With Democratic Wins, Charter Schools Face a Backlash in N.Y. and Other States - The New York Times

With Democratic Wins, Charter Schools Face a Backlash in N.Y. and Other States - The New York Times

With Democratic Wins, Charter Schools Face a Backlash in N.Y. and Other States

Over the last decade, the charter school movement gained a significant foothold in New York, demonstrating along the way that it could build fruitful alliances with Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and other prominent Democrats. The movement hoped to set a national example — if charter schools could make it in a deep blue state like New York, they could make it anywhere.

But the election on Tuesday strongly suggested that the golden era of charter schools is over in New York. The insurgent Democrats who were at the forefront of the party’s successful effort to take over the State Senate have repeatedly expressed hostility to the movement.

John Liu, a newly elected Democratic state senator from Queens, has said New York City should “get rid of” large charter school networks. Robert Jackson, a Democrat who will represent a Manhattan district in the State Senate, promised during his campaign to support charter schools only if they have unionized teachers.

And another incoming Democratic state senator, Julia Salazar of Brooklyn, recently broadcast a simple message about charter schools: “I’m not interested in privatizing our public schools.”

No one is saying that existing charter schools will have to close. And in fact, New York City, which is the nation’s largest school system and home to the vast majority of the state’s charter schools, has many that are excelling.

Over 100,000 students in hundreds of the city’s charter schools are doing well on state tests, and tens of thousands of children are on waiting lists for spots. New York State has been mostly spared the scandals that have plagued states with weaker regulations.

But it seems highly likely that a New York Legislature entirely under Democratic control will restrict the number of new charter schools that can open, and tighten regulations on existing ones.

The defeat is magnified because Mr. Cuomo, a shrewd observer of national political trends with an eye toward a potential White House bid, recently softened his support for charter schools. Mayor Bill de Blasio is a longtime charter opponent with his own national aspirations.

And New York is not the only state where the charter school movement is facing fierce headwinds because of the election.

Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, an enemy of public sector unions, was unseated by a Democrat, Tony Evers, a former teacher who ran on a promise to boost funding to traditional public schools.

In neighboring Illinois, J.B. Pritzker, a Democrat who promised to curb charter school growth, beat the incumbent Republican, Gov. Bruce Rauner, a supporter of charter schools. And in Michigan, a Democrat, Gretchen Whitmer, promised to “put an end to the DeVos agenda.”

Ms. Whitmer won her race for governor decisively against the state’s Republican attorney general, Bill Schuette, who is an ally of Betsy DeVos, Continue reading: With Democratic Wins, Charter Schools Face a Backlash in N.Y. and Other States - The New York Times

Is Screen Time at School Bad for Kids? - The Atlantic

Is Screen Time at School Bad for Kids? - The Atlantic
The Backlash Against Screen Time at School
Combining education and technology is great—until it's not.

Four years ago, Paul France left a teaching job in the Chicago suburbs to move to San Francisco and be part of the so-called personalized-learning revolution in education. He joined a high-profile start-up called AltSchool whose investors include Mark Zuckerberg and the venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. France was passionate about both education and technology and welcomed the opportunity to combine the two. But they would not prove to be as complementary as he thought.

AltSchool’s founder, a former Google executive named Max Ventilla, envisioned it as a place where students, aided by technology and tech-savvy teachers, would learn at their own pace, based on their interests and aptitudes. Teachers, using proprietary software to track student performance and help guide their learning, would be freed from time-consuming tasks like scoring exams and could devote more attention to students. The company’s mission was to help move the American education system from an industrial age model “where schools were set up to resemble factories and students had a conveyor belt-like experience” to a more “learner-centric” approach that gives students a sense of agency and 21st-century problem-solving skills, Devin Vodicka, who is responsible for guiding the company’s personalized learning platform as it expands to more schools, told me.

The company opened small lab schools in San Francisco, Palo Alto, and New York. Students were provided with their own iPads or Chromebooks along with individualized “playlists” of learning activities to choose from. Cameras in classrooms videotaped students’ and teachers’ interactions, enabling teachers and engineers to analyze the footage and review what worked, a process AltSchool technologists hoped would eventually be aided by computers using machine-learning algorithms.

