Chicago public schools' sex-crimes unit had 'extraordinary high case volume' in 2022 - "The Chicago Public Schools department charged with investigating sexual misconduct received 470 complaints in fiscal year 2022, a number described as "an extraordinary high case volume... In its four years, the unit has opened 1,735 cases of sexual misconduct. The report stated at least 16 criminal charges have been filed against school-district affiliated adults for sex-related crimes by prosecutors. "While the volume of allegations and the number of substantiated cases of sexual misconduct understandably causes concern within the District and impacted school communities, there is no indication that the frequency of these occurrences is higher within CPS than in other districts nationwide""
Betrayed: Chicago schools fail to protect students from sexual abuse -- Chicago Tribune (2018) - "Their lives were upended, their futures clouded and their pain unacknowledged as a districtwide problem was kept under wraps. A Tribune analysis indicates that hundreds of students were harmed."
Time to bash the Catholic Church and Catholic Priests again. Because the Church used to cover sexual abuse up, it needs to be abolished!
CA Teacher to Zoom Class: 'Sick to My Stomach' over Parents Telling Teachers 'How to Do Their Job' - "A California high school teacher was caught on a Zoom video telling students to “dare” their parents “to come at” her in response to parents’ collective push to end remote learning and have their children return to in-person classes full time. The teacher added, “I am so sick to my stomach of parents trying to tell educators how to do their job.” San Marcos High School teacher Alissa Piro can be heard on video raising her voice in a virtual Zoom class in what appears to be a reaction to an ongoing lawsuit launched by parents seeking eased coronavirus-related restrictions and an accelerated return to in-person classrooms... “However, if your parent wants to come talk to me about how I’m not doing a good enough job in distance learning, based on what you need as an individual, just dare them to come at me,” the teacher continued. “Because I am so sick to my stomach of parents trying to tell educators how to do their job,” Piro added."
When you're not allowed to indoctrinate children freely and have no say over what your taxpayer money is going to, because it threatens the left wing agenda
Don't trust the Science on the failure of virtual learning when teachers don't like it
Thread by @cremieuxrecueil on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "Texas seems to have produced a disproportionate number of interesting natural experiments. Here are a few examples. When Texas tried to get around an affirmative action ban by exploiting de facto school racial segregation, people changed schools so they could get in the top 10%. People moved; home prices adjusted accordingly. Among the students who could exploit the policy, at least 5% switched to a different, typically less-competitive high school, and they tended to displace minorities from the top 10% of that school's graduating class when they did. The implementation of the 10% rule improved the enrollment and graduation outcomes for high-ranked students at low-ranked schools, and it did not harm college enrollment, graduation, or subsequent earnings among students who lost access, and it didn't affect earnings for either. This sits well with Dale & Krueger/Ge, Isaac & Miller's findings regarding the returns to selectivity being in large part returns to student unobservables. Texas also had randomized ballot orders, so they provided data that shows that moving from the last to the first position on a ballot has a massive effect for down-ballot races. In this study, it was nearly ten percentage points."
Crémieux on X - "When Texas implemented its 10% rule, tons of parents switched their kids into easier schools so they would have less competition for college admission. Parents do respond to changes in school quality, funding, incentives, etc. If you want to, say, do an event-study estimate of the effects of school spending on kids' performance, make sure you control for their prior achievement or you use people consistently enrolled before and after the change, or you might be looking at a compositional effect. Side-note: some school funding effect identification strategies suffer from endogeneity:"
Liberals believe people don't respond to incentives. Thus admitting the top 10% of every high school cohort (even in the worst schools) is good
25 States Have Now Left National School Boards Association As Nebraska Departs - "The Nebraska Association of School Boards (NASB) has left the National School Boards Association (NSBA), making it the 25th state to exit. The NASB’s decision on Saturday adds to a mass exodus of departures following a September letter that compared upset parents at school board meetings to domestic terrorists... A total of 30 states have distanced themselves from the national association since the September letter, according to Parents Defending Education, a nonprofit that describes itself as “a national grassroots organization working to reclaim our schools from activists imposing harmful agendas,” The NSBA board sent a letter in September asking federal law enforcement to investigate threats against school officials as domestic terrorism, including implementing the use of the Patriot Act."
The pandemic's lesson on teacher licensure - "The American K-12 school system is expansive, with millions of students attending thousands of schools. And one of the great frustrations of education policy research is that while many interventions appear to be highly effective at small scale, they almost all flop when implemented at the scale that would actually move the needle for the country as a whole. The very existence of this scaling problem suggests that one promising avenue for change is to look at things we are already doing that don’t seem to work, because we could simply stop doing those things. Suppose America hired only right-handed teachers, but then it turned out that lefties teach just as well. Repealing the ban on left-handed teachers would be a large-scale intervention that works. Not an intervention that revolutionizes education, but one that makes it a bit easier for principals around the country to fill vacancies without compromising on quality... Many of the current teacher training and licensing requirements have no real benefits, and getting rid of a lot of them would save time and money for various stakeholders and expand the potential supply of teachers, without reducing quality"
Massachusetts emergency licensed teachers performed as well as other new educators
The teachers are going to be very upset that their protectionism is exposed
Grading Kids Based On Race - "in the District of Columbia, by the end of the 2016/17 academic year, the goal for reading is that there be 70 percent proficiency for black students and that for white students it be 94 percent proficiency. So that's obviously a 24 percentage point difference. But black students are so far behind their white peers right now in D.C. that they're being asked to make a much greater rate of growth."
So much for self-fulfilling prophecies
University agrees that black students should be graded differently - "Students at the University of Washington are demanding that black students should not face difficult exams and time constraints because they are too “busy fighting for [their] rights to sit down and study”."
Of course, when black students' degrees are not valued as much as other students', this will be due to racism and white supremacy
The War on Merit Takes a Bizarre Turn - "For years, two administrators at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (TJ) have been withholding notifications of National Merit awards from the school’s families, most of them Asian, thus denying students the right to use those awards to boost their college-admission prospects and earn scholarships. This episode has emerged amid the school district’s new strategy of “equal outcomes for every student, without exception.” School administrators, for instance, have implemented an “equitable grading” policy that eliminates zeros, gives students a grade of 50 percent just for showing up, and assigns a cryptic code of “NTI” for assignments not turned in. It’s a race to the bottom... When it came time to submit his college applications this fall, he didn’t have a National Merit honor to report—but it wasn’t because he hadn’t earned the award. The National Merit Scholarship Corporation, a nonprofit based in Evanston, Illinois, had recognized him as a Commended Student in the top 3 percent nationwide—one of about 50,000 students earning that distinction. Principals usually celebrate National Merit scholars with special breakfasts, award ceremonies, YouTube videos, press releases, and social media announcements. But not at TJ. School officials had decided to withhold announcement of the award. Indeed, it turns out that the principal, Ann Bonitatibus, and the director of student services, Brandon Kosatka, have been withholding this information from families and the public for years, affecting the lives of at least 1,200 students over the principal’s tenure of five years. Recognition by National Merit opens the door to millions of dollars in college scholarships and 800 Special Scholarships from corporate sponsors... On September 16 of this year, National Merit sent a letter to Bonitatibus listing 240 students recognized as Commended Students or Semi-Finalists. The letter included these words in bold type: “Please present the letters of commendation as soon as possible since it is the students’ only notification.” National Merit hadn’t included enough stamps on the package, but nevertheless it got to Bonitatibus by mid-October—before the October 31 deadline for early acceptance to select colleges. In an email, Bonitatibus told Yashar that she had signed the certificates “within 48 hours.” But homeroom teachers didn’t distribute the awards until Monday, November 14, after the early-application deadlines had passed. Teachers dropped the certificates unceremoniously on students’ desks. “Keeping these certificates from students is theft by the state,” says Yashar. Bonitatibus didn’t notify parents or the public. What’s more, it could be a civil rights violation, says local parent advocate Debra Tisler, with most TJ students in a protected class of “gifted” students, most of them racial minorities, many with disabilities, and most coming from immigrant families whose parents speak English as a second language. “It’s just cruel,” says Tisler. In a call with Yashar, Kosatka admitted that the decision to withhold the information from parents and inform the students in a low-key way was intentional. “We want to recognize students for who they are as individuals, not focus on their achievements,” he told her, claiming that he and the principal didn’t want to “hurt” the feelings of students who didn’t get the award"
The way to prevent "stigma" and "bullying" is to pretend everyone is identical
Public outrage sparked by Idaho’s government offering “porn literacy” to students - "The public is outraged after learning that the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare (IDHW) implements Planned Parenthood-endorsed sex education in schools and purchases materials and training from an interest group promoting porn literacy. The IDHW’s sex education program is funded by federal grants. The IDHW then uses these tax dollars to purchase sex education products from the group Education, Training, and Research (ETR), whose curriculum is developed and endorsed by Planned Parenthood. ETR advocates for teaching elementary school students porn literacy, which involves instruction on “kink and power, pleasure, sexual identity, sexual acts, and sexual exploration in relation to pornography.”... Adam Coleman, founder of Wrong Speak Publishing, added, “These perverts would call us puritans for finding it inappropriate to have elementary school aged kids watching porn.” Some members of the public were shocked to learn that this radical gender ideology had infiltrated schools in a red state like Idaho"
Meme - Libs of TikTok @libsoftiktok: "Not a single student can read at grade level in 30 Illinois schools. I bet they can name a dozen genders though and explain why white people are evil."
"Lovejoy Middle School. Lovejoy Elementary School Brooklyn. Urban Prep Englewood HS. Urban Prep Bronzeville HS. North Lawndale Prep Chtr-Collins. Dunbar Vocational Career Acad HS. Richards Career Academy. YCCS-Scholastic Achievement HS. YCCS- MLL Academy. YCCS-ASPIRA Pantoja Alt HS. YCCS-Association House. YCCS-Austin Career Ed Cntr HS. YCCS-Community YDI HS. YCCS-Olive Harvey Mid College HS. YCCS-Sullivan House Alt HS. YCCS-West Town Academy Alt HS. YCCS West. YCCS-YCL Academy. YCCS Chtr - Chatham. Spry Community Links High School. Clark Acad Prep Magnet HS. Douglass Academy High School. CICS - Ralph Ellison Campus. Chicago Excel Academy HS. Clay City Jr High School. Delavan High School. Edison Primary School. YBMC Charter Sch. Sandoval Sr High School. Bluffs High School"
Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy and others draw attention to Illinois’ dismal education results - "For several years we’ve been sounding the alarm about Illinois’ dismal rates of literacy. In Peoria, just 7% of black children can read at grade level. For Hispanics in Waukegan, it’s only 13%. Decatur’s whites are at just 12%. And of the black students in the Chicago Public Schools, only 17% are at grade level. Overall, 1.2 million of Illinois’ 1.85 million school children can’t read at grade level. Those are numbers the education establishment refuses to acknowledge and doesn’t want parents to know. And its allies in the traditional media often help suppress the facts we frequently report on... “Failing schools don’t need more money, they need accountability” wrote Vivek Ramaswamy... Most of Illinois’ children can’t read. We’ll keep shouting that fact until it gets the recognition it deserves. And that means major reforms to the system: an end to social promotion, a return to phonics, a reinstatement of high expectations, a dismantling of teacher union powers, and, of course, universal school choice."
i/o on X - "ZERO students passed the state math proficiency test at 53 Illinois public schools (almost all of whom are majority-black). At one such school — a "prep school" designed to prepare students for medical careers — the per student spending is $47,000."
Clearly, even more money is needed
Illinois per student spending jumps to nearly $24K, CPS at nearly $30K. - "In 2019, Illinois had about $35 billion in state, local and federal sources to pay for the education of nearly 2 million students. On a per student basis, that was nearly $18,000. Just two years later, total sources had jumped to more than $45.5 billion, or $24,000 per student. Federal covid support helped push up spending by 36 percent in those two years. Now in 2024, the numbers are almost as large. Wirepoints estimates Illinois will spend approximately $44 billion in K-12 education dollars for just 1.85 million students – just shy of $24,000 per student... At CPS, the all-in spending is even higher and the recent jump has been greater despite recent failing results. CPS will spend nearly $9.5 billion this year on its 323,000 students. That’s just over $29,900 per student. Spending has jumped by 40 percent compared to 2019, when the district spent $7.6 billion on 360,000 students – just under $21,000 per student."
Chicago wants $14 billion to ‘modernize’ public schools, one-third of which are half empty - "Over one-third of the city’s 473 traditional schools are at less than 50 percent capacity. $1 billion alone of that infrastructure spending is targeted for the district’s 20 most empty, failing schools – all of which are only 5 to 25 percent full and where, on average, just 8 percent of students could read at grade level in 2022... Rather than spending billions on upgrades, many of these schools should be closed and sold off... But Illinois lawmakers, at the behest of the Chicago Teachers Union, won’t let the district close a single school. Since Mayor Emanuel closed 49 schools in 2013, the district has been restricted by a series of school-closing moratoriums, the most-recent of which won’t expire until January 2025."
i/o on X - "Kansas City Public Schools once spent more than $1.5 billion (more than $40,000 per student) to close race achievement gaps — spending the most in the nation per pupil and twice as much as in nearby suburbs — but black student test scores did not improve."
America's Most Costly Educational Failure - "School reformers rejoiced when Federal District Judge Russell Clark took control of the district in ’85. He ruled it was unconstitutionally segregated, with dilapidated facilities and students who performed poorly. To bring the district into compliance. the judge ordered it and the state over the next 12 years to spend nearly $2 billion to build more schools, renovate old ones, integrate classrooms and bring student test scores up to national norms. But when the judge finally took himself off the case last year, there was little to show academically for all that money. Although the district’s 37,000 mostly minority students enjoyed some of the best‐funded school facilities in the country, student performance hadn’t improved. It was a major embarrassment and an ideological setback for backers of vastly increased funding for public schools. From the start, proponents of Kansas City’s desegregation and education plan had touted it as a controlled experiment that would resolve once and for all two radically different philosophies of education. For decades, critics of excess spending for public schools had said, “You can’t solve educational problems by throwing money at them.” To which educators and public school advocates replied, “No one’s ever tried.” Kansas City settles the argument. Judge Clark invited the district to “dream.” Forget about cost, he said. He urged administrators to let their imaginations soar and assemble a list of everything they might possibly need to boost the achievement of inner‐city blacks. Using the extraordinary powers granted judges in desegregation cases, Clark said he would find a way to pay for it... For more than a decade, the Kansas City district got more money per pupil than any other of the 280 major school districts in the country. Yet in spite of having perhaps the finest facilities of any school district its size in the country, nothing changed. Test scores stayed put, the three‐grade‐level achievement gap between blacks and whites did not change, and the dropout rate went up, not down. Why? One reason was that Judge Clark was unwilling to challenge the educational status quo in Kansas City. After many decades of slow decline, the distnct was burdened with many incompetent teachers. The quickest way to raise achievement would have been simply to fire the bad teachers and replace them with good ones. But for many, the school district was as much a jobs program as an educational institution. Firing teachers was too traumatic. Instead, the district increased teacher pay 40% across the board, which guaranteed that poor teachers would stay farever. Eventually, the ineffective or burned‐out teachers ended up at the district’s office downtown. In time, the central administration grew so large — three to five times the size of the bureaucracy of comparable school districts — that it consumed over half the district’s entire education budget."
Clearly, the problem is that they didn't spend enough money
From 1998. More than 2 decades on, the left still has not learnt
Chicago: Where violence and dismal education intersect - "There’s a good reason why Chicago Teachers Union President Stacy Davis-Gates sends her son to a private school instead of the public one in her community. At Harlan Community Academy, the school Davis-Gates’s son would have attended, only 5 of every 100 students were proficient in reading in 2022. The Roseland community is a dangerous place, too – 28 people were killed there last year. Roseland is one of the 20 worst communities in Chicago where violence and a dismal education intersect, creating a toxic environment for families. Many of those communities experience dozens of murders yearly and have schools where the percentage of children that can read or do math at grade level is in single digits. That leaves most parents with only three options: Suffer in the current system, hope for school choice before it’s too late or flee the city entirely... CPS’ student population has declined 25 percent in the last two decades – a drop driven overwhelmingly by disappearing black families... A partial answer to the problem above was given recently by Stacy Davis-Gates herself when she took her son out of CPS and put him into a private school. Here’s how she explained her move after having previously called private schools “segregation academies” and “racist.”... Unfortunately, Davis-Gates and the rest of the city and state leadership are doing everything they can to stop parents from having that choice here in Illinois. If they get their way in the next month or so, they will kill the state’s only school choice program, a tiny program that grants just 9,700 scholarships to students across the entire state. That’s cruel, considering that about 86,000 kids in the 20 violence-torn communities can’t read at grade level."
Why Is Biden Trying to Punish Charter Schools for Their Success? - "it appears that charter schools use their freedoms to do things that regular publicly funded schools are either unwilling or unable to do. A recent study summarizing the effects of “No Excuses” charter schools—a specific model of charters common in urban centers in the US—estimates that charters provide significant gains in reading and mathematics. Importantly, the studies in the summary made use of the fact that many charters are oversubscribed and are obliged to admit students via a lottery. This makes it possible to compare the outcomes of those admitted with those who applied but were not admitted, and this removes the possibility that the effect is due to ambitious families, who are more inclined to seek admittance to charters, providing a better home environment. This finding is broadly supported by a study conducted by the economist Thomas Sowell of over 100 charters in New York City that share the same building with regular public schools. In analysis after analysis, Sowell finds evidence of the charter schools generally outperforming co-located public schools in English and mathematics. You may think that success in addressing such a wicked problem as the educational underachievement of disadvantaged students would be celebrated, with politicians climbing over each other to take the credit. But that is not the case and it’s important to understand why... If you are sipping a soy latte in a prosperous exurb and you read that a charter school has instituted a policy where students are expected to walk through the corridors silently, it is almost a reflex to adopt the mantle of Rousseau and bemoan the need to control students or seek their compliance with petty rules. Yet, if you have ever worked in a challenging school you will know just how unsafe corridors can be. If not literal warzones, they can bear a striking resemblance. Unfortunately, charter schools’ successful behavior policies are now being undermined. In the aftermath of the police killing of George Floyd last summer, two charter school networks saw the need to issue statements that they were reviewing their approaches. The way that charter schools seek to manage the behavior of students seems to have been conflated with issues of race. Many of the supposed virtues previously promoted by these schools—such as hard work—are now seen by some as associated with “whiteness.” The KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) chain has, for instance, dropped its motto of, “Work hard. Be nice.” It is with this in mind that I read the Biden-Sanders statement about making charter schools more accountable for “civil rights protections, racial equity… disciplinary procedures.” And yet the ability for parents from disadvantaged backgrounds to opt out of a failing local public school and opt in to a charter is still popular with a large section of the US population. A 2019 poll found, for instance, that 53 percent of African American Democrats were in favor of charters, a larger proportion than the 40 percent of Democrats generally... regular public schools are also in a position to suspend or exclude students who pose a danger to others. It is possible that traditional public schools do not make enough use of their powers to manage students and that this is what is driving down behavior and driving up parental interest in the alternatives... The fact is that charters provide a solution for some students in an imperfect system. Either forcing them out of business or forcing them to become just like regular public schools through “accountability” measures will not help anyone. It will simply level-down and see the loss of the modest gains for some disadvantaged students that the charter school system has achieved."
No wonder liberals hate them
Charter Schools and Their Enemies - "A study by economist Caroline Hoxby using a gold-standard random-assignment methodology found that students in the city’s charter schools made substantially better academic progress than they would have in a traditional public school. Margaret Raymond, the director of Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes, conducted a separate analysis and confirmed Hoxby’s study. (It’s notable that other research of Raymond’s found far more mixed results in other states’ charters.) Some critics contend that charter schools harm conventional public schools by robbing them of resources and their best students. But the success of charter students doesn’t come at the expense of kids who remain in the traditional schools, as my own research demonstrates. Was there a relationship, I wondered, between the percentage of students that a traditional New York City public school lost to the charter sector one year and that school’s academic performance the following year? Using data on individual students over time, I found that the more students a public school lost to charters, the better its remaining students performed—probably because the school now faced competition from charters for enrollment. Though that finding contradicts the narrative, propagated by the teachers’ unions, that charters threaten traditional public schools, it’s consistent with a wide body of research evaluating school-choice programs across the nation. In a perfect world, charter schools wouldn’t be a political issue. But their autonomy threatens the teachers’ unions and others who benefit from the restrictions that govern the traditional public school sector... Charters already have more autonomy here than traditional public schools do: since they aren’t restricted by the city’s collective bargaining agreement, they can remove ineffective teachers without the extensive due-process requirements that the traditional schools’ administrators face. But by law, charters still can’t employ many uncertified teachers, which often inhibits them from hiring qualified candidates. At first glance, that restriction might seem sensible. But empirical research provides no meaningful evidence that certified teachers are more effective in the classroom than uncertified ones. So the law stops schools from hiring promising candidates who haven’t jumped through the mandated hoops. A former engineer may or may not turn out to be an effective high school math teacher—but it’s preposterous that she wouldn’t be qualified to teach in a charter school without first obtaining an otherwise useless education certificate. The new mayor should push Albany to allow charter schools to staff their schools with as many uncertified teachers as they please.
Left wingers hate choice and competition
Thread by @notcomplex_ on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "This is the SEED school, a 100% Black public boarding school in DC. These disadvantaged students here enjoy a rigorous study schedule and a spending per student of 63000$ per year, comparable to some of the best schools in the country... They enroll mostly disadvantaged students, only 23 percent of applicants live in a two-parent household and 62 percent live with their mother. 75 percent of students qualify for free lunch. Students here report more motivation and interest in their studies than their peers at other local schools; compared to their peers, SEED students report:
-Doing 4 more hours of homework a week
-Receiving more tutoring from adults
-Participating in student leadership activities
-More academic motivation...
the school sadly has performance comparable to that of the surrounding public schools... Also in terms of lottery comparison, the school saw little change in risky behavior. In fact, the only significant difference was where the SEED group performed worse: general risky behavior. In fact, there was no significant difference in pregnancy/ fathering a child at 26.7%. Overall SEED lottery winners are no more likely to attend college or graduate high school. There isn't much in the way of measured positive long-term effects."
