Mark Pafford, House Minority Leader in the Florida legislature, supports parents who tell their children to opt out of standardized testing.
Pafford says that Florida does not have the public education system that the state’s children need. He singles out the overuse of testing as an area where the state has gone wrong. It uses tests not to help people, but to punish them.
Wise man! Pafford for Governor!
The NPE Political Action Fund endorses Dr. Lottie Beebe for election to the Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education. Zealots for privatization captured the Board at the last election. Help supporters of public education restore the Board as the protector of the state’s public schools.
The Network for Public Education enthusiastically encourages voters in Louisiana’s District 3 to return incumbent Dr. Lottie Beebe to her seat on the Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE).
Louisiana author, teacher, researcher and blogger Mercedes Schneider agrees, stating, “She has consistently stood against the privatizing BESE majority. Be sure to re-elect her.”
Dr. Beebe has worked in and around education for 32 years. She has been an elementary and special education teacher, assistant principal, principal, supervisor, director, and currently serves as the superintendent of the St. Martin Parish Schools.
Back in 2012, Dr. Beebe demonstrated courage and bravery when she spoke out against the state spending nearly $1 million on ill trained Teach For America recruits. Lottie Beebe believes in public education; she believes that children should have well-prepared professional teachers.
Fast forward to 2015, and Dr. Beebe has a clear understanding of the teacher shortage states across the nation are now facing. She has vowed that she “will make every effort to address teacher attrition concerns in Louisiana.” Dr. Beebe continued that, “without quality teachers in the classroom, we can’t expect improvements in student outcomes. The education profession has been vilified and I hope to change the negative public perception of those who go above and beyond the call of duty”
Dr. Beebe has stated that during her term on BESE, Louisiana has been in a state of “educational chaos.” She attributes this chaos to a lack of leadership.
The next BESE board will evaluate the contract of current Louisiana State Superintendent, the controversial reformer John White. When White was hired, Dr. Beebe fought for a fair and transparent hiring process. Instead, the BESE majority hired White, who did not meet state requirements for the position. Dr. Beebe will continue to fight for a state superintendent who is a true educational leader.
Louisiana educator Bridget Bergeron said Dr. Beebe, “speaks out loudly and with conviction against the faux reforms and hidden agendas led by the state superintendent and fellow board members. She has proven that she has what it takes to move us forward in improving outcomes for our public school children in Louisiana.”
Dr. Beebe’s work on BESE must continue, but she is facing a well-financed reform candidate who is a self-described “fierce advocate for school choice.” It has recently been reported that hundreds of thousands of dollars, including money from the Waltons and Eli Broad, have been flowing into Louisiana PACs in order to keep the current reform majority and Superintendent White in place for another four years.
We all must do what we can to keep Dr. Beebe’s courageous voice on BESE. Please spread the word about Dr. Beebe’s campaign, and donate or volunteer your time to keep this committed, experienced educator in the District 3 seat.
Mercedes Schneider writes here about the latest campaign filings of funds received.
Four billionaires have donated huge sums to purchase seats on the Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education.
The board under Governor Bobby Jindal has avidly supported charters, vouchers, for-profit virtual charters, and attacks on teachers.
But the chairman of the board stepped down, and there are several highly credible candidates.
To make sure that the anti-public school, anti-teacher privatizers retain control, the following billionaires have funded a super-PAC to overwhelm the middle-class educators and other citizens who are running for the state board:
Michael Bloomberg (New York): $800,000
Eli Broad (California):$250,000
John Arnold (Texas): $625,000
Walton Family (Arkansas):$400,000
An ordinary person might be able to raise $40,000-60,000 to run for state board. The billionaires are destroying democracy with their obscene donations and their goal of buying control of a democratic institution.
You will note that none of them lives in Louisiana yet they feel okay about determining the future of public education for the people of Louisiana and their children.
A reader named mrobmsu left a comment on the last post, the one saying that Eva Moskowitz demands an apology from PBS and John Merrow. It made me laugh out loud. (LOL). Here it is:
Nation’s Children, Parents and Teachers Demand Apology by Eva Moskowitz and Success Network, Campbell Brown, Michelle Rhee, Teach for America, StudentsFirst, the New Teacher Project, Democrats for Education reform, Arne Duncan, John King, Bill Gates, The Walton Family Foundation, The Heritage Foundation, KIPP, Wendy Kopp, David Coleman, the Relay Graduate School, Education Post and Peter Cunningham, Chris Stewart and Every Hedge Fund Manager and Investment Banker Who Has Profited from Corporate Education Reform
Not to be picky, but I think Eli Broad would demand an apology for being omitted from the list.
I just saw this press release:
**FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE, OCTOBER 19, 2015**
Contact:
Ann Powell, 646-894-6407
Ann.Powell@successacademies.org
EVA MOSKOWITZ DEMANDS APOLOGY FROM PBS NEWSHOUR FOR INACCURATE REPORTING
Veteran Reporter John Merrow Violates Journalism Ethics with Biased Report,
Denies Success Academy Fair Response to Allegations
New York, NY — Today, Eva Moskowitz, Success Academy CEO, released a copy of a letter sent via email to Judy Woodruff of PBS NewsHour, demanding a correction and apology for inaccurate and biased reporting by John Merrow in his segment, “Is Kindergarten Too Young to Suspend a Student.” The letter, sent on Friday, October 16, details Merrow’s willful disregard for journalistic ethics and refusal to allow Success Academy to respond to false allegations of a former parent and student, who represent that the student was suspended for not tucking in his shirt and wearing red shoes and “losing his temper.” Later in the report, Merrow alleges that Success Academy students were suspended for getting up to “go look at the bulletin board.”
The letter to Woodruff includes email exchanges between Moskowitz and Merrow, wherein she asserts her right to hear and rebut the parent’s allegations against Success Academy. Merrow refuses, responding that he “would not air unsubstantiated allegations” and “her role is limited and should not be cause for concern on your part,” an overt lie in view of the finished segment.
Merrow further misrepresents Success Academy as having high attrition rates when in fact the popular charter school network does a far better job of retaining students than the city’s district schools.
Full letter is posted here: http://bit.ly/1ODDmJ4
Reader Michael Fiorillo writes in response to Carol Burris’s post about Gwen Ifill’s interview of Bill and Melinda Gates:
“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy – they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they made.”
-F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Great Gatsby”
Andrew Rotherham is a reformer who runs a consulting business. He is on many boards, including Campbell Brown’s 74. He used to write a regular column for TIME, now he writes for US News. He typically discloses his conflicts of interest at the end of his articles.
In this article, he tries to explain why it is so difficult for public companies to succeed in the public education sector. He says that the market makes demands for performance indicators that lead to poor decisions. His example is Joel Klein’s Amplify, which Rotherham thinks was too good for the market. (Amplify is or was a client of Rotherham’s business). Other commentators attributed Amplify’s failure to the poor quality of its tablets, some of whose screens cracked and chargers melted after delivery to Guilford County, NC. Rotherham also explains the poor stock performance of K12 (another of his past or present clients) by saying that the market forced it to enroll students who were “ill-suited” to its model.
He writes:
Pressure to hit revenue and growth expectations drives companies to attract customers who are a poor fit. That’s why Edison ended up in Philadelphia. It’s also why the online learning company K12 got caught in a perverse spiral when enrollment expectations drove it to recruit students who were ill-suited to succeed in the company’s model. The more such students the company signed up, the more its academic results suffered.
All in all, his explanation of why businesses fail is a good explanation of why “reform” by test scores fails. Reformers think they can reach the projected “profits” by setting audacious goals, pressuring and intimidating educators, and closing schools. Those tactics don’t work in business, and they don’t work in education.
PS: apologies to readers for the several typos in the original. I wrote this while riding in a taxi on a bumpy highway. But no excuses. I should have read it before posting it.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has spent a few billion on remaking public schools in the United States. Strangely, they have not attempted to introduce the kind of student-centered education that their own children experience at Lakeside Academy in Seattle. Instead, they want everything and everyone to be tested and data-driven, including the privately managed charter schools in which they have invested. They don’t “give” money to public schools, as philanthropists of an earlier generation did. They give money to be used only as they direct: on high-stakes testing, on evaluation of teachers by test scores, on the uniform adoption of the Common Core standards, and on schools willing to follow their directions. Needless to say, neither Bill nor Melinda has ever been a teacher. Yet they consider themselves to be experts in what and how to teach.
