issue: Education

Online Courses Cost Too Much—So Do Onsite Classes

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

After welcoming undergraduates back to campus, Notre Dame, Michigan State, and the University of North Carolina (among others), experienced outbreaks of COVID-19. The result—they switched back to remote learning. With 26,000 cases of coronavirus linked to college campuses, more will soon follow. While some of those schools will offer discounts for online courses, many others won’t. Is this fair?

Students don’t think so. In a recent survey, 93 percent of undergraduates said online tuition should be reduced. This result isn’t a surprise. Most of us equate “online” with “less expensive.” But while other industries have been able to cut prices taking advantage of technology and the Internet—colleges and universities (with the exception of massive online courses or MOOCs) typically charge the same for online and onsite courses. Why?

Read Paul’s full op-ed here.

Fix Higher Ed’s Broken Model

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The Covid-19 pandemic and recession will leave lasting marks on many major U.S. institutions, and higher education is no exception. Last spring, as most of the economy shut down, America’s colleges and universities also closed their campuses and shifted to online, video-teaching, or some combination of the two.

The experience likely will trigger a searching debate over the relative merits of online versus classroom instruction in higher education. But it already has shown that many U.S. colleges have been resilient enough to deliver a high-quality learning experience amid an unprecedented public health emergency.

If that’s the upside, here’s the downside: Once the pandemic is behind us, there will be fewer schools to welcome students, and fewer families that can afford to send them to college.

Many of America’s colleges and universities have lived on the economic margins for a long time, able to postpone tough budget choices so long as students could get federal loans to finance the rising price of a college education. A 2016 report by Ernst & Young found, there are 800 colleges vulnerable to “critical strategic challenges” because they depend on tuition for more than 85% of their revenue. Already more than 90 colleges have closed in the last three years, according to EducationDive, and that number will likely increase dramatically because of the impact of Covid-19.

The pandemic, in short, may bring to a boil a long-simmering crisis in higher education financing caused by profligate spending and mismanagement. Tuition and fees have skyrocketed since the 1970s, increasing by 2020 percent at private nonprofit four-year schools and 285 percent at four-year public colleges and universities. Though some higher education institutions have frozen or roll-backed tuition because of the pandemic and its impact on family income and savings, many others have marched ahead with their tuition hikes.

As America recovers from the Covid-19 crisis, policymakers and educators should give high priority to fixing higher education’s broken finance model. Building a more resilient education system, where schools are less dependent on tuition to survive and better skilled in providing different modalities of learning, is the key to moving forward.

More specifically, PPI proposes the following reforms:

1. Expand opportunities for qualified applicants at leading universities by creating more high-quality online and virtual courses and degrees. Many of America’s top schools already have significant experience in offering online education (where everything is online, lectures, assignments, readings) and virtual education (remote learning typically by videoconferencing). By combining in person, online, and virtual learning, schools could expand college enrollments by 10 to 25 percent, helping to expand access to America’s best public and private schools. For example, students could take their introductory courses online or virtually, and then shift to in-person classes for their majors. Schools also could offer an online/virtual version of their bachelor’s degree in certain specialties.

2. Cut the cost of higher education. Even before the pandemic, the cost of higher education was reaching a tipping point, with total debt held by students and parents now at half a trillion dollars — more than total credit card debt in America.

Yet despite the warning signs, few schools have made progress toward controlling tuition, much less reducing it. Most university presidents have called for more government aid to students rather than subjecting their institutions to touch-minded fiscal scrutiny and finding ways to cut costs and hold down expenses.

While those who call for the federal government to provide more aid to students are well-intentioned, experience shows that opening the spigots allows colleges and universities to inflate prices even more, thereby eating up most of the additional assistance. A better approach is to use some of the almost $75 billion in direct federal spending on higher education to leverage cuts in college tuition and fees. Schools can bring down the costs of tuition, and federal and state governments should require them to do so as part of any bargain to increase aid. There are a number of ways they can do this:

