College Remediation is Less About Bad Students Than Academic Elitism

October 5, 2018October 5, 2018 stevenmsinger Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Bill Gates, Budget, capitalism, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, college, Common Core, Corporate Education "Reform", Education, Learning, Politics, Prejudice, School Choice, School Funding, school segregation, school vouchers, Schools, small class size, Special Education, Standardized Testing, standards, Students, Teachers, Uncategorized Budget, college, college admissions, developmental psychology, education, educators, Elitism, Higher Learning, Post-Secondary, Profit, Psychology, Remediation, school funding, schools, standardized testing, teachers, Test Prep

Ah, college.

The school on a hill.

The marble columns, wood paneled studies and ivy encrusted gardens.

It’s never really been a place for everybody. But in rhapsodizing the college experience, our lawmakers have pushed for universities to enroll an increasing number of students. The demand for free or reduced tuition – especially for low-income students – has meant more kids putting on a letterman jersey and giving it the ol’ college try.

Teenagers who wouldn’t dream of higher education in previous decades are going for it today.

And the result has been a greater proportion of incoming college freshman taking remedial courses before they can even begin the normal post-secondary track.

According to a 2017 report by the Hechinger Report, more than half a million students at two- and four-year colleges in 44 states had to take such courses.

This costs up to an estimated $7 billion a year.

So, as usual in our country, we’re looking for someone to blame. And look! Here’s our favorite scapegoat – the public school system!

The gripe goes like this: Incoming college freshman wouldn’t need remediation if the public schools had bothered to teach them correctly!

However, the argument ignores several important factors and jumps to a completely unearned conclusion.

1) Public schools don’t decide who is accepted at colleges. College admissions departments do.

If people in higher learning think all these teenagers don’t belong in college, don’t accept them. Period.

But that would mean fewer students, less tuition and forgoing the lucrative revenue stream provided by – surprise! – these same remediation courses!

We pretend that colleges are special places where honor and scholarship rule the day. It isn’t necessarily so.

They are run by people, and like anywhere else, those people can be ethical and egalitarian or petty and materialistic.

Colleges aren’t immune to small mindedness or the economic realities facing institutions of learning everywhere.

Like most schools, they’re starved for funding.

The state and federal government have slashed subsidies to colleges and universities just as they have to public schools. Colleges have to make up the shortfall somewhere.

So they enroll students who don’t meet their own academic standards and then charge them for the privilege of attempting to get up to snuff.

It’s a good deal. You get to blame kids coming in AND reap the rewards.

2) How exactly do we determine that these kids need remediation?

In many schools, they use standardized tests like the SAT or ACT to make this determination. Others give their own pretest to all incoming freshman and assign remediation based on the results.

You’d expect more from institutions of higher learning.

You’d expect them to know how inadequate standardized tests are at assessing student knowledge. After all, most of the mountain of studies that conclude these tests are worthless are conducted at the college level. However, it seems people in admissions don’t always read the scholarly work of their colleagues in the departments of education and psychology.

I remember when I was in college, several classmates were being pressured to take remedial courses but refused. It didn’t stop them from graduating with honors.

3) Let’s say some of this remediation actually is necessary. Why would that be so?

These are high school graduates. What has changed in public schools over the past few decades to increase the need for these additional services at colleges?

It seems to me the answer is three-fold:

1) School budgets have been cut to the bare bone

2) Schools have to fight for limited funding with charter and voucher institutions

3) Standardized testing and Common Core have been dominating the curriculum.

If you cut funding to schools, they won’t be able to prepare students as well.

That’s a pretty simple axiom. I know business-minded number crunchers will extol the virtue of “doing more with less” and other such self-help platitudes, but much of it is nonsense.

You never hear them explain how cutting CEO salaries will mean corporations will run more effectively. It’s only workers and schools that they think deserve tough love and penury.

Look, schools with less funding mean fewer teachers. That means larger class sizes. That means it’s more difficult to learn – especially for students who don’t already come from privileged backgrounds.

None of this is bettered by the addition of charter and voucher schools sucking up the limited money available. We don’t have enough for one school system – yet we’re asking two or more parallel systems to exist on that same amount. And we’re stacking the deck in favor of privatized systems by prioritizing their funding and not holding them to the same accountability and transparency standards as traditional public schools.

It’s like deliberately placing leeches on a runners back and wondering why she’s started going so slowly.

Moreover, it’s ironic that the Common Core revolution was conducted to make students “college and career ready.” It has done just the opposite.

Narrowing the curriculum to weeks and months of test prep has consequences. You can increase students ability to jump through the hoops of your one federally mandated state test. But that doesn’t translate to other assessments. It doesn’t mean they’ll do better on the SAT or other college entrance exams. Nor does it mean they’ll possess the authentic learning we pretend we’re after in the first place.

The bottom line: if we really want to improve student academic outcomes in public schools, we need to fully and equitably fund them. We need to abandon school privatization schemes and fully support public schools. And we need to stop the obsession with standardized assessments, curriculum and – yes – even canned standards, themselves.

That might actually reduce the numbers of students who allegedly need remediation at the college level.

However, there is another aspect that we need to consider that is harder to remedy…

4) Developmental psychology.

Schools – whether they be post-secondary, secondary or primary – are built to meet the needs of human beings. And human beings don’t grow according to a preconceived schedule.

Just because you think someone should be able to do X at a certain age, doesn’t mean they’re developmentally ready to do so.

Speaking from experience, I was a C student in math through high school. It wasn’t until I got to college that I started to excel in that subject and earned top marks.

I didn’t have to take any remedial courses, but I was forced to take a quantitative reasoning course as part of my liberal arts majors.

I’m not alone in this. Many people aren’t cognitively ready for certain concepts and skills until later. That doesn’t make them deficient in any way nor does it betray any problems in their schooling.

That’s just how their brains work. We can whine about it or we can accept human nature and do what we can to help students cope.

And this brings me to my final reason behind the college remediation trend – a problem that is more insidious than all the others combined.

5) The elitism behind the whole post-secondary system.

For centuries, higher learning has been seen as a privilege of the wealthy and the upper class. Sure a few exceptional plebians were let into our hallowed halls just to “prove” how egalitarian we were.

But college was never seen as something fit for everyone.

As such, the attitude has always been that students are on their own. Many who enroll will not end up graduating. And that’s seen as perfectly acceptable. It’s part of the design.

It’s the baby sea turtle school of education – thousands of hatchlings but few survive to adulthood.

However, if you really want to make college the right fit for an increasing number of students, you have to get rid of the elitist attitude.

If students come to college and need remediation, stop whining and provide it.

And it shouldn’t incur an extra cost from students, either. This should just be a normal part of the process.

If a patient comes to the emergency room with heart disease, you don’t penalize him because he didn’t eat heart healthy. You do what you can to help him heal. Period.

That’s how colleges and universities need to approach their students.

You know – the way public schools already do.

SOLUTIONS

In summary, it’s not a case of colleges vs. public schools. And anyone who tells you differently probably has a hidden agenda – the standardization and privatization industry, for instance.

We need to support colleges and universities. We need to support public schools. Both need additional funding and political will.

However, colleges need to become more accepting and supportive of the students enrolled there. They need to meet them where they are and provide whatever they need to succeed.

Moreover, public schools need the autonomy and respect routinely given to college professors.

The answer is a transformation of BOTH institutions.

That’s how you make a better school system for everyone.

That or we could just keep grumbling at each other, forever pointing fingers instead of working together to find solutions.

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

Democrats for Education Reform Think Being Progressive Means Mirroring Betsy DeVos

August 9, 2018 stevenmsinger Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Campaign Donations, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Corporate Education "Reform", Democrat, Democrats for Education Reform, Donald Trump, edtech, Education, Green Party, Politics, Poverty, privatization, Propaganda, Republican, School Choice, School Funding, school segregation, School to Prison Pipeline, school vouchers, Schools, segregation, Social Justice, Standardized Testing, Students, Teachers, voting Betsy DeVos, charter schools, Corporate Education Reform, corporate school reform, Dark Money, Democrats, Democrats for Education Reform, education, Privatize, schools, the 1%

Democrats for Education Reform (DFER) put out a new video about what they think it means to be an education progressive.

And by the political action committee’s definition, Betsy DeVos may be the most “progressive” education secretary ever.

She champions “public charter schools.” Just like them!

She is in favor of evaluating teachers on student test scores. Just like them!

She is a booster for “holding schools accountable” through the use of standardized tests. Just like them!

And she loves putting public tax dollars into private hands to run schools “more efficiently” by disbanding school boards, closing public debate and choosing exactly which students get to attend privatized schools. Just like… you get the idea.

But perhaps the most striking similarity between DeVos and DFER is their methodologies.

DFER announced it again was going to flood Democratic races with tons of campaign cash to bolster candidates who agreed with them. That’s exactly how DeVos gets things done, too!

She gives politicians bribes to do her bidding! The only difference is she pays her money mostly to Republicans while DFER pays off Democrats. But if both DeVos and DFER are paying to get would-be lawmakers to enact the same policies, what is the difference!?

Seriously, what is the difference between Betsy DeVos and Democrats for Education Reform?

Progressives in Colorado and California say it is only the word “Democrat.”

Democratic party conferences in both states passed resolutions asking DFER to stop using the name “Democrat” because the privatization lobbying firm does not represent party ideals or goals.

It is degrading what the party stands for and hurting the brand.

Why do some progressives vote third party? Because of groups like DFER.

Voters think something like – if this charter school advocacy group represents what Democrats are all about, I can’t vote Democrat. I need a new party. Hence the surge of Green and other third party votes that is blamed for hurting Democratic candidates.

The Democrats have always been a big tent party, but the canvas can’t shelter the most regressive far right bigotry without destroying the organization’s identity as an opposition party.

It is entirely incoherent to oppose Republicans by pushing for almost the same agenda.

The reason for the confusion is that DFER is not a grassroots organization. It is funded by Wall Street hedge fund managers.

It is not an authentic expression of the public’s wants and desires. It is another avenue for the mega-rich to use their power and influence to tell the rest of us what they want us to believe.

Yet DFER tries to hide this fact with various forms of propaganda. In effect, they’re trying to convince us that their ideas are what we actually believe.

For instance, the group is now offering a nationwide poll from Benson Strategy Group as proof that Democratic voters agree with DFER’s goals.

However, the questions asked to about 2,000 people on the phone are laughably biased:

“Do you believe we have a responsibility to do everything we can to give every child a great education, and does that mean we need faster change in our schools to prepare students for the future?”

Of course people are going to agree with that! It doesn’t mean people want to privatize public schools. We SHOULD do everything – including closing failing charter schools and boosting funding at struggling public schools!

“Do you agree that we can’t go back to the way things used to be in schools? Do you think we need to keep bringing in new ideas and finding new ways to improve schools?”

Of course we need new ideas, but charter schools and standardized tests aren’t new ideas! We’ve been doing that nonsense for decades and they haven’t helped a bit. In fact, they’ve made things worse!

“Do you think funding alone is enough to give our children the education they deserve? Do you also want to see new ideas and real changes to the way public schools operate?”

Of course schools need more than just additional funding. But let’s not minimize funding equity. Students of color will never get an equitable education until we pay for the resources they need to succeed. The poor will never catch up to the rich without money to provide the services they need to learn.

Moreover, blanket statements disparaging public schools before asking about school privatization invites bias against public schools and bias in favor of privatization.

When you couch privatization as “more options” and “choice,” who doesn’t want that? But it’s not what you’re offering.

Giving administrators the ability to accept or deny my child into their school is not “more options” for me. It is greater choice for them.

Slashing funding at the public school because its finances got gobbled up by the neighborhood charter is not “choice” for me. It is providing alternative revenue for the corporations that run the charter school while my only option is to accept fewer resources for my child.

None of this is progressive. None of this is truly supported by grassroots people or organizations.

Civil rights groups like Journey for Justice and even the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) oppose school privatization and high stakes testing.

This is the meat and potatoes of DFER.

The only difference between these alleged Democrats and DeVos is that the Trump administration also champions school vouchers.

But both charters and vouchers involve sending public tax dollars to schools that are privately run. Both involve stripping taxpayers of control over how that money is spent until all we have are parents moving their children from school-to-school in a desperate attempt to find one that does a good job and will also accept their child.

That is not the progressive ideal.

Progressives want to make every public school excellent. They want all children to have the resources they need to succeed. They want to assess students, teachers and the system fairly to clearly understand what children are learning, what educators are doing to help them learn and how administrators and school directors are enabling that success. They want innovation – not the same old corporate-minded top-down policy failures of the past decades. They want technology as a tool to bridge understanding and not as an end in itself to drive the curriculum. They want an end to the school-to-prison pipeline. They want truly integrated schools, not the current segregated system where Cadillac funding goes to rich white districts and the scraps are thrown to the poor brown ones.

Yet DFER, these so-called Democrats, support none of this.

And they’re spending millions of dollars to convince our lawmakers not to support it either.

Politicians can’t keep accepting their dirty money and expecting grassroots voters to continue to support them.

To paraphrase Matthew, no one can serve two masters. If lawmakers are taking sacks of cash from billionaire hedge fund mangers, they aren’t going to listen to you or me.

They can serve their constituents or mammon. Not both.

So if Democrats want strong support in the coming elections, they need to do the progressive thing.

Stop accepting bribes from dark money influence peddlers like DFER.

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Top 10 Reasons You Can’t Fairly Evaluate Teachers on Student Test Scores

August 6, 2018 stevenmsinger Accountability, Arne Duncan, Betsy DeVos, Bill Gates, Budget, Civil Rights, Common Core, Corporate Education "Reform", Education, Junk science, Learning, Obama, Politics, Poverty, Prejudice, privatization, Propaganda, School Funding, school segregation, Schools, Standardized Testing, Students, Teachers, Value Added Measures, VAM Audrey Amrein-Beardsley, education, EVAAS, junk science, PVAAS, schools, Teacher Evaluation, teacher shortage, teachers, TVAAS, TxVAAS, Value Added Measures, VAM, William L. Sanders

I’m a public school teacher.

Am I any good at my job?

There are many ways to find out. You could look at how hard I work, how many hours I put in. You could look at the kinds of things I do in my classroom and examine if I’m adhering to best practices. You could look at how well I know my students and their families, how well I’m attempting to meet their needs.

Or you could just look at my students’ test scores and give me a passing or failing grade based on whether they pass or fail their assessments.

It’s called Value-Added Measures (VAM) and at one time it was the coming fad in education. However, after numerous studies and lawsuits, the shine is fading from this particularly narrow-minded corporate policy.

Most states that evaluate their teachers using VAM do so because under President Barack Obama they were offered Race to the Top grants and/or waivers.

Now that the government isn’t offering cash incentives, seven states have stopped using VAM and many more have reduced the weight given to these assessments. The new federal K-12 education law – the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) – does not require states to have educator evaluation systems at all. And if a state chooses to enact one, it does not have to use VAM.

That’s a good thing because the evidence is mounting against this controversial policy. An evaluation released in June of 2018 found that a $575 million push by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to make teachers (and thereby students) better through the use of VAM was a complete waste of money.

Meanwhile a teacher fired from the Washington, DC, district because of low VAM scores just won a 9-year legal battle with the district and could be owed hundreds of thousands of dollars in back pay as well as getting his job back.

But putting aside the waste of public tax dollars and the threat of litigation, is VAM a good way to evaluate teachers?

Is it fair to judge educators on their students’ test scores?

Here are the top 10 reasons why the answer is unequivocally negative:

1) VAM was Invented to Assess Cows.

I’m not kidding. The process was created by William L. Sanders, a statistician in the college of business at the University of Knoxville, Tennessee. He thought the same kinds of statistics used to model genetic and reproductive trends among cattle could be used to measure growth among teachers and hold them accountable. You’ve heard of the Tennessee Value-Added Assessment System (TVAAS) or TxVAAS in Texas or PVAAS in Pennsylvania or more generically named EVAAS in states like Ohio, North Carolina, and South Carolina. That’s his work. The problem is that educating children is much more complex than feeding and growing cows. Not only is it insulting to assume otherwise, it’s incredibly naïve.

2) You can’t assess teachers on tests that were made to assess students.

This violates fundamental principles of both statistics and assessment. If you make a test to assess A, you can’t use it to assess B. That’s why many researchers have labeled the process “junk science” – most notably the American Statistical Association in 2014. Put simply, the standardized tests on which VAM estimates are based have always been, and continue to be, developed to assess student achievement and not growth in student achievement nor growth in teacher effectiveness. The tests on which VAM estimates are based were never designed to estimate teachers’ effects. Doing otherwise is like assuming all healthy people go to the best doctors and all sick people go to the bad ones. If I fail a dental screening because I have cavities, that doesn’t mean my dentist is bad at his job. It means I need to brush more and lay off the sugary snacks.

3) There’s No Consistency in the Scores.

Valid assessments produce consistent results. This is why doctors often run the same medical test more than once. If the first try comes up positive for cancer, let’s say, they’re hoping the second time will come up negative. However, if multiple runs of the same test produce the same result, that diagnosis gains credence. Unfortunately, VAM scores are notoriously inconsistent. When you evaluate teachers with the same test (but different students) over multiple years, you often get divergent results. And not just by a little. Teachers who do well one year may do terribly the next. This makes VAM estimates extremely unreliable. Teachers who should be (more or less) consistently effective are being classified in sometimes highly inconsistent ways over time. A teacher classified as “adding value” has a 25 to 50% chance of being classified as “subtracting value” the next year, and vice versa. This can make the probability of a teacher being identified as effective no different than the flip of a coin.

4) Changing the test can change the VAM score.

If you know how to add, it doesn’t matter if you’re asked to solve 2 +2 or 3+ 3. Changing the test shouldn’t have a major impact on the result. If both tests are evaluating the same learning and at the same level of difficulty, changing the test shouldn’t change the result. But when you change the tests used in VAM assessments, scores and rankings can change substantially. Using a different model or a different test often produces a different VAM score. This may indicate a problem with value added measures or with the standardized tests used in conjunction with it. Either way, it makes VAM scores invalid.

5) VAM measures correlation, not causation.

Sometimes A causes B. Sometimes A and B simply occur at the same time. For example, most people in wheelchairs have been in an accident. That doesn’t mean being in a wheelchair causes accidents. The same goes for education. Students who fail a test didn’t learn the material. But that doesn’t mean their teacher didn’t try to teach them. VAM does not measure teacher effectiveness. At best it measures student learning. Effects – positive or negative – attributed to a teacher may actually be caused by other factors that are not captured in the model. For instance, the student may have a learning disability, the student may have been chronically absent or the test, itself, may be an invalid measure of the learning that has taken place.

6) Vam Scores are Based on Flawed Standardized Tests.

When you base teacher evaluations on student tests, at very least the student tests have to be valid. Otherwise, you’ll have unfairly assessed BOTH students AND teachers. Unfortunately standardized tests are narrow, limited indicators of student learning. They leave out a wide range of important knowledge and skills leaving only the easiest-to-measure parts of math and English curriculum. Test scores are not universal, abstract measures of student learning. They greatly depend on a student’s class, race, disability status and knowledge of English. Researchers have been decrying this for decades – standardized tests often measure the life circumstances of the students not how well those students learn – and therefore by extension they cannot assess how well teachers teach.

7) VAM Ignores Too Many Factors.

When a student learns or fails to learn something, there is so much more going on than just a duality between student and teacher. Teachers cannot simply touch students’ heads and magically make learning take place. It is a complex process involving multiple factors some of which are poorly understood by human psychology and neuroscience. There are inordinate amounts of inaccurate or missing data that cannot be easily replaced or disregarded – variables that cannot be statistically controlled for such as: differential summer learning gains and losses, prior teachers’ residual effects, the impact of school policies such as grouping and tracking students, the impact of race and class segregation, etc. When so many variables cannot be accounted for, any measure returned by VAMs remains essentially incomplete.

8) VAM Has Never been Proven to Increase Student Learning or Produce Better Teachers.

That’s the whole purpose behind using VAM. It’s supposed to do these two things but there is zero research to suggest it can do them. You’d think we wouldn’t waste billions of dollars and generations of students on a policy that has never been proven effective. But there you have it. This is a faith-based initiative. It is the pet project of philanthrocapitalists, tech gurus and politicians. There is no research yet which suggests that VAM has ever improved teachers’ instruction or student learning and achievement. This means VAM estimates are typically of no informative, formative, or instructional value.

9) VAM Often Makes Things Worse.

Using these measures has many unintended consequences that adversely affect the learning environment. When you use VAMs for teacher evaluations, you often end up changing the way the tests are viewed and ultimately the school culture, itself. This is actually one of the intents of using VAMs. However, the changes are rarely positive. For example, this often leads to a greater emphasis on test preparation and specific tested content to the exclusion of content that may lead to better long-term learning gains or increasing student motivation. VAM incentivizes teachers to wish for the most advanced students in their classes and to push the struggling students onto someone else so as to maximize their own personal VAM score. Instead of a collaborative environment where everyone works together to help all students learn, VAM fosters a competitive environment where innovation is horded and not shared with the rest of the staff. It increases turnover and job dissatisfaction. Principals stack classes to make sure certain teachers are more likely to get better evaluations or vice versa. Finally, being unfairly evaluated disincentives new teachers to stay in the profession and it discourages the best and the brightest from ever entering the field in the first place. You’ve heard about that “teacher shortage” everyone’s talking about. VAM is a big part of it.

10) An emphasis on VAM overshadows real reforms that actually would help students learn.

Research shows the best way to improve education is system wide reforms – not targeting individual teachers. We need to equitably fund our schools. We can no longer segregate children by class and race and give the majority of the money to the rich white kids while withholding it from the poor brown ones. Students need help dealing with the effects of generational poverty – food security, psychological counseling, academic tutoring, safety initiatives, wide curriculum and anti-poverty programs. A narrow focus on teacher effectiveness dwarfs all these other factors and hides them under the rug. Researchers calculate teacher influence on student test scores at about 14%. Out-of-school factors are the most important. That doesn’t mean teachers are unimportant – they are the most important single factor inside the school building. But we need to realize that outside the school has a greater impact. We must learn to see the whole child and all her relationships –not just the student-teacher dynamic. Until we do so, we will continue to do these children a disservice with corporate privatization scams like VAM which demoralize and destroy the people who dedicate their lives to helping them learn – their teachers.

NOTE: Special thanks to the amazingly detailed research of Audrey Amrein-Beardsley whose Vamboozled Website is THE on-line resource for scholarship about VAM.

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Since School Vouchers Don’t Increase Test Scores, Racism is an Acceptable Reason for Privatization, Says Advocate

July 24, 2018 stevenmsinger #BlackLivesMatter, Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Campbell Brown, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Corporate Education "Reform", Donald Trump, Education, Parents, Politics, Prejudice, private schools, privatization, Propaganda, Racism, School Choice, School Funding, school segregation, school vouchers, Schools, segregation, small class size, Social Justice, Standardized Testing, Students, Teachers, White Fragility, White Privilege Brown v. Board, Campbell Brown, Cato Institute, Corey DeAngelis, history, prejudice, private schools, Privatize, racism, racist dog whistle, school segregation, school vouchers, standardized testing, The 74

For decades, school voucher advocates claimed that sending poor kids to private schools with public tax dollars was acceptable because doing so would raise students’ test scores.

However, in the few cases where voucher students are even required to take the same standardized tests as public school students, the results have been dismal.

In short, poor kids at private schools don’t get better test scores.

So why are we spending billions of public tax dollars to send kids to privately run schools?

A 2018 Department of Education evaluation of the Washington, D.C., voucher program found that public school students permitted to attend a private or parochial school at public expense ended up getting worse scores than they had at public school.

Their scores went down 10 points in math and stayed about the same in reading.

These are not the pie in the sky results we were promised when we poured our tax money into private hands.

However, corporate education propaganda site, The 74, published a defense of these results that – frankly – makes some pretty jaw dropping claims.

The article is “More Regulation of D.C. School Vouchers Won’t Help Students. It Will Just Give Families Fewer Choices for Their Kids” by far right Cato Institute think tanker Corey DeAngelis.

In his piece, not only does he call for less accountability for voucher schools, he downplays the importance of standardized test scores.

And he has a point. Test scores aren’t a valid reflection of student learning – but that’s something public school advocates have been saying for decades in response to charter and voucher school cheerleaders like DeAngelis.

Supply side lobbyists have been claiming we need school privatization BECAUSE it will increase test scores. Now that we find this claim is completely bogus, the privatizers are changing their tune.

But that’s not the most shocking irony in DeAngelis article.

Parents don’t really care about the scores, he says. Instead they send their children to voucher schools because… You know what? I’ll let him tell it.

“Families choose schools for their children based on several important factors, including culture, individual attention, and, of course, safety. Research tells us that parents — unsurprisingly — often value these things more than standardized test scores.”

Certainly parents prefer their children have more individual attention. But many private schools have larger class sizes than public schools.

Moreover, reducing class size at all schools would be a more equitable reform than letting some kids enjoy smaller classes if they can just get into the right school.

However, it is his other two claims that sent my racist dog whistle senses tingling.

So parents don’t like the CULTURE of public schools. And they’re afraid public schools aren’t as SAFE.

Hmm. I wonder what culture these parents are objecting to. I wonder why they would think public schools wouldn’t be as safe.

Could it perhaps be fear of black students!?

I don’t want my little Billy to be exposed to all that rap music and kids with sagging pants. I don’t want my little Susie to cower in a class full of thugs and gangstas.

This is racist, stereotypical and just plain wrong about what you’ll actually find in public schools.

But it’s also typical white flight – the impulse behind the charter and voucher school movement in the first place.

Where did the boom for privatized schools come from historically?

It was a reaction to Brown vs. Board. When the US Supreme Court ruled in 1954 that segregated schools were unconstitutional, many white parents rebelled. They didn’t want their kids to go to school with THOSE kids. Hence, Georgia Gov. Herman Talmadge’s aborted plan to close all state schools and issue vouchers to private schools instead.

Hence, the plan that actually did take place in Price Edward County, Virginia, in 1959 where the public schools were closed and all taxpayer money for education was funneled to segregated white academies that would not admit black students. Though the term had yet to be invented, these were proto-“charter schools.” They were publicly funded but privately run. They were housed in privately owned facilities such as churches and the local Moose Lodge.

Hence, various segregationist “freedom of choice” plans in several states that allowed white students to transfer out of desegregated schools. Black students could apply but because of various administrative hurdles were never admitted.

This is the history of so-called school choice. And it is a history that DeAngelis, the 74 and the Cato Institute are willing to bring full circle.

School privatization advocates pretend they’re defending choice, but what choice are they championing?

The choice to segregate?

Pardon me, but I don’t think we should be spending public tax dollars to enable bigots.

If you want to shield your children from the horrors of kids with darker skin, do so on your own dime.

Public money should only be spent on policies that are in the public good – and that’s not segregation. It’s the exact opposite – integration.

Learning how to get along with people who are different than you is an essential skill for good citizens. Understanding that people of different races, ethnicities, religions and cultures are also human is vital if our nation is to survive.

Being exposed to another culture isn’t a bad thing. It’s the definition of the American melting pot.

Our public schools are not perfect. They suffer from targeted disinvestment – especially those situated in urban neighborhoods and those serving larger populations of children of color.

But that is because of the same segregation school privatization lobbyists are empowering. If all students went to the same schools, parents wouldn’t allow this kind of inequity.

In protecting their own kids, parents with power and resources would be protecting all kids.

But this isn’t the goal of privatization promoters. They don’t care about what’s best for children. They’re looking out for what’s best for the businesses running the privatized schools.

So what have we learned?

School vouchers do not increase test scores.

And when that excuse behind the entire school privatization movement is exposed as nonsense, opportunists have no problem using racism and prejudice to defend their industry.

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Why We Need a Department of Education

July 7, 2018 stevenmsinger Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Budget, Charter Schools, Child Predators, Civil Rights, Common Core, Corporate Education "Reform", Democrat, Donald Trump, edtech, Education, immigration, Labor, Obama, Politics, Poverty, privatization, Propaganda, Republican, School Choice, School Funding, school segregation, school vouchers, Schools, segregation, Social Justice, Standardized Testing, Students, Teachers Betsy DeVos, Department of Education, Donald Trump, education, federal authority, Jimmy Carter, Politics, scam, school funding, schools, Trump

Let’s say you have a starving child.

You take out a knife, a fork and a spoon. You hand her a cup.

This isn’t what she needs.

She needs food. She needs water.

But the utensils seem a precursor to meeting those needs.

That’s what the Department of Education has always been – a tool and a promise.

But now the Trump administration wants to do away with even that polite fiction.

Two weeks ago, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos announced the plan to merge the Education and Labor departments.

The reason you may not have heard much about it – beside the fact that bigger stories have overshadowed it like the forced separation of undocumented children and parents at the border, coercing kids into immigration court without parents or even legal counsel and then locking them up in cages in detention centers – is that the plan has about zero chance of coming to fruition.

Democrats oppose it and there don’t even seem to be enough Republicans in favor to get it through Congress. It may not even have enough support to get a vote.

Unless it’s a huge tax cut for the rich, no one seems able to get any actual laws through this GOP controlled legislature.

Moreover, the proposal is a definite step backward. The Department of Education was created in 1980 by splitting the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare into the Department of Education and the Department of Health and Human Services.

At that time, its purpose was clear. It was a tool to increase funding equity and transparency while protecting students.

After all, the department was an extension of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965, which tried to bring equity to America’s public schools.

As President Jimmy Carter said upon signing the bill into law:

“First, [the Department of Education] will increase the Nation’s attention to education. Instead of being buried in a $200 billion-a-year bureaucracy, educational issues will receive the top-level priority they deserve. For the first time, there will be a Cabinet-level leader in education, someone with the status and the resources to stir national discussion of critical education concerns.”

Unfortunately, those principles were never fully realized.

The Department did increase funding to public schools, but it didn’t end up dramatically increasing opportunities for the underprivileged.

Sure, it provided targeted grants like Pell Grants that did offer opportunities to select groups of students. But it didn’t radically alter our outdated (even then) funding system.

Our schools are segregated by race and class – worse now than they were then. Since they’re funded primarily by local property taxes, that means the poor and minorities get less funding than richer whiter kids.

And unless you’re willing to let your kids go to a school that receives less funding than others, don’t tell me it doesn’t matter. Rich white people have long complained about the money we spend on other people’s children while doing everything in their power to protect funding for their own.

In the late 1970’s, it was hoped the creation of the Department would be the first step to increasing federal funding of schools to one third of the total cost, thereby leveling the playing field somewhat.

But that never happened.

Now as then, the federal government only funds less than 10 percent of the cost.

To return to the metaphor with which this piece began, the creation of the department was like handing a starving child utensils without much actual food.

As the years have passed, we’ve used those tools for everything except nourishing students.

We’ve fed the child by guiding an empty fork into her cheek. We’ve poked and prodded her mouth with a knife.

The result hasn’t been for her benefit. Instead we’ve let special interests feed off of HER – charter schools, voucher schools, high stakes standardized testing corporations, the ed tech industry and even book and software publishers through the boondoggle of Common Core.

Many have insisted this misuse of the Department means we should do away with it entirely.

I disagree.

The child is still starving. It is still our responsibility to feed her.

You don’t do that by taking away her utensils.

Oh, you can feed her without them, but not very effectively. She can drink from the sink, but not as well as from a cup. She can eat with her hands, but not as easily as with utensils.

This latest proposed merger wouldn’t really satisfy anyone.

It wouldn’t do away with the department – it would hide it behind closed doors.

It would simply make it harder to see what was happening to it.

Moreover, it betrays an ideological bias against education for its own sake. Making the Department of Education part of the Department of Labor implies that the only reason one goes to school to learn job skills.

One can imagine a newly reorganized federal effort to cut anything from our schools that couldn’t be immediately connected with becoming a worker drone. And I don’t mean to imply this would be a new effort, because it’s already what President’s George W. Bush and Barack Obama were using the Department to achieve. But now it would be in the shadows and who knows what monstrosity could grow without the cleansing light of day?

This would help no one. It would be a continuation of the status quo (or possibly a doubling down on it) under a different name.

No one needs that.

What we need is to roll up our sleeves and meet students’ needs.

The child is hungry.

She has been sitting before us starving for decades and all we’ve done is give her the means to eat without the food.

Isn’t it time someone open the cupboard and get this kid something to eat!?

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I Voted for Jill Stein. Was I Wrong?

June 20, 2018 stevenmsinger Accountability, Arne Duncan, Bernie Sanders, Betsy DeVos, bloggers, Charter Schools, Corporate Education "Reform", Data, Democrat, Donald Trump, Dr. Jill Stein, Education, Election, Green Party, Hillary Clinton, immigration, Labor, Obama, Pennsylvania, Politics, President, privatization, Republican, School Choice, School Funding, school segregation, School to Prison Pipeline, school vouchers, Schools, segregation, Social Justice, Standardized Testing, Students, Teachers, Unions, voting Donald Trump, education, election 2016, Hillary Clinton, Jill Stein, Pennsylvania, Politics, schools, teachers, unity

On November 8, 2016, I had a heart attack.

That’s not a metaphor.

I went to vote. I went to the doctor. I was sent to the hospital.

How much of that was a result of the Presidential election? I will never know.

But whenever I think back on that day, I am filled with a sense of bone-deep sadness.

After only a little more than a year in office, Donald Trump is already the worst President of my lifetime – and that’s saying something after the disaster that was George W. Bush.

Yet today our country is separating parents and children seeking asylum on the border and locking them away in detention centers. Nearly every cabinet secretary is an incompetent plutocrat put in office to dismantle the department in which they’re in charge. Meanwhile, Trump insults traditional allies and consorts with dictators all over the globe. And nationwide white supremacists of all stripes are emboldened, on the rise, and openly running for office.

I wish there is something I could do to go back in time and change the results of that day. I wish there was something I could do to stop Donald Trump from being elected President. And though I did not vote for her, I would do anything to have Hillary Clinton defeat him.

On that day, though, I voted for Jill Stein.

There’s nothing I can do about that now.

I imagine going back in time and telling myself not to do it. “Go vote for Hillary,” I imagine Future Me telling an ailing younger version.

Yet even now, I’m not sure if I’d say that to myself.

Go vote for Hillary? Would it have made a difference?

Factually, no. One more vote wouldn’t have put her over the top in my home state of Pennsylvania.

But I wrote articles advising readers to do like me and vote Jill Stein. Does that mean I’m responsible for every Stein vote cast in the Keystone state?

No, not really. I may have influenced some people. But I certainly didn’t influence them all.

I suppose the bigger question is this: did Stein spoil the 2016 election for Clinton?

Let’s look at some numbers.

In Pennsylvania, the results went like this:

Screen Shot 2018-06-20 at 10.21.41 AM — Source: New York Times.

Trump got 2,970,733 votes.

Clinton got 2,926,441 votes.

So he won the state by 44,292 votes.

Stein got 49,941 votes – 5,649 more than Trump’s margin of victory.

So if every Stein voter had cast a ballot for Clinton, she would have won the state – though she’d still lose the Presidency by 10 electoral votes.

But if the same process were repeated even in a few other swing states Clinton lost, the result would change. Clinton would have won and be sitting in the Oval Office right now.

Those are just facts. Or at least they’re facts manipulated in a game with counterfactuals.

If this had happened, then this other thing would have happened, too.

However, it is rarely so clear even with numbers.

For instance, Stein ran in 2012, too. She ran against Obama and Romney. She got 20,710 votes in Pennsylvania.

Screen Shot 2018-06-20 at 10.22.27 AM — Source: New York Times

That’s tens of thousands of Green voters who didn’t cast a ballot for centrist Obama. I don’t think it’s fair to assume they would have voted for centrist Clinton, either.

So if we subtract that 20,000 from Stein’s 2016 totals, (49,941 – 20,710) you get 29,231 new people who voted Green who didn’t do so in 2012.

That’s less than Trump’s margin of victory (44,292).

So even if every NEW Stein voter cast a ballot for Clinton, Trump still would have won the state.

The point?

I don’t think it’s factual or fair to assume Stein or Stein voters gave Trump the election.

If I had voted for Clinton, even if I had advised my readers to vote for her, the end result probably would have been the same.

These are the things I think about in the middle of the night when sleep won’t come.

Is there anything I could have done to change things? In trying to make things better, did I make things worse?

I don’t assume I have that much power – either way.

I’m just a school teacher with a blog.

And that’s why I voted for Stein.

Hillary Clinton made her name politically going against teachers unions. She and her husband have done quite a lot to weaken my profession and the school my daughter attends.

The national teachers unions may have supported her run for President, but they did so without fairly polling members. Her entire nomination process was marred by unfair and undemocratic practices by the Democratic Party that left many progressive voters who favored Bernie Sanders feeling left out and silenced.

I still think THAT more than any scribbling on my blog contributed to her loss.

Compared to Trump, Barack Obama was one of the best Presidents we’ve ever had. But compared to Trump, so was George W. Bush. So would be an inanimate carbon rod!

However, Obama was not particularly good for education. He and the corporate Democrats favored every anti-union, pro-privatization scheme they could. What a missed opportunity!

You’d think our first African American President might do something about school segregation – which has been on the rise in the last few decades. Instead, he helped make it worse by promoting charter schools. You’d think he might do something to stop the school-to-prison pipeline. Instead he helped lubricate it by championing high stakes standardized tests.

I think that’s another reason Clinton lost. Many of us were fed up with Obama’s neoliberal policies and wanted a candidate who might change course. Clinton promised only more of the same.

Don’t get me wrong. In retrospect, more of the same sounds lovely. Give me that old time Obama neoliberalism over Trump’s neo-fascism, any day!

But back in 2016 I thought we had a chance for something more – real hope and change. Was I wrong to vote for a candidate who promised to end high stakes testing and school privatization? Was I wrong to vote for a candidate who promised to fairly fund public schools, provide free college for all and end all student debt?

Maybe.

I suppose I should have been more frightened of Trump back then. But my anger at the Democrats who continually stabbed me and other progressives in the back outweighed my fear of this buffoon.

Perhaps I was wrong in that.

I don’t think it’s too much of an assumption to say we all underestimated Trump. We all underestimated how many people in this country would vote for him.

So was I wrong to vote for Jill Stein?

I still don’t know.

I’m sure many people will criticize me for this article. They’ll blame me for every horrible thing Trump does. If I have any point here, it’s that there’s plenty of blame to go around.

Perhaps we’d do better fighting against Trump than fighting amongst ourselves.

I still believe there is a silent majority of Americans for whom the status quo is unacceptable. Most of us don’t want a wall on our border – we want healthcare for all. Most of us don’t want families separated and undocumented immigrants scapegoated and rounded up – we want a path toward citizenship. Most of us don’t want our democracy subverted and the wealthy to have a greater say in our policies – we want freedom and justice for all.

We just need a way to find each other again. We need to find a way to look past any political, social, racial, gender or cultural differences and find a common humanity.

What better way to do that than in a common cause?

I hope you’ll join me by stopping the recriminations and take on the fight.

We may never fully solve the riddle that was the 2016 election.

There are political and social lessons to be had. But the most important thing is to remember the value of unity and to hold on to each other tight.

We’re all we’ve got.

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This Fathers Day Let’s Be Worthy of Our Children

June 17, 2018 stevenmsinger Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Budget, capitalism, Charter Schools, Child Predators, Child Safety, Civil Rights, Compassion, Corporate Education "Reform", edtech, Education, Feminism, Parents, Politics, Prejudice, School Choice, School Funding, school segregation, school vouchers, Schools, segregation, Sexism, Social Justice, Standardized Testing, Students, Teachers Big Business, Depersonalized Learning, edtech, education, Fathers Day, immigration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, personalized learning, schools, separating parents and children, teachers, teaching

My daughter wrote me a card for Father’s Day.

It had a heart on the front and the following message on the back:

“Happy Fathers Day! Dad, you are my superstar. You help me when I’m sad. And I love everything you do for me. That is why I wish you a Happy Fathers Day.”

It was a sweet token of affection from a 9-year-old to her sleepy daddy sitting at the kitchen table.

But it got me thinking.

All over this country fathers are probably receiving something similar from their children.

Hawaiian shirts, blotchy neckties and more finger paintings than you could fit in the Louvre.

But the sentiment is probably the same.

Thank you for being there for me.

But are we there for America’s children?

We may be there for our own kids, but where genetics end, are we there for others?

Our government has separated approximately 2,000 children from their parents at the border, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

Two thousand children forcibly separated from their parents in our name and we dare to celebrate Father’s Day?

From April through May, the policy has separated 1,995 minors from 1,940 adults traveling with them who said they were the children’s guardians.

A country that doesn’t respect the rights of parents – even if those parents aren’t documented US citizens – has no right to pretend it values fatherhood or motherhood.

At best, we value WHITE parenthood, and that, my friends, is not good enough.

Look at what we subject our own children to in the public school system.

We segregate our schools by race and class so we can horde resources for wealthy and middle class white kids while providing the bare minimum to the poor and children of color.

In the name of accountability we bestow upon them high stakes standardized tests to “prove” even those meager funds are wasted – yet we ignore the financial disparity, the social problems, the health issues and a host of other obstacles the underprivileged face.

The only help we’re willing to offer is privatized schools that can pocket a portion of their funding and reduce resources for these kids. We demand local control and democratically elected school boards for rich white kids, but expect the poor brown ones at charter and voucher schools to get along with appointed boards where their parents have no choice except to take it or leave it.

Does a society that routinely treats its children this way deserve a thank you card? I think not.

Last month, the CDC released a report indicating that the U.S. birth rate ― the number of babies born nationwide ― is the lowest it’s been in 30 years and is below the “replacement” rate needed to sustain the population.

Various media sources were quick to blame women nationwide. Women put off having kids because they want to focus on careers. They aren’t sexy or submissive enough.

Yet few look at the responsibilities of men in this equation.

Who is it behind the salary gap between men and women? Who conflates women’s healthcare with abortion and communism? Who makes it easier to get a gun in this country than proper maternity leave, childcare or any adequate resources to make having a family sustainable?

Answer: men.

We’re grossly over-represented in government, business and management.

We don’t even support men who want to have families. Men make more money than women, but salaries are down for them as well. If there’s little support for pregnant women, there’s little support for the fathers who impregnated them.

We pretend family values are the bedrock of our society but we don’t do much to support families.

And when we look to the future, it doesn’t appear to be getting any better.

Big business and huge corporations are salivating all over the prospect of further monetizing our children.

They’re piloting scores of so-called personalized learning programs, apps and devices to spy on children and monitor every aspect of their learning.

Not only are they asking kids whether they feel excited or bored by canned test prep lessons provided on-line, they’re focusing cameras on children’s faces, monitoring their breathing and heart rate. They’re collecting mountains of data with little accountability, privacy or even the promise of these things.

Investment bankers and hedge fund managers are funding these programs and more to create a priceless database on each individual child that can be used for lifelong marketing, job placement, even profiling by law enforcement.

These are not practices that are done in the best interest of children. They are in the best interest of investors and free market privateers.

No wonder fewer people are having children! They don’t want their kids to become helpless victims to a society that cares less and less about our humanity and more and more about our marketability.

It is us vs. them – where the us is significantly limited by race, economics and class.

So this Fathers Day, we need to do more than accept a congratulatory pat on the back.

We need to accept our responsibility for the status quo.

If we don’t like the way things are, we need to commit ourselves to doing something about it.

Call and/or write your Senators and Representatives about the policy of separating undocumented parents and children. Visit your lawmakers’ offices and demand fair funding and an end to school segregation, high stakes testing and school privatization. Get active in your local school district going to meetings and making your voice heard. Do everything you can to educate the powers that be on the coming Ed Tech scandal and remove or block it from your district.

We’re not just fathers on Fathers Day.

We’re fathers all year long.

Let’s do something more to deserve it.

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African Immigrants Excel Academically. Why Don’t African Americans?

June 6, 2018 stevenmsinger #BlackLivesMatter, Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Budget, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Corporate Education "Reform", Data, Education, immigration, Learning, Parents, Politics, Poverty, Prejudice, Racism, School Choice, School Funding, school segregation, School to Prison Pipeline, school vouchers, Schools, segregation, Social Justice, Standardized Testing, Students, Teachers, White Privilege African American, African Students, American Culture, anti-racism, Black Culture, culture, immigration, racial proficiency gap, racism, SAT, standardized testing, white supremacy

The presence of melanin in your skin shouldn’t affect your academics.

But in America, it does.

On average, black students achieve less academically than white students. They have worse grades, lower test scores, meager graduation rates and fewer achieve advanced degrees.

The question is – why?

Why does pigmentation matter so much in this country? What about it brings such negative academic consequences?

This is especially apt since it doesn’t apply to foreign born black students who come here to study or those who recently emigrated here.

In fact, they see just the opposite effect – they earn some of the best grades, have some of the highest test scores, and disproportionately graduate from high school and achieve advanced degrees.

This is something that distinguishes foreign-born Africans – especially those from Sub-Saharan Africa – even from other immigrants. African immigrants sit near the top of the scale of so-called model minorities.

According to a report by Christine Gambino and associates at the Census Bureau, 41% of the African-born immigrant population earned a bachelor degree compared with 28% of the overall foreign-born population in the US.

The four African birth countries with the highest percentages of bachelor and higher degrees among their expat populations in the US are Egypt at 64%, Nigeria at 61%, South Africa at 57% and Kenya at 47%.

So why the difference?

Obviously, it’s not skin color.

Part of it seems to be qualities selected for in the immigration process, itself.

We don’t let just anyone come to the U.S. We have rigorous qualifications and prerequisites that have to be met. For instance, students who want to study here must get high marks on the SAT, Act and/or the TOFFEL – the language proficiency test. To do that, they need the money and resources to study for these exams. They are already some of the best achievers in their native countries.

Moreover, there is a huge cultural difference coming from Africa as opposed to coming from the United States. Native-born Africans have to deal with the effects of post-colonialism. It wasn’t so long ago that European nations conquered and plundered the African continent for gold and resources. That era has mostly ended, but those living there still have to deal with lingering consequences. This has an effect on everything from gender, ethnicity, class, language, family relationships, professions, religions and nation states.

However, native-born Africans do not have to navigate the world of American white supremacy. The affects of being black in this country may be much more harmful than negotiating post-colonialism.

For instance, most mainland Africans enjoy intact cultures. They are not the product of families that were torn apart, religions that were displaced and entire belief systems, world views and genealogies that were stolen.

Nigerian cultures, in particular, highlight the importance of learning.

One typical Nigerian saying goes like this:

“The best inheritance that a parent can give you is not jewelry or cash or material things, it is a good education.”

This is why academics in Nigeria are widely supported, mandatory and free.

Meanwhile, in America native-born black students grow up in a much more stressful and unstable environment. This translates to academic struggles.

For one, they are the victims of educational apartheid. Brown v. Board is more than 60 years old, but American schools have become increasingly segregated by race and class. Black students receive fewer resources than whites and their schools struggle to provide the same quality of education. Moreover, they are the target – either directly or indirectly – of privatization schemes that result in less control over their own schools and the further reduction of resources through charter and voucher schools that can cut services and pocket the savings as profit.

However, the problem is not just systemic. I hate to say it, but sometimes even American teachers put up obstacles to black students success due to (often unconscious) bias.

Most teachers are white. They have certain societally reinforced expectations of black students. When these children struggle, they are more often put into special education and stigmatized for their differences.

It is no doubt that black students are more often disciplined and suspended than white students – numerous studies have shown this.

I think this is due at least partially to white teachers’ expectations. It is tempting to see black student behavior as negative in the default. We too often label them “bad kids” and then try to find evidence to support it instead of giving them the benefit of the doubt or assuming they’re smart and well-behaved until proven otherwise.

African immigrants don’t have to deal with these stigmas to nearly the same degree. They don’t get the same negative label. They have more support from close-knit families. They have more positive role models including more college graduates in the family.

Another obstacle for American born black students is a cultural imputation against academic achievement. Doing well in school can be seen as “acting white.” In order to maintain popularity and prestige, they are steered away from the exact things that immigrant Africans are steered toward.

The poverty of American blacks plays a huge factor, too. Even in moderately successful African American homes, parents or guardians are often working multiple jobs or long hours to make ends meet. This reduces their ability to oversee their children’s homework and monitor academic progress.

It seems then that the so-called proficiency gap between native-born black and white students in this country is due to generational poverty, white racism and coping mechanism in their own culture.

If we want to help American-born black students, we need to realize, first, that this problem is not due to inherent racial deficiencies. It is the product of class warfare and white supremacy.

As such, it can be cured through progressive economic policies and anti-racist efforts.

The strongest argument for reparations comes from a recognition of the lingering effects of our history of slavery, segregation, Jim Crow and the prison industrial complex.

These are daunting problems, but they can be solved.

It just takes an honest appraisal of the issues and the social will to make things right.

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The Best Charter School Cannot Hold a Candle to the Worst Public School

May 26, 2018 stevenmsinger Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Budget, capitalism, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Corporate Education "Reform", Education, Local Control, Parents, Politics, Poverty, privatization, School Choice, School Funding, school segregation, Schools, Social Justice, Students, Teachers charter schools, Democracy, freedom, Privatize, public schools, tyranny

There are good charter schools.

I admit that.

There are bad public schools.

I admit that, too.

But if one had to choose between the worst public school and the best charter school, you’d still be better off with the public school.

Does that sound crazy? Does it sound ideological, partisan, or close-minded.

I don’t think so.

Imagine if we said the same thing about tyrannies and democracies.

There are good tyrannies.

There are bad democracies.

Still, I’d prefer the worst democracy to the best tyranny.

Why?

Because even a badly run democracy is based on the principle of self rule. The government gets its right to make and enforce laws from the consent of the will of the governed.

Even if our representatives are corrupt and stupid, even if our federal, state and local agencies are mismanaged and disorganized – there is the potential for positive change.

In fact, the catalyst to that change is embedded in democracy, itself. Egalitarian systems founded on the principle of one person, one vote tend toward fairness, equity and liberty much more than others.

Bad leaders will be replaced. Bad functionaries will be retrained or superseded. Bad agencies will be renovated, renewed, and made to serve the will of the people.

However, in a tyranny, none of this is true.

Even if you have a benevolent tyrant who does nothing all day but try to do whatever is best for his or her subjects, that is a worse state of affairs.

Eventually the tyrant will change. Absolute power will corrupt him or her absolutely. Or even if this bastion of human goodness is incorruptible, he or she will eventually be deposed, replaced or die.

And there is nothing – absolutely nothing – to ensure the next tyrant is likewise benevolent. In fact, the system is set up to increase the likelihood that the next ruler will be as selfish, greedy and malevolent as possible.

This is because it is the system of tyranny, itself, that is corrupt – even if those that fill its offices are not.

The same goes for good charter schools.

These are schools that are publicly funded but privately run.

As such, the overwhelming majority have no elected school board, their meetings are held in private, their documents are kept secret, they discriminate in enrollment and they take advantage of a plethora of legal loopholes and bad policy to embezzle funds, overcharge for nonexistent utilities and cut services for students while pocketing the “savings” as profit.

If you can find a charter school that does none of these things – congratulations! You have found a diamond in the rough! But it is a diamond that is more likely to turn to coal the second you turn away.

Let’s say you find the rare charter school run by an elected school board. THEY AREN’T REQUIRED TO DO THAT. Organizers could at any time revert to an appointed board. Community members could be making all the decisions when you send your child to school, but by dismissal time they could have all been replaced with flunkies appointed by the private business people who took out the charter from the state in the first place!

Let’s say your charter school has open meetings and public documents. They invite the public to their deliberations. They take public comment and share all their internal communications with taxpayers and the media. THEY AREN’T REQUIRED TO DO THAT. They could close the doors any day they wanted. And there’s nothing you could do about it.

Why? Because that’s what a charter school is. Despite all the propaganda to the contrary, it is not fundamentally a public school. It is a private school at public expense.

All these things that are optional at a charter school are required at public schools. Not just some public schools – ALL OF THEM!

Public schools are required to have elected school boards (unless taken over by the state). They are required to have open meetings and public documents. They are essentially democratic, whereas even the best charter schools are only democracies because of someone’s goodwill. When the wind changes, so will their system of government.

But that’ not all.

Let’s say you find a charter school that has open enrollment. It accepts every student who applies from its coverage area. Or at least it does so until it runs out of room. If demand exceeds supply, it conducts a lottery to determine which students to let in and which it has to unfortunately turn away.

First of all, if the school doesn’t have open meetings and public documentation, you have no way of knowing whether these lotteries are fair and unbiased. Operators are often charged with cherry picking the best and brightest and denying students with disabilities or behavioral problems – they’ve even been known to discriminate based on race and class.

Second of all, even if your charter school is one of the magical few that just does the right thing with no oversight, THEY AREN’T REQUIRED TO DO THAT. Once they figure out how much money they can save by only accepting the cheapest students to educate, inclusive enrollment policies will be a thing of the past. And you’ll probably never even know the difference.

Public schools aren’t allowed to do that. They have to accept every student from their coverage area regardless of academic deficits, emotional needs, race, religion, class or creed. And if there isn’t enough space, they still can’t turn students away. They have to expand!

And what about the most salient feature of charter schools?

Unlike public schools where all the funding has to be spent on student services, most charter schools are run for profit. They are allowed to cut services for students and swipe the savings for their investors.

Some charter schools don’t do this. BUT THEY CAN! Any day now they could cut little Timmy’s gym class down to twice a week so a shady group of business people in a smoke filled room could stuff a bunch of bills in their own wallets.

Offering French AND Spanish? Adios muchachos. And bonjour to a fistful of dollars going directly into their bank accounts.

All of that is perfectly legal even though it’s your money they’re collecting – money you put aside to help your child learn – there’s not a thing you can do about it.

Sure, you can take your child out of the charter school. But the money funding the school isn’t just your child’s. You’re paying for every student enrolled there. Even if you don’t have kids, you’re footing the bill. And unlike the public school system where you get a voice in how that money is spent, here you don’t get to say a thing.

You just get to pay.

Call me crazy, but I think there’s something wrong with that.

I think that’s worse than even the most decrepit public school.

If a public school has a terrible school board, they can be replaced. In fact, they most certainly will be given time. With each bad policy and unpopular decision, bad school directors motivate taxpayers to vote them out.

This is the exact opposite of charter schools. There is more reason for a charter to replace an elected board with an appointed one so as to increase their autonomy and ability to make money.

Most of the problems with public schools aren’t located in the schools, themselves.

They are the result of strategic disinvestment – archaic funding formulas that allocate less to districts without a large tax base than those in richer neighborhoods. They are the result of segregation schemes that keep the poor and minorities in neighborhoods where they can be ignored and then blamed for their own underprivileged status. They are the result of national and state policies allowed to play the parasite on their budgets – high stakes testing, Common Core and – yes – charter schools.

So, no, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to be so positive about public schools and so negative about charter schools.

The problem with privatized education isn’t just specific to individual schools. It is a feature of the very kind of school we’re talking about in the first place.

Charter schools are at heart a less democratic system than public schools.

Therefore, public schools are always preferable.

I wouldn’t give up my country just because we have an idiot in the oval office. Nor would I give up my public school just because of inadequacies in my local district.

Democracy isn’t for wimps. You have to fight for it.

Those people who are telling you to switch teams are trying to pull the wool over your eyes.

Don’t fall for it.

Public school proud.

Today.

Tomorrow.

Always.

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The State Penalized My School Because We Tried to Integrate

May 11, 2018 stevenmsinger Accountability, Budget, capitalism, Charter Schools, church and state, Civil Rights, Corporate Education "Reform", Democrat, Education, Local Control, Parents, Pennsylvania, Politics, Poverty, Prejudice, privatization, Propaganda, Racism, Republican, School Choice, School Funding, school segregation, school vouchers, Schools, segregation, small class size, Social Justice, Standardized Testing, Students, Taxation, Teachers, Toxic Testing Educational Improvement Tax Credit, high stakes testing, injustice, integration, Opportunity Scholarship Tax Credit Program, Pennsylvania, school segregation, school vouchers, standardized testing, student achievement, test-based accountability

The original sin of American education is segregation.

Yet in Pennsylvania, taking steps to integrate can result in a penalty from the state legislature.

That’s what happened to my school this year.

After years of innovation and academic growth, my school added a new program to bring in struggling students from another institution – and the state rewarded us by putting us on a list of “failing” schools and forcing us into a voucher program.

I teach in a racially diverse, high poverty district in the western part of the state, just outside of Pittsburgh.

Charter schools have been leeching off us for years.

But today was the first day school vouchers sunk their teeth into us, too.

It’s called the Opportunity Scholarship Tax Credit Program (OSTCP) – a ridiculous bit of legislation that allows children in struggling public schools to use public tax dollars to pay for tuition at a private or parochial school.

I’d say they could use that money at a participating public school, too, but in Pennsylvania the public schools taking part in the program can be counted on one hand with fingers to spare.

And why does my school now qualify for this dubious distinction? Because of our standardized test scores.

Not our test scores from this year. They won’t be released until at least June – more likely August or September.

This is based on test scores from last year – 2016-17.

Moreover, it’s not district wide. It’s just the middle school and one elementary school.

In previous years, the middle school was the district powerhouse. We had the highest test scores and the most innovation. So what happened?

In short, we integrated.

From a state-wide standpoint, my district is hugely segregated.

About 60% of our students are poor and/or minorities. Yet if you go a few miles north, south, east or west, you’ll find schools serving every flavor of white privilege. Beautiful big buildings with the best of everything and a tax base to pay for it. My district, on the other hand, is made to do the best it can with what we’ve got, which isn’t much.

To make matters worse, the structure within our district, inherited from decades of unenlightened social planning, doubles down on that segregation.

Though we only have one middle school and one high school where all our students rub shoulders, we have two elementary schools – one for the middle class white kids and one for the poorer black ones.

This has dramatic academic consequences. Kids at the better-resourced white school flourish scholastically more than kids from the crumbling black school. So the racial and economic skills gap becomes entrenched by the time kids move to the middle school in 6^th grade.

If only we could integrate the elementaries.

However, we can’t bus kids from one neighborhood to the other because we can’t afford it. We have a walking district. Moreover, parents would revolt at the idea of elementary kids having to trudge long distances or take a city bus to school.

The only long-term solution is to create a new, centrally located elementary center serving both populations. However, that takes money we don’t have.

So last year we tried a partial solution – move the 5^th grade up to the middle school. That way, we can at least integrate our students a year earlier.

Of course, this means taking kids from the black school with terrible test scores up to the middle school. This means adding more struggling students from the school that already is on the state’s bottom 15% list and making them the middle school’s responsibility. It means a new program, new trials and challenges.

You’d think we’d get praise or at least understanding for tackling such a problem. But no.

Taking on the 5^th grade tipped the middle school’s test scores over the edge.

Now we’re in the bottom 15%, too. Now we have to let our students go to a private or parochial school with public tax dollars.

Why? Because we tried to right a wrong. We tried to correct a social and academic injustice. And the result was a kick in the gut.

Thanks, Harrisburg legislators! Way to support students of color!

This is just another way that school vouchers support white supremacy. They make it harder to battle segregation.

Why would anyone integrate if doing so could mean losing funding and looking like a failure in the press?

Moreover, forget all the junk you hear from the state about growth.

This penalty is based on whether we hit testing benchmarks – what percentage of students we have earning proficient or advanced on the tests. It doesn’t matter how much they’ve improved. It doesn’t matter if they’ve gone from the lowest of the low to scratching at the ceiling of proficient.

My 8^th graders last year (the year we’re being penalized for) experienced tremendous growth just like my students this year are doing. From where they came in to where they’re leaving, the difference is phenomenal!

But apparently that doesn’t count in Pennsylvania.

A poor school serving mostly underprivileged minorities needs to meet the same benchmarks as schools with Cadillac resources serving kids who have everything money can buy. There’s certainly no need for the state or federal government to do anything about equitable resources (At least, not until the result of a lawsuit is handed down where local districts are suing the state over just such strategic disinvestment).

Instead, we’ve got to offer our student the “opportunity” to go to a private school on the public dime.

And what an opportunity it is!

The chance to send your child to a cooperating private or parochial school at public expense.

The opportunity to lose your duly-elected school board. The opportunity for decisions about how your money is spent being made behind closed doors with little to no input from you. The opportunity to send your child to a school with fewer resources and fewer certified teachers. The opportunity to send your child to (an often) religious school on the public dime.

Wow! I can’t imagine why so few parents take advantage of that opportunity! My district has had a few schools on the OSTCP list before, and families overwhelmingly opt to stay put.

Let’s not forget the justification for this “opportunity” is low test scores.

Wait a minute. These cooperating private and parochial schools don’t even take the same standardized tests, if they take any at all.

In our community, there is only one cooperating private school – a catholic school located right next door.

Students enrolled there don’t take the PSSA or Keystone Exams. I believe they take the Terra Nova test. And the school must do a great job because its Website is three years out of date about the results of those tests.

What a great way to improve test scores for our students – comparing apples-to-pears or, to be honest, actually making no comparison at all.

This OSTCP law is based on an unjustified assumption that private schools are always better than public ones. The reality is that if the resources both schools receive are similar, the public school usually greatly outperforms the private or parochial one.

I’ve seen this first hand. I’ve toured our next door Catholic institution. A few years ago, we relocated our students there temporarily during an emergency drill.

It’s a quaint school. Cobblestones and a shaded green campus.

But the buildings are crumbling – especially on the inside. Watermarks on the walls and dirt collecting in the corners.

It’s also much smaller than my school. They only have less than 300 students from K-8. We have about 1,500 from K-12.

I can see why parents who graduated from that school and have a history with it might want to send their kids there to continue that legacy. But anyone else would be giving up much better facilities, a much wider curriculum, much better trained and experienced teachers and even smaller classes!

The OSTCP bill has nothing to do with providing better opportunities for children and families.

It’s a public tax giveaway to private businesses.

The private/religious schools benefit and so do the businesses who “donate” their taxes to these programs.

In 17 states you can get substantial tax credits for contributing to this scam.

Louisiana, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Virginia, for example, all provide tax credits worth between $65 and $95 on every $100 donated. Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Montana, and South Carolina go even further by reimbursing 100% of the donation. You read that right. Donate $100, get $100 back.

Oh, but it gets much worse. Since these are considered donations, you can also claim them as charitable deductions and get an additional 35% off your taxes. So you donate $100 and get back $135! Yes. You actually make money off this deal!

In Pennsylvania, investors can even “triple dip” receiving a state tax credit, a reduction in their state taxable income, and a reduction in their federal taxable income. And, yes, that means they sometimes get back more in tax breaks than they provide in contributions.

Meanwhile all of these “savings” come from money stolen from local public schools like mine. Businesses and individual investors are profiting off the industrial testing complex.

In the Keystone state, we have the OSTCP and the Educational Improvement Tax Credit (EITC).

This blatant swindle is championed on both sides of the political aisle.

We already waste $200 million in business taxes to these programs in the Commonwealth, yet both Democrats and Republicans keep trying to pass another bill to increase that sum by another $50 million.

In Allegheny County, where I teach, that includes Democratic State Reps. Dom Costa, Daniel J. Deasy, William C. Kortz II (who represents part of my school district) and Harry Readshaw.

Because of this bogus philanthropy, there will always be a bottom 15% of state schools – approximately 400 “failing schools” – that are ripe for the picking from private and parochial school vultures.

I’m sorry, but this just isn’t right.

That money should be going to public schools not private or religious institutions many of which espouse fundamentalist or racist teachings.

There is a reason our founders legislated a separation of church and state. We’d do best to remember it.

We could be using our resources to help solve our problems, alleviate segregation and increase equity.

Instead our lawmakers are too interested in giveaways to business and corporations even if that means stealing the money from our children.

gadflyonthewallblog

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

school segregation

College Remediation is Less About Bad Students Than Academic Elitism

1) Public schools don’t decide who is accepted at colleges. College admissions departments do.

2) How exactly do we determine that these kids need remediation?

3) Let’s say some of this remediation actually is necessary. Why would that be so?

4) Developmental psychology.

5) The elitism behind the whole post-secondary system.

SOLUTIONS

Top 10 Reasons You Can’t Fairly Evaluate Teachers on Student Test Scores

1) VAM was Invented to Assess Cows.

2) You can’t assess teachers on tests that were made to assess students.

3) There’s No Consistency in the Scores.

4) Changing the test can change the VAM score.

5) VAM measures correlation, not causation.

6) Vam Scores are Based on Flawed Standardized Tests.

7) VAM Ignores Too Many Factors.

8) VAM Has Never been Proven to Increase Student Learning or Produce Better Teachers.

9) VAM Often Makes Things Worse.

10) An emphasis on VAM overshadows real reforms that actually would help students learn.