The State Penalized My School Because We Tried to Integrate by Steven Singer

Originally posted at: https://gadflyonthewallblog.com/2018/05/11/the-state-penalized-my-school-because-we-tried-to-integrate/

The original sin of American education is segregation.

Yet in Pennsylvania, taking steps to integrate can result in a penalty from the state legislature.

That’s what happened to my school this year.

After years of innovation and academic growth, my school added a new program to bring in struggling students from another institution – and the state rewarded us by putting us on a list of “failing” schools and forcing us into a voucher program.

I teach in a racially diverse, high poverty district in the western part of the state, just outside of Pittsburgh.

Charter schools have been leeching off us for years.

But today was the first day school vouchers sunk their teeth into us, too.

It’s called the Opportunity Scholarship Tax Credit Program (OSTCP) – a ridiculous bit of legislation that allows children in struggling public schools to use public tax dollars to pay for tuition at a private or parochial school.

I’d say they could use that money at a participating public school, too, but in Pennsylvania the public schools taking part in the program can be counted on one hand with fingers to spare.

And why does my school now qualify for this dubious distinction? Because of our standardized test scores.

Not our test scores from this year. They won’t be released until at least June – more likely August or September.

This is based on test scores from last year – 2016-17.

Moreover, it’s not district wide. It’s just the middle school and one elementary school.

In previous years, the middle school was the district powerhouse. We had the highest test scores and the most innovation. So what happened?

In short, we integrated.

From a state-wide standpoint, my district is hugely segregated.

About 60% of our students are poor and/or minorities. Yet if you go a few miles north, south, east or west, you’ll find schools serving every flavor of white privilege. Beautiful big buildings with the best of everything and a tax base to pay for it. My district, on the other hand, is made to do the best it can with what we’ve got, which isn’t much.

To make matters worse, the structure within our district, inherited from decades of unenlightened social planning, doubles down on that segregation.

Though we only have one middle school and one high school where all our students rub shoulders, we have two elementary schools – one for the middle class white kids and one for the poorer black ones.

This has dramatic academic consequences. Kids at the better-resourced white school flourish scholastically more than kids from the crumbling black school. So the racial and economic skills gap becomes entrenched by the time kids move to the middle school in 6th grade.

If only we could integrate the elementaries.

However, we can’t bus kids from one neighborhood to the other because we can’t afford it. We have a walking district. Moreover, parents would revolt at the idea of elementary kids having to trudge long distances or take a city bus to school.

The only long-term solution is to create a new, centrally located elementary center serving both populations. However, that takes money we don’t have.

So last year we tried a partial solution – move the 5th grade up to the middle school. That way, we can at least integrate our students a year earlier.

Of course, this means taking kids from the black school with terrible test scores up to the middle school. This means adding more struggling students from the school that already is on the state’s bottom 15% list and making them the middle school’s responsibility. It means a new program, new trials and challenges.

You’d think we’d get praise or at least understanding for tackling such a problem. But no.

Taking on the 5th grade tipped the middle school’s test scores over the edge.

Now we’re in the bottom 15%, too. Now we have to let our students go to a private or parochial school with public tax dollars.

Why? Because we tried to right a wrong. We tried to correct a social and academic injustice. And the result was a kick in the gut.

Thanks, Harrisburg legislators! Way to support students of color!

This is just another way that school vouchers support white supremacy. They make it harder to battle segregation.

Why would anyone integrate if doing so could mean losing funding and looking like a failure in the press?

Moreover, forget all the junk you hear from the state about growth.

This penalty is based on whether we hit testing benchmarks – what percentage of students we have earning proficient or advanced on the tests. It doesn’t matter how much they’ve improved. It doesn’t matter if they’ve gone from the lowest of the low to scratching at the ceiling of proficient.

My 8th graders last year (the year we’re being penalized for) experienced tremendous growth just like my students this year are doing. From where they came in to where they’re leaving, the difference is phenomenal!

But apparently that doesn’t count in Pennsylvania.

A poor school serving mostly underprivileged minorities needs to meet the same benchmarks as schools with Cadillac resources serving kids who have everything money can buy. There’s certainly no need for the state or federal government to do anything about equitable resources (At least, not until the result of a lawsuit is handed down where local districts are suing the state over just such strategic disinvestment).

Instead, we’ve got to offer our student the “opportunity” to go to a private school on the public dime.

And what an opportunity it is!

The chance to send your child to a cooperating private or parochial school at public expense.

The opportunity to lose your duly-elected school board. The opportunity for decisions about how your money is spent being made behind closed doors with little to no input from you. The opportunity to send your child to a school with fewer resources and fewer certified teachers. The opportunity to send your child to (an often) religious school on the public dime.

Wow! I can’t imagine why so few parents take advantage of that opportunity! My district has had a few schools on the OSTCP list before, and families overwhelmingly opt to stay put.

Let’s not forget the justification for this “opportunity” is low test scores.

Wait a minute. These cooperating private and parochial schools don’t even take the same standardized tests, if they take any at all.

In our community, there is only one cooperating private school – a catholic school located right next door.

Students enrolled there don’t take the PSSA or Keystone Exams. I believe they take the Terra Nova test. And the school must do a great job because its Website is three years out of date about the results of those tests.

What a great way to improve test scores for our students – comparing apples-to-pears or, to be honest, actually making no comparison at all.

This OSTCP law is based on an unjustified assumption that private schools are always better than public ones. The reality is that if the resources both schools receive are similar, the public school usually greatly outperforms the private or parochial one.

I’ve seen this first hand. I’ve toured our next door Catholic institution. A few years ago, we relocated our students there temporarily during an emergency drill.

It’s a quaint school. Cobblestones and a shaded green campus.

But the buildings are crumbling – especially on the inside. Watermarks on the walls and dirt collecting in the corners.

It’s also much smaller than my school. They only have less than 300 students from K-8. We have about 1,500 from K-12.

I can see why parents who graduated from that school and have a history with it might want to send their kids there to continue that legacy. But anyone else would be giving up much better facilities, a much wider curriculum, much better trained and experienced teachers and even smaller classes!

The OSTCP bill has nothing to do with providing better opportunities for children and families.

It’s a public tax giveaway to private businesses.

The private/religious schools benefit and so do the businesses who “donate” their taxes to these programs.

In 17 states you can get substantial tax credits for contributing to this scam.

Louisiana, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Virginia, for example, all provide tax credits worth between $65 and $95 on every $100 donated. Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Montana, and South Carolina go even further by reimbursing 100% of the donation. You read that right. Donate $100, get $100 back.

Oh, but it gets much worse. Since these are considered donations, you can also claim them as charitable deductions and get an additional 35% off your taxes. So you donate $100 and get back $135! Yes. You actually make money off this deal!

In Pennsylvania, investors can even “triple dip” receiving a state tax credit, a reduction in their state taxable income, and a reduction in their federal taxable income. And, yes, that means they sometimes get back more in tax breaks than they provide in contributions.

Meanwhile all of these “savings” come from money stolen from local public schools like mine. Businesses and individual investors are profiting off the industrial testing complex.

In the Keystone state, we have the OSTCP and the Educational Improvement Tax Credit (EITC).

This blatant swindle is championed on both sides of the political aisle.

We already waste $200 million in business taxes to these programs in the Commonwealth, yet both Democrats and Republicans keep trying to pass another bill to increase that sum by another $50 million.

In Allegheny County, where I teach, that includes Democratic State Reps. Dom Costa, Daniel J. Deasy, William C. Kortz II (who represents part of my school district) and Harry Readshaw.

Because of this bogus philanthropy, there will always be a bottom 15% of state schools – approximately 400 “failing schools” – that are ripe for the picking from private and parochial school vultures.

I’m sorry, but this just isn’t right.

That money should be going to public schools not private or religious institutions many of which espouse fundamentalist or racist teachings.

There is a reason our founders legislated a separation of church and state. We’d do best to remember it.

We could be using our resources to help solve our problems, alleviate segregation and increase equity.

Instead our lawmakers are too interested in giveaways to business and corporations even if that means stealing the money from our children.