As readers of the blog know, our friend Phyllis Bush is fighting cancer with humor and determination.
In this post, she brings us up to date on her activities, her treatment, and the kindness of friends and strangers.
Archives for the month of: July, 2017
I heard about a product called the Amazon Alexa. I wanted to learn more, went to Amazon, and found this fabulous thread about two electronic devices, the Alexa and the Echo.
“Question: I have 2 children, one named Alexa and the other named Amazon. Will this present any problems?
A: My kids do not respond to voice commands, do yours?!? I am selling my kids on eBay and buying the Echo.
tomh
A: My daughter Siri loves it..
ACChapa
A: I was in the same boat. After much debate with the husband, we decided to adopt our children out to family members. We could not be more pleased with our decision. This product has literally changed our lives.
Tami
A: Don’t worry about it. Your children do not have voice command recognition features, so only the Echo will respond accordingly. I’m not sure if they have the voice command upgrade for children yet. I heard it’s still buggy and only works when you pay it. see less
Lionel C.
A: No. It will only matter if you name your third child Echo.
Ben’jammin
A: This isn’t really a problem because as a parent, you usually just go through the entire list of available names before getting to the right one anyway. They’re probably all in trouble, so it’s not really an issue.
PSW
A: You will finally get an answer when you call their name.
Bryan F.
A: Just replace your children with the echos will cost you less in the long run.
John
A: No, in the Alexa app you can choose a wake-word with the choices being “Alexa”, “Amazon”, and “Echo”.
Seth Hollander
A: Yes, but you can always just donate your old items. Goodwill takes children now, just make sure to use their convenient “after hours” drop off. Huge donation deduction for tax purposes but may be offset by not having dependents.
S. Harper
A: While all the answers are funny, the ones I find MOST hilarious are the ones who don’t think this is a joke and are trying to solve your issue. Lol
Correction: I posted this morning that New York would allow charter “teachers” to be ncertified.
Not yet a done deal.
Stay tuned.
Dr. Priscilla Chan sounds like a lovely young woman. She is married to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and seems to be running the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, which will dispense billions of dollars.
She is a graduate of Quincy Public Schools in Massachusetts so we can hope that she is not reflexively hostile to public education.
Do you have any advice for her?
This is a soul-searching article about the resegregation of schools in the South.
After the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, racial discrimination was prohibited in any federally funded program. But in 1964, there was very limited federal aid to schools. However, in 1965, Congress passed the Elementary and Zsecondary Education Act, and there was quite a lot of federal money for schools that enrolled poor children. The Office of Education in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare took the Brown decision seriously. Top officials in the Lyndon B. Johnson told Southern districts that they would lose federal funding unless they presented real data on the racial distribution of students and faculty.
So did the federal courts. Southern districts, governors, and legislators offered “school choice” proposals. They were a farce. Federal officials rejected them. Federal courts rejected them.
Within ten years after the passage of ESEA, the South had more integrated public schools than any other region.
But then the great rollback began. With more conservative justices on the federal courts, the zeal to follow through on the promise of the Brown decision faded. The Department of Education, created in 1980, never had the energy and focus of the LBJ officials.
The authors of this article write:
“As we continue our “anti-dumbass” campaign to champion and improve Southern public schools for all students, we maintain our focus on the influence poverty, race, and racism continue to play in schools. Within the current political and cultural climate, there looms a growing sense of separation, where private interests replace democratic interests and the rich and powerful profit while the poor and underserved continue to struggle. You might think we were living in the 1930s or 1940s. This is, however, 2017, and the resegregation of public schools is increasing at an alarming rate.
“As parents and proud Southerners we constantly ask ourselves, are these the schools we want? Are these the schools we need? Is this the way we want to prepare our children for the future? What scares us the most is that this is happening without much pushback. As Southern schools continue to resegregate, as communities secede from larger county school districts and state legislatures vote to dismantle integration efforts, the result is greater separation and less equity for all students. Add to this the push for greater school choice and a national budget proposal that would move millions of tax dollars from public schools to for-profit charters as well as private and religious schools, and you have the potential to reverse decades of work to integrate Southern schools.
“The impact of rising numbers of segregated schools is highlighted in a recent report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office. According to the GAO report, “From school years 2000-01 to 2013-14 (the most recent data available), the percentage of all K-12 public schools that had high percentages of poor and black or Hispanic students grew from 9 to 16 percent.” In these schools, “75 to 100 percent of the students were black or Hispanic and eligible for free or reduced-priced lunch.” The most telling aspect of the report is this finding: “Compared with other schools, these schools offered disproportionately fewer math, science, and college-preparatory courses and had disproportionately higher rates of students who were held back in ninth grade, suspended, or expelled.”
“Again, we ask, are these the schools we want? Are these the schools we need? Is this how we want to prepare our children for the future? If the answer is “no,” then we have to resist the resegregation of public schools and promote inclusive schools that bring students together in integrated schools.”
Read on to learn about efforts to stop the tide of resegregation.
Amy Frogge ran for the Metro Nashville School Board in 2012 as a concerned mom who was also a lawyer. She was unaware of the pitched battle about charters and privatization. She had the simple goal of improving public schools, which made her an enemy of the privatizers. She ran again last year and was re-elected. Both times, she faced candidates who outspent her by vast sums with out-of-state reformer cash. She was previously named to the Blog’s Honor Roll for her fortitude in standing up to the vilification by reformers and sticking to her promise to fight for public schools.
In this post, she writes that it is a new day in Nashville. High-profile charter operators arrived with big promises, then crashed and burned. The Nashville community sees them for the frauds they are.
She hopes to alert parents in Kentucky and Mississippi to beware, now that rightwing legislators have opened their state’s to the same scammers.
She writes:
“While my personal views and political positions have not changed at all since my first run for school board, the atmosphere surrounding education policy has changed drastically, both in Nashville and at a national level. Locals have finally become aware of the driving forces behind the school privatization movement, and alliances have shifted. After a newspaper editor was fired last fall, all of the politically-motivated, factually inaccurate “hit pieces” about me in the local paper (accompanied by comically bad photos) ceased. Many of the bad actors have either been fired or fled town- headed off to other less suspecting places that have not yet caught onto the privatization movement.
“At our last board meeting, we discussed LEAD Academy, often touted as a Miracle Charter School. LEAD likes to promote its 100% graduation rate, but as we learned at our last board meeting, this statistic is at the very least misleading, if not entirely untrue. In reality, LEAD high school has a 40% attrition rate, meaning that nearly half of students who start high school at LEAD don’t make it through to graduation. (So much for that 100% graduation rate!) It’s also clear that LEAD does not serve all students. Only one English Learner at LEAD has reached graduation in four graduating classes, and only three students with special needs are on track to graduate this year. Furthermore, student performance is decreasing in all tested areas for grades 3-8 at LEAD. Over a one-year period at LEAD, 13.5% more students scored basic or below in math, 17% more students scored basic or below in English Language Arts, and 42.6% more students scored basic or below in science.
“Ravi Gupta, head of RePublic Schools, left Nashville last year after a number of disturbing events occurred at his “no excuses” schools: First, several parents accused the RePublic of “abuse and neglect” of students, and Teach for America (which supplied most of its teachers) also expressed concerns about RePublic. Then, a parent accused RePublic of copyright violation for photocopying book passages (a common practice in charter schools to save money) containing inappropriate reading materials for middle school students. And most recently, parents filed a multi-million dollar class action lawsuit against RePublic for violation of federal law. Gupta is now trying to recreate himself as a political consultant of sorts with a new group called “The Arena,” standing in opposition to the new President. Ironically, though, Gupta’s own work in schools has been very much aligned with Betsy DeVos’s education agenda.
