Six on History: Schools
panaritisp
Welcome back to Six on History.
PS: If you like what you find on the "Six on History" blog, please share w/your contacts.
Click here for Detailed Search Help Thanks John Elfrank
There’s no going back.
This story also appeared in AL.com and The Christian Science Monitor and The Dallas Morning News and The Fresno Bee and The Seattle Times
That is the consensus emerging from education leaders across the country as the nation enters a second year of schooling in a pandemic.
A public school district in Arizona is looking to become a service provider for parents who have pulled their children out to home-school them. In Oklahoma, students are having a say in where and when they learn. And educators everywhere are paying closer attention to students’ mental well-being.
“None of us would have ever wanted to go through this,” said Deborah Gist, the superintendent of schools in Tulsa, Oklahoma. “We have a chance now to make it something that will change teaching and learning forever for the better.”
At the outset of the pandemic, schools nationwide had to make swift and drastic changes in public education to keep students learning. And while teachers, principals, district leaders and parents forced to shift to virtual learning are eager for an end to the emergency measures, many are already looking ahead and considering which education solutions have worked well, and what parts of public schooling should be permanently altered.
Related:Coronavirus opens doors to rethinking education
The changes to schools go beyond the sudden dive into education technology. In fact, some of the most exciting education solutions forced by the pandemic have very little to do with giving every student a device.
This story is a part of Learning from Lockdown, a series about education solutions in the pandemic, produced in partnership with the Education Labs at AL.com, the Dallas Morning News, Fresno Bee and Seattle Times partnered with The Christian Science Monitor, Hechinger Report and Solutions Journalism Network.
In many districts, educators are reconsidering old norms about schedules and thinking about how to incorporate more community-based learning. The pandemic’s disruptions have also forced schools to get more proactive about communicating with families, especially in places where remote learning has turned homes into classrooms. Some educators are listening more closely to student and parent voices, and a few are even going door to door. And they’re placing greater weight on the emotional well-being of all members of a school community, a gratifying development for experts who have long called on schools to pay attention to the way home life can affect children.
“I don’t see parents wanting to go backwards.”
“This is a disruptive moment” for schools, according to Robin Lake, director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education. “There are so many discoveries, realizations — so much innovation,” she said.
Schooling has changed forever. Here’s what will stay when things go back...
Many are already looking ahead and considering which education solutions worked well, and what parts should be p...
"It its inaugural year, DIAL is being held in New York City, in partnership with Macaulay Honors College at CUNY and Breakthrough New York, an organization dedicated to empowering and supporting students from diverse backgrounds to and through college.
“The innovative nature of Kitamba’s program made it a great fit for Macaulay students who are very smart and love a challenge,” said Gianina Chrisman, associate director of career development for Macaulay Honors College at CUNY. “Data analytics skills will help distinguish our students in the job market, no matter what field they choose.”
DIAL is part of Kitamba’s new “Equity in Action” initiative, a broad long-term organizational commitment that seeks to create pathways to opportunity for young people from diverse backgrounds. Kitamba, based in New York, delivers consulting and products to solve complex social problems nationwide.
“Kitamba is committed to developing future generations of analysts, public policy leaders and educators, particularly from underrepresented communities,” said Rajeev Bajaj, CEO and co-founder of Kitamba. “When robust perspectives are included in responsible data analysis [is there a template for that?], public policy - from immigration to education, national security to health care - can be more inclusive and better all lives.”
The first cohort of DIAL students will spend the fall learning how to bridge gaps in researcher or policy-maker experience by pulling in information from otherwise underrepresented communities to overcome potential biases [a mouthful there] . Participants will receive mentors from prominent companies and organizations, as well as networking opportunities to jumpstart their careers [now you're talkin!]."
Kitamba Partners with Macaulay Honors College at CUNY and Breakthrough New York to Develop Researchers and Leaders Focused on EquityLearn the Basics on School Ventilation and Virus MitigationIndoor Air Quality 101 for School LeadersA Webinar on Keeping Your School Community HealthyRegister TodayTodayMarch 24, 20213 p.m. ET
Proper air ventilation and filtration in your schools—when combined with other best practices like mask wearing, physical distancing, hand-washing and surface cleaning—are essential strategies to protect school staff and students from the coronavirus. In the long term, proper air ventilation not only will keep your school community healthier, it also will impact learning outcomes in a positive way.
