Dem. Candidates Call for Equitable Public School Investment. Can the New Narrative Be Sustained?
Is our society beginning to realize that we must invest in helping instead of punishing the school districts which serve our poorest children?
Clearly the conversation about public education among the Democratic candidates for President has turned away from what has been a quarter century of bipartisan test-and-punish, pro-privatization education policy. No Child Left Behind, which was signed into law 18 years ago, formalized the strategy. But in a remarkable commentary on Wednesday in USA Today, Democratic candidate, Bernie Sanders declared a very different agenda: “Under NCLB, standardized tests were utilized to hold public schools and teachers ‘accountable’ for student outcomes. As a result, some schools that underperformed were closed and their teachers and unions blamed. The long-term effects of this approach have been disastrous. NCLB perpetuated the myth of public schools and teachers as failing, which opened the door for the spread of school voucher programs and charter schools that we have today. Some of these charter schools are operated by for-profits, many of them are nonunion and are not publicly accountable… The most serious flaw of high-stakes testing, however, is that it ignores the real problems facing our teachers and students: social inequality and underinvestment in our schools.”
And all the leading Democratic candidates have also taken notice. In Pittsburgh on December 14, at a Public Education Forum 2020, the leading candidates for the Democratic nomination for President all endorsed tripling or quadrupling the federal investment in Title I. They spoke for helping instead of punishing the schools in our nation’s poorest communities.
The Devastation Wrought by Accountability-Based, Test-and-Punish, Pro-Privatization School Reform
Federal and state governments have imposed school closures, state takeovers, and the transformation of low-scoring public schools into charter schools, but I don’t know of any school district serving mostly poor children with enough money to do the things wealthy CONTINUE READING: Dem. Candidates Call for Equitable Public School Investment. Can the New Narrative Be Sustained? | janresseger
