Kellyanne Conway told an interviewer that the surveillance of the Trump campaign may have been more extensive than simply tapping telephones. It may have occurred through television sets and even microwaves.
Complaints like this are what you might expect to hear from losers, not winners.
Kellyanne Conway alludes to even wider surveillance of Trump campaign – http://www.northjersey.com
I have earlier reported studies showing that students post higher scores when they take tests with pencil and paper, rather than on computers. Some children do not have keyboard skills, some get confused by scrolling up and down in search of the right text. Yet state officials demand that students take tests online. This is especially pernicious for the youngest children, who are least likely to have the computer skills needed for the testing. This parents asks why.
Open Letter to
Kimberley Harrington,
Acting Commissioner of Education
State of New Jersey
March 10, 2017
Dear Ms. Harrington,
You are making nearly all third graders in the state of New Jersey take the PARCC test on a computer knowing scores would measure more accurately, and very likely be substantially higher if the test were administered with pencil and paper. Many reputable articles in professional publications substantiate this. My son is in third grade. I am both a concerned father and an educator. Why would you not want New Jersey students to achieve the highest scores possible? PARCC assessment tests the knowledge students acquire from their teacher, not adeptness using a computer – or am I missing something? Your insistence the PARCC be administered on a computer not only likely negatively impacts scores, but also potentially reflects negatively on a teacher’s evaluation as 30% is based on PARCC scores.
I would like to understand more about your logic behind this mandate. Schools unfortunately have cast aside handwriting instruction and other important developmental skills to make room for PARCC. Why then insist the PARCC be administered on computer?
Many parents across New Jersey are anxious to hear your detailed reasoning on this matter.
David Di Gregorio
Father, Englewood Cliffs
Leonie Haimson explains here the significance–or lack thereof–of the Senate’s decision to kill former Secretary of Education John King’s highly prescriptive regulations to implement the 2015 federal law called Every Student Succeeds Act.
There were some who reacted with joy to see the King regs killed. King was known for his love of high-stakes testing.
Others worried whether the death of the regs meant that the states would be free to ignore the neediest kids because of the withdrawal of federal oversight.
I worked in the U.S. Department of Education for two years. What I learned is there are very few educators who work for ED.
The Feds have two important roles:
1. Supplying extra money for equity purposes
2. Protecting the civil rights of children
The federal government has zero capacity to direct or measure academic quality.
The people who work in the Department of Education are clerks, not educators.
THE ED has no capacity whatever to assure or ascertain quality of education. Very few people who work there have a view about what education is or should be. That is not their job. Most have worked for ED for many years, regardless of which party is in power. They do not express their views. They do their job. They write checks, collect data, review contracts. They can tell you how many students are served in which programs. They can determine how much money is allocated and spent. The Department consists of clerks and bureaucrats. I was there. Nothing has changed. Educators are in schools, not at the U.S. Department of Education.
These days, in the Trumpian era, certain politicians are busy shredding the “social safety net” that sends “our” money to “those people,” who are undeserving.
Sheila Kennedy, a law professor at Indiana University Purdue Indianapolis, says we should rethink what we mean by “social safety net” and who it benefits.
She writes:
A “social safety net,” properly conceived, is the web of institutions and services that benefit all members of a given society while building bonds of community and cross-cultural connection. In this broader understanding, the safety net includes public education, public parks, public transportation and other services and amenities available to and used by citizens of all backgrounds and income categories.
Public education is a prime example. Even granting the challenges—the disproportionate resources available to schools serving richer and poorer neighborhoods, the barriers to learning created by poverty—public schools at their best integrate children from different backgrounds and give poor children tools to escape poverty. Public schools, as Benjamin Barber has written, are constitutive of a public.
Common schools create common cultures, and it is hard to escape the suspicion that attacks on public education have been at least partially motivated by that reality. While supporters of charter schools and voucher programs have promoted them as ways of allowing poor children to escape failing schools, the data suggests that most children—including poor children—are better served by schools that remain part of America’s real social safety net.
This point was recently underscored by Thomas Ratliff, a Republican member of the Texas Board of Education—a board not noted for progressive understandings of the role of education. After setting out the comparative data about costs and outcomes achieved by traditional public schools in Texas and those operating via various “privatization” programs, he concluded
When you hear the unending and unsubstantiated rhetoric about “failing public schools” from those that support vouchers or other “competitive” school models, it is important to have the facts. ISDs aren’t perfect, but they graduate more kids, keep more kids from dropping out and get more kids career and college ready than their politically connected competitors. Any claims to the contrary just simply are not supported by the facts and at the end of the day facts matter because these lives matter.
Recognition that “these lives matter” is the hallmark of a society with a capacious understanding of citizenship—both in the sense of who counts as a citizen, and what constitutes the mutual obligations of citizens to one another.
The actual social safety net is not limited to the (grudging and inadequate) financial assistance given to the most disadvantaged in our society. The true safety net consists of the many institutionalized avenues within which the citizens of a nation encounter each other as civic equals, and benefit from membership in a society built upon the recognition that all their lives matter.
Defining the social safety net that way allows us to see that the portion of our taxes used to assist needy fellow-citizens isn’t “forced charity.” It’s our membership dues.
The New Jersey Appellate Court will hear an important case on March 14, in which the city of Hoboken’s public schools are challenging an expansion of a charter school called Hola Charter School. The ACLU and the Education Law Center have filed amicus briefs on behalf of the Hoboken Public School District. The expansion of the Hola Charter School will have a negative impact on the public schools, by intensifying racial and socioeconomic segregation. The New Jersey Charter Association has submitted a brief defending the charter expansion. Governor Chris Christie favors charter schools as a way to encourage gentrification and stop white flight.
The Hola Charter School has a segregative impact.
61% of its students are white, compared to 25% white in Hoboken public schools.
The Hola Charter School is 3% black, while the Hoboken public schools are 55% black.
The Hola Charter School is 29% Latino, compared to 17% in the Hoboken public schools.
The Hola Charter School enrolls 11% free/reduced lunch, compared to 72% free/reduced lunch in the public schools.
The purpose of the charter school is to provide a refuge for affluent and white parents who don’t want their children to go to public schools. Should the state subsidize white flight and segregation?
If you are in New Jersey, attend the hearing:
Tuesday March 14th 10 am
Middlesex Courthouse, room 103
56 Paterson St, New Brunswick
Judges: Reiser, Koblitz, Rothstadt
Alternet’s Steven Rosenfeld interviews Yale historian Timothy Snyder, who is a specialist in the study of fascism and totalitarianism. Professor Snyder finished a boon “ON TYRANNY: Twenty Lessons from the Twentith Century,” a week after the election.
The subversion of Dem racy moves fast, Snyder warns:
“Nazi Germany took about a year. Hungary took about two and a half years. Poland got rid of the top-level judiciary within a year. It’s a rough historical guess, but the point is because there is an outside limit, you therefore have to act now. You have to get started early. It’s just very practical advice. It’s the meta-advice of the past: That things slip out of reach for you, psychologically very quickly, and then legally almost as quickly. It’s hard for people to act when they feel other people won’t act. It’s hard for people to act when they feel like they have to break the law to do so. So it is important to get out in front before people face those psychological and legal barriers.”
He adds:
“Democracy only has substance if there’s the rule of law. That is, if people believe that the votes are going to be counted and they are counted. If they believe that there’s a judiciary out there that will make sense of things if there’s some challenge. If there isn’t rule of law, people will be afraid to vote the way they want to vote. They’ll vote for their own safety as opposed to their convictions. So the thing we call democracy depends on the rule of law. And the things we call the rule of law depends upon trust. Law functions 99 percent of the time automatically. It functions because we think it’s out there. And that, in turn, depends on the sense of truth. So there’s a mechanism here. You can get right to heart of the matter if you can convince people that there is no truth. Which is why the stuff that we characterize as post-modern and might dismiss is actually really, really essential.
“The second thing about ‘post-truth is pre-fascism’ is I’m trying to get people’s attention, because that is actually how fascism works. Fascism says, disregard the evidence of your senses, disregard observation, embolden deeds that can’t be proven, don’t have faith in god but have faith in leaders, take part in collective myth of an organic national unity, and so forth. Fascism was precisely about setting the whole Enlightenment aside and then selling what sort of myths emerged. Now those [national] myths are pretty unpredictable, and contingent on different nations and different leaders and so on, but to just set facts aside is actually the fastest catalyst. So that part concerns me a lot.
“Where we’re going? The classic thing to watch out for is the shift from one governing strategy to another. In the U.S. system, the typical governing strategy is you more or less have to follow your constituents with legislation because of the election cycle. That’s one pulse of politics. The other pulse of politics is emergency. There’s some kind of terrorist attack and then the leader tries to suspend basic constitutional rights. And then we get on a different rhythm, where the rhythm is not one electoral cycle to the next but one emergency to the next. That’s how regime changes take place. It’s a classic way since the Reichstag fire [when the Nazis burned their nation’s capitol building and blamed communist arsonists].
“So in terms of what might happen next, or what people could look out for, some kind of event that the government claims is a terrorist incident, would be something to be prepared for. That’s why it’s one of the lessons in the book….
“The things that he might do that some people would like, like building a wall or driving all the immigrants out, those things are going to be difficult or slow. In the case of the wall, I personally don’t believe it will ever happen. It’s going to be very slow. So my suspicion is that it is much easier to have a dramatic negative event, than have a dramatic positive event. That is one of the reasons I am concerned about the Reichstag fire scenario. The other reason is that we are being mentally prepared for it by all the talk about terrorism and by the Muslim ban. Very often when leaders repeat things over and over they are preparing you for when that meme actually emerges in reality.”
Snyder says that people don’t realize how quickly the political situation can change, how easily people can accept the unacceptable:
“Let me put it a different way. Except for really dramatic moments, most of the time authoritarianism depends on some kind of cycle involving a popular consent of some form. It really does matter how we behave. The danger is [if] we say, ‘Well, we don’t see how it matters, and so therefore we are going to just table the whole question.’ If we do that, then we start to slide along and start doing the things that the authorities expect of us. Which is why lesson number one is: Don’t obey in advance. You have to set the table differently. You have to say, ‘This is a situation in which I need to think for myself about all of the things that I am going to do and not just punt. Not just wait. Nor just see how things seems to me. Because if you do that, then you change and you actually become part of the regime change toward authoritarianism.'”
Snyder describes the importance of resistance, of refusing to obey, of believing in truth, of being courageous. He also talks about Eugene Ionesco’s play “Rhinoceros.”
Snyder says:
“There are a few questions here. One is how to keep yourself going. Another is how to energize other people who agree with you. And the third thing is not quite “Rhinoceros” stuff, but how to catch people who are slipping. Like that CNN coverage last week of the speech to Congress, where one of the CNN commentators said, ‘Oh, now this is presidential.’ That was a “Rhinoceros” moment, because there was nothing presidential—it was atrocious to parade the victims of crimes committed by one ethnicity. That was atrocious and there’s nothing presidential about it.
“Catching “Rhinoceros” moments is one thing. I think it’s really important to think about. The example that Ionesco gives is people saying, ‘Yeah, on one hand, with the Jews, maybe they are right.’ With Trump, people will say something like, ‘Yeah, but on taxes, maybe he’s right.’ And the thing to catch is, ‘Yeah, but are you in favor of regime change? Are you in favor of the end of the American way of democracy and fair play?’ Because that’s what’s really at stake.”
In the age of Trump and Bannon, it is okay for racists to come out from under their rocks and speak their prejudices.
Congressman Steve King of Iowa tweeted that civilization can’t be restored “with somebody else’s babies.”
He was congratulating a far-right Dutch politician who had complained about the influx of Muslims into the Netherlands.
Critics said that Mr. King echoed the principles of white nationalism, the belief that national identity is linked to the white race and its superiority to other races. Self-proclaimed white nationalists emerged as a small but vocal group during the candidacy of Donald J. Trump, celebrating his promises to crack down on illegal immigration and ban Muslims from entering the United States, as well as heralding his presidential victory as a chance to preserve white culture.
David Duke, the white nationalist and former Ku Klux Klansman who called Mr. Trump “by far the best candidate” during the campaign, celebrated Mr. King’s comments. Duke tweeted “GOD BLESS STEVE KING!!!”
It has been a long time since racism was so openly expressed by a public official. What an embarrassment Cong. King must be to the people of Iowa. I hope.
Karen Francisco, editorial page editor of the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette in Indiana, reviews the state’s disastrous experiment with vouchers. In 2011, state lawmakers started the voucher program with the promise of helping low-income children get better schooling. As time has passed, the income level for eligibility has gone up, the costs have gone up, but the vouchers have never fulfilled their promise. Instead, they have become a permanent drain on public school funding even as the schools remain unaccountable and non-transparent. Over time, they have become a subsidy for private school parents who never sent their children to public schools and never intended to. Over time, they have developed a strong political constituency in the legislature that is unwilling to hold voucher schools accountable for performance.
The Choice Scholarship Program annual report – quietly released by the Indiana Department of Education late last month – shows voucher participation grew by 4.9 percent this year, while the cost grew by 8.4 percent, topping $146 million for the 2016-17 school year. The percentage of voucher students who have never attended a public school also grew, to 54.6 percent. The state improbably claims that it is saving money by sending children to voucher schools, but most of these students would never have attended public schools anyway.
The voucher program has turned into an entitlement for middle-income and low-income families to send their child to a religious school at public expense, and for some, a means of white flight from diverse public schools.
The results of the millions of dollars spent on vouchers are not easily obtained, but they are unimpressive and troubling:
Indiana lawmakers have mostly abandoned the pretense of helping struggling students in favor of an argument that parents should be allowed to choose the best schools for their children. But their failure to hold voucher schools accountable leaves parents without the information they need.
In Fort Wayne, Horizon Christian Academy III earned letter grades of D in both 2013-14 and 2014-15, as enrollment grew from 236 last year to 433 this year. Voucher payments to the Wells Street school increased from $1.14 million last year to $2.43 million this year. At Cornerstone College Prep, voucher funding grew from $631,000 to more than $687,000 this year, even as voucher enrollment fell from 127 students to 122 this year and the school earned an F on its school report card. Its earlier performance results are shielded by student privacy law and no information is available about teacher certification. Only public schools are required to report information about educator evaluations, student performance on college aptitude exams and more.
Transparency is in short supply at voucher schools. Cornerstone’s address is listed as a post office box and its website has been disabled, although a woman answering the phone confirmed the school is at 3501 Harris Road, at Destiny Dome Embassy at Cathedral of Praise Ministries International.
Voucher schools are not subject to public access or open records law; they agree only to “cooperate” in an audit of school records.
When Indiana became a pioneer in so-called school choice, research on the effectiveness of voucher programs was slim, as there were too few subjects to study. Milwaukee was the first major city with a voucher program; Cleveland and Washington, D.C., later adopted programs. Florida had a voucher program for special education students.
Indiana, a follower in almost every other policy area, became the first to approve a statewide voucher program open to all income-eligible students. As large voucher programs developed in Louisiana and Ohio, the data available to study effectiveness have grown.
The results are poor.
• In Ohio, the pro-voucher Fordham Institute commissioned a Northwestern University research team to study the state’s choice program. It found voucher students tend to be more economically advantaged and higher-performing academically when they enter private schools, but they post worse educational results than their peers who stayed behind in public schools.
• In Louisiana, a major study found voucher students – predominantly black, from low-income families and coming from public schools that had received poor ratings from the state – posted disastrous results. Students who started at the 50th percentile in math and then used a voucher to transfer to a private school fell to the 26th percentile in a single year.
Results were still well below the starting point in the second year.
• A report released last week by the Children’s Law Clinic at Duke Law School concluded this of North Carolina’s Opportunity Scholarship Grant Program: “Based on limited and early data, more than half the students using vouchers are performing below average on nationally standardized reading, language, and math tests. In contrast, similar public school students in North Carolina are scoring above the national average.”
• Mark Dynarski of the Brookings Institution summarized large-scale research done on the Indiana and Louisiana voucher programs to find public school students who received vouchers scored lower on reading and math tests compared to similar students who remained in public schools.
“The magnitudes of the negative impacts were large,” Dynarski wrote. “In education as in medicine, ‘first, do no harm’ is a powerful guiding principle. A case to use taxpayer funds to send children of low-income parents to private schools is based on an expectation that the outcome will be positive. These recent findings point in the other direction.”
The accumulating research about the negative effects of vouchers doesn’t matter to Indiana legislators. Indiana already has the largest voucher program in the nation, and the legislature wants to make it even bigger.
Indiana lawmakers aren’t backing down, however. The state has almost 20 percent of the nation’s 178,000 voucher students, yet there were multiple bills filed in this legislative session to increase the eligibility pathways for a voucher. The most noxious is attached to the preschool pilot program expansion.
The House version of the bill makes any child who receives an On My Way Preschool grant as a 4-year-old eligible for vouchers for the next 13 years, provided their families meet the generous income eligibility guidelines (up to $91,020 a year for a family of four next year). The estimated cost? Another $10.5 million added annually to the nation’s most costly voucher program.
A powerful school voucher lobby maintains a tight grip on Indiana’s legislative leaders, who in turn maintain a tight grip on the GOP House and Senate caucuses.
There are many more public school parents than voucher school parents. Why don’t they hold their legislators accountable for transferring public funds to religious schools that get worse results than public schools? Why continue to give public money to failing private schools? Indiana was once known for its community public schools. Soon, it will be known as a national laughing stock for its dedication to a failed idea: vouchers for failing private and religious schools.
