Jullian Vasquez Heilig got the right terminology: The Texas Education Agency has pulled a “gangster move” on black and brown children in Houston public schools. TEA has warned the Houston Independent School Board that it must privatize the 10 lowest performing schools or face a state takeover.
Guess what? Every district has a bottom 1%, a bottom 5%, a bottom 10.
But only gangsters would threaten to shut down and takeover the whole district if the bottom 10 were not handed over for privatization.
Mike Morath, the state commissioner, failed to turn Dallas into an all-charter district, and now he is plotting to put more charters wherever he wants, whenever he wants.
Morath is a software developer who served on the Dallas school board, then was appointed state commissioner. He is not an educator. He is a vandal. He has no ideas about improving schools. His only ideas are how to privatize them and hand them off to the corporate sector that is hungry for more taxpayer dollars.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Would love to know how many states have an actual educator (and, personally, I wouldn’t count someone like John White in Louisiana) as state superintendent/commissioner of education.
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“Energized For STEM Academy Inc., an organization run by NAACP Houston Branch President James Douglas ….”
What?!
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Once these privateers establish a beachhead, they will stop at nothing to expand privatization. In Texas it is gangster tactics. In Pennsylvania the corrupt legislators refused to give the governor a budget unless he agreed to more charters in Philly. We need more elected school board members and fewer appointees that represent the interests of the wealthy and corporations. Such thuggery and extortion should not be tolerated. The education of young people should not be bargaining chips of politicians and bureaucrats.
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When the “education” of young people used as bargaining chips for chaos, invasion and a lucrative blame-based test/charter reform is exposed as the actual “non-education” of our lowest scoring children.
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The fact that public education is part of state law IMHO implies that the “free market” was never in the picture. Education is a state responsibility, and it is implied that should be free of outside influences that result in chaos and instability for our most vulnerable students.
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Another month where public school kids are ignored while the adults all chase vouchers:
“U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos met with Pentagon officials Thursday to talk about one of her favorite topics: Extending school choice to the children of military personnel.
The meeting has stoked fears among school districts that receive Impact Aid that the Trump administration is planning to put its muscle behind a bill sponsored by Rep. Jim Banks, R-Ind., and Sens. Ben Sasse, R-Neb., and Tim Scott, R-S.C.”
They simply don’t serve public school families. They contribute nothing of value to our schools. We’re paying thousands of public employees to do nothing all day but promote private schools- working for something like 3% of families.
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“Morath is a software developer who served on the Dallas school board, then was appointed state commissioner. He is not an educator.”
What is it about techies (especially software developers) that makes them believe they are experts on everything?
I worked with them for years and still have no clue to the mystery.
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And, I don’t like the way these techies of educational software (who know nothing about how kids learn) think. So, why would I want to use their software?
I am NOT willing to let some techie make decisions for teachers. They don’t know as much as teachers and don’t care about the HARM they inflict on students, teachers, and in the end the general condition of this country.
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If we sincerely want more people to finish college, and increase the college completion rate, we must fix the high schools. see
https://www.chronicle.com/article/Want-More-College-Students-to/243101?cid=wcontentgrid_40_3
Students in minority groups, are particularly hurt, when high schools do not prepare them properly for college-level work.
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Charles, if we want more students to go to college, the government must make higher education affordable.
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AMEN, Diane.
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And spend the proper resources to ensure that all children have the proper support to live up to the potential that they seek.
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Absolutely. And until we do, we shouldn’t want more students to go to college. Nobody, but especially not first-generation college graduates, should be saddled with that kind of enormous debt.
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I agree, that if college costs were lower, more students would be able to go. How about working to increase the college completion rate, and ensuring that students who can afford college, will be more likely to finish their degree programs? According to the article, high schools in minority areas, are not adequately preparing their students for college success. I must find myself in total agreement with this appraisal.
I agree that lowering the financial bar to college is a laudable goal. But even if college were free, and we paid students to attend, how can they succeed, when they cannot write a coherent sentence? Or perform simple mathematical equations?
Q Too many public high schools are failing, especially those serving low-income students of color. The (WashDC)chancellor lost his job, but the students in such schools are losing much more. These are the very students who, if they enroll in college, are most likely to drop out before completing degrees. END Q Amen and Amen!
Q Now, in the backlash, nearly 60 percent of the district of columbia’s public-high-school seniors might not graduate this year END Q
Right here in the nation’s capital, 60 (sixty) percent of the seniors might not graduate. And can you imagine the quality of the education, that the remaining 40% will have? Will these students have a prayer of coping with college-level work?
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“. . . we must fix the high schools. . . :
When one starts with a falsehood one ends up with a falsehood. Crap in, crap out, GIGO or however you want to label it.
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@Duane: Did you read the article? It is from the Chronicle for Higher Education, a respected journal. It is the author’s opinion, that “we must fix the high schools. This is an opinion, in which I must wholeheartedly concur.
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Not yet. I was responding to your statement, nothing more. I stand by my response.
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Exactly. “Fix the high schools” betrays the ignorance of the speaker.
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@Laura Chapman: The author of the article under discussion is Patricia McGuire, president of Trinity Washington University. She graduated college cum laude, and earned her law degree from Georgetown. Are you asserting that she is ignorant? see
https://www.trinitydc.edu/president/biography/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patricia_McGuire
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If we want more people to go to college, we have to have jobs for them to do once they graduate.
BTW, how exactly do you propose we “fix” high schools? Should we make them more like KIPP and other “no excuses” schools that tell kids exactly what they can and can’t do every second of the day? Because obedience is such an important real life skill?
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Read the article: https://www.chronicle.com/article/Want-More-College-Students-to/243101?cid=wcontentgrid_40_3
Here are some ideas:
Q Faculty collaboration: Stronger collaborative relationships among school and college teachers across all disciplines can strengthen college readiness. The Yale National Initiative to strengthen teaching in public schools is one model that pairs faculty members in the sciences, arts, and humanities with high-school teachers for a sustained partnership in curriculum and pedagogical development. Successful teacher institutes are already flourishing in New Haven, Conn.; Philadelphia; New Castle County, in Delaware; and Tulsa, Okla.; and Trinity is working with the Yale National Initiative to establish a similar program in Washington, D.C. END Q
How about having college teachers liaison with high schools? By communicating the requirements and topics that incoming freshmen are going to be dealing with, high schools could adjust and improve their curriculum, and help the students prepare more adequately for college-level work.
Q Colleges should devote more intellectual capital to informing and shaping school-reform projects, including research that reveals the real and devastating impact of poverty, violence, racism, and trauma on the ability of children to learn effectively. We should propose specific reform strategies across disciplinary areas, from health-care policy to nutrition and food security, criminal-justice reform, housing and child care, and other social services that support improving educational outcomes in marginalized neighborhoods. ENDQ
Colleges have to deal with the students who step out of a high school classroom, and into a college classroom. How about having colleges go directly into the ‘hood, and work to relieve the serious problems of safety, drugs, crime, housing, illegitimacy, and the host of social problems that hammer the kids daily?
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If you don’t recognize that states have shifted the cost of college from the public to the student, you miss the point.
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Jobs are the most greatest need for the educated. Too many young people graduate and cannot find the type of employment opportunties that other generations of college graduates had. They are part of a large network of under employed young people. What is worse, many of them believed that college would pay off in the end so they borrowed thousands to achieve their dream, but their reality is a nightmare of debt, under employment and no way to pay back the enormous debt.
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I concur that employment for college graduates is a necessity. No one disputes that. One way to help college graduates to secure employment after graduation, is to advise college students, where the jobs are, and what skills are in demand.
Maybe then, fewer students would be taking out degrees in recreation, Italian literature, sociology, and other such fields which are already overcrowded, and the career prospects are dim.
Colleges should be steering students into fields like engineering, computer science, petroleum technology, robotics, etc. where there are shortages of qualified personnel, and career prospects are much brighter.
Who is to blame, when a student takes out huge college loans, to earn a degree where unemployment is the norm?
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Lowering college costs, and enabling more qualified students to attend college, is truly a laudable goal, and most reasonable people support this goal.
Assisting high schools, in reforming their programs, to enable more students to be able to cope with college-level work, is also a truly laudable goal. Assisting students who are able to go to college, to actually complete their degree programs, and secure employment after graduation, is also a truly laudable goal.
This is not a case of “either-or”. Why not work together, to accomplish all of these goals?
Educating young people, and ensuring their place as productive citizens, is both cost-effective, and a clear moral imperative. If we fail our youth, we have failed our own society.
