Charter Schools Cherry Pick Students & Call it Choice – PART 1: The “I Didn’t Do It!” Excuse

October 19, 2019October 26, 2019 stevenmsinger Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Corporate Education "Reform", Credibility, Data, Education, Local Control, Parents, Politics, Poverty, Prejudice, privatization, Racism, School Choice, School Funding, school segregation, Schools, segregation, Standardized Testing, student privacy, Students, Teachers charter schools, cherry picking, creaming, education, enrollment, evidence, excuses, parents, Politics, Privatize, public schools, research, school privatization, schools, Students, teachers

It takes a certain kind of hypocrite to be a charter school champion.

You have to deny any wrongdoing one minute. And then admit you’re guilty but explain it away with the excuse “Everyone’s doing it!” the next.

Take cherry picking – one of the most common admonishments leveled against the school privatization industry.

Detractors claim that charter schools keep enrollment low and then out of those who apply, they pick and choose which students to accept.

Charters are run by private enterprise but funded with public tax dollars. So they are supposed to accept all comers just like the authentic public schools in the same neighborhoods.

But charter schools don’t have to follow the same rules as authentic public schools. They pretty much just have to abide by whatever was agreed upon in their charter contracts. Even then states rarely check up on them to make sure they’re in compliance.

So critics say many of these institutions are circumventing enrollment procedures. They’re welcoming the easiest kids to teach and dissuading others from enrolling – even to the extent of kicking out hard to teach children or pretending that an “unbiased” selection process just so happened to pick only the most motivated students.

Charter school supporters usually respond to this critique in one of two ways.

(1) Cherry picking!? How dare you!? We don’t cherry pick students! The demand to get in to our schools is so great that we put all the names in a hat and let chance decide!

(2) Cherry picking!? Why of course we cherry pick students! But so do the public schools with their discipline policies and magnet schools!

You’d think these folks would suffer from some cognitive dissonance. Imagine if the Oscar Mayer company claimed that their hot dogs don’t contain any rat feces only to backtrack a minute later saying that their wieners have no more rat feces than the leading competitor’s franks.

And make no mistake – the charter school response is very much like a hot dog company’s damage control – a corporate press release written by various billionaire-funded think tanks to protect the industry’s market share.

It’s like a spoiled child saying, “I didn’t do it! And even if I did do it, there’s nothing wrong with it!”

Thankfully, there are these pesky things called facts that show both responses to be… well.. baloney!

Let’s take a look at each and examine why they’re wrong.

In Part 1, we’ll focus on the first excuse that charters don’t cherry pick students. In Part 2, we’ll look at the excuse that it’s okay for charters to cherry pick students because the authentic public schools do the same.

THE “I DIDN’T DO IT!” EXCUSE

Short answer: There is plenty of evidence that shows you did.

Long Answer:

Selecting the students you want to teach instead of families selecting the school they want their kids to attend is sometimes called cherry picking or creaming, and it comes in at least three varieties.

(1) Charter schools do things to encourage only the most motivated families to apply and discourage anyone else. This can involve long applications that may deter uneducated, non English-speaking and/or immigrant parents.

(2) Charter schools literally handpick students with higher test scores and sterling academic records.

(3) Charter schools “counsel out” or expel difficult students during the school year.

TYPE 1: APPLICATION SCHENANIGANS

The international news organization Reuters found evidence of the first type to be widespread at U.S. charter schools.

Reuters documented the following:

“Applications that are made available just a few hours a year.

Lengthy application forms, often printed only in English, that require student and parent essays, report cards, test scores, disciplinary records, teacher recommendations and medical records.

Demands that students present Social Security cards and birth certificates for their applications to be considered, even though such documents cannot be required under federal law.

Mandatory family interviews.

Assessment exams.

Academic prerequisites.

Requirements that applicants document any disabilities or special needs. The U.S. Department of Education considers this practice illegal on the college level but has not addressed the issue for K-12 schools.”

For a specific example, take a look at the online application form for 2016-17 at Roseland Accelerated Middle School, a charter school in Santa Rosa, California.

Applicants must fill out several dozen pages before a student is accepted, according to the website.

Students must write five essays that are each two pages in length using complete sentences covering a variety of topics including family background. One essay even asks applicants to write an essay beginning with “The qualities and strengths that I will bring to school are… .”

But that’s not all. Parents have to write seven small essays of their own and fill out their child’s medical history including medications the child takes (which some critics say violates federal privacy law).

Finally, students must write a minimum three-page autobiography, typed, double spaced and “well constructed with varied structure.”

This is all required BEFORE applicants are accepted to the school – a taxpayer funded school, by the way, that is supposed to accept everyone who applies unless too many enroll. Then the school is supposed to use a lottery to determine who gets in.
Funny how the lottery winners always seem to be those with the best essays and the lowest academic, psychological or medical needs.

Of course, that’s just one school.

The Southern California chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) along with Public Advocates looked at the application policies of 1,000 of the state’s 1,200 charter schools.

A quarter of them (including Roseland) had policies in violation of state law that could exclude some types of students. In particular, these charters are selecting against children from families with lower incomes or poorer English skills by requiring parents to volunteer, demanding students’ academic histories and/or failing to provide services for special-education students.

It should be obvious why this is unfair.

No family should have to do more to apply for a K-12 school than would be expected at a private college or university. We should not allow schools that are funded with public tax dollars to select against low-income students and families or foster children. No family should be forced to disclose their child’s medical histories as a prerequisite for enrollment so that school administrators could decide if asthma or a leukemia diagnosis makes the child a bad academic bet. No family should have to divulge members’ immigration status, religion or culture to apply to a school. Frankly, this is not the school’s business. No parent should have to volunteer on campus. Low income parents work two or more jobs, have younger children at home or just don’t have the time. And when you require parents to write essays, too, you’re really just trying to gauge family literacy and the ease of educating the student applicant.

TYPE 2 AND 3: HANDPICKING STUDENTS AND COUNSELING OUT

The good thing about the first type of selective enrollment is that you can see it on school applications which are free and open to the public.

The problem with proving the other two types of cherry picking is the lack of transparency at most charter schools.

Charter schools are notoriously tight lipped about what happens behind their closed doors. Unlike authentic public schools that have several monthly open meetings, open documents, and frequent state audits, charter schools don’t have to share hardly any of this with the public – even though we pay for their school.

The public is not allowed into the room where charter operators pick and choose students because of test scores or academics. Nor are many people allowed into private meetings with students and parents where children are highly encouraged to seek their education elsewhere or even given the boot.

However, there have been numerous studies that show this happens.

To be fair, there are competing studies that show it doesn’t happen. However, those studies are often paid for by the very industry under investigation. Their funding is predicated on finding a certain result and – GASP! – that’s what they usually end up finding.

It’s like the National Apple Institute funding a study that concludes “Pears suck.” It’s not a real study. It’s an advertisement.

The studies that DO show evidence of the second and third type of cherry picking, though, are independent and peer reviewed.

Here are a few results:

-Vasquez Heilig, J., Williams, A., McNeil, L & Lee, C. (2011). Is choice a panacea? An analysis of black secondary student attrition from KIPP, other private charters and urban districts. Berkeley Review of Education, 2(2), 153-178.

This paper concludes that charter school dropout rates – especially for black children – are much higher than at authentic public schools in Texas. In particular, KIPP charter schools claim that 88-90% of their students go on to college. The evidence does not support this claim. In fact, even though KIPP does spend 30-60% more per student, it still has a higher dropout rate and a higher rate for students transferring to other schools. Moreover, Texas charter schools were found to serve fewer black children than authentic public schools.

-Vasquez Heilig, J., LeClair, A. V., Redd, L., & Ward, D. (in press). Separate and Unequal?: The Problematic Segregation of Special Populations in Charter Schools Relative to Traditional Public Schools. Stanford Law & Policy Review, XX(X), XXX-XXX.

An analysis of charter schools in large metropolitan areas finds that authentic public schools have much greater rates of high needs students than charter schools in the same areas.

-Frankenberg, E., Siegel-Hawley, G., & Wang, J. (2011, January). Choice without equity: Charter school segregation. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 19(1). Retrieved from http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/779/878

An examination of charter schools in 40 states and the District of Columbia found widespread evidence that charter schools are much more segregated by race and class than authentic public schools.

In particular:

“This analysis of recent data [2007-08] finds that charter schools are more racially isolated than traditional public schools in virtually every state and large metropolitan area in the nation. In some regions, white students are over-represented in charter schools while in other charter schools, minority students have little exposure to white students. Data about the extent to which charter schools serve low-income and English learner students is incomplete, but suggest that a substantial share of charter schools may not enroll such students.”

-Garcia, D. R. (2008). Academic and racial segregation in charter schools: Do parents sort students into specialized charter schools? Education and Urban Society, 40(5), 590- 612. doi: 10.1177/0013124508316044

This study found little evidence that charter schools were more segregated because of parental choice. “…parents enroll their students into charter schools with at least the same degree of academic integration as the district schools that students exited.” The segregation found at charter schools is due to some other source.

-Lacireno-Paquet, N., Holyoke, T. T., Moser, M., & Henig, J. R. (2002). Creaming versus cropping: Charter school enrollment practices in response to market incentives. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 24(2), 145-158. doi: 10.3102/01623737024002145

School choice makes disparities of race and class worse – not better – by selecting the easiest to teach in enrollment.

In particular:

“…competition for students will pressure individual schools into targeting students with the highest performance and the least encumbered with personal and social disadvantages. We suggest that some charter schools, by background and affiliation, are likely to be more market-oriented in their behavior than others, and test the proposition that market-oriented charter schools engage in cream-skimming…”

Market-based charter schools are not serving high needs students. They are “…skimming the cream off the top of the potential student population, [and] market-oriented charter schools may be “cropping off” service to students whose language or special education needs make them more costly to educate.”

–Positioning Charter Schools in Los Angeles: Diversity of Form and Homogeneity of Effects. Douglas Lee Lauen, Bruce Fuller and Luke Dauter American Journal of Education Vol. 121, No. 2 (February 2015), pp. 213-239

This study finds:

“Charter school students were less likely to be Black, Latino, LEP, special education, and low income and were more likely to be White, academically gifted, high achieving, and have more highly educated parents. For example, about 12 percent of the parents of traditional public school students attained a college degree or higher, compared with 35 percent of the parents of charter school students.”

Researchers also concluded that despite serving more advantaged students, Los Angeles charter schools did not have much effect on student test scores.

In fact:

“We report no statistically significant positive effects of attending a charter school on achievement growth. For the first three cohorts studied, charter school effects on test score growth were negative and significant. For the last cohort studied, the effect was negative, but not statistically significant.”

-Government Accountability Office. (2012). Charter schools: Additional federal attention needed to help protect access for students with disabilities. Washington, DC: Author. http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-12-543

This study found that charter schools enrolled a lower percentage of students with disabilities than traditional public schools.

