Archives for the month of: January, 2017
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Washington Post Fact Checks Trump’s Gloomy Inaugural Speech But Overlooks His Smear of Education

By dianeravitch
January 20, 2017 //
19

Trump has spent most of his days living in a billionaire’s bubble, most recently in a gold-plated penthouse, so to his limited vision, the rest of us live in squalor. Everything’s a mess, everyone is poor (other than the members of his cabinet), the cities are crumbling, no one has a job, the schools are “flush with cash,” but no one learns anything.

 

The Washington Post fact checked his speech and corrected many of his statements. 

 

Unfortunately, the fact checking did not include a correction of Trump’s false claims about American education.

 

He said,

 

“But for too many of our citizens, a different reality exists: Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation; an education system, flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of knowledge; and the crime and gangs and drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential.

 

Deprived of knowledge?

 

I challenge Trump, the members of his cabinet, the members of Congress, and the editorial board of the Washington Post to take a test composed of eighth grade NAEP questions in math and publish their scores!

 

I doubledare them! How dare they slander our children and teachers when they themselves would fail the same tests that our kids are expected to pass. Eighth grade, not high school!

 

Categories Education Reform, Trump

Notes from Inauguration Day

By dianeravitch
January 20, 2017 //
54

There is a certain expectation that a new president’s inaugural speech will unite the nation and present a vision of a better future for all.

 

Ever surprising, Trump used his inaugural speech to continue the dark and divisive themes of his campaign. Things are terrible, and he alone cane save us.

 

George Will, the conservative columnist, called it the most dreadful inaugural speech ever.

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2017/01/20/a-most-dreadful-inaugural-address/

 

In his speech, Trump took a swipe at America’s public schools, saying they deprive students of “all knowledge.”

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/2017/live-updates/politics/live-coverage-of-trumps-inauguration/in-his-speech-trump-grouped-public-schools-with-gangs-drugs-and-rusted-out-factories/?utm_term=.3776fabc599f

 

The new White House website removed the page devoted to civil rights advances and the page about LGBT rights, but added a page advertising Melanie trump’s jewelry.

 

And this is the the new Twitter picture of our angry president:

 

A professor of history at the University of California at Davis reminded the world that the term “America First” was embraced by Nazi sympathizers in the U.S. in the 1930s.

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2017/01/20/president-trumps-america-first-slogan-was-popularized-by-nazi-sympathizers/?utm_term=.5b99a808f43a

 

As E.J. Dionne wrote in the Washington Post, this was a very ominous Inauguration Day in modern history.

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/this-is-the-most-ominous-inauguration-day-in-modern-history/2017/01/18/5105f7ee-ddc0-11e6-918c-99ede3c8cafa_story.html?utm_term=.93275cb36d26

 

 

 

 

Categories Trump

John Merrow: Stopping by Washington on a Snowy Evening

By dianeravitch
January 20, 2017 //
7

I didn’t know John Merrow was a poet. But he is.

 

Stopping by Washington on a Snowy Evening

 
Whose swamp this is, I think I know:

Hails from Kenya, name starts with ‘O.’

He’s been dumped. I’m President Trump

It’s time for that loser to go.
He came to Washington talking about ‘hope.’

Nobel Prize or not, that makes him a dope.

To that mope, I say ‘nope.’

Let’s go find us some chicks to grope.
That house he lives in, historic and old

Not my style. I like bold

And I like huge, and (trust me) I’m huge.

I’ll fill it with women, cover it in gold.
‘Cause this swamp’s mine, it’s for sale.

This is my moment. No way I’ll fail.

Billionaires welcome, no Mexicans please.

Just say ‘Heil Donald’ (but pronounce it ‘hail’).
I’ll fill this swamp, call it ‘Trump Lake.’

Say I’m doing it for America’s sake.

Let’s move. I have promises to break…

And lots and lots of money to make.

(Lots and lots of money to make!)

 

 

(Who wrote this poem, you think you know:

Old man with glasses, hair like snow.

You’re thinking Frost, but you are lost.

