Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: WEEKEND QUOTABLES:

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Albert Woodfox, released from Angola prison after 43 years in solitary confinement. 

Albert Woodfox

 “I can now direct all my efforts to ending the barbarous use of solitary confinement and will continue my work on that issue here in the free world.” -- Guardian

Jamil Smith

Scalia’s passing underscores that waiting for bigots to die is a fool’s errand. It doesn’t excuse us from the work that needs to be done, both organizationally and politically, to further equality. -- MTV News

Donald Trump on his support for Iraq War. 

“I really don’t even know what I mean because that was a long time ago and who knows what was in my head.” -- NBC, Meet the Press

NEA Pres. Lily Eskelsen García

“We definitely hear something new coming out of [Interim Ed Sec. John King],” she said, adding that while his words “mean a lot to us,” teachers are interested in seeing how he backs up those words Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: WEEKEND QUOTABLES:

H.S. Future Teachers Being Prepped for Common Core and Competency-Based Education

H.S. Future Teachers Being Prepped for Common Core and Competency-Based Education:

H.S. Future Teachers Being Prepped for Common Core and Competency-Based Education

 We hear we have a serious problem finding teachers for America’s classrooms. One solution is to encourage students in high school to become career teachers.

Young people are full of vibrant ideas and high school should be considered a valuable place for teacher recruitment. I am not saying we should push students to be teachers, but high schools have long used clubs and after-school activities to help young people understand the kinds of careers that are available.

But the new process to do this appears corrupted. It leads to Common Core and digital instruction.

As a high school student in the ‘60s, I participated in Future Teachers of America. I shadowed teachers, corrected papers, and worked with children. The club was sponsored by teachers at my school. FTA is still around. It is updated, though it looks somewhat like what I remember.

But there is another organization called Educators Rising. If you visit this website, the program, by the sound of the students describing their experiences, sounds great–at H.S. Future Teachers Being Prepped for Common Core and Competency-Based Education:

'Got to Go': high-performing charter schools shed students quickly | US news | The Guardian

'Got to Go': high-performing charter schools shed students quickly | US news | The Guardian:

'Got to Go': high-performing charter schools shed students quickly
Success Academy, New York City’s largest charter school network, loses more than 10% of its enrolled student population each year once testing starts, compared to 2.7% at nearby schools

 Brendin Smith was only four years old when his mother, Monique Jeffrey, realized her son was no longer wanted at Success Academy. Jeffrey says that administrators at one of the charter school’s Brooklyn locations told her the kindergartener “wasn’t going to make it”. Jeffrey later found out that Brendin was one of 16 students who been placed on the school’s “Got to Go” list, a list uncovered by the New York Times that singled out students that the school wanted to shed.

Success Academy, the largest charter school network in New York City, also has some of the highest test scores. Critics have alleged that the city achieves this in part by driving low performers out.

A Guardian analysis has found that the school system loses children between the third and fourth grade, the first two years of New York state testing, at a rate four times that of neighboring public schools. Success lost more than 10% of its enrolled student population from grade to grade, compared with the average rate of 2.7% at public schools in the same building or nearby during the same years.

The analysis compared Success and traditional public school populations in high poverty neighborhoods and therefore excluded data from one Success Academy site on the Upper West Side where only about 25% of students were classified as “economically disadvantaged”. This school’s relatively well-to-do student population features the only example of a Success Academy class that grew in size from second to fourth grade.

According to Jeff Jacobs, a researcher at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, chance alone cannot adequately account for these enrollment drop differences. “Within testing years, the enrollment drop rate observed at Success Academy is greater than the enrollment drop rates at next door public schools 70% of the time. Furthermore, in 61% of these cases, this difference is so large that we can reject the hypothesis that it occurred due to random variation in attrition rates, at the 5% significance level.”

Richard Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation who focuses on education policy, said: “It could be that Success is counselling out weaker students, encouraging them to leave, or it could be that Success is not backfilling [replacing students] in the same way that traditional public schools do, or it could be a combination of those two things.”

