“It’s always hard to tell for sure exactly when a revolution starts,” wrote John Tierny in The Atlantic  recently. “I’m not an expert on revolutions,” he continued, “but even I can see that a new one is taking shape in American K-12 public education.”

Tierney pointed to a number of signs of the coming “revolution:”

• Teachers refusing to give standardized tests, parents opting their kids out of tests, and students boycotting tests.
• Legislators reconsidering testing and expressing concerns about corruption in the testing industry.
• Voucher and other “choice” proposals being strongly contested and voted down in states that had been friendly to them.

Tierney linked to a blog post by yours truly, “The Inconvenient Truth of Education Reform,” explaining how the movement known as “education reform” has committed severe harm to the populations it professes to serve while spreading corruption and enriching businesses and political figures.

Echoing Tierney, on the pages of Slate, The Nation, and elsewhere, David Kirp, education professor and author of a popular new book casting doubt on competitive driven, market-based school reform, declared that cheating scandals and parent rebellions over high stakes standardized testing were proof that much ballyhooed reform policies championed by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Education Secretary Arne Duncan are not “a proven – or even a promising – way to make schools better.”

Kirp declared that mounting evidence from school reform efforts in major U.S. metropolitan areas reveals “it’s a terrible time for advocates of market-driven reform in public education. For more than a decade, their strategy – which makes teachers’ careers turn on student gains in reading and math tests, and promotes competition through charter schools and vouchers – has been the dominant policy mantra. But now the cracks are showing.”

In a legislative view, the Progressive State Network, which supports left-leaning state legislators and monitors legislative policy in state houses, noticed “a backlash is brewing in many states as more and more parents and legislators alike start asking questions about corporate education reform.” The post on PSN’s website referenced Tierney’s article and highlighted a Minnesota bill that eliminates testing requirements for graduation and several states that are embroiled in battles to defeat measures known as the “parent trigger,” which enables private takeovers of public schools.

These observations are not alarmist chatter but well-reasoned, valid conclusions that anti-government collectivist actions related to public school policy are scaling up from isolated protests to a nationwide movement of unified resistance.

The movement is widespread among teachers, students, and parents. It is grassroots driven and way out in front of most journalists and political leaders. And it’s scaling up in intensity.

A Teacher-Student-Parent Movement

For quite some time now, education historian and reform opponent Diane Ravitch has written about the ever expanding discontent among teachers over the emphasis on standardized testing and test-based teacher evaluation and school rating systems.

As proof of this discontent, Ravitch has closely followed and commented on a boycott against standardized testing among teachers in Seattle, an ongoing protest among principals in New York state against new teacher evaluations, and objections to the “testing beast” among educators and parents in Texas.

In ever-greater numbers, however, students are also leading the resistance. A recent article in The Nation reported on the growing student resistance movement driven by grievances over austerity budgets and systemic racism.

From all corners of the country – North Carolina to Philadelphia to Louisiana to Chicago – students as young as eight years old are organizing and taking part in a variety of actions including zombie protests, school walkouts and sit-ins, and acts of defiance like the recent rant by a high school student in Texas that went viral over the Internet when he castigated a seemingly indifferent teacher for dispensing education in “packets” rather than engaging the class in meaningful, relevant learning.

In Chicago, youth voice is forming in grassroots groups like CSOSOS (Chicago Students Organizing To Save Our Schools) and VOYCE (Voices of Youth in Chicago Education) that have led prominent, headline-earning protests to school closures, teacher firings, and over emphasis on high-stakes testing.

In Philadelphia, a handful of students used their social media and organizing skills to whip up student resentment and send hundreds of students into the streets to protest budget cuts to their favorite education programs.

In Denver, high schoolers have formed Students4OurSchools and staged walkouts protesting the over-emphasis on standardized testing.

Students in Philadelphia, Providence, Rhode Island, Portland, Oregon, and elsewhere have formed student unions that have developed attention-getting tactics, which have spread to a national scale. These student organizations’ Facebook pages speak in unison against school closures and cutbacks, widespread teacher firings, and top-down implementations of mandated standards and high-stakes testing.

In many places, teachers and parents are supporting rebellious students and even joining in the protests. Grassroots parent groups, in fact, have been the driving force behind efforts to beat back school voucher proposals in Tennessee and parent trigger legislation in Florida.

Resistance is particularly vehement in low-income communities of color in large urban school districts where reform measures have lead to widespread teacher firings and school closings. In Chicago, Philadelphia, New York City, Cleveland, and Detroit, vocal protestors have been organizing in their own communities but also uniting in national campaigns, such as this year’s Journey for Justice effort that brought hundreds of activists in allied grassroots organizations to the White House to protest school closings.

Unlike school reform proponents who benefit from massive donations from rich foundations and politically connected funders, grassroots groups leading the resistance – like the Alliance for Educational Justice and Alliance for Quality Education – have far humbler means and few connections to the political class and deep pocketed philanthropists like Bill Gates.

Nevertheless, these groups have generated strong outpourings of popular dissent and produced important analyses of the duplicity of the reform agenda.

A Movement Getting More Recognition

Mostly, grassroots-led protests against education mandates have gotten little attention from even the few media outlets and reporters focused on education.

That changed, however, when the head of the American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten, called for a moratorium on the consequences of high-stakes testing related to the Common Core.

All of a sudden, when there was a crack in the conventional wisdom that education policy was a centrist agreement between teachers’ unions and conservative belief tanks, many education bloggers and journalists decided the school accountability movement had reached a surprising new level of intensity.

Long-time education journalist Dana Goldstein speculated on her blog that Weingarten’s moratorium call is proof that education matters that were once considered products of a “coalition” of centrist-minded – although mostly conservative – wonks and Beltway operatives are now points of strong contention.

