redefinED
  • Home
  • ABOUT US
  • Content
    • Analysis
    • Commentary and Opinion
    • News
    • Spotlights
    • Voices for Education Choice
    • factcheckED
  • Topics
    • Achievement Gap
    • Charter Schools
    • Customization
    • Education Equity
    • Education Politics
    • Education Research
    • Education Savings Accounts
    • Education Spending
    • Faith-based Education
    • Florida Schools Roundup
    • Homeschooling
    • Microschools
    • Parent Empowerment
    • Private Schools
    • Special Education
    • Testing and Accountability
    • Virtual Education
    • Vouchers
  • Multimedia
    • Video
    • Podcasts
  • Guest Bloggers
    • Ashley Berner
    • Jonathan Butcher
    • Jack Coons
    • Dan Lips
    • Chris Stewart
    • Patrick J. Wolf
  • Education Facts
    • Research and Reports
    • Gardiner Scholarship Basic Program Facts
    • Hope Scholarship Program Facts
    • Reading Scholarship Program Facts
    • FES Basic Facts
  • Search
redefinED
 
  • Home
  • ABOUT US
  • Content
    • Analysis
    • Commentary and Opinion
    • News
    • Spotlights
    • Voices for Education Choice
    • factcheckED
  • Topics
    • Achievement Gap
    • Charter Schools
    • Customization
    • Education Equity
    • Education Politics
    • Education Research
    • Education Savings Accounts
    • Education Spending
    • Faith-based Education
    • Florida Schools Roundup
    • Homeschooling
    • Microschools
    • Parent Empowerment
    • Private Schools
    • Special Education
    • Testing and Accountability
    • Virtual Education
    • Vouchers
  • Multimedia
    • Video
    • Podcasts
  • Guest Bloggers
    • Ashley Berner
    • Jonathan Butcher
    • Jack Coons
    • Dan Lips
    • Chris Stewart
    • Patrick J. Wolf
  • Education Facts
    • Research and Reports
    • Gardiner Scholarship Basic Program Facts
    • Hope Scholarship Program Facts
    • Reading Scholarship Program Facts
    • FES Basic Facts
  • Search
Tag:

NAEP

Commentary and OpinionDemographic ResearchEducation and Public PolicyFeaturedParent EmpowermentReligious EducationSchool Choice

A lesson from the Buddha

Matthew Ladner February 8, 2021
Matthew Ladner

The podcast “99% Invisible” featured a fascinating story of an impromptu shrine and the unexpected benefits it’s brought.

Dan Stevenson of Oakland, California, lived in a neighborhood beset with crime and drugs. An open space near his home was being used in 1999 as a site for illegal garbage dumping. Frustrated, Dan decided to clean up the space, purchase a statue of the Buddha, and place it on the site.

Strange things were afoot at the Circle K from that point forward. The trash dumping stopped. People began to leave offerings of various sorts at the statue. After being identified as the person who erected the statue, Dan started finding gifts left for him at his front door.

Daily prayer vigils began, and the space surrounding the statue was spruced up. Most interesting of all, recorded crime in the area dropped by 82%.

Erecting a shrine on public property might offend some sensibilities, but those in the area continue to appreciate it, and you can still visit it today.

University of Notre Dame law professors Margaret F. Brinig and Nicole Stelle Garnett may have found an echo of the Oakland Buddha in their statistical analysis between Catholic schools and neighborhood crime rates. Specifically, they examined data over time from Chicago and found that areas with closed Catholic schools experienced greater crime.

Interestingly, the analysis found no relationship between charter schools and social disorder.

A great deal more research lies ahead, but one of the aims of empowering families in education is to treat religious groups in a neutral fashion rather than actively discriminating against them.

American K-12 policy has addressed the question of religion through a series of follies. Public schools initially were used as an instrument of the Protestant majority to “assimilate” Catholic immigrants. The public schools were religious (Bible readings and all) but only in a fashion generically acceptable to Protestants. If you happened to be a Catholic, Jew, Buddhist, Muslim, Agnostic or Atheist, well too bad.

