One simple if unexpected answer: Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid.

Republicans had stopped confirmation of many of President Obama’s executive and judicial appointments in late 2013. Reid, then the majority leader in charge of the Senate calendar and procedure,  so that all nominees except those to the Supreme Court would need a simple majority of those voting, rather than 60 votes, to be confirmed. (Education Secretary John King, for example, was confirmed this spring in a 49–40 vote.)

That change eliminated the need for nominees with bipartisan appeal, but with the GOP holding just 51 or 52 seats in the Senate next year (pending a runoff in Louisiana), it is essential that Trump’s nominees maintain near-universal support among Republicans.

And that’s perhaps one of the reasons Rhee’s nomination was doomed — her staunch support of the Common Core would be a deal-breaker for many Senate Republicans.

Rhee is a Democrat, but that wasn’t enough to win her wide support among Senate Democrats. The reforms she advocated as chancellor of DC Public Schools and in years since through Students First — specifically the push to remove ineffective teachers from the classroom — won her few friends among teachers unions, an influential group for Democrats, already disinclined to help the president-elect.

Rhee might have received a few votes from reform-minded Democrats, but likely not enough to offset defections by Republicans opposed to the Common Core. In short, the votes for Rhee just weren’t there.

Rhee removed herself from the running the day before DeVos was named, releasing a  that said she was “not pursuing a position with the administration.” She effectively cleared the decks for DeVos while also providing a sharp contrast that made DeVos seem more appealing to some Republicans.

Unlike Rhee, there is little in DeVos’s background likely to scare off fellow Republicans.

She’s been a GOP stalwart, party leader and major donor for many years, and her work through the American Federation for Children has long focused on school choice, through charters and various private-school-choice programs, such as vouchers.

On her website Wednesday, she criticized the Common Core, saying she supports high standards but that the Common Core has turned into a “federalized boondoggle.”

(More at ����Ӱ��: Common Core, Trumped: Ed Secretary Hopeful DeVos Aligns With Pence in Pushing Local Standards)

Sen. Lamar Alexander, chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, on Wednesday  and vowed to move swiftly on her nomination in January. 

“Betsy has worked for years to improve educational opportunities for all children. As secretary, she will be able to implement the new law fixing No Child Left Behind just as Congress wrote it, reversing the trend to a national school board and restoring to states, governors, school boards, teachers and parents greater responsibility for improving education in their local communities,” Alexander added.

That doesn’t mean Democrats will make DeVos’s confirmation easy.

Sen. Patty Murray, who will retain the top Democratic spot on the HELP Committee, put out a  late Wednesday promising to “scrutinize her record closely.”

“President-elect Trump has made a number of troubling statements over the course of his campaign on a range of issues that a future Secretary of Education will be charged with implementing and enforcing — from education policy, to civil rights and equality of opportunity, to his personal views on sexual assault and harassment, and more,” Murray said. “Right now students, parents, teachers and school leaders across the country are demanding to know how his Secretary of Education will ensure the safety and respect of all students, of all backgrounds, all across this country—and I will be focused throughout this process on how his nominee intends to do just that.”

More Betsy DeVos Analysis:

Keierleber: New to Team Trump, DeVos Has Long Been on Team Pence

Stringer: The First 6 Things to Know About Betsy DeVos 

Petrilli:

The Dick & Betsy DeVos Family Foundation provides funding to ����Ӱ��, and the site’s Editor-in-Chief, Campbell Brown, sits on the American Federation for Children’s board of directors, which was formerly chaired by Betsy DeVos. Brown played no part in the reporting or editing of this article. The American Federation for Children also sponsored ����Ӱ��’s 2015 New Hampshire education summit.

����Ӱ�� is supported by donations from foundations, corporate sponsors and individuals. Our reporters play no role in cultivating financial relationships with any of our contributors. Donors do not dictate editorial content and understand that ����Ӱ�� may publish content that does not reflect their views or preferences.

Adding 600 troops to Islamic State fight is "absolute minimum"

— Ryan Zinke (@RepRyanZinke)

So proud that is supporting . The Historic Congressional Race That Nobody’s Watching

— Vanessa Cardenas (@vcardenasDC)

Updated Aug. 3; see previous 74 interviews, including former Education Secretary Arne Duncan and U.S. Senator and education committee Chairman Lamar Alexander.

Sen. Tom Harkin, the liberal stalwart who represented Iowa in the House and Senate for a combined 40 years, came to a sad if predictable conclusion during his congressional career: Education is not a priority in America.

And that lack of focus has real consequences, he said, with the quality of a child’s education boiling down to the luck of which family he happens to be born into.

“Is that sort of a national statement of ours?” he asked rhetorically in an interview with ����Ӱ��. “Is that what people want to campaign on? Is that what a president wants to stand for?”

Harkin served on the funding and bill-writing committees covering education for nearly his entire career in the Senate, serving as chairman of both. Under Harkin’s tenure at the Senate Health Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, Congress passed long-overdue reauthorizations of bills governing federal child care subsidies and workforce training programs, and his committee released a blockbuster report on .

The HELP Committee under his leadership twice approved , but Harkin couldn’t get floor time to consider the bills in the full Senate. Unlike the Every Student Succeeds Act, Harkin’s proposals kept large parts of the NCLB federal accountability apparatus in place.

Harkin — compelled by the experiences of his late brother Frank, who was deaf — has long focused on issues surrounding disability. He wrote several smaller bills aimed at expanding the rights of students and others with disabilities and was the author of the landmark Americans with Disabilities Act.

In the year and a half since his retirement from Congress, his main project has been organizing the inaugural . The conference, Dec. 8 and 9 in Washington, D.C., will bring together disability advocates, educators, employers and others to discuss how to better provide productive, dignified work to people with disabilities.
 

The interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity:

����Ӱ��: What do you think of the Every Student Succeeds Act?

Harkin: Overall, I give it a positive. I have concerns that, in fact, we are going back to where we were before and leaving it up to states and local education agencies to sort of self-correct and to make sure that students who have been underserved in the past are adequately served with qualified teachers and that they are included in all aspects of educational opportunities. That was the good thing about No Child Left Behind.
 

I was involved in No Child Left Behind, and I remember being at the White House … when [President] George Bush was there and we had agreed, basically I thought, agreed upon a funding stream for No Child Left Behind … The idea was there was going to be a funding stream for No Child Left Behind. That never materialized. We kept falling further and further behind. The hammer on No Child Left Behind stayed there, but the states and local education agencies were not given the resources … The Bush Administration reneged on the funding. We got wrapped up in the war and all that kind of stuff. We just never could get adequate funding for No Child Left Behind. A lot of people say NCLB was a failure. Well, it was a failure because we never funded it, adequately enough, more than anything else. 

The good thing, the really good thing about No Child Left Behind was that every subgroup had to be distinguished and subgroups have to be identified, and [there was] accountability for every subgroup. What we found was, even with the funding restrictions in No Child Left Behind, kids with disabilities were being included more and more, as a subgroup, and schools were held accountable. We found that the graduation rate … between 2002 and 2013, the national high school graduation rate increased from 47 percent to 62 percent for kids with disabilities. Now by God, that’s something that I like …

The good thing about this new bill, and I credit Sen. (Patty) Murray for doing this, is that it keeps this subgroup accountability. Therefore parents and communities are able to tell how well students are doing, especially students with disabilities and students living in poverty. To me, that was just essential and something that I insisted on in our bill when we passed it a couple years ago. You know we passed it out of our committee twice, but I could never get it on the floor … (I wanted) to go to the floor, but I wanted to see the House come up with a bipartisan bill like we did. I got Republican votes, even though some of them said they might want to try to amend it on the floor, I said, ‘That’s fine, that’s part of the process.’ But the House insisted on having a purely partisan bill. And therefore we never got to the floor. I credit Sen. (Lamar) Alexander and Sen. Murray for getting that done this year.

I am concerned, as I said, I’m concerned about LEAs (local education authorities, i.e. districts and school boards) now going back to where we were before, that there’s so much flexibility in there on how states determine how to intervene. We can identify the subgroups, but how are they going to intervene on this? And how’s the funding going to come to make sure that students with disabilities and others, high-need students, have the adequate resources, in order to succeed in (post)-secondary education? That’s my biggest concern.

Was your concern about funding about Title I or some separate NCLB-specific program?
 

There needs to be more Title I funding, and the Title I funding needs to be directed …

We had a problem with Title I money in the past and how it was distributed, and we changed it so it focused more Title I money on schools that were underperforming in high-poverty areas, for example … I’m just hopeful that this new law doesn’t backtrack on that. I’m afraid it might, in terms of the quote, flexibility, that states are given. And states are just as tight with their money in education as the federal government.

May I make a statement right up front here? It had become clear to me after 30 years on the Senate education committee … that education is simply not a priority in the United States of America, and it is not a priority in our states. It’s just not. It comes after everything else. It comes after you get your budgets for everything else, then you think about education. It is not a priority. People think it is, they say it is, but it’s simply not.

You look at Title I money and the money that the states are putting in, and a lot of times that money is skewed away from what it’s intended to do. And that’s what concerns me about this, quote, flexibility …

Local school boards have discriminated against poor kids and kids with disabilities for years, for decades. It was the well-placed schools that seemed to get all the money and all the resources. We tried to change that with Title I.

As you know, in America, our system of funding for elementary and secondary education is based on property taxes … Why is it that the quality of any American child’s education be determined by where that child lives? Why? I’ve been talking about this for years. If you’re lucky enough to be born to a wealthy or even an upper-middle income family and live in a great area, you’ve got a great school. If you’re unlucky enough to be born to a poor parent or a single parent and you’re in the inner city or a low-income rural area in Appalachia, well, you simply don’t have good schools. Is that sort of a national statement of ours? Is that what people want to campaign on? Is that what a president wants to stand for? …

Well, if you don’t, then you can’t just leave it up to local education agencies and local governments in states to fill that in, because this is based on property taxes. Some states do have equalization formulas in their budgets … but it never quite gets to the point of really thorough support and quite frankly, and here I’m going off a little bit, it’s not just a matter of equalization at this point. Some poor areas and some students in those areas, in rural areas, inner cities, need more aid. They need even more resources, i.e. money, to hire better teachers and have better schools and better equipment and better technology in order to move them up …  

It’s not just a matter of saying it. I read recently some state said they were going to make sure, I think it was New Jersey, that every student in the state gets the same … and they say well that’s fair. No it’s not fair. And so that’s why I’m coming full circle on this bill …

We’re going back to that old system, we’re going to leave it to the states and local communities, to make these decisions. We were there before and we saw what it got us. The one good thing about this bill is we still have accountability for the subgroups, they’ve got to be identified in how well they’re doing, and to me that is that bright spot in that piece of legislation.

