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The 74 interview: Jack Coons on rethinking school funding, restoring authority to low-income families and his role in the Serrano v. Priest cases

Special to redefinED December 6, 2019

Editor’s note: Long-time education choice advocate and redefinED guest columnist Jack Coons recently sat for a three-hour interview with Bellwether Education co-founder Andrew J. Rotherham and Emmeline Zhao, senior editor for special projects at The 74. The result, in Rothman’s words, was “a thoughtful, thorough and once-in-a-lifetime conversation” in which Coons reiterated his decades-long belief in education equity and academic quality for all children, regardless of income level. Here are the opening paragraphs of the post, with a link to the full piece on The 74. Be sure to watch the video of Coons at the conclusion of the interview transcript.

It was a warm, sun-splashed day when Emmeline Zhao and I visited Jack Coons at his cozy bungalow in Berkeley, California. That day his son and granddaughter, an accomplished dancer, happened to be visiting for spring break, and the mood was light, with three generations under the same roof. A law professor by training, Coons was a fixture on the education landscape in California for decades and — unbeknownst to most — an influential character for public education across the country.

He litigated the three landmark Serrano v. Priest cases, which challenged California’s school funding structure, arguing that the state created a gross financial disparity between wealthy and poor districts due to its reliance on taxes on local real property.

Coons also created odd alliances around school choice and crafted one of the most enduring intellectual partnerships in education with Stephen Sugarman. Coons credits this to a generosity of spirit and shared intellectual curiosity. Whatever the reason, their partnership left its mark on California education policy and politics in ways that are still felt today.

Click here to read more.

December 6, 2019 0 comment

Advocate Voices Education choice Education equity Featured Parent empowerment Parental Choice Podcast School Choice

podcastED: an interview with education choice advocate Virginia Walden Ford

David Hudson Tuthill December 5, 2019

David Hudson Tuthill

Education choice advocate Virginia Walden Ford served as the inspiration for a new independent movie that chronicles the creation of the Opportunity Scholarship Program in Washington, D.C.

Editor’s note: For more than two decades, education choice advocate Virginia Walden Ford has tirelessly championed families and students living in lower-income neighborhoods to ensure that all children have the academic options they deserve.

After growing up in Little Rock, Ark., during the battle for school integration, Walden Ford led the fight for the Opportunity Scholarship Program in Washington, D.C. Her passion for education equality was ignited as she witnessed, as the single mother of three children, the need for more education choices for all families.

Now, her story has been made into a movie starring Uzo Aduba, Matthew Modine and Vanessa Williams. Step Up For Students, which hosts this blog, is bringing three free screenings of the film to Florida Dec. 8, 9 and 10 in Jacksonville, Orlando and Tampa, respectively. Walden Ford will be present at all three shows and will do a talk-back following the Tampa screening.

The Jacksonville and Orlando shows are sold out, but RSVPs are still being accepted for the Tampa screening here.

Step Up For Students advocacy coordinator David Hudson Tuthill recorded an exclusive interview with Walden Ford Tuesday in which she discussed her children’s diverse academic needs, the effect of neighborhood drug and gang activity on their learning, and her growing conviction that someone had to stand up and be the voice for children in the D.C. area and across the country.

We hope you enjoy the podcast.

December 5, 2019 0 comment

Customization Education choice Education equity Featured Gardiner Scholarship Parent empowerment School Choice Student spotlight

Even out here, education choice for Eli

Ron Matus December 4, 2019

Ron Matus

Eli Conner, shown here with his mother, Stephanie Conner, and his sister, Madeline, benefits from the flexibility offered by the Gardiner Scholarship, Florida’s education savings account for students with special needs. The Conners have crafted an education regimen that includes therapy, home school and private school for Eli. PHOTO: Lance Rothstein

Editor’s note: To learn more about Eli and to hear his story in his mother’s words, please watch the video at the end of this post.

LaBELLE, Fla. – In his family’s backyard, Eli Conner, 13, wobbled across a 20-foot tightrope, pretending to be the hero in a rescue scene from a “Despicable Me” movie.

Using foam hand grips hanging from another rope, he pulled himself toward a big oak at the end of the line. “You’re getting closer,” encouraged his mom, Stephanie Conner. “Now touch the tree.” Eli finished with a triumphant tap.

“One handed,” said Mom. “Nice.”

Eli, who communicates mostly through sign language, has been diagnosed with cerebral palsy and other developmental delays. A few years ago, he was scared and struggling in a traditional school. A few weeks ago, he couldn’t do the tightrope.

Now he can.

And now, thanks to a cutting-edge education choice scholarship, his family is confident they will see his growth continue to accelerate.

Even in this remote town near the Everglades, there are more educational resources than meet the eye. It just takes the right tool to assemble them. The Conner family did that with the Gardiner Scholarship, Florida’s education savings account for students with special needs. It gave them flexibility to devise an education regimen – therapy, home school, private school – that was just right for Eli.

The scholarship, Stephanie Conner said, “changed everything.”

The Gardiner Scholarship has allowed Eli to gain a year’s worth of knowledge in a year’s worth of time for each of the past three years. PHOTO: Lance Rothstein

Stephanie Conner describes herself as a stay-at-home mom. She is a former public and private schoolteacher. Her husband, Joel Conner, is a graphic artist and adult education teacher from a family of educators, including his father, a former superintendent of the local public schools. The Conners have four children, three of them adopted. All four use education choice scholarships.

Eli and his sister, Madeline, 9, use the Gardiner Scholarship, the largest education savings account program in America. Created by the Florida Legislature in 2014, it now serves 13,112 students, including 449 in rural counties. Three thousand more are on a wait list. The Conners’ 5-year-olds, Meizi and Gideon, use the new Family Empowerment Scholarship for working- and middle-class families. Created by the Legislature this year, it’s already reached its cap of 18,000 students.

Without intending to be trendsetters, the Conners are using the Gardiner Scholarship in a novel way that underscores the potential for schools to unbundle their services – and better serve families. (More on that in a sec.) Their experience also shows the upside of giving parents more power to shape their children’s educational programming – even in rural areas – where myths about education choice not being viable persist despite this, this and this.

LaBelle, pop. 4,640, is not postcard Florida. It’s laid-back, fringed with cabbage palms, a pit stop between Lake Okeechobee and Fort Myers. It’s also the county seat of Hendry County, a patch of farm country blanketed by sugar cane that holds fewer humans per square mile than Kansas.

The Conner kids are fourth-generation Hendry County. They have plenty of family nearby, which is why, pre-Gardiner, the Conners were on the verge of a heart-breaking decision. Family? Or therapy? To be closer to the therapists Eli needed, they kept thinking they’d have to uproot to the city. “It was always a terrible feeling to have to even consider giving up one or the other,” Conner said. “Family support, when you’re dealing with special needs, is indispensable.”

Thanks to the scholarship, they never had to make that choice. This is Eli’s third year using the Gardiner Scholarship, and the first for Madeline, who has been diagnosed with bilateral congenital deafness.

The combination of therapies, home school and private school have been the perfect combination for Eli. PHOTO: Lance Rothstein

Like growing numbers of parents with education savings accounts, the Conners are “customizers.” They use the funds to mix and match educational products and services in addition to, or beyond, school. In their case: home school materials; therapy sessions and equipment (for speech, occupational and sensory integration therapy); and partial tuition at International Christian Academy, a private school a block from their home.

Several times a year, Stephanie Conner takes Eli to Orlando for three weeks of intensive therapy. The rest of the time, she does daily therapies with Eli and Madeline, many involving tools purchased with Gardiner funds. “Peanut balance balls” help them both improve motor skills. A microphone helps Madeline better enunciate words. An array of spoon-like tools helps Eli with his speech, with Mom using them to strengthen muscles in his mouth.

For Eli, the positive effects spill over into academics. Depending on the subject, his proficiency ranges from a first- to fourth-grade level. He reads at a third-grade level. But over the past three years, he’s gained a year’s worth of knowledge in a year’s worth of time. And sensory integration therapy has made it possible for him to learn in more settings, from field trips to classrooms. “His ability to sit still and not be overwhelmed by sights and sounds … has allowed him to participate,” Conner said.

The private school piece is key. So is the way the school offers its services. The youngest Conners go full time. Eli goes for PE, lunch and a science/social studies class. Madeline goes for PE. For the older siblings, the school charges partial tuition. It has unbundled its services in a way that more and more parents will appreciate and other schools, public and private, would be wise to consider.

“If someone wants to be part of our school, I’m going to let them,” said International Christian Academy founder and principal Tracy Co. “I thought it was a good fit for them and it’s worked.”

The school serves 80 full-time students in K-12. More than half are non-white. More than 80 percent use state scholarships. (Sixty use either the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship for lower-income students or the Family Empowerment Scholarship. FTC, FES and Gardiner are administered by nonprofits such as Step Up For Students, which hosts this blog.)

Eli has been warmly welcomed. During a recent kickball game, his classmates erupted in cheers when he booted a low liner up the middle. At first base, he fist bumped the coach.

The boost to Eli’s social skills is also bolstering his academics, giving him more confidence and more ability to focus and learn, Conner said. Between therapies, home school and part-time private school, she said, “this has just been the perfect combination.”

Perfect combinations really are possible. Even out here.

December 4, 2019 0 comment

Charter Schools Education equity Education politics Featured School Choice

Let’s begin listening to the voices that really matter in ed choice conversation

Keith Jacobs December 3, 2019

Keith Jacobs

Mary McLeod Bethune Day Academy is one of 123 schools in the Washington, D.C., area under the oversight of the D.C. Public Charter School Board. Founded in 2003, the PreK3-8 academy is an IB World School that offers world language, art and music in addition to its core academic curriculum.

While attending a recent event hosted by D.C. Public Charter Schools, I stood in the lawmaking core of our country where landmark decisions such as Brown v. Board of Education promised education equality and closed my eyes.

I imagined what it would be like to celebrate the success of all students without focusing on the particular setting that allowed them to achieve this success. That’s when I realized we’ve been going about this all wrong.

Education choice reformers often focus on the wrong “face of the education choice movement.” We look at lawmakers, activists or orators declaring their unwavering support of education choice who are surrounded either by supporters or by the opposition – teacher unions and school district leaders.

All those faces have one thing in common: adulthood.

Yes. The only faces we see, the only voices we hear, are those of adults. But those faces and voices cannot convey that education right now, particularly in cities like Washington D.C., is a life or death choice for students.

As a choice organizer from the same background as many of our students, even I struggle to communicate for our kids. Grownups are sometimes too far removed. Opponents of education choice who would deny students the means to escape the shackles that have burdened their families through generational poverty, despite their inability to effectively support these populations, must hear from students directly.

I opened my eyes and looked around. The event I was attending was meant to celebrate the accomplishments of charter school students and highlight the fact that more than 12,000 are waiting for a seat in those charter schools.

In most instances across the country, waiting lists are tied to funding access, but in D.C., the problem is far more egregious.

In 1995, the District of Columbia School Reform Act stated that charter schools would receive right of first choice to vacant buildings. Today, Mayor Muriel Bowser literally has closed the door on minority students by refusing to allow this. Refusing to allow the expansion of charter schools keeps students beholden to the randomness of the charter school lottery and forces them to remain stuck in ineffective and unsafe schools.

Over the past 20 years, D.C. public charter schools have effectively served low-income and minority students by implementing dual-language, technology, arts, inquiry-based and project-based schools while also focusing on diversity and innovative learning models. These schools are safe, effective and thriving.

This was evident in the thunderous drumline of Mary McCleod Bethune Day Academy Public Charter School as participants marched through a standing-room-only crowd. Students as young as 8 showed pride and mastery musicianship representing a charter school that caters to their unique abilities.

The worth of these schools also was evident in an exhibit in which students shared their journeys and inspirations through original works of art. One student stood before his drawing of Emmett Till, the teenage boy brutally lynched at age 14 in Mississippi for allegedly whistling at a white woman. This student’s portrait reminded me of the sins of our history and how the grotesque and untimely death of a child catapulted the civil rights struggle into a mainstream movement.

Till’s casket is memorialized right up the street at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, but what has our country actually learned from years of oppressive practices against minorities and the fight to do better? Today, instead of denying access to diners and buses, our country limits the access of our most vulnerable children to quality education options, continuing oppression that began long ago.

In the days of the Civil Rights Movement, we didn’t focus on children until tragedy struck. Until the death of a child galvanized a nation.

Education choice is the social justice issue of our time.

Let’s not make the same mistake twice.

December 3, 2019 0 comment

Commentary and opinion Education equity Featured School Choice

‘Midway’ reminds us of what made America great

Matthew Ladner December 2, 2019

Matthew Ladner

“Midway,” directed by Roland Emmerich, is based on real-life events in the clash between the American fleet and the Imperial Japanese Navy that marked a turning point in the Pacific Theater during WWII. While the Battle of Midway is a great reminder of American society’s admirable traits, the U.S. must continue to expand opportunity for everyone in the education arena to flourish in a growing and innovative society.

Trips to the cineplex are important holiday rituals in the Ladner clan, and Midway was on the viewing list this year. I enjoyed it. Looper issued a video with several scenes you might suspect were Hollywood embellishments. But nope, they actually happened.

See more here and here.

The Battle of Midway is a helpful reminder about many admirable aspects of American society. George Orwell said that to understand London, one had to visit Paris. Imperial Japan is a good stand-in for our un-America, which allows us to understand ourselves better.

Japan of the 1930s was a monarchy run by rival elites of the Army and Navy. The film does a decent job of portraying this rivalry and hints at the precipitating cause of the Pearl Harbor attack. Japan imported most of its oil from the United States at the time. Horrified by atrocities in Japan’s empire building in China, the United States passed an embargo on the sale of oil to Japan. The Japanese elite decided to secure new sources for oil but understood the need to knock out the American fleet at Pearl Harbor to do so.

All of this reminds me of a quote from Matt Ridley’s book, “The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge.”

The elite gets things wrong, says Douglas Carswell in “The End of Politics and the Birth of iDemocracy,” because they endlessly seek to govern by design in a world that is best organized spontaneously from below. Public policy failures stem from planners’ excessive faith in deliberate design. They constantly underrate the merits of spontaneous, organic arrangement, and fail to recognize that the best plan is often not to have one.

Elitist societies, like the pre-Civil War American South, are prone to making rash decisions to suit the needs of their elite. Japan’s elite got the Pearl Harbor attack very, very wrong, and it cost their country dearly. Japan had employed similar tactics successfully against Russia earlier in the century, but the United States was no sclerotic Czarist Russia.

Despite putting a priority on Europe, the USA was far more than Japan would ever have been able to handle. At one point, for instance, the United States was producing a new state-of-the-art aircraft carrier per month. Japan brought six such carriers to attack Pearl Harbor and lost four of them at Midway.

The pilots who carried out the Pearl Harbor attack were the best trained in the world. Their planes were superior to ours at the outset. The elitism of pilot training, however, represented a severe weakness. Many of the pilots who carried out the Pearl Harbor attack died in the battle of Midway. Given that pilot training was akin to graduating from Harvard Law in the Japanese system, this was a huge problem.

Where did the United States get enough pilots to crank out a new fleet carrier every month? It went something like “Hey Tommy, you’re a bright kid and good in a fight. How would you like to become a fighter pilot?”

American planes improved in quality and quantity. Admiral Yamamoto, the architect of the Pearl Harbor attack, realized the scale of their folly after the attack, stating, “I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.”

The Japanese elite had not just underestimated American industrial capacity and human capital; they also underestimated American ingenuity. “Midway” accurately portrays the crucial role played by American codebreakers in the pivotal Midway battle.

Yamamoto aimed to draw the remaining American aircraft carriers into a trap by attacking Midway Island. Admiral Nimitz learned of their plans and instead had our remaining carriers lying in wait to destroy the four Japanese carriers. A group of Navy musicians proved crucial to the codebreaking effort.

A key to American success in World War II was making good use of talent, whether in the form of repurposed musicians or Rosie the Riveter back in the factories. We were much better at this than Imperial Japan, but not as good, either then or now, as we could or should be.

Today, state, national and international testing data show that talent development is not normally distributed in the United States. White students in America sit comfortably among the ranks of the top European and Asian education systems, while American black and Hispanic students score closer to the averages of countries that expend a fraction of our financial effort:

Our ancestors weren’t afraid of foreign competition. They made the foreign competition afraid of us. If we want to “make America great again,” we need to expand the opportunity for everyone to flourish in a growing and innovative society.

Equipping children with literacy and numeracy is a key component of mobility. The performance of our education system is a major impediment to such an aspiration, and in fact, may have us trending toward a detrimental elitism of our own.

December 2, 2019 0 comment

ArchivED Bipartisanship Education and Public Policy Education politics Featured Podcast School Choice

archivED: Meet Florida’s newest school choice Democrat

Ron Matus November 30, 2019

Ron Matus

On MLK Day, Rep. Bush attended a special event with Gov. Ron DeSantis at Piney Grove Boys Academy, an all-male, predominantly black private school in Lauderdale Lakes where all 85 students are recipients of state-supported educational choice scholarships. From left is Piney Grove Principal Alton Bolden, Rep. Bush, Frances Bolden, Bobby Bolden, and Tellis Bolden.

Editor’s note: redefinED wraps up its series of podcast flashbacks with one of the best from 2019: an interview with state Rep. James Bush III.

OPA-LOCKA, Fla. – If you want to know why Florida state Rep. James Bush III supports educational choice, take a ride with him.

Just a few blocks from his legislative office, District 109 – which Bush called “one of the largest and poorest and most violent and neglected districts in the state” – is more Mad Max than Miami, a hodge-podge of industrial zoning and bars-over-windows residential. On a recent Sunday, Bush bumped a rented Mustang down a moonscape of graded road, lined with teetering chain-link fence and littered with cast-offs: a flat-screen TV, a jet ski, a crushed camper top.

Around the corner, a line of salvage yards emerged like fortresses, stacks of crunched cars rising over walls topped with barbed wire.

Then, right next to them, a public housing complex …

Bush braked. The contrast panned into view. Satellite dishes poking out of lavender stucco … a woman pushing a stroller … kids riding bikes …

“Now what is right five steps from this (junk yard)?” Bush said. “Look at all this stuff the kids are breathing. I don’t want it to sound like I’m painting a real negative picture of our city but … this should be our focus.”

“Those are the kinds of concerns I have when it comes down to doing what I’m supposed to be doing as a rep in Tallahassee,” he said minutes later. “Not getting caught up in who can control who, and doing the most politically correct things, and not putting the children of this state first … ”

Say hi to Florida’s newest school choice Democrat.

Bush, 63, served four terms as state representative in the 1990s. He was elected for a term in 2008. He was elected again in August.

His Democratic roots run deep. Bush retired after 30 years as a public school teacher (and teachers union member). He served as acting president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He earned his bachelor’s from Bethune-Cookman, the private-school-turned-college founded by Mary McLeod Bethune. Bush doesn’t just know the history of black churches, education and liberation. He’s lived it.

His support for choice is, on the one hand, practical. His district includes thriving faith-based schools. His district has far more pressing needs than what schools parents choose. As a lawmaker, he said he’s going to fight for more funding for the Miami-Dade school district (and everything else his district desperately needs) at the same time he supports the options his constituents desperately want.

On the other hand, Bush’s support is grounded in a belief. When parents are empowered to determine the educational destinies of their children, he said, that confidence in the power to make change spills over into the rest of their lives.

“Because the parent now would say, ‘Well I feel now better because I got my child where I think it’s best for them,’ as opposed to going through just a normal traditional way of educating,” Bush said. “It gives them a sense of belonging and a sense of ownership and a sense of having some input.”

“It propels them to another level of getting involved in other things that affect their child,” he continued. “It’s a plus in the long run.”

HD 109 is 20 minutes, but a world away, from the condo towers gleaming along Biscayne Bay. It’s split between blacks and Hispanics. It’s shaped like a gun.

Liberty City sits where the grip is. The neighborhood of Brownsville, once dubbed Miami’s most blighted, is where the barrel begins. The city of Opa-Locka is where the sight would be. By some measures, it’s one of the most dangerous cities in America.

As night fell, Bush turned towards Ali Baba Avenue, once a notorious drug hole. He stopped between a zippy mart with a Lotto sign and a tiny apartment complex with plywood-covered windows. A woman emerged from the shadows, a man on a plastic sheet – asleep? – on the ground behind her.

“My friend,” Bush said through the car window. “This Bush.”

“Hey!” the woman chirped. “How are you sweetie?”

The two clasped hands. Turns out, the woman worked on Bush’s campaign. He thanked her for the help, then asked about the man on the ground. She assured him the man was okay.

HD 109 is full of good people doing good things, Bush said over and over. But that guy on the ground?

“I got spots,” he said, “where a lot of that takes place.”

Bush riffed on his district’s challenges. Better roads, better jobs, better housing … safer, cleaner neighborhoods “so our children can have a different perspective on life.” He kept repeating: The people in HD 109 “have a lot of needs … need assistance … just need our share … ”

Same with schools. The Miami-Dade district is on the rise, arguably one of the best urban districts in America. At the same time, half its low-income students aren’t reading at grade level.

