Could This Be Gadfly’s End? Top 12 Articles From 2023 Read By Fewer Than Ever

December 22, 2023 stevenmsinger academic freedom, Accountability, Budget, Censorship, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Corporate Education "Reform", Data, Education, history, Labor, Learning, McKeesport Area School District, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Philosophy, Pittsburgh, Politics, Poverty, Prejudice, privatization, School Choice, School Funding, Schools, Social Justice, Standardized Testing, Students, Teach for America, teacher autonomy, Teachers, Technology, Uncategorized 2023, After School Satan Club, Asian-Americans, blog, bloggers, charter schools, Commonwealth Charter Academy, Cyber Charter Schools, education, Education Bloggers Network, end of the year, library, MAP test, Politics, Propel Charter Schools, teacher salary, teachers, woke

Thank you, loyal readers, but this may be the end of Gadfly on the Wall.

Readership has fallen off to such a degree that I’m just not sure it’s worth continuing anymore.

That combined with increasing difficulties in my own life have made me truly question whether I should (or can) go on with it.

Don’t get me wrong. I will truly cherish every moment writing these articles, fighting for what I (still) think needs to happen in public education so that our children can be fairly treated and succeed.

There is so much I think most people don’t know about what happens in our schools and what could be done to make them better for children, families and the people who work there.

But after 9 years of pounding my head against the wall – well, it seems like the wall is winning.

This blog used to be read by at least half a million people each year. But social media – the prime distributor of this material – is not what it was a decade ago. In 2021, I had 222,414 hits. Last year it was 124,984. This year it was 73,121.

And much of those were for articles I’d written in years past. The highest three articles this year were not written in 2023. They were: The MAP Test – Selling Schools Unnecessary Junk at Student Expense ( 2,344) from Aug. 2022, When Good Students Get Bad Standardized Test Scores (1,775) from Oct. 2022, and Lesson Plans Are a Complete Waste of Time (1,544) from Sept. 2021.

Why keep putting out new content? It often feels like I’m saying the same thing over and over anyway – and not really being heard except by the same few people.

So I’m going to pause, take a moment and really think about things.

Heck! I might find out that I simply can’t quit because I’ve got too much to say. Then again, I may only write when something really important comes up that I absolutely have to let loose on.

Or this could be it.

I don’t know.

In any case, thank you so much for nearly 10 years of readership. I assume most people seeing this would have been here for the long haul.

It has been an amazing experience. I’m not sure what comes next, but for now I leave you with some outstanding moments from 2023.

All the best in the future!

-Steven Singer

The Gadfly on the Wall

12) Standardized Tests Hurt Asian-American Students, Too, Though Many Get High Scores

Published: March 27

Views: 243

Description: Asian-Americans – taken as a whole – score better on standardized tests than white Americans. But they are just as much victimized by testing as any other minority. The only difference is their success is held up as an excuse for upholding this deeply inequitable practice. It obscures that all Asians are not the same, certain types do not score as highly yet all are held to unfair expectations.

Fun Fact: This is a rarely explored or reported on aspect of the standardized testing phenomenon. I’m proud to have written on it despite its low readership.

11) Fact Checking Propel Charter Schools – Do They Live Up to Their Own Hype?

Published: Jan. 20

Views: 572

Description: The Propel Charter School network of 13 schools based in Pittsburgh, Pa, has advertisements everywhere proclaiming its virtues. However, this is just advertising. From test scores to safety to class size to teacher qualifications and many other factors, the charter chain comes up short again and again. Compared with authentic public schools in the same neighborhoods where these schools are located, Propel compares rather badly.

Fun Fact: I think this is incredibly important in the western Pennsylvania region. This information should be shared far and wide. It should at very least spark media investigations comparing Propel and authentic public schools so parents could make informed choices about where to send their children. But we never see that because Propel is a frequent advertiser. If the media provided this information – and didn’t just uncritically repeat propaganda – the media conglomerates would lose valuable advertising revenue. I am proud I could provide this public service.

10) Stay Woke, Public School Teachers

Published: March 12

Views: 588

Description: Being “woke” just means being alert to racial prejudice and discrimination – just knowing that these things exist and trying to recognize them when present. The way I see it, that’s well under a teacher’s job description. After all, who else will teach the true history that for more than 400 years in excess of 15 million men, women and children were the victims of the transatlantic slave trade? Who will teach the true history of the fight against human bondage and the struggle for equal rights? Who will teach about women’s fight for suffrage, equal pay, and reproductive freedom? Who will teach about the struggle of the individual to affirm their own gender identity and sexual expression? It’s up to us.

Fun Fact: Republicans are so anti-teacher, they’ve made the acquisition of knowledge part of the culture war and turned teachers into the enemy. This was just my way of pushing back a little.

9) Where Have School Libraries Gone?

Published: Aug. 25

Views: 681

Description: McKeesport Area School District – where I graduated and my daughter still attends classes – closed its high school public library for good. They gave away the books and turned it into a large group instruction room. And this kind of thing is happening all across the country. This is a problem because every book is not available on-line. In fact, the number and variety of books available digitally is much smaller than most public or school libraries typically have in their collections – if you’re not going to pay an additional fee. I can read most of the classics of world literature on the Internet, but anything that isn’t in the public domain is going to require me to pony up some dough. And the same goes for most respected resources.

Fun Fact: This was a truly depressing discovery but even more so was the response. Many people couldn’t grasp why libraries are even necessary today. Libraries used to be something society provided to every citizen just as a matter of course. Now our expectations are so low that we’ve nearly given up on this essential resource.

8) After School Satan Clubs Are Teaching Public School Districts an Important Lesson in Free Speech

Published: May 17

Views: 691

Description: Thousands of districts in the US allow religious organizations and clubs to operate on public school property, especially after classes are over. So The Satanic Temple goes around proposing After-School Satan Clubs at the same districts – and all Hell breaks loose.

Fun Fact: You want to let religion in the school house door, you have to let all of them in. You can’t pick and choose.

7) Congress May Raise Educators’ Minimum Salaries to Combat the Teacher Exodus

Published: Jan. 1

Views: 699

Description: A group of Congressional Democrats have proposed a national minimum salary for teachers. Rep. Frederica Wilson and Rep. Jamaal Bowman, (both former teachers) and six other members of the House have introduced The American Teacher Act establishing a minimum salary of $60,000 for all public school teachers working in the U.S. – the first legislation of its kind. The average starting salary of teachers nationwide was $41,770 in the 2020-21 school year, according to the National Education Association (which supports the bill).

Fun Fact: What a lovely thought! Still waiting on this to be approved. Any day now. Come on, Congress!

6) I am a Charter School Abolitionist, and You Should Be, Too

Published: March 22

Views: 701

Description: Charter schools have been around since 1992. Though it seems like they’re everywhere these days, only 45 states and the District of Columbia allow these schools and even then they enroll just 6% of the students in the country – roughly three million children. The five states that do not have charter school laws are Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Vermont. So after 32 years of trial and error, we’re left with a charter school system that does not get better academic results than authentic public schools (despite being given dramatic advantages in their charter agreements) and in many cases drastically fails by comparison. Not to mention all the fraud, malfeasance and ineptitude you get from removing regulations for any Tom, Dick or Harry who thinks he can open a school. Time to abolish these schools and end this failed experiment.

Fun Fact: This article really angered some folks. There are lots of people who hate the idea of charter schools in general but want to preserve anything that they think might give their own kids an advantage over others. Even if that is rarely the case! However, the gleam of the new has definitely worn off this concept and an increasing number of folks are open to limiting or ending this fiasco.

5) A Private Equity Firm, The Makers of the MAP Test, and an Ed Tech Publisher Join Forces

Published: Jan. 26

Views: 930

Description: A year after being gobbled up by private equity firm Veritas Capital, ed tech company Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH) is acquiring K-12 assessment giant Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA). Let me put that in perspective – a scandal-ridden investment firm that made billions in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan bought one of standardized testing’s big four and then added the Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) test to its arsenal. This almost certainly means the cost of state testing is going to increase since the providers of the tests are shrinking.

Fun Fact: This is the kind of story that will creep into our lives before we even realize what is happening. We’ll wonder why our districts and even entire states which rely heavily on the MAP test are buying as much HMH curriculum as possible. That way they can teach directly what is on their standardized tests. Bye, bye, tax dollars that could have been spent to educate kids!

4) Top 4 Things McKeesport Area School Directors Need to do to Extinguish the District Dumpster Fire

Published: Oct. 8

Views: 963

Description: My neighborhood district – McKeesport Area School District (MASD) – is going through tough times. School directors reneged on a teachers contract. Their business manager ran for the hills. And at a board meeting two school directors had their dirty laundry aired during public comments prompting one to call a White Oak Councilperson a homophobic slur. I had four suggestions to right the ship: (1) Pass a Code of Conduct for Board Members and Administrators, (2) Start Streaming Council Meetings Again, (3) Hire a New Reputable Business Manager, and (4) Pass a Teachers Contract with No Tax Increase.

Fun Fact: This article got a lot of notice in the neighborhood and some of my suggestions actually got done. The district hired a new business manager and will begin streaming new meetings. They’re also negotiating with teachers so fingers crossed.

3) Teach for America Promised to Fix the Teacher Exodus Before Anyone Even Noticed There Was One. Now It’s Choking on Its Own Failure

Published: Aug. 7

Views: 1,070

Description: Teach for America (TFA) was supposed to fix the teacher exodus by fast tracking non-education majors into the classroom where they would teach for a few years and then enter the private sector as “experts” to drive public policy. College graduates would take a five-week crash course in education and commit to at least two years in the classroom thereby filling any vacant teaching positions. Not only didn’t it work, it ended up making the situation worse. Now the organization created in 1990 is expecting its lowest enrollment in 15 years. TFA anticipates placing slightly less than 2,000 teachers in schools across the country this fall. I guess watering down what it means to be a teacher is even less popular than actually being an educator.

