have for them are reruns.

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Covid Has Hobbled Public Schools. Here’s Why They’re Worth Saving

April 27, 2022 stevenmsinger Accountability, Budget, capitalism, Charter Schools, Child Safety, Civil Rights, Corporate Education "Reform", COVID-19, Data, Democrat, Education, Election, history, Junk science, Labor, Learning, Local Control, Media, Parents, Pennsylvania, Politics, Prejudice, privatization, Racism, Republican, School Choice, school closings, School Funding, school segregation, school vouchers, Schools, segregation, small class size, Social Justice, Special Education, Standardized Testing, Student Mobility, Students, teacher autonomy, Teachers, Technology, Uncategorized, voting charter schools, coronavirus, COVID-19, education, faith, justice, pandemic, Politics, public schools, safety, school board, School Choice, school vouchers, Students, teachers, trust

Is public education worth saving?

That’s the question in the air these days.

In the last century, the US academic system helped us reach the moon, defeat Communism and become the world’s largest super power.

However, today our public schools are more damaged than ever before.

An increasing number of families are leaving them for charter and voucher schools.

Teachers are quitting their jobs in droves with few people willing to fill the vacancies they leave behind.

And above all, many people seem to think the schools, themselves, are failing.

Isn’t it time to move on to something else?

I’m here to tell you – no, it is not.

In fact, we need to guard and cherish our public schools more than ever before. Because we face the real possibility of losing them for good.

The Covid-19 pandemic on top of years of corporate sabotage and propaganda have obscured what public education really means and why it is absolutely necessary to the functioning of our society and any possibility of social, racial or economic justice.

Let’s begin by looking at how the current disaster exacerbated an already difficult situation and then consider why we should care enough to fix the mess.

The Pandemic Effect

Public schools got a bloody nose from the Coronavirus crisis.

After decades of segregation, inequitable funding, incentives to privatize, and federally mandated standardized testing, it took a deadly virus to finally hobble the system.

Being forced to contend with the uncertainties of Covid-19 damaged people’s faith in public education more than anything that had come before it.

Issues of masking, contact tracing, safety of immunocompromised students and staff, and when to open or close buildings (among other issues) lead to inevitable dissatisfaction from all fronts.

However, none of these issues should have been decided at the local level in the first place.

These were issues of national significance. We needed a unified strategy to fight a global pandemic as it washed over our shores – not scattershot policies by part-time officials unequipped to deal with them.

These problems should have been tackled by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and enforced by the federal government without deference to big business.

Instead, the CDC made conflicting decisions based more on the needs of the economy than public health (many of which were roundly ignored anyway). Then federal and state governments either refused to decide safety protocols leaving it up to individuals or municipalities, or when they did decide matters, they were embroiled in partisan battles over any kind of restrictions.

In fact, it was the failure of federal, state and even local municipal governments that often made public schools the de facto legislators of last resort. And this is something they were never meant to be.

Public health should be decided by scientists not school directors.

The result was widespread dissatisfaction no matter what school boards decided and an exodus of students and faculty.

Many families, upset at local school board decisions, enrolled their children in charter, cyber or voucher schools.

Overall, charters saw a 7% increase in enrollment – an influx of roughly 240,000 students -during the 2020-21 school year, according to a new report from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. This is the largest increase in five years. By comparison, public school enrollment dropped by 3.3% – or 1.4 million students – in the same period.

The biggest increases were in cyber charter schools. For example, in Pennsylvania 99.7 percent of the charter enrollment growth occurred in virtual charter schools. Enrollment at the Commonwealth’s 14 cyber charter schools swelled from about 38,000 students in October 2019 to more than 60,000 students in October 2020, according to the Pennsylvania Department of Education.

But it wasn’t just students leaving our public schools. It was staff, too.

Teachers and other school employees who felt unsafe or were crushed by the incredible pressure thrust on their shoulders either quit or retired in droves.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are 567,000 fewer educators in our public schools today than there were before the pandemic. And finding replacements has been difficult. Nationwide, an average of one educator is hired for every two jobs available.

This has left us with a weakened system suffering from more problems than before the pandemic hit.

Why Are Public Schools Important?

Because of what they are and what they represent.

We hear about public education so often – usually in deprecating terms – that we forget exactly what the term signifies.

A public school is a school meant for everybody and anybody.

It is a school where any child can go to get an education.

You don’t have to pay tuition. You don’t have to have a special ability or qualification. You don’t have to be neurotypical, a certain race, ethnicity, belong to a certain faith or socioeconomic status. If you’re living in the US – even if you’re here illegally – you get to go there.

That may seem simple, but it is vitally important and really quite special.

Not all nations have robust systems of public education like we do in the US.

This country has 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.

We simply define education differently. We look at it as a right, not a privilege. And for a full 13 years (counting kindergarten) it’s a right for every child, not just some.

Perhaps even more significant is our commitment to children with special needs.

We have developed a special education system to help children at the edges that many other countries just can’t touch. In some nations these students are simply excluded. In others they are institutionalized. In some countries it’s up to parents to find ways to pay for special services. The United States is one of the only countries where these children are not only included and offered full and free access, but the schools go above and beyond to teach these children well beyond their 12th academic year.

In every authentic public school in the United States these students are included. In math, reading, science and social studies, they benefit from instruction with the rest of the class. And this, in turn, benefits even our neurotypical students who gain lessons in empathy and experience the full range of human abilities.

That isn’t to say the system has ever been perfect. Far from it.

There are plenty of ways we could improve. Even before the pandemic, we were incredibly segregated by race and class. Our funding formulas were often regressive and inadequate. Schools serving mostly poor students didn’t have nearly the resources of those serving rich students.

But at least at the very outset what we were trying to do was better than what most of the world takes on. You can’t achieve equity if it isn’t even on the menu.

Without public schools, equity is definitely not on offer.

Public is Better Than Private

That’s really the point.

Charter, cyber and voucher schools are not set up around this ideal.

They are not instruments of inclusion. They are instruments of exclusion.

They are about who is sent away, not about letting everyone in.

The United States is a big country – the third most populous in the world. We have 332,630,000 people and growing. That’s about 50 million students in public schools.

No private system in the world has ever been able to work at that scale. If we lose our public schools, many kids will be left wanting.

The market-driven approach does not guarantee an education. It guarantees competition for an education.

It forces students to compete to get into schools and schools to compete for their very existence. Think of how that affects instruction. Schools have to spend a considerable amount of time and money attracting students to enroll. That’s time and money that doesn’t go to education. It goes to advertising.

Moreover, any school that attracts a surplus of students can choose which ones its wants to enroll. The choice becomes the school’s – not the parents’ or students’. In fact, administrators can turn away students for any reason – race, religion, behavior, special needs, how difficult it would be to teach him or her. This is much different from authentic public schools. There, any student who lives in the district may attend regardless of factors such as how easy or difficult he or she is to educate.

Another major change with this approach is how privatized schools are run. Many are operated behind closed doors without the input of a duly-elected school board, without transparency for how they spend tax dollars, without even the guide rails of most regulations.

Like in the charter school sector, these schools get almost free reign to do whatever they want.

This means corporate interests get to run charter schools while cutting services and increasing profits. In fact, administrative costs at charter schools are much higher than at traditional public schools. Students lose, the market wins.

Moreover, many charter schools provide a sub-par education. To put it more bluntly, they do things that would be impossible for public schools to do. One in Philadelphia literally transformed into a nightclub after dark. Another funneled profits into the CEO’s personal bank account to be used as a slush fund to buy gifts and pay for rent at an apartment for his girlfriend. Another CEO used tax dollars to buy a yacht cheekily called “Fishin’ 4 Schools.”

And virtual charter schools are even worse. A study found that cyber-charters provide almost less education than not going to school at all. Even brick and mortar charter schools can close on a moments notice leaving students in the lurch.

It’s a Darwinian model made to benefit the predators, not the prey. It’s a boon for any unselfconscious businessman who doesn’t mind getting rich stealing an education from children.

We Must Fight

That’s why we must fight to keep our public schools.

As flawed and bruised as they are, the public school model is far superior to the alternative.

But many will look only at their own individual situation and stop there.

They will say, “At MY charter school we do this…” Or “That’s not the way things are at MY voucher academy…”

First of all, a well-functioning privatized school is like a castle built precariously on a cliff. Things may work well now, but they could change at any moment and there’s nothing you could do but vote with your feet. When authentic public schools go bad, you have a democratic process to fix the problem.

But you may luck out. Every privatized school isn’t a scam. Just most of them. So if you have found a charter, cyber or voucher school that is working for your child and doesn’t self-destruct in the time your child is enrolled, you may wonder why you should worry about the rest of us – the kids caught up in a web of privatized predation and neglect?

Because it’s not all about you and your child. Selfishness cannot be the foundation of a just society.

Even a well-functioning charter or voucher school is publicly funded. It splits the funding that would normally go to one school and divides it among two or more. So students at both have to make do with less.

You have to live in this society. Do you really want to live in a country with a large population of undereducated citizens who cannot figure out how to vote in their own interests? Do you really want to live in a society where crime is a better career choice for those who were not properly educated?

That’s why we can’t let public education disappear.

It is a necessary condition for democracy, shared economic prosperity and a just society.

I know it may sound like an insurmountable task, but saving our public schools can be done.

It will require collective action.

We will need to actively participate in our school board elections, go to school board meetings and possibly even run to serve on the board, ourselves.

