Archives for the month of: November, 2016
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Jeff Sessions, Attorney-General Designate, Fought to Preserve Separate but Unequal in Alabama

By dianeravitch
November 22, 2016 //
24

Jeff Sessions has a long history of racism. He was nominated for a federal judgeship and rejected by a Republican-led Senate because of his history of racist comments and actions. More recently, before entering the U.S. Senate, he was attorney general of Alabama. In that role, he fought to preserve the unequal funding of public schools in Alabama. 

 

President-elect Donald Trump has chosen Senator Jeff Sessions as Attorney General in his administration, the person who is supposed to enforce all the laws.

 

This is a dark time.

 

But it may lead to a rebirth of energy, vitality, and focus on the other side of the aisle.

Categories Accountability, Alabama, Civil Rights, Race

The Facts About State Takeovers of Public Schools

By dianeravitch
November 22, 2016 //
9

The Alliance to Reclaim Our Public Schools (AROS) has gathered important information about state takeovers, which target disproportionate numbers of black and brown communities.

 

Be sure to check out this fact sheet.

 

When the fact sheet was published earlier this year, AROS identified 116 schools that were operating in state takeover districts in Louisiana, Michigan, and Tennessee. Of 44,000 students affected, 96% are African American or Latino.

 

The first consequence of the takeover is the abolition of elected school boards. Democracy ends, and the board is replaced by an appointed board, often made up of people who have no connection to the community.

 

The results have been disappointing. Nearly half the schools in the New Orleans Recovery School District are rated D or F by the state (other studies put the figure even higher). The charters in the Tennessee Achievement School District lag the performance of public schools. In Michigan’s Educational Achievement Authority, 79% of students either showed no improvement or lost ground on state tests.

 

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Michigan, New Orleans, Privatization, Tennessee, Turnaround Schools

No High-Performing Nation in the World Tests Every Student Every Year

By dianeravitch
November 22, 2016 //
6

Marc Tucker posted two incredibly important articles about testing, from an international perspective.

First, no high performing nation in the world tests every child every year.

Second, taking a standardized test every year is not a civil right and does nothing to close the achievement gap.

Children don’t get smarter because they are tested more often.

Standardized testing is normed on a bell curve. The bottom half of the bell curve has a disproportionate number of children who live in poverty, children who don’t read or speak English, and children with disabilities. The top half has a disproportionate number of children who grow up in stable, secure homes.

The bell curve never closes. It is built into the standardized test. Test makers know in advance how each question will “perform.” The test is designed to produce a bell curve.

The standardized test assesses whether children know the skills and content that are tested. Teacher-made tests assess whether children have learned what they were taught. As we know from Howard Gardner’s work, children have many different abilities; they may not be good at test-taking, but they may be wonderful at making things, doing things, building things, figuring things out, creating things, inventing things.

When Tucker wrote that annual testing did not promote civil rights or narrow achievement gaps, he set off a firestorm of criticism from the reformers (see here and here).

He had evidence on his side. They had ideology. They were wrong. If we hang on to testing and privatization as our weapons to create equity, we will never get there. These are the strategies of the 1% meant to avoid paying a fair share of their vast wealth to close the income inequality gap.

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Testing

Trump Won’t Prosecute Hillary, Tries to Bully Media

By dianeravitch
November 22, 2016 //
46

Another busy day in the transition of President-elect Trump.

 

He won’t prosecute Hillary Clinton for the “crimes” that he said were “worse than Watergate.” The crowds chanting “lock her up” surely must have known he never meant to follow through.

 

Yesterday, Trump met with leaders of the TV networks and told them he didn’t like their coverage. Has anyone briefed him on the First Amendment?

 

Here’s the deal with Trump. He is vain. He has no sense of humor. He is thin-skinned. He can’t laugh at humself. He is in for a very rough four years. And so are we.

 

His is vanity and touchiness make him a rich target for satirists, artists, and the entertainment industry.

 

 

Categories Education Reform

Arthur Camins: U.S. Schools Don’t Fail at Test Scores, They Fail at Teaching Citizenship

By dianeravitch
November 22, 2016 //
28

Arthur Camins, director of the Center for Innovation in Engineering and Science Education at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, NJ, writes frequently about education issues.

In this post, written a year ago, he warned that the real problem in education is that we fail to prepare our students for the challenges of citizenship. The post was prophetic.

The phrase college and career readiness has become ubiquitous in education debates, but as a slogan without significant transformational direction. Of course, students should leave K-12 education with the knowledge and skills to succeed in the next phase of their lives. Of course, students’ experiences should open rather than restrict their choices and opportunities when they graduate. Of course, they should all graduate. Of course, young people need to develop the knowledge, skills and dispositions to be successful in the world of work. Ignoring that would be an irresponsible abdication, especially for students whose parents already struggle to make a decent living. It’s not that that these are misplaced goals. They are just insufficient.

We need an education system intentionally designed to engage students to understand their values and to learn how to become effective citizens. Which questions teachers ask or do not ask influences how their students understand the world and their role in it.

There are ways to teach that promote passivity, he writes. And there are ways to teach that encourage active engagement:

In the past, how have people worked together to improve the human condition in different societies? What has supported and thwarted those efforts? What features of governments support or impede peaceful resolution of conflicts? How do scientists make discoveries? How do engineers design solutions that improve people’s lives? How do literature and the arts help us understand and value one another and our environment? How can mathematics be used to help make better decisions? What changes are you interested in investigating? These are change-oriented questions that affirm students’ capacities and encourage them to imagine themselves as agents of improvement. These are engaging motivational questions. When student engage in such action-directed learning they can develop the values, confidence and mindset to make things better.

We need a rebirth in the teaching of history and civics. We need more than ever to teach students the importance of living together with others in peace and mutual respect. We need to teach them to respect the humanity and individuality of others.

Perhaps this is the state we are in after 16 years of No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, focused exclusively on test scores, standardized testing, basic skills, and getting the right answer.

Civics is about asking the right questions, and questioning why those questions are “right,” not picking a bubble and saying it is the “right answer.”

Categories Accountability, Citizenship, Democracy, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top, Testing

A Day in the Life of Your Quantified Child

By dianeravitch
November 22, 2016 //
8

This is a very interesting and important graphic about “The Quantified Student.”

If you are concerned about data mining of your child or yourself, you are right to be concerned.

Our government and the corporate sector wants to know everything about us. They want to quantify our lives and use what they know to create Big Data.

Big Data can be useful in tracking public health trends and needs, but it can be destructive in defining solely as our data.

We are humans. We are not robots. Take a look at the graphic.

We must protect our privacy, our individuality, our voice, our uniqueness as human beings.

Categories Data and Data Mining, Education Reform, Privacy and Privacy Rights

Sara Stevenson: Living in a Post-Truth World

By dianeravitch
November 22, 2016 //
44

Sara Stevenson is a librarian at O. Henry Junior High School in Austin, Texas. She is a genuine warrior for public education. The “reformers” have no one like her; they have to pay people six-figure salaries to write the way she does. For one, she frequently publishes articles in Texas newspapers in defense of public schools and teachers. But her most valuable service is that she is a perennial watchdog for the conservative Wall Street Journal, which can be counted on to bash public schools and teachers with regularity. She writes letters there frequently and they are often published, rebuking the newspaper’s blatant bias against anyone who works for a public school.

She sent me her thoughts about fake news, which are being published also in The Texas Tribune.

She writes:

 

 

How to navigate a post-truth world

 

In the aftermath of the U.S. presidential election, I’ve been reflecting on what it means to live in a post-truth world. I was shocked to read several accounts, explaining that a majority of Americans receive their news via Facebook. “Trending stories” are highlighted in the right-hand margin of your Facebook page and serve as clickbait. Since Facebook has already determined your political bias, these stories — selected by algorithms, not people — play into each user’s biases and fears.

