Archives for the month of: March, 2017
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Mercedes Schneider: Why Did Trump Move HBCU Funding from US Ed to White House?

By dianeravitch
March 7, 2017 //
7

Mercedes Schneider writes that someone at the White House transferred the funding and oversight of the nation’s Historically Black Colleges and Universities from the U.S. Department of Education to the White House.

When I first read this, I laughed out loud. First, because this happened the day after Betsy DeV pointed to HBCUs as a wonderful example of “choice,” when they were in fact created because so few institutions of higher education would admit black students. If anything, they were created because black students had no choice. They were a refuge for black students who wanted higher education and a path to a profession in a deeply racist society.

So, boom, the HCBUs are removed from the oversight of the clueless Ms. DeV. (By the way, if you watched the Senate confirmation hearings, you know that Ms. DeVos prefers to be called Mrs. DeVos.)

But my second reaction was bafflement. The White House is the home of the President and his family. It doesn’t fund or supervise programs. Presumably, the funding will follow the program. But there is no one on the White House staff who can answer a question about federal regulations or the upcoming reauthorization of the Higher Education Act.

Does this mean the White House will take control of every program that one of its cabinet members insults? Will it manage the Great Lakes Restoration Project, whose budget will be cut by EPA de-administrator Scott Pruitt from $300 million to $10 million?

This is one of the nuttier developments in an era of the inexplicable.

Categories Betsy DeVos, Funding, Higher Education, Trump

SomeDAM Poet: Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss

By dianeravitch
March 7, 2017 //
13

The Good Old Days

Don’t you miss the good old days?
The days of school deforming ways?
When Arne ruled with iron hand
With Common Core and test and VAM?
And Cuomo plotted night and day
The way to make the schools obey?
And Rhee was riding on her broom
And closing schools and spreading doom?
And charter schools in neighborhoods
Were popping up like shrooms in woods
And billionaires were here and there
And all about and everywhere?
Don’t you miss reformy times
Immortalized by someDAM rhymes?
Well, good old days of yesteryear
Have never left, are still right here
The good old days were never gone
The school deform lives on and on

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, Teacher Evaluations, Testing, VAM

Russ Walsh: Vouchers Are for the Rich, the Racists, and the Religious Right

By dianeravitch
March 7, 2017 //
12

Russ Walsh, literacy expert, describes the Three are of vouchers: They are for the Rich, the Racists, and the Religious Right.

http://russonreading.blogspot.com/2017/03/school-vouchers-welfare-for-rich-racist.html

Russ writes:

“Our new Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, is rich, white, and a proselytizing supporter of the Christian religious right. DeVos is also an outspoken champion of school vouchers. These two things are not coincidences. While voucher proponents will tell you, and some may even believe, that their push for vouchers is a push to make sure all children have the opportunity to get a great education, the real benefactors of school vouchers are the rich, the white and the religious right….

DeVos claims that voucher opponents are foes of change and champions of the status quo. I hope to show that it is the voucher schemes and the DeVos’ of the world who are championing the status quo – the status quo where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer as we see happening in this country right now.

“What are the problems with vouchers? Do vouchers achieve the supposed goal of improving educational opportunity for low-income and minority children? Many have cataloged the issues, but here is a quick list with some links for further reading.

*Vouchers do not improve student academic performance

*Vouchers do not improve opportunities for low-income children

*Vouchers lead to private schools of questionable quality

*Voucher divert public money to unaccountable private institutions

*Vouchers undermine religious liberty

*Vouchers do further harm to already struggling public schools

*Vouchers enable discrimination and segregation

So why the push for vouchers? Because vouchers are very good for the rich. If the rich can sell vouchers as the cure for educational inequality, they may be able to get people to ignore the real reason for public education struggles – income inequity. If the rich really want to improve schools, they need to put their money on the line. If the rich are really interested in helping poor school children they need to invest – through higher taxes (or maybe just by paying their fair share of taxes), not unreliable philanthropy, in improved health care, child care, parental education, pre-school education, public school infrastructure and on and on. This will be expensive, but we can do it if the wealthy would show the same dedication to the “civil rights issue of our time” with their wallets as they show to harebrained schemes like vouchers.”

Categories Betsy DeVos, Privatization, Racism, Religion, Vouchers

Red Queen in LA: Why Can’t Public Schools and Charter Schools Get Along?

By dianeravitch
March 7, 2017 //
12

Sara Roos, aka the Red Queen in LA, explains here why public schools and charter schools are bound to clash.

To begin with, they are competing for a finite amount of public dollars and a finite number of students. It is a zero-sum competition.

