Maria Bustillos writes here about “the smallness of Mark Zuckerberg” and why you should not give your personal information to Facebook.
She thinks he is running for President. The current occupant of the White House has demonstrated that anyone can do it and win, regardless of qualifications.
Beware.
We should have learned from Trump not to entrust our democracy to a billionaire with an inflated ego.
This story was published in 2016. It remains the best single description of the chaos that free-market advocates have inflicted on the children of Detroit.
Please read it. Don’t skim it. Read it.
Detroit is a city with many choices and very few good choices. It is a city overrun with charter schools. Many of them operate for profit. The companies profit, the children lose.
“Michigan leapt at the promise of charter schools 23 years ago, betting big that choice and competition would improve public schools. It got competition, and chaos.
”Detroit schools have long been in decline academically and financially. But over the past five years, divisive politics and educational ideology and a scramble for money have combined to produced a public education fiasco that is perhaps unparalleled in the United States.
“While the idea was to foster academic competition, the unchecked growth of charters has created a glut of schools competing for some of the nation’s poorest students, enticing them to enroll with cash bonuses, laptops, raffle tickets for iPads and bicycles. Leaders of charter and traditional schools alike say they are being cannibalized, fighting so hard over students and the limited public dollars that follow them that no one thrives.
“Detroit now has a bigger share of students in charters than any American city except New Orleans, which turned almost all its schools into charters after Hurricane Katrina. But half the charters perform only as well, or worse than, Detroit’s traditional public schools.
“The point was to raise all schools,” said Scott Romney, a lawyer and board member of New Detroit, a civic group formed after the 1967 race riots here. “Instead, we’ve had a total and complete collapse of education in this city…”
“The 1993 state law permitting charter schools was not brought on by academic or financial crisis in Detroit — those would come later — but by a free-market-inclined governor, John Engler. An early warrior against public employee unions, he embraced the idea of creating schools that were publicly financed but independently run to force public schools to innovate.
“To throw the competition wide open, Michigan allowed an unusually large number of institutions, more than any other state, to create charters: public school districts, community colleges and universities. It gave those institutions a financial incentive: a 3 percent share of the dollars that go to the charter schools. And only they — not the governor, not the state commissioner or board of education — could shut down failing schools.
“For-profit companies seized on the opportunity; they now operate about 80 percent of charters in Michigan, far more than in any other state. The companies and those who grant the charters became major lobbying forces for unfettered growth of the schools, as did some of the state’s biggest Republican donors.
“Sometimes, they were one and the same, as with J. C. Huizenga, a Grand Rapids entrepreneur who founded Michigan’s largest charter school operator, the for-profit National Heritage Academies. Two of the biggest players in Michigan politics, Betsy and Dick DeVos — she the former head of the state Republican Party, he the heir to the Amway fortune and a 2006 candidate for governor — established the Great Lakes Education Project, which became the state’s most pugnacious protector of the charter school prerogative…
”Operators were lining up to get into the city, and in 2011, after a conservative wave returned the governor’s office and the Legislature to Republican control for the first time in eight years, the Legislature abolished a cap that had limited the number of charter schools that universities could create to 150.
“Some charter school backers pushed for a so-called smart cap that would allow only successful charters to expand. But they could not agree on what success should look like, and ultimately settled for assurances from lawmakers that they could add quality controls after the cap was lifted.
“In fact, the law repealed a longstanding requirement that the State Department of Education issue yearly reports monitoring charter school performance.
“At the same time, the law included a provision that seemed to benefit Mr. Huizenga, whose company profits from buying buildings and renting them back to the charters it operates. Earlier that year he had lost a tax appeal in which he argued that a for-profit company should not have to pay taxes on properties leased to schools. The new law granted for-profit charter companies the exemption he had sought.
“Just as universities were allowed to charter more schools, Gov. Rick Snyder created a state-run district, with new charters, to try to turn around the city’s worst schools. Detroit was soon awash in choice, but not quality.
“Twenty-four charter schools have opened in the city since the cap was lifted in 2011. Eighteen charters whose existing schools were at or below the district’s dismal performance expanded or opened new schools…
”With about $1.1 billion in state tax dollars going to charter schools, those that grant the charters get about $33 million. Those institutions are often far from the schools; one, Bay Mills Community College, is in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, nearly 350 miles away — as far from Detroit as Portland, Me., is from New York City…
”“People here had so much confidence in choice and choice alone to close the achievement gap,” said Amber Arellano, the executive director of the Education Trust Midwest, which advocates higher academic standards. “Instead, we’re replicating failure.”
Some children have attended three, four, five different charters. They compete for the kids and the money.
When there was a bipartisan effort in the legislature to establish accountability, the DeVos family fought it and won.
Kate McKinnon is the most talented member of the Saturday Night Live cast (in my humble opinion). She plays Hillary Clinton, Jeff Sessions, Robert Mueller, Kellyanne Conway, Elizabeth Warren, Justin Bieber, and almost anyone else. She is a great mimic and a talented singer. She plays the piano, the cello, and the guitar. She is a public school graduate from a high school from Long Island.
Last night, she played Betsy DeVos, and SNL offered her the opportunity to rectify her flubbed appearance on “60 Minutes.”
Kate is hilarious, but no way can she capture the true DeVos sneer, which I think of as the billionaire sneer (“I am very very rich, but you are not.”)
A disturbing article in the Washington Post says that the Alt-Right and White Nationalists are co-opting the popular film “Black Panther” to promote their own hateful vision of ethno-nationalism.
White nationalists have embraced “Black Panther,” Marvel Comics’ blockbuster, to push their argument online that nation-states should be organized by ethnic groups, according to new research published Wednesday, an unlikely convolution of the ground-breaking African superhero movie.
One popular image circulating on far-right corners of the Internet shows the title character — the superhero king of the fictional, secluded and wealthy African nation of Wakanda — wearing a red “Make Wakanda Great Again” hat. This is an explicit homage to President Trump’s “Make America Great Again” campaign gear.
The image, first posted online in June, months before the Disney/Marvel film’s February release, carried a headline of “BLACK PANTHER IS ALT-RIGHT,” referring to the movement that espouses racist, anti-Semitic and sexist views and seeks a whites-only state. It claimed the superhero opposed immigration, diversity and democracy while favoring “ethno-nationalism” — a profound mischaracterization of the movie’s main themes, according to researchers at Data & Society, a New York-based think tank that studied far-right online conversation about the film. They said the film uses science fiction and “Afro-futurism,” a thematic exploration of African and African American history, to explore real-life questions of culture, race and politics.
This is such a crock of you-know-what. This country is thoroughly multicultural and that cannot be reversed or imagined away. We must learn to live together or we will surely destroy our great experiment in democracy.
Why do people choose to teach when they know they won’t get rich? Why do people choose to teach when they know that the working conditions are tough?
Steven Singer answers these questions and more. He loves teaching! There is nothing else he would rather do.
”My feet hurt, my temples throb from making a hundred tiny decisions every 40 minutes, my body feels like it’s already been through a war… But there is no place in the world I would rather be.
“Look what I’ve already accomplished today!
“I took about 50 anxious human beings and made them feel like it was going to be okay.
“I made 50 faces smile, sigh and relax…
”And in return I heard: “This is the best class!” “Mr. Singer is my favorite teacher!” “I don’t like to read or write but I’m really looking forward to doing your homework!”
How can you hear such things and not come away energized and new? How can you see such things and not feel a warm glow in your heart?…
“I go through my Individual Education Plans and see a catalogue of hurt and trauma. Babies, they’re just babies, and they’ve gone through more than I have in my whole life. And I’m more than three times their age!
How can I not come to school every day and give my very best?
“A public school is more than a building to me. It’s a temple to humanity. It’s where we go to offer ourselves to other people.
“Every action, every thought spent on these children is holy. The tiniest gesture is magnified through infinite time and space. When I help a child gain confidence in her reading, I help not just her. I help everyone she will ever come into contact with –her co-workers, her friends, family, even her own children if she someday has some.
“It’s humbling. Amazing. Staggering.
“Where else can you see the accumulated hurt of the world and actually make a dent in it? Where else can you reach out not just to a cause or an idea but to a living person?
“I’m lucky. I am so lucky. My circumstances allowed me to do whatever I wanted with my life.
“I could have become a doctor or a lawyer. I could have gone into business and made a whole mess of money. But I never wanted any of that. I wanted to make a difference. I wanted to help people…
“This is what I was meant to do. It’s the only thing I ever could and still respect myself.
“Some folks will tell you teaching is about numbers and data. Increase these test scores. Cut costs by this much. Boost profits, escalate the graph, maximize effectiveness.
“These people are fools.
“Teaching has nothing to do with any of that. It’s about the children. Being there for them. Being an active part of eternity.
“Thankful eyes, delighted smiles, joyous laughter. Ameliorating hurt. Igniting a tiny candle whose light will grow to encompass sights I will never see.
“That’s why I teach.”
Florina Rodov taught in a charter school in Los Angeles for a year. In this article, she describes her experiences.
It was an eye opening and nightmarish year.
She taught from 2005-2009 in a New York City public school,and got burned out by the testing, the paperwork, and the cultural contempt for teachers. She heard about the charters and was intrigued.
“On August 2, 2016, in sunny Los Angeles, I interviewed with the amiable principal of a charter school. A former teacher herself, she founded the school with an attorney friend to give middle and high school kids a college preparatory program that offered AP courses, sports, and the arts. The teachers at her school had a voice, she said, and the close rapport between students and staff made it feel “like a family.” I was inspired by her passion — and despite the fact that the school was moving for a third time in three years and had lost its co-founder and a few teachers (all of whom had resigned), I signed a non-union contract on the spot.