Whatever the cause, Kahlenberg said the decline “provides a tremendous advantage to Success that we have be aware of when we compare the test scores”. Not replacing lost students with new ones in later years could provide Success a significant test score advantage, since highly transient students tend to do worse in school.

Brian Whitley, a researcher at Success Academy, said some of this enrollment shrinkage is to be expected since, up until last year, Success did not accept new students after the third grade. In an email to the Guardian, Whitley also argued that enrollment numbers don’t take into account whether public schools are losing even more kids and taking in new ones to replace them. Last March, Success Academy’s CEO, Eva Moskowitz, told the Brian Lehrer Show that if Success added new students in older grades, the incoming students’ lower academic preparation would negatively affect the schools’ other students.

To make its calculations, the Guardian pulled data from 25 Success classes that had enrollment numbers from pre-testing grades up until the fourth, and pulled comparable data from public school classes that were either in the same building or one block away from Success Academy sites. 

The analysis also found that at sites where the majority of Success Academy’s student populations are from low-income families, classes in the school’s later testing grades served far smaller proportions of students with disabilities (13.2% vs. 27.6% ), students with limited English proficiency (2.4% vs. 16.3%), and poor students (78.7% vs. 92.1%). Such demographic data from many of the earlier grades is not publicly available, and thus it is difficult to determine whether these types of students are dropping disproportionately within Success Academy’s 'Got to Go': high-performing charter schools shed students quickly | US news | The Guardian:

State-appointed schools chief giving away Newark school property–can the board stop Cerf? |

State-appointed schools chief giving away Newark school property–can the board stop Cerf? |:

State-appointed schools chief giving away Newark school property–can the board stop Cerf?

The Burnet Street School–now a charter–will be given away to the city.

Newark’s state-appointed superintendent Christopher Cerf has reached a deal with city officials to turn over 12 school district properties worth millions of dollars  to the Newark Housing Authority–for nothing.

Members of the Newark school board are expected to try to stop the massive property transfer at Tuesday night’s meeting but it’s not clear whether opponents of Cerf’s plan have enough votes to stop him–or even whether the board has the power to stop him. The state still controls the Newark district despite promises of a return to local control.

Cerf announced the plan at last week’s business meeting of the board, calling it part of his continuing efforts to cut the school district’s budget. He initially said all the property was unused, but that’s not true. One of the properties, the former Burnet Street School,  is now occupied by the Paolo Freire Charter School. And there are more than these 12 parcels in the district’s property inventory.

“We are getting the impression we are being rushed to do this,” said board member Antoinette Baskerville-Richardson. “We don’t have the information we need.”

Morton Street School–free to the Newark Housing Authority

“We should have been notified,” said board member Dashay Carter. “We should have received the courtesy of being told you were doing this.”

Cerf insisted he had the power to make the deal and said he had “many meetings” with City Hall officials,  presumably including Mayor Ras Baraka. Baskerville-Richardson shot back that he should have held a meeting with the school board members before cutting the deal with the city.

The state-appointed superintendent said the district spends $2 million to $4 million every year to maintain and insure the properties that are not used. Giving away the property would cut that amount from the budget, he said.

He called it, “responsible leadership and management.”

Carter, however, insisted the school district should have more control over the conditions of handing the land over to the Newark Housing Authority–particularly because the district will not immediately receive any compensation for the property State-appointed schools chief giving away Newark school property–can the board stop Cerf? |:

We Don’t Have to Suspend So Many Kids—But Alternatives Cost $$$$ | EduShyster

We Don’t Have to Suspend So Many Kids—But Alternatives Cost $$$$ | EduShyster:

We Don’t Have to Suspend So Many Kids—But Alternatives Cost $$$$

By Corey Gaber 
The typical *woke* person’s evaluation of the behavior management landscape is that we suspend and expel too many kids. We suspend more than 3 million students a year, twice the level of suspensions in the 1970s. And we suspend kids for less and less severe actions, most famously in no-excuses charter chains, for doing things likesinging Michael Jackson’s Man in the Mirror in the Cafeteria. As has been well documented, we teachers and administrators issue consequences in a racially-biased manner. 

But removing a student from school rarely benefits the student. In fact it often hurts their long term academic prospects. They miss valuable class time and teacher support, which puts them in a tough position to catch up whenever they do return. They often harbor feelings of resentment, embarrassment, and/or confusion about the suspension, combined with their academic falling behind can lead to further acting out. Finally, suspension is unlikely to address the root problem that led to the behavior in the first place.

That said, here’s the thing that progressive educators don’t like to talk about: there is a point where removing a student from the learning environment does benefit everyone else. The learning of an entire class can be derailed by a single student, and allowing that student to remain robs others of an education, and sends a message about just how porous or firm your boundaries are as the leader of your classroom. Which raises a big question. When a student needs to be removed from the learning environment, if We Don’t Have to Suspend So Many Kids—But Alternatives Cost $$$$ | EduShyster:

The Pros and Cons of Teaching Black History Month in Schools - The Atlantic

The Pros and Cons of Teaching Black History Month in Schools - The Atlantic:

Black History Month in Schools—Retire or Reboot?

Now in its 40th year, questions remain about the value of commemorating it in classrooms.

A classroom in Alabama's old Mount Sinai Junior High School, which was built for rural blacks during the Jim Crow era

The seed of what is now known as Black History Month was planted in the doctoral thesis of Carter G. Woodson, a noted scholar, author, and co-founder of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History. The son of former slaves, Woodson received a Ph.D. in 1912 from Harvard University, where he studied under renowned historians who minimized the importance and vitality of black history. But Woodson would not be deterred. He believed the heritage and contributions of black Americans was excluded from history, and he saw this knowledge as essential to social change.

Woodson’s dedication to the research and promotion of black history has been memorialized by his actions—in 1926 he declared the second week of February Negro History Week—and his words:

If a race has no history, if it has no worthwhile tradition, it becomes a negligible factor in the thought of the world, and it stands in danger of being exterminated.

Today Woodson’s brainchild is the entire month of February. First celebrated in 1976, Black History Month was the result of a growing racial pride and consciousness of black Americans and Woodson’s association pushing to expand the weekly celebration. Now a well-entrenched, nationally recognized observance, Black History Month is a commemoration that might be short in days but is increasingly long on controversy. In the last month—in examples that cross racial boundaries—the black actress and conservative commentator Stacey Dashcalled to eliminate Black History Month, labeling it a vestige of segregation, while Republicans in the Kansas legislature questioned if an entire month dedicated to honoring black history was “too long.”

In one corner, advocates of Black History Month argue that a special month is needed to celebrate and recognize the achievements of black Americans in a country where European history dominates historical discourse. In the other corner, critics cast doubt that Black History Month is still relevant with the gains made in race relations—a black U.S. president the most visible sign—andThe Pros and Cons of Teaching Black History Month in Schools - The Atlantic:

Randi Weingarten: Labor is united in support of Clinton. | Fred Klonsky

Randi Weingarten: Labor is united in support of Clinton. | Fred Klonsky:

Randi Weingarten: Labor is united in support of Clinton

NEA President Eskelsen Garcia. Buyer’s remorse?

AFT President Randi Weingarten thinks political election campaigns are like differences in her union.

It’s works like her vision of democracy.

All she has to do is declare it so and that’s the way is.

So she tell’s the New York Times that all labor union members support Hillary. There is no other opinion. And it is so. Facts don’t get in the way.

In an effort to dispute what they say is a false narrative that union voters are closely split between Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Hillary Clinton, a group of more than 20 unions representing more than 10 million workers is releasing a statement on Monday reaffirming support for Mrs. Clinton.

“Secretary Clinton has proven herself as the fighter and champion working people and their families need in the White House,” the statement says. “That is why, of all unions endorsing a candidate in the Democratic primary, the vast majority of the membership in these unions has endorsed her.”

Leading the charge for Hillary among labor union leaders is the AFT Randi Weingarten: Labor is united in support of Clinton. | Fred Klonsky:

Teacher at elite New York City high school has a serious beef with Teach for America — here's why - Yahoo Finance

Teacher at elite New York City high school has a serious beef with Teach for America — here's why - Yahoo Finance:

Teacher at elite New York City high school has a serious beef with Teach for America — here's why

During the first weekend in February, 15,000 members of the Teach for America (TFA) community gathered in Washington, DC, for the organization's 25th anniversary.

