Public Education Stories From Around the Country

It's not often you see public education and entertainment cross (but see John Oliver and charter schools) but now we have a trifecta of Donald Trump, Colin Kapenick of the San Francisco '49s and public education.  (For those out of the loop, Kaepernick did not stand for the national anthem in the last two preseason games he was in.  He said he was because the song is racist (and read that third verse - I honestly never did before this) and the nation does not have freedom for all.

In wades Donald Trump.  He addressed the American Legion Convention this morning and said  would be "promoting American pride and patriotism in America's schools." How? Via ABC News:

• "We want young Americans to recite the Pledge of Allegiance," Trump said.  If reciting the pledge is the most patriotic thing we can ask of students, we may be asking them to do the  wrong thing.  Also, they really need to get rid of the "under God" part.
  
• One country, under one Constitution, saluting one American flag. And always saluting it," he said.  Is the pledge a salute?  Or, as some believe, was he referencing Kaepernick staying seated during the anthem?

Want to see what a Trump presidency might push in public education?  For one thing, he says he'd get rid of the Department of Education.  I may not have liked Arne Duncan's work but to say the feds have no role in public education almost defies belief.

But take a look at what one of his closest advisors - Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey - wants to do in his state and you get an idea of what Trump would support.

From Slate:

“No child in this state is worth more state aid than another,” he said. He suggested equalizing per-student education funding across New Jersey so every public school, whether in a suburb or city, receives $6,599 in state aid per child.

This might sound like a civil rights speech—a plea to provide more opportunities to the neediest kids. In fact, if enacted, Christie’s proposal would amount to a huge giveaway to the children and families who are already thriving in New Jersey while hurting the kids who most need a leg up. With this plan, the governor hopes to lower taxes and end a state program that sends extra money to schools that educate at-risk children. Lest you have any doubt about whom Christie is trying to protect with his “equalization” plan, consider the fact that although his proposal would cut supplemental funding for poor children and English language learners, it would continue to send extra money to children with learning disabilities—a group, unlike the other two, that is majority white.

What's interesting is New Jersey has - from a court case - something called "Abbott school districts" that receive supplemental funding because of the income levels of their students.  

This system is considered a national model in getting resources to the kids who need them most. But Christie has always opposed it. When he came into office in 2010, he proposed more than $1 billion in education budget cuts, a move the state Supreme Court declared unconstitutional.

New Jersey is one of the top two states in the nation on academic performance adjusted for student demographics, meaning poor children there academically outperform poor children in every state except Massachusetts.  There is little doubt that extra funding for poor children drove those gains. While self-declared school reformers like Christie have long argued that “more money” cannot drive educational improvement, new longitudinal research shows higher graduation rates and higher adult incomes nationwide in places where courts ordered more school funding for poor kids.

Speaking of public ed and politics, a great article from Alternet about Hillary Clinton's running mate, Tim Kaine and how his views could influence her policy on public education

An education “reform” establishment that has enjoyed the complete support of Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush may be getting nervous.

A Politico education journalist at the DNC reported that Shavar Jeffries, president of Democrats for Education Reform, a policy group that has gotten used to getting its way in the Obama administration, said, “There was ‘anxiety’ within the education reform movement over the future of [the movement’s] priorities.”

In what may be the most revealing commentary about his education perspectives, an op-ed he wrote for his hometown Richmond paper, Kaine lays out an education agenda of increased personalization, relief from the testing mandates, richer and more varied curriculum, and support and autonomy for experienced teachers.  

Education journalists covering Kaine also never fail to include mention of his wife Anne Holton, who serves as Virginia’s secretary of education. As education journalists at The Washington Post explain, Holton “has worked to reform a standardized testing regime that had been criticized as unnecessarily time-consuming and onerous.”

Some interesting state from latest data from the U.S. Department of Education on our nation's public schools.  (The data will be available to the public by the fall.)  From the Washington Post:

The U.S. Education Department on Tuesday released a trove of data drawn from surveys of nearly every single one of the nation’s 95,000 public schools. This latest installment of the Civil Rights Data Collection, from the 2013-2014 school year, offers a sobering look at the wide disparities in experience and opportunity that divide the nation’s 50 million students.

Meantime, here are five eye-opening figures from the overview that the Education Department released Tuesday:

1. In the 2013-2014 school year, 6.5 million children were chronically absent from school, missing 15 or more days of school.

2. 850,000 high school students didn’t have access to a school counselor.  The national average is close to 500 students per school counselor; many student have no counselor at all.

3. 1.6 million students went to a school that employed a sworn law-enforcement officer, but no counselor.

4. Nearly 800,000 students were enrolled in schools where more than 20 percent of teachers hadn’t met state licensure requirements.

5. Racial disparities in suspensions reach all the way down into preschool: Black children represent 19 percent of all preschoolers, and 47 percent of all those who were suspended.  

Another good article with a list, this from the Huffington Post - Nine Elephants in the (Class)Room That Should "Unsettle"Us.

1. We know that most of our students will forget most of the content that they “learn” in school.

2. We know that most of our students are bored and disengaged in school.  And, by the way, let’s stop pretending that we can solve the engagement problem by handing kids iPads or other technologies. Hand them more agency over their own learning instead.

3. We know that deep, lasting learning requires conditions that schools and classrooms simply were not built for. 

4. We know that we’re not assessing many of the things that really matter for future success. 

5. We know that grades, not learning, are the outcomes that students and parents are most interested in.

6. We know that curriculum is just a guess.

7. We know that separating learning into discrete subjects and time blocks is not the best way to prepare kids for the real world.  

8. We know (I think) that the system of education as currently constructed is not adequately preparing kids for what follows if and when they graduate.

9. And finally, we know that learning that sticks is usually learned informally, that explicit knowledge accounts for very little of our success in most professions.