  • Reduce Administrative Bloat. As my colleague Ben Ginsberg has noted, over the past 40 years, the growth rate in the number of administrative staff at colleges and universities has been five times that of faculty. Jobs faculty used to do, including admissions, have now become the province of a cadre of overpaid “management” staff who spend days and weeks devising new rules and procedures that stifle creativity and initiative and bloat university budgets. Schools should commit to cutting administrative expenses, including staff, travel, as well as association fees, and salaries of every school leadership position (presidents, provosts, deans, vice deans, associate deans, etc.) by five percent for the next three years.
  • More Teaching. Teaching loads at research universities have declined almost 50 percent in the past 30 years, according to the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. While university research is often of great societal value, teaching should be given equal if not greater consideration. After all, tuition is the main source of revenue for most colleges and universities. Over the next five years, colleges should require tenured and full-time faculty to teach one additional course per year at the median pay rate for adjuncts –$2700. According to the American Association of University Professors, there are over 52,000 tenured or non-tenured
    full-time faculty in the U.S. If each agreed to teach one additional course during the next academic year at 20 students per class, the number of course slots would increase by one million.
  • Three-Year Degrees. Three-year degree programs are common in much of Europe, and students who graduate with bachelor’s degrees from prestigious institutions such as Oxford, Cambridge, or the London School of Economics typically do so in just three years. Transitioning to a three-year degree system would force U.S. universities to streamline their curricula and cut unnecessary degree requirements that pad educational expenses for students without enhancing the value
    of their degree. Making a 3-year bachelor’s degree the norm in the United States as well could cut the cost of tuition, fees, room & board by up to 25 percent. There are a variety of ways schools could shift to three-year degrees. Schools could award course credit (not just course waivers), for Advanced Placement (for students with a score of three or higher), International Baccalaureate, and other college-level coursework completed by students in high school. Schools could also give students credits for work experience and internships even if those jobs paid wages. And universities could create accelerated bachelors/masters programs so that students could earn both degrees within five years rather than in six or seven years as is currently the case.

The coronavirus pandemic has tested our country’s capacity to adapt and improvise in the face of a nationwide quarantine of indefinite duration. So far, many of America’s colleges and universities have stepped up to the challenge by shuttering their on-campus operations and swiftly moving students to virtual education. But others, operating on the slimmest of economic margins, are unlikely to survive the pandemic recession.

To make our higher education system more resilient against future shocks of this kind, lawmakers and educators must now focus on two critical tasks. The first is refining and improving remote learning and striking the right balance between online and classroom instruction. The second is developing a new financing model for higher education, one that makes colleges more cost-effective and affordable, instead of relying on ever-growing public subsidies to chase ever-rising tuition costs.

Create More Innovation Schools

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The nation is embroiled in a fierce debate over whether or not to reopen public schools this fall. Governors facing fresh outbreaks are rightly reluctant to act in haste, while President Trump has threatened to withhold federal aid to districts that don’t open on schedule. Everyone wants to see their kids get back to school when it’s safe. But the deeper question is how to make our public schools more resilient against this still unfolding crisis—and more adaptable as other challenges arise in the future.

The pandemic posed a revealing test of our adaptability. Too many school systems reacted slowly and had trouble finding effective ways to deliver remote education (and food) to their students. In other places, such as New Orleans, districts and schools were remarkably nimble. Our goal should not be just returning to the status quo ante COVID, as Trump insists, but building a more nimble, adaptable way of organizing public education in America.

How bad was it this spring? By April 3, three weeks after school districts began shutting down, 76 percent of the 82 districts studied by the University of Washington’s Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) still provided no instruction to students. More distressing, by May 22 a third of them provided no instruction.

But even that finding was overly optimistic. In a later study of 477 districts, a statistically representative sample of all districts, “We found just one in three districts expect teachers to provide instruction, track student engagement, or monitor academic progress for all students—fewer districts than our initial study suggested,” CRPE reported. “Far too many districts are leaving learning to chance during the coronavirus closures.” Since “school districts in affluent communities are twice as likely as their peers in more economically disadvantaged communities to expect teachers to deliver real-time lessons to groups of students,” many students in poorer communities “were unlikely to receive consistent instruction in spring 2020.”

The most damning finding: “Only 14.5 percent of school districts with the highest concentration of students receiving free or reduced-price lunch expect teachers to provide live instruction.”

National student surveys reflected the same disappointing reality: 41 percent of teens had not attended any online or virtual classes; 78 percent reported spending only one to four hours per day on online learning; 32 percent reported two hours or less; and nearly one in four said they were connecting with their teachers less than once a week. “In a survey by YouthTruth, only half of students say that while schools were closed their teachers gave them assignments that really helped them learn, and just 39 percent say they learned a lot every day,” reports CRPE Director Robin Lake. “According to YouthTruth, only 50 percent of students say they were able to focus on learning and only 41 percent said they were motivated to do schoolwork.”

CRPE found more rapid adaptation when it studied the responses of 18 charter management organizations (CMOs), which operate networks of public charter schools. By April 3 44 percent of these CMOs were providing instruction and monitoring student progress, and by May 22 only 17 percent still provided no instruction. Yet charter schools have higher percentages of low-income and minority students, who are less likely to have computers and internet access at home, than districts. CRPE found that CMOs quickly redefined teachers roles and responsibilities to fit the new reality—using teacher leaders for each grade to lead the redesign of instruction, record sample lessons, and organize professional development for other teachers, for instance.

Unlike district schools, charters control their own operations; they are not subject to most state and district rules. While district principals and teachers are constrained by bureaucratic rules and collective bargaining agreements, most charter leaders and teachers can pivot quickly when necessary. On the other hand, districts (and larger CMOs) had the resources to purchase and distribute computers and hotspots quickly, a big advantage. To adapt to remote learning effectively, in other words, school systems needed strong central offices capable of marshaling resources but decentralized operation of schools, so principals and teachers could quickly implement remote education.

Perhaps the best example was New Orleans, where every public school is a charter. Within three school days of the closure, more than half the schools were handing out free meals. By May 20 schools and the district, working together, had distributed over a million meals to students and families. Within three weeks of closure, the district had procured thousands of laptops and hotspots, which it then delivered to schools for distribution to those who needed them.

“By March 23, the beginning of the second week of school building closures, at least 97% of New Orleans public schools had begun providing their students with some form of physical and/or digital educational resources to continue learning,” reports New Schools for New Orleans. “Responses to a Louisiana Department of Education (LDOE) survey in mid-April show that teachers at 100 percent of New Orleans schools were reaching out to their students across all grade levels at least weekly. Teachers at approximately 90 percent of New Orleans schools were providing students in all grades with feedback on their work. Roughly 80 percent of schools were delivering at least some instruction of new content across all grade levels, as opposed to solely providing assignments in which students review and practice material taught previously.”

This pandemic will not be the last time our school systems need such resilience. Hurricanes, tornadoes, terrorist attacks, future pandemics, fiscal crises and more lie in our future. We need school systems capable of rapid adaptation to new conditions: systems with lean but capable central offices that can steer well but empowered school leaders and teachers who can row —i.e. operate schools—effectively.

This combination is possible in a system of charter schools, whether it is a district like New Orleans or a CMO. But it is also possible with district schools that are given charter-like autonomy, often called “innovation schools,” “partnership schools,” “pilot schools,” or “renaissance schools.”

While these schools should be given significant autonomy, so their leaders can make key hiring, budgetary, and management decisions usually reserved for the central office, they must also be held accountable for their performance. Not all autonomous schools will succeed, particularly with low-income students, so districts need to weed out the failures, replacing them with stronger operators. With autonomy must come accountability.

More than a dozen school districts across the nation are converting significant numbers of their schools to this model. The best approach, in our view, is that of Indianapolis Public Schools, which has converted a third of its schools to nonprofit organizations with full autonomy and five-year performance agreements. They are called “innovation network schools,” and they include restarts of failing schools, new startups, conversions of district schools, and conversions of charter schools. Since they were launched five years ago, they have been the fastest improving group of schools in the district.

To be ready for the next crisis, states should create incentives for districts to do this, both carrots and sticks. Many states have sticks already: when a district school is rated failing for four, five, or six years, some states can close the school, hand it to a charter operator, and/or appoint a new school board. But Texas has shown how effective it can be to add carrots. There, districts that recruit nonprofit organizations to operate “partnership schools” receive about $1,000 per student per year in extra funding for those schools.

Other states should pass similar legislation. (PPI is preparing an extensive report outlining the most effective methods to do this, complete with model legislation.) With President Biden’s leadership, Congress should enact and his education department should implement a financial incentive to encourage states to pass such legislation and districts to implement it. President Obama’s Race to the Top showed how effective financial incentives can be, particularly when states face fiscal crises. By devoting as little as $2-3 billion to challenge grants for states that empower and encourage their districts to shift toward a more decentralized model, the federal government could speed up a transition that is already underway but moving far too slowly. In today’s world of rapid change, extraordinary technologies, and growing inequality, we need nimble, decentralized public systems full of innovative, empowered school leaders and teachers.

Post-Pandemic, Joe Biden Needs to Rethink His K-12 Education Plans

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The Covid-19 pandemic has shown people some real flaws in our public education systems. If Joe Biden is elected, will he fix them?

