Archives for the month of: January, 2019
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Los Angeles: How the Resistance Undermined the Propaganda About Teachers

By dianeravitch
January 20, 2019 //
12

Sara Roos, aparent in Los Angeles whose children are no longer in school, muses about the major impact of the Teacher Revolt. It seems there is overwhelming public support for striking teachers (as there was last spring in Red states).

Remember the bad old days when Michelle Rhee, Campbell Brown, and Raj Chetty (not to mention their billionaire funders) were demonizing teachers? I recall a PBS interview with Melinda Gates in which she confidently asserted that “we” (she and Bill) knowhow to make better teachers.

Where are they all today?

How many of the Reformers arespeaking out for more funding and smaller classes?

Let me know if you find them.

Roos, the Red Queen in LA, writes:

To and from today’s tremendous rally in front of LA’s City Hall, you could feel overwhelming support from random people, everywhere. On the expo a stranger tosses out: “Good luck with your strike”. From bus drivers in uniform and lunch couriers in beat-up Hondas, waiting at every intersection from downtown to our neighborhoods blares the staccato horn of support. Professional cameramen trained to remain unfazed and neutral nevertheless emanate waves of sympathy. Business and car windows display signs of solidarity. Workers at City Hall open their windows to hear. Supersaturated among our populace is a pent-up frustration with where we’re at politically, and how to get ourselves heard.
This is Resistance writ huge. This is our women’s march, the march of our teachers. Our teachers are leading the way and giving We the People a voice here in LaLaLand.

These teachers are actually kinda the same old apple-faced Good People they always ever were. There hasn’t been some gigantic social evolution. It’s just the propaganda that’s changed; the underlying reality, not surprisingly, is robust, centered on social service for the betterment of us all. Our teachers haven’t changed, only the corporate, capitalist-centered narrative surrounding all of it has.

By the way, it turns out the long-sought after solution to LA’s traffic gridlock may be simply: stop sending kids far afield to some school of “Choice” and choose to value and invest in your own neighborhood. Anyone else notice how empty the streets have been all week long? When parents aren’t racing their kids hither and yon in a frenzy of Choosing Excellence, everyone’s lives get a little more deeply vested in their surrounds. It is everyone’s right to have the same excellent education as the next families’. But education isn’t a value added commodity to buy off the shelf whether the salesman peddles snake oil, false promises, educational spyware or a social panacea. Like democracy itself it’s a collective activity valued by the value which we each add.

Categories Los Angeles, Parents, Propaganda, Resistance, Teachers

Walton Gives $1 Million to St. Louis University

By dianeravitch
January 20, 2019 //
27

The Walton Family Foundation gave a grant of nearly $1 million to St. Louis University, “To develop education policy.”

As is well established, the Waltons have certain goals: privatization of public schools and elimination of teachers unions.

There are legislative proposals currently for vouchers in the House and Senate.

Here come the Waltons, Missouri!

Categories Missouri, School Choice, Walton Foundation

Advice to the New York State Legislature About Mayoral Control of the City’s Schools

By dianeravitch
January 20, 2019 //
11

The Legislature is preparing to renew and extend mayoral control of the New York City public schools. Before it does so, it should consider some important and necessary changes.

I have studied the governance of the New York City Public Schools for many years. My first book, published in 1974, was a history of the city’s schools. (The Great School Wars.)

I support mayoral appointment of board members with checks and balances. At present, there are no checks or balances, and no meaningful role whatever for parents and communities.

For most of the 20th century, the mayor appointed the board members. The board selected the Superintendent of Schools, who reported to the board. To prevent the Mayor from filling the board with cronies, the candidates for the central board were vetted by a screening committee comprised of leaders from recognized civic groups. The Mayor made sure to have a balance of appointees from different boroughs who reflected the people of the city.

Every district had a functioning local board to respond to parent concerns. The local boards were representative of their districts and were usually appointed by the Central Board after consultation with local leaders.

Today, the New York City Board of Education lacks any checks or balances. It has been reduced to a city agency, completely subservient to the will of the Mayor. The Mayor, not the central board, selects the “chancellor.” The chancellor serves at the pleasure of the Mayor, not the central board. The central board does whatever the Mayor tells them to do. He can fire them if they don’t follow his orders. Local school councils are powerless and ignored.

As the Legislature reviews the renewal of mayoral control, I hope it will restore checks and balances.

The so-called “panel on educational policy,” which doesn’t even exist as such in the law, should be restored as the Board of Education of the City of New York. Its members should be selected by the Mayor from a list of people reviewed by an independent panel of civic leaders.

The Board, not the Mayor, should appoint the Superintendent of Schools, who should be an educator, not a business person. The Superintendent should serve at the pleasure of the Board, not the Mayor.

Public policy over the schools should be reviewed and vetted in public, not behind closed doors in City Hall.

The Mayor should retain his control of the overall budget, which is vast power, but the details should be left to the Board and the Superintendent.

Local boards in every district should be appointed by local leaders, with the approval of the Central Board. Elections of local boards have been tried but failed to garner a decent turnout and are easily captured by politicians and special interests

There is no perfect way to organize a system that enrolls over one million children. Every organization has faults. But the least perfect way is to turn the school system over to the Mayor, with zero checks or balances, and no input whatever from parents or communities. The Mayor should not be a dictator of education policy, free to do whatever pleases him.

Autocracy is wrong. The Mayor is not an educational expert. It is his or her responsibility to make sure that the members of the board are people of great integrity and that the budget is adequate to the needs of the children.

But the Board should not be his solely owned property, to do with as he wishes. The Board should choose its executive and that executive should answer to the Board, not the Mayor.

Yes, renew Mayoral Control, but renew Democracy too.

Diane Ravitch

Categories Democracy, New York City

Leonie Haimson: The Lesson in Los Angeles Strike: Class Size Matters

By dianeravitch
January 19, 2019 //
70

Leonie Haimson has been fighting the battle to reduce class size for many years. She believes that the breaking point for teachers in Los Angeles was the outrageous numbers of children in many classes, in some cases approaching 50 students in a class. Haimson has the research to back up her contention. When students need extra attention, they will not get it if the class has large numbers.

She notes the popular refrain among reformers like Arne Duncan that one “great teacher” is more important than small classes, but there is no evidence that this is true, and it is very likely that the “great teacher” will no longer be great if there are 45 students in his or her class.

It is pathetic that not a single former or current Secretary of Education has supported the teachers in L.A. The public does, however. Polls in the city show overwhelming pubic support for their strike. For some reason, workaday folks understand what Secretaries of Education do not. The teachers are striking for their students’ learning conditions.

Categories Class size, Los Angeles

NPE: What Does the UTLA Strike Have to Do With Charter Schools? Everything.

By dianeravitch
January 19, 2019 //
20

Read the Network for Public Education round-up of articles about the UTLA Strike andits national significance.

The cat is out of the bag. The billionaires bought the LAUSD school board. The school board is intent on disrupting the district while starving schools of what they need: reduced class sizes (some classes have nearly 50 students); a full-time nurse; counselors; and other essential staff and programs. Instead of supporting the teachers, the school board majority is fighting them, backing the hedge fund financier who is superintendent of schools.

Categories Los Angeles

NY Times: Sacklers Directed Efforts to Mislead Public About Danger of Opioids

By dianeravitch
January 19, 2019 //
40

Trump says he wants a border Wall to stop the flow of drugs into the US. Actually, the biggest source of the opioids that have killed over 200,000 people is not Mexico or Latin America, but Connecticut. Thatsthe home of Purdue Pharmaceuticals, which created and sold OxyContin, which is the most widely used opioid.

The Sackler family of Connecticut became billionaires because of their development and marketing of OxyContin. Their names grace museums around the world. The family collectively has about $15 billion or so. They have always claimed that they had no personal knowledge of the deceptive promotion of their popular and highly addictive drug, which has claimed more than 200,000 lives.

The Sacklers are major financiers of charter schools, having funded ConnCAN, 50CAN, and numerous other organizations that promote privatization of public funds for schools.

Now the New York Times reports that the Sackler family knew what was going on with their opioid drug.

