Schools of choice creating white flight in metro Detroit

Schools of choice creating white flight in metro Detroit:

Schools of choice creating white flight in metro Detroit

When the high school in Eastpointe recently welcomed the football team from Lakeview High, it was a homecoming of sorts.

That’s because nearly 700 students from Eastpointe actually attend school in Lakeview, a public school district five miles away in St. Clair Shores. As it happens, many of the students who left Eastpointe for Lakeview are white.

• Editor's note: This story originally appeared online at Bridge magazine. 

So it was that on a cool September evening, most students and fans on the home team’s side of the football field were African American, while many of their white neighbors filled the Lakeview side. It was a sight that saddened Jennifer Ward, head of the band boosters.

A lifelong Eastpointe resident, Ward, who is white, graduated from the high school in 1988, when almost everyone in the district looked like her. Eastpointe was called East Detroit back then, but residents soon changed its name to distance this blue-collar city in Macomb County from the crime-soaked image of its neighbor to the south. The only vestige of its old name is in its schools, which are still called East Detroit Public Schools.

Ward said she thinks half of those who left East Detroit schools choose other districts for racial reasons. Others, she said, probably did so because the Lakeview schools have better test scores, more funding and better facilities. She admits there is likely no way to know for sure. But she also believes that when neighbors don’t go to school together, they don’t get to know each other as well as those who do.

“East Detroit is diverse. It’s the real world,” Ward said. “Everybody should go to school where they live.”

►Editorial: New lawsuit says we're failing Detroit kids. It's right
►Contributor: Don't forget poor kids in suburban schools

The white flight seen in Eastpointe is playing out in districts across metro Detroit and around the state. In the past 20 years, as African Americans have moved out of Detroit and into the suburbs, white parents have, whether by chance or design, used the state’s schools of choice program to move their children to less diverse, more white traditional public schools. At the same time, some black families have chosen historically white suburban school districts to send their children, while others are choosing charter schools that are strikingly more segregated and black.

As a result, school districts across parts of the state are ending up more racially segregated than the communities from which they draw students.

Such is the case in Eastpointe.

Consider: The East Detroit school district is only 19 percent white, even though 40 percent of school-age children living there are white. And the flood of East Detroit students to Lakeview, which is 80 percent white, has produced yet another shift: The loss of students prompted East Detroit to solicit students from other cities, mostly Detroit.

“School choice has accelerated segregation by race, by class, by ability, by special education status and by language,” said Gary Miron, an education professor at Western Michigan University who has reported widely (and often critically) on Michigan’s school choice policies.

►Related: Map shows just how segregated metro Detroit is

But defenders of school choice say the policies produce more good than harm by empowering parents – black and white – whose local schools are failing their children.

Gary Naeyaert, executive director of the Great Lakes Education Project, is one of the staunchest defenders of school choice in Michigan. He acknowledges that choice can financially harm the districts that are losing students.Schools of choice creating white flight in metro Detroit:

 

Booed in Brockton -- state education head hammered on charter schools

Booed in Brockton -- state education head hammered on charter schools:

Booed in Brockton -- state education head hammered on charter schools

Loud hissing and then booing broke out in a Brockton school cafeteria during a town hall-style forum on Tuesday when the state's public education commissioner mentioned the charter school he recommended for approval in the city this year. "You can decide whether we judged erroneously or not," Chester Mitchell said. "You can decide that the demand is not there. The facts belie that."

By Marc Larocque
Enterprise Staff Writer 

BROCKTON – Loud hissing and then booing broke out in a Brockton High School cafeteria during a town hall-style forum on Tuesday when the state’s public education commissioner started talking about charter schools, with the uproar only intensifying after he mentioned the name of one that he recommended to open in the city this year.

One of the problems with the new Brockton charter school that Department of Elementary and Secondary Education Commissioner Mitchell Chester avoided mentioning is that the school did not open in Brockton. It also didn’t open on the schedule it planned. After renovation delays reported at one site in Brockton and a problem obtaining proper permits for construction at a second location in the city, the New Heights Charter School opened 22 miles away in Norwood after gaining Mitchell’s permission less than a week before the first day of class. Before that, Mitchell’s department approved a shortened school year to help the new charter school get off the ground.

Instead of acknowledging those problems with the readiness of the New Heights Charter School to open, Mitchell seemed to suggest the exact opposite for his reasons to recommend the Brockton charter school’s approval in mid-February earlier this year.

“We have very strict criteria for judging whether an applicant or an application is ready to start a charter school,” said Mitchell, noting that New Heights failed to gain state approval during two previous attempts. “The New Heights Charter School submitted two years of applications and was rejected because we didn’t think they were ready to start a charter school.”

That’s when some members of the crowd let him have it, heckling, hissing and booing.

“They still aren’t,” one man shouted, responding to the assertion that New Heights was ready to start a charter school. “They’re in Norwood.”

Mitchell was speaking in the cafeteria as part of an event to kick-off the school year, which also served as a rally for the Brockton Kids Count campaign, launched by the school district in March to call on the state to provide more adequate funding for public education in the city.

