The teacher’s role in community schools with business partnerships seems murky. This raises concerns about a teacher’s purpose in those schools. If Americans are going to embrace community schools, teachers must be recognized as professionals in their own right.
Community schools rely on business partners, so will teachers be replaced with online (personalized) instruction, the kind of schooling parents hated during the pandemic that collects nonstop data about their children?
A 2021 Urban Education report claims:
. . .the literature has given scant attention to how teachers help fulfill these schools’ promises (Sanders, Galindo, & Allen).
Yet schools across the country are converting to community schools, many are charter schools, including in wealthier school districts.
Should Teachers Trust Business Partners?
Business partners are community school stakeholders but let’s face it, they’ve never been the teacher’s best friends.
For thirty years, corporations and businesses, including the Chamber of Commerce (remember their Leaders and Laggards Report Card?), have bullied teachers and worked to destroy public education with:
- high-stakes standardized tests,
- praise for alternative teachers with little preparation like Teach for America,
- Common Core State Standards,
- online learning,
- a collection of a student and their family’s personal information (data),
- pushing developmentally inappropriate curriculum down to the youngest learners,
- funding charter buildings while ignoring pitiful school buildings,
- a focus on charter schools and vouchers,
- unjustified blame for teachers and their unions for not turning out career and college-ready students.
So how do teachers trust them now when it comes to community schools? Are they suddenly on their side?
Online Rocketship Charter School Is Considered a Community School in California
California is pouring $645 million into community schools, including many charter schools like Rocketship, a controversial online non-profit with few real teachers. They’ll get $15 million.
A Rethinking Schools 2014 report Rocketship to Profits described Rocketship charter schools.
Few areas have as concentrated and active a group of wealthy reformers as California’s Silicon Valley. One of the country’s fastest-growing charter school operators, Rocketship Education, started here. A big reason for its stellar ascent is the support it gets from high tech’s deep pockets, and the political influence that money can buy.
So Rocketship becomes both a community and public school. Will they be the prototype for more charter schools and traditional public school conversions to replace teachers?
What Does Deeper Learning Mean, When Everyone’s a Teacher?
Deeper Learning is associated with community schools. It refers to online learning, without teachers, that will supposedly lead students to future workforce jobs, whatever they might be.
Here’s Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s definition:
Deep learning is a type of machine learning that uses algorithms meant to function in a manner similar to the human brain.
In Teaching in Community Schools: Creating Conditions for Deeper Learning, the authors describe the teacher’s role as changed. Parents develop into teachers (Daniel, Hunter, & Oakes). So what happens to degreed teachers?
Community school teachers also often take on roles like social work, blurring the line of what they have traditionally done as classroom teachers.
There’s talk that teachers must have credentials, but what are they? Online badges? Will this adequately academically prepare children for their futures?
As Community Schools Take Over, Will Technology Rule?
For years, corporations have relied upon learning gap and poverty talk to reference schools simultaneously ridiculing and defunding them. They’ve worked to paint teachers as failures.
If community schools are what they claim, teachers should be front and center, with better wages, able to step into schools that treasure them as professionals. There should be no confusion about their role, and what it means to the education of children.
Instead, the research about teachers in these schools seems purposely thin, to redefine it, to make teachers look unprepared like they must prove themselves worthy of taking on new challenges.
Pair this with the teacher shortage and the historical treatment of teachers; it looks like screens may win in the end. Yet, no research shows children learn better with online learning.
So, are community schools a way for big businesses to take control of America’s schools? Will they end the teaching profession and public education, by creating more Rocketship cyber charters?
Everyone wants children to receive the wraparound services they need, but they deserve public education and real teachers too. They should not have to lose those critical services in the process.
References
Sanders, M., Galindo, C., Allen, K. M. (2021). Professional Capital and Responses to Student Diversity A Qualitative Exploration of the Role of Teachers in Full-Service Community Schools. Urban Education. 56(10), p. 1782-1814.
Daniel, J., Hunter Q. K., Oakes, J. (2019) Teaching in Community Schools: Creating Conditions for Deeper Learning. Review of Research in Education. 43. pp. 453-480.
“Community” schools sounds so nice, warm and inviting except that it’s a wolf dressed as a sheep. These people never stop. They are relentless in their efforts to divert tax payer dollars into private coffers at the expense of children and families. As altruistic as they wish to be perceived by their marketing departments and spin doctors, they are the epitome of greed, fraud and corruption.
I’m afraid you’re right, Lisa. Public schools should be responsive to the needs of their children, society should be, for that matter, and if businesses want to support this endeavor, fine. Seeing Rocketship designated as a community school should raise questions.
I do not recognize this description of community schools. When did business get their talons embedded in the concept? Originally, the idea was to house some of the community health and human services that can be hard for people to access within the school. it was to be even more of a hub of the surrounding community that traditional public schools have been with more opportunities for community engagement.
That’s often still the description that makes these schools sound appealing. The concern lies with partnerships and the fact that many of these schools are charter schools. I am also concerned about the school itself and the teachers, whether there will be a heavy reliance on technology and anytime, anyplace learning.
My introduction to community schools or at least the modern iteration was through the National Education Policy Center a few years back. I don’t remember any mention of charter schools at the time. I guess the money men will hijack any plan that has the potential to make them money.
Maybe it’s a concept the country is willing to embrace. It just seems like the use of the word charter school, the questionable role of the teacher, and reliance on partners should be discussed more.
Here’s the Biden administration’s word on community schools.
How Charter Schools Can Leverage Community Assets through Partnerships
https://charterschoolcenter.ed.gov/sites/default/files/files/field_publication_attachment/How%20Charter%20Schools%20Can%20Leverage%20Community%20Assets%20through%20Partnerships.pdf
U.S. Department of Education Emphasizes Importance of Full-Service Community Schools Through Competitive Grant Program
https://www.ed.gov/news/press-releases/us-department-education-emphasizes-importance-full-service-community-schools-through-competitive-grant-program
You are absolutely right. I’m so tired of every good idea being high jacked by someone who plans to monetize the effort. Where are the public/private partnerships that actually benefit the people to be served? I know there are private agencies who serve their clients and whose primary purpose is to serve. who may contract out their expertise. They do not take over the host public agency. The problem seems to come when big money moves in. Service seldom seems to be their primary goal. There is no reason why public social service agencies cannot be the primary partners in community schools. In areas where those services are sparse it is trickier. I suspect, though, in those communities the services are more likely to be local support networks. Charters are totally inappropriate in such areas with the scarce public resources. I am sad to see greedy actors moving in on a good idea.
I guess the key would be for businesses to have boundaries as to what they could do, and I know there are some community schools that might do that, but I don’t know why they need to be called charters and worry there’s an underlying motive to replace teachers with screens and cyber schools. Community schools should still be public schools and the teacher should figure prominently. My take anyway.
We agree.
Nancy, I think you are absolutely right to question the community schools agenda when what is actually meant is schools with warped visions of teaching and learning such as Rocketship. The following are excerpts from an NPR report in 2016. I remember seeing the NPR video of a Rocketship school in which a large number of k-1 students were each sitting at computer consoles arranged around the walls of a large classroom, resembling a call center. It’s hard to imagine a worse fraud on trusting parents than what this image portrayed.
“The heart of the Rocketship model is the daily rotation of students between classrooms and laptop work in what the company calls Learning Labs.
“To achieve his goal of scaling quickly, Danner couldn’t rely on philanthropic money to supplement school budgets, as other charter schools do. According to Richard Whitmire, the author of the generally positive 2013 book On the Rocketship: How Top Charter Schools Are Pushing the Envelope, a major cost-saving solution was for students to spend significant time working on laptops in large groups supervised by noncertified, lower-paid “‘nstructional lab specialists.’
“‘Students rotating into Learning Labs meant employing fewer teachers,’ Whitmire writes. ‘Thus a school such as Rocketship Mosaic could successfully serve 630 students with only 6 teachers plus aides. …
“Networkwide, Rocketship schools track the amount of time that students spend on each of several learning software programs, down to the minute each week and the percentage of goals reached.
“That drive to maximize instructional time and monitor data is a tenet of Rocketship culture, said the former principal, Sarratore. ‘We are trying to teach kids responsibility on how to use their time the most wisely. [!]
“Several former staffers, plus a parent and a doctor, said that this zeal extended to limiting bathroom breaks. At his school, Sarratore said, there was a policy of not allowing bathroom visits for 20 minutes after lunch or recess.
“Others reported more severe limits at several different schools: that during Learning Lab, only eight students out of 60, or sometimes just one boy and one girl, were allowed to visit the restroom, a number that was tracked and at times even posted publicly along with other metrics that classes competed on.
“Some teachers handed out behavior penalties for going to the restroom, according to a former Rocketship teacher who asked not to be named because she still works in San Jose. [This resulted in children peeing on themselves or developing urinary tract infections.] …
“… as long as schools are held accountable for reading and math scores on standardized tests, and as long as large achievement gaps on those tests bedevil traditional public schools, schools that produce high scores for disadvantaged populations will remain, by definition, successful. [educational malpractice in my view]
“The long hours, high pressure, tight discipline and ritualistic classroom protocols aren’t out of line with those seen at other charter school networks, like KIPP and Success Academy, that also have high test scores and draw communities of fiercely loyal parents like Gomez.
“But these practices, at charter schools across the country, have also come under increasing scrutiny.”
https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2016/06/24/477345746/high-test-scores-at-a-nationally-lauded-charter-network-but-at-what-cost
Are these practices still under increasing scrutiny, or have communities capitulated to the edtech/privatization propaganda?
Are these really schools that any caring, informed parents would want for their child?
Transformational Community Schools
I do not favor charters/Innovation schools. What am I for? I favor a Community School and in fact its advanced form–a Transformational Community School. I need your feedback on this concept. If you want to say more, please do so here or write me at johnharrisloflin@yahoo.com.
https://vorcreatex.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/A-Tomorrows-Public-Education-Transformational-Community-Schools-Advancing-the-Community-Schools-model-Increasing-its-democratization-while-enabling-its-decolonization.pdf.