When you get what you pay for

It is often said, in certain circles, that “money doesn’t matter in education.”  But, as that well-known social commentator, Deep Throat, observed, to understand what’s going on, we need to “follow the money.”

 

This chart shows the dramatic per pupil spending differences between some of our nation’s largest school districts, a sample of wealthy public school districts and three of our most prestigious private schools.

The three schools on the far right are well-regarded private schools, the American equivalents of Eton and Harrow.  They are boarding schools, so the typical boarding charges ($12,000 annually) have been deducted from these figures.  The remainder, the per student expenditure, averages $62,000.  Some of this is from tuition, some from the school’s endowment and other sources. 

The middle three columns represent the per student expenditures of school districts in upper-middle-class communities well-known for the quality of their schools. Their per student expenditure averages just under $20,000, less than a third of what the private schools spend.

Chicago, Los Angeles and Baltimore are large urban districts with all the challenges that go with that.  They spend, on average, $12,000 per student, less than one-fifth what private schools spend.

Phillips Exeter, St. Paul’s and Deerfield Academy have classes that average 11 students (remember this when you hear someone say,  “class size doesn’t matter”); student-to-teacher ratios of 5:1, and send their students to Harvard, Columbia, Georgetown, University of Pennsylvania, Yale, Dartmouth, Stanford, Brown, Middlebury, Princeton, Tufts and Amherst.

Presumably, the parents of the children sent to Phillips Exeter, St. Paul’s and Deerfield Academy know that investing in their children’s futures is worth the price. 

So it should be for all children in this increasingly inequitable society.

EdVox Blog: NY 2011 test scores are no time to celebrate

The citywide test scores for New York’s public school students were released this week, and Zakiyah Ansari from the NYC Coalition for Educational Justice voices concern about blowing modest gains out of proportion:


"Without a real commitment to providing the supports parents, students and educators need to get us out of this crisis, a small improvement measured by questionable scores that are already so low is nearly irrelevant."

Read Zakiyah Ansari's entire blog post, published on the EdVox blog, here.

Colorado’s school funding case goes to trial

Molly A. Hunter, Esq.

Director, Education Justice

Education Law Center

[Yesterday], the Lobato v. Colorado educational opportunity case began with opening arguments in the state District Court in Denver. The trial is scheduled for a content- and witness-packed five weeks. View videos from [yesterday’s] press conference.

Follow the trial on Twitter or the blog.

Plaintiffs say they will prove that the State is not providing the resources necessary for a "thorough and uniform system" of public education, as guaranteed by the Colorado Constitution. Instead, the lack of resources guarantees failure, plaintiffs said. They will ask the court to order the legislative and executive branches to remedy the problem.

Defendants will argue that the finance system is OK and ask the court to refrain from issuing an order.

Plaintiffs are students and their parents and 119 Colorado school districts. Defendants are the State, the state board of education, the education commissioner, and the governor. The attorney general represents the state defendants.

A combination of pro bono attorneys and law firms represent the original plaintiffs. Kathleen Gebhardt of Children's Voices, Kenzo Kanawabe of Davis Graham & Stubbs, and Alex Halpern of Alexander Halpern are lead counsel for plaintiffs, and lawyers from DGS, Faegre & Benson, Greenburg Traurig, The Harris Law Firm, Holland & Hart, Perkins Coie, Reilly Pozner, and Snell & Wilmer will handle various aspects of the case. 

MALDEF (Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund) represents plaintiff intervenors, who are additional students and parents concerned about opportunities and missing resources for low-wealth students and students learning English.

For more background, see: Lawsuits in Other States, Denver Post, and One of 119 Plaintiff School Districts, Craig Daily Press.

Education Justice Press Contact: Molly A. Hunter, Esq. Director, Education Justice email: mhunter@edlawcenter.org www.edlawcenter.org

Save Our Schools March: United, we stood for all children’s right to a high-quality public education

By Jan Resseger

Minister for Public Education and Witness

The United Church of Christ Justice & Witness Ministries

The United Church of Christ Justice & Witness Ministries proudly carried our banner at the Saturday, July 30, at the Save Our Schools (SOS) rally near the White House. Boy, was it a hot afternoon!

The planners brought in serious academic prophets of educational equity – NYU’s education sociologist, Pedro Noguera; Deborah Meier, New York small-schools founder and education guru;  Linda Darling-Hammond, the Stanford Professor who almost became Secretary of Education until pushed aside by a campaign by corporate reformers; Angela Valenzuela, professor of cultural studies at the University of Texas; Jonathan Kozol, the writer of a whole shelf of books about inequity and injustice for children and in public schools – beginning with Death at an Early Age in the 1960s; and Diane Ravitch, NYU education historian who donated the Moynihan Prize money she was recently awarded by the American Academy of Political and Social Science to help pay for the rally. 

The event got press coverage, a lot of it devoted to celebrities like actor Matt Damon, who contributed financially to the rally and the video clip sent from Jon Stewart. 

Speakers decried corporate-style school reform that has culminated in Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act and Obama’s Race to the Top.  They affirmed the importance of a strong system of public schools that provides an opportunity to learn for all children with a variety of needs, not a race that creates a few winners and the rest who lose out. 

And they spoke up for school teachers and against those who claim teachers need merit pay incentives to do their jobs well.  Again and again speakers pointed out that the dedication of teachers is not motivated by financial gain.  After Ravitch’s speech, teachers chanted, “Thank you!” “Thank you!” “Thank you!”

Delegations from places where public education has been under attack were particularly visible – Chicago, Wisconsin, and New Orleans.  Ohioans wore buttons decrying Senate Bill 5, the anti-collective bargaining law that will go on the ballot for possible repeal in November.   While unionized teachers were present in matched T-shirts from many places, the rally was a grass roots affair originally growing from several bloggers who are Nationally Board Certified teachers. 

In perhaps the day’s most moving speech, a school superintendent from Texas declared his unwavering commitment to educating all children. I paraphrase here as closely as possible what he said: 

“The schools in my district are failing schools.  You want to know why?  Eighty percent of my children do not speak English when they come to us and they can’t pass the tests after only one year in our schools.  I wear my scarlet letter proudly, because it means that we serve the children who come to us; we do not push those children out of our schools.  It is our job to welcome them and to teach them.  We seek to be the Good Samaritan and not pass by on the other side of the road.  In these terrible times of attack on educators and public schools, I take heart, knowing that our children’s lives will be touched by what we do for them while they are with us.”

Voucher programs fail to deliver promised academic gains, national research review finds

The National Opportunity to Learn Campaign applauds the Center on Education Policy for its initiative and diligence in conducting a national review of a decade of research that, among other key findings, concludes that publicly funded voucher programs have failed to produce promised academic gains for thousands of students. 

After all these years of diverting taxpayer funds from public education, the research shows that low-income students who switched schools using a voucher program are not experiencing academic progress that is any more substantial than their public school peers, according to the CEP’s report, “Keeping Informed about School Vouchers: A Review of Major Developments and Research.” 

CEP reviewers found that students receiving vouchers in Milwaukee, Cleveland and Washington, D.C., showed no significance difference in reading and math achievement.

The CEP report confirms what those who oppose vouchers have been saying for a long time: Voucher programs are inherently flawed in that they siphon off precious public school dollars and don’t improve students’ educational experiences.

“Vouchers have never been the answer,” says Tina Dove, National Director for the Opportunity to Learn Campaign. “Instead, our state and federal leaders should be focusing on systemic solutions that invest in public education and work toward ensuring all children are guaranteed a fair and substantive opportunity to learn as a civil right.”

The privatization of public education through vouchers means that public dollars are used to support private schools, which often discriminate against students with physical and learning disabilities and English language learners, some of our most vulnerable students.

Other key findings in the CEP report include:

•  In the absence of evidence that voucher students do any better than their public school peers, advocates have shifted their rhetoric to focus more on the value of parent choice and overall parent satisfaction. 
  
• Initially created to aid low-income students in low-performing urban school districts, some newer voucher programs – such as those in Indiana, Wisconsin and Douglas County, Colo. – are open to middle-income and suburban families.
  
• Greater scrutiny of voucher research is necessary to help ensure that studies are not biased.
  

The National Opportunity to Learn Campaign, which is focused on eliminating the opportunity gap that is fueling a persistent achievement gap, aims to hold state and federal leaders accountable for ensuring that all children, regardless of where they live, have equitable access to an opportunity to learn. Competitive programs that benefit limited numbers of children are not the answer. We must, instead, make sure all children have access to the four building blocks research has proven are needed for academic success: high-quality early childhood education; highly prepared and effective teachers; rigorous college-prep curriculum; and equitable instructional materials and policies.

To read the entire CEP report, download it here: www.otlcampaign.org/resources/keeping-informed-about-school-vouchers-review-major-developments-and-research.

Valerie Strauss: "Why Save Our Schools March is happening Saturday"

As hundreds of education advocates, parents, teachers and students prepare to bring their demands for substantive education reform to our nation's capitol tomorrow, Washington Post blogger Valerie Strauss writes about her interview with organizers of the Save Our Schools March taking place in Washington, D.C.



In her blog -- originally posted on washingtonpost.com -- read remarks from march organizers Anthony Cody is a veteran California science teacher who has a blog called Living in Dialogue for Education Week Teacher and Rita Solnet is a Florida businesswoman, parent and education activist, and co-founder of the nonprofit Parents Across America.



By Valerie Strauss

I long wondered why public school teachers sat quietly during the decade-long No Child Left Behind era watching high-stakes standardized test-based reform take hold, leading to a host of damaging unintended consequences (narrowed curriculum and teaching to the test, just to name a few).

This Saturday, teachers, along with principals, parents and other activists, quiet no longer, are scheduled to take their concerns to Washington, D.C., with a march intended to let the Obama administration know that they are unhappy with corporate-based school reform that is obsessed with test-based “accountability,” the expansion of charter schools and other measures.

I recently asked two march organizers why, now, after all these years, they were speaking out. Here, in a repost, is what they said:

Read the full post here.

How much a family earns shouldn’t determine how much a child learns

Do Americans today believe it is fair for children from wealthy families to have greater opportunities to learn than children from poorer families?  Few would say so.  Most of us would say, most of us believe, that children at every income level should have an equal opportunity to learn.

But this chart of 8^th grade reading data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress — “The Nation’s Report Card” — shows an enormous gap in student reading proficiency based on family income.

After eight years in school, students from low-income families – those that are eligible to receive free and reduced-priced meals through the National School Lunch Program – have between one-third and a half the likelihood of reading at or above Proficient as those from families with higher incomes.  This holds true for Black, Hispanic, White and Asian students.

Our public education system was founded to create a level playing field,  so that all children would have an equal opportunity to learn, prosper and thrive.  How have we reached the point where the quality of the education a child receives is determined by the quantity of income available to his or her parents?

It is time to return to the vision of the Founders:  a first-class public education system for all children.

Shedding light on education and civil rights

By Tina Dove

National Director, The Opportunity to Learn Campaign

In a recent House of Representatives debate, a heated discussion arose about light bulbs and energy-efficiency standards. As an environmentally conscious American, I’m quite concerned about energy efficiency. As an educator, I’m extremely interested in light bulbs, specifically the ones inside of our children that come to life when they learn something new.

As a high school social studies teacher, I saw those light bulbs come to life when my students had the famous “aha!” moments we teachers know all too well.  I worked hard to make those bulbs light up because my students deserved that kind of inspirational learning moment.  It’s this energy that fuels lifelong learning and future academic success.

Sadly, for many of our nation’s students, this light bulb moment hasn’t happened because the conditions that enable such an experience don’t exist for far too many of our neediest and underserved children. For them, the lamp shows up for school, but too many obstacles exist to get the light bulbs working. 

The U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR) recently released extraordinary data that provides in stark detail the level of inequity that exists in schools serving our poorest students, our students of color, and our students with special needs.  

According to Russlynn Ali, Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights at the Department of Education, “Despite the best efforts of America's educators to bring greater equity to our schools, too many children — especially low-income and minority children — are still denied the educational opportunities they need to succeed.”  

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said, “These data show that far too many students are still not getting access to the kinds of classes, resources and opportunities they need to be successful.”  

In short, these students are being denied an equitable opportunity to learn; a chance to have that light bulb moment that so many of their peers across town or in the suburbs enjoy in their everyday school experiences.

The numbers don’t lie.  Of the 7,000 schools sampled: 

• Only 22 percent of local education agencies (school districts) reported that they operated pre-K programs targeting children from low-income families.  This runs counter to the research that speaks to the overwhelming benefits associated with access to high-quality early childhood education for all children, particularly those from poor families.
   
• Schools serving mostly African-American students are twice as likely to have teachers with only one or two years of experience than are schools within the same district that serve mostly White students.  This when the research is abundantly clear about the impact highly prepared and effective teachers have on student success.
  
  
• 3,000 schools serving nearly 500,000 high school students offer no Algebra II classes — a course that is a basic requirement for acceptance into two- and four-year colleges and universities — essentially robbing them of access to college-preparatory curriculum.
  
  
• Only 2 percent of the students with disabilities are taking at least one Advanced Placement class, thus contradicting the notion that all students deserve rich and rigorous academic curriculum.
  
  
• English language learners make up 6 percent of the high school population (in grades 9-12), but are 15 percent of the students for whom Algebra is the highest-level math course taken by the final year of their high school career.  Meanwhile, girls are underrepresented in physics, while boys are underrepresented in Algebra II.  

Data like this underscore our need to question the equity of not providing access for all children to the kinds of resources that are proven to help students become successful in school, their careers and in life.

So instead of having raucous debates about whether Americans should be able to purchase incandescent light bulbs instead of compact florescent ones, Congress (and other policy makers) needs to be coming up with equitable solutions that flip the switch on the most important lights we have and keep them shining brightly — those found inside all of our children.