To make matters worse, the needs of both entities is not reciprocal, nor is the distribution of these commodities without impact on the other entity. That is, the cost to educate every pupil is not equivalent, some are costlier than others. And where you cluster funds is not a matter of +$1 here means -$1 there because the impact of a dollar matters depending where it is. There are economies of scale, for example, to be gained or it is long-acknowledged that severely disadvantaged communities require more money to come to equity (this is what Federal Title 1 dollars provide, it is why the new “LCFF” uses a formula to assign more money per capita to poorer schools than to relatively richer ones).

Therefore while it’s possible for both entities to tolerate one another, it’s not possible for their existence not to impact the other.

That’s where the fallacy lies. Folks who wonder ingenuously why we can’t all “just get along”, seem not to understand the pernicious consequences of charter schools on the totality of a public education system.

The underlying game-plan of charters is to rarefy its pupil-population, by hook or by crook. Sometimes in the past, this has been done illegally through fixing lotteries or selections processes. Sometimes the lottery process has been weighted through a sanctioned, if questionable, process. Empirical reports of “counseling out” already admitted kids are easy to come by; discouraging applicants to begin with through onerous application or enrollment procedures, for example, which disproportionately impact the “wrong sort” is another trick. There are many, many, many sleights of hand employed to fix the underlying demographic of a charter school in a certain fashion (there are, after all, many, many charter schools). The reciprocal of fashioning a student body just-so, means that elsewhere in the system whatever is overrepresented among charters, is underrepresented among RDS.

The “business plan” of charters is to manipulate the student and parent demographic to their advantage, and that disadvantages the public schools.

Sure we can get along if what you need does not negatively effect what I need. But your school system inherently, necessarily, diminishes mine. It will inherently, necessarily, with time, bankrupt mine. And it will inherently, necessarily, with time grow what is to me democratically intolerable social inequity with time.

“Regular Public District Schools” were designed to be by, for and about the public: it is democracy itself.

Charters are simply the modern incarnation of ancient tribalism, constitution-era separatism, pre-Plessy “separate but equal” schools.

Sending your child – yes, yours – to sit beside someone who is different, smells different, looks different, speaks differently, thinks differently, acts different: this plurality is intrinsically valuable. It sustains a system of equal opportunity and it assures a possibility of awareness and tolerance of things-different.

As we march today nationally, even internationally, toward fascism, protecting with fierceness a public education system of equity for, and by us all, seems about as critical – most very especially for “progressive democrats” – as the very sustenance of democracy itself.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Democracy, Education Industry, Equity, Segregation

The Florida Corporate Tax Credit Program: A Statewide Scam

By dianeravitch
March 7, 2017 //
14

A nonprofit parent-led group called Fund Education Now created a fact sheet about Florida’s Corporate Tax Credit plan, which was designed to evade the state constitution’s explicit ban on using public money to fund religious or private education.

In 2006, as governor, Jeb Bush pushed through a universal voucher plan, which was subsequently ruled unconstitutional by the Florida Supreme Court.

In 2012, Jeb Bush led a campaign to amend the state constitution to remove the prohibition on spending public money on religious schools. The amendment was cleverly called the Florida Religious Freedom Amendment, on the assumption that not many people would oppose “religious freedom.” However, a majority of people figured out that it was an effort to make vouchers for religious schools legal, and the “religious freedom amendment” was defeated 55-45. Probably, had it been honestly named the Vouchers for Religious Schools Amendment, the margin would have been even larger.

Florida now has a large voucher program funded by tax credits to businesses that get large tax write-offs in return for funding vouchers. It is called the Corporate Tax Credit (CTC) program. It is administered by four groups, which collect an administrative fee of up to 5% for their services. The largest of the administrative groups is called Step Up for Students. As of 2012, Step Up had more than $300 million in its coffers at present. By 2014, it reported that it had assets of $439 million. The administrative fee is very significant on assets of this magnitude.

At the time the Fund Education Now brief was written, the voucher was worth about $4,500, far less than the cost of the private or religious schools available to the children of Jeb Bush and other elites. The participating schools are largely unsupervised and unregulated. Numerous evaluations have shown that students in voucher schools do no better on tests than students in public schools.

The reason for CTC vouchers: the assumption that voucher schools are cheaper than public schools, which is true, and save taxpayers the cost of educating children well.

Categories Betsy DeVos, Florida, Vouchers

Paul Thomas: Unpacking the Lies Behind the “Failing Schools” Narrative

By dianeravitch
March 7, 2017 //
12

Paul Thomas of Furman University taught high school in rural South Carolina for 18 years before becoming a college professor. He happens to be one of the nation’s leading authorities on the effects of poverty on children and schooling. Recently, he has been writing about the flaws of education journalism.

In this post, he unpacks the claim that public schools are “failing,” that (some) charter schools have found the secret sauce of innovation, and that public schools are resisting change. He cites two paragraphs from a recent article in Education Week that embody what he calls a “self-fulfilling prophesy.” Open the link to read the two paragraphs.

The article he cites does not mention the names of the charter schools that have unlocked the magic of innovation and hold the key to reforming recalcitrant public schools if only they were willing to change. It would be good to know where they are.

Thomas says these are “post-truth” claims. He is right on the face of it. If I knew of five or ten or twenty schools that held the key to reforming all of American education, I would name them and give everyone their location so all the world could see their amazing success.

Thomas writes:

The paragraphs above traffic in very predictable nonsense—”innovative charter schools” and public schools and educators who actively resist change—that resonates only with those who have no real experience in public education.

This nonsense is driven by the self-proclaimed innovators, few of whom are actual educators, and embraced by the public, most of whom have been students in public schools, and thus, believe they know the system.

Let’s here, then, unpack the nonsense…

The Great Lie about charter schools versus public schools is very complex. The lie begins with the hollow use of “innovation,” a term that means nothing except in the sort of pyramid-scheme reality now promoted by Trump and newly minted Secretary of Education DeVos.

The lie then falls apart when you unpack the claim that innovative charter schools will save public education; we must ask, if bureaucracy and mandates are crippling public schools, and freedom to be innovative is the key to charter schools, why not just release public schools from the bureaucracy and mandates so that all schools are free to innovate?

The answer reveals the circular and misleading logic of the Great Lie that is charter innovation: For decades, school choice advocates have struggled against the public remaining mostly against school choice, mostly in favor of their local public schools (even when the public holds a negative view of public schools in general). How, then, could the public be turned against public schools?

The solution has been relentless and ever-increasing mandates that guarantee the self-fulfilling prophesy of public schools.

From SOE DeVos to the EdWeek narrative above, relentless education reform has resulted in creating public schools and teachers trapped in mandates and then criticizing them for not being innovative.

If innovation is really the solution to the problem facing public schools (and I suspect it isn’t), teachers need autonomy.

Yet, education reform has systematically de-professionalized teaching, systematically made teaching and learning less effective, and systematically overwhelmed schools with impossible demands so that the public sees only a failing system, one that the innovator-propagandists can smear as resisting change, refusing to innovate, and doomed to failure—with only innovative charter schools to save the day.

When we peel back the post-truth rhetoric, evidence fails to support claims of charter school success, and five minutes in a public school reveal that schools and teachers are not incapable of “imagin[ing] dramatic change,” but are blocked from practicing their professional autonomy by the exact forces accusing them of being against reform.

Public school teachers have never had professional autonomy, and most cannot even go to the restroom when they need to.

Spitting in the face of public school teachers as the paragraphs above do is the worst of post-truth journalism.

I have now spent about the same amount of time as an educator in K-12 public schools and higher education.

The professional autonomy gulf between the two is stunning.

K-12 public schools and teachers are scapegoats in a ridiculous political charade that depends on post-truth journalism and a gullible public.

There is nothing innovative about that.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Privatization

Mother Jones: Why Did Trump and DeVos Choose Florida as Their National Model for School Reform?

By dianeravitch
March 7, 2017 //
8

Kristina Rizga, the veteran education journalist at Mother Jones, explains why Trump and DeVos love Florida. Although the state has a constitutional ban on the use of public money for private and religious schools, although the state’s voters rejected Jeb Bush’s effort to change the state constitution in 2012, Florida has figured out numerous DeVious ways to circumvent the state constitution and the will of the voters.

Jeb Bush is the permanent state minister of education in Florida, and he loves school choice. He does not like public schools. The state has hundreds of charter schools, many of which are managed by for-profit entrepreneurs. The head of the education appropriations committee in the state senate is a member of a family that owns the state’s largest for-profit charter chain. But better yet, for the purposes of DeVos, who is a religious zealot, Florida has a tax-credit plan that funnels hundreds of millions of dollars to unregulated and unaccountable religious schools.

Rizga writes:

Tax credit scholarships provide a crafty mechanism to get around these obstacles. Tax credits are given to individuals and corporations that donate money to scholarship-granting institutions; if parents end up using those scholarships to send their kids to religious schools—and 79 percent of students in private schools are taught by institutions affiliated with churches—the government technically is not transferring taxpayer money directly to religious organizations.

