Monday, October 7, 2024

In Case You Missed It – October 7, 2024

Here are links to last week's articles receiving the most attention on NEIFPE's social media accounts. Keep up with what's going on, what's being discussed, and what's happening with public education.

Be sure to enter your email address in the Follow Us By Email box in the right-hand column of our blog page to be informed when our blog posts are published.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

"I think that teacher shortages have existed in the United States for a long time. The pandemic has certainly made the teacher shortage worse in many ways, right? In particular, what we’re seeing is that enrollments and completion in teacher preparation programs have decreased 30 to 35 percent over the last 10 years, so the number of people who are enrolled to become teachers have just decreased substantially over the last 10 years." -- Tuan Nguyen, associate professor of Education at the University of Missouri in Teacher shortages improve, but not everywhere

TEACHER PAY

Yes, What We Pay Teachers Matters

Who is going to teach your children and grandchildren when there are no more teachers? Why would someone choose teaching as a career?

From Nobody Wants This Substack by Anne Lutz Fernandez
Public school teachers once took home salaries in line with workers in similar professions. Through the eighties and into the nineties, they paid a small penalty for choosing to teach; in 1993 the average salary of teachers was about 5% lower than that of others with college degrees. A new report by economist Sylvia Allegretto at the Economic Policy Institute reveals that three decades later, that penalty has grown to nearly 27%—an all-time high.

This penalty has worsened as teacher salaries began a prolonged stagnation.

There are those on the right who argue that this gap isn’t all that meaningful. A recent piece in Reason tries to downplay the impact of the teacher pay penalty by pointing out that averages obscure state-by-state differences. It’s hard to see how this helps their case, though, when teachers pay a penalty in every state and when more than a dozen states across various regions—New Hampshire and Colorado, Oklahoma and Oregon, Georgia and Arizona among them—pay penalties worse than the national average.

Opponents of raises for teachers frequently claim that teachers’ benefits balance out their low pay, but Allegretto’s analysis shows they don’t. When total compensation packages are accounted for, the teacher pay gap is reduced, but only to 16.7%.

Then there’s the argument that teachers aren’t motivated by money...

SCARING THE PUBLIC ABOUT EDUCATION

Cynical Politicians Try to Frighten Us with Inaccurate Stories about Teachers and Public Schools

Attacks on public education continues during this election season. Lies abound.

From Jan Resseger
In the current polarized political season, the press is filled with articles spawned by desperate politicians looking to frighten voters with stories about the collapse of our society. In this narrative of collapse, attacks on the public schools loom large.

The Wall Street Journal‘s Matt Barnum and Melissa Korn quote Donald Trump: “Our public schools have been taken over by the radical left maniacs… We will cut federal funding for any school or program pushing critical race theory.” “The former president has said he would deploy federal powers to pressure schools and universities that he considers to be too liberal. One strategy that he has described would launch civil-rights investigations of schools that have supported transgender rights and racial diversity programs.”

It doesn’t seem to matter in today’s political environment that the extremist political rhetoric about what’s happening in public schools has been shown to be inaccurate. Here is Education Week‘s Sarah Schwartz reporting the response of the American Historical Association: “The longstanding battle over how to teach America’s past has been particularly contentious over the past few years. Conservative commentators have accused history teachers of rampant left-wing bias, ‘indoctrinating’ students into hating their country and rejecting its founding ideals… But this portrait of American classrooms as ideological incubators is largely a fiction… Instead, the research, from the American Historical Association, finds that teachers overwhelmingly say they aim to develop students’ historical thinking skills—teaching them how to think, not what to think—and value presenting multiple sides of every story… The finding echoes history teachers’ responses to attacks on their work…. (I)n interviews with AHA researchers, teachers explained that it was important for them to remain neutral and nonpartisan. ‘I am going to teach the good, the bad, and the ugly. I’m going to tell it like it is and how it happened.’ one teacher from Texas told the researchers. Another, from Illinois, said they didn’t want ‘students knowing my views.'”

