Education philanthropy: why the billions spent aren’t working - Vox

Education philanthropy: why the billions spent aren’t working - Vox

Billionaires are spending their fortunes reshaping America’s schools. It isn’t working.
Here’s the problem with education philanthropy.

Philanthropists need to take a step back from the American education system before it ruins them, they ruin it, or both.

Major philanthropies like the Gates, Walton Family, and Broad Foundations are spending hundreds of millions of dollars annually in an attempt to transform American K-12 education. Gates alone reported spending nearly $390 million in 2017; the Waltons spent more than $190 million. That’s a non-trivial chunk of the $67 billion all US foundations spent on all projects that year.

Such contributions have come under fire in recent years. The big foundations promote a particular set of K-12 education policies — including increased accountability for teachers, more school choice, and higher-stakes testing — that are profoundly controversial, and that teachers unions and skeptical education researchers have spent years questioning and resisting. The foundations’ use of billions in spending to change public policy on education raises troubling questions about democratic accountability and the role of money in politics (questions given new prominence when a major conservative education funder became US secretary of education).

Those are both valid lines of critique, but they’re not the ones I’m going to pursue here. (I am frankly more sympathetic to the Gates/Walton/Broad education reform agenda than a lot of my left-leaning friends.)

My beef, rather, is that improving the American education system, while important, is neither a neglected cause nor a tractable one. It is a system on which hundreds of billions of dollars are spent annually by diffuse governments whose policies are difficult and expensive to change, where matters of importance are intensely contested, and where interest groups tend to fight each other to a standstill.

And it’s a system where, even after investing millions if not billions in research, we still don’t have a lot of confidence as to which interventions are helpful and which are not. The views of Continue reading: Education philanthropy: why the billions spent aren’t working - Vox

How America Is Breaking Public Education

How America Is Breaking Public Education

How America Is Breaking Public Education

The ultimate dream of public education is incredibly simple. Students, ideally, would go to a classroom, receive top-notch instruction from a passionate, well-informed teacher, would work hard in their class, and would come away with a new set of skills, talents, interests, and capabilities. Over the past few decades in the United States, a number of education reforms have been enacted, designed to measure and improve student learning outcomes, holding teachers accountable for their students' performances. Despite these well-intentioned programs, including No Child Left Behind, Race To The Top, and the Every Student Succeeds Act, public education is more broken than ever. The reason, as much as we hate to admit it, is that we've disobeyed the cardinal rule of success in any industry: treating your workers like professionals.

Everyone who's been through school has had experiences with a wide variety of teachers, ranging from the colossally bad to the spectacularly good. There are a few qualities universally ascribed to the best teachers, and the lists almost always include the following traits:

• a passion for their chosen subject,
• a deep, expert-level knowledge of the subject matter they're teaching,
• a willingness to cater to a variety of learning styles and to employ a variety of educational techniques,
• and a vision for what a class of properly educated students would be able to know and demonstrate at the end of the academic year.

Yet despite knowing what a spectacular teacher looks like, the educational models we have in place actively discourage every one of  Continue reading:How America Is Breaking Public Education

Young voters will determine the outcome of the 2018 midterms

Young voters will determine the outcome of the 2018 midterms

Youth will determine the outcome of the 2018 midterms

That’s why Republicans are trying to stop them

The stakes are high in the upcoming midterm elections, but few races have commanded as much national attention as the one for Texas senator between Republican incumbent Ted Cruz and Democratic U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke of El Paso. O’Rourke’s commitment to stricter gun laws, universal healthcare, and debt-free college has mobilized young people across the state and the country.

Last week, five students from Prairie View A&M University, an HBCU (historically black colleges and universities) outside of Houston, filed a lawsuit in federal court against Waller County, where the university is located. It alleged that the county violated students’ voting rights by not providing early voting stations on campus and in the city of Prairie View in the first week of Texas’ early voting period — though stations were available in other parts of the mostly rural county. Just two days after the suit was filed, the county opened a polling place at Prairie View City Hall, and expanded voting hours at the university’s campus center.

Voter suppression and intimidation has been a time-honored tactic in America, and in the run-up to the midterms next week, complaints have been reported from Georgia to Texas. The party in power can only maintain it by curtailing the rights of Continue reading: Young voters will determine the outcome of the 2018 midterms

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No School Is “Doomed.” Continuous Improvement, Not School Closure, Must Be the Goal | janresseger

No School Is “Doomed.” Continuous Improvement, Not School Closure, Must Be the Goal | janresseger

No School Is “Doomed.” Continuous Improvement, Not School Closure, Must Be the Goal

I have read Eliza Shapiro’s reporting in POLITICO for years and I respect her as a reporter, but her story in Friday’s NY Times baffles me: New York Knew Some Schools In Its $773 Million Plan Were Doomed, They Kept Children in Them Anyway. The story raises a thousand questions and answers none of them. It fails to consider realities, which Shapiro surely knows, affect any child’s experience at school.

In Shapiro’s piece last Friday, we learn that the future of NYC’s Renewal Schools plan is in jeopardy.  And we learn that one of the interventions made in these, NYC’s lowest performing schools, as part of the Renewal Schools plan was their transformation into full-service, wraparound Community Schools. We are not told, however, what other interventions have been tried or how widely any intervention has been taken across the schools.  Over the weekend, in the blog of her organization, Class Size Matters, Leonie Haimson explains that one improvement which would have been likely to support students was not tried.  Children were still assigned to classes of over 30 students. Shapiro tells us that the Renewal Schools program has cost $773 million but not how the money was spent.

Here is how Shapiro begins last week’s report on the failure of Mayor Bill de Blasio and then-Chancellor Carmen Farina’s Renewal Schools program: “Mayor Bill de Blasio promised to ‘shake the foundations of New York City education’ in 2014 with a new program called Renewal, a signature effort to improve the city’s 94 poorest-performing schools by showering them with millions of dollars in social services and teacher training.  A year later, aides raised a confidential alarm: about a third of those schools were likely to fail. The schools were not meeting goals that the city set for higher test scores, increased graduation rates and other academic measures—and probably never would… ‘In order for these schools to reach their targets for 2017, the interventions would need to produce truly exceptional improvements,’ read the December 2015 memo, a copy of which was obtained by the New York Times. ‘Historically, it has been quite rare for schools to improve that much in two years.’  Mr. de Blasio kept most of the schools open.  Now, after sending thousands of children into Continue reading: No School Is “Doomed.” Continuous Improvement, Not School Closure, Must Be the Goal | janresseger