Minnesota: Elites Propose Constitutional Amendment to Enable Segregated Schools | Diane Ravitch's blog

Minnesota: Elites Propose Constitutional Amendment to Enable Segregated Schools | Diane Ravitch's blog

Minnesota: Elites Propose Constitutional Amendment to Enable Segregated Schools

Minnesota was the first state to pass a charter law in 1991. As blogger Sarah Lahm wrote in the Progressive in 2019, the new charters were exempt from most state regulations, including desegregation. A number of its charters are segregated by race and ethnicity, intentionally so, because the charter industry believes that segregation is culturally affirming. This situation led to a lawsuit to assure the rights of children of color in the state.

So now leading figures in the state charter lobby want to pass an amendment to the state constitution that would make segregated schools acceptable, while adding that school quality would be determined by standardized tests.

Blogger Rob Levine explains:

The Page Amendment is best understood if you recognize these foundations’ overall public education strategies. For 30 years the Minneapolis Foundation and its allies have been creating, funding, and persuading the CONTINUE READING: Minnesota: Elites Propose Constitutional Amendment to Enable Segregated Schools | Diane Ravitch's blog

Jeb Crow, pt. 5: Reformers, you long ago stopped being the good guys -- if you ever were. Will you join us now? - Public Enemy Number 1

Jeb Crow, pt. 5: Reformers, you long ago stopped being the good guys -- if you ever were. Will you join us now? - Public Enemy Number 1

Jeb Crow, pt. 5: Reformers, you long ago stopped being the good guys -- if you ever were. Will you join us now?

Help us end Big Test/Jeb Crow. We could create equity together by rebuilding the capacity you've helped bad people destroy. You may have to swallow some pride; but what's most important to you?

Part 1: Florida's voucher segregation factories imitate pre-Brown American education - only worse

Part 2: What "Jeb Crow" has wrought for FTC, McKay, and Gardiner kids -- and everybody else

Part 3: How to shop in a Jeb Crow voucher marketplace built to cheat and grift and harm your child

Part 4: The dark story of "Failure Factories" and "Schools without Rules" shows how power dominates education journalism, narrative, and humanity

Today is the final installment of this series, which evolved in its focus as I wrote it. And that has led me to change its name from “Segregation Factories” to “Jeb Crow.” That’s the title I want readers to take with them when they leave. I appreciate everyone who has read the first four pieces. I tend to ask a lot from readers in what I write because I respect readers very much; and I know it’s my job to make the complex and long fun to read. I hope I’ve done that here. And I hope this series serves as resource for a long time to come.

Adam Miller was the Florida Department of Education’s Office of Independent Education and Parental Choice for nearly six years until July 2019. That gave him official state government oversight of both voucher schools and charter schools.

I had two substantive conversations with Miller during my time as an elected Polk County School Board member. One was strained because I was asking about the CONTINUE READING: Jeb Crow, pt. 5: Reformers, you long ago stopped being the good guys -- if you ever were. Will you join us now? - Public Enemy Number 1

Bruce D. Baker and Robert Cotto Jr.: The underfunding of Latinx-serving school districts - kappanonline org

The underfunding of Latinx-serving school districts  - kappanonline.org

The underfunding of Latinx-serving school districts 

An analysis of spending in U.S. public schools reveals dozens of districts — many with large Latinx enrollments — that are underfunded compared to other districts in their region, even though they serve children with much greater needs.  

When analyzing questions of fairness in local education spending, it’s important to understand that the value of the education dollar is relative. It doesn’t just matter how much money, in total, a school district spends but also how that figure compares to spending in nearby districts. After all, schools in the same area must compete with each other for employees. The district that spends $15,000 per pupil will have a harder time hiring and retaining the area’s highest-quality teachers and staff than will the neighboring district that spends $20,000. Moreover, each dollar will go further in districts that serve relatively affluent students than in those that serve large numbers of students from low-income backgrounds, who tend to need more (and more expensive) services. 

Several years ago, one of us (Bruce Baker) set out to identify public school districts that face this kind of competitive disadvantage — more specifically, districts where the students face greater needs than in surrounding districts (i.e., child poverty is more than 20% higher) but where per-pupil spending is less than 90% of the region’s average.  

At the time, a number of national reports had just been published comparing the overall fairness of states’ school finance systems (Baker & Corcoran, 2012; Baker, Sciarra, & Farrie, 2014). But studies were also beginning to show a lot of variation within states. Even in those states that appeared to have relatively well-funded and equitable school finance systems, some districts were being left out. And that raised the question: Did those districts have something in common?  

The answer turned out to be yes. Those districts where students’ needs were greater but the schools were relatively under-resourced were disproportionately located in smaller cities that served high CONTINUE READING:  The underfunding of Latinx-serving school districts  - kappanonline.org

‘School choice’ is a dog whistle for resegregation

‘School choice’ is a dog whistle for resegregation

‘School choice’ is a dog whistle for resegregation

Congratulations to Cindy Marten. San Diego Unified School District’s superintendent has been tapped to become the next deputy U.S. education secretary.