Her conclusion was that these differences represent a “deep divide” among the political class about whether it’s a good idea to “scare us into meaningful school reform.”

Another experienced education journalist, Sam Chaltain also reflected on his blog on calls for a testing moratorium. He recalled that after Barak Obama was elected, Obama proceeded with “a series of education policies that further entrenched America’s reliance on reading and math scores as a proxy for whole-school evaluation.”

Critics of those policies “vented,” Chaltain explained, but “policymakers nodded. And absent any real noise, the tests continued.” But with this more recent backlash to education mandates, Chaltain observed, “policymakers have been unable to ignore a groundswell of noise and resistance.”

Chaltain concluded that conflicts over school policy had “reached a tipping point.”

Similarly, veteran education reporter at Education Week Michelle McNeil observed, “Not since the battles over school desegregation has the debate about public education been so intense and polarized.”

McNeil sourced the polarity to the conventional wisdom that public education is “an institution that historically is slow to change,” and now it’s being “forced to deal with so much change at once.” And she asserts that the controversy over change is mostly “about centralization or decentralization” of specific “reform” efforts.

But what Goldstein, McNeil, and others on the sidelines fail to grasp is that the pushback against the nation’s education policy is not new. The “polarization” is not “obscuring” the issues – as McNeil contends – it’s clarifying them. And the “debate” over education has broken free from being an issue confined to “fringes” and “policy elites” to take its rightful place at the center of “a growing, broader backlash.”

Indeed, just like the fight to integrate public schools was connected to the larger struggle for civil rights, fights to preserve and strengthen public schools – whether they take the form of students walking out of class to protest education cuts, parents fighting against deceptively named “empowerment” policies, or teachers boycotting standardized tests – are connected to much larger struggles over what kind of nation America is becoming.

A Leadership Out Of Touch

The growing rebellion to education mandates has been driven mostly by grassroots groups formed first among low-income communities of color, but now the movement is extending to people of greater means and social-political capacity like parent groups that worked an inside game with state legislators to thwart implementation of the Common Core standards in Indiana, block parent trigger bills in Florida, and curb the emphasis on high stakes testing in Texas.

This unification of the grassroots with the “grass tops” in education is not well understood in the media or among policy elites.

In fact, people in charge of education governance appear to be more clueless than ever about what they are intent on accomplishing and legislating.

Witness the recent confession from one of the movement’s most influential leaders, Bridgeport, Conn., school chief Paul Vallas. As Valerie Struass reported at her blog on The Washington Post, Vallas has led reform efforts in Chicago, Philadelphia, and New Orleans that have become blueprints for education policy ideas across the country. Yet he admitted that the policies he has championed are resulting in a “nightmare” of complexity.

Reportedly, he characterized his efforts to enact test-based teacher evaluations as a feature of a “testing industrial complex” and “a system where you literally have binders on individual teachers with rubrics that are so complicated … that they’ll just make you suicidal.”

Vallas’ newfound doubts over what he has created reflected other confusing comments from education policy leaders. Most notable was the commentary by Bill Gates, widely acknowledged as a leader in the movement to base teacher evaluations and school ratings on student test scores, warning against the “rush to implement new teacher development and evaluation systems” based on test scores.

Even more perplexing was Secretary Duncan’s recent inability to deliver a straight answer about parent trigger bills. As Beltway gadfly Alexander Russo recently reported, “Duncan described the trigger as ‘an important tool’ for parent involvement — but not the only or even the most important one” – whatever that means.

Compared to authentic grassroots outpourings for resources, equity, and real democracy, these equivocations from education policy leaders are puny and venal to say the least.

Intensity Is Building

“Scared” or not, recalling Goldstein’s comment, activists driving protests against the nation’s prevailing education policies are ratcheting the fight to unprecedented intensity that will likely become even more forceful in future efforts.

Later this month, for instance, teachers in Chicago are planning a citywide three-day march to protest impending school closures. Education related bills in state legislatures in California, Texas, New York, North Carolina, and elsewhere will be highly visible points of contention. And actions to protest the imminent doubling of college loan debt interest rates – certainly an issue related to public education – are generating a unified response from hundreds of thousands of Americans.

Clearly, the resistance to top-down education mandates is building. The movement is propelled by forces far greater than what education journalists and policy leaders understand – widespread grievances about inequity, unfairness, and public disempowerment.

The revolt is happening. The revolt is now.

By now it’s become clear to anyone willing to pay attention that our nation’s obsession over education standards and testing has gotten out of hand.

Ratcheting education standards ever higher at the same time we cut supports that schools and students need to reach those standards never made any sense to begin with. And the value placed on testing isn’t yielding the return promised in terms of significantly better results for children and improved evaluations of teachers and schools.

Nevertheless, new tests with even higher stakes are being rolled out across the country. The tests are purported to align to new curriculum standards called the Common Core that are strongly backed by the Obama administration and many education advocates from across the political spectrum.

But curriculum materials aligned to the new tests are generally not available for teachers, and educators complain they’ve not been trained in how to teach to the new standards.

In a moment of sanity last week, a leading proponent of the new standards-aligned tests, Randi Weingarten leader of the American Federation of Teachers, defected from the run-up to implementation and called for a moratorium on the high-stakes associated with the Common Core and its new tests.

“We aren’t saying students shouldn’t be assessed,” Weingarten declared. “We aren’t saying teachers shouldn’t be evaluated. We’re not saying that there shouldn’t be standardized tests. We’re talking about a moratorium on consequences in these transitional years.”

She called for an “implementation plan” with more time and input from frontline teachers and “field testing” of the new tests to gather data on the results without punitive “high-stakes” consequences attached.

AFT’s stand quickly got the approval of The Nation’s Katrina vanden Huevel who wrote for The Washington Post, “In today’s high-stakes climate, families have come to dread the endless parade of bubble sheets that now dominate their kids’ lives. Many feel that the emphasis on standardized tests has focused instruction on how to answer multiple-choice questions instead of how to reason and think critically.”

Of course, we all remember taking tests during our school years. And education standards for public schools are nothing new – most states have had them for years.

But testing today is different. Teachers’ and principals’ jobs – indeed the entire existence of the school – can hinge on the results, creating a super-charged atmosphere for the students that stresses them and robs them of valuable instructional time.

Testing and standards have their place for sure, but current education policies have crossed a line and given standards and testing more emphasis than they deserve at the expense of other important initiatives.

Test Obsession Runs Wild

If you hadn’t noticed that America’s obsession with testing students has gotten out of hand, maybe this will get your attention.

Last week, a CBS outlet in upstate New York reported that a “4th grader, hooked to medical machines and IV’s, undergoing pre-brain surgery screening was asked to take a New York State test from his hospital bed.”

The boy has “life-threatening epilepsy” and, according to his mom, was “hooked up to an EEG . . . an IV in his hand and he’s wearing a pulse oximeter in case something happens with his oxygen levels.” Nevertheless, a teacher was dispatched by the state to administer the test.

New York State’s test obsession was perhaps an attempt to outdo Florida where, last month, a local reporter in that state noticed that the state was determined to get a test score from a 9 year old boy who “has never attended school . . . . was born premature at four pounds with only a brain stem and can’t speak or see.”

In an update of this story, Valerie Strauss reported from her blog at The Washington Post that the boy indeed was made to complete the test, “meaning that a state employee sat down and read it to him, as if he could actually understand it.”

If these stories seem to be just extreme examples, not at all representative of what states are doing to emphasize the tests, then why does at least one state have a protocol for what to do when students vomit on the test? Astonishingly, should the student be judged capable of resuming the test, the procedure is to “give their testing materials back to them to continue testing” – and if not, “secure the testing materials in a plastic bag.”

Elementary school teacher Dan Brown reported at Huffington Post that test-security procedures at his school caused a student to wet himself during the test. “Several students in my class, as well as others around the school, vomited on the day of the test. One boy, Dennis, could not stop shaking,” Brown wrote.

A running commentary from New York teachers who recently administered the new English Language Arts tests has been posted online, which conveys a consensus view that the exams were too long, students didn’t have enough time, students were visibly stressed during the tests, and test questions did not reflect what teachers had taught.

As students stress out about the emphasis placed on the tests, they’re also being robbed of valuable instructional time. In addition to the hours and hours of test prep teachers increasingly conduct, schools also devote more time to motivating students to do well on the tests. In Washington, DC, “school staff stage academic pep rallies, produce rap videos and raffle off prizes,” The Washington Post reported.

The same sorts of elaborate motivational strategies to psych students up for tests have been reported in Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Texas, and Florida.

Now, connecting these tests to new nationwide standards has the potential to make the stakes even higher.

Does Common Core Make Things Worse?

The fact that the new tests are aligned to the Common Core has gotten many people particularly riled. As The Wall Street Journal recently reported, “the Common Core effort is under attack” from political factions of all kinds – especially conservative Republicans.

Journal reporter Stephanie Bachero noted, “Indiana’s Republican-controlled legislature . . . legislatures in Michigan, Alabama and several other states . . . and the Republican National Committee” have all sought measures to curb funding and or implementation of the new standards.

The supposed advantages of the standards were summed up by a reporter in The Washington Post, who wrote, “The standards are designed to ensure that, for the first time, third-graders in Maine will acquire the same knowledge and skills as their peers in Hawaii. Once states begin testing against the new standards, it will be possible for the first time to compare test scores across communities and states.”

But the transition from “theory to reality,” the Post reporter noted, is what’s bringing out the “critics.”

At FairTest.org, the website for The National Center for Fair and Open Testing, there is an ongoing tallynews of “Testing Resistance & Reform News” related to the tests, including parents opting out their students from the tests, teachers refusing to give the tests, students walking out of school in protest of the tests, and pundits and leaders of all stripes raising objections.

The fact that some of the voices protesting Common Core and its related testing can at times sound extremist – that the standards teach “communism is good,” for instance – should not be a rationale to dismiss reasonable objections to the standards and the tests.

Education journalist Sam Chaltain observed that there is a “growing willingness to publicly acknowledge . . . that tests do not align well with the latest research into how people learn; that they prevent adults from measuring higher-level thinking in children; and, most importantly, that there are better ways to evaluate student learning and growth.”

Chaltain singled out “mini-rebellions” against testing around the country including a Montgomery County Maryland superintendent who has called teacher evaluations based on test scores “insanity,” teachers in Seattle who have boycotted the tests, and legislation in Texas to reduce testing.

Chaltain looked at “specific and realistic alternatives” to the current thinking, but these alternatives simply won’t do for those bent on “education reform.”

The Status Quo Objects

Many who were quickest to object to AFT’s moratorium resorted to conventional wisdom that has ruled education policy for nearly 20 years.

These views tend to be grounded in deep suspicion that teachers will only do the “hard work” when they are “held accountable.” What the status quo crowd wants for teachers to be “accountable” to, of course, is test scores – the very thing being over-emphasized by the current policies.

An even stranger argument is to object to the AFT moratorium based on the timeline benchmark used to implement failed NCLB policies – hardly a yardstick worth measuring up to – and the fact that a lot of time and money has already been invested in these Common Core tests, which is again, not a persuasive call for more time and money.