The Ku Klux Klan muscled through a law requiring public school attendance in Oregon in the 1920s. The Klan aimed to turn Oregon Catholics into “real Americans” (insert author gagging noise about here). The United States Supreme Court struck the law down. The productive course at that point (or any future point) would have been to embrace pluralism in education as is common in Europe.

As Winston Churchill once noted, Americans always can be relied upon to do the right thing but only after all other possibilities have been exhausted. Instead of “to each his own” in a fashion common in Europe, American public schools essentially banished religion from the curriculum in the decades following the Oregon episode.

The U.S. had precisely zero states in 2019 in which 50% or more of eighth-grade students could read at proficiency. I can live without these schools teaching religion, or their secular equivalents. If more kids could read proficiently, we would have hope for a future in which more adult Americans could think.

We may, however, have lost something very important in actively discriminating against religious schools, and it may stretch well beyond test scores. Government neutrality toward religious groups, neither favoring nor discriminating against them, creates a way forward in which the American people can shape the education space according to their needs and values.

We’ve exhausted all the other possibilities. It’s time to get this right.

February 8, 2021 0 comment
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestLinkedinEmail
Commentary and OpinionDemographic ResearchEducation and Public PolicyEducation ChoiceEducation SpendingFeaturedFlorida Tax Credit ScholarshipPrivate School ScholarshipsSchool Choice

Florida’s tax credit scholarship saves taxpayer dollars and helps students succeed

Special to redefinED November 6, 2020
Special to redefinED

Editor’s note: This guest editorial written by Florida Sen. Joe Gruters, who represents District 32 and serves as chairman of the Republican Party of Florida, first appeared in the Sarasota Herald Tribune.

In her Nov. 1 column, (Herald Tribune opinions editor) Barbara Peters Smith wrote that she welcomes a debate on school vouchers – as do I. But she describes a very different education landscape than the hard facts reveal. Two decades of data demonstrate that Florida’s Tax Credit Scholarship program has benefited the low-income students it is aimed at.

First, we need to put to rest the idea that private schools improve outcomes because they “weed out” students less likely to succeed. The truth is students who choose the FTC – 68% of whom are Black or Hispanic, with an average annual family income of about $25,755 – are among the lowest-performing students in the public schools they leave behind.

According to research by the Learning Systems Institute at Florida State University, new scholarship students scored roughly 5 percentile points lower in math and reading than scholarship-eligible public students in the year before they started on the scholarship. A 2013 report described the difference this way: “Scholarship participants have significantly poorer test performance in the year prior to starting the scholarship program than do non-participants … These differences are large in magnitude and are statistically significant.”

If that is “weeding out,” then private schools are doing a poor job of it – they’re taking the kids who have the biggest mountains to climb academically.

And yet, standardized test score analyses of FTC students consistently show that even though scholarship students were, on average, the lowest-performing students in their prior public schools, they’re now making the same annual learning gains as students of all income levels nationally. In other words, the average scholarship student has moved from falling further behind grade level each year to gaining a year’s worth of knowledge in a year’s worth of time.

That has led to long-term success. In its 2019 report, the Urban Institute found that FTC students were up to 43% more likely to enroll in four-year colleges than their public school peers, and up to 20% more likely to earn bachelor’s degrees. For those who used the scholarship four or more years, the outcomes were even stronger – up to 99% more likely to attend four-year colleges, and up to 45% more likely to earn bachelor’s degrees.

All these improved outcomes are coming at far less cost than the alternative. According to a 2019 analysis by Florida TaxWatch, the average amount for a Florida Tax Credit Scholarship was $6,447 in 2017-18, while the average per-pupil funding for Florida district schools was $10,856. That puts the value of the scholarship at 59% of the average, per-pupil cost in district schools.

It’s not just private school students who are benefiting from scholarships. A report this year from the National Bureau of Economic Research found as the FTC program expanded, students attending public schools most affected by the increased competition from private schools experienced higher test scores, reduced absenteeism and lower suspension rates.

Meanwhile, during this two-decades growth in tax credit scholarship enrollment – and education choice in general – Florida overall has made impressive strides in academic achievement. Florida ranks No. 3 in the nation in K-12 achievement, its highest position ever. The state also ranks No. 1, No. 1, No. 3, and No. 8 on the four core tests of the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

So much for choice dragging down Florida public schools.

The results are indisputable positives for Florida students, particularly low-income students. That’s why education choice supporters like me welcome a debate on scholarship programs: We have the facts on our side.

November 6, 2020 0 comment
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestLinkedinEmail
2020 Presidential ElectionAnalysisCommentary and OpinionCoronavirus / COVID-19Demographic ResearchEducation SpendingFeaturedTesting and Accountability

NAEP scores: American public schools spend more but deliver less for students, families, taxpayers

Matthew Ladner October 29, 2020
Matthew Ladner

The performance of American public schools was in decline before the pandemic struck; based on the latest results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress released Wednesday by the National Center for Education Statistics, things are likely to only get worse from here.

The data show the average reading score for the nation’s 12th-graders declined between 2015 and 2019. Meanwhile, there was no statistically significant change in 12th-graders’ average mathematics score for the same time period.

Bottom line: considerably more money per pupil was spent to get the same not-so-great results.

The tests upon which the data is based were given in spring 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic. The indications are now worse: Inflation-adjusted spending per pupil is up, childhood poverty is down, and scores are down rather than flat.

The earliest 12th-grade reading score in this series comes from 1992. The Class of 1992 benefited from a nationwide average of $105,560 in 2018 constant dollars spent on their K-12 education. The Class of 2017, the cohort from which we have the most recently available data, had a nationwide average of $158,431 in constant dollars spent on their education – approximately 50% more. The figure for the Class of 2019 will be even higher.

Which class, 1992 or 2017, demonstrated better reading ability? Let’s break down the results by parental education.

Regardless of the level of a parent’s education, reading scores were lower for the Class of 2019 than the Class of 1992. All of the above differences are statistically significant.

Now take a look at the chart below, provided by Michael J. Petrilli from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, showing the decline in childhood poverty rates from the 1980s and 1990s.

What the chart shows: higher spending, less poverty and lower national achievement.

 Mind you, this was the trend before the current massive decline in instruction time due to the pandemic. I’ll dare to predict that if the NCES manages to conduct the scheduled 2021 NAEP, exams scores will decline across the board and achievement gaps will grow. K-3 kids who are in their literacy acquisition windows, for instance, in districts like Los Angeles Unified, Clark County Nevada and New York have been receiving less than half the amount of instruction time delivered during a normal school year.

And finally, special education trends were a disaster in many states before the pandemic, as detailed in this chart.

It’s difficult to imagine that this already dismal chart won’t look even worse with 2021 data, coming in the aftermath of generally reduced instruction time and special education being attempted using the Zoom platform. We are not out of the pandemic yet, but the academic damage seems likely to greatly outlive the virus.

These most recent data came among favorable conditions of declining poverty and increased spending. Very soon, we’ll be forced to face what happens when you reverse these favorable trends and we end up with a large percentage of students with huge academic deficits.

Buckle up.

October 29, 2020 0 comment
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestLinkedinEmail
Commentary and OpinionCoronavirus / COVID-19Education and Public PolicyFeatured

Space age systems collapse

Matthew Ladner October 26, 2020
Matthew Ladner

O God of earth and altar,

Bow down and hear our cry,

Our earthly rulers falter,

Our people drift and die;

The walls of gold entomb us,

The swords of scorn divide,

Take not thy thunder from us,

But take away our pride.

-GK Chesterton, Space Age Systems Collapse

The Late Bronze Age collapse is one of the great mysteries of history and archeology.

We know what happened: Multiple eastern Mediterranean civilizations – the Mycenean Greeks, the Hittites and others – disappeared within a 50-year span, roughly 1200 to 1150 BC. What we don’t know are the reasons why it happened. Written records from this period are scattered and not entirely reliable; one of the unfortunate byproducts of this collapse was a large reduction in literacy rates.

Get ready for some more of this. History doesn’t repeat, but it does echo.

One of the written records we do have is the inscription pictured above, left behind by Egyptian Pharaoh Ramses III (presumably the giant bow-wielder trampling the bodies of crushed enemies) who claimed to have smashed an invasion of the mysterious “Sea Peoples.”

PRIII likely exaggerated the scale of his combat prowess, but a number of other coastal civilizations did not live long enough carve propaganda into rock. Several simply vanished only to slowly emerge from dark ages centuries later. Egypt fared relatively well, surviving the Bronze Age collapse, but was never the same afterward.

Scholars have used the phrase “systems collapse” to describe what happened in the Late Bronze Age. You can get a flavor for the phenomenon in an article by Nicole Gelinas on New York City’s current economy, which describes how interdependent the city’s industries are and how none of them currently are running strong enough to support each other.

The eldest among us today have seen multiple examples of system collapse. European imperialism and the Soviet Union both dissolved during our lifetimes for instance. Other large systems, like Pax Americana and the European Union, obviously are under considerable strain.

American public education also is facing an unprecedented challenge. Like Bronze Age Egypt, American public education will survive. K-12 funding is guaranteed in state constitutions across the country, making it as permanent an institution as one can imagine in American life. But unlike Ramses III, we should not attempt to deceive ourselves regarding the scale of the damage being done not only by the pandemic but also to the response to it.

Earlier this year, the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution published the scatterplot above regarding school district re-openings. As you can see, the decision regarding remote versus in-person learning by district has little to do with COVID-19 infection rates, and a great deal to do with the political leanings of the county in which the school district operates.

Notice especially the cluster of dark blue dots on the bottom left of the chart, representing remote learning only districts in counties with low COVID-19 countywide infection rates.

Chad Alderman, senior associate partner at Bellweather Education Partners, recently examined 10 large school districts to see how much instruction time they were delivering to students by whatever means – in-person, remote, etc. Alderman wrote:

The term ‘chronic absenteeism’ is defined as missing 10% or more of school days in a year. By that standard, the majority of K-12 students might be considered chronically absent this school year.

Alderman included the chart below that details instruction time by district. Congratulations to Miami Dade, Gwinnett County Georgia and Houston. Otherwise, read it and weep.

A few notes on the above disaster.

The Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation’s largest, had a world of academic problems before COVID-19. Cutting instruction by more than half in a district that already had a below-average rate of academic growth will be an academic wound that leaves a deep and enduring scar on California and points beyond.

The NAEP Trial Urban District Assessment already had documented a horrific academic disaster in New York City before COVID-19. The chart below shows results for Black and Hispanic students from 2013 to 2019; 10 points approximately equals an average grade level worth of learning.

Humans have survived plagues before. We eventually will recover from this one, but that recovery will come only after a great deal of suffering and long-lasting, self-inflicted damage. False tales of victory have already been written that would make Ramses III blush.

The lesson here is clear: The system takes care of itself as best it can. Taking care of the kids in your family, that’s up to you. If we funded students rather than systems, the next pandemic would go considerably better, and we would have a stronger recovery from this one as well.

October 26, 2020 0 comment
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestLinkedinEmail
Charter SchoolsCommentary and OpinionCustomizationEducation and Public PolicyEducation ChoiceEducation ResearchFeaturedSchool Choice

Do Boston charter schools have a lesson to teach America?

Matthew Ladner October 12, 2020
Matthew Ladner

In 2016, Massachusetts voters soundly rejected a ballot proposition (Question 2) which would have allowed 12 additional charter schools per year. A recent study demonstrates how costly this decision has been, especially for special education and English language learner (ELL) students.

Tufts University Professor Elizabeth Setren analyzed enrollment lottery data for Boston charters in order to compare long-term outcomes for three groups of students: general education students, special education students and ELL students (see above). The random admission process provides confidence that observed differences in outcomes show the impact of the schools.

Professor Setren noted that the Boston district schools spend significantly more on special education than charters, but charter schools see much better results.

I find that charter enrollment at least doubles the likelihood that a student designated as special education or an English learner at the time of the admissions lottery loses this classification and, subsequently, access to specialized services. Yet charter enrollment also generates large achievement gains for students classified at the time of the lottery—similar to the gains made by their general-education charter classmates.

Classified students who enroll in charters are far more likely to meet a key high-school graduation requirement, become eligible for a state merit scholarship, and take an AP exam, for example. Students classified as special education at the time of the lottery are more than twice as likely to score 1200 or higher on the SAT than their counterparts at traditional public schools. English learners who enroll in charters are twice as likely to enroll in a four-year college.

Students with special education and ELL labels at the time of the enrollment lottery are more likely to discard that status in charter schools. They are also more likely to enroll in a four-year college, score proficient on state exams and take an Advanced Placement course. Notice as well that general education students also see large improvements in those same outcomes.

This study seems all the more important given the nationwide decline in NAEP scores for students with disabilities. While there are exceptions, most states saw declines in scores for both eighth-grade math and reading between 2009 and 2019.

A similar chart for ELL students during the same period looks even worse.

So, Boston charter schools just might have a lesson about high expectations and inclusion. The charter school cap in Massachusetts, meanwhile, is limiting the opportunities for both general and special status students.

October 12, 2020 0 comment
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestLinkedinEmail
Achievement GapCommentary and OpinionCoronavirus / COVID-19Featured

Social science, climate change, shutdowns and achievement gaps

Matthew Ladner October 8, 2020
Matthew Ladner

As a young graduate student, I participated in an exercise that should be routinely practiced in social science training.

Our statistical methods professor gave us an article published in a top political science journal and provided the same data used by the authors.

Our assignment was to replicate the results. The authors described the methods they used in the article, we despite having the same data, try as we might, none of us could replicate the results.

Our professor had taught us an important lesson about social “science” without having to say it out loud: caveat emptor.

All kinds of things can go wrong in social science research, some errors more innocent than others, so an informed consumer will be looking for results across multiple studies using higher quality methods and from scholars willing to share their data for others to examine. In situations where data is not shared and methods are complex and opaque, the opportunities for mischief multiply rapidly.

Having a press that tends to breathlessly report on studies that confirm pre-existing political narratives is not helpful, as these invariably travel around the world well before there has been time for replication or scrutiny.

This all came to mind recently when I read the following about research claiming to demonstrate that warm weather negatively impacts the academic achievement of students – but only Black and Hispanic students:

In a paper published Monday in the journal Nature Human Behavior, researchers found that students performed worse on standardized tests for every additional day of 80 degrees Fahrenheit or higher, even after controlling for other factors. Those effects held across 58 countries, suggesting a fundamental link between heat exposure and reduced learning.

But when the researchers looked specifically at the United States, using more granular data to break down the effect on test scores by race, they found something surprising: The detrimental impact of heat seemed to affect only Black and Hispanic students.

So, could there be a correlation between climate and student learning?

There could be, and there should be more research performed. Do we have reasons to be skeptical? I would say we do. Florida, for instance, gets plenty of days of 80 degree plus weather, but here are the academic trends for White, Black and Hispanic students on NAEP:

That looks a lot like across-the-board improvement to these eyes. The percentage of Florida Black students scoring “Basic or Better” more than doubling between 1992 and 2019 in balmy Florida does not mean there is no role for climate, but it does seem it’s possible to overcome whatever that role may be.