“Shaka Mitchell, former head of Rocketship, also left his post. Rocketship came into Nashville amidst great fanfare, thanks in large part to former Mayor Karl Dean (and his education liaison Wendy Tucker, mentioned in the attached article). However, only a few years later, Rocketship is now performing in the bottom 3% of schools statewide. Recently, Rocketship was also found in violation of state and federal laws for failing to provide services for students with disabilities and for English learners. Furthermore, Rocketship was censured for requiring homeless students to buy uniforms. Despite all this, the state has expressed its intent to force Nashville to open another Rocketship school this fall. This should tell you ALL you need to know about the charter school movement. (Hint: It’s not “about the children”)…
“The PR wall has begun to crumble, the veil is pulled back, and the truth emerges. Evidence has emerged that charter schools are contributing to the re-segregation of school systems, that they have a negative fiscal impact on school systems, and that they do not improve educational outcomes for students.
“In response, what do these folks do? Do they try to address these problems or worry that perhaps they are increasing inequity within MNPS? No, they work on the “spin.” They go after the reporter who wrote the attached story, demanding a retraction. They manipulate, harass, bully, race-bait, and attack. They tell charter parents that board members “hate charter parents and their kids,” hoping to whip these parents into a frenzy. This is the toxicity we have experienced in Nashville for years.
“Watch out Mississippi and Kentucky. These problems are headed your way. Steel your spine, and buckle your seatbelt. It doesn’t matter how professional or evidence-based you remain; if you don’t toe the line for charter schools, you will be attacked. You will be demeaned, bullied, and belittled. Get ready for the smear campaigns and character assassinations. But pay them no mind. Stay on the right side of history, and keep standing up for the students. Keep standing up for justice and equity. Keep standing up for public education. There’s important work to be done.”
Open the link to read the attached article.
Blogger Peter Goodman reports that a last-minute deal was struck in the closing hours of the legislative session in New York State. Charter schools authorized by the State University of New York (which includes Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academy schools) will not be required to hire professional, certified teachers. This is yet more evidence that charter schools are not public schools. Teachers in public schools must be professionals, with appropriate professional education and certification. To become a public school teacher, applicants must pass three different tests.
Goodman writes:
“Within days of the end of the special session of the state legislature the SUNY Board of Trustees approved a new regulation – teachers in SUNY authorized charter schools are no longer required to be certified by the State Department of Education – charter school networks can now self-certify teachers: no college courses, no student teaching, no pre-service tests. Politico writes,
“New York City’s charter school sector appears to have secured a significant victory in the 11th hour of the Legislative session Wednesday night, with a set of regulations that will make it much easier for large charter networks to hire more uncertified teachers.
“All other teachers must complete a program approved by the state education department as well as meet CAEP Standards (Council on the Accreditation Of Education Programs) and pass three separate tests: the edTPA (a self-assessment developed by Stanford), Educating All Students (multiple choice and essay test emphasizing teaching children with disabilities and English language learners) and a Content Specialty Test, also multiple choice and essay testing knowledge and literacy within their area of expertise. SUNY teachers would not have to meet ANY of these requirements.”
Charters are already free to hire as much as 30% of staff from uncertified persons.
Bottom line: the public schools have genuine standards for teachers. The charters authorized by SUNY have no standards at all for their teachers.
Michael Gerson was a speechwriter for President zgeorge W. Bush.
He does not admire Trump, to say the least.
Here, he offers advice on dealing with a president who is out of touch with reality, impulsive, uninformed, has no ability to steady or unite the nation, and is unfit to lead.
Wherever there is a bipartisan consensus for charter schools, the Koch brothers see the state as ripe for expanding vouchers. Now they are targeting Colorado, where they have developed a strategic plan for the state.