There was something else in that bill that Patty Murray got, and that was early child education, it encourages states and LEAs to use Title I for early childhood programming. As long as that money is really targeted towards the low-income families and kids in poor areas, that could be a great boost, as long as that money’s not diluted in the way it has been in the past.

Would it be safe to assume you support the department’s proposed Title I funding regulations?

Without a doubt. Yes, of course. Again, I think I’m hearing from the other side ‘the national school board,’ here we go, trying to impose. No. We’re trying to solve a problem that’s been there for a long time and which we tried to solve with No Child Left Behind, and that was to redirect resources to areas that need it the most … Everything I’ve heard and read, this is the proper way to go, yes.

We’re overdue for a reauthorization of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. What are you looking for the next time that comes up?

… Basically I can’t even call up a friend of mine, a senator that I know, to say here’s how I feel, here’s what I think, even though I’m not representing a company.  prohibit members of Congress from lobbying their former colleagues for two years after leaving office.] It’s really quite strict. I haven’t been able to do that, but in January I will be.

I hope that by next year we’ll see some movement on a reauthorization of IDEA. … Basically what needs to be done is more inclusion of kids with disabilities in mainstream education. I want the IDEA also to take what we did in the WIOA (Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act) bill (requiring states to set aside 15 percent of a certain pot of money to help students with disabilities transition into the workforce) …

I want to see IDEA also incorporate that into the new bill, not something separate and apart, but being part of IDEA. Just again, more inclusion, more accountability, more focus on assistance and support services for teachers in school …

You  very early in the primary. Why?

I’ve known her for so long. I served with her on the education committee in the Senate, and I just know how well she works with others. She listens and absorbs things and can find common ground, and I think we sorely need that in the future. I agree with President Obama that she’s better prepared to be president than anyone in the last 100 years … That’s why I supported her.

And, of course, she’s long been a supporter of early childhood education, also one of your priorities.

… Back in the late ‘80s, first under Reagan and Bush there was this committee … This board was made up of all these big, high CEOs of all these companies. It started because President Reagan said he wanted to have a group of business people look at education in America and what we needed to do … He didn’t want a lot of pointy-headed liberals and people like that, he wanted business people who were successful to tell us what we needed to do in education …

After three or four years of hearings and examining education, their executive summary stated that we must understand that education begins at birth and the preparation for education begins before birth. The whole little book they put out was on how we have to focus on early childhood education, how we have to focus on maternal and child health care … and that was 1990.

I’ve been waving that book ever since. I think six years ago, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce commissioned another study … And guess what, here it is almost 20 years later, they said the same thing. Here’s the business community of America saying we’ve got to put more money into early childhood education. The business community, they get that, but we’ve never been able to get it through the thick heads of policymakers and governors …

We’ve got to put a lot more into early childhood education. I’ll lay you a bottom line, there won’t be an extra nickel for it. And that’s the problem, isn’t it? They’ll say you should do all this stuff but no one wants to pay for it because education simply is not a priority.

There hasn’t been a lot of discussion of K-12 education during this presidential campaign. To what do you attribute that? 

Education simply is not a priority among the people of America, and not a priority among the leadership of America, I mean political leadership. It’s just not. You give a lot of verbiage to it … and then we get down into battles … (and) you lose the big picture of how much money are we actually putting into education and what kind of priority do we make it so that our teachers are the best.

You go to Scandinavian countries, like I have, and to actually get into college and to get into a teacher prep … you have to graduate from high school at the top of your class. You can’t just have a C average. They won’t let you in to become a teacher. This country, hey, you’ve got a D average, they’ll let you in. Why don’t we start moving in that direction? If you are an A student, we’re going to pay for your college, you can become a teacher … we pay for everything and then we give them higher pay.

If you pay teachers the same equivalent that we’re paying people to write programs for computers and if you set qualifications high for teachers and make sure that they have a respectful place in our community. I grew up in a small town, 150 people, in Cumming, Iowa … I remember at an early age, Mary Powers and Mae Lynch, they were sort of the people we looked up to, they were the teachers, the people you want to emulate. They were highly respected as part of our community.

Why aren’t the candidates for president talking about it? Because it’s not a priority.

There’s a split in the Democratic party on education, between education reformers and teachers unions. Is that a new phenomenon?

It’s new in that teachers unions have become more prominent in the last 20 years I guess you’d say. I understand the teachers unions. I understand why a lot of them feel besieged … We’re asking teachers to do things in schools that we’ve never asked them to do before and that is to solve the problems that kids bring to school …

We know, we have the data, we know that the best teaching environment in say elementary school in early grades is like one teacher for a maximum, I think it’s 15 maybe or 12 (students). Heck, I’ve been to elementary schools where you get one teacher for 20, 25 kids. I understand the unions are trying to protect these teachers who are put upon to do a better job and they’re not given the resources to do that. I understand that dynamic.

It all comes back to how we’re going to fund education and whether or not we’re going to change the structure of a classroom. To me, no child in elementary school, at least in the first six grades, ought to be in a class of more than maybe even a dozen students. Period …

I’m very respectful of teachers unions, I can understand why they get so frustrated, and I can understand why there’s a clash between, say, local governments or state governments on a lot of issues …

Is it a problem for Democrats going forward? No. I think as a progressive, as a liberal, I say define the problem. We’ve defined the problem. We know classes are overcrowded. We know the best learning environment is a few kids in a classroom … OK, let’s do it. Well, that costs money and especially if you’re going to do it for low-income kids. Well, nobody wants to spend the money to do it.

Who would you recommend be appointed the next secretary of education, either a specific individual or a type of person?

I wouldn’t say a person, but I would say someone who is bold enough to really take to the American people what needs to be done and what the cost is and why we need to do it and maybe even work collaboratively, of course, with the president and with Congress to find the sort of funding streams that are needed to do this.

This is not some dark magic. We’ve got plenty of data, we know what needs to be done. I know there are those that still say the federal government shouldn’t do it, it should be the state and local governments. To a certain extent I don’t have a problem with that, so long as there is an overriding federal course of intervention for states and local communities that can’t do it or won’t do it, that drag their feet.

School boards tend to be very powerful and more often than not they’re made up of people that come from well-heeled families. Single mothers and others who are working day and night don’t generally run for school board. We need some oversight to make sure we’re not skewing the money away from low-income, high-need areas. We need a secretary of education that will do some new bold thinking and throw some things out there for people to think about …

We have in this country, a long time ago, way back, Abraham Lincoln’s time, even before, we decided that the federal government was going to be involved in higher ed (through land-grant universities.)

It wasn’t until the Elementary and Secondary Education Act that the federal government ever said elementary and secondary education is a national concern. Think about that, 200 years later we finally said, this is a national concern. So it’s only been in the last 40 years that we’ve dribbled along, looking at elementary and secondary education as a national concern.

I think we need now one more step, we need a secretary of education and a president who will say, OK, we went from higher ed as a national concern, and then we said elementary and secondary education is a national concern, now early childhood should be a national concern and focus on that.

That’s what I want to see in a secretary of education, someone who will just keep harping on a national priority. If you think education is a priority, you’re mistaken, and how do we make this a national propriety for state governments, local governments and the federal government. ]]> /article/74-interview-sen-tom-harkin-on-endorsing-clinton-early-and-why-hes-wary-of-essa/feed/ 0 /article/what-philadelphias-schools-chief-hopes-to-hear-from-the-visiting-democrats-on-education/ /article/what-philadelphias-schools-chief-hopes-to-hear-from-the-visiting-democrats-on-education/#respond Sat, 01 Jan 2000 00:00:00 +0000

This originally appeared as part of ����Ӱ��’s Democratic National Convention Live Blog, which was produced in partnership with . See our full DNC archive.

Philadelphia School Superintendent William R. Hite Jr. wants Hillary Clinton to tell Democrats to check their heads. To say to the country, in her speech accepting the party’s nomination on Thursday, that low expectations are a tragedy we can’t afford. It’s what he tells people everyday.

And given the fractures in America’s body politic this year, given the success of a presidential campaign that intoxicates voters on the idea of lost hopes, that makes disappointment a badge of honor, his concern seems sensible — if vague and better aimed at the other party’s divisive leader.

But Hite, who recently completed his fourth year as superintendent of the School District of Philadelphia, has children in mind. Poor children, in a city where 90 percent of the 130,000 district school students qualified for lunch assistance before the district began giving all children free lunch two years ago. (Full disclosure: I once worked for the district)

Philadelphia may surprise visiting delegates who don’t know it, or know it only from the movies. The gritty, working-class streets that Rocky Balboa memorialized in dirty sweats and black Chuck Taylors four decades ago are mostly gone. Center City, the downtown, is prosperous and energized; the jewel-like Old City, townhouse-lined squares that look like postcards turned real, and industrial and hardscrabble areas lately gentrified and culture-infused — all witness the city’s 21st-century renaissance.

The convention’s guidebooks sends Democrats to “5 Great Philly Coffee Spots,” on tours around the National Constitution Center and Liberty Bell and the city’s many museums, and recommends three “most instagramable spots (sic).”

None of these will take visitors near the north and west precincts where the city’s very large poor population lives. Philadelphia remains the poorest of the nation’s ten largest cities. was $34,207, nearly one-third less than the national figure of $50,502. Even as Democrat rally around a vision for a better future this week, there are no easy answers for the nearly 40 percent of Philadelphia children who are poor, or the roughly 12 percent of residents who are deeply poor — families of three earning $10,000 or less. About 60,000 Philadelphia children live in deeply poor families.

Hite adheres to the reform precept that a student who doesn’t thrive has been failed by her school. He comes by the idea honestly: after a football career at Virginia Tech, he became a teacher, then principal, and quickly rose up the education ladder, landing in Prince George’s County, Maryland, first as deputy to reformist district head (and later Los Angeles schools chief) John Deasy, then succeeding Deasy as the top man.

Like Deasy, he attended the Broad Academy, a kind of West Point for education reform executives, but when he arrived in Philadelphia, summer 2012, to a massive budget crisis — precipitated as in other struggling districts by years of state funding cuts and gross inequities, charter growth, benefit costs, and years of fiscal mismanagement in the district — keeping school system open trumped policy.

Dozens of school closures, along with layoffs and austere budgets (Northeast High School had an extracurricular budget of $14,000, about $5 per student for the school year), have kept the district pulse beating, but Philadelphia remains riven by conflicts between charter proponents who want much faster growth and a community of educators and electeds that believes charters are yanking dollars from the poorest students’ hands (the state’s charter funding law punishes the district). “I would never advocate for one sector over the other when that sector cannot respond to the needs of all children,” .

The district’s budget and charter difficulties are exacerbated by perennially unfriendly state Republicans, while its unilateral efforts to reduce health costs in the teachers contract has alienated labor supporters in one of the nation’s strongest union towns. And the consequences and debate about the state’s 2001 takeover of the District — Hite reports to a joint state/city board — continue to grow, 15 years later.

Attacked on the right and left, though almost universally liked — his hail-fellow-well-met manner and probity, and a courtliness that manifests in part in a seemingly endless closet of well turned-out suits and shirts — Hite has become a new type of school leader: the non-ideological radical, urgent, open to any solution that works, doubtful about real progress without a national change in culture.

He spoke with ����Ӱ�� last week from his office in Philadelphia.

����Ӱ��: Why do you think there’s been almost no mention of education in the campaign?

Superintendent Hite: I’ve actually been talking about the absence of education conversation… Everyone watching what has actually happened over the last eight years maybe see it as too complex, too hard, and filled with political strife. I think that’s why you only hear the more general things that people think about as reform, like charter schools and choice. People feel like that’s the only safe place to be.

Although Hillary was booed when she mentioned charters to the National Education Association.

You’re right. What’s missing in this whole conversation is quality: how do we create high-quality schools irrespective of sector. And I do think the whole notion of choice and charters as the only solution [reflects], or speaks to, the type of disillusionment that we’re seeing with banks, Wall Street, government. You think of school districts — they think of bureaucracies.

It feels like the desire not to deal with complex things complexly has seeped into education more than it had five or ten years ago. Donald Trump shows everyday that a lot of people don’t want to think about actual solutions to life problems; they want magical thinking. Do you see that in the schools?

More people see that the work is hard. Charters that have begun taking on some of the most challenging areas in the city and more challenging and more at-risk populations — they’re either not meeting the academic outcomes that they agreed to or they’re handing them back to us. Young Scholars has handed back two charters to us. We have made recommendations to non-renew four other ones… So we made a recommendation [to close] four and two others have handed it back over. And then we approved still a third for this year and the people said we can’t do it, we don’t have the capacity to do this. So people are recognizing that this work is hard and this work is complex and challenging and it doesn’t happen overnight. And has not been happening overnight with even a charter.

Philadelphia, like almost every big city in the country, has been killed over the last few years in terms of funding. Do you have thoughts about how the country can fund public schools more effectively?

We’re still 800 million dollars down from where we would be if in fact there weren’t state cuts in funding for four years [ former Governor Tom Corbett cut school budget for four consecutive years]. And so even with additional revenue we’re still down 800 million dollars. If you think about revenues, you have to think two ways on this. One, the monies that are available for us to educate children — the revenues are always going to be a challenge because these costs are escalating, and the costs of running schools are escalating And then we have think just as they’re thinking at the national level with respect to all the federal monies that have some pretty stringent requirements associated with them — provide some flexibility for use of that money differently.

I still say we have to make the same investments in education around research that we do with the military or with medicine, and we don’t do that. We try a lot of stuff, the stuff doesn’t work, and then we cycle back through it a decade later adding a new wrinkle without the level of research. We need an NIH for education. I think that the department (of education) or the federal government should think about what is working and take a more empirical look at the data associated with it.

The other thing is, there has to be dedicated revenues streams for this stuff. Education has always been a target, and just as costs escalate to do everything else costs have escalated in education. I’m not just suggesting that we all need air conditioned climates, because school districts have to rethink how we do our work as well. How to pay labor, pensions, benefits, all of those institutional structures that cause costs to increase are very problematic for districts and those are fixed costs that have to get off the table first.

There’s some kind of disconnect between what people say they believe and the way political priorities have been constructed.

I’ll add a point to that. I’m not so sure if it’s a disconnect or the intent to dismantle. You could dismantle structures or systems in multiple ways. One is attacking them like a frontal attack. Another is creating a structure that disperses resources to multiple places and then systems are left to figure out how they’ll manage their legacy costs (costs of programs initiated by previous administrations).

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi calls and want to bring a group of congressional leaders to see two Philadelphia schools in action. Which would you choose and why?

I would take them to a school that has looked at itself, said we’re not working for children, and redesigned itself. I would take them to a PA school [Promise Academy, a district turnaround model] in North Philadelphia that has redesigned itself. It remains a school district school. They are seeing outcomes now that are very different.  

That’s for K-8. And then I would take them to an inquiry-based school that’s open to all children… the Workshop School. I would take them to the Workshop School because I’m pretty sure they would be amazed at the problems that children are working to solve. Or create solutions for. And the type of children that they serve.

They’re not a special admit (magnet). They take on all children, any children that are interested in that kind of school, and the children are doing incredible stuff.

For years schools didn’t do inquiry with poor kids because educators thought poor kids couldn’t do it, and it turns out that’s totally wrong.

Right.

If you could insert an idea into Hillary Clinton’s speech on Thursday, what would you have her say?

If I had to insert something into her speech I would say: here in Philadelphia, just like every other place in the country, children need high-quality, great schools close to where they live, irrespective of zip code, irrespective of income, irrespective of nationality, or gender identification, they need high-quality options close to where they live.

How could she help make that happen? What are your biggest needs: teacher training, classrooms resources, community engagement?

We need a mindset change. We need a mindset change around the ability of all children to achieve at high levels. We need everyone to have the belief in all children… We need that. We need sustaining corporate revenue because we need to insure that we can support the investments we’re making in schools this year five years from now. So that it’s not this thing of investing and then subtracting and then every three years you have to insert trauma into the equation because you’re laying off people, closing stuff, reducing stuff, eliminating stuff. Recurring sources of revenue become extremely important for us to continue our investment to provide school districts with what they need. ]]> /article/what-philadelphias-schools-chief-hopes-to-hear-from-the-visiting-democrats-on-education/feed/ 0 /article/watch-desperate-nevada-parents-hope-courts-uphold-education-savings-accounts/ /article/watch-desperate-nevada-parents-hope-courts-uphold-education-savings-accounts/#respond Sat, 01 Jan 2000 00:00:00 +0000 This is the fourth EDlection 2016 film in a series that will profile the top education issues driving public discussion in the early primary states (see our dispatches from South Carolina, New Hampshire and Iowa). To read our previous coverage of urgent education reforms in Nevada, as well as other EDlection stories from across the country, please see our full archive.

While a legal battle plays out at Nevada’s top court surrounding the fate of a new law to grant unprecedented school choice to families through education savings accounts, the education of thousands who already applied for the program is now in limbo.

That includes the future educational opportunities for Dayanara Lara, who hoped to use state money through the savings accounts to attend a private religious school that her family couldn’t afford on their own. According to the Las Vegas Sun, her mother Daysi Lara had already spent $550 on uniforms and school supplies before a state judge brought the program to a halt.

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In January, a state judge ruled the new law establishing the education savings accounts diverts public money appropriated for public schools to private schools, some of which are religious — a violation of the state constitution. Schools like Mountain View Christian School, where Lara planned to attend, are at the center of the debate.

The new law, which Republican Gov. Brian Sandoval signed in June, established education savings accounts that allow families to use the state’s per-pupil education funding at the educational programs of their choice, including private schools and via homeschooling. Although about half of states allow families to use vouchers or tax credits to subsidize private school tuition, education savings accounts go one step farther.

States with education savings accounts, tax credits, and vouchers

Source: Foundation for Excellence in Education (2015)

The Foundation for Excellence in Education, an education reform nonprofit founded by former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, praise education savings accounts for offering greater flexibility to parents than traditional vouchers because they provide choice beyond traditional schools, including online education programs or classes at a community college.

This is the first EDlection 2016 film in a series that will profile the top education issues driving public discussion in the early primary states (the Iowa caucuses are scheduled for Monday). To read our previous coverage of Iowa education issues, as well as other EDlection stories from across the country, please see our full archive.

Updated January 27

Phomvisay has good reason to boast — both about his unlikely program and the unique, forward-looking school that houses it. Phomvisay is the assistant director of the Des Moines Public Schools Central Campus, a vast complex of 39 programs for career technical training for high schoolers in Iowa. Central Campus draws students from districts throughout Des Moines and its suburbs, with about 1,500 enrolled in its advance career programs. Students attend training in everything from aviation to catering to ocean environmental studies.

It’s a bustling technical high school with a 98 percent attendance rate, where students can earn college credits or even an associate’s degree to qualify them for specialized jobs right after graduation.

In recent years, Iowa’s high schoolers have struggled finding jobs and completing college.  In 2012, the state had one of the lowest college graduation rates in the midwest.

Educators blamed a variety of factors, but rising college tuition and a sagging local economy continues to challenge the state’s families. With significant investments from the Obama administration for Career Technical Training since 2012, Iowa doubled down on programs like those at Central Campus.

Teachers at Central Campus say CTE makes Iowa’s high school grads more competitive: “When I went to high school, I could just get a job at a plant,” says veteran wind turbine instructor Larry Beall. “Now you need at least some kind of secondary degree to be able to compete.”

“It’s a win-win for business, for Iowa and for students,” Phomvisay says as he exist the marine biology lab for the airplane hangar — and state-of-the-art flight simulator — down the hall.

Special Report: How the Drought Is Crippling California’s Schools

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America’s Oldest – and Most Adorable – Teacher Turns 102

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Meet the Visionary Chicago School Leader Who Just Won a ‘Genius’ Grant

is The Seventy Four's ongoing coverage of state-level education news, issues and leaders in the run up to 2016 elections. (Among our previous stories in this series, stories from , Connecticut, Minnesota, , and Texas. See the latest stories ). The Mississippi primaries are scheduled for March 8.

What happens next — what sort of discipline is meted out, how long it lasts, and whether administrators or parents are notified — may differ drastically from one state to the next.

That’s because while all educators struggle with how to cope with defiant or disruptive kids, there is no federal legislation and only a patchwork of state laws regulating  how two of the most fraught responses — restraint and seclusion — are used against them. As a result, restraint and seclusion are misapplied on millions of American schoolchildren each year, sometimes with deadly consequence.

Mississippi is one of five states without a policy governing restraint and seclusion in schools — but in a group that also includes New Jersey and North Dakota, it could be the next one to set a baseline for how these interventions should be handled.

If a policy prevails in Mississippi, it would put the state in line with new federal guidance in the recently reauthorized Every Student Succeeds Act (formerly known as No Child Left Behind). The new law will require states to develop plans on how they’ll reduce the use of restraint and seclusion, as well as bullying, harassment and student suspensions.

Ron Hager, a senior staff attorney at the National Disability Rights Network, called the ESSA language “a kind of foot in the door” toward ultimately doing away with restraint and seclusion altogether.

For the time being, though, Mississippi is a far cry from that scenario.

“They do whatever they want to do, whenever they want to do it, however they want to do it,” said Heather Rhodes, the mother of the boy who was secluded in the pen. She intends to file a civil case against the Lamar County school district, while a criminal complaint she filed against the teacher was dismissed in 2014.

Heather Rhodes' son was isolated in "The Chill Zone" pen in his first-grade classroom at Longleaf Elementary School in Lamar County, Mississippi, in 2013. (Photo courtesy Heather Rhodes)

Rhodes said she entered the classroom to find her son, Cade, who was 8 at the time, confined in a three-sided wooden pen, banging his head on the floor, screaming to get out and calling for her as his teacher held the gate closed with her foot.

Cade also has central auditory processing disorder (CAPD), which impairs his ability to listen and communicate back what’s been said or done. His teacher wanted him to sit down, but he knew his mother was on her way to his classroom with birthday treats for his classmates and wanted to find her, according to by the Mississippi Clarion-Ledger.

The Clarion-Ledger reported: “The school dismissed the incident as no big deal, Rhodes said, but she was furious. “If I had that contraption in my house,” Rhodes said, “and my child told his teachers, 'My mom puts me in a box when I'm bad,' I would have been arrested and my kids would have gone to foster care.”

State by state, an effort to regulate these tactics and better protect students from potential abuse in their classrooms has slowly gained traction in the last six years, following a gut-wrenching 2009 . The collected testimony from schools around the country included the case of a 14-year-old boy in Texas who died after being pinned down by a teacher; another involved a volunteer teacher’s aide in Florida who gagged and duct-taped 6- and 7-year-old students who were misbehaving.

Often in these cases, the GAO found, children with disabilities were forcibly restrained or isolated when they were not physically aggressive, and by staff who were not trained in these techniques.

Even in states with policies, there’s no guarantee that the adults in charge are aware or will heed them.

Take the recent case of the Kentucky sheriff’s deputy who, in a viral video, is shown handcuffing an 8-year-old boy’s biceps together behind his back — his wrists apparently too small for the cuffs — because he had misbehaved. The boy has attention deficit hyperactive disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder, but the officer wasn’t properly trained to discipline elementary students, much less those with disabilities, according to an ACLU complaint. This, in spite of Kentucky’s policy that explicitly prohibits mechanical restraints. (Read our investigation into school safety officers:  “Armed but Untrained: Why So Many School Cops are Unprepared for the Classroom”)

The GAO report and subsequent criticism of the practice by former U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan led to several attempts to pass federal legislation that ultimately failed.

“As education leaders, our first responsibility should be to make sure that schools foster learning in a safe environment for all of our children and teachers,” Duncan wrote in to state education officials in 2009, urging them to take action.

A federal bill sponsored in 2013 by U.S. Rep. Gregg Harper, a Republican congressman from Mississippi, would have established minimum standards for the practice of restraint and seclusion, as well as guidelines for state reporting and enforcement. It also stalled.

Meanwhile, in the last few years, 25 states have either strengthened existing laws or adopted them for the first time, according to an analysis called an Autism National Committee report by Jessica Butler, an attorney and parent advocate.

In addition to Mississippi, New Jersey and North Dakota, the states that remain without any law, policy or guidelines are Idaho and South Dakota, according to Butler’s report, last updated in July 2015.

Nationwide, far more often than not, the subjects of restraint and seclusion are children of color and children with disabilities. That’s evident in Mississippi, according to 2009 data from the Office of Civil Rights. Of the total 715 incidents of restraint and seclusion reported by schools that year, 72 percent involved black or Hispanic students while 28 percent involved white students.

Mississippi, however, is one of three outlier states where fewer than half of students subjected to physical restraint were students with disabilities, according to the ’ 2011 school discipline data snapshot. Whether that’s because students with special needs are under-classified is unclear.

L. Rene´ Hardwick grew up in Vicksburg, Miss., and returned to Jackson several years ago after working as a university professor and administrator and a K-12 consultant and advocate in places like Atlanta, Durham and Baltimore.

Now the advocacy coordinator for the run by the Mississippi American Civil Liberties Union, she said there are cultural and historical factors at work here that influence attitudes toward behavior management and classroom discipline. Those factors are at least partially rooted in Mississippi’s painful history of segregation.

“What’s going on in Mississippi and particularly Jackson … is simply a microcosm of the legacy of oppression that hovers over Mississippi as a state and us as a country,” she said.

“I believe you have certain groups, some of whom are our legislators, who are dedicated and determined to support” the status quo of white supremacy, either out of fear or ignorance, she said.

Now in Mississippi, when a child doesn’t follow the teacher’s instructions, “you don’t know where that case will lead,” Hardwick said.

Hardwick said that if a child is being disruptive or fails to obey a teacher’s request, the “natural propensity of school personnel” in Mississippi is to respond with any tactics at their disposal.

Their propensity is not, she said, “to teach that child and guide that child, which takes time and needs to be repeated over and over to correct behavior.”

“That’s a process and if you don’t subscribe to that process philosophically, on a basic level, then you’re going to deal with children in the classroom in a way that’s convenient for you,” she said.

Many of Mississippi’s 490,225 students arrive at school from family environments strained by poverty and neglect, so it’s imperative that educators are prepared to meet them at the doors, Hardwick said. That means presenting school as a place of refuge, nurturing interpersonal relationships between adults and children, setting high expectations for teachers and parents, and, in the classroom, rooting curriculum in students’ real-life experiences.

Ensuring staff receive better training to prevent and respond to crisis situations involving children with disabilities and those in the general population is also badly needed, she said.

“What we’re pushing for is the tone of the policy to not be in reactive mode but to be in proactive mode,” Hardwick said, meaning it should promote a “climate of positive intervention” that starts at the top with effective district- and building-level leadership.

That’s a lot of ground to cover in one state education policy, but advocates feel they’re finally being heard by policymakers. At the same time, they maintain legislation is also necessary and hope to pursue that this year.

Some Mississippi schools have tried to address the problem of disruptive students on their own.

In 2012, an alternative school for children who’d been suspended or expelled from other schools agreed to stop shackling students to fixed objects after the Southern Poverty Law Center sued Jackson Public Schools in 2011. The SPLC alleged that students were "handcuffed and shackled to poles" for up to six hours for non-criminal offenses such as violating the dress code or talking back to a teacher, .

The lead plaintiff in the case was an eighth-grader with a history of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, asthma and seizures who, on one occasion, was handcuffed to a pole for hours and had to call out to be taken to the bathroom, according to Reuters.

Advocate groups in Mississippi say requiring training for school personnel and prioritizing positive behavioral interventions ahead of force — all part of the current proposal being considered by state officials — will help avoid chaotic and potentially dangerous incidents like the ones in Jackson and Lamar County.

Groups including the ACLU and Families As Allies are pushing the state school board  to craft a policy that clearly defines what kind of restraints can be used, by whom, and for what duration. It also spells out requirements for parent notification and districts’ internal record-keeping.

In fits and starts, legislators have moved to enact minimum standards for use of restraint and seclusion in Mississippi schools. But a tendency by the Republican majority to fiercely oppose limiting school districts’ local authority has stymied those efforts.

Skeptics of regulating restraint and seclusion frequently point to the education dilemma that’s caused anguish for teachers everywhere: How to preserve the learning environment for the many that is threatened by the few?

Republican Rep. John Moore, who is the most recent chairman of the House Education Committee, said he’d consider a restraint and seclusion bill if one is reintroduced this year, but he is “wary” of placing limits on school districts’ ability to control students if they become violent.

“If you are a teacher or a school and you have a child that will just not be quiet or sit down, what do you do with that student? Do you let them just destroy the education for the rest of the class? Or do you do what needs to be done?” Moore said.

Moore, who’s spent 20 years in the House of Representatives; four of those as education chairman, said he grew up in an era when a call from the principal to his mother or father meant he was in for a spanking when he got home. Moore’s wife is a veteran elementary school teacher.

He said he supports the use of restraint and seclusion in schools if and when “positive reinforcement” strategies have been tried and are ineffective.

“People have to learn that there are consequences of bad actions and if they don’t, it only elevates down the road,” Moore said, “And if you don’t believe me, just look at our prison systems.”

The education department’s proposed policy would dramatically redefine the threshold for using physical restraint in Mississippi classrooms: If approved by the nine-member state Board of Education, restraint and seclusion could only be used as an emergency response when “all other verbal de-escalation measures have failed” and when the student poses a danger to themselves or others.

It could also be used if there’s potential or actual destruction of property; and to remove a “non-compliant” student from the scene of an incident, according to policy.

The policy bans “chemical restraints,” such as sedatives, and prohibits mechanical restraints like straps, harnesses and handcuffs. It also prohibits any restraint that obstructs the airway.

It’s the second time around for Mississippi education policymakers. In 2009, a task force convened by the state Board of Education developed some language but no action was taken.

The new policy was crafted with advocates’ input in 2015 following the failure of a related bill, , in March, which was sponsored by Republican Sen. Gray Tollison. It passed in the state Senate but never came to a vote in the House. Tollison, chairman of the Senate Education Committee, did not return messages seeking comment.  

The Mississippi School Boards Association and state teachers and administrators associations have quietly resisted attempts to regulate restraint and seclusion, advocates say. The school boards group also skipped the opportunity to take a public stance on the proposed restraint and seclusion policy at two public hearings last year.

MSBA Executive Director Mike Waldrop and other school boards association employees did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Pat Ross, the education department’s chief performance officer, said there’s no question about the need to have a policy. One of the major sticking points is whether the new rules would prohibit seclusion altogether, as the ACLU and other advocates groups have pushed for.

“Nobody likes for things to go badly in schools but sometimes they do and so restraint and seclusion has to come into play,” Ross said. “The schools in the districts across the state and, I think, across many states will tell you that — give us the parameters by which we can operate restraint and seclusion and we’ll do it within those parameters, but taking seclusion off the table completely maybe (is) a little unrealistic.”

Ron Hager, the National Disability Rights Network lawyer, was pushing for the new federal K-12 law to do away with restraint and seclusion.

“This is not what we had hoped for but it is something,” Hager said of the new ESSA rules.  “It’s not an outright ban on restraint and seclusion but it requires that the states should take steps to reduce the use of those interventions. We would love to see (the U.S. Department of Education) issue more specific binding guidance and we think it’s the perfect time to do it because of the requirements of the ESSA.”

The Mississippi state education department met again with key advocates and stakeholders Wednesday, looking for input on a revised policy that will be presented to the Board of Education in mid-February. The board’s approval would kick off a 30-day public hearing period, and once that wraps up, the board would hold a final vote to adopt the policy as soon as this spring, Ross said.

Hardwick said she’s optimistic that state officials are finally, and sincerely, listening, as evidenced in the special Oct. 22 meeting advocates organized with Ross and other state officials prior to a public hearing.

“We have commitment from Pat Ross that a more diverse set of stakeholders will review the feedback and make a more earnest and sincere attempt to (develop a policy) that embraces positive interventions and supports,” Hardwick said. “(The state education department) has been very good about meeting us halfway.”  

Rhodes, the parent whose son was secluded in the wooden pen known as the “Chill Zone” and later, in another district, locked in a closet during a fire drill, said she’s “trying to have faith” in the will of the department to enact meaningful change.

Parents’ voices need to continue being heard, Rhodes added, but it’s not easy for them to speak up. Some fear their children will be retaliated against in school if they complain; if they work in the schools themselves, they also risk retribution.

Too many other parents are simply disengaged, she said, and either lack the wherewithal to be involved in their children’s school lives or don’t care. Case in point: Each of the public hearings on the restraint and seclusion policy, held in Jackson with ample public notice, were attended by only a few dozen people.

Rhodes is a single parent to 9-year-old Cade and his twin sister, Calea and works part-time. She also regularly spends hours attending special education services meetings (for her own children and others) and talking to lawyers regarding Cade’s case. With a pre-law degree and a professional background in teaching and administration, she has enough savvy to navigate the education bureaucracy — and she’s become an unofficial representative for other parents of special needs students struggling with the system.

“I’m taking all that from my life experience and it’s become my life purpose,” Rhodes said. “These are kids that don’t have a voice. They don’t have someone standing up for them… If any good comes for any other child from fighting the battle for my children or through what my children have personally endured, it's all for a greater purpose.” ]]> /article/mississippis-horrifying-history-of-punishing-students-through-restraint-could-be-coming-to-an-end/feed/ 0 /article/after-years-of-squashing-school-choice-in-texas-the-speaker-of-the-house-may-be-singing-a-different-tune/ /article/after-years-of-squashing-school-choice-in-texas-the-speaker-of-the-house-may-be-singing-a-different-tune/#respond Sat, 01 Jan 2000 00:00:00 +0000

Texas Republican Joe Straus, speaker of the state House of Representatives, addresses hundreds of educators at the annual conference of the Texas Charter Schools Association in October 2015.

Photo: Adam Sear

In explaining House lawmakers’ routine resistance to such measures, Straus’ critics in the reform camp point to one of his major supporters, billionaire businessman and union ally Charles Butt, CEO of the grocery chain H-E-B.

is The Seventy Four's ongoing coverage of state-level education news, issues and leaders in the run up to 2016 elections. (Among our previous stories in this series, coverage from Connecticut, , , , , , , and . See the latest stories ). Minnesota’s caucuses are scheduled for March 1.

Incoming Higher Ground students might start out behind, but the K-12 charter school, located in a converted industrial building in a working-class neighborhood in St. Paul, sets a high bar. The student body may come from impoverished households, but classrooms are orderly and test scores impressive. In order to graduate, students must earn admission to college — even if they speak no English when they enrolled, and even if their first exposure to school was Higher Ground. While achievement is actually falling in nearby St. Paul Public Schools, the Higher Ground program has landed on U.S. News & World Report’s Best High Schools list three times in recent years.

As parents spread the word about the school, Wilson soon had a student body that was almost entirely of African descent, a long waiting list and a steady stream of visiting educators eager to learn how the school succeeds where so many fail.

“We set that bar high because we know the headwinds these kids face,” says Wilson. “I have not gone out one day knocking on doors to recruit. Our accomplishments do our recruiting.”

And yet despite all this success — or perhaps precisely because of it — today Wilson finds himself defending Higher Ground from what he and other Minnesota charter school leaders see as a two-pronged assault on parental choice.

A class-action suit filed in November accuses the state of Minnesota of depriving students of a quality education by allowing segregated schools. The rise of charter schools, , has made integration impossible.

At the same time, state officials have proposed requiring charters to participate in the state’s desegregation program. Right now the independent schools must admit whoever applies, with a lottery when there are more applicants than seats. The proposed desegregation rule is scant on details, but what’s clear is charters that keep their color-blind, random lotteries would have to come up with a way to put their students in integrated settings.

In short, compliance would run roughshod over their autonomy. And many charter leaders say it’s precisely that sort of autonomy — which gives flexibility in staffing and allows for longer school days, for example — that is fundamental to their academic success.

“Why can’t people go to the schools they want to? Why take that choice away?” asks Wilson. “There’s an interest in closing down schools like this. We bust a myth” that students from low-income backgrounds can’t excel in school.

School choice proponents throughout the country would be advised to pay close attention to this Midwestern legal fight. The challenges come at a time when charter opponents — chief among them teachers’ unions — have turned up the political heat by claiming the schools compound inequity in education.

Black Lives Matter and high-profile initiatives like President Barack Obama’s My Brother’s Keeper have propelled equity to the forefront of the education agenda. Proponents of differing education policies have raced to claim that their philosophy or initiative is the one that will deliver for children of color.

Questions of equity are at the heart of debates about expanding charter sectors in Boston, Los Angeles, Chicago and other cities. And they are behind efforts to ensure disadvantaged students have the same access to the best teachers.

A recent and controversial New York Times  by New York City’s Success Academies charter network overshadowed coverage of the Obama Administration’s ongoing push to reduce yawning racial disparities in discipline in traditional school districts.

Hillary Clinton fanned the flames further, claiming at a November African American candidate forum that charter schools the most challenged students.

That claim enrages Wilson, who served as Minnesota’s commissioner of human rights and as a member of the St. Paul City Council. His efforts to advocate for African American youth in both positions left him profoundly discouraged about traditional schools’ ability to serve students of color.

He opened Higher Ground to take in the exact students Clinton was talking about because he knew better was possible. Wealthy white families could also enroll their children if they wanted, but their kids are doing pretty well in neighboring schools, where their culture is the dominant one.

69 percent of white students in St. Paul Public Schools read at or above grade level, while just 25 percent of black children score proficient. Numbers are slightly better for Latino and Asian American students, but fall to 15 and 17 percent for special education students and those learning English, respectively.

By contrast Higher Ground’s students, all of them black and impoverished, are on par with statewide averages. Half can read at grade level, and nearly 60 percent can do math at grade level.

To call the school segregated is to fundamentally misinterpret the history of racial inequities in U.S. schools, Wilson says. Segregation is the practice of stopping a person or group from enrolling in a school, not what happens when families choose a program that protects and celebrates their children’s heritage.

University of St. Thomas Law School Professor Nekima Levy-Pounds, who also heads the Minneapolis NAACP, agrees. “People are trying to use the civil rights laws to say that those are segregated schools, and that to me is a false analysis,” she says. “I send my children to an all-black charter on purpose so they will be affirmed, so that their history would be brought forward in the classroom, so they would feel like a whole human being and not inferior.”

At the center of the controversy is a University of Minnesota Law School professor who has authored a number of reports decrying charter schools as ineffective and a major barrier to integration. The director of the university’s Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity, Myron Orfield has been a vocal proponent of integrating schools by creating metro-wide school districts.

The brother of noted integration scholar Gary Orfield, a professor at the University of California Los Angeles Graduate School of Education, Myron Orfield began decrying school choice in an era of starkly different school demographics. In 1991 when the first charter school law was passed, more than 90 percent of Minnesota students were white. Today, three-fourths of Minneapolis and St. Paul students are children of color.

As demographic shifts have put integration further out of reach, policymakers have focused on improving the quality of impoverished schools. As the shift has accelerated, Orfield’s work has become increasingly strident and ideological. Last year he was forced to concede that half the funding for a marquee report came from teachers unions, which used it to push anti-charter policies.

In one of his most recent reports, Orfield describes the rise of a “poverty education complex,” which he asserts is a “lucrative private education sector” with a financial interest in reversing desegregation efforts.

White flight in the 1990s, he wrote, caused re-segregation in Twin Cities neighborhoods and schools. “This triggered a decline in test scores, which was used by self-styled ‘school reformers’ as evidence of the failure of central city public education,” he . “School reformers argued that Minnesotans needed more ‘choice’ in education: both the ability to choose which public school district to attend, and also the option to choose between traditional public and independent ‘charter’ schools.”

What Wilson and other school leaders see as efforts to provide culturally relevant programming, Orfield depicts as deliberate attempts to thwart integration efforts.

“While legally mandated segregation is forbidden, charters have found [an] effective workaround, one that skirts as close as possible to the enforced separation of the Jim Crow era,” he writes. “A large number of charters are ‘culturally focused’ and overwhelmingly composed of a single racial group, ensuring that students from any other group will remain isolated.”

A few months prior, Orfield released a study largely financed by three Illinois teachers unions titled “.” In it, he claimed that the city’s traditional district schools outperformed its charters. The conclusion called for a moratorium on new charters as well as legislation curtailing their expansion, positions the unions were lobbying for at the Capitol.

The Illinois Network of Charter Schools , noting that Orfield made a number of errors, including inflating district schools’ graduation rate from 63 percent to 83 percent, and cherry-picking research that supported his contentions.

Orfield’s own colleagues have , with another University of Minnesota faculty member decrying a recent study as “highly suspect” and “unworthy of the label ‘university research.’”

Two other Twin Cities scholars, one of them an attorney who has represented charter schools, were so frustrated with errors and inaccurate depictions in a widely circulated 2009 Orfield report, “,” they authored published in the same journal, the William Mitchell Law Review. Among their assertions: Orfield omitted research conducted by his own brother that contradicted the study’s hypothesis.

(More from The Seventy Four: Read Myron Orfield's response to this article)

After years of painful debate, in 2013 Minnesota lawmakers passed an overhaul of the program that provides school districts with money to be used for voluntary integration efforts. The move followed a protracted conversation over the relationship between integration and academic achievement and whether the money — $173 million annually — might better be directed toward closing the achievement gap.

After the new law was adopted, it fell to the state’s Education Department to create the rules governing the program. Orfield was a member of the task force assigned to . In February 2014, he dissented from its recommendations, which again suggested schools should make voluntary efforts to expose students to kids from other races and cultures.

Instead, Orfield asked for a series of sweeping changes. He demanded the removal of a provision that said a school is not segregated if its enrollment is the result of parent or student choice. He also pushed for the addition of clauses that would ban the creation of new schools that might have an effect on segregation. At a minimum, the changes would make it nearly impossible to open an alternative to an underperforming traditional school.

When the state didn’t bite, Orfield asked the city of Brooklyn Center, an impoverished first ring suburb of Minneapolis, to petition a judge to order the change. Months later, after a hearing had been scheduled in the case, the Minnesota Association of Charter Schools sent out an e-mail asking its members to voice their concerns about the rule change.

“The effect of the Brooklyn Center/Orfield Amendment would be to create ‘super school districts’ which would include charters,”  warned. “It would allow the state to define differences in programs, staffing, facilities, etc. that may exist between school districts or schools as acts of ‘legal segregation.’ A finding of legal segregation could require students to be placed in other schools, staff to be transferred to other buildings and even schools to be closed — all to implement a particular vision of the world.”

Brooklyn Center decided to drop its petition shortly before the scheduled hearing. Officially, they said it was because another organization with more resources and a stronger case came forward. But public records suggest city officials were surprised to learn the implications of the petition.

As it happened, a member of the Brooklyn Center City Council also served on the board of a local charter school. According to Odyssey Academy meeting minutes, as the hearing drew near she suggested school representatives might want to let city officials know the negative impact the proposed change would have.

And e-mails between city and school officials obtained under open-records laws by , an education advocacy group, show city officials asked Orfield about the school’s concern and were told the rule change was “not likely” to have an adverse effect.

The charter community was also concerned about the state’s proposed revision of the rule, but for a different reason. Minnesota law deliberately exempts charters from many regulations, granting autonomy in exchange for accountability.

State officials would be circumventing the law by deciding to apply the desegregation rule to their schools, charter leaders say. That precedent could set the stage for the return of regulations lawmakers intended the schools to be exempt from when they wrote the original charter legislation.

Nor would including the schools actually result in the kind of mixed student bodies most people think of when they hear the word integration. Until recently Minnesota encouraged schools and districts to voluntarily come up with ways to expose students to other cultures. For years, integration funds were spent on staff diversity training, after school activities and even in some places ethnic art.

When they rewrote the law two years ago, legislators decided the money should be tied to efforts to close academic achievement gaps like the ones in St. Paul. Integration should still be a goal, they said, but not at the expense of achievement.

Orfield now says he will testify at an early January hearing on the proposed new state law only if he feels there aren’t enough others pushing for traditional integration. For radically different reasons, he is as opposed to the new rule as charter leaders.

“The present rule is abandoning the field,” he says. “People need to start over at ground zero.”

He believes the matter ultimately will be settled in the courts. The attorney behind the recently filed class-action suit, Daniel Schulman has suggested the ultimate aim is to dismantle the Twin Cities’ current school systems and replace them with several metro-wide districts in which all schools would be balanced by race.

Orfield acknowledges his work undergirds the suit and says he has spoken to the lawyers behind it but is not formally involved.

A decision on the state rule is expected in coming weeks. The lawsuit, meanwhile, will take years to wend its way through the courts.

Which means Wilson and other charter and civil rights leaders are in for a long battle to educate the public and policymakers on the dangers of eliminating parental choice, albeit in the name of integration.

“It’s the difference between democracy and autocracy,” says Wilson. “In a democracy, every person has a chance, has a choice. You can choose who to vote for. With charter schools, people vote with their feet.”

And he finds it offensive that the central argument behind both the proposed new rule and the lawsuit is that integration is the only solution to the achievement gap. “It’s saying the only way a black child can learn is in the presence of a white one,” Wilson says. “And that’s very troubling.”

If the lawsuit goes forward, doubtless one of the central questions would be whether schools chosen by parents of color can be defined as segregated. And the years of legal challenges that would ensue could have sweeping, national implications.

Not the least of which is whether today’s civil libertarians are right that it’s not “segregation” to offer parents a high-quality alternative in a school that is chosen predominantly by one race. Instead, they argue, segregation is the process of locking children out of opportunity — denying them choices — because of their identity.

“At the end of the day, I do believe in the Beloved Community,” says law professor Levy-Pounds. “I also believe in the importance of differentiating between schools that are designed with kids of color in mind to try to protect them and affirm their identity in a land that is hostile to difference.”

Beth Hawkins is an award-winning education writer for Education Post and a contributor to The Seventy Four ]]> /article/how-minnesotas-push-for-integrated-schools-is-sparking-a-war-against-charters-serving-minority-families/feed/ 0 /article/why-oklahoma-is-racing-to-put-nearly-1000-uncertified-teachers-in-its-classrooms/ /article/why-oklahoma-is-racing-to-put-nearly-1000-uncertified-teachers-in-its-classrooms/#respond Sat, 01 Jan 2000 00:00:00 +0000

EDlection 2016 is The Seventy Four’s ongoing coverage of state-level education news, debates, headlines and votes in the lead up to 2016 elections. Read our previous dispatches from Iowa, Maryland, Missouri, Nevada, New Mexico, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Oklahoma’s presidential primary is scheduled for March 1.

The nearby University of Oklahoma created a strong pipeline of talent,  its aspiring teachers often training in the Norman Public Schools to complete their degree. Norman, one of Oklahoma’s larger districts with some 15,600 students, was also in the enviable position of being able to pay its starting teachers more than others in the state. 

This school year, those advantages weren’t enough for Norman, never mind other public school systems with even fewer resources, in this state whose economy is fueled by wheat, cattle and oil. They are all feeling the effects of paying their public school teachers far less than what they could earn in the private sector or by taking a teaching job in a neighboring state like Texas.

Last year, the Washington, D.C.-based Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found that Oklahoma had made the deepest cuts to education funding of any other state since the start of the recession.

The result means school chiefs like Siano are scrambling to make hires, consolidating classes that would have normally been broken up and filling classrooms with teachers that are not certified in their subject matter or are part of a patchwork of substitutes. For students that means crowded classrooms led by instructors who would otherwise not be qualified to teach them.

“I think we are in a critical situation,”  Siano said. “I liken it to showing up to the emergency room with a life-threatening issue.” 

Norman upped from one to 15 its requests to the state this year to award educators emergency certificates to teach in an area outside their certification.  Statewide that number has grown to 948 this year, almost double last year’s total. The Oklahoma State Education Department awarded 506 emergency certifications in 2014, 189 in 2013 and 98 in 2011, according to department statistics.

Emergency teaching certificates were once a rarely used solution for Oklahoma public schools.

“This is truly historic,” Oklahoma State Superintendent Joy Hofmeister newspaper last month as she predicted that the state would award 1,000 emergency teacher certificates by the end of the year. 

Some school systems left positions unfulfilled or increased class sizes. Hofmeister estimated that with an average class size between 25 and 35, the 1,000 vacancies districts faced at the start of the 2015-16 school year translated into 25,000 to 35,000 Oklahoma students without a teacher. 

“They have cut hundreds of classes across the state,” said Christy Watson, the communications director for the Oklahoma State School Boards Association.

“Schools are using all different kinds of shorter-term solutions.”

Oklahoma has problems both in recruiting new teachers and keeping the ones they have.

Teacher salaries in Oklahoma are about 16 percent lower than their peers working in Texas and 28 percent lower than median salaries for similar workers in Oklahoma’s private sector, according to a November report released from the school boards association. 

The average teacher in Oklahoma with no full-time experience can expect to make $34,152 a year compared to the $47,078 that new teachers in Houston or Dallas make. As teachers gain more experience in the classroom, the salary gap between the two states widens.

Even in higher-paid school districts such as Tulsa and Oklahoma City, teacher salaries fall behind their peers in the private sector after three years in the workforce. Decades later, the salary gap between those teachers and the private sector persists, the report found.

“You can’t really raise a family on a teacher’s salary” in Oklahoma, state school board member Leo Baxter said.

Just a few years ago, Baxter recalled, his daughter, an out-of-state middle school guidance counselor, was at an event with former governor Frank Keating who told her she should come back to Oklahoma to work. Baxter’s daughter responded, “I’d like to but I don’t want to take a $12,000 pay cut.”

The school boards association estimates that Oklahoma would have to invest an extra $400 million annually to level out state teacher salaries with those in Texas.

Compounding the problem is that Oklahoma teachers are more likely to leave the field than educators in other states. Only 8 out of 100 teachers leave the Texas public school systems each year, compared to 11 out of 100 Oklahoma teachers who depart.

Lawmakers and state education officials are proposing new initiatives to end Oklahoma’s teacher shortage.

Hofmeister, the newly elected state superintendent, has made the compensation issue a key talking point in her first year in office.   In January, she proposed a plan called #OKhigh5 that would add five days of instruction to the school year and give $5,000 pay increases to teachers over a five-year period.

“Our teacher pay isn’t competitive and our kids are paying the price,” she tweeted.

Yes! for

— Joy Hofmeister (@joy4ok)

Earlier this year, the state formed a task force that meets monthly to address the hiring crisis. More recently, the state education department announced another task force that would address unnecessary paperwork in hopes of freeing up teachers’ time and making the job more attractive.  

Meanwhile, David Boren, a former governor and current president of the University of Oklahoma, has proposed raising the state sales tax from 4.5 percent to 5.5 percent to boost teacher pay and programs in higher education.  The average combined local and state sales tax rate would increase to 9.78 percent from 8.78 percent and could reach as high as 11 percent in some communities.  The campaign, entitled , seeks to gather enough signatures to put the tax hike on the November 2016 ballot.

The plan could result in $615 million a year, $424 million to fund those $5,000 teacher raises and implement locally-controlled reforms such as performance-based pay increases. The rest would help curb tuition hikes at state colleges and boost early childhood programs and vocational training.  

“Since 2008, Oklahoma’s education budget has undergone the deepest cuts in the nation, lowering Oklahoma’s per pupil spending to 49th in the country,” Boren said in a statement announcing the plan. “Enough is enough. We must invest in our children and grandchildren’s future if we want to succeed.”

But both proposals face an uphill battle. The drop in the price of oil has helped push the state into a budget crisis, prompting the governor to warn state departments to expect cuts. Hofmeister’s administration said she still supports the pay hikes for teachers but acknowledges finances are tight.

In November, OCPA Impact, a state advocacy group that promotes job growth and the free market, of Boren’s proposal in court, alleging it lumps together too many topics into one potential ballot question.

The political and legal limbo leaves Oklahoma districts to navigate the teacher shortage on their own.  Some have gotten more aggressive.

Last school year, Tulsa Public Schools opened with 77 vacancies and administrators knew it would not get any easier to fill openings. So the district started the hiring process much earlier this year, expanding recruitment through social media into markets such as Arkansas and Kansas, where Tulsa’s salaries for young teachers are competitive.

The school system also hired educators from Teach For America and requested that the state award 83 teachers emergency certifications compared to the 33 that were given last year, said Talia Shaull, the district’s chief human capital officer.

This year, Tulsa schools opened their doors to students with no vacancies.

“It’s definitely a concern that we have had to rely on emergency certifications in order to get folks in the classroom,” Shaull said. “It’s going to continue to be an issue. I’m happy people are paying attention to it.”

EDlection 2016 is The Seventy Four’s ongoing coverage of state-level education news, issues and leaders in the run up to 2016 elections. (Among our previous stories in this series, coverage from Iowa, Maryland,Missouri,Nevada, New Mexico, Ohio, Oklahoma and Pennsylvania. See the latest stories here)

Heart Butte, Montana

On the trip there, three-and-a-half hours from the capital of Helena, cell service and radio reception come and go. The road – speed limit 80 mph – winds for miles past vast plains, scattered farms and just one town big enough to have a gas station. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, a statue rises of two Native American warriors welcoming drivers to the Blackfeet Nation.

The same monument of the two riders — its base made of stones from a circa 1800s tribal mission and its figures crafted from the parts of rusted cars destroyed in a devastating 1964 flood  — stands at each of the four main entrances to the 1.5 million-acre reservation.

From the southern gateway off Interstate 89, it’s another 19 miles to reach Heart Butte proper. The school sits on top of a hill overlooking the rest of town — a post office, an Indian Health Services outpost, a few dozen houses and three churches.  And that’s pretty much it.

The nearest town, Browning, is 30 miles away, a do-able commute until the brutally snowy winters more or less cut off access. Many families make monthly journeys of more than 100 miles each way to stock up on groceries at the Wal-Mart in Great Falls, the closest large city.

It’s in that remote area that Greg Hirst, the superintendent-slash-French teacher, is attempting to educate 195 children from kindergarten through 12th grade, all of whom live on the Blackfeet reservation, at the Heart Butte School.

“My vision is simple: I just want a much better school,” Hirst said.

Creating that much better school —  the key to breaking a cycle of poverty for Heart Butte’s children that has persisted for generations — will be no easy task. Money is tight, good teachers are hard to recruit, and the town’s isolation means many of the social safety net resources available elsewhere are missing here. Heart Butte is poised for potential turnaround — the school has routinely been identified as in need of improvement under federal performance guidelines — with a new program run by the state and funded by Washington, D.C.

The school, so small it’s fielding a six-man football team this year, has never got more than 52 percent of its students at or above the proficient level on state reading tests between 2007 and 2013, despite more than 80 percent of kids statewide hitting that benchmark those same years. Math and science results were worse.

“I think our community would be hard-pressed to give the reasons. They know our students as being alive and wanting to learn, and yet it doesn’t add up,” Hirst told a group of reporters and visitors from the state education office and Council of Chief School Officers touring the school in October.

With any program financed by Congress, the questions are will the resources be enough and how long will they last. Hirst believes in his bones that the kids of Heart Butte can do better and is hopeful this new program will provide the funding and expertise the school so sorely needs.

Students here haven’t had a strong structure in their early schooling, Hirst said, perhaps because the district didn’t have the proper programs and supports in place, or because of the school’s high staff turnover.  Some 50 percent of the staff leave each year, voluntarily or involuntarily. The school board takes a “tough stance” in search of quality staff despite the difficulties in attracting teachers to such a remote location, Hirst said.

The students at Heart Butte School tend to come from homes without a lot of money. Jobs on the reservation are scarce, and many of their parents don’t work. Native Americans tend to have, and  than other races.

The school doesn’t really have a tax base — only about $15,000 of its $1.8 million annual budget comes from property taxes. Montana has a special state funding stream that aims to mitigate the impacts of that but revenue is still scarce. Heart Butte spends about $1,200 less per pupil every year than the roughly $10,400 per pupil state average. Officials rely in large part on a dizzying array of federal funds, including Impact Aid, with a sometimes-overwhelming amount of paperwork.

Nature —  beautiful but dangerous in this part of the country, so far north that students live closer to the Canadian border than any major city in Montana —  presents a threat.

In August, just as the school year was starting, a wildfire burned 70 acres of land near Heart Butte. No one was hurt and no homes were destroyed, but the whole town, population 582,  .

The school’s roof needs $2 million in repairs, and other physical plant repairs have sometimes meant that curriculum is rarely updated or students lack the necessary books, Principal Carinna Hall said.  

“Our students can handle it. We’re Blackfeet, and we’re tough people,” Hirst said. “Our community knows that we’re tough-minded, tough-willed people, but for some reason our public school has not been able to meet those needs.”

The Heart Butte school stands in stark contrast to the other school on the Blackfeet reservation, in Browning, the tribal headquarters. There, about 500 students fill a beautiful new high school. There’s a career and technical education program that’s adding new concentrations, and one of the three elementary schools provides dual language immersion for its kindergarteners in the Blackfeet language.

Kindergarteners at Browning Elementary School learn the Blackfeet words for classroom objects, colors, animals and days of the week from teacher Carolyn Zuback. The students were part of a Blackfeet language immersion program, and spent half their day learning in Blackfeet and half learning in English. (Photo by Carolyn Phenicie)

Hirst believes better incorporating the students’ tribal identity — the Blackfeet confederacy was a group of four tribes that hunted buffalo along what is now the Canadian-U.S. border; their name is thought to come from the — will help overcome some of these difficulties and be part of Heart Butte’s turnaround.

The school day now starts with the Blackfeet flag song, and Hirst helps students dig through family trees to find traditional Blackfeet names if they don’t already have them.

“Once we get our identity down, our students kind of, I believe, feel a head taller. I know the programs that have been tried, I know the efforts that have been brought in. But I really do not believe any of those will work until our students want to be here,” he said.

This is not just feel-good curriculum. There is  that solid ethnic studies, when taught well, have positive effects on academic achievement and social outcomes, particularly for students whose history has  traditionally been marginalized, like Native Americans.

A sign marks the entrance to the Blackfeet Nation off Interstate 89 in Northern Montana. Statues of two chiefs, made from rusted cars destroyed in a 1964 flood and stones from a 19th century mission, marked each of the four entrances to the 1.5-million acre reservation. (Photo by Carolyn Phenicie)

Five years ago, state Superintendent of Public Education Denise Juneau — herself an enrolled member of the Mandan and Hidatsa tribes who grew up in Browning— started Schools of Promise. The program, Montana’s effort to improve its lowest-performing schools, is funded by the federal School Improvement Grant, which provides similar grants to help states with struggling schools across the country.

Heart Butte is the eighth school in the sixth community, all on reservations, that will get School of Promise assistance. For Heart Butte, that means $1.4 million over three years.

Montana’s achievement gap is between its white students and American Indian children, who, at 11 percent of the school-age population, are the state’s largest minority group.

American Indian children who live on reservations face a type of poverty not unlike that found in urban areas, Juneau said. It’s deep, generational, isolated, and concentrated.

“When you have those four components of poverty, anywhere in the country, you’re going to have schools that are struggling with academic achievement, just because of a lot of the challenges of their context,” she said in an interview in her office in Helena ahead of the visit to Heart Butte.

Unlike children in Baltimore or the Bronx or other areas where families have been impoverished for decades, though, children on reservations don’t have access to the services or educational options available to children in big cities.

The remoteness of Heart Butte and the other reservation schools necessitated a new turnaround model. Rather than implement some of the more dramatic measures used elsewhere — converting to charters or dismissing and re-hiring large numbers of staff— Juneau “Montana-ized” the School Improvement Grant model using a more collaborative approach.

The state doesn’t have a charter law, and staffing schools in these remote areas is already an issue, Juneau said. She and her staff, with representatives of the state teachers union in tow, visited the schools that fit the formula for assistance to make the case that they should become a School of Promise.

“Because it was a significant amount of dollars, we knew it had to be more of a partnership than just a granting of dollars,” Juneau said. The state has doled out a little more than $11.5 million on the effort since 2010, and will have spent about $14 million in total when the grants run out.

Small groups from schools, including teachers and students, came up with plans for what was needed for turnaround, and then Juneau, plus school leaders and the president of the local union, signed on to an agreement.

The state held on to the money because officials say the districts, all very small, didn’t have the capacity to make large-scale changes. Instead, the state education office provided direct services to districts, things like instructional coaches and reading and math interventions. School board coaches help the lay people on the local board deal with the complexities of a multi-million dollar budget, hiring and firing, and the intricacies of federal funding.

Teachers also had to agree to a new evaluation system. Montana doesn’t have a federal Race to the Top grant or a No Child Left Behind waiver that in other states have been the impetus for an evaluation system tied to test scores.

Five years in, the program hasn’t always been successful. One district’s teachers union wouldn’t sign on; another district participated for one year but dropped out for the second.

Where schools have stuck with the program, though, Juneau says she sees results.

“I know when I walk into those schools now, they feel different. The community members talk differently about their school, where they feel it’s more welcoming. Students were leaving school, they’re now coming back. There’s just a sort of resurgence of belief in their public education system,” she said.

Hard numbers, though, are tougher to come by. Montana hasn’t had a statewide test in three years, so there isn’t test data to compare year by year. (The state was field testing the Smarter Balanced test, aligned to the more rigorous Common Core standards, in 2014 but this year’s exercise was so plagued with technical problems that Juneau.)

Graduation rates are disheartening. Of the three high schools that were served for four years, rates actually declined substantially at two — from 52.8 to 38.9 percent at Lame Deer High School between 2011 and 2014, and from 83.3 percent to 44.4 percent at Frazer High School.  At Plenty Coups High School, the graduation rate was pretty much flat, at 63.1 percent in 2011 and 61.5 percent in 2014.

Juneau pointed out, though, that with class sizes as small as those at the Schools of Promise —  the largest of the three high schools had a total enrollment of 95 — having only a few students drop out could cause a dramatically swing in a class’s graduation rate.

The state has funding to fully implement the program in Heart Butte in 2016-17, but after that is anyone’s guess. Republicans in D.C., now in charge of the federal purse strings, have been skeptical of setting aside funds designated just for school improvement. Juneau’s pitch to the legislature in Helena for state dollars went nowhere.

“We’ve been working with our congressional delegation” to get the federal dollars, she said. “We hope it does [come through] because it’s really good work. It’s some of the most important work we do as a state agency.”

Juneau hopes to soon be part of that delegation. Forced out of the state superintendent’s job next year by term limits, she in early November that she’ll challenge Republican Ryan Zinke for Montana’s lone seat in the House of Representatives.

The Heart Butte Model

Some money is already flowing to Heart Butte, but Montana got a year window to do some serious planning before implementing the full turnaround programming next August. But that doesn’t mean school staff are just waiting around in the meantime, Hall, the principal, said.

The teachers asked to make some changes now, she said. They’ve done diagnostic reading tests for their kindergarteners through sixth-graders and ordered appropriate materials; interventions will begin in the next few weeks. Faculty will take the interventions to the junior and senior high school students in January at the start of the new semester.

The school has also had some new professional development through a local college, as well as in-class instructional coaching. State and school officials are hunting for a school board coach and a counselor.

“I’m excited about Schools of Promise coming in” with the accompanying host of resources, both financial and professional, “but we are not waiting, we’re doing the work that needs to be done now,” Hall said.

The school is also bringing in other improvements at a smaller scale. A federal Twenty-First Century Learning grant finances many new after-school programs, everything from tutoring to ceramics to possibly a new robotics program or other STEM activity.

The grant also provides an evening school meal program: an afternoon snack, given at about 3:30, and dinner, offered between 5 and 6 p.m. The evening meal is free to anyone under the age of 18 — including the athletes on opposing sports teams that make the trek to a Heart Butte home game — and adults in the community can get a meal for $3.25. The school took the commitment a step further, sending a bus back down the hill to students’ houses to pick up those that didn’t stay after-school but might also be hungry.

“It was a big vision to put in for 100 students eating a night, and we actually are hitting that,” Hall said.

Hirst is also enriching the class offerings. After student council leaders approached him, he agreed to move the standard academic classes to earlier in the day and leave afternoon periods open for new electives. The deal is contingent, though, on the students performing well in their more core courses.

They now have class options like psychology, strength and conditioning, and basketball, all wildly popular with a group of students who spoke to the visitors. And while French is no longer offered at many public schools across the country because of declining enrollment and budget cuts, Hirst has brought the language of diplomacy to Heart Butte.

Most students hope to attend community college in nearby Browning, with the usual goal to transfer to the University of Montana’s main campus in Missoula, Hirst said.

Although all five high school students who spoke to the group of recent visitors have plans to leave the reservation after graduation — to Cornell University to study veterinary medicine, to University of California Santa Barbara to study law, to Gonzaga University for biology, to the U.S. Army, and to Missoula to become a pediatrician — they all want to return to the Blackfeet Nation.

“Montana is home,” said freshman Taysa Andrew. “We’ll come back and help our people. We know how it is on a reservation.” ]]> /article/montanas-schools-of-promise-inside-the-fight-to-turn-around-americas-remote-native-american-classrooms/feed/ 0 /article/watch-the-74-interview-ben-carson-doubles-down-on-school-choice-wishes-common-core-a-quiet-death/ /article/watch-the-74-interview-ben-carson-doubles-down-on-school-choice-wishes-common-core-a-quiet-death/#respond Sat, 01 Jan 2000 00:00:00 +0000

“I think the less federal interference the better. States will be able to set their own standards, work with their local school districts and work with parents and PTAs. I don’t see a downside in doing it that way. I see a big downside in imposing from above … So far it’s created nothing but chaos,” he said.

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����Ӱ��’s Ben Carson Education Card (see the other candidates):

 

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• A misfired text message sent by Valentino to the Chief Financial Officer, Don Moya, sharing the new superintendent’s plan to “go after” Moya for running “roughshot” over the administration. The message was intended for Skandera. Later that day, Moya is put on paid leave; no explanation is provided by the district.
• A whistleblower lawsuit filed against the board and Skandera by Moya, claiming  Skandera and the superintendent conspired to retaliate against him for his complaints about potential malfeasance related to an alleged kickback scheme. Moya objected to a contract for an IT audit that Valentino was pushing to sign with a vendor who was friends with Jason Martinez, that top school official facing child sex abuse charges. The vendor and Jason Martinez had both worked for Denver Public Schools.
• A probe by state Attorney General Hector Balderas into how Martinez was hired by Albuquerque schools while facing criminal charges in Colorado, where he was ordered to stay within state boundaries.
• The U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division revealed it is into the district’s handling of students with disabilities, responding to a parent’s claim that disabled students are being “funnelled” into the juvenile justice system.

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker put the dollar back in his pocket but the shutters on the cameras at the front of the stage kept clicking, fast and loud like a gaggle of crickets. Walker was deftly doubling down on an idea that had dominated the 2015 New Hampshire Education Summit — a day-long education gathering hosted by The Seventy Four and sponsored by the American Federation for Children that was held Wednesday outside Manchester, New Hampshire — where six Republican policymakers came to give in-depth summaries of their K-12 education positions.

You’d have to be under a rock not to know, but to sum up the day’s declaration in six words: Local control is the best control. (Watch the full NH Education Summit: Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, Carly Fiorina, Bobby Jindal, John Kasich and Scott Walker talk K-12 with Campbell Brown)

Each political party has their own whipping boy proxy that best embodies this notion (and you can see it among the Democrats in what Randi Weingarten calls the “test and punish” dogma of standards and assessments) but at Wednesday’s GOP summit it was about Common Core — which has become shorthand for national standards, the U.S. Department of Education as an agent of oppressive regulation and coercion, and a bunch of other things. Common Core is a rare instance of seeming agreement among the hard left and the hard right … they both hate it (even if for different reasons).

Governors Bush and Kasich remain supportive of the concept if not the name while the other attendees — with varying levels of efficacy — are walking away from them like the hero in a Michael Bay movie just after the big explosion.

Personally, I’m on the role of the federal government (or government broadly) where regulation and implementation are concerned, but I am highly skeptical of centralized bureaucracies. Carly Fiorina — who spent more time talking about the nature of regulation and innovation than education — might have summed up my feelings best when she noted that innovation is about “risk taking and mistake making” and that when you “give a bureaucracy an inch it takes a mile.”

But I am absolutely NOT sold on this reasoning that “local control” is a panacea for the ills of Washington’s overregulation. And it shocks me, given some of the examples we’ve seen, that the candidates would sell it that way.

Consider what you might describe as the radical localism of a place like Newark, New Jersey, where local control (the state has run Newark for over 20 years and pays the lion’s share of the school budgets) is “the” community issue. Things are tense enough there that it was common to see drawings of former superintendent Cami Anderson scrawled across her face hanging in the window of the CWA office downtown. Governor Christie’s picture, more recently, was seen hanging in the window next to Anderson’s receiving the same treatment. Is giving this sort of local establishment more power really the way to go?

And then there’s Missouri, where the triggering of a state-law transfer provision catalyzed by the Normandy school district’s (which is almost entirely black) loss of its accreditation unleashed what I will kindly describe as “the worse angels” of the folks in nearby Francis Howell (which is mostly white). Local control, taxation, property wealth concerns, community cohesion, and safety were offered as the primary reasons to oppose the transfer of students from Normandy. But when people start talking about “knives, guns, metal detectors, and test score drops” you don’t need to be a Navajo code talker to understand what they really mean: those poor black kids will ruin “our” public schools. It’s all very David Simon-esque.

And let’s not forget that “local control,” which is to say traditional school board governance where the teachers unions have an outsized ability to put their own folks in charge, is precisely what we’ve been trying to get away from as “reformers.” To add some more nuance, I think lots of folks on Team Change like local control when it’s “parent control” in the form of more school choice (which all the candidates support). But school board elections in particular—which the former head of The Fordham Institute Checker Finn once described as “deeply corrupting of the democratic process”—created the highly uneven system of public education we’re all trying to improve. Given the history here, and the tense relationships with teachers unions that many of the candidates (Walker, Christie, and Bush in particular) have experienced, the cry of “onward” for local control seems like running backwards, or to borrow from Governor Christie, like “arming the palace guard” instead of empowering the revolutionaries.

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Common Core has its issues (as a proxy and as a policy on its own) but I’m not sold on the wholesale notion of forcing the federal government out of education and exclusively empowering the locals. And that’s not even because I don’t think competition among states, or states as “laboratories for innovation” are bad things … and it’s absolutely not because I think the federal government is a perfect implementer.

It’s because, given the history of No Child Left Behind and its important legacy of shining the spotlight on student failure which states routinely covered up in the absence of any federal push, I think local “accountability” in an era of no federal intervention is flatly “no accountability.” The , because the states, in the absence of Washington calling for some rational transparency and, if not describing, at least mandating that there should be sanctions for failure (though even this seems to be a bridge too far) aren’t going to do these things wholesale. Sure, Governor Bush had a breakthrough education policy agenda that has shown great gains for the kids who needed them the most, but for every strong-willed, tough, committed wonk like Bush there’s someone who thinks letting parents know their schools aren’t up to snuff is morally and civically untenable. Without the federal role and, indeed, some level of federal command, we’ve got nothing on this.

Running for office is more about what you say than what you’ll do. And, yes, primary voters of all stripes are a prickly bunch (I happen to be one waiting to chime in on the other side of the aisle). But this chatter — brilliantly cloaked in the language of local sovereignty — is … unsettling, and it troubles me deeply to hear the positive aspects of the federal role dismissed so cavalierly. Maybe the candidates know better and are just posturing. I certainly hope so.

Fans of Game of Thrones will recognize the themes behind this debate. In one exceptional scene of the HBO series, scheming Petyr Baelish summarizes his worldview, claiming .” But Cersei Lannister, a royal who is woefully detached from her citizens, but who controls the money and the soldiers, sees it a whole lot differently: “POWER is power.”

But in the case of education, aren’t both of these sentiments true? Don’t we need to both empower families and leaders at the local level AND have a federal government that acts as an honest broker, ensuring there’s some semblance of consistency across districts and states?

And more urgently: Can a candidate who actually gets this nuance survive the Republican primary melee?

Here’s the memo from our pollster—Hart Research, one of top firms in US—on their findings of our member poll

— Randi Weingarten (@rweingarten)

But the AFT’s online following was not completely satisfied. Consider these comments from its Facebook page, slamming the endorsement:

Similarly, a stream of frustrated reactions from educators started circulating on Twitter:

. Hillary needs to say where she stands on testing, evaluating teachers by test scores, charters & Common Core.

— Carol Burris (@carolburris)

Hillary Clinton lost my support when she said “helps you organize your whole education system”

— Anthony Cody (@AnthonyCody)

Did Hillary give a specific education platform? What is her position on testing, evals, charters, CC?

— Chris Cerrone (@Stoptesting15)

Shame on AFT. If you support anybody, it should be

— Tim Farley (@tfarley1969)

“Long campaigns allows us to fully vet candidates, consider all options, engage allies & opponents…oh, whatever!”

— Andy Smarick (@smarick)

Exactly who did the poll before endorsing Hillary? The Kardashians?

— lacetothetop (@lacetothetop)

Don’t hold your breath. That obviously wasn’t a prerequisite.Another AFT backstab.

— Elizabeth Lynch (@AJMGrandma)

. can stand with . I’m standing with the kids.

— Jeb Bush (@JebBush)

Meanwhile, on , here’s a Monday morning shapshot of where the petition stands: 

Photo: Change.org screenshot

Hillary Clinton photo by Getty Images

• The worst high school graduation rate in the nation, at 63 percent, compared to 80 percent nationally
• A paltry 21 percent of children enrolled in preschool
• Just 34 percent of fourth-graders testing as proficient or better in math in 2013, compared to 41 percent nationally
• An F from the Education Law Center for both school funding fairness — poor students received 48 cents to the dollar allocated to their more affluent peers — and the total amount spent on education as compared to the state’s GDP.

She suggested that the modeling meant to draw racially balanced congressional districts be used to separate the Las Vegas schools. “Those are really good and legitimate questions, but let’s not be paralyzed by fear of the uncertain,” she added. “More than anything, being able to bring the decision-making and the autonomy to the local level, that’s what makes our democratic public education.”

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