Tag: public schools

Team Biden’s backward hostility to charter schools

Joe Biden is expected to name Connecticut Education Commissioner Miguel Cardona as his education secretary Wednesday. Given rumors about the president-elect tapping union officials for the job, this is a relief. Still, reformers and school-choice advocates shouldn’t let their guards down.

In a recent interview with the Education Writers Association, Stef Feldman, Biden’s national policy director, threatened to cut funding for “public charter schools that don’t provide results.” This, even as she vowed to fight for “the funds that our underperforming schools need, so our educators can succeed at their jobs.”

Got that? Team Biden’s position is that bad charter schools need to be defunded and possibly shuttered, while traditional failure factories just need more cash.

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2020 exposed the teachers unions for the frauds they are

The coronavirus pandemic has brought too many failures of leadership to count. But chief among them is remote learning and teachers unions’ continued lobbying against reopening schools.

When the virus was still a novel concept and schools shut down in response, we understood why. There was too much we did not know about COVID-19, and the risk of endangering students and teachers was too great. As time went on, however, the science became overwhelmingly clear that COVID-19 posed little risk to children and that schools were not a major source of transmission. It also became clear that distance learning has been a disaster both for students and for parents, especially those with limited resources.

Over the course of the year, it has become glaringly obvious that unions insisting on long-term school closures were not concerned about their students’ health or teachers’ safety so much as they were interested in what they could gain from the shutdown.

In Los Angeles, for example, one of the largest teachers unions in the state released a reopening proposal in July that was accompanied by a list of demands. These included — we kid you not — defunding the Los Angeles Police Department, implementing “Medicare for all,” increasing taxes on the wealthy, and placing a moratorium on charter schools in the county. The purpose of this ultimatum was purely political, yet Los Angeles’s public schools remain closed to this day.

New York City’s public schools made progress this fall by gradually reintroducing students to the classroom. But teachers unions sabotaged this, too, demanding that Mayor Bill de Blasio close public schools again because coronavirus cases in the city had risen above a certain threshold. Never mind that the schools themselves were nowhere near this threshold, or that viral transmission among students had been proven nonexistent. New York’s teachers wanted to work from home, so the teachers unions flew into action.

Anyone who questions the teachers unions — health officials, other educators, even parents — is accused of recklessly endangering lives. The truth, however, is that the unions have behaved utterly selfishly while camouflaging their dishonorable conduct in the garb of social concern. The head of the country’s largest teachers union went so far as to say teachers are “being bullied into returning back to the classrooms.” The science, however, shows there is nothing unsafe about in-person education. Several studies have confirmed that infection rates among students and teachers remain extremely low, and health precautions that most schools have mandated make sure they stay that way.

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Congress Blocks School Choice in New Stimulus Package

Governors are prohibited from using emergency education funding to give families more education options, thanks to a new provision inserted in the 5,600-page bill that Congress passed (without having time to read it) on Monday night.

The new stimulus package includes $2.75 billion for the Governors Emergency Education Relief (GEER) fund, a program established by the earlier stimulus bill passed in March, but it comes with new restrictions on how that money can be used. Seemingly in response to the fact that several governors used the first round of GEER funding to launch or expand school choice programs, the new stimulus bill explicitly excludes “vouchers, tuition tax credit programs, education savings accounts, scholarship programs, or tuition assistance programs for elementary and secondary education.”

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School District Decides Asians Aren’t Students of Color

One school district in Washington state has evidently decided that Asians no longer qualify as persons of color.

In their latest equity report, administrators at North Thurston Public Schools—which oversees some 16,000 students—lumped Asians in with whites and measured their academic achievements against “students of color,” a category that includes “Black, Latinx, Native American, Pacific Islander, and Multi-Racial Students” who have experienced “persistent opportunity gaps.”

Most indicators in the report show that the achievement gap between white/Asian students and “students of color” is fairly narrow and improving over time. It would probably be even narrower if Asian students were categorized as “students of color.” In fact, some indicators might have even shown white students lagging behind that catch-all minority group. Perhaps Asians were included with whites in order to avoid such an outcome. (The superintendent did not respond to a request for comment.)

What the equity report really highlights is the absurdities that result from overreliance on semi-arbitrary race-based categories. The report also measured “students of poverty”—those who qualify for free or reduced-cost lunches—against non-poverty students, and unsurprisingly found a much more significant achievement gap. Students of poverty perform 28 percent worse on math tests, for instance. That socioeconomic category captures something real and meaningful in a way that the gerrymandered race category does not.

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