Vaccine for Teachers, Shortages, and The Shock Doctrine

VACCINATE TEACHERS

Anthony Fauci: ‘Get Teachers Vaccinated as Quickly as We Possibly Can’

Teachers were acclaimed as heroes when the pandemic lockdowns occurred in March. They adapted quickly to new technologies and new circumstances. That changed quickly, however, when people (and the media) realized that not everyone could stay home with their children and help them learn. Getting the "kids back in school" was a high priority. Teachers, apparently, are essential workers after all.

The CDC has guidelines for reopening schools which include making sure that everyone has sufficient PPE, that the school is well ventilated, and that no one, staff or students, should come to school if they test positive or have been in contact with someone who has tested positive for COVID. That means, if a school can't follow those guidelines (and others) it's not safe to reopen.

Meanwhile, teachers unions are fighting for the health and safety of their members and their members' students. Our public school infrastructure is not the best and many schools don't have adequate ventilation, especially older buildings. Most schools don't have the resources to make sure that all their students are COVID free before they enter the classroom...nor do they all have extra money to spend on PPE for their teachers and staff members.

So teachers unions are getting blamed for "insisting that those lazy teachers stay home and get paid for not working." Meanwhile, teachers and students continue to test positive for COVID.

And in Indiana, teachers, noted by the CDC as essential workers needing vaccines ASAP, were skipped when health professionals and first responders were vaccinated.

If we really want schools to open shouldn't we be willing to pay to make them safe for students and teachers?

From Anthony Fauci, quoted in Education Week

“We’re not going to get back to normal until we get children back into school, both for the good of the children, for the good of the parents, and for the good of the community,” he said. “We want to make sure we do that by giving the teachers and the teams associated with teachers the resources that they need to do that. The idea of, ‘Go do it on your own'—that doesn’t work.”

Making sure schools can reopen safely is a personal issue for him, Fauci added: His daughter is a 3rd grade science teacher in New Orleans.

THE TEACHER SHORTAGE

27% of teachers are considering quitting because of Covid, survey finds

This is from December 2020. The teacher shortage isn't going away.

We were already losing teachers at an alarming rate before the pandemic hit. Now, with uncertainty about school funding and uncertainty about classroom safety, many teachers are calling it quits.

From CNBC Make It

The coronavirus pandemic has put significant pressure on America’s teachers. Some have been asked to weigh risks to their personal health and teach in person. Some have been asked to teach from behind computer screens and perfect distance learning. Many have been asked to do both.

These pressures are taking a toll on teachers across the country.

According to a new report, 77% of educators are working more today than a year ago, 60% enjoy their job less and 59% do not feel secure in their school district’s health and safety precautions. Roughly 27% say they are considering leaving their job, retiring early or taking a leave of absence because of the pandemic.

“Before the pandemic, large numbers of U.S. educators were already leaving the profession due to the financial pressure the job puts on their lives,” reads the report. “Then COVID-19 came along.”

THE SHOCK DOCTRINE COMES TO YOUR PUBLIC SCHOOL

Americans United Gears Up To Oppose Private School Voucher Bills

The pandemic has the country in an economic as well as a medical uproar. Social unrest related to political upheaval has added to the chaos. In this atmosphere, it should come as no surprise that "edupreneurs" want to get their hands on the billions of dollars spent each year on public education.

Across the country, state legislatures are starting their legislative year with bills focusing on transferring public funds to private and privately owned (aka charter) schools.

To add to the trouble, public schools are hemorrhaging teachers as the normal stresses of being a teacher in the 21st century are compounded by the stresses of the pandemic, virtual teaching, combination teaching, and teaching without proper equipment.

The loss of professional teachers is a plus for the privatizers. As states come to the conclusion that there aren't enough professional teachers for their students, they'll weaken certification requirements allowing untrained or poorly trained people to take charge of classrooms -- because of course, anyone can teach. This weakening of teacher professionalism will lead to lower pay for those in the classroom and weakened teachers unions - a definite plus for those who want to profit from the economic challenges faced by the country.

Enter "Disaster Capitalists" as described by Naomi Klein in her 2007 book, The Shock Doctrine. The crisis in education can only be solved by the private sector. Hence the pressure on legislatures to give public dollars to private schools and CMOs.

From Americans United for the Separation of Church and State

We know that private school voucher programs are bad public policy for so many reasons, including that they funnel desperately needed funds away from public schools to private, mostly religious, schools. And public schools face unprecedented financial difficulties right now because of COVID-19. There are increased costs to offer virtual learning and make sure in-person classes are safe for teachers and students. At the same time, states are cutting public school budgets because of decreased revenue. The Learning Policy Institute estimated that COVID-19 has cost public schools between $199 billion and $246 billion. Lawmakers should not drain additional money away from public schools – which 90 percent of our students attend – in the middle of a pandemic.

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2020 Medley #8: Public Education, Disaster Capitalism, and COVID-19

UPDATE: A version of this blog entry appears in the Friday, March 20 edition of the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette, titled: Coping in the time of COVID

DISASTER

Naomi Klein, in her book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, described how natural and man-made disasters open the door to privatization. During the COVID-19 disaster, we must ensure that the same thing doesn't happen to public education.

Schools have been starved over the last few decades. The lack of funding for public education, and other public institutions and public infrastructure, have opened up schools to vulnerability under the Shock Doctrine. Klein wrote...

When it comes to paying contractors, the sky is the limit; when it comes to financing the basic functions of the state, the coffers are empty.

and...

The American Society of Civil Engineers said in 2007 that the U.S. had fallen so far behind in maintaining its public infrastructure -- roads, bridges, schools, dams -- that it would take more than a trillion and half dollars over five years to bring it back up to standard. Instead, these types of expenditures are being cut back. At the same time, public infrastructure around the world is facing unprecedented stress, with hurricanes, cyclones, floods and forest fires all increasing in frequency and intensity. It's easy to imagine a future in which growing numbers of cities have their frail and long-neglected infrastructures knocked out by disasters and then are left to rot, their core services never repaired or rehabilitated. The well-off, meanwhile, will withdraw into gated communities, their needs met by privatized providers.

COVID-19

As of this writing, schools are closed for more than half of America's children. But, as we've discussed in these blogs over the last fourteen years, public schools, and public school teachers, are about more than academics.

Teachers care about their students. Friends of Betsy DeVos may think that we're only in it for the money, but public school teachers care about the whole child...and as Nancy Flanagan writes below, teachers are First Responders when it comes to taking care of the nation's children.

The following articles describe what public school teachers and public schools are doing to help children and their parents thrive during this stressful time. I recommend that you read all of them in their entirety...

ED-TECH

HEWN (Hack Education Weekly Newsletter), No. 344

Ed-tech is ready to dump their items on schools (for a price, of course)...especially now when those schools that have closed are using technology to connect with their students. Remember that computers, phones, iPads, and similar digital devices are tools, not ends in themselves.

...an assertion that rests on the assumption that ed-tech is good, that it can replicate at home what happens in the classroom. “This may be our moment,” ed-tech folks exclaim, giddily sharing lists of their favorite digital learning tools (with little concern, it seems for questions of accessibility, privacy, or security) and tips for quickly moving “to the cloud.” Of course, education technology — as a field, an industry, a discipline, a solution, what have you — has had decades and decades and decades to get this right. It still hasn’t. So when you hear “this is our moment,” you should recall perhaps the thesis of Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine. What we’re poised to see in response to the coronavirus — and not just in education, to be fair — is more disaster capitalism, and “disaster capitalists share this same inability to distinguish between creation and destruction, between hurting and healing.”

TEACHERS AND SCHOOLS STEP UP

Coronavirus Has Shown Us the Vital Role Schools Play, But Will America Listen?

Schools feed and house (and sometimes clothe) students every day. Those students who have little or no home resources will suffer most from the lack of open school buildings.

The coronavirus pandemic has laid bare something that educators have always known. Schools, side by side with hospitals, are the most important institutions in our country’s social safety net. Of course, we’ve said this since the era of school shootings, where teachers have placed their bodies (literally) in front of students to keep them safe.

But the coronavirus pandemic has put this into even sharper focus, as we grapple with the domino effects of closing entire school districts for prolonged periods at a time. Some public schools will be closed anywhere from a day to a month. Yet, others, such as the New York City system, are still, at this writing, open.

Thus far, dealing with the coronavirus has highlighted four important things about our nation’s schools:

Schools are key to keeping the economy running...
Schools provide respite housing for homeless students during daytime hours...
Schools help to prevent large-scale child hunger every day...
Schools are the primary source of public health information for many families.

Once Again Teachers are First Responders

Schools and teachers have stepped up to help their students.

...Teachers are like those firefighters in Kirkland, Washington who came to transport extremely ill nursing home residents to the hospital, without gloves and masks. Just doing our jobs, just following directions.

Thank you to the hundreds of thousands of teachers who organized take-home packets and figured out how to get coursework online, even if they didn’t have a clue about how to do it before last week. And thank you to those who pointed out, with considerable asperity, how incredibly inequitable virtual instruction will be, but went ahead and made plans to do it anyway. Thanks to all who sent home food or arranged for food pickup—or even made a single call to a single household, to make sure an adult was home.

Nobody knows how to do this well. Nobody. But schools and teachers are still trying.

Disaster Capitalism, Online Instruction, and What Covid-19 Is Teaching Us About Public Schools and Teachers

Nancy Bailey's blog entry was the catalyst for this post.

We’re reminded of disaster capitalism, a concept highlighted by Naomi Klein in The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, how Katrina was used in New Orleans to convert traditional public schools to charter schools. Within nineteen months, with most of the city’s poor residents still in exile, New Orleans’ public school system had been almost completely replaced by privately run charter schools. (p. 5-6). Who thought that could happen?

The transitioning of technology into public schools, not simply as a supplemental tool for teachers to use at their discretion, but as a transformative means to remove teachers from the equation, has been highlighted with groups like Digital Promise and KnowledgeWorks. Both promote online learning and it’s difficult to find teachers in the mix.

Combining this with the intentional defunding of public schools, shoddy treatment of teachers including the unwillingness to pay them appropriate salaries, inadequate resources and support staff, crumbling buildings, and the destruction of public schooling in America, should we not question what placing students online at this strange time will mean in the future to our schools?

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Listen to This #1: Don't be a Malfoy!

Random quotes...

DON'T BE A MALFOY

From a sign at the Women's March, January 20, 2018, in Oklahoma City. Published in The Oklahoma Observer, February 2018.

In a world full of Malfoys, be a Hermoine.

PRIVATIZATION: PUERTO RICO

Crippled Puerto Rico Offered School Privatization as Quick Fix for Woes

America's inadequate response to the hurricane damage done to Puerto Rico has opened the door to the vulture capitalists who have decided that the solution should include school privatization – because it worked so well in Chile and New Orleans.

It's time to reread The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein.

Whose interest is being served by privatizing the schools of Puerto Rico? I guarantee, it's not the students.

From Steven Singer

Corporate school reform is not about making better schools. If it was, you would see plans like this being proposed in Beverly Hills and rich white neighborhoods across the country.

But somehow that never happens.

These schemes only show up in poor communities populated predominantly by people of color.

How the Shock Doctrine works.

PRIVATIZATION: CHOICES

Oklahoma pastor: Standing in the gap for our school children

"reformers" don't mention that the "choice" of attending a school on a voucher belongs to the school, not the student; the "choice" in the management of a charter school belongs to the corporate board of directors, not the voters through an elected school board.

From Rev. Clark Frailey

...children in public schools deserve the choice not to be marketed and sold as investments in profiteering schemes.

PRIVATIZATION: SEGREGATION

Charter Schools Are Driving Segregation in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools

The nation has reneged on the promise of Brown vs. Board of Education, and has stopped trying to integrate public schools. Corporate school "reform" has brought on more segregation. I'd say it was an unintended consequence, but...

From Roslyn Arlin Mickelson, UNC Charlotte’s Chancellor’s Professor and professor of Sociology, Public Policy and Women’s and Gender Studies at UNC Charlotte, quoted by The Civil Rights Project at UCLA

...Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools were once the nation's bellwether for successful desegregation. Today, the district exemplifies how charter schools can impede districts' efforts to resist re-segregation...This research has important implications not only for schools and communities in the Charlotte Mecklenburg region, but for the national debate over the growth and role of charter schools in our nation’s education system.

PRIVATIZATION: VOUCHERS

ALEC and Indiana’s Voucher Program

Millions of Indiana's tax dollars are going to subsidize parents who wish to send their children to a religious school. Vouchers are no longer directed towards the poor. Voucher recipients no longer have to "try" the public schools or have come from a "failing" public school. And voucher schools can choose their students. These tax dollars are spent with no public oversight.

From Sheila Kennedy

Indiana’s voucher program has “become increasingly affluent and white,” which shouldn’t surprise us, since these schools “set their own admission standards and can reject students for any reason.”

FOCUS ON LEARNING, NOT TESTING

No school until age seven: Finland's education lessons for the future

We can't duplicate Finland's educational system in the U.S. for a variety of reasons, but we can learn from them...

From Kristiina Volmari from the Finnish National Agency for Education

We want our teachers to focus on learning, not testing. We do not, at all, believe in ranking students and ranking schools...

DEMORALIZATION, NOT BURNOUT

Teacher Burnout or Demoralization? What’s the Difference and Why it Matters

The teacher shortage; this is why.

From Doris Santoro in NEA Today

This teacher was not burned out. This woman was saying ‘I can’t teach the way I know I’m supposed to be teaching.’ The profession had changed. This isn’t burnout. This is demoralization.

NO QUICK FIX

New Jersey Orders Closure of Trenton Charter School

This!

Instead of trying to "fix" education by privatizing public schools and throwing money to private and privately run schools that don't do any better than neighborhood public schools, we should be doing a better job of supporting local public schools.

Privatization of public education is an example of policy makers refusing to accept their share of  responsibility for supporting the children of our nation. Improving the lives of our young people is not the sole responsibility of public schools...nor should it be.

From Russ Walsh

...Learning happens best in consistent, predictable environments. The disruption that often accompanies the charter sector is antithetical to learning. Adults in charge need to stop looking for quick fixes like charter schools and vouchers and get down to the serious work of addressing income inequity, segregation, and the wise investment of funds and educational expertise in the public schools.

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2015 Medley #28

Reform, Read-aloud, New Orleans, Teacher Shortage, Privatization, Pushing Children, TFA, The Danger of Choice

AGAINST REFORM

Why Conservatives Should Not Support Our Current Education Reform

Something to think about when you listen to Republican candidates talk about public education policy...

Education reform does not really mean smaller government: it has resulted in an unprecedented expansion of the power and influence of the Federal Department of Education. Education reform has resulted in the Federal government interfering with local decision-making, using top-down edicts to drive what happens in districts, in schools, and in individual classrooms. No Child Left Behind, Race To The Top, and the Common Core State Standards (which were heavily promoted, if not used as a bribe) were all examples of federal overreach...

...the free-market theory of education states that if only parents could choose schools for their children, we would quickly see "bad" schools close when parents took their children elsewhere, and we would soon be living in an educational utopia. First, a true free-market would not be government- funded...

...Public schools are often criticized as being full of teachers who are only there for the money, for an easy paycheck. Money is seen as being a bad motivator. Yet no one seems to question the money-making motivation of testing companies, charter schools, or for-profit private schools. The question becomes, is money the best motivation for education?

READ ALOUD

Study says reading aloud to children, more than talking, builds literacy

Reading aloud to children continues to prove its worth. Thank you Jim Trelease!

Reading aloud is the best way to help children develop word mastery and grammatical understanding, which form the basis for learning how to read, said Massaro, who studies language acquisition and literacy. He found that picture books are two to three times as likely as parent-child conversations to include a word that isn’t among the 5,000 most common English words.

YET ANOTHER MIRACLE PROVES FALSE

The Myth of the New Orleans School Makeover

First we had George W. Bush's "Texas Miracle" which brought us No Child Left Behind and the statistically impossible goal of 100% proficiency by 2014.

Then Arne Duncan told us about the "New Orleans Miracle"...and gave thanks for the destruction caused by Katrina.

It turns out, however, that the "New Orleans Miracle" is no more successful than the "Texas Miracle."

...the New Orleans miracle is not all it seems. Louisiana state standards are among the lowest in the nation. The new research also says little about high school performance. And the average composite ACT score for the Recovery School District was just 16.4 in 2014, well below the minimum score required for admission to a four-year public university in Louisiana.

There is also growing evidence that the reforms have come at the expense of the city’s most disadvantaged children, who often disappear from school entirely and, thus, are no longer included in the data.

The author also responds to critics of this article. Read here.

TEACHER SHORTAGE

Crisis hits Oklahoma classrooms with teacher shortage, quality concerns

The teacher shortage is finding its way across the country.

A host of other things made her life as a teacher more difficult, including bigger class sizes, rates of teacher turnover and student discipline problems, plus she feared repercussions for speaking out about those problems.

Tart said she and her colleagues would sometimes stay at school as late as 9 p.m., grading papers and finishing lesson plans. She would also take work home, some nights working past midnight.

Education reform caused teacher shortage

Robert Behning began his career in the Indiana House as a florist, but apparently, collecting donations from school "reform" proponents is adequate training in education because now, all of the sudden, with no additional schooling whatsoever, Behning has become an "educational consultant."

Behning, and State Senator and auctioneer, Dennis Kruse, have led their respective houses of the Indiana General Assembly, along with the Pence dominated State Board of Education, on a 5 year campaign to destroy public school teachers and public schools. With the Governor's blessing, the General Assembly and SBOE have overseen the loss of revenue to more and more testing, diversion of public funds for vouchers and charter schools, teacher evaluations based on test scores, the end of due process for teachers, lowering the qualifications for teaching, and severe reductions in collective bargaining rights. During the legislative sessions the battles for and against public schools are widely publicized and reported around the state.

Yet Behning and Kruse don't understand why there is a teacher shortage.

As chairmen of the Indiana House and Senate Education Committees, Rep. Robert Behning and Sen. Dennis Kruse have announced formation of a study committee to determine why there is a pending teacher shortage. They seem surprised. They shouldn’t be.

They and Gov. Mike Pence need to look into the mirror...

PRIVATIZATION

Pearson to become the gate-keeper for student teachers in Illinois.

There's no longer any pretense in the quest to privatize everything to do with public education. In the first of what will likely become a national trend, Pearson, the giant textbook, test prep, and test publisher will now be responsible for licensing teachers in Illinois.

Student teachers will be evaluated by Pearson's "edTPA" and, without regard for their supervising teachers' opinions, be granted, or not granted, certification.

Oh...and it will cost student teachers an extra $300 above the tuition (and the thousands of dollars of debt) to the teacher preparation institution they might be attending.

While high achieving nations reduce the cost for teacher candidates...and in many cases pay them during their internship...we are going in the opposite direction.

Starting this fall Pearson will be in the business of deciding who becomes a teacher in the state of Illinois.

The Illinois State Board of Education has adopted a rule that designates Pearson’s “edTPA” as the means by which student teachers will be evaluated and granted certification.

As the fall semester begins, all student teachers in the state will be required to pay an extra $300 (on top of the tuition they are already paying) and arrange for videotaping so that they can submit a lengthy narrative that covers the planning, execution and evaluation of a series of lessons with one of their classes as well as a ten-minute video of themselves carrying out their lesson with a class.

Student teachers are required to get parent permission for their children to be video-taped.

Pearson owns the video.

Once submitted to Pearson, an “evaluator” will apply rubrics and 2-3 hours of their time to decide whether or not the student teacher “passes” and can be licensed to teach by the State of Illinois.

That’s right—no longer will the evaluations of cooperating teachers, university field instructors and education professors determine the success of a student teacher.

Sounds like a nightmare?

TOO MUCH, TOO EARLY

Why pushing kids to learn too much too soon is counterproductive

In this and the following articles we see once again, that the United States ignores the lessons of research and the best practices which high achieving nations use. We ignore developmentally appropriate practices. We are going backwards with the training of teachers; We're pushing for less training instead of more. And we're steadily, surely, moving our schools back to a segregated, inequitable, and unequal system.

Given the nationwide push to teach children more and more complex concepts at earlier and earlier ages, you’d think that there surely must be an extensive scientific literature to support these efforts. Not only does no such data exist, but an emerging body of research indicates that attempts to accelerate intellectual development are in fact counterproductive.

TFA

The Teach For America Bait and Switch: From 'You’ll Be Making a Difference' to 'You’re Making Excuses'

How do we get the "great teachers" that "reformers" claim we need to make our schools great again, when we let our most vulnerable students go to classes taught by poorly trained novices?

TFA staff ignored the life circumstances of many of my students. I could not change the circumstances that led Jerome to bring a roach-infested notebook to school, or the fact that Peter’s mother told him to “get his lick back,” meaning that if someone hits him, he should hit back. Whenever I tried to bring up the lived realities of my students’ lives and the real challenges they faced, once again, I was told I was “making excuses.” Despite my having personal knowledge of my students and their families, my voice and ultimately my potential to use alternative methods and ideas for creating a more learner-centered, productive environment was repeatedly pushed aside, as it contradicted TFA talking points.

CHOICE = INEQUITY

Opinion: National experiment in school choice, market solutions produces inequity

A look at Chile's educational system will give you a glimpse into our future...a two tiered system with well funded, high quality schools for the rich, and deteriorating, underfunded, crowded classrooms for the rest. Milton Friedman's legacy is tragic.

Imagine a country that was once committed to quality public education, but began to treat that public good like a market economy with the introduction of charter schools and voucher systems.

Imagine that after a few years, most students in this country attended private schools and there was public funding for most of such schools, which must compete for that funding by improving their results. Imagine the state fostered this competition by publishing school rankings, so parents were informed of the results obtained by each institution.

Imagine, finally, that school owners were allowed to charge extra fees to parents, thereby rendering education a quite profitable business.

But let’s stop imagining, because this country already exists.

After a series of policies implemented from the 1980s onward, Chilean governments have managed to develop one of the most deregulated, market-oriented educational schemes in the world.

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Support Teachers of Conscience

The narrow pursuit of test results has sidelined education issues of enduring importance such as poverty, equity in school funding, school segregation, health and physical education, science, the arts, access to early childhood education, class size, and curriculum development. We have witnessed the erosion of teachers’ professional autonomy, a narrowing of curriculum, and classrooms saturated with “test score-raising” instructional practices that betray our understandings of child development and our commitment to educating for artistry and critical thinking. And so now we are faced with “a crisis of pedagogy”–teaching in a system that no longer resembles the democratic ideals or tolerates the critical thinking and critical decision-making that we hope to impart on the students we teach.

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Stop the Testing Insanity!

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Vermont State Board of Education: Statement and Resolution on Assessment and Accountability, Adopted August 19, 2014

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A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words - Nov.2012

Here are some pictures, graphic images and cartoons from FaceBook -- plus my own 2 cents worth of comments. Click on any image to see the full sized version.

On Being a Teacher

Teaching to "the test" is not included!

Bipartisan Agreement

This is my "election day" thought. No matter who wins today's Presidential election, unless we, as teachers, parents, and concerned citizens, do something to change people's minds, nothing will change. The selling/privatization of the nation's public schools is a mistake.

Who Will Choose to Teach?

Teach Them to Think...

...not just bubble an answer. Critical and creative thinking aren't being measured by today's tests, yet critical and creative thinking are essential for the success of our society.

Shock Therapy

I'm reminded of the discussion in The Shock Doctine, about shock therapy used on individuals and societies as a means to privatization.

...those in power use times of crisis to push through undemocratic and extreme free market economic policies...

such as mayoral control of school systems, instead of elected school boards...corporate charter boards instead of elected school boards...

Public School Teachers: Miracles Performed Daily

We have millions of dedicated, hard working, competent teachers in public school classrooms around the country. They deserve better than to be mis-characterized as lazy, incompetent, money-grubbing, selfish union thugs. We teach because we value learning and children.

“I touch the future. I teach.” -- Christa McAuliffe

Exploration

Reading

We teach reading to create a society of life-long learners.

Values

What does our society value?

Do we value creativity? Understanding? Or do we value money and power. Why are billionaires who have never attended or worked in a public school accepted as experts on education? Why do politicians, pundits and policy makers ignore the experience of teachers when they make their punitive attacks on public education, public school teachers and public sector unions? Why aren't the people who caused our current economic problems held accountable?

Why does one of the richest nation's on Earth allow a fourth of their children to live in poverty?

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Stop the Testing Insanity!

Sign the National Resolution on High Stakes Testing!

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Cuts in Public Education...but the Enemy is Still Poverty

The excerpts from the article below have to do with the Indianapolis Public Schools, but the problem is nation wide. Public education is no longer a priority for Americans. The "reformers" and state governments, in cooperation with the federal government are defunding public education. Is this just another public sector institution being privatized...part of the larger privatization process outlined in The Shock Doctrine? Or is it something else, such as a misguided attack at schools because schools are an easy target and times are tough?

Whatever the cause, the nation will suffer in the long run. Cuts in services and programs hurt children more than adults, and with the highest poverty rate in the industrialized world, we in the United States have more than one-fifth of our children living in poverty.

As I've written before, poverty is the biggest problem facing schools today. Check these out if you still have doubts:

Change in Family Income-to-Needs Matters More for Children with Less

Blame for School Achievement Gap Misplaced

Poverty and Potential: Out-of-School Factors and School Success

If we don't address the growing poverty rate by any means other than cutting services and increasing tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy, we'll be hurting ourselves in the long run. Our children are our most important natural resource...all of them.

The Impact of IPS Cuts on Students
Tens of millions of dollars in budget cuts, hundreds of teachers let go and the state's largest school district dealing with a financial crisis some say is the worst in decades. It is going to have an impact on the students.

The job cuts announced by IPS Superintendent Dr. Eugene White are bigger than originally thought. 357 teaching positions, the majority of them layoffs, will occur before the start of the new school year. 23 administrators and the jobs of 19 social workers and non-teaching employees are also being eliminated.

All that adds up to more children in every classroom...

..."Those effects are going to be profound. Indianapolis already has the hardest children in the state to educate. We have more at-risk children. more children with needs. 87% of our kids come from free and reduced lunch. 85% of our kids come from single parent families. It makes it much more difficult to educate those children. They have a lot of needs and with cut-backs it is going to be more difficult because there are higher class sizes," said Ron Ellcessor, Indiana State Teachers Association.

Fewer teachers also means less individual attention.

"The teacher is not going to be able to give them the individualized time. Today there is something called differentiated instruction. A teacher is not supposed to teach the same thing to every student. Each student has special needs and each student's special needs then are supposed to be met by that teacher. Will those special needs be met if class sizes get larger? I certainly hope so, but I know it will be more difficult for a teacher to do that," Ellcessor said...

...Lawmakers say there will be no additional money for public schools. In addition, they are changing the formula that determines how much money each school system receives for each student.

You can read the entire article HERE.

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SAVE OUR SCHOOLS MARCH AND NATIONAL CALL TO ACTION

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National Insanity

I had my own little tantrum yesterday...last night, actually...and posted an emotional, whiny, "Won't someone please think of the children..." rant on these pages...

Luckily, there are cooler heads than mine in the national debate over education.

Valerie Strauss for example...

In her Answer Sheet blog entry of March 15, Obama and Boehner: Education nonsense, she discusses (quite calmly) the differences between the President's words and actions.

Speaking directly to teachers, for example, he said that while the country needs better assessments to figure out how students are progressing, “I’m not talking about more tests. I’m not talking about teaching to the test.”

Really? Then why have his policies pushed states and school districts to evaluate and pay teachers according to students’ standardized test scores, which is resulting in the development of new and more tests to assess kids in subjects not covered now by such exams? And when teachers’ livelihoods depend on test scores going up, does he really think teachers are not going to “teach to the test?” It has already become commonplace in public schools, one of the unfortunate consequences of No Child Left Behind.

Since President Obama doesn't have anyone with teaching experience advising him, he must not realize that his policies are having the opposite effect on public education that he verbalizes. Race to the Top has so many problems that I often don't know where to begin when talking about it -- the fact that it relies more than NCLB on testing, coerces states into grading teachers using student test scores, manipulates states to increase charter school funding even as they reduce money for public schools...

Ms. Strauss then takes on House Speaker Boehner...who hypocritically wants to cut funding "across the board" except for the areas of discretionary spending that he likes.

According to a story by my Post colleagues Ben Pershing and Paul Kane, Boehner credits Catholic schools with helping him become the most powerful member of Congress, and wants to give low-income D.C. kids a chance to escape what he calls “one of the worst school districts in the country.”

He has called the nation’s $14.1 trillion debt “a mortal threat to our country” and has said that all discretionary programs -- except for the few that he especially likes -- are at risk of being cut.

Like his colleagues in Governor's offices across the nation (Wisconsin, Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, Idaho, Florida, Oklahoma...) Boehner is all for slashing school budgets...as well as for increasing funding for charters and vouchers.

Obama himself didn’t exactly address in his speech the slashing and burning going on in public school districts today -- not the plan just announced in Detroit to close half of all public schools and create high schools with classes of 60 kids, and not the stripping of most collective bargaining rights for teachers in Wisconsin and other states, and not a plan in Idaho to lay off hundreds of teachers and have students take a few courses on line...

Instead, he said, somewhat inexplicably, that while he is determined to cut the deficit, “I refuse to do it by telling students here who are so full of promise that we’re not willing to invest in your future.”

She ends by reminding us...and hopefully President Obama, that students are not as stupid as he apparently thinks.

Obama doesn’t have to tell kids that if he doesn’t want to; they can see what’s going on in their schools. They know when their teachers pay out of their own salaries for paper and pencils. They know when their class sizes soar. They know what’s going on, even if Obama doesn’t want to mention it.

Another voice has called the current public education crushing fad, "a moment of national insanity."

In one of her recent entries, Diane Ravitch referred to three events that took place during the last week of February:

• In Detroit, the school system will reduce its deficit by closing half the city's public schools and creating classes of as many as 60 students. These are among the poorest and lowest-performing students in the nation. Parents and teachers should be rioting in the streets of Detroit, along with everyone who cares about these children and our future. This is an outrage.
• The school board of Providence, R.I., voted to fire all of its teachers to address its deficit. Most will be rehired, but now the board has maximum flexibility to choose which ones. At the same time, Providence's leaders are humiliating every teacher, breaking the bonds of trust that are essential for the culture of a good school. Will anyone hold these reckless, heedless, unprofessional "leaders" in Rhode Island to account?
• And, in Idaho, the state superintendent of education has proposed a plan that would lay off 770 teachers over five years, banking on students taking more online courses. Do they know there is no evidence for the efficacy of virtual learning? I don't think they care. For them, this is just a cost-cutting measure. And it's other people's children who will get this bargain-basement training, not their own.

She reminds us what's really going on...

What do we hear from the corporate reformers? Merit pay. Really? Bonuses for some, layoffs for others? Fire teachers with low value-added scores? Ah, more teaching to the test, more narrowing the curriculum.

Nothing to improve education. Just "innovation" (i.e., no evidence) and "disruption" (I.e., firing the whole staff, closing the school).

Our schools remain subject to a failed federal accountability system. We are packing children into crowded classrooms, ignoring the growing levels of child poverty (the U.S. now leads all advanced nations in infant mortality), and putting fear into the hearts of our nation's teachers. Who will want to teach? How does any of this improve schools or benefit children? Do you understand it? I don't.

It's the "Shock Doctrine" at work.

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SAVE OUR SCHOOLS MARCH AND NATIONAL CALL TO ACTION

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