Archives for the month of: August, 2017
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Laura Chapman: Beware Think Tanks Predicting the Future

By dianeravitch
August 28, 2017 //
26

Laura Chapman recounts the failed efforts to predict the jobs of the future:


In 2004, Achieve,Inc, the Education Trust, and Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, and William and Flora Hewett Foundation started marketing the myth that specific high school requirements would provide the necessary “college and career readiness” for “high-performance, high- growth jobs.”

The report: Ready or Not: Creating a High School Diploma that Counts was designed to say that American education had one main mission, preparing students for those jobs—projected to “ support a family well above the poverty level, provide benefits, and offer clear pathways for career advancement through further education and training. (p. 105).”

The writers relied on the 2002–03, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook, and course taking patterns and transcripts of a cohort of students who graduated from high schools in 1992 in order to make absurd claims about the “proper curriculum content” for entry into high-growth, well-paying jobs.

This effort, called the American Diploma Project, morphed into the Common Core State Standards, with math and ELA the be-all and end-all of education and the meme of “college and career readiness” implanted as if the only thing that mattered in education.

There was not an ounce of reliable information in that report. The economy tanked in 2008. It has not yet recovered.

Now the tech industry is pushing computer everything into school. Here is a recent account of who is doing this and how well. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/27/technology/education-partovi-computer-science-coding-apple-microsoft.html

Here are the Bureau of Labor statistics job projections for the next 10 years 2014-2014. These projections are modified every two years. A typical US worker has held 11 jobs before the age 44.

People who say that career planning should begin in pre-school and kindergarten are really doing damage to education. The “college and career” meme has been marketed as if there is nothing more that matters, and that these two emphases will guarantee a great future for students and the economy. NOT, NOT, NOT.

FASTEST GROWING OCCUPATIONS

Bachelors degree or higher required
Number of new jobs in thousands and median salary
Physical therapists 71.8 $85,000
Nurse practioners 44.7 $100,900
Physician assistants 28.7 $101,480
Statisticians 10.1 $80,500
Operations researcher analyst 27.8 $78,300

SOME POSTSECONDARY EDUCATION REQUIRED

Web developer 39.5 $ 66,310
Physical therapy assistants 31.9 $56,610
Occupational therapy assistants 14.1 $59,010
Commercial drivers 1.6 $49,090

FASTEST GROWING JOBS OVERALL

Home health aides 348.4 $22,600
Physical therapy assistants 31.9 $56,610
Occupational therapy assistants 14.1 $59,010
Physical therapy aides 19.5 $25,680
Wind turbine service technicians 4.8 $52,260

OCCUPATIONS WITH THE MOST JOBS
Personal care aides 458.1 $21,920
Registered nurses 439.3 $68,450
Home health aides 348.3 $22,600
Food services, fast food 343.5 $19,440
Retail sales 314.2 $22,680

Categories Economy

Emily Talmage: Why Aren’t We Talking About the Racism Called “No Excuses”?

By dianeravitch
August 28, 2017 //
42

Emily Talmage, who teaches in Maine, recalls the time when she applied to teach at a charter school. It was a chilling experience.

She writes:

When I was twenty-five, I interviewed at a charter school in Brooklyn.

Before I sat down to talk to the dean, I observed a kindergarten class that looked nothing like any kindergarten class I had ever seen: just shy of thirty children sitting in rows on a carpet, each with legs crossed and hands folded, all completely and utterly silent.

In my interview, the dean asked me what I noticed about the class.

“They were very well behaved,” I said.

“Yes, they were. But they sure don’t come in like that,” he answered. With icy pride in his voice, he said: “It’s only because of the hard work of our staff that they act like that.”

I took the job – foolishly – and soon found out what this “hard work” meant: scholars, as we called them, were expected to be 100% compliant at all times. Every part of the nine-hour school day was structured to prevent any opportunity for deviance; even recess, ten-minutes long and only indoors, consisted of one game chosen for the week on Monday.

We were overseers, really. Our lessons were scripted according to the needs of the upcoming state test, and so we spent our days “catching” scholars when they misbehaved, marking their misdeeds (talking, laughing, wiggling) on charts, and sending them to the dean when they acted their age too many times in one day.

There weren’t any white children at the school, but there I was – a white teacher, snapping at a room full of black children to get them to respond, in unison, to my demands.

…

Everyone in the nation is talking about our racist history, but do people know what type of racism is happening today, beneath our noses, under the banner of education reform?

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization

Farewell to the Gulf of Mexico: EPA Will Allow Dumping of Toxic Chemicals

By dianeravitch
August 28, 2017 //
42

The Gulf of Mexico sustains a large fishing and tourism industry. Not for long.

Scott Pruitt, head of the Environmental Protection Agency, wants to gut environmental protection regulations that prevent the dumping of toxic chemicals into the Gulf.

Pruitt sued the EPA a dozen times when he was attorney general of Oklahoma. Oklahoma now has so much fracking that fracking is blamed for extraordinary earthquakes in the state.

Fracking involves pumping chemicals into the earth to force the release of natural gas. What to do with the chemical waste? Pruitt says, dump it into the Gulf.

If you want to learn about fracking, see a film that was nominated for an zacademy Award called “Gasland.”

Categories Environment

Teacher Ken: Biden Says We Are Living Through a “Battle for the Soul of This Nation”

By dianeravitch
August 27, 2017 //
41

Kenneth Bernstein, who blogs at The Daily Kos as Teacher Ken, calls attention to a perceptive statement by former Vice President Joe Biden.

Biden writes:

“The giant forward steps we have taken in recent years on civil liberties and civil rights and human rights are being met by a ferocious pushback from the oldest and darkest forces in America. Are we really surprised they rose up? Are we really surprised they lashed back? Did we really think they would be extinguished with a whimper rather than a fight?”

One man has brought the forces of darkness out of the shadows.

What can we do?

“We have to do what our president has not. We have to uphold America’s values. We have to do what he will not. We have to defend our Constitution. We have to remember our kids are watching. We have to show the world America is still a beacon of light.”

The way to begin is to vote in 2018. Flip the Senate. Flip the House. Flip the state legislature. Go to town halls. Speak to your elected officials. Give them a spine if they don’t have one. Support candidates who support the common good. Insist that they speak up for public schools. Insist that they support adequate and equitably funded public schools, for the sake of our children and our future.

Categories Accountability

Reagan Comforted a Black Family Terrorized by the Klan. Would Trump Have Done This?

By dianeravitch
August 27, 2017 //
39

Let me start by saying that I know most of the readers of this blog dislike Ronald Reagan. Some despise him. Some remember that Reagan campaigned for the Presidency at the Neshoba County Fair in Mississippi in 1980 (not Philadelphia, Mississippi).

“But Reagan did somethingg in 1982 that is unimaginable from Trump. He read in the morning paper about a young black family in Maryland whose house Who won their civil case against a member of the Ku Klux Klan who burned a cross on their lawn. He and Mrs. Reagan paid them a visit.

“President Reagan read the story about the cross burning in his morning Washington Post. A black family in College Park, Md., had just won a civil suit against a young Ku Klux Klan leader who had been convicted of terrorizing them five years earlier.

“Reagan’s deputy press secretary, Larry Speakes, said the president was jarred by what had happened to Phillip and Barbara Butler. “That was the first thing on his mind this morning,” Speakes told The Post on May 3, 1982. White House Chief of Staff James Baker and Deputy Chief of Staff Michael Deaver walked into the Oval Office, and the first thing he said to them was, “ ‘I’ve read this story. I’d like to go see these people.’ ”

“Deaver found the Butlers at their jobs at the Government Printing Office, where they both worked as printers, and told them the president wanted to visit them at their home.”

“The Butlers had been newlyweds when they bought the house in 1976. They were the fifth black family to move into the neighborhood. They had lived there for five months when, on Jan. 30, 1977, the Klan burned the cross on their front lawn….

“He finished his last meetings at the White House at 4:15 p.m. Fifteen minutes later, he and first lady Nancy Reagan climbed aboard a helicopter on the White House lawn.

“A few minutes later, the helicopter landed in Beltsville, Md., and the president and first lady rode in a motorcade to the Butlers’ beige brick rambler in College Park Woods.

“The Butlers, their 4-year-old daughter, Natasha, and Barbara Butler’s mother, Dorothea Tolson, were waiting outside to greet them.

The Reagans arrived with a jar of gourmet jelly beans, the president’s favorite candy. The Butlers invited them inside, where they sat on the sofa in the living room.

“Rimer, who then was a Post Metro reporter, remembers how dignified the Butlers were. “My one memory is of how great the family was,” said Rimer, who now works in communications at Boston University. “My thought was, ‘How could someone do that to them?’ ”

“Inside the house, Reagan told the family: “I came out to let you know that this [cross burning] isn’t something that should happen in America.”

I can’t imagine Trump showing compassion to a black family.

Categories Accountability, Race

California: Testing Incoherence Continues

By dianeravitch
August 27, 2017 //
16

California can’t release its Common Core test scores yet, as promised, due to an unspecified “data issue.”

Categories Accountability, California, Testing

Ukraine Took Down the Last Statue of Lenin

By dianeravitch
August 27, 2017 //
22

Anne Applebaum writes about Russia and Eastern Europe for The Washington Post. She reports that Ukraine took down the last of 1,320 statues of Lenin. Her reflections about Eastern Europe bear on the question of why Confederate Monuments have suddenly become an issue under Trump when there were not, during eight years of Obama’s presidency. Why now?

She writes:

“I was in Warsaw on Nov. 17, 1989, the day that the city decided to take down its statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky. Given that Dzerzhinsky, a Polish aristocrat and dedicated Bolshevik, was best known as the founder of the organization that became the Soviet KGB, and given that hundreds of thousands of Poles were murdered or deported by the Soviet KGB, this was a popular decision. Crowds converged on the scene and cheered loudly as a crane removed the figure from its base.


“Why had it lasted so long if it was so unpopular? The statue was a symbol of Soviet domination, and while the Soviet-backed communist regime ruled the country, from 1945 to 1989, nobody dared remove it. Even after a non-communist government was finally elected in June 1989, it took some time before anybody thought about the statue. So why Nov. 17?

“Perhaps it was because eight days earlier, on Nov. 9, East Germans walked for the first time through the Berlin Wall. People felt that a historic moment had arrived. Change was in the air. Walls were falling, statues were toppling, and Warsaw wanted to participate in this symbolic revolution too.

“
A year later I was in Lviv, in western Ukraine, when that city decided to remove its Vladi­mir Lenin statue — another symbol of Soviet domination, bloody dictatorship, terror and famine. The cause of that decision was, once again, genuine political change. It was September 1990: Restrictions on politics and press had just been lifted, the debate about Ukrainian independence had just begun, and suddenly nobody was afraid of the Soviet state anymore. A crowd in the small town of Chervonograd had demolished its Lenin statue and Lviv followed suit; these things were viral, even back when there was no social media.


The removal of the Lenin statue was important not because it was political theater, but because it reflected real change, at least for some. In the space where the Lenin statue had stood, a lovely square in front of the opera house, people gathered to debate. Some felt afraid; others felt, as President Trump now says he does, that old statues were part of “history” and shouldn’t be removed. Nostalgia for the autocratic system that Lenin represented was still strong, and indeed many monuments to him remained all across Ukraine — at least until another wave of political change, sparked by a street revolution and a foreign invasion, inspired another wave of removals.

Just this month, 26 years after the U.S.S.R. ceased to exist, the Ukrainian government announced that it had finally removed every single remaining Lenin statue, all 1,320 of them.




I thought of both of these moments a few days ago, when I read the words of the writer Vann R. Newkirk II in the Atlantic about his childhood in North Carolina: “For most of my life I didn’t know Confederate statues could come down.” Nor did he know — I didn’t know either — that the statues to Confederate generals and soldiers in the American South were erected not in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War but decades later, as a part of the imposition of Jim Crow.

