Cutting Through the Culture War Distractions to Preserve Public Education
In Schoolhouse Burning, the important recent book about the history of public education since the Civil War and the protection of public schooling by the provisions of the 50 state constitutions, Derek...
View ArticleModest Child Tax Credit Reform Is Possible as Part of Federal Tax Policy...
You may remember that in 2021 during COVID, child poverty in the United States dropped by 46 percent, primarily thanks to the American Rescue Plan, which made the Child Tax Credit fully refundable....
View ArticleWhat to Do About the Surge in Student Absenteeism?
Everyone agrees that COVID somehow changed norms about regular attendance at school. The Columbus Dispatch‘s Laura Bischoff reports that chronic absenteeism has become an extremely serious problem in...
View ArticleCongress Must Pass Deal to Expand the Child Tax Credit This Week
Congressional dysfunction fills the news, but somehow House Ways and Means Chairman Jason T. Smith (R-MO) and Senate Finance Chairman Ron Wyden (D-OR) have managed to negotiate a surprising tax deal...
View ArticleNY Times Exposes More Culture Warriors Attacking Social Justice in Education
In an urgently important NY Times report last Sunday, Nicholas Confessore exposed some of the culture warriors who have been inflaming attacks on Critical Race Theory and Diversity, Equity, and...
View ArticleDefund School Privatization, Defend Public Schools: Vouch for This!
A professor in the Department of Educational Leadership at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, Thomas S. Poetter, has edited a new book about the danger of public school privatization, Vouch for This!...
View ArticleU.S. House Passes Child Tax Credit Expansion. Bill Heads to Senate.
For a long time, the needs of poor children have not been much of a motivator for American social policy reform. Many of us remember Bill Clinton “ending welfare as we know it” in 1996, but we have...
View ArticleWho Benefits and Who Loses When School Vouchers Are Expanded?
Alec MacGillis’s much reprinted piece for ProPublica last week on Ohio’s vast new universal school voucher expansion proves the truth of the Cleveland Scene‘s stunning 2001 headline: Plaid Skirt...
View ArticleOhio’s Gerrymandered, Supermajority Republican Senate Wields Intimidation to...
Ohio’s powerful state senate president, Matt Huffman defined how gerrymandering works in Ohio’s supermajority GOP legislature: “We can kind of do what we want.” The easy part is being able to amass...
View ArticleWho Redefined Teaching as the Production of High Test Scores and Who Taught...
The history that happens in our lifetimes is sometimes the most obscure. We live it without thinking about it, and it hasn’t yet been recorded or analyzed by historians who help us sift out the...
View ArticleSchool Ratings and Rankings Cause Educational Redlining and Resegregation
Here is the lead in a story in the Washington City Paper (Washington, D.C.) that describes not only how public school ratings and rankings work in the nation’s capital but also their impact in every...
View ArticleModest Child Tax Credit Expansion Languishes in the U.S. Senate Awaiting a Vote
Despite all the distractions of former President Trump’s legal challenges, a terrible war in Gaza, delayed funding for Ukraine and Israel due to controversy around the U.S. southern border but at the...
View ArticleSupreme Court Allows Pro-Diversity but Race-Neutral Admissions Policy at...
Last year in Students v. Fair Admissions at Harvard, the U. S. Supreme Court ended colleges’ and universities’ use of race-based affirmative action to achieve a diverse student body. A 5-4 decision...
View ArticleHow Committed Are Each State’s Leaders to Democratically Governed Public...
Yesterday the Network for Public Education (NPE) released an excellent and desperately needed report on the state of public schooling across the states in the midst of well funded, far-right campaigns...
View ArticleAmerica Neglects to Address the Big Problems for Public Schools
Two weeks ago this blog covered problems stemming from the rating and ranking of public schools required by the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), the 2015 reauthorization of the federal education law....
View ArticleAs Expected, Ohio’s New Voucher Expansion Benefits Wealthy Students Already...
The Cleveland Plain Dealer placed Laura Hancock’s expose about Ohio’s wildly expanded school voucher program on the front page above the fold in Sunday’s paper. It is good to see this dangerous threat...
View ArticleThe Essential Narrative for Public Education Advocates: Public Schools Are...
Last week’s National Education Policy Center Newsletter reports on research showing that the expansion of school privatization in Washington, D.C. is changing parents’ attitudes and, by itself, causing...
View ArticlePlain Dealer Editorial Correctly Condemns Voucher Entitlement for the Rich...
Last Friday, the Plain Dealer‘s editors correctly condemned what the Ohio Legislature did in last summer’s two-year state budget, when it raised the income eligibility cap on Ohio’s largest private...
View ArticlePresident Biden Proposes Urgently Needed Federal Education Budget Increases...
On Monday of this week, President Joe Biden released his budget proposal for the upcoming federal fiscal year beginning on October 1, 2024. President Biden’s priorities define our society’s obligation...
View ArticleWill the U.S. Senate Waste this Year’s Opportunity to Reduce Child Poverty?
One of three huge structural injustices for American children and their public schools—along with inadequate and unequally distributed school funding across the states and persistent economic and...
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