Many people are upset with what local boards did during the pandemic, but the way to solve this isn’t to flee to schools without democratic principles. It is to seize those principles and make them work for you and your community.

We will need to change the way our system treats teachers. If we want to encourage educators to stay on the job and even entice young people to enter the field, we need to make the profession more rewarding. That means higher salaries, more autonomy, more respect, smaller classes, less paperwork, and actually listening to educators on the subject of education.

We also need to discontinue countless policies and programs that have been dragging our public schools down for decades. We need to eliminate high stakes standardized testing. We need to ensure every school is adequately, equitably and sustainably funded. We need to actively integrate our schools and classrooms. We need to stop supporting privatization through charter and voucher schools and instead support authentic public schools.

And to do that, we need real political change at every level of government – local, municipal, state and federal.

None of this is easy. All of it takes work.

But it is the fight we must wage if we are ever to keep our democracy.

It is the fight we must win to create the better world our children deserve.

Public schools are worth saving, but it is up to you and me to do it.

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Top 5 Charter School Myths Debunked

April 15, 2022 stevenmsinger #BlackLivesMatter, Accountability, capitalism, Charter Schools, Child Safety, Civil Rights, Corporate Education "Reform", Education, history, Learning, Local Control, Parents, Politics, Prejudice, privatization, Racism, School Choice, School Funding, school segregation, Schools, Social Justice, Standardized Testing, Student Mobility, Students, Teachers charter schools, debunked, education, Myths, parents, Politics, public schools, school privatization, Students, teachers

If there’s one thing people love to argue about, it’s charter schools.

Go to any school board meeting, PTA forum or editorial page, and you’re bound to see folks from all different walks of life getting red in the face over these institutions.

But what are they anyway? And why do they generate so much passionate disagreement?

To answer these questions and many more, I’m going to examine five of the most pernicious myths about charter schools, debunk the fallacies and come to the simple truths.

1. Charter Schools are Public Schools

That’s what charter school supporters say, anyway. But it’s only partially true.

In short, charter schools are schools that were opened by special arrangement (or charter) with a state or authentic public school district that allows them to exist without having to abide by all the rules and regulations that govern all the other schools. Thus, the charter school can go without an elected board, it can pocket public money as private profit, hire uncertified teachers, refuse to admit special education students, etc. The degree of latitude depends on the special arrangement.

Is that a public school? In one way it most certainly is. All charter schools are funded by public tax dollars. Everything else is up for grabs.

They don’t even have to accept all the students in their coverage area like authentic public schools do. You still have to support them with your taxes though.

Is that a public school?

QUICK ANSWER: NO.

2. Charter Schools Save Money

This is another claim by the charter school industry that has been in contention for their entire 30 year existence.

Charter schools were invented in 1991 and only exist in 43 states and the District of Columbia. They enroll about 6% of the students in the country – roughly three million children.

However, the idea that they could save money is pretty absurd. They duplicate services that already exist at neighborhood public schools. When you pay for two providers to do the same thing, that doesn’t lower the cost.

It drains money from the existing public schools and often forces school directors to raise taxes so they can continue to provide the same services as before.

However, not only do charter schools increase costs, they often waste the extra money taxpayers are forced to provide.

Consider that more than a quarter of charter schools close within 5 years of opening. By year 15, roughly 50% of charter schools close. That’s not a stable model of public education.

Moreover, 1,779 charter schools (37 percent that receive federal grants) never opened in the first place or were quickly shut down. Since 1994, the federal government has spent $4 billion on these types of schools. Think of how much money has been wasted that could have been put to better use in our much more dependable authentic public schools!

To be fair, some charter defenders will argue that since they are free from the same regulations as public schools, they can cut costs WITHIN their institutions and provide the same services for less. However, they never return that savings to the taxpayers. They simply cut services for their students and then pocket the savings. Lowering quality may be a way to cut costs, but it’s not exactly an innovation – and certainly not something to be envied.

This may be cost effective to the bureaucrats and profiteers running charter schools, but it is not a savings to you and me – to speak nothing of how it hurts the students hoping to receive a quality education.

So do charter schools save money?

QUICK ANSWER: NO!

3. Students do Better Academically in Charter Schools

This is what it says on all those charter school advertisements you see popping up everywhere. But is it true?

The problem with answering that is one of apples and oranges. How do you fairly compare charter and public school students when each group is so different?

Charter schools can legally cherry pick their students. They serve far fewer students with disabilities and English Language Learners. If a student is hard to teach, they “convince” them to go somewhere else.

Meanwhile, authentic public schools can’t do that. They take all comers.

As a result, charter schools can APPEAR to do better for their students but that appearance is due to privileged rules not better teaching or academic programs.

However, even with such advantages, charter schools have failed to show consistent results over authentic public schools on comparative studies.

According to a 2010 Mathematica Policy Research study funded by the federal government, middle-school students who were selected by lottery to attend charter schools performed no better than their peers who lost out in the lottery and attended nearby public schools. This was the most rigorous and most expensive study of charter school performance commissioned by the US Department of Education, and it found no overall positive benefit for charter schools.

And there have been many others. A 2016 study found that Texas charter schools had no overall positive impact on test scores and, in fact, had a negative impact on students’ earnings later in life.

Even a 2020 study by the charter-friendly Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) found that charter schools are not exceeding public schools in most areas of the country. In addition, the study found vast variations in the quality of charter schools – some being better and many being much worse than the norm.

So, taken as a whole, do charter schools outperform authentic public schools?

QUICK ANSWER: NO!

4. Charter Schools are About Innovation

This was, in fact, one of the selling points of the charter school concept when it was first proposed. Being freed of the regulations that authentic public schools have to abide by would allow charter schools to be laboratories for innovation.

However, after 31 years, practices at charter schools can be seen as somewhat different than at authentic public schools, but are they innovative?

According to a 2018 report by IBM Center Visiting Fellow for Evidence-Based Practices, the practices connected with most positive academic outcomes at charter schools are:

1) Longer school days or academic years

2) Zero tolerance and other strict discipline policies associated with rewards and sanctions

3) Centering the curriculum on improving test scores and test prep.

These are pretty much the opposite of what developmental psychologists, education experts and civil rights activists want for children.

Forcing adolescents to spend more time in the classroom is the exact opposite of what other high achieving countries (like those in Scandinavia) do. Treating children like prisoners with harsh punishments for not conforming to strict rules is not considered best for developing young minds. And narrowing the curriculum to drill and kill reading and math test prep may improve scores but it certainly doesn’t create well-rounded adults with strong critical thinking skills.

Moreover, those few charter schools that do engage in creative practices such as organizing the curriculum around a theme like creative arts or racial justice issues aren’t doing anything that isn’t already being done at authentic public schools – specifically magnet and lab schools.

The creativity and innovation you find at most charter schools is in the accounting department – finding new ways to reduce the services students would find at the neighborhood public school and redefining the savings as profit. That and circumventing conflict of interest regulations to allow the corporation that manages the charter school to buy properties from itself at a hefty mark up.

Is any of this innovation?

QUICK ANSWER: NO!

5. Charter Schools Improve Civil Rights

This is perhaps the most often cited benefit of charter schools. In fact, the impression has been that charters are the choice of people of color and serve them better than their neighborhood public school.

However, the facts show a somewhat different reality.

Yes, charter schools do serve a disproportionately high percentage of children of color. According to 2016 data from the National Center for Education Statistics, 26% of all charter school students are black (832,000) compared with 33% of Hispanics (1,056,000) and 32% of whites (1,024,000).

However, approximately 57% of charter schools are located in cities compared to only 25% of authentic public schools.

So black people aren’t selecting charter schools more often as much as charter schools are deciding to locate in areas where more black people live and are often marketing their services directly to black and brown populations.

Are these schools doing a better job of meeting the needs of these children? A 2016 report from UCLA casts doubt on this idea.

Charter schools are notorious for suspending their black students at much higher rates than their white students. While suspensions for students of color are high at public schools as well, they are much more extreme at charter schools.

More than 500 charter schools suspended Black students 10 percent more often than white students. Moreover, the same figure holds for students with disabilities at 1,093 charter schools. In fact, 374 charter schools suspended 25% of their entire student bodies at least once.

Charter schools are also notorious for increasing racial segregation in the neighborhoods where they locate. Nearly half of all Black secondary charter school students attended a charter schools that was hyper-segregated (80% Black) and where the aggregate Black suspension rate was 25%.

However, this increased segregation isn’t just something that affects Black charter school students. It affects white charter school students, as well.

A 2018 report by The Hechinger Report found that 10 percent of charter schools enrolled a disproportionately high number of White students as compared to the racial demographics of the district at large. Writer Kimberly Quick calls these “White-Flight Charters”.

In the first case, the charter schools end up with a disproportionate percentage of Black students and the white students are left in the public schools. In the later case, the Black students are left in the authentic public schools and the white kids flee to the charter schools.

Both cases are not good for civil rights. They allow students of color to be targeted for disinvestment and reductive curriculum while further privileging the white students.

Don’t Black students deserve the right to an education where corporations can’t teach them on the cheap? Don’t they deserve educations free from developmentally inappropriate long days, harsh discipline policies and narrowed curriculum? Don’t their parents deserve the right to participate in the running of their schools through elected school boards?

The idea that it is somehow in the best interest of children of color to be provided with schools containing fewer safety precautions is kind of insulting.

Far from improving civil rights, charter schools too often violate them.

This is why the NAACP has repeatedly called for a moratorium on new charter schools. Members of the organization’s educational task force released a statement saying:

“With the expansion of charter schools and their concentration in low-income communities, concerns have been raised within the African American community about the quality, accessibility and accountability of some charters, as well as their broader effects on the funding and management of school districts that serve most students of color.”

Black Lives Matter organizers also called for a charter school moratorium. Charters, they wrote, represent a shift of public funds and control to private entities. Along with “an end to the privatization of education,” the Movement for Black Lives organizers are demanding increased investments in traditional community schools and the health and social services they provide.

Moreover, the Journey for Justice Alliance – a coalition of grassroots community, youth, and parent-led organizations in over 30 cities – has gone even further calling for an end to all school privatization.

The organization posted on it’s Website:

“The evidence is clear and aligns with the lived experience of parents, students and community residents in America’s cities: school privatization has failed in improving the education outcomes for young people. There is no such thing as “school choice” in Black and Brown communities in this country. We want the choice of a world class neighborhood school within safe walking distance of our homes. We want an end to school closings, turnarounds, phase-outs, and charter expansion.”

So do charters improve civil rights?

QUICK ANSWER: NO!

There are a lot of myths spread about charter schools – many of them being propagated by the charter school industry, itself.

Most of these are not facts; they are marketing.

While there are some charter schools that do a decent job educating children, the charter school concept is deeply flawed.

Authentic public schools are far from perfect, but taken as a whole they are much more effective, reliable, economical, transparent and democratic than the alternatives.

We should take steps to end the charter school model and transition those schools that are working back to the authentic public school system that has served our students well for more than a century.

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If Standardized Tests Were Going to Succeed, They Would Have Done So By Now

April 7, 2022 stevenmsinger Accountability, Budget, capitalism, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Corporate Education "Reform", Democrat, Education, Eugenics, history, Junk science, Learning, Local Control, No Child Left Behind, Politics, Poverty, Prejudice, private schools, privatization, Propaganda, Racism, Republican, School Choice, school closings, School Funding, school vouchers, Schools, Standardized Testing, standards, Student Mobility, Students, Teachers, Uncategorized annual testing, charter schools, education, high stakes testing, Milton Friedman, Politics, school privatization, school vouchers, schools, standardized testing, Students, teachers, teaching to the test, Test Prep, test-based accountability, testocracy

Standardized tests were supposed to be the magic remedy to fix our public schools.

They were supposed to make all students proficient in reading and math.

They were supposed to ensure all students were getting the proper resources.

They were supposed to ensure all teachers were doing their best for their students.

But after more than four decades, standardized tests have not fulfilled a single one of these promises.

In fact, all they’ve done is make things worse at public schools while creating a lucrative market for testing companies and school privatization concerns.

So why haven’t we gotten rid of them?

To answer that question, we have to understand how we got here in the first place – where these kinds of assessments came from in the US and how they became the guiding policy of our public schools.

Standardized testing has been around in this country since the 1920s.

It was the product of the pseudoscientific eugenicist movement that tried to justify white supremacy with bad logic and biased premises.

Psychologists Robert Yerkes and Carl Brigham invented these assessments to justify privileging upper-class whites over lower class immigrants, Blacks and Hispanics. That was always the goal and they tailored their tests to find that result.

From the very start, it had serious consequences for public policy. The results were used to rationalize the forced sterilization of 60,000 to 70,000 people from groups with low test scores, thus preventing them from “polluting” the gene pool.

However, Brigham’s greatest claim to fame was the creation of the Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT) to keep such undesirables out of higher education. These tests were not central to school curriculum and mainly used as gatekeepers with the SAT in particular still in wide use today.

The problem then – as now – is that standardized tests aren’t very good assessments. They work okay for really simple things like rudimentary math. However, the more complex a skill you’re assessing, the more inadequate the tests. For example, imagine just trying to have a conversation with someone where your only choices of reply were limited to four canned responses. That’s a multiple-choice assessment. The result is a testing system that selects against the poor and minorities. At best, it reproduces the economic and racial disparities of society. At worst, it ensures those disparities will continue into the next generation.

That isn’t to say the system went unchallenged. By the 1960s, the junk science and leaps of logic behind standardized testing were obvious and people began fighting back in court. Black plaintiffs began winning innumerable lawsuits against the testing industry.

Perhaps the most famous case is Hobson v. Hansen in 1967, which was filed on behalf of a group of Black students in Washington, DC. The court ruled that the policy of using tests to assign students to tracks was racially biased because the tests were standardized to a White, middleclass group.

Nevertheless, just as the tests were beginning to disappear, radical economists like Milton Friedman saw them as an opportunity to push their own personal agenda. More than anything, these extreme capitalists wanted to do away with almost all public services – especially public schools. They hoped the assessments could be repurposed to undermine these institutions and usher in an era of private education through measures like school vouchers.

