Chalkbeat

What do New Yorkers want from education news? Here’s what a new survey tells us.

2025-03-27T20:30:39+00:00

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More coverage of school safety. Stories about what students are really learning in the classroom. And less focus on the most politically fraught topics in education.

That’s what New Yorkers indicated they wanted from their education news in a survey conducted last December for Civic News Company, Chalkbeat’s parent organization. The poll asked New York City residents how they consumed news, what they needed from education coverage in the city, and about the different ways they showed up for their communities as parents, advocates, and citizens.

Here are a few key takeaways.

1. Local news really matters — and for parents, education news is especially important.

The survey asked New Yorkers how important information about a range of local topics – from politics to transportation and emergencies – was to their daily lives. In almost every category, most respondents said that information was somewhat or very important. (The only category to rate fairly low in importance? Local sports.)

Local education news was on the lower side, with 74% of overall respondents saying that kind of information was somewhat or very important to them. But that obscures how critical parents say that information is to them: Of those surveyed who identified as parents, 95% of them told us that getting information about local education, including about school programs and school quality, was somewhat or very important.

2. School safety, curriculum issues, and student performance are especially important to many New Yorkers.

So what kind of education news are New Yorkers looking for?

Parents, teachers, and those who have made an effort to effect change in local or state education were asked to name what issues matter most to them. The safety of schools, the content students are taught, and student academic performance rose to the top in importance. Upcoming events and local school council elections were least likely to be named as the most pressing issues.

3. But satisfaction with education coverage varies.

Despite their interest in education, New Yorkers aren’t always satisfied with the information they are finding. Overall, New Yorkers were less satisfied with information they receive about education than other topics, including weather and transportation. Less than 50% of respondents said they were even “somewhat” satisfied with local education information.

Still, New Yorkers surveyed showed relatively high satisfaction with coverage of certain key topics. Those included school calendars – a popular topic at Chalkbeat – as well as upcoming school events, and, to a lesser extent, academic performance.

Information about school council elections and educational disparities was lacking, the respondents said, with only 20% and 19% satisfaction rates, respectively. These findings were of particular interest to us at Chalkbeat, where we often highlight how racial, economic, and other disparities show up in New York City’s public schools.

Recent Chalkbeat coverage of the city’s low-turnout Community Education Council elections — just 2% of eligible parents voted in the last election — led to a probe by the comptroller’s office and highlighted the need for increased outreach. (Here’s the latest on this year’s education council elections.)

One area that many respondents said in written responses they wanted covered less: political and cultural debates around diversity, equity, and inclusion, as well as transgender students’ rights. This sentiment came from New Yorkers on all sides of these issues.

4. Word of mouth really matters – as do Parent Teacher Associations.

Asked where they turn for quality information, New Yorkers told us they look most often to friends, family, and colleagues. Local digital news outlets ranked second, tied with online search and local TV stations.

The trend holds for education information. New Yorkers consistently turn to personal networks for their information. And compared to respondents nationwide, they were less likely to cite local schools, districts, and local TV stations as sources. But New Yorkers set themselves apart in another way: They were much more likely to cite their PTAs or parent associations as a source for local education news.

5. Involvement in education is low.

New Yorkers are interested in civic issues – but not always moved to participate, the survey found. A little under half of respondents in New York City reported getting involved in local or state education, such as talking to a member of the community about an education issue or participating in a school board. And only 9% described themselves as advocating and working for improvements.

No surprise here: Educators were a bit more likely than respondents overall to say they are civically engaged and had volunteered, contacted an elected official, or organized in their community in the last year.

This survey, part of an effort called the Civic Information Needs Census, was conducted online Dec. 9-20, 2024 by EMBOLD, a nonpartisan research company. It surveyed 1,428 adults in New York City, oversampling parents and educators, and had a 3% margin of error.

Sarah Darville is Chalkbeat’s editor in chief.

Chalkbeat now has a new look — and a public health sister site

2024-08-26T11:30:03+00:00

Welcome to the new Chalkbeat!

If you’re a regular reader, you might notice that things look a little different here today. Nothing about our stories or the functionality of our site is changing, but we have a new look that we hope you enjoy: simple, modern, and with the work you know and love front and center.

Why? It’s always nice to feel fresh at the start of a school year. But more importantly, the change comes as we launch a new sibling site. Meet Healthbeat, which is officially launching today to cover public health.

Healthbeat reporters will be digging into issues that shape our collective well-being, from infectious diseases to air and water quality and food safety. And they will be bringing the Chalkbeat (and Votebeat) model of national and local reporting to bear on public health at a time when it’s badly needed. Healthbeat will start with bureaus in New York City and Atlanta as well as national reporting in partnership with the great folks over at KFF Health News.

I hope you will check them out, starting with editor in chief Charlene Pacenti’s introduction to Healthbeat’s work. You can also sign up for Healthbeat’s newsletters here.

— Sarah Darville, Chalkbeat editor in chief

Chalkbeat gets a shout-out on ‘Abbott Elementary’ season three premiere

2024-02-08T16:01:56+00:00

Well, that was cool!

Last night’s season three premiere of “Abbott Elementary” on ABC featured a Chalkbeat shout-out none of us was expecting.

Janine Teagues, played by the show’s creator Quinta Brunson, is telling someone from the district about choosing colors for her classroom: I wanted to go with blue, which inspires focus.

District employee Manny: And calm, which is so important for primary classes. I read about that in Chalkbeat.

Janine: You read Chalkbeat?

Manny: Mhm. Janine: I basically live in the comments section, so.

Our phones immediately lit up from readers across the country. The Chalkbeat staff was, to put it mildly, freaking out in the best way. And we loved seeing responses like this one:

Spot on and so well-deserved. Teachers do read Chalkbeat!! https://t.co/FxC8fEBGUM
— Sara Clough (@Sfclough) February 8, 2024

If you’re coming to Chalkbeat for the first time because you saw us on Abbott, welcome! We’re a nonprofit news organization that reports on schools and education policy in eight locations across the country. We are powered by award-winning journalists who live in the communities we serve and care deeply about education, and by a community of teachers and parents who read our work and tell us what’s happening inside their homes and classrooms. Many teachers like Janine are also members — donors who make it possible for us to stay independent as local news struggles.

How ‘Abbott Elementary’ speaks to the bond between students and teachers: ‘You are making a difference’

What was that story Janine mentioned? There’s no exact match, we did recently write about an Indiana school’s new sensory room with walls painted teal. (We’ve also written about the show and how other Philly teachers felt watching it.)

And about our comments section: We did have a thriving one in our early days, but switched to other ways of connecting with readers a few years back. Janine’s reference makes us think that, like so many teachers, she’s been a fan for a while. Did we mention this is our 10th anniversary year?

We’re grateful that so many of the Janines of Philadelphia, and the rest of the country, are avid Chalkbeat readers. We’re willing to bet that not every Janine in your community is a Chalkbeat newsletter subscriber yet, though. We’d love it if you’d share this with them — they can sign up here — or take a moment to tell us your reaction to last night’s episode.

Advanced Placement debate feels high-stakes for teachers of African American history

2023-02-02T19:16:30+00:00

Keziah Ridgeway has taught African American history at Northeast High School in Philadelphia for four years, calling it a “labor of love.”

“I say it is a labor because it is very daunting teaching African American history,” she said. “It’s a lot of trauma — a lot of events that can make you uncomfortable.”

Still, Ridgeway added, “It’s something that needs to be done.”

More teachers across the country are likely to confront this challenge in the years to come as the College Board rolls out its first Advanced Placement course in African American studies.

Already, the course has been thrust into the political fray. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said the state’s schools wouldn’t teach the class, alleging that it violated a 2022 state law that restricts how race and racism are taught. He and other state officials pointed to the inclusion of subjects like Black queer studies, the debate over reparations for slavery, and the Black Lives Matter movement in criticizing the curriculum.

Then, after the College Board released a final curriculum framework Wednesday that removed much of the criticized content, some protested that the course had been watered down — while educators who are piloting the class and others like it stressed the vital role it can play in schools.

“I compel anyone who has questions about this course to actually take the time to read the curriculum, spend time in classrooms, and talk to students,” said Melissa Tracy, a teacher at Odyssey Charter School in Delaware who is teaching a pilot version of the AP course this year. “What many students will tell you is, ‘This is the first time in my entire educational experience where I actually get to learn this content — because I was never taught it.’”

Tony Green, a teacher at Bishop O’Dowd High School in Oakland, California who is participating in the pilot, said it’s a more comprehensive course than any high school class that has preceded it.

“This is the ideal situation for a teacher who’s teaching African American studies, because the resources have already been gathered,” said Green, who has taught Black history for decades.

The College Board has denied that DeSantis or any states influenced the revision process, saying the changes were pedagogical and based on feedback from educators, the New York Times reported.

National curriculum decisions are rare

Curriculum revisions, especially to a new course, aren’t unusual, noted Tambra Jackson, a professor and dean of the School of Education at Indiana University - Purdue University Indianapolis who focuses on social justice in education. The College Board’s process of convening scholars and teachers at the high school and college levels to construct the course wasn’t unusual either.

“If this would have happened without the political fanfare, we might not be giving it that much attention,” she said.

What is different now is the intensity of the Republicans’ focus on how race and gender are taught in schools, and the way figures like DeSantis have turned critiques more often hashed out in state standards committee hearings into a political spectacle. Eighteen states have legislated or imposed changes to how race and racism can be taught since January 2021, according to Education Week’s tracker. Many have also restricted discussion of sexism and LGBTQ content. Schools also have faced a new wave of challenges to the availability of school library books.

“The political context where we’re in right now — there is this very direct, extreme focus on any kind of social awareness, on any kind of social action that focuses on how human beings in this country have been dehumanized, and there is an attempt to water down that history,” Jackson said.

“Because of all of that, on Feb. 1, the first day of Black History Month, the announcement that this curriculum has been revised, and the revision excludes really important, key people and thought leaders — it is disheartening,” she said.

The curriculum framework for an AP course is in many ways a particularly vulnerable target for political opposition, since it is a rare piece of public schooling in America that is nationally standardized. Generally state bodies adopt standards that guide teaching of various subjects, while local school districts and school leaders choose textbooks and curriculum, and individual teachers make daily choices about what materials to use and topics to emphasize.

Textbooks in California and Texas, for example, vary in their treatment of topics like Reconstruction, the period immediately following the Civil War. And debates about topics like sex education, climate change, and evolution have flared in parts of the country for decades.

Debates about teaching Black history have a long history

In a number of cities, including Newark and Philadelphia, African American history is a curriculum staple.

Philadelphia has required all students to take an African American history course since 2005 in order to graduate. There, officials don’t shy away from teaching upsetting history. The district’s soon-to-be-updated curriculum will include a unit on one of the most fraught racial incidents in the history of Philadelphia: the city’s standoffs with Black activists who were part of the MOVE organization. In 1978 a police officer was killed in a shootout; in 1985, the bombing of the MOVE house by the police resulted in the deaths of 11 people, including children.

“Our official position is that we encourage teachers to approach controversial issues in the classroom,” said Ismael Jimenez, the district’s director of social studies curriculum who taught history in the district, including that course, for 12 years.

Established courses in many districts emerged from decades of activism and come with their own history of debate about how they should be taught. Last year, Detroit’s public school district chose new curriculum materials for its elective African American history course that the superintendent noted emphasized “strength, joy, and achievement,” without the frequent overemphasis on slavery as the starting point of Black history.

In Newark, New Jersey, where a 2002 state law required the teaching of African American history, the district didn’t offer a complete middle and high school curriculum on the subject until 2021 – nearly 20 years later.

Bashir Muhammad Ptah Akinyele teaches history and Africana studies at Weequahic High School in Newark and now uses the district’s Amistad curriculum. “I’m appreciative of the conversation. I think it’s needed,” he said of the debate about the AP course content. “But it’s not something new.”

Whether to give space to figures some find radical is always a piece of that discussion, even in places with legal protections, he said. In other states, he knows those battles are even tougher.

“There’s still a struggle to factually document the history of Black people in this country,” he said. Often when schools introduce the subject, he said, “They want something safe, comfortable.”

Green said he wasn’t surprised to see the course spark national backlash, adding that historically, introducing an African American studies curriculum has “always been a struggle.”

He pointed to student movements in the late 1960s, where protestors clashed with university officials and police in an effort to establish ethnic studies programs. “It was definitely attacked,” he said of African American studies at the time, adding the efforts came under fire from local conservative leaders. “There was bloodshed behind the introduction of that curriculum.”

The College Board’s new curriculum suggests that many of the topics now gone from the course framework can still be the focus of student projects — with a sample list of topics including, for example, “Gay life and expression in Black communities,” and “Reparations debates in the U.S./ the Americas.” Tracy and Green, who are teaching the pilot AP course, both noted that a curriculum doesn’t dictate every move teachers make in a classroom.

“There’s still a lot of built-in flexibility,” Tracy said. “Although there may not be a very specific lesson on Black Lives Matter, there still is an opportunity for students to research it. And at the end of the day, I don’t know how you can not talk about it. How do you talk about the Black freedom struggle without talking about Black Lives Matter?”

To Jackson, Ridgeway, and others, the revisions remain disappointing — and suggest the organization folded to political influence.

“For a long time, before cities and school districts began to teach ethnic studies and African American history, our students were subjected to a history that was very much whitewashed,” Ridgeway said. “Removing these things is unacceptable. It waters down our history and it hides the truth from our students.”

What is still heartening, Jackson said, is that the years ahead could see more students than ever getting a deep exposure to the topic.

“The fact that we now have an AP African American history course, I think it’s a wonderful thing,” she said. “I think students will take it, they will be engaged, they will be excited about the content, they will share it with their friends, and their friends will want to take it.

“When people have access, it opens up new curiosities.”

Dale Mezzacappa contributed reporting.

Julian Shen-Berro is a reporter covering national issues. Contact him at jshen-berro@chalkbeat.org.

Omicron upended school this week. Here’s what you need to know about the latest disruptions.

2022-01-06T12:57:29+00:00

It’s been a bumpy start to 2022 for America’s schools.

While most schools reopened as planned, at least 4,500 schools closed their buildings for all or part of this week, according to Burbio, a site tracking closures. That makes this week the most disrupted of the school year so far.

Although the closures affected a fraction of the roughly 100,000 American public schools, mostly in the northeast and midwest, they triggered fears of a broader return to remote instruction, seen by many as an educational disaster. That experience has led some school officials to vow to avoid the practice as much as possible.

“What we do in person cannot be replaced,” said Denver superintendent Alex Marrero. “This is not March 2020.”

But school officials are running into a simple but profound constraint: not enough staff due to the surging COVID cases. Even in Denver, 16 schools have temporarily shifted to virtual instruction because too many staff were sick or quarantined.

Meanwhile, national attention is focused on Chicago Public Schools, the country’s third-largest district, where a standoff between the teachers union and the mayor led to the last-minute cancellation of school Wednesday. It was a stark reminder of how local politics is shaping students’ school experience.

Here are some key takeaways from a chaotic and widely varied start of the new year.

Chicago is getting headlines, but its political dynamics make it an outlier.

Chicago Public Schools was shut down Wednesday after a late-night teachers union vote. Almost three-quarters of the rank-and-file members who voted said they preferred to teach remotely until Jan. 18 or until COVID rates fell, prompting the district to cancel classes. School was canceled again Thursday.

Teachers unions in several other cities have expressed similar concerns about school safety as COVID cases rise. In New York City and Philadelphia, for example, the unions have called for a temporary return to virtual learning. But they have not turned to labor action to prevent schools from opening, making Chicago an outlier — as is often the case when it comes to dynamics between the city and its teachers union.

For now, the result is at least 280,000 students out of school and some big unresolved questions, as the union is pushing for a threshold of COVID cases that would pause in-person learning citywide, an approach that city leaders say is unreasonable and health officials say is unnecessary.

Staff shortages remain the central challenge to in-person learning.

The surge in COVID-19 has left schools grappling with a fundamental challenge: Many don’t have the teachers and staff, like bus drivers, that they need to operate smoothly — or at all. More staff are now sick or quarantined, adding to already steep staffing challenges.

“Outside of Chicago and a handful of districts that announced a shift to virtual learning before Christmas, current disruptions tend to be triggered by cases among staff,” Dennis Roche of Burbio wrote in an email update.

In Philadelphia, district leaders had vowed to keep schools open but have moved 92 of the district’s 216 schools to virtual instruction due to staffing challenges. There were simply too many teachers sick, quarantining, or with pending test results, the district said.

Some schools that have stuck with in-person instruction have also struggled with missing staff, making quality instruction a challenge. One New York City high school sent students to the auditorium Monday. In Broward County, Florida, more teachers were out and in most cases the district couldn’t find a substitute, forcing some schools to double up classes.

More students are missing, too, complicating efforts to keep them learning.

New York City has kept nearly all schools open, but student attendance is unusually low — a reminder that even when in-person learning is available, many students still are receiving little or no instruction. About one third of students were absent Monday, and absenteeism rates tended to be higher in schools with more students of color.

Attendance has been relatively low all year in schools across the country, but the problem has grown with more children sick or quarantined and more parents concerned about the spread of the virus.

“There’s not teaching and learning going on anywhere near what you could feel good about as a teacher and educator,” said one Brooklyn teacher, who had raced to post online content for the many students absent Monday.

In Rochester, New York, 40% of students were absent on the first day back. Across Florida, more students were gone too — 23% were missing in Osceola County on Monday, twice what was typical last month, and 18% were absent in Miami–Dade County. In Hartford, Connecticut, nearly a third of students weren’t present.

This could lead to longer-term challenges as teachers try to catch up students who missed class while moving kids who were present forward. The good news: a number of places, including New York City, saw attendance climb a bit on Tuesday.

Many schools still aren’t prepared for virtual learning, and it still doesn’t work for lots of parents.

At schools that returned to virtual learning this week, educators and families experienced déjà vu. Teachers scrambled to post lessons online, parents cobbled together child care, and students dealt with tech glitches that kept them out of class.

In Philadelphia, some families didn’t find out until just before midnight that their child’s school would go remote the next day. In Detroit, some students are still waiting to pick up laptops to access their online classes. Others had a smoother transition. In Newark, the district gave teachers a few days before winter break to hand out work packets and review with students how to log in to their online classrooms in the event of a switch to remote.

“It’s actually going better than I anticipated,” said Alyson Hairston Beresford, a fifth grade teacher who works with students on the autism spectrum. “A few days to prepare makes a huge difference when it comes to my students who have reading difficulties, trouble holding a mouse, and other challenges.”

Parent reactions have been divided, leaving school officials to walk a careful line. Some families say schools should allow remote learning when positivity rates are at record highs, while others say the academic and mental health costs to students, plus the difficulties for parents, are too high to return to online learning for any period.

That division was evident in Detroit, where many parents supported the district’s decision to go remote through mid-January, while others were critical.

“We do put them at risk going to school, but at the same time, I feel kids are better off having school in person just to get the right education and the right needs,” said Ashley Gutierrez, a parent of three children in the district.

In-person learning continues at many schools, though it remains to be seen if more disruptions are coming.

In much of the country, in-person instruction is continuing as usual, though some districts are stepping up mitigation efforts. Some districts where masks were optional are now requiring face masks, while others are encouraging staff and students to wear medical-grade masks instead of fabric ones.

“We have got about 4,000 N95 masks that we just got in that we’re making available to anyone who needs them,” St. Louis schools spokesperson George Sells told the city’s NBC station this week. “Obviously, we would like to see people using the best quality mask that they can.”

In Colorado, where most districts brought students back for in person learning this week, some districts are tightening quarantine rules, while others are relaxing protocols in hopes of keeping more students and staff in school. Denver schools adopted shorter quarantines this week. The district’s teachers union supported the move, though its leaders said they would have preferred if teachers had to present a negative test to return.

“What we don’t want is someone to come back too early and infect others and cause more cases and more closures,” the union’s president said.

Omicron and schools: What we know now

2021-12-22T17:37:08+00:00

As the omicron variant of COVID spreads rapidly, schools are facing a fresh round of questions about how to respond.

This latest curveball comes at an awkward time, with some schools already closed for winter break or open for only a few days this week. And it remains to be seen exactly how substantial this wave will be, top health officials say, which will depend on whether omicron cases end up being less severe and whether more Americans get vaccinated and boosted.

What is clear is that some school systems are already adjusting course, but most have not yet made big changes to their plans for schooling in January or in-person learning this week. Here’s what we know so far.

Rising case numbers have caused disruption, but not widespread closures

The school tracker site Burbio estimated over 600 of the tens of thousands of American schools were unexpectedly closed at the start of this week. That’s an uptick from the prior weeks, but much lower than some weeks in November.

Local reporting in Maryland and New York suggests many of those schools saw dramatic spikes in cases among students and staff. Washington D.C.’s school district also announced Tuesday that it would extend winter break two days in January.

Even where the virus is surging, big school systems are staying open. In New York City, seven schools were closed and another 45 “under investigation” Monday, and some principals made it simpler for students to attend from home. The mayor has said wider closures of the system’s 1,600 schools are off the table, though those decisions will be made by a new mayor in January.

In Chicago, the schools chief said Tuesday that he expects schools to reopen as planned after the break, though individual classrooms could close. And in Philadelphia, district leaders said Tuesday they have no immediate plans for a shift to remote learning, though eight schools are temporarily closed.

The exception to that trend, for now: Prince George’s County Schools in Maryland, which drew headlines for its recent decision to switch to virtual learning until mid-January.

There are signs more are considering a switch, though. On Monday, the superintendent of Newark Public Schools warned parents and educators that the district was preparing for a “potential pivot to remote instruction” in January.

Some districts now lack the legal authority to entirely close on their own, like those in Tennessee, though individual schools there were granted permission to shutter for brief periods this fall in response to the delta variant.

There is widespread concern in the education community about the effects of additional school closures

Many educators and policymakers are warning against school building closures as a response, based on the academic, social, and economic effects of last school year’s widespread remote learning on students and families.

Students fell behind where they would normally be academically — especially low income, Black, and Hispanic students. This “learning loss” appeared to be worse when students received less in-person instruction.

Loss of in-person learning also means missed opportunities to connect with peers. One study found that students who learned virtually scored slightly worse on a survey of social and emotional well-being — like whether they felt that an adult at school cared about them and were generally feeling happy.

“We have seen the devastating impact of school closures and long-term virtual instruction on student learning here in Maryland and across the country,” Maryland schools chief Mohammed Choudhury said Monday. “When COVID-19 transmission increases and health measures become a necessity, schools must be the last places to close.”

Over the course of the pandemic, the research has been mixed on whether keeping schools open contributes to community spread of COVID, though conditions are continuously changing.

Unlike last year, children over 5 can now be vaccinated, although vaccination rates for younger children remain low.

Omicron appears more likely to infect vaccinated people than delta, which could make staffing shortages worse

Schools across the U.S. have struggled with shortages of bus drivers, cafeteria workers, and even teachers for months. Substitute teachers have been in particularly short supply, leaving schools with little wiggle room when educators are home sick or quarantining.

Prince George’s County, for instance, reported that hundreds of staff were either out sick with COVID or quarantining because of exposure to the virus.

Those staffing gaps contributed to a few districts’ decisions to briefly return to virtual learning over the last month. The challenges were widespread enough to prompt Education Secretary Miguel Cardona to ask states and districts to consider urgent new efforts to add staff, from signing bonuses to legal shifts that would allow retired educators to return to buildings.

The World Health Organization warned Monday that people who have been vaccinated or who have recovered from COVID are more likely to contract the new, fast-spreading variant than they were the delta variant. That could mean additional staff absences — even when vaccination rates are high — and more building closures where schools are already short-staffed.

The CDC is recommending schools utilize “test to stay,” which could keep more students and staff in school during a surge

In places like Colorado, the delta variant has posed a months-long threat to schools’ normal operation. There, school-based COVID outbreaks have been common, but schools switching to remote learning have been rare — largely due to relaxed quarantining rules.

More schools are taking steps in that direction. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last week endorsed “test to stay,” a protocol that allows unvaccinated students who would have had to quarantine after COVID exposure to instead remain in school if they have no symptoms and regularly test negative.

A variety of districts have adopted the practice, and state officials in New York and New Jersey signaled support on Monday. In places where most students haven’t given consent for frequent testing, the logistics of a true “test to stay” program remain difficult. Chicago is piloting it in just one school.

Districts are beginning to rely more on at-home testing, another tool to monitor and limit spread. Chicago is distributing 150,000 at-home tests meant for students before returning after winter break, and D.C. is asking families and staff to use the extended spring break to pick up tests of their own.

At-home rapid tests may be more accessible soon, too. President Biden announced Tuesday that Americans will be able to request free tests to be delivered to their homes starting in January.

Biden admin: New effort to start COVID vaccination sites at schools on the way

2021-10-20T14:10:30+00:00

Ahead of the expected authorization of the COVID vaccine for children ages 5 to 11, the Biden administration says the shots will be distributed to school-based clinics as well as pediatricians’ offices, pharmacies, and other sites.

The federal government will also launch a program helping school districts start school-based vaccination sites by “matching” districts with vaccine providers, officials said Wednesday.

“Our planning efforts mean that we will be ready to begin getting shots in arms in the days following a final CDC recommendation,” the White House said in a statement.

The Biden administration’s plan signals schools will continue to play a role in completing a massive challenge of both logistics and persuasion: vaccinating the 28 million children ages 5-11 across the country. A new federal campaign “to increase vaccine confidence” will involve schools, as well as local health departments and faith leaders.

School-based clinics have already vaccinated many students 12 and up. In New York City, the country’s largest school system, officials said vaccinations were offered at every campus with eligible students during the first week of school. In Newark, pop-up clinics in schools helped quickly increase its youth vaccination rate this summer. In Colorado, officials found school clinics had the welcome side effect of sometimes drawing in students’ relatives, too.

“The kids make the decision that this is the right thing for them to do, and then they bring the family along,” Dr. Sonja O’Leary, a pediatrician and medical director of Denver Health’s school-based health centers, said in May.

Elsewhere, though, vaccine pushes have been less well received. Tennessee’s health department, for instance, stopped vaccine outreach targeting minors after Republican lawmakers balked, dubbing it a form of peer pressure.

Polling shows that a significant share of parents are hesitant to vaccinate their child. A September poll found that only a third of parents of children ages 5-11 said they would vaccinate their child right after the shot is approved. Another third said they would “wait and see,” and the final third said they would either not vaccinate their child or only do so if required. Among children 12-17, the same poll found that about half had received at least one dose of the vaccine.

Polling shows vaccine skepticism is strongest among Republican parents, but that there is some hesitancy among parents of all political leanings.

Most parents also oppose school vaccine requirements, but many believe that schools should encourage vaccination.

The Biden administration’s plan does not mention making vaccines mandatory for school attendance. California recently announced that it would eventually require the vaccine for students who attend school in person.

Last month, U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said he supported vaccine requirements for teenagers, for whom the Food and Drug Administration has fully approved the vaccine. “It’s the best tool that we have to safely reopen schools and keep them open,” he said. “We don’t want to have the yo-yo effect that many districts had last year, and we can prevent that by getting vaccinated.”

How this National Teacher of the Year uses an outdoor classroom to teach, connect with families

2021-05-06T22:38:30+00:00

Some parts of Juliana Urtubey’s year will be familiar to teachers across the country. Her school was all-virtual until February, and she didn’t get to meet most of her students in person until March.

When she did, the moment was overwhelming.

“After a year like this year, watching kids walk down the hallway for the first time made me very emotional,” said Urtubey, who teaches students with disabilities at Kermit R. Booker, Sr. Elementary School in Las Vegas, Nevada. “It reminded me why we had all the sleepless nights — why our hours were all funny and I was teaching resource class at 7 p.m. sometimes.”

Urtubey’s year is ending in a more singular way. She was named the National Teacher of the Year on Thursday, recognized in part for her work building, overseeing, and teaching in a school garden that grew into an outdoor classroom, and for connecting deeply with her students, many of whom come from immigrant families. Winners are typically honored at the White House, though the ceremony has been postponed for now.

Chalkbeat spoke to Urtubey about how she used that garden to teach math, the toughest parts of pandemic-era education, and how schools can make themselves more welcoming spaces for parents who are learning English.

This conversation has been lightly edited for space and clarity.

What did school look like for you and your students this year? What challenges did you face teaching during the pandemic?

I think that this year helped remind us that our impact as educators is only as strong as our connection and commitment to families.

We were remote until February. Then we took a hybrid approach. And then in early March, we welcomed all our students back on campus five days a week that were comfortable coming back. I cried, I was so happy. I’m at a new school this year, so a lot of my students, I had met them virtually but I had never met them in person.

We still have about 20-25% of our students in a remote cohort. But I’m full-time, five days a week, with little people.

You mentioned teaching at 7 p.m. — what was going on then?

It was toward the end of last school year. As a resource teacher, I have certain services that my students need. And this was before our state pulled together private and public resources to get every student a laptop and Wi-Fi. There were families where their only technology access was a cell phone, and the student had access to that cell phone once a family member got home from work. So we did phone tutoring and classes whenever we could.

How did the school garden at your last school come to be? What is a favorite lesson that’s allowed you to use the garden?

When we started, my former principal and I were just looking at an unused grass area of the school. We were talking about how it was important to beautify the school, as it was an older school. She said, ‘Hey, there’s this grant that might be available to build a small garden. Are you interested?’ I didn’t even think about it and said yes. Years later, here we are.

In terms of using garden science to teach, I think the most powerful lesson was having my students look for patterns in the garden and associating that with multiplication. Skip counting, multiples — it makes sense to students.

I had a student who had a long-term memory issue, and that’s how he learned to multiply. He noticed strawberries have three leaves, and he skip-counted by three to figure out how many leaves in all. That just symbolized the power of the garden. It centers the student and centers their interests, and they’re not intimidated.

Students who displayed off-task behaviors — when they’re in a garden, they’re grounded, pun intended. I had students who had severe behavior challenges in the classroom, and in the garden they were calmer and open to learning. It changes any human being if you’re in nature, especially if you’re caring for it.

You wrote in your application, “Like many of my students, I am first-generation, Latinx, and bilingual.” How did those connections to your students affect how you approach your work?

I know firsthand what it’s like to be in a country that is new to you, and to have barriers to access in terms of language. Kids who are learning English as a second language, I call them linguistically gifted. I think anyone who speaks a language other than their most commonly spoken language is offering us a gift.

I have a very strong bond with my mother. She always encouraged us to advocate for ourselves and I always saw her advocating for me. She was a lawyer in Colombia, and had a linguistics degree, and was very confident in her rights. But a lot of my students, their families don’t have that privilege. And I just don’t believe that parents should have to fight for a quality, humanizing education for their children. It should be afforded them in their neighborhood, in every school across our country.

The most important thing is having time for engagement. Like any relationship, you have to build in the time to get to know each other — to have casual conversations, to show interest in that person, to remember details about their lives, to be there for the struggles as much as the celebrations. When we’re talking about first-generation families, they’re handing us their children, their reason for sacrificing what they have to get here. We have to show them how much of an honor that is to us.

The second thing that’s really critical is for schools to do self-assessments about how inviting, welcoming, and inclusive their spaces are. If I’m a Spanish-speaking parent who doesn’t feel I have the right to assert my will at school or my authority or voice my concerns, and I walk into an office and there is nothing that speaks to me in my native language — I’m not saying everyone needs to learn Spanish, or the languages in that community. But we can make the effort to communicate that this is a safe space, we’re so glad you’re here, and we’re welcoming you with open arms.

Cardona: Schools need to rebuild trust with students and families of color as reopening continues

2021-04-09T19:31:48+00:00

Education Secretary Miguel Cardona issued a blunt call Friday for schools to address the mistrust felt by Black and brown communities as they push more students to return to classrooms.

It was concerning, Cardona said, that students of color have opted into in-person learning at lower rates than their white peers. “But it shouldn’t surprise us, if prior to pandemic we have had issues engaging and achieving the same outcomes for students of color as the general student population,” he said.

“It’s our responsibility to make sure that we’re focusing not only on better remote [learning], but also engaging in the communities to regain that trust, and share very specifically what we’re going to do to help those students achieve at high levels. They deserve it.”

Cardona’s comments come as new federal data show the racial disparities in which students were learning online remained wide in February. More than half of Black and Hispanic fourth graders, and nearly 70% of Asian fourth graders, were learning virtually, compared with only a quarter of white students in that grade. That pattern has been apparent all year, with districts serving more students of color less likely to offer in-person learning and families of color less likely to choose in-person learning when it is offered.

On Friday, the federal education department also released a wide-ranging set of guidance for school districts with suggestions for using stimulus money and helping students recover from the pandemic.

That document lays out ways schools can increase mental health support for students who’ve experienced trauma, re-engage students who’ve stopped coming to class, and help students catch up academically. It also encourages schools to come up with plans to support teachers who are dealing with their own stress, grief, and anxiety.

Notably, officials make suggestions in each section for how these strategies can be put into action fairly by paying particular attention to students of color, students from low-income families, and other disadvantaged students who’ve long experienced inequities in their schools. It’s an example of how Cardona is likely to lead the education department in the years to come, given his past focus on addressing racial and economic gaps in outcomes for students.

To address student mental health, for example, the document says schools can consider running 24/7 crisis lines where students can call or text a counselor if they’re going through an emotional crisis or having suicidal thoughts. But it also notes the barriers particular student groups may face when seeking help.

Students of color may have a greater sense of distrust because people of color are under-represented in the medical field, it notes, while English learners often face language barriers that lowers the care they receive, which could in turn make them less likely to seek help. Native American students have historically lacked access to culturally competent care, though they experience depression at higher rates than their peers.

Students living in places where COVID has taken a greater toll — often communities of color — and whose schools have been closed to in-person learning longer are likely to need even more support, officials say.

To find students who’ve been absent from school for many days, or who haven’t been engaged with their teachers, federal officials suggest leaning on personal outreach by school staff, rather than police officers, to avoid “unintentionally intimidating” students and their families. It highlights door-knocking efforts led by social workers in Hillsborough County, Florida and stipends given to teachers in Oakland, California so they could spend time outside their usual hours re-engaging students.

Officials say these should be “non-punitive” efforts, and that schools shouldn’t take steps like holding students back a grade or sending their parents to truancy court. Schools should also consider the unique needs of teens, who may now be working to support their family or caring for family members. “In these instances, additional flexibilities should be provided,” the document states.

Officials note many students who’ve been chronically absent or disengaged are students of color, or students experiencing homelessness who did not have reliable internet access during the pandemic.

As schools look to help students make up lost academic ground, federal officials say schools should keep students learning at their grade level as much as possible, rather than tracking them into lower-level tiers or reteaching them all the content they missed. They say schools should focus instead on filling in critical skills that will help them stay on pace, through tutoring, extra sessions before or after school, or summer school.

And as school districts encourage more students to come back into classrooms, federal officials say educators need to be mindful of the reasons why many parents of color have been hesitant to return, including the “physical, mental, and emotional safety” of their children. Some Asian families may be worried their children will be harassed, the document notes, while some Black families may be fearful their children will face disproportionate discipline, as they did before the pandemic.

For that reason, officials say, work to re-engage families should include efforts to “address any longstanding feelings of distrust resulting from students’ and families’ of color experiences in school prior to the pandemic and that may have been exacerbated by events of the last year.”

That’s something Cardona addressed Friday. “We know that Black and brown communities were negatively impacted by the pandemic more as well,” he said. “So they may be dealing with more loss. There may be issues of distrust, of how the system is going to support their students.”

The guidance also suggests shifts that would reverberate far beyond the pandemic, including changes to how states fund schools to more equitably account for students with the greatest needs. “The current crisis can serve as a call to action,” it says.

Biden proposes doubling Title I, sending even more money to high-poverty schools

2021-04-09T16:44:43+00:00

The Biden administration proposed more than doubling funding for the Title I program in a budget plan Friday — a move that would send billions to high-poverty schools.

The proposal would take the Title I program from its current $16.5 billion to $36.5 billion, an increase the administration said would be the biggest in the program’s history.

The ask is only a first step in the budgeting process, and it’s unclear if it will make it through Congress, as it will likely require some support from Republicans, who have been skeptical of additional federal funding. But it underscores the Biden administration’s focus on students and families living in poverty, whose schools are already in line for billions more from the economic stimulus packages.

The president’s budget request spans the upcoming school year. An increase would mean high-poverty schools have more to support students as they look to make up lost academic ground following the pandemic, and would put Biden one step closer toward his campaign promise of permanently increasing spending on students from low-income families.

Overall, the president’s request would raise the budget for the federal education department by $29.8 billion, or just over 40%.

The budget plan also includes:

A boost for special education funding. The president is seeking an additional $2.6 billion, or around a 20% increase, for Individuals with Disabilities Education Act grants. That brings the total to $15.5 billion. The administration says it marks a “significant first step” toward its campaign promise of providing all of the money the federal government is supposed to spend on these students.
More counselors, nurses, and mental health professionals in schools. The proposal includes $1 billion to add more of these roles.
More for child care and Head Start. The early childhood programs would both get a boost, with the Head Start budget increasing by $1.2 billion (to $11.9 billion) and the Child Care and Development Block Grant increasing by $1.5 billion (to $7.4 billion).
A big increase for the relatively small community schools program. The Biden administration’s ask is for more than $400 million, up from $30 million, to support schools that offer additional wraparound services to students and families.
More money for the Office for Civil Rights. The plan would put an additional $144 million, a 10% increase, toward the department that investigates claims of discrimination in schools and helps enforce civil rights laws.
$100 million to launch a school desegregation grant program. That money could be used to help communities come up with plans to make schools more diverse, or to turn those plans into reality. A similar, smaller program was launched at the end of the Obama administration, but Trump officials canceled it before school districts got any money.

They sent early SOS signals about COVID and schools. Here’s what life looks like for them, one year in.

2021-03-09T12:30:00+00:00

In the early days of the pandemic, the U.S. Department of Education set up an email inbox to field questions about the new virus.

Hundreds of messages poured in.

I am a senior. I was wondering what is going to happen in our school as COVID-19 spreads.

I’m very concerned about my relative who is a custodian having to clean up the school. Will he be forced to do this work?

My student has chronic asthma, and he has a history of becoming extremely ill due to colds and flu. What provisions is the Dept of Education recommending for these sensitive group students???

There is a lot of confusion ... Please help me understand!!!!

Chalkbeat obtained the emails sent to the inbox during the chaotic first two weeks of March 2020 through an open records request. Some of the first questions, like whether students should still gather in the lunchroom, would be answered in time, as public health officials learned more about how the virus spread. Others foreshadow what would become the most stubborn challenges, like how to serve students with disabilities remotely and how to know what exactly should trigger a school closure.

Together, they paint a picture of educators, parents, and students grasping for knowledge at the very start of a crisis for America’s schools.

One year later, we asked some of those who sent those first distress signals to tell us about that moment — and about how they navigated the challenging months ahead. Here’s what they told us.

12:19 p.m. March 9: ‘Do you have any guidance for students with IEPs who are participating in long term online learning?’

After 30 years, Beth Jones is very familiar with the intricacies of serving students with disabilities. So when the pandemic began closing school buildings, the assistant superintendent of Barrington 220 schools in northwest suburban Chicago knew her district was facing thorny questions about how to comply with students’ special education plans remotely.

When she didn’t hear back from federal officials, she sought advice from her school district’s lawyers and the Council for Exceptional Children, a national group for educators who work with students with disabilities. Then she advised her team: “Don’t look at the overwhelming amount of stuff we have to do.” Zero in on the most important goals in students’ special education plans, she told them, and above all, make sure they’re getting online.

When then-Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos made it clear there would be no “wiggle room” when it came to federal special education law, Jones’ focus turned to making sure students received every minute of the services they were entitled to, like speech therapy. A few weeks in, special education teachers and assistants in her district — which is relatively affluent, and provided students with iPads before the pandemic — had gotten into a rhythm.

In the fall, her district brought many students with disabilities back into buildings so they could meet with physical therapists, school psychologists, and occupational therapists in person.

“Was it the same as it would be? No,” Jones said. “Were there things that got in our way and obstacles? Yes. But the thing we never strayed from was: You have to meet the minutes, you have to provide the services, and you have to communicate with families.”

She wishes she could have known last March about the many positive things that would come out of the pandemic. The stronger relationships she’s built with her staff. The impressive work she’s seen teachers do. The struggling parents who now reach out for help.

Back then, “we all felt so doomed,” she said. Now, “they’re letting us into their lives and we’re getting through it.”

7:51 a.m. March 9: ‘Should teachers over the age of 60 or with health problems avoid going to work?’

Before the pandemic, Linda Mendel spent her whole day with students. In the early morning, she was the school crossing guard. During the day, the Portland paraeducator would work with students with disabilities or students who needed extra academic help. And in the evening, she would teach students to sew and to take apart engines at an after-school program, which also served supper. “I know some of our kids are missing that,” she said.

Schools closed quickly after Mendel emailed federal officials, and the spring was a scramble. Without their usual materials or the ability to sit beside students, she and her colleagues improvised — sometimes, one paraeducator would hold a book up to the computer camera while the other worked with a student.

This school year, which has been entirely remote, has gone more smoothly. She’s been impressed by the way the schools created delivery systems for school supplies, hotspots, library books, and free meals. “One of my favorite things is seeing kids who don’t raise their hands participate more,” she said. “It’s let our shy kids shine.”

Still, certain aspects of in-person class just can’t be replicated. The students with autism she works with, she noted, have less access to social cues from their classmates when all they can see are each others’ faces on screens. “Students who use those visual cues, they’re losing a lot,” she said. “I don’t have a way to fix that.”

11:21 a.m. March 10: ‘My seven year old daughter has a pre-existing lung condition that puts her at risk.’

When parent Star Atkeson wrote to the education department suggesting officials require schools to teach hand-washing techniques, she didn’t expect a response.

But she felt compelled to reach out in part because her daughter, Isabel, who was in first grade in Boston Public Schools when the pandemic began, has allergies and has needed a maintenance inhaler. As a young child, she had to be hospitalized several times for asthma. “I was nervous about her,” Atkeson said.

Early in the pandemic, Star Atkeson’s daughter, Isabel, worked on a sewing project.

Atkeson envisioned schools holding assemblies to talk about hygiene — maybe teaching kids to sing the “Baby Shark” song while they washed up. Looking back now, she said, her note reveals some of the early confusion about the main way the virus spreads.

“We thought it was all hand washing, but it wasn’t. It was breathing shared air,” she said.

When her daughter’s school went remote, they experienced feelings now familiar to many families: frustration, boredom, stress. “There was just a lot of looking for passwords under pressure,” Atkeson said.

But there was one upside. Atkeson realized her daughter had been purposely moving slowly through her work, or randomly guessing on math games, because she was afraid to ask for help. Seeing it allowed Atkeson to intervene.

“I do feel more in touch with Isabel’s learning now,” Atkeson said. She says her daughter has started to internalize her nudges, too. “She will say: ‘You told me to ask questions.’”

1:54 p.m. March 11: ‘What would it take to close a public school?’

Kelly Griffith, the schools chief in Talbot County, Maryland, has been an educator for 38 years. She’s run the school district for the last eight, and she’s also the president of the superintendents association in her state.

“You’re supposed to be the educator with all the answers. When you don’t have those answers, you start trying to find those answers,” she said.

So in early March, Griffith got on White House conference calls and emailed the education department: What happens next?

She didn’t hear back any time soon. “I don’t think anyone had the answers,” she said.

In the year since, Griffith has been at the forefront of a local campaign to get internet access to families in her rural district. She’s cried happy tears watching one of her kindergarten teachers connect with her students through a screen. And she got students back into buildings part-time for most of this school year with no evidence of COVID transmission.

That’s been an extraordinary logistics challenge. But she’s tried not to lose sight of how it’s all felt for students. When a group of high schoolers told her back-to-back virtual classes were wearing on them, she pushed schools to lengthen the traditional five-minute class changes to offer students more time to move around and decompress.

“Too many times, we’re trying to find technical solutions to all of the issues we have during a pandemic, and we lose sight of children,” she said. “That resonates with me on a daily basis. And I stop and think about our kids.”

10:57 a.m. March 13: ‘We are getting a lot of questions about our homeless students. We need help.’

When Melinda Dyer wrote to federal officials, Washington state was “ground zero” for the coronavirus. Dyer works for the state’s education agency assisting school district liaisons who work with homeless students, and she was desperate for information to pass on to districts from anyone in a position of authority.

“There was a lot of concern about students that were very high risk and not being able to have eyes on them on a daily basis,” Dyer recalls. “There was a level of crisis that I’ve not seen before.”

Melinda Dyer in her home office.

In Washington, many small school districts are in rural areas without internet providers. Centralized meal distribution hubs can be a challenge for homeless families to access if they are staying outside the district’s boundaries or don’t have transportation. It took a lot of creative work from school districts — like sending school buses to deliver meals, Chromebooks, and power strips — to get students what they needed.

Now, one of her biggest concerns is making sure schools are actively identifying students who are homeless or at risk of becoming homeless. Dyer says the identification of homeless students in Washington has decreased significantly, as it has elsewhere in the country. In some districts, it’s down by half.

“Having them vanish and districts not knowing where they went … that’s really concerning,” Dyer said. “It needs to be corrected.”

For Dyer, that means doing Zoom check-ins with districts, training school district liaisons, and reminding districts about their obligations to do things like hang notices in churches and on grocery store bulletin boards to let families know about their rights. She’s seen efforts vary. One district knocked on the door of every known address of a homeless student, while others “need a lot more help.” When the national eviction moratorium eventually lifts, she knows her department will need to provide even more support.

“This is a long haul,” she said. “There is a lot of work to be done, I believe, in just reconnecting and helping people feel safe and connected to schools again.”

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For this Chicago educator, teaching students with autism means teaching parents when to help and when to back off

2021-02-17T00:37:17+00:00

Glenda Liner started this school year with a lot of familiar names on her class roster. But as she geared up for more remote teaching, it was the newcomers she worried about.

So before the year began, she visited each of her new students’ homes — at a careful distance — to say hello and talk about the school year ahead.

“It made a difference,” said Liner, who teaches on Chicago’s South Side and has been an educator for 20 years. For her students, all kindergarteners, first graders, and second graders with autism, that in-person check-in helped her gauge their skills and needs. “Can they write? Do they need occupational therapy? I need to see them.”

Glenda Liner, a special education teacher in Chicago.

Now, some of her students have returned to the school building, while others remain at home. The setup requires juggling two groups of students, and for remote learners, lots of hands-on support from parents weary from frequent schedule changes. Still, Liner said, some aspects of this year have been reassuringly normal, with students picking up new skills, doing science experiments, and surprising those around them with their insights.

Chalkbeat spoke with Liner about her approach to remote teaching, the loss of field trips, and how she used her own vegetable garden to teach science.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

How do you get to know your students and build relationships with them?

I talk to them every day. If you teach the parent how to pin the screen, the student is only looking at you and only talking to you. That’s what has made this so special. You can talk to a child and they can feel like you are only talking to them because they only see you. I’ve gotten more from some students remotely than I ever would have in the classroom.

That’s if they’re not distracted, if they have headphones in a situation where they would be distracted in the house, if they’re capable of being by themselves and the parent checks in on them every few minutes. That’s a lot. If the household around them is chaos, that’s where the problem comes in.

I still have most of the same children I had in March. When we transitioned in the spring, I already knew the parents, I already knew the children. This school year, I have four new kindergartners, but before we started school, I went to their homes so I could get eye contact and say hello and say what our expectations were. So even before we got on camera, I had seen them physically, and they had seen me physically.

What’s been the toughest part about teaching this year?

I can’t have hands-on time with the students. With parents, I’ve kind of taught them how to be the paraprofessionals, since most of my students need hand-over-hand assistance or verbal prompting.

I can’t take students on field trips in person. For my children, that’s important. I need to take them to the zoo, to the museum. We do some with YouTube and SAFARI Montage. I don’t let it be a stumbling block. I just take a detour around it.

My biggest challenge, though, is getting some of the parents to leave their kids alone. I’m not always looking for the correct answer immediately, I’m looking for them to process the question I’m asking them. That’s hard. Don’t give them the answer!

What lessons have gone particularly well?

Today, I’m having kids go out and get some snow. That becomes a science experiment. During the spring, we were talking about vegetables. I have a garden. So I ran outside and said, here’s a cucumber. We make it work so they’re doing hands-on work at home. They’re really successful when parents get into it. It’s fun when they have fun.

What’s been really good, which happened a couple weeks ago, was when one of the parents did not realize that her child could really do what I asked them to do. They were like, I didn’t know he knew those words. I was like, just because he’s nonverbal doesn’t mean he doesn’t understand what’s going on around him!

Then when you can get a student to speak who isn’t normally talking, it’s like, wow! Sometimes, the most communication parents have had is a doctor saying to them, your child is never going to be able to do A-B-C and 1-2-3. And I’m saying, no, your child can do A-B-C and 1-2-3.

My thing is, I need students to know their name, address, phone number, north, south, east, and west. I need them to be able to count money and look at a calendar. I try to teach them functioning skills at the earliest possible point in their lives. When they leave me, I can’t assume someone else is going to teach them.

What can we learn from this moment?

For teachers, be flexible. When technology doesn’t work, don’t panic.

As a parent, you can really see how your role is so important. As we go through life, every day is an opportunity to teach. It doesn’t all have to be inside a classroom. When you’re going to the grocery store, and you’re asking them to select items — how much do you think is in the cart? Show me how much it weighs. Everything does not need to be computerized for it to be a teaching moment.

In confirmation hearing, Cardona says he’ll work to reopen schools. But how hard will he push?

2021-02-03T20:27:41+00:00

Miguel Cardona, President Biden’s education secretary nominee, said Wednesday that there were “great examples” of schools reopening safely across the country. But the “frustration and distrust and fear” in many places, he acknowledged, is real.

To address that, teachers should be prioritized to receive the coronavirus vaccine, and schools need to be able to conduct systematic testing to keep tabs on the virus’ spread.

“I’ll do everything in my power to make sure that our rollout strategy for reopening schools includes communication on how to safely reopen schools,” he said during his confirmation hearing before the Senate education committee. “That needs to include increased surveillance testing for our educators and prioritization of our educators for vaccination.”

Still, Cardona signaled that he doesn’t believe it’s necessary for all teachers to be vaccinated before in-person learning can resume, if enough other mitigation strategies are in place — a position echoed by the new CDC director Wednesday.

Those comments were the most concrete take on the national school reopening debate from the Connecticut schools chief, who appears poised for confirmation after a fairly friendly hearing.

Cardona has a limited track record in public office, and his choice allowed Biden to avoid choosing a side on issues like school choice that have divided Democrats in recent years.

And though Cardona is known for his strong stance in favor of school reopening, he didn’t wade into the more divisive side of that effort on Wednesday: how aggressively to encourage reluctant school officials and teachers to return.

Instead, Cardona continued to express support for Biden’s stimulus plan, which he said would help reopen schools. The proposal would provide $130 billion for schools, or $2,600 per student.

Students have lost learning, are failing more classes, and in some cases, are experiencing more mental health issues as a result of the pandemic. Schools are also facing an uncertain financial future, with some state cuts still likely without additional federal aid. Cardona said that money would help address those longer-term challenges, allowing districts to extend the school day, expand summer programming, and hire more counselors and other school staff.

“The funding that’s being considered now, moving forward, is really to make sure we recover,” he said. “If we really want to recover, we really need to invest now, or we’re going to pay later.”

Some Republicans were not sold. Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina pointed out that Congress has already allocated nearly $70 billion in new funding for schools. Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah questioned the efficacy of hiring more teachers. (A number of studies have found tangible benefits of smaller classes, though some researchers have questioned their cost-effectiveness.)

When asked what it would take to reopen America’s schools, Cardona said he would follow much of the same playbook he used as the commissioner of Connecticut’s schools. He pointed to the importance of talking regularly with public health experts and letting school districts know which mitigation strategies work best.

“We have some communities with high schools of 150 students, we have other communities with high schools of 3,000 students,” Cardona said. “We recognized that our job was to provide clear guidance on how to open schools safely.”

Cardona also clashed at times with Connecticut’s teachers unions, who wanted a more conservative approach to reopening — but he maintained consistent communication with them, and the unions ultimately praised his nomination.

In recent days, several influential teachers unions across the country have ratcheted up their demands to put more safety measures in place before in-person learning can resume, prompting questions about whether labor battles would interfere with the president’s goal of reopening more schools soon.

Notably, Cardona was not asked about what the federal government should do to help improve the experience for students who are still learning remotely — or if it should play a role in encouraging school officials and families who’ve been hesitant to return to buildings to go back. Nearly four in 10 students still only have access to virtual instruction, while many others have opted for that model, and those students are disproportionately Black and Latino.

Questioned about charter schools, Cardona suggested that he wouldn’t actively oppose them, but that his focus would be elsewhere.

“I recognize there are excellent examples of charter schools … I know there are also phenomenal examples of neighborhood schools,” he said. “It’s really important that we support all schools, including those neighborhood schools that are usually the first choice for families in that community.”

He didn’t answer a question on whether he supports D.C.’s private school voucher program, which is funded by the federal government.

The most tense moments came as several Republican senators pressed Cardona on whether transgender students should be able to compete in athletic competitions corresponding with their gender identity — an issue that Cardona has watched play out in Connecticut.

In response, Cardona said he would uphold the civil rights of all students, including transgender students, and said it was “critically important” and the “legal responsibility of schools” to make sure transgender students are afforded the same opportunities as other students to participate in extracurricular activities.

The Supreme Court recently ruled that a federal law barring discrimination on the basis of sex also effectively bans discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. The education department under Betsy DeVos claimed that this ruling does not apply to Title IX, which bars sex discrimination in education settings. Cardona suggested that he would begin applying the ruling to Title IX.

If he’s confirmed, one of the first decisions awaiting Cardona will be whether to grant waivers from required federal testing this year. He sent mixed messages on this question Wednesday.

“If the conditions under COVID-19 prevent a student from being in school in person, I don’t think we need to be bringing students in just to test them,” he said. At the same time, he said getting a gauge of student learning is important. “If we don’t assess where our students are and their level of performance, it’s going to be difficult for us to provide targeted support.”

Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut hinted that reforming student discipline will also be on Cardona’s plate early. He said Cardona would be “immediately presented” with an executive order on school discipline policies that will push schools to collect more data.

DeVos revoked guidance that had been issued under President Obama in 2014 that was meant to curb racial disparities in suspensions and expulsions. A pledge to reissue the school discipline guidance was part of Biden’s Democratic platform, though many education advocates have surmised it would be updated to include more guidance around school policing, which has been under greater scrutiny in recent years, especially in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd.

Biden to nominate Miguel Cardona as education secretary, sidestepping fraught policy debates

2020-12-23T00:38:45+00:00

President-elect Joe Biden will nominate Miguel Cardona to become the country’s education secretary, Biden announced Tuesday.

Choosing the Connecticut education commissioner, a relative unknown on the national stage, allows Biden to briefly sidestep fraught debates over charter schools, teachers unions, and testing that have divided his party. Biden would also fulfill his promise to nominate a former public school teacher to replace Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.

“In Miguel Cardona, America will have an experienced and dedicated public school teacher leading the way at the Department of Education — ensuring that every student is equipped to thrive in the economy of the future, that every educator has the resources they need to do their jobs with dignity and success, and that every school is on track to reopen safely,” Biden said in a statement.

Miguel Cardona.

If confirmed, Cardona will oversee the federal education department as schools grapple with the unprecedented disruption caused by the coronavirus pandemic. As commissioner in Connecticut, Cardona encouraged schools to reopen their buildings, but with mixed success, as only about a third of students in the state have access to full-time in-person instruction.

He will likely face the same challenge on the national stage. The role of U.S. education secretary is a limited one, as states and school boards make most education policy decisions. But the position took on increased prominence under DeVos, and Biden’s education secretary is set to oversee the dispersal of tens of billions of dollars in new federal relief — and to decide whether states can cancel federally required tests this year.

If Biden was counting on Cardona to be a unifying choice, the bet paid off Tuesday, with a wide array of education groups praising the pick.

Cardona also adds to the diversity of Biden’s cabinet, a top priority for the president-elect. Cardona is Latino and as a child was an English learner, and he has focused on improving outcomes for those students throughout his career. His doctoral dissertation, the CT Mirror reported, was about building political will to end the “normalization of failure” of English learners.

Cardona’s biography makes for a sharp contrast with DeVos, a billionaire philanthropist who focused on private schools. He grew up in public housing and didn’t speak English until starting school. And his career has been spent almost exclusively inside public schools and within a single school district.

Cardona began his career as an elementary school teacher in Meriden, Connecticut. He quickly became a school principal — the youngest in the state at 28, according to the local Record-Journal. He then served as the district’s assistant superintendent before being named the state schools chief.

He seems to have won affection locally, with city officials and Gov. Ned Lamont offering praise as his name was floated in recent days. “I don’t want to lose him,” the governor said. “He understands the challenges of our students and a district like Meriden,” the city’s mayor said.

Cardona’s management experience is fairly limited, though. He never oversaw a school district before being appointed schools chief in August 2019 by Lamont.

The pandemic has dominated Cardona’s tenure. He has pushed schools to keep their buildings open, emphasizing the benefits of in-person school, especially for struggling students. When several districts decided to switch to all-remote learning after Thanksgiving, he challenged the move, saying the virus isn’t spreading in schools.

Cardona has allowed districts to make their own calls, though. “When a superintendent tells me, ‘Miguel, my staffing is so bad that I have to close the school because I don’t have enough staff to keep it safe,’ I respect that decision,” Cardona said in November.

That stance has prompted criticism from some who say he should have intervened as districts chose not to reopen. It’s also garnered pushback from the other side: teachers and their unions who have circulated a petition urging Cardona and Lamont to close schools that they said weren’t fully complying with safety guidelines.

Biden’s choice of Cardona represents a less union-aligned approach than some other potential picks. AFT President Randi Weingarten and former National Education Association President Lily Eskelsen García were themselves reportedly under consideration for the role.

Still, Cardona is likely to have a much closer relationship with the country’s two major teachers unions than his predecessors in both the Trump and Obama administrations.

“Miguel Cardona’s formative experience as a teacher and administrator has been critical to his accomplishments as Connecticut Education Commissioner,” a coalition of Connecticut labor unions said in a joint statement last week. “If selected as Secretary of Education, Dr. Cardona would be a positive force for public education — light years ahead of the dismal Betsy DeVos track record.”

In 2013, the American Federation of Teachers highlighted Meriden, Connecticut, where Cardona was then an assistant superintendent, as a model for labor-management partnerships. He was in charge of the district’s teacher evaluation system, and the AFT profile suggests that he prioritized getting teacher buy-in.

Both Weingarten and Eskelsen García praised Cardona’s nomination Tuesday.

If confirmed, Cardona will also face an immediate decision that could further illuminate his relationship with unions: whether to allow states to cancel federally required annual testing this year. Unions are pushing for the Biden administration to do so, but some civil rights groups say that testing must continue to measure learning gaps.

Connecticut, like every state in the country, canceled state testing last school year. But unlike a number of other states, Connecticut has not sought a waiver from testing in spring 2021, a spokesperson for the state education department said. Instead, Cardona’s department issued a memo in October saying the tests would go on.

“State assessments are important guideposts to our promise of equity,” the memo said.

Cardona, though, has criticized linking state tests to teachers’ evaluations. “Not reducing a teacher to a test score and bringing the voices of teachers and leaders into the process of professional learning — those are the two things I really felt like I had to champion,” he said about his work on a state evaluation committee.

On two other particularly contentious education issues, charter schools and private school vouchers, Cardona has a limited track record.

While the Obama administration championed charter schools, and the Trump administration sought (unsuccessfully) to expand access to private schools, Biden has promised to focus on neighborhood district schools while limiting, but not entirely restricting, charters. Cardona’s philosophy seems in line with the President-elect’s, although his influence on the issue as education secretary would be limited.

“Charter schools provide choice for parents that are seeking choice, so I think it’s a viable option,” he said during his Connecticut confirmation hearing. But neighborhood schools are “going to be the core work that not only myself but the people behind me in the agency that I represent will have while I’m commissioner.”

“He is much more of an educator than a politician or an ideologue — he’s not pro-charter or anti-charter,” Dacia Toll, CEO of Achievement First, a charter network that started in Connecticut, said in an interview.

Cardona’s department authorizes the network’s charter schools in the state. When their charters were up for renewal, Toll said, “The state department under him was certainly willing to praise us on the things we were doing well and push on the things we were not doing as well. It felt very fair.” After the network garnered a reputation for high-quality remote instruction during the pandemic, Toll noted, state department officials observed several lessons.

Cardona is likely to prioritize the education of English language learners, a population of students who have faced particular challenges during the pandemic. Asked earlier this year about the quality of education those students were receiving in Connecticut, he responded: “Not good enough. Not good enough. We have to focus on that more.”

Surges in COVID cases are upending school reopening plans across the U.S.

2020-11-13T16:42:35+00:00

Rising COVID cases are derailing plans by school districts across the country to reopen their buildings and pushing some schools that had opened to close once again.

Just this week, the Detroit school district suspended all in-person learning until January. Health officials ordered schools in Indianapolis to do the same. Philadelphia put its plans to bring young students back at the end of this month on hold indefinitely. And some of Colorado’s largest districts are reverting to remote learning after quarantine requirements made staffing buildings too challenging.

They join schools in Newark, Boston, San Diego, and many smaller districts in scaling back or scrapping their school reopenings — an illustration of how the country’s failure to contain the coronavirus has continued to disrupt the education of millions of students. Some of the school districts now closing buildings completely had already been open only for students with disabilities, English learners, and young students, for whom virtual learning is a particular strain.

Many districts in places with significant COVID caseloads remain open, though, highlighting the widely varying approaches to school shutdowns being taken by school leaders, governors, and even health officials.

The inflection point follows a period when more and more schools opened with apparent success. Public health experts have grown cautiously optimistic that it could be done relatively safely during the pandemic, with certain safeguards and as long as the virus was not spreading through a community at extremely high rates. But the test positivity rates in many parts of the country have now reached new heights.

“The bottom line is if community rates get to a certain level and higher, schools are going to have to close,” said Rebecca Haffajee, a health policy researcher at RAND. “Now where exactly that threshold is, is the million dollar question.”

Those districts may be joined soon by New York City, the country’s largest. Officials there are warning that the city is approaching its self-imposed threshold for closing schools — a 3% positivity rate, an unusually low limit. (The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s latest guidance describes a 14-day positivity rate over 10% as indicating the “highest risk” of transmission in schools, while under 3% indicates “lowest risk.”)

Notably, the positivity rate among randomly tested school staff and students in New York City remains very low: 0.18% since mid-October.

Nationwide, over 60% of students attend school in a district offering some form of in-person learning, according to a recent estimate by the website Burbio, which tracks school reopenings. That figure marks a sharp increase from the beginning of the school year, though it has flatlined of late.

(That’s different from what share of students are actually attending school in person, since many districts allow students to choose fully virtual learning. In a late October poll, 54% of parents said their child was still learning exclusively online.)

The growing drumbeat to get schools to reopen appears to have been overtaken, though, by rising rates and new staffing challenges.

Take Jefferson County schools, one of Colorado’s largest districts, where schools have remained open even as test positivity rates eclipsed 10%. Janitors there are struggling to keep up with the “deep cleanings” the district has promised whenever a school has a reported case. The district is struggling to run its bus routes because too many drivers have had to quarantine. And administrative staff are regularly covering classrooms of teachers who are out.

The district is now set to have all middle and high school students go remote next week, with elementary schools following later this month. (Preschool and some services for students with disabilities will continue in person.)

Philadelphia, meanwhile, has not opened buildings yet and announced this week that it will not do so “until further notice,” now that its COVID test positivity rate is above 9%.

“We hope to see those children return before the spring,” Superintendent William Hite said, as the city’s top health official warned it was “entering a dangerous period.”

In Detroit, where schools superintendent Nikolai Vitti has pushed for months to keep school buildings open for students who want in-person learning, the decision to close them came in anticipation of the city reaching a 6% test positivity rate this week.

“It is what it is at this point. Cases are going up. There’s nothing I can do or say,” said Detroit parent Ebony Graves. “I’m a healthcare worker and I know how crucial it is right now.”

But the changes are deeply frustrating to others, who find themselves in a childcare bind or watching their children struggle with remote learning. “He likes going to school,” said Indianapolis parent Steven Thompson, referring to his fourth grade son. “And his learning needs, in my opinion, require that engagement and that face-to-face interaction.”

Los Angeles and Chicago, two of the country’s largest districts, have also not opened for any in-person instruction, and it remains unclear when they will. Cases in Los Angeles County are rising (test positivity rates are around 5%), and the school district there says reopening won’t happen until January at the earliest.

Chicago had hoped to welcome some students back into buildings soon, but rising cases in the city — test positivity rates are at 14% — and an ongoing dispute with its teachers union means there is no clear reopening date. Eight of Illinois’ 10 largest districts have remained fully virtual or recently put their reopening plans on pause.

The setbacks are coming as Thanksgiving and winter holidays approach. That adds yet another layer of complication, as some fear families who travel and then return to schools could spread the virus even further. A handful of districts where schools are open are already planning to avoid this by closing buildings from Thanksgiving until the new year.

Still, in some large school districts, buildings are open and have been for some time. In Florida, schools in Miami-Dade (where daily positivity rates have recently ranged from 6% to 9%), Broward (6% to 8% positivity), and Hillsborough (7% to 9% positivity) counties remain open, even as cases have risen locally. The same is true in Texas, where schools in Dallas and Houston remain open. (Houston hit 7% test positivity, the district’s previous benchmark for closing schools, in late October, but changed its protocols.) State officials in both places have aggressively pushed schools to reopen.

Haffajee of RAND said the coming months would be critical for containing the virus enough to allow more schools to open. To get there, she said, individuals need to do their part to reduce the spread, and governments should prioritize schools over other public places like bars, restaurants, and gyms.

“If we want to keep schools open, we have to make some other sacrifices,” said Haffajee.

Election results are still coming in. While we wait, here’s a look at what that means for schools

2020-11-04T19:03:23+00:00

Every week, Chalkbeat’s national team rounds up the news you need in our Wednesday newsletter. Today, we’re publishing a version of it here, too. Subscribe here for the latest on how the pandemic and the election are changing schools across the country.

So. We still don’t know who won the presidential election or which party will control the U.S. Senate.

What does that all mean for schools? In short, more uncertainty, after months and months of it.

The ambiguity means it’s hard to know what will happen to a potential new package of federal help for schools. Without that aid, schools in many parts of the country are likely to have to cut budgets in the years ahead. The outcome depends both on who controls the different parts of the federal government and how they do — or don’t — end up working together.

Also still unclear is whether Education Secretary Betsy DeVos will get the chance to remain in office or be replaced by a Joe Biden appointee, who is likely to make different decisions about civil rights enforcement in schools and will decide whether schools must give the usual standardized tests this year.

Other state and local education races we’re watching:

Two education-related ballot initiatives in California are currently losing, but haven’t been called yet. One would increase school funding by raising commercial property taxes. The other would repeal a ban on affirmative action, including in public colleges and universities.
Big-money school board races in Los Angeles are still too close to call. If current results hold, the board will be split between candidates backed by the teachers union and by charter advocates.
An Arizona ballot initiative to raise taxes on high-income households in order to increase teacher pay is leading, but hasn’t been called yet.
Washington state voters approved an initiative to require sex education in public schools.
Colorado voters approved a nicotine tax to fund universal preschool. San Antonio and St. Louis voters also backed funding initiatives for pre-kindergarten.
Control of the Indianapolis Public Schools board remains up in the air. Critics of the district’s collaboration with charter schools are looking to take control.
And it appears that voters in Gary, Indiana approved a “do or die” referendum that would help the struggling school district dig itself out of debt, paving the way to end a state takeover.

What else you need to know about the discussion surrounding potential picks for education secretary

If Biden ends up winning, a major education reform group is set to push Chicago, Baltimore, Philly schools chiefs for education secretary. Janice Jackson, Sonja Brookins Santelises, and William Hite are on Democrats for Education Reform’s short list, we reported yesterday.
Meanwhile, the Washington Post reported other names that a Biden administration is likely to consider: AFT President Randi Weingarten, former NEA head Lily Eskelsen García, and California state board of education president Linda Darling-Hammond.

And some youth voices to get you through, as election night turns into election week

Ahead of Election Day, Chalkbeat spoke with students about why this election mattered to them. They told us how issues like the pandemic, police violence, and LGBTQ rights drove them to get involved and encourage family and friends who are able to vote.

Below is a selection of what they said. You can read more here.

In the past, if I’m being totally honest, elections have never been a priority for me. Looking back on it now, it does affect me. The majority of my friends are queer identified, so I’m taking that into account. Can I walk down the street without being called a slur? Can my friends choose the bathroom they want to use? If you go on TikTok or you go on Twitter or you go on Instagram, you see these comments. ‘You can’t even vote. Why do you care?’ We have to erase that notion. — Leonel Ramirez, 17

I was never interested in politics. During coronavirus, when we were in quarantine, when George Floyd [was killed], my school gave us a day off if you wanted to make a change or voice how you’re feeling. I wanted to be engaged in politics. There are always people saying: Oh these youths don’t do anything. I don’t want to be in that stereotype category. I wanted to get out of my comfort zone. Right now, I’m in the process of becoming a poll worker. — Kiara Green, 17

I came to the U.S. from Spain five years ago, so I’m a first-generation immigrant. I can’t personally vote. By being involved and spreading information, I can make my voice count and allow people to understand what’s happening. My family members, they barely speak English. Most of them speak Spanish. When my parents are watching the news, they’ll say: I saw this. And I have to explain. On Election Day, I’ll be trying to convince my family members who can vote to vote. — Michelle Del Villar, 18

Major ed reform group is set to push Chicago, Baltimore, Philly schools chiefs for ed secretary

2020-11-03T20:47:38+00:00

Americans are still voting for president, and it’s not clear when we’ll have a winner. But a major education reform group already has a short list of preferred candidates for the education secretary post in a Biden administration.

Democrats for Education Reform is coordinating a behind-the-scenes push for Chicago schools chief Janice Jackson, the head of Baltimore schools Sonja Brookins Santelises, or Philadelphia superintendent William Hite, according to an email sent to supporters Monday by the group’s president Shavar Jeffries and obtained by Chalkbeat. All three, Jeffries wrote, would represent a “‘big tent’ approach to education policy making.”

Translation: Political realities mean that someone who has championed a specific brand of education reform isn’t likely to be Biden’s pick. But it’s possible for the choice to be someone who’s worked closely with charter schools while running a big-city school district — rather than someone affiliated with a major teachers union, for instance, whose tent might be too small for Democrats for Education Reform.

“Our primary goal is to persuade Biden to support — and to appoint a Secretary of Education who supports — innovation, public-school choice, and accountability,” Jeffries wrote, urging recipients to reach out to top Biden associates and offering talking points to help make their case. “This work remains an uphill battle.”

Jackson, Santelises, and Hite are leaders of major school systems. Jackson has overseen Chicago Public Schools, the nation’s third-largest school district, since 2017. Santelises has led Baltimore City Public Schools since 2016. And Hite has run schools in Philadelphia since 2012.

A spokesperson for Hite said he was not aware of the DFER email and declined to comment further. A spokesperson for Jackson also declined to comment. And a spokesperson for Santelises had not responded to a request for comment as of Tuesday afternoon. A DFER spokesperson said the organization had not reached out to Hite, Jackson, or Santelises in advance of its email.

The three schools chiefs are Black and have focused on improving education for students from low-income families and students of color.

All three also oversee schools in cities where lots of students attend charter schools. In Philadelphia, about one in three public school students attends a charter school, while in Baltimore, about one in five do. In Chicago, it’s about 15%.

They are each now navigating the challenges of leading a large urban school district during a pandemic. Their districts are still operating virtually, but have tentative plans to bring some students back for in-person learning later this fall.

All are former public school teachers, too — something Biden has said is a prerequisite for the job. Jackson began her career as a high school social studies teacher before rising through the administrator ranks in Chicago. Santelises started her career with Teach for America, taught for three years in New York City, and spent time as the Baltimore district’s chief academic officer. Hite began as a marketing teacher, and was later the head of Prince George’s County schools in Maryland.

The key question is whether DFER’s advocacy has a chance of swaying a Biden transition team or is more likely to harm the chances of their preferred choices.

What could help DFER is that it has secured the support of noted civil rights groups. Jeffries said in his note that the National Urban League, UnidosUS, and the National Center for Learning Disabilities, among other groups, have signed onto its advocacy push. DFER was influential during the Obama administration, and has continued to play an advocacy role within the Democratic party.

“Since early in the primary season, our team has been in regular contact with the Vice President’s team, sharing our national and swing state polling, and elevating our innovative policy agenda,” Jeffries wrote in a separate email to supporters Tuesday morning.

In general, though, DFER has found some of its favored policies moving further from the Democratic Party’s mainstream. As a presidential candidate, Biden has proposed a slew of new federal restrictions on charter schools and been critical of standardized testing — a clear shift from the Obama administration, which promoted the growth of charter schools and teacher evaluations linked to test scores.

“It is certainly the Biden plan,” the campaign’s policy director Stef Feldman said at a recent event, describing the candidate’s agenda for schools. “The vice president is pretty committed to the concept that we need to be investing in our public neighborhood schools and we can’t be diverting funding away from them.”

A number of factors have driven the shift within the Democratic party — including disillusionment with Obama-era reforms, the increased political strength of teachers and their unions, and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, who is highly unpopular among Democrats and became a figurehead for school choice.

This shifting ground is reflected in DFER’s recent policy agenda, which was signed onto by a few civil rights groups; the Center for American Progress, a progressive think tank; and major charter school organizations, including the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. The document emphasizes areas of likely agreement with a Biden administration, including expanding access to early childhood education, increasing federal funding for low-income students and students with disabilities, and raising teacher pay. Charter schools get only a brief mention in a section about “choices in quality public schools.”

Polls have shown support for charter schools among Democrats has waned, though Democratic voters of color remain more supportive, a fact DFER emphasizes in its email to supporters.

DFER’s recommendations add to a growing group of names being floated to succeed Betsy DeVos — if Biden wins — including leaders from the nation’s largest teachers unions.

The Washington Post reported this weekend that Biden is considering AFT president Randi Weingarten or former NEA leader Lily Eskelsen García. Both unions have endorsed Biden and donated to his campaign.

In interviews this week, Weingarten and Becky Pringle, the current NEA president, both declined to comment on potential selections for a Biden education secretary, saying they were focused on getting him elected. If that happens, Pringle said, the NEA will be looking for Biden to choose an education secretary who will promote racial and social justice in schools, who respects teachers, and is willing to work with teachers unions.

“It’s not about releasing a list to the public,” she said. “It is about partnering with them to get the person that I just described as Secretary of Education.”

For these teens, election season has been a political awakening

2020-11-03T03:34:53+00:00

They aren’t all old enough to cast their ballots, but the teenagers Chalkbeat spoke with are clear on what’s at stake for them this Election Day. The response to COVID-19, voter suppression, police violence, and LGBTQ rights are driving their work to get their parents, old-enough friends, and other New Yorkers to vote.

“If you go on TikTok or you go on Twitter or you go on Instagram, you see these comments. ‘You can’t even vote. Why do you care?’ We have to erase that notion, ” said Leonel Ramirez, 17, of Brooklyn.

Ramirez, who is a senior at Food and Finance High School in Manhattan, is active in YVote, a nonprofit that gives students opportunities to talk politics and learn how they can make a difference, regardless of their age or immigration status. (YVote’s founder, Sanda Balaban, is a member of Chalkbeat’s reader advisory board.)

In recent months, YVote participants have made scorecards for assessing candidates on issues such as racial and climate justice, created public service announcements, and reached out to voters.

“For people I can get through to, I kind of just walk them through the process: how to register, how easy it is,” said Kenisha Mahajan, a 15-year-old who lives in Queens and is a sophomore at Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan. “I just try to get them as involved as possible. I tell them: You can become a poll worker or do phone banking.”

What follows are excerpts from our interviews with New York City teenagers about their political awakenings and why this election matters to them.

These interview excerpts have been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Born a day late

Karla Sterrett, 17, Bronx, New York
Freshman, City College of New York, Manhattan

Karla Sterrett

I’m 17 right now, and Nov. 4, literally the day after Election Day, is my 18th birthday. I went with my mom to vote and was looking over the ballot, and I was just like: Isn’t there some way [for me to vote]? Then I read it and was like, yeah, I’m not going to jail! Don’t want to do that!

During the 2016 election, I was a freshman. Seeing everyone’s faces and just viewing everyone’s energy — the election felt so vital and important. I didn’t really grasp it. I thought: It doesn’t really involve me, I’m so young, this doesn’t matter.

But since I joined YVote in 2017, I’ve been on this crazy train of wanting to try to educate others about voting rights, Black people’s rights. Learning about voter suppression definitely altered my mindset.

Throughout history, Black people had to take extremely hard tests just to prove we should be able to vote. There are still so many barriers, especially for Black people, people who are incarcerated, people who are immigrants. It’s an ongoing fight to show we are citizens of the U.S. There needs to be more talk around this.

On Election Day, I’m going to be spreading resources to people who are voting on Nov. 3 and trying to rush to the polls. We’re not going to know [the election results] on Nov. 3 because of all of the absentee and mail-in ballots. Whether it’s a Trump rally or Biden supporters, there’s going to be friction, so I’m just advising people to be careful.

‘It’s pretty tough to be a conservative’

Isaiah Taylor, 17, Queens, New York
Senior, Benjamin Franklin High School for Finance and Information Technology, Queens

Isaiah Taylor

This will be my first election season remotely politically involved. Before this, I had a natural interest in politics and already considered myself conservative.

Right now [the issues driving me] are voter integrity, voter suppression, COVID response, and domestic policy toward inequality. It’s a good first step that both of our presidential candidates are speaking toward racial injustice issues and proposing different policy changes.

I have a strong, strong passion for foreign policy. I just wrote a paper for my AP government class about how imperative it is that everybody knows what’s going on outside of the United States. I’m pretty sure the general American public doesn’t know the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty that was originally instated by President Ronald Reagan was recently suspended. People don’t know about the [clashes between] Armenia and Azerbaijan.

At school, it’s pretty tough to be a conservative. People say, ‘Oh my God, you are conservative — do you support this candidate?’ I’m like, ‘No — just because I’m in a certain party doesn’t mean I support a specific candidate.’ People will attack you and say you’re racist or you’re sexist. I say to them: It’s really stupid to generalize all of Republicans or conservatives because you were making the argument that certain minorities should not be generalized. So why were you generalizing me and the rest of the people in my party?

Even my family members are taken aback that I am a Republican. My mother identifies as independent and my dad is a Democrat. It was really tough to develop that individuality, instead of saying I’m a Democrat because everybody else is.

Immigrants: our voices matter

Kenisha Mahajan, 15, Queens
Sophomore, Stuyvesant High School, Manhattan

Kenisha Mahajan

I grew up in India and moved here around third grade. Obviously, as young people, we feel really limited because we can’t vote yet. Even though my family can’t vote, I try to encourage people we know to vote.

I know a lot of family members or friends who are just over 18 or in college, and they don’t know much about voting. A lot of them weren’t really exposed to that, or they come from immigrant families. And one thing I’ve seen in immigrant families is there’s kind of this belief that your voice doesn’t really belong and that voting isn’t going to make a difference.

For people I can get through to, I kind of just walk them through the process: how to register, how easy it is. I just try to get them as involved as possible. I tell them: You can become a poll worker or do phone banking. There are quick and easy ways to get involved.

What they’re saying on TikTok

Leonel Ramirez, 17, Brooklyn
Senior, Food and Finance High School, Manhattan

Leonel Ramirez

Four years ago, when the Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton election was happening, I actually ran for my school presidency that same week. I had lost the presidency and no one wanted Donald Trump to win, regardless of how young we were. Especially coming from a first-generation family — my mom is Mexican-American and my dad is from El Salvador — it was not a fun time. I remember the next day, in homeroom, no one was happy with the results. Teachers are supposed to be very neutral. They aren’t supposed to tell you their politics, but you could see where they stood. It was a very gray ambiance.

In the past, if I’m being totally honest, elections have never been a priority for me. I kind of watched it from afar, whether it be through YouTube or through my friends or what my parents were saying, but it didn’t seem like something that concerned me. Within the LGBTQ community, you think, I’m still young; I’m part of Generation Z; this has nothing to do with me.

If you go on TikTok or you go on Twitter or you go on Instagram, you see these comments. ‘You can’t even vote. Why do you care?’ We have to erase that notion.

Looking back on it now, it does affect me. The majority of my friends are queer identified, so I’m taking that into account. Can I walk down the street without being called a slur? Can my friends choose the bathroom they want to use? Are my transgender friends going to have the acknowledgment they deserve? Just because marriage isn’t a prospect for us right now, doesn’t mean that six years from now we’re not going to want to. It’s not enough to say. ‘I’m an ally’ or to stay in the range of ‘I have gay friends.’ You have to be anti-homophobia. You have to be anti-hate crime. Just like in the Black Lives Matter Movement, you can’t remain complicit because the voices in the room are not always reflective of the voices in America.

George Floyd inspired me to get involved

Kiara Green, 17, Brooklyn
Junior, Achievement First Brooklyn High School

Kiara Green

I wanted to be engaged in politics. There are always people saying: Oh these youths don’t do anything. They’re always on the streets. Gangs and everything. I don’t want to be in that stereotype category. I wanted to get out of my comfort zone.

Right now, I’m in the process of becoming a poll worker, though they’re taking so long to email me the link to train. I’m confused whether I’m in it or not, so I’m crossing my fingers. My mom says I’m a workaholic. I have no time to rest.

Helping my parents navigate the news

Michelle Del Villar, 18, Bronx
Freshman, City College of New York, Manhattan

Michelle Del Villar

My family members, they barely speak English. Most of them speak Spanish. There are a lot of limitations and obstacles for them. They rely on two main channels on TV that are in Spanish, and they are really biased. When my parents are watching the news, they’ll say: I saw this. And I have to explain. On Election Day, I’ll be trying to convince my family members who can vote to vote.

Also, something really important during this election is mental health. These are really uncertain times due to the pandemic and the election, and [some] people don’t have access to mental health services or don’t have people to talk about it. Establishing that safe space with someone who seems to be really worried about the election, just to talk about it with them, is really important.

‘Are you registered to vote?’

Bianca Peterkin, 16, Bronx
Junior, Bronx Early College Academy For Teaching and Learning

Bianca Peterkin

I saw this video by [the rapper] YelloPain called, “My Vote Don’t Count.” He says, a lot of people say, “My vote doesn’t count,” but they don’t really know about the election. I realized, I need to know what I can do.

I’ve been learning more. In our racial justice group, we talk about education, health care, affordable housing, police brutality, COVID-19. We only focus on the presidential elections, but we don’t realize the Senate and all these other elections are also important.

YVote linked me to the New York Immigration Coalition. They do text banking and phone banking. I joined in the beginning of October. We text and ask people: Are you registered to vote? If they’re not registered, you can send them the link.

Another member and I also worked on a racial justice scorecard. You can check it off if candidates meet the criteria. We focus on the issues that touch on racial justice: education, health care. Police brutality is another issue, still occurring after all these years.

Now, my mom and my sister come to me, asking: Where do I go for my early poll site? They both voted early.

Election Day is here. These are the education issues and races we’re watching.

2020-11-02T23:44:58+00:00

As Americans cast their ballots, we’re watching to see how the results will affect schools in individual communities and across the country.

Chalkbeat reporters in Detroit and Indianapolis will be monitoring school board races that could decide the course of local school improvement efforts. In Colorado, a ballot measure will determine whether schools take a big budget hit next year. And in Pennsylvania and Tennessee, legislative races could send important signals about education policy.

Of course, we’re watching the national results too. President Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden offer very different visions for education, while the specifics of any additional financial coronavirus aid for schools depend on control of Congress. Hundreds of billions in federal money for schools may be at stake, with Biden and Congressional Democrats saying they want to send a huge infusion of money to schools and state governments while Trump and Congressional Republicans are less interested in plugging state budget gaps.

Here are other reasons the national election results matter for schools — and, below, a rundown of the local races we’re watching.

In Indiana, we’ve got our eyes on a school board race that will shape the future of Indianapolis Public Schools. Four of seven seats are up for grabs in the state’s largest district, which is known for partnering with charter school organizations and nonprofit operators to run what are known as innovation schools. The candidates who back innovation schools had far out-raised their competitors by early last month.

In Michigan, we’re watching the Detroit school board race, where three of seven seats are in play. The incumbents were elected in 2016 and have worked closely with Superintendent Nikolai Vitti, whose efforts to turn around the city’s long-struggling schools began in 2017. That makes these races something of a referendum on Vitti’s tenure.

Also on the ballot: Two openings on the state’s board of education, and in Detroit’s Wayne County, the fate of a special fund that sends millions to local school districts for things like lowering class sizes, boosting teacher salaries, and buying technology.

In Colorado, we’re watching a ballot measure that will help decide whether school districts will face big budget cuts next year. Voters are choosing whether to repeal an amendment that will require residential property taxes to fall sharply this year. At stake: nearly $500 million for schools.

A proposed tax on nicotine, meanwhile, would provide the money needed for universal pre-K. And in Denver, voters will decide whether to approve two measures that would pay for things like air conditioning in schools and teacher pay raises.

Also on the ballot: Three seats on Colorado’s seven-member state board of education, which Democrats took control of in 2016 for the first time in 50 years, and three seats on the University of Colorado Board of Regents.

In Pennsylvania, Democrats could take back control of the legislature and change how schools are funded. Pennsylvania’s entire House and half of the Senate are up for election. If Democrats win control of one or both chambers, they could make changes to a school funding formula that critics say sends too little to urban districts like Philadelphia.

How legislative races in Pennsylvania could affect education spending

In Tennessee’s legislature, one question is whether fierce fights over private school vouchers will have bruised some Republican incumbents. The balance of political power in the Tennessee statehouse, where Republicans hold a supermajority, isn’t going to shift. But education is playing a role in individual races — most notably the one involving the chair of the House Education Committee, Republican Rep. Mark White, who supported the governor’s plan to launch a voucher program in Memphis and Nashville. He’s facing a credible challenge from an anti-voucher Democrat.

Why school vouchers are an issue to watch in Tennessee legislative races

And teachers — no matter where you are — we still want to hear from you. What have conversations in your classroom around the local and national 2020 election been like so far? What specific lesson plans are you crafting for after Election Day? If you’re willing to give us a peek into your planning, fill out the form below.

Correction: An earlier version of this story said there were 10 total seats on the Indianapolis Public Schools board, rather than seven.

Civics and history teachers: How are you bringing the 2020 election into your classroom?

2020-10-23T14:18:28+00:00

Guiding students through an election cycle is a big task in normal times.

Social studies, history, government, civics teachers — we know you’re busy helping students understand the mechanics of the Electoral College, find ways to feel civically involved, and eventually process the results of the presidential race and local ones, too.

These aren’t normal times. Some of you are trying to reach students through a screen, and also connect this moment to the ongoing national reckoning about racism.

We’re looking for teachers willing to give us a peek behind the curtain, before, on, and after Election Day. How are you planning for the weeks ahead? Are there lessons you’re excited about or conversations you’re dreading? Do you have ideas you’d like to share with other educators? How has the pandemic changed your work? What are your students struggling to understand?

If you’re open to sharing, fill out the form below. (Elementary school teachers, we want to hear from you too!)

If you are having trouble viewing this form on mobile, go here.

A new national effort to promote school integration is underway. More than two dozen school districts want in.

2020-10-09T19:29:15+00:00

More than two dozen school districts, including some of the nation’s largest, have signed on to a new national effort to promote the racial and economic integration of America’s schools.

The effort, known as the Bridges Collaborative, spans 20 states and includes the New York City, Los Angeles, Miami-Dade, Dallas, Fort Worth, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and Oakland school districts, as well as charter school networks and housing organizations.

Some members, like the Howard and Montgomery county school districts in Maryland, have recently attempted to make schools more racially and economically balanced, prompting local debate and pushback. Other participating school districts have long histories of working to desegregate schools, including Charlotte-Mecklenburg in North Carolina, Jefferson County in Kentucky, and Hartford and New Haven schools in Connecticut.

Over the next two years, they’ve pledged to work together to find successful ways to integrate schools and to build momentum for the effort — a notable show of support for a movement that’s attracted increased attention in recent years, as the country attempts to grapple with its history of racism and segregated schools.

“This is not some sort of a fringe group of a few integration allies,” said Stefan Lallinger, a former New York City schools official who’s leading the initiative. “This is a growing recognition across the country that our school system and our housing is unacceptably segregated in the year 2020, and it’s about time folks rolled their sleeves up and did something about it.”

The effort, first announced in May, is launching at a time of intense racial reckoning in America, as the country reels from months of protests over the police killings of Black Americans and as the nation’s educators work to address their students’ concerns about racism. It also begins in the midst of a pandemic that’s disproportionately killed or sickened Black, Native, and Latino Americans.

The pandemic means school districts are stretched thin. But Lallinger said his group still believes the time is right to push for change, particularly after the police killing of George Floyd prompted new interest in tackling systemic injustice.

“There are a lot of people interested in having this conversation and making real change, and it would be a mistake to not think about how we would make our schools more just, more equitable, more diverse,” Lallinger said. “While we recognize there’s so many challenges that COVID presents, we also recognize that this is not the time to forget about the fact that this is a scourge, segregation specifically, that has plagued us for many decades.”

Lallinger would know: He’s the grandson of one of the lawyers who argued Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark Supreme Court case that ruled racially segregated schools were unconstitutional in 1954.

School officials in Tucson, Arizona, where the district still operates partially under a decades-old desegregation consent decree, said they signed on because they see this moment as an ideal time to push for change.

“We’re interested in how integration closes the learning gap, in how integration closes the resource gap and the opportunity gap,” said Kinasha Brown, the district’s assistant superintendent for equity and diversity. “I think given our current circumstances, with us nationally being in this pandemic and kind of doing school differently, that this is an opportune time for us.”

Also participating in the coalition are housing groups, like the housing authorities that serve Charlotte, New Haven, and Dallas, and some organizations that work closely with school districts, including Enroll Indy, the nonprofit that operates the enrollment process for some district and charter schools in Indianapolis, and METCO, the longstanding program that sends Boston students into surrounding suburban schools.

For Tucson, Brown said, a big draw was the chance to learn how to work more closely with housing and community organizations. Tucson officials also hope others can learn from their ongoing desegregation efforts, which include magnet schools and a transportation program.

Any organizations that want to push harder to integrate schools over the next several years, though, are likely to come up against a variety of roadblocks. One is the lingering effects of the pandemic, which may mean schools are short on the time and money they’d need for initiatives that require a lot of planning and community dialogue.

Another is school districts’ limited ability to influence enrollment patterns outside their district lines — which is especially a problem for mostly Black and Latino city school districts bordered by whiter, more affluent suburban ones. A 1974 Supreme Court ruling makes it very difficult to integrate schools across those boundaries.

Who wins the White House next month may also affect the resources available for school desegregation efforts.

The Democratic candidate for president, Joe Biden, supports legislation that would fund school desegregation efforts. He’s also said he would reinstate Obama-era guidance designed to help school districts consider student race while trying to diversify or desegregate schools without getting into legal trouble. (Biden’s own record on school desegregation is complicated: He opposed federally mandated school desegregation efforts in the 1970s and ‘80s, though he’s said he supports locally led efforts.)

If President Trump is re-elected, his administration is unlikely to prioritize such work. Early in Trump’s tenure, federal officials ended a $12 million grant program launched under President Obama that would have helped pay for economic school integration plans — an effort that had attracted applications from 17 large and mid-size school districts.

The Supreme Court, meanwhile, is poised to continue to move to the right, meaning it’s unlikely to reverse any longstanding court decisions that make school desegregation more challenging.

What the Bridges Collaborative can do, Lallinger said, is give interested school districts more tools to fight for integration. It has hired a polling firm to learn more about American attitudes about school integration in 2020 and determine which messages resonate most with the public, and plans to share the results with its members.

“What are the ways leaders should be talking to people about this issue,” Lallinger said, “so they’re not turned off, quite frankly, but rather are inspired to action?”

How this teacher of the year uses hiking, skiing, and gardening to re-engage middle-schoolers

2020-08-18T21:17:00+00:00

Heather Whitaker’s classes are unconventional even in normal times.

Her seventh- and eighth-graders go hiking six times a year, in the process learning about environmental stewardship and how to read topographic maps. They go skiing and interview employees at a local ski resort about their career paths. And they manage a school garden, caring for the plants and then volunteering at the food pantry where the produce is donated.

The students are those who have otherwise struggled at Whitaker’s middle school in Gorham, Maine, a suburb of Portland.

“It’s my job to re-engage and motivate and take students who are not truly shining and allow them to show their true selves,” she said. “The hope is to hook them back into school before they get into high school and really disengage.”

Whitaker, Maine’s 2020 teacher of the year, is now working through a challenge facing educators nationwide: how to adapt her teaching for the coming school year, when she won’t be seeing her students in person every day.

Whitaker spoke recently with Chalkbeat about balancing outdoor education with algebra, using conversations with families to plan for the year ahead, and adjusting her own lessons in the wake of this summer’s Black Lives Matter protests.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Tell me a little bit about how your classes work in a normal year.

Alternative education is a program for students that are not accessing the traditional curriculum in the traditional classrooms. We read and we write and we do two-step algebraic equations. But it’s amazing how much you can learn by doing, and it doesn’t have to take place in four walls of the classroom.

We completely run and manage a school garden. It’s not small: We grow and donate over 1,000 pounds of produce per season to our local food pantry.

We also spend a lot of time in the Maine outdoors. We go on six hikes that progress from easier to more difficult. Our culminating trip is with the Appalachian Mountain Club in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. We’re in the woods, completely cut off from technology, for three days.

Heather Whitaker, Maine’s 2020 teacher of the year.

We also go to Sunday River, a big ski resort here. Students choose skiing or snowboarding, and they learn how taking healthy risks can be empowering and invigorating. It’s healthy adrenaline — healthy risk-taking to replace any negative risk-taking they may be experimenting with as teenagers.

I was on a chair lift a few years ago with a student, who was struggling with substance abuse, and he looked over at me and said, “Ms. Whitaker, this is the only time I don’t want to be high.” If I can give kids windows of opportunity, and windows into how things can be different in their life, then I’ve done my job.

What is your school’s plan? What challenges do you expect to face teaching this year?

I will have my students in person two days and be remotely teaching three days. I see, during days they’re with me, a mix of some skills with a lot of experiences. Then, when students are at home, they are carrying over what they learned the day before.

When we were fully remote, that was really hard for my students. It was so computer based. I know I really want to develop kits so kids at home can work on design challenges, hands-on projects.

