Fair and Just School Resources

Partnerships have the potential to build power. On March 31, Schott hosted a webinar, the penultimate of our 25th Anniversary series, “When Community and Labor Join Forces: Parent, Student and Teacher Partnerships”, to highlight lessons from the successful Chicago Teachers Union Strike in 2012, and the partnerships that carried the movement to victory. The story of the Chicago strike provides many lessons for public education advocates, particularly in how to build the kind of cross-sector relationships and alliances that find common ground.

Building Movement Project Co-Director Sean Thomas-Breitfeld moderated the online discussion between Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis and Action Now Executive Director Katelyn Johnson.

The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), passed in 2015, was a marked shift away from its predecessor, the No Child Left Behind Act. Under ESSA, much of the decision-making, accountability, and oversight passed from the Federal government to the states. In this transfer of policymaking to the state level, ESSA includes some important opportunities for students, parents, educators and communities to have their voices heard both in state capitols and in their local districts.

On Saturday, March 4th, New Yorkers took to the streets to march for equity in public education. The People’s March for Education Justice was held in 8 cities across the state. The marchers’ demands are:

• fully resourced public education, starting with early childhood and including higher education.
• to end the privatization of public schools and to end high stakes testing.
• to end the school-to-prison pipeline.
• to Raise the Age and decriminalize our youth.

Less than 0.3% of philanthropic dollars go to Native groups. This fact was pointed out at Philanthropy New York’s event, “Invisible No More: Native Realities in a Post-Election Era”, by Schott Foundation Vice President of Programs and Advocacy Edgar Villanueva. Alongside Edgar were Native Americans in Philanthropy CEO Sarah Eagle Heart, American Indian Law Alliance President and Executive Director Betty Lyons, and moderator Patricia Eng, who is Vice President of Strategic Partnerships at The New York Women’s Foundation. The panelists discussed concerns of and hopes for philanthropy’s engagement with Native partners. Each panelist identified gaps in support for Indigenous communities but emphasized that these issues affect us all: the planet that the Native community is fighting to protect is a shared responsibility for all of us, and we must collaborate with others to save it.  

Yesterday the Senate voted 50-50, with Vice President Mike Pence casting the tie-breaking vote, to confirm Michigan billionaire Betsy DeVos as the 11th U.S. Secretary of Education. The vote—which followed an overnight session of protest and some support of DeVos—marked the first time in history a vice president has been called upon to break a tie on a presidential nomination. The historic vote also followed a widely publicized groundswell of grassroots opposition to the nomination, citing among other issues, DeVos’s lack of experience, support of privatization and unfamiliarity with education policy and practice.

At the Schott Foundation we were clear that DeVos is dangerously unqualified for such an important position governing our nation’s public schools.

Following yesterday’s confirmation, our grantees and allies in education justice are speaking loud and clear: the fight for public education and equity in opportunity for all students continues.

Hopefully, responsible senators from substantially rural states spent the weekend taking cues from their peers from Maine and Alaska and learning why the potential impact of school privatization on their constituents should cause them to oppose Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education. If not, there's still time to catch up before tomorrow's vote.

Besides displaying a troubling ignorance of education policy and practice in her confirmation hearing and in answers to written questions from senators over the last two weeks, DeVos has an especially harmful future in mind for rural districts as part of a broader plan to divert public money to private education enterprises, no matter what the evidence says.

“High quality virtual charter schools provide valuable options to families, particularly those who live in rural areas where brick-and-mortar schools might not have the capacity to provide the range of courses or other educational experiences for students,” she wrote in answer to a question about online schools. As examples she cited seven virtual schools that she said graduate more than 90 percent of their students. But, as the Washington Post reported, a check of public data for each school tells a much different story: