Chalkbeat

We don’t have to choose between academic recovery and social-emotional learning

2022-12-02T13:00:00+00:00

National test scores showing dramatic declines in student achievement have prompted some politicians and school board candidates to call for education to go “back to basics.” Now is the time to focus on core academic subjects, they say, not things like social-emotional learning.

As a former teacher and school principal, and as the mother of a third grader and sixth grader, I believe academic recovery is paramount. But any claim that suggests schools exclude a focus on social and emotional learning, or SEL, misses the real “basics” of student learning.

Dr. Aaliyah A. Samuel

I lead an organization that promotes social and emotional learning, and I often hear from people who see academics and SEL as a zero-sum game. Some of them believe it’s a choice between core academic subjects and attention to social-emotional skill-building, such as learning to manage emotions, make responsible and caring decisions, and show empathy for others.

From where I sit, I know the opposite is true. Independent studies have shown social and emotional learning to be a powerful tool for boosting academic achievement. But you don’t need researchers to tell you why this is the case. Any parent or teacher knows the basics of learning involve supportive relationships, joy, and skills like perseverance and effective communication.

With my younger son, I’ve seen firsthand that productive academic learning doesn’t happen unless students feel valued and heard in the classroom. Last year, he struggled socially and was teased by other children about his braids. Because he didn’t have a strong relationship with his teacher, he didn’t tell her. Had his classroom prioritized SEL alongside academics, I believe he would have felt empowered to ask for help. Instead, he said, he was just trying “not to be seen.”

Any parent or teacher can tell you the basics of learning involve supportive relationships, joy, and skills like perseverance and effective communication.

Now, as a third grader, my son is engaged and excited to learn. His teacher’s focus on social and emotional learning has helped him develop connections with educators and classmates. Not only does she teach them strategies for asking for help and building relationships, she makes connections to students’ interests, models kindness and empathy, and carves out time to support every child.

The pandemic has impacted education in ways we won’t fully understand for years. What is clear is that real recovery will require schools to help students engage, connect with content, set and achieve goals, and focus on learning. A recent survey from Pew Research found that 93% of parents said it’s important that schools teach their students skills such as respect, cooperation, perseverance, and empathy. That doesn’t mean they want SEL to replace math, English, and science. Rather they see SEL as I do: a prerequisite for academic success.

Similarly, district administrators also ranked mental health as a top priority in a recent poll. And research shows that academic activities that spark emotion or give students opportunities to interact socially with each other lead to deeper, longer-term learning.

Schools and families need a multi-pronged approach to address the pandemic-related losses kids have experienced. That includes a deep focus on academic learning as well as bringing joy back to schools and cultivating relationships between students and teachers. We have to get back to what makes school the fun and supportive learning environment that we know it can be. As a teacher myself, I know that students could care less about what you are presenting to them unless they trust the adult teaching it.

The question of whether or not academics are critical is not up for debate. The real question is how educators actually go about teaching academic content in a way that allows students to engage with it.

I’ve seen the benefits of social and emotional learning in real time. Recently, when my younger son had an opportunity to miss school for a day, he insisted on attending, saying: “Mom, Mrs. H says I’m the light of her day, so I have to go to school.”

Dr. Aaliyah A. Samuel is the CEO of the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning, or CASEL, a senior fellow at Harvard University’s Center on the Developing Child, and a former NWEA official.

‘This is something I can do now’: What Kamala Harris’ ascension means for girls of color

2021-01-19T23:26:42+00:00

As Kamala Harris becomes the first woman, the first African American, and the first person of South Asian descent to become U.S. vice president, many girls of color will be celebrating the multiple historic barriers coming down with a single oath.

In the days leading up to the inauguration of Joe Biden and Harris, Chalkbeat spoke with Black, brown, and Asian teenagers about the significance of this moment. They discussed the importance of having elected officials who look like them, wondered why it took so long to get here, and told us how they plan to hold the new administration accountable. These young women also shared their wide-ranging policy priorities, including COVID relief, combatting climate change, increasing the minimum wage, and defunding the police.

Their stories are interspersed with poetry by younger girls, and a performance of “Represent” by 16-year-old spoken-word artist Ife Martin of Detroit. “Do you feel that?” she asks. “The roar of change rumbling under our feet, under our All Star Chucks and church shoes. It’s hard to find but long overdue.”

Kellen Zeng, 17, Staten Island, NY

Senior, Staten Island Technical High School

I saw something on Twitter about all the vice presidents throughout the years. It’s all white men and then, all of the sudden, you see Kamala. I find that really inspiring.

I want to follow in her footsteps in a way. I’ve always had an interest in policy and advocacy and activism but I told myself: “No, you have to play it safe. You have to reach financial security.” And then there’s the whole idea that as a woman of color, you have to work twice as hard. But now, having a female vice president and seeing BIPOC women in office, I want to be able to pursue that path, too. I’d love to see the day that having a woman in office isn’t something to celebrate. It’s not a success story; it’s just a norm.

Kellen Zeng is a member of the nonprofit civic engagement organization YVote.

For now, there’s a lot of pressure on Biden and Harris during their first 100 days. What are they going to do about the pandemic? How are they going to help Americans who are currently unemployed? The economy is not doing the best right now, and that should be one of the priorities. Both of my parents were unemployed at the beginning of the pandemic. My dad helps out in his friends’ restaurants, and my mom has a beauty salon that wasn’t open for a long time. They are immigrants from China, and I had to help them apply for unemployment.

The most pressing thing right now is rolling back some of the damage done during the Trump presidency. A lot of LGBTQ rights were violated. I know that the fight isn’t over. Just because Biden and Harris won the election, it doesn’t mean America is great again.

Ife Martin, 16, Detroit, Michigan

Junior, West Bloomfield High School in West Bloomfield, Michigan

Ife Martin performs an original poem titled “Represent,” reflecting on Harris’ historic role. Ife is a member of InsideOut Literary Arts and the Mosaic Youth Theatre of Detroit. She is the winner of the 2021 National YoungArts Award in spoken word.

Ashton Mayo-Beavers, 18, Chattanooga, Tennessee

Freshman, Mercer University in Macon, Georgia

When I moved from Tennessee to Georgia to start college last fall, I was expecting, well, another version of Tennessee.

Growing up in Knoxville and Chattanooga, I saw policies that impact women’s health designed by men. I saw a lack of representation of Black women in government. I saw police brutality and inequitable justice systems.

Ashton Mayo-Beavers started college during the pandemic.

I still see many of those things in Georgia from my dorm room. But now, I also see Stacey Abrams. I see Kamala Harris. I see the importance of local elections, and that every single vote really does matter.

Fall of 2020 was a crazy time to start college. The COVID-19 pandemic meant that some of my classes were online and some were in person, and I had to navigate the tension of trying to focus on friends and classes while staying safe. As we were trying to prepare for our first final exams — and on top of the pandemic — there was this election. One of my professors called it the most important election of our time. For me, it was the first election I ever voted in.

On Election Day, which was more of an election month, we were told by older African American students that we shouldn’t go out. Even though Kamala Harris, a Black woman, was on the path to one of the most powerful positions in our nation, I, as a Black student, didn’t feel comfortable going to all-campus debate watch parties. I worried that the color of my skin would make me a target if tensions escalated.

Even now, I’m not sure I have processed how big it is that Kamala Harris is going to be so many firsts. For so long, I was waiting for the results to be official. I was waiting for the carpet to be dragged out from under us. It’s happened before.

No one is fully processing how big it is or how long it took. There already are so many great local leaders that are women of color, and that’s amazing. But the fact is, we will have a woman vice president who is a person of color that’s going to open the doors for so many people to envision themselves as our nation’s future.

Kimora Guy, Memphis, Tennessee

First grade, Power Center Academy Elementary School in Memphis

I can
I can do what she can do…
She went to a Black college.
I can too.

She wrote a book.
I can too.
Look! She’s running to be Vice President for the United States.
Can she do that?

Not only can she do it, but she has done it!!
So I can too!

Munaja Mehzabin, 17, Queens, New York

Senior, Academy of American Studies in Queens

Growing up South Asian, I saw brown actors and actresses while watching Bollywood movies with my parents. When it came to Hollywood films, Jasmine from “Aladdin” was the closest it came. Of course, when I was younger I didn’t think about representation, about not seeing people like me in TVs or movies. (The exceptions were side characters in stereotypical roles — a math whiz, or an owner of a gas station store.)

Munaja Mehzabin has critiqued Harris’ record as a prosecutor.

These days, there are more and varied roles for South Asians, and I’m extremely glad. But representation is about more than entertainment. Representation also matters when it comes to who is representing us in government.

Kamala Harris will be the first-ever South Asian vice president, even though that tends to go over people’s heads, and the first-ever African American vice president. She will also be the first-ever woman to be vice president. In this role, she is changing things for women of color. It is so important to see people who look like you make a change because it can push people to be “the next first.” Young girls can look to Kamala Harris and feel like it’s possible to have a seat in the White House. Sure, there will always be men who don’t think a woman is capable of an important job, but we must prove them wrong.

Even though Kamala Harris has accomplished something so extraordinary, she’s far from perfect when it comes to racial justice. She was previously a prosecutor, and has sometimes sided with the police. As California’s attorney general, her office fought to keep a man named George Gage behind bars even though there was evidence that he had been wrongly convicted. She also opposed a state bill that would have regulated the use of police body cameras.

As citizens, we have to hold our leaders accountable. We have to make sure they hear us. Vice President Kamala Harris will inspire others and hold open doors. I am extremely grateful for that. At the same time, I will not glorify her.

Brooklyn Cauley, 16, Rockwall, Texas

Sophomore, Rockwall High School

I live in a predominantly white community and attend a predominantly white school, where I’m a National Honor Society student and participate in several clubs. I’m the only Black girl and the only Black person on my robotics team. I used to mentor a younger robotics team, and I felt like I was showing others that Black girls — and girls in general — can excel in STEM. That’s a big, progressive step.

Brooklyn Cauley has mentored younger students who are interested in robotics.

In a political office, where there is not that much diversity, Kamala Harris’ win is a big thing. It shows that people are moving forward. It’s making a change. Our voices are being heard.

Biden talks about raising the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $15. This increase would bring so many people out of poverty in the U.S. This could help make so many Black communities better.

I also hope they get more vaccines out, and they actually focus on the coronavirus. [President Trump] made a joke out of it. I know a lot of kids at school don’t believe that the virus is dangerous. I’m also in the agriculture program at school, and a lot of the students tend to be big Trump supporters, which is fine. I’m not judging anyone based on their political views. We are required to wear masks to school, but a lot of students don’t keep it up over their nose. Some won’t even wear them at all when school staff is not around.

Biden’s message at the inauguration should be something like: I know the country hasn’t been the greatest this past year. I know we have had a lot of racial issues, but we can persevere. A lot of people are struggling financially with job losses, and some are struggling mentally. We can’t just break away and say, we hate this person or that person. We have to come together to fix these issues. They are not going to be resolved by violence or fighting with our neighbor. I believe we need to pray more.

Sharona Nagamuthu, 17, Queens, New York

Junior, Scholars Academy in Queens

When the election was called for Biden and Harris, I was sleeping because [since Election Day] I was staying up until ridiculous hours of the night, glued to my TV. I checked my phone at about 11 a.m., and all of my friends were texting me: “Oh my God. They won.” It was an instant sense of relief. It had been this whole week; it was this whole long process. I’d be in my classes online, and I’d have another tab with the news open just so I could keep myself updated. After I heard, I actually went back to sleep — that’s how relieved I was, that I could finally sleep.

Sharona Nagamuthu said the new administration comes as “a relief.”

It was a relief because it showed me that this state that we’re in right now hopefully won’t always continue to exist, and we can ultimately improve on our lives and — especially, as a person of color — that new policies can be enacted that will help me and many others.

I’m an immigrant from Guyana. My family immigrated to the U.S. when I was 2. [Through YVote], I’ve done a lot of research on immigration policies, and we know the Trump administration has enacted a lot of policies that have impacted immigrants negatively — the travel ban from some Middle Eastern countries and countries in Africa and also the construction of the southern border wall. I know the border wall has done a lot of environmental damage. To add onto that, I’d also like to see policies that combat climate change. I think it’s kind of ridiculous that you have people who don’t recognize that climate change is real when scientists are literally proving it, and you can see the impacts in our life.

Megan Davis, Memphis, Tennessee

Fourth grade, Power Center Academy Elementary School in Memphis

A Little Girl's Dream
Roses are red and violets are blue
The next Vice President is Black and she's a woman, too!
2020 has been hard, but also great.

I can't believe a woman is part of the Head of State.
This changes everything, history too.
Madam Kamala Harris, I want to be just like you.
The path you've set out for me and others means we can do anything,
if we help one another.

I'm proud to be Black and a young girl, too, so I can grow up and be just like you.

Melanie Gonzalez Castillo, 19, Newark, New Jersey

Freshman, Villanova University in Villanova, Pennsylvania

As a feminist, I am happy a woman is becoming vice president in the U.S. for the first time. This inspires me. Kamala Harris’ parents were immigrants to this country. I moved to New Jersey from Mexico when I was 14 years old. This gives me hope for me and for my future children.

Melanie Gonzalez Castillo says Kamala Harris’ rise gives her hope.

I have been watching old interviews with Kamala, and she said that DACA recipients — undocumented young people, brought to the U.S. as children — come here believing in the democracy of the United States, and it’s beautiful to see them trust in this democracy.

A lot of people don’t trust in this country right now.

With everything that happened in the Capitol this month, I’ve been thinking more about what it means to believe in democracy. Throughout history, a lot of negative things have happened in this country, but it is my second home and has given me much. Yet people from this nation are the ones tearing it apart.

It’s so disturbing to see what this has come to, but I do have a lot of hope for the future. I have hope because of my dad, who came to this country and works hard every day. He taught me how important the work ethic is when paired with honesty and positivity. I have hope when I think about my sister, who is about to graduate college with a psychology degree.

Even though there’s still a lot to be done, and many things we must change, I have hope when I think about the generations that will come after me. They won’t think of it as revolutionary to have a woman in the White House. I hope the new generation grows up in a world where they can see equality and opportunity as something normal — not something they have to tirelessly fight for. It is up to each of us to create that change.

Ama Russell, 17, Detroit

Senior, Cass Technical High School

When I heard Biden and Harris had won, I was with my 92-year-old grandma, so it was a really big deal. She didn’t think we’d have Barack Obama [in her lifetime], so it was special to share the moment with her.

Later that day, organizers in Detroit held a Count Every Vote action, celebrating that we got Trump out and gearing up to hold the Biden-Harris administration accountable. We were very excited because Detroit, and most importantly its Black voters, carried Michigan [for Biden].

Ama Russell says representation is important, but it’s not enough.

Holding the Biden-Harris administration accountable means they are centering Black people in their policy, making sure that people don’t think that just because we got Trump out that injustices are solved. We will put pressure on them to do more for environmental issues and more for social justice, that we are pushing them to defund the police and to push the envelope to liberate Black people. Representation is important, but it’s not enough.

Before Biden chose Kamala Harris, there was talk that he was going to pick a Black woman as his running mate. When my father announced it was Kamala, I was like, “Oh, yay,” even though I really wanted it to be my girl Stacey Abrams. It was Stacey Abrams who ultimately made it possible for Democrats to win back the Senate. I think it’s important to honor her and all of the Black organizers who made space for Kamala.

For young girls, like myself, Kamala will make them see themselves in American politics. It will make them feel like they belong, in some sense, and see that they can do this. This isn’t a “when pigs fly” kind of thing. This is something achievable, it’s attainable, and it’s not something that has to happen in the next century. This is something I can do now.

‘Brave spaces’ needed: How schools can foster meaningful conversations after the 2020 election

2020-12-15T17:20:38+00:00

While all 50 states require some form of instruction about civics and government, the nation’s public schools generally make little time for students to discuss issues at the heart of American democracy.

“It isn’t talked about enough at our school,” said Ommay Farah, a high school senior in Nashville, on the topic of citizenship and its rights and responsibilities.

Ommay joined educators and other students Monday to brainstorm how schools can foster meaningful classroom conversations in the wake of the most divisive presidential election in modern U.S. history. The online event was hosted by Chalkbeat and The Education Trust in Tennessee.

The panelists agreed that understanding the political and practical issues that divided America in 2020 is too critical to a functioning democracy to limit to a single high school civics course. Civics instruction, media literacy, and discussions about history and current events should be embedded across K-12 curriculum and instruction, they said.

But how exactly to do that can be almost as controversial as the political issues being debated across America.

Kat McRitchie, who teaches humanities at Crosstown High School in Memphis, said the goal should be to create a “brave space” to help students turn honest talk into constructive action. She cited numerous national resources to help.

“It’s happening in other states and places. There’s a movement for action civics,” McRitchie said.

Watch the discussion for ideas and resources on how to help students respectfully learn and grow together — and help educators feel equipped and empowered to lead those conversations. (Having trouble viewing the video on mobile? Go here).

The 2020 Election is a pivotal moment. How can educators and students foster meaningful conversation?
For many of Tennessee’s students, the 2020 election was the first memorable election that they voted in, volunteered for, or talked about with their peers and teachers. In the midst of such chaotic times – the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the tumultuous election, and the contention over the results – we want to hear directly from students and educators. There’s no set curriculum for how to talk about current events, especially in such a divisive political season – and some Tennessee students have had robust discussions in their classrooms while others have had little space for such conversations. How can educators and students foster meaningful dialogue right now? Join Chalkbeat and the Education Trust in Tennessee to hear directly from students and educators.
Posted by Chalkbeat Tennessee on Monday, December 14, 2020

Panel members are:

Trey Cunningham, senior at Haywood High School, Brownsville, Tenn.
Ommay Farah, senior at Hume-Fogg Academic Magnet High School, Nashville
Khadesha Gordon, student at the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga (co-moderator with Chalkbeat reporter Laura Faith Kebede)
Diarese George, founder and executive director of the Tennessee Educators of Color Alliance
Joey Hassell, superintendent of Haywood County Schools
Kat McRitchie, humanities teacher, Crosstown High School, Memphis

Two Jefferson counties embody how the college degree has become a political fault line

2020-11-17T21:51:21+00:00

In just a single generation, the college degree has become a major fault line in American politics.

Just 20 years ago, Al Gore and George W. Bush split the 100 most-educated counties in the nation. This year, Joe Biden won 83 of them. Donald Trump, meanwhile, won nine out of 10 of the least-educated counties — those where fewer than 16% of adults have a college degree.

Strong shifts in voting based on educational level are happening in nearly every state and in most counties. Take two counties with the same name: the Jefferson counties of Colorado and of Ohio.

Colorado’s Jefferson County has moved 26 points toward the Democrats in presidential elections since 2000. Here, 44% of residents 25 and older hold a bachelor’s degree, well above the national average of about 31%.

This Jefferson County sits on the western edge of the Denver metro area, touting itself as the “Gateway to the Rocky Mountains,” and is home to companies like Coors Brewing and Lockheed Martin. Its residents voted solidly for Bush in both 2000 and 2004. In 2008, the county went for Barack Obama and has voted for the Democrat in presidential elections ever since.

Contrast that with the Jefferson County of Ohio, which has swung 45 points toward Republicans over the past two decades. Just over 15% of its residents 25 and older have a bachelor’s degree, well below the national average.

The county, a former steel stronghold in eastern Ohio along the Ohio River, voted for Gore, John Kerry, and then Obama (once). Since then, it’s gone for Republicans.

The suburban mindset

Talk to people who live in these counties, and higher education doesn’t always leap to the forefront of the conversation about what’s changing. But you can quickly hear how it plays into all kinds of issues that shape the identity and politics of a place — what jobs are there to do, how much money can people earn, which generations are moving in and which ones are moving out.

In Colorado, the rhetoric of the Republican Party is now simply out of step with the suburban mindset, said State Rep. Colin Larson, a Republican who grew up in Jefferson County and now represents it.

His party’s stark, socially conservative positioning doesn’t play well here, he said, especially with his constituents who are 45 and younger. More late Generation Xers and millennials are now at stages in their lives where they’ve saved up enough money and are moving to the suburbs, said Larson, who is 33.

There’s a real generational shift on issues like gay rights and climate change. When he knocks on doors, he said, he regularly hears about those policies. People tell him they don’t plan to consider voting for a party that seems stuck in the past.

Here’s how a college education fits in, said Larson, who graduated from Colorado College and started an independent coffee shop before running for office:

People who are college educated “have more of a tendency to be movable in politics,” he said, “because they get outside of their communities more.”

Over just two decades, Jefferson County has gone from being the beating heart of Colorado’s Republican Party to being a nationally watched bellwether to being pretty reliably Democratic, said Eric Sondermann, a columnist for the news journal ColoradoPolitics.

Larson says he’s watched a “meteoric implosion” of his party in Jefferson County. Of the county’s seven representatives in the Colorado House, he’s now the only Republican.

Diminishing industries

In Ohio, Jefferson County was once dominated by industries like steel mills, paper mills, glass factories, and potteries. The prevalence of unions here helped drive the county’s past affiliation with Democrats, said Charles Green, a volunteer historian and genealogist at the Jefferson County Historical Association.

Now, those industries are gone.

When young people get out of high school, Green said, there are few jobs for them here if they don’t go to college. And if they do go to college, they don’t come back. They move to the bigger cities, places like Columbus and Cleveland.

There are a couple of major industries left — including Titanium Metals, up north in Toronto, and Barium & Chemicals, in Steubenville. Beyond that, he says, there are some satellite businesses and machine shops but nothing big like there used to be.

Green, who is 83, has lived in Jefferson County his whole life. He served in the U.S. Marines. He worked in quality control for many years at Titanium Metals, and he’s been volunteering with the historical association since 1997. Over the years he took some college courses — at Wittenberg University and at what used to be known as Jefferson County Technical Institute. And he studied metallurgy through the American Society of Metals. But he never completed a college degree.

He doesn’t always vote with the same party, he said. Both this year and four years ago, though, he went with Trump.

When asked about Jefferson County politics, Green first touted local history. The 19-room county museum where he gives tours showcases the famous people born here. There’s Dean Martin, there’s Dorothy Sloop (the song “Hang on Sloopy” is said to be about her). And then there’s one local legend, Green said, everyone here supports: Edwin McMasters Stanton, the war secretary under Abraham Lincoln.

As it happens, Stanton spent the first decades of his political life as a Democrat — before switching to become a Republican.

A version of this story originally appeared in Open Campus. Open Campus, a Chalkbeat partner, is a nonprofit news organization focused on higher education.

Teachers unions will have newfound influence in a Biden administration. Here’s how they might use it

2020-11-17T15:50:38+00:00

In his victory speech, President-elect Joe Biden said it was a “great day” for America’s educators because “one of your own” would be in the White House, referring to his wife, Jill Biden, a member of the country’s largest teachers union.

When Biden selected an education transition team, four of the 20 members worked for national teachers unions.

And among the names circulating for potential education secretary picks are two national teachers union leaders: Lily Eskelsen García, who recently headed the National Education Association, and Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers.

No matter who ends up in the top job, teachers and their unions are poised to help shape the Biden administration’s approach to federal education policy.

“Joe and I will never forget what you did for us,” Jill Biden told the heads of the NEA and the AFT on Monday as she thanked them for their members’ support during the election. “Joe and Kamala will not only listen to you, they’re going to make sure that your voices are leading this movement. Educators, this is our moment.”

What that moment looks like, and where that influence might be felt most clearly, are the key questions now.

Had the pandemic not upended this last school year, the answer might have been on issues like big funding boosts for public schools serving low-income students and a tougher stance on charter schools. Those union-aligned promises were a part of Biden’s campaign platform.

Now, though, it’s clear that the next education secretary — union leader or not — will spend much of their initial time dealing with the pandemic. That puts the details of a future pandemic aid package front and center, along with unions’ hopes that it could insulate educators from layoffs and even add to their ranks.

Teachers unions, congressional Democrats, and the incoming Biden administration align on wanting more money to help K-12 schools reopen and aid for state governments, which could be used to buoy school district budgets and prevent educator layoffs. Already, The Pew Charitable Trusts estimates nearly 670,000 public school staffers have lost their jobs during the pandemic, though many of those losses may be temporary.

“They’re going to want a quick infusion of funds, in particular to save educators’ jobs,” said Bradley Marianno, an assistant professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas who studies teachers unions. (There is evidence that this would be good for the broader economy, too.)

Biden’s campaign has also said coronavirus relief aid could be used to hire more teachers to make class sizes smaller during the pandemic — a key way to encourage social distancing — and to help students with mental health needs.

What ultimately happens, though, is likely to depend on control of the Senate, which now hinges on two runoff elections in Georgia. Negotiations over that legislation have dragged on for months, and Republicans generally don’t support a large sum going to state governments.

Teachers unions also could make their influence felt in the details of any eventual law.

The CARES Act, the last big comprehensive package that passed in March, set aside just over $13 billion specifically to help K-12 schools. School districts could spend that on staff salaries or things like technology, cleaning supplies, and building improvements. This time around, teachers unions could pressure the Biden administration to insist on “clear parameters” around how much should be spent on educator salaries, Marianno said.

A Biden education department also could provide written guidance to states about how to spend new dollars in a way that’s more favorable to teachers and their unions. DeVos, notably, told governors they likely couldn’t give any of their $3 billion in CARES Act dollars to teachers unions.

And there are other ways teachers want to influence the Biden administration’s pandemic response. Teacher unions will likely continue to push for a more cautious approach to reopening schools, with the education department offering support for school districts that are choosing to stay remote — a decision Education Secretary Betsy DeVos (and public health experts, in some cases) has repeatedly criticized.

“The unions have been pretty clear that they don’t want schools to reopen until it can be very safe to do so,” said Katharine Strunk, an education policy professor at Michigan State University. “If we do have someone [as education secretary] with a strong union background, we might see the school reopening conversation take a very different shape.”

Other parts of Biden’s education agenda will likely be difficult to advance if Democrats lack control of both houses of Congress. How much influence unions have, then, could depend on whether the Biden administration is able to tie its pre-COVID priorities to pandemic relief.

Before the pandemic hit, one of Biden’s biggest education campaign proposals was a pledge to triple Title I funding for schools with greater shares of students from low-income families. He proposed that some of that new money could be used to raise teacher pay in high-poverty schools.

If Republicans control the Senate, they likely wouldn’t go along with a big spending boost like that, but they may accept some modest increases, said Michael Petrilli, the president of the Fordham Institute, a conservative think tank.

“There’s going to be a lot of competing priorities and any sort of big, transformative education law that would create longer-lasting funding increases is probably not going to be forthcoming right away because most of the attention is going to go to the coronavirus,” said Jon Shelton, an associate professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, who wrote a book about teachers unions.

But another avenue for raising teacher pay could be through addressing learning loss in the months to come. In his plans, Biden has said there’s a need to improve remote learning and help students catch up after missing instruction during the pandemic, but he hasn’t spelled out details yet.

“We’re hearing from teachers that they would be excited about substantial increases in teacher pay that go along with a longer day and/or a longer school year to help students recover from this missed time,” said Evan Stone, the co-CEO of Educators for Excellence, a group that pushes to include teacher voice in education policies.

Another area to watch is testing. On the campaign trail, Biden criticized high-stakes testing, echoing the concerns of teachers unions. DeVos allowed states to cancel state standardized tests this year, and Biden’s education secretary will have to decide whether or not to do that for a second time.

Teachers unions may have a “window” to have a larger debate about the value of those tests, said Strunk, of Michigan State.

Union leaders are already pressuring the Biden administration to cancel state tests again.

“Of course you’re not going to impose the testing program that has existed over the last several years, because that’s unfair,” Becky Pringle, the head of the NEA, said recently. “Do we explicitly articulate that in our priorities? Yes.”

But many civil rights groups and others support keeping the tests as a way to document opportunity gaps between students, which could be especially important during the pandemic. If the Biden administration doesn’t grant blanket testing waivers, teachers unions may seek to ensure that state tests aren’t tied to teacher evaluations and school ratings.

“There might be a continued push to make sure that testing isn’t used to hold any type of accountability pressure upon teachers, but is instead used as a tool to guide instruction and focus of priorities and resources,” Marianno said.

Charter schools are likely to be another pressure point, though many observers agree that issue is likely to go on the back burner for now. On the campaign trail, Biden said he would seek to prevent federal funds from going to for-profit operators, but he hasn’t said what he intends to do with the federal grant program that funds charter school expansion.

Charter schools are still popular within parts of the Democratic party, especially among Black and Latino parents. Teachers unions may press Biden to spend less on the expansion of charter schools, or to put stipulations on how that money can be spent, but the administration may want to avoid a contentious fight on that front.

Where teachers unions definitely stand to gain from the Biden administration is from a new education secretary who is likely to strike a more positive tone about public school educators than DeVos. Biden has pledged his education secretary will have experience teaching in a public school.

“That is both symbolically important and it is really important to change the relationship between the federal government and teachers, which right now is caustic and antagonistic,” Stone, of Educators for Excellence, said. “They could shine a light on the amazing work that educators are doing in a way that builds some positivity at a time when there is just a lot of negativity and fear.”

Biden has said his education department will be “teacher-oriented” and that policy will flow “from the teachers up,” rather than “from the top down.”

Teachers union leaders, for their part, aren’t worried about facing public backlash because of their newfound influence. Pringle recently told the New York Times she knew Biden would “take the slings and arrows for being ‘too close’” to the teachers unions, but that Biden will “be able to say, ‘Not only did they help me get elected, they help me lead in a bold way.’”

Many educators hope the new education secretary’s classroom teaching experience will make them more likely to seek out teachers’ opinions.

That’s happened in the past. During the Obama administration — which had often-tense relationships with teachers unions — teachers served as “ambassadors,” according to Deborah Delisle, who was the assistant secretary of elementary and secondary education for three years under Obama and is now the president and CEO of the Alliance for Excellent Education, an advocacy group.

During that time, she said, the teacher ambassadors had offices on the same floor as the education secretary and often weighed in on policy during meetings.

“For educators, the main goal is to always be at the table,” said Marisol Garcia, the vice president of NEA’s Arizona state teachers union, who helped advise the Biden campaign as one of the leaders of Educators for Biden. “A lot of times we’re at the secondary table, or in the back row.”

IPS charter supporters outspend and repel opponents

2020-11-13T00:22:43+00:00

Four years ago, education advocate Elizabeth Gore won a surprise victory in the Indianapolis Public Schools board race, defeating two people, including a far better-financed incumbent backed by supporters of school choice.

In the next election, two other challengers who were skeptical of partnerships with charter schools seized board seats, raising the profile of their viewpoints.

But last week’s election dashed critics’ hopes to claim control of the seven-member school board.

Gore and three other candidates supported by the teachers union lost, solidifying board support for dramatic changes in the district, including controversial partnerships with charter schools.

As the dust settles on the contentious battle for control of the district, there is deep disagreement about what to make of the results. Supporters of the four winners say the victories show that voters are happy with the direction of the district. Those who lost the race, however, say that the election came down to money, where they had a significant disadvantage.

The starkest funding gap was in the at-large race where Gore lost to newcomer Kenneth Allen. A Gary native and father of school-age children, Allen raised over $174,000 — the most money for an IPS board seat in recent memory. About 90% came from political action committees that are friendly to school choice.

Even though Gore — who raised about $22,000 primarily from the state teachers union PAC — has seen school board campaigns escalate spending in recent years, the flood of money into the IPS race stunned her.

“I’m speechless,” said Gore, who lost the race by about 2 percentage points. Gore believes that candidates who are skeptical of the direction of the district are so vastly outspent they have little chance of claiming seats.

“When you add it all up,” Gore said, “the power of money at this point is the thing that seems to be working.”

Allen declined an interview request from Chalkbeat, saying that he needed to focus on work and family after the campaign.

About 37% of IPS students now attend innovation schools, which are managed by outside charter or nonprofit operators. Those schools are controversial in part because teachers are not represented by the union and they are not directly controlled by the administration.

Some who backed the winners downplay the role of money. Justin Ohlemiller, executive director of Stand for Children Indiana which runs a PAC that spent at least $140,000 on the race according to the candidate reports, instead credited voters who learned about the issues and then supported the changes in the district.

It takes money to pay for outreach, such as mailers and text messages to voters telling them about candidates. In a race where many voters are not familiar with the candidates or issues, Ohlemiller argues that it is crucial to inform them.

“I don’t buy into the premises that spending has anything to do with the outcome,” Ohlemiller said. “End of the day, voters make decisions. ... That decision should be honored.”

Sashah Robertson, an IPS parent who was on the Stand committee that chose candidates to endorse, didn’t realize how much money was spent on the election. But she dismissed the idea that the seats were bought.

The group worked hard to research and pick candidates to endorse and to tell thousands of parents about their choices, Robertson said. “I just want the best for our kids.”

Incumbent Diane Arnold, who defeated a challenger to win reelection in District 4, said that it takes more than money to win a board seat. During the campaign, she made 500 phone calls and walked over 20 miles going door to door to meet voters and hand out flyers.

Arnold pointed to prior candidates who won despite funding deficits. But she was also surprised at the surge in fundraising this election, and she raised concerns about the “optics” of spending so much on the election.

“I think they probably need to reevaluate what they’re doing and see if it’s too much,” said Arnold, referring RISE Indy, a newly formed PAC funded by national school choice advocates that endorsed Arnold and the other winning candidates.

RISE Indy did not respond to interview requests.

Over the last eight years, the battle for control of IPS has become contentious and politicized, with candidates backed by allies of charter schools facing off against candidates backed by the teachers union.

The ideological split did not dominate either side’s campaign, and campaign literature largely didn’t mention charter schools. Many voters may not have been aware of the ideological debate or what is going on in IPS schools. Others likely voted based on factors like who they trust or who friends recommend.

Shanta Williams chose a candidate who was supported by the union and one backed by charter-friendly PACs. The mother of a high schooler, Williams moved to the district four months ago. When it came time to cast her ballot for school board members, she voted for incumbents — Diane Arnold and Elizabeth Gore — because she heard IPS was getting better.

“I don’t think your common people know anything about innovation schools,” Arnold said.

The vigorous campaigns for board seats help spread information among voters and give them access to information, Arnold said. People “at least have the opportunity to be more informed than in the other surrounding districts.”

Incumbent Venita Moore, who was backed by RISE and Stand, won re-election with 79% of the vote, the most decisive margin in the race. Another RISE-supported candidate, newcomer Will Pritchard, handily won the District 1 seat on the east side.

Moore believes that voters supported her because they see her as independent and sincere, she said. But she also argued that the success of the four candidates who support the current direction of the district shows that “more people are benefiting from the decisions that we’re making than are not.”

All four defeated candidates were backed by the IPS Community Coalition, a group that’s consistently critical of the current administration. Coalition leader Jim Sheurich blamed the loss on outside money that poured in.

In 2018, two coalition-backed candidates won their uphill battle because many voters were angry that the district had recently closed several high schools, Scheurich said.

If IPS closes more schools, as is widely anticipated, “we will be back in the same situation because that’s going to upset a ton of people,” he said.

Christina Smith, who helped found the coalition and ran against Arnold to represent District 4, said supporters of partnerships with charter schools invested heavily in this race because they lost two seats in 2018.

“They realized that if they didn’t step up their game, that they would lose again,” said Smith, an activist and parent. Smith, who lost by about 4 points, said she was encouraged that two races were close despite the fact she and her allies raised significantly less than their opponents.

While the coalition’s candidates were defeated, the fight for control of the district is not over, Smith said.

That’s one thing she and Arnold agree on.

Charter allies sweep IPS school board election to win four seats

2020-11-06T14:35:11+00:00

Candidates favoring charters and school choice claimed a sweeping victory in the Indianapolis Public Schools election, winning all four seats on the ballot when county officials largely finished tallying votes Thursday.

In the at-large race, Kenneth Allen eked out a victory over incumbent Elizabeth Gore with 40% of the vote. Gore garnered 38% of the vote, with the remainder going to Kendra McKnight (17%) and Ellis Noto (5%).

In another close contest, incumbent Diane Arnold held on to her seat with 52% of the vote, beating challenger Christina Smith. Arnold represents District 4, the west and south side of the school system.

Marion County took more than two days to count the results because of the large numbers of mail-in and early ballots. As a result, the winner of those close contests didn’t emerge until late Thursday, when fewer than 100 votes remained to be counted.

Two other candidates easily sailed to victory. Incumbent Venita Moore reclaimed a seat representing District 2, on the north east side of the district, with 79% of the vote. Newcomer Will Pritchard won 63% of the vote to represent District 1, the east side.

The four winners will join a seven-member board that sets the priorities and direction of the 31,000-student district. The board faces a host of challenges, including how to cut the district’s spending, how to fulfill its commitment to racial equity, and how to stem the learning loss wrought by school closures during the pandemic.

The victories in the hard-fought campaigns all but ensure that the district will expand partnerships with charter schools. The strategy has won it attention from national observers and advocates for “portfolio” districts, where the central office runs its own schools and also oversees the quality of independently managed schools.

Charter-friendly political action committees invested heavily in the IPS board election, and the four winning candidates raised over $390,000 combined — nearly 10 times as much as their opponents did.

Two incumbents and a Michigan legislator win tight Detroit school board race

2020-11-05T22:56:16+00:00

The incumbents reelected to the Detroit school board say they’re ready to get back to the difficult work of transforming a school system that has struggled for years with low academic achievement.

But they’ll do that work without Iris Taylor, the school board president since 2017 who lost her reelection bid. The new president will be chosen in early 2021.

Board members Sonya Mays and Misha Stallworth were the top two vote-getters in the election, which had 14 people running for three open seats. Sherry Gay-Dagnogo, a current state lawmaker, won the third seat. She’s a familiar face to the district as a former teacher.

Mays and Stallworth said their reelection is a sign that Detroiters support the direction of the district’s reform efforts.

“The district still has a long way to go before our community can claim it as a fully reformed school system, and I am excited to have another term to continue the important work of rebuilding for our students,” Mays said in a statement.

The district’s toughest challenges ahead include addressing the safety concerns of students and staff working inside school buildings, combating rising chronic absenteeism, curbing the effects of pandemic learning loss, and helping students adapt to the difficulties of remote learning.

Stallworth said she is humbled that so many people voted for her.

“I ran for re-election to continue serving Detroit, our families and children,” Stallworth said in a statement. “There’s a lot more work to do to build an excellent school district. I’m grateful that the community sees the progress we’ve made so far and believes in me to continue it.”

In addition to the incumbents and Gay-Dagnogo, the field of candidates included retired educators, community activists, and several former school board members.

None of those former board members — all of whom served during the years the district was overseen by a state-appointed emergency manager — garnered enough votes to be in contention. That included LaMar Lemmons, who served during emergency management and again for two years after the district emerged from state control.

Gay-Dagnogo said she’s excited for the opportunity to return to what she loves most: education.

“Providing our young people with quality education is part of my theory of change,” she said.

“If we can improve the academic trajectory of our young people ... we’ll have more children able to thrive and be good citizens.”

She said she looks forward to working with current board members and district Superintendent Nikolai Vitti. She said she has positive relationships with many of the board members.

“Everybody won’t have the same views or ideology, but I intend to bring my voice as a policymaker and a former DPS teacher to the table to advance moving our district forward,” she said.

Mays currently is the board’s treasurer and Stallworth is the secretary. Taylor, who has been the board president since 2017, lost her reelection bid despite support from Mayor Mike Duggan and donations from top business and community leaders.

In her statement. Taylor said she was grateful for her time serving on the board and working with Vitti.

“I feel the district has a strong plan and leadership team in place to continue to strengthen the academic achievement goals for each student. I look forward to transitioning this work and continue to support as a volunteer in any way possible to ensure a seamless move forward,” Taylor said.

The top three vote-getters will take office in January and will serve on the board until 2024.

The school board approves budgets and establishes policies for the state’s largest school district, which serves nearly 50,000 students. Chief among its duties: The board will decide whether it’s safe to continue holding in-person classes if rates of positive coronavirus cases increase. Michigan school boards must reapprove their reopening plans every month, a requirement under a recent bipartisan legislative deal.

The election comes as the Detroit district navigates the obstacles of an unprecedented school year during the pandemic. School officials project an enrollment decline of about 3,000 students and rising chronic absenteeism. Education experts warn that students may have substantial learning loss due to the shift to remote instruction. And virtual learning remains a struggle for students and teachers who’ve complained of too much screen time, which may be eroding social and emotional health and wellness.

Last week, the Detroit Financial Review Commission approved a waiver to release the Detroit district from financial oversight after years of state control.

‘I couldn’t sleep last night’: Newark teachers help students manage post-election anxiety

2020-11-05T19:46:57+00:00

“Patience” is the word they keep hearing.

But for many Newark students, like millions of other Americans nervously awaiting the outcome of the too-close-to-call presidential election, patience has been hard to muster. So some teachers spent time Wednesday helping students process the election’s evolving outcome and their own raw emotions.

“They’re just really supportive with the situation,” Tara Johnson, a senior at University High School, said Wednesday. “They know what we’re going through.”

Newark schools geared up to the election by helping register voters and urging 18-year-old students to cast ballots. Teachers also taught students about the voting process and warned them about misinformation and this election’s uncertain timeline.

Tara Johnson is a senior at University High School and president of the student government association.

Yet there’s only so much educators could do to prepare students for such an unprecedented election, or ease their anxiety about a divisive presidential race occurring during a pandemic and on the heels of mass protests against anti-Black racism and police violence. For many Newark students, who are mostly Black or Hispanic, the outcome of this election feels especially consequential.

“I couldn’t sleep last night,” said Johnson, who is University’s student body president. “I was so anxious to see who was in the lead and kept refreshing my feed.”

At Science Park High School, history and sociology teacher Branden Rippey reviewed a map of electoral college votes with his students Wednesday, explaining how neither candidate had secured enough votes yet to clinch the election. Then he answered student questions: Why are there only two major political parties? Are there any actual problems with mail-in voting? What happens if President Trump refuses to leave office?

With the president and his supporters spreading misinformation, it’s important for students to get accurate information about the voting process and to critically evaluate what they read and hear about the election, Rippey said.

“There’s a war on truth in this country,” he said, “and we need to be clear that some people are consciously trying to confuse and manipulate Americans.”

Hafsah Dauda’s father was proud to vote in Tuesday’s election.

At TEAM Academy charter school, social studies teacher Heike Domine paused a unit on ancient history the week before the election. Instead, she taught her sixth graders about the history of voting rights in the United States, from the disenfranchisement of Black people to modern forms of voter suppression. She also tried to manage their expectations.

“I want them to be OK with the fact that they’re not going to know the results for a really long time,” Domine said on Election Day.

Still, by Wednesday, the students were anxious to know the results. They understood that the stakes are high.

Student Hafsah Dauda was concerned about low-income Americans, especially essential workers, and believed that a Joe Biden presidency could raise their wages. Her classmate, Abdul Haq-Adome, was thinking about how to repair the U.S. economy and safely reopen businesses and schools such as his own, which has been shuttered since March.

Sixth-grader Abdul Haq-Adome would appreciate a plan from the next president to fight COVID-19.

Abdul had read that President Trump didn’t have a clear plan for managing the pandemic, which didn’t exactly fill Abdul with confidence.

“I’m really hoping that, whichever person is picked to be the president,” he said, “that instead of just sitting there and hoping COVID-19 will eventually go away, they will actually have a plan to fight the virus.”

Before the election, some of Domine’s students had questioned whether voting really matters. Domine responded that it’s understandable why some people grow frustrated with the political system, especially Black Americans, who have never had to stop fighting for their rights. Yet, she said, people who withdraw from the democratic process “lose their opportunity to share their voice.”

That rang true to Hafsah, whose father voted in the election.

“He felt like it’s an important part of his life to vote because he thinks it might change the whole society,” she said. “If you don’t vote, that means that you’re not speaking for yourself.”

Back at University High School, eighth-grader Mia Jones had also prepped for the election. She’d watched a documentary about voter suppression, and discussed the importance of voting with her parents. Yet she was still feeling jittery on Wednesday.

“I’m kind of anxious,” she said. “I just need some, like, stability and clarity on the election right now.”

The presidential campaign had been stressful enough. Mia, who is a member of her school’s debate team, was dismayed by what she saw during the first debate.

“It was really chaotic, nobody could get their point across,” she said. “You couldn’t evaluate what they were saying, so there really wasn’t a debate.”

Still, Mia has kept her faith in the electoral process. She wants justice for Black Americans, women, and LGBTQ people. In a few years, she’ll let that be known at the ballot box.

“I have all these opinions,” she said, “and I can’t wait to vote so I can put my voice out there and make it be heard.”

Democrats maintain 6-2 edge on Michigan school board

2020-11-05T17:56:04+00:00

Two Democrats won seats on the state board of education Tuesday, maintaining the party’s 6 to 2 edge on the panel that shapes Michigan’s learning standards and oversees the state education bureaucracy.

Ellen Cogen Lipton and Jason Strayhorn filled the two open seats on the eight-member board. Democrats have controlled the panel for most of the last two decades.

Lipton won 2,456,899 votes, or 24.5%, while Strayhorn earned 2,353,817 votes, or 23.5%, edging out their Republican challengers in a tight race. Rural Antrim County was the only county that hadn’t reported election results as of Thursday morning, but its votes won’t be enough to change the outcome.

Lipton, a Democrat, is an attorney who holds a bachelor’s degree from Williams College and a law degree from Harvard Law School. She served as a Michigan state representative for six years. Lipton says the state should provide more funding to disadvantaged students, deemphasize standardized tests as a measure of school quality, and increase regulation on for-profit charter schools. (The board does not directly make school funding decisions, but advises the Legislature on the state education budget.)

“We need to give a lot more autonomy to teachers to do what they were professionally trained to do, which is to teach students,” she said, adding “teachers spend more time on standardized testing and we are not letting them really deliver high quality instruction.”

Strayhorn, a Democrat, is a licensed real estate broker and Michigan State Football analyst for Fox Sports. He holds a bachelor’s degree from Michigan State University.

He is critical of Michigan’s read-or-flunk law, which would hold back third graders who score too low on standardized reading tests, and says the state should deemphasize standardized tests.

“Students in impoverished areas, including inner city and rural districts along with special needs students, require more funding,” he said. “We need to educate them on the same level as more affluent suburbs.”

The state board’s main functions are to establish policy, set standards, and hire and oversee the state superintendent, who in turn oversees the Michigan Department of Education.

Many key state education policies, including those related to funding, testing, and teacher preparation, are made by state lawmakers, not the state board.

The Republican candidates were Tami Carlone and Michelle Frederick. The two Democratic incumbents, Michelle Fecteau and Lupe Ramos-Montigny, did not run for reelection.

Minor party candidates were Bill Hall and Richard A. Hewer, Libertarian Party; Karen Adams and Douglas Levesque, U.S. Taxpayers Party; Mary Anne Hering and Hali McEachern, Working Class Party; and Tom Mair, Green Party.

Incumbents and Michigan lawmaker in battle for top spots in Detroit school board race

2020-11-05T02:01:26+00:00

The race for three open seats on the Detroit school board was still tight Wednesday night, with the three incumbents and one challenger leading a field of 14 candidates.

At 7:03 p.m., the top four vote-getters in the DPSCD board race were Sonya Mays with 66,836 votes, Misha Stallworth with 63,981 votes, Sherry Gay-Dagnogo with 51,499 votes, and Iris Taylor with 49,769 votes.

Final results likely won’t be available until late Wednesday evening. The city clerk’s web site showed more than half of the precincts had not been fully reported.

This is where things stood with the candidates Wednesday night.

Richard Carl Clement, 14,908
Sherry Gay-Dagnogo, 51,499
Bessie Lee Harris, 36,016
Elena Herrada, 19,253
Zsa Zsa Chantel Hubbard, 18,597
Jermain Jones, 21,687
LaMar Lemmons, 37,640
Terrance Lemmons, 14,659
Sonya Mays, 66,836
Ida Short, 30,018
Chico Frank Sorrell, 10,939
Misha Stallworth, 63,981
Iris Taylor, 49,769
John Telford, 14,992

Mays, Stallworth, and Taylor are the incumbents. Gay-Dagnogo is a current state representative.

The top three vote-getters will take office in January, and will serve on the board until 2024.

Fourteen candidates are competing for three, four-year spots. Challenging the incumbents is a field that includes retired educators, community activists, and former school board members. The three incumbents are running as “The Achievement” slate and are backed by donations from some of the city’s high-powered political and business leaders.

The election comes as the Detroit district navigates the obstacles of an unprecedented school year in the era of pandemic learning. School officials project an enrollment decline of about 3,000 students and rising chronic absenteeism. Education experts warn that students may have substantial learning loss due to the shift to remote instruction. And virtual learning remains a struggle for students and teachers who’ve complained of too much screen time, which may be eroding overall social and emotional health and wellness.

The stakes are high. The school board approves budgets and establishes policies for the state’s largest school district, which serves nearly 50,000 students. Chief among its duties: The board will decide whether it’s safe to continue holding in-person classes if rates of positive coronavirus cases increase. School boards must reapprove their reopening plans every month, a requirement under a recent bi-partisan legislative deal.

