“Providing a World-Class Education in Every ZIP Code” is the title of Joe Biden’s education task force policy recommendations, released last week. Given his long record of support for high-quality public schools, there’s no reason to doubt the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee’s sincerity. As president, surely, he’d wave a magic wand and instantly make every American child’s school a great one, if he could.
issue: Education
WEBINAR: What Worked: Remote Instruction During COVID-19
When America’s schools abruptly closed in March, few had strategies for keeping students engaged. Watch RAS Associate Director Tressa Pankovits, as she moderated a 90-minute interactive discussion with CRPE and Public Impact analysts who co-presented comprehensive new data on how school systems performed, and top educators shared how their teams excelled under pressure.
Panelists include:
Bree Dusseault, Practitioner-in-residence at the Center on Reinventing Public Education
Lyria Boast, Vice president for data analytics and a senior consulting manager at Public Impact
Joyanna Smith, DC Regional Director at Rocketship Public Schools
Amy D’Angelo, Regional Superintendent, Achievement First Charter Schools
Brian Riddick, Principal at Butler College Prep, of Noble Network of Charter Schools
Moderator: Tressa Pankovits, Associate Director, Reinventing America’s Schools Project
Our educator panelists described their fast pivot from the classroom to the cloud, and they shared their strategies for ensuring distance learning was effective, including setting high expectations and relentless student engagement. They dissected lessons learned, and examined pitfalls to avoid in the coming school year.
Watch here.
Bryan Morton Leads Fight for Better Schools in Camden, N.J.
For Bryan Morton and Parents for Great Camden Schools, the fight for a great school in every neighborhood is the best way to ensure that no child in Camden, New Jersey, falls into the pre-K-to-prison pipeline.
Parents for Great Camden Schools (PGCS) is, in many ways, built in the image of its founder. A native of Camden, Morton grew up seeing police officers, firefighters and schoolteachers who looked like him.
Educated in the Camden City Public Schools (CCPS), Morton attended the only public schools available to him. He excelled early and tested into gifted and talented programs.
By the time Morton entered high school, Camden looked very different. The municipal unions had negotiated away city workers’ residency requirements, creating an exodus of the African-American workers Morton grew up emulating.
Read the full piece here.
Dealing with Zoom Fatigue: Using Project-Based Learning to End the School Year on a High Note
As schools wind down from a, hopefully, once-in-a-lifetime shutdown, many students and teachers find their motivation also winding down. Educators are calling this “zoom fatigue,” referring to the commonly used teleconference platform. To end the year on a high note, teachers could turn to project-based learning (PBL), by asking students to complete a project they are interested in.
Motivation is the key to learning. “If the kids want to learn, you can’t stop ‘em,” former Ohio State professor of education Jack Frymier once said. “If they don’t, you can’t make ‘em.”
So urge students to work on something they care about. Education researchers have identified four main strategies to motivate students: focusing on learning students find relevant; giving them autonomy, or ownership of their learning; using positive feedback; and creating strong student-teacher relationships. So let students pick something they find relevant and give them some autonomy.
Jodi Chamberlin, a Tacoma, Washington, elementary school teacher, provides a good example. She selected projects “based on my students’ individual interests,” she wrote on DonorsChoose.org, a website where teachers can ask for donations for school projects. “I selected car building kits for my students who are interested in physics and mechanics of cars. I selected origami kits for a few of my kiddos who are always folding paper into various games during class time. I selected comic book templates for kids who are interested in being illustrators one day.”
Projects do not have to be physical. Some could be built online, through video games such as Minecraft, in which users enter a blocky, 3-D, computer-generated world in which the user has free reign to create any structure he or she can imagine using the tools built into the game. The first graphic shows a Minecraft world, while the second shows a suggested school project using Minecraft, from Fusion Yearbooks.
Source: Planet Minecraft
Irene Weinstein, a library media specialist at New Beginnings Family Academy in Bridgeport, CT, has used BreakoutEdu, an immersive learning games platform, to get her students excited about learning from home. “I have given students completely digital breakouts that I was able to access for free and the excitement and focus that I saw has been unmatched by any other activity,” she wrote on DonorsChoose.org. “However, there are only a handful of free lessons. With the access that this kit gives us, students can continue their thinking adventures throughout the year.”
Another teacher raised money to give students the material needed to build a terrarium at home, so they can grow plants and record their life cycles in a closed environment. Another raised funds for aquaponics sets, so students could grow their own vegetables.
