Diane Ravitch on Gavin Newsom's Three Education Challenges | Capital & Main

Diane Ravitch on Gavin Newsom's Three Education Challenges | Capital & Main

Diane Ravitch on Gavin Newsom’s Three Education Challenges
California is one of the richest states in the nation but spends about the same on its students as states like Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana and South Carolina, where the cost of living is far less than in California.

The incoming administration of Governor-elect Gavin Newsom will not be cleaning up a mess. Governor Jerry Brown has been a good steward of the state during his time in office.

But Newsom faces three distinct challenges in the field of education. Although Governor Brown significantly increased spending for education, California has large unmet needs and much catching-up to do to maintain its edge as an incubator of talent and innovation, and of equal opportunity for all.

First, the state must substantially increase funding for K-12 education, which would enable districts to pay teachers better salaries, reduce class sizes and assure that all children, regardless of where they live, have access to a well-equipped, well-staffed school. The latest federal data (2016) show that California spends somewhat less than the national average per pupil. California’s per-pupil spending is $11,420, compared to a national average of $11,841. California is one of the richest states in the nation but spends far less than states such as New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maryland, Wyoming and North Dakota. California spends about the same on its students as states like Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana and South Carolina, where the cost of living is far less than in California.

Second, California must recommit to the long established tradition that tuition for higher education must be free to all residents of the state. This principle was reiterated in the state’s Master Plan in 1960, but ended by Governor Ronald Reagan. The low-cost availability of higher education and the large pool of educated talent it created were  CONTINUE READING: Diane Ravitch on Gavin Newsom's Three Education Challenges | Capital & Main

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Charter school leaders should talk more about racism

Charter school leaders should talk more about racism

Charter school leaders should talk more about racism
Praising charters for “doing more with less” ignores how racist systems have devalued black communities, starving kids in both traditional and charter schools of resources

"Charter schools can do more with less” is a common refrain of school choice advocates, who criticize traditional public schools for wasting money. The promise of greater efficiency has been an attractive argument for charters as states struggle to keep up with ever rising educational expenses. Many charter supporters go so far as to say poverty is a poor excuse for underachievement.

In fact, income and wealth consistently rank as the strongest predictors of academic success. But racism is the reason students in black neighborhoods don’t get the finances they need.

Racism creates systems that undervalue black schools, homes and lives, leading to fewer resources for the people who need every cent. If charter backers and other school reformers are really going to uplift black and brown students, they must recognize this and fight funding inequities created by that devaluation of black worth.

Our new research shows that homes in black neighborhoods are devalued, draining critical sources of revenue for school districts – property taxes. Jonathan Rothwell of Gallup, David Harshbarger of Brookings and I found in the average U.S. metropolitan area, homes in neighborhoods where black residents are 50 percent of the population are valued at roughly half the price as homes in neighborhoods with no black residents.

Some might assume that’s because black residents are concentrated in older or less desirable neighborhoods. Segregation and redlining, which deemed black neighborhoods too risky for banks to award loans they gave their white counterparts, certainly kept investments at bay, accelerating depreciation and social decline. But differences in home and neighborhood quality do not fully explain the lower prices of homes in black neighborhoods. Homes of similar quality in majority black neighborhoods with similar amenities are worth 23 percent less than neighborhoods where the black population is 1 percent or fewer. The difference equates to $48,000 per home on average, amounting to $156 billion in cumulative losses in majority black neighborhoods.

There is not a superintendent or school leader in either charter or CONTINUE READING: Charter school leaders should talk more about racism

Billionaire philanthropists like Gates and Buffett keep accumulating more wealth - Vox

Billionaire philanthropists like Gates and Buffett keep accumulating more wealth - Vox

It’s surprisingly hard to give away billions of dollars
Even billionaires who want to give all their money away keep accumulating more. Here’s why.

David Callahan caused a stir with a piece last week at Inside Philanthropy, which pointed out that the wealthiest people in the world are sitting on $4 trillion, and accumulating money much faster than they give it away.

“[Bill] Gates was worth $54 billion in 2010, the year the Giving Pledge debuted; he’s worth $97 billion today. [Warren] Buffett’s wealth has also nearly doubled, to $90 billion, despite annual transfers of Berkshire Hathaway stock to the Gates Foundation and the four foundations controlled by his three children,” Callahan wrote.