I’m also going to build in office hours. I have an ed tech [elsewhere, a paraprofessional], and I can make sure he’s checking in with the kids who are at home. That’s not the truth for many educators across the country. I have so much compassion for educators who are going to be juggling that dual model. Your head and your heart wants to be with the students who are in front of you, but you’re also worried about your students who are at home.

During distance learning, many students may have fallen behind. How do you plan to help catch them up?

We need to meet them where they are and take them as far as we can. This notion that we’re going to cover as much as in normal years — we would be putting too much pressure on ourselves. We need to look at the critical standards, the critical knowledge and skills, and teach that after students are safe and well.

I have a 6 year old and a 10 year old. This past school year was my daughter’s kindergarten year. It was cut short. I know there are skills she didn’t get, and like a true teacher’s child, she doesn’t want to work with me. My child isn’t my student! I get caught up every so often in that fear. And we have to be so careful with that fear, because it leads to irrational thinking.

There’s been a lot of talk about the importance of social-emotional learning this coming school year. Will you be doing anything differently this year to account for what many families have been through?

This was a collective trauma. If students were not traumatized by what happened, there was stress. It is our responsibility when we get back to school as educators to acknowledge that.

I partner heavily with our social worker. We run skills groups in my class that help students with things like mindfulness, stress tolerance. That partnership I’m going to depend on more.

I’m really going to be making sure students are going home to a home where they have food. I’m on the board of directors for our food pantry. I started and run our backpack program, which identifies students throughout the district who need food to make it through the weekend.

I don’t have a full concrete plan yet of what I’m going to do, because I need to get to know my students. What platforms did their teachers from last year use? What worked? What didn’t work? I need to interview all of my parents. I started that today — I talked to a family for an hour on the phone.

That’s what I’ll need to do for all. Again, I have 15 students. And that’s where I have so much compassion for our high school teachers, who have 125 on their caseloads. Teachers need to have grace with themselves, and the community also needs to feel that same way.

Do you plan to talk with your classes about the antiracism protests that took place following the police killing of George Floyd? If so, how?

I need to make sure that all of my students in my class feel safe to come to school. I’m responsible for looking at my curriculum and making sure it’s culturally responsive and the work we’re doing is supportive of students of color.

For example, one of our monthly field trips is to a farm called Pineland Farms. At Pineland Farms, there is a cemetery with Black bodies exhumed from an island off the coast of Maine, Malaga Island. The bodies were exhumed and put on Pineland Farms because, at that time in Phippsburg, they wanted to put a hotel on the coast. They forced many people of color off the island or they institutionalized them at Pineland Farms, which was part of the eugenics movement. We go to Pineland Farms, but I never teach about Malaga Island. So I’ve dived in, to be able to infuse that into my social studies curriculum.

I’m really proud that Gorham has a Black Lives Matter group. They are working with students and families of color, and led by students of color, they are taking a hard look at our curriculum to make sure it is culturally responsive and really using their voice despite having some pushback from different members of the community.

Maine is one of the whitest states in the nation, and it is my responsibility to learn more and to do better and learn how I can do better.

What gives you hope in this moment?

Going remote changes things and makes it harder, but it’s not permanent. It’s not always going to be like this. That’s what I have to keep telling myself. Five years from now, it’s not going to be this way. That and my students’ passion.

Schools that don’t physically reopen would lose out on most funding under Republican stimulus bill

2020-07-27T23:19:40+00:00

For several weeks, President Trump has said that schools that didn’t reopen their buildings this fall could risk losing funding. Now, Senate Republicans have introduced a mechanism to make that a reality.

Their bill, which kicks off a final round of negotiations over an additional coronavirus stimulus package, includes $70 billion for K-12 public and private schools. But two-thirds of that money would only be accessible to schools if they offer some in-person instruction — something that schools in many parts of the country have decided is unsafe to do for now.

The reopening provision is a testament to the economic and political importance Republican lawmakers attach to reopening school buildings, and sets up school schedules to continue to serve as a flashpoint in the weeks ahead. It also may prove unpopular: national surveys of parents show that most remain wary of their children returning to schools while the country fails to control the coronavirus. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention itself warned last week that schools in “hot spots” may not be able to reopen.

Democrats have indicated they will strongly oppose tying funds to reopening, and education groups immediately criticized the Republican proposal, which was released Monday. “We are deeply concerned that the bill would seek to tie much-needed assistance to a federal definition of school building reopening. Student health and safety is the most local of concerns,” said Carissa Moffat Miller, executive director of the Council of Chief State School Officers.

“It is important to know that nearly all schools will reopen in some way this fall, whether in person, remotely or a combination of both. Additional federal resources are critical to serve students in every learning environment,” she said.

The funding would be distributed like this: The federal education department would first send about $70 billion to states. One-third of that money could go to schools regardless of whether they planned to physically reopen. But another two-thirds of the money would only be distributed if the school district, charter school, or private school planned to hold some form of in-person instruction.

Schools offering in-person learning for at least half of their students and for at least half of the school week would be eligible for their full allotment. Funding would be reduced for schools offering in-person learning to fewer students or for less time.

Public schools that open physically would also have some more leeway around how they spend their money. The money that states can distribute to schools right away must be used to cover costs related to getting schools open and responding to the pandemic, while the larger pot of money tied to schools’ reopening plans could be used by school leaders for anything “to address the needs of their individual schools.”

All told, the amount of money earmarked for schools is comparable to what was included in the bill House Democrats passed in May. But there is a major difference: while the House Democrats’ proposal included $500 billion to help fill state coffers, the Republican bill does not provide anything for state and local budgets, which are the primary funders of public schools.

That could mean that while schools get an infusion of federal dollars, they will face down other budget cuts that effectively cancel them out. That already happened in some states with the CARES Act, the earlier relief legislation that included money for schools.

“Without some federal aid for state and local budgets, we can expect millions more layoffs,” said American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten.

Another key difference between the new proposal and the House bill is support for private schools. Under the Republicans’ bill, states must set aside some of the $70 billion pot to be sent directly to private schools; the amount would be determined by the share of students who attend a private school, which is 10% nationwide.

Reopening America’s schools is way harder than it should be

2020-07-23T11:07:10+00:00

This article is co-published with The New York Times Sunday Review.

Of all the American institutions the pandemic has shut down, none face pressure to reopen quite like schools do. Pediatricians exhort schools to open their doors wherever possible or risk developmental harm to kids. Working parents, particularly mothers, are in crisis, worried about having to leave the work force altogether in the absence of a place to send their young children each day. And President Trump is campaigning for schools to reopen, threatening to withhold funding if they don’t.

The pressure has mounted as school districts have made it clear that they can do no such thing. Across the country — including in Phoenix, Houston, and a huge chunk of California, where coronavirus cases are rapidly rising — schools are preparing their students and staffs for a continuation of the “remote learning” that began in the spring. In New York City and Chicago, where the virus is more under control, schools are moving toward a hybrid option with remote learning some days, in-person school others. Even in places like Detroit and Memphis, where districts plan to offer in-person school for those who want it, local leaders could change course if virus cases rise; they also have yet to figure out what to do if too many worried teachers or students opt out.

Outrage over schools’ inability to fully reopen should not, of course, be directed at schools themselves, but at the public health failure that makes it impossible for most of them to do so. The consequences of closed or half-open schools, meanwhile, are far vaster than the brutal economic challenge facing working parents and their employers. That’s because schools do much more than provide child care. They provide education, fundamentally. But as the pandemic has made clear, they also provide meals, social connection and health services.

Meeting any one of these needs in normal times through a single institution is a struggle. Add in an out-of-control pandemic that multiplied the number of children who are not getting enough to eat to 14 million, made in-person teaching a health gamble and threw off the learning trajectory of every child in America — all while creating huge projected budget shortfalls for schools — and you have a “train wreck,” said David K. Cohen, a visiting professor of education at Harvard.

Compounding the difficulty is the fact that schools are run locally, autonomy the Trump administration has taken to new extremes by offering reopening instructions that amount to, “good luck.” As a result, many of the country’s 13,000-plus school districts have been left alone to navigate everything from finding masks to deciding what safe classrooms look like — not to mention how to offer widespread and safe food distribution and personalized emotional support in the absence of physical gathering space.

“If you wanted to invent a really weak organization to do all of those things, it would be schools,” Cohen said. “But the reality is, schools are what families have. Especially poor families and Black and brown families.”

So if the first sin was failing to control the pandemic, the second was letting the virus run wild in a country ill suited to handle the cascading consequences. The people left to figure it out are superintendents, school board members, teachers and parents, for whom that simple word “reopen” actually entails a dizzying array of interlocking problems. The people who will pay the eventual price are America’s children, for years to come.

Let’s start with child care, which translates, at the barest minimum, to providing every child with a safe place to go so their parents can work and so that they can learn. For schools to play that role, they require two basic ingredients: sufficient physical space and willing and capable adult caregivers. But how much space and how many adults?

That calculation starts with public health considerations. Exactly what part open schools play in spreading the virus is still unknown, but new research suggests that kids age 10 to 19 can transmit it at rates similar to adults. And with case numbers still rising in the United States, school reopenings in places like Denmark that have contained the virus aren’t fitting guides to what would lie ahead here if districts heeded Trump’s call to bring students back.

P.S. 20 The Clinton Hill School in Brooklyn.

One way to mitigate concern is to enforce physical distancing rules, along with mandates for masks and strict hygiene. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has suggested schools keep students 6 feet apart where feasible, a caveat at the root of school leaders’ confusion. The American Academy of Pediatrics has suggested just 3 feet may be OK, especially with masks, citing the challenge of distancing in schools and the downsides of remote learning.

Skyrocketing cases in some parts of the country have rendered this conversation moot, with school districts and health departments deciding they cannot take the risk of opening school doors at all. But even if other districts decide they can open, superintendents have to take into account two other variables in addition to space: parents’ willingness to send their children to in-person school and teachers’ willingness to show up and teach them.

These considerations can be in direct tension. The more children who want to go to school, the more teachers needed to teach them. And both families and teachers are more likely to want to go if schools take more precautions, like promising 6 feet of separation. But the more precautions schools take, the fewer students they can welcome into each building. Even more complicated, preferences are likely to change multiple times throughout the year, as families and educators reassess the spread of the virus in their community and their personal risk tolerance.

Jason Kamras, the schools chief in Richmond, Va., recently likened the entire conundrum to “playing a game of 3-D chess while standing on one leg in the middle of a hurricane.”

“I have families emailing me that they are desperate for their kids to be back in school,” he said. “And also some families who, if their kids are not in school, they are going to lose their jobs and lose their homes. Then I have families emailing me, understandably, saying they have somebody at home who has a compromised immune system and they’re terrified to send their kids.” (Richmond schools are now set to start the school year online.)

Nationally, despite the looming child care challenge, a vast majority of parents remain skeptical of a return to in-person school. In a recent survey, nearly three-quarters of parents called going back into school buildings a “large to moderate” risk for their children, and the numbers were even higher for Black parents and Hispanic parents.

Teachers are also wary. They know more than most how much students and their families need school. “I 100% want to be with my kids,” said Kathleen McGinness-Grimes, a ninth-grade algebra teacher at a Bronx high school. “I know that they do better in person.”

But teachers did not sign up to prop up the economy by providing child care while putting their health and the health of their families at risk. And romantic portrayals of teaching as a calling obscure the reality that, vocation or not, teachers are also workers who have received few assurances about job safety. School districts are still working out who will be able to work from home, what protective equipment they can provide, how students will be grouped and how infections will be handled.

“Honestly, we’ve had times where there’s no soap in bathrooms. We’ve had no hot water in the building,” McGinness-Grimes said. “I don’t feel safe.”

In Detroit, the schools superintendent, Nikolai Vitti, wants to offer in-person schooling five days a week to those who want it, with an online option for those who don’t. He says he thinks that only half of families will choose physical school, allowing for plenty of social distancing. But he worries teachers’ concerns could make that impossible — for reasons he understands, even if they frustrate him.

Imagining the thought process of a teacher, he said, “If we’re in a non-Covid environment and I have to buy pencils for my children, and my school doesn’t have enough guidance counselors and social workers, and class sizes are large, then how in the world can I trust school systems to get this right in a Covid environment?”

One possible compromise: Some districts are considering providing full-time or nearly full-time in-person school to elementary school students, for whom at-home supervision is most taxing and, according to early evidence, virus transmission is least likely.

The uncertainty around space and safety has driven some districts to a hybrid schedule, where students spend some days in school and other days learning at home, allowing for far fewer students per classroom. One of the many permutations New York City schools can choose from would have students going to their schools just five days in a three-week stretch: Tuesday and Thursday one week, Monday and Thursday the second week, and just Thursday the third week.

The hybrid approach comes up short for many parents. Debra Morello, who lives in the Bronx, works for a meat distributor and has sent her 5-year-old daughter to one of New York City’s centers for children of essential workers for the last several months. If those centers go away, and her daughter is welcome in school buildings only occasionally, “Where am I going to find money for extra child care?” she wondered.

New York City’s schools chancellor says the city is working on some limited child-care options, and figuring out whether empty offices and vacant buildings can be used as school space. But there are no real answers yet.

The reality is that solutions like converting community or outdoor space into additional classrooms, or increasing the number of available adults through a new national child care or tutoring corps, would require a degree of shared responsibility, coordination and resources that schools have never been able to count on — and that hasn’t changed with the pandemic’s arrival.

The clock is ticking: Even as schools delay their start dates, students and teachers across much of the country are due back in August.

In addition to child care, there is food — another resource schools provide that is both much more necessary and much harder to deliver because of the pandemic. In normal times, U.S. public schools provide 30 million free or nearly-free meals a day.

Last spring, when schools closed, states and schools devised emergency workarounds to ensure that students and their families could still have access to food. Many set up grab-and-go distribution sites. Some handed out a week’s worth of food at a time. We do not know exactly how many families schools managed to reach.

In Colorado, where Chalkbeat analyzed available data, the pattern was clear: While demand was high in some districts, over all, schools gave out only a small fraction of what they normally would have. Denver’s public schools served 12% of the meals they usually provide, for example.

One of the biggest impediments to picking up available meals — the inconvenience of driving or using public transit to go to a pickup site during a limited window, risking exposure to the virus along the way — is not going away in the fall if schools are closed.

Eventually, the federal government set up a program to send money for food directly to families to make up for lost meals, though months later, some families are still waiting for those benefits to arrive. That program came out of one of several pieces of coronavirus relief legislation passed since March, which have included financial help that researchers estimate have kept poverty rates from rising sharply.

But the financial stress on families is continuing to mount. In June, a survey by the Census Bureau asked American adults whether children in their household “were not eating enough because we couldn’t afford enough food.” The results indicate that about 14 million children are hungry because of financial strain — more than five times the number in 2018. That’s also about two and half times the number in 2008, the peak of food insecurity during the Great Recession, according to Lauren Bauer, an economics fellow at the Brookings Institution who analyzed the newest data.

As with the virus itself, Black and Hispanic families bear the heaviest burden. Among Black households, one in three families with children reported some food insecurity for children. That was true of about one in four Hispanic families with children and one in five families with children nationwide.

“The numbers we’re observing in June are higher than we’ve ever observed,” Bauer said.

The program replacing school meals with benefits doesn’t extend into the new school year. And rule changes that made food distribution doable this spring — allowing schools to give meals to any students, rather than having to check their eligibility — are also set to expire. Another relief package could address both. But no matter what happens, schools will be working to fill in the gaps as a major source of meals for low-income children.

Beyond providing food, schools also serve as de facto community social workers, sometimes with an actual social worker or two on staff, and sometimes not. That was true before the pandemic, when teachers and administrators could count on speaking face-to-face with children and their parents on a regular basis.

“At this moment, given the pandemic, we need to create safe ways” to continue doing that when “we can’t ensure schools will be safe for kids and teachers and families,” said John King, a former education secretary who now runs the Education Trust, a nonprofit focused on education and civil rights.

Again, the experience of the spring gives a hint at families’ challenges and the lengths schools will go to help them. In an agricultural community about 50 miles from Fresno, Calif., the Sundale Union Elementary School district’s social worker spent much of the spring assisting families applying for federal food benefits. The district posted local job openings on its Facebook page for parents. The community center that operates out of the district’s single school opened a food and clothing pantry to families twice a week.

“We did a lot more of that than we normally do,” Superintendent Terri Rufert said. “And it wasn’t just the parents normally in our socioeconomically disadvantaged group.”

Whether or not they open their buildings, schools will also be tasked with helping students adjust after months of upended schedules, limited social interaction, and families trying to keep it together during a period of heightened stress.

“Our children are falling behind, even more than they already were. What are you going to do about it?”

Our failure to get schools fully open means that meeting students’ mental health needs is even harder. And organizing hybrid schedules or remote learning may sap energy that schools need to serve students’ continuing needs. “I think we’re still going to be in survival mode as we move into this next academic year,” said Lisa Sontag-Padilla, a behavioral scientist with the RAND Corporation who has studied school mental health services.

Black and Latino children will deserve particular attention, as their family members are disproportionately likely to have gotten infected with the virus and had to deal with its medical, emotional and financial effects. Black students, families and educators have simultaneously been at the center of a national movement protesting the violent deaths of Black Americans by police officers.

“These kids have suffered a lot over the last few months,” Zelatrice Fowler, who teaches gifted students in Phoenix and is the president of the Arizona Alliance of Black School Educators, said.

She’s not sure schools will be up to the task of helping students move forward. Already, “There was a disconnect between teachers and students, especially when the majority of teachers were white,” she said. “Now, there’s a bigger need to really, truly understand the students and their families.” (Nationally, about 79% of public-school teachers are white, whereas about half of public-school students are white.)

The support Fowler will be able to offer this fall will be through a computer screen. With case numbers rising in Phoenix, schools there are all starting online.

If taking on the child care, food and the mental health challenges facing American children this fall were not enough, there is also, of course, the matter of making sure those children learn.

Providing any form of education this fall means reckoning with an extraordinary version of what educators call “summer slide.” In normal times, teachers sometimes lack precise information about each child’s academic starting point, and basics like who and what teachers will teach can remain a mystery until late summer.

Heading into this school year, these constraints are profound. After school buildings closed this spring, teachers offered various forms of substitute education, from paper packets to video classroom gatherings. Nevertheless, a small but significant share of students went totally unaccounted for as they struggled to connect to online lessons without reliable internet, took on child care responsibilities for younger siblings, or just tuned out without the familiar support of teachers and counselors. Over all, the best estimates from teachers are that six in 10 students were regularly engaged in their coursework.

“Children were not properly served academically and social-emotionally when schools were shut down in the spring,” Vitti, the Detroit superintendent, acknowledged. His push for in-person summer school and an in-person option for students this fall, he said, was spurred by parents saying: “Our children are falling behind, even more than they already were. What are you going to do about it?”

P.S. 20 The Clinton Hill School in Brooklyn.

Remote learning was an especially poor substitute for the needs of America’s seven million students with disabilities. Anna Fridman’s 5-year-old twins missed out on seven weekly sessions each of speech, occupational and physical therapy when their Brooklyn pre-K center closed. “As a parent, it’s very, very painful to see,” she said.

In Chicago, 16-year-old Sarah Alli-Brown had planned to spend her entire junior year preparing for the SAT with daily help from an English teacher. Instead, the older sister of 9-year-old twins, she found herself charged with caring for her brothers while her mother worked, and she went weeks without real instruction from her school.

Many of the impediments that made remote learning a mostly nonlearning experience this spring are still present today. The most significant is many students’ lack of internet access at home. In Newark, where cost is the main barrier, one in three households don’t have internet at home; in some rural parts of the country, broadband options don’t exist at all.

An ever-optimistic group, some educators see potential in their hybrid or fully remote future, imagining more personalized lessons and deeper connections with smaller groups of students. And districts are working on ways to make the fall better than the spring, adding more time during the day to interact with teachers live over video and bringing back more of the usual structures, like letter grades, to keep kids on track.

But that’s little solace to parents of kids who will be trying to learn to read on Zoom.

Even if teachers and students can return to classrooms, the fundamentals that can make school come alive will be challenged by even the most basic health requirements. “I like students to be able to talk about their writing with each other,” Kristin Roberts, a high school English teacher in Phoenix, said, “to ask someone how this sentence sounds, to pass papers back and forth, to sit next to each other and have conversations about what makes writing good or what they’re noticing in literature.” How will any of that happen in a mask from 6 feet apart?

Schools are mustering real creativity to meet the moment. Arne Duncan, education secretary for most of President Barack Obama’s tenure and now a managing partner with the Emerson Collective, said he’s spoken to school districts that know they won’t be able to open in person and so are planning to run weekly bus routes to bring their most vulnerable students to school for check-ins. Other schools are figuring out that if some students are in the building only on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays, for example, the school will send them home Thursday with enough food for the weekend. Others are converting cafeterias into academic space and creating afternoon and Saturday shifts for their schools.

These workarounds are also dark, revealing how far we remain from being able to offer a halfway normal school year for the students who need it most.

The most important way to help is undoubtedly to do what could have made our American pandemic what it is for children and families in Finland, Denmark, and even Italy. We have to control the virus. Because whether it should work this way or not, without schools we have a hobbled economy, hungry children, and exhausted parents.

Making schools functional will also take money, as states are facing projected shortfalls totaling more than $500 billion over the next three years thanks to the spiraling pandemic. Without federal help, schools will have to lay off teachers and make other painful cuts in the years ahead. What school leaders, social scientists, parents, and others say is needed in the short term — the ability to add space and staff members, offer in-school tutoring, and provide additional child-care options, among other things — won’t be possible without more funding, either.

Congress has yet to answer calls for additional relief. If it comes, and if every state enacts real public health measures, schools will have a shot at turning a catastrophe into a mere crisis. Unless both happen, schools are likely to spend years trying to meet students’ growing needs with less. They will try their best. It will not be remotely enough.

DeVos floats ‘microgrants’ for students, teachers as coronavirus upends schooling

2020-03-28T01:47:00+00:00

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos said Friday that she will push for legislation offering “microgrants” to individual students and educators adapting to remote learning.

Speaking at a White House briefing on the coronavirus, which has closed schools nationwide, DeVos said the grants would help “the most disadvantaged students in states or communities where their school system has simply shut down.”

For students, the grants would help them “continue to learn,” DeVos said. For teachers, the grants would “help them pivot to supporting all of their students in a different environment than they’ve been used to.”

DeVos took no questions and offered no information about the size of the grants or how they would reach teachers or students. A department spokesperson said later Friday that the proposed grants could be used for physical items like computers or other devices, Internet access or hotspots, and textbooks or other materials, or for services like tutoring, therapy for students with disabilities, or tuition and fees for an online program at a public or private school.

The proposal would “focus” on students with disabilities and those eligible for government food benefits, and whose school has been closed for at least 30 days, spokesperson Angela Morabito said in a statement.

The idea — especially the grants for students that could pay tuition — is a glimpse at how DeVos will use the upheaval to advance her ideas about education. A proponent of private-school vouchers and school choice, DeVos has long downplayed the role of the federal government and scoffed at those who see school buildings or school districts as education’s key organizing principle.

“I’ve always believed education funding should be tied to students, not systems, and that necessity has never been more evident,” DeVos said Friday.

She’s also spent the last two years promoting a $5 billion tax credit program that would fund stipends for private school tuition and other education expenses like tutoring or enrichment programs — items that overlap with the microgrants proposal. The tax credit program has not gained traction in Congress, though.

Money for technology, cleaning, summer learning: What the coronavirus stimulus bill means for schools

2020-03-26T17:05:00+00:00

A stimulus bill designed to blunt the economic impact of the coronavirus is moving closer to becoming law. If it does, it will mean billions for school districts, with more money going to states and schools with more low-income students.

The Senate voted late Wednesday on a bill that President Trump has said he’ll sign. The House is expected to vote on that bill Friday.

The bill includes significant sums for schools. The biggest chunk: $13.5 billion to be distributed among states, which would have to pass most of that on to school districts and charter schools for needs like buying technology to get remote learning off the ground, sanitizing school buildings, and paying for summer learning programs.

School districts could also receive some of another $3 billion distributed to governors. And another $8.8 billion would be directed to child nutrition, including school meals.

Some education advocates quickly praised the legislation. “States are facing mounting costs in dealing with this unprecedented crisis,” Carissa Moffat Miller, executive director of the Council of Chief State School Officers, said in a statement. “We applaud Congress for reaching a bipartisan solution that provides historic levels of emergency funding.”

Others praised the extra money, but warned that with a recession looming it should be seen as just a start. “As revenues decline and state and local governments’ budgets suffer, Congress must help prevent dramatic cuts from hitting our schools,” said National Education Association president Lily Eskelsen García in a statement. “Congress must understand that tens of billions dollars more will be needed going forward to truly support all students, counter the learning loss happening through school closures and prevent educator layoffs.”The bill also includes language allowing Education Secretary Betsy DeVos to waive parts of the federal education law.

Here’s what we know about what this means for schools.

🔗Who’s getting money for education?

For the $13.5 billion to states and school districts:

Each state’s share will be determined by how much money it currently gets through Title I — meaning states with more low-income students will get more money. States will divide that money up among districts and charter schools the same way, with districts and schools that get more Title I funding getting more coronavirus relief funding.
States must give at least 90% of the money they receive to districts. State education departments could choose to spend the rest themselves, including through “grants or contracts.”

For the $3 billion to governors:

Each state’s share will be determined by its population of children and young people. Then governors decide where the money goes. Their choices: school districts deemed “most significantly impacted by coronavirus,” colleges and universities, or any other school district or “education related entity,” including those providing child care and early childhood education.

🔗What will schools be able to spend money on?

Districts will be able to use their portion of the $13.5 billion on a wide variety of things, including:

Supplies for cleaning and sanitizing schools and school district buildings
Efforts to help students from low-income families, students with disabilities, English learners, “racial and ethnic minorities,” homeless students, and students in foster care
Coordinating long-term school closures, including meals, technology, and serving students with disabilities
Buying technology, including connectivity, to help students continue learning, including adaptive equipment for students with disabilities
Items principals need “to address the needs of their individual schools”
Mental health services
Planning and providing in-person or online summer learning programs and after-school programs
Continuing to provide district-level services and employ staffers

🔗What new authority does this grant Education Secretary Betsy DeVos?

The law codifies the education secretary’s ability to waive parts of the federal education law requiring testing and identification of low-performing schools.

DeVos has already said states can cancel testing this year and introduced a streamlined process for states to request waivers. States that get such waivers will have to hold constant its list of schools considered low-performing.

The bill says explicitly, though, that DeVos cannot waive any provisions pertaining to civil rights.

🔗What about the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act?

The bill does not give DeVos authority to waive any part of IDEA, but it does take a small step in that direction. DeVos is tasked with preparing a report within a month in which she offers recommendations for additional flexibility under various federal laws, including the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.

Recently, DeVos has issued guidance reiterating that schools must comply with IDEA as they move to remote instruction. The department has also emphasized that IDEA shouldn’t stop schools from providing any instruction at all.

Some school leaders are still skittish, though, saying it’s challenging or even impossible to fully meet students’ needs remotely. Existing guidance “is not nearly enough,” Wesley Smith, who leads an association of California school administrators, told EdSource. “We need explicit waivers of explicit provisions.”

But critics say even starting down this path could be dangerous.

“IDEA was created because people said ‘we can’t do it’ for a laundry list of reasons. And IDEA clearly says ‘but you have to,’” Wendy Tucker of the National Center for Special Education in Charter Schools said earlier this week. “Instead of rolling back civil rights, we need to roll up our sleeves and get to work.”

DeVos to school districts: Don’t let disability law concerns stop you from educating kids

2020-03-23T21:27:00+00:00

The federal education department told school districts this weekend that they should not fully close — or decide against offering online instruction — because of legal concerns about serving students with disabilities.

The bottom line, the department said in a new fact sheet, is that there are ways for online instruction to be made accessible for students with disabilities, and districts need to work out the details. Many types of therapy and other services can be offered online or by phone, the department noted, and in some cases, schools and parents should agree to extend deadlines for things like IEP meetings.

“We need schools to educate all students out of principle, rather than educate no students out of fear,” Education Secretary Betsy DeVos said in a statement. “These are challenging times, but we expect schools to rise to the occasion, and the Department stands ready to assist you in your efforts.”

Department officials said they understood that during the national emergency, “schools may not be able to provide all services in the same manner they are typically provided.” If a school deems it safe to do so, officials said, certain services could still be provided to students in person.

The department’s strong words come as school districts across the U.S. struggle to quickly figure out how to educate their students online, including their students with disabilities. Some, like Miami-Dade County, have forged ahead. New York City is starting its remote-learning effort Monday, and has been distributing iPads and making plans to offer speech and occupational therapy to students over the phone.

Other districts have said they simply lack the resources to distribute the technology or provide the services for students with disabilities needed to make remote learning work for all. Chicago Public Schools is one. The Philadelphia school district is another. Both districts are providing optional printed and digital learning materials.

Some advocates for students with disabilities praised the move. “The U.S. Department of Education’s guidance is helpful. There’s a lot of flexibility under the law and in the law,” said Lindsay Jones, president of the National Center for Learning Disabilities. “Our shared goal is keeping our kids engaged and getting kids the services that we can during this time.”

The education department’s latest document says federal officials stand ready to offer “guidance, technical assistance, and information on any available flexibility.” But that doesn’t address the practical and financial roadblocks facing many districts.

Help could come with the passage of a coronavirus stimulus package that includes money for states and school districts. Negotiations are ongoing.

It’s unclear if states and districts will be able to request waivers that would loosen some of the restrictions on meeting students’ special education plans while schools are closed. Past versions of the coronavirus stimulus package legislation have called for DeVos to make recommendations about whether this would be necessary.

Matt Barnum contributed reporting.

AP exams this year: 45 minutes, online, and focused on early-year content

2020-03-20T17:41:35+00:00

Students in Advanced Placement classes will be able to take the end-of-course exams, the College Board announced Friday — but the tests will look very different than usual.

There will be no in-person exams. Instead, tests will last 45 minutes and be able to be taken at home using a computer, tablet, or phone. Photographing handwritten work will also be an option, according to the new guidance.

The tests will also only cover a portion of the courses’ content — “topics and skills most AP teachers and students have already covered in class by early March,” the College Board said. Each test will be offered on two dates.

The fact that the tests will be given at all — and won’t cover an entire year’s worth of material — will come as a relief to some students, who have seen the school year upended as schools nationwide close in an effort to stop the spread of the coronavirus.

“All I am is worried. I’m worried that I’ll fail my AP World History exam in May,” Savannah Storms, a student at Fountain-Fort Carson High School in Colorado, said earlier this week. “I don’t know if I should study stuff we’re learning now, or the whole year.”

The testing is likely to concern some students and teachers, too, given the uncertainty around whether schools will return to regular operations at any point this year and students’ varying access to virtual learning. The College Board says it will be ramping up its online practice options to help students with more limited access to their teachers while schools are closed.

Some teachers worry this will disproportionately affect students with less access to technology at home.

Not only have students told me repeatedly they strongly prefer learning and testing on paper, but this will only exacerbate the already inequitable technology, time, connectivity, access, etc that our students already deal with. https://t.co/Au3zlpwGTy
— Hayley Breden (@HayleyVatch) March 17, 2020

Already, some AP teachers had said they planned to meet in small groups with students to help them continue studying for exams because they didn’t have access to devices or the internet at home.

It’s also unclear whether all colleges will be inclined to offer credit — a key incentive for students — for passing scores on a more limited test. “Colleges support this solution and are committed to ensuring that AP students receive the credit they have worked this year to earn,” the College Board says.

More information about individual subjects will be available by April 3. Students who want to cancel their tests won’t have to pay a fee.

This article answers questions raised by our readers. Share your coronavirus-related questions, concerns, and ideas by emailing us at community@chalkbeat.org, and keep up with our reporting on COVID-19 here.

Without child care for health care workers, school closures may prove ineffective, new research says

2020-03-16T15:15:00+00:00

Officials deciding whether to close schools must consider the costs of leaving health care workers without child care, new research shows — or they risk losing the potential lifesaving benefits of those closures.

An analysis by Colorado State and Yale researchers, released Friday, estimates that 15% of health care providers have children but don’t have another family member in their household to provide child care when schools close. That could keep some of them from going into work and helping patients.

“School closures come with many tradeoffs,” wrote Jude Bayham and Eli Fenichel. “The results suggest that it is unclear if the potential contagion prevention from school closures justifies the potential loss of health care workers.”

The research is the clearest look yet at a key downside of widespread school closures as a tactic to reduce spread of the new coronavirus. Most of the country’s largest school districts, and at least 20 states, have announced closures. And while some have promised to develop alternate child care arrangements for parents who need it, it’s unclear how widespread and effective these contingency plans will be.

The analysis is consistent with guidance released Friday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which said that other countries’ experiences haven’t proven that closures would slow the illness.

But most questions about whether closures will succeed — including the extent to which health care workers will be able to find alternative child care arrangements — remain unanswered for now.

The paper, which has not been formally peer-reviewed, uses Census data to show that 29% of American health care workers have children in their household between ages 3 and 12. About half of those households have a non-working adult or a teenager who could potentially provide child care. But that still leaves 15% of health care workers without clear avenues for child care when schools close.

Then the researchers make a back-of-the-envelope estimate for what this could mean for the consequences of the coronavirus.

Say that closing schools reduces the spread of the new coronavirus by 15%. If the loss of health care workers increases the disease’s mortality rate from 2% to 2.35% — because there are fewer staffers to care for patients — school closures would ultimately cause more deaths than they would prevent.

Those figures rely on a number of assumptions, which the researchers readily acknowledge. For instance, it’s not known what the true mortality rate is for the new coronavirus, or to what extent closures would limit the coronavirus’ spread.

Under some assumptions, the researchers say, school closures would have a clearly beneficial effect, while others indicate they may be clearly harmful.

Those estimates, the researchers say, “imply great uncertainty to whether school closures will ultimately reduce COVID-19 mortality.”

A particularly big question mark is whether closures would actually cause a substantial share of health care workers to miss work. Many of them, including single parents, might already have a number of other child care solutions. (An older study estimated that school closures would lead to a drop in health care personnel of 6 to 19%.)

Past research on influenza outbreaks has suggested that school closures can limit spread, though it’s unclear if these results will apply to the current virus.

Whether or not closures are a good idea, they are happening at a rapid pace across the country. Leaders in holdouts like New York City and Clark County, Nevada, are facing intense pressure to close, and schools may see absence rates climb among students and staff.

School districts and public health officials, this research suggests, should be working to set up alternative child care arrangements, particularly for health care workers.

Some places have made efforts in this regard. The Los Angeles school district, for one, will be opening child care hubs from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. In Chicago, the Park District will open 18 sites for emergency child care. San Francisco is converting its libraries into child care centers.

Government action may be especially necessary because community institutions that typically offer child care during summers and spring breaks are responding in different ways. In the Phoenix area, for example, YMCAs and most Boys and Girls Clubs are continuing operations. But in San Diego and Louisville, Kentucky, YMCAs have suspended their camps and child care.

Elizabeth Warren joins teachers on strike in Chicago: ‘Unions are how we have power’

2019-10-22T17:10:52+00:00

Elizabeth Warren offered another big show of support for teachers unions on Tuesday, appearing with Chicago teachers as their strike extended into a fourth school day.

“The unions are how we have power. The unions are how we make sure that the needs of every one of our children are heard loud and clear,” Warren said. “I’m here because the eyes of this nation are upon you. They have turned to Chicago for you to lead the way — for you to show how the power of standing together is the power of making real change in this country.”

The event followed the Monday release of the Democratic presidential candidate’s K-12 education plan, which calls for a suite of union-friendly policies, including a big increase in federal spending on public schools, an end to federal support for charter school growth, and making it easier for public employees to collectively bargain.

At the Chicago event, Warren stood alongside American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, who has praised Warren’s plan. Warren also promised that she would be a friend to teachers unions in the White House, implicitly contrasting herself with the Obama administration — which had a complicated relationship with unions in part thanks to its embrace of testing and new teacher evaluation policies — and the Trump administration, which has tried (but largely failed) to cut federal education spending.

“America’s public schools need a partner in Washington,” said Warren. “Not a partner who’s going to tell them what to do, not a partner who’s going to do high-stakes testing. Not a partner who’s going to pinch pennies. But a partner who’s going to be there to back you up in the critically important work you do every day.”

The Massachusetts senator isn’t the only candidate to have voiced support for striking teachers in Chicago. Former Vice President Joe Biden and former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Julián Castro both tweeted their support, and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders attended a Chicago union rally last month before the strike began. When Los Angeles teachers went on strike earlier this year, Sen. Kamala Harris of California also tweeted her support for them as well.

That level of enthusiasm for teachers unions, coupled with Warren and Sanders’ criticism of charter schools, underscores how the politics of education have changed for Democrats over the last few years. Warren’s plan has earned sharp criticism from leaders of charter schools that have won praise — and millions of federal dollars to expand — from presidential administrations of both parties.

“We are disappointed that her plan paints a picture that all charter schools are part of the problem, when public charter networks, like KIPP, are providing a quality education to so many African American and Latinx students and are trying to address the same issues of inequality in our education system,” Richard Buery, the chief of policy and public affairs for the KIPP Foundation, said in a statement. KIPP is the country’s largest nonprofit charter school network.

Asked about that criticism Tuesday, Warren said only, “I believe that public money should stay in public schools.” (Charter schools are publicly funded but privately run.)

Bargaining between the union and Chicago officials appeared to be at a standstill on Tuesday, and union President Jesse Sharkey warned Monday that a quick settlement was “not likely.” Class sizes, staffing levels for school nurses and social workers, as well as pay for veteran teachers and paraprofessionals, have been the key issues at play. The last time the union went on strike, in 2012, it lasted for seven school days.

Looking for up-to-the-minute coverage of the Chicago strike? We’re tracking it here.

The College Board says it’s tried to reduce inequity in college admissions. A new book argues it hasn’t

2019-09-10T04:01:53+00:00

It was a small detail tucked inside a March 2014 New York Times Magazine piece titled “The Story Behind the SAT Overhaul.”

The piece profiled the College Board’s new leader, David Coleman, and a suite of initiatives he was introducing to make the test — and the entire college admissions process — fairer. That included sending packets of information to low-income, high-achieving students about college, something that had been shown to push them into more selective universities.

“Research on the initial effects of the program won’t be released until next month,” the story said.

But that research didn’t come out the following month, or the month after that. The results, showing that the packets made virtually no difference after all, weren’t published until five years later.

“This was the pattern with the College Board during the early years of David Coleman’s presidency: one grand, well-publicized attempt after another to make the SAT more equitable and more fair ending in either quiet unpublicized failure or in a noisy claim of success that fell apart under more careful scrutiny,” argues journalist Paul Tough in his new book, “The Years that Matter Most.”

The book catalogs instances where the College Board spun, obscured, or downplayed unfavorable research findings. In Tough’s telling, the initiatives — including free SAT prep created by Khan Academy — amounted to a “large-scale exercise in corporate rebranding” for the nonprofit that had been losing market share to competitor ACT, Inc.

The College Board, and Coleman himself, deny that. “There’s no mercantile motive,” Coleman told Chalkbeat. “We do our best to make tools available for students from a wide range of backgrounds to show their talents.”

In his telling, the College Board made earnest efforts to address — and study — vexing societal inequities. The results may have been mixed, even concerning in some cases, but that reflects the difficulty of the mission, not the failure of the College Board, he said. The College Board released a lengthy response to Tough’s book.

Tough’s portrayal has the potential to shift the perception of one of the most influential players in education as it continues to roll out high-profile initiatives purporting to reduce inequity in higher education. And Tough’s indictment is broader than the College Board — it includes philanthropists and policymakers eager to find cheap solutions to entrenched disparities and news outlets that accepted the College Board’s framing.

Curious about Tough’s claims? We took a careful look ourselves. Here’s what we know about the organization’s key initiatives and how the College Board is responding.

What we know: A packet of college info sent to low-income high achievers didn’t help them much — and the College Board sat on the results for years, though it did eventually release them.

The College Board’s packets were based on work by researchers Caroline Hoxby and Sarah Turner. They found that providing customized information about the college application process, as well as application fee waivers, caused those high achievers to attend colleges better matched with their abilities.

A New York Times columnist called it “a simple way to send poor kids to top colleges.” Coleman decided to take the effort nationwide shortly after taking the helm at the College Board.

That’s where Tough picks up the trail. He says he asked for results of that expansion, only to be put off again and again. Tough finally received an internal memo about the program’s first two rounds. “As soon as I read it, I understood why the College Board had been so reluctant to give it to me,” Tough wrote. The effects were minimal.

As Tough’s book was going to press, a study was released looking at the program’s effect on a larger group of students over the following two years. Again, the packets had few clear effects. (Chalkbeat wrote about the study after finding it on a research website two weeks after its release; the College Board did not publicize the findings.)

David Coleman, president and CEO of The College Board, Caroline Hoxby, Scott and Donya Bommer Professor in Economics at Stanford University, CA, and Tamron Hall, Anchor of MSNBC’s “NewsNation” — (Photo by: Rob Kim/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images)

Today, the College Board says it’s stopped sending the packets but incorporated elements of them into other projects.

While the results were disappointing, they can be seen as the social scientific process in action: trying something that other research suggested would be successful, monitoring the results, and discontinuing what doesn’t work.

Tough counters that the new study got too little attention, too late. “They knew these results years ago and they chose … not to reveal to the public that this replication wasn’t working,” he said in an interview.

“We were willing to share those results,” Coleman told Chalkbeat, pointing to the 2019 study. “But admittedly, we made some false starts where we thought we’d earlier be able to share the results, and we paused because we found this whole area rather confusing, what we were seeing.”

Coleman said that the organization was also concerned about seeming to differ with researchers the College Board respected.

“I totally accept that another road we could have gone down, in retrospect, was to give gradual reports of progress,” he said. “I think that might have been better, and I just want to own that.”

What we know: There’s no evidence that the College Board’s partnership with Khan Academy has helped close racial or economic test-score gaps.

The College Board partnered with Khan Academy to provide free online SAT prep courses starting in 2015. Its goal was to provide a credible alternative to the expensive tutoring services accessible to affluent students.

One year in, Coleman claimed remarkable results. “Never in my career have I seen a launch of technology on this scale that has broken down the racial divisions that so haunt this nation — never,” Coleman said.

Two years in, the College Board released data showing that time spent on Khan Academy test prep was correlated with similar gains for students of all demographics. Practice, Coleman said, is “an equal opportunity employer.”

The problem, Tough notes, is that the data showed that not all groups of students were practicing the same amount. Those with more educated parents tended to study longer, and Asian students used the tool far more than any other racial group. (Black students used it a bit more than white and Hispanic students.)

Coleman says those disparities concern the College Board, too, and that the organization has acknowledged this in its research reports. “The notion that a free tool would disrupt those patterns on day one would be unbelievable, really,” he said.

The College Board says it’s taken meaningful action to respond to the data, such as partnerships with urban school districts and incentives for low-income students to use Khan Academy.

The College Board also points out that students who had the lowest PSAT test scores saw the biggest gains after more time on Khan Academy. But again, students with higher scores were much more likely to spend a lot of time practicing.

Another key point to understanding this debate, which Tough doesn’t get into, is that the College Board’s research doesn’t show whether Khan Academy truly caused the score increases. Perhaps the students who used Khan most were particularly motivated or were using other study aids.

The bottom line: Students’ use of Khan Academy was unequal. It’s also possible that Khan partially replaced an even more unequal system of private tutoring and commercial prep programs, and has prepared students who might otherwise have gone without any extra help. It’s impossible to tell what the overall effect has been, but Coleman’s claims from 2016 seem overstated.

Sal Khan, founder of the Khan Academy, gives a lecture at the first global philanthropy conference on July 9, 2016 in China. (Photo by Visual China Group via Getty Images/Visual China Group via Getty Images)

What we know: The SAT favors affluent students more than grade point averages do. But there’s also little evidence that more colleges going “test optional” would level the playing field.

Tough also takes aim at an analysis of high school grade inflation published in a 2018 book edited by College Board-affiliated researchers. It shows that grades at high schools serving affluent and white students are rising faster than GPAs at schools serving mostly students from low-income families. Separate research in North Carolina has found a similar phenomenon.

These results were widely publicized, and the College Board used them to suggest the downside of moving away from admissions tests like the SAT.

“Submitting SAT scores as part of a college application can open doors to opportunity not just for a privileged few, but for all students,” reads a College Board-sponsored piece focused on the study’s findings.

But Tough points out that other aspects of the study, as well as other research, don’t support the idea that GPA gives more advantaged students a leg up.

At the student level, GPA increases between 2001 and 2016 were similar for black students (+.11) and white students (+.12). Students with highly educated parents saw only slightly larger increases (+.15) than students whose parents hadn’t completed high school (+.11). (One exception was Hispanic students, who have seen minimal GPA increases over that time.)

SAT scores are correlated with race and family income, much more so than high school GPA — a fact other researchers note in the same book. “Studies have found that students who have higher [high school] GPAs than test scores tend to be female, minority, and low-income students,” they write.

Coleman says the key fact is that the SAT can help predict, along with GPA, which students will do well in college.

“That debate is to me, tired,” he said. “What’s evident is that two sources of data, like so many cases in life, are more than one.” (Research supports that claim, though high school GPA alone is more predictive than SAT scores alone.) Coleman has also said that poor SAT scores “must not be a veto on any student’s life.”

Tough zeroes in on expensive test prep as a key driver of the disparities between the SAT scores of different groups. But here he’s on weaker ground: research has found that test prep offers students only a modest boost, and large test score gaps exist on exams that students are unlikely to explicitly prepare for.

What all of this means for the fight to make college admissions more equitable is unclear. Tough is highly critical of the SAT, but acknowledges that empirical research has not found that colleges become more racially or economically diverse after they drop SAT or ACT requirements.

Coleman also argues that, if more schools shifted attention from test scores to grades, affluent students’ GPAs would rise at an even more rapid clip. “Let’s not be naïve,” he said.

In general, he says, people should not expect that the SAT to mitigate the realities of poverty. As inequality persists, tests will reflect them.

“We can empower more people to practice, to grow, to defy those,” he said. “It should never blind us to their effects.”

Michael Bennet, fighting for traction, releases education plan focused on preschool and partnerships

2019-09-05T12:40:09+00:00

Former Denver schools chief Michael Bennet hasn’t qualified for the next Democratic presidential debate. But he’s still pursuing the nomination — and trying to win supporters with his education bona fides.

Bennet released an education plan Thursday that he says draws from his experience as superintendent. While his time in that role was marked by controversial decisions to close underenrolled schools and allow charter schools to operate in district buildings, his policy plan steers clear of those ideas.

Instead, it calls for the federal government to spend more on things like universal free preschool, pay raises for teachers, and evening out spending disparities across schools.

“I spent a significant part of my life in classrooms,” Bennet told reporters on Wednesday. “I’ve seen what works.”

You can read Bennet’s full plan here. Here are a few notable elements.

500 “Regional Opportunity Compacts”

Bennet is proposing creating hundreds of local partnerships among school districts, local leaders, unions, and nonprofits that would be charged with ensuring students are prepared for kindergarten, learn to read on time, and graduate with key skills. They would receive $10 billion a year for five years, which Bennet said would be paid for by reversing President Trump’s tax cuts.

An initiative with similar ambitions kicked off in Denver in 2011, but appears to have been active for just a few years.

