Teacher Tom: The Original Affluent Society

Teacher Tom: The Original Affluent Society

The Original Affluent Society

One thing that the pandemic has done for many of us is to cut commute times down to zero. I live in an apartment building surrounded by Amazon, Google, and Apple offices that have been more or less vacant for a year. That's tens of thousands of people who have not been getting up early, eating, grooming, dressing, and transporting themselves, which translates to millions of hours that have been freed up for . . . what?

I hope most people have been sleeping longer or engaging in hobbies or some other self-selected activity, but I suspect not. I'm guessing most of that extra time has been used being in some way productive, which is historically what we do with the gift of time. Peasants in the Middle Ages, for example, working with the crudest of farming tools, for instance, worked far fewer hours each day than our modern farmers with their advanced farming machinery. Homemakers continue to always have work to do even as they no longer have to churn their own butter or scrub the laundry by hand in a tub of soapy water. Every day business tasks that once took days, can now happen in seconds, yet office workers still CONTINUE READING: Teacher Tom: The Original Affluent Society

As COVID-19 Continues, Classroom Learning Gaps Between Haves And Haves-Nots Are Getting Wider | HuffPost

As COVID-19 Continues, Classroom Learning Gaps Between Haves And Haves-Nots Are Getting Wider | HuffPost

As COVID-19 Continues, Classroom Learning Gaps Between Haves And Haves-Nots Are Getting Wider

They attend the same schools and have the same teachers, but some kids have started to fall behind their wealthier classmates.

As soon as schools reopened in September, it was apparent that the gaps in her son’s classroom between the haves and the have-nots had grown, says parent Amina Scott. Scott suspects that some kids had access to enrichment programs and hands-on help during the many months that schools and summer camps were shut down, and some, like her third-grade son, had not.

Scott’s son, Yasin, attends a public school in the affluent suburb of Newton, just outside Boston. He is bused from their home in the Roxbury neighborhood to the suburbs through a voluntary desegregation program called METCO. Yasin has always been at grade level or even ahead of his classmates, especially excelling in reading, says Scott. But this year, while attending in-person classes two times a week on a hybrid schedule, the dynamic shifted.

After months away from school, some of his classmates seemed to have mysteriously advanced, easily reciting concepts he says they were never taught. In the early weeks of class, Yasin came home upset, questioning where his classmates could have learned such material. He used to indulge his mom’s questions about what he was learning and how his day was, but he soon stopped wanting to talk about school, telling Scott that he had finished his homework even when he had skipped questions.

“He feels behind and it’s affecting his confidence. I could tell he was avoiding talking about it,” said Scott, a 29-year-old single mother who works full time at a nonprofit in addition to holding down two consulting gigs. “To me it’s scary, it worries me but also I CONTINUE READING: As COVID-19 Continues, Classroom Learning Gaps Between Haves And Haves-Nots Are Getting Wider | HuffPost

Public Schools. Public. | Teacher in a strange land

Public Schools. Public. | Teacher in a strange land

Public Schools. Public.

[Many years ago, at my husband’s class reunion]: Inebriated classmate starts rhapsodizing about the extreme superiority of the education they all got at their well-regarded co-ed Catholic high school in the suburbs of Detroit, back in the day. His monologue derails (did I mentioned he was sloshed?) and he turns to yammering at ME (a public school teacher) about how terrible schools are today (he has no children) and that the public schools—well, they’re the worst of all. Everybody knows that.

I bite my tongue.

I’m used to people assuming that private and religious schools are, somehow, automatically better than public schools. On the face of it, if ‘you get what you pay for’ is a truism, private schools ought to be better than public schools. Depending on your definition of ‘better,’ of course.

Part of the cachet of privately funded education is exclusion. You’re paying for the privilege (a carefully chosen word) of sending your child to a school that other people can’t afford, and having them taught using a set of values (religious and otherwise) that your family has chosen, not been assigned to by location.

You are making the decisions, finding a school with a socio-economic level close  CONTINUE READING: Public Schools. Public. | Teacher in a strange land

The Limits of School Choice | Diane Ravitch's blog

The Limits of School Choice | Diane Ravitch's blog

The Limits of School Choice

There are many reasons to be concerned about the spread of school choice via charters and vouchers. One is that it reduces the funding available for the public schools that enroll the vast majority of students. Most states are barely willing to finance their public schools, so now they divvy up the funds to support choice schools. Makes no sense. Another is that proponents of choice claim that their schools “will save poor kids from failing public schools,” but we now know that this is a false promise. Neither charters nor vouchers get better test scores than public schools, except for the charters that have selective admission and high attrition. Choice schools are free to choose their students and to push out the ones they don’t want, sending them back to public schools, which now have even less funding. Voucher schools.

Stephen Ruis writes a summary of the problems with choice on his blog, “Class Warfare.”

Here is a sample:

I cannot fathom a scenario in which school competition benefits the students most. We have seen charter school after charter school close business, some do this before they have officially opened. In business this is CONTINUE READING: The Limits of School Choice | Diane Ravitch's blog

The Rich and the Rest – Have You Heard

The Rich and the Rest – Have You Heard

The Rich and the Rest

Have You Heard episode #98: The Rich and the Rest

There is a vast gulf between the public education priorities of most voters and the favored policies of the very wealthy. Nowhere is that gap more visible than in Arizona, where support for public education has emerged as a central issue in 2020. Complete transcript of the episode is here.

The financial support of listeners like you keeps this podcast going. Subscribe on Patreon or donate on PayPal. Jennifer and Jack’s forthcoming book, A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door, will be out on November 17 and is now available for pre-order.

Have You Heard · #98: The Rich and the Rest

The Rich and the Rest – Have You Heard

PROOF POINTS: Survey reveals stark rich-poor divide in how U.S. children were taught remotely during the spring school closures - The Hechinger Report

PROOF POINTS: Survey reveals stark rich-poor divide in how U.S. children were taught remotely during the spring school closures - The Hechinger Report

PROOF POINTS: Survey reveals stark rich-poor divide in how U.S. children were taught remotely during the spring school closures

Low-income children reviewed old material while high-income children learned new things

As the coronavirus pandemic spread through the country, a common (socially distanced) conversation among friends and families compared how many hours of remote learning kids were getting. Preliminary results from a new survey of school districts confirm what many parents learned through the Zoom grapevine. The number of hours your kids got varied wildly depending on where you happen to live. But the amount of time was not the only difference, according to a recent survey: the type of instruction students received also diverged dramatically.

Twenty-five percent of districts said children in kindergarten through second grade were supposed to receive more than three hours of remote instruction every day but another 25 percent of districts reported only one hour or less. The two-hour-a-day difference narrowed a bit in higher grades but even by high school, many students received 1.5 fewer instructional hours every day than others (3 hours vs. 4.5 hours). Over several months of school closures, the daily difference in hours added up to a lot of instructional time. My back-of-the-envelope calculation puts it at more than 100 hours. (My math: 2 hours a day x 5 days a week x 12 weeks of school closures = 120 hours.)

 “One key question is why these differences occur and what do these differences mean for students,” said Mike Garet, head of the survey team at the American Institutes of Research (AIR), a nonprofit research organization. AIR presented early results from its “National Survey of Public Education’s Response to COVID-19” at a virtual session of the Education Writers Association’s national seminar on July 22, 2020. AIR sent out surveys to more than 2,500 of the nation’s 13,500 school districts in May and plans to release results periodically to inform education policymakers during the pandemic. This early report represents a 19 percent response rate so far and includes data from nearly 500 districts across 49 states and covers a wide range of both urban and rural regions.

I was surprised to learn that the difference in instructional hours can’t be simply explained by poverty. When researchers diced the survey data up CONTINUE READING: PROOF POINTS: Survey reveals stark rich-poor divide in how U.S. children were taught remotely during the spring school closures - The Hechinger Report

Mr. G for District 3: Chris Guerrieri's Education Matters: DCPS gives "SOME" i.e poor families an impossible choice while telling OTHER i.e. well off families to opt for safety.

Mr. G for District 3: Chris Guerrieri's Education Matters: DCPS gives "SOME" i.e poor families an impossible choice while telling OTHER i.e. well off families to opt for safety.

DCPS gives "SOME" i.e poor families an impossible choice while telling OTHER i.e. well off families to opt for safety.

DCPS gives "SOME" i.e poor families an impossible choice while telling OTHER i.e. well off families to opt for safety, they exacerbate the inequalities between groups and further harm the families they think they are helping. In short with fronds like superintendent Greene and the five members of the board who voted to go back to brick and mortar schools who needs any enemies.

When Superintendent Greene and Vice-Chair Andersen beg people to put their children into Duval Homeroom, they exacerbate the massive inequalities that already exist in Duval. They gave their tacit approval to the fact some people will be able to keep their children safe, and others will have to choose between putting food on the table or risking their children's lives.

Why else would they be telling people to sign their children up for Duval homeroom? They and we all know that having a live in-person teacher is better. They are doing so because they know our schools will be dangerous. They know our schools will not be safe, and there is a likelihood that people will get sick or worse. THEY ADMIT THIS!!!

DCPS cannot control if some family's parents have to work, but they could control if their children were safe or not. Schools should control what schools can control, and in this instance, it was if children and families were safe or not.

My heart breaks for the families put in this terrible position, but how are things going to change for the better if DCPS gives them an option to risk their and their families' lives? How is a business going to realize they have CONTINUE READING: Mr. G for District 3: Chris Guerrieri's Education Matters: DCPS gives "SOME" i.e poor families an impossible choice while telling OTHER i.e. well off families to opt for safety.

A decade of research on education inequality in America

A decade of research on education inequality in America

A decade of research on the rich-poor divide in education
Many studies show large and growing inequities

Americans like to believe that education can be a great equalizer, allowing even the poorest child who studies hard to enter the middle class. But when I looked at what academic researchers and federal data reports have said about the great educational divide between the rich and poor in our country, that belief turns out to be a myth. Basic education, from kindergarten through high school, only expands the disparities.

In 2015, during the Obama administration, the federal education department issued a report that showed how the funding gap between rich and poor schools grew 44 percent over a decade between 2001-2 and 2011-12. That meant that the richest 25 percent of school districts spent $1,500 more per student, on average, than the poorest 25 percent of school districts. 

I wish I could have continued to track this data between rich and poor schools to see if school spending had grown more fair. But the Trump administration crunched the numbers differently. When it issued a report in 2018, covering the 2014-15 school year, it found that the wealthiest 25 percent of districts spent $450 more per student than the poorest 25 CONTINUE READING: A decade of research on education inequality in America