Mercedes Schneider is a fearless fighter for truth, accuracy, public schools, and the common good. She has great research skills and unstoppable determination. She wrote three books three years in a row during her summer break. She is a knight in shining armor for students and teachers. We all owe her our thanks for her relentlessness.
Today is her 50th birthday. Open this link to learn what her birthday wish is. You can thank her too.
Sad. So sad.
The Legacy Academy Charter school in Titusville in Broward County in Florida may not be able to open its doors. It failed to meet minimal standards for health and safety.
The superintendent said he and the local board are very pro-choice, but the school is not ready. A final decision will be made on August 8.
Parents are scrambling to make alternative arrangements.
As Secretary DeVos might say, why do health and safety requirements matter when parents want their children to attend? Shouldn’t their choice end the discussion?
Very sad.
Betsy DeVos asked the superintendent of the Grand Rapids public schools to bring together a group of School Superintendents. That is, people who actually work in public schools, a sector previously viewed by her as hostile territory. She has publicly described public schools as “dead ends,” so she must have thought she was condescending to meet with a bunch of losers.
Here is a report about the meeting.
The Superintendents told her what they wanted. None mentioned school choice. Which is too bad because that is the only subject she cares about.
Sometime last fall I wrote a post about the risk of the election being hacked. This was based on my experience on a federal commission appointed to study what went wrong in the 2000 election and to make recommendations about how to avoid another fiasco. The commission was chaired by former Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. One of the issues we investigated was the reliability of voting machines. Everyone wanted to get rid of the “hanging chads” that marred the voting in Florida.
The obvious answer was to switch to electronic machines. No hanging chads. No uncertainty. We commissioned a study of voting machines. The most foolproof machine was the mechanical one that was used in New York City and other places. The voter goes into a booth with a curtain. When he pulls a giant lever, the curtain closes. He or she pulls little levers to cast a ballot. When the voter pulls the big lever to open the curtain, his vote is recorded. Nothing ambiguous. However, this machine was becoming obsolete, the manufacturer was not making them anymore as demand for electronic machines grew.
The experts told us that the electronic machines were susceptible to hacking but no one took that seriously. Who would hack an election?
Now we learn that hacking machines is easy. The more they are networked, the easier it is.
“LAS VEGAS – One of the nation’s largest cybersecurity conferences is inviting attendees to get hands-on experience hacking a slew of voting machines, demonstrating to researchers how easy the process can be.
“It took me only a few minutes to see how to hack it,” said security consultant Thomas Richards, glancing at a Premier Election Solutions machine currently in use in Georgia.
“The DEF CON cybersecurity conference is held annually in Las Vegas. This year, for the first time, the conference is hosting a “Voting Machine Village,” where attendees can try to hack a number of systems and help catch vulnerabilities.
“The conference acquired 30 machines for hackers to toy with. Every voting machine in the village was hacked.”
Tom Ultican, a teacher of math and physics in Southern California, sat in on two local school board meetings recently. People argued. They disagreed. They berated board members. They made their voices heard. Democracy is inefficient and messy. Sometimes people win even though their ideas seem half-baked.
So-called self-described reformers think that the way to get rid of dissension is to get rid of local school boards. They like mayoral control and state control. They like private management. They don’t like democracy. It is messy.
David Smith of The Guardian, a British publication, writes that Betsy DeVos “is viewed by many in the sector as its most dangerous and destructive since the post was created by Jimmy Carter in 1979. DeVos, a devout Christian, stands accused of quietly privatising schools, rescinding discrimination guidelines and neutering her own department’s civil rights office. Along with the attorney general, Jeff Sessions, she is said to be at the tip of the spear of Trump’s illiberal agenda.”
Trump doesn’t care for the details of policies he supports. He has left DeVos alone to do whatever she wishes.
Neil Sroka, spokesman for the liberal pressure group Democracy for America, said: “Trump doesn’t care about education, much like he doesn’t care about healthcare in any meaningful way. Betsy DeVos has been given a blank cheque to do pretty much whatever she wants. And what she is doing in the department of education is the dream of the rightwing ideologues who work on education policy.”
Critics point to DeVos’s record in Michigan, where she used her wealth to push legislators to defund public education in favour of for-profit charter schools. Students’ test results have plummeted as a consequence, they argue.
Sroka, who is based in Detroit, said: “What’s so amazing is that Betsy DeVos and the DeVos family have almost singlehandedly destroyed public schools in the state of Michigan. They’ve gone from some of the best in the country to among the worst in the region. It’s mind-boggling that anyone would put her in charge of education policy.”
If Michigan is her petri dish, DeVos has demonstrated that her ideas have failed. And now she is free to push them obsessively on the nation.
A charter school in Clay County, Florida, received two consecutive F grades from the state and is losing its contract.
But never fear!
The Orange Park Performing Arts Academy will not close! It is converting to a private school and has assured its students that they are all eligible to receive scholarships from the state of Florida!
“The charter has been terminated, the school has not closed. The district has no power to close Orange Park Performing Arts Academy, they can terminate their contract. We need to be very clear because at the end of the day, it’s all about the students,” said Chris Norwood, president and founder of the Miami-based Florida Association of Independent Charter Schools Inc.
Yes, it is all about the students!
Here is the letter that the school sent to parents.
Who will save these children from a failing charter school that will now be a failing private school?
