On Saturday, the NAACP's board approved its resolution calling for a moratorium on new charter schools.
Here's a worthwhile response from Charles Cole, III:
I am a member of the NAACP and contrary to many other black folks; I do have a profound respect for them and what they are meant to stand for. My letter to you is not an entryway or access point for non-Blacks to use to attack the NAACP. My blackness just won’t allow that. Think of this as a family meeting where we have some things to address amongst ourselves. I am not interested in watching Black leaders eviscerate each other at the entertainment of other folks.
This Education Next forum on race and ed reform sheds light on the bigger question of whether the movement has credibility in the communities it serves. Here are some highlights.
Conservatives think it’s a problem to include social justice issues in the reform movement, because it threatens to splinter coalitions by introducing divisive racial and social issues. But ground-level reformers who engage in communities have discovered an important truth: the next wave of school reform won’t succeed without bottom-up consent of the governed, and that isn’t possible without a transformative focus on social justice.
And the kicker:
If there is any real threat to education reform it isn’t the inclusion of advocates who believe deeply in social justice, it’s the inability of cultural fundamentalists to realize there is no future in their own supremacy.
Facing tricky political calculus, Nevada's governor is convening state lawmakers for a special session that won't address the funding issue at the heart of a state Supreme Court ruling that blocked one of the nation's most ambitious educational choice programs.
A funding fix may now have to wait until next year's regular legislative session, but some advocates aren't giving up.
Does the Nevada ruling suggest ESAs are on stronger constitutional ground than conventional vouchers? Perhaps.
Both research and legal precedent demonstrate that the ability to direct ESA funds to multiple education services and products separates ESAs from school vouchers. This is a critical distinction for states to recognize when considering parental choice options. Blaine amendments to state constitutions, such as the provisions in the Arizona and Nevada constitutions, have an ignoble history and should be repealed. Moreover, the distinctive policy design of ESAs makes the accounts well-positioned to withstand legal challenges based on Blaine amendments.
Meanwhile...
Districts are leading Florida's foray into personalized learning. They could probably use some support along the way.
Principals and teachers trying to personalize their students’ learning are charged with radically reimagining the classroom. It’s a tall order that requires educators to take risks, move outside their comfort zones, and essentially overhaul much of their jobs. What we’re seeing in the schools we’ve visited for this project makes clear that this work shouldn’t—and often can’t—be done alone.
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, here's what's at stake in the debate over Massachusetts' charter school referendum: (more…)
Nevada's Supreme Court blocked one of the country's most ambitious educational choice programs, finding its funding mechanism unconstitutional. But in many ways, the outcome is actually a win for the state's policymakers and thousands of families waiting to use education savings accounts. The ruling could even help bolster the constitutional case for private school choice in other places.
A march to double charter school enrollment in New York drew 25,000.
The NAACP faced more pushback for fighting against the nation's largest school choice program.
I have been involved in advocating for school choice for the last 20 years and I still don’t understand why anyone, especially the NAACP, would oppose families having a choice in education.
Mother Jones on the response to the civil rights organization's stance against charter schools. (more…)
The history of American public education is messy, and at times, ugly.
“We do not refuse anyone on account of race,” Orange Park Normal and Industrial School principal Amos W. Farnham wrote to William N. Sheats in the spring of 1894.
In a letter to Sheats, Florida’s top education official, Farnham described a faith-based institution in Clay County that was racially integrated 60 years before Brown v. Board of Education. Black and white students went to chapel, ate meals and learned together. Boys at the school, he wrote, “play baseball, ‘shinney,’ marbles and other games together.”
Those words would soon spell trouble for the school, its students and its teachers.
Sheats, who would later be hailed as the “father of Florida’s public school system,” was an unrepentant segregationist and racist who launched an 18-year campaign to destroy the upstart school. His staunch opposition to racial integration fueled a decades-long crackdown on dozens of schools — many of them private institutions run by religious aid societies. It also inspired laws that subjected Florida to national ridicule and dashed hopes of racial progress after Reconstruction.
