Weekend To-Do List

4/28-4/30

1. An Adult Charter High School

Indianapolis has a well-earned reputation as one of the most innovative charter school markets in the country. Case in point: they are set to open their seventh adult charter school. Here’s a write-up from Amelia Pak-Harvey in Chalkbeat:

The centers primarily help students ages 18 or older to graduate from high school. The centers are geared toward those who have dropped out of school or are significantly behind their graduating peers. The group’s goal in opening near Twin Aire is to provide educational opportunities for those who are exiting the criminal justice system, said Anne Davis, vice president of education initiatives at the Goodwill of Central and Southern Indiana. The Twin Aire neighborhood is home to the city’s new Community Justice Campus that houses the court system and the jail … Goodwill Education Initiatives is seeking an increase in the current legislative session for the number of seats that Indiana will fund statewide for its adult Excel Centers, which state statute currently limits to 4,900. The group is asking for an additional 1,650 seats, Davis said. The session ends this week.

This is charter schools at their best — serving the most vulnerable. Read more here. 

2. Stockton Probe 

READ: On Monday, a California district attorney announced an extensive investigation into the Stockton Unified School District, following state auditors' identification of potential fraud involving millions of dollars in board members' use of pandemic relief funds. The inquiry will encompass any and all misconduct" within the district and will involve cooperation from the FBI and DOJ. From Yahoo News:

The district, which a top education researcher previously told The 74 was a "worst-case scenario" for its COVID spending, had been waiting on news of a criminal probe after a February report from state auditors highlighted questionable contracts. On Monday, they got their answer: Authorities will not only examine the auditors’ findings, but take an expansive look at other possible malfeasance … Stockton Unified already faces a $30 million budget deficit next year and could be forced to pay back millions more in misspent federal grant money.

3. Fauci: "Show me a school that I shut down." 

READ: Anthony Fauci made some eyebrow-raising comments in an interview with the New York Times:

I happened to be perceived as the personification of the recommendations. But show me a school that I shut down and show me a factory that I shut down. Never. I never did. I gave a public-health recommendation that echoed the C.D.C.’s recommendation, and people made a decision based on that. But I never criticized the people who had to make the decisions one way or the other.

4. Ghosts of the Orphanages

READ/LISTEN: On yesterday’s episode of Lost Debate, I interviewed Dr. Christine Kenneally about her book Ghosts of the Orphanage: A Story of Mysterious Deaths, a Conspiracy of Silence, and a Search for Justice. It’s a sad story of systematic and coordinated abuse that we as a country tolerated for over a century. We followed up that interview with a discussion with Dr. Sarah Font, an expert on child welfare, about our current foster care system. Listen here. 

5. Ban Participation Trophies? 

READ: In North Carolina, three state lawmakers have put forth a bill aimed at prohibiting youth sports awards that are granted purely for participation. Jason Gay, writing in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, argues that this misguided move is actually a distraction from a larger problem:

Naturally, the participation trophy debate isn’t about the children, or even sports. It is yet another pastime for the recreationally outraged, a howl to make an easy score in the culture wars, earning back slaps from followers who think the planet is going to hell, thanks in part to socialist 7-year-old soccer programs … As always, the attention-seeking outrage obscures a genuine issue. The problem with youth team sports isn’t that they’re giving out too many trophies to participants. It’s that participation is down, worrisomely. Numbers have been dropping for a while, both pre- and post-pandemic. According to the Aspen Institute’s Project Play, which monitors data from the Sports & Fitness Industry Association, the percentage of children aged 6-12 who regularly played a team sport dropped from 45% in 2008 to 37% in 2021. That drop was under way well before Covid—participation fell to 38% in 2019, the year before the pandemic. 

Read more here. 

6. Mom’s For Liberty is Winning 

READ/LISTEN: David Gilbert in Vice argues that the conservative political action committee/moms group is accomplishing their goals:

The influence Moms for Liberty had on Carolyn and Tony’s lives was not an isolated incident. Since the group’s founding in Florida in 2020, its influence over local and national Republican politics has grown exponentially: It’s now a nation-wide movement with 260 chapters that claims to be a "grassroots" group working to protect students and defend parents’ rights. Its members are leading the charge on book-banning campaigns across the country and the group says it has helped install 275 of its favored candidates on school boards in 2022 alone, dozens of whom don’t have any children attending public schools in their districts. 

Read more here. 

7. Where are the HBCU Men? 

READ: Naomi Harris and Skylar Stephens wrote about the dearth of men at HBCUs:

At many of the nation’s HBCUs, just 1 in 3 undergraduate students are men. It’s true at some of the largest public institutions, including Texas Southern University, and some of the most-selective private ones, such as Howard University. And, it is happening even as overall enrollment numbers at some HBCUs are rising. Howard, for example, has gained more than 3,000 students since 2016. But of those additional students just 1 in 6 have been male. To be sure, the problem affects more than just HBCUs. Overall, Black student enrollment across higher education has been declining. But it’s particularly evident at historically Black institutions, which are specifically committed to educating Black people.

Read more in the Washington Post. 

8. Flushing Cash Down the Toilet

READ: Connor Boyack and Corey DeAngelis argue that increased K-12 spending in the U.S. has not yielded better results for kids: 

The international academic rankings by the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) evaluate 15-year-olds in 79 different countries to create a comparative score. The latest rankings place the U.S. thirty-sixth among these countries in math with mediocre scores in the other tested subjects. . .  . As of 2018, American taxpayers were compelled to spend an average of $14,400 for every student in elementary and secondary education, an amount that is 34 percent higher than the average spent by other countries in the PISA assessment. (The amount spent on American students for higher education is $35,100 — double the average of other countries.) More money does not equate to better performance. To back up that point further, consider the recent trend of education spending in the United States alone. Since 1970, "the inflation-adjusted cost of sending a student all the way through the K-12 system has almost tripled while test scores near the end of high school remain largely unchanged. Put another way, per-pupil spending and achievement are not obviously correlated." Indeed, while standardized test scores have remained mostly flat or have declined, spending has skyrocketed.

Read more from them in The 74. 

For a counterpoint, read Matt Barnum’s 2019 Chalkbeat article arguing that increased funding helps low income students in particular. Here’s his take:

Does money matter in education? The answer is increasingly clear. A 2018 overview of the research on education spending found that more money consistently meant better outcomes for students — higher test scores, higher graduation rates, and sometimes even higher wages as adults. It was enough for Northwestern economist Kirabo Jackson to say the question was "essentially settled." Since then, the research hits have just kept on coming. Four new studies from different parts of the country have come to similar conclusions. In Texas and in Wisconsin, researchers found that spending more translated to higher test scores and boosted college enrollment. Two other studies — one looking at California and another looking across seven states — found that spending more money didn’t affect test scores in more affluent areas, but did boost test scores in higher-poverty districts.

The obvious answer here seems to be that how the money is spent matters most. Certain investments, like high-powered tutoring, yield strong results. Others, like decreased class sizes, have more mixed support. That’s what makes the New York legislature's recent moves to block funding for tutoring while spending loads on decreased class sizes all the more perplexing. 

9. The College Board’s Secret Apology

READ: The Wall Street Journal editorial board has unearthed emails that suggest the college board wasn’t totally honest about why they changed their AP African American Studies standards:

Gov. Ron DeSantis is credited with forcing a rewrite of a new high-school AP class in African-American Studies, after Florida balked at such lesson topics as "Black Queer Studies." Denying pressure, the College Board said the revisions were pedagogical: "This course has been shaped only by the input of experts and long-standing AP principles and practices.”

Yet its own faculty advisers privately castigated this as dishonest spin, according to emails we obtained via open-records laws. "I have patiently and quietly watched the ubiquitous interviews and media assertions that AP would not make changes at the behest of any group beyond professors, teachers, and students," wrote Nishani Frazier, a University of Kansas professor who sits on the AP course’s development committee. "If this is so, which student, professor, or teacher suggested adding Black conservatives to the course over Combahee River Collective?"

A representative from the College Board went on to apologize to the group for mishandling the process. Read more here. 

10. Summer Camp Feeding Frenzy

READ: Elliot Haspel wrote in the Atlantic about the rush to secure coveted spots in summer camps:

The scramble to sign kids up for summer camp begins in January, because limited slots and huge demand have led to a highly competitive environment that verges on absurd … The lack of universal child care is a pain point for parents throughout the year, but the summer is a unique headache. As with after-school care, parents have to navigate a confusing patchwork of options, but in the summer, they need a plan for all day, every day, for three months. And society leaves them largely on their own to figure it out: A 2019 survey from the Center for American Progress found that for three-quarters of parents, securing summer care was at least a little bit difficult. The system is essentially a competition that has winners and losers, and rests upon a willful ignorance of the reality of most American families—only one-fifth of all parents are stay-at-home. Change is long overdue … Lenhart’s research found that about one-third of parents in 2018 were sending their kids to camp; another study concluded that the kids of college graduates had an attendance rate seven times higher than that of kids whose parents had only a high-school diploma or less.

Read more here.