So in the 1980s, the Reagan administration published “A Nation at Risk,” a campfire tale about how America’s public schools were failing. Thus, the authors argued we needed standardized testing to make American children competitive in a global marketplace.

However, the report, which examined test scores from the past 20 years, was misleading and full of statistical and mathematical errors.

For instance, it concluded that average student test scores had decreased but didn’t take into account that scores had actually increased in every demographic group. It compared two decades worth of test scores, but failed to mention that more students took the test at the end of that period than at the beginning, and many of the newer students were disadvantaged. In other words, it compared test scores between an unrepresentative group at the beginning of the comparison with a more representative group at the end and concluded that these oranges were nothing like the apples they started with. Well, duh.

Most people weren’t convinced by the disaster capitalism at work here, but the report marks a significant moment in the standardization movement. In fact, this is really where our modern era began.

Slowly governors and state legislators began drinking the Kool-aide and mandating standardized testing in schools along with corporate-written academic standards the tests were supposed to assess. It wasn’t everywhere, but the model for test-and-punish was in place.

It took an additional two decades, until 2001, for President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation to require standardized testing in ALL public schools.

With bipartisan support, Bush tied federal funding of schools to standardized test performance and annual academic progress. And from then on, the die was cast. This policy has been upheld through both Republican and Democratic regimes.

In fact, standardized testing intensified under President Barack Obama and was continued with few changes by Donald Trump and even Joe Biden. Far from changing course, Biden broke a campaign promise to discontinue the tests. Once in office, he thought testing was so important that he forced schools to give the assessments during the Covid-19 pandemic when districts had trouble even keeping school buildings open.

And that brings us to today.

From the 1980s to 2022 we’ve had wide scale standardized testing in our schools. That’s roughly 40 years where the entirety of what is done in public school has been organized around these assessments. They drive the curriculum and are the ultimate benchmark by which success or failure is judged. If this policy was ever going to work, it would have done so by now.

However, it has achieved NONE of its stated goals.

NCLB specifically stated that all children would be proficient in reading and math by 2014. That has not happened. Despite spending billions of dollars on remediation and completely reorganizing our schools around the assessments, test scores have remained mostly static or even decreased.

The law also justified its existence with claims to equity. Somehow taking resources away from districts with low test scores was supposed to increase funding at the neediest schools. Unsurprisingly this did not happen. All it did was further increase the funding gap between rich and poor schools and between wealthy and disadvantaged students.

NCLB also championed the idea that competing for test scores would result in better teachers. However, that didn’t happen either. Instead, educators were forced to narrow the curriculum to cover mostly what was assessed, reduce creativity and critical thinking, and teachers who served poor and minority students were even punished for doing so.

If the purpose of standardized testing was all the things the law purported, then it was a decades long failure. It is the policy equivalent of slamming your head into a wall repeatedly and wondering why you aren’t moving forward. (And where did this headache come from?)

If, however, the purpose of standardized testing was to fulfill Friedman’s privatization dreams, then it was a resounding success. Public schools still persist, but they have been drained, weakened and in many ways subverted.

Look at the evidence.

Standardized testing has grown from a $423 million industry before 2001 to a multi-billion dollar one today. If we add in test prep, new text books, software, and consultancy, that figure easily tops the trillion dollar mark.

Huge corporations make the tests, grade the tests and then sell remediation materials when students fail. It’s a huge scam.

But that’s not the only business created by this policy. Test and punish opened entirely new markets that hadn’t existed before. The emphasis on test scores and the “failing schools” narrative stoked unwarranted distrust in the public school system and a demand for more privatized alternatives.

Chief among these was charter schools.

The first charter school law was passed in 1991 in Minnesota. It allowed for the creation of new schools that would have special agreements (or charters) with states or districts to run without having to abide by all the usual regulations. Thus, the school could go without an elected board, pocket public money as private profit, etc. The bill was quickly copied and spread to legislatures across the country by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

Today, there are charter schools in 43 states and the District of Columbia educating nearly three million students. Charter schools enroll about 6% of the students in the country.

However, charter schools are rife with fraud and malfeasance. For instance, more than a quarter of charter schools close within 5 years of opening. By year 15, roughly 50% of charter schools close. That’s not a stable model of public education. It’s a get rich quick scheme. And since these types of schools are free from the kinds of regulations, democratic governance and/or transparency that keeps authentic public schools in check, another charter school scandal pops up almost every day.

But let’s not forget school vouchers. Before high stakes testing, the idea of using public money to pay for private or parochial schools was widely considered unconstitutional. Now about 4% of US students go to private and parochial schools some of which are funded with school vouchers. This is an option in 32 states and the District of Columbia, and more than 600,000 students participated in a voucher, scholarship tax credit or education savings account program last school year, according to EdChoice, a pro-voucher and school choice group.

There is little evidence that school vouchers actually improve student performance, however, and there’s even evidence that students who receive vouchers to attend private schools may do worse on tests than they would have if they had stayed in authentic public schools.

Moreover, the cost of attending one of these private or parochial schools isn’t completely covered by the voucher. On average, vouchers offer about $4,600 a year, according to American Federation for Children, which supports voucher programs. The average annual cost of tuition at a private K-12 school nationwide is $12,350, according to Educationdata.org, though that can be much more expensive in some states. In Connecticut, for example, the average tuition is almost $24,000. So vouchers only REDUCE the cost of attending private or parochial schools for a few kids while siphoning away tax dollars that should go to educating all kids.

In short, they’re subsidies for wealthier kids at the expense of the middle class and disadvantaged.

Without standardized testing, it is impossible to imagine such an increase in privatization.

High stakes testing is a Trojan horse. It is a way to secretly undermine and weaken public schools so that testing corporations, charter schools and voucher schools can thrive.

Judged by its own metrics of success, standardized testing is an abject failure. Judged by the metric of business and school privatization it is a rousing success.

And that’s why it has been so hard to discontinue.

This is corporate welfare at its finest, and the people getting rich off our tax dollars won’t allow us to turn off the flow of funding without a fight.

On the right, policymakers are often boldly honest about their goals to bolster privatization over public schools. On the left, policymakers still cling to the failed measures of success testing has not been able to meet time-and-again.

However, both groups support the same system. They only give different reasons.

It is past time to wake up and smell the flowers.

If we want to ensure education dollars go to education and not profiteers, we need to end standardized testing.

If we want to help students learn to the best of their abilities, we need to stop gaslighting them with faulty measures of success or failure.

If we want to allow teachers to do the best for their students, we need to stop holding them back with antiquated eugenicist shackles.

And if we truly want to save our public school system, we have to stop propping up privatization.

In short, we need to end standardized testing.

The sooner, the better.

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Hope Grows as Argument Ends in PA School Funding Lawsuit

March 9, 2022 stevenmsinger Accountability, Budget, Charter Schools, Child Predators, Civil Rights, Compassion, Data, Democrat, Education, Harrisburg, history, Labor, Learning, Local Control, NAACP, Parents, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Politics, Poverty, Prejudice, privatization, Racism, Republican, School Choice, School Funding, Schools, Students, Teachers, Tom Wolf, Uncategorized #FairFundingPA, education, Governor Tom Wolf, PA Budget, Pennsylvania, Politics, public schools, school funding, school funding lawsuit, Students, teachers

Is it safe to hope?

That’s what I’m wondering as closing arguments are set to begin tomorrow in the historic Pennsylvania school funding lawsuit.

In my home state, public schools have had to band together and sue the legislature for adequate funding.

Though a final decision may not come until summer or fall, it actually seems possible that things could change for the better.

I feel cautiously optimistic that Commonwealth Court will decide in favor of the state’s schools and not the legislature.

But frankly I am also disgusted that it has even come to this.

The schools had to take our own government to court to force lawmakers to pay for kids to get an adequate education.

Can you imagine the kind of person who refuses to care about children?

As a public school teacher and father, I just can’t.

Pennsylvania is one of seven states with a Constitution that specifically requires the state to provide a sufficient education. Some of these other states – like New Jersey – have used similar Constitutional requirements to force their legislatures to increase state funding to public schools.

Specifically, our state Constitution says:

“The General Assembly shall provide for the maintenance and support of a thorough and efficient system of public education to serve the needs of the Commonwealth.”

“Thorough and efficient.”

Not lavish. Not extravagant. Just complete and productive.

Yet for nearly 8 years getting to court and for three months, 13 weeks, 48 days in court, the state has argued that it already does that.

It’s one of the most absurd assertions I have ever heard. They might as well argue that water is not wet and fire is not hot.

Walk into any wealthy school in the Commonwealth and look around. You’ll see the equivalent of the Taj Mahal. Now walk into any poor district and look around. You’ll see the equivalent of a slum.

One has brand new facilities, marble columns, and wood paneling scrubbed to a shine with a bustling staff moving to-and-fro.

The other has badly maintained structures, exposed insulation, dusty corners, leaky ceilings and animal droppings while a skeleton crew of adults try their all to do the impossible without the tools to get it done.

The Pennsylvania legislature has been paying less and less of public schools’ budgets over the last four decades. The state used to contribute 54% of all public school costs in the early 1970s. Today it pays just 38% of the cost. Only five states cover a smaller share with the national average at 47%. This leaves local taxpayers to take up the slack. Since districts are not equally wealthy, that increases the disparity of resources between rich and poor districts.