Meanwhile... (more…)
The court battle over the nation's largest private school choice program isn't over.
The statewide teachers union wants to bring the lawsuit challenging Florida's tax credit scholarships* to the state Supreme Court. The legal fight reflects a national divide over civil rights and the future of public education.
The NAACP has historically supported labor groups like the teachers unions. Florida Branch President Adora Obi Nweze said that because not all children can attend a charter school or obtain a voucher, it is not a policy the group can support, according to Politico Florida.
Some self-described lifelong NAACP members strongly disagree.
“The NAACP is on the wrong side of history on this,” said the Rev. R.B. Holmes Jr., a Tallahassee pastor and former president of that city’s NAACP chapter. He describes the nation’s most storied civil rights organization as “a part of who I am.”
This year, the program serves 92,000 low-income children, and more than 1,200 scholarship parents are school district employees. Many of those employees are unionized.
Let's start this off with some good news.
The enormous gap in academic performance between high- and low-income children has begun to narrow. Children entering kindergarten today are more equally prepared than they were in the late 1990s.
We know this from information collected over the last two decades by the National Center for Education Statistics. In the fall of 1998 and again in 2010, the N.C.E.S. sent early childhood assessors to roughly 1,000 public and private kindergartens across the United States. They sat down one-on-one with 15 to 25 children in each school to measure their reading and math skills. They asked children to identify shapes and colors, to count, to identify letters and to sound out words. They also surveyed parents to learn about the children’s experiences before entering kindergarten.
Working with the social scientist Ximena Portilla, we used this data to track changes over time in “school readiness gaps” — the differences in academic skills between low-income and high-income children entering kindergarten. What we found is surprising. From 1998 to 2010, the school readiness gap narrowed by 10 percent in math and 16 percent in reading. The gaps that remain are still vast. But even this modest improvement represents a sharp reversal of the trend over the preceding decades.
'Seeking educational justice'
A Black Lives Matter leader breaks with the movement over its stance against charter schools.
Rashad Anthony Turner, a prominent voice in the debate over racial disparities in outcomes in Minnesota schools, said his desire to continue to push for equity in education put him at odds with BLM’s leadership.
“For me, it was a question of integrity,” Turner explained, saying Black Lives Matter had been “hijacked.” “Being that I am all for charter schools and ed reform, and as someone who is seeking educational justice for students and families, I could no longer be under that banner of Black Lives Matter.
School choice offers black families new ways to hold the government accountable.
Given Black Lives Matter’s premise—that the government systematically acts in a way that undermines trust in both the police and in order—you have to wonder why, if the movement’s members approach the police with such skepticism, they are now asking parents to put all their faith and confidence in schools that have failed them for decades. If the government acts in ways that are systematically racist and unfair, why would it do so in only one arena? The challenge for parents is not a lack of trust in the government’s ability or desire to keep their children alive and safe or to educate them; it’s in trusting the government to doany of those things at all.
In the context of public charter schools, parents are actually being empowered to hold the government accountable in ways not available to them in any other segment of our society.
School choice and Trump
Donald Trump is out with an education plan, announced at an academically struggling charter school, that emphasizes school choice. The GOP nominee proposes making $20 billion in federal school aid for 11 million low-income school children portable. Some who don't embrace the candidate still welcome the conversation he's starting, and hope his opponents will, too.
“While I do not support Donald Trump, his speech on school choice demonstrates that he is giving serious thought to education issues and I strongly challenge Hillary Clinton to do the same,” said Kevin P. Chavous, a former Democrat elected official and founding board member of the American Federation for Children. “As a lifelong Democrat and education reformer, I urge Hillary Clinton to show more openness and creativity when it comes to embracing school reform, choice and charter schools. So far Mrs. Clinton has largely been a representative of the interests of teachers’ unions and the status quo, which is in opposition to parents and students and will serve to be on the wrong side of history."
What might happen to federal education policy under a Trump presidency?