 

I wasn’t really aware of this problem of fake news until I read an op-ed by Nicholas Kristof, “Lies in the Guise of News in the Trump Era,” that reminded me of a recent day on Facebook. I saw a trending news story with the headline “Michelle Obama Snubs Hillary Clinton.” I thought it was odd, but I fell for the clickbait. Within reading the first two sentences, I could tell it was a totally bogus news story along the lines of The National Enquirer. Then again, our president-elect actually quoted The National Enquirer during his primary battle with Senator Ted Cruz, referring to an article that falsely identified the senator’s father in an old photo with Lee Harvey Oswald, handing out pro-Castro fliers before the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. It wasn’t until I read Kristof’s column that I realized these proliferating fake news stories may have played a profound and sinister role in our just-concluded presidential election.

 

Many of us find ourselves at times in the awkward position of directing our family members to a Snopes article, proving what they just disseminated on social media was a lie. Of course, when one major political party continually distrusts the “lamestream” media, the fourth estate or journalism, “truth” becomes malleable, merely reflecting the reader’s own suspicions and biases. In the olden days, publishers were the guardians of the truth, and whatever we read in print had a kind of trusted authority behind it. Now, anyone can say anything on the Internet, including a seventeen-year-old boy who creates fake news sites from his home in Macedonia, according to Kristof’s article.

 

But it’s not just Facebook. According to a recent Washington Post article, the top Google search on the election results led users to a fake news site. Since the Post article’s publication, that selection is no longer in the top 10. After initially denying the problem, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook has joined Google in working to find ways to alert users to fake news stories, including cutting off these sites from the revenue stream fueled by online ads. There is now even a Google Chrome extension that alerts you to false news.

 

Then again, there’s no substitute for critical thinking.

 

All of us who value the truth need to challenge our fellow citizens to be more skeptical and discerning when surfing the web. We have many sources to help us, such as who.is, which allows us to search for the domain owner of every website. For instance, a search for the innocuous-sounding martinlutherking.org leads us to discover the site is owned by Don Black, leader of the white supremacist group Stormfront, which endorsed Donald Trump for president.

 

We must all do our due diligence and evaluate every website we visit. One way to do that is using what Gettysburg College has termed the CRAAP Test: Currency, Relevancy, Authority, Accuracy, and Purpose.

 

The very survival of our republic depends on an educated, engaged, and information-savvy populace.

 

Categories Accountability, Media

Mike Klonsky: Corporate Reformers Throw in with Trump!

By dianeravitch
November 21, 2016 //
15

The natural alliance between the corporate reformers and the incoming Trump administration has been a theme of many of the posts today, starting with Peter Greene’s post about the “Faux Progressive Polka.”

 

Michael Klonsky calls it as he sees it: the corporate reformers are very comfortable with Trump, because he is singing their song about “school choice” being “the civil rights issue of our time.” Of course, he doesn’t mean it any more than the billionaire hedge funders mean it. School choice is a lot cheaper than raising taxes on the 1% to reduce poverty and to provide medical and social services for poor kids and families.

 

Mike writes:

 

It looks like they’ve dropped their phony rhetoric about charter schools being “the civil rights issue of our time.” Following the Democrat’s devastating loss to Trump, one by one, the corporate reformers and champions of privately-run charters are jumping the Dems’ ship and throwing in behind the racist, anti-immigrant Trump education movement.

 

For some, the move is nothing new. Former D.C. chancellor, Arne Duncan fave, and Waiting for Superman star Michelle Rhee for example, turned to selling her talents to the far right as soon as voters ran her and Mayor Fenty out of town. She went to work advising FL Gov. Rick Scott on school privatization and union-busting matters.

 

Now that she’s stepped down from leadership of her anti-union ed group, Students First, she’s considering leaving her new position with a national fertilizer company if Trump offers her the job as his secretary of education. Her problem is that she’s a proponent of Common Core. Trump isn’t. But either of them can easily accommodate the other’s position since Rhee sees Common Core’s value mainly in its testing provisions, enabling teachers to be evaluated, hired and fired on the basis of student test scores. There should be a basis for unity with Trump there somewhere.

 

And her scandal-ridden past, including her connection with D.C. test-cheating scandal shouldn’t bother the Trump transition team too much considering the rest of his recent scandalized appointees and advisers. Not to mention, Trump’s own $25M pay-off to make the Trump Univ. suit go away.

 

But Trump also has to placate his base. Upon hearing about his possible choice of Rhee, the right-wing group, Parents Against the Common Core, wrote Trump and open letter calling on him to cut federal funding of public schools, dismantle the D.O.E. and appoint someone like former Bush aide Williamson Evers to the top post.

 

BTW, Trump also met with Rhee’s husband KJ, the disgraced mayor of Sacramento. They have some legal problems in common. Something about teenage girls. But let’s not even go there right now. I just ate.

 

Then there’s New York’s own charter-hustler supreme, Eva Moskowitz who is now pulling down nearly a half-million a year for managing the city’s Success Academy Charters. EM met with Trump last week, but reportedly turned down the Ed Sec job. Some NY friends told me she couldn’t afford the pay cut. The Secretary of Education’s salary is a measly $186,600. Others say, she has her eyes on the NY mayor’s office. But she left the meeting on good terms, promising Trump that she would get behind his school reform plan.

 

You really must open Mike’s article to see the many links.

 

He ends his piece by asking, with all the corporate reformers falling in line, can Joel Klein be far behind? As it happens, when I was researching Betsy DeVos, billionaire, school choice advocate, and potential Secretary of Education in the Trump administration, I learned that Betsy and Joel had co-authored an article lauding the value of grading schools on an A-F scale. (see footnote 32 in DeVos’ Wikipedia entry.) Unfortunately, the article is behind a pay wall; the summary says:

 

DeVos and Joel Klein noted in a May 2013 op-ed that residents of Maine “are now given information on school performance using easy-to-understand report cards with the same A, B, C, D and F designations used in student grades.”

 

Giving public schools a single letter grade is a corporate reform favorite, as it is necessary for school choice. Experience demonstrates that the letter grades reflect affluence and poverty, so the schools of poor kids are slated for closing and privatization. But worse, the very idea that a complex institution can be evaluated with a single letter grade is offensive. No, it is not like a child’s report card. If a child brought home a report card with nothing but a single letter grade, parents would be outraged. No child is a single letter grade. No school is a single letter grade.

 

Klonsky nails it.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization, School Choice, Trump

Will Trump Deduct the Trump University $25 Million Fine from his Taxes?

By dianeravitch
November 21, 2016 //
15

The New York Times reported today that the $25 million fine imposed on Donald Trump to reimburse people defrauded by “Trump University” cannot be paid by his charitable foundation.

 

 

However, a sentence buried deep in the story points out that Trump may be able to deduct all but $1 million of the fine from his business taxes.

 

Thanks to to the eagle-eyed Mercedes Schneider for catching this interesting detail.

 

Trump also said said he would have won the case if it had gone to trial but he was too busy.

 

 

Categories Trump

A Reader: Where Should the Money Go?

By dianeravitch
November 21, 2016 //
12

After listening to the debate between Duke Professor Helen Ladd and Harvard Professor Marty West about the funding of our schools (“Getting Our Money’s Worth“), a reader sent this comment:

 

I don’t understand why we’re not talking more about the great things our teachers are doing in spite of being under funded. What don’t our schools have? My goddaughter asked for a ream of copy paper for Christmas a couple of years ago! Her whiteboard is actually plastic shower stall wall material that can’t be cleaned. She works in the Boston area.

 

Our schools are giving our students wonderful, whole child educations. They’re winning awards for the wonderful things they do with parents, students and other community members but we rarely talk about it.

 

What do the almighty (all richy) charters have – facilities in good repair with great technology, small classes, resources we can’t even dream about? That’s what I hear is the case for many charters. Where does that money come from? Do they save so much by not paying certified teachers that they can afford all those amenities or do they get tax deductible gifts from afar? How much more money does all their splendor take? Can community public schools get some from the same places? How about just enough for small classes?

 

Proud of public schools
Mary

Categories Charter Schools, Funding, Supporting public schools, Teachers and Teaching
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