Fun Fact: People really hate TFA. The organization’s cred has gone down more than anything else in the education field – even more than charter schools. The fact that the emperor has no clothes here is painfully obvious.

2) Come Visit Your Wasted Tax Dollars at Commonwealth Charter Academy’s Waterfront Luxury Office Space

Published: Feb. 4

Views: 1,236

Description: If you go to the Waterfront in Homestead, PA, you’ll find the newest satellite office of Commonwealth Charter Academy (CCA) – the biggest cyber charter school network in the entire state. It’s one of 51 locations statewide. Only 27 states allow CYBER charters like this – schools that teach mostly (or entirely) distance learning through the Internet. Nationwide, Pennsylvania and Ohio have the largest cyber charter enrollment. In 2020-21, the Keystone State enrolled 61,000 students in 14 cyber charters – and roughly 21,000 attend CCA! There’s an authentic public school in this neighborhood, too – Steel Valley School District – right up the hill. It’s not located in nearly as trendy a spot though. Moreover, its four buildings were constructed around the 1970s and are crumbling down in places. But the new cyber charter school building looks like a palace!

Fun Fact: I don’t think most people who go to the Waterfront understand what the CCA location really is. To them it’s just another school, kind of sleek and modern looking. This article was my attempt to tell them. Thankfully it proved relatively popular, though the CCA people absolutely had a conniption. They couldn’t believe someone was criticizing their profitable business venture. This story brought the most trolls of any this year.

1) McKeesport Teachers Without a Contract Because of Bad Business Manager or Bad Faith School Board?

Published: Aug. 16

Views: 1,409

Description: McKeesport Area School District (MASD) botched a new teachers contract. So the question is – does it have a terrible business manager or a regressive school board? School directors and the teachers had agreed to a new contract, but the board tabled it in June after concerns that the western Pennsylvania district didn’t have the money to pay for moderate raises. Then the board skipped the entire month of July without a meeting as if the livelihoods of hundreds of employees don’t count. By the time classes were set to begin in August, the board was no closer to solving the problem. Board members mostly blamed the business manager who eventually quit. The situation still has not been resolved.

Fun Fact: This article hit the neighborhood like a nuclear blast. Everyone seemed to be talking about it. Someone in the neighborhood literally called me a “local legend” for having written it. I’m just glad it focused people’s attentions on the facts of the matter. If anything gets me to blog again, it will be writing more about the local stories that are so important but no one else is talking about.

Gadfly’s Other Year End Round Ups

This wasn’t the first year I’ve done a countdown of the year’s greatest hits. I usually write one counting down my most popular articles and one listing articles that I thought deserved a second look. Here are all my end of the year articles since I began my blog in 2014:

2022:

Gadfly’s Most Outrageous Articles in 2021 That You May Have Missed or Been Too Polite to Share

Gadfly’s Top 10 Articles of 2021 – Shouts in the Dark

2020:

The Most Important Education Articles (By Me) That You Probably Missed in 2020

Outrunning the Pandemic – Racing Through Gadfly’s Top 10 Stories of 2020

2019:

Sixteen Gadfly Articles That Made Betsy DeVos Itch in 2019 

2018:

A Gadfly’s Dozen: Top 13 Education Articles of 2018 (By Me)

2017:

What’s the Buzz? A Crown of Gadflies! Top 10 Articles (by Me) in 2017

Hidden Gadfly – Top 5 Stories (By Me) You May Have Missed in 2017

2016

Worse Than Fake News – Ignored News. Top 5 Education Stories You May Have Missed in 2016

Goodbye, 2016, and Good Riddance – Top 10 Blog Post by Me From a Crappy Year

2015

Gadfly’s Choice – Top 5 Blogs (By Me) You May Have Missed from 2015

Who’s Your Favorite Gadfly? Top 10 Blog Posts (By Me) That Enlightened, Entertained and Enraged in 2015

2014

Off the Beaten Gadfly – the Best Education Blog Pieces You Never Read in 2014

On Discriminatory School Vouchers, Democrats Divide the Party to Appear Unified!?

December 19, 2023 stevenmsinger Accountability, Allegheny County, Budget, capitalism, Civil Rights, Corporate Education "Reform", Democrat, Donald Trump, Education, Election, Harrisburg, Josh Shapiro, Labor, Learning, Local Control, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Politics, Poverty, Prejudice, privatization, Propaganda, Republican, School Choice, School Funding, school vouchers, Schools, Standardized Testing, Student Mobility, Students, Teachers, Uncategorized Democrats, education, governor, Josh Shapiro, neoliberal, Pennsylvania, Politics, school vouchers, separation of church and state, teachers

Most Democrats oppose school vouchers.

In fact, the national party officially opposes them as part of its stated platform.

However, the national party warned Pennsylvania State Democrats against adopting a formal resolution opposing vouchers because the Democratic Governor, Josh Shapiro, supports them.

The national party was afraid of appearing divided going into the 2024 election.

But it IS divided!

Stopping this resolution is what divided it.

If the Democrats wanted to actually be unified, they should have pushed for Shapiro to get on the same page as the rest of them. The national party’s position is X. He is pushing for Y.

The fact is Shapiro already broke with the party earlier this year by working with Republican senators to craft a $100 million school voucher program. However, after a tidal wave of Democratic push back, he eventually rejoined the group and vetoed that same program.

So – despite Shapiro’s grumblings – Democrats actually were united again against vouchers before the national party got involved.

The national Dems could have put pressure on the Governor to keep with the group. Instead they asked the majority of Democratic lawmakers to just hush until Donald Trump was defeated and Sen. Bob Casey was re-elected.

That’s not unity. It’s deception.

They’re cynically hoping no one reads the news and folks just button their lips about the continuing disagreement over this wasteful and discriminatory policy that they have allowed to fester.

Several Democratic committee members introduced the anti-voucher resolution at the party’s September meeting in order to both chastise the Governor and clarify the party’s continued commitment to public schools. They agreed to table it so the authors of the resolution could work with committee staff to remove direct criticisms of Shapiro.

However, the committee members who brought this forward said they’d continue to push for the state Democratic Party to affirm an explicit anti-vouchers stance at all future state committee meetings – even those during the Presidential election year. They did not consider this controversial because they were merely asking the state party to align its stance with the national party’s official platform.

Unfortunately, the problem goes much deeper.

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have trouble supporting public schools while perpetuating a self-fulfilling prophecy of academic struggle.

The overwhelming majority of children in the state (and throughout the country) are public school students, but legislators will not adequately fund their schools.

Instead they waste $470 million every year on private and religious schools.

Lawmakers are Constitutionally required to fund public schools – not private and parochial schools – yet Democrat and Republican legislators BOTH support throwing your tax dollars away on something that isn’t their responsibility or yours.

The problem is there are at least two ways of doing this.

There are hush hush programs called Educational Improvement Tax Credit (EITC) and Opportunity Scholarship Tax Credit (OSTC) programs – school vouchers in everything but name.

Then there’s the idea first floated by Republican Gov. Tom Ridge in 1995 that every student should get a school voucher that could be used at a private or parochial school.

The low key programs are tax-credit scholarships that allow donors to pay less in taxes if they fund tuition for low income students at private schools. The full throated program could go to students regardless of parental income.

The former program already exists and is supported by nearly all Republicans and some Democrats. The later program is supported by nearly all Republicans and very few Democrats. It is the later which actually goes by the name of school vouchers.

So as nice as it would be to have all Democrats on the same page being against school vouchers, that would really just mean they were against anyone above the poverty line getting a voucher. Many of them would still be fine with poor kids getting subsidized to go to private and parochial schools.

In fact, just this year the General Assembly approved a 40% increase, or $150 million, to the state’s existing tax-credit scholarship programs as part of an expansive budget deal.

Meanwhile, the state Supreme Court ruled the legislature wasn’t meeting its Constitutional obligations to public schools due to inadequate funding.

Republicans, angered by Shapiro’s veto of the voucher program he helped create, refused to go along with Democrats and add a single penny in funding to the Commonwealth’s impoverished public school system – Supreme Court ruling be damned!

PA lawmakers are determined to waste taxpayer dollars on private and parochial schools while starving the public school system they are required to support.

School vouchers are not a new idea. They’ve been tried and failed over and over again.

If we look at the facts, using a school voucher to go from a public school to a private one actually hurts kids academically.

   Large-scale independent studies in Indiana, Louisiana, Ohio and Washington, D.C., show that students who used vouchers were as negatively impacted as if they had experienced a natural disaster. Their standardized test scores went down as much or more than students during the Covid-19 pandemic or Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

   This should come as no surprise. When we give children school vouchers, we’re removing their support systems already in place.

   They lose the friends, teachers, and communities where they grew up. It’s like yanking a sapling from out of the ground and transplanting it to another climate with another type of soil which may not be suited to it at all.

Moreover, vouchers have nothing to do with helping kids escape struggling public schools.

     School vouchers overwhelmingly go to kids who already attend private or parochial schools.

 In the states that have released their data, more than three quarters of families who apply for vouchers for their children already send their kids to private schools. That’s 75% of voucher students in Wisconsin, 80% in Arizona, and 89% in New Hampshire. So these kids didn’t need our tax dollars in the first place. We’re just paying for services they’re already receiving.

   Moreover, the very idea is absurd. If the school where the student is enrolled is struggling, why wouldn’t you simply invest in that school to make it better and fix the underlying problem? Why disrupt children’s educations by moving them to another school in another system that is entirely unproven, itself?

Vouchers are about exclusion – who gets to attend these PRIVATE schools – and indoctrination – what nonsense they can teach that public schools cannot.

     Private schools can and do discriminate against children based on religion, race, gender, sexuality, special needs – you name it – even if those schools take public money.  

 For example, in Florida, Grace Christian School, a private institution that refuses to enroll LGBTQ kids has received $1.6 million so far in taxpayer funding. In Indiana, more than $16 million has gone to schools banning LGBTQ kids—or even kids with LGBTQ parents! That’s roughly 1 out of every 10 private schools in the state with just this one discriminatory enrollment.

     Meanwhile thousands of parochial schools that receive public funding use textbooks provided by The American Christian Education (ACE) group. This includes the A Beka Book and Bob Jones University Press textbooks. A Beka publishers, in particular, reported that about 9,000 schools nationwide purchase their textbooks.

     In their pages you’ll find glowing descriptions of the Ku Klux Klan, how the massacre of Native Americans saved many souls, African slaves had really good lives, homosexuals are no better than rapists and child molesters, and progressive attempts at equal rights such as Brown vs. Board of Education were illegal and misguided. You know – all the greatest Trump/MAGA hits!

   Call me crazy, but I don’t think that’s a curriculum worthy of taxpayer dollars. I think if you’re going to take public money, you should have to accept all of the public, and you shouldn’t be allowed to teach counterfactual claims and prejudice as if they were fact.

That’s why Democrats should unequivocally oppose school vouchers of all types!

If lawmakers were making decisions based on facts instead of which policies will get them the most donations from wealthy special interests, this would be a no brainer.

As usual it is campaign contributions that are dividing the party – not popular policy.

State Democrats should pass an anti-voucher resolution today!

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Standardized Tests Lie

November 19, 2023 stevenmsinger Accountability, capitalism, Corporate Education "Reform", Credibility, Data, Education, Journalism, Labor, Learning, Media, Parents, Politics, Poverty, Prejudice, privatization, Propaganda, reading, School Funding, Schools, Standardized Testing, Students, teacher autonomy, Teachers, Toxic Testing, Uncategorized badass teachers association, education, high stakes testing, Journalism, lies, media, NAEP, National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), Politics, reading, schools, standardized testing, test scores, test-based accountability

Whom do you trust?

So much in life comes down to that simple question.

When two groups disagree, which one do you believe?

If it’s a matter of fact, you can look at the raw information yourself and come to your own conclusions. But often the matter under discussion is so complicated and the field so rarefied that you can’t hope to make a rational decision alone.

So we appeal to the experts.

In education, the experts are basically classroom teachers and standardized testing companies.

Sure there are students who experience all of their own educations. But that experience is by definition subjective and applies only to them. Something similar can be said of parents who experience the process second hand through their children. They can make decisions about the individuals in question but don’t have enough information to fully generalize about the entire system.

Those with the most exposure to the most diverse educational experiences are teachers and testing companies.

On the one side you have teachers who instruct students for at least 180 days a year, giving formal and informal assessments throughout to provide a classroom grade. On the other you have the testing companies that give students a single assessment over a period of hours or days.

And often they come to different conclusions.

Many times children get high classroom grades but low scores on the standardized test.

So let us ask the question that the media never does: which should we believe?

News sources almost always act as if there was no question in the first place. They invariably go with the test as if it were a pure matter of fact. But it isn’t. There are economic reasons for this sleight of hand – not academic ones. After all, the huge media conglomerate that ultimately pays the journalist’s salary often owns the standardized testing company or the publishing house or technology company that provides remediation for that particular assessment.

It’s also more interesting to write about failing test scores than kids doing well in school. An alarmist narrative certainly sells more papers. Would there even be a story if a reporter wrote “Majority of Kids Pass Courses and Graduate Again This Year”?

So we’re bombarded with doomsayer stories about failing schools, failing teachers and failing students.

Education Week ran a story last week titled “U.S. Parents Think Reading Instruction Is Going OK—Until They See National Test Results.”

And another called “Students’ Grades May Not Signal Actual Achievement, Study Cautions.”

It’s too bad the article never explains why we should take standardized test scores over classroom grades.

The first story even centers on a misreading of test scores.

The test in question is the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) . Sometimes called the Nations Report Card, the assessment is given to a random sampling of elementary, middle and high school students in participating countries to compare the education systems of nations.

According to the latest NAEP results, about 2/3 of US students read below “proficient.” And when parents are told this, a new survey finds they lower their opinions of students’ reading abilities.

However, what the article fails to mention is that “proficient” on the NAEP is a misleading benchmark and always has been.

On the NAEP, “proficiency” does not mean students can read at grade level. Being able to do that would actually earn them a “basic” score.

If you read the NAEP’s own Website about how to interpret the scores, you’d see that:

“The NAEP Proficient achievement level does not represent grade-level proficiency, but rather competency over challenging subject matter. NAEP achievement levels are to be used on a trial basis and should be interpreted and used with caution.”

So why are journalists continually spreading false claims about the tests that the test makers, themselves, dispute? And why have they been doing so for decades?

Part of the problem is the NAEP has not revised a purposefully misleading grading scale since it was first given in 1969. As much as representatives will dispute the interpretation of scores if pressed, they could do something about it if they cared to do so. They could even put out press releases about how the organizations’ scores are being misread. But that never happens. They remain quiet unless you ask them specifically about the scores and – surprise – education journalists are not very curious about this issue. It would ruin their stories!

Only about 1/3 of US students were below NAEP’s Basic score. In other words 2/3 of US students read at or above grade level – the exact opposite of what journalists are reporting based on their interpretation of the results! However, even the meaning behind that is debatable because each state has a different definition of reading at grade level. A more accurate metric might be reading at age level, but NAEP scores don’t really correlate with it. Good luck getting anyone interested in reading about that.

Then we have the article about student grades not showing actual learning achievement.

The story is about schools in Washington state where students earned increasingly higher classroom grades but lower end-of-the-year standardized tests scores.

Why did the education journalists decide the standardized test scores were accurate and the classroom grades were not?

Good question, but you won’t find the answer in the story. This is taken as an article of faith.

Obviously the standardized tests scores are better. They were given by a corporation. Classroom grades were given by teachers.

This just goes to show the media’s glaring bias against educators and in favor of big business.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average salary of public school teachers in Pennsylvania (my home state) is between $53,000 and $59,000 per year.

Meanwhile, more than $1.7 billion is spent on standardized testing in the US each year, according to a study by the Brown Center on Education Policy at Brookings. Another $669 million is spent on elementary assessments. Between $34-65 per student per year is spent by the states on standardized testing.

To put that in perspective, perhaps the biggest standardized testing corporation, Pearson, reported revenues of $5.511 billion and profits of $762 million in 2018. That doesn’t include $89 million in additional profit for Pearson from its ownership stake in Penguin Random House Publishers, a major world school textbook publishing company.

Pearson’s main competitor, Educational Testing Services (ETS), reported revenues of $2.1 billion for the same time period. And the College Board, maker of the SAT test, reported another $1.068 billion in revenue in 2017.

Standardized testing companies want people to believe there is a crisis in our public schools and that children are not learning well unless they are held accountable by the same standardized tests these companies make and manufacture. These companies make the tests, grade the tests and then sell school remediation materials when kids don’t pass.

There are certainly real problems with our educational system.

For instance, the U.S. is one of the only countries in the world – if not probably the ONLY country – that funds schools based largely on local taxes. Other developed nations either equalize funding or provide extra money for kids in need. In the Netherlands, for example, national funding is provided to all schools based on the number of pupils enrolled. But for every guilder allocated to a middle-class Dutch child, 1.25 guilders are allocated for a lower-class child and 1.9 guilders for a minority child – exactly the opposite of the situation in the U.S.

If we want to compare the US to other countries, this is a perfect place to start.

But a focus on test scores obscures the differences.

Virtually all of the top scoring countries taking the NAEP exam have much less child poverty than the U.S. If they had the same percentage of poor students that we do, their scores would be lower than ours. Likewise, if we had the same percentage of poor students that they do, our scores would go through the roof! We would have the best scores in the world!

NAEP scores just mirror back to us our child poverty rate – that more than 1/3 of our students live below the poverty line and more than half of public school students qualify for free or reduced lunches.

But this myopic focus on standardized tests also blinds us to the ways our system is superior to that of many other countries.

We do something that many international systems do not. We educate everyone! Foreign systems often weed children out by high school. They don’t let every child get 13 years of grade school (counting kindergarten). They only school their highest achievers.

So when we compare ourselves to these countries, we’re comparing ALL of our students to only SOME of theirs – their best academic pupils, to be exact. Yet we still hold our own given these handicaps!

This suggests that the majority of problems with our public schools are monetary. Pure and simple.

A 2018 review by Northwestern University found that in 12 out of 13 studies increased spending had a positive effect on student outcomes. And that result has been verified by studies since then in California, Texas, Wisconsin and other states.

Money makes a difference.

Money spent on students – not more testing.

The bottom line is that standardized tests are not accurate assessments of student learning. They are corporate propaganda.

Standardized tests lie, and the corporate friendly education media feed us those same lies as if they were fact.

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Top 4 Things McKeesport Area School Directors Need to do to Extinguish the District Dumpster Fire

October 8, 2023 stevenmsinger Accountability, Allegheny County, Budget, capitalism, Charter Schools, COVID-19, Credibility, Education, history, Labor, Learning, Local Control, McKeesport Area School District, Parents, Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh, Politics, Prejudice, privatization, School Funding, Schools, Students, Taxation, Teachers, Technology, Uncategorized, Unions charter schools, education, McKeesport, McKeesport Area School District, Pennsylvania, Politics, public schools, school board, teachers contract, Union Contract

It gives me no joy to write this, but McKeesport Area School District (MASD) is a raging dumpster fire.

School directors reneged on a teachers contract. Their business manager ran for the hills. And at the last board meeting two school directors had their dirty laundry aired during public comments prompting one to call a White Oak Councilperson a homophobic slur.

Our finances have been given over to an accounting firm paid for by Dick’s Sporting Goods. An $86 million district budget (2023-24) at the mercy of the place where you go to buy new sneakers and fishing tackle.

This is pretty low – even for schools as historically dysfunctional as McKeesport.

As a local reporter in Pennsylvania’s Mon-valley area in the late 1990s and early 2000s, I saw a lot of crazy things happen at local government meetings throughout the western corner of the state.

But McKeesport School Board meetings were legendary. The nepotism, incompetence, ignorance, glad-handing and focus on anything but education was something my colleagues and I would marvel at when we had time to compare notes.

Now the running of district schools threatens to grind to a halt by a prospective teachers strike! If we want to get things back into some semblance of order, I think we need to do a few things.

As a lifelong resident of the district, an alumni and father of a child who currently goes to school there – not to mention a public school teacher at a neighboring district with more than two decades in the classroom – I think school directors need to focus on these four things first.

They are:

4) Pass a Code of Conduct for Board Members and Administrators

I am sympathetic to School Board members Jim Brown and LaToya Wright. At the last board meeting several people trolled the pair with questions about their marriage. Since school board members have to live in the district, these folks wanted Wright removed if she were separated from her husband and had relocated outside of the district.

While it’s fair to require school directors to provide proof of residency, this kind of Jerry Springer style questioning is not appropriate for a public meeting. If I had to constantly answer questions like this while volunteering to help guide the community’s schools, I might also find it hard to keep my composure.

However, that does not excuse using slurs of any kind at a public meeting – not racial, religious, sexual or otherwise.

Brown has apologized on-line for his indiscretion and should do so again at the next school board meeting. But his actions highlight a glaring problem within our district.

We need a code of conduct for our school board members and administrators.

The previous Superintendent Dr. Mark Holtzman was frequently sarcastic, flippant and rude to members of the public who asked questions he did not like at board meetings – myself included. It has been pretty standard procedure for board members to ridicule each other, make threats and/or stifle public comments.

These are the people who run our schools. They make the decisions that impact all of us as taxpayers and citizens – decisions that impact those of us with family enrolled in the school even more.

They should have to abide by a certain minimum level of civility – especially that hate speech of any kind not be tolerated.

Given the circumstances, I do not think Brown should be removed from the board. However, he should be given the chance to publicly apologize at the next board meeting. If he does not, he should be censured by his fellow board members.

It should be entirely clear what kind of behavior would bring censure, removal and/or impeachment.

School directors often act like being on the board gives them the right to hand out jobs to unqualified relatives and acquaintances, to seek revenge for supposed wrongs done to family or friends, and an excuse to enrich themselves on the public dime.

This needs to stop.

We need to draw a line in the sand to show what behavior is appropriate not just as a model for our children who we are supposed to be serving here, but also so that despite our differences we can finally work together in the best interests of everyone in the community. That’s why these people are supposed to be there in the first place.

3) Start Streaming Council Meetings Again

During the Covid pandemic, MASD would routinely video and stream its school board meetings on-line. About a year ago, the school board voted to stop.

Why?

These are public meetings. We are a working class district. Most people don’t have the time to physically attend every meeting.

This isn’t 1973. It’s not even 2003. We have the technology to cheaply and easily tape and share the meetings. We should absolutely do so. There is no possible excuse not to comply.

My middle school students have the know how to do this – and could do it in better quality than the district used to provide.

In the past, the board was indifferently microphoned so it was incredibly difficult to make out what they were saying – especially if they didn’t want to be heard. The camera was so far away, you couldn’t see anything except a few blurs behind a table.

That showed indifference to the public. Not streaming the meetings at all shows downright hostility.

Board members are afraid of spectacles like that which happened at the last board meeting becoming a video part of the public record. With the relative lack of almost any reliable newspaper to cover the area, it is often the case that board meetings aren’t even reported in the local paper and if they are, it may be in the most rudimentary terms possible or behind a paywall.

The school board should absolutely reverse itself on this point and renew taping the meetings and release them on-line. They could even invite a high school video club to do the work and probably greatly increase the quality of the product. The board should be proud of what it’s doing – not cower in the shadows. If the results are embarrassing, the public has a right to see it. What better inducement for board members and administrators NOT to behave badly?

And if the board won’t do this, some enterprising members of the public should. The teachers union or others could easily do this. These are public meetings. We have every right to tape them and put them on-line.

And any district who wants any kind of control over that should provide it as a free service, itself.

2) Hire a New Reputable Business Manager

Business Manager Scott Domowicz left the district over controversy about the board’s rejection of the teachers contract (more on that below).

The board accepted Domowicz’s resignation at its September meeting, but it won’t go into effect until the beginning of November. The board passed a motion to advertise the open position.

Meanwhile, accounting firm Klynveld Peat Marwick Goerdeler (KPMG) is ensuring the district’s finances are in order.

The board voted 5-4 to allow Dicks Sporting Goods to pay for 50 hours of accounting services by the firm, one of the big four in the industry.

Personally, I don’t like our schools being beholden to the largest sporting goods retailer in the country even if they are based in nearby Coraopolis. Our district already is too focused on its athletics program to the detriment of academics. I may just be cynical, but I don’t believe in corporate philanthropy – only philanthrocapitalism. I wonder what Dicks is going to ask MASD to do to repay this debt or what backroom deals may have already been made along these lines.

The district needs to hire a new business manager ASAP – and this time it needs to be someone with experience and a good reputation.

Domowicz originally had been hired in late February 2022 at an annual salary of $100,000. He had been the business manager at Spectrum Charter School in Monroeville for about a year. Before that he was Senior Management Consultant for two decades at Great Lakes Management Consulting, a firm offering accounting and tax preparation services to customers and small business owners in Grosse Pointe, Michigan.

Spectrum Charter School is much smaller than MASD. The privatized school employs 11-20 people and has $1 million to $5 million in annual revenue. MASD has roughly 3,000 students and 300 teachers with a proposed budget of $86 million next year.

The previous Business Manager Joan Wehner had more experience in the education field. She was assistant to the business manager at Penn-Trafford School District for 10 years before coming to McKeesport. She left the district to become business manager at Greensburg Salem School District.

It would be beneficial to get a replacement with a demonstrated track record in education – but it may be difficult to entice someone like that to come to a place as toxic as McKeesport. However, we need to do whatever we can to make it so.

1 ) Pass a Teachers Contract with No Tax Increase

School directors and the teachers had agreed to a tentative new contract in June, but the board tabled it after concerns that the district didn’t have the money to pay for moderate raises.

Then the board skipped the entire month of July without a meeting. But had no answers when they came back in August or September.

They just heaped blame on Domowicz, so he resigned.

Meanwhile, the teachers current contract expired at the end of August and the 266 teachers and professional education staff become so fed up, they voted unanimously to authorize a strike. This does not mean an immediately work stoppage, but it is the first step toward one.

The union has agreed to one more 30-day extension to contract negotiations. However, union President Gerald McGrew said that this is the final extension the union will grant. So the board needs to make this right by the end of October.

I think the teachers are being fair. The proposed raises in the contract rejected by the school board are moderate and well below what some educators in neighboring districts make.

Over five years, the proposed pay increases are: 6.11% in 2023-24, 6.59% in 2024-25, 6.03% in 2025-26, 4.38% in 2026-27, and 3.26% in 2027-28.

If they can afford relatively similar pay scales at West Mifflin, Steel Valley and other neighboring districts, MASD should be able to do so, too. The school board needs to make this work.

The district should be open about its finances. How much exactly would this cost? What cost saving measures can be conducted to reach this goal? And no ridiculous speculation about how much this might cost from board members with no financial background. These numbers should come from the experts. Facts not politics.

Obviously this should be done without a tax increase. I think it is entirely realistic to expect such an outcome without further information to the contrary. However, let’s be real. Ensuring fair pay for our teachers needs to be done even if that means raising taxes.

The heart of a school is its teachers. You can’t have a great school without great educators and you won’t have them without fair pay.

We are already being eaten alive by charter schools. Every child living in the district who goes to a charter school takes away money that would have gone to fund MASD. The district paid $14 million toward charter school tuition in 2022-23, according to Domowicz. He budgeted $16 million next year. That’s 17 percent of the new budget going toward charter schools.

If MASD doesn’t have quality teachers and a quality academic program, we’ll lose even more to these privatized schools. The only way to reverse the trend is to provide the best education and get the word out.

If we leave schooling to the competing piranha charter schools, they will gobble up our taxes while we have no say whether they are raised or not since most charter schools have no elected school boards.

McKeesport School Directors may be dysfunctional, but at least they’re elected representatives. At least they are members of the community who are required to listen to the public and conduct business in an open forum.

They could do their jobs better, but at least they’re ours. And we can replace them.

The only way we get MASD back on course is to pass a fair teachers contract. And to do that we need a reputable, reliable business manager. We need to video and stream school board meetings so everyone can see them easily. And we need to cut the crap and start conducting those meetings civilly and respectfully in the spirit of cooperation and the good of the community at large.

The way I see it, these are the first steps to get there.

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Teaching in Pennsylvania’s Unconstitutional School Funding System

September 4, 2023 stevenmsinger Accountability, Allegheny County, Budget, capitalism, Charter Schools, Child Safety, Civil Rights, Corporate Education "Reform", Democrat, Education, Harrisburg, history, Labor, Learning, Local Control, McKeesport Area School District, Parents, Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh, Politics, Poverty, Prejudice, private schools, privatization, Propaganda, Republican, School Choice, School Funding, school vouchers, Schools, small class size, Social Justice, Special Education, Students, Supreme Court, teacher autonomy, Teachers, Uncategorized #FairFundingPA, classroom, education, fair funding, Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh, Politics, school funding, school funding lawsuit, school vouchers, Steel Valley Schools, Supreme Court, teachers

It’s hard not to wonder about things in my new basement classroom.

I kill what bugs I can, wipe away the damp from the desks and try to think over the rattling hum of the ancient overhead heating and cooling system.

The room is about 1/3 smaller than the space I had last year and the class size is about that much larger.

I smile for a moment remembering that after nearly a decade of litigation, Pennsylvania’s state Supreme Court ruled in February that our school funding system violates the constitutional rights of students in poorer school districts like where I teach.

The deadline to challenge this ruling expired in July.

So where’s the additional funding?

I wonder about this as I prepare to teach classes at Steel Valley School District in the western part of the state near Pittsburgh.

Plaintiffs including six school districts, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Pennsylvania Association of Rural and Small Schools claimed that billions more dollars in state aid are necessary to meet the state’s constitutional obligation.

And the judge agreed, but why didn’t she direct the state legislature on exactly how much more state aid to distribute and how?

I mean even Judge Judy would have done that! She would NOT have said, “You owe him money! Now figure out how much and pay him somehow!”

I wonder about that as I get sick from the damp and the mold in my new classroom space.

I wonder about it as I see the school library in my alma mater of McKeesport Area High School permanently closed, the books given away years after the librarian positions were eliminated and the space now becomes a large group instruction room.

I wonder about how students at Steel Valley will access their library now that the sole librarian for the high school and middle school has to teach additional classes reducing the library’s hours almost to nothing.

I wonder about teachers (some retired, others forcibly moved) whose positions were eliminated and the resulting impact on class size and resources.

I wonder about the increasing number of special education students, emotional support students, and English Language Learners all squeezed into larger and larger classes (often with less and less physical space) who are forced to vie with each other for a single teacher’s limited attention.

I wonder about my own daughter in McKeesport sitting in stifling hot classrooms and eating increasingly disgusting lunches.

I wonder about the thousands of experienced teachers who have left the profession for good because of poor salary, poor working conditions, heavy expectations and lack of tools or respect. In McKeesport the school board can’t even agree to the contract its business manager negotiated with its teachers because they think the business manager somehow misunderstood what the district could afford.

I wonder about school boards filled with volunteers who are charged with the task of making water into wine and often end up turning water into vinegar.

I wonder about our legislature mired in a more than two-month-old partisan budget stalemate between Gov. Josh Shapiro, the Democratic-controlled House and the Republican-controlled Senate.

Republicans (and even the Democratic Governor to some extent) want to use taxpayer dollars to pay for students to attend private and religious schools. GOP operatives have signaled that any discussion about meeting the judge’s order to increase funding will have to involve spending more on school vouchers lite (tax deferment scholarships) or the full fledged variety.

I just don’t get it. The Supreme Court case was about public schools – not private and parochial ones. Taxpayers have no obligation to pay for people to send their kids to schools that aren’t governed by elected school boards, that won’t accept all students regardless of race, gender, religion, ethnicity, etc. Why are Republicans putting their ideological priorities in front of the law? If they want to use taxpayer money for this stuff, just make it a voter referendum. Ask taxpayers if they want their money spent this way. And change the constitution so that it’s legal to do so.

Compliance with the judge’s ruling should have nothing to do with it. Instead we should look to ensure every public school district has enough staff to keep class size low and constructive. We should ensure all schools have safe buildings and grounds. We should make sure all schools have broad curriculum with plenty of extracurricular activities and opportunities for students to learn. We should make sure all students have the services they need and the opportunities to access those services.

But we’re not doing that.

We’re just playing politics as usual.

Meanwhile in classrooms across the state the situation gets worse every day.

Parents, students and teachers waited almost a decade for this ruling. And it looks like we’ll have to wait even longer for anything of substance to actually happen because of it.

Our schools are drowning and our kids inside them. No one is even looking for a life preserver.

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Where Have School Libraries Gone?

August 25, 2023 stevenmsinger Accountability, Allegheny County, Budget, capitalism, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, computers, Corporate Education "Reform", edtech, Education, history, Labor, Learning, literature, Local Control, McKeesport Area School District, Parents, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Politics, Poverty, Prejudice, privatization, School Choice, School Funding, Schools, Standardized Testing, Students, Teachers, Technology, Uncategorized anti-intellectualism, Austin Davis, banned books, budget cuts, education, librarian, library, literacy, Politics, public schools, reading, school library, schools, teachers

Last week I discovered that an important part of my neighborhood school is gone – the library.

My daughter and I were taking a tour of my old alma mater, McKeesport Area High School, when I noticed the huge empty space where all the books used to be.

“What happened to the library?” I asked the guidance counselor who was showing us where my daughter’s classes would be this year.

Nowhere. Turns out it’s closed – for good.

The school board eliminated its last two librarian positions in 2018 to save money. Even then these had been itinerant librarians who jumped between buildings keeping the libraries open whenever possible but not all day, every day.

Since they’ve been gone, for the past five years teachers could still take their classes to each building library, however, without someone to sort and organize the books, it wasn’t worth the trip. So at the end of last school year, the remaining books in the high school were given away to students and teachers.

This year the high school’s ex-library space is set to become a large group instruction room.

And that may be the fate for the other libraries at the district’s two elementaries and middle school sometime in the future. My daughter tells me both Francis McClure and Founders Hall (the other two district schools she attended) have libraries but her classes rarely went there. It’s probably the same at Twin Rivers, the district’s other elementary school.

What a pity!

When I walked passed the space that used to house the high school library, I saw a few random books piled up on packing pallets ready to be taken away.

I can still remember what the room used to look like 30 years ago when I went to school there – the rows and rows of sturdy wooden shelves. I remember sitting in comfy chairs at wide tables with surfaces worn smooth by years and years of use.

Library time had been so special – curling up with a book and being transported away from the here and now. How many papers had I written with help from those books? How many books had I checked out over the years? Horror stories, joke books, historical narratives, books of world records, myths, reference texts…

My daughter will never know what that’s like unless I take her somewhere outside of the district. There is a local Carnegie library, but there’s nothing like having all of that just a few steps away.

Now I know what some of you probably are thinking: This is 2023. Why do we even need libraries anymore? Can’t kids just use the Internet?

There are many problems with this. Yes, all students in the district have access to Chrome Books and Internet connections in school. But every book is not available on-line. In fact, the number and variety of books available digitally is much smaller than most public or school libraries typically have in their collections – if you’re not going to pay an additional fee.

I can read most of the classics of world literature on the Internet, but anything that isn’t in the public domain is going to require me to pony up some dough. And the same goes for most respected resources.

Want an article from a local or national newspaper or even a magazine? Most require subscriptions to access articles – especially articles from their archives. You can find some free on-line encyclopedias but the articles are limited and it can be difficult for children (and some adults) to be able to tell which are most trustworthy. Wikipedia is still one of the most cited sources, and as useful as it is, you can’t trust it as well as the kind of reference books you’d find in most libraries.

McKeesport Area School District (MASD) isn’t the only public school greatly reducing or doing away with its school libraries.

The School Library Journal and the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) reported:

“Between the 1999–2000 and 2015–16 school years, the NCES reports that the profession lost the equivalent of more than 10,000 full-time school librarian positions nationwide. That translates to a 19 percent drop in the workforce, from 53,659 to 43,367. The most rapid declines happened from 2009–10 to 2013–14. The decline slowed from then to 2014–15; but resumed larger losses in 2015–16, the latest data available.”

We see school libraries being closed in Philadelphia, Boston, Los Angeles, Washington, DC, etc. A 2016 report in The Guardian indicates how serious the problem is worldwide:

“Libraries should be a right in schools. We must give pupils the opportunity to go to a quiet place to do extra study or to choose a book to read. It is particularly important to children from deprived areas. Opening a library door helps children open their mind. For many, books are too expensive and a library allows students to borrow them.”

The problems is often one of priorities. Districts would rather spend billions on technology than libraries. However, both are important. Schools should not have to choose. They should make more diligent decisions about which technologies are most essential instead of buying every new techno-fad with huge promises and no track record.

In the most impoverished districts, the problem isn’t just what hardware or software to purchase, but how to keep the district afloat without cutting vital services like libraries.

In 2018 when the MASD board eliminated the librarian positions, district officials said the cuts were because of “budgetary constraints” combined with the rise of charter school costs.

Every child living in the district who goes to a charter school takes away funding that would have gone to pay for all the kids attending the distict. MASD paid $2 million toward charter school tuition in 2006-07, which has risen to $14 million in 2022-23, according to Business Manager Scott Domowicz.

If this continues, Domowicz said in May that he expects the district will need to pay $16 million next year. That’s 17 percent of the new budget going toward charter schools.

What a pity that parents who remove their children from authentic public schools are making it more difficult for children in those schools to have access to a campus library!

But they’re also depriving their own children of the same amenity since charter schools are much less likely to have library facilities at all.

According to NCES, in 2020–21 only 52 percent of charter schools had a library media center. And only one-third of these charter school media centers had full-time, paid, state-certified library media center specialists, compared to two-thirds of authentic public schools. It’s actually worse than it seems because these statistics include learning resource centers that are entirely on-line without any physical books. So charter schools actually have fewer traditional libraries than quoted here.

Neighboring districts to MASD have dealt with the issue in similar ways.

Nearby Steel Valley School District (SVSD) still has a library for the middle – high school campus staffed with a full time librarian.

However, the librarian’s schedule is often taken up with teaching and/or study halls making it very difficult for teachers to take their classes to the library.

If administrators and school board members don’t prioritize keeping the library open during the school day, it’s only a matter of time before SVSD goes the way of MASD.

And if that’s not scary enough, think of the academic impact.

There is evidence that school libraries help increase standardized test scores. According to Phi Delta Kappan: Data from more than 34 statewide studies suggest that students tend to earn better standardized test scores in schools that have strong library programs.

It is no coincidence that this is all happening as literacy and facts are being challenged nationwide.

According to the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF), which monitors textual challenges, more than 273 books were challenged or banned in 2020. However, the majority of attempts to remove books go unreported so the reality is probably much higher.

This is part of a concerted effort to make America dumb again. These are political attacks against science, history and facts. It just makes sense they would also target the repositories of these sciences, histories and facts – libraries.

One day our descendants may not even know enough to ask the title with which we began this article. Instead of “Where have school libraries gone?” they may ask, “What was a library?”

“And what was a school?”

One of the last pictures of McKeesport Area High School’s library – Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. Austin Davis (an MASD alum) talks with students during a visit to the district in February 2023.

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McKeesport Teachers Without a Contract Because of Bad Business Manager or Bad Faith School Board?

August 16, 2023 stevenmsinger Accountability, Allegheny County, Budget, Charter Schools, Corporate Education "Reform", COVID-19, Credibility, Data, Education, Labor, Learning, Local Control, McKeesport Area School District, Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh, Politics, Poverty, Prejudice, privatization, School Funding, Schools, Students, Taxation, Teachers, Uncategorized, Unions business manager, education, MASD, McKeesport, McKeesport Area School District, Pennsylvania, Politics, schools, teachers

Which is it?

Does McKeesport Area School District (MASD) have a terrible business manager or a regressive school board?

School directors and the teachers had agreed to a new contract, but the board tabled it in June after concerns that the western Pennsylvania district didn’t have the money to pay for moderate raises.

Then the board skipped the entire month of July without a meeting. Which is fine if you don’t have any pressing business left unfinished, but I guess the livelihoods of hundreds of employees don’t count.

Now classes are set to begin on Aug. 21, yet the board is no closer to solving the problem.

At a school directors’ meeting last week, the board mostly blamed Business Manager Scott Domowicz.

“A contract was negotiated with ineptitude, and we cannot afford it,” said board member Matthew Holtzman. “Our business manager did not negotiate well. We don’t have the money to cover this.”

No board members sat on the negotiating committee? You just left it all up to the business manager?

“This board wants to give the teachers the raises, we can’t afford it,” board member Joseph Lopretto said. “Taxpayers will be looking at a 30% raise in their property taxes over five years.”

Where did you get that percentage from exactly? What are the exact figures, the exact cost?

All of which really comes down to the question – how is this possible!?

The pay raises in the proposed contract are not extravagant and the district does not pay as much as nearby districts.

Over five years, the proposed pay increases are: 6.11% in 2023-24, 6.59% in 2024-25, 6.03% in 2025-26, 4.38% in 2026-27, and 3.26% in 2027-28.

“This contract was offered to us. We accepted this contract. It was not the numbers we wanted, but it’s the numbers that were given to us, and that’s what we went with,” said Gerald McGrew president of the McKeesport Area Education Association (MAEA).

“At the end of five years, our highest salary is still not at some of the local district highest salary now. The parents and the kids are the ones being affected mostly by this.”

So how can this happen?

Can a business manager – a person responsible for a district’s finances – negotiate a contract without a full understanding of what the district can and cannot afford!?

Domowicz was hired in late February 2022 at an annual salary of $100,000. He had been the business manager at Spectrum Charter School in Monroeville for about a year. Before that he was Senior Management Consultant for two decades at Great Lakes Management Consulting, a firm offering accounting and tax preparation services to customers and small business owners in Grosse Pointe, Michigan.

However, could Domowicz really be so clueless about MASD finances to negotiate a contract with the teachers that the district could not pay?

He certainly seemed on top of district finances at the board’s May meeting where he discussed the 2023-24 budget.

Domowicz said next year’s total proposed budget is for $86 million with an approximate fund balance of $10.6 million. This is an increase from the $79.8 million budget approved by the board for 2022-23.

Even though this years budget has a fund balance for the future, expenses are rising.

“Contractual labor agreements and additional staffing represents an increase in payroll expenses of 8 percent,” Domowicz said.

“There (have) been a lot of labor market pressures making recruitment and retention difficult without making some market adjustments to what we are offering in starting salaries. And there (has) been a decline in the median income of the families that we support with the district.”

This does not sound like someone ignorant of the issues.

He even noted that charter school costs were one of the leading causes of financial increases. Every child living in the district who goes to a charter school takes away funding that would have gone to fund MASD. The district paid $2 million toward charter school tuition in 2006-07, which has risen to $14 million in 2022-23.

If this continues, Domowicz said he expects the district will need to pay $16 million next year. That’s 17 percent of the new budget going toward charter schools.

If Domowicz’s figures were accurate all along, why is the school board suddenly refusing to approve the contract with the teachers it had originally offered?

In today’s increasingly anti-intellectual and anti-teacher environment, it is no stretch of the imagination to see why.

The entire country is in the midst of a national educator walk out. Teachers are refusing to stay in the classroom due to poor salary, poor working conditions, heavy expectations and lack of tools or respect.

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

Nationwide, we only have about 3.2 million teachers left!

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

Not only are teachers paid 20% less than other college-educated workers with similar experience, but a 2020 survey found that 67% of teachers have or had a second job to make ends meet.

And now MASD school board is refusing to approve very reasonable raises for educators who have given everything to the district and its children.

This is my school district where my family was educated, where I graduated and where my daughter still attends. I’ve seen so many fine educators give up the ghost and leave the classroom for better opportunities elsewhere.

If MASD school directors don’t do something to solve this problem, we will only lose more talented and experienced teachers. The quality of education will fall further while charter schools gobble up even more of our tax dollars. This means devaluing our properties and paying even higher taxes.

No one wants a tax increase.

The median income in the district is about $34,379, according to Domowicz. The community cannot afford to waste its declining tax revenue.

School directors need to either prove that the business manager they hired is incompetent and replace him – or prioritize educators when writing their budgets. You can’t have an excellent school without excellent teachers. And you can’t have excellent teachers – especially in a time of shortage – without paying them a fair wage.

Even though many school boards don’t have a meeting in July, perhaps MASD directors shouldn’t have done the same without a solution ready in August. That kind of disrespect is just asking for educators to strike – though the MAEA has not threatened to do so.

It is a shame that we are even in this position.

US schools should not have to rely on local tax revenues to fund neighborhood schools. Rich communities can afford to give their children the best of everything and poorer ones like McKeesport have to make do with whatever they can scrape together.

This is not how other modern countries do it. Internationally, schools are more often funded by state or federal governments so that all children get equitable resources. And charter schools do not even exist in many modern nations. However, until our own regressive governments catch up with the rest of the world, it is up to our duly elected representatives at home to get down to work and make sure all our children have the best we can provide.

School directors, no more excuses. Get to work.

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Teach for America Promised to Fix the Teacher Exodus Before Anyone Even Noticed There Was One. Now It’s Choking on Its Own Failure

August 7, 2023August 7, 2023 stevenmsinger academic freedom, Accountability, Betsy DeVos, capitalism, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Corporate Education "Reform", COVID-19, Credibility, Data, Democrat, Education, Labor, Learning, NEA, Pennsylvania, Politics, privatization, Republican, School Choice, school vouchers, Schools, Standardized Testing, student teacher relationship, Students, Teach for America, teacher autonomy, Teachers, Uncategorized, union busting, Unions education, Politics, schools, Teach for America, teacher exodus, teacher shortage, teachers, TFA

Teach for America (TFA) was a solution to a problem it helped create.

Educators have been leaving the profession for decades due to poor salary, poor working conditions, heavy expectations and lack of tools or respect.

So Wendy Kopp, when in Princeton, created a program to fast track non-education majors into the classroom where they would teach for a few years and then enter the private sector as “experts” to drive public policy.

These college graduates would take a five week crash course in education and commit to at least two years in the classroom thereby filling any vacant teaching positions.

Surprise! It didn’t work.

In fact, it made things worse. Apparently deprofessionalizing education isn’t an incentive to dive into the field.

That isn’t to say everyone who went through the program became a bad teacher. But the few good and committed educators that did come through the program could have done so even more successfully by graduating with a degree in education.

Now the organization created in 1990 is expecting its lowest enrollment in 15 years. TFA anticipates placing slightly less than 2,000 teachers in schools across the country this fall. That’s two-thirds of the number of first-year teachers TFA placed in schools in fall 2019, and just one-third of the number it sent into the field at its height in 2013.

Apparently fewer people than ever don’t want to train for four to five years to become lifelong teachers – and neither do they want to be lightly trained for a few years as TFA recruits, either – even if that means they can pass themselves off as education experts afterwards and get high paying policy positions at think tanks and government.

On the one hand, this is good news.

Watering down what it means to be a teacher is even less popular than actually being an educator.

On the other hand, we have a major crisis that few people are prepared to handle.

The US is losing teachers at an alarming rate.

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

Nationwide, we only have about 3.2 million teachers left!

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

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

Not only are teachers paid 20% less than other college-educated workers with similar experience, but a 2020 survey found that 67% of teachers have or had a second job to make ends meet.

It’s no wonder then that few college students want to enter the profession.

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

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

To put that more concretely, a decade ago roughly 20,000 new teachers entered the workforce each year in the Commonwealth, while last year only 6,000 did so, according to the state Department of Education (PDE).

But don’t look to most of the so-called experts to solve the problem. A great deal of them are former TFA recruits!

Through programs like TFA’s Capitol Hill Fellows Program, alumni are placed in full-time, paid staff positions with legislators so they can “gain insights into the legislative process by working in a Congressional office” and work “on projects that impact education and opportunities for youth.”

Why do so many lawmakers hire them? Because they don’t cost anything.

Their salaries are paid in full by TFA through a fund established by Arthur Rock, a California tech billionaire who hands the organization bags of cash to pay these educational aides’ salaries. From 2006 to 2008, alone, Rock – who also sits on TFA’s board – contributed $16.5 million for this purpose.

This isn’t about helping lawmakers understand the issues. It’s about framing the issues to meet the policy initiatives of the elite and wealthy donors.

It’s about selling school privatization, high stakes testing and ed-tech solutions.

As US Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) said on a call with Justice Democrats:

“I don’t think people who are taking money from pharmaceutical companies should be drafting health care legislation. I don’t think people who are taking money from oil and gas companies should be drafting our climate legislation.”

I’d like to add the following: people taking money from the testing and school privatization industry shouldn’t be drafting education policy. People who worked as temps in order to give themselves a veneer of credibility should not be treated the same as bona fide experts who dedicate their lives to kids in the classroom.

The whole point of this scam is to serve the needs of the privatization movement.

Investors want to change public education into a cash cow. They want to alter the rules so that corporations running districts as charter or voucher schools can cut services for children and use the extra cash for profits.

And that starts with teachers.

If we allow privatizers to replace well-prepared and trained teachers with lightly trained temps, we can reduce the salaries we pay instructors. We delegitimize the profession. We redefine the job “teacher.” It’s no longer a highly-trained professional. It’s something anyone can do from off the street – thus we can pay poverty wages.

And the savings from cutting salaries can all go into our corporate pockets!

This kind of flim-flam would never be allowed with our present crop of highly trained professionals because many of them belong to labor unions. We have to give them the boot so we can exterminate their unions and thus provide easy pickings for the profiteers.

This helps explain why so many plans to address the teacher exodus are focused almost exclusively on recruiting new hires while completely ignoring the much larger numbers of experienced teachers looking for the exits.

According to the National Education Association (NEA), it is teachers who are quitting that is driving a significant part of the current educator shortage. More teachers quit the job than those who retire, are laid off, are transferred to other locations, go on disability or die. And this has remained true almost every year for the last decade with few exceptions.

To put it another way, you can’t stop a ship from sinking if you don’t plug up the leak first!

But experienced teachers always have been the biggest obstacle to privatizing public schools and expanding standardized testing.

That’s why replacing them with new educators has been one of the highest priorities of corporate education reform.

After all, it’s much harder to try to indoctrinate seasoned educators with propaganda that goes against everything they learned to be true about their students and profession in a lifetime of classroom practice than to encourage those with no practical experience to just drink the Kool-Aid.

So it should come as no surprise that supply side policymakers are using the current teacher exodus as an excuse to remake the profession in their own image.

As Rahm Emanuel, Chief of Staff to President Barack Obama (Later Chicago Mayor) said:

“You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that [is] it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.”

If our policymakers really want to solve the problem, we’d spend at least as much time keeping the experienced teachers we have as trying to get new ones to join their ranks.

Research shows that teacher experience matters.

“The common refrain that teaching experience does not matter after the first few years in the classroom is no longer supported by the preponderance of the research,” Tara Kini and Anne Podolsky write in Does Teaching Experience Increase Teacher Effectiveness?

“We find that teaching experience is, on average, positively associated with student achievement gains throughout a teacher’s career.”

Their analysis is based on 30 studies published over the past 15 years and concludes:

1) Experienced teachers on average are more effective in raising student achievement (both test scores and classroom grades) than less experienced ones.

2) Teachers do better as they gain experience. Researchers have long documented that teachers improve dramatically during their first few years on the job. However, teachers make even further gains in subsequent years.

3) Experienced teachers also reduce student absences, encourage students to read for recreational purposes outside of the classroom, serve as mentors for young teachers and help to create and maintain a strong school community.

The road to keeping experienced teachers isn’t exactly mysterious.

First, there must be an increase in salary. Teacher pay must at least be adequate including the expectation that as educators gain experience, their salaries will rise in line with what college graduates earn in comparable professions. This is not happening now.

In addition, something must be done to improve teachers working conditions. Lack of proper support and supportive administrators is one of the main reasons experienced teachers leave a building or the profession.

And perhaps most obviously, politicians have to stop scapegoating educators for all of society’s problems and even for all of the problems of the school system. Teachers don’t get to make policy. They are rarely even allowed a voice, but they are blamed for everything that happens in and around education.

If we want teachers to work with socially disadvantaged students, they must be provided with the institutional supports needed to be effective and steadily advance their skills.

But this requires making education a priority and not a political football.

To do that, you would need to stop bankrolling organizations like TFA.

However, the billionaires funding school privatization and the standardized testing industry would never allow it.

So unlike our public schools, as fewer and fewer applicants come to TFA, there will always be money to keep it afloat.

Those who are causing the teacher exodus will never be the ones to fix it.

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Will PA Finally Hold Cyber Charter Schools Accountable?

July 10, 2023 stevenmsinger Accountability, Budget, capitalism, Charter Schools, Child Predators, Child Safety, Civil Rights, computers, Corporate Education "Reform", Cyber Charter Schools, Data, Democrat, edtech, Education, Harrisburg, history, Josh Shapiro, Learning, Local Control, Parents, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Politics, Poverty, Prejudice, privatization, Republican, School Choice, School Funding, Schools, Student Mobility, Students, Taxation, Teachers, Technology, Tom Wolf Cyber Charter Schools, education, House Bill 1422, Josh Shapiro, PA House, PA Senate, Pennsylvania, Politics, Students, teachers

Pennsylvania pays more than $1 billion every year for its 14 cyber charter schools.

And overpays them by more than $450 million each year.

Now – after half a decade of legislative shenanigans – a new bill actually has the possibility of being passed to hold these types of schools accountable.

Last week House Bill 1422 passed by a vote of 122-81, with all Democrats voting for it, joined by 20 Republicans. Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro would likely sign the legislation if it comes to his desk.

So now it goes to its biggest hurdle – the Republican-controlled Senate.

The state GOP has held up every cyber charter reform measure since the previous Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf suggested it. However, now that Democrats hold a slim majority in the House, Republicans can no longer stymie it completely.

One of the largest problems centers on the cost of doing business. Cyber charter schools educate students online via computer. So why do local public schools have to pay cyber charters the same money as brick and mortar schools to educate students living in their boundaries? Cyber charters don’t have nearly the brick and mortar – no athletic fields, busing, etc. And the physical structures they do have are much smaller. The result is underfunded public schools and cyber charters bursting with cash.

That means higher public school taxes for you and me while cyber charters spend money like it’s going out of style.

The new measure would stop that by telling public schools exactly how much they must pay cyber charters – $8,000 per student not receiving special education services. Most schools currently spend approximately $10,000.

In addition, cyber charter schools would no longer be given more funding for special education students than authentic public schools. Tuition for special education students would be aligned with the system used for authentic public school districts. These measures, alone, are expected to result in about $456 million in savings.

But that’s not all!

The legislation also seeks additional transparency, eliminating conflicts of interest and requiring cyber charters to comply with the state’s ethics and open records law as authentic public schools are already required to do. It would ban enrollment incentives, restrict advertising and event sponsorships.

Gov. Wolf’s original proposal went even further. He had asked the General Assembly to place a moratorium on new cyber charter schools and cap enrollment in low-performing charter schools until they improve. None of that appears in the current legislation.

The bill’s primary sponsor, Rep. Joe Ciresi, D-Montgomery, said the goal was not to close cyber charter programs, but to stop overfunding them. He said:

“We’re looking to put money back into the public schools and also leave the choice that’s there. We should have choice in this state. We’re asking that it’s a fair playing field.”

A lot of the prohibitions in the new legislation seem to have been inspired by real practices by current cyber charter schools like Commonwealth Charter Academy (CCA), the largest school of this type in the state.

For example, CCA spent approximately $19 million on marketing over a two-year period, including a float featuring Jerold the Bookworm for a Thanksgiving Parade.

The proposed law would prohibit all public schools from paying to sponsor public events such as parades and professional sporting events. Moreover, it would require all public schools who advertise to state that the cost of tuition and other costs are covered by taxpayer dollars.

CCA also uses tax dollars to provide $200 for monthly field trips that can be of debatable educational value. They’ve gone to petting zoos, laser tag, bowling and kayaking. A parent of a CCA student even bragged on Facebook about using these funds for Dave and Busters Arcade, a Motley Crue concert, Eagles tickets, and family vacations to Universal Studios and Disney, according to Education Voters of Pa.

The new bill would prohibit cyber charter schools from paying or reimbursing parents/guardians from educational or field trips as well as offering any cash, gifts or other incentives for enrolling or considering enrolling in a cyber charter school.

It would also force these types of schools to be more financially accountable by requiring them to approve an annual budget by June 30th each year, and make the budget available, as well as imposing fund balance limits so they couldn’t horde taxpayer money – all things already required of authentic public schools.

Charter schools – institutions that are publicly financed but often privately run and not subject to the same rules and regulations as authentic public schools – are still controversial despite the first charter school law being passed in 1991 and having spread through at least 45 states. However, only 27 states also allow CYBER charters like this – schools that teach mostly (or entirely) distance learning through the Internet.

Nationwide, Pennsylvania and Ohio have the largest cyber charter enrollment. In 2020-21, the Keystone State enrolled 61,000 students in cyber charters – and roughly 21,000 attend CCA.

A 2022 report by Children First found that of the states with cyber charters, Pennsylvania spends the most but has the “weakest systems to ensure students and taxpayers are getting their money’s worth.” Moreover, of the roughly $1 billion state taxpayers spend on these schools, several reports suggest that the money comes from the poorest districts, where cyber student academic performance is much lower than at neighboring authentic public schools. These are the students most in need of help.

Many provisions in the proposed bill read like such common sense initiatives, it’s chilling that they aren’t already in place.

The bill would require cyber charter schools to verify the residency of enrolling students, report the number of newly enrolled students and how many of those students have been identified as needing special education. Since cyber charter teachers meet with students online, they would need to visibly see and communicate with enrolled students at least once per week to verify the student’s well-being.

There are also many rules about how a cyber charter school can be governed. You could not have a school director from another school district or a trustee from another charter school serving on the board of the cyber charter school. Boards would require a quorum and a majority vote to take action. They would have to comply with the Sunshine Law, Right-to-Know Law, and the Ethics Act. Cyber charter school boards would need to have at least seven non-related members, at least one of whom must be a parent/guardian of an enrolled student.

But let’s not forget the many ways this new law would make cyber charters more transparent. Cyber charter schools could not lease a facility from a foundation or management company – unfortunately a common practice that allows the school to bill the public for a service to itself multiple times. Any conflicts of interest between the cyber charter school and a foundation or management company would need to be disclosed. Cyber charters would not be allowed to have administrators and their family members serving on the board of a charter school foundation that supports the charter school. No charter school trustee could be employed by the cyber charter school, a foundation that supports the school, or a management company that serves the school. The state Department of Education would need to have access to the records and facilities of any foundation and/or management companies associated with the school. Foundations associated with these schools would need to make budgets, tax returns and audits available.

The overwhelming majority of these regulations simply hold cyber charter schools to the same standard we already use for authentic public schools.

However, what often gets left unsaid is how terribly students do academically at cyber charters – something completely left out of this proposed legislation.

Study after study consistently shows that cyber charters are much less effective than traditional public schools – heck! They’re even less effective than brick and mortar charter schools!

A nationwide study by Stanford University found that cyber charters provide 180 days less of math instruction and 72 days less of reading instruction than traditional public schools.

Keep in mind that there are only 180 days in an average school year. So cyber charters provide less math instruction than not going to school at all.

The same study found that 88 percent of cyber charter schools have weaker academic growth than similar brick and mortar schools.

Student-to-teacher ratios average about 30:1 in online charters, compared to 20:1 for brick and mortar charters and 17:1 for traditional public schools.

Researchers concluded that these schools have an “overwhelming negative impact” on students.

And these results were duplicated almost exactly by subsequent studies from Penn State University in 2016 (enrolling a student in a Pennsylvania cyber charter school is equal to “roughly 90 fewer days of learning in reading and nearly 180 fewer days of learning in math”) and the National Education Policy Center in 2017 (cyber charters “performed significantly worse than feeder schools in both reading and math”).

The legislation being considered here does the important work of holding cyber charters financially accountable. However, there still remains the very real question of whether this type of educational institution is viable under normal circumstances.

It will be interesting to see if Republicans find even accountability a prospect worthy of a vote in the state Senate. Lobbyists for charter school networks like K12 Inc. and Connections Education have spent billions of dollars against something like this ever happening.

I guess we’ll soon see who the Commonwealth GOP really listens to – voters or corporate interests.

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Absurd School Voucher Proposal Stalls PA Budget

July 1, 2023 stevenmsinger Accountability, Budget, capitalism, Charter Schools, Corporate Education "Reform", Democrat, Donald Trump, Education, Harrisburg, Josh Shapiro, Local Control, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Politics, private schools, privatization, Republican, School Funding, school vouchers, Schools, Standardized Testing, Student Mobility, Students, Teachers, Uncategorized, Unions #PAbudget, Budget, Democrats, education, Josh Shapiro, Pennsylvania, Politics, public schools, Republicans, school vouchers, teachers

How do you stop the other team from making a goal when you aren’t even sure your own team’s goalie will try to block the shot?

Pennsylvania House Democrats find themselves in that uncomfortable position as they refuse to pass a Republican supported 2023-24 budget on time.

The problem? School vouchers.

Democrats generally oppose them and Republicans love them. But in the commonwealth, new Gov. Josh Shapiro, ostensibly a Democrat, has let it be known that he likes vouchers under certain conditions.

So Republicans designed a bill exactly along those lines hoping that if they can get it through both legislative bodies, the Governor will give it his signature. (Under the previous Democratic administration, Gov. Tom Wolf blocked the worst the GOP could throw at him, stopping all kinds of horrible policies from getting through.)

A budget encrusted with voucher giveaways passed the Republican-controlled Senate on Thursday, but the House – where Democrats now hold a slim majority – refused to go along with it.

So Republicans are holding the entire budget hostage. As usual.

In a time when the state is flush with cash from inflation-juiced tax collections and federal pandemic subsidies, legislators still couldn’t pass a budget on time.

And it all comes down to our schizophrenic education policies.

Fact: the Commonwealth shortchanges public school students.

The state Supreme Court said so after an 8 year legal battle.

Now lawmakers in Harrisburg are rushing to fix the problem by tearing public schools apart and giving the pieces to private and parochial schools.

It’s called the Lifeline Scholarship Program – throw a lifeline of $100 million to failing edu-businesses and religious indoctrination centers on the excuse that that will somehow help kids from impoverished neighborhoods.

You could just increase funding at the poorest public schools – but that would make too much sense.

Better to give taxpayer money to private interests with little to no accountability or track record and just hope it works!

During the election, Shapiro admitted he liked the concept of these kinds of vouchers, but back then the only other choice was Doug Mastriano, a raving MAGA insurrectionist Republican. The Democrat could have said he had developed a taste for human flesh and he would have been the better alternative.

This means only the slim Democratic majority is left to uphold public schools over this wrongheaded policy nightmare.

House Democrats swear the bill is destined to fail.

House Majority Leader Matt Bradford, D-Montgomery, put it this way:

“There are not the votes for it. It’s not coming up, and if it comes up, it will be defeated.”

This seems to be the case. Yesterday, the House Rules Committee voted against sending the tuition voucher bill to the full House for a vote. So it is not scheduled for a vote at all.

However, now that the June 30th deadline has been blown, lawmakers probably will try to use this newest school voucher bid as a bargaining chip to get a spending plan – any spending plan – passed. This could drag on for months – it certainly has in the past.

The current voucher iteration is a taxpayer funded tuition subsidy for students attending private schools.

Under this bill, students in the lowest 15% of schools in the commonwealth (as determined by standardized test scores) would be eligible.

So what’s wrong with school vouchers?

1) Vouchers have nothing to do with helping kids escape struggling public schools.

School vouchers overwhelmingly go to kids who already attend private or parochial schools.

This is true even when the law explicitly stipulates the money should only go to poor and needy children.

2) Using taxpayer money to send your child to a private or parochial school has got nothing to do with getting a quality education.

If we look at the facts, using a school voucher to go from a public school to a private one actually hurts kids academically.

This should come as no surprise. When we give children school vouchers, we’re removing their support systems already in place.

3) Vouchers have nothing to do with more efficient schools.

Let’s get one thing straight – voucher schools are businesses, often new businesses just opening up. And like any other start-up, the failure rate is extremely high. According to Forbes, 90% of start-ups fail – often within the first few years.

The same is true here. Like charter schools (another privatized education scheme), most voucher schools close in the first few years after they open. In Wisconsin, for example, 41% of voucher-receiving schools have opened and subsequently closed since public funding began in the early 1990s.

Yet when they close, they take our tax dollars with them leaving less funding available to educate all kids in the community.

Public schools, by contrast, are community institutions that usually last (and have been around) for generations. Their goal isn’t profit – it’s providing a quality education.

4) Vouchers have nothing to do with freedom or choice.

Unless it’s the choice to be a bigot and indoctrinate your child into your own bigotry.

Vouchers are about exclusion – who gets to attend these PRIVATE schools – and indoctrination – what nonsense they can teach that public schools cannot.

Private schools can and do discriminate against children based on religion, race, gender, sexuality, special needs – you name it – even if those schools take public money.

To be fair, this voucher program is not supposed to take money directly from the public system – one of Shapiro’s requirements for his support – but the money has to come from somewhere.

The state treasury would be responsible for managing the program, and it can’t just print money. This is taxpayer funding. We won’t allocate the money to support the schools we have, but we’re willing to send $100 million to schools we have no responsibility for now!? With no fiscal accountability!?

Lots of other states have enacted vouchers like this and surprise, surprise! The program expands enormously. For instance, in New Hampshire, voucher supporters predicted their program would cost taxpayers about $130,000, but within two years the cost had ballooned to more than $14 million.

Pennsylvania schools have monetary needs – but this voucher program is not one of them.

Lawmakers have been tasked by the state Supreme Court with increasing education funding.

That’s education funding for public schools – PUBLIC. Schools.

If they want to give away our tax dollars to their buddies in the private education industry or support religious indoctrination, that’s a different matter entirely.

And shame on Shapiro for giving the most reckless policymakers in the commonwealth on the other side of the aisle hope that these shenanigans will work.

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gadflyonthewallblog

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

privatization

On Discriminatory School Vouchers, Democrats Divide the Party to Appear Unified!?

Standardized Tests Lie

Top 4 Things McKeesport Area School Directors Need to do to Extinguish the District Dumpster Fire

4) Pass a Code of Conduct for Board Members and Administrators

3) Start Streaming Council Meetings Again

2) Hire a New Reputable Business Manager

1 ) Pass a Teachers Contract with No Tax Increase

Where Have School Libraries Gone?

McKeesport Teachers Without a Contract Because of Bad Business Manager or Bad Faith School Board?

Teach for America Promised to Fix the Teacher Exodus Before Anyone Even Noticed There Was One. Now It’s Choking on Its Own Failure

Will PA Finally Hold Cyber Charter Schools Accountable?

Absurd School Voucher Proposal Stalls PA Budget

1) Vouchers have nothing to do with helping kids escape struggling public schools.

2) Using taxpayer money to send your child to a private or parochial school has got nothing to do with getting a quality education.

3) Vouchers have nothing to do with more efficient schools.

4) Vouchers have nothing to do with freedom or choice.

12) Standardized Tests Hurt Asian-American Students, Too, Though Many Get High Scores

11) Fact Checking Propel Charter Schools – Do They Live Up to Their Own Hype?

10) Stay Woke, Public School Teachers

9) Where Have School Libraries Gone?

8) After School Satan Clubs Are Teaching Public School Districts an Important Lesson in Free Speech

7) Congress May Raise Educators’ Minimum Salaries to Combat the Teacher Exodus

6) I am a Charter School Abolitionist, and You Should Be, Too

5) A Private Equity Firm, The Makers of the MAP Test, and an Ed Tech Publisher Join Forces

4) Top 4 Things McKeesport Area School Directors Need to do to Extinguish the District Dumpster Fire

3) Teach for America Promised to Fix the Teacher Exodus Before Anyone Even Noticed There Was One. Now It’s Choking on Its Own Failure

2) Come Visit Your Wasted Tax Dollars at Commonwealth Charter Academy’s Waterfront Luxury Office Space

1) McKeesport Teachers Without a Contract Because of Bad Business Manager or Bad Faith School Board?

Gadfly’s Other Year End Round Ups

2022:

2021:

2020:

2019:

2018:

2017:

2016

2015

2014

4) Pass a Code of Conduct for Board Members and Administrators

3) Start Streaming Council Meetings Again

2) Hire a New Reputable Business Manager

1 ) Pass a Teachers Contract with No Tax Increase

1) Vouchers have nothing to do with helping kids escape struggling public schools.

2) Using taxpayer money to send your child to a private or parochial school has got nothing to do with getting a quality education.

3) Vouchers have nothing to do with more efficient schools.

4) Vouchers have nothing to do with freedom or choice.