HEJE Overview 6-8-17: Education

QUOTE OF THE DAY

“If an idiot were to tell you the same story every day for a year, you would end by believing it.”
–Horace Mann

EDUCATION

• The Secretary of Education testified Tuesday before the Senate subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education and Related Agencies. Valerie Strauss watched the testimony and reported on it in her WaPo education blog “The Answer Sheet.” Frankly, there were no big surprises: the Secretary essentially said that private schools (voucher schools) and charters would not be barred from discriminating against LGBTQ students, or on the basis of students’ religious beliefs; that for-profit schools will not be subject to accountability rules to protect taxpayers’ money; that programs which are proposed for cutting in the 2018 budget can devolve to the states, which are longing for “flexibility”.

Our favorite: “When Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.) told her it was difficult for families in rural areas to exercise school choice, and he proposed allowing institutions of higher education to open alternative schools, she said she hoped the students in those areas would be provided with more opportunities to engage in virtual learning.” [Emphasis added]

We have been predicting this for some time. Replacing rural and otherwise-isolated physical schools with virtual learning is a cheap (though highly-profitable) way to get rid of rural schools, which provide not only education for students but serve as social hubs for entire communities.

The headline of Strauss’s summary calls the Secretary’s latest appearance before Congress “painful.”

• Another summing-up (similar content, angrier take) by the education blogger Steven Singer at GadflyontheWall. Here are the federal regulations the Secretary didn’t vow to uphold in her testimony: (1) Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which forbids discrimination on the basis of race, color, and national origin, and also includes “protecting children who are being treated unfairly due to limited understanding of the English language or who are still learning to speak the language. This includes children experiencing bigotry as a result of their shared ancestry, ethnicity or religion such as Muslims, Sikhs or Jews.” (2) Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which “explicitly includes ‘…sex stereotypes (such as treating persons differently because they do not conform to sex-role expectations or because they are attracted to or are in relationships with persons of the same sex); and gender identity or transgender status.’” (3) Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. (4) Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, which “explicitly forbids public entities – whether or not they receive federal funds – from demonstrating any partiality against students with disabilities.”

From the Education Department’s own website: ““These civil rights laws extend to all state education agencies, elementary and secondary school systems, colleges and universities, vocational schools, proprietary schools, state vocational rehabilitation agencies, libraries and museums that receive federal financial assistance from ED [the Education Department].”

How much clearer can it be? Singer’s final word: “…it is anyone’s guess who – if anyone – will step into the void [left by the Secretary].”

• From Politico’s Morning Education Tipsheet: “SENATE DEMS QUESTION DEVOS OVER CLIMATE SCIENCE MAILERS: Four Senate Democrats — Sheldon Whitehouse, Elizabeth Warren, Brian Schatz and Ed Markey — asked Education Secretary Betsy DeVos in a letter Wednesday whether her agency played any role in the distribution of materials disputing the scientific consensus on climate change to more than 200,000 public school science teachers across the country. The senators say the materials were distributed by a conservative think tank that lobbies against climate regulation called the Heartland Institute, quoting the group’s CEO telling PBS Frontline, ‘We’re getting a lot of requests for expert opinion from the White House.’ The senators ask DeVos whether any Education staff have been in contact with Heartland. ‘It is our sincere hope that neither White House staff, nor Department of Education officials have turned to the Heartland Institute on the issues of climate change and climate science, or had any role in this mailing to educators.’”
• It’s now clear that this Education Department will roll back another Obama administration initiative, the Gainful Employment Rule. This rule, which was designed to bring private, for-profit “career” and “professional” schools to heel, foresaw that such schools would “fail” the rule should loan repayments exceed 12% of annual earnings or 30% of discretionary earnings. Students at such schools could pay back loans based on annual income, and have the remainder of their loans forgiven after 20-25 years.
• On the value of purchasing (!) seats on local school boards, complete with a history of the institution of the school board in the U.S. Interview by Jennifer Berkshire and co-host Jack Schneider (Have You Heard education blog) with education researcher Rebecca Jacobsen. For the cities she was looking at (Indianapolis, New Orleans, Los Angeles, and Denver) what was perhaps most surprising was the relatively low monetary involvement of teachers’ unions: “at least in the cities that we’ve looked at, union money has been significantly dwarfed by these large outside donors. And increasingly, not just direct donations, but we’re seeing dark money donations.” Billionaire education donors (Jacobsen identified around 92 such individuals/organizations nation-wide, some of them well-known Silicon Valley / tech names) have different policy goals than Americans, but it is difficult to precisely understand them given that researchers have little or no access to such individuals (“their gatekeepers have gatekeepers”).
• To absolutely zero fanfare, NYC unveiled its longish-term plan for “diversifying” (integrating) the NYS school system. It’s complicated. Measures which will be implemented include: (1) no special consideration for high school applicants who attend early-interest events like school fairs and open houses; (2) establishment of measurable goals; (3) creation of a School Diversity Advisory Group to consist of diversity (integration) experts, parents, and students; (4) expanded efforts to get more blacks and Hispanics admitted to specialized high schools; (5) an expanded “diversity in admissions” initiative to private providers of pre-K education; (6) establishment of a “community stakeholder engagement process” in districts (e.g. District 1 on the Lower East Side, District 13 in Brooklyn 13) where integration is already underway.This all sounds good—in the absence of housing diversity (integration), a lot of separate initiatives will have to be taken, none of which are terribly significant in themselves, but which as a whole can significantly increase school diversity over a period of years and decades.