A reader sent this link to a speech about Eva Moskowitz’s charter schools, delivered at the Manhattan Institute, which is New York’s premier conservative think tank. The speaker is named Charles Upton Sahm. I googled him and could not find any information about him, other than a piece in the Daily Beast defending the Common Core.
Sahm here defends the Success Academy schools against their critics. He describes them as idyllic. The children are happy and highly motivated. The teachers are well-trained, enthusiastic, and cheerful about their work. The curriculum is rich with literature, history, constructivist math, and projects. The attrition rate is no different from city public schools. Despite published reports, the teacher turnover is very low because they are so happy. The charters not only take a fair share of students with disabilities and ELLs, but many of them leave that status because SA remedies their needs. He admits that the schools don’t take the most disabled children.
He makes it seem as though Eva should be chancellor of the public schools, so every school could be equally rich in learning and joy, and of course, the millions that the hedge fund managers give to her.
One new fact that I had been searching for: He acknowledges that in the first two eighth grade graduating classes not a single student was able to pass the admissions test for entry to one of the city’s highly selective high schools. Now, this is puzzling. If these students are so well educated in math and science and literature, starting in the earliest grades, if they knock the socks off the state tests, why are they not acing the test for schools like Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, Townsend Harris, Brooklyn Tech, Bard, and a few others? These schools have small numbers of black and Hispanic students, and the general assumption is they were ill-prepared. But why are Eva’s graduates unable to pass this test? If you are well educated, if you have mastered the tested subjects, you should be prepared for any test, not just the one you prepared for.
It is a puzzlement.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
When an idiot looks at a dog-and-pony show, s/he sees Shakespeare. When the politically clueless look at a Soviet show trial, they see justice. And when a conservative think tanker looks at a charter school, s/he sees meaningful education.
Doesn’t make any of those perceptions true or useful.
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Apparently anything can be said and it passes for truth if the audience is sympathetic and no one challenges it.
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By next year ed reformers will be promoting “backpack vouchers” as progressive. Ten years ago that was far Right in the US.
They’ve adopted the entire conservative agenda on public schools and slapped a “progressive” label on it.
I wish national Democrats would just stop with the hedging and run on complete privatization. It’s insulting to continue with this “we’re agnostics!” charade. The plan is for government to pay private contractors to run publicly-funded schools. That’s what privatization is- private contractors replace publicly owned and run services. There’s nothing unique about charter schools in terms of how government privatizes services other than the rhetoric.
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It is amazing how much time ed reformers in both the private and public sector spend on promoting charter schools.
It’s such a lie that this this is about “improving public schools”. It is 90% charter promotion. The other 10% is about testing public school students.
Charters and testing, over and over and over. I think what bothers me the most about is half these “experts” are employed in either pushing policy that applies TO public schools or pushing product ON public schools. If that’s your profession, don’t you occasionally have to mention public schools, some time other than when you’re imposing an unfunded mandate? If there’s so little interest in public schools in ed reform, why are we hiring ed reformers to run them?
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Very telling about those 8th grade classes. Unfortunately (for the students) it seems only logical. Anyone who has taken a practice test for PARCC/smarter balance/insert your state’s rebranded version here, knows that mastering these tests has nothing to do with mastering knowledge/content/subject matter. You just need to figure out how to wiggle your way through a shockingly badly designed computer program and learn to decipher brain teaser, confusion-masked-as-rigor, questions. That’s probably enough to get a decent score even while tanking all the above grade level content.
So..all it would take is all day every day and some extra hours on top of that.
Congratulations. You’ve mastered the cc standardized tests. And nothing else…
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Hi Diane,
This was actually the cover story of the Summer 2015 issue of Education Next.
http://educationnext.org/what-explains-success-academy-charter-network/
I think the story is much more balanced than the way you describe it in your blog post. I visited four Success schools, interviewed lots of teachers, parents, critics. I spent a lot of time at Success. I know you’ve been invited to visit many times but you’ve never accepted. Maybe you should check them out for yourself.
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Charles Sahm,
I have never been invited to visit a Success Academy charter school. The issue for me is not whether the schools are great or not. I oppose privatization. If Eva pledged never to close her schools to send the children and staff to rally for more charters, I would visit. I don’t like to see children used as political pawns. Public schools can’t do that. Public schools don’t go to court to block audits.
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Balanced?! That article could be an advertising brochure.
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dianeravitch: a conundrum…
Two statements.
