In Case You Missed It – July 22, 2024

Here are links to last week's^† articles receiving the most attention on NEIFPE's social media accounts. Keep up with what's going on, what's being discussed, and what's happening with public education.

Be sure to enter your email address in the Follow Us By Email box in the right-hand column of our blog page to be informed when our blog posts are published.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

"There are several major threads when it comes to K-12 education.

Vouchers, vouchers, vouchers. Eliminate the federal Department of Education, and turn the money for Title I and IDEA into block grants that states can use for anything education-adjacent (but Heritage is hoping it will be for vouchers), with Title I ending within a decade." -- Peter Greene in What Does Project 2025 Actually Plan For Education?

PROJECT 2025

Project 2025's education plan is a broad scheme for privatization.

What Does Project 2025 Actually Plan For Education?

From Peter Greene at Forbes

The education chapter was written by Lindsey Burke, chief of the Heritage Center’s Center for Education Policy. She’s also works at EdChoice, a school choice advocacy group formerly named after Milton Friedman, and she was part of Governor Glenn Youngkin’s transition team in 2021.

Burke leads off with some broad goals, including the elimination of the Department of Education and the goal that “families and students should be free to choose from a diverse set of school options and learning environments.” She salutes Friedman’s ideal, with education publicly funded but “education decisions are made by families.” She points to state leadership where the “future of education freedom and reform is bright and will shine brighter when regulations and red tape from Washington are eliminated.”

Federal money comes with federal rules and regulations attached. Burke proposes that federal dollars come to the states as block grants with no rules or regulations attached. She nods to the characterization of the department that runs through the whole document—a department born of a deal between Jimmy Carter and the National Education Association, attractive because it gave certain people a way to extend their influence via federal power and “continuously expand federal expenditures.” The federal education infrastructure has been “[b]olstered by an ever-growing cabal of special interests that thrive off federal largesse.”

Project 2025’s Plan for Public Education

From NPE Action

Project 2025 has an agenda for public schools: Destroy your neighborhood public schools and make parents shop for schooling using vouchers. Even as that is occurring, it would whittle away protections and support for LGBTQ students, disadvantaged students, and students with disabilities. Watch our explainer and find out how.

Project 2025: What Happens to K-12 in a New Trump Term?

From Diane Ravitch

Matthew Stone of Education Week described the plans for K-12 education in a second Trump term, as they appear in Project 2025, a document written by hundreds of former Trump officials. The 44-page education section emphasizes eliminating the U.S. Department of Education, distributing its functions to other agencies, converting categorical funds (like Title I for low-income children) into block grants, and rooting out “critical race theory” and any recognition of the existence of LGBT students. The document emphasizes the primacy of parental rights.

Trump has distanced himself from the document, because its recommendations are so radical, but it was prepared under the watchful eye of Kevin Roberts, president of the ultra-rightwing Heritage Foundation. Roberts is a close associate of Trump’s.

CHARTER SCHOOLS ARE WOKE

Wacky Heritage Foundation Report Warns that Charter Schools Are “Woke”

If being "woke" means being aware of what's going on in your community relating to race and injustice...being awakened to the needs of others...being informed, thoughtful, compassionate, humble, and kind...then count us in.

From Diane Ravitch

A recent Heritage report warns that parents can’t trust charter schools because so many of them are just as “woke” as public schools. Some are even more woke than public schools.

The report, written by Jay Greene, Ian Kingsbury, and Jason Bedrick, asserts that the major philanthropic foundations supporting charter schools—the Walton Family Foundation and the Gates Foundation—are also woke. This is where it gets crazy. Walton is woke? The anti-union, rightwing Waltons?

ILEARN

Indiana’s new ILEARN test scores show student progress remained stagnant in 2024

When reading this article, keep in mind that grades are a better measure of academic success than standardized tests.

Because...

...standardized tests have a major blind spot, the researchers asserted: The exams fail to capture the “soft skills” that reflect a student’s ability to develop good study habits, take academic risks, and persist through challenges, for example. High school grades, on the other hand, appear to do a better job mapping the area where resilience and knowledge meet. Arguably, that’s the place where potential is translated into real achievement.

"...cut-off scores are professional judgments that sit somewhere between objective and subjective, art and science, and reasoned and arbitrary."

From the Indiana Capital Chronicle

New state standardized test results show stagnant progress among Hoosier students in grades 3-8, signaling a continued struggle to reverse widespread learning loss following the COVID-19 pandemic.

New ILEARN scores show 41% of Indiana students who were tested earlier this spring were at or above proficiency standards in English and language arts (ELA), according to new data released Wednesday by the Indiana Department of Education (IDOE). That’s on par with the year prior, when 40.7% of students were proficient.

The percentage of students at or above proficiency standards in math, on the other hand, saw a slight decrease — from 40.9% in 2023 to 40.7% in the most recent school year.

Data released by IDOE reported 30.8% of Hoosier students passed both the math and English sections of ILEARN. That’s slightly up from last year’s spring test results, which showed that 30.6% earned dual passing scores.

SCIENCE OF READING

Science of Reading and the Emperor's New Clothes

Michael B. Shaffer is an associate clinical professor of educational leadership at Ball State University. He wrote this for a pro-public education Facebook group and gave us permission to repost it on the NEIFPE blog.

From Michael B. Shaffer on Facebook and in NEIFPE's Blog

I should clarify that I am not against ANYTHING that improves the practices of literacy instruction and helps students gain better reading skills. I am not against anything that supports teachers in gaining additional skills in literacy instruction. I dedicated most of my professional life as a principal to studying literacy, and providing professional development to the teachers in the schools where I was principal on the topic of literacy. I should say that I started my career as an elementary teacher.

The major argument I have against the current push for Science of Reading at this point is that it is the embodiment of the fable, The Emperor's New Clothes. We have been told that it is something shiny and new and that if we follow it, our students will suddenly start to read effectively where they could not prior to following the path established by SOR and as trained by the State of IN through Keys to Literacy, and includes (are you ready for this?) phonics, phonemic awareness, fluency, comprehension, and vocabulary. Hold on. Every responsible reading approach I have seen in the last twenty years has been built on these five pillars! Oh, yeah, that is what they call them. The Five Pillars of Reading Instruction. That is not new.

JOIN US

An Evening with Jennifer McCormick

NEIFPE is proud to co-sponsor this event featuring Indiana's next governor, Jennifer McCormick. Hope you can attend.

Click HERE to register for the September 25th event:

^†Note: NEIFPE's In Case You Missed It is posted by the end of the day every Monday except after holiday weekends or as otherwise noted.

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Science of Reading and the Emperor's New Clothes

By Michael B. Shaffer

I should clarify that I am not against ANYTHING that improves the practices of literacy instruction and helps students gain better reading skills. I am not against anything that supports teachers in gaining additional skills in literacy instruction. I dedicated most of my professional life as a principal to studying literacy, and providing professional development to the teachers in the schools where I was principal on the topic of literacy. I should say that I started my career as an elementary teacher.

The major argument I have against the current push for Science of Reading at this point is that it is the embodiment of the fable, The Emperor's New Clothes. We have been told that it is something shiny and new and that if we follow it, our students will suddenly start to read effectively where they could not prior to following the path established by SOR and as trained by the State of IN through Keys to Literacy, and includes (are you ready for this?) phonics, phonemic awareness, fluency, comprehension, and vocabulary. Hold on. Every responsible reading approach I have seen in the last twenty years has been built on these five pillars! Oh, yeah, that is what they call them. The Five Pillars of Reading Instruction. That is not new.

So, what is new? Oh, they added in a focus on Orton-Gilingham which was the basis for Reading Recovery and a host of other programs. Orton-Gillingham has been around since the 1930s. Again, not new.

I know, they have created a new approach to dealing with dyslexia as we teach literacy. That has to be what is new! Some of you are not old to remember that we were told not to use the term DYSLEXIA. So, allow me to give you a very brief history. Dyslexia was first added to the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychological Association) in 1980. It had five distinguishing characteristics then. It stayed there until DSM 5, which removed dyslexia because the APA said there were more precise terms to describe reading difficulties than the broad term dyslexia. However, now, we have brought dyslexia back. PATOSS (the Professional Association of Teachers of Students with Specific learning difficulties) announced a new definition of dyslexia on 15th May 2024. The new definition that PATOSS gave of dyslexia is: Dyslexia is primarily a set of processing difficulties that affect the acquisition of reading and spelling. Thank you, PATOSS, but that is even less specific than we had before.

Now, let's approach the title, The Science of Reading. I personally love to hate that title. Why? Because I am a teacher at the university level, and I teach teachers. What I do, what YOU do, is as much art as it is science. That is every bit as true about the teaching of reading as it is anything else. Now, don't get me wrong, I am a huge believer in intense reading programs for students in kindergarten through second grade. I believe in programs that focus heavily on the five pillars and identify the needs of students who need additional assistance because they cannot learn through traditional means and require RtI or assessment for learning disabilities. I believe in a strong identification process at the building level that actively progress monitors every student to insure that they are making progress and learning. As far as I have seen, the lower grades are largely the setting where much of the science part applies because I have worked with many incredible lower elementary teachers who have mad skills in teaching children to read.

The art side of reading instruction is what I believe applies once a student has gained the skills and mastery of the actual act of reading. It is here that we cross a line in the sand that outsiders to our great profession don't even know exists. This is where the teachers take students from "stop and go" reading to I LOVE READING! What does that mean? To a teacher, it means that a kid will have a book under their desk that they pull out any time they have a free second. It means a boy will scour the library for any book they can find on motorcycles because they are fascinated and want to read every word written about them. It means that a principal or teacher starts book wars against another class and they all read the same book, and the biggest thing going in the school is who can answer the most questions correctly about a book they have all read. It means that a principal has started a book club for boys that has 100 fourth and fifth-grade boys who skip recess every other Friday to hang out and talk about books, and then every day on the way to the bus one of those boys stops to talk to the principal about a. book he is reading.

So, am I impressed with The Science of Reading as defined by what is happening now? If and only if it generates the kind of practices that get teachers more motivated to raise expectations for every child to read in their room, whether that is kindergarten, fourth grade, sixth grade, eighth grade or tenth grade. I am for anything that gets Indiana reading. I am just afraid that the approach mandated by the legislature, ordained by ALEC, and implemented by the DOE is not going to get us there.

Indiana Educators United, we deserve better, and it is about time we demanded it. This THING was rolled out by the legislature without input by professional teachers because ALEC despises teachers' unions (it is part of the warp and woof of their very being) and that is why they did not ask for any of us to participate. And now you know the rest of the story.

Reprinted with permission. Find the original on the Indiana Educators United Facebook page.

In Case You Missed It – April 22, 2024

Here are links to last week's^† articles receiving the most attention on NEIFPE's social media accounts. Keep up with what's going on, what's being discussed, and what's happening with public education.

Be sure to enter your email address in the Follow Us By Email box in the right-hand column of our blog page to be informed when our blog posts are published.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

"Does 3.0 represent a serious shift for the organization? Not really. The fundamental message of M4L has always been the same-- public schools are scary and terrible and good God-fearing people should either take them over or abandon them. Parental rights (but not student rights)! As Chris Rufo, hot young culture panic agitator, told a Hillsdale College audience, 'To get universal school choice, you really need to operate from a place of universal school distrust.'" -- From Peter Greene in Moms For Liberty 3.0

MOMS FOR LIBERTY VERSION 3

Moms For Liberty 3.0

Moms for Liberty - yet another group of right-wing warriors who hate public education.

From Peter Greene at Curmudgucation

First, there was Moms For Liberty Beta, called the Florida Coalition of School Board Members. Then came the actual Moms For Liberty launch, a group of ladies who were upset about masking and school building closures. That gave way pretty quickly to M4L 2.0, the group that was all about banning naughty books and clamping down on LGBTA ideology (whatever that is).

M4L 2.0 cruised along pretty well for a while. But as more people came to understand what they were up to, their thin skins, their desire to tell other moms what children should be allowed to read. their intolerance-- well, opposition started to swell. And their last election round wasn't very impressive (we'll never know exactly how unimpressive because, perhaps already sensing that their brand was tarnished, they backed away from endorsing so many candidates). And their beloved Ron DeSantis had to slink home in humiliation and defeat. And they went on 60 Minutes and couldn't really explain the terrible alleged indoctrination they were crusading against.

Make way for version 3.0.

CHARTER AUTHORIZER SHOPPING

Charter school goes shopping

Steve Hinnefeld at School Matters writes about what happens when failing charter schools go shopping for an authorizer after being dropped by a previous authorizer...or two.

From School Matters

Trine University came to the rescue eight years ago when Thea Bowman Leadership Academy was in danger of losing its charter and being shut down.

Now Trine has revoked the Gary, Indiana, school’s charter, citing academic and governance issues. But another private institution, Calumet College of St. Joseph, has stepped up.

“It’s funny how things have come full circle,” said Lindsay Omlor, executive director of Education One, Trine’s charter-school-authorizing office.

Today’s topic is authorizer shopping, what happens when charter schools jump from one authorizer to another to stay open or find a better deal. Thea Bowman looks to be taking the practice to a new level. It now has its third authorizer in less than a decade.

CASHING IN ON THE SCIENCE OF READING LAWS

Jobs’ Reading Scam

Retired teacher and blogger Tom Ultican, writes that the science behind “the Science of Reading” movement is not very scientific. Publishers and vendors are preparing to cash in on legislative mandates that force reading teachers to use only one method to teach reading despite the lack of evidence for its efficacy. Ultican zeroes in on the role of billionaire Laurene Powell Jobs as one of the key players in promoting SofR.

From Tultican

Laurene Powell Jobs controls Amplify, a kids-at-screens education enterprise. In 2011, she became one of the wealthiest women in the world when her husband, Steve, died. This former Silicon Valley housewife displays the arrogance of wealth, infecting all billionaires. She is now a “philanthropist”, in pursuit of both her concerns and biases. Her care for the environment and climate change are admirable but her anti-public school thinking is a threat to America. Her company, Amplify, sells the antithesis of good education.

I am on Amplify’s mailing list. April third’s new message said,

“What if I told you there’s a way for 95% of your students to read at or near grade level? Maybe you’ve heard the term Science of Reading before, and have wondered what it is and why it matters.”

Spokesperson, Susan Lambert, goes on to disingenuously explain how the Science of Reading (SoR) “refers to the abundance of research illustrating the best way students learn to read.”

This whopper is followed by a bigger one, stating:

“A shift to a Science of Reading-based curriculum can help give every teacher and student what they need and guarantee literacy success in your school. Tennessee school districts did just that and they are seeing an abundant amount of success from their efforts.”

A shift to SoR-based curriculum is as likely to cause harm as it is to bring literacy success. This was just a used-car salesman style claim. On the other hand, the “abundance of success” in Tennessee is an unadulterated lie. National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) tracks testing over time and is respected for education testing integrity. Tennessee’s NAEP data shows no success “from their efforts.” Their reading scores since 2013 have been down, not a lot but do not demonstrate an “abundance of success”.

EXHAUSTED SUPERHEROES

Too Much For Mere Mortals

Former classroom teacher Peter Greene knows that teachers are overworked. There are not enough hours in the day for them to meet all their obligations. What to do?

From Peter Greene at Curmudgucation

Being overworked is part of the gig, and some of us wear our ability to manage that workload as a badge of honor, like folks who are proud of surviving an initiation hazing and insist that the new recruits should suck it up and run the same gauntlet. On reflection, I must admit this may not be entirely healthy, especially considering the number of young teachers who blame themselves because they can't simply gut their way past having overloaded circuits.

There's also resistance because the "let's give teachers a break" argument is used by 1) vendors with "teacher-assisting" junk to sell and 2) folks who want to deprofessionalize teaching. That second group likes the notion of "teacher-proof" programs, curriculum in a box that can be delivered by any dope ("any dope" constitutes a large and therefor inexpensive labor pool).

We could lighten the teacher load, the argument goes, by reducing their agency and autonomy. Not in those exact words, of course. That would make it obvious why that approach isn't popular.

INDIANA TESTING: NEW ILEARN FORMAT

New ILEARN format will allow for more personalized learning for students

From The Fort Wayne Journal Gazette**

An estimated 1,200 Hoosier schools including those in the Fort Wayne Community and East Allen County districts will pilot a new ILEARN assessment format next school year. This adds three preparatory tests to be administered prior to the typical end-of-year exam.

Summative assessments are intended to collect data on student performance, pinpoint problem areas and spur improved educational programs. But Indiana’s low proficiency rates on standardized tests have been used by proponents of the state’s school voucher system to claim public schools are failing Hoosiers.

The new setup, which will be adopted statewide for the 2025-26 school year, moves away from that played-out game. Instead, the preparation tests are diagnostic, helping teachers and parents learn where students between grades 3 and 8 are performing academically throughout the year and could better prepare them for the spring summative exam.

Approved by the State Board of Education last summer, the three preparatory tests will contain 20 to 25 questions focusing on four to six state education standards and a shortened summative exam in the spring. The new ILEARN setup will help educators implement remediation and intervention, such as additional tutoring for students who require it, ahead of the end-of-year exam, said Education Secretary Katie Jenner.

**Note: The Fort Wayne Journal Gazette is behind a paywall. Digital access, home delivery, or both are available with a subscription. Staying informed is essential; one way to do that is to support your local newspaper. For subscription information, go to fortwayne.com/subscriptions/ [NOTE: NEIFPE has no financial ties to the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette]

^†Note: NEIFPE's In Case You Missed It is posted by the end of the day every Monday except after holiday weekends or as otherwise noted.

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