Larry Berger, CEO of the curriculum and assessment firm Amplify, described a science project for older students from Amplify’s curriculum, in a recent interview. “Every kid participates in what we call an engineering internship for each unit,” he said. “They are on a fictional team at a science and engineering company. In the unit where we’re learning about changing climate, we’ve been tasked with designing rooftops for a city, and we are trying to use the science we’ve learned, but in an applied way, working with our team, designing rooftops, and we’ve set it up so most of the time, the really good idea that your team has fails for an interesting scientific reason and you’ve got to go back to the drawing board, like real engineers.”
Teachers could ask students who are passionate about sports to design the reopening of their favorite professional league. They could give students a series of questions they have to answer, such as how they would keep players and referees from exposure to the COVID-19 virus, whether any spectators would be allowed, how much television revenue each game would generate, whether the teams could make any profit this way, and if not, how the league would keep teams from going bankrupt. As they developed answers, teachers could continue to challenge them, poking holes in their reasoning and asking them to think more deeply.
Some teenage boys, who are disengaged in most classes, might love working on a project like this.
Through PBL, teachers serve as coaches and guides, giving inspiration and constructive feedback to help their students succeed. By posing increasingly demanding challenges and questions, they help students learn many different skills, from math and writing to critical thinking and digital publishing.
Students without computers or internet access could be put on teams with students who do have those resources. For individual assignments, teachers could either have the family photograph or record the student’s project and send it to the teacher or drop it off at a designated pick-up location.
At the end of the year, students and/or teams could showcase their work through an online show-and-tell. Every student or team would talk about their project, why they care about it, and what they were able to learn from it. This would help students develop the confidence to present in front of the class. For the students without internet, the teacher could present the project visually as the students discuss their work through a phone connection.
Whether it is origami animals, a Minecraft world, a terrarium, or an NBA restart, every student has something unique and noteworthy to contribute. Through these projects, students would be able to fuel their passions without ever leaving home.
And who knows, perhaps teachers would learn something they could use to motivate and engage their students in future years.
Bruce Arao, a spring 2020 intern at the Progressive Policy Institute, is a student at the University of California, Santa Barbara, double-majoring in economics and sociology.
With Latinx Students Near 30 Percent of all Public School Students, Latinx Leaders Demand a Seat at the School Board Table
It is time for Latinx communities to build the political power necessary to demand education reforms that benefit their children, several Latinx leaders argue. Within 16 months, 30 percent of all public school students will be Latinx, they pointed out during a recent Progressive Policy Institute webinar. But school boards often have no idea what these students need.
“A lot of the problem I see is that the people in power don’t even take the first step to understand who they’re dealing with,” said Ricardo Miguel Martinez, who founded and leads Latin American Parents for Public Schools (LAPPS), in Georgia.
“These systems were designed” generations ago by white people, added Cinto Ramos, president of the school board in Ft. Worth and the Mexican-American School Board Association in Texas. “Our whole system was designed in whiteness.” Latinx parents are rarely at the table when decisions are made, so “we district leaders have got to get ready to listen like we’ve never listened before.”
Particularly now, the needs are acute. Many communities have suffered during the Covid-19 pandemic, but Latinx and black communities have suffered the most. They have lost jobs faster than white or Asians, and their death rates are higher.
“Most Latino families are low-income, and what we’re seeing is that low-income families are much more susceptible to health problems,” says Alma Marquez, who leads a public affairs firm called the Del SOL Group and founded La Comadre, a network of Latina women in California fighting to improve education for their children. “Only 15 percent of Latino parents can work from home, so most of them have to work outside the home, and that exposes them to this virus.”
“We have people in our community that are already selling their cars and their possessions to pay for groceries and rent and keep the lights on,” Martinez added.
Martinez’s LAPPS organization has helped create a COVID Relief Fund, to provide money to Latinx and black families in crisis, and Ramos’s district has worked to get laptops and WiFi hotspots to Latinx students so they can continue learning from home. But all agreed that deeper reforms are necessary.
The first step, several argued, is to give Latinx parents real information about the quality of their children’s schools. LAPPS prepared an “Equity Report,” which showed the disturbing reality that in Atlanta Public Schools, only 16 percent of black students and 20 percent of Latinx students read proficiently. “We show people the graphs and charts about how we’re doing, and the first thing we see is the jaws drop,” Martinez said.
“If you do not have an Equity Report for your district, you need one.”
The next step is to get parents to attend school board meetings and speak up. In Atlanta, LAPPS worked with the school board to pass the first language access policy in the state of Georgia. Other districts have begun to follow suit.
Parents should demand that the districts actively recruit quality Latinx teachers, the participants agreed. Districts should also create more options that fit the needs of Latinx students, such as specialized schools for recent immigrants, dual-language immersion schools, and career-tech high schools. In California, La Comadre is pushing the governor to mandate that districts create individualized learning plans for each English language learner, based on the success of a program in Modesto that has done that.
Rather than assign students to such schools based on where they live, districts should allow families to choose the school that best fits their needs, some participants added. “For Latino families, I think choice is something that could be of life or death importance,” Marquez said. “School choices really do dictate so much of family outcomes, socioeconomic outcomes, and as we’re seeing with this COVID crisis, health outcomes.”
Both Marquez and Ramos noted that they had benefited from the opportunity, as Ramos put it, “to attend a better school than some of my neighbors were able to, than some of my siblings were able to.”
They also stressed that schools need significant autonomy, so their leaders can hire more effective teachers and use their resources in more effective ways.
As an illustration, Beacon Network Schools Executive Principal Alex Magaña talked about the opportunity he had in Denver to transform a struggling district school — where 80 percent of the students were Hispanic and 96 percent qualified for subsidized meals — into an “innovation school,” with waivers from much of the bureaucracy’s red tape.
He and his teachers — all district employees — “redesigned the school to do something different for the population we were serving. We offer a unique program of enrichment activities [particularly through an extended day], personalized learning and blended learning [in which every student has a computer], and character development, or social-emotional learning.”
Because innovation school status gave them the flexibility they needed to do all of this, Magaña and his staff succeeded. A few years later the district offered them a chance to take over another failing school, which they also turned around. Now they are an “innovation zone,” with its own board, which advocates for the school, defends its autonomy, and raises money to fund its many enrichment activities.
With their autonomy, the schools were able to pivot to remote learning almost immediately when the district closed down. “The students were not shocked,” Magaña said. “They knew where to go on their computers for their assignments. We can quickly make adjustments and changes to serve the needs of our kids; we don’t need to wait.”
Marquez expanded on this theme in a subsequent interview: “We’ve got to trust educators at the local level, and too often, because of these big bureaucracies, and because people who work in them are disconnected from the daily realities that students and their families face, they just don’t have the connections to the students. We’ve got to trust that educators can make those decisions, and at the same time, we have to hold them accountable.
“We need to trust principals to hire their team. We need to trust that principals can be instructional leaders, who should have the autonomy to help others move out if they are not meeting the goals and vision of the school. In addition to hiring and firing their staff, we need to make sure principals are able to determine what resources are used where, with a very clear delineation that the kids who most need those resources get those resources. So we need to make sure that the money is being budgeted with an equity lens, that more of the money is going to kids who are furthest from opportunity. And we need to make sure that there is transparency and accountability about that money.”
Martinez emphasized that schools should be made accountable to parents. “We‘re big on accountability,” Martinez explained, also in a follow-up interview. “Accountability means that the customers and the customer service are based on facts and decisions are based on facts and figures. The customers are the kids and their parents, and the customer service is the teachers and principals. The customer service in so many of these schools is horrible; parents are treated like dirt.”
Marquez noted that accountability to parents can be made real by giving them the right to move their children to a better public school if they are not satisfied. “They deserve the same opportunity to choose a school for their children that upper income people have,” she said.
She added that parents should have the option of choosing public charter schools if they prefer them. “Latino families like the autonomy” charters have, she noted. “Latino families like the respect they get as customers” who can choose what’s best for their children.
But none of this will simply be given to Latinx families, Marquez and the others noted. Cinto Ramos, who described himself as “that pissed off parent who ran for the school board,” said Latinx leaders have not yet figured out how to mobilize their community to embrace its power. He quoted Martin Luther King: “You must have power with love. Power without love is reckless and abusive. And love without power is sentimental and anemic.”
“We must lift our people into positions of power to fight for our children,” Marquez added. “Often those in power don’t want to hear from black and brown moms — and surely don’t want to give them any power. So we are raising our voices to them. We’re going to continue to push you, to embarrass you, to love on you, whatever it takes to make sure our kids get what they need. Because our kids only have one chance. They don’t get a do-over in 10 years.”
Read the full piece here.
