TOP STORY

The Forces Driving America’s Education Spring

By Jeff Bryant

“Behind nearly every protest to the status quo policies meted out to the nation’s public education system are common grievances about resource deprivation, inequity, public disempowerment, and the widespread perception that governing policies are driven by corruption. The situation in Chicago is a microcosm of how these four grievances are converging.”
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NEWS AND VIEWS

Head Start Centers Feeling ‘Sequester’ Pain

Education Week

“The sequestration cuts, which represent a 5.27 percent reduction for Head Start from fiscal 2013 spending, take Head Start funding back to approximately $7.6 billion, which is close to where it was in 2008. The administration has framed the reduction as the loss of 70,000 slots. And while lawmakers have been quick to end a furlough of air traffic controllers because of flight delays, there has not been the same traction to stave off Head Start funding reductions.”
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The Most Important Problem Facing American Children Today

The Washington Post

“What is the most important problem facing American children today? According to the Academic Pediatric Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics, it is the effects of poverty on the health and well being of young people. But, they concede, there is no sustained focus on childhood poverty … The consequences of poverty for child and adolescent well-being are perhaps even more critical than those for health. These are the consequences that may change their life trajectories, lead to unproductive adult lives, and trap them in intergenerational poverty.”
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How To Turn An Urban School District Around – Without Cheating

The Atlantic

“The Cincinnati school district has improved both test scores and graduation rates since 2003 … Because Cincinnati has implemented proven instructional approaches while nurturing a culture in which administrators, teachers, parents, and community groups closely communicate and work together as teams, the case serves as an important counterweight to the public school stories that have been dominating the news in the past few years. It also can serve as a road map for reversing course from the high-pressure tactics that gave rise to the cheating scandals and led to little progress elsewhere.”
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Exposed: How Murdoch, Bill Gates And Big Corporations Are Data Mining Our Schools

Nation Of Change

“Starting next year, [test] scores, along with students’ personal information – race, economic background, report cards, discipline records and personal addresses – will be stored in a database designed by Wireless Generation, a subsidiary of media mogul Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation … The database will be managed by inBloom inc, a non-profit outfit that, like Wireless Generation, is under the domain of billionaire Bill Gates … Data analyzing firms, educational software designers and other third-party venders, both for and not-for-profit, will be granted access to student information.”
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Needed: A Mass Movement for College Debt Relief

The Huffington Post

Robert Kuttner writes, “Senator Elizabeth Warren … introduced her very first free-standing bill, and fittingly it was a bill to cut interest rates on student loans. Warren’s bill is only a start … But there is in Warren’s proposal the germ of a counter-revolution against austerity politics … Refinancing of college debt would put the money to better use and provide an immediate stimulus to the economy.”
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Hispanic High School Graduates Pass Whites In Rate Of College Enrollment

Pew Research

“A record seven-in-ten (69%) Hispanic high school graduates in the class of 2012 enrolled in college that fall, two percentage points higher than the rate (67%) among their white counterparts … This milestone is the result of a long-term increase in Hispanic college-going that accelerated with the onset of the recession in 2008 … The rate among white high school graduates, by contrast, has declined slightly since 2008. The positive trends in Hispanic educational indicators also extend to high school. The most recent available data show that in 2011 only 14% of Hispanic 16- to 24-year-olds were high school dropouts, half the level in 2000 (28%).”
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In three days of protests over the weekend and lapping into Monday, people who look like they would be involved in a civil rights cause – mostly African-American and Latino/a teachers, parents, and students, many living in low-income communities – were protesting against the city’s decision to close their neighborhood schools.

City officials have claimed that the closures are for the sake of “reforming” the city’s schools, but people who the schools actually serve aren’t buying it.

Similar protests are happening in Philadelphia where communities of black and brown citizens are openly defying civic leaders’ decisions to cut education spending and close neighborhood schools, again, in the name of “reforming” them.

Also from the heartland last week, in Indiana, a parent-led rebellion against policies mandating that schools adopt new curriculum standards known as the Common Core resulted in government officials delaying implementation of the standards that have been cast as necessary “reforms” to the system.

