"The U.S. is losing teachers at an alarming rate" -Steven Singer

 

Teach for America (TFA) was a solution to a problem it helped create. Educators have been leaving the profession for decades due to poor salary, poor working conditions, heavy expectations and lack of tools or respect.  

So Wendy Kopp, when in Princeton, created a program to fast track non-education majors into the classroom where they would teach for a few years and then enter the private sector as “experts” to drive public policy. These college graduates would take a five week crash course in education and commit to at least two years in the classroom thereby filling any vacant teaching positions.

Surprise! It didn’t work. In fact, it made things worse. Apparently de-professionalizing education isn’t an incentive to dive into the field.

That isn’t to say everyone who went through the program became a bad teacher. But the few good and committed educators that did come through the program could have done so even more successfully by graduating with a degree in education.

Now the organization created in 1990 is expecting its lowest enrollment in 15 years. TFA anticipates placing slightly less than 2,000 teachers in schools across the country this fall. That’s two-thirds of the number of first-year teachers TFA placed in schools in fall 2019, and just one-third of the number it sent into the field at its height in 2013.

Apparently fewer people than ever don’t want to train for four to five years to become lifelong teachers – and neither do they want to be lightly trained for a few years as TFA recruits, either – even if that means they can pass themselves off as education experts afterwards and get high paying policy positions at think tanks and government.

On the one hand, this is good news. Watering down what it means to be a teacher is even less popular than actually being an educator. On the other hand, we have a major crisis that few people are prepared to handle.

The US is losing teachers at an alarming rate.

After decades of neglect only made worse by the Covid-19 pandemic, we’re missing almost a million teachers. Nationwide, we only have about 3.2 million teachers left!

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are 567,000 fewer educators in our public schools today than there were before the pandemic. And that’s on top of already losing 250,000 school employees during the recession of 2008-09 most of whom were never replaced. All while enrollment increased by 800,000 students.

Meanwhile, finding replacements has been difficult. Across the country, an average of one educator is hired for every two jobs available. Not only are teachers paid 20% less than other college-educated workers with similar experience, but a 2020 survey found that 67% of teachers have or had a second job to make ends meet.

It’s no wonder then that few college students want to enter the profession. Over the past decade, there’s been a major decline in enrollment in bachelor’s degree programs in education.

Beginning in 2011, enrollment in such programs and new education certifications in Pennsylvania — my home state— started to decline. Today, only about a third as many students are enrolled in teacher prep programs in the Commonwealth as there were 10 years ago. And state records show new certifications are down by two-thirds over that period.

To put that more concretely, a decade ago roughly 20,000 new teachers entered the workforce each year in the Commonwealth, while last year only 6,000 did so, according to the state Department of Education (PDE).

But don’t look to most of the so-called experts to solve the problem. A great deal of them are former TFA recruits! Through programs like TFA’s Capitol Hill Fellows Program, alumni are placed in full-time, paid staff positions with legislators so they can “gain insights into the legislative process by working in a Congressional office” and work “on projects that impact education and opportunities for youth.”

Why do so many lawmakers hire them? Because they don’t cost anything.

Their salaries are paid in full by TFA through a fund established by Arthur Rock, a California tech billionaire who hands the organization bags of cash to pay these educational aides’ salaries. From 2006 to 2008, alone, Rock – who also sits on TFA’s board – contributed $16.5 million for this purpose.
 
This isn’t about helping lawmakers understand the issues. It’s about framing the issues to meet the policy initiatives of the elite and wealthy donors. It’s about selling school privatization, high stakes testing and ed-tech solutions.

As US Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) said on a call with Justice Democrats: “I don’t think people who are taking money from pharmaceutical companies should be drafting health care legislation. I don’t think people who are taking money from oil and gas companies should be drafting our climate legislation.”
 
I’d like to add the following: people taking money from the testing and school privatization industry shouldn’t be drafting education policy. People who worked as temps in order to give themselves a veneer of credibility should not be treated the same as bona fide experts who dedicate their lives to kids in the classroom.

The whole point of this scam is to serve the needs of the privatization movement.

Investors want to change public education into a cash cow. They want to alter the rules so that corporations running districts as charter or voucher schools can cut services for children and use the extra cash for profits.

And that starts with teachers.

If we allow privatizers to replace well-prepared and trained teachers with lightly trained temps, we can reduce the salaries we pay instructors. We delegitimize the profession. We redefine the job “teacher.” It’s no longer a highly-trained professional. It’s something anyone can do from off the street – thus we can pay poverty wages.

And the savings from cutting salaries can all go into our corporate pockets!

This kind of flim-flam would never be allowed with our present crop of highly trained professionals because many of them belong to labor unions. We have to give them the boot so we can exterminate their unions and thus provide easy pickings for the profiteers.

This helps explain why so many plans to address the teacher exodus are focused almost exclusively on recruiting new hires while completely ignoring the much larger numbers of experienced teachers looking for the exits.

According to the National Education Association (NEA), it is teachers who are quitting that is driving a significant part of the current educator shortage. More teachers quit the job than those who retire, are laid off, are transferred to other locations, go on disability or die. And this has remained true almost every year for the last decade with few exceptions.

To put it another way, you can’t stop a ship from sinking if you don’t plug up the leak first!

But experienced teachers always have been the biggest obstacle to privatizing public schools and expanding standardized testing. That’s why replacing them with new educators has been one of the highest priorities of corporate education reform.

After all, it’s much harder to try to indoctrinate seasoned educators with propaganda that goes against everything they learned to be true about their students and profession in a lifetime of classroom practice than to encourage those with no practical experience to just drink the Kool-Aid.

So it should come as no surprise that supply side policymakers are using the current teacher exodus as an excuse to remake the profession in their own image.

As Rahm Emanuel, Chief of Staff to President Barack Obama (Later Chicago Mayor) said: “You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that [is] it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.”

If our policymakers really want to solve the problem, we’d spend at least as much time keeping the experienced teachers we have as trying to get new ones to join their ranks. Research shows that teacher experience matters.

“The common refrain that teaching experience does not matter after the first few years in the classroom is no longer supported by the preponderance of the research,” Tara Kini and Anne Podolsky write in Does Teaching Experience Increase Teacher Effectiveness?

“We find that teaching experience is, on average, positively associated with student achievement gains throughout a teacher’s career.”

Their analysis is based on 30 studies published over the past 15 years and concludes:

1) Experienced teachers on average are more effective in raising student achievement (both test scores and classroom grades) than less experienced ones.

2) Teachers do better as they gain experience. Researchers have long documented that teachers improve dramatically during their first few years on the job. However, teachers make even further gains in subsequent years.

3) Experienced teachers also reduce student absences, encourage students to read for recreational purposes outside of the classroom, serve as mentors for young teachers and help to create and maintain a strong school community. 

The road to keeping experienced teachers isn’t exactly mysterious.

First, there must be an increase in salary. Teacher pay must at least be adequate including the expectation that as educators gain experience, their salaries will rise in line with what college graduates earn in comparable professions. This is not happening now.

In addition, something must be done to improve teachers working conditions. Lack of proper support and supportive administrators is one of the main reasons experienced teachers leave a building or the profession.

And perhaps most obviously, politicians have to stop scapegoating educators for all of society’s problems and even for all of the problems of the school system. Teachers don’t get to make policy. They are rarely even allowed a voice, but they are blamed for everything that happens in and around education.

If we want teachers to work with socially disadvantaged students, they must be provided with the institutional supports needed to be effective and steadily advance their skills. But this requires making education a priority and not a political football.

To do that, you would need to stop bankrolling organizations like TFA. However, the billionaires funding school privatization and the standardized testing industry would never allow it. So unlike our public schools, as fewer and fewer applicants come to TFA, there will always be money to keep it afloat. Those who are causing the teacher exodus will never be the ones to fix it. 

-Steven Singer

 

“Almost half of teachers are thinking about leaving their jobs. Where does that leave America?” (Forbes)

 

We’re at a major tipping point in education. According to a recent survey, 48% of teachers admitted that they had considered quitting within the last 30 days. Of that number, 34% said they were thinking about leaving the profession entirely.

Understaffing has plagued schools for years, but it’s now reaching epic proportions. At a conference last month, I sat around the table with four superintendents from various parts of the country and asked them, “What percent of teachers quitting would create a cataclysmic drop in your organization’s ability to educate young people?” The answers were all shockingly low—with one superintendent answering, “One. One teacher quitting would hurt us in a big way.”

Teachers and administrators alike are stressed, overworked and at the end of their rope. After the tremendous pressures of the past two years, they have nothing more to give. They are already giving everything—time, energy, mental wellbeing, and heart. They’re beyond tired. They’re exhausted. Conditions in the education field have always trended toward demanding, but today they’re a recipe for burnout—which teachers experience almost twice as much as other government employees. 

At the same time, teachers are very hard to replace. The specialization and requirements inherent to the field of education make it extremely difficult to expand the talent pool, as other fields are often able to do. It’s not sustainable. And as a nation, we’re about to feel it.

The vicious cycle

In order to reach and teach students effectively, teachers must forge a human connection with them. Today’s younger generations simply will not move forward in their education and career journey without that connection. This is a non-negotiable; it’s just who they are. 

The vast majority of teachers truly want to forge that meaningful connection with students. In fact, for many it was the driving force behind their decision to enter the profession. But, understaffed and overworked as they are, many simply have no time to show students that they see, hear, and care about them. Survival mode—where many teachers have lived for the past two years—doesn’t allow much room for relationship building. 

This creates a vicious cycle. Students aren’t performing, so more burdens are placed on teachers to help students hit the mark, thus decreasing teachers’ time and bandwidth to forge a human connection with students that is the basis for all learning. Teachers’ legs are cut out from under them, yet they’re still expected to carry their students across the finish line. It’s a gridlock. 

The fallout

What’s the fallout of all this burnout and lack of connection? We’ll see significant drops in three vital areas:

A drop in young people entering the profession. Teachers and students spend hours every day together—and unfortunately, stress isn’t easy to hide. Even teachers that don’t actually mention their stress to the class manifest it in a thousand small ways that young people can observe. 

The elevated and prolonged levels of teacher stress are warning the next generation not to become teachers. Who wants that kind of life, for that kind of money? Obviously, fewer people entering education will only exacerbate the teacher and substitute shortage for the long term. The skills gap is going to hit the education field hard. There just won’t be enough teachers to go around. 

A drop in education quality. As current educators flee the profession and the next generation avoids entering it, we may see class sizes skyrocket—further straining the teachers that remain. Without a healthy student-teacher ratio, the quality of instruction, the individual time spent with each student, and any vestige of a human connection will inevitably drop. 

The quality of education will also drop if states, desperate to staff their schools, lower the bar for teacher requirements. Such a move could potentially bring into the classroom “teachers” or substitutes who lack the necessary training and skills to teach effectively. A lower-quality educational experience will hurt not just the students, but soon the workforce and economy in significant ways. 

A drop in graduation rates. How long before students, unengaged in school and with no human connection there, realize that there are ways they can succeed without that diploma? The gig economy has a place for them. There’s always bitcoin. And no one will question their graduation status if they start their own business. 

Skills, rather than diplomas and degrees, are coming to the forefront in the hiring process. Amid our record talent shortage, employers are frantic for workers and are trying to entice them by any and all means: higher wages, sign-on bonuses, flexible work arrangements and more. How long before they relax their requirements to hire workers with the ability to do the job, even if they don’t have a high school diploma?

This highly entrepreneurial generation is savvy enough to realize they can start making a living now—and worry about getting their GED later. If they don’t feel that human connection at school, they’re checking out, and not just mentally. They’re not going to stay on a sinking ship.

What to do right now

There’s no magic bullet to solve this crisis. There are, however, several things that we can start doing right now to mitigate the worst of it. 

Take stuff off teachers’ plates. What happens if teachers don’t do all the busy work they’re supposed to do? What really happens? Will it change anything in the classroom experience? In our current climate, it’s highly unlikely they’ll be fired for not checking all the boxes. So what if we take the busy work away and free teachers to focus solely on the mission-critical tasks. The number-one question that administrators need to be asking themselves is, how can we lighten the load for teachers—effective immediately? What can we take off their plate to give them more time to focus on the all-important task of connecting with students? 

Stop preaching self-care. Bubble baths and wine aren’t going to cut it. We’re beyond self-care. Teachers don’t have time for it, and at this point, it just becomes another thing on an already overwhelming to-do list. Teachers need care from others, not just from themselves. 

Don’t expect teachers to “catch students up.” The Covid learning slide is a real and serious problem. But somehow, there has been an expectation that returning to in-person learning would magically solve all of it and bring students right back to their appropriate mastery levels. This puts incredible, even impossible pressure on teachers who are already overburdened with ever-changing policies and demands. Instead, as a nation we need to be realistic about where students are really at—and meet them there. That’s the only way we’re going to move them forward.

Start rebuilding trust. One key thing to remember is that everything that students need in the way of a human connection, teachers also need. Many times, there is no human connection between administrators and instructors. We need to uncover where trust has been compromised and commit to rebuilding it.

Equip teachers for their real work. Teachers must forge a human connection with students before students will receive what’s being taught. This is the real work of education: to awaken the mind and unleash the potential of the student. Connecting on a real level with these young people is the only way to educate them effectively. Without that connection, teaching just becomes white noise. We must give teachers not just more time, but also fresh ideas and tools to connect, engage, and answer why for students. 

Raise morale, not just salary. More money is important, but it’s not everything. This is actually good news for administrators working within the bounds of ever-tightening budgets. People want to work in an organization where the culture is healthy. 

No going back

The education crisis isn’t a passing problem. At the beginning of the pandemic, most of us assumed that after a short period of upheaval, we’d return to business as usual, like nothing had ever happened. But it’s clear today that the genie’s out of the bottle. There’s no going back. Leaders in education must heed the warning signs and pivot now to avert the worst of this crisis. Our teachers need us. Let’s be there for them.

