Tuesday, July 19, 2011 4:49:29 AM
Our Broken Escalator
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: July 16, 2011
YAMHILL, Ore.
THE United States supports schools in Afghanistan because we know that education is one of the cheapest and most effective ways to build a country.
Alas, we’ve forgotten that lesson at home. All across America, school budgets are being cut, teachers laid off and education programs dismantled.
My beloved old high school in Yamhill, Ore. — a plain brick building that was my rocket ship — is emblematic of that trend. There were only 167 school days in the last school year here (180 was typical until the recession hit), and the staff has been reduced by 9 percent over five years.
This school was where I embraced sports, became a journalist, encountered intellectual worlds, and got in trouble. These days, the 430 students still have opportunities to get into trouble, but the rest is harder.
For the next school year, freshman and junior varsity sports teams are at risk, and all students will have to pay $125 to participate on a team. The school newspaper, which once doubled as a biweekly newspaper for the entire town, has been terminated.
Business classes are gone. A music teacher has been eliminated. Class size is growing, with more than 40 students in freshman Spanish. “It’s like a long, slow bleed, watching things disappear,” says the school district’s business manager, Michelle Morrison.
The school still has good teachers, but is that sustainable with a starting salary of $33,676?
In a rural, blue-collar area like Yamhill, traditionally dependent on farming and forestry, school has always been an escalator to opportunity. One of my buddies was Loren, a house painter’s son, who graduated as salutatorian and became a lawyer. That’s the role that education historically has played — but the escalator is now breaking down.
“Every year we say: ‘What can we cut? What can we reduce?’ ” said Steve Chiovaro, superintendent of Yamhill-Carlton schools. “We’ve gotten to the point where we can no longer ‘do no harm.’ We’re starting to eviscerate education.”
Yamhill is far from alone. The Center on Education Policy reports [ http://www.cep-dc.org/ ( http://www.cep-dc.org/cfcontent_file.cfm?Attachment=KoberRentner%5FReport%5FStrainedSchools%5F063011%2Epdf ; http://www.cep-dc.org/cfcontent_file.cfm?Attachment=Appendices%5FStrainedSchools%5F062911%2Epdf ; http://www.cep-dc.org/cfcontent_file.cfm?Attachment=PressRelease%5FStrainedSchools%5F062911%2Epdf )] that 70 percent of school districts nationwide endured budget cuts in the school year that just ended, and 84 percent anticipate cuts this year.
In higher education, the same drama is unfolding. California’s superb public university system is being undermined by the biggest budget cuts in the state’s history. Tuition is set to rise [ http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/09/us/09uc.html ] about 20 percent this year, on top of a 26 percent increase last year, which means that college will become unaffordable for some.
The immediate losers are the students. In the long run, the loser is our country.
Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz, two Harvard economists, argue in their book “The Race Between Education and Technology [ http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/05/business/05shelf.html ]” that a prime factor in America’s rise over the last two centuries was its leadership in educating the masses.
On the eve of World War I, only 1 percent of Britain’s young people graduated from high school, compared with 9 percent of Americans. By 1950, a majority of American youths were graduating from high school, compared with only 10 percent of British youths.
American pre-eminence in mass education has eroded since the 1970s, and now a number of countries have leapfrogged us in high school graduation rates, in student performance, in college attendance. If you look for the classic American faith in the value of broad education to spread opportunity, you can still find it — in Asia.
When I report on poverty in Africa and poverty in America, the differences are vast. But there is a common thread: chipping away at poverty is difficult and uncertain work, but perhaps the anti-poverty program with the very best record is education — and that’s as true in New York as it is in Nigeria.
Granted, budget shortfalls are real, and schools need reforms as well as dollars. Pouring money into a broken system isn’t a solution, and we need more accountability. But it’s also true that blindly slashing budgets is making the problems worse. As Derek Bok, the former Harvard president, once observed, “If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.”
Still, we nation-build in Afghanistan and scrimp at home. How is it that we can afford to double our military budget since 9/11, can afford the carried-interest tax loophole for billionaires, can afford billions of dollars in givebacks to oil and gas companies, yet can’t afford to invest in our kids’ futures?
Sometimes I hear people endorse education cuts by arguing that “school isn’t for everybody,” which usually means something like “education isn’t for other people’s children” — or that farm kids in places like Yamhill really don’t need schools that double as rocket ships. I can’t think of any view that is more un-American.
© 2011 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/17/opinion/sunday/17kristof.html
===
Charter School Battle Shifts to Affluent Suburbs
Founders of a proposed Mandarin-immersion charter school meeting in a South Orange, N.J., home. From left, Jutta Gassner-Snyder, Nancy Chu, Tom Piskula and Tiffany Boyd Hodgson.
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
By WINNIE HU
Published: July 16, 2011
MILLBURN, N.J. — Matthew Stewart believes there is a place for charter schools [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/c/charter_schools/index.html ]. Just not in his schoolyard.
Mr. Stewart, a stay-at-home father of three boys, moved to this wealthy township, about 20 miles from Midtown Manhattan, three years ago, filling his life with class activities and soccer practices. But in recent months, he has traded play dates for protests, enlisting more than 200 families in a campaign to block two Mandarin-immersion charter schools from opening in the area.
The group, Millburn Parents Against Charter Schools [ http://millburnparentsagainstcharters.blogspot.com/ ], argues that the schools would siphon money from its children’s education for unnecessarily specialized programs. The schools, to be based in nearby Maplewood and Livingston, would draw students and resources from Millburn and other area districts.
“I’m in favor of a quality education for everyone,” Mr. Stewart said. “In suburban areas like Millburn, there’s no evidence whatsoever that the local school district is not doing its job. So what’s the rationale for a charter school?”
Suburbs like Millburn, renowned for educational excellence, have become hotbeds in the nation’s charter school battles, raising fundamental questions about the goals of a movement that began 20 years ago in Minnesota.
Charter schools, which are publicly financed but independently operated, have mostly been promoted as a way to give poor children an alternative to underperforming urban schools — to provide options akin to what those who can afford them have in the suburbs or in private schools.
Now, educators and entrepreneurs are trying to bring the same principles of choice to places where schools generally succeed, typically by creating programs, called “boutique charters” by detractors like Mr. Stewart, with intensive instruction in a particular area.
In Montgomery County, Md., north of Washington, the school board [ http://www.montgomeryschoolsmd.org/ ] is moving toward its first charter, a Montessori elementary school, after initially rejecting it and two others with global and environmental themes because, as one official said, “we have a very high bar in terms of performance.”
Imagine Schools [ http://www.imagineschools.com/ ], a large charter school operator, has held meetings in Loudoun County [ http://www.loudoun.k12.va.us/loudoun/pages/static_district_homepage.asp ], Va., west of Washington, to gauge parental interest in charters marketed partly as an alternative to overcrowded schools.
In Illinois, where 103 of the current 116 charter schools are in Chicago, an Evanston school board [ http://www.district65.net/ ] committee is considering opening the district’s first charter school.
More than half of Americans live in suburbs, and about 1 in 5 of the 4,951 existing charter schools were located there in 2010, federal statistics show. Advocates say many proposed suburban charters have struggled because of a double standard that suggests charters are fine for poor urban areas, but are not needed in well-off neighborhoods.
“I think it has to do with comfort level and assumptions based on real estate and not reality,” said Jeanne Allen, president of the Center for Education Reform [ http://www.edreform.com/Home/ ] in Washington, which studies and supports charter schools. “The houses are nice, people have money, and therefore the schools must be good.”
Ashley Del Sole, a founding member of one of the rejected charters in Montgomery County, said that regardless of how well a district performed, children benefited from choice because not everyone learned the same way. She added that competitive pressure would invigorate schools that had grown complacent.
“There’s sort of this notion that if it’s not broken, why fix it,” Ms. Del Sole said. “But there are people who are not being served.”
With high test scores and graduation rates to flash around, suburban school officials have had an easier time than their urban counterparts arguing that charters are an unnecessary drain on their budgets. In some states, including Virginia, where only local school boards authorize charters, suburban boards have all but kept them out.
“It’s like you’re Burger King and you have to go to McDonald’s to get a license — in most cases you won’t get a friendly reception,” said Roy Gamse, executive vice president of Imagine Schools.
District school boards in Georgia have rejected so many charters that lawmakers created a commission that approved 16 schools over local objections. But after several boards sued, the law was overturned in May, leaving in question the fate of some of those schools.
In New Jersey, where the State Education Department approves charters, school boards and parents have been fighting a proposed school [ http://www.questacademynow.us/ ] in another suburb, Montclair, north of Millburn, and another Mandarin-immersion school in the Princeton area [ http://www.piacs.org/learnmore.php ] that was approved last year but has yet to open. Statewide, 15 of 73 charter schools are in the suburbs.
The latest battle, over Hua Mei and Hanyu International [ http://www.hanyuschool.org/ ] — which would start in 2012 with 200 kindergarten through second-grade students drawn from Millburn, Maplewood, Livingston, South Orange, West Orange and Union — has divided neighbors and has spurred calls for legislation to require voter approval to open charters.
Jutta Gassner-Snyder, Hua Mei’s lead applicant, said some of the school’s 12 founders had received threatening e-mails.
“This is not just about the education of my child,” said Ms. Gassner-Snyder, who sends her daughter, Kayla, 4, to a private Mandarin-immersion preschool. “If we just sit back and let school districts decide what they want to do without taking into account global economic trends, as a nation, we all lose.”
Millburn’s superintendent [ http://www.millburn.org/ ], James Crisfield, said he was caught off guard by the plan for charters because “most of us thought of it as another idea to help students in districts where achievement is not what it should be.” He said the district could lose $270,000 — or $13,500 for each of 20 charter students — and that would most likely increase as the schools added a grade each year.
“We don’t have enough money to run the schools as it is,” Mr. Crisfield said, adding that the district eliminated 18 positions and reduced bus services this year.
Millburn offers Mandarin only in high school, fueling the arguments of those seeking the new charters. “Kids are like sponges,” said Yanbin Ma, a Hanyu founder. “There are so many things they can absorb and become good at, and I feel that our public schools haven’t done enough to take advantage of that.”
But to Mr. Stewart, a leader in a growing opposition that includes Livingston mothers who have helped collect more than 800 petition signatures [ http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/nocharterschool/signatures?page=1 ], this sounds “selfish.”
“Public education is basically a social contract — we all pool our money, so I don’t think I should be able to custom-design it to my needs,” he said, noting that he pays $15,000 a year in property taxes. “With these charter schools, people are trying to say, ‘I want a custom-tailored education for my children, and I want you, as my neighbor, to pay for it.’ ”
© 2011 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/17/education/17charters.html [ http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/17/education/17charters.html?pagewanted=all ] [comments at http://community.nytimes.com/comments/www.nytimes.com/2011/07/17/education/17charters.html ]
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: July 16, 2011
YAMHILL, Ore.
THE United States supports schools in Afghanistan because we know that education is one of the cheapest and most effective ways to build a country.
Alas, we’ve forgotten that lesson at home. All across America, school budgets are being cut, teachers laid off and education programs dismantled.
My beloved old high school in Yamhill, Ore. — a plain brick building that was my rocket ship — is emblematic of that trend. There were only 167 school days in the last school year here (180 was typical until the recession hit), and the staff has been reduced by 9 percent over five years.
This school was where I embraced sports, became a journalist, encountered intellectual worlds, and got in trouble. These days, the 430 students still have opportunities to get into trouble, but the rest is harder.
For the next school year, freshman and junior varsity sports teams are at risk, and all students will have to pay $125 to participate on a team. The school newspaper, which once doubled as a biweekly newspaper for the entire town, has been terminated.
Business classes are gone. A music teacher has been eliminated. Class size is growing, with more than 40 students in freshman Spanish. “It’s like a long, slow bleed, watching things disappear,” says the school district’s business manager, Michelle Morrison.
The school still has good teachers, but is that sustainable with a starting salary of $33,676?
In a rural, blue-collar area like Yamhill, traditionally dependent on farming and forestry, school has always been an escalator to opportunity. One of my buddies was Loren, a house painter’s son, who graduated as salutatorian and became a lawyer. That’s the role that education historically has played — but the escalator is now breaking down.
“Every year we say: ‘What can we cut? What can we reduce?’ ” said Steve Chiovaro, superintendent of Yamhill-Carlton schools. “We’ve gotten to the point where we can no longer ‘do no harm.’ We’re starting to eviscerate education.”
Yamhill is far from alone. The Center on Education Policy reports [ http://www.cep-dc.org/ ( http://www.cep-dc.org/cfcontent_file.cfm?Attachment=KoberRentner%5FReport%5FStrainedSchools%5F063011%2Epdf ; http://www.cep-dc.org/cfcontent_file.cfm?Attachment=Appendices%5FStrainedSchools%5F062911%2Epdf ; http://www.cep-dc.org/cfcontent_file.cfm?Attachment=PressRelease%5FStrainedSchools%5F062911%2Epdf )] that 70 percent of school districts nationwide endured budget cuts in the school year that just ended, and 84 percent anticipate cuts this year.
In higher education, the same drama is unfolding. California’s superb public university system is being undermined by the biggest budget cuts in the state’s history. Tuition is set to rise [ http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/09/us/09uc.html ] about 20 percent this year, on top of a 26 percent increase last year, which means that college will become unaffordable for some.
The immediate losers are the students. In the long run, the loser is our country.
Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz, two Harvard economists, argue in their book “The Race Between Education and Technology [ http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/05/business/05shelf.html ]” that a prime factor in America’s rise over the last two centuries was its leadership in educating the masses.
On the eve of World War I, only 1 percent of Britain’s young people graduated from high school, compared with 9 percent of Americans. By 1950, a majority of American youths were graduating from high school, compared with only 10 percent of British youths.
American pre-eminence in mass education has eroded since the 1970s, and now a number of countries have leapfrogged us in high school graduation rates, in student performance, in college attendance. If you look for the classic American faith in the value of broad education to spread opportunity, you can still find it — in Asia.
When I report on poverty in Africa and poverty in America, the differences are vast. But there is a common thread: chipping away at poverty is difficult and uncertain work, but perhaps the anti-poverty program with the very best record is education — and that’s as true in New York as it is in Nigeria.
Granted, budget shortfalls are real, and schools need reforms as well as dollars. Pouring money into a broken system isn’t a solution, and we need more accountability. But it’s also true that blindly slashing budgets is making the problems worse. As Derek Bok, the former Harvard president, once observed, “If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.”
Still, we nation-build in Afghanistan and scrimp at home. How is it that we can afford to double our military budget since 9/11, can afford the carried-interest tax loophole for billionaires, can afford billions of dollars in givebacks to oil and gas companies, yet can’t afford to invest in our kids’ futures?
Sometimes I hear people endorse education cuts by arguing that “school isn’t for everybody,” which usually means something like “education isn’t for other people’s children” — or that farm kids in places like Yamhill really don’t need schools that double as rocket ships. I can’t think of any view that is more un-American.
© 2011 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/17/opinion/sunday/17kristof.html
===
Charter School Battle Shifts to Affluent Suburbs
Founders of a proposed Mandarin-immersion charter school meeting in a South Orange, N.J., home. From left, Jutta Gassner-Snyder, Nancy Chu, Tom Piskula and Tiffany Boyd Hodgson.
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
By WINNIE HU
Published: July 16, 2011
MILLBURN, N.J. — Matthew Stewart believes there is a place for charter schools [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/c/charter_schools/index.html ]. Just not in his schoolyard.
Mr. Stewart, a stay-at-home father of three boys, moved to this wealthy township, about 20 miles from Midtown Manhattan, three years ago, filling his life with class activities and soccer practices. But in recent months, he has traded play dates for protests, enlisting more than 200 families in a campaign to block two Mandarin-immersion charter schools from opening in the area.
The group, Millburn Parents Against Charter Schools [ http://millburnparentsagainstcharters.blogspot.com/ ], argues that the schools would siphon money from its children’s education for unnecessarily specialized programs. The schools, to be based in nearby Maplewood and Livingston, would draw students and resources from Millburn and other area districts.
“I’m in favor of a quality education for everyone,” Mr. Stewart said. “In suburban areas like Millburn, there’s no evidence whatsoever that the local school district is not doing its job. So what’s the rationale for a charter school?”
Suburbs like Millburn, renowned for educational excellence, have become hotbeds in the nation’s charter school battles, raising fundamental questions about the goals of a movement that began 20 years ago in Minnesota.
Charter schools, which are publicly financed but independently operated, have mostly been promoted as a way to give poor children an alternative to underperforming urban schools — to provide options akin to what those who can afford them have in the suburbs or in private schools.
Now, educators and entrepreneurs are trying to bring the same principles of choice to places where schools generally succeed, typically by creating programs, called “boutique charters” by detractors like Mr. Stewart, with intensive instruction in a particular area.
In Montgomery County, Md., north of Washington, the school board [ http://www.montgomeryschoolsmd.org/ ] is moving toward its first charter, a Montessori elementary school, after initially rejecting it and two others with global and environmental themes because, as one official said, “we have a very high bar in terms of performance.”
Imagine Schools [ http://www.imagineschools.com/ ], a large charter school operator, has held meetings in Loudoun County [ http://www.loudoun.k12.va.us/loudoun/pages/static_district_homepage.asp ], Va., west of Washington, to gauge parental interest in charters marketed partly as an alternative to overcrowded schools.
In Illinois, where 103 of the current 116 charter schools are in Chicago, an Evanston school board [ http://www.district65.net/ ] committee is considering opening the district’s first charter school.
More than half of Americans live in suburbs, and about 1 in 5 of the 4,951 existing charter schools were located there in 2010, federal statistics show. Advocates say many proposed suburban charters have struggled because of a double standard that suggests charters are fine for poor urban areas, but are not needed in well-off neighborhoods.
“I think it has to do with comfort level and assumptions based on real estate and not reality,” said Jeanne Allen, president of the Center for Education Reform [ http://www.edreform.com/Home/ ] in Washington, which studies and supports charter schools. “The houses are nice, people have money, and therefore the schools must be good.”
Ashley Del Sole, a founding member of one of the rejected charters in Montgomery County, said that regardless of how well a district performed, children benefited from choice because not everyone learned the same way. She added that competitive pressure would invigorate schools that had grown complacent.
“There’s sort of this notion that if it’s not broken, why fix it,” Ms. Del Sole said. “But there are people who are not being served.”
With high test scores and graduation rates to flash around, suburban school officials have had an easier time than their urban counterparts arguing that charters are an unnecessary drain on their budgets. In some states, including Virginia, where only local school boards authorize charters, suburban boards have all but kept them out.
“It’s like you’re Burger King and you have to go to McDonald’s to get a license — in most cases you won’t get a friendly reception,” said Roy Gamse, executive vice president of Imagine Schools.
District school boards in Georgia have rejected so many charters that lawmakers created a commission that approved 16 schools over local objections. But after several boards sued, the law was overturned in May, leaving in question the fate of some of those schools.
In New Jersey, where the State Education Department approves charters, school boards and parents have been fighting a proposed school [ http://www.questacademynow.us/ ] in another suburb, Montclair, north of Millburn, and another Mandarin-immersion school in the Princeton area [ http://www.piacs.org/learnmore.php ] that was approved last year but has yet to open. Statewide, 15 of 73 charter schools are in the suburbs.
The latest battle, over Hua Mei and Hanyu International [ http://www.hanyuschool.org/ ] — which would start in 2012 with 200 kindergarten through second-grade students drawn from Millburn, Maplewood, Livingston, South Orange, West Orange and Union — has divided neighbors and has spurred calls for legislation to require voter approval to open charters.
Jutta Gassner-Snyder, Hua Mei’s lead applicant, said some of the school’s 12 founders had received threatening e-mails.
“This is not just about the education of my child,” said Ms. Gassner-Snyder, who sends her daughter, Kayla, 4, to a private Mandarin-immersion preschool. “If we just sit back and let school districts decide what they want to do without taking into account global economic trends, as a nation, we all lose.”
Millburn’s superintendent [ http://www.millburn.org/ ], James Crisfield, said he was caught off guard by the plan for charters because “most of us thought of it as another idea to help students in districts where achievement is not what it should be.” He said the district could lose $270,000 — or $13,500 for each of 20 charter students — and that would most likely increase as the schools added a grade each year.
“We don’t have enough money to run the schools as it is,” Mr. Crisfield said, adding that the district eliminated 18 positions and reduced bus services this year.
Millburn offers Mandarin only in high school, fueling the arguments of those seeking the new charters. “Kids are like sponges,” said Yanbin Ma, a Hanyu founder. “There are so many things they can absorb and become good at, and I feel that our public schools haven’t done enough to take advantage of that.”
But to Mr. Stewart, a leader in a growing opposition that includes Livingston mothers who have helped collect more than 800 petition signatures [ http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/nocharterschool/signatures?page=1 ], this sounds “selfish.”
“Public education is basically a social contract — we all pool our money, so I don’t think I should be able to custom-design it to my needs,” he said, noting that he pays $15,000 a year in property taxes. “With these charter schools, people are trying to say, ‘I want a custom-tailored education for my children, and I want you, as my neighbor, to pay for it.’ ”
© 2011 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/17/education/17charters.html [ http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/17/education/17charters.html?pagewanted=all ] [comments at http://community.nytimes.com/comments/www.nytimes.com/2011/07/17/education/17charters.html ]
Greensburg, KS - 5/4/07
"Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty."
from John Philpot Curran, Speech
upon the Right of Election, 1790
F6
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