Kitty Kelly Epstein's Blog

The Oakland school district is likely to propose the closing of more schools using a term borrowed from corporate America called “rightsizing.” The Business Dictionary calls rightsizing: “The process of a corporation reorganizing or restructuring their business. The term rightsizing is often used by companies instead of downsizing because it sounds less drastic.”

Adopting corporate vocabulary for public institutions is a problem, but the bigger problem is that closing schools has no educational justification. The most definitive national study of school closings indicates that they do not save money or improve student education.
University of Maryland researcher Gail Sunderman and UC Berkeley professors Erin Coghlan and Rick Mintrop produced a report “School Closure as a Strategy to Remedy Low Performance” for the National Education Policy Center.

They document that closing schools is not good for either student performance or non-cognitive well-being, and they begin their recommendations with this statement: “The relatively limited evidence base suggests that school closures are not a promising strategy for remedying low student performance.”

Four important points emerge from the study that was published in May of this year:

1. Some have argued that closing schools where students do not have high test scores will help those students to do better.  The evidence indicates that the opposite is true.
   Student performance declines in the year after the closing is announced, even before the school is actually closed.   There is also an increase in dropout rates.
   Performance declines further at the new school to which the student is assigned.  Even if the new school is a better-performing school than the one from which the student was transferred (which is often not the case), performance improves in the second and third year but not more than it would have improved if the student had stayed at the original school. The studies also found modest negative spillover effects on the students attending the schools receiving the new students.
2. Closings have a differential negative impact on Black students. In urban school closures 61 percent of the impacted students are African-American although African-American students makes up only about 31 percent of urban school populations.  And in some districts such as Chicago, Black teachers are also more likely to be affected.
3. Students do not feel that they are being “saved” from a “failing” school. They experience the closings as oppressive.
4. Closing schools does not save money.

In the case of Detroit, for example, the study concluded that the district achieved little or no savings, because of the extra costs associated with moving the additional students lost to the district and the renovation costs for upgrading schools, some of which were themselves later closed. The notion that schools should have a minimum size is not born out by a look at the average private school, which is smaller than the average public school.

Wealthier people do not, by and large, choose large anonymous institutions for their kids. Why should we?

So why would the Oakland district do something which is not helpful to its students?

The following are speculations:  First, the school board may not have this information.  (I plan to encourage them to read the study.) Second, it seems that the school board is being pressured in policy by the same entities that have led Oakland astray persistently.  The Fiscal Crisis Management and Assistance Team (FCMAT), for example, is a quasi private body of consultants, operating out of Bakersfield, which was involved in the take-over of the school district years ago.

Further, a number of Sacramento politicians are heavily funded by corporatized charter schools and may be willing to see public schools close because districts are required to offer closed schools sites to charters.

The recommendation of the NEPC study on school closings is simple – Instead of taking the costly step of closing needy schools, invest in them.

Kitty Kelly Epstein, PhD, hosts Education Today on KPFA and tweets from @educate2day941

By Kitty Kelly Epstein

There are a number of new educational research findings that are important for teachers and parents to consider.

Especially significant are four new studies: the importance of ethnic studies in student performance, the negative impact of retaining students, how Teach for America displaces Black teachers and the harmful effects of teaching reading to children in kindergarten.

In an interesting study on the impact of ethnic studies on the school performance of students in a San Francisco high school, Stanford Professor Thomas Dee found that students who took ethnic studies classes had better attendance and better grades than their peers at the same level of school performance who did not take these classes.

His study bears out the argument made by many Black and Latino educators that students do better in school when they learn about history and issues related to people of their ethnicity and culture. http://news.stanford.edu/news/2016/january/ethnic-studies-benefits-011216.html

Many parents wonder whether holding children back in the same grade is a good idea.

The most recent research, conducted with a large cohort and a sophisticated research model, concluded that children who were retained in the same grade were “scarred” and were more likely to drop out of high school, even when the grade retention happened in the early grades.

This is particularly important research in the Bay Area, since a large portion of those retained in the same grade are African-American or Latino males.

(The abstract is available free at this site; the full article has a cost charged by the journal)

http://sf.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2014/09/03/sf.sou074.abstract

The Impact of Teach for America on Black Teacher Displacement in Urban Schools: Associate Professor Terrenda White finds that policies promoted by Teach for America contribute to the displacement of veteran African-American teachers, even though TFA has recently begun to recruit more diverse individuals for its own teaching corps.

The author concludes that, “TFA’s diversity initiative, while potentially praiseworthy, neither negates nor redresses the harms of its policy commitments that have disrupted the professional lives of Black teachers broadly and undermined their pedagogical contributions to children.”

The article is long and is available free through an open access journal. Reading the introduction will give you the gist.

http://edushyster.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/TFAdiversity-paradox.pdf

The parents of young children will want to pay particular attention to the report by Dr. Nancy Carllson-Paige, and co-authors, “Kindergarten Reading: Little to Gain and Much to Lose”

They summarize the many studies indicating harmful results from the formal teaching of reading in kindergarten. She lists many appropriate and helpful reading-related activities.

But actual direct reading instruction in kindergarten does not lead to better reading ability in the later grades, and, according to some studies, is correlated with negative outcomes.

In considering this evidence, it is worth asking whether sometimes children may be referred to special education because they cannot do things that schools should not be forcing them to do in the first place.

http://www.allianceforchildhood.org/sites/allianceforchildhood.org/files/file/Reading_Instruction_in_Kindergarten.pdf

Kitty Kelly Epstein, PhD is the host of Education Today on KPFA 94.1 and the author of “A Different View of Urban Schools: Civil Rights, Critical Race Theory and Unexplored Realities” (2012) Peter Lang Publishers.

Many U.S. mayors and governors approach public schools with intense criticism.     L.A. Mayor Villaraigosa critiqued the L.A. schools and tried to take them over.  Chicago’s Mayor Rahm Emanuel closed fifty schools, mostly in the Black community.   And New Jersey’s Governor Chris Christie says the teachers union should be “punched in the face” and recently refused to sign a bill mandating recess for elementary school students.

(Really – He can’t get behind recess?)

Former Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums took a different approach.   He acted on a number of recommendations from his seven community-led education task forces, which had generally advocated for greater democracy and new programmatic approaches, rather than mayoral take-over or headline-grabbing teacher bashing.

He and his task forces thought the school board should get to run the school district.  So his first act after being elected Mayor was a drive to Sacramento to tell the State Superintendent that Oakland wanted its schools back.     The community had been pressuring for a return to local control ever since state take-over began in 2003.and local control was returned within a few months of Dellums’ actions.

When asked to endorse California’s bid for Race to the Top money in 2009, he said “No.  I don’t think there should be a competition for which children get money. They are all our children” Pressured by an assortment of press and other elected officials, he kept on saying “No.”  And he turned out to be right.  The competition and testing endorsed by the Business Roundtable and other corporate leaders have produced a national education system that is declining in the very test scores these schemes were designed to increase.

These two examples exhibited his commitment to democratic governance, but, at the same time, he thought mayors could be programmatically helpful.

Everyone now admits that there is a teacher shortage, and teacher diversity is shockingly low.  Dellums was the first Mayor to do anything about it. He held a big gathering of soon-to-be college graduates and career changers at City Hall and told his life story of growing up in Oakland.  He rallied them with the image of what it would mean to young people if they became teachers.   Hundreds signed up to check out the opportunity and many eventually became teachers.  Then he worked directly with the school district to create the most successful program in the country for recruiting, preparing, credentialing and supporting diverse teachers from the local community.  The Teach Tomorrow in Oakland program and its director, Rachelle Rogers-Ard (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6wP-oBGXZs) are nationally regarded for the unique approach, and other programs such as the Teacher Apprenticeship Program (https://www.hnu.edu/academics/graduate-programs/teacher-apprenticeship-program) have since been developed in the region.

A former Congressman, Dellums had been a national leader on health issues, opposition to apartheid, proposals to reduce the military budget and pressure to end the war in Vietnam. He was the first legislator to propose national health insurance through a single-payer system.

Given the opportunity to make a difference in the health of Oakland youngsters, he worked with a national foundation to fund and build five new school based health centers on middle-school campuses in flatlands, low-income neighborhoods where children did not have even a school nurse, before the health centers were built.

This project became a model for the nation.

Mayors should be involved in schools, not as dictators, but as allies. Dellums left his imprint on Oakland and these policies and programs for the benefit of youth will now be expanded at the Dellums Social Justice institute he has just started.

Kimberly Mayfield Lynch is chair of the Education Department at Holy Names University and chair of the local chair of Black Women Organized for Political Action.

Kitty Kelly Epstein is a professor who worked with former Mayor Dellums from 2007 to 2011. Her book, Organizing to Change a City (2012) Peter Lang Publishers expands on the themes in this article.