charter schools

Bernie Sanders: Good for K-12 Education

~ Ann Policelli Cronin ~ 2 Comments

On February 23rd, I wrote an open letter to the Presidential candidates and asked them their positions on K-12 education. I also asked readers to begin the conversation on this blog about who would be the best choice for our kids and for our country.  I received the following statement in support of Bernie Sanders. It informs us about Hillary Clinton’s and Bernie Sander’s positions on charter schools and the financing of public education. Note the specific details in the WSJ link. 

What are your thoughts about who would be best for K-12 education? Send your statement to annpcronin@gmail.com or comment below. 

Read on:   

Teachers and Parents Should Endorse Bernie Sanders Over Hillary Clinton. 

One has to wonder whether the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) made a mistake in their early endorsement of Hillary Clinton for the presidency.Thus far, according to a recent Wall Street Journal (WSJ) story, Hillary Clinton’s campaign has given reassurances to her wealthy campaign financiers that she will not deviate from the education policies of Barack Obama in the support of charter schools and high-stakes standardized testing as a means of measuring schools and teacher effectiveness.

On the other hand, Bernie Sanders in a speech in New Hampshire on January 3, 2016 stated that, “I am not in favor of privately run charter schools…..I went to public schools my whole life, so I think rather than to give tax breaks to billionaires, I think we invest in teachers and we invest in public education.” Needless to say, this statement by Bernie Sanders is “earth-shaking” and is in opposition to what the Clinton campaign is advocating which is the continuation of the billionaires’ and corporate America’s influence on K-12 public education.

Also highly innovative and unique among main-stream politicians are Bernie Sanders’ recent comments on school districts’ dependency on property taxes. He believes this dependency on local property taxes is the cause of inequality among the affluent school districts and school districts which are largely impoverished. He cites the fact that schools in the more affluent suburbs have “great schools” whereas schools in the poorer, inner-cities of the nation are substandard. Moreover, he advocates that the federal government needs to play an active role in order to  “make sure that those schools who need it the most get the funds that they deserve.” Needless to say, this type of forward thinking is unheard of in modern-day politics.

One of the concerns of teachers and parents regarding Hillary Clinton’s K-12 positions is her close affiliation with the “millionaire” donors who are helping to fund her presidential campaign. If elected president, will Clinton continue the education policies of her predecessor, Barack Obama, by espousing the use of standardized tests as a measurement of school and teacher effectiveness? Thus far, Hillary Clinton has said very little on the campaign trail to indicate that she plans to change what Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has supported during his nearly eight years in this cabinet position. Will Hillary follow in the footsteps of Duncan in his support of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), along with its flawed standardized tests created by non-educators which have proven to be developmentally inappropriate for young children?

 If Hillary Clinton should be elected in 2016, it will not take very long for the NEA and UFT to know whether they had made a wise decision in their early endorsement. The appointment of the new Secretary of Education will determine whether it will be “business as usual “ and someone who will adhere to the “testocracy” agenda along with the continued privatization movement. Or will it be someone who will move education in a new direction, an Education Secretary who will restore the dignity of the teaching profession and someone who is a true advocate of public education? Shouldn’t Hillary Clinton be indicating her views concerning K-12 education on the campaign trail in order that teachers and parents can make an informed decision whether to vote for her or Bernie Sanders in the upcoming primaries?

Joseph A. Ricciotti, Ed.D.

For Our Kids: Crucial Questions About Education Each Presidential Candidate Must Answer

~ Ann Policelli Cronin ~ 2 Comments

Dear Dr. Carson, Secretary Clinton, Senator Cruz, Governor Kasich, Senator Rubio, Senator Sanders, and Mr. Trump:

An issue that you have barely touched on in the televised debates and town hall meetings is K-12 education. Yet the education policies of the next President will affect every child and adolescent in the United States and will determine the future of our nation. Therefore, I am writing to ask you some crucial questions about K-12 education. I will post your responses on my blog, which has more than a quarter of a million readers who are concerned about education in this country.

The questions for you are:

  1. More than 500 experts in early childhood education, including the most respected professionals in the country, issued a public statement opposing the Common Core Standards for Early Childhood Education because those standards are developmentally inappropriate and cause harm to young children. The National Council of Teachers of English, comprised of elementary, middle, and high school teachers as well as college professors, did not endorse the Common Core Standards. In their analysis of the Common Core Standards, they noted that they are not internationally benchmarked and are lacking vital elements of literacy education that countries with which we compete have. No experts in the field of teaching reading and writing and no early childhood professionals were asked to participate in the writing of the  Common Core Standards. The Common Core Standards were not written by educators who know how to teach and how students learn best; they were written by people who produce standardized tests and analyze student data. What do you think the federal government or state governments should do about these standards, which are neither based on a reliable foundation nor have any evidence that they make students “college and career ready”?
  1.  Private foundations have funded and mandated what and how all students in the country will be taught and have been a strong force in determining how teachers and administrators will be trained. The leading funders are Bill and Melinda Gates who have spent billions to create and implement the Common Core. Bill and Melinda Gates also control the discussion of the Common Core in the media and promote the Common Core by giving grants to organizations, ranging from the national teachers unions to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the League of Women Voters. Do you think such control over public education by billionaires is true to the nature of a democracy? Or does it make the United States an oligarchy with major decisions made by the wealthy few?
  1. Rupert Murdoch has said that the public education sector in this country is a $500 billion market. We have seen the privatization of public education as charter schools proliferate. Charter schools use public money but are not publicly accountable and operate for the profit of their investors. What is your position on privatizing public education? Do you think it acceptable to provide taxpayer dollars to charter schools that are not accountable to the public for the use of that public money?
  1. States fund charter schools for a relatively small number of students and, thereby, deny those funds to traditional public schools, which have the responsibility to educate all of the students. What is your opinion of that use of public funds?
  1. Charter schools, on the whole, do not perform better than public schools, even though their students are more select due to their family background and come from less impoverished homes than students in traditional public schools. Charter schools also have students with fewer special needs and and fewer students who are English language learners, and charter schools control what students they keep and  what students they dismiss. What, then, is your justification for supporting charter schools if you do and your reasons for not supporting them if you don’t?
  1. According to Valuing Public Education: A 50 State Report Card, only five states, Alabama, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, and Vermont, earn the mark of A for rejecting  high stakes tests as a way for determining if students are promoted to the next grade and graduate from high school and for evaluating teachers. What is your opinion about the test-and-punish practices of the other states?
  1. Valuing Public Education: A 50 State Report Card also discusses and provides data about racial segregation in our schools. It states:  “To a large extent, residential segregation is responsible for school segregation. However, state policies that promote school choice typically exacerbate segregation and charters often isolate students by race and class. Therefore, even beyond housing policies, the education policies and incentives that states put in place influence the degree of segregation in their public schools. In some schools, segregation is so extreme that the UCLA Civil Rights Project describes them as apartheid schools.” What would you, as President, do to reduce or eliminate the segregation caused by school choice programs and publicly funded but privately managed charter schools?
  1. Affluent students in our country receive a far different education than less privileged students do. School officials in affluent school districts are confident that their students’ standardized test scores will be fine so do not limit education to the totally inadequate Common Core. They provide their students with an education rich in inquiry and independent thinking. However, in poorer school districts officials are concerned with their history of low test scores. Therefore, students in those lower income districts often have their school days filled with test prep instead of authentic learning experiences. How do we, as a nation, make sure that we do not have two separate and unequal educational systems determined by class, one for the haves and one for the have-nots?
  1. Perhaps it is not the curricula or the teachers but rather the poverty of a large portion of our population that creates problems in student achievement.  Depending on how poverty is defined, either  1 in 5 children  or 1 in 3 children are living below the poverty level in the United States. Either statistic is shameful. We, the richest nation in the world, have staggering amounts of child poverty compared with other industrialized nations. How will you address the issue of poverty? Do you have plans for making  resources and opportunities more equitable for students in affluent, middle class, and impoverished school districts?
  1.  It is abundantly clear that standardized tests cannot measure the quality of an educational system or the capabilities students will need for their future. They will need to know how to ask good questions, collaborate with diverse people, be innovative, have strategies for learning how to learn as they solve new problems and address issues that we can’t yet imagine. How will you, as President, ascertain if our educational system is working well so that students are learning what they need to learn in order to live satisfying lives, have productive careers, and be contributing citizens of a democracy? How will you measure the quality of American education?

Dr. Carson, Secretary Clinton, Senator Cruz, Governor Kasich, Senator Rubio, Senator Sanders, and Mr. Trump, thank you for your time. I will post your responses as soon as I receive them. Your answers will be of great interest to the many readers of this blog.

Sincerely,

Ann Policelli Cronin

Note to readers: While we wait for responses from the candidates, let’s start the conversation. I encourage you to write in support of a candidate for President of the United States, based on that candidate’s positions on education.  You may post your comments below, or if you wish to write a longer piece, send it to me at annpcronin@gmail.com. I will post as many statements as feasible. 

 

 

 

The Sequel: Beyond Common Core And Beyond SBAC

~ Ann Policelli Cronin ~ 2 Comments

All the adults in our neighborhoods have been to school so they all think they are experts about schools and are quick to tell us what schools are doing right, not doing right, and should be doing right.

All the Presidential candidates want to be elected so they have positions, often not well informed and varying with the winds of public opinion, about Common Core, standardized testing, charter schools, vouchers, magnet schools, and teacher evaluation.  

Entrepreneurs and investors are involved in public k-12 education because, as Rupert Murdoch has said, the U.S. public education industry currently represents a $500 billion dollar opportunity, what with all the testing, all the materials to prepare students for the tests, and all the openings of privately managed and publicly funded charter schools.

So many people want a piece of the action or at least a piece of the conversation. There is so much noise.

How about a little calm?  How about a little light?

 The calming voice of a full-time researcher sheds light on the neighborhood conversations, the political hype and the investment speculations.  That researcher is John Hattie. He is the real deal. He directs the Melbourne Education Research Institute at the University of Melbourne, Australia and heads the Science of Learning Centre, which works with over 7,000 schools worldwide. In a recent paper,  “The Politics of Distraction”, which was highlighted on NPR, Dr. Hattie reviewed 1200 meta-analyses (analyses of analyses) and examined studies covering a combined 250 million students around the world. He analyzed some of the most popular approaches to education reform and determined what, among them, does not improve education. 

We in the U.S. are now doing a lot of what he says does not work.

Hattie says that national standards do not raise student achievement and actually diminish student achievement for the most talented of students, that standardized tests do not give us the information we need to improve student learning, that small class size alone without an accompanying change in pedagogy has an insignificant positive effect, that school choice through charter schools accomplishes nothing in terms of raising student achievement, and that money alone will not improve education. Dr. Hattie’s bottom line is how students learn influences what they achieve and that how students learn is influenced by how teachers teach.

 None of his findings come as a surprise to educators. We as a nation probably could have been on a wiser and more productive course than the one we are on if we had asked educators how to improve learning and achievement. But we didn’t.  The Common Core Standards and the Common Core-aligned testing were designed without educators.

 What if we, as neighbors, political candidates, and citizens, bring Dr. Hattie’s 1200 studies and 250 million students into our conversations?  What if we come to believe his proposition, delineated further in a second paper,  entitled “The Politics of Collaborative Expertise”, that how students learn influences what they achieve and that how students learn is influenced by how teachers teach? What if we remember our own learning and our own teachers and recognize that what Dr. Hallie’s meta-analyses show is simply common sense?

 What if we put Dr. Hallie’s common sense into an action plan for Connecticut?

 Here is what a Connecticut action plan would look like:

 1.    Teachers and school leaders would assess the individual growth of each student each school year rather than assess if all students of the same grade demonstrate the exact same achievement at the exact same time.

2.   Teachers would be authorized to collectively judge if their students are making agreed-upon progress and then empowered to remedy any learning needs their students might have. 

3.   Publicly funded but privately managed charter schools would be eliminated because there is not evidence of those schools increasing student achievement. Instead, student achievement would be increased because teachers within a school or academic department would collectively decide to teach and assess students in the ways that the most effective teachers in that school or academic department teach and assess students. 

4.   There would be intensive professional development of teachers so that active learning, student collaboration, and frequent, personalized teacher feedback to foster student growth become the norm.  

5.    Money would be budgeted for and spent on what directly increases student learning. For example, lowering class size to implement a learning-centered pedagogy in which teachers teach students to construct their own knowledge, instead of doing worksheets or listening to lectures, would be a good use of funds. Also, providing school time for teachers to discuss sample student work and agree upon measures of students’ growth would be another good use of funds. 

It is time for a new action plan for Connecticut. The SBAC scores will soon be out. Those scores, like the scores of all standardized tests that are always highly correlated with family income, will tell us which towns and cities are the wealthiest and which are the poorest. The SBAC scores will also play out the pre-determined failure rate for Connecticut students. The scores will generate almost no conversation about what it means to learn and what it means to teach.  Schools will continue to implement the Common Core Standards, which the Common Core designers proudly proclaim do not in any way address how to teach or how students learn.

 But what if Professor Hallie is right and all achievement is a direct result of how teachers teach and how students learn?

What if our children’s time, educators’ energy, and our public money are now being misdirected?

 It’s time for all of us to talk about the real basic of education:  student learning.

 It’s time for all of us – neighbors, educators, legislators, and politicians – to focus our conversations. It’s time to move beyond Common Core and SBAC. It’s time to put together a Connecticut Action Plan for Teaching and Learning that gets it right for all of our children.

Put The Public Back Into Public Schools

~ Ann Policelli Cronin ~ Leave a comment

Russ Walsh, an experienced curriculum director in school districts in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, regularly contributes considerable wisdom to the conversation about education through his blog called Russ on Reading (russonreading.blogspot.com). In this May 17th post, he points to the disaster that awaits us as a nation if support for public schools continues to erode. His post is below.

We in Connecticut right now are faced with a choice regarding state funding:  Do we support the public schools which serve all students or give public money to charter schools which will serve only a few students and, at the same time, provide private citizens with personal financial gain?

Derailing the Public Schools

                                       by Russ Walsh

As yet we don’t know what caused the horrific crash of the Amtrak train in Philadelphia this week. Human error? Mechanical malfunction? Delayed technology? The crash happened less than 20 miles from my home on a stretch of track that I travel regularly into Philly or Washington. As a frequent traveler, I can assure one and all of something certain: our train infrastructure has been allowed to fall into ignominious disrepair. A trip on the train these days is like traveling through the pages of a history book detailing the once glorious system of public works in this country, which has then been allowed to fall into a mess of barely functional tracks, dilapidated train stations, rusting bridges and routine lengthy delays. Why has this happened? Why in the age of European and Japanese bullet trains, does it take longer to take the train from Philadelphia to Washington today than it did 50 years ago?

Adam Gopnick, writing in The New Yorker, has the answer I believe. In a piece called “The Plot Against Trains”, he says:

“What we have, uniquely in America, is a political class, and an entire political party, devoted to the idea that any money spent on public goods is money misplaced, not because the state goods might not be good but because they would distract us from the larger principle that no ultimate good can be found in the state. Ride a fast train to Washington today and you’ll start thinking about national health insurance tomorrow.”

That train that derailed travelled right past the crumbling hulk of the junior high school my mother attended. In fact in travelling through Philadelphia the train passed dozens of crumbling dilapidated schools that were once pointed to with pride by the citizens and civic leaders of my home town. At one time we were justly proud of the fine edifices we constructed for our children to go to school and at one time those buildings housed the very best that public education had to offer in this country.

What happened? Many things happened, of course. There was the systematic creation of the ghetto brought on by federal, state and local housing policies after World War II (please see the work of Richard Rothstein on this phenomenon), there was “white flight” to the suburbs, but mostly this was the rise of the political philosophy, as Gopnick has pointed out in relation to trains and airports, that the government can ultimately do no good. In the large cities of America, we have exactly the schools we deserve because we have refused to invest in them.

This pathological, deeply ingrained distrust of government is perhaps best demonstrated by the House voting to cut Amtrak funding the day after the tragic accident, but it is also symbolized by the decision to privatize education. The charter school movement, the voucher movement, the entire narrative of “failing schools” and “bad teachers” is all a part of this refusal to provide adequate monies to provide for what we used to call “public works.” If, as Gopnick said, the dominant ideology is that no ultimate good can be provided by the state, why should we spend state monies on schools? Let the privatizers run the schools; the job is big, expensive and messy anyway.

Philadelphia, where the train accident occurred, is an object lesson in how to destroy a public school system. The system had been starved of funds for decades before any politician noticed. Then suddenly after systematically denying funds to the school system, politicians determined that the solution to the problem ridden public school system they created was charter schools. These schools then proliferated in the city, with very, very mixed results. Some did well, if test scores are your measure of improvement, some did poorly, some closed in the middle of the school year leaving students stranded, and some charter leaders defrauded the public out of their money. But good, bad, indifferent or criminal, all charters drained money from an already cash strapped school district and led to the further deterioration of this once great public institution.

All of this was intentional. All of this could have been avoided. All of this is the result of our refusal to appropriately meet our public responsibility.

The truth is that there are things that government can do better than private industry. Public transportation is one. Protecting the environment is another. Public schooling is the most important. Our refusal to provide the money needed to support public programs can be seen by anyone who rides a train, listens to climate change deniers or walks into an urban public school.

We need to wake up. We need to recognize that public monies well spent make life better for us all. We need to realize that the decay of urban school systems is a problem for all of us and it will take money from all of us to begin to fix it. I wish instead of using their great wealth to pursue their own flawed vision of schooling that plutocrats like Bill Gates and the Waltons would just pay their taxes and let us use the money on our public schools. It is time to take the private out of our schools and put the public, the whole of us, back into our public schools, because whether we choose to believe it or not, we all have skin in this game.