Big-name billionaire charter school backers donate to California and other key governor races

Big-name charter school backers donate to California and other key governor races

Big-name charter school backers donate to California and other key governor races

Prominent charter school supporters are dishing out campaign money, as key gubernatorial races in several states have now begun in earnest.

June primary contests set up a number of state battles for governor in the midterm elections this November, with both Democratic and Republican candidates that could change how public resources flow into charter and private schools in the coming years.

Last week, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings and philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs donated $29,200 each — the maximum amount — to Democrat Gavin Newsom’s campaign for California governor. It’s a sign that the potent charter forces in Golden State politics are pivoting toward the state’s lieutenant governor, who is widely considered a shoo-in to beat Republican businessman John Cox.

Many of the billionaire philanthropists who want to reshape America’s struggling school systems believe that charters — which are privately run but publicly funded schools — help breed better and different ways to educate students who struggle in traditional public schools, especially poor and minority children. Some also support allowing tax dollars to fund vouchers for families that pick private schools, which don’t have public oversight. Studies are mixed when considering how those programs result in academic gains.

Critics, notably teachers unions, reject both charters and vouchers as drains on the cash-starved schools that educate the vast majority of students. Public school advocates also loathe those programs for eroding the neighborhood schooling model that defines communities.

Newsom has said that successful charters would thrive under his leadership, but he would seek to temporarily pause charter school openings to consider transparency issues. The moratorium would be a halting sea-change — if even for a limited time — for California’s robust charter school movement, which has for years enjoyed expansions and developments.

Newsom previously said he was disappointed that Hastings, a prolific charter schools supporter in California, gave millions of dollars to one of his primary challengers, former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. Newsom on the campaign trail has mostly Continue Reading: Big-name charter school backers donate to California and other key governor races

In America, Schools Aren’t Required to Teach Kids to Read and Write - The Atlantic

Detroit's Right to Literacy Case and U.S. School Reform - The Atlantic

In America, Schools Aren’t Required to Teach Kids to Read and Write
A judge in Detroit has concluded that the Constitution doesn't require Michigan to ensure schools promote students’ literacy.

What to do when a school is infested with vermin, when textbooks are outdated, when students can’t even read? Perhaps the answer is sue the government.

That’s what seven students in Detroit have done. Their class-action suit filed against the state of Michigan asserts that education is a basic right, and that they have been denied it.

Usually, such education-equity cases wend their way through state courts, as all 50 state constitutions mandate public-education systems, while the country’s guiding document doesn’t even include the word education. But this case, Gary B. v. Snyder, was filed in federal court, and thus seeks to invoke the Constitution. And as of this week, it’s headed to the federal appeals court in Cincinnati.

The lawyers filing the suit—from the pro bono Los Angeles firm Public Counsel—contend that the students (who attend five of Detroit’s lowest-performing schools) are receiving an education so inferior and underfunded that it’s as if they’re not attending school at all. The 100-page-plus complaint alleges that the state of Michigan (which has overseen Detroit’s public schools for nearly two decades) is depriving these children—97 percent of whom are students of color—of their constitutional rights to liberty and nondiscrimination by denying them access to basic literacy. Almost all the students at these schools perform well below grade level in reading and writing, and, the suit argues, those skills are necessary to function properly in society. It’s the first case to argue that the U.S. Constitution guarantees the right to become literate (and thus to be educated) because other rights in the Constitution necessarily require the ability to read.

The case is a long shot. Late last week, the district-court judge in Detroit, Stephen J. Murphy, dismissed it. (The plaintiffs are appealing that dismissal.) Murphy essentially stated that he needed guidance from the Supreme Court if he were to weigh in on whether the students’ abysmal proficiency levels and learning conditions amount to a violation of the Constitution. He also concluded that the suit makes too many hard-to-prove causal claims. Even though Michigan subjects the predominantly black Detroit students to conditions to which it doesn’t subject, say, the predominantly white students of nearby Grosse Pointe, Murphy wrote, there isn’t enough evidence to suggest that the state is treating the former group differently because of their race and thus violating the equal-protection clause. Another obstacle: The federal judiciary has in grown particularly restrained on educational-rights issues in recent decades, in part because of the backlash from parents and othersopposed to integration efforts that followed the wave of school-desegregation Continue Reading: Detroit's Right to Literacy Case and U.S. School Reform - The Atlantic

Is It Time for Parents to Unionize?

Is It Time for Parents to Unionize?

Is It Time for Parents to Unionize?

Think of Alissa Quart’s new book, Squeezed: Why Our Families Can’t Afford America, as “What to Expect When You’re Expecting Under Late Capitalism.” Of the more than 50,000 books listed on Amazon under “Parenting,” few engage as deeply with the economic pressures today’s parents must navigate: precarious work, a shortage of high-quality, affordable daycare and rising costs of living combined with stagnant wages. 

Quart, the executive editor of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, also profiles efforts to improve the lives of parents and care workers––and offers suggestions about what’s still to be done. She spoke with In These Times about the challenges of organizing parents, why we’re so attached to the fantasy of middle-class life and why she considers her book “radical self-help.”

ITT: I’m interested in the theme of self-blame that runs through Squeezed. You write that after your daughter was born, and it became clear that you and your husband’s freelance earnings weren’t going to be enough to raise her, you began to blame yourself. Why did you have that reaction?

AQ: I think we have a tendency to blame ourselves, or we blame others. It’s binary. You can see that tendency in the way some disenfranchised groups now blame immigrants, say, and then on the other side, there’s a lot of rhetoric of self-punishment in American culture that you’re responsible for your own success and if you don’t make it then there’s something wrong with you.

The self-blame and guilt discourse comes from conservatives but it also emanates off of a certain kind of bootstrap self-help, like Lean In.  “Why aren’t you asking for a Continue reading: Is It Time for Parents to Unionize?