Killing public schools

One comment I hear every time budgets for public education are discussed is, "You can't fix the educational system by throwing money at it."

This pisses me off on a variety of levels.  First, there's the sense that funding public schools is randomly "throwing money," as if it's inherently irresponsible to provide adequate resources for educating the next generation of citizens.  Implicit in this is that schools will just waste the money anyhow, that school boards spend their time looking for frivolous ways to spend their state and federal funding.

The worst part, however, is that this convenient and glib little quip ignores the truth of a different adage: "You get what you pay for."  If you want to obtain and retain quality teachers, ensure that they have manageable class sizes that optimize student success, and give them the resources they need to deliver top-quality education, you have to pay for it.

And it's not like if you refuse to spend tax money to fund schools, then somehow the money magically stays in your pocket.  Taxpayers will pay either for supporting schools, or for the consequences of a generation of poorly-educated, disaffected young adults whose career choices are constrained by a lack of opportunities in public schools, or who have chosen to go to college and racked up hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loans that will take decades to repay.

All of which is why the proposed federal education budget is such a travesty.

The Washington Post calls this "Trump's education budget," which is a little doubtful, given that Trump gives every impression of having never written anything longer 140 characters, much less an actual budget proposal.  The specifics, honestly, have Betsy DeVos written all over them.  The Secretary of Education is a staunch believer in federal funding for private and religious schools -- which she refers to as "school choice" -- and for cutting damn near everything else to the bone.

Here are a few of the provisions of this proposal:

• cutting a total of $10.6 billion from the overall budget for education
• cutting funding for college work-study programs by half
• cutting over a hundred million dollars from programs supporting mental health services and programs providing enrichment, honors, and advanced coursework in middle and high schools
• ending a program to provide student loan forgiveness for college graduates who work in public service
• cutting $168 million from grants to states for career and tech programs
• cutting $72 million from programs for international education and foreign language training
• cutting $12 million from funding for the Special Olympics
• cutting $96 million from a program for adult literacy instruction

On the other hand, it:

• expands support for charter schools and private and religious schools by $400 million
• adds $1 billion to programs to push school districts to adopt "choice-friendly" policies

"It’s time for us to break out of the confines of the federal government’s arcane approach to education," DeVos said.  "Washington has been in the driver’s seat for over fifty years with very little to show for its efforts."

Betsy DeVos [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

DeVos, of course, is in no position to make that kind of judgment.  She has never worked in a public school, did not send her children to public school, and her main claim to fame, education-wise, is pushing a program in her home state of Wisconsin that funneled $2 billion to private and religious schools despite peer-reviewed studies showing that these programs do not work.  And the situation in Wisconsin is by no means unique -- other states have tried voucher systems, and by and large they have been a dismal flop.  Michael Hiltzik of the Los Angeles Times gives one example:

A study released last February by a team of researchers led by Jonathan Mills of Tulane University found that students in Louisiana’s expanded program lost ground in their first two years in the program.  Those performing at average levels in math and reading — that is, at about the 50th percentile — fell 24 percentile points in math and eight points in reading after their first year in the program.  In the second year, they improved slightly in math, though they still scored well below non-voucher students, and barely improved at all in reading.

So let's take those results, and make them national by mandate!  That'd be a great idea!

It doesn't take an expert to recognize the terrible effect that such a diversion of funds has on schools.  You'd think this would be enough for even the most diehard supporter of "school choice" to say, "Oh.  I guess I was wrong, then."

But no.  Data, facts, and evidence have no impact on a doctrinaire ideologue like DeVos, who honestly doesn't seem to give a damn if public schools fail.  In fact, if by her actions public schools do decline, in her mind it will just prove what she's claimed all along; that education in America is in a tailspin.

 Look, I've worked in education for thirty years.  It's not that I think we're perfect.  There's wastefulness, there is misspent money, and I have long decried the increasing focus on trivial content and preparation for standardized tests.  But the solution is not to cut funding to the bone.  Faced with revenue loss, public schools have only one real choice -- reducing staff.  Most of the rest of the line items in school budgets are earmarked or non-discretionary -- school boards have no choice in whether to include them.  The only big-ticket item that boards actually do have control over is salaries.  But since the salary per teacher is set contractually, there's only one option: lay people off.

Which means higher class sizes, cutting of electives, and loss of program.

Not that DeVos would ever admit this.  But look at the actual results of voucher programs and charter schools, nationwide -- not the spin that DeVos puts on it, but real numbers coming from studies such as the ones described by Hiltzik in The Los Angeles Times article linked above.

The conclusion is unequivocal.  And the budget being proposed will, if passed, be a death blow to the schools that can withstand it least -- poor, overcrowded, inner-city schools.

Remember that next time you see Betsy DeVos smile her smarmy smile and say that she's pro-child.

State-supported abuse

In the past few years, the religious right has cultivated an attitude of persecution amongst its followers.  It's worked; we hear over and over about the War on Christmas, how anti-discrimination laws are restricting the rights of the religious, even how the Evil Federal Government and Their Activist Judges are plotting to round up Christians and put them in jail for their beliefs.

And instead of being laughed into well-deserved obscurity, these ranting loons have actually convinced large numbers of apparently sensible people that Christians are a persecuted minority in the United States, despite the fact that 83% of Americans self-identify as Christian.  Also despite the fact that churches and church property are tax-exempt.

And also despite the fact that in many states, Christian private schools receive little to no oversight from state education departments.

I didn't realize the extent to which this can go awry until I read the exposé published last week in the online news source Alabama.  Written by Anna Claire Vollers, this article is entitled "Former Students Share Harrowing Stories of Life Inside Alabama's Worst Religious Private School," and was as gruesome and hard to read as the title would lead you to believe -- but I strongly urge all of you to read it, because it's brilliantly written and there is more to the story than the few details I have room for in this post.

Under the guise of providing religious guidance and education to troubled teens, the Restoration Youth Academy of Prichard (outside of Mobile, Alabama) was allowed for years to engage in practices that as an educator I can only describe as "destroying children."  Teenagers were shackled, beaten, put in solitary confinement for speaking up for themselves or others, deprived of food and clothing.  One 14-year-old was confined naked in an "isolation room;" a girl made to stand in front of the others while the leaders called her derogatory names.   The only curriculum provided was ACE (Accelerated Christian Education) which is an ultra-fundamentalist school curriculum that teaches young-earth creationism and that anything other than traditional gender roles is sinful.

Lucas Greenfield, who when 14 was locked into an eight-foot-by-eight-foot room with blank walls and a single bare light bulb, said, "When you're inside a tiny room where all you can see is four walls, you start – I won't say hallucinating, but you start going crazy.  All you think about is, what's the best way to kill myself?  Is there any way out of this?  This is ridiculous.  I hope I die...  This kind of program should not be allowed to exist.  All because you put a cross on top of a building and call it a Christian program, we're supposed to overlook all that happens in those places?"

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

There are stories of mandatory boxing matches, often deliberately pitting younger and weaker children against stronger and more aggressive ones.

"They'd have the bigger kid beat the shit out of the other kid," said Greenfield.  "They'd make us form a big circle. You can't get out and you can't get back in.  They would always have somebody, normally me, pray before we'd have the boxing match. Will [head instructor William Knott] told me to pray nobody got killed.  I was like, really?  You're the one making them fight."

Greenfield is one of the lucky ones.  He was freed in 2015, and has completed his high school diploma, and has plans for his future.  Others still suffer from PTSD and anger issues.  Many have dropped out of the public schools to which they were transferred after being released.  Several have retreated into drug abuse.

And all of this went on for years, with the state turning a blind eye.  Vollers writes:

Alabama law (Code of Alabama 16-1-11.1) says state regulation of any religiously affiliated school would be an unconstitutional burden on religious activities and directly violate the Alabama Religious Freedom Amendment.  State law also says the state has no compelling interest to burden nonpublic schools with licensing or regulation. 

While Alabama does have a few basic reporting requirements for private schools, it exempts those that are church schools in every instance.  Teachers do not have to undergo background checks and schools do not have to be inspected.  While many church-affiliated schools do choose to pursue licensing or accreditation by outside agencies, it's not a mandate in Alabama.

The good news -- if we can call anything connected to this nightmare "good news" -- is that Restoration Youth Academy has been closed, and its owner, Pastor John David Young, head instructor William Knott, and guidance counselor Aleshia Moffett, were arrested and charged with multiple counts of aggravated child abuse.  They are scheduled to stand trial this fall, and astonishingly, deny all wrongdoing.

What sickens me most about all of this is that these three monsters spent years overseeing the ruin of children's lives, and because they are a "religious institution" the state made no effort to check on what they were doing.  There are children who were imprisoned in RYA (yes, I use the word "imprison" deliberately, although people in prison are treated more humanely than this) who will never recover.

It's time that state and federal officials recognize that religious institutions, like any human-created and human-run endeavor, can be wonderful and life-enriching or sadistic and destructive.  There is no justification (and never has been) for the government giving carte blanche to places like RYA simply because they're afraid of being accused of a campaign of persecution by the religious.  

Giving proper oversight to churches and church schools and treating them as equivalent to any other organization aren't encroaching on "religious freedom;" it's doing what government should do, which is to protect the rights and safety of the citizens from the unethical, unscrupulous, and as is the case here -- the downright evil.