To anyone with experience of 1989-1990 in Europe, his earlier assumption that the statues were a hateful but an immutable part of the landscape seems familiar; so does his delight to discover, in 2017, that they can be removed.


But there is another parallel. Polish and Ukrainian statues came down as the result of a revolutionary moment, a sudden break in the political situation. In the United States in 2017, we are living through what feels to many like a similar, though not entirely analogous, revolutionary moment. The election of Trump, the first American president in decades to use unapologetically racist language — starting with his insidious slur that Barack Obama was not American, moving on to his reference to Mexican “rapists” and continuing with his refusal to condemn neo-Nazis — has smashed the ordinary rhythms of American political life. Suddenly, in Trump’s America, a statue honoring a Confederate leader looks like not just a boring monument to the distant past but a living political statement about the present.


As I’ve said, these movements have always been viral; there will be plenty of copycats, and some of them will be silly or self-serving, especially those organized by students who imagine that changing a building’s name changes something real. But the movement to topple Confederate statues is precisely the opposite: People want to change the statues because they want to resist something real — a real threat, which may be accompanied by real violence. As long as Trump is in office, the movements against Confederate monuments, from the public and from public officials, will continue. I hope they have the same success as protesters in Warsaw and Lviv did.

Categories Education Reform

John Oliver: The Ultimate Takedown of Alex Jones

By dianeravitch
August 27, 2017 //
7

Get a cup of coffee and sit down. John Oliver dissects Alex Jones, the rightwing provocateur who makes money saying insane things. Jones is the talk-show host who pushed the outrageous claim that the Sandy Hook massacre never happened, that it was staged by the federal government to promote gun control.

Oliver totally demolishes Jones’ credibility. Jones complained that his critics take his words out of context, so Oliver shows his remarks in full, in context. They don’t get any better.

This segment demonstrates the power of humor to inform and the power of evil to mislead.

Categories Fake News, Fraud, Humor

“Then They Came for Me”: The Complicated Story of Pastor Martin Niemoller

By dianeravitch
August 27, 2017 //
9

We all know the words attributed to the German Protestant Pastor Martin Niemoller, who was sent to Dachau by the Nazis. They appear at the back of the paperback edition of “The Diary of Anne Frank”:

“First they came for the Jews and I did not speak out — because I was not a Jew 


Then they came for the communists and I did not speak out — because I was not a communist


Then they came for the trade unionists and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist


Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak for me.
— (Pastor Niemoeller, Victim of the Nazis in Germany)”

It turns out that the story is far more complicated than we knew (as reader GregB has written here on more than one occasion).

The Washington Post explains here that Pastror Niemoller was a Hitler supporter and an anti-Semite. He became concerned that the Nazis were trying to politicize and control the church. His critical views led to his arrest and assignment to Dachau.

After the war, he toured American cities, and he said the things for which he is now remembered, but not always in the same words or the same order.

Categories Bias, Bigotry

Ariela Rosen: A Whisper in an Age of Shouting

By dianeravitch
August 27, 2017 //
5

Ariela Rosen is a high school senior in a public school in New York City. She wrote a beautiful article that was published on the op-ed page of the New York Times.

It is the story of a man you have never heard of: Charles Stover. There is a bench in Central Park in New York City dedicated to him. But only a bench.

She writes:

“Under his name a simple inscription proclaims him “Founder of Outdoor Playgrounds.” When I read that for the first time, I laughed. How could one person be the founder of playgrounds? And shouldn’t he get more than a bench?

“Even more absurd was what I found when I looked him up. His Wikipedia page was barely two paragraphs long and made no mention of playgrounds at all. The article mainly concerned the day in 1913 that Stover, after three years as New York City’s parks commissioner, went out to lunch … and didn’t come back. For 39 days.

“Naturally, this made me more than a little curious about the man. I’ve been looking for him ever since.