Under Marten, San Diego Unified was one of two large urban districts nationwide in 2019 to outperform average test scores for fourth- and eighth-graders. The district’s Black and Latino students also graduated at higher rates than the state average.

Meanwhile, Iowa is headed in the other direction. Like, really far in the other direction.

Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds has proposed a bevy of so-called “school choice” reforms to the state’s education system.

What you’d expect is included. Private school vouchers. More funding for privately operated charter schools.

But most striking is a change that would allow students to transfer out of schools that have a voluntary or court-ordered diversity plan.

Higher-income families (read: well-to-do white families) would be able to remove their kids from schools that educate predominantly lower-income students (read: Black and immigrant families in cities like Des Moines).

In other words, the resegregation of public schools.

No wonder so many right-wing politicians and pundits are gung-ho about vouchers and charter schools. As historian Steve Suitts has documented, “school choice” rhetoric and policies harken back to the racist segregationists of the mid-twentieth century.

Like former Alabama Gov. George Wallace, who coordinated with the Ku Klux Klan while cloaking his CONTINUE READING: ‘School choice’ is a dog whistle for resegregation

Diane Ravitch: The Dark History of School Choice | by Diane Ravitch | The New York Review of Books

The Dark History of School Choice | by Diane Ravitch | The New York Review of Books

The Dark History of School Choice

How an argument for segregated schools became a rallying cry for privatizing public education.

During her tenure as secretary of education, Betsy DeVos repeatedly asked Congress to allocate billions of dollars for vouchers for religious and private schools. She was repeatedly rebuffed. Even Republican members of Congress were unwilling to use the federal education budget to pay for vouchers. After all, most of their constituents’ children attend public schools.

After the pandemic struck, DeVos tried again. Late last March, Congress passed a $2.2 trillion relief bill called the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, which allocated $13.2 billion for K–12 education. Congress expected that the money would be shared, as federal education funds typically are, among the nation’s nearly 100,000 public and 7,000 charter schools, as well as private schools based on the number of low-income students they enroll. DeVos instead directed states to share the money allotted to public schools with private and religious schools that enrolled middle-income and affluent students. The NAACP and several states responded with lawsuits, arguing that her order was illegal. Three federal judges in different parts of the country ruled against DeVos, and she backed down.

But the Trump administration found another way to enrich charter and private schools. The Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), also part of the CARES Act, was supposed to rescue small businesses. Lobbyists for the charter industry, however, encouraged charter schools to apply as nonprofits, thus double-dipping into both the public school and PPP funds (public schools were ineligible for PPP funding). Private and religious schools also qualified for PPP funds as nonprofits. Therefore, through a bill supposed to aid small businesses at risk of bankruptcy, thousands of charter, private, and religious schools received an average of about $855,000 each, compared to about $134,500 per public school through CARES. Religious schools of every denomination, elite private schools, and more than one thousand charter schools received anywhere from $150,000 to $10 million each according to a database compiled by a website called COVID Stimulus Watch. Antelope Valley Learning Academy, a charter school in California, received $7.8 million. The for-profit Academia Corporation charter school chain won $28.6 million. Buckingham Browne & Nichols, an elite private school in CONTINUE READING: The Dark History of School Choice | by Diane Ravitch | The New York Review of Books

What Happened to the School in New Orleans That Was First to Desegregate? | Diane Ravitch's blog

What Happened to the School in New Orleans That Was First to Desegregate? | Diane Ravitch's blog

What Happened to the School in New Orleans That Was First to Desegregate?

You may recall the iconic painting of little Ruby Bridges, a first-grader, who was the first African American student to enroll in a previously all-white segregated school in New Orleans. If you don’t, be sure to read this article, which tells what happened to the William Franz Public School.

Three scholars–Connie L. Schaffer, Martha Graham Viator, and Meg White–tell the story. The three are also the co-authors of a book titled: William Frantz Public School: A Story of Race, Resistance, Resilience, and Recovery in New Orleans, which I am reading now and expect to review.

They write:

If that building’s walls could talk, they certainly would tell the well-known story of its desegregation. But those same walls could tell another story, too. That story is about continued racism as well as efforts to dismantle and privatize public education in America over the past six decades.

When little Ruby Bridges enrolled in November 1960, she was escorted by four federal marshalls. Crowds of angry CONTINUE READING: What Happened to the School in New Orleans That Was First to Desegregate? | Diane Ravitch's blog

Shanker Blog: How Much Segregation Is There Within Schools? | National Education Policy Center

Shanker Blog: How Much Segregation Is There Within Schools? | National Education Policy Center

Shanker Blog: How Much Segregation Is There Within Schools?

Our national discourse on school segregation, whether income- or race-/ethnicity-based, tends to focus on the separation of students between schools within districts. There are good reasons for this, including the fact that the majority of desegregation efforts have been within-district efforts. Sometimes lost in this focus, however, is the importance of segregation between districts.

This distinction can be confusing, so consider a large metro area with a central city district surrounded by a group of suburban districts. There may be extensive racial/ethnic segregation of students between schools within those districts, with students of color concentrated in some schools and their White peers concentrated in others. But total segregation across the entire metro area is also a function of segregation between districts - i.e., the degree to which students of certain races or ethnicities are concentrated in some districts and not others (e.g., students of color in the city, white students in the suburbs). In a sense, if we view diversity as a resource, there are multiple "chokepoints" at which that resource is distributed down to the next level—from states to metro areas to districts to schools—and this can exacerbate segregation.

A recent working paper provides one of relatively few pieces of recent evidence suggesting that, in addition to racial and ethnic segregation between districts and between schools within districts, there may be an additional important "layer": segregation within schools.

The paper, written by Charles Clotfelter, Helen Ladd, Calen Clifton, and Mavzuna Turaeva, and published by CALDER, uses detailed administrative data from (no surprise) North Carolina. These data allow the researchers to determine the racial and ethnic composition not only of schools and counties (which in North Carolina mostly define districts), but of individual CONTINUE READING: Shanker Blog: How Much Segregation Is There Within Schools? | National Education Policy Center

Laura Chapman: “GreatSchools” Rating System Is Funded by School Choice Billionaires | Diane Ravitch's blog

Laura Chapman: “GreatSchools” Rating System Is Funded by School Choice Billionaires | Diane Ravitch's blog

Laura Chapman: “GreatSchools” Rating System Is Funded by School Choice Billionaires

Laura Chapman, intrepid researcher, writes here about the billionaire and corporate money supporting the rating system for schools called GreatSchools. It clearly exists to promote school choice, not community cohesion or civic responsibility. GreatSchools recently announced that it would use “growth scores” to measure school quality, not just test scores, but the difference is miniscule, and the outcome is the same: to promote segregation and school choice by linking “school quality” and test scores.

Laura Chapman writes:

Great Schools is supported by income from Scholastic, Zillow and other advertisers, who pay for packages that can push up their page views or allow them to license the school ratings. The whole website functions as a tool to perpetuate redlining, charter schools, and advocates forf school choice.

Here are the largest financial pushers of the dubious ratings:

Walton Family Foundation, Laura and John Arnold Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Carnegie Corporation of New York, Einhorn Family Charitable Trust, Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Trust, and Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

These big funders are offered a display of their logos. Other supporters are: CONTINUE READING: Laura Chapman: “GreatSchools” Rating System Is Funded by School Choice Billionaires | Diane Ravitch's blog

My Conversation with Steve Suitts about the Segregationist Origins of School Choice | Diane Ravitch's blog

My Conversation with Steve Suitts about the Segregationist Origins of School Choice | Diane Ravitch's blog

My Conversation with Steve Suitts about the Segregationist Origins of School Choice

In case you missed our Zoom conversation, this is the link to my discussion with Steve Suitts about his new book about the segregationist origins of “school choice.”

His book is Overturning Brown: The Segregationist Legacy of the Modern School Choice Movement.

My Conversation with Steve Suitts about the Segregationist Origins of School Choice | Diane Ravitch's blog

In crackdown on race-related content, Education Department targets internal book clubs, meetings - POLITICO

In crackdown on race-related content, Education Department targets internal book clubs, meetings - POLITICO

In crackdown on race-related content, Education Department targets internal book clubs, meetings

The guidance largely echoes OMB’s memo in describing the type of content that is now disfavored in government training sessions.

The Education Department plans to scrutinize a wide range of employee activities — including internal book clubs — in search of “Anti-American propaganda” and discussions about “white privilege” as it carries out the White House’s demand that federal agencies halt certain types of race-related training.

In an internal email this week obtained by POLITICO, the department ordered a review of agency contracts for diversity training and "internal employee activities" to root out topics such as “critical race theory” or materials that suggest that the U.S. is an inherently racist country. The crackdown comes as the department implements a government-wide directive the White House issued Friday to stop what it called “un-American propaganda training sessions" about race.

To implement that policy, the Education Department will require each of its offices in D.C., as well as regional outposts throughout the country, to review a range of training materials, including outside contracts for diversity workshops, plus content produced internally at the agency.

An Education Department spokesperson did not comment on the internal agency guidance Wednesday night.

The department's guidance largely echoes OMB’s memo in describing the type of content that is now disfavored in government training sessions: any material “that teaches, trains or suggests the following: (1) virtually all White people contribute to racism or benefit from racism (2) critical race theory (3) white privilege (4) that the United States is an inherently racist or evil country (5) that any race or ethnicity is inherently racist or evil (6) Anti-American propaganda.”

Department officials, according to the email, have already concluded that at least some of its training activities — including a program called “Unconscious Bias and Conversations in the Midst of Change” — would be allowed to continue because they do not include any of the topics prohibited by the OMB memo.

The email said department officials have similarly determined that all diversity and inclusion training offered by the agency’s Office of Equal Employment Opportunity Services complies with the new OMB policy.

The OMB memo, first reported on Friday evening by The Washington Post, states that “it has come to the President’s attention” that the federal CONTINUE READING: In crackdown on race-related content, Education Department targets internal book clubs, meetings - POLITICO