is this a democracy? One man, One Vote?
Clinton now has a 2 million vote lead over Trump in the popular vote.
Archives for the month of: November, 2016
This is a statement by Parents United for Public Schools, on the news that their Superintendent is moving to D.C.
“Parents United for Public Schools released the following statement on the announced departure of OUSD Superintendent Antwan Wilson:
“The departure of Superintendent Antwan Wilson midway through his contract to lead our schools presents Oakland with a unique opportunity to learn from the mistakes of the past, and select a new leader who is committed to making a difference in our students’ lives and who will stay in Oakland long enough to see those changes through.
“The past two years have seen a decline in enrollment while upper-level administrative salaries have skyrocketed more than 500%. Major changes in the Programs for Exceptional Children and Student Enrollment have come without meaningful input from parents, teachers, staff or community, and the departure of long time administrators has further destabilized the district. Planning for major district initiatives has been made in closed meetings with charter leaders, but without input from our public school community. It is time for our District to put our public schools first by hiring a superintendent who believes in our public school system, who will work to create true community schools that will support and educate the whole child, and who will stay at least long enough to see those changes through.
“We call on the School Board to conduct an open and transparent search for a new superintendent in partnership with those most impacted by District policies: students, parents, teachers, staff and true community-based organizations. Our children deserve a leader with deep connections to Oakland, a strong belief in its public schools and a commitment to following through with the transformation of OUSD as a quality full-service community school district.”
In case you don’t know anything about Betsy DeVos, the Washington Post has a good summary.
So does Wikipedia.
She is a huge fan of vouchers. She supports Common Core. She thinks vouchers will give every child a great education.
The story says that some studies find that voucher students are more likely to go to college. Those studies show that voucher schools have high rates of attrition. The students who don’t transfer back to public schools are slightly more likely to go to college. The studies typically don’t factor in the students who leave when calculating the graduation rate. In Milwaukee, for example, 44% of the kids who started in voucher schools in 9th grade dropped out before graduation.
i guess my withdrawal of support for Betsy DeVos came too late. I just received a news flash from CNN that Trump offered her the U.S. Department of Education post, and she took it.
Now we will have a “reformer” who does not hide her contempt for the public schools.
She loves vouchers.
She opposes any any regulation or oversight for charter schools.
She wants privatization, perio.
A few days ago, I said that I support Michigan billionaire and hard-right voucher advocate Betsy DeVos, because she would show the world that “reformers” are out to destroy our public schools. No ambiguity there. She would demonstrate the close link between “reform” and the rightwing.
But I hereby formally withdraw my support for DeVos’s candidacy. To be sure, it was meant in jest, but many readers failed to see the humor in supporting someone who would totally privatize education.
Why am I withdrawing my support? Well, I just learned that DeVos has more flaws than I thought. Not only does she want all children to have vouchers (charters apparently are a fall-back form of privatization for her), she opposes any regulation or oversight for the private schools she supports. When the Michigan legislature made an attempt to create some oversight for charter schools, DeVos spent over $1 million to block the effort, and she won. In Michigan, 80% of the charters operate for-profit, without regulation or oversight, and DeVos is happy with that. The scandals and waste of taxpayers’ dollars don’t concern her. I also object to her because she supports the Common Core. My reasons for opposing the Common Core are different from that of people on the Trump team. I oppose them because they were imposed without a field trial, without any evidence that they were good standards. I oppose them because I oppose standardization in education. I oppose developmentally inappropriate demands on young children. If any teacher loves them, use them, but they are not and never will be national standards, nor will they reduce achievement gaps. If anything, they increase the gaps and reduce achievement.
So, sorry, Betsy, you are not my choice.
Who is my choice? Glad you asked that question. I support Williamson (Bill) Evers, whom I have known for nearly 20 years. He is not mean, unlike some of the other candidates. He is at heart a libertarian and won’t shove federal policies down everyone’s throats. He is the only choice Trump might make that would do the least harm.