While DeVos is best known as an advocate of vouchers, most veteran Beltway insiders told me that a federal voucher program is very unlikely. “Democrats don’t like vouchers. Republicans don’t like federal programs, and would rather leave major school reform decisions up to states and local communities,” Rick Hess, a veteran education policy expert with the conservative American Enterprise Institute said. “Realistically, nobody thinks they’ve got the votes to do a federal school choice law, especially in the Senate.”

This political reality is perhaps why Trump and DeVos are singling out Florida’s tax credit programs as a way to expand private schooling options. While Trump and DeVos have not specified what shape this policy might take at the federal level, most of these changes will come from the state legislators. Republicans have full control of the executive and legislative branches in 25 states, and control the governor’s house or the state legislature in 44 states. At least 14 states have already proposed bills in this legislative session that would expand some form of vouchers or tax credit scholarships, according to a Center for American Progress analysis. (And 17 states already provide some form of tax credit scholarships, according to EdChoice.)

This perfect storm for pushing through various voucher schemes comes at a time when the results on the outcomes of these programs “are the worst in the history of the field,” according to New America researcher Kevin Carey, who analyzed the results in a recent New York Times article. Until about two years ago, most studies on vouchers produced mixed results, with some showing slight increases in test scores or graduation rates for students using them. But the most recent research has not been good, according to Carey: A 2016 study, funded by the pro-voucher Walton Family Foundation and conducted by the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute, found that students who used vouchers in a large Ohio program “have fared worse academically compared to their closely matched peers attending public schools.”

Businesses make gifts to Step Up for Students. They get a tax credit. Step Up for Students gets a hefty cut of the take. It currently has about $500 million to use to fund vouchers for private and religious schools that the state does not regulate or supervise. The voucher-receiving schools report attendance, but are not subject to the state standards, curriculum, or tests, and they do not report on academic performance.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Florida, Privatization, School Choice, Testing, Vouchers

Trump is the “Distractor-in-Chief”

By dianeravitch
March 6, 2017 //
41

Jane McAlevey writes in Alternet that there is method to Trump’s seeming madness. Whenever things get rough, he changes the subject.

This past week, as the media was roasting Jeff Sessions for lying to Congress under oath, Trump changed the subject by tweeting that Obama was wiretapping his phones at Trump Tower. The Sessions matter was dropped, and all the weekend talk shows were obsessed with Trump’s tweet about Obama.

Every tweet Trump bangs out has three primary purposes: 1) to lure most media and pundit discussion away from critical news Americans desperately need; 2) to embolden his base; and 3) to make ordinary people throw their hands up and say, “Just turn it off, I can’t watch it anymore,” or a key variant, “Just turn it off, who even knows who is telling the truth? They are all liars.”

People casually, dismissively or angrily refer to Trump as a pathological liar. That seems clearly to be true. But more dangerous is that he’s a strategic liar. And in the twisted calculations of his handlers, including Steve Bannon, it doesn’t matter one iota if anyone calls Trump a liar, as long as they also come to think of all media and anyone linked to the media—such as journalists, pundits, academics, experts, and think tanks—as liars too.

Trump and Bannon’s objective is to undermine experts and scientists defending successful social policy and the role of government, just as their allies successfully undercut scientists’ ability to explain climate change by relentless efforts, using highly paid fossil industry experts, to plant seeds of doubt….

As with its depressingly successful strategy of debunking climate science, the new administration’s real goal is to get everyone distracted, doubting everything, all the time, and ultimately disengaging completely because even to try to discuss serious matters with someone who doesn’t already agree with you 1,000 percent feels intimidating, or worse, futile….

Jeff Sessions is a lynchpin to the planned, systematic undermining of the right to vote, as demographic changes further threaten white supremacy. When the extreme free marketers in the corporate class team up with the cultural right-wing in war-room planning sessions, “Get the attorney general’s office 100 percent on our side” is top on their flip-chart lists. The attorney general’s office is crucial to undermine if not destroy voting rights, clean air and water, labor, civil rights, and other equally critical laws.

The attorney general also acts as the defender of the administration, and as such, will play a crucial role in protecting and defending Trump and the crooks and thieves being positioned into key agencies so they can, per Steve Bannon’s words at the Conservative Political Action Conference, “deconstruct the administrative state.” Trump and Bannon truly need Sessions, a racist, homophobic misogynist, in the position at the helm of law enforcement, as attorney general. He covers all their asses.

Crazy. Like a fox.

Categories Trump

Mike Klonsky: While Trump Tweets, the GOP is Dismantling Our Social Safety Net

By dianeravitch
March 6, 2017 //
16

Mike Klonsky wants us to stop talking about the Russians and pay attention to what the Republicans are doing while we are not looking.

While we’re consumed 24/7 with the Trump/Russia psychodrama, Republicans are quietly, under the cover of darkness and diversion, introducing these new bills in the House:

HR 610 Vouchers for Public Education — (The bill also repeals basic nutrition standards for the national school lunch and breakfast programs)
HR 899 Terminate the Department of Education
HR 785 National Right to Work (aimed at ending unions, including teacher unions)

And there’s more. Much more, including:

–HR 861 Terminate the Environmental Protection Agency
–HJR 69 Repeal Rule Protecting Wildlife
–HR 370 Repeal Affordable Care Act
–HR 354 Defund Planned Parenthood
–HR 83 Mobilizing Against Sanctuary Cities Bill
–HR 147 Criminalizing Abortion (“Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act”)
–HR 808 Sanctions against Iran

Vote. Organize. Protest. Demonstrate. Join the Indivisibles.

Categories Republicans, Resistance

Norm Scott: The Battle to Save JHS 145 from Eva Tonight

By dianeravitch
March 6, 2017 //
8

Retired teacher Norm Scott writes:

While closing schools is not as widespread as it was under former Mayor Michael Bloomberg, it is still occurring and it is very troubling. The Department of Education still fails to provide proper resources for schools and then calls them failures… James Eterno, ICE blog

I’m taking the subway up to Yankee Stadium tonight, not for a Yankee game, but to take the long walk from there to 1000 Teller Ave for the JHS 145 hearing. I never go to the Bronx, even for Yankee games, because it is as far away from where I live as possible and still be in NYC.

If Eva and her little band of slimeballs show up to tell us about their scholars I’m going to be retching, so I better not eat.

This is not about closing a struggling school but about yet another giveaway of a school building to Eva Moskowitz, who has enough money to rent Radio City Music Hall for a test-prep rally, but wants to toss poor kids into the street in another avaricious grab. And the DOE is closing the school – or trying to – because they fear the slings and arrows of the charter lobby publicity machine.

As for the UFT — they are supposedly doing things behind the scenes. Ho-hum –when what is needed is a strong public stand against the Farina/deB giveaway to Eva. DeB thinks if he pays off charters they will lay off him in the election. Good luck with that.

I reported on teacher Jim Donahue’s heroic efforts to help organize resistance — Closing JHS 145 So Eva/Success Academy Can Ge..

When Jim spoke at the UFT Ex Bd they acted dumb — it was Jim and MORE that asked for the item to be pulled from the March 22 PEP agenda which so far has not happened. March 22 may turn into a redux of Bloomberg era resistance.

James Eterno reported on tonight’s hearing at the ICE blog:

SCHOOL CLOSING BATTLE IN BRONX TONIGHT

The common perception from the UFT is that school closings are not a real problem under the current Mayor Bill de Blasio and his Chancellor Carmen Farina. While closing schools is not as widespread as it was under former Mayor Michael Bloomberg, it is still occurring and it is very troubling. The Department of Education still fails to provide proper resources for schools and then calls them failures.

Tonight there will be a Joint Public Hearing to save Junior High School 145 in the Bronx. JHS 145 is slated for closure. Eva Moskowitz has already claimed the building for one of her Success Academy charter schools.

The only trouble with this arrangement is the school community at 145 is waging a valiant fight to save their school. Tonight is their Joint Public Hearing, a public meeting required before a school can be closed. If you can make it to the Bronx this evening, I suggest that you attend the hearing to show your support for 145. Get there before 6:00 p.m. to sign up to speak. Schools targeted for closure need the public to be behind them to have any chance of surviving.

I certainly know how the JHS 145 people feel as Jamaica High School, where I taught for 28 years, was phased out and then closed in 2014.

Here is an email from MORE leader Jia Lee on tonight’s JHS 145 hearing.

Colleagues,

An injury to one is an injury to all. Success Academy is slated to take over the building where JHS 145 has been for generations. Incredibly, SA has advertised for their new middle school even before the vote has taken place at the March 22 PEP.

The staff and families of JHS 145 are fighting to keep their school open. They serve students who have been mislabled based on faulty test score metrics. A large showing of support for the school and resistance against charterization will send a message to the DOE that we will not stand by while they destroy public schools.

Please join me at this joint hearing with JHS 145 and Success Academy

JHS 145
1000 Teller Ave. Bronx NY
Take any train to Yankee Stadium or
take the A or 1 train to 181 Street in Washington Heights, then take the Bx35 bus toward the BX.

Categories Charter Schools, Harlem Success Academy, New York City
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