The celebration was billed as the biggest event in the history of TFA — which recruits high-achieving recent college graduates to teach in poor schools.

TFA members gathered to reflect on the organization's accomplishments and discuss the current state of education reform. It culminated with a performance by Janelle Monáe, a Grammy-nominated R&B singer.

But the anniversary wasn't entirely a celebration of TFA's successes.

At the event was also a smaller, if not at times equally vocal, subset of the TFA community, who set their sights on being a disruptive force at the event. About 100 of the so-called disrupters attended a meeting called "Critics not Haters" where they could discuss their issues with TFA, according toGary Rubinstein, a math teacher and former TFA member who attended the session. The group was not welcomed by everybody else in attendance.

"The people who criticize me, they were taunting me for the whole weekend," Rubinstein told Business Insider.

Rubinstein doesn't mince words when talking about TFA, placing much of the blame squarely on its shoulders for supposedly denigrating the state of education. He asserts that TFA and many of the organization's alumni have bolstered a harmful narrative about traditional public schools and have taken part in "teacher bashing."

"TFA has highlighted their few successes so much that many politicians actually believe that first year TFA teachers are effective," Rubinstein has written on his blog. "They believe that there are lazy veteran teachers who are not ‘accountable’ to their students and who are making a lot of money so we’re better off firing those older teachers and replacing them with these young go-getters."

TFA was founded in 1989 by Wendy Kopp, a Princeton graduate, who wrote her thesis on building such an organization. It places college graduates in public and charter K-12 schools with the promise they will serve two years in the program.

The organization has successfully introduced highly qualified new teachers into the profession, andstudies have shown the teachers in the program are effective educators. One of the most cited, a study out of Mathematica Policy Research, showed that TFA teachers were just as effective as their counterparts in other schools who had an average of 13.6 years experience teaching, versus TFA average of 1.5 years.Teacher at elite New York City high school has a serious beef with Teach for America — here's why - Yahoo Finance:

Report: California education system forsaking Black students | Compton Herald

Report: California education system forsaking Black students | Compton Herald:

Report: California education system forsaking Black students

Advocates say California’s Black students face systemic disparities and inequalities; suspensions, remedial education, lack of college prep access cited

By MANNY OTIKO and CHARLENE MUHAMMAD, Contributing Writers

SACRAMENTO (CBM) – The California Legislative Black Caucus is preparing strategies for accountability after a new report revealed Black students are disproportionately suffering from disparities and inequalities in access, opportunity, and achievement in education.

“Poverty plays a factor, but it can’t be explained by poverty alone” – Ryan Smith, Executive Director. Photo: The Education Trust–West

State lawmakers held a briefing to examine findings of “Black Minds Matter: Supporting the Educational Success of Black Children in California,” which studied the plight of California’s Black school children.

“Our goal is to demonstrate that there are replicable program models that the state and local districts should consider as they contemplate ways to close the achievement gap,” saidAssemblymember Shirley Weber, D-San Diego. She chaired the Feb. 10 hearing in partnership with The Education Trust-West, the Oakland-based organization that advocates for educational justice and high academic achievement of California students, particularly those of color and impoverished.

The report found that the California education system is failing Black students in various ways. For instance, Black students are more likely to be suspended, more likely to be placed in remedial or special education programs, less likely to graduate from high school, and have less access to college preparatory programs.

The briefing on the study comes in the wake of the two-year-old “Black Lives Matter” movement against police violence, which has drawn national attention.

Now “Black Minds Matter” is gaining momentum as another movement which aims to raise awareness about problems in California’s educational system.

The ‘Black Minds Matter” movement grew out of a partnership between The Education Trust-West and the San Jose-based California Alliance of African American Educators (CAAAE), which provides culturally-informed services to students, families, and teachers.

