DRUM ROLL FOR GOVERNORS AGAINST PUBLIC SCHOOLS

The following list of governors who have negatively influenced public education in their states was compiled by Russ Walsh, an experienced curriculum director in school districts in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Our governor, Dan Malloy, is on the Top Ten list of offenders, but Governor Malloy is ranked number 10. I am sure, to the dismay of many in Connecticut, if this list had been written today, our governor could earn a much, much higher spot.

Surely, he could place at #3 or maybe even at #2. His new attacks on public education include taking $17.1 million out of traditional public schools, which will curtail extended day and summer programs in needy school districts, make universal preschool impossible, not fund priority districts as promised and at less than last year, and limit aid for transportation of students. At the same time, his budget will spend $12.4 million to build two new charter schools in cities that voted against them and add 700 new seats in existing charter schools.

In addition as the legislative session was coming to close the first week of June, Governor Malloy  tried to pull a fast and sneaky trick on the legislature by switching language on a bill that the legislature had almost unanimously passed a few days earlier. The bill gave the authority to approve charter schools to the state legislature instead of keeping it in the hands of the officials at State Board of Education, who are appointed by the governor,  and would make charter schools responsible under the Freedom of Information laws to disclose the same information as all other publicly funded entities. The governor tried to change those two provisions in the bill that the legislature had just passed without telling the legislators.

Now that I think of it, I say that we have a governor who definitely ranks #1 in the destruction of public education.

Here is the list as posted on russonreading.blogspot.com/2015/06/stupid–governors–tricks.html

Top Ten Governor’s Stupid Education Tricks

by Russ Walsh

Now that David Letterman has exited stage left, taking his Top Ten Lists and Stupid Pet Tricks with him, Russ on Reading is ready to step into the void by highlighting a new bunch of clowns for your diversion. Inspired by the incredible stone-headedness of this nation’s governors when it comes to education, I call my new list Top Ten Stupid Governors Education Tricks.

Since education policy supposedly lies with the states in this country (unless you are accepting bribes in the form of stimulus money from the federal Department of Education), governors hold a great deal of power when it comes to education policy and budgets. Many governors have fallen in love with the false promises and faulty reasoning of the corporate education reformers (possibly because these reformers fill their campaign coffers) and have done some supremely stupid things. The list below only scratches the surface. Please feel free to add your own stupid governor’s tricks to the list.

Now that David Letterman has exited stage left, taking his Top Ten Lists and Stupid Pet Tricks with him, Russ on Reading is ready to step into the void by highlighting a new bunch of clowns for your diversion. Inspired by the incredible stone-headedness of this nation’s governors when it comes to education, I call my new list Top Ten Stupid Governors Education Tricks.

Since education policy supposedly lies with the states in this country (unless you are accepting bribes in the form of stimulus money from the federal Department of Education), governors hold a great deal of power when it comes to education policy and budgets. Many governors have fallen in love with the false promises and faulty reasoning of the corporate education reformers (possibly because these reformers fill their campaign coffers) and have done some supremely stupid things. The list below only scratches the surface. Please feel free to add your own stupid governor’s tricks to the list.

10. Connecticut Governor Dannel Malloy – While most governors on this list are Republicans, Democrat Malloy shows that Republicans don’t have a monopoly on gubernatorial stupidity. In his 2012 State of the State address, after riding teacher union support to an electoral victory, Malloy said,  “In today’s [education] system, basically all you have to do is show up for four years. Do that and you have a job for life.” Malloy then introduced a bill to do away with tenure. Malloy has been backpedaling from this stupid trick ever since, finally pressuring his reformy Education Commisioner, Stefan Pryor, out in a deal with the Connecticut Education Association last year. But you need to ask, “On what planet do you get better education performance from students by denigrating the people who are working closely with those students every day?” See?  Just stupid.

9. Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner – Rauner is so reformy that he has a charter school named after him. He has given millions to charter schools in Chicago. In an exchange with charter critic Diane Ravitch, Rauner said that his charters don’t need to apologize for not accepting second language learners and children with disabilities, because they only want families who are highly motivated. For Rauner “school choice” apparently means only educating children that charters choose to educate. He is a champion of the dual system of education, one for the haves and another that none of his cronies cares about or supports for the have-nots.

8. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie – Chris Christie is running so hard for president that he is laying waste to the state he was actually elected to govern. On education he has flip-flopped more than a stranded whale on a New Jersey beach. Christie has read the conservative political waters of the nation and has suddenly discovered that the Common Core State Standards, which he has long championed, now represent federal overreach. Compounding his stupidity is that the governor has called for new “New Jersey” standards, but will keep the Common Core aligned PARCC test in place. So, let’s change the standards, but not the test that measures the learning of those standards. This leaves New Jersey’s school children and teachers further confused about what to study and how to prepare. In any test of accountability in public office, Christie can only be pronounced “not proficient”.

7. Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal – Like Christie, Jindal loved him some Common Core until he decided to run for president. But this flip-flop added an extra measure of stupidity by generating a legal battle between Louisiana Schools Superintendent John White, who continued to support the Core and Jindal, who needed to distance himself from the Core to appeal to the conservative Republican base. White actually sued and won a court battle over the Common Core against Jindal. Louisiana blogger Mercedes Schneider writes that Jindal’s legal team failed to provide a strong case. This is the second high profile court case related to education Jindal has lost (He lost an earlier federal case that vacated his voucher program). Jindal has argued that teachers do not need training in education to be effective teachers. Perhaps Jindal hires lawyers without legal training as well.

6. Mississippi Governor Phil Bryant – Governor Bryant flunked third grade when he was 9 years-old because he couldn’t read well. Bryant believes that this was really good for him and so he has decided to share this good fortune with about 6,000 current Mississippi third graders who “failed” a state literacy test. Apparently, Bryant’s literacy education was not sufficient to allow him to read and comprehend the tons of research that demonstrates how retention is bad for children in myriad ways and often leads to students dropping out. I wrote more about this child abuse here, but for perpetrating this stupid education trick let us hope that Bryant is not “retained” as governor in the next election.

5. Indiana Governor Mike Pence – Republican Mike Pence came into office in 2012 hoping to continue the destruction of public education begun by his predecessor Mitch Daniels. Unfortunately for Pence, on the same election night when Pence was elected, the people of Indiana also elected a new Superintendent of Public Instruction, Glenda Ritz. Ritz was voted in as a rebuke to the reformy policies of former Superintendent Tony Bennett (not the one who left his heart in San Francisco), so Pence was faced with a quandary: How to continue the reformy agenda with an actual public school teacher and advocate for public education in office as the schools superintendent. Pence hit on a plan that earns him a special place on this list. He decided to ignore the democratically elected Ritz and strip her of any power. His message: Democracy be damned, I gotta’ deliver school choice for my wealthy cronies.Pence managed most of this with the aid of a heavily Republican legislature, but Ritz may have the last laugh. She recently announced she is running for governor. In the last election, she polled more votes than Pence. We can only hope that happens again in 2016. Read more about Pence’s stupid education tricks here.

4. Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker – College dropout Scott Walker earns his stupidity award honestly. His motto seems to be “Who needs an education when you have rich friends?” Taking his cues from these rich friends, Walker has gone full frontal in his attack on public employees, particularly teacher’s unions.The New York Times reporters Patrick Healy and Monica Davey have done a good job of exposing the roots of Walker’s anti-unionism in this article. There are many acts of stupidity that can get Walker on this list, but his latest one is a doozy. Walker wants to cut 250 million from the budget of the University of Wisconsin and use the money to build a new stadium for the National Basketball Association’s Milwaukee Bucks. Walker was quoted as saying about his reasoning for spending big bucks on the Bucks, “There is a cost to ‘no’.” Apparently it is ok to say no to a great state university, but you dare not say no to a basketball team. What Walker seemingly learned during his short stay at Marquette was “Basketball good, public education bad.”

3.  Florida Governor Rick Scott – Like the other reform governors here, Florida’s Rick Scott loves charter schools, vouchers, union bashing and everything else designed to destroy public education and turn it over to the privatizers. Scott makes this list though because about three years ago he discovered that Florida might be giving too many tests.  Nothing much happened about this discovery until this year, where, after apparently three years of study of the problem, Scott signed a bill eliminating exactly one test, an 11th grade language arts exam. I am sure that makes the 3rd graders in Florida feel better. Of course, these kids should all feel better because now they can only be tested for 45 hours a school year or the equivalent of non-stop testing for two weeks a year. Gee, thanks, Guv.

2. New Mexico Governor Susana Martinez – Martinez earned her way onto this list with one of the more telling stupid governor’s tricks. During her campaign she was caught on tape denigrating women, political opponents, and teachers in a profanity laced campaign meeting. Specifically, Martinez said that she could not understand what teachers were complaining about since they “don’t work you know two-and-a-half months out of the year, three months out of the year.” Unsurprisingly, a person with such a low regard for teachers has bought in to the entire corporate education reform agenda of test based accountability and choice. When her uncensored remarks were made public, her advisors tried to laugh it off as Susana being Susana, but the teachers and children of New Mexico are not laughing.

1. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo – And the number one prize for Stupid Governor Tricks can go to none other than that champion of educational obtuseness, Andrew Cuomo. In December 2014, Cuomo vetoed his own bill that placed a two year moratorium on the use of test scores in teacher evaluations. Apparently, Merry Andrew was miffed that teachers scored well on their 2014 evaluations, and he would have none of that.  Against any and all factual information at hand, Cuomo then decreed that 50% of the teacher evaluation would be based on test scores. If these bogus “value added measures” show the teacher to be ineffective, the teacher cannot get an effective rating, no matter what observational data says. Other provisions rule out the following as part of the evaluation: student work portfolios, student or parent surveys, and professional goal setting documents. Andrew Cuomo truly believes that teachers are to blame for student failure and by gum, he is going to find an evaluation scheme to prove he is right, no matter what damage it does to teachers, children, and public education in New York.

Like all the other governors listed here, Cuomo has chosen to ignore the real reasons for educational problems: poverty, segregation and inequitable distribution of resources and has focused his sights on those miscreant teachers, who have only dedicated their lives to working with children. Children whose welfare and potential these governors ignore at every turn. Let us understand that the actions of these governors play to their political and financial backers, to the monied few, and are designed to further disenfranchise those without the political and financial resources to fight back. Unfortunately, the ultimate joke is on all the citizens of this country who rely on a strong public education system as a centerpiece of a thriving democracy.

The bad news for education in Connecticut is that in the state budget, which takes effect on July 1, 2015, money will be spent on charter schools for 2% of Connecticut children that would have been better spent on the other 98% of Connecticut children. The good news is that if the Connecticut legislature wants to address that kind of injustice, it will soon have the power to do so.

The legislature derives that power from a bill it just passed. It is S.B. 1096 entitled “An Act Concerning Charter Schools”. The bill passed with a vote by the Connecticut State Senate of 35-1 and with the House of Representatives voting in concurrence with the Senate. The passage of that bill gives the Connecticut legislature, for the first time, the authority to approve the formal funding of any proposed charter schools. Previously, the appointed officials of the Connecticut State Department of Education had that authority. This change means that we as citizens, for the first time, through our elected officials, will have some say over the extending or limiting of charter schools in Connecticut. That will take place unless nefarious political shenanigans in the Special Session overturn the decisive vote of the legislature.