In particular:

“In school year 2009-2010, which was the most recent data available at the time of our review, approximately 11 percent of students enrolled in traditional public schools were students with disabilities compared to about 8 percent of students enrolled in charter schools.

“GAO also found that, relative to traditional public schools, the proportion of charter schools that enrolled high percentages of students with disabilities was lower overall. Specifically, students with disabilities represented 8 to 12 percent of all students at 23 percent of charter schools compared to 34 percent of traditional public schools.”

Researchers could not prove a reason for this discrepancy but they did consider that “…some charter schools may be discouraging students with disabilities from enrolling.”

-Jabbar, H. (2015). Every Kid is Money: Market-like competition and school leader strategies in New Orleans. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis. http://epa.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/04/27/0162373715577447.abstract

“This study examines how choice creates school-level actions using qualitative data from 30 schools in New Orleans. Findings suggest that school leaders did experience market pressures… [and some] …engaged in marketing or cream skimming.”

-Hirji, R. (2014). Are Charter Schools Upholding Student Rights? American Bar Association. Available online at http://apps.americanbar.org/litigation/committees/childrights/content/articles/winter2014-0114-charter-schools-upholding-student-rights.htm

The study concluded:

“The structures that allow charter schools to exist are marked by the absence of protections that are traditionally guaranteed by public education, protections that only become apparent and necessary when families and students begin to face a denial of what they were initially promised to be their right. [Charter operators] may encourage charter schools to push certain students out and make it easier to deny them the benefits of a publicly supported education. The perception that charter schools are open to all students is being called into question by increasing evidence that children who are disadvantaged by a disability, poverty, or being a member of a minority group, or who have been accused of an offense, may not have the same access to charter schools as those [who] are not.”

-Taylor, J., Cregor, M., & Lane, P. (2014). Not Measuring Up: Massachusetts’ Students of Color and Students with Disabilities Receive Disproportionate Discipline, Especially in Charter Schools. Lawyers Committee For Civil Rights and Economic Justice. Available at: http://lawyerscom.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Not-Measuring-up_-The-State-of-School-Discipline-in-Massachusetts.pdf

“…A significant number of charter schools, particularly those in the Boston area, had high discipline rates. Roxbury Preparatory Charter suspended 6 out of every 10 students out-of-school at least once… all for non-violent, non-criminal, non-drug offenses– for each suspended student.”

Civil Rights complaints and documents from the Katrina Truth (Education) page may be accessed here: http://www.katrinatruth.org/pages/education.html

“Accountability for what’s happening in New Orleans schools has been sorely lacking. While 92% of students are now enrolled in charters, many charter schools have failed to accommodate students with disabilities or limited English proficiency, violating federal law and prompting civil rights complaints to federal agencies. Making matters worse, students enrolled in New Orleans charters are subject to harsher charter-specific discipline policies aimed at pushing out even more students. Suspension rates at New Orleans charters, especially for out-of-school suspensions, are among some of the worst in the nation, with several schools above Louisiana’s already high statewide average and a select group at “rates of 40, 50, 60% and more each year.”

There is much more in comprehensive reports like Pushed Out: Harsh Discipline in Louisiana Schools Denies The Right to Education.

-Henig, J. R., & MacDonald, J. A. (2002). Locational decisions of charter schools: Probing the market metaphor. Social Science Quarterly, 83(4), 962–980. doi:10.1111/1540-6237.00126

The study examined why charters chose to locate in the District of Columbia (D.C.).

Researchers concluded:

“Charters are more likely to locate in areas with high proportions of African–American and Hispanic residents than in the predominantly white neighborhoods, and more likely to locate in neighborhoods with middle incomes and high home ownership than in either poor or wealthy areas of the city. This is especially true of those operated by for–profits…”

-Jennings, J. (2010). School choice or schools’ choice?: Managing in an era of accountability. Sociology of Education, 83(3), 227–247.

Looking at New York City charter high schools, researchers concluded:

“Although district policy did not allow principals to select students based on their performance, two of the three schools in this study circumvented these rules to recruit and retain a population that would meet local accountability targets.”

-Corcoran, S. & Jennings, 2015. The Gender Gap in Charter School Enrollment. 2015. NCSPE. http://www.ncspe.org/readrel.php?set=pub&cat=287

“Though many studies have investigated the extent to which the racial, socioeconomic, and academic composition of charter schools differs from traditional schools, no studies have examined whether charters enroll and/or retain a higher fraction of girls.

“…Analyzing enrollment data for all charter and public schools from 1999-00 through 2006-07, we find that charters enroll a significantly higher fraction of girls, an imbalance that is largest in the secondary grades, and has grown steadily each year.”

“…While attrition from charter schools is higher in all grades than from traditional schools, we find that boys are only slightly more likely to exit charter schools once enrolled. This suggests that much of the gender enrollment gap occurs at intake.”

VERDICT ON CHERRY PICKING

This really just scratches the surface. There are hundreds of more peer-reviewed studies and reputable news articles documenting that the second and third type of cherry picking takes place at many charter schools.

This is a problem even for charters that don’t engage in this practice because the laws governing the industry allow for selective enrollment.

Even charters that don’t cherry pick today could do so tomorrow and there’s nothing we could do about it.

Allowing schools that are publicly financed the freedom to pick whichever students they want to educate is like giving a match to an unsupervised child. It’s only a matter of time before something catches on fire.

In Part 2, we’ll examine the second excuse charter school advocates proclaim when confronted with the evidence above. Namely, that cherry picking students is okay since the authentic public schools do it, too.

NOTE: This article owes a debt to the research of Julian Vasquez Heilig whose Cloaking Inequality Website is an essential resource in the fight for equity in our schools.

Like this post? I’ve written a book, “Gadfly on the Wall: A Public School Teacher Speaks Out on Racism and Reform,” now available from Garn Press. Ten percent of the proceeds go to the Badass Teachers Association. Check it out!

Teachers Are More Stressed Out Than You Probably Think

September 29, 2019 stevenmsinger Accountability, Badass Teachers Association, Betsy DeVos, Budget, Corporate Education "Reform", Data, Education, Labor, Learning, Local Control, Parents, Politics, Poverty, Prejudice, principals, School Funding, school violence, Schools, small class size, Social Justice, Students, teacher autonomy, Teachers, Unions Data, education, health, labor, Politics, public schools, Respect, salary, schools, stress, Students, teacher appreciation, teacher autonomy, teachers, teaching, unions, work load

When I was just a new teacher, I remember my doctor asking me if I had a high stress job.

I said that I taught middle school, as if that answered his question. But he took it to mean that I had it easy. After all – as he put it – I just played with children all day.

Now after 16 years in the classroom and a series of chronic medical conditions including heart disease, Crohn’s Disease and a recent battle with shingles though I’m only in my 40s, he knows better.

Teaching is one of the most stressful jobs you can have.

You don’t put your life on the line in the same way the police or a soldier does. You don’t risk having a finger chopped off like someone working in a machine shop. You don’t even have to worry like a truck driver about falling asleep and drifting off the road.

But you do work a ridiculous amount of hours per day. You lose time with family, children and friends. And no matter how hard you work, you’re given next to no resources to get it done with, your autonomy is stripped away, you’re given mountains of unnecessary bureaucratic paperwork, you’re told how to do your job by people who know nothing about education, and you’re scapegoated for all of society’s ills.

Not to mention that you’re expected to buy supplies for your students out of your own pocket, somehow magically raise student test scores but still authentically teach, convince parents not to send their children to the local fly-by-night charter or voucher school and prepare for an unlikely but possible school shooter!

Oh! And the pay isn’t competitive given the years of schooling you need just to qualify to do the work!!

That causes a mighty amount of stress.

One in five teachers (20%) feels tense about their job most or all of the time, according to an analysis by the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) in England. In similar professions, only one in eight feel this way (13%).

But those are conservative estimates.

A representative survey of more than 4,000 educators conducted in 2017 by the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the Badass Teachers Association (BATs) found even more stark results.

Educators and school staff find their work “always” or “often” stressful 61 percent of the time. Workers in similar professions say that their job is “always” or “often” stressful only 30 percent of the time.

That kind of tension among teachers has consequences. More than half of educators reported that they have less enthusiasm now than at the beginning of their careers.

One respondent commented:

“This job is stressful, overwhelming and hard. I am overworked, underpaid, underappreciated, questioned and blamed for things that are out of my control.”

WORK LOAD

The most obvious cause of teacher stress is the workload.

Though the details vary slightly from study to study, the vast majority highlight this as the number one factor.

The NFER study concluded that teachers work longer hours than people in other professions though a less number of official days. This is because of the school year – classes meet for about 9-10 months but require far more than 40 hours a week to get everything done. In fact, teachers are putting in a full years work or more in those limited days.

For instance, an average American puts in about 260 days at work a year. Teachers average 70 less days but do the same (or more) hours that other employees put in during the full 260 days. But teachers are only paid for 190 days. So they do roughly the same amount of work in a shorter time span and are paid less for it. The result is a poor work-life balance and higher stress levels.

But exactly how many hours do teachers routinely work? It depends on who you ask.

The University College London Institute of Education estimates that one in four teachers works 60 hours a week or more – a figure that has remained consistent for the past 25 years.

According to NFER, teachers work an average of 47 hours a week, with a quarter working 60 hours a week or more and one in 10 working more than 65 hours a week.

Four in 10 teachers said they usually worked in the evenings, and one in 10 work on weekends.

Both of these studies refer to British teachers but estimates are similar for teachers in the United States.

The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) reports that teachers in both countries are among those who work the most hours annually. The average secondary teacher in England teaches 1,225 hours a year. The average secondary teacher in the United States teaches 1,080 hours a year. Across the OECD, the average for most countries is 709 hours.

Finally, a study focusing just on US teachers by Scholastic, found that educators usually work 53 hours a week. That comes out to 7.5 hours a day in the classroom teaching. In addition, teachers spend 90 minutes before and/or after school mentoring, tutoring, attending staff meetings and collaborating with peers. Plus 95 additional minutes at home grading papers, preparing classroom activities and other job-related tasks.

And teachers who oversee extracurricular clubs put in an additional 11-20 hours a week.

No matter how you slice it, that’s a lot of extra hours.

According to the NFER study, two out of five teachers (41%) are dissatisfied with their amount of leisure time, compared to 32% of people in similar professionals.

This is a prime factor in the exodus of trained professionals leaving the field in droves, sometimes miscalled a teacher “shortage.”

It’s why one in six new teachers leave the profession after just a year in the classroom.

SALARY

Another contributing factor is salary.

Teacher pay in the United States (and many other countries) is not competitive for the amount of training required and responsibilities put on employees.