The citizens of Massachusetts spoke loudly and clearly on November 8 when they overwhelmingly rejected Question 2. They don’t want more charter schools. They want strong and well-resourced public schools.
But the state of Massachusetts and the Boston school superintendent Tommy Chang have decided to close Mattahunt Elementary School despite the pleas of the parents and the local community.
The state Education Commissioner Mitchell Chester has threatened to take over the school, although state takeovers have seldom been successful at improving schools. Boston superintendent Chang says that the only way to save the school is to close it. Read that sentence over two or three times and see if it makes any sense to you. It reminds me of the saying during the Vietnam War that “we had to destroy the village in order to save it.” This is insane.
Test scores are low. Kids are poor. Why not come up with a strategy to improve the school? Chang, who worked for John Deasy’s in Los Angeles, seems to have no idea how to help the school other than to close it. Neither does Mitchell Chester.
Citizens for Public Schools writes:
Does Boston have to close a school to save its children from suffering harm at the hands of the state?
That startling question was the focus of nearly four hours of passionate debate last week, pitting 100 parents and other supporters of the Mattahunt School against Superintendent Tommy Chang.
In the end, the School Committee voted to close the school at the end of June to head off state takeover, even after parents said they were willing to take the risk and would join with the School Committee in fighting for their school.
The Mattahunt students are 95 percent Black and Latino, and over 25 percent English language learners. Many come from Haiti and have already experienced trauma and instability. School Department officials said 17 of the students came to the Mattahunt from other schools that the department closed.
“You would never do this in a white community,” said Peggy Wiesenberg, a white parent who came to support the Mattahunt parents…
All sides agreed that state intervention would be a tragedy for the children. Speakers said the state takeover of the Dever and Holland schools had hurt the children in those schools, using terms like “disaster.”
Have public officials in charge of education in Massachusetts lost their minds? Why would they close a school to avoid a state takeover that everyone agrees would be a disaster? Would they do this in a white neighborhood? Why are they treating these children like they are inanimate objects? Like they don’t matter? Like their well-being is unimportant? They are not doing this for the kids. Why are they doing it? What is the point? This is not education reform. This is community destruction and child abuse.
Where is the accountability for Mitchell Chester and Tommy Chang? They are guilty of educational malpractice. They should be held accountable.
D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser selected Antwan Wilson as the next chancellor of schools, promising that he would continue the policies of Michelle Rhee and Kaya Henderson. Wilson has been superintendent in Oakland for the past two years. He is a graduate of the unaccredited Broad Superintendents Academy. He has pledged to tackle the achievement gaps in D.C., which are the largest of any urban district.
D.C. adopted mayoral control of the schools in 2007, copying New York City’s example. Michelle Rhee served from 2007 to 2010, when Adrian Fenty, the mayor who appointed her, was defeated, in large part because of Rhee. Her deputy, Kaya Henderson, took her place.
About half the children in the District are enrolled in charter schools, which are not under the chancellor’s control. The Walton Family Foundation has made privatizing schools in the nation’s Capitol a priority.
G. F. Brandenburg, a fearless blogger who taught math for many years in the schools of D.C., writes here about the hypocrisy of reformer rhetoric.
He writes:
If you look at the lingo used to justify all the horrendous crap being imposed by “Ed reform”, you’ll see that it’s all couched in lefty-liberal civil rights language. But its results are anything but. Very strange.
He takes, for example, the flowery language used to recruit college students to join Teach for America. They are led to believe that their presence will reduce the achievement gap and bring us closer to the day when all children, regardless of zip code, get an excellent education.
He writes:
GFB: However, the way TFA works in practice is that the kids who need the most experienced, skillful teachers, instead get total newbies straight out of college with no teaching experience, no mentoring, and courses on how to teach whatever subject they are they are assigned to. Their five weeks of summer training are mostly rah-rah cheerleading and browbeating. Their only classroom experiences during that summer are a dozen or so hours teaching a handful of kids, **in a subject or grade level totally different from whatever they will be randomly assigned to**.
What underprivileged students do NOT need is an untrained newbie who won’t stick with them. If anything, this policy INCREASES the ‘achievement gap’.
He then proposes 17 ideas that would actually improve the lives of children and their education. Begin, he says, by getting non-educators out of the drivers’ seat.
Get people who don’t have actual, extensive teaching or research experience out of the command and control centers of education except as advisors. So, no Michelle Rhee, Andre Agassi, Arne Duncan, Billionaire Broad at the helm.
Read his other good ideas, and add your own.
According to New York magazine, the votes in three swing states--Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin–are suspicious and should be audited. Clinton’s lead over Trump in the popular vote is now 1.75 million and still rising.
Hillary Clinton is being urged by a group of prominent computer scientists and election lawyers to call for a recount in three swing states won by Donald Trump, New York has learned. The group, which includes voting-rights attorney John Bonifaz and J. Alex Halderman, the director of the University of Michigan Center for Computer Security and Society, believes they’ve found persuasive evidence that results in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania may have been manipulated or hacked. The group is so far not speaking on the record about their findings and is focused on lobbying the Clinton team in private.
Last Thursday, the activists held a conference call with Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta and campaign general counsel Marc Elias to make their case, according to a source briefed on the call. The academics presented findings showing that in Wisconsin, Clinton received 7 percent fewer votes in counties that relied on electronic-voting machines compared with counties that used optical scanners and paper ballots. Based on this statistical analysis, Clinton may have been denied as many as 30,000 votes; she lost Wisconsin by 27,000. While it’s important to note the group has not found proof of hacking or manipulation, they are arguing to the campaign that the suspicious pattern merits an independent review — especially in light of the fact that the Obama White House has accused the Russian government of hacking the Democratic National Committee…
The Clinton camp is running out of time to challenge the election. According to one of the activists, the deadline in Wisconsin to file for a recount is Friday; in Pennsylvania, it’s Monday; and Michigan is next Wednesday. Whether Clinton will call for a recount remains unclear. The academics so far have only a circumstantial case that would require not just a recount but a forensic audit of voting machines. Also complicating matters, a senior Clinton adviser said, is that the White House, focused on a smooth transfer of power, does not want Clinton to challenge the election result. Clinton communications director Jennifer Palmieri did not respond to a request for comment. But some Clinton allies are intent on pushing the issue. This afternoon, Huma Abedin’s sister Heba encouraged her Facebook followers to lobby the Justice Department to audit the 2016 vote. “Call the DOJ…and tell them you want the votes audited,” she wrote. “Even if it’s busy, keep calling.”
Donald Trump met today with reporters and editors of the New York Times. He walked back most of his campaign promises. He won’t prosecute Hillary Clinton. He won’t bring back torture. He didn’t actually mean to do anything he said. He has an open mind about climate change.
But this was the most astonishing thing he said:
But pressed to respond to criticism in other areas, he was defiant. He declared that “the law’s totally on my side” when it comes to questions about conflict of interest and ethics laws. “The president can’t have a conflict of interest.”
He said it would be extremely difficult to sell off his businesses because they are real estate holdings. He said that he would “like to do something” to address ethics concerns, and he noted that he had turned over the management of the businesses to his children.
But he insisted that he could still have business partners into the White House for grin-and-grab photographs. He said that critics were pressuring him to go beyond what he was willing to do, including distancing himself from his children while they run his businesses.
“If it were up to some people,” he said, “I would never, ever see my daughter Ivanka again.”
Mr. Trump rejected the idea that he was bound by federal anti-nepotism laws against installing his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, in a White House job. But he said he would want to avoid the appearance of a conflict and might instead seek to make him a special envoy charged with brokering peace in the Middle East.
Diane Ravitch's blog 