Tag Archives: education

California’s Ed Reform Wars

Originally published in The American Prospect on August 2nd, 2016.
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This past April, the California Court of Appeals unanimously struck down the controversial Vergara v. California decision, in which a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge ruled that five longstanding teacher protections—including a two-year probationary period for new teachers and a layoff system based on how many years one’s been teaching—violated students’ constitutional right to an equal education. The lower court judge had argued that these labor protections make it harder to fire bad teachers, and bad teachers significantly undermine a child’s education. In a 3-0 decision, the appellate judges concluded that the labor protections themselves are not responsible for harming students, even if school administrators sometimes implement them injudiciously.

Students Matter, a nonprofit backed by Silicon Valley entrepreneur David Welch that’s representing the Vergara plaintiffs, has filed an appeal to California’s Supreme Court. Their supporters argue that children pay the price for such job protections as teacher tenure and seniority. They also point to research that suggests making it easier to fire teachers has positive effects on student achievement. Critics counter that the real problems students face—particularly low-income students of color—are not teacher job protections, but their under-resourced, highly segregated schools that fail to attract and retain high-quality educators. At a time when states like California face real teacher shortages, they say, the focus on firing teachers is misplaced at best.

Since the lower court’s Vergara ruling two years ago, similar suits challenging teacher job protections have been filed in New York and Minnesota.

While David Welch and his allies remain committed to waging legal battles against tenure, seniority, and other job protections, they are also pushing for statutory changes via the California legislature. Following the original Vergara decision, Republican lawmakers introduced a package of three bills to extend the time it would take a teacher to earn tenure, to repeal the “last-in, first-out” statute that makes layoff decisions based on seniority, and to establish an annual teacher evaluation system. These bills, however, got nowhere in the Democratic-controlled statehouse.

“I think the Vergara decision helped increase public demand for improvements in our education system, but I always think it’s better when we can make policy changes through the legislature rather than the court system,” says Assemblywoman Kristin Olsen, the Republican who sponsored the teacher evaluation bill.

Back during the original Vergara trial, unions and some education experts also argued against making policy changes through the courts. A spokesperson for the California Teachers Association told The Wall Street Journal that legislators were already looking at ways to amend the contested laws, and Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, said that extending the time it takes to get tenure in California is a legitimate idea, but that such changes should be done through the political process, not the judiciary.

Today, however, local unions are fighting back against attempts to change employment laws through the legislature. California is one of just five states that grants teachers tenure after two years—32 states require a three-year probationary period, and nine states require four or five years. And, as critics are quick to point out, the reality is that California administrators must file paperwork for tenure status after a teacher has been working for just 15 to 18 months if they’re to meet state deadlines. Even those who are very supportive of teacher tenure feel lengthening the amount of time it takes to earn it makes sense. Before granting genuine job security, they say, make sure it’s for an individual you’d really want in front of students for the long haul.

But the California Teachers Association and the California Federation of Teachers have both strongly opposed bills aimed at modifying tenure, even legislation from which their adversaries have withdrawn support. While the final outcome of the Vergara case remains to be seen, the unions’ firm stance against reform could help prompt tenure opponents to mount an initiative campaign—a routine occurrence in California politics. That may not bode well for the unions: A 2015 poll of registered California voters found that most respondents think teachers in their state receive tenure too quickly, and that seniority should count less during the layoff process. If changes to tenure and seniority were to come before the voters, there are decent odds that such a measure would pass.

The concept of teacher tenure in American public education, as Dana Goldstein documents in her book The Teacher Wars, was an idea originally imported from Germany. Progressive-era reformers saw that giving teachers more job security was often a good way to incentivize people to join the low-paid profession. Tenure also made it harder to fire teachers, which consequently made it more difficult for the urban political machines that then dominated cities to dole out teaching jobs as political favors.

Though teachers unions have existed in the U.S. for a long time, the idea of collective bargaining didn’t take off until the second half of the 20th century, as membership in teachers unions grew, and public sector unionism gained strength more broadly. The first teachers union to win collective bargaining rights was New York City’s United Federation of Teachers in 1963, and by the end of the 1970s, after a series of labor strikes across the country, 72 percent of public school teachers were covered under collective bargaining agreements.

As a result, teacher tenure in unionized school districts means being covered under a “just cause” provision in a collective bargaining agreement. In a non-unionized workplace, employees can be fired simply because an employer doesn’t like them. The added job security that comes with tenure means that a boss would need to legally demonstrate that firing their employee was justified—that there is “just cause” for the worker’s termination. Tenured employees also have the right to contest their firing.

Tenure critics rightly note that in many school districts, the process an administrator has to go through in order to dismiss a teacher for cause ends up being so lengthy and expensive that it can feel nearly impossible. In many cases, it’s easier, and a lot cheaper, to keep an ineffective teacher employed, rather than jump through the legal hoops to remove them. In New York City, officials who make failed attempts to terminate teachers often end up just issuing fines.

Union contracts generally distinguish between two kinds of dismissals. The first is termination for cause; for example, an administrator should be able to fire you if you’re an ineffective teacher or if you sexually harass a student. The second type of dismissal is through a layoff due to an economic circumstance—generally, cuts to school district budgets during recessions.

Many teacher tenure critics also want to end the process of “seniority”—which requires that districts make layoff decisions based on the number of years a teacher has been working. Opponents of these “last-in, first-out” statutes say that high-quality young teachers are penalized under this system, since their few years in the profession makes them more likely to be canned, regardless of their job performance. This also disproportionately hurts students in high-poverty schools, critics say, because young teachers are generally assigned to those schools.

Some states, including many that are substantially unionized, have already explicitly banned seniority when making layoff decisions, and others require teacher job performance to be the primary factor considered. Ten states—including New York and California—however, still require that the number of years a teacher has taught be a partial, or the primary factor for districts when making layoff decisions.

Defenders of seniority say that if you want to fire someone for poor performance, then do it for cause, not disguised through the layoff process. In effect, tenure and seniority work together to give employers the flexibility to lay people off when economic circumstances require it, but in a way that protects teachers from being arbitrarily targeted, or targeted because they were paid more than more junior faculty. Seniority-patterned layoffs exist specifically to protect the “just cause” rights.

“Until very recently, these rules were fairly uncontroversial,” says Leo Casey, the executive director of the Albert Shanker Institute, a think tank affiliated with the American Federation of Teachers. “They prevented older, more expensive teachers from being discriminated against during lean economic times, and administrators often appreciated the simplicity of ‘last-in, first-out’, especially because there was no consensus on how to best evaluate teachers’ performance.”

In February, before the Vergara appeals court decision came down, California Assemblywoman Susan Bonilla, a Democrat, introduced a bill aimed at finding some legislative common ground for the various employment statutes being challenged in court. While the three bills sponsored by Republicans in 2015 got nowhere, some believed an effort led by a Democrat might get more traction. Both the California Teachers Association and the California Federation of Teachers have donated to Bonilla’s campaigns.

Bonilla proposed, among other things, giving principals the option of waiting until a teacher’s third or fourth year to grant tenure, and placing poorly performing teachers in a program that would provide increased professional support. If the ineffective teacher received another low performance rating after a year in this program, Bonilla’s legislation would enable schools to fire the teacher through an expedited process. The LA Times editorial board said her bill would make the rules “more reasonable and practical, while preventing capricious or vindictive firings of teachers by school administrators.” Education reformers initially took no position on her bill, but following April’s Vergara appeals decision, Students Matter, the group that brought the case, decided to back it.

However, Bonilla still lacked support from school administrators and teachers unions, and the California Teachers Association was urging its members to fight her bill. EdSource, a nonprofit news site focused on education in California, reported that the union posted an “action alert” for teachers to call their lawmakers, labeling the proposed legislation “an all-out assault” by “corporate millionaires and special interests.”

In June, Bonilla introduced an amended version of her bill, one that would require new teachers to work for three years before becoming eligible for tenure. Her bill no longer included provisions to create a new teacher evaluation system, to require teachers with poor performance reviews to be laid off before those with less seniority, and to remove many of the dismissal rules that administrators found frustrating. In an interview with The American Prospect, Bonilla explained that she needed to narrow her legislation’s scope because that’s what the Senate Education Committee requested. “They are looking for policy change, but my original bill was too wide-ranging,” she says.

Despite being significantly watered-down, the bill was still opposed by the unions, while the education reform groups that originally offered support came out in strong opposition, too. However, the Association of California School Administrators and the California School Boards Association now came forward with endorsements of the amended legislation.

“In my opinion, I really needed administrators’ support. That’s why we took LIFO [last-in, first-out] completely out and worked with the superintendents and the school board association to craft a version they could back. They’re part of the education community, they really understand what needed to be changed,” says Bonilla. The Association of California School Administrators is listed as one of Bonilla’s top campaign contributors.

Students Matter called the amended bill “a bad deal for California students” and urged members of the California legislature to reject it.

“The reform groups wanted everything, and some wanted everything but only if it was written exactly by them,” says Bonilla. “They didn’t want to come on board if it didn’t come out of their house.” She says Students Matter, and another reform-oriented group, Teach Plus, withdrew their support when her legislation no longer addressed seniority.

“If I had to choose who I was going to go with, I’d choose the administrators, the people actually running the schools. That was my priority in terms of really getting sound policy,” says Bonilla.

The California Teachers Association called upon its members to organize against the amended bill, saying it would take rights away from educators, and negatively impact students.

On June 29, the California Senate Education Committee held a hearing,ultimately rejecting Bonilla’s amended bill. Just two of the committee’s nine senators voted in favor—and both are terming out in November. (Five opposed it, and two others didn’t vote.)

“I do feel that at least having the hearing on the bill, which went on for about an hour and a half, was really important,” says Bonilla, who is also leaving office in November. “I felt it was important, as a Democrat, that I stand up and say, we as legislators have an obligation to our constituencies to find a solution and not pretend that the status quo is alright, just because the union says it is.”

One senator to vote in favor of Bonilla’s bill was Carol Liu, the chairwoman of the education committee. Liu told Bonilla that she could amend her bill further over the July recess period if she wanted to try and get more support. Bonilla took Liu up on this and submitted a new version that does not extend the time it takes a new teacher to earn tenure. All Bonilla’s latest version does now is grant school districts the authority to negotiate an alternative dismissal process with their local bargaining units, if they so choose. Right now, under California state law, local bargaining units are prohibited from negotiating the terms of their dismissal process. In 2014, the teachers union in San Jose tried to do this, and asked the California state board of education for a waiver so they could extend their probationary period to three years. But the state board denied the San Jose school district and its union their request. (The California Teachers Association argued that such changes should only come from the state legislature, not through waivers.) Bonilla’s twice-watered-down bill, then, would make such a change.

As of August 1st, it was still unclear whether Bonilla’s new bill would receive a waiver and come up for a re-vote. The American Prospect was unsuccessful in getting an interview with the California Teachers Association, despite repeated attempts over several weeks.

I asked Josh Petchalt, the president of the California Federation of Teachers, why his union opposed Bonilla’s amended bill in June. Wasn’t a one-year extension of the probationary period a fairly good compromise?

Petchalt, though, does not think the tenure law needs to be changed, and believes changing it would not solve the underlying issue of how tenure is assessed. “I think all the commotion about making it three years or five years really misses the point about what it means to have a rigorous procedure for evaluating teachers,” says Petchalt, who taught high school for more than two decades. “I don’t think it takes very long to decide if an adult should be working with kids. I think it happens relatively quickly if that person is being observed on a regular basis by properly trained administrators who know what they’re doing.”

Some leading academics share Petchalt’s assessment. During the Vergara trials, Jesse Rothstein, an economics professor at UC Berkeley, testified that two years was long enough for principals and school administrators to determine whether or not to award tenure. He cited his own research, which suggests that granting tenure earlier, rather than later, is better for students. Rothstein also argued in favor of using seniority to handle layoffs, which he says is a less costly, subjective, and controversial method than using annual performance evaluations.

If Bonilla’s revised-again bill, which has been stripped of its probation provision, comes up for a revote, she says she really hopes there will be “three courageous legislators” who will vote for its passage. “Allowing a union to bargain locally is not an anti-union position,” Bonilla says.