David Hornbeck is a veteran education reformer, old-style, meaning he actually has experience running school districts and states. He was superintendent of the Philadelphia schools, state superintendent of Maryland and Kentucky, and led the implementation of KERA (the Kentucky Education Reform Act).
In this post, Hornbeck writes that he once believed that charter schools were “reform,” but he no longer does.
“As Philadelphia’s Superintendent of Schools, I recommended the approval of more than 30 charter schools because I thought it would improve educational opportunity for our 215,000 students. The last 20 years make it clear I was wrong.
“Those advocating change in Maryland’s charter law through proposed legislation are equally committed to educational improvement. They are equally wrong. New policy should not build on current inequities and flawed assumptions, as the proposed charter law changes would do.”
I admire people who are willing to listen, Watch, learn, and change their minds. Why did Hornbeck change his mind?
He paid attention to evidence. Imagine that!
On average, charter schools don’t get better academic results than public schools.
Charter funding negatively affects public schools, creating opportunities for a few but inequities for the many. He writes: “Opportunity for the 13,000 charter school students in Baltimore City is in part funded by the loss of opportunity for the remaining 70,000 students without a commensurate performance improvement by charter school students.”
In addition, charters may harm the credit ratings of urban districts by creating inefficiencies: As Moody’s reported, “charter schools pose the greatest credit challenge to school districts in economically weak urban areas and may even affect their credit ratings.”
Contrary to the claims of charter advocates, “States with “stronger” charter laws are not doing better: Advocates say we need a “stronger” charter law, noting that Maryland ranks near the bottom. Pennsylvania’s law is ranked much higher, yet its charter growth is contributing significantly to a funding crisis that includes draconian cuts to teachers, nurses, arts, music and counselors in Philadelphia.”
The changes proposed in Maryland will make it harder to get and keep the best teachers:
“The proposed “stronger” law undermines collective bargaining that protects teachers from politics and favoritism and has been crucial to improvement in compensation and benefits. It would create a two-tiered system in which charter teachers would have to organize and bargain separately with each charter opting out of the larger system’s contract. Unionization is not the problem. There are no unions in many of the nation’s worst educational performing states. All schools, charter or traditional, must pay competitive salaries and benefits to attract experienced, skilled teachers who can succeed with all children.”
Charters do not serve the children with the greatest needs.
If Maryland passes the proposed charter law, it will make the education system incoherent and inefficient.
This is not reform.
Hornbeck describes what real reform is. His short list does not include charters.
The House Republicans have cooked up a bill to empower states with unencumbered control over federal funds. It is called HR 610. In DC, they refer to the principle of the bill as”block grants.” Otherwise known as send the money without strings so the states can do what they want. An earlier post by Denis Smith explained that federal funds without oversight leads to waste, fraud, and abuse.
Laura Chapman explains more here:
“HR 610 has the Arne Duncan trick of requiring a change in state law if vouchers are not on the books. So the new national system must be voucher-compliant or no federal funds will be available. Federal funds to states are in the range of 8% to 12%, average about 10%. Given that many states have already cut their state budgets for education, and most are in Republican hands, this law is likely to pass. Notice that the same bill invites a lot of junk food contractors to get in the game of providing food to all children.
“Some key passages in the bill.
“From these amounts, each LEA shall: (1) distribute a portion of funds to parents who elect to enroll their child in a private school or to home-school their child, and (2) do so in a manner that ensures that such payments will be used for appropriate educational expenses.
“To be eligible to receive a block grant, a state must: (1) comply with education voucher program requirements, and (2) make it lawful for parents of an eligible child to elect to enroll their child in any public or private elementary or secondary school in the state or to home-school their child.”
“This is part of the same bill.
“No Hungry Kids Act
“The bill repeals a specified rule that established certain nutrition standards for the national school lunch and breakfast programs. (In general, the rule requires schools to increase the availability of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and low-fat or fat free milk in school meals; reduce the levels of sodium, saturated fat, and trans fat in school meals; and meet children’s nutritional needs within their caloric requirements.)”
“Notice that money goes to states, then to local districts where the administrative burden for distributing money is located with no state oversight or consideration of how districts can make sure that payments to parents “will be used for appropriate educational expenses.” Follow them to Walmart? to Target? to Staples? This is a ridiculous bill. It is legislation from Republicans who want to create chaos.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 