 

 

Author’s a guy with weak sense of humor, poor rhyming skills and absolutely no sense of meter)

HERE’S THE LINK: https://themerrowreport.com/2017/01/19/a-poem-for-the-inauguration/

John

Categories Trump

A Century of Skills Movements

By dianeravitch
January 20, 2017 //
30

I wrote about this topic in 2010. Year after year, decade after decade, some educational “authority” tells us that the world is changing fast, and that the schools must teach useful skills, not academic knowledge. The article appeared in the AFT’s American Educator magazine in spring 2010.

 

If I were to rewrite the article today, I would add the Common Core to the list, because it is a collection of skills without content. Because it is mandated in so many states and tied to high-stakes tests, subjects like history, civics, and science get short shrift. Even literature gets short shrift, because students are taught to read short passages without context. Teachers have reported that they no longer teach novels or poetry, to meet the demands of the Common Core for close reading.

 

If I were to revise the article, I would change its tone to acknowledge the value of the “maker-movement.” This is a deservedly popular activity in which children make things with their hands, some involving electronics, some using tools or fabric or paper or wood. Genuine progressive education recognizes the value of loving literature, delving into history in depth, and using your hands and mind to make beautiful things.

 

Here is the 2010 article:

 

I am a historian of education and have written often about the educational enthusiasms and fads of the past century. One of my books, titled Left Back, tells the story of the rise and fall of one fad after another across the 20th century. In brief, what I’ve found is that in the land of American pedagogy, innovation is frequently confused with progress, and whatever is thought to be new is always embraced more readily than what is known to be true. Thus, pedagogues, policymakers, thought leaders, facilitators, and elected of cials are rushing to get aboard the 21st-century-skills express train, lest they appear to be old-fashioned or traditional, these terms being the worst sort of opprobrium that can be hurled at any educator.

 

What these train riders don’t seem to realize is that there is nothing new in the proposals of the 21st-century-skills movement. The same ideas were iterated and reiterated by pedagogues throughout the 20th century. Their call for 20th-cen- tury skills sounds identical to the current effort to promote 21st-century skills. If there was one cause that animated the schools of education in the 20th century, it was the search for the ultimate breakthrough that would nally loosen the shackles of subject matter and content.

 

For decade after decade, pedagogical leaders called upon the schools to free themselves from tradition and subject matter. Ellwood P. Cubberley, while dean of the education school at Stanford, warned that it was dangerous for society to educate boys—and even girls—without reference to vocational ends. Whatever they learned, he insisted, should be relevant to their future lives and work. He thought it foolish to saturate them with “a mass of knowledge that can have little application for the lives which most of them must inevitably lead.” They were sure to become disappointed and discontented, and who knew where all this discontent might lead? Cubberley called on his fellow educators to abandon their antiquated academic ideals and instead to adapt education to the real life and real needs of their students. This was in 1911.

 

The federal government issued a major report on the education of black students in 1916. Its author, Thomas Jesse Jones, scoffed at academic education, which lacked relevance to the lives of these students and was certainly not adapted to their needs. Jones wanted black children to “learn to do by doing,” which was considered to be the modern, scienti c approach to education. It was not knowledge of the printed page that black students needed, wrote Jones, but “knowledge of gardening, small farming, and the simple industries required in farming communities.” Jones admired schools that were teaching black students how to sew, cook, garden, milk cows, lay bricks, harvest crops, and raise poultry. This was a prescription for locking the South’s African American population into menial roles for the foreseeable future. As Jones acknowledged in his report, the parents of black children wanted them to have an academic education, but he thought he knew better. His clarion call was sounded with extremely poor timing—just as America was changing from a rural to an urban nation.

 

Although there were many similar efforts to eliminate the academic curricu- lum and replace it with real-world interactions, none came as close to the ideals of 21st-century learning skills as William Heard Kilpatrick’s celebrated Project Method. Kilpatrick, a fabled Teachers College professor, took the education world by storm in 1918 with his proposal for the Project Method. Instead of a sequential curriculum laid out in advance,

 

Kilpatrick urged that boys and girls engage in hands-on projects of their own choosing. As Kilpatrick envisioned it, the project was “whole-hearted purposeful activity proceeding in a social environment.” Kilpatrick said that the project shaped character and personality. It required activity, not docility. It awakened student motivation. Ideally, the project would be done collaboratively by a group.

 

Another forerunner to the 21st-century-skills movement was the activity movement of the 1920s and 1930s. As in the Project Method, students were encouraged to engage in activities and projects built on their interests. Studies were interdisciplinary, and academic subjects were called upon only when needed to solve a problem. Students built, measured, and gured things out, while solving real-life problems like how to build a playhouse or a pet park or a puppet theater. Decision making, critical thinking, cooperative group learning: all were integral parts of the activity movement.

 

Something similar happened in many high schools in the 1930s, where many avant-garde school districts replaced courses like science and history with interdisciplinary courses, which they called the “core curriculum” or “social living.” Some districts merged several disciplines— such as English, social studies, and science— into a single course, which was focused not on subject matter but on students’ life experiences. In a typical class, students studied their own homes, made maps and scale drawings, and analyzed such questions as the cost of maintaining the home; the cost of fuel, light, and power; and how to prepare nutritious meals.

 

But there were occasional parent protests. In Roslyn, New York, parents were incensed because their children couldn’t read but spent an entire day baking nut bread. The Roslyn superintendent assured them that baking nut bread was an excellent way to learn mathematics.

 

In the 1950s came the Life Adjustment Movement, yet another stab at getting rid of subject matter and teaching students to prepare for real life. And in the 1980s, there was Outcome-Based Education, which sought to make schooling relevant, hands-on, and attuned to the alleged real interests and needs of young people.

 

The early 1990s brought SCANS—the Secretary’s Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills—which recommended exactly the kinds of functional skills that are now called 21st-century skills. These documents were produced by a commis- sion for the U.S. Secretary of Labor. I recall hearing the director of SCANS say that students didn’t need to know anything about the Civil War or how to write a book report; these were obsolete kinds of knowledge and skills.
When the SCANS recommendations appeared in 1991, I was an assistant secretary at the U.S. Department of Education and I discussed them with David Kearns, the deputy secretary who had been CEO of Xerox. I said, “David, the SCANS report says that young people don’t need to know how to write a book report, they need to know how to write advertising jingles.” He replied, “That’s ridiculous. You can’t write advertising jingles if you don’t know how to write a book report.”

 

Each of these initiatives had an impact. They left American education with a deeply ingrained suspicion of academic studies and subject matter. “It’s academic” came to mean “it’s purely theoretical and unreal.” For the past century, our schools of education have obsessed over critical-thinking skills, projects, cooperative learning, experiential learning, and so on. But they have paid precious little attention to the disciplinary knowledge that young people need to make sense of the world.

 

One of the problems with skills-driven approaches to learning is that there are so many things we need to know that cannot be learned through hands-on experiences. The educated person learns not only from his or her own experience, but from the hard- earned experience of others. We do not restart the world anew in each generation. We stand on the shoulders of those who have gone before us. What matters most in the use of our brains is our capacity to make generalizations, to see beyond our own immediate experience. The intelligent person, the one who truly is a practitioner of critical thinking, has the learned capacity to understand the lessons of history, to engage in the adventures of literature, to grasp the inner logic of science and mathematics, and to realize the meaning of philosophical debates by studying them. Through literature, for example, we have the opportunity to see the world through the eyes of other people, to walk in their shoes, to experience life as it was lived in another century and another culture, to live vicariously beyond the bounds of our own time and family and place. What a gift! How sad to refuse it. ☐

Categories Common Core, Education Reform

Forbes: A Frightening Portrayal of “What Life Will Be Like Under Trump”

By dianeravitch
January 20, 2017 //
14

Melik Kaylan, writing in Forbes magazine, has spent the past two decades reporting on foreign affairs, with much time spent in authoritarian (“populist”) regimes. [Please do not ask me to explain why an authoritarian regime is called a “populist” regime; I don’t know.]