Last week, the Detroit Financial Review Commission approved a waiver to release the Detroit district from financial oversight after years of state control.

This story will be updated as more votes are counted.

Except for ousting one fierce voucher advocate, Tennessee voters stick with their legislature

2020-11-04T23:40:04+00:00

While nobody expected a sea change in Tennessee’s GOP-dominated legislature, this year’s election mostly disappointed Democrats’ hopes of increasing their influence on big issues like education.

Republicans will comfortably keep control of the House and Senate as lawmakers are expected to revisit teacher pay, literacy, and other education matters that were abruptly paused when the coronavirus pandemic hit this spring. In recent years, Democrats have called for significant funding increases for K-12 education.

Campaign issues that Democrats hoped to capitalize on — like reopening schools safely and a controversial school voucher law that’s been overturned in court — didn’t seem to have much sway with voters consumed with the presidential race.

“I think Trump vs. Biden sucked all of the air out of Election Day,” Sen. Raumesh Akbari, a Memphis Democrat who wasn’t up for reelection, said on Wednesday. “It just overshadowed a lot of the issues that normally would be in play.”

GOP leaders had a different take on why Tennessee voters will return them to the Capitol with supermajority advantages of 72-23 in the House and 27-6 in the Senate.

“They like what the Republican Party has accomplished for our state and they overwhelmingly want to keep going in that direction,” said Rep. Jeremy Faison, chairman of the House Republican caucus.

One bright spot for Democrats was Torrey Harris, a Memphis human resources professional who trounced Rep. John DeBerry, an ardent voucher supporter who has served in the legislature since 1994 and ran this year as an independent.

From left: Democrat Torrey Harris defeated incumbent Rep. John DeBerry for a legislative seat that represents Memphis.

DeBerry was a Democrat in 2019 when he was the only member of his party who voted for Gov. Bill Lee’s education savings account plan that barely passed out of the House. Soon after, he received a “champion of choice” award from the pro-voucher Tennessee Federation for Children for his support of policies that give taxpayer money to parents wanting to send their children to private schools. But in April, Democrats ousted him from their state party for consistently siding with the GOP on issues like vouchers and abortion.

Harris, who won this year’s Democratic primary, portrayed DeBerry as out of touch with his constituents and pledged to advocate for public education, not privatization of education services. He was aided by a $17,000 donation from the state’s largest teachers organization, the Tennessee Education Association. DeBerry, a minister who said parents need more education choices for their children, got a $10,000 contribution from the Tennessee Federation for Children.

The upended voucher law was a touchy election-year subject and contributed to losses by several East Tennessee lawmakers in their GOP primary races.

But in the general election, except for DeBerry, the issue didn’t derail other high-profile incumbents who helped pass the bill.

Rep. Mark White, a Memphis Republican who voted for vouchers and presided over debate as chairman of the House Education Committee, defeated Democrat Jerri Green, an attorney and political newcomer who opposed the policy.

Rep. Mark White celebrates his election victory Tuesday with his wife, Kathy.

White said Wednesday the election took on much broader implications, especially as students, families, and teachers deal with the strain of learning and teaching during a public health emergency.

“That’s what’s on the minds of a lot of voters,” said White, who expects to continue chairing his chamber’s education committee. “But I think they also looked at the hard work I’ve done for the past 11 years in the legislature and were willing to hang with me, whether it’s because of education or economic development.”

His challenger, Green, was seeking to become the only mother of school-age children serving in the legislature

“Public education was the thing I heard most about from voters, and I hope Chairman White heard their voices loud and clear,” said the former public defender and mom to three children.

In Middle Tennessee, former House Speaker Glen Casada got more than 60% of the vote against two opponents in Williamson County, even though he strong-armed the voucher bill through the House and later resigned from his leadership post over a scandal involving racist and sexist texts.

In East Tennessee, Knoxville Republican Rep. Jason Zachary, who changed his voucher vote to break a tie and advance the bill out of the House for the first time ever, defeated Democrat Justin Davis.

Also retaining their seats were several freshmen GOP lawmakers who supported the governor’s education savings account plan — Charlie Baum of Murfreesboro, Jerome Moon of Maryville, and Chris Hurt of Halls — in defiance of their local school boards who opposed it.

“These guys really stuck their necks out on that vote, and plenty of people thought there would be ramifications on Election Day. That just didn’t happen,” said Shaka Mitchell, who leads the Tennessee Federation for Children.

His pro-voucher group contributed about $300,000 to legislative candidates across the state.

Among them were Republicans John Gillespie in suburban Shelby County and Eddie Mannis in Knoxville.

Gillespie narrowly defeated Democrat Gabby Salinas for the seat vacated by Rep. Jim Coley, a Bartlett Republican and retired school teacher who opposed vouchers.

Mannis, an unsuccessful candidate for Knoxville mayor last year, defeated Democratic attorney Virginia Couch and will succeed retiring Rep. Martin Daniel, a Republican who chaired the joint Government Operations Committee.

Also of note from Tuesday’s races: Retiring Senate Education Committee Chairman Dolores Gresham will be succeeded by fellow Republican Page Walley, a psychologist who is former commissioner of the Tennessee Department of Children’s Services and also served five terms in the House. Walley will represent eight mostly rural counties in southwest Tennessee.

Colorado voters approve Gallagher repeal, preserve local school funding

2020-11-04T19:45:10+00:00

Colorado voters gave strong approval to a constitutional change that preserves local school funding and spares the state budget a massive new obligation.

With more than 2.7 million votes counted, Amendment B received more than 57% of the vote. In approving Amendment B and repealing the Gallagher Amendment, voters headed off a fiscal crisis for schools but removed protections from homeowners.

“Having the Gallagher repeal pass takes a lot of pressure off the state for school finance and for backfilling [local district budgets],” said Tracie Rainey, director of the Colorado School Finance Project. Property tax revenue won’t decline dramatically. “That helps next year, and it helps into the future.”

At the same time, voters approved an income tax cut that will result in reduced state revenue and appeared likely to make it harder for lawmakers to establish new fees. Education advocates say the passage of Propositions 116 and 117 will make an already tight budget situation more challenging.

Voters approved Proposition 116 by a similar margin as the Gallagher repeal, while Proposition 117 had a narrower but steady lead.

“We still have a lot of work to do as Coloradans to get to that structural fix where we can say through our budget that we value and support public education,” said Amie Baca-Oehlert, president of the Colorado Education Association, the state’s largest teachers union.

Michael Fields, executive director of the conservative group Colorado Rising State Action, which opposed Amendment B and backed Propositions 116 and 117, said the split votes create an “offset,” with school districts avoiding a hit even as state government will be more constrained. He downplayed concerns that schools funding would be affected.

“I’m not worried the governor and the legislature won’t prioritize education,” he said.

The Gallagher Amendment was a 1982 state constitutional provision that determined what share of property taxes were paid by residential and commercial property owners, respectively.

Over time, this ratio, which is based on statewide averages, has driven down property tax collections for rural school districts, fire districts, hospital districts and other taxing entities. Commercial property owners now pay taxes on a much larger percentage of their property value than do homeowners, and the state has had to cover a larger share of school funding. These were the problems that a bipartisan group of lawmakers wanted to address by placing Amendment B on the ballot.

Colorado’s school finance system requires the state to make up whatever money is not covered by local taxes. Every year, growing education costs crowd out other needs in the state budget, from transportation to human services to higher education. And even then, lawmakers can’t meet their constitutional obligations for school funding, instead holding back money every year.

This problem would have gotten dramatically worse if Amendment B had failed.

Last year, lawmakers slashed spending in response to expected revenue shortfalls due to the pandemic. Gov. Jared Polis on Monday introduced a proposed budget for 2021-22 that would restore many of those cuts. He believes the state can afford to do so because the economic downturn has been less severe than anticipated.

The passage of Proposition 116 means lawmakers have less money to work with as they create the 2021-22 budget. Proposition 117 requires voters to approve major new fee increases, just as they have to approve all tax increases. That would make it harder for lawmakers to turn to new fees to make up lost revenue.

Polis, a Democrat, supported the tax cut, as well as the Gallagher repeal. In an emailed statement Wednesday, he praised Colorado voters.

“Colorado solidified itself as one of the best places in the country to live, work, and play, or to start and run a business,” he said. “Coloradans overwhelmingly supported a measure to provide free preschool to every 4-year-old in our state. We voted in support of our firefighters, small businesses, and local communities. Voters provided tax relief for every Coloradan and paved the way for broader fiscal and tax reform.”

Carol Hedges, director of the left-leaning advocacy group the Colorado Fiscal Institute, expressed relief that voters had repealed the Gallagher Amendment, but said the Colorado tax code had become more regressive, with the passage of Proposition EE, a tax on nicotine products to support preschool, alongside an income tax cut that will benefit well-off Coloradans more.

“Despite this setback, we are hopeful about one thing: This result should give Gov. Polis the tax cut he’s been pushing for since he took office,” she said in an emailed statement. “We hope this result allows the governor to move on from income tax cuts and focus on ways to work with the legislature to make our tax code fair.”

With the passage of Amendment B, residential property assessments will stay roughly where they are today, and school districts get to keep $490 million in local property tax revenue they had been counting on. Homeowners, though, lose some protections against future property tax increases.

Lawmakers, rural fire chiefs, business interest groups, and others have been working on a Gallagher reform or repeal for years, but the issue reached a crisis point due to the economic downturn associated with the coronavirus pandemic. If nothing had changed, falling commercial property values would have forced down the assessment rate applied to residential property in order to maintain the ratio required by Gallagher.

Supporters pitched Amendment B as a way to support firefighters, health care workers, and teachers during a time of unprecedented crisis. Opponents said the repeal is a tax increase in disguise.

Baca-Oehlert attributed the passage of Amendment B to the broad coalition that supported it. Recent years have seen the failure of several tax measures aimed at increasing school funding.

“We’ve not solved our problems,” she said. “I have hope that this is a door opening to a future where we could work together on solutions.”

Democrats to keep majority on Colorado State Board of Education

2020-11-04T19:09:11+00:00

Incumbent Republican Joyce Rankin appeared likely to keep her seat on the Colorado State Board of Education, even as Democrats maintain their majority with two new members.

Three of the seven seats for State Board of Education were up for grabs, and only one of them featured an incumbent.

In District 1, which includes Denver, Democrat Lisa Escárcega defeated Republican Sydnnia Wulff, an attorney, and two third-party candidates. Escárcega will replace current board member Val Flores, who failed to make the ballot. Escárcega recently retired as the head of the Colorado Association of School Executives and was previously chief accountability officer for Aurora Public Schools.

“I came into this campaign to bring a strong voice for the k - 12 classroom. Thank you to all who are ready to put our students and educators first!” Escárcega posted on her Facebook page late Tuesday night.

In District 3, which covers the western slope, incumbent Rankin, a Republican and former educator, maintained a steady lead against Democratic challenger Mayling Simpson, a former Steamboat Springs school board member. Rankin’s lead was the smallest of the three races.

In District 7, which covers the northwestern suburbs including Jeffco, Democrat Karla Esser, a retired college administrator and education professor, defeated Republican Nancy Pallozzi in the race to replace board member Jane Goff, who has reached the term limit.

Colorado’s State Board of Education is responsible for setting education standards, administering several grants, ruling on disputes between charter schools and districts, and evaluating the performance of schools and districts.

Currently the board is overseeing the state’s support for schools during the pandemic, efforts to improve reading instruction, and mandates to improve low-performing schools and districts. That includes the order given to the Adams 14 district to improve by hiring an outside manager for at least four years. MGT Consulting, the district’s for-profit manager, is in the second year of the four-year contract. The district is the first in the state to be run by an outside company.

Monitoring those improvement efforts has become complicated by the fact that the state cancelled last spring’s standardized testing as schools shut down to slow the spread of the coronavirus. A decision about this year’s testing has not been made, but at least some education leaders are asking the state to continue to put off testing.

The board has a majority of Democrat members and Tuesday night’s results showed that majority would be maintained. The board previously had long been run by a majority of Republican members until the 2016 election. State board members serve six-year terms.

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

Gary schools’ $71.2 million referendum takes an early lead in returns

2020-11-04T16:24:26+00:00

Gary voters appeared to be approving a $71.2 million referendum Tuesday night to help their struggling school district dig out of debt and give teachers their first raises in more than a decade.

The referendum was winning 60% of the vote as of 10:42 p.m. It needs a simple majority to pass.

“I’m so thankful to Gary voters for supporting more opportunities for our students and overdue raises for our teachers,” said Paige McNulty, the Gary district manager, in a statement Wednesday morning. “Passing this referendum puts us on the fastest track to ending State control of our schools, and I couldn’t be happier for the entire community.”

The referendum is a do or die for Gary Community Schools, which is still paying off years of debt due to mismanagement. For three years, a private firm has run the district for the state of Indiana, in order to set Gary’s financial and academic house in order. If the referendum passes, the district could be closer to ending the state takeover. The district needs a stable budget for two years before regaining local control.

The referendum would provide $8.9 million annually to the 4,000-student district for eight years. It would cost property owners up to 56.2 cents per $100 in assessed property value. According to the Gary school district website, the average homeowner would pay an additional $6 per month.

None of the referendum funds would go to charter schools, independently operated schools that 58% of students living within the district’s boundaries attend.

If the measure passes, district officials said revenue first would cover annual budget deficits. Then the district would spend about $1 million to provide raises to teachers and other instructional staff. Gary educators have not had an across-the-board raise in 12 years.

District officials said of the remainder, about half would go to address students’ social and emotional needs and to hire more counselors and therapists. Funding would also go toward arts, athletics, and extracurricular activities.

If the referendum does not pass, the district could face severe budget cuts next school year and likely remain under state control for longer. Referendum proponents said the district could face an exodus of teachers and have a hard time recruiting new staff.

Gary schools twice tried and failed to win voter approval of a tax increase. The district sought a $51.8 million referendum in 2015 and a $50 million referendum in 2016, both before the state took over the district.

Three years ago, the state chose the for-profit MGT Consulting Group to run the Gary district.

By December, the company had reduced Gary’s $104 million debt to $79 million, according to McNulty. It brought down the district’s annual deficit to $6 million from $22 million in August 2017. The company is now in the first year of a two-year, $7.4 million extension of its contract.

MGT points out that the district has made progress. It has stabilized enrollment, which nudged up this year, the first sign of growth after a decade of decline.

But critics think that academics have taken a back seat to debt repayments. In campaigning for the referendum, proponents had to battle lingering public disenchantment with the district stemming from a school closure, low student performance, and a steady decline in graduation rates, among other issues.

McNulty said that if the referendum passes, the district will form an oversight committee to review referendum spending.

“We want to make sure that we’re transparent with the dollars that are being spent because of the mistrust of what’s happened in the past with the past leadership,” McNulty said.

Correction: Nov. 4, 2020: This story has been updated to correct how much the emergency manager has reduced the Gary school district’s debt and deficit.

Wayne County school tax renewal wins overwhelming approval

2020-11-04T12:48:30+00:00

Voters overwhelmingly approved the renewal of a tax that will send about $90 million per year to schools in Wayne County beginning in 2022, continuing a program that has already allowed districts to reduce class sizes and provide extra help to struggling students.

With 100% of precincts reporting at 10:29 a.m. Thursday in the state’s most populous county, 68% of voters supported the millage.

There was no apparent organized opposition to the renewal, which won’t increase taxes for Wayne County homeowners. The average homeowner will continue paying $8 monthly, or about $96 annually, for the 2-mill millage.

The enhancement millage, first approved in 2016 with 54% of the vote, has generated about $80 million annually for schools. It expires in 2021.

Charter schools, public schools that are typically overseen by a public university instead of an elected school board, had previously been barred from receiving the funds. They will be able to get a piece of the millage revenue thanks to a Michigan law enacted in 2018.

Superintendents across the county said the millage has already allowed them to reduce class sizes, purchase technology, provide teacher training, and increase salaries for teachers. Nikolai Vitti, superintendent of the Detroit Public Schools Community District, said there would have been a “substantial hole” in his budget if the millage failed.

The tax will generate an estimated $90 million in 2022 and will continue for six years. The money will be divided based on enrollment between the county’s 33 school districts as well as dozens of charter schools. The tax will provide an estimated $300 per student.

Election 2020: Control of the IPS school board up in the air with two close races

2020-11-04T05:20:32+00:00

Supporters of Indianapolis Public Schools Superintendent Aleesia Johnson’s administration appear poised to hold on to at least two seats in the race for control of the school board. But with many votes uncounted, the outcome of two other races remain undetermined.

Marion County Clerk’s Office was counting ballots until nearly midnight Tuesday.

Ten candidates were competing in races for four seats — a majority of the seven-member board.

The winners will help set the direction of the 31,000-student district by overseeing the superintendent, setting priorities, and signing off on the budget. The vigorous campaign pitted well-financed supporters of the current IPS administration against opponents who are critical of the district’s collaboration with charter schools.

Incumbent Venita Moore, who was backed by groups that support charter partnerships, was winning nearly 80% of the vote late Tuesday. Moore’s District 2 seat covers the north east slice of the district. Challenger Daqavise Winston, who formerly worked in discipline in IPS, trailed with 20%.

In District 1, IPS parent Will Pritchard led with about 65% of the votes. A political newcomer, Pritchard was supported by choice-friendly groups. His opponent, teachers union-backed candidate Brandon Randall, a program director for a youth services nonprofit. The east side district was previously represented by Michael O’Connor, who favored partnerships with charter schools and did not run for reelection.

The two other races remained extremely close late Tuesday. At-large candidate Kenneth Allen, a newcomer with the backing of several choice-friendly political action committees, was just one percentage point ahead of incumbent Elizabeth Gore, who was supported by the teachers union. Each of them had about 40% of the vote, while Kendra McKnight and Ellis Noto trailed significantly behind.

In one of the hardest-fought races in the election, incumbent board member Diane Arnold held a slim lead over activist and IPS parent Chrissy Smith. Arnold represents District 4, which includes the west and south side of the district.

Candidates for school board often can win by small margins. The seats represent relatively small regions, and many voters do not cast a ballot — in part because they may not know about the race or the candidates in the non-partisan contest. In 2018, nearly 32,000 IPS residents who cast ballots did not vote for an at-large candidate for school board. Susan Collins won the seat by about 700 votes.

Outside the polling place at Irvington Community School on Election Day, Jeremy Stephens said that he supported Pritchard for the District 1 seat because he seemed like a trustworthy family man. But Stephens, who has two children at School 57, chose not to vote in the at-large race because he didn’t feel well-informed about the candidates.

Lejuan and Casey Harris, who voted Tuesday at Brookside Park, supported Venita Moore and Elizabeth Gore. But the couple, who sent their children to IPS, were distrustful of district leaders and frustrated that programs had been cut and schools closed.

“I’m 45 years old, and I went to IPS. There’s been problems with IPS since I went to school. Lack of funding. You know what I mean. Teachers are underpaid,” Lejuan Harris said. “Everybody knows this. And everybody says they are going to change it, and nobody has done it yet.”

Earlier this week at the Indianapolis City-County Building, early voter Brian Gill said he favored Kenneth Allen for the at-large seat. He wants to see better pay for teachers, which he believes will improve education for students.

Gill primarily decided to support Allen because of good word-of-mouth when he asked people he knew about Allen, he said. “That’s why he’s getting my vote.”

IPS teacher Ilana Shinkle, who voted early during fall break, said that she chose Elizabeth Gore because “she supports our neighborhood public schools” rather than partnerships with charter schools, she said.

Allies of the administration vastly outraised their opponents. Candidates friendly to charter schools raised over $390,000 by the election, out of a total of more than $430,000 raised for the campaign.

At-large candidate Allen raised at least $174,000, an enormous sum for a local school board election. Largely bankrolled by pro-charter political action committees, Allen’s campaign deluged voters with flyers, text messages, and advertising.

Incumbent Gore, meanwhile, raised about $12,000. Her largest contribution was an $8,000 donation from the political action committee of the state teachers union.

Political spending is particularly influential in school board races because voters often know little about the candidates or issues. In 2016, however, Gore herself proved it is possible to win a seat on the IPS board without a large war chest. She defeated the incumbent to win a seat after raising about $1,200.

The two other candidates for the at-large seat, Noto and McKnight, did not file campaign finance reports.

Denver passes 4A and 4B, earmarking funding for schools

2020-11-04T05:08:15+00:00

Two ballot measures that earmark extra funding for Denver Public Schools passed by wide margins Tuesday.

The money from ballot measures 4A and 4B will be spent on teacher pay raises, installing air conditioning at more schools, reopening a comprehensive high school in far northeast Denver, and more. Denver voters have a long history of throwing financial support behind Denver Public Schools, which serves 92,000 students.

“Denver Public Schools is a central part of our community, and this election was really about showing our teachers and students that we want to give them every opportunity to succeed,” Superintendent Susana Cordova said in a statement.

Ballot measure 4A asked voters to approve a $32 million mill levy override, a type of tax increase. It will raise Denver’s property tax rate by 1.55 mills next year. That’s the equivalent of $51 per year on a home valued at $465,000.

The $32 million will be used for initiatives including:

Pay raises for teachers and hourly workers, like bus drivers and custodians.
Hiring more school nurses.
Hiring more school-based mental health workers.
Increasing special education services.

4B asked voters to approve a $795 million bond. It is not expected to raise the property tax rate next year. That’s because the district can make payments on the bond with revenue generated at the current tax rate. Rejecting 4B would have made the property tax rate go down.

The $795 million will be used for projects including:

Installing air conditioning at 24 school buildings that still lack it.
Renovating or rebuilding the former Montbello high school campus.
Upgrading playgrounds, building new science labs, and other school renovations.
Buying land for new schools in the far northeast Gateway neighborhood.

Proposition EE, nicotine tax measure for universal preschool, cruises to victory

2020-11-04T04:46:00+00:00

Colorado voters easily approved a nicotine tax measure Tuesday that will fund universal free preschool for 4-year-olds statewide starting in the fall of 2023.

Proposition EE will help Gov. Jared Polis achieve one of his signature campaign promises, a major expansion of Colorado’s publicly funded preschool program. Initially, the new tax will send funding to rural schools, state health and housing programs, and the state education budget. Starting in 2023, most of the proceeds will go toward statewide universal preschool, and in 2024, a smaller chunk of money will go toward smoking and vaping cessation programs.

Polis highlighted the measure’s support from voters across the political spectrum during a press call Tuesday night, saying the victory represented “Republicans, independents, Democrats coming together around health and around kids.”

He said, “First and foremost, our 4-year-olds, each one of them, regardless of their family’s wealth or circumstances will be able to start school prepared for success.”

Polis and an array of early education and health groups supported Proposition EE, saying the measure would help reduce Colorado’s highest-in-the-nation teen vaping rates while also making preschool accessible to many more families. Opponents, including discount cigarette makers, argued that a so-called sin tax will put a disproportionate burden on low-income consumers during tough economic times.

The new tax, which would take effect Jan. 1, would more than triple state taxes on cigarettes by 2027 to $2.64 a pack and also impose new taxes and fees on smokeless tobacco and vaping products. Colorado doesn’t currently tax vaping products.

Jake Williams, executive director of the advocacy group Healthier Colorado, called the passage of Proposition EE a “gigantic win for our kids.”

“Tonight, thankfully, Is the beginning of the end of our teen vaping epidemic in Colorado,” he said. “We know that the price increase this measure brings will push kids away from these products.”

As of now, Colorado’s preschool program is reserved for children from low-income families, and those with learning delays or other risk factors. It serves only about 40% of eligible children. Statewide, only about a quarter of 4-year-olds attend publicly funded preschool.

With Proposition EE’s passage, the share of 4-year-olds in public preschool could increase to 75% or more depending on the number of families who opt in. Children in the program would be guaranteed 10 hours a week of preschool, but it’s not yet clear how that would be split over the school week.

Children from low-income families or those with other risk factors would have access to more hours of preschool or other support services if the tax yields additional preschool revenue as advocates expect.

Colorado voters have not historically supported statewide tax measures for education initiatives, rejecting Proposition CC last year, Amendment 73 in 2018, and Amendment 66 in 2013. They also rejected a nicotine tax for health programs in 2016.

Proposition EE’s passage, it will represent a major win for Polis, who pledged to institute universal, full-day kindergarten and preschool by the end of his first term in January 2023. He got tuition-free, full-day kindergarten in place last fall, and while he won’t quite make the end-of-term deadline for tuition-free preschool, he’ll come close.

Check back here for updated election results throughout the night.

Democrats take control of CU Board of Regents

2020-11-04T04:40:25+00:00

Democrats flipped political control of the CU Board of Regents in Tuesday’s election, a feat that moves the last statewide Republican stronghold blue.

The Democratic sweep gives them a 5-4 majority on the board after Republicans dominated the University of Colorado Board of Regents for decades.

Democrats secured wins in both contested seats, including a pivotal District 6 race that will see Ilana Spiegel replace Republican John Carson, who did not run for reelection. Spiegel beat Republican Richard Murray.

Spiegel, who is an experienced educator, said what is more important is that this year’s election ensures that the board has a group of Regents that understand education.

“This isn’t just a Democratic majority, but you’ll have a majority of educators on the Board of Regents — Democrats and Republicans who come from a background in education,” she said.

In the Congressional District 2 Regent seat, Democratic candidate Callie Rennison secured a win over Republican Dick Murphy. Rennison will replace Democrat Linda Shoemaker. The district includes Boulder, Loveland, and Fort Collins, several northwestern suburbs of Denver, and rural sections to the west of those cities.

Democrat Nolbert Chavez ran unopposed in Congressional District 7. He will replace Irene Griego, also a Democrat, whose seat represents Arvada, Golden, and Westminster, among other cities.

With the win, Democrats will be able to dictate the direction of the University of Colorado system over the next several years. Together, the campuses have a $4.8 billion budget and about 70,000 students.

The nine-member Board of Regents consists of elected officials from each of Colorado’s seven congressional districts and two from the state at large. The board is charged with the supervision and financial decisions of the University of Colorado system, whose campuses include Boulder, Denver, and Colorado Springs.

The new batch of Regents will be tasked with helping guide the school through the coronavirus pandemic and lobbying lawmakers for more funds in a state where higher education is funded at a level that is below most of the nation. And Rennison and Spiegel said the cost of tuition is a big issue for both of them.

The switch to Democratic control also has the potential to put President Mark Kennedy on notice. He was brought in by Republicans last year on a party-line vote. The selection was controversial, and the search process came under scrutiny.

Rennison said she wants to work with Kennedy to do what is best for the CU system.

“But all of us who have been running have been very clear that if he’s not doing things that we think the system needs, that we will look to make changes,” she said.

Democrats have increasingly become more competitive in CU Board of Regents races and achieved a feat they hoped for in 2016. That year, they failed to win control of the Board of Regents in a hotly contested election. Republican Heidi Ganahl edged out her opponent by a 4-point margin, giving Republicans a single-vote majority.

How Newark schools helped get out the vote

2020-11-04T02:09:07+00:00

Newark schools turned the historic presidential election into a real-life civics lesson.

Teachers taught students about voting rights and staged mock elections. School staffers helped parents and 18-year-olds register to vote and urged them to cast ballots. And employees at one school organization drove through the city Tuesday honking, waving, and encouraging residents to get to the polls.

The efforts were intended partly to increase turnout in an election whose outcome will help determine the amount of funding for schools and relief for families in places like Newark, which has been ravaged by the COVD-19 pandemic. But the voting push was also meant to send a message to students that American democracy only works when informed citizens take part in elections.

“It’s a way of showing that your voice is important,” said Tish Johnson, director of external relations for the BRICK Education Network, which oversees several Newark charter schools and organized Tuesday’s car caravan. “If you want to see a change, voting is a way to do that.”

Teachers faced a tough task explaining this year’s extraordinary election to students. The presidential race, which pitted President Donald Trump against former Vice President Joe Biden, came amid a pandemic that forced millions of Americans to vote by mail, followed massive protests this summer over racial injustice, and featured divisive rhetoric and disinformation.

Heike Domine tackled that challenge by rooting her classroom conversations in facts. A sixth-grade social studies teacher at a Newark charter school, she had her students research each candidate’s views on pressing issues, including the pandemic, health care, and immigration. She also taught them about the long struggle over voting rights in the U.S., from past efforts to block Black Americans from the polls to the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to present-day attempts to suppress voter turnout.

Domine also held a mock election, in which 87% of her students voted for Biden and most of the others opted for third-party candidates. The history lessons and voting exercise drove home the point that suffrage is only valuable when it’s put to use.

“While voting is a right, it’s also a responsibility and a civic duty,” said Domine, who teaches at TEAM Academy, part of KIPP New Jersey network.

Newark schools didn’t just teach about the election — they also helped residents participate in it.

BRICK employees called about 1,000 voters ahead of the election reminding them to cast ballots and offered free rides to the polls. On Tuesday, the organization partnered with the South Ward Democratic Committee to pay for a van outfitted with video screens saying “Vote Now!” to cruise through the southern section of Newark. And schools managed by BRICK, along with KIPP schools, did not hold classes Tuesday so that employees and parents could take part in the election.

Other Newark schools also made a push to register parents to vote. Several were assisted by Project Ready, a Newark-based nonprofit that works to increase civic engagement. The group trained charter school employees on voter registration and the mail-in voting process and held registration events at several district schools.

The group also enlisted high school students in neighboring East Orange to call young voters. About a third of Newark’s unregistered voters are between 18 and 25 years old, said Project Ready CEO Shennell McCloud. She hopes to convince Newark families and young people who participated in the presidential election to also vote in Newark’s school board election in April.

“We’re at a unique moment where we can actually reimagine what education should be looking like,” McCloud said.

Joshua Speight, a senior at East Side High School, voted for the first time this week.

The Newark school district also made a push to get voting-age students to exercise their right. The district helped register some of the roughly 675 students who were eligible to vote in Tuesday’s election, said Superintendent Roger León. Since 2018, the district has helped about 2,000 students register to vote, he said.

East Side High School went a step further, creating a homemade public service announcement urging students to cast ballots. In the video, staff members do “cool” things like wear sunglasses, play guitar, and watch Netflix. Then a teacher says: “Do you know what else is cool? Voting is cool.”

Joshua Speight, a senior at East Side, took that message to heart. On Monday, he voted for the first time.

He dropped off his completed ballot with his mother, Shanique Speight, who is a Democratic state assemblywoman. He was amazed to see so many other people also hand delivering their ballots during the pandemic.

“I was like, ‘This voting stuff really matters — especially in 2020, with everything going on right now,’” he said. “Every vote really does matter.”

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.

‘We have to unite’ — Philadelphia students plan to make a difference on Election Day

2020-11-03T00:43:12+00:00

Giovanni Pagan, 17, has been watching his grandmother work the polls his entire life.

This year, during one of the most fraught elections in the nation’s history, in one of the most contentious battleground states, it will be his turn.

The junior at the Workshop School said he’s always wanted to be a poll worker. Now that his grandmother is more vulnerable to the coronavirus, he’s happy to take her place.

Pagan is only one of many Philadelphia students, themselves too young to vote, who have volunteered this year to be poll workers and have engaged in election-related activities including voter registration and candidate forums.

If you listen to the pundits, read the polls, crunch the turnout numbers, and pay attention to the attacks of President Donald Trump against election integrity in the city and state (he said, “bad things happen in Philadelphia”), the outcome of the presidential election could be riding on Pennsylvania. Turnout in Philadelphia will have a major effect on who carries the state and ultimately occupies the White House.

Both presidential candidates and their running mates are spending the last days before the election crisscrossing Pennsylvania. Joe Biden was in Philadelphia on Sunday trying to boost turnout in the heavily Democratic city, specifically among Black voters, while Trump concentrated on other parts of the state.

Sheyla Street, a 17-year-old senior at Central High School has long been focused on convincing everyone she knows to participate in the electoral process.

Street is an organizer with Central’s voter registration committee. She and the other members of the group hold regular virtual meetings and forums for local and statewide candidates. They have registered 100 of the 111 potential voters at Central, students who have reached the age of 18 before Nov. 3.

“What we need to get out the vote is badger people until they answer and encourage them and talk them into doing it,” said Street. “Teens don’t always follow through.”

During a meeting of the committee last week, Street talked about how the prior several days had been “tough and depressing for everyone,” after the police shooting of Walter Wallace, Jr.

“I was starting to lose hope, and think that after all this work, it doesn’t matter,” she said.

Then she went to a voting site in Overbrook. “The line was literally two or three blocks long,” she said. “There was a 92-year-old lady out there. There was a boy who said he was a future voter. They were standing in line for four and five hours.”

The scene “was motivating to me,” she said. “I can’t give up, because all these other people aren’t giving up. The work we’re doing is having an effect, people are turning out.”

And these teens, most not old enough to vote, are determined to do their part. Organizations and initiatives to increase voter turnout and involvement, especially among young people, have been busy throughout the election season.

Central’s voter registration committee works with several citywide organizations for young people including When Philly Votes, the local chapter of When We All Vote. Poet, playwright and novelist Lorene Cary started Vote that Jawn. Philly Youth Vote! is a collaboration of community organizations and educators to get young people involved in the election, and to vote if they are eligible. The School District of Philadelphia has a voter registration page on its website and it held a districtwide virtual voter registration assembly last month.

Tom Quinn, a social studies teacher who helped start Philly Youth Vote!, has worked with Central students on civic activism since 2008.

“This year is different from others, because it’s a presidential election and the political climate is so contentious and divided,” Quinn said. “Police brutality, gun violence, racism and antiracism, and the ongoing disparities in schools and neighborhoods are all impacting students.”

All this “piqued young people’s interest,” he said, and “they really took charge.” The pandemic set back the students’ efforts, “until we learned how to engage young voters remotely and went full steam on social media. But we regained our footing, and no matter the format, young people know and care about the outcome of this election” and the importance of their voice.

On Saturday, Street and several other Central students organized a Black Lives Matter event at Malcolm X Park in West Philadelphia and ran a voter education table. The event had originally been planned as a Halloween celebration, but that changed after Wallace’s death.

Students also set up a voter education table at Malcolm X Park in West Philadelphia on Saturday.

“When tragedies happen in our community we have to unite, and have to include the youth because the youth are feeling the same thing, but 10 times worse,” she said. “We’re not in school and we’re not in the community, so it’s important for us to gather and celebrate our joy and also recognize our pain in order to heal.”

Street, who missed the age requirement to vote by two weeks, plans to work the polls Tuesday and host a get out the vote event. “We’re running through the finish line,” Street said. “We’re almost there.”

Keziah Ridgeway, who teaches African American history and International Baccalaureate social and cultural anthropology at Northeast High School, spoke at the BLM event Saturday.

“It’s not enough for me to just teach in the classroom,” she said. “It has to go beyond the classroom.”

Since Ridgeway voted early, she plans to spend Election Day hosting a student town hall at Northeast High School on Zoom to discuss Wallace’s death. The Black Student Association is spearheading the student-only event.

“It is important that we allow them to use their voice,” she said. “We don’t have to give them anything, they actually have all the tools they need. We adults keep getting it wrong, but the youth have the answer.”

“There’s an African proverb that says a child that’s forgotten about a village will burn it down just to feel its warmth,” Ridgeway said. “It’s time that we stop forgetting the youth of this city.”

Tatiana Roldan, a 17-year-old student at Northeast High School, helped Street organize Saturday’s event. She’s currently the president of the school’s Black Student Association.

Sheyla Street, left, youth organizer Saudia Durrrant, and Tatiana Roldan close Saturday’s event with a pledge for the community.

“The youth are so underrepresented. Having an event like this shows we can all bond together,” she said. “I plan on telling people Tuesday to go and vote.”

Lucy Duckworth, a 17-year-old senior at Masterman High School, also signed up to be a poll worker after learning Philadelphia might have a shortage this year because of the pandemic. Older people, more vulnerable to the coronavirus, were staying home.

At first, she said, it was an “issue I didn’t know existed.” But then she saw an Instagram post from the Poll Hero Project, which advertises poll working positions to teens through social media sites. She signed up that day. Since then, she has signed up hundreds of students, including her classmates.

One is Rory Macdonald, a 17-year-old senior at Masterman. He has also done significant work trying to turn out the vote. MacDonald works with an organization called Vietlead, which helps register Asian Americans and other people of color.

“Every Sunday, I sat on my couch for three hours and called people and helped them through the registration process.” Macdonald said. “It’s apolitical … [we’re] just trying to give people information that they might not have.”

Macdonald said he focuses specifically on people of color because “we have a really terrible history of voter suppression in our country.”

Many of the Central students on the voter registration committee will also work the polls. And, like Macdonald, have spent time trying to convince friends and family to vote. They have discovered that many people remain cynical.

“For a while I had a misconception about voting,” said Eden (DeeDee) McLendon, 16, a junior from Germantown. “I thought it was pointless, these people make decisions for us” and the average person has no control over what they do.

Then she did some research and changed her mind. But she hasn’t necessarily been able to sway some family members.

“They just say, ‘I can’t be bothered,’” she said. “My mom has a billion siblings and some of them didn’t register. It’s confusing to me, they have this power, and voting is a thing that is important.” When she asks why they won’t vote, people tell her they say they don’t like either candidate, or they don’t care, or whoever wins won’t affect them. Now, she feels that “if I can get just one person to vote, that’s a representation of me voting.”

Once, when Street was at a voter registration table outside a grocery story, she chased down a man who had ignored her invitation. The man told her he was an ex-felon who now owns a business, but doesn’t believe the political process — or the choices available — cared about helping people like him.

Still, she didn’t give up, telling him that there were plenty of local candidates on the ballot he could support. “At some point, he broke. He said, “Yeah, I see your point. I really like you guys and I want to vote for you guys.” And he registered.

Zion Sykes, 17, a senior who lives in Roxborough, said he has also faced cynicism or indifference. Some older cousins shrugged off his pleas, saying politicians never do anything they say.

“I see that skepticism…they have no faith in people to make the change they want,” he said.

Sophomore Evelyn Feldman, 15, said she tells people that “there are so many big topics being debated right now. A lot are affecting me now or will in the future. I can’t vote, but a lot of changes will happen in the next four years in big issues, and helping people register to vote is my way of helping to decide my future.”

As with the other students, she said a lot of her family members don’t vote because they don’t think things will ever change.

Sykes said 60% to 70% of his peers regard voting as a “coming of age moment.” Others shrug it off.

“I guess,” he said, “that it’s our job to try to convince them they can make a difference.”

Additional Resources

Philadelphia Student Union
Want to get involved? Become a member.

Philadelphia Black Student Alliance
Education Website

Penn African Students Association (PASA)

Knowing Your Right to Vote

Understanding the Hispanic/Latino Vote
Pew Research Center

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.

Legislative races in Pennsylvania could impact education spending

2020-11-02T19:14:29+00:00

Chalkbeat Philadelphia is one of more than 20 news organizations producing Broke in Philly, a collaborative reporting project on solutions to poverty and economic mobility in the city. Read all our reporting here.

Pennsylvania’s entire state House and half of its Senate are up for election Tuesday — and the results could have a big effect on education policy and school funding.

Some political observers believe Democrats have the ability to take back control of the house or possibly even both chambers of the legislature. If so, changes could be coming to the formula used to distribute money to Pennsylvania school districts.

Pennsylvania has one of the widest spending gaps in the nation between its rich and poor districts. A recent report done as part of a landmark lawsuit challenging the system found that Pennsylvania districts need $4.6 billion in additional funds to adequately educate their students. Districts with majorities of Black and Latino students are particularly shortchanged, the analysis found.

Philadelphia, where nearly three-fourths of students are Black and Latino, is underfunded by the state to the tune of $5,600 per student, according to the report by Penn State education professor Matthew Gardner Kelly done for plaintiffs in the six-year-old case.

The legislature in 2016 approved a funding formula that weights per-student aid depending on a district’s poverty level, district taxing capacity and other conditions. But lawmakers decided to apply it only to new funds, not the entire pot, while assuring that no district gets less money than the year before. This is called “hold harmless,” and benefits mostly rural districts that have lost enrollment. Under this system, urban and some suburban areas have seen student needs grow while their per-student state aid shrinks.

“Right now, we have a formula that works only for the ‘hold harmless’ districts,” said Donna Cooper, executive director of the research advocacy group Public Citizens of Children and Youth who helped organize the Children Matter Access Fund to lobby the legislature on issues important to their welfare.

A dozen or more new Democratic legislators would create a strong bloc of 20 to 25 members of the House caucus who would push its own leadership to fight for a change in the formula and an increase the total amount allocated to education, Cooper said.

Most of the opportunities for Democratic House pickups are in the suburbs of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, where President Trump’s support, particularly among women, has been waning, and Republican legislators are keeping their distance.

“The Democratic candidates who are running in these Republican seats, their top issue is to get the schools funded,” Cooper said.

Democrats are outspending Republicans in competitive districts in the Philadelphia suburbs by a 2-to-1 margin. They need to flip nine seats in the House and four in the Senate to win a majority.

Cooper, who was policy director for former Democratic governor Ed Rendell, said that the Republicans could pick up a few house seats mid-state, but 14 suburban seats are ripe for flipping from Republican to Democratic — enough to reverse the GOP’s current 109-93 majority.

8 big consequences the election could have for America’s K-12 schools

2020-10-28T18:19:22+00:00

Most education decisions are local decisions. But the pandemic has thrust education policy onto the national stage, bringing unusual attention to new debates about when to reopen schools and what resources schools need to get back on track.

That means that the elections for president and Congress will almost certainly have some concrete implications for schools in just the next few months. And even though education hasn’t been at the center of President Donald Trump’s or former Vice President Joe Biden’s campaigns, the two candidates offer starkly different visions for the future of America’s schools — when it comes to both navigating the COVID crisis and improving education over the long haul.

Here are eight ways that the choices Americans make next week could affect K-12 schools, and the students they serve, for years to come.

1. Tens, even hundreds, of billions of dollars of federal money for schools are likely at stake.

Public school budgets face a major crisis in the coming years. With state tax dollars drying up during the COVID-fueled recession, schools are likely to face budget cuts. Some already have.

Public school groups are looking to the federal government for a huge infusion of money to schools and state governments to help fill this gap and address the costs of opening schools during the pandemic. Biden and Congressional Democrats say they’ll do exactly that.

“Schools — they need a lot of money to open,” Biden said at the final presidential debate. “They need to deal with ventilation systems. They need to deal with smaller classes, more teachers.”

A paraeducator reads to a kindergarten class operating on a hybrid model in Stamford, Connecticut in October 2020.

In other words, Democratic control of the White House and Congress means additional federal money for public schools is much more likely to happen.

Trump and Congressional Republicans take a different view. They too have backed additional funding for schools to address COVID, with much of it tied to a requirement that schools reopen for in-person instruction. They also want to ensure private schools receive some of the relief dollars.

But Republicans have balked at additional funding for state governments, suggesting this would amount to a bailout of blue states. (Red states are also facing budget challenges, and Republican governors have called for federal aid.) In states with large budget holes, no federal help could mean sizable cuts to public education.

Overall, Republican control of the White House and Congress would likely mean less money for schools, but more money for private schools. There’s also a greater chance that additional money would be tied to reopening requirements.

2. Under a Biden administration, schools would face less federal pressure to reopen buildings, especially without more aid. Trump is likely to keep up the pressure.

Since the summer, the Trump administration has pushed schools to fully reopen their doors without much regard for the spread of the virus. It’s put pressure on federal health officials to downplay the risks of reopening. The guidance it has provided to schools has often been confusing. And it’s threatened to withhold federal funds to schools that don’t reopen. The administration hasn’t signaled it would change its approach if Trump were reelected.

“We’re not going to shut down,” Trump said at last week’s presidential debate, while pointing to his teenage son’s recovery from COVID. “And we have to open our schools.”

Joe Biden spoke about reopening schools in September 2020.

On the other hand, Biden has said he would issue “national guidelines” that tie school reopening to the level of viral spread in a community. Those guidelines would include infection rate thresholds and suggestions for class sizes and which students should return to classrooms first. His campaign has criticized the Trump administration for leaving school districts to “improvise a thousand hard decisions on their own.”

But Biden has emphasized he’s not planning to mandate specific approaches. The campaign has said state, local, and tribal officials will ultimately decide when to reopen schools.

3. A Biden administration would boost civil rights enforcement and bring renewed attention to issues like student discipline disparities.

Under Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, President Trump’s administration has shrunk the size of the education department’s civil rights office and limited the scope of its investigations. It’s also revoked guidance issued by the Obama administration meant to curtail racial disparities in school discipline, protect the rights of transgender students, and improve racial diversity in colleges and K-12 schools.

Officials in the Trump administration have defended these moves, saying getting rid of the guidance and reducing the size of the federal education department means states and local communities have more control over education.

The Biden campaign has promised a dramatic reversal of that approach. Stef Feldman, the campaign’s policy director, recently told reporters that Biden “absolutely believes that we need a strong civil rights division in the department of education,” and sees its “oversight ability” as a key part of the federal government’s role in education.

As part of the 2020 Democratic platform, Biden has pledged to “reinvigorate” and increase funding for the education department’s civil rights office, and to reissue the revoked school discipline guidance. His campaign has also promised to reinstate Obama-era guidance that helped schools consider student race while working on desegregation plans and guaranteed transgender students access to facilities that correspond with their gender identity.

“It is clear that we have heard different views expressed by different candidates during this election cycle with regards to their understanding of, and commitment to, the rights of LGBTQ students, and sexual assault survivors, Black students, and other students of color,” said Liz King, the education program director at The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, a nonpartisan civil rights umbrella organization.

4. The next administration is going to make an important decision about standardized testing this school year.

The Trump administration canceled state testing last spring as schools closed across the country, but has signaled a repeat of that decision is unlikely.

“It is now our expectation that states will, in the interest of students, administer summative assessments during the 2020-2021 school year,” DeVos wrote in a September letter to state school leaders. “The data from assessments can help inform personalized support to children based on their individual needs and provide transparency about their progress.”

A Biden administration would provide advocates of canceling the tests another bite at the apple, and some state education leaders are holding out hope for a different decision.

Biden has criticized standardized testing generally, but has not weighed in on this specific issue. “Right now our focus is on doing everything we can to get our schools up and running as quickly as possible,” Feldman, the Biden policy director, said last week. “In some ways, the answer to this question depends on how much progress we can make in supporting our schools.”

Notably, this issue does not cut neatly along partisan lines. Congressional Democrats have praised DeVos’ support for maintaining testing.

5. Aside from the pandemic, Biden has promised to spend more on public schools, while the Trump administration has tried to cut the federal education budget.

With the ongoing pandemic, it’s unclear how much money Congress would be willing to spend on new education initiatives, especially if legislators agree on another big round of coronavirus relief for schools.

But Trump and Biden have laid out very different visions, and have diverging track records, when it comes to federal spending on education.

In each of the last four years, Trump and DeVos have tried to reduce the federal education budget, though Congress has largely blocked those efforts. The federal government’s role in education should be smaller, they’ve argued.

Meanwhile, Biden has promised a flood of new federal spending on education. He’s pledged to triple the Title I funding that benefits higher-poverty schools and to massively expand pre-kindergarten — promises he’s still making despite the pandemic. He’s also called for raising federal spending on special education and providing free community college.

6. Trump and DeVos would likely continue to prioritize access to private schools, while a Biden administration may ignore them.

DeVos’ top priority has been expanding access to and funds for private schools. She has (unsuccessfully, so far) championed a federal tax credit to help parents pay private school tuition. She has argued that any future pandemic relief package should include money for private schools. And she attempted to redirect money from the CARES Act from public to private schools, before three federal judges said she was misinterpreting federal law.

“At the end of the day, we want parents to have the freedom, the choices, and the funds to make the best decisions for their children,” DeVos said in a recent speech.

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos speaks about her proposal for a federal tax credit that would help parents pay for private school in February 2019.

It’s not clear whether DeVos would stay on if Trump is re-elected, though one of her top deputies, Jim Blew, has indicated she and her team likely would. “If I had to say today, I would say that our calculation would be that we will stay,” he said at a conference in September.

A Biden administration is unlikely to prioritize private schools. “Joe Biden opposes the Trump/ DeVos conception of ‘school choice,’ which is private school vouchers that would destroy our public schools,” his campaign has said.

7. Biden has promised to reinstate and expand protections for many young immigrants.

Back in 2017, the Trump administration tried to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, which grants protection from deportation and work permits to nearly 650,000 young immigrants. The program has had an outsized effect on schools: Many of its recipients have been high school or college students, while research has suggested DACA made undocumented students more likely to graduate from high school and go to college.

Earlier this year, the Supreme Court blocked Trump’s efforts to end DACA, allowing current recipients to keep and renew their status. But the high court’s ruling also opened the door for the Trump administration to try again to end it, and the federal government has since said it will not accept new applications — leaving in limbo some 56,000 immigrant teens who previously would have qualified, according to an estimate from the Migration Policy Institute.

Demonstrators gather outside the Supreme Court in support of DACA in November 2019.

If Trump remains in office, it’s expected he will try to end DACA again, though he’s also said he’s open to striking a legislative deal.