Free preschool

A key element of Bennet’s education proposal is his commitment to offering universal free preschool. Here, he offers a timeline: All 4-year-olds would have access by 2024, and all 3-year-olds by 2027.

Early childhood education has gotten attention from most of the Democrats vying for the nomination. But Bennet has tried to distinguish himself by insisting that he is more focused on the country’s youngest students than his counterparts pushing free college. (Bennet’s proposal would make community college free and four-year public colleges debt-free over time.)

Raising teacher pay

Bennet’s plan says his administration would work to increase teacher pay, with the goal being pay for educators “at least the equivalent amount they could earn in the private sector with a comparable level of education.” That gets at a key disparity in teacher pay: The gap between teacher pay and the pay of other college-educated professionals has grown substantially over the last 25 years, even accounting for benefits, according to a 2018 report by the Economic Policy Institute.

Bennet offers no details about how he would change that, though. And recent news out of Denver indicates that there could be some short-term tension between that goal and another of Bennet’s aspirations, diversifying the teaching profession. That city saw the diversity of its newest teachers fall after salaries rose and drew veterans from other districts.

Expanding child nutrition and child tax credit programs

Bennet says he would push for legislation to offer a child tax credit of up to $300 per month per child and boost support for food stamps and the Women, Infants, and Children program. Research has shown that access to those kinds of benefits can have real effects on how students do in school — and on their health.

Creating a “future-oriented education system”

Bennet’s plan calls for revamping classroom instruction and creating an education system with “a variety of high-quality options for families.” It’s the only reference to school choice — and an oblique one, as he goes on to mention options like career and technical education and dual enrollment, not charter schools.

That’s likely a reflection of how politically polarizing charters have become. Support for charters among white Democrats has seen a notable drop since 2016, though support among black Democrats has risen.

Not mentioned in the plan are any new measures specifically designed to racially integrate schools.

“I think the real focus at this point needs to be on making sure that kids in neighborhoods where there are no good options have the chance to go to schools in places where there are better options and we are investing much more heavily in neighborhoods where kids today have no educational opportunities,” Bennet told Chalkbeat in August.

Catch up: Four takeaways from the Democratic presidential forum on education

2019-07-05T23:50:21+00:00

Democrats agreed Friday that teachers should be paid more, public schools should get an influx of resources, and that Betsy DeVos is an awful education secretary.

One by one, 10 presidential candidates preached to the choir of educators at the National Education Association, the country’s largest union, which is holding its annual assembly in Houston. (Most of the top-tier candidates were in attendance, though Pete Buttigieg and Cory Booker were absent.)

The NEA is optimistic that one of these Democrats will become president and usher in an administration far friendlier to teachers unions than Trump’s — or Obama’s. The NEA has called on education secretaries from two parties and two successive administrations, DeVos and Arne Duncan, to resign.

But political winds have shifted in the union’s direction, with teachers’ strikes across the country drawing wide support and many Democratic voters and leaders souring on charter schools, most of which are not unionized. At the NEA’s Strong Public Schools 2020 forum, candidates vying for the endorsement of the powerful union took questions from NEA President Lily Eskelsen García. And while the candidates agreed on a lot, there were a few standout moments.

Here are four takeaways from the event.

1. More candidates agreed: The next education secretary must be an educator.

Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren promised a few months ago — prompted by a Brooklyn teacher — that her education secretary would be a public school teacher.

On Friday, a few more candidates followed her lead. Biden said appointing a teacher would be the first thing he did as president. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, too, said the next education secretary should be an educator, and touted his choice of longtime educators as city schools chancellors. (His predecessor, Michael Bloomberg, tapped non-educators for the role.)

California Senator Kamala Harris said the person she nominates “will be someone who comes from public schools,” and promised the audience of union members that they would “be at the table to help me make that decision.”

2. Despite recent national discussion, integration got scant attention.

A sharp exchange between Harris and former Vice President Joe Biden at last week’s debate brought fresh attention to the issue of school integration. The two candidates have faced questions about the government’s role in desegregating schools on the campaign trail all week.

But it didn’t come up at the NEA forum for either Harris — who has said she supports federal integration efforts, but been short on details — or Biden, who has endorsed federal grants to promote school diversity but said he still opposes court-ordered desegregation efforts.

Senator Bernie Sanders has offered the most detailed ideas for addressing school segregation.

In response to a question about inequality and segregation in schools, Julián Castro said that he had attended — and seen the consequences of — segregated schools, and that he would support efforts to address housing segregation and federal funds for “voluntary busing.”

“Today we’re still grappling with so many of the same issues that we were grappling with 30, 40, 50 years ago,” he said.

There were no other questions about segregation, though — perhaps reflecting the fact that the NEA has not itself prioritized the issue. Asked about segregation in May by Chalkbeat, Eskelsen García quickly pivoted to the issue of charter schools, which make up a minority of the country’s segregated schools.

3. De Blasio went all out against charter schools.

De Blasio, who has garnered little support in recent polls, took an aggressive stance against charter schools, saying supporting them should be disqualifying for potential Democratic nominees.

“Too many Republicans, but also too many Democrats, have been cozy with the charter schools,” de Blasio said. “Let’s be blunt about it. We need to hold our own party accountable, too. And no one should ask for your support, or no one should be the Democratic nominee, unless they’re willing to stand up to Wall Street and the rich people behind the charter school movement once and for all.”

Moments earlier, he said, “I am sick and tired of these efforts to privatize public education. I know we’re not supposed to be saying ‘hate’ — our teachers taught us not to — but I hate the privatizers and I want to stop them.”

His comments stood out for their tone, even though some of his fellow candidates have also been critical of charters. Sanders, for one, reiterated his call to limit federal funding for charters during the NEA event, also invoking Wall Street.

Beto O’Rourke, the only other candidate who spoke about charters, took a more positive view, saying, “There is a place for public nonprofit charter schools, but private charter schools and voucher programs — not a single dime in my administration will go to them.

The remarks also trod familiar territory for the mayor, who notably once said that the head of New York City’s largest charter network, Eva Moskowitz, shouldn’t be “tolerated, enabled, supported.” But de Blasio has been less than successful at turning that opposition into policy. De Blasio’s desire to limit charters’ access to space in public buildings led to state legislation that blocked him and costs the city millions every year.

4. Warren criticized high-stakes testing, despite clashing with unions on the issue previously.

Warren, the Massachusetts senator, disavowed “high-stakes testing” and recalled her time as a teacher of students with disabilities.

“This notion that it’s all about testing — that it’s all about what somebody far off in the state capital or far off in the national capital says, here’s what constitutes success and worse yet, here’s what constitutes failure — no, that’s not what education is about,” Warren said.

“Education is what goes on in the classroom; what a teacher has said is the goal. And when a kid gets there, it is a teacher who knows it. We do not need high-stakes testing.”

The comments appear to be a departure for Warren, who in 2015 pushed for the federal education law to include rules that would identify schools where certain subgroups of students had low test scores and hold them accountable for those results. That won the support of many civil rights groups but drew a sharp rebuke from teachers unions, including the NEA, which are more skeptical of the use of test score data.

Barbara Madeloni, president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association, wrote at the time: “In my conversation with Warren, her concern for traditionally underserved students, which is noble, was distorted by a seeming unwillingness to accept what so many teachers and parents are saying: that the use of testing for accountability is narrow-minded, undermines meaningful teaching and learning, and shifts the focus from the real issues our students and communities face.”

(Advocates like Warren argued then that their approach would mean extra resources for struggling schools and give local districts flexibility to decide how to help them improve.)

Warren has not yet released a detailed K-12 education plan.

‘Why Busing Failed’ author on Biden remarks: ‘This sense that communities should only desegregate when they locally decide to do so is farcical’

2019-06-28T20:47:09+00:00

Matthew Delmont, the Dartmouth history professor who has written extensively on school segregation and busing, didn’t even watch the debate Thursday night.

But he realized early Friday morning — “I woke up at 5:30 and saw a bunch of tweets,” he says — that a back-and-forth between Democratic presidential hopefuls Joe Biden and Kamala Harris had put his area of interest at the center of the national political conversation.

Harris, the former California attorney general, had challenged Biden’s record of opposing desegregation efforts as a senator in the 1970s in starkly personal terms. “There was a little girl in California who was a part of the second class to integrate her public schools and she was bused to school every day. That little girl was me,” she said.

Biden’s response: “I did not oppose busing in America. I opposed busing ordered by the Department of Education. That’s what I opposed.” (Read their entire exchange here.)

Delmont’s 2016 book, “Why Busing Failed,” examines how politicians and the media shaped fights over desegregation efforts across the U.S. during the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s. Chalkbeat caught up with him Friday to help put the candidates’ comments in context. This conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Chalkbeat: So what did you make of that exchange?

Delmont: First of all, I was really surprised that school segregation came up as an issue. It hasn’t shown up a lot in the last couple presidential cycles. So I was surprised it came up at all. And the power of it was that Harris was able to speak from her own personal experience. One of the things that happened with busing historically as an issue is that we almost always heard from parents and politicians, and we almost never heard from students. I think for her, as a presidential candidate, to speak to her own experience as a student — and it was a positive experience — was powerful. And he seemed flustered and not really sure how to deal with it.

It seemed like the crux of his response was, he was trying to draw this distinction between when busing or desegregation efforts were mandated by outsiders versus when communities came up with them or OK’d them themselves. I wonder what you made of that.

It struck me as a distinction without much meaning to it. By which I mean, the local and the federal roles have always been intertwined with schooling in America, particularly on the school desegregation issue. This sense that communities should only desegregate when they locally decide to do so is farcical. It demonstrates a complete either lack of knowledge or willful misunderstanding of how race and school desegregation played out in the country.

But it does echo a lot of the talking points from the history of the debates about busing. This idea that you need local support before you do anything, and any court order or federal intervention to make it happen is somehow an overreach or makes it “forced.” That’s the kind of thing Biden would have said in the ’70s, and it’s what a lot of his colleagues would have said. But it doesn’t align with the evidence that we have, in terms of the kinds of intentional decisions that segregated school districts in the first place. And the reality that, in both the South and the North, if you had to wait for school leaders to voluntarily do this, it would never ever happen.

I wanted to talk for a moment about the word busing. Your book is called “Why Busing Failed,” and you tweeted this morning: “you have to understand that “busing” has been used since the ‘50s as a code word.” What do you want people to understand about what your research has shown that the word “busing” often means?

That word only starts to be used in political debates when people want to oppose school desegregation. That first happened in the late 1950s. It actually starts in New York City, which is the first public protest I found against busing.

But the reason I use it in quotations throughout the book is that it’s a very selective way to describe school desegregation. School buses had been used starting in the 1920s and ‘30s in the United States. It’s what made the more modern American school system we know now possible. That’s what allowed us to transition from the rural, one-room school houses to larger, more comprehensive schools. That use of school buses was never a controversial issue. It was never a problem among white parents until it got linked to the issue of race and school desegregation. So I would want people to know that busing is a political code word.

I think part of what the exchange last night illustrated was that, the scholars who have looked at outcomes of the busing programs that were actually put in place, looking back to see how students did a decade and two decades later — I’m thinking of Amy Stuart Wells at Columbia — found that by and large, students had positive experiences, had different opportunities. So that the reality on the ground was a lot of busing programs succeeded, or rather that school desegregation plans that used busing succeeded.

But busing as a political term, I argue in the book, was a failure, because the narrative that came out of it from the media and politicians was almost only negative. It only emphasized the inconvenience to white families and white students. It emphasized that it was going to be costly, it emphasized all of the negative things without talking about the constitutional rights of black students. It talked about the feelings of white people rather than the constitutional rights of black students.

And I think in that very small soundbite, that exchange between Harris and Biden, illustrated that. Harris was speaking to her positive experience as a student, and Biden was speaking more to what this is politically — it doesn’t always poll well, particularly with white parents.

One thing we’ve been thinking about is, how relevant is that debate — that back-and-forth last night — to the larger conversations about school desegregation efforts right now? In what ways is the word busing and talking about the ’70s a distraction, and in what ways is it actually really helpful?

I think it can be helpful if we don’t just fixate on that word, busing, but if we talk about what kind of policies can cities, and then federally, can we put in place to improve the educational opportunities and outcomes, particularly for students of color and also low-income students. That isn’t just the use of buses, but zoning and a whole host of things that schools and districts have been trying for decades now.

I honestly don’t think a lot of the candidates want to run on that platform and make that an issue that’s front and center of their campaign. It remains a pretty hot-button issue. In New York City, even — the specialized high schools, and then the debate going on on the Upper West Side over zoning — even in a liberal city, these things are still very contentious.

But I think, if we don’t just fixate on the word busing, we can think about — should the next president take seriously the fact that our education system continues to not serve students of color and low-income students as well as it should? If that could become an issue that politicians care about, I think that would be a great outcome. I’m not super optimistic about that, but I think that would be the upside of this coming up.

I’ve already seen some people tweet sort of snidely, well, ask Harris what her position is on forced busing is. And I think that’s exactly the wrong thing. I don’t think the question is, do you support busing today? I think the question is, do you support policies that would improve educational opportunities for students of color and low-income students? When that whole debate got linked to that single word of busing, it made it very, very difficult for civil rights activists and advocates and those who cared about this issue to succeed. It was just such a powerful code word. If it shows up in the same way, it will only lead, I think, to the same outcomes.

Does it feel possible for the next president of the United States to make a dent on this issue? In what ways can history inform what we expect from that?

I like to think anything is possible. I think we have the system we have now because politicians and school officials made specific choices that led us in different directions. And that when the country decides it’s going to do something very difficult and actually puts the funds there and puts the political leadership there to make it happen, those things can succeed. I would be very surprised to see that from the next president, but I think it is technically possible.

I think what it has to look like in practice is allocating funds to the Department of Education and having leadership at the Department of Education to get school districts to put in place meaningful plans over the next decade or two decades to really make those kinds of changes. I say that because, given the composition of the Supreme Court, it’s not going to come from court orders. So I think funds need to be put in place as a carrot to encourage schools in this way.

And I think if it happens at the top, it gives local leaders either cover to make more aggressive moves or it gives them motivation to do it. That’s all very speculative, because I think honestly all of their pollsters will say there are more votes to stick with the status quo than there are votes to make sweeping changes. But I remain optimistic that some change is possible.

Defending her discipline decision, Betsy DeVos says Obama-era guidance amounted to ‘quotas’

2019-03-26T20:04:18+00:00

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos faced sharp questions Tuesday from Democratic lawmakers about her rollback of federal school discipline guidelines.

Her answers didn’t break much new ground — but they did offer a vivid illustration of an ongoing disagreement about discrimination.

The guidance in question was issued by the Obama administration and told school districts to limit suspensions and expulsions and to examine how students of different racial groups were punished. Disparities, it said, could prompt a federal review into whether a district had violated civil rights law.

Progressives and civil rights groups saw the guidance as critical to ensuring black and Hispanic students were not disproportionately removed from classrooms. Conservatives maintained that the rules made schools less safe as they shied away from needed discipline.

When DeVos scrapped the guidance in December, she tied it to other recommendations meant to improve school safety in the wake of the school shooting in Parkland, Florida. The connection is what California Rep. Barbara Lee asked DeVos to explain here, prompting that back and forth about discrimination:

DeVos: Congresswoman, no child should be treated or disciplined differently based on his or her race or color or national origin. And if and when they are, our Office for Civil Rights will act swiftly — has acted swiftly. Children need to be treated as individuals, not as statistics. Lee: But they’re not being treated as individuals. That’s why — DeVos: They are. Lee: — we have this order put in place. And you rescinded that. DeVos: Again, any student that is treated or disciplined differently because of his or her color or race — that is not acceptable. Lee: Madame Secretary, the department of civil rights — your own Department of Education Office of Civil Rights — indicated that students of color are suspended three times more than white students. We put into place some requirements that would begin to turn this around. You rescinded those requirements. So what message does that send to school districts? DeVos: No student should be treated or disciplined differently based on their race. Lee: But Madame Secretary, they are treated differently. DeVos: No. If they are, it’s discrimination. The Office for Civil Rights — Lee: But then why in the world would you rescind the orders that would correct for this? DeVos: The letter amounted to quotas. Children are individuals, not a statistic. Lee: Madame Secretary, this didn’t involve quotas. This gave direction on how to correct this horrible problem that we have throughout the country.

The discussion of quotas is really a debate about what kinds of discrimination the government is supposed to police. DeVos, echoing many conservative education observers, is insisting that her department’s role is to investigate when individual students are discriminated against because of their race. Rep. Lee, echoing civil rights groups, is insisting that her mandate extends further — to watch for systemic disparities and then to intervene on behalf of entire groups.

DeVos never directly addressed why the change was tied to the broader package of school safety changes, in part because she was cut off by lawmakers.

“The guidance, we heard from many many different quarters — the guidance was actually harming schools’ opportunities,” she said.

Achievement First charter network, still receiving Sackler money, joins nonprofits weighing opioid-linked donations

2019-03-18T11:00:07+00:00

The co-founder of the Achievement First network of charter schools faced a weighty question in a meeting with a few students earlier this year. Is the network still receiving money from any member of the Sackler family, which has been accused of fueling the national opioid epidemic?

“Yes,” Dacia Toll said. Then she explained why.

The donations — $1.6 million from Jonathan Sackler between 2013 and 2017 — are critical to the 36-school network and its Connecticut schools in particular, Toll said.

“We could say to the Sacklers, we do not want your money. We could. Tomorrow,” she said, according to audio of the conversation obtained by Chalkbeat. “And as a result, some amount of things that we are able to do here … would go away.”

“I am so worried about the survival of our Connecticut schools.”

Toll repeated many of those sentiments in a statement to Chalkbeat, but indicated that the network is reconsidering its relationship with Sackler. “Without the philanthropy, we would have to lay off staff and cut core programs,” she said. “Our board is actively reassessing as we get more information.”

The comments underscore the quandary facing education organizations that have received donations from the Sackler family, which controls Purdue Pharma. The company and the Sacklers, including Jonathan, are the subject of lawsuits alleging that they knew that the drug OxyContin was addictive, but downplayed that as they continued to promote the painkillers — reaping millions in profit as many grew hooked and even died. The company and Sackler family have disputed claims made in a Massachusetts lawsuit.

Newly public documents detailing the Sacklers’ involvement have increased pressure on nonprofits that have benefitted from the family’s largesse — including charter schools, universities such as Yale and Columbia, and museums such as the Guggenheim — to give up funding they have grown to rely on. So far, many have taken a path similar to Achievement First, promising to review the situation but not yet disavowing future dollars.

“On the one side, some believe that so long as money is directed toward a good purpose, its source doesn’t matter,” said Rob Reich, a Stanford University professor who studies philanthropy. “On the other side, every nonprofit has to decide what boundary it will set for itself.”

Jonathan Sackler specifically has focused his philanthropy on education, giving to charter schools including Achievement First and pro-charter advocacy groups such as 50CAN, as well as a Chicago-based after school program and a network of district schools in New York City.

Most education groups that received money from Jonathan Sackler’s Bouncer Foundation in 2017, the last year for which records are publicly available, declined to comment on recent fundraising or did not respond to questions from Chalkbeat. (A few did: Students For Education Reform says it hasn’t received money from Bouncer this year. After School Matters says it hasn’t gotten money since 2017. The 74 says it has not asked for or received money from the Bouncer Foundation since 2017, while 50CAN says it is not currently asking for money from any Sackler family members.)

A spokesperson for Jonathan Sackler did not respond to a request for comment.

Achievement First’s relationship with Sackler is longstanding and was recently described in a New Haven Register story. The network has listed donations from his foundation in its annual reports, and Sackler was an Achievement First board member for over a decade before he resigned in January 2018.

The fact that Sackler money continues to flow to Achievement First has not been previously reported, though, and the network did not disclose its ongoing relationship with Sackler to the Register.

“I have not said anything about this situation privately that I wouldn’t also say publicly,” Toll said in her statement to Chalkbeat. (It does not appear that Toll herself has been publicly questioned on the matter before now.)

The network is now reexamining its Sackler-connected grants, Toll said, but she indicated that funding realities, especially in Connecticut, would make cutting ties challenging.

“We have to raise money for our Connecticut schools because they unfairly receive thousands of dollars less per child than the traditional schools,” Toll said in her statement. “We don’t use philanthropy for extras. We use it for core teacher salaries, books, supplies, and basic art, sports and music programs. Without the philanthropy, we would have to lay off staff and cut core programs.”

Similarly, in the meeting with students, Toll described the decision to continue to accept Sackler money in stark terms.

“I can see how people would say, ‘I don’t agree with that,’” she said. “And I would just say, if you don’t agree with it, literally tell me what you want to cut at the schools. Because I cannot raise enough money to do everything we want to do at the network.”

Leaders of Achievement First, whose schools have posted strong academic results, have said that providing schools with the resources they need is a particular challenge in Connecticut. In 2017, the network said it needed to merge two of its Hartford middle schools and halt the creation of an elementary school in part because of inadequate public funding.

According to its 2017 annual report, Achievement First schools in Connecticut, spent less per student but depended much more on philanthropy than the network’s schools in New York or Rhode Island. The Connecticut schools raised $2,800 from philanthropy per student, compared to just $81 per student in its New York schools, which relied almost entirely on public funds.

Turning down philanthropy, then, could make it more difficult to close those gaps. And it’s already a challenging moment for Achievement First, which has has faced pressure to address why a New Haven principal was allowed to keep his job after shoving a student in the fall. (The principal eventually resigned, and the network has promised other changes are coming.)

Reich, the Stanford professor, said nonprofits that continue to accept money from suspect donors must consider whether they are then “complicit in ‘reputation laundering’ for the donor, who can associate himself or herself with the good cause.”

The Sackler name adorns galleries, university centers, and endowed professorships at institutions across the country. That includes Yale, where Jonathan Sackler’s millions earned him a named professorship and a press release describing the Sackler family’s “transformative legacy.”

That’s not the case for Achievement First, Toll told the students.

“I think the question is, not are we benefiting from the Sacklers, but are the Sacklers benefiting from us?” she said. “And I am not aware of a way — they do not go around and say, ‘We’re good people, we support Achievement First.’”

But she said the issue is still weighing on her and the network’s leaders.

“It’s something we, our board, has struggled with,” she said. “Do you take money from people who, now, it is clear, engaged in some … not good [actions], or not?”

How this Oklahoma geography teacher brings students from crisis to calm

2019-03-13T23:45:40+00:00

Here, in a feature we call How I Teach, we ask educators who’ve been recognized for their work how they approach their jobs. You can see other pieces in the series here.

Cheyenne Branscum recently won several thousand dollars to purchase a microscope for her students. She takes a team of students to science and engineering competitions. She’s helped them study how tiny pieces of plastic are affecting ocean fish, too.

And no, she’s not the science teacher.

“I teach geography, and I get jokes all the time,” Branscum said. “But I work so closely with the science teacher. It’s OK! We want to make sure that kids understand that all of these subjects blend together, and we want them to see those connections.”

Branscum teaches sixth grade at Shawnee Middle School in Shawnee, Oklahoma. It’s the middle school serving an area that is home to members of several tribal nations, about an hour from Oklahoma City. Branscum is a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, and about one-third of her school’s students are members of a tribal nation, too.

Her Geo team students, she says, inspired her to apply for the grant she won from the Society for Science & the Public, which will allow them to do experiments without traveling to the local university. We spoke with Branscum about that project, how she brings Native American culture into her geography lessons, and how she’s grown more attuned to the family lives of her sixth-graders, many of whom are in the foster care system.

This interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

Cheyenne Branscum (right).

Was there a moment when you decided to become a teacher?

Before I got into teaching, I was a domestic violence advocate, and I was tutoring on the side.

It became very apparent that I liked the tutoring program better than my job. I was enjoying the one-on-one connections with kids — seeing them grow up and become these little people with independent thoughts.

How do you get to know your students?

At least once a week, I build a very independent lesson so they are sitting at their desks, working. It gets them doing something so that I can walk around and sit down and have conversations.

I will also show up in the lunchroom and joke around with them. I try to come up with an inside joke between me and each student — something they can connect with me on. At the beginning of the year, there was this girl who was really quiet. She was eating a salad, and I just went over and stole one of her croutons. And she looked at me like I was a crazy person. So I just kept doing it. It became this ongoing joke. There was a day I didn’t come to the cafeteria, and she came to me and brought me a crouton.

Tell us about a favorite lesson to teach.

My favorite lesson to do is one where we look at minorities in the U.S. and really find the similarities and differences in their experiences. I get to bring in Mexican, Hispanic, African, and tribal culture.

I’ll show a news video on Hispanics in California, and how they’ve gone from feeling disenfranchised to now feeling that they can run for office and participate. And I’ll show a video of our local tribes — we have a really thriving local tribe, and the kids are used to hearing about it. And then I’ll show them stories about the Lakota in Pine Ridge, who are incredibly disenfranchised. They’re always shocked. It gives them the tools, no matter what culture they’re looking into, to say, these people went through this. How is this similar to my culture? How is it completely different and why?

What’s something happening in the community that affects what goes on inside your class?

We have an incredibly high rate of family violence. It affects my students. I’ve had several kids this year go into foster care, and those are the ones I know about. The ones who aren’t in foster care are usually the ones I worry about.

It makes me very flexible. If they show up and they don’t have any work from yesterday, I might have a conversation about why, and move on. I don’t know if they were evicted or they had to run from a violent person. Unfortunately, that means sometimes my standard of what I might take for a grade drops. It’s more important that my students feel safe.

Tell us about a memorable time — good or bad — when contact with a student’s family changed your perspective or approach.

I had a student recently, an incredible student, who just panics on my tests. We had parent-teacher conferences, and I was talking to what I thought was her mom, who was listed as her mom. She came in, and the woman said, I don’t know if she’s told you this, but I’m her foster mom. I’m actually her aunt.

Immediately, it started clicking for me: this kid is in crisis. When she’s panicking over my tests, it really has nothing to do with my tests. I turned to the kid, and I was joking with her, because I’m a foster parent and she knows my foster daughter. And I said, ‘Why didn’t you tell me you were in the club? Fosters watch out for each other.’

So I think she’s going to slowly relax. But now I understand it wasn’t just test anxiety.

What part of your job is most difficult?

When children confide in you something and you know you have to make a call. You know then that they probably are not going to trust you again, but it’s something you have to do.

What’s the most fun part?

All of the fun toys we get to play with! We have a drone. We’re getting software to do 3D modeling so that we can create 3D maps.

I had several members on the Geo team who were doing a project looking at microplastic in fish. They were having to go to the local university to use their microscope because we didn’t have a powerful enough one here. They really inspired me to ask, what do we need? What kind of equipment would we need to be an incredible STEM community — a school that stands out? I’ll be able to connect it to the projector and we’ll all be able to see it.

What was the biggest misconception that you initially brought to teaching?

The idea that you have to solve something right then. If there is a kid that is going bonkers in one side of your classroom — do I really need to shut this down right now? He may just need five minutes of spinning in the corner and getting his energy out and then he might be on his way.

What’s the best advice you’ve received about teaching?

To be positive. You don’t want to be the coworker that brings people down. Your students rely on the team of teachers that they have. You want to be the positive voice on the team.

After visiting a Chicago high school, Bill Gates says it’s a model for his current education vision

2019-03-06T18:48:01+00:00

When Bill Gates announced in 2017 that his foundation would begin investing in “networks” of schools, he said he wanted to replicate the success of a particular Chicago organization.

On Tuesday, Gates in a blog post heaped fresh praise on Chicago’s Network for College Success, a group housed at the University of Chicago that works with 17 Chicago high schools. Gates also posted video of his visit to North-Grand High School in Humboldt Park, a school he says uses student data to keep students on track for graduation with the network’s help.

“The students I met at North-Grand during my visit liked the fact that there was no mystery about their standing in their classes,” Gates wrote. “I hope more schools around the country can learn from this success.”

Gates was calling attention to the school’s use of the “Freshmen On-Track” metric, which emerged from another University of Chicago group, its influential Consortium on School Research, and eventually became a citywide measure of school success. Writer Emily Krone Phillips described Harper High Principal Elizabeth Dozier’s first attempts to improve that data point in her book “The Make-or-Break Year: Solving the Dropout Crisis One Ninth Grader at a Time”:

She created a community of freshman teachers who met weekly to review data on each student’s grades, attendance, and discipline patterns. The group strategized about ways to support and motivate students academically and to provide additional help for those whose struggles had nothing to do with academics. To make the work feel more tangible, she created a board with every student’s name on it and moved the student on- or off-track throughout the year. The team celebrated every small victory — a kid who went from failing to passing math; a chronic truant who started showing up regularly.

Gates attributes Chicago’s increasing graduation rates and gains on standardized tests to that focus on data. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has already begun giving money to organizations that convene schools to help them act on that information, awarding an $11.7 million grant to the Network for College Success and $92 million overall to networks last year. (The Gates Foundation is a supporter of Chalkbeat.)

Of course, there are a variety of potential explanations for Chicago’s academic improvements, some of which Gates mentions, including longer school days, more principal autonomy and training, and demographic changes. His post doesn’t acknowledge a persistent problem for the district: longstanding gaps in test scores between students of different races. And while graduation rates citywide have shot up 20 points, from 57 percent in 2011 to slightly over 78 percent last spring, stubborn gaps by race remain there too, though they closed slightly this past year.

At North-Grand, a 990-student school that is predominantly Latino, the 2018 graduation rate was 72 percent, up from 69 percent from 2011. The percentage of freshmen on track to graduate last spring was 92.8 percent, outpacing the citywide average of 89.4 percent.

The post comes at a crucial time for Chicago schools, with a new mayor about to be elected and current schools chief Janice Jackson’s fate uncertain as a result. Jackson herself touted the district’s fast-growing graduation rate in a Chicago Sun-Times op-ed on Monday, and former Chicago schools chief Arne Duncan used the city’s grad rates and test-score growth to argue in the Sun-Times that the next mayor should continue to appoint the school board.

‘Not a proud moment’: How turmoil at one school could shake up the Achievement First charter network

2019-03-01T18:55:00+00:00

Turmoil at an Achievement First high school has escalated into a larger reckoning for the charter school network spanning three states.

The spark was two videos released in January. In the first, the former principal of Achievement First Amistad High School in New Haven, who is white, is seen shoving a student. In the second, a former staff member, who is black and who released the first video, described the school as “oppressive.”

The ensuing backlash — including over the fact that the principal was not immediately fired — has pushed the network’s leaders to accelerate planned changes. Now, they say they’re open to reconsidering things big and small, from how students are expected to sit in class to even the network’s leadership.

The two CEOs have recently sent a series of candid emails to the network’s staff, who work across 36 schools in Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New York. Those emails, obtained by Chalkbeat, illustrate how the events at Amistad raised significant questions about the network’s approach to racism, discipline, and leadership.

“The last 3 weeks have been the hardest weeks we’ve ever had leading our network,” CEOs Dacia Toll and Doug McCurry wrote. “What happened at AF Amistad High School is a failure of our leadership.”

Many of those questions connect the controversy to a long-standing debate about so-called “no excuses” charter schools, which emphasize strict discipline, high expectations, and an academic focus. Research has found that these school networks, including Achievement First, substantially increase students’ test scores and, in some cases, help more of them attend college. But critics and some scholars argue that the discipline-heavy approach amounts to a racist, even abusive form of control over mostly students of color, while failing to prepare them to lead independent lives.

In the last two months, more Achievement First teachers and parents have called for change. The network’s leaders say they are committed to improving students’ experiences — and everything is on the table as its principals gather this week.

“We’re going to remain a high-expectations organization. The provocative question is, what does high expectations actually look like?” Toll told Chalkbeat in a lengthy interview. “Is it high expectations or low expectations to insist that kids fold their hands?”

‘This is not a proud moment for AF’

The controversy broke into public view because of Steven Cotton, a behavioral specialist with Achievement First who worked for the network for five years.

Cotton says he saw the security footage in October showing principal Morgan Barth grabbing and shoving a student emerging from a classroom. By January, Cotton had resigned and posted a lengthy Facebook video criticizing Amistad’s treatment of teachers and students, including its merit and demerit discipline system.

“There’s not a place in that building at this point where a kid can be a kid,” he said. “Yes, we’re here for education, but we’re not here to be robots.”

The New Haven Independent published a story featuring the security camera footage and Cotton’s video. In the piece, the brother of another student said that Barth had shoved his sibling at a Bridgeport Achievement First school Barth led in 2013. (Toll told Chalkbeat that, because it was a personnel matter, she could not comment on whether she or the network had known about that allegation.)

Barth resigned that day, hours after the Independent story.

McCurry soon emailed the entire Achievement First staff, telling them that an “unfortunate situation” at Amistad “has growing implications for the rest of AF and the external community.”

In that email, McCurry noted Barth’s resignation and described the principal’s actions as “improperly restraining a student.” McCurry called the conduct unacceptable, while noting that Barth had been disciplined after the incident, had apologized, and that Barth “has given 15 years of service to the kids of AF.”

McCurry also said Achievement First would hire an independent firm to examine the chain of events at Amistad.

“This is not a proud moment for AF, and I’m not going to close out by trying to put a silver lining on it,” McCurry concluded.

To some Achievement First teachers, it was an inadequate response that minimized the seriousness of the principal’s action — and did nothing to explain why the network’s leaders had allowed Barth to stay in his position until the video went public.

“A lot of us are not happy with the emails,” said Rousseau Mieze, a teacher and dean at Achievement First Bushwick Middle School in Brooklyn who has criticized the no-excuses approach of some charters. “What feels like a cover-up — the fact that this happened and the guy continued to have a job — those things, they don’t foster trust.”

‘We are facing another reckoning’

McCurry and Toll acknowledged that anger in another email to staff on Jan. 22, four days later. Staff members at Amistad, they said, are “furious with us, and they have every right to be.”

McCurry and Toll reiterated their plans to ask an outside firm to investigate.

“We have also asked the board to use the final report to determine if additional consequences should be implemented, including for the two of us,” they wrote.

Their next steps would be to confront the broader issues raised by the incident, they said, just as the network had navigated other challenges like adapting to the Common Core standards and reducing suspension rates.

“Now we are facing another reckoning,” they wrote, one that “has everything to do with race, power, and privilege.”

“There are many classrooms and schools at AF where the adults lead with love and students are empowered — and there are too many where that is not yet the case,” they said.

A day after the email, parents and students from Amistad called for change at an unusually packed board meeting.

“I get calls for him slouching, he gets detention for apparently not focusing, he gets demerits for being late for class during the first two weeks of school,” said one parent, referring to her son, according to the Independent. “This whole system is a school-to-prison pipeline.” (A spokesperson for Achievement First said its internal network-wide survey data from last year show most parents had a positive experience. For instance, among the two thirds of parents who responded to the survey, 94 percent of them rated their child’s school as an A or B.)

Teachers spoke up, too. Sixty-eight staff members signed a letter, obtained by Chalkbeat, noting they had spent days discussing the school’s discipline system and that they felt “disgust and disappointment” at the network’s lack of transparency after the Barth incident.

On Feb. 7, McCurry and Toll wrote to staff again, this time offering a mea culpa.

“We want to apologize. What happened at AF Amistad High School is a failure of our leadership,” they said. “We inaccurately called what happened a restraint. And we did not clearly treat the scholar involved in the incident as the primary person who should be receiving our care and concern.”

But they promised that change is on the way.

“Core to who we are has always been growth mindset, and it’s time for the next chapter at AF,” they concluded.

Can Achievement First change — and will it?

Achievement First’s principals are gathering Friday for an annual meeting. There, Toll says they will continue grappling with how their schools can improve, part of a year-long effort to rethink the network’s approach and values.

“What we’ve said to them is, it’s all on the table,” she said. “Do kids have to fold their hands? Do they have to make eye contact with other students when they’re speaking? Do they have to raise their hands? Do they have to walk in lines in the hallway? Part of what our principals are doing, getting together tomorrow, is revisiting those expectations: which ones continue to have real learning value and which ones do we think no longer have the value.”

But Toll also noted that school environments are more complicated than their most visible elements. “If only this issue was that simple,” she said. “A whole bunch of our schools kids no longer walk in lines. That doesn’t mean that when they sit down and reflect on their school experience, that it’s positive.”

The network is also going to focus on how teachers interact with students — ”whether something is done with purpose and out of love or done with control and out of fear,” as Toll put it — as well as ways to give students more choices and make their academic classes more engaging.

“On all of those dimensions, there is a range” across the network’s schools, Toll said. “But the AF average has not been strong enough, and was not strong enough at Amistad High.”

Achievement First has told staff it plans four organizational shifts, which came out of work started before the Amistad incident: explicitly embracing anti-racism, improving the student experience, holding its leaders accountable, and moving decision-making closer to schools. Student surveys will play a bigger role in school evaluations, Toll said, and teacher training will do more to emphasize building relationships with students.

Toll said she had given serious thought to whether change was needed at the CEO level, too.

“For now, I’m choosing to channel my embarrassment into urgency and commitment to change,” she told Chalkbeat. “So I am here now, and deeply committed to leading us through this challenge the way I have tried to lead us through past challenges. If there is a time when AF needs new leadership, I would step aside.”

Will all of that amount to meaningful shifts? Joanne Golann, a Vanderbilt sociologist who has extensively studied (and sometimes criticized) “no excuses” charter schools, said she found the network’s promises notable, but thought they could prove difficult to enact.

“I was encouraged reading Achievement First’s email and the direction they’re planning on going,” she said. “It’s more than a symbolic change.”

Golann’s work has found little evidence that “no excuses” charter schools’ strong academic results are a direct result of their strict discipline. But changes could still come with tradeoffs. A recent study on restorative justice showed that the initiative reduced test scores for black students, for example.

Cotton, the former Amistad staff member, doubts that the changes will be substantive. “I think what they’re saying is what we want to hear at the moment,” he said.

“Why do we want Doug and Dacia to fix the issue when you’re a part of the problem?” he said, referring to the CEOs. “You all thought it was good judgment to keep [Barth] on staff. Had I not come out and said anything, he would have been there until the end of the year.”

But Kerri-Ann Thomas, an Achievement First regional superintendent, says she has successfully pushed for changes, including diversifying school staff. Forty-seven percent of teachers and other professional staff in schools are black or Latino, the network says.

I’ve “personally been a part of the pain and the progress,” she said.

Mieze, the Brooklyn teacher and dean, sees reason for skepticism and hope.

“There are ways I’m disillusioned to it — I’m just like, that is never going to change,” he said. “But then there are also ways in which I think that I’ve seen, over the years, AF put its money where its mouth is.”

The story has been updated to include information on Achievement First’s parent survey data.

Read the original documents used to report this story:

‘The reckoning has come’: Denver teachers union takes a hard line in negotiations

2019-01-16T01:35:00+00:00

Negotiations grew more tense between the Denver teachers union and the district on Tuesday as the two sides struggled to find common ground over its pay-for-performance system.

Union and district officials appear to literally be at standstill. After a tense exchange before noon, district officials departed the room to regroup — and did not return to the negotiating table. Talks are scheduled to resume Thursday.

The day’s developments indicate that it may be growing more difficult for Denver to avoid a strike that would upend Colorado’s largest school district and add to a national wave of teacher activism.

On Tuesday morning, Denver Classroom Teachers Association representatives told district leaders that they want a traditional salary schedule, with “steps” corresponding to a teacher’s experience and longevity and “lanes” representing education. The district’s proposal, which would allow teachers who served 10 consecutive years to jump into the next lane, was unacceptable, the union said, and they don’t plan to budge.

“We need you to convert your structure to ours so we can move forward,” said union bargaining representative Robert Gould.

Asked what kind of changes the union might still be open to, Gould responded, “You’re not listening. You’re not listening to what we’ve been saying for the last two weeks, you haven’t been listening to what we’ve been saying for the last two months, you haven’t been listening to what we’ve been saying the last year, nor the last five years. What we’ve been saying is, we need the structure to be our structure. Then we can move forward.”

A long pause followed.

“Well, I don’t honestly know where we go from this ultimatum here,” said Michelle Berge, the district’s general counsel, adding that her team would regroup.

Then Gould continued.

“Denver teachers, they’ve met their limit,” he said. “There’s only so long you can continue to tell people no. And at some point, that’s what you’re going to get back — no. This Saturday, teachers are going to vote. They’re either going to vote yes for a commitment or they’re going to vote yes for a strike.”

“I understand that,” Berge said, explaining the district is struggling to find a way forward when the union hasn’t agreed to changes in months.

Then the room erupted with union supporters noting changes they had agreed to.

“Cut more central administration waste!” parent and education activist Amy Carrington yelled.

District officials said they were cutting central administration. Seven million dollars is being cut, and more is coming, they said.

As talk shifted back to the union, Pam Shamburg, DCTA executive director, said it was time for bigger change.

“The reckoning has come,” she said. “The district is going to have to dig deep. But it’s going to have to happen. And now is the time for the reckoning.”

The two sides went into a break — and didn’t meet again.

District officials said Tuesday evening that they are processing the union’s position and have work to do before Thursday.

Superintendent Susana Cordova told Chalkbeat district officials entered Tuesday’s negotiations feeling they had come a long way toward the union position. Cordova said the district remains committed to making a deal, but would still like to get a counter-proposal from the union.

“We would like to see something from them,” said Cordova, who took the district’s top job last month. “I am new to negotiating, but that’s generally how that works.”

On Friday, Denver Public Schools officials presented a new proposal that would put an additional $6 million into teacher pay. That’s on top of the additional $17 million the district had already proposed, for a total of $23 million more.

Corey Kern, the union’s deputy executive director, said the two sides need to reach a “fundamental understanding” of how a teacher can qualify to move up “lanes” and potentially earn more money.

“If not, it will be very difficult for us to make a counter to the district,” he told Chalkbeat. “We would like to get back to the table and work on the issue and come to an agreement. But right now, we’re so far apart.”

The union is pushing for teachers to be able to move up in the system not just if they have earned master’s degrees or doctorates, but from other avenues, such as taking taking college courses or completing district professional development units, he said.

Mark Ferrandino, chief financial officer of the Denver district, said steps and lanes have become a sticking point in part because of how much money it would take to fund the different proposals but also because of philosophical differences. The district believes its proposal actually allows for more flexibility for teachers, while the “very clear table” provides much more transparency than the old ProComp system.

Kern said the union was disappointed the two sides did not reconvene Tuesday — “it felt like we lost a day” — but is hopeful for what’s next.

Cordova said she believes a deal remains in everyone’s best interests, but if one cannot be reached, she will do everything possible to keep schools open. That includes offering more money to substitute teachers, deploying other district staff to classrooms, and preparing lessons for those people to teach.

The union, for its part, is also encouraging parents to send students to school if there is a strike — with the intent of proving how hard it is to run schools without teachers.

Bargaining sessions are scheduled for Thursday and Friday, if necessary. Without an agreement, union leaders plan a strike vote for Saturday, and a strike could start as early as Jan. 28.

Eric Gorski contributed reporting.

Correction: This story has been updated to reflect that it was a parent, and not a union representative, who shouted, “Cut more central administration waste!”

Los Angeles teachers went on strike Monday. Here’s what you need to know.

2019-01-14T02:50:01+00:00

The nation’s second-largest school district will be upended Monday as Los Angeles teachers are set to go on strike.

Teachers and their union say they are fighting for higher pay, lower class sizes, and more support for district schools. The district says it agrees with many of the union’s demands, but can’t pay for them given its fiscal realities.

The United Teachers of Los Angeles rejected a final offer from the district Friday afternoon, which included steeper class size reductions and more nurses and counselors for schools. There was no bargaining over the weekend.

What will happen at Los Angeles schools on Monday?

Schools will remain open — with other staff, emergency substitutes, and parent volunteers supervising kids. Teachers will be outside picketing. Inside, the L.A. Times reports that “schools have been preparing to keep students together in large spaces and use online education when they can.”

Is this a continuation of the #RedForEd wave of teacher protest?

Yes and no. Schools staying open marks one crucial difference from what happened when teachers went on strike in West Virginia last year, closing schools for nearly two weeks. That was the start of a wave of teacher activism focused on school funding and teacher pay, reaching Oklahoma, Kentucky, and Arizona.

The L.A. Times has a helpful look at why this strike is both similar to and different from the ones across the country last year. Unlike in those red states, it notes, California teachers can’t be portrayed as “victims of Republican machinations” because the state government is reliably Democratic:

An us-versus-them construct, however, does not translate readily to California, where unions are among the state’s most powerful special interests. And L.A. teachers must face off against a district whose leaders echo their union’s demand for increased state and federal funding for schools. The union leader also is trying to put forward a complex argument on funding. While [UTLA president Alex] Caputo-Pearl argues that the state needs to do much more, he also says that L.A. Unified is hoarding a fortune — and that district leadership is choosing to starve its schools.

What are the union and the district really fighting about?

The L.A. Times broke down the essential disagreement over funding in a separate story this weekend. In short: Although the district currently has a substantial surplus, the district’s analyses, as well as one from L.A. County, suggest it will soon turn into a deficit. The union claims the district is “hoarding” money, while the district says it’s simply being prudent. At the same time, a proposed budget from the state’s new governor, Gavin Newsom, could bring an infusion of new resources. Reporter Howard Blume ends it here:

Beutner says the union’s demands would cost $3 billion. That’s debatable, partly because the union has not responded to the district with specifics on how much smaller it is asking for classes to be. The union’s position, so far, is to demand the elimination of a contract clause that gives the district broad authority over class sizes. … Everyone wants smaller class sizes — teachers, parents, students. But meaningful class-size reduction is one of the most expensive reforms in education.

What about charter schools?

Unlike in most places that saw teacher strikes last year, Los Angeles is set to see charter schools play a big role in striking teachers’ rhetoric.

The union has gone on the attack against charters, which serve about one in five Los Angeles public school students and are mostly non-unionized. UTLA recently called for stopping any new charters from opening, pinning the district’s financial struggles on their growth.

The union also believes that the district wants to implement a “portfolio model” of managing schools, a controversial idea that often brings about charter school growth and holds district and charter schools accountable for their results in similar ways. (The district says it has no such plans.)

These union–charter battles have deeply shaped the district’s politics. The last set of school board elections were the most expensive in American history, with charter supporters spending nearly $10 million and unions putting in over $5 million.

But the union’s contract demands only briefly touch on charters. Charters, though, are the focus of many district educators’ anger over not having the resources they say they need and, in the unions’ telling, amount to privatization of public education.

Some of L.A.’s charter schools share buildings with district schools, making some confrontation possible on Monday.

The head of the state charter association wrote an open letter to Caputo-Pearl before the strike. “Please be kind to both our District and charter community,” wrote Myrna Castrejón on Friday. “Students, parents, and school staff aren’t crossing picket lines to make political statements.” (The union’s strike guidelines tells members not to “get involved in confrontations or debates,” threaten people who cross the picket line, or block entrances for kids. “It’s okay to make adults wait a little while to get in [to schools], though,” UTLA says.)

As to the substantive debate, each side can point to research backing up one of their key points. Academic analyses from other states, as well as a union-backed report from Los Angeles, show that districts really do lose resources as charters grow, at least in the short term. At the same time, studies show Los Angeles charter students do better on state tests than similar students in district schools.

What does this mean for teacher unions nationwide?

As the strike kicks off, other teachers unions will be paying attention — wearing red in solidarity or watching for cues as they inch toward strikes of their own. In Denver, for one, the teachers union is entering its last week of negotiations. And as CALmatters noted on Jan. 11:

Issues at the forefront of the LAUSD dispute, such as rising pension costs, declining enrollment and the charged debate over charter schools, are also brewing in other school districts across the state. The looming strike in Los Angeles has made ripples in local unions across California. Teachers in the Oakland Unified School District, for example, are nearing a potential strike and plan to rally Saturday similar to a demonstration UTLA held in downtown Los Angeles in mid-December.

