Mike Klonsky is a nervy guy.
In this post, he explains why some schools and states get high marks while others are “failing.”
Let Edweek know.
Archives for the month of: January, 2017
No link. The article appears in the Washington Post. Google it to read it in full.
It it is very worrisome that the president-elect is smitten with the Russian tyrant. It shows Trump’s lack of judgement and knowledge. Remember in 2015 when he guaranteed an interviewer that the Russians would never invade Crimea? The interviewer informed him that it had already happen. Dumb Donald had no idea.
Eugene Robinson wonders about Trump’s crush on Putin:
“Coming from a presidential candidate, Donald Trump’s misty-eyed admiration of Russia and its autocratic leader was weird. Coming from a president-elect, it’s nothing short of alarming.
I repeat the questions I asked back in September: What’s the deal with Trump and Russia? Does he have financial entanglements with Russian banks, businesses or billionaires that color his views? If not, as he claims, then why won’t he release the personal and business tax returns that could put the matter to rest?
“The latest sign of Trump’s infatuation is his refusal to accept the conclusion of the U.S. intelligence community that Russian state-sponsored hackers meddled in our election — a risky and provocative operation that could have been authorized only by Vladimir Putin.
“It could be somebody else,” Trump told reporters on New Year’s Eve. “And I also know things that other people don’t know, and so they cannot be sure of the situation.” The president-elect added that “I know a lot about hacking, and hacking is a very hard thing to prove.”
“It is unclear how Trump could know even a little about hacking, since he rarely uses computers. Aides reportedly must print out news articles for him to read. In my experience, experts on cybersecurity know how to use a Web browser.”
The latest on Russian hacking of our election:
Cybersecurity Takes Center Stage on The Hill
WASHINGTON — Rebuffing efforts by President-elect Donald J. Trump to cast doubt on Russian interference in the presidential election, top intelligence officials and senators from both parties on Thursday issued a forceful affirmation of the findings. They took relentless aim at Mr. Trump’s public skepticism and suggested he had negatively affected morale in the intelligence community.
“There’s a difference between skepticism and disparagement,” James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, said at the hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Mr. Clapper added that “our assessment now is even more resolute” that the Russians carried out the attack on the election. President Obama received a classified briefing on the intelligence community’s findings today, followed by one for Mr. Trump on Friday. An unclassified report will be released to the public next week.
The hacking was only one part of the Russian endeavor, which also included the dissemination of “classical propaganda, disinformation, fake news,” Mr. Clapper said.
The gathering was extraordinary as much for its context as its content — a public, bipartisan display of support for the intelligence community that seemed aimed, at times, at an audience of one.
Though Mr. Clapper and most Republican senators were careful to avoid antagonizing the president-elect directly, the hearing spoke to the searing rift Mr. Trump has threatened to create between the incoming administration and the intelligence officials tasked with informing it.
Intelligence Officials Testify About U.S. Cyber Security
Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona and chairman of the committee, said the purpose of the gathering was “not to question the outcome of the presidential election” but to move forward with a full understanding of what had happened.
Repeatedly, though, Mr. McCain and his colleagues seemed to undercut Mr. Trump’s past messages of support for Russia and Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, whom Mr. Trump has appeared to defend.
“Do you think there’s any credibility we should attach to this individual?” Mr. McCain asked.
“Not in my view,” Mr. Clapper said. Another witness at the hearing, Adm. Michael S. Rogers, a leader of the National Security Agency and United States Cyber Command, said he agreed.
Later, as if concerned the point had not been duly made, Mr. McCain asked Mr. Clapper again to describe his view of Mr. Assange.
Mr. Clapper noted that Mr. Assange had been “holed up in the Ecuadorean embassy in London” to avoid a Swedish arrest warrant on allegations of sexual assault. WikiLeaks’ revelations, Mr. Clapper said, had sometimes put Americans at risk. “So I don’t think those of us in the intelligence community have a whole lot of respect for him.”
In Twitter messages on Thursday before the hearing — one day after sharing with his followers remarks from Mr. Assange, who has dismissed the intelligence findings — Mr. Trump accused the “dishonest media” of concluding that the two men agreed.
“I simply state what he states,” Mr. Trump wrote, “it is for the people to make up their own minds as to the truth. The media lies to make it look like I am against ‘Intelligence’ when in fact I am a big fan!”
Mr. Clapper, while withholding revelations about the Russian attack ahead of next week’s release, did promise to “push the envelope” in declassifying as much detail as possible, including the motive of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia in carrying it out. “We’ll be as forthcoming as we can, but there are some fragile and sensitive sources and methods here,” he said.
He said he welcomed skeptical questioning from Mr. Trump, allowing that the intelligence community was “not perfect.” But Mr. Clapper spoke sternly of the wall of stars in the C.I.A. lobby, commemorating the deaths of agency officers on duty, and said the agencies’ efforts to keep the country safe were not always appreciated.
Democrats on the committee repeatedly coaxed intelligence leaders to underscore the contrast between their view that the Russian government was behind the hacking and Mr. Trump’s multiple assertions that a random individual hacker might be to blame.
Senator Joe Donnelly, Democrat of Indiana, told Mr. Clapper that in the conflict between the intelligence agencies and Mr. Assange over Russian responsibility for the attack, “We’re on your side every time.” He asked Mr. Clapper to convey his level of confidence in attributing the election attack to Russia, rather than “someone in his basement.”
“It’s, uh, very high,” the laconic intelligence director replied.
At one point, Senator Claire McCaskill, Democrat of Missouri, wondered aloud “who benefits from a president-elect trashing the intelligence community….”
Senator Tim Kaine, Democrat of Virginia, used the occasion for an aside about Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, Mr. Trump’s choice for national security adviser, who has a history of sharing discredited news stories and conspiracy theories. Mr. Kaine said he was unsure whether Mr. Flynn was acting out of “gullibility” or “malice,” but said it was a cause for “great concern” that Mr. Flynn shared stories that “most fourth-graders would find incredible.”
This is the questionnaire that Billionaire Betsy DeVos submitted to the Senate committee that will meet with her on January 11.
Go to the end to see the long list of political contributions.
At Senate hearings, the nation’s top intelligence officials testified that Russia interfered in our elections by hacking and propaganda.
By testifying, they are almost certain to be fired by Trump.
Trump said yesterday that he plans to cut and reorganize our intelligence agencies. He prefers to get his “intelligence” from his friends and FOX news.
Trump continues the dumbing down and politicization of federal agencies by selecting rightwingers Dan Coats of Indiana as director of national intelligence, a job that up until now has gone to nonpartisan professionals.
Wonder how Coats feels about Putin? Must have pledged allegiance to the KGB.
This article appeared on Supreme Court blog.
The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act gives federal funds to states that agree to offer a “free appropriate public education” (FAPE) to children with disabilities. An important part of providing a FAPE is the IEP, or individualized education program, which – among other things – must set forth a plan that is tailored to the unique needs of each child with a disability. In 1982, the Supreme Court ruled in Board of Education v. Rowley that an IEP must be “reasonably calculated to enable the child to receive educational benefits.”
Next week, the court will hear oral argument in the case of a Colorado boy who has asked the justices to clarify exactly what kind of “educational benefits” an IEP must provide: Is it enough that the benefit is simply non-trivial, or does the IDEA require more? The boy and his family argue that a greater benefit is required, and that a ruling to the contrary will directly affect the quality of the education that is offered to millions of children with disabilities. But the school district where the boy attended school counters that imposing the kind of specific standard proposed by the boy and his family will create its own set of difficulties, including entangling courts in complicated inquiries that they are not qualified to make.
The student, Endrew F. (also known as Drew), is autistic. He began as a student in Douglas County School District in preschool and stayed there through fourth grade. During each of those school years, he had an IEP, through which he received a special-education program. However, Drew did not return to the public-school system for fifth grade, because his parents disagreed with school officials about the IEP proposed for him for that year. For example, they say, the fifth-grade IEP contained goals that closely resembled the goals for earlier years, such as mastering multiplication of single-digit numbers. Instead, Drew’s parents enrolled him in a private school – where, they note, “he has made academic, social, and behavioral progress.”
Drew and his parents filed a complaint with the state’s department of education. They claimed that Drew had been denied a FAPE, and they sought reimbursement for the tuition paid to his private school. After a three-day hearing, a hearing officer ruled for the school district, finding that Drew had made “some academic progress” while in public school.
Drew and his parents then filed a lawsuit in federal district court, which also sided with the school district. On appeal, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit upheld that ruling. It reasoned that the school district needed to try to provide Drew with an educational benefit that was “merely more than de minimis.” And under that test, it concluded, Drew’s proposed IEP was “substantively adequate.” Drew and his parents then asked the Supreme Court to weigh in, which it agreed to do in late September of 2016.
In their brief on the merits, Drew and his parents acknowledge that the IDEA does not require schools to “maximize the potential of children with disabilities.” But, they are quick to add, it is not enough for schools to provide a “merely more than de minimis” benefit to children with disabilities: They need to provide those children with essentially the same opportunities that are available to students more generally. This conclusion follows from the purpose of the IDEA, they reason, in which Congress intended to provide children with disabilities not simply with access to public education, but also with enough substantive educational benefit to make such access meaningful. To that end, they continue, Congress twice made changes to the IDEA – in 1997 and then again in 2004 – that were intended to “place greater emphasis on improving student performance and ensuring that children with disabilities receive a quality public education.” “Providing a child with disability with” an education that imparts a benefit that is “merely more than de minimis,” they suggest, “offers little hope of” meeting that goal.
The federal government filed a brief supporting Drew and his parents. The Supreme Court, the government notes, indicated in Rowley that the requirement of a FAPE imposes on states a duty to ensure that children with disabilities have “access” to an education that is “meaningful.” That “meaningful access” requirement, the government continues, “is most sensibly understood” to require states to provide each child with disabilities with “an opportunity to make significant educational progress” – a much higher standard than a “more than de minimis” benefit.
The school district also relies on the court’s decision in Rowley, but to support a very different conclusion. In the school district’s view, Rowley squarely answers the question presented by this case, indicating that the IDEA does not “prescribe the level of education to be accorded handicapped children.” Instead, the school district contends, the court in Rowley made clear that a child with a disability receives an “appropriate education” as long as that education is “personalized” and “sufficient to confer some educational benefit.” Other provisions of the IDEA, the school district points out, help to “ensure that children will and do receive a high-quality education”; there is no need to impose a more specific standard.
The more specific and exacting standard proposed by Drew’s family and the federal government would, the school district argues, have two undesirable consequences. First, it would require courts to get embroiled in exactly the kind of “educational policy disputes they lack the specialized knowledge and experience necessary to resolve.” The school district observes that this case itself illustrates the complexity of such disputes, because Drew’s family and the federal government cannot even agree on what the IDEA requires: The family suggests that Drew is entitled to the same opportunities provided to children without disabilities, but the government posits that an IEP must provide “an opportunity to make significant progress.” Moreover, the school district adds, neither Drew and his family nor the federal government has indicated what, under these standards, Drew’s “fifth-grade IEP ought to have said. And if they cannot say, it is hard to imagine how a court could.”
Second, the school district continues, imposing the standard requested by Drew’s family and the federal government would unfairly change the rules in the middle of the game. To receive federal funds for special education, the district explains, states must agree to comply with certain requirements. However, based on the court’s decision in Rowley and the text of the IDEA, no state could have anticipated, much less agreed to, either of the more onerous standards proposed by Drew’s family and the federal government.
Drew and his family have the support of (among others) over a hundred members of Congress, who in a “friend of the court” filing criticize the “more than de minimis” standard as a “vanishingly low” one that “runs contrary to Congress’s intentions.” On the other side of the issue, a “friend of the court” brief by a group of urban school districts warns the justices that a ruling for Drew and his family could “increase both litigation and” unilateral decisions by parents to place their children in private school, which would in turn “divert significant resources from school districts’ efforts to educate other students with disabilities and those without.” These concerns and others will no doubt be on the justices’ minds when they hear oral argument in Drew’s case next week.
The Washington Post reports that House Republicans have revived an obscure rule that enables them to target individual federal employees by reducing their pay to $1.
“House Republicans this week reinstated an arcane procedural rule that enables lawmakers to reach deep into the budget and slash the pay of an individual federal worker — down to a $1 — a move that threatens to upend the 130-year-old civil service.
“The Holman Rule, named after an Indiana congressman who devised it in 1876, empowers any member of Congress to offer an amendment to an appropriations bill that targets a specific government employee or program.
“A majority of the House and the Senate would still have to approve any such amendment, but opponents and supporters agree that it puts agencies and the public on notice that their work is now vulnerable to the whims of elected officials.
“Democrats and federal employee unions say the provision, which one called the “Armageddon Rule,” could prove disastrous to the federal workforce, when combined with president-elect Donald Trump’s criticism of the Washington bureaucracy, his call for a freeze on government hiring and his nomination of Cabinet secretaries who seem to be at odds with the mission of the agencies they would lead.”
Jeff Bryant lives in North Carolina and is a close observer of the recent political coup. Before the new governor, Roy Cooper, took office, the legislature rushed through bills to reduce his power and his appointments. Not content to have gerrymandered the state to put themselves in a supermajority in both houses of the General Assembly, they acted swiftly, without hearings, to diminish the role of the governor.
Bryant contends that education is at the heart of the coup, as it has long been in North Carolina. He interviews a historian of the state who explains the efforts by racist whites to disenfranchise blacks. Literacy tests were key to maintaining control of state government. When it turned out that large numbers of whites were illiterate, that gave impetus to improving white schools.
It is especially sad to see North Carolina on the path of racism, reaction, and hostility to public education, because it was once recognized as the most progressive state in the South.
Stop Billionaire Betsy DeVos from ruining public schools everywhere.
Contact members of the Senate HELP Committee, which begins hearings on January 11.
Diane Ravitch's blog 