In Case You Missed It – December 18, 2023

Here are links to last week's^† articles receiving the most attention on NEIFPE's social media accounts. Keep up with what's going on, what's being discussed, and what's happening with public education.

Be sure to enter your email address in the Follow Us By Email box in the right-hand column of our blog page to be informed when our blog posts are published.

NEIFPE's In Case You Missed It will be on hiatus until January 8. Thank you for your support of public education.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

"The evidence that grade retention will work over the long run is mixed, at best. And making students repeat a grade has negative social and emotional impacts, especially for poor children and students of color. Let’s hope Indiana officials keep all that in mind in their efforts to improve reading." -- Steve Hinnefeld in More on Reading and Retention

GRADE RETENTION

Retention of students in grade has been used for decades as a way to help slower learners "catch up." In recent years state legislatures have required third-grade students to pass a reading test or be retained. Yet retention alone doesn't seem to help in the long run.

Do we even know if the tests accurately measure student learning?

Grade Retention Sleight of Hand

Peter Greene is a retired English teacher. Here he uses his knowledge to explain how words are used to put a positive spin on grade retention while downplaying the need for additional help for struggling students aside from retention.

From Curmudgucation

Flunking 8 and 9 year olds because they didn't pass a Big Standardized Test is easy; giving additional supports and resources to students in poor and under-resourced schools is hard. "Flunk everyone who didn't make the cut score," is quick and simple. Broad support systems require investments of time, money, and staffing. And, of course, the retention is a hot new reform idea, while the broad support for students who need it has been the request of teachers since the invention of dirt.

Maybe this research is solid, or maybe it's just well-packed baloney. I'm not going to get into that now (though my suspicions have a first name). But even if this is legit, the framing of it is irresponsible; it's a sleight of hand trick aimed at getting you to pick the card they want you to pick. Whenever someone brings up this report, ask them why they didn't write the sentence the other way.

More on reading and retention

Steve Hinnefeld at School Matters wants to know if 'parental rights' will be ignored when it comes to the retention of students in grade.

From School Matters

Indiana legislators say they want more children to repeat third grade if they don’t pass the state’s IREAD-3 test. Data released last week suggest that would be a big change in elementary schools.

According to the Indiana Department of Education, nearly all third-graders who weren’t proficient on IREAD-3 in spring 2023 were promoted to fourth grade anyway. Many of those students had “good-cause exemptions” because they were in special education, were English learners or had previously been held back twice. But even among the 8,337 students without such exemptions, 95% were promoted.

WHAT HAPPENED?

The Rise and Fall of Moms For Liberty

Moms for Liberty has had some difficulties lately...

From The Progressive: Public Schools Advocate

On June 30, 2023, a Washington Post headline declared “Moms for Liberty didn’t exist three years ago. Now it’s a GOP kingmaker.” On November 10, 2023, after a raft of school board elections across the country, the Post ran another headline: “Voters drub Moms for Liberty ‘parental rights’ candidates at the ballot.” Moms for Liberty (M4L) not only didn’t make any kings, it didn’t even make many school board members. What happened?

FRACKING OUR ATTENTION

John Thompson: The Most Important Lesson That Students Need Today

Can we restore our attention?

From Diane Ravitch

D. Graham Burnett, Alyssa Loh, and Peter Schmidt begin their New York Times opinion piece, “Powerful Forces Are Fracking Our Attention. We Can fight Back,” with an eloquent version of a statement that should have long been obvious:

We are witnessing the dark side of our new technological lives, whose extractive profit models amount to the systematic fracking of human beings: pumping vast quantities of high-pressure media content into our faces to force up a spume of the vaporous and intimate stuff called attention, which now trades on the open market. Increasingly powerful systems seek to ensure that our attention is never truly ours.

Then Burnett, Loh, and Schmidt use equally insightful language to explain why “We Can Fight Back” against “the little satanic mills that live in our pockets.” They recall that “for two centuries, champions of liberal democracy have agreed that individual and collective freedom requires literacy.” Today we face widespread complaints that reading is being undermined by “perpetual distraction,” due to commercial use of digital technologies. They add, “What democracy most needs now is an attentive citizenry — human beings capable of looking up from their screens, together.”

FORT WAYNE LOCAL NEWS

Fort Wayne Community Schools board awards superintendent with raise, bonus

From the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette**

Superintendent Mark Daniel’s salary will increase by 3% under his second raise since returning to Fort Wayne Community Schools more than three years ago.

Maria Norman, school board president, announced the board’s decision to increase the superintendent’s compensation and award him a $5,000 bonus during Monday’s meeting. She noted the raise aligned with the raises other employees received.

**Note: The Fort Wayne Journal Gazette is behind a paywall. Digital access, home delivery, or both are available with a subscription. Staying informed is essential; one way to do that is to support your local newspaper. For subscription information, go to fortwayne.com/subscriptions/ [NOTE: NEIFPE has no financial ties to the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette]

^†Note: NEIFPE's In Case You Missed It is posted by the end of the day every Monday except after holiday weekends or as otherwise noted.

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In Case You Missed It – December 11, 2023

Here are links to last week's^† articles receiving the most attention on NEIFPE's social media accounts. Keep up with what's going on, what's being discussed, and what's happening with public education.

Be sure to enter your email address in the Follow Us By Email box in the right-hand column of our blog page to be informed when our blog posts are published.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

"Private schools cannot be counted on to protect students’ civil rights...Private schools are always selective. They can select the students they prefer and push out students whose behavior or academic problems challenge staff. Many of the schools created as segregation academies continue to discriminate by race as do many private schools created more recently. Private schools can keep out students whose sexual orientation or gender identity violates the school’s religious preference. Unlike public schools which are required by the Individuals with Disability Education Act to provide services that accommodate the needs of each child, private schools can choose whether to provide appropriate programs and specially trained teachers. Sometimes the schools promise special services but fail to provide qualified staff." -- Jan Resseger in Public Schools: Our Essential Democratic Institution

PUBLIC SCHOOLS: ESSENTIAL TO DEMOCRACY

Public Schools: Our Essential Democratic Institution

Public schools are essential to our democracy. What kind of nation do we want?

From Jan Resseger

For generations, public schooling has been our society’s largest and most widespread civic institution. Back in 1992 when The Good Society was published, Bellah and his colleagues could not have anticipated the widespread expansion of educational individualism in the form private school vouchers state governments are supporting today, but they did notice our society’s ethos of radical individualism as a threat to our essential institutions: “Freedom, for most Americans, is an essential ingredient to a definition of a good society, and one we affirm… But in the great society of today, freedom cannot mean simply getting away from other people. Freedom must exist within and be guaranteed by institutions, and must include the right to participate in the economic and political decisions that affect our lived idea of a good society.” (The Good Society, p. 9)

Most of us who oppose today’s explosion of bills across the states to establish or expand private school tuition vouchers are skilled enough to argue accurately about the practical detriments of private school tuition vouchers as they drive money out of states’ public school budgets. We have learned that today in most states, the students taking the vouchers are already enrolled in a private school and only using the money to discount the tuition their parents are already paying. Researchers have also documented conclusively that on the whole, students lose ground academically when they leave public schools and carry a voucher to a private school. (Chris Lubienski, T. Jameson Brewer, and Joel Malin, “Bait and Switch,” The School Voucher Illusion, pp. 127-147), and (Josh Cowen.) We know that vouchers divert tax dollars away from small towns and rural areas where the population is too small to support any private schools. And we know that many privatized schools fail to provide programming for English learners and special needs students, leaving behind the most expensive students to educate in the public schools.

PLAY IS CHILDREN'S WORK

Is Too Little Play Hurting Our Kids?

This fascinating article on children's mental health is a transcript from the Scientific American podcast, Science, Quickly.

From Scientific American

[Joseph] Polidoro: In the September issue of the Journal of Pediatrics, [Peter] Gray and his co-authors observed a continuous increase in depression, anxiety and suicide rates among children and adolescents since at least 1960. And they link it to a decline in unsupervised play and other independent activities.

[Peter] Gray: Play is how children pursue what’s fun for them. That’s an immediate source of mental health—part of mental health really means “I’m happy” or “I’m most satisfied with my life right now.”

Polidoro: Gray says that play and other independent activities also have far-reaching long-term effects on children’s mental health and resilience.

Gray: I think that the real crisis is that young people are losing a sense of, “I can solve problems, I can deal with bumps in the road of life.” And the way the children learn to do these things is through play where they are responsible to solve their own problems. They negotiate with their peers. They figure out how to solve quarrels among themselves. If somebody gets hurt, they figure out what to do about being hurt.

CARNEGIE UNIT UNDER FIRE

John Thompson: The Carnegie Unit in the Line of Fire

"Given the failed track record of the disruptive change, as well as Petrilli’s advocacy for it, we need to pay attention when he goes on record saying that the under-reported story of ‘multiple pathways—via multiple diplomas' could create 'multiple pitfalls.'"

From Diane Ravitch

John Thompson, historian and retired teacher in Oklahoma, noticed that the Carnegie Unit is under fire. Do you know what a Carnegie Unit is? It’s a measure of time spent learning a subject. Here’s the definition on the website of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching:

The unit was developed in 1906 as a measure of the amount of time a student has studied a subject. For example, a total of 120 hours in one subject—meeting 4 or 5 times a week for 40 to 60 minutes, for 36 to 40 weeks each year—earns the student one “unit” of high school credit. Fourteen units were deemed to constitute the minimum amount of preparation that could be interpreted as “four years of academic or high school preparation.”

Why is this controversial?

FWCS TEACHER HONOR ROLL

Teacher Honor Roll: FWCS educator collaborates to find best plan for students

Focus on FWCS teacher, Nicole Block.

From the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette**

Why did you become a teacher? I volunteered at my son’s elementary school and his second grade teacher, who later became my best friend and mentor, encouraged me to pursue teaching. As a volunteer, I directly saw the impact teachers have on children and I was inspired to do the same. My family and I relocated to Fort Wayne, I enrolled in a master’s program in special education, and I met (Snider Principal) Chad Hissong at Purdue’s Educator Career Fair. I have never looked back.

**Note: The Fort Wayne Journal Gazette is behind a paywall. Digital access, home delivery, or both are available with a subscription. Staying informed is essential; one way to do that is to support your local newspaper. For subscription information, go to fortwayne.com/subscriptions/ [NOTE: NEIFPE has no financial ties to the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette]

^†Note: NEIFPE's In Case You Missed It is posted by the end of the day every Monday except after holiday weekends or as otherwise noted.

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In Case You Missed It – December 4, 2023

Here are links to the last two week's^† articles receiving the most attention on NEIFPE's social media accounts. Keep up with what's going on, what's being discussed, and what's happening with public education.

Be sure to enter your email address in the Follow Us By Email box in the right-hand column of our blog page to be informed when our blog posts are published.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

"Taxpayers can end up paying for the same building multiple times. First, the taxpayers pay for the school district to build it. Then they pay for the charter operator to buy it from the school district. Then, in cases like the White Hat fiasco, they end up not owning the building at all, as the CMO [Charter Management Organization], or some CMO real estate subsidiary, walks off with the building when the charter fails. In the worst of situations, this means that CMOs actually win whether the charter school succeeds or not." -- Peter Greene in Charter School Real Estate Profits

PRIVATIZATION: CHARTERS

Charter School Real Estate Profits

How many times should the public purchase a single school building? With charters managing their own real estate, it can be more than once.

From Curmudgucation

The ultimate problem with charters getting into the real estate business is that it exacerbates a fundamental flaw of the "run schools like a business" approach of free market based school choice-- if a school is a business, then its interests conflict with the interests of students. Every dollar spent educating students is a dollar not spent enriching the business and its owners, and vice versa. The argument that the free market will punish the business for not spending enough on students is not really valid; in a free market, the challenge for an education-flavored business is not how to provide the very best education for students, but how to find the bare minimum they can get away with and still make a profit. Maximizing profit means minimizing service provided.

That tension is present in all free marketeering of education. But when the most attractive driver of profit is not even the service, but the building the service is housed in, it just makes matters worse.

PRIVATIZATION: VOUCHERS

It’s time for private schools to open the books

Private schools that use taxpayer dollars need to be open about where the money is being spent. Note, too, that most vouchers go to religious institutions which pay no taxes of their own.

From Indiana Capital Chronicle

Maybe you saw the yard signs this summer? Across the state, a private organization — the Institute for Quality Education — put money toward promoting the dollar amount a child can receive from the state of Indiana to help pay for private school.

It’s around $6,000 this school year, per the yard signs. In 2023-24, almost all Hoosier children qualify for a private school voucher if they can find a private school that will accept them.

A program that was founded on the premise of providing opportunities for low-income and minority families has grown significantly since it was first challenged in court in 2012, one year after state legislators passed legislation establishing it. Yet while the program has expanded to include almost all families, the same problems persist: little accountability for taxpayers and few protections for families.

As the state sends millions more tax dollars to private schools this year — an estimated $500 million, more than 35 times the initial cost to taxpayers in the 2011-12 school year — taxpayers still have no idea how these voucher dollars are being used by the schools that receive them. Is the money going into the classroom to help students? Unsure. Is the school financially distressed? Who knows.

There are no state-required audits as there are for public schools. There are no public school board meetings in which to ask questions.

Indiana vouchers grew less than expected

Small comfort...

From School Matters

Indiana’s private school voucher program grew by a third this fall, according to data from the state Department of Education. Some 69,271 students were awarded state-funded vouchers to pay for private school tuition. That’s up from 52,614 in fall 2022.

It’s less of an increase than was expected when the Indiana General Assembly dramatically expanded eligibility for the program. Families now qualify if their income is no more than four times the threshold for reduced-price school meals. That’s $220,000 for a family of four.

An estimated 97% of Hoosier students should qualify. When the voucher expansion passed as part of the state budget, the state Legislative Services Agency projected the program and its cost would grow by over 70%, to over a half billion dollars in 2023-24.

That seemed like a reasonable guess. According to last year’s state voucher report, over 35,000 students attended private schools with their families paying their own way. If most of those families now qualified and opted for vouchers – and if the increasingly generous program drew more students to private schools – a big increase in the program would be expected.

TIME TO PAY TEACHERS MORE

How Can Anyone Afford to Teach Anymore?

Normally, when there's a shortage of workers, the pay goes up. Not so with teachers. Is it because teachers are mostly women? Is it because privatizers want an employee base of workers who can be replaced cheaply? Whatever the reason, teachers continue to take a pay cut just by their choice of profession. America's priorities need some adjustments.

From The Progressive

Teacher shortages have been reported in all fifty states, and 86 percent of public schools are hard pressed to fill vacant teaching positions. Low pay is often cited as a cause of the shortages. Let’s put that in context.

On average, teacher pay in the United States is nearly 25 percent less than what other college graduates receive, according to a study by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI). If you are a teacher in New Hampshire, as I am, your paycheck is nearly 30 percent less than other college graduates. Let that sink in.

People who go into teaching are taking on the same level of debt as other college graduates (or more), yet they are receiving nowhere near the same financial benefits. The typical U.S. graduate with a four year degree walked away with their diploma and $29,417 in debt in 2022. In my home state, the average debt for a bachelor’s degree topped the nation at an astounding $39,928.

TRUST TEACHERS

Standardized Tests Lie

Your child's teacher knows more about education than do the legislators in Indianapolis. Your child's teacher knows more about your child's progress than can be shown on any standardized test. Trust educators.

From Gadfly on the Wall

Whom do you trust?

So much in life comes down to that simple question.

When two groups disagree, which one do you believe?

...Those with the most exposure to the most diverse educational experiences are teachers and testing companies.

On the one side you have teachers who instruct students for at least 180 days a year, giving formal and informal assessments throughout to provide a classroom grade. On the other you have the testing companies that give students a single assessment over a period of hours or days.

And often they come to different conclusions.

Many times children get high classroom grades but low scores on the standardized test.

So let us ask the question that the media never does: which should we believe?

FORT WAYNE LOCAL NEWS

4 northeast Indiana school districts get state literacy grants

Indiana has jumped into the Science of Reading Movement. For information, see the Executive Summary of The Science of Reading Movement: The Never-Ending Debate and the Need for a Different Approach To Reading Instruction by Paul Thomas of Furman University, published by the National Education Policy Center.

From the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette**

Indiana has awarded nearly $15 million in grants to support literacy, including more than $850,000 to four northeast school districts.

The Indiana Department of Education announced on Monday that 72 school corporations would receive the grants, which are expected to reach more than 65,000 students in kindergarten through third grade. The grants are meant to support the implementation of evidence-based practices aligned with science of reading.

Science of reading integrates instructional practices with efforts focused on phonics, phonemic awareness, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension, the news release said.

Fort Wayne Community Schools Plans for 'Success'

From the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette**

FWCS Superintendent Mark Daniel is looking forward to when the students who are in eighth grade now become high school seniors.

That’s because the class of 2028 will be the first to experience the Schools of Success, Fort Wayne Community Schools’ new approach to high school.

Snider's Kurt Tippmann one of five national Power of Influence Award winners

From the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette**

Snider football coach Kurt Tippmann is one of five coaches to win the Power of Influence Award, the American Football Coaches Association announced on Thursday.

School district donates land to Fort Wayne trail project

From the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette**

Fort Wayne Community Schools is contributing to the city’s Hanna Street Trail construction efforts.

Fort Wayne Community Schools plans $2 million in North Side stadium upgrades

From the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette**

A Fort Wayne high school athletics facility is set for nearly $2 million in upgrades, including installation of synthetic turf.

Northwest Allen County Schools tweaks school capacities as redistricting eyed

From the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette**

The demographic firm Northwest Allen County Schools hired to develop redistricting scenarios will have updated school capacity information to consider as it creates options for the growing district.

Audit reveals equity priorities at Fort Wayne Community Schools

From the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette**

Fort Wayne Community Schools board members informally indicated their support Monday for requiring culturally diverse training for employees.

“Diversity is huge in our district,” President Maria Norman said during an hourlong work session about equity. “I think anything that we can do to help people better understand different cultures, different races...”

Fort Wayne Community Schools addresses student behavior with $10,000 grant

From the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette**

A consultant will provide educators at a Fort Wayne middle school with strategies to reduce unwanted student behavior, thanks to a $10,000 grant from the Indiana State Teachers Association Foundation.

**Note: The Fort Wayne Journal Gazette is behind a paywall. Digital access, home delivery, or both are available with a subscription. Staying informed is essential; one way to do that is to support your local newspaper. For subscription information, go to fortwayne.com/subscriptions/ [NOTE: NEIFPE has no financial ties to the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette]

^†Note: NEIFPE's In Case You Missed It is posted by the end of the day every Monday except after holiday weekends or as otherwise noted.

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