I happen to live in a desert in a state (Arizona) which has a large majority of the state’s students living in Maricopa County, the greater Phoenix area, which is a desert – and a hot one to boot. Stanford University recently compiled data that allows us to compare academic growth rates by county. Maricopa County Hispanic students had an academic growth rate 16% above the national average during the period covered by the Stanford data (2009 to 2016) and Maricopa County Black students were 11% above the national average.

Delightfully, Arizona kids did not get the climate memo either.

Currently, approximately half of white students have access to in-person learning compared to only one-quarter of Black and Hispanic students. A recent analysis of district reopening decisions found politics and teacher union strength to be more influential than COVID-19 trends. The same analysis found that districts with more Catholic schools were more likely to reopen for in-person education.

Luckily for them, in my opinion.

This study, of course, deserves the same sort of scrutiny that the previous one discussed. I fear, however, that we have far more immediate concerns regarding growing achievement gaps than climate change.

October 8, 2020 0 comment
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestLinkedinEmail
Blog GuestCommentary and OpinionEducation and Public PolicyEducation ChoiceEducation Savings AccountsFeaturedLindsey BurkeParent EmpowermentParental ChoiceSchool Choice

Following the lead of education savings accounts to cover student assessment costs would put more information, choice in parents’ hands

Lindsey Burke September 29, 2020
Lindsey Burke

If you wanted to determine, tomorrow, if your child was on track in reading or math, where would you turn? What if you wanted to know how your child was doing in a particular math concept, like the Pythagorean theorem?

There are some companies that exist for such purposes, like DreamBox Learning, which provides math curriculum, lessons, and formative and summative assessment. But as a regular practice – parents getting outside audits of their child’s understanding of certain subjects and topics, and getting external assessments untethered from the district school system – it is far from the norm.

As I wrote recently in a paper for the American Enterprise Institute, parents should have the resources to obtain regular audits of their child’s learning, and such audits should become commonplace. In the era of COVID-19 learning, this will become more critical than ever.

The National Center for Education Statistics pegs total average per-pupil spending at $14,439 per child in public schools across the country. To get a child from kindergarten to high school graduation costs taxpayers more than $187,000 on average over those 13 years. This is an incredibly costly expense with a high potential for information asymmetry, which can occur when one party has better information about a product or service than another party.

In nearly every other aspect of our lives, such costly investments typically have an associated appraisal market to assure the buyer of the quality of their investment. Yet, no similar market exists for K-12 education. From home appraisals to horse appraisals, external audits of the value of a product provide important information to the end user. We should apply that concept to K-12 education by separating learning assessment from learning delivery.

In normal (non-COVID times), parents largely are recipients of data on public school performance on state assessments, received at the end of the year, providing little information on their child for any necessary education course corrections. They also have access to state- or district-level school report cards, which provide information on the school, not the student.

There also are data from measures such as the National Assessment for Educational Progress (NAEP) that provide state-to-state and some district-level assessments. But while those are useful to education researchers, they are less informative for parents.

For many parents, the most useful information on their child’s progress comes from parent-teacher conferences. Yet these tend to be held infrequently throughout the year. Grades on student homework provide additional information but can be subjective or even inflated.

Teachers may provide information on student progress through portfolios or performance assessments, and schools provide formative and interim assessments. For example, in many schools, parents receive quarterly reports and then report cards at the end of the semester. Some schools also use private assessments, including tests like the PSAT and external assessments for gifted students or English as a Second Language (ESL) exams for non-native English speakers.

And more and more schools are using tools like Schoolology that allow for real-time reporting on student grades. But these evaluations aren’t universal and may not always focus on student understanding of discreet concepts.

So, while parents are not entirely in the dark when it comes to how much their children know, they largely do not have day-to-day, actionable information about student progress. Creating an appraisal market for K-12 education could provide immediate, granular information on student performance for parents that is actionable and timely. To do so, states should provide funding for diagnostic and evaluative testing to parents separately from the per-pupil dollars spent on their child in district and charter schools.

When Arizona designed and implemented its groundbreaking education savings account (ESA) program in 2011, they were on to something. Allowing ESA funds to be used for assessments and diagnostic tests, along with the accounts’ other uses (e.g., private school tuition, online learning, special education services and therapies, etc.), was a helpful solution.  

As micro-credentials grow in popularity, freeing-up funding in the form of ESAs will enable more students to get specific certifications of learning and knowledge acquisition. ESA-style accounts also enable parents to pay directly for diagnostic tests at testing sites unrelated to the school in which their child is learning.

Making ESAs a reality for every child would enable families to easily acquire real-time, external audits of their child’s learning. And it would likely foster a growth in the supply of such diagnostic tools in the market.

To date, five states – Arizona, Florida, Mississippi, Tennessee, and North Carolina – have education savings account options in operation, enabling parents to pay for external audits of their child’s learning if they choose. Other states should follow suit. Short of that, states should at least allow parents to leverage a small portion of their child’s state per-pupil funding to pay for assessments and other diagnostic tools.

Information on their child’s progress is a powerful tool. When combined with education choice options, it can be the key to finding options that are the right fit for them, setting them up for success long term.

September 29, 2020 0 comment
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestLinkedinEmail
Achievement GapCommentary and OpinionEducation and Public PolicyEducation ChoiceFeaturedSchool Choice

Fixed for whom, Ms. Weingarten?

Matthew Ladner June 22, 2020
Matthew Ladner

In the film “The Matrix,” Laurence Fishburne’s character, Morpheus, explains to the protagonist that the world he perceived himself to be living in actually had been a neural computer simulation. Humanity had lost a war against its own artificial intelligence mechanical creations years before. Human beings were grown captive in tanks, kept under control by a system known as the Matrix, and used as batteries.

The film’s final scene and credits roll to a song by Rage Against the Machine called “Wake Up.”

Last week, American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten gave an interview on MSNBC. Host Stephanie Ruhle posed this scenario for Weingarten’s comment:

We know that there are kids living in cities in this country where those cities and those schools are not serving them. If you live in an inner city and you’ve got kids, your best chance for economic mobility for your child is through a great education, and there are schools that are not serving our kids.

Weingarten responded:

And those schools need to get fixed like we did in New York City.

New York City schools may have been “fixed,” but this raises the question, “fixed for whom?”

Weingarten’s organization virulently opposed the education reforms of former Mayor Mike Bloomberg, who left office in 2013. Since 2013, New York City has been run by American Federation of Teachers ally Mayor Bill de Blasio. Have New York City Schools been fixed since 2013?

Fortunately, New York City is one of the districts included in the Trial Urban District Assessment of the NAEP. The chart below looks at trends for black and Hispanic students since 2013. On these tests, 10 points approximately equals a grade level’s worth of average progress.

Most of both groups of fourth graders scored “Below Basic” on the 2019 fourth-grade reading exam. The schools clearly are not “fixed” for the sort of students in New York City that Stephanie Ruhle asked Weingarten about in the interview.

In fact, the schools needed improvement in 2013, and then got worse rather than better. If New York City schools have not been fixed for students, for whose benefit have they been fixed? The United States Census Bureau offers a telling clue:

Weingarten’s confusion is understandable, but New York City schools have not been fixed for all students. Rather, they look to have been rigged for her organization and others.

Wake up, New York.

June 22, 2020 0 comment
0 FacebookTwitterPinterestLinkedinEmail
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • …
  • 9
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • RSS

© 2020 redefinED. All Rights Reserved.


Back To Top