Massachusetts to allow remote learning pods, kids’ programs outside schools

State education officials announced Friday that families can form small remote-learning co-ops, after-school programs can operate during typical school hours, and churches and community centers can host students who might otherwise be unsupervised when out of school this fall.

The move was made in recognition of the challenges that working parents will face in many districts where schools are expected to hold virtual classes at least part of the week.

The Baker administration had encouraged schools in areas with low rates of COVID-19 to start the school year normally. But since many districts opted for some form of remote learning, Education Secretary James Peyser said in a statement Friday, “it’s critical that we enable parents, after-school providers, and community organizations to offer additional child-care options and learning supports when students are unable to attend school in person.”

Licensed child-care providers will automatically be allowed to serve older children during the school day, in addition to before, after, and out-of-school time.

The state is also expediting licensing so that child-care providers can tap additional space to expand capacity to serve older children. Some day-care centers, for instance, aim to open kindergarten rooms to accommodate the siblings of younger children already in their care.

A larger change will be making spots available for students to be supervised during their remote learning time. “Remote learning enrichment programs” will accept children on a regular or drop-in basis to supervise children from kindergarten to 14 years old, or up to 16 with special needs.

Organizations that want to provide such a space must apply to the local city or town for approval, beginning Monday. The municipality will be responsible for overseeing safety, conducting background checks of staff, and maintaining COVID-appropriate group sizes and health protocols. Group sizes will be limited to the state’s limits on crowds: 25 people indoors and 50 outdoors.

Learning pods, or groups convened by up to five families, will be able to operate without licenses, as long as a parent is on-site at all times. Payments are not allowed, and exchanges of funds are limited to compensation for food and materials.

Governor Charlie Baker on Friday made the changes by executive order.

The Department of Early Education and Care will also support providers in creative solutions to partner with communities to meet the needs of families, officials said.

Some parents and providers had pushed for more flexibility to be able to care for children who will not all be permitted to attend school at the same time, due to concerns about the spread of the coronavirus.

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The New York Times’s podcast “Nice White Parents” makes the false argument that parents removed their children from failing public school because of racism

Why does the public education system continue to fail America’s children? Policy experts have pondered this question for decades. Most say the answer is complicated, requiring a nuanced, collaborative approach.

But not The New York Times. It found the problem, and it’s simple: white parents.

The solution? “Try, whenever possible, to suppress the power of white parents.”

That quote comes from the Times’ podcast “Nice White Parents,” which chronicles the history of a single public school in New York. Specifically, the host, Chana Joffe-Walt, decides to look into the racial history of this school.

Her first finding: Many parents who advocated for the integration of public schools, specifically this public school, did not end up enrolling their children. Instead, they chose to send their children to established schools with a history of success. This choice—made predominantly by white families—is why the school has struggled, Joffe-Walt says.

She contacts several of these parents to scold them for not sending their children to a worse school to serve the larger cause of public education. Some parents note that although they believed in advancing school integration, they perceived this particular school to struggle academically, noting that many students could not read at grade level.

Joffe-Walt chalks up these criticisms to racism, rather than a genuine observation that the school would be a step backward academically for a student functioning at grade level.

Does she offer concrete policy solutions to fix the underlying academic issues plaguing the school? Of course not. Instead, she perpetuates the myth that parents choosing to exit the public school system leads to underfunded schools.

In reality, schools are not underfunded. Not even close. In fact, since the creation of the Department of Education in 1979, education spending has gone only in one direction: up. Test scores, by contrast, have remained entirely stagnant.

New York spends almost $23,000 per student per year in the public school system—a close second to Washington, D.C., for the highest per-pupil expenditure in the country. That figure also is significantly higher than most private school tuitions. So why are so many schools still failing?

One reason: The public school system is drowning in bureaucracy. And bureaucrats get paid before teachers—and before students get new textbooks.

Ben Scafidi at Kennesaw State University has studied the concept of administrative bloat in the K-12 public education system extensively. He found that between 1950 and 2015, the student population at public schools had grown roughly 100%. During that same time period, teaching staff had grown 243%.

Although that disproportionate growth in the number of teachers compared to the growth in student population is shocking enough, that is hardly his biggest finding. During that same time period, “administrators and other staff” in the public school system grew 709%.

An increase in administrative staff exceeding 700% compared to just a 100% increase in students seems to be a far more likely answer to why heavily funded public schools appear to lack resources than the choices of some parents to seek out the best education options available for their children.

Throughout “Nice White Parents,” Joffe-Walt details examples of parents’ getting involved in the day-to-day operation of the school, and paints this involvement as affront to public schooling.

In Episode 1, for example, she describes how when “white parents” came into the school, many wanted their children to learn French, yet no French classes were offered. The parents formed a committee, held fundraisers, collaborated with administrators, and got their French program.

This is problematic, according to “Nice White Parents,” because a French program strays from the cultural needs of the majority-minority population of the school.

This scenario is exactly why every family needs school choice. There never will be a one-size-fits-all public school system that will offer the foreign language needs and wants of every family, nor other such demands.

The New York Times and the makers of “Nice White Parents” argue that the solution to the different wants and needs of families is to ignore the wishes of parents altogether and let education bureaucrats decide what is best for their children.

School choice proponents, by contrast, believe that every family in America should be empowered to choose an education option that is custom fit for their child’s needs. Through programs such as vouchers or education savings accounts, every family would be financially empowered to make that decision. Students do better when their parents are actively engaged in their education.

A podcast attacking parental autonomy is bad enough. But the fact that The New York Times attacks parents of a particular race for executing their autonomy is worse. “Nice White Parents” isn’t just troubling, it’s wrong, and an affront to American ideals.

Ultimately, this hurts all children because “Nice White Parents” racializes the failure of the public schools, hurting the students who are trapped there and don’t have the resources to flee the public system.

There has got to be some accountability for the failure of the public system. The New York Times’ use of a racist canard to avoid systemic culpability for failing these kids isn’t going to cut it.

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School Choice Shines This Week

School choice was a policy star this week at the Republican National Convention. President Donald Trump capped off the week by stating his desire to “expand charter schools and provide school choice for every family in America” during his speech Thursday night, the final night of the convention.

A slate of speakers throughout the week made impassioned cases for school choice, including Rebecca Friedrichs, famous for bringing a legal challenge to the forced collection of union dues. Her effort resulted in the Supreme Court’s ruling in favor of teacher freedom in the case of Janus v. American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees.

South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley and Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., also made powerful arguments for education freedom. Scott called a good education “the closest thing we have to magic in America… When a parent has a choice, a kid has a better chance.”

On Wednesday, Tera Myers, an Ohio mother who helped launch that state’s school choice program for children with special needs, spoke about how life-changing school choice had been for her son, who has Down’s syndrome.

The teachers’ unions were none too pleased. American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten tweeted in part, “Tonight we heard over and over about ‘school choice.’ This is their way [of] pushing to defund public ed.”

Her tweet begs the question: Why would giving parents a choice defund public education?Implicit in her tweet is the recognition that given an option, many parents would chose something other than their child’s assigned district school.

There are numerous policy changes Congress could make to advance school choice immediately, recognizing the particular urgency of the moment (most public schools across the country are still closed to in-person instruction). That includes:

1. Repurposing Existing Federal Programs

There are dozens of federal programs that are ineffective and inappropriate for Washington to manage. Instead of those dollars flowing to district public schools that are largely closed, Congress should redirect funding for those programs to families to use at an education option of choice.

There are many to choose from, including:

Supporting Effective Instruction (Title II, Part A of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act)—which would yield $2.13 billion per year for education choice.

Teacher and School Leader Incentives Fund (Title II, Part B)—$200 million per year.

Literacy for All (Title II, Part B)—$192 million per year.
Student Support and Academic Enrichment (Title IV, Part A)—$1.2 billion per year.

21st Century Community Learning Centers (Title IV, Part B)—$1.2 billion per year.

Education Innovation and Research Grants (Title IV, Part F)—$190 million per year.

2. Allowing Portability of Title I and Individuals With Disabilities Education Act Dollars

To help students with special needs and children from low-income families, Congress should allow Title I dollars and funding from the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act to follow students to learning options of choice.

For example, public schools receive $13.5 billion annually in federal the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act funding for students with special needs, ages three to 21. Federal policymakers could do a better job of serving these students by allowing them and their parents to access micro-education savings accounts worth approximately $2,000 per year, carved out of those existing the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act funds.

Similarly, the design of the federal Title I program for low-income students has become cumbersome and obsolete, with distributions today having little connection to district-level poverty. Congress should allow states to make their Title I dollars portable, following a child from a low-income family to a private school or education option of choice.

3. Creating School Choice for Populations That Congress Is Directly Responsible for Educating

Finally, for education purposes, specific populations of students fall under the jurisdiction of Congress. That include children from active duty military families, Native American students living on tribal lands, and children residing within the District of Columbia—a federal city. Congress should provide education options for these populations.

That includes providing education savings accounts to military-connected children, education savings accounts to Native American children living on tribal lands, and transforming the Washington, D.C., into an all-choice district through expansion of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program.

States Should Lead Charge to Expand Education Choice
Most importantly, states should heed the call to advance education choice. COVID-19 has demonstrated how ill-prepared districts were to meet the needs of students when the pandemic hit. Six months later, most remain closed to in-person instruction, leaving children without access to their schools and friends.

It doesn’t have to be this way. American taxpayers spend more than $700 billion per year on K-12 education. If that money funded children directly instead of defaulting to a district school system, families could have maintained education continuity by directing dollars to learning options that were open, or to private tutors, learning pods, online education, micro-schools, and homeschooling co-ops. But the inflexible nature of the existing system precludes that.

States should be doing everything they can right now to provide emergency education savings accounts to families.

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Australia: Independent review aims to replace existing university entrance test with new Australian Standardised Assessment “ANSA”

The latest independent review into the National Assessment Program - Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) was today presented to the Education Council which comprises commonwealth, state and territory Education ministers.

The review’s key recommendations included that NAPLAN be replaced with the new test “ANSA”, and testing students in Year 10 instead of testing students in Year 9 to better inform senior subject choices.

Sweeping changes to the writing assessment and more focus on critical thinking and science, were also among the recommendations.

If adopted, ANSA would be held earlier in the year as opposed to when NAPLAN is held in May in a bid to prevent schools “teaching to the test”.

It would aim for results to be returned within one week, to inform teaching and learning for the rest of the year.

However, replacing or amending NAPLAN would require consensus of the Education Council.

The review found that the lag between testing and results makes data ineffective for teachers, the writing test was flawed, the timing of the test contributes to teacher stress and student anxiety, and the test lacks contemporary content and delivery.

Education Minister Grace Grace said the review acknowledged that standardised testing should remain but needed to be improved.

“It is clear that the current NAPLAN testing is not world’s best practice,” Ms Grace said.

“By modernising these tests, we will be able to find a model that best suits parents, teachers and most importantly students.

NAPLAN performance has been calculated by finding each school’s yearly average total over five years. Five year change has been calculated by finding the percentage change between a school’s NAPLAN scores over five years.

Queensland schools cover the 2015 to 2019 period. Schools in all other states and territories cover the 2014 to 2018 period.

The Palaszczuk Government recently promised the Queensland Teachers’ Union, who have relentlessly opposed NAPLAN, to advocate for its replacement as a bid to appease the union over its anger and lobbying against the pay-rise deferral.

Ms Grace said the report proposes changes that would address issues that have been heard “loud and clear” that the “testing is onerous for teachers and too high-stakes for students”.

“This review aims to make changes to NAPLAN that alleviate these concerns, all while providing valuable information to schools, parents and the wider community alike.”

Since the testing began in 2008 NAPLAN has been subject to several reviews and controversy, and was this year cancelled because of COVID-19.

The latest review was commissioned by the Queensland Victorian, New South Wales and ACT governments and conducted by education experts Emeritus Professor Barry McGaw AO, Emeritus Professor William Louden AM and Professor Claire Wyatt-Smith.

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