HEJE Overview 6-24-17: Education

QUOTE OF THE DAY

On Illinois’s budget impasse and looming fiscal crisis: “What is the solution? I don’t know, but it’s not my job to untangle this mess and the people responsible for undoing the monstrosity aren’t doing it. Citizens of Illinois deserve better. We DEMAND better. Who is going to come bail us out? I’m guessing no one, but it doesn’t hurt to put an S.O.S. out there….just in case.”

–Deb Robinson, Editor, Canton Daily Ledger

• Department of Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke addressed massive cuts to the budgets of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Bureau of Indian Education (12% plus an additional $23.3 million cut to social services and welfare programs) in testimony before the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources on June 20. The overall reduction in the DOI’s budget is also 12%, for a total of $1.6 billion; of this amount, $371 million would come from the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

Question: Is the following exchange deliberately ironic, or unintentionally so?

“’Clearly, when it comes to the Bureau of Indian Education,’ Sec. Zinke said in response [to a question by Senator Catherine Cortez Mastro, D-Nev.], ‘I think we failed.’”

“Aside from withholding massive amounts of funding from the agency, the Secretary admitted, however, he was at a loss for ideas to improve Native American education.

“‘More money may not produce a better solution,’” he claimed. ‘Something is not right.’”

Since when can something “not right” be righted by “withholding massive amounts of funding”?

• Making connections: a piece by Lisa Pruitt of legalruralism, taking note of a recent WSJ article detailing the great digital divide between rural and urban America—and by extension, between rural and urban American schools’ ability to deliver online (“cyber”, “virtual”) education to rural students. A statistic to keep in mind: 39% of rural residents in flyover land lack broadband access. Here’s the thing (Pruitt, quoting the WSJ): “Rural America can’t seem to afford broadband: Too few customers are spread over too great a distance. The gold standard is fiber-optic service, but rural internet providers say they can’t invest in door-to-door connections with such a limited number of subscribers.”

We’ll be following the Secretary of Education’s push for “personalized education” (aka online, cyber, virtual, etc.) in rural areas and in Native American schools, most of which are located in isolated rural areas. We don’t think the lack of internet access will stop the Department of Education from imposing solutions like this, but it’s something for rural education advocates to keep in mind as the movement to “de-commission” “failed” rural schools—which are less attractive to the charter school industry because sparsely-populated regions aren’t as profitable for-profit enterprises (essentially, the same reasoning that broadband providers use when they refuse to lay fiber-optic cable across the rural heartland of the U.S.)—and replace brick-and-mortar institutions with at-home online programs gathers momentum.

• Michael Klonsky brings himself to say out loud what we’ve been thinking: Rahm Emanuel is poised to turn the CPS into the nation’s premier military recruiter. Emanuel will be addressing the National Press Club on “Moving Forward in Chicago” to “detail his plan to require all public high school seniors to provide a college or trade school acceptance letter, proof of military enlistment or a job offer in order to graduate. It’s another one of those ‘reforms’ that would be mocked to death if proposed in the rich white suburban schools Rahm attended or in the private school where he sends his own children. Mainly poor, black and Latino Chicago students will have to comply with the new mandates without the benefit of the hundreds of counselors and school social workers recently fired by CPS.”

“For those who can’t afford spiraling college tuition costs or simply don’t choose to enter college right now, or for those who through no fault of their own, can’t find a job, let alone one that pays a living wage (Rahm opposes a $15/hr. minimum wage), their only choice is the military.

In other words, Rahm’s plan could turn CPS into the nation’s largest military recruiter. For many, Afghanistan, Iraq or Syria may even seem safer than the streets of the west side or Humboldt Park.”

Klonsky notes that the Mayor laid off 50 more Head Start aides on the eve of the last day of school, following another weekend of violence which saw 50 shootings in Chicago (8 fatal), mostly of young people.

• Peter Greene on what “choice” won’t accomplish: (a) Choice will not save money – running two or more school districts in a geographical range that should only have won costs more; (b) Choice does not improve quality (through competition, etc.)—rather, it improves marketing, and (c) Choice will not put the power of decision-taking in parents’ hands: “…once in a selected choice school, parents may well have no avenue for talking to school management. No monthly board meeting to attend, no local elected board members to call, no central office that has to respond to customer complaints.”
• Something’s missing from the Secretary of Education’s—and by extension, the President’s—goals for charter school expansion, namely “anything that seeks to hold charter schools and for-profit charter operators accountable for how they spend money and educate children and their level of transparency to the public.” Valerie Strauss republishes an article by Carol Burris, Executive Director of the NPE (Network for Public Education) on four concerns highlighted by the NAACP at its meeting in 2016, when the Board called for a moratorium on charter schools until these issues were addressed. Burris, keeping in mind the concerns, summarizes by category:

1. Transparency – Accountability. Charters are largely free of the regulations that “choice” proponents claim have hampered public schools. But twenty-five years on in the charter school movement, “we find that freedom from the safeguards that regulations provide has too often resulted in theft, mismanagement, fraud and less transparency. The sector, in general, now operates more like businesses than schools. One in 5 are for-profit schools and still others turn over the majority of their funding to for-profit management companies. Many are run as chains.” Examples abound; Ohio in particular exercises weak-to-no accountability on its charters (and see following link).

2. Public funds diverted from public schools to charter schools. While states and/or districts have different formulas for determining the costs of losing a student to a charter school, there’s no doubt that the public (i.e. the taxpayers) lose when monies are diverted to charters. This is because public schools have sunk costs that cannot be recouped when student numbers decrease.

3. Student expulsion, suspensions, and push-outs. For example, “[h]alf of the 164 New York City-reviewed charter school discipline policies permitted suspension or expulsion as a penalty for lateness, absence or cutting class, in violation of New York state law. Many also did not include rights to appeal and rights to notice.” Expulsions (technically forbidden for students under the age of 17 in many states), repeated suspensions and push-outs are deliberately employed by charters to cherry-pick students and keep those standardized test results up.

4. De facto segregation. While segregated schooling is the direct result of segregated housing, charter schools have made segregation worse. “Seventy percent of black charter school students attend schools that are intensely segregated — schools in which 90 to 100 percent of the students are black or Latino.” In addition to segregation by race and economic status, some charters also exacerbate segregation by refusing to accept disabled students or those whose first language is not English (ELLs). “In 2016, the Boston Globe found that although one-third of the students in the Boston public school population are English-language learners, only 13 percent of Boston’s charter school students are. And while 13 percent of New York City public school students are English-language learners, ELLs make up only 6 percent of its charter school population.”

• On a directly-related note, we should expect to uncover more of this sort of thing in future: An Ohio-based chain of around 20 charter schools was charged with racketeering and organized fraud by the Florida State Attorney last week. “The founder of an Akron-area charter school company is accused of using thousands of dollars parents paid for student lunches and uniforms and millions more from Ohio and Florida taxpayers to fund home mortgages, plastic surgery, extensive world travel, credit card debt and more. Criminal charges filed last week in Florida against Marcus May also allege he improperly used private and public funds earmarked for students’ education to expand his charter school empire in Columbus, Akron, Cleveland and Dayton.”

This is the inevitable outcome of lack of oversight of charter schools.

ILLINOIS UPDATE, HIGHER ED TRAINWRECK EDITION

• The president of the HLC (Higher Learning Commission, the accrediting body for institutions of higher education in nearly 20 states), has written to TPTB in Illinois (governor, Senate/GA leadership, GA members) to let them know that the state’s defunding of higher education is being carefully monitored by their accreditors.

Here’s what the Commission is keeping its eye on:

“• Increased tuition and fees for students and loss of MAP money for needy students;
• Significantly declining student enrollments;
• Loss of faculty and staff and elimination of academic programs and services;
• Canceled capital projects and cuts to plant operations, further diminishing jobs; and,
• Depleted or diminished cash reserves and loss of grant and charitable donation income.”

It seems unimaginable that a system consisting of Research I powerhouses—the UIUC flagship campus, UIC (Chicago), SIU (Southern) could be at risk of losing accreditation. That’s incredibly serious—does the governor even understand what a warning letter from the system’s accreditors means?

Loss by any of the U of I system’s schools of accreditation could bring them all tumbling down like a house of cards—it would be the educational equivalent of demoting Illinois bonds to junk status, which Moody’s is threatening to do in six days’ time.

Billionaires who enter politics late in life may not be up to what politics requires of them—an ability to work with others, including their opponents, and a good-faith willingness to compromise in the best interests of the governed.