 

Why Education Is about to Reach a Crisis of Epic Proportions (Forbes)

A Former Lobbyist Explains How the Privatization Movement Is Trying to End Public Education (Common Dreams)

 

A few years ago I ran a piece by Joanne Barkan about the long history of the movement to privatize public education. It began:

When champions of market-based reform in the United States look at public education, they see two separate activities—government funding education and government running schools. The first is okay with them; the second is not. Reformers want to replace their bête noire—what they call the "monopoly of government-run schools"—with freedom of choice in a competitive market dominated by privately run schools that get government subsidies.

Today, that privatization movement is alive and pushing ahead, with Republican legislators in 16 states actively pushing bills to create or expand school vouchers and/or charter schools that are part of that movement.

This post—a continuation of sorts of the Barkan article—is a discussion with a man named Charles Siler, who was once a lobbyist for school privatizers but who came to oppose the very thing he was working toward. Siler worked for two privatization organizations, including the Goldwater Institute in Arizona, where his job was to persuade legislators to pass laws that privatize public services, especially K-12 schooling.

In March, Siler had a conversation with education historian and activist Diane Ravitch as well as with podcaster Jennifer Berkshire, in which he provided insight into the playbook used by “school choice” proponents, the belief system that drives them and their long-term objective. He makes it very clear: Their ultimate goal is to dismantle K-12 public schools.

Carol Burris, a former prizewinning principal and executive director of the nonprofit advocacy group the Network for Public Education, did a Q&A with Siler on the same issues. Here’s the interview Burris did with Siler:

BURRIS: Charles, can you tell me about yourself—specifically, for whom did you work as a lobbyist for privatizing public services, and why did you leave that work?

"I grew up truly believing the best way we could help the most people was to get the government out of their lives. But if you take a look at the actual impacts of libertarian policies when they're implemented, it becomes apparent, they aren't helping people, and in fact, they make people worse off."

SILER: I am Charles Siler, former Army public affairs and graduate of George Mason University with an economics degree. I lobbied and did public relations for the Goldwater Institute in Phoenix, Arizona, and the Foundation for Government Accountability in Naples, Florida. Both organizations are part of the State Policy Network, a collection of libertarian/conservative policy organizations around the country. While there, I promoted medical freedom legislation, programs to increase limitations on public assistance programs and school privatization programs.

I eventually left as I realized I wasn't a great fit for that work. The outcomes weren't aligning with my values. I grew up truly believing the best way we could help the most people was to get the government out of their lives. But if you take a look at the actual impacts of libertarian policies when they're implemented, it becomes apparent, they aren't helping people, and in fact, they make people worse off. I couldn't continue to do the work I had done. Now I work to educate people about the problematic programs I had helped promote and how we can build something better.

BURRIS: Let’s get straight to the point. It is becoming more obvious that all of the voucher and charter expansion legislation we see this year is part of a larger mission being pushed by libertarian Republicans. First, am I right? And second, what is the ultimate goal?

SILER: There’s virtually no other initiative in the education space that’s a bigger priority for the right today than creating and expanding unaccountable, unrestricted, universal voucher programs. The easiest way to recognize this reality is to look at the incredible number of school voucher bills being pushed across state legislatures just this year.

They aren’t doing it because their constituents are demanding these programs. Voters continually reject voucher programs, and in any state where a public response is permitted, the wave of public opposition to these programs dwarfs the AstroTurfed support for them. They also fervently refuse to include any kind of measures to mitigate fraud, waste, abuse and lack of accountability in these voucher programs despite having evidence from established programs. But simply setting up voucher programs isn’t their ultimate goal; it’s just the current next step towards their ultimate goal.

Their ideal is a world with as minimal public infrastructure and investment as possible. They want the weakest and leanest government possible in order to protect the interests of a few wealthy individuals and families who want to protect their extraction of wealth from the rest of us. They see private wealth accumulation as a virtue signal because a person can only become wealthy by creating something of exceptional value for the public. In their world view, the more money someone has, the more moral life they've lived, and any attempt to take that money through taxation or other means is a moral issue.

"Their ideal is a world with as minimal public infrastructure and investment as possible. They want the weakest and leanest government possible in order to protect the interests of a few wealthy individuals and families who want to protect their extraction of wealth from the rest of us."

That's why they work so diligently to undermine public infrastructure, whether that's public schools, public transportation, military spending, and even the carceral system.

They also work to undermine collective action in the form of unions, voting blocs, protests and more. To them, it’s equally immoral for a union to demand higher wages of a business owner as it is for voters to impose a higher minimum wage on business owners. The same people pushing for school privatization are the same ones pushing for voter suppression, and that’s why. They fear the power of people.

BURRIS: In many states, we see a multiplicity of voucher programs—all functioning differently and all with different names. Why?

SILER: The hodgepodge of voucher and privatization programs is a result of their unpopularity. Since they are pushing an unpopular agenda across the country, each state presents different opportunities and challenges for school privatizers.

The programs have to have different names to create a sort of moving target. When advocating for voucher programs, I never used the term “voucher” because we knew it was already tainted and politically unpopular. That's why we called them Education Savings Accounts, or Personal Learning Scholarship Accounts, and so on. We knew that the public didn't support our efforts, but there's also a sincere belief that the public doesn't truly understand what is best for them, so we have to trick them into buying what we're selling. So much of our outreach was obfuscation. I spent many phone calls with reporters trying to explain to them why our program wasn't a voucher program and shouldn't be labeled as such.

At the end of the day, the multiplicity you see is a direct result of the unpopularity of vouchers, but make no mistake, they all have the same purpose: To undo public education — not only the institution but also the public funding of schools.

BURRIS: We are now seeing charter expansion legislation paired with voucher legislation. How do charter schools fit into the agenda?

SILER: Charter schools are part of the incremental march towards full privatization. Sometimes charter schools are part of the hook for large donors. A number of wealthy privatization financiers have become part of the movement by funding large grants and other programs for charter schools.

Also, charter schools can be set up in a number of different ways depending on the local political climate, all while starting the shift of public funds into private investments. Charter schools also help garner the support of White voters as charters often find creative ways to discriminate against students of color, increasing segregation. Charters create a number of loopholes in the public education space, from financial and academic accountability to legal protections for marginalized students, which begin to normalize those problems for the general public. In many ways, charter schools are the gateway to total public school dismantling.

BURRIS: What were some of the tricks of the trade, so to speak. Were there certain individuals you searched out to carry the message?

SILER: We would seek out people with sympathetic stories, families or individuals with sincere struggles. The goal was to find people with whom the general public could empathize.

When Florida's voucher program faced a lawsuit by the teachers union there in 2014, I flew to meet with a handful of families who had children with disabilities to create a video series promoting the value of the voucher program. I met with a single mom whose daughter had Down syndrome and needed highly individualized care and therapy. I met with a home-school mom who taught her five kids, but one had severe autism, and she struggled to meet his needs on her own. I met with other families hoping to enroll their kids in special schools that focused on their kids' specific needs. These people were part of the campaign's public face around the legal defense of the voucher program.

Also, if we could ever find minority families willing to speak up about their struggles and desires for school privatization, we'd work to put their faces in as many places as possible. It's one reason privatization advocates focused so heavily on promoting vouchers within the Navajo community recently in a bid to leverage their tribal identity to expand their state's voucher program. In many ways, there's an emphasis on playing identity politics to subvert actual equity efforts, especially when it comes to privatization.

BURRIS: Why is it that many voucher programs start small—with children with disabilities or with military families?

SILER: It goes back to the unpopularity of these voucher and privatization programs, not just with the public but also with many lawmakers. If possible, privatization advocates would completely dismantle public schools tomorrow, but they don’t have the political leverage to achieve that right now, so they have to engage in incrementalism. Just this year, we’ve seen pushes to pass expansive, universal voucher programs in some states, showing that privatizers will abandon elements of incrementalism when they think they have an opportunity.

So, when they can't pull that off, they choose a population they think will be politically unassailable, like children with disabilities or kids in foster care. The idea is that by presenting a small program focused on a small group of vulnerable students, it will be difficult for pro-public education advocates to be directly critical of the programs. It's a “human shield” strategy so they can get any aspect of the program started as it's almost always politically easier to expand something than it is to establish something new. And that's why these voucher programs never stay focused on their original population. They are continually expanding eligibility to more and more students, sometimes at the expense of the initial group of kids the program was established for.

BURRIS: Who are the major funders of the so-called school choice movement, and why are they hostile to public education?

SILER: I can’t speak about specific funders or donors who haven’t been identified already in a public way, but some are pretty obvious. Former secretary of education Betsy DeVos has made dismantling public schools part of her life’s work, and through the DeVos Family Foundation, she funds privatization efforts across the country. Her work as a financier likely has done and will do more damage to public schools than her entire tenure with the Trump administration.

The heirs of the Walmart fortune, the Walton family, also funds privatization across the country—especially charter schools. The Koch Foundation is probably the most publicly villainized supporters of dismantling public schools, and in many ways, there wouldn’t be such a vast network of pro-privatization advocates had it not been for the tireless support of Charles and David Koch. There’s also the Bradley Foundation, which contributes to numerous conservative groups and is also a financial driver of school privatization.

But it's not just billionaires. It's also local businesses funding privatization efforts, either through donations made by their owners or investments into state and local chambers of commerce. It's individuals, small donors, too. But they really aren't sufficient to make the entire machine, the industry of school privatization, function. It truly takes the massive investment of the exceptionally wealthy to drive the privatization agenda.

"Public schools are also incredibly popular, and they don’t want the general public to view public institutions as effective or popular."

Their hostility to public education is best described as being the nexus of three parts. First, they want to minimize any government spending whatsoever, and public education is one of the largest line items in any state budget. Getting rid of public education spending would massively reduce the tax burden on wealthy individuals at the state level.

Public schools are also incredibly popular, and they don’t want the general public to view public institutions as effective or popular. It’s why they’ve driven a false narrative about “failing schools” for decades now, and it’s also why they continually attack Social Security, Medicare, public pensions, public transportation and more because they know it’s impossible to get people to share their vision for limited government when people have so many positive experiences with government programs. And lastly, it’s about diminishing collective power. Taking down public schools also means taking down teachers unions, PTOs, local school boards and all the other ways those of us who aren’t exceptionally wealthy come together to push for collective investment in our communities.

Public schools and the communities around them represent the kind of togetherness privatization advocates despise.

BURRIS: I know that one of the principles that school choice advocates believe in is “backpack funding,” or “the money follows the child.” If that were to happen, what would prevent the money in the backpack to become less and less, with parents required to finance the rest? Is that the plan? Is that ever discussed?

SILER: The idea of “backpack funding” is absurd on its face since public investments are in institutions to educate a community rather than any individual. We don’t have money for each student, because we have money for schools. And privatizers rarely tell you what all you leave behind when a family decides to take their “backpack,” like federal protections against discrimination, protections for disability services, mandatory reporters and much more.

To your question, though, we can already see that privatizers have no interest in increasing the funds in the “backpack.” In Arizona, where voters passed a new tax to increase public education funding, which would, in turn, increase the value of vouchers in the state, that tax is being actively undermined by privatization advocates. They are actively working to continue their divestment of our public education system, even at the expense of funds to voucher families, because these programs are not designed to help anyone. They are simply designed to exacerbate the destruction of public funding for education.

If the privatizers could create their ideal education model, which they are building towards every day, individual families would determine how important their children’s educations are to them by funding that education on their own. They would create a model similar to what we have for higher education, where individuals can take out loans to cover the cost of their K-12 education. The premise being that if education for an individual is truly a worthwhile investment, then the individual receiving the education should bear those costs. School privatizers want to empty the public “backpack” entirely and leave individual families to figure out funding for their education expenses.

BURRIS: For several years now, I have feared that the school choice movement is not about providing families with choices, but part of a bigger vision that seeks to make the education of America’s children a service to be paid for by parents, with a poorly funded public option for those who cannot pay. Now former insider Charles Siler confirmed that fear.

This discussion is relevant not only at the state level but also at the federal level. The fiscal year 2022 federal budget, which is in development, is likely to include funds for the Charter Schools Program (CSP), a program whose purpose is to expand charter schools, which are privately operated but publicly funded. The CSP is about charter school expansion — which plays right into the right-wing/Libertarian agenda that former lobbyist Siler was hired to expand.

There may be well-meaning elected officials in Washington and state capitals who think charters and vouchers are about helping disadvantaged students. And no doubt some families have enjoyed choice. But every bill that passes and every program funded furthers the agenda of the radical libertarian right and Betsy DeVos. They know what their endgame is, and they are rapidly making progress.

(Common Dreams)

Valerie Strauss writes the Answer Sheet blog for the Washington Post.

Carol Burris is a high school principal, former teacher, author, and a fellow with the National Education Policy Center. In 2013, she was chosen as the New York State High School Principal of the Year by her colleagues. Her most recent book is, "On the Same Track: How to Join the 21st Century Struggle against Re-segregation." Follow her on Twitter: @carolburris

 

Saving Public Education

“…Good teachers are leaving. States won’t fix the reasons why teachers are leaving. Good teachers are being replaced by inexperienced and/or underqualified teachers. And (eventually) our children will be taught by these teachers. We should all be very, very worried about this. In fact, I wanted to make the title of this article ‘Nine Things Teachers Need if We Don’t Want a Dystopian Future in Which America’s Children Are a Pack of Raging, Illiterate Wildlings,’ but my editor said it was too long. This is what teachers need if we want to save public education.

1. A living wage and competitive health care.

“Since so few people are willing to teach under the current conditions, every state in the US is currently experiencing a teacher shortage. States are responding to these shortages not by improving conditions for teachers but often by lowering the qualifications to become a teacher. I don’t know how I can say this any more clearly: We will no longer have talented teachers if we do not take steps to make teaching an attractive profession. Period. Read ‘How Close Are Teachers to Receiving Poverty Benefits?’

2. Smaller class sizes. 

“In addition to challenges with discipline, behavior, and building relationships, large classes force teachers to deliver less effective instruction. A student in a class of 35 will not receive the same quality of education as a student in a class of 20. However, it’s important to know that smaller class sizes cannot be a solution in itself. If we don’t take steps to make teaching an attractive profession, the educators coming in to teach those small classes won’t have the experience they need.

3. Shared accountability with parents and students.

“In the past several decades, what used to be a shared accountability between teachers, parents, and students has now shifted—largely thanks to education reform based on the whims of legislators instead of actual research—to an expectation that the teacher alone should deliver results. Borrowing wording from Professor Jason Read, teachers have become ‘the solution, scapegoat, and sacrificial lamb rolled into one.’ I’m not suggesting we head back to a time when teachers were the unquestionable authority. I’m saying that we can’t do this alone. We need parents to support us in and out of the classroom by following up with homework, discipline, and in modeling—especially in their conversations at home about school and teachers—that education matters.

4. Support and respect from the public. 

“There’s an old proverb I teach to my students every year: ‘A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.’ In the same way, we will only fix the problems in education if people decide to do what’s right for education even if:

§  They no longer have (or never had) kids in public schools.

§  They feel they aren’t connected to education (they are, but that’s another article).

§  For some reason they harbor a bizarre, decades-long resentment of teachers and troll Facebook posts about education with their misspelled outrage.

5. Lawmakers who treat education as seriously as security.

“Because in so many ways, education IS security. A country that cannot think is just as dangerous as a country that cannot defend itself.

6. For people in education reform to actually listen to teachers.

“Longer recess. More arts education. Play-based learning. All of these are better for kids and their academic and developmental growth. We know this from research. And yet those in positions of power continue to impose limits on them or cut them completely.

7. Highly qualified administrators.

“A school is only as good as its leadership. I once transferred to a school in a new district that was pretty much identical to the school I was leaving—Title I middle school, identical population breakdowns, similar facilities and resources—but the experience was like night and day. What was the difference? The leaders in my new school were really, really good at their jobs. We have to demand that our administrators have more than two years of experience teaching and a state license.

8. School facilities that reflect that the people within them actually matter. 

“School buildings are often outdated and full of hazards, including but not limited to: black mold, broken windows, entrances left unsecured, cracked tile and flooring, missing ceiling tiles, broken hand rails on stairs, classrooms designed for 20–25 students that house 35, plants growing out of the gutters on the roof, leaks bursting from paint bubbles in ceilings, etc. Note: This is a short, incomplete list.

9. Counselors.

“Mental health is a topic that’s been in the news a lot in the past couple of years, particularly as it relates to school shootings. But very few public schools have enough counselors to meet their students’ needs. In fact, the average ratio of counselors to students in schools is 1 to 471 (the recommended is 1 to 250), and many states don’t even require that schools hire mental health professionals. The lack of access is even worse in high schools, where counselors have the added expectation of connecting students with college opportunities. We’ve known that education has been in trouble for years, but the solution is simple: Listen to teachers. Listen to research. Elect people who do so" (We Are Teachers).

Commentary:

10. A Defined-Benefit Pension Plan.

·         Teachers need a guaranteed pension plan. Most teachers do not pay into the Social Security System. A defined-benefit pension plan is more cost efficient than the defined-contribution savings plan (401(k), 403(b), 457).
           A defined-contribution savings plan does not have the pooled investments, professional asset managers, and shared administrative costs that a defined-benefit pension plan provides.

·         A defined-benefit pension plan offers the retiree predictability; it guarantees monthly benefits for life.

·         Funds are invested by professional asset managers in a diversified portfolio that follows long-term investment strategies; the large-pooled assets reduce asset management and miscellaneous fees.  

·         A defined-benefit pension plan provides spousal (survivor) financial benefits and disability benefits.

·         A defined-benefit pension plan is a more effective protection than the defined-contribution savings plan because it provides self-sufficiency in retirement; it is associated with far fewer households that experience food privation, shelter adversity and health care hardship.

·         With a defined-contribution savings plan only contributions are defined.

·         The benefit is based upon individual investment earnings; the employee assumes all funding, investment, inflationary and longevity risks.

·         

Sources: the National Institute on Retirement Security, Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, National Conference on Public Employee Retirement Systems, and Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

11. Fight Against Vouchers and Charter Schools.

·         Money intended for public schools go to private schools

·         This money is deposited in the bank accounts of private investors

·         Voucher proponents prefer selective admission policies that continue the inequality, stratification, and segregation of students (race, religion, and class or income)

·         Voucher proponents “represent the most reactionary elements of our society”

·         Vouchers are not about “saving children” or “improving education.” It is about destroying public education and making profits

·         Vouchers do not increase “Parental choice and control over tax dollars”

·         “Big money” is financing this campaign

·         Voucher advocates are often referred to as “nonpartisan”

·         Koch Brothers, Eli Broad Foundation, Walton Family Foundation, and other corporate education reformers are proponents of vouchers (and charter schools)

·         Private schools have no accountability, especially for children with disabilities 

·         Privatizers do not acknowledge the role of poverty that creates educational disadvantages

·         There are no “reliable data” that prove vouchers and charter schools perform better than public schools; there is evidence to the contrary

·         "We Ask America" poll, commissioned by the Illinois Policy Institute (an organization deeply invested in charter school chains), is questionable

·         There is no separation of church and state in private schools

·         Vouchers have been “declared unconstitutional” in North Carolina; other legal debates continue

·         It has been noted there is “rampant fraud and abuse” in many for-profit voucher programs

·         The latest Gallup Poll (2013) found that “70 percent of Americans oppose the use of public funds for religious or private schools”

·         “The Milwaukee voucher schools have never outperformed the public schools on state tests: Read here and here. The only dispute about test scores is whether voucher students are doing the same or worse than their peers in public schools. Read hereabout some very low-performing schools in Milwaukee that have never been held accountable”

·         “Steve Hinnefeld analyzed Indiana’s growth scores and found that public schools usually showed greater gains than charters or religious schools”

·         “Public school students perform as well as or better than comparable children in private schools” (U.S. Department of Education) Diane Ravitch, Death and Life of the Great American School System)

·         Some charter operators are opened by “hedge-fund managers, for-profit firms, and get-rich-quick schemers” (Diane Ravitch)

·         Some charter schools (of choice) have been under “federal criminal investigation for nepotism, conflicts of interest, and financial mismanagement” (Ravitch)

·         “Enthusiasm for charter schools far outstripped research evidence for their efficacy… Too many promises that are only, at best, weakly supported by evidence” (Ravitch)

            "Rhetoric of many charter school advocates has come to sound uncannily similar to the rhetoric of voucher proponents and of the most rabid haters of public schooling. They often sound as though they want public schools to fail; they want to convert entire districts to charter schools, each with its own curriculum and methods, each with its own private management, all competing for students and public dollars” (Ravitch)

             “The charter movement is now part of the growing privatization of public education and Wall Street sees an emerging market.   Take a look at this piece published last fall on Forbes.com. ‘…dozens of bankers, hedge fund types and private equity investors…’ gathered to discuss ‘…investing in for-profit education companies…’ There’s a potential gold rush here. Public education from kindergarten through high school pulls in more than $500 billion in taxpayer revenues every year, and crony capitalists and politicians alike are cashing in…” (Bill Moyers). 

12. Oppose Common Core and Other So-Called Education Reform.

·        Common Core was developed in the private sector with economic and political objectives: “Common Core State Standards will prepare all children to be successful in a competitive global economy”

·         It was imposed by the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices; the Council of Chief State School Officers; and Achieve, Inc. without proper examination of consequences

·         It is not a grassroots movement

·         It is a proposed “Free Market” solution for problems in education

·         Its chief advocates favor privatization of public education through charter schools, online learning and vouchers

·         It is linked to federal funding

·         It is funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation

·         The Initiative is a bonanza for the education entrepreneurs

·         The Initiative assumes that national assessment and standards will raise achievement, despite the past failures of No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top

·         It is an untested “same skills” or “one-size-fits-all” approach to curricula, with a focus on only those skills that can be “tested with pre-packaged tests”

·         It assumes that test scores are related to “earning capacity, productivity or other measures of success in life”

·         It ignores “non-cognitive” skills that are essential for “success in life”

·         It emphasizes “abstract” concepts and arbitrary ratios (for example, the emphasis on teaching “non-fiction”)

·         It assumes that informational texts will help students learn

·         It is a no-choice method, without sufficient research and experienced teachers’ input

·         It ignores the fact that students learn at different rates

·         It ignores the fact that students have different learning styles

·         It ignores the fact that effective classrooms often work in spontaneous and unpredictable situations

·         It undermines the way children learn

·         It de-emphasizes playtime for kindergarten children

·         It promises that prescribed standards will make students “college ready”

·         It creates wasted hours of test preparation in classrooms

·         It creates a punitive high-stakes testing methodology tied to teacher evaluation and without adequate preparation and professional development for teachers

·         It will set up students, teachers and schools for failure and blame; thus, it will promote the reform agenda for the privatization of public education 

·         Common Core does not address the significant societal problems such as poverty, dysfunctional families, parental unemployment, gangs and illicit drugs: the issues that cause “marginalized” students to fail continuously.

-Glen Brown