 

Kaylan begins like this:

 

This column is about what life will be like under Trump, based on discernible patterns in other countries where populists gained power, especially those with possible murky Russian ties. I write this not as the kind of airy opiner now ubiquitous via the internet – just one more shrill partisan voice in the noise – but as a professional with specific two-decades-long experience in the subject. Experience on the ground that is, as a reporter and commentator. I have now covered upwards of a dozen countries that have buckled under the emergent wave of populist leaders, from the Far East to the Mideast to Europe and the Americas. Many of the countries have done so quite democratically, at first. That emergent wave has crashed onto US shores in a fashion thoroughly precedented abroad.

 

Recently, I wrote about how I’d seen all the tricks in the Trump campaign before, actually in Tbilisi, Georgia, during the 2012 national elections when the pro-US candidate lost to a pro-Russian populist. At that time, no one was ready to believe the Russians capable of influencing Western style elections. Many still don’t, even after Trump. We now have enough experience of populists in power in the West and elsewhere to guess intelligently at what’s to come in the US; what life will feel like under Trump. Here is a checklist to compare against in the coming months and years. We will all be happier if none of this comes to pass but the weight of evidence suggests the worst. Equally, none of this implies that supporters of Trump don’t have legitimate issues on their side which, sadly, other politicians won’t address. Which is how populists come to power.

 

Constitutional Chaos

 

Already the intelligence services and Mr.Trump have squared off. Think about that for a long moment. Then think about what Trump will do. He will appoint new chiefs. They will fight with their rank and file. He will try to downsize and defund. There will be pushback. Imagine what that will look like in the media. Then there’s the ‘Emoluments Clause’ that, according to various experts, requires Trump resign from his businesses. He won’t fully. His kids certainly wont. His kids will also occupy indefinable White House positions with disproportionate power, raising all manner of nepotism questions. For a long while, Trump will ignore his more-or-less respectable cabinet chiefs and get things done via non-accredited unofficial advisors. Picking through the legal minefield, the courts and ultimately the Supreme Court will be very busy. So, think about vacancies on the Supreme Court. Watch Republicans in Congress divide endlessly over the issues. There will be incessant all-against-all confusion in America’s institutions – as there was in the very process of the election. All this chaos – cui bono? Confusion and uncertainty creates a yearning for strongman rule….

 

At first it was Trump forecasting doubts on electoral fairness. After the election, it was Hillary’s side. First the FBI seemed to take Trump’s side. Then the CIA took the opposite side. Rightwingers went with Putin over their own national security agencies. Prog types unprecedentedly sided with national security. Suddenly Up is down, down is up. Everything can become its reverse, moral equivalency will reign. Trump’s conflicts of interest? Answer: What about the Clinton Foundation. Trump’s (and Kissinger’s) connections to Russia? Answer: What about the Clinton Foundation. Kremlinologists of recent years call this ‘whataboutism’ because the Kremlin’s various mouthpieces deployed the technique so exhaustively against the US. So Putin commits Georgia, Crimea, Donbass, MH17, Olympic doping, poisoning and killing of opponents, Assad, Allepo etc.? Answer: What about Iraq and Libya.

 

The suspicious similarity between Kremlin propaganda and Trump propaganda surely cannot mean, that the Kremlin, influences the Trump campaign? Surely not. Preposterous notion. But just in case the patterns don’t go away, remember: the Kremlin’s goal is not merely to create national bifurcation. The goal is to create confusion of allegiance, of trust, of truth, loss of faith in the open society, in the very epistemology of empirical fact. You’d think such a quasi-metaphysical inversion of all certainty couldn’t be deliberately achieved. You’d have to be paranoid to believe that….