The story continues after the following video.Booed in Brockton -- state education head hammered on charter schools:

Trump's New Education Transition Team Has Corporate Dark-Money Ties

Trump's New Education Transition Team Has Corporate Dark-Money Ties:

Trump's New Education Transition Team Has Corporate Dark-Money Ties

Major education news outlet Education Week reported that Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s campaign has appointed two new staffers to his “presidential transition team for education”: the Hoover Institution’s Williamson Evers and the American Enterprise Institute’s (AEI) Gerard Robinson. Both Evers and Robinson are well-connected in the pro-privatization education policy sphere and affiliated with several groups devoted to weakening public schools.

In a September 19 article, Education Week reported that multiple sources confirmed the addition of Evers and Robinson to Trump’s education transition team. Both Evers and Robinson have previously served in Republican administrations and are connected to prominent corporate- and dark-money-fueled groups in the education policy landscape. As Education Week explained:

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has picked Williamson M. Evers, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and Gerard Robinson, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, to be on his presidential transition team for education, according to multiple sources.

Evers served as an assistant secretary for policy at the U.S. Department of Education from 2007 to 2009, and also was an adviser to former U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings in 2007 under President George W. Bush. Robinson served as Florida's education commissioner from 2011 to 2012, and has also served as Virginia's education secretary and as the president of the Black Alliance for Educational Options.

The policies backed by Trump, Evers, and Robinson -- often cloaked in the language of so-called “school choice” -- have earned the support of corporate and private billionaire funders eager to profit off students, an interest Trump himself has pursued through his now-defunct and allegedly fraudulent Trump University business. Among education groups funded largely by right-wing dark money to drum up support for education privatization are three directly connected to Evers and Robinson.

Evers is a research fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution at Stanford University, which publishes the education policy journal Education Next and has received thousands in funding from the anti-union, right-wingBradley Foundation to support a K-12 education “taskforce.” Evers’ work at the Hoover Institution has largely focused on his opposition to the Common Core State Standards and his conservative interpretation of the federal government’s limited role in shaping education policies. Trump has both egregiously misrepresented the standards and confused the parameters of federal education policy on the campaign trail, namely by repeatedly and incorrectly asserting that he would abolish the Common Core as president.

Robinson is a resident fellow at the conservative right-wing think tank AEI, which has received millions in funding from conservative donors such as dark-money conduit DonorsTrust, the Charles Koch Foundation, and the Sarah Scaife Foundation, to support general operations and education-related research. AEI, “one of the country’s main bastions of neoconservatism,” frequently publishes education research defendingvoucher programs that drain money from public schools (similar to Trump’s recent education policyproposals) and online education programs that allow private companies to profit off students with little oversight. Robinson’s tenure at AEI has included Bradley Foundation-funded work on the “future of American society and the role education plays in it” and efforts to push a conservative view on racial justice in education across mainstream and right-wing media outlets.

Robinson also previously led the Black Alliance for Educational Options (BAEO), a group that receives substantial funding from conservative donors to make the case for privatized educational policies as a means for racial equity. Both AEI and BAEO work closely with a number of other pro-privatization nonprofits and think tanks such as the anti-union American Federation for Children and the Koch-affiliated State Policy Networkof right-wing think tanks.

Evers’ and Robinson’s research and affiliations reveal a commitment to pro-education privatization policies that should come as no surprise -- they perfectly align with Trump’s support for expanding opportunities to open up the public school system to market competition and private, for-profit actors with little regulation. These recent appointments reveal the Trump campaign’s active desire to operate solidly within the “education reform” echo chamber built, funded, and fueled by dark-money conservative activists.Trump's New Education Transition Team Has Corporate Dark-Money Ties:

 

Don't Blame the Teachers- The Atlantic

Content Changes Key for Teacher Success - The Atlantic:

Don't Blame the Teachers

Blame the curriculum.

Why has the topic of teacher quality suddenly reached such a crescendo? Education reform has been on the national agenda since 1983, the year of A Nation at Risk, but only in the last few years has the teacher-quality issue risen to the top. I think it may be reform fatigue, possibly desperation. The teacher is becoming a convenient scapegoat for America’s education reformers, who, after decades of ideas that have not panned out, cling to the belief that the flaw is not in the reform ideas themselves but in their implementation.

Teachers are being blamed for failures not their own. The “back-to-basics” and “whole-school reform” strategies disappointed. Similarly, as the National Assessment of Educational Progress has consistently shown, the state-standards movement and the No Child Left Behind law have left high-school students just about as far behind as they were before the reforms were instituted. Charter schools, despite their laudable triumphs, are highly uneven in quality, and their overall results are not much better than those of regular schools.