1), “I know you’ve been invited to visit many times but you’ve never accepted.”
2), “I have never been invited to visit a Success Academy charter school.”
😱
I am rheeally perplexed because I don’t know how you could have been invited so many times and never rheealized it—others know it! That’s a fact! Or, perhaps, this tells us something very important indeed about the quality and veracity of the “data analytics” in the above linked article.
Hmmm… I think I’ll go with the latter possibility. Really!
😏
As for experts on SA…
Eva Moskowitz. Paul Fucaloro, “her director of instruction and right-hand man.” Infinitely better informed than drive-through fanboys.
[start of reality-based statement about SA]
“We have a gap to close, so I want the kids on edge, constantly,” Fucaloro adds. “By the time test day came, they were like little test-taking machines.”
[end of reality-based statement about SA]
Link: http://nymag.com/news/features/65614/index3.html
Remembering, of course, that the Eva Moskowitz article referenced yesterday on this blog ends with her worshipful evaluation of Mr. Fucaloro:
[start]
In my case, that belief has nothing to do with any ideological predisposition or pet pedagogical theory. I came to it only because Paul Fucaloro—the most gifted educator I’ve ever met, who spent four decades honing his craft before retiring last year—showed me that it works.
[end]
So again, I am faced with a conundrum. Who am I to believe? A rheephorm VIP that went on Potemkin Village tours—a pageant often staged in schools and work sites of all kinds in all manner of places and times—where happy thoughts were the order of the day? Or the guy that summed it all up with that classic phrase—
“little test-taking machines”?
I’ll go with the expert.*
😎
*”expert”: “a person who has a comprehensive and authoritative knowledge of or skill in a particular area.”
Notice that the above definition does not begin with the words “a person who pretends to have a”—there’s a difference. Maybe too much time spent reading CCSS decontextualized informational texts?
😧
P.S. Dienne: I’m so sorry…
That article wasn’t an advertising brochure?
😳
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I agree that while many things sound bad in that article, there are things that sound good. But much of the things the School Take Over Movement People are saying sounds good.
Words are words, but what matters really is what you are doing. So let’s see some unedited videos from *full* Success classes. For example, put a camera in a first grade classroom for a full day. Also put a GoPro camera on one of the kids for the whole day.
Then do this for a week.
I also would like to see what’s going on during that 2 week long prekindergarten training camp. Unedited.
Put a camera in the school cafeteria.
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If I remember correctly, back in the day when the state stopped dumbing down its grade 3-8 tests every year, and the test scores dropped precipitously, Joel Klein or one of his minions was asked why the SA kids who had done so well were now performing no better than public school kids. He answered, “They weren’t prepared for the new test.” I remember howling at that response — proof, I would say, that SA kids are not “educated,” but prepared for a test — a specific test.
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Hi Diane,
It wasn’t a speech. It was the cover story of the Summer 2015 issue of Education Next.
http://educationnext.org/what-explains-success-academy-charter-network/
I thought my article was much more balanced than you describe in your blog post. I visited four Success schools, interviewed teachers, parents, critics. I believe you have been invited to visit Success (and other charter schools) many times. You should check them out for yourself. — Charles Sahm
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Charles, your article was indeed balanced. But it sounded like a tourist who had just visited Potemkin Village. It did not explain to me why I often get long emails from former Success Academy teachers explaining why they resigned.
I appreciated your point about how the schools are so much a reflection of Eva’s personality and drive that they might not be replicable.
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In my long life I have never read a single thing promoted by the Manhattan Institute that could be called “balanced” by any but a true believer mired in the far right wing rhetoric favored by this propaganda organization.
Guess what Mr. Sahm? You don’t get to define ‘progressive’ for those of us who actually are progressive and not trying to use a Lee Atwater-inspired political talking point to influence public debate.
Balanced? Maybe those who embrace Rush Limbaugh as a thinker, who believe Rupert Murdoch’s Fox is actual news, or those who think Sarah Palin is qualified to be anything but a supermarket checker might call your article “balanced.”
Me, I can read and I know the background facts. Your reasoning is flawed in oh, so many ways.
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You did have some “balance” in which you acknowledged some of the criticisms, but instead of doing independent research you simply repeated the Success Academy talking points to counter them. Here are some examples:
– “Success suspended 11 percent of its students last year, triple the district school rate but similar to those of other charter networks.”