During the trial, the state had tried to argue that money doesn’t matter. Yet poor schools can spend $4,800 less per student than wealthy districts. What’s worse, impoverished students have greater needs than rich ones. They often don’t have books in the home or access to Pre-kindergarten. Poor students often suffer from food insecurity, malnutrition, a lack of neonatal care, worse attendance, are less well rested and have greater special needs and suffer greater traumas than wealthier students. Yet we provide them with fewer resources!?

According to a benchmark written into state law, public schools need $4.6 billion in additional funding just to give students a shot. And 277 districts – whether they be in cities, small towns or suburbs – need $2,000 in additional funding per student to get up to snuff.

This affects the great majority of our children – 86% of students attend schools that don’t receive adequate resources.

But it’s even worse for children of color. Half of the state’s Black students and 40% of the state’s Latino students go to schools in the bottom 20% for local wealth.

John Krill, a lawyer for the state, sees no problem with this disparity. In fact, he argued in favor of it.

In perhaps the most revealing moment of the trial, Krill, who represents GOP Senate President Pro Tempore Jake Corman, asked:

“What use would a carpenter have for biology? […] What use would someone on the McDonald’s career track have for Algebra 1? […] The question in my mind is, thorough and efficient to what end? To serve the needs of the Commonwealth. Lest we forget, the Commonwealth has many needs. There’s a need for retail workers, for people who know how to flip a pizza crust.”

So the Commonwealth actually argued that inequitable funding is okay because all kids don’t need a thorough education. Some just need the bare minimum to do whatever menial jobs they’re destined to have while the elite kids need more for the high skilled jobs they’re going to get.

I wonder which kids Krill and his defendants in the legislature think deserve less funding. I’ll bet it’s the black and brown kids already suffering most from this disparity.

Luckily, the school districts asking the courts to intervene feel differently.

Six school districts – William Penn, Lancaster, Panther Valley, Greater Johnstown, Shenandoah Valley, and Wilkes Barre Area – filed the suit along with the Pennsylvania Association of Rural and Small Schools, the NAACP PA State Conference, and families whose children attend under-resourced schools.

Essentially, they are asking for two things.

First, for the court to declare the current funding system unconstitutional.

Second, for the court to order the legislature to create and maintain a fair funding system.

You might say, wait. Didn’t the legislature adopt a new Basic Education Funding formula in 2016 that already provides a fairer way to allocate money based on need?

And the answer is – yes, it did, BUT this funding formula is hardly ever used. Lawmakers only apply it to distribute new money, and increases have been few and far between. So the lion’s share of education funding is still inequitably distributed. We need to change that, to make sure everyone is getting their fair share AND that the money is adequate for the task.

Gov. Tom Wolf’s 2022-23 budget proposal has already begun to address this.

He suggests a $1.75 billion down payment to schools on the $4.6 billion gap.

The state has the money to do this. It just needs to cut wasteful spending elsewhere and close tax loopholes.

For example, the state throws away $240 million a year to The Race Horse Development Fund. These are taxpayer funded subsidies to wealthy horse racing enthusiasts and hobbyists. Since 2004, the legislature has lavished $3 billion on the horse racing industry. Shouldn’t we prioritize school children over cash prizes and inflated pensions for wealthy horse owners, breeders, and trainers? Aren’t kids more important than paying to drug test horses and for racetrack marketing?

It’s these kind of shenanigans that forced 57% of school districts to increase taxes this year.

If the state was doing its job and looking after kids instead of giving handouts to wealthy oligarchs, you and I wouldn’t feel as much pain in our wallets.

Moreover, local school districts will pay $2.8 billion in charter school tuition this year. Why does the state keep opening these expensive privatized institutions that have less fiscal accountability than our authentic public schools? Again the ideology of far right lawmakers is funded by you and me with our tax dollars.

So what’s next after closing arguments this week?

Both parties in the case will file a series of post-trial briefs saying what they believe they proved during the testimony, the “conclusions of law” they are asking the judge to reach, and their analysis of the legal questions presented—such as the meaning of the state Constitution’s “thorough and efficient” education clause.

The final post-trial brief is due on July 6. Then — after oral argument on legal issues at a later date — the court will make its final decision weeks or months later.

In the meantime, the budget is supposed to have been approved by the legislature (one way or another) and signed by the Governor by June 30. If not, funding for some state programs may be delayed. But you never know. The legislature has been late on this before.

So what am I learning from all of this?

The value of hope?

The evil of lawmakers who want to continue shortchanging our children?

The bravery of public school districts that challenge the state to follow its own darn rules?

All of the above.

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If Standardized Tests Were Going to Succeed, They Would Have Done So By Now

Hope Grows as Argument Ends in PA School Funding Lawsuit