DON’T LET VOUCHERS KILL THE PUBLIC’S SCHOOLS!

With Betsy DeVos in as US Secretary of Education, we know our public schools are not safe.  A new administration should have come in ready to do away with high-stakes testing and other punitive policies and jumped right in to use the Secretary’s power – and budget in the billions of dollars – as a force for the most academically rich, culturally grounded, child-centered and, of course, equitable schools we can as a nation imagine. 

Instead, we see a Secretary eager to use the power of her office to impoverish the public’s schools by robbing them of our tax dollars, giving them to private schools.  Betsy DeVos wants our public dollars to leave our children’s classrooms and fly across town into the pockets of people who run schools but for some reason can’t make them financially viable on their own.   Religious schools (in her case, Christian ones), corporate-run charter chains, independent private schools – these are the folks who want a handout from the government!   Education “welfare”?

We can call it theft, misappropriation, corporate welfare, or de-democratizing.  Betsy DeVos calls these cash transfers “vouchers,” “freedom scholarships,” “market payments.”

Vouchers by whatever name will take money out of our public schools, making them weaker and – surprise! – vulnerable to closure or take over by private interests.    The president’s proposed budget takes billions of federal dollars away from even basic services to put into vouchers – voucher programs that states may have to go along with to get other federal dollars they desperately need in such areas as special education.  And many Republican governors and state legislatures are voting on voucher bills this very month (including, my Texas neighbors, right now in Austin).

“Vouchers” sound neutral; “freedom scholarships” sound generous.  How can we explain to our friends, our legislators, and our members of Congress how dangerous vouchers are?

A teacher can tell us!  Mercedes K.Schneider is a public school teacher in Louisiana, a careful researcher, and writer who can explain the most complicated policies in clear prose even a legislator can understand!     Her new book is here just in time to give to your member of Congress or state representative before they get sucked into thinking vouchers are inevitable, vouchers “worked” in Michigan (they didn’t), vouchers help poor kids (no).  SchoolChoice:  The End of Public Education?(Teachers College Press, 2016) traces vouchers to their roots in Southern resistance to desegregation:  if white families could take their local school tax dollars to private schools not under the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education Topeka, they could keep their kids in all-white schools – and at the public’s expense.  

Schneider shows vouchers to be fundamentally aimed at destroying democracy, starting with Milton Friedman’s goal of replacing public institutions (the public’s institutions) by private players in a market where “competition” would be the only form of regulation.  And private interests would have no obligation to collective governance.   Her section on “choice” is especially compelling: Schneider shows that when tax dollars – and kids – go to voucher and charter schools, it’s the schools, not the parents and children, who have the power of “choice”: to include, to exclude, to do less than advertised.  Not good for children, not good for the community, and definitely not consistent with our democracy.

Get Schneider’s book today – for you, your teachers and school board, your policy folks, your local library!  Keep our dollars in our classrooms.  Anyone who wants to start a private school should try it; but raise your own money.  The rest of us have already committed our tax dollars to the public’s schools.

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Don't Wait to Read "Wait for Me" by Caroline Leech!

Wonderful news for young adult readers:

We no longer have to wait to read Scottish author Caroline Leech's new book "Wait for Me"!  It hit the bookshelves yesterday and I'm already captivated by the story, the characters and Leech's vivid descriptions of life on a farm in Scotland in 1945 where the shortage of farm hands (the sons are of course off to war) is shockingly solved by assigning German prisoners of war to work in their place.

We won't easily forget our first meeting of the enemy prisoner the British army truck brings to Lorna's father's farm:

As Lorna began to argue, a prisoner -- had the sergeant called him "Vogel"? -- jumped down from the truck, stumbling as he landed, his back to them.  He quickly righted his balance. Tall and skinny, his dark uniform didn't fit him. The pants were baggy and too short, and the jacket swamped his gaunt frame.  He  had the same haircut as the others, shaved close, and his neck was scrawny and pale. He was just a boy, and it looked as if a puff of wind would blow him away.

But then the boy turned toward them and Lorna could see a high cheekbone and strong jawline. All right, perhaps he was more a man, but still...

Then he faced them full on, and Lorna's irritation was instantly extinguished, her shock catching in her throat.  

Half the boy's face was gone.  No, that wasn't quite right. His face was there, but .....

Praised by her peer authors as "Compelling, moving and beautifully written....rich with history, conflict and tension," and "A delicately written love story with a gorgeously evoked setting, an intrepid heroine, and a knee-weakening romance. Not to be missed."

I loved hearing Caroline Leech share with the teachers in our Writing and the Arts seminar how she came to write this story, in this time period, with these characters.  She has generously shared with the students in my Adolescent Literature class the challenge and mystery and fun of writing first lines.

(Should I tell you that the first line of "Wait for Me" is Lorna Anderson was ankle deep in muck and milk.  Yes, you want to keep reading!

The only thing better than reading her writing is to hear Caroline Leech read in her lilting Scottish voice (I actually asked her to repeat something once so I could hear those vowels again!)

If you're lucky enough to be in Houston next week, you can hear that memorable Scottish voice for yourself  on February 7 when Caroline Leech reads from Wait for Me and talks about her writing at Brazos Bookstore.  

Congratulations, Caroline, and to all the young adult readers about to discover what happens when the stalwart Scots meet the German enemy -- at home. 

COLONIZING BY TEXTBOOK, Part 3
See What Organizing Can Do!

Image source:  http://kxan.com/2016/09/13/rally-says-controversial-mexican-american-textbook-is-inaccurate-offensive/

History was made today! The State Board of Education of Texas rose above its almost caricatured record of questioning whether Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and civil rights labor leader Cesar Chavez are worthy role models for our children by voting unanimously to reject – to not approve – the racist, erroneous Mexican American Heritage "textbook."

While we applaud the good sense of the members of the state board of education, real credit goes to the parents, educators, scholars and friends of Texas children who showed what democracy can do:  they organized, they publicized, they studied, they brought their deepest concerns and their scholarly expertise and their families’ stories into the debate.  They built a coalition to reject racism. They also built that coalition to affirm what is just and inclusive and historically authentic.

I applaud historian Emilio Zamora and his Nuestro Grupo colleagues for doing the  tedious work of a fine-grained review of this proposed book. And I applaud the thousands who became informed, signed the petition opposing this book, and made their opposition known through calls, letters, emails and testimony.

This is what democracy looks like! This is what democracy can do!

Image source:  http://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/texas-textbook-dripping-racism-opposed-hearing-awaits-vote-n647911

Here is the board’s decision.  Also check out Professor Angela Valenzuela’s testimony at the hearing, and the testimony of historian Emilio Zamora. 

Our work isn’t finished.   Bills are already being drafted to shift our tax dollars from the public’s schools to the corporate charter chains as soon as the legislative session opens in January.    Our kids deserve strong public schools.  We can stop the charter movement.  

We’ve seen what organizing can do!

To comment on this post click on the word "comment" below

COLONIZING BY TEXTBOOK, Part 1

What my students saw in a Spanish class

Tejano Monument, Austin, TX
Image source:  https://www.flickr.com/photos/wallyg/8069642490

Two students burst into my course on the American High School, angry to the point of tears, theirs the anger of righteous indignation.   Forget the syllabus and the assigned lesson: we had to hear their story.

These two Rice students had observed earlier that day in classrooms at one of the city’s predominantly Latino high schools:  95% Latino, some recently immigrated, most long-time Texans.   The subject of their fury:  a Spanish I textbook.  The kind that goes chapter by chapter introducing grammar rules, verb conjugations, and vocabulary. The interesting stuff is found in those sidebars,-- you know the ones that are in color and talk about the countries and cultures where this new language is spoken. 

My students were almost shouting, “It keeps saying ‘they’!”  “’They’ eat this, ‘they’ wear that….it keeps saying ‘they’!”

Seated in a Spanish class among Mexican American students, my Anglo students were shocked to find that these “cultural” sidebars described Spanish-speakers as an exotic “other.”  The “they” were all native speakers of Spanish wearing rebozos and singing Mariachi; “they all” eat tacos and enchiladas, with corn as the staple in their diet.

The “they” assumed the book – and the class – would be exclusively for non-Spanish speakers.

The problem of “othering” non-Anglo students is larger than the book: the district had vetoed several principals’ attempts to add Spanish-for-Spanish-speakers to their course offerings. Those courses in Spanish and Latin American literature, in advanced composition and conversation, were seen as electives “we can’t afford”  despite a Latino majority in the district’s student population. Thus students who were fluent in Spanish were having to sit through Spanish 1 and 2 to get “foreign language” credits on their transcript.

My students were very upset at what they came to see a form of cultural colonizing in the selection of the book. Even more upsetting was the silence about those “cultural” sidebars: the teacher did not mention them, nor did the students speak up against  this objectification of themselves and their families and their language.   Angela Valenzuela’s path-breaking book Subtractive Schooling:  US-Mexican Youth would suggest that by high school these students had probably absorbed this colonizing, this culturally subtractive curriculum, as normal, as the way we do school.  My students, preparing to be teachers, wanted assurance that this othering is not normal, will not be inevitable. They wanted to learn ways to teach respectfully, drawing on what students bring to class. They aspired to amass culturally rich and authentic instructional materials and, most important, they wanted to not hurt their students. And they wanted to work in schools that supported that vision and made it, not subtractive schooling, the norm.

That old textbook is not likely to still be bouncing around in our city’s high schools. But the colonizing continues and in very dangerous ways.

The newest instrument of colonizing is a proposed textbook that is as startling in the audacity of its racism as in the utter falseness of its content.  Whether as a cynical backlash against the hard-fought victory for Mexican American Studies courses to be approved by the State Board of Education in Texas or as a brash and opportunistic commercial venture, “Mexican American Heritage” produced by uninformed Anglo writers and a conservative former member of the state board of education – does far more damage than those references to a “they,” to the “them” in those Spanish I textbooks that so upset my students.  The "Mexican American Heritage" book didn't sit well with the State Board of Education committee that reviewed it, either:

"Jamie Riddle and Valarie Angle failed to meet the professional standards and guiding principles for the preparation of a textbook worthy of our teachers and youth in Texas classrooms. They failed to engage in critical dialogue with current scholarship and, as a consequence, presented a prolific misrepresentation of facts. This means that the proposed textbook is really a polemic attempting to masquerade as a textbook."

You can learn more about this book here.  Its errors and racist messages are documented by scholars and activists, as well as journalists. It does not take historians to know that a book that calls Mexicans “lazy” is toxic, racist, and frankly ridiculous.

But this racist text is not being met with silence.   Critiques have emerged from historians, activists, community groups, and most important from the state’s Mexican American community – the “we” of this story.

And this book can be stopped.  In fact, the book has catalyzed a movement.  When the State Board of Education meets later this month to vote on this book, the opposition will be organized, vocal and most of all, present.  Add your voice to opposition to having this fake history book in our schools.  See my next post for ways you can speak up against colonizing the Mexican American children of Texas. 

To register your thoughts on this book or share experiences with other ways our schools and our instructional materials may be colonizing our kids, click on the word “comments” below.

REPOST FROM DIANE RAVITCH'S BLOG

Diane's latest post is about a teacher using her own voice against reducing children to data and for honoring children's privacy, not only in the legal sense, but in care for the many ways children learn and grow -- almost none of them linear or precisely measurable.  I encourage you to visit her blog and read the entire thing.

Welcome to Educating. All Our Children., dedicated to building an informed community of advocacy on behalf of our children and their education. The public’s schools, so vital to democracy and to children’s wellbeing, are under siege.  Testing systems that once seemed to be an expensive bureaucratic nuisance that “one day too would pass” are now widely understood to be the Trojan horse of statistical tricks to triage students, discredit teachers, and cast suspicion on the very legitimacy of public education.  The urgency of this assault on the public’s schools calls for timely, informed, collective response:  a paradox of both immediacy and thoughtful deliberation. 

The “All Our Children” in our name means just that – every child must grow and learn and thrive under our care.  The “Educating” extends to us, the parents, teachers, scholars, activists, policy shapers – the grown-ups who must get smarter about what is going on before we can fully educate the children. 

Educating. All Our Children.  will keep the focus on the children as we share timely information, important research studies, voices from the classroom, and in doing so, work to recast – and reclaim --the debates about what our schools would be like if we were committed to a powerful, equitable, and democratic education for all our children.

To begin, a piece I wrote as an introduction to a special issue on Education and Democracy for the American Educational Research Journal – in 2002! Our struggle isn’t new, but energies must be:

“There has perhaps been no time in our history when the links between a public education and democracy have been as tenuous as they are right now, at the beginning of this new century.  From Jefferson to Dewey, from the common schools to the freedom schools, educational practices and policies in the United States have invoked the values of democracy for their legitimacy. Even when the reality has fallen far short of the ideal, the articulated premise surrounding public support for the education of children has been democracy’s need for an educated citizenry.  That an educated citizenry could prevent, discern, and even throw off tyranny underlay the presumption that the education of children was a shared and common good, an insurance, if you will, against tyrants and oppression, against those who would co-opt or silence the voices of the many. The denial of literacy to slaves spoke perversely of the power that Whites believed an educated mind to possess – a power multiplied when held not just by one slave, but by slaves in common. 

Our press and government chambers are filled with stories about education, advocacy for education, plans for education “reform.” Education would seem to be a vaunted priority, a collective good. Yet when closely exampled, many of the policies and practices being promoted as reforms are attempts to restructure even publicly funded education into forms of private goods.  Such efforts include privatization and standardization.

Privatization, particularly in the form of vouchers, removes public education dollars from public governance, transferring public funds into private entities that may or may not have any responsibility to serve a public purpose. . . a fairly transparent threat to a tradition of schooling that presumes both a democratic purpose and a democratic governance of schools. 

The symbolic language of education for democracy has dominated the history of education in the US, even when many of our schools were highly inequitable in the populations they served and extremely hierarchical in their bureaucratic structures.  That symbolic language. . . nevertheless provided a common ground where, from time to critical time, citizens could revisit not only their goals for schooling, but their ideals for their children and for their country."

Our hope in launching this blog – a decade after those concerns were raised -- is to create a space for reclaiming, re-asserting the many ways we need to be talking about children and the public’s schools – morally, developmentally, democratically, creatively, truly educationally.  Educating. All Our Children. aspires to be that common ground.

*An excerpt from “Private Asset or Public Good: Education and Democracy at the Crossroads,” the Editor’s Introduction to the Special Issue on Education and Democracy, American Educational Research Journal (summer 2000, vol 30,2; pp 243-238.)