The state of Massachusetts thinks the family members should be held personally responsible for the devastation their drug caused.

How do you sleep at night or enjoy your luxurious lifestyle knowing that the drug that made you fabulously wealthy killed over 200,000 people?

The Times wrote:

Members of the Sackler family, which owns the company that makes OxyContin, directed years of efforts to mislead doctors and patients about the dangers of the powerful opioid painkiller, a court filing citing previously undisclosed documents contends.

When evidence of growing abuse of the drug became clear in the early 2000s, one of them, Richard Sackler, advised pushing blame onto people who had become addicted.

“We have to hammer on abusers in every way possible,” Mr. Sackler wrote in an email in 2001, when he was president of the company, Purdue Pharma. “They are the culprits and the problem. They are reckless criminals.”

That email and other internal Purdue communications are cited by the attorney general of Massachusetts in a new court filing against the company, released on Tuesday. They represent the first evidence that appears to tie the Sacklers to specific decisions made by the company about the marketing of OxyContin. The aggressive promotion of the drug helped ignite the opioid epidemic.

The filing contends that Mr. Sackler, a son of a Purdue Pharma founder, urged that sales representatives advise doctors to prescribe the highest dosage of the powerful opioid painkiller because it was the most profitable.

Since OxyContin came on the market in 1996, more than 200,000 people have died in the United States from overdoses involving prescription opioids, and Purdue Pharma has been the target of numerous lawsuits.

For years, Purdue Pharma has sought to depict the Sackler family as removed from the day-to-day operations of the company. The Sacklers, whose name adorns museums and medical schools around the world, are one of the richest families in the United States, with much of their wealth derived from sales of OxyContin. Disclosure of the documents is likely to renew calls for institutions to decline their philanthropic gifts.

In a statement, Purdue Pharma, which is based in Stamford, Conn., rejected suggestions of wrongdoing by the company or members of the Sackler family, describing the court filing as “littered with biases and inaccurate characterizations.” The statement said the company was working to curtail the use and misuse of prescription painkillers.

Asked for a response from Richard Sackler and other members of the Sackler family, a Purdue Pharma spokesman, Robert Josephson, said that the company had no additional comment.

In 2007, the company and three of its top executives pleaded guilty to federal criminal charges that Purdue had misrepresented the dangers of OxyContin, and they paid $634.5 million in fines. The Sacklers were not accused of any wrongdoing and have not faced personal legal consequences over the drug.

But last June, Maura Healey, the Massachusetts attorney general, sued eight members of the Sackler family, along with the company and numerous executives and directors, alleging that they had misled doctors and patients about OxyContin’s risks. The suit also claimed that the company aggressively promoted the drug to doctors who were big prescribers of opioids, including physicians who later lost their licenses.

The court filing released on Tuesday also asserts that Sackler family members were aware that Purdue Pharma repeatedly failed to alert authorities to scores of reports the company had received that OxyContin was being abused and sold on the street. The company also used pharmacy discount cards to increase OxyContin’s sales and Richard Sackler, who served as Purdue Pharma’s president from 1999 to 2003, led a company strategy of blaming abuse of the drug on addicts, the suit claimed.

In 1995, when the Food and Drug Administration approved OxyContin, it allowed Purdue Pharma to claim that the opioid’s long-acting formulation was “believed to reduce” its appeal to drug abusers compared with traditional painkillers such as Percocet and Vicodin.

At a gathering shortly afterward to celebrate the drug’s launch, Mr. Sackler boasted that “the launch of OxyContin tablets will be followed by a blizzard of prescriptions that will bury the competition. The prescription blizzard will be so deep, dense, and white,” according to a document cited in the legal complaint.

Company sales representatives told doctors that OxyContin couldn’t be abused and were trained to say that the drug had an addiction risk for patients of “less than one percent,” a claim that had no scientific backing. Within a few years, Purdue Pharma was selling more than $1 billion worth of OxyContin annually.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Privatization

Tennessee: Disastrous Choice for State Commissioner of Education

By dianeravitch
January 19, 2019 //
25

Newly elected Governor of Tennessee, Bill Lee, picked a privatizer from the Texas Education Agency to be State Commissioner of Education. Penny Schwinn, chief deputy commissioner for academics in Texas, is Lee’s choice. She is a supporter of school choice, including vouchers, which was never passed in Texas despite multiple efforts by the hard-right there. For some reason, she is described as a “reformer.” Apparently if you want to underfund public schools by diverting money to religious and private schools, that qualifies you to be called a “reformer.” The word “reformer” has become anathema.

In Texas, rural Republicans combined with urban Democrats to stymie vouchers in the legislature, year after year.

Tennessee also has rural Republicans who will question why public money should be diverted from their community schools to religious schools.

Schwinn has promised to fix Tennessee’s longstanding testing mess. Testing in Texas has been used to label and stigmatize schools and students. Remember the phony claims of a “Texas miracle” that brought NCLB to the nation? Legislators in the Lone Star State still has a zealous faith in standardized tests.

Worse, Schwinn was controversial in Texas.

Schwinn moves from Texas amid controversy there.

A September audit found Schwinn failed to report a conflict of interest between her and a subcontractor who got a $4.4 million contract to collect special education data. As a result, the Texas state commissioner canceled the contract, according to the Dallas Morning News.

The canceled contract cost the state more than $2 million, according to the Texas Tribune.

The Dallas Morning News also reported that Schwinn told auditors that while she had a professional relationship with the subcontractor, she didn’t try to influence the contract. In the wake of audit, Texas revamped its procurement process, the Texas Tribune reported.

Schwinn will need to help secure an assessment vendor to administer the TNReady test with the state’s contract with Questar Assessment set to expire.

This is not an auspicious start.

Categories Accountability, Administrators, superintendents, Tennessee, Testing, Texas, Vouchers

Los Angeles: LAUSD Cries Wolf. Board Has More Than Enough Reserves to Cover Teachers’ Needs

By dianeravitch
January 19, 2019 //
18

Bill Raden of California-based Capital & Main reports that the L.A.school district hasample reserves to meet teachers’s needs.

LAUSD is not infinancial distress, as superintendent Austin Beutner claims. It does not need to cram 40-47 students in a classroom.it can afford full-nurses, librarians, and counselors.

“Capital & Main’s own analysis of the LAUSD budget finds that funding exists that would more than cover UTLA’s core demands without touching the district’s surplus. Our research also raises questions over how much of LAUSD’s budget projections are more of a creative art than a hard-nosed science.

“There is a history of the district crying wolf over negative balances two years out that then never seem to arrive,” agreed former Board District 5 member David Tokofsky. “If the budget were a basketball game, LAUSD would see a 20 point, final quarter lead by the Clippers as too close to call…

“The unresolved issues include contract demands for lowered class sizes, additional nurses, librarians, counselors and social workers. The union also insists that the district commit a significant chunk of a contested, nearly $2 billion budget surplus to increases to bilingual and adult education, and to making major investments in community schooling. The union has also been advocating for curriculum reforms that include a teacher say in achievement testing (UTLA wants less testing) and ethnic studies at every school.

“Class-size reduction is a basic sticking point in the negotiations.
If there has been a single deal-breaker on the table, it is the district’s lack of movement on “Section 1.5” — a contractual holdover from the Great Recession unique to LAUSD and anathema to UTLA because it allows the district to unilaterally raise class sizes. The union wants it gone; the district wants it replace with “Section 1.8,” which would raise some class sizes beyond the current memorandum of understanding that Section 1.5 has nullified.

“Class size is the fundamental issue that we’ve got to deal with,” argued UTLA president Alex Caputo-Pearl at the January 11 news conference. “Their [insistence] of continuing to . . . be an outlier in the state of California is unacceptable.”

“LAUSD’s last known offer (both sides have agreed to a media blackout during the current round of bargaining) hadn’t budged from its position that the union’s demand for a 6.5 percent pay raise be contingent on cannibalizing the retirement security of future teachers to fund it. What was new on Friday, January 11, was the district’s modest offer to add 200 new hires — or 1,200 in all — for class-size reduction, nurses, librarians and counselors. But for the nation’s second-largest school district, this represented a $130 million drop in a 900-campus bucket — and the lowered levels would expire after one year.

“The offer was extraordinary both for its timing and its explanation of how LAUSD would fund the classroom reductions. The $25 million increase to the $105 million it had previously offered, a district press statement said, would include a recent $10 million pledge by Los Angeles County. It also kicked in $15 million from what LAUSD had estimated would be the $40 million in savings from $3 billion in pay-downs of rate increases and pension liability for CalSTRS, California’s giant teachers’ pension fund, that Governor Gavin Newsom unveiled January 10 in his first state budget.

“UTLA immediately challenged the district’s $40 million windfall estimate, claiming that its own call to the state Department of Finance turned up an additional $100 million in ongoing revenue. By Wednesday, LAUSD had clarified that the $40 million figure merely represented the district’s share from Newsom’s recalculation of this year’s Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) cost of living adjustment increase, which was revised upward from the November’s projected 2.57 percent to 3.46 percent. (The actual gain, which represents an additional $120 per student for L.A. Unified’s non-charter enrollment, should bring the district closer to $49.2 million).

“The school district didn’t allow Governor Newsom’s recent good financial news to dispel its fiscal gloom.

“The district estimated its takeaway from Newsom’s $700 million contribution rate buy-downs at $60 million over the next three years. But there will also be ongoing cash savings from lowered liability that should be dramatic. (Some have estimated that the buy-downs could be worth as much as $200 million to the district.)

“Newsom’s budget had other good news for LAUSD. It included an extra $576 million to school districts in special education funding, which would be worth roughly $75 million to LAUSD. The biggest windfall, earmarked for early education, should net Los Angeles roughly $180 million as its share of $1.8 billion for expanded kindergarten and preschool and childcare infrastructure (using a longstanding ballpark calculation that LAUSD claims roughly 10 percent of many statewide education appropriations).”

Read it all.

Bottom line: LAUSD can fund all the teachers need and demand.

The district leadership is trying to starve the district of needed resources.

Categories Budget Cuts, Funding, Los Angeles

Los Angeles: First Charter Strike Ever in California

By dianeravitch
January 18, 2019 //
6

A small number of charter schools have gone on strike in Los Angeles. This is remarkable because charter schools were created to eliminate teachers’ unions. That’s why the Waltons Fund them. That’s why DeVos and the Koch brothers fund them. The remarkable story in the following press release from UTLA is what happened when charter school parents tried to meet with the charter Zceo. Instead of listening to them, he called the police.

MEDIA ADVISORY
Contact: Anna Bakalis, 213-305-9654
Kim Turner, 213-305-9316

TODAY, FRIDAY, JANUARY 18

Bargaining between UTLA and LAUSD begins at 11 am at City Hall.

• 10:30 am: MAJOR RALLY: “Let the Sunshine In”

Where: Grand Park, in front of City Hall

Musical performances by:
Tom Morello
Aloe Blacc
Maya Jupiter
Marisa Ronstadt

• 3 pm: CHARTER PARENT ACTION

Contact: Ed Gutierrez, 213-595-7949

What: Accelerated parents and students will demand a face-to-face meeting with CEO Johnathan Williams to deliver their petition

Where: The Accelerated School, 4000 S. Main St. Los Angeles 90037

Who: Accelerated parents, students and striking teachers

On Thursday afternoon parents and students of The Accelerated Schools charter network attempted to deliver a petition including hundreds of parent signatures to CEO Johnathan Williams. The petition calls on Williams and the charter schools’ board of trustees to negotiate a fair contract for teachers and to end the bitter strike at the three schools. Parents and students entered the school premises demanding to speak directly with Williams, but rather than meeting to discuss resolving the ongoing work stoppage and its impact on teachers and students, Williams called the police.

Outraged parents are determined to have their voices heard and will be returning this afternoon to again attempt to deliver their petition in support of teachers’ demands. Approximately 80 Accelerated teachers are heading toward the fourth day of their historic strike – the first charter school strike in California’s history.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Privatization

Los Angeles: Board Member Scott Schmerelson Speaks Out on UTLA Strike

By dianeravitch
January 18, 2019 //
25

LAUSD board member Scott Schmerelson, a retired educator, issued this statement:

“Where Do I Stand?”

A Statement by Board Member Scott Schmerelson
on Day 3 of the Teacher Work Stoppage

—–

The repeated message to Board Members, over the last several months, was that the only way to avoid a
strike was for the Board to speak with one voice.

I have struggled with this concept because it is clear to everyone who is paying attention that the one voice that the Board majority supports is that of Austin Beutner.

I very publicly opposed hiring Mr. Beutner and nothing in my experience with him since last May has inspired confidence in his ability to provide effective leadership, accountability or transparency in his efforts, as a non-educator, to manage our school district and the future of public education in Los Angeles. I can no longer allow Mr. Beutner to speak for me or to suggest that the massive public relations, and often misinformation, campaign that he is waging represents my views about the current teachers strike. We need to end the strike and get back to our teachers teaching and our kids learning.

My constituents, and parents throughout the District, are demanding to know just where I stand. I will tell you: As a retired LAUSD teacher, counselor, and principal, I dedicated my life and career serving LAUSD kids. I continue to stand with the kids. For me, this means that I Stand with Teachers because today they are standing for what’s best for students.

Our teachers are the foundation of our mission to provide a quality public education and opportunity for every child that passes through our school gates. They are dedicated professionals who work hard to serve our kids despite the very trying conditions for our families and their families that come with teaching in an urban school district like LAUSD.

Our teachers deserve respect and fair compensation. I also believe that too many of our classrooms are too crowded to truly serve our students. For example, how can we say that we are putting kids first when there are 45 students in an Algebra class?

The recent Neutral Fact Finder between the parties agreed that “lower class sizes are one of the best predictors of successful teaching and student success.” He also agreed that “lowering class size may be one of the keys to increasing ADA, and maintaining and recruiting students to LAUSD.”

We need to find a way to significantly lower class size, not based on misleading district averages, but at every school site where there are just too many students in one room for the effective teaching and personalization to which we lend so much lip service.

I also agree that we need to work much harder to provide more support staff at all our schools. As a retired principal, I can tell you that our parents do not understand, nor should they, why many of our schools only have a nurse one day a week. We absolutely need more social workers, librarians and college counselors.

How can we constantly talk about 100% graduation, and our students being college prepared, if our secondary students do not have adequate and easy access to a college counselor?

I am not convinced that we have tried our hardest to identify additional resources to fund what our kids need.

This point became extraordinarily clear to me last June when Dr. McKenna and I put forward a resolution to place a parcel tax on the ballot in November based on polling that predicted ample voter support for a sensible measure to increase funding for our schools.

Yet, by the narrowest Board majority, our resolution was defeated.

In November, voters approved nine of the ten parcel tax or school bond measures on the ballot in Los Angeles County.

Instead of repeating the “doom, gloom and heading for bankruptcy” predictions that we have heard for decades, I believe that it is Mr. Beutner’s job to honestly identify sources of funding buried in our existing budget, and the revenue growth predicted for next year, that could be creatively sourced and invested in the students who need smaller classes and adequate support services now.

LAUSD has a nearly $2 billion reserve. Of course, we have financial commitments and need to plan for rainy days. Nevertheless, I believe that Mr. Beutner could at least temporarily repurpose a larger share of this reserve, for the benefit of kids, that could be repaid when additional sources of revenue have been identified and secured. We also need to work with state officials to increase school funding and resources to reflect the values we hold dear as Californians but such efforts do not offer immediate solutions for our students.

As a democratically elected trustee, sworn to protect our children and the long term stability of Los Angeles Unified, I believe that there are resources available to end this strike.

What I do not see from Austin Beutner, and his supporters, is the political will to substitute constructive negotiations for the fear mongering, expensive taxpayer funded ads, slanted editorials and endless press conferences.

I am but one voice and one vote on the Board, but I believe that the posturing must stop and a sincere and adequate offer put on
the table that will better serve our students and end this strike.

This is where I stand.

Sincerely,

Scott M. Schmerelson
Board Member, District 3

Categories Courage, Los Angeles
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