Biden has said that he would reinstate the program and work to make it permanent by sending Congress an immigration reform bill on “day one” of his presidency. He’s also said the young immigrants who qualify for DACA should have a pathway to citizenship and be allowed to receive federal student loans to help pay for college.

8. Whoever controls the Senate will have a say in additions to the Supreme Court — with potentially big consequences for education.

This week’s confirmation of Justice Amy Coney Barrett brought into sharp relief a crucial power that the next president will have — the ability to appoint Supreme Court justices if any vacancies arise or the court is expanded.

In the coming years, several key legal educational battles could reach the highest court.

One involves the interpretation of a recent court decision saying states cannot exclude private schools from public funding solely because they are religious. Some, including DeVos, are already arguing that laws prohibiting religious institutions from running charter schools are unconstitutional.

Another issue is whether there is any federal right to an education, something that has percolated in lower courts recently. A third is how to apply a recent decision allowing public employees — including teachers — to fully opt out of labor unions. And a final issue is what free speech rights public school students have off campus, which has been the subject of recent lower court debate.

McCormick asks Indiana lawmakers to avoid school funding cuts, restrict charter schools

2020-10-27T14:31:53+00:00

A week before the election, State Superintendent Jennifer McCormick is making policy recommendations for Indiana lawmakers and whoever becomes the state’s next top education official.

She emphasized the need to spare K-12 schools from potential cuts as lawmakers look to slim down the upcoming two-year budget because of revenue shortfalls during the pandemic. State education officials already took steps to shield schools at the start of the school year.

Among her suggestions, McCormick offered a few outside-the-box solutions, like raising cigarette or casino taxes or using lottery revenues to fund schools. Some of her policy recommendations will displease choice advocates, such as placing a moratorium on new charter or voucher schools, banning private schools from discriminating against LGBT students or staff, and reducing charter school funding.

“Although Indiana has become K-12 education policy-heavy, with little regard for implementation monitoring, I remain optimistic that sound education policies, designed with the best interest of students and educators in mind are possible,” McCormick wrote in a 24-page policy document addressed to state lawmakers on Tuesday.

As she prepares for her four-year term to expire in January, the comprehensive policy recommendations are among the most ambitious and most contentious that McCormick has offered. She touches upon issues that have become critical for schools during the pandemic, such as funding and internet connectivity, and others that show how she’s sharpened her pro-district schools stance after meeting resistance from Republicans.

McCormick notably acknowledges Indiana’s teacher pay problem but did not offer specific ideas for addressing it.

McCormick continued to push for streamlining Indiana’s dual accountability system, which assesses schools by state and federal metrics separately, into a single measure — a point of contention between her and the State Board of Education throughout her four-year term.

Whoever is elected governor on Nov. 3 will replace the elected state superintendent position with an appointed secretary of education. Democratic challenger Dr. Woody Myers has pledged to keep McCormick on as the state’s education leader if he unseats incumbent Republican Gov. Eric Holcomb.

Indiana education chief bucks party politics to try to oust officials who stood in her way

2020-10-26T18:34:16+00:00

Four years ago, Jennifer McCormick was a triumph for the Republican Party — a public school superintendent who snatched back Indiana’s top education office from a pesky Democrat.

Now, the Indiana GOP considers McCormick a traitor.

She’s siding with the Democrat trying to unseat the Republican governor. She’s endorsing Democrats in hotly contested races for state lawmaker seats, attorney general, and Congress. She’s betraying the party that got her elected.

McCormick does not care.

“They want me out. That doesn’t hurt my feelings right now,” she told Chalkbeat. “What is alarming is the direction, from the federal level on down, that Republicans are going regarding education. I just simply do not agree with it… I believe in public education. That’s just who I am, and I make no apologies for that.”

After a term spent clashing with a Republican stronghold at the Statehouse, McCormick is jaded — but she’s not done. During her last months in office, she’s putting whatever political weight she might hold behind trying to overthrow the forces that she felt held her back and undercut her work shaping education policies.

Her bipartisanship probably won’t make too many ripples, political watchers say. But she doesn’t have a lot to lose.

McCormick is putting a point on a bigger issue. Her political stand echoes the crescendoing cries of teachers’ discontent over the past decade as they have tried to claw back some of the power, respect, and money that they feel Republicans have taken away from public education.

Indiana ranked last in the nation for teacher salary raises over a 15-year period, according to a Forbes study. Teachers lament needing to pay for pencils, watching class sizes grow, and having too few counselors to support students.

“The Republican supermajority has not been especially friendly to teachers, and I think that’s probably why even Dr. McCormick, she’s a Republican yet she’s supporting Democratic candidates,” said Sandra Vohs, president of the Fort Wayne Education Association. “We’ve been burdened by a lot of unnecessary rules and regulations.”

Next year, teachers could lose the supporting role of the state’s education chief — a voice that, depending on who’s been in office, has both helped them and hurt them. Indiana will no longer elect a state superintendent but look to the governor to appoint a secretary of education, leaving many wondering whether that person will be a champion or a puppet.

But state leaders will still have to reckon with educators’ concerns. Teacher pay and school funding, especially with the pandemic, pose two huge issues.

As McCormick puts it: “There is a crisis in K-12 education.”

Targeting the Republican supermajorities

The bulk of McCormick’s dozen or so Democratic endorsements seek to break up Republicans’ supermajorities in the state House and Senate.

With the two-thirds majority in both chambers, Indiana Republicans can easily bypass Democrats, hashing out discussions in private and stopping Democrats from meaningfully shaping bills.

Democrats don’t have a realistic shot at flipping the tables. But if they can knock the Republicans down to just a regular majority, “it gives them a bargaining chip,” said Charles Taylor, managing director of the Bowen Center for Public Affairs at Ball State University.

McCormick endorsed several Democrats fighting tight races, including the House speaker’s challenger and a schoolteacher seeking re-election.

The supermajority “does not allow for good, sensible proposed policy to even be heard,” McCormick said. “It just won’t go anywhere.”

Endorsing Democrats is a low-risk move, considering the GOP has already rejected McCormick, and “she’s one of the lamest of lame ducks — not only is she not running again, but nobody’s running for that office again,” Taylor pointed out.

Many teachers have protested the Republican charge to expand school choice, strip unions of bargaining rights, and add requirements they’ve since walked back on teacher evaluations and training.

That’s why McCormick holds broad appeal among teachers as she advocates to reduce challenges for traditional districts. She has supported expanding preschool access and lessening the emphasis on standardized tests. Educators like McCormick’s direct and open style, and feel they can get answers and clarity from her.

On some issues, Republicans have agreed at least in part with McCormick: They decoupled test scores from teacher evaluations, shielded schools from low scores after changes in standardized tests, and incrementally increased school funding.

McCormick’s stances, however, alienate influential school choice advocates. She has buckled down on criticism that charter schools have proliferated without enough oversight to ensure quality. She has also called for prohibiting private schools that accept publicly funded vouchers from discriminating against LGBT students and teachers.

Betsy Wiley, president and CEO of the school choice advocacy organization Institute for Quality Education, said McCormick has shown “just an absolute disdain” toward charter and private schools and infused “a lot more negativity” in how her department treats school choice issues.

In distributing coronavirus relief funds, for example, McCormick blocked charter schools from receiving a grant after initially approving their applications.

“I think she has slowed the progress [of educational choice] with her rhetoric and her position,” said Wiley, whose group once supported McCormick. “But she’s not in a position to stop it.”

Aligning with Democrats

McCormick’s friendliness with Democrats isn’t surprising. This is who she was even when she sought the GOP’s nomination in 2016 for state superintendent.

She had acknowledged her “checkered” voting past, as someone who sometimes voted Democrat and sometimes Republican. She ran as a district superintendent raising the alarm over the teacher shortage and pledging to cut through the political squabbling.

The Republican Party chose McCormick over a more conservative candidate. She could relate to educators, a critical piece in contending against popular Democrat Glenda Ritz.

Riding Indiana’s red wave backing Donald Trump for president, McCormick prevailed. As state superintendent, she quickly won over teachers unions by supporting districts and amplifying educators’ voices on issues.

Republicans “expected that they were getting a yes-woman, and that was not what they got,” said Ben Yoder, a Hamilton Southeastern teacher who serves on the Indiana State Teachers Association’s board of directors. “They got someone who was really standing for public education, standing for teachers, and standing for kids.”

Opposing the governor

McCormick’s most interesting endorsement aims to oust fellow Republican Gov. Eric Holcomb, by backing his challenger Woody Myers. She’s agreed to serve as Myers’ secretary of education if he wins.

It seems like a long shot: Myers has trailed in polls and lagged in fundraising, and Holcomb appears to be heading to easy reelection.

But McCormick’s support indicates her power struggle with Holcomb.

McCormick frequently clashed with the State Board of Education, where most members are appointed by Holcomb. The dual system of education governance, with the state board crafting policy and the education department carrying it out, left a lot of room for disagreements.

“If we could be smarter at the state level, we could help all schools,” McCormick said.

Much of the strife, however, goes unacknowledged by other Republicans, including Holcomb, who hasn’t publicly addressed it but rarely appears with McCormick. Holcomb’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment about McCormick nor say who he would appoint as education secretary.

The Indiana governor will hold even more influence in education next year, with the power to name a secretary of education.

Holcomb has said he wants someone “fluent” in education and who understands the full pathway of a student through K-12 and their pathway after graduating high school.

Libertarian candidate for governor Donald Rainwater said he’d name McCormick’s opponent for the 2016 GOP nomination, Dawn Wooten, for the role.

If McCormick doesn’t continue as Indiana’s top education official, she said she’d welcome a break from the political scene.

After the election

Will her voice matter?

McCormick could help bring education to the forefront for some candidates.

For some educators, McCormick’s show of bipartisanship is a rallying cry in a divisive election year. To them, she proves that education issues don’t have to fall along party lines.

Educators have gained momentum on their issues, as evidenced by last year’s monumental turnout for the Red for Ed rally, where McCormick pulled on red boots to stand with teachers calling for more school funding, higher pay, and better working conditions.

The pandemic, too, has put teachers in a new spotlight as schools reopen and juggle in-person, online, and hybrid instruction. It’s shown how quickly educators have adapted, how hard their jobs are, and how critical it is for students to be in school.

That puts added pressure on lawmakers to support schools financially.

Restive teachers are watching carefully to see who becomes the next state education leader, said Vohs, the Fort Wayne teachers union president. If that person doesn’t support them, she said, “I think it might actually give fuel to the movement.”

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.

Indiana governor hopeful Woody Myers would pick Jennifer McCormick as education secretary

2020-10-21T00:52:49+00:00

In a live televised debate Tuesday night, Democratic candidate for governor Dr. Woody Myers promised to keep Republican State Superintendent Jennifer McCormick on as Indiana’s top education official if he is elected.

“She has been and will continue to be an outstanding leader for our state,” Myers said in his opening statement.

While an unusual political move, the show of bipartisanship was not wholly unexpected. McCormick crossed the aisle last month when she endorsed Myers’ campaign, after years of clashing with fellow Republicans — incumbent Gov. Eric Holcomb, his appointed education policymakers, and the GOP-dominated state legislature.

In endorsing Myers, McCormick praised his education agenda, which includes pausing the opening of new charter schools, and said he has shown he values educators’ input.

Some surmised McCormick was positioning herself for her next job after her term expires in a few months. She is the last elected state schools chief. Starting next year, the governor will select the education secretary — an increase in influence over education that raises the stakes in the gubernatorial election Nov. 3.

Holcomb has not said who he would choose to lead education in Indiana if he wins a second term, though it seemed clear McCormick would not make his short list, particularly after she endorsed his opponent. Libertarian candidate Donald Rainwater has advocated for minimizing government agencies such as the state’s department of education.

The three candidates for governor tackled education as the first topic in the debate, addressing issues such as teacher pay and school funding. Holcomb emphasized his support for charter schools, touted funding increases for schools during his four years as governor, and hinted at his plan after the election to propose strategies for increasing teacher pay “up to a competitive level — meaning up to $60,000 for the average teacher and $40,000 for the average teacher who’s just beginning,” he said.

Myers, on the other hand, said the state has “starved teachers for over 15 years,” changed the school funding system to punish urban schools, and wasted money on Indiana Virtual School and Indiana Virtual Pathways Academy, two online charter schools accused of defrauding the state of nearly $86 million.

Rainwater contended that education has been “over-politicized” and said the state should stop spending the money on bureaucracy. He essentially pitched an idea for universal school vouchers, to have state funding follow students to whatever schools their families choose.

Voter guide: What the Gallagher repeal means for school funding

2020-10-20T12:00:00+00:00

A fiscal crisis nearly 40 years in the making — exacerbated by a historic pandemic — prompted lawmakers to put Amendment B on November’s ballot.

The measure would repeal the 1982 Gallagher Amendment, which set ratios for how much property tax is paid by residential and commercial property owners. Over time, this ratio, which is based on statewide averages, has driven down property tax collections for rural school districts, fire districts, and other taxing entities.

If Amendment B passes, it wouldn’t solve many of the problems in Colorado’s school finance system, but it would spare districts from steep budget cuts next year. If it fails, lawmakers won’t have the money to meet even current school funding levels.

At stake is roughly $490 million in property tax collections for school districts.

If Amendment B passes, residential assessment rates would be frozen, and school districts would get more property tax revenue. Residential homeowners would lose some protection against the impact of rising property values on their tax bill, while business property owners would get relief from taxes that had increasingly shifted to their shoulders.

If the measure fails, residential assessment rates will continue to fall while commercial assessment rates hold steady. Schools are likely to see additional funding cuts during a time of increased need.

“When you lose additional local revenue, you decrease the tax base that supports the system,” said Tracie Rainey of the Colorado School Finance Project, who supports Amendment B. “The idea behind school finance is you want to have a combination of income tax, sales tax, and property tax. And property tax is your most stable revenue source.

“By reducing the amount of property tax in the system, you are weakening that stability, in addition to putting pressure on the state to backfill.”

The measure is not technically a tax increase, but opponents say it will function like one because if it passes, residential property owners will pay more than they otherwise would have.

“The key thing is that property taxes go up every year no matter what,” said opponent Michael Fields, executive director of Colorado Rising State Action, a conservative issues committee. “Even when the assessment rate goes down, values are going up and people pay more. … You don’t want people taxed out of their homes.”

How we got here

The Gallagher Amendment requires that residential property owners contribute no more than 45% of total property tax collections and that non-residential property — offices, shopping centers, farms, oil and gas fields, and so on — contribute the other 55%.

To achieve this balance, Colorado tinkers with the assessment rate, which determines the amount of property value that is actually taxable. As residential property values soared along the booming Front Range, the residential assessment rate fell from 21% in the early 1980s to just 7.15% this year to keep tax collections at 45% of the total.

The non-residential assessment rate remains fixed at 29% of a property’s assessed value. How much a property owner pays on that taxable value is determined by tax rates levied by local school districts, counties, and other taxing districts.

The falling residential assessment rate has had a number of challenging effects. It’s dramatically shifted the state’s tax burden to businesses, a major reason that some Republicans support repeal, especially when so many business owners are struggling to stay afloat.

It’s also left many small, rural taxing districts that support hospitals, libraries, and fire departments struggling to provide basic services.

Gallagher sets assessment rates based on statewide averages. In urban and suburban communities, property values have risen so much that local governments still take in more revenue each year, even with less of that property value being taxable. These areas also have lots of businesses paying taxes as well.

But that’s not the case in rural communities with a limited tax base.

Schools have been shielded, to a degree

Once a school district’s per-pupil budget is established by a formula, Colorado’s school finance system requires the state to make up whatever money is not covered by local taxes. Over time, the Gallagher Amendment, in particular how it interacts with another voter-approved amendment, the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights, has shifted the burden of school finance from local districts to the state.

That means school districts haven’t felt the hit from reduced property tax collections the way that fire districts have.

But the state budget has. Every year, growing education costs crowd out other needs in the state budget, from transportation to human services to higher education. And even then, lawmakers haven’t met their constitutional obligations for school funding. Every year, they hold back money in a maneuver known as the budget stabilization or negative factor.

This year, with the state budget battered by a COVID-induced downturn, that withholding reached nearly $1.2 billion out of roughly $8 billion in education spending.

Next year, the impact is expected to be much greater.

COVID makes everything worse

A coalition of rural fire chiefs, business groups, and politicians of both parties have wanted to do something about Gallagher for a while now. The pandemic and the economic downturn created a favorable political environment to place an amendment on the ballot with bipartisan support.

Widespread business closures and loss of income are expected to result in a drop in commercial property values. According to Gallagher’s ratio, if business property values go down, the assessment rate on residential property has to drop too, so that those taxpayers will only pay 45% of total tax collections. State property tax administrators estimate the assessment rate will hit 5.88% and that the loss of income to school districts will be around $490 million.

In the East Grand district in northwest Colorado, Superintendent Frank Reeves estimates the decrease in assessed value could cost his district about $900,000 out of a $10 million annual budget. The 9% hit would comes as the district is spending more on everything from smaller class sizes and plexiglass dividers to online courses.

The district already covers about 78% of its own costs, and the state withholding more money would cut deep. Separate from Amendment B, the East Grand district is asking voters to approve a local tax increase that would bring in about $1 million a year.

“We’re going to have to do pretty much all of our funding locally,” Reeves said. “We can’t count on the state to give us what we need to operate.”

But many rural districts with small tax bases struggle to get voters to agree to increases. For those with limited property values, it would take a large increase to generate much money.

When Reeves talks budgets with other rural superintendents, it’s “doomsday,” he said.

What Amendment B does and doesn’t do

Amendment B would keep assessment rates where they are today. That means the portion of a home’s value that is taxable would stay at 7.15% instead of decreasing. Property assessments — a home’s value for tax purposes — could still go up or down based on determinations made by county assessors.

At today’s assessment rate, the owner of a $200,000 home in a district with a tax rate of 26 mills would pay roughly $371 in school taxes. If Amendment B passes and the home’s value stays the same, that homeowner would pay a similar amount next year. If Amendment B fails, the Gallagher requirements would still be in effect, and the portion of the home that is taxable would go down. That means that if the home’s value stays the same, the owner would pay closer to $305 in school taxes next year.

Of course, home values rarely stay the same over time.

Opponents of Amendment B point out that increases in property values have generally outpaced the decreases in the residential assessment rate, such that homeowners continue to pay more every year.

Supporters of Amendment B say the legislature could still reduce the residential assessment rate in the future, though they admit that’s unlikely to happen in the next fiscal year, given the dire budget outlook.

State lawmakers and local school districts will face tough budget decisions next year either way, but the challenges will be much more significant if Amendment B fails.

“The state has made it clear they don’t have the ability to backfill in this current environment,” Rainey said.

Voter guide: Nicotine tax would fund Colorado preschool efforts, fight teen vaping

2020-10-20T03:41:12+00:00

A tax on nicotine products on this November’s ballot could deliver the dedicated funding source that Colorado preschool advocates have sought for years to make sure more children have access to early learning.

Supporters also hope Proposition EE will make a dent in an epidemic of teen vaping. But a “sin tax” may be shaky ground on which to expand essential government services.

Proposition EE would more than triple state taxes on cigarettes by 2027 to $2.64 a pack and also impose new taxes and fees on smokeless tobacco and vaping products popular among youth. Colorado has the nation’s highest rate of teen vaping, with the low cost being one factor. The measure also would set a minimum price for cigarettes, a provision that already has provoked a lawsuit.

The tax revenue would fund free preschool to 4-year-olds across the state, among other efforts. Providing universal preschool was a key campaign promise of Gov. Jared Polis when he ran for office in 2018, but finding the money for it has proved challenging.

The sin tax aims to generate revenue — perhaps as much as $276 million a year — and also to discourage harmful behaviors by making them too costly to partake. Its double-edged sword is controversial: If the tax succeeds in changing behavior, people spend less money on the sin — and generate less money for the government.

What’s in it for children?

Colorado falls below the national average in providing quality preschool education to families. The state enrolls only 23% of its 4-year-olds and 9% of its 3-year-olds into public pre-K programs, according to the National Institute for Early Education Research.

If the measure passes, all children will have access to at least 10 hours of preschool each week in the year prior to entering kindergarten. Children in families with low incomes or who face other barriers to school readiness will have access to additional preschool programming to better meet their needs beginning in the fall of 2023.

“This would make Colorado unique in the country in that we would offer a state preschool program that would provide something for everyone, but provide the greatest benefit to those who face the greatest barriers to opportunity,” said Bill Jaeger, vice president for early childhood and policy initiatives for the Colorado Children’s Campaign.

Currently, the Colorado Preschool Program — which serves low-income families and those with learning challenges or other risk factors — only has the funding to serve 40% of eligible children.

Two years ago, the latest data available, Colorado met only four of 10 minimum standards for high-quality preschool education, according to the National Institute for Early Education Research. Enrollment grew by fewer than 500 children from the previous school year. The state ranks 28th nationwide in access for 4-year-olds, 12th in access for 3-year-olds, and 39th in state spending per pupil.

With additional revenue, Colorado could improve its quality preschool education rankings.

“As enrollment expands, then [Colorado] could move up a few rankings quickly, and if it moves toward universal, into the top 10,” said Steven Barnett, NIEER founder and senior co-director.

However, the most reliable income source for preschool education is one that taps into property taxes, he said, but with provisions to make it more progressive.

Research shows children who attend high-quality educational programs are more likely to graduate from high school, have higher earning potential as adults, and are less likely to commit crimes or become teenage parents. And in Colorado, white children are more likely to be enrolled in quality preschool programs than children of color, a gap that additional funding could help close.

Jaeger called Proposition EE “a wise investment,” leaning on the numerous findings that prove preschool works in the long run.

“For every $1 invested in quality preschool, between $8 and $16 is avoided in societal cost and between $2 and $3 is returned in increased per capita earnings and jobs for state residents,” Jaeger said.

Voters rejected an increase in the cigarette tax in 2016, as they have rejected most statewide taxes on the ballot. Proponents hope that the impact of the coronavirus pandemic coupled with imposing a new tax on vaping products and fuel — which are not currently taxed in the state — give the measure a better chance of passing this year.

Opponents: Now is not a good time

Opponents are leery of the measure because it first directs its tax revenue to the general fund and preschool funding would be delayed for several years. The group calls the proposition a “blank check” for unidentified projects. While the proposition lays out how the money would be spent, future legislators could make changes.

They also contend that a pandemic-induced recession is not the best time to impose a tax on the most vulnerable populations.

“As our economy recovers from COVID 19, now is not the time to raise taxes on any Colorado voter,” wrote A Bad Deal for Colorado, a committee funded by discount cigarette makers opposed to the measure, in a statement. “Proposition EE taxes approximately 14% of Coloradans, around 80% of whom earn less than $40,000 per year.”

By the numbers

If approved, the measure would increase the current $0.84 tax on a single pack of cigarettes gradually over a seven-year period until it reaches $2.64 by 2027. That would bring Colorado from 39th in the nation to 13th, based on 2020 tax rates maintained by the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids.

The measure also would set a minimum price of $7 per pack starting in January, growing to $7.50 per pack by 2024.

Discount cigarette makers already have filed a lawsuit challenging the minimum sales price provision. Altria, the owner of Marlboro cigarettes, helped write the initiative and is not opposing it, unlike previous years, the Colorado Sun reported.

For smokeless products such as chewing tobacco, cigars, and snuff, the current 40% tax would incrementally increase to 62% by 2027. The measure would impose a minimum tax of $1.48 per 1.2-ounce container starting in January that would increase to $2.26 by 2027.

Also beginning in January, vape products including vaping devices, fuel, and e-cigarettes would be taxed at 30%, increasing over time until it reaches 62% by the summer of 2027.

The measure would provide an estimated $25 million to $35 million a year for Colorado’s rural schools for the first several years, replacing dedicated funding the legislature could no longer afford after the coronavirus downturn.

Starting in 2024, the measure calls for 73% of revenue generated by the tax to be put into a newly created fund for preschool programs, with the rest remaining in the general fund for other programs.

Analysts estimate that, in total, Proposition EE would generate about $178 million by 2022-23 and as much as $276 million a year by 2027-28.

A Brighter, Healthier Future for Colorado’s Kids, a group supporting the measure, estimates the proposition will generate $2 billion for universal preschool over 10 years and $110 million for tobacco-vape cessation and other public health programs.

That all depends, though, on whether Coloradans keep vaping and smoking at the same rates.

Political groups give over $200,000 to charter-friendly candidates for IPS board

2020-10-18T00:21:04+00:00

Deep-pocketed political action committees have thrown over $200,000 into four races for Indianapolis Public Schools board seats, helping candidates who support partnerships with charter schools to far out-raise their competitors.

With significant donations from PACs for Stand for Children Indiana, RISE Indy, and the Indy Chamber, District 4 incumbent Diane Arnold, District 1 hopeful Will Pritchard, and at-large challenger Kenneth Allen have each raised between $57,000 and $123,000, according to pre-election campaign finance reports due Friday. The filings include contributions through Oct. 9.

Those school choice-friendly groups also endorsed Venita Moore in the District 2 race. Moore raised $55,000, according to reports she filed Sunday. She told Chalkbeat that she missed the deadline due to technical problems.

Four candidates backed by the IPS Community Coalition, a group critical of the current administration, have raised less than $20,000 in total, according to disclosures. Those candidates are District 4 challenger Christina Smith, District 2 challenger Daqavise Winston, District 1 candidate Brandon Randall, and at-large incumbent Elizabeth Gore.

The gulf in fundraising was most apparent in the four-way at-large race. Bolstered by donations from PACs, Allen brought in more than $123,000 — dwarfing the $1,700 raised by Gore. Gore herself, however, has shown that candidates can overcome fundraising deficits. She won the seat in 2016 after raising about $1,200.

Reports were not available for two at-large candidates: Ellis Noto, who said his campaign was not required to file a report because it has not yet received or spent over $500, and Kendra McKnight, who said she was not aware of the reporting requirement.

The outcome of the race will shape the district for years to come because a majority of seats on the seven-member board are up for election. Over the past six years, IPS has been transformed by innovation schools, which are considered part of the district but run by outside managers. In part because teachers at the schools are not unionized, the approach is controversial.

Critics of the district’s approach defeated incumbents to win two board seats in 2018. But the balance of power on the board has remained largely supportive of innovation schools.

The money flowing into this school board race is more transparent compared with recent elections because spending by Stand for Children Indiana will be publicly reported, according to Executive Director Justin Ohlemiller. For the past several years, Stand has led extensive campaigns through an independent expenditure committee, also known as a 501(c)(4), which the government exempts from having to disclose all of its political activity.

This year, Stand is contributing directly to candidates and campaigning for them through a political action committee, which is required to disclose spending. That committee has spent about $49,000 on school board races so far this election, according to the disclosure. That includes cash contributions to candidates and in-kind support, such as phone outreach to voters.

RISE, an education advocacy group formed last year, spent about $243,600, including $105,000 for digital advertising and $55,900 for campaign mailers. Some of that spending went toward other political offices, but at least $100,000 of that was spent on the IPS school board races, according to candidate filings.

The political arm of the Indiana State Teachers Association contributed $11,500 to candidates who are critical of innovation schools, a fraction of the amount the union spent on the 2018 election.

Here are the totals by race:

At-large

Kenneth Allen raised $123,000, including two large contributions received after Oct. 9, the close of the window covered by the pre-election report.

Elizabeth Gore raised $1,700.

Ellis Noto did not file a report.

Kendra McKnight did not file a report.

District 1

Will Pritchard raised $64,800, including a large contribution received after Oct. 9, the close of the window covered by the pre-election report.

Brandon Randall raised $1,800.

District 2

Daqavise Winston raised $3,100.

Venita Moore raised $55,000, including two large contributions received after Oct. 9, the close of the window covered by the pre-election report. Moore also had $3,900 remaining in her campaign coffers.

District 4

Diane Arnold raised $57,300 including a large contribution received after Oct. 9, the close of the window covered by the pre-election report.

Christina Smith raised $12,500, including a $11,000 donation reported by the teachers union. Smith told Chalkbeat she did not include the contribution in her own disclosure because she did not deposit it until after Oct. 9, the end of the reporting period.

Update: Oct. 19, 2020: This story has been updated to include the amount Venita Moore raised. Her reports were filed after the deadline.

Voter guide: Denver’s 4A and 4B would fund school nurses, air conditioning, and more

2020-10-10T00:26:10+00:00

Note: This story is about Denver’s 2020 request. If you’re looking for information on Denver’s 2024 4A ballot measure, read: Ballot measure 4A: $975 million Denver Public Schools bond will be on the November 2024 ballot.

Denver voters will decide whether to earmark tax dollars for schools this November.

They face two questions on the ballot. Measure 4A asks voters to approve a $32 million mill levy override, a type of tax increase. 4B asks voters to approve a $795 million bond.

What would the bond and mill levy override pay for?

In general, bonds pay for one-time expenses like school construction or maintenance. Bond funds can also be used to pay for technology such as computers and tablets. Mill levy overrides can pay for ongoing expenses like staff salaries, software, or programming.

The Denver school board approved a slate of projects and initiatives to be funded. The projects were recommended by a 75-person committee, which prioritized those that would benefit students from low-income families, multilingual students, and students with disabilities.

The projects that would be funded by the $795 million bond issue, 4B, include:

Installing air conditioning at 24 schools. Currently, 55 of Denver’s more than 150 school buildings lack air conditioning. The committee recommended the 24 schools based on student demographics and indoor temperature studies.
Renovating or rebuilding the Montbello high school campus in far northeast Denver. The construction would restore a large, comprehensive high school to a neighborhood where most students are Black and Hispanic.
Upgrading learning environments. This would include replacing outdated equipment, upgrading playgrounds, building new science labs, expanding classroom space for career and technical programs, and other projects.
Buying land for new schools in the far northeast Gateway neighborhood. The district anticipates additional students from new home construction in that neighborhood.
Upgrading technology and safety systems. One of the largest investments in this category would expand student access to computers and home internet, the lack of which has impeded virtual learning for low-income families.

The initiatives that would be funded by the $32 million mill levy override, 4A, include:

Pay raises for teachers and hourly workers, including bus drivers, custodians, and paraprofessionals. The district would also increase its minimum wage.
Hiring more school nurses. Last school year, only 15% of Denver campuses had a school nurse five days a week, which is concerning during a pandemic.
Hiring more school staff to tend to students’ mental health. This could include school counselors, psychologists, and social workers. Students need more mental health support in the face of COVID-19 and rising youth gun violence.
Increasing special education services. More students are requesting one-on-one support from a paraprofessional, and more young students need speech therapy.

How would 4A and 4B affect my tax bill?

If approved, 4A would raise Denver’s property tax rate by 1.55 mills next year. That’s the equivalent of $51 per year on a home valued at $465,000. Denver property owners are already taxed at a rate of 46.7 mills for Denver Public Schools, and 4A would raise that to 48.2.

The tax rate could go even higher if, for example, property values drop and the district can’t raise sufficient funds at the current rate. The ballot measure would allow the district to raise the tax rate by 1 mill per year, up to a total of 4 additional mills.

Measure 4B is not expected to raise the property tax rate next year. That’s because the district can make payments on the bond with revenue generated at the current tax rate.

The 4B bond would raise $795 million. But with interest, the total amount of money Denver taxpayers end up paying will be higher: as much as $1.5 billion, per the language of 4B. If voters reject 4B, the property tax rate would go down.

What are the pros and cons?

Supporters of 4A and 4B — which include all seven members of the Denver school board, the Denver teachers union, and the Denver Democratic Party — say the measures will make Denver schools safer for students physically and emotionally, connect more students to virtual learning during COVID-19, and help pay teachers and other staff a livable wage.

Opponents of 4A and 4B — which include the Denver Republican Party, as well as critics of the district administration — argue, in part, that the district has repeatedly asked voters to raise taxes for schools and should use that funding, along with budget reserves, to address its needs. However, no one submitted a statement for the blue book in opposition to the ballot measures.

Voters last approved tax measures to benefit Denver Public Schools in 2016.

McCormick criticizes Holcomb as she campaigns for his Democratic challenger

2020-10-06T21:55:27+00:00

State Superintendent Jennifer McCormick, a frequent critic of her fellow Republicans, took several swipes at Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb as she campaigned Monday night for his Democratic challenger.

On a Facebook Live event with Dr. Woody Myers, who is running against Holcomb this fall, McCormick blasted Republicans for ignoring educators’ concerns about “expensive and inefficient” education policies that bog down teachers’ and administrators’ work.

“Any educator who’s probably watching this could tell you there are a lot of things we do that don’t make sense,” McCormick said. “And then we tell you how to improve upon it, but you have to have leaders who will listen. And we’ve tried to be a voice, but it is really difficult to do right now when you have the executive office of the governor, and you have the House and the Senate under supermajority, and you have a state board who is really the governor’s board.”

McCormick didn’t name specific policies that she felt were burdensome but went on to discuss the challenges of school funding, teacher retention, and pandemic instruction.

This election season, McCormick’s cross-party endorsements of several Democrats, including Myers, mark the latest chapter in years of strife between the state’s top elected education official and the governor. McCormick denounced the “toxic” behind-the-scenes politics that she blamed for encumbering her job when she announced she would not seek a second term.

Last year, she appeared with another Democratic gubernatorial hopeful, state Sen. Eddie Melton, who later dropped out of the race.

Holcomb, who has styled himself as a mild-mannered moderate, hasn’t directly addressed McCormick’s grievances. Soon after they were both elected in 2016, he led a successful movement to give the governor, rather than voters, the power to choose the top education official.

After her Democratic endorsements, the state GOP cast McCormick out: “It’s not surprising that a Democrat is endorsing a Democrat,” party spokesman Jake Oakman told IndyStar.

On Monday, Myers praised McCormick for crossing party lines to endorse candidates whose public education platforms she supported. “That took a lot of courage politically,” he said.

When he asked her about what characteristics a governor should look for in an education secretary, McCormick emphasized education experience and collaboration.

“You have to have willing partners in that,” she said. “It has to go both ways.”

McCormick also criticized Holcomb’s campaign commercials touting a $100 million state investment in expanding broadband access in rural areas. The lack of internet access has hampered many schools’ abilities to offer robust e-learning during the pandemic.

“It’s a billion-dollar problem,” she said. “So until we really want to pony up true money that’s going to put a dent in things and move it … everybody knows it’s a concern. I don’t know why we’re pretending it’s not.”

In addition to the state’s response to the pandemic, teacher pay has emerged as a key issue in the governor’s race. Holcomb has taken some steps to increase teacher paychecks, but he largely put off the issue until the 2021 legislative session. Myers has emphasized that the state needs to increase teacher pay, since low salaries lead fewer people to go into teaching and more to leave it, but he hasn’t yet offered solutions.

McCormick called teacher recruitment and retention a “crisis” and commended Myers for recognizing the extent of the problem.

“We are just not keeping up,” she said.

IPS board candidates debate innovation schools, racial equity, and budget cuts

2020-09-30T22:19:32+00:00

Ten candidates for Indianapolis Public Schools board all emphasized the need to close educational gaps for Black students and improve neighborhood schools, in a Tuesday night debate hosted by Chalkbeat Indiana and WFYI.

Their stances varied on one controversial issue that has divided the district: IPS’ partnerships with charter and nonprofit operators to run what are known as innovation schools. The district most notably uses the strategy to try to turn around low-performing schools.

“Some of those schools are struggling still,” said Elizabeth Gore, who is in a four-way race to keep her at-large seat. “They have not, I feel, met the quota that I would like to see. So at this point, I have a problem with innovative schools. I’d like to see a moratorium on them until we can find out what works and what doesn’t work.”

Four seats on the seven-member board are up for election Nov. 3. Advocacy groups have drawn the usual battle lines between candidates who back innovation schools and those who are skeptical of the strategy. In six years, IPS has grown to include 26 innovation schools among the 72 schools in its portfolio.

Gore’s challengers in the at-large race, which represents the entire district, were split on innovation schools.

“I’m all for parents being able to choose what they think is best for their young people,” said Kenneth Allen, program director of the Indiana Trafficking Victims Assistance Program and chairman of the Indiana Commission on the Social Status of Black Males. He added that he wants more transparency around innovation schools.

“I’m a little on the fence,” said Kendra McKnight, whose children attended an innovation school. While she liked that families have more choices, she said different policies and teaching strategies at her children’s innovation school were sometimes confusing. “The innovative school wasn’t really beneficial to me and my children.”

Ellis Noto, an Army veteran who works for the U.S. Department of Defense, said he liked that innovation schools allow teachers “a little more flexibility.” Teachers at innovation schools aren’t covered by the district’s union contract. But he also raised concerns about vetting the quality of innovation school strategies.

Watch the forum in full here:

A Conversation About Education with IPS Board Candidates
Election season is upon us--with mail in ballots already being cast and early voting beginning on October 6th. Learn about the candidates running for IPS School Board during this online form hosted in partnership by @WFYI and @ChalkbeatIN. The discussion will be hosted in two parts: 5:30 pm - District Candidates, moderated by WFYI’s Eric Weddle District 1: Brandon Randall and Will Pritchard District 2: Daqavise Winston and Venita Moore District 4: Christina Smith and Diane Arnold 6:30 pm- At-Large Candidates, moderated by Chalkbeat’s Dylan Peers McCoy At-large: Kendra McKnight, Elizabeth Gore, Ellis Noto, and Kenneth Allen
Posted by WFYI on Tuesday, September 29, 2020

In the District 4 race to represent the west side and south side, the innovation school issue pits longtime board member Diane Arnold against vocal critic Christina Smith. Arnold has backed innovation school partnerships during her tenure on the school board, while Smith has criticized the district for not involving families and community members enough in forging those partnerships, which she believes take control away from local schools.

“I think that we really need to work on strengthening our neighborhood schools,” Smith said. “If we can get more parents to invest in the community, invest in their neighborhood school, and not only be looking to magnet programs that have limited numbers of seats, we can bring and keep people in the district.”

Smith said word-of-mouth discouraged her from sending her children to their neighborhood school, leading her family to choose magnet options.

Arnold agreed but also defended innovation schools: “So I think it’s obvious innovation schools have been a positive for the district and more students have come back. We have to raise the quality of every school in the district … so that every neighborhood school is as good as every innovation and every choice school.”

Candidates also discussed how a tightening budget could potentially lead to IPS closing schools. In District 2, which covers the far east side, incumbent Venita Moore said the district should work with lawmakers and community partners to make clear where additional funding or support is needed.

“We need to be able to advocate very loudly about where we are and what we’re doing,” Moore said.

Challenger Daqavise Winston, a former IPS behavior specialist, said he didn’t want to see more school closures on the east side.

“I won’t let any schools in District 2 be closed, especially considering the fact that we have one middle school and both of our high schools have been closed here recently,” he said. “It’s unacceptable for us not to have a public high school on the far east side.”

In the race for an open seat in District 1, which represents the near east side and southeast side, candidates addressed racial equity in response to a question about Black IPS students recording lower passing rates on state tests than do other student groups.

“I think we have to do a better job of not relying on standardized testing as a way of evaluating success,” said Brandon Randall, a program director for a youth services nonprofit, pointing to racial biases in test questions. “They’re not equitable, they’re not culturally competent. And so we have to find other measurements, other evaluation methods.”

Will Pritchard, who is on the IPS board’s finance committee and works for a company that specializes in low-income housing tax credits, said the district can better support Black students if it hires more teachers of color. About three-quarters of IPS teachers are white, serving a student population that is 80% nonwhite.

“The second thing is we need to create a support system for kids that come from less stable situations, so we need to build a support team to help them go into the class and get ready to learn and not have all of the responsibility fall on teachers,” Pritchard said.

Read up on the candidates’ positions through our voter guide. Watch a recording of the full debate here.

Indiana governor hopeful Woody Myers would overhaul school funding, scrutinize charters

2020-09-28T17:59:00+00:00

Chalkbeat is profiling the education stances of the two major-party candidates for Indiana governor in the 2020 election. Read about Republican Gov. Eric Holcomb’s education plans here.

When Democrat gubernatorial candidate Dr. Woody Myers spoke at an event last year at a suburban high school, he picked up a pamphlet.

Leafing through, he read that every student at that high school received a MacBook for their studies. “Wow,” he thought, “isn’t that terrific!”

Then, he thought: “Why is it that there’s such a difference in what one school district can do and another?”

That same opportunity wasn’t available just 25 miles away in Indianapolis Public Schools, where he worries that not having those same resources or support factors into Black students’ single-digit passing rates on standardized tests.

“I want them to be able to do it, too. Is that wrong?” Myers said. “Why should superintendents have to figure out how to do a political referendum and get votes in order to get basic stuff done? … It’s the job of the state of Indiana to fund educational opportunity for people.”

Myers, a former state health commissioner, is challenging incumbent Gov. Eric Holcomb in the Nov. 3 election. If elected, Myers would be Indiana’s first African-American governor.

But overshadowed by the weight of the Republican Party in state politics and Holcomb’s spotlight in handling the coronavirus crisis, Myers has trailed in polls and struggled to raise money.

Myers and running mate Linda Lawson, a former state representative, are emphasizing education as a key component of their ticket, playing to those who may be disgruntled with Indiana’s education reform movement that embraced school choice and accountability measures such as standardized testing, teacher evaluations, and school letter grades.

Myers also favors a more cautious approach to reopening school buildings during the coronavirus pandemic.

He picked up endorsements from Republican Superintendent Jennifer McCormick and the American Federation of Teachers Indiana but failed to win support from the Indiana State Teachers Association, the state’s largest teachers union.

In a recent interview with Chalkbeat, Myers laid out his education priorities, including how he would select a secretary of education, re-evaluate school funding, and scrutinize charter school oversight.

On continuing instruction during the pandemic:

Myers suggested a more cautious approach to reopening schools, with a more stringent standard for reducing the number of new coronavirus cases each week before allowing students to return to classrooms.

While children are less likely to have severe symptoms or die from COVID-19 complications, they can still spread the virus among each other and to adults, he said.

He said schools should be prepared to offer remote learning until the threat of the virus is under control — which he estimates could take about two more years.

“I would say that in very, very rural areas of the state, a hybrid model is a good thing to do,” Myers said. “But in every place else, where we know the cases are going up and when we know the positivity rate is high, let’s continue to use distance learning for the time being until we get a vaccine and herd immunity.”

Myers said it’s “just not acceptable” that not all Hoosiers have access to the internet, a substantial barrier to remote education. While Holcomb has pushed a $100 million initiative to partner with broadband providers to expand access, Myers thinks that’s not enough. He criticized Indiana for allowing providers to protect exclusive coverage areas and said the state needs to allow increased competition among internet providers in order to spur more connections to households and better services.

On enhancing oversight of charter schools:

Indiana should not allow new charter schools to open until it can improve oversight, Myers said.

Why? Myers points to the $86 million scandal at Indiana Virtual School and Indiana Virtual Pathways Academy. The state has called for the two schools to return $86 million in public funds after investigators found school officials inflated enrollment and funneled funding to their own businesses and ones tied to their families and friends.

“Clearly, the oversight that’s there now isn’t working,” Myers said. “Nobody wants to take responsibility.”

Myers noted that some charter schools appear to be “really outstanding.” But he wants the state to raise standards for the entire sector by strengthening charter authorizing laws and examining the track record of charter oversight agencies.

On naming a state secretary of education:

Neither Holcomb nor Myers has named a specific person they would appoint to be the state’s top education official. The governor will hold more influence in education next year because he will select a person for that post instead of having voters elect a state superintendent.

Myers said he’s looking for a “superhuman being” who’s an expert in public education and would be more involved in charter school oversight. He stressed that he would need to communicate well with that person but didn’t rule out disagreement, adding that he wouldn’t necessarily pull rank on issues they don’t see eye-to-eye on.

“I’m going to have to believe in what she or he wants to do; they’re going to have to understand what my priorities are,” Myers said.

He added that he also wants a State Board of Education “who’s got some moxie,” holding more robust debate on policy issues and soliciting public input. Eight out of the 11 current state board members are chosen by the governor.

On increasing teacher pay:

Myers believes Indiana schools don’t pay teachers enough, which leads to teachers leaving the state or the profession for more lucrative jobs. While it’s clear there’s a problem, he said he wants to better understand which districts have the biggest pay issues and what the state could do to affect salaries, which are determined at the local level.

He didn’t offer specific solutions but said he believes the state has enough money to direct more to teachers’ paychecks and to schools with the highest needs — even if it means overhauling the budget to divert funding from other areas to send to education.

“We’re going to go through each and every nickel that the state spends, and there are going to be some things that we’re going to say we’re going to push the pause button on,” Myers said, “and say, not now — the state has better priorities right now.”

Seeking re-election, Holcomb highlights progress on teacher pay — and what comes next

2020-09-28T17:57:50+00:00

Chalkbeat is profiling the education stances of the two major-party candidates for Indiana governor in the 2020 election. Read about Democratic challenger Dr. Woody Myers’ education plans here.

Six months ago, Republican Gov. Eric Holcomb mustered his executive power to take an extreme step at the start of the pandemic: Close the schools.

It was perhaps one of the biggest decisions any governor has made in recent history. A few months later, Holcomb made another significant call in declaring that students could return to classrooms.

Holcomb’s response to the coronavirus pandemic will likely factor significantly into whether voters secure him a second term as Indiana’s governor. A moderate Republican, Holcomb can also point to several ways he’s responded to educators’ concerns, such as pledging twice to free up more money for schools so they can spend more on teacher salaries, supporting a hold-harmless measure on low test scores, and putting to rest a controversy over possible school funding cuts this summer.

“I know that a great economy is based on a great workforce. A great workforce is developed by a great education system. And a great education depends on great teachers,” Holcomb told Chalkbeat.

But Holcomb has also been criticized by Indiana teachers, who turned out in record numbers last year at a Statehouse rally to pressure lawmakers to take action on teacher pay, standardized testing, and school funding. While Holcomb has promised to study the teacher pay issue and have experts bring policy suggestions, he hasn’t yet delivered the results. One of his promises to raise teacher pay in the future may no longer be financially viable in a pandemic economy.

And Holcomb, who has spent his career working for Indiana’s GOP, appeared to have a strained relationship with fellow Republican Jennifer McCormick, the state’s education leader who has advocated for teachers. In a splashy move last week, McCormick crossed party lines to support Holcomb’s opponent in the governor’s race.

Holcomb supported stripping voters of the opportunity to elect a state superintendent, instead giving the governor the power to choose the state’s top education official.

Holcomb’s campaign declined an interview request from Chalkbeat. Holcomb responded to questions by email about what he’s learned about education politics and how the state can continue supporting schools through the pandemic.

On increasing teacher pay:

Holcomb said his teacher pay commission will release its report in December, “in time for leaders to discuss ways to get more dollars into teacher paychecks.”

The budget constraints caused by the pandemic will make those recommendations even more important, he said.

“We do need to recruit more teachers, especially teachers from minority communities, and we need to do more to keep the great teachers who are already in the profession,” Holcomb wrote. “Increasing their compensation is one way to do that.”

He noted that he believes the state has made progress on teacher pay, since nearly every school district offered some kind of salary increase in last year’s teacher contracts. Holcomb highlighted Indiana’s regular incremental increases to school funding and paying down $150 million in schools’ pension liabilities, which helped some districts offer raises but resulted in little savings for others, as IndyStar reported last year.

On school funding in the next budget:

State revenues have declined during the pandemic, which means state lawmakers will likely have to shape a smaller two-year budget.

“Some difficult choices will need to be made,” Holcomb said. “Having said that, education will remain our top priority.”

On education politics:

Holcomb said he didn’t think education politics caused a lot of friction, casting it instead as “a lot of passion surrounding education issues.”

Holcomb didn’t address tensions, highlighting instead moments of consensus, such as lawmakers’ swift, bipartisan move to protect schools and teachers from low ILEARN results when Indiana switched to the new standardized test.

“Of course, there’s never unanimity on all issues, but in Indiana we’ve shown that we can work together to get things done, and that’s certainly been the case when it comes to education and will continue to be my intent,” he said.

On naming a secretary of education:

Holcomb said he’s looking for an education leader who is “honest, hungry, and humble and has the needs of students at heart. I want a leader that’s creative and is thinking about education in a holistic sense... meaning K-12, higher education, career training, and can collaborate with superintendents, principals, teacher organizations, and parents.”

On education in the pandemic:

Throughout his response to Chalkbeat’s questions, Holcomb praised the work of educators to respond to the challenges of teaching through the coronavirus crisis and noted the state’s efforts to close the digital divide even before the pandemic started. He also acknowledged that the pandemic will exacerbate inequities in education among the most vulnerable students.

“It will be important for us, as a state, to stay focused on student learning... and knowing where we are now and how we will be better after this,” he said.

Want to know where IPS school board candidates stand? Check our voter guide.

2020-09-25T00:08:13+00:00

Four seats are on the November ballot for the Indianapolis Public Schools’ Board of School Commissioners, putting the district’s future in the hands of voters at a pivotal moment.

The winners will join the board as the state’s largest school district faces the unfolding fiscal and educational impact of the pandemic. The next board will also weigh in on crucial issues, including: a reckoning with racial equity; potential school closings or consolidations; and the district’s ongoing commitment to partnerships with charter school operators.

Now, the 10 candidates face a challenging campaign landscape. The pandemic curtailed face-to-face meetings and shifted the interaction with voters into the digital space. Candidates are relying on videoconferencing to meet constituents. Others are supported by texting campaigns organized on their behalf by outside groups.

Chalkbeat Indiana and WFYI asked candidates to respond to the biggest issues facing the district and how they would represent their constituents. Candidates showed support for the district’s recent Racial Equity Mindset, Commitment & Action policy and concern for keeping students academically on track during the pandemic. Below are their answers.

You can learn even more about the candidates and hear them answer questions from reporters at a virtual forum Tuesday.

Districts 1, 2, and 4: 5:30 p.m. to 6:20 p.m.

At-large 6:30 p.m. to 7:20 p.m.

Register for the virtual event and submit your questions for the candidates here.

Hear from the IPS board candidates running in the 2020 election

2020-09-22T19:23:00+00:00

The coronavirus pandemic has thrown a new spotlight and new pressures on the leadership of Indianapolis Public Schools as the district navigates the challenges of educating students and keeping them safe.

Ten candidates, including three incumbents, are running for four seats on the IPS board this fall. Join Chalkbeat Indiana and WFYI on Tuesday, Sept. 29, for a virtual forum to hear from the candidates on issues facing the district, including the school system’s response to COVID-19, school funding, impending budget reductions, racial equity, and innovation schools.

IPS returns to in-person learning next month, one of the last districts in the city to do so. The pandemic created extra costs for the district, which was already planning to make hefty budget cuts that could lead to closing schools. The district, made up of about 80% students of color, has resolved to scrutinize and work toward undoing racist systems and attitudes.

IPS has also transformed over recent years, converting many of its struggling schools into “innovation schools” independently run by charter operators or nonprofit partners.

Register for the virtual event and submit your questions for the candidates here.

Correction: Sept. 22, 2020: A previous version of this story said that 11 candidates were running for the school board. One candidate, Cary Patterson, has been removed from the election board list. Patterson told Chalkbeat she made a clerical error in her filing.

Indiana teachers union will sit out governor’s race despite key education issues at play

2020-08-21T22:54:05+00:00

At a time when Indiana’s governor will exert greater control over education and school reopening remains a key political issue, Indiana’s largest teachers union said it won’t be taking sides in this fall’s gubernatorial race.

In what some observers say is a pragmatic move to maintain policy influence, the political arm of the Indiana State Teachers Association will not make an endorsement in what looks like an easy cruise to reelection for Republican Gov. Eric Holcomb against Democratic challenger Dr. Woody Myers.

Instead, the Indiana Political Action Committee for Education will focus on supporting dozens of legislative races, particularly those in which teachers are running.

“We’re a small PAC with limited resources, and so we have to be careful with that,” Keith Gambill, ISTA president and a member of the political action committee, told Chalkbeat. “The legislature has been at times a roadblock for positive change for our public schools, and we’ve got to elect more pro-public education candidates into the General Assembly.”

That decision leaves Myers without a key endorsement and funding source that typically boost Democratic candidates for governor, though the American Federation of Teachers Indiana backed his candidacy in May.

The winner of the governor’s race will pick who leads the state’s education department, making this a particularly consequential election to sit out. That marks a change from having voters elect the top education official. School funding will also pose a key issue in 2021, when the next two-year budget will be finalized and when lawmakers could decide on funding cuts for remote learning during the pandemic.

Holcomb holds a heavy advantage in the race, maintaining a consistent lead in the polls and far outraising his competitor. His $9.1 million in campaign cash this year eclipses the roughly $700,000 that Myers has raised. A spokesperson for Holcomb’s campaign declined to comment on the union’s decision.

“If I were going to read the tea leaves, the move was a strategic one,” said Aaron Dusso, an associate professor of political science at IUPUI and chair of the department. It signals that the union wants to build bridges with Holcomb, he said, rather than antagonize him by endorsing his opponent, in order to have more of a say in education policies.

But, Dusso added, it’s a move that also “certainly would be demoralizing to state Democrats.”

Brandon Evans, communications director for Myers’ campaign, said in a statement that Myers “will continue to stand in solidarity with teachers” and holds education as a top priority.

Without a union endorsement, Gambill said both candidates will have to work harder to earn teachers’ votes. Neither candidate, he said, has adequately explained their vision for the role of the top education appointee.

“At this point, both candidates need to get out there to work to convince us that they are going to focus on our issues in order to earn our votes,” Gambill said.

The teachers union PAC, which has about $1 million to spend, has traditionally endorsed Democratic candidates. In 2016, for example, the union’s PAC backed Holcomb’s opponent, John Gregg, giving more than $300,000 to his unsuccessful run for governor, according to campaign finance records.

Many pieces of Myers’ education platform align with ISTA’s priorities. Myers, a physician and former state health commissioner who hopes to become Indiana’s first Black governor, is pushing for less standardized testing, more restrictions on charter schools and school vouchers, and more support for publicly funded preschool. He is also focusing on increasing funding for schools serving disadvantaged students, reducing gaps in academic outcomes for marginalized students, and reducing disproportionately harsh discipline against students of color.

In AFT Indiana’s endorsement, President GlenEva Dunham said Myers’ “strong executive leadership is what Indiana needs today,” noting that “public education in Indiana has been attacked on all fronts over the last 15 years.”

Over the past year, Holcomb has supported educators’ call for higher pay, though ISTA was disappointed that the state didn’t directly set aside more money for it earlier this year. Through the pandemic, he has pledged to continue fully funding schools and has used federal funds to help schools secure masks, hand sanitizer, and internet access for students.

Holcomb also backed the move to put the state superintendent’s post under the governor’s purview. The change aims to improve cooperation between the governor and the top education official, but some see it as taking voice away from teachers.

Education Reform Now Advocacy spends $57,000 on 2 Memphis school board challengers ahead of the election

2020-08-04T22:39:34+00:00

A national advocacy organization that seeks to increase charter school funding and school accountability is the biggest contributor in the races to elect Shelby County Schools board members.

Our Children, Our Choice TN, the political action committee funded by Education Reform Now Advocacy, spent about $57,000 between Sheleah Harris and Kristy Sullivan, who are challenging incumbents Scott McCormick and Kevin Woods, respectively.

The PAC spent about $48,000 on mailings, digital advertising, phone banking, and campaign donations to Harris and about $9,000 on Sullivan’s behalf.

The spending boosts competition in the Memphis school board’s two biggest races. Woods, who has been on the board since he was appointed in 2011, and McCormick, who was elected to the board in 2014, are each facing three challengers. (Mauricio Calvo dropped out of the race against McCormick and endorsed Harris last month.)

Education Reform Now Advocacy is affiliated with Education Reform Now, which is run by Shavar Jeffries, who is also the president of Democrats for Education Reform. The national think tank researches and helps draft legislation on school funding, teacher preparation, and expanding quality charter schools.

Lacretia Carroll, Education Reform Now’s training director based in Memphis, said in a statement that Harris and Sullivan are graduates of their Leaders of Color program.

“These candidates — both of whom would be the first Black woman to hold their position —have been, and will continue to be, strong advocates for Shelby County students and families,” she said.

Other groups endorsing or spending on school board candidates include Memphis PACE, the political action committee for Memphis-Shelby County Education Association, which represents thousands of Shelby County Schools teachers; Stand for Children, an education advocacy organization based in Portland with a Memphis chapter; and the Central Labor Council of Memphis & West Tennessee.

Early voting has ended, but election day is Thursday. The Tennessee Secretary of State said Tuesday that because of a surge of absentee ballots, election results could be delayed. A spokeswoman for the Shelby County Election Commission said the county usually distributes up to 1,000 absentee ballots per election. Now that voters can cite coronavirus concerns as a reason to vote by mail, the county has distributed more than 19,000 absentee ballots and as of Monday had received about 12,000.

Candidates Paul Evelyn Allen, Trevor Johnson Banks, Miska Clay Bibbs, Althea Greene, Stephanie Love, Clyde Pinkston, Tamarques Porter, and Aaron Youngblood did not report campaign spending this summer or had incomplete information, according to the Shelby County Election Commission’s website. The election commission noted some finance disclosure forms have not been posted yet. Below is a sampling of contributions to school board candidates:

District 2

Althea Greene: $500 from Stand PAC of Tennessee (Stand for Children), $500 from Memphis PACE, and endorsed by the Central Labor Council of Memphis & West Tennessee

District 3

Jesse Jeff: $1,000 from Memphis PACE and endorsed by the Central Labor Council of Memphis & West Tennessee
Stephanie Love: $3,500 for mailings from Stand PAC of Tennessee and $500 from Memphis PACE
Aaron Youngblood: $500 from Memphis PACE

District 4

Clyde Pinkston: No information available
Tamarques Porter: $500 from Memphis PACE and endorsed by the Central Labor Council of Memphis & West Tennessee
Kristy Sullivan: $6,400 donation from Our Choice, Our Children TN, along with nearly $3,000 in digital ads and mailings
Kevin Woods: Contributions from more than 100 donors totaling $83,000 including $500 from Stand PAC of Tennessee and Memphis PACE, and various amounts from Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris, Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland, State Sen. Raumesh Akbari, county commissioners Mickell Lowery and Tami Sawyer, city council members Patrice Robinson and Jeff Warren, and fellow school board member Billy Orgel

District 5

Paul Evelyn Allen: $500 from Memphis PACE
April Ghueder: $100 from County Commissioner Michael Whaley and $220 from Leadership for Educational Equity staff, who support Teach for America alumni in advocacy
Sheleah Harris: $6,400 donation from Our Choice, Our Children TN, along with about $41,000 in digital ads, phone banking, and mailings; $2,500 donation and $2,500 worth of mailings from Stand PAC of Tennessee; $500 from Memphis PACE; endorsed by the Central Labor Council of Memphis & West Tennessee
Scott McCormick: About $14,000 from about 30 donors including fellow board member Billy Orgel, city councilman Jeff Warren, and Blue Cross Blue Shield PAC. Board member Woods is the Memphis market president for BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee.

District 7

Trevor Johnson Banks: No information available
Miska Clay Bibbs: $3,500 worth of mailings from Stand PAC of Tennessee, $500 from Memphis PACE, and endorsed by the Central Labor Council of Memphis & West Tennessee

Update and clarification, Aug. 5, 2020: This story has been updated with a statement from Education Reform Now sent after publication and PAC contribution amounts to Kevin Woods. This story also clarifies that Education Reform Now Advocacy, affiliated with Education Reform Now, is the entity that donated money to the Our Children, Our Choice PAC.

Shelby County Schools board contenders talk pandemic, state testing, and ASD transition

2020-07-21T22:55:33+00:00

The COVID-19 pandemic may be just the thing to break the five Shelby County Schools board contests on the August ballot out of the usual rhetoric that comes with school board races.

At two online candidate forums in the past four days sponsored and hosted by Chalkbeat Tennessee in partnership with the National Civil Rights Museum and MICAH (Memphis Interfaith Coalition for Action and Hope), what broke through the rhetoric were questions about what public schools will look like in the pandemic, state achievement testing and the coming transition of students out of the state-run Achievement School District.

Watch the conversation with candidates from districts 2, 3, and 4 in full.

“Just sitting through this Zoom call is painful enough,” District 4 school board member Kevin Woods said of the impact of a full online school day for teachers.

“That’s a heavy, heavy lift,” he said. “It’s not a question of ‘if’ on virtual education. It’s how good is it going to be.”

Kristy Sullivan, who is among Woods’ challengers in the District 4 race, said parents should continue to choose virtual or in-person, as they are doing through Friday. But Sullivan said numbers of new cases, positivity rates and hospitalization rates could change the nature of that choice and the question from which one to when.

“If it looks as though we cannot continue to go forward with in-person options … then we should give some consideration to going all virtual for the first month or so,” she said.

District 3 school board member Stephanie Love said the school system’s plans have to include options.

“Regardless of the plans we make, COVID-19 is going to determine what plan we actually follow,” she said. “We are most definitely prepared, whatever happens, to continue.”

One of her two challengers, Aaron Youngblood, said children learn best in person and in a classroom. But he also said a return to classes “is not an option.”

“Until there are two weeks of no new cases and in-person school board meetings, along with more staff input, I don’t think we should allow kids to go back in-person,” he said.

Love’s other challenger, Jesse Jeff, a director of the Memphis-Shelby County Education Association, said there should be a gradual return to in-person classes.

“Maybe for the first semester it should be virtual,” he said. “I don’t think we are down far enough with the positivity rate.”

District 5 board member Scott McCormick said the school system won’t be able to plan ahead for every possibility that could come up.

“What happens if a teacher is diagnosed or tests positive? Does a substitute teacher come in? Does that classroom have to go on lockdown for 14 days?” he asked. “We’re not going to have an answer totally when we are ready to start school. There will be a lot of issues that come up as we go along.”

One of his three challengers, Sheleah Harris, said the pandemic’s effects are more profound than the immediate questions about the unexpected in a classroom.

“COVID-19 only pulled back what we have not done,” she said. “It only revealed the gaps that were already there.”

District 7 incumbent Miska Clay-Bibbs, who is also chairwoman of the board, said procedure is more important than policy when it comes to schools in a pandemic that neither parents nor grandparents have seen in their lifetimes.

“If something happens in the building, it will affect everyone,” she said of the contact students and teachers may have well beyond a school. “Things are changing daily. We have to be nimble when it comes to this plan.”

At the second Chalkbeat forum for the contenders in the District 5 and 7 races, all five candidates were critical of TNReady testing and said if the state performance tests return, it should be under different conditions and not during the coming school year.

Watch the conversation with candidates from districts 5 and 7 in full.

District 5 candidate April Ghueder, a teacher, said the school system should move to “screening” tests that are used to indicate where a student is as a snapshot instead of as a more substantial judge of achievement.

“When can I teach? When can I really teach the curriculum?” she asked, saying it is a common question among teachers who feel they have to switch near test time to teach the test. “I think we have the data. I think the data is there. We need to use it.”

Clay-Bibbs said because the state tests are used to evaluate the effectiveness of teachers, they are seen as “punitive.”

“We cannot continue to be testing in that same way,” she said. “Whichever way it goes, it will give us an opportunity for us to create something for ourselves as a district.”

McCormick said the school system needs a “different approach” on school resource officers.

“They should be in the school not dressed in an intimidating way,” he said. “They should be in the school as another form of support that we provide the students. There is so much mistrust between students and law enforcement, and I think we need to realize that.”

Paul Evelyn Allen, a retired teacher in the District 5 race, said that should depend on the school, especially middle and high schools.

“The school climate and environment determines the need,” she said, noting that some teachers have retired on disability because of violent encounters with children. “We don’t want students or staff left vulnerable to possibly violent altercations.”

Harris said she has taught literacy to detainees at the Shelby County Jail as well as her past as a teacher in Shelby County Schools.

“It looks the same,” she said by way of comparison. “Our officers should be in school for safety only and not intimidation.”

Asked about the return of SCS students from eight years of the state-run Achievement School District that took over failing schools in the system, retired educator and District 2 board member Althea Greene said there may be changes to the school day for those students.

Greene is the only one of the five incumbents seeking re-election this election year who is running unopposed on the August ballot.

“The children are coming back farther behind than they were when they left,” she said of changes to the ASD by the state.

“We may need extended learning days and school on Saturday and other resources to bridge the gap. … But please send some dollars back with those children.”

Woods was more outspoken about the legacy of the ASD.

“We were sold a bill of goods that someone else could come into our community, educate our children better, displace our teachers. And when you fail at that you say, ‘Here it is. It’s right back in your lap. Now go back and fix it.’ It’s hard to educate poor children.”

Woods said the school system should be prepared to bring some of the ASD teachers “into the fold of our system,” possibly as an extension of the Innovation Zone schools – the school system’s version of the ASD.

Eight years later, the I-Zone schools appear to have boosted student achievement in failing schools better than the ASD model that relied heavily on using charter school organizations.

Sullivan said the transition will take more money.

“We don’t have enough resources to educate those most at risk with the limited resources we have,” she said.

Jeff said all schools should be along the optional school model – another hot button issue with educators and parents for decades.

“Everybody should play by the same rules,” he said.

This story was originally published on The Daily Memphian, a nonprofit news organization. Bill Dries covers city government and politics. He is a native Memphian and has been a reporter for more than 40 years.

Want to know where Memphis school board candidates stand? Check our voter guide.

2020-07-09T22:07:55+00:00

Update, July 17, 2020: Shelby County Schools board candidate Mauricio Calvo is suspending his campaign and endorsing Sheleah Harris to oust incumbent Scott McCormick.

Calvo is the executive director of nonprofit advocacy organization Latino Memphis and said when he decided to run for school board, he thought the coronavirus spread would be less than what it is now.

“As COVID-19 continues to surge and disproportionately impact the Hispanic community and other vulnerable populations, I must give my undivided attention to this crisis,” Calvo said in a statement Friday as early voting started for the Aug. 6 election.

He also said Harris, a former teacher and graduate of Cordova High School in District 5, would represent the interests of Hispanic students. Calvo, the only Hispanic candidate in the race, said his daughter had her first Hispanic teacher as a high school sophomore last year.

“As a Black woman, Sheleah understands the importance of representation and her presence would add another impressive woman into the ranks of public service in Memphis and Shelby County,” Calvo said.

We have removed Calvo from the voter guide below.

A majority of the seats on Shelby County Schools’ board are up for election as leaders prepare for a school year full of uncertainties because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Fifteen people are vying for five spots on the school board governing Tennessee’s largest district on Aug. 6. Early voting starts July 17.

We asked candidates to share their thoughts on major education issues facing the district. Below you can sort through each school board district race and see candidates’ answers to a survey Chalkbeat sent out last month. Some of the questions came from our readers.

You can learn even more about how candidates hope to lead the district by attending our upcoming forums via videoconferencing:

Districts 2, 3, and 4: 5:30 to 7 p.m. on Thursday, July 16
District 5 and 7: 5:30 to 7 p.m. on Monday, July 20

Please RSVP to receive a Zoom link for one or both forums. If you’re unsure which district you live in, check out these maps.

One incumbent changes his mind and joins 14 others running for five Memphis school board seats

2020-04-06T20:15:45+00:00

Fifteen people are running for five seats on the Shelby County Schools board in August, including an incumbent who initially was not going to seek re-election.

Kevin Woods, who in February said he would step down, announced Tuesday he would run again as schools are closed indefinitely because of coronavirus. In response, two candidates planned to withdraw, including Joann Massey, who oversees the city’s contracts with businesses owned by women and people of color.

“These are exceptional times and the health and well-being of our education system are at stake,” Woods said in a Facebook post. “I plan to stay committed to District 4 families and employees, as well as my fellow board members while we continue to work through these difficult challenges.”

Open seats in Memphis school board elections are staggered. Five seats are open in this year’s election in districts 2, 3, 4, 5, and 7, including most neighborhoods north of Poplar Avenue, plus South Memphis and Hickory Hill.

With the majority of seats open on the nine-member board, the election could affect support for Superintendent Joris Ray, whom the board hired last April. He currently enjoys the support of most board members.

This year, all but one of the five seats are being contested. Four years ago, only one of the five seats was contested. The incumbent, Stephanie Love, won it handedly.

School board members serve four-year terms and are paid $25,000 per year. Early voting for the Aug. 6 election will run from July 17 to Aug. 1.

A display at the “State of the District” address, a nod to the city’s area code.

There is one candidate for District 2, which includes North Memphis and Binghampton:

Althea Greene, 62, is the school board’s only former teacher and was appointed in February 2019 after her predecessor Teresa Jones was appointed as a municipal judge. Soon after her appointment, Greene was one of the first board members to publicly endorse abandoning a national superintendent search and hire Ray. She is the pastor of Real Life Ministries and the owner of Third Generation Catering. She graduated from Treadwell High School and retired from Shelby County Schools in July 2018 after 38 years of teaching at six Memphis schools.

There are three candidates running for District 3, which includes Frayser, Raleigh, and Woodstock:

Jesse Jeff, 60, is a Uniserv Director for Memphis-Shelby County Education Association, a teachers group that in part represents employees in labor disputes, and currently represents the association in district negotiations with teachers. Jeff retired from Shelby County Schools in 2016 after teaching in Memphis elementary schools for 22 years. He is a city native, former police officer, and veteran of the United States Army and Marine Corps. He has unsuccessfully run for sheriff, city council and state representative. Both of his children graduated from Memphis public schools.
Stephanie Love, 39, was elected to the school board in 2014 and won re-election in 2016. She is the co-chair of the board’s budget committee and has advocated for more parent and community engagement from the district, charter schools, and the state-run Achievement School District, which has concentrated in the Frayser neighborhood. She has four children, all of whom have attended or are attending SCS schools.
Aaron Youngblood, 28, is the regional manager for Enriched Schools, which provides charter schools with substitute teachers. He is a former teacher at Frayser Elementary, a part of the state-run Achievement School District and the co-chair of the Memphis Youth Guidance Commission, which makes recommendations to the city mayor on youth issues. Youngblood was on a board committee for Southwest Early College High, a charter school forced to close this year.

Four people are running for District 4, which includes the far southeast of Memphis and the district’s three Germantown schools:

Clyde W. Pinkston, no further information was available
Tamarques Porter, 35, is a cyber security analyst and policy advisor for the U.S. Department of Treasury and is a former teacher assistant and field support analyst for Shelby County Schools. Previously, he administered literacy programs at day care centers. Porter is a graduate of Melrose High School and serves on the board for Blacks and Latinos in Technology, the Educational Technology Advisory Committee for State Rep. Barbara Cooper and the Shelby County Commission’s IT steering committee. He is married with two sons, one of whom attends a private school.
Kristy Sullivan, 41, is the director of family and stakeholder engagement at The New Teacher Project, where she previously helped develop a teacher recruitment and retainment strategy for Shelby County Schools. She is a White Station High School graduate and has two daughters, one who attends Idlewild Elementary School. She also works with Think Before You Act, a nonprofit antibullying and anger management awareness campaign that works with schools and was founded by her father.
Kevin Woods, 43, is the Memphis market president for BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee, and has served on the school board for nearly nine years after being appointed in 2011 as plans for merging city and county school systems got underway. Woods was board chair during the one year the districts were actually merged in 2013. The next year six suburban districts formed and split from the district. He has two daughters who attend SCS schools and serves on the board of 100 Black Men, Leadership Tennessee, United Way, and the Salvation Army, among others.

Shelby County Schools enrolls about 113,000 students in Memphis.

Five people are running for the District 5 seat, which includes Cordova and unincorporated rural parts of the school system:

Paul Evelyn Allen, 57, retired from Shelby County Schools as a music teacher in 2017 after 30 years in the classroom. She is a graduate of Northside High School.
Mauricio Calvo, 44, is the 11-year executive director of Latino Memphis, and ran unsuccessfully for Memphis City Council last year. In that race, he got an endorsement from Stand for Children, an education advocacy organization. Originally from Mexico City, Calvo became a U.S. citizen in 2018 and serves on the boards of Downtown Memphis Commission, Hope Credit Union, Memphis Convention and Visitors Bureau, Memphis Brand Initiative, and Shelby Farms Park Conservancy, among others. He is married and has three children who attend schools in the district. The Shelby County Election Commission was still processing Calvo’s petition to verify signatures as of noon Monday.
April Ghueder, 25, is a sixth grade English teacher at Believe Memphis Academy, a charter school authorized by Shelby County Schools. Before that, she taught in the KIPP charter network and Germanshire Elementary. She is an alumnae of Teach for America Memphis, though she previously obtained her education degree through Christian Brothers University. Ghueder is a White Station High graduate and on the board of The Collective, which provides professional training for Teach for America alumni of color.
Sheleah Harris, 32, is a government affairs manager for Verizon and a former high school teacher for Shelby County Schools and Bartlett City Schools. Harris is a Cordova High School graduate and was previously the director of policy and advocacy for Tennessee Charter School Center. She is on the board of National Association for Homeless Children and Youth, Boys and Girls Club of Memphis, and Sister Supply. She is also the founder of nonprofit Living Grace, which provides supplies and support for homeless students.
Scott McCormick, 60, was elected to the school board in 2014 and won re-election in 2016 uncontested. McCormick is the board’s vice chairman and leads the superintendent evaluation committee. He also serves on the Tennessee School Boards Association’s OPEB Trust retiree benefits board. He is a Memphis native and White Station High School graduate. He previously served on the Memphis City Council from 2004 to 2008, served as the council’s chairman, and unsuccessfully ran as a Republican for a statehouse seat last year.

Two people are running in District 7, which includes South Memphis, Alcy Ball and Parkway Village:

Trevor Johnson Banks: The Shelby County Election Commission was still processing Bank’s petition to verify signatures as of noon Monday. No further information was available.
Miska Clay Bibbs, 45, is the chairwoman for the Shelby County Schools board. She was elected in 2014, won re-election in 2016 uncontested and became the chief of staff at Teach For America in Memphis in August. Bibbs previously was the executive director for the Memphis office of Teach Plus, which ended its teacher fellowship program in 2016. Before that, Bibbs led community engagement for charter network Green Dot Public Schools and coordinated volunteer training and community events and partnerships with the former Memphis City Schools for nearly 10 years. During her time on the school board, Bibbs has led the district’s effort to increase accountability and transparency with the school system’s charter schools. Two of the district’s new elementary buildings are in her district, Alcy and Parkway Village. Her son is a Shelby County Schools high school senior.

Have questions you think we should ask the candidates? Email us at tn.tips@chalkbeat.org.

Chicago teachers union leaders back Sanders, becoming latest to offer personal endorsements as unions tread carefully

2020-03-04T16:57:08+00:00

Two leaders of the Chicago Teachers Union announced Wednesday that they were personally endorsing Sen. Bernie Sanders for the Democratic presidential nomination.

“Educators in Chicago’s public schools fight for their students, and their students’ families and communities,” said Jesse Sharkey, the union’s president, in a statement sent out by the Sanders campaign. “No other candidate has put forth a better plan to make that fight a reality than Bernie Sanders.”

“Black mothers and educators like me need a candidate that will fight for all our students,” said Stacy Davis Gates, the union’s vice president. “For these reasons and so many more, I’m happy to say that I’m part of the revolution, and I urge my fellow educators to stand with Senator Bernie Sanders for the Democratic primary nomination.”

The show of support is the latest in a flurry of personal endorsements from top teachers union leaders, even as the unions they run have hesitated to get behind a single candidate.

Randi Weingarten, the head of the American Federation of Teachers, personally endorsed Sen. Elizabeth Warren last week after her union encouraged members to support former Vice President Joe Biden, Sanders, or Warren. Another top AFT leader, Lorretta Johnson, has endorsed Biden. New York City teachers union leader Michael Mulgrew did too, even though his union is sitting out the primaries.

Experts say it’s uncommon to see labor leaders making personal endorsements like these. Usually, candidates seek union support because of the valuable financial contributions, volunteer support, and votes the unions can marshal.

“The institutional endorsement is what’s meaningful, and that’s what Democratic party candidates desperately want and seek,” said Robert Bruno, who directs the labor education program at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

But those endorsements have been tough to come by in many cities, including Chicago. A few weeks ago, a large body of Chicago teachers union members voted not to endorse Sanders and to remain neutral in the primaries, in part because educators were divided in their loyalties between Sanders and Warren. Both candidates stood in solidarity with Chicago teachers during their 11-day strike last fall.

Other local teachers unions have hesitated without a signal from one of the major national unions, which changed their processes for 2020. In the run-up to the 2016 election, the AFT and the National Education Association both issued early endorsements for Hillary Clinton during that election cycle, angering some members who thought the unions didn’t give Sanders enough consideration.

This cycle, the AFT — to which New York City and Chicago teachers belong — has said its local and state affiliates can make their own primary endorsements, but many have shied away from choosing from within a crowded Democratic field. (Some notable exceptions include the teachers unions in Los Angeles and Clark County, Nevada, which both endorsed Sanders. The Boston teachers union and one large Massachusetts teachers union endorsed Warren.)

With the country’s national and large local teachers unions sitting on the sidelines, wary of making a divisive official endorsement, it makes sense that some of their leaders are issuing their own endorsements, said Jon Shelton, an associate professor of democracy and justice studies at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay.

“Teachers unions and union leaders of all kinds are very much invested in the future of the Democratic party,” said Shelton, who wrote a book about teachers unions. “We have a contested primary along ideological lines. You have a lot of leaders who have their own personal opinions and they obviously feel as if they want to be able to weigh in.”

Whether these personal endorsements carry much weight, though, remains to be seen. There’s also the possibility that they could alienate educators who wanted their union either to stay neutral or to conduct a more thorough endorsement process.

Bruno said while the candidates could benefit from having “well-respected people who’ve been around a while and have worked hard on behalf of their members” at their side at campaign events or speaking for them as surrogates, it’s a “far cry” from having the full weight of the union thrown behind them.

“I don’t think these endorsements are meaningless, they matter,” Shelton said, “but I don’t think that any individual really is a game-changer.”

We’ve got you covered: Here’s what you need to know about education issues on Super Tuesday

2020-03-02T17:37:10+00:00

Tomorrow is Super Tuesday and six candidates are still vying for the Democratic presidential nomination. Here at Chalkbeat, we’ve been paying close attention to where the candidates stand on education — from preschool to vouchers and school segregation.

Want to compare the candidates’ promises about Title I funds? Trying to track down who’s said what about charter schools? Our 2020 education tracker includes it all — plus information about candidates’ track records and notable statements they’ve made on the campaign trail.

Here are some other stories you might find useful:

Last week, pro-school choice parents met with Elizabeth Warren. For some, it was the second time. The Powerful Parent Network is getting meetings with, though not concrete promises from, leading candidates, including Warren and Joe Biden. Here’s what happened in South Carolina.

When Biden talks about parents and poverty, criticism often follows. We looked back at statements the former vice president made on the campaign trail referring to students from low-income families and black parents, and why some see them as tone-deaf or racist.

Michael Bloomberg may be a newcomer to the race, but he has a long record on schools. He spent 12 years shaking up New York City’s school system. Research tells us that some of his signature policies, like closing large high schools, helped students. Others, like holding more students back, did not.

Bernie Sanders courted the Chicago teachers union. Here’s why he didn’t land its endorsement. We got the inside scoop on how divisions within one of the country’s largest and most vocal teachers unions led to the decision not to endorse anyone, for now.

Who’s getting money from big names in education? Here’s how some familiar faces — think Bill Gates and Arne Duncan — have spent their money in the race so far.

Democrats are divided on charter schools. Polling shows that white Democrats are highly skeptical, while black and Hispanic Democrats are more supportive, but still hold a range of positions. Meanwhile, Democrats are very aligned on giving teachers a raise — something all the party’s presidential candidates support.

What’s missing? Tell us what you’d like to see explained or reported out. We’d love to hear from you: community@chalkbeat.org.

‘Dysfunctional homes,’ ‘Play the radio’: When Biden talks about poverty and parenting, criticism often follows

2020-02-28T17:13:40+00:00

Joe Biden confused debate-watchers this summer when, in a response to a question about how to remedy the legacy of slavery, he instructed parents to turn on their record players so that “kids hear words.”

He shocked and frustrated a group of black mayors last year when he said one problem the black community faces is that “parents can’t read or write,” according to a New York Times report.

And he drew heat for seeming to equate low-income children with children of color at a campaign stop in Iowa last year. “Poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids,” Biden said.

“I meant to say ‘wealthy,’” he told reporters at the time, noting he quickly corrected himself. “I don’t think anybody thinks that I meant anything” else.

The former vice president has long been criticized for his tendency to make gaffes. But over the course of his latest presidential bid, Biden has made a series of statements referring to black parents and students from low-income families that have been seen as tone-deaf or racist — enough for some to see a broader pattern.

It’s a striking one, given how crucial African American support is to Biden’s campaign heading into this Saturday’s primary election in South Carolina, where the Democratic electorate is majority black. And while many of Biden’s black supporters say occasional off-color statements shouldn’t overshadow his legislative record — which includes fighting racial discrimination on many fronts — others say his words feed harmful narratives about the causes of educational inequality.

“From my standpoint, it does matter,” said William Darity Jr., a professor of public policy, economics, and African and African American studies at Duke University. The repetition of these ideas, he said, “does affect the kind of social policies we choose to adopt.”

The Biden campaign did not respond to a request for comment. In the past, Biden and his campaign have said his comments were calling attention to differences of class, not race, or were made in reference to his family’s personal experiences.

Bebe Coker, a longtime education activist in Biden’s home state of Delaware, says she understands people could be offended if they didn’t know Biden or his work.

“He was there with us,” she said of her fight to pass laws against racial discrimination in housing and public accommodations when Biden was in the Delaware legislature. “He sees humanity as humanity.”

Coker, who is black, sees Biden’s words as an attempt to highlight the struggles of children in poverty and the need for schools to better serve them. “Whether you like it or not,” she said, “he’s telling the truth.”

His language has evoked stereotypes about black families

One of the major problems with Biden’s comments, critics say, is that they sometimes recall a racist stereotype that black families are dysfunctional — whether he means to or not.

During the third debate of this Democratic primary cycle last September, a moderator asked Biden about race and inequality in schools, mentioning a 1975 interview about school segregation in which he said he did not “feel responsible for the sins of my father and grandfather.” Then she asked what Americans should do “to repair the legacy of slavery in our country.”

In response, Biden spoke about his education plan, drawing attention to his proposals to triple federal funding for low-income schools, raise teacher pay, and bring “social workers into homes” to help parents “deal with how to raise their children” — likely a reference to his plan to expand a home-visiting program aimed at improving school readiness.

“It’s not that they don’t want to help,” Biden said of parents. “They don’t know quite what to do.”

While Biden didn’t explicitly say the families who need help raising their children are black, some interpreted it that way because his answers came in response to a question about slavery and reparations.

A few months later, in a December interview with the New York Times editorial board, Biden was pressed again about how the country should confront its legacy of slavery. He made a similar pivot, mentioning black parents.

“I remember how much trouble Barack [Obama] got in when he said that parents, black parents, should take responsibility,” Biden responded. “That wasn’t my point. My point was to make it clear that there are a number of things we can do now to help parents who have been disadvantaged as a consequence of lack of opportunity, to be able to provide more guidance and better guidance for themselves and their families.”

That emphasis on parenting reinforces thinking that there is something “culturally pathological about black Americans,” said Darity — thinking that has played a prominent role in American culture and politics for decades, from racist scholarly writings in the 19th century that argued black Americans were culturally inferior to the influential 1965 Moynihan report, which said black poverty was rooted in a high rate of single-parent households.

As Biden noted, Obama also faced criticism for comments he made as a presidential candidate about black families and fathers.

“For the African American community, that path [forward] means embracing the burdens of our past without becoming victims of our past,” Obama said in his famous 2008 speech about race. “And it means taking full responsibility for our own lives — by demanding more from our fathers, and spending more time with our children, and reading to them.”

He zeroes in on parent literacy and ‘word gaps’

Biden has also faced criticism for implying that black Americans struggle to read, affecting their ability to help their children.

In response to the Times’ question about how the country should address the legacy of slavery, Biden told a story about his father — a “well-read, high-school-educated guy” — not wanting to tour colleges with his son because he was embarrassed he hadn’t attended college himself. Then he mentioned his wife’s experience as a teacher in public schools and at community college.

“The people who don’t show up on the nights when there’s a parent-teacher meeting are not people who in fact don’t care, but folks from poor backgrounds,” Biden said. “They don’t show up because they’re embarrassed. They’re embarrassed the teacher’s going to say — and it’s hard to say, ‘Well, I can’t read.’ I’m talking about not just people of color, but poor folks.”

Recently, Biden’s campaign didn’t deny the Times’ reporting that in response to a question about education reform he told a group of black mayors that one problem black communities face is that the “parents can’t read or write themselves.” Instead the campaign provided a statement saying Biden “regularly talks about how his father’s experience has shaped the way he feels about and views the relationship between parents and their children’s learning.”

Another common touchstone in Biden’s education speeches is “word gaps,” or differences in the number of words children hear in their first years based on family income — a concept based on popular but widely debated research. Biden has sometimes veered far from the research findings, though, implying that low-income or black parents don’t read or speak to their children.

For example, Biden brought up word gaps in a 2007 interview with the Washington Post editorial board while discussing differences in school performance.

“It goes back to what you start off with, what you’re dealing with,” he said, during his second run for president. “When you have children coming from dysfunctional homes, when you have children coming from homes where there’s no books, where the mother from the time they’re born doesn’t talk to them — as opposed to the mother in Iowa who’s sitting out there and talks to them,” he said, going on to mention the word gap research.

Biden said this after pointing out that Iowa has a much smaller black population than cities like Washington, D.C., “leaving the impression,” the paper wrote, “that he believed one reason so many Washington D.C. schools fail is the city’s high minority population.” (At the time, Biden’s campaign said he was calling out disadvantages stemming from socio-economic differences, not racial ones.)

The original 1992 study, of 42 families in Kansas, found large differences in the number of words that young children heard each hour during monthly observations. The researchers came to the conclusion that children from the lowest-income families would hear 13 million words by age 4, compared with 45 million words for children from higher-income families.

These findings have been used to help expand Head Start and early intervention programs. The Obama administration, in partnership with the Clinton Foundation, worked to raise awareness about the importance of closing the word gap — which likely contributes to why Biden cites it so often.

Since the publication of the original study, some critics have taken issue with how it was conducted, including that all six of the lowest-income families in the study were African American and only one of the 13 high-income families was African American.

Attempts to replicate those findings have found gaps do exist, but that they are smaller. Biden seems aware of that: On the campaign trail this time — when he called on parents to “play the radio” so that “kids hear words” during the September debate — he cited newer research that found a 4-million word gap between children from low- and high-income families.

“It’s so much more complex than politicians or people listening to debates would like to think it is,” said Douglas Sperry, an associate professor of psychology at Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College. His own research found that the number of words children heard varied widely within income groups and across five different places. His research also found children from low-income black families in Alabama heard almost three times as many words per hour as the original study’s lowest-income black families in Kansas.

So why have word gaps continued to be such a focus for Biden and many others?

Sofía Bahena, an assistant professor of education at The University of Texas at San Antonio, who has critiqued how the original word gap research was conducted, thinks it’s partly because word gaps fit with preconceived notions many Americans have about the language abilities of students of color, and the idea that structural inequities can be toppled with individual hard work.

“We have this whole American theme of ‘pick yourself up by the bootstraps,’” she said. “It’s not just Biden.”

Parent group pushes Democratic presidential contenders on charters, winning audience before Biden and Warren

2020-02-28T15:41:00+00:00

The Powerful Parent Network is getting meetings, but not concrete promises, from some leading Democratic candidates for president.

In South Carolina yesterday, the group of parents who favor school choice met with former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Elizabeth Warren. Today, one of the group’s leaders, Sarah Carpenter, talked with Tom Steyer by phone, and the group met with his wife. Each of the candidates has been critical of charter schools, indicative of a recent shift in political winds against charter schools.

Carpenter said in an interview that the candidates made no specific promises to address the group’s concerns that they would limit parental choice.

Thursday night, Carpenter also spoke with former mayor Pete Buttigieg, who later answered a question from the group during a public event.

The meetings highlight the strides Powerful Parent Network — a group that supports school choice and drew headlines last November for confronting Warren at a campaign event — has made in getting the ear of some leading Democratic presidential candidates. It remains unclear, though, to what extent these meetings will translate into different policy proposals from a field of candidates who have generally been highly critical of school choice through charter schools and private school vouchers.

“Parents need to make choices where they want to send their kids,” said Carpenter. “Our kids are stuck in a system that’s been broken for decades. That’s all I’m saying. That’s my message, and they can take it or leave it.”

On Wednesday during a public event in Georgetown, South Carolina, Carpenter asked Biden why he was “lukewarm” on charter schools and choice. In response, the former vice president reiterated that he was “not a charter school fan,” before quickly pivoting to a broader discussion of improving education.

Afterward, Carpenter said she was disappointed by his response, saying, “Nobody’s addressing the system that got our kids into this mess.”

But a short time later she and others had a private audience before Biden adviser Symone Sanders. In a video, she can be heard emphasizing Biden’s proposal to triple funding for Title I schools. (Symone Sanders even said that Biden was the only candidate to make such a promise; in fact, most other Democrats have made a version of this proposal. A Biden spokesperson said the advisor simply meant to emphasize that increasing Title I funds is a central part of Biden’s plan.)

Then they met with Biden himself. In a partial audio recording of the meeting, Biden can be heard saying that he opposes for-profit charter schools, but that some charter schools are succeeding.

“Most charter schools that are working are charter schools that are held to the same standards as public schools … and are not able to turn people away because they can’t pass a test,” he said. (Charter schools in most states must admit students by random lottery. But in Delaware, Biden’s home state, charter schools can select students based partially on students’ test scores.)

Carpenter told Chalkbeat that Biden did not make specific promises. “He didn’t — we’re sending them over some literature,” she said. “We’ll wait to hear back from them.”

Biden has sounded a skeptical note on charter schools throughout the campaign, promising to ban for-profit charter schools, but his education plan does not mention them.

“Vice President Biden will do everything we can to help traditional public schools, which is what most students attend. He will ban for-profit charter schools from receiving federal funds and ensure that charter schools are held to the same levels of accountability and transparency as traditional public schools,” a Biden campaign spokesperson said in a statement.

Later Wednesday evening, the group met with Warren. For some of them it was the second time. Last November, Carpenter and others had a lengthy discussion with the Massachusetts senator after disrupting a campaign event in Atlanta. They took issue with Warren’s education plan, which called for new limits on charter schools, including eliminating a federal program to help start new charters. During the exchange Warren defended her plan, saying she was seeking more accountability for charter schools, but also promising that she would review the plan to “make sure I got it right.”

This time, Carpenter said, Warren mostly just heard them out. “We talked about parent choice,” said Carpenter. “All she did was listen — that was it.” Carpenter said Warren didn’t talk about any changes to her plan, and there’s no indication that any have been made. “It was a little bit disappointing,” said Carpenter, who said she was still pleased that Warren met with them again.

A spokesperson for the Warren campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

Carpenter said the group offered the same message about the importance of school choice to Tom Steyer and his wife Thursday. Steyer has vowed to halt federal funding for new charter schools, a position the campaign reiterated to Chalkbeat.

“Tom and Kat believe it’s important to meet with everyone out of respect for the opinions of those who disagree with them,” said Benjamin Gerdes, a spokesperson, “but the way to fix our public education system is not by working around it through charter schools or school vouchers, but by dealing directly with the challenges such as funding disparities and segregation.”

On Thursday evening, the parent group attended a Buttigieg event, where Carpenter met with the former South Bend mayor. In response to a question from the group during the event, Buttigieg said that the school system had let down too many students of color, but emphasized the need to improve the public school system rather than focus on school choice.

“I understand why this has parents frustrated with their options and looking for any way possible to make sure there are more options for their children,” said Buttigieg. “I also think that if we solve this the right way — put the right resources into it and make sure whatever innovations develop in non-traditional schools ultimately are used to support and lift up traditional schools too — then your success will no longer depend on whether you win a lottery.”

Buttigieg has voiced skepticism about charter schools throughout the campaign, but his education platform does not seek to limit their growth like Warren’s or Bernie Sanders’ plans.

A spokesperson for Buttigieg did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Powerful Parent Network has not spoken with Sanders, the leading candidate, but the group is seeking to meet with him Friday, according to social media posts.

Carpenter said the parents had raised money for the trip to South Carolina through small and large donations to a GoFundMe campaign, as well as a $10,000 matching contribution from a donor she declined to name. Carpenter leads an organization called the Memphis Lift, which is backed by groups, like the Walton Family Foundation, that are supportive of charter schools. (Walton is also a supporter of Chalkbeat.)

Under Carpenter’s leadership, the Memphis Lift has pushed to create a joint enrollment system for district and charter schools, protested the NAACP’s push to ban new charter schools, created a fellowship to help parents advocate at their schools, forged a strong relationship with the local school district, and helped similar parent groups form across the country.

Carpenter, who is a grandparent of 15, said she supports good charter schools, but doesn’t want to be pigeonholed as pro-charter. “If it’s a failing district school I want it shut down; If it’s a failing charter, I want it shut down,” she said. (Carpenter said she doesn’t have a position on private school vouchers.)

The Powerful Parent Network’s effort to reach candidates comes at a perilous political moment for charter schools. Most of the Democratic candidates have taken a sharply skeptical view of the schools, which were promoted by former President Barack Obama. Many attended a forum last year hosted by teachers unions, civil rights groups, and others critical of charter schools. The American Federation of Teachers recently urged its members to vote for either Biden, Sanders, or Warren.

Support for charter schools has fallen among white Democratic voters, though generally held steady among black and Hispanic Democrats.

Advocates of charter schools emphasize giving parents’ choices among schools, and the high academic performance of many charter schools in cities; critics argue the schools lack sufficient oversight and place financial strain on school districts.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration, often seen as a staunch ally of school choice proponents, recently proposed eliminating a $440 million federal fund earmarked for charter schools. Advocates at the national level pushed back aggressively, which led a Trump education official to refer to them as “desperate.”

Carpenter said that the parent network would eventually seek out Trump too. “I will talk to Trump at the right time,” she said. “He needs to know what low-income communities deal with also.”

This story has been updated with information on the group’s meeting with Pete Buttigieg Thursday night.

Michael Bloomberg is running for president on his education record. Here’s what research found about those policies.

2020-02-26T01:10:00+00:00

As mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg was one of the most powerful people in American education.

For more than a decade, he effectively controlled the country’s largest school system — a power he had pushed the state legislature to grant him in 2002 — and he took full advantage of it, closing schools, expanding charters, and agreeing to large teachers raises (before alienating many teachers and their union). Now, Bloomberg is running for president on his education record, painting a rosy picture of his tenure.

“Through the collective efforts of New York’s city leaders, teachers, principals, parents and of course students, Mike took a dysfunctional, underperforming system and turned it into an extraordinary success story using innovations based on data — expanding those that worked and ending those that didn’t,” said Marshall Cohen, a Bloomberg campaign spokesperson. (Bloomberg Philanthropies is a funder of Chalkbeat.)

Bloomberg’s policies have been extensively studied by researchers, and Chalkbeat reviewed dozens of these studies to understand more fully his administration’s impact. Some specific policies, like high school closures, were vindicated by subsequent research. But others, like grade retention and merit pay for teachers, didn’t work.

And today, New York City schools are wrestling with how to unwind deeply entrenched patterns of segregation that persisted through the Bloomberg era.

James Kemple, the executive director of the Research Alliance for New York City Schools, said Bloomberg’s 12-year tenure was defined by steady improvements across most metrics.

“Every ship was rising,” he said, but noted that disparities across critical demographic and economic groups remained.

Jennifer Jennings, a Princeton University professor, who has studied and critiqued many Bloomberg-era policies, said some of them were successful, but that others came with serious downsides.

“The school report cards and the incessant focus on increasing state test scores by any means necessary,” she said, “it created a focus on a small set of outcomes.”

Here’s a deeper look at the research.

Student performance trends: local metrics improved, sometimes substantially, but gains on federal tests were unremarkable.

On certain key indicators, New York City students appeared to make significant gains. Test scores rose on state exams. High school graduation rates jumped from 54% in 2004 to nearly 75% in 2013. College enrollment and persistence rates steadily increased, though more modestly. Chronic absenteeism ebbed slightly downward. (A number of these positive trends have continued since Bloomberg left office.)

An analysis by Kemple found that between 2003 and 2013 the city made more progress than the rest of the state across both state test and graduation rates.

But these trends don’t explain whether Bloomberg’s policies or other factors propelled the improvements. For instance, New York City schools became better funded over this time period.

Additionally, graduation rates may have been boosted by the rise of credit recovery programs or failure to fully count students who dropped out.

Progress on the federal test, NAEP, was more limited. The city did make gains between 2003 and 2013, but they were generally similar to the nation as a whole and smaller than in a number of other cities; test score disparities by race didn’t change much. Unlike state exams, the NAEP is low stakes — meaning schools were not under pressure to increase scores — and thus the results may be more reliable.

Again, though, researchers warn against judging specific policies (or even a set of policies) based on these trends, meaning firm conclusions can’t be drawn.

New York City charter schools did better on state tests.

Bloomberg was a big proponent of school choice and fostered the expansion of charter schools, which now educate about 10% of the city’s public school students.

These schools, particularly their performance on state exams, have been widely studied. A number of papers show that students who attend charter schools in New York City outscore those in district schools, even accounting for demographic differences. This is also true of several specific networks that have been studied.

Other research has examined common critiques of New York City’s charters — supporting some, while debunking others. Charters tend to have higher suspension rates, serve fewer English-language learners and students with disabilities, and sometimes get substantial outside money. But they don’t appear to systematically push out low performing students or harm the performance of nearby district schools.

Letter grades led to higher state test scores in low-rated schools.

Issuing A-F letter grades for schools was one of the first things that Bloomberg’s successor Bill de Blasio scrapped.

But there is evidence that struggling schools improved test scores as a result of a low grade.

Two studies found that students scored higher on state tests in subsequent years if their school got a low grade (compared to similar schools that got a higher grade).

Research also found that earning an F led to increases in teacher retention rates at those schools. “This is an important counterpoint to the people who worry about the stigmatization effects of letter grades,” said Jonah Rockoff, an education researcher at Columbia University, previously told Chalkbeat.

Jennings, though, said that using test scores as the way to judge these policies is “deeply problematic” because schools were under such pressure to raise scores, potentially to the detriment of other domains.

More broadly, it’s possible that increased teaching to the test or low standards on the state exam might explain some of the city’s testing gains . And research can’t answer questions like whether there was too much focus on testing during Bloomberg’s tenure.

Grade retention did more harm than good in the long run.

A 2004 policy to hold back third grade students if they didn’t score high enough on math or reading tests was among Bloomberg’s most controversial. (He even fired two of his appointees to the city school board who planned to vote against his position.) The policy was extended to other grades over time.

A recent study examined the effects of grade retention, and the results were dramatic — but not in a good way. Middle schoolers, who were held back, were 10 percentage points more likely to drop out of high school as a result compared to similar students who were allowed to advance to the next grade. The same study found that elementary school retention didn’t affect drop-out rates. The policy was also quite costly since for many students it entailed an extra year of school.

“There was already a great deal of evidence that this was not going to be an effective policy,” said Jennings. “They implemented it anyway.”

On the other hand, there is some evidence that students benefited from the summer classes that came with the possibility of retention.

Closing high schools helped future students, but middle school closures didn’t do much…

A study of Bloomberg’s highly controversial high school closure policy found that the move did not help or harm students who were already attending those schools as they were phased out. But the closures did benefit future students who would have otherwise attended those high school. Students’ odds of graduating high school jumped substantially as a result, going from 40% to 55%.

“The kids who no longer had those schools on their list of options, they benefited pretty substantially,” said Kemple, who co-authored the study.

Research on closures of city middle schools, on the other hand, found little clear effects on the average student one way or the other.

… Meanwhile, small schools helped students in the long run.

What explains the benefits of high school closures? Almost certainly, one factor was the creation of new small schools that many students from closed schools ended up attending. Several studies have found that those schools did well. One recent paper showed that students who won a lottery to attend one of those schools were nearly 10 percentage points more likely to graduate high school and 4 points more likely to persist in college through four years.

Other research found that as small schools expanded, other New York City high schools also seemed to improve.

“Kids are more likely to graduate now and [from] these small schools in particular,” said Jennings. “I think that that was a very successful reform.” But she also pointed to her own research showing that certain small schools attempted to screen out or push out students who would hurt their ratings.

There’s more school choice, but persistent segregation.

Bloomberg also put in a place an extensive and complex high school choice system, using a Nobel Prize winning algorithm to determine which students get their top choices. He created new selective high schools which students must test into. There’s much more choice generally in New York City schools as a result of Bloomberg-era changes.

But it’s not entirely clear the overall effect of this proliferation of choice. What is clear is that New York City schools are currently highly segregated across many dimensions — including students’ race and academic performance. One study found that families tend to prioritize the skills of other students as opposed to the quality of the school when choosing among schools.

Currently, New York City officials are making efforts — in fits and starts — to better integrate schools. This was generally not a priority of the Bloomberg administration.

Merit pay experiment fell flat.

It was a pioneering agreement with a teachers union that had long resisted performance pay: The United Federation of Teachers gave the green light to cash bonuses for teachers in schools that made large test score gains.

But two studies found that this experiment failed to improve results for students. If anything, this group-based merit pay led to somewhat lower test scores (though it’s not clear why). Schools generally awarded the bonuses equally to all teachers, which some suggested explained the failure of the program.

A number of other policies have been studied, with mixed results:

A touted computer-based math program known as School of One did not lead to clear test score improvements.
School suspensions rapidly increased under Bloomberg, and research found that suspended students suffered as a result. Late in his tenure, suspensions began to decline as a result of policy changes, and this seemed to benefit students, according to a recent study.
Stop-and-frisk — a signature and controversial policing practice that Bloomberg expanded — spilled over into public schools. Black middle school students were more likely to drop out of high school and less likely to enroll in college, research has found.
Tightening of teacher tenure rules led to an increase in novice teachers deemed less effective to leave New York City schools.
A teacher mentoring program that the city adopted as a result of state law increased the odds that new teachers would complete their first year.
Providing principals with teachers’ value-added scores resulted in higher turnover rates among teachers with lower scores.
Between 2000 and 2005, high-poverty New York City schools were staffed by more qualified teachers as measured by their years of experience and SAT scores. This may have been due to pay raises, limiting uncertified teachers, and expanding alternative certification like the Teaching Fellows.
The principal training program known as the Leadership Academy produced principals who performed similarly as other new principals.

Stop-and-frisk under Michael Bloomberg led more black students to drop out, study shows

2020-02-18T22:48:10+00:00

When Andom Ghebreghiorgis was a middle school teacher at the Richard R. Green campus in the Bronx, his students sometimes arrived to class late, reeling from being stopped by the police on their way to school.

“They would enter the classroom very agitated, and not really in a place to learn,” said Ghebreghiorgis, who taught there a decade ago. “On the days in which my students were stopped and frisked, their whole day was affected.”

He added, “It probably still affects them now.”

A recent study offers tangible support for Ghebreghiorgis and other critics of stop-and-frisk: Ratcheting up this policing tactic led more New York City public middle school students to later drop out of high school and fewer to enroll in college, it found. The harmful effects were particularly large for black students — who also bore the brunt of stop-and-frisk.

The study, conducted by Andrew Bacher-Hicks and Elijah de la Campa, both doctoral students at Harvard, focuses on New York City middle schools between 2006 and 2012, a period when stop-and-frisk substantially increased.

The findings come as former New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg, now vying for the Democratic presidential nomination, is rising in the polls but facing backlash for rapidly expanding — and repeatedly defending — the controversial police tactic, which a judge ruled was racially discriminatory in 2013. (Bloomberg Philanthropies is a funder of Chalkbeat.)

Bloomberg now apologizes for the policy, and points to his record on education as a way of boosting his bona fides with voters of color. But the latest study illustrates how stop-and-frisk often spilled over into New York City’s classrooms during Bloomberg’s time as mayor, harming the students he says his education policies were meant to help.

The study’s findings also are relevant for districts around the country that are ratcheting up police presence in response to safety concerns.

“We should be careful when we think of policing or other types of disciplinary approaches that are meant to reduce crime or improve discipline but [are] also clearly having effects on social and educational outcomes,” said Bacher-Hicks. “This should make policymakers think twice about unequal effects of these policies.”

Stop-and-frisk hurt black middle school students

To tease out cause-and-effect, the researchers took advantage of the fact that some NYPD precinct commanders directed officers to conduct more (or fewer) stops. The study examined what happened to middle school students when commanders with different stop-and-frisk patterns moved into a local precinct. The idea was that this move — and its effect on stops — was as good as random. (The researchers couldn’t simply look at the prevalence of stops directly because this was likely influenced by many other factors that could also affect students’ educational outcomes.)

In the short run, the tactic led to notable upticks in school absence rates, particularly for black students, who were 1.4 percentage points more likely to be chronically absent from school in areas with substantially more stops.

That didn’t surprise Christian Reyes, who was stopped by the police multiple times when he attended The Equity Project Charter School, an Upper Manhattan middle school.

The first time, he was on a school break and was stopped by a police officer who demanded to know why he wasn’t in school. “I was just like, ‘Oh my God, I’m in trouble with the law. I’m going to get locked up or I’m going to get in trouble now,’” recalls Reyes, who is Hispanic. “I just panicked.”

Reyes, now a senior at Manhattan’s Beacon High School, said the experience didn’t make him avoid school. But he understands why it might make other students less engaged. After his encounters with police, he was constantly looking over his shoulder.

“Students will take those negative thoughts and bring themselves down,” Reyes said.

The researchers also tracked students into high school and beyond. Overall, those exposed to more stops in middle school were about half a percentage point less likely to graduate high school and 1 point less likely to enroll in college.

The effects were largest for black students: they were 1.8 points less likely to graduate and 2.5 points less likely to enroll in college. Perhaps surprisingly, the effect was similar for black boys and black girls, even though black boys were much more likely to be stopped. This suggests that the consequences may come not just from being stopped, but from the environment created by frequent police interaction.

There were no clear effects for Hispanic students. For white students — who make up about 15% of New York City public school students — there was some evidence that stop-and-frisk actually led to slightly higher graduation rates. It’s not clear why.

The study also finds that stop-and-frisk led to fewer disciplinary incidents in schools. Despite this, in schools with a large number of black students, students reported feeling less safe. (A separate paper by the same researchers found that stop-and-frisk rates had no effect on felony crime.)

Perceived benefits for white residents may have been one of the political reasons stop-and-frisk was kept in place for so long, even as the policy was harming New York City students overall.

“While police stops could — in theory — reduce inequality by improving safety in high-risk schools and communities, we show that a reliance on this form of proactive policing increases racial inequality across a range of long-run educational outcomes,” conclude Bacher-Hicks and de la Campa.

Prior research supports the new findings

Joscha Legewie, a Harvard sociology professor, has conducted separate research illustrating a similar phenomenon: increased police presence near New York City middle schools led to lower test scores among black male students. He praised the latest research as “innovative and convincing.”

“We now have two articles based on very different methods and assumptions showing the same pattern,” he said.

Other research in Texas has found that security officers in schools can lead to declines in high school graduation and college attendance.

Carla Shedd, a sociologist at the CUNY Graduate Center, has studied how stop-and-frisk affected high school students in Chicago. She raised concerns about the fact that the new paper, for methodological reasons, looks only at middle school students, rather than high schoolers.

But Shedd’s work also offers a potential explanation for the far-reaching nature of the latest findings. For students, she said, the impact of police presence is “not necessarily a direct sense of ‘I’m being arrested,’ but ‘I am being scrutinized, I am being held to a higher standard.’”

“Those are things that can lead to estrangement and kids having lower achievement,” she said.

Ghebreghiorgis, the former teacher who is now running for Congress, said the police were a frequent presence at the school, often positioning themselves outside during dismissal.

“We had a lot of stories of unjust encounters with the police. It affected everyone — teachers and students as well,” said Ghebreghiorgis, who is black.

Bloomberg has backed away from stop-and-frisk but promoted his education record

Bloomberg’s reliance on stop-and-frisk has recently made headlines after audio from 2015 surfaced capturing the presidential hopeful using racist language defending the practice even after it was found to be discriminatory by a judge and had been scaled back.

“Ninety-five percent of murders, murderers and murder victims fit one M.O.,” he said. “You can just take a description, Xerox it, and pass it out to all the cops.”

Bloomberg walked back his support of the practice shortly before entering the presidential race. On the campaign trail, he has leaned into his record as head of the country’s largest school system, which he successfully pushed to bring under mayoral control.

“This issue and my comments about it do not reflect my commitment to criminal justice reform and racial equity,” said Bloomberg in a statement last week. “We overhauled a school system that had been neglecting and underfunding schools in Black and Latino communities for too long.”

He apologized again at a campaign rally in Houston last week, in which he focused on appealing to black voters.

The Bloomberg campaign did not respond to a request for comment on this story.

As mayor, Bloomberg implemented a number of controversial school reforms, including the closing of a number of large high schools, the tightening of teacher tenure rules, and the expansion of charter schools. Research has found some of these changes — including high school closures and creation of new small schools — contributed to improved outcomes, including the city’s rising graduation rates. Between 2005 and 2013, the graduation rate for New York City’s black students rose by more than 20 percentage points.

The latest study, though, suggests that these gains would have been even greater if not for stop-and-frisk — and highlights how Bloomberg’s record on schools and his record on criminal justice are connected.

“These worlds cannot be divided. In fact, they overlap,” said Shedd, the CUNY professor. “Students are the ones who feel the intersection.”

Want more? Here’s a deeper look at Michael Bloomberg’s education legacy. Find the latest on his proposals – as well as what other Democratic presidential candidates have said about education – in our 2020 tracker.

Bernie Sanders courted the Chicago teachers union endorsement. Here’s why it didn’t happen.

2020-02-07T20:42:00+00:00

CHICAGO — Shortly before Chicago teachers went on an 11-day strike this fall, Sen. Bernie Sanders headlined a rally at the union’s headquarters. The space was packed with teachers, many carrying blue “Bernie” signs.

His appearance was a show of support for Chicago educators as they pushed for a contract guaranteeing higher pay, smaller class sizes, and more social workers and school nurses. And in his speech, Sanders linked his presidential bid to the union’s fight.

“You are demanding, and I am demanding, a change in national priorities,” he told them.

Sanders went on to send a half-dozen messages of solidarity during the strike. And nationally, he’s raised more money from K-12 teachers than any other Democratic presidential candidate.

The #RedForEd movement is a fight for the future of this nation. @CTULocal1 and @SEIU73 in Chicago are standing up and fighting back for justice in education. I was proud to stand with them last month at the start of this fight. pic.twitter.com/43AvZlJqmv
— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) October 24, 2019

So it didn’t come as a surprise when hundreds of Chicago teachers took up a vote this week to endorse Sanders for the Democratic nomination. But the result was unexpected: it failed by a slim margin, and the union decided to remain neutral for now.

The result is that one of the country’s largest and most vocal teachers unions won’t be weighing in as voters head to the polls in early-voting states. It’s an illustration of some of the factors keeping other unions from jumping into the fray, including the crowded Democratic field and national teachers unions deciding to hold back. An ambiguous start to primary season in Iowa this week didn’t help.

“The confusion of who was the frontrunner, people just not being sure of who’s going to beat Trump — all of those mainstream proclivities and considerations exist within our membership,” said Jackson Potter, a high school social studies teacher who supports Sanders and helped lead the effort to put the endorsement question before union members. “I think Iowa did factor in.”

Educators say the votes not to endorse were a result of a variety of concerns. Some were procedural, including questions about whether members had been adequately consulted. Others were local, including lingering tensions over the union’s endorsement of and spending on a losing 2019 mayoral candidate.

Another big factor, union members said, was that support is clearly divided between Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who also visited Chicago teachers during their strike.

“There are a lot of strong feelings on both sides,” said one union member who witnessed Wednesday’s vote. “Some really like Warren, and some really like Sanders.”

A union spokesperson agreed. The neutrality vote “represented members’ appreciation for two candidates, Senators Sanders and Warren, who rallied with us in our union hall and stood with us on picket lines,” Ronnie Reese said in a statement. “Both supported our struggle and our issues — class size, essential staffing, veteran pay — before, during and after the strike. They’re both allies.”

There’s no official message coming from the union’s affiliated national leadership, either. The Chicago Teachers Union is part of the American Federation of Teachers, which hasn’t endorsed a candidate or spent money in the presidential election so far. Neither has the National Education Association, the other of the nation’s two largest teachers unions.

Both endorsed Hillary Clinton and contributed to her campaign early in the 2016 election cycle — a decision that angered educators who thought the national teachers unions didn’t give enough consideration to Sanders.

As a result, the national unions changed their processes. Both unions recently told Chalkbeat that they have no timeline for when they’ll issue an endorsement, though the head of the NEA has said the union is likely to wait to see the results of some early-voting states, while the head of the AFT has suggested that the union could sit out the primaries altogether.

Some local unions have declared a favorite, though. The Los Angeles teachers union, a close ally of the Chicago teachers union, issued an early endorsement for Sanders in November, prompting many observers to think Chicago would follow suit. Educators in Clark County, Nevada, who represent teachers in the nation’s fifth-largest district, have also endorsed Sanders. Meanwhile, Boston teachers and one Massachusetts statewide teachers union endorsed Warren.

But other local unions have decided to sit the primaries out. A spokesperson for New York City’s United Federation of Teachers said the union hasn’t made an endorsement because it doesn’t want to tip the scales in favor of one candidate. The real goal, the union said, is to support the eventual Democratic nominee. (The union’s president, though, is personally supporting Joe Biden.)

In Chicago, the union didn’t even begin to consider endorsements until after its strike had ended. Union members ratified their new contract in November. In January, an email sent to members said the union was considering weighing in and included a link to a survey that asked them to choose among several candidates.

“Our recent successful strike gave us an opportunity to take part in the public discussion,” the email said.

Some union members objected to the choices offered, which didn’t include a way to indicate you were undecided or preferred the union not endorse anyone.

After seeing the poll results, which weren’t shared with members, a small union committee recommended not to endorse a candidate. But later, Potter, one of the 40 voting members of the union’s executive board, raised a motion in one of its meetings to consider a Sanders endorsement.

In the end, the executive board agreed to put the Sanders endorsement before a union body made up of hundreds of delegates representing most of Chicago’s schools. That vote happened Wednesday. The final tally: 136 votes not to endorse, 121 to endorse, and 28 abstentions.

Then, the union’s leadership suggested that members take a second vote — this one on the question of whether to remain neutral in the primaries — reasoning that would avoid any perception that the union actively didn’t support Sanders. That passed overwhelmingly.

Those who supported the Sanders endorsement said they were disappointed by the results.

“It would have signaled that we are part of this movement that is sweeping the entire country right now,” said Kenzo Shibata, a civics and history teacher who voted in favor of endorsing Sanders and is a volunteer for the campaign. “If we, as teachers who support Sanders, have to organize independently, that’s what we’re going to do.”

But observers said it made sense, given that many union members remained in the Warren camp and the discomfort some felt with potentially endorsing a candidate who might not earn the AFT’s endorsement later, as happened in 2008.

Chicago teachers can still return to the question later in the primary, especially as the field narrows. If Michael Bloomberg — who had a contentious relationship with the teachers union in New York City as mayor — makes it further, for example, a choice would become more obvious, Potter said.

“We’re not foreclosing on this,” he said. “We just delayed a decision.”

This story has been updated to include a comment from the Chicago Teachers Union.

Yana Kunichoff and Amy Zimmer contributed reporting.

Here’s how some big names in education are spending in the 2020 presidential race

2020-02-06T22:50:00+00:00

Former Education Secretary Arne Duncan is a Joe Biden donor.

Bill and Melinda Gates jumped in early for Sen. Cory Booker, but haven’t donated to anyone since.

Eli and Edythe Broad, the influential California philanthropists, spread their donations around, giving to Booker and Biden as well as Sens. Michael Bennet and Kamala Harris.

Federal campaign finance records show that some of the biggest names in education policy and philanthropy have donated to a range of Democratic presidential hopefuls since their campaigns began, with a few donors giving to four, six, or even eight people. The nation’s largest teachers unions, meanwhile, are holding off on endorsements and have spent nothing yet.

Both are a reflection of the crowded field — and the reality that it’s far from clear who will end up winning the party’s nomination.

Most of these contributions are relatively small, as campaign spending goes, since individual donations to presidential candidates are capped. And it’s not clear that all of these donations are related to candidates’ education positions. (Some, including a spokesperson for Eli Broad, told Chalkbeat they donated with other factors in mind.) But the donations can serve as one signal of where candidates fall on certain hot-button education issues like charter schools that not all of the candidates have discussed in depth.

Here are a few items of note drawn from federal election filings, including newly released information about donations made through the end of 2019. We reached out to all of the donors mentioned below and included their response if we got one; donors who are also supporters of Chalkbeat are noted further below.

National teachers unions haven’t spent money yet — but plenty of individual teachers have.

At this point in the 2016 presidential election cycle, the country’s two largest teachers unions had already endorsed Hillary Clinton’s bid for the Democratic nomination and donated to her campaign. By the end of 2015, the National Education Association had spent $135,000, while the American Federation of Teachers had given $85,000. (They’d both go on to donate more to Clinton as Election Day neared.)

This time around, neither union has endorsed or spent in the presidential race. And they both changed their endorsement processes after angering members who thought they didn’t give Sen. Bernie Sanders enough consideration as a candidate in 2016.

Both the NEA and the AFT told Chalkbeat they do not have a timeline for their endorsements, even though voting began in Iowa earlier this week. NEA President Lily Eskelsen García told Politico last week that her union is waiting to see which candidate “actually can deliver votes” in states with early primaries. An NEA official said it would be premature to discuss spending plans.

The AFT is leaving its options open when it comes to a primary endorsement, with president Randi Weingarten telling HuffPost in December, “I could see us doing it and I could see us not doing it.” The AFT told Chalkbeat it doesn’t comment on its donations.

Some influential local teachers unions have endorsed candidates, though they haven’t spent much either. The Los Angeles teachers union’s political action committee spent about $600 for Sanders just before endorsing him in November. (A union spokesperson said this paid staff for time spent posting information online about the endorsement.)

Individually, though, teachers have already played a notable financial role in the race. HuffPost reported that Sanders received the most of any candidate from K-12 teachers across the country — $2 million in 2019, according to data provided by the nonprofit Center for Responsive Politics. Sen. Elizabeth Warren took in the second-highest amount from teachers at $875,000, followed by Biden at $393,000.

Many big names in education philanthropy picked a candidate — or several.

The education donor who has spent the most in the election is doing so to support himself. That would be Michael Bloomberg, the former New York City mayor who has given more than $200 million of his own money to catalyze his presidential bid.

But many other wealthy individuals who have supported education causes have chipped in for a range of candidates.

Laura and John Arnold: The Texas philanthropists who support The City Fund each donated $2,800 to Bennet, the former Denver schools chief.
Katherine Bradley: The D.C. philanthropist, who is on the KIPP Foundation’s board, gave $5,400 to Rep. Seth Moulton; $2,800 apiece to Sen. Amy Klobuchar, Bennet, and former mayor Pete Buttigieg; $2,700 to Booker; and $1,000 to Biden.
Eli and Edythe Broad: The Los Angeles philanthropists gave a total of $5,600 to Bennet, Biden, and Booker. They gave Harris $8,400. (Suzi Emmerling, a spokesperson for Broad, said the donations were not motivated by education issues.)
Dick DeVos: The husband of Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos has donated $11,200 to Donald Trump’s re-election and another $400,000 to America First Action, a pro-Trump super PAC.
Bill and Melinda Gates: The philanthropists each donated $2,700 to Booker in October 2018, before his campaign officially launched. They do not appear to have donated to any presidential candidates since.
Reed Hastings: The Netflix founder and charter school donor donated $5,600 to Buttigieg and co-hosted a fundraiser for him. (Hastings told Vice in December that he wasn’t sure where Buttigieg stands on charters and hadn’t spoken to him about the issue.)
Laurene Powell Jobs: The founder of the Emerson Collective, which is behind XQ, gave $2,800 apiece to Bennet, Biden, Booker, Buttigieg, and Klobuchar. She also gave $2,700 to Harris last January.
Carrie Walton Penner and Greg Penner: Walton Penner, the Walton Family Foundation board chair who also sits on the KIPP Foundation board, gave $5,600 each to Booker and former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper as well as $2,800 apiece to Bennet and Biden. She also donated $5,000 to a pro-Bennet PAC a month before he launched his presidential campaign. Her husband, chair of Walmart, made the same donations to Bennet, Biden, Hickenlooper, and the Bennet PAC.

Other prominent figures in the school reform world donated, too.

Richard Barth: The KIPP Foundation CEO donated $250 to Bennet and later co-hosted a fundraiser for him.
Richard Buery: KIPP’s chief of policy and public affairs donated at least $725 to Booker.
Arne Duncan: President Obama’s education secretary, who now serves as a managing partner at the Emerson Collective, gave $1,000 to Biden.
Chris Gabrieli: The chairman of the Massachusetts Board of Higher Education who also founded a nonprofit focused on school turnarounds has given to Bennet ($1,000), Biden ($2,800), Booker ($2,800), and Hickenlooper ($2,800).
David Harris: The partner at The City Fund donated $500 to Buttigieg. (Harris, who is from Indiana, said he has long admired Buttigieg and attended a fundraiser hosted by a friend.)
Shavar Jeffries: The president of Democrats For Education Reform, who sits on the KIPP Foundation board and is reportedly considering a run for New Jersey governor, donated $250 to Biden in September.
John Petry: The a hedge fund manager who co-founded DFER and sits on the board of Success Academy charter schools, has donated widely, with $2,800 donations to Bennet, Bullock, Buttigieg, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, Klobuchar, Moulton, and former Rep. Beto O’Rourke. He also donated $2,700 to Booker. (Petry told Chalkbeat that he chose candidates he thought could win in the general election and wasn’t focused on a specific policy issue.)
Whitney Tilson: Another co-founder of DFER, Tilson donated $2,000 to Bennet and $2,800 to Booker. (“I was delighted to support my long-time friends Cory and Michael,” Tilson told Chalkbeat. “They both care deeply about reforming our broken and unjust system of K-12 public education.” Tilson says he is now supporting Bloomberg.)

Democrats for Education Reform made a big bet on Booker’s struggling campaign.

One big donation with a direct education connection was not made to a candidate, but to a super PAC known as United We Win. Formed in November 2019 to support Booker’s campaign, the super PAC took in a $250,000 donation from Boykin Curry, a New York hedge fund manager who co-founded DFER and the Public Prep charter school network. (Curry also made individual contributions in 2019: $5,500 to Booker, $2,800 to Gillibrand, and $2,800 to Bennet. He also donated another $5,000 to the Booker-backing Purpose PAC.)

In early December, a few weeks after Booker wrote an op-ed for the New York Times reiterating his support for charter schools, United We Win got another $250,000 from Education Reform Now Advocacy, an arm of DFER. But it wasn’t enough: Booker dropped out a month later.

“Senator Booker was one of the strong voices supporting high quality public education who we thought was important to keep on the debate stage,” DFER spokesperson Victoria Fosdal said in a statement. “We look forward to continuing to engage Presidential candidates in the coming weeks and months in a conversation on how we can improve equitable outcomes for all students.” She declined to share the source of the donations to Education Reform Now Advocacy.

This story has been updated to include donations from Dick DeVos.

Arnold Ventures, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Chris Gabrieli, the Emerson Collective through the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation are all Chalkbeat supporters.

We used FEC filings to report this story. See any notable donations that we missed? Let us know at national@chalkbeat.org. We’ll continue following donations as the campaign continues, and provide updates in stories and in our newsletter. Want to know more about each candidate’s positions on education? Check out our 2020 tracker.

6 notable moments from Saturday’s Democratic education forum

2019-12-15T15:17:00+00:00

Education rarely comes up in the presidential debates, but it had its own day in the spotlight this weekend.

In a six-hour Pittsburgh forum hosted by teachers unions and their allies, seven Democratic presidential hopefuls tried to distinguish themselves — though they made similar promises to bring new respect to the teaching profession, pour more money into high-poverty schools, and scale back, or even eliminate, standardized testing.

American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten said the forum — where candidates fielded questions from two journalists as well as teachers, students, and community activists — represented a “paradigm shift.”

“What’s happened today kind of flipped the script,” she said.

One ongoing conflict was visible, though largely offstage. Parents and advocates for charter schools gathered outside the event to say their message was not being heard, both by candidates and the event organizers.

It was a striking juxtaposition, and one that showed how the political winds have shifted in recent years. Whereas President Obama supported the expansion of charter schools and accountability measures for teachers, those who want to be the next Democratic president have taken a very different approach. Among Democrats, charter school advocates are now playing defense, while teachers unions and philosophically aligned groups are in the driver’s seat.

Here are six noteworthy moments you might have missed:

Biden stumbles on school segregation and defends his civil rights record

Though former Vice President Joe Biden has been asked numerous times about his record on school desegregation this election cycle, he again appeared rattled by a question on the subject.

Biden said he once supported busing students as a remedy for segregation codified in law. But Biden’s record on integration is complicated. As a senator in the 1970s, he opposed busing students for desegregation purposes in Delaware, saying he was against federal intervention. In recent debates, Biden has said he didn’t oppose all busing for desegregation — only busing that was mandated by the federal government.

Moderator Rehema Ellis also asked Biden if he considered the long-standing racial segregation of the nation’s schools to be “a failure of American education.” Biden responded “no,” though it’s possible he wasn’t directly answering her question. He said the best way to address segregated schools is to “provide for the best education possible in every single school.”

Biden also defended his record fighting redlining, and pointed to his support from black voters. “I make no apologies for my record on civil rights,” he said.

Warren gets pushed on charters, stands her ground; most others aren’t questioned on the issue

Just a few weeks after Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren was confronted by pro-charter school activists, she was again pushed on the issue. “Right now, the majority of children who find themselves in public charter schools are minority children,” said Ellis. “What do you say to those parents who are looking for that public charter school option?”

Warren responded by saying that although her plan would seek to limit the growth of new charters, it would not cut off funding for existing nonprofit charter schools. Her focus would be dramatically increasing funding for public schools serving many students in poverty, she said.

“I can’t let you sit here and tell me that we’ve already put plenty of money into our schools because we have not,” Warren said. “My proposal is how about we put $800 billion into our public schools and make them all excellent schools.”

Most of the other candidates weren’t asked about charter schools, though. That included Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, whose stance is similar to Warren’s, and South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg. He has criticized charter schools, but not gone nearly as far as Warren or Sanders in seeking to limit charter growth; he has also drawn support from a number of pro-charter donors.

Bennet met with pro-charter parents outside the forum

The Powerful Parent Network, the group of pro-charter families who recently disrupted a Warren event to advocate for school choice, was outside the event in Pittsburgh with a similar message, challenging the fact that they weren’t invited to participate in the event. On Twitter, some in the network said that they tried to enter the event but were barred by police. Organizers said there were more than 250 people present.

The Powerful Parent Network suggested that candidates come meet with them, too. Only Sen. Michael Bennet took them up on that. In a clip he posted on Twitter, he said, “We live in a country today where the quality of a kid’s education is most defined by the income of their parents.”

A separate pro-charter group was outside the event Saturday morning holding up signs like “Protect Charter Schools!” and “My Child! My Choice!”

Booker, whose new education plan is relatively pro-charter, called out sick

Sen. Cory Booker’s absence — his campaign said he was recovering from the flu — meant he didn’t get a chance to discuss his education plan, which he released Friday. In many respects, it is similar to other candidates’ plans, but it’s also more favorable to charter schools. He calls for “high-quality charters … to expand when they help meet local community needs,” but he wants to limit for-profit charters and “strengthen transparency and accountability for charters.”

Booker also reiterated his opposition to private school tuition vouchers. But he has not explained why he is still listed as a co-sponsor of a bill to reauthorize D.C.’s voucher program.

Sanders and Biden offer sharp criticism of standardized testing

Ellis noted that Sen. Bernie Sanders voted against the No Child Left Behind Act nearly two decades ago because of its emphasis on standardized testing. What would he do instead?

“We need to keep track of the individual progress kids are making,” he said. “And if they’re not making progress, let’s deal with that.” Sanders said individual schools should be in charge of monitoring the progress of every child.

Biden was also sharply critical of standardized testing, which is required by federal law in grades three through eight and once in high school. One questioner, who linked testing to eugenics, asked Biden if he would commit to “ending the use of standardized testing in public schools.” Biden said he would.

“Teaching to a test underestimates and discounts the things that are most important for students to know,” he said. Biden also distanced himself from the Obama administration in saying that he opposes using test scores to evaluate teachers — a key priority of Obama’s education department.

Bennet: States should not take over local school districts

In response to a question from Chicago activist Irene Robinson, who pointed out that many city school districts, such as Little Rock, Arkansas and Houston, have faced state intervention in their schools, Bennet said he’d “never seen a state takeover of a school district that’s worked well in America.”

“They don’t work well and we shouldn’t do it,” said the former Denver schools superintendent.

The issue hasn’t gotten much attention from other candidates, but it disproportionately affects school districts that enroll predominantly African-American students, according to a 2018 book by a Rutgers political scientist. The research on the outcomes of state takeovers is mixed: in some cases, like in New Orleans and Lawrence, Massachusetts, it led to academic gains, but in other cities like Detroit, Memphis, and Philadelphia, it didn’t move the needle.

Curious where all the Democratic presidential candidates stand on education? Read Chalkbeat’s tracker.

Correction: An earlier version of this piece referred to two pro-charter protests as one.

Pete Buttigieg’s education plan highlights broad agreement among Democrats on K-12 policy — though differences on charters remain

2019-12-07T11:00:14+00:00

Pete Buttigieg’s pre-K-12 education plan calls for raising teacher pay, addressing school segregation, and banning for-profit charter schools.

If those ideas sound familiar, that’s because they echo many of the proposals of his top Democratic rivals, who have also released education plans. The mayor of South Bend, Indiana, Buttigieg has risen from obscurity to be a top contender, particularly in early primary states, alongside former Vice President Joe Biden and Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders.

“My plan will empower teachers,” said Buttigieg, whose husband, Chasten, is a junior high teacher on leave from a private school in Indiana. “I’ve seen up close the incredible challenges that educators across the country face, from late nights grading papers to emptying their own bank accounts to pay for school supplies.”

Buttigieg’s plan highlights how the leading Democratic candidates have converged on many key education policies, with one partial exception — charter schools. His proposal touches on the lightning rod issue only briefly, calling for stronger accountability, but without going nearly as far as his primary rivals, some of whom have called for halting all federal support for new charters. Warren has recently been embroiled in the debate, after being confronted by activists and parents critical of her stance on charter schools.

The campaign did not share whom Buttigieg sought guidance from in crafting the plan. But education activist Diane Ravitch said in a July blog post critical of Buttigieg that the campaign told her it had reached out to former Obama administration officials John King and Jim Shelton, as well as the American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, who praised the plan in a release Saturday.

You can read Buttigieg’s full plan here. Here are four things to know about it:

In many ways Buttigieg’s education plan matches his Democratic rivals — highlighting consensus on several key issues.

If you read Buttigieg’s or other candidates’ plan with their name blotted out, you would have a hard time knowing which Democrat’s plan it was. For instance, Buttigieg wants to triple Title I funding for schools that serve a high percentage of students from low-income families, which Biden and Sanders have also pledged to do. (Warren would quadruple it.)

Most or all of the major candidates have vowed to increase teacher diversity; raise teacher pay; reduce school segregation; close funding disparities; increase access to preschool programs; oppose vouchers for private school tuition; fully fund IDEA, the federal law for students with disabilities; strongly enforce federal civil rights laws, including reinstating regulations rolled back by the Trump administration; and replace Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos.

Buttigieg’s plan is no exception on any of these counts, though it varies on the specifics in some cases. For instance, he wants parents to pay for preschool based on how much they earn, with the poorest parents paying nothing — similar to his stance on higher education, which has been met with much debate — whereas others want to offer it for free to everyone.

And the plan also touches on a number of lower-profile issues — like increasing spending on schools for Native American students or expanding access to dual-language curriculum in early years — that some other plans don’t.

Like other candidates, Buttigieg promises to support the teaching profession by raising pay and status. “We need to honor teachers like soldiers, and pay them like doctors,” the plan states. More specifically it says that some of the new infusion of Title I dollars would have to be spent on raising teacher pay to ensure it’s competitive with that of other professionals.

Many of the candidates’ ideas, particularly on civil rights, are in line with those the Obama administration espoused. Notably absent, though, from any of the major candidates’ proposals, including Buttigieg’s, are concepts like more rigorous teacher evaluations and tying teacher pay to performance, which Obama’s Department of Education promoted. Those proved controversial, and the #RedforEd movement has turned focus — and public sympathy — away from performance evaluations and toward stagnant teacher pay.

Buttigieg isn’t promoting charter schools, but takes a less hostile approach than Sanders and Warren.

The plan runs 20 pages, but charter schools get just a single paragraph. Buttigieg seeks to “ban for-profit charter schools and ensure equal accountability for public charter schools.” This is in line with a number of Democrats who largely agree on these points. (We’ll hold aside that it would not be easy for the federal government to ban for-profit schools.)

“He will work with states to ensure that policy innovations from charter programs that benefit students can be subsequently shared to strengthen the traditional public school system,” the plan promises, though it doesn’t explain how. Buttigieg also would “take action” against state and local entities that oversee low-performing charter schools.

Buttigieg is silent on the federal Charter Schools Program, a fund to support new charter schools across the country. Sanders and Warren have called for halting or eliminating it altogether. A spokesperson for Buttigieg said he would stop those dollars from going to for-profit charters. (Federal guidance already prohibits CSP money from going directly to any for-profit entity; it can, however, go to a nonprofit charter that contracts its operations out to a for-profit company, so long as there is an “arm’s length” relationship between the two entities.)

Buttigieg is taking a somewhat more favorable stance towards charters than Warren or Sanders — but a less favorable one than President Obama, who supported the expansion of charter schools.

“I think that the promise of charter schools has been that ideas can be piloted there that will then benefit the overall system and find their way into traditional public schools,” Buttigieg told Education Week in August. “But I’m skeptical that we’re going to gain a lot through expansion of charter schools when we still have such severely underfunded traditional public education.”

The charter issue is fraught politically for Democrats. Recent polling shows support for these schools has declined in the party among white Democrats, but indicates stronger, but still mixed, backing among black and Hispanic Democrats.

Meanwhile, Biden, another leading contender, did not even touch on charter schools in his education plan. But in a recently released interview with the National Education Association, he said, “No privately funded charter school or private charter school would receive a penny of federal money — none,” he said. Asked to clarify, campaign spokesperson told Chalkbeat that Biden would seek to stop federal funding for for-profit charter schools.

Buttigieg plans to tackle school segregation.

Buttigieg offers a number of proposals to address school segregation. He would create a $500 million fund to incentivize “community-led” racial and economic school integration. And he says school districts looking to make major changes to their boundaries would have to first seek clearance from federal officials, who would check to see if those changes would exacerbate racial and economic segregation.

The idea appears to be aimed at preventing so-called “breakaway districts,” in which whiter, more affluent communities establish their own school districts by leaving districts with more students of color from low-income families. (This issue attracted Warren’s attention, too; in her education plan she says the departments of education and justice would monitor attempts to create breakaway districts and possibly take action to stop them.)

Buttigieg also says he would direct the departments of education and housing and urban development to issue guidance to help states integrate their neighborhoods and schools using funds set aside to create more affordable housing in high-performing school districts. Buttigieg plans to reinstate Obama-era guidance that allowed consideration of student race in some circumstances to integrate K-12 schools, which was rescinded by the Trump administration. He would also “immediately remove” restrictions on using federal funds to bus students for desegregation purposes. But those barriers exist in federal law and would require Congress to take action.

These policy ideas come as Buttigieg has faced criticism for saying he “worked for years under the illusion that our schools in my city were integrated, because they had to be, because of a court order.” He added that that was “true within the limits of the South Bend Community School District,” but it wasn’t in the rest of the county. While South Bend’s school district does enroll a much higher percentage of black and Hispanic students from low-income families than the districts that surround it, South Bend has long struggled to fulfill the terms of a desegregation order, and even today some schools are not in compliance with it.

There’s a fund for that.

Buttigieg’s plan calls for large increases in federal spending on education, partially through specific grant programs.

In addition to the $500 million desegregation fund, he’s also calling for a $10 billion “equity fund” for early education. It would go to programs targeting low-income students of color and using “novel teaching methods and materials, targeted support services, school-family partnership programs, communication and personalization technologies, and other innovative strategies.”

There’s also a new grant program of unspecified size that would help school districts adopt new ways to discipline students, instead of suspending or expelling them. Buttigieg also says he would triple funding to $3.5 billion for an existing federal grant program that funds student safety, health, technology, and arts programs. And he would create a fund to help high-poverty districts prepare students for the workforce through apprenticeships.

In total, the campaign estimates that its K-12 education proposals would cost the federal government an extra $425 billion over 10 years — for context, public elementary and high schools got $56 billion from the federal government in a single year, 2016. Buttigieg says he’ll pay for this and other proposals in a variety of ways, including increasing the capital gains tax for top earners and repealing recent corporate tax cuts.

Curious where all the Democratic presidential candidates stand on education? Read Chalkbeat’s tracker.

Michael Bloomberg is running for president. What you should know about the billionaire’s education record in New York City

2019-11-25T14:30:00+00:00

Curious to learn more about Michael Bloomberg’s education views since he announced his bid for the presidency? You can read the latest on his proposals — as well as what other presidential candidates have said about education — in our 2020 tracker.

Weeks before he left office in 2013, former Mayor Michael Bloomberg stood before reporters and touted a record-high city graduation rate of 66 percent — a full six months before the state planned to release the statistics.

That’s how eager Bloomberg was to secure his legacy as an education reformer who battled mightily to enact his specific vision for a better school system. Pitting himself against those who argued that student poverty would impede efforts to improve education, Bloomberg closed low-performing schools, opened many small ones in their places, championed charter schools, and gave principals more autonomy in exchange for strict accountability.

“What is clear is that for the 12 years we’ve been doing this, the results are – by any national standards – outstanding,” Bloomberg said at the time. “We really have become the poster child.”

Bloomberg has now launched a bid for president, after initially saying in March that he wouldn’t run. But six years after he left office, many of the education programs that he introduced are gone after his successor, Mayor Bill de Blasio, dismantled them. (De Blasio briefly campaigned for president himself, earlier in 2019.)

At the same time, while some of the ideas Bloomberg advanced have become a new status quo, many others have fallen out of favor among Democrats. That means his education agenda could be a liability on the campaign trail — putting him in a position like that of New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, who championed similar policies as mayor of Newark.

Here’s a look at Bloomberg’s education legacy in New York City.

Bloomberg wanted control of the schools, and he got it.

New York City’s school system had long been considered ungovernable when Bloomberg took office in 2002. Bloomberg, and plenty of others, argued the city’s community school boards were ruled by political patronage that rendered them ineffective and diffused accountability. Bloomberg campaigned on a new way of doing business: consolidating unprecedented power over schools in the mayor’s office.

Soon after his first election, Bloomberg got his wish when the state legislature approved a sweeping system of mayoral control. The change made the system less democratic but also, Bloomberg argued, less corrupt and easier to steer. Elected community boards, put in place during the civil rights era, were stripped of most of their power. The citywide school board was relegated to a largely ceremonial role, with a majority of members appointed — and fired — at the will of the mayor.

Then he moved decisively to advance his ideas, many drawn from the business world.

Bloomberg believed that the same things that benefited him in business would yield better schools: information and competition.

He created new schools and also allowed privately run charter schools to use the city’s school buildings, under the principle that successful schools would draw families. He also transformed the high school admissions process so that students could apply to schools citywide, with an algorithm matching students and schools. He then moved to close schools that did not post strong results or that did not draw interest from families. Ultimately, Bloomberg phased out about 150 schools in a move that elicited resistance from communities and even lawsuits.

Under his direction, the city also began generating reams of new data about schools and what happened inside of them — surveys of parent and teacher satisfaction, reports showing how students’ scores improved over time, evaluations of teachers based on their students’ test scores.

To make all of this happen, Bloomberg recruited people from outside of the public service sector — starting with his flagship chancellor, Joel Klein, an attorney who had been working for an international media company. Their ambitious education agenda made working in the city education department feel like a glamorous place for talented young professionals to kick off their careers. (Not all of Bloomberg’s hires worked out well: Infamously, the former publisher Cathie Black stepped down as chancellor after only 95 tumultuous days on the job.)

He never shied away from a fight.

Bloomberg wielded his new power without reservation, and he made many enemies along the way. Frequently, he seemed to relish conflict.

In an early move that would be described as the “Monday night massacre,” Bloomberg booted three of his appointees to the city school board when they went against his controversial move to end “social promotion” of students from one grade to the next.

Over time, his embrace of charters prompted public battles over space and resources for traditional schools. His efforts to close low-performing schools also drew public outcry — and faced a lawsuit that temporarily saved more than a dozen of them. New York City became ground zero for a broader polarization around education politics that deepened throughout the first decade of Bloomberg’s leadership.

He fought the union constantly, but raised teacher pay substantially.

No one drew Bloomberg’s ire more than the United Federation of Teachers. At first, he worked collaboratively with the union, arriving at a contract agreement well ahead of schedule that boosted base pay by 43 percent. The longest-serving teachers could now earn more than $100,000.

But that was the last contract they agreed to. Moving forward, virtually every piece of Bloomberg’s agenda stoked outrage from the teachers union, which he once likened to the National Rifle Association.

He proposed a simple eight-page contract to replace the UFT’s doorstop-sized agreement, pushed for merit pay — a third rail for the union — and mused about firing half of the city’s teachers.

Despite — or maybe because of — all the battles, schools got better.

Graduation rates climbed by more than 40 percent to historic highs, and dropout rates cratered. Later research would peg some of the increases to Bloomberg’s policy of closing large high schools and opening smaller ones in their place. The charter schools that opened in New York City drove larger learning gains than their district-run counterparts. And in a city that was growing safer and wealthier, families that might have chosen to leave or opt for private schools chose public education instead.

There were also less encouraging trends. In an increasingly competitive marketplace, some schools wound up with high concentrations of needy students, deepening segregation. The creation of new gifted programs and selective high schools also introduced inequities. And Bloomberg’s social promotion ban got rolled back after it became clear that being held back repeatedly was harming some students.

In the end, Bloomberg left office feeling like his schools legacy was unfinished. Creating the kind of education students need, he said in a speech just before the election to replace him, would require a broader political effort — one that could be contributed to equally by public servants and business leaders.

“We’ve seen here in New York, and in cities around the country, that progress is possible – real, substantial, dramatic progress,” Bloomberg said. “But it’s going to take strong organized political leadership, and it’s going to take innovative ideas from civic leaders in the public and private sectors because we’re all in this together.”

‘I’m going to make sure I got it right’: What Elizabeth Warren told charter activists after protest at Atlanta event

2019-11-22T23:50:00+00:00

Elizabeth Warren defended her education plan — while also promising to go back and read it — in a meeting with pro-charter activists Thursday, a lengthy video of the conversation shows.

The Democratic presidential candidate argued that her plan seeks only to put charter schools on an even playing field with district schools.

“Nothing in my plan says we’re going to close any existing charter schools,” she told the activists, including longtime school choice supporter Howard Fuller and Sarah Carpenter of the Memphis Lift. “Nothing says that we’re going to end charter schools if they’re meeting the same standards.”

And while Warren did not make specific promises, she appeared to leave some room for change. “If I don’t have the pieces right, I’m going to go back and read it,” she said of her plan. “I’m going to make sure I got it right.”

Saloni Sharma, a spokesperson for the campaign, reiterated Warren’s perspective: “In the meeting, Elizabeth noted that charter schools should have to meet the same standards as public schools — as her plan says. She noted that funding for existing non-profit charter schools is not affected like her plan says. She believes that we should not put public dollars behind a further expansion of charters until they are subject to the same accountability requirements as public schools — like her plan says.”

Warren’s education plan, which she released last month, proposes limiting charter schools in a number of ways. It promises to ban for-profit charter schools and eliminate federal funding for new charters. Warren’s plan also seeks to limit who could authorize charters — the kind of change that could threaten existing schools, though one that it’s unclear whether a president could pull off. It’s a reflection of a growing skepticism about charter schools among Democrats, though two recent polls show black and Hispanic Democrats tend to be more supportive.

The meeting followed a Warren campaign event in Atlanta, where the Massachusetts senator gave a speech focused on black activism. The group of parent activists disrupted that speech with chants of “our children, our choice.”

Fuller said Rev. Miniard Culpepper, a Boston pastor who is close to Warren, came over and offered a meeting with Warren if they stopped. They agreed.

“To her credit, she came down to meet with us,” Fuller told Chalkbeat. “We were there to support good schools and the power of parents to choose.”

In that meeting, Fuller, former Milwaukee schools chief and advocate for private school vouchers, told Warren that her language is helping anti-charter efforts across the country. A number of states, including California, Illinois, and Michigan, have recently moved to limit charter schools or cut their funding.

Parent activist Sarah Carpenter speaks to Sen. Elizabeth Warren after the presidential candidate’s rally in Atlanta on Nov. 21. Facebook / Sunny Thomas

“Your plan starts out with an attack on charter schools,” he tells Warren.

“What you may see as an attack is designed to say everybody’s got to meet the same standards,” Warren counters.

Throughout, the activists say they support the idea of charters meeting the “same standards,” though it’s not clear exactly what either party is referring to. (Depending on where they are located and who they are authorized by, charter schools are often exempt from rules that apply to public school around things like public records and teacher certification, and are held accountable for academic performance in different ways. Opponents say that’s a problem; supporters argue that charters are held to performance contracts that amount to a higher standard.)

In the conversation with Warren, Carpenter emphasized her personal experience. “Charter schools saved my grandbaby because every school in my community was failing,” she said.

At one point, Carpenter said that she had heard that Warren sent her own children to private school, perhaps alluding to a recent article in the New York Post. Warren responded, “No, my children went to public schools.”

Asked to clarify, a campaign aide said, “Elizabeth’s daughter went to public school. Her son went to public school until 5th grade.”

This appears to align with the Post article, which found evidence that Warren’s son attended a Texas private school in 5th grade.

Warren said she wants to increase funding for public schools, by quadrupling Title I dollars for schools serving low-income students and providing more federal money for students with disabilities. Fuller was not persuaded.

“If you don’t say there has to be significant structural changes in order to use that money — that money is going to go down the drain,” he told her.

Warren did not agree. “I have to say, I don’t think that’s true in every school. Why would you say that’s true everywhere?” she responded. (Research has found that public schools generally do improve when given additional resources.)

The discussion ended with a prayer, led by Culpepper as the group held hands. Warren hugged Carpenter and said she appreciated her comments.

Fuller told Chalkbeat that roughly 200 people from a number of overlapping groups took part in the protest. That included the Freedom Coalition for Charter Schools, a group that Fuller started with Connecticut charter school leader Steve Perry. They worked with the Powerful Parent Network — a collection of groups in Atlanta, Nashville, Memphis, and elsewhere — to mount protests outside the Democratic debate in Atlanta and then attend Warren’s rally.

They were funded by an online campaign, which has raised over $16,000 from a mix of small donations and several anonymous $1,000 contributions.

Fuller said his group hasn’t received any direct financial support. A number of groups present have been backed by pro-charter philanthropies and wealthy funders, though.

Carpenter’s group, the Memphis Lift, has received $1.5 million from the Walton Family Foundation since 2015. Carpenter told ABC News that the trip was not funded by Walton, which was singled out for criticism in Warren’s education plan.

Lakisha Young said most of the staff of the Oakland Reach, a parent group, was in Atlanta for the protest. The Oakland Reach is funded by local and national foundations, including Walton and The City Fund, which is backed John Arnold and Reed Hastings. (Arnold and Walton are also Chalkbeat donors.) Bryan Morton, who leads a Camden group supported by The City Fund, was also present.

Young said she’s happy to talk about her group’s donors, but that the focus should be on what is driving parents’ activism.

“As interested as people are in our funding — totally get it — but we would love people to also be interested in why we get up every day and do this work,” she said.

Fuller said critics who focus on funding are using a long-standing tactic to discredit black activists. “I don’t give a damn what they say about where the funding came from — it’s an old trick that they’re using,” he said.

Fuller says he will keep trying to engage the Democratic candidates. He said has spoken with an advisor to Pete Buttigieg’s campaign and directly to Cory Booker, who reiterated his support for charter schools in a New York Times op-ed earlier this week. And Fuller’s group, the Freedom Coalition, will be in Los Angeles in December for the next Democratic debate, he said.

“We are not going to go away,” he said.

Julián Castro attended segregated schools. Now he wants the country’s housing and education policies to do more to help students like him.

2019-10-22T23:53:12+00:00

Julián Castro wants voters to know that he attended segregated schools as a student. The Democratic presidential candidate says that experience shaped his education plans, which he’s been touting this week even as he warns supporters that he may have to drop out of the race later this month.

The former mayor of San Antonio is calling for universal pre-kindergarten for all 3- and 4-year-olds, a federal tax credit to raise teacher pay, and a national program to develop more teachers of color.

He’s also proposed more affordable housing in high-opportunity areas, zoning reform, and investments in transportation to desegregate schools — tying education to efforts to address the country’s housing issues, building on his experience as the head of the Department of Housing and Urban Development under President Obama.

In an interview with Chalkbeat, Castro was hesitant to say whether he would cut funding for charter schools, something that Sen. Elizabeth Warren attracted a lot of attention for when she released her K-12 education plan this week, and that Sen. Bernie Sanders has also pledged to do.

He did say he wanted to subject charters to greater transparency and accountability measures. But he would continue to support giving parents choices within the public school system, while also working to improve the neighborhood schools where students are assigned based on where they live.

Here’s what else he told us.

You’ve talked a lot about how housing is really important for tackling school segregation, and you have plans that talk about addressing residential segregation. Tell me more about what you think the role of the Department of Education should be in encouraging school desegregation.

As I see it, our schools are segregated because our neighborhoods are segregated, and we need to connect the dots of policy to address that segregation across departments. The Department of Education has a role to play with HUD in making sure that our policies are linked up. For instance, I believe that one of the ways that we should assess communities for grants at the departments of education and housing is how good a job are they doing in sparking greater housing opportunity for families, especially families that are low-income and families of color.

I’m a fan of the Promise Neighborhoods program at the Department of Education, and that works well with the Choice Neighborhoods program at HUD and these other place-based initiatives.

Fundamentally, what I want to do is to create options for families. We need to be able to make sure that they can continue to live in the neighborhoods that they’re living in, if they want to do that, and we should invest in those traditionally distressed neighborhoods so that people’s quality of life is better. And at the same time, following on the Raj Chetty research from 2015, we need to also ensure that people have more options in terms of moving to neighborhoods that offer opportunity right now.

What do you think about the federal government playing a role in incentivizing school desegregation? Is there anything you think the Department of Education could do to nudge places to get back involved in desegregation work that we really haven’t seen happening across the country?

I believe so. I also believe that we need to continue to enforce anti-discrimination laws in education, in housing, in every way that we can, to open more opportunity at the local level for families of modest means and people of color to be able to attend the public schools of their preference.

And I say that as somebody that grew up in segregated neighborhoods and went to segregated schools. The two school districts that I went to [San Antonio and Edgewood] … were two of the seven districts at the heart of the 1973 Supreme Court case in which the 5-4 court refused to strike down Texas’ unequal school financing system, that eventually was better addressed in 1989 [by the Texas Supreme Court]. I had a front-row seat to the impact that the legacy of discrimination can make on education.

My brother and I, thankfully, were able to get that education and then go to college and law school and reach our dreams, but that’s not the case for the vast majority of students still stuck in those classrooms. I wholeheartedly agree with both a carrot and a stick approach to helping further integrate classrooms in our country.

As I understand it, there is still a block on using federal money for busing for desegregation. Is there any way you see that you could get around that and encourage voluntary busing?

I believe that for school districts that are interested in doing that, they should have the opportunity to do it, and the federal government should help facilitate that.

At the September debate you had said, “It is a myth that charter schools are better than public schools. They’re not.” Then you elaborated: “I’m not categorically against charter schools. I would require more transparency and accountability.” Can you talk a little bit about your position on charter schools and what you’re concerned about with them?

It seems like the common notion is that charter schools are generally better than public schools, and at least the research that I’ve seen suggests otherwise. [Most studies show charter and district schools perform comparably, though charter schools in many cities perform better. In San Antonio, charters perform slightly worse.] There are a handful of charter schools that are true standouts and I applaud their success.

I believe that one of the original intentions of charter schools was that they would be able to experiment and perhaps provide some insight that the public school system could learn from and adopt. But I don’t believe that happens as much as it could. Secondly, a lot of charter schools don’t have to play by the same rules that public school systems do in terms of transparency and accountability. And by this I mean open records laws, open meetings laws, prohibitions against self-dealing with board members and administrators. There is an opacity there that concerns me.

Do you believe that you would reduce or cut funding for the Charter Schools Program, which has been one of the main drivers of charter school expansion?

My first priority is going to be to expand the resources for our public schools.

But would you want to roll back funding for the Charter Schools Program?

We would evaluate that. It’s different in different states right now, in terms of the landscape of charter schools, how many of them are permitted, and the rules around how many more could come into existence. I would like to analyze that, and understand the changes that we need to make.

Can you tell me one thing that you have learned from your wife’s experience in education that is shaping how you’re thinking about education policy?

My wife started her career as a classroom elementary math teacher in the school district that she grew up in on the south side of San Antonio, which is a low-income school district. One of the things I remember her telling me early on in her teaching career is how itinerant a lot of the students in these low-income school districts are. Oftentimes they move around from place to place, school to school, because they can’t afford the rent at an apartment, and they may get evicted or may end up having to double up and live with a relative. That itinerancy is a big problem for making sure that students actually learn smoothly in a school year.

So that’s one more reason that I think our housing policy and education policy should work together. When I was HUD secretary, there was a program in the Tacoma school district … that used housing choice vouchers to incentivize families to stay put so that their students could have an effective educational experience without having to move around two or three or four times during a school year. That struck me, because that’s being thoughtful about how you can use housing policy and education policy to create a better chance for students to learn.

Is there anything else from your experience of running the Department of Housing and Urban Development that you feel impacts your perspective on schools?

What I see is that many of the same students that are sitting in classrooms that have the toughest needs are those same students that are living in public housing or whose family has a housing choice voucher. They are low-income students, they are facing tough odds, and so I believe the more we can coordinate our housing, education and other policies around providing what those families need to succeed, the better off they’re going to be. Maybe that’s most reflected by my call for a community school model that invests in that school the resources, the connections to housing opportunities and health care opportunities and job opportunities.

How are you thinking about neighborhood schools? Because we’re talking so much about housing policy and students are often assigned to go to school based off of where they live, do you have any thoughts about whether or not that model should be one of the most common ways we send kids to school?

I’ve been a supporter of giving parents options within the public school system. I do think that school districts should look at ways they can be more effective there. I went to a magnet school centered around foreign languages within the public school system. Fundamentally, our school system can strengthen the neighborhood-based approach, but we need better coordination among policies. And we need more investment of resources and to equip our teachers with the tools they need to be successful for the students.

You’re one of the few candidates who actually has school-aged children. I wonder if the process of having to choose schools for your kids — has that impacted your thinking about education policy?

I’m not afraid of public schools. I think a lot of parents come in with this preconceived notion that somehow the public schools are going to fail their kids. I grew up in the public school system. I fundamentally believe that our children can get a good education in our public schools. So there was never a question, when my kids started school — my son just started pre-K this year — that they would go to public schools. And my daughter did that from the beginning.

Like every parent, I want the best for my children, and I understand they can do well in the public school system.

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.

Elizabeth Warren’s K-12 education plan would quadruple Title I funds, nix federal support for charters

2019-10-21T16:36:00+00:00

Sen. Elizabeth Warren released her long-awaited K-12 education plan on Monday, calling for a massive boost in federal spending on public schools, a bigger federal effort to confront school segregation, and an end to federal support for charter school growth.

At nearly 7,400 words, Warren’s plan is the longest and most detailed collection of K-12 education proposals put forward by any of the major Democratic candidates for president. Like many of her fellow candidates, she says she would roll back changes made by the Trump administration and offers proposals likely to be popular with teachers — like encouraging states to raise teacher pay — that she argues would also help high-need students.

“I believe that every kid in America should have the same access to a high-quality public education — no matter where they live, the color of their skin, or how much money their parents make,” Warren says.

The plan also makes clear that the Massachusetts senator’s outlook has continued to shift on a few key education issues that attracted a level of bipartisan support during the Obama administration but that many Democrats have since turned from: standardized testing and charter schools.

Warren pushed hard in 2015 for test scores to be a key component of how schools are judged under the country’s main K-12 education law, saying standardized tests were important for understanding how schools were serving students of color and students from low-income families — and her campaign says she still believes this. But her comments on tests have been more critical recently, saying at a teachers union forum in June: “We do not need high-stakes testing.”

Her education plan doubles down on that language, saying she would “push to prohibit the use of standardized testing as a primary or significant factor” in decisions about schools and teachers. A campaign spokesperson says she would use federal incentives to push states to use more “authentic” assessments.

The leaders of the country’s two largest teachers unions, the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, both praised the plan.

“Like so many of the other candidates’ education plans we have praised, this one is bold and thorough and lays out tangible steps and resources that are critical for all students to thrive,” the AFT’s president Randi Weingarten said in a statement.

You can find Warren’s full plan here. Here are three notable elements.

More federal spending on education

Sen. Bernie Sanders and former Vice President Joe Biden both say they would triple spending on Title I, the pot of federal money that goes to schools that serve students from low-income families. Warren goes further, saying she would quadruple Title I spending to $450 billion over a decade.

To get this additional money, Warren says states would have to promise to increase their own education spending and adopt funding formulas that send more money to school districts serving low-income students.

Warren also wants to send more federal dollars to states and districts to help students with disabilities — $20 billion more each year for federal IDEA grants.

Separately, Warren would start another open-ended grant program for schools. That “Excellence in Education” program would offer $100 billion over 10 years for schools that want to do things like fund after-school art programs, pay for mentoring programs, or upgrade labs.

This money could help turn some 25,000 public schools into “community schools” that offer wraparound support to students and families by 2030, she said. Warren said she would also spend an additional $50 billion on school infrastructure, which includes fixing crumbling buildings, abating lead, and expanding access to high-speed Internet.

No federal support for charter schools

Warren would end the federal Charter Schools Program, which has given out more than $3 billion since it began in 1995 and served as a key driver of charter school expansion. Earlier this year, for example, the U.S. Department of Education awarded the KIPP charter network $87 million to create 52 schools and the IDEA network $116 million to continue its rapid growth. (A Warren campaign spokesperson said she would permit current grants to expire on their expected timeline.)

Sanders has put forward a similar proposal to end public funding for new charter schools.

Warren also said she’d seek to “ban” for-profit charter schools and nonprofit charter schools that outsource their operations to for-profit companies, something the federal government doesn’t have much authority over.

In the past, Warren has praised Boston’s charter schools, attributing their success to the stricter oversight and accountability rules in her home state. She did oppose a Massachusetts ballot measure in 2016 that would have lifted the cap on charter schools in the state, saying she was concerned about charters’ financial impact on school districts — and she draws attention to that opposition in the plan. (Recent research has shown that charter schools do cost school districts, though districts can recover by cutting costs over time.)

“To keep our traditional public school systems strong, we must resist efforts to divert public funds out of traditional public schools,” the Warren plan says.

Charter advocates weren’t pleased with the plan, highlighting divides within the Democratic party on the issue.

“Elizabeth Warren’s plan to starve charter schools of funding would destroy the dreams of a quality education for the families who need it most,” Amy Wilkins of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools said in a statement.

A greater focus on school desegregation

Warren’s plan includes a slate of proposals to encourage school desegregation, something that has gotten little attention at the federal level for years, including under President Obama.

Warren’s plan explicitly identifies integration as a school improvement strategy, saying she would would encourage states to spend Title I money set aside to help low-performing schools “on integration efforts of their own design.”

“All told, that will add up to billions of dollars a year that states can use to promote residential and public school integration, including through the use of public magnet schools,” the plan says.

Warren also says she would continue to provide Title I funding to schools that have successfully integrated and fallen below the federal threshold to receive money for low-income students — something that’s been a problem in places like New York City. But it’s unclear how exactly this proposal would work.

A campaign spokesperson said Warren would also reissue the 2011 guidance from the Obama administration that gave schools direction on how to voluntarily integrate schools, which was rescinded by the Trump administration.

Warren said she would push to expand federal civil rights legislation so that students and parents could challenge school segregation in court by claiming “disparate impact” discrimination — when one group is adversely affected by a policy. (This idea resembles a House bill introduced earlier this year and is sponsored by the chair of the House’s education committee.) Warren also said she’d push to give the Department of Justice the power to file and investigate those claims.

Taking note of the trend of whiter and wealthier parts of school districts seceding to form their own districts, Warren said so-called “breakaway districts” would face added scrutiny and possible enforcement actions from her departments of education and justice.

She also said she would increase funding to make civil rights data collection faster and more expansive. And she said she would only appoint federal judges who’ve committed to upholding Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark 1954 Supreme Court case that outlawed school segregation.

Many of Warren’s ideas for tackling school segregation also involve combatting residential segregation — a significant challenge.

“The first step toward integrating our schools is integrating our communities,” the plan states.

As part of her housing plan, Warren has proposed a $10 billion grant program that would encourage cities to remove restrictive zoning laws and provide home-buying assistance to families who used to live in communities where real estate agents wouldn’t provide mortgages, often because many low-income black families lived there.

Why a candidate for governor wants to end vouchers, even though it’s politically ‘not possible’

2019-10-10T18:27:48+00:00

One candidate vying for the Democratic nomination in Indiana’s governor’s race is seizing on the frustration of public school educators by proposing a plan so sweeping that even he acknowledges it isn’t politically viable.

In his education plan, released Thursday, candidate Josh Owens calls for raising teacher pay by dissolving the state’s voucher program, which now serves some 35,000 Indiana students. It’s one of many of his ideas that — like previous progressive proposals, including using the state’s $2 billion budget reserves to fund teacher pay initiatives — are unlikely to win the backing of the state’s Republican supermajority.

“Obviously I think that with the makeup of the legislature as it is, it’s certainly not possible,” Owens said about ending the voucher program. “But that’s the whole point of the election that’s coming up, is for us to have conversations about big ideas, and really thinking about what are the values that we have.”

Indiana is home to one of the nation’s largest and broadest voucher programs and spends around $160 million a year to pay students’ private school tuition. In 2019, more than 3% of students in Indiana used vouchers.

The program was meant to give students from low-income families — particularly students with special education needs or students attending failing public schools — access to private options. But critics of vouchers say that the program largely funds religious education that doesn’t have to meet the same standards as public schools and is so broad that many of the students who receive them would attend private school anyway.

“In the abstract, what vouchers are trying to solve is noble,” Owens said. “But in practice what it ends up doing is taking resources away from our public schools and away from those schools that really need them.”

Under Owens’ plan, the state would use its surplus to create a $300 million permanent public education endowment, with the proceeds benefiting public schools. The state would also phase out vouchers over multiple years, allowing students currently in the program to continue receiving the funding until they move schools or graduate.

In an email statement Thursday morning, EdChoice, a national school choice advocacy organization based in Indianapolis, said the conversation about K-12 education in Indiana should focus on finding “more options for students, not fewer.” (EdChoice is a funder of Chalkbeat.)

“Hard-working Hoosier families shouldn’t be tossed around like a political football for trying to find the right schooling option for their kids,” said Jennifer Wagner, an EdChoice spokeswoman. “Our state has a robust choice environment … That’s a thing we should celebrate, not disparage, especially when so many families are utilizing choice beyond the voucher program.”

Owens’ proposal speaks to the growing frustration among teachers in Indiana over their pay. In 2016-17, Indiana teachers made an average salary of $50,554, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, compared to $61,602 in Illinois and $57,000 in Ohio. Starting salaries in Indiana, however, can be as low as $30,000.

Last session lawmakers pumped more money into schools overall — an increase of 2.5 percent — and freed up $70 million each year in retirement payments, which they hoped would send more money into teachers’ pockets. But the impact of that funding varies across districts, and there’s no guarantee school systems will use the additional dollars to increase salaries. And it appears unlikely that lawmakers will revisit the issue in the upcoming legislative session, when the state’s two-year budget isn’t scheduled to be reopened.

Owens, 34, is a Butler University economics instructor and the CEO of a company that develops digital strategies for retailers. He previously chaired the Indiana Charter School Board, to which he was appointed by former Gov. Mike Pence in 2015, and served as an economic policy adviser for former Rep. Luke Messer, a Republican. Owens ran for a seat on the Indianapolis Public School Board in 2014, but lost.

He will face two other candidates for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination, former state health commissioner Woody Myers, and state Sen. Eddie Melton, a former State Board of Education member. Neither have released education plans yet.

Melton also appears to be making teacher pay the center of his campaign, which he officially announced on Tuesday with Republican State Superintendent Jennifer McCormick by his side. In a campaign video posted Tuesday, Melton pledged to increase teacher pay: “We need to invest in our schools and value our teachers.” This summer he and McCormick went on a statewide listening tour on education policy.

The Democratic primary is scheduled for May 5. The winner will face Republican Gov. Eric Holcomb, who has already announced that he will seek a second term.

Elizabeth Warren doesn’t have a K-12 education plan. Here’s what her record on schools tells us.

2019-09-25T18:43:49+00:00

Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren wants voters to know she was a teacher. Her stint as a teacher of students with disabilities early in her career, she often says, was the fulfillment of a childhood dream.

But the Democratic presidential candidate, law professor, and frontrunner in Iowa (according to a poll released this week) hasn’t said much about her plans for the nation’s public elementary, middle, and high schools.

Vocal on the campaign trail about her proposals to expand pre-kindergarten and make college more affordable, Warren has yet to release a comprehensive K-12 education plan. A campaign spokesperson did not respond to questions about her K-12 positions, whether a plan was in the works, or who is advising Warren on education issues.

So Chalkbeat reviewed her writing, her record in the Senate, and comments she’s made at the Democratic debates and teachers union forums to get a better sense of where she stands.

A few patterns emerge — and on the hot-button issues that have divided Democrats, like charters and testing, Warren has offered a little something for everyone.

She has been a staunch advocate for holding schools accountable for their test scores and graduation rates, describing that data as a tool to push for racial equity, though more recently she’s criticized “high-stakes testing.” She has also praised charter schools in her home state while pushing for greater oversight of the schools nationally, especially those run by for-profit companies.

“I think her position, in many ways, is an evolving position,” said Carol Burris of the Network for Public Education, a group that opposes charter schools and policies it sees as putting public education in private hands.

Warren has also taken positions likely to earn enthusiastic union support, taking aim at Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and opposing private-school vouchers.

“Like all of the Democratic candidates, she’s trying to find a way to thread the needle between winning the support of teachers unions and wanting to present herself as a strong advocate for civil rights,” said Martin West, a professor of education at Harvard.

Here’s what else you should know.

Warren doesn’t support publicly-funded vouchers for private schools — but she’s voiced skepticism about assigning students to schools based on where they live.

In the 2004 book that Warren co-authored with her daughter, “The Two-Income Trap,” Warren argued for a program that would allow parents to choose from all public schools in their area.

“Students would be admitted to a particular public school on the basis of their talents, their interests, or even lottery numbers; their zip codes would be irrelevant,” she wrote. “Ultimately, an all-voucher system would diminish the distinction between public and private schools.”

Some have tried to link that idea to publicly funded vouchers for private schools, something DeVos favors. Warren says the two are unconnected. A website paid for by Warren’s campaign says she “believes private school voucher programs are dangerous, cost taxpayers billions of dollars … and have been used to further racial and socioeconomic segregation.”

During DeVos’ contentious 2017 confirmation process, Warren asked DeVos how she would ensure that voucher programs followed federal education laws, including civil rights laws, and “do not result in public school funding cuts.”

Warren voted against expanding charters in Massachusetts, but has expressed support for Boston’s charter schools.

Warren voted against a Massachusetts ballot measure that would have lifted the state’s cap on charter schools in 2016. (The measure failed.) In a statement, Warren told the Boston Globe that while “many charter schools in Massachusetts are producing extraordinary results for our students,” she was concerned about the financial impact of more charters on cash-strapped school districts.

Some charter proponents say her “no” vote didn’t come as a surprise, given that a Republican governor was leading the charge. And there doesn’t seem to be any lasting bitterness: Last week, the head of Massachusetts’ charter school association told Chalkbeat that the organization applauds “Warren’s commitment to public education.”

Warren has continued to offer praise for Boston’s charter schools, calling them “among the best-performing charter schools in the nation” at a 2018 Senate hearing. (That claim is largely backed by research.) At the same hearing, Warren attributed that success to limits on who can issue charters in Massachusetts, a cap on their numbers, and a ban on their operation by for-profit companies. “More oversight and more accountability works for our kids,” she said.

In July, Warren told the American Prospect she wouldn’t seek additional federal funding for charter schools if elected president.

All told, Burris sees Warren’s record as being “somewhere in the middle of the field” between Sen. Bernie Sanders — who’s called for a moratorium on charter school expansion — and Sen. Cory Booker, a proponent of charter schools and other policies associated with education reform.

Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Chris Murphy attend a Senate hearing in 2016 on the implementation of the Every Student Succeeds Act with Education Secretary John King.

Warren was a leading proponent of making sure the new federal education law had provisions that held schools accountable for test scores. Now, she says, “We do not need high-stakes testing.”

Warren has said repeatedly that she views the country’s main K-12 education law, the Every Student Succeeds Act, as civil rights legislation that should be used to send federal money to the country’s most vulnerable students.

Warren pushed for the final version of the law to require 95% of students in every school to be tested each year and to say that schools should face outside intervention if they are among the lowest-performing 5% in their state or if they fail to graduate at least two-thirds of their students. She was “deeply concerned that without stronger accountability, billions of dollars in taxpayer money would not actually reach those schools and students who needed them the most,” she explained in a December 2015 speech.

That position put her at odds with the head of the Massachusetts Teachers Association, which wrote earlier that year that Warren’s “concern for traditionally underserved students … 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” and “undermines meaningful teaching and learning.”

Earlier this year, though, at a forum hosted by the National Education Association, the country’s largest union, Warren seemed to do an about-face when asked about testing by a retired teacher.

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

The distinction may come down to the contested meaning of “high stakes.” Still, West, the Harvard professor who also advised the ranking Republican member of the Senate’s education committee while ESSA was being drafted, finds the tone shift notable.

“I find it hard to reconcile the stance she took in the ESSA debate with her recent comments about standardized testing,” he said. While ESSA does ask states to use other factors to measure student success and school quality, test scores remain among the most important.

She’s courted teachers unions.

Randi Weingarten, the head of the American Federation of Teachers, gave Warren a warm welcome at a May town hall event, describing Warren as someone who “understands the need of unions” and “the aspiration of public education.”

Several times, Warren has promised to strengthen teachers unions by making it easier to join a union and giving unions more power to negotiate. And at the NEA’s July forum she praised teachers who’d led strikes and walkouts in West Virginia, Arizona, Oklahoma and other states. “It was a lesson not only in what teachers need to be able to survive,” Warren said, “it was a lesson in democracy.”

Warren has also vowed to appoint someone with experience teaching in a public school as her education secretary. “Betsy DeVos need not apply,” she quipped in Detroit earlier this year.

She’s been a close observer of school segregation, and has raised questions about racial gaps in access to advanced programs.

Warren’s track record of paying attention to school integration goes back to her time as a law student. In 1975, she wrote a law review article on the Supreme Court’s Milliken v. Bradley decision, which made it more difficult for suburban school districts to take part in desegregation plans, arguing that it would lead to more “separate and unequal” schools.

As a senator, she’s pushed for the federal government to collect demographic data that would allow for fine-grained information on students’ academic performance by race and disability. “States and local communities can’t address persistent achievement gaps if they don’t have good data about what’s gone wrong,” Warren said during a 2016 ESSA hearing.

Later that year, she quizzed Education Secretary John King about civil rights data showing that most high schools serving black and Latino students don’t offer calculus — and asked how his proposed rules would “help close these critical opportunity gaps.”

More recently, she co-sponsored the Strength in Diversity Act, legislation that would create a modest federal program to fund school integration initiatives. When Joe Biden came under fire for his comments opposing busing for desegregation, Warren said she supported it.

She’s similar to other Democrats in her support for school discipline reform.

In her criminal justice plan, Warren says students of color often “bear the brunt” of school suspensions and expulsions, and says she would provide schools with federal funding for trauma-informed training. Police officers assigned to schools should be required to undergo training in youth development and de-escalation, she says, and school truancy should not be a crime.

Many expect Warren would re-issue the Obama-era guidance aimed at reducing racial disparities in school discipline that DeVos rescinded last year. In her criminal justice plan, Warren says she’d direct more money to the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights to investigate school discipline disparities.

She wants the federal government to invest in teacher training and sees promise in non-traditional teacher prep programs.

In 2015, Warren was highly critical of a draft of ESSA that gave states greater flexibility in how they’d spend federal funding for teacher and principal training. It was “not a responsible use of federal tax dollars” because there was no assurance “that states will actually use this federal money to help teachers do their jobs,” she said.

At the May AFT Town Hall, when asked about how she would invest in the teaching profession, Warren pointed out that she’d “fought hard” to keep federal dollars going toward teacher training.

At a 2014 Senate hearing on teacher preparation, Warren praised teacher residencies in Boston, saying they’d had “great successes.” Such residencies typically compensate student teachers and offer mentorship and practice teaching in schools.

Research has shown that residents are more diverse and more likely to stay in the profession than typical teacher candidates, though it’s unclear if they are more effective than teachers who went through more traditional prep programs.

Bernie Sanders joins Chicago teachers union rally, calls educators ‘the conscience of America’

2019-09-25T03:32:11+00:00

CHICAGO — Sen. Bernie Sanders told teachers and school support staff that they were “the conscience of America” during a union rally in Chicago Tuesday night, as the Democratic candidate for president looked to tie the city’s tense, ongoing contract negotiations to broader debates about American teachers and schools.

Sanders called on Chicago officials to hammer out a deal with the Chicago Teachers Union that adds school nurses, social workers, and librarians; reduces class sizes; and blocks the expansion of charter schools in the city. (While charter school growth hasn’t been a focus of these contract talks, the union has negotiated over the issue in the past.)

“You are demanding, and I am demanding, a change in national priorities,” Sanders told hundreds of teachers, support staff, and other union members at the teachers union’s packed hall.

Sanders’ demands for Chicago teachers echoed ideas he has put forth on the campaign trail, including a moratorium on the use of public funds to expand charter schools and directing more money to schools serving low-income students. The event was also the latest effort by a Democratic presidential candidate to latch onto the #RedforEd movement, which saw teachers strike or walk out in states across the country in 2018 and 2019. Some see the Chicago teachers union’s seven-day strike in 2012 as an early step in that movement.

Chicago teachers are voting this week on whether or not to authorize a strike. If three-quarters of the union’s some 25,000 members vote in favor, a strike could happen as soon as Oct. 7.

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, who oversees the city’s schools, has offered the teachers union a 16% raise over five years. The sticking point hasn’t been raises, but concerns about school staffing and class sizes. The teachers union wants Lightfoot to put in writing promises she’s made about adding more social workers, special education case managers, and school nurses.

Before the rally kicked off, Jessica Suarez Nieto, who teaches sixth-grade social studies on the city’s South Side, said she saw the Chicago negotiations as part of a larger national movement for “education justice” reflected in Sanders’ platform.

“A lot of our demands do align,” she said. “Bernie at least pushes to do something that’s not reformist.”

During his speech, Sanders repeated his campaign promise to triple funding for Title I, the federal program that directs money to schools with students from low-income families, saying “too many of our kids are going to schools that are inadequately funded.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders appeared at a union rally on Tuesday night and pushed Chicago officials to settle ongoing contract negotiations with two unions that represent the city’s teachers and support staff.

Sanders also called for more funding for after-school programs, technology in schools, and school building maintenance — an issue that’s plagued Chicago and other large city school districts.

And he drew attention to his long-standing campaign pledge to make public colleges and universities tuition-free, noting that since he discussed the proposal in Chicago during the last presidential campaign four years ago, at least a dozen states have passed legislation enacting some kind of free college.

Silvia Gonzalez, a visual arts teacher at Franklin Fine Arts Center, a magnet school in the city’s Old Town neighborhood, said she decided to attend the rally after Sanders posted a message of solidarity with the Chicago unions representing teachers and support staff on Twitter.

Sanders, like the Chicago’s teacher union, had the ability to mobilize people, she said. “It’s so exciting to have this kind of movement develop so strongly with a candidate that seems to really stand for education,” she said.

Cory Booker now says he opposes school vouchers. But he backed D.C.’s voucher program just months ago

2019-09-23T21:05:52+00:00

Cory Booker told the Washington Post he no longer supports school vouchers — a notable turnaround for the Democratic presidential hopeful who has been a longtime advocate for school choice.

“The evidence has become clear that vouchers do not help — and in fact, hurt — the cause of educational equity,” Booker said in response to the Post’s candidate survey.

But the extent of that anti-voucher stance, and when Booker adopted it, remain somewhat mysterious.

According to the Post, Booker said that he had turned against publicly funded vouchers for private school tuition by 2006, when he became mayor of Newark, New Jersey. In fact, Booker has been a voucher supporter on the national stage for at least a decade since — and remains one, according to legislation he is supporting.

He is still listed as a co-sponsor of a Senate bill to re-authorize Washington D.C.’s school voucher program, legislation he signed onto this February after announcing his bid for president. In 2012 and 2016 he spoke to the American Federation for Children, a pro-voucher group previously led by Betsy DeVos, now education secretary. He called it an “incredible organization.”

Spokespeople for Booker’s campaign and Senate office did not respond to requests for comment.

Booker has struggled to gain traction as a presidential candidate, and recently announced that if he didn’t hit fundraising targets in the next several days, he would drop out of the race. Education issues probably aren’t the main reason for his setbacks as a candidate, but Booker’s past association with DeVos — who is highly unpopular among Democrats — has dogged him throughout the campaign.

Booker’s about-face highlights how the political winds have shifted on education issues over the past decades.

Historically, most Democratic politicians have opposed vouchers, but some have broken with their party, arguing that they provide a much needed lifeline for low-income students in struggling public schools.

In 1990, Wisconsin created a voucher program in Milwaukee with the support of Republicans and a number of black Democrats. In 1997, Joe Biden, then a U.S. Senator, expressed openness to the idea of vouchers, even though he had previously voted against them. In 2000, Democratic vice presidential nominee Joe Lieberman supported vouchers, in contrast with his running mate Al Gore. In 2003, Colorado passed a voucher law — subsequently struck down by state courts — with the support of Ken Salazar, a prominent Democrat and Latino politician in the state.

Over time, some of that energy would be redirected toward the growth of charter schools, including in Newark, where about one in three public school students now attend a charter.

In 2014, President Obama, for instance, explained his opposition to vouchers by saying his administration had supported charter schools instead. In Denver, where charter schools have flourished, a Democratic school board member who once supported vouchers explained that debate had become less relevant. “We have a whole mechanism that lets parents select a school they want for their children,” said Barbara O’Brien in 2013.

In an interview with Chalkbeat in 2017, the president of Democrats for Education Reform Shavar Jeffries described vouchers as a “sideshow,” and said the focus should be on charters.

Vouchers have continued to see some political success largely in red states, like Tennessee, which recently passed such a program. Today, few Democrats on the national stage back vouchers, and none of the leading Democratic presidential candidates have indicated support for the idea. Many in the party have become increasingly skeptical of charter schools as well.

DeVos, who has championed private school vouchers throughout her career, may have polarized the issue even further, and her efforts to get school choice initiatives through Congress have gone nowhere. One poll has shown that support for vouchers has actually ticked up while DeVos has been education secretary, but DeVos herself remains a bogeyman for progressive politicians.

Booker obviously has a political incentive to change his views on the hot-button issue as he vies for higher office. In his brief response to the Post, though, Booker suggested that his shifting opinion is due to new evidence.

It’s true that a number of studies in recent years have found that private school vouchers hurt participating students’ test scores. Research out of Indiana, Louisiana, and Ohio has found that students who use a voucher perform significantly worse on state math tests, even years into the program. Before 2015, there were few if any studies showing such negative effects.

Supporters of vouchers tend to point to research showing other kinds of benefits for students. In the most recent evaluation, for example, Washington D.C. students who used a voucher didn’t have better (or worse) test scores, but they did have lower rates of chronic absenteeism and reported feeling more satisfied with their school.

How the Democratic candidates talked about charter schools and school segregation in Thursday night’s debate

2019-09-13T03:42:20+00:00

The leading Democratic candidates for president took on some hot-button issues in education during Thursday night’s debate, and illustrated the divide in how they think and talk about charter schools.

Held at Texas Southern University, a historically black university in Houston, the debate featured 10 candidates: Joe Biden, Cory Booker, Pete Buttigieg, Julián Castro, Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar, Beto O’Rourke, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Andrew Yang.

Here are a few of their most notable comments on education and racial equity. We’ve got a full guide to the Democratic candidates’ positions and promises on education here.

On charter schools and school choice

Castro: “It is a myth that charter schools are better than public schools,” the former housing secretary said. “They’re not.” Castro was one of the few candidates who directly spoke to the question about charters, an issue where he has a limited track record. In general, research supports his comment — most studies show charter and district schools perform comparably, though charter schools in many cities perform better. “I’m not categorically against charter schools,” Castro went on to say. “I would require more transparency and accountability from them than is required right now.”

Booker: “We closed poor-performing charter schools, but dagnabbit, we expanded high-performing charter schools,” the former Newark mayor said. “We were a city that said we need to find local solutions that work for our community. The results speak for themselves. We’re now the No. 1 city in America for beat-the-odds schools, from high-poverty to high-performance.”

Booker’s record on schools in that city has been much debated and deeply controversial. The rapid expansion of charters and closure of district schools drew fierce community resistance; the latest teachers’ contract scrapped a much-touted teacher performance pay plan. Research found that in the initial years after Mark Zuckerberg’s 2010, $100 million grant to Newark schools, student growth on state tests dipped. But it eventually bounced back and has continued to improve. Charter schools in Newark have also seen notable academic success.

Warren: “Money for public schools should stay in public schools, not go anywhere else,” the Massachusetts senator said in response to a question about her support for teachers unions. It’s likely she was referring to her opposition to private school vouchers. Warren has a complicated record on charter schools — she opposed an effort to lift the Massachusetts’ charter cap in 2016, but has also highlighted research showing that Boston’s charter schools are high-performing.

Yang: “I am pro-good school,” the Venture for America founder said when asked about his support for charter schools before quickly pivoting to other issues. In a May Twitter thread, he said, “There are very good charter schools and very bad charter schools. The goal should be to make more schools high-quality and effective — not denounce an entire category.” He also noted that he has “friends who have put their heart and soul into charter schools.” One of them is Zeke Vanderhoek, who founded The Equity Project, a New York City charter school that has drawn attention for paying its teachers six-figure salaries.

On segregation

Biden: The former vice president was asked about comments he made to a reporter about race 40 years ago — “I’ll be damned if I feel responsible to pay for what happened 300 years ago” — and how he would work now to repair the damage done by slavery. “There is institutional segregation in this country,” he said, going on to mention his plan to triple Title I funds for schools serving mostly students from low-income families and the need for more school psychologists.

Biden has previously said that he still opposes busing for school integration, even though it has proven successful in helping students of color do better in school. However, his education plan notes that he supports federal grants for school districts interested in pursuing integration.

On racial disparities in school discipline

O’Rourke: The former Texas Congressman pointed to how racism “is foundational” to the founding of America, which he said was created not in 1776 but in 1619 when the first enslaved Africans were brought to the country, picking up the argument made in the New York Times Magazine last month.

“We have to be able to answer this challenge,” he said. “And it is found in our education system, where in Texas, a 5-year-old child in kindergarten is five times as likely to be disciplined, or suspended, or expelled based on the color of their skin.” He appears to be referring to a statistic in a report released by the nonprofit Texans Care for Children that said that black students from pre-K to second grade in Texas during the 2015-16 school year were nearly five times more likely to be suspended than white students. Such racial disparities in school discipline are not unique to Texas.

On teacher diversity

Harris: The California senator talked about her plan to raise teacher pay, and referenced research demonstrating that students of color benefit from having teachers of color. “If a black child has a black teacher before the end of third grade they’re 13% more likely to go to college,” she said. “If that child has had two black teachers before the end of third grade, they’re 32% more likely to go to college.” We’ve got more on that research here, which has been cited in other candidates’ education plans, too.

On active shooter drills in schools

Harris: “Elementary, middle, and high school students, they are learning about how they have to hide in a closet, or crouch in a corner if there is a mass shooter roaming the hallways of their school,” she said. “It is traumatizing our children.”

Harris said a child, about 8 years old, told her about going through such a drill at a recent town hall event. According to the Washington Post, though school shootings remain rare, lockdowns are common: more than 4.1 million students participated in a lockdown during the 2017-18 school year, according to the Post’s estimate. That is likely an undercount because many large districts do not track them.

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.

6 of the 10 leading Democratic candidates say they will boost teacher diversity. Here’s how.

2019-08-30T17:13:00+00:00

Teacher diversity wasn’t an explicit part of either Hillary Clinton’s or Bernie Sanders’ platforms in the lead-up to the 2016 election.

But as 2020 approaches, six of the 10 leading Democratic candidates for president, including Sanders, have laid out concrete steps they’d take to diversify the teaching force, which is about 80% white — a serious mismatch with the nation’s public school students, about half of whom are students of color.

“I’ve never seen presidential candidates be this interested in what I think is a relatively wonk-ish policy,” said Constance Lindsay, an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who has studied the issue.

A key reason: while there was evidence that teachers of color benefitted students of color prior to 2016, several influential studies have bolstered the case in the years since. One, a study Lindsay co-authored, showed when black students had even one black teacher, they were less likely to drop out of high school and more likely to aspire to college — a finding both Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg have cited.

Other research has found black and Hispanic students are more likely to be referred to gifted programs when they have black and Hispanic teachers. Black teachers are also less likely to suspend or expel black students and to have higher academic expectations for them.

The emphasis on this issue reflects a broader shift away from some of the major topics that have dominated the national education debate over the last decade, such as how to evaluate teachers and schools. And it fits within a larger national shift toward acknowledging the ways in which race affects how students experience school.

That’s helped bring the conversation about teacher diversity “to the forefront,” said Jessica Cardichon, who directs federal policy for the Learning Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank.

While the Democratic candidates generally agree that the next president should do something to expand America’s pool of teachers of color, how they’d do it varies. Here’s a look at some of the common strategies candidates are proposing — and whether they could really make them happen.

Strategy #1: Add and expand teacher-prep programs at colleges that serve many students of color

One of the most popular ideas is to invest in historically black colleges and universities, or HBCUs, and other minority-serving institutions. That would expand an important part of the pipeline for teachers of color; HBCUs enroll about 2% of the nation’s teacher candidates, but 16% of all black teacher candidates.

At least three Democratic candidates have said they’d set aside additional funds for teacher prep programs at colleges that enroll many students of color. Harris, herself a Howard University graduate, called for a $2.5 billion investment in teacher prep programs at HBCUs. Beto O’Rourke called for a $500 million fund to create teacher academies at HBCUs and minority-serving institutions, which he said could be used for scholarships, mentorship programs, or to pay students’ teacher certification fees. And Sanders has called for a fund of an unspecified amount to expand existing teacher-training programs at HBCUs and other minority-serving institutions. Joe Biden has more vaguely pledged to work with HBCUs to recruit and prepare teachers.

Elizabeth Warren, Julián Castro, and Cory Booker have all said they’d create a fund to help HBCUs, though they did not specify if any of that money would be dedicated to teacher training.

That kind of funding would require Congress’ approval. Travis Bristol, an assistant professor of education at the University of California, Berkeley, points out that the federal Higher Education Act sets aside money that can be used to improve teacher training at HBCUs and minority-serving institutions, but Congress hasn’t adequately funded the program.

Strategy #2: Fund new kinds of teacher-prep programs

Only focusing on pushing more undergraduates into traditional teaching programs, though, leaves out a lot of prospective teachers of color. That’s why many candidates are also looking to expand programs that focus on helping adults who aren’t teachers to enter the profession.

Castro says he would offer grants to states to start or expand “Grow Your Own Programs,” which work differently across the country but generally target teacher’s aides, substitute teachers, and people who live in communities of color by providing financial assistance and mentoring as they earn teaching credentials.

These programs recognize that teaching assistants are more likely to be non-white and more likely to be bilingual than traditional teachers. Harris and Buttigieg have also expressed support for “Grow Your Own” programs, and Biden has said he wants to help teacher’s aides work toward teaching licenses.

Those programs can focus on recruiting particular groups, like African American men, or filling hard-to-staff vacancies.

“Teacher labor markets are highly localized, and so to the extent you can shape candidates for your own market, they’re more likely to stick around,” Lindsay said.

Three candidates — Castro, Harris, and O’Rourke — have also said they’d invest in another kind of nontraditional teacher training program: teacher residencies.

Those programs typically pair up a student teacher with an experienced, effective mentor teacher for at least a year. In exchange for a commitment to teach for a certain number of years, student teachers are paid during their residency, making the program accessible to those who might otherwise struggle to pay tuition.

Residency programs tend to be more diverse than other pre-service teaching programs. Research shows teachers trained through residencies are more likely to stay in the profession — and retention is especially important for raising the overall percentage of black educators.

And while some places, like California, have invested heavily in residency programs, they remain relatively rare. That could change if a presidential administration chose to invest substantially in the model.

Castro said he would provide grants and stipends to teacher residents and their mentors for five years. O’Rourke’s plan would create a $500-million-a-year program for colleges to partner with school districts on teacher residency programs. He said he’d provide $10,000 stipends to teacher-residents, as well as funding for participating school districts.

Strategy #3: Tackle prospective teachers’ financial challenges

Most of the leading Democratic candidates have proposed tuition-free or debt-free college for students from low- and middle-income families. While not aimed specifically at teachers, these proposals would likely make it easier for black and Hispanic college graduates to pursue a teaching degree.

Research has shown that black college graduates have higher average debt loads than other students. And while Hispanic students graduate with lower-than-average debt loads, they tend to have a harder time paying it off than their white and Asian peers because of their lower earnings.

Another approach would be raising teacher pay, which varies dramatically by state.

Every leading Democratic candidate has said they support higher pay for educators, and many support the federal government getting involved to help. Doing that could make the teacher profession more attractive in general, including for college graduates of color who might otherwise pursue higher-paying careers. (While black and Hispanic teachers aren’t paid less than their white peers, they are more likely to be concentrated in high-poverty schools where working conditions are more challenging. Some also report added responsibilities they aren’t compensated for.)

While any federal efforts to increase teacher pay would be complicated, there are some straightforward ways the federal government could make it easier to teach in a high-poverty school.

The president could work with Congress, for example, to increase grants for teacher candidates or boost loan forgiveness for teachers who work in high-poverty schools.

And because there are already various federal programs funding teacher preparation and training, a presidential administration could also do more to help states understand how to use that money to boost teacher diversity efforts. Buttigieg, for example, has said he would issue guidelines on spending federal Title II funds to train new principals of color.

After calling out inequity on the debate stage, Bennet leans on his education experience to advance his presidential campaign

2019-08-09T17:14:00+00:00

On the heels of his criticism of Sen. Kamala Harris and former vice president Joe Biden’s exchange on school integration at last week’s Democratic primary debate, U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet isn’t calling for new efforts to integrate American schools.

But, at the debate, after Harris was asked by a moderator if she and Biden shared the same view on school integration (she said no), Bennet, a former Denver schools superintendent, chimed in to point out that school segregation is not just an issue of the past.

“This is the fourth debate that we have had and the second time that we have been debating what people did 50 years ago with busing when our schools are as segregated today as they were 50 years ago,” he said. “We need a conversation about what is happening now. And when there’s a group of kids in this country who don’t get pre-school through no fault of their own and another who does, equal is not equal.”

In an attempt to capture this moment, the presidential hopeful went to South Carolina on Tuesday for a day of education-focused events. He visited the state’s “Corridor of Shame,” an area where schools are known for meager student achievement and inequitable school funding. While there, Bennet said he was driven by concern about inequities in education to join in the crowded pool of 2020 presidential hopefuls.

Bennet, who is currently polling at less than 1% and has yet to release an education platform, spoke with Chalkbeat on Thursday about his education plans, which include universal pre-K and debt-free college. But he’s not offering up specifics on how he’d make schools less segregated.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

You got attention at the debate when you said that school integration isn’t an issue of the past, it’s an issue now. As president, what would you do to increase school integration in American schools?

The most important thing we can do is make sure that we’ve got much better quality education in this country to give kids what they need. Unfortunately, especially in poor communities, we aren’t doing that. We need far better access to pre-K than we have and much better K-12 schools. For kids that are going to college, our goal is to have them graduate debt-free. For the kids that don’t go to college, they’ll be able to leave high school with a set of skills that’ll pay them more than a minimum wage.

On the desegregation issue, these are the ones that are very challenging for the country because they’re not just education issues, they’re a legacy of housing and banking redlining and Jim Crow laws that go all the way back and have created deep inequality in our educational systems. I don’t believe there’s much of an appetite for busing on anybody’s part. There is a desire, on the part of communities that are most affected by poverty, to have much better schools in their communities.

What would you try to do specifically to change that?

There are things that local school districts can do to change attendance zones and the way schools operate with one and other to make them more integrated. 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.

As president, how would you promote these opportunities for these kids?

One of the things we have to confront as a society is that our education system is reinforcing income inequality rather than liberating kids from it. I believe the next president should have a focus on changing that. It can’t all happen, obviously, from Washington. But leading a collaboration among states and school districts and mayors in this country to drive better results for kids is something we have got to do.

Education has got to be front and center for the next presidency. Very early on, I would gather the governors and school superintendents and mayors together to discuss how we’re going to create a situation where education is once again the wind on our back, transforming our economy as it once was rather than shackling kids to the fortunes that their parents have. Roughly, what I think that means is, as a country, we’ve got to move toward a world of universal preschool. We’ve got to have much better K-12 schools than we have and when a kid is in high school, they’ve got to be in a position to earn a living wage when they graduate. Those all may sound like obvious things, but we’re doing almost none of it in America today.

What are the education-related topics you’d push for as president? You haven’t released an education plan yet. What would it include?

It would include a commitment to figuring out how we get to universal preschool, a commitment to how we get to a much better set of K-12 schools, and a commitment to making sure that when kids graduate from college, they are debt-free. And for kids who didn’t go to college, that they are able to earn more than a living wage. Those would be the things I would want to be working on and I would want to use every element in the federal government to try to drive that.

I don’t think that’s just the Department of Education. The workforce development money that we spend, the economic development money that we spend, the infrastructure money that we spend, these things need to be aligned to support communities of kids that are in the greatest need in this country. Unfortunately, the way we have approached government historically, all of these efforts have been siloed from one and other. We don’t have a committee in Congress that houses its responsibility in the well-being of children in this country. We don’t have an agency of government whose main focus, in a significant way, is focusing on the needs of children in this country and that would be the focus of my administration.

Would you want to create an agency to accomplish that?

I haven’t thought it all the way through, but I would want to make sure that we are organizing ourselves bureaucratically so that we are able to much better support people at the local level who today are having to fight through all kinds of accounting wars to figure out how to spend money in a way that supports the whole child in their community. So when I think about that, what I have in mind is the resources that are spent through the Department of Health and Human Services dollars to children in schools who don’t have access to healthcare. There’s a never-ending set of possibilities here.

When you were superintendent, did you focus on school segregation issues in Denver, considering that Denver is often regarded as one of the most segregated districts in the country?

We had a number of focuses there, including the absence in many neighborhoods of quality schools or choices for kids. We worked very hard to close schools that were not serving kids well and replace them with schools that would serve them better. There were areas in the city where people were fleeing their schools, where today there’s now less migration of students going to other places. The district worked hard to change its enrollment policies at the secondary level to make our schools more integrated and to make the demographics better reflect the demographics of the whole city.

Would you do anything different if you were in charge of Denver schools again? What would you like to see Denver do now?

Well, it’s not my place to say what Denver should do now. They have good leadership. I think we would’ve worked harder to integrate the social service network that kids need in order to be able to succeed in schools. That was something I always wanted to do, but never got to do it.

What are some lessons from running a school district you’ve brought to the campaign trail?

There’s certainly a lot of lessons that I’ve brought to the Senate. Certainly one is to understand that while I don’t look for conflict, it is a part of making change, so that kids a decade from now don’t have the same limited opportunities that they have today.

You’re polling at less than 1%. What’s your plan to qualify for the September debate and what role does your position on education play in that?

I don’t know that it does play a role in that. My plan to qualify is to make sure that I get the qualifying numbers and the fundraising numbers.

Biden, Harris reprise school integration dispute during second Democratic debate

2019-08-01T02:49:22+00:00

Kamala Harris and Joe Biden were once again at loggerheads Wednesday night over busing for school desegregation and the vice president’s track record on the issue.

In the previous debate, Harris criticized Biden’s 1970s opposition as senator to court-ordered busing for school integration — a move that catalyzed Harris’s rise in the polls as well as a national discussion on the school segregation that persists in many American schools.

This time, the issue was raised by the debate moderators, who asked Harris whether Biden’s contention that the two candidates share a position on “busing” was true. Harris said their views differed sharply, and she would have opposed his efforts decades ago to limit the use of busing to desegregate schools.

“Had I been in the United States Senate at that time, I would’ve been completely on the other side of the aisle, and let’s be clear about this: had those segregationists their way, I would not be a member of the United States Senate,” she said. “So on that issue, we could not be more apart.”

But the California senator did not detail her views on how schools should be integrated Wednesday, a question that has dogged her since her criticism of Biden. “Senator Harris supports federal measures to increase school diversity, including resources for busing,” her campaign told Chalkbeat earlier this month, but didn’t spell out details.

Harris’ signature education policy proposal is a hefty raise for American teachers; she hasn’t released a proposal on school integration, though she did recently sign on to a federal bill to offer modest incentives for school districts looking to spur integration. Bernie Sanders, who appeared in Tuesday night’s debate, has released the most detailed plan on the issue of school segregation. A number of other candidates have said they support expanded integration efforts.

Biden responded to Harris that as California attorney general she did little to push for school integration in Los Angeles and San Francisco. “I didn’t see a single solitary time she brought a case against them to desegregate them,” he said.

Michael Bennet, the Colorado senator and a former Denver schools superintendent, chimed in to point out that schools remain deeply segregated by race and economic status.

“Our schools are as segregated today as they were 50 years ago,” said Bennet. “We’ve got a group of K-12 schools that are good because families can spend a million bucks and you’ve got Detroit Public Schools that are as segregated as they were.”

Schools do remain divided by race in many parts of the country, and the share of black students attending school alongside white students has declined in recent years. (Trends differ depending on how segregation is measured.) Research has also found that low-income students and students of color benefit from attending integrated schools.

Camille Respess contributed reporting.

The other school funding divide: States with more poor students tend to spend less, creating hard-to-fix disparities

2019-07-31T18:24:37+00:00

The image of school funding inequities in the American mind is often urban schools serving predominantly low-income students of color going without, while just miles away, suburban schools serve more white, affluent students in gleaming facilities with an army of college counselors.

Those “savage inequalities,” as they were termed in a prominent 1991 book, certainly still exist in some parts of the country. There’s another key driver of school funding inequity, though, one that is harder to see and might be harder to fix: massive differences in spending between states.

Connecticut, for instance, spends more than twice as much as Mississippi, which has dramatically more poor students. A number of the states that spend the most per student (Massachusetts, Minnesota, and New Jersey, for instance) also have relatively few low-income students. And many of the states that spend the least (Arizona, Mississippi, and California) serve more low-income students and students of color.

There are exceptions. But that pattern likely explains in part recent reports showing that districts serving low-income students and students of color get less in state and local education dollars. That matters, as dollars translate into more education services and better academic outcomes, according to recent research.

“Because there’s so little power given to the federal government with issues related to school funding, the issue is largely left to states,” said Rebecca Sibilia, who leads EdBuild, which released the report showing a $23 billion disparity faced by districts composed largely of students of color. “Cross-state inequities truly demonstrate that when it comes to school funding, your luck is driven largely by lot.”

These disparities are difficult to change because education spending is predominantly a state and local responsibility. The federal government is perhaps best positioned to step in to make up for these differences — and already does, to a degree.

Funding concerns have prompted a number of Democratic presidential candidates to promise to help level the playing field across districts. But doing more, experts say, won’t be easy, and some will object to an increased federal role in education.

“The feds are never going to cough up that big a share” of education spending, said Bruce Baker, a Rutgers professor who has done research for the Education Law Center, which favors more school funding. “We’ve got to find a way to come up with better leverage on states.”

How differences in funding between states drive school funding inequities

It seems like a math riddle: In most states, school districts serving mostly low-income students get similar amounts of state and local funding for schools as the affluent districts in the same state. And yet if you look across the country, low-income districts are at a notable disadvantage.

The reason is that national comparisons look beyond, say, affluent Greenwich, Connecticut vs. the low-income Hartford, Connecticut, to include Greenwich vs. low-income Jackson, Mississippi, where there are even starker spending disparities.

An analysis by the Education Trust pegged that nationwide disparity at $1,000 less per student in districts that serve mostly low-income students, even adjusted for cost differences between states. There was a similar pattern for districts serving predominantly students of color. (These figures, as well as EdBuild’s $23 billion number, don’t include federal dollars. More on that later.)

Certain states spend less on their education systems — because of economic constraints, because elected leaders have not prioritized school spending, or both — and that itself is correlated with a state’s share of white and non-poor students.

There are exceptions to this general pattern, of course, particularly, when considering race. For instance, Maryland’s public schools spend a lot of money and are also composed largely of students of color; Colorado has relatively few poor students, but doesn’t spend much on schools.

And while school spending does not perfectly correlate with outcomes like test scores, the two are related. With that in mind, Baker and colleagues estimated how much money would need to be spent in each state to get different groups of students to the national test score average. In many parts of the country, spending was already there, while elsewhere — particularly, the South, Southeast, and California — it lagged far behind, according to the report, which was released by the Education Law Center.

To take one extreme example, Baker estimated that the wealthiest school districts in Connecticut would only need to spend around $6,000 per pupil to get their students to average performance. In fact, those districts spent over $17,000 and their students perform much better than average.

On the other hand, the poorest districts in Mississippi would need to spend over $26,000 per student to get to average. In reality, they spent about $9,000 per pupil.

Why it would be tough for the federal government to address state funding differences

Again, these funding differences are decided by states and localities and limited by economic conditions.

There are ways for the federal government to help close those gaps, though. It already targets resources to the country’s poorest schools, including through the nearly $16 billion Title I program, which likely eases some of the disparities between states. (In total, about 10 percent of K-12 public education spending comes from the federal government.)

A number of Democratic candidates want to go further. Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden have both proposed tripling Title I spending, and Beto O’Rourke recently laid out a plan to create a $500 billion federal fund to encourage and help states close funding gaps, including the one identified by EdBuild.

The approaches each have pros and cons, Baker and Sibilia said.

“Expanding poverty-directed federal funding is a reasonable thing to do,” said Baker, referring to growing Title I. “The problem is when you do that, states might take it as an opportunity to reduce their own effort.” In other words, states could try to lower how much they spend on their poorest districts if they realize the federal government will foot the bill instead. (Regulations known as “supplement not supplant” have attempted to limit this.)

O’Rourke’s plan takes a more aggressive tack — pushing states to do their part and excluding them from a major pot of federal money if they don’t. States could lose out, O’Rourke’s plan warns, if they fail to “demonstrate they are providing equitable funding across schools and districts including additional funding for high-need students.”

In some ways, it reads like a Race to the Top for school funding. That underscores why the idea might prove controversial, particularly in light of objections during the Obama administration that the federal government had overstepped its role in education. Conservatives are also likely to balk at increased spending on schools and the higher taxes necessary to fund that.

Still, Sibilia likes this idea because it would better leverage scarce federal dollars to push states to make changes.

“Just putting more money into Title I is just not going to lead to the kind of change that I think all of these candidates are trying to get to,” she said. “A provision with teeth, like Beto’s, would be interesting.”

At the same time, the approach comes with risks for funding advocates. If the feds withhold dollars from states that have the least equitable funding systems, their students could end up doubly disadvantaged, with access to fewer state and federal dollars than students elsewhere in the country. In other realms — namely Medicaid expansion — a number of red state leaders have rejected federal money targeted at low-income households.

“You have to provide the carrot/stick,” said Sibilia, “and unfortunately the stick is just going to hurt the kids you’re trying to help to begin with.”

‘Giving students an equal start’: Democratic presidential candidates push for pre-K at Indy conference

2019-07-25T21:08:34+00:00

Five 2020 Democratic presidential candidates pointed to education as a tool for accelerating economic growth in urban communities and fighting voter suppression during a forum Thursday, with several calling for more support for pre-kindergarten, social-emotional learning, and free community college.

The forum was part of the National Urban League’s annual conference, which is being held in Indianapolis by the civil rights organization for the first time in almost 25 years.

Former vice president Joe Biden, U.S. Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey, U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, U.S. Rep. Tim Ryan of Ohio, and former Maryland U.S. Rep. John Delaney spoke to attendees about how their policies could promote equity in housing, business, and criminal justice reform.

While education didn’t dominate the forum, many of the candidates spoke in their brief remarks and one-on-one interviews with Marc Morial, president of the National Urban League, about how early childhood education programs, new funding for school infrastructure, and improved workforce development initiatives can dismantle inequities — a mission that the candidates said has become only more pressing under the Trump administration.

Biden, for example, argued at length for the expansion of early education and pre-kindergarten, which he said could be covered by closing tax loopholes among the wealthy and corporations. He said schools and the government have an obligation to give all students the same opportunities and that leaders have to help the schools furthest behind in funding, infrastructure, and teacher pay first.

“Schools should be giving students an equal start in life,” Biden said. “We know the numbers. There’s no debate anymore.”

The former vice president said equity issues, including questions of educational equity, are becoming even more urgent as President Donald Trump continues to condone racism — making references to the president’s claim that there were “very fine people” on both sides of a deadly protest of a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville in 2017 — and fails to divert money to those most in need. If Democrats can replace Trump, Biden continued, they’ll have to work “twice as hard” to combat inequities and injustice.

Booker joined Biden, calling the looming choice citizens will make in the election a “moral moment in America.” Booker did not address his education policies in depth.

The other candidates argued that education merits a special defense because there is so much at stake: ensuring students can find jobs in the age of automation and global competition, as noted by Klobuchar and Ryan, and reducing trauma among young people that may lead to violence, mental health disorders, and a lack of economic mobility.

“I want to shift the question from ‘how do we get these test scores up?’ to ‘how do we take care of our kids?’” said Ryan, who is promoting social-emotional learning and “community schools” that could offer neighborhoods health care and other resources. “If we shift that question, it transforms everything.”

Biden and Delaney described how they plan to deliver this aid to students and their families sooner, too, by creating a national pre-kindergarten program. All candidates in the forum include pre-K in their education platforms.

“Universal pre-K is the single best investment we can make in this country,” said Delaney, whose education plan seeks to redefine K-12 education as “pre-K through 14 education” to account for early childhood education and at least two years at a community college or vocational school.

Two of the candidates also criticized the way schools are funded. Klobuchar, for example, emphasized that traditional public schools need more funding, particularly for renovating “crumbling schools.” And Delaney argued that leaders should do away with property taxes as a way to fund schools outright, calling the process “unjust” and “racially biased.”

A second group of candidates — including U.S. Sens. Kamala Harris of California and Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio — will speak at the Indiana Convention Center at 8 a.m. Friday. Learn more about each candidate’s perspective on education with this guide.

AFT’s Weingarten: We survived our battle with ‘billionaires and ideologues’

2019-07-11T22:15:53+00:00

American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten took what amounted to a victory lap on Thursday, telling union members they had survived a decade-long battle with “billionaires and ideologues.”

“To our enemies’ vexation, we are thriving,” Weingarten told attendees of the union’s conference in Washington D.C.

“Remember the false narrative about public schools a decade ago — about so-called bad teachers, failing students, and a system supposedly so broken that privatization and austerity were the only answers? We’ve busted up those myths, one by one.”

The speech reflected the union’s confidence, which has been buoyed by widespread support for teacher strikes and walkouts over the past year, backlash toward charter schools, and, for now, the union’s ability to avoid a budget crisis in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Janus decision.

Still, the union can hardly claim total victory: charters have continued to grow, albeit more slowly, and they maintain political support among many black and Hispanic Democrats; a number of red states have passed legislation favorable to charters and private school vouchers; and Weingarten acknowledged that AFT has lost fee-payers in the wake of Janus.

“Ten years ago, Time magazine emblazoned its cover with this image of a school superintendent sweeping out so-called ‘bad teachers,’” Weingarten said, referring to former D.C. schools chief Michelle Rhee’s December 2008 cover. “Today, presidential candidates are one-upping each other with their support of teachers and public schools.”

A chorus of Democratic presidential hopefuls are calling for changes that align with union priorities, including increases in teacher pay and funding boosts for schools serving low-income students. Ten of them made their case last week at a forum hosted by the National Education Association, the country’s largest teachers union, and the AFT has held its own events with seven of the candidates.

In March, California Senator Kamala Harris announced her plan to increase teacher salaries by an average of $13,500. Former vice president Joe Biden’s first presentation of his education plan, including his proposal to triple Title I funding, was at an AFT event. Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders is calling for that same measure, while also saying that teachers should get paid at least $60,000 and that charter school growth should be sharply curtailed.

The speech came the same day the AFT filed a lawsuit against Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. The union is claiming educators have been improperly rejected from the federal government’s public service loan forgiveness program.

What it means when Democratic frontrunners say they support the Strength in Diversity Act

2019-07-11T20:49:20+00:00

When Senator Kamala Harris and former Vice President Joe Biden sparred on the Democratic primary debate stage, they launched a national conversation about school desegregation and prompted questions about how candidates would tackle the issue as president.

Their exchange also raised the profile of legislation known as the Strength in Diversity Act, which several Democratic frontrunners have endorsed. Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren were both early co-sponsors of the bill, and Harris signed on just this week.

The legislation would create a federal grant program to fund racial and economic school integration efforts across the country. Even supporters acknowledge it’s a fairly modest proposal, limited only to communities that want to participate. But candidates who support it, they say, are signaling that they believe school segregation is a problem and that the federal government should play a role in fixing it — a departure from the increasingly hands-off approach federal officials have taken in recent decades.

“This is a glass of water in a desert of policy in this area,” said Gary Orfield, who co-directs the Civil Rights Project at UCLA and recently co-authored a report documenting the rising level of racial and economic segregation in the nation’s public schools. “This is not a bill that’s going to change the world, but it could change the discussion.”

What is the Strength in Diversity Act?

The latest version of the Strength in Diversity Act was introduced in May by U.S. Rep. Marcia Fudge of Ohio and Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut. Murphy pointed to “unconscionable levels” of school segregation in his state when the two lawmakers first proposed similar legislation in 2016.

In its current form, the bill would allow districts to apply for one-year planning grants or multi-year grants to start school integration efforts.

The planning grants would fund efforts to collect data, explore different approaches, and come up with a community engagement plan. The implementation grants would be used to try out an existing integration model or a promising new idea.

Districts could spend this money to recruit or train staff, fund specialized academic programs or buildings, or transport students to and from school. (Congress would have to first eliminate a decades-old ban on using federal money to pay for transportation in school desegregation efforts.)

Though past versions of the bill have focused more on economic integration, this version gives preference to districts that would explicitly tackle racial segregation, as well as plans that would involve multiple school districts. That’s notable because inter-district school desegregation efforts have been among the most stymied in the wake of a pivotal 1974 Supreme Court decision.

The idea for the Strength in Diversity Act is rooted in the work of John King, who launched a similar grant program in New York when he was the state’s education chief. After President Obama tapped King as his education secretary in 2016, King included a $120 million grant program aimed at economic integration in the administration’s federal budget proposal. But Congress wouldn’t fund it, so King announced a scaled-back, $12 million version of the grant program at the end of 2016.

“If you have a federal program of this kind, it … reinforces that we as country value racial and socioeconomic diversity,” said King, who now leads The Education Trust, a nonprofit that advocates for student civil rights.

Twenty-six districts said they planned to apply for those grants, but the Trump administration’s Education Department cut King’s program in early 2017. Since then, lawmakers have stepped up their efforts to get the initiative enshrined in federal law so it wouldn’t be vulnerable to changes in presidential administration.

Right now, there’s no dollar amount attached to the legislation, but as of last year, lawmakers were still suggesting $120 million.

Why does the Strength in Diversity Act matter?

Though the proposed funding is relatively small and the legislation has little chance of passing this Congress, proponents say the Strength in Diversity Act is still important, both practically and symbolically.

First, it lays out a road map for how the federal government could get involved in school desegregation efforts today, given some of the restrictions put in place by the Supreme Court.

“The right next step for what federal government involvement in this issue could look like is finding the low-hanging fruit,” said Halley Potter, a senior fellow at The Century Foundation who has studied and supports school integration efforts. “And that’s part of what Strength in Diversity Act is about: finding the places that would step up to be interested in this funding.”

Potter co-authored a 2016 report that found more than 90 school districts and charter school networks across the country already put measures in place to integrate students by family income, which she thinks indicates there are dozens of districts that would be interested in a grant program like the one in the Strength in Diversity Act.

Orfield, of UCLA, also believes many districts would be interested, especially in suburbs that have seen an increase in students of color and families living in poverty. Cities with few white students could also use the money to ensure that black and Latino students attend school together more often.

“That’s the theory of change of the bill, that there are a lot of places that would like to do something, but they need this incentive to push it to the forefront,” said Philip Tegeler, who heads the Poverty & Race Research Action Council, a civil rights organization that has advocated for the legislation.

Though the program would mean funding integration efforts in just a few dozen places, advocates say the bill could create important test cases and amass more evidence about the impact of integrated schools. They say the bill also signals that it’s possible for school districts to address racial segregation using tactics like redrawing attendance boundary zones, instead of blaming underlying housing patterns.

And because relatively little funding is directed toward school desegregation right now — the federal magnet school program spent just $105 million last year — even a modest boost would represent a significant new investment.

To win an implementation grant, a school district would have to show evidence of strong family and community support for the method of integration it’s proposing. Potter says this could prompt more schools to have the difficult conversations like the ones that happened during the high-profile merger of two schools in Chicago — one with more affluent and white students, the other with more black students from low-income families — or in New York City, where two districts recently overhauled their admissions policies to admit a more diverse group of students to sought-after middle schools.

But advocates agree the bill is just a first step, not a comprehensive plan to address school segregation, and that changes to housing and transportation policy will also be necessary to truly make a dent.

“I do think it’s a momentum-generator, but I’d be the first to say it’d be great to have even more invested,” King said. “This bill alone isn’t enough to tackle the scope of the problem.”

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.

We asked every Democratic candidate for president about desegregating schools. Here’s what they told us.

2019-07-03T13:55:00+00:00

When California Senator Kamala Harris challenged Joe Biden on his past opposition to school integration programs during a Democratic primary debate, she started a conversation few candidates seemed interested in having.

Although many of the 2020 field’s 25 Democratic candidates have put out some education policy ideas, few of them have emphasized integration. Harris, for her part, has focused on boosting teacher salaries and adding billions for teacher training.

The lack of emphasis on integration is not surprising, says Brett Gadsden, a Northwestern history professor who has written about three decades of school desegregation efforts in Delaware, including the role of former Vice President Biden.

“I think too often we are constructing him as a kind of anomaly in Democratic party politics in the 1970s forward, when I think there is a consensus among Democrats and liberals that school segregation is kind of a social fact,” he said. “No one has picked up the ball and attempted to advance a concerted challenge to that problem in American education today.”

So Chalkbeat asked the candidates where they stand on school desegregation and on the debate about busing. We compiled what they’ve said or done on the issue in the past, too.

Colorado Senator Michael Bennet told us that he believes busing for desegregation can be helpful, but isn’t sufficient. New Jersey Senator Cory Booker’s campaign said “we should consider every tool at our disposal” to desegregate schools. And a spokesperson for former Representative Beto O’Rourke said that he “absolutely believes that the federal government has a responsibility and a role to play” in desegregation efforts.

Few offered details, though. We’ve listed the candidates in the order of their recent national polling average, and included President Trump, too. We’ll update this if more candidates respond.

Joe Biden, former vice president

As a young senator in the 1970s, Biden vocally opposed court-mandated school desegregation programs. After facing criticism from Harris on the debate stage, Biden stood by his position at the Rainbow PUSH convention on Friday. He said he “never ever opposed voluntary busing.” On Sunday, his press secretary tweeted that Biden thinks other desegregation policies are more advantageous, “like rezoning school districts, putting public housing in white neighborhoods and combatting redlining.”

Biden’s education platform indicates he supports some integration efforts. “As President, Biden will reinstate Department of Education guidance that supported schools in legally pursuing desegregation strategies,” his website says. “And, he will provide grants to school districts to create plans and implement strategies to diversify their schools.”

Biden’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment from Chalkbeat.

Bernie Sanders, Vermont senator

In his education platform, Sanders said he would prioritize school desegregation. In particular, he’s promised “execute and enforce desegregation orders and appoint federal judges who will enforce the 1964 Civil Rights Act in school systems,” provide “federal funding for community-driven strategies to desegregate schools,” and end a prohibition on funding for busing for school integration.

But Sanders also recently told ABC News that busing to achieve school desegregation isn’t optimal. “Does anybody think it’s a good idea to put a kid on a bus, travel an hour to another school and to another neighborhood that he or she doesn’t know?”

Sanders’ campaign did not respond to a request for comment from Chalkbeat.

Elizabeth Warren, Massachusetts senator

“I’m already on record on busing and using busing as a way to help communities that are diversifying,” Warren told reporters on Friday. She’s signed onto proposed Strength in Diversity Act, which would provide $120 million in grants to voluntary efforts aimed at increasing diversity in schools.

Warren’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment from Chalkbeat.

Kamala Harris, California senator

“Senator Harris supports federal measures to increase school diversity, including resources for busing,” her campaign told Chalkbeat.

Harris is also a proponent (though not a cosponsor) of the proposed Strength in Diversity Act.

Pete Buttigieg, mayor of South Bend, Indiana

A handful of South Bend schools have been found out of compliance with a desegregation consent decree in recent years. As mayor, Buttigieg hasn’t taken up the issue of school segregation in his city, but he doesn’t control the schools.

Buttigieg’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment from Chalkbeat.

Beto O’Rourke, former U.S. representative from El Paso, Texas

“Beto absolutely believes that the federal government has a responsibility and a role to play in desegregating our communities,” O’Rourke’s campaign told Chalkbeat. “As president, he would reinvigorate the work of the Office of Civil Rights at the Department of Education and the Department of Justice to investigate racial disparities and promote efforts to integrate our schools and communities.”

Cory Booker, New Jersey senator

“At a time of increasing segregation of schools, we should consider every tool at our disposal — including busing — to support desegregation and ensure equal opportunity for all kids,” Booker’s campaign told Chalkbeat.

Tulsi Gabbard, U.S. representative from Hawaii

Gabbard’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment from Chalkbeat.

Andrew Yang, entrepreneur

Yang’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment from Chalkbeat.

Julián Castro, former U.S. secretary of housing and development

Castro’s education platform says he’d work to integrate schools though housing policy.

The presidential hopeful would “fulfill the promise of Brown v. Board of Education through a progressive housing policy that includes affirmatively furthering fair housing, implementing zoning reform, and expanding affordable housing in high opportunity areas. These efforts will reduce racial segregation in classrooms,” his website says.

Castro’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment from Chalkbeat.

Amy Klobuchar, Minnesota senator

In March, the Minnesota senator said, “I think desegregation of schools is very important.”

Klobuchar’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment from Chalkbeat.

Kirsten Gillibrand, New York senator

After the debate on Thursday, the New York senator told reporters she supports busing for school integregration: “I think every child should be able to go to a good public school. And as president I will assure that. If it needs busing, it needs busing.”

Gillibrand’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment from Chalkbeat.

Bill de Blasio, New York City mayor

Segregation has been a big issue in New York City’s school system, which de Blasio controls. De Blasio has also pushed for changes in admissions policies to the city’s selective high schools to include more black and Hispanic students, but that’s largely in the hands of the state legislature. His schools chancellor has made integration a key talking point. But while de Blasio is on the presidential campaign, some youth activists in the city are arguing that he hasn’t done nearly enough to desegregate schools. In 2018, he said he didn’t think busing for school integration is “the right way to achieve the goal.”

De Blasio’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment from Chalkbeat.

Steve Bullock, governor of Montana

Bullock’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment from Chalkbeat.

Michael Bennet, Colorado senator

“As a former urban school superintendent, let me first note that right now our education system is reinforcing inequality, instead of liberating kids from it. When cities and states aren’t ensuring equal access to quality education, then the federal government has a civil rights responsibility to address that inequality. Busing can help ensure that kids in every community and every neighborhood can benefit from a great education, but it isn’t sufficient by itself. From instituting universal preschool, to raising teacher pay, to building more affordable housing in neighborhoods with great schools, to addressing funding inequities across schools, we need to do much more to prepare every child in the next generation for success,” Bennet told Chalkbeat in a statement.

Seth Moulton, U.S. representative from Massachusetts

Moulton’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment from Chalkbeat.

John Delaney, former U.S. representative from Maryland

Delaney’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment from Chalkbeat.

Tim Ryan, U.S. representative from Ohio

“If we are going to start tackling the big, systemic problems we have today, we need to start by offering big solutions, like busing was back then, and do so fearlessly, rather than continue to offer up the same failed talking points that ring hollow with the American people and do nothing to address the anxiety that people have about their lives and the state of the nation,” Ryan told Chalkbeat in a statement.

John Hickenlooper, former governor of Colorado

Hickenlooper’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment from Chalkbeat.

Jay Inslee, governor of Washington

“Gov. Jay Inslee supports recommitting the federal government to integration of our schools by doubling funding for the federal Magnet Schools Assistance Program to support magnet schools that integrate students, eliminating rules that penalize districts for efforts to desegregate through use of Title I funds, and removing the last vestiges of anti-integration riders from the appropriations process that prevent school districts integrating districts using school transportation,” an Inslee spokesperson told Chalkbeat.

Mike Gravel, former Alaska senator

“Mike had one vote early in his career against school busing, then went on to vote in favor of it consistently,” a Gravel spokesperson told Chalkbeat. “The position on busing was that, in the long term we can’t externalize good schooling away from the neighborhoods where children live, but in the meantime children still needed to be educated, and the way the system had been set up better education was doled out on racial lines. Mike was a cosponsor on S.210 in the 96th Congress which established a federal Department of Education. Part of its mandate was civil rights which included desegregation efforts. Ultimately we know now that these efforts ‘failed’ in the sense that, once they were stopped, de facto segregation started flourishing again, despite them often being effective when they were in place.”

Wayne Messam, mayor of Miramar, Florida

“Segregated schools were and are wrong where they existed in the past or even today. However, along with segregation was and still remains the vast disparity in school facilities, technology and other education resources,” Messam told Chalkbeat in a statement. “Busing cannot be deemed the solution to cure this issue. We must appropriately fund schools in these underserved communities. Busing kids away from bad schools doesn’t solve the underlying issue.”

Joe Sestak, former U.S. representative from Pennsylvania

“I believe that busing has been and can be a very useful tool for desegregation,” Sestak told Chalkbeat. “I also believe that the best way, over the long term, to achieve broader levels of integration in our schools is to tackle broader issues of injustice in society. When we improve social mobility — such as through universal healthcare, broader access to small business development assistance, fairer housing policy, criminal justice reform, and of course dealing with entrenched discrimination and racism in society — we will reduce segregation at the community level, which will ultimately mean more integrated schools as well.”

Eric Swalwell, U.S. representative from California

“Successfully desegregating schools requires immediate efforts by the federal government, which has a central responsibility to ensure equality for all Americans,” Swalwell told Chalkbeat in a statement. “Tools like busing have proven to successfully desegregate schools in communities across America, and we should use them to address this issue. In resolving school desegregation, no option is off the table.”

Marianne Williamson, author and activist

“I support measures within the Strength in Diversity Act, legislation being considered by Congress that would promote school diversity initiatives, including expanding busing services,” Williamson told Chalkbeat in a statement. “My goal is to make every public school a palace for learning, no matter the zip code or location.”

And their likely opponent: Donald Trump, president

In response to a question about “busing,” Trump did not appear to understand the connection to school integration, instead focusing on busing solely as a means for transportation.

“Well, it has been something that they’ve done for a long period of time. I mean, you know, there aren’t that many ways you’re going to get people to schools. So this is something that’s been done. In some cases, it’s been done with a hammer instead of velvet glove. And, you know, that’s part of it,” Trump said.

“But this has been certainly a thing that’s been used over the — I think if Vice President Biden had answered the question somewhat differently, it would’ve been a lot — it would’ve been a different result. Because they really did hit him hard on that one. But it is certainly a primary method of getting people to schools.”

Trump’s administration has not prioritized integration efforts. In fact, his Department of Education scrapped Obama-era guidance that spelled out instances where school districts could consider race in efforts to integrate schools.

Matt Barnum contributed.

Did busing for school desegregation succeed? Here’s what research says.

2019-07-01T22:15:29+00:00

Kamala Harris and Joe Biden have catapulted a long-running debate about “busing” and school integration back into the news.

Harris’ criticism of fellow Democratic presidential candidate Biden for his vigorous opposition to court-ordered desegregation in the 1970s has also sparked fresh debate about whether those efforts were successful.

What do we know? In the most basic sense, they did succeed. School segregation dropped substantially as courts and the federal government put pressure on local districts to integrate. But those efforts also sparked bitter, sometimes racist, resistance that shaped political discourse for decades.

“Busing as a political term … was a failure, because the narrative that came out of it from the media and politicians was almost only negative,” said Matt Delmont, a Dartmouth historian who wrote a book titled “Why Busing Failed.” “It only emphasized the inconvenience to white families and white students.”

A political failure does not necessarily mean an educational failure, though, as Delmont and others have pointed out. Indeed, research has consistently shown that integrated schools offered, and still offer, tangible benefits to students of color.

Since public schools in many places today remain intensely segregated by race and socioeconomic status, this issue is not just a historical one.

“School integration didn’t fail,” Berkeley economist Rucker Johnson, who has conducted some of the most far-reaching research on school integration, recently argued. “The only failure is that we stopped pursuing it and allowed the reign of segregation to return.”

At the same time, there is evidence that desegregation efforts have had some unintended consequences, like the loss of black teachers.

Here’s what research tells us about how these desegregation policies worked.

Research shows that school desegregation — often including “busing” — helped black students in the long run.

To isolate the impact of court-ordered school integration in the 1960s, ‘70s, and ‘80s, Johnson used two strategies. First, he compared students in the same school district right before and after court-ordered integration was put in place. Second, he compared pairs of siblings, when one went to integrated schools but the other didn’t.

His conclusions were similar: integration helped black students academically and into adulthood.

The effects were quite large: going to integrated schools for an additional five years caused high school graduation rates to jump by nearly 15 percentage points and reduced the likelihood of living in poverty by 11 percentage points.

In a follow-up analysis, Johnson found that these benefits extended to the next generation. The children of those who attended integrated schools had higher test scores and were more likely to attend college, too.

Johnson’s work is consistent with other research. Another national paper found that school desegregation efforts in the ‘70s reduced the dropout rate among black students, though the effect was smaller than Johnson’s estimate. A study focusing on Louisiana between 1965 and 1970 found that integration dramatically boosted black students’ chances of graduating high school.

Why did school integration make such a difference? Johnson and others show that black students ended up attending much better resourced schools with smaller class sizes.

“Court-ordered desegregation that led to larger improvements in school quality resulted in more beneficial educational, economic, and health outcomes in adulthood for blacks who grew up in those court-ordered desegregation districts,” Johnson concludes.

More recent research continues to find benefits of integrated schools, though they tend to be somewhat smaller.

One study found that when desegregation orders were lifted between 1991 and 2010 in many districts — essentially the reverse of what Johnson looked at — dropout rates jumped by 3 percentage points among Hispanic students and 1 point among black students.

“If policymakers have an interest in increasing the graduation rate of black and Hispanic youth, one tool in their disposal … is promoting racially integrated schools,” said researcher David Liebowitz.

A separate study of an anonymous city school district found that scrapping race-based integration efforts in the early 2000s reduced college enrollment among black students.

Research on the end of court-ordered busing in Charlotte, North Carolina, showed that this resegregation increased arrest and incarceration rates of black male students. (There was not a clear effect on the academic outcomes of black students, though, likely because the district reallocated extra resources to segregated schools.)

Meanwhile, black and Hispanic students who participated in a Bay Area integration program had higher test scores and college attendance rates, one recent paper found. Integrated magnet middle and high schools in Connecticut, created in response to a 1996 state court ruling, have been found to increase student achievement. And research in Montgomery Country, Maryland showed that low-income students who attended affluent schools did better on state tests as a result.

Researchers have also examined whether academic outcomes are simply worse in more segregated schools (as opposed to looking at specific actions to integrate or segregate schools). Again, nationally and in specific states like Texas, researchers have found that students of color do worse when concentrated in racially and economically segregated schools or residential areas. These studies, though, are more limited in their ability to pin down cause and effect, so should be interpreted cautiously.

Two things to keep in mind about all of this research: None of these studies say that schools that predominantly serve students of color can’t be successful, and integrated schools still often have large gaps between white and non-white students when it comes to test scores and discipline rates.

There’s little evidence that integration hurts white students — and it may also reduce racial bias.

Often, the argument against integration efforts is that white students will get a worse education as a result. Most research finds that’s not the case.

For instance, Johnson’s paper found that integration had no effect on white students’ high school graduation rate or adult earnings. Lifting school desegregation orders also didn’t increase the dropout rate of white students, according to separate research.

The Texas study found that attending a school with a higher share of black students didn’t affect the test scores of white students. And a study of a Metco — an integration program that sends Boston students to school in more affluent suburbs — found that it did not affect the achievement of white students in receiving districts.

One exception: the research on Charlotte did find a link between the resegregation of schools there to higher high school graduation rates and college attendance rates for white students.

There may also be non-academic benefits for white students from attending more racially diverse schools. One recent study found that white students who had more black classmates were more likely to have more interacial friendships as children and romantic relationships as adults. Research in other contexts has found that diversity can reduce racial prejudice and improve critical thinking.

School desegregation has had some negative side effects.

One recent study found that school districts in the South that went from being fully segregated to being fully integrated between 1964 and 1972 cut the number of black teachers by nearly a third. Today, many worry about the scarcity of black teachers, who have been linked to the success of black students in a number of ways.

“Desegregation generated large benefits for many groups,” wrote researcher Owen Thompson. “But such a fundamental reform of a major institution also inevitably comes with disruption and costs. The results of the present study indicate that the costs associated with transitioning to a more equitable educational system were in large part paid by African American teachers.”

Even successful integration programs can create unique challenges. The paper on the Bay Area-busing program found that while it benefitted black and Hispanic students academically, it also increased their likelihood of being arrested for non-violent crimes. That could be due in part to traveling more in predominantly white areas and bias among local police.

Finally, another consequence has been “white flight” in the wake of desegregation. This continues to play out — a recent North Carolina study found that Democratic school board members are more likely to make efforts to integrate schools, which cause some white students to leave the district.

White flight, alongside court rulings limiting integration between different school districts, has made these efforts difficult, particularly in cities where virtually all public school students are low-income and non-white. Recent research has shown that even as cities are becoming more residentially integrated, schools generally aren’t.

“There is this incredibly striking trend,” said CUNY researcher Ryan Coughlan. “It raises all kinds of alarm bells and questions as to what that’s about.”

Biden defends record on busing at Chicago’s Rainbow PUSH convention

2019-06-28T23:59:46+00:00

Democratic presidential front-runner Joe Biden on Friday defended his position on using busing to desegregate schools, saying at a labor luncheon in Chicago that he “never ever opposed voluntary busing” — but didn’t mention his opposition to court-ordered busing.

Biden spoke about his record supporting civil rights and his ideas for education after a heated exchange at Thursday’s debate among 10 Democratic presidential candidates. Fellow candidate Kamala Harris, who previously had criticized him for touting his ability to work with pro-segregation senators earlier in his career, accused him of opposing school busing, a program that had benefited Harris.

Biden indignantly denied that. He followed Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot and longtime civil rights leader Rev. Jesse Jackson on the stage during Rainbow PUSH’s annual convention, which kicked off Friday at the Chicago Teachers Union headquarters.

The former vice president advocated tripling federal funds awarded schools serving poor children, raising teacher salaries and making pre-kindergarten mandatory.

“Every single child in America has enormous potential but it means you have to have good schools in every neighborhood,” said Biden, whose wife Jill used to be a school teacher.

In contrast, Lightfoot all but ignored education in her talk — even as the current contract with the Chicago Teachers Union expires at midnight Sunday and negotiations over the next contract remain in limbo.

As she stepped to the podium, Lightfoot said, “I am honored to be here in the house that Karen built,” referring to the expansive headquarters built under the leadership of former union chief Karen Lewis, who retired last year amid a battle with cancer.

Instead, Lightfoot focused on the need for increased investment in the South and West sides.

“It’s been 400 years since the first African reached our nation’s shores in chains,” she said, noting the theme of the convention, which was the “repairing the damage” of the hundreds of years of African-American history in the U.S.

The answer, Lightfoot told the crowd, which included members of some of the city’s biggest public unions, is a plan for a comprehensive urban investment program.
“We cannot look away from the needs of people in our neighborhoods,” she said. “If we want to be a truly global city we need to look south of Roosevelt and West of Ashland. This is not a challenge, but an opportunity.”

The teachers union long has demanded more resources for South and West side schools, affordable housing and wage hikes.

Since Lightfoot took office in May, negotiations with the teachers union have moved slowly. Lightfoot’s team has said it is still weeks away from sharing a full contract proposal.

The union, meanwhile, has argued that Lightfoot and the district are not negotiating in good faith. “We are still negotiating with Rahm’s bargaining team and proposals,” Ronnie Reese, the union’s communications manager, said, referring to previous Mayor Rahm Emanuel.

The two sides are expected to continue bargaining, and teachers could return to school in the fall without a contract.

‘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.

Kamala Harris challenges Biden on school desegregation: ‘It cannot be an intellectual debate’

2019-06-28T03:25:03+00:00

Leading presidential candidate Joe Biden did not back away from his opposition to court-mandated school desegregation efforts when challenged by California Senator Kamala Harris during their first debate appearance Thursday.

Do you agree that you were wrong to oppose busing in America, Harris asked, referring to Biden’s hostility to efforts to desegregate schools as a new senator in Delaware in the 1970s?

“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. “On this subject, it cannot be an intellectual debate among Democrats.”

“I did not oppose busing in America,” Biden said. “I opposed busing ordered by the Department of Education. That’s what I opposed.” But he still attempted to claim the mantle of civil rights advocacy more broadly.

“I ran because of civil rights, I continue to think we have to make fundamental changes in civil rights,” he said.

The exchange among the Democratic presidential hopefuls put school desegregation at the center of the national political discussion, a rarity.

Biden’s record on this topic has been documented in recent Washington Post and Washington Examiner articles. Biden vigorously opposed efforts by courts to integrate schools by race, often referred to by critics as “busing,” during the 1970s. (Courts — not the Department of Education, which began operating as its own agency in 1980 — were the key driver of most of those busing efforts, including in Delaware.) Biden said then that he was against mandated segregation, as well as efforts to actively integrate schools, which he described as quotas.

“The courts have gone overboard in their interpretation of what is required to remedy unlawful segregation,” Biden said in a 1975 interview, according to the Post. “It is one thing to say that you cannot keep a black man from using this bathroom, and something quite different to say that one out of every five people who use this bathroom must be black.”

A Biden spokesperson said the vice president still believes he was correct to oppose court-ordered desegregation.

That view has been largely codified more recently by the Supreme Court’s conservative majority, but it’s an unusual stance for someone competing in a Democratic primary. A recent poll found that while most white voters prioritized neighborhood schools over racial integration, a majority of black voters said racially integrated schools were more important.

“The fact is that in terms of busing, you would’ve been able to go to school the same exact way because it was a local decision made by your city council,” Biden said to Harris. It’s not clear whether that’s true — and local communities have often stood in the way of integration efforts.

Today, schools in many parts of the country remain deeply segregated by race and socioeconomics. Research, including studies over the time periods Biden opposed desegregation, has shown that students of color benefit from integration — and were harmed when court orders were lifted.

One of the researchers who has found that, Rucker Johnson, recently wrote a book “Children of the Dream” making the case for stronger integration efforts. That idea might get a boost from Harris’ focus on the issue.

“I think there’s a groundswell of movement that is positive and actually that is being mobilized through student voices and perspectives that we have found to really invigorate and revive the movement towards integration,” Johnson said in a recent interview.

Another study, released this week, pointed to one unintended consequence of desegregation: the number of black teachers was cut by nearly a third in certain areas.

Here is the entire exchange, which emerged from a discussion of policing:

Harris, to Biden: “I do not believe you are a racist. I agree with you when you commit yourself to the importance of finding common ground. But I also believe — and it is person. And it was actually hurtful to hear you talk about the reputations of two United States senators who built their reputations and career on the segregation of race in this country. And it was not only that, but you also worked with them to oppose busing. 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. So I will tell you that on this subject, it cannot be an intellectual debate among Democrats. We have to take it seriously. We have to act swiftly. As attorney general of California, I was very proud to put in place a requirement that all my special agents would wear body cameras and keep those cameras on.” Biden: “That is a mischaracterization of my position across the board. I did not praise racists. That is not true, number one. Number two, if you want to have this campaign litigated on who supports civil rights and whether I did or not, I’m happy to do that. I was a public defender. I did not become a prosecutor. I left a good law firm to become a public defender when in fact my city was in flames because of the assassination of Dr. King. Number one. Now, number two. As the vice president of the United States, I worked with a man who in fact — we worked very hard to see to it and dealt with these issues in a major, major way. The fact is that, in terms of busing, you would’ve been able to go to school the same exact way because it was a local decision made by your city council. That’s fine. That’s one of the things I argued for, that we should be breaking down these lines. The bottom line here is, look, everything I’ve done in my career, I ran because of civil rights, I continue to think we have to make fundamental changes in civil rights. Those civil rights, by the way, include not only African-Americans, but also the LGBT community.” Harris: “Vice President Biden, do you agree today — do you agree today that you were wrong to oppose busing in America then? Do you agree?” Biden: “I did not oppose busing in America. I opposed busing ordered by the Department of Education. That’s what I opposed.” Harris: “Well there’s a failure of states to integrate public schools in America. I was a part of the second class to integrate Berkeley, California public schools almost two decades after Brown v. Board of Education.” Biden: “Because your city council made that decision. It was a local decision.” Harris: “So that’s where the federal government must step in. That’s why we have the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act. That’s why we need to pass the Equality Act and that’s why we need to pass the ERA. Because there are moments in history when states fail to preserve the civil rights of all people.” Biden: “I have supported the ERA from the very beginning. I’m the guy that extended the Voting Rights Act for 25 years.”

Camille Respess contributed.

Round 1: What the 2020 Democratic candidates said about education in the first debate

2019-06-27T03:16:20+00:00

They interrupted each other. They spoke Spanish. And, for a few moments, they talked about education.

The first televised Democratic presidential candidates debate, held in Miami on Wednesday night, featured 10 candidates: Cory Booker, Bill de Blasio, Julián Castro, John Delaney, Tulsi Gabbard, Jay Inslee, Amy Klobuchar, Beto O’Rourke, Tim Ryan, and Elizabeth Warren.

Here’s what we heard about schools and education. For a full rundown of the candidates’ education positions, check out our tracker.

Booker: Improving health care would improve schools, too. “In communities like mine, low-income communities, this is an education issue because kids who do not have health care are not going to succeed in school.”
De Blasio: I can bring pre-kindergarten to America. “It matters that we choose someone who saw the wasted potential of our children denied pre-K and gave it to every single one of them, for free. These are the things I’ve done in New York.”
Delaney: We need to do “real things” to help working people. “We’ve got to fix our public education system,” he said. “It’s not delivering the results our kids need, nor is college and post-high school career and technical training programs doing that.”
Klobuchar: College should be more affordable, and not just for “rich kids.” “My plan would be to make community college free and make sure that everyone else, besides that top percentile, gets help with their education. My own dad and my sister got their first degree with community college. There are many paths to success and certifications. Secondly, I’d use Pell grants. I’d double it from $6,000 to $12,000 per year and expand it to the number of families that get covered to families that make up to $100,000.”
Ryan: Every school needs a mental health counselor. “We need to start dealing with the trauma that our kids have. We need trauma-based care in every school. We need social and emotional learning in every school.”

Ten more candidates will debate Thursday night.

2020 cheat sheet: What the Democratic presidential candidates have said about education

2019-06-13T22:37:44+00:00

Education is hardly the only issue driving the 2020 presidential campaign. But policies affecting schools and students are emerging as some of the most talked-about.

Within the crowded field of Democrats seeking to unseat Donald Trump, some candidates are reckoning with long-standing positions on education issues — including Cory Booker, who has downplayed his past support for charter schools on the campaign trail. Others, such as Pete Buttigieg, are formulating wide-ranging education policy plans for the first time. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have distinguished themselves by taking aggressive stands against charter schools.

We’ve collected what we know about each Democratic candidate’s views on education issues here and filled it with links where you can learn more. We’ll continuously update this page as candidates share more.

Michael Bennet, Colorado senator — Read More
Joe Biden, former vice president — Read More
Michael Bloomberg, former mayor of New York City — Read More
Cory Booker, New Jersey senator — Read More
Pete Buttigieg, mayor of South Bend, Indiana — Read More
John Delaney, former U.S. representative from Maryland — Read More
Tulsi Gabbard, U.S. representative from Hawaii — Read More
Amy Klobuchar, Minnesota senator — Read More
Deval Patrick, former governor of Massachusetts — Read More
Bernie Sanders, Vermont senator — Read More
Tom Steyer, philanthropist, former hedge fund manager — Read More
Elizabeth Warren, Massachusetts senator — Read More
Marianne Williamson, author and activist — Read More
Andrew Yang, entrepreneur — Read More

Michael Bennet, Colorado senator

After Bennet announced his candidacy in early May, Chalkbeat recapped his education track record as superintendent and senator.
The superintendent of Denver Public Schools from 2005 to 2009, Bennet became closely tied to the education reform movement. He closed low-performing Denver schools and changed the district’s merit pay system in a way that favored newer teachers. Both decisions led to pushback from veteran teachers and some students, but he’s defended them recently.
In Congress, he helped author the Every Student Succeeds Act, the overhaul of No Child Left Behind. Bennet is also known as a vocal opponent of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. He has tried to distinguish school choice as it’s played out in Denver from DeVos’s approach to choice.
In an August interview with Chalkbeat, Bennet called for debt-free college and more investment in neighborhoods where students “have no educational opportunities.” He also said he did not believe “there’s much of an appetite for busing” as a means to desegregate public schools.
Bennet released an education plan in September that called for a $50 billion investment in “regional opportunity compacts” that would create local partnerships among school districts, unions, nonprofits, and others. He also said he supported higher teacher pay and free preschool for all 4-year-olds by 2024 and for all 3-year-olds by 2027.
A number of prominent education reform leaders, including Success Academy head Eva Moskowitz, KIPP Foundation CEO Richard Barth, and Teach For America founder Wendy Kopp, hosted a fundraiser for Bennet in November.
Bennet defended charter schools in an interview with the National Education Association. “I’m proud of the work that I did as superintendent of the Denver Public Schools, including the replication of high-performing charter schools,” he said. “Today in Denver you can’t find a low-performing charter school because we put so many of them out of business.”
At December’s MSNBC public education forum, Bennet said states should not take over local school districts. He was the only one of the seven candidates to meet with a group of pro-charter school parents who demonstrated outside the forum.