What will the political ramifications of the strike be?

That’s not at all clear, and likely depends on the length of the strike and the public response. But there is a special election around the corner to fill the seventh seat on the closely divided LAUSD board. Expect the strike and its fallout to play a big role in the race.

A few prominent elected officials have also weighed in supporting teachers, including U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders and California Rep. Ro Khanna — though most national Democrats have been silent.

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, who is mulling a run for president, has tried to broker an agreement between the two sides, to no avail. A strike would complicate a campaign kickoff.

“Launching a presidential bid while thousands of chanting, sign-toting teachers take to the streets would seem to be a non-starter,” the L.A. Times wrote. “A strike could force Garcetti to push back any presidential announcement, as better-known rivals enter the race, soak up media attention and begin fundraising.”

Want a charter school application? If your child has a disability, your questions more likely to be ignored, study finds

2018-12-21T18:56:53+00:00

In a sweeping national “mystery shopper” experiment, researchers posing as parents sent emails to thousands of schools asking how to apply for admission.

Some messages said their child had a disability. Others said their child sometimes had trouble behaving in class, or struggled with academics.

The results: charter schools and certain traditional district schools were more likely to ignore parents who indicate their children may be tough to educate, and charter schools in particular are more likely to ignore inquiries that appear to be from families of students with disabilities.

It’s powerful new evidence that schools can exert real influence over who ends up in their classrooms — and offers one explanation for why charter schools nationally serve a smaller share of students with disabilities than traditional public schools.

“For schools of choice, charter and the traditional publics behave fairly similarly, with the exception of special needs kids,” said Peter Bergman of Teachers College, who conducted the study with Isaac McFarlin of the University of Florida. “It’s certainly disconcerting.”

The researchers sent the emails to nearly 6,500 schools in 29 states and Washington, D.C. Many had basic messages like, “I am searching for schools for my daughter. Can anyone apply to your school? If so, can you tell me how to apply?”

Other emails implied that the student had a significant disability. “Her IEP says she has to be taught in a separate room,” the messages said, referring to individualized education programs describing the resources or services a student needs. The emails also used a variety of names, including ones commonly associated with Hispanic and black families.

When the emails included no additional details, schools responded 53 percent of the time. But schools overall were 7 percentage points less likely to respond to messages referencing behavior problems, 5 percentage points less likely to respond to messages mentioning a significant disability, and 2 percentage points less likely to respond to Hispanic-sounding names.

Charter schools in particular were less likely to respond to the messages mentioning a disability than to the standard messages — 7 percentage points less likely. Schools the researchers identified as “no excuses” charters were 10 percent less likely to respond to emails mentioning the disability.

“It reflects what we know anecdotally,” said Lauren Rhim, the executive director of the National Center for Special Education in Charter Schools. “Parents of students with disabilities aren’t able to access choice in the same way others are.”

The findings are notable because research on charter schools and students with disabilities tends to focus on how enrollment numbers compare to the surrounding district, or whether students end up leaving a school once enrolled. This research looks at what can happen before any of that, opening up a part of the admissions process that can be most opaque: interactions between prospective parents and schools.

“A lot of charters may argue, we don’t counsel anyone out,” Bergman said. “We’re taking one giant step backwards and saying, hey, we want to look at what happens before families apply. We think those interactions can be very important.”

Others think so, too. The D.C. Public Charter School Board, which authorizes charter schools in Washington, D.C., has its own mystery-shopper program where it calls schools to see how they respond to admissions questions. The Massachusetts state education department has also tried it.

Charter advocates said the study didn’t show that students were kept from enrolling at the schools, but acknowledged communication with prospective families could be improved.

“We did not see in the study any findings that students were in fact prevented from enrolling in any charter school for any of the reasons that the researchers were testing,” the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools said in a statement. “The study does however suggest that schools could improve their administrative and communications practices when responding to inquiries from members of the public and parents.”

The new study also offers evidence that charter schools’ reluctance to respond to messages indicating a student has a disability may be tied to the way they receive funding.

In states where schools are reimbursed for most of what they actually spend on special education, like Michigan and Wisconsin, schools were no less likely to respond to those messages, the researchers found.

“It’s very unusual to have a study that has such a clear implication for policy to solve a problem,” said Brian Gill, a senior fellow at Mathematica Policy Research, though he noted that funding method could have other downsides.

McFarlin said he hopes the findings can prompt discussion among both district and charter schools. Both, he said, are discouraging some parents through their actions.

“We think these are issues that can be addressed,” McFarlin said. “That’s the hope for what comes out of this.”

Francisco Vara-Orta contributed reporting.

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative has a new education leader

2018-12-18T22:50:00+00:00

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s education work has a new leader: Sandra Liu Huang, who has worked as the organization’s head of product and technology.

Huang now holds one of the most influential jobs in education: overseeing how CZI — which has already spent more than $300 million on education and is set to receive Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s fortune — tries to influence schools and classrooms.

Huang takes over for Jim Shelton, the former deputy education secretary under President Obama. Unlike Shelton, her background is in technology, and she ran product teams at Quora, Facebook, and Google before moving to CZI in 2017.

There, she oversaw the education team’s partnership with the Summit Learning platform, the personalized learning program that Facebook engineers helped build and is now supported by CZI. (The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative also supports Chalkbeat.)

CZI announced the hire Tuesday.

“With her deep background in managing complex, interdisciplinary teams and building tools and products that help people learn, Sandra Liu Huang is the ideal leader to carry forward our vision for what’s possible in education,” Priscilla Chan, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s co-founder, said in a statement.

Huang’s appointment ties CZI’s education work even more closely to Summit, which CZI says is now used in 380 schools nationwide. Offered free to schools, Summit has emerged as a poster child for the personalized learning approach — and attracted some backlash from students and parents, too.

CZI says its education mission remains the same, and Summit is a key part of its work.

“Since my tours at Google and then at Facebook, I’ve essentially been on a pursuit to build the products and platforms that I see as inevitable — the Jetsons world is at hand,” Huang said in a 2015 interview with the website Brit + Co describing her career. “I’m inspired by how technology massively accelerates knowledge sharing, but I also think the web can be more than ways to pass time.”

Tell Chalkbeat about hate crimes in your schools

2018-10-22T15:04:13+00:00

Chalkbeat is joining the Documenting Hate consortium organized by ProPublica to better understand the scope and nature of bias incidents and hate crimes in schools.

You may have heard of the project — it’s already fueled some powerful journalism by dozens of news organizations. We’re joining now both because we want to better understand this issue and because Francisco Vara-Orta, who wrote this piece for Education Week on how those incidents marked the months after President Trump’s election, recently joined our team.

Hate crimes and bias incidents are hard to track. Five states don’t have a hate crimes law at all, and when they happen in schools, data are not uniformly collected by a federal agency. But we know they do happen and that they affect classrooms, with teachers often unprepared to address them.

Without data, it’s harder to understand the issue and for policymakers to take action. That’s why we want to help fill in those gaps.

If you have witnessed or been the victim of a suspected hate crime or bias incident at school, you can submit information through the form below. Journalists at Chalkbeat and other media organizations will review and verify submissions, but won’t share your name or contact information with anyone outside of the Documenting Hate consortium.

Why some teachers across the U.S. turned the Kavanaugh hearings on in class — and what discussions followed

2018-09-28T19:32:53+00:00

In many ways, U.S. Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s hearing Thursday was similar to other major events that educators have turned into teaching moments.

But this one had an extra level of delicacy, as it dealt directly with high schoolers’ behavior — and started with psychology professor Christine Blasey Ford’s voice shaking as she told senators that Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her as a teenager.

A few teachers told Chalkbeat they thought it was important to devote class time to the proceedings. In other cases, students carved out time themselves to watch. Here’s what they said happened.

In a New York City math class, teacher Laura Mourino decided to put the hearing on for interested students at her high school, Harvest Collegiate. (Students were also given an option to sit elsewhere with other work.) It felt like a important historical moment, she said, and was relevant to some students’ end-of-semester projects — to design a new electoral system using mathematical functions.

The morning portion of the hearing, which centered on Ford’s testimony, prompted student questions both about the process of choosing a Supreme Court justice and about the combative language being used by some lawmakers.

Afterwards, Mourino said, a few girls approached her. “‘I have to tell you,’ they said, ‘if something like that happened to me, I would shut up. Look what they did to her,’” she recalled. That left Mourino planning follow-up discussions with her students.

“I feel like I had a moral obligation to show this to students and be a part of history, but I also feel depressed — that I may have created a sense of discouragement for someone who might want to come forward,” she said.

Found a kid watching the Kavanaugh hearing today while he was doing work in my class...we had a good chat and I allowed him to continue watching while working...I love that kids are aware of what's going on in our world and want to get involved in making changes❤️
— Kristyna (@kristynaeagle) September 27, 2018

On Wednesday, Michelle Finley, a psychology and sociology teacher at Whitmer High School in Toledo, Ohio, realized that her students didn’t know about the upcoming hearing. Many also hadn’t heard of “#metoo.” So Finley spent time talking about both, then watched and then discussed some of the hearing with students.

“I wanted students to see for themselves,” she said. “I wanted them to see the testimony, not just commentary.”

The class discussion included at least one moment of debate. “One young man posed the possibility that Dr. Ford might not be telling the truth and we processed that information as a class,” she said.

“Most importantly, I wanted all of my students to know that if they ever experienced sexual harm and they told me about it, that I would believe and support them,” Finley told Chalkbeat.

The #KavanaughHearings haven't even started the line of questioning yet, but 100% of my US Government & Politics students are watching intently and with great interest. #sschat #hsgovchat #edchat
— Jason Jaffe (@JasonJaffe) September 27, 2018

Ilan Cohen, who attends Charles E. Smith Jewish Day School in Rockville, Maryland, said that students gathered independently to watch during a break in the day. Later, students watched about a half-hour of the hearing in a history class.

“The idea that almost 50 high schoolers were watching quietly to me was incredible,” he said. His peers are interested in politics, but also were familiar with the places at the center of Ford’s story.

“A lot of us grew up in these ZIP codes. We connected with the story,” he said. “This took place in our own backyard.”

Still, he said his friends tried to be sensitive to the fact that not everyone would want to hear the details of an alleged assault.

In the common area, he said, “I turned the volume down so passersby wouldn’t have to hear something they don’t want to hear.”

Lifting the veil on education’s newest big donor: Inside Chan Zuckerberg’s $300 million push to reshape schools

2018-09-10T13:45:00+00:00

Read the list of grants made by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative that Chalkbeat has compiled.

In late 2015, Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan promised to donate 99 percent of their Facebook shares to their philanthropy, which would focus part of its work on improving American education.

In the three years since, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative has given away millions to groups working to “personalize” learning, reshape teacher training, and diversify the ranks of education leaders. But the full scope of that giving hasn’t been clear.

Now, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is putting a number on it: The organization has given $308 million in education grants since January 2016, when CZI took its current form. After inquiries from Chalkbeat, the organization provided that total, which has not been previously disclosed, as well as details of 19 specific grants.

The numbers offer new perspective on a philanthropy that has quickly become one of the biggest in U.S. education, thrusting itself into the ongoing debate over the appropriate role for private dollars in education policy. They also offer hints about how broadly CZI may try to extend its philanthropy in the years to come, as Zuckerberg’s billions position the organization to become even more influential. The Facebook founder, whose net worth is currently estimated at over $60 billion, is poised to transfer up to $13 billion to CZI by early 2019.

“Even given the fact it can be hard to pinpoint every dollar over time, $308 million over nearly three years would pretty easily make CZI a top-five grantmaker in pre-K-to-12 education,” said Jeff Snyder, a professor at Cleveland State University who has studied education philanthropy. Available data suggests that CZI’s donations may put it behind only the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation, he said.

(Chalkbeat receives support from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and other funders mentioned in this story, including the Gates Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, and the Emerson Collective through the Silicon Valley Community Foundation.)

CZI’s education work is at an inflection point. Its head, former Obama administration official Jim Shelton, said in July that he was leaving the post. His replacement stands to become one of the most influential figures in education policy.

As for its past giving, CZI is being more open than it has ever been by providing the new data. But the organization remains one of the least transparent funders in education.

Unlike a number of other philanthropies, CZI does not publicly list its grants, instead announcing only certain awards on Facebook or in press releases.

The 19 grants that CZI disclosed to Chalkbeat account for about one-third of the $308 million it has spent on education.

As a limited liability company, CZI is not required to list donations on its tax forms, unlike private foundations. Still, the organization says its approach is changing. “We have begun sharing our learnings to date with the education community and news media as part of our commitment to transparency,” spokesperson Dakarai Aarons said in a statement. “As we continue to build our strategy and systems, we plan to share more information about our grants in the future in a way that respects our grantees and community partners.”

Based on the information from CZI, details provided by other organizations, and publicly available information, Chalkbeat compiled its own list of over 50 groups that have received grants from CZI since 2016. Of the $308 million CZI says it has given away, Chalkbeat was able to account for roughly 45 percent. (Find our full list here.)

A push for tech-based personalized learning

The organizations receiving money from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative illustrate the scope of CZI’s efforts to personalize learning, the central focus of its known education giving. Shelton of CZI has suggested that the approach can produce massive gains in student learning; research hasn’t backed that up so far, but some programs have shown promise.

CZI’s giving includes expanding the use of technology in schools so that students can learn at their own pace or teachers can closely track student progress. CZI has also defined personalized learning as including “social-emotional and interpersonal skills, mental and physical health, and a child’s confident progress toward a sense of purpose,” as Shelton put it in 2017.

CZI has funded personalized learning efforts directly in a variety of places: statewide in Rhode Island ($1.5 million), in more than 100 Chicago-area schools ($14 million), and in a small district in California, Lindsay Unified ($775,000).

It has supported personalized learning-focused work by leadership groups Chiefs for Change ($3 million) and the Council of Chief State Schools Officers (nearly $400,000).

This includes the 19 grants that CZI provided details about to Chalkbeat.

CZI has backed efforts to infuse the concept into teacher training, including through the Woodrow Wilson Teaching and Learning Academy ($3 million), the New Teacher Center ($1.7 million), and the Harvard Graduate School of Education ($1.1 million).

CZI teamed up with the Gates Foundation to each send about $6 million to New Profit, which used that money to fund groups including iNACOL, an online learning association, and Valor Collegiate, a Tennessee-based charter network that uses a curriculum that students move through at their own pace.

CZI has built a unique relationship with Summit Public Schools, a charter network in California, which created a tool known as the Summit Learning Platform. Now being used in hundreds of schools across the country, the platform got early engineering help from Facebook and gets ongoing support from CZI.

Both CZI and Summit declined to say how much CZI has spent supporting the effort, though the details of their partnership form a long — and likely expensive — list.

Summit schools have received CZI money to launch and operate a teacher residency program and to buy and build school facilities, according to a Summit spokesperson. CZI support also allows the network to distribute its learning platform to schools, put on three free trainings each year for more than 2,500 educators, and pay for mentors who coach schools using the platform.

Expanding the definition of personalized learning and the pipeline of leaders

CZI has also supported efforts to give poor children eyeglasses through Vision to Learn ($3 million) and a partnership that includes Community in Schools ($2.2 million).

One of CZI’s priorities has been expanding what we know about how students learn, and it’s backed research on the science of learning by both the Learning Policy Institute and Turnaround for Children ($7 million).

It has funded initiatives focusing on non-academic skills, including the Character Lab — led by Angela Duckworth, the professor who popularized the concept of “grit” — and the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning ($750,000).

CZI awarded $750,000 over two years to Common Sense Media to review the privacy protections offered by education technology products.

The College Board won nearly $14 million for initiatives including expanding access to SAT practice using Khan Academy; an expansion of AP computer science courses, particularly in rural areas; and a college advising program.

CZI has also placed a major emphasis on growing the number of leaders of color in education, with grants to Teach For America ($10 million), The Surge Institute ($1 million), Camelback Ventures, Education Leaders of Color ($300,000), and Latinos for Education.

CZI has supported media and communications ventures, too, including personalized learning and other coverage at EdSurge (at least $700,000), a video series on social and emotional learning by Edutopia ($500,000), and “future of learning” coverage by The Hechinger Report. Education Post, a communications firm and blog, netted $1 million from CZI, half of which went to its California-focused outlet. Chalkbeat received a $250,000 grant from CZI in 2018; the grant is not for a coverage of a particular topic.

The grants illustrate how Chan and Zuckerberg have adjusted their approach since their first major foray into education philanthropy, a $100 million gift to Newark schools in 2010. Used to expand charter schools and implement a performance pay system for that city’s teachers, the donation proved deeply controversial.

Although CZI has given to traditional districts, other grants remain tied to charter schools. In addition to its work with Summit, it has donated to the Charter School Growth Fund and given at least $5 million to New Schools Venture Fund, which supports charter schools and efforts to grow the number of leaders of color in education. Achievement First, a charter network, got $350,000 for its “Greenfield” schools, which have an online learning component.

Meanwhile, CZI continues to be involved in Newark. Chalkbeat reported last month that CZI provided funding meant to ease the school district’s transition from state to local control.

Big influence but limited transparency

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s recent giving vaults CZI into the top echelon of education funders, though it remains behind the Gates Foundation and Walton Family Foundation for now. Whereas CZI averaged a bit over $100 million in grants each of the last three years, Walton spent $191 million on U.S. education programs in 2016 and the Gates spent about $367 million.

That kind of funding is dwarfed by the public dollars spent on education. But philanthropic money can have an outsized influence on policy: think the rapid spread of teacher evaluation changes, the Common Core standards, and charter schools, all catalyzed by funding from major philanthropies in the last decade.

For now, the entirety of CZI’s grantmaking strategy is unknown. A number of organizations that Chalkbeat contacted declined to say how much money they’ve received from CZI or whether they have received funding at all.

That level of transparency differs from the two biggest foundations in U.S. education. The Gates Foundation has a searchable database of grants going back many years. The Walton Family Foundation posts annual giving reports reaching back to 2009. Other philanthropies, like the Broad Foundation, are somewhat less transparent — listing current grantees but not amounts, for instance, though more detail can be found on tax forms.

Chan Zuckerberg differs from those foundations in key ways, some reflecting changing preferences among philanthropists.

Unlike the Gates, Walton, and Broad foundations, CZI is a limited liability company. That allows it to make political donations, invest in for-profit companies, and not disclose the compensation of its top leaders. CZI is not alone in this approach: The Laurene Powell Jobs-funded Emerson Collective is also an LLC.

CZI says it has not made political donations pertaining to its education work. It has invested in a number of for-profit businesses, though, including RaiseMe, a software platform aimed at helping students access information about college scholarships; Ellevation, a product to help teachers of English language learners; and Panorama Education, which provides student surveys. Any profit earned will be put back into the organization, CZI says.

“Just constraining yourself to only nonprofit giving cuts off a lot of good options,” Zuckerberg told Education Week in 2016. “I believe that companies can do a lot of good stuff in the world.”

A complicated funding web

Adding a layer of complication, CZI has given much of its $308 million in education grants through a “donor-advised fund” at the Silicon Valley Community Foundation — an increasingly popular but controversial strategy offering tax benefits for funders and little transparency.

Such community foundations allow donors to reap substantial tax benefits by donating stock; Chan and Zuckerberg have given the Silicon Valley Community Foundation about $1.75 billion worth of it. CZI directs the community foundation to make grants, and those donations are listed on the community foundation’s tax forms and its website.

But, crucially, those disclosures don’t indicate which fund makes which donation — meaning grants directed by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative through SVCF are not distinguishable from those made by more than 1,000 other funds.

For instance, the Silicon Valley Community Foundation lists $35 million, $20 million, and $16 million grants made to Summit Public Schools in 2016 and 2017, but offers no information on which fund made the donations.

The result of this trend? “Even as we’ve entered a period in which more donors are writing bigger checks to promote this or that cause, it’s become ever harder to follow the money,” Inside Philanthropy editor David Callahan wrote in a 2016 piece highlighting the rise of donor-advised funds. (He praises the Silicon Valley Community Foundation’s database of grants, while noting that it “doesn’t give us any clue” who is behind the donations.)

Those donor-advised funds also do not have to give away a specific share of their assets each year, unlike private foundations, which must donate 5 percent — a setup that has prompted criticism that they allow money meant for charity to sit idle.

To defenders, these funds are just a new vehicle for helping nonprofits improve their communities. The Silicon Valley Community Foundation says its donor-advised funds with more than $1 million pay out an average of over 15 percent each year.

Snyder of Cleveland State University said this new breed of philanthropy raises fresh questions about how groups like the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative will use their influence.

“Traditional philanthropy from private foundations has been critiqued for being anti-democratic, yet LLCs such as CZI have opportunity to be even more emblematic of this concern,” he said.

“That’s really the question: Can LLCs simultaneously be freed from constraints that are supposed to ensure they work in the public interest, and evolve into institutions that democratically work with communities they seek to shape?”

Amanda Zhou contributed reporting. Graphics by Sam Park.

Success Academy COO leaving for another charter network

2018-05-21T22:33:00+00:00

A top official at New York City’s largest charter network is leaving for another network, Success Academy officials confirmed Monday.

Kris Cheung, the chief operating officer at Success Academy, is headed to Texas for an operations job at KIPP. Rob Price, Success’s chief financial officer, is also leaving his post. The moves were first reported by Gothamist.

“As Success scales to 100 schools, we have hired several new leaders this past year — general counsel, chief of technology and head of leadership and human resources,” Success spokeswoman Ann Powell said. “While Kris Cheung, who has spent seven years with Success, is leaving to work in Texas for another charter network, Rob Price will continue as a consultant.”

Cheung was promoted to oversee operations in the shake-up that followed a 2015 school-supply fiasco required network staff to work nights and weekend days sorting boxes and furniture on Long Island.

The moves leave the network, which has ambitions to grow to 100 schools, with key positions to fill. Dan Loeb, Success’s board chair, also stepped down recently (and was replaced by Steven Galbraith); founder Eva Moskowitz lost another key ally in Emily Kim, the network’s former top lawyer, in 2017.

The city’s 46 Success Academy schools are known for their high test scores, strict discipline, Moskowitz’s fights with Mayor Bill de Blasio, and controversies around pushing out students and a much-publicized video showing a teacher ripping student work.

KIPP spokesman Steve Mancini said Cheung’s precise role is still being decided. That network’s well-known co-founder, Mike Feinberg, was fired in February after a sexual misconduct investigation.

Chalkbeat’s newest newsletter is made for teachers. Sign up here.

2018-05-03T23:01:20+00:00

We’re about to launch another newsletter over here at Chalkbeat, and this one is especially for teachers.

The newsletter is a spinoff of our interview series How I Teach. Over the past year, our reporters have already introduced you to a Memphis teacher who uses Facebook Live on snow days, a government teacher in East Harlem tackling debates about race and the presidency, a Colorado Springs teacher who helps students navigate parents’ deployments, and dozens of other educators from across the country.

Our goal is to share realistic snapshots of what life looks like in classrooms today, and make sure you don’t miss the tips and tricks those teachers have passed along to us. (Our goal is definitely not to provide any more professional development or pat answers about successful teaching.)

In the newsletter, we’ll also include stories we think might be especially useful to teachers, including our take on new research and thoughtful pieces written by educators themselves. And we’ll use this newsletter as another chance to bring you into our reporting — letting you know what we’re working on and how you can help by sharing your own experiences.

Ann Schimke, the Colorado-based reporter behind some of our award-winning coverage of early childhood issues and many How I Teach features, will be your guide.

Interested? Sign up below. And for those of you keeping track, we now have local newsletters for each of our bureaus — Chicago (where coverage is launching soon), Colorado, Detroit, Indiana, Newark, New York City, and Tennessee — plus a national newsletter and a Spanish-language newsletter out of Colorado.

A Chalkbeat cheat sheet: What’s going on with Upper West Side desegregation

2018-04-27T19:14:24+00:00

A viral video and a late-night tweet by New York City’s new schools chancellor may have left you trying to catch up with the debate about a proposal to integrate Upper West Side middle schools.

Here’s a primer to the controversy that suddenly has everyone talking about state tests, middle school admissions, and privilege:

What was that meeting in the video about?

There’s a plan on the table to offer a share of seats at 16 middle schools to students who have low scores on statewide math and English exams. Those 16 schools are in District 3, which includes the Upper West Side and part of Harlem.
The expectation there now is that high test scores — achieved most often by the district’s middle-class students — should guarantee families their top choice of middle schools.
The plan’s specifics are still a work in progress. But as the proposal stands now, 10 percent of admissions offers would go to students scoring at the lowest level (level 1), and another 15 percent would go to students scoring just below the proficiency bar (level 2).
Those admissions rules would increase the proportion of low-scoring students at some highly sought-after schools, according to a city analysis, but have little impact at others.

Whose plan is it? Who supports it?

Officials in District 3 — namely, District 3 Superintendent Ilene Altschul. This is not a citywide plan, and it’s not a proposal put forth by the mayor’s office.
While the video showed parents speaking vehemently against the proposal, many on the district’s elected parent council are on board. The council plays only an advisory role in setting these kinds of admissions rules, though.
Many middle school principals in the district are also speaking out in favor of the proposal and say they could handle having students with a wider range of academic abilities than they serve now.
While research suggests that academic integration generally benefits all students, some research shows that when the gulf among students is too wide, neither high- nor lower-performing students are better off.

Why is this getting so much attention?

New York City’s schools are deeply segregated by race and class, and conversation about whether and how to change that has picked up recently. Among the latest developments: advocates have focused on segregation at the city’s specialized high schools, where black and Hispanic students accounted for just 10.4 percent of offers.
Unlike some parts of the city, the area that makes up District 3 is pretty diverse — yet schools are starkly divided: While less than 10 percent of the students at some middle schools come from low-income families, nearly 100 percent do at others.
The controversy gets at unspoken and often unexamined rules about who gets what privileges in New York City — in this case, who gains entry into desirable middle schools. Parents have expected that their children would receive spots there if they do well on tests, and this proposal challenges that notion.
The video shows in stark terms what some see as the unlevel playing field that underlies the current system. An angry mom insists that telling children that they didn’t get to attend a great middle after “you worked your butt off” will drive home the message that “life sucks.” But Henry Zymeck, the principal of The Computer School, noted that some parents spent $5,000 in tutoring on state exams — an expense that is out of reach for most parents.
Now Chancellor Richard Carranza has weighed in. He said he’s still looking into the details of the proposal, but called it “well thought-out” and “very moderate, quite frankly.”

Is this related to the last big public fight about integration on the Upper West Side?

You might be thinking about this case, where the education department proposed new attendance zone lines for elementary schools that would send some students headed for high-performing P.S. 199 instead to P.S. 191, which has had much lower test scores and far more students who are poor and of color.
While it is the same neighborhood and the cases brought similar tensions to the fore, they aren’t directly related.
One of the goals of that plan was to diversify schools, but officials were also trying to alleviate overcrowding. Here’s a look back at where things stand with those schools today.
But yes, many of the same parents are involved. The meeting in the video was even at one of the two elementary schools in question, P.S. 199 — the more affluent and outspoken of the two schools in the 2015 fight.
Altschul, the district superintendent, also proposed an integration plan two years ago that would have affected district middle schools. That plan would have required schools to set aside 30 percent of seats for students from low-income families, but it died after she did not win over principals.

What happens next?

The leaders on the Community Education Council and the district superintendent have taken the proposal on the road to get feedback from parents in the district. The next CEC meeting is scheduled for 6:30 p.m. on May 16 at P.S. 242. A special meeting that will focus on the admissions proposal will take place at 6:30 p.m. on May 22 at P.S. 163.
It’s possible for the plan to get tweaked, based on the feedback received.
Altschul would then formally propose the changes to the education department for approval. The parent education council wouldn’t have a formal role in approving the plan. The goal is for changes to go into effect in the 2019-20 school year.

Robotics is bringing Betsy DeVos to Detroit for the first time as education secretary

2018-04-27T00:15:04+00:00

Betsy DeVos is set to appear in Detroit for the first time as education secretary on Friday, though she’s unlikely to encounter local students when she’s there.

DeVos is scheduled to attend a student robotics competition being held downtown in a bid to promote science and math education. The event is also likely to again highlight DeVos’s past influence over education policy in the city, which has been heavily scrutinized.

Before becoming President Trump’s education chief, DeVos, a prominent Michigan philanthropist, was a key architect of policies that many blame for the dire state of Detroit’s schools.

We’ve outlined that debate in full, but the key points are that the state’s charter law puts no restrictions on where or how many charter schools can open, which has created school deserts in some neighborhoods, and far too many schools in others. Both district and charter schools struggle financially with less-than-full enrollments, while student performance suffers across the board.

DeVos’ critics say she has blocked attempts to bring order and oversight to Detroit schools. Defenders note that parents now have more options and that charter school students in the city do slightly better on state exams than their peers in district schools.

DeVos also had a tense exchange with Lesley Stahl of “60 Minutes” about Michigan schools back in March.

“Michigan schools need to do better. There is no doubt about it,” she said.

DeVos’s announcement says she plans to meet with students on Friday. But while the event is happening in Detroit, the students DeVos encounters at the FIRST Robotics World Championship on Friday will almost surely hail from elsewhere. Earlier this week, Chalkbeat noted that just one city high school in Detroit qualified to send a team.

In her own words: Remembering Linda Brown, who was at the center of America’s school segregation battles

2018-03-27T17:10:18+00:00

Linda Brown, whose name became part of American history through the Brown v. Board of Education case, died Sunday.

She became the center of the legal and political battle to integrate U.S. schools after she was denied access to an all-white school down the street in Topeka, Kansas in 1950. Her father and several other parents sued with the help of the NAACP, and their case made it to the Supreme Court.

When they won, it set a lasting legal precedent. Brown was attending an integrated junior high school by then, and she later recalled the initial desegregation of local elementary schools going smoothly. But over the course of her life, she saw the reality of school integration fall short, locally and nationally.

In Topeka, where Brown would send her own children to public school, some elementary schools remained disproportionately black. In 1979, Brown was part of a lawsuit to re-open the case, which eventually resulted in a 1993 desegregation order for the city’s school district. Across the country, schools remain highly stratified by class and race; in many districts, court orders have ended and schools have quickly resegregated.

Brown seemed ambivalent about the spotlight that came with her name, and some news articles recount failed attempts to reach her. But she often spoke at anniversaries of the 1954 ruling — and while she called it a victory, she wasn’t shy about expressing disappointment at just how much the Brown case itself didn’t achieve.

Here she is, telling her own story over the course of a lifetime.

“I was kind of afraid at first. I didn’t talk about it very much, I guess, because I was afraid it would get back to someone who would make trouble.”

“Last year in American history class we were talking about segregation and the Supreme Court decisions, and I thought, ‘Gee, some day I might be in the history books!’”

— 1961 interview with the New York Times, when Brown was 17

“It was not the quick fix we thought it would be.”

— 1984 New York Times interview marking the 30th anniversary of the ruling

“Brown was a very necessary victory. It opened up doors to entertainment, housing, education, employment. All facets of black life was affected by Brown. After 30 years, yes, you do feel that Brown is still not fulfilled. Which is very disheartening to me. I find that after 30 years, desegregation of schools is still very much the issue of today.”

— May 1984 interview with ABC News, marking the 30th anniversary

“I was a very young child when I started walking to school. I remember the walk as being very long at that time. In fact, it was several blocks up through railroad yards, and crossing a busy avenue, and standing on the corner, and waiting for the school bus to carry me two miles across town to an all black school. Being a young child, when I first started the walk it was very frightening to me um, and then when wintertime came, it was a very cold walk. I remember that. I remember walking, tears freezing up on my face, because I began to cry because it was so cold, and many times I had to turn around and run back home.”

— 1985 interview for “Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years”

“It is very disheartening. We are still going through the old arguments.”

— 1989 interview, again in the New York Times, at age 46

“We feel disheartened that 40 years later we’re still talking about desegregation. But the struggle has to continue.”

— 1994 Washington Post story, “Ruling’s Promise Unkept In Topeka,” on the ruling’s 40th anniversary

“It’s disheartening that we are still fighting. But we are dealing with human beings. As long as we are, there will always be those who feel the races should be separate.”

— 1994 New York Times story, “Aftermath of ’54 Ruling Disheartens the Browns”

“To me, the impact of Brown is best seen in the increasing numbers of black professionals today. These are the people that, after 1954, were able to have some degree of choice. This surely made a difference in their aspirations and their achievements.”

“I ran across a quote, in a new book by one of our black women authors — her name is Mildred Pitts Walter — that I believe says it all. ‘It is not the treatment of a people that degrades them, but their acceptance of it.’”

— 2004 speech at the Chautauqua Institution, near the ruling’s 50th anniversary

‘Everything is different now’: Stoneman Douglas librarian reflects one month after shooting

2018-03-19T15:35:08+00:00

One month ago, Diana Haneski was hiding in an equipment closet at Stoneman Douglas High School. She’s the school’s media specialist, and when the lockdown was announced she herded students into the closet, where she texted family members and waited, listening to the sounds of helicopters overhead.

Seventeen people were killed in the shooting that day at her Parkland, Florida, school. In the days that followed, some of Haneski’s students reignited a national movement against gun violence. Students returned to Douglas two and a half weeks ago, and that library is now a counseling hub for traumatized students and teachers.

You might know Haneski’s name because of this chilling story about her longtime friendship with Yvonne Cech, who was the librarian at Sandy Hook Elementary School when 26 were killed there. I reached out to Haneski because I know her — she became close friends with my mother when they worked together at Westglades Middle School, which is next door to Stoneman Douglas.

I wanted to know how she was adjusting to the wrenching changes to her work and her community, and what learning looks like now at her school. Here’s some of our conversation.

There’s such a huge wave of news coverage when something like this happens, and we hear less as people who work with students settle back in to their routines and people have returned to those same spaces. I was hoping we could talk about how you’re thinking about your library, and how you’re thinking about the job that you do every day after something like this.

Everything is different now. The library, half of it is counseling. Everyone needs some help still.

The first few days back there were so many people from the district. I mean, anyone that had a teaching certificate who worked for the district that wasn’t in a classroom, they were asked to come to our school and support us. Anyone who wanted help from someone certified in what they teach could have had someone at their side that first week.

And really, they were not trying to really teach anything. They were trying to heal and help. There was no big push to teach. Now, there are kids who really want to learn and want to have regular classes. There are also kids who are just not ready to learn yet. And there are teachers who are having trouble with what they’re supposed to do as well.

So there’s counseling going on to help with all of this. That’s really the number one thing going on in the library. In addition to all these kids coming in the library, there are therapy dogs. As soon as I realized how important dogs were, I was asking the superintendent, asking everyone, can I have a dog in the library, please, for this week and next week?

Now there are two or three in the library. The kids just want to sit there and pet them — it relaxes them, it gets them in a position where they can maybe start talking to a counselor. It’s helps the counselor get the kids to start talking. I’ve seen it work.

It’s unbelievable to see the things coming our way from around the country and around the world, from schools and from random people. I get handwritten notes from people I don’t know who just want to write to me and say how bad they feel and want to send their love and support.

In general, kids still need to talk. Fourth period is when this horrible thing happened to us. We’ve had two fourth periods since we’ve had full days. And they’re hard. You end up with more kids in the library. They just want to hang, and be really close to each other, and to talk.

What was it like after the walkouts on Wednesday?

It was really great. A lot of people went to the football field. Some kids felt compelled to walk to where the memorials are, north of our school. And then some of them came back. That caused a little bit of mayhem, kids leaving and coming back. But they want to be part of something.

They ended it with the song the kids wrote. It was really moving. And as we were out there on the field, we see the Westglades [Middle School] kids coming on the other side of our fence. They’re making noise and they’re waving at us. And as we were first coming out onto the field, there were people from the community on the other side of the fence waving at us and supporting us. So that was kind of nice. And then we ended it with a group hug.

As I came back in, the classrooms were very empty. Then I passed the front office and saw a crowd of kids trying to come back. This is what it is now. We were taking care of business, making sure kids are doing OK and getting what they need.

What’s surprised you about everything that’s happened since the shooting?

The whole controversy with, should a teacher have a gun. The fact that you can actually have a conversation with someone and they could be like, well, of course they should have one. I mean, I don’t know if I should say this, but I looked for my keys and my phone yesterday for a little longer than I want to admit to. For me to be responsible for a gun? I went to school to be a librarian, media specialist, teacher.

Here’s what’s surprising me. That this could happen — and our kids are being vocal, and sound very logical, and I’m very proud of them — and they go up to Tallahassee with this optimism and enthusiasm, and they think that they’re going to get their voices heard because the legislature is in session. And they get there, and it’s like a slap in the face.

How can it be so hard to say, you shouldn’t sell an AR-15 to an 18-year-old? Why is that so hard? The realization of the power of the NRA, that has surprised me. I didn’t really pay attention to that before.

My life is really different now. No one wants to be a part of that club, surviving a mass shooting. And I’m also an activist. I didn’t really think about myself as an activist. I did learn from my father, rest in peace. He was in politics, and I learned from watching him and helping him. And I learned that you’re supposed to talk when you can make a change.

And knowing that if we’re quiet, it’s just going to go away. Really, if little children in Sandy Hook getting killed didn’t make much of a change, if 50-odd people in Las Vegas at a concert, if that didn’t make much of a change? We have to do something.

I saw you asked for book recommendations for your students — or maybe teachers? — on Facebook. Have you gotten responses? Is that still on your mind, what they will want or need to read?

Yes, teachers really need more material and different resources than they needed before. We do yoga in the library on Monday afternoons, and I was stretching and I looked up at a shelf and there was this book on display — “The Gun Fighter.” That is not a book I want on display right now!

People have been amazing, especially media specialists. FAME, the association for Florida media specialists, has been so kind to me. They’ve started compiling resources, nonfiction and fiction — anything that might help in this area, so that we can help with coping and healing, and also stories that might be inspiring, show kids going through a struggle or pain or hurt and coming out OK.

I know reading is really important to you. Have you managed to read anything yourself this last month?

The first week I didn’t even want to eat. And I really couldn’t get my head to read, which was very unusual. That took me a while; I think it was two weeks before I could. And I started with listening to a book.

I did that because people have been so nice — media specialists have sent me gifts, sharing an audio book, giving me an Amazon gift card and saying, get the books you need to read. I’m also on the Florida Teens Read committee, which means I have to read a lot of books. I told one of them, I don’t know I’ll be able to read the books I need to, since they’re in the school. So they shared their audio books, and I got lucky — one was “Letters to the Lost,” about writing letters to those who have gone.

So yes, I have read three books in these last two weeks. It’s part of moving forward and living my life. And I know there are 17 that couldn’t, and then their heartbroken families.

What it looked like as students across America walked out of school to protest gun violence

2018-03-14T21:20:00+00:00

Students across America left their classrooms on Wednesday to take part in a national protest pushing for stricter gun laws and memorializing those who died in last month’s school shooting in Florida.

The event was rare in its scope, with students from hundreds of schools leaving class for at least 17 minutes in memory of the 14 teens and three teachers killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland one month ago. The event continued throughout the day, with students walking out at 10 a.m. local time across the country.

“People need to start realizing that there needs to be change,” explained Zhy’yon Hoover, a sophomore at Northwest High School in Indianapolis who helped organize that school’s protest, on Wednesday morning.

Students at Northwest High School joined the National School Walkout on Wednesday, March 14, 2018.

In New York City, students in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood chanted and carried signs reading “How many more?”

Other demonstrations were quiet: elementary school students at P.S. 40 in Manhattan stood with their parents and observed a moment of silence.

At Stoneman Douglas, students had gathered on the school’s football field by 10 a.m. David Hogg, a student who has become one of the most prominent faces of student activism after the shooting, livestreamed the walk-out and thanked school administrators for supporting the effort to remember those who died.

“They don’t have their voices, but we still do,” Hogg said.

Students from The SALK School of Science in New York City join Wednesday’s national walkout.

In Washington D.C., lawmakers at a U.S. Senate committee hearing on improving school safety acknowledged the event, too.

“Across the country, in a few minutes, students from across America will be exercising their First Amendment right to speak out about changes that they want on how we regulate our Second Amendment right,” said Florida Senator Marco Rubio, alluding to the uphill battle students may face in advocating for stricter gun control laws.

Moments earlier, Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican and the judiciary committee’s chair, said that he was introducing a new bill — the “Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Memorial Act of 2018” — in order to conduct research on school safety and threat assessment training for schools. But Diane Feinstein, the ranking Democrat on the committee, focused her remarks on limiting access to guns.

“High school students who have lost their friends are literally begging us to take action to get these guns off the streets and out of our schools,” she said.

In several districts in the Northeast, a snow day — normally a cause for celebration among students — derailed walk-out plans. In Vermont, some students said they would delay the protest until Thursday, but in Portland, Maine, two dozen middle schoolers still marched with signs like, “Will your school be next?” and “Is it your opinion or the NRA’s?” In Massachusetts, despite widespread school closures, many students still planned to march to the statehouse in protest.

Students from the Urban Assembly Gateway School for Technology and Stephen T. Mather Building Arts Craftsmanship High School walked out Wednesday in New York City.

At some schools, protesting students needed to navigate school policies designed to minimize disruption. But some politicians and school officials have offered their support for the event: New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and AFT President Randi Weingarten walked out of a Manhattan school and participated in a “die in.” Both the Boston and Philadelphia school districts tweeted support for protesting students.

Meanwhile, students who have long been fighting — and experiencing the consequences of — gun violence had mixed feelings about the national attention the Parkland shooting has focused on the issue.

In Detroit, many students participating were remembering their own, less-publicized tragedies. Darryl Erwin, 17, recalled his mother’s shoulder being grazed when someone fired bullets at several houses on his block.

Students at Western High School in Detroit gather as part of National Walkout Day, a student-led protest happening across the country.

“I don’t want the school shootings to overshadow the youth violence shootings that happen every day,” said Brandon Warren, a high school senior in Indianapolis who had two classmates killed last spring and started a local anti-violence group as a result. Students at his school were allowed to walk out of classes but not leave the school due to safety concerns.

In Colorado, which has a tragic history of school shootings, hundreds of Denver high school students marched out of class and converged on the state Capitol steps to chant and wave signs decrying gun violence.

Some were holding hand lettered signs: “Protect Kids, Not Guns,” one said. “Keep Your Guns Out of My School.” “Am I Next?”

“We’ve been existing in a world of violence since we were born,” one student said.

Gov. John Hickenlooper, a Democrat, briefly address the crowd, saying into a megaphone: “You look pretty fired up,” he said into a megaphone. “A big part is just the fact you took the initiative to come out here and show up. It’s a big part, but it’s not the only part.”

Another national protest is planned for next month: a “day of action” on April 20, the anniversary of the 1999 shooting at Colorado’s Columbine High School. That protest, sponsored by the National Education Association, the American Federation of Teachers, and the Network for Public Education among others, encourages events at schools focused on pushing policy changes to reduce gun violence.

Melanie Asmar, Monica Disare, Dylan Peers McCoy, Amanda Rahn, Kimberly Hayes Taylor, and Alex Zimmerman contributed reporting.

Making the rounds on TV, Betsy DeVos says she hasn’t visited struggling schools and draws sharp criticism

2018-03-12T14:52:01+00:00

U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has visited all kinds of schools since she took office last year: district-run, charter, private, religious — even a school located in a zoo.

But one kind of school has been left out, she said Sunday on 60 Minutes: schools that are struggling.

It was a curious admission, since DeVos has built her policy agenda on the argument that vast swaths of American schools are so low-performing that their students should be given the choice to leave. That argument, DeVos conceded, is not based on any firsthand experiences.

Host Lesley Stahl pushed DeVos on the schools she’s skipped. Here’s their exchange:

Lesley Stahl: Have you seen the really bad schools? Maybe try to figure out what they’re doing? DeVos: I have not — I have not — I have not intentionally visited schools that are underperforming. Stahl: Maybe you should. DeVos: Maybe I should. Yes.

Her comments attracted criticism from her frequent foes, like American Federation of Teachers head Randi Weingarten, who tweeted:

Among the most stunning answers: @betsydevosed admits she hasn't bothered to visit the schools she bashes to learn about them https://t.co/Ha9p4h3jKB
— Randi Weingarten (@rweingarten) March 11, 2018

Even some who are more sympathetic to school choice initiatives said the interview did not go well.

This is a debacle of an interview. Inept/offensive answers on struggling district schools, disproportionate discipline, guns, and school choice. DeVos is an embarrassment to responsible education choice and reform movements. https://t.co/abVSYxH5et
— Robin Lake (@RbnLake) March 12, 2018

We can support families having choices abt where to send their children to school & also believe that @BetsyDeVosED was woefully unprepared for her #60Minutes interview and also, apparently, for her job as Ed Sec. Families desperate for options deserve better. @laurenonthehill
— Erika Sanzi (@esanzi) March 12, 2018

The exchange occupied just a few seconds of the nearly 30 minutes that DeVos spent on television Sunday and Monday, including interviews on Fox and Friends and the Today Show. The appearances followed several school-safety proposals from the White House Sunday, including paying for firearms training for some teachers.

DeVos sidestepped questions about raising the age for gun purchases. “We have to get much broader than just talking about guns, and a gun issue where camps go into their corners,” she said. “We have to go back to the beginning and talk about how these violent acts are even occurring to start with.”

She also endorsed local efforts to decide whether to increase weapons screening at schools. Asked on Fox and Friends about making schools more like airports, with metal detectors and ID checks, DeVos responded, “You know, some schools actually do that today. Perhaps for some communities, for some cities, for some states, that will be appropriate.”

DeVos also said on 60 Minutes that she would look into removing guidance from the Obama administration that was designed to reduce racial disparities in school suspensions and expulsions. Education Week reported, based on comments from an unnamed administration official, that the the guidance would likely land on the DeVos task force’s agenda.

Florida Senator Marco Rubio has argued that the Obama-era guidance may have contributed to Florida shooting by preventing the shooter from being referred to the police. (In fact, the 2013 Broward County program designed to reduce referrals to police for minor offenses predated the 2014 federal guidance.)

Details of the commission were not immediately available. Education Week also reported that “age restrictions for certain firearm purchases,” “rating systems for video games,” and “the effects of press coverage of mass shootings” are likely to be discussed.

“The Secretary will unveil a robust plan regarding the commission’s membership, scope of work and timeline in the coming days,” Liz Hill, a spokesperson for the Department of Education, said in an email.

DeVos + Puerto Rico + Texas funding = SXSW day two

2018-03-07T12:34:21+00:00

Welcome to Chalkbeat’s coverage of SXSW EDU! We’re spending the week in Austin and publishing special editions of our national newsletter along the way. Here’s what you should know happened on the conference’s day two. Did a friend forward? You can subscribe here.

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos took questions from a somewhat rowdy crowd.

A few highlights from DeVos’s speech and appearance at SXSW EDU:

In response to a question from Chalkbeat, DeVos said she backs a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants covered by the DACA program. This appears to be one step more specific than her previous comments on the topic. “I’m very hopeful that Congress is going to ultimately do what Congress needs to do, and act on this,” she said.
Asked why she she named entrepreneurs ahead of teachers and students in earlier comments listing education stakeholders, DeVos said, “Well, we’re at an innovation conference.” Teachers are innovators too, she said, and they need more freedom in the classroom.
DeVos was moderating, and she initially offered up a question about how to improve education for students of color — submitted by the audience — to the panelists. But after murmuring from audience members, she took it herself. She relied on her now standard responses: school choice and bottom-up change. “When I see communities that have the greatest number of choices and opportunities for students to find the right fit for them — the environments that excite them and engage their curiosity — I don’t think you can find anything better than that,” she said.
In other news: DeVos is visiting Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida on Wednesday morning.

