The Missouri legislature ended their legislative session without passing legislation that would authorize “education savings accounts,” a form of voucher that parents could use to spend anywhere for anything. It is a path to allowing parents to spend public money on anything regardless of quality. Where ESAs exist, many children are getting a subpar education or none at all.
Other countries must think we have gone crazy or turned against educating our young.
Good work, Missouri!
Jeff Murray is the Ohio operations manager of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute’s offices in Columbus. He read an essay by a high school English teacher who was offended by Governor John Kasich’s proposal that teachers should be required to shadow business people if they wanted to be rectified. Murray was disturbed when a high school English teacher objected. The teacher wrote: “I believe, as a professional English teacher that vocational training is neither my role nor my responsibility to my students.” Murray wrote in reply: “But I want to tell him that he’s wrong.”
Murray says the high school teacher is wrong. Every course he took in high school, he says, taught him job skills. Is that the same as “vocational training”? I don’t think so.
Murray wrote:
Everything about my high school and college experiences helped me to become a successful employee. Math teachers gave me the skills to measure work areas and assist in computing price quotes. History professors helped me understand why a developer was converting this former manufacturing plant into apartments. Communications instruction helped me hone marketing pitches to boost business. And, yes, I used every ounce of wordcraft I had studied and obsessed over in Brit Lit and Sonnet Seminar to write newsletters, clarify job specs, and interact with customers. It wasn’t Fitzgerald, but it was clear and direct and helpful to business. They didn’t know they needed an English major until they got one.
Maybe he actually is agreeing with the high school teacher. Maybe he doesn’t think he is wrong, after all. Surely, Murray didn’t want vocational training in his English class instead of reading Fitzgerald or Ellison. I assume he would have preferred reading and writing about “The Great Gatsby” to learning how to write a business letter. He realizes now that studying literature and writing prepared him for whatever career he chose. Does he really think that his English teachers and his history teachers would have been better if they had been required to spend a week in a factory or a department store?
My most beloved teacher taught us adolescent ruffians to read and appreciate Keats, Shelley, Shakespeare, and Blake. The only job skill I learned from her was the importance of accuracy.
A friend of mine, a lawyer who won a Supreme Court case knocking down voter suppression in Georgia in the 1970s, once told me that he met the Chancellor of the Exchequer in London, the highest financial official in the government. He told my friend that once a boy has mastered “the greats,” he can do anything.
Teachers do not need to shadow people in business. People in business need to shadow teachers. Kasich’s bill, by the way, was dead on arrival.
Andy Borowitz has the latest news about the prospects for Trump’s impeachment.
I was curious to see whether the L.A. Times editorial board would stand up for public education or would join the chorus of privatization and greed.
Would the editorial board be offended that billionaires are swamping the district with millions to promote the privatization candidates?
Would they recall all the stories about charter scandals and corruption that the newspaper has reported? Would they forget about the Celerity charter chain, whose CEO used the school credit cards for resorts, fancy hotels, lavish meals, couture clothing, and chaffer-driven limousines?
Could they possibly endorse the candidates benefitting from the money poured in by the likes of the Walton family and other out-of-town Republicans and rightwing corporate Democrats?
They could and they did.
Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised that they endorsed the candidates who are best equipped to promote the Trump-DeVos privatization agenda. And I won’t attribute it to the fact that the newspaper accepts $800,000 a year from Eli Broad for its education coverage, the elderly billionaire who has a fetish about stamping out public education. The editorial board has the chutzpah to refer to puppets of the charter industry as “independent thinkers.” If those two fit the L.A. Times’ definition of an “independent thinker,” they must be reading from a script provided by the billionaires who pull their strings.
If you live in Los Angeles in one of the districts where there is a run-off, please vote for Steve Zimmer or Imelda Padilla.
Don’t let the billionaires buy control of the public schools. They don’t want to improve them. They want to turn them over to the unregulated, scandal-ridden charter industry.
Don’t be fooled: charters and choice and privatization are the Trump-DeVos agenda!
Howard Blume reports in the Los Angeles Times on the flood of outside money that is flowing into the high-profile run-offs for two crucial seats on the Los Angeles school board. The charter billionaires are dumping millions into the campaign to defeat Steve Zimmer, president of the school board, and into the race between Imelda Padilla and charter supporter Kelly Fitzpatrick Nonez.
The election is May 16. It will determine whether the charter industry can buy control of the nation’s second largest school district.
The owner of Netflix, billionaire Reed Hastings, has gifted $5 million to the California Charter School Association. Hastings memorably told a meeting of CCSA that he looks forward to the day when there are no more elected school boards in the nation. Democracy is a problem for corporate reformers. It is so much easier to just buy up the competition, instead of giving ordinary people a vote that is equal in power to the vote of a billionaire.
Two members of the billionaire Walton family from Arkansas have given to the charter candidates. They are part of America’s wealthiest family, whose riches were gained by paying low wages to their non-union employees.
Teachers unions have supported Zimmer and Padilla, but the unions’ money comes from their hard-working members, not from a family fortune or billionaires with no limits on what they spend.
Outside spending for Melvoin has surpassed $4.25 million; for Zimmer, $2.16 million.
Both charter-backed candidates have raised more money for their own campaigns than their opponents have.
Charters are privately operated public schools that are exempt from some rules that govern traditional campuses. Most are nonunion.
CCSA Advocates can use donations for any political purpose, but the L.A. school board race — the most expensive in the nation — has been its primary project.
Besides having money, Hastings is a desirable donor for the charter side in left-leaning California. He’s been a regular and reliable contributor to Democratic causes and candidates. That’s a valuable attribute given the state’s anti-Trump political climate — because the Trump administration has made increasing the number of charter schools a central goal.
Like Trump’s Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, Hastings is an ardent, longtime advocate for charters and a major donor to charter causes. (California Gov. Jerry Brown also strongly supports charters, though not as a big-money contributor.)
The teachers union casts donors such as Hastings in the role of outside billionaire trying to buy a local election. Hastings has insisted he simply wants to support meaningful steps to improve public education.
The “outsider” tag also applies to some other donors; some are notably associated with conservative or anti-union politics, or both.
Major CCSA Advocates donors since last September include:
Former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan: $1 million. (Riordan gave another million to a second, allied campaign to defeat Zimmer.)
Conservative GAP co-founder Doris Fisher: $1.05 million
Walmart heir Jim Walton: $500,000
Philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs (whose late husband, Apple founder Steve Jobs, was assertively anti-union): $250,000
Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg: $200,000
Walmart heir Alice Walton: $200,000…
United Teachers Los Angeles ended 2016 with about $366,000 in a political action committee established to support its candidates, according to public filings.The union also had $286,000 in a fund for “issues” messages. That latter fund has been tapped to put out flyers with messages such as, “Thank Steve Zimmer for student recovery day.”
Issues advertising cannot refer to an election or an election date. Nor can it urge voters to vote a certain way. But there’s a clear political benefit for the union-backed candidates.
UTLA also collects an average of $9.50 a month from the 22% of its 32,000 members who have agreed to contribute, totaling about $67,000 a month from January onward, said union political director Oraiu Amoni. This money is split about 60-40 between candidate and issues messages.
And last week, union members voted to borrow $500,000 from their strike fund for such messages. Past debts to the strike fund will not be paid off until 2020, according to Amoni.
UTLA also is spending a smaller but undisclosed amount as part of a “We Are Public Schools” media campaign, which includes billboards with positive messages about public schools. Some feature pictures of Zimmer or Padilla.
Besides the American Federation of Teachers, other unions have kicked in for those candidates — notably the National Education Assn. with $700,000 and the California Teachers Assn. with $250,000.
Gary Rubinstein read Rick Hess’s latest book, “Letters to a Young Education Reformer” and found much to admire, even though Gary is one of the most perceptive critics of what is now called “reform.”
He writes:
“I was eager to receive Rick Hess’s latest book ‘letters to a young education reformer.’ Hess is the director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a conservative think tank. Hess is one of the few defenders of the reform movement whom I respect. His writings, like his column in Education Week, always have the nuance that most reform writers at places like The 74 and Education Post lack.
“This book explains what is behind some of the failures of the reform movement. With states opting out of the Common Core, parents opting out of state tests, and prominent reformers even opting out of ed reform, the reform movement is currently experiencing a slump.
“Though the book is written in an informal tone with plenty of very interesting anecdotes, it is a very scathing critique of the reform movement, the style of reform that really became big with people like Michelle Rhee, Joel Klein, and, of course, President Obama.
“Hess knows what missteps reformers committed along the way to lead to this. By writing about these mistakes in a series of letters to an unnamed ‘young education reformer,’ Hess hopes that the next generation of ed reformers will avoid those mistakes.”
Gary offers quotes from the book that he likes, such as:
““Washington-centric, dogmatic big R Reform has too often neglected this reality, with reformers exhausting themselves to win policy fights and then winding up too bloodied and battered to make those wins matter. It’s left me to wonder whether all the fuss and furor of recent years has done more harm than good.”
“In the fourth letter he writes:
“Calling something an implementation problem is how we reformers let ourselves off the hook. It’s a fancy way to avoid saying that we didn’t realize how a new policy would affect real people … and that it turned out worse than promised.”
Gary disagrees with two major arguments that Hess makes:
“One is that I think that Hess has overestimated the potential of the Reformers. I see his central argument as: it’s time for us to start playing fair, to stop misusing data and to stop ignoring, and otherwise showing contempt, for Reform critics. He seems to think that the Reform movement has made some progress, but to get to the next level, to win, they will need to be more open to discussion with critics and be more open about potential problems when things like the Common Core are implemented.
“I think the opposite is true. I think the Reformers have actually overachieved to get the victories they have. Getting more humble and honest and letting critics participate in the discussion will not get them to the next level at all. In a fair matchup, Reformers will get clobbered. I think they are going to lose the education reform war either way, but really the only chance they have is to ramp up the slick messaging and the lying. With the dishonest route, I think they have about a ten percent chance of ultimately winning. With the honest route, I think they have a zero percent chance of winning.”
Gary clearly enjoyed the book because it made him think.
Without having read this book, I want to add my thoughts about Rick Hess. I sponsored Rick’s first appearance in D.C. right after he received his doctorate from Harvard. For several years in the 1990s and early 2000s, I ran an annual education policy conference at the Brookings Institution, to which I invited researchers on different sides of contentious issues. I also invited a lunch speaker and a dinner speaker. In 1998, looking for a fresh face, I invited Rick as the lunch speaker after hearing good things about his first book, “Spinning Wheels: The Politics of Urban School Reform.” Rick subsequently found a home at AEI, and my confidence in him was affirmed.
From the very first day that I turned against the corporate reform movement, Rick has been gracious to me. When “The Death and Life of the Great American School System” was published in 2010, I called Grover (Russ) Whitehurst at the Brookings Institution, where I had been a Senior Fellow for 17 years, to ask if I could hold an event at Brookings to present my book, which was my refutation of No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top. He said I would have to rent the auditorium, pay for the sound system, and pay for any incidental costs, in addition to paying my own way. Having sat in his seat at Brookings in the mid-90s, I knew this was not customary for someone who was part of Brookings.
So I called Rick to ask if I could do the event at the free-market American Enterprise Institute. Rick immediately said yes and created an excellent event, where I spoke to an overflowing crowd, and a balanced panel responded with thoughtful questions. AEI paid all expenses. It was an excellent setting in which to present to the D.C. establishment my change of mind about the basic “reform” principles of testing and choice. Clearly, I appreciated Rick’s openness to dissent.
The Florida Department of Education, firmly in the hands of the Jeb Bush team, tried to spin the “success” of the charter industry, but Sue M. Legg of the League of Women Voters in Florida says, “Not so fast.”
In this post, she explains that charter schools enroll a lower percentage of students who qualify for free and reduced lunch, of English language learners, and of students with disabilities.
She asks:
Is the formula for successful charters to weed out students whom they cannot help? Should traditional public schools do the same? Where does this road lead?
Andrea Gabor reviews research produced by the Education Research Alliance of New Orleans about veteran teachers, those who taught before Hurricane Katrina and returned.
“ERA’s analysis provides an important before-and-after-the-storm glimpse of the city’s schools from a unique perspective—the small group of pre-Katrina teachers who returned to teaching following the storm, and who have remained in the classroom for over a decade. As New Orleans looks forward, the views of these returning pre-Katrina teachers are key; they are the survivors.
“In the wake of the mass firings following the storm, the teachers who returned to New Orleans and were still teaching at the time of the study, in the 2013/2014 school year, almost surely represent the city’s most experienced educators—and those with the closest community ties. While teachers with greater than 20 years of experience made up nearly 40 percent of the teaching force before the storm, that number has dropped to about 15 percent, according to another ERA study. Conversely, the number of inexperienced teacher with less than 5 years experienced now make up the majority of teachers, up from about 30 percent before the storm….
“Indeed, important characteristics of New Orleans reforms, including a high-rate of school closings and at-risk students cycling through multiple schools, are more likely to adversely impact high school students who, unlike their younger peers, are more likely to resist no-excuses culture of the non-selective New Orleans charters, and eventually to drop out. New Orleans also has done a terrible job of keeping track of kids who “fall between the cracks.”
“Education reformers like to say that “teachers are the single most important” school variable in a child’s education. As with so much else in the ed-reform debates, this is misleading. For surely, school stability and culture, which is controlled by school leaders—in the best cases, by cadres of teacher leaders—is as important as the role of individual teachers. School culture also helps determine just how much influence teachers have over curriculum, discipline and other policies. In my research, both quality education and teacher job satisfaction are highly correlated with schools that include teachers in such key decisions.
“In New Orleans, with a teacher cadre plagued by high turnover and sparse classroom experience, veteran teachers should be treasured. That so many say they have less job satisfaction than during the pre-Katrina years, suggests that they are not, which is surely a failing with implications far beyond just teacher morale.”
I promise you, I am really trying not to post about Trump. Some articles, however, are too compelling to pass up. This is one of them.
The latest Trump interview once again reveals appalling ignorance and dishonesty – Vox
https://apple.news/Ak-YKQ5ZJR6OLq0yvVV_LDw
Appointments to the Education Department:
— Stanley Buchesky, senior adviser, budget and finance;
— Robert Eitel, senior counselor to the secretary;
— Jason Botel, principal deputy assistant secretary and acting assistant secretary for the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education;
— Candice Jackson, deputy assistant secretary for strategic operations and outreach and acting assistant secretary for the Office for Civil Rights;
— Ebony Lee, deputy chief of staff for policy;
— José Viana, assistant deputy secretary and director for the Office of English Language Acquisition;
— Jana Toner, White House liaison;
— Dougie Simmons, deputy chief of staff for operations;
— Kathleen Smith, special assistant to the secretary;
— Robert Goad, confidential assistant and education policy adviser on the White House Domestic Policy Council;
— Holly Ham, assistant secretary of education for management;
— Michael Oberlies, confidential assistant;
— Andrew Kossack, attorney adviser;
— Patrick Shaheen, confidential assistant;
— Jeffrey “Justin” Riemer, attorney adviser;
— Elizabeth “Liz” Hill, press secretary;
— Carrie Coxen, confidential assistant*;
— Nate Bailey, special assistant to the secretary;
— Michael Brickman, special assistant to the secretary;
— Michael Chamberlain, special assistant;
— Deborah Cox-Roush, special assistant to the secretary;
— Kevin Eck, special assistant to the secretary;
— Ronald Holden, special assistant;
— Amy Jones, special assistant to the secretary;
— Cody Reynolds, special assistant;
— Eric Ventimiglia, confidential assistant;
— Matthew Frendewey, special assistant to the secretary;
— Alexandra Hudson, confidential assistant;
— Gillum Ferguson, confidential assistant;
— Neil Ruddock, special assistant to the secretary;
— Sarah Delahunty, confidential assistant;
— Jessica Newman, special assistant*;
— Nathaniel Breeding, special assistant*;
— Martha Davis, confidential assistant*.
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