CURMUDGUCATION: Rules for Rural Philanthropy

CURMUDGUCATION: Rules for Rural Philanthropy

Rules for Rural Philanthropy

Juliet Squire is a partner at Bellwether Education Partners, a reliably reformy part of the Fordham-AEI axis. She has traveled the Phillips Exeter-Yale-AEI career trajectory with a stop in the New Jersey Department of Education before landing at Bellwether, where she makes observations about education  that I pretty much always disagree with. 

But she also just released an article for AEI about philanthropy in rural communities, and speaking as someone who has lived his life in a rural community that periodically is afflicted by someone trying to do philanthropy to it, she's made some good observations here.

One of her three "key points" is really on the mark:

Place-based philanthropy is hard to do right. It requires philanthropies to shift their mindset from that of a benefactor to that of a partner committed to learning and working alongside local leaders.

This is fundamental. Do-gooders who sail into town with attitude of, "I'm here to bestow my wisdom and largesse on this bundle of hicks," are doomed to well-deserved failure. Squire goes on to offer CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: Rules for Rural Philanthropy

CURMUDGUCATION: More Absurd Learning Loss Data + Update: How Pandemic School Is Going In One Rural Area

CURMUDGUCATION: More Absurd Learning Loss Data

More Absurd Learning Loss Data

Pandemic education has featured a great deal of chicken littling about "learning loss" that is largely ridiculous. Test manufacturers and folks in test-adjacent edu-biz endeavors are selling the picture of students as buckets and education as water, and now the education is just leaking out at a rate so alarming that it's kind of amazing that people have not turned into drooling couch potatoes once they've been out of school for a decade.

NWEA's report from last April is oft-cited, along with its sexily simply assertion that students will learn days and months of learning. That's baloney, and what it really means is that the folks at NWEA are guessing that test scores will probably go down X points. And if that isn't enough evidence this was a nothingburger, note that in November NWEA announced that their guesstimate had turned out to be over-stated.

But the learning loss drama continues, with Hechinger Report this week emailing links to some research from Amplify (motto: "Trying to make a buck off education since 2000), launched by Rupert Murdoch, later sold to Joel Klein after the company failed to make a killing with their flawed school CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: More Absurd Learning Loss Data

Update: How Pandemic School Is Going In One Rural Area

I've been reporting periodically on how pandemic school is going in my own rural/small town county. Since nobody is doing any kind of systematic large-scale tracking of which schools are doing what and how it's going, I'm just throwing one more batch of data into the general big-city-dominated noise (here's the most recent post on the subject, from the beginning of November).

Numbers have continued to climb here, though deaths are still relatively low. The four local districts moved to save winter sports season, so basketball and even wrestling have been going on scholastically. In Pennsylvania we experienced a tightening of the rules around the holidays, but now they're loosened and restaurants are operated at limited capacity again. 

A couple of local school districts (there are four) mostly decided to go back to full face-to-face at the beginning of the second semester last week, while the others remained hybrid and anticipated going full face to face in a week or two. That plan lasted a couple of days, until it turned out that a cafeteria worker at my old high school had tested positive for covid. That triggered a two day shut down, but while that shutdown was happening, more positive cases turned up and now the school CONTINUE READING: Update: How Pandemic School Is Going In One Rural Area

Report from South Carolina: Rasheem and LaRonda | Diane Ravitch's blog

Report from South Carolina: Rasheem and LaRonda | Diane Ravitch's blog

Report from South Carolina: Rasheem and LaRonda

Arnold and Carol Hillman were educators in Pennsylvania. They retired to South Carolina and, instead of golfing and relaxing, they became involved with rural public schools. They created clubs for high school boys and girls and helped steer their kids towards college. I wrote about their work with students in rural schools several times. See here. Arnold wrote me recently to tell me about the devastating impact of the pandemic on rural students, and I asked him to write it up for the blog. He wrote the section about Rasheem, and Carol wrote about LaRonda.

They wrote:

Rasheem and LaRonda are two students in a rural South Carolina county. A review of county statistics will show that the county is 700 square miles. It is one of the poorest counties in the state. Over the past five years, the education system has declined in quality. The ACT scores have descended 15.8%. Even the state’s average ACT scores have gone down from 18.6 to 18.1. 

When you travel around the county, you are struck by the endless roads that seem to include only a forested area on both sides and a town or two with some stores and maybe a gas station. You must travel to the county seat to go shopping at a supermarket or travel to the other urban center at the bottom of the county.

Choices in any aspect of normal life are limited. There is CONTINUE READING: Report from South Carolina: Rasheem and LaRonda | Diane Ravitch's blog