There is no more effective advocate for Texas children and public schools than Pastors for Texas Children. Through their dedication and hard work, they have played an important role in blocking vouchers and encouraging the passage of a new state budget that adds billions of dollars for public schools.
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German Chancellor Angela Merkel spoke at Harvard’s commencement ceremonies. She was eloquent and spoke to our dearest values and ideals, exactly what we hope to hear from the leader of the West, which we called “the Free World.” That used to be the President of the United States. No longer. Our president is an isolationist who treats our allies with contempt and showers love on dictators.
Angela Merkel is now the leader of the West.
She offers important lessons.
Most important for all of us right now to hear: Nothing terrible lasts forever.
It is up to us to restore our path towards a better world.
This is an inspiring, moving speech. Please watch and listen.
Dr. Anika Whitfield, an education activist in LittleRock, Arkansas, wrote an open letter to State Commissioner Johnny Key and the members of the Arkansas State Board of Education. She appeals to their humanity, forgetting for the moment that the state of Arkansas is owned by the Walton Family Foundation:
Mr. Key and the Members of the AR State Board of Education,
Mercedes Schneider discovers that a prominent reformer has a new career. Hanna Skandera was State Commissioner of Education in New Mexico, where she tried to impose the “Florida Model of Mediocrity.” She fought with the state’s teachers for seven years and accomplished nothing. New Mexico remained at the bottom of NAEP, as one of the poorest states in the nation. Her goal of raising test scores flopped.
Schneider performs her wizardry of financial investigation.
It is impressive to see how many Astro-turf Disrupters have signed on to give the impression of a crowded room.
But bear in mind, as yet another bunch of organizations pop up, that the whole Disruption machine is spinning in circles. It has accomplished nothing other than Disruption, and is like an automobile with a full gas tank—refueled over and over by the Waltons—driving round and round and round, going nowhere, but kept in motion solely by the money that fuels it.
Voters in Los Angeles yesterday turned down Measure EE, which would have raised $500 million yearly for schools. The measure required a 2/3 yes vote, but didn’t win a majority. It would have been funded mostly by taxes on commercial properties, and the LA Chamber of Commerce mounted a campaign to defeat it.
It would have funded smaller classes, nurses, social workers, librarians, arts and music.
What a crying shame.
If you care about the kids, you have to do right by them.
Peg Tyre is a veteran education journalist who is currently tracking the path of education reform in Japan. She reminds me of something that I learned when I visited schools in other countries. Education officials and teachers wonder how Americans are able to teach their students creativity, critical thinking, imagination. While we obsess over test scores, other nations are awed by our students’ inquisitiveness, their ability to speak out and ask questions instead of regurgitating facts.
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This is an ironic story. There is no one and no institution that has done more to set off an international test score competition than Andreas Schleicher of the OECD, which administers the periodic international tests called PISA, the Programme in International Student Assessment. Every nation wants to be first. Every nation waits anxiously to see whether its test scores in reading, mathematics, and science went up or down. In 2010, when the 2009 PISA scores were released, Arne Duncan and Barack Obama declared that the U.S. was facing another “Sputnik moment,” and it was time to crack down. Others wrung their hands and wondered how we could toughen up to compete with Shanghai.
The arts could become more important for young people than maths in the future, according to a leading education expert.
Researcher Andreas Schleicher, who leads the Programme for International Student Assessment at the intergovernmental economic organisation OECD, told a House of Commons inquiry that he believed young people could benefit more from the skills gained through creativity than test-based learning.
He was giving evidence to the Education Select Committee as part of an ongoing inquiry into the fourth industrial revolution – the influence of technologies such as robotics and artificial intelligence on society.
Schleicher, who is widely regarded as one of the world’s leading educational thinkers, said: “I would say, in the fourth industrial revolution, arts may become more important than maths.”
“We talk about ‘soft skills’ often as social and emotional skills, and hard skills as about science and maths, but it might be the opposite,” he said, suggesting that science and maths may become ‘softer’ in future when the need for them decreases due to technology, and the ‘hard skills’ will be “your curiosity, your leadership, your persistence and your resilience”.
His comments come amid ongoing concerns about the narrowing of the education system in the UK to exclude creativity and prioritise academic subjects.
Campaigners argue that this is prohibiting many young people from pursuing creative careers. However, Schleicher said that too narrow a curriculum could also make young people less prepared for the demands of the future.
This article by Senator Bernie Sanders appeared in the New York Times.
My father came to this country from Poland at the age of 17 with barely a nickel in his pocket. I spent my first 18 years, before I left home for college, in a three-and-a-half-room, rent-controlled apartment in Brooklyn. My mother’s dream was to own her own home, but we never came close. My father’s salary as a paint salesman paid for basic necessities, but never much more.
As a young man I learned the impact that lack of money had on family life. Every major household purchase was accompanied by arguments between my parents.
I remember being yelled at for going to the wrong store for groceries and paying more than I should have. I’ve never forgotten the incredible stress of not having much money, a reality that millions of American families experience today.
We are the wealthiest nation in the history of the world and, according to President Trump, the economy is “booming.” Yet most Americans have little or no savings and live paycheck to paycheck.
Today our rate of childhood poverty is among the highest of any developed country in the world, millions of workers are forced to work two or three jobs just to survive, hundreds of thousands of bright young people cannot afford to go to college, millions more owe outrageous levels of student debt, and half a million people are homeless on any given night. Over 80 million Americans have inadequate health insurance or spent part or all of last year without any insurance, and one out of five cannot afford the prescription drugs they need.
While wages in the United States have been stagnant for over 40 years, we have more income and wealth inequality than at any time since the 1920s.
Today, the wealthiest three families in the country own more wealth than the bottom half of the American people and the top 1 percent owns more wealth than the bottom 90 percent. Millions of workers earn starvation wages even as nearly half of all new income is going to the top 1 percent.
Gentrification is ravaging working-class neighborhoods, forcing many struggling Americans to spend half or more of their incomes to put a roof over their heads. The rent-controlled apartment I grew up in was small, but at least we could afford it.
I am running for president because we must defeat Donald Trump, the most dangerous president in the modern history of our country. But, if we are to defeat Mr. Trump, we must do more than focus on his personality and reactionary policies.
We must understand that unfettered capitalism and the greed of corporate America are destroying the moral and economic fabric of this country, deepening the very anxieties that Mr. Trump appealed to in 2016. The simple truth is that big money interests are out of control, and we need a president who will stand up to them.
Wall Street, after driving the United States into the worst economic downturn since the 1930s, now makes tens of billions in profits while forcing working-class Americans to pay usurious interest rates on their credit card debt. The top 10 American drug companies, repeatedly investigated for price fixing and other potentially illegal actions, made nearly $70 billion in profits last year, even as Americans paid the most per capita among developed nations for their prescription medicine.
Top executives in the fossil fuel industry spend hundreds of millions on campaign contributions to elect candidates who represent the rich and the powerful, while denying the reality of climate change.
Major corporations like Amazon, Netflix, General Motors and dozens of others make huge profits, but don’t pay federal income taxes because of a rigged tax system they lobbied to create.
Back in 1944, in his State of the Union speech, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt reminded the nation that economic security is a human right, and that people cannot be truly free if they have to struggle every day for their basic needs. I agree.
We must change the current culture of unfettered capitalism in which billionaires have control over our economic and political life. We need to revitalize American democracy and create a government and economy that works for all.
The U.S. Department of Education criticized Eva Moskowitz for releasing the private disciplinary record of a student whose mother repeatedly criticized the school. This comes soon after the ED awarded Success Academy $10 Million to expand.
Leonie Haimson, advocate for student privacy, comments:
This press release is also posted here.
For immediate release: