Archives for the month of: May, 2017
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Buzzfeed Reports Phone Call Threatening Lawyer Who Was Suing Trump

By dianeravitch
May 2, 2017 //
14

Bill Moyers’ website had this story this morning.

“When Donald Trump was going through litigation related to a hotel bankruptcy in 2009, a lawyer representing clients who were suing Trump received an ominous phone call. If you keep bothering Trump, a caller who identified himself as Carmine told the lawyer, “we know where you live and we’re going to your house for your wife and kids.” Police traced that call to a payphone across the street from a theater where Trump was appearing on The Late Show with David Letterman. Jason Leopold reports for Buzzfeed.”

Read it yourself. The language violates the guidelines of this blog. It is about character. It will please his base.

Categories Education Reform, Trump

Mike Rose: Keepin’ Up with the Trumps, One Budget Cut at a Time

By dianeravitch
May 2, 2017 //
6

Mike Rose of UCLA, a much-published author, wrote this post before Congress shredded and tossed away his proposed budget cuts. But it nonetheless remains timely as a reminder of what Trump wants to do, hopes to do, and will continue to press for.

Keepin’ Up With the Trumps

One Budget Cut at a Time

The Trump administration recently released its proposed budget, and it contained cuts to a long and wide list of programs and initiatives. A budget is not only an economic document but also a moral document, a statement of values. There are the predictable GOP targets: The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, The National Endowment for the Arts, and so on. But let us look at four less visible programs targeted for elimination, programs that directly affect the less fortunate, some of whom looked to Donald Trump to improve their lives.
​The Delta Regional Authority and The Appalachian Regional Commission are two wide-ranging agencies that foster economic and workforce development, infrastructure improvement, and education and health programs. The Delta Regional Authority will lose $45 million in federal funding; The Appalachian Regional Commission will lose three times that amount. Both of these agencies cover parts of the country that are in great need—and that voted for Mr. Trump in strong numbers.

​The Striving Readers Comprehensive Literacy Program is targeted toward students with disabilities or limited English proficiency, many of whom come from low-income backgrounds. The cut here is $190 million.

​The U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness has a small budget of $3.5 million and coordinates federal and state agencies that deal with homelessness and also serves to connect local agencies with available resources. It is on the chopping block.

***

​Now consider another set of numbers, beginning with the much-discussed price tag for President Trump’s frequent trips to his Palm Beach resort Mar-a-Lago. On the campaign trail, candidate Trump repeatedly said to great applause that once elected he wouldn’t be taking vacations or playing all that golf that Obama plays. He would stay in the White House “making deals.” But since assuming the presidency, Mr. Trump has, to date, gone to Mar-a-Lago seven times. While two of those visits involved meetings with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Chinese President Xi Jinping, others have not been for affairs of state. The Secret Service does not make available the costs for security, but estimates range from $1 million to $3 million per trip. These estimates do not include a number of associated costs, such as $60,000 in overtime pay each day for the Palm Beach Sheriff’s Department. President Obama spent around $97 million on travel during his two terms in office. Reports by CNN and The Hill suggest that President Trump could spend close to that amount in his first year alone. The president’s trips to Mar-a-Lago or to Trump Tower and his New Jersey country club—all lavishly developed—could over several years provide the budget for both the Delta Regional Authority and The Appalachian Regional Commission, agencies committed to fostering economic development in regions that desperately need it.

​If the President is vacating the White House, the First Lady is avoiding it altogether. Melania Trump has said that she maintains residence at Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue because she wants to keep her son, Barron, in his current school. The cost for protecting Trump Tower is $500,000 per day, according to The Guardian. I could not determine how much of this cost is for New York police officers versus Secret Service personnel, nor could I find, for comparison, the yearly cost of protection for President Obama’s two daughters to attend Sidwell Friends School in D.C . Over one year, the cost for the First Lady and her son to stay in New York could be as much as $183 million, which is just about the budget for Striving Readers. Tax payers are subsidizing the education of one child with every academic resource and option imaginable while equivalent tax payer dollars are stripped from thousands of children who have few if any options.

​Another expense associated with Donald Trump is the tax-payer supported cost for security for Eric Trump and Donald Trump, Jr. whenever they travel for Trump family business. Again, the Secret Service does not release expenditures, but The Washington Post, CBS, and The Guardian were able to get some figures. A trip to Dubai to open a Trump-branded golf course resulted in a $16,000 hotel bill for Secret Service agents and a trip to a Trump-branded condominium in Uruguay resulted in a $88,320 hotel bill for Secret Service agents and other federal employees. These expenses are only for lodging (and possibly food); they do not include salaries, travel, equipment, and other expenses. The two Trump sons are the managers of the Trump estate, so these trips will occur with some frequency and have nothing to do with the United States government and do not benefit taxpayers in any way. It wouldn’t take many of Donald Jr. and Eric’s business trips to promote luxury properties to supplant the budget cut for the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, an agency helping people who have no property at all.​

***

​The conservative commentator Kevin Williamson has a point when he writes in National Review that the criticism about presidential travel expenses—Bush’s, Obama’s, or Trump’s—is overdone and overwrought, for the problem lies in the presidential entourage itself, which is “bloated and monarchical” and, in the scheme of things, travel “is small beans in the context of federal spending.” OK, fair enough—though it should be said that what is small beans to one person is a whole bean field to another. Still, when travel and residential spending hits the levels it is hitting now, beyond the bloated norm with no sign of abating, and when that spending is connected to a president who pledged his allegiance to the Little Guy, and when that same president’s budget includes substantial cuts to programs to aid the less fortunate, well… then the excesses are worthy of condemnation, for they represent not just a case of very bad optics, to use that tiresome buzzword, but a case of moral blindness.

I’ll close with a question that kept coming to mind as I was writing this post, a question from another time and place in our history and from quite a different context: The Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954. It was the Cold War and Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy had been conducting increasingly assaultive and unprincipled investigations on the infiltration of communists into various government departments and agencies, including the U.S. Army. After a particularly nasty exchange, Joseph Welch, the lead counsel for the Army, asked McCarthy in exasperation, “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?” I certainly thought of that question many times as candidate Trump insulted everyone from Mexican immigrants to a reporter with a disability. But the question seems fitting here as well, perhaps even more so, posed to President Trump and the entire Trump enterprise: Where is the decency here? At long last, where is your decency?

Categories Trump

David Kristofferson: What Everyone Needs to Know about AP Exams

By dianeravitch
May 2, 2017 //
88

David Kristofferson tutors students for AP exams in California. He sees a scam that benefits mainly the College Board, which sells the exams for $100 per students and rakes in millions.

He wrote this article to share what he has learned.

The first thing that parents and others need to do is that the passing scores on these exams are very low.

Parents don’t realize that the passing scores for at least some of these exams are set very low. When their son or daughter passes with a 3, 4, or 5, parents are elated without understanding what this really means.

For example, the minimum passing score to get a 3 for AP Physics 1 for 2015 was only 41%. Despite that low bar, 63.1% of all students who took the exam were not able to pass it!

41% was the minimum score for a 4, and 71% for a 5.

Unconfirmed reports state that the AP Physics 1 passing grade in 2016 may have been 36%, but the College Board does not readily release such information to the public.

Meanwhile their test fees are pushing close to $100 per exam!

Jay Mathews of the Washington Post has been a strong advocate for the AP exams. He believes that students benefit even if they don’t pass them.

Kristofferson disagrees. He writes:

From my direct experience with students, the AP curriculum covers a large amount of material very quickly. Because the exams are in early May, the curriculum must be completed before then, wasting the final month of school, and making the pace of “learning” even more hectic.

The exams are also filled with very tricky, challenging questions to fulfill the College Board’s quest to, in old school, sexist language, “separate the men from the boys.”

The consequence of this fast-paced, trick-filled curriculum is not quality learning for a very significant number of students, but instead, frantic memorization of test methods and past exam question tricks, most of which disappears right after the student completes the course.

Even worse, this curriculum leads to significant amounts of cheating on local classroom tests!

Read Kristofferson’s article. What do you think?

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Testing

Mother Jones: DeVos’ Favorite “Reform” Gets Horrible Grades

By dianeravitch
May 2, 2017 //
18

Edwin Rios of Mother Jones writes here about the dreadful evaluations on Betsy DeVos’ favorite form of school choice: Vouchers.

Researchers used to find that students who received vouchers saw little or no difference in their test scores.

Now a new body of research is reporting that students (who enter the program with low scores) actually lose ground when they transfer to a voucher school.

We had seen these discouraging reports before about Louisiana, Indiana, and Ohio.

Now the latest study from D.C. reaches the same conclusion. Students are negatively affected by switching from a public school to a voucher school.

The logic seems clear. The public school has experienced and credentialed teachers. Many voucher schools do not.

School choice advocates (aka reformers) used to claim that they were “saving poor kids from failing schools.”

DeVos, however, told the Washington Post that when the choice movement is fully implemented, all three sectors (public, charter, and voucher) will have the same results. “When school choice policies are fully implemented,” she said, “there should be no differences in achievement among the various types of schools.”

In other words, the children who are now low-performing will continue to be low-performing, and all three sectors will have the same outcomes they have now.

Remind me of the reason for school choice?

Categories Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, District of Columbia, Failure, School Choice, Vouchers

Congress Reauthorizes DC Voucher Program, Despite Evidence of Negative Effects, and Restricts Future Research

By dianeravitch
May 2, 2017 //
20

Emma Brown and Peter Jamison report that Congress reauthorized the D.C. Voucher program, on the heels of a federal evaluation showing that vouchers have a negative effect on students who use them.

Now we know that vouchers don’t “save poor children from failing schools.” They actually do educational harm to those children. The purpose of vouchers is choice for its own sake.

Even more surprising is that the new language in the reauthorizatuon bars the use of randomized field trials–long considered “the gold standard”–in future evaluations. RCT is a means of comparing similar groups.

Thus, Congress demonstrates that it not only doesn’t care about the effects of vouchers, but doesn’t want to learn about them in the future.

“The D.C. study was conducted using what’s known as the gold standard in scientific research: An experimental design, comparing the performance of students who received a voucher through a citywide lottery to the performance of their peers who applied for a voucher and didn’t receive one. The study was designed to comply with the law as currently written, which requires the “strongest possible research design” for determining the vouchers’ effectiveness.


“The reauthorization rolls back that language and prohibits the department’s researchers from using that gold standard. Instead, it says that researchers must use a “quasi-experimental” design, comparing voucher recipients to students with “similar backgrounds” in D.C. public and public charter schools.


“Researchers say this approach is generally weaker because it creates uncertainty about whether the comparison is fair.

“This program has been studied rigorously since it began in 2004, using an approach that the field of medical research would regard as common practice,” said Mark Dynarski, who co-authored the D.C. study released last week. “If rigor is rolled back, a future study might lead to more questions than answers.”


“Rep. Gerald E. Connolly (D-Va.) called the research change an “egregious dilution” of serious science, accusing his Republican counterparts of trying to escape empirical data that might not back up their school-choice philosophy.”

Categories District of Columbia, Vouchers

James Meredith to Trump: Please Don’t Claim the Mantle of Civil Rights When You Betray Its Purpose

By dianeravitch
May 2, 2017 //
14

In a recent article, civil rights icon James Meredith expressed his frustration with Trump and DeVos claiming that education is “the civil rights issue of our time” and that school choice is the remedy.

He writes:

Today, President Donald Trump and Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos are attempting to improve our schools with “school choice,” vouchers, charter schools, cyber-charters, privatization, putting uncertified “temp teachers” with six weeks training into our highest-needs schools, and shackling public schools to the mass standardized machine-testing of children.

This represents a doubling-down on a quarter-century of failed bipartisan efforts at education reform, few of which have a track record of success, even when measured by the dubious metric of standardized test scores. The achievement claims of Potemkin-style “miracle schools” rarely stand up to serious scrutiny. Education is an exquisitely difficult and complex system, and there are few magic bullets, quick-fixes or shortcuts….

The main problems in American public education are poverty, decades of neglect and segregation of our high-poverty schools, and a system that is today driven not by parents and teachers but by politicians, bureaucrats, ideologues and profiteers with little if any knowledge of how children learn.

The education system has been hijacked by money, much of which is being squandered. We are wasting tens of billions of dollars annually on failed experiments, bloated bureaucracies, unproven and unnecessary technology products, and ineffective teacher professional development. A dystopian culture of constant, pointless, mass standardized machine-testing of children is crippling the schools and students it is supposed to help. The continuation of these trends threatens to hollow out and destroy our urban schools, and pull the rest of the system down with them.

Meredith goes on to explain what children today need, and what would constitute genuine reform in education.

Categories Betsy DeVos, Civil Rights, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization

Tennessee: Parents Explain Why National PTA No Longer Represents Them

By dianeravitch
May 2, 2017 //
9

This is a must-read.

The Momma Bears of Tennessee are ferocious in protecting their children against corporate reform.

In this post, they excoriate the National PTA for selling out the interests of real parents and deferring to the powerful.

The National PTA supports Common Core and high-stakes testing; it opposes opting out of tests.

“As Momma Bears, we are beyond frustrated with TNReady testing. Every year, it’s one testing fiasco after another. Already, reports are coming in this year that the test booklets and answer sheets don’t line up. It’s just another source of frustration for our children. So, its no wonder that more and more parents are wanting to opt their children out of testing. Unfortunately, the Tennessee Department of Education refuses to recognize that parents do have opt-out rights.

“​So, wouldn’t it be great if we had a state law that settled things once and for all by giving parents the explicit right to opt out of standardized testing?

“YEAH!!! Momma Bears would love to see a law giving parents explicit opt-out rights!!! But guess what?

“​If you are a Momma Bear PTA leader, you are not allowed to publicly advocate for legislation allowing parents to opt out of standardized testing. That’s right. A couple of dozen uppity-ups in the National PTA all got together last year and decided that parents didn’t want the right to opt their children out of testing.

[National PTA said:] “National PTA does not believe that opting out is an effective strategy to address the frustration over testing. Mass opt-out comes at a real cost to the goals of educational equity and individual student achievement.”

“We know, parents are scratching their heads on that one!! When did dues paying PTA members vote to oppose a parent’s right to opt their children out of abusive standardized testing?

“Oh, yeah, they didn’t. Nope. There wasn’t a vote. PTA members did not approve this position statement.

“Instead, the PTA uppity-ups aligned with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to oppose parents who wanted the right to protect their children from abusive testing. While the PTA attempts some lame plattitude about supporting parental rights, it’s clear the PTA thinks that parents only get to decide what’s best for their kids when it doesn’t run afoul of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.”

Why did National PTA become cheerleaders for Common Core? Was it right after receiving a grant from the Gates Foundation in 2009 to promote Common Core?

The Mama Bears say:

“Now, we know why the PTA likes to say, “it’s not your Momma’s PTA” because our Momma’s PTA actually taught parents to advocate for the best interests of their children. Today’s PTA is nothing more than a corp-ed shill who wants to push parents right out of the decision-making process.”

Categories Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Opt Out, Parent Groups, Parents, Resistance, Special Education, Tennessee, Testing

Trump’s Ignorance of History Is Embarrassing

By dianeravitch
May 1, 2017 //
53

Trump seems never to have studied American history. The things he says that betray his ignorance are alarming.

I think it is very important for every American to learn about history and government and civics.

Whenever he opines about the past, his comments show a man who has no background knowledge, has never learned any history.

Today, Trump tweeted that Jackson saw the Civil War coming and he would not have let it happen.

Jackson died some 15 years before the Civil War, but we know this about him. He was a slave-owner and a white supremacist. He also drove Native Americans out of their lands, in what is known as the Trail of Tears. Probably, had he been president in 1861, he would have let the South secede or avoided their secession by offering to accept slavery as okay.

But counterfactuals are always problematic. We can’t know what Jackson would have done. He might have been changed by events, or not.

Frankly, it is weird to speculate about what Jackson would have done. Might as well speculate about what Millard Fillmore or JFK would have done. Who knows? Nobody.

I feel no assurance that Trump has ever read anything about Andrew Jackson. Or any other history. He knows real estate.

Categories Trump

How Trump “Got Rolled” in His First Budget Negotiation

By dianeravitch
May 1, 2017 //
17

It is probably not a good idea to brag that you are the world’s best negotiator when your only experience was in the real estate world. Apparently those skills do not transfer to government, where you have to deal with wily veterans of both parties and a complex set of procedural rules that you do not know.

Democrats and Republicans agreed on a budget to avert a shutdown, and Trump didn’t get anything he asked for.

The budget doesn’t include a deep cut for the Environmental Protection Agency; not one job will be lost.

Trump wanted to cut the National Institutes of Health, but it didn’t happen.

The budget maintains funding for Planned Parenthood.

There is no funding for a border wall.

Read the story and understand that the real estate negotiator’s skill set doesn’t work in D.C., where a knowledge of legislative history helps, as well as personal relationships, and some sense of the importance of the programs that are funded.

Trump’s first lesson in Washington, D.C., is that he can’t go it alone; he needs to work with other people. He was not elected to be a dictator or autocrat. That’s very different from being the owner of a private firm where your decisions override the wishes of everyone else.

Categories Budget Cuts, Funding, Trump

Write a Letter to Your Representative in Congress to Protect Federal Education Funding!

By dianeravitch
May 1, 2017 //
5

Leonie Haimson, executive director of Class Size Matters, sent out the following bulletin:

It was just revealed that Congress is due to vote on an education budget early this week which would cut Title IIA funds by $300 million. President Trump’s budget would eliminate these funds altogether for the following year.

Please write Congress today: Urge them NOT to cut Title IIA funds – which many districts use to keep teachers on staff to prevent further class size increases. In NYC, $101 million of these funds are used to keep approximately 1000 teachers on staff.

As I explained in a recent piece in Alternet, districts throughout the country have already lost thousands of teaching positions since the Great Recession which were never replaced — increasing class sizes in many schools to sky-high levels.

For more on the myriad, proven benefits of smaller classes, check out our research summary here. But please write to Congress today by clicking here.

Thanks!

Leonie Haimson
Executive Director
Class Size Matters
124 Waverly Pl.
New York, NY 10011

Categories Budget Cuts, Class size, Funding, Trump
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