“The first thing I discovered was that almost nobody — not my parents, not my high-school teachers — knew who Stover was. This seemed strange to me because he was an enormously important figure. In 1886 he was a co-founder of the University Settlement House — the first settlement house in the United States — from which he spearheaded the growing reform movement in New York City. Stover was also involved in efforts to preserve Central Park and develop more parks and playgrounds in poor neighborhoods. In 1898 he founded, together with Lillian Wald, the Outdoor Recreation League, which sponsored the construction of playgrounds as a substitute for unsupervised street play. As parks commissioner, Stover created the Bureau of Recreation, which built dozens of playgrounds in its first three years, including DeWitt Clinton Park, Seward Park and Jacob Riis Park….”

“When Stover died in 1929, he left only a few books and papers, but his legacy went far beyond his possessions. He spent his time and money providing playgrounds, gardens, housing and other services for poor immigrant children and their families, all the while battling his depression…

“Stover believed — and his life proves — that it is possible to make a difference in the world without yelling. It is easy to get caught up in the shouting of politicians, or to want simply to walk away from it all. That is why it is more important than ever to listen to the stories of those around us.

“I plan to go on looking for Stover, but his bench has already taught me an important lesson: Sometimes the most powerful words are the ones that are whispered.”

What a lovely essay.

Ariela Rosen roused my curiosity, so I checked Stover’s Wikipedia entry. It was five paragraphs long.

It reads:

“Stover was born in Riegelsville, Pennsylvania, on July 14, 1861. He attended Lafayette College and graduated in 1881. He studied to become a Presbyterian minister at the Union Theological Seminary and graduated in 1884. He also took classes at the University of Berlin, before moving to Manhattan’s Lower East Side.

“In 1886, Stover founded the Neighborhood Guild on Forsyth Street, the first settlement house in the United States. In 1898, he and Lillian Wald, director of the nearby Henry Street Settlement, founded the Outdoor Recreation League (ORL), whose mission was to provide play spaces and organize games for the children of the densely populated Lower East Side. The ORL opened nine privately sponsored playgrounds and advocated that the City itself build and operate playgrounds. In 1902 the City assumed the operation of the ORL playgrounds, and in 1903 opened what is presumed to be the first municipally built playground in the nation, Seward Park in Manhattan’s Lower East Side; the ORL had opened an outdoor gymnasium there in May 1899, on city-owned land.

“In January 1910, Stover was named parks commissioner for Manhattan by New York City’s newly-elected mayor, William Jay Gaynor. Stover’s tenure was controversial; in July 1911 The New York Times reported that he was being asked to hand in his resignation. He did not resign and was not fired; in August 1911 he announced major plans were underway for Central Park and Riverside Drive Park. In April 1913 Stover said “I do not believe in the policy that the parks are merely places people to walk through and look at the trees and gaze at the landscapef from a distance, nor do I believe that any one should be permitted to destroy anything, but I take the position that certain parks of the asphalt and the lawns should be open most liberally to the young people for amusement, proper athletics, and recreation, under proper circumstances.

“In October 1913, Stover told his staff and coworkers that he was going out for lunch then he disappeared. In mid-November he was erroneously thought to have died in Delaware when a body resembling him was found. A week later, he was seen in Washington, D.C., by a former city official. In late November, a nationwide search began, which included sending a short film clip to 10,000 moving-picture places across the United States. Shortly thereafter, Stover mailed his letter of resignation from Cincinnati, and Ardolph Loges Kline, the Mayor of New York City, replaced Stover with Louis F. La Roche, Stover’s deputy. On January 28, 1914, Stover returned to the University Settlement House.[10]

“Stover spent the rest of his life developing a summer camp at Beacon, New York, operated by the University Settlement House. He died at the University Settlement House on April 24, 1929, at the age of 67, leaving an estate valued at only $500.”

I recommend that Ariela continue her search by reading about Mayor Gaynor, who appointed Stover as Parks Commissioner. He was shot in the neck by a discharged city worker, but survived. Gaynor was put into office by the Tammany Hall machine, but to the surprise of all, turned out to be an honest and dedicated public servant. I have a published collection of letters that he wrote to constituents, and they are masterpieces of wit and irascibility.

Categories History, New York City, Play, Real Education
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