I remember how it was -- JR
This National School Choice Week, Let’s Celebrate Return to Founding Principles
The school choice policies sweeping the nation may be among the most innovative—and promising—enacted in recent memory. Yet they also embody a return to principles first enshrined in American law nearly 400 years ago.
In 1642, when the Massachusetts Bay Colony crafted the nation’s first education law, its objective was clear: Parents must educate their children.
Echoing Moses’ exhortation to Israelite parents to teach their children and their children’s children the statutes and decrees of the Lord, the law recognized not just the grave importance of a good education, “of singular behoof and benefit to any Common-wealth,” but how parents are uniquely positioned to deliver this benefit.
Education entails more than preparation for the workforce, after all. It entails the cultivation of virtue, both intellectual and moral. To educate children in this way, to form their minds and shape their souls, demands knowledge of their souls—which is to say it requires love. And no one loves a child more than his or her parents.
“Consider how much the dignity and happiness of your children both in time and in eternity, depend upon your care and fidelity,” Founding-era preacher Nathanael Emmons reminded Massachusetts parents nearly a century after the first education law passed. “And let the ties of nature, the authority of God, and your own solemn vows, engage you … to cultivate and embellish their opening minds in every branch of useful and ornamental knowledge.”
In keeping with these natural ties, the 1642 law charged parents—not state bureaucrats—with the duty to ensure that their children learn not only how to provide for themselves, whether through farming or some other trade, but also how to think for themselves, which requires the literacy skills necessary to read and understand texts of history, law, religion, and philosophy, among others.
Should parents neglect this natural duty, the Massachusetts law continued, they would face legal consequences, incurring fines for initial offenses. Prolonged negligence, however, would up the ante. Children whose parents refused to educate them would be placed with government-appointed teachers.
Such was the pedagogical vision of our nation’s earliest lawmakers. Education begins in the home, with parents possessing both the right and the responsibility to direct their children’s education. Only exceptional circumstances would warrant governmental intrusion into this emphatically familial affair.
In this, the Massachusetts colonists’ 17th-century education policies embodied the truth that human law ought to reflect and assist the natural law, rather than seek to undermine or replace it.
As future President Calvin Coolidge reminded another set of Massachusetts lawmakers in 1914, almost three centuries later: “Men do not make laws. They do but discover them.”
The law ought not to supplant parents in their natural role as primary educators of their children, then, but to encourage and, where possible, facilitate this noble endeavor.
For too long, however, modern lawmakers and administrators have perverted this natural order, insisting on government-run schooling as the rule, rather than the exception, while suppressing parental involvement and stigmatizing home-based education as backward.
Thanks to the school choice movement’s tireless efforts, in several states those days finally are coming to an end.
Among the cutting-edge tools employed in the movement’s fight for education freedom are universal education savings accounts or ESA-style options, which allocate a portion of a school district’s per-pupil spending to an account that parents then may use for their children’s education. Although vouchers must be used for tuition, ESAs may be used for other educational expenses as well, including home-schooling materials, individual classes, personal tutors, special needs therapy, and more.
As universal policies, these accounts are available to all K-12 students in states that have embraced them, regardless of income level. They also permit parents to save unused funds from year to year, encouraging a fiscal responsibility that ever has eluded government-run schools.
Add to the universal ESA programs now live in nine states (and counting) the curriculum transparency laws that more than a dozen states have adopted in recent years, and it’s clear that such policies better enable parents to take charge of their children’s education.
Affirming that parents are their children’s primary caregivers, transparency laws protect parents’ right to know what their children are reading and learning at school, so that parents in turn can make informed decisions concerning their children’s education.
In other words, education choice policies invite parents—all parents—to resume the central role they traditionally held in America’s approach to education.
Like the Puritans’ 1642 law, transparency reforms and ESAs summon parents to take the reins, reviewing curriculum options for their children, customizing the courses taken and skills honed to their children’s particular talents and needs if not teaching themselves, and planning for their children’s future.
Should parents reject this invitation, government-run schools remain available as the backup option lawmakers initially intended them to be.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/01/22/school-choice-movement-revives-americas-education-principles/
***********************************************Public Education's Alarming New 4th 'R': Reversal of Learning
Call it the big reset – downward – in public education.
The alarming plunge in academic performance during the pandemic was met with a significant drop in grading and graduation standards to ease the pressure on students struggling with remote learning. The hope was that hundreds of billions of dollars of emergency federal aid would enable schools to reverse the learning loss and restore the standards.
Four years later, the money is almost gone and students haven’t made up that lost academic ground, equaling more that a year of learning for disadvantaged kids. Driven by fears of a spike in dropout rates, especially among blacks and Latinos, many states and school districts are apparently leaving in place the lower standards that allow students to get good grades and graduate even though they have learned much less, particularly in math.
It’s as if many of the nation's 50 million public school students have fallen backwards to a time before rigorous standards and accountability mattered very much.
“I'm getting concerned that, rather than continuing to do the hard work of addressing learning loss, schools will start to accept a new normal of lower standards,” said Amber Northern, who oversees research at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a group that advocates for academic rigor in schools.
The question is—why did the windfall of federal funding do so little to help students catch up?
Northern and other researchers, state officials and school leaders interviewed for this article say many districts, facing staffing shortages and a spike in absenteeism, didn’t have the bandwidth to take on the hard work of helping students recover. But other districts, including those that don’t take academic rigor and test scores very seriously, share in the blame. They didn’t see learning loss as a top priority to tackle. It was easier to spend the money on pay rises for staff and upgrading buildings.
The learning loss debacle is the latest chapter in the decade-long decline in public schools. Achievement among black and Latino students on state tests was already dropping before COVID drove an exodus of families away from traditional public schools in search of a better education. Although by lowering standards and lifting the graduation rate districts have created the impression that they have bounced back, experts say that’s the wrong signal to send, creating complacency when urgency is needed.
“There is a lot of fatigue among educators in looking at this issue and how to deal with it,” says Karyn Lewis, a research director at assessment group NWEA. “But if we just accept this as the new normal, it means accepting achievement gaps that have widened exponentially. That is what’s most concerning.”
The Depths of Learning Loss
The Nation's Report Card/National Center for Education Statistics
During COVID all types of students fell behind, partly because of chronic absenteeism of more than 25% that persisted even after they returned to in-person schooling. On average, students fell behind by the equivalent a half year's worth of learning in math and a bit less in reading, while those in high poverty cities like St. Louis regressed three times that much, according to a joint Harvard-Stanford study. Reading scores in 2022-23 resembled those of the 1970s, before the era of school accountability.
What’s even more worrisome is that students have not been recovering. NWEA has examined the test scores of 6.7 million students since the fall of 2020 when all schools resorted to remote learning. Researchers found that after an initial drop off in performance when compared to pre-pandemic scores, the pace of learning returned to normal in 2021-22. That seemed like good news. But then learning slowed again the next year. This means students have been losing more ground even after returning to classrooms, lacking the skills to keep up with a curriculum that keeps advancing.
“It's alarming to us that the academic growth in 2022-23 was actually more sluggish than the previous year,” said Lewis, co-author of the study. “The students are missing those building blocks in their skills that allow them to understand grade level content.”
The consequences for students with learning loss could be serious, affecting everything from lifetime earnings to incarceration rates. In a paper co-authored by Harvard’s Thomas Kane, researchers estimate that K-12 students on average face a drop in lifetime earnings of almost 2 percent, totaling $900 billion.
As learning declined, so did academic standards. More than 40 states eased requirements beginning with the class of 2020, according to a report in Education Week. Graduation tests and required courses were eliminated, and the number of credits needed to graduate was reduced. Schools also backed off on standard grading with credit-no credit scores, limits on low grades and more.
***************************************************
Australia: The road to reform in higher education is long and slow
Late next month Education Minister Jason Clare will at last unveil his long-term plan for higher education when he releases the final report of his Universities Accord.
It’s the culmination of something that started 15 months ago and has consumed a huge amount of effort from the Accord panel, education bureaucrats and those who made 800-odd submissions to the review.
The Accord review had broad terms of reference that would have allowed it to be another Bradley Review leading to major reforms. But as it progressed, the heady enthusiasm that marked its beginning gradually waned. It became clear the Universities Accord would be limited in its immediate impact.
It’s main idea for visionary change is to expand university access for students from disadvantaged backgrounds – something to which Clare has a deep personal commitment.
But other goals that are priorities of universities look like being pushed toward the horizon.
For example, as a legacy of the Morrison government, HECS fees are now four times higher for students doing humanities, law and business degrees compared to those doing teaching and nursing degrees. The goal of this Morrison policy, to persuade more students to become nurses and teachers, is not being achieved but we are left with this inequitable fee structure. Fee reform is essential but it does not look likely to happen quickly under the Universities Accord.
Similarly the urgent pleas of research-intensive universities for more research funding are unlikely to be fulfilled in the short term.
The Accord will almost certainly recommend the creation of a new Tertiary Education Commission to oversee universities, and it seems likely that many things universities want, such as fee restructuring and a research funding review, are likely to be shunted to the commission for consideration down the track.
But Clare must find money for any new initiatives – including extra funding for disadvantaged students – from within his portfolio, which is why a tax on international student revenue is expected to be recommended by the Accord review, to the chagrin of nearly all universities.
The upshot is a reform plan that will extend over several terms of government, and, as any observer of politics knows, such plans rarely retain the support they need for that lengthy period.
We all know government works under constraints but, at this stage, it looks like a lot of work has been done to create something that is weighted toward aspiration rather than action.
******************************************************
My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
******************************************************
No comments:
Post a Comment