AltSchool was flooded with applicants willing and able to pay tuition of $30,000 or more for their children to attend, and became one of the hottest start-ups in educational technology; to date, it has raised more than $170 million in investment. It was part of a broad investor rush to ed tech. Last year, Continue reading: Is Screen Time at School Bad for Kids? - The Atlantic

School Choice Fails to Create Equity and Justice for Our Society’s Poorest Children | janresseger

School Choice Fails to Create Equity and Justice for Our Society’s Poorest Children | janresseger

School Choice Fails to Create Equity and Justice for Our Society’s Poorest Children

Early this week, in her Washington Post column, Valerie Strauss published an important reflection on Why It Matters Who Governs America’s Public Schools by Diane Ravitch and Carol Burris of the Network for Public Education. Burris and Ravitch are responding to a major report from the Learning Policy Institute’s Peter Cookson, Linda Darling-Hammond, Robert Rothman, and Patrick Shields, a report which endorses the idea of “portfolio school reform.”

The Learning Policy Institute’s report, The Tapestry of American Public Education, promotes a lovely metaphor, a tapestry of school options woven together—open enrollment, magnet schools, charter schools, and specialty schools based on distinct educational models. The Learning Policy Institute declares: “The goal and challenge of school choice is to create a system in which all children choose and are chosen by a good school that serves them well and is easily accessible. The central lesson from decades of experience and research is that choice alone does not accomplish this goal.  Simply creating new options does not lead automatically to greater access, quality or equity.”  Here is how the Learning Policy Institute proposes that such fair and equal choice might be accomplished: “Focus on educational opportunities for children, not governance structures. Too often, questions related to the number of charters a district should have address school governance preferences, rather than the needs of children… Work to ensure equity and access for all. Expanding choice can increase opportunities, or it can complicate or restrict access to convenient and appropriate opportunities, most often for the neediest students… Create transparency at every stage about outcomes, opportunities, and resources to inform decision making for families, communities, and policymakers… Build a system of schools that meets all students’ needs.”

The Learning Policy Institute’s recommendations sound familiar. They are the same arguments made by the Center on Reinventing Public Education as it describes its theory of “portfolio school reform.” Portfolio school reform imagines an amicable, collaborative mix of many different schools: “A great school for every child in every neighborhood. The portfolio Continue reading:School Choice Fails to Create Equity and Justice for Our Society’s Poorest Children | janresseger

Linda Darling-Hammond vs. Diane Ravitch and Carol Burris - The Washington Post

Linda Darling-Hammond vs. Diane Ravitch and Carol Burris - The Washington Post
Linda Darling-Hammond vs. Diane Ravitch and Carol Burris

I recently published a post by Diane Ravitch and Carol Burris titled “Why It Matters Who Governs America’s Public Schools,” which took issue with some parts of a new report — “The Tapestry of American Public Education: How Can We Create a System of Schools Worth Choosing for All?” — released by a California think tank founded by education expert Linda Darling-Hammond. This post is a response from Darling-Hammond and colleagues to that piece.

[Why it matters who governs America’s public schools]

Ravitch, Darling-Hammond and Burris are three of the most prominent voices in the national education debate about how to create equitable schools in this country and more often than not agree with one another. This piece and the earlier one reveal a split in the way they view school choice.

Ravitch, a former U.S. assistant secretary of education, is an education historian and advocate who for years was seen as the titular leader of the grass-roots movement against corporate school reform. Burris is a former award-winning high school principal in New York. Both women are leaders of the nonprofit advocacy group the Network for Public Education.

Ravitch and Burris oppose the expansion of alternatives to publicly funded and publicly operated schools and districts, including charter schools, which are privately operated but funded with taxpayer dollars. Their piece criticized the new report for, among other things, failing to take a strong stand on the expansion of charter schools.

Darling-Hammond, an expert on teacher preparation and equity, founded the Center for Opportunity Policy in Education at Stanford University, where she is professor emeritus, and is founder and president of the California-based Learning Policy Institute. The nonprofit think tank was created to conduct independent, high-quality research to improve education policy and practice, and it was the institute that released the report.

As the post below explains, the report looks at the issue of school choice in a different way than many of the debates on the subject, and in contrast to Ravitch and Burris. You can read their piece here.

School choice is a means, not an end — and a useful one only if it results in greater quality and access for all students

By Linda Darling-Hammond, Peter Cookson, Bob Rothman and Patrick Shields

Last week, the Learning Policy Institute (LPI) released a report, “The Tapestry of American Public Education: How Can We Create a System of Schools Worth Choosing for All?” that takes up the issues of choice in public education from a different perspective from the one that has been driving debates since the election of President Trump.

Trump and Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos have made “choice” their central education policy — defining it primarily as vouchers and tax credits for private schools and funding for charter schools, which include for-profit as well as nonprofit entities. DeVos has actually been a shareholder in K12 Inc., one of the largest for- Continue reading: Linda Darling-Hammond vs. Diane Ravitch and Carol Burris - The Washington Post