However, the real danger to the standards and testing regime is not that they “won’t work.” As the Shanker Institute’s Matt DiCarlo recently observed, a far more dangerous outcome is that they will.

“We most certainly should hold schools accountable for their results, and there are, at least at the moment, relatively few feasible alternatives to standardized tests,” DiCarlo wrote.

But, Di Carlo cautioned, “Educational outcomes, such as graduation and test scores, are signals of or proxies for the traits that lead to success in life, not the cause of that success.” (emphasis original)

What our current emphasis on standards and testing is doing is to “mold policy such that livelihoods depend on increasing scores” rather than molding it to what really matters: the teaching and learning of “skills – including the critical non-cognitive sort –” that are critical to success in work and in life. (again, emphasis original)

“I’m troubled,” DiCarlo concluded, “by the possibility that, if we don’t pull back the reins, this research may eventually show that we pushed the pendulum to its ultimate breaking point and structured a huge portion of our education system around measures that were only useful in the first place because we didn’t use them so much.”

That outcome would be terrible for education and the wellbeing of children. But it’s what’s becoming the norm in education policy today.

Time For A Pause

What should be noted is that most teachers actually see some reason to proceed with implementing of the Common Core, according to a survey of the AFT membership.

Indeed, in a recent editorial in the education trade newspaper Education Week, a classroom teacher defended the standards, saying, “The common core can be an opportunity to shift the work of learning from our own backs onto the shoulders of our students, where it belongs – and that’s the heart of progressive education.”

But at a time when our education system is being so starved of the resources it needs, should we be funneling ever more cash toward a “pig in a poke” like standards-based testing while research proven remedies such as early childhood education continue to go unfunded?

Even the most ardent devotees to the standards and testing regime should be convinced of the need to pause and reflect on what kind of results this “movement” has wrought, consider why no other country in the world is hurtling down this path, examine the evidence with the skepticism it deserves, and, yes, support a moratorium.

Cuts to government spending like the now-reviled “sequester” are not only “dumb” as my colleague Robert Borosage explained this week. They are literally making us dumber.

What’s dumb is to cut money for air traffic controllers and endanger airline passengers and relegate them to long waits for delayed flights.

What’s even dumber is to cut funding to Head Start and other education programs that ensure the nation’s children have learning opportunities that vastly improve their futures and our national prosperity.

Unfortunately, cuts to essential funds for educating our children aren’t limited to the dreaded sequester. The assault on spending is pervasive in all aspects of education budgeting at every level of government. Even worse, spending cuts are aimed at the very areas where we should be investing the most.

If you’re of the opinion that “money doesn’t matter” in relation to the quality of education, then you’re horribly misinformed. Indeed, anyone advocating for better education in America should put the funding cuts at the top of their list of policy mandates to protest against.

Stupid Sequester

Anyone advocating for good schools for all kids should be particularly alarmed at the damage being done by cuts to spending resulting from imposed across-the-board budget cuts called “sequestration.”

Sequester cuts are especially damaging to schoolchildren who are the most vulnerable and critically in need of government funding.

As Think Progress and other news outlets reported, the sequestration resulted in numerous cuts to programs that give poor children access to early education.

• In Indiana, “At least two Indiana Head Start programs have resorted to a random drawing to determine which three-dozen preschool students will be removed from the education program for low-income families.”
• In Tennessee, “Cuts have affected the Head Start program in several ways,” including that “bus transportation will discontinue.”
• In Washington, there will be “dollars lost” from a “child care food program,” a program “for serving kids with disabilities,” and pre-K education. “Spokane Head Start currently serves 900 families and there are a thousand more on the waiting list,” but cuts are on the way nevertheless.
• In Pennsylvania, cuts to Head Start threaten “lunch and snacks to the children . . . cleaning or other supplies . . . [and] fuel for Head Start’s buses.”
• In Palm Beach County Florida, transportation to Head Start centers “would be eliminated,” affecting “roughly 400 of the 2,296 children enrolled” and resulting in “the elimination of 14 jobs.”
• In a community in New Jersey, fewer children will be able to enroll in Head Start.
• In Missouri, a Head Start program announced that nearly 200 fewer children would be enrolled next fall.

Of course, funding targeted to families and very young children isn’t limited to Head Start. Parents with little children need day care, too. According to an article at The American Prospect, “Quality child care costs more in most states than tuition at public universities. In 22 states and D.C., the average cost of infant care in a center was more than the median rent in 2012.”

Nevertheless, “states cut services for the poor, including the child-care subsidies. A study by the National Women’s Law Center found that families in 27 states were worse off in 2012 than in 2011″ (emphasis original).

In addition to Head Start and child care cuts, according to a report from Reuters, schools serving “school districts near Native American reservations, military bases and other areas where property tax revenue is kept low by a federal presence are getting ‘severe spending cuts’ equaling $58 million.”

These cuts are especially devastating to states like New Mexico that have large percentages of Native American students. In New Mexico, federal spending is “12.8 percent of the state’s gross domestic product,” according to the Reuters article cited above, and federal aid can provide as much as half or more of what a school gets to fund its programs.

Schools that educate the children of our military families are also victim to the sequester cuts. School districts near military bases report the need to furlough teaching staffs, cancel Friday classes, and shorten school years. According to Reuters, this affects schools in New York, Wisconsin, Texas, and California.

Sequestration cuts also have had negative impact on the amount of money available to schools that get federal Title I money for educating children from low-income households, money for teaching children with learning disabilities, and funds for rural schools and teaching jobs.

• In Kentucky cuts stemming from the sequestration have reduced Title I federal funding by a double-digit percentage, cut money for school lunches by 7 percent, and reduced funds available for educating students with learning disabilities.
• North Carolina schools stand to lose $25 million in funding and 350 teaching jobs due to sequestration.
• In Montana, rural schools are getting particularly hard hit, losing millions of dollars in funding.

The Center for American Progress has a great chart and ongoing news feed tracking the effects of the sequester.

Wait, It Gets Worse

Sequester cuts come on top of other massive budget cuts that rolled out to the nation’s children over many years. The cuts often target education programs that have the most potential for enhancing the future lives of students – particularly in their early years.

The evidence that high-quality early education gives children the foundation they need to succeed is “overwhelming,” according to studies cited by the U.S. Department of Education. Young children who receive high-quality, full-day preschool experience “crucial benefits in high school graduation rates, employment and avoidance of criminal behavior,” according to “the best scientific evidence.”

Numerous studies have found “High-quality preschool appears to propel better outcomes by enhancing non-cognitive skills such as persistence, self-control and emotion regulation.” That’s why, as The Huffington Post’s education reporter Joy Resmovits recently reported, “several police chiefs have highlighted the need for more and better preschool as a tool for long-term crime reduction.”

Despite the enormous benefits of early childhood education, government policy makers over the years have chosen to cut these programs.

This week, a new report from the National Institute for Early Education Research nieer.org published its annual research study for 2012, which found, “State funding for pre-K [education] decreased by over half a billion dollars in 2011-2012″ – the largest one-year drop ever – enrollment in state pre-K stalled, and “state funding per child fell to $3,841″ – well below the inflation-adjusted national average of what states paid ten years ago.

In a good review of the research, a reporter at Education Week noted,

• 27 of 40 states cut early childhood programs – 13 by 10 percent or more – and only 12 states increased funding per child in 2011-2012.
• Only 15 states plus D.C. provide “enough per-child funding to meet all 10 benchmarks for quality standards.”
• Pre-K enrollment increases are not enough to offset population growth and increase the percentage of children served. Only “4 percent of 3-year-olds and 28 percent of 4-year-olds were served in state-funded pre-K.”
• Head Start programs boost enrollment levels to 41 percent of 4-year-olds and 14 percent of 3-year-olds, but these levels have “stagnated.”

Money Matters

Government budgets that cut education spending are deeply harmful to the well-being of children. It’s a universal truth that education outcomes – as measured by achievement tests, high school graduation levels, and college completion – are strongly correlated to the level of affluence and financial investment children experience growing up.

Writing in The New York Times this week, Sean F. Reardon explained that the achievement gap in our society closely tracks the income gap, and the greater the income inequality, the more children are apt to experience an “opportunity gap” in their lives that reduces their long-term wellbeing.

“Children of the rich,’ Reardon wrote, “have better grades and higher standardized test scores, on average, than poorer students.” And nothing education policymakers have been enacting in schools “has reduced educational inequality between children from upper- and lower-income families.”

“Over the past three decades, Reardon said, the opportunity gap between students of the rich and less well-off – even middle class – families has widened – not because we’re doing such a worse job of educating less-well-off children, but “because rich students are increasingly entering kindergarten much better prepared to succeed in school than middle-class students. This difference in preparation persists through elementary and high school.”

“Not only are the children of the rich doing better in school than even the children of the middle class, but the changing economy means that school success is increasingly necessary to future economic success, a worrisome mutual reinforcement of trends that is making our society more socially and economically immobile.”

What’s needed to rectify this growing inequality is “to invest much more heavily as a society in our children’s educational opportunities from the day they are born.”

Reflecting on Reardon’s words, Jared Bernstein, senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and former Chief Economist and economic adviser to the Obama Administration, wrote at Salon.com that instead of cutting education funding, we should be focused on the “need to offset the impacts of the income disparities by providing less-advantaged kids with access to the enrichment opportunities they’re increasingly not getting. Quality preschool has got to be the right place to start.”

Education historian Diane Ravitch considered Reardon’s piece as well and concluded, “What have we been doing for the past 30 years? Relying on standards and testing to close the gaps. It hasn’t worked.”

What we need instead, Ravitch contended, is “parent education, early intervention, support for children.”

Yet, that is precisely what our leaders are choosing not to do.

What’s Needed Instead

It’s not too late to turn this dreadful trend around. Also this week, authors of a new book Closing the Opportunity Gap spotlighted the actions state and school district officials should take to address the nation’s opportunity gap.

“Quite simply, children learn when they are supported with high expectations, quality teaching and deep engagement, and made to feel that they are entitled to good schooling,” explained the book’s co-editor Stanford University Professor Prudence Carter. “The richer those opportunities, the greater the learning. When those opportunities are denied or diminished, lower achievement is the dire and foreseeable result.”

Writing at the blog site of The Washington Post’s Valerie Strauss, another co-editor of the book, Kevin Welner of the National Education Policy Center, explained, “There is no way to tease those data into showing that test-based accountability reform is accomplishing its key learning goals … In particular, we have failed to build capacity or increase opportunities to learn.”

“American society has the means to provide supports for communities, for families, for students, and for teachers,” Welner wrote. What’s needed is more spending that ensures “children are safe and healthy and ready to learn, that they have access to rich learning environments in schools and also in their homes and in their communities, and that they have qualified, experienced teachers.”

Cutting Education Is Bad Economics Too

Regardless of what budget austerity fans tell you about the necessity of spending cuts, cutting education is also not good economics, either.

Writing at Salon.com, economist Simon Johnson explained, “In recent decades, some families chose locations and occupations that seemed to offer a reasonable means of support and good prospects for their children. Many of these decisions turned out badly, largely because information technology (computers and how they are used) eliminated many middle-class jobs. Increasing globalization of trade also did not help in this regard. In addition, as Till von Wachter of Columbia University has documented, prolonged periods of unemployment for parents have a severe and lasting negative impact on their children.”

“Children whose families cannot provide a decent start in life deserve help,” Johnson maintained. “Imposing austerity on poor children is not just unfair; it is also bad economics. When economists, again with their dry jargon, talk about a country’s ‘human capital,’ what they really mean is the cognitive and physical abilities of its people.”

Nobel prize-winning economist Paul Krugman agreed with Johnson, writing at The New York Times this week, “We’re cheating our children. How? By neglecting public investment and failing to provide jobs.”

“What about investing in our young?” Krugman asked. “We’re cutting back there …  having laid off hundreds of thousands of schoolteachers and slashed the aid that used to make college affordable for children of less-affluent families.”

“Fiscal policy is, indeed, a moral issue,” Krugman concluded. “We should be ashamed of what we’re doing to the next generation’s economic prospects.”

Time To Address Real Causes

Once upon a time, America’s political leaders sought to resolve big problems by acting on the actual causes. Recall how government policies eventually took action on the harm cigarette smoking and tobacco use were having on the populace?

Now the nation’s leadership tends to favor policies that either ignore real causes or even exacerbate what’s making things worse.

We know our children’s education attainment is key to their future development and prosperity – and the very health of our democracy. We know poverty is to academic achievement what tobacco use is to cancer, and children’s education attainment is strongly correlated to levels of affluence and the investment they receive.

So anyone who really cares about our children’s well-being must make this priority #1: Stop the cuts. Invest in children.

By now, there have been plenty of negative reactions to last week’s defeat of sensible gun regulation in the U.S. Senate due to the power of the gun lobby to have more sway with senators than popular opinion has.

In his Rose Garden address, President Obama was incredulous that legislation favored by 90 percent of Americans couldn’t get 60 votes in the Senate.

News stories about the bill’s defeat invariably referenced the origin of the bill in the “tragedy” of the horrific shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.

Even former U.S. House Representative Gabrielle Giffords – an ardent backer of the bill and a victim of gun violence herself – castigated the senators’ fear of the gun lobby as a shameful contrast to “the fear the first graders in Sandy Hook Elementary School felt as their lives ended by a hail of bullets.”

The quick take on this might lead you to believe that the massacre of innocent school children in Newtown has had little to no effect on how Americans have dealt with school safety and gun proliferation.

You would be mistaken.

Legacy Of The Sandy Hook Shootings

Although connecting the Sandy Hook shootings to high-profile legislation in D.C. seemed to impart little power to passing the bill, the aura of that tragedy has quietly been at work producing all kinds of other actions around the country

While federal lawmakers hesitated and then faltered to take action on restricting gun commerce, policy makers elsewhere in America have had no problem using the Sandy Hook shootings to rationalize new ways to turn school buildings into harsher, more punitive environments for the students who populate them.

The result is likely to be more students – particularly students of color – having disciplinary issues that result in suspensions, expulsions, arrests, and referrals to the criminal justice system, and what has become known as America’s “school to prison pipeline” will quite probably grow ever larger unless this wave of nonsense stops.

More Guns And Guards In Schools

Following the Sandy Hook shootings, there were widespread reports of school districts adding more police presence, in the form of “campus resource officers,” to their campuses.

As this article in The Atlantic  reported, following the killings, there was “a spate of new bills proposed at the state level – including in Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Virginia – to either allow educators to carry weapons or to add armed guards to public schools.”

Altogether, The Sunlight Foundation, found that, post-Sandy Hook, 36 states were considering legislation related to guns on school grounds with “the vast majority of these bills” making it “easier for school personnel, guards, and volunteers to carry guns on campus.”

As the Politics K-12 blog at Education Week observed, the Obama administration helped move this effort along by providing “incentives for schools to hire resource officers . . . by giving priority to applicants who plan to use the U.S. Department of Justice’s COPs grants.”

The National Parent Teachers Association noted the White House’s move to encourage more guns and guards in schools and declared that action a “disappointment.”

What’s wrong with heightened “school security?”

What More Guns And Guards Do To Schools

As the above-mentioned article in The Atlantic noted, “about a third of states already allow school personnel to carry concealed weapons on campus,” so there is a long and well-researched track record for what happens when school and government officials respond to violent incidents by stocking schools with more guns and guards. That track record is not good.

As a recent op-ed in the Raleigh News and Observer noted, “on the heels of the Columbine High School massacre,” schools “rapidly increased deployment of law enforcement officers.” This resulted in “soaring rates of suspension, dropouts and school-based arrests and court referrals” that pushed students committing school infraction into the juvenile and criminal systems.

A recent article in The New York Times also looked at the track record for adding more guns and guards in schools and found “the most striking impact of school police officers so far, critics say, has been a surge in arrests or misdemeanor charges for essentially nonviolent behavior – including scuffles, truancy and cursing at teachers – that sends children into the criminal courts.”

“Nationwide,” the report continued, “hundreds of thousands of students are arrested or given criminal citations at schools each year” with Texas setting the worst example, “where police officers based in schools write more than 100,000 misdemeanor tickets each year.”

“A large share are sent to court for relatively minor offenses, with black and Hispanic students and those with disabilities disproportionately affected,” the report found.

When a Washington, D.C.-based civil rights group studied the results of increased police presence in schools, their investigation found that officers were so rarely called upon to address real emergencies that they found “something else to do” and became “the de facto disciplinary arm of the school.”

As reported by USA Today’s Greg Toppo, increased police presence in schools resulted in a spike in students being arrested in school “for things like disorderly conduct” that previously would not involve the criminal justice system.

One of the researchers, testifying before Congress just three days before the Newtown shooting, explained that school discipline is “increasingly handled by law enforcement, and today, students are more likely to be arrested for minor in-school offenses.”

According to Toppo, her testimony included the statistic that harsher, more punitive security measures in schools have resulted in over 3 million students being suspended and over 100,000 students being expelled nationwide, each year.

There’s Money For Guns And Guards

At a time when most states are cutting education budgets, and depressed property taxes are reducing local revenues for schools, lawmakers are having no problem finding cash to spend on guns and guards in schools.

According to The Center for Public Integrity, post-Sandy Hook, a state legislative delegation in Florida approved a proposal to increase property taxes to pay for more school police, “at an annual cost of up to $130,000 per officer.”

A bill in Mississippi “set up a $7.5 million school-security fund.” Alabama legislators proposed “a lottery to pay for a $20 million plan to put police officers in every school.” And Indiana lawmakers weighed a measure to “set aside $10 million to offer grants to schools to hire local police to post in schools.”

Minority Students Hit Hardest

The increased rates of suspensions and expulsions that result from more police presence in schools are particularly devastating for students of color.

According to a report in The Christian Science Monitor, the number of school suspensions nationwide has grown dramatically in recent decades, from nearly 1.8 million students – 4 percent of all public-school students – in 1976, to, by 2006, 3.3 million – 7 percent of all students. “In addition to the suspensions, 102,000 students were expelled – removed from school for the remainder of the year or longer – in 2006.”

Suspensions and expulsions for certain groups – “particularly African-Americans, Hispanics, and those with disabilities” – are disproportionally high,” the report found, with African-Americans making up 18 percent of the students but “accounting for 46 percent of students suspended more than once, 39 percent of students expelled, and 36 percent of students arrested on campus.”

An even more recent report, this one from The Center for Civil Rights Remedies at the University of California, Los Angeles Civil Rights Project, found “an increasing gap between suspension rates of black and white students,” with “24 percent of black students” getting the brunt of harsh discipline measures while only “7.1 percent of white students” experienced the same treatment.

According to a write-up of the report in The Huffington Post, “Most of the suspensions came not in response to violent behavior, but for minor infractions such as dress code violations or lateness. The research also found that suspensions increase the likelihood kids will drop out of school and commit crimes.”

Some Say “Enough!”

The strong correlation of guns and guards in schools to increasing rates of school suspensions, expulsions, and arrests has not gone unnoticed, and a growing number of educators and lawmakers have expressed concern that society will pay down the road for more jobless and incarcerated young people.

In fact, a different article about the study from the UCLA Project, quoted one of the report’s authors who noted, “The likelihood of dropping out from school can rise to 32 percent for a ninth-grader who’s been suspended just once.”

The civil rights coalition that produced the research from The Advancement Project, cited above, took action to preempt more guns and guards in schools with a “Gun Free Way to School Safety” recommending schools “focus on prevention of crisis situations through creation of a positive school culture,” enact “appropriate security measures” that don’t involve law enforcement personnel, and develop a “school crisis plan.”

Recently, the National School Boards Association released a report declaring that the use of out-of-school suspensions had reached a “crisis” level. The report, released in conjunction with the National Opportunity to Learn campaign (a funder of the Education Opportunity Network), included new policy guidelines for “discipline policies aimed at ending excessive and discriminatory out-of-school suspensions.”

Education Week reported that NSBA declared “School board members should lead the charge to reduce, if not eliminate, the practice of out-of-school suspensions and instead push comprehensive strategies for preventing the removal of students from school for disciplinary reasons.”

Students have spoken out as well, organizing in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and elsewhere in separate yet connected efforts to promote a process called “restorative justice.”

These and other recent actions got the attention of the editorial board of The New York Times, who last week expressed concern about “a larger police presence in schools” that can “create a repressive environment in which children are arrested or issued summonses for minor misdeeds — like cutting class or talking back — that once would have been dealt with by the principal.”

The editors called for “greater transparency in the reporting process to make the police even more forthcoming” and more efforts “to dismantle . . . the school-to-prison pipeline.”

Their recommendation: “Districts that have gotten along without police officers should think twice before deploying them in school buildings.”

Truly, isn’t this the least we can do?

If the horrendous crime that took place at Sandy Hook Elementary can’t provide the impetus for positive action on gun control, let’s make sure it doesn’t provide the rationale for turning schools into extensions of a brutal, uncaring culture we want our children to abhor.

Now that every major media outlet has weighed in on the budget that President Obama introduced last week, the conventional wisdom is that Obama has proposed a “balance” of new revenues and spending cuts with an emphasis on sacrificing “entitlements” enjoyed by old people in order to increase “investments” in children.

This sensibility was most obvious in a quote in The New York Times from Virginia Senator Mark Warner who talked about “the math on entitlements” causing the federal government to “squeeze early-childhood programs … Head Start,” and “education.”

Warner continued, “There’s nothing progressive about a business or any other enterprise to invest less than 5 percent of its revenues on the education of its work force … and that’s what we’re doing.”

The “rift” the Times article refers to over the Obama administration’s budget became even more obvious when a broad coalition of progressive groups took to the streets in immediate opposition to Social Security cuts – known as “Chained CPI” – while the Center for American Progress hailed the budget’s proposals for early childhood education as “historic,” and Democrats for Education Reform gave the it “high praise” for it education measures.

The narrative that there’s a sort of generational warfare breaking out in the Democratic Party is remarkably false, though. Because Social Security spending is completely independent from the budget, it in no way puts a “squeeze” on how much the federal government spends on education and children.

Further, Democrats who fear opposition to Social Security cuts included in the Obama budget runs the risk of scuttling worthwhile spending on the younger generation should rest assured their fears are unwarranted.

What the Obama administration is proposing for education is in no way worth the sacrifice being demanded from the elderly, disabled, and poor.

What’s Being Praised

For sure, education items in the Obama administration’s proposed budget seem attractive at first glance.

As Education Week’s Alyson Klein observed, the proposed new outlays would increase the U.S. Department of Education’s spending “to $71.2 billion for fiscal year 2014″ – a “4.6 increase” over what the DOE was spending before the automatic sequester cuts took effect.

“This would constitute the largest expansion of educational opportunity in the 21st century,” the article quoted Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.

What’s most often praised in the budget plan is the new money allotted for a big expansion of prekindergarten programs. The Center for American Progress, in the article cited above, labeled the program a “bold new $75 billion investment in preschool over 10 years,” claiming the investment “would significantly shrink the preschool-access gap by helping states establish and expand high-quality programs.”

Other big-ticket items in the budget proposal were to boost the federal government’s spending on competitive grant programs, including

• $300 million for a “competitive-grant program aimed at helping high schools better prepare students for post-secondary education and the workplace and focus on science, math, engineering, and technology.”
• $1 billion more for a new Race to the Top competition focused on higher education.
• A big increase for the School Improvement Grant program, including $125 million for “school turnarounds.”

So, what could be wrong with these?

What’s Problematic

Despite the near-universal praise for the Obama budget’s support for early childhood education, more critical takes on the proposal have turned up some serious problems.

As The Huffington Post’s Joy Resmovits pointed out, the proposal does not “require states to actually expand preschool offerings. Rather, it would give incentives for them to do so.”

Paraphrasing early education expert Sara Mead, Resmovits noted, “The federal government can’t mandate that states expand preschool,” so many states that have been unwilling to expand these services will quite probably continue to do so.

Resmovits likened the proposal to the Affordable Care Act, with its optional health insurance exchanges that have been rejected by 21 states.

“But the preschool incentive may be even less compelling to states than Obamacare,” Resmovits wrote, “since Preschool for All doesn’t help governors fulfill a federal mandate.”

Raising further complications, Sara Meade, who Resmovits cited, had more to say about the Obama preschool proposal at the blog site Education Sector.

Meade wondered about other impediments to implementing the pre-K program, such as whether “quality requirements” would “make states hesitant to take the funds.”

She also noted that at the 10-year target range for new federal outlays, as a percent of funding for early childhood education, would actually be “lower than the current federal share of all government spending on early childhood education (where federal funds account for the majority of public dollars).”

How does this “incentivize” states?

The increases to competitive grant programs in the proposed budget pose complications as well. There is emerging evidence that requirements for federal education grants often result in new costs to school districts that exceed the money rewarded in the grant.

Many school districts across the state of New York, an RTTT winner, have come to the realization that “no one did the math,” as one school superintendent put it, to see whether the federal grant would cover the costs of the very heavy strings attached.

School officials, according to this account, “are finding they will have to spend significantly more – perhaps 50 to 100 times as much, in some cases – to meet Race to the Top’s demanding requirements.”

Yet, many of the districts either got no federal money or “received grants of less than $50,000.”

Similarly, in Ohio, which was awarded its RTTT grant in 2010, “about 80 districts and charter schools across the state” recently backed out of participating in the program because “school officials realized that grants weren’t enough to cover the requirements attached to them.”

What’s Missing

While backers of the Obama budget like to recite the big numbers associated with the proposal’s preschool and competitive grants, what they often fail to mention is that the budget areas where the federal government has traditionally had the most effect on education – Title I grants for disadvantaged students and special education funds stemming from the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act – have been completely level-funded.

This is especially problematic at a time when the nation is experiencing sharp increases in child poverty; now 23 percent of all children live in poverty.

Further, the federal government’s obligation to cough up its share of spending on special education students is long overdue. As this blog post recently pointed out, the original legislation establishing IDEA obligated the federal government to pay up to “40 percent of the average per-pupil expenditure.”

But federal expenditure levels are currently nowhere near 40 percent, making special education, essentially, “an unfunded mandate.”

These are indeed glaring omissions in what the administration is proposing.

Educators Voice Concerns

It’s telling that even a constituency normally reflexively supportive of increased education spending – the nation’s teachers’ unions – is none too pleased with the president’s proposals.

One communiqué from the National Education Association called the budget proposal “a mixed bag for those who care about students, schools and working families” acknowledging that the budget proposal cuts the “social safety net.”

In a more formal statement, NEA president Dennis Van Roekel repeated this concern, stating the budget failed at being “balanced and fair by demanding more of the wealthiest and corporations while staying true to our nation’s commitment to seniors and those most in need.”

Van Roekel also lamented that spending increases are in the form of competitive grants that states have to apply for. “This is disappointing,” he said, “because competitive grants leave too many students behind.”

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, also voiced “serious concerns” about the budget’s cuts to Social Security and Medicare that “are irresponsible and untimely.”

What Just Happened?

In the conventional wisdom of how Washington is supposed to work, things aren’t going to plan.

Those aligning with the “special interests” devoted to education funding should have been bought off by the carrot dangled before them rather than joining the resistance defending what heretofore have been “old people’s issues” – Social Security and Medicare.

Things may yet work out as the David Brookses of the world would have it, where Democrats “get a lot of the good ideas” the pundit class has allotted to them – such as, um, making more men “marriageable” (?) – while Republicans get to “restructure” America to benefit their corporate benefactors rather than ordinary Americans.

But what seems equally, if not more so, likely is that progressive Democrats have rallied around a unifying principle to defend the common good.

What has become the galvanizing issue today – defending Social Security – will perhaps set a precedent for resistance in the future from a coalition that unites the “special interests” of young and old.