Leading Democrats, such as wealthy Congressman Jared Polis and former State Senator Michael Johnston, have led the charge for charters and schiool choice (both have announced they are running for the Democratic nomination for governor.) Polis has opened two charter schools and fiercely supports them as a member of the House Education Committee. Johnston, former TFA, introduced legislation in 2011 to make student test scores count for 50% of teachers’ evaluation. The law has been an abject failure, although Johnston claimed it would guarantee that Colorado had great teachers, great principals, great schools.
DFER and Stand for Children have been active in Colorado, laying the groundwork for the Koch brothers.
And now they arrive with a plan to defund public schools and call it “opportunity.”
“COLORADO SPRINGS — In a nondescript office building on the north side of this conservative enclave, more than a dozen volunteers spent hours making calls to educate voters about a new initiative that will allow parents to use taxpayer dollars to send children to private schools.
“At the same time, just miles down the road, the political network behind the effort gathered hundreds of its wealthiest donors at a posh mountainside resort to raise money to support the campaign to remake the education system.
“The confluence of policy and politics epitomized how the conservative billionaires Charles and David Koch flex their organization’s muscle and spread an ideological agenda in states across the nation.
“The value of this network cannot be overstated,” said Stacy Hock, a Koch donor and conservative education advocate in Texas. “The ability to stand on the shoulders of the giant that is this network to make yourself more impactful and strategic changes the game.”
The Koch brothers plot a conservative resistance movement in Colorado Springs strategy session
Koch network to Trump administration: “You are never going to win the war on drugs. Drugs won.”
The phone calls to middle-of-the-road voters and presentation to donors in Colorado last week were part of the Koch network’s six-figure campaign to promote school choice and education savings accounts, or ESAs.
“The effort in Colorado involves the Americans for Prosperity Foundation and the Libre Initiative, a group focused on Hispanic community outreach. Together the organizations are making calls and sending flyers to voters this summer, two of which promote ESAs as a way to “give families the freedom to select schools, classes and services that fit the unique needs of their kids….
“The Koch network considers Colorado an attractive state for its message because public charter schools are a bipartisan cause. In the 2017 session, lawmakers equalized funding for charter schools with district schools.
“EdChoice, a conservative education advocacy organization aligned with the Kochs, commissioned a survey in 2015 to introduce Colorado to the ESA issue, finding strong support when cast in favorable terms.”
As you know, I was for many years involved in the rightwing corporate reform made cement. As I realized that the real end game was not to “reform” public schools but to privatize them, I became a skeptic. Then as I saw that all of their strategies were failing, I jumped ship. I am often asked why I changed my mind, and I try to explain that I realized that the reform movement was a hoax, with no evidence to support its strategies.
It turns out that I was not alone.
Mike Lofgren was a top-level staffer for Republicans in Congress.
From Wikipedia: “From 1995 to 2004, he was budget analyst for national security on the majority staff of the House Budget Committee. From 2005 until his retirement in 2011, Lofgren was the chief analyst for military spending on the Senate Budget Committee.”
After his retirement, he wrote books and articles about the weakness and corruption of both parties when campaign contributors dangled big money.
“In September 2011, Lofgren published an essay entitled Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult on the website Truthout. In it he explains why he retired when he did, writing that he was “appalled at the headlong rush of Republicans to embrace policies that are deeply damaging to this country’s future; and contemptuous of the feckless, craven incompetence of Democrats in their half-hearted attempts to stop them.” He charged that both major American political parties are “rotten captives to corporate loot,” but that while Democrats are merely weak and out of touch, the Republican Party is “becoming more like an apocalyptic cult.” He particularly described Republicans as caring exclusively about their rich donors; being psychologically predisposed toward war; and pandering to the anti-intellectual, science-hostile, religious fundamentalist fringe. Lofgren wrote that the Tea Party is “filled with lunatics” and that lawmakers used the “routine” vote to raise the debt limit—which Congress has done 87 times since the end of World War II—to create “an entirely artificial fiscal crisis.”[3] The essay received widespread media attention because of Lofgren’s status as a long-term, respected Republican civil servant. Truthout reported the piece received “over a million views.”[4][5][6][7][8]
Lofgren called the reaction to his essay “bewildering,” saying he wrote it not to settle scores, but because he felt he had a uniquely privileged view of the machinery of government which Americans deserved to know about. He added that he’d had “a good career” and no personal problems on Capitol Hill.[9]
In 2012, Lofgren published the book The Party Is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless and the Middle Class Got Shafted, receiving a starred review from Booklist, which described the book as a “pungent, penetrating insider polemic.”[10] The Washington Post called it “forceful, hard-hitting and seductive.”[11] “I wrote the book,” he said in a 2012 bookstore appearance, “because I am a concerned citizen.”[12]”
Check his Wikipedia entries for links to his writings.