Ryan Smith, executive director of The Education Trust-West, said when people think about Report: California education system forsaking Black students | Compton Herald:

Governors urge federal restraint in new K-12 law

Governors urge federal restraint in new K-12 law:

Governors urge federal restraint in new K-12 law

WASHINGTON — Governors from around the country praised a new federal K-12 education law on Sunday, but some aren't convinced Washington bureaucrats will stay out of their way as states implement it.

The governors, in Washington for the National Governors Association's winter meeting, credited the new law with limiting federal control over local schools. But some said they're on the lookout for hidden federal mandates on elementary and secondary education policy.

They plan to monitor the U.S. Education Department “to ensure that it adheres closely to the principles of federalism,” said Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley.

The Every Student Succeeds Act, signed by President Obama in December, leaves it up to states to set their own academic standards, decide the role of test scores in measuring school quality and dictate state plans for improving underperforming schools.

THE TENNESSEAN

Lamar Alexander says new K-12 law to reduce federal role

Bentley, vice chairman of the NGA's education and workforce committee, also warned federal education officials to tread lightly in issuing rules to implement the new law.

“The federal government should issue regulations selectively and only on provisions where states and local districts agree that guidance is needed,” said Bentley, a Republican.

Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., tried to reassure the governors that the Every Student Succeeds Act wouldn’t have passed by such large bipartisan margins if it hadn't promised to reverse the years of federal control established by its predecessor, the No Child Left Behind law.

“We are taking away power from the administration,” said Alexander, a former governor who served as education secretary under President George H.W. Bush.

THE TENNESSEAN

Alexander leads vote to replace No Child Left Behind

As chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Pensions and Labor Committee, Alexander was a key negotiator in passing the new law. He suggested governors form statewide coalitions to help write their own state education plans that meet Governors urge federal restraint in new K-12 law:

Does Money Matter in Education? | Shanker Institute

Does Money Matter in Education? | Shanker Institute:

Does Money Matter in Education?

 ** NEW SECOND EDITION

This report presents a comprehensive review of the high-quality empirical evidence on whether and how money matters in education, written by Rutgers Professor Bruce Baker. This is the second edition of the report originally released in 2012. It has been updated by the author.

Baker concludes that, despite recent rhetoric, “on average, aggregate measures of per-pupil spending are positively associated with improved or higher student outcomes,” while “schooling resources which cost money … are positively associated with student outcomes.” Finally, reviewing the high-quality evidence on the effect of school finance reforms, he asserts: “Sustained improvements to the level and distribution of funding across local public school districts can lead to improvements in the level and distribution of student outcomes.”

The full report is available below. The executive summary is pasted directly below.

Executive Summary

This second edition policy brief revisits the long and storied literature on whether money matters in providing a quality education. It includes research released since the original brief in 2012 and covers a handful of additional topics. Increasingly, political rhetoric adheres to the unfounded certainty that money doesn’t make a difference in education, and that reduced funding is unlikely to harm educational quality. Such proclamations have even been used to justify large cuts to education budgets over the past few years. These positions, however, have little basis in the empirical research on the relationship between funding and school quality.

In the following brief, I discuss major studies on three specific topics: (a) whether how much money schools spend matters; (b) whether specific schooling resources that cost money matter; and (c) whether substantive and sustained state school finance reforms matter. Regarding these three questions, I conclude:

Does money Matter? Yes. On average, aggregate measures of per-pupil spending are positively associated with improved or higher student outcomes. The size of this effect is larger in some studies than in others, and, in some cases, additional funding appears to matter more for some students than for others. Clearly, there are other factors that may moderate the influence of funding on student outcomes, such as how that money is spent. In other words, money must be spent wisely to yield benefits. But, on balance, in direct tests of the relationship between financial resources and student outcomes, money matters.

Do schooling resources that cost money matter? Yes. Schooling resources that cost money, including smaller class sizes, additional supports, early childhood programs and more competitive teacher compensation (permitting schools and districts to recruit and retain a higher-quality teacher workforce), are positively associated with student outcomes. Again, in some cases, those effects are larger than in others, and there is also variation
 by student population and other contextual variables. On the whole, however, the things that cost money benefit students, and there is scarce evidence that there are more cost-effective alternatives.

Do state school finance reforms matter? 
Yes. Sustained improvements to the level and distribution of funding across local public school districts can lead to improvements in the level and distribution of student outcomes. While money alone may not be the answer, more equitable and adequate allocation of financial inputs to schooling provide a necessary underlying condition for improving the equity and adequacy of outcomes. The available evidence suggests that appropriate combinations of more adequate funding with more accountability for its use may be most promising.

While there may in fact be better and more efficient ways to leverage the education dollar toward improved student outcomes, we do know the following:

• Many of the ways in which schools currently spend money do improve student outcomes.
• When schools have more money, they have greater opportunity to spend productively. When they don’t, they can’t.
• Arguments that across-the-board budget cuts will not hurt outcomes are completely unfounded.

In short, money matters, resources that cost money matter, and a more equitable distribution of school funding can improve outcomes. Policymakers would be well-advised to rely on high-quality research to guide the critical choices they make regarding school finance.

Journalists interested in the report can contact Professor Baker directly – bruce.baker [at] gse.rutgers.edu

Documents

Does Money Matter in Education? | Shanker Institute:

Online Charter Schools Tested by Setbacks and Self-Inflicted Blows - NBC News

Online Charter Schools Tested by Setbacks and Self-Inflicted Blows - NBC News:

Online Charter Schools Tested by Setbacks and Self-Inflicted Blows

Online charter schools have soared in popularity in recent years, based on a deceptively simple promise: delivering quality instruction — anytime and anywhere — to any student with an Internet connection.

But new questions about the quality of that education, and how the schools operate, are threatening to stifle that growth.

Supporters of traditional public school systems say the online schools lack accountability and are too dependent on for-profit school managers. High-profile scandals have added to the perception.

The criticism has sharpened since an October 2015 study of 200 online charter schools that serve approximately 200,000 students in 26 states. It found that charter students who received instruction exclusively via the Internet achieved "significantly weaker academic performance" in math and reading, suffered from larger class sizes and received far less attention from teachers than those in traditional schools.

The study — funded by the pro-charter Walton Family Foundation and comprised of three separate reports by Stanford's Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO), the Center for Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) at the University of Washington and Mathematica, a private policy research company — found the education deficit was "exacerbated by high student-teacher ratios and minimal student-teacher contact time."

CRPE Director Robin Lake said the results came as little surprise to anyone who had followed student testing in individual states that hosted online charter schools.

"I think the general reaction was that it was the evidence people needed to confirm what they already knew," she said.

Nonetheless, the study added fuel to the debate over charters' impact on the traditional public school system.

"It should certainly give parents, taxpayers and policymakers pause before Online Charter Schools Tested by Setbacks and Self-Inflicted Blows - NBC News:

In the age of Common Core, states are still defining ‘proficient’ differently - The Washington Post

In the age of Common Core, states are still defining ‘proficient’ differently - The Washington Post:

In the age of Common Core, states are still defining ‘proficient’ differently

 The vast majority of states have adopted Common Core academic standards, but individual states are still setting different definitions of “proficient” on annual math and reading tests, according to a new study.

And in many states, the study says, annual tests set a significantly lower bar for “proficient” than the National Assessment for Educational Progress, or NAEP, a national exam that is administered every two years to a sample of students in the fourth and eighth grades.

The analysis by Gary Phillips of the American Institutes for Research shows that it continues to be difficult to directly compare student performance across state lines — one of the key problems that common standards and tests were meant to address.

“This is something I’m hoping will just help policymakers put in perspective what the states are claiming and what they’re doing,” Phillips said. “The states still are setting wildly different standards.”

[What happens when the Common Core becomes less common?]

The 50 states gave 50 different tests until last year. Although some were scored rigorously, others were not, making it difficult to compare how students in Alabama were faring compared with students in Arizona and Alaska.

In 2015, more than half the states administered one of two Common Core tests developed with multimillion-dollar grants from the Obama administration. The analysis shows that students in the 11 states (plus D.C.) that administered the PARCC (Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for In the age of Common Core, states are still defining ‘proficient’ differently - The Washington Post:

Corporate reformers wreck public schools: Billionaire foundations and Wall Street financiers are not out to help your kids learn - Salon.com

Corporate reformers wreck public schools: Billionaire foundations and Wall Street financiers are not out to help your kids learn - Salon.com:

Corporate reformers wreck public schools: Billionaire foundations and Wall Street financiers are not out to help your kids learn

Both parties embrace all the wrong education reform ideas. Why is it so hard to invest in kids and teachers?

George W. Bush, Bill Gates, Arne Duncan (Credit: AP/Charles Dharapak/Ted S. Warren/Andrew Harnik)

 From the book "SCHOOLS ON TRIAL" by Nikhil Goyal

When Barack Obama was elected president of the United States in November 2008, I was grinding my way through the eighth grade, my final year at John F. Kennedy Middle School before I was to move up to high school. While I followed the election closely, the candidates’ positions on education policy weren’t of much interest to me. And at the time, I didn’t give any thought to how my school experience could be different.

Among many progressives and liberals, there were flickers of hope that Obama’s election signaled the prospect that his presidency would lead to the reversal of the No Child Left Behind Act and Bush-era policies. It sure seemed that way once he named Stanford professor and NCLB critic Linda Darling-Hammond to head his transition’s education policy team.

But then in December 2008, any remaining optimism suddenly vanished. The president-elect appointed the CEO of Chicago Public Schools and his friend (and basketball pal) Arne Duncan to the post of secretary of education. A report by the Broad Foundation, a group that has financed anti– public education reforms, noted that Obama’s election and the appointment of Duncan “marked the pinnacle of hope for our work in education reform. In many ways, we feel the stars have finally aligned.”

As head of Chicago schools, Duncan shook up the system—in a disturbing manner. He bounced kids around from school to school to make it appear as though schools were “turning around.” He did not confront the effect of poverty on learning in a city system where 80 percent of schoolchildren live below the poverty line. He dumbed down standards, misleading the public when he pronounced that test scores had improved. He shuttered “failing” schools, replacing neighborhood schools with charters, often financed and run by fat cats and corporations. This is the man Obama put his faith in to run the Department of Education of the most powerful nation in the world.

The Obama-Duncan duo began their campaign on public education by surreptitiously slipping the Race to the Top program into the stimulus package. Few were aware of the magnitude of this initiative. Race to the Top is a $4.35 billion sweepstakes contest that dangled dollar bills before states that adopted Duncan-backed policies. As with all races, there were many more losers than winners. Obama and Duncan were well aware that states were bleeding red ink, teachers were being laid off left and right, and school budgets were being slashed. States would have little choice but to comply.

In distilled terms, Race to the Top is No Child Left Behind on steroids. Obama’s education policies have had a broader and more harmful effect on schools than Bush’s policies.

In order to qualify for money, states had to agree to tie teacher evaluations to standardized test scores, implement the Common Core standards, institute charter-Corporate reformers wreck public schools: Billionaire foundations and Wall Street financiers are not out to help your kids learn - Salon.com:

Real Solidarity In The Time of Education Reform | The Jose Vilson

Real Solidarity In The Time of Education Reform | The Jose Vilson:

Real Solidarity In The Time of Education Reform

We don’t have to choose between the testing / Common Core State Standards / Teach For America / charter school debate and intersectional / race talk. In fact, they’re part and parcel.

I want to talk about all of it from the position that we need to look at education reform from the most disenfranchised, those who’ve rarely if ever had a voice in their own schooling for the last century. Generally, that means people of color and poor white people, more so the former than the latter. Instead of creating unity around the most ignored, some edu-activist movements decided to wait until after education reformers ravaged centers of color, specifically urban school systems. On a national level, we leave these wide gaps for the wrong ideas to creep in, pre-packaged with social justice language, but without the principles that allows for people on the ground to have real agency.

People can mistake teargas, handcuffs, and hyperbole for uplift, but the totality of the work and the people it helps is ultimately the effect we should look towards.

We can have the conversation about political hopefuls on the city, state, and federal level all across the country, but if there isn’t a plan that’s one big “no,” then there’s no reason to trust the next Real Solidarity In The Time of Education Reform | The Jose Vilson: