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EDUC 202: URBAN EDUCATION IN THE NEWS
Name
Article: House Restores Local Education Control in Revising No Child Left Behind
Author: Emmarie Huetteman and Motoko Rich
Source: The New York Times Website
URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/03/us/house-restores-local-education-control-inrevising-no-child-left-behind.html?ref=education&_r=0
Main Ideas of the Article
The article discussed in this paper explores the current debate between the Republican and the
Democrats, on the NO Child Left behind Rule. The main issue being discussed the decision by
the Congress to revise the no child left behind law, in order to allow the state governments to be
in more control of the school. The article highlights the need for states and local governments to
begin setting their own educational goals, and how to rate their schools and performance. This is
as opposed to allowing the federal state control the education standards and performance for
schools in the country. Another issue highlighted is that despite the revisions to the law, the input
of the federal government is still required in the implementations of the revisions and
recommendations.
Critical Analysis
The bipartisan law enacted by George Bush in 2001 sought to improve the education standards in
North America. Targets and goals were set for the year 2014, where non-English students were
supposed to have gained proficiency in language and other skills. This is just one of the
requirements provided by the law. Schools which fail to reach targets or continuously record
poor performance face sanctions from the government. However, the Republicans have recently
perceived this law as retrogressive and demand for the government to revise the provisions. The
article has outlined the law to the reader, where he begins to understand the origin of the
discussion. It is important for the government to regulate and monitor school performances in
order to uphold quality education standards. However, the Congress no longer finds the law
effective, especially due to the sanctions. Therefore, with the motion to free the states to adopt
their own direct policies away from the federal government, it sought to pass a bill that would
enable revisions to the bipartisan law.
If revised, the new law will allow states to set their own education standards and rules. However,
the Democrats are worried that without the federal government’s intervention, there will be a
sharp increase in the cases of racial segregation against minorities, and those from low-income
families as well. In this debate, the Democrats seem to have the voice especially because they are
in the ruling party. President Obama had given ultimatums that by the end of 2014; every child in
each state should be proficient in mathematics and reading. The Republicans, who are
spearheading the debate, appear to have the common good in mind when pushing for these
revisions. However, as mentioned earlier, the major ethical concern as voiced by the Democrats
is that allowing states to set their own standards is likely to create a situation where racial and
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social classes prevail. The federal government is opposing the motion, with their reasons largely
based on the Civil Rights, which provides them with a historical ground for their argument.
Revising the law will improve the standards of the urban education in America. This is because
when each state sets its own standards, they will be able to cater for their specific educational
need. The main issue with the federal intervention is that the regulations are not specific, which
essentially neglect other students with special needs.
Challenges to the Assumptions
The main assumption is that the revisions to the law will definitely improve the education system
in the United States. The aim is to reduce or completely eradicate the federal government
intervention in the matters. However, as claimed in the article, implementation of the revised
laws will still require federal intervention, failure to which they will be ineffective. As I read the
article, I learnt that the government is actively involved in the educational performance of the
students in the country. Prior to reading the article, I was unaware of how the system operates,
and how stringent the NO Child Left Behind Law is. Moreover, my basic assumption was that
schools were not answerable to any authorities regarding the academic performance. It was also
a pleasant surprise to learn that schools get sanctions, and sometimes some are as extreme as
closing the school down. However, I realized that it is also important to consider other
underlying issues such as racial discrimination in schools, which adversely affect the students’
performance, despite this bipartisan law having good intentions as stated in the article,
sometimes it is retrogressive and ineffective.
New Ideas from the Article
The Democrats claim that revision of the law will breed more ground for racial and class
discrimination. This claim serves induces the need to investigate on the extent and reasons for
racial segregation in schools. In addition to this, the investigation should also include element
such as identifying the specific states in which discrimination is rampant, and identifying the
specific minority groups that face this problem.
Action to be taken
Granted, the revisions to the law are necessary in ensuring the urban education standards are
upheld. However, there seems to be an underlying problem with racial discrimination in schools.
Therefore, the main issue that should be addressed initially is the marginalization of students
from the minority groups and those from low-income backgrounds.
ARTICLE BELOW
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WASHINGTON — The House on Wednesday approved a sweeping bill to revise the
contentious No Child Left Behind law, representing the end of an era in which the federal
government aggressively policed public school performance, and returning control to states and
local districts.
No Child Left Behind, which had strong bipartisan backing when it passed in 2001, was the
signature education initiative of George W. Bush, who said the failure of public schools to teach
poor students and minorities reflected the “soft bigotry of low expectations.”
That law ushered in high-stakes testing to measure student progress in reading and math between
the third and eighth grades. Schools were required to make every child in the nation proficient in
those subjects by 2014, as measured by standardized tests. Schools that failed to hit targets along
the way were subject to federally required sanctions, ranging from tutoring to school closing in the
worst cases. Over time, the law became anathema to both the right and the left, and it became clear
that the sanctions as well as the goal of proficiency by 2014 were unworkable.
The overhaul passed by the House on Wednesday, 359 to 64, jettisons No Child’s prescribed goals
and punishments, and allows states and school districts to set their own goals and to decide how to
rate schools and what to do with those that underperform.
After months of compromise and negotiation, the bill earned nearly unanimous approval from a
conference committee of House and Senate members two weeks ago, and is expected to be passed
by the Senate next week. A White House official said Wednesday that President Obama plans to
sign it when it reaches his desk.
Representative John Kline, the Minnesota Republican who is chairman of the House Education
Committee, said the existing law had left the federal government “micromanaging” the education
system.
“No Child Left Behind was based on good intentions, but it was also based on the flawed premise
that Washington knows what students need to succeed in school,” he said in a statement.
The bill passed Wednesday retains the annual testing requirements in math and reading. Schools
must also continue to report the results by students’ race, income and disability status.
Some said they were uneasy about whether the new law could exacerbate uneven schooling across
the country.
“The real question is what authority is left to the federal government to intervene should the states
in one way or another fall short of what the hopes are?” said David Steiner, executive director of
the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy and a former New York state education
commissioner. “We all are concerned that we not go to a place where based on where you happen
to be born or which state you’re in, you face very, very increasingly different opportunities.”
The path to Wednesday’s vote was long and arduous. Even as recently as last summer, educators
thought that partisan and often acrimonious bickering would stymie any movement.
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No Child officially expired in 2007. As virtually every school in the country came to be labeled
failing, subject to sanctions, Congress repeatedly tried to revise the law, but lawmakers could not
agree on a revision. Democrats and Republicans wrangled over just what role the federal
government should play in public education. Democrats wanted guarantees that the law would
protect racial minorities and those from low-income families, citing its roots as a civil rights bill,
initially passed in 1965 as the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Republicans wanted
states and local communities to be free to direct policies with little federal intervention.
In 2013, House Republicans passed a version of the bill that would have allowed states and
districts to develop their own ways of rating schools and working with struggling ones. But
Democrats flatly opposed that legislation, and Mr. Obama threatened to veto it, despite his support
for changing the one-size-fits-all approach of No Child Left Behind.
For the last three years, the Obama administration has given waivers from the law’s most onerous
conditions, including that every child in a school must be deemed proficient in reading and math
by 2014. In its waivers, the administration added conditions that states tie performance ratings of
teachers to student test scores, and that states adopt rigorous academic standards. Many states
responded by adopting the Common Core, and conservatives chafed at what they saw as federal
overreach.
Although the new bill requires that states take action to improve schools in the bottom 5 percent of
all schools in the state as well as high schools that graduate fewer than two-thirds of students, the
bill does not impose any specific action if those goals are not met.
States are required to use test scores and other academic measures to rate schools but can also
include other components like student surveys. The bill specifically prevents the federal
government from requiring that states evaluate teachers at all, much less use test scores to rate
them, and says the education secretary cannot dictate any specific academic standards to states.
Arne Duncan, the education secretary, said the new bill would “reduce overtesting and one-sizefits-all federal mandates.”
Senator Lamar Alexander, the Tennessee Republican who is chairman of the Education
Committee, said the bill would usher in a new period of experimentation in schools as
communities are released from federal control.
“Basically we’re back to an era that encourages local and state innovation rather than Washington
telling you what to do,” said Mr. Alexander, who was one of the architects of the legislation, along
with Senator Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington.
Most education advocacy groups, including both teachers unions and the National School Boards
Association, as well as the National Governors Association, have signaled their support for the bill.
Civil rights groups, which fought hard to keep some requirement that states intervene in the
lowest-performing schools as well as schools that consistently failed to educate racial minorities or
poor students, cautiously welcomed the bill.
But they expressed concerns that without sufficient federal intervention, numerous children would
still be left behind.
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“This certainly makes us nervous,” said Liz King, director of education policy at the Leadership
Conference on Civil and Human Rights. “The lesson of the civil rights movement and community
is that the federal government is the defender of vulnerable children and we are worried that with
new state and local authority, vulnerable children are going to be at risk.”
But others said states and local communities were better able to meet the educational needs of
students. “This now means that instead of directing your attention to Washington, you now need to
direct your attention to Albany and Trenton and Columbus,” said Andy Smarick, partner at
Bellwether Education Partners, a nonprofit education consulting and research group.
“Over the past 10, almost 15 years,” he continued, “we’ve so focused on reading and math scores
and this is the real opportunity to make sure we’re capturing the things that are important, whether
it’s grit and persistence or school culture or parent engagement, and the only way to do that is to
give power back to the states. You cannot centrally manage an innovative, creative accountability
system from Washington D.C.”
Emmarie Huetteman reported from Washington, and Motoko Rich from New York.
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EDUC 202: URBAN EDUCATION IN THE NEWS
Name:
Title/Date: Massachusetts’s Rejection of Common Core Test Signals Shift in U.S. - Nov 21, 2015
Author of Article: Kate Zernike
Source of Article: The New York Times
URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/22/us/rejecting-test-massachusetts-shifts-itsmodel.html?ref=education&_r=0
1. Main Ideas of the Article:
The Massachusetts’s Commissioner of Education, Mitchell Chester, created the national test
based on the Common Core Standards in 2009. In 2015, he is deciding to walk away from his
original idea and eliminate Common Core tests in the state of Massachusetts. This initiative
will take an entire year and millions of dollars to further develop.
2. Critical Analysis:
Common Core was sought to be a well-balanced idea to keep all American students on top of
learning the same curriculum; however, no one closely examined the consequences Common
Core to lead to. A calculated one out of every five children enrolled in US public schools
does not speak English as their first language, and the percentage is supposedly going to rise
to two out of five by 2030. With this extreme statistic of students not being able to clearly
read and write the English language, they are automatically put at a disadvantage when it
comes to successfully complete national tests. For this reason, I completely agree with
Massachusetts to eliminate the standardized testing because they are truly putting immigrant
students at a disadvantage. In addition, teachers have to teach to the test which wastes time
from their original lesson plans to develop each child as a well-rounded individual. Creativity
in curriculum has been lost in school across the country due to Common Core.
3. Challenges to your Assumptions about the Issue:
Prior to enrolling in this class, I thought Common Core was an excellent idea. I believed
every student in the United States, regardless of where they came from, should aim to reach a
certain level of ability to create equality throughout the education system. I did not realize
that implementing such a national curriculum would actually hurt the public school systems
who have large percentages of students whom do not speak English as their first language. I
originally thought that having a nationwide curriculum would be easier on the teachers to not
have to worry about what lessons to instill into their students, or what pace they should be
teaching at. Through this class and the article, I am now realizing that teachers desire that
flexibility and creativity to develop lesson plans according to their personal classroom to
achieve a more individualistic style of growth that will benefit their students the most.
4. New Questions or Ideas that the Article Raises for You:
Since Massachusetts was the state to issue the Common Core national test in the first place,
what will this do for the reputation of the Massachusetts Education system? Will the public
applaud them for realizing their mistake or will they be viewed as disloyal to their original
claims and ideas? I also wonder how many other states will hop on the bandwagon and
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eliminate Common Core throughout their schools as well. Will this initiative inspire all
colleges to not require SAT scores on college applications?
5. Action you could take to Address the Issue:
In my home state of New Jersey, Governor Chris Christie originally loved the idea of
Common Core for the same reasons I mentioned and now wants to abolish it in New Jersey.
My father is a great friend of Chris Christie’s, so I could easily write a letter to him to
encourage him to rid New Jersey of these national standards. I could have a petition signed to
include with this letter, and when he sees X amount of signatures from students whom have
been through New Jersey public school systems supporting him, he would feel more inspired
to make change. The more states that eliminate Common Core will only lead to a ripple
effect of states Nationwide abandoning this idea.
Article:
BOSTON — It has been one of the most stubborn problems in education: With 50 states,
50 standards and 50 tests, how could anyone really know what American students were learning,
or how well?
At a dinner with colleagues in 2009, Mitchell Chester, Massachusetts’s commissioner of
education, hatched what seemed like an obvious answer — a national test based on the Common
Core standards that almost every state had recently adopted.
Now Dr. Chester finds himself in the awkward position of walking away from the very
test he helped create.
On his recommendation, the State Board of Education decided last week that
Massachusetts would go it alone and abandon the multistate test in favor of one to be developed
for just this state. The move will cost an extra year and unknown millions of dollars.
Across the country, what was once bipartisan consensus around national standards has
collapsed into acrimony about the Common Core, with states dropping out of the two national
tests tied to it that had been the centerpiece of the Obama administration’s education strategy.
Photo
The president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association, Barbara Madeloni, standing
left, who has spoken out against high-stakes tests, at a campaign house party this month. She is
seeking re-election.
But no about-face has resonated more than the one in Massachusetts, for years a leader in
education reform. This state embraced uniform standards and tests with consequences more than
two decades before the Common Core, and by 2005, its children led all states in the National
Assessment of Educational Progress, often called the nation’s report card, and rose above all
other countries, save Singapore, in science.
The state’s participation was seen as validation of the Common Core and the multistate
test; Dr. Chester became the chairman of the board that oversees the test Massachusetts joined.
The state’s rejection of that test sounded the bell on common assessments, signaling that the
future will now look much like the past — with more tests, but almost no ability to compare the
difference between one state and another.
“It’s hugely symbolic because Massachusetts is widely seen as kind of the gold standard
in successful education reform,” said Morgan Polikoff, an assistant professor of education at the
University of Southern California, who is leading an evaluation of the national tests. “It opens
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the door for a lot of other states that are under a lot of pressure to repeal Common Core. Getting
rid of these tests is a nice bone to throw.”
The fight in Massachusetts has been dizzying, with a strange alliance between the
teachers’ union and a conservative think tank that years before had been a chief proponent of the
state’s earlier drive for standards and high-stakes tests. As in other states, conservatives
complained of federal overreach into local schooling, while the union objected to tying the tests
to teacher evaluations. The debate drew money from national political players like the billionaire
David Koch and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Amid the noise, many parents had trouble understanding what the Common Core was, or
argued that the nation’s public schoolchildren took too many tests. So while parents and students
here did not opt out of testing in the waves they did in places like New York and New Jersey,
they also did not express much support.
“It’s much more about politics than it is about education,” said Tom Scott, the executive
director of the state superintendents’ association, which had encouraged the state to keep the
multistate test.
People on either side of the debate here still celebrate the Massachusetts Education
Reform Act of 1993 as “the grand bargain.” Democratic legislators and the Republican governor
at the time, William F. Weld, agreed to give schools more money in exchange for ambitious
standards defining what students were expected to learn and new tests tied to those standards,
including one that, by 2003, students had to pass to graduate from high school.
But while state scores rose, there were still hints that the new standards were not teaching the
skills students needed. The number requiring remedial education in college remained high. So
the state joined in when the National Governors Association began drafting what became the
Common Core, a description of the skills students should learn by the time they graduated from
high school. Because of the state’s expertise, large numbers of its teachers joined in writing the
standards. The state adopted them in 2010.
Dr. Chester and his counterparts in Louisiana and Florida proposed that states also
combine resources on a test, not only to compare results but to afford a better test design.
As states rolled out the new tests over the last two years, parents and teachers pushed back in
states from Oregon to Florida. There were technical glitches, as well as complaints that the
exams were too hard and too long. When states began reporting poor results, parents and policy
makers did not necessarily see the benefit of comparing their schools with others.
But at hearings here this fall, many superintendents and teachers testified that the new test,
known as Parcc, for the Partnership for the Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers,
had improved what was happening in classrooms. Given the choice between the state’s old test
and the multistate test this spring, more than half the state’s school districts chose Parcc.
“If we revert back to the old standards, all this work will have been for naught,” said Dianne
Kelly, the superintendent in Revere, who credits the standards for tripling the number of students
taking algebra in eighth grade and doubling the number taking Advanced Placement courses.
The opposition came from what might have once seemed an unlikely place, the Pioneer
Institute, a conservative think tank that had been a driver behind the higher standards in the 1993
legislation. It had hired Tom Birmingham, who as a Democratic state senator had been a coauthor of that legislation. He warned that the state would be pressured to lower standards as other
states hid failure by lowering the bar for passing.
“It becomes not a race to the top but a race to the middle,” Mr. Birmingham said in an
interview.
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The federal government was not involved in writing the Common Core. But Pioneer, like
other conservative groups, argued that the Obama administration had forced it on states by
granting money to the national tests. As part of its Race to the Top program, the administration
in 2010 awarded about $350 million to design the Parcc and the other national test, known as
Smarter Balanced.
That argument persuaded even educators who believed the Common Core was improving
what happened in the classroom.
“It was almost like extortion — if you want this money, you have to do things the way
we want,” said Todd Gazda, the superintendent in Ludlow, near the western Massachusetts city
of Springfield.
The president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association, Paul Toner, had supported the
Parcc test. But in 2014, the membership elected a new president, Barbara Madeloni, who had
campaigned against high-stakes tests, period.
“It is destructive to our students and our teachers and the very possibility of joyful and
meaningful public education,” Dr. Madeloni said in an interview.
“We’ve really flipped the narrative in a year,” she said.
Supporters of the standards countered that Pioneer’s biggest donors include Mr. Koch
and the Walton Family Foundation, funders of other conservative causes. Jim Stergios, Pioneer’s
executive director, said, “David Koch never talked to me about Common Core.”
Supporters of Parcc also accused its opponents of distorting facts. The opponents argued, for
instance, that the new standards squeezed out literature and poetry. In fact, Common Core
requires students to read more nonfiction, but only because it requires them to do expository
reading in all subjects, including science and math.
“The opposition was making some wild claims that the proponents answered with factual
information, assuming that everyone would take a very rational approach to the facts and reach a
valid conclusion,” said Linda M. Noonan, the executive director of the Massachusetts Business
Alliance for Education, a proponent of higher standards. “But that isn’t how the public process
works.”
The multistate exam was not the only one in the glut of testing, but it became the most
toxic.
“We blew it,” said Mr. Scott, at the state superintendents’ association. “That’s too bad,
because there’s a lot of good that’s going out with it.”
Making his recommendation for a new test to the state board of education, Dr. Chester
described it as the best of both worlds. The new test will use Parcc content, which better reflects
the Common Core, but the state will maintain the flexibility to change or add material without
having to go through a committee of multiple states.
Dr. Chester said Massachusetts would remain in the Parcc consortium so it could
compare results with other states.
“We’re increasingly a global world,” he said. “And the idea that 50 different states in the
United States had 50 different definitions of what it means to be literate and what it means to
know math — and on top of that those 50 states had 50 different assessments to determine
whether you’re literate or whether you know math — makes little sense.”
But with states dropping out of the tests, comparisons remain elusive. Parcc began as a
cooperation between 26 states, but now only five and the District of Columbia will use the test.
Smarter Balanced began with 31 states — some states joined both groups — and now counts 15.
Three states have repealed the Common Core altogether, and here a proposed ballot initiative
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would do the same.219
COM Concerns about the tests have become self-fulfilling. Officials in Massachusetts said that
the multistate test had become less appealing now that there were fewer states to compare and
that they feared that Parcc would fail, leaving them without a test. Lawmakers in states stillusing
the test point to the states’ withdrawing as evidence that it is not valid.
Still, Michael Cohen, the president of Achieve, a nonprofit founded by business groups
and governors that helped states draft the Common Core, noted that even in states that are reexamining it and the Common Core, most are sticking with the higher standards.
“The notion that the Parcc brand is somehow toxic, that has happened and will continue
to happen,” he said. “But at the end of the day, there will be, in the overwhelming majority of
states, standards that are still highly common.”
A version of this article appears in print on November 22, 2015, on page A1 of the New
York edition with the headline: Rejecting Test, Massachusetts Shifts Its Model. Order
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EDUC 202: URBAN EDUCATION IN THE NEWS
Your Name:
Title of Article and DATE: “Baraka, Cerf announce $12.5M plan to rescue needy Newark
Schools” (December 1, 2015)
Author of Article: Dan Ivers
Source of Article: NJ.com
URL:http://www.nj.com/essex/index.ssf/2015/12/baraka_cerf_announce_125m_plan_to_rescue_
needy_new.html
1. Main ideas of article:
City officials in Newark, New Jersey have recently announced a new initiative in which they are
hoping to completely eradicate the “glaring and often controversial disparities” that are evident
in the Newark school system. The city is planning on providing support and resources to students
in some of the schools, particularly public schools that are most in need of some support. The
initiative has received millions of dollars in donations, and is planning on providing more
academic resources, social workers, physical and mental health workers and staff to provide
healthier food options.
2. Critical Analysis:
This issue is mainly affecting the students that are attending public schools in Newark, that are
underfunded and lacking in resources. Many of the students in these needier schools may have had a
difficult time learning in classrooms that lack necessary resources. These environments may not have
been fully conducive to learning. And, that could have negatively impacted their overall performance.
This new initiative could be really beneficial to many students attending Newark public schools, as it
could help the students perform, get better grades, improve the nutrition of students, and just succeed
in life. This issue also affects teachers in Newark public schools. Like the students, the teachers may
have been suffering from a lack of resources. The teachers may have been forced to teach in an
environment that is not fully conducive to teaching. Providing more resources to these schools, could
help foster a more positive teaching and learning environment. If these teachers had more resources to
work with, they could possibly be given a little bit of leeway to implement their own individual,
unique teaching styles.
Public schools as a whole are also affected by this issue. If the students in a school are not performing
well, that reflects poorly on the school. Providing more support and resources to these schools will
likely aid in improving the overall perform of the students, and that would reflect positively on the
school. This new initiative is attempting to provide social resources and healthier food options for
students. That is particularly beneficial for parents that may not be able to provide such things for their
children. This new initiative is aiming to provide schools with social workers and physical and mental
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health workers among other resources. It could potentially help to create more jobs within the
community. The students, teachers, schools, parents, and the entire community would be benefitting
from this new initiative being implemented.
In this particular situation, the Newark city officials have the power. They have the power to plan the
initiative and all of the details that are going it. They also have the power to enforce the initiative.
Also, the groups that are donating money to the cause have power. They are able to decide just how
much money to donate, and that affect just how successful the initiative will be and what actions can
actually be carried out. School administrators also have power since they are allowed “additional
latitude over budgets and curriculum and the ability to hand-pick staff members”. The students do
not have the power in this situation. They are not able to decide what resources will be provided for
these schools, help format the curriculum or decide how much money should be donated.
There does not appear to be a hidden agenda behind this issue. It truly seems like the Newark city
officials are looking out for these students’ best interests. This is not the first attempt that the city
has made to help improve the school system, so it appears that the initiative is trying to do that
again. The initiative is mainly attempting to improve the lives of students and the community, and
although the intentions of it seem to be pure, there are some ethical concerns that come with it.
There could be some concern as to what the donated money is being spent on, and if it is even
going into classrooms. Generally speaking, people have very different ideas on where the majority
of the money should be spent. Some people believed that a majority of the money should be on
academic resources, and others believe that a majority of the money should be spent on social
resources. Money is always a source of contention. This issue greatly effects urban education, as
those are the main schools that are suffering from a lack of funding and resources. They are the
schools that are going through this type of struggle. Overall, this new initiative could a very good
thing for the Newark school system.
3. Challenges to your assumptions about the issue:
Before I read the article, I was unaware of the impact that the growth of charter schools could
have on the budget of a traditional public school. I thought that since charter schools rely so
heavily on donations, public schools would not necessarily be financially effected by their
existence. After reading the article, I found out that charter schools really dipped into the budget
of public schools, and that has had a negative effect on public schools in Newark.
4. New questions/ideas that the article raises for you:
I would like to know much more about the initiative. What are some specific resources that are
being provided to these schools? When will the actual plans come into effect? What social
problems in Newark are you tackling? About how much money does the city still need in
donations to fully implement the plan? Will the curriculum of these schools change at all?
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5. Action you could take to address issue in the article:
Fully implementing a plan such as this one, would likely take several years to accomplish. The
main action would be to stop charter schools from dipping into budgets that were specifically
meant for public schools. It would be beneficial for the funds to be staunchly separated. Then,
work on raising money that can be spent on improving the conditions of these schools.
ARTICLE-----------------------------------------------Baraka, Cerf announce $12.5M plan to rescue needy Newark schools
A coalition of city officials gathered at City Hall Tuesday to announce a new initiative they hope
might blaze a path toward erasing the glaring and often controversial disparities across Newark's
school system.
Mayor Ras Baraka and Superintendent Chris Cerf were among those on hand to detail early plans
for the "South Ward Community Schools Initiative", which would provide a variety of supports to
students in the some of the city's neediest schools.
The initiative has received a tentative commitment of $12.5 million from the Foundation for
Newark's Future – the organization created to manage the $100 million Facebook founder Mark
Zuckerberg donated to the city in 2010 to reform the city's floundering school system.
Those reforms have been widely criticized for what many considered a narrow focus on
classroom-based efforts rather than the city's social ills, and for fostering the growth of charter
schools that have stretched budgets for their traditional counterparts thin.
Those points were not lost on Baraka, who praised the new program's comprehensive support
network that spans far beyond the academic, including social workers, physical and mental health
workers and staff to supply healthy food.
"As people parachute in, pass out money and have us at each other's throats, our children every
day are still stuck, for the most part," said Baraka.
The nuts and bolts of the program are still being ironed out, though officials said they plan to
launch the program at Malcolm X Shabazz High School and three yet to be determined "feeder"
schools in the immediate area by next fall.
FNF has pledged a total of $1.2 million to help plan the initiative and the Newark Opportunity
Youth Network – a separate program aimed at steering dropouts and other disconnected youth
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toward obtaining a diploma. If all goes as expected, the organization has pledged another $10
million to community schools and $2.5 million to NOYN.
If successful, officials said they hope to replicate the program in other schools around the city,
though funding could present a major issue in a district still wrangling with a significant budget
deficit.
"As we expand and invest in this initiative, we will make sure that we not in any way short change
any of the other schools in the district," said Cerf.
The initiative also creates partnerships between Baraka, the state-controlled school district and
FNF – an alliance that might have seemed inconceivable just months ago, when the mayor
regularly called for the resignation of reform-minded superintendent Cami Anderson.
Plans for the community schools initiative incorporate much of the comprehensive, holistic
solutions that critics like Baraka had pushed for, while also allowing school administrators
additional latitude over budgets and curriculum and the ability to hand-pick staff members.
South Ward Councilman John Sharpe James said the move appeared to be a stark reversal for the
state-controlled district that many had come to regard as an occupying force with little regard for
the concerns of Newarkers.
"In 20 years, this is the first time we've seen that the state has taken an active interest in....what the
community needs, what the community wants," said South Ward Councilman John Sharpe James.
The city's teachers and school administrators' unions had leaders in attendance at the press
conference Tuesday, each of whom expressed tentative support for the plan.
Officials said the new program was borne out of a mutual recognition that community schools
were in need of additional help amid years of flat funding from the state and a rapidly expanding
network of charter schools in the city.
With control of the district now set to return to the city for the first time in more than two decades,
Baraka said it was crucial to ensure students in traditional public school were properly equipped to
succeed.
"When we get local control, we want to get a hold of something. We don't want to get local control
and we have nothing," he said.
15
EDUC 202: URBAN EDUCATION IN THE NEWS
Your Name: Sarah Lanasa
Title of Article and DATE: Urban Charter Schools Often Succeed. Suburban Ones Often Don’t.
November 20, 2015
Author of Article: Susan Dynarski
Source of Article: New York times
URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/22/upshot/a-suburban-urban-divide-in-charter-schoolsuccess-rates.html?ref=education&_r=0
Main ideas of article:
Charter schools have shown to be very beneficial to nonwhite urban students. It has been proven
that children in urban (nonwhite poor) schools have better performance in school and increased
likely hood to go to college compared to public schools in that area. For suburban majority white
charter schools their performance is the same if not worse than the public schools of that area.
Leading to the conclusion the author makes that charter schools are only beneficial to urban
nonwhite, poor schools.
Critical Analysis:
In this article the author states that it is difficult to compare public schools to charter schools
because not all charter schools select their students randomly so their better results may be better
if they used test to determine who can attend their school. So their better results may be caused
by already gifted students attending those schools would show the same results at a public
school. Assuming these schools that do not use random selection where not considered in the
data determining that charter schools benefit urban students more. There is another bias to
consider when comparing charter schools to public schools not addressed in the article, which is
the condition of the public schools in general they are being compared to. If public schools in
generally white areas are already more successful then nonwhite, poor or urban areas charter
schools in that area have hirer results to be compared with. Public school in nonwhite urban
areas have very bad results for students so their charter schools results seem better. There is no
mention in the article of the urban verses suburban charter school results so no conclusion can be
made if suburban charter schools are at an advantage or disadvantage to urban charter schools.
These results should instead be used to come to the conclusion that public schools in urban areas
are not benefiting those children. This had led those children to only be able to get a good
education if they are lucky or smart enough to get into a charter schools. So the result of these
studies may lead for a push for more charter schools in urban areas and less in suburban areas.
But instead it should push for better public schooling in urban areas.
This issue effects urban education because it shows the benefit of charter schools but also shows
the disadvantage all the students attending urban publics schools have that aren’t able to get into
the charter schools.
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Challenges to your assumptions about the issue:
This article challenged my assumption that charter schools lesson the education gap for children
in poor areas. This is because is instead put a gap between the children that are able to attend and
those that aren’t. Those children were not able to pass the test or get picked in that lottery are
attending very bad public school that they do not reserve a good education. This causes them to
have unequal opportunities then those lucky enough to attend charter schools.
New questions/ideas that the article raises for you:
Does the funding of a charter schools take away from the funding of public schools in the same
area?
Is it cheaper to fund a charter school than fix issues in education to many public schools?
Action you could take to address issue in the article:
More funding and effort needs to be put into urban public schools to solve an overall problem in
education for urban students. By adding a charter school in and allowing a small portion of the
population to have a better education does not benefit the vast amount of public schools and their
students that do not receive good education.
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