Arne Duncan just was invited to join the board of Dreambox, a digital math program selling technology to schools. Dreambox also got $130 Million from a new investor. Board members of private corporations typically get $100,000 or more to show up for a few meetings and add prestige to the board. Nice work, Arne. I assume Dreambox doesn’t know that Rave to the Top was a flop.
Archives for the month of: August, 2018
Michael Hynes is a visionary superintendent in the Patchogue-Medford public schools on Long Island in New York. He has written and spoken frequently about the importance of a healthy environment for children to learn and grow.
He writes here about the toxic environment caused by federal and state mandates and the mental health crisis in K-12.
Arne Duncan would say, in response, do we have the “courage” to test them more and close their schools.
Those who really put children first, decry testing and privatization, disruption and destabilization.
Now that we are fully aware of the failure of. O Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, it’s time to listen to the voices of wisdom and experience, not to those who think that life is a race, and the devil take the hindmost.
In this podcast, Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider interview business journalist Andrea Gabor about the lessons of her new book, “After the Culture Wars: How Smart Schools Upend the Business of Reform.”
“Gabor argues that business DOES offer lessons for schools – but that the education reform industry has learned all of the wrong ones.”
This is the book to read this summer.
After the 2016 election, Trump was furious that he didn’t win the popular vote. He claimed that millions of illegal immigrants were allowed to vote, and they voted for Hillary. He set up a commission to investigate voter fraud and placed an ally from Kansas in charge as chairman. Many states refused to submit their records to the commission, claiming that it was politicized. The commission disbanded.
A member of the voter fraud commission spoke out recently, after reviewing the body’s documents, and said it found no evidence of voter fraud.
“Maine Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap, one of the 11 members of the commission formed by President Trump to investigate supposed voter fraud, issued a scathing rebuke of the disbanded panel on Friday, accusing Vice Chair Kris Kobach and the White House of making false statements and saying that he had concluded that the panel had been set up to try to validate the president’s baseless claims about fraudulent votes in the 2016 election.
“Dunlap, one of four Democrats on the panel, made the statements in a report he sent to the commission’s two leaders — Vice President Pence and Kobach, who is Kansas’s secretary of state — after reviewing more than 8,000 documents from the group’s work, which he acquired only after a legal fight despite his participation on the panel.
“Before it was disbanded by Trump in January, the panel had never presented any findings or evidence of widespread voter fraud. But the White House claimed at the time that it had shut down the commission despite “substantial evidence of voter fraud” due to the mounting legal challenges it faced from states. Kobach, too, spoke around that time about how “some people on the left were getting uncomfortable about how much we were finding out.”
“Dunlap said that the commission’s documents that were turned over to him underscore the hollowness of those claims: “they do not contain evidence of widespread voter fraud,” he said in his report, adding that some of the documentation seemed to indicate that the commission was predicting it would find evidence of fraud, evincing “a troubling bias.”
“In particular, Dunlap pointed to an outline for a report the commission was working on that circulated in November 2017. The outline included sections for “Improper voter registration practices,” and “Instances of fraudulent or improper voting,” though the sections themselves were blank as they awaited evidence, speaking to what Dunlap said indicated a push for preordained conclusions.
“After reading this,” Dunlap said of the more than 8,000 pages of documents in an interview with The Washington Post, “I see that it wasn’t just a matter of investigating President Trump’s claims that 3 to 5 million people voted illegally, but the goal of the commission seems to have been to validate those claims.”
“After a career of more than 20 years that has included stints as a state representative and the chairmanship of a committee on fisheries and wildlife, Dunlap said that his time on the panel was “the most bizarre thing I’ve ever been a part of.”
The Southern Poverty Law Center is one of our nation’s most valuable organizations defending our Constitution and democratic values against extremists.
Their report today says that extremist groups are holding a hate rally in Portland, Oregon, today. There are many links, which I am not including because I would have to do each one manually. If you sign up to get their newsletter, you can get the full report with links. What SPLC describes is an example of the way the far-right is “weaponizing the First Amendment,” using it as a shield to defend hatred, racism, and incitement’s to violence. What or who incited these groups?
SPLC writes:
AUGUST 4, 2018
Weekend Read // Issue 91
The threat of violence hangs over a rally that’s being staged by far-right groups in Portland, Oregon, today, nearly a year after the deadly white supremacist gathering in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Patriot Prayer and the Proud Boys have held more than a dozen rallies throughout the Pacific Northwest over the past year, events marked by street violence and harassment and buoyed by a wide array of racist and antigovernment extremist allies.
David Neiwert, who frequently writes for our Hatewatch blog, has been covering the rallies from the beginning. In a piece for The Baffler, he describes the last violent rally they held in Portland on June 30th:
The Proud Boys and Patriots were primed for battle. Indeed, the whole point of the event was to try to provoke a fight that they were not simply prepared for, but were keen to take part in. Prior to the onset of street hostilities, the alt-right crowd bristled with warlike talk about martyrdom as the price of freedom and “taking down” the antifascists across the street. Periodically they’d break into chants of Queen’s mock-authoritarian seventies anthem “We Will Rock You,” which they dedicated to British Identitarian Tommy Robinson.
As I watched the last of the Proud Boys—waiting for the final school bus that had brought them to the rally to arrive so they could leave, clustered on a street corner and haranguing the counter-protesters across the way—I mused about how conservatives’ sudden concern to safeguard civility in American discourse is a crude, cynical manipulation. Its operational logic is very similar to the Proud Boys’ insistence on claiming that their protests are about nothing more than the assertion and protection of free-speech rights.
That, after all, has been what Gibson’s Patriot Prayer events have been ostensibly about since they were launched in Portland last year. Gibson and his comrades claim that they’re standing up for “conservative speech,” which has always translated into a lot of immigrant-bashing, Islamophobia, “constitutionalist” gun nuttery straight from the Bundy Bunch, and a heavy dose of Deep State/globalist conspiracy theorizing. Unsurprisingly, the gatherings attracted more than their share of extreme rightists, including a broad array of skinheads and white nationalists; last year one of the more unhinged such fellow travelers showed up to one of the earliest Patriot Prayer events draped in a flag, and then began shouting that he was a Nazi and using racial epithets. Organizers kicked him out.
His name was Jeremy Christian. One month later, in May 2017, while riding a Portland MAX commuter train, he began harassing two Arab teenage women, one of whom was wearing a hijab, using ethnic slurs against Muslims. Three men riding the train tried to intervene; Christian pulled out a knife and stabbed them, two of them fatally. At his arraignment, he was still protesting Joey Gibson style: “Free speech or die, Portland! You got no safe place. This is America—get out if you don’t like free speech!”
Patriot Prayer had a previously scheduled rally just over a week after the murders. Civic leaders urged the group to cancel the event amid burgeoning anger in the community, but Gibson and his cohorts held it anyway. It turned into a gigantic melee, with the Patriot crowd heavily outnumbered, and a number of assaults and arrests on both sides. It was some of the worst crowd violence Portland had seen in decades.
Since then, Gibson has organized an ongoing series of “free speech” and “freedom” rallies along the West Coast and elsewhere—in Seattle, San Francisco, San Diego, and Olympia and Vancouver, Washington. He’s denounced white supremacists after Charlottesville, but also openly embraced the Proud Boys, the group founded by the white identitarian hipster journalist Gavin McInnes, who’s long been a presence at Gibson’s rallies. The June 30 event was originally intended to commemorate the post-murder event, but it took on a life of its own after an early June rally in downtown Portland also dissolved into violence.
Gibson made a pitch for help from supporters across the nation, and the Proud Boys gladly obliged, putting out the word on their regional social media sites. As a result, a considerable number among the Patriots were wearing black polos and red MAGA ballcaps, and they came from all over the country, especially California.
Listening to them bait the counter-protesters with ugly speech, and talk among themselves about fighting tactics, it was clear the “free speech” they wanted to defend was bigoted and threatening. The lofty constitutional principles were little more than a pretext: they were there mostly to bash some “leftist” heads.
Patriot Prayer and the Proud Boys were emboldened by the fighting at that June 30 event. Organizers have discussed coming to the rally armed; open carry is legal in Oregon. We will be monitoring the event closely and reporting live on Hatewatch and Twitter.