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Joe Biden, former vice president

(Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)

As Barack Obama’s vice president, Biden is tied to the constellation of education policies that Obama encouraged. They include evaluating teachers in part through their students’ test scores, the expansion of charter schools, and common standards for what students should learn.
In late May, Biden rolled out his education platform while speaking to the American Federation of Teachers, one of the nation’s largest teachers unions. The highlights of his plan: tripling Title I funding, implementing universal pre-kindergarten, and doubling the number of health professionals in schools. Read his full proposal here.
Biden also said he doesn’t support any federal funding going to for-profit charter schools and wants to see charters do away with admissions tests. (Most can’t use them anyway.) His education platform doesn’t mention charters.
This came up during his first debate appearance in June, when California Senator Kamala Harris asked Biden if he was wrong to oppose busing. “I did not oppose busing in America,” Biden said. “I opposed busing ordered by the Department of Education. That’s what I opposed.”
Recently, he’s expressed interest in reinstating Obama-era desegregation guidelines that were repealed by the Trump administration in July 2018.
At a town hall hosted by the National Education Association in July, Biden said the first thing he would do as president is to appoint a teacher as education secretary.
His campaign was accused of plagiarism because Biden’s education platform lifted a sentence from the XQ Institute without attribution.
Biden said he misspoke when he said, “Poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids,” while discussing access to Advanced Placement courses.
In August, Biden said he supported two years of free community college and reduced tuition at public universities; in the past he said he supported four years of free college.
Biden’s “education beyond high school” plan, released in October, includes free community college, including for part-time students and DREAMers; a grant program to help community colleges grow programs that help students complete degrees; spending $50 billion on workforce-oriented partnerships between high schools, colleges, and businesses; doubling the maximum size of Pell grants; and big investments in HBCUs.
Biden praised teachers strikes as “courageous” at a union event in October, and expressed his support on Twitter for striking Chicago teachers and support staff.
In an infrastructure plan, Biden pledged to invest $100 billion to modernize schools, including by addressing health risks and upgrading technology.
In an interview with the National Education Association, Biden suggested he would restrict charter schools. “No privately funded charter school or private charter school would receive a penny of federal money — none,” he said. He added that any charter school “worthy of being able to be in education would have to be accountable” to school boards and other “mechanisms” that govern traditional public schools. A campaign spokesperson clarified to Chalkbeat that Biden would seek to stop federal funding for for-profit charter schools.
At the December public education forum, Biden said he would commit to ending the use of standardized testing in schools. He also distanced himself from the Obama administration, saying that he opposes using test scores to evaluate teachers.

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Michael Bloomberg, former mayor of New York City

Earlier this year, Chalkbeat took a deep dive into Bloomberg’s education legacy in New York, where he won mayoral control of the schools.
As mayor, Bloomberg believed that the same things that benefited him in business would yield better schools: information and competition. He created new schools and championed charter schools. He also transformed the high school admissions process, and then moved to close schools that did not post strong results or that did not draw interest from families.
He fought New York City’s teachers union vigorously, but raised teacher pay substantially.
During Bloomberg’s time in office, New York’s graduation rates rose and dropout rates fell, but the creation of new gifted programs and selective high schools introduced inequities. After he left office, many of his initiatives, like a ban on social promotion, were rolled back.
A campaign spokesperson told the New York Post in January that Bloomberg’s soon-to-be-released education plan would promote the expansion of charter schools.

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Cory Booker, New Jersey senator

Booker has been a leader in the school choice movement, setting him apart from most other Democratic candidates. You can read our overview for details.
Booker released a K-12 schools plan in December. It calls for tripling Title I funding, creating a $10 billion grant program to encourage states to make their school funding formulas more equitable, and offering tax credits to teachers who work in high-poverty schools. His plan also calls for making new funds available to states to conduct racial equity audits and to address racial disparities in schools.
The plan also says he would support the growth of high-quality charter schools “when they help meet local community needs” and that he would expand how federal Charter Schools Program funds could be spent to include things like supporting student diversity and “understanding and mitigating impacts on home districts.” But he says he would not permit federal funds to be spent on for-profit charter schools.
His plan says he would “oppose public funding for vouchers and tax credits that take money away from public schools and send money to private schools” — a reversal of his past support for vouchers, a policy few Democrats favor. He is currently a cosponsor of a bill to reauthorize the federally funded D.C voucher program.
Booker has promoted charter schools, test-based accountability for low-performing schools, and ratings for teachers linked to student performance.
As mayor of Newark, New Jersey, Booker solicited and won a $100 million donation from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg that led to performance-based teacher pay, school closures, and more charters. Currently about one in three public school students in Newark attend a charter.
At his presidential campaign launch, Booker said he plans to run “the boldest pro-public school teacher campaign there is,” noting that his state’s teachers unions had previously endorsed him.
In an early version of his education plan, Booker said he would guarantee universal early childhood education, raise teacher pay, and give additional money to “underperforming school districts.” He would also expand the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights.
Booker threw his support to public schools at a campaign event in Iowa in May. “I’m a guy who believes in public education and, in fact, I look at some of the charter laws that are written about this country and states like this and I find them really offensive,” he said.
At an August forum, Booker criticized Michigan’s charter school law, saying it lacked accountability measures, and vowed to hire an education secretary who attended public school.
Booker proposed a federally funded “baby bond” program that would put money in interest-bearing accounts for all children, with higher payments going to children from low-income families.
In his environmental plan, Booker said he would remediate all schools with peeling or chipping lead-based paint.
Booker met with striking Chicago teachers in October and tweeted his support for them, saying: “Educators spend their careers caring for and investing in others — it’s our responsibility to care for and invest in them.”
Booker wrote an op-ed calling on the Democratic party to support high-performing charter schools “if and when they are the right fit for a community, are equitable and inclusive, and play by the same rules as other public schools.” This surprised some observers, since Booker has spent much of the campaign backing away from his prior support of charter schools and vouchers.
Booker released a plan to reduce child poverty, which he argued would also improve school performance.
Booker introduced federal legislation that would ban hair discrimination in schools and other settings, citing the case of a New Jersey high school wrestler who was forced to cut off his dreadlocks.

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Pete Buttigieg, mayor of South Bend, Indiana

Buttigieg released a K-12 schools plan in December that calls for tripling Title I funds, raising teacher pay, and banning for-profit charter schools. In many respects it echoes ideas promoted by his Democratic rivals. But it takes a somewhat less oppositional stance towards charters than Warren and Sanders, avoiding, for instance, a call to halt federal funds for all new charter schools.
His plan also includes a $500 million fund to incentivize school integration efforts and a process that would require school districts to seek federal permission before making major boundary changes to ensure they wouldn’t further entrench school segregation.
He also wants to make debt-free collegea reality for some of the nation’s poorest students. I just don’t believe it makes sense to ask working class families to subsidize even the children of billionaires. I think the children of the wealthiest Americans can pay at least a little bit of tuition,” he said during the first round of televised debates in June. (He has $130,000 in student loans of his own.)
As for for-profit charters, he doesn’t think they should “be part of our vision for the future.” He also said, “I think the expansion of charter schools in general is something that we need to really draw back on until we’ve corrected what needs to be corrected in terms of underfunded public education.” On the same note, he said, voucher programs “come at the expense of quality public education.”
In a policy plan focused on his ideas for black Americans, Buttigieg proposes “dramatically” increasing funding for Title I schools. He also says he’ll up the number of black teachers by requiring states to disclose the race of the educators they hire and new guidelines on the use of Title II funds to recruit these educators.
An opponent of Florida’s guardian program, which gives districts the option to arm their staff, he said, “It’d be such an enormous, condemnation of our country if we were to become the only developed nation where this is necessary.”
The mayor’s husband is a theater educator who until recently taught at a private Montessori school. Chasten Buttigieg tweeted disparagingly about a poll asking whether South Bend schools should switch to a four-day week, saying that what teachers actually want is a “living wage please.”
Buttigieg told a crowd in South Carolina that federal intervention would be necessary to tackle school segregation. He acknowledged it would be a difficult task because so much segregation occurs between school districts.
In an interview with Education Week, Buttigieg said he believed the federal government should play a bigger role in addressing resource inequities between schools and that he was working on a plan to curtail the growth of for-profit charter schools.
In his mental health plan, Buttigieg said he’d require all schools to teach a “mental health first aid” class.
In November, Buttigieg released an economic plan that calls for larger Pell Grants and free public college for students whose families make $100,000 a year or less.
Buttigieg faced criticism for a 2011 interview in which he said there are children from “lower-income, minority neighborhoods” who don’t “know someone personally who testifies to the value of education.” Buttigieg later said those comments didn’t “reflect the totality of” his understanding “about the obstacles that students of color face,” and said he had been referring to the need for student mentorship and career pathways.
Buttigieg said he’d been “slow to realize” that schools in his county were racially segregated. “I worked for years under the illusion that our schools … were integrated, because they had to be, because of a court order,” he said. While that was “true within the limits of the South Bend Community School District, as they were drawn,” he said, it wasn’t true in the rest of the county. This statement isn’t completely accurate. South Bend’s schools have long struggled to meet the racial targets set in a desegregation consent decree, and even today some are out of compliance.
A number of charter school advocates, including Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, have hosted fundraisers for Buttigieg. Buttigieg told reporters that these donors would not change his education positions, including his “support for labor.”

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John Delaney, former U.S. representative from Maryland

Delaney wants to guarantee students two years of free community college. He is also calling for a “rethink” of the education system, with a push for personalized learning and the addition of courses like financial literacy. Delaney’s full plan is on his campaign’s site.
While in Congress, Delaney twice authored unsuccessful bills to expand universal pre-K.

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Tulsi Gabbard, U.S. representative from Hawaii

Gabbard supports free community college and also wants to see tuition at four-year public colleges and universities waived for families making up to $125,000 per year.
In May, she tweeted that teachers need to be paid more. In February, she expressed her support for the teachers striking in Los Angeles.

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Amy Klobuchar, Minnesota senator

Klobuchar has proposed a $1 trillion infrastructure plan that would, in part, be used to repair schools.
She wants to see teacher pay increases, free community college, and reduced interest rates for student loans, and expanded Pell grants.
Her proposed “progress partnerships” would provide matching federal funds to states that increase teacher pay, update high school curricula to prepare students for the workforce, and repair school infrastructure in a way that “ensures equity.”
At a town hall hosted by the American Federation of Teachers in May, Klobuchar said she’s against private school vouchers and for holding charter schools to “high standards.” She also said, “I don’t think you see me focusing on charter schools when you look back on my career.”
In her first 100 days in office, Klobuchar says she would re-issue guidance that urged school districts to address racial disparities in school discipline that current Education Secretary Betsy DeVos repealed. Klobuchar also plans to restore guidance documents related to students with disabilities, bring back jobs at the Department of Education cut by the Trump administration, and “prevent the expansion of private school vouchers.”
In an interview with the National Education Association, Klobuchar said: “We have to have better standards for charter schools… and if they can’t meet them, they shouldn’t be there.” She did not lay out specific policy details.

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Deval Patrick, former governor of Massachusetts

As governor, Patrick supported the expansion of high-performing charter schools and spending more on public education.
Patrick released an education platform in December that says he supports free universal pre-K and two years of free college. He also proposed more federal spending on schools — though he didn’t suggest an amount — as well as longer school days and more social services in schools.

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Bernie Sanders, Vermont senator

(Photo by Sarah Silbiger/Getty Images)

In a 10-point platform called “A Thurgood Marshall plan for public education,” Sanders outlines his agenda, including tripling Title I funding, creating a per-pupil spending floor, and spending $5 billion on summer and after-school programs. He also proposes using federal funding to spur school integration.
Sanders has proposed making community college free for all, with states paying about a third of the bill and the rest coming from the federal government.
He has expressed support for teachers across the country who have gone on strike or walked out to demand higher pay and better working conditions. He’s also said teacher starting salaries should be at least $60,000.
And he has proposed curbing charter school growth by eliminating federal grants and banning for-profit charters (which presidents cannot do).
In Congress, he voted against the No Child Left Behind Act in 2001. In June, he introduced legislation that would forgive student loans, expand what Pell grants can pay for, and eliminate tuition at public four-year colleges and universities. The legislation was supported by Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers.
In his criminal justice plan, Sanders said he would decriminalize truancy and work to end restraint and seclusion in schools. He called for more investment in school counselors and nurses, and said he would end federal incentives for “zero-tolerance” school discipline policies.
Sanders appeared at a rally for Chicago teachers in September, shortly before they went on strike, where he praised their demands for smaller class sizes and more support staff. In November, he also expressed support for striking teachers in Little Rock, Arkansas.
The Los Angeles teachers union endorsed Sanders in November, saying he “has the most comprehensive, progressive plan for public education among the candidates.” Sanders had expressed support for LA teachers while they were on strike earlier this year.
Sanders released a plan that calls for spending $1.3 billion a year to support HBCUs and other minority-serving institutions so they can eliminate or significantly reduce tuition and fees.
Sanders has said he opposes standardized testing. At the December public education forum, he said individual schools should be responsible for monitoring the progress of students instead, though he didn’t spell out how that would work.

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Tom Steyer, philanthropist, former hedge fund manager

The billionaire gave $32 million to support a measure that closed tax loopholes for out-of-state corporations in 2012. According to his campaign website, the change has generated $1.7 billion for California schools.
Steyer and his wife’s foundation has donated millions to schools and education-focused organizations, including the Oakland Schools Education Foundation. In 2009, the foundation gave $100,000 to Teach for America.

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Elizabeth Warren, Massachusetts senator

(Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Before Warren released her K-12 education plan, Chalkbeat dug deep into Warren’s record on schools to get a sense of where she stands.
Warren is campaigning on a promise of college affordability, including making community college free for all. She’s also proposed cancelling student loan debt for 42 million Americans.
Under Warren’s pre-K plan, anyone making under 200% of the federal poverty level would be eligible for free child care and free pre-kindergarten programs. For those above that line, child care centers and preschools would charge a maximum of 7% of that family’s income for their service.
In her K-12 education plan, released in October, Warren said she would quadruple Title I funding for low-income schools, spend $20 billion more a year on students with disabilities, and launch a $100 billion grant program called “Excellence in Education” that schools could use for a wide variety of things. (You can read our full breakdown of the plan here.)
Warren also said she would eliminate federal funding for the Charter Schools Program, and seek to “ban” for-profit charter schools — though the federal government doesn’t have much authority over this.
Warren would encourage states to use Title I money set aside to help low-performing schools “on integration efforts of their own design.” The plan also calls for greater scrutiny of communities that “break away” to form their own school districts, which tend to be whiter and more well-off than the districts they left.
She also vowed to appoint a public school teacher as education secretary under her presidential administration. “Betsy DeVos need not apply,” she said at a rally in Detroit.
Warren opposed an unsuccessful 2016 Massachusetts ballot initiative that would have allowed more charter schools in the state, while also saying that “many charter schools in Massachusetts are producing extraordinary results for our students.”
In a 2018 Senate hearing, Warren said, “Boston’s public charter schools are among the best performing charter schools in the nation and that is particularly true for low-income children and children of color.” (That claim is largely backed by research.) She attributed this to tight oversight, a prohibition on for-profit charters, and a limit on growth of charters in the state.
If elected, Warren won’t seek additional federal funding for charter schools, a spokesperson told the American Prospect in July.
Warren fought for stronger test-based accountability provisions in the Every Student Succeeds Act, a stance that drew the ire of the Massachusetts teachers union. But at an NEA forum in July, Warren said testing is “not what education is about.”
At the NEA forum, Warren also called for strengthening unions and praised the string of teacher-driven strikes and walkouts that started in West Virginia.
In her criminal justice plan, Warren said she would decriminalize truancy and encourage schools to use “trauma-informed alternative discipline practices” and implicit bias training to reduce suspensions and expulsions. She also called for investments in school-based mental health staff.
At a Democratic National Convention event, Warren said she would push for higher wages for preschool teachers and child care workers, increased funding for Pell grants, and a $50 billion investment in historically black colleges and universities.
“Money for public schools should stay in public schools, not go anywhere else,” she said in response to a question about her support for teachers unions at the September debate. It’s likely she was referring to her opposition to private school vouchers.
Warren’s labor plan, which includes ideas to make it easier for workers to strike, cites recent teacher strikes in Oklahoma, West Virginia, and Kentucky.
Warren put out an environmental justice plan in October that includes a proposed federal grant program to abate lead in schools and daycares.
In October, Warren released an LGBTQ rights plan that calls for amending federal education law to require school districts to adopt codes of conduct that forbid bullying and harassment on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. She also said she would reinstate guidance on the rights of transgender students that was rescinded by the Trump administration.
Warren appeared later that month alongside striking teachers in Chicago, where she praised teachers unions, saying: “Unions are how we have power.” In November, Warren also expressed support for striking teachers in Little Rock, Arkansas.
In response to pro-charter school activists, Warren said her education plan would not close existing charter schools. She also left room for changes, saying: “If I don’t have the pieces right… I’m going to make sure I got it right.” The moment was overshadowed to some degree by her campaign’s acknowledgement for the first time that her son attended a private school for part of his education.
Charter school supporters criticized Warren for comments she made in a video interview with the NEA released in December in which she said: “If you think your public school is not working, then go help your public school.”

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Marianne Williamson, author and activist

On her campaign’s website, Williamson says “undereducation is a form of oppression.”
Williamson wants to implement an array of changes in education, including reducing standardized testing and creating a “whole-person educational system.”
Williamson released a K-12 education plan in September that focuses on social and emotional learning, restorative justice programs, and mindfulness and meditation. She also expressed support for bolstering civics education and life-skills programs, such as financial literacy and choosing a career that aligns with student interests.

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Andrew Yang, entrepreneur

Yang was the CEO of Manhattan Prep, a test-prep company that was bought by Kaplan Test Prep in 2009. He was brought on by founder Zeke Vanderhoek who subsequently started The Equity Project, a New York City charter school. On his website, Yang praises the school, which pays teachers six-figure salaries.
He’s also the founder and CEO of Venture for America, a program modeled after Teach For America, which places recent college graduates in startups.
A proponent of early childhood education, the entrepreneur wants universal pre-K for 3- and 4-year-olds and supports increasing teacher pay.
In an outline of his education plan, Yang said he would promote vocational education, support HBCUs, “expand selective schools,” and provide life-skills education at all high schools.
Despite or perhaps because of his background in test prep, Yang tweeted in March, “As someone who was very good at standardized tests growing up I think they are a terrible measurement of anything other than whether you are good at the test.”
In a May Twitter thread, he said, “There are very good charter schools and very bad charter schools. The goal should be to make more schools high-quality and effective — not denounce an entire category.”
“I am pro-good school,” Yang said when asked about his support for charter schools at the September debate.
Yang released a mental health plan that calls for training for school administrators and teachers on suicide prevention and awareness and expanding mental health services in schools.

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Dropped out

Bill de Blasio, New York City mayor

As mayor, he made universal pre-K available to 4-year-olds and expanded “community schools,” which offer a range of social services. De Blasio also launched a $773 million school turnaround plan for New York schools that was perceived to be ineffective and will not continue.
He’s faced pressure to address the high levels of racial segregation in the city’s schools, but has favored solutions that emerge from neighborhoods and individual schools.
In 2018, de Blasio laid out a plan to overhaul New York’s test-in high school admissions process in an attempt to increase their number of black and Hispanic students.
De Blasio spoke out against charter schools at the NEA forum in July. “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,” he said. (He’s had difficulty blocking charter school growth in New York.)
At the NEA forum, he also proposed a constitutional amendment establishing the right to an adequate education.
Here’s Chalkbeat’s broader look at de Blasio’s education record.

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Steve Bullock, governor of Montana

As governor, one of Bullock’s signature agenda items has been getting state-funded preschool for Montana. Since 2015, he’s tried three times with no success to get a statewide program going
He’s been able to freeze tuition at the state’s public colleges and universities and grow school breakfast programs. His administration also increased internet access at schools and nearly doubled the number of high school students in dual-enrollment programs.
Bullock has expressed his opposition to charters that operate outside the direct control of school districts (as charter schools in most states do).

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Julián Castro, former U.S. secretary of housing and development

As mayor of San Antonio, Castro expanded pre-K access, saying that having more children in high-quality early childhood programs would benefit the city over the long term. The program, financed through a sales tax, served just 8% of local 4-year-olds in 2018. As president, Castro wants to create a grant-funded, universal “Pre-K for USA” program.
His “People First Education” platform also includes things like a $150 billion plan to grow technology use in schools, increasing access to dual-enrollment programs, and ending tuition at all public colleges.
At the NEA forum in July, Castro said that in formulating his education plan he had reached out to the NEA and would continue to do so.
His presidential platform includes implementing of a federal tax credit that could boost teacher pay by $10,000 per year.
His policing plan says his administration would ensure schools receiving federal funding couldn’t use police officers as “discipline agents.” “Too often times they are enforcing it in a biased way, especially against young black men,” he said at an NAACP presidential forum in July. The plan also says schools would be required to provide employees with unconscious bias training.
He also wants to remedy lead exposure in government buildings, including at public schools. If children develop lead poisoning, he plans to provide them with support services such as tutoring and nutritional help through funds from the Individuals with Disabilities Act. We reported on a study citing that measures such as this can improve learning gains while decreasing suspensions, absences, and crime rates.
At the NEA forum, Castro said he would promote school integration through efforts to integrate housing and “voluntary busing.” Castro also spoke about his own experience attending public schools. “I know from first-hand experience the impact of growing up in segregated school districts,” he said. “Today we’re still grappling with so many of the same issues that we were grappling with 30, 40, 50 years ago.”
Castro’s wife was a math teacher in public elementary schools for many years and now works as an education consultant.
In August, Castro said he supports working with parents who end up in court because of their children’s truancy — not fining them — and pointed to a San Antonio program as a model.
“It is a myth that charter schools are better than public schools. They’re not,” Castro said at the September debate. “I’m not categorically against charter schools,” he went on to say. “I would require more transparency and accountability from them than is required right now.”
Castro and his wife sent a video message of support to Chicago teachers in October shortly before they went on strike, calling attention to his support for public education.
In an October interview with Chalkbeat, Castro said he would evaluate the federal Charter Schools Program, but didn’t say he would cut it. He said he would continue to support giving parents choices within the public school system while working to improve neighborhood schools.
Castro’s disability rights plan says he would help retain special education teachers by raising pay and expanding teacher residencies. He also wants to lower the age that students with disabilities can begin to receive transition-planning services from 16 to 14.
Castro released a plan to address hunger that says he would make meals free for every public school student and give students benefit cards to pay for food when they’re out of school during the summer. He also said he would reinstate Obama-era rules on school nutrition standards that were rolled back by the Trump administration.

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Kirsten Gillibrand, New York senator

Gillibrand has said that she wants to see increases in teacher pay, smaller class sizes, and expanded pre-K access.
In 2017, she authored the Computer Science Career Education Act that would have created grants to schools for STEM programs.
Gillibrand was the only Democrat to vote against the confirmation of John King as education secretary in 2016. It was an unusual move to oppose a nominee from her own party and state. She cited King’s controversial tenure as New York’s state education commissioner.
In her mental health plan, Gillibrand said she would expand the use of school-based health centers and push to hold schools accountable for their school climate.

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Mike Gravel, former Alaska senator

The 89-year-old is the oldest presidential candidate and he doesn’t plan on hitting the campaign trail for his presidential bid.— Read More
On his website, Gravel says he wants to change how schools are funded so that property taxes don’t play a role, offer tuition-free public university for undergraduates and graduate students, and have a “Student Debt Jubilee” that would forgive all public student loan debt.

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Kamala Harris, California senator

Harris added one of the first education ideas to the campaign cycle, with a proposal to use federal funding to boost American teachers’ salaries by an average of $13,500.
Previously, Harris had advocated for increased school funding in California, her home state, and tweeted support for Los Angeles teachers who went on strike for higher pay and better working conditions.
Harris is proposing a $50 billion boost for scholarships, research grants, and fellowships at historically black colleges and universities. Another $10 billion would go toward infrastructure improvements. The proposal also includes a $2.5 billion investment into teacher training programs at HBCUs.
She also has criticized DeVos and rejected the education secretary’s suggestion about arming teachers in response to school shootings as “ridiculous.”
At the first round of debates held in June, Harris questioned Biden’s storied opposition to school busing programs. “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.
Harris also supports the Strength in Diversity Act, which would create a federal grant program for districts interested in boosting integration.
As a prosecutor, Harris launched an initiative to prosecute parents of truant students. She has continued to defend the initiative against criticism that it disproportionately affected poor families.
In 2016, Harris, then California attorney general, won a multi-million dollar settlement against the for-profit charter operator K12 Inc over “alleged violations of California’s false claims, false advertising and unfair competition laws.”
An investigation launched by Harris’ office when she was California attorney general paved the way for a school desegregation order in a district just outside San Francisco.
In a plan to bolster the civil rights of people with disabilities, Harris said she would increase funding for students with disabilities and training for their teachers.
At the September Democratic debate, Harris said school lockdown drills were “traumatizing our children.”
Harris released a children’s agenda in October that features several significant education policy proposals. They include supporting legislation that would offer money and incentives for states to expand access to preschool; increasing Title I funding and changing the Title I formula to be “more equitable”; and incentivizing states to increase spending on schools.
The plan says Harris would also expand the federal education department’s Office of Civil Rights and reinstate the school discipline guidance rescinded by Betsy DeVos.
Harris says she will work to cut child poverty by 50% in her first term. Her proposed strategies include expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit and boosting food stamp benefits for children.
Harris’ children’s plan also promises to “ensure that all students have access to school-based health services,” including a nurse and a social worker.
In November, Harris proposed offering federal funds to encourage schools to add after-school programming to accommodate working families’ schedules.

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John Hickenlooper, former governor of Colorado

As Denver mayor, Hickenlooper helped create a college scholarship program for low-income students in the city. He didn’t control the schools, but supported his former chief of staff Michael Bennet who became Denver superintendent (and whom Hickenlooper later appointed to the U.S. Senate).
Hickenlooper supported a referendum that would have generated billions of dollars for education. Voters rejected it in 2013.
When running for mayor in 2003, Hickenlooper said he would be open to a private school voucher plan.
Read more from our coverage of Hickenlooper’s education track record in Colorado.

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Jay Inslee, governor of Washington

A hallmark of Inslee’s campaign is his focus on climate change. In his extensive education platform, released in July, he included plans to invest in STEM education and give districts with zero-emission buses federal funding. He also proposed retrofitting every school building in the country.
Other highlights of his plan include providing universal pre-K and funding for all-day kindergarten. He also would have the federal government put more money toward Title I and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, and allocate $500 million for districts to use for school integration efforts.
As governor, Inslee signed a tax hike to increase teacher wages.
Inslee was long an opponent of bringing charter schools to his home state, but charters were approved through a voter initiative. After the state Supreme Court struck down charter schools as unconstitutional, Inslee abstained from signing a charter school bill that created a workaround to allow charter schools to remain in the state. Inslee’s abstention allowed the law to go into effect, to the chagrin of charter critics.

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Wayne Messam, mayor of Miramar, Florida

Messam wants to cancel $1.5 trillion in student loan debt.
According to his campaign website, Messam plans to increase teacher wages and give more students access to “learning experiences that will unleash their potential.”

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Seth Moulton, U.S. representative from Massachusetts

Moulton has said that all young Americans age 17-24 should serve in the military in exchange for certain benefits, including 60 to 100% in-state tuition coverage.
Moulton has been backed by Democrats For Education Reform and has expressed his support for school choice, including the (unsuccessful) bid to raise the state charter cap in 2016.

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Beto O’Rourke, former U.S. representative from El Paso, Texas

O’Rourke, whose children attend public schools, has criticized what he says is “arbitrary, high-stakes testing” in public schools.
He proposes a $500 billion fund to close spending gaps for districts that serve students of color and increase teacher pay, a signature part of his education policy plan his campaign released in July.
In 2012, O’Rourke praised charter schools. “They encourage innovation in the classroom, and they’re a laboratory for some of the best ideas and concepts in public education today,” he said at a debate. In April of this year, he said he values non-profit charters with state oversight, but doesn’t support for-profit charters.
He has vocally opposed vouchers and other policies “allowing our public tax dollars to be pulled out of our classrooms and sent to private schools.”
In June, O’Rourke issued an LGBTQ+ equality plan that said he would reinstate Department of Education guidance that included protections for LGBTQ students that was rescinded by the Trump administration.
At an NAACP presidential forum in July, O’Rourke said his administration would “wipe clean” student loan debt for public school teachers. According to his plan, educators who have worked for more than five years in public schools would receive total loan forgiveness.
O’Rourke’s wife, Amy O’Rourke, directs an organization aimed at improving education options in El Paso, including by recruiting new charter schools to the area. She began her career as a classroom teacher and later launched a dual-language charter school in El Paso.
Carmel Martin, former assistant secretary for policy and budget at the Department of Education under the Obama administration, is now O’Rourke’s national policy adviser.
At the September Democratic debate, O’Rourke said the country needed to address racial disparities stemming from the legacy of slavery in America. He pointed to wide racial disparities in school discipline in Texas.
In October, O’Rourke released a housing plan that called for tripling funding for McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Grants, some of which would be used to support homeless students.

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Tim Ryan, U.S. representative from Ohio

His education platform centers around pushing public schools to become “community schools” with the help of $50 billion for federal education programs. Ryan suggests that schools should provide students with health care, housing assistance, and before- and after-school programs. The plan doesn’t say which existing programs would receive this funding.
The presidential hopeful also says he’d work with Congress to pass a $100 billion school infrastructure bill.
In Congress, Ryan has pushed for more accountability for charter schools and salad bars in schools.
One of his key pieces of his platform as a congressman: increasing access to social-emotional learning programs. In a video on his campaign’s website, he’s seen meditating with a classroom full of students.

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Joe Sestak, former U.S. representative from Pennsylvania

The former Navy admiral wants to create a universal pre-K program for the nation’s 4-year-olds without adding to the budget deficit.
He supports common academic standards like the Common Core, though he says the Common Core standards “are not perfectly written.”During his three years in Congress, Sestak sponsored eight education bills, including an unsuccessful bill aimed at removing paper applications for free or reduced-price breakfast and lunch.

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Eric Swalwell, U.S. representative from California

Swalwell listed “no-interest federal student loans” and “debt-free college for public university students who do work-study and commit to bettering their communities after graduation” among initiatives he’d enact in his first 100 days in office.
He voted against the Washington D.C. private school voucher program.

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This tracker was created and updated through August 2019 by Camille Respess. Matt Barnum, Kalyn Belsha, Philissa Cramer, and Sarah Darville contributed reporting.

Meet the Brooklyn science teacher who got Elizabeth Warren to narrow her education secretary options

2019-05-17T15:43:36+00:00

Liat Olenick was on her way home from teaching elementary school science on Monday when she saw that a friend had forwarded the latest email from Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign.

The email contained Warren’s pledge to choose a public school educator as U.S. education secretary. Wrote Olenick’s friend: “You would be so into this!”

A seventh-year teacher, Olenick was indeed excited about the news. She also knew she was the reason behind it.

Back in March, she had ended a long week of teaching by attending a Warren rally. Afterward, she approached a staffer who turned out to be Warren’s communications director and issued a challenge: Would the candidate commit to elevating a public school educator to the nation’s highest education office?

As a leader of Indivisible Nation BK, a Brooklyn chapter of the grassroots progressive activism movement founded in 2016, Olenick would also make the same request of Bernie Sanders and Kirsten Gillibrand. But Warren’s campaign responded, staying in touch with her until this week.

“Indivisible is all about pushing elected officials at forums, so this was a very Indivisible thing to do,” Olenick said. “But it’s really just a question and I was lucky enough to ask it. It’s something I thought lots of other teachers would be interested in.”

She was right. This week, Olenick has fielded interview requests, won kudos from fellow activists, and gained Twitter followers when Warren credited her publicly. But things have been pretty much normal back at Brooklyn Arbor Elementary School, where Olenick, the staff’s representative to the city teachers union, said she does not “talk about political campaign-related things in a school setting.”

We talked to Olenick about the pledge, how her teaching and activism dovetail, her favorite lesson, and more. This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length. (We also paused once when Olenick said her turtle tank was at risk of igniting; she added water and returned.)

Was there a moment when you decided to become a teacher?

I was one of those kids who would put stuffed animals on my bed and teach them. I would make my sister be my student. Out of college, I worked with kids because I thought, what else would I do? I became an environmental educator and then went to graduate school at Bank Street College.

How did you become politically active and how is your activism connected to your teaching?

My first year teaching, I worked at a charter school that was in complete chaos and I helped unionize the staff. That was a formative experience for me. I left and ended up at the school that I’m at now. At that time there was a lot of testing and teacher evaluation debate going on and I did a little bit of organizing around that within my school. But the big thing was, like so many other people, when Trump got elected. I needed an outlet. I found activism and quickly found lots of resources and people and learned so many things I never thought about before.

My experiences at school inform my reasons for activism and what my priorities are. I’m passionate about education, I’m passionate about climate change — I’m a science teacher, and I teach my students about climate change. I’ve seen the impact of housing insecurity and immigration policy on students. It’s like a motivator for my after-school activist work.

Liat Olenick speaks at a Green New Deal rally in March as part of her work with Indivisible Nation BK.

What public school educators would you want to see on the shortlist? What about you?

There are so many qualified, knowledgeable teachers and principals out there. I don’t think I know who the right person is, but I know someone is out there who has the real-world experience and policy background and the ability to manage people and think strategically and create messages — and who understands what teachers and kids are facing every day.

What’s important is it’s someone who spent significant time teaching kids in public schools and someone who understands the implications of policy.

There’s so much that needs to be done, reversing the deregulating that Betsy DeVos has done and funding early childhood education and giving protections for teachers and teachers unions. Instead of incentivizing high-stakes testing, we should be incentivizing integration, small class sizes, science education — all these things that actually help kids.

As for my own career, I would be excited about being in a position where I can really make policy change happen one way or another, but I’m not sure how I want to do that. And right now I love teaching elementary school science!

What’s the most rewarding thing about being a teacher?

Connecting with kids. This doesn’t happen often during the day, but the moments where there’s downtime, and the kids are having fun and they’re self-directed and mellow, and you can see their delightful selves — that’s the best.

I was showing an animal to a pre-K class recently, and they absolutely love looking at animals more than anything. It was a bearded dragon and they were all trying to kiss it. A bearded dragon is not at all kissable. It’s a lizard.

With all that’s going on politically, I’m glad I get to spend my day with little people who are excited and sweet and I get to tune out all the news for part of the day.

What part of your job is most difficult?

The hardest part is never feeling like you are doing enough. There’s always more you can do. You always have too many students with so many different needs. A lot of them you can’t meet by yourself but you want to. Your to-do list is unending. It can be emotionally draining to have that feeling all the time.

If I had six more hours in the day, oh my god. I would sleep an hour more every day. I would probably do some more activism. And I would try to have an hour outside and with my husband, too.

What’s something happening in the community that affects what goes on inside your class?

My school is in Williamsburg, so it has undergone a lot of gentrification. There’s a lot of new development and housing insecurity, where people are needing to move in the middle of the school year. It’s a big issue in my school and something I’ve written about as an activist.

We’ve had a number of students unenroll in the middle of the year, or are in temporary housing, and that has a big impact. Some families in temporary housing, their kids are late because they’re commuting from far away, and obviously they miss instruction, or if they get to school on time they had to wake at 4 a.m. to get here. The students who move in the middle of the year, it affects them but it also affects the friends they left behind — it’s a lot of change in their classes. I’ve done a lot of research, too — I know it hurts them academically.

What are you reading right now?

“The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma.” As a teacher and as a person who has experienced pretty severe illness, it feels incredibly relevant. There’s a lot about cognitive development and how trauma impacts cognitive development and how even people with a lot of knowledge about children — like teachers — can respond to trauma in a way that can make things worse rather than better.

I’ve worked with kids whose behavior suggested they had experienced a trauma, kids who would run away when they get upset, would go from 0 to 10 quickly, would get upset really easily even when something isn’t going to hurt them. I’m thinking about how our education system is supporting kids who have experienced that, and how schools — not mine — are cutting art, dance, and music even though research has shown that those things help kids who have experienced trauma feel connected to other students.

Tell us about a favorite lesson to teach. Where did the idea come from?

Liat Olenick teaches science at Brooklyn Arbor Elementary School.

I used to do this project on water pollution in New York City waterways. We would do a lesson where kids had to design a filter that would mimic an oyster. They would make dirty water and try to filter it out, comparing it to how fast an oyster would filter the water. We went canoeing as part of the project, in Brooklyn on Newtown Creek.

Now there’s a new science curriculum and there’s no water unit in fourth grade anymore. It’s always hard when you’re used to something or attached to something to give it up, but I like being creative and coming up with new ideas, so it’s been a nice way to try new things. With a new curriculum there’s a process of learning what’s really usable, because you’re never in the ideal setting. You have to think, what can I actually do? What makes sense for these kids? What makes sense for where we are in our school community? What will be exciting and what will not be?

What object would you be helpless without during the school day?

Coffee. I have one cup first thing in the morning, and another during the day. I try not to have a third but sometimes I do. If I didn’t have coffee I couldn’t go to school.

What was the biggest misconception that you initially brought to teaching?

I was lucky in that I kind of eased into classroom teaching and wasn’t thrown in on day one. Still, I had this idea that I could control everything, every part of my kids’ day-to-day experiences, and that I should control everything, that it was my job to do so. It took some time to realize that sometimes being a good teacher means letting go of control, both to foster independence in my students but also — there are some things you can’t control, and you need to work with the resources and the kids you have.

What’s the best advice you’ve ever gotten about teaching? What advice would you want?

I got advice in my first year to invest in personal relationships with my colleagues, to take a step back from the work you’re trying to do and have lunch with them, get to know them, ask them about your day. In building that relationship you’ll be able to fix what’s not working. It was really helpful.

At this point, I want fair funding for public schools, small classes, and housing justice, instead of advice. I’m still growing and learning as a teacher, but ultimately those are the big issues.

What advice do you have for other educators?

One thing I’ve learned is that it’s helpful to keep in mind my goal. I went from being a classroom teacher to a specialist where I see kids once a week. It’s a short amount of time, and I don’t know them as well as I would if I were their classroom teacher, so I try to make the environment really exciting. It’s a little science museum they get to come to once a week. Just remembering that goal — that I want them to feel excited about science and connected to the place — helps me.

Also, I think teachers should not be hesitant to get involved in activism — on their own time, after work! — because there’s a lot at stake.

Kamala Harris wants to give American teachers a $13,500 average raise

2019-03-26T10:00:26+00:00

Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris introduced an ambitious — and expensive — plan to raise teacher pay across the U.S. in a bid to win the support of insurgent teachers and an increasingly sympathetic public.

The California senator’s proposal, outlined by her campaign Tuesday, aims to close the compensation gap between teachers and similarly educated professionals. Nationally, they make 11 percent more in pay and benefits than teachers do, according to a recent analysis.

To change that, Harris aspires to give the average teacher a $13,500 pay raise, with the exact number based on the size of each state’s pay gap. The campaign estimates it would cost the federal government $315 billion over 10 years. For comparison, U.S. public schools took in $678 billion in fiscal year 2016, including $56 billion from the federal government.

The price tag may make the initiative a tough sell in some quarters. But the size of the investment also makes the plan more likely to achieve the central goal of attracting and retaining teachers.

“It isn’t enough to just say our teachers shape the future of our country, we should pay them like it,” Harris tweeted Sunday. “It’s past time we value and respect their work, compassion, and dedication to our kids.”

The plan is the first substantive proposal from a presidential candidate that responds directly to a national wave of teacher activism that began with West Virginia’s teachers strike in 2018. Teachers in Oklahoma, Arizona, Los Angeles, Oakland, and Denver have followed.

Teachers’ demands have varied, but disagreements over salaries have played a major role in most of the strikes and walkouts. And educators seem to have been successful in winning more funding for public schools in several states, including Oklahoma and Arizona, without losing public support.

Harris’s campaign says it would work with states to set salary goals, and incentivize them to spend more with a three-to-one match for every dollar states put toward raising teacher pay “until the teacher pay gap is entirely closed by the end of Harris’ first term.” That implies that the federal government would make different investments in different states, as some have much larger teacher pay gaps than others.

The plan calls for an “additional targeted investment” in high-poverty schools to boost pay even further, but offers no details on how it would do so.

Similarly, it is light on details for the how the initiative would be paid for, saying the money will come from “strengthening the estate tax and cracking down on loopholes” used by wealthy taxpayers.

By omitting any mention of performance pay, the plan also differentiates Harris from a previous generation of Democratic leadership on the issue. President Obama backed performance pay systems as a candidate and while in office. (A number of Democratic candidates, including Harris, have regularly expressed support for striking teachers.)

Harris’s plan is likely to be popular with the nation’s teachers unions, too — organizations with money and manpower to offer a presidential campaign. It has already won plaudits from the leaders of the two largest unions, Lily Eskelsen Garc ía of the National Education Association and Randi Weingarten of the American Federation of Teachers.

“For every teacher in America and for the 91 percent of kids who attend our public schools, this is one of the most thoughtful initiatives we’ve seen in years,” Weingarten said in a statement timed with the plan’s Tuesday morning release.

Studies have found that pay increases generally improve the likelihood that teachers will stay in the classroom, and lower turnover has been linked to improved student test scores. Recent international research has found that teacher pay is positively correlated with teachers’ academic skills — and in turn, connected to higher rates of student learning. Research has also connected school spending increases, some of which likely went to teacher pay, to academic gains for students.

“I think there’s really good evidence that teachers respond to salaries,” said Dan Goldhaber, a professor at the University of Washington who studies teacher quality but has not reviewed Harris’s plan. “And there is some evidence that ultimately, that affects students.”

But, Goldhaber argued, efforts to boost teacher salaries should focus on the positions where higher salaries could make the most difference — for new teachers more likely to leave the profession, for example, or for teachers in low-income schools where turnover is high.

“We would probably be better off if whatever pot of money is being allocated to raising teacher salaries tended to disproportionately go to schools serving disadvantaged kids, the front end of pay in a teacher’s career, and to shortage subjects,” he said.

There are longstanding debates about exactly how to measure how teachers are paid, especially around how to account for factors like pensions, working conditions, and job security. Some argue that if you take all that into account there is no teacher pay gap. Critics also claim that teacher raises could be accomplished without spending more, but instead cutting the number of non-teaching staff in schools, like administrators and cafeteria workers.

One recent study compared giving teachers 1 percent across-the-board bonuses to using a similar amount of money to give larger raises to teachers with better performance ratings. Measures of teacher retention and student test scores were slightly higher in the second group.

Allison Atteberry, a professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, said she thinks it makes sense to substantially raise teacher pay, but questioned the feasibility of widespread increases.

“Dramatically increasing base pay for all teachers would be my first policy choice, because it could elevate the entire profession in the eyes of society for generations to come,” she said. “But in a more realistic world where there are hard constraints on how much more the public is willing to spend on education, I would suggest increasing the salaries most for teachers who are most capable of changing the life trajectories of their students.”

Cory Booker has been an ed reform favorite. That could be a problem for his 2020 campaign.

2019-02-01T21:26:52+00:00

New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker is running for president — and bringing a lengthy record on education with him.

The former mayor of Newark announced his plans Friday, joining a growing group of Democratic hopefuls. One way he stands out from that crowd: He’s spent much of his career promoting a specific vision for improving education that includes charter schools and merit pay for teachers — views that in recent years have gone out of fashion with many Democrats.

On Friday, Booker vowed to run “the boldest pro-public school teacher campaign there is,” noting he’s previously been endorsed by his state’s teachers unions.

But at a time when teachers across the country are pushing for higher salaries and against charter schools, Booker’s record on education is sure to draw a skeptical eye from unions and public school advocates. And his past work alongside Betsy DeVos may make its way into campaign attack ads from his Democratic opponents, even though he voted against her as education secretary.

Here’s what you should know about Booker’s education track record, including the dramatic overhaul of schools in Newark he oversaw as mayor.

His vision for education has looked a lot like Barack Obama’s …

Booker, who first ran for Newark mayor in 2002, gained prominence at a time when both Democrats and Republicans were endorsing what became known as “education reform”: a constellation of policies that included school choice, including through privately managed charter schools; accountability for low-performing schools; and ratings for teachers that weighed student test scores.

Booker was among the strongest local evangelists of the movement, which drew criticism from teachers unions and community groups who understood that its goals could be at odds with their own. He even became a leading figure for Democrats for Education Reform, a group that worked to advance the reform agenda among elected officials and successfully influenced President Obama’s education platform.

Booker has championed policies that reward highly rated teachers and remove those with poor ratings.

And he’s been a vocal critic of teachers unions along the way, something that could be problematic as he tries to run a pro-teacher campaign.

“Ten years ago when I talked about school choice, I was literally tarred and feathered,” Booker said in 2008, urging Democratic office holders to “have the political will to stand up against these phenomenally powerful interests.”

“I was literally brought into a broom closet by a union and told I would never win office if I kept talking about charters,” he said.

… Except where his vision has looked more like Betsy Devos’s.

Like every Senate Democrat (and two Republicans), Booker voted against Trump’s nominee for secretary of education in 2017. But unlike his colleagues, he appeared to have a close connection with Betsy DeVos.

That connection stems from one issue where Booker has also gone further than most Democrats: school vouchers. In 2001, he spoke at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, praising private school vouchers, something most progressives opposed then and now.

Booker served with DeVos on the board of directors of the Alliance for School Choice (now known as the American Federation for Children Growth Fund). He also spoke at gatherings of the American Federation for Children, an organization DeVos chaired, in 2012 and again in 2016.

“The mission of this organization is aligned with the mission of our nation,” he said in 2016.

The American Federation of Children has focused much of its efforts on promoting private-school voucher programs, which Booker has supported, arguing that poor children and children of color need ways to escape from struggling public schools.

Still, Booker voted against DeVos, whose nomination drew fierce opposition from teachers across the country. He said his vote was about DeVos’s record on issues outside of school choice.

As a senator, Booker has continued to support vouchers and tougher test-based accountability for schools. Along with Elizabeth Warren — now a Democratic primary rival — Booker led the charge to ratchet up pressure on low-performing schools under the Every Student Succeeds Act, a move opposed by the National Education Association.

In 2015, Booker joined three other senators to sponsor the extension of the Washington, D.C. school voucher program. Last week, those three senators were again pushing for reauthorization — but without Booker. It’s unclear whether that’s a sign of waning support. In an interview with CNN in 2017, Booker said his views on education “haven’t changed one iota.”

As Newark mayor, Booker used his star power to champion dramatic changes to schools. Those reforms sparked backlash locally, overshadowing any limited evidence of success.

The clearest case study of Booker’s education philosophy can be found in Newark, New Jersey, the city where he engineered a massive — and massively controversial — overhaul of the city’s beleaguered school system.

As Newark’s mayor, he formed a bipartisan alliance with then-Gov. Chris Christie to reshape the district, the state’s largest and one of its most troubled. To bankroll their efforts, Booker secured a $100 million gift from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and a matching amount from other deep-pocketed donors eager to see Newark become a “proof point” for the education reform movement.

The changes that Booker helped bring came straight out of that playbook: school closures, more charter schools, the ouster of some teachers and principals deemed ineffective, and a new teachers contract that tied teachers’ pay to their performance.

Although the union agreed to the contract, a number of the changes triggered bitter resistance among teachers. Ras Baraka, a local principal, turned his opposition to the reforms into a winning bid for mayor and many residents first learned of the planned overhaul through a splashy announcement on “The Oprah Winfrey Show.” In the coming years, students would stage a sit-in protest in the board of education headquarters, and the firebrand superintendent charged with carrying out the changes, Cami Anderson, would be run out of town.

There’s no doubt the reforms were unpopular with many residents. Whether they improved outcomes for students has been the subject of debate.

A recent study led by Harvard researchers found that the changes led to an initial decline in student growth on state tests. By 2016, students’ annual gains in English, but not math, were higher than comparable students across New Jersey, the researchers found. Students’ scores have continued to rise, and graduation rates leapt nearly 20 percentage points since the overhaul began. Meanwhile, the city’s large charter-school networks — including North Star Academy, whose board Booker once sat on — rank among the top performing schools in the state.

Other indicators are less encouraging: About one in three students in Newark’s traditional schools were chronically absent last school year — about the same share as when the reforms began.

But whatever improvements the changes spurred have largely been overshadowed by the way they were enacted. Detailed in the book “The Prize” by journalist Dale Russakoff, the overhaul came to symbolize top-down reform imposed by ideological outsiders and highly paid consultants.

In recent years, Zuckerberg has reconsidered his approach to reform in Newark, saying he wants to “go in the opposite direction” by working more closely with community members and teachers unions.

Booker, by contrast, has shown no regrets. In a recent interview, he expressed frustration with the widespread perception that the Newark reforms went awry, calling it “one of the biggest disconnects between reality and perception that I’ve ever seen in my politics.”

During a briefing with Newark reporters in January 2018, Booker recalled how aides had warned that “forces that don’t even really care about schools” would “savage” his reputation if he tried to shake up the city’s school system. That prediction came true, Booker said, yet he still stands by the controversial reforms.

“I wouldn’t change a thing,” he said, pointing to students’ recent test-score gains. “It really is one of prouder efforts I’ve been a part of in my life.”