2/5/2015 – An End To Education Austerity?:

2/5/2015 – An End To Education Austerity?

February 5, 2015 Subscribe

THIS WEEK: Pre-K Save On Special Ed … School Spending Drops, Again … The Activity Gap … More Churches In Schools … Lani Guinier On Meritocracy Lie

TOP STORY

Is This The End Of Education Austerity?

By Jeff Bryant

“Don’t get too excited yet, but there are signs we may have finally turned a corner for the better in the war for public school financing. Recently, government officials and politicians – from the Beltway to the heartland – have declared allegiance to do what has been, up until now, the unmentionable: Spend more money on public education.”
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NEWS AND VIEWS

Study: Early Childhood Programs In NC Reduce Special Education

Raleigh News & Observer

“Children enrolled in North Carolina’s state-supported early education programs have a reduced chance of being placed in special education by third grade, Duke University researchers say. The findings suggest that state investment in quality early childhood programs can prevent costly special education later … Access to the state’s prekindergarten program for 4-year-olds (at the 2009 funding of $1,110 per child) reduced the likelihood of third-grade special education placements by 32% … The study confirmed … there are conditions in young children that could be improved by high-quality early childhood education … Even children who were not funded for an NC Pre-K slot benefited.”
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School Spending Per Student Drops For The Second Year In A Row

The Hechinger Report

“The most recent data, from the 2011-12 school year … show that average per-pupil spending fell 2.8%, to $10,667, from the previous school year. That’s the second year in a row that per-student spending fell … the steepest drops were in Arizona, Florida, Texas, Wisconsin and Washington, D.C. … One major reason is that federal funding to schools fell by more than 20% … The U.S. has a higher percentage of children in poverty than other top performing countries, and many experts say that poor children need more resources … It is troubling to see the rise in poverty and a decline in education spending happen at the same time.”
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The Activity Gap

The Atlantic

“Income-based differences in extracurricular participation are on the rise, and these differences greatly affect later outcomes. This disparity exacerbates the already-growing income achievement gap that has kept poor children behind in school and later in life. While upper- and middle-class students have become more active in school clubs and sports teams over the past four decades, their working-class peers ‘have become increasingly disengaged and disconnected,’ particularly since their participation rates started plummeting in the ’90s … While there’s always been a gap in access to extracurriculars, participation numbers for the two groups increased at about the same rate until they started to diverge precipitously – in the early 1980s for non-athletic activities and in the early 1990s for sports teams … outside experiences have just as much impact on a child’s life as the classroom ones.”
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The Movement To Put A Church In Every School Is Growing

The Nation

“The fusion of church and school … is an increasingly common phenomenon in the U.S. Indeed, a number of national and international franchise networks are dedicated to planting churches in public schools across the country, sometimes providing services that fill in the vacuum left by the government underfunding of public education. The mingling of church and school has also been encouraged by some poorly understood but profound changes originating in recent Supreme Court decisions about the relationship between religion and public education … Evangelical networks that have planted churches in public schools across the U.S. … The religious right has invested in legal-advocacy organizations that promote a certain version of Christianity in public life and seek to destroy the separation of church and state.”
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Lani Guinier On Our Ivy League Meritocracy Lie

Salon

In a Salon interview with Lani Guinier, Jeff Bryant writes, “You remember Lani Guinier. In the early days of the Bill Clinton presidential administration, she became a lightning rod for wingnut conservatives when news broke that Clinton would nominate her to be the first black woman to head the Civil Rights … In her new book, ‘The Tyranny of the Meritocracy,’ she once again takes on a component of right-wing authoritarianism … Guinier argues for a radically different view of how merit is awarded in American society starting with the college admission process. Guinier does not confine her argument to higher education, but merely uses the college admission process as a launching pad to critical examinations of K-12 education policy and the greater public arena. ‘We need a culture shift,’ she writes, “about how we reevaluate the meaning of merit by measuring its democratic values rather than its testocratic machinery.’”
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