However, to be effective, the key word is “proper.”
It is time to get educated on indoor air quality. Learn more about making your schools safe and the questions to ask in your district.
The COVID-19 crisis has put a spotlight on decades of neglect and the growing deficiencies of school infrastructure, including heating, ventilation and air conditioning, also known as HVAC systems. The vast majority of classrooms in the United States fail to meet minimum ventilation rates, and those inadequacies have an especially major impact on our ability to provide safe learning environments as the virus remains in our communities.
To learn more and maximize the safety of your school, join this special webinar that will cover the basics of air quality in schools and what you need to know and consider.
It’s a complex subject, but critical for preventing the spread of the coronavirus today and improving educational outcomes tomorrow.
As you consider the air quality within your school, ask yourself the following questions:
- Does your school HVAC system meet the basic standards?
- How often are the filters changed?
- How does the ventilation and airflow differ within the building—in classrooms, hallways, cafeterias and other settings?
- Who performs your school HVAC system assessments and what are their qualifications?
- When was the last time your HVAC system was tested?
Join the Webinar on Indoor Air Quality for Schools
March 24, 2021 — 3 p.m. ET
Click Here to Register for the Webinar
"But on Tuesday, Randi Weingarten, president of the 1.7-million-member American Federation of Teachers, told Walensky and Education Department Secretary Miguel Cardona that while she and her members "trust the CDC ... to provide them with accurate information," they have concerns about the recent changes. The letter was obtained by CBS News.
"We are not convinced that the evidence supports changing physical distancing requirements at this time," Weingarten wrote. "Our concern is that the cited studies do not identify the baseline mitigation strategies needed to support 3 feet of physical distancing."
Weingarten also questioned the scientific foundation of the social distancing studies: "[T]hey were not conducted in our nation's highest-density and least-resourced schools, which have poor ventilation, crowding and other structural challenges."
"The findings from this study indicate many reasons for teachers’ resignations, as outlined in their public letters. Some teachers’ letters presciently foretold the themes that other educators’ statements confirmed, as in Weldon’s (2013) description of “the usual suspects” that constrained teachers:
inadequate pay, burdensome mandates that rob teachers of precious time, obsession with high-stakes testing that reduces children to numbers, creation and tracking of ever more data in the name of accountability and contemptuous disregard of classroom teachers by both the public and school administrations.
The majority of Weldon’s reasons and the others that I uncovered through thematic coding are linked to contextual factors rather than individual ones, pointing to the limits of retention in a climate that does not support teachers’ agency. Further, the majority of reasons for leaving are explicitly or implicitly tied to current neoliberal educational policies."
Can't see this email? Read Online
For-Profit Charter Schools Gone Wild—Proof That Greed and Education Don’t Mix
President Biden and his Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona must crack down on an industry ripping off taxpayers.
By Jeff Bryant
"A new report by the Network for Public Education (NPE) explains why charter schools are often nonprofit in name only when they are associated with a for-profit management group.
NPE’s report, titled “Chartered for Profit: The Hidden World of Charter Schools Operated for Financial Gain,” reveals that many charter schools have contracts with for-profit management groups, commonly called education management organizations (EMOs), which use the nonprofit status of charter schools to hide their business dealings. (Charter schools are defined as nonprofit entities in all states except Arizona.)
The Network for Public Education—an organization co-founded by education historian Diane Ravitch that advocates for public schools—states in the report that between September 2020 and February 2021, NPE identified more than 1,000 charter schools contracted with for-profit EMOs, including “directing schools to their related real estate and service corporations” more often than not.
Charters Run for Profit
The NPE report covers an astonishing range of enterprises that make up the for-profit charter school industry, and their array of profit-yielding business methods.
When Florida couple Dwight and Connie Cenac were losing too many students from the Christian private school they ran, they converted the school to a charter, made their for-profit management company the school’s operator, and made their real estate firm the school’s landlord, according to the NPE report. Now their financial situation is bolstered by the 10 percent fee the management firm earns from taxpayer revenue sent to the charter school, and by the ever-expanding rental income from the school, also courtesy of taxpayers, because of a 3 percent annual increase they wrote into the contract.
What the Cenacs pulled off by getting into the charter school business, when writ large, can lead to considerable private fortunes funded with taxpayer dollars.
In 1997, Fernando Zulueta, a Florida real estate developer, opened his first charter school as part of a housing development, NPE reports. Shortly after, he and his brother Ignacio created a for-profit management company, Academica, and added more charter schools to their operations. Each charter school the Zuluetas created became its own nonprofit sub-chain, with each holding its own charters to other schools and with each school making lease payments and other business transactions to Academica, or companies associated with Academica, for payroll, construction, equipment leasing, and other services.
By 2010, the Zulueta brothers controlled more than $115 million in Florida tax-exempt real estate, with the companies collecting about $19 million in annual lease payments.
Today, Academica is the largest for-profit charter school chain in the United States, with 189 charter schools in six states and with at least 56 active corporations listed at its Miami headquarters’ address and another 70 entities at another Miami address where its real estate corporations, holding companies, and finance corporations are housed, according to the NPE report.
The report found numerous examples of EMOs that lock nonprofit charters into agreements called “sweeps contracts” in which virtually all of the charter’s finances are passed to the for-profit management corporation, which then outsources the schools’ services to its own related companies that provide leasing, personnel services, or curriculum.
Charter School Profiting Is Not a ‘Myth’
The issue of for-profit charter schools became particularly contentious in the 2020 presidential election when Democratic candidate Joe Biden told a crowd of teachers and public school advocates at an event organized by a national teachers’ union, “I do not support any federal money for for-profit charter schools, period.”
The remark was then “distorted” by the Trump campaign as a call to end school choice and “abolish all charter schools,” reported FactCheck.org, which corrected the record.
Biden’s declaration also created considerable consternation in the charter school industry and among its advocates. Charter school lobbyists at the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools called the whole notion of charter schools that operate for profit a “myth.” Operatives in the so-called “education reform” movement took to websites like Education Next, which advocates for charters, to declare that profit-earning charter operators are merely “partnering” with their nonprofit boards and serving as “vendors,” much in the same way that private companies, such as textbook publishers and tech businesses, serve public schools.
The NPE report soundly refutes the former argument and seriously calls into question the latter.
Hardly a myth, charters that operate for a profit are a huge part of the industry. The report “identified more than 1,100 charter schools that have contracts with one of 138 for-profit organizations” that control the schools’ operations. The presence of for-profit operators in the charter industry constitutes over 15 percent of all charter schools, educating over 600,000 students, about 18 percent of all students enrolled in charters.
The charter businesses range in size from nationwide chains of schools to smaller operations that are just a few schools. And rather than partnering with nonprofit boards, these charter operations handpick their boards, who then enter into a contract with the for-profit to run the school.
Sometimes the very same people, or members of their family, who are employed by the charter management company also serve on the nonprofit board. And sometimes board members will serve on multiple boards for schools that are run by the same company.
“Opportunities are plentiful,” the report states. “And because the schools are publicly funded, the risk is low. Every student who walks through the door brings ample public funds.”
These types of business arrangements are very different from the typical contracts that public schools enter when they purchase products and services from private vendors. For instance, when school districts purchase textbooks from a publisher, the contracts are subject to approval by an elected board that is required to conduct open meetings with transparent documentation. And the districts own the books.
Charter operations, on the other hand, generally have minimal oversight and are rarely transparent in their business dealings. And when ownership of school purchases passes from public institutions to private organizations, the difference represents a huge impact to the public’s purse, especially when private companies end up owning real estate and school buildings that were purchased with public tax dollars.
Will Biden Keep His Promise to Crack Down?
Further, when for-profit firms control where to place schools, they can choose to configure their businesses to disproportionately serve fewer disadvantaged students—the students who cost the most to educate.
Looking at the five cities with the most for-profit charter schools by the proportion of students attending these schools, the NPE report found that “in all but one city—Detroit—for-profit run charters served far fewer students who are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch [a common measurement of poverty]. In all cities, for-profit-run schools serve fewer students who receive services under IDEA,” the federal program for students with special needs.
Some of the largest for-profit charter chains—such as Academica, Charter Schools USA, and BASIS—were found to have greater disparities of disadvantaged students, something that clearly seems by design rather than happenstance given how large their student populations are.
The report concludes that because of the creative workarounds that profit-seeking charter operators have developed to evade state and federal laws, public officials must toughen regulations that govern how charter schools operate.
At the federal level, that means the Biden administration and Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona must make good on Biden’s campaign promise to crack down on charter schools that operate for profit by enforcing existing regulations governing how federal funds are distributed to charters and by placing new requirements that make charter schools more transparent about their businesses and their relationships with for-profit companies."
Jeff Bryant is a writing fellow and chief correspondent for Our Schools. He is a communications consultant, freelance writer, advocacy journalist, and director of the Education Opportunity Network, a strategy and messaging center for progressive education policy. His award-winning commentary and reporting routinely appear in prominent online news outlets, and he speaks frequently at national events about public education policy. Follow him on Twitter @jeffbcdm.
"We’ve been told for decades we can’t do anything about poverty, we can’t change property tax-based school funding, and we have to use our teaching skills to raise achievement. Sadly states and school districts have relied on top-down edicts and standardized testing, teacher voice is absent.
Suddenly, unexpectedly, two Democratic Senators are elected in Georgia and President Biden’s American Rescue Plan is law.
The plan attacks childhood poverty. We may be the richest country in the world, we have turned out back on children.
,For more than half a century, we have failed to address child poverty in this country. This neglect has resulted in negative outcomes on child well-being and threatens our nation’s future. A child who grows up in poverty is far less likely to perform as well as their classmates in school, more likely to have food insecurity, more vulnerable to homelessness, and more likely to be subjected to violence, abuse, and neglect. While the United States proudly leads the world in science, technology, innovation, and sports, we sadly also leader in infant mortality, violence against children, and child poverty. Despite lots of expressed concern for children, our nation’s leaders have failed make needed investments in child well-being. ...
New York City public schools are projected to receive $4.5 billion in federal coronavirus relief, bringing a significant financial boost as education officials plan for the fall.
The money comes from a sprawling, $1.9 trillion relief package … But big questions remain, including how state and city officials will use this new infusion of cash — roughly $4,500 more per student — to help schools rebound from a year of unprecedented disruption.
… one-fifth of the money to districts must be spent on “evidence-based” practices to combat “learning loss,” which amounts to about $900 million for New York City.
Beyond announcing a vague framework for providing extra academic and mental health support, the mayor has not yet shared many details or the projected cost of such plans. Schools Chancellor Meisha Porter, in a recent interview with Chalkbeat, said more answers would come soon as to whether individual schools will be able to choose how to spend the money or whether the education department will issue directives.
Since the stimulus must be distributed through the federal government’s Title 1 formula, a large portion of the dollars will go to districts that serve many students from low-income families. In the nation’s largest system, about 73% of students are from low-income families, and the city will receive about half of the $8.9 billion set aside for the state’s education system. The money can be used until 2024.
A lame duck mayor struggling to repair his damaged legacy, a dozen candidates for mayor throwing brickbats, a governor desperately trying to remain in office: what kind of plan will emerge?
The mayor’s last attempt to turnaround the 100 lowest achieving schools was a disaster.
After making an ambitious promise to rapidly turn around nearly 100 of New York City’s lowest performing schools, Mayor Bill de Blasio acknowledged … that after four years, almost $800 million, and a mixed record of success, a new approach is needed.
That new approach, it turns out, looks a lot like the old one.
Ironically an innovative approach to school organization has both thrived, and been ignored; more than ignored, Chancellor Carranza tried, without success, to squelch the project.
The Affinity District, 150 schools working with six not-for-profits function as school districts within the greater school district, akin to Charter Management Organizations. The organizations provide professional and leadership development along with a safe space for school leaders and teachers. Many of the Affinity District schools participate in the teacher union (UFT) PROSE initiative.
The Progressive Redesign Opportunity Schools for Excellence (PROSE) program was established as part of the contract between the UFT, CSA and the DOE. The PROSE program enables schools who have a demonstrated record of effective school leadership, collaboration, and trust to implement innovative practices outside of existing rules.
Norm Fruchter and his team at the NYU Metro Center examine the Affinity District in depth. Read here.
Does it make sense to ask the leaders of the two largest support organizations in the Affinity District, Mark Dunetz the leader of New Visions for Public Schools and Richard Kahan, the leader of the Urban Assembly to sit down with Michael Mulgrew, the leader of the teacher union (UFT) and hammer out a plan for the future?
I know, I know, unlikely."
