Weekend To-Do List

12/16 - 12/17

and

Dec 16, 2023

1. Chicago BOE Votes No on School Choice

READ: Chicago’s Board of Education approved a resolution this Thursday that will threaten the city’s school choice system. The Board says its goal is to “transition away” from admissions and enrollment policies, which primarily involve charter and magnet schools, as part of its effort to eliminate all forms of racial oppression. While the resolution states that these policies have enforced cycles of inequity, not all parents agree:

"The selective enrollment schools are one of the shining stars of CPS. They are actually something that CPS has done right," Katie Milewski, a CPS mother, said. "And it needs to be supported. Neighborhood schools absolutely need help. No doubt about that. I’m not sure why those concepts are mutually exclusive," Milewski continued. "Why can’t neighborhood schools be built up, at the same time as supporting selective enrollment and magnet schools?"

2. Republican-Led Coalition Reclaims Idaho School Board From the Far-Right

READ: 31% of West Bonner, Idaho’s school staff left just one year after Moms for Liberty supporters won multiple seats on the town’s school board and hired a new Superintendent. By early 2023, the culture wars had increased the temperature among residents so much that the town’s police chief said he’d rather go to a bank robbery than a school board meeting. Laura Pappano profiled a bipartisan effort among parents and community members, including grandmother-turned-organizer Dana Douglas, to recall and replace the current board:

“I am a Republican. I am a Christian conservative,” said Douglas. “But I am 100 percent pro–public education, and I am pro–every child, and I will do anything for this community to embrace everyone and to love everyone.”

Read more at The Hechinger Report here.

3. New York City’s Contracts System Hurts Kids

READ: New York City students have missed out on field trips, mental health support, and tutoring thanks to the Education Department’s notoriously slow contract and payment processes. Amy Zimmer spoke to several small non-profits whose services are in high demand from local schools but have waited up to a year to receive payment from the city:

Some organization leaders told Chalkbeat they’ve had to take themselves off of payroll to ensure their employees get paid. One nonprofit leader said her organization bowed out after the first year of the community schools contract because of the payment delays. “I’d rather walk away than put my company in that situation,” the organization’s head said, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “Because of the passion we have for the work, we allow certain things to be done. But passion doesn’t pay the bills and keep the lights on.”

4. New Microschooling Experiment Shows Promise – for Some

READ/LISTEN: Allan Gotlieb took to the pages of Education Next to reflect on the year he spent monitoring Learning Societies, an Idaho-based microschooling experiment that melds traditional schooling, online learning, and homeschooling by hiring professional educators to supervise small, in-person student pods. While Learning Societies faced several operational challenges throughout its first year, it also saw significant academic progress, including a 40% increase in students reading at grade level. As the organization prepares for expansion in its second year, one leader cautioned that the model won’t suit every student:

“Our scholars need to have the innate drive to complete their assignments in a high-quality manner or at least the desire to develop this skill,” Bruno said. “One of our early lessons is that those ‘running from something’—they only chose Gem because they didn’t like the local district—struggled more than those ‘running to’ our model of rigorous self-directed learning. The model can work for any scholar, but there has to be total family buy-in to become a self-directed learner and achieve college readiness.”

5. Home Schooling Evangelist Faces Scrutiny for Flawed Research

READ: Laura Meckler at The Washington Post wanted to know how Brian Ray, president of the National Home Education Research Institute, became one of the leading figures in the home schooling movement by peddling non-scientific, biased research. So she interviewed the critics, who range from his oldest daughter to university professors. William & Mary Law School professor Jim Dwyer says the NHERI’s work, much of which is funded by lobbyists and features non-random samples, is typical of idealogues:

“Someone with an ideological agenda can concoct bad social science and convince naive researchers and naive audiences to accept some position. It’s clearly true of Ray. … The research he relies on is not scientifically valid.”

6. MIT, Harvard, and Penn Students React to Congressional Testimony

READ: Olivia Sanchez at The Hechinger Report reported on the reactions of Harvard, Penn, and MIT students as their presidents faced unending security this week for their testimony before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce regarding antisemitism on campuses. The editorial board at The Daily Pennsylvanian, Penn’s student newspaper, sidestepped judgment and focused on recentering student voice:

“As global and local events continue to converge on this campus now and into the future, we should not let voices that are prominent, but distant, speak for us,” the editorial board wrote. “The path forward for Penn must be paved with more, not less, speech. As members of the Penn community, we have a special opportunity, and some may even say responsibility, to speak up about our experiences here.”

7. Could a New Bipartisan Effort Threaten Diversity at Wealthy Colleges?

READ: The House Committee on Education and the Workforce continued to stay in the news this week as they deliberated over a new bill that would ban students who attend 50 of the country’s wealthiest private colleges, including Harvard and Yale, from taking out federal student loans. While the bipartisan coalition of representatives who support the bill say these elite institutions have the resources to fully fund their students, Amy Laitinen, senior director for higher-education policy at New America, disagrees:

“How can we say we are concerned about diversity at the elite institutions in this country and take away the ability for anybody who is not exceedingly wealthy to pay to attend?” In plain terms, the result would be that these colleges, law schools, medical schools, and other graduate programs would look for more students who could cover the full cost of their attendance—meaning the institutions would likely become even more racially and socioeconomically homogenous.

If passed today, 64,000 students would lose $1.8 billion in student loans. Read more from Adam Harris at The Atlantic here.