#FailureIsAnOption
Carol Burris has written a bombshell piece exposing the links that connect charter schools, political money, and teacher certification.
Wall Street gives heavily to Governor Cuomo. Hedge fund managers love charter schools, those entrepreneurial start-ups that they identify with. Charter schools in New York have a serious problem retaining teachers. Some charters have a teacher turnover rate exceeding 50% every year. Several charters authorized by the State University of New York (SUNY) had teacher attrition rates of at least 70%. The charter committee of SUNY was appointed by Governor Cuomo. It is considering a plan to allow new teachers to bypass the state’s high standards and to gain their teaching credential from the charter. This credential would not be recognized by any public schools in New York State.
Want to know what’s behind all of these machinations?
Let’s look at the confluence of Cuomo-appointed SUNY board members to large contributions of charter boards to Cuomo’s campaigns[1].
“The corporation with the largest number of charter schools under the control of the SUNY Charter School Institute is the Success Academy charter chain, run by Eva Moskowitz. Her political action committee, the Great Public Schools PAC, contributed $65,000 to Cuomo in 2011-2012 and another $50,000 to date in 2017. Success Academy Chairman Daniel Loeb, founder and chief executive of Third Rock Capital, and his wife, have directly contributed over $133,000 to Cuomo. Since 2015, Loeb has added $300,000 to Moskowitz’s PAC, and another $270,000 to other PACs that support Cuomo. That’s more than $700,000.
“Other Success Academy present or former board member families who contributed over $100,000 either directly to, or to PACS, supporting Cuomo include: Andrew and Dana Stone ($280,000), Bruce Kovner ($130,000); Joel and Julia Greenblatt ($280,000), John and Regina Scully of California ($110,000), John Petry ($130,000) and Daniel Nir and his wife Jill Braufman ($152,500). An additional nine other Success Academy Board members, including three who live outside New York state, collectively contributed hundreds of thousands directly or indirectly to Cuomo. Most of the contributions are direct donations.
“The Success Board is only one example of many. Paul Tudor Jones is the founder of Excellence Boys Charter School of Bedford Stuyvesant, which is also authorized by the SUNY Charter Board. He and his wife, who both live in Connecticut, contributed $400,000, with most of the contributions going into PACs that gave to the governor. Even the charter-loving Waltons, who don’t live in New York, have jumped in — nearly $100,000 in direct contributions to Cuomo and over $100,000 into PACs. And it doesn’t end there. Charter board members from the Harlem Children’s Zone to Hebrew Academy Charter Schools contribute large sums of money to Cuomo.”
That kind of money buys a lot of friendship.
We will see if it is enough to establish a special route for charter school teachers: one with lower standards.
Chris Taylor, a Democratic State Assemblyman from Madison, Wisconsin, joined ALEC so he can learn what the far-right advocacy group is up to. He attended the recent conference in Denver where Betsy DeVos spoke.
He wrote about what he learned here.
He writes:
The issue of the moment for ALEC is public education—that is, undermining it. ALEC members are foaming at the mouth for the now-endless opportunities to further privatize public schools, long a central goal. When he was governor of Wisconsin in the early 1990s, Tommy Thompson implemented the first state voucher scheme in the nation—an idea he acquired from an ALEC conference.
Taylor describes DeVos’s speech.
And he adds:
DeVos, like most of the people at ALEC, dismisses the collective good in favor of the individual benefit. Our public education system was designed to collectively educate the masses, in hopes that democracy would thrive. Her priority, and ALEC’s agenda, are otherwise.
After bashing the federal government and federal program, her answer for change is…get ready…a federal program to promote school choice, charters and vouchers!
Proponents know their universal voucher scheme, where public dollars flow directly to families rather than to schools, makes it impossible for a public-school infrastructure to survive. How do you maintain public school facilities and staff when you have no guaranteed funding?
For ALEC, it is all about tearing down our public-school infrastructure so corporate privatization efforts can move in and make a buck.
Proponents of privatization have abandoned their claim that vouchers offer better education, so now they are selling choice for the sake of choice.
The Trump Justice Department plans to sue colleges and universities that engage in affirmative action to favor students of color for the sake of diversity.
Vox and several other websites said this is a good time to remember how Jared Kushner got admitted to Harvard.
Of course few will be surprised that Kushner’s father, Charles Kushner, a wealthy and connected developer and political donor, helped him get in. But the details of just how that happened, described in Daniel Golden’s thoroughly reported 2007 book The Price of Admission, remain remarkable to this day.
What Golden found, essentially, was that Jared’s father handed Harvard (a school he did not attend) a big pile of money just as Jared was starting to apply to colleges. Around the same time, Jared’s dad got his US senator to contact another US senator to arrange a chat with Harvard’s dean of admissions.
Happily for the Kushner family, Jared was then admitted. But several officials at Jared’s high school outright told Golden that they found the choice puzzling, since his grades and academic record really didn’t seem to merit it.
Two senators contacted Harvard on behalf of young Kushner, Ted Kennedy and Frank Lautenberg, both Democrats.
The school that Jared attended was taken aback when he was admitted and far better qualified students were rejected.
If AG Jeff Sessiono wants to stop preferential treatment, then he will surely investigate universities that set aside seats for underqualified boys whose daddies offer large contributions.
Diane Ravitch's blog 