With some billionaires, there’s a simple explanation for why they don’t give away more money: They don’t really feel like it.

But that doesn’t seem like a fully satisfying explanation when it comes to Gates, Buffett, or other billionaires who’ve pledged to give away their wealth before they die. I want to speak up in their partial defense here: It’s actually shockingly challenging to effectively give away vast sums of money, especially at the rates billionaires would need to give to keep up with their recent gains on the stock market.

Philanthropy is harder than you think

It can strain credulity that it’s really that challenging to give away money. But when you look at the track record of many poorly planned, failed philanthropy projects, it gets clearer.

This year, the data came out from a $575 million multi-year project to improve schools, spearheaded by more than $200 million from the Gates Foundation — and the expensive intervention didn’t improve student outcomes at all. Mark Zuckerberg spent $100 million to improve schools and saw some modest gains — but they were small and accompanied by outrage and local backlash. (My colleague Dylan Matthews has pleaded for philanthropists to stay out of education, where their track records are particularly disappointing.)

The charity evaluator GiveWell, which researches promising interventions, found that these failures aren’t the exception, but the norm. “We think that charities can easily fail to have impact, even when they’re doing exactly what they say they are,” they write. “[M]any of the problems charities aim to address are extremely difficult problems that foundations, governments and experts have struggled with for decades. Many well-funded, well-executed, logical programs haven’t had the desired results.”

GiveWell recounts what went wrong with one intervention that didn’t live up to expectations: PlayPumps, a merry-go-round that was also supposed to pump water and which replaced CONTINUE READING: Billionaire philanthropists like Gates and Buffett keep accumulating more wealth - Vox

Controversial Virtual School Operator K12 Pivots to Job Training | Education News | US News

Controversial Virtual School Operator K12 Pivots to Job Training | Education News | US News

Controversial Virtual School Operator Pivots to Job Training
The for-profit educator has been under fire for years over charges that it has provided degrees and certificates that have been of little worth to students.

K12 INC., THE controversial for-profit virtual charter school operator, plans to pivot its entire platform to career education and has laid the groundwork to offer the new programs in 40 states over the next three years.

"This is a pivot, absolutely," says Kevin Chavous, president of academics, policy and schools at K12. "We were the first ones to do the online education in a big way. Now, this is a pivot where we have a laser focus on academics and student growth, but the corresponding focus on [career] gives kids more opportunity than they otherwise wouldn't have."

In an interview with U.S. News, Chavous and Executive Vice President Shaun McAlmont, who was hired in August to direct the shift toward career readiness, outlined K12's new direction.

The company is focusing on a handful of core industries, including information technology, business, manufacturing, health sciences or health care, and agriculture. McAlmont says they plan to peg different industry course offerings to specific parts of the country. Schools in Ohio and Michigan will offer specialized courses IT and health care, for example, while its schools in California will offer specialized courses in all the industries.

K12 already has 13 programs in place, which the company brands as "destination career academies." They serve approximately 7,000 students. The goal is to roll out the new offerings over the course of the next three years across 40 states and ultimately have all of K12's 120,000 students taking a least some career education classes.

Students enrolled in specific industry tracks will take two to three courses in that track each year with the goal to have 10 to 12 courses completed by graduation, along with a certificate that allows for immediate employment. The new programs will also involve a job-shadowing component, which will be up and running in seven states by the end of this academic year, they say.

"We really want to be the comprehensive national provider of career education, and we feel that nobody is doing it at that scale right now," McAlmont says. "We are looking for industry partners at the national level and local level to build that."

K12's shift raises obvious questions as the for-profit model in the higher education world has CONTINUE READING: Controversial Virtual School Operator K12 Pivots to Job Training | Education News | US News

Screen time kids study: Groundbreaking study examines effects of screen time on kids - 60 Minutes - CBS News

Screen time kids study: Groundbreaking study examines effects of screen time on kids - 60 Minutes - CBS News

Groundbreaking study examines effects of screen time on kids

60 Minutes goes inside a landmark government study of young minds to see if phones, tablets and other screens are impacting adolescent brain development

If you have kids and wonder if all that time they spend on their smartphones endlessly scrolling, snapping and texting is affecting their brains, you might want to put down your own phone and pay attention. The federal government, through the National Institutes of Health, has launched the most ambitious study of adolescent brain development ever attempted. In part, scientists are trying to understand what no one currently does: how all that screen time impacts the physical structure of your kids' brains, as well as their emotional development and mental health.

