“Kyrsten Sinema must be stopped” [Matt Yglesias, Slow Boring].
"Sinema isn’t blocking
popular progressive ideas because she’s getting corporate money; she’s
getting corporate money because she’s blocking popular progressive
ideas, and businesses want their key ally to succeed and prosper.”
"Because while I don’t believe Kyrsten Sinema will be the future of
the Democratic Party, one can at least squint and sort of see it. So
far, most of the newly elected Democrats from favored quarter suburbs
are pretty solid liberals who still back taxing the rich and expanding
the welfare state. But Sinema and a handful of her allies in the House
do portend a possible alternate route where Democrats try to turn
themselves into a pro-business identity politics movement that mostly
just gets creamed by the populist right. It’s a very alarming
development, and unless she changes course quickly, it would be very
advisable to mount a primary challenge to her…."
“Pandemic Bird-Watching Created a Data Boom—and a Conundrum” [Wired]. “
With the fall migration now in full swing, this army of avid birders is
amassing a wealth of data about how weather, human movements, artificial
lights, and city infrastructure can affect birds as they travel.
Farnsworth notes that while both Cornell projects have grown every year
since their inception over a decade ago, the increase in users,
downloads, and data over the past 18 months was unprecedented.”
apps like Merlin and eBird.
quinta-feira, 30 de setembro de 2021
Why charter schools are not as ‘public’ as they claim to be
This finding is particularly relevant in light of the fact that charter school enrollment reportedly grew at a rapid rate during the pandemic. Specifically, according to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, enrollment increased 7% from 2019-20 to 2020-21. The organization says that is the biggest enrollment jump in a half-decade.
In our book, we identify and describe 13 different approaches that
charters use to bring certain types of students in and push other kinds
of students out.
Here are four examples from our book.
Unbiased. Nonpartisan. Factual.
1. Targeted marketing and advertising
By using specific types of language in their promotional materials
and by targeting those materials to specific audiences, charter schools
often send a message that they are looking for a certain type of
student. This is a way for charter schools to reach or appeal to a
certain audience but not others, which in turn shapes who ends up
applying to a given school.
For instance, Mueller Charter Leadership Academy in San Diego
told prospective families that
“All eligible students are welcome to apply. However, it should be
noted that because this is a highly advanced, demanding program, it may
not be appropriate for everyone.”
Targeted advertising can also carry a message. LISA Academy in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 2016 sent out targeted recruitment mailers to area neighborhoods – skipping over the three zip codes for the heavily Black and Latino parts of town.
“They’re sending a message they don’t want the kids on the east side of town,” Max Brantley, editor of the Arkansas Times, remarked after his newspaper exposed the practice. The school later apologized and explained that its plan was to subsequently reach out to those populations through digital advertising.
2. Conditional applications
Charter schools sometimes require multiple essays or a minimum GPA as a condition for initial or continuing enrollment.
Roseland Accelerated Middle School in Santa Rosa, California, for
instance, required applicants to submit five short essays plus an
autobiography using “well constructed and varied structure.”
Minimum GPA requirements can be imposed at the application stage or
once admitted. At Lushor Charter School in New Orleans, parents and
students are asked to sign a contract that requires students to maintain a 2.0 GPA in core subject areas for continued enrollment.
3. Parents required to ‘volunteer’
Some charter schools require parents to volunteer a certain amount of
time at the school, or pay money in lieu of volunteering. Pembroke
Pines Charter High School in Florida, for example, required each family
to complete 30 such “volunteer hours”
per year, but allowed 20 of those hours to be “purchased” – US$100
total to buy out the first 10 hours and $200 more for the next 10 hours.
These requirements place an additional burden, in terms of time and
money, on families that are already struggling economically.
At so-called “no excuses” charters that “sweat the small stuff”, students have – at least historically – been subjected to harsh discipline for minor infractions, such as chewing gum or failing to constantly keep their eyes on the teacher during class.
Some of these schools repeatedly suspend students and call parents to
leave work to pick up a suspended child. The most high-profile example
is Success Academy charter school in Fort Greene, in the Brooklyn
borough of New York City, where school leaders created a “Got to Go”
list of 16 students who were then subjected to harassing discipline. In
one case, a school official threatened to call 911 on a 6-year-old
because the child was having a “bad day.” Nine of the 16 students did in
fact withdraw from the school.
Functioning like private schools
Cumulatively, these and the other approaches we detail in our book – titled “School’s Choice” – make charter schools more like private schools than the public schools they claim to be.
These practices influence which students are admitted to charter
schools and then stay in those schools. Charter school choice therefore
affects schools’ demographics, including the degree to which they are segregated.
They affect funding equity as well, since state school-finance
formulas often don’t adequately account for the actual costs of
educating different students. In Pennsylvania, for example, charter
schools are funded through a system that creates problematic incentives related to access for students with special needs. As explained in a report by the state’s bipartisan legislative Special Education Funding Commission,
the current funding system provides charter schools “the same funding
for each student with a disability, regardless of the severity of that
student’s disability.”
“This creates a strong incentive to overidentify students with less
costly disabilities and to under-identify (or under-enroll) students
with more severe (or more costly) disabilities,” the report states. A
speech impediment, for example, is an example of a mild disability,
versus a student with, say, a traumatic brain injury, which is a more
severe disability. As the report explains, “A student with a mild
disability can be a financial boon to a charter school, given that the
funding the charter receives will exceed the charter’s cost to educate a
child.”
Notably, Pennsylvania’s funding system does not create these incentives for district-run public schools.
These practices also can play a decisive role for comparisons of
academic outcomes between charters and traditional public schools run by
a school district. Overall, research consistently shows
little if any difference in the average test-score outcomes for the two
types of schools. But the comparisons may not be fair and accurate. If
charter schools can improve their test scores by screening out students
they don’t think will do well, it can give them an unfair advantage in
comparisons with public schools that accept all students.
Policy incentives revisited
So what can be done to make charter schools more accessible? One way
is to change policy incentives such as the Pennsylvania funding system
mentioned earlier. States can also change the way they reward schools
for how well their students do on tests. Arizona, for instance, has
policies that give extra funding to charters and other schools with higher achieving students.
In the final two chapters of our book, “School’s Choice,”
Mommandi and I point to a future with charter schools that don’t screen
or push out students who are lower achieving or more expensive to
educate. First, we hold up examples of charter schools that have
resisted the incentives to limit access by, for example, working to
support their communities’ most marginalized students. We then offer a
design for a healthier charter school system that doesn’t put these
exemplary schools at a disadvantage when it comes to accountability and
funding systems.
Even in a post-pandemic world, charter school enrollment may continue
to grow. But until the public has more access, charters will not be
truly public.
Yves here. This article points out that while
Covid vaccination rates are lower in rural areas than in metro areas,
it does not fully explain the much greater rural mortality rate. This
article focuses on much poorer access to hospitals. Another which this
piece ignores is that rural America is older. From a 2018 survey:
In the United States, 19 percent of the rural population
is 65 years or older, compared with 15 percent in urban areas. Rural
counties make up nearly 85 percent of the 1,104 “older-age
counties”—those with more than 20 percent of their population age 65 or
older.
I just came back from Bailey Island, Maine, where the median age of
the year-round population is 60. And the winters are not nice!
