This and That, August 18, 2024

To national news from the Chalkbeat Blog, a story about Democratic VP candidate (and former teacher), Tim Walz.

Tim Walz helps Democrats make the ‘prairie populist’ case for public schools

The Minnesota governor and longtime high school teacher had just signed into law a bill making school breakfast and lunch free to nearly all children in the state. In the pictures from last year, Walz is surrounded by children who happily embrace him, and he beams with joy.

Teachers and teachers unions have embraced Walz as the Democrats’ vice presidential nominee with similar joy. The last major party candidate to previously have led a K-12 classroom was Lyndon B. Johnson.

I did not know that LBJ had been a teacher. 

This emphasis on resources and social factors outside the classroom sidesteps education issues that have divided Democrats and differs in key respects from former President Barack Obama’s tenure, when Democrats backed education reform policies like merit pay for teachers and pushed low-performing schools to improve or face closure. It stands in even sharper contrast to Republican attacks on public schools as places where children are at risk of indoctrination.

Yes, I had always been disappointed in Obama's embrace of charter schools. Then we got Betsy DeVoss as Secretary of Education and it only got worse. 

Walz’ ability to listen and respond to what he hears by working for solutions has struck Joe Nathan, who heads Minnesota’s Center for School Change and has worked on education policy and charter school issues in the state for years.

Teachers?

 “They feel like there’s somebody who’s been through this, and they feel like there is someone who will go in and fight for them,” he said. 

“We’re also missing a lot of joy in the classroom, and they could channel that joy into how they talk about schools,” Mehta said. “If it’s just that and no policy proposals, it will feel light after a while, but the combination of the rhetoric and some policy could be really invigorating for the teaching profession.”

It might also appeal to voters in general. Poll after poll finds that large majorities of parents like their kids’ teachers, said Jennifer Berkshire, an education researcher and author of the book “The Education Wars.”

I have seen Walz attacked for being the advisor for the first Gay-Straight Alliance club at the high school he taught at. But Walz has said:

Walz thought it was important that a straight married military veteran who coached the football team take on that role.

It's a good article. 

Next week is "SMART Week" for gun safety. SMART stands for:

Secure all guns in homes and vehicles

Model responsible behavior around guns

Ask about the presence of unsecured firearms in other homes your child visits

Recognize the role of guns in suicide

Tell your peers to BE SMART

Basically, being responsible for the guns you own. 

Publicola has this article about public meetings and what citizens who attend them can and cannot do. Apparently the City Council is getting ever wary of any public demonstration of agreement or disagreement at meetings.

Over the past few days, city council members have objected repeatedly to public commenters expressing their support for one another by clapping—an innocuous, brief burst of joyful noise that council members argue is a disruption that slows council meetings down and prevents everyone from being heard.

Last week, for example, Bob Kettle instructed commenters at a sparsely attended public safety committee meeting to snap their fingers instead of clapping, which he suggested would be disruptive. On Wednesday, Dan Strauss told advocates for student mental health spending, many of them current or recent high school students, to use silent “jazz hands” to express approval, and admonished them repeatedly for clapping instead.

Jazz hands? Wish I had been there to laugh out loud.  

And of course, on Tuesday, Council President Sara Nelson repeatedly warned people who showed up to testify against a long list of council proposals to stop being “disruptive” by clapping and cheering supportively. Then she cut off public comment, prompting many in the crowd to yell at her to let them speak. Instead of defusing the situation by extending public comment, Nelson pulled the council off the dais for a recess, then another, before shutting down council chambers and reconvening the meeting remotely.

The job of being a council member is inseparable from the duty to listen to the public, including during official public comment periods, even when the public’s message is basically, “you suck.”  

It feels like the City Council think they are judges in a courtroom. It's not - it's a public place having a public meeting. There may be issues of civility but democracy is messy sometimes.

Writer Erica Barnett continues:

Yesterday, for example, after a large group of young people testified in favor of a budget proposal to release funding for student mental health care, Kettle said they had mistakenly brought their concerns to the wrong place, and that the adults that brought them to City Hall should have taken them, instead, to Olympia. Maritza Rivera accused Morales of making false promises to “the students who were here, who were expecting that if we pass this money, that somehow they’re going to get it immediately.”

The council’s condescension to young people (who, incidentally, were the instigators of the proposal to spend money on mental health care, which Kettle repeatedly claimed “came out of nowhere”) is the flip side of their enraged response to frustrated public commenters on Tuesday. 

Kids who disagree with the council are confused; adults who disagree with the council are dangerous. My advice for the council is to try something that might feel radical: Just let people speak.

I bring this to your attention for two reasons. 

One, while the Seattle School Board hasn't done these kinds of things, they have chosen to limit public discussion by moving many items to the one-vote Consent Agenda as well as cutting out one board meeting per month. What is interesting is that President Liza Rankin warns people at the beginning of public comment that she will cut them off if they go too long but she never does. 

Two, I'm sure youth does feel unheard and disrespect by electeds. There is nothing worse than people you assume you, as a young person, know nothing. And to think young people thought that, somehow, they would be deciding what to do with $20M towards teen health is ridiculous. 

From The 74, a story about Arizona and how its universal voucher program could change if the state flips the legislature. (The legislature is currently control by the GOP in both the House and Senate by only by two seats in each.)

I'm going out on a limb to tell you, as someone who lives here, that Kamala Harris will win Arizona. There have been too many things happening that are leaning this purple state into blue territory. You heard it here first. 

A pioneer of sorts, the state became the first in the nation to offer education savings accounts, or ESAs, in 2011. A decade later, it was the first to make those programs — which offer parents roughly $7,500 to spend on their children’s educational expenses, including private school tuition — available to any family. 

Nearly 75% of those who signed up for the universal ESAs were families who ALREADY had their kids in private school so it's something of a rebate for them, not an aid for low-income students to access private schools.

Earlier this year, (Governor - D) Hobbs came back with a package of much more modest reforms aiming to bring “accountability” to the system by, among other things, requiring private schools receiving ESA money to fingerprint their teachers (as traditional public schools must). That mandate, along with one preventing ESA families from using their accounts over summer vacation, was included in the FY 2025 budget passed in June, but ESA detractors complained that they would do little to stem the growth of private school choice. 

And here's one reason why Arizona might go blue:

Yet many in the local education policy community still lament the state of K-12 finances, which could prove a headache over the next few years in either divided or unified government. Arizona has consistently ranked near the bottom of the United States for school spending, placing at 49th in the country over the last academic year. 

It is so sad what they spend for public education here.