The Bernie Sanders K-12 Plan Falls Way Short

Bernie Sanders has received lots of attention since his announcement of a new education platform for K-12.  While the Sanders plan is the only plan among twenty-some-odd candidates with any real specifics, the Sanders Plan falls far short of addressing the basic needs of children, teachers, and parents who depend upon public schools in the U. S.

However, an article just published by Nikhil Goyal at The Nation offers a positive take on the Sanders Plan.  Let's look at a couple of specifics: first, his position on charter schools.

Sanders announced that as president, in alignment with the NAACP, he would ban for-profit charter schools and impose a moratorium on federal dollars for charter expansion until a national audit was conducted. An audit would reveal that there are indeed many progressive, student-centered charters, such as High Tech High in San Diego, Minnesota New Country School, YouthBuild Charter School in Philadelphia, and Compass Charter School in Brooklyn. And those shouldn’t be shuttered.

We have to wonder if Team Sanders knows that if all for-profit charters were closed today, still over 85 percent of U. S. charter schools would remain open.

As for the proposed moratorium on "non-profit" charter expansion that would remain in effect until a national audit could be conducted, such a moratorium would leave open around 6,400 existing charters, most of which are either entirely apartheid or intensely segregated, and most are based on a total compliance lockdown instructional model that no middle class parent would ever consider for her own child.

As for the value of a national audit for charter operators, the suggestion by Sanders is that if a charter school has high test scores and clean bookkeeping, then it should continue to operate and expand, regardless of how many millions of "non-profit" public dollars are being siphoned away to build corporate education empires whose managers decide how segregated and disenfranchised children will be culturally sterilized in the no-excuses KIPP Model charter schools.

We have to ask ourselves, too, if a national audit would ignore more fine-grained details that show how "non-profit" charter chains legally shortchange instructional budgets while padding management and administrative costs.  Would an audit uncover the many ways that corporate charter grifters legally take public money from children and their teachers?

A couple of charts from 2015 research paper by Bruce Baker and Gary Miron demonstrate what I'm talking about.  Table 3 below shows how Texas charter schools compare with a major urban district in terms of expenditures.  We can see, for instance, how KIPP, Harmony, and other Texas charter schools spend a smaller percentage on instruction and a larger percentage on administration and plant services, when compared to Texas public schools that serve the same students.

We see, too, how charters depend upon a workforce model that exploits new teachers who are burned through, discarded, and replaced by more beginners.

Table 6 shows who the real beneficiaries are of public's generosity to fund a separate school system in  America.

Remember, too, that over 60 billion public dollars go to charter schools every year in this country.

How long can we afford this kind of support for a handful of amateur non-educators who are clueless about the art and science of education or the needs of children?

"Portfolio Districts"

From Kenneth J. Saltman, via the Great Lakes Center for Education Research & Practice:

Urban School Decentralization and the Growth of “Portfolio Districts”

Kenneth J. Saltman, DePaul University

Executive Summary

In the latter half of the past decade, school districts in several large cities, including New York, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and post-Katrina New Orleans, have implemented an urban school decentralization model generally known as “portfolio districts.” Others, including those in Denver and Cleveland, are following suit in what appears to be a growing trend. The portfolio strategy has become increasingly prominent in educational policy circles, think tank and philanthropy literature, and education news reporting. As CEO of the Chicago Public Schools, Arne Duncan embraced the portfolio district model. His appointment as U.S. Secretary of Education suggests the Obama administration also supports the approach. The premise of the portfolio strategy is that if superintendents build portfolios of schools that encompass a variety of educational approaches offered by different vendors, then over time school districts will weed out under-performing approaches and vendors; as a result, more children will have more opportunities for academic success. This brief examines the available evidence for the viability of this premise and the proposals that flow from it.

[Continued here]

The Unbearable Stupidity of Chicago School Reform

As schools become more and more desperate to solve problems for which poverty stands in the way of solving, it is fascinating to watch the disemboweling of the public schools with the accompanying inhumane treatment of educators and students as they are ground up in the mindless and voracious reform crucible.

And while the teachers and administrators must still use "proven" and "scientifcally-based" curriculums and methods to turn around student performance now inspired by the evaporation of hope, the pols who control the schools adopt entirely unproven and draconian measures as a remedy for the school failure created by the poverty and lack of opportunity that they ignore, thus making it even more difficult for schools to have a positive effect in the lives of children who are now counted as test scores.

This is, truly, a stunning degree of self-imposed blindness by those chosen to lead. From the Chicago Tribune:

January 29, 2008
No school district in the nation has yet managed what Chicago officials proposed last week: a sweeping, simultaneous overhaul of a cluster of failing schools.

Experts say the plan to fire the staffs of eight schools and replace them with better qualified educators is somewhat of a gamble, one that will require an almost perfect alignment of stellar principals, committed teachers and re-invigorated curriculum and programs to succeed.

But that's no guarantee.

"No one knows if turnarounds work," said Andrew Calkins of the Mass Insight Education and Research Institute. "We spent two years looking at turnarounds and could not find a single example of turnaround work that was successful and sustained and done on scale, not just one school."

As Chicago parents began to digest the proposal first reported in the Tribune on Thursday, many seemed willing to roll the dice -- in part, an acknowledgment that even partial success is better than what their children face now.

Fara Bell, a Morton Career Academy parent, said turning around both Orr High School and Morton, an elementary school that feeds into it, is the only way to guarantee wholesale change.

"There's a little thing going on with every grade, and there's no progress. I believe [the teachers ] get to the point where they're ready to give up," said Bell. "I think we need stricter and dedicated teachers. Just because they come to work don't mean nothing. I see a lot lacking."

The school district is proposing replacing the staffs at Harper High School and the three small schools on the Orr High School campus.

Both Harper and Orr have undergone repeated efforts to be reinvented, but those efforts have been unable to improve student performance. Fewer than 25 percent of students at the schools met or exceeded state standards last year. . . .