Given its depth of poverty, Bush said it’s no surprise HD 109 has among the highest concentrations of school choice scholarship students in the state. Some 2,330 use the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship, for lower-income students, to attend 28 private schools. Bush said the students in his district “benefit immensely from … not only the public schools but schools of choice.”

He said he supports them. All of them.

It remains to be seen how many other elected Democrats do.

November 30, 2019 0 comment

2020 presidential election Chris Stewart Education equity Education politics Featured School Choice

The system is winning. For now.

Chris Stewart November 29, 2019

Chris Stewart

More than 100 mainly black and Latino parents and education advocates from around the country attended an Elizabeth Warren event in Atlanta Nov. 21 to share how Warren’s recently unveiled education plan shortchanges children of color.

Editor’s note: In this commentary, originally published Nov. 26 on Education Post, Chris Stewart shares his thoughts on Elizabeth Warren’s recent encounter with charter school supporters and expresses gratitude for those individuals who had the courage “to take their grievances directly to the source of political power that seeks to deny them agency and a fair shot at finding options for their youth.”

It must have been mortifying for Democratic presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren to have a loud group of Black parents—mostly mothers and grandmothers—shout her down at a campaign stop that was meant to highlight the importance of valuing Black women. As they chanted “our child, our choice,” a mantra in support of school choice (and against Warren’s proposed curb to federal charter school funding) she stood immobilized. Ayanna Pressley had to step in with a wagging finger to sternly lecture the protestors.

In that moment the Democrats’ battle over public education was on full display.

This reminds me of Fannie Lou Hamer who in the 1960s brought plain talk to the Democratic party that was ignoring the needs of southern, poor Black folks. The establishment worked all of its angles to silence her. They sent Roy Wilkins, the educated negro from the NAACP, to tell Hamer that she was ignorant and she should leave politics to the people who know best—people like him.

That encounter caused her to cancel her NAACP membership and say, “There ain’t nothing I respect less than the NAACP.” The Southern, poor and country Hamer would not be turned back, belittled, or silenced, even against crazy odds and the most powerful people.

I can’t help but think history repeats itself until we learn from it.

Today, Warren, a wealthy, White woman candidate who once supported and used school choice to her advantage—but now takes her cues from the unions representing America’s Whitest, most female profession—can’t handle the Black folks, so she turns to a surrogate.

That’s where Pressley, a college-educated, middle-class Black woman, whose hard-working mother living on the South Side of Chicago sent her to a prestigious private school that today costs $37,000 a year, eagerly volunteered to play the role of Wilkins.

And these mothers, fathers, grandmothers and guardians, who live in some of the poorest, most incarcerated zip codes in the country, traveled long distances to Atlanta, only to be told they are ignorant, like Hamer.

Those who wish to be president on the Democratic side want the most economically insecure families to wait for better schools. A fix is coming, they promise, like they promised for years. More money, more services, more staff in the same system of miseducation will make it all better. No need for expanding school choices, or for improving and diversifying the teaching profession, or for improving and modernizing our standards and curricula to better serve the needs of each and every child.

Be patient.

But how patient would middle-class people be if their kids were falling years behind in school? What do they do when the system isn’t working for their kids? Warren’s case is instructive. When the public system didn’t work for her son she put him in a private school. Ambitions for higher office have recast her as a champion of public schools who gets her education policy wholesale from unions and Diane Ravitch, the ranking leader of the unreform movement (and another private school parent turned public school zealot).

The education establishment, its unions and the politicians it controls are working to dismantle two decades of progressive education policy that offered families options beyond bureaucratized, politicized and unionized district schools. The public’s sympathy for striking teachers, the universal belief that the biggest problem with schools is lack of money and a general disregard for the experience of marginalized parents makes it an opportune moment to roll back education reforms.

The system is winning.

For now.

In the past few days, I’ve seen too many messages online scandalously demoting the protestors to ignorant nobodies who are being used by White, wealthy people in an attempt to destroy our perfectly amazing district schools. These claims come without the slightest realization of how much they expose many Democrats for being the elitist, racist people they accuse others of being.

While they constantly profess their love for the little guy, leading Democratic candidates constantly throw that little guy under the union bus if it helps their career prospects.

Families like those who make up the Powerful Parent Network—who are purposely redlined into the school districts where the only people who think the status quo is worthy of loyalty are the adults who draw their pensions from those schools—can’t be bamboozled by the system. They can’t sacrifice their children to some sketchy promise of a “public good.”

To be Black in America is a constant struggle for full humanity. Nobody knows that more than the guardians of the faces at the bottom of the well. Nobody knows that more than the mothers of the poor, the grandmothers of the children left behind, the caregivers to those who are Black, Brown, under-resourced, dyslexic, exceptional, medically fragile and academically thirsty in classrooms built on the lowest of expectations.

This week, I’m grateful for those mothers and guardians who boarded buses or planes, made signs and planned chants, and headed out for Atlanta to take their grievances directly to the source of political power that seeks to deny them agency and a fair shot finding options for their youth. I’m grateful that they spoke plainly, in their own vernacular, and made the leaders hear them—because ignoring them before the cameras and bright lights would have shown them for the classist hypocrites they are.

Hamer wanted a fundamental change in the power structure that made sure the underclass has a direct role in the system governing their lives. We can learn from that. Rather than discounting the parents who demand better school options, fair school systems and more resources, leaders should make sure they are seated in the power rooms when agendas are formed.

Warren isn’t alone in ignoring voices in the underclass about public schooling. Her competitors should be called out too. If Democratic candidates for president—indeed, candidates from all parties—wish to be true representatives of all Americans, they will stop taking sides in the education wars, stop pitting parents against each other, and stop acting as if children are less important the moment they enter a charter or non-traditional schools.

November 29, 2019 0 comment

Education equity Education politics Education spending Featured School Choice

Thankful for more educational freedom (hopefully) on its way

Special to redefinED November 28, 2019

Special to redefinED

“The First Thanksgiving at Plymouth” by Jennie A. Brownscombe (1914) presents a typical mythologized scene showing Plymouth settlers celebrating Thanksgiving with Wampanoags, dressed in the garb of Plains Indians.

Editor’s note: redefinED is offering this Thanksgiving Day commentary from Neal McCluskey, director of the Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom, via a Creative Commons republication agreement.

If you know your United States history, you know that the Pilgrims came to North America seeking to practice their religion free from the constraints of the Church of England. If you know your U.S. history well, you know that what many call the beginning of public schooling was the Massachusetts Bay colony’s law of 1647 requiring towns to supply some form of education, lest children fall victim to “that old deluder, Satan.” And if you know your history really well, you know that as public schooling developed it was repeatedly beset by religious conflicts, first as the schools were de facto Protestant, then as they became de facto agnostic.

What am I thankful for this Thanksgiving? That we may be on the verge of tearing down barriers to people directing education funds to schools sharing their religious values, barriers that do not just hurt religious families, but by forcing all to support one system of schools also keep non-religious families from getting what they want. Where religious people are sufficiently numerous, they can sometimes create de facto religious public schools, and where they are not sufficiently numerous to exert outright control educators will often avoid things that upset them.

The barriers I’m speaking of are Blaine Amendments, named after 19^th century U.S. Senator James G. Blaine but found in 37 state constitutions. They are being challenged in the U.S. Supreme Court in Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue. The case involves a scholarship tax credit program that was struck down by Montana’s supreme court because it would have allowed scholarships to be used at religious schools. Oral arguments are scheduled for January 22, 2020.

These amendments, originally created to keep money in de facto Protestant public schools and out of Catholic institutions, are often interpreted to mean that no government money may go to religious schools even if directed by the free choice of parents. Basically—and as these Cato amicus briefs lay out in greater depth—they force religious people to pay for government schools that legally cannot teach religious beliefs as true, or make policies based on religious convictions. Indeed, the schools often teach things and institute policies that contradict people’s religious beliefs. That violates religious freedom and renders religious people unequal under the law.

The prospects for these amendments being struck down, or at least sufficiently curbed that people can get tax credits for funding religious school scholarships, are good. From Zelman v. Simmons Harris, in which the U.S. Supreme Court established that parents can take state vouchers to religious schools without violating the U.S. Constitution, to the Trinity Lutheran decision that states cannot bar institutions from participating in funding programs simply because they are religious, precedent is on freedom’s side.

For this we should all be thankful. Because more freedom is what America is supposed to be about.

November 28, 2019 0 comment

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