No place to lay your head at night

 NO Place to lay your head at night

As rents increase the number of children who are homeless is also increasing.  In the last six years, the number of homeless children has risen 24%.  In that same time, federal funding for these children has decreased 11%.  At last count there were 5,732 homeless kids in Baltimore City schools.  Baltimore County was right behind at 2,791.  Montgomery County came in third with 1,234 and Prince George’s County at 1,245.  

Median incomes in all of these jurisdictions are high. The median income means that 50% or the population is above the number and 50% is below the number.  In Baltimore City the median income is $59,000.   In Baltimore County it is 90k and rises to 100k in both Prince George’s and Montgomery counties.  These children do not just live in outdoor encampments.  The numbers include kids living in cars, emergency shelters and motels.  As these children move, district transportation will follow them. In Baltimore City 8% of the children are homeless.  While the numbers aren’t large in school districts like Talbot County, they have the second highest percentage in the state at 7% followed by St.Mary’s County at 5%.  Baltimore County has 2.5% of its student body homeless.

Most of these families are living paycheck to paycheck.  Changes in eviction laws have made it easier for a missed paycheck to lead to missed rent payments and eviction.  Families with no place to live do not have discretionary funds for school supplies, school trips, participation in extra-curricular activities.   For many of these kids, breakfast and lunch at school are their main meals of the day.  The noise of a growling stomach can be very disruptive to learning.  As kids get older the peer pressures to do the things other kids are doing can lead to minor (or even major) criminal activity. 

If you have no good place to lay your head at night, it’s hard to engage your brain in the morning.

How good is good enough

 Is Well Enough Good Enough?

 

Under federal and state law, if a child has a disability,  parents have the right to contest their child’s education placement.    The laws require that public schools provide a free and appropriate education (FAPE) for all children with disabilities up until age 21.   Of course, there is that pesky word “appropriate” and there is lots of disagreement about that.   Parents often disagree about what that word means for their children.

Long ago “appropriate” meant helping the child to achieve his or her full potential.  That standard has long since been abandoned.  The new standard seems to be “well-enough”.  Often public schools lack sufficient staffing to provide the level of speech therapy and other related services as determined on the child’s IEP.  And no, they often don’t inform parents of that issue.  There is also the issue of staffing of teachers.  Every Maryland school district is lacking fully licensed teachers.  Parents are not told if their child’s teacher is fully licensed.   Are the students of these teachers receiving FAPE?  The answer is maybe.  There is no guarantee that every fully licensed teacher is good nor that every conditionally licensed teacher is bad.  Parents should just be informed.  

When parents are sufficiently unhappy about the education their children are receiving, they can enter into a system called “due process”.   The process begins with a mediation and can progress all the way to a formal hearing with an administrative law judge.  Not all school complaints involve dissatisfaction with special education services.   However, for the 23-24 school year, EVERY complaint that wound up before an administrative law judge was about a family requesting non-public school placement for their children.  There were only 20 cases and the families won 18 of them.

Evidently well enough isn’t quite good enough for some families and their children.

Protection is a spectrum disorder

 Protection is a spectrum disorder

The Supreme Court recently ruled that parents have the right to remove their elementary aged children from being exposed to literature and/or instruction with regard to LGBYQIA+ based on the religious beliefs of the parents.   The case happened to be a Montgomery County Public Schools case beginning in Maryland.   The decision was not a final ruling in the case but the Justices hinted strongly that the parents will likely win in the end.

The ability of parents to protect their children from certain experiences is not a new privilege.  Parents can deprive children of vaccination  based on religious beliefs.  Parents can already require that their children be excluded from sex ed.   As a society we exclude children from sexually explicit content in movies (but interestingly not specific violence in video games or the internet).  

So what is different from this new parental prerogative that uses religion as the foil.  In the other instances the prohibition was about a non-human experience.  Now parents may exclude the recognition of humans from their children’s knowledge.

How much protection should parents provide for their children and how much it too much.  When does that protection smack up against the dignity and protection of other kids.  One of the first things parents who would deny access to their children should know is that the more something is forbidden the more it becomes fascinating.   Kids who are removed from the group during instruction on these topics will be VERY curious about what they are missing.  Probably more curious than they would have been with the lesson.  Secondly, there is a chance that one or more of the kids in the class is wondering about his/her own sexuality.  The question becomes “why am I so tainted that I can’t be seen in a story?”   Thirdly, what happens when two same gender parents show up at a PTA event or other parent invitation events?   How will the same gender parents be explained to the children who have been deprived?

Organizations such as Moms for Liberty will tell you the public schools were set up to meet the parents’ needs so therefore, parents should have the right to opt out of unacceptable instruction.   Actually that is not true.  Public schools were set up at the taxpayer’s expense to ensure an informed electorate for a democracy at a time when the majority of the population could barely read or write.

In the ‘50’s there was a Broadway musical, South Pacific.  One song in the show, had the lyrics, “you’ve got to be taught to hate and fear, it’s got to be drummed in your dear little ear, you’ve got to be taught from year to year, to hate all the people your relatives fear, you’ve got to be carefully taught”.

The Supreme Court is always supreme.  It just isn’t always on the right side of history.  This is one of those times.

 

 

 

 

Does your child go to a religious school?

 Does your child go to a religious school?

 

Since 1962 the Supreme Court has bared prayer in the public schools.   In the not so good old days, kids read from the bible and said the Lord’s Prayer as part of the opening of school each day.   Whether it was the protestant or Catholic version depended on the politics of the region.   Then came Madeline Murray, a Marylander who also happened to be an atheist.  She resisted and out of that resistance came the Supreme Court decision.  Although not a party to the case, her reasoning that prayer in public schools violates the first amendment to the religious establishment clause of the Constitution became part of the decision.

Now come the new found religious conservatives.   Legislators in Tennessee, Texas and Louisiana have passed legislation that would require the 10 Commandments to be displayed in every public school classroom in the state.   In 1980, there was a similar law in Kentucky and it was struck down by the Supreme Court as a violation of the Establishment Clause.

Recently, Louisiana thought it might give the idea a chance.   But the federal appeals court struck down that law.

But hey, nothing succeeds like “let’s give this another try”. The effort is very appealing to the conservative religious right.   Sorry, last week the Appeals Court also struck down a new Tennessee law for the same reason.  Do these folks even pay attention?   Because days after the Tennessee law was struck down, the Texas Governor signed an almost identical bill requiring that the 10  Commandments be displayed in every classroom in Texas.   More than likely opponents of the legislation in Texas will also raise the issue of the Establishment Clause and separation of church and state.

So why do these bills keep passing if they are consistently struck down?  The answer is pandering to the conservative base.   The governors of these states and their legislative majorities knowing full well that what they are doing violates the US Constitution can tell their constituents that they tried.  The can blame the left wing courts that struck them down.  Thing is the courts in these states could hardly be called left wing.

Religious schools are a good thing for those who want to send their children to a school with those belief systems.   Folks sending their kids to public schools, for whatever reasons, need to know that they did NOT chose a religious school and their taxes shouldn’t be supporting one.   Says so in the First Amendment.

Time for a Break- What do Teachers want?

 Time for a Break- What do Teachers want?

 

By this time in June, most teachers are on summer break.  It’s a time to renew and refresh. We know that 3 out of 5 teachers leave the field in the first five years of teaching.  The dropout rate for special education teachers is even higher.  Education Week interviewed teachers from all across the country to try to discern just what it is that teachers want.

Teachers still feel that becoming a teacher is one of the greatest privileges and responsibilities to have.  But it’s very important to think about ones’ individual values and the values of the school or school district where you serve.  A misalignment serves to erode both your personal confidence and your enjoyment of the profession.  Teachers would tell new teachers that they need to be brave because there will be many days when you will need to put on your big-girl and big-boy boots.

Teachers see the field of teaching changing and not for the better. They note that since the pandemic, more teachers have left the field and with them goes a great deal of experience and wisdom that younger teachers can’t lean on.  Teachers are also upset about the amount of technology- what they have to learn and how their students are using it for instruction.   They are particularly concerned about the student use of AI.

Politics are coming into schools at an alarming rate.  Teachers in areas strongly impacted by the immigrant raids worry about keeping their students safe as well as explaining to the other children why safety is not accorded to all children.  Some teachers are concerned about expanding their students’ social experiences.  

Most of all, it seems the principal makes a huge difference.   Teachers acknowledge that the principal’s job is truly difficult.  It is middle management.  Their control and power are limited.  Teachers and families blame them for what is going wrong; yet their power to make changes is controlled by the central office.  Teachers feel that principals need to lock in at least one thing that is special about each teacher and to let that teacher know.  In this time of outside control of curriculum and what can be said in a classroom, now more than ever principals need to recognize the individual expertise of teachers and to honor that.

What do teachers want?  A great deal, but then again we are asking a great deal of them and entrusting our children’s future to them.

 

 

Now it's a federal case

 Now it’s a federal case!

Learning to read is a funny thing.  Everyone thinks they have the one and only road to heaven.  Over the years that road has frequently changed. Resulting in different kids being in the third reading group.  Yep, like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.   Now the highway runs ONLY to the Science of Reading which is a primarily phonics-based approach.  

In years past, Lucy Calkins developed an approach that is called “balance literacy”.  It emphasizes student choice in selection of reading materials, reading comprehension and meaning.  Students are encouraged to use a variety of strategies, such as picture clues and sentence meaning to figure out unfamiliar word. Techniques that closely align with mature reading skills.  New York City at one time used this approach for all of their schools.  Critics argue that there is not nearly enough explicit instruction in phonics which causes students to have difficulty decoding words.  The program was developed at Teachers College in Columbia University.  Recently, they have added more phonics to the program.

The Fountas & Pinnell programs use phonics and phonemic awareness but not to the exclusion of fluency, vocabulary development and comprehension.

Well none of that was any good for the “true believers” in the Science of Reading.  So those folks did what any  red, white and blue blooded American would do, they went to court in Massachusetts claiming that these other methods were not backed by sufficient research and were making false claims to the extent that the consumer protection laws should be applied to stop school districts from using and promulgating these alternative methods.

The judge in the US District Court declined to be a warrior in the reading wars.  He said, “The court cannot find defendants’ research inadequate…without delving into the merits of the defendants’ approaches to literacy education”

So there we are, left in a world where differing approaches to teaching reading can still co-exist.   You can’t even make it a federal case.

 

 

Pay now or pay later

 Pay now or pay later

Medicaid pays for a lot more than your neighbor’s visit to the ER or your visit for a well-baby check.  In the next several years, the bills passed by the House of Representatives will cut 687 billion dollars from the plan.  What does that mean, on the ground?

That’s a great deal of waste, fraud and abuse.  This is one of the biggest cuts to Medicaid in history.  Community based services for people with disabilities are not federally mandated.  But these are the services that allow people with disabilities to remain in their communities and to thrive.  Over 700,000 people are currently on waiting lists for these services.  With cuts this list can only grow.  Sixty-nine percent of the agencies providing these services are already declining new clients.  A third of the agencies are considering closing.  Without these community based services, people with disabilities will need to be served in more costly residential placements.

The new regulations are more complicated and require frequent eligibility checks.  Those will create administrative costs that will be subtracted from funds that can be used to care for people.  And more complications mean slower processing and more opportunity for error.

What will people do if they can’t get medical services from their local provider?  First of all, many will probably wait until they are a lot sicker.  Then they will seek medical care in their local ER.  The ER can not turn them away if they can’t pay.  But the service must be paid for somehow, some way.   And it’s the rate payer who will ultimately bear the burden as their health insurance goes up to cover the hospital costs for all of those unfunded ER visits.  And managing short term virus in a physician’s office is a great deal cheaper than the same service in the ER.  ER facilities are already overwhelmed meaning long waits.

The question isn’t so much will these services be paid for, it’s more who will do the paying and how much more will they cost depending on the provider.  So when you think the cuts in Medicaid don't impact you because you have private insurance, think again.  The piper must be paid and you could be the payer.