At 21 sites across the country scientists have begun interviewing nine and ten-year-olds and scanning their brains. They'll follow more than 11,000 kids for a decade, and spend $300 million doing it. Dr. Gaya Dowling of the National Institutes of Health gave us a glimpse of what they've learned so far.

Dr. Gaya Dowling: The focus when we first started talking about doing this study was tobacco, marijuana, all drugs the screen time component really came into play because we were wondering what is the impact? I mean, clearly kids spend so much time on screens.

The first wave of data from brain scans of 4,500 participants is in and it has Dr. Dowling of the NIH and other scientists intrigued.

The MRI's found significant differences in the brains of some kids who use smartphones, tablets, and video games more than seven hours a day.

"We're sort of in the midst of a natural kind of uncontrolled experiment on the next generation of children."

Dr. Gaya Dowling: What we can say is that this is what the brains look like of kids who spend a lot of time on screens. And it's not just one pattern.

Anderson Cooper: That's fascinating.

Dr. Gaya Dowling: It's very fascinating.

The colors show differences in the nine and ten-year-olds' brains. The red color represents premature thinning of the cortex. That's the wrinkly outermost layer of the brain that CONTINUE READING: Screen time kids study: Groundbreaking study examines effects of screen time on kids - 60 Minutes - CBS News

Fight for Federal Right to Education Takes a New turn Education Law Prof Blog

Education Law Prof Blog

Fight for Federal Right to Education Takes a New turn

Derek W. Black, University of South Carolina

A new fight to secure a federal constitutional right to education is spreading across the country. This fight has been a long time coming and is now suddenly at full steam.

In 1973, plaintiffs in San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez argued that school funding inequities violated the right to education. The Supreme Court rejected education as a fundamental right under the federal Constitution, leaving funding inequalities in Texas and elsewhere completely untouched. For more than 40 years, no one even dared to directly challenge Rodriguez’s conclusion in court. Now, in just two years, four different legal teams and plaintiff groups have done just that. But this time, they are shifting their arguments away from just claims about money. They are focusing on educational quality, literacy and learning outcomes.

The boldest claim was filed on Nov. 29 in Rhode Island, arguing for an education that prepares students for citizenship – an argument that draws directly on my own legal research and expertise as a scholar of education law.

When plaintiffs filed the first two cases in Detroit and Connecticut in 2016, the Supreme Court was set to shift significantly to the left. Hillary Clinton was a strong favorite to win the presidency and fill the vacancy created by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia. What looked like perfect timing for plaintiffs in mid-2016 turned awful a few months later when Clinton lost. The questions now are why plaintiffs, including new ones, continue to press forward and whether they have any chance of winning. The answers lie in a strange and tangled confluence of events that include school funding shifts, new legal theories and evolving cultural challenges.

Steep declines in school funding

Schools’ real-world problems are first and foremost driving the litigation. Detroit’s schools, for instance, are among the most segregated, lowest performing and most financially strapped in the country. The net result, plaintiffs allege, are schools where “illiteracy is the norm.” Detroit’s problems, while severe, are not entirely unique. Public schools nationwide are suffering from increasing segregation and a decade of steep funding cuts.

State tax revenues have been up since 2012, but most states continue to fund education at a lower level than they did before the 2008 recession.

While many state supreme courts allow students to challenge educational inequality and inadequacy, about 20 do CONTINUE READING: Education Law Prof Blog

 (Also see FY 2015 chart or FY 2014 chart.) 

NOTE: Adult education, community services and other nonelementary-secondary program expenditures are excluded. Enrollments for state educational facilities and charter schools whose charters are held by nongovernmental entities are also not reflected in the totals. "Other" spending includes non-personnel related expenses, such as capital outlays and transfer payments to municipal entities.
SOURCE: U.S. Census Bureau 2016 Annual Survey of School System Finances

Education Spending Per Student by State - http://www.governing.com/gov-data/education-data/state-education-spending-per-pupil-data.html on @governing

New from the National Education Policy Center: “How School Privatization Opens the Door for Discrimination” | janresseger

New from the National Education Policy Center: “How School Privatization Opens the Door for Discrimination” | janresseger

New from the National Education Policy Center: “How School Privatization Opens the Door for Discrimination”

Last week this blog explored some of the ways the expansion of school choice ends up creating injustice and inequality. The National Education Policy Center just published a new report, How School Privatization Opens the Door for Discrimination, in which Julie Mead of the University of Wisconsin and Suzanne Eckes of Indiana University further investigate one particular aspect of the same topic: how privately operated charter schools and private schools receiving publicly funded tuition vouchers fail, often quite legally, to protect the civil rights rights of their students and staff.

Mead and Eckes explain: “Our review of relevant laws indicates that voucher and charter school programs open the door to discrimination because of three phenomena.  First, federal law defines discrimination differently in public and private spaces. Second, state legislatures have largely ignored the issue of non-discrimination while constructing voucher laws and have created charter laws that fail to comprehensively address non-discrimination. And third, because private and charter schools have been given authority to determine what programs to offer, they have the ability to attract some populations while excluding others.”

The new report briefly summarizes the history of attempts to ensure that public schools protect the rights of all students: “Whether and to what degree schools should be available to all children without regard to race, national origin, religion, immigration status, first language, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, and disability has a long litigious history.  While it is routine now to observe that public schools must enroll all students, that understanding evolved over time beginning with litigation in the 1950s.  As illustrated by the decisions in Brown v. the Board of Education, Lau v. Nichols, Plyler v. Doe, and Mills v. the Board of Education of the District of Columbia, it took many brave plaintiffs and unflinching jurists to reach the conclusion that the term ‘public’ excludes no one and that equal educational opportunity defines our collective obligation to our nation’s children.  Congress reinforced those rulings by enacting a series of federal laws to emphasize that discrimination has no place in public education… Despite such hard fought judicial and legislative battles, public schools still struggle to realize that aspirational ideal.  Persistent achievement gaps, funding disparities, over-representation of students of color in special education, under-representation of students or color in advanced placement and honors programs, and the continued overuse of suspension and expulsion all suggest that public schools and the state and local officials who operate them have much work to do before equal educational CONTINUE READING: New from the National Education Policy Center: “How School Privatization Opens the Door for Discrimination” | janresseger

Florida: Governor-Elect Appoints a Public School Hater as Commissioner of Education | Diane Ravitch's blog

Florida: Governor-Elect Appoints a Public School Hater as Commissioner of Education | Diane Ravitch's blog

Florida: Governor-Elect Appoints a Public School Hater as Commissioner of Education

Republican Ron DeSantis was elected Governor of Florida in a close election, besting Andrew Gillum. DeSantis is a Tea Party extremist who has pledged to continue Rick Scott’s ruinous policies towards the environment and education. His choice for Commissioner of Education is Richard Corcoran, Out-of-office speaker of the House, whose wife runs a charter school. Corcoran supports charters, vouchers, and every possible alternative to public schools. He sponsored legislation to award bonuses to teachers based on their high school SAT/ACT scores. He has no education experience.

The League of Women Voters of Florida published a strong statement opposing his nomination.

The League sent this letter to The State Board of Education:

Dear Chairwoman and State Board Members,

With the impending departure of Commissioner of Education Pam Stewart, the League of Women Voters of Florida reminds you that as members of the State Board of Education you not only have the opportunity, but a constitutional responsibility, to conduct a national search to find the person who is best suited to oversee Florida’s system of public education.

Article IX, Section 2 of the Constitution of Florida was overwhelmingly adopted by the people of Florida in 1998. That provision created the Board of Education, consisting of seven members serving staggered terms to oversee Florida’s system of free public schools.

By enacting that provision, the people of Florida made it clear in the Constitution that it is the Board of Education — not the Governor — that has the responsibility to appoint a Commissioner of Education. Further, the Board of Education members’ terms of office were purposely CONTINUE REAIDNG: Florida: Governor-Elect Appoints a Public School Hater as Commissioner of Education | Diane Ravitch's blog