Otherwise known as "How to further privatize and sell off our public school system to the highest bidder, Part _".
Those of you who have read my previous posts know that I used to be a public school teacher. I have for a long time now been concerned about the trend in our school system toward charter schools, privatization, and standardized testing. I had some transitory hope that the new reauthorization of the ESEA of 1965 would take heed of the continuing (and widening) educational gap and do more to address it. However, those hopes have been dashed.
The title of the new reauthorization sounds promising, doesn't it? It implies that the intent is to prepare our students for college or careers, right? But what it's doing is continuing the trend toward privatization and the increased involvement of corporate America in the public school system.
My concerns with this are many, and I've discussed some of them in previous posts. My main issue at this point is that the current draft of the legislation appears to open the door wider to the proliferation of charter schools, which are accompanied by a severe lack (in most states) of public oversight or accountability. There are many examples in current studies of the ways in which charter schools are failing to live up to public demands and expectations. To wit:
This study [Charter Schools in Chicago: No Model for Education Reform, Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity, University of Minnesota Law School, 2014] using comprehensive data for 2012-13, shows that, after controlling for the mix of students and challenges faced by individual schools, Chicago’s charter schools actually underperform their traditional counterparts in most measurable ways. Reading and math pass rates, reading and math growth rates, and graduation rates are lower in charters, all else equal, than in traditional neighborhood schools. This is true despite the fact that, because students self-select into the charter system, student performance should exceed what one sees in traditional schools, even if charters do no better at teaching their students.
Oversight of charter schools is nominal in many cases. Take a look at the situation in Arizona:
Arizona’s charter school law is unique in allowing charter schools to operate for 15 years before coming up for review...But our evidence also suggests that a 15-year period with little oversight of academic quality may be too long to wait to intervene and potentially close schools that are producing subpar results. A shorter authorization period accompanied by vigorous efforts to measure quality along the way may strike a better balance between autonomy to innovate and accountability for results.
Then there are the widespread financial transparency and accountability concerns revealed by
several sources:
A 2014 report by two anti-education-privatization organizations, the Center for Popular Democracy and Integrity in Education, found $136 million in fraud and abuse in 15 states. A follow-up study (PDF) in Pennsylvania revealed “charter school officials have defrauded at least $30 million intended for Pennsylvania schoolchildren since 1997.” Some of the questionable dealings may not be illegal because of the intricacies of state laws, but there is little doubt that public money is being wasted.
A recent review of charter school scandals in Florida and Michigan by The Washington Post listed numerous cases of real estate flipping, in which charter schools were used as vehicles for exorbitant profits. Michigan’s largest charter operator, National Heritage Academies gets a 16 percent return on its investment in rent from the state — nearly twice what most commercial properties receive.
In Special Report: Class Struggle - How charter schools get students they want
[here]
Charters are public schools, funded by taxpayers and widely promoted as open to all. But Reuters has found that across the United States, charters aggressively screen student applicants, assessing their academic records, parental support, disciplinary history, motivation, special needs and even their citizenship, sometimes in violation of state and federal law.
Further:
Set up as alternatives to traditional public schools, charter schools typically operate under private management and often boast small class sizes, innovative teaching styles or a particular academic focus. They're booming: There are now more than 6,000 in the United States, up from 2,500 a decade ago, educating a record 2.3 million children.
Thousands of charter schools don't provide subsidized lunches, putting them out of reach for families in poverty. Hundreds mandate that parents spend hours doing "volunteer" work for the school or risk losing their child's seat. In one extreme example the Cambridge Lakes Charter School in Pingree Grove, Illinois, mandates that each student's family invest in the company that built the school...
All these give me cause for concern about the health of our public school system as it's forced to compete with charter schools. My biggest concern with the current draft of the College or Career Act of 2015, however, can be found below the orange graphic.
You have a dig a bit -- it takes scrolling through about 120+ pages of the draft legislation -- but here is the part that concerns me:
>‘‘(i) Reforming teacher, principal, and other school leader certification, recertification, licensing, or tenure systems to ensure that—
,‘‘(iii) Carrying out programs that establish, expand, or improve alternative routes for State certification of teachers (especially in the areas of mathematics and science), principals, and other school leaders, for—
(I) individuals with a baccalaureate or masters degree, or other advanced degree;
(II) mid-career professionals from other occupations;
(III) paraprofessionals;
(IV) former military personnel; and
(V) recent graduates of institutions of higher education with records of academic distinction who demonstrate the potential to become highly effective teachers, principals, or other school leaders.
The key language here is the phrase
alternative routes for certification so that people without an education background can become -- not only certified teachers, but also certified principals or other school leaders. Why is this an issue? Because in essence, it implies that an academic background, business experience, military experience, or academic distinction are an adequate substitute for actual teaching experience and training.
The education profession receives little enough respect as it is. Too many people assume that "anyone" could become a teacher, that all it takes is ______ -- just fill in the blank. To provide this many loopholes in the certification system for teachers simply reinforces that idea that teachers are not professionals, and that anyone could do the job.
Browsing through some posts earlier today, I came upon a link to a blog that offered some really interesting information on where the author thinks we went wrong educationally. I'm going to post later on this further, but I wanted to leave this last thought:
Standards-based education reform of public schools has been tried before.
Around 1913, the industrial “efficiency movement” focused public attention on outcomes but when educators attempted to “routinize teaching,” or standardize it, it didn’t work according to Robert J. Marzano and Jon S. Kendall in “The Fall and Rise of Standards-Based Education.”
by the late 1930’s research completed by the Cooperative Study of Secondary Schools Standards concluded, among other things, that standardized test scores as the sole means of evaluating schools tended to make “instruction point definitely to success in examinations,” cultivated “a uniformity that was deadening to instruction,” “thwarted the initiative of instructors,” and can “destroy the flexibility and individuality of an institution.” In addition to bringing about a rigid curriculum, the study concluded, this type of testing had little validity for identifying superior and inferior schools and a better method was available.
The Crucial Voice