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"There are several major threads when it comes to K-12 education.
Vouchers, vouchers, vouchers. Eliminate the federal Department of Education, and turn the money for Title I and IDEA into block grants that states can use for anything education-adjacent (but Heritage is hoping it will be for vouchers), with Title I ending within a decade." -- Peter Greene in What Does Project 2025 Actually Plan For Education?
PROJECT 2025
Project 2025's education plan is a broad scheme for privatization.
What Does Project 2025 Actually Plan For Education?
From Peter Greene at Forbes
The education chapter was written by Lindsey Burke, chief of the Heritage Center’s Center for Education Policy. She’s also works at EdChoice, a school choice advocacy group formerly named after Milton Friedman, and she was part of Governor Glenn Youngkin’s transition team in 2021.
Burke leads off with some broad goals, including the elimination of the Department of Education and the goal that “families and students should be free to choose from a diverse set of school options and learning environments.” She salutes Friedman’s ideal, with education publicly funded but “education decisions are made by families.” She points to state leadership where the “future of education freedom and reform is bright and will shine brighter when regulations and red tape from Washington are eliminated.”
Federal money comes with federal rules and regulations attached. Burke proposes that federal dollars come to the states as block grants with no rules or regulations attached. She nods to the characterization of the department that runs through the whole document—a department born of a deal between Jimmy Carter and the National Education Association, attractive because it gave certain people a way to extend their influence via federal power and “continuously expand federal expenditures.” The federal education infrastructure has been “[b]olstered by an ever-growing cabal of special interests that thrive off federal largesse.”
Project 2025’s Plan for Public Education
From NPE Action
Project 2025 has an agenda for public schools: Destroy your neighborhood public schools and make parents shop for schooling using vouchers. Even as that is occurring, it would whittle away protections and support for LGBTQ students, disadvantaged students, and students with disabilities. Watch our explainer and find out how.
Project 2025: What Happens to K-12 in a New Trump Term?
From Diane Ravitch
Matthew Stone of Education Week described the plans for K-12 education in a second Trump term, as they appear in Project 2025, a document written by hundreds of former Trump officials. The 44-page education section emphasizes eliminating the U.S. Department of Education, distributing its functions to other agencies, converting categorical funds (like Title I for low-income children) into block grants, and rooting out “critical race theory” and any recognition of the existence of LGBT students. The document emphasizes the primacy of parental rights.
Trump has distanced himself from the document, because its recommendations are so radical, but it was prepared under the watchful eye of Kevin Roberts, president of the ultra-rightwing Heritage Foundation. Roberts is a close associate of Trump’s.
CHARTER SCHOOLS ARE WOKE
Wacky Heritage Foundation Report Warns that Charter Schools Are “Woke”
If being "woke" means being aware of what's going on in your community relating to race and injustice...being awakened to the needs of others...being informed, thoughtful, compassionate, humble, and kind...then count us in.
From Diane Ravitch
A recent Heritage report warns that parents can’t trust charter schools because so many of them are just as “woke” as public schools. Some are even more woke than public schools.
The report, written by Jay Greene, Ian Kingsbury, and Jason Bedrick, asserts that the major philanthropic foundations supporting charter schools—the Walton Family Foundation and the Gates Foundation—are also woke. This is where it gets crazy. Walton is woke? The anti-union, rightwing Waltons?
ILEARN
Indiana’s new ILEARN test scores show student progress remained stagnant in 2024
When reading this article, keep in mind that grades are a better measure of academic success than standardized tests.
Because...
...standardized tests have a major blind spot, the researchers asserted: The exams fail to capture the “soft skills” that reflect a student’s ability to develop good study habits, take academic risks, and persist through challenges, for example. High school grades, on the other hand, appear to do a better job mapping the area where resilience and knowledge meet. Arguably, that’s the place where potential is translated into real achievement."...cut-off scores are professional judgments that sit somewhere between objective and subjective, art and science, and reasoned and arbitrary."
From the Indiana Capital Chronicle
New state standardized test results show stagnant progress among Hoosier students in grades 3-8, signaling a continued struggle to reverse widespread learning loss following the COVID-19 pandemic.
New ILEARN scores show 41% of Indiana students who were tested earlier this spring were at or above proficiency standards in English and language arts (ELA), according to new data released Wednesday by the Indiana Department of Education (IDOE). That’s on par with the year prior, when 40.7% of students were proficient.
The percentage of students at or above proficiency standards in math, on the other hand, saw a slight decrease — from 40.9% in 2023 to 40.7% in the most recent school year.
Data released by IDOE reported 30.8% of Hoosier students passed both the math and English sections of ILEARN. That’s slightly up from last year’s spring test results, which showed that 30.6% earned dual passing scores.
SCIENCE OF READING
Science of Reading and the Emperor's New Clothes
Michael B. Shaffer is an associate clinical professor of educational leadership at Ball State University. He wrote this for a pro-public education Facebook group and gave us permission to repost it on the NEIFPE blog.
From Michael B. Shaffer on Facebook and in NEIFPE's Blog
I should clarify that I am not against ANYTHING that improves the practices of literacy instruction and helps students gain better reading skills. I am not against anything that supports teachers in gaining additional skills in literacy instruction. I dedicated most of my professional life as a principal to studying literacy, and providing professional development to the teachers in the schools where I was principal on the topic of literacy. I should say that I started my career as an elementary teacher.
The major argument I have against the current push for Science of Reading at this point is that it is the embodiment of the fable, The Emperor's New Clothes. We have been told that it is something shiny and new and that if we follow it, our students will suddenly start to read effectively where they could not prior to following the path established by SOR and as trained by the State of IN through Keys to Literacy, and includes (are you ready for this?) phonics, phonemic awareness, fluency, comprehension, and vocabulary. Hold on. Every responsible reading approach I have seen in the last twenty years has been built on these five pillars! Oh, yeah, that is what they call them. The Five Pillars of Reading Instruction. That is not new.
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An Evening with Jennifer McCormick
NEIFPE is proud to co-sponsor this event featuring Indiana's next governor, Jennifer McCormick. Hope you can attend.
Click HERE to register for the September 25th event:
†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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1 comment:
Thanks, Stu.
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