Voucher advocacy group EdChoice has its eyes on Puerto Rico.

After seeing its schools rocked by Hurricane Maria, Puerto Rico is considering closing hundreds of traditional public schools and expanding charters and vouchers. The territory may get the help of EdChoice. Robert Enlow, the group’s leader, told Chalkbeat that Puerto Rico’s education secretary, Julia Keleher, asked his advocacy group to offer “technical assistance” there. Keleher didn’t respond to Chalkbeat’s request to comment, but she subsequently told a Politico reporter that there had just been “one phone call” with EdChoice and that there was no formal agreement with the group.

Consensus on school funding in Texas.

Texas Rep. Gina Hinojosa, said “it is broken.” Nicole Conley Johnson, the chief financial officer for Austin’s schools, called it “undeniably broken.” Noel Candelaria, head of the Texas State Teachers Association, offered “inadequate and broken.” The three were on a panel together Tuesday, where Hinojosa said lawmakers should focus on better funding special education in the state, referencing the 2016 Houston Chronicle investigation into illegal caps on special ed services.

The Great American Teach-Off

Chalkbeat’s first-ever Great American Teach-Off happens today! Be sure to arrive early — doors open at 3 p.m. We’re in Room 16AB of the convention center. We can’t wait to see you there.

What else we’ll be paying attention to tomorrow

The chief growth officer of the charter school network Green Dot talks about taking over struggling schools at 11.
Can the school to prison pipeline be “disrupted”? Answers, maybe, at 11.
How El Paso schools has changed professional development for dual-language teaching, also at 11.
Our Matt Barnum is giving a short talk on what conventional wisdom in education is actually wrong, according to research, at 11:30. Give him a full house!
The latest on trauma-informed teaching at 12:30.

Local stories on Chalkbeat to check out

A bill that would allow some Tennessee teachers to carry handguns in school is on hold for now. It had 40 co-sponsors but not the crucial support of the governor’s office.
Indiana has no way to know how certain virtual schools are doing. The schools are growing quickly, though — one virtual school just tripled the size of a small district.
New York City’s school turnaround effort is losing its founding leader. The move means that incoming chancellor Richard Carranza will get to choose who runs the three-year-old Renewal program.

What we’re reading

The West Virginia teachers strike is over, and teachers are getting a 5 percent raise. It’s the latest instance of teacher activism coming at a moment of social upheaval for the country. New York Times
Oklahoma teachers are also considering a strike over low pay. The Intercept
The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is giving $30 million to an early-literacy program run by Harvard and MIT that will start in Charlotte, North Carolina. The 74

What happened when: Inside the circus that was the Carvalho pick and sudden rejection

2018-03-01T23:41:32+00:00

Mayor Bill de Blasio thought his search for a schools chancellor was wrapping up.

After a lengthy search, city officials had identified a top contender in Miami-Dade County Superintendent Alberto Carvalho, a rising star in education circles who would have been a high-profile get for the mayor. Almost two weeks ago, Carvalho was offered the job leading the nation’s largest school district. A week ago, after many conversations and clandestine trips to the city, Carvalho signaled he would take it.

Then on Thursday, it all fell apart in dramatic fashion during a four-hour emergency school board meeting in Miami that was carried live on television. It all left New York City back at square one.

“Like many of you, I was very surprised by Mr. Carvalho’s decision,” de Blasio said at a packed news conference Thursday afternoon, at which he described the timeline of the city’s discussions with Carvalho. “I thought we had found the right candidate.”

The surprise turn of events left education observers in both cities wondering what happened in the time between Carvalho apparently confirming that he would move to New York City and his statement that stunned the mayor and his top officials.

Here’s what we know so far about how the events played out across two cities.

The city’s courtship of Carvalho involved multiple meetings with the mayor at Gracie Mansion — one in January and another in February, according to mayoral spokesman Eric Phillips.

In Miami, rumors began swirling on Tuesday that Carvalho had been offered the post. School board member Martin Karp met with the superintendent the next day on the seventh floor of the school board building in downtown Miami.

Karp says he didn’t ask whether Carvalho had already made up his mind — perhaps the long-serving school board member didn’t want to hear the answer. Instead, he made a final case for Miami, and walked away thinking his city still had a chance to keep its longtime superintendent.

“I felt that he’s vested around 30 years in this community, that he has a lot of ties here, that he has established a tremendous amount of relationships,” Karp said. “You work very hard to establish those things.”

By Wednesday afternoon, news that the search had narrowed to Carvalho had spread beyond South Florida — and reached the rest of Miami’s school board members, who called an emergency meeting just after 4:30 p.m.

“There was an unusual situation in terms of some news starting to move around,” de Blasio said at the press conference Thursday. “His school board as a result called this meeting.”

The media was indeed onto the story. At 4:52 p.m., Chalkbeat informed City Hall of plans to immediately run a story reporting that the search had narrowed to Carvalho.

The city already had reached an agreement to share the news with Politico that Carvahlo was the city’s choice, and de Blasio said that at about 5 p.m, Carvalho “confirmed that he was very comfortable giving the information to Politico.”

Politico broke the news at 5:20 p.m. Immediately after, City Hall officials began confirming to the other reporters and the public that Carvalho was the pick.

Carvalho was quickly overwhelmed with messages of support and pleas for him to stay. The superintendent said 500 texts clogged his inbox, along with as many missed phone calls.

In lower Manhattan, City Hall scrambled to notify members of the Panel for Educational Policy, the school-oversight board which had been scheduled to vote Wednesday evening on the largest round of proposed school closures since de Blasio took office.

Panel members were hastily assembled at 5:30 p.m. and placed on a conference call with City Hall officials, who explained that Carvalho would be the next chancellor. Some of the members expressed frustration that they had only been brought in the loop after the news had been publicly reported.

“Panel members were very upset by this whole thing,” said one person who was in the room.

By 6:30 p.m., Carvalho’s chief spokeswoman released a cryptic statement: “The superintendent has been offered the job, but has not yet accepted,” wrote Daisy Gonzalez-Diego. (That was the start of a back-and-forth over the nature of Carvalho’s communication with de Blasio that would last into Thursday, with Gonzalez-Diego telling Miami public radio affiliate WLRN, “I don’t know that ‘accepted’ the job was the right word.”)

Despite the breaking news, the Panel for Educational Policy members were scheduled to vote on a series of 13 school closures. As they prepared to start what would become one of the most contentious panel meetings in recent history, Chancellor Carmen Fariña told at least one panel member that the city would hold a press conference the next morning to officially unveil their new pick. She noted that the monthly panel meeting would be her last as chancellor.

“She was very positive about the selection,” said one panel member who spoke with her about Carvalho.

The meeting eventually drew so many angry lawmakers and parents that some panel members wondered whether the timing of the city’s announcement of Carvalho was meant to crowd out coverage of the closures. “The thought crossed my mind,” said one panel member, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Meanwhile, back in Miami, education insiders were also pulling a late night — and many thought they were hours away from seeing their schools chief walk away.

Miami community activist Tangela Sears said she stayed up speaking with the superintendent and bombarding his phone with texts.

At that point, “I think Alberto was heading to New York,” said Sears, an outspoken advocate against gun violence in Miami, a cause for which Carvalho has been an outspoken ally. “I think he was battling the decision, but I think he was heading to New York.”

First thing Thursday morning, Carvalho was flanked by television cameras at iPreparatory Academy, the downtown Miami school where he serves as principal. He declined to say anything about New York City, instead railing against the idea of arming Florida teachers.

When the Miami-Dade school board came together at 10 a.m. Thursday, desperate Miamians lavished the superintendent with praise and begged him to stay put. The show of support dragged on for hours while Carvalho sat silently, at times tearing up, touching his heart, and wrapping one student up in a hug on the dais. School board members passed a symbolic, and unanimous, vote of confidence in the superintendent.

It took four hours, two breaks, and a soaring speech before Carvalho revealed his final decision.

“I just don’t know how to break a promise to a child, how to break a promise to a community. And that has weighed on me in the past 24 hours,” Carvalho said. He would stay.

To observers in Miami, the outpouring of support is what finally pushed Carvalho to call de Blasio during the meeting, with a surprising message: thanks, but no thanks.

“If he had a commitment, either way, I think at that moment he felt something inside. ‘This is what I have to do for these kids,’” said school board member Larry Feldman.

Monica Disare contributed reporting.

Alberto Carvalho stuns New York City by turning down chancellor job after first accepting it

2018-03-01T18:26:51+00:00

Miami-Dade County Superintendent Alberto Carvalho shocked New York City, South Florida, and the entire education world on Thursday, reneging on his decision to move north and lead the country’s largest school system in an emotional, livestreamed school board meeting.

Only a day earlier, officials in the New York City’s mayor’s office made the move seem like a done deal, confirming that the high-profile education leader would make the move north. Carvalho himself confirmed at the meeting’s stunning conclusion that he had accepted the position.

But after an outpouring of support that included an unusual “vote of confidence” from school board members, Carvalho stunned everyone by appearing to change his mind in real time, seeming to refer to his repeated promise to stay in Miami until his contract is up in 2020.

“I just don’t know how to break a promise to a child, how to break a promise to a community. And that has weighed on me in the past 24 hours,” Carvalho said.

At 1:15 p.m., Carvalho requested a second break during the meeting, which began at 10 a.m. He implied that he needed to reach de Blasio to turn down the job.

“Give us a minute, folks. We’re also sorting through the weirdness,” Eric Phillips, the mayor’s spokesman, tweeted.

Shortly afterward, Carvalho returned to the meeting and delivered his final decision: He would stay in Miami.

“I underestimated the emotional tug, the level of commitment, the power that crying members of the community have had on me,” Carvalho said. “After speaking with the honorable Mayor Bill de Blasio … I shall remain in Miami-Dade as your superintendent.”

Cavalho talks to Miami’s school board chair during a break in the meeting Thursday.

In a press conference after the announcement, Carvalho said it was “not an easy conversation.”

Phillips sent a series of scathing tweets after Carvalho announced his decision and suggested there had been an agreement between Carvalho and the mayor for more than a week.

“He was a Yes for a week+, until he was a No 15 minutes ago. Bullet dodged,” Phillips said in one tweet. “Who would ever hire this guy again? Who would ever vote for him?”

It’s a humiliating setback for New York City, which has been searching for a new schools chief since Chancellor Carmen Fariña announced in December that she planned to retire.

In recent days, Fariña embarked on what seemed like a valedictory tour, and city officials said they were close to announcing a new hire. Now they will have to restart the search — with the added challenge of recruiting people who know they were not the first choice.

Carvalho’s shocking decision means that Miami will avoid a superintendent search that board members said they were unwilling to entertain.

“He’s not going to leave us. We will make sure of that,” board member Dorothy Bendross-Mindingall pledged during the meeting. “We will fight. We will fight. We will fight.”

How KIPP’s observers and allies are reacting to co-founder Mike Feinberg’s firing

2018-02-23T22:19:33+00:00

A day after one of the education reform movement’s most prominent figures was fired, his colleagues are grappling with their shock over the allegations that led to his termination and with what the news might mean for the schools he founded and the movement as a whole.

The KIPP charter network fired Mike Feinberg, its co-founder, Thursday after revealing that a law firm hired by the network to investigate found credible allegations of sexual abuse of a child in the 1990s and sexual harassment of two adult KIPP employees. Feinberg denies the allegations, which were not definitively substantiated.

What are people who have followed Feinberg, KIPP, and the charter movement thinking today? We asked a number of them. Here’s some of what they said.

First, from Richard Barth, KIPP’s CEO: “This morning 100,000 KIPPsters went to school across the country – nearly 90,000 in our schools and over 10,000 on college campuses. This organization is bigger than one person and while this is a difficult day in our history our KIPPsters and families are depending on us. We are thoroughly reviewing all of our organizational policies and practices to ensure that they protect every member of the KIPP community.”

Robin Lake of the Center for Reinventing Public Education, which is generally supportive of charters: “I really don’t think of this as a charter schools issue. The #metoo movement is an equal opportunity movement that is showing up everywhere. For me, this is just another reminder that these kinds of issues can pop up anywhere, anytime, with neighbors and with icons. We just have to have good systems in place so they are dealt with fairly and effectively.”

Mike Petrilli of the pro-charter Fordham Institute: “This is a sad day for all of us in education reform. Either one of the heroes of our movement is a monster, or he has been the victim of a terrible injustice. KIPP is no doubt in for some tough sledding, but assuming they handled the allegations appropriately, they will get through it. And they should get through it, because they continue to do amazing work for kids on a daily basis.”

Jeff Henig, a professor and longtime observer of education policy at Columbia University: “For various reasons, at least a little steam seems to have been escaping from the charter movement, so this could be a delicate time to take on any extra baggage. Charter networks like KIPP depend on public bodies — authorizers, school boards, district administrators — for a range of things including funding, access to buildings, contracts, and their charters themselves. Even when public officials can intellectually distinguish between an organization and one bad actor, they remain highly sensitive to public opinion. With the #MeToo movement roiling the waters of voter sentiment, at least some officials may find it easier to look elsewhere.”

Nina Rees, president of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools: “The National Alliance believes creating safe spaces for all is a core premise of public education, and one that we work towards every day. These jarring allegations — especially against someone with ties to the public school ecosystem — are antithetical to everything our community stands for. We support the actions taken by KIPP leadership to proactively and thoroughly investigate and subsequently terminate Mr. Feinberg.”

Dacia Toll, co-founder and president of Achievement First charter schools: “While this news is incredibly upsetting, KIPP is bigger than any one individual. Over many years in many communities, KIPP has established a strong legacy of excellence and a commitment to doing what’s right. Their values are on display even in how they are handling this difficult situation.”

Some people defended Feinberg, which in turn led to a sharp backlash.

Jeanne Allen, head of the Center for Education Reform: “Mike Feinberg’s long time, unassailable record of integrity, honesty and commitment to putting kids first and his outright denial of the allegations, lead me to question the findings of KIPP’s lawyers and management and thus their decision to move Mike out without ever giving him a chance to respond to the allegations. This is not coming from an uncritical fan — I have had differences with Mike on policy for years, but I still respect his work and accomplishments and have seen him enough in action to know these are likely scurrilous charges. If he or anyone else is guilty of sexual misconduct they should be dismissed immediately. But I have doubts that this is the case.”

Allen’s support for Feinberg in a tweet Thursday prompted a number of critical responses.

“I’m heartbroken & angry that you think an independent investigation that confirmed ‘credible evidence that is incompatible with the mission and values of KIPP’ isn’t enough to NOT give someone the benefit of the doubt,” responded Kate Duval, the head of external relations for the group 50CAN.

“Neither good work nor service entitles a man to the benefit of the doubt when accused of sexual assault or harassment. No matter who they are,” wrote Matt Richmond of EdBuild.

A few others on Twitter — John Arnold of the Arnold Foundation and Nelson Smith, a former senior advisor at the National Association of Charter School Authorizers — have emphasized Feinberg’s past work rather than the allegations against him, or the fact that they were deemed credible by KIPP.

Rishawn Biddle, who runs the site Dropout Nation, seemed to allude to this in his own statement: “The big question is how will leaders in the school reform movement address what has happened? So far, a few leading figures have chosen to not make strong, unwavering calls for all leaders in the movement, and in American public education as a whole, to engage in good conduct, especially when it comes to working with children, at all times. At the same time, I’m not necessarily surprised with the responses so far. One reason is because the movement itself has long struggled with holding its own leading lights to account.”

Correction: A previous version of this story stated that Nelson Smith is a senior advisor at NACSA; in fact, he is a former senior advisor to the group.

Mike Feinberg, KIPP co-founder, fired after misconduct investigation

2018-02-23T02:24:08+00:00

Mike Feinberg, the co-founder of the KIPP charter network, has been fired after an investigation into sexual misconduct, its leaders announced Thursday.

KIPP found “credible evidence” connected to allegations that Feinberg abused a student in the late 1990s, according to a letter sent to students and staff. Feinberg denies the allegations.

“We recognize this news will come as a shock to many in the KIPP Team and Family as we struggle to reconcile Mr. Feinberg’s 24 years of significant contributions with the findings of this investigation,” the letter says.

It’s a stunning move at one of the country’s best-known charter school organizations — and one where Feinberg has been in a leadership role for more than two decades. Feinberg started KIPP along with Dave Levin in Houston in 1994, and Levin brought the model to New York City the next year. The network became known for its “no excuses” model of strict discipline and attention to academic performance.

KIPP says it first heard the allegation last spring. The network eventually hired the law firm WilmerHale to conduct an external investigation, which found evidence that Feinberg had sexually harassed two adults, both alums of the school who were then employed by KIPP in Houston, the network said.

“In light of the nature of the allegations and the passage of time, critical facts about these events may never be conclusively determined. What is clear, however, is that, at a minimum, Mr. Feinberg put himself into situations where his conduct could be seriously misconstrued,” KIPP wrote in the letter, signed by CEO Richard Barth and KIPP’s Houston leader, Sehba Ali.

Feinberg’s lawyer, Chris Tritico, told the Houston Chronicle that Feinberg had not been fully informed about the allegations against him.

“The treatment he received today from the board that he put in place is wrong, and it’s not what someone who has made the contributions he’s made deserves,” Tritico said.

Read KIPP’s full letter here.

To fight poverty in U.S., Bill and Melinda Gates say they may move beyond education

2018-02-13T16:53:13+00:00

Bill and Melinda Gates say they are rethinking how they address poverty in the U.S. — a move that could have them expand their influential philanthropic efforts beyond education.

The couple’s philanthropy has had an outsized influence on U.S. schools over the last two decades, as they’ve given hundreds of millions to encourage new models for high schools, the Common Core standards, and sweeping changes to teacher evaluation. In a letter released Tuesday, though, they indicate that they’re grappling with how improving education alone isn’t enough to move people out of poverty, and their strategy may be about to shift as a result.

“We’ve been looking at how we might expand our work in the U.S. beyond education,” Bill Gates writes. A trip to Atlanta last fall “reinforced the importance of education,” he said, but also underscored how issues of race, employment, housing, mental health, and incarceration are also connected to their mission. (Gates also supports Chalkbeat.)

It’s an acknowledgement that the U.S. is still grappling with issues that have been more central to their international giving. And it’s in line with some recent research showing that education may matter less than other factors, like local labor conditions, in determining whether poor children move up the economic ladder.

Here are a few other notable lines from the Gates’ annual letter:

“Cash-strapped school districts are more likely to divert money and talent toward ideas they think we will fund.” The letter includes a lengthy section grappling with their own disproportionate influence. It’s unfair, they say, but they make up for it by being transparent and changing course when things don’t work — as they’re doing now with their education initiatives. We’ve written recently about their new focus on “networks” of public schools and improving curriculum.
“For any new approach to take off, you need three things. First you have to run a pilot project showing that the approach works. Then the work has to sustain itself. Finally, the approach has to spread to other places.” This formula didn’t work for their teacher evaluation work, they acknowledge, as only a few places — including Memphis — have stuck with new systems over the long term.
“I wish our president would treat people, and especially women, with more respect when he speaks and tweets.” The letter also includes an appeal to President Trump to be a role model and, on education, to help simplify the financial aid process for poor students applying to college.

Chalkbeat’s national newsletter: The new testing debates look a lot like the old testing debates

2018-01-24T17:43:11+00:00

Welcome to Chalkbeat’s national newsletter! We’re Matt Barnum and Sarah Darville, Chalkbeat’s national team. Our goal is to help you make sense of the messy, fascinating, often controversial efforts to improve education for poor students across the country. Want to receive this in your inbox? Subscribe here.

The big story

Betsy DeVos’s education department has been on an ESSA plan approval tear. Last week, the department approved 16 states’ (and Puerto Rico’s) plans for complying with the federal education law, bringing the total number of plans that have gotten a green light to 35.

Some of those states have promised to use new metrics, such as absences and suspension rates, to help measure schools. But underneath talk of new ideas lurks the same old debates about how to use math and English tests.

We recently talked to Harvard professor Daniel Koretz, whose new book “The Testing Charade” makes the case against the way tests were used during the Bush and Obama administrations. His concern is that ESSA doesn’t change “the basic logic of the system” — the idea that pushing schools to boost test scores will improve the schools themselves.

Critics of testing in New York echoed those concerns yesterday. State officials there had hinted that they would apply for a federal program to give their tests a more radical makeover, but this week announced that they had abandoned the plan, in part because it would have been expensive. “I am frustrated,” one opt-out advocate said.

Others are skeptical about state plans for different reasons. “States mostly produced plans that are vague and noncommittal about how they will support low-performing schools,” according to a review of by Bellwether Education Partners, a reform-oriented consulting firm.

Those issues are holding up approval of California’s ESSA plan, the L.A. Times reported this week. Colorado is still waiting for a decision, too, months after appearing to bow to federal pressure to penalize schools where many students opt out of testing.

Local stories to watch

Poor families are leaving Denver — and charter schools may soon follow. KIPP says it’s looking to add schools outside the city where priced-out families are clustering.
Detroit is the latest city to rethink admission to its elite high schools. A placement exam has been the only factor; now the test will count for only 40 percent of admissions decisions.
New York City has a low bar for some turnaround schools. Graduation rates and test scores can actually fall at some schools and still land within the city’s targets.
In Memphis, the superintendent has raised the possibility of bringing charter operators into struggling district schools. That’s a big shift, since the district has battled openly with the charter sector. The state’s Achievement School District has been absorbing Memphis schools (and state dollars) and turning them over to charters for six years.

Matt’s research roundup

Scores (and hard work) on international tests pay off. That’s the conclusion of a new study, which shows that a country’s overall performance predicts economic growth — but so does students’ persistence over the course of a lengthy exam, which the researchers see as a measure of their “non-cognitive” skills. That give more credence to concerns from a long list of policymakers — including, most recently, Betsy DeVos — about the U.S.’s mediocre international rankings.
The worst principals aren’t sticking around. School principals don’t get studied nearly as much as teachers do, so a recent paper caught our eye. Focusing on Tennessee, the research found that less effective school leaders were especially likely to leave the job, often to take an assistant principal or classroom teacher position. That’s good news for students, as long as new principals are better than the ones they replaced. The best principals also had slightly higher-than-average turnover, in part because they were often promoted to central office positions.
Update: CHIP gets a six-year extension. Last week, we wrote about the research showing that children benefit educationally from health insurance programs. This week, as part of a deal to end the government shutdown, the Children’s Health Insurance Program was extended for six years.

Names to note

TNTP President Karolyn Belcher is stepping down in April and says she hopes to “lead an urban school district.” Jeffrey Villar will be the state-appointed “receiver” of schools in Southbridge, Massachusetts. Angélica Infante-Green is the subject of a campaign to make her New York City schools chief. Erika Soto Lamb is Democrats for Education Reform’s new national director for strategic communications.

DeVos watch

At an event held by a conservative legal group last week, DeVos was asked what she would do to promote the teaching of evolution in schools, presumably as opposed to creationism. “I’m not an advocate of any kind of national curriculum,” she said in response. “I continue to encourage the most local level to be able to have the kind of flexibility to meet individual students’ needs.”

The portfolio push

In Indianapolis, where the central school district is a darling of portfolio model advocates, nearly 4,000 students used a unified enrollment system for district and charter schools — the system’s first test. The state also released new data this week showing that only 55 percent of students who live in the Indianapolis Public School boundaries attend district schools.

Denver Public Schools has faced criticism from from national portfolio advocates and local charter leaders for not calling for new schools or expansion of charters this year. Our reporter Melanie Asmar breaks down the debate with responses from charter schools and the district.

The Memphis Education Fund — a member of a network of groups known as Education Cities, which supports the portfolio model — is working on principal training, teacher recruitment, helping single-site charter schools, and boosting reading skills among the city’s youngest students.

What we’re reading

Teen pregnancy has plunged, but students who have kids of their own still struggle to graduate. Hechinger Report
The school board in Evanston, Illinois, is hiring a “director of black student success.” Daily Northwestern
Bullied students may soon be eligible for private-school vouchers in Florida. Tampa Bay Times
A leader of the Democracy Prep charter network is in a public debate with students about the importance of “standard English.” Democracy Prep
San Antonio is set to allow Democracy Prep to take over a low-performing district school. Folo Media
Nearly 12,000 students are scrambling after the closure of online charter school Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow. WOSU
KIPP is headed to Miami, even as one of its charter schools elsewhere in Florida has struggled. WLRN
A helpful (and wonky) overview of research on race and school discipline. Brookings
The head of the National Council for Teacher Quality says education reformers should keep the focus on improving schools, rather than addressing poverty or racism. NCTQ
Los Angeles’s school board may aim for a compromise pick for new schools head. EdSource

A Chalkbeat roundtable: The promise and perils of charter networks like Success Academy

2018-01-16T19:10:29+00:00

When we published an essay about the promise and perils of charter schools by our CEO and editor in chief Elizabeth Green last month, we heard from a lot of readers.

Elizabeth’s piece outlined her conclusions after more than a decade of reporting about charter school networks, and more specifically the Success Academy network in New York City. She wrote that charter school networks offer both great advantages — in their ability to provide rare coherence in what is taught across classrooms — and significant danger. Charter networks, she wrote, have changed public education by “extracting it from democracy as we know it.”

Some of our readers saw their own thinking reflected in her conclusions. Others had a very different take.

What was clear was that Elizabeth had kicked off a conversation that many Chalkbeat readers are ready to have, and that, as always, robust and respectful debate is good for everyone’s thinking.

So we reached out to people who engage with big questions about how schools are structured every single day, in their work or personal lives. Today, we’re sharing what they had to say. But we think this is far from the end of the conversation. If you want to add your voice, let us know.

Charter networks’ needs and goals may not be the community’s

By Tim Ware, former executive director of the Achievement Schools managed by the Tennessee Department of Education and founder of Ware Consulting Group

As the founder and former executive director of a high performing public charter middle school in Memphis, Tennessee, I am a firm believer in the promise of well-run charter schools. I also understand the limits of these schools.

A key aspect of public charter legislation is autonomy. This means that public charters decide how to staff their schools, which curriculum to use, how to allocate resources for student support, and how their daily and summer schedules work. However, this legislated autonomy creates issues that thoughtful policymakers need to address.

For instance, in Memphis, a high-performing public charter network began operating a chronically underperforming middle school as a part of a turnaround intervention effort. Despite significant improvements in learning and school culture, as well as the support of the community, the school grappled with dwindling enrollment and suffocating building maintenance costs. Fewer dollars were available to invest in high quality teaching and learning, social-emotional supports, and extracurricular activities. Ultimately, the charter operator made the difficult decision to cease operating the school.

This example illustrates the limits of public charter schools. The same autonomy that allowed them to create an approach that drove improvement for children also allowed them to decide that they could no longer operate the school. This means that, as long as autonomy exists for public charter schools (and it should), we cannot eliminate traditional districts.

The solution for historically underserved communities will be found by creating strong ecosystems of education. These ecosystems should consist of a healthy mix of traditional schools, optional schools (schools with competitive entry requirements), magnet schools, public charter schools, and private schools. By ensuring that multiple types of schools flourish and are accessible to all, parents will be able to make informed choices and select a school which best meets the needs of their most precious belonging — their child.

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Focusing on charter networks is a mistake. Districts have the same potential

By Josh Thomases, dean of innovation, policy, and research at Bank Street College of Education

Elizabeth Green’s article on Eva Moskowitz misses one important detail – districts have successfully scaled change for students. In this era of attacks on government, it is worth looking closer.

The hundreds of new small high schools opened in New York City between 2000 and 2012 transformed thousands of lives. The research firm MDRC documented that impact, showing a 9.4 percent increased graduation rate and an 8 percent increase in college attendance. Notably, this increase was driven by success with groups that school systems often fail: poorer students, black students, and students with disabilities.

This extraordinary effort happened with district educators and unions, public resources and processes.

I saw this reform inside and out. I helped create a small school in the 1990s and was part of community protests against some of the initial school closures under Chancellor Joel Klein. And, in 2004, I became responsible for the development and support of new schools within the education department.

The new schools work was an example of democracy in action – with all its imperfections. There were legendary protests against the Department of Education and arguments over race, equity and power. And through all of that, the process transformed schools.

Why the success?

The point was to improve teaching and learning. Everything was looked at through this lens.
Educators were the agents of change. The new schools process challenged principals, teachers, community members and parents to reimagine school.
External partners multiplied the power of the changes. These included school development organizations (such as New Visions and CUNY) and local partners ranging from the Brooklyn Cyclones and South Bronx Churches. For the first six years of the reform, the unions were a partner, too.
The district shifted authority towards the principal and school based staff in key areas: hiring, scheduling, budgets, and curriculum.

This is not a story of perfect success; as a district, we made mistakes and they were debated publicly. But the results show that districts can take bold action to change what is happening in schools.

Charters in New York have also demonstrated they can make an important contribution to a district. The task ahead is not to forego government, but to activate its strengths.

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Charter networks are a laboratory for consistent and high-quality instruction

By Seneca Rosenberg, chief academic officer at Valor Collegiate Academies in Nashville, Tennessee

My first year in the classroom, I desperately wanted to be the teacher my fourth graders deserved. A diligent student, I carefully examined California’s standards, the curriculum my district had adopted, new research, and popular trade books. I quickly saw that the approaches they outlined — for how to teach reading, for example — were often in direct conflict.

Veteran teachers advised: have your students fill out the mandated worksheets to avoid scrutiny, then close your door and teach as you want. This would have been good advice if only I had known what to do behind that door to help my students to learn.

Now, as chief academic officer of Valor Collegiate Academies, a small charter school network in Nashville, I reflect daily on how our autonomy and network structure provide crucial, and often unremarked upon, resources for developing coherent systems of teaching and learning.

Like other charter networks, Valor has the flexibility to set our educational vision and then organize our own curriculum, assessments, hiring policies, student and teacher schedules, and culture to realize it. Many of our teachers and school leaders report that our shared systems, while demanding, buffer them from some of the stress that comes with making sense of dissonant policies and practices they more regularly encountered in traditional public schools.

Even more importantly, our infrastructure provides our teachers and leaders with a common framework around which expertise can be developed, shared, and improved.

For example, at Valor, our teaching teams meet frequently to study and plan from our students’ work. We have shared protocols for data analysis and teacher coaching. Each piece has been intentionally developed as part of a system. As a result, teachers have opportunities to learn that far exceed anything I had access to as a teacher — and our students benefit.

I share some of Elizabeth Green’s ambivalence about the potential impact of the rise of charters nationally, though she inflates the extent to which charters “extract” public education from democratic control — at least in states in which authorizing laws are well crafted. I am also skeptical of Moskowitz’s suggestion that perhaps “a public school system consisting principally of charter schools would be an improvement.”

But charter networks’ unique conditions do provide a useful laboratory. Critics who dismiss our high-performing charter networks’ many successes risk missing what we are learning from this critical innovation — coherent instructional systems — and how that might contribute to new possibilities for American education.

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In my city, no schools have it figured out

By Bernita Bradley, parent advocate and blogger at Detroit School Talk (and a Chalkbeat Reader Advisory Board Member)
Take all kids out of charter schools, they say. Close them down and require those students to attend their closest public school, no matter how far, how full the classrooms, and how low-performing. Hop on a bus more than 25 minutes to attend the closest high school near you and sit at the back of the class on the floor. After all, public schools were perfect before charter schools came along, and in order for them to be perfect again, we need everyone on board.

Don’t talk bad about public schools, they say. Don’t draw attention to the fact that we are still figuring out how to improve public schools and need your help. The city of Detroit must unite, be of one mind, and let all charter school leaders know that we are only supporting traditional public schools.

These arguments won’t work. I fight for quality public schools and fought for us to not lose more of them. However, if you strip parents of choice, you prove that you are not committed to providing children with what they need.

To be clear, I am an advocate for both sides. Parents don’t care about this war — we just want good schools that will educate all children equally. Can we have that conversation?

Let’s tell the truth about how, here in Detroit, both sides cherry-pick students and “counsel out” parents. Public schools just suspend students indefinitely until parents leave to find a charter school. Let’s tell the truth about how teaching to the test has affected both charter and public school teachers’ ability to make sure student academic growth is more robust.

Both sides could do better. My children have attended both kinds of schools. I’ve bused my kids 15 miles away. I’ve sent my kids to the top charter and public schools in the city. And no one — including charter schools — has this figured out.

I can’t think of a person would say they are totally happy with their child’s educational experience here in Detroit. We have come to the point where, while we’ve made friends in both charters and public schools, this is a journey full of struggles and broken promises that we would not wish on any parent.

Believe me, if we had our way there would be no need to choose. The school on the corner would be full and alive with students, parents, and teachers who have one common goal, to educate all kids.

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The rise of networks hurts the charter movement

By Steve Zimmerman, Coalition of Community Charter Schools

In the ongoing saga of Eva Moskowitz and her war against the the educational status quo, two key issues are overlooked. The first is that the rise of Success Academy has come at significant cost to the charter school movement and the democratic values that were at its genesis.

The rigidly top-down managerial approach of the Success network is the antithesis of the original idea of chartering: to free schools from district-imposed conformity so they have autonomy to innovate. There is no autonomy or innovation in a franchise. Franchisees follow the script.

The second issue is that Success Academy schools, for all intents and purposes, turn teachers into technicians. They are trained in a rigid model of classroom management with a relentless focus on student outcomes. As Elizabeth Green and others point out, the effectiveness of this system, at least in terms of test scores, is well documented and ostensibly justifies the orthodoxy of “no excuses” education reform.

Relentlessness, however, comes at a cost. Just as legendary as its record-high test scores is Success Academy’s teacher attrition. Success Academy appears to welcome an increasing number of bright young people to learn and execute the scripts, and then watch as they move on to their real careers after they burn out in three years. The consequences of this trend are chilling to imagine.

If we believe the purpose of public education to be the development of exceptional test takers, then Eva Moskowitz has clearly pointed the way to the promised land. If, however, we believe the purpose is the betterment of society and the development of the whole child, there are better models to emulate.

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Coherence is important, but charter networks aren’t necessary to achieve it

Andy Snyder, social studies teacher at Harvest Collegiate High School in New York City

Who should decide what students learn in school? Families or individual teachers? District and charter school leaders, elected officials, or panels of professors?

Elizabeth Green’s recent essay focuses our attention on this huge question. She points out that many other countries provide “a clear sense of what students need to learn, the basic materials necessary to help them learn it (such as a curriculum).” And she argues that some charter school networks, enabled by their anti-democratic powers, are developing coherent and meaningful ideas of what to prioritize and how to teach it well.

When I began student teaching, I was shown stacks of textbooks and boxes of transparencies, quizzes, tests, homework — corporate-branded, filled with facts, empty of meaning. I switched to another mentor and recreated the trial of John Brown. Later I left one innovative public school where administrators were attempting to bend my courses into more traditional shapes for another where the interview includes, “Describe a dream course that you would love to teach” and where we teach those courses every day.

But I’ve seen in Germany the effects of a thoughtful curriculum — classes connect between disciplines and spiral powerfully between grades, and teachers adapt rather than invent. Improvised individual efforts often produce a worse result than a strong system. That’s why I commute in New York by subway, not bicycle.

The systemic approach can break down too. Today we curse the defunding of our transit agency, and we saw what happened to the Common Core. How can charter schools develop truly excellent curriculum when their priority seems to be preparing students to win against bad bubble tests?

Students, no matter what kind of school they attend, deserve lessons crafted by well-trained practitioners who draw from the best ideas of the profession.

In the best future I can imagine, each school or district adapts curriculum from one of several coherent curriculum packages developed over years with millions of dollars and genius and honest sweat. Teachers trained in that tradition lead students in cultivating the deep questions and necessary knowledge, and students graduate with a sense of how it all adds up and what they can bring with them into the world.

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About our First Person series:

First Person is where Chalkbeat features personal essays by educators, students, parents, and others trying to improve public education. Read our submission guidelines here.

Carmen Fariña is stepping down as New York City schools chief

2017-12-21T01:37:00+00:00

Carmen Fariña is stepping down as the head of the nation’s largest school district, according to an official briefed on her plans.

Fariña has led the education department since 2014, when the city’s new mayor, Bill de Blasio, plucked her from retirement. The appointment marked the culmination of a 50-year career in the school system, where she rose from classroom teacher to principal and finally to schools chancellor.

As chancellor, Fariña worked to change the tone of the department, earning the loyalty of some teachers and principals eager for support after three tumultuous terms under de Blasio’s predecessor, Michael Bloomberg. Her plans were first reported by Politico.

She also presided over a large expansion of free prekindergarten, new efforts to help poor students with the challenges they face in school, and increased prominence for the department’s efforts to improve instruction.

Fariña offered no comment after tonight’s meeting of the Panel for Educational Policy, the city’s school board. She is reportedly planning to leave in early 2018.

Here are some highlights of Fariña’s tenure:

Overall, the city’s scores on annual state exams and its high-school graduation rate have steadily inched up during her tenure, building on gains made during the previous administration.
Her focus on improving conditions for educators — and de Blasio close ties with the city’s unions — helped foster a tight relationship between the city’s large and powerful teachers union and the education department, after years of feuding under Bloomberg. At the start of her tenure, the city negotiated a new contract with the union that included pay hikes for teachers and more time for professional development.
Fariña oversaw the school system as it added tens of thousands of new pre-K seats for four-year-olds, a change spearheaded by City Hall but largely implemented from within the education department.
She re-engineered the city’s largely invisible, but highly influential, school support bureaucracy that works directly with principals, replacing dispersed “networks” with geographic centers. At the centerpiece of her reorganization were superintendents, whom she reinvested with broad authority to carry out her mandates.
She managed a sweeping program to improve the city’s lowest-performing schools, which partnered schools with community organizations and sent them extra funding. A key portion of that program culminated with a set of school closures — and “graduations” for schools that improved — announced this week. In sharp contrast to the success of universal pre-K, the so-called “Renewal” turnaround program has achieved mixed results and weathered persistent criticism.
She sometimes struggled on a big stage, making a few memorable gaffes. Most notably, she deflected criticism about not calling off school during a snowstorm by declaring it a ”beautiful day,” and she suggested that one way to combat segregation is to connect students with “pen pals.”
Along with her boss, she was slow to act on advocates’ and educators’ calls to address the school system’s deep racial segregation.
She become known for her frequent school visits, where she gave feedback on minute details of schools’ operations — and often personally intervened. Fariña’s theory of school management was that schools improve and students learn only when the adults in the building are happy, well-trained, and working together.

With new ‘Rise’ schools, de Blasio tiptoes through a school-closure minefield

2017-12-18T23:08:52+00:00

For nearly 20 New York City schools, the news was grim on Monday morning: The city would be moving to close them, shrink them, or combine them with another school.

But for others, Monday’s announcement was a long-awaited boost. Twenty-one schools were named Rise schools, a new designation meant to indicate their progress under Mayor de Blasio’s School Renewal turnaround program.

Officials say that Rise schools will retain the extra social services that had been provided for students and their families, while other extra support will be reduced over time. The Rise program will operate independently, but stay connected to the Renewal one. And the Rise schools will be held accountable for continued improvement, but face less intense scrutiny.

It’s a middle ground that could help answer questions that have vexed the de Blasio administration since it unveiled the program in 2014 as a three-year intervention: What comes after year three? Specifically, can the city reward improvement by freeing the schools from intense oversight without undercutting their progress by pulling out support? And how can the city help schools it labeled as struggling to rebrand so they can attract new students?

“Rise schools are the Renewal schools that have been graduated and promoted,” Chancellor Fariña said Monday. “They will be moving into a different sphere.”

The Rise schools are in four boroughs and include schools like DreamYard Preparatory School in the Bronx, which is still struggling to push its graduation rate over 70 percent, and I.S. 528 Bea Fuller Rodgers School in Upper Manhattan, where fewer than one in five students passed the state math and English tests.

But overall, the city says the schools are on an upward climb, with proficiency rates on state English tests jumping an average of 15 percentage points and attendance rates jumping 4 points since the 2013-14 school year. (At the same time, however, the state made tests easier to pass and also made it easier to earn a diploma over the last three years.)

Aaron Pallas, a professor at Teachers College, called Rise a smart political move for Mayor Bill de Blasio.

“Graduating schools on the grounds that they were successful allows the mayor to declare victory,” he said.

Despite making gains, students at Rise schools fall below the city average on test scores. About 22 percent of students passed the state English exam and about 17 percent passed math. Citywide, those numbers are significantly higher, with a little over 40 percent passing English and just under 38 percent passing math. The graduation rate for Rise schools — which stands at almost 73 percent — is closer to the city’s projected average at 74 percent. (The city cautioned this number is preliminary and subject to change.)

The Rise program may allow the city to provide these schools — which still need help to maintain and further their gains — with extra support, while allowing them to shed the stigma of being in the city’s Renewal program. Even as the city showered these schools with millions of dollars over the last three years, convincing families to send their children to them was a challenge. Throughout the program, the schools struggled with enrollment, losing thousands of students.

Rise schools will remain “community schools,” a signature piece of de Blasio’s turnaround strategy in which schools are hubs for social and medical services. The schools will also enjoy an expedited roll-out of Equity and Excellence initiatives, including support for computer science, literacy, algebra, and Advanced Placement.

Principal Kyesha Jackson, who runs P.S. 67 in Brooklyn, said she is both excited to maintain the support provided by Renewal and lose the label. Under Renewal, she was able to purchase an online program that assess where students have learning gaps and provides access to lessons that target the area in which a student needs work. She also purchased an electronic literacy program that allows students access to 3,000 books, she said.

Those initiatives and others that she says were integral to improving her school will remain, but when families are researching the school, they will no longer see that it is designated as a struggling school.

“That stigma that a Renewal school is a failing school would be taken away,” she said.

Critics, including longtime de Blasio foe StudentsFirstNY, have pointed out the relatively low rates of students passing state tests at Rise schools.

But at least so far, principals remain hopeful that the new title — coupled with a high level of continuing support — will make a difference.

“We’re not yet where we want to be. But we really are a school on the rise,” said Miles Doyle, principal of Orchard Collegiate Academy in Manhattan at Monday’s press conference. “I welcome this new designation as a Rise school.”

Christina Veiga contributed reporting.

In her first months as education secretary, Betsy DeVos met with lawmakers, pollsters, and Peter Thiel

2017-10-26T18:30:20+00:00

Betsy DeVos spent a trip to California this summer having breakfast with Peter Thiel and visiting start-ups aimed at reshaping education.

That’s according to the detailed schedule of the U.S. Education Secretary’s first months on the job, obtained through a records request and posted online this week by the website AltGov2. (The education department did not respond to questions about the schedule, which aligns with the secretary’s public events for those months.)

The schedule, which runs to more than 300 pages, includes calls and meetings with education power brokers, including Republican lawmakers, heads of foundations, charter school leaders, and state schools chiefs.

Some of the meetings reveal more about how DeVos is trying to push her school-choice agenda. Here are a few items of note from the schedule, which ends on July 19:

DeVos may not have called Arne Duncan after taking the job, but she did talk to other former education secretaries. She had calls or meetings with Bill Bennett, who served under President Reagan, and with Margaret Spellings and Rod Paige, who served under President George W. Bush.
She’s heard from some opposing voices … The topic for a call with the National Alliance of Black School Educators, an organization that opposed DeVos’s appointment, was noted as “introduction to areas of concern.”
… and made time for prominent conservative thinkers. Those include Jim DeMint, then of the Heritage Foundation, and Professor Robert P. George of Princeton, who the New York Times Magazine once called “The Conservative-Christian Big Thinker.”
She met with conservative pollster Frank Luntz, who is noted as having a “60 slide deck of the words to use and the words to lose” on education issues. He pushes for Republicans to call private-school vouchers “opportunity scholarships.”
Her trip to the Bay Area in July included breakfast with Peter Thiel, the billionaire PayPal founder who helped take down Gawker and has drawn attention for his support for President Trump, at the “Thiel residence.” (On education, Thiel has been a longtime critic of traditional colleges.) DeVos also visited the Minerva Project, a for-profit attempt to restructure college learning, and what appears to be Horizons School of Technology, which describes itself online as a “12-16 week immersive program” for undergraduates.
She’s staying connected to her home state. The topic noted for a call to former Michigan Governor John Engler: “Catching up.” She recently tapped Engler to chair the board that helps oversee the National Assessment of Educational Progress.
JD Vance, author of “Hillbilly Elegy,” also got a call. Politico explored the education angle of his book here.

Tell us what else you find: see a searchable version of the document here.

Gates Foundation: Before we spend $1 billion on school ‘networks,’ tell us how they should work

2017-10-23T19:30:51+00:00

Bill Gates announced last Thursday that his foundation would pour more than $1 billion into a new effort to improve schools. Today, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is asking how to do it right.

Specifically, the foundation wants existing “networks” that help public schools improve to explain how they spend their money and what’s already worked for them. The Gates Foundation wants to fund more of those organizations, like Chicago’s Network for College Success, starting in 2018.

The Gates-funded networks will be focused on helping middle and high schools get more students to graduate and then succeed in college — specifically black, Hispanic, and poor students, according to the foundation’s website.

“We know there are organizations with strong perspectives about what it takes to do that work,” it says. “We want to hear about where great networks come from, how they operate, and under what circumstances they have been successful.”

The Gates Foundation is also a funder of Chalkbeat.

In his speech Friday, Gates said the foundation will spend $1.7 billion on U.S. education over the next five years, and more than 60 percent will go to expanding these networks and improving the curricula that students use.

You can read the request for information here. The foundation won’t be asking groups to officially apply for funding until January, and it expects to launch the effort in summer 2018.

In more than 200 school districts, at least 1 in 10 students attends a charter

2017-10-23T18:04:56+00:00

Charter school enrollment is continuing to tick upward in cities across the country. And in 208 districts, at least 10 percent of public-school students attended a charter last school year.

That’s according to the annual analysis from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, an advocacy group that tracks the sector of publicly funded, privately run schools. The year before, 190 districts had reached that 10 percent threshold.

It’s a trend line with profound implications for school districts — which often have to reshape themselves as local charter sectors grow, keeping students and funding outside of their purview — as well as teachers unions and families.

Other milestones the report notes for 2015-16: New York City’s charter enrollment hit 100,000 students, and Denver’s charter enrollment share hit 20 percent.

Here are two handy charts for tracking the schools’ growth. First, the districts with the largest share of students attending charters:

And second, the districts with the largest total number of students attending charters:

You can read the whole 2017 report here, or compare to last year’s here.

Gates Foundation to move away from teacher evals, shifting attention to ‘networks’ of public schools

2017-10-19T19:11:08+00:00

Its massive education funding efforts have helped spread small high schools, charter schools, and efforts to overhaul teacher evaluations. Now, the Gates Foundation is going in a new direction.

In a speech Thursday, Bill Gates said the foundation is about to launch a new, locally driven effort to help existing public schools improve.

The idea is to fund “networks” that help public schools improve by scrutinizing student achievement data and getting schools to share their best ideas, he said. Of the $1.7 billion the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation will spend on U.S. education over the next five years, more than 60 percent will go to these networks — dwarfing the amount to be spent on charter schools, about 15 percent.

Gates said that’s both because he wants to go where other philanthropy isn’t and because the foundation’s strategy is to affect as many students as possible. (Only 5 percent of U.S. public-school students attended a charter school in 2014.)

“In general, philanthropic dollars there … on charters is fairly high. We will be a bit different. Because of our scale, we feel that we need to put the vast majority of our money into these networks of public schools,” Gates said. (“We love charters,” he quickly added.)

The Gates Foundation is a supporter of Chalkbeat.

The strategy appears to be a nationwide expansion of the work Bob Hughes, the Gates Foundation’s K-12 education chief, did in New York City as the longtime head of an organization called New Visions for Public Schools. New Visions started several dozen district and charter schools but also created tools for schools to check on student progress that were later adopted by New York City itself.

Gates offered other examples: Chicago’s Network for College Success, which works with about 15 high schools; the LIFT Network in Tennessee, which includes 12 school districts; and the CORE Districts in California. The foundation plans to fund 20 to 30 such networks, Gates said.

Also notable is where Gates said the philanthropy will no longer be sending money: toward efforts to encourage new teacher evaluation systems, which in some states have faced fierce political resistance in recent years.

The foundation’s new work to support school networks will be driven by local ideas about how to create the best schools, Gates said.

“The challenge is that, even that piece when it’s done very well, the teacher in the classroom — that is not enough to get the full result we want,” Gates said. “And this is something that I’m sure has been obvious to all of you. But it’s really the entire school, where the leadership, the development, the overall culture, the analysis of what’s going on with the kids — it’s that school level where you have to get everything coming together.”

The final quarter of that $1.7 billion will go toward research into how kinds of technology could improve student learning and ways to improve math instruction and career preparation.

Six things you should know about Betsy DeVos’s tense trip to Harvard

2017-09-29T00:45:27+00:00

By now, U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos must be used to a tough audience. Her reception at Harvard Thursday, featuring plenty of protesters, was no exception — in line with what she’s faced at Senate confirmation hearings and at school visits across the country.

DeVos was attending a school choice conference filled with supporters of her perspective, and she was questioned by Harvard Professor Paul Peterson, who has long advocated for private school vouchers. But she was also met a number of skeptical audience questions.

Here were some highlights from the night:

1. DeVos has a new analogy: schools are like restaurants and food trucks.

The education secretary has compared schools to taxis and Blockbuster to emphasize the need for innovation. We need schools operating like Uber and Netflix, she’s urged.

On Thursday, she offered a new metaphor for school choice — one that tried to deflect criticisms that she is anti-public education.

“Near the Department of Education, there aren’t many restaurants. But you know what — food trucks started lining the streets to provide options,” DeVos said. “Some are better than others, and some are even local restaurants that have added food trucks to their businesses to better meet their customers’ needs.”

“Now, if you visit one of those food trucks instead of a restaurant, do you hate restaurants? Or are you trying to put grocery stores out of business?” she asked. “No. You are simply making the right choice for you based on your individual needs at the time.”

This gets at the heart of the school choice debate — whether or not schools should function like consumer goods in a marketplace.

Protestors at Betsy DeVos’s speech on school choice at Harvard.

2. Eight months on the job hasn’t changed her view that the feds should play a minimal role in deciding how schools are run or which schools are working.

The first question lobbed at DeVos came from a parent who has sent her children to district, charter and parochial schools, but argued that “as a whole, most [school] systems … aren’t working for black parents like me.”

The question focused on DeVos and the federal government’s role in ensuring quality schools: “Why don’t you think that you should have any say or any control over setting minimums … so systems aren’t the wild, wild West?”

DeVos, a skeptic of the federal role in education, immediately pivoted back to school choice. “My goal, my hope, is that all parents like you and all others would have the power to choose a school that is right for your child,” she said. “Accompanying that there has to be a lot of great information available to parents.”

DeVos also demurred when Peterson asked her a nitty-gritty question on ESSA, the federal accountability law. Peterson noted that many states — whose plans have been approved by DeVos’s education department — have decided to judge schools, in part, by rates of student chronic absenteeism. DeVos wouldn’t say what she thought of this.

“All the states are coming up with different measures,” she said. “I’m not sure that that’s the right approach or the best approach, but I’ll withhold judgment, and let’s see what the states’ results are.”

3. She’s still on the defensive when it comes to Michigan’s charter schools.

One questioner, who — like DeVos — is from Michigan, echoed a common criticism of the secretary: “Thanks in part to your advocacy, we [Michigan] lead the nation in for-profit schools, paired with some of the weakest accountability laws. … Given the fact that in Michigan students have a lot of choice, but not good choices, and corporations are profiting from that, why do you think that choice is appropriate for the nation?”

DeVos responded, “Of the students that are still left in the city of Detroit, 49 percent of them” — here, the audience reacted with guffaws and boos, and DeVos interrupted herself. “Excuse me, everybody who has had means and wants to move elsewhere has moved outside the city of Detroit. And the students that are there, 49 percent of them have chosen to go to charter schools. Nobody is forcing them to go to charter schools.”

“Of the traditional public schools in Detroit,” she continued, “not one of them has ever been closed down because of performance, not one. Yet there have been over 20 charter schools closed. … The reality is, of kids going to charter schools in Michigan and in the city of Detroit, they are gaining three or four months per year over their public school counterparts.”

DeVos appears to be referencing the CREDO study of Michigan charters, which shows that charter students outscore similar kids in public schools on standardized tests.

It’s also worth noting that while it may be true that no Detroit district schools have been closed explicitly for performance, well over 100 Detroit district schools have shut down since 2000, presumably due to declining enrollment. And another study from CREDO found that low-achieving district schools in Michigan were more likely to close than low-achieving charters.

4. Research undermines DeVos’s claims on school choice and school spending.

In her speech, DeVos hit on what she believes works (school choice) and what she thinks doesn’t work (spending more money).

She pointed to a study released Wednesday on Florida’s tax-credit voucher program, saying that it “demonstrated the longer a student participated in the choice program, the better their long-term educational outcomes.”

Later, she said, “More funding? Does that fix the problem? Again, the data would show otherwise, with the U.S. spending significantly more per pupil than nearly every other country in the developed world – and without the student achievement to go along with it.”

The research on voucher programs is more mixed than she suggests. It also may be misleading to say that students who stay in private school through Florida’s program longer, benefit more; as the researchers acknowledge, this may have less to do with the program and more to do with the types of students who stick around.

On funding, DeVos’s claim is also difficult to support. Recent research shows that schools and students do in fact benefit from additional resources. DeVos is right that in raw dollars per student, the U.S. outspends most other countries. As a percentage of GDP, though, our spending on K-12 education is about average.

Protestors at Betsy DeVos’s speech on school choice at Harvard.

5. DeVos is excited about tax credits, but federal action isn’t imminent

The education secretary reiterated that she’s interested in a tax credit program that would help parents send their students to private school — but that she had no plans to make any announcements.

“Not here and not now,” DeVos said. “There’s certainly a lot of hope for that.”

“I would just hope that more states would embrace this notion and the ones that actually have it would expand their offering and get even more assertive about offering parents more of these choices,” she added.

Eighteen states have already adopted those policies, which allow individuals to donate to nonprofits, then get a tax cut for amount they donated. The donated money is doled out as tuition stipends, which function just like school vouchers.

Congressional Republicans’ new proposal to overhaul to federal tax policy, unveiled Wednesday, didn’t touch school choice.

6. She stayed calm as audience members unfurled protest banners and students asked pointed questions about her wealth and her department’s Title IX changes.

Outside the event, protesters took up about a city block in front of the Harvard Kennedy School. Speakers included presidents of Boston Teachers Union and the New England NAACP, plus Boston mayoral candidate Tito Jackson. The crowds sang “When the Schools Belong to Us” to the tune of “When the Saints Go Marching In.”

Inside, one student asked, “How much do you expect your net worth to increase as a result of your policy choices?” to laughs and snaps.

“I’ve been involved with education choice for 30 years,” she responded. “I have written lots of checks to support giving parents and kids options to choose a school of their choice. The balance on my income has gone very much the other way and will continue to do so.”

Grace Tatter contributed reporting.

What is Betsy DeVos’s ‘rethink school’ initiative all about? Her Wyoming speech offers clues

2017-09-12T18:45:38+00:00

According to Betsy DeVos, American education embodies that quote often attributed to Albert Einstein: “doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”

The U.S. education secretary kicked off her “Rethink School” tour in Casper, Wyoming, encouraging schools to be more innovative — and to help students avoid the boredom she once felt as a student.

DeVos’s speech to students at Woods Learning Center included familiar digs at “the education system” and Washington bureaucrats. It also sketched out her own vision for education in more detail than we’ve heard in a while, after a summer where DeVos made few public appearances.

That vision is all about parents having lots of options for where to send their students — and for many of those options to serve one slice of students well, rather than trying to educate students with different needs.

Here are a few key takeaways:

DeVos is convinced that school hasn’t changed in 100 years.

From today’s remarks: “For far too many kids, this year’s first day back to school looks and feels a lot like last year’s first day back to school. And the year before that. And the generation before that. And the generation before that. That means your parents’ parents’ parents. Most students are starting a new school year that is all too familiar. Desks lined up in rows. Their teacher standing in front of the room, framed by a blackboard. They dive into a curriculum written for the “average” student. They follow the same schedule, the same routine – just waiting to be saved by the bell. It’s a mundane malaise that dampens dreams, dims horizons, and denies futures.”

This claim has gotten lots of attention recently — it is an idea central to last week’s primetime “XQ Super School Live” special on innovative high schools. (XQ, the initiative behind that broadcast, even shares most of a slogan with DeVos’s effort.)

Education historians say DeVos has a point in some respects, such as how school days are structured. But in other ways, schools have changed substantially — especially in how they now see themselves as an institution for all students, not a chosen few.

Her vision comes back to school choice …

“Your school leaders recognize this and say, as it says on your website: ‘We also know that families have many reasons for choosing various schools. Some want to send kids to the school down the street, while others select schools based on proximity of daycare or work … Open enrollment gives families the opportunities to find the schools that are best for them and their children.’

School choice is the issue that brought DeVos, a longtime school voucher proponent, into the public sphere. On Tuesday, DeVos’s praise for Woods Learning Center’s district centered on its willingness to let parents choose a school for their children.

After the speech, a Woods Learning Center student asked DeVos what kind of changes she wants schools to make.

“Starting with the opportunity for every kid, every child to go to a school that is going to fit their kind of personality,” she replied.

… And personalized learning.

From today’s remarks: “Here at Woods, you know that well. Your personalized learning program rethinks school because it’s structured around you. Each of your learning plans is developed for each of you, recognizing that each of you is different, and that you learn at your own pace and in your own way. Your success here at Woods is determined by what each of you are learning and mastering. Not by how long you sit at your desks. That is awesome, by the way. If I had that opportunity when I was in school, many many many years ago, I think I would not have been nearly as bored as I was.”

This focus on personalization is why DeVos wanted to highlight Woods Learning Center, she said. It’s also a focus of her former advocacy group, the American Federation for Children.

“The end game … is personalized learning,” said Kevin Chavous, an AFC board member, said at the group’s convening in May. “We are going to get to this place where as opposed to every child being shepherded into a schoolhouse where they sit in a classroom and where a teacher stands and delivers, and then they regurgitate back … those days are not going to be the future.”

The research evidence for those blended or personalized learning models is mixed. Results are worse for fully virtual schools, which DeVos did not mention.

Watch DeVos’s full speech here:

LIVE NOW: Join us on the #ReThinkSchool tour with Secretary DeVos! First stop: Woods Learning Center, Casper, WY.
Posted by U.S. Department of Education on Tuesday, September 12, 2017

Betsy DeVos offers first comment on DACA ending, says DREAMers should ‘take courage’

2017-09-08T14:30:33+00:00

Five former U.S. education secretaries have denounced the Trump administration’s decision to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. But the current secretary, Betsy DeVos, stayed silent this week.

That’s until an interview with CBS, posted Friday morning. Of the young people allowed to live and work without fear of deportation under DACA, DeVos says her “heart is with them.” The rest, she indicated, was up to lawmakers.

“I understand they’re here not by their own volition, and yet they are serious about pursuing their education and contributing to our American society and culture,” DeVos said. “And I would just encourage them to take courage and have courage.”

“We are a nation of compassion, and we are also a nation of laws,” she added.

Trump has tasked Congress with passing legislation on the issue.

DeVos’s muted comments only underscore the uncertainty that thousands of students, and teachers, are grappling with as the school year begins across the country.

In New York City, where school started Thursday, some teachers came armed with resources to offer families looking for legal advice. At KIPP, counselors raced to check in with alumni already protected by DACA and make sure they planned to meet a tight deadline for renewal applications.

In Memphis, where school has been in session for more than a month, Shelby County Schools has seen attendance by Hispanic students drop. “You can really feel that void,” one principal said.

And in Colorado, students from more than 20 Denver schools walked out of class in protest on Tuesday.

“I’m a little heartbroken,” one DACA recipient said. “I’m not sure what’s going to happen now.”

Grilled by lawmakers, Betsy DeVos says voucher rules should be set locally — even if some kids are shut out

2017-05-24T19:02:17+00:00

Betsy DeVos faced tough questions Wednesday from lawmakers on whether private schools in voucher programs would be allowed to exclude students, including LGBT students and students with disabilities.

The budget plan the Trump administration released this week asks for $250 million to fund pilot programs that would use public funds to pay tuition for students at private schools. Those voucher programs are a focus of U.S. Education Secretary DeVos, who has said they are critical for helping low-income families who need more good choices for educating their children.

The budget is unlikely to be enacted by Congress, but it’s put more attention on a key aspect of how these voucher programs work: outside of the public school system and without the same rules for accountability and access.

Rep. Katherine Clark, a Massachusetts Democrat, asked DeVos about a Christian school in Indiana that participates in that state’s voucher program and whose handbook says students may be denied admission if they have a gay family member.

“If Indiana applies for this federal funding, would you stand up that this school be open to all students?” Clark asked. “Is there a line for you on state flexibility?”

“For states that have programs that allow parents to make choices, they set up the rules around that,” DeVos responded.

“So that’s a no,” Clark said.

DeVos noted that the education department’s Office of Civil Rights would continue its work. All private schools are prohibited from discriminating on the basis of race or national origin, but they can discriminate based on sexual orientation — in fact, no voucher program in the country prohibits participating schools from discriminating against LGBT students.

Private schools may also be able to deny admission to students with disabilities. DeVos herself visited Providence Cristo Rey High School in Indianapolis on Tuesday, a Catholic school that participates in Indiana’s voucher program and whose admissions website warns that it has “limited ability to offer services” for students with disabilities.

Some voucher programs are designed specifically for those students. In turn, those students typically give up some or all of their rights under IDEA.

Rep. Mark Pocan, a Wisconsin Democrat, challenged DeVos on whether new voucher programs would actually help needy students with few options. In Milwaukee, home to the country’s longest-running voucher program, Pocan noted that many voucher recipients already attended a private school and came from wealthy families.

“The 28,000 students that are attending school by the choice of their parents in Milwaukee — that is a success for those students,” DeVos responded. “Those parents have decided that’s the right place for their children to be.”

Pocan mentioned recent studies out of Indiana, Louisiana, Ohio, and Washington, D.C. showing that students using vouchers lose ground on standardized tests after attending private schools. (“I think you were asked recently about this and I know you were on your way out and didn’t have a chance to answer, so I’m glad that today we’ve got a chance to ask some of these questions,” he said.)

Pocan said his experience had led him to conclude that Wisconsin’s school voucher programs had failed. However, research on Milwaukee’s voucher program found it has had a positive effect on students’ likelihood of attending and staying in college.

Pocan also asked DeVos about how any new voucher programs that used federal dollars would be held accountable for their success. DeVos responded by discussing the responsibility of each state to craft accountability rules under ESSA, the new federal education law, which private schools are generally not subject to.

On Betsy DeVos’s budget wish list: $250M to ‘build the evidence base’ for vouchers

2017-05-23T21:19:51+00:00

Recent research about private-school voucher programs has been grim: In Washington D.C., Indianapolis, Louisiana, and Ohio, students did worse on tests after they received the vouchers.

Now, the Trump administration is looking for new test cases.

Their budget proposal, released Tuesday, asks for $250 million to fund a competition for school districts looking to expand school voucher programs. Those districts could apply for funding to pay private school tuition for students from poor families, then evaluate those programs “to build the evidence base around private school choice,” according to the budget documents.

It’s very unlikely that the budget will make it through Congress in its current form. But the funding boost aimed at justifying private-school choice programs is one way U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is delivering on years of advocacy for those programs. On Monday, she promised the Trump administration would soon lay out the “most ambitious expansion of school choice in our nation’s history.”

DeVos and other say vouchers are critical for helping low-income students succeed and also help students in public schools, whose schools improve thanks to competitive pressure. Private school choice programs have also come under criticism for requiring students with disabilities to waive their rights under IDEA and for allowing private schools to discriminate against LGBT students.

Bill Cordes, the education department’s K-12 budget director, told leaders of education groups Tuesday that the “sensitive” issues around the divide between church and state and civil rights protections for participating students would be addressed as the program is rolled out.

‘A revolutionary level of trust’: Empower Schools CEO on how Tennessee could partner to turn around Chattanooga schools

2017-05-19T20:34:57+00:00

When state education officials met Thursday with Chattanooga leaders to discuss their newest idea for how to improve struggling schools there, they weren’t alone.

In the room was Chris Gabrieli, the architect of the “Empowerment Zone” in Springfield, Massachusetts — the model for what could happen in Tennessee’s fourth-largest city. State officials would call their version a “partnership zone.”

Gabrieli is working with Education Commissioner Candice McQueen to help local officials understand the approach, in which clusters of schools are essentially turned into mini-school districts that are freed from many local rules and governed jointly by local and state officials. He’s also interested in helping the city if it decides to go forward with the zone, one of several options for intervening in schools that have struggled the longest.

“We’ve made it clear we’d be in a position to help if they say yes,” Gabrieli said.

Chalkbeat sat down with Gabrieli at this week’s New Schools Venture Fund Summit in California. Here are the highlights. (This interview was edited for length and clarity.)

Chalkbeat: What is the partnership model and what is your role in bringing it to Tennessee?

Gabrieli: Empower Schools, the nonprofit I’m the CEO of, works in partnership with communities to help them consider how new structures and approaches could allow them to get schools they want and the results their students need.

Communities often want schools that, for example, follow the existing student assignment patterns. Those are usually very important to the community and thought through for years. Often, with high schools, there’s a huge commitment from the community and it’s a place people care about. And they want to see that school continue in some similar fashion.

So there are things people want out of their schools that they want to preserve, but I think in some cases they know they need to do some things differently to get the results.

So how could you structure something like that? Our work is just to partner with them to see what a pathway to setting up a structure like that could be — one that could bring more change, more boldness, more energy, at each school while still preserving the role of that school as a member of that school district.

Where the state has such strong interest, as it does in Tennessee, with the outcome of these schools — having at least two of them be eligible to be taken over by the ASD — rather than having the state take an independent action, it can really partner with the district. In Tennessee, they’re calling it partnership zone. The partnership is between the state and the district. And people can scoff, say it’s somewhat involuntary of a partnership. Maybe. But I would say, instead of the state unilaterally acting, which it has the authority to do, it is saying, let’s together look at what the best plan is.

If people can get away from that focus on power and instead focusing more on what are the right structures, I think the chance for our students, usually disadvantaged students, goes higher. Our role is to show people it’s been done elsewhere.

What edge does this model have on others that have fallen short in Tennessee and beyond?

There are always really good things to build on. And Chattanooga has some really good things: really good educators, good programs that have got some momentum. We never find, even in schools that are really struggling, that it’s the case that no one good is being tried and nobody good is there. That’s a parody. But clearly it’s not working and changing fast enough in those places.

When you say you’re just going to take a school over, close it, bring in a charter operator, and start anew, you’re just saying, nothing was working. Nobody who was involved will probably be kept on. Somehow, somebody from outside will do better. I understand that theory, but people feel like there’s a lot of friction cost in that, a lot of inefficiencies, a lot of things missed about what’s going on. On the other hand, if it was really going well enough, the state wouldn’t be flagging these schools as not objectively delivering high enough outcomes for students. People in the districts know it.

So, unlocking bolder change, but doing it in the context of giving the benefit of the doubt to a lot of the existing people and programs is what’s different.

How does this compare to to the Innovation Zone in Shelby County and the Achievement School District, two high-profile school improvement efforts that are already underway?

These schools were in an I Zone in Hamilton County. They have the ability to get some different conditions, but these I Zones don’t have a stable, independent governing structure. The schools are still reporting to the district.

In Springfield, for example, the district delegates operational and managerial authority to the zone and the staff they hire. The I Zone is not a delegated authority situation. They’re saying, we ourselves are going to choose to do some things differently, and we run them still, versus, we know things might need to let things work differently and we’re choosing to allow others to run these schools. And we’re a part of it, but it’s not us.

One thing that’s different from an I Zone is that we would encourage that board, and we have encouraged the board in Springfield, to also be willing to make choices and bring in totally different programs at schools that are not working. In Springfield, of the nine schools this year, three are run by very different people from outside. Six are run by people from there. They’ve had a chance to basically restart. In one case it’s an organization, a nonprofit operator, and in two cases it’s individuals who came in and are building a whole new school. They’re hiring entirely new people, taking an entirely different approach.

So, improvement is the top strategy. But change where it’s needed is something we think zoned boards have to have the backbone to do. Getting that blend right is important.

To some degree, the ASD is, change ‘em all. To some degree, an I Zone is, improve ‘em all. We say, improve as many as we can and change the ones we can’t. That’s what most people want. Let’s give the benefit of the doubt to people if we can. And if they aren’t getting it done, they don’t get an infinite window.

What are the key elements of the partnership model and what could change in schools?

Three key pieces. One is that there would be an independent board, with the majority of the folks not being elected officials but independent folks — ideally who are from same community — who can make a fresh set of choices and ensure the schools’ autonomy continues. With the minority of the board being the elected and appointed officials. Having members of the school board is a very good idea. These are still Hamilton County schools.

The second is a clear contract that would assign most of the money and those key levers: who gets hired, what curriculum is used, what schedule is followed, what the budget is. That’s set at the zone level and the school level.

In Tennessee, there isn’t the third element of the collective bargaining process. It’s those two.

That structure allows the schools to then go through the redesign process to say, what curriculum do we need to add? How do we raise teacher skills? What hours should we operate? With support from partners.

How it exactly it would work in Chattanooga would be different than how it exactly works in Springfield, but the elements would be the same ones to be settled. The big two would be allocation of financial resources — how much of the money per student goes to the schools to be used flexibly and how much stays with the district for the use of the buildings and other supports — and what decision-making authorities are given over to the zone.

Along with that would be the performance milestones the zone would have to make to continue to go on. This is all about performance. Individual schools have to perform and the zone has to work. If the zone doesn’t work, it should go away. The board really has to be accountable.

In Lawrence [Massachusetts] — where we were quite involved, but the structure was different — and in Springfield, where the structure would be very similar — we’ve seen that, with support from outside, with partners helping, a lot of existing people have plenty of appetite to take on the kind of things that need to be done.

A simple example is the school schedule. There’s lots of data that show that for high-poverty kids, who often have few great choices outside the school building for academic or non-academic opportunities, a longer school day — that allows them to get more core academics and more arts, music, drama, sports — is a really important idea. And it also means giving teachers more time to work together, to collaborate, to use data. That’s also a good idea. But usually traditions of district structures and compensation lock in an outdated calendar.

So one of the autonomies schools get in any zone we’d want to be a part of is the ability to set the right school schedule. It doesn’t have to be identical for each school. But generally, if you want kids to succeed, you need more time. That also means you need to pay teachers more for that. That’s fair. Saying, do the same job for more hours for no more pay doesn’t strike working adults as fair. So you’ve got to have more resource flexibility. These all flow together into something where you can work faster and better.

Isn’t it possible that this kind of shared governance model might just be creating yet another layer of bureaucracy?

This usually comes out of circumstance of underperformance, so these schools have a lot of anxiety. They’ve been a part of innovation zones, and they wonder, is this the next thing? We’re trying to say, you tell us what you think it would take to succeed. Frankly, we don’t often ask in education, what do you need. We tend to say, new program! Personalized learning! Singapore math!

Part of what we’re able to do is expose them to how this has played out in other schools. Some remain concerned that whatever it is, it might be bad. Others react and say, this would be really different. We could rise to this. We like the chance to do new things.

When you move most of the money and decisionmaking all the way to the school, it’s the least bureaucratic possible. The presence of the board is in part to make sure it happens. There’s a lot of policymaking about schools that happens very far from schools. One of the things we really encourage, is to say, OK, let’s make decisions at the school.

In Springfield, how can they afford to pay [teachers] more for more time without there being more state money going in? The answer is, they get 85 percent of per-pupil funding and can make those decisions. It feels like the opposite of bureaucracy. We had one principal and their teacher talking to their governor, who had come to visit the school. They told him, we’re thinking of changing to have one fewer janitor and another teacher. I don’t think that’s bureaucratic.

If the board of this entity becomes very involved and micromanages, it would be bureaucracy. If they empower schools — and my organization is called Empower Schools — it feels the opposite. It’s a revolutionary level of trust.

After reshaping itself to combat declining interest, Teach For America reports a rise in applications

2017-05-04T15:55:06+00:00

Teach for America says its application numbers jumped by a significant number this year, reversing a three-year trend of declining interest in the program.

The organization’s CEO said in a blog post this week that nearly 49,000 people applied for the 2017 program, which places college graduates in low-income schools across the country after summer training — up from just 37,000 applicants last year.

“After three years of declining recruitment, our application numbers spiked this year, and we’re in a good position to meet our goals for corps size, maintaining the same high bar for admission that we always have,” Elisa Villanueva Beard wrote. The post was reported by Politico on Wednesday.

The news comes after significant shake-ups at the organization. One of TFA’s leaders left in late 2015, and the organization slashed its national staff by 15 percent last year. As applications fell over the last several years, it downsized in places like New York City and Memphis, decentralized its operations, and shifted its focus to attracting a more diverse corps with deeper ties to the locations where the program places new teachers.

This year’s application numbers are still down from 2013, when 57,000 people applied for a position. But Villanueva Beard said the changes were working, and that “slightly more than half of 2017 applicants identify as a person of color.”

Budget deal would spare AmeriCorps, which supports thousands of schools

2017-05-01T22:19:17+00:00

Schools and education nonprofits that rely on AmeriCorps members may soon be able to breathe a sigh of relief — at least temporarily.

Funding for AmeriCorps and SeniorCorps programs would hold steady under the federal budget deal expected to pass this week, according to the Corporation for National and Community Service, the agency that finances the programs. President Trump proposed eliminating all funding for the agency earlier this year.

The deal would be a win for 11,000 schools across the country where corps members serve as mentors, tutors, and extra sets of hands in classrooms. As we wrote in February, about half of the agency’s grant funding goes to education-related work, making it a significant player in school improvement efforts across the country.

Its programs include City Year, College Possible, Playworks, Citizen Schools, the National College Advising Corps and a school-based foster grandparent program through Senior Corps.

At Denver’s Manual High School, principal Nick Dawkins told Chalkbeat that the school’s City Year corps members had logged 875 hours helping students with literacy and math this year, in addition to surprising teachers with treats and playing chess to connect with kids.

“In a tighter budget picture, I would hate to see programs like this go away,” Dawkins said.

The budget deal does slash the agency’s Social Innovation Fund, which gives grants to foundations and nonprofits that then distribute money to local initiatives. Many of those programs, like College Bound Dorchester in Massachusetts and KIPP through College in Washington, D.C., are meant to help young people succeed after high school.

Betsy DeVos to meet with New York City charter leaders Eva Moskowitz and Valerie Hoekstra

2017-04-10T22:11:06+00:00

U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is set to dip her toes into the world of New York City charter schools this week, meeting with its most controversial figure and another local school leader.

DeVos plans to meet Wednesday with Eva Moskowitz, the CEO of Success Academy Charter Schools who met with President Trump during his search for an education secretary. Moskowitz, a Democrat whose network now includes 41 schools in the city, has stuck up for DeVos and her support of private-school vouchers as others in the charter school sector have kept their distance.

“I believe that education reform has to be a bipartisan issue,” Moskowitz told Chalkbeat last month.

On Tuesday, DeVos will meet with Valerie Hoekstra, the middle-school principal at Inwood Academy for Leadership, a charter school in upper Manhattan. That school won a 2009 fight with New York state to be allowed to give admissions preference to students who are learning English — a push with particular relevance when the city’s charter schools are often dinged for not serving as many high-needs students as surrounding schools.

The school’s 2016 test results for math and English were below state averages, with 18 percent of students proficient in English and 21 percent proficient in math. That’s well below the proficiency rates at some charters, including Success Academy.

Inwood Academy has expressed pride in its low student attrition numbers and its policy of filling all vacancies that open at the school, something not all charter schools do.

Hoekstra herself, according to her biography on the school’s website, started her career as a special-education teacher at an Air Force base in North Dakota, joined Inwood Academy before it opened in 2010 and became its middle-school principal in 2015.

Neither meeting will be open to the press or include a school visit, according to DeVos’s public schedule.

Weeks after DeVos praises school choice efforts in Denver, she slams the city as offering ‘accessibility without choices’

2017-03-30T02:22:00+00:00

Earlier this month, U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos was praising Denver’s efforts to support school choice. Not today.

Speaking at the Brookings Institution Wednesday, she called out Denver as an example of a district that appears to be choice-friendly — but actually lacks sufficient options for families.

A new Brookings report gave the city the top score for school choice, citing the unified application process that allows families to consider charter and district-run schools at the same time.

But DeVos implied that without vouchers to pay for private schools (something Colorado’s state Supreme Court has twice ruled unconstitutional) and a sufficient supply of charter schools, Denver’s application process amounts to an optical illusion.

“The benefits of making choices accessible are canceled out when you don’t have a full menu of options,” she said, pointing to New Orleans as a better example of the choice ecosystem she’d like to see. “Choice without accessibility doesn’t matter. Just like accessibility without choices doesn’t matter. Neither scenario ultimately benefits students.”

The harsh criticism comes just weeks after DeVos publicly praised Denver’s efforts to solve a thorny challenge complicating school choice across the country: transportation. In a speech to the Council of Great City Schools, a group of leaders and school board members of America’s large school districts, she praised the “Success Express” that shuttles students in a handful of neighborhoods to both charter and district schools. But transportation challenges continue to prevent families from taking advantage of the options that do exist.

Denver Public Schools’ Superintendent Tom Boasberg released the following statement responding to DeVos’s comments: “We respectfully disagree with Secretary DeVos. We do not support private school vouchers. We believe that public dollars should be used for public schools that are open to all kids, whether they are district-run or charter.” “A core principle in Denver and one of the main reasons we rank No. 1 nationally in school choice is that we ensure equitable systems of enrollment among district-run and charter schools, where all schools play by the same enrollment rules and all schools are subject to the same rigorous accountability system. We do not support choice without accountability.”

Here are DeVos’s full comments about Denver’s top school choice ranking in the Brookings report:

“I am hopeful this report helps lights a fire under [low-scoring cities] to better serve students. And while we may be tempted to emulate cities with a higher grade, I would urge a careful look. The two highest-scoring districts, Denver and New Orleans, both receive As. But they arrive there in very different ways. New Orleans provides a large number of choices to parents. All of its public schools are charters, there is a good supply of affordable private schools, and the state provides vouchers for low-income students to attend private schools if they choose. Combined with its easy-to-use common application, New Orleans’ sophisticated matching system maximizes parental preference and school assignment. Meanwhile, Denver scored well because of the single application process for both charter and traditional public schools, as well as a website that allows parents to make side-by-side comparisons of schools. But the simple process masks the limited choices there.”

Betsy DeVos on American schools: ‘I’m not sure that we can deteriorate a whole lot’

2017-03-29T16:59:49+00:00

U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos isn’t concerned that a push for more school choice could inadvertently harm America’s schools, she said Wednesday — because she believes the nation’s achievement is already too abysmal for that to be possible.

“I’m not sure how they could get a lot worse on a nationwide basis than they are today,” DeVos said of achievement levels. “The fact that our PISA scores have continued to deteriorate as compared to the rest of the world, and that we’ve seen stagnant at best results with the NAEP scores over the years — I’m not sure that we can deteriorate a whole lot.”

DeVos was referring to one international test and another taken by a sample of students across the United States that’s used to compare performance across states. Her comments, made at the Brookings Institution, paint a picture that’s more dire than fully accurate.

On the international PISA tests in reading and science, the U.S. hovers near the international average, though it falls near the bottom of other industrialized countries in math. And on the NAEP tests, often referred to as the “nation’s report card,” math scores have been rising for decades, as moderator Russ Whitehurst noted, while reading scores have also increased, though much more slowly.

The comments reveal an unflinchingly negative guiding premise for the nation’s top education official: With nowhere to go but up, any disruption of the current system is, by definition, going in the right direction. (She pushed that idea further by invoking the fight between Uber and taxi companies as a parallel for the push for school choice.)

At the same time, DeVos indicated that she was uncomfortable using statistics as the basis for some of her own policies.

“I’m not a numbers person in the same way you are,” DeVos said, when asked specifically how she would want her success to be measured. “But to me, the policies around empowering parents and moving decision-making to the hands of parents on behalf of children is really the direction we need to go.”

You can watch her speech and her discussion with Whitehurst afterward here:

Rave reviews: Here are the states, schools, and programs that have gotten Betsy DeVos’s seal of approval

2017-03-28T14:22:18+00:00

U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos might not have ever worked in a school system or state education department, but she’s been getting up to speed fast on what they’ve been doing.

And unlike her boss, who issues insults so freely that people track his targets, DeVos talks a lot about the things she likes. In her speeches, she’s been citing program after program that she supports, often with remarkable specificity. Together, they offer a look at what issues — school choice! — and what parts of the country she is focused on first.

For your reference, we’ll be keeping a running list of the K-12 initiatives that get a public DeVos seal of approval here. Did we miss something? Let us know.

CALIFORNIA’s support for career and technical education:

California has been forward-leaning in implementing career and technical education programs that deliver results: The state now offers more than 13,000 courses that meet the admissions requirements of the University of California system. California has also invested in Linked Learning programs across the state that integrate industry-based learning at the college-prep level, allowing students to acquire the skills needed to begin a high-potential career right after graduation. (March 20, in a talk to the National Association of State Boards of Education)

CLEVELAND’s technology training:

Another example is Cleveland’s “Project Lead the Way.” Project Lead the Way connects students with engineering businesses and organizations in the community. Children learn relevant subjects such as coding, robotics, and in some cases, 3D printing. This type of hands-on experience encourages students to engage in ways the traditional classroom often does not, and it introduces them to skills and subject-areas with high-potential futures. (March 13, speaking to the Council of Great City Schools)

DENVER’s student transportation efforts (more from Chalkbeat here):

In Denver, represented today by Happy Haynes, the district is currently providing transportation to children from underserved areas to schools in other regions of the city. This transportation is key in order to provide students with access to quality options. The “Success Express,” as it’s called, is a great example of how LEAs are leveraging federal, state and local funds to best serve children. (March 13, speaking to the Council of Great City Schools)

FLORIDA’s dual-enrollment programs:

I think dual-enrollment is a great option for high schoolers that want to earn college credit and get a jump on their college, their post-high school studies. And Valencia [College in Orlando] is clearly addressing that need in a meaningful and major way. It’s a model that can be replicated in many other communities. (March 24 interview with Orlando’s WFTV)

FLORIDA’s tax credit scholarship program:

One young lady, Denisha Merriweather, failed the third grade twice at her assigned traditional school in Florida. Denisha was on the path to becoming another statistic. She appeared destined to follow in the footsteps of her brother and mother, who both dropped out of high school. But Denisha’s godmother intervened, and, because of Florida’s Tax Credit Scholarship Program, Denisha was able to attend a school that better met her needs. Now Denisha is not only the first in her family to graduate from high school, but she also graduated from college and, this May, she will receive her master’s degree in social work. (March 20, in a talk to the National Association of State Boards of Education)

FLORIDA’s St. Andrew Catholic School:

Joining @realDonaldTrump today to visit with @SACSOrlando students, parents & teachers. St. Andrew is improving outcomes and changing lives!
— Secretary Betsy DeVos (@BetsyDeVosED) March 3, 2017

INDIANAPOLIS’s “innovation schools” initiative (more from Chalkbeat here):

These schools are under the governance of the Indianapolis Public Schools district, but they are freed up to operate independently and thus better attune themselves to the unique needs of their students. I want to bring School 15 to your attention as an example of new thinking. School 15 has struggled for years with low-test scores, and the state gave it an “F” in 2016. But in recent months, parents and teachers in Indianapolis have come together to propose School 15 become a “neighborhood-run” school under the “innovation schools” program. This isn’t a school run by an outside, third-party operator – this is a school where parents are in direct control. The community takes ownership of developing the school’s structure, staffing and performance. (March 13, speaking to the Council of Great City Schools)

MICHIGAN’s program to help people with disabilities join the workforce:

In my home state of Michigan, Lt. Gov. Brian Calley joined forces with state Supreme Court Justice Richard Bernstein to level the playing field for a group that’s consistently underrepresented in the overall workforce: people with disabilities. The initiative, MI Hidden Talent, provides training and resources to help businesses adopt inclusive hiring practices. (March 15 speech to the National Lieutenant Governors Association)

MICHIGAN’s The Potter’s House private school:

After visiting The Potter’s House, a small private school in my hometown that provides scholarships to low-income, mostly minority students, I saw the struggle of so many families who were just trying to access the same opportunities and choices for their children that my husband and I had for ours. Schools like The Potter’s House gave kids the chance to succeed and thrive, but for every student who got the chance to attend The Potter’s House, I knew there were others stuck in schools not meeting their needs. (March 13 speech to the Council of the Great City Schools, and a number of other mentions)

MICHIGAN’s City High Middle School:

In my hometown of Grand Rapids, Michigan, City High Middle School is nationally recognized and is ranked the third-best school in the state. Forty-five percent are minority students, and 98 percent of all students are enrolled in IB programs. In conversations with parents and students who are part of City High, it’s clear how much they appreciate and value the opportunity that school provides. (Feb. 15, speaking to Magnet Schools of America national conference)

MILWAUKEE’s school choice program:

The longest-running program in the country, Milwaukee’s Parental Choice Program, is located in Lt. Gov. Kleefisch’s state of Wisconsin. That program started in 1990, and is now one of four private choice programs in Wisconsin, serving more than 33,000 students in that state. If you add to that the population attending the state’s public charter schools, more than 76,000 students in Wisconsin are able to attend a school of their parents’ choosing. One of these schools is St. Marcus Lutheran School in Milwaukee, which serves almost exclusively students from low-income families. One of those students, Jeffrey, described his education experience prior to attending St. Marcus as “setting him up to fail.” His traditional schools simply didn’t meet his academic needs. When he enrolled at St. Marcus everything changed for him. Jeffrey’s teachers took special interest in him, and today he’s a college graduate and works as an architectural designer. And he credits his success to the support of his family and his teachers at St. Marcus. (March 15, speaking to the National Lieutenant Governors Association)

NEVADA’s turnaround school district:

One of those 25 programs is the Nevada Achievement School District, which was launched this year. The state identified the schools that were persistently underperforming, and has instructed the achievement school district to provide the families attending those schools with up to six high-quality, local options. This is but the first step in helping more than 57,000 children attending Nevada’s underperforming schools, but it is a step in the right direction. (March 20, in a talk to the National Association of State Boards of Education)

WASHINGTON state’s support for virtual schools:

Another student I met, Sandeep Thomas, grew up impoverished in Bangalore, India with absent and neglectful parents. Sandeep was adopted by a loving couple from New Jersey but continued to suffer from the experiences of his early years. He was not able to focus in school, and it took him hours to complete even the simplest assignment. This changed when his family moved to Washington state, where Sandeep was able to join a virtual public school. This option gave him the flexibility to learn in the comfort of his own home and develop at a pace that was right for him. He ended up graduating high school with a 3.7 GPA, and also having earned 39 hours of college credit. Today, he’s working in the finance industry and is a public advocate for increased school options that allow students like him a chance to succeed. (March 20, in a talk to the National Association of State Boards of Education)

Why the Trump administration wants school districts to change their budgets — and how Title I could stand in the way

2017-03-21T15:24:16+00:00

President Trump’s first budget proposal promised $1 billion in new funds for poor students, with a catch: the money would be used to encourage school districts to adopt a new way of funding their schools.

Tucked into the administration’s “skinny budget,” the single sentence on the issue manages to say a great deal about the Trump administration’s priorities — and about how complicated it could be to move them forward.

The budget proposal calls for expanding Title I with money “dedicated to encouraging districts to adopt a system of student-based budgeting and open enrollment that enables Federal, State, and local funding to follow the student to the public school of his or her choice.” In calling for student-based budgeting, Trump joins a host of big-city school leaders and education reformers who argue that money should follow each student, no matter where they enroll.

It sounds like a simple idea, but it’s far from how most school districts operate.

Districts traditionally create school budgets based largely on how much it costs to pay the salaries of the adults who work in a building. That can mean schools serving high-needs students, which often have less experienced and lower-paid teachers, get less money than schools with more affluent students.

Under student-based budgeting, each student attending a school brings a certain amount of money, which can grow based on factors like whether the student has a disability or comes from a low-income family. That kind of system appeals to those who want schools with greater challenges to receive more funding. School-choice advocates like it, too, since it rewards schools that attract students and makes inequities in funding between district and charter schools more apparent.

It also forces districts to do the student-by-student calculations that could enable private-school vouchers — making student-based budgeting a gateway policy for voucher advocates such as U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.

Districts such as New York City and Denver have shifted toward student-based budgeting in the last decade, as their systems of school choice have grown more robust. Other districts, including Indianapolis Public Schools, are making the shift now, sometimes painfully. (The approach is also known as fair student funding and weighted student funding.) But districts don’t control the distribution of federal funds, so making the change requires maintaining different budgeting processes.

“There’s a lot of interest in being able to use federal funds in the mix,” said Jennifer Schiess, a policy analyst at Bellwether Education Partners.

But there’s a hitch in the budget proposal: Federal law spells out exactly how Title I funds must be distributed, through funding formulas that sends money to schools with many poor students.

“I do not see a legal way to spend a billion dollars on a incentive for weighted student funding through Title I,” said Nora Gordon, an associate professor of public policy at Georgetown University. “I think that would have to be a new competitive program.”

There are good reasons for the Trump administration not to rush into creating a program in which states compete for new federal funds, though. For one, advertising the new funds as part of Title I, even if ultimately adding them there would be tricky, brought the administration some of its only positive spin on the budget news, which was widely panned as working against poor Americans.

Plus, creating a new program would open the administration to criticism of overreach — which the Obama administration faced when it used the Race to the Top competition to get states to adopt its priorities.

One pathway to encouraging student-based budgeting already exists in the law. When they rewrote the law last year, lawmakers included a pilot program designed to let 50 school districts change the way they hand out funds, including Title I funds. Martin West, an associate professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, says he expects a DeVos-led education department would push for that program to expand.

And a big question with any of the possible changes, he said, is how poor students fare.

“It will be important to see the details of what is ultimately proposed in order to see if it’s done in such a way to benefit the students that Title I is designed to serve,” West said.

$1.4 billion for school choice, AmeriCorps cuts, and other details from Trump’s first budget proposal

2017-03-16T15:12:38+00:00

The road to a $20 billion school choice plan starts with less than 10 percent of that, according to President Trump’s budget plan.

The proposal adds $1.4 billion for school choice efforts, including $168 million for charter schools, $250 million to fund a private school choice program, and an extra $1 billion in Title I funds — which would be used to encourage school districts to shift to “student-based budgeting.” The U.S. Department of Education will eventually “ramp up” that funding, according to the budget proposal.

Those increases would come alongside deep cuts to the education department. Its budget would fall by 13 percent, or $9 billion, with cuts coming from grants that fund professional development for teachers, support for after-school and summer programs, and programs designed to help middle and high school students prepare for college.

Trump’s budget plan would also eliminate the Corporation for National and Community Service, the $1 billion-a-year agency that finances programs run by AmeriCorps — including City Year, College Possible, Playworks, Citizen Schools, and the National College Advising Corps. Those programs now provide support to about 11,000 schools.

What wouldn’t be cut? Funding for students with disabilities, under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. That’s likely a relief to advocates and lawmakers who worried that Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, who appeared confused about special-education law during her confirmation hearing, would slash that funding.

Echoing Bush and Obama, Trump calls education ‘the civil rights issue of our time’ — and asks for a school choice bill

2017-03-01T03:30:31+00:00

“Education is the civil rights issue of our time,” President Donald Trump said Tuesday night.

The line inserted a bit of boilerplate — and bipartisan — education reform-speak into his first address to a joint session of Congress. Former Presidents George W. Bush and President Obama also used the phrase, and it has come to represent the education reform movement that has encompassed policies like expanding charter schools, testing, and school accountability.

Trump attached the idea to a campaign promise: to expand school choice. He called on lawmakers to fund school choice for “disadvantaged youth” to help “millions of African-American and Latino children” choose among public, private, religious, and charter schools.

He implied that those changes, along with a reduction in violence, would turn the tide after the U.S. “ignored the fates of our children in the inner cities of Chicago, Baltimore, Detroit and so many other places throughout our land.”

But he offered no more specific ideas for how his choice plan should work — including where the money should come from, a key question as Republican leaders move to trim federal spending.

Here’s the full section of Trump’s speech focused on education, pulled from his prepared remarks. (Look out for a cameo by Denisha Merriweather, who also stood by Education Secretary Betsy DeVos this week.)

Our children will grow up in a Nation of miracles. But to achieve this future, we must enrich the mind –- and the souls –- of every American child. Education is the civil rights issue of our time. I am calling upon Members of both parties to pass an education bill that funds school choice for disadvantaged youth, including millions of African-American and Latino children. These families should be free to choose the public, private, charter, magnet, religious or home school that is right for them. Joining us tonight in the gallery is a remarkable woman, Denisha Merriweather. As a young girl, Denisha struggled in school and failed third grade twice. But then she was able to enroll in a private center for learning, with the help of a tax credit scholarship program. Today, she is the first in her family to graduate, not just from high school, but from college. Later this year she will get her masters degree in social work. We want all children to be able to break the cycle of poverty just like Denisha.

Why Betsy DeVos’s comments about historically black colleges have ignited a firestorm — and what she isn’t saying

2017-02-28T21:58:16+00:00

U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has launched yet another firestorm — on the eve of President Trump’s first address to Congress, when he is expected to offer more details about his education vision.

On Monday, DeVos called historically black colleges and universities “real pioneers when it comes to school choice,” in a statement that was widely criticized for ignoring America’s history of segregation. The schools were in fact created because almost all American universities did not allow black people to enroll at the time.

“They saw that the system wasn’t working, that there was an absence of opportunity, so they took it upon themselves to provide the solution,” DeVos said of the schools.

The comments launched a brouhaha that could easily eclipse DeVos’s early troubles — her apparent lack of knowledge during her confirmation hearing and her comments criticizing teachers at the first school she visited.

.@BetsyDeVosED's backwards, confused comments on history of #HBCUs only makes it clearer how unqualified she is to serve all our students.
— Senator Patty Murray (@PattyMurray) February 28, 2017

this is an actual serious question. Does Betsy DeVos know that Jim Crow happened? — Vann R. Newkirk II (@fivefifths) February 28, 2017

#CodedLanguage like "school choice" only normalizes new forms of racism & inequity in education, @BetsyDeVos
— Donovan Livingston (@dlive87) February 28, 2017

DeVos tried to sidestep the criticism with her remarks on Tuesday to lawmakers and leaders of some of those schools. “Your history was born, not out of mere choice, but out of necessity, in the face of racism, and in the aftermath of the Civil War,” she said. “HBCUs remain at the forefront of opening doors that had previously been closed to so many.”

