“Daddy, are gay people not allowed to get married?”
My daughter was looking at me in confusion as we sat together on the couch watching an old episode of “Top Chef.”
In Season 6, episode two, the chefs were asked to cook for a bachelor party. One of the contestants, Ashley, was indignant that she had to participate in a challenge centered on marriage when she, herself, couldn’t marry another woman.
I was surprised.
It hadn’t occurred to me that the show was so old. It first aired in 2009. Was that really so long ago?
We’ve only had marriage equality in all 50 states since 2015. That’s just seven years ago.
So I explained to my daughter that gay people can marry today, but that it wasn’t always the case.
My 13-year-old thought the idea that people couldn’t marry whoever they wanted to was just too crazy to be believed. And I agreed.
Apparently, the landmark 1973 decision that expanded access to abortion nationwide is about to be overturned by the Republican majority on the Supreme Court.
Did I just sleep through a monologue by Rod Serling?
I’m still seeing things in color but they’re starting to feel very black and white.
These are issues of settled law.
Roe v. Wade is older than I am. Women have been able to terminate unwanted pregnancies for my entire life and the world hasn’t come to an end. In fact, if you read about what life was like before this decision, things have improved.
Women have freedom over their own bodies. They aren’t trapped by the Catch 22 of whether to submit to a forced birth or risk their lives with a back alley procedure.
I remember having a similar moment of cognitive dissonance as my daughter did when I was in high school.
I read the book “An American Tragedy” by Theodore Dreiser and was shocked at what life was like in the 1920s before women had such freedoms. In the book, a couple get pregnant and have to choose between an unwanted marriage while raising an unwanted child or a black market abortion and the freedom to move on. When they can’t agree, the protagonist, Clyde, murders the poor woman.
At the time, the whole situation seemed entirely quaint. It was a series of arguments, examples, and counter examples on an issue that had been decided long ago.
That anyone could think differently struck me as absurd.
In my high school public speaking class, we debated the issue. I argued in favor of reproductive rights, and a girl I had a crush on argued against them.
Let’s cut to the chase. None of this really is about stopping abortions. (If that was the concern, we’d be talking about free birth control, neonatal care and making a better world to raise children in.) Nor is it about safeguarding marriage between a man and a woman – or a white man and a white woman.
It’s about strengthening white supremacy. It’s about bolstering the patriarchy.
Democrats have a majority in both the House and the Senate and we have the Presidency.
If we can’t get 60 votes in the Senate (and we probably can’t) we can end the filibuster and pass it with 50 votes.
I hope with all my heart that we do this.
I will push and organize and protest and electioneer. But I fear it will not be enough.
Just making it to this regressive moment in time seems to indicate that our system is too broken to be fixed that way.
This is not the world I wanted for my daughter. I fear it is the world she will have to fight to overcome.
The battles of our grandparents have become our inheritance to our posterity.
They deserve a much better world.
But all we seem to have for them are reruns.
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The Covid-19 pandemic on top of years of corporate sabotage and propaganda have obscured what public education really means and why it is absolutely necessary to the functioning of our society and any possibility of social, racial or economic justice.
Let’s begin by looking at how the current disaster exacerbated an already difficult situation and then consider why we should care enough to fix the mess.
The Pandemic Effect
Public schools got a bloody nose from the Coronavirus crisis.
Issues of masking, contact tracing, safety of immunocompromised students and staff, and when to open or close buildings (among other issues) lead to inevitable dissatisfaction from all fronts.
However, none of these issues should have been decided at the local level in the first place.
Instead, the CDC made conflicting decisions based more on the needs of the economy than public health (many of which were roundly ignored anyway). Then federal and state governments either refused to decide safety protocols leaving it up to individuals or municipalities, or when they did decide matters, they were embroiled in partisan battles over any kind of restrictions.
In fact, it was the failure of federal, state and even local municipal governments that often made public schools the de facto legislators of last resort. And this is something they were never meant to be.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are 567,000 fewer educators in our public schools today than there were before the pandemic. And finding replacements has been difficult. Nationwide, an average of one educator is hired for every two jobs available.
This has left us with a weakened system suffering from more problems than before the pandemic hit.
Why Are Public Schools Important?
Because of what they are and what they represent.
We hear about public education so often – usually in deprecating terms – that we forget exactly what the term signifies.
It is a school where any child can go to get an education.
You don’t have to pay tuition. You don’t have to have a special ability or qualification. You don’t have to be neurotypical, a certain race, ethnicity, belong to a certain faith or socioeconomic status. If you’re living in the US – even if you’re here illegally – you get to go there.
That may seem simple, but it is vitally important and really quite special.
Not all nations have robust systems of public education like we do in the US.
This country has a commitment to every single child regardless of what their parents can afford to pay, regardless of their access to transportation, regardless of whether they can afford uniforms, lunch or even if they have a home.
We simply define education differently. We look at it as a right, not a privilege. And for a full 13 years (counting kindergarten) it’s a right for every child, not just some.
Perhaps even more significant is our commitment to children with special needs.
We have developed a special education system to help children at the edges that many other countries just can’t touch. In some nations these students are simply excluded. In others they are institutionalized. In some countries it’s up to parents to find ways to pay for special services. The United States is one of the only countries where these children are not only included and offered full and free access, but the schools go above and beyond to teach these children well beyond their 12th academic year.
In every authentic public school in the United States these students are included. In math, reading, science and social studies, they benefit from instruction with the rest of the class. And this, in turn, benefits even our neurotypical students who gain lessons in empathy and experience the full range of human abilities.
That isn’t to say the system has ever been perfect. Far from it.
But at least at the very outset what we were trying to do was better than what most of the world takes on. You can’t achieve equity if it isn’t even on the menu.
Without public schools, equity is definitely not on offer.
Public is Better Than Private
That’s really the point.
Charter, cyber and voucher schools are not set up around this ideal.
They are about who is sent away, not about letting everyone in.
The United States is a big country – the third most populous in the world. We have 332,630,000 people and growing. That’s about 50 million students in public schools.
No private system in the world has ever been able to work at that scale. If we lose our public schools, many kids will be left wanting.
It forces students to compete to get into schools and schools to compete for their very existence. Think of how that affects instruction. Schools have to spend a considerable amount of time and money attracting students to enroll. That’s time and money that doesn’t go to education. It goes to advertising.
Moreover, any school that attracts a surplus of students can choose which ones its wants to enroll. The choice becomes the school’s – not the parents’ or students’. In fact, administrators can turn away students for any reason – race, religion, behavior, special needs, how difficult it would be to teach him or her. This is much different from authentic public schools. There, any student who lives in the district may attend regardless of factors such as how easy or difficult he or she is to educate.
It’s a Darwinian model made to benefit the predators, not the prey. It’s a boon for any unselfconscious businessman who doesn’t mind getting rich stealing an education from children.
We Must Fight
That’s why we must fight to keep our public schools.
But you may luck out. Every privatized school isn’t a scam. Just most of them. So if you have found a charter, cyber or voucher school that is working for your child and doesn’t self-destruct in the time your child is enrolled, you may wonder why you should worry about the rest of us – the kids caught up in a web of privatized predation and neglect?
You have to live in this society. Do you really want to live in a country with a large population of undereducated citizens who cannot figure out how to vote in their own interests? Do you really want to live in a society where crime is a better career choice for those who were not properly educated?
That’s why we can’t let public education disappear.
I know it may sound like an insurmountable task, but saving our public schools can be done.
It will require collective action.
We will need to actively participate in our school board elections, go to school board meetings and possibly even run to serve on the board, ourselves.
Many people are upset with what local boards did during the pandemic, but the way to solve this isn’t to flee to schools without democratic principles. It is to seize those principles and make them work for you and your community.
And to do that, we need real political change at every level of government – local, municipal, state and federal.
None of this is easy. All of it takes work.
But it is the fight we must wage if we are ever to keep our democracy.
It is the fight we must win to create the better world our children deserve.
Public schools are worth saving, but it is up to you and me to do it.
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“We also need conservative eyes and ears in the schools. If anyone can substitute even one day a week, the teachers who are activists and indoctrinating children can be revealed. Not all teachers are for [Critical Race Theory] CRT, etc. We need to identify the ones who are pushing the professional development they received over the summer. Are they putting black children’s tests in separate piles and grading them differently? Have they separated the classrooms? We won’t know these things until parents are allowed back into schools, so the best way is to sub.”
They certainly have the time! Legislators from the Keystone State make the third highest salary in the country, and they’re only in session a few weeks every month! They could easily spend a few days a week struggling with overstuffed classes, in-school suspension, hall duty and the like.
Districts that aren’t experiencing a shortage may require a teaching certificate as well, but beggars can’t be choosers. In districts where it is hard to get subs (i.e. those serving poor and minority kids) you can get emergency certified for a year.
But when I made such a suggestion, I naively thought lawmakers might see the problems schools actually have and start to support them.
Fat chance of that!
People with an agenda like Gleim would simply take the most innocent of interactions and pretend they were examples of indoctrination.
In Florida they banned 41% of the math books for being “woke” without a single concrete example and then patted themselves on the back for being transparent. It would be the same here. It would be like the Puritan girls in “The Crucible” finding witches in every classroom and hallway.
This state representative really thinks teachers are putting black children’s tests in separate piles and grading them differently!? As if we’re somehow changing their grades or assessing them more leniently?
NEWS FLASH: Children of color are not suddenly acing all their tests or rocketing to the head of the class. In fact, just the opposite. There has been a racial proficiency gap for decades based on segregation, lack of resources and punitive and biased standardized tests.
But back to her social media tirade. She wonders if there are separated classrooms – by which I assume she means classrooms segregated by race.
BINGO! She got that one right! But it’s not what she seems to think.
A majority of children of color are not getting privileged treatment. They’re being underprivileged. They’re in the lower academic tracks and a majority of the white kids are in the honors courses.
But back to her social media bubble. She wants parents to be allowed “back” into public schools!? Parents have never been excluded. As long as they can pass the background check, they can come in almost any time.
The books are riddled with counter factual claims and political bias in every subject imaginable such as abortion, gay rights and the Endangered Species Act, which one text labels a “radical social agenda.” They disparage religions other than Protestant Christianity and cultures other than those descended from white Europeans.
But that won’t happen because they’re terrified it might lose them a vote. They’re too afraid of being called partisan. Yet there is no middle ground with justice. You either have it or you don’t.
It would require a stance on principle.
So far, it hasn’t happened, and I doubt it will.
So Republicans will continue to take aim at all the usual scapegoats like teachers.
That’s the kind of thing that happened a few years ago at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh. A MAGA gunman was convinced by Trump that Jews were helping immigrants come into the country illegally. So he decided to kill as many Saturday worshipers as he could.
If we don’t stand up to this, it’s only a matter of time before it happens again.
Look. I don’t want to be at the center of this ridiculous culture war.
I just want to teach. I just want to do right by my students and their families.
But as our country burns to the ground, the school house often seems to be the center of the blaze.
I am sick of it.
I am sick of it.
I am just so sick of it.
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If there’s one thing people love to argue about, it’s charter schools.
Go to any school board meeting, PTA forum or editorial page, and you’re bound to see folks from all different walks of life getting red in the face over these institutions.
But what are they anyway? And why do they generate so much passionate disagreement?
To answer these questions and many more, I’m going to examine five of the most pernicious myths about charter schools, debunk the fallacies and come to the simple truths.
1. Charter Schools are Public Schools
That’s what charter school supporters say, anyway. But it’s only partially true.
Charter schools were invented in 1991 and only exist in 43 states and the District of Columbia. They enroll about 6% of the students in the country – roughly three million children.
To be fair, some charter defenders will argue that since they are free from the same regulations as public schools, they can cut costs WITHIN their institutions and provide the same services for less. However, they never return that savings to the taxpayers. They simply cut services for their students and then pocket the savings. Lowering quality may be a way to cut costs, but it’s not exactly an innovation – and certainly not something to be envied.
This may be cost effective to the bureaucrats and profiteers running charter schools, but it is not a savings to you and me – to speak nothing of how it hurts the students hoping to receive a quality education.
So do charter schools save money?
QUICK ANSWER: NO!
3. Students do Better Academically in Charter Schools
This is what it says on all those charter school advertisements you see popping up everywhere. But is it true?
The problem with answering that is one of apples and oranges. How do you fairly compare charter and public school students when each group is so different?
Meanwhile, authentic public schools can’t do that. They take all comers.
As a result, charter schools can APPEAR to do better for their students but that appearance is due to privileged rules not better teaching or academic programs.
According to a 2010 Mathematica Policy Research study funded by the federal government, middle-school students who were selected by lottery to attend charter schools performed no better than their peers who lost out in the lottery and attended nearby public schools. This was the most rigorous and most expensive study of charter school performance commissioned by the US Department of Education, and it found no overall positive benefit for charter schools.
And there have been many others. A 2016 study found that Texas charter schools had no overall positive impact on test scores and, in fact, had a negative impact on students’ earnings later in life.
So, taken as a whole, do charter schools outperform authentic public schools?
QUICK ANSWER: NO!
4. Charter Schools are About Innovation
This was, in fact, one of the selling points of the charter school concept when it was first proposed. Being freed of the regulations that authentic public schools have to abide by would allow charter schools to be laboratories for innovation.
Moreover, those few charter schools that do engage in creative practices such as organizing the curriculum around a theme like creative arts or racial justice issues aren’t doing anything that isn’t already being done at authentic public schools – specifically magnet and lab schools.
The creativity and innovation you find at most charter schools is in the accounting department – finding new ways to reduce the services students would find at the neighborhood public school and redefining the savings as profit. That and circumventing conflict of interest regulations to allow the corporation that manages the charter school to buy properties from itself at a hefty mark up.
Is any of this innovation?
QUICK ANSWER: NO!
5. Charter Schools Improve Civil Rights
This is perhaps the most often cited benefit of charter schools. In fact, the impression has been that charters are the choice of people of color and serve them better than their neighborhood public school.
However, the facts show a somewhat different reality.
Are these schools doing a better job of meeting the needs of these children? A 2016 report from UCLA casts doubt on this idea.
Charter schools are notorious for suspending their black students at much higher rates than their white students. While suspensions for students of color are high at public schools as well, they are much more extreme at charter schools.
More than 500 charter schools suspended Black students 10 percent more often than white students. Moreover, the same figure holds for students with disabilities at 1,093 charter schools. In fact, 374 charter schools suspended 25% of their entire student bodies at least once.
However, this increased segregation isn’t just something that affects Black charter school students. It affects white charter school students, as well.
In the first case, the charter schools end up with a disproportionate percentage of Black students and the white students are left in the public schools. In the later case, the Black students are left in the authentic public schools and the white kids flee to the charter schools.
Both cases are not good for civil rights. They allow students of color to be targeted for disinvestment and reductive curriculum while further privileging the white students.
The idea that it is somehow in the best interest of children of color to be provided with schools containing fewer safety precautions is kind of insulting.
Far from improving civil rights, charter schools too often violate them.
“With the expansion of charter schools and their concentration in low-income communities, concerns have been raised within the African American community about the quality, accessibility and accountability of some charters, as well as their broader effects on the funding and management of school districts that serve most students of color.”
Black Lives Matter organizers also called for a charter school moratorium. Charters, they wrote, represent a shift of public funds and control to private entities. Along with “an end to the privatization of education,” the Movement for Black Lives organizers are demanding increased investments in traditional community schools and the health and social services they provide.
Moreover, the Journey for Justice Alliance – a coalition of grassroots community, youth, and parent-led organizations in over 30 cities – has gone even further calling for an end to all school privatization.
The organization posted on it’s Website:
“The evidence is clear and aligns with the lived experience of parents, students and community residents in America’s cities: school privatization has failed in improving the education outcomes for young people. There is no such thing as “school choice” in Black and Brown communities in this country. We want the choice of a world class neighborhood school within safe walking distance of our homes. We want an end to school closings, turnarounds, phase-outs, and charter expansion.”
So do charters improve civil rights?
QUICK ANSWER: NO!
There are a lot of myths spread about charter schools – many of them being propagated by the charter school industry, itself.
Most of these are not facts; they are marketing.
While there are some charter schools that do a decent job educating children, the charter school concept is deeply flawed.
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To answer that question, we have to understand how we got here in the first place – where these kinds of assessments came from in the US and how they became the guiding policy of our public schools.
From the very start, it had serious consequences for public policy. The results were used to rationalize the forced sterilization of 60,000 to 70,000 people from groups with low test scores, thus preventing them from “polluting” the gene pool.
However, Brigham’s greatest claim to fame was the creation of the Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT) to keep such undesirables out of higher education. These tests were not central to school curriculum and mainly used as gatekeepers with the SAT in particular still in wide use today.
The problem then – as now – is that standardized tests aren’t very good assessments. They work okay for really simple things like rudimentary math. However, the more complex a skill you’re assessing, the more inadequate the tests. For example, imagine just trying to have a conversation with someone where your only choices of reply were limited to four canned responses. That’s a multiple-choice assessment. The result is a testing system that selects against the poor and minorities. At best, it reproduces the economic and racial disparities of society. At worst, it ensures those disparities will continue into the next generation.
That isn’t to say the system went unchallenged. By the 1960s, the junk science and leaps of logic behind standardized testing were obvious and people began fighting back in court. Black plaintiffs began winning innumerable lawsuits against the testing industry.
Perhaps the most famous case is Hobson v. Hansen in 1967, which was filed on behalf of a group of Black students in Washington, DC. The court ruled that the policy of using tests to assign students to tracks was racially biased because the tests were standardized to a White, middleclass group.
So in the 1980s, the Reagan administration published “A Nation at Risk,” a campfire tale about how America’s public schools were failing. Thus, the authors argued we needed standardized testing to make American children competitive in a global marketplace.
For instance, it concluded that average student test scores had decreased but didn’t take into account that scores had actually increased in every demographic group. It compared two decades worth of test scores, but failed to mention that more students took the test at the end of that period than at the beginning, and many of the newer students were disadvantaged. In other words, it compared test scores between an unrepresentative group at the beginning of the comparison with a more representative group at the end and concluded that these oranges were nothing like the apples they started with. Well, duh.
Most people weren’t convinced by the disaster capitalism at work here, but the report marks a significant moment in the standardization movement. In fact, this is really where our modern era began.
It took an additional two decades, until 2001, for President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation to require standardized testing in ALL public schools.
With bipartisan support, Bush tied federal funding of schools to standardized test performance and annual academic progress. And from then on, the die was cast. This policy has been upheld through both Republican and Democratic regimes.
From the 1980s to 2022 we’ve had wide scale standardized testing in our schools. That’s roughly 40 years where the entirety of what is done in public school has been organized around these assessments. They drive the curriculum and are the ultimate benchmark by which success or failure is judged. If this policy was ever going to work, it would have done so by now.
However, it has achieved NONE of its stated goals.
NCLB specifically stated that all children would be proficient in reading and math by 2014. That has not happened. Despite spending billions of dollars on remediation and completely reorganizing our schools around the assessments, test scores have remained mostly static or even decreased.
NCLB also championed the idea that competing for test scores would result in better teachers. However, that didn’t happen either. Instead, educators were forced to narrow the curriculum to cover mostly what was assessed, reduce creativity and critical thinking, and teachers who served poor and minority students were even punished for doing so.
If the purpose of standardized testing was all the things the law purported, then it was a decades long failure. It is the policy equivalent of slamming your head into a wall repeatedly and wondering why you aren’t moving forward. (And where did this headache come from?)
If, however, the purpose of standardized testing was to fulfill Friedman’s privatization dreams, then it was a resounding success. Public schools still persist, but they have been drained, weakened and in many ways subverted.
Look at the evidence.
Standardized testing has grown from a $423 million industry before 2001 to a multi-billion dollar one today. If we add in test prep, new text books, software, and consultancy, that figure easily tops the trillion dollar mark.
Huge corporations make the tests, grade the tests and then sell remediation materials when students fail. It’s a huge scam.
But that’s not the only business created by this policy. Test and punish opened entirely new markets that hadn’t existed before. The emphasis on test scores and the “failing schools” narrative stoked unwarranted distrust in the public school system and a demand for more privatized alternatives.
Chief among these was charter schools.
The first charter school law was passed in 1991 in Minnesota. It allowed for the creation of new schools that would have special agreements (or charters) with states or districts to run without having to abide by all the usual regulations. Thus, the school could go without an elected board, pocket public money as private profit, etc. The bill was quickly copied and spread to legislatures across the country by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).
However, charter schools are rife with fraud and malfeasance. For instance, more than a quarter of charter schools close within 5 years of opening. By year 15, roughly 50% of charter schools close. That’s not a stable model of public education. It’s a get rich quick scheme. And since these types of schools are free from the kinds of regulations, democratic governance and/or transparency that keeps authentic public schools in check, another charter school scandal pops up almost every day.
But let’s not forget school vouchers. Before high stakes testing, the idea of using public money to pay for private or parochial schools was widely considered unconstitutional. Now about 4% of US students go to private and parochial schools some of which are funded with school vouchers. This is an option in 32 states and the District of Columbia, and more than 600,000 students participated in a voucher, scholarship tax credit or education savings account program last school year, according to EdChoice, a pro-voucher and school choice group.
In short, they’re subsidies for wealthier kids at the expense of the middle class and disadvantaged.
Without standardized testing, it is impossible to imagine such an increase in privatization.
High stakes testing is a Trojan horse. It is a way to secretly undermine and weaken public schools so that testing corporations, charter schools and voucher schools can thrive.
Judged by its own metrics of success, standardized testing is an abject failure. Judged by the metric of business and school privatization it is a rousing success.
And that’s why it has been so hard to discontinue.
This is corporate welfare at its finest, and the people getting rich off our tax dollars won’t allow us to turn off the flow of funding without a fight.
On the right, policymakers are often boldly honest about their goals to bolster privatization over public schools. On the left, policymakers still cling to the failed measures of success testing has not been able to meet time-and-again.
However, both groups support the same system. They only give different reasons.
It is past time to wake up and smell the flowers.
If we want to ensure education dollars go to education and not profiteers, we need to end standardized testing.
If we want to help students learn to the best of their abilities, we need to stop gaslighting them with faulty measures of success or failure.
If we want to allow teachers to do the best for their students, we need to stop holding them back with antiquated eugenicist shackles.
And if we truly want to save our public school system, we have to stop propping up privatization.
In short, we need to end standardized testing.
The sooner, the better.
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“The General Assembly shall provide for the maintenance and support of a thorough and efficient system of public education to serve the needs of the Commonwealth.”
“Thorough and efficient.”
Not lavish. Not extravagant. Just complete and productive.
One has brand new facilities, marble columns, and wood paneling scrubbed to a shine with a bustling staff moving to-and-fro.
The other has badly maintained structures, exposed insulation, dusty corners, leaky ceilings and animal droppings while a skeleton crew of adults try their all to do the impossible without the tools to get it done.
The Pennsylvania legislature has been paying less and less of public schools’ budgets over the last four decades. The state used to contribute 54% of all public school costs in the early 1970s. Today it pays just 38% of the cost. Only five states cover a smaller share with the national average at 47%. This leaves local taxpayers to take up the slack. Since districts are not equally wealthy, that increases the disparity of resources between rich and poor districts.
During the trial, the state had tried to argue that money doesn’t matter. Yet poor schools can spend $4,800 less per student than wealthy districts. What’s worse, impoverished students have greater needs than rich ones. They often don’t have books in the home or access to Pre-kindergarten. Poor students often suffer from food insecurity, malnutrition, a lack of neonatal care, worse attendance, are less well rested and have greater special needs and suffer greater traumas than wealthier students. Yet we provide them with fewer resources!?
“What use would a carpenter have for biology? […] What use would someone on the McDonald’s career track have for Algebra 1? […] The question in my mind is, thorough and efficient to what end? To serve the needs of the Commonwealth. Lest we forget, the Commonwealth has many needs. There’s a need for retail workers, for people who know how to flip a pizza crust.”
So the Commonwealth actually argued that inequitable funding is okay because all kids don’t need a thorough education. Some just need the bare minimum to do whatever menial jobs they’re destined to have while the elite kids need more for the high skilled jobs they’re going to get.
I wonder which kids Krill and his defendants in the legislature think deserve less funding. I’ll bet it’s the black and brown kids already suffering most from this disparity.
Luckily, the school districts asking the courts to intervene feel differently.
Six school districts – William Penn, Lancaster, Panther Valley, Greater Johnstown, Shenandoah Valley, and Wilkes Barre Area – filed the suit along with the Pennsylvania Association of Rural and Small Schools, the NAACP PA State Conference, and families whose children attend under-resourced schools.
Essentially, they are asking for two things.
First, for the court to declare the current funding system unconstitutional.
Second, for the court to order the legislature to create and maintain a fair funding system.
You might say, wait. Didn’t the legislature adopt a new Basic Education Funding formula in 2016 that already provides a fairer way to allocate money based on need?
He suggests a $1.75 billion down payment to schools on the $4.6 billion gap.
The state has the money to do this. It just needs to cut wasteful spending elsewhere and close tax loopholes.
For example, the state throws away $240 million a year to The Race Horse Development Fund. These are taxpayer funded subsidies to wealthy horse racing enthusiasts and hobbyists. Since 2004, the legislature has lavished $3 billion on the horse racing industry. Shouldn’t we prioritize school children over cash prizes and inflated pensions for wealthy horse owners, breeders, and trainers? Aren’t kids more important than paying to drug test horses and for racetrack marketing?
If the state was doing its job and looking after kids instead of giving handouts to wealthy oligarchs, you and I wouldn’t feel as much pain in our wallets.
Both parties in the case will file a series of post-trial briefs saying what they believe they proved during the testimony, the “conclusions of law” they are asking the judge to reach, and their analysis of the legal questions presented—such as the meaning of the state Constitution’s “thorough and efficient” education clause.
The final post-trial brief is due on July 6. Then — after oral argument on legal issues at a later date — the court will make its final decision weeks or months later.
In the meantime, the budget is supposed to have been approved by the legislature (one way or another) and signed by the Governor by June 30. If not, funding for some state programs may be delayed. But you never know. The legislature has been late on this before.
So what am I learning from all of this?
The value of hope?
The evil of lawmakers who want to continue shortchanging our children?
The bravery of public school districts that challenge the state to follow its own darn rules?
All of the above.
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I just can’t believe that in light of such a flame dancing ever more quickly down an ever-shorter fuse that people aren’t interested in reading about how to stomp it out.
Mass media is not particularly kind to educators like me.
Even when journalists are writing about schools and learning, they rarely ask classroom teachers their opinions. Instead, the media often turns to self-appointed experts, think tank flunkies, billionaire philanthropists or politicians.
It’s like they can’t even conceive of the fact that someone with a masters degree or higher in education who devotes her whole life to the practice of the discipline has anything worthwhile to say.
So many of us have taken to the blogosphere to circumvent the regular media channels.
And so people like Joe Rogan make millions on their podcasts spreading science denial, vaccine disinformation and racist dog whistles.
A guy like me just trying to make the world a better place?
I get silenced.
I guess when money is speech, poverty is the real cancel culture.
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Players from Steel Valley School District contend that during a November playoff game at their home field, rivals South Side Area School District called them the N-word and “monkeys” as well as purposefully incapacitated their star player.
WPIAL Executive Director Amy Scheuneman said her organization is refusing to take sides and students, coaches and administrators for both districts will have to undergo racial sensitivity training.
It is absurd. Imagine making a gunman and the person he shot go through firearms training.
Talk about false equivalency!
“We don’t want to walk away saying you’re right and you’re wrong, but we need to learn from this,” Scheuneman said. “We need to all work together to make that happen.”
Calls for unity are great but justice needs to come first. It’s nearly impossible for everyone to just get along when you don’t hold wrongdoers accountable for their actions – especially when the victims are mostly black and the perpetrators are mostly white.
Though Steel Valley went on to win the game, their star senior running back and linebacker Nijhay Burt suffered a season ending ankle injury which his family alleges was caused by South Side Players on purpose.
Burt’s mother Shunta Parms says, “…The two players that tackled him, they were pushing off his ankle. They were twisting it as they got up. After they got up they cheered in his face and said ‘Yeah! We got you now!’”
WPIAL board of directors and Diversity and Inclusion Council heard testimony for more than four hours on Wednesday.
The meeting was closed to the public at the request of the South Side District from Beaver County, and WPIAL officials have refused to give specific details of what was said behind closed doors.
However, Scheuneman was adamant that the board did not find any evidence the official used racial taunts.
“…The board did not find that to be accurate,” Scheuneman said.
I would love to know what evidence there was to so unequivocally clear the referee.
Especially since she noted the other allegations came down to a matter of he said-she said.
There were “conflicting reports” about what happened and “direct testimony against” the claims of Burt and the Steel Valley School District, Scheuneman said.
“Based on what we heard, I would say that, while there may be tendencies to lean one way or another, it was inconclusive, specifically, one way, as opposed to another.”
Ma’am, isn’t it your job to lean one way or another?
You need to be impartial at first but then you listen to the evidence and decide who was at fault.
Either South Side Beaver players used hate speech against Steel Valley players or not. Either they intentionally injured Steel Valley’s star player or not.
And if they did not, that means Steel Valley players made the whole thing up.
Do you really find that possibility credible?
“There was testimony on both sides, and there were missed opportunities by adults from both schools, so we do feel that it’s important for everybody to learn from the events that happened and take something positive from it,” Scheuneman said.
And Steel Valley’s coach did not report his player’s accusations to the head referee.
Therefore, they’re both to blame!?
What the heck are you smoking!?
Steel Valley Superintendent Ed Wehrer issued a statement that shed some light on the previous incident at South Side Beaver:
“The testimony by South Side Area confirmed that a month prior to the playoff game at issue a member of their team had behaved the same way in a game against Carlynton High School, as witnessed by the Athletic Director at Carlynton. Combined with our statements, that admission established a pattern of racist behavior by our opponent, which should have reinforced the trustworthiness of our complaint.”
The only specific mention of wrongdoing on Steel Valley’s part is neglecting to alert the head referee. But the district’s actions make perfect sense in context. Why would the district go to the referees after allegations that one of them was also guilty of making racial taunts!? Isn’t it logical that Steel Valley and Burt waited to file a report against the Beaver County District!?
South Side Beaver district is 96% white. There are so few black students, 2019 Census data puts the number at 0%.
Meanwhile, Steel Valley is 72% white and 23% black with a higher percentage of children of color on the football team than in the district as a whole.
Are you telling me it’s likely that a mostly black team who is already crushing their rivals (they won 20-12) would make up being the target of racism? Are you saying Burt would make up how his leg was manhandled by the opposing team?
And then we have the issue of socioeconomics.
South Side Beaver is a wealthier district than Steel Valley.
Median household income at the South Side district is $69,905. At Steel Valley it’s $42,661.
At the South Side, 7.7% of residents live below the poverty line. At Steel Valley it’s 17.4%.
These make a difference.
More privileged students are way more likely to think they deserve to win just because of who they are. Underprivileged kids have to work for everything they have.
And officials are way more likely to ignore poorer black kids in favor of richer white ones.
Scheuneman said, “Regardless if one side was more wrong than the other, it takes both parties to mend that bridge and get through anything. So we want those schools to work together in moving forward in cultural competency.”
This is a bad idea.
It won’t do anything to stem the increasing tide of racism from whiter, wealthier districts directed at poorer blacker ones.
These sorts of trainings are not in themselves enough to stop hate speech.
It’s true that having South Side Beaver and Steel Valley go through racial sensitivity training won’t hurt anyone.
Steel Valley students won’t suffer being forced to undergo this measure.
But the fact that they HAVE TO do this will underscore the injustice of the systems they have to live under.
They were the victims, and they got the same punishment as the oppressor.
And at South Side Beaver we can HOPE the training will do some good.
But let’s be honest – this sort of thing is only effective when those attending the training are receptive to its message.
The fact that South Side got away with this will poison everything being taught.
WPIAL is supposed to be about fair play.
They got it really wrong here.
If anyone needs this training, it’s them.
Steel Valley’s Statement:
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For one, all this focus on equity has made it harder to support standardized testing.
That’s a big problem for these folks.
They think that if being against discrimination means also turning against something as obviously innocuous as fill-in-the-bubble tests, maybe it’s today’s brand of anti-racism that has to go.
However, most of us probably don’t see this as a difficult choice.
And today the scores still routinely fail Black and Brown people while passing whites thus barring many people of color from graduation or college entrance.
However, describing such a state of affairs as “racist” has been criticized by a self-described anti-woke backlash.
People as diverse as Fox News correspondents, old school neoliberals and contrarian progressive academicians have taken arms together to fight against what they see as an overstatement of the degree of racism present in modern America and an attack on free speech.
“…an old-school Black progressive who doesn’t hide his disdain for white liberals and what he considers their Black enablers in academia and the culture. He argues that the anti-racism movement of the “elected” is more performative than intellectually serious and that the white allies who provide the shock troops at universities and street rallies are just as gross as white supremacists because their virtue signaling hides their condescension.”
Ultimately Norman concludes, “I agreed with so much of what the writer had to say about specific hypocrisies of white saviors while disagreeing with much of its premise.”
As a white person, I make no judgment on McWhorter’s overall thesis because I don’t feel qualified to do so.
However, as a classroom educator with more than two decades experience teaching mostly poor and minority students, I feel qualified to address the issue of testing.
After all, I have proctored hundreds of these assessments, seen their impact, studied the history and spoken with hundreds of people of color who oppose the tests and a few like McWhorter who defend them.
The linguist’s main argument can be summed up as follows.
Excusing people of color from the tests because they generally score lower is mere pity. People of color don’t need your pity. Give them the tools necessary to pass the tests like everyone else.
“Is it the moral thing to exempt black and Latino kids from the serious competition we consider a normal part of life for all other children, instead of making an effort to prepare them for it?”
First of all, testing should not be about competition. It should be about assessment – telling who knows what, not judging who is worthy of what social and economic position later in life.
Second, it’s not just Black and Brown children who are hurt by the testing. It is ALL children.
The very term “standardized test” means an assessment based around a standard. It privileges the kinds of questions white students are more likely to get correct. After all, that’s how test questions are chosen – not based on the quality of the question but on whether the majority (i.e. white people) get the questions right and the minority (i.e. people of color and others) consistently get it wrong.
It’s not just about knowing math. It’s about knowing the cultural terms, shared experiences and assumptions the math question is embedded in.
McWhorter sees nothing wrong in this. He thinks people of color simply need the tools necessary to pass the tests even if that means being taught to respond as a white person would and to make the same linguistic assumptions and have the same cultural knowledge as privileged white people.
I think it’s kind of sad that in McWhorter’s view Black people would have to engage in such a radical and complete double consciousness or more likely give up their own uniqueness and assimilate as much as possible just to be considered the equal of a white person.
However, another thing he doesn’t seem to understand is that even if he got his wish and the playing field were level giving all children the same chances on the tests, it wouldn’t change a thing.
These exams are made up of multiple choice questions. This is not the best way to determine whether learning has taken place on complex topics. How a linguist could ever suppose even the most rudimentary subtleties of meaning could be captured by a simple A, B, C and D is beyond me.
Wittgenstein, Jakobson, Chomsky… all just so you could choose between a narrow set of prewritten answers!?
“And yet it is considered beyond the pale to discuss getting the kids up to speed: Instead we are to change the standards—the current idea is to bring GPA, performance on a state test, and even attendance into the equation as well. What an honor to black kids to have attendance treated as a measure of excellence. What’s next, rhythm?”
However, it’s not a matter of adding ridiculous or insulting data to the mix to make Black kids look better. It’s about adding enough data to give a clear enough picture of a student’s learning.
At best a standardized test is a snapshot of a student’s learning. It shows what a student answers on a single day or even two or three. By contrast, grade point average (GPA) is made up of student assessments (informal, formal, formative and summative) over the course of 360 some days.
Whether you take other things into account like attendance, poverty level, per pupil spending at the school, etc. – that would just give more information.
In fact, if I were using a metric to accurately assess student learning, I would not include standardized testing at all. I would look at many of these other measures like GPA instead.
These tests are not just immoral because they’re racist, but they’re bad at the act of fairly assessing.
And part of the reason for that is their embedded prejudice.
An assessment that unfairly singles out certain groups not because of their lack of knowledge of the subject being tested but their different enculturation and lack of similar opportunities as the dominant culture can never be a good assessment.
But even if they didn’t do that, they would be like using a pencil to eat soup.
The systems of our society matter. Using the right tool matters.
Whether we call an appreciation of these facts being “woke,” “antiracist” or anything else does not.
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The most popular topic people wanted to read about on my blog this year has been how teachers are dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic.
In short, it’s a mess.
We’re struggling big time.
In the media, they call it a teacher shortage, but it’s really an Exodus away from the profession for educators who are fed up with being treated like crap.
But that’s not the only thing I wrote about in 2021.
At this point in my career with everything crumbling around me, I have no more F’s to give.
I’m laying it all out straight. And this is from a blogger who has often been criticized for not holding anything back BEFORE!
Now I am pointing out all the elephants in the room.
Some of these articles are not for the faint of heart.
If you’re tired of being polite and ignoring all the flaming dumpster fires that well behaved teachers aren’t supposed to mention, then you might enjoy some of these stories.
Description: The title says it all. Stop wasting teachers’ time by making us fill out paperwork that won’t help us do our jobs but will make administrators and principals look good. We make our own plans for ourselves. We don’t need to share with you a bunch of BS with Common Core nonsense and step-by-step blah-blah that will probably have to change in the heat of the moment anyway.
Fun Fact: Teachers in my building rarely say anything to me about my blog. But I got some serious appreciation on my home turf for this one.
Description: We talk about missing teachers, subs, aides, bus drivers, but not parents or guardians. We should. They are absolutely essential to student learning. I think there are a lot of good reasons why parents don’t participate in their children’s schooling, but they will never get the help they need if we continue to ignore this issue and throw everything on teachers and the school.
Fun Fact: So many liberals lost their minds on this article saying I was attacking parents. I’m not. If people were drowning, you would not be attacking them by pointing that out and demanding help fishing them out of the water. It is not “deficit thinking” to acknowledge that someone needs help. It’s authentic advocacy for both students and parents.
Description: It wasn’t just liberals who were butt hurt by my writing – it was neoliberals, too. Comedian Bill Maher actually mentioned my article “Standardized Testing is a Tool of White Supremacy” on his HBO show. He joked that I was devaluing the term ‘white supremacy.” Sure. These assessments only help white people unfairly maintain their collective boot on the throats of black and brown people. That’s not white supremacy. It’s melanin deficient hegemony. Happy now!?
Fun Fact: Maher’s assertion (I can’t claim it’s an argument because he never actually argued for anything) seems to be popular with neoliberals trying to counter the negative press standardized testing has been receiving lately. We need to arm against this latest corporate talking point and this article and the original give plenty of ammunition. My article was republished on Alternet and CommonDreams.org.
Description: Most of the world does not have competitive after school sports. Kids participate in sports through clubs – not through the schools. I suggested we might do that in the US, too. This would allow schools to use more of their budgets on learning. It would stop crucial school board decisions from being made for the athletics department at the expense of academics. It would remove litigation for serious injuries. Simple. Right?
Fun Fact: So many folks heads simply exploded at this. They thought I was saying we should do away with youth sports. No. Youth sports would still exist, just not competitive sports through the school. They thought poor kids wouldn’t be able to participate. No, sports clubs could be subsidized by the government just as they are in other countries. Some folks said there are kids who wouldn’t go to school without sports. No, that’s hyperbole. True, some kids love sports but they also love socialization, routine, feeling safe, interaction with caring adults and even learning! But I know this is a radical idea in this country, and I have no illusions that anyone is going to take me up on it.
Description: Republicans have a new racist dog whistle. They pretend white people are being taught to hate themselves by reference to a fake history of the US called Critical Race Theory. In reality, schools are teaching the tiniest fraction of the actual history of racism and Republicans need that to stop or else they won’t have any new members in a few generations. I wrote three articles about it this year from different points of view than I thought were being offered elsewhere.
Fun Fact: I’m proud of this work. It looks at the topic from the viewpoint of academic freedom, the indoctrination actually happening (often at taxpayer expense) at private and parochial schools, and the worthy goal of education at authentic public schools. Article B was republished on CommonDreams.org.
Description: I ran for office this year in western Pennsylvania. I tried for Allegheny County Council – a mid-sized position covering the City of Pittsburgh and the rest of the second largest county in the state. Ultimately, I lost, but these three articles document the effort.
Fun Fact: These articles explain why a teacher like me ran for office, how I could have helped public schools, and why it didn’t work out. Article C was republished on CommonDreams.org.
Description: These are terrifying times. In the future people may look back and wonder what happened. These two articles document how I got vaccinated against Covid-19 and my thoughts and feelings about the process, the pandemic, and life in general.
Fun Fact: It hasn’t even been a full year since I wrote these pieces but they somehow feel like they were written a million years ago. So much has changed – and so little.
Description: Pennsylvania Republican state legislators were whining that they didn’t know what teachers were doing in public school. So they proposed a BS law demanding teachers spend even more of their never-ending time giving updates. I suggested legislators could just volunteer as subs and see for themselves.
Fun Fact: So far no Republicans have taken me up on the offer and their cute bit of performative lawmaking still hasn’t made it through Harrisburg.
Description: When it comes to stopping a global pandemic, we need federal action. This can’t be left up to the states, or the counties, or the townships or every small town. But all we get from the federal government about Covid mitigation in schools are guidelines. Stand up and do your F-ing jobs! Make some rules already, you freaking cowards!
Fun Fact: As I write this, President Joe Biden just came out and said there is no federal solution to the pandemic. It’s not that I think the other guy would have done better, but this was a softball, Joe. History will remember. If there is a history after all this is over.
Description: On January 6, a bunch of far right traitors stormed the Capitol. This articles documents what it was like to experience that as a public school teacher with on-line classes during the pandemic.
Fun Fact: Once again, history may want to know. Posterity may have questions. At least, I hope so. The article was republished on CommonDreams.org.
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 (like this one). Here are all my end of the year articles since I began my blog in 2014:
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