public education

First the wonderful Google logo I found when I was trying to find some back ground on Stevie wonder's campaign to create a national holiday for Martin Luther King. 

                                                                                                                              And  then I found the story .. and the album cover 

It's an interesting exercise to go into the mainstream and ask people to name a Supreme Court Justice, inquire about the components of our Constitution, and name the three branches of government.  The (incorrect) answers would be amusing if not for the fact that the government is us, the people of the USA.  We elect the people who set our laws and the budgets by which we must live.  What's the saying...we get the government we deserve.  That's why the iCivics program to educate young children about how our government works is fantastic! [Los Angeles Times]

This slim knowledge of civics — and the potential risk it poses to American democracy — captured the attention of retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor.  "It's very disturbing," said O'Connor, 81, the first woman to serve on the nation's highest court. "I want to educate several generations of young people so we won't have the lack of public knowledge we have today."

Civics education involves explaining the structure of U.S. government, including the meaning and influence of the Constitution and its evolution over time. Advocates also emphasize the importance of getting students to engage in the democratic process, said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Philadelphia-based Annenberg Public Policy Center.

One problem may be a consequence of the federal No Child Left Behind Act, which emphasized reading and math instruction with required testing.

Massachusetts is in line to get $50 million dollars from the federal government for specific early education initiatives.  That's a good thing.  The more we provide quality early education and care to our youngest children, addressing their social, emotional, cognitive and language development in the early years, the more ready our children are to embrace their future as life-long learners. [Governor's press release]

“This award will enable Massachusetts to accelerate the implementation of our plan that is designed to yield improvements in our early childhood system that significantly raises the level of quality opportunities and experiences for children and families,” said Department of Early Education and Care Commissioner Sherri Killins. “The Early Learning Challenge recognizes the importance of early learning in providing the foundation for children’s healthy growth and brain development and ensuring the collective future prosperity of our Commonwealth and our nation. Both educators and families alike will benefit from this award.”

The New York Times conducted research on virtual schools, focusing on K12, Inc.  What they found is not encouraging for us who care about quality education for our children and who are also concerned about the dwindling funds available for public education.

Here's some startling quotes about the funding:

“What we’re talking about here is the financialization of public education,” said Alex Molnar, a research professor at the University of Colorado Boulder School of Education who is affiliated with the education policy center. “These folks are fundamentally trying to do to public education what the banks did with home mortgages.”

Here's less encouraging information about the performance of these virtual schools:

A Stanford University group, the Center for Research on Education Outcomes, tracked students in eight virtual schools in Pennsylvania, including Agora, comparing them with similar students in regular schools. The study found that “in every subgroup, with significant effects, cyber charter performance is lower.”

Devora Davis, the center’s research manager, said the group’s analysis of Pennsylvania online schools showed that students were slipping. “If they were paired with a traditional public schools student, the public school student kept their place in line, and the cyberstudent moved back five spots,” she said.

School choice and privatization are hot political issues.  But educational rights, equitable and quality education for all our children, is the 1964 civil rights movement of the 21st century.  We need to provide better education for all our children.  It's certainly not about profits for the corporations.

The Board of Elementary and Secondary Education determined that Lawrence was not providing quality and equitable public education to all its children, and therefore voted to place the school system in receivership.  As you can imagine, parents, students, and teachers had a lot of questions regarding that decision.  DESE Commissioner Mitchell Chester, was on hand at a three-hour meeting in Lawrence, to try to answer these questions. [Full Article: Eagle-Tribune]

"Some students are receiving an excellent education and outstanding instruction, but lots of our youngsters never make it through, they never make it to the finish line," Chester said. "Without receivership we had little chance of all students getting a strong education," he said.

Once a receiver is appointed, the board will hold a stakeholder's meeting made up of residents, School Committee members, teachers and business people to develop a turnaround plan. They will be finalized by winter and implemented by next fall.

Parents' concerns included what was going to happen to the schools after the problems were fixed and the receiver left....Other comments from parents and students were about teachers and what to do to reengage drop-outs.

Boston's City Councilor Charles Yancy just keeps on going -- working with parents fighting for the kids in his district (and mine) to have an Opportunity to Learn: Quality Education, Safe Buildings. 

From the Dorchester Reporter:

City Councilor Charles Yancey has a new tactic in his long-running battle to get a high school built in Mattapan: Blasting the city's plan - which he voted for - to spend $115 million moving BPS headquarters from Court Street downtown to the old Ferdinand building in Dudley Square, when nearly 4,000 high-school students attend classes in "substandard" buildings originally built for elementary students or as warehouses.

At a hearing tonight, Yancey asked for the city to borrow $110 million to build a high school on a college-like 15-acre campus on the grounds of the former Boston State Hospital. Students and their parents have waited long enough for a modern high school like the ones that have sprung up in surrounding suburbs, he said.

Natalie Hopkinson observes how school choice has adversely affected the educational opportunities for her son and other children in her community in Washington, DC.  Clearly school choice has winners and losers...and it comes down to economic and social justice.  Again an education policy has gained political traction and funding that is failing to provide quality educational opportunities, equally, all our children.

Such inequities are the perverse result of a “reform” process intended to bring choice and accountability to the school system. Instead, it has destroyed community-based education for working-class families, even as it has funneled resources toward a few better-off, exclusive, institutions.       

The idea was to introduce competition; good schools would survive; bad ones would disappear. It effectively created a second education system, which now enrolls nearly half the city’s public school students. The charters consistently perform worse than the traditional schools, yet they are rarely closed...Meanwhile, failing neighborhood schools, depleted of students, were shut down. Invariably, schools that served the poorest families got the ax — partly because those were the schools where students struggled the most, and partly because the parents of those students had the least power. [Full Opinion: The New York Times]

Here's the case of penny wise, or so the schools thought, and pounds (literally) foolish.  Schools going the privatization route in providing cafeteria food and service are not seeing the health and education performance results they were expecting with supposedly healthy food in the schools.  Our children's health and education performance are suffering accordingly.

An increasingly cozy alliance between companies that manufacture processed foods and companies that serve the meals is making students — a captive market — fat and sick while pulling in hundreds of millions of dollars in profits...The money is ill spent. The Center for Science in the Public Interest has warned that sending food to be processed often means lower nutritional value and noted that “many schools continue to exceed the standards for fat, saturated fat and sodium.” A 2008 study by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation found that by the time many healthier commodities reach students, “they have about the same nutritional value as junk foods.”  [The New York Times]