If her amended bill does not pass, or even if it does, the education reformers may seek to place an initiative on the 2018 ballot. Bonilla says she’s heard that there already been some money raised to start that effort.

If such a measure is placed before voters, I asked Petchalt, wouldn’t it look bad to oppose a bill that wouldn’t end seniority, wouldn’t end tenure—just merely extend the probationary period to three years, which is how long it takes in most states anyway?

“I don’t doubt that the optics are not great, but our members spend a career in the classroom, they are committed to public education, to children, and so it’s not good enough to say well there’s an element of goodness in this specific bill if the overall effect would make things worse,” he says. Petchalt points to the Vergara trial, and the broader political effort to weaken teachers unions and collective bargaining. At a time when public sector workers are under attack, when public education is under attack, he says, his union feels compelled to fight back against “a broad narrative.”

“The teachers union supported No Child Left Behind and it got them nowhere,” Petchalt adds. “And they supported [NCLB] for exactly what you’re saying, they didn’t want to be seen as folding their arms and being opposed to everything. [Some union leaders] said if we support [NCLB], then they’ll stop their attacks. But it furthered the attacks, creating a dynamic that resulted in very bad things happening.”

Petchalt is probably right to suspect that even if his union and the CTA backed Bonilla’s bill, even if union leaders agreed to change the probationary period to three years, education reformers would be unlikely to stop fighting for more concessions. In Pennsylvania, where teachers are eligible for tenure after three years, reformers are pushing to extend it to five years, insisting that three years is too short. In this political climate, unions have decided that ceding no ground and putting forth alternatives is preferable to compromising and hoping the disputes get resolved.

Whether this is the most strategically savvy move, though, is unclear. A survey released in 2012 of 10,000 educators found that, on average, teachers felt it was reasonable to work 5.4 years before being evaluated for tenure. Another survey released in 2015, sponsored by the pro-reform group Teach Plus, found that 65 percent of California teachers think that a probationary period between three and five years makes sense for administrators making tenure decisions.

“In California, when legislators can’t come up with a solution, it ends up going on the ballot,” says Bonilla, who worries about lawmakers abdicating their responsibilities, and the electorate voting on issues they’re not well informed about. “We as legislators have to be the ones to demand that the reformers and the centrally-controlled unions be reasonable. There is no one else who is going to do it.”

Education Reform Democrats Look Ahead to Life After Obama

Originally published in The American Prospect on July 26, 2016.
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Lately on the campaign trail, Hillary Clinton has been talking about how she wants to end the “so-called education wars.” The Democratic presidential nominee wants to see the factionalism among education groups end and instead see new coalitions form to advance policies on which all can agree. Clinton took this message on the road to the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers conferences earlier this month, and her campaign proffered another education olive branch to the Democrats for Education Reform on Monday in downtown Philadelphia.

Virtually every speaker lauded President Obama’s education legacy, highlighting his support for charter schools and test-based accountability at the organization’s day-long Democratic National Convention forum. Shavar Jeffries, the president of Democrats for Education Reform, said he recognized that many have been feeling anxious and unsure about whether Obama’s successor will be as friendly toward their political agenda as he was.

Ann O’Leary, a senior adviser to Hillary Clinton, assured the school choice–supporting audience that the Democratic presidential nominee and the reformers have a “shared vision.” She said that Clinton touted “great charter schools” at both of those recent teacher union conferences. But Clinton notably did not lavish praise on charter schools when she appeared before the American Federation of Teachers last week in Minneapolis. After denouncing for-profit charters and vouchers, she said simply, “where there are public charter schools, we will learn from them.”

Kira Orange Jones, the executive director for Teach for America’s greater New Orleans region, said that she’s “profoundly concerned” that the Democratic Party may divert its attention away from protecting the rights of all children, especially the most disenfranchised. “That’s our party, that’s why I’m a Democrat,” she said.

Meanwhile, school integration also prompted a vigorous discussion among attendees. Kristen Clarke, the president and executive director of the National Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, made an impassioned case for a deeper focus on integration. “We cannot turn our backs on Brown [v. Board of Education],” she said. “And, yes, I do think [Democrats for Education Reform] stands to play an important role in moving that project forward.”

Others made the case for successful segregated charter schools, and questioned whether a real political will exists to pursue new desegregation efforts. Surprisingly, attendees had very little to say about Clinton’s Democratic vice presidential pick, Tim Kaine, or his wife, Anne Holton. Holton, who recently stepped down as Virginia’s education secretary, was a strong supporter of school integration and had opposed the further expansion of charter schools. Her father, former Virginia Governor A. Linwood Holton, a Republican, championed school desegregation during his time in office in the early 1970s.

Though the forum focused on the future of the Democratic Party’s educational agenda, teachers unions, a core constituency within the party, received little attention. “Unions don’t get all the seats at the table,” said Ben LaBolt, a former Obama spokesperson who now heads a communications firm working toweaken teacher tenure and other job protections.

Tafshier Cosby-Thomas, a Newark parent who came down to Philadelphia for the discussions, told The American Prospect that she believed that teachers unions in Newark are “very territorial” and don’t want to collaborate. “They don’t want to even find out about what’s happening in the charter schools,” she said. “I don’t know if they’re unwilling or if traditionally they’re standoffish.”

While education reformers were clearly throwing their political weight behind Hillary Clinton—organizers passed out pins with Clinton’s picture on them to all the attendees—some audience members were still “feeling the Bern.” Kean University student Yasmine Veale, a member of the New Jersey Black Alliance for Educational Options told the Prospect that she’s been considering becoming an independent in the next election cycle. “I’d like to see Democrats become more progressive, and not stay in the center,” she said. Like many millennial women, Veale backed Bernie Sanders during the presidential primary.

“I’m glad that some of what Bernie wanted made its way into the party platform,” she said. “But I’d still really like to see free education for all. It’s crazy that I have to work three jobs … and I’m still going to have a whole bunch of debt.”

Joy Russell, a Washington parent who serves on the advisory board of the Democrats for Education Reform’s D.C. chapter, told the Prospect that she feels confident Hillary Clinton will continue to push for the education policies that Obama has backed, but that overall, “politics have been getting in the way” of ensuring high-quality education for all kids.

Hillary on Charters: Yes and No

Originally published in the The American Prospect on July 6, 2016.
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On Tuesday morning, as the FBI issued a recommendation to not indict Hillary Clinton for her use of a personal email server while secretary of state, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee came before more than 7,500 delegates at the National Education Association’s Representative Assembly in Washington, D.C., and praised public charter schools—to the audible dismay of some of the delegates—while condemning for-profit ones.

The moment of tension emerged when Clinton started to discuss replicating the success of “great schools”—including public charter schools. She noted there had been too much focus on so-called “failing” schools.

Though Clinton has been a long-time supporter of school choice, and her husband helped to catapult charters to the national stage when he was president, she took heat from charter school advocates in November when she remarked that “most charter schools … don’t take the hardest-to-teach kids, or, if they do, they don’t keep them.” Although an adviser emphasized shortly thereafter that Clinton remains a “strong supporter” of public charter schools, many reformers remained leery of her commitment.

But on Tuesday, Clinton gave charters a shout-out, resulting in the loudest boos she received the entire morning. “We’ve got no time for these education wars!” Clinton told the crowd. Facing the evidently anti-charter audience, Clinton quickly pivoted to denouncing for-profit charter schools, saying, “We will not stand for [them].”

The Representative Assembly is the annual conference for the NEA, the nation’s largest labor union, which gathers each summer to set its political agenda for the coming year. The union, with its nearly three million members, endorsed Clinton in October, following the American Federation of Teachers, which endorsed her last July. Throughout the campaign, Clinton’s ideas around public education have been much debated, with self-proclaimed reformers worried she would be hostile to their policies, while many rank-and-file teachers remained skeptical that Clinton would stand up for unions and fight efforts to privatize public schools. 

Despite these concerns, the mood in the plenary hall on Tuesday was overwhelmingly enthusiastic; members wore “Educators for Hillary” T-shirts, waved signs in support, and cheered with excitement.

“I want to say right from the outset that I’m with you,” Clinton told the audience early on in her speech. She promised that if elected, educators will “have a partner at the White House” and that they’ll “always have a seat at the table.”

Clinton framed her education policy proposals around the slogan of “TLC,” or teaching, learning, and community. She threw out a lot of ideas that met eager applause, from raising teacher salaries to reducing the role of standardized testing, to creating universal preschool for every child. She discussed “repairing crumbling schools” and making general investments in school facilities and technology.

Clinton’s rhetoric on charters mirrors language in the recently released Democratic Party platform, which says the party is committed to providing parents with “high-quality public school options” and expanding such options—namely neighborhood schools and charters—for low-income children. The platform comes out against for-profit charter schools, which it says are “focused on making a profit off public resources.”

According to the National Alliance of Public Charter Schools (NAPCS), a charter advocacy group, just under 13 percent of charters are run by for-profit companies, though in cities like Detroit, more than 80 percent of charter schools are run by for-profits. However, the distinction between for-profit and nonprofit is often messier than groups like NAPCS readily admit: Nonprofit charters can still hire for-profit management companies to run their schools.

Some states have begun banning for-profit charter schools, or passing laws that make opening them more difficult. Last year, California legislators tried to ban for-profit charter schools from operating in their state, but Democratic Governor Jerry Brown vetoed the bill, saying he did not “believe the case has been made to eliminate for-profit charter schools in California.” The momentum against for-profit schools has clearly grown more pronounced since then, and also reflects growing divisions within the education reform coalition, between those who champion market-based reforms, and those who push for greater accountability.

In her speech, Clinton also denounced her likely opponent, Donald Trump, who enthusiastically endorsed charter schools during a March primary debate and has said he opposes Common Core standards and “may cut the Department of Education.”

The NEA carries formidable political weight. According to the union, its members represent one out of every 58 general election voters. Rallying those teachers who preferred Senator Bernie Sanders for president to not only vote for Clinton in November but also help campaign for her will be a pressing priority for the union’s leadership.

Following the speech, the union released a statement saying that Clinton’s remarks “held no punches in articulating a clear and inspiring vision of opportunity for every student in America, regardless of ZIP code.”

Education Reformers Reflect at 25

Originally published in The American Prospect on June 29th, 2016.
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It’s been a quarter-century since the nation’s first charter school opened in Minnesota, prompting many self-proclaimed reformers to step back and reflect on their movement’s progress. Charters educated 2.5 million students this past year, in 6,700 schools across 43 states. Programs enabling students to attend private schools with vouchers are expanding. And in February, Teach for America celebrated its 25-year anniversary with a summit in Washington, D.C.—noting that of their 50,000 teachers and alumni, 40,000 are still under 40.

But challenges loom for the movement—politically and philosophically. Some tensions can be chalked up to growing pains: a nationwide bipartisan coalition is bound to disagree at times, and certainly policy implementation can be far more contentious than passing legislation. Transforming the public education system, reformers have found, turns out to be hard, messy work.

But the problems run deeper than that. Internally, two main camps of reformers—market-driven advocates and accountability hawks—have been butting heads increasingly over goals and political priorities. For a long time, these two groups seemed to be one and the same—“choice and accountability” have always been buzzwords for the movement. But over time, the divisions between Team Choice and Team Accountability have grown more apparent. Today, some veteran choice advocates, those who have been pushing market-driven reforms for the last 25 years, have expressed feelings of being hemmed in, and in some cases crowded out, by others who are demanding formal checks and balances.

Jeanne Allen, the president of the Center for Education Reform, is one such frustrated choice advocate. “Reformers have become our own worst enemy,” she declared at an event at the National Press Club earlier this month. Her group organized the event to release its new manifesto, outlining challenges Allen sees within education reform, and steps allies must take to get their movement back on track. “If we’re to be honest with ourselves, we must acknowledge that our efforts to drive change have hit a wall,” she said. In Allen’s view, reformers saw more progress during their first nine years, than over the last 16.

Her manifesto cites a declining interest in Teach for America, decreasing enthusiasm for the education technology sector, and slower overall charter school growth. She says that officials who authorize charters have grown too overbearing, stifling flexibility and innovation. And she calls on the reform movement to get back on offense—to focus on “opportunity and upward mobility”—so they can begin rebuilding momentum.

Chester E. Finn Jr., president emeritus at the right-of-center Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an education reform think tank, tells me he thinks Allen is correct to note that reformers have not looked ahead to the future enough. He worries that the current partisanship in the country threatens to splinter the reform coalition. But he says he thinks certain gains and accomplishments—like judging schools on whether students are learning, improved graduation rates, better tests, and more rigorous standards—are ones to be proud of. “She doesn’t really give them enough credit,” he says.

Greg Richmond, the president of the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, tells me that while he felt many of Allen’s observations were accurate, the overall tone of her manifesto was too cynical and pessimistic. “In the places where we have a lot of charter schools, they won’t disappear,” he says. “The fight now is how many more are there going to be, and what are the regulations around them going to look like.”

Still, fairly stark divisions have emerged within education reform over what role “the market” should play in determining what kinds of public schools should exist and expand.

Still, fairly stark divisions have emerged within education reform over what role “the market” should play in determining what kinds of public schools should exist and expand.

Some groups, like the Center for Education Reform, remain committed to the idea that parents should be able to choose the schools they think best meets the needs of their child. While all reformers still generally use this type of rhetoric, many have actually moved away from the more corporate “parents as customers” language that leaders like Allen still regularly employ. From the perspective of the Center for Education Reform, if a parent is satisfied with a school, then that is reason enough to assume it’s successful and working. If enough parents want to leave a school, and have the freedom to do so, the thinking goes, then bad schools will be inevitably shut down, just as bad businesses close if they can’t sustain demand for their products.

In her manifesto, Allen says that while charter authorizers have a role to play in terms of opening schools, it should be parental choice that determines whether or not schools close. “No accrediting agency has more of an incentive to keep kids out of bad schools than mothers and fathers,” she writes.

“Well, we just fundamentally disagree with that,” Richmond tells me.

Chester E. Finn Jr. says he’s also less willing to leave school accountability up to parents, and believes student outcomes have to be part of the conversation. “Jeanne is a little more willing to settle for a market test, and I want something else besides that. I’m also pretty fussy about achievement.”

Nowhere is this divide more evident than within the ongoing debates surrounding virtual charter schools, which more than 180,000 students attend full-time in 23 states and the District of Columbia. Last fall, multiple research studies found that virtual charter schools yield significantly worse academic results than traditional public schools. Building on those findings, this month, the National Alliance of Public Charter Schools, the National Association of Charter School Authorizers (Richmond’s group), and 50Can, an education reform advocacy group, jointly released a report with recommendations for states to hold virtual charters more accountable for student performance. “It is increasingly clear that full-time virtual charter schools are not a good fit for many children and that solely relying on self-selection in the enrollment process isn’t working,” their report said.

As Matt Barnum, an education policy writer for The 74 observed, that reform groups opted to say ‘self-selection’ –rather than “choice”—highlights some of the tensions of this particular moment. For so long, reform advocates argued that schools should be measured on the basis of whether parents choose them. (Or “self-select” them.) But now more groups are saying that perhaps unfettered choice is not the best policy after all.

“What most of the folks in the charter world realized after ten years was that having an unfettered market produced some great schools, but also a lot of bad ones,” Richmond says. He notes that groups like the Walton Family Foundation used to be very generous in terms of who they would fund. “There was a period of time where it was as if almost anyone who wanted to open a charter school could get a grant of $100,000 from the Waltons. It ran like that for a number of years, until eventually they looked at the results and decided this wasn’t working.”

“As supportive as I am about entrepreneurialism and private sector engagement,” says Finn, “there’s also been a lot of greedy behavior—a lot of ‘to the heck with the kids’—and we reformers didn’t really pay enough attention to that.”

The Center for Education Reform issued a statement sharply critical of the three groups’ report, saying it “exemplifies precisely why the education reform movement is at risk—its conclusions endanger the ideals of opportunity and innovation that are so desperately needed in education today.” At the National Press Club, Allen went further, saying there’s been a “death march” around research studies, with too many reports and academics critiquing various aspects of reform, which then inhibits a culture of risk and innovation.

Efforts to transform public education aren’t going away, but what shape they will take going forward remains unclear. A growing number of people, including both school choice advocates and education reform opponents, say there’s little evidence that standardized test score gains in math and reading lead to improved long-term life outcomes. This has further fueled debates over how students should be tested, and how schools should be held accountable for test scores. There are also growing disputes among reformers over the role of for-profit companies, and what type of regulation and accountability a choice-based system really needs.

“I don’t feel that charters are going to go away, but I do believe they will become so hamstrung they will become like the traditional school system,” said Donald Hense, the founder of one of D.C.’s largest charter networks, at the National Press Club earlier this month. Richmond tells me that while he whole-heartedly agrees some authorizers have gone too far in regulating charter schools, many don’t go far enough.

In late May, Robert Pondiscio of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, penned a provocative post warning of a narrowing space for conservatives within education reform; its “increasingly aggressive” social justice rhetoric, he said, has served to marginalize Republicans and conservative ideas. A fellow conservative, Fredrick Hess, the director of Education Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, followed up, lamenting what he described as growing “groupthink” within the movement. “It has undermined the healthy competition of ideas,” Hess said. “It has weakened the ability to sustain bipartisan cooperation. It has rendered the space less hospitable to young minds who may not share the current orthodoxy.” These and other critiques have sparked a flurry of internal discussion and debate about the future of the coalition—a fairly healthy conversation as reformers work to grow a more diverse movement, but one that has also left people divided over just how existential these problems really are.

As education policy devolves back to the states, as it’s set to do through the Every Student Succeeds Act, which Congress passed in December, we’re likely to see much more school variation across states and communities. Teacher unions and market-driven reformers have cheered these developments, but many civil rights groupsand accountability hawks worry about what a decreased federal role will mean for struggling students. As reformers continue to mobilize, so do their critics. The discussion around school integration has grown louder over the past two years, and more community advocates are exploring models like full-service community schools as ways to boost student success.

Needless to say, the next quarter-century will require close attention.

 

Charter and Traditional Public Schools Fight Over Money

Originally published in The American Prospect on June 6, 2016.
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Last month, a teachers union-funded study in Los Angeles sparked a furor when it reported that the city’s charter sector—which educates 16 percent of L.A.’s public school students—drains upwards of $500 million a year from the district’s school budget.

In a brief accompanying the report, the teachers union and its allies charged that L.A.’s charter school explosion “limits educational opportunities” for more than 500,000 public school students, and “imperils the financial stability” of the district. Education reform advocate Peter Cunningham shot back in a blog post that the study’s premise that charters siphon money from traditional public schools “is like arguing that a younger child deprives an older child of parental attention.”

Such school budget fights are not just happening in Los Angeles. In cities all over the country—from Massachusetts, to Missouri, from Florida to Pennsylvania, from Washington state to Maryland—charters and local school districts are clashing fiercely over who gets what funding. Districts say charters steal their money, leaving them unable to properly educate the students who remain at their schools—very often those who are the most expensive to educate, like children with disabilities.

Charter advocates counter that districts’ financial woes began long before charters came on the scene, and students who seek alternatives shouldn’t have to suffer just because districts and unions face budget and organizational crises. Money should “follow the child” school choice supporters say, meaning per-pupil tax dollars should be directed towards whichever school system a student wishes to attend.

Charter school policy discussions often devolve into political battles that pit advocates armed with competing research studies against one another in arguments over academic impact. In some cities, like Boston and New Orleans, students attending charter schools have demonstrated significant test score gains. In others, the academic results have been no better than those in traditional public schools. And in some cases, charters have yielded worse results than the district schools.

The research examining charter schools’ academic effectiveness will continue indefinitely, but it is concerns about their fiscal impact that are becoming increasingly charged. As the pressure to expand charter schools continues to mount, and the budgetary health of local districts continues to decline, teachers, administrators, parents, and activists on both sides of the charter school divide are facing off over a dwindling resource: money.

Intensifying the heated political clash between charter schools and traditional school districts is that overall spending on public education, for all schools, has fallen. In 2015, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a progressive think tank, found most states provide less financial support for public schools than they did before the Great Recession, and in some cases, much less.

“Even as we’ve come out of the recession, heels are dug in, and nobody is really considering putting in additional funds,” says Bruce Baker, an expert on school finance.

Funds are not only shrinking, but districts are hard pressed to manage costs that are “fixed” or “stranded” when students leave to attend charter schools, experts warn. Charter advocates say that as money follows the child, districts should figure out how to adjust to new fiscal realities. But it’s not always so easy to reduce certain expenses, at least right away, say researchers who have studied education funding. The cost of heating a building, for example, is the same for a classroom of 15 students as it would be for one of 18 students.

Similarly, a district that has lost only a few students from each grade can find it difficult to reduce the number of school employees. In 2013, Moody’s Investor Service, a bond credit rating agency, released a report which concluded that a small but growing number of school districts face severe financial stress as charter schools proliferate, specifically because these districts can’t reduce their costs as quickly as they lose revenue. This has forced already struggling districts to make further cuts to programs and services, and in some cases, to shut down schools entirely.

In 2014, education policy experts Robert Bifulco and Randall Reback co-authored a paper on the fiscal impact of charter schools, noting a dearth in existing research on the topic. They looked at Buffalo and Albany, two cities with relatively large concentrations of charter schools, and with public school districts facing stagnant, and shrinking student enrollments. The two concluded that charter school expansion produces negative fiscal impacts for school districts, yet that such harm can be somewhat mitigated by better coordination between charters, districts, and states. Bifulco and Reback found that, in general, closing schools can be the most effective way to manage some of the fiscal strain produced by charter growth, but that such closures are “politically contentious undertakings.”

Still, given that research shows money matters a great deal in education, many charter critics believe it is neither wise nor ethical to gamble that cost cuts will wind up improving student learning.

Still other academics suggest tight budgets may actually help boost student achievement. Ron Zimmer, an education researcher at Vanderbilt University, has said it’s possible that fiscal strain on district budgets could spur competition, potentially helping all students. Still, given that research shows money matters a great deal in education, many charter critics believe it is neither wise nor ethical to gamble that cost cuts will wind up improving student learning.

When the charter school expansion first started to take off, some states freed up transitional funds to help school districts cope with declining enrollments and fiscal fallout as students left for charters. Such transitional aid began “as a sort of compromise” between charters and district schools says Reback. Yet many of these compromise measures were reduced or eliminated once the recession hit.

For example, in Illinois, state law once provided a three-year, declining payment to districts to help them manage their budgets as charter enrollment grew. According to Kasia Kalata, the external affairs manager at the Illinois Network of Charter Schools, the state offered impact aid to support school districts with declining enrollments, but phased out the policy in 2009.

Similarly, in 2007, Michigan began to provide some categorical funding to districts with declining enrollments. But these allocations were never fully funded, and by 2012, the state eliminated them altogether. Michigan also lifted its charter school cap in 2011, leading to rapid charter growth.

“Right now you could open a charter school, for almost any reason, in any location, regardless of what that will do to district schools,” says Peter Joseph Hammer, a law professor at Wayne State University in Detroit. He says Michigan’s charter law, and the elimination of the state’s charter cap, has just been “devastating” to traditional public school finances. While the categorical grants that Michigan once offered provided some help, Hammer says even those measures were always “very small relative to the need” and mostly enacted to quiet critics.

Pennsylvania used to reimburse local districts up to 30 percent of their charter school costs, but in 2011, the state’s Republican governor eliminated these partial reimbursements. This was a loss of more than $240 million across the state, including over $110 million for Philadelphia alone.

Laws governing pension participation for charter school employees vary from state to state. Charters, though, have generally not been around long enough to accumulate their own unfunded pension liabilities. The question now is: do charters share responsibility to help pay down the pension legacy costs of area school districts?

Monique Morrissey, a pension expert at the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive think tank, says there is no reason to exempt charter schools from paying unfunded liabilities that are no more the public schools’ fault than they are the charters’. “In fact, I would say that even if charter schools are allowed to opt out of a pension system, they should be required to help pay down the legacy costs to maintain a level playing field,” she says. “Otherwise it creates a downward spiral, where every public school has an incentive to convert to a charter and/or every family has an incentive to choose a better-funded charter school, leaving fewer and fewer students—and less and less funding—in the regular school system to cover the legacy costs.”

In Morrissey’s view, the legacy costs are owed by taxpayers, not students in either regular public schools or charter schools. Thus, she says, “if funding is supposed to follow the students, legacy costs should be taken out of the equation and considered part of the overall budget, not something owed by certain schools and not others. Otherwise, students in regular public schools are effectively provided with less education funding than those in charter schools.”

There have always been disagreements between charters and traditional district schools, but Susan Spicka, the interim director of the advocacy group Education Voters of PA, says that losing those charter reimbursements in 2011 greatly exacerbated tensions between the two sectors. “We support the charter reimbursement and we think it’s a valid argument that, yes, you do have some costs you can’t get rid of right away just because you have fewer children,” Spicka says. “There should be some type of compensation [for districts] to handle those costs.”

Not everyone agrees. Such academics as Marguerite Roza and Jon Fullerton say that policies designed to help districts cope with the effects of shifting student enrollments “weaken the incentives that should drive change and adaptation.” Roza and Fullerton question the idea that schools have all these “fixed costs,” and argue that districts should think more seriously about cheaper alternatives like online schooling, defined-contribution plans, and modified tenure systems. Only by “adopting more nimble expenditure structures,” they have written, can districts feasibly adapt to a changing landscape.

Other “fixed costs” that tend to receive far less attention in conversations about the fiscal impact of charters are the billions of dollars owed by states and districts in pension obligations—and what effect the expansion of charter schools means for local districts saddled with these payments.

Unfunded pension liabilities are the estimated value of benefits earned by employees minus the assets set aside to pay them. Unfunded liabilities can arise because required contributions have not been made in full, or because actuarial assumptions have not been met. States and districts with large unfunded liabilities are now scrambling to find the dollars to pay up, resulting in painful cuts in other areas, including salary reductions for current teachers.

While some unfunded pension liabilities are due to market fluctuations, including sharp stock market declines in 2002 and 2008, leading economists say the most severe cases are due to politicians’ failure to keep up with employers’ share of pension payments over many years (most public-sector workers also contribute toward their own pensions). Instead of setting aside money for future retirees, political leaders opted to defer their responsibilities, borrowing against the next generation of public school students and taxpayers.

Though some education reform advocates have dismissed the idea that districts can’t sufficiently downsize when students leave for charters—they chalk the problem up to bureaucratic recalcitrance—many people acknowledge that such expenses as pension commitments simply cannot be scaled back when student enrollment shifts. “Lifetime health benefits and defined-benefit pensions, sometimes guaranteed decades ago, have created ongoing costs for districts that are unconnected to revenues and enrollment and cannot be easily reduced,” Roza and Fullerton write.

Others disagree.

“The approach of the incumbents—the unions, the administrators—is to chain new teachers to the Titanic because they don’t want to let anyone escape,” says Michael Podgursky, a school finance researcher at the University of Missouri. “These young teachers, charter school teachers, TFA teachers, are cross-subsidizing the pension plans, so [the incumbents] don’t want to let anyone escape.”

He acknowledges that leaving districts to handle those costs alone as charters expand might make things more difficult for traditional school districts. But he says charters “didn’t make this mess.”

Josh McGee, a prominent pension reform advocate at the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, also thinks it would be wrong to ask charters to help pay down legacy costs, though he says it’s true it could be “cumbersome” if local districts have to pay the bulk of those pension liabilities alone. “But charter schools didn’t contribute to that legacy debt, nor can they raise funds from local taxpayers,” McGee says. “Charging charters for the unfunded liabilities that they weren’t around for is just a way to tax them and reduce their state aid.”

McGee says there is an argument to be made that local taxpayers should bear some of the pension costs, but suggests that states pick up the bills in order to mitigate any financial harm to school districts. Currently, according to Keith Brainard, the research director for the National Association of State Retirement Administrators, the source of the employer contribution varies across the country, ranging from local districts paying the full cost, to states paying the full cost, to “everything in between.”

Still, Brainard says, it would be fairly unusual for states that don’t currently pay the employer contribution to absorb those costs back from districts, as McGee suggests, though they could increase aid in other ways. In some places where states do currently pay the pension costs, like in Illinois, legislators are even trying to unload their pension obligations right back onto the backs of local districts. (The only district Illinois does not pay the pension contributions for is Chicago Public Schools.)

Some charter operators have begun to explore how they might extricate themselves from their state pension plans. “Charter schools are a cash cow for the pension plans, and once you’re in, it can be hard to get out—which is what a lot of operators face now,” says Podgursky. “As the costs are going up and up and up, many are saying ‘hey, we want out of here’—though generally escaping is hard.” In an effort to avoid adverse selection, pension plans do not typically allow individual schools to opt out.

As a result, some charter operators are turning to the courts. In 2013, charters in Georgia argued to the state supreme court that they shouldn’t be responsible to help pay down debt they didn’t create. Georgia’s high court agreed, and ruled that charters cannot be asked to share in the burden of paying down unfunded pension liabilities.

To complicate things still further, the question of whether charter employees should be eligible to participate in state pension plans remains unsettled. “They’re private employees for some things, like collective bargaining, but public for other things, like pensions,” notes Podgursky. Since 2011, the Internal Revenue Service and the Treasury Department have been scrutinizing this issue, and working to determine whether private charter teachers are “governmental” enough to participate in state plans. Asked to check on the status of this guidance, the IRS told The American Prospect that, five years later, it still has not been finalized.

For districts saddled with pension payments, the consequences can be severe.

“If the total payroll of the pension plan is slower than expected, by virtue of slow growth in the number of employees or slower growth in salaries, then there are fewer dollars available to fund the plan,” explains Brainard. Essentially, if charter schools do not participate in their state plan, either by not contributing to it as employees or not helping to pay down legacy costs, then there are fewer available dollars to pay down existing debts—obligations that cannot be “downsized” through layoffs or school closures.

In the absence of increased state and federal funding, tense battles over school spending are likely to be handled in piecemeal—and controversial—fashion. In 2015, for example, the Philadelphia School Partnership, a local philanthropic education reform group, offered to pay the Philadelphia School District $25 million in order to take the issue of stranded costs “off the table.” Partnership leaders wanted to push for more charter schools, without having to contend with school district worries about their fiscal impact. But the school district said the group’s offer was too low—generous, but insufficient to cover the yearly stranded costs they’d bear if more students were to leave for charters. Local advocates also protested the organization’s offer on democratic grounds.

“It would be a terrible mistake to take the money,” Susan Gobreski, the former executive director of the Education Voters of PA, told Newsworks at the time. “We cannot let benefactors make decisions like that. I’m very concerned about how much pressure is being put on the district to make decisions that are not in the best interest of the district or most of the kids in Philadelphia, and certainly not in the interest of Philadelphia as a community. This is ideology gone wild.

Tensions surrounding funding for the charter and traditional public school systems are not going away, and indeed are likely to grow more serious over time. While Bifulco and Reback offer some policy suggestions for ways to help mitigate financial stress as charter schools expand—such as constraining when students may enroll in charters in order to help districts plan their budgets more systematically—right now ideological divisions have left the two sectors at a stalemate. Charters market themselves as ways to “escape” failed school districts, touting their autonomy and independence. Traditional school districts resent charters for wooing away their students, and now fear charters are hollowing out their budgets. The bitter divide between education sectors has blocked cooperation and solutions. As the bickering over money continues, more and more public school students will likely cram into overcrowded classrooms, studying in schools without basic resources like textbooks, computers, teachers, and guidance counselors. With fewer and fewer dollars to go around, the price for policymakers’ impasse will invariably be paid by students.

 

 

Learning from History: The Prospects for School Desegregation

Originally published in The American Prospect on May 10th, 2016.
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In a new book, Making the Unequal Metropolis: School Desegregation and Its Limits, Teachers College, Columbia University historian Ansley Erickson explores the legal and political battles surrounding the desegregation of public schools in Nashville. By 1990, almost no school within Nashville’s metropolitan school district had high concentrations of black or white students—making it one of the most successful examples of desegregation in the 20th century. However, since being released from court-ordered busing in the mid-1990s, schools have quickly resegregated, concentrations of poverty have intensified, and academic scores for black students in Nashville have suffered.

Erickson shows that desegregation was not all rainbows and butterflies, and it often created new challenges that families were forced to wrestle with. She also shows how school segregation had been no accident. Rather, it was a result of deliberate choices made by politicians, parents, real estate developers, urban planners, and school administrators—ranging from funneling subsidies to build schools in suburban areas, to privileging white families when making zoning and student assignment decisions.

And yet for all the challenges that desegregation entailed, Erickson also lets us hear the voices and positive experiences of students who went through desegregation—voices that were routinely ignored during the heated debates of the 20th century.

The point of recognizing the flaws within one of desegregation’s best-case scenarios is not, she says, to conclude that it’s ultimately a fruitless project. Rather, it serves as a guide for those who might want to figure out how to start anew. What follows is an edited transcript of our conversation.
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Rachel Cohen: Your book makes the point that while desegregation challenged some inequalities, it also “remade” inequality in new forms. Are all inequalities equal, so to speak? Can we evaluate the challenges and still decide whether the needle moved overall in one direction or another in terms of progress?

Ansley Erickson: I think that desegregation absolutely was necessary, and I think that busing for desegregation was, in sum, a positive—and in some ways ambitious—effort to counteract persistent segregation. We can recognize that even as we notice desegregation’s limits and problems. I say this not only because of the stories that students who experienced desegregation tell, and not only because of the positive test score impact. It’s also because busing made segregation a problem within local political landscapes and put questions about historic inequality in front of people to grapple with.

RC: In the conclusion of your book you say that desegregation, mandated by a Supreme Court that recognized schooling’s crucial function in our democracy, has rarely been shaped by, or measured for, its potential impact on the making of democratic citizens. If it were to be, what could that look like?

AE: In Carla Shedd’s new book, Unequal City, she explores how students who attend segregated schools versus more diverse ones perceive inequality. She finds that those in more highly segregated schools have a less developed sense of inequality—they are less informed about it because they have less to compare their own experience to.

Schools are not just about whether you can read or calculate; they are about how robustly you perceive the world around you. Even if you go to high-performing schools, segregated white or segregated black schools, it can still be difficult for kids to understand the world they inhabit. They need to have some understanding of their community, and not just their immediate community, but in the broader sense. Work like Shedd’s points to how segregation can get in the way of that understanding.

Today, economic goals and justifications for schooling seem to be valued over all others. Nashville has invested very heavily in career and technical education. Its big comprehensive high schools have been redesigned as career academies, targeting jobs like being a pharmacist or working in hospitality. The goal is to help prepare kids for jobs, to sustain local businesses. At the same time, Nashville is a place that doesn’t have a local living wage, has a skyrocketing cost of living, an affordable housing crisis. Schools are clearly focused on helping to make students workers. But what is their responsibility in making citizens who can address big and pressing questions, including about the economy and about work? What’s a reasonable and just compensation for a person’s labor? What are workers’ basic rights? To me, helping kids be ready to participate in those debates matters just as much as helping students earn a certification in a certain vocational skill area.

RC: You wrote a lot about how “growth agendas” helped fuel inequality and new kinds of segregation. Can you talk a little bit about what that means and how it worked?

AE: This question connects to the themes we were just discussing. History can help bring some nuance to today’s often oversimplified rhetoric about how education and economic growth relate. It’s been popular recently to talk about schools as providing skills that leverage economic growth. But links between education and economic growth have worked in other ways, too.

In Nashville, in the name of economic growth, big urban renewal and public housing construction projects sharpened segregation in housing and in schooling. In the name of increasing property values, suburban developers appealed for segregated schooling by class as well as by race. And in the name of economic growth, schools focused on vocational education—often furthering segregation inside schools even as buses transported students for desegregation.

RC: While combining city and suburbs into one school district is not without its challenges—the dilution of black voting power was one you explored in the context of Nashville—do you think the benefits outweigh the costs?

AE: Nashville would not have had extensive statistical desegregation without consolidation. Nashville was highly residentially segregated and the old city boundary was quite small, like many U.S. cities. By the time busing began, the people living in the old city boundary were predominately African American. Had desegregation taken place only within the old city boundaries, the district would have had a much less diverse pool of students to draw on and a less diversified tax base. Having a consolidated city-county school district didn’t prevent “white flight,” but it did slow it and make it more onerous. But consolidation did not ensure equal treatment for all parts of the metropolis, either.

RC: In your book you show how back in Nashville in the ‘60s and ‘70s, some black communities felt as if advocacy for integration suggested that students of color are inferior and need to be around white kids in order to succeed. We see similar concerns today. Integration carries many important social and civic benefits for all students, but in modern education policy discussions the impact on student test scores gets the most attention—and that significant positive impact is by and large just for students of color. Though the test score gains are huge, could a narrow focus on student achievement dilute political support for integration?

AE: I think about this a lot, as I consider how history might inform today’s nascent conversation about segregation and desegregation. Other scholars have shown striking test-score improvements from desegregation. But if your ultimate goal is test score parity, then there will always be multiple ways to get there. If the goal is also preparing citizens for a diverse democracy, it’s harder for me to see how that happens without some measure of desegregation.

RC: You note that when it came to busing, residents decried state intervention as government overreach, an illegal intrusion into their private lives. But when it comes to the state playing a heavy role in facilitating economic growth, they welcomed the government’s help. Did you find there were people back in Nashville who were pointing out this contradiction?

AE: I didn’t find anyone who was pointing it out then. Then, as now, many people did not perceive how government action was shaping their lives, especially white suburbanites’ lives, in ways that benefited them but that they did not see. People wanted to draw sharp boundaries between what was public and private. White homeowners in particular liked to talk about their housing decisions as private choices they made within a free market. What they didn’t recognize was how enabled they were by their government-backed mortgage, their low-gas-tax subsidized commutes on new highways. Public policy supported what they wanted to cast as a private choice. When asked to recognize the segregation in their cities and schools, they wanted to call it “de facto segregation”—as if it had roots only in private action. But in fact, many layers of state action and policy were involved as well. There wasn’t a coherent small-government conservatism then. Like today, the question is what people thought government power should be used for.

RC: You explored school closures and the loss of black teaching jobs as a result of desegregation. Today we see similar trends, with schools closings, charter school expansions, and the increase in non-union jobs targeted to a whiter, and shorter-term teaching force. What, if any, historical lessons can we glean?

AE: There’s a lot of good scholarship on the history of desegregation and job loss—particularly by Michael Fultz and Adam Fairclough. I didn’t make that a huge focus in my book, but there is an important broader question here about how we think about education. Schools often account for around half of municipal budgets; they are huge municipal expenditures, and they do represent a big source of employment. Historically this employment has been an important step towards middle class existence for lots of American communities. Women of Irish, Italian, Jewish descent moved into the middle class by becoming schoolteachers in the early- and mid-20th century. Similarly, African American educators have attained, or preserved, middle class status through education jobs for a long time. Somehow we have been unable to find a way to talk about the teaching profession recognizing that it is both labor and employment that matters for communities and a crucial factor in students’ lives.

School Closures: A Blunt Instrument

Originally published in the Spring 2016 print issue of The American Prospect
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In 2013, citing a $1.4 billion deficit, Philadelphia’s state-run school commission voted to close 23 schools—nearly 10 percent of the city’s stock. The decision came after a three-hour meeting at district headquarters, where 500 community members protested outside and 19 were arrested for trying to block district officials from casting their votes. Amid the fiscal pressure from state budget cuts, declining student enrollment, charter-school growth, and federal incentives to shut down low-performing schools, the district assured the public that closures would help put the city back on track toward financial stability.

One of the shuttered schools was Edward Bok Technical High School, a towering eight-story building in South Philadelphia spanning 340,000 square feet, the horizontal length of nearly six football fields. Operating since 1938, Bok was one of the only schools to be entirely financed and constructed by the Public Works Administration. Students would graduate from the historic school with practical skills like carpentry, bricklaying, tailoring, hairdressing, plumbing, and as the decades went on, modern technology. And graduate they did—at the time of closure, Bok boasted a 30 percent–higher graduation rate than South Philadelphia High School, the nearby public school that had to absorb hundreds of Bok’s students.

The Bok building was assessed at $17.8 million, yet city officials sold it for just $2.1 million to Lindsey Scannapieco, the daughter of a local high-rise developer. On their website, BuildingBok.com, Scannapieco and her team envision repurposing the large Bok facility into “a new and innovative center for Philadelphia creatives and non-profits.” They describe the “unprecedented concentration of space” in the Bok building for “Do-It-Yourself innovators, artists, and entrepreneurs” to congregate.

In August 2015, Scannapieco launched Bok’s newest debut, a pop-up restaurant on the building’s eighth floor, which served French food, craft beers, and fine wines. The rooftop terrace was decorated with student chairs and other school-related items found inside the building. Young millennials dubbed the restaurant “Philly’s hottest new rooftop bar,” while longtime residents and educators called it “a sick joke.” Situated in a quickly gentrifying community where nearly 40 percent of families still have incomes of less than $35,000, there was little question about who would be sipping champagne and munching on steak tartare on Bok’s top floor.

When it comes to closing schools, Philadelphia is not alone. In urban districts across the United States—from Detroit to Newark to Oakland—communities are experiencing waves of controversial school closures as cash-strapped districts reckon with pinched budgets and changing politics.

The Chicago Board of Education voted to close 49 elementary schools in 2013—the largest mass school closing in American history. The board assured the distressed community that not only would the district save hundreds of millions of dollars, but students would also receive an improved and more efficient public education.

Yet three years later, Chicago residents are still reeling from the devastating closures—a policy decision that has not only failed to bring about notable academic gains, but has also destabilized communities, crippled small businesses, and weakened local property values. With the city struggling to sell or repurpose most of the closed schools, dozens of large buildings remain vacant, becoming targets of crime and vandalism throughout poor neighborhoods. “These schools went from being community anchors into actual dangerous spaces,” says Pauline Lipman, an education policy professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

African Americans have been hit hardest by the school closings in Chicago, Philadelphia, and elsewhere. While black students were 40 percent of Chicago’s school district population in 2013, they made up 88 percent of those affected by the closures. In Philadelphia, black students made up 58 percent of the district, but 81 percent of those affected by closures. Closure proponents insist that shutting down schools and consolidating resources, though certainly upsetting, will ultimately enable districts to provide better and more equitable education. It’s easier to get more money into the classroom, the thinking goes, if unnecessary expenses can be eliminated. But many residents see that school closures have failed to yield significant cost savings. They also view closures as discriminatory—yet another chapter in the long history of harmful experiments deployed by governments on communities of color that strip them of their livelihood and dearest institutions.

Today “the pain is still so raw, it’s not business as usual,” Reverend Robert Jones told me, speaking inside the Kenwood Oakland Community Organization, the oldest black grassroots center in Chicago. Indeed, threats of further closures have not abated since 2013. Jones was one of 12 local residents to go on a highly publicized hunger strike late last summer, starving himself for 34 days to prevent another beloved school from being shut down. Their dangerous efforts proved successful; the district reversed its decision and pledged to reopen Walter H. Dyett High School, located on the South Side of Chicago.

Rather than shutter schools, residents argue, districts should reinvest in them.

Rather than shutter schools, residents argue, districts should reinvest in them.They point to full-service community schools, a reform model that combines rigorous academics with wraparound services for children and families, as promising alternatives. The effort to fight back against school closures has grown more pronounced in recent years, as tens of thousands across the country begin to mobilize through legal and political channels to reclaim their neighborhood public schools.

TO TALK ABOUT SCHOOL CLOSURES, one must talk about school buildings. The average age of a U.S. public school facility is nearly 50 years old, and most require extensive rehab, repair, and renovation—particularly in cities. None of the school buildings constructed before World War II were designed for modern cooling and heating systems, and many schools built to educate baby boomers in the 1960s and 1970s were constructed hurriedly on the cheap. Studies find that poor and minority students attend the most dilapidated schools today.

But the federal government offers virtually no economic assistance to states and local districts trying to shoulder the costs of building repairs. And things don’t look much better on the state level, either. Jeff Vincent, the deputy director of the Center for Cities & Schools at University of California, Berkeley, says that state spending has failed to keep up with the needs in schools following the recession, leaving local districts to take on those capital costs even if they can’t afford to.

Despite contributing next to nothing toward school facility spending, the federal government encourages public-school closure and consolidation as a strategy to boost academic performance. Such school improvement interventions for “failing” schools began during the controversial No Child Left Behind era, but financial incentives to close schools and open charters really ramped up under the Obama administration.

“Our communities have been so demonized to the point that nobody thinks they’re good. But no, our institutions have been sabotaged,” says Jitu Brown, the executive director of Journey For Justice (J4J), an alliance formed in 2013 that connects grassroots youth and parents fighting back against school closures. “These districts—Newark, Chicago, Detroit—they all cry ‘broke’ as they shift major portions of their budget towards privatization while neglecting and starving neighborhood schools.”

Besides pointing to low performance, districts often justify closing schools on the basis of the facilities being “underutilized.” This refers to buildings deemed too large for the number of students enrolled, and thus too expensive for districts to operate. Critics of school closures say that how districts determine “utilization” insufficiently accounts for the variety of ways communities use and rely on school facilities. Moreover, Mary Filardo, executive director of the 21st Century School Fund, says that urban districts tend to “completely underestimate” how much space is needed for special education and early childhood learning.

“When you’re resource-starved, you tend to take a defensive approach,” says Ariel Bierbaum, a Ph.D. student in the Department of City and Regional Planning at UC Berkeley. “You’re in a crisis mode, you’re looking to balance your books, so you’re not necessarily thinking the most creatively” about how to use some of the seemingly excess facility space.

PUBLIC SCHOOLS HAVE ALWAYS impacted communities in ways that go beyond just educating young people. Well-maintained school facilities can help revitalize struggling neighborhoods, just as decrepit buildings can hurt them. And whether it’s attracting businesses and workers into the area, directly affecting local property values, or just generally enhancing neighborhood vitality by creating centralized spaces for civic life, research has long demonstrated the influential role schools play within communities.

Yet most existing research on school closures has failed to explore the ways in which shuttering schools impacts these civic spheres; instead researchers have adopted a narrower focus on how school closures impact school district budgets and student academic achievement. On both of these fronts, though, the record has not been impressive.

Researchers find that what districts promise to students, staff, and taxpayers when preparing to close schools differs considerably from what actually happens when they close. For example, most students who went to schools that were closed down in Chicago, Philadelphia, and Newark—whether for fiscal reasons or for low academic performance—were transferred to schools that were not much better, and in some cases even worse, than the ones they left. In Chicago, for example, 87.5 percent of students affected by closures did not move to significantly higher-performing schools. Children also frequently encounter bullying and violence at their new schools, while teachers are often unprepared to handle the influx of new students.

Moving students around can negatively impact student achievement, and closures exacerbate such mobility. In some cities, students have been bumped around two, three, four times—as their new schools were eventually slated for closure, too.

Not all research casts school closures in a uniformly negative light. One study found that New York City school closures had little impact—positive or negative—on students’ academic performance at the time the schools were shut down, yet “future students”—meaning those who had been on track to attend those schools before they closed—demonstrated “meaningful benefits” from attending new schools. Another study found that while most children experienced negative effects on their academic achievement during the year they transitioned to new schools, such negative effects were impermanent, and student performance rebounded to similar rates as their unaffected peers the following year. Essentially, researchers find that there can be substantial positive effects if students are sent to much better schools than they ones they left; however, the reality is that most students do not go to such schools.

In addition to overselling academic gains, districts also tend to overstate how much money they’ll save from shutting down schools. When Washington, D.C., closed down 23 schools in 2008, the district reported it would cost them $9.7 million. A 2012 audit found the price was actually nearly $40 million after taking into account the cost of demolishing buildings, transporting students, and the lost value of the buildings, among other factors. Another study conducted by the Pew Charitable Trusts in 2011 found that cost savings are generally limited, at least in the short term, and such savings come largely through mass employee layoffs.

Bierbaum, however, has been studying Philadelphia’s school closures from a broader community-development and urban-planning perspective to understand how school closures, sales, and reuses are related to larger issues of metropolitan-wide racial and class inequality. This means examining school closures in the context of neighborhood change, like gentrification or disinvestment, and in relationship to the city plans and policies that help facilitate that change.

In some cases, Bierbaum says that residents feel closures are “necessary” responses to dramatic demographic shifts, even if “draconian”; city officials are “doing the best they can to deal with things out of their control” in terms of fiscal management, she says. But in other cases, residents see closures as yet another manifestation of systemic oppression, closely related to other kinds of disinvestment within neighborhoods. “In this way, not only closures but also school building disposition is actually experienced as dispossession,” Bierbaum explains.

A majority of closed schools are converted into charter schools, with a second significant chunk repurposed into residential apartments. Other buildings are demolished or left vacant. Interviews with experts in several cities reveal that school district officials have not prioritized urban-planning questions, like those Bierbaum is asking, when deciding whether to close schools.

Clarice Berry, the president of the Chicago Principals and Administrators Association and member of a state legislative task force focused on Chicago school facilities, says the Chicago public school district was simply uninterested in discussing those sorts of civic topics. “At no time have they wanted to study that, or even been interested in discussing it,” she says. “The district spends all their time trying to keep us from getting data [on school closures] that could show us how they could make improvements.” While the task force has repeatedly asked the district to track kids who have been shuffled around from school to school, by and large Chicago and other urban districts have not carefully tracked how school closures have impacted students, families, and communities.

SHORTLY AFTER J4J BEGAN ORGANIZING, another network formed—the Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools (AROS)—comprising ten national organizations, including the American Federation of Teachers, the National Education Association, and J4J. Through weekly email newsletters and support for on-the-ground organizing, AROS has helped mobilize individuals looking to fight for public education. Parents and community groups hope they can agitate districts to think creatively about facility space, and invest more in neighborhood schools.

In mid-February, AROS helped stage the first-ever national day of “walk-ins,” where students, teachers, and parents at 900 schools in 30 cities across the country rallied in support of increased school funding, local schools with wraparound services, charter school accountability, and an end to harsh discipline policies, among other demands.

Their action built on momentum that’s been brewing over the past two years around the idea of “full-service community schools,” or schools that offer not only academics but also medical care, child care, job training, counseling, early college partnerships, and other types of social supports. This school model, which dates back more than a century, can be particularly beneficial for low-income residents who face challenges like accessing transportation.

In February, the Center for Popular Democracy released a report on the roughly 5,000 self-identified community schools across the country, lifting up particularly successful examples and offering strategies on how to replicate their success. One such school was Reagan High School, a poor and minority school in northeast Austin, Texas, which adopted a community schools strategy five years ago. In 2008, the local district was threatening to close Reagan due to its declining enrollment and its below–50 percent graduation rate. Parents, students, and teachers began organizing around a community schools plan to save Reagan from closure, and the district gave them permission to give it a shot. After expanding supportive services, like mobile health clinics and parenting classes, after changing its approach to discipline, and after expanding after-school activities, among other things, graduation rates at Reagan have now increased to 85 percent, enrollment has more than doubled, and a new Early College High School program has enabled many Reagan students to earn their associate’s degree before they graduate.

Implementing community schools can be difficult, particularly to the extent that it requires schools to adopt joint-use policies so that facility space can be shared with other public agencies and nonprofits, many of which have no prior experience working together. Some states and local districts have been much more amenable to these types of partnerships than others. “Yes, there’s complexity. But my response is ‘welcome to modern life.’ Stop whining, we know we can do this,” says Filardo of 21st Century School Fund.

Political support for full-service community schools is also on the rise.Philadelphia’s new mayor, Jim Kenney, has pledged to create 25 new community schools by the end of his first term. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio aims to create 200 community schools during his tenure. The new federal education bill passed in December even authorizes grant-funding for community schools, which has incentivized many other cities and states to begin thinking about how to take advantage of this opportunity.

I sat down with Antoinette Baskerville-Richardson, a member of Newark’s elected advisory school board, to learn more about her interest in expanding community schools. With more than one-third of Newark’s children living in poverty, Baskerville-Richardson says local leaders have been looking for ways to address the harms of poverty while also supporting student achievement and school success. After five years of controversial education reforms pushed by Republican governor Chris Christie and his appointed superintendent, Baskerville-Richardson says the Newark community is just plain tired.

“There was a period when all our efforts were basically just fighting against these reforms being imposed on our communities,” she explains. “At the same time, we realized that the conversation could not just be about what we were against, and we had to mobilize around what we were for.” And so, a little over two years ago, public school leaders and local advocates began to really home in on the idea of full-service community schools.

“We began to do a lot of research, we got in touch with experts, talked with people from the Center for Popular Democracy, the Children’s Aid Society, and people involved on the national level,” Baskerville-Richardson recalls. “We also started visiting community schools like in Paterson, New Jersey—which is also a state-controlled district—[and] in Orange, New Jersey, which has similar demographics as ours. We visited Baltimore, New York City; some of our people visited Cincinnati; we talked to people in Tulsa, Oklahoma. … We’re really looking to dig into a model that has been proven to work.” Starting in the fall of 2016, five full-service community schools are set to open up in Newark’s South Ward, its poorest area.

ON THE 60TH ANNIVERSARY OF Brown v. Board of Education in 2014, parents and community organizations in New Orleans, Chicago, and Newark filed federal complaints under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. They alleged that school closures in their cities have had a racially discriminatory impact on children and communities of color. The groups received legal assistance from the Advancement Project, a civil-rights organization.

Jadine Johnson, an attorney with the Advancement Project, says they chose to file Title VI complaints because they wanted to raise disparate impact claims. “When districts are making these decisions they don’t say ‘we’ll close black and Latino schools.’ They’ll say ‘we’ll close schools that are under-enrolled or under-achieving,’” she says. “But those decisions can still have discriminatory effects on black and brown students.” In Newark, for example, during the 2012–2013 school year, white students were nearly 20 times less likely than black students to be affected by school closures, despite what would be predicted given their proportions of student enrollment.

Ariel Bierbaum says her field research demonstrated that many Philadelphians understood school closures as symbols of continued and consistent disrespect and disinvestment for poor communities of color. “Many of my interviewees tied school closures to urban renewal, to their parents’ experience, … [to] the Jim Crow south and migrating north,” a legacy that dates back to slavery, she says. “For them, these closures are not a ‘rational’ policy intervention to address a current fiscal crisis. School closures are situated in a much longer historical trajectory of discriminatory policymaking in the United States.”

J4J has also helped to bring a racial-justice lens to the school-closure conversation, namely by forcing the public to discuss it within the context of discrimination, segregation, underfunding, and marginalization—both inside and outside of schools. In some respects, there’s a seeming irony around efforts to save schools in poor and racially segregated neighborhoods—these are the same schools that were treated as expendable during the desegregation era. But residents understand that their schools aren’t closing for integration purposes, and if one looks closer, it is clear that aims to create more diverse neighborhood schools are still very much on the table.

In December, the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) at the Department of Education reached a groundbreaking resolution with Newark Public Schools to aid those who may have been negatively impacted by Newark’s closures. Johnson, the Advancement Project attorney, says she believes the Newark OCR resolution “sends a loud message” to school districts that may be considering similar types of school closures. “We see this [as] a multi-year strategy,” she explains. “This resolution is hopefully the first of many agreements, and the first step to sounding the alarm for why public schools should remain public.”

Meeting with some parent activists who helped to file the Newark Title VI complaint, I wanted to see how they were feeling about the OCR resolution. Sharon Smith, the founder of Parents Unified for Local School Education (PULSENJ), thinks that irrespective of whatever remedies their superintendent proposes, it will take generations until Newark’s South Ward heals.

“It’s always very scary to me when people who are guilty of something, like the district is, say ‘Yes, we are guilty, but we’re going to fix this our own way without the input of the people who were hurt,’” says Darren Martin, another parent involved with PULSENJ. “We’re happy the OCR took our complaint seriously, but it feels almost like the police are policing themselves. How do you allow the person who helped design all these destructive policies [to] also design the remedy?”

IN FEBRUARY, I VISITED KELLY HIGH SCHOOL, a full-service community school on the southwest side of Chicago, serving a student body that’s more than 90 percent low-income. Kelly used to draw a large Italian, Polish, and Lithuanian population, but now predominately serves Hispanic students. With the help of the Brighton Park Neighborhood Council, a local community organization, Kelly offers all sorts of programs for parents and children, ranging from tax-prep classes and English-language instruction, to tutoring and political organizing. The academic improvement Kelly students have shown over the past decade has also been substantial—targeted interventions have helped more at-risk students stay on track to graduate, and the school is now ranked as a Level 2+ in the district’s rating system—where the highest possible score is a 1+ and the lowest is a 3.

But Kelly’s progress, both academically and as a civic institution, is threatened by increasing budget cuts, declining student enrollment, and the growth of charter schools in the surrounding area. In July 2015, the Noble Network of Charter Schools, the largest charter chain in Chicago, submitted a proposal to open a new high school a few blocks away from Kelly. Students, parents, and teachers began mobilizing against the proposal, concerned that this new project would siphon even more resources from their already-pinched school, which had been forced to slash programs and teaching positions over the last few years. In October, 1,000 Kelly High School students walked out of class to protest the proposed new school. Yet despite overwhelming local opposition, the unelected Chicago Board of Education voted unanimously to open the new charter.

It’s possible that over the next few years, Kelly High School’s fiscal strain will become just too much to manage, and the school will be slated for closure, too. “The narrative to close schools is essentially a budget one, which can be extremely powerful,” says Filardo. Even if the budget savings turn out to be fairly small, or nonexistent.

One way to reduce budgetary pressures on schools, thereby helping prevent school closures, would be for states and the federal government to pay more, particularly toward local capital budgets. Decades of social-science research have shown how unsafe and inadequate school facilities can negatively affect students’ academic performance—particularly when a school has poor temperature control, poor indoor air quality, and poor lighting. Researchers also find that the higher the percentage of low-income students in a district, the less money a district spends on the capital investments needed to keep school facilities in good repair. The most disadvantaged students tend to receive about half the funding for school buildings as their wealthier peers. And often, low-wealth districts spend more from their operating budgets on facilities—paying for large utility bills, more demanding maintenance for old systems, and the high costs of emergency repairs. It’s not a coincidence that affluent communities invest more in their public school buildings. “They improve and enhance their school facilities because it matters to the quality of education, to the strength of their community, and the achievement and well-being of their children and teachers,” says Filardo.

In other words, increasing state and federal spending could both help struggling urban schools, and also help fortify communities more broadly. Filardo thinks districts should be able to leverage up to 10 percent of their Title I funds to help pay for capital expenses—right now, Title I funds can only go toward local operating spending. Or, even better, Filardo thinks the federal government should start contributing at least 10 percent toward district capital budgets, just as it contributes 10 percent to district operating budgets.

“Schools belong to the entire community, and it should be the state and federal government’s job to find the right policy levers so that we can really advance our educational and economic development together in the best, most equitable way,” she says.

Battles about how best to save and improve public education are sure to intensify in the coming months and years. No researcher has been able to conclusively say what the optimal policy intervention is for students in terms of boosting academic achievement. And some individuals are certainly more sympathetic to closing schools, particularly if it means their children could attend higher-performing district schools or charters. Even on the question of school governance, researchers have reached no clear consensus on whether state takeovers or local control is better for student outcomes or fiscal management. Nevertheless, there’s consensus that any system which generates uncertainty and distrust is a recipe for disaster.

Reflecting on the past four years in her city, Lauren Wells, the chief education officer for Newark Public Schools, notes that reform-minded leaders expanded charter schools quickly without really taking into account the impact such decisions would have on existing schools. A recent report from the Education Law Center, a legal advocacy group, found that the combination of the state’s refusal to adequately fund New Jersey’s school aid formula, coupled with rapid charter-school growth, has placed tremendous strain on district finances, forcing Newark to make significant cuts to district programming and staff. “We really want to move the conversation away from charters versus district schools,” Wells says. “We’re trying instead to build a coalition around this idea that we are the guardians of all children. That should be the basis of any decision that we make.”

 

North Carolina Educators Fight Deportations of Central American Students

Originally published in The American Prospect on March 23, 2015.
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Wildin David Guillen Acosta, a Durham, North Carolina, high school senior, was set to graduate from Riverside High School in June. Instead, he is being held at a federal detention center in Georgia. In late January, U.S. Immigration and Enforcement agents (ICE) apprehended the 19-year-old student as he was on his way to school. While languishing in the detention center, Acosta asked his teachers to send along his homework, so that if he gets released, he would still be on track for commencement. In late February, his teachers mailed him his assignments, but detention center officials refused to accept the package.

In January, the Obama administration authorized a series of raids to arrest, detain, and deport undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. from El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala over the past two years. About 15,500 Central American mothers and children have received deportation orders since July 2014, and ICE is now ramping up its enforcement of those orders. More than 330 young people have been arrested nationwide so far. Although students do not comprise all the youths being targeted, local educators have been galvanized by the arrests. Teachers say the raids have had a chilling effect on other students, too.

The ICE raids, which involve barging into homes and picking up individuals off the streets, are reminiscent of Bush administration–era immigration enforcement tactics. While immigration officials avoid making arrests in “sensitive locations”such as churches and schools, immigration advocates say this policy hasn’t stopped ICE agents from detaining undocumented students on their way to school.

ICE agents picked up Yefri Sorto, a 19-year-old Charlotte high school student on his way to a bus stop in late January. Sorto came to the United States from El Salvador in 2014 as an unaccompanied minor. He says he fled his country because he feared gang violence and was finally reunited with his parents, who had been living in the U.S. for more than a decade.

“These raids are impacting not just the individuals we know of who have been picked up; there is wide and deep fear across the community,” says Allison Swaim, a Durham high school teacher.“Kids are not coming to school because they’re afraid, kids are dropping out because they don’t want to be picked up, or maybe they still have a legal process pending, or they’re trying to file for asylum—everyone has their own story.”

The majority of Central Americans who crossed the U.S. border were apprehended, or turned themselves in, hoping to apply for some type of asylum. Immigration advocates say these individuals should be treated as refugees, not as criminals, given the extreme violence found in their home countries. A Guardian investigation found that since January 2014, 83 people who were deported to Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador were murdered, some just a few days after they returned.

Swaim has been working to organize teachers statewide around what she calls a humanitarian crisis across the South. In Atlanta, ICE agents pulled over 19-year-old Kimberly Pineda Chavez, while she was driving to school. Kimberly arrived in Georgia from Honduras in 2014 with her mother and sister after receiving a series of threats from local police.

Swaim hopes that teachers across the region will collect data and anecdotes about how students are being affected by raids in their communities. Durham teachers held a conference call with U.S. Department of Education officials to express their concerns. “We’re asking federal officials, including Education Secretary John King, to get involved because part of their mission is to provide an equal education for all students, and that includes immigrant students,” Swaim says. “These raids are directly in contradiction with the mission of the Department of Education.”

Rebecca Costa, a Charlotte ESL teacher, says that educators in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg district are also trying to duplicate the Durham organizing efforts in their community. Two of Costa’s students stopped coming to school after Yefri Sorto was arrested, and have since gone into hiding. “It all felt very isolating, but now we realize this is happening all over North Carolina and we have to reach out and unite,” she says.

Obama immigration officials stress that ICE is not targeting anyone under 18. But many high school upperclassmen who are completing their secondary education are 18 or older. “My two kids that have gone into hiding were 18 and 19, both juniors,” says Costa.

Mayra Arteaga, a 20-year-old living in Charlotte, has been involved in immigration advocacy since she was in middle school. Mayra has been raising awareness about the deportation raids by rallying students, testifying at school board meetings, and helping to organize protests, like a recent Charlotte march.

“I think once teachers started noticing what was going on, the ball really started rolling,” Arteaga says, noting that these raids have mobilized a much more diverse group of people than immigration advocates typically see at their events.

Advocates worry that the undocumented immigrants are not receiving fair legal treatment, and say that deportation orders have frightened many. Tin Than Nguyen, a Charlotte immigration lawyer, has been working to try and help undocumented families in the city understand their legal rights. “The recent rounds of raids have truly sent shockwaves through the community and everyone is shuddering in fear,” he says.

According to the U.S. Justice Department, of the roughly 10,000 deportation orders given to unaccompanied minors since July 2014, roughly 87 percent were issued in absentia; advocates say many immigrants never received sufficient notice of their scheduled court hearings.

Meanwhile, North Carolina activists have appealed to federal lawmakers to help stop the raids. Representative G.K. Butterfield, a North Carolina Democrat who represents Durham, has been pressuring ICE to delay Wildin’s deportation, so that he can apply for asylum.

“Wildin Acosta and other young people like him fled extreme violence and mayhem in Central America in search of refuge and a better life in the United States,” said Butterfield in a statement. “I believe that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) limited resources would be better utilized focusing on dangerous criminals who pose a threat to our communities rather than high school students and teenagers trying to make better lives for themselves.”

“[Wildin] is being labeled as some kind of internal threat to the security of the United States,” Bryan Proffitt, president of the Durham Association of Educators told WNCN, a CBS affiliate. “He’s a kid sitting in a detention cell hoping to get his homework, so that he can graduate on time.”

 

Can Charlotte-Mecklenburg Desegregate its Schools … Again?

Originally published in The American Prospect on March 18th, 2016.
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It was not so long ago that Charlotte, North Carolina, was widely considered “the city that made desegregation work.” The Queen City first pioneered busing to desegregate schools in 1969, and when the Supreme Court upheld that strategy as a legal remedy for school segregation two years later in its landmark Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education ruling, districts across the South began busing students as well.

In the past 15 years, however, Charlotte has seen a rapid resurgence in segregated schooling. Following a late 1990s decision that said court-mandated integration was no longer necessary, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools (CMS) grew quickly divided by race and class, and the economic isolation continues to intensify with each passing year. Though CMS is still considered a relatively high-performing school system, a closer look at the data reveals deeply unequal outcomes among the district’s 164 schools.

For more than a decade, local residents ignored the demographic shifts taking place within CMS. Political leaders, as well, seemed to just have no energy left to expend on school diversity following their highly publicized school segregation lawsuits. Yet now, due to a district policy that requires school board members to revisit student assignments every six years, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg community finds itself facing a rather unusual opportunity. Wary of litigation, but troubled by the damning diversity data, Charlotte leaders have been working cautiously over the past year to see if there might be any popular support for breaking up pockets of poverty within CMS.

Their timing may be just right. In addition to sobering statistics on school segregation in Charlotte-Mecklenburg, new research out of Harvard University and the University of California at Berkeley found that Charlotte ranks dead last in the nation in terms of upward mobility, and that racial segregation and school quality are two main culprits behind this. Moreover, after years of lackluster results from other school turnaround efforts, resistance to shuffling students as a way to improve school quality is softening.

The political momentum in favor of school segregation in Charlotte is fairly new, but so is the backlash against it. Charlotte-Mecklenburg has seen a 15-year population surge, predominately in the county’s northern and southern regions. Many of the county’s newcomers missed Charlotte’s desegregation history, and see no real reason to bring it back. They moved into their communities, they say, largely for the schools. As more leaders explore how CMS might revamp student assignment, a growing number of parents have begun to raise objections—warning officials that they would not hesitate to send their children to private schools, or to the state’s notably segregated charter sector, if they had to.

Last summer, when it became clear that the CMS school board was thinking of revisiting student assignment, a group of pro-integration community members began organizing in support of the idea. And so back in July, OneMeck was born—a grassroots coalition of residents committed to making Charlotte-Mecklenburg a place where diverse individuals live, work, and attend school together. Through public forums, social media, and one-on-one conversations, OneMeck advocates began to make their case.

“We spent a few months figuring out what we were for and how we would structure ourselves, and we’re still evolving even now,” says Carol Sawyer, a co-founder of OneMeck. “But we have no intention of becoming a 501c(3); we really value our nimbleness and our ability to advocate as a community organization.”

Students also got involved. Through the organization Students for Education Reform, (SFER), CMS students began to strategize how they could best interject their personal experiences into an increasingly heated public debate over school segregation.

“Even though school board members said they wanted to hear from students, they weren’t actually invited to the table in any of these conversations,” says Kayla Romero, a former CMS teacher and current North Carolina SFER program coordinator. “This issue is going to directly impact students, they are the ones currently in the system, but people were not seeking their opinions out or intentionally bringing them to the table.”

OneMeck supporters say they are not advocating for any one specific policy, and that they believe there are a number of steps CMS could take to reduce racial and economic segregation. They are encouraging the school board to hire a national consultant who could come in and study the school district, and make recommendations on how to best legally, and strategically, diversify CMS schools.

Throughout the summer and fall of 2015, the public discussion in Charlotte revolved largely around issues of race and desegregation. But beginning in 2016, suburban families started to ramp up their efforts to shift the narrative. In February, hundreds of parents joined two new groups—CMS Families United for Neighborhood Schools and CMS Families for Close to Home Schools and Magnet Expansion—which sought to reframe the conversation around the importance of neighborhood schools, and to express collective opposition to what they called “forced busing.” Some even began to sell T-shirts that read “#Close-To-Home-Schools #NOforcedbusing.”

Christiane Gibbons, a co-founder of the CMS Families United For Neighborhood Schools, (now renamed CMS Families for Public Education) says when she first learned that the school board was rethinking student assignments in early February, she felt compelled to alert local parents to the dangers of forced busing. I asked her if forced busing was on the table at this time. “Who knows?” she responded. “But it seemed like, for a lot of people, an option for alleviating pockets of poverty is to bus in and bus out.”

Advocates of diverse schools point out that CMS actually buses students more now than the district ever did at the height of desegregation. The CMS school board chairperson, Mary McCray, has also stressed that student assignments would be based on choice, and not on forced busing. Since 20,000 students already attend magnet schools throughout the district, integration advocates say figuring out how to improve and expand those models is one choice-based option CMS could consider.

“In some high-wealth suburban neighborhoods there’s been claims that OneMeck is pushing ‘forced busing,’ but that’s been sort of dog whistle politics,” says Sawyer. “We’ve never said anything like that, and neither has any board members. It’s a pure fabrication.”

Whatever the case, many parents began pressing the school board and other local political leaders to commit to “home school guarantees”—promises that no matter what else changes with student assignment, children could still attend the neighborhood schools that their parents have expected them to enroll in. In three towns north of Charlotte—Huntersville, Cornelius, and Davidson—political leaders passed resolutions affirming that they want every student guaranteed a spot within their neighborhood school. In two towns south of Charlotte—Matthews and Mint Hill—the mayors even floated the idea of splitting off from CMS if the school board goes forward with revamping student assignments.

“That’s not a realistic threat,” says Sawyer. “Though it makes good copy.”

Aside from discussions that smaller suburban towns may secede from the district, leaders take far more seriously the threat that parents may send their children to private schools or charter schools if their traditional public schools no longer seem desirable. Last year, researchers at Duke University published a study suggesting that white parents in North Carolina were already using charters as a way to avoid racially integrated public schools.

On the nine-person CMS school board, Rhonda Lennon, who represents northern Mecklenburg County, has been the fiercest critic of redrawing lines; for months she has emphasized that families would certainly leave CMS if the board interferes with student assignment, and that she might open her own charter school, if parents in her community lost their home school guarantee.

“I think it’s a valid fear that parents have; I don’t think this is ‘chicken little’,” says Amy Hawn Nelson, an educational researcher at UNC Charlotte. “When you look at the aggregate school level performance data in some high poverty racially segregated schools, it can look frightening. Every parent wants the best school for their child, and for parents that have a choice, they are going to choose a school that is high-performing.”

At the end of January, the school board released an online survey inviting parents, CMS staff members, and other Mecklenburg County residents to share their thoughts and opinions on student assignments. Board members said they would use the results—which were published in a 241-page report—to guide their decisions. The online survey, which ran from January 29 until February 22, garnered more than 27,000 responses.

In addition to the survey, the CMS school board voted in late February on a set of six goals to consider when re-evaluating student assignment. These included providing choice and equitable access to “varied and viable” programmatic options; maximizing efficiency in the use of school facilities, transportation, and other resources to reduce overcrowding; and reducing the number of schools with high concentrations of poor and high-needs children.

CMS has since put out a request for a proposal for a national consultant to help the district develop a plan. The consultant would consider, among other things, the board’s approved goals and the results of the countywide survey. CMS plans to make a hire sometime this month.

Some parents say the board is getting this all wrong, and that focusing on student assignments is a distraction from the district’s real problems. “What’s really disheartening about all this is that people are making it about ‘us versus them’ and about race and desegregation, but it’s not,” says Gibbons. She thinks there should be greater focus on improving individual schools, through strategies like increasing parent involvement and expanding after school programming. Gibbons says she does not see changing student demographics as a way to improve schools.

At the start of the 2012-2013 school year, CMS, along with local philanthropic and business communities in Charlotte launched Project LIFT—a five-year public-private partnership to boost academic achievement. The program selected nine low-performing Charlotte schools and infused them with an additional $55 million in private investment. Three years into the experiment, however, researchers have found only modest and mixed evidence of academic improvement.

“I think Project LIFT is a school reform effort to make segregation work, and it hasn’t,” says Sawyer, of OneMeck.

Gibbons disagrees. “I think it’s a great turnaround program, I think it’s obviously beneficial,” she says. “It was the first time they did it so it may need tweaks, I don’t know enough about the actual numbers, but I think those types of turnaround programs are what is going to really benefit the under-performing schools.”

Some of the SFER students that Kayla Romero works with attend Project LIFT schools. “When people say ‘oh we just need more money,’ it’s been helpful to use Project LIFT as an example,” she says. Though spending more money has undoubtedly helped in some ways—such as providing students with better technology, and enabling administrators to employ more strategic staffing—Romero says students recognize that it hasn’t been enough.

The disagreements taking place in Charlotte mirror those playing out in districts all over the country. How much does money matter? Can segregated schools be equal? How should we factor in school choice? How should we define diversity?

Proponents of desegregating Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools point to a significant body of research that says diverse schools provide better social and academic education for all children. OneMeck launched the #DiversityWorks campaign, where organizers asked CMS residents to submit videos explaining how they have benefited from attending diverse schools. They also point to research on economic opportunity that came out of Harvard and Berkeley last year, which found Mecklenburg County is the worst big county for escaping poverty after Baltimore; in 2013 the researchers ranked Charlotte as 50th out of 50 big cities for economic mobility.

Still, some CMS residents balk at OneMeck’s fervent advocacy. In a Charlotte Observer op-ed, Jeremy Stephenson, who previously ran for school board, protested that those who push to use student assignment to break up concentrations of poverty “accept as gospel” that this will raise the achievement of all students. “They accept this diversity panacea as both empirical truth and an article of faith,” he writes, alleging that academia is “merging into advocacy” as it did with tobacco-funded cancer research. Stephenson argued that panel discussions “feature no diversity of thought; support for neighborhood schools is cast as xenophobic; and so postured, any questioning is heretical.”

Despite Charlotte-Mecklenburg’s historical legacy of school desegregation, hardly anyone describes that history as central to the conversations taking place today. Sandra Conway, an education consultant who has been working in conjunction with OneMeck, says she and her allies hope to mobilize Charlotte-Mecklenburg around a new, shared commitment to diverse schools.

“We’ve just really been trying to get people together to think about what kind of city we want to be,” says Conway. “We’ve grown so dramatically, we’re a Technicolor city, we’re a Southern city, and race is at play. But we need to have a new vision going forward, and if you don’t understand your history, and you don’t understand the data—that’s a problem. So we’ve just been working hard for over a year to get that out there.”

James Ford, awarded the 2014-2015 North Carolina Teacher of the Year, was a black CMS graduate during desegregation. As an educator today, Ford has been sharing his story to help raise support for reviewing student assignment. “As America becomes more brown, the question is not just whether or not we want integrated schools, but do we want to live in an integrated society? Are we an inclusive or exclusive community?” he wrote in Charlotte Magazine. “The answer depends on how we see ourselves.”

“I think for many kids growing up in Charlotte, segregation has just been the norm,” says Romero. “Some of them could live in this city for their whole lives and never come across white kids. However, some of their parents have had those experiences and do speak out about being part of the integration movement and the opportunities it created for them.”

The school board plans to continue reviewing student assignments throughout most of 2016, and any approved changes it makes would take effect no sooner than the 2017-2018 school year.

Tensions are high, but some school diversity advocates predict that the political landscape will calm down if and when a consultant presents the community with a real plan. “In the absence of a plan, you’ll have all sorts of fear mongering,” one activist confided. “It doesn’t matter how much we say that’s not the case, that there won’t be forced busing—until a plan is presented, people will continue to freak out.”

Even opponents of reassigning students have acknowledged that some of the current CMS boundaries are a bit peculiarly drawn. An article published in The Charlotte Agenda looked at various “gerrymandered” maps and found that it would be relatively easy to increase student diversity in schools without resorting to miles and miles of extra busing. Gibbons acknowledged “there are definitely some lines that don’t make sense” on the maps.

“OneMeck is feeling pretty energized,” says Sawyer. “We realize that we are facing tremendous fear, but we’re trying to show that we can make all our schools better for all our kids.”

Why DeRay Mckesson’s Mayoral Candidacy Will Be Defined Far More By Education than Policing

Originally published in Slate on February 12th, 2016.
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News of mayoral runs usually don’t merit the attention that Black Lives Matter activist DeRay Mckesson got when he announced his candidacy for Baltimore’s top job last week. His campaign had leaked the story to the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Guardian in advance, and within 24 hours, he had already crowd-funded $40,000.

National publications began speculating how Mckesson’s candidacy would elevate police reform onto Baltimore’s political agenda, the implication being that it wasn’t already a top priority in the race. It absolutely is: Nearly 10 months after the death of 25-year-old Freddie Gray in police custody, and after one of the most crime-ridden years Baltimore’s seen in decades, few topics are more prominent. So what, exactly, will Mckesson bring to the election?

Mckesson joins 12 other Democrats competing in April’s primary, the winner of which will almost certainly go on to win in November. But though Mckesson’s large Twitter following may be eager to see how he’ll carry his national Black Lives Matter work into Charm City, I suspect they’ll be in for a surprise. What’s going to distinguish Mckesson probably won’t be policing and criminal justice at all—it’ll be education.

Nationally, school reform is an issue that confounds political partisans, opening fault lines among progressive allies and uniting constituencies that typically never agree. Reform is even more complicated in Baltimore; the city stands as a distinctively unusual landscape for education politics next to other, similar urban centers.

Already, Mckesson has signaled that he plans to campaign on education, which isn’t surprising since that’s where the 30-year-old cut his professional teeth. After graduating college, he spent two years teaching sixth graders in Brooklyn followed by several stints with education nonprofits, reform organizations, and administrative district jobs. But Mckesson brings to the race some national baggage, which he’ll have to confront as he tries to make his case to Baltimore voters. Specifically, residents have already raised questions about his ties to national reform groups like TNTP and Teach for America, as well as his enthusiastic support for charter schools.

So far, Mckesson has largely dismissed these concerns. He’s reminded the public that he’s spent several years working with the Baltimore school district as an administrator focused on staffing personnel. Still, he’ll have to reckon with local education politics that have changed substantially since he left his job back in 2013.

For example, a few months ago a coalition of charter operators filed a lawsuit against the school district over funding—a highly controversial move that’s divided Baltimore public school families. The city is also in the midst of closing down more than two-dozen schools, and the next mayor will need to determine what becomes of the vacant buildings. Will they be sold off? Will they be leased to charter schools? Will they be repurposed into some other civic entity? These decisions are sure to intensify an already-fraught K-12 landscape.

The main thing to grasp about Baltimore’s education environment is that it’s pretty unique. All charter teachers are unionized, unlike most charter employees in other states. Moreover, Maryland charter schools—which are predominately mom-and-pop institutions, not larger charter-school chains—are subject to more oversight and regulation than charters elsewhere. While reformers say they’d like to see Maryland charters freed from these legal constraints, supporters of the status quo say that tougher oversight explains why Maryland charter schools have never wrought the kind of fraud, mismanagement, and abuse found in other jurisdictions.

What Mckesson will soon have to decide is whether he is committed to keeping Baltimore’s charter sector as is—with unionized teachers, a close relationship to the school district, and substantial oversight—or join the coalition of charter operators and national education reform groups that seek to significantly revamp chartering in Maryland. That decision may also force him to choose between competing groups that may try to back him. Some national charter networks have expressed disinterest in setting up shop in Baltimore, namely because they don’t want to work within the school district and employ unionized teachers. The National Alliance of Public Charter Schools, a D.C.-based organization, consistently ranks Maryland as the worst charter school state in the country, largely for these same reasons.

Yet within Baltimore, both traditional teachers and charter teachers alike strongly support Maryland’s charter law—and rallied together last year to protest reformers’ attempts to change it. The Center for Education Reform, another national group, hired lobbyists to push for loosening Maryland’s regulations. They were ultimately unsuccessful, but the fight is expected to resurface again soon.

On Friday, Mckesson released his education campaign platform—a substantive list of proposals ranging from expanding early childhood education to strengthening college and career readiness programs. He calls for increasing the school district’s transparency (a common theme among all the candidates) and more equitable state financing. He notably doesn’t mention anything about unions or charter schools, but Mckesson won’t be able to shy away from that charged debate for long.

When news broke that Mckesson would be running, some Baltimore activists, particularly those who have been fighting for police reform, protested on Twitter—a surprise to some outside the city, given his national stature within Black Lives Matter. Among other things, locals argue that Mckesson lacks sufficient relationships with the communities he now seeks to lead.

In many ways, their critiques mirror those that veteran public school educators level at Teach for America—that outside young teachers without roots in the cities they work in displace those who have more of a right, and need, to be there. And despite Mckesson’s early campaign efforts to brand himself as a “son of Baltimore,” some local activists have said they’ve rarely seen him fighting alongside them in the causes they’ve been invested in for years, like building independent black institutions and weakening the Maryland police union. (Mckesson defended himself against these charges, saying “there are many ways to engage in the work.”)

A few weeks ago, 11 Democratic candidates gathered together for a mayoral forum to discuss their political vision for Baltimore. One audience member asked the candidates, “How will you stop police from killing black people?” Answers varied somewhat, but all in all, they were broadly similar. The candidates spoke of strengthening civilian review boards, getting body cameras on all police, transforming the way Baltimore recruits and trains officers, establishing more transparent accountability systems, pushing for more police to formally live within the city, mandating cultural diversity training and regular psychiatric evaluations, and calling for convictions for those who break the rules.

In other words, Mckesson is entering a crowded field of candidates who likely share many of his police reform policy goals. Some hope that Mckesson’s candidacy will encourage others to articulate even sharper campaign proposals. Perhaps, and that would be a good thing. But it was already an issue that no candidate was really ignoring—and certainly one that no future mayor can expect to avoid.

So despite to Black Lives Matter’s national work, that aspect of his candidacy is unlikely to be too disruptive in the race. It’ll be where his campaign intersects with the school-reform movement, and specifically how local education politics rub up against his national ties, that could really shake things up.