Tag: public schools

New Policy Watch news story shows the “genius of the market” at work in education

February 14, 2013 at 3:34 pmCategory:Uncategorized

by

Cameron Creek Charter SchoolAnyone who pays any attention to the debate over public education knows the rap consistently advanced by the pro-vouchers/pro-privatization crowd: “We need to bring the ‘genius’ of the free market to education so that schools will compete with each other and thereby drive up the overall quality of education.” This is the same argument under which charter schools are supposed to be “incubators of innovation” that hatch all sorts of brilliant ideas that then percolate  throughout the K-12 system.

A key and obvious flaw in this logic, of course, is its blind and absurd glorification of the private sector. Here’s the real truth about the ”free market” in the U.S.: For all of its many strengths as a wealth producer, it is also frequently a ruthless and cutthroat world in which most new enterprises fail and in which many actors are driven by (and act upon) less-than-honorable motives — most notably greed.

To see evidence of this hard reality in North Carolina’s just-underway move to bring market forces to bear upon K-12 education, check out this story by NC Policy Watch reporter Sarah Ovaska: “Charlotte charter founders accused of plagiarizing, school may not open.”  

It turns out that a new charter school applicant in Charlotte basically lifted the language in its application, word for word, from another applicant. And what is perhaps even more disturbing, Read More…

Encouraging signs on high school graduation

January 22, 2013 at 3:02 pmCategory:Uncategorized

by

It’s only incremental progress, but it is worth noting the quite measurable bump (almost 3%) that has taken place in the most recent data on American high school graduation rates. The data are from 2009-10 so there may even be grounds for hoping that the actual rate is now even higher. This is from the story in Education Week:

“The new NCES report reflects the best performance in decades by high school students. It is the highest graduation rate since 1969-70, when the figure was 78.7 percent. Since 1972, when the dropout rate was 14.6 percent, it has steadily improved, falling to 11 percent in 1992 and 3.4 percent for the class of 2010.

There were 38 states with an increase of one percentage point or more, in the most recent analysis. Overall, 3.1 million students received a diploma in 2009-10, the report, ‘Public School Graduates and Dropouts from the Common Core of Data: School Year 2009-10′ finds.”

Does this mean that the problem has been addressed or that we now know the solution to all of our public education challenges? Of course not. We obviously have a long way to go and can readily surmise that the recent progress is the result of dozens of factors — some related to school policies and some not.

But it also seems safe to draw a couple of additional conclusions from the new data: Read More…

Economic disparity in state public schools is growing

January 18, 2013 at 2:39 pmCategory:Uncategorized

by

Although racial balance in North Carolina’s public schools has remained steady since 2005-06,  students are increasingly separated by income.

That’s one of several findings in a new report by Duke University professors Charles Clotfelter, Helen Ladd and Jacob Vigdor, “Racial and Economic Diversity in North Carolina’s Schools: An Update.”

“Although state-enforced school segregation is now a distant memory, significant disparities remain between schools, both racial and economic,” Clotfelter. “These disparities are among the most pressing civil rights issues of our time.”

Among other findings:

• Imbalance by economic status has increased steadily since 1994-95. This index measures disparities in the percentage of students eligible for free lunch across schools within each of the state’s 100 counties. Vance, Mecklenburg, Hyde, Forsyth and Bertie counties have the highest rates of economic imbalance, meaning school populations do not mirror the counties’ populations.

• Enrollment of Hispanic students in N.C. public schools grew from 1.5 percent in 1994-95 to 13.3 percent in 2011-12. Largely as a result of this growth, the proportion of students attending predominantly white schools (those at least 90 percent white) decreased from 9 percent of all students in 2005-06 to 4 percent in 2011-12.

• After increasing between 1994-95 and 2005-06, average white-nonwhite imbalance in the state’s public schools has remained stable. The study’s racial imbalance index assesses whether the racial makeup of schools mirrors the county’s population. • Racial imbalance is highest in Halifax County, followed by Davidson County. Both counties are served by three racially disparate school districts, a county-level district and two citywide districts. Mecklenburg, Alamance and Forsyth round out the top five most racially imbalanced counties. Each of these counties has one school district.

• Public charter schools are much more likely than regular public schools to be racially unbalanced. Whereas 30 percent of regular public school students attended a racially unbalanced school (one with less than 20 percent or more than 80 percent minority enrollment), more than 60 percent of charter school students attended a racially unbalanced school. This measure considers the racial makeup within a particular school, rather than comparing the school to the county as a whole.

The full report can be found here.

Canaries in the school bus lane

September 7, 2012 at 2:25 pmCategory:Uncategorized

by

(Cross-posted from the blog of the North Carolina Council of Churches).

By George Reed, Executive Director

You probably know how the phrase “canary in the coal mine” came into being, but it doesn’t hurt to repeat it. Before there were other ways of monitoring for dangerous gases in coal mines, like carbon monoxide, miners took caged canaries with them into the tunnels. If gases were present, they would kill the canaries first, perhaps giving the miners a chance to escape. They were what we might call an early warning system today.

There were some big ole yellow canaries in the school bus lanes of Wake County’s public schools last week. The first days of the year were a disaster, at least in terms of transportation. Children waited for buses that ran late or never came at all. In the afternoons, some kids didn’t get home until 6:00 or later. The school system fielded thousands of calls from irate parents. Read More…

Budget cuts are not helping this problem

August 21, 2012 at 8:28 amCategory:Uncategorized

by

The folks at Public News Service highlighted an often underreported story this morning that confronts public school administrators at this time of year: the difficulty that schools have in attracting and retaining good teachers — especially in math and science.  The story focuses on the special challenges confronting poorer, rural districts, but as even the folks in bigger urban districts like Wake and Mecklenburg can readily attest, it is a statewide problem.

So, how could this be? Aren’t we in the midst of a prolonged period of high unemployment? Aren’t would-be teachers happy to have any job?

Well, it’s not quite that simple.  Several factors tend to work against stability in teacher employment. These include the following: Read More…