This is an article he wrote in 2012 called “The Revolt of the Rich.”
Here is a brief excerpt:
“Being in the country but not of it is what gives the contemporary American super-rich their quality of being abstracted and clueless. Perhaps that explains why Mitt Romney’s regular-guy anecdotes always seem a bit strained. I discussed this with a radio host who recounted a story about Robert Rubin, former secretary of the Treasury as well as an executive at Goldman Sachs and CitiGroup. Rubin was being chauffeured through Manhattan to reach some event whose attendees consisted of the Great and the Good such as himself. Along the way he encountered a traffic jam, and on arriving to his event—late—he complained to a city functionary with the power to look into it. “Where was the jam?” asked the functionary. Rubin, who had lived most of his life in Manhattan, a place of east-west numbered streets and north-south avenues, couldn’t tell him. The super-rich who determine our political arrangements apparently inhabit another, more refined dimension.
“To some degree the rich have always secluded themselves from the gaze of the common herd; their habit for centuries has been to send their offspring to private schools. But now this habit is exacerbated by the plutocracy’s palpable animosity towards public education and public educators, as Michael Bloomberg has demonstrated. To the extent public education “reform” is popular among billionaires and their tax-exempt foundations, one suspects it is as a lever to divert the more than $500 billion dollars in annual federal, state, and local education funding into private hands—meaning themselves and their friends. What Halliburton did for U.S. Army logistics, school privatizers will do for public education. A century ago, at least we got some attractive public libraries out of Andrew Carnegie. Noblesse oblige like Carnegie’s is presently lacking among our seceding plutocracy.
“In both world wars, even a Harvard man or a New York socialite might know the weight of an army pack. Now the military is for suckers from the laboring classes whose subprime mortgages you just sliced into CDOs and sold to gullible investors in order to buy your second Bentley or rustle up the cash to get Rod Stewart to perform at your birthday party. The sentiment among the super-rich towards the rest of America is often one of contempt rather than noblesse….
“Since the first ziggurats rose in ancient Babylonia, the so-called forces of order, stability, and tradition have feared a revolt from below. Beginning with Edmund Burke and Joseph de Maistre after the French Revolution, a whole genre of political writings—some classical liberal, some conservative, some reactionary—has propounded this theme. The title of Ortega y Gasset’s most famous work, The Revolt of the Masses, tells us something about the mental atmosphere of this literature.
“But in globalized postmodern America, what if this whole vision about where order, stability, and a tolerable framework for governance come from, and who threatens those values, is inverted? What if Christopher Lasch came closer to the truth in The Revolt of the Elites, wherein he wrote, “In our time, the chief threat seems to come from those at the top of the social hierarchy, not the masses”? Lasch held that the elites—by which he meant not just the super-wealthy but also their managerial coat holders and professional apologists—were undermining the country’s promise as a constitutional republic with their prehensile greed, their asocial cultural values, and their absence of civic responsibility.
“Lasch wrote that in 1995. Now, almost two decades later, the super-rich have achieved escape velocity from the gravitational pull of the very society they rule over. They have seceded from America.
“Mike Lofgren served 16 years on the Republican staff of the House and Senate Budget Committees. He has just published The Party Is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 