Report: US Shortchanged Public Schools by Hundreds of Billions of Dollars Over Decades

September 17, 2018 stevenmsinger #BlackLivesMatter, Accountability, AFT, Betsy DeVos, capitalism, Charter Schools, Child Predators, Congress, Corporate Education "Reform", Data, Democrat, Donald Trump, Education, ESEA, Healthcare, Local Control, NEA, Politics, Poverty, Prejudice, privatization, Racism, Republican, School Choice, School Funding, School to Prison Pipeline, school vouchers, Schools, small class size, Social Justice, Special Education, Standardized Testing, Students, Taxation, Teachers, Unions Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools, AROS, Confronting the Education Debt, debt, education, Elementary and Secondary Education Act, fairness, Politics, school funding, schools, solutions, Students, tax cuts, Taxation, teachers, The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, wealth inequality

Fun Fact: Between 2005 and 2017, the federal government withheld $580 billion it had promised to spend on students from poor families and students with disabilities.

Fun Fact: Over that same period, the personal net worth of the nation’s 400 wealthiest people ballooned by $1.57 trillion.

So, rich people, consider this the bill.

A new report called “Confronting the Education Debt” commissioned by the Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools (AROS) details the shortfall in minute detail.

For instance:

$347 billion owed to educate low-income students most of whom are children of color.

$233 billion owed to provide services for students with disabilities.

And this is just the shortfall of the last dozen years! That’s just money due to children who recently graduated or are currently in the school system!

We’ve been cheating our children out of the money we owe them for more than half a century!

Federal education funding levels were first established in 1965 as part of Pres. Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty in the landmark education law, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA).

That law, which has become little more than a boondoggle for the standardized testing and school privatization industries, originally was passed to address inequality in America’s education funding.

Now this report from a coalition of groups including the Education Justice Research and Organizing Center, the National Education Association, the American Federation of Teachers, Center for Popular Democracy and the Action Center on Race and the Economy points out the multifarious ways we have failed to live up to the standards we set in that original legislation and beyond.

One of the most glaring examples of neglect is Title I funding.

The Johnson administration admitted that schools with a high concentration of students living below the poverty line needed extra support to succeed at the same levels as students from middle class or more affluent backgrounds. So the law promised to provide an additional 40 percent for each poor child above what the state already spent per pupil.

And then it promptly failed to fund it. In 1965 and every year since!

These are not just numbers. With this money, high poverty schools could provide:

“health and mental health services for every student, including dental and vision services; and
a full-time nurse in every Title I school; and
a full-time librarian for every Title I school; and
a full-time additional counselor in every Title I school, or
a full-time teaching assistant in every Title I classroom.”

A decade later, in 1975, the same thing happened with The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA).

Congress told local districts they’d have to do more to help disabled students succeed academically. However, doing so costs money. Lawmakers admitted that disabled students cost more to educate and that local districts often struggle to find the funding to help them succeed.

Once again, Congress pledged to pay up to 40 percent of that additional cost, with local and state funds covering the remainder.

Once again, Congress failed to fund it.

STATE AND LOCAL FAILURE

But it’s not just the federal government that has shirked its duties to school children.

State and local governments also stiffed generations of students out of the resources they deserved – especially if those students have black or brown skin.

Beside the federal government, public schools are funded by their local municipalities and the state. Local governments pay for about 45 percent of school budgets.

However, since most of this allotment is determined by property tax revenues, it ensures the poor get fewer resources than the rich. Kids from rich neighborhoods get lots of resources. Kids from poor areas get the scraps. Inequality is built into the funding formula to ensure that students don’t start out on an even playing field and that economic handicaps are passed on from one generation to the next.

State governments are no better. They provide about 47 percent of school budgets.

As such, they are in the position to right the wrongs of the local community by offsetting the inequality of local governments – but only 11 states do so. Twenty states close their eyes and provide the same funding to each school – rich and poor alike – regardless of need or what each community can afford to provide for its own children. But 17 states are even worse. They actually play Robin Hood in reverse – they funnel more money to wealthier districts than to poor ones.

As a result, schools nationwide serving mostly students of color and/or poor children spend less on each child than districts serving mostly white and/or affluent children.

TAX CUTS

And while our federal, state and local governments have failed to meet their responsibilities to students, they have required fewer taxes from business and industry.

In the late 1940s and 1950s, the top marginal tax rate was more than 90 percent. Today it is 37 percent.

Congress just passed a series of whooping tax cuts that go into effect in 2019. More than half of the benefit of these cuts will go to the richest five percent of taxpayers. The law is expected to cost the federal treasury as much as $1.5 trillion in lost revenues over the next decade.

Nearly every state levies a much greater share of taxes from low- and middle-income families than from the wealthy.

And that’s before we even start talking about corporations!

While the US federal corporate tax is 35 percent, the effective tax rate that corporations pay after loopholes and deductions is only about 14 percent. This costs the federal government at least $181 billion in annual revenue, based on 2013 estimates by the Government Accountability Office. Local and state corporate tax and abatement programs make it even worse.

This is a choice. We are not requiring the rich to pay their fair share.

SCHOOL-TO-PRISON

Instead of investing in ways to help educate children, one of the only areas we’ve increased funding is incarceration.

The private prison industry is booming, fueled in part by a lack of opportunities in schools.

According to the report:

“In 2017, the National Association of School Resource Officers claimed that school policing was the fastest-growing area of law enforcement. The school safety and security industry was reported to be a $2.7 billion market as of 2015. Most of that $2.7 billion is public money now enriching the private security industry instead of providing real supports to students.”

According to the US Department of Education, 1.6 million students go to a school that employs a law enforcement officer but not a guidance counselor.

That is not an unalterable economic reality. It is a failure of priorities. It is the mark of a society that is not willing to help children but will swoop in to punish them if they get out of line.

SCHOOL PRIVATIZATION

Finally, the report identifies school privatization as a contributing factor to this systemic neglect.

Charter schools are legal in 44 states plus Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico. They have “systematically stripped public school budgets through the creation of parallel structures of privately-operated, publicly-funded schools.”

Cost studies in San Diego, Los Angeles, Nashville, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Durham and other localities have come to the same conclusion: “the privatization of schools has contributed to austerity conditions in traditional public schools.”

Yet Congress continues to appropriate millions of dollars to the Department of Education’s Charter Schools Program (CSP), which funds new charter start-ups and expansions. The program has a budget of $500 million this year, alone. It is the largest single backer of charter schools in the nation.

According to the report, “In other words, the U.S. Department of Education is operating a program that directly undermines public schools.”

SOLUTIONS

But the report isn’t just about what’s wrong. It outlines how we can make it right.

It outlines three policy initiatives:

1)      “Full funding of Title I and IDEA to target federal support to low-income children and students with disabilities.

2)      The creation of 25,000 Sustainable Community Schools by 2025.

3)      A new focus for the U.S. Department of Education, on ensuring and incentivizing equity in public schools across the country.”

And we can pay for it by:

A. “Make the wealthy pay their fair share of taxes.

Rescind the 2017 tax code changes, which overwhelmingly favor the top 1 percent of income earners.

Close the federal carried interest loophole, a step that could increase federal revenues by between $1.8 and $2 billion annually or, according to some researchers, by as much as $18 billion annually.

If the carried interest loophole is not closed at the federal level, states can impose a surcharge on carried interest income at the state level, raising millions for state budgets.

Enact so-called “millionaire’s taxes” that increase the tax rate on a state’s highest earners. New York and California have already passed such law.

B. Require wealthy corporations to pay their fair share.

End or reduce corporate tax breaks that cost the federal government at least $181 billion annually.
Reduce state and local subsidies to businesses for economic development projects and hold school funding immune from tax abatements.
Enforce and strengthen programs like Payment in Lieu of Taxes (PILOT) to ensure that wealthy institutions pay their fair share towards local budgets.

C. Divest from the school-to-prison pipeline.

School safety and security is now a $2.7 billion industry. Much of that money is public money, going to profitable corporations instead of schools.

Divest from expensive security systems, metal detectors and legions of school-based police officers and instead invest in counselors, health and mental-health providers and other supports that make schools safer.

D. Place a moratorium on new charter schools and voucher programs.

A moratorium on the federal Charter Schools Program would free up $500 million annually, which could be used to support the creation of Sustainable Community schools.”

The executive summary concludes with the following statistic.

Even a 10 percent increase in funding for each high poverty student maintained through 12 years of public school can dramatically change the likelihood of academic success. It can boost the chances that students will graduate high school, achieve 10 percent higher earnings as adults and a 6 percentage point reduction in the annual incidence of adult poverty, according to a 2015 report.

“Ten percent is pocket-change for a nation that has orchestrated the rise of an unmatched billionaire class. In the richest nation in the world, it is possible to fully fund all our public schools, and to provide Black, Brown and low-income children with the educational resources and additional supports and services they need to achieve at the highest levels.”

The facts are in, folks.

We can no longer gripe and complain about a public education system we fail to support without recognizing the cause. We have failed to meet our responsibilities to our children – especially our children of color.

The solution is simple – equity.

We need to demand the rich do the right thing.

We cannot achieve greatness as a nation when wealth and privilege continue to shirk their duties and our lawmakers do little more than enable greed and corruption.

The bill is here.

Time to settle up.

READ THE WHOLE REPORT.

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!

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No One Ever Remembered a Teacher for Raising Standardized Test Scores

August 25, 2018 stevenmsinger Accountability, Compassion, Corporate Education "Reform", Data, Education, Learning, Pennsylvania, Schools, Standardized Testing, Students, Teachers, Uncategorized, Value Added Measures, VAM public schools, schools, standardization, standardized testing, Students, teacher, Teacher Evaluation, teachers, teaching, Value Added Measures, VAM

It’s the day before school begins.

I’m out to eat with my family and have just taken a big bite of a juicy beef taco.

That’s when I notice someone standing right next to me at the restaurant.

So I raise my eyes upward, a meat filled tortilla overfilled with lettuce and beans hanging from my mouth, and I’m greeted with a familiar face.

“Mr. Singer!” the woman says with a nervous smile on her lips.

“Do you remember me?”

I think for a moment but realize I have more pressing concerns. I couldn’t reply with an answer to the woman’s question even if I did remember her.

So I chew and swallow and then look again.

“It’s me,” she says. “Tamarind.”

And then it hits me like a flash.

The face in front of me ages backward. The adult eyes soften. The taut cheeks become chubbier. And her whole figure shrinks three feet closer to the ground.

“Oh my God! Tamarind! Of course I remember you!” I say.

She smiles and blushes. I’m surprised by how nervous she is. I’m no one to inspire anxiety. I’m just a guy out with his wife, daughter and father-in-law shoving a taco in his face.

“When I saw you here I just had to come up to you,” she said. “I was in your 6^th grade class.”

“I think it was 8^th grade, wasn’t it?” I said.

“Yes! That’s right! Eighth grade!”

“How old are you now? My gosh I remember you when you only came up to here off the ground.”

“I’m 22. I’m doing really well. I just wanted you to know that you taught me how to write. If it wasn’t for you I never would have made it anywhere. I just wanted to thank you so much for everything you did for me.”

We chatted a bit more and then she left us to finish our meal.

But, of course, the whole interaction got me thinking.

As a teacher, you are something of a minor public figure.

When you’re out and about – especially if you’re somewhere in your district – you’re bound to be recognized and invariably someone will want to chat.

I remember one time at the bakery counter a former student gave me my order and told me he threw in a few donuts.

I remember laughing and telling him he didn’t need to do that.

“Nah, Mr. Singer, you never wrote me up for falling asleep in your class. You knew I was watching my brothers and sisters at home and never gave me shit for it. You keep those donuts.”

Another time at the theater I was almost late to my movie because I was listening to a former student at the concession stand catch me up on her life and what all of her friends from my class were doing these days.

So many students. So many kids that have now become adults.

You lose track of how many lives you’ve had an impact on.

The first few days of school are always filled with endless administrative meetings. The superintendent welcomes you with testing data. Then your principal breaks it down by building and subject.

You find out which diagnostic exams you have to give your students and when. You find out what your Pennsylvania Value Added Assessment Score (PVAAS) is – how good a teacher you are based on how well your students from last year did on the state standardized test.

On the one hand, I suppose I have no reason to feel like much of a good teacher.

Most of my students didn’t pass the test. They rarely do.

The same number of 7^th graders (that’s what I taught last year) passed the reading test as in previous years. However, many more passed that were expected to fail.

The state uses a mystery metric based on Classroom Diagnostic Assessment (CDT) data to come up with a prediction of who they expect to pass and who they expect to fail. No one really knows how they calculate this. For all we know, the state secretary of education could examine a pile of chicken entrails before entering it all into the system.

Does all that data mean I’m a good teacher or not?

I don’t know.

But I do know what Tamarind thinks.

And I know what a host of former students have told me. I know how they react when they see me out in the wild, just living my life.

I’m sure there are probably former students who don’t like me. There must be those who hold a grudge for getting a 59% on an assignment. Or maybe they remember me yelling at them for something. Or – who knows – maybe they just didn’t respond to The Singer Charm.

But an awful lot of people come up to me who don’t have to.

Yesterday was the first day of classes for the year.

For the first time, all my classes were looped. I taught 7^th grade Language Arts last year and I’m teaching the 8^th grade course this year.

When those kids came into the class on Friday, it was like a homecoming.

So many smiles. So much laughter and joy. And, yes, impromptu hugs.

It felt like a family gathering, not a school function.

As I left the building feeling more exhausted than I have in months, another teacher stopped me.

“Steve! I wanted to catch you before you left!” she said.

She told me that she gave her students a survey in her class as an icebreaker. One of the questions was to name their favorite teacher from last year. My name came up a lot.

What can you say about that?

I’m actually getting choked up just typing this.

In my years in the classroom, I’ve helped a lot of kids get better test scores.

But that’s not why they come up to me. That’s not why they remember me.

I touched their lives in some meaningful way.

And they have done the same for me.

I’m just a guy who should really take smaller bites of his tacos.

But they make me feel like a hero.

I am so grateful.

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The Necessity and Importance of Teachers

June 29, 2018 stevenmsinger Accountability, Betsy DeVos, capitalism, Civil Rights, Common Core, Competency Based Education, computers, Corporate Education "Reform", Donald Trump, edtech, Education, Healthcare, immigration, Junk science, Labor, Learning, Philosophy, Politics, Poverty, Prejudice, School Funding, Schools, small class size, Standardized Testing, Students, Teachers, Unions collective bargaining, common core, Competency Based Education, Depersonalized Learning, ed-tech, education, Janus v. AFSCME, Learning, learning ecosystem, personalized learning, standardized testing, Students, teachers, unions

Are teachers necessary?

That’s the question big business is asking.

Well, “asking” isn’t really the right word. They’re implying an answer.

Hedge fund mangers and ed tech soothsayers are betting hundreds of millions of dollars that educators aren’t really all that important.

They’re planning a future where real live people play a much smaller role in student learning.

They’re mapping out a world where kids don’t even have to go to school to grasp the basics, where learning can be accomplished anywhere but instigated, tracked, and assessed on-line through various computer platforms.

It’s called a learning ecosystem, personalized learning, competency based or individualized education. With little to no guiding principles, management or oversight, kids would engage in educational tasks on various devices in order to earn digital badges.

Children would bounce from a few hours of Khan Academy videos here to a software package there and Voila! “Modern” education!

It’s a brave new world where investors hope to make a bundle by reducing the cost and pocketing the savings.

Since teachers are the biggest cost, they’re the first things to go.

Since their rights as workers and human beings are a roadblock on this learning superhighway, they’re the first to go.

And since they’re in a prime position to see exactly what’s going on and to object when this ed tech paradise exploits the students it ostensibly is being built for, they MUST go – now, as soon as possible.

The Supreme Court’s recent decision in Janus v AFSCME is part of that process. It’s another way to weaken labor and clear the path for business – the collusion of politics and corporations to steamroll the rest of us and swipe more of our money regardless of the children in the steamrollers way.

So when I ask “Are teachers necessary?” it’s not a purely philosophical question.

The answer will have a major impact on both the education of today and where we go in the future.

If teachers are not necessary, that removes one of the biggest obstacles to this frightening and uncertain future.

Unfortunately, no matter how much I want to answer in the affirmative that teachers are necessary, I can’t do so.

Even after thousands of years of recorded history, learning remains a mysterious process. Yet it doesn’t take much reflection to realize that it can take place without the presence of a teacher.

Some things can be figured out solely by the learner in the right circumstances.

In fact, many academic studies have shown that teachers are not even the most important factor in the process.

Roughly 60% of academic achievement can be explained by family background – things like income and poverty level. School factors only account for 20% – and of that, teachers account for 15%. (see Hanushek et al. 1998; Rockoff 2003; Goldhaber et al. 1999; Rowan et al. 2002; Nye et al. 2004).

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

In short, teachers are not necessary to student learning.

But neither are doctors necessary to healing or lawyers necessary to acquittals.

Necessity is a very high bar.

To survive, you need food, shelter and clothing. However, having all three does not mean you have a good life. Slaves had all three – no free person would choose to trade places with someone in generational servitude simply because they had everything they needed to survive.

The same with medicine. If shot in the arm, you could provide me with all the medical equipment necessary to remove the bullet, but I would still have a difficult time doing it by myself. I COULD. A doctor is not NECESSARY for that operation. But without a doctor present, my chances of getting the best medical care drop dramatically.

Moreover, you could pop me in a courtroom without the benefit of legal counsel and it’s not impossible that I could argue my way to the dismissal of all charges against me. But the likelihood of doing so is infinitesimal – as undocumented youngsters are discovering when forced into the courtroom to defend against deportation without an attorney or even their parents present.

The same is true of education.

Though teachers are not necessary to learning, they are vital to it.

Having a teacher dramatically boosts a student’s chances, and the more disadvantaged that student is, the more he or she benefits from an educator.

The academic schemes of the corporate class amount to changing the field into the equivalent of an automated teller or a business robocall.

You can purchase your groceries through the self-checkout line. You can get your customer service from an automated list. But neither of these are the highest quality service.

They are cheap alternatives.

They are ways for the business to cut costs and boost profits. Neither have anything to do with making things better for the customer.

And when it comes to education, eliminating (or even drastically reducing access to) the teacher will decrease the quality of the service beyond recognition.

A 2009 report, Poverty and Potential: Out-of-School Factors and School Success, released by the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice outlined several real world solutions to increase academic outcomes. None of them involve the elimination of teachers.

They are:

1. Reduce the rate of low birth weight children among African Americans

2. Reduce drug and alcohol abuse

3. Reduce pollutants in U.S. cites and move people away from toxic sites

4. Provide universal and free medical care for all citizens

5. Insure that no one suffers from food insecurity

6. Reduce the rates of family violence in low-income households

7. Improve mental health services among the poor

8. More equitably distribute low-income housing throughout communities

9. Reduce both the mobility and absenteeism rates of children

10. Provide high-quality preschools for all children

11. Provide summer programs for students from low-income homes to reduce summer losses in their academic achievement.

These are ways you improve education FOR CHILDREN.

This is how you make things better FOR THE LEARNER and not necessarily for the investor class.

And when it comes to teachers, there are numerous ways you can help them provide support for students.

First of all, hire more of them!

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

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

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

And if you want to improve the quality of the teachers in those classrooms, here’s an easy fix – pay them.

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

Sadly, it only gets worse as time goes on.

Teacher salary starts low, and grows even more slowly.

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

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

If you want to attract the best candidates to the profession, you need to make it more attractive. One way to do that is to increase the salary.

And finally, stop micromanaging everything teachers do and stomping on their rights. To do their job effectively teachers need autonomy. They need the ability to make decisions on the ground based on the empirical evidence gathered in the classroom.

Moreover, they need the freedom to speak out when something is going wrong in their buildings or districts. When software packages are purchased that spy on students for corporations, they need the ability to sound the alarm. When high stakes standardized testing is out of control, they need to be able to voice their objections. When shoddy, second-rate academic standards are forced onto them by politicians and business people, they need to be able to blow the whistle.

To do that, they need their union protections. They need collective bargaining rights to give them the power to counterbalance the forces of greed and corruption that have always been at the schoolhouse door.

As a country we have taken our attention away from what’s really important. We’ve stopped focusing on how to make education better and instead equated it with how to make it more profitable for those who are already wealthy.

Teachers are vital to education. They are lifelines to struggling students. We should find ways to support them and not constantly undercutting their social standing, autonomy and rights.

The importance of teachers is beyond doubt. As is the importance of society in supporting them.

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“He Was Kind” – My Students Describe What I’m Like as a Teacher

June 14, 2018 stevenmsinger Accountability, Charter Schools, Compassion, Corporate Education "Reform", Data, Education, Learning, privatization, Schools, Standardized Testing, Students, Teachers Compassion, education, educators, Kindness, public schools, schools, Students, Teacher Appreciation Week, Teacher Evaluation, teachers

What’s the most important attribute of a good teacher?

Some might say intelligence.

You want a teacher who knows the subject matter and can convey it clearly to students.

Others might say classroom management.

You want a teacher who keeps things organized and gets kids to behave.

But for me the most important thing a teacher can be is kind.

I’m not saying intelligence, classroom management and a host of other qualities are unimportant, but if you approach your students with good will in your heart, the rest seems to fall into place.

This isn’t a long-held pedagogical belief I could have articulated for you at the beginning of the school year.

It came to me – as did so much else – from my students.

At the end of the year as my 7^th graders are finishing up their final projects and we’re tidying up the room, I always give them a little survey about their experience in the class.

“I’ve been grading you all year,” I say. “Now’s your turn to grade me.”

The surveys can be anonymous – kids needn’t put down their names, and whatever they write has no impact on their grades.

Yet the results are always enlightening.

I wrote in detail two years ago about the survey and the kinds of responses I often get.

But this year it was one of the simplest comments that really got me thinking.

“He was kind.”

That’s what one of my students told me that I had done especially well during the year.

“He was kind.” That’s all.

It was a response that was echoed by many of my students.

Another child wrote:

“He was kind (and awesome). One of the best teachers.”

And another:

“He can’t [improve]. He is the best he can be and is the teacher I wish I had every year.”

This is all very flattering, but what exactly did all this niceness mean?

How did being a kind teacher help me do my job? What did I do that helped students learn?

They had an answer for that, too:

“He came and sat with me and helped me through everything I needed help with.”

***

“If we needed help on anything he helped and explained everything well so work was easier.”

***

“What my teacher did to help me succeed was that he made me feel motivated to do the work in class and not giving us so much work at once.”

***

“[He] taught me how to write essays, indent on papers and showed me a lot of useful things.”

Another particularly enlightening comment was this one:

“I don’t know [how he could improve], but in this class you grew with us. So uh yeah.”

And I do try to change and grow with my students. When your mandate is to individualize instruction to fit each particular child, I don’t know how you can do otherwise.

This means opening yourself up and letting students know who you are and what you stand for.

I try not to inflict my political, religious or philosophical beliefs on my classes. However, I think some core values come through.

For instance, my students knew I was going to Connecticut to give a TED Talk on the current state of public schools.

They knew my thoughts on standardized testing and school privatization – perhaps not in detail but the general shape of them, certainly. They knew my firm conviction against racism, sexism and prejudice of any kind.

Perhaps that’s why one of them wrote this:

“You’re not only a good teacher. You’re a good friend, and man.”

***

“P.S. – Nice jokes and commentary.”

Of course there were dissenting opinions. One child thought I was too nice:

“He is way too nice for me and you give way too much essays for people to handle. But overall grade 94%. He doesn’t like Tom Brady so yeah. And he likes the Steelers.”

I guess no one’s perfect. But how interesting she thought either she deserved a stronger hand or would have been more motivated by fear and consequences. Yet I have to take her with a few grains of salt because this student identified herself on her response and had a friendly rivalry with me about football. She said I was too nice but then referenced our interpersonal rapport.

Another student highlighted how I wasn’t excessively permissive:

[He was good at] “Helping me with instructions and keeping me on task.”

Most comments were unbridled approbation:

What did your teacher do especially well this year to help you succeed? – “Uh, everything.”

***

In what areas can your teacher improve his/her instruction? – “I’m not sure. That’s how good a teacher he was.”

***

“I think you did awesome, Mr. Singer. Thanks for being my reading teacher!”

***

“I don’t think my teacher needs to improve. He’s already a great teacher.”

And so another school year comes to an end.

I’ll miss this class. It was the first year I taught exclusively 7^th grade. I’d taught one or two sections of that grade before, but never only that grade.

I’m more used to 8^th grade. You wouldn’t think there’d be a world of difference between the two. And who knows? Perhaps if I teach the same grade level next year things will be even more unexpected because the kids will be different.

But when that final bell chimed, I was surprised that so many kids came up to me with hugs and tears.

They really didn’t want to see me go, and, frankly, I don’t want to see them go, either.

If I could follow them next year, I would.

I gave them everything I had to give.

I gave them my heart. I shared with them my life.

And I got back so much more.

That’s what non-teachers don’t understand.

Education is created through often reciprocal relationships.

Learner and teacher are tied together in a positive feedback loop. Sometimes it’s hard to tell which is which and sometimes there is no difference at all.

Thank you so much, last year’s students.

Thank you for letting me be your teacher.

Thank you for bringing out the best in me as I tried to do the same for you.

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Don’t Worry About Grade Inflation. Worry About Grading Fairly.

June 11, 2018June 12, 2018 stevenmsinger Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Bill Gates, capitalism, Common Core, Compassion, Corporate Education "Reform", Data, Education, Learning, Politics, Prejudice, Schools, Standardized Testing, Students, Teachers abundance, assessment, cut scores, economics, education, evaluation, fairness, Grade Inflation, grading on a curve, Myths, scarcity, schools, standardized testing, Students, teachers

Hard work should be rewarded.

If you earn an A in a given class, you should get an A on your report card.

And this is true no matter how many of your classmates work just as hard as you do.

If everyone in class gives it their best shot, they should all get A’s. It is not the teacher’s job to split hairs and sort kids into arbitrary categories in order to preserve a monetary myth about grades’ value based on a model of scarcity.

Those who demand otherwise are under the spell of one of the oldest myths in academia – grade inflation.

It goes like this: You can’t give all your students excellent marks! That would devalue what it means to get an A!

To which I reply: Bullshit.

Almost every plane that leaves an airport lands safely. Does that devalue what it means to travel? When you arrive at your destination, are you upset that everyone else has arrived safely or would you feel better if some of the planes crashed?

According to the American Journal of Public Health, 93% of New York City restaurants earn an “A” from the health department. Does that shake your faith in the food service industry? Would you feel better if more restaurants were unsanitary? Would your food digest more efficiently if there were more people going home with stomach pain and food poisoning?

Of course not! In fact, these stats actually reassure us about both industries. We’re glad air travel and eating out is so safe. Why would we feel any different about academia?

The idea of grade inflation is a simple imposition of the concept of economic value onto learning. It has no meaning in the field of academics, psychology or ethics. It is just some fools who worship money imaging that the whole world works the same way – and if it doesn’t, it should.

It’s nothing new.

Conservatives have been whining about grade inflation for at least a century. It’s not that the quality of teachers has declined and they’re letting all their students pass without doing the work. It’s that certain types of curmudgeons want to justify their own intelligence by denying others the same privilege.

It’s the “I’ve Got Mine” philosophy.

We see the same thing with Baby Boomers who grew up in the counter culture and pushed for progressive values in their youth. Once they got everything they wanted for themselves, they became conservatives in their old age and worked to deny the same things for subsequent generations.

It’s the very definition of Age scoffing at Youth – a pathology that goes back at least to Hesiod if not further. (Golden age of man, my foot!)

Moreover, there is no authentic way to prove grade inflation is actually happening. Grades are a subjective measure of student learning. They are human beings’ attempt to gauge an invisible mental process. At best they are frail approximations of a complex neural process that is not even bounded temporally or causally. If a student doesn’t know something now, they may come to know it later even without further academic stimulus. Moreover, isolating the stimulus that produced the learning is also nearly impossible.

The important thing is not grade inflation. It is ensuring that grades are given fairly.

If students work hard, they should be rewarded.

I am very upfront with my students about this. And doing so seems to have a positive and motivating effect on them.

This year, I had students who told me they had never read a book from cover-to-cover before my class. I’ve had students look at their report cards in shock saying they’ve never received such high marks in Language Arts before. And doing so makes them want to try all the harder next year to repeat the results.

They leave me excited about learning. They feel empowered and ready to give academics their all. Because the greatest lesson a teacher can instill is that the student is capable of learning.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t just hand out these grades. Students have to earn them. They have to demonstrate that they have actually learned something.

Everyone rarely measures up to the challenge. But that’s not the point. Everyone COULD. There is nothing in my design that prohibits that outcome. I don’t start with the assumption that I’ll only have 3 A’s, 4 B’s, 10 C’s, etc.

In fact, it is THAT scarcity model that dumbs down academics. If I grade on a curve like that, I have to give out a certain number of high marks regardless of achievement. I’m committed to giving out those 3 A’s regardless of whether that trio of students deserve it or not. However, in my abundance model, I give exactly the number of A’s that are deserved. If that’s zero, no one gets an A. If that’s everyone, then everyone gets an A. It all depends on what students actually deserve, not some preconceived notion about how the world works.

To do this, I give very few tests. I just don’t find them to be very helpful assessments.

A test is a snapshot of student learning. It has its place, but the information it gives you is very limited.

Most of my grades are based on projects, homework, essays, class discussion, creative writing, journaling, poetry, etc. Give me a string of data points from which I can extrapolate a fair grade – not just one high stakes data point.

This may work to some degree because of the subject I teach. Language arts is an exceptionally subjective subject, after all. It may be more challenging to do this in math or science. However, it is certainly attainable because it is not really that hard to determine whether students have given you their best work.

Good teaching practices lend themselves to good assessment.

You get to know your students. You watch them work. You help them when they struggle. By the time they hand in their final product, you barely need to read it. You know exactly what it says because you were there for its construction.

For me, this doesn’t mean I have no students who fail. Almost every year I have a few who don’t achieve. This is usually because of attendance issues, lack of sleep, lack of nutrition, home issues or simple laziness.

I only have control over what happens in the classroom, after all. I can call home and try to work with parents, but if those parents are – themselves – absent, unavailable or unwilling to work with me, there’s little I can do.

And before you start on about standardized testing and the utopia of “objectivity” it can bring, let me tell you about one such student I had who was not even trying in my class.

He never turned in homework, never tried his best on assignments, rarely attended and sleepwalked through the year. However, he knew his only chance was the state mandated reading test – so for three days he was present and awake. The resulting test score was the only reason he moved on to the next grade.

Was he smart? Yes. Did he deserve to go on to the next grade not having learned the important lessons of his classmates? No. But your so-called “objective” measure valued three days of effort over 180.

The problem is that we are in love with certain academic myths.

MYTH 1: Grading must be objective.

WRONG! Grading will never be objective because it is done by subjective humans. These standardized tests you’re so in love with are deeply biased on economic and racial lines. Whether you pass or fail is determined by a cut score and a grading curve that changes from year-to-year making them essentially useless for comparisons and as valid assessments. They’re just a tool for big business to make money off the academic process.

MYTH 2: Learning is Economics.

WRONG! Grades are not money. They don’t function in any way like currency or capital. They aren’t something to be bought and sold. They are an approximate indication of academic success. Treating them as a commodity only degrades their value and the value of students and learning, itself.

Treating grades economically actually represses the desire to learn, dispels curiosity and eliminates the intrinsic value of education.

So go ahead – inflate the “value” of your grades.

Give A’s to every student who deserves it.

That’s how you promote learning and fairly assess it.

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Dear Betsy DeVos, I Will NEVER Report My Students to ICE

June 1, 2018 stevenmsinger #BlackLivesMatter, Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Child Predators, Child Safety, Civil Rights, Compassion, Donald Trump, Education, Hate Crimes, immigration, Learning, Local Control, Parents, Politics, Prejudice, President, Propaganda, protest, Racism, Refugees, Republican, Schools, Social Justice, Students, Teachers, White Privilege Betsy DeVos, bigot, education, immigration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, schools, Students, teachers

Teachers fill a lot of roles in our public schools.

We’re mentors to kids in need.

We’re aides to students struggling with new concepts and skills.

We’re homework-givers, pencil-providers, idea-encouragers, lunch-buyers, scrape-bandagers, hand-holders, hug-givers, good listeners, counselors, caregivers and – yes – sometimes even butt-kickers.

It’s no wonder that we occasionally get mistaken for mothers and fathers.

But one thing we will never be is a snitch.

Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos recently intimated that principals and teachers could report their undocumented children to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

She’s not going to say what we should do one way or another. She’s just saying that this is something we COULD do if we wanted.

If that results in those kids and their families being deported, well we are a nation of laws, after all.

It’s a remark that sounds so reasonable to some folks.

Luckily, I speak dog whistle.

So did the U.S. Supreme Court back in 1982 when justices ruled in Plyler v. Doe that schools cannot deny children their right to a free education based on immigration status.

When kids are afraid to learn because they or their parents or extended family may be undocumented, that has a smothering affect on the classroom.

When ICE raids a local business, we see a sudden drop in class attendance.

So if students thought their teachers or principals were scrutinizing them to determine their citizenship status, we’d be discouraging many with brown skin or extra-national credentials from ever coming back.

By suggesting that educators have a choice whether to obey established law or to become self-appointed border patrol officers, DeVos actually is prescribing how we should act.

Well, not this teacher, Betsy.

Not now. Not EVER.

No matter who you are – black, white or brown – a public school is a sanctuary. It is where kids of all different races and creeds come to escape from the ravages of poverty, violence and indifference.

Teachers are not the enforcers of our broken, bent and biased immigration policy. It is not our job to oblige xenophobia and bigotry.

It is our job to teach, to protect and inspire.

Sure, I’ve made my fair share of calls to parents, healthcare professionals and Child Protective Services.

I’ve reported abuse, addiction and mental illness.

But I did that to protect my kids. And I do think of them as my kids.

When these little people come toddling into my class, I take a kind of ownership of them.

For the time they’re here, we’re family. I take interest in their lives and they take interest in mine.

They know all about my wife and daughter, my parents and grandparents. And I know about theirs.

We don’t just learn grammar, reading and writing. We share our lives with each other.

We share a mutual trust and respect.

If I reported even a single student for a suspected immigration violation, I would lose that forever.

It’s sad how much things have changed in a little over year.

Hispanic names have become Anglicized. Angelo has becomes Angel. Julio has become Jules. Jorge is now George.

The dulcet melody of Spanish has been silenced. You’ll only hear it in muffled voices if you wander by a few lockers, but never in class.

My kids aren’t even 13 yet, but many of them have already learned to hide.

Don’t appear different. Don’t let anyone know your roots extend beyond national borders.

Be “normal.” Be homogenized, bland American.

That’s the world we’ve built and it’s the one that DeVos is encouraging with her tin pot nationalism.

Some things don’t change when you cross municipal lines – human decency is one of them.

So I won’t be reporting any of my students to ICE.

I won’t help the Gestapo separate parents and children based on citizenship status.

I won’t help set up ethnic checkpoints where armed guards get to ask “suspicious persons” for their papers.

White supremacy was bad enough before Trump was elected. I won’t help the unfortunately named Department of Homeland Security become the protector of a new white trash Fatherland.

I will defend my students. I will stand up for their safety and their rights.

That’s just what we do in public school. We look after our own.

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School Vouchers and Runaway EdTech Pave the Way for the Destruction of the Very Concept of School

May 30, 2018 stevenmsinger Accountability, Betsy DeVos, capitalism, Charter Schools, Child Predators, Civil Rights, Competency Based Education, computers, Corporate Education "Reform", Cyber Charter Schools, Data, Data Mining, edtech, Education, Labor, Learning, Local Control, Parents, Politics, privatization, School Choice, School Funding, school vouchers, Schools, Standardized Testing, Students, Teachers, Unions, video games Competency Based Education, edtech, Education Savings Accounts, individualized education, learning ecosystems, PA Senate, personalized learning, Privatize, school vouchers, schools, Students, teachers, technology

School is where you learn to learn.

A teacher with an advanced degree and decades of experience devotes her time to figuring out what helps you comprehend the world around you.

And, if she’s good, she imparts that lesson to you as well.

Imagine if we took that away.

Imagine a world where there are no schools – just free range children plopped in front of a computer or an iPad and told to go learn something.

No schools, no teachers, just gangs of students walking the streets, stopping along the way to thumb messages to each other on social media, play a video game or take an on-line test.

That’s the world many EdTech entrepreneurs are trying to build.

And school vouchers are helping them do it.

Take Education Savings Accounts (ESAs) and other market based privatization schemes.

Normally, the federal, state and local government collect taxes to fund an individual child’s education, which is then spent at a public or charter school.

At a public school all that money must be spent on the student. At a charter school some of that money can be pocketed as profit by the private company who runs the school.

Public schools provide a better alternative because the funding must be dedicated to the student, living within a district’s coverage area guarantees enrollment, the school must be managed by an elected school board with open meetings and a plethora of other amenities you won’t find at a privatized institution. But at least the charter school is a school!

However, an ESA or other voucher would allow that money to go elsewhere. It could go to funding the tuition at a private or parochial school where organizers can use it however they like – pocketing some and using the rest to help the child as you’ll find in most charter schools.

But as bad as that is, vulture capitalists want to add another destination for that money – let it pile up in the bank where it can be used for discrete education services provided by the EdTech industry.

It’s almost like homeschooling – without the loving parent being in charge.

It goes by many names – a learning ecosystem, personalized learning, competency based or individualized education.

But it’s really a single person cyber school with little to no guiding principles, management or oversight.

Education is reduced to a series of badges students can earn by completing certain tasks.

Reading a book or an article gives you a badge. Answering a series of multiple-choice questions on a reading earns you more badges. And if you’ve completed a certain task satisfactorily, you can even earn a badge by teaching that same material to others.

It’s the low wage gig economy applied to education. We just transform a crappy job market where workers bounce from a few hours of minimum wage labor here to a few hours of minimum wage toil there – all without benefits or union protections – into learning. Children bouncing from a few hours of Khan Academy videos here to a software package there and Voila! “Modern” education!

In short, it’s school without the school or teachers.

And make no mistake, it’s not about improving the quality of education. It’s about providing the cheapest possible alternative and selling it to rubes as innovation.

The wealthy will still get institutions of learning. They will still be educated by the most qualified teachers in the world. They will still learn how to learn.

The best path to becoming a truly educated person involves human interaction and mentorship. You need experienced professional educators who use the empirical evidence they see in the classroom about your child to tailor lessons to their needs. The wealthy would never dream of making their children learn from the academic equivalent of an automated check out aisle or telemarketer robocall.

It is only the poor and middle class who will be released like chickens into the pasture of a learning ecosystem.

And as an added benefit, the badge structure creates a market where investors can bet and profit off of who gains badges and to what degree on the model of crypto-currencies like Bitcoin! So all the stability of the pre-crash housing market! What could possibly go wrong!?

Let me be clear – this is the ultimate goal of the school privatization movement.

Charter and voucher schools are only the tip of the iceberg. They still require real human beings to act as teachers (though they need not be as well educated or have as much experience as public school teachers). They still require buildings and grounds.

But this depersonalized learning approach allows them to do away with all of that. They can just provide students with an Internet accessible device and some dubious on-line tracking and management system.

Then they can pocket all the rest of the money taxpayers put aside to educate children and call it profit.

And they can use the programs students access to “learn” as a way to gather valuable marketing data about our kids. Everything students do on the device is free market research – every word they input, every keystroke, every site visited down to the slightest eye movement.

This is the logical conclusion of the monetization of education and an economy that only sees value in others as human capital that can be bought, sold and exploited.

This is where the privatization movement is going. And they’re laying the groundwork in legislation being proposed in our state capitals today.

In Pennsylvania, for instance, Senate Bill 2 proposes the creation of just such ESAs. If approved, the immediate result would be to boost private and parochial schools.

However, given a few years to strengthen the technologies and systems needed for a full learning ecosystem, the same law would allow taxpayer money to be used in this way.

And it’s something hardly anyone is talking about.

We’re fighting the privatization systems of today as the plutocrats set up the privatization systems of tomorrow.

Even if school vouchers never take off to the degree necessary to scaffold the most robust learning ecosystems, EdTech lobbyists are trying to install as much of this garbage as they can into our existing schools.

They are using one-to-one iPad initiatives and grants to fund up-to-date computers, Wi-Fi networks and software packages to pave the way for this brave new world of digital exploitation. They are selling our test score obsessed bureaucrats software like iStation and IXL that bridge the gap between test prep and learning ecosystems lite.

You can walk into many schools today where students spend hours on-line earning digital badges for watching videos and taking stealth assessments.

Few people are sounding the alarm because few people understand what’s going on.

This is not conjecture. This is not a conspiracy theory. This is the goal the edtech entrepreneurs will gladly tell you all about hoping you’ll invest.

There are hours of videos, pages of documents, mountains of graphs, charts and graphics about how this scheme will pay off for investment bankers and venture capitalists. (See below)

The only true way to win this battle is a cultural shift away from dehumanizing runaway capitalism.

We need to stop thinking that the private sector is always better than the public good. We need to stop allowing big business and corporations to get away without paying their fair share. We need to increase the voice of citizens and decrease the megaphone of money and privilege.

Otherwise, the science fiction dystopias of books like “Ready Player One” will no longer be fiction.

They will become the reality for every school child in this country.

A reality where school, itself, is a thing of the past.

And education is reduced to the mercenary collection of discrete skills that add up to nothing of value for the students except their own enslavement.

But don’t take my word for it. Here is the learning ecosystems model from the EdTech industry, itself, in corporate officers own words and graphics:

LEARNING IS EARNING – the scariest 6:58 video you’ll ever see.

KNOWLEDGEWORKS Vision for the Future of Education:

Graphic as a PDF

Listing for PARENTS AS CONSUMERS Symposium

Read all about it her e.

FIGHT BACK AGAINST SCHOOL PRIVATIZATION AND RUNAWAY EDTECH:

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gadflyonthewallblog

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

Students

No One Ever Remembered a Teacher for Raising Standardized Test Scores

The Necessity and Importance of Teachers

“He Was Kind” – My Students Describe What I’m Like as a Teacher

Don’t Worry About Grade Inflation. Worry About Grading Fairly.

School Vouchers and Runaway EdTech Pave the Way for the Destruction of the Very Concept of School

LEARNING IS EARNING – the scariest 6:58 video you’ll ever see.

KNOWLEDGEWORKS Vision for the Future of Education:

Listing for PARENTS AS CONSUMERS Symposium

FIGHT BACK AGAINST SCHOOL PRIVATIZATION AND RUNAWAY EDTECH: