I remember how it was -- JR
Over a Million Students Left District Schools. Are They Learning?
The education disruption caused by mass school closures and prolonged remote instruction beginning three years ago this month led many families to seek other learning options beyond an assigned district school. Emerging research reveals just how significant and sustained that shift was.
In a new report, “Where the Kids Went: Nonpublic Schooling and Demographic Change during the Pandemic Exodus from Public Schools,” Stanford economist Thomas Dee reveals that more than 1.2 million students left district schools during the pandemic response. That exodus endured throughout the 2021/2022 academic year, as families continued to opt for private schools and homeschooling even though most district schools reopened.
Indeed, homeschooling accounted for the largest growth area. According to Dee, for every one child that enrolled in private schools during the pandemic, nearly two children became homeschoolers. The district schooling exodus was particularly pronounced in areas where district schools remained closed the longest, as previous research also revealed.
Prolonged school closures and remote district schooling were the triggers many parents needed to explore other educational possibilities for their children. Now that they have discovered private schools and homeschooling, many families have no desire to return to a district school.
This shift has some people wondering about how children are being educated outside of a district school. Dee concludes his paper by stating that “the sharp and sustained growth in homeschooling and private school enrollment raises new questions about the quality of the learning environments children are experiencing.”
Parents clearly believe that the “quality of the learning environments” their children are now experiencing is better than the district schools they fled. For those families who chose homeschooling and private schooling over the past three years, they gave up a local “free” option for something more expensive, either in time or money—or both. Their continued satisfaction with the quality of their children’s new learning environment is keeping them there.
If parents are satisfied with that quality, then the rest of us should be too.
It helps that there are now many more education options for families, thanks to the everyday entrepreneurs who are creating new learning models and reimagining K-12 schooling.
One of those entrepreneurs is Amber Okolo-Ebube. A longtime homeschooling mother of four children in the Dallas/Fort Worth area of Texas, Okolo-Ebube runs Leading Little Arrows, a weekly homeschooling enrichment program focused on nature, art, and STEM subjects. Her program has become so popular over the past year that she recently leased a building across the street from the University of Texas at Arlington campus. With 33 students and several adult facilitators, she is already near capacity, and will be expanding to run a microschool this fall.
Approximately three-quarters of Okolo-Ebube’s students are neurodiverse, with several, including two of her own children, on the autism spectrum. Leading Little Arrows provides the individualized learning environment and freedom of movement that enables both neurodiverse and neurotypical children to thrive.
Okolo-Ebube sees continued interest from families in homeschooling and other schooling alternatives. “I feel like there’s been a shift,” she told me during my recent visit to Leading Little Arrows. “I think COVID showed parents what was happening in their children’s schools, and also showed them that they could do better with homeschooling.”
She fields calls regularly from parents looking to leave local district schools for homeschooling and microschooling. “I don’t think this is stopping any time soon,” she said.
The Dallas/Fort Worth area has become a hub of education entrepreneurship and innovation. Many of these entrepreneurs, including Okolo-Ebube, have received small grants from the VELA Education Fund to accelerate their programs. A philanthropic nonprofit, VELA provides microgrants to entrepreneurial parents and educators who are building out-of-system learning models, such as microschools, homeschool co-ops, learning pods, and more. Since launching publicly in 2020, VELA has provided grants to over 2,000 of these entrepreneurs across the US, totaling more than $20 million.
The quality of Leading Little Arrows is measured by the continued growth of the program and increased parent interest, as well as the fact that some of Okolo-Ebube’s families drive more than an hour each way to attend. The parents I spoke with told me they value the diversity there, not only racially and socioeconomically, but also the diversity of ages of students (3-17) and the neurodiversity that is represented and celebrated. They also appreciate the personalized curriculum content that is being provided, with academic blocks bookended by ample outside and free-play time.
Over the past three years of education disruption, parents have been empowered to take back control of their children’s education. They are exploring learning options beyond their assigned district schools, and are flocking to homeschooling, microschooling, and related private education models at record rates. Education entrepreneurs across the country are acknowledging this demand for new and different educational possibilities, and are creating the kinds of quality programs that parents want.
https://catalyst.independent.org/2023/03/21/million-students-schools/?omhide=true
*****************************************School Choice Primarily Benefits Students Who Weren’t Already in Private Schools
As school choice sweeps across the country, opponents are getting more desperate in their attempts to stem the tide. Like those who spring October surprises in presidential campaigns, aiming to derail candidates with false but confidently expressed last-minute accusations, opponents of school choice seek to undermine it with a falsehood just as state legislatures gather to vote on choice proposals.
The misleading falsehood is the claim that universal school choice programs wouldn’t expand opportunity because the vast majority of the beneficiaries would be students who already are enrolled in private schools.
The claim is that choice programs do little more than give taxpayer money to families whose kids already attend or would have attended private schools anyway at their own expense. This may provide financial relief to those families, but they are assumed to be advantaged and therefore undeserving of assistance.
Let’s leave aside the fact that all families pay taxes and so all deserve greater control over how those resources are used to educate their own children. As education freedom advocate Corey DeAngelis reminds us, we should fund students, not systems.
And let’s also ignore the insulting assumption that parents who struggle to pay private school tuition, even as they pay taxes for a public school they don’t use, are somehow unworthy of relief from this double financial burden. The assertion that the vast majority of students who use school choice already were enrolled in private schools is completely untrue.
The main promoter of this false claim is Josh Cowen, a professor at Michigan State University who founded and directed its Education Policy Innovation Collaborative. Cowen, however, ceased being affiliated with that center for reasons that haven’t been disclosed, and, around the same time, became a full-throated advocate against school choice.
Cowen writes in a Network for Public Education blog post: “Despite supporter rhetoric that voucher schemes are about new opportunities, the reality is 70-80 percent of kids in states like Arizona, Missouri, and Wisconsin were already in private school before taxpayers picked up the tab.”
He also has widely circulated on social media an infographic by the National Coalition for Public Education that answers the question “Who benefits from school vouchers?” by asserting: “The majority of voucher users in these states have never attended a public school. Vouchers subsidize tuition for students who already attend pricey private schools.”
The coalition’s infographic claims that 80% of choice students in Arizona, 89% of choice students in New Hampshire, and 75% of those in Wisconsin were “already in private school.”
The true rates of choice students who were “already in private school” (or would have enrolled in one anyway) are less than half as large as Cowen claims in those states. Cowen arrives at his inflated figures only by using outdated information and wrongly assuming that all students without a record of prior enrollment in a public school in the state must have been in private school previously.
The largest number of school choice students enter those programs in kindergarten or first grade. Cowen falsely asserts that all those students were “already in private school,” when in fact most weren’t enrolled in regular school at all. They would show no record of having previously been enrolled in public school, but that doesn’t mean that they were “already in private school.”
***********************************************
Stanford Law ‘Diversity’ Dean Who Allowed Students To Heckle Conservative Federal Judge Placed on Leave
How fitting that the student thugs wore Fascist black
Stanford Law School announced via a ten page memorandum on Tuesday that no disciplinary action will be taken against students who angrily protested the presence of a federal appellate judge, Kyle Duncan, and prevented him from speaking at a scheduled event earlier this month.
The school also said that a dean who abetted the students’ behavior has been placed on leave, and that the school’s faculty will work to review campus free speech policies following the incident. SLS made clear that it stands by the apology it issued to Judge Duncan for how he was treated on campus.
The memo’s author, law school dean Jenny Martinez, said the assistant dean for diversity, equity, and inclusion, Tirien Steinbach, was on leave from her position, although a reason was not given. The statement left ambiguous whether her change in status is related to potential sanctions from the school or the death threats she has received in recent weeks, which are mentioned in the statement.
On March 9, Judge Duncan of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals was set to give a talk at the invitation of the school’s conservative Federalist Society. Instead of addressing legal issues as he had planned, Judge Duncan was berated by students for his past rulings.
When the crowd got too unruly, Judge Duncan handed the podium to Ms. Steinbach, who promptly dismissed the judge and praised the students. Ms. Steinbach was widely criticized for her handling of the event.
“I had to write something down because I am so uncomfortable up here. Your advocacy, your opinions from the bench land as absolute disenfranchisement of their rights,” Ms. Steinbach said to Judge Duncan as she pointed to the crowd of students.
“Is your speaking here worth the pain that it has caused, the division it has caused?” she asked. After she finished her remarks, dozens of students walked out of the room, with one calling Judge Duncan “scum” as she walked past the jurist.
Since the event, some students have called for the expulsion of the student protesters, while the demonstrators themselves say they were only exercising their First Amendment rights when they addressed Judge Duncan in the way that they did.
But Ms. Martinez does not believe that to be the case. She allows that “unless we recognize that student members of the Federalist Society and other conservatives have the same right to express their views free of coercion,” the school will be defaulting on its free speech commitments.
Those who protested, Ms. Martinez wrote in the memo, do not have the right to wield a “heckler’s veto.” She defended Judge Duncan’s right to speak to the group in her memo by citing a raft of judicial decisions from both federal and California courts. However, she added the Stanford policies around free speech were unclear and has promised to work with faculty to clarify them.
“I believe we cannot function as a law school from the premise that appears to have animated the disruption of Judge Duncan’s remarks — that speakers, texts, or ideas believed by some to be harmful, inflict a new impermissible harm justifying” the kinds of protests that occurred, she wrote.
Ms. Martinez will now require that every student at the law school take “mandatory educational programming” instead of “referring specific students for disciplinary sanction.”
Dean Martinez argues that the campus-wide programming is a more viable option than singling out individuals for the conduct displayed that day. Video and audio of the event depicted several students peacefully sitting in on Judge Duncan’s event, she said, which would make it difficult to determine who exactly is responsible for the aggressive heckling.
“Even if we could come up with a fair process for identifying and distinguishing between the two categories of students consistent with First Amendment values, the particular circumstances of this event raise additional concerns,” she wrote, including the “chilling” of free speech.
After the incident with Judge Duncan, Ms. Martinez and the president of Stanford University sent a joint letter to the judge to apologize for the way he was treated. That apology, however, sparked nearly as much backlash as the original presence of Judge Duncan himself.
Once the apology was publicized, students peacefully occupied Ms. Martinez’s constitutional law class, donning black clothing and masks. Ms. Martinez and the few students who refused to take part in the silent protests were forced to exit the building down a hallway that was lined with black-clad protesters.
Ms. Martinez notes that the “course I have chosen will not please everyone, not least of which those who have demanded that I retract my apology to Judge Duncan and those who have demanded that students be immediately expelled.”
***********************************
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