In this article, Carol Burris reviews the couple’s recent national conference, at which they announced that they are pleased with what they have done and have no intention of changing their approaches. In other words, they called a press conference to say “Stay the course.” Clearly, they have not noticed that 220,000 students in New York state opted out of the state tests in protest of an overemphasis on standardized tests. Nor have they noticed the protests from all sides of the political spectrum against the coup engineered by Bill Gates to impose the Common Core on the nation without bothering to respect the views of the public (i.e., democracy).
Burris, the new executive director of the Network for Public Education, says that Bill and Melinda point to Kentucky, Denver, and Washington, D.C. as their evidence for the success of their reforms. She carefully dissects each of these examples and demonstrates that they have only been listening to their “yes” men and women. Denver has stagnated for the past decade despite near-total control by Gates-style reformers; Washington, D.C. continues to have staggeringly large achievement gaps between different racial and ethnic groups; Burris shows that Kentucky’s improvements began long before the introduction of the Common Core. (Hmmm, Kentucky is one of the few states that doesn’t have charter schools, which may explain why communities are very invested in their public schools.)
Carol says that this is what she learned from their interview with PBS journalist Gwen Ifill:
From this interview, three things seem clear.
Bill and Melinda Gates do not understand teaching and learning, yet they comfortably assume an air of expertise.
They view victory as the implementation of their reforms and while they claim to be all about the metrics, they only select examples that suit their purpose.
The first couple of reform neither appreciate nor respect the role of democracy plays in the governance public schools.
They demonstrate the old maxim that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
They also demonstrate that they have a problem with democracy; it threatens to derail some of their fabulous ideas.
It was clear that the couple worry that the democratic process can undo their reforms. As Bill Gates wryly observed at the end of the interview, “The work can go backwards….nobody votes to un-invent our vaccine.”
This statement is a bold assertion of Gates’ arrogance. Nothing that his foundation has done to American public schools is comparable to a vaccine against disease. If you listen to parents and teachers, the Gates’ obsession with standardization and testing is the disease, not the vaccine.
Our only hope to find a vaccine for the standardized testing disease, which is a mental aberration that distorts the purpose of education, is democracy, not the Gates Foundation. The public must vote for candidates who promise to make public education more like Lakeside, not a processing machine that ignores the interests and needs of children.
I owe a special debt to my alma mater, Wellesley College. The college accepted me in 1956, coming from San Jacinto High School in Houston, an unpolished, unsophisticated 17-year-old who wanted to make a difference in the world but didn’t know where to start. My four years at Wellesley changed my life. I acquired a bit of polish, a smidgeon of sophistication (my friends would say, none or very little, actually), and a great education. It took a while to figure out where and how to make a difference, but I eventually did figure it out. After marriage and children, I entered graduate school, studied with Lawrence Cremin, the nation’s most outstanding historian of education, and found my niche.
This Thursday, I will be speaking at Wellesley and inaugurating a lecture series that I endowed. Its theme is: “Education and the Public Good.” I have also endowed opportunities for student research and internships, as well as other activities that promote scholarship and understanding of current issues in education. Knowing the idealism and brilliance of the students it attracts, I am hopeful that Wellesley will become a center that produces women devoted to advancing the common good and the public interest. Wellesley graduates enter many fields, including education, government, business, law, medicine, science, engineering, philanthropy, and finance. Wherever they are, I hope that what they learn in college will imbue them with a commitment to improving the lives of all children and investing in our shared future. There is a huge reservoir of intellect, character, and wisdom at Wellesley. My hope is that this great resource will advance our common purposes, our public purposes, now and in future generations of students.
I am speaking at 7 p.m. and all are welcome. The event will be live streamed.
Here is the College’s announcement:
Watch the live webcast of the inaugural Diane Silvers Ravitch ’60 Lecture on Thursday, October 22 at 7:30 PM EST.
Wellesley College is proud to welcome Diane Ravitch ’60 for the inaugural lecture in a new series of talks on current issues in public education. Ravitch is a leading national advocate for public schools who is ranked at the top of Education Week’s 2015 listing of influential scholars. In her presentation, entitled How to Ruin or Revive Public Education, she will discuss how testing and privatization are damaging children, teachers, schools, and communities, and are threatening public education as a common good.
Author of the New York Times bestsellers The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education and Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement, and many other books and articles on education history and policy, Ravitch also maintains a popular blog with nearly 23 million page reviews. She served as Assistant Secretary of Education and Counselor under President George H.W. Bush, and was later appointed to the National Assessment Governing Board by President Bill Clinton.
Please join us in the Diana Chapman Walsh Alumnae Hall Auditorium, Thursday, October 22 at 7:30 PM, or watch How to Ruin or Revive Public Education streamed live.
Wellesley College
106 Central Street | Wellesley, MA 02481
781.283.2373 | wellesley.edu/events
Amanda Koonlaba, an art teacher in Tupelo, Mississippi, explains here that Mississippi is in a pitched battle to fund its public schools adequately. The issue is joined in a political struggle over Initiative 42, which would require the adequate funding of public education. Initiative 42 is opposed by the forces of privatization, which prefer to open privately managed charters, hand out vouchers for religious schools, and block any increase in funding for the public schools.
Koonlaba writes:
In 1997, the Mississippi Legislature passed a law promising to provide each public school district in Mississippi enough financial support to furnish an adequate education to every K-12 student. That law is called the Mississippi Adequate Education Program (MAEP), and has only been followed twice since its was passed. This has resulted in a shortfall of over a billion dollars since 2009. That is a billion dollars that would have provided textbooks, technology, and certified teachers. Instead, Mississippi’s students have just had to do without.
In 2014, nearly 200,000 Mississippians from every county and both political parties took a stand and signed petitions to have Initiative 42 added to the ballot on November 3, 2015. This would amend the state constitution in a way that makes public education a priority instead of an afterthought. Initiative 42 closes a loophole that has allowed the Legislature to break the MAEP law for so long.
After citizens signed these petitions, the very first thing the Legislature did when they went back into session was to pass an alternative to Initiative 42.
The alternative was intended to confuse voters, to protect the status quo, and to prevent any increase in funding for public schools.
The leaders of the opposition to Initiative 42 have ties to the Koch Brothers and Americans for Prosperity.
And ALEC, the enemy of the public good, is involved too.
This spring, the Legislature passed a school voucher bill straight from the American Legislative Exchange Council’s (ALEC) playbook. ALEC helps corporations, idealogues, and their political allies pass legislation that privatizes schools. This legislation is written behind closed doors and then passed around from state to state. All a lawmaker has to do is fill in the blanks with the name of their particular state. It benefits large corporations and directs public tax dollars to private entities. ALEC is funded by the Koch Brothers. Interestingly, Jeb Bush, who is also closely connected to Americans for Prosperity, attended [Governor] Phil Bryant’s signing of this bill in Jackson.
The passage of Initiative 42 is crucial for the future of the children and public schools of Mississippi. It is a chance for the public to say NO to the 1% that rule ALEC and the other privatization advocates.
It is a chance for citizens and local communities to stand up for their public schools and stop the corporate assault on them.
Koonlaba writes:
Initiative 42 is a light in the darkness of this attack on Mississippi’s public schools. It is a chance for the citizens of Mississippi to stand up to the Legislature and remind them that they work for citizens not privatizers. Mississippians want their public schools to remain public and be fully funded.
However, Mississippians need help sorting through what the Executive Editor of the Clarion Ledger, Sam R. Hall, called “a load of horse crap” from the opposition to Initiative 42. Luckily, several groups are working to help Mississippians do this to get the initiative passed.
The Parent’s Campaign and the Mississippi Association of Educators have been working to educate the public on the initiative. 42 for Better Schools is the actual campaign to pass Initiative 42 and is a coalition of Mississippi public schools supporters and organizations. A grassroots group called Fed Up with 50th emerged to support school funding issues. They write on their Facebook page that
“We are law-abiding, tax-paying Mississippi voters—Republicans and Democrats—and we are FED UP! We are FED UP with failing schools, low graduation rates, poor teacher support, crowded classrooms, crumbling buildings, not enough textbooks or computers—all the things that make us 50th in education year after year. More than anything, we are FED UP that our legislators continue to BREAK THE LAW and underfund our schools, STEALING from our children and SELLING OUT their future to special interests.”
If Initiative 42 passes on November 3, Mississippians will have won a major battle but will have much work still left to do. If it doesn’t pass, the war will be lost.
Initiative 42 is a chance for Mississippians to tell the corporate entrepreneurs that their children and their public schools are not for sale.
If they stand together, the people of Mississippi can beat the 1%.
Diane Ravitch's blog 