2018 Medley #21

The New Segregation, "Choice," Vouchers,
Environmental Toxins: Lead,
Read-aloud to Big Kids

THE NEW SEGREGATION

The New Segregation of Schools

The 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision was, for all practical purposes, reversed in 1999 when a federal court ruled that forced integration was no longer necessary because "intentional" segregation no longer existed.

The result is that the U.S. has returned to separate schools for rich and poor, separate schools for black and white...and the schools are not "equal."

When some students walk through the door, they will take their first steps toward an endless potential of possibilities.

Their schools have been cleaned and polished, new textbooks and computers await them, and their long-tenured teachers will comment on how much they look like their older siblings.

Other students will walk into an entirely different setting. Students and teachers will be forced to learn in hot classrooms because the air conditioning has not been looked at since last spring. Their textbooks will have broken spines and the inscriptions of graduates from 1992.

Some of the teachers who greet them at the door are kind enough, but they are scared to death because they just received their emergency certificate last week due to the dwindling teacher pool.

Realistically, as students return to class after the summer break, they will be walking into two different public school systems.

There is the public school system for the privileged, another for the poor and powerless.

School Choice Is the Enemy of Justice

"Choice" has become the new tool of segregation.

Choice and innovation sound nice, but they also echo what happened after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision, when entire white communities in the South closed down schools to avoid the dread integration.

This kind of racial avoidance has become normal, embedded in the public school experience. It seems particularly so in Los Angeles, a suburb-driven city designed for geographical separation. What looks like segregation to the rest of the world is, to many white residents, entirely neutral — simply another choice.

How America's public schools keep kids in poverty by Kandice Sumner, Boston Public School teacher.

If we really, as a country, believe that education is "the great equalizer," then it should be just that -- equal, and equitable. Until then, there's no democracy in our democratic education.

PRIVATIZATION: VOUCHERS

More Bad News For Private School Vouchers In Florida And Indiana

The success or failure of students no longer matters to education "reformers." Now it's all about the "choice." Unfortunately, most school "choice" advocates don't mention that it is the school that makes the "choice," not the student.

Public schools accept all students.

The latest study highlighting vouchers’ poor academic results looks at Indiana’s program, the nation’s largest. Researchers studied thousands of low-income Indiana students who used a voucher to switch from public to private schools beginning in the 2011-12 school year.

Focusing on students in grades five through eight over the course of four years, the study found the voucher students consistently scored worse in math than their public school peers. The results for English proficiency were a wash; “there were no statistically significant positive effects after four years,” was how the education blog Chalkbeat described it. These study results echo those from an Indiana voucher study released last year.

So, Indiana diverts more than $150 million per year in taxpayer money away from public schools and into private schools with little to show for it. “Although school vouchers aim to provide greater educational opportunities for students, the goal of improving the academic performance of low-income students who use a voucher to move to a private school has not yet been realized in Indiana,” wrote the study’s authors.

PUBLIC EDUCATION

Improving education Across America with guest Linda Darling-Hammond

What kind of schools and teachers do we need for our children? Linda Darling-Hammond lists the top five actions we need to take to improve education in the U.S.

tl;dr More money is needed to reduce out-of-school factors which interfere with achievement.

How do countries that have built an education system that is really strong, do it? And what's the difference between what they're doing and what we see in the united states right now?

Number 1, they take care of children. They have a child welfare system. They don't allow high rates of child poverty. In the United States, one out of four children lives in poverty -- homelessness has increased astronomically, children with food insecurity and so on, raggedy early childhood system for learning in the United States. And these nations...Canada is one of them, also, by the way, that's near the top...take care of children. They have food and housing and they have early learning opportunities that are high quality.

Number 2, they fund schools equally...[in the United States] the rich get richer, the poor get poorer...

EDUCATIONAL MALPRACTICE: LEAD POISONING

Educators Demand Safe School Water as Nationwide Lead Crisis Comes to Light

Policy makers have long held public schools solely responsible for their students' achievement. The A-F school grading system in Indiana and other states places the burden on schools alone to solve the problems of low test scores -- as if tests alone were an adequate measure of student achievement...as if there were no out-of-school factors that had an impact on student achievement.

Policy makers must be held accountable as well as schools.

From John Kuhn

Educational malpractice doesn't happen in the classroom. The greatest educational malpractice in the Unites States happens in the statehouse not the school house.

If we truly cared about how our students end up, we would have shared accountability, where everyone whose fingerprints are on these students of ours, has to answer for the choices that they make.

One of the out-of-school factors having an impact on student achievement is the presence of environmental toxins in neighborhoods, like lead.

Exposure to lead has an impact on children's school achievement and behavior. Public schools in areas with high levels of lead exposure (according to the CDC any exposure to lead is too much) are labeled "failures" because of the students' low achievement. Yet, in many cases, it's public policy which allows exposure to lead.

And it's not just the children. Adults who work in schools are also exposed to high lead levels.

According to a new study by the Government Accountability Office that was also prompted by the Flint crisis, only 43 percent of school districts test for lead in drinking water. About a third of districts that do test reported elevated lead levels.

That means tens of millions of students and educators could be exposed to lead—a proven neurotoxin that is especially devastating to children’s developing brains—through water they consume at school. Educator unions are leading the charge in many communities to demand water testing and access to the results and advocating for policies to ensure future monitoring.

READ-ALOUD

Read Aloud in Middle and High School? Of Course

Russ Walsh presents the case for read-aloud after elementary school.

If we want students to value reading we need to let them know that we value reading.

Research supports the use of read aloud for motivation. Qualitative studies by Ivey and Broadus (2001) and Ivey and Johnston (2013) found that student read-aloud was an integral part of a reading engagement strategy. As the authors said in the 2001 study

For the students in our survey, it is clear that high-engagement reading and language arts classrooms would include time to read, time to listen to teachers read, and access to personally interesting materials [emphasis mine].

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The Wrong Kinds of Tests, in the Wrong Kinds of Ways

LIES, DAMN LIES, AND STATISTICS

We've known for decades that standardized tests measure family income more than student achievement, yet we have continued to rely on test scores to label students, teachers, and schools as "failures" instead of attacking the real barriers to achievement -- inequity and poverty.

Why?

• It's convenient to pick a number...a statistic...and claim that it answers an important social question. Tests give quick numbers.
• Testing companies play up how easy it is to evaluate students, teachers, and schools using their tests (not to mention the kickbacks to legislators).
• Legislators (with kickbacks in hand) can use test scores as quick and easy soundbites to denigrate public schools and help with passing privatization legislation.
• Just like in other areas of education, we don't know what else to do, but we have to do something so we do what doesn't work.

If you think the era of test-and-punish is over, think again. Teachers will continue to be graded on the test scores of their students. Schools will continue to be closed and replaced with charters because of their low test scores. The ridiculous A-F grading systems will continue to economically punish schools and their neighborhoods for the crime of having high levels of poverty.

Think about the levels of lead in the blood of the children of Flint, East Chicago, and elsewhere (and here).

How is an A-F grading system going to help them in their increased need for special services?

How are high-stakes tests going to help those students?

When are policy-makers going to be held accountable for their part in the achievement level of students?

Instead of accountability we get more tests. Indiana's testing will continue to rob students of valuable instructional time and punish teachers who teach students who score low, and students who had the bad luck of growing up poor.

William Mathis: What Standardized Tests Measure and What They Can’t Tell Us

Here is yet another piece of research showing that tests measure SES, not schools.

A Stanford professor compared all the school districts in the nation using six different measures of socio-economic well-being and found that a stunning 70% of test scores could be predicted by these six factors. When the PARCC tests, which are used to test “college and career readiness” were compared with freshman grade point average, the tests only predicted between one and 16% of the GPA. What this means is that the tests do a better job of measuring socio-economic status than measuring schools. This pattern has been solidly and consistently confirmed by a mountain of research since the famous Coleman report in 1966. It pointed to family and social problems rather than schools.”

Pressuring schools to raise test scores got diminishing returns, new study of No Child Left Behind finds

In the "this is no surprise to anyone" category, Chalkbeat reports that No Child Left Behind's focus on tests really didn't have much of an impact on actual student achievement. In other words, the obsessive focus on testing, the misuse and overuse of testing, the punishment of students and schools dealing with high levels of poverty, and the billions of dollars transferred from cash-strapped public schools to testing corporations, didn't -- and doesn't -- help anyone.

Keep in mind that throughout this article, with phrases such as low-performing, struggling schools, and levels of performance, Chalkbeat assumes that the only measures of student and school performance are standardized tests.

“Districts may have understood it was a nudge and a wink and it didn’t really have teeth,” he said of the law.

No Child Left Behind’s replacement, the Every Student Succeeds Act, takes a different tack. Instead of giving each state discretion in how many schools are identified as failing and requiring them to ramp up the consequences over time, the law requires each state to identify 5 percent of schools as low-performing.

The latest study suggests that might be a preferable approach if states are able to figure out better ways to help a small group of struggling schools improve. Turnaround efforts — including a prominent federal program backed by a lot of money — have often produced disappointing results.

As Linda Darling-Hammond said in Rise Above the Mark, "We're using the wrong kinds of tests...we're using the tests in the wrong kinds of ways."

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Public Education is a Public Responsibility

John Merrow's latest blog post is a review of Arne Duncan's new book, "How Schools Work."

My first thought about Duncan's book was how ironic it was that someone who had never attended a public school or worked in a public school, claimed to know how schools actually work. But that's something I've ranted about many times, and I'll try not to do it again in this post...

As I was reading I thought that Merrow's review was generally thoughtful and fair, but then I read the comments.

Blogger GF Brandenburg commented...

gfbrandenburg
August 15, 2018 at 1:42 pm

You didn’t really expect him to admit that all his efforts to improve education, USING HIS OWN YARDSTICKS, namely the NAEP, actually failed miserably, do you?

I draw an additional lesson: you should let neither professional athletes nor neophytes (ie neither Michelle Rhee’ nor her two husbands, nor Arne Duncan, nor Andre Agassi, nor Lebron James, nor Betsy DeVos) run education.

Merrow replied...

John Merrow
August 17, 2018 at 7:27 am

Public education is a public responsibility, an invaluable investment in our future and our present….End of story.

Am I wrong in thinking that Merrow's response seemed to imply that it's ok for non-education-professionals such as Rhee, DeVos, Gates, et al, to run schools, create and implement school policy, and make decisions affecting the 50 million public school children in the U. S.? Because, "Public education is a public responsibility, an invaluable investment in our future and our present..."

I agree that they have the "legal" right to do those things...but the "ethical" right, the "professional" right, the "educationally sound" right? Not so much.

Education is still something that most people think "anyone can do" since "we all went to school."

Why is education singled out as something "anyone can do?" Public Health is also a public responsibility, but we generally find health professionals making choices and policy in that area.

When has there ever been a Surgeon General who did not have some connection to a medical profession? (Answer: Never) When has there ever been an Attorney General who hadn't studied law? (Answer: Never) Yet only 3 of the eleven Secretaries of Education had degrees in education or teaching experience in K-12 education (Bell, Page, and King).

Unfortunately, the problems facing education are complicated and generally come from the outside such as the effects of poverty on children and their families and the inequity of funding. If Duncan, as a sociologist (Harvard, BA, 1987), had used his position to try to impact the social order that has led to one of the highest rates of child poverty in the developed world, that would have been different. But he didn't. He pushed policies that had a direct impact on how schools were run, how teachers were evaluated (junk science), and how tests were used (misused). Duncan, like most education "reformers" who are ignorant of what goes on inside a school, tried to affect the education of America's students by doing things to schools, rather than aiming at the out-of-school-factors.

Public education is a public responsibility, but that is not the end of the story. There can be no "race to the top" when kids, schools, and school systems don't all have the same starting point. We can't have "no child left behind" while children are still being left behind economically and socially. We will never be a nation where "every child succeeds" until we are a nation where every child is given a fair chance to succeed.

The achievement gap will continue to plague us until we can rid ourselves of the economics gap...and the racial gap. No amount of charter schools, vouchers, or the misuse of testing will change that.

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Back to School in America, 2018-2019 Indiana Edition

It's August and the back-to-school march has begun. In many cases, America's public school students are going to schools whose funding is at levels lower than a decade ago and whose teachers' chores have continued to expand. Indiana is one of those places.

It happens every year. The responsibilities of teachers and schools increase mostly from legislated mandates and "accountability."

Mr. Fitz, a teacher, author, and comic strip artist, listed his Top Ten Cognitive Dissonances That Give Teachers Headaches...things like,

Number 8: You should teach creatively, as long as you can be creative just like everybody else.

and

Number 5: You should promote love of learning for its own sake, but also push students to focus on getting grades, scoring well on tests, and collecting credits so they can get a diploma.

His number one cause of cognitive dissonance headaches is

You hear them say they want to hire and retain the best teachers, even as they create a system that drives the most passionate teachers out of the profession.

MORE WORK...

Increased responsibility -- often for things outside of a teacher's control -- lower salaries, lowered expectations of salary increases, less autonomy, insufficient building or classroom resources, lack of wraparound services and support, and larger class sizes, are only a few of the millions of tiny cuts contributing to a nation-wide teacher shortage.

Teachers are leaving the classroom...new teachers, experienced teachers. Here's what former teachers had to say about why they left teaching...from Florida...

I have become more and more disturbed by the misguided reforms taking place which are robbing my students of a developmentally appropriate education. Developmentally appropriate practice is the bedrock upon which early childhood education best practices are based, and has decades of empirical support behind it. However, the new reforms not only disregard this research, they are actively forcing teachers to engage in practices which are not only ineffective but actively harmful to child development and the learning process

...from here in Fort Wayne, IN

While [former Indiana Governor] Daniels promised that reform would bring good teachers higher pay, it never happened. Instead, great teachers perform unrealistic legislative mandates only to receive minuscule stipends. Years of experience? Higher education? Doesn’t matter. Since the teacher rubric model was implemented, teachers’ salaries stay around $35,000. Forever.

A teacher's paid work day is only 7 or 8 hours long...but for the vast majority of teachers, the workday doesn't begin when the students arrive, or end when they go home. Homework and after-hours work is part of everyday life for teachers. I have seen teachers stay at school 4 or 5 hours after the students leave, carry home hours of paperwork every night, or spend every weekend in their classroom, not trying to get ahead, but trying to keep up. I have been that teacher.

And each year the legislature adds something new...

Are Indiana school districts required to do too much?

"There's more and more and more put on the plate of the schools and eventually something has to give...said [TSC Superintendent Scott Hanback]...

"Our day hasn't increased, our school year hasn't increased but our requirements have increased," said [Lafayette School Corporation Superintendent Les Huddle].

Teachers are overworked, and with the stagnation of school funding, underpaid. Is there any wonder why there's a teacher shortage?

...AND LESS PAY

Legislators in our state will quickly claim that "52% of the budget goes towards education spending."

Unfortunately, that 52% includes public school losses due to corporate tax incentives, the constitutional requirement of a property tax cap, and money being diverted from public schools to private and charter schools.

Since its inception in 2011, Indiana's voucher program has accounted for a half billion dollars of public money being taken away from the state's public schools...quite a lot for a program that was supposed to save money for the state.

When the voucher plan was first implemented then-Governor Mitch Daniels said,

Every child deserves an equal chance to be all they can be. Regardless of race, regardless of income, every child and every parent deserves an equal chance...

By "equal chance" Daniels was implying that public schools were "failing" and private schools were better...a falsehood then, and now.

Study: Learning loss persists for voucher students

“Although school vouchers aim to provide greater educational opportunities for students, the goal of improving the academic performance of low-income students who use a voucher to move to a private school has not yet been realized in Indiana,” the authors write.

Much news coverage last year of the preliminary results focused on the finding that voucher students regained the learning they lost. But that finding disappeared, Waddington and Berends said, as they fine-tuned their statistical analysis in response to suggestions from reviewers and editors at the academic journal.

In addition, public funds are now being spent by schools which are allowed to discriminate in hiring, blurring the separation of church and state...

Roncalli High School defends why a counselor would lose job over same-sex marriage

"As role models for students, the personal conduct of every teacher, guidance counselor and administrator and staff member, both at school and away from school, must convey and be supportive of the teachings of the Catholic Church," Roncalli officials posted on the school's official Facebook page Sunday night.

Should a private church school be allowed to choose who their teachers are based on their own standards and beliefs? If so, should they be allowed to use public tax dollars to do it? If not, shouldn't the state have something to say about how its money is spent? Mixing public money with religious schools seems to be damaging to both the church and the state.

Trying to support three separate school systems, a public one, serving 90% of the students in the state, and two private school systems through vouchers and charters, has made it difficult for Indiana to support schools and pay teachers. Can we really afford that?

Only one school system is mandated by the state constitution...the one that serves all students who enter -- no exceptions.

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2018 Medley #20

Segregation, Testing Toddlers, VAM, Duncan Still Unqualified, Why Teachers Quit, Giving Kids Books, Charters

SCHOOL SEGREGATION

Why Is This Happening? Investigating school segregation in 2018 with Nikole Hannah-Jones: podcast and transcript

The U.S. gave up on integrattion. Public school systems are more segregated than when Brown vs. Board of Education was handed down sixty-four years ago. This is all complicated by our underfunding of public education, especially for black and brown students.

So where is the concept of the public good -- where is the concept of "promote the general welfare"?

Nikole Hannah-Jones is one of the few voices calling for Americans to teach their children...all their children...together.

...who the hell pays your social security one day?

Right, when we're a country that is very quickly going to be a minority white country and you're gonna continue to under-educate half of the population of your country, then what jobs are they gonna get that are gonna help pay for the infrastructure of this country, that are gonna help pay your social security.

TESTING

Toddlers and Preschool Testing? Don’t Steal the Joy of Reading!

From the makers of DIBELS comes a new test...this one for toddlers. The next step in educational malpractice.

A child three years old is still a toddler. What demands, if any, should be placed on a child this young when it comes to learning to read? Will it harm their chances of enjoying reading in the future? This is what we should ask when it comes to the new PELI testing.

The same creators of DIBELS (Dynamic Indicators of Basic Literacy Skills), the controversial assessment started with the controversial program Reading First, following the recommendations of the controversial National Reading Panel, now have reading assessment for children as young as three years old.

DIBELS uses nonsense syllables which might not mean anything to a child. There are other problems with the assessment according to reading expert Ken Goodman who edited Examining DIBELS: What it is What it Does.

Top 10 Reasons You Can’t Fairly Evaluate Teachers on Student Test Scores

Using student test scores to evaluate teachers isn't appropriate, yet we still do it. There's no rational reason for continuing a practice that even the American Statistical Association says is statistically unreliable and invalid. This ignorant use of numbers is just another example of America's anti-science and anti-intellectualism.

Steven Singer lists 10 reasons why VAM is junk science...

2) You can’t assess teachers on tests that were made to assess students.

This violates fundamental principles of both statistics and assessment. If you make a test to assess A, you can’t use it to assess B. That’s why many researchers have labeled the process “junk science” – most notably the American Statistical Association in 2014. Put simply, the standardized tests on which VAM estimates are based have always been, and continue to be, developed to assess student achievement and not growth in student achievement nor growth in teacher effectiveness. The tests on which VAM estimates are based were never designed to estimate teachers’ effects. Doing otherwise is like assuming all healthy people go to the best doctors and all sick people go to the bad ones. If I fail a dental screening because I have cavities, that doesn’t mean my dentist is bad at his job. It means I need to brush more and lay off the sugary snacks.

Former Education Secretary Arne Duncan says U.S. education system "not top 10 in anything"

I agreed with some of what Duncan had to say in his interview on Face the Nation. Unfortunately, when he had the chance to change things he made them worse.

In 2015 I wrote,

Look what we got...Arne Duncan -- who never set foot in a public school as either a student or a teacher -- and Race to the Top which doubled down on No Child Left Behind's labeling of low test takers as losers. Arne Duncan, who cheered when an entire school full of teachers in Rhode Island were fired because the school was "low achieving" (aka filled with high poverty students). Arne Duncan, who manipulated federal dollars meant for low income students so that it became a contest to see which states could raise the caps on Charters fast enough and evaluate teachers based on test scores.

It's the ultimate of ironies that this man wrote a book called "How Schools Work."

"We say we value education, but we never vote on education. We never hold politicians accountable — local, state or national level — for getting better results," Duncan, the education secretary under President Obama, said on "Face the Nation" on Sunday. He added that the "toughest lie" for him personally is that "we say we value kids, and we've raised a generation of young people, teens, who have been raised on mass shootings and gun violence, and that simply doesn't happen in other nations."

"I don't look at what people say. I look at their actions, their policies. I look at their budgets. Our values don't reflect that we care about education or we care about teachers or that we truly care about keeping our children safe and free of fear," Duncan said.

WHY TEACHERS QUIT

Brittani Pollock: "I Left Teaching. I Had To."

Here is yet another story about a teacher who left teaching. In this case it's because of lack of funding in poorly funded Oklahoma. Americans are so intent on paying no taxes that we're sabatoging our future.

I'm donating my blog today to a former student, now friend, Brittani. She was my student and an officer in my club, Teen Volunteers, at Norman North. I always knew she wanted to be a teacher, you could see her deep love of children when she volunteered. I watched her get her teaching degree and watched as she began what we both thought would be a long career in the classroom. I planned to watch her become a National Board Certified Teacher. Things did not work out the way we hoped. And my heart is broken for every student who will never know Miss Pollock's love.

GIVE KIDS BOOKS

Dolly Parton's literacy program donates its 100 millionth book to Library of Congress

Before LeBron James, there was Dolly Parton. She started the Imagination Library in 1995. From the Imagination Library web site...

...a book gifting program that mails free, high-quality books to children from birth until they begin school, no matter their family’s income.

After launching in 1995, the program grew quickly. First books were only distributed to children living in Sevier County, Tennessee where Dolly grew up. It became such a success that in 2000 a national replication effort was underway. By 2003, Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library had mailed one million books. It would prove to be the first of many millions of books sent to children around the world.

Earlier this year the Imagination Library sent out its 100 millionth book.

Alongside Carla Hayden, who heads the Library of Congress, the iconic country singer dedicated the 100 millionth book from her Imagination Library to the research library. Through the nonprofit, she has been donating millions of books to children for more than 20 years.

...as of August 1, 2018

The 4th Annual National Give-A-Kid-A-Book Day

Speaking of giving kids books, last July 6 was the fourth annual Give-A-Kid-A-Book day. Did you remember? Russ Walsh reminds us every year.

It's not too late...give-a-kid-a-book today.

Literacy research has shown that the single best way to combat summer reading loss is to get books in kids hands. One way to do this is to give children books.

Participation is easy. All you need to do to is find a child and give that child a book. The child could be your own, a neighbor's child, a student, a grandchild, one of your own kid's friends, children in a homeless shelter. Just give the child a book and say, "I thought you might enjoy this." Some participants like to include a lollipop or other small sweet treat to send the message, "Reading is Sweet!", but the most important thing is to give a kid book.

CHARTERS

In the Public Interest’s weekly privatization report

In the Public Interest posts a weekly privatization report. The reports cover more than just the privatization of public schools. Here is just one of eleven different reports about charter schools from this week's report.

You might also be interested in taking a look at Breaking Point: The Cost of Charter Schools for Public School Districts.

29) Pennsylvania Just a few weeks before the start of the new school year, Wonderland Charter School in Ferguson Township is closing its doors, sending students and parents scrambling after they received email notification. “During the charter review, several people associated with Wonderland, including board members, teachers and parents, informed the board of directors of their concerns with the charter: ‘long-standing, calculated, inappropriate, and unlawful practices with respect to students with special needs,’ according to a letter to the board from Superintendent Bob O’Donnell.”

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2018 Medley #19: LeBron James and the Promise of Public Schools

LeBron James, Public Education,
Public School Funding.

INVEST IN PUBLIC EDUCATION AS IF THE FUTURE DEPENDS ON IT

The multimillion-dollar school: Support and resources pour into LeBron’s I Promise School opening Monday

LeBron James is a millionaire...but unlike others among the super-rich who stick their wallets into America's education infrastructure, The LeBron James Family Foundation, along with community partners, is helping to fund a public school run by a public school system, and staffed with unionized public school teachers. The taxpayers are paying for the school, teachers, and the usual expenses just like they do for all public schools, while the Foundation and its partners are providing funds for building renovations, wraparound services, and other extras.

This kind of investment is what all our children need and deserve. The Finns, when they decided to improve their schools, invested in education as if their future as a nation depended on it. We should do the same. This article describes the benefits provided by an outpouring of community help...volunteers and local businesses. This should be the design for all local public schools...a community effort for the community's (in this case, the larger community) children.

What does it take to get some of education’s best practices into one school and off the ground?

For the I Promise School, it’s taken one superstar athlete, one force of a foundation, one willing school district, one traveling food truck and at least 35 other community partners that provide an army of volunteers — and millions of dollars in funding.

And that’s just the beginning.

A kid had to grow up and dunk a million basketballs to provide his community with basic services.

That should bother you.

— Ella Septima-Hamer (@Jbrous14) August 1, 2018

Props to LeBron James and his new Akron public school — but what about the other kids?

The effort going into the I Promise School reflects the understanding that a community's children are the community's future. Public schools provide continuity and stability which privatization does not. When a community invests in their public schools they are building a foundation for the future, not lining the pockets of privatizers.

Why is it that we are only able to provide this type of program for children when there's a wealthy individual behind it? LeBron James and other donors for the I Promise School have stepped forward to help the most at-risk students in Akron, but what about the other students in Akron? What about students in Chicago, or New York, or Oakland?

Our children should be our highest priority -- all of them. As Jersey Jazzman asked (see below), "Why do we give disadvantaged children what they need only when an exceptionally generous celebrity leads the way?"

...James’s focus on building a school within a traditional public district suggests he understands the importance of the traditional public education system in the United States, which some argue is the country’s most important civic institution and which is under assault from school “reformers” who want to privatize it.

Still, the fact that this school opened only because of the good graces of a very wealthy, civic-minded athlete underscores the continuing problem with education funding in this country. And it highlights the push for school “choice” that has Betsy DeVos, President Trump’s education secretary, as its chief advocate.

.@KingJames’s new school looks extraordinary: https://t.co/EYmTUv4yId But why doesn’t EVERY child have a neighborhood school like this? Why do we give disadvantaged children what they need only when an exceptionally generous celebrity leads the way?

— Jersey Jazzman (@jerseyjazzman) July 30, 2018

LeBron’s Education Promise Needs to Become This Country’s Promise

All public schools...all of them. [empasis added]

A school funded by LeBron James in Akron, Ohio, is a beautiful example of what all our public education should look like.

SUPPORT PUBLIC SCHOOLS

LeBron James might not know about this latest study showing that private schools are no better than public schools. He might not have read Steven Singer's blog post...

Wealth – Not Enrollment in Private School – Increases Student Achievement, According to New Study.

Instead of spending tax-payers' money to support private and religious schools we should make sure that all of our public schools are fully resourced and are responsive to the needs of the students who attend.

A new peer-reviewed study from Professors Richard C. Pianta and Arya Ansari of the University of Virginia found that once you take family income out of the equation, there are absolutely zero benefits of going to a private school. The majority of the advantage comes from simply having money and all that comes with it – physical, emotional, and mental well-being, living in a stable and secure environment, knowing where your next meal will come from, etc.

The study published in July 2018 attempts to correct for selection bias – the factors that contribute to a student choosing private school rather than the benefits of the school, itself.

No, private schools aren’t better at educating kids than public schools. Why this new study matters.

It's encouraging that James understands that public schools serve communities well. Public schools provide stability for children and, when well resourced, provide their students with the best education America has to offer.

Despite evidence showing otherwise, it remains conventional wisdom in many parts of the education world that private schools do a better job of educating students, with superior standardized test scores and outcomes. It is one of the claims that some supporters of school choice make in arguing that the public should pay for private school education.

The only problem? It isn’t true, a new study confirms.

A Decade of Neglect: Public Education Funding in the Aftermath of the Great Recession

"Why do we give disadvantaged children what they need only when an exceptionally generous celebrity leads the way?" Because we still haven't committed to giving our children the resources they need to secure their...and our...future. Our leaders are so hell-bent on starving the government of tax revenue, that they are starving our future.

Instead of investing in our children we're stripping public education of needed funds.

...this analysis will show how policies of austerity have had a negative impact on education and have not produced the promised boost in economic growth.

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