 

Already, the newsmedia serves separated groups of true believers while the thinning center bloc of citizens drift to either side. Few CNN watchers follow Breitbart – and vice-versa. In short, the country cannot agree on what actually happened at any given time. The fight is over reality itself. If people treat every fact as partisan, facts cease to be facts. In the confusion, the populist attacks opposition media for causing the confusion. Chavez and Maduro blamed ‘saboteurs’ for shortfalls in foodstuffs at supermarkets. In a more extreme case, Turkey for example, the ruling party provoked terror then used each incident to curb press freedom as a way of curbing terror. From Cairo to Moscow we’ve seen this same scenario: Government quickly accuses the press of abetting terrorists by revealing too much. Let us hope that Trump’s tenure doesn’t coincide with a sustained wave of terrorist acts. Let us hope that the Kremlin keeps this method of interference and provocation undeployed.

 

You might argue that the US Constitution explicitly protects independent newsmedia. The US is not Turkey or Russia. You can’t fine or close down top newspapers or their reporters. No, but you can jail journalists for holding out on info crucial to national security. Already, we see the Trump administration asking NBC to reveal its sources of high-level leaks from the intel community. Such legal disputes over media freedoms can rumble on endlessly causing clouds of distraction. But the real war between Trump and the media will unfold elsewhere, along other stealthier vectors. Assume that Moscow has our digital communication records – and I mean most of us – going back many years. Emails, health details, banking details, even telephone calls. Now you know why those mysterious hacks of large databanks happened repeatedly for so long.

 

Expect specific anti-Trump or anti-Putin figures to find themselves swathed in personal scandals, from journalists to politicians to entertainers. See what was done to such staunch anti-Kremlin investigative journalists such as Anne Applebaum and the Finnish journalist who probed Russian trolls Jessikka Aro In Poland it took the form of audiotapes of politicians chatting unguardedly at a restaurant they favored, taped throughout many months and then released on the web. All resigned. The government fell. Populist government took over. In Turkey, it was emails and celphone chats by any and all possible independent thinkers to consolidate power before elections.

 

New Distractions

 

The newsmedia’s compulsion to swarm all over certain news events – shootings, bombs, personal scandals, leaks – poses a genuine risk to the media itself. Its clout weakened by fragmented niche audiences, the media only unites in covering such topics en masse. Which offers opportunities for genuinely effective and damaging manipulation from abroad, some of it highly convoluted. Watch out for ultra-salacious leaks about Donald Trump or his personal entourage that prove partly or wholly false. Such fake news will precede or render ineffectual real revelations….

 

For the best guide to the garish sensory wall-paper of the Trump era’s assault on our senses we must look to RT and other Russian news media. They pioneered post-fact reality as mainstream culture. Peter Pomeranzev’s book “Nothing Is True, Everything Is Possible” studies the phenomenon, lays it out plainly. In essence, the kind of supermarket gossip-tabloid material that once infested our peripheral vision now moves front and center. Total fantasy – for the masses. Every so often containing a tiny germ of truth. Total fantasy and not even simple lies like Kellyann Conway’s recent assertion that the intelligence services clearly concluded Russia hadn’t successfully influenced the election. (They concluded no such thing.) Or Trump’s notorious assertion months ago that Mexico’s President, after their meeting, had agreed to pay for the wall. It will feel more like a wholly fabricated unending theater of bizarrerie and Orwellian inversions. As Michael Hirschorn says in the MSNBC interview, we look for the wrong things in Trump’s world, such as content and argument. “In reality tv it really isn’t about content, it’s about show, about performance,,, it’s about endless chaos….”

 

Categories Fake News, Media, Trump

Carol Burris: Betsy DeVos Did Not Tell the Truth

By dianeravitch
January 20, 2017 //
18

Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, has spent countless hours working with lawyers to get the tax status of our organization established, one that is charitable (c3) and one that is political (c4). She knows the laws, and they are exacting.

 

When she heard Betsy DeVos tell the Senate committee that she was not on the board of her mother’s foundation and that the listing of her name on the foundation documents was “a clerical error,” Burris was incredulous.

 

She wrote this comment:

 

“Betsy DeVos statement that it was “a clerical error” that she was listed as a Vice President of the Edgar and Elsa Prince Foundation is not plausible. The 990PF forms of the Foundation from 1998 (the earliest year on Guidestar) until the latest filing which is 2014, list Elizabeth DeVos as a Vice President. The family foundation is a “pass through” fund that makes donations to extremely conservative and religious causes.

 

“The assets of the Foundation total over 27 million dollars.

 

“According to Michigan law, any Foundation, including private foundations, must undergo an independent financial audit during any year that the foundation receives in excess of $500,000 in contributions. In 2012, the Edgar and Elsa Prince Foundation received nearly $19 million in contributions. Therefore the Foundation would have been subject to an extensive audit that year.

 

“Part of the audit includes the review of all Board member names, and contact information. All information about board officers must be provided. If her name has been “inadvertently listed” by error for fourteen years it would have been discovered in the independent audit. Yet she is listed on the 990PFs for both 2013 and 2014.”

 

You can read the audited tax forms of the foundation on the website of NPE Action, where they are posted. The forms list the officers, the assets, and the amounts paid to various causes.

 

She didn’t tell the truth to the Senate committee.

Categories Betsy DeVos

A Poem by W.H. Auden for Inauguration Day

By dianeravitch
January 20, 2017 //
9

This is one of my favorite poems.

 

September 1, 1939

 

I have read it for years. I thought I understood its meaning. But it reads differently now. More ominous because more personal. More relevant.

Categories Education Reform

Michael Winship: 12 Great Films About Demagogues for This Weekend

By dianeravitch
January 20, 2017 //
14

Michael Winship writes the daily Bill Moyers & Co. blog.

 

Here he suggests a dozen classic American films about demagogues.

 

These will help you get through the weekend.

 

There is, of course, “Elmer Gantry.”

 

And “Citizen Kane.”

 

My favorite on the list, appropriate for now, is “The Manchurian Candidate.” Think of it as “The Siberian Candidate.”

Categories Trump

Greg Fuchs: Make America America Again

By dianeravitch
January 20, 2017 //
6

Read the rest of this entry »

Categories Art

BREAKING NEWS: Trump Associates Under Investigation for Ties to Russia

By dianeravitch
January 19, 2017 //
38

 

On the eve of Trump’s inauguration, the New York Times published a startling story: close associates of Trump are under investigation by American intelligence agencies for possible contacts with the Russian government.

 

“American law enforcement and intelligence agencies are examining intercepted communications and financial transactions as part of a broad investigation into possible links between Russian officials and associates of President-elect Donald J. Trump, including his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, current and former senior American officials said.

 
“The continuing counterintelligence investigation means that Mr. Trump will take the oath of office on Friday with his associates under investigation and after the intelligence agencies concluded that the Russian government had worked to help elect him. As president, Mr. Trump will oversee those agencies and have the authority to redirect or stop at least some of these efforts.

 
“It is not clear whether the intercepted communications had anything to do with Mr. Trump’s campaign, or Mr. Trump himself. It is also unclear whether the inquiry has anything to do with an investigation into the hacking of the Democratic National Committee’s computers and other attempts to disrupt the elections in November. The American government has concluded that the Russian government was responsible for a broad computer hacking campaign, including the operation against the D.N.C.

 
The counterintelligence investigation centers at least in part on the business dealings that some of the president-elect’s past and present advisers have had with Russia. Mr. Manafort has done business in Ukraine and Russia. Some of his contacts there were under surveillance by the National Security Agency for suspected links to Russia’s Federal Security Service, one of the officials said.

 
“Mr. Manafort is among at least three Trump campaign advisers whose possible links to Russia are under scrutiny. Two others are Carter Page, a businessman and former foreign policy adviser to the campaign, and Roger Stone, a longtime Republican operative.

 
“The F.B.I. is leading the investigations, aided by the National Security Agency, the C.I.A. and the Treasury Department’s financial crimes unit. The investigators have accelerated their efforts in recent weeks but have found no conclusive evidence of wrongdoing, the officials said. One official said intelligence reports based on some of the wiretapped communications had been provided to the White House.”

 

Trump has the power to shut down the investigation after he is sworn in.

 

 

 

Categories Trump
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