The Editors
New York made an accounting error that cost public schools $12 Million, while overpaying charter schools by that amount.
“The $12 million misallocation is about 7.8 percent of the $153 million the state distributed to its Local Educational Agencies in 2017-18 for Title IIA, which supports professional development initiatives such as teacher training, recruitment and retention.
“The state distributed additional funds to 275 charter schools and three school districts, and underallocated funds to 677 school districts and 10 Special Act schools. The majority of those school districts will be repaid the gap from last year, in addition to their correct allocations for the 2018-19 school year.
“But because the underfunding at the larger districts of Buffalo ($382,610), Rochester ($317,452), East Ramapo ($208,311) and Syracuse ($168,317) exceeded amounts of $130,728, their reallocations will be spread out over a two-year period. New York City’s repayment of $7,085,650 will be made up over a four-year period.
“The charter schools and three districts will not be forced to repay the extra money they received last year, Elia said but will will see reductions in their Title IIA funding over the course of up to five years to make up the funds.”
Some charter schools were paid thre-to-four Times the amount actually due. Here is the spreadsheet, showing the correct allocations compared to what was paid to the charters.
Achievement First Crown Heights, for example, was due $60,000, but paid $200,000.
The Harlem Hebrew Language Academy was owed $16,000 but paid $51,000.
The Success Academy (Upper West Side) was owed $31,000, but received $116,000.
A nice reward for the charters. A loss for public schools. Someone should hire an auditor to check previous years’ allocations.
America’s high school math team just won the International Mathematical Olympiad!
Our kids are the best in the world!
And most of the kids on the winning team are children of immigrants (attention, D.J. Trump and Stephen Miller, the Trump administration’s point person on keeping immigrants out).
Last month, the United States made an extraordinary achievement: For the third time in four years, it won the International Mathematical Olympiad.
This is staggeringly impressive. The Math Olympiad is the hardest and most prestigious math competition for high school students in the world. University professors often cannot solve more than one or two of the six problems on the exam. Since 1978, Math Olympiad gold medalists have made up more than a third of the winners of the Fields Medal, the Nobel Prize equivalent for mathematics.
Yet from the U.S. team, James Lin from Phillips Exeter Academy received one of two perfect scores at the competition. (The other went to Britain’s Agnijo Banerjee.) Also from the U.S. team, Andrew Gu, Vincent Huang, Michael Ren and Mihir Anand Singhal all won gold medals, and Adam Ardeishar received a silver medal.
The team, led by mathematics professor Po-Shen Loh of Carnegie Mellon University, is about as American as you can get. After all, its members celebrated their victory by going to McDonald’s. But in this time of charged debates about immigration, it is worth noting that many of the team members are second- or third-generation immigrants. Loh, in fact, is the son of immigrant parents from Singapore. The team’s deputy leader, Sasha Rudenko, is the son of Ukrainian immigrants.
The New York City Department of Education placed literacy coaches in struggling elementary schools to lift test scores. A new study concluded that the literacy coaches made no difference. The Department responded by increasing the funding for literacy coaches and expressing its confidence that its failed strategy is working. At the least, the Department should try an experiment in reducing class sizes to no more than 12 in similar schools. Hiring literacy coaches is a strategy that was long ago described by the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan as “feeding the horses to feed the sparrows.”
Leonie Haimson predicted the failure of this initiative last April, as it builds on a similar failed program started by Joel Klein.
A major push by New York City to help poor children in public schools learn to read by assigning literacy coaches to their teachers had no impact on second-graders’ progress, according to a study of its first year.
The city Department of Education conducted the evaluation, but its officials said Thursday it was too early to judge the initiative. They said they would strengthen the program while boosting annual funding to $89 million, from $75 million.
The initiative has been a key part of the education agenda of Mayor Bill de Blasio, who early in his tenure set a target of having all students read on level by the end of second grade, by 2026.
Research shows that if children lag behind in reading in third grade, it is very hard for them to catch up. About 43% of the city’s third-graders passed 2017 state exams in English language arts, with some high-poverty schools showing much lower pass rates.
The literacy program embedded 103 coaches in 107 high-need schools in fall 2016. Each coach was assigned to spend the academic year honing teachers’ instructional skills in kindergarten through second grade.
This evaluation tested second-graders in schools that had literacy coaches, and compared their results with peers in similar city schools that had no coaches. The report found that both groups of students were behind in skills in October 2016 and fell further behind expectations by May 2017.
Each group gained an average of four months of skills, when they should have gained seven months. At the end of second grade, students in schools with coaches on average performed at the level expected in the second month of second grade, on a measure known as the Gates-MacGinitie Reading Test. It covered decoding skills, word knowledge and comprehension.
The disappointing results didn’t surprise Susan Neuman, a New York University professor of literacy education. She said the department deployed coaches of varying quality, gave them insufficient training and, in some schools, principals shifted them to drilling for state exams…
Department of Education Deputy Chancellor Josh Wallack said he had confidence in the coaches, their training and principal buy-in. He noted that some schools showed real improvements.
“We think we are on the right track,” he said. “We know we have a lot of work to do.”
Skeptics of the initiative have long argued it would be better to reduce class size, add services for the disabled and require a stronger focus on phonics, which teaches children to sound out letters as a primary way to identify words.
The department has expanded the literacy initiative yearly, and will dispatch about 500 coaches this fall, with every elementary school getting a coach or additional attention.
Nothing is as inexplicable as doubling down on failure.
Remember that Arne Duncan said that Hurricane Katrina was “the best thing that ever happened to New Orleans” because it made it possible to wipe out public schools, fire all the teachers, eliminate the union, and replace them all with charter school?
Well, the Secretary of Education Julia Kelleher in Puerto Rico is grateful for the opportunity that Hurricane Maria has given her to do the same to the public schools there.
Forget the deaths of at least 4,000 people. Think of charter schools and vouchers!
Here she is in an interview.
She’s in the middle of closing 264 schools and working with Betsy Devos on vouchers.
Video of her here: https://twitter.com/GoHedgeClippers/status/1024336534965825536
Full text from full video: https://www.facebook.com/David-Begnaud-108679513654/
David Begnaud 24:07
And I’ll preface the question with this. When I first met Miss Keleher, her at the convention center we were sitting off in a cornerdidn’t actually know who she was, until about 10 minutes before I found out and I thought, Oh, well, she’d be a good person to talk to how are the schools to doing and this was in like, the first few days after the storm. And we sat down and you said to me, I’ll never forget “hurricane Maria Maybe the best thing that’s happened to this island” Do you still feel that way
Julia Keleher 24:37
I think the fact that I have $500 million to improve the quality of a kids academic experience and learning environment, I think that I have four times as much money as I would have to be able to fix the physical plant in which they go to school plus, plus the option to access more, I think that’s a tremendous opportunity that no one wanted the storm, but I’m I’m not going to miss spend, pardon the pun, the the opportunity that I have to, to to redirect these things that would have never been available to Puerto Rico, I would have been short $300 million, I wouldn’t be able to do the things that we’re going to be able to do for teachers and for kids.
Leonie Haimson reports here on a federal court decision to allow a lawsuit to proceed against Success Academy.
https://nycpublicschoolparents.blogspot.com/2018/08/federal-court-rules-lawsuit-vs-success.html
“This week, a federal judge in Brooklyn ruled that a lawsuit vs Success Academy could go forward to trial on behalf of some of the children who were on the “Got to go” list put together by the principal of Success Academy Fort Greene, Candido Brown. These children were subsequently pushed out out of the school.The decision is here.
“While the school claims they simply made “errors in judgement,” the practice of repeatedly suspending kids and calling ACS on their parents if they don’t pick them up promptly in the middle of the school day is a common practice at Success, used to persuade parents to pull their children out of the school. Other methods commonly used by the school include calling the police to take unruly children either to the precinct house or to a hospital emergency room.”
She also notes:
“Meanwhile, NYSED reported today that last year it had overpaid charter schools and underpaid NYC from federal Title II funds. The spreadsheet is here, revealing that Success charter schools were overpaid by $1.5 million; and NYC public schools underpaid by $7.1 million, which will only be repaid slowly over four years.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 