Many school districts had trouble adapting to the sudden closure and were never able to deliver effective distance learning. Many parents were surprised how low schools’ expectations were and disappointed by the quality of education their children were receiving.

Different children had very different experiences with distance learning. Even more than usual, they will arrive at school next fall with different needs. Batch processing—teaching an entire classroom the same thing at the same pace—will work even worse than usual.

We need an education system that is adaptable, that meets all students where they are, that helps them move at a pace that works for them, and that has high expectations for all of them. As many schools have demonstrated, children rise to the expectations we set for them.

As we reopen schools, we shouldn’t simply restore the old public education system. We should aim higher and apply the lessons of the last four months to building a more flexible, resilient K-12 school system.

Read more here.

To Open or Not To Open: Educational Equity Under COVID

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The Reinventing America’s Schools Project sponsored an engaging discussion entitled “To Open or Not To Open: Educational Equity Under COVID.”

Over 4,000 parents, educators, advocates, funders, journalists, and policy makers registered to hear from experts in teaching, parental engagement, system leadership and health on how to equitably reopen schools in the fall.

Our moderator and panel discussed the health, policy, and budgetary factors school systems should consider before making a decision grounded in educational equity for all students.

The Reinventing America’s Schools Project was glad to sponsor such an important conversation at this time. Thanks to Alma Vivian Marquez, George Parker, Paul Vallas, and Dr. Leana Wen for joining our Deputy Director Curtis Valentine!

Watch here.

Opinion: Bridgeport schools must do more to prepare for fall

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Bridgeport Public School students were in trouble before the pandemic shuttered schools in March. Each year, BPS students take the “Smarter Balance” state tests. On the 2019 test, not a single BPS school recorded 50 percent of its students meeting or exceeding expectations for their grade level in reading, with the exception of two select enrollment magnet schools.

At seven BPS schools, fewer than 20 percent of students scored at grade level in reading, with just 10 percent of students proficient at Cesar Batalla School, and just 9.5 percent meeting or exceeding expectations at Luis Munoz Marin Elementary. Scores in math were no better — in many cases, they were worse.

What does this look like when we turn the statistics into living, breathing children? Well, from those seven BPS schools with fewer than 20 percent of students scoring at grade level, the state counted a total of 3,466 student test scores. Of those 3,466 kids, only 444 of them had learned what they should have by that point in their schooling. The vast majority, 3,022 kids, are behind, and had not learned what they need to succeed at more challenging coursework in the next grade.

This spring, the pandemic closed BPS before students could take the state test, to see if they had done any catching up since the previous year. Since 1906, researchers have been studying the “summer slide,” or, the amount of learning students lose over summer when schools are closed. One of the biggest studies in recent times showed that students can forget as much as 25 to 30 percent of what they learned the previous year over the roughly 10 weeks of summer vacation. This year, if schools really do open as scheduled, BPS students will have been out of the classroom for 24 weeks — a solid six months.

In a normal year, there would be no reason to expect the massive numbers of BPS students who are behind would do better in the following grade without some kind of intervention, like tutoring, remedial work in summer school, and so on. In this very abnormal year, with its huge gap in continuous learning, BPS has a heightened responsibility to marshal every available resource to reach its already-behind students and ensure they do everything humanly possible to give them the attention and instruction to which they are entitled.

Read the full piece here.

Teacher-centric is good, but student-centric is better

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

But the “unity” task force left out some important voices. It included both presidents of the two largest teachers’ unions, as well as several vocal critics of public charter schools. Excluded from the task force was any representative of the 3.3 million mostly Black and brown families who depend on charter schools for equitable access to quality education. In fact, no Black education stakeholders, other than Rep. Marcia Fudge (D-Ohio), were given a seat at this particularly important table — a puzzling omission against the backdrop of current events, not to mention the Obama-Biden administration’s strong backing of charters.

Given its makeup, it’s no surprise that the task force report trots out the oft-refuted canard that charter schools “undermine” traditional schools. The National Education Association (NEA) used identical language in a 2017 policy statement pledging “forceful support” for limiting charter schools. “The growth of charters has undermined local public schools and communities, without producing any overall increase in student learning and growth,” the NEA claimed.

Read the full piece here.

WEBINAR: What Worked: Remote Instruction During COVID-19

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

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.

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

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

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

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

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

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

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

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

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

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

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

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.

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

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

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

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.