This is ridiculously misleading. What you might have noticed if you had cared to look is that Success Academy suspends as many as 27% of the students (and often over 20%) in some of their schools where a high percentage of students are African-American and Latino and most are low-income. But in schools like Upper West, where the majority of students are middle class and white, the suspension rates are 4%. So looking at “averages” instead of bothering to look at WHO and WHERE the Success Academy students are being suspended is very naive. Why didn’t you look at how different the suspension rates were for middle class kids at Success versus at-risk kids. Now I know you might argue that those low-income 5 year olds are just doing particularly violent things, but it’s a pretty abhorrent argument to make. As is the argument that 20% of the 5, 6 and 7 year olds at one school could be so violent that the school had no choice but to suspend them and expect people to believe it because they are poor and African-American. That’s pretty bad, don’t you think?
– “Traditional public schools annually lose about 14 percent of their students, while Success loses about 10 percent.”
Again, you look at “average” attrition rates instead of looking at WHERE and WHEN and WHICH students disappear from Success Academy. Look at the attrition rate at specific Success Academy schools where most students are non-white and low-income and not some “average” that implies students just randomly moving away and leaving at a rate of 10%/year. What you see at Success Academy (if you had taken the time to look) is large numbers of 2nd graders who are most often at-risk suddenly disappearing from their cohort before 3rd grade testing. Why didn’t you do any research at the data.nysed.gov website? For example, Bed Stuy 1 had 103 2nd graders in 2013-2014. Guess how many were around to take the 3rd grade test in 2014-15? 76. That’s 26% of that cohort missing in one year. And it’s worse than that: that 2nd grade cohort had 68 economically disadvantaged students out of the 103, but by 3rd grade only 41 economically disadvantaged students were around to take the test. ALL 27 2nd grade students who were MIA were economically disadvantaged. So nearly 40% of the at-risk 2nd graders disappeared from the cohort before 3rd grade testing. And you think that is okay? I wonder what the suspension rate was for those little 6 and 7 year olds — want to take any guesses? This pattern of high attrition for at-risk kids is repeated at other Success Academy schools.
“I visited four Success schools, interviewed teachers, parents, critics…” All the parents of students who remain at Success Academy are the ones whose students were WANTED. They are getting all the extras the millions in donations can buy, while public schools are starving for funds and overcrowded. The question isn’t why those parents are so happy. The question is why so many other parents who celebrated when their Kindergarten child won the lottery and promised to commit to all that was asked of them in their meetings before the first day would then pull out their child over the next few years. The question is why so many of those parents are low-income with very few better options?
The July 2015 IBO report of 53 NYC charter schools that had students who entered in Kindergarten found that 49.5% of those students had left by 5th grade. Half the Kindergarten students in those 53 charters were gone by 5th grade. Four of those 53 schools were Success Academy schools — why don’t you find out how many of those missing Kindergarten kids were at those 4 schools and compare it to the number of Kindergarten kids who left OTHER charter schools? Apples to apples comparison. If you really believe that Success Academy keeps more of its students than other charter schools, you should be curious as to whether the data really supports that belief. Instead of accepting the laughable number that the average NYC elementary school loses 14% of their students each year. That would mean that the AVERAGE 5th grade class has only 30% of the Kindergarten students who started at that school — is that really what you are taking at face value? You think there is a decent elementary school in NYC where 70% of the Kindergarteners disappear by 5th grade? I challenge you to name one.
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This blog, today, 11-14-2015, “Annette Marcus: Why I Stopped Working at Harlem Success Academy Charter Schools.”
So let me get this straight: Annette Marcus only worked for SA and Eva Moskowitz for years and years—but not one mention of having made visits to four SA schools. What could she possibly know? And she surely doesn’t have a clue about what children, parents, and staff think and feel.
No, leave it to the experts to sell the product, er, write the advertising brochure, er, get all those hard data points to line up.
But Saint Eva’s almost $600,000 last reported yearly take—I love it when those in mad dog pursuit of $tudent $ucce$$ let the cat out of the bag:
“a bargain from a return-on-investment standpoint.”
So thank you, Mr. Sahm, for supporting the viewpoint of the owner of “Diane Ravitch’s blog A site to discuss better education for all” that charters and privatization and all the rest of the rheephorm agenda is about monetizing children and ROI and vanity projects of the BBBC [BoredBillionaireBoysClub].
😎
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FYI, Townsend Harris and Bard aren’t specialized high schools but admit on the basis of state tests, report cards, and other factors so they actually have higher percentages of African-American and Latino students. (Townsend Harris is 18% African-American and Latino students, while Bard Manhattan is 36%).
The specialized high schools only admit via the score on the SHSAT and have smaller numbers of African-American and Latino students. However, of the over 5,100 students who were offered seats in 2015, 12% of the students were African-American and Latino, so while it is less than their share of test-takers, it is still unexpected that not a single student from Success Academy would be among those students. You would expect at least one or two to get in (which would still be below average, given two years of 8th grade classes). Over the last two years more than 1,000 African-American and Latino 8th graders in NYC scored high enough on the SHSAT to be admitted to a specialized high school, but they all came from middle schools other than Success Academy.
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Reblogged this on Politicians Are Poody Heads and commented:
So, the Success Acadamies are a “progressive ideal”?
Yeh, right, says a conservative think tank.
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Zorba,
This is reformer doublethink. Try to imagine the anti-union Waltons as devotees of the reform movement, trying to save poor black children from failing public schools by privatizing them.
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Just as Obamacare (based on conservative ideas about “markets” and individual “responsibility” and implemented by Mitt Romney) was a “progressive ideal”.
Isn’t it just lovely how some folks have Humptydumptified the English language?
“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.” — Humpty Dumpty(Through the Looking Glass”by Lewis Carroll)
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“Economic Think Tanks”
Better at tanking
Than at thinking
Bringing the banking
To the brinking
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Ever since it became apparent that the right wingers in the Democratic party are not “centrist” as claimed by Bill Clinton, they adopted the “progressive” nomenclature to distinguish themselves from liberals who they see as “f*cking retarted,” as stated by Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel when he was Obama’s Whitehouse Chief of Staff. It’s a misnomer and an insult to genuine Progressives, who would never in a million years support such segregated, military style, privatized boot camp schools for poor children of color. It’s all a ruse to trick voters into believing that politicians still offer two primary parties instead of the corporate bought Repblicrats that we now have in fact.
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Here is Charles Upton Sahm in 2004, Celebrating GWBush, Rod Paige and NCLB.
CHARLES UPTON SAHM
Bush and Blacks
The message—both in words and action—is clear, consistent, and stirring.
July 21, 2004
Instead, tomorrow the president will address the National Urban League, a black organization whose mainstream leadership is focused on ideas for improving life in inner cities rather than on politics and racial demagoguery. The president will have a lot to talk about. Issues number one and two on his domestic agenda have been education reform and his faith-based initiative, both specifically targeted to help inner city minority residents, and both implemented by two accomplished African-American cabinet members, education secretary Rod Paige and HUD secretary Alphonso Jackson.
During his 2000 campaign, George Bush spoke often and eloquently about the need to improve education, particularly for minorities, who he said too often suffer from “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” The day after his inauguration, President Bush brought together a renowned group of education experts who began to craft the No Child Left Behind Act, which Congress passed a few months later with overwhelming bipartisan support. This landmark legislation, which increased federal education funding by nearly 50 percent, has brought elements of accountability and competition into the equation for the first time.
http://www.city-journal.org/html/eon_07_21_04cs.html
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Once upon a time, the specialized high schools had a prep program aimed at advancing the skill level of kids from predominantly minority schools so that they could succeed in making a successful grade on the specialized HS admission test. I should point out that in the Bronx, in middle/JH schools, there were virtually NO licensed math teachers employed.
Vincent Galasso, now a former Principal at Science, was the director of this program, and it had some reasonable success.
The program was scrapped at the beginning of the Bloomberg reign.
I’m sure it could be revived.
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And here is Charles Upton Sahm 18 years ago, on his true, ideological mission – Global Privatization
December 2007
Lessons for Mexico in Brazil’s Boom
Charles Upton Sahm – Manhattan Institute
Taking a page from the Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan playbooks, Brazil’s President Cardoso ordered the strikers to return to work or face dismissal.
Cardoso was then able to push through legislation that turned Petrobras into a quasi-public corporation open to foreign investment and competition. The company raised capital through a listing on the New York Stock Exchange.
Today, under Petrobras’s two-tier stock structure, the federal government maintains a slight majority of voting shares, but about 60 percent of overall equity is now in the hands of outside shareholders. Foreign operators can enter into partnership agreements with Petrobras or even bid against the company for offshore drilling rights. .
As a result, over the past decade, Brazil’s Petrobras has gone from an inefficient industry laggard to one of the world’s most respected publicly traded energy firms. Petrobras is now a leader in deep-water oil exploration and natural-gas discovery and delivery.
Mexico’s national oil company, Pemex, is notoriously inefficient, less a corporation than an arm of the Mexican government. Because the government depends on Pemex to fund over a third of the federal budget, there is often little money left over to invest in expensive exploration in the Gulf of Mexico’s deep waters, where experts believe vast reserves of untapped oil and natural gas exist. And as a result of years of underinvestment, Mexico’s oil production has begun to stall.
What Mexico needs is Cardoso/Brazil-style reforms that would create a real corporate-governance structure for Pemex and open up the nation’s energy monopoly to foreign investment, competition, and expertise. President Calderón is expected to introduce an energy-reform proposal in the coming weeks. His campaign slogan in last year’s election was “mas inversion, mas empleos” (more investment, more jobs). The Brazil example shows how much a country can gain with that philosophy; will Calderón and Mexico have the will to adopt it?
Charles Sahm directs a Latin American initiative for the Manhattan Institute and is President of Inter-American Advisors, LLC.
http://www.banderasnews.com/0712/edat-lessonsformexico.htm
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Given all of the bandwidth that is spent on this blog decrying the inappropriate uses of tests, especially the promotion of the idea that tests cannot accurately represent the intelligence of a student or whether or not she has learned from her classwork, I find the celebration over the testing failures of a group of poor children of color to be a little strange.
The vast majority of children who qualify for a seat at an SHSAT high school attended a small subset of selective K-8 or middle schools with accelerated coursework (and with very few black and Hispanic students) and/or attend one of the city’s many test-prep schools, which are neither inexpensive nor quick and easy. Only 4.8% of black and Latino children who took the SHSAT in 2014 scored high enough to receive an offer; 65% of those qualified for the two SHSAT schools with the lowest cut-off scores (Brooklyn Tech and Brooklyn Latin). We don’t know enough about those children (including what schools they applied to; the differences in qualifying scores are substantial) to assume that 4.8% of Success’s first two graduating classes should have received an offer. It could be that many of the black and Latino qualifying children attended parochial or independent schools for some or all of K-8, e.g., or are proportionately less at economic risk. There is no shame in not making the Stuy cut-off: many, many, many white and wealthy children from Districts 2, 3, and 15 fail to do so.
According to the most recent NYC DOE Quality Snapshot for the oldest Success school, most students from Success 1’s second graduating class attend either the Success high school or independent/parochial schools (the report from the first graduating class does not contain this information). One child attends LaGuardia, the highly selective NYC DOE performing arts HS. http://schools.nyc.gov/OA/SchoolReports/2014-15/School_Quality_Snapshot_2015_EMS_M351.pdf
It is also probably relevant that Eva Moskowitz isn’t the only person who isn’t impressed by the SHSAT Schools. Here’s Pedro Noguera’s take from a 2014 Politico article: “I don’t think [the SHSAT] schools are that great. I would not tell a top African-American student to go to one of those schools, I would tell them to go to Medgar Evers Prep. It’s a much more supportive environment and the quality of education is better.”
Perhaps Juan Gonzalez’s next piece about this could report on where Success’s graduates do go to school, not where they don’t.
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Tim, could you point me to the statistics and actual proof that SA has ended generational poverty and all the ills that accompany it? How about the results of institutionalized racism? What are the figures for the drops in crime, drug use, pregnancy, hunger, preventable illness, etc. in the neighborhoods served by Eva’s prison schools?
Where is the comparison between SA graduates quality of life, economic success, community impact, etc. compared to, say, Bronx Science grads? That would be actual meaningful data instead of the he said/she said stuff you love to promulgate in your strange postings.
You always seem to think you are pointing out some kind of hypocrisy here or catching someone doing something that is not genuine. Yet I’ve never actually read a single thing you’ve written that accomplished what you think you are doing.
Why is that, I wonder?
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Tim, WHAT the heck are you talking about with the SHSAT?
No one is surprised that not one child from Success Academy got into Stuy. But there are 7 other specialized high schools that at least one of those students — and really far more — should have been well enough educated to get admitted. Not one did.
And, FYI, despite your desperation to claim that the African-American and Latino students who outscored their peers at Success Academy on the SHSAT must have come from private or parochial schools, that simply isn’t true.