Teachers have understandably become demoralized by being constantly blamed for failures not of their own making. Here is the new conventional wisdom about teachers taken from a 2013 article in the nonpartisan policy magazine Governingof June 13, 2013:

The research is clear: Teacher quality affects student learning more than any other school-based variable (issues such as income and parental education levels are external). And the impact of student achievement on economic competitiveness is equally clear. That’s why it’s so disturbing that in 2010, the SAT scores of students intending to pursue undergraduate education degrees ranked 25th out of 29 majorsgenerally associated with four-year degree programs. The test scores of students seeking to enter graduate education programs are similarly low, and, on average, undergraduate education majors score even lower than the graduate education applicant pool as a whole. Education schools long have accepted under-qualified students, then offered them programs heavy on pedagogy and child development and light on subject-matter content.

This scientific-sounding comment is incorrect from the start. The assertion that “Teacher quality affects student learning more than any other school-based variable” isn’t corroborated. According to research summaries by Russ Whitehurst, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a better curriculum can range from being slightly to dramatically more effective than a better teacher. That’s not surprising when you consider that the curriculum is what teachers teach and what students are supposed to learn.

Evaluating teachers based on how much they contribute to student progress in reading, for example, doesn’t make sense under current conditions in American schools. The curriculum-blind standardized tests focus on the measurement of nonexistent general skills like the ability to find the main idea, making Content Changes Key for Teacher Success - The Atlantic:

Fear Of A Black Educator, Part 1 | The Jose Vilson

Fear Of A Black Educator, Part 1 | The Jose Vilson:

Fear Of A Black Educator, Part 1

Last night, in a fit of angst, I sent off a series of tweets:

It’s hard telling kids to pledge allegiance to a flag when its representatives barely represent us. #TerenceCrutcher

— Jose Vilson (@TheJLV) September 20, 2016

Without hesitation, someone decided to reply with “Why not move to a country where there isn’t white oppressors then?” It was the usual fare for folks who tweet with a social justice framework. The anonymous trolls range anywhere from 16 year olds getting their kicks from beating down “social justice warriors” to older folks touting flags, dogs, and egg avatars. I’m not fazed. 

But this one made me do a double take. Because, in many ways, the current education reform movement treats longstanding educators, especially of color, as disposable. Indeed, educators of color seemingly have a choice to teach wherever they wish. They can teach at a private school with a plethora of resources, only a tint of racial diversity, and a truly safe space for kids to learn. This space won’t get shut down from test scores or incompetent adults. They can teach at a charter school and work longer hours, expertise need not apply. They may get their supplies paid for, but if they come off-script, they get their boundaries quickly redrawn for them.

Or they can teach at a public school. They might want to teach at a well-resourced and well-renowned school, but chances are, they’ll be told they’d be better off teaching at a low-income school with mostly students of color.

I’ve spoken to dozens of educators of color across the country. It’s no surprise that choice for educators is more perilous for those of us with marginalized phenotype and skin color. As I’ve Fear Of A Black Educator, Part 1 | The Jose Vilson:

Michigan Leads Nation … In Denying Child Care To Low-Income Families

Michigan Leads Nation … In Denying Child Care To Low-Income Families:

Michigan Leads Nation … In Denying Child Care To Low-Income Families

The cost of child care is one of the biggest expenses facing many families in the United States. For some, the cost is more than their rent or mortgage payment. Low income families especially struggle to find affordable child care.

Child care providers are among the lowest paid workers, are most likely to be living in poverty, and barely making ends meet for their own families.

Yet, lawmakers in Michigan are about to walk away from $20.5 million in federal funding for child care because they won’t commit to spending $7.5 million in state money to help working families. Michigan has the disappointing distinction of being the state that returns the most unused federal funding dollars every year. In 2014, Michigan missed out on $9.3 million of federal funding.

Michigan’s limit on the amount of income a child care assistance recipient can earn is also the lowest in all 50 states. That means Michigan only offers assistance to the bare minimum number of needy families.

Some legislators have named underutilization of the program as a reason for not supporting funding, but Michigan also makes it incredibly difficult to apply for child care assistance. Parents trying to get help report onerous paperwork, long waits, and confusion over the process.

At the recent Child Care Policy Summit in Lansing, participants heard from many people about road blocks to receiving assistance.

Marnese Jackson is one of them. The Michigan mother found paying for full day care for herMichigan Leads Nation … In Denying Child Care To Low-Income Families:

The Child Predator We Invite into Our Schools | gadflyonthewallblog

The Child Predator We Invite into Our Schools | gadflyonthewallblog:

The Child Predator We Invite into Our Schools

There is a good chance a predator is in the classroom with your child right now.

He is reading her homework assignments, quizzes and emails. He is timing how long it takes her to answer questions, noting her right and wrong answers. He’s even watching her body language to determine if she’s engaged in the lesson.

He has given her a full battery of psychological assessments, and she doesn’t even notice. He knows her academic strengths and weaknesses, when she’ll give up, when she’ll preserver, how she thinks.

And he’s not a teacher, councilor or even another student. In fact, your child can’t even see him – he’s on her computer or hand-held device.

It’s called data mining, and it’s one of the major revenue sources of ed-tech companies. These are for-profit business ventures that produce education software: programs to organize student information and help them learn. They make The Child Predator We Invite into Our Schools | gadflyonthewallblog: