Catholic schools are closing their doors all across America, leaving future generations with nowhere to turn for the high-quality academics and values-based education so many families are seeking. The number of students attending Catholic schools in the US fell from about 5.2 million in 1965 to around two million in 2008.
Pioneer Institute believes these schools are worth preserving. For over a decade, we have raised our voice in support of these excellent academic options, and tools such as tax credit scholarships that would enable more families to attend.
Pioneer has held public forums, published research on the benefits of Catholic education, on successful models such as Cristo Rey, and on policy changes that would stop the Massachusetts education department from depriving religious school students of special needs services and school nurses. The Institute has also convened key stakeholders, appeared in local and national press, filed amicus briefs, produced a feature a documentary film, and much more.
It certainly has been a busy one, both nationally and here at Pioneer. We are set to release a short policy brief on the inequities in Unemployment Insurance in Massachusetts and are gearing up for an education event Tuesday to discuss issues around student test data, including MCAS, TIMSS, the state’s data warehouse and the need to use data to guide professional development and inform classroom practice. For that reason, I saved up my thoughts this week for one weekend post. Here goes; from lightest to most serious.
1) This week’s sign of the apocalypse – According to The Week (a periodical I’ve trumped here before) a Colorado inmate is suing the prison where he is incarcerated because he was badly hurt when trying to escape from it. I’m sorry; that one was just too good not to pass on.
2) The other election – Yes, there was another heartbreaking election this week and my boyhood hero Jim Ed Rice fell just 16 votes shy of election to baseball’s Hall of Fame. To make matters worse, the only player who achieved election this year was hated Yankee reliever Goose Gossage, who, if you remember correctly, during an era when some sort of curse seemed to plague the Red Sox, enticed Jim Ed to fly out with two on and one out in the bottom of the ninth in 1978’s historic one-game play-off.
3) Tackling the important issues – University of Georgia President Michael Adams stepped up to address the most pressing issue in higher ed today: the lack of a playoff system for college football’s Bowl Championship Series. It seems he felt his school’s team had been unfairly excluded from competing for a national title. Never mind that, according to statistics provided by the Boston Globe’s Derrick Jackson, only 29% of the African-American players on that team are graduating from school, a school whose president seems to think winning games is more important than closing the persistent achievement gap between black and white students. I wonder that other educators don’t try a similar sleight-of-hand: focus the public’s attention on ephemera so that they don’t notice their children aren’t learning.
Passed on by a friend is the shocking bulge in hiring for grades K-8: In the past year, there were 52,000 new K-8 students nationwide, and 42,500 new K-8 teachers hired.
The National Education Association today released its annual report, Rankings and Estimates: Rankings of the States 2006 and Estimates of School Statistics 2007…
Teacher hiring is completely out of control.
Yes, believers in the eternal teacher shortage, you read that correctly. A trend that was obvious after last year’s edition of Rankings and Estimates is now glaring. The last of the Baby Boomer’s kids are working their way through high school and they are not being replaced. NEA estimates that K-12 enrollment grew by only 0.3 percent in 2006-07, but the demographic implications are only clear when you separate elementary enrollment from secondary.
Grades K-8 Enrollment 2006-07= 29,758,808 (+51,958; +0.2%)
Grades 9-12 Enrollment 2006-07= 19,133,765 (+113,079; +0.6%)
Looks like we should be hiring a greater percentage of high school teachers, right? But we’re not, not even close.
Grades K-8 Classroom Teachers 2006-07= 1,856,567 (+42,541; +2.3%)
Grades 9-12 Classroom Teachers 2006-07= 1,317,787 (+10,175; +0.8%)
That’s right. America hired 42,541 extra elementary school teachers for 51,958 extra elementary school students. That’s one extra teacher for every 1.2 extra students. This is not a new trend, only an accelerated one. In the last 10 years, K-8 enrollment has risen by a cumulative 4.1 percent. But the K-8 teaching forced has risen by a cumulative 17.1 percent.
If the national picture seems insane, consider California. NEA estimates a 48,031 student decrease in K-8 enrollment for 2006-07, but an increase of 9,284 K-8 teachers.
NEA estimates K-8 average salaries increased 4.2 percent in 2006-07, which means we are paying a premium for all those extra teachers. So while NEA decries the failure of average salaries to match inflation, the fact that public school districts can so massively increase the number of teachers at the bottom end of the scale, while still increasing the average salary by a substantial amount, is a testament to the ability of government to appropriate money for education.
Why can’t teacher salaries go up? Might have something to do with hiring too many.
This space has been a supporter of in-store limited service clinics in the past. And the state’s Public Health Council, despite some misgivings, just approved the regulations which will allow these clinics to begin opening. And good for them, they approved blanket regulations, not just case-by-case waivers, which would tied the process up in red tape.
But then, Mayor Menino steps into the frame with a vociferous and very public condemnation of the clinics. Its not clear to this writer why he’s so focussed on the issue.
Sure, these clinics bring up some clear issues about our healthcare delivery system — discontinuity of care, fragmented recordkeeping, etc. But, guess what, these problems exist today and will exist tomorrow, regardless of the clinics.
In the meantime, they offer an alternative source of care at a time and place that is convenient to a lot of us, at no cost to the government and with the potential to move a lot of low-acuity patients out of the hospitals.
In Massachusetts, the Know-Nothing amendments prevent more than 100,000 urban families with children in chronically underperforming school districts from receiving scholarship vouchers that would allow them access to additional educational alternatives. These legal barriers, also known as Blaine amendments, restrict government funding from flowing to religiously affiliated organizations in nearly 40 states and are a violation of the first and fourteenth amendments.
The U.S. Supreme Court will hear a case this year, Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue, that could end these amendments. In 2018, Pioneer produced a 30-minute documentary on the impact of the Blaine amendments on families in Massachusetts, Georgia, and Michigan.
“She’s a good girl. She helps me a lot. She has big, big dreams. I don’t have the money, but she has big dreams. I hope she’s going to get everything, but she works so hard. She works so hard in school.”
“Our family is needing to make some really big sacrifices because we believe this is important, and so, we’re basically going to do whatever it takes… Sometimes we look at each other and go ‘I don’t know if I can do it again another month…’”
“A lot of the families have to sacrifice and work multiple jobs… And just scraping together enough money to just make tuition, just the basics.”
“It is discriminatory, that parents who want to choose an alternative to public school for their children, would not in any way receive any compensation for that, whether it be tax credit, whether it be a voucher…”
In the 1840s, nativist movement leaders formed official political parties and local chapters of the national Native American Party (later the American Party), although they continued to be commonly known as the Know-Nothing Party. Politicians sought to insert provisions into state constitutions against Catholics who refused to renounce the pope. The Know-Nothing movement brought bigotry and hatred to a new level of violence and organization.
The party’s legacy endured in the post-Civil War era, with laws and constitutional amendments it supported, still today severely limiting parents’ educational choices. A federal constitutional amendment was proposed by Speaker of the House James Blaine prohibiting money raised by taxation in any State to be under the control of any religious sect; nor shall any money so raised or lands so devoted be divided between religious sects or denominations. These were then named the Blaine Amendments of 1875.
in recent decades, often in response to challenges to school choice programs, the U.S. Supreme Court has demonstrated great interest in examining the issues of educational alternatives and attempts limit parental options. Massachusetts plays a key role in this debate. The Bay State was a key center of the Know-Nothing movement and has the oldest version of Anti-Aid Amendments in the nation, as well as a second such amendment approved in 1917. Two-fifths of Massachusetts residents are Catholic, and its Catholic schools outperform the state’s public schools, which are the best in the nation.
Help families like the Costons in Michigan to end the bigoted Blaine amendments in their state that are blocking tuition scholarships and other types of financial support that would make it possible for families to send their children to high-quality schools that are best suited for their children.
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It certainly has been a busy one, both nationally and here at Pioneer. We are set to release a short policy brief on the inequities in Unemployment Insurance in Massachusetts and are gearing up for an education event Tuesday to discuss issues around student test data, including MCAS, TIMSS, the state’s data warehouse and the need to use data to guide professional development and inform classroom practice. For that reason, I saved up my thoughts this week for one weekend post. Here goes; from lightest to most serious.
1) This week’s sign of the apocalypse – According to The Week (a periodical I’ve trumped here before) a Colorado inmate is suing the prison where he is incarcerated because he was badly hurt when trying to escape from it. I’m sorry; that one was just too good not to pass on.
2) The other election – Yes, there was another heartbreaking election this week and my boyhood hero Jim Ed Rice fell just 16 votes shy of election to baseball’s Hall of Fame. To make matters worse, the only player who achieved election this year was hated Yankee reliever Goose Gossage, who, if you remember correctly, during an era when some sort of curse seemed to plague the Red Sox, enticed Jim Ed to fly out with two on and one out in the bottom of the ninth in 1978’s historic one-game play-off.
3) Tackling the important issues – University of Georgia President Michael Adams stepped up to address the most pressing issue in higher ed today: the lack of a playoff system for college football’s Bowl Championship Series. It seems he felt his school’s team had been unfairly excluded from competing for a national title. Never mind that, according to statistics provided by the Boston Globe’s Derrick Jackson, only 29% of the African-American players on that team are graduating from school, a school whose president seems to think winning games is more important than closing the persistent achievement gap between black and white students. I wonder that other educators don’t try a similar sleight-of-hand: focus the public’s attention on ephemera so that they don’t notice their children aren’t learning.
Passed on by a friend is the shocking bulge in hiring for grades K-8: In the past year, there were 52,000 new K-8 students nationwide, and 42,500 new K-8 teachers hired.
The National Education Association today released its annual report, Rankings and Estimates: Rankings of the States 2006 and Estimates of School Statistics 2007…
Teacher hiring is completely out of control.
Yes, believers in the eternal teacher shortage, you read that correctly. A trend that was obvious after last year’s edition of Rankings and Estimates is now glaring. The last of the Baby Boomer’s kids are working their way through high school and they are not being replaced. NEA estimates that K-12 enrollment grew by only 0.3 percent in 2006-07, but the demographic implications are only clear when you separate elementary enrollment from secondary.
Grades K-8 Enrollment 2006-07= 29,758,808 (+51,958; +0.2%)
Grades 9-12 Enrollment 2006-07= 19,133,765 (+113,079; +0.6%)
Looks like we should be hiring a greater percentage of high school teachers, right? But we’re not, not even close.
Grades K-8 Classroom Teachers 2006-07= 1,856,567 (+42,541; +2.3%)
Grades 9-12 Classroom Teachers 2006-07= 1,317,787 (+10,175; +0.8%)
That’s right. America hired 42,541 extra elementary school teachers for 51,958 extra elementary school students. That’s one extra teacher for every 1.2 extra students. This is not a new trend, only an accelerated one. In the last 10 years, K-8 enrollment has risen by a cumulative 4.1 percent. But the K-8 teaching forced has risen by a cumulative 17.1 percent.
If the national picture seems insane, consider California. NEA estimates a 48,031 student decrease in K-8 enrollment for 2006-07, but an increase of 9,284 K-8 teachers.
NEA estimates K-8 average salaries increased 4.2 percent in 2006-07, which means we are paying a premium for all those extra teachers. So while NEA decries the failure of average salaries to match inflation, the fact that public school districts can so massively increase the number of teachers at the bottom end of the scale, while still increasing the average salary by a substantial amount, is a testament to the ability of government to appropriate money for education.
Why can’t teacher salaries go up? Might have something to do with hiring too many.
This space has been a supporter of in-store limited service clinics in the past. And the state’s Public Health Council, despite some misgivings, just approved the regulations which will allow these clinics to begin opening. And good for them, they approved blanket regulations, not just case-by-case waivers, which would tied the process up in red tape.
But then, Mayor Menino steps into the frame with a vociferous and very public condemnation of the clinics. Its not clear to this writer why he’s so focussed on the issue.
Sure, these clinics bring up some clear issues about our healthcare delivery system — discontinuity of care, fragmented recordkeeping, etc. But, guess what, these problems exist today and will exist tomorrow, regardless of the clinics.
In the meantime, they offer an alternative source of care at a time and place that is convenient to a lot of us, at no cost to the government and with the potential to move a lot of low-acuity patients out of the hospitals.
The Week in Review
/0 Comments/in Blog, News, Related Education Blogs /by Liam DayIt certainly has been a busy one, both nationally and here at Pioneer. We are set to release a short policy brief on the inequities in Unemployment Insurance in Massachusetts and are gearing up for an education event Tuesday to discuss issues around student test data, including MCAS, TIMSS, the state’s data warehouse and the need to use data to guide professional development and inform classroom practice. For that reason, I saved up my thoughts this week for one weekend post. Here goes; from lightest to most serious.
1) This week’s sign of the apocalypse – According to The Week (a periodical I’ve trumped here before) a Colorado inmate is suing the prison where he is incarcerated because he was badly hurt when trying to escape from it. I’m sorry; that one was just too good not to pass on.
2) The other election – Yes, there was another heartbreaking election this week and my boyhood hero Jim Ed Rice fell just 16 votes shy of election to baseball’s Hall of Fame. To make matters worse, the only player who achieved election this year was hated Yankee reliever Goose Gossage, who, if you remember correctly, during an era when some sort of curse seemed to plague the Red Sox, enticed Jim Ed to fly out with two on and one out in the bottom of the ninth in 1978’s historic one-game play-off.
3) Tackling the important issues – University of Georgia President Michael Adams stepped up to address the most pressing issue in higher ed today: the lack of a playoff system for college football’s Bowl Championship Series. It seems he felt his school’s team had been unfairly excluded from competing for a national title. Never mind that, according to statistics provided by the Boston Globe’s Derrick Jackson, only 29% of the African-American players on that team are graduating from school, a school whose president seems to think winning games is more important than closing the persistent achievement gap between black and white students. I wonder that other educators don’t try a similar sleight-of-hand: focus the public’s attention on ephemera so that they don’t notice their children aren’t learning.
One reason we do not pay teachers more
/0 Comments/in Blog, News, Related Education Blogs /byPassed on by a friend is the shocking bulge in hiring for grades K-8: In the past year, there were 52,000 new K-8 students nationwide, and 42,500 new K-8 teachers hired.
Why can’t teacher salaries go up? Might have something to do with hiring too many.
Minute Clinics are coming
/0 Comments/in Better Government, Blog, Blog: Better Government, Expanding Healthcare Access, Healthcare /by Steve PoftakThis space has been a supporter of in-store limited service clinics in the past. And the state’s Public Health Council, despite some misgivings, just approved the regulations which will allow these clinics to begin opening. And good for them, they approved blanket regulations, not just case-by-case waivers, which would tied the process up in red tape.
But then, Mayor Menino steps into the frame with a vociferous and very public condemnation of the clinics. Its not clear to this writer why he’s so focussed on the issue.
Sure, these clinics bring up some clear issues about our healthcare delivery system — discontinuity of care, fragmented recordkeeping, etc. But, guess what, these problems exist today and will exist tomorrow, regardless of the clinics.
In the meantime, they offer an alternative source of care at a time and place that is convenient to a lot of us, at no cost to the government and with the potential to move a lot of low-acuity patients out of the hospitals.