In 2008 I supported Obama’s primary bid, but I wrote at the time that Hillary Clinton’s statement on education was more progressive and creative than Obama’s. Unfortunately, as president, Obama has held true to his timid campaign statements on education and adopted a less-than-progressive educational agenda. With his appointment of Arnie Duncan as Secretary of Education and his embrace of the Democratic hedge funders and other members of the Billionaire Boys Club who created Democrats for Education Reform, he joined the Democratic wing of the “education reform”/privatization movement, even though Linda Darling-Hammond, his educational advisor during the 2008 campaign, was pulling him the other way. We ended up with an administration that continued George Bush’s educational legacy by throwing its support behind high stakes testing and the expansion of charter schools.
If this year’s Democratic education platform is any indication, the party may be moving in a more progressive educational direction. The tepid first draft of the education platform was revised due mainly to members of the Sanders delegation working together with some Clinton supporters. In an indication of how significant the changes are, DFER is furious.
If you want a detailed description of the changes, go to Valerie Strauss’s post in her “Answer Sheet” column in the Washington Post. Here are some highlights.
While both drafts of the platform support “great neighborhood public schools and high-quality public charter schools” and “oppose for-profit charter schools focused on making a profit off of public resources,” the revised draft says public schools and charters should be “democratically governed.” That’s a big difference when it comes to charters, since their boards are often made up of a tight group of supporters appointed by the school, and charters are notoriously opaque about their finances and operations. It also adds this.
“We believe that high quality public charter schools should provide options for parents, but should not replace or destabilize traditional public schools. Charter schools must reflect their communities, and thus must accept and retain proportionate numbers of students of color, students with disabilities and English Language Learners in relation to their neighborhood public schools.”
When it comes to high stakes testing, the original draft simply talks about being “committed to ensuring that we strike a better balance on testing so that it informs, but does not drive, instruction.” The revised version is far more specific about the problems arising from heavy dependence on standardized testing, and t states that parents should be able to opt their children out of the tests.
“[W]e encourage states to develop a multiple measures approach to assessment, and we believe that standardized tests must meet American Statistical Association standards for reliability and validity. We oppose high-stakes standardized tests that falsely and unfairly label students of color, students with disabilities and English Language Learners as failing, the use of standardized test scores as basis for refusing to fund schools or to close schools, and the use of student test scores in teacher and principal evaluations, a practice which has been repeatedly rejected by researchers. We also support enabling parents to opt their children out of standardized tests without penalty for either the student or their school.”
The revised draft includes strong language against discriminatory discipline policies which can lead to the “school to prison pipeline.” It advocates for universal preschool. And it acknowledges the importance of improving the lives of children outside of school to their educational success.
“The Democratic Party is committed to eliminating opportunity gaps–particularly those that lead to students from low income communities arriving to school on day one of kindergarten several years behind their peers from higher income communities. The means advocating for labor and public assistance laws that ensure poor parents can spend time with their children. This means being committed to increasing the average income in households in poor communities. It means ensuring these children have health care, stable housing free of contaminants, and a community free of violence in order to minimize the likelihood of cognitive delays. It means enriching early childhood programming that increases the likelihood that poor children will arrive to kindergarten with the foundations for meeting the expectations we have for them in the areas of literacy, numeracy, civic engagement, and emotional intelligence. It means we support what it takes to compel states to fund public education equitably and adequately, as well as expand support provided by the Title I formula for schools that serve a large number or high concentration of children in poverty. It means that we support ending curriculum gaps that maintain and exacerbate achievement gaps.”
The platform changes don’t mean much unless Hillary wins and she, supported by Democratic members of Congress, embraces them. But to the extent that the education component of the platform reflects the growing influence of the most progressive wing of the party, it increases the possibility that Democrats will move away from the more conservative policies enacted by the Obama administration.
This article appears in Jul 14-20, 2016.
Both the Democratic and Republican Party platforms on education are weak, and do nothing to address the structural problems with our current public education system.
What is needed at this juncture is a separate system along side the existing system. A system with a completely different curriculum, a focus on personalized learning, project-based assessment and simulation, and connections to apprenticeship.
Our current system is too powerful and too tightly balanced in an equilibrium of forces – you cannot change one without the others rebelling against the change.
Also, the industrial era structure of standardization and mass-schooling no longer fits with a population that is wants to have more control of what, when, where, and how it learns. Everything about education and learning needs to change. The only way to do it is to start over with a new model that does not have the current system’s constraints.
Let’s forget all the social engineering, political and religious agendas, and focus on the results — when a child, any child, graduates from high school, they should be able to fully read and write in English, all thought being able to read and write in any other language would be a bonus, they should be able to use critical thinking skills to see the world as it is and not just be a “good” consumer who buys lock, stock and barrel what the politicians, marketers, scientists and religions are trying to sell. They should be able to do math that allows them to balance a checkbook — unlike the federal, state and local governments — and know when financial institutions are setting them up for failure and a debt-ridden life. Finally, they should be taught how to lead a safe, secure and healthy life, free of those who would yoke them into lives destroyed by fast food, fast cars, easy money, fuzzy ethics, loose morals, drugs, alcohol, tobacco and sitting on the couch in front of the television or computer screen waiting for everything to be delivered to their door.
Here’s a clue on platforms, Democrats’ or Republicans’: They are meaningless statements that say little in terms of actual legislation to be proposed and embraced by the winning party. Like “in my first 100 days, I will….” Platforms, like bonfires, take lots of short term energy to build, only to be set afire immediately after the election has been decided.
Hillary? Lots of dollars will flow to the “educational reformists” and her campaign benefactors while the wheels on the bus go round and round. Bill will be scheduled to speak to the same groups for hundreds of thousands per brain fart, while teachers plead for supplies. Get ready for creeping progressive incrementalism (and that’s if Clinton actually beats Trump).
And that is by no stretch of the imagination a sure thing.
Rick Spanier, looks to me like you understand very well what we can expect from another Clinton administration. Too bad Sanders chose to endorse the financial industry’s candidate rather than accepting Jill Stein’s invitation to run on the Green Party ticket. A Sanders Green candidacy may have divided the “liberal” vote, but it would have been better than giving the “Democratic” party the impression that it can continue to shut out candidates who actually reflect the base’s values and still succeed in getting the base to vote for establishment candidates that will not do what the country needs done.
For all his pretense of cynicism, Safier proves himself entirely willing, always, to swallow his own party’s lines, locally and nationally, and he evidences astonishingly ill-advised optimism about party politicians’ potential effectiveness in getting theory to translate into meaningful practice. When it comes to local politics, he propounds theories and endorses candidates and then pays absolutely no attention whatsoever to what they actually do in office. In national politics: see above.
I used to believe that Safier had a conscience that might, if provoked sufficiently, become active in what he wrote here and in whom he endorsed. These days, I’ve lost that belief. I’ve followed his commentary for three solid years and I’ve yet to see anything that would demonstrate that he’s capable of anything other than soul-lesson promoting of business-as-usual party-line politics.
“Hillary Clinton’s disclosure also shows that her husband made an undisclosed amount of money last year (2015) in consulting roles for two international interests — the Dubai-based Varkey GEMS Foundation and Laureate Education Inc., a global for-profit education firm. Bill Clinton ended his relationship with Laureate last year after earning $16.5 million as the operation’s honorary chancellor, according to previously released Clinton tax records. Bill Clinton also has made more than $5.6 million in an honorary role for the GEMS foundation.”
http://bigstory.ap.org/article/9724b250129…
$22,000,000 for doing squat. Oh, but the Democratic Party platform is so progressive and anti-for profit schools.
These are the same education progressive democrats that eliminated trade skill classes, And then shipped out jobs overseas. Corporate tax rates was the mail in the coffin that accomplished the destruction of the American blue collar tradesman.
Obama and the Clintons call it globalization. It actually reads more like treason as they enrich themselves.
It’s astounding the degree to which people who have to work for a living in this country have been persuaded that the country’s problems are the fault of requiring the class that has, throughout history, always played the largest role in depressing wages to pay their fair share of the taxes that support infrastructure and services available to all. As Sanders noted during his campaign, his tax proposal involved returning the tax rates on the top brackets to what they had been during Dwight Eisenhower’s administration, provoking the interesting thought that perhaps part of what it will take to “make America great again” is not building border walls and developing protectionist economic policies, but reverting to a tax code that is sane and fair and has worked very well in our country’s past, before the Reagan era issued in such successful programs of self-serving neoliberal groupthink / brainwashing and the sad spectacle of the corporate class persuading millions of its employees to vote against their own economic best interests and to become vociferous defenders of their employers’ right to avoid fair taxation in support of the common good and to refuse to distribute a fair share of the profits made from their labor back to them in the form of decent wages and benefits.
That our population is vulnerable to being misused and exploited in this way is, among other things, a testament to the conspicuous failure of our education system, which produces graduates without enough knowledge of history and economic theory to recognize shoddy and manipulative arguments when they encounter them in political campaigns.
David Safier: to expect Hillary Clinton to deliver effective push-back against the corporate agenda for education and taxation — rather than to pay lip service to the need to resist the corporate agenda while she is trying to persuade former Sanders supporters to vote for her, which is what she is doing — is naive at best (if you actually believe her, which seems doubtful) and manipulative at worst (if you know she won’t follow through but you want people to vote for her because you don’t want Trump to win the election).
With a rebel yell they cried more, more, more. Start cutting wasteful programs and you already have more than you need. How much did Obama waste trying to overthrow Israel?
Our population is more vulnerable from the socialist, globalist lies. They could learn a lot from Reagan era if they were not so lied to.
How much more should be cut, Rat T, from Arizona’s Child Protective Services? Try talking to one of their overloaded caseworkers some time, or to a rep from one of the many underfunded, insufficiently professionalized, patched together non-profits that tries to fill one of the gaping holes in the sinking ship of child welfare in this state. “A thousand points of light” indeed. Rather: a dysfunctional, uncoordinated mess of voluntary “social enterprises” that provide “services” that are gravely insufficient in some areas and redundant and superfluous in others and, even where they may fill a real need, are often impaired in their effectiveness by being delivered by insufficiently qualified (and underpaid) staff.
Those who promote the further dismantling of the public sector should take a good look at what is actually happening to people in our community as critically important services are cut and cut and cut again rather than continuing to get information about how beneficial “starving the beast” is from the ALEC newsletter.
To return to the topic of this blog: Clinton-style collaboration with and capitulation to the forces behind privatization will not get this country where it needs to go. The time has come to let the Democrats know that if they continue putting people like Clinton forward, their candidate will lose in the general because they cannot unite the base behind her.
David: could you do a compare and contrast on exactly what Obama said about education before he became president and what the policies became once he was in office? I’ve seen clips of his campaign speeches that seem to indicate there was a significant difference between his campaign statements and what he was allowed to do once the interests backing him got him into office. How about an explanation of what happened with the federal education policy advisory committee after he assumed office? I’ve heard it described as an externally forced “sweep” over which he had little control.
What could your reason be for thinking that what we’re seeing with Clinton will not be the same: a candidate being allowed to make statements that may sway voters, while there is no chance the candidate, if they become an elected official, will be allowed to implement those policy ideas?
I didn’t advocate cutting necessary services. Why can’t you folks ever concede that there are things that are NOT necessary? Yours is an old trick. Politicians also use it well.
The verdict is in on both Obama and his education legacy “Race to the Top” of which Common Core Standards were the tent pole. United States math scores went down for the first time ever from 2011 to 2015 and reading scores did not improve.
By comparison, Arizona had the highest combined math and reading gains from 2011 fourth grade to 2015 eighth grade. Our African Americans eighth graders rose to number one in the nation, our Hispanics rose from 35th to 11th and our white students rose to 6th.
Could the evidence be more stark about which approach works between centralized systems and decentralized systems? Monopolies versus free markets?
Nothing will change until the population of Arizona stops CONSISTENTLY giving power to the ideology that screwed it up in the first place.
What do you all think………………………..they’ve effed it up for the last 30 years BUT..if we re-elect them, they promise they’ll fix it “This time?” Has the education system here made you all THAT stupid???
Guess that question will be answered in November.
Last time an “establishment” candidate (Gore) was spurned in favor of a “pure” candidate (Nader) we got George W Bush. I think it’s hilarious when people want to repeat that with Sanders. Be careful what you wish for.
Also find it hilarious that accepting “persons of color” and “english language learners” is so commonly accepted as undesirable that they have to spell out that unpleasant requirement for charter schools.
We wouldn’t have the problem with English language learners if we just returned to historically normal levels of immigration. We have been importing 6 times the historic average with predictable problems of assimilation.
From the revised Democratic party platform: “Charter schools must reflect their communities, and thus must accept and retain proportionate numbers of students of color, students with disabilities and English Language Learners in relation to their neighborhood public schools.”
Could we just acknowledge openly the indisputable fact that properly educating students to our curricular grade-level standards when they:
A) enter school with deficits in their pre-literacy and pre-numeracy skills compared to the majority of their peers of the same age
B) must receive instruction in English as a second language at the same time that they gain competence in core subjects
C) have cognitive disabilities or diagnosed special education needs
requires the installation and maintenance of professionals with special training in these areas of education and thus is more expensive for a school to achieve than educating students who don’t have special needs to the same curricular, grade level standards?
District public schools have depended for a long time on funding formulas that assume a certain percentage of these kinds of needs in the population, and that percentage has been altering as more families with children who do not have remedial needs, ESL needs, or special education needs have been exiting the public district school system for charters and privates. As the ratio alters, it creates funding problems for district schools because it costs less than the per-pupil amount currently allocated to educate a child with no special needs, more than the per-pupil amount currently allocated to educate a child with special needs.
But the solution to the funding problems created as ratios of special needs to non-special needs students in district public schools change is not to require every charter school, many of which have very small-scale operations, to deliver services their size may not make it financially feasible for them to provide. Nor is the solution to require all schools to be large enough to sustain ratios that make retaining the full complement of ESL and special education professionals on site possible. A more effective and fair solution to the problems public district schools are experiencing as their ratios are altering is to adjust the per-pupil rate for students with special needs to accurately reflect the ACTUAL expense of giving these students the high-quality education they deserve, delivered by fully qualified professionals. Adjusting the rate to reflect the reality of expense should help more schools of all types retain the needed services, but there would still be a “threshold” — a minimum # of students enrolled requiring a certain kind of service needed to support the necessary staff, and it will probably be the case that not every charter school — and perhaps not every district school — will have the enrollment numbers of students with special needs of various sorts to support the installation of every kind of special service on every site. Publicly funded transportation needs to be provided to the sites where the type of services each child needs are being delivered to remove any geographic or financial obstacles to families to enrolling each of their children in the school best equipped to meet their needs, but the notion that it should be possible for every publicly funded school in existence to have the full range of services needed by every member of our school-age population is an impractical, unimplementable, fiscally irresponsible fantasy. I am disappointed that the Democratic party platform now includes this plank, and I hope attempts to implement it won’t do as much damage as attempts to implement other misguided federal policies (Race to the Top, etc., ad nauseam) have done.
Rat T. – Rather than posting your usual snark, please point out what services you deem unnecessary? I agree there is plenty of waste in public and private education, but I don’t think services are where the problem lies.
Pick up the book “Government Waste From A-Z” If only concerned Americans had heeded the warning 30 years ago. Mr Gross was spot on. It would still work today. Sorry my snark has become usual, but after a lifetime of commenting, little progress has been made.