Republicans just L-O-V-E-D reconciliation when it was used to give some $2 trillion in tax breaks for billionaires — that was fine! But now that we want to use reconciliation to address the long-neglected needs of working people, SUDDENLY, the sky is falling!
Give me a break.
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If you have a child with disabilities, you’re not alone: According to the latest data, over 7 million American schoolchildren — 14% of all students ages 3-21 — are classified as eligible for special education services. With this classification comes a set of rights, codified in federal law through the Individuals with Disabilities Act (IDEA), that your school district guarantees to your child. While parents generally advocate for their children, parents of students with disabilities have to advocate a little harder. Here is a set of questions and answers to help you secure what your child needs to thrive.
My son was evaluated at school and we were told he has a learning disability, is eligible for special education services, and we’ll meet with staff members soon to write an “IEP.” What does this mean?
Under the federal law IDEA, all public schools must provide children with disabilities a “free appropriate public education” in “the least restrictive environment.” These two pillars of disability education law are sometimes cited by their initials: your child is entitled to a “FAPE” in the “LRE.” In order to get what is promised by federal law, each child with disabilities has an Individualized Education Plan, or an IEP. This is a written contract between you and your school district that lists all the services, therapies, and accommodations your child will receive to adapt the classroom content to his particular needs.
Why are FAPE and LRE important?
IDEA was modeled on civil rights law. Just like people of color once were barred from “whites only” restaurants or forced to sit in the back of the bus, children with disabilities once were barred from traditional public schools. IDEA says that even children with the most severe disabilities must be offered a free (at district expense) appropriate (individualized to meet their particular requirements) education. Also, that education must be offered in the most inclusive environment that can still meet your child’s academic needs. Restriction is a spectrum: the “least” restrictive would be a classroom for typical children. The most restrictive would be home-schooling or even placement in a residential facility.
Who creates an IEP?
Your child study team, which includes your child’s case manager (the go-to person when you have a concern), the classroom teacher, and the specialists who provide therapies. But the most important member of the child study team is you, and it is typically in this group where you’ll exercise your advocacy muscles.
In most cases, your child study team is your partner in providing your child with all the services, modifications, and accommodations they need to be successful in school. But sometimes things get a little chilly. If so, there are many ways to work things out. You can even bring a friend, a professional advocate, or a lawyer when you meet as a team to review drafts or get updates on your child’s progress. (It’s customary to alert your case manager ahead of time if you’re bringing any guests.)
What is in an IEP?
There are lots of rules about what must be in an IEP. For example, IEPs must include narratives that describe your child’s present levels of academic achievement and functional performance (based on evaluations conducted by specialists); list goals for the coming year; quantify how much of the school day your child will spend with typical children and how many minutes a week your child will spend in therapies (occupational, speech, physical, psychological, social, etc.). Your child’s IEP will even include how he or she will get back and forth to school, if and how a medication will be administered, and whether he or she will participate in afterschool activities. It’s a long document! Here’s a sample IEP you can look at.
How does the child study team decide on where my child will go to school?
Everything comes back to the IEP. After specialists evaluate your child’s current academic levels, you and your team develop the goals necessary for your child to be successful. This includes all the supportive therapies necessary to achieve those goals. Then you look at the best places — the least restrictive places — to implement those goals. Usually this is in the district in a typical classroom, sometimes with an instructional aide, or in a self-contained classroom where all the students have similar disabilities. Sometimes children spend part of the day in typical classrooms and the rest in classrooms where they get more support. In other cases, your team may decide that your child’s services can’t be delivered within the district and will help you select another district or even a private special education school.
What if I think my child needs certain services but my case manager says those services are not available in my school?
That’s a perfect example of the cart leading the horse. The IEP comes first, and then the team determines the placement, not the other way around. If a school can’t provide the services listed in your child’s IEP, then your child must 1) be placed elsewhere or 2) the district must pay the cost to make those services available in-district to your child. By law, the team may not use expense as a reason to not provide services you’ve agreed are necessary.
I have a disagreement with my team about the content of the IEP. I want the goals to be more specific but the team wants them more general.
IEP goals should be “SMART”: Specific, Measurable, Use Action Words, Realistic, and Time-Limited. For example, a smart goal for reading would be, “By the end of the second marking period Joey will read a third-grade level paragraph aloud at 50 words a minute with no more than five errors.” A not-smart IEP goal would be “Joey will improve his reading.” A district would have a hard time arguing before a judge or mediator that goals shouldn’t be SMART.
My team says my child is academically at grade level but I think he needs more support. What can I do?
Your team’s assessment of your child’s functional level of performance must be based on a professional evaluation. If you disagree with the evaluation, you have the right to ask for an Independent Educational Evaluation at public expense. The district can challenge that request through due process — argue to a mediator or a judge that its original evaluation is fine – but parents usually prevail with this request. Typically districts have a list of independent evaluators ready and you can choose from that list. If you want your child evaluated by someone who’s not on the list, you have to pay for it yourself. You can’t ask for more than one independent evaluation per assessment.
What happens if I can’t come to an agreement with my team on my child’s IEP?
The world isn’t perfect. Sometimes parents have to make compromises: an extra speech therapy session a week instead of an aide during gym. But don’t compromise on anything that you feel is essential to your child’s success. If your team can’t reach a consensus on something important, keep it civil but don’t back down. Your first step is bringing a third party, or mediator, to try to help you and your team work out the conflict. If that doesn’t work, you have the right to go to “due process.” This means that you send a letter to your school saying you feel your child’s rights are violated and you would like a due process hearing. Sometimes you need a lawyer. Many states have advocacy groups that can provide them for you. Here is a state-by-state list of Community Parent Resource Centers.
What do I do if my child starts needing additional services mid-year?
You’re the boss. You can call an IEP meeting whenever you feel it’s necessary and ask for changes: additional therapies, an adjustment to curriculum, the services of an aide during a particularly challenging class. Often these mid-course corrections will involve just you and your case manager; if you’re in agreement, he or she will alter the IEP, you’ll sign it, and your child’s educators and therapists will be informed of the changes.
And if all else fails, you can always go to due process. While some parents are reluctant to go on the offense and swear by bringing cookies to every IEP meeting, others bring heavy artillery. Over time you’ll develop your own “IEP style” that will keep your child’s needs front and center.
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Every single thing we do is challenging. My kids are being forgotten.
That’s Keri Akkawi, a Philadelphia mom of two boys with Fragile X Syndrome, a genetic mutation that can cause multiple disabilities. According to their Individualized Education Plans (IEP’s), her boys are supposed to receive one-on-one speech therapy, reading and math instruction, social skills training, and occupational therapy, even during the pandemic. But their services were substantially diminished during COVID-19 school disruptions — her younger son’s speech therapy was reduced to 10 minutes per week — and the boys have regressed behaviorally and academically.
It’s not supposed to work this way for the seven million American children — 14% of all K-12 students — who are eligible for special education services. According to state and federal laws, all schools are required to fully implement the therapies and accommodations listed in each child’s IEP during COVID-19 school closures. If circumstances render that impossible, districts are supposed to provide compensatory “make-up” services. But many are not even trying and few bother pretending these districts are complying with federal law. “It would break the system of public education if we tried to compensate for everything that everyone has lost,” said Phyllis Wolfram, the executive director of the Council of Administrators of Special Education, which represents district-level officials.
Many parents of children with disabilities, as well as advocates and researchers, regard school districts’ failures to provide legally mandated services for students classified as eligible for special education to be an ethical and regulatory failure. While education for all children was disrupted, students with disabilities suffered more, according to a nationally representative survey of 1,500 teachers conducted by the RAND Corporation last October. Our kids tend to be an afterthought in non-pandemic times. Now they’re victims of a widely-acknowledged boondoggle.
To add insult to injury, students with disabilities, particularly those with developmental and cognitive impairments, are prone to substantial regression without necessary therapies. Suddenly the “COVID slide” — academic setbacks among neuro-typical kids due to school disruptions — becomes the COVID nosedive.
The data backs this up.
The Center for Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) has been collecting district-specific information throughout the pandemic, including for students eligible for special education. CRPE found that 12% of all school opening plans didn’t even bother to mention special needs students and only 33% of districts surveyed had plans that included interventions or increased support for students with disabilities to address pandemic-related learning loss. In addition, districts were neglecting to educate teachers on how to support special needs students during remote instruction. Both general and special education teachers said, “they had been largely left on their own.”
Lane McKittrick, a CRPE research analyst, said,
For me as a special education parent, I know sometimes special education feels like an afterthought, and as a researcher too, it kind of feels like that as well. There’s a lot of kids who were left behind last year because we just weren’t able to serve them.
Students with disabilities and their families are in crisis. They can’t afford to wait for local, state, and national governments to put out other fires before they turn to their needs. And there are resources to relieve the burn, including $125 billion for K-12 education in the Biden Administration’s American Rescue Plan. Any parent of a child with disabilities would tell you the same: It is a moral imperative to stop treating our kids as an afterthought. Or, as Keri Akkawi would say, “stop forgetting these children.”
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Eric Hanushek, the Paul and Jean Hanna Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University and a prolific longtime contributor to Education Next, is a winner of the $3.9 million Yidan Prize honoring individuals or teams that have significantly contributed to the theory and practice of education.
The prize consists of a gold medal, a cash award of 15 million Hong Kong dollars, and a project fund of 15 million Hong Kong dollars.
“Like no one else, Eric has been able to link the fields of economics and education. From designing better and fairer systems for evaluating teacher performance to linking better learning outcomes to long-run economic and social progress, he has made an amazing range of education policy areas amenable to rigorous economic analysis,” said Andreas Schleicher, head of the Yidan Prize for Education Research judging panel, and director for the OECD’s Directorate of Education and Skills.
The press release announcing the prize noted that Hanushek “has shown that it’s how much students learn – and not how many years they spend in school – that boosts economies.” This finding was the focus of one of his most influential contributions to Education Next, “Education and Economic Growth” (Spring 2008), an article co-authored with German economist Ludger Woessmann.
Hanushek told Education Next he was thrilled at the news. He said he plans to use the project fund to select and train fellows to support the development of a strong education research network in Africa. “A carefully selected group of policy analysts would participate in a two-year research and policy development fellowship that introduces them both to relevant research and analytical experiences and to international networks of researchers and policy advisers,” the project description says. “The objective is to build a group of country-specific leaders capable of developing evidence and shaping educational policies that are relevant for each country. They would be part of a global network of such people and, if successful, could also build out local networks of strong advocates for improvement of schools.”
“A small number of African fellows would get some training in visiting time in Stanford, Munich, and Paris. They would hopefully be in a position to translate research and evaluation into policy,” Hanushek said.
Hanushek’s other major Education Next articles include “The Achievement Gap Fails to Close” (Summer 2019, with Paul E. Peterson, Laura M. Talpey, and Ludger Woessmann), “Do Smarter Teachers Make Smarter Students?” (Spring 2019, with Marc Piopiunik and Simon Wiederhold), “What Matters for Student Achievement” (Spring 2016).
In the past 18 months, Hanushek has published two Education Next blog posts addressing the educational challenges posed by the pandemic: “Costs of Past and Future Learning Losses” (with Ludger Woessmann), “Focus on Teaching, Not Just Masks and Hand-Sanitizer.”
Among his recent Education Next and Education Exchange podcast appearances are “It’s Not How Much You Spend, It’s How You Spend It,” and “Comparing Teacher Skills in the U.S. and Abroad.”
Hanushek is a founding member of the journal’s editorial advisory board and had two articles in the first issue of Education Next (then known as Education Matters) in Spring 2001.
The other Yidan winner this year was Rukmini Banerji, chief executive officer of the Pratham Education Foundation, an India-based organization that focuses on teaching young children basic reading and math skills.
This isn’t the first time an Education Next author has won a prestigious international prize (See “A Nobel for Education Next,” 2019.) It may be the largest dollar amount attached to one, though. Cash value aside, the recognition to Hanushek, who in addition to being one of the most prolific and hardworking researchers in the education field is also one of the most personally gracious ones, is being celebrated today not only at Stanford but here in Cambridge, too.
Ira Stoll is managing editor of Education Next.
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The superintendent of Miami-Dade County Public Schools, Alberto Carvalho, joins Paul E. Peterson to discuss how the district has supported school choice, which includes spreading choice options to communities and creating new programs that meet the needs of students and demands of parents.
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The ruling class in this country is very, very religious. Their religion is greed. And they are prepared to destroy the planet to make a few more dollars.
The good news is this: if we stand together in solidarity around a progressive agenda for working people, we can win.
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Ethan Ashley is the president of the Orleans Parish School Board, which regained full control of New Orleans public schools on July 1, 2018. New Orleans is the only school district in the U.S. with a majority of charter schools, and the district is preparing to launch a search for a new superintendent. Ashley and his fellow board members are determined to disrupt the usual opaque, insider-network ways of finding district leaders by building a transparent, community-focused search and hiring process. Here’s how.
What is your vision for a new superintendent in New Orleans, and what are the innovations you are putting in place for the search?
We are extremely interested in making sure our next leader is a visionary: equity-minded, anti-racist, experienced. That’s the goal. To get there, we have to include the community.
We are trying to be extremely transparent about this process of going through a superintendent search. The board is leading this process in partnership with the community. We are ensuring that the folks who are most impacted — our students, our families, our educators, our administrators — are kept up to date as transparently as possible.
We’ve launched a website where the community can view every committee meeting or special board meeting, as well as provide their input [related to the search]. it’s not super-fancy. It works well on phones. Information is available in three languages: English, Spanish and Vietnamese.
What makes finding a superintendent for New Orleans unique?
We can honestly say as a district there’s only one person who has experience running our kind of district, and that’s our current superintendent. No one else has been a superintendent of a majority-charter district. That uniqueness alone puts us in a different position.
We’re not as wedded to the traditional qualifications that folks want to see in a superintendent. We’re not going to cut anybody out who is talented and can do the job. We want to see someone who is unique. We want to see someone who will be good partners with our community of schools.
How is the hiring process expected to work?
After the search firm is selected, we’re going to work to ensure that educators, students and families are truly able to build a superintendent profile and job description. We really want to make sure that certain populations are included. Then we’ll publicize it.
Once we get to interview the candidates, the community will have an opportunity to ask critical questions. The public is an integral part of the process. It happened in the past, in our previous search.
There was an ask to make sure that we do not just do blanket, all-call community meetings where you ask people to show up and sit in a gym. In the current [COVID] environment, you can’t do that because there are certain populations that we need to hear from that in-person meetings would make it hard for them to participate. Essentially, we need to have various opportunities for our community to engage. We want to make sure we are providing a real virtual option [to give input].
Which populations are you most concerned to bring into the hiring process?
Our next-largest population, after African-American, is Latinx — that’s important to acknowledge, important to know. We need to ensure we are engaging our Latinx brothers and sisters. We need to reach other minorities, including the LGBTQ+ community. There are grandparents who are acting as second parents — some of my board colleagues are doing just that. Extended family, not just grandparents, who are helping raise children. Community leaders who are doing the work to make sure our students are safe and supported in the after-school hours.
People might think because your school board has substantial Black membership and has historically been majority-Black, anti-bias training would be less of a priority. How do you respond to that viewpoint?
Our board is no longer majority-Black, since January of this year. In fact, we have three Black members out of seven. With that said, this board has been committed to equity. We know how hard it is to get high-level leadership that is anti-racist. Women dominate teaching. In urban districts, women of color are prominent. Yet we still see a male-dominated, not-very-diverse superintendency. We need to make sure we don’t carry biases into the process. You can be as anti-racist as you personally want to be and still perpetuate racism systematically. We’re not perfect.
Who is your partner for the anti-bias training and how did you find them?
Last year, after George Floyd’s murder, we had the opportunity to present a request for qualifications to do a racial equity audit. The people who won that bid were Beloved Community. They did the anti-bias training with our staff, and as a board we thought, “We need to do that.”
How has COVID affected the candidate pool of superintendents?
COVID has been really hard on the education sector. There has been pressure put on superintendents around the country. When former Chicago Public Schools CEO Janice Jackson’s contract came up for renewal, she said “no, thank you,” and that’s not unique among superintendents. Education leaders are exhausted from the challenges of the pandemic.
It’s early yet — you haven’t yet formally put out a call for candidates to apply — but what message do you have for those who might be interested in the job?
We are welcoming folks who want to continue transforming an urban district full of great culture, food, and community. Our board is with you. We’re for innovation and we’re ready for bold leadership. We’re trying to be thoughtful at every step of the hiring process. For our students and families, the most important thing is to get this right.
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In an effort to be inclusive, counter genocide, and decolonize America, last spring California’s Board of Education approved an ethnic studies curriculum that includes as a “lesson resource” a prayer to five Aztec gods: Tezcatlipoca (God of the Night Sky), Quetzalcoatl (God of the Morning and Evening Star), Huitzilopochtli (God of Sun and War), Xipe Totek (God of Spring), and Hunab Ku (God of the Universe).
The curriculum has both a legal and political problem. Legally, forcing students to recite a prayer has been unconstitutional since 1962, when the Supreme Court ruled in Engel v. Vitale that a school-sponsored nondenominational prayer violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. If asking the Lord for “blessings upon us, our parents, our teachers and our Country” is impermissible, then calling upon Tezcatlipoca to make students “warriors” for “social justice,” asking Xipe Totek for “healing epistemologies,” or invoking Huitzilopochtli for a “revolutionary spirit” certainly can’t be reconciled with existing constitutional doctrine. If implemented, this lesson plan couldn’t be dismissed as an idle historical exercise, since there are still practitioners of the religion, though mercifully, as far as we know, not in its comprehensive, historical form.
Politically, the Aztec religion included sacrificing humans, cutting out their beating hearts, flaying the offerings and wearing their skin as capes. At least they practiced two of today’s three creeds of reduce, reuse, recycle. Some parents aren’t terribly excited about having their children recite prayers to some of the bloodthirstiest gods in human history. Tezcatlipoca and Xipe Totek were particularly, shall we say, demanding. Human sacrifice was apparently introduced to central Mexico in an attempt to placate Tezcatlipoca. Meanwhile, Xipe Totek, whose name means Our Lord the Flayed One, was responsible for some of the Aztecs’ more unfortunate sartorial choices. During Tlacaxipehualiztli (literally “the Flaying of Men”), the second month of the Aztec religious calendar, Aztec priests would flay the human sacrifices, dye their skins yellow, and wear them as “golden clothes,” according to Encyclopedia Britannica. Having students recite prayers to such a creature (how a god like Xipe Totek who was always depicted wearing a fleshly flayed skin was converted to today’s religion of social justice is unclear) would be comparable to having students pray to Moloch, the Canaanite god of child sacrifice, as a way of increasing understanding of Semitic cultures.
Naturally, the curriculum has been challenged. Represented by attorneys from the Thomas More Society, three San Diego parents sued in state court on September 3. Their request to the state board to remove the prayer, which is described in the model curriculum as an “affirmation,” went unacknowledged. Their claims rest on the California Constitution’s establishment, free exercise, and no-aid clauses. The establishment and free exercise claims largely mirror arguments that would be made under the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment. The no-aid claim relies on California’s Blaine Amendment which says “nor shall any sectarian or denominational doctrine be taught, or instruction thereon be permitted, directly or indirectly, in any of the common schools of this State.” Thus, the parents are contending that even “the printing and disseminating the prayer[s]” constitute “an improper government aid of religion in violation of the California constitution.” In other cases the Thomas More Society has been one of the most severe critics of Blaine Amendments, so it is interesting to see them rely on that clause here. The parents have not claimed that students should not be taught about the Aztec religion. It’s possible they’d even welcome students learning about it in all its gory reality rather than having it presented in such a sanitized, false way.
A spokesperson for the state Department of Education, Scott Roark, has argued that the state isn’t mandating use of this particular “lesson resource.” Others involved in the curriculum’s development have claimed that the Aztec gods are being invoked as broad “concepts” such as self-reflection rather than actual deities. This, however, would be comparable to having students recite affirmations to Christ not as the son of God but merely as a broad concept related to self-sacrifice. One suspects that courts would not credulously accept such a claim. One also suspects that Xipe Totek, should he exist, would object to being reduced to a merely “broad concept.”
Joshua Dunn is professor of political science and director of the Center for the Study of Government and the Individual at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs.
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For over three decades, the private school-choice movement has largely pursued a bipartisan legislative strategy. The calculus was simple: Democrats tend to oppose school choice, but if enough of them could be won over to join widespread Republican support, it would produce legislative victories.
To court these Democrats, the choice movement has favored designing programs that give priority to Democratic concerns. This included means-testing eligible participants to target programs toward Democratic constituents, capping the size and funding of programs to avoid competing for resources provided to traditional public schools, and regulating participating private-school admissions, curriculum, and school discipline practices.
While this approach might have seemed reasonable in the early days of the choice movement, there has been little critical re-examination to assess whether the strategy has actually succeeded in passing more programs. In short, has it worked?
In a new study released by the American Enterprise Institute, we conduct the first empirical analysis of this bipartisan strategy and find that it has failed to contribute to the creation of additional private school-choice programs. Very few Democratic state legislators vote for school-choice proposals—and the few that do almost never make a difference in whether those bills receive support of at least 50% of the legislators.
To conduct this analysis, we identify 70 state legislative chamber votes on initial passage of private school-choice programs. We find that while 85% of Republicans in state House chambers and 88% of Republicans in state Senate chambers voted for those choice bills, only 17% of House Democrats and 24% of Senate Democrats did the same. Over the last three decades, the vast majority of support for private school choice in state legislatures has come from Republicans. Very little has come from Democrats.
We also examine whether the small number of Democratic state legislators who voted for private school choice were instrumental in getting those bills over the hump to become law. We find that even if we assumed that every Democrat voted “no,” school choice would have received support from at least 50% of legislators in 67 of those 70 legislative votes. That is, in almost all instances, private school-choice bills did not need any support from Democrats to reach 50% support. Republican state legislators provided almost all of the necessary votes for adopting private school-choice programs. Democratic legislators were almost entirely inconsequential to the outcomes.
Given this history, the school choice movement should reconsider its strategy. Of course, choice advocates should always welcome support from any quarter where it can be found, but designing choice proposals and supporting language to court Democrats may not be the wisest way to grow the number of new private school-choice programs. After all, more than 15 percent of Republican state legislators have balked at supporting school choice. Giving priority to Republican concerns might win over those reticent Republicans to pass more programs in Red states without sacrificing the coalitions that are already supporting choice since losing some Democratic votes has almost never mattered. More than three-fifths of states are Republican-dominated, so there are plenty of Red states where new programs could be adopted. And demonstrated success in those Red states could eventually be leveraged to make advances in Blue states down the road.
This reconsideration of the focus on courting Democrats has many implications for how the choice movement might proceed. Choice advocates might decide to focus on universal school choice programs without means-testing or caps on program size, as they successfully did recently in West Virginia. The 2021 Education Next survey of public opinion found Republican support is greater for universal vouchers than for low-income vouchers, while Democrats were more supportive of vouchers for low-income families than for all families. Choice advocates might also embrace efforts to identify school choice as a mechanism that allows families to find learning options that reflect their values, enabling them to reject curriculum they do not like, such as Critical Race Theory and the 1619 Project. That could appeal to a broader base of Republicans even at the risk of losing support among Democrats.
If the goal of the private school-choice movement is to get more programs adopted, the empirical evidence is clear that the historical practice of courting Democratic policymakers has not been effective. Indeed, it has likely been counter-productive. Proponents of school choice should make a values-based appeal for choice that could attract more families, and elevate choice as a solution to some of the most pressing education policy fights of the day.
Jay P. Greene is a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation. James D. Paul is the director of research at the Educational Freedom Institute. And Lindsey M. Burke is the director of the Center for Education Policy and Mark A. Kolokotrones Fellow in Education at the Heritage Foundation.
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A new report from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools (NAPCS) finds that enrollment in district public schools dropped 3% from school years 2019-2020 to 2020-2021, the first full year of the COVID epidemic. However, enrollment in public charter schools grew by 7%, or almost a quarter-million students, the largest rate of increase in student enrollment in half a decade.
What accounts for this unprecedented growth in 39 states among the 42 that allow charter schools, as well as the attendant drop in traditional district schools? That’s what analysts at NAPCS wanted to find out. Here are highlights from their report, “Voting with Their Feet: A State-Level Analysis of Public Charter School and District Public School Enrollment Trends”:
First, the loss of 1.3 million students from traditional district schools wasn’t only due to enrollment increases in public charters. There was also a sharp increase — from 5% to 11% — in the number of students home-schooled during the pandemic. Also, some families decided to wait a year before enrolling their children in preschool or kindergarten and others sent their kids to private schools. All these changes reflect an “unmistakable message, says NAPCS, that “something wasn’t working for more than one million parents” so “they voted with their feet and chose options that are a better fit for their children.”
In all, 240,000 new students transferred to the public charter schools during the year studied and charter schools were the only public school sector to see increases in enrollment. After all, many families were dissatisfied with their schools’ management of COVID restrictions and that dissatisfaction led them to explore alternatives. According to analysts, the “nimbleness and flexibility” of charter schools made them the right public school choice for many families during the pandemic as “uncertainty and changing guidance from community, state, and federal leaders made meeting the educational needs of students difficult.”
While some states permit virtual charter schools, in only three states — Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, and Utah — were enrollment increases tied to virtual schools. Every other state’s increase came from traditional public charters. And in the three states that saw charter enrollment decreases, some of those drops were quite small; Iowa, for example, lost 9 students and Wyoming lost 22. While Illinois had the largest drop of 702 students, 67,000 students left district schools.
The report includes a chart of state-by-state increases in public charters and decreases in traditional schools. For example, Pennsylvania saw a 15.3% increase in charter enrollment and a 3.2% drop in district enrollment. California saw a 3.2% increase in charter enrollment and a 3.2% decrease in district enrollment.
Some have predicted that the increase in enrollment and enthusiasm for charters is a blip due to the pandemic. Of course, it’s too soon to tell — but polling suggests otherwise. According to the National Parents Union, “80% of the parents they surveyed said the 2020-2021 school year was an eye-opening experience that also resulted in a demonstrable shift in parental involvement when it comes to their child’s education.” Similarly, a survey of parents conducted by the Freedom Coalition of Charter Schools showed a majority of parents want more options for their students following the pandemic and they have no plans to return to the way things were. Also, while the pandemic has contributed to the increase in students they serve, this shift was already happening in many communities.
Currently, America’s public charter schools now serve more than 3.5 million students and their families.
“It is wonderful to see the data prove what I hear from families of charter school students every day,” said Nina Rees, President & CEO of NAPCS. “Public charter schools are answering their call.”
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It is no great secret that in America, it is not the United States Congress that regulates the pharmaceutical industry.
It is the pharmaceutical industry that controls the United States Congress.
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How many times have we heard it said that “these are unprecedented times?” That statement may have provided some comfort at the start of the pandemic, but it is time to face the reality that the chaos families are experiencing is here to stay.
This year, back-to-school season fills us with anxieties about the safety of our children and their prospects for academic progress. Americans are obsessed with viewing everything as a television show that cathartically wraps up in a nice, little bow at the end of the scheduled 30 minutes. Yet, tough times in the real world require us to admit tough truths. For instance, the pandemic we’re living through does not have an expiration date. We have to stop acting as if the coronavirus will disappear just because we desperately want to get back to normal. It won’t.
Let’s do the adult thing and face facts. Studies show the pandemic has demolished children’s reading and math scores as well as their mental health. I haven’t seen a clear fix that fits every family’s needs, but I do know that if we’re paralyzed by how awful it all is, we won’t be able to save our children. They need us to model what it looks like to stand strong when the world makes us weak.
I have a few suggestions to help not only protect our kids in school but provide solace as we navigate problems we’ve never seen in our lifetime.
We are in month 17 of a global health crisis that has taken the lives of loved ones and obliterated our way of life without any warning. As social creatures, we need to interact with one another to feel fulfilled, yet we are suffering under a detached, socially distanced set of mandates that have cut us off from our support systems. We are privately mourning our relationships and worrying about the possibility that some things will never be the same again.
I know my children miss the ease of playdates, sitting side by side with friends and just being a kid. We lost that peace, and just like any other loss, we need to grieve to fully accept that what has happened won’t change.
It’s too soon to say our current situation is the “new normal,” but it’s certainly today’s normal, and that’s a million miles away from the norms we took for granted two years ago. For parents sending their kids to the chaos that is our current school system, there is uncertainty in how long we will have to patch together some reasonable semblance of schooling for our children.
Students who are already at a disadvantage in our schools (students of color and/or those experiencing poverty) are going to fall further behind. According to a McKinsey & Co study, it is estimated that white students will lose one to three months in math and students of color will lose at least three to five months. We must think intently about creating the best possible plan for children — one that fits our unique situation — and we must do so knowing the best plan won’t be a perfect one.
Has your children’s school articulated a plan that aligns with the new normal that you have determined is best for your family? Already, several states, including Indiana, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Georgia, have opened their schools for the 2021 – 2022 school year and had to quickly close again due to coronavirus outbreaks. If there is no clear plan as to what happens if there is an outbreak in your school, except for sending people home and back to remote learning.
What is your plan for remote learning to ensure that your children are not left behind? Parents need to think realistically about what they may need to do to prepare in case remote learning is thrust upon them again.
Acceptance is always easier said than done. The school system was created to not only teach students the fundamentals but to provide a place to learn core values. It is hard to accept that core values are not something schools can teach because not everyone has the same values that your family may. It is important to understand that schools are changing and, to protect our kids’ futures, we need to be willing to fight the patterns of wanting to go back to the “way it was” and focus on what is best for our children now.
There is no clear story or path or even direction to how we are supposed to protect our kids in schools during a pandemic. Tough times are testing us, and we can’t afford to fail. We must do what we can with what we have, as our ancestors who lived through depressions, wars and natural disasters have done in times past. We, as parents, need to take charge and be our own saviors for our children. If we don’t, who will?
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Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., may have just blown a gaping hole in the education community’s hopes for supersized new federal outlays.
Here’s the deal: Democrats control a 50-50 U.S. Senate by dint of Vice President Harris’ tie-breaking vote, when they can get all 50 Democrats on the same page (the calculus is different on legislation subject to the filibuster). Currently, Democrats are focused on their massive $3.5 trillion bill, which combines Biden’s “American Jobs Plan” and “American Family Plan” into legislation whose price tag is more than four times the price of FDR’s entire New Deal (in inflation-adjusted dollars). Since they’re moving the bill through “reconciliation” on a party-line vote, the Dems need every one of those 50 Senate votes. Manchin represents the “50th vote.”
Well, last weekend, after weeks of hinting, Manchin came out forcefully against the $3.5 trillion package. On Sunday, he told Dana Bash on CNN’s “State of the Union” that the dollar amount he’d support is “going to be at 1 [or] 1.5 [trillion]. It’s not going to be at 3.5, I can assure you,” while adding that he would only support tax increases if they maintain a “globally competitive” tax code.
Manchin was expanding on an op-ed he’d recently penned for The Wall Street Journal, in which he called for a “strategic pause” when it came to federal spending and took issue with those who believe that “spending trillions upon trillions will have no negative consequence for the future.” As Manchin told Bash, “There are still 11 million jobs that aren’t filled right now. Eight million people are still unemployed. Something’s not matching up. Don’t you think we ought to hit the pause and find out?”
To no one’s surprise, some of Manchin’s colleagues in the Democratic caucus were deeply displeased. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., declared that Manchin’s $1.5 trillion figure “is absolutely not acceptable to me. I don’t think it’s acceptable for the president, to the American people, or to the overwhelming majority of the people in the Democratic caucus.” Asked if he shared Manchin’s views on the bill, Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., replied, “Are you crazy? Are you trying to get me shot? I’d never, ever want to be aligned with Joe Manchin. My wife would divorce me.”
Of course, Manchin has noted that he has no particular reason to care what Sanders deems acceptable. As he said regarding pushback from Democratic leader Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., “He will not have my vote on $3.5 [trillion], and Chuck knows that, and we’ve talked about this.” Much like John McCain, who tanked GOP efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act (aka “Obamacare”) back in 2017, Manchin seems largely untroubled by the backlash. (Keep in mind that Manchin represents deep-red West Virginia, a state that Biden lost by 39 percentage points last year and where Manchin doesn’t want to get branded as an enabler of Bernie Sanders and the Squad. That means this fight could work extraordinarily well for Manchin back home.)
For what it’s worth, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., has also expressed reservations about the size of the $3.5 billion package, although she’s been much quieter about how much spending she would support.
But this is all inside-the-Beltway stuff.
More relevant for those in education is what this all means for proposals like universal pre-K, school infrastructure, and free community college. For starters, there’s no evidence that Manchin wants to sink the whole bill. Rather, he’s signaled that he’ll support it, eventually, at something more like $1.5 trillion, which is still an extraordinary sum of money. If the progressives are willing to settle for that, it seems likely they’ll still get to spend a lot of money—but the question will be on what.
That’s where things get unpredictable. If Democrats ultimately accept something in that range, they’ll need to squeeze $3.5 trillion in proposed outlays into a bag less than half that size. That’ll entail a pretty intense game of monetary musical chairs. After all, that $3.5 trillion currently includes a supersized child tax credit, various pieces of the green agenda, free community college, universal pre-K, paid leave, new benefits for Medicare, home- and community-based services for seniors, new aid for VA hospitals, affordable housing, and more.
So, if Manchin holds firm, the question becomes: What makes the cut? Well, when push comes to shove, AARP and the rest of the senior lobby has historically fared far better than the schools lobby. It’s easy to imagine a scenario in which Medicare expansion and senior services push to the front of the line. The Democrats have a lot invested in the green agenda, and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., has termed the climate provisions a “pretty red line,” saying that any deal is “going to be good enough on climate, or it won’t go.” Meanwhile, it’s tough to imagine Dems stiffing the VA hospitals, especially in the aftermath of the Afghanistan debacle.
Bottom line: As Politico’s playbook reported the other day, “We’re told the $762 billion envisioned for education—which includes more than $450 billion for child care and universal pre-K and hundreds of billions more for school infrastructure and free community college—won’t likely make it to the White House intact.” Indeed, it’s a good bet that the education proposals will take an outsized hit. It’s not at all clear that the education community has prepared itself for that eventuality. It may be time to start.
Frederick Hess is director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute and an executive editor of Education Next.
This post originally appeared on Rick Hess Straight Up.
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The post Manchin Just Downsized the Democrats’ Massive Education Spending Plans appeared first on Education Next.
By: Frederick Hess
Title: Manchin Just Downsized the Democrats’ Massive Education Spending Plans
Sourced From: www.educationnext.org/manchin-just-downsized-the-democrats-massive-education-spending-plans/?utm_source=Manchin%2BJust%2BDownsized%2Bthe%2BDemocrats%25E2%2580%2599%2BMassive%2BEducation%2BSpending%2BPlans&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS%2BReader
Published Date: Wed, 22 Sep 2021 09:00:04 +0000
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Teachers are walking away from education, but the pandemic has accelerated the exit of some educators. I have spoken to several principals who have not filled all vacancies for the 2021-2022 school year. Some keep filling vacancies and become fully staffed only for another educator to resign, putting the administrator back on another search in a teaching pool that is drying up. Now, more than ever, school administrators should update their practices to better support teachers to increase retention and lower vacancies.
This school year is another one under the cloud of the pandemic. To break up those clouds, an administrator should make strong efforts to support teachers in a way that allows them to successfully support students.
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