As CT Mirror reports, the two-year budget that was passed on July 3, 2015 allocates $12.4 million dollars to add about 700 seats to existing charter schools and to open two new charter schools this fall, one in Bridgeport and one Stamford, both of which are being opened despite the local boards of education voting against them. At the same time, a group of struggling public schools, targeted for state intervention and state funding, called The Commissioners Network will receive $4.7 million less than they received this year. Also, 15 of our poorest public school districts will lose $3.6 million slated to extend the school day and offer summer academic programs and lose $1.6 million to help public schools transport students. In addition, the Democratic Party’s plan to move the state towards universal preschool has been put aside because $7.2 million was cut from the planned $10 million dollar project.

For those of you who are counting, that is $12.4 million given to publicly funded, privately operated and profit-making charter schools and $17.1 million taken away from traditional public schools.

But maybe it’s not all about the money. Maybe it’s about the education. What if the student achievement gained in charter schools is worth it? What if the trade-off pays off?

Answers to these questions can be found in a multitude of national studies which demonstrate that student achievement in charter schools and traditional public schools is pretty much the same. Answers particular to Connecticut can be found a report commissioned by the Connecticut State Department of Education entitled Evaluating the Academic Performance of Choice Programs in Connecticut, which was just released. The report compares student achievement in non-urban schools, urban schools, and the choice programs of public charter schools, magnet schools operated by districts, regional magnet schools such as those operated by CREC, and Open Choice programs in which inner-city students attend suburban schools.

The news was quite underwhelming regarding the performance of charter schools. As Commissioner of Education, Dianna Wentzell commented, “ In some cases, students in choice programs made greater academic gains than their peers not enrolled in these programs (students in traditional public schools), thereby closing the achievement gap, while in other cases they did not.” Sometimes students in regular, old inner city public schools made more impressive gains than students in publicly funded but privately owned and managed charter schools, and sometimes students in charter schools did better.

There was no clear winner among the alternatives to traditional public schools. The report compared the growth in reading and writing at both proficient and advanced levels of students between grades 3 and 5 and between grades 6 and 8 as measured by standardized test scores.

The public charter schools actually showed a regression in proficiency in reading and writing for students between Grades 3 and 5 while all other choice programs as well as traditional urban schools demonstrated growth in proficiency. Charters students also demonstrated much less growth in advanced scores of 5^th graders than all other groups of students, including those in traditional urban public schools. The students in regional magnet schools showed the greatest growth in proficiency in reading and math.

The report also measured students’ growth in proficiency between Grades 6 and 8. Students in charter schools and inner city students who attend school in the suburbs through the Open Choice program showed the most growth in proficiency, and students in charter schools and regional magnet schools demonstrated the most growth in 8^th grade advanced scores.

So it’s a mixed bag for charter schools.

Charter schools in Connecticut, as everywhere else, have a more select population than traditional public schools: fewer students with special education needs, fewer students who have English as a second language, fewer students from impoverished homes or no homes at all, and more students who have higher base line scores than their counterparts in traditional public schools. This Connecticut State Department of Education study acknowledged those differences and corrected for them but did not correct for other differences between the students in charter schools and students in traditional public schools.

Three factors not corrected for in the study influence student achievement. One is the dynamism or lack of it in the family structure. There is a difference between charter school parents who have had the time and energy to seek out various schooling options for their children and other parents who did not or cannot. That family structure influences study habits and attitude towards school and provides all kinds of support for achievement. Another factor contributing to student achievement is peer influence. Attending a charter school with other students from families who similarly value education establishes a school culture which fosters achievement. Both the family and the peer group greatly influence the third factor: intrinsic student motivation.

Given that many more students in charter schools have the advantages of a positive family structure, a peer group that is a positive influence, and their own inner drive that many students in traditional public schools do not, it is reasonable to expect that charter school students would perform very much better than they do. But they don’t.

The report also demonstrates that it is impossible to know if the teaching and the approach to learning in charter schools improve student achievement. The report states: “ It cannot be said with certainty that clones of these choice programs, or an exportation of specific pedagogical techniques and strategies used, will necessarily ensure similar performance success for urban students in general.” Therefore, this report does not in any way endorse the curriculum or instruction of charter schools or make any statement about what goes on in the classrooms as being a causal factor for student achievement.

So we are back to the question: Should we set up new publicly funded, privately managed, profit-generating charter schools at the expense of providing educational resources to a broad spectrum of Connecticut’s children? Hopefully, each Connecticut legislator in the future and each Connecticut citizen who puts legislators in office will answer: Not on my watch.

Ultimately, it is way more than a question about one educational setting versus another one. Whether like Jennifer Alexander who lobbies for charter schools, you see thousands of Connecticut public school students “trapped in failing schools” or, like me, you see the possibilities for curriculum design and professional development in those schools, what we have before us and before the Connecticut legislators in the future is a key moral question about what is the right thing for citizens in a democracy and their elected representatives to do.

That moral question is: Are not all Connecticut’s children our children, and, if they are, how will we educate them?

A reposting from Saturday for those who were away for the weekend:

The other night, I was making shrimp scampi for the first time. The man behind the fish counter at Whole Foods had talked to me about the importance of de-veining the shrimp exactly right and predicted unpleasant results if I didn’t follow his directions precisely so I wasn’t paying attention to the news on the small kitchen TV.

Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw an ad which told me that this sweet, forlorn little girl was about to have her locker, her school desk, her teacher, her friends, and even “her very self “taken away from her if the Connecticut legislature did not fund new seats in her public charter school.

1

Moreover, the ad said that 861 children would be denied access to new seats in public charter schools. The ad concluded with a plea to Connecticut legislators to live up to their responsibility for all of Connecticut’s children.

I continued to de-vein the shrimp.

Several shrimp later, the ad came on again, and I watched it more intently.

I heard again about the sad plight of the lovely little girl and was shown how happy she had been before everything was taken away from her (See below).

When I finished with the shrimp, I put the water on for the pasta. As I placed the cutting board I had used for the shrimp into the dishwasher, I looked to the TV, and there was the ad again. I saw once more how the little girl was overcome with sadness without her locker, without her desk, without her teacher, without her school, and without her very self.

When the water boiled, I added the pasta. The pasta took seven minutes to cook. As I drained the pasta, the ad came on once again. I heard for the fourth time that the sweet little girl would have her locker, her desk, her teacher, her very self taken away from her, and it was the fault of the Connecticut legislature because legislators were threatening to not fund new seats in her charter school.

By this time, I had a lot of questions:

First of all, how would this little girl have her existing seat, locker, friends, and teacher taken away from her since it is new seats, not her seat, that are at stake in the state budget?

Also, who has the kind of money to run this ad four times in the time it took me to make a meal that the recipe said took 30 minutes?

Why would that child in the ad be denied a locker, a desk, a teacher, and a school? Don’t we have public education in this country with lockers, desks, and teachers to which all students have a right?

Why would this child lose “her very self”, her whole identity, if she didn’t have a charter school? What disservice was being done to her that she would feel adrift in the world without the identity of attending a charter school? Who would foster that kind of cult-like allegiance?

What happened to Brown vs. the Board of Education and Sheff vs. O’Neill? Aren’t all children better off in classrooms of diversity? The children in the classroom in the ad, as typical of charter schools, are all children of color.

Why are the 861 children who could fill new seats in publicly funded but privately owned and privately managed charter schools more important than educating 98.5% of children in Connecticut who attend publicly funded and publicly accountable traditional public schools? Governor Malloy’s proposed state budget does not increase funds for traditional public schools but does call for an increase in funding for public charter schools.

Watching this ad convinced me that the governor has the wrong priority in requesting the funding of new charter schools seats and not increasing funding for traditional public schools. Even more importantly, I became aware of how parents and children in Connecticut’s inner cities are being taken advantage of by those who own and run publicly funded, profit-making charter schools. Parents in Simsbury, South Windsor, Fairfield, and Mansfield, or any other suburban community would not tolerate a publicly funded but privately owned and managed charter school in their town.

Can you imagine a neighborhood in West Hartford in which two or three of the children on the cul-de-sac attend a charter school, funded with $11,000 per student per year of taxpayer money and promoted as a superior school, while all the other children in the neighborhood attend what is said (by the charter school advocates) to be an inferior school also funded by taxpayer money?

Can you imagine Avon supporting a public charter school although that school has no greater performance record than the Avon Public Schools? Measured by standardized test scores, which is the current American way of determining school excellence, about 50% of charter schools perform the same as their traditionalX public school counterparts although the charter school student population is more selective and has fewer special education students and fewer students with English as a second language. The other 50% of charter schools are about equally divided between some doing better than traditional public schools and others doing worse than traditional public schools. What is clear from reviewing the studies of charter school performance is that charter schools have not lived up to their claim to provide an education significantly and dependably better than traditional public schools.

Can you imagine New Canaan parents sending their children to an elementary school in which 23.78 % of the children are suspended as at a charter elementary school in New Haven (Achievement First’s Amistad Academy)? Or can you imagine Wethersfield parents sending their high school students to a charter school that suspended 58.6% of its students (Elm City College Prep) or 53.5% of its students (Bridgeport Achievement First) as compared to 25 % of high school students suspended from “failing” high schools and 12.3% as the state-wide average for high school suspensions?

Can you imagine a high school in Glastonbury in which 50% of the students who entered the school as ninth graders would be pushed out of that high school by senior year, thus producing a graduation rate of 50% although touted to be 100% because 100% of those not pushed out of the school did graduate? The graduation rates and college acceptance rates in Connecticut’s charter schools need to be scrutinized. For example, in 2013, Achievement First’s Amistad High School announced that 100% of its seniors were accepted to college. In reality, 38% of those who entered the high school in ninth grade were accepted to college, 25 students out of the original 64 ninth graders. The remaining 39 students were either held back in senior year or were no longer enrolled in the school.

Can you imagine a school in Madison having a 20-45% teacher turnover rate with young, uncertified teachers who have no teaching experience coming in each year and staying for an average of 2.3 years as in most charter schools, including Achievement First schools in Connecticut? High teacher turnover affects the quality of the education because it impedes the development of instructional cohesion within the school or school district. Teacher turnover rate in charter schools is much greater than in traditional public schools, and teachers in charter schools are more likely to leave the profession than teachers in traditional public schools.

Can you imagine the taxpayers of Greenwich supporting a school budget in which 10% of the budget went to a charter management company with no oversight by local or state taxpayers through the Greenwich Board of Education or the Connecticut General Assembly?

The answer to all for all of these questions: Of course not.

Families For Excellent Schools, though, is asking the state legislature to give to our inner cities, through the funding of new charter school seats, a kind of education that would not be tolerated in our more affluent towns.

Below is the last frame of the ad:

The words of this last frame of the ad are correct. The Connecticut legislature must stand with all of Connecticut’s children, most of all those being victimized by the charter school establishment, funded by billionaires such as the Walton family, owners of Walmart. The Walton family underwrites the organization called Families for Excellent Schools and, among others who do not give their names, is responsible for the ad I saw four times before dinner.

Connecticut legislators have a public trust to deliver to ALL Connecticut children a well-funded, taxpayer-accountable, integrated, PUBLIC school with experienced, knowledgeable teachers and administrators who are involved in the school for the long term, knowledgeable about providing the best learning experiences possible, and committed to graduating all the students who enter their schools.

It is the responsibility of legislators to give our inner city children the same quality of education that children in more affluent towns in Connecticut receive. Those children do not deserve to be shuttled into academically limited, segregated, restrictive learning environments of publicly funded but privately owned and privately managed charter schools. The legislature should not vote to fund the expansion of charter schools. It makes no sense. It is simply wrong.