A dispute over pay and class size in Chicago boiled over into the nation’s first charter school strike this month, raising questions about how teachers’ unions, going forward, will reconcile their longheld opposition to charters with their need to pick up more dues-paying members.
The historic walkout—and the concessions won by the Chicago Teachers Union on behalf of the striking charter school teachers—was welcome news for unions, which are predicted to potentially shed substantial members and revenue after the fateful U.S. Supreme Court Janus decision earlier this year.
Soon after the strike started, people began asking whether cracks were starting to show in the charter movement, the first viable public alternative—and challenge—to traditional public schools. For so long the charter movement has steadily expanded in many American cities, propelled by some of the world’s wealthiest philanthropists.
The Chicago teachers’ strike has been largely cast in the media as a major symbolic win for teachers’ unions and a warning sign for charter schools and their supporters.
But there are equally fraught—if less examined—questions facing unions as they simultaneously decry charters as the tools of billionaires trying to privatize public education and encourage charter teachers to join their ranks. A growing unionized workforce in the charter sector may very well require changes from teachers’ unions as well as charter schools.
Anti-Charter Policy Pushes
Unions have longed positioned themselves as the defenders of traditional public schools, and have used their considerable political and financial clout to stymie charters. In Chicago, the Chicago Teachers Union has called for a moratorium on all new charter schools. Elsewhere, unions have lobbied to block additional state funding for charter schools, backed lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of charter schools, campaigned to keep caps on the number of charter schools allowed to open, and called for bans on charter management groups and companies…
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WASHINGTON, D.C.—Five leaders from around the country have been appointed to the National Assessment Governing Board to serve four-year terms, U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos announced today.
This year’s Governing Board appointees include four new members and one re-appointed member—the Board’s current Vice Chair Tonya Matthews. The appointees’ terms begin on Oct. 1, 2018, and end on Sept. 30, 2022.
The appointees will help set policy for the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), also known as the Nation’s Report Card. NAEP offers to the public and to education policymakers at the national, state and local levels, objective data on student performance in nearly a dozen subjects. The information NAEP provides helps education stakeholders evaluate the progress of American education. The 26-member nonpartisan, independent Governing Board determines the subjects and content of NAEP tests, sets the achievement levels for reporting and publicly releases the results.
“I’m pleased to welcome this diverse group of leaders from across the country to the National Assessment Governing Board,” Secretary DeVos said. “The board plays an important role in assessing student achievement, and I am confident that their collective experience will be a valuable asset as we work to ensure that all students have equal access to a great education that gives them the opportunity to reach their fullest potential.”
The appointees and the roles they represent on the Board are listed below:
Paul Gasparini, Secondary School Principal: Gasparini is the principal of Jamesville-DeWitt High School in Dewitt, New York, a position he has held for 17 years. Gasparini chairs the Central New York High School Principals Consortium, and his accolades include being named state high school principal of the year by the School Administrators Association of New York state.
Julia Keleher, Chief State School Officer: Keleher was appointed as Puerto Rico’s secretary of education in December 2016. She has more than 20 years of experience in education at the federal, state, district and school levels. Keleher is also an adjunct professor at The George Washington University, where she teaches graduate-level courses in the Business School and the Graduate School of Education and Human Development.
Tonya Matthews, General Public Representative: Matthews joined the Governing Board in 2014. She is the founder of The STEMinista Project—an initiative to engage girls’ interest in science and technology careers. Mostly recently, Matthews served as president and chief executive officer of the Michigan Science Center, a science museum for children and young adults in Detroit.
Mark Miller, Eighth-Grade Teacher: Miller is a mathematics teacher and chair of the mathematics department at Cheyenne Mountain Junior High School in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Miller has more than 20 years of experience teaching mathematics at the junior-high level. Miller is a National Board Certified Teacher and serves on a standard-setting panel for the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. His accolades include being nominated for the Presidential Award for Excellence in Mathematics and Science.
Nardi Routten, Fourth-Grade Teacher: Routten is a fourth-grade teacher at Chester A. Moore Elementary in Fort Pierce, Florida. She has taught third- and fourth-graders in St. Lucie County for more than 20 years. Routten, a National Board Certified Teacher, has received local and national recognition for her excellence in teaching, including the Milken Educator Award in 2014.
“We are excited to have such a breadth of talent and expertise join the Board and contribute to a group of leaders who are dedicated to maintaining NAEP’s rigor and quality, while making the assessment useful and relevant for the public,” said Lisa Stooksberry, deputy executive director for the Governing Board.
Every year, the Governing Board conducts a nationwide search for Board nominees. After the nominations period ends, the Governing Board narrows the pool of nominees to a list of finalists from which the U.S. Secretary of Education selects Board members.
The Governing Board is now accepting nominations for Board members whose terms will begin Oct. 1, 2019. To learn more about the open Board positions and the nomination process, visit http://bit.ly/JoinTheBoard11. Nominations are due by 5 p.m. EST on Oct. 31, 2018.
The National Assessment Governing Board is an independent, nonpartisan board whose members include governors, state legislators, local and state school officials, educators, business representatives and members of the general public. Congress created the 26-member Governing Board in 1988 to set policy for the National Assessment of Educational Progress. For more information about the Governing Board, visit www.nagb.org.
U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos and her team are moving forward with parts of a department-wide reorganization proposal unveiled earlier this year, including elevating the office charged with helping to advocate for the private school community within the federal bureaucracy, and changing the way privacy policy is handled.
The office of nonpublic education, which was previously part of the soon-to-be-defunct office of innovation and improvement, will now report directly to the office of the secretary. DeVos is a longtime advocate for vouchers, tax credit scholarships, and other forms of private school choice.
That move and other reorganization changes were first reported by Politico.
The remainder of the office of innovation and improvement will be moved to the broader office of elementary and secondary education, Education Week reported earlier this year.
DeVos is also planning to move the department’s budget office, which she has reportedly sought to eliminate, into a new office of finance and operations. That office’s other jobs will include finance, accounting, budgets, contract management, personnel, business data analysis and more.
And she will make changes to the way privacy policy is handled within the department. The department will continue to have a chief privacy officer, who will be housed in the office of the chief information officer. The chief privacy officer will be in charge of privacy legislation, privacy safeguards, and information collection and clearance. Subject matter experts in the family policy compliance office will provide student privacy technical assistance, and investigate Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act violations, said Elizabeth Hill, a spokeswoman for the agency.
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U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke, D-Texas, who is in a fierce race for the Senate, has hit his opponent, Republican Sen.Ted Cruz, for wanting to take money away from public schools, and for being the “deciding vote” in favor of U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos’ confirmation.
“At a time when nearly half of the school teachers in Texas are working a second job just to make ends meet, Ted Cruz wants to take our public tax dollars out of their classrooms, turn them into vouchers,” O’Rourke says in a new campaign ad. “He was the deciding vote in putting Betsy DeVos in charge of our children’s public education. I want to pay teachers a living wage. I want to allow them to teach to the child, and not to the test. And when they retire, I want it to be a retirement of dignity. Those public educators have been there for us. Now it’s time to be there for them.”
It’s true that Cruz has been a big proponent of private school vouchers. And he was the author of a provision in the new tax law that allows families to use 529 college-savings plans for K-12 private schools.
With the 2018-19 school year in full swing, U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos has finished approving nearly every state’s plan to implement the Every Student Succeeds Act. But in some ways, the federal government’s work on ESSA is just beginning.
The federal K-12 law’s hallmark may be state and local control, yet the Education Department still has the responsibility to oversee the more than $21 billion in federal funding pumped out to states and districts under ESSA. That will often take the form of monitoring—in which federal officials take a deep look at state and local implementation of the law.
And the department has other oversight powers, including issuing guidance on the law’s implementation, writing reports on ESSA, and deciding when and how states can revise their plans.
Even though ESSA includes a host of prohibitions on the education secretary’s role, DeVos and her team have broad leeway to decide what those processes should look like, said Reg Leichty, a co-founder of Foresight Law + Policy, a law firm in Washington.
Given the Trump team’s emphasis on local control, “I think they’ll try for a lighter touch” than past administrations, Leichty said. But there are still requirements in the law the department must fill, he added.
“States and districts shouldn’t expect the system to be fundamentally different [from under previous versions of the law.] They are still going to have to file a lot of data,” Leitchy said.
But advocates for traditionally overlooked groups of students aren’t holding their breath for a robust monitoring process, in part because they think the department has already approved state plans that skirt ESSA’s requirements…
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The plans will now be read by different teams of peer reviewers at the department. Political appointees, including U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, are forbidden from monkeying with that process. But the secretary gets to give the plans the final thumbs or down. More on how all that will work here…
Mick Zais, President Donald Trump’s nominee to fill the No. 2 spot at the U.S. Department of Education, has some big things in common with his would-be boss, U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos.
They’re both believers in school choice and a smaller foot-print for the federal government in K-12. They both like the idea of a slimmer bureacracy.
Published in Print: January 6, 2016, as New Law, Fresh Challenges
Corrected: February 4, 2016.
State and school district officials who have complained for years that an inflexible, overprescriptive federal role in public education is at the heart of the No Child Left Behind Act seem to have finally gotten their wish: a replacement law that scales back Washington’s K-12 footprint for the first time in more than a quarter-century.
Now, big questions loom about just where states and districts will take the leeway granted to them under the newly minted Every Student Succeeds Act—and just how their decisions will affect the perennially foundering schools and traditionally overlooked groups of students and schools the NCLB law was designed to help.
It’s equally unclear just how much power the U.S. Department of Education will have when the law, the latest reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, is fully implemented.
The new law—already widely known by the acronym ESSA—slims down the U.S. Department of Education, consolidating nearly 50 programs, including elementary and secondary counseling, into a giant block grant…
WASHINGTON, D.C.—Five leaders from around the country have been appointed to the National Assessment Governing Board to serve four-year terms, U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos announced today.
Mick Zais, President Donald Trump’s nominee to fill the No. 2 spot at the U.S. Department of Education, has some big things in common with his would-be boss, U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos.