Education Week - March 8, 2017 - 20

investigation uncovered widespread fraud,
nepotism, fiscal mismanagement, and serious
ethical concerns among many Detroit charter
schools, some of the worst-performing schools
in the state.
Finally, Allen's assertion that less
regulation improves education raises the
question: If less regulation is good for schools,
why shouldn't traditional schools also be less
regulated? At least there would be a level
playing field.

LETTERS to
the EDITOR

Reader: Commentary Adds to
Charter School 'Mythology'
To the Editor:
The recent Commentary "Untie Charters'
Bureaucratic Strings" by Jeanne Allen (Feb.
8, 2017) is another addition to the mythology
about charter schools, which the author
believes are "suffering from regulatory
strangulation." To the contrary, any time
you have a multi-billion-dollar industry-
such as charters-that is largely without
transparency and accountability, you are
asking for problems.
It is ironic that in the same Education
Week issue as Allen's Commentary, a news
item entitled "FBI Raids L.A. Offices
of Charter Network" also appeared.
Multiple law-enforcement agencies are
investigating allegations of fraud and fiscal
mismanagement at Celerity Schools, a
California charter management company.
In Michigan, a state with some of the
weakest charter laws in the nation and the
home state of U.S. Secretary of Education
Betsy DeVos, an intensive Detroit Free Press

William J. Price
Professor of Educational Leadership
Eastern Michigan University
Ypsilanti, Mich.

K-12 Scholarship's Leftward Tilt
Is No Surprise and Not a Concern
To the Editor:
Frederick M. Hess is right when he notes
in his recent Commentary ("Its Leftward Tilt
Leaves Ed. Scholarship on the Sidelines,"
Jan. 11, 2017) that America's colleges and
universities lean heavily to the left. That
should not be surprising.
Institutions dedicated to the search for
knowledge, understanding, tolerance, and
truth are quite likely to be progressive and
liberal. Looking backward-the natural
stance of conservatism-is not a natural view

for professors or their eager students who are
gearing up to change the world.
But Hess is overreaching when he argues
that academe is "unrepresentative of the
nation as a whole." As I recall, a few million
more voters chose liberal Hillary Clinton last
November over the candidate on the right.
It's more accurate to claim that academe
is out of step with the ultra-conservative
minority that has moved further right as the
world around it has changed.
Hess writes: "While education school
scholars may almost uniformly regard a
race-conscious focus on practice and policy
as essential for addressing structural racism,
a huge swath of the country sees instead a
recipe for fostering grievance, animus, and
division. ... Many on the right experience
university initiatives intended to promote
'tolerance' and 'diversity' as attempts
to silence or delegitimize their views on
immigration, criminal justice, morality, and
social policy." No surprise there, either.
Hess says "our views are principled."
Depends on who the "our" includes. Based
on their actions and pronouncements, I
would argue that the views of a great many
conservatives in the United States are hostile
to the fundamental values of our democratic
republic and its Constitution, starting with
the new Conservative-in-Chief.
The practical consequence of academe's
leaning to the left, Hess suggests, is that the
Trump administration, and the president's

supporters in statehouses and think tanks,
will not look kindly on education researchers
in the academy. Wow, now that is really
shocking.
Except for the studies by education
school faculty that correlate learning and
achievement to standardized-test scores
or insist that funding is not really relevant
to quality, conservative policymakers have
largely ignored the work of education
scholars. But then liberal policymakers
haven't paid much attention to education
research either.
Ron Wolk
Warwick, R.I.

The writer is the founding editor of Education Week
and the board chair emeritus of its nonprofit parent
corporation, Editorial Projects in Education. The
views in this letter are his own.

COMMENTARY POLICY
Education Week takes no editorial positions,
but publishes opinion essays and letters
from outside contributors in its Commentary
section. For information about submitting an
essay or letter for review, visit

www.edweek.org/go/guidelines.

| READERS REACT ON EDWEEK.ORG |

The Politicalization of
The Common Core
Donald Trump's pledge to "end" the Common Core
State Standards may not be within his power as
president, but his rhetoric is nonetheless
damaging, argued Maria Ferguson in a March 1
Commentary. Ms. Ferguson, the executive director
of George Washington University's Center on
Education Policy, urged state and local lawmakers
to resist efforts to "play politics with public
education" and instead continue to move toward
more-rigorous standards.
In a slew of comments, readers disputed Ms.
Ferguson's characterization that states which
adopted the common standards "did so freely and
on their own accord," arguing that the Obama
administration overstepped with its support of the
standards. Other readers took aim more broadly
at the merits of the common core itself, citing
stagnant test scores as an indictment of the
standards.

Getty

have observed, including in the pages of Education
Week, it is unlikely that the common-core standards
would ever have become as controversial as they did
and unlikely so many states would have dropped
them, if they had not been so closely identified with
the Obama administration. For that we have the administration to thank at least as much as its critics."

federal grant money. Education departments loved
the common core/Race to the Top because the responsibility of local control of education performance was
abrogated to the federal government. With this process any poor performance could be blamed on the
federal bureaucrats and local administrators would
not be responsible."
- RPRICE

- JACK ARCHER

To read the full Commentary and more reader
responses, please visit: www.edweek.org/go/ferguson

"The primary determining factor [in deciding to
scrap the standards] should be what parents want for
their children, not what the district or teachers want."
- FROMTEACHERTOHOMESCHOOLER

"Ms. Ferguson's point is well taken, but she ignores
the fact that the politicizing of the Common Core
State Standards began with the Obama Administration, when it first incentivized (some would say
bribed) states to adopt them in the competition for
Race to the Top grants, trumpeted them as an Obama
achievement at the Democratic convention, and required their adoption for NCLB waivers. As many

20 | EDUCATION WEEK | March 8, 2017 | www.edweek.org/go/commentary

"Ms. Ferguson's whole argument flounders under
the weight of her poorly chosen 'alternative facts.' ...
The Department of Education, under [former U.S.
Secretary of Education Arne] Duncan, made it abundantly clear that adoption of the common core was a
necessary component in applications for Race to the
Top grants. ... The use of 'alternative facts' seems to
be reaching epidemic proportions, but we can't and
must not just sit down and nod our heads just because the falsehoods come from those on our side."
- MCRUIZ

"The federal government, using stimulus money,
bribed the states to participate in a lottery for a
chance to win funds. ... The common core was a subtle
effort by the Obama administration to have states
voluntarily give over state control of education for

"This is a political call to remain committed to common-core standards by demanding others not be political. This also once again ignores that standards have
never and will never change anything. The presence or
quality of standards have no correlation with student
achievement. The ever-new and so-called more-rigorous
standards mantra is a scam."
- PLTHOMAS
"The focus should not be on 'the enormous amount of
time and resources that have been devoted to implementing the standards across the country,' but rather
on measurable results. Thus far, NAEP 2015 indicates
the expenditure of time and resources may have been
seriously misdirected. Do these standards increase student achievement? Apparently not."
- DAN DEMPSEY

-COMPILED BY ALEX LENKEI

http://www.edweek.org/go/guidelines http://www.EDWEEK.ORG http://www.edweek.org/go/ferguson http://www.edweek.org/go/commentary

Education Week - March 8, 2017

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