Education Topic Notes

Education reform nowadays is accountability reforms

o Started in 1980s Report called A Nation at Risk
Shat on American education system for being behind other countries
Showed achievement gap between various communities in America
o Task is to make teachers and schools accountable for doing their job (better
teachers=better education)
o Reforms started looking at how market principles could be used to hold
individuals accountable
Standardized testing- Metricized improvement
Merit pay- Basic idea was to give incentives and disincentives to teachers
School choice- Parents are customers who can choose between schools
as commodities to invest in, thereby forcing lower performing schools to
catch up

Charter schools- Created charters between school district and admins of charter school
that agreed to free the school from certain regulations thus granting freedom to
experiment
o Wouldnt be require to hire teachers who are union members or hire teachers
who have more experience.
o Regular schools constrained by union contracts and seniority rules

In mid 90s charters started to be run by for-profit organizations

o Called EMOs/CMOs (Educational/Charter Maintenance Organizations)
CMOs were non-profit but large number of charters started going out to
for-profit chains where certain questionable rules were enforced/not-
enforced (bad with attendance and harsh discipline)
These rules can be used to select out of people who have disabilities or
behavior problems
o Charters turned from grassroots teacher effort into a mechanism of privatization

Accountability, quite literally, is the use of market principles to encourage public schools
to improve

Teacher shortages have not decreased overall, but they have decreased drastically
within poorer minority communities
o Teachers move to schools which pay more because they have wealthier (and
thus more successful) students
o Testing standards also favor bigger and wealthier suburban schools
o Creates a vacuum of teachers in poorer areas and propagates cycles of poverty
o Opposite scenario with test scores where on average tests scores are lower than
other countries but there are certain affluent schools which are internationally
ranked
 Issue is not easily broken down into traditional party affiliations
o Both progressive democrats and libertarian conservatives implement and enact
policies which largely base reform around accountability
o The problem is highlighted much more clearly by the notion of neoliberalism and
the union/corporatist divide

Education inequality isnt so much about an achievement gap as it is about funding

equality
o Local property taxes are used to disproportionately fund schools and directly
cause already wealthier regions to have better schools that contain better
infrastructure
o Privatization schemes (like CMOs) which use corporate investments further
accelerate the disparity between wealthy and poor schools

Testing regime- idea that schools success is wholly based on performance on tests
o Completely unsupported by current academic research and literature
o Moreover, test scores are used to shutdown programs and fire teachers
o Especially punishes minority and poor areas
VAMs=Value Added Metrics (Things like PARCC and SBA)
Stacked Ranking- Give raise to top 10% of teachers, improve middle, and
fire bottom 10%
o Testing is #1 reason for quitting teaching cause of time suck

Current reforms also have the ulterior motive of busting teacher unions
o Teacher unions have been a strong grassroots way to mobilize for progressive
causes
Protest against neoliberalization of education
Big educational corporations are against the progressive reforms that
teacher unions advocate for
Can swing elections through stopping teacher activism
o Attack things like teacher tenure, seniority, and last in first out
o Studies that say charter schools and VAMs work are funded by the same big right
wing conservative corporations (Koch Brothers, Gates Foundation, Walton
Foundation)
o Microsoft makes millions off of selling things like education software

Debates over education revolve around the 10th and 14th amendments
o 10th says everything that is not explicitly specified as a federal power is left up to
the states (including provision of public education)
o 14th says that the federal government can intervene when the states are not
providing equal protection under the law
Thus, the federal governments role in education primarily revolves
around civil rights
 Brown v. Board of Education (had to pass other implied laws such as busing, funding,
and curriculum regulation to protect students)
o Head Start- early education for low-income communities (pre-K)
o Bilingual Education Act- helped create schooling opportunities for immigrants
o Most education reforms are just amendments made to Elementary and
Secondary Education Act(ESEA)
ESEA Title I- Allocated resources to high-poverty schools through Title I
ESEA Title IX- Gender equality in school activities
o Individuals with Disabilities Education Act(IDEA)- Ensured access to public
education for individuals with disabilities

In the 80s school performance was analyzed in order to determine whether or not a
school was eligible for Title I funding
o Improving Americas Schools Act(IASA)- 1994 reauthorization of the ESEA
officially shifted the focus of the federal governments involvement in education
from civil rights to accountability
IASA required that schools adopt challenging content and set official
standards to receive Title I funding
o No Child Left Behind- 2001 reauthorization of IASA. Intensified accountability
requirements. It also added a set of sanctions for schools that failed to meet
performance standards

o Race to the Top- Obama adminstration