To Succeed in the Post-COVID Era, Our Schools Need to Stop Batch-Processing Kids
As school winds down for this year, discussion in education circles has turned to next year. After a spring of uneven distance learning and a long summer, should classes pick up where they were last March—or where they would normally start? Should they ask those who did not participate in distance learning to repeat a year?
But these questions miss the point. All students arrive, every year, at different stages in their academic growth. Some are multiple years behind grade level; some are near grade level but have gaps in their learning, topics they have never mastered. And some are at or above grade level.
Schools full of low-income children have struggled with this reality for years, because many of their students are years behind grade level. Many charter schools were founded to serve such students, and they have led the search for answers.
Read the full piece here
Helping Things Click, Brick-by-Brick: America’s Great Shut-in is a Chance to Engage Students in Deeper Learning
My 10-year-old nephew, like most American kids, is “doing school” at home. An only child, he misses his friends, is not learning as much as he would in the classroom (by his own and his parents’ admission), and is often-times bored.
I ordered him a Lego Star Wars space fighter with a gazillion pieces to occupy him (and to give my sister some peace). He astounded me by putting it together in hours. During our “thank you−you’re welcome” video chat, the conversation drifted to the challenges of his confinement. He imaginatively listed places he plans to visit after the pandemic recedes. Tokyo was at the top, but every other place on his list was a far-flung historical site.
My first thought was, “good luck with that.”
My second thought was a lightbulb moment.
After a quick check−yes, Lego, makes kits for many monuments, buildings and city skylines−we made a deal. I would send him as many sets as he wanted, one at a time, in exchange for a written report on the edifice he’d just built. Reports would include history, architectural significance, milestone events, and so on. I warned him I would critique his English, including spelling and grammar, and would help him correct mistakes.
Read more here.
Medema and Pankovits: A Wrench in the Works — How Schools Can Keep the Coronavirus Pandemic From Derailing Their Construction Projects
Many state governments have deemed school construction an essential service during the coronavirus crisis. This is a good thing. While New York, the nation’s pandemic epicenter, didn’t give school facilities projects the green light until April 9, states less hard-hit were quicker to make the declaration. That sounds like good news for charter schools expecting to move into new or renovated buildings in time for the fall.
Not necessarily.
Mass public quarantines implemented by China to slow the coronavirus there temporarily shut down factories in the world’s second-largest economy. This will disrupt supply chains globally for months at least, and that includes building supplies.
What does this chaos mean for school leaders, building owners and contractors — not to mention teachers, students and parents — wondering about the fate of charter school construction projects? The Charter School Facility Center turned to three experts in the field for guidance.
Read more here.
Osborne: COVID Slide Is Going to Make the Usual Summer Slide Even Worse.
This year, thanks to the coronavirus, the dreaded “summer slide” will be worse than usual. Studies have found that students lose up to 25 to 30 percent of what they learned in an academic year over the following summer, with the worst losses, particularly in reading, among low-income kids.
A Gallup survey done in early April found that 83 percent of parents reported their children were involved in online distance learning. But Gallup conducted the survey online, so it excluded families with no internet connection. That means perhaps a third of students are not participating in remote learning this spring. For them, “summer” will last at least five months.
Some districts and charter schools may run summer schools after stay-at-home orders are lifted. But most are predicting funding problems ahead due to lower tax revenues, so it’s likely that few will be able to afford summer school.
Are there other solutions? Districts and charter organizations could switch to year-round schedules, which have developed in some places to combat summer slide. Typically, these schools close for only a month or so at the height of summer. They reopen in early August, then have two-week breaks in the fall, at Christmas, in February and in April. Some charter schools bring kids who are behind grade level in for intensive catch-up work during at least one of the two weeks off each quarter.
Read the full piece here.
Public Education in the Age of Coronavirus: We Need Swift Boats, Not Ocean Liners
No sooner had Michigan closed its public schools than the state Department of Education announced that no distance learning time would count toward the required 180 days of instruction. When met with a storm of criticism from district and school leaders, parents, students, and the governor, the department blamed state law.
Meanwhile Pennsylvania’s Department of Education encouraged public schools to provide some “continuity of learning” but warned that “schools must work to meet the needs of all students, with particular attention to free appropriate public education (FAPE) for students with disabilities and English as a second language (ESL) services for English Learners (EL).” Spooked, many districts decided they were better off not even trying remote learning.
Seattle Public Schools decided that if it could not assure every student had access to online learning, it would offer it to none. Besides, the superintendent told Time magazine, “There’s just no way a district this large can do that.”
Even in the midst of crisis, bureaucracy reared its ugly head. Many districts have gone to heroic lengths to ensure their students keep learning, but overall, the crisis has illustrated a fundamental truth about public education: our hierarchical, standardized, rule-driven bureaucracies struggle to adapt when things change.
Traditional school districts were created more than a century ago, after all, and they were built to be stable, not adaptable. They control their vast budgets and armies of personnel by nesting them in thousands of rules, to prevent abuses. They adopt budgets that hem schools into spending patterns that may have made sense at one time but not anymore — and they make it almost impossible for schools to change how they spend the money.
They negotiate collective bargaining agreements that set hours and duties in stone, making it impossible to make up for lost time by extending school into the summer months, for instance — something probably needed this year.
In a crisis, our bureaucracies are often at their best — waiving rules, soliciting extra efforts from employees, trying their hardest to do what is necessary. Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation’s second largest, quickly promised to buy 150,000 laptops or tablets for every student who doesn’t have one, contracted with Verizon to offer free internet access through new hotspots, used its own television network plus two public broadcasting channels to broadcast school lessons, and handed out 260,000 free meals a day.
Superintendent Austin Beutner asked the state legislature for emergency funding to pay for all this. “We face the largest adaptive challenge for large urban public education systems in a generation,” he said. “Pick your metaphor: This is the moon shot, the Manhattan Project, the Normandy landing, and the Marshall Plan, and the clock is ticking.”
Other districts with entrepreneurial superintendents, such as Miami-Dade County Public Schools and District of Columbia Public Schools, have also turned on a dime, launching distance learning and free meals. Some have even put wifi hotspots on school buses and parked them in low-income neighborhoods.
But they are the exceptions, not the norm. A survey of 82 large districts by the Center on Reinventing Public Education found that as of March 30, “Most districts are still not providing any instruction. The majority provide links to general online resources but no direction on how to use them.”
And when the crisis is over, that bureaucratic norm will reassert itself even in Los Angeles. Teachers unions will demand extra pay for extra work. Principals whose roofs start leaking will wait months or years for central headquarters to repair them. Centralized school bus systems will dictate school start and end times, regardless of what the children and their parents need.
Personnel rules that give teachers with more seniority more control over where they teach will send the most senior, best paid teachers to the middle-class schools and the rookies to the schools full of poor children — guaranteeing that districts actually spend more on their well-off students than on their low-income students.
It doesn’t have to be this way. In today’s world, where change is the norm, we need flexible, nimble public schools.
That’s one reason public charter schools were invented, three decades ago. These schools, operated mostly by nonprofit organizations outside the control of school districts and free of most bureaucratic rules, find it much easier to innovate. In return for this luxury, they are held accountable for their performance — often closed or replaced if their students are not learning enough.
In this crisis, the education media has been full of stories of charter schools shifting rapidly to remote learning. You can read inspiring examples here, here, here, and here.
A few school districts, in Denver and Indianapolis and San Antonio, have embraced chartering as part of district strategy. They have learned that effective information-age organizations are decentralized, mission-driven rather than rule-driven, results-oriented, customer-driven, and competitive. These principles, outlined in a book I wrote with Ted Gaebler, Reinventing Government, capture the essence of why charter schools usually perform better than district-operated schools.
One large urban district embodies all of these principles: New Orleans Public Schools, where every public school is chartered. Central headquarters is small, because it doesn’t operate schools. Its job is to steer the system, not to row every boat.
When Mardi Gras celebrations spread the coronavirus throughout New Orleans, the school district quickly bought 10,000 Chromebook laptops and 5,000 wireless hotspots and launched 45 sites for “grab-and-go” meals and 11 sites for hot dinners.
Free of constraining rules and union contracts, the schools quickly pivoted to remote learning. “Traditional districts are like luxury cruise ships: If they want to change direction, it’s going to take a long time,” explains Patrick Dobard, who led the state’s Recovery School District, which spearheaded the transition to an all-charter system. “New Orleans is like a bunch of swift boats: When we need to change directions, we’re able to change nimbly, and quickly.”
The new virus has once again shown us how badly we need swift boats, not ocean liners. It is high time we reinvented our public school systems.
Read the full piece here.
Reinventing the New Orleans Public Education System
If we were creating a public education system from scratch, would we organize it as most of our public systems are now organized? Would our classrooms look just as they did before the advent of personal computers and the internet? Would we give teachers lifetime jobs after their second or third years? Would we let schools survive if, year after year, half their students dropped out? Would we send children to school for only eight and a half months a year and six hours a day? Would we assign them to schools by neighborhood, reinforcing racial and economic segregation?
Few people would answer yes to such questions. But in real life we don’t usually get to start over; instead, we have to change existing systems.
One city did get a chance to start over, however. In 2005, after the third deadliest hurricane in US history, state leaders wiped the slate clean in New Orleans. After Katrina, Louisiana handed all but seventeen of the city’s public schools to the state’s Recovery School District (RSD), created two years earlier to turn around failing schools. Over the next nine years, the RSD gradually turned them all into charter schools—a new form of public school that has emerged over the past quarter century. Charters are public schools operated by independent, mostly nonprofit organizations, free of most state and district rules but held accountable for performance by written charters, which function like performance contracts. Most, but not all, are schools of choice. In 2019, New Orleans’ last traditional schools converted to charter status, and 100 percent of its public school students now attend charters.
Read the full policy report here.
Blog: Does America CARE about Charter Schools?
The $2.2 trillion Corona Aid, Relief, and Economic Securities (CARES) Act appropriated $30.75 billion for education—almost half of which will flow to “Local Education Agencies.” These LEAs include both school districts and many charter schools or networks. But charter laws differ from state to state, and many charter schools authorized by school districts do not have legal status as LEAs.
Will these charters—more than a quarter of all charter schools, according to the National Alliance of Public Charter Schools (NAPCS) —get a piece of the federal relief money? Or will some districts, which may feel hostile toward charters, keep the money for their own schools? And will governors hand out their share fairly?
Governors will distribute $3 billion to K-12 schools and institutions of higher education, as they see fit. State education departments will distribute $13.5 billion to LEAs, based on the relative share of federal Title 1 funding (for low-income children) they received last year. So LEAs with higher percentages of poor children will get more money.
School districts and charters that are LEAs can use the money for a variety of purposes, including buying devices for schools and children so they can continue their learning online and making up for lost time with summer school.
The U.S. Department of Education should immediately issue guidance to governors, state education departments, and school districts requiring that CARES Act funding flow to all charter schools at the same rate and using the same formula as the traditional public schools within a district. (Online charter schools could be exempted, since they have suffered far less disruption than brick-and-mortar schools.)
The CARES Act funds will be distributed to states within 30 days of enactment, based on applications to the U.S. Department of Education. The department has 30 days from the date of receiving a state’s application to respond. If approved, states will be responsible for disbursing the funds within a year of receipt.
Amy Wilkins, senior vice president for advocacy with NAPCS, is optimistic about how CARES Act funding will be disbursed. When asked about whether NAPCS believed charter school families could be punished for the choice they made, Wilkins said, “In this time in which we are all acting together against common challenges and threats, we are confident that school districts will rise to the occasion to ensure that all students benefit from the education funds contained in the CARES Act. It’s almost beyond thinking that anyone would try to undercut charter school students in this moment.”
As the Department of Education finalizes the application states will use, it must include guidance to ensure that charter school students and their families are not penalized for exercising choice in public education.
Blog: Let’s Flatten the Curve on Anti-Charter Politics
Lest anyone still thinks the teachers union in Los Angeles cares a whit about school children, its president, Alex Caputo-Pearl, has again demanded that L.A. Unified School District block any expansion of charter schools. These schools educate almost a quarter of Los Angeles County’s public school students—and do it far more effectively than district-operated schools.
In a letter to Superintendent Austin Beutner and the school board, Caputo-Pearl used the COVID-19 health crisis as his excuse this time. He demanded that the board not approve any new charter schools this spring, since board meetings will probably take place by audio or video conference. Conveniently, he seems to believe the public could not submit comments in such a format.
Caputo-Pearl also said the board should not make any new decisions to allow charters to share space with district-operated schools—something charters have a right to do under state law. Any new sharing would not begin until next fall, but Caputo-Pearl apparently believes the health crisis will still be underway then.
Or perhaps Caputo-Pearl just wants to make life as difficult as possible for the thousands of children on charter school waiting lists.
Charters are free public schools, operated by nonprofit organizations, that cannot select their students. In today’s world, the majority of publicly funded services are delivered by private organizations—in health care, in transportation, in almost everything the public sector does. Charter schools are the manifestation of this trend in education.
Because they have freedom from most bureaucratic rules and are closed if they perform poorly, they produce better results than schools operated by district bureaucracies. In Los Angeles they produce higher test scores, graduation rates, and college preparedness than district-operated schools.
The most detailed study of test scores was done by Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes, an organization embraced by the teachers unions after its first charter school report, more than a decade ago. Its 2014 report on Los Angeles found that charter students in L.A. gained months of learning every year, compared to demographically similar students with similar past test scores in district schools.
But the teachers unions hate charters, because most of their teachers choose not to unionize. Hence as the number of charter school children grows, the unions shrink.
During a strike last year, Caputo-Pearl and UTLA demanded a moratorium on charters and broadcast the false claim that charters were responsible for the district’s financial woes.
Clearly, Caputo-Pearl and United Teachers of Los Angeles don’t care about students’ test scores, graduation rates, or preparation for college or careers. If they did, they would support the expansion of charter schools. They care only about keeping their coffers full of union dues.
While we all do our parts to flatten the coronavirus curve, is it asking too much for teachers unions to flatten the curve on their anti-charter lies? Our crisis today calls for truth and unity, not propaganda and division.
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David Osborne, author of Reinventing America’s Schools: Creating a 21st Century Education System, directs the education work of the Progressive Policy Institute.
Blog: Corporate Citizens in a Time of Crisis
For parents struggling with the uncertainty of employment while also dealing with a global pandemic, paying for an internet connection may be the last thing on their minds. But with the closure of nearly every public and private school in America, many school systems are relying on the internet to make sure their students can keep learning.
Even in the days before COVID 19, a strong and reliable internet connection was integral to functioning in our information age. During this time of social distancing and self-quarantine, a strong internet connection is essential.
Unfortunately, far too many students lack access to a reliable internet connection. According to a Pew Research Study, 44% of households with incomes below $30,000 don’t have broadband. And while many Americans rely on smartphones for internet access, 29% of lower-income people don’t even have smartphones.
For parents struggling to make ends meet, the costs of groceries could take precedent overpaying for the internet.
In a time like this, school system leaders cannot shy away from the mission of providing equitable access to education for all students. Fortunately, corporate citizens like Comcast, Charter Communications, and AT&T are stepping up to help school systems provide internet access. For Comcast President Dave Watson, “It is vital that as many Americans as possible stay connected to the Internet – for education, work, and personal health reasons.”
On March 12th, as school closures began, Comcast announced a number of initiatives to help our nation’s students:
- All Xfinity Wifi hotspots in businesses and outdoor locations are available to anyone for free.
- All Comcast customers receive unlimited data for 60 days for no additional charge.
- Internet Essentials, a service for low-income households that normally costs $9.95 a month, is free for new customers for 60 days.
- New educational content for all grade levels is available to customers, in partnership with Common Sense Media.
Charter Communications announced that its Spectrum service would install both broadband and Wifi for K-12 and college students for free for 60 days, while also opening its Wifi hotspots to the public.
Comcast’s and Charter’s response came in advance of the Federal Communication Commission’s March 24th challenge to providers to take the “Keep America Connected Pledge.” The pledge is for the next 60 days to (1) not terminate service to any residential or business customer unable to pay, (2) waive late fees for any residential or business customer, and (3) open Wifi hotspots to any American who needs them.
On March 24, AT&T announced that it would offer schools activating new lines free wireless data service for 60 days and expand access to its $10/month Access from AT&T service to any household receiving free or reduced-price lunch or Head Start, beginning with two months of free service.
And smaller, regional internet providers have announced similar initiatives.
For large school districts like Prince George’s County Public Schools (PGCPS) in Maryland, ensuring that 135,000 students continue their education is a top priority. With over 60% qualifying for free or reduced lunch, reliable, low-cost, internet is essential.
When asked about the impact of Comcast’s support, PGCPS CEO Dr. Monica Goldson said, “For some of our students, lack of equal access to Wi-Fi hotspots, connected devices, and mobile broadband internet will make continuing their education nearly impossible. It is not because they are unwilling, but these students simply are unable to get online at a time when they have no choice. Public spaces are closed and the economy is sputtering, leaving many to cut back on expenses.”
Schools in many states will likely be closed for at least another month. As parents around the country try to create a sense of normalcy for their kids, it is reassuring to know corporate citizens such as Comcast, Charter, and AT&T are stepping up in a major way.
Blog: Connectivity is Everything
All the Distance Learning Tools in the World Don’t Matter if Kids Can’t Get Online
Now that distance learning is virtually the only learning happening, all levels of government must shift into high gear to ensure that every child in America who needs Internet connectivity has it.
School districts and charter schools across the country are doing their best to distribute laptops and Chromebooks to millions of students forced out of class by the coronavirus. But 14 percent of children have no internet access at home, including nearly 20 percent of black and Latinxstudents and 37 percent of Native American students.
A recent Microsoft survey found that three-quarters of a million Montana households lack Internet access. On American Indian reservations or tribal lands, just over half of Native Americans have access to high-speed internet service–compared to 82 percent of households nationally.
Census data shows that 29 percent of Cleveland households have no internet access. Pew Researchers found in a 2018 survey of 13- to 17-year-olds, one in fiveteens said they often or sometimes can’t complete assignments because they don’t have reliable access to the internet or a computer.
Predictably, some school districts are holding back from providing any distance learning because they can’t ensure that every child has access to it—a decision the New York Post has already labeled “progressive lunacy.”
For instance, Philadelphia’s superintendent told his teachers they could not require students to log on and could not grade work done online or by phone because they “cannot ensure students equal access to technology.” One wonders what this means for high school students who need course credits and GPA scores for college admission.
An affluent suburban Seattle district invested in Wi-Fi “hotspots” to loan to students without internet at home, then halted the effort for similar reasons.
In Montgomery County, Maryland, a public elementary school foundation planned to give money to every family at its school and a neighboring school that needed it for Wi-Fi access, a laptop, or food. The school district would not allow it.
We have to agree with the Post: This is lunacy. We should be rolling out connectivity for all as we begin distance learning, not giving up.
The federal and state departments of education need to make clear to every district in America that they don’t have to deny education to every child just because they can’t provide it equally to all. Then they should start funding a massive effort tomake it universal. After urging from Democratic Senators Michael Bennet, Edward Markey, Brian Schatz and others, the Federal Communications Commissionon Wednesday announced a waiver of federal E-rate rules. Under the E-rate program, until September 30th service providers can give free equipment and services—such as mobile hotspots, improved connections, and connected devices—to schools.
In addition, Comcast–and other providers–are giving free Wi-Fi and the modems and routers needed to access it to low-income families in its service areas for the next 60 days.
Congress and the states should add more funding. Districts are scrambling to design and deploy distance learning programs, while simultaneously ensuringthat children who depend on school for nutrition don’t go hungry.
With state and federal aid, they should go into overdrive to ensure that every child can log on, at adequate speed.
For those outside of areas where free Wi-Fi is on offer, it is time to get creative. As far back as 2014, one district outfitted school buses with Wi-Fi routers and deployed them after hours to park in remote neighborhoods. In this way, California’s Coachella Valley Unified School District–one of the nation’s poorest, spanning 1,200 miles of mountains and valleys–was able to get all of its students online outside of school.
Some rural districts, like Santa Fe, already have Wi-Fi on school buses that make long drives to transport rural students, so the kids can do homework while making the long commute. The U.S. currently has about 480,000 school buses–more than enough to bring Wi-Fi to all 21.3 million offline Americans. And it has almost as many bus drivers—now sitting home with little to do— who could help.
In 2014, the driver of one of Coachella’s buses, Darryl Adams told the Hechinger Report, “Come on! We can do better than this as a nation, especially for our low-income families and our disadvantaged families.’’
Surely, in this most extraordinary of times, we not only can do better–we must.
Tressa Pankovits is Associate director at Reinventing America’s Schools project at Progressive Policy Institute
Marshall and Osborne for The 74: ‘Free College for All’ Is a Non-Starter for Many Voters. New Poll Shows Why Talking Point Is Dangerous for Democrats
Sadly, education has been all but ignored in this year’s Democratic primaries. But a new poll commissioned by the Progressive Policy Institute points toward one reason Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have not lived up to their supporters’ hopes: Their embrace of free college and paying off all student debt strikes many voters as elitist.
Because narrow victories in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania gave Donald Trump his Electoral College win in 2016 — even while he lost the popular vote by 3 million ballots — PPI recently commissioned a poll in those states.
Much of the poll, by Expedition Strategies, dealt with health care, the economy, taxes, business and climate change. (You can find the entire poll here.) But when pollsters asked about promises of free college and the elimination of student debt, the response was anything but enthusiastic. To many voters, these are elite preoccupations that compound the advantages of the already privileged college-going cohort at their expense.
Read the full piece here.