Similar rebellions are occurring in Alabama, Georgia, and Pennsylvania.

Moving west to Seattle, teachers boycotting standardized tests that state leaders mandated in a “reform” effort got what they wanted last week when the school administration gave into the teachers’ demands that the tests not be made mandatory for high schools.

A similar resistance has been happening across the state of Texas where a coalition of educators, parents, and state policy leaders are calling for a “counterattack” against standardized testing. This time, instead of teachers leading the rebellion, the salient force are parents who have, according to a reporter for the Austin American-Statesman, “overwhelmed the powerful business and political forces that made Texas the capital of high-stakes testing.”

These events, and others, reveal an emerging American movement unifying diverse factions across the nation in efforts to reverse education policy mandates and bolster public schools instead of punishing them and closing them down.

There is little doubt now that a counterargument to the education policies championed by the likes of Michelle Rhee and Education Secretary Arne Duncan is now slipping into the mainstream of American opinion.

Even the editorial board of The New York Times is calling for a change in how that city has been administering its public schools. In an editorial this week, the newspaper, which had been a cheerleader for Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s education mandates, now states, “The school system has indeed gone overboard in relying on standardized testing. Tests need to be a means to the end of better instruction, not the pedagogical obsession they have become.”

What’s generally not understood is that these flashpoints of resistance around the country are driven by common core grievances – a grassroots “common core” if you will – that is shaping the rapidly evolving education debate.

Behind nearly every protest to the status quo policies meted out to the nation’s public education system are common grievances about resource deprivation, inequity, public disempowerment and the widespread perception that governing policies are driven by corruption.

The situation in Chicago is a microcosm of how these four grievances are converging.

Resource Deprivation

What’s not widely acknowledged is that there is a systemic and deliberate agenda across America to starve public schools of funding. This is especially true in Chicago and especially true for the schools that are scheduled for closing.

A recent report from the Chicago Teachers Union looked at schools that were closed and revealed the district’s intentional policy to starve the targeted schools of necessary funds. As local blogger and activist Kenzo Shibata recently observed at The Huffington Post, “The school closings wave is at the crescendo of years of slow and steady sabotage by the Chicago Board of Education.”

Shibata quoted a Chicago Public Schools Official who readily admitted that “If we think there’s a chance that a building is going to be closed in the next five to 10 years, if we think it’s unlikely it’s going to continue to be a school, we’re not going to invest in that building.”

Shibata correctly observed, “The very schools that needed the most support – libraries, small class sizes, and wraparound services – were starved.”

Inequity

Not only is there a nationwide effort to disinvest from public schools, there is a systemic policy in America to ensure schools that need funding the most are targeted for deeper cuts or lower funding.

This is especially true in Chicago where the schools being closed are predominantly in parts of the city that are populated with lower-income African American and Latino families.

Writing at the website Alternet, Samantha Winslow reported, ” Almost all of the 54 schools targeted for closing serve primarily black and Latino students. All are in poor neighborhoods.”

Reporter James Patrick at Substance News observed,

“Since 2001, 98 of the 100 schools being closed or phased out in Chicago have been located in predominantly African-American and Latino communities. School closures directly correspond to the locations of troubled mortgages, foreclosures, and population loss.”

Public Disempowerment

Behind nearly every protest against the nation’s education metric-driven agenda is the complaint from teachers, parents, and school children that they are being disempowered.

Whether the voices of dissent are coming from teachers objecting to unfair evaluations, parents objecting to having no voice in creating and implementing new standards, or students complaining of unjust discipline measures, the prevailing narrative is that Americans of all persuasions increasingly believe they have diminishing control over their education destinies.

Policy decisions affecting education are increasingly promulgated from governing bodies that are not elected and serve at the whim of powerful mayors and governors who take power away from locally-elected bodies and hand it over to hand-picked “managers” and committees filled with their close associates and campaign funders.

Education policies are increasingly the product of Washington-based technocrats who have little or no contact with the schools and communities whose schools are being affected by their plans.

Even charter schools – often promoted as a authentic “choice” for parents who want to escape “government monopoly schools” – are increasingly operated by distant executives and appointed boards with little accountability to local constituents.