Should Trump actually win, we’ll just have to see what happens. We’d have to see who was named to senior posts in the administration and Department of Education. We’d have to see whether a President Trump took any interest in the issue. We’d have to see how much leeway his appointees had or whether educational policy might be handed off to VP Mike Pence (a passionate proponent of school choice). We’d have to see whether a Trump administration deferred to Hill Republicans or struck a different course.
It's also worth considering the things the nation's next leaders could be talking about.
Judging equity
A Connecticut judge issued a sweeping opinion on school funding and educational equity that confounds the usually tribal divides in education politics. Those of us who follow efforts to protect children's educational rights through the courts take note:
Declaring that "Connecticut is defaulting on its constitutional duty" to fairly educate its poorest children, a Superior Court judge on Wednesday ordered the state to come up with a new funding formula for public schools.
Judge Thomas Moukawsher's unexpectedly far-reaching decision also directed the state to devise clear standards for both the elementary and high school levels, including developing a graduation test. He also ordered a complete overhaul of Connecticut's system of evaluating teachers, principals and superintendents. And he demanded a change in the "irrational" way the state funds special education services.
...
"Nothing here was done lightly or blindly,'' Moukawsher said, reading his entire 90-page decision from the bench, a highly unusual undertaking that took close to three hours. "The court knows what its ruling means for many deeply ingrained practices, but it also has a marrow-deep understanding that if they are to succeed where they are most strained, schools have to be about teaching children and nothing else."
The state now has six months to make major changes. As ConnCAN suggests in a statement, it'll be interesting to see how this case dovetails with a separate lawsuit in which families demand access to charter schools and other choice programs.
Meanwhile...
Recent federal labor rulings could give new momentum to charter school unionization efforts.
The National Labor Relations Board issued a pair of decisions in late August, which ruled that teachers at charter schools are private employees, therefore falling under the NLRB’s jurisdiction. The cases centered on two schools with teachers vying for union representation: PA Virtual Charter School, a statewide cyber charter in Pennsylvania, and Hyde Leadership Charter School, located in Brooklyn. In both cases, the NLRB concluded that the charters were “private corporation[s] whose governing board members are privately appointed and removed,” and were neither “created directly by the state” nor “administered by individuals who are responsible to public officials or the general electorate.” The NLRB determined that a charter’s relationship to the state resembled that of a government contractor, as governments provide the funding but do not originate or control the schools.
For more good news on ed reform, look at recent victories in the states.
North Carolina's virtual charter schools get off to a rocky academic start.
When we say public education is being redefined, this is what we mean.
Here's a school in Germany that wants to "reinvent what a school is.”
Parents are worried a funding lawsuit could force Missouri charter schools to close.
Charter schools redefine local control of public education. “'Local control' is one of the more malleable political-cudgels-posing-as-principle you’ll find in state politics."
Why "the zealots on all sides are wrong" about school choice.
Tweet of the Week
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The week in school choice is our weekly compendium of school choice news and notes from around the country. Please send tips, suggestions and feedback to tpillow[at]sufs[dot]org, and sign up to get it in your inbox.
Less than a week ago, California's high court dealt a pair of blows to efforts to improve public education through litigation, declining to hear cases dealing with funding equity and the state's teacher tenure laws.
The next day, backers of the tenure fight moved into a new arena, arguing in federal court that a lack of access to charter schools and other options violates Connecticut students' right to a high-quality education.
[Students Matter founder David] Welch said Tuesday that while he was disappointed in that outcome, he was pleased with the way the tenure challenge — known as Vergara v. California — had generated debate over reforming tenure laws both in California’s legislature and in education and policy circles nationwide.
And he said he hopes the Connecticut lawsuit has the same rippling effect.
Many who agree with the arguments in these cases still question whether they'll truly guarantee students' right to a high-quality education. It may be worth looking at other avenues to codify such a right.
Meanwhile...
New polling by Democrats for Education Reform suggests efforts to raise the charter school cap in Massachusetts have the support of rank-and-file Democrats. But the state party opposes them. A similar disconnect also shows up the new, national poll from Education Next. Both findings suggest the negativity about charters isn't working. (more…)
This week, Nat Malkus of the American Enterprise Institute examined the national debate over charter schools:
These political contests hinge on two competing narratives about what charters are and who they serve. Opponents often paint charters as public-privates that skirt public accountability and select the most advantaged students for their schools. Clinton played to that perspective last year, saying, “most charter schools, they don’t take the hardest-to-teach kids, or, if they do, they don’t keep them.” Supporters often view charters as hope-filled alternatives to traditional public schools for historically disadvantaged students. As Democrats for Education Reform President Shavar Jefferies put it, “In communities of color throughout our country, public charter schools are providing pathways to college and careers that previously were not available.”
And we continued to see new reasons why monolithic national narratives about charter schools make little sense:
Attempts to nationalize the charter school debate inevitably distort the picture of a movement that varies state by state, community by community, and school by school. And they obscure real lessons about how to serve children better under the new definition of public education.
Meanwhile... (more…)
At the end of a podcast debating the fallout from a new NAACP proclamation calling for a moratorium on charter schools, Howard Fuller was asked to recommend one book to help people understand his position in favor of school choice. He selected The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935.
James D. Anderson's volume reveals the new definition of public education was also the original definition of public education in many parts of the South. Former slaves turned to private institutions — many of which they founded themselves — to educate their children. In so doing, they helped lay the groundwork for free, universal schooling throughout the region.
The book reinforces my colleague Ron Matus' vital point: There's a long history of educational institutions that were founded outside the control of school districts or government bureaucracies, but whose motives were far nobler than "privatization."
Anderson's research also holds another key lesson: All communities, but especially communities of oppressed people, ought to hold real power over their educational institutions.
Meanwhile...
A worthy response to the NAACP and the Movement for Black Lives. An open letter to the NAACP. A sympathetic explanation of their position from inside the charter school tent. (more…)
School choice debates have divided civil rights advocates in Florida, and this week, they did the same nationally, as both the venerable NAACP and the new Movement For Black Lives called for a moratorium on charter schools.
Dropout Nation attributed the proclamations to longstanding efforts by national teachers unions "to co-opt black and other minority-oriented groups," while Shavar Jeffries, the president of Democrats For Education Reform, responded with a statement:
The public charter school moratorium put forward at this year’s NAACP convention does a disservice to communities of color, particularly the parents and caregivers who seek the best school options available to prepare their children for the demands of the 21st century. This moratorium would contravene the NAACP’s historic legacy as a champion for expanding opportunity for families of color. In communities of color throughout our country, public charter schools are providing pathways to college and careers that previously were not available. Indiscriminately targeting all charter schools, even the many great public charter schools that are offering students a bridge to college, while ignoring underperforming district schools, undermines the quality and integrity of our entire education system. We should be fixing what’s broken and expanding what works, not pre-empting the choices of parents of color about the best schools appropriate for meeting the particular needs of their children
And yet, The Atlantic reports that one of the authors of the movement's proposal has a child enrolled in a charter school and believes anti-charter sentiment “comes from a lived experience.” According to the magazine, activists believe the "reformer-union dichotomy ignores the movement’s broader goal of returning control of schools to parents, students, and local communities."
The education proposals are rooted in the K-12 space, activists who helped draft them told me, because the U.S. public-school system is so broken that college is never an option for many young people of color. And while many universities are privately controlled, the group sees an opportunity to return control of K-12 public schools to the students, parents, and communities they serve.
Public schools, even in the nation’s most affluent cities, remain highly segregated, with black children disproportionately likely to attend schools with fewer resources and concentrated poverty. There are more school security officers than counselors in four of the 10 biggest school districts in the country. And whereas spending on corrections increased by 324 percent between 1979 and 2013, that on education rose just 107 percent during the same time.
This raises a question for school choice supporters: Are you listening to these concerns? Done right, the redefinition of public education could help address them.
Legal updates (more…)