INDIANA'S NEXT GOVERNOR

Gubernatorial candidates far apart on education

Mike Braun, Republican candidate for Governor of Indiana, proposes to continue the same right-wing anti-public education plan that has damaged the state's public schools since 2011. A vote for Jennifer McCormick is a vote for Public Education.

From School Matters
The two major-party candidates for governor of Indiana have released their education agendas, and they couldn’t be any more different.

Republican Mike Braun wants to further expand Indiana’s already radical school choice programs, protect “parent rights” and double down on the culture wars. Democrat Jennifer McCormick wants to strengthen local public schools, increase support for preschool and hold accountable all schools that receive state funding.

Both say they want to raise pay and benefits for teachers – a worthwhile goal but likely a tough sell with a legislature intent on cutting taxes.

Their most substantive differences are over funding private schools. Braun wants to expand the state’s nearly half-billion-dollar voucher program to include the wealthiest 3% of Hoosier families. He would also double funding for the “education scholarship account” program, which pays for tuition and services for students with disabilities and their siblings.

VOUCHERS ARE DRAINING INDIANA'S PUBLIC SCHOOLS

Vouchers nearly universal at half of Indiana private schools that take them, data shows

Indiana started with a small voucher program, and expanded it year by year until almost every child in the state is now eligible for a voucher. Voucher advocates in Indiana hope that the only remaining limits are soon removed so that all students in the state, rich and poor alike, will qualify for a voucher.

Most of the students who use vouchers were already enrolled in private schools. The cost of the voucher program is near $500 million for about 70,000 students. The public schools of Indiana enroll one million students.

Indiana's Constitution requires the legislature to fund a single public school system.

"Knowledge and learning, generally diffused throughout a community, being essential to the preservation of a free government; it shall be the duty of the General Assembly...to provide, by law, for a general and uniform system of Common Schools, wherein tuition shall be without charge, and equally open to all."

From Chalkbeat Indiana
...critics like Fuentes-Rohwer of the Indiana Coalition for Public Education say the $439 million price tag for the program in 2023-24 represented a costly diversion of public resources from public schools that the state is constitutionally obligated to fund.

According to the state’s 2023-24 voucher report, if all 70,000 students receiving vouchers had attended public schools, the state would have added over $500 million in public education funding. But most voucher students receiving vouchers have never attended a public school.

“There are so many things you have to go through as a public school system to be transparent,” Fuentes-Rohwer said. “We are very concerned that funding leaves public schools that have the obligation to educate everyone.”

Note: NEIFPE's In Case You Missed It is posted by the end of the day every Monday except after holiday weekends or as otherwise noted.

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Monday, September 30, 2024

In Case You Missed It – September 30, 2024

Here are links to last week's articles receiving the most attention on NEIFPE's social media accounts. Keep up with what's going on, what's being discussed, and what's happening with public education.

Be sure to enter your email address in the Follow Us By Email box in the right-hand column of our blog page to be informed when our blog posts are published.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK

"When lawmakers consider expanding or creating private school voucher programs, their projections often dramatically underestimate the actual costs. They sell a false promise that vouchers will save money, do not budget adequate funds, and then wind up with million dollar shortfalls, necessitating cuts from public education and even tax increases… First, it costs less than the average expenditure to educate some students...The students who are most expensive to educate...tend to remain in public schools, because they cannot find a private voucher school willing to accept them. Yet, because of the voucher program, the state now pays tuition for private school students who never attended public schools...This all adds up to more, not less spending." -- from the National Coalition for Public Education, quoted in Voucher Programs Prove Again and Again What We Already Know


THE COST OF VOUCHERS

Voucher Programs Prove Again and Again What We Already Know

Voucher costs in Indiana...two-thirds of which go to students who never attended public schools and who can afford the cost of a private education...are approaching half a billion dollars a year. That money goes to mostly religious schools even though the Indiana Constitution states (in Article 1, Section 6) that...

"No money shall be drawn from the treasury, for the benefit of any religious or theological institution."

Note also that the state allows voucher accepting schools to reject students on the basis of "religion, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, or academic ability."

From Jan Resseger
As we all know, state legislators across the country originally justified passing small, experimental voucher programs as a way to help poor kids escape from their so-called “failing” public schools. A year ago, at the end of The School Voucher Illusion: Exposing the Pretense of Equity, an authoritative collection of essays by experts on school vouchers, here is what the editors conclude instead:

“As currently structured, voucher policies in the United States are unlikely to help the students they claim to support. Instead, these policies have often served as a facade for the far less popular reality of funding relatively advantaged (and largely White) families, many of whom already attended—or would attend—private schools without subsidies. Although vouchers are presented as helping parents choose schools, often the arrangements permit the private schools to do the choosing…


In states like Ohio, where the legislature made vouchers universal by raising the income eligibility level to 450 percent of the federal family poverty level (with partial vouchers for even wealthier families), the state simply started paying the private school tuition bills that families had been undertaking for generations. In other states like Arizona, the state has been awarding Education Savings Account vouchers for the private educational expenses of children who are not enrolled in public schools, whether to pay for private school tuition vouchers or homeschooling costs...Here is the primary fiscal problem of all these programs, according to Josh Cowen, a professor of education policy at Michigan State University: “It’s not that there is a mass exodus from public to private schools… (W)hat these states are doing is obligating themselves to expenditures that were previously borne by the private sector.”

Indiana is a classic example of a state that has made its old fashioned private school tuition voucher program universally available. This week for Chalkbeat Indiana, Aleksandra Appleton and Mia Hollie report: “Voucher use has soared in Indiana since lawmakers made nearly every student in the state eligible, with more than 90% of students at more than half of all participating schools using a voucher during the 2023-24 school year…. That was true in just 11% of private schools before lawmakers made the Indiana Choice Scholarship available to nearly every student in Indiana by relaxing income eligibility and removing other requirements to participate…. Since lawmakers approved the expansion last year, the number of schools where 100% of students receive a voucher rose from just one in 2022-23 to 28 in 2023-24. Last year, in 178 of the 349 private schools that accept vouchers, more than 90% of students enrolled use a voucher to pay for tuition.” The program cost the state of Indiana $439 million for the 2023-24 school year.

Peter Greene: Why Sex Scandals Matter

From Diane Ravitch
...How could someone who had inveighed against “the woke agenda” and urged the adoption of vouchers to escape that agenda have done what the rumors said? I didn’t think I would touch it with a ten-foot pole. I don’t care what others do in their private lives. I believe in Tim Walz’s credo: “Mind your own damn business.” But I was troubled by the hypocrisy.

Corey worked for Betsy DeVos and was her leading salesman for vouchers. DeVos and her family are rabidly anti-LGBT. For years, they have funded anti-LGBT organizations like the Family Research Council, Focus on the Family, and Alliance Defending Freedom. Yet the rumor was that Corey had performed in gay porn, and there were many videos online to prove it.

One of the alleged virtues of vouchers was that they enable students to escape pedophile teachers and to attend schools that ban LGBT students. I couldn’t make sense of these two lives.

Peter Greene wrote about Corey’s apparent double life.
NEWS FROM THE NETWORK FOR PUBLIC EDUCATION (NPE)

Network for Public Education launches the National Center for Charter School Accountability

The National Center for Charter School Accountability provides research and recommendations on increasing transparency and accountability for charter schools.

From The Network for Public Education and Diane Ravitch
Having spent years covering charter scandals and seeking accountability for charters, the Network for Public Education realized that it could not compete with the high-powered corporate public relations firms representing the charter school industry. So, we decided, the only way to get accountability is to do it ourselves.

So NPE established the National Center on Charter School Accountability, which will produce reviews of charter school performance.

Network for Public Education 2025 National Conference

From The Network for Public Education
Registration is now open for NPE/NPE Action’s 2025 national conference, Public Schools: Where All Students Are Welcome. We can’t wait to see you in Columbus, Ohio, on April 5-6!

Stay tuned for more info about keynote speakers and session topics.

BANNED BOOKS WEEK

Banned books week is over...but book banning continues.

It's Banned Books Week

NOTE: A Facebook account is required to access this article.

From Michael B. Shaffer on Facebook
So here we are in the third day of Banned Books Week 2024, and I want to give a huge shout-out to all of the great teachers in Indiana who have resisted the mandate to clear their shelves of books that one person might find objectionable, in favor of keeping the books that speak to the hearts of kids. What those who want to restrict access to the kinds of books students want, do not realize is that if we are serious about literacy, we must have the books that mean something, books that students want to read, books that students will read!

When we ban books, or sit still while it happens, we are not only giving up a precious freedom, we are also depriving our students the ability to do what my friend Alan Boyko, the retired President of Scholastic Book Fairs, used to say that students need the ability to "find themselves in a book, and then lose themselves in that book."

Banned Books Week

From American Library Association
In a time of deep political divides, library staff across the country are facing an overwhelming number of book ban attempts. In 2023 alone, the American Library Association's Office for Intellectual Freedom tracked 1,247 efforts to censor books and other resources in libraries—an increase of 65% from the year before. In total, 4,240 unique book titles were targeted, many of them representing LGBTQIA+ and BIPOC voices and experiences.

As we gear up for Banned Books Week 2024 (September 22-28), with the theme "Freed Between the Lines," we’re reminded how much is at stake. The freedom to explore new ideas and different perspectives is under threat, and book bans don’t just restrict access to stories—they undermine our rights. Now is the time to come together, celebrate the right to read, and find freedom in the pages of a book. Let’s be "Freed Between the Lines."

LOCAL NEWS

Wells County school district scores Red Wagon status

From the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette**
The Bluffton-Harrison Metropolitan School District has once again earned Red Wagon Corporation status for its fundraising efforts for Riley Hospital for Children, a news release said.

Districts receive this designation when their fundraising equals $1 per student per building in an academic year, the release said. State enrollment data shows Bluffton-Harrison had about 1,800 students last year – the year its recognition honors.

The Wells County school system has contributed more than $300,000 to the Indianapolis-based children’s hospital since 1993, the release said. It indicated each school annually hosts special events – including dress-up days, boat races and an auction – to support the cause.

Note: The Fort Wayne Journal Gazette is behind a paywall. Digital access, home delivery, or both are available with a subscription. Staying informed is essential; one way to do that is to support your local newspaper. For subscription information, go to fortwayne.com/subscriptions/ [NOTE: NEIFPE has no financial ties to the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette]

Note: NEIFPE's In Case You Missed It is posted by the end of the day every Monday except after holiday weekends or as otherwise noted.

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Monday, September 23, 2024

In Case You Missed It – September 23, 2024

Here are links to last week's articles receiving the most attention on NEIFPE's social media accounts. Keep up with what's going on, what's being discussed, and what's happening with public education.

Be sure to enter your email address in the Follow Us By Email box in the right-hand column of our blog page to be informed when our blog posts are published.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK

"...the teacher pay penalty is one more symptom of two issues that are fundamental to so many of our education debates-- the desire to avoid paying one cent more than we absolutely have to for public school funding, and the desire not to pay taxes to educate Those Peoples' Children. Both of those desires are getting full expression in the privatization movement." -- Peter Greene in Does Teacher Pay Matter?

TEACHER PAY

Does Teacher Pay Matter?

It does. But teacher pay alone is not enough.

From Curmudgucation
...the teacher pay penalty-- the gap between teacher pay and pay for similarly-educated professionals-- has been growing over the last three decades to reach an all-time high. The gappage appears to have accelerated in the mid-90s.

Some, like the folks at Reason magazine...argue that it's not so bad because blah blah blah shuffling numbers around. But considering averages and other benefits does not improve the picture.

Fernandez also notes the other perennial argument against paying teachers well-- teachers don't care about money and they aren't motivated by it and boy do my old fart hackles raise at every similar argument posted by someone who also posts that damned stupid "Teachers do it for the outcome, not the income" meme.

Teaching is not supposed to be some act of self-sacrifice, immolating yourself so that you can illuminate the lives of students. For one thing, it's not sustainable. It's not even functional, because (as they don't tell you in teacher school), you can give every last atom of yourself and it won't be enough. You will burn out early, and--bitterest of ironies--you won't even be very good at it, because what can a person who has no life of their own teach students about life?

Don't get me wrong-- teaching is absolutely a noble and supremely worthwhile profession of service. But that doesn't mean teachers shouldn't be paid well.

DON'T ELIMINATE THE USDOE

Eliminating the Education Dept. Would Destroy Public Schools

Carol Corbett Burris is the Executive Director of the Network for Public Education.

From Carol Burris in The Daily Courier (Connellsville, PA)
Since President Jimmy Carter created the modern Department of Education in 1979, the department has faced continuous calls for its abolition. This threat has persisted through Republican administrations, from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump.

Never following through on their campaign promises to abolish it, some presidents have often used the department to push agendas hostile to public schools. Reagan’s department brought exaggerated claims of doom and gloom in A Nation at Risk, denigrating our public schools with a still-existing narrative. And Trump’s secretary of education, Betsy DeVos, did little to hide her disdain for public schools, calling for abolishing the department she ran.

However, no matter how often presidents promise to ax it, ending the department would require an act of Congress. While there is little reason to believe that Congress would agree, given the volatility of government, one can never be sure. At the least, the promise to abolish the department is a rallying cry and a dominant feature of the right-wing agenda to end what it calls “government schools.”

That right-wing agenda, reflected in Project 2025 and to a more limited extent in the Republican platform, is to eliminate democratically governed public schools. It emanates from the vision of Milton Friedman, who believed that public school systems should be replaced by a patchwork of private, home school, religious and semi-public schools like charter schools. Parents would receive funds in a “savings account” to shop among them. Proposers of this voucher-like funding scheme know that public school systems could not survive without reliable systemic funding streams. The remnant of public schools would serve the children no private or charter school wants.
PRIVATIZATION

Why have vouchers "failed to improve test scores or educational outcomes?" Because the most pressing problem in the United States when it comes to education is child poverty.

“…we are likely to find that the problems of housing and education, instead of preceding the elimination of poverty, will themselves be affected if poverty is first abolished.” – Martin Luther King Jr., The Southern Christian Leadership Conference Presidential Address, 8/16/1967

Public School Successes

From Sheila Kennedy
...Some twenty or so years ago, privatization enthusiasts had a standard answer for every perceived government malfunction: let the private sector do it! This approach had multiple, significant drawbacks, and as those drawbacks became too obvious and costly to ignore, the early enthusiasm faded–except in education, where the “market can solve all problems” ideologues were joined by rightwing activists pursuing a vendetta against teachers’ unions, and by religious folks who chafed at separation of church and state and wanted a First Amendment “work-around.”

“How do you improve the performance of the nation’s public schools?” was–and remains– a fair question. Urban school districts, in particular, face multiple challenges, and when the question of how to meet those challenges became an everyday topic following publication of A Nation at Risk, political figures offered two wildly competing suggestions: “the market can solve everything” ideologues insisted that competition from private schools would incentivize public school improvement; supporters of public education lobbied for additional resources, to be deployed in line with reforms suggested by new academic research.

As we know, vouchers won the political debate. It was a disarmingly simple fix, championed by people who not-so-coincidentally stood to gain from it. Unfortunately, however, despite the promises, vouchers have failed to improve test scores or educational outcomes...

The fight over vouchers is an existential battle for America’s public schools

From Linda Blackford in The Charlotte Observer
Advocates of “school choice,” or using public funds to pay for private school, often call it the civil rights issue of our time.

That’s a special kind of gaslighting, not only because numerous studies have shown how little academic progress students make with school vouchers, but also because the school choice movement was actually born out of the horror that parents and politicians had toward the 1954 Brown v. Board decision that would end legal segregation in schools.

That resistance was bolstered by Nobel prize-winning economist Milton Friedman’s book “The Role of Government in Education,” which objected to any government oversight of any kind, and first suggested some kind of tax code changes to subsidize private education.

“It was this idea — what became school vouchers — that allowed segregationists to frame a racist response to the Court’s desegregation orders as an issue of markets and what we would call today parental choice,” writes Josh Cowen in his timely new book, “The Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers.”

The book is a fascinating history of how the school choice movement began in segregation, then caught steam as a way to help poor and minority students in failing systems.

WHAT DO PARENTS KNOW?

What Do Parents Know About Public Education?

The most important facet of education is the relationship between the student and the teacher. The second most important is the relationship between the teacher and the student's parents/guardians. Communication is important.

From Nancy Flanagan in Teacher in a Strange Land
Kappan recently took a look at American adults’ knowledge of public schools:

Our findings shed light on a key question: What do adults know about U.S. education? Specifically, what do they know about what is taught, who makes decisions, the role of parents, and the belief systems driving education policy? Our results have important implications for how we might support children and improve the education system.

No kidding, Sherlock.

The survey results would come as no surprise to veteran public school educators: Half of adults don’t know what is/is not taught in their local school. Most are unsure about who’s making curricular decisions. Most are unclear on the impact of privatization on their public schools. Some of the surveyed issues (Critical Race Theory and learning loss) revealed a complete lack of understanding.

Least surprising finding: Adults’ perceptions of what’s happening in public schools mainly come from their own personal experiences (and this includes people with no K-12 children in the home). The percentage of people who read books or articles, watch cable news or videos, or listen to podcasts about education is small. People who get their education news from newspapers? Fifteen percent. Second highest source of ed news? Social media.

That’s a lot of guesswork, memes and faulty memories.

FORT WAYNE AND INDIANA

The challenge of chronic absenteeism

From the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette**
Indiana’s battle against chronic absenteeism mirrors a broader national trend that has proven difficult to reverse in the post-pandemic era. Chronic absenteeism is the rate of students absent from school for any reason for at least 10% of the school year.

While the Indiana Department of Education noted earlier this month that the state made progress last school year, with the absenteeism rate falling to 17.8%, the improvement still leaves more than 1 in 6 students habitually missing school.

Allen County’s chronic absentee rates are mixed. Southwest Allen County Schools, for example, posted an impressive absenteeism rate of less than 1%, the lowest the district has seen in more than a decade. By contrast, Fort Wayne Community Schools and East Allen County Schools struggled with rates higher than 20%. However, FWCS did see modest improvement.

Core change: With deadline looming, state must move rapidly on new diploma requirements

By Indiana State Representatives Phil GiaQuinta and Kyle Miller in the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette**
Indiana is in the middle of redesigning its high school diploma requirements. Given the importance of getting this right, the Indiana State Board of Education and Department of Education are required to engage in a public comment period to hear from Hoosiers about their feedback on the proposal.

When the first draft came out earlier this year, there was widespread outcry from parents, educators and our state universities about how the proposal focused too much on nebulous work-based learning and external internship requirements and would not adequately prepare students to meet admissions requirements to Purdue, Indiana University and other in-state institutions.

Thankfully, the department of education and board of education heard our concerns, and the second draft, which has been unveiled but not yet fleshed out in the form of a draft agency “rule,” is a marked improvement. However, we believe it can improve more.

That’s why we hosted a town hall on the redesign this week and invited local education leaders to join us to discuss the plan’s promises, pitfalls and remaining questions.



JOIN US

An Evening with Jennifer McCormick

NEIFPE is proud to co-sponsor this event featuring Jennifer McCormick, candidate for Governor of Indiana. We hope you can attend.

Click HERE to register for the September 25th event:






**Note: The Fort Wayne Journal Gazette is behind a paywall. Digital access, home delivery, or both are available with a subscription. Staying informed is essential; one way to do that is to support your local newspaper. For subscription information, go to fortwayne.com/subscriptions/ [NOTE: NEIFPE has no financial ties to the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette]

Note: NEIFPE's In Case You Missed It is posted by the end of the day every Monday except after holiday weekends or as otherwise noted.

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