This sense of disempowerment is an especially prevalent force behind the Chicago protests. Bloggers and activists have recorded countless stories of parents who have done everything they can to provide their children access to good schools only to see their efforts undone by the city’s action.

One account, appearing in the local independent newspaper Catalyst, told how parents have seen these Chicago neighborhoods completely transformed by forces out of their ability to address. In one neighborhood, “Over the past decade, three of the schools that served the area’s children have been closed and reopened – one as a charter school, one as a selective enrollment school and the third as a lease by a private Catholic school that costs about $8,000 a year.”

In other words, the option to choose a school that accepts all children is no longer available.

This is not an isolated example, noted reporter Sarah Karp. “The end result of the school [administration's] actions is that traditional, district-run neighborhood schools will become scarcer. Schools to which students have to apply and those run by private organizations will continue to take over, casting an ever-bigger shadow over the district.”

Widespread Perceptions Of Corruption

Prominent news stories about charter school profiteering, massive cheating on standardized tests, and the heavy involvement of Wall Street investment firms and the publishing industry behind the scenes are creating widespread perceptions that education policy is driven by corruption.

People to the right of the political spectrum accuse efforts to align all state curricula to Common Core standards of being driven by a federal government intent on spreading “propaganda” and invading our privacy.

Those who tend to lean left see corporations as the primary benefactors of education policies like the Common Core and charter school proliferation.

Either way, the core grievance is that education policies are being sold to the American people with very deceptive language and with occasionally ulterior motives.

These perceptions are not confined to the extremes of the spectrum. Recently at The New Republic, Nicholas Lehmann wrote that education reform poster-person Michelle Rhee has “misled” education advocates who favor current policies.

“Rhee simply isn’t interested in reasoning forward from evidence to conclusions: conclusions are where she starts,” Lehmann observed. “She gives us little or no discussion of pedagogical technique, a hot research topic these days, or of curriculum, another hot topic owing to the advent of the Common Core standards, or of funding levels, or class size, or teacher training, or surrounding schools with social services.”

Lehmann concluded that Rhee’s leadership in “the education-reform movement” has had the damaging effect of making the whole enterprise take on “a narrow and melodramatic frame” that remains so influential mostly because “it depends so heavily on the largesse of people who are used to getting their way.”

Certainly the people of Chicago know what it’s like to be misled by influential and local officials threatening their schools. A local radio station, WBEZ, took the time to fact check what school district officials have been reporting and found lots of gaps in the truth.

For instance, Chicago Public Schools says “30,000 children will be impacted by school closings. But the district’s plan actually will touch more than 46,000 children.”

Although school and city officials have “claimed a loss of 145,000 students, between 2000 and 2013, actual enrollment in Chicago Public Schools has not decreased dramatically.” And, “since 2000, the proportion of Chicago kids attending public schools has actually increased.”

Also, “Mayor Rahm Emanuel has said the key reason to close schools is about getting children ‘trapped’ in low performing schools to a better place.” But the reporters found that in previous closings, “most students whose schools were closed by the district re-enrolled in schools that were academically weak.”

School and city officials have stated the school closures are scheduled to save $43 million and help close $1 billion shortfall in the district’s operating budget. But again, the facts show “all cost savings, plus tens of millions of additional dollars (for a total of $233 million), will be put into receiving schools.” And “the district is borrowing $329 million to pay for improvements to receiving schools,” which “will cost $25 million in debt service every year for 30 years.”

The New Bipartisanship On Education?

The common core grievances driving the backlash to education mandates are not going to go away any time soon. Despite how the particulars of the debate pivot to issues about content standards, to assessment results, to school choice, etc. widespread feelings of resource deprivation, inequity, public disempowerment, and overwhelming corruption are not only going to remain – they are likely to grow. Any lurch from crisis to crisis – no matter how well orchestrated – will likely further intensify a popular sense of a system out of control.

The only remaining question is, now that it’s becoming more acceptable to say that education mandates have “gone too far,” how much longer will it take for those same opinion outlets to admit the mandates were mistaken to begin with?

TOP STORY

Unified Backlash to Education Mandates Grows, Spreads

By Jeff Bryant

“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 … 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.”

Read more …

NEWS AND VIEWS

President Obama’s Cigarette Tax Up In Smoke

Politico

“Remember the cigarette tax hike President Barack Obama proposed in his big budget rollout? The White House barely does … The president hasn’t mentioned it. The White House didn’t coordinate with outside anti-smoking groups. Tobacco companies never worried about putting together a lobbying strategy to kill it. Obama’s political arm hasn’t sent an email calling on Congress to consider it. Not even Obama’s surgeon general, who calls curbing smoking ‘the single most important issue for all the surgeons general of the past five decades,’ put out a press release applauding the idea.”

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CPS Wants To Close First Renaissance Schools

WBEZ 91.5

“Chicago has been opening and closing public schools every year for the past decade. It’s a controversial strategy that former Chicago Public Schools CEO Arne Duncan believed was an answer to improving public education. But in the most recent round of proposed school closings, CPS is shutting down the very schools Duncan created … All these changes raise a much bigger question. Does the idea that closing down bad schools and opening new ones actually work? Does it lead to better schools?”

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Schools Game System To Meet Standards, Paper Finds

The Wall Street Journal

“The way some schools are being held to account for student performance can corrupt how these institutions seek to achieve the standards, a new paper from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York warns … Schools deliberately moved underperforming students into exempt categories in order to have those students not drag down the performance of the school as a whole … Critics say the testing, while it has a place, can distort education and thwart real learning, as classroom leaders ‘teach to the test’ … Anywhere where testing and statistics become the guiding forces in how something is judged, cheating and misrepresentation can follow.”

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The Solution To A Bad Guy With A Test Is A Good Guy With A Test

The Huffington Post

Arnold Dodge, chairperson of the Department of Educational Leadership and Administration at LIU-Post writes, “Arne Duncan, the Secretary of Education, gave what was billed as a Special Invited Address, at the annual meeting of the American Education Research Association (AERA) … attended by thousands of higher ed scholars in education departments … What we heard was breathtaking in its lack of awareness about the effects of Race to the Top (RTTT). Far from being chastened by what is going on in schools around the country, the Secretary doubled-down on his test-driven offensive. … Race to the Top, with its federal dollars as leverage, has wrought untold misery on schools across the country. This fact escapes the officials in Washington as their rhetoric clearly demonstrates.”

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Falling Further Apart: Decaying Schools in New York City’s Poorest Neighborhoods

SEIU

A new report finds, “years of deferred maintenance and inadequate facilities funding have taken a toll on public school buildings, with serious consequences for some of New York City’s most vulnerable populations. Students from the poorest families and neighborhoods attend some of the most neglected school buildings in the city. Because poorer students are generally nonwhite, this disparity in building conditions predominantly affects Black, Latino and other nonwhite schoolchildren.”

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Student Debt And The Crushing Of The American Dream

New York Times

Economist Joseph E. Stiglitz writes, “America – home of the land-grant university, the G.I. Bill and world-class public universities from California to Michigan to Texas – has fallen from the top in terms of university education. With strangling student debt, we are likely to fall further… To be competitive in the 21st century is to have a highly educated labor force, one with college and advanced degrees. Instead, we are foreclosing on our future as a nation … Along with tougher regulation of for-profit schools and the banks they connive with, and more humane bankruptcy laws, we must give more support to middle-class families struggling to send their children to college, to ensure that they have a standard of living at least equal to that of their parents … Those concerned about the damage America’s growing divide is doing to our ideals and our moral character should put student debt at the top of any reform agenda.”

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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.

TOP STORY

Why We Need A Moratorium On The High-Stakes Of Common Core Testing

By Jeff Bryant

“Our nation’s obsession over education standards and testing has gotten out of hand … In a moment of sanity last week, Randi Weingarten, leader of the American Federation of Teachers and a leading proponent of the new standards-aligned tests, 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 … 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.”
Read more …

NEWS AND VIEWS

Hey Congress: Pre-K Is A Better Investment Than The Stock Market

The Washington Post

“Early childhood education is a tremendously effective investment … Preschool programs help kids develop ‘non-cognitive skills … like patience, cooperation, planning and delaying gratification … There’s some dispute as to whether Head Start does any good, and it’s fair to question the benefit of high-quality preschool for privileged students who’ll do fine anyway. But the overwhelming bulk of the evidence suggests that there are few better investments for poor children.”
Read more …

Exposed: The Billionaire-Backed Group Strong-Arming Parents Into Destroying Their Kids’ Public Schools

Alternet

“A Los Angeles-based group calling itself Parent Revolution organized a local campaign to harass and trick [parents] into signing petitions that they thought were meant for simple school improvements. In fact those petitions turned out to be part of a sophisticated campaign to convert their children’s public school into a privately-run charter — something a majority of parents opposed … Charter school advocates like Parent Revolution and so-called ‘school reformers’ like Michelle Rhee … front for some of the world’s biggest, most powerful corporate figures.”
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Computer Issues Ensnare Testing At Schools In 4 States, Raise Questions About Scores’ Validity

The Washington Post

“Thousands of students in Indiana, Kentucky, Minnesota and Oklahoma have been kicked offline while taking tests in recent weeks, postponing the testing schools planned for months and raising concerns about whether the glitches will affect scores … Many frustrated students have been reduced to tears and administrators are boiling over, calling the problems ‘disastrous’ and ‘unacceptable’ at a time when test results count so heavily toward schools’ ratings under the federal No Child Left Behind law. In places such as Indiana, where former Gov. Mitch Daniels approved changes tying teachers’ merit pay to student test scores, the pressure is even greater.”
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New Report Examines School Improvement and Turnaround Strategies

National School Boards Association

“As states and the federal government push for more turnaround strategies for low-performing schools – and put billions of dollars into their efforts – a new report … finds that while there have been some successes there’s not much evidence yet that many of these strategies will work overall … The report concludes: Research is limited. There is some evidence of success, primarily for schools undertaking more dramatic turnaround reforms, but data collected over a longer period of time is needed.”
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Nation’s Online Elementary and Secondary Schools Expand Rapidly, But Academic Performance Lags Behind Other Public Schools, New Report Finds

National Education Policy Center

“A national study … finds serious and systemic problems with the nation’s full-time cyber schools … Despite virtual schools’ track record of students falling behind their peers academically or dropping out at higher rates, states and districts continue to expand virtual schools and online offerings to students … Publicly-funded virtual school expansion appears to be driven by lobbying and advertising dollars. It is not justified by the research evidence, nor is it governed by thoughtful policy.”
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Recent U.S. College Graduates Disillusioned, Underemployed

Reuters

“More than 40% of recent U.S. college graduates are underemployed or need more training to get on a career track … 34% said they had student loans of $30,000 or less, while 17% owed between $30,000 to $50,000 … 42% of recent graduates expect they will need an advanced degree to further their career and almost a quarter are already planning to take graduate courses. More than half of graduates said it was difficult finding a job, but 39% were employed by the time they left college. 68% said they are working full time, while 16% are in part-time positions. The top industries that graduates wanted to work in were education, media and entertainment and healthcare.”
Read more …

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.

TOP STORY

Cutting Education: Dumb And Dumber

By Jeff Bryant

“What’s dumb is to cut money for air traffic controllers … even dumber is to cut funding to Head Start and other education programs that ensure the nation’s children have learning opportunities. … Cuts to essential funds for educating our children aren’t limited to the dreaded sequester … 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.”
Read more …

NEWS AND VIEWS

Ed. Companies Exert Public-Policy Influence

Education Week

“Education observers are alarmed at what they see as increasingly aggressive moves by companies to make money from the K-12 system … Many companies seeking K-12 business have deep pockets. In addition to spending $6 million in federal lobbying since 2001, Pearson and its employees donated more than $249,000 to presidential and congressional candidates … K12 Inc. and its employees donated more than $1 million to state candidates, political parties, and ballot-measure committees.”
Read more …

The Coming Revolution in Public Education

The Atlantic

John Tierney writes, “The dominant regime for the past decade or more has been what is sometimes called accountability-based reform … Fueled in part by growing evidence of the reforms’ ill effects and of the reformers’ self-interested motives, the counter-movement is rapidly expanding … I predict it will continue … It’s what history teaches us to expect. … Education policies based on standardization and uniformity tend to fail … Policies based on distrust of teachers tend to fail … Many of the organizations involved in ‘corporate reform’ seem to need reforming themselves … If I am correct that a new educational revolution is under way, it will need its own Thomas Paine.”
Read more …

Obama’s Big Second-Term Education Problem

The Washington Post

Valerie Strauss writes, “President Obama has a big problem in his second term in terms of education policy: his first term … The agenda was ambitious, designed to shake up the status quo — and it did. But it has had major consequences for schools, students, teachers, principals and superintendents — some of them clearly unintended, and they threaten to consume Obama’s second-term education policy agenda … the reforms were not well thought out, not based in solid research and were rushed into implementation.”
Read more …

The First Race to the Top

The New York Times

“It turns out that the race to the top has a lot of history behind it. Members of the Boston School Committee fired the first shots in the testing wars in the summer of 1845 … The examiners’ report lambasted the schools … The examiners believed that the teacher made the school … They named the worst ones and called for their removal … No one could explain, however, why some schools did better than others.”
Read more …

Study: There May Not Be A Shortage Of American STEM Graduates After All

Washington Post

“A study released Wednesday by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute reinforces what a number of researchers have come to believe: that the STEM worker shortage is a myth … the U.S. has ‘more than a sufficient supply of workers available to work in STEM occupations.’ Basic dynamics of supply and demand would dictate that if there were a domestic labor shortage, wages should have risen. Instead, researchers found, they’ve been flat, with many Americans holding STEM degrees unable to enter the field and a sharply higher share of foreign workers taking jobs in the information technology industry.”
Read more …

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.

TOP STORY

Wrong Lesson From Sandy Hook Shootings

By Jeff Bryant

“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 … 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.”
Read more …

NEWS AND VIEWS

Feds Can Do More To Promote Funding Equity, Report Urges

Education Week

“Civil rights leaders and education advocates say it’s time to push for new efforts to address decades-long disparities in how resources are parceled out to public schools … Those recommendations … are outlined in a new report from the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights that … focuses on five areas to help close the resource and achievement gaps between poor students and their middle and upper-class peers.”
Read more …

Of Rich Dads And iPads

Huffington Post

Chicago parent activist and attorney Matt Farmer asks: “When is a Chicago elementary school with 23 kids in a classroom not considered by Mayor Rahm Emanuel to be an ‘underutilized’ school? Answer: When it’s his kids’ school … Chicago’s school ‘reform’ efforts have always worked best on other people’s children.”
Read more …

Students Face Tougher Tests That Outpace Lesson Plans

New York Times

In New York, “a pall has settled over classrooms across the state because this year’s tests … have been redesigned … are tougher… and cover at least some material that has yet to make its way into the curriculum. The new tests … align[ed] with Common Core standards … are so new that many New York schools have yet to fully adopt new curriculums – including reading material, lesson plans and exercises – to match.”
Read more …

Common Core Standards Attacked By Republicans

Washington Post

“Republicans have launched an attack on the Common Core State Standards, an initiative that more than 45 states and the District of Columbia … that has been facing increasing opposition in recent months from both right and left. This new effort could undermine what has largely been bipartisan cooperation … Those on the right say that the initiative is nothing more than a federal move towards a national curriculum.”
Read more …

Teachers Union Suit: Florida’s Merit-Pay Law Violates U.S. Constitution

Orlando Sentinel

“Florida’s teachers union Tuesday filed a federal lawsuit … challenging how the state ties teacher evaluations to student test scores. The lawsuit argues that Florida’s sweeping merit-pay law unfairly resulted in many teachers’ evaluations being based on the test scores of students or subjects they did not teach. That violates the equal-protection and due-process clauses of the U.S. Constitution, the lawsuit claims.”
Read more …

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.