But she stuck to making a school choice argument — and said little about how she would improve the schools that most of America’s black students attend, which are public. Here’s what she said, according to her prepared remarks:

The inequities in our education system are, to me, among the most glaring problems we as a nation must solve. As you know, education inequality disproportionately harms minority students. Just over half of African-American high school students have access to the full range of high-level math and science courses that are gateways to college. This reality is troubling, and it is wholly unacceptable. But it’s also what motivates us, and it is part of the reason the President intends to deliver on his promise to help those who have long been forgotten by offering more opportunity to low-income families whose children deserve access to a high-quality education.

Then she recognized Denisha Merriweather, a student who benefitted from a school-choice program in Florida that allowed her to attend a small, Christian private school and who now is an advocate for Florida’s school voucher program. She supported DeVos during the confirmation process and will attend Trump’s speech to Congress Tuesday night.

“This is a model we must follow – to provide every child an opportunity to attend a quality school,” DeVos said. “We need more good schools. We need more good teachers. And no child should be denied the opportunity to enter a great school.”

Betsy DeVos’s second week at the U.S. Education Department: What you need to know

2017-02-24T20:40:18+00:00

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’s second full week on the job was characterized by mixed messages.

She made the department’s first big policy shift, but might not have wanted to. She criticized teachers and said they were doing a great job. And some education leaders criticized her policies while at the same offering to work with her.

It’s a lot of news, and we’re here to help you keep up. Some highlights:

She a lost an internal battle to keep Obama-era protections for transgender students — though it also became a PR win. Accounts of the fight come from the New York Times, which said DeVos couldn’t outmaneuver Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who wanted to kill the old guidance requiring schools to allow transgender students to use the bathrooms of their choice. That prompted some headlines like this one, from Quartz: “Betsy DeVos—of all people—is fighting Donald Trump to protect transgender students.”

One interpretation, courtesy of Justin Cohen: “The more cynical way to view this story, is that the administration was always going to rescind this guidance, and that letting DeVos disagree publicly with Jeff Sessions would give her a temporary, harmless PR coup after a bruising confirmation process.” If that’s true, “Outside political pressure matters, and in this case, that pressure might have forced the hand of a cabinet secretary.”

The New Yorker’s take: “But trying to do something good—if that is, indeed, what DeVos tried to do—deserves no praise when the end result is to be complicit in something bad.”

We’re seeing the influence of others in Trump’s inner circle. Sessions is one — and Education Week explains that his influence over the transgender guidance led to some hand-wringing about whether Democrats should have directed more of their anti-DeVos fervor at the attorney general during his confirmation fight.

Steve Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist and the former head of Breitbart News, described Trump’s agenda in a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference as having three parts: national security, economic nationalism, and the “destruction of the administrative state.” Trump’s Cabinet nominees “were selected for a reason, and that is deconstruction,” he said. And in her own on-stage interview at CPAC, DeVos said she thinks the federal government should have “as light a touch as possible” on education.

Some education leaders say they are open to working with her. Two leading education officials say they don’t support DeVos’s outlook or policy priorities but will sit down with her anyway. Randi Weingarten, head of the country’s second largest teachers union, has committed to touring two schools with DeVos — one that she picks and one that DeVos chooses. “You have to talk, and you have to engage,” Weingarten told the New Republic.

New York City Schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña sounded a similar note this week: “I work with everyone,” she said. “I will have conversations with anyone and everyone to ensure that the work we’re doing here is being celebrated and recognized, and we’ll see what time will bring.”

And one notable leader who has offered public support for DeVos, Success Academy charter schools founder Eva Moskowitz, is facing forceful pushback from her own staffers, according to Politico.

That comes after DeVos got into trouble with teachers — then tried to mitigate the damage. DeVos’s comments criticizing teachers at the first public school she visited for being in “receive mode” spread via social media last weekend, drawing sharp criticism from the school itself.

DeVos responded, “Great teachers deserve freedom and flexibility, not to constantly be on the receiving end of government dictates.”

But the episode appeared to cut off goodwill from one education leader: Kaya Henderson, the former head of D.C.’s public schools. Her response on Twitter started with, “Sorry lady. Tried to give you the benefit of the doubt.”

DeVos’s popularity is low but on the rise. A poll found that public opinion of DeVos is back to pre-confirmation hearing levels — with a third of Americans seeing her favorably. During the confirmation process, just 12 percent of Americans viewed her favorably, the same poll found.

Betsy DeVos, reportedly opposed to rolling back protections for transgender students, defends the changes

2017-02-23T20:30:41+00:00

If Education Secretary Betsy DeVos opposed rolling back protections for transgender students behind the scenes this week, she wasn’t letting it show Thursday when she spoke to many of the country’s staunchest conservatives.

“This issue was a very huge example of the Obama administration’s overreach, to suggest a one-size-fits-all, federal government approach, top-down approach, to issues that are best dealt with and solved at a personal level and a local level,” DeVos said.

“I have made clear from the moment I have been in this job that it’s our job to protect students and to do that to the fullest extent that we can,” she continued. “And also to provide students, parents, and teachers with more flexibility around how education is delivered and how education is experienced, and to protect and preserve personal freedoms.”

The remarks, which DeVos made at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland, came the day after the Trump administration officials rescinded federal guidance instructing schools to allow transgender students to use bathrooms of their choice. The New York Times reported that DeVos — who faced tough questions in her confirmation hearing about her support for gay rights — had opposed the changes, but lost a power struggle with Attorney General Jeff Sessions and President Donald Trump.

DeVos’s statement about the changes on Wednesday emphasized that she was committed to “protecting all students, including LGBTQ students.” States, districts, and schools that have established their own protections for transgender students will be able to continue to enforce those.

But some see the changes as an unnecessary blow to students vulnerable to bullying and whose rights to spaces like bathrooms aren’t specifically protected in many parts of the country.

“Supports for transgender students in K-12 schools change and save lives, and hurt no one,” Dr. Eliza Byard, the head of GLSEN, an advocacy group focused on the rights of gay students in schools, said in a statement.

Hundreds of education leaders from charter schools, nonprofits denounce Trump’s travel ban

2017-02-23T19:26:27+00:00

Leaders of several hundred education nonprofits, charter school networks, and other education groups have signed onto an open letter expressing “unequivocal disagreement” with the travel ban President Trump instituted last month.

The letter, posted on Medium, is narrowly focused on the executive order Trump signed in late January banning people from seven Muslim-majority countries, as well as refugees, from entering the U.S. Though that order has since been blocked by federal courts, the letter has continued gaining signatures, reaching 438 by this Thursday — indicating that education leaders are increasingly open to weighing in on political matters that they think connect to their mission.

“Groups like ours exist to help lift up the poorest and most marginalized with innovative solutions,” the letter says. “In our opinion, this ban will make our work to foster peace, sustainability, opportunity and inclusiveness much harder.”

Its signers include leaders of the KIPP, YES Prep, DSST, Achievement First, and Uncommon charter school networks; leaders of organizations that provide social services in schools, like Partnership with Children, Good Shepherd Services, and the Center for Supportive Schools; and leaders of mentoring and after-school organizations like Citizen Schools, Groundswell, and OneGoal. Other names include Wendy Kopp, the Teach for America founder, and Lola Hurst, the 11-year old founder of the organization D.C. Bully Busters.

The letter does not touch on new U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, or address issues like the recent increase in raids targeting undocumented immigrants or the rescinding of federal guidance about protections for transgender students in public schools. But the uncertainty facing undocumented immigrants in particular have prompted leaders of school districts like New York City and Denver to speak out in recent weeks.

Others have faced criticism for staying silent: Politico reported this week that Eva Moskowitz, founder of New York City’s Success Academy network of charter schools, had heard from staff members concerned she wasn’t doing enough to speak up for her students, some of whom are undocumented.

“My position as a public figure and national education leader limits the expression of my personal views,” Moskowitz said in a letter to staff.

‘Receive mode’? The D.C. school DeVos visited responded to her criticism with a withering tweetstorm

2017-02-18T20:03:16+00:00

Washington D.C.’s Jefferson Middle School Academy is standing up for its teachers after U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos said they are “waiting to be told what they have to do.”

DeVos made the comments in one of her first interviews since being confirmed last week. She said teachers at the school — the first one she visited on the job — were “sincere” but seemed to be in “receive mode,” which she said “is not going to bring success to an individual child.”

The school took to Twitter late Friday to make its case. In 11 messages, the school described several teachers who creating new programs and tailoring their teaching to meet students’ considerable needs.

“JA teachers are not in a ‘receive mode,'” read the final message. “Unless you mean we ‘receive’ students at a 2nd grade level and move them to an 8th grade level.”

The former and current D.C. schools chiefs have also weighed in. Chancellor Antwan Wilson, who accompanied DeVos on her school visit, issued a statement praising the teaching at Jefferson Academy. And his predecessor, Kaya Henderson, tweeted her withering take on DeVos’s comments:

Sorry lady. Tried to give you the benefit of the doubt. But this is so amateur and unprofessional that it's astounding. We deserve better. https://t.co/qOABdRlxi5
— Kaya Henderson (@HendersonKaya) February 18, 2017

Here’s the full tweetstorm from Jefferson Academy, which D.C. Public Schools considered a “rising school” because of its good -but-not-great test scores.

This is what Sec. DeVos said about our teachers after her visit. Needless to say, we're about to take her to school... @dcpublicschools pic.twitter.com/Wcx1YyqDHL
— Jefferson Academy (@JATrojans) February 18, 2017

First, the secretary visited the classroom of Ashley Shepherd and Britany Locher, a dynamic co-teaching team that differentiates for the...
— Jefferson Academy (@JATrojans) February 18, 2017

needs of students ranging from a first grade level to an eighth grade level in reading. They build amazing relationships with students and..
— Jefferson Academy (@JATrojans) February 18, 2017

maintain a positive classroom environment focused on rigorous content, humor, and love. They aren't waiting to be told what to do.
— Jefferson Academy (@JATrojans) February 18, 2017

Then she saw Latisha Trent in action. Ms. Trent has been at Jefferson for 3 years, and each year her students grow MULTIPLE grade levels...
— Jefferson Academy (@JATrojans) February 18, 2017

in Math. EVERY student realizes his or her maximum potential in Ms. Trent's room. She isn't waiting to be told what to do.
— Jefferson Academy (@JATrojans) February 18, 2017

Then the Sec. met Band teacher Jessica Harris, who has built our Music program from the ground up. Ms. Harris pours her heart into her work.
— Jefferson Academy (@JATrojans) February 18, 2017

Ms. Harris is patient, kind, relentless, and reflective. She is everything you want in a teacher. She isn't waiting to be told what to do.
— Jefferson Academy (@JATrojans) February 18, 2017

Morgan Markbreiter was there as well. Ms. MB has unleashed the passion of countless students through her Video Game Design course. MB also..
— Jefferson Academy (@JATrojans) February 18, 2017

runs our INCREDIBLE after-school program, which provides FREE tutoring and enrichment to our kids. She isn't waiting to be told what to do.
— Jefferson Academy (@JATrojans) February 18, 2017

JA teachers are not in a "receive mode." Unless you mean we "receive" students at a 2nd grade level and move them to an 8th grade level.
— Jefferson Academy (@JATrojans) February 18, 2017

DeVos later added:

.@JATrojans Your teachers are awesome! They deserve MORE freedom to innovate and help students.
— Secretary Betsy DeVos (@BetsyDeVosED) February 18, 2017

.@JATrojans Great teachers deserve freedom and flexibility, not to constantly be on the receiving end of government dictates.
— Secretary Betsy DeVos (@BetsyDeVosED) February 18, 2017

Secretary Betsy DeVos on first school visit: ‘Teachers are waiting to be told what they have to do’

2017-02-18T17:55:00+00:00

For someone now running the federal education department, Secretary Betsy DeVos doesn’t have many ideas for how it’s needed.

In one of her first interviews since being confirmed as secretary last week, DeVos said the federal government was right to step in “when we had segregated schools” and to ensure girls’ access to sports teams. But she suggested that those issues have been resolved, narrowing the issues where federal intervention might be appropriate.

From the interview, published Friday by Axios (the new news site created by Politico’s founders):

“I think in some of the areas around protecting students and ensuring safe environments for them, there is a role to play … I mean, when we had segregated schools and when we had a time when, you know, girls weren’t allowed to have the same kind of sports teams — I mean, there have been important inflection points for the federal government to get involved.” But are there any remaining issues like that where the federal government should intervene? “I can’t think of any now,” she replied.

In fact, American schools, by some measures, are more racially segregated now than when the federal government began to play an active role in desegregating them in the 1960s.

Some advocates have called on the U.S. Department of Education to play a stronger role in desegregating schools. DeVos’s comments suggest her worldview is one in which the major fights over civil rights in American education have already been fought and won, and almost all remaining issues can be addressed best by states and local districts.

Meanwhile, in an interview with a conservative news site, DeVos was also quick to offer her ideas about why teachers struggle — and criticize some of the first public school teachers she encountered on the job. (Cue her critics, who are concerned that she does not have any experience as an educator or working in schools.)

Here’s how she described the discussion she had during her one of her first school visits in Washington, D.C.:

I visited a school on Friday and met with some wonderful, genuine, sincere teachers who pour their heart and soul into their classrooms and their students and our conversation was not long enough to draw out of them what is limiting them from being even more success[ful] from what they are currently. But I can tell the attitude is more of a ‘receive mode.’ They’re waiting to be told what they have to do, and that’s not going to bring success to an individual child. You have to have teachers who are empowered to facilitate great teaching.

In the same interview, DeVos signaled interest in a tactic more commonly used by activists than agency leaders.

She was asked,

Have you considered some political theater of your own, like bringing poor and minority kids trapped in failed public schools to Washington so Congress can tell them why they have to stay in failing schools while their kids attend private schools?

She recalled a march in Florida that drew thousands to protest a lawsuit meant to block a voucher program that she supported. “I think that is an idea worthy of consideration,” she said.

Update: Jefferson Academy Middle School, the DeVos made the “receive mode” comments about, hit back on Twitter late Friday — as did the current and former chancellors of the D.C. school systems. Read what they had to say.

Dear Secretary: Your messages to Betsy DeVos, as she begins her job overseeing the U.S. education department

2017-02-15T22:10:19+00:00

“Our school has 300 students spread out over 550 square miles.”

“Today I dealt with a student who has been in 19 foster homes.”

“Public schools are where we build a just and fair society.”

That’s a bit of what you told us when we asked Chalkbeat readers what you wanted the new education secretary, Betsy DeVos, to know about your schools. DeVos, who took the helm at the U.S. Department of Education last week, faced extra criticism before she was confirmed because she hasn’t had personal experience with public schools as a teacher or student.

We thought you could help fill in those gaps — and help her start her to-do list.

It turns out you had a lot to say. Many of you wanted DeVos to know that the school where you work or send your children is working. Others explained how acutely those schools needed additional teachers, pencils, and counselors. And a few of you offered stories of individual students she might never meet, but her policies might touch.

Here’s more of what you told us.

Dear Secretary DeVos, here’s what’s working …

We are a district with great diversity and with great pride. We do not have a lot of money, but the money we do receive is used efficiently and with students in mind.
— Marcella Safe, Arvada, CO

The teachers in my children’s public school work incredibly hard. They put in 30 hours a week above and beyond the typical school week. Fortunately, they are willing to do this with no extra compensation.
— Shari Sullivan-Marshall, Crested Butte, CO

P.S. 295 is a model of the inclusivity that will prepare my (middle class, white, male) child for success in a diverse, global America. It’s a joyful, effective school because it’s funded — and beloved — by our community.
— Zoe, Brooklyn, NY

Three of my children graduated from a “choice” high school in Jefferson County, Co. My wife feels it saved one of our kids from serious trouble, and he and the other two are better for their experience.
— Craig Bakken, Golden, CO

As a white, upper middle-class family, we were blessed to have a wonderful, diverse neighborhood public school. My kids had an incredibly rich experience thanks to the school’s diverse population, which includes many refugee families.
— Beckett Stokes, Denver, CO

My son is a sophomore at Arsenal Tech High School, inner city Indianapolis, and he scored a PSAT score in the 99th percentile. We can afford private, have charters, but chose Arsenal Tech for its awesome teachers. Our son’s teachers deserve better resources, but mostly they deserve your respect.
— Ruth Jean, Indianapolis, IN

Metropolitan State University of Denver is a haven for first generation and nontraditional college students. Though they juggle academics with parenting, jobs, and other adult responsibilities, they come to class prepared, engaged and on time. They work hard and think hard. I love them.
— Anne Thulson, Denver, CO

I am the mother of a severely disabled child. There is no school in my state that could meet her needs the way our local public school has.
— Dawn Mathias, Fort Wayne, IN

The school I teach at is a public charter school that does not treat education as a product or students as customers. The business-model approach to education cannot account for the depth and complexity of a human being.
— Matt Dooley, Durango, CO

I come from a poor family, where we didn’t always have enough to eat, but I was blessed with a strong public school system in my hometown in Massachusetts. Public schools prepared me for college, which launched a successful career that provides for my family.
— Gretchen Craig, New York, NY

We were a beloved community asset linking culture and history across generations.
— Madeline Morrissey, formerly of New Orleans, LA

And what isn’t.

Unregulated charter schools and poor emergency managers destroyed the public school district in Detroit. I teach freshmen at the alternative high school here who are the result of those policies. We don’t get enough funding to serve them emotionally or academically now.
— Emily Simpson, Detroit, MI

Today I dealt with a student who has been in 19 foster homes and another recently busted for dealing meth after a drug dealer groomed her, much like a sexual offender does a victim. She is undocumented with little hope in her future, especially if DACA is repealed.
— Stacey Hervey, Denver, CO

My students need the federal government’s support. Currently, they are suffering from a lack of resources and a lack of consistent teachers. They need people to believe in them.
— Shannon E. G. Brown, Indianapolis, IN

For 30 years I have served students in a rural setting with a high poverty. We have bare-bones resources. We can’t fulfill the transition needs of our secondary students. There are few jobs and much addiction among families.
— Jennifer Christiansen, Chazy, NY

I want you to know that when my students come to school in the morning, many are receiving their first hot meal since they left school the day before. I want you to know that some of my students don’t have electricity or hot water at home, yet are tasked with unfair norms of proficiency.
— Amber, Memphis, TN

There was no school bus to many areas of the city where our students lived. Many took unreliable Detroit city buses to school every day, and if they lost their bus pass, they were required to pay the $200+ to replace it.
— Jen Spears, Detroit, MI

I have students who eat breakfast and lunch daily at school and get snacks sent home because their parents working three-plus jobs can’t afford enough food. I have students who don’t have pencils or books at home to do any school related work.
— Jessica McNary, Gunnison, CO

Our school has 300 students spread out over 550 square miles. It is sad for me to see our starting teacher salary is $30,000 after college grads have spent four or five years of schooling and oftentimes having debt.
— Steve Wilson, Simla, CO

As a Title I school, 75 percent of our students are living below the poverty line. Our fourth and fifth grade classes have over 30 students. Please assist with lowering the teacher/student ratio.
— Terri Mitchell, Lafayette, CO

Detroit Montessori student Bryan Smith, 8.

Some suggestions:

We are working to keep all of our students in school every day until they graduate by using restorative practices. Take a few minutes to find out about how teachers can help students this way.
— Samantha Rubin, Brooklyn, NY

In rural Colorado, it is hard to find and keep teachers because the pay is so low. A voucher program will not work because there aren’t any private schools.
— Janae Ash, Pagosa Springs, CO

I’m from a rural, impoverished school where expectations are high and resources low. With Common Core standards implemented, I’d like to see resources, websites, units, [special education] support for grades K-12 … in one accessible place.
— Cassandra Torres, Las Animas, CO

I am with a non-profit that serves public and charter schools. Teachers and students suffer the most when they aren’t sure if their school will be open the next year.
— Karen Hess, Memphis, TN

My child’s public neighborhood school is a mix of income levels, languages, abilities. Studies show that good neighborhood schools benefit entire communities.
— Natalie Winslow, Culver City, CA

Students must be able to voice concerns about their school and education. They should not only choose where they go to school, but have a strong voice in what and how they are learning.
— Roxanne McKnight, Durango, CO

Along with some reminders — and two invitations.

Teachers like me, along with our community partners, will fight back relentlessly if you try to limit opportunities for our most vulnerable students.
— Sean Davis, Denver, CO

I went to school in Chicago. The milk was often spoiled, but I got an excellent education. I met people from varied economic/racial/social backgrounds. I learned diversity makes us stronger.
— Rebecca, New York, NY

Our elementary school is full of wonderful children who come from difficult backgrounds, and most speak two languages. They may not be getting the best test scores, but they achieve their best.
— Kaity, Detroit, MI

We are a rural public school. We have strong community support and are not failing our children. We struggle in being underfunded but we make it work. We are not paid enough to own homes in our resort community and we still work our hardest.
— Lisa Hughes, Louisville, CO

I grew up in Denver during desegregation and the resulting white flight. People were afraid of their children going to school with children who did not share their class and race … Public schools are where we build a just and fair society, together, for everyone.
— Belle Zars, Denver, CO

A rural school is the hub of the community; we have one building for pre-K through 12. We have limitations (reduced Internet availability, long bus commutes), but we are a small town with big pride. We invite Ms. DeVos to visit and ask us about school choice. She’ll hear there’s no place else we’d rather be.
— Elissa Smith, Lyndonville, NY

I teach at a Title I charter school in Denver, Colorado, serving students of poverty and students of color. My students are talented, brilliant, resilient, and capable young people who represent the future of our country. You are welcome to visit my classroom.
— Hailey McClure, Denver, CO

As dropout rate hits record low in New York City, these schools struggle to hang on to students

2017-02-10T22:30:38+00:00

New York City’s dropout rate hit an all-time low in 2016: 8.5 percent.

But at a handful of schools, the number of dropouts — students who have left and are not enrolled elsewhere — is still much higher. At 22 high schools, at least one in four students who started in fall 2012 had dropped out four years later, according to data the city released Friday.

Most of those schools exclusively serve students who have a hard time reaching graduation: new immigrants learning English, students who have already been held back, and students who have already left traditional high schools.

A few, though, are traditional high schools: August Martin, Banana Kelly, Bronx Collegiate Academy, Coalition School for Social Change, DreamYard Preparatory, and Herbert H. Lehman. All six are in the city’s “Renewal” turnaround program.

Four others have already closed: Bread and Roses Integrated Arts High School, where 39 percent dropped out, Foreign Language Academy of Global Studies, where 35 percent dropped out, and Foundations Academy, where 30 percent of those students dropped out. Peace and Diversity Academy, a tiny school where more than half of its original ninth graders dropped out, was merged into another school.

Here’s the list:

Crotona Academy HS (64.3 percent dropout rate, transfer school)
Peace and Diversity Academy (64.3 percent dropout rate, merged)
Brooklyn Frontiers HS (52.8 percent dropout rate)
Providing Urban Learners Success in Education HS (44.1 percent dropout rate, transfer school)
ELLs and International Support Preparatory Academy (42.7 percent dropout rate, transfer school)
Bread & Roses Integrated Arts HS (39.4 percent dropout rate, closed)
Crotona International HS (36.3 percent dropout rate)
Foreign Language Academy of Global Studies (35.3 percent dropout rate, closed)
Liberty HS Academy for Newcomers (32.9 percent dropout rate, transfer school)
August Martin HS (32 percent dropout rate)
DreamYard Preparatory School (31.9 percent dropout rate)
Lower East Side Preparatory HS (31 percent dropout rate, transfer school)
Queens Satellite HS for Opportunity (30.9 percent dropout rate, transfer school)
Foundations Academy (30.8 percent dropout rate, closed)
Leadership Institute (30.4 percent dropout rate)
Coalition School for Social Change (28 percent dropout rate)
New Explorers HS (27.5 percent dropout rate)
Brooklyn HS for Leadership and Community Service (26.9 percent dropout rate, transfer school)
Herbert H Lehman HS (26.1 percent dropout rate)
Banana Kelly HS (26.1 percent dropout rate)
Bronx Collegiate Academy (25.3 percent dropout rate)
WEB Du Bois Academic HS (25 percent dropout rate, transfer school)

In her first speech as education secretary, DeVos aims for the middle ground

2017-02-08T21:05:45+00:00

In her first speech as head of the federal education department, Betsy DeVos tried to distance herself from the Betsy DeVos who ignited national backlash.

She told staffers that she valued their experience and ideas. She said students with disabilities and their families deserve the department’s full support, and that diversity and inclusion were important values. And she used language about “bending the arc” and “breaking the cycle” that echoed those who have tied education closely to social-justice work.

DeVos also poked fun at the answer she gave about guns in schools during her confirmation hearing that inspired many a grizzly-bear meme. “For me personally, this confirmation process, and the drama it engendered, has been a bit of a bear,” DeVos said, to some laughter.

The remarks indicate that DeVos — a billionaire philanthropist who made a name for herself as a school-choice advocate in Michigan — has paid attention to the criticisms lobbed her way over the last two months. She seemed eager to seem more moderate than she was portrayed earlier this week, when Senate Democrats staged a 24-hour talkathon opposing her nomination. They pointed to her bungled answers about federal law protecting students with disabilities and about measuring student performance as evidence that DeVos’s lack of experience would be dangerous for America’s students.

That fight ended with a historic tie-breaking vote from the vice president, who swore her in later on Tuesday.

“For many, the events of the last few weeks have likely raised more questions and spawned more confusion than they have brought light and clarity,” DeVos said. “So for starters, please know: I’m a door-open type of person, who listens before she speaks. I’m here to serve with you.”

Also notable was what went unsaid. DeVos didn’t mention the causes that have been the focus of her education advocacy: school choice, school vouchers, or charter schools.

She did promise to “challenge all on how and why we’ve done things a certain way.” But she indicated that she knew the job ahead would require others’ expertise.

“From students who may be struggling, to hard-working teachers who feel stifled, special-needs students and families to whom we owe our full support, and leaders and administrators seeking clarity and evidence-based solutions — the department has a complex population to champion,” she said. “Even though I’m a grandmother, since this is my first day, I know I’m the newbie and I have a lot to learn.”

How long she wants to remain on that common ground is unclear. In the coming weeks, she’ll need to make important decisions about staffing and about the agency’s top priorities — decisions that will shed light on her agenda, how quickly she’s planning to pursue it, and how divisive it will be.

How do you pronounce Betsy DeVos? Let the new U.S. secretary of education tell you herself

2017-02-08T18:04:24+00:00

Senators talked about Education Secretary Betsy DeVos for a full day before she was confirmed on Tuesday. But it didn’t always sound like they were talking about the same person: some pronounced her name “di-vose,” rhyming with “close,” while most said “di-voss,” rhyming with “moss.”

Her swearing-in ceremony offered another chance to hear her say it herself.

So, how do you pronounce DeVos? It’s “di-voss” — a quick “di” like the first part of “did,” and “voss” like “the boss.”

Watch it yourself here:

It’s official: Betsy DeVos wins confirmation after vice president’s historic tie-breaker

2017-02-07T17:31:30+00:00

After a bruising fight, Betsy DeVos, the billionaire philanthropist and school choice activist, got the votes she needed to become the next U.S. education secretary.

It took a historic move to make it happen: a vote from Vice President Mike Pence, who was called in to break a 50-50 tie in the Senate. All of that body’s Democrats voted against DeVos, as did two Republicans.

But despite a 24-hour, last-ditch talkathon by Democrats, a third Republican to oppose DeVos — whose vote would have toppled her nomination — never emerged.

The vote was historic for more than just Pence’s role. In the two months since President Donald Trump nominated DeVos, the Michigan power broker became his most controversial nominee, attracting more public opposition even than his choices for secretary of state or attorney general. DeVos’s bungling of questions about guns in schools and special-education law ignited unprecedented opposition: congressional mailboxes overflowed, grizzly bear memes appeared at nationwide protests, and rumors that a Pennsylvania senator could be on the fence sparked a crowdfunding campaign that topped $70,000. She was even mocked on “Saturday Night Live.”

DeVos’s nomination also widened growing divides among the bipartisan coalition that has pushed for overhauling American education over the last 25 years. Eli Broad, the developer turned charter-school backer; Sen. Cory Booker, who supported charters and private-school vouchers as Newark mayor; and the group Democrats for Education Reform have all said DeVos is the wrong choice.

As the head of the federal education department, DeVos won’t have unlimited authority to reshape education. In fact, state legislatures hold most of the power to make decisions about funding for schools, how schools are judged, and how charter schools will grow, for example. Their power has only increased in the last year amid an overhaul of federal education law.

That means states with liberal legislatures are unlikely to embrace the conservative agenda quickly. But DeVos’s could use her powerful pulpit to advance conservative ideas that, if enacted, would affect all 50 states.

These include potentially changing the federal tax code to allow parents to use tax-deductible donations to pay private school tuition and changing rules about how federal funds for poor students are allocated. DeVos will also set the pace and tone around enforcement of federal anti-discrimination rules in schools.

Betsy DeVos has little experience with public schools. What should she know about yours? Tell us here.

These two Republican senators could be putting Betsy DeVos’s confirmation in jeopardy

2017-02-01T20:45:15+00:00

Betsy DeVos’s nomination for education secretary may be in jeopardy, after two Republican senators said Wednesday they would vote against her.

But a more likely scenario appears to be that Vice President Mike Pence — whose Indiana voucher program benefitted from the support of DeVos’s political action committee — could cast the deciding vote.

Sen. Susan Collins of Maine and Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska both said Wednesday that they would not support Devos’s nomination, citing her lack of experience in public education and the knowledge gaps she displayed during her confirmation hearing last month.

Collins called it a “very difficult decision,” but repeated that she was “troubled and surprised” by DeVos’s apparent lack of familiarity with federal law related to students with disabilities.

“The mission of the Department of Education is broad, but supporting public education is at its core,” Collins said. “I’m concerned that Mrs. DeVos’s lack of experience with public schools will make it difficult for her to fully understand, identify, and assist with these challenges, particularly for our rural schools in states like Maine.”

Their decision leaves a narrow possibility for DeVos to become the first Trump nominee not to be confirmed. Just one additional senator would need to vote against DeVos to derail her nomination — and critics of DeVos across the country are keeping up the pressure by calling and emailing senators whose support is considered vulnerable.

One of those senators, Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, ended speculation Wednesday by declaring that he would vote for her.

If no additional Republicans vote against DeVos, and all Democrats do vote against her, she would receive an unusual split vote in the Senate. In that case, Pence would cast the tie-breaking vote — presumably ushering her into office.

Betsy DeVos’s confirmation clears first hurdle, but two Republicans raise possibility of ‘no’ votes

2017-01-31T18:53:24+00:00

Betsy DeVos, the Michigan philanthropist nominated to be the next U.S. education secretary, won the votes she needed in the Senate’s education committee on Tuesday. She now faces a confirmation vote by the full Senate.

But it’s still not completely clear that DeVos will prevail, after two Republican senators raised the possibility that they won’t support her. If Senate Democrats all vote to oppose DeVos, three Republicans voting with them would derail the nomination.

During the committee hearing, Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Sen. Susan Collins of Maine both said they were not yet committed to supporting DeVos in a final vote.

Murkowski’s indicated that the outpouring of protest from constituents has had an effect. “I absolutely believe that Betsy DeVos cares deeply for kids,” she said. But, she said later, “I have to acknowledge the thousands, the thousands, of Alaskans who shared their concerns with me about Mrs. DeVos as secretary of education. They have come to my office here in Washington, in Alaska, on the phones, in petitions. And their concerns center on Mrs. DeVos’s lack of experience in public education and the lack of knowledge she portrayed at her confirmation hearing.”

Here is Collins’s full explanation:

As crisis over Trump’s immigrant order mounts, what America’s teachers of refugee students want you to know

2017-01-29T03:53:59+00:00

President Donald Trump signed an executive order late Friday that blocked refugees from coming into the U.S. for 120 days and bars refugees from Syria from entering indefinitely.

The order — and subsequent detentions of refugees and other legal immigrants arriving in U.S. airports — prompted dramatic protests across the country and an emergency, late-night court ruling temporarily suspending part of Trump’s decree.

Among the many people who will spend the coming days trying to make sense of the shifting, uncertain terrain facing refugee families are the teachers who, in increasing numbers, have been working with their children.

Before and after Trump’s order this week, we asked several of those teachers to tell about their jobs, their students, and what has them worried right now. Here’s some of what they told us.

Louise El Yaafouri helps teachers learn the best ways to reach refugee education in Denver and Aurora, Colorado. She recently wrote this piece about teaching a student who had come to the U.S. from Iraq.

“I was just visiting some former students who are now in middle school, and they’re very cognizant of what’s going on. Families come in waves [to the U.S.], and many have family members that are still in that process of being approved. That creates is a lot of anxiety around, am I going to get to see my family again.

For our students, it’s not safe for them to go back. That saying, ‘Nobody leaves home unless home is the mouth of shark,’ that’s the situation. None of these families would volunteer to come to America. These aren’t families that that was their goal. None would have chosen to lose their homes, their culture, language, food.

I’ve been [around] refugee camps and watched this process of resettlement. It’s often long and terrifying ordeal. The U.S. is known for having a long and stringent process. And in the Denver community, those [countries targeted by Trump’s recent executive order] are seven populations we receive the most.

"Most of the families from Iraq are not refugees but asylees who volunteered to help the U.S. in their country."

A lot of students I get from those countries are not Muslim to begin with! And most of the families from Iraq are not refugees but asylees who volunteered to help the U.S. in their country.

We’re just starting to see our first Syrian kiddos here. [My former school] Bridge Academy got about five.

Our families, they have such a deep love for their home country. I’m an American and I love my country. This is different. It’s the idea of community and family so embedded in every aspect of life. To come to a place like the States … I feel, from my families, there’s a deep sense of isolation and detachment. The Syrian students tend to exhibit more symptoms of traumatic shock.

Syrians are also among the most literate people anywhere. Academically, it doesn’t take a long time for them to be ready to go. Even with disrupted schooling, the chance of them having literacy in their home language is really high. Kudos to those parents.

I work with the whole field of service workers in the refugee context. Working with people from the State Department, Lutheran Family Services, our African Community Center — having a network of people is crucial. We share all this information as it’s coming out and brainstorm and problem-solve. This community is really mobilized to dedicate ourselves to the people we serve. If it were me as an island, it would be too overwhelming.”

Emily Ramirez teaches English as a second language in a diverse Dallas high school.

“We had an influx a few years ago from Myanmar, more recently we’ve received students from the Congo. Just in the past year, we’ve had a lot of placements from Syria and Iraq. Most of those students have refugee status. And then there’s a pretty sizable community from central America, a lot who are fleeing pretty violent situations.

"A lot of people complain that refugees put strain on schools. That is true"

I do have a few students [from Syria and Iraq] who are here, but they might still have a brother or an uncle they’re hoping they can come here. For one student, that might be changing — the likelihood of his brother being able to join his family.

We talk about ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors. So, why did you leave? And, why did you choose America? For the descriptions of why people left, I got a pretty wide variety. A lot of people from Syria wrote, civil war, war, dying, dead people. When I asked, why America, why not Canada, France, Turkey? They say, I don’t know. We just ended up here.

The placements happen so fast. I had a class that reached 38 students speaking 17 languages. You just keep on welcoming people. A lot of people complain that refugees put strain on schools. That is true, and it can be difficult on schools. But it’s what I do, it’s what I love.”

Tonya Powers is a long-term substitute teacher near Lubbock, Texas.

“I’m a speech and debate teacher. This is a fairly wealthy district, so a lot of this is about teaching them how to accept and communicate with people who are not like them. Lubbock is the home of Texas Tech, so there are graduate students especially who have children and go to school in the area. I’ve had a student whose family was in the process of applying for political asylum who has been trying to figure out how that would affect his chances at college. This area is built on cattle and farming, which means a lot of migrant workers.

Most days are pretty normal, but this last week has been rough on them. After the election, we had a horde of eighth-grade boys walking down the hallway chanting ‘Trump, Trump, Trump.’

I want people to know that these are just kids. Kids don’t make the choices they’re so afraid of. Even teenagers don’t. None of these kids I have ever been afraid of becoming terrorists.

It worries me when people talk about immigrants and refugees in broad strokes and have never even talked to one. If you could look your own child in the eye and say they didn’t deserve an education, you’d be heartless. And I think most people are better than that. But I think people don’t remember that immigrants and refugees are kids, too.”

Carol Salva is a teacher and consultant working with newcomer students in Houston.

“In one of our more affluent areas, one of the apartment complexes struck a deal with Catholic Charities to resettle refugees there. Before [the nearby high school] could realize what was happening, they were flooded. There were over 30 kids who were coming from Somalia, Burundi, Egypt.

"For the last year or more, so many people in our community have been enriched."

They’re middle schoolers, full of hormones, there were all kinds of issues with behavior. We had refugees in in-school suspension every day. They kept loading them into this one class, and they had no good models for how you act in schools.

These kids are so mad by October. And in October, I went back into the classroom, and took over the class.

One of the teachers quit. But it all turned out really, really well. We watched tape of class, like football players. What did we do wrong? What did we do right?

The kids are learning more English every day, so you can explain things. You start talking about perseverance and grit. ‘You could help prove how fast refugees can learn.’

Most of the school is scared of them … then they started learning. And they bring perspective that you don’t have and I don’t have. Who wouldn’t want that for their child? I moved my kid to this school so he could be part of it.

I don’t mean to romanticize their hardships. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. But their perspective is huge and what we want for every classroom.

Their appreciation for education kept blowing us away over and over again. I don’t know if you know any middle schoolers, but their appreciation for education can be rather low. To have a student ask, why do we have a week off? And I would say, it’s spring break, it’s what we do. And he actually said, I don’t need a break. I’ve been on break my whole life.

I teach brand-new newcomers in high school now, and over half the class is from Syria. Their math and science is way beyond ours.

I’m deeply saddened. For the last year or more, so many people in our community have been enriched. You would want these people to be your neighbors.”

Do you teach refugee students? We’d love to hear from you. Tells us where you work and what you’d like other Americans to know about that experience at firstperson@chalkbeat.org.

Women’s march participants took on DeVos this weekend — with posterboard. Here’s what it looked like

2017-01-23T20:11:48+00:00

A portion of the protesters at the women’s marches across the country on Saturday made it clear that they found Betsy DeVos unbearable.

Signs referencing President Trump’s nominee for education secretary were scattered throughout the protests — and grizzly bear puns abounded, in reference to remarks DeVos made during her confirmation hearing about the need to protect students from bears.

DeVos, a philanthropist and school-choice champion, also appeared confused about the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, inspiring another round of signs. She faces a Senate committee vote on Jan. 31.

Here are some of the education and DeVos-focused posters:

New York, courtesy Alex Zimmerman

ATTN: Betsy DeVos #WomensMarch Seattle: (pic from @CarlOmniart ) pic.twitter.com/z6fc4DI1NR
— 💥 (@dynamoe) January 22, 2017

Outside of the predictable Trump/Pence signs and one Paul Ryan sign I saw, the main DC signs were devoted to DeVos. #WomensMarch #DumpDevos pic.twitter.com/ITNGAPIlBh
— Christin M 🇵🇷🌈 (@christinnyc) January 23, 2017

So my 11yo asks, "What DO cabinet secretaries do?" And now she knows more than DeVos or Perry #smartgirls #OaklandWomensMarch #WomensMarch pic.twitter.com/3ch17GN5y0
— Emily Cotler (@EmCotler) January 21, 2017

.@BobCorker @SenAlexander Nashville March today. Public school educators proudly say NO to DeVos pic.twitter.com/yIkYUumD9N
— Pietkiewiczb (@pietb50) January 22, 2017

Best anti- #devos sign I saw today! @PoliticsK12 pic.twitter.com/BTHCSYzSQC
— Chandi (@Chandilin) January 22, 2017

Me holding the bleb in his bear costume with his ‘bears against deVos’ sign at the Madison march pic.twitter.com/l0Sg1n4nq0 — were_duck (@were_duck) January 21, 2017

Great sign from the women's march in D.C.
Posted by Mark Roth on Saturday, January 21, 2017

Washington, D.C., courtesy Elizabeth Green

What we learned (and didn’t) about Betsy DeVos at her confirmation hearing

2017-01-18T05:00:04+00:00

President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to be the next secretary of education spent more than three hours before the nation Tuesday night trying to recast herself as “mainstream.”

After weeks of skewering criticism from public school advocates who have painted her as an extremist who opposes public education, Betsy DeVos — the billionaire philanthropist and school-choice advocate — used her Senate confirmation hearing to mention her mother’s history as a public school teacher. She repeatedly stressed that her support for policies such as private-school vouchers is about giving parents control over their children’s education. And she pushed back against critics who suggested that her support of free-market policies has allowed failing charter schools to proliferate in her home state of Michigan.

She also stumbled on some key issues — and raised the prospect that some America’s children need protection from grizzly bears.

Here’s a quick roundup of what else we learned, and didn’t, about DeVos’s views on key education issues:

On school vouchers: DeVos has long lobbied for states to allow parents to use public funds to pay private school tuition. As secretary, she said, she would encourage states to create voucher programs — but not try to impose them. “I would hope I could convince you all of the merit of that in maybe some future legislation,” she said. She said she would “absolutely” support a state that wanted to use federal education dollars to give students $2,100 scholarships for tuition in non-public schools.

One reason vouchers are controversial is that some versions of the policy allow public education dollars to go to religious or private schools that can discriminate in admissions or require students to sign away rights to special-education services. DeVos didn’t say whether she thinks schools that receive vouchers should be required to serve all students.

Her biggest stumble of the day came when Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine asked whether schools that get federal funding should have to comply with the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, which requires schools to address students’ special needs. She responded, “I think that’s a matter best left to the states.” In a follow-up, when asked if she was aware that the IDEA was a federal law that she would need to enforce as education secretary, she admitted that she may have been confused and said federal laws must be followed.

On science: Some critics have questioned DeVos’s commitment to fact-based science education because of her past support for Republicans who have denied that climate change exists and who voted for bills that bar the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating greenhouse gases. DeVos didn’t address her position on climate change, but she insisted that she supports science in schools. “I support the teaching of great science,” she said.

On guns (and bears) in schools: DeVos deflected a question from Connecticut Sen. Christopher Murphy about whether guns should be allowed in or around public schools. “I think that’s best left to states and locales to decide,” she answered. When Murphy, whose state saw the worst school shooting in U.S. history at Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown in 2012, expressed incredulity, DeVos noted a school in Wyoming that she heard about from Wyoming Sen. Mike Enzi that is protected by a grizzly bear fence. “I will refer back to Sen. Enzi and the school that he was talking about in Wapiti, Wyoming,” she said. “I think probably there, I would imagine, that there’s probably a gun in the school to protect from potential grizzlies.”

On Detroit: Much of the criticism of DeVos has focused on her influence on schools in Michigan, where she has advocated for the dismantling of the Detroit school district and against new regulations for the state’s charter schools. After Democratic senators confronted her with a long list of unfavorable statistics about the quality of both district and charter schools in Detroit, DeVos insisted that charter schools in Detroit are doing well, especially given the high percentage of Detroit children who live in poverty. “Actually, I believe that there’s a lot that has gone right in Detroit and in Michigan with regard to charter schools,” she said, citing a study that found Detroit charter school students on average do slightly better on state exams than their district school peers. (But they all struggle: Just 10 of Detroit’s 200 district and charter schools had test scores in the top half across Michigan.)

She called suggestions that policies she’s promoted have shielded charter schools from consequences from poor performance “false news,” since 122 charter schools across the state have been shut down for poor performance. Still, the state has no restrictions on how many charter schools can open, and groups with long records of allowing low-performing charter schools to stay open are not prevented from opening new ones.

On how student progress should be measured: What should matter more, that a third-grader who arrived at school at a first-grade reading level is now at second-grade level, or that the student failed the third-grade test? That question has been at the core of the debate over how schools are evaluated in recent years. But when Minnesota Sen. Al Franken put the question to her, DeVos didn’t have a quick answer, stumbling a bit over the definitions of growth and proficiency. (Franken didn’t give her a chance to follow up.)

On her wealth and conflicts: Like many of Trump’s other wealthy Cabinet nominees (and Trump himself), DeVos has faced questions over conflicts of interest she could face in office. DeVos said she intends to take a salary of $1, and to forgo a tax loophole that can help wealthy nominees save money. “I will not be conflicted, period. I commit that to you all,” she said. But some pieces of information are still missing, because the Office of Government Ethics has not completed DeVos’s ethics agreement.

DeVos did offer one new tidbit: that she was listed as a board member of her mother’s foundation on federal tax forms because of “a clerical error.” The foundation gave to Focus on the Family, which has supported gay conversion therapy. DeVos said she doesn’t support that work.

On the Office of Civil Rights: Under Obama, the Education Department stepped up enforcement of civil rights policies and issued guidance on issues affecting transgender students. Some civil rights groups are concerned the Trump administration will scale back the Office of Civil Rights. Those concerns increased after Politico reported that DeVos had spoken about the office with Republican Sen. James Lankford, who is skeptical about its work to ensure transgender students have certain protections in schools. A Lankford aide said he and DeVos had talked of “reining in” that office. In Tuesday’s hearings, DeVos said she had not used those words.

On violence against women: Like attorney general nominee Jeff Sessions, DeVos was asked whether touching women without their consent — as Trump bragged about doing in the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape released last fall — is sexual assault. And like Sessions, she said yes.

On other education policy issues: What does DeVos think about academic standards, teacher evaluations, how to improve struggling schools, segregation — the issues that most affect the way students and teachers across the country experience school on a daily basis? We still don’t know, because DeVos wasn’t asked about them.

American teens are no better at reading or math than they were 15 years ago, according to key comparison test

2016-12-06T11:00:30+00:00

The reading skills of America’s 15-year-olds haven’t improved since 2000, while math skills have actually declined in recent years, according to new results from a test given to students across the world.

But science scores suggested one possible upside: a narrowing of the gap between affluent and poor students’ scores.

The test, known as PISA, is a key international yardstick for how much students are learning — and a justification that policy makers frequently cite for pushing schools and teachers to do better. But a tumultuous decade and a half since the test was first administered, U.S. students again landed near the middle of the pack in 2015.

“We’re losing ground – a troubling prospect when, in today’s knowledge-based economy, the best jobs can go anywhere in the world,” U.S. Education Secretary John King will say Tuesday at an event in Boston, according to his prepared remarks.

In science, though, the relationship between poverty and achievement is loosening. The U.S. saw the biggest jump in that measure of equity since 2006. The country’s share of “resilient” students — poor students who ended up in a top-scoring group across all countries — also grew, from 25 percent to 31 percent.

Andreas Schleicher, the director for education and skills at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which organizes the tests, said he could only offer a hypothesis about the cause of America’s apparent increase in equity.

“What certainly contributed: over the last decade, there has been more attention to underperforming schools and underperforming students,” he said.

In math, the average U.S. score was 470, below the 490 average of the tested countries. The picture was brighter in Massachusetts, one of two states with its own scores this year, where the average math score was 500. Singapore, the highest scoring nation, had an average score of 564.

U.S. students overall did better in reading, with an average score of 497, and in science, with an average score of 496.

Compared to the average among countries that participated, a bigger share of U.S. students say they enjoy learning about science. More U.S. students also say they expect to have a career in science than the international average.