It’s not as though we don’t know what works

One of the most distressing aspects of the Covid pandemic has been seeing governors and state education officials abdicate responsibility for managing the worst disruption of public schooling in modern history and leaving the heavy lifting to the localities. Virtually every school in the nation closed in March 2020, replacing face-to-face schooling with thrown-together online education or programs that used a disruptive scheduling process to combine the two. Only a small portion of the student body returned to fully opened schools the following fall. The resulting learning setbacks range from grave for all groups of students to catastrophic for poor children.

From the start, elected officials seemed more concerned about reopening bars and restaurants than safely reopening schools that hold the futures of more than 50 million children in their hands. Failed leadership continues to be painfully evident as the states enter yet another pandemic school year without enforcing common-sense public health policies that would make a much-needed return to in-person schooling as safe as possible. These policy failures are compounding at a time when the highly infectious Delta variant is surging and the coronavirus seems likely to become a permanent feature of life.

The New York Times editorial from last week, The School Kids Are Not Alright, quoted above, decried the "learning loss" of American students during the pandemic. A closer reading, however, should remind anyone that the "learning loss" is, was, and always has been a feature of inequality -- racism and poverty.

Just like standardized tests BP (Before the Pandemic) those kids who were poor and/or who attended schools filled with low-income students (mostly children of color), scored lower on standardized tests than their wealthier, and mostly white, peers. The current assessments of students show significant differences between those who have access to the internet and those who don't -- between those who can afford to have at least one parent stay home and help them with school work, and those who cant -- between those who live at or near the poverty line, and those who don't.

Which parents found it easier to stay home with their children during the school lockdowns? Which parents have (or had) low-wage jobs that we now know are "essential?" Which students had access to the internet for online instruction? Which students often had to share one smartphone among the members of their entire family to get their lessons?

Are current test scores a "scalding rebuke of those who have minimized the impact of the school shutdowns" as the editorial says, or are they simply more of the same. And btw, who among those who wanted to shut down schools to keep families safe has minimized the impact of the pandemic? No one wanted to close schools...least of all educators, but a global pandemic sometimes means that we have to do things that we don't want to do.

The editors wrote, "Perhaps the most grotesque of these minimizing arguments holds that concerns about learning loss are being manufactured by educational testing companies with dollar signs in their eyes."

Grotesque?

Is that why the NYT Editorial Board, in looking for sources about "learning loss," started with N.W.E.A. -- a testing company? "NWEA is the company that generated a lot of buzz with their covid-learning loss “research.” NWEA sells standardized math and English testing." Grotesque? I don't think so.

As if that wasn't enough, they also checked with the "educational experts" at McKinsey & Co...because financial consultants always know the best things to do for public education, right? The McKinsey report stated that "the pandemic has widened existing opportunity and achievement gaps and made high schoolers more likely to drop out."

Raise your hand if you're an educator who could have guessed that would happen! Raise your other hand if you're an educator who knew that the pandemic would hit children living in poverty harder than those who never went to bed hungry.

The problem with school achievement has always been poverty. And the problem with poverty is that it's built on racism (Read The Sum of Us, and The Color of Law to get started). It's true that the pandemic made things worse, but that's because during economic declines those at the bottom always suffer most.

Kids who live in poverty, just like their parents, suffered (and still are) more during the pandemic because our economy is a plutocracy made for the rich to get richer. Don't blame teachers, administrators, and school boards for closing schools. The schools closed because we didn't want children to die...or bring home COVID-19 to their parents and grandparents for them to die.

I'm seriously tired of the politicians, pundits (looking at you, NYT Editorial Board), and policy-makers telling teachers and public schools to single-handedly solve the problems of racism and poverty by increasing test scores. Public schools and public school teachers are not the only ones who have anything to contribute to growing our society!

Linda Darling-Hammond had this to say nearly a decade ago.

Why is Congress redlining our schools?

It’s not as though we don’t know what works. We could implement the policies that have reduced the achievement gap and transformed learning outcomes for students in high-achieving nations where government policies largely prevent childhood poverty by guaranteeing housing, healthcare and basic income security. These same strategies were substantially successful in our own nation through the programs and policies of the war on poverty and the Great Society, which dramatically reduced poverty, increased employment, rebuilt depressed communities, invested in preschool and K-12 education in cities and poor rural areas, desegregated schools, funded financial aid for college and invested in teacher training programs that ended teacher shortages. In the 1970s teaching in urban communities was made desirable by the higher-than-average salaries, large scholarships and forgivable loans that subsidized teacher preparation, and by the exciting curriculum and program innovations that federal funding supported in many city school districts.

These efforts led to big improvements in achievement and attainment from the ’60s through the ’80s. The black-white reading gap shrank by two-thirds for 17-year-olds, black high school and college graduation rates more than doubled, and, in 1975, rates of college attendance among whites, blacks and Latinos reached parity for the first and only time before or since.

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2021 Medley #7 - Playing catch up

Teacher shortage, Punishing schools, Privatization, Facts, Rationality

Apparently, retirement is needed so there's enough time to go to all the doctor appointments you're going to need as you age.

Things have been quiet on this blog lately...for a variety of reasons. Now that things are a bit better I have a backlog of unposted Medley entries. To make it a bit easier, I'll limit my own comments to one, or sometimes two, sentences max (Warning...prepare yourself for compound and run-on sentences)...

THE TEACHER SHORTAGE HASN'T GONE AWAY

'Perfect storm' of events causing teacher shortage crisis in Michigan

Who would have guessed that demonizing, overworking, reducing job security, and underpaying an entire profession of people would make that profession unattractive...leading to a shortage of teachers nationwide. Legislatures in large part caused the problem, and are now scrambling to fill classrooms with anyone, even those who are unqualified.

Carol Baaki-Diglio, Assistant Superintendent of Human Resources Oak Park Schools, says districts across the state are seeing an increase in retirements. She says it is part of a trend schools have seen for the past decade, that has been made worse by the pandemic creating more work, stress, and health fears.

“Our staff has also experienced loss. Loss of parents. Loss of colleagues,” said Baaki-Diglio.

She says we are seeing the perfect storm for a crisis.

“The perfect storm being far fewer people are choosing education, so we have fewer coming in, and then we have a mass exodus going out,” she said.

PUNISHING SCHOOLS FOR THE FAILURES OF SOCIETY

In Camden, School Closures Revealed How Unequal the System Can Be

Public schools are name-called as "failing" while legislatures, unable or unwilling to solve problems of unemployment and poverty, ignore their own impact on student achievement. It's much easier to blame public schools than to accept one's own responsibility.

During the Obama Administration, thousands of public schools were closed due to being deemed “low performing” because of their students’ test scores [Blogger's Note: This is also true for the Bush Administration's No Child Left Behind plan]. This was part of Obama’s Race to the Top initiative, and it resulted in school closures in cities across the United States—including Chicago, Cleveland, New York City, and Philadelphia—in a misguided attempt to improve the education of Black and brown children.

In 2012, Race to the Top caught on in New Jersey, where state officials determined that twenty-three of Camden’s twenty-six traditional public schools were “failing.” After taking over the Camden school district in 2013, state lawmakers made school closures their go-to strategy to remedy poor academic performance or budget shortfalls, despite the negative consequences school closures often led to.

Closing schools continues to be a popular “school improvement” strategy well into this new decade. But based on results in Camden, it’s clearly failed.

Education "ratings" are inherently biased against schools serving racially minoritized and economically marginalized students.

I heard a quote recently (forgot where and from whom) that goes something like, "The way to get rid of high poverty schools is to get rid of high poverty schools." Legislatures insist on "rating" schools without doing anything to ease the problems of economic and racial segregation. In Indiana, the legislature passed a law that will end the punishment of "F" schools. Now it's just a tool for shaming them. (I know...more than two sentences. Further down is one with no comment, so we're even.)

The correlation between the percentage of "at-risk" students and standardized test score "proficiency" (high school) is 0.8

That's...massive. That's like the correlation between rain and rainclouds.
Meanwhile...

The correlation between the % of at-risk students in a school and that school's GROWTH RATE on standardized test scores is...like...zero.

Wow.
OK not wow. Because...well...that's exactly the point of growth scores. They are designed to take into account the uneven distribution of students across schools.
Schools serving privileged kids are not "better" just because they have higher test scores. Those students would score roughly the same no matter where they went to school.

We can't say, just by looking at proficiency rates, what the quality of a school is. Because...demography.

CONSERVATIVE PRIVATIZATION AT THE UNIVERSITY LEVEL

Why Conservatives Want to Cancel the 1619 Project

Conservatives claim that America's public universities are hotbeds of liberal (or socialist) subversion, and UNC is willing to do what they can to "suppress ideas they consider dangerous."

The prevailing conservative view is that America’s racial and economic inequalities are driven by differences in effort and ability. The work of Hannah-Jones and others suggests instead that present-day inequalities have been shaped by deliberate political and policy choices. What appears to be an argument about reexamining history is also an argument about ideology—a defense of the legitimacy of the existing social order against an account of its historical origins that suggests different policy choices could produce a more equitable society.

Campus Cancel Culture Freakouts Obscure the Power of University Boards

One only needs to look at the billions of dollars of influence the Koch brothers have had on public schools and especially on college campuses to see how the fringe right-wing, now the base of the Republican Party, has had an impact on education in America.

...the right is not underrepresented in higher education; in fact, the opposite is true: The modern American university is a right-wing institution. The right’s dominance of academia and its reign over universities is destroying higher education, and the only way to save the American university is for students and professors to take back control of campuses.

Judge: Betsy DeVos Cannot “Quash” Deposition About Her Actions Re: Defrauded Corinthian College Students

Koch supporter, and billionaire anti-public school advocate, Betsy DeVos is stymied by a federal judge.

Former US ed sec Betsy DeVos did not want to give a formal, in-person account of her decision to side with defunct, for-profit, California-based Corinthian Colleges by not granting monetary relief to hundreds of thousand of students defrauded by this federal-aid-sucking monster.

However, on May 19, 2021, US District Judge William Alsup refreshingly denied DeVos’ “motion to quash a subpoena for her deposition.”

FACTS HAVE A WELL-KNOWN LIBERAL BIAS

Opinion: The Trumpy right is violating everything our children are taught

...only a quarter of U.S. students are proficient in civics, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress. And apparently, the right wants to keep it that way.

A bipartisan bill in Congress sponsored by Republican Sen. John Cornyn of Texas and Republican Rep. Tom Cole of Oklahoma (Disclosure: My wife’s stepmother, Rep. Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, is one of the bill’s Democratic sponsors), would authorize $1 billion a year in grants to pay for more civics and history programs that teach children “to understand American Government and engage in American democratic practices as citizens and residents of the United States.” It’s as American — and as anodyne — as apple pie.

But, as The Post’s Laura Meckler reported over the weekend, “Conservative media and activists are pelting the Republicans who support the bill to abandon it. They call the grant program a ‘Trojan horse’ that would allow the Biden administration to push a liberal agenda.”

Fossil Fuel Interests Caught Peddling Propaganda to Schoolchildren

Science teachers, who work to help students understand climate change, are undercut by propaganda from the fossil fuel industry -- funneled through the Heartland Institute -- denying science.

Fossil fuel companies and climate denial groups have long sought to shape how the next generation perceives climate change, turning the classroom into a battleground for what the country’s future ideology will be. In 2012, leaked documents revealed that the oil and gas-funded Heartland Institute, a conservative and libertarian public policy think tank that promotes climate denialism, planned to spend $200,000 over two years to sow doubts about the scientific consensus on climate change in K-12 classrooms. Years later, the think tank mailed 350,000 booklets titled, “Why Scientists Disagree About Global Warming” to students across the country.

The Heartland campaign is an overt example of fossil fuel interests attempting to influence children’s understanding of climate change, but groups also employ more subtle methods to paint a favorable picture of the fossil fuel industry.

The Age Of Misinformation

Will teachers be able to leave their own tribal biases behind and help students become critical thinkers? If not, will we ever live in a nation with a shared fact base again?

In one particularly troubling analysis, researchers found that when a fact-check revealed that information in a post was wrong, the response of partisans wasn’t to revise their thinking or get upset with the purveyor of the lie.

Instead, it was to attack the fact checkers.

TIME FOR SOME RATIONAL THINKING

19 Rules for Life (2021 Edition)

Read all 19 of Peter Greene's rules for a refreshing taste of rational thinking.

1. Don't be a dick.

There is no excuse for being mean on purpose. Life will provide ample occasions on which you will hurt other people, either through ignorance or just because sometimes life puts us on collision courses with others and people get hurt. There is enough hurt and trouble and disappointment and rejection naturally occurring in the world; there is no reason to deliberately go out of your way to add more. This is doubly true in a time like the present, when everyone is already feeling the stress.

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2020 Medley #24: No More Political Ads Issue

The 2020 Election, Racism, Online learning,

Kids in high poverty schools, School "choice",

Discrimination using public funds

As of this writing (11 AM ET, Nov 4, 2020), the 2020 election is not completely over. Ballots are still being counted in the swing states of Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Georgia. The Democrats have likely flipped two Senate seats (Colorado and Arizona), but lost one (Alabama). Other Republican Senate races are not called but are likely to remain the same. So with a net gain of one seat, the Senate will remain under the control of Mitch McConnell.

HEALING WILL TAKE TIME

The Racist Genie is Out of the Bottle (again)

This post by Russ Walsh was originally published on November 11, 2016. Even if Joe Biden eventually gains enough electoral votes to become president, the rise of white supremacy during the last four years is not likely to disappear quickly.

Read the whole post. Not much has changed since 2016.

This morning the New York Times published an editorial asking that the President-elect directly and immediately denounce the hate and let his supporters know that this targeting behavior is not OK. But once you let the hate genie out of the bottle, it is devilishly difficult to put it back in. Racism, xenophobia, and misogyny are never far from the surface in this country and when these baser instincts of humans seem to have the imprimatur of the leader of the country, it may take a lifetime to tame them.

As teachers, we need to be on guard and vigilant. We must re-double our efforts to make sure the classroom, the hallways, the cafeteria, the locker room, the campus are safe for all people, including Trump supporters, who will almost certainly be the targets of backlash as well.

In 1992, Rodney King, the African-American victim of a brutal police beating in Los Angeles asked, “Can we all get along?” Apparently not, Rodney. Not yet, anyway. There is still a lot of work to be done.

EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION IN THE TIME OF COVID-19

Kindergarten Pandemic Learning Fears Should Not Be Tied to Screen Time and Rigid Drilling

Play is children's work and it is the way in which children learn, make sense of the world, and acclimate themselves to their culture. Online instruction can't reproduce the benefits of play.

Online learning is a relatively new phenomenon, and drilling five-year-olds, making them sit and face screens for long periods, can’t be good for them or instill a love for learning.

Most childhood specialists are not excited about online learning, and they discourage formal reading instruction in kindergarten. They disapproved of this push before Covid-19, so why would they like it now?

The benefit of online connection for kindergarteners is being linked to a kindergarten teacher and other children, to feel some semblance of a kindergarten class during a lonely time. Teachers who demonstrate love and kindness, introducing children to exciting and funny information they will find memorable, create the best foundation.

WASTING PUBLIC MONEY

Instead of Funding Public Education, Oklahoma Bankrolled a For-Profit Virtual Charter School

The pandemic has given privatizers permission to defund public education. Sometimes the money diverted from public schools ends up in the hands of charlatans.

Back in May, as Oklahoma state leaders sent traditional public schools contradictory messages on online, hybrid, and in-person learning during the fall semester, families flocked to Epic as an alternative. Now, Epic has about twice as many students as the Oklahoma City Public School System.

This shift amounts to a massive drain on traditional public schools, which receive funding based on student numbers, as they face the increased costs of adhering to health and safety guidelines.

Epic, while currently experiencing a surge in enrollment, has been mired in controversy since 2013, when it first came under scrutiny for financial irregularities by the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation, the state’s education board, and the legislature. Throughout the investigation, Epic refused to cooperate, and used expensive lobbying and advertising campaigns to delay the process.

Much of the Epic scandal was predictable, as Oklahoma funded a for-profit charter without creating an accountability system with the power to oversee its financial practices or education outcomes.

PUBLIC SCHOOLS AREN'T FAILING

Kids in poor, urban schools learn just as much as others

Test scores of children in high poverty schools are generally lower than those of wealthier children. However, the scores are more a reflection of what happens outside of school.

"Martin Luther King Jr. said, ...we are likely to find that the problems of housing and education, instead of preceding the elimination of poverty, will themselves be affected if poverty is first abolished."

Instead of being “engines of inequality” – as some have argued – this new research suggests schools are neutral or even slightly compensate for inequality elsewhere.

Disadvantaged kids start with poorer home environments and neighborhoods and begin school behind students who come from wealthier backgrounds, Downey said.

“But when they go to school they stop losing ground. That doesn’t agree with the traditional story about how schools supposedly add to inequality,” he said.

“We are probably better off putting more energy toward addressing the larger social inequalities that are producing these large gaps in learning before kids even enter school.”

Downey emphasized that the results don’t mean that school districts don’t need to invest in disadvantaged schools.

“As it stands, schools mostly prevent inequality from increasing while children are in school,” he said.

“With more investments, it may be possible to create schools that play a more active role in reducing inequality.”

SCHOOL "CHOICE" IS NO CHOICE

Two posts by Peter Greene (Curmudgucation) on how school choice is being used to discriminate, and who really benefits from school "choice."

School Choice Is Not For Those People

The message to LGBTQ students could not be clearer--"we don't want your kind here."

And if that wasn't clear enough, Alabama has been making it clearer. Back in January, an application from Birmingham AIDS Outreach to open up an LGBTQ charter school was turned down by the Birmingham school board. Alabama has a Public [sic] Charter School Commission that stands ready to overrule local school boards in case the charter is turned down, but the board has now shot down Magic City Acceptance Academy twice--first last May, and again just last week. Last week four of the eight board members abstained, three voted in favor of the school, and one against, which adds up to no.

So school choice is only for some students, and those decisions are not going to be made by elected officials are answerable to the public, nor are choice schools going to be bound by the same rules that operate in the public school world.

School Choice Disempowers (Almost) Everybody

With no collective or empowered group to stand against them, privatizers get that much closer to living in the land of Do As They Please. It's not better for students, for families, for education, for the country; it's better for them.

This is a unifying them for the "democracy is not the point--liberty is" crowd-- collectivism is bad. Well, bad in the sense that in order to be part of a collective, like a team or a board or a democracy or a functioning society, you have to give up some of your individual liberty. But the rich and powerful have accumulated a huge amount of liberty for themselves, and they would like to give up as little as possible. A publicly owned and operated school system is just one more obstacle to their perfect liberty state. Disempowering all the Lessers just helps them get closer to that fabled state.

PUBLICLY SUPPORTED PRIVATE SCHOOLS DISCRIMINATE

Another gay teacher fired. LGBTQ students face expulsion. Discrimination continues in Florida schools | Commentary

Once you accept tax money you should follow the laws made on behalf of the taxpayers. Firing someone because of who they are is not allowed in this country.

...discrimination against teachers is just the tip of this intolerance iceberg. Dozens of publicly funded voucher schools in Florida have policies that blatantly discriminate against LGBTQ students and families.

Many schools spelled them out in writing on their websites — until the Orlando Sentinel started reporting on them. Then, some of these faith-based schools started scrubbing their sites. Few came out to say they were no longer discriminating; they just wanted to erase the evidence.

One Volusia County school that received more than $1 million a year told students that simply uttering the words “I am gay” was “basis for dismissal.” A Merritt Island school that received more than $700,000 told students they could be suspended for five days for lying or cheating but expelled for being gay.

All told, the Sentinel found more than 80 schools with blatant, written policies — against students and their parents.

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U.S. Neglects Tomorrow

In Aesop's tale of the ant and the grasshopper, the busy ant made preparations for the coming winter, while the flighty grasshopper played away the summer. When winter came, the ant was prepared with substantial food for the winter while the grasshopper was starving.

The United States seems determined to play the grasshopper when it comes to our future. We use up our energy without a thought of what will happen when it runs out -- and fossil fuels, no matter what other arguments one might make about them -- are a finite resource. We fill our landfills to bursting...and recycling is failing in its promise. We ignore the changing climate that is drying out the "nation's breadbasket" and burning up California's farmland. And, most important, we don't seem concerned with preparing our future citizens and leaders, our children.

In 1989 Carl Sagan said,

...we have permitted the amount of poverty in children to increase. Before the end of this century, more than half the kids in America may be below the poverty line.

What kind of a future do we build for the country if we raise all these kids as disadvantaged, as unable to cope with the society, as resentful for the injustice served up to them? This is stupid.

In the video above, Sagan claims that the US is 19th in the world in Infant Mortality. We haven't improved much -- if at all -- since then. Why? Because we don't spend as much money on our babies as other countries. We're a wealthy country yet we aren't investing in our future by taking care of our most important natural resource -- our children.

Without continued investment in our children, will we be able to maintain our lifestyle and standard of living? In 1996, Sagan wrote,

I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time – when the United states is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.

Superstition and darkness -- take a look around.

U.S. ranks near bottom of advanced nations in child wellness — new report

If we don't take care of our children now how will that affect our future? Will we prepare enough doctors? enough teachers? enough people to support the society? Will we have more social unrest? more poverty? more violence? Will our economic gaps increase?

Which will have a greater impact on our daily lives...Jeff Bezos's $200+ billion net worth, or the more than 38 million Americans living in poverty?

The United States ranks near the bottom of dozens of advanced nations in terms of the well-being of its children, according to a report with data from before the coronavirus epidemic.

The rankings were published by the United Nations Children’s Fund, known as UNICEF, which show that of 38 advanced countries for which data was compiled in a range of wellness markers, the United States was No. 36. (See ranking chart and full report below).

The Netherlands, Denmark and Norway topped the list, which takes into account data on the mental and physical health of children as well as their skills as measured by international exams. Mental well-being includes both life satisfaction as well as suicide rates; physical health includes rates of overweight and obesity as well as child mortality, and skills focuses both on proficiency in reading and mathematics as well as social skills.

But the report noted that in many of the advanced nations on the list, children are not doing well; in fact, in nearly half, more than 1 in 5 children live in poverty. Of 41 nations ranked on child poverty, the United States was fourth from the bottom.

What Does It Mean When Hardly Anybody Stands Up for the Basic Needs of Children and Public Schools?

I do not remember a time when the wellbeing of children has been so totally forgotten by the leaders of the political party in power in the White House and the Congress. This fall, school district leaders have been left on their own as they try to serve and educate children while the COVID-19 pandemic continues raging across the states. School leaders are trying to hold it all together this fall at the same time their state budgets in some places have already been cut.

Teacher pay penalty dips but persists in 2019

In order to prepare our children for their (and our) future, we'll need teachers. Are we investing enough in teachers? Are we providing an incentive for the "best and the brightest" to go into education? Are we addressing the nation-wide teacher shortage?

We have been living through a decline in the number of teachers being trained, even before the pandemic. Colleges and universities report fewer students are choosing education. This past week we learned that the University of South Florida will close down its education school. Will more universities follow USF's lead? Who will train tomorrow's teachers?

Key findings

• The teacher wage penalty has grown substantially since the mid-1990s. The teacher wage penalty is how much less, in percentage terms, public school teachers are paid in weekly wages relative to other college-educated workers (after accounting for factors known to affect earnings such as education, experience, and state residence). The regression-adjusted teaching wage penalty was 6.0% in 1996. In 2019, the penalty was 19.2%, reflecting a 2.8 percentage-point improvement compared with a penalty of 22.0% a year earlier.

• The teacher wage penalty declined in the wake of recent teacher strikes but only time and more data will reveal whether teachers’ actions led to a decline and a turning point. The lessening of the teaching penalty from 22.0% in 2018 to 19.2% in 2019 may reflect pay raises enacted in the wake of widespread strikes and other actions by teachers in 2018 and 2019, particularly in some of the states where teacher pay lagged the most. Unfortunately, the data we have to date are not sufficient to allow us to identify the geographic locus of the improvements in teacher wages and benefits and any association with the recent wave of teacher protests and strikes. Only time will tell if this single data point marks a turning point in teacher pay...

• The benefits advantage of teachers has not been enough to offset the growing wage penalty. The teacher total compensation penalty was 10.2% in 2019 (composed of a 19.2% wage penalty offset by a 9.0% benefits advantage). The bottom line is that the teacher total compensation penalty grew by 7.5 percentage points from 1993 to 2019.

Isn't it time that we started to prepare for the future?

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The Fourteenth: We all do better when we all do better.

Today marks the fourteenth blogoversary of this blog. When I began it on September 14, 2006, I was in my late 50s and teaching Reading Recovery in a small public school in northeast Indiana (which has since closed), the US was at war in Iraq, there had just been a mass shooting at Dawson College in Montreal, and George W. Bush was the US President.

In September of 2006, Beyoncé and Justin Timberlake released their second albums and Elton John released his 29th; naturalist Steve Irwin and former Texas governor Ann Richards died; the Cubs finished last in the National League Central (a year later they would finish first); and Star Trek celebrated 40 years of television and movies (premier Sept 8, 1966).

Public education in the US was deep into the mess of No Child Left Behind. Testing defined (and still defines) everything taught in America's public schools. In Indiana, we weren't yet spending huge amounts of tax money on vouchers and charter schools, and Hoosier teachers still had seniority rights, the right to due process before getting fired, and collective bargaining for things like prep time and class size.

My blog's focus was on 1) the overuse and misuse of standardized testing, 2) the overwhelming intrusion of politics and politicians into public education, and 3) my students. I was reading education authors like Richard Allington, Gerald Bracey, Susan Ohanian, and Alfie Kohn.

Since then I've taught part-time before I retired; volunteered in three different elementary schools after retirement; joined with others to advocate for public education; moved to a new house; made a couple trips to the hospital; voted in six elections; watched the Cubs win the World Series (Bucket List item #1); signed up for Social Security and Medicare; welcomed two more grandchildren, a grandchild-in-law, and a great-grandchild into my life; made new friendships and said good-bye to some old friends and family members; drove Route 66 from California to Illinois; celebrated a fiftieth wedding anniversary; reached half-a-gross years in age; and written 1370 blog posts (this one is #1371).

Here are some thoughts about life and education that I've gathered over the last year.

LIFE: LIVING AND UNDERSTANDING

The Earth is ours, not mine or yours. We're all in this together so we need to work together. "We all do better when we all do better." -- Paul Wellstone

From The Tris Speaker speech in The Sporting News (February 20, 1971), p. 44.

Roberto Clemente, Feb 20, 1971

We must all live together and work together no matter what race or nationality. If you have an opportunity to accomplish something that will make things better for someone coming behind you, and you don't do that, you are wasting your time on this earth.

Why Are Poor Countries Poor?

Media creator and author, John Greene argues for "us," not "them." We're all in this together.

If these problems aren't "our" problems, I'm troubled by how we're defining "us." I don't want to be part of an "us" that makes a "them" of the world's most vulnerable people.

Ricky Gervais' funniest ever interview | 60 Minutes Australia

Success in life is at least partly a matter of perspective. Once we realize that most of the world's (or the nation's, or of the family's) history happened without us, we can let go and start treating our lives as a holiday. This is our chance. Let's enjoy it.

Ricky Gervais

Why are we here? Well, we just happen to be here. We couldn't choose it. The chance of us being born - that sperm hitting that egg - is 400 trillion to one. We're not special, we're just lucky. And this is a holiday. We didn't exist for 14 and a half billion years. Then we've got 80 or 90 years, if we're lucky, and then we never exist again. So, we should make the most of it.

Nightfall, A Novel

The "Us vs. Them" mentality has reared its ugly head in the US and has been exacerbated by the combined health and economic crises, and lack of competent leadership that are now challenging us.

Why don't we do what science tells us to do to end the pandemic and heal the climate crisis?

Why is there a growing distrust of intelligence and rational thought?

We're living in a time of "medieval emotions."

Isaac Asimov

It's the old hatred of the intellectual that crops up whenever medieval emotions start surfacing.

EDUCATION: TEACHING AND LEARNING

Martin Luther King Jr., The Southern Christian Leadership Conference Presidential Address, 8/16/1967

Societal bandaids like vouchers and charter schools won't solve the problems of inequity and poverty. Poverty is like gravity...it has an impact on everything that happens. It has an impact on student health and it has an impact on student learning.

It's not enough to say, "The poor will always be with us." We have an obligation to work to eliminate poverty, if not for those who are living in poverty, then for our children and grandchildren, so that we leave them a happier, healthier world.

We all benefit from an equitable society. We must stop thinking in terms of what "I need" and start thinking about what "we need."

"We all do better when we all do better."

Martin Luther King, Jr.

...we are likely to find that the problems of housing and education, instead of preceding the elimination of poverty, will themselves be affected if poverty is first abolished.

Kids will need recess more than ever when returning to school post-coronavirus

Relationships are important in the learning process. Teachers must build relationships in their classrooms. Students won't remember that you taught them the times table, the Preamble to the Constitution, or what carbohydrates are. They will remember who you are.

Students will need those relationships more than ever to heal from the trauma of the pandemic while it continues and once it ends.

Lauren McNamara (Ryerson U) and Pasi Sahlberg (UNSW)

What matters to students, first and foremost, is friendships, social connections and feelings of acceptance and belonging. And this happens through play, recreation and leisure activities — at every age.

I. Asimov

Can you learn anything outside of school?

Isaac Asimov

I received the fundamentals of my education in school, but that was not enough. My real education, the superstructure, the details, the true architecture, I got out of the public library. For an impoverished child whose family could not afford to buy books, the library was the open door to wonder and achievement, and I can never be sufficiently grateful that I had the wit to charge through that door and make the most of it. Now, when I read constantly about the way in which library funds are being cut and cut, I can only think that the door is closing and that American society has found one more way to destroy itself.

The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers

As a teacher, if you don't care about what you teach, your students won't care either.

The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers by Maxwell King

Fred Rogers remembered that when [Margaret Beall] McFarland wanted to expose the little children at the Arsenal Center to the work of a sculptor, she gave these instructions to the artist she invited to her classes: "'I don't want you to teach sculpting. All I want you to do is to love clay in front of the children.' And that's what he did. He came once a week for a whole term, sat with the four- and five-year-olds as they played, and he 'loved' his clay in front of them. The children caught his enthusiasm for it, and that's what mattered. Like most good things, teaching has to do with honesty."

POLITICS, GOVERNMENT, AND DEMOCRACY

I found the following quote in a comment somewhere on the internet. I don't have a link to the original article or the author's name, but it speaks to the current threat to the US Postal Service. The Post Office is a government service, not a profit-making business. It's not supposed to make money anymore than roads are supposed to make money. It's supposed to be there for us when we need it. If we insisted that it make a profit then our neighbors in rural areas won't have mail-service -- just like they don't have internet service.

Us...not me.

Anonymous

The Government isn't SUPPOSED to make money. It's supposed to provide services for citizens and promote the general welfare. If you only have services that are profitable, then the rural areas of this country will have no public transportation, no electricity, no roads. And therefore, no town. The horrible money-wasting Government laid the Interstate. Developed radar. Built huge hydroelectric dams that powered our rural regions. Landed on the moon. Split the atom. Created the Internet. Since convincing ourselves that the Government can't do anything, we can't fix a bridge. Because some billionaire would lose his Almighty Tax Cut. While the nations of Europe - that we call "Socialist" - have shot ahead of us in innovation and technology.

Kindness is the foundation for peace and happiness.

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2020 Medley #20

The US is broken, Privatization gets money,
Vulture capitalists, Fake news,
Reopening gamble,
Educational decisions without teachers

WHAT'S 'BROKEN'? THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS OR AMERICA ITSELF?

Trump exploits Biden’s charter school silence

Margaret Fortune of the Freedom Coalition for Charter Schools calls out the President for lying about former Vice President Biden's plan for charter schools. The comment by the current occupant of the White House that Biden wants to close all charter schools has been debunked over and over again, though this will hardly stop him lying about it...nor will it stop his base from believing him.

In any case, Fortune continues by making a misstatement of her own when she talks about public schools in Black neighborhoods being "broken."

It's true that public schools in high-poverty neighborhoods, especially neighborhoods filled with Black and Brown children, are generally not as successful as schools in higher-income areas, but the problem is the larger society's inability (or unwillingness) to overcome poverty. The problem is the racism and classism inherent in the social structure of the US. Why is it that test scores in low-income schools are lower than in wealthy schools? Are all the schools in low-income neighborhoods bad and all the schools in high-income neighborhoods good?

No. It's because...

• the US is one of the very few countries in the wealthy, industrialized, capitalist world that spends more money on the education of wealthy children than poor children (see here, here, here, and here).

• standardized testing which we use to "grade" our schools are culturally and racially biased (see here, here, here, and here).

• poverty affects children's ability to learn and achieve (see here, here, here, and here). 

Children of color in the US have been denied equal opportunities compared to their white counterparts for more than 400 years. Diverting much-needed funding from the public schools for their inability to solve the centuries-old problem of racism isn't going to make the issue go away.

From Politico

Before an audience of nearly 24 million viewers, Trump said during his Republican National Convention speech that Biden has vowed to “close all charter schools, ripping away the ladder of opportunity for Black and Hispanic children.”

The president's claim is not true, and Trump has not been a reliable charter school ally himself. But Biden isn’t making a big show of countering that accusation or bearhugging the charter community either, after support for the schools took a beating during the Democratic presidential primary. Boxed in by that progressive tide, the former vice president may be creating an opening for Trump to woo parents of color — and on an issue considered part of President Barack Obama’s legacy.

“I could never believe a Donald Trump on the television, trying to exploit the desperation of Black families who need a better option for their kids because the public schools in their neighborhoods are broken,” said Margaret Fortune, co-chair of Freedom Coalition for Charter Schools. “But it also moves me to deep concern that Joe Biden would hand him that narrative, by being silent on the issue.”

PRIVATIZED SCHOOLS GRAB MORE FUNDS

Private and Charter Schools Receive Approximately $5.7 Billion in PPP Loans, Raising Questions About Equity in Education

While public schools are threatened with cuts, private schools (mostly parochial) and charter schools get more than five times the funding from the CARES Act.

From COVID Stimulus Watch

Our review revealed that approximately 1,200 charter schools and 5,400 private schools received an estimated $1.3 billion and $4.5 billion in PPP loans, respectively—averaging $855,000 per school. In contrast, other parts of the CARES Act allocate only $13.2 billion for all of the 98,158 public schools in the country, or $134,500 per school. In other words, private and charter schools are getting six times more per facility than public schools.

This gap will likely widen, as charter and private schools are also entitled to a portion of federal funding for public education. Additional analysis will be needed to determine the exact size of this gap, but there is clearly a significant disparity in CARES Act funding for different kinds of schools.

VULTURE CAPITALISTS

Ed Tech Cashes In on the Pandemic

When the pandemic hit, the vultures moved in. If you've never read The Shock Doctrine, now is the time.

From The American Prospect

Ed tech companies lost no time moving in. “When the pandemic hit, right away we got a list of all these technology companies that make education software that were offering free access to their products for the duration of the coronavirus crisis,” said Gordon Lafer, political economist at the University of Oregon and a member of his local school board. “They pitch these offerings as stepping up to help out the country in a moment of crisis. But it’s also like coke dealers handing out free samples.” ...

For the past two decades, ed tech has been pushing into public schools, convincing districts to invest in tablets, software, online programs, assessment tools. Many superintendents have allowed these incursions, directing funding to technology that might have been better spent on human resources, teachers, counselors, nurses, librarians (up to $5.6 billion of school technology purchased sits unused, according to a 2019 analysis in EdWeek Market Brief). Now the pandemic has provided ed tech a “golden opportunity,” a “tailwind” (these are the terms we hear): Michael Moe, head of the venture capitalist group Global Silicon Valley, says: “We see the education industry today as the health care industry of 30 years ago.” Not a happy thought.

THE FAKE NEWS LEGACY

91 Examples of Americans At Odds About Covid-19 as Students Start School

The US is a post-truth society. We no longer have facts common to us all. We only have the facts of our own little bubble of news and information. Republicans have one set of facts. Democrats have another. Even the health of the nation suffers from partisan bickering.

From Nancy Bailey's Education Website

1. Schools are not safe. Students should learn remotely.
2. Send students back to school; it’s more dangerous if they stay home.
3. Make sure students wear masks.
4. I would not want to wear a mask if I was a kid.
5. Teachers who make children wear masks are sheep.
6. Forcing us to wear masks is tyranny!
7. Masks are disgusting!
8. Teachers don’t realize that Covid-19 is a hoax.
9. Covid-19 is real, but it is not as bad as they say. It is over-reported.
10. Covid-19 is worse than they say. It’s under-reported.

CHILDREN AND THEIR TEACHERS ARE THE PAWNS IN POLITICAL GAMES

The School Reopening Gamble

America's schoolchildren and their teachers are the pawns in the political games of adults.

From Jersey Jazzman

In the next week or so, school districts all over the country will reopen their buildings as their new year begins. During our pre-service training, a teacher colleague of mine described the process as a “grand experiment.”

But he’s wrong; it’s not an experiment. It’s a gamble.

An experiment, by definition, is a controlled, scientific procedure designed to gain knowledge. When a researcher conducts an experiment, they try, as much as possible, to control for outside factors that may affect an outcome. The goal is to see relationships between causes and effects, and better understand how the world works.

A gamble, on the other hand, is a risky action taken with the hopes of getting a favorable result. A gambler isn’t trying to learn anything – all they want is a win.

EDUCATIONAL DECISIONS: NO NEED FOR EDUCATORS

“Teachers Can Turn This Thing Around” – Not Billionaires, Private Interests, Or ALEC-Aligned Stooges

Educational decisions are being made without the input of educators. Does this surprise you? It shouldn't. It's been going on for years.

From Caffeinated Rage

It’s kind of like re-imagining health care without input from health care professionals or receiving marital advice from someone who has never been in a long-term relationship. It’s like getting counseling from someone who cannot even empathize with your situation.

But with the end of the traditional school year coming and the need to start talking about how we will proceed with fall, it is apparent that the input of teachers is paramount.

Why? Because “Teachers Can Turn This Thing Around.”

And don’t forget to vote this November.

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2020 Medley #17 -- All COVID-19, All the Time

It's all COVID-19 - all the time, 
Teach in-person or lose funding,
Billions for privatization, Stingy U.S. Senate, 
The damage done, It's still poverty

IT'S ALL COVID-19, ALL THE TIME

Is there really anything to write about besides the problem of schools starting during the pandemic...the threat to students and teachers...the lack of preparation and science-based decisions?

The big problem facing public education right now is the fact that states are coercing school staff and students back into in-person classrooms before the pandemic is under control and virtually every education writer has at least one, and often more, opinions about the subject.

Maybe it's my "bubble" but most of the articles I've read (and posted) were on the side of "no in-person school until it's safe." The few that were in favor of opening schools in the middle of a pandemic took the side of 1) parents need to go back to work, which only shows up the failure of state and federal governments ability to provide for safe child care and provide support for parents who would have to stay at home to be with their kids, and 2) kids are less affected by COVID-19 so they'll be ok...with little if any acknowledgment that in order to have kids in school one must also have adults who are at greater risk from the illness.

For me, however, the biggest problem is the same one that the media has faced since the current occupant of the White House* announced his candidacy four years ago; there is so much shit going on -- mostly from Washington D.C. -- that one can't keep up with it.

Take a look at the news. There is no longer any such thing as a 24-hour news cycle. Now it's more like 24 seconds...the time it takes "tiny fingers" to tweet something outrageous. "Little kids are immune to coronavirus" (not true), "Hydroxychloroquine will cure COVID-19" (not true), and other things that are also not true. Meanwhile, there are [the current number of Americans dying daily] Americans dead today who were alive yesterday, and a total of [the current total of Americans dead from COVID-19] Americans who are dead from the pandemic. As of this writing (August 7, 2020), nearly 158,000 dead.

TEACH IN PERSON OR LOSE FUNDING

Schools that don’t offer in-person instruction could lose funding, top lawmaker says

First, the Indiana supermajority has decided that the current occupant of the White House* and his ignorant Secretary of Education have the right idea -- double down on their plan to privatize public education by requiring schools to reopen for in-person instruction or lose federal funding. Local control be damned.

The current President Pro Tempore of the Indiana Senate has jumped on that bandwagon and will cut by 15 percent, funding for schools that don't provide in-person instruction. Local control be damned.

The decision for schools to remain closed in counties with a dangerously high prevalence of COVID-19, therefore, is out of the hands of local health departments and school boards. The Republicans in the Indiana General Assembly intend to punish any school or school system which dares to keep its students and staff members safe. Guess which school systems, and which students will be hurt the most by this.

Public schools that do not offer an in-person education option could see their budgets slashed, despite prior assurances from Gov. Eric Holcomb and other state leaders that they would be fully funded.

Senate President Pro Tempore Rodric Bray sent a letter to school leaders Thursday – after dozens of districts around the state have already started — to offer “a bit more clarity” about state funding. Only public schools offering in-person instruction or both in-person and virtual options are likely to be fully funded, he said in the letter obtained by IndyStar.

BILLIONS FOR PRIVATIZATION

AU’s New Report Details How Billions In Pandemic Relief Was Diverted To Private Schools

Money meant for public education was diverted to private, mostly religious, schools. Fortunately for Indiana, Republican State Superintendent Jennifer McCormick made sure that the damage was minimal.

Private schools got billions in taxpayer money: Under PPP, private schools, both religious and secular, got between $2.67 billion and $6.47 billion. At least 5,691 private schools, including at least 4,006 private religious schools, got “loans” from PPP – and remember, these loans can be mostly forgiven by the government as long as the schools meet a few criteria, so they are really grants.

Private schools often received more money than nearby public schools: Public schools were not eligible for PPP, but they were able to receive funds from a separate coronavirus relief program called ESSER. The ESSER fund allocated $13.2 billion in pandemic recovery funds for public school districts. But we know that private schools might have received as much as $6.47 billion under PPP. That’s nearly half of the ESSER fund – even though private schools serve only 10 percent of the student population.

NO HELP FROM MCCONNELL & CO

Myths and Facts About the COVID-19 Public Education Relief Being Debated in Congress

Next, don't expect much help from the Republican-controlled U.S. Senate. After already diverting an outsized chunk of coronavirus relief help to private schools, the Senate plan has no desire to help struggling public school systems.

First Myth The leaders in the U.S. Senate say there is more money for public schools in the HEALS Act than there is in the HEROES Act: The HEALS Act would award $105 billion for K-12 and higher education while the HEROES Act would award only $90 billion.

The Facts ...The Vice President for State Policy and Tax at The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Michael Leachman explains that already, “Huge state and local budget shortfalls are forcing schools to lay off teachers and other employees, making it even harder to open safely or provide adequate remote instruction. Because the pandemic forced states to shut down their economies, state and local revenues have fallen off the table. Already, states and localities have furloughed or laid off 1.5 million workers, including 667,000 bus drivers, cleaning staff and other school workers, and imposed other steep funding cuts. Without more federal aid, cash strapped states—which must balance their budgets each year—likely will continue cutting school funding, forcing more layoffs and other cuts in school support… Yet the Senate Republican plan… offers no new general fiscal aid to states, only to schools to cover reopening costs… With fewer staff and dollars, schools would find it even harder to open safely and provide high-quality instruction.”

THE DAMAGE IS DONE

This Year Will Be a Lost School Year

Nearly everyone wants students to be in school. Teachers didn't study education for four (or more) years, accept lower than average salaries (compared to other college graduates), in order to sit behind a computer screen and try to keep the attention of several dozen inattentive students. Teachers want to be in the classroom, interacting with students. Relationships are one of the most important parts of a good classroom atmosphere. The damage from COVID-19 is already done.

First, virtual learning should open everyone’s eyes to how much goes on at school. Last spring, there was simply no way to replicate, in a virtual setting, my daily classroom routine. Virtual learning uncovered the vast amount of work that teachers were ushering kids through each day. It was a literal ton of work. It raised questions about the purpose and ends of the work we were assigning and exposed the reality that we continue to worry about the number of work students produce ahead of the work’s relevance to, and interest of, students. We need to grapple with the balance between quality instruction and quantity of instruction.

Second, the driving factor concerning the quantity of work heaped upon students was revealed this spring-testing. With testing suspended, it hastened teachers’ ability to truncate and focus their instruction, which led to more questions about why we rely so heavily on testing. Clearly, schools and teachers understood which students needed more help even when testing was no more. If teachers and schools know who needs help without standardized tests, it is a reasonable conclusion that testing resources should be reallocated more effectively.

IT'S STILL POVERTY

School poverty – not racial composition – limits educational opportunity, according to new research at Stanford

From September 2019: The problem is race and poverty. America is failing.

To determine what accounted for the correlation, they controlled for racial differences in school poverty and found that segregation no longer predicted the achievement gaps. That meant the association between racial segregation and the growth of achievement gaps operated entirely through differences in school poverty.

“While racial segregation is important, it’s not the race of one’s classmates that matters, per se,” said Reardon. “It’s the fact that in America today, racial segregation brings with it very unequal concentrations of students in high- and low-poverty schools.”

* WARNING: Politics:

I've decided that I can no longer use the proper name of the current occupant of the White House or the title which he has sullied in his less than 4 years in office. He has shown that he is willing to provide more help to red states, "his people", than to "Democratic states" (see also here). 

In that respect, I no longer consider him the President of the United States (even though I live in a state filled with "his people"). He has proven that he is only the president of his base, of which I am not, and never will be, a member.

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2020 Medley #12 -- Post-pandemic Education

Post-pandemic education,
Economic and racial stratification in education,
The kids are alright, Online education, 
The damaging effects of vouchers

[child PNG Designed By ali105 from Pngtree.com]

POST-PANDEMIC EDUCATION

Have you read anything lately about "when schools reopen after the pandemic is over?" There are ideas galore...some good, some ridiculous. It's good to plan ahead, of course, but we don't really know what the situation will be in three months.

One thing is sure, with the pandemic there came an economic downturn -- a recession, which actually began in February. The House of Representatives has passed a spending bill that's stalled in the Senate. States are running out of money...and schools are, as usual, at the top of the list of cuts.

Here in Indiana, schools have yet to recover from the recession of 2008. More cuts to education, at a time when increased funding for education is absolutely necessary, will be disastrous. Last week I suggested that one way to reduce costs for public schools is to cancel testing...another way would be to return charter and voucher money back to the public schools. Those, however, are not likely to happen, the latter especially.

So the post-pandemic calls for more bus service, smaller classes, teachers teaching online and in person, and a host of other ideas which will cost more money. How does that happen?

Five things not to do when schools re-open

Pasi Sahlberg, author, with William Doyle, of Let the Children Play: How More Play Will Save Our Schools and Help Children Thrive, has some ideas of what NOT to do when schools reopen. At the top of the list is refusing to accept that school is the only place where children learn. He emphasizes that kids will come to school traumatized and will need a focus on social-emotional learning.

So much has been said already about teaching and learning during the Covid-19 pandemic that it is hard to say something new. More focus on social and emotional learning, student and teacher wellbeing, authentic assessments, distance learning with technology, relationships in schools and recess during school days. Fewer high-stakes standardized tests, less unproductive consequential accountability, more direct instruction in school, and less rote textbook learning. All these ideas were presented already before this crisis, but people see that the time is right to transform schools after the pandemic is gone...

1. Don’t think that kids only learn when they are taught...

2. Don’t worry about kids’ losses on school tests...

3. Don’t expect kids to be ready to continue where they left off...

4. Don’t consider recess as a low priority...

5. Don’t expect there will be a ‘new normal’ anytime soon...

David Berliner: Kids Missing School? Don’t Worry.

David Berliner, Regents' Professor Emeritus of Education at Arizona State University and a past president of the American Educational Research Association, agrees with Pasi Sahlberg. A child is more than a test score and school is not the only place to learn.

...what if they do lose a few points on the achievement tests currently in use in our nation and in each of our states? None of those tests predict with enough confidence much about the future life those kids will live. That is because it is not just the grades that kids get in school, nor their scores on tests of school knowledge, that predict success in college and in life. Soft skills, which develop as well during their hiatus from school as they do when they are in school, are excellent predictors of a child’s future success in life.

U.S. schools lay off hundreds of thousands, setting up lasting harm to kids

Among the layoffs are teachers, of course, but also support personnel. The cuts will negatively impact poor students the most.

School districts in poor areas face the most punishing blows. A Brookings Institution paper in April predicted that education layoffs “would come at the worst possible time for high-poverty schools, as even more students fall into poverty and need more from schools as their parents and guardians lose their own jobs.”

Low-income districts are particularly troubled because of plunging revenue amid the Covid-19 recession. Districts rely for revenue on local property taxes and state subsidies. Poorer districts, where property tax revenue is low, rely on states for most of their income. With states hit hard by falling income and sales taxes, aid to school districts is dwindling in many places.

Austerity, Subsistence, or Investment: Will Congress And The President Choose to Bail Out Our Children’s Future?

We bailed out the auto industry. We bailed out the banks. We bailed out the airlines. Do we care enough about the future of America to bail out our children?

Our policymakers are on the edge of a precipice. If they step into the budget-cut austerity abyss at this time of great crisis, they will be choosing to harm the nation’s children and, in doing so, to devalue the country’s most important asset. Recovery would become a long and arduous process. We may, in fact, never recover. As one alternative, they can choose the stopgap, subsistence option of backfilling state and local budgets, which we contend is necessary but not sufficient. In fact, the cost of education will likely be higher due to added safety measures schools will be required to take and the added needs of the returning students. The third choice available to policymakers is stimulus investment devoted to our schools and children, especially children of color, in their time of great need, which would provide the extra benefit of saving jobs and creating new jobs to help in combating national unemployment.

...The enormously expensive bailouts of airlines, financial markets, investors, and other elements of the economy are defended — and are arguably defensible — as necessary to prevent further pain that would be felt by “average Americans” if that larger economy collapses. But many of those average Americans are families with children in public schools. If policymakers choose to let those children sink, taking their futures down with them, then why bother bailing out the businesses that we hope will one day serve them and employ them?

Refusing the needed funding for public education systems means impoverishing our youth, our communities, our public life – our democracy. Economically speaking, it would result in hundreds of thousands additional job losses across the country in the short-term, devastate the future job market for highly skilled labor, and hurt the ability of companies to bring on new talents and grow their profits – shrinking future GDP and tax revenue. If policymakers are willing and able to put $4.5 trillion of Fed lending into bolstering financial markets through treasury funding,43 how can they deny a fraction of that to our children to save their futures?

THE CONTINUED ECONOMIC AND RACIAL STRATIFICATION OF PUBLIC EDUCATION

Rich schools get richer

While our poor children suffer from decaying facilities, underpaid teachers, and lack of materials, America's wealthy children get richer. They get the equipment they need, the well-trained teachers that we all want for our own children, and the opportunities to advance based on income.

Why we should care about high levels of education spending among the rich is a matter of debate. [Bruce Baker, a school finance expert at Rutgers Graduate School of Education,] argues that their choices affect the rest of us. That’s because education investments by the rich can potentially boost their children’s achievement levels and give them an advantage in college applications. As these well-educated children move from well-funded schools to elite universities, their advantages continue as they apply to graduate schools and seek the most coveted jobs. Those at the bottom as well as those in the middle can struggle to compete against this kind of educational privilege.

“It’s kind of like baseball,” Baker said. “When the Yankees spend more, it makes it harder for everyone else to compete.”

THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT

This Teacher Went To A Peaceful Protest And…

The self-professed old guy at Caffeinated Rage lets us know that kids today are alright.

The people I marched with yesterday came from various backgrounds with many older people such as myself, BUT…

The number of students and younger people who just might be voting in their first national elections this fall were staggering. It was their energy that fueled that peaceful protest.

There was no violence. There was no cursing.

There was purpose. There was understanding and quest to understand more.

ONLINE EDUCATION IS NOT GOOD ENOUGH

What Do We Know About Online Education and Virtual Charter Schools?

As hard as it is to find a way to teach students during a pandemic it's important to remember that online education is not the same, or as good as, face to face interaction between teachers and students in a classroom.

We find the impact of attending a virtual charter on student achievement is uniformly and profoundly negative, equating to a third of a standard deviation in English/language arts (ELA) and a half of a standard deviation in math. This equates to a loss of roughly 11 percentile points in ELA and 16 percentile points in math for an average virtual charter student at baseline as compared to their public school peers (see Figure 1 above). There is no evidence that virtual charter students improve in subsequent years. We could not “explain away” these findings by looking at various teacher or classroom characteristics. We also use the same methodology to analyze the impact of attending brick-and-mortar charter schools. In contrast, we find that students who attended brick-and-mortar charters have achievement no different from their traditional public school peers (see Figure 2 below). Our confidence in these results is further buoyed by other studies of virtual charter schools in Ohio and nationwide having similar findings.

THE DAMAGING EFFECTS OF VOUCHERS

Public Funds Public Schools Website Provides Compendium of Research on School Vouchers

There isn't enough money to support public education. So why are we sending public tax dollars to private schools? Public funds should go to public schools. Here's a group that explains why.

Public Funds Public Schools introduces its research compendium: “Studies of voucher programs across the country have found that students who participate in private school voucher programs fare worse academically than students educated in public schools, and in some cases dramatically worse. In addition, voucher programs undermine already struggling public schools. Other damaging effects of vouchers include loss of civil rights protections, increased segregation, and erosion of the separation of church and state. Private school voucher programs often lack accountability and transparency, yet cost millions of public dollars.”

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