According to the Economic Policy Institute, teachers in the United States make 14 percent less than people from professions that require similar levels of education.

Sadly, it only gets worse as time goes on.

Teacher salary starts low, and grows even more slowly.

According to a report by the Center for American Progress, on average teachers with 10 years experience only get a roughly $800 raise per year. No wonder more than 16 percent of teachers have a second or third job outside of the school system. They simply can’t survive on the salary.

They can’t buy a home or even rent an apartment in most metropolitan areas. They can’t afford to marry, raise children, or eke out a middle class existence.

BACK TO WORKLOAD

This mixture of refusing to pay teachers what they’re worth and expecting them to do more-and-more with less-and-less is unsustainable.

Today’s public schools employ at least 250,000 fewer people than they did before the recession of 2008–09. Meanwhile enrollment has increased by at least 800,000 students.

So if we wanted our kids to have the same quality of service children received in this country only a decade ago, we’d need to hire almost 400,000 more teachers!

That’s how you cut class size down from the 20, 30, even 40 students packed into a room that you can routinely find in some districts today.

The fact that we refuse to invest in our schools only increases the workload of the teachers who are still there. They look around and see students in desperate need and have to choose between what’s good for them, personally, and what’s good for their students.

THAT’S why teachers are working so many unpaid hours. They’re giving all they have to help their students despite a society that refuses to provide the necessary time and resources.

And make no mistake, one of those resources is having enough teachers to get the job done.

RESPECT

For a lot of teachers, the issue boils down to respect – lack of it.

Teachers are expected to do everything and then denigrated when they can’t accomplish miracles every single day.

The fact is teachers are extremely important – the most important in-school factor for student success.

However, that doesn’t make them the most important factor in the entire learning process.

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%. (see Hanushek et al. 1998; Rockoff 2003; Goldhaber et al. 1999; Rowan et al. 2002; Nye et al. 2004).

Estimates vary somewhat from study to study, but the basic structure holds. The vast majority of impact on learning comes from the home and out-of-school factors. Teachers are a small part of the picture. They are the largest single factor in the school building, but the school, itself, is only one of many components.

The people who know teachers the best—parents, co-workers and students—show much more respect for teachers than elected officials and media pundits, many of whom rarely set foot in a classroom, according to the 2017 BATs and AFT Quality of Work Life Survey.

While educators feel most respected by their colleagues, they also indicated that their direct supervisors showed them much more respect than their school boards, the media, elected officials and U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. A total of 86 percent of respondents did not feel respected by DeVos.

Most educators said they felt like they had moderate to high control over basic decisions within their own classrooms, but their level of influence and control dropped significantly on policy decisions that directly impact their classroom – such as setting discipline policy, performance standards and deciding how resources are spent.

“This lack of voice over important instructional decisions is a tangible example of the limited respect policymakers have for educators,” the report concluded.

Sometimes this lack of respect leads to outright bullying.

A total of 43 percent of respondents in the public survey group reported having been bullied, harassed or threatened at work in the last year. Of these reports, 35% included claims of having been bullied by administrators, principals or supervisors, 23% by co-workers, 50% by students, 31% by students’ parents. Many claimed to have been bullied by multiple sources.

This is a much higher rate of bullying, harassment and threats than workers in the general population.

I, myself, have experienced this even to the point of being physically injured by students multiple times – nothing so serious that it put me in the hospital, but enough to require a doctor’s visit.

And to make matters worse, one-third of respondents said that teachers and faculty at their schools did not felt safe bringing up problems and addressing issues.

CONCLUSIONS

Teacher stress is a real problem in our schools.

If we want to provide our children with a world class education, we need to look out for the educators who do the actual work.

We need to drastically reduce the workload expected of them. We need to hire more teachers so the burden can be more adequately sustained. We need to increase teacher salary to retain those already on the job and to attract the most qualified applicants in the future. We need to stop blaming teachers for every problem in society and give them the respect and autonomy they deserve for having volunteered to do one of the most important jobs in any society. And we have to stop bullying and harassing them.

As a nation, our children are our most valuable resource. If we want to do what’s best for the generations to come, we need to stop stressing out those brave people who step up to guide our kids into a brighter tomorrow.

Charter School’s Two Dads – How a Hatred for Public School Gave Us School Privatization

September 19, 2019September 19, 2019 stevenmsinger Accountability, Betsy DeVos, bloggers, capitalism, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Corporate Education "Reform", Democrat, Donald Trump, Education, history, Labor, Learning, Local Control, Parents, Politics, Prejudice, privatization, Propaganda, Racism, Republican, School Choice, School Funding, school vouchers, Schools, segregation, Standardized Testing, Students, Teachers, union busting, Unions Albert Shanker, ALEC, American Federation of Teachers, charter schools, education, Ember Reichgott, history, Joe Nathan, Milton Friedman, Politics, public schools, Ray Budde, schools, Ted Kolderie, union busting

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If bad ideas can be said to have fathers, then charter schools have two.

And I’m not talking about greed and racism.

No, I mean two flesh and blood men who did more than any others to give this terrible idea life – Minnesota ideologues Ted Kolderie, 89, and Joe Nathan, 71.

In my article “Charter Schools Were Never a Good Idea. They Were a Corporate Plot All Along,” I wrote about Kolderie’s role but neglected to mention Nathan’s.

And of the two men, Nathan has actually commented on this blog.

He flamed on your humble narrator when I dared to say that charter schools and voucher schools are virtually identical.

I guess he didn’t like me connecting “liberal” charters with “conservative” vouchers. And in the years since, with Trump’s universally hated Billionaire Education Secretary Betsy Devos assuming the face of both regressive policies, he was right to fear the public relations nightmare for his brainchild, the charter school.

It’s kind of amazing that these two white men tried to convince scores of minorities that giving up self-governance of their children’s schools is in their own best interests, that children of color don’t need the same services white kids routinely get at their neighborhood public schools and that letting appointed bureaucrats decide whether your child actually gets to enroll in their school is somehow school choice!

But now that Nathan and Kolderie’s progeny policy initiative is waning in popularity, the NAACP and Black Lives Matter are calling for moratoriums on new charters and even progressive politicians are calling for legislative oversight, it’s important that people know exactly who is responsible for this monster.

And more than anyone else, that’s Kolderie and Nathan.

Over the last three decades, Nathan has made a career of sabotaging authentic public schools while pushing for school privatization.

He is director of the Center for School Change, a Minneapolis charter school cheerleading organization, that’s received at least $1,317,813 in grants to undermine neighborhood schools and replace them with fly-by-night privatized monstrosities.

He’s written extensively in newspapers around the country and nationwide magazines and Websites like the Huffington Post.

But it all started for Nathan back in 1987 when he happened to see an advertisement on TV, according to Ember Reichgott, the former Minnesota State Senator who originally proposed the first charter school bill.

The ad was called “Ah, Those Marvelous Minnesota Schools,” writes Reichgott.

It dared to dispute the Reagan administration’s propaganda hit piece “A Nation at Risk” which painted public schools as failures that needed to be disrupted and replaced.

Well Nathan wasn’t about to take it.

According to Reichgott’s book, “Zero Chance of Passage: The Pioneering Charter School Story”, Nathan:

“…talked with the Minneapolis Foundation, among others, about what they might do. ‘The Minneapolis Foundation decided it was time to introduce into Minnesota some pretty radical ideas,’ said Nathan. So plans got underway for the Itasca Seminar, with a focus on public education.”

This seminar was instrumental in turning the tide in Minnesota that ultimately birthed the most infectious school privatization virus on an unwitting nation.

Nathan had always been a fan of transferring public services to private control. In fact, he had just finished lobbying for privatization in the National Governors Association. Now back in Minnesota, he joined together with Kolderie, a former journalist and self professed “policy entrepreneur” who had been pushing for the same thing since at least the 1970s.

Their ideology – expounded by southern segregationists and people like the divisive economist Milton Friedman – was extremely unpopular, but they were about to get a break.

In 1988, Albert Shanker, the union hero President of the American Federation of Teachers, had just given an infamous speech to the National Press Club praising the idea of a new concept called “charter schools.”

However, he wasn’t talking about the modern idea of a charter school. Shanker was building off an idea originally proposed by Ray Budde, a little-known professor of education from upstate New York.

It was Budde who actually coined the term “charter school.” He thought school boards could offer “charters” directly to teachers allowing them to create new programs or departments.

Shanker liked this idea because of his own teaching experience in East Harlem where administrators constantly got in the way of educators. “One of the things that discourages people from bringing about change in schools is the experience of having that effort stopped for no good reason,” he said.

Nathan saw in this an opportunity and invited Shanker to speak at the Itasca Seminar. His goal was to hide his side’s privatization aims under the shadow of progressive unionism.

And it worked. In fact, if you look up the history of charter schools, you’ll STILL find people who insist they were invented by Shanker.

With this cover, the Citizen’s League, which was underwritten by the Minneapolis Foundation, was able to pass a bill requiring mandatory statewide standardized testing. The bill, authored by the Minnesota Business Partnership put forth the evaluation system necessary to demonize the public schools and prepare the way for the ultimate goal – privatization.

In 1991, the same forces passed the nation’s first charter school bill.

But let’s be clear on this – the charter schools created in this bill and the “charter schools” talked about by Shanker and Budde are very different concepts.

Nathan and Kolderie wrote the majority of the bill and they stripped out almost everything any educator had ever proposed.

According to Budde’s conception, charters would be authorized by school districts and run by teachers. Central office administrators would step out of the way, but charter schools would still operate within collective bargaining arrangements negotiated between districts and unions.

Instead, Nathan and Kolderie proposed that schools be authorized by statewide agencies that were separate from local districts. The state had the power, not communities or their elected representatives. That meant charters could be run not just by teachers but also by entrepreneurs. And that’s almost always who has been in charge of them ever since – corporations and business interests.

This was the goal Friedman and the deregulators had been fighting for since the 1950s finally realized – almost the same goal, it should be noted, as that behind school vouchers.

From the start, this was a business initiative. Competition between charters and authentic public schools was encouraged. And that included union busting. Thus charters were free of all the constraints of collective bargaining that districts had negotiated with their unions. The needs of workers and students were secondary to those of big business and the profit principle.

Shanker eventually realized this and repudiated what charter schools had become. But by then the damage was done.

Shanker hadn’t created charter schools. He had suggested something very different. And that suggestion was used to help usher in a concept that has haunted our public school system ever since.

Kolderie had been working on it for two decades, and with Nathan’s help it became a reality.

With the backing of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the two men went on to push a version of this same bill from legislature to legislature. Kolderie even boasts of helping 25 other states enact charter school legislation.

Today 43 states are afflicted with charter schools enrolling about 6% of the students in the country. An additional 4% go to private and parochial schools some of which are funded with school vouchers.

This distinction between charter and voucher schools is important to political pundits, but it’s really just hair splitting. It’s like saying vanilla chocolate swirl ice cream is nothing like chocolate vanilla swirl.

Consider: charter schools are privatized schools paid for with taxes. Voucher schools are private schools paid for with money diverted from taxes.

False distinctions like these are another way of managing public perception just like the pettifogging contrast between for-profit and non-profit charter schools. Again they’re pretty much the same thing. They can each cut services to students and pocket the left overs – the only difference is which loopholes they have to jump through and how they designate their tax status.

They are both the flowering of the deregulationist dream of destroying public education and replacing it with business-operated schools. They are attempts to destabilize, defame and destroy public education.

And though the plan has worked for decades, here’s hoping that the current political pause represents the beginning of a change of course.

Kolderie and Nathan’s monster has devoured too many schools and with them too many children’s hopes of an excellent education.

It’s time to pin the monster down with facts and shove a stake through its heart.

Charter Schools Were Never a Good Idea. They Were a Corporate Plot All Along

September 15, 2019September 15, 2019 stevenmsinger Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Budget, capitalism, Charter Schools, church and state, Civil Rights, Corporate Education "Reform", Democrat, Education, history, Labor, Learning, Local Control, Parents, Politics, Prejudice, privatization, Propaganda, Racism, Republican, School Choice, School Funding, school segregation, school vouchers, Schools, segregation, Social Justice, Students, Supreme Court, Teachers, union busting, Unions Albert Shanker, American Federation of Teachers, Bill Clinton, charter schools, education, history, Milton Friedman, Politics, public schools, Rachel Cohen, Ray Budde, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, teachers, Ted Kolderie

America has been fooled by the charter school industry for too long.

The popular myth that charter schools were invented by unions to empower teachers and communities so that students would have better options is as phony as a three dollar bill.

The concept always was about privatizing schools to make money.

It has always been about stealing control of public education, enacting corporate welfare, engaging in union busting, and an abiding belief that the free hand of the market can do no wrong.

Charter schools are, after all, institutions run privately but paid for with tax dollars. So operators can make all decisions behind closed doors without public input or accountability. They can cut student services and pocket the difference. And they can enroll whoever the heck they want without providing the same level of education or programs you routinely get at your neighborhood public school.

In essence, charter schools are a scheme to eliminate the public from public education paid for at public expense.

But whenever anyone brings up these facts, they are confronted by the bedtime story of Albert Shanker and his alleged advocacy of the industry.

So grab your teddy bear and put on your jammies, because here’s how it goes:

Once upon a time, hero president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) Al Shanker had an idea. He wanted to make laboratory schools where educators would be freed of regulations so they could experiment and find new pedagogies that worked. Then these innovations could spread to the rest of the school system.

One day in 1988, he gave a speech at the National Press Club and subsequently published a column in the New York Times advancing this idea.

And he called it – Dum, Dum, DUM! – charter schools!
The second act of the story opens in the mid-1990s when Shanker had largely turned against the idea after it had been co-opted by business interests.

He dreamed of places where unionized teachers would work with union representatives on charter authorizing boards, and all charter proposals would include plans for “faculty decision-making.” But instead he got for-profit monstrosities that didn’t empower workers but busted their unions.

If only we’d stuck with Shanker’s bold dream!

Or at least, that’s how the story goes.

Unfortunately it’s just a story.

It’s not true. Hardly a word of it.

Shanker did not come up with the idea of charter schools. He wasn’t part of the plan to popularize them. He didn’t even come up with the term “charter school.”

If anything, he was a useful patsy in this stratagem who worked tirelessly to give teachers unions a seat at the table where he then discovered they were also on the menu.

The real origin of charter schools goes back decades to at least the 1950s and the far right push for deregulation.

When the afterglow of the atomic bomb and the allied victory in Europe had faded, there was political backlash at home to roll back the amazing economic successes of the New Deal. Social security, strong banking regulations, deposit insurance, a minimum wage, job programs that put millions of people to work – all of that had to go in favor of right wing ideology.

A cabal of mostly wealthy, privileged elites wanted to do away with these policies in the name of the prosperity it would bring to themselves and their kind. They claimed it would be for the good of everyone but it was really just about enriching the already rich who felt entitled to all economic goods and that everyone else should have to fight over the crumbs.

Never mind that it was just such thinking that burst economic bubbles causing calamities like the Great Depression in the first place and made the conditions ripe for two world wars.

Show me the money!

However, this really didn’t go anywhere until it was combined with that most American of institutions – racism.

Even before the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown vs. Board decision struck down school segregation, many white people said they’d never allow their children to go to school with black children.

In the South, several districts tried “freedom of choice” plans to allow white kids to transfer out of desegregated schools.

In 1952 and ’57, governments in two states – Georgia and Virginia – tried out what became known as the “private school plan.” Georgia Gov. Herman Talmadge and community leaders in Prince Edward County, Virginia, tried to privatize public schools to avoid any federal desegregation requirements. Each student would be given a voucher to go to whatever school would enroll them – segregated by race.
The plan was never implemented in Georgia and struck down by the federal government in Virginia after only one year as a misuse of taxpayer funds.

But these failed plans got the attention of one of the leading deregulation champions, economist Milton Friedman.

He sided with the segregationists citing their prejudice and racism as merely “market forces.”

In his seminal 1955 tract, “The Role of Government in Education,” he wrote:

“So long as the schools are publicly operated, the only choice is between forced nonsegregation and forced segregation; and if I must choose between these evils, I would choose the former as the lesser. Privately conducted schools can resolve the dilemma … Under such a system, there can develop exclusively white schools, exclusively colored schools, and mixed schools.”

Throughout the 1970s, school voucher proposals were widely understood as a means to preserve school segregation, according to education historian Diane Ravitch. But they couldn’t gain any traction until privatizers came up with a new wrinkle in the formula – the charter school.

Charter schools are really just school vouchers with more money and regulations.

In the case of vouchers, we use tax dollars to pay for a portion of student enrollment at private and parochial schools. In the case of charters, we use tax dollars to pay for all of a student’s enrollment at a school that is privately managed. The only difference is how much taxpayer money we give to these privatized schools and how much leeway we give them in terms of pedagogy.

Charter schools can do almost whatever they want but they can’t blatantly teach religion. Voucher schools can.

Other than that, they’re almost the same thing.

In order to get the public to support school privatization, Friedman thought we’d need to convince them that they didn’t need the burden of self-government. This was especially true of minorities.

In his 1981 book Free to Choose, Friedman and his wife Rose suggested the necessity of convincing black voters that they didn’t need Democracy. School privatization could be pitched as a system that would “free the black man from dominion by his own political leaders.”

The opportune moment came in 1983 with the publication of the Reagan administration’s propaganda piece A Nation at Risk. Using bogus statistics and outright lies, the report painted our public school system as a failure and set up the false urgency that school deregulationists needed.

From this point forward, a series of supply side lawmakers, policy wonks, economists, billionaires and CEOs came out of the woodwork to push for school privatization which culminated in the first charter school law in 1991 in Minnesota.

In the middle of all this tumult came Shanker’s National Press Club speech in 1988.

Ronald Reagan was still in office and it’s hard to overstate the threat he posed to unions having infamously fired more than 11,000 striking air traffic controllers.

Shanker was trying to ride the tide of public opinion in favor of deregulation and privatization. He accepted the bogus criticisms of schools in A Nation At Risk and offered to restructure schools to fix the problem. Like so many union leaders after him, Shanker gave away much of the power of his people-driven movement so as not to come across as obstructionist. He didn’t think teachers unions could oppose the rising tide of privatization without offering innovations of their own.

It’s true that he called these reforms “charter schools” but he didn’t invent the term. He borrowed it from a little-known Massachusetts educator, Ray Budde, who meant by it something very different from what it has become. Budde thought school boards could offer “charters” directly to teachers allowing them to create new programs or departments.

Shanker’s proposal wasn’t nearly the first time a public figure had suggested restructuring public schools.

In the late 1960s after helping provide justification for school desegregation, sociologist Kenneth Clark advocated for alternative school systems that could be run by groups as diverse as universities to the Department of Defense.

Shanker’s contribution was not nearly as powerful as subsequent apologists have claimed. He was one voice among many. Though his comments were useful to the deregulators, they ignored everything of substance he had said beyond the myth that he supported their efforts at school privatization.

According to journalist Rachel Cohen, the true architect of the charter school concept as it appears today wasn’t Shanker, Budde or Clark. It was Minnesota “policy entrepreneur” Ted Kolderie.

He was at the heart of the issue pushing for school privatization from the 1970s through the 1990s.

Throughout the 1970s, Kolderie lobbied for a plethora of ways for private industry to provide government services – including education – through an initiative known as Public Service Options (PSO). By 1981, the focus narrowed almost exclusively to education.

In several reports, he blamed the bogus failure of public schools on the democracy of the school boards. Though he didn’t use the term “charter school,” his conception was essentially the same as the modern charter school: independent schools accountable only through market forces and a set of contractual obligations. He thought they could be run by almost anyone – universities, corporations, nonprofits— even public school districts – if state law could be amended to allow it.

That’s pretty much a charter school – a privately run learning institution that’s publicly financed.

Why doesn’t Kolderie get the credit? Why the emphasis on Shanker who had very little to do with what ultimately became law?

Because Kolderie and others wanted to hide behind the union. They wanted their policy to have a friendlier public image than that of a shadowy puppet master.

Shanker walked right into their trap.

He even agreed to give another speech in favor of charter schools in October 1988 at the Minneapolis Foundation’s annual Itasca Seminar for political and business leaders.

With continued lobbying from the corporate sector and right wing ideologues, three years later the state was the first to pass a charter school law.

And the die was cast.

Sure charter school cheerleaders like to give Shanker the credit today, but the legislation that was eventually passed and funneled to other states through the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) had little resemblance to anything Shanker said.

It was the deregulation and privatization model first conceived in the 1950s, funneled through Friedman and now Kolderie.

And make no mistake – the overall plot wasn’t simply to enact charter schools. That was merely the foothold that enabled subsequent school voucher bills and tax scholarship plans (vouchers lite). The end game was made clear by Friedman time and again – the complete destruction of public schools.

While speaking to rightwing lawmakers at a 2006 ALEC meeting, Friedman explained that school privatization was always about “abolishing the public school system.”

Here is an excerpt from Friedman’s ALEC speech:

“How do we get from where we are to where we want to be—to a system in which parents control the education of their children? Of course, the ideal way would be to abolish the public school system and eliminate all the taxes that pay for it. Then parents would have enough money to pay for private schools, but you’re not gonna do that. So you have to ask, what are politically feasible ways of solving the problem. The answer, in my opinion, is choice…”

When Minnesota proposed the first charter school law, the state teachers union fought against it. But tellingly Shanker refused to speak out during legislative debates.

And this was due in part to the rise of the neoliberals.

School privatization was the brainchild of the far right. But as the ‘80s gave way to the ‘90s, so dawned a new type of political figure – the social progressive with distinctly right wing economic views.

In 1989 when the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) named Bill Clinton as chairman, it also founded its own think tank—the Progressive Policy Institute. Kolderie worked closely with the DLC and even wrote its first policy paper on school privatization.

Clinton was an immediate convert, embracing Kolderie’s proposals as he traveled around the country making speeches even though he knew it was unpopular with teachers unions. Clinton ruffled so many feathers that Shanker, himself, commented, “It is almost impossible for us to get President Clinton to stop endorsing [charters] in all his speeches.”

Though the first charter school law came a year later, in 1990 Wisconsin passed the first school voucher program. Since it was pushed through with mostly Republican support, this provided cover for neoliberal charter supporters. Though there was little difference between the two policies, neoliberals could distinguish themselves by criticizing school vouchers while endorsing their ideological cousins the charter schools.

So we had the two major political parties both supporting different flavors of the same school privatization.

It allowed Democrats to stop supporting more funding for social programs and schools while weakening the main driver of such policies – labor unions. This allowed the neoliberals to be economically as conservative as their “adversaries” across the aisle while publicly pretending to support progressivism.

Today, there are charter schools in 43 states and the District of Columbia educating nearly three million students.

This does not now – and never did – represent any ideal offered by Shanker or unions.

His dream of teacher-run schools as laboratories of innovation may or may not have merit, but not at the expense of making different rules for different schools. Where regulation is important, it is important for all schools. Where it is too restrictive, all schools should be freed from its requirements. All teachers should be allowed to innovate and take a leadership role in their schools.

When Shanker spoke about “charter schools,” he was not a visionary. He was leading us down a dead end. He was foolishly offering an olive branch to an inferno. That doesn’t mean he started the blaze or even that it was his idea.

Yet even now you can read propaganda that says otherwise on the AFT’s own Website – “Restoring Shanker’s Vision for Charter Schools” by Richard D. Kahlenberg and Halley Potter. It’s funny how Potter, a former charter school teacher, and Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation – which loves charter schools – both want to keep the happy face on an ugly idea. And sad that one of the largest teachers unions can’t face up to one of its heroes biggest mistakes.

If charter schools have a face, it should be Kolderie’s or Friedman’s – or perhaps it should be the industry’s most famous modern champion Betsy Devos.
Charter schools are no progressive dream.

They are the corporate paradise of spending tax dollars with zero accountability, zero transparency and as much deregulation as possible. They are the continued destabilization of public education in the knowledge that the edifice cannot stand without support indefinitely.

Public education will crumble and fall just as the architects of school privatization always knew it would.

Unless we take a stand and take back our power.

To do that we need to understand where charter and voucher schools came from and who is responsible.

Charter schools do NOT represent a good idea that was perverted by the corporate world. It is an essentially bad policy that should be abolished immediately.

NOTE: This article owes a debt to the reporting of Rachel Cohen.

Every Charter School Must Be Closed Down – Every. Single. One.

September 8, 2019September 8, 2019 stevenmsinger Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Corporate Education "Reform", Democrat, Donald Trump, Education, Labor, Learning, Local Control, Parents, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Politics, Prejudice, private schools, privatization, Republican, School Choice, school closings, School Funding, school segregation, school vouchers, Schools, segregation, Social Justice, Special Education, Students, Taxation, Teachers, Tom Wolf, Unions Austin Davis, charter schools, Democrats, for-profit, James Brewster, Pennsylvania, policy, Politics, public schools, Republicans, school closings, school privatization, Tom Wolf

The problem with charter schools isn’t that they have been implemented badly.

Nor is it that some are for-profit and others are not.

The problem is the concept, itself.

Put simply: charter schools are a bad idea. They always were a bad idea. And it is high time we put an end to them.

I am overjoyed that lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are starting to hear the criticisms leveled against the charter school industry in the face of the naked greed and bias of the Trump administration and its high priestess of privatization, Betsy DeVos. However, I am also disappointed in the lack of courage displayed by many of these same lawmakers when proposing solutions.

Charter schools enroll only 6 percent of students nationwide yet they gobble up billions of dollars in funding. In my home state of Pennsylvania, they cost Commonwealth taxpayers more than $1.8 billion a year and take more than 25 percent of the state’s basic education funding. That’s for merely 180 schools with 135,000 students!

Charter schools are privately run but publicly financed. They are what happens when the public abrogates its responsibility to run a school and signs that right away (in a charter agreement) with another entity, usually a business or corporation.
As such, these schools are not held to the same standards as authentic public schools. Unlike your neighborhood school, charters are not required to be run by elected boards, to have public meetings, to have open records, or to spend all their money in the service of their students. Nor do they have to provide the same standard of services for students – even children with special needs. Nor do they have to accept all students within their coverage area who enroll. And that’s to say nothing of how they increase racial segregation, are susceptible to fraud and malfeasance, often produce much worse academic results, close without notice, hire many uncertified teachers, trample workers rights and destabilize the authentic neighborhood public schools.

These are not problems that can be solved by fiddling around the edges.

We cannot simply constrain them from stealing AS MUCH from authentic public schools and consider it a victory.

We need to address the issue head on – and that issue is the very concept of charter schools.

Why would the public give up its schools to a private entity? Why allow someone else to take our money and do whatever they want with it behind closed doors? Why allow anyone to give our children less of an education than we’re already providing at our own schools?

We must end this failed experiment. Nothing less will do. It will only provide more breathing room so that this unjust situation can drag on for another generation.

In Pennsylvania, Gov. Tom Wolf has proposed sweeping reforms via executive order that would make real progress toward holding charter schools accountable. He has asked that the state senate and house take the next step with legislation to finish the job.

Just this past week, Wolf visited Twin Rivers Elementary School in McKeesport along with state Senator Jim Brewster and state Reps Austin Davis and Jake Wheatley to listen to resident and teachers’ concerns and propose solutions.

Such a move is unprecedented and represents a seismic shift in the political landscape. However, I am concerned that lawmakers are too timid to fix the real problem here.

No one has the bravery to come out and say what I’ve said here.

Consider this statement from Brewster, my state Senator:

“I have legislation to address some of these issues, but it’s not an indictment on charter school teachers. It’s not an indictment on the charter school concept. It’s an indictment on the process that was put in place 20 some years ago that has put in a playing field that’s not level. Together I believe if we get the charter school folks to the table we can iron this out, we can fix several things that need to be fixed – the funding formula, the capacity, the cap and those sort of things – and when we do that, then the mission statements of the charter schools and the public schools are the same – educate our children, bring their skill sets out, help them achieve their dreams.”

I am deeply grateful for Brewster’s support and willingness to take on the charter industry. And he is right about many things. But not all of them.

He is right, for example, about the financial impact of charter schools on authentic neighborhood public schools.

At the same meeting, McKeesport superintendent Mark Holtzman said, “Charter schools are depleting our resources with no accountability or without being financially responsible. Taxpayer money is being used to flood the media with commercials and billboards right before the start of school so that they can take our students.”

There are roughly 500 students living in the McKeesport district enrolled in brick-and-mortar charter schools and 100 students enrolled in cyber charters. The district spends about $7 million — or 10% of its budget — on charter school payments, according to Holtzman.

It’s roughly the same at other districts in the Mon-Valley. Steel Valley Schools, where I work as a middle school teacher, has budgeted a $6 million payment to charter schools this year – 16% of our spending plan.

Again, I am extremely grateful that Wolf and other state Democrats recognize this fact and are willing to take measures to make matters more fair. I hope many Republicans will join them in this.

However, fixing the way charters are funded alone will not correct the problem.

Charter schools are a parallel service to authentic public schools. If you’re suggesting we fund them both, you’re asking taxpayers to pay for two complete and separate school systems.

Why should we do that? Why should we waste our money on it? I don’t think the people of Pennsylvania – or any state of the union – have money to spare on a pointless duplication of services.

It is a politically impossible position that has zero justification – especially when you consider all the inequitable practices charter schools are allowed to get away with.

In his executive orders, Wolf proposes putting a stop to some of this.

For example, he wants to require charter schools to stop turning away students based on race, ethnicity, gender, disability, intellectual deficits, or other factors. He wants to make charter schools as transparent as authentic public schools. He wants to stop conflicts of interests for charter school board members and operating companies so that they can’t make decisions on behalf of the school that would enrich themselves, their families and/or friends.

These are excellent suggestions and I hope he is able to make them a reality.

However, these “fixes” are all things that authentic public schools already do. They don’t discriminate in enrollment. They are financially accountable and transparent. They aren’t allowed to engage in conflicts of interest.

Why bother making charter schools act like authentic public schools when we already have authentic public schools? That’s like genetically engineering your cat to have a longer snout and say “woof.” Why bother when you already have a dog?

The same could be said about for-profit and non-profit charter schools.

Apologists want to pretend that the former is the “bad” type of charter and the latter is the “good” type.

Wrong.

As Jeff Bryant, an editor at Education Opportunity Network, puts it, this is a “Distinction without a difference.”

These terms only define an organization’s tax status – not whether it is engaged in gathering large sums of money for investors.

With a knowledgeable accountant or hedge fund manager, almost anyone can claim nonprofit status while still enriching yourself. It happens all the time.

For instance, take the use of management companies.

A for-profit charter school can simply cut services to students and pocket the savings as profit.

A nonprofit charter school can do the same thing after engaging in one additional step.

All they have to do is start a “nonprofit” charter school and then hire a for-profit management company to run it. Then the management company can cut services and pocket the profits!

Yet we call such a school “nonprofit.” It’s meaningless.

It doesn’t even matter who owns the for-profit management company. It could even be the same people who own the nonprofit charter school.

The law actually allows you to wear one hat saying you’re nonprofit and then put on a different hat and rake in the cash! The only difference is what hat you’re wearing at the time! You get to claim to be a nonprofit while enjoying all the advantages of being for-profit.

You can even buy things with public tax dollars through your for-profit management company and then if your “nonprofit” school goes bankrupt, you get to keep everything you bought! Or your management company does.

So the public takes all the risk and you reap all the reward. And you’re still called a “nonprofit.”

But let’s not forget real estate shenanigans.

If I own property X, I can sell it to my own charter school and pay myself whatever I want. And I can do the same thing with a nonprofit charter school, I just need to sell it to my for-profit management company which will still buy my property for whatever I decide to pay myself.

Face it – charter schools are a scam.

They are a failed policy initiative.

It’s time they were ended.

But don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting we simply throw away the people who work there or the students who are enrolled there.

We need to look at each charter on a case-by-case basis and decide how best to transition them to an authentic public school system.

In some cases, it may make sense to rehabilitate charters into fully public schools with all the transparency and regulations that means. However, in most cases it will mean eventually closing them.

If there are any charters that actually provide valuable services for students and their families wish to keep children enrolled there, we should allow these students to finish their academic careers there. But let the present classes be the last.

In schools that do not offer better outcomes than the neighborhood public school (i.e. the overwhelming majority) students should be transitioned back to the neighborhood schools.

If there are any charters that do not wish to abide by such changes, they should have the opportunity to become what they already are except in name – private schools. The only difference is that taxpayers will no longer take up the tab.

And when it comes to charter school teachers, they should not be punished for having worked in the industry. In fact, we should find ways to bring them into the authentic public schools.

Our public schools need more teachers. Charter teachers who are fully certified should be given first chance to fill some of those vacancies. And charter teachers who are not certified should be given the opportunity to go back to school and complete their education degrees.

Any sane solution to the charter school mess would include these measures with the ultimate goal of ending school privatization in all its forms financed at public expense.

We don’t want privatized prisons. We don’t want privatized mercenary armies like Blackwater. We don’t want privatized schools.

Tax dollars should go to our authentic neighborhood public schools so that we can make them even better than they already are.

Our students deserve the best we can give them – and we can’t give them the best when we’re needlessly paying for two separate school systems and passing legislation with more of an eye on private investors than the welfare of the next generation.

It is my sincere hope that this push for real charter school reform becomes an effort to solve this problem once and for all.

Are we brave enough to do it?

Do we have the courage and conviction to take that on?

What Kind of A—hole Ransoms School Data?

August 29, 2019 stevenmsinger Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Bill Gates, Budget, Charter Schools, Child Predators, Civil Rights, computers, Corporate Education "Reform", Data, Data Driven Instruction, Data Mining, edtech, Education, Learning, Local Control, Politics, Poverty, privatization, ransomware, School Funding, Schools, Standardized Testing, student privacy, Students, Teachers, Technology blackmail, cyber attack, Data, Data Mining, edtech, education, Embezzle, Politics, Privatize, public schools, ransom, ransomware, school funding, schools, standardized testing, Students, teachers, technology, theft

You’ve got to be a grade A sleaze bag to steal from kids’ public schools.

But that’s exactly what a growing number of slime balls are doing when they hack into schools’ computer networks and hold their data for ransom.

Even worse – districts are paying it!

Just this week the Rockville Center School District in New York state paid an $88,000 ransom to get back files that had been encrypted by Ryuk ransomware.

The district negotiated the payment down from $176,000. School directors only decided to pay after realizing it would cost more to hire another firm to fix the problem.

Plus the school had insurance that covered ransomware so it only ended up losing its $10,000 deductible.

But this district isn’t the only one being extorted by these basement dweller bandits.

In July, alone, schools in New Mexico, Nevada, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Alabama, Connecticut and another in New York suffered similar cyber attacks.

Nor do they show any signs of slowing down.

A report by cybersecurity firm Recorded Future concluded that attacks on state and local governments have reached an all time high. There were 170 cyber attacks since 2013, of which 22 occurred just this year.

After years of budget cuts and downsizing, hackers see local governments like wolves see the oldest and weakest animals in the herd – easy pickings.

And schools are particularly vulnerable.

They often have small IT departments, antiquated equipment and the cheapest cybersecurity.

That’s why in recent months schools in Lake City, Fla.; La Porte County, Indiana; and Riviera Beach, Fla. have all paid ransoms to regain access to their data.

If you think about it, data is one of the most financially valuable things schools have.

Districts are responsible for students’ privacy in so many ways – records of special services, grades, accommodations, discipline, etc. In addition, schools are large employers with privileged information on their staffs including healthcare, finances, insurance, social security numbers, etc.

School directors and administrators have a responsibility to safeguard this information. It’s no wonder, then, that many are giving in to these demands, especially when nefarious nonentities ensure payment is cheaper than any other alternative.

Even so, what a monster you have to be to squeeze schools in order to make a buck!

Every dollar you blackmail away from district coffers is a dollar not spent on children’s educations.

That’s less money for teachers, supplies, classes, tutors, nurses, counselors, etc.

You aren’t stealing candy from a baby. You are literally snatching away opportunities for a better future.

Given the stakes involved, it shouldn’t be all up to individual districts to stop cyber thieves. The state and federal government should be flexing their muscles to help.

One thing they can do is toughen laws against using ransomware.

Maryland legislators proposed a law to consider ransomware attacks that resulted in a loss of more than $1,000 as a felony, which would then be subject to a fine of up to $100,000 and 10 years in jail.

Current Maryland laws define such attacks that extort less than $10,000 as misdemeanors, while only a breach that results in a loss of greater than $10,000 is a felony.

But some argue that there are already federal laws on the books criminalizing ransomware such as The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and the Electronic Communications Privacy Act. Unfortunately, these laws don’t mention ransomware specifically and may be too broad.

Federal and state governments could at least offer grants to update school cybersecurity to make such attacks more difficult. Otherwise, the burden becomes an exponential increase in the cost of doing business for schools which can only be made up by increasing local taxes and/or cutting student services.

Another option would be setting up a federal program to step in whenever schools are victims of ransomware. After all, these are public schools! If they were under attack by armed terrorists, the federal government wouldn’t think twice before jumping in.

With federal resources, perhaps we could stop all schools from ever paying these ransoms again. Because that’s the only way to truly end these cyber attacks.

As long as schools and governments are willing to pay, there will be trolls unscrupulous enough to take advantage.

Public services set up to meet the public good should never have to shortchange society so they can meet some fool’s ransom demand.

Ransomware has been around since at least 2012. The largest incident so far came last year with the WannaCry attack which infected more than 200,000 computers in about 150 countries, including the United Kingdom’s National Health Service, at a cost of about $4 billion.

It’s past time we got serious in dealing with these cowards.

As technology increases, data crimes have become more common. In fact, there are far too many legal ways to pilfer private data.

Schools, in particular, do a bad job of safeguarding student data by entering into unregulated and nefarious contracts with ed tech companies. Contracts with these companies commonly contain loopholes allowing them to take student data at will and sell it.

The situation is worsened by the supply-side economic policies governing public schools. There are already numerous roads to privatize public schools and turn tax dollars into corporate profits. Moreover, the standardized testing industry monetizes learning when their services are mandated by the state and federal government. They conveniently offer to remediate the large numbers of students who don’t score well on these same tests and cash in on both ends.

With so many fully legal ways to steal education dollars from practices and policies that actually help kids learn, it’s no surprise where these shadow dwellers get their ideas.

As repulsive and selfish as these hackers are, they’re only taking the greed of the testing, privatization and ed tech industry to its logical conclusion.

What kind of a—hole ransoms school data?

The a—holes we allow to get away with it.

Blaming Schools for Student Absences is Like Denouncing Doctors for Disease

August 25, 2019 stevenmsinger absenteeism, Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Budget, Charter Schools, Child Safety, Civil Rights, Compassion, Corporate Education "Reform", edtech, Education, ESSA, Every Student Succeeds Act, Learning, Local Control, Parents, Pennsylvania, Politics, Poverty, Prejudice, privatization, School Funding, school segregation, Schools, segregation, Standardized Testing, Students, Teachers absenteeism, Accountability, charter schools, chronic absences, education, Every Student Succeeds Act, Politics, public schools, responsability, safe schools, school funding, school segregation, schools, Students, teacher bashing, Teacher Evaluation, teacher shortage, teachers

If something is wrong with children, it must be the school’s fault.

Right?

If kids can’t read, write and do ‘rithmetic, the teachers must not have taught ’em right.

It couldn’t have anything to do with home life, generational poverty, economic inequality and systemic racism.

Except that it almost always does.

Inextricably.

The fact is children who don’t live in safe, loving homes have much greater difficulty concentrating and caring about academics. Kids with impoverished parents are much more likely to go to underfunded schools and sit in classrooms that are racially segregated.

None of that is under the control of teachers or schools, but a focus on high stakes standardized testing, school privatization and dangerously unregulated ed tech hides the problem.

It’s not that teachers don’t teach. Inequality, prejudice and privatization – these are the root causes and the reason we do nothing about them generation after generation is that we have an easy scapegoat in the public schools in general and public school teachers in particular.

Take student absences.

It’s a huge problem.

When kids don’t show up to school, they learn less. It’s a simple concept.

Yet just four years ago when we had a chance to rewrite the federal law governing public education to actually DO SOMETHING about the problems we’re facing, we dropped the ball. Again!

The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) requires states to include five indicators measuring school performance: four based on academic achievement, and a fifth, “non-academic” measure of student success.

Most states have adopted chronic student absenteeism as this “fifth indicator.”

So we take those five indicators, weight them and combine them together to get overall school scores that are used to sort and rank educational institutions. That way we can prioritize funding to the highest performers and withhold it from the lowest.

It’s the same supply side nonsense we’ve been doing for years with a few numbers moved around and given a different name.

Schools overflowing with resources serving rich white kids get a sticker. Schools starving for resources serving poor brown kids get a kick.

And somehow that’s supposed to help things get better.

Don’t get me wrong. Absenteeism is important.

Nearly 8 million students missed 15 or more days of school in 2015-16 — an increase from the 6.8 million who missed the same amount in 2013-14, when the federal Department of Education began tracking the data. And there’s a mountain of research that links chronic absenteeism with poor academic performance, delayed graduation, and increased dropout rates.

But putting it all on neighborhood schools and local districts is a huge abrogation of responsibility.

By and large, public schools do not cause students to be absent. Nor do they have the resources to ensure these students start attending.

But we’ve found someone to blame and that’s really all this whole exercise was about in the first place.

It’s like denouncing your doctor for your disease. It won’t cure you, but it might make you feel justified as you die.

The reasons students are chronically absent have little to do with individual schools.

According to Attendance Works, a non-profit focusing on ways to improve student attendance, the main causes of chronic absences are:

•Chronic disease or lack of health care and/or dental care.

•The need to care for siblings or other family members.

•Unmet basic needs: transportation, housing, food, clothing, etc.

•Trauma.

•Feeling unsafe getting to school.

•Academic or social struggles.

•Being teased or bullied.

•Poor school climate or unsafe schools.

•Parents had negative school experience.

•Lack of engaging and relevant instruction.

•Peer pressure to be with peers out of school vs. in school.

•No meaningful relationships with adults in school.

•High suspension rates and disproportionate school discipline.

Certainly some of these things are under the control of school directors, administrators, and teachers.

Schools can and should provide safe ways for students to get to and from school. They should work to reduce bullying and make school a welcoming place for all children. They should provide engaging instruction, fair discipline policies and reach out to parents and the community.

But most schools are already doing that – or certainly trying to do that within the confines of their budgets.

My own Western Pennsylvania district has been flagged by the Commonwealth for increasing chronic absences. In the state, this is defined as students with 10 or more unexcused absences. We’ve been put on an improvement plan – which basically means an employee at the state Department of Education wagging his finger and telling us to get better or else.

However, the overarching problem and solution are easy to see. We are a district without busing.

The high school and middle school sit on top of a hill. Students who live in the poorer sections of town at the bottom of the hill have to walk or take public transportation daily to get to school.

It’s no wonder that some of them don’t do that every day and stay home instead.

However, we serve a mostly impoverished population. Decades ago, school directors decided it would be more cost effective to save money on busing so they could provide greater services for students. Yet as the economy has continued to stagnate and funding has become even more hard to come by, attendance has worsened.

So what are we to do? Cut services and add buses?

Doing so would mean we’d have to bus students to local charter schools as well, increasing the burden on taxpayers and the amount of muscle and bone we’d have to cut from our own academic programs.

It’s all very well and good to have the federal government tell us that attendance is important – but where is the help to improve it?

As with everything else in education, we get threats and the promise of economic sanctions but nothing in the way of assistance, aide or intervention.

We could be working together to try to solve this and other social issues. We could pool resources and construct social programs to help parents get jobs, set up stable homes, fund robust systems of public transportation, and a host of social services for students and their families such as tutoring, counseling, child care, and continuing education classes. We could end discriminatory policies such as school segregation, school privatization and high stakes standardized testing.

But doing so would mean abandoning the blame game and nothing has worked better to shield the rich from paying their fair share than pointing fingers at the less privileged and those who dedicate their lives to help them.

In truth, the problems with public schools are rarely the teachers.

It’s that society has written them off and refuses to take responsibility for its own role in supporting the next generation.

Gov. Wolf Tries to Stop Charter Schools Gorging on Public School Funding

August 22, 2019August 22, 2019 stevenmsinger Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Education "Reform", Cyber Charter Schools, Democrat, Education, Local Control, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Politics, Prejudice, privatization, Republican, School Choice, School Funding, Schools, Students, Teachers, Tom Wolf Accountability, charter schools, Cyber Charter Schools, education, fiscal responsability, Governor Tom Wolf, Harrisburg, legislature, PA Budget, PA House, PA Senate, Pennsylvania, Politics, school funding, teachers, teaching, Tom Wolf, transparency

Sooey! Here Pig Pig Pig!

No one minds that healthy call at the hog farm when it’s time to feed the sows.

But taxpayers do take issue with it when it’s the call of the state legislature gathering a different kind of swine around public tax dollars.

Pennsylvania’s 180 charter schools gobbled up $1.8 billion last year from the Commonwealth’s public schools.

And Gov. Tom Wolf is refusing to let them continue to gorge on public funding meant to nourish everyone.

Last week, he took executive action to hold these schools accountable and force them to be more transparent – even if the legislature won’t.

Charter schools are publicly financed but privately run. Unlike authentic public schools, charters are often administered by appointed boards. They don’t have to provide the same level of services for children, don’t have to accept all students, can make a profit and don’t even have to be transparent about how they spend their money.

Yet that money comes from taxpayers.

For years fiscal watchdogs have complained that the state’s 22-year-old charter school law needs revising. However, after lining lawmakers pockets with charter school cash, the legislature continually refuses to do anything about it.

A few Democrats have offered plans that would increase accountability, but they’ve gotten no traction. And Republican plans have almost exclusively offered to make matters worse by dumping more money in the trough and putting up a thicker curtain so we don’t see the school privatizers eat.

So finally Gov. Wolf, a Democrat, took action on his own.

He has directed his Department of Education to circumvent the legislature to develop regulations that he says, “will level the playing field for all taxpayer-funded public schools, strengthen the accountability and transparency of charter and cyber charter schools and better serve all students.”

His plan would:

•Allow districts to limit student enrollment in charter schools where students aren’t making academic gains.

•Require charter schools to stop turning away students based on race, ethnicity, gender, disability, intellectual deficits, lack of athletics or other student characteristics.

•Make charter schools as transparent as authentic public schools.

•Stop conflicts of interests for charter school board members and operating companies so that they can’t make decisions on behalf of the school that would enrich themselves, their families and/or friends.

•Make charters submit to financial audits to state regulators, make them publicly bid contracts for supplies and services and use fair contracting practices.

•Provide greater oversight of charter school management companies so they can’t profit off of the students enrolled in the schools they’re managing.

•Seek more information about how prospective charters will be run in a new model state application to be used when charters seek to open up shop or renew existing charters.

•Require charters to accurately document their costs.

•Prevent charters from overcharging for services they provide to students.

•Make charters pay to cover the state’s costs for implementing the charter school law.

•Recoup money from charter schools for the time and services the state provides when it reviews applications, distributes payments and provides legal and administrative support to them.

It’s a bold step for a governor, but apparently Wolf is tired of waiting on a dysfunctional legislature to actually legislate.

The problem is Wolf has to be more than a governor. He has to be a goalie.

The state House and state Senate are deeply gerrymandered and controlled by Republicans.

Every year, lawmakers pass mostly crap bills written by Koch Brothers proxies only to be vetoed by Wolf.

Occasionally, the GOP convinces enough right-leaning Democrats to go with them and Wolf can’t or won’t veto the bills.

And that’s pretty much how things work in Harrisburg.

However, this time Wolf wasn’t content to just guard the net. He actually took the puck down the ice, himself, and made a slap shot on the opposing team.

Can he do this? Is he still operating within the law?

Time will tell – though I’d argue that in the absence of legislative action, he is within his job description.

Moreover, this is only a first step.

Wolf, himself, has said that more needs to be done by the legislature. Even after his executive actions, much needs to be done to make charter schools function properly in the Commonwealth.

Specifically, Wolf asked the legislature to pass a moratorium on new cyber charter schools, cap enrollment in low-performing charter schools until they improve, subject charter management companies to the same transparency rules that districts must follow, and create a fair, predictable and equitable charter school funding formula.

I’d like them to go even further.

Frankly, I’d like to see charter schools ended as educational institutions.
Why should the public pay for schools that aren’t locally controlled? Why pay for privatized schools at all?

I suppose if there are some that are functioning well for students, they can be grandfathered in, but they should be funded separately. When two districts have to compete for the same funding, the students lose.

At least, we should not be opening up new charters. The public should not be in the business of funding privatized schools.

I am grateful to Gov. Wolf for finally having the guts to stand up to this powerful industry.

The state exists to further the public good – not enrich private corporations like those running many charter schools.

It’s time we admitted that charter schools are a failed experiment and shut them down.

It’s time to block these pigs from chowing down on public funding without public oversight.

See how much each charter school gets of Commonwealth tax dollars.

Pennsylvania Law Meant to Forbid Arming Teachers May Have Done Just the Opposite

August 8, 2019 stevenmsinger Accountability, Budget, Child Safety, Civil Rights, Democrat, Education, Gun Control, Guns, Harissburg, Labor, Local Control, Mass Shooting, Parents, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Police, Politics, Republican, school violence, Schools, Shooting, Students, Teachers, Tom Wolf, Unions, Violence Against Children child safety, education, Gun Control, gun sense, Gun Violence, Guns, Guns in Schools, Harrisburg, law enforcement, legislature, Mass Shooting, Pennsylvania, police, Politics, public schools, safe schools, school shootings, schools, security guards, teachers, Tom Wolf

Pennsylvania teachers, don’t forget to pack your Glock when returning to school this year.

A new law meant to close the door on arming teachers may have cracked it open.

Despite warnings from gun safety activists, the bill, SB 621, was approved by the legislature and signed into law by Gov. Tom Wolf this summer.

The legislation explicitly allows security guards – independent contractors who are not members of law enforcement – to carry guns in schools if they go through special training.

And that’s bad enough.

Why you’d want glorified rent-a-cops with guns strapped to their hips running around schools full of children is beyond me.

That’s not going to make anyone safer. It’s going to do just the opposite.

But that’s not even the worst of it.

Commonwealth law already allowed for armed police and school resource officers in school buildings.

The new bill just adds security guards to the accepted list – so long as they go through special training.

So some observers are asking what happens if teachers and administrators go through the same training? Wouldn’t they then qualify as “security personnel” and thus be eligible to be armed as part of their jobs?

Some say yes.

But others go even farther.

The bill only says who may be armed in schools. It doesn’t say anything about who may not be armed.

So if a district were to arm teachers – even without that special security guard training – it wouldn’t be specifically breaking the law. It would be operating in a huge loophole left open by the legislature and Gov. Wolf.

In fact, the original version of the bill would have covered just such an ambiguity. It included language saying that ONLY the people specifically mentioned in the law (police, resource officers and security guards) were allowed to be armed. However, Wolf could not get legislators to agree on it, so this language was stripped from the bill that was eventually passed.

This isn’t just theoretical.

Several school administrators have already taken advantage of it.

A handful of superintendents in rural parts of the state have already gotten permission from country law enforcement officials and are now carrying guns to school, according to a lawyer representing 50 Commonwealth districts.

Attorney Ronald Repak, of Altoona-based Beard Legal Group, gave a presentation at a school safety conference saying that his firm had secured permission from local district attorneys for administrators to carry firearms as part of their jobs. They cited ambiguity in the law that allowed for different interpretations.

Repak said that fewer than six superintendents had been approved, but he would not say which ones or which districts employed them.

Meanwhile, a district in the eastern part of the state between Hershey and Allentown has already passed a policy to arm teachers and staff.

Tamaqua Area School District in Schuylkill County, approved the policy last year but suspended it following litigation from the teachers association and a parent group.

Since Harrisburg passed this new measure, school board members and administration have been going back and forth about how it pertains to their policy and whether they can legally reinstate it even with pending litigation.

SB 621 was supposed to fix the ambiguity of previous statutes on the matter.

Title 18, Section 912 of the Pa. Crimes Code says that no one except recognized security personnel may bring a weapon onto school grounds, unless it is for a supervised school activity or “other lawful purpose.”

But again that leaves a huge loophole.

Secretary of Education Pedro Rivera wrote in 2016 that the Pennsylvania Department of Education considers “the scope of ‘lawful purpose’…unclear and unsettled.”

That’s what originally prompted Tamaqua school directors to pass their policy to arm teachers – the first of its kind in the state.

The Republican majority in the legislature has been trying to pass a law explicitly allowing teachers to be armed for years.

In June of 2017, the state Senate even passed just such a bill but it got nowhere in the House. Moreover, Gov. Wolf threatened to veto it.

And that has been the pattern in Harrisburg on most matters – a gerrymandered GOP-controlled legislature narrowly passing far right legislation checked by a popularly elected Democratic governor.

However, Republicans may have gotten one passed the goal with SB 621.

Wolf had hoped the bill would end the matter once and for all. When he signed it into law, he released a statement saying:

“The students, parents, and educators in this commonwealth can now be secure in the knowledge that teachers can dedicate themselves to teaching our children, and that the security of school facilities rests in the hands of trained, professional security personnel.”

Ceasefire Pennsylvania, a statewide gun safety organization, saw the danger and warned against it. The organization urged the legislature not to pass the bill and the governor not to sign it.

In a letter sent to lawmakers, the group wrote:

“…adding security personnel who do not have the same law enforcement background, training and experience of those personnel already authorized to serve as school security in the School Code is misguided.

[In addition] …although we understand that the legislation initially was intended only to address security personnel, we believe SB 621 could be manipulated by school districts intent on arming teachers as a ‘security’ measure… We hope you will Vote No on SB 621.”

The matter is bound to wind up in the courts where it will ultimately be decided.

Concerned citizens should probably go to their local school board and let directors know they don’t want school personnel – security guards or others – packing heat.

To be clear, the new bill doesn’t require security guards to be armed, but it does allow districts to arm them if they go through the necessary training.

The instruction outlined in the law required before guards can be armed costs less than $500 per person.

It includes lessons on developing relationships with diverse students, understanding special needs students, how to deal with violence, victimization, threat response and the prevention of violence in schools. It also includes Act 235 lethal weapons training on specifically how to carry and use lethal weapons.

Some legislators wanted security guards to have to go through the same training as police officers – a 900-hour municipal course. However, since this would include instruction school security officers would not need such as lessons on traffic laws and the vehicle code – not to mention its hefty cost of $9,000 per person – it was scrapped.

Don’t get me wrong. I have nothing against security guards. There are several good ones at my district.

However, putting guns in their hands doesn’t make me feel any safer.

A few years ago, a security guard at my school lost his job because he slammed one of my students into a lunch table.

The child in question was certainly difficult and could be defiant. But he was a middle school age child. He didn’t deserve to have his head slammed into a table – nor would I want someone with so little impulse control to have to police his trigger finger during tense confrontations with students.

Arming security guards is just plain dumb. Heck! So is arming teachers and administrators!

This isn’t the wild west. It’s a classroom.

In real-world shootings, police officers miss their targets about 4-in-5 shots, according to Dr. Peter Langman, a psychologist who’s studied school shootings. Do you really expect rent-a-cops and teachers to be more accurate?

Even armed police don’t do much to stop school shootings.

The four high-profile school shootings in 2018 — including the one in Parkland, Florida and Santa Fe, Texas — had armed guards. All failed to stop the gunmen.

But research consistently shows that increasing the number of guns in schools increases the likelihood that students will get hold of them.

What we need are sensible gun regulations to limit the number of people who have access to firearms. We need mandatory background checks and a ban on assault weapons – the murder instrument of choice for mass shooters. We need buy back programs to reduce the ridiculous numbers of guns available.

This new law does none of that. It was a Faustian bargain at best – and like always happens when you try to best the Devil, you end up losing.

Only this time, the losers are our teachers and school children.

The Welcome Back Letter I’d Love to Give My Students – But Can’t

August 5, 2019 stevenmsinger Accountability, Betsy DeVos, bloggers, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Common Core, Corporate Education "Reform", Data, Data Driven Instruction, Education, Labor, Learning, Local Control, Opt Out, Parents, Pennsylvania, Politics, Prejudice, principals, privatization, protest, School Funding, school vouchers, Schools, Social Justice, Standardized Testing, Students, teacher autonomy, Teachers, Unions charter schools, education, letter, public schools, school vouchers, schools, standardized testing, Students, Teacher Evaluation, teachers, welcome back

I’m a very lucky guy.

I get to teach language arts in an amazing urban middle school in Western Pennsylvania.

I have reasonable autonomy, opportunities to collaborate with my co-workers and strong union protections.

Even so, I know there are a lot of teachers out there who don’t have those things.

Yet even after counting all my blessings, I still can’t do whatever I want. I can’t even do everything that my years of academic training and experience tells me would be best for my students.

Every year I’m told that my worth as a professional is mainly defined by student test scores – that I should use those scores to drive my entire class, that my major goal should be increasing the scores and my every waking moment should be spent examining past scores.

Every year I have to watch out for this data metric and do that much more work because my district has lost even more funding to the vampire charter school in our neighborhood. Or lawmakers have compromised away another several hours of my time to do meaningless paperwork – time that I either have to take away from my students or my family.

I see all this and I just want to scream.

I want to tell everyone what’s happening so that they can help stop the madness.

And I do scream into the whirl of cyberspace on my blog.

But I can’t do the same in my district. I can’t tell those right in front of me – my school board, my administrators, the parents or students.

Doing so would put everything I do have in jeopardy.

I know this because it already has.

Every year on the first day of school, I give my students a welcome letter.

This is the kind of letter I’d love to give them – but don’t dare:

Dear Students,

In a matter of weeks you will be invited back to school and I wanted to let you in on a little secret.

We missed you.

That’s right. Your teachers missed the heck out of you over the summer.

Don’t get me wrong. We enjoyed our time at home with our own children, time on vacation, time spent continuing to refine our craft, and/or time spent working another job. (Hey! Those extra pencils, papers, books and supplies aren’t going to buy themselves! Right?)

Here’s another little secret – your teachers come to school every day not because we have to, but because we want to.

We literally could do anything else with our lives but we’ve devoted our time to you.

Why? Because we love you.

I know that’s mushy talk, but it’s true.

Another secret: We know you’re nervous about your first day back. But – heck – so are we!

Don’t forget you’re young. We’re old!

We know you’re wondering who your teachers will be this year, what they’ll require you to do, which friends will be in your classes, who will sit with you at lunch…

We wonder if we’re still going to be able to do all the things we need to do to help you learn? Are we going to be able to provide a safe, secure environment for you? Will we be able to keep you engaged, and excited to learn? Will we be able to actually teach everything you want and need to know?

This is going to be a challenging year for all of us.

But that’s a good thing.

We’re in this together.

That’s kind of an important point.

You see, we know you’ll probably be asked to take high stakes standardized tests. Just know that it’s not us who’s asking. It’s the state and federal government. Lawmakers seem to think that your answers on multiple choice tests are very, very important.

Another secret: they aren’t.

We don’t care how you score on these tests. Not really. We don’t even care if you take them at all – and if your parents decide not to have you sit through this garbage, we will honor their wishes, because they are the ultimate authority on you – their children.

We know that standardized tests don’t assess how much you learn. The tests your teachers make do that – the work that you do in class every day shows it better than any canned corporate exam.

We know those scores don’t define who you are. We see you every day. We see your creativity, your intelligence, your fire, your verve, your passion.

We want to stoke that fire and help you become the people you always wanted to be.

And none of that can be shown on a standardized test.

THAT’S our job – not to turn you into great test takers but into the kind of people you most want to be.

Oh. By the way, please thank your parents for us.

Thank them for ignoring the hype about the flashy charter school that hedge fund managers opened on the hill – the school sucking up our funding, cutting services for students and making its investors very rich.

Thank them for declining the shiny school voucher to Pastor Dan’s Creationism, Anti-vaxxor, Climate Denial Academy. Thank them for passing up the tax rebate to Ivy Laurel Prep – where the rich white kids go.

Thank them for trusting us with the most precious things in their lives – you.

You really mean a lot to all of us.

So rest up and try to have fun for the remainder of your summer. We’ll do the same.

And before you know it, we’ll be back together in class expanding minds, expressing hearts and having a great time!

Love you all!

Your Teachers

That’s the kind of welcome back letter I would love to give my students – but can’t.

It was partially inspired by a REAL welcome back letter given by a New York Superintendent.

Around this time last year, he gave it to 11 principals and about 600 teachers in the
Patchogue-Medford School District before someone posted it online and it went viral.

His audience was teachers, but his message was the same:

Aug. 14, 2018

Dear….

Once again… this letter is too let you know I DO NOT CARE what your state growth score is. Let me be clear… I DO NOT CARE. It does not define you. You are more than a score. I’m hoping you know by now that the children and parents you serve appreciate your talents and the ability to make a difference in their lives. Keep your head up and your eye on what is most important… your students and your teaching craft.

The Patchogue-Medford School District fully supports you as an educator, regardless of what this meaningless, invalid and inhumane score states. You have my permission to throw it out, or use it for any creative ways you may think of. I have a feeling divergent thinking will be at an all-time high at Pat-Med. Let me know if you need anything and it is my sincere hope you have an outstanding year.

With Warmest Regards,

Michael J. Hynes, Ed. D.
Superintendent of Schools

Cheers to Superintendent Hynes!

If only every teacher, administrator and school board member could be that brave and honest!

Here’s another letter given to year six students at Barrowford Primary School in Lancashire, England, along with their results from a recent standardized exam:

“Please find enclosed your end of KS2 test results. We are very proud of you as you demonstrated huge amounts of commitment and tried your very best during this tricky week.

However, we are concerned that these tests do not always assess all of what it is that make each of you special and unique. The people who create these tests and score them do not know each of you- the way your teachers do, the way I hope to, and certainly not the way your families do.

They do not know that many of you speak two languages. They do not know that you can play a musical instrument or that you can dance or paint a picture. They do not know that your friends count on you to be there for them or that your laughter can brighten the dreariest day.

They do not know that you write poetry or songs, play or participate in sports, wonder about the future, or that sometimes you take care of your little brother or sister after school.

They do not know that you have traveled to a really neat place or that you know how to tell a great story or that you really love spending time with special family members and friends.

They do not know that you can be trustworthy, kind or thoughtful, and that you try, every day, to be your very best… the scores you get will tell you something, but they will not tell you everything.

So enjoy your results and be very proud of these but remember there are many ways of being smart.”

Here’s another one to parents from a principal in Singapore:

“The exams of your child are to start soon. I know you are all really anxious for your child to do well.

But, please do remember, amongst the students who will be sitting for the exams there is an artist, who doesn’t need to understand Math… There is an entrepreneur, who doesn’t care about History or English literature…There is a musician, whose Chemistry marks won’t matter…There’s an athlete…whose physical fitness is more important than Physics… If your child does get top marks, that’s great! But if he or she doesn’t…please don’t take away their self-confidence and dignity from them. Tell them it’s OK, its just an exam! They are cut out for much bigger things in life. Tell them, no matter what they score…you love them and will not judge them.

Please do this, and when you do… watch your children conquer the world. One exam or low mark won’t take away…their dreams and talent. And please, do not think that doctors and engineers…are the only happy people in the world.”

If teachers and principals were allowed to speak freely, I bet there’d be a lot more of these kinds of letters.

School should not be centered on testing and test scores. It should be centered on students.

gadflyonthewallblog

"To sting people and whip them into a fury, all in the service of truth."

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