“In this world, God’s work must truly be our own” – John F. Kennedy.
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Charles, first, I would ask, what is your definition of “fix schools”? Because this type of language is used by reformers whose sole goal is the privatization of education for profit. They fail to look beyond invalid tests as their evidence. The lowest performing schools are often the charters, which are touted as the solution to improving schools. Yet few acknowledge this lackluster performance, because doing so would not fit their goal of expanding the for-profit industry. We’ve seen how this turned out in healthcare, and I for one do not want my tax dollars lining the pockets of CEOs and stockholders.
If by “fixing schools” you mean properly funding them, then I’m all for it. You have to remember, kids in inner-city schools are not starting from the same starting line as kids from suburban schools. Please forgive the golf analogy, but it’s like putting the poorest kids at the men’s tee with a nine iron, and expecting them to drive as far as the suburban kids teeing off from the ladies tee with a driver.
Teachers in struggling schools need the same tools and resources as the teachers in the suburbs. They need smaller class sizes. They need art, music, recess, and quality after-school programs – usually the first things to go when money gets tight. They need pre-school. And, quite frankly, what would get the most mileage with “improving” schools is ensuring that kids don’t come to school hungry, that they have adequate food, shelter, and personal safety (Mazlow), so that they can learn properly. There are wonderful, caring, dedicated teachers fighting an uphill battle every day in struggling schools, usually hinging around sociological problems they have neither the power nor resources to solve, but must shoulder the blame when kids fail to meet goals on standardized tests. No kid is “standard”. Each should be measured individually for growth, not compared to suburban kids born with silver spoons, then punished for coming up short. College-readiness is great…but the way to achieve that isn’t by siphoning money from schools that already don’t have enough, and giving it to charters that do not have to serve all students, and who use ridiculous zero-tolerance policies to bounce out the hardest cases while keeping the tax-payer funding.
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Read the article:
https://www.chronicle.com/article/Want-More-College-Students-to/243101?cid=wcontentgrid_40_3
Q what is your definition of “fix schools”? END Q If you read the article, the author makes some interesting proposals. She does NOT mention school choice or privatization. I have my own ideas about improving secondary schools, and Ms McGuire has hers, and you have yours.
Here is one:
Q Faculty collaboration: Stronger collaborative relationships among school and college teachers across all disciplines can strengthen college readiness. The Yale National Initiative to strengthen teaching in public schools is one model that pairs faculty members in the sciences, arts, and humanities with high-school teachers for a sustained partnership in curriculum and pedagogical development. Successful teacher institutes are already flourishing in New Haven, Conn.; Philadelphia; New Castle County, in Delaware; and Tulsa, Okla.; and Trinity is working with the Yale National Initiative to establish a similar program in Washington, D.C. END Q
The author suggests that colleges can reach out to secondary schools, and work to strengthen college readiness. This seems like a perfectly reasonable proposal. Colleges have to deal with students coming out of secondary schools. If the students are better prepared in secondary school, then the colleges will not have to spend time and resources on remediation. Everyone wins.
Again, read the article:
Q Colleges should devote more intellectual capital to informing and shaping school-reform projects, including research that reveals the real and devastating impact of poverty, violence, racism, and trauma on the ability of children to learn effectively. We should propose specific reform strategies across disciplinary areas, from health-care policy to nutrition and food security, criminal-justice reform, housing and child care, and other social services that support improving educational outcomes in marginalized neighborhoods. ENDQ
Of course students coming out of inner-city schools, where poverty, poor nutrition, crime, fatherlessness, drugs, etc. are endemic, are at a disadvantage, compared to students graduating from top-quality high schools, in affluent neighborhoods, where the biggest problem in school is gum-chewing. That is why Ms. McGuire advocates for colleges going into the ‘hood, and providing specific reform strategies across disciplinary areas.
The standard line, is that with more money, we can all go to the promised land. School choice will devastate school budgets. Properly funding struggling schools, is the answer.
The author asserts, and I agree, that a “holistic” approach is needed, to properly prepare students to succeed at the college level. How can anyone disagree?
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see
https://www.kiplinger.com/slideshow/college/T012-S001-worst-college-majors-for-your-career-2017-2018/index.html
and
https://www.kiplinger.com/slideshow/college/T012-S001-best-college-majors-for-your-career-2017-2018/index.html
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All materialistic learning purpose is to provide a convenient lifestyle whereas all humanity and civilized learning purpose is to sustain a compassionate lifestyle.
Society with convenient lifestyle will produce more selfish, demanding, and cruel people.
Society with compassionate lifestyle will yield worry-free, honest and caring people.
Today, corrupted corporate destroy regulation for safety in all aspects in needs for civilization and impartiality, like in education (NCLB, RttT, CCSS from FAKE superintendents to few-week-certified teachers), in banking industry (subprime mortgage brokers), in manufacturing industry (drugs without properly trials and with lots of bad side effects) .
In short, now we have YOUNG leaders from all fields WHO CATCH ALL dirty TRICKS FROM CORRUPTED CORPORATE and who are the real puppets to do all bad deeds for corrupted corporate. Let’s get back to the basic, such as:
1) Body = jobs, living rental cost, foods transportation and utilities
2) Mind = education, learning from K-12 to PSE
3) Spirit = Music, dance, paint, languages, photography, gardening, writing, reading…
Back2basic.
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Validates my bi-tribal educational analogy:
Tribe 1 – mainly concerned with how great they appear to others
Tribe 2 – mainly concerned with how they do great things for others
…and ne’er the two shall meet
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And, thanks to Amazon, jobs are dramatically decreasing at rapid rates (but that’s okay for Jeff Bezos). Nationwide, Sears closing down, Toys R Us (sorry–my computer won’t make a backward R–yet another thing a computer cannot do!!), many Macy’s (never thought we’d see the day; perhaps the flagship Manhattan Macy’s will close, & then Trump’s military parade can actually help the children by mixing Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade into that; after all, balloons trump arms) &, just the other day, all Bon Ton-owned stores, sadly closing all of our Carson Pirie Scott stores in ILL-Annoy (on Sunday, I had a heartbreaking talk w/one of the clerks soon to lose her job; their former neighbor, Borders, had closed all over the U.S. many years ago, & I recall conversations w/employees there, as well).
The point being-? Well, I guess all of these men & women should now go to college (which they couldn’t possibly afford.) And/or some of them were clerking at Carson’s to PAY for college. Aha!
Oh, wait, LOTS of them HAD gone to college; they just couldn’t find a job.
Darn them! They SHOULD have gone into tech, engineering, robotics (better living through robots…taking away human jobs) &–petroleum technology (there are excellent jobs at Koch Industries–haven’t you seen the commercials with the happy Koch ‘bots–er, I mean, employees?)
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@retired: I do not see your point. Retailing has changed. We now purchase items on-line. Parcels are going to be delivered by drone. Technology is dynamic. Wal-mart killed small mom-and-pop shops. This is the “creative destruction” of a modern economy.
The jobs of the 21st century, are going to require a post-secondary education. Either a 4-year college degree, or vocational/technical school. This is the reality.
Colleges should inform students about the real world, and where the jobs of the future will be. Telecommunications, engineering, robotics, and other STEM fields will need many more professionals. Nursing and health care professions will continue to grow. Photography is almost obsolete.
My brother-in-law is a robotics technician. He is never out of work. Robotics create jobs, and robots are eliminating the economic incentive for USA firms to locate manufacturing jobs abroad, to take advantage of cheap foreign labor costs. It is better to buy a widget made by a US robot, that to buy a widget made by a Chinese worker making 50c per hour.
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On the charter takeover, it’s gonna be a hard no:
http://abc13.com/education/hisd-backs-off-charter-plan-for-underperforming-schools/3389758/
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Here is an interesting fact: Only two(2) states publish information on whether the graduates of their publicly-operated high schools, go on to college and post-graduate studies. And only twelve(12) states collect and publish data on how well their high-school grads do when they are in college. see
https://www.greatschools.org/gk/csa/
The reason for this dearth of information, is that states are not required to collect and publish this data. The result is that parents really have no metric, to inform them of how well their state’s publicly-operated secondary schools are doing their job, which is to prepare young people to cope with college-level work.
Since the states are so reluctant to collect and publish this data, it is time for a federal mandate. Our SecEd, says that she believes in “accountability”, this is one way to accomplish this laudable goal.
We need to be demanding that state departments of Education inform their citizens, about how well their secondary schools are accomplishing their mission!
Thirty-nine(39) states, either can’t say or won’t say, anything about how well their secondary schools are preparing young people for college work.
A disgrace!
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