“But I soon realized there was a gulf between charter school hype and reality. Every day brought shocking and disturbing revelations: high attrition rates of students and teachers, dangerous working conditions, widespread suspensions, harassment of teachers, violations against students with disabilities, nepotism, and fraud. By the end of the school year, I vowed never to step foot in a charter school again, and to fight for the protection of public schools like never before.
”On August 15, my first day of work, I dashed into the school’s newest home, a crumbling building on the campus of a public middle school in South Los Angeles. Greeting my colleagues, who were coughing due to the dust in the air, I realized most of us were new. It wasn’t just several people who had quit over the summer, but more than half the faculty — 8 out of 15 teachers. Among the highly qualified new hires were a seasoned calculus teacher; an experienced sixth grade humanities teacher; a physics instructor who’d previously taught college; an actor turned biology teacher; and a young and exuberant special education teacher.
“When the old-timers trickled in, they told us there’d been attrition among the students, too: 202 of 270 hadn’t returned, and not all their seats had been filled. Because funding was tied to enrollment, the school was struggling financially.”
Working conditions were difficult. Everyone worked a 60-hour week. The SPED teacher had 48 students.
But that wasn’t all.
“The working conditions made it a test of endurance. The contract with the district that called for our school to get cleaned twice weekly wasn’t honored. The frazzled janitor only had time for us after he was done with the co-located middle school, which was almost never. I watched pieces of pepperoni decay on the stairs and globs of feces dry up on the bathroom wall over several weeks. During a lesson, my smart, sweet ninth graders were distracted by a roach striding across the floor, victoriously waving a cookie crumb in the air with its pincers. Needless to say, the lesson went to the insects.
“But the biggest threat was to our safety. We were in a gang-ridden, drug-infested area — but there was no security guard or emergency plan in place. And even without outside factors, it was quickly becoming a climate of terror inside the school, as well. When a senior grabbed a teacher’s ass, the principal didn’t expel him (she couldn’t afford to lose more students) — so he continued sexually harassing her, and it felt like there was nothing we could do to stop him…
”Last year, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos quipped that picking a school should be as easy as choosing Lyft, Uber, or a taxi. In California — the Wild West of the charter sector because of the schools that pop up indiscriminately — it is that easy. The result is chaos: Schools struggle to establish themselves, teachers quit, and kids bounce around from school to school at a head-spinning rate. One of my seventh graders had attended seven schools over the course of seven years…Due to this school-hopping culture, only 16 seniors remained of the 43 freshmen who had enrolled at our charter in 2013.”
There are no doubt good charters, bad charters, every kind of charter. What is the value of disrupting a nation’s public schools recklessly, without regard to quality or consequences?
Renegade Teacher hast taught in both public schools and charter schools in Detroit. He writes here about the highly profitable fraud of online charter schools. Among their most prominent supporters are Betsy DeVos (who invested in them, and now advocates for them) and Jeb Bush, who relentlessly promotes online learning.
From his own experience as a teacher, he saw what online learning lacks: human relationships between students and teachers and between peers. It is soul-deadening.
“Online education in the K-12 sphere is a growing trend- as of 2015, there were some 275,000 students enrolled in online charter schools. In my home state of Michigan, from 2010 to 2014, the number of students in Online Charter Schools increased from 718 students to 7,934 students (over 1000% increase).
“Private, for-profit companies (using public funds) are cashing in- the two largest online charter companies, K12 and Connections Academy, are raking in an estimated $1 billion per year (as of 2014). The motive is profit over substance: less operating costs, less teachers, and less building maintenance.
“The results have been damning: according a study from the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CREDO), students in online charters lost an average of about 72 days of learning in reading and 180 days of learning in math IN THE COURSE OF AN 180-DAY SCHOOL YEAR. They could have had equal math progress if they had spent the entire year asleep.
“In Philadelphia, a system composed of mainly poverty-stricken Black and Latinx students, online schools educated more than one-third of students as of 2014 [1]. The kicker is that, between 2011 and 2014, 100% of those students failed their state achievement tests. 100%!!! [2].”
The biggest online charter school in Ohio recently collapsed, both an academic and financial disaster.
Renegade Teacher thinks they should be banned. They are educational frauds.
Joanne Yatvin is a former teacher, principal, superintendent, and president of the National Council of Teachers of English.
Far too many politicians and ordinary citizens have forgotten that the purpose of American education is as much to support a democratic society, as it is to prepare students to be active citizens, in charge of themselves and their communities. They have also forgotten that the proof of the pudding is not how well our students’ test scores compare with those of other countries but the proportion of American citizens who are leading intelligent, productive, and caring lives.
Ideally, civic learning begins and continues for children at home, mostly by watching, listening, and imitating what good parents do. But not all homes are wise and harmonious, and even the best ones cannot offer the full range of experiences that civic maturity requires.
Traditionally, schools were expected to reinforce civic actions as children grew older, such as developing friendships with students of different backgrounds and taking responsibility for their own behavior. But now the pressure to raise test scores and increase graduation rates has forced most schools to abandon those responsibilities. In enacting harsh discipline policies and expecting academic achievement beyond what is normal, the demands for better test scores have all but wiped out the opportunities for teachers to teach and students to learn the basics of good citizenship. In addition, schools have been forced to reduce or eliminate recesses, and cut back on classes such as art, music, and physical education, where students are most likely to interact positively.
Although teachers do not have the power to change the school curricula or the emphasis on testing, they can eliminate some of the harsh practices that have come with them. Teachers may still set up processes in the classroom that allow students to have power and work together, such as selecting books to read, planning projects, and developing classroom rules. When students feel that “this is our classroom” rather than the teacher’s personal domain, they will learn how to be responsible citizens in their own school community.
At the school-wide level it is up to administrators to establish policies that respect students’ rights and personal dignity, even when they have broken the rules. One common practice should be giving students a fair hearing before setting any punishment. That means a private meeting with the adults involved after everyone’s temper has cooled. In really serious matters, a hearing before a committee made up of the principal, a few teachers, and one or two community members is the best choice. As for consequences, schools should reconsider suspensions and expulsions for minor offenses by older students and any errors by young children.
The next step in civic education is having students share decision making with adults in ways that are age-appropriate. For instance, elementary grade students can work with teachers to choose new playground games and set the rules of participation, while high school students should serve on groups that make decisions about what is best for them, such as curriculum committees and even the local School Board.
In their free time students of all ages should be encouraged to join with adults on local projects such as planting a community garden, adopting a road, or building a playground in a neighborhood that has none.
Once more, I remind you that giving all this attention to student citizenship is not an unreasonable expectation. Until high stakes testing took over our schools, demanding that every school day and every bit of student and teacher effort be dedicated to raising test scores, public support for character building in schools was common. But now, the legislators concerned about school “accountability” have no interest in how students treat each other or how schools treat their students.
Concern for the growth of responsibility and humanity in our children should never be out of style.
Education Week reports that the headmaster of Barron Trump’s private school issued a statement opposing the arming of teachers.
“The head of St. Andrew’s Episcopal School—where President Donald Trump’s son Barron attends—joined dozens of other Maryland private schools in urging the president, Congress, and state policymakers to improve background checks, especially for automatic weapons and strengthen mental health measures.
“And they don’t want to see the schools arm teachers with guns. The heads of school called that move—which has been embraced by Trump and U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos—”antithetical to our profession as educators,” wrote St. Andrew’s head, Robert Kosasky and more than 100 other heads of school in an open letter published as an advertisement in the Baltimore Sun this week. The letter is also slated to be published in the Washington Post this weekend.”
Stephen Dyer, a former legislator and currently a fellow at think tank Innovation Ohio, wonders why the state of Ohio is considering legislation to have the state dissolve the state board of education. He wonders if the move is payback for meddling with the fraudulent practices of the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow, which rewarded legislators for favoring ECOT and ignoring its inflated enrollments. Is it mere coincidence that five of the eight sponsors of the legislation received generous gifts from the owner of ECOT?
Be sure to read Dyer’s testimony to the legislature on HB 512 and why it should be dropped.
Bill Phillis, founder of the Ohio Coalition for Equity and Adequacy, writes that HB 512 is an outrage and is unconstitutional.
“HB 512 is an affront to the Ohio Constitution-a change in governance of the State Education agency must be submitted to Ohioans on a statewide ballot
“HB 512 is a sinister end-run around the Ohio Constitutional provision for a state board of education and a superintendent of public instruction employed by the Board. HB 512 essentially proposes the elimination of a constitutional provision by legislation. The legislature has no right to transfer the State Board of Education operation to the Governor’s office.
“The crafters and other proponents of HB 512 are hoping to slip daylight past the rooster. They are trying to steer the attention of folks, including witnesses at the hearings, away from the fact that this is a constitutional issue subject to the voters of Ohio.
“HB 512 needs to be dropped. If state officials are serious about improving governance of the state education agency, they will propose an amendment to add constitutional language to require that all state board members are elected.
“The crafty scheme of leaving a hollow shell of the State Board of Education in the Constitution by transferring its responsibilities to the governor’s office is blatant contempt for Ohio’s highest governing document.
“Ohioans should be outraged with state officials who trample on the Constitution.”
William L. Phillis | Ohio Coalition for Equity & Adequacy of School Funding | 614.228.6540 | ohioeanda@sbcglobal.net| http://www.ohiocoalition.org
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