ALL those students were educated in NYC public schools, which is why the city has the information about their ethnic and racial background. If you look at the breakdown of students who sit for the SHSAT and are admitted to schools, there is a category listed as “unknown” which includes over 1500 test takers from parochial and private schools. So I’m sorry, but in the last two years OVER 1,000 African-American and Latino students scored high enough on the SHSAT to be admitted to one of the specialized high schools and they ALL came from public schools. There were more than likely OTHER students of color from private and parochial schools among the 343 students from private schools offered admissions.
No one is “celebrating”. We are pointing out that scoring high on state tests for which students are prepped endlessly while forgetting about teaching those students how to THINK may be detrimental to their learning in the long run.
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Thanks for that link to the school quality snapshot — there was one ALARMING fact:
21% of this school’s former 8th graders earned enough high school credit in 9th grade to be on track for graduation. The % of students in their “comparison group” (students from similar backgrounds and schools) is 99%!!
What???
This is saying that the 8th grade students who went to other high schools aren’t doing well at all. That is a huge red flag if they struggled to keep up at high schools that aren’t especially rigorous like the specialized high schools. Tim, what is your theory about why the students aren’t keeping up with their peers educated in other public schools for high school?
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“I find the celebration over the testing failures of a group of poor children of color to be a little strange.”
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“Moskowitz used her network’s performance on the state exams to again criticize her frequent political foe, de Blasio.
“These results prove that the educational inequality that traps thousands of New York City’s children of color in poverty can be eliminated, if only our elected officials muster the political will,” Moskowitz said in a statement.”
“Today’s results tell a distressing story of a lack of progress in New York City’s schools, with students of color hurting the most,” Jeremiah Kittredge, the group’s CEO, said in a statement. ”
FLERP!, is THAT what you mean when you said “I find the celebration over the testing failures of a group of poor children of color to be a little strange”?
Or do you and Tim only approve when that “celebration” comes from the people who are paid to advocate for more and more charter schools?
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Here is how RightWingWatch describes the racist, extremist Manhattan Institute:
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/manhattan-institute-policy-research
“The Manhattan Institute is an increasingly prominent conservative think-tank that promotes limited government and free-market idealism. The organization has attacked minority-focused policies including affirmative action, civil rights initiatives, and immigrant support programs as obstacles to full social integration and to the benefits of the market system. The Institute heavily promotes school vouchers, saying that competition as the best way to improve public schools.
– See more at: http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/manhattan-institute-policy-research#sthash.57SqsBqw.dpuf
Purpose
A think tank focused on promoting free-market principles whose mission is to “develop and disseminate new ideas that foster greater economic choice and individual responsibility.”
Activities
A staff of senior fellows and writers contribute to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal and compose books, reviews, lectures and articles to promote the organization’s views. The organization holds several high profile lecture series and policy forums and has hosted policy speeches by Bush administration officials and Republican presidential candidates.
The Center for Civic Innovation focuses on improving the quality of life in cities by turning away from government policies and giving power to people closest to each specific problem, like parents, police, and ministers. The Center advocates for school vouchers and greater educational accountability.
The Center for Race and Ethnicity seeks to examine prevalent issues within minority communities and criticizes relevant government policies. The Center argues that many government social programs act as barriers toward fostering a greater sense of individual responsibility and entrepreneurial spirit within minority communities.
Many of the Center’s writers attribute the socio-economic problems of the black community to an overriding sense of victimization, a reliance on government social programs, and a culture adverse to education and individualist social advancement.
Accordingly, they contend that government programs such as welfare and affirmative action reinforce the community’s sense of dependence and victimization.
While many of the Center’s writers do not hold an anti-immigration position, the Center opposes government programs intended to accommodate immigrant concerns, such as bi-lingual education. They argue that such policies stand in the way of Hispanic integration and deprive immigrant communities from the full benefits of America’s market system.”
Balanced? LMAO
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They also promote “doubt” about the human role in climate change.
It’s ideologically rather than reality driven.
Even by “think tank” standards (which are pretty low), it’s pathetic.
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Eva’s schools are a nightmare. I would never in good conscience send any children there to be treated with such disrespect and disregard. Scholars….rhymes with dollars. Every one a little silent prisoner, drilled to fill in bubbles, and never have an original thought in their heads. No wonder these scholars can’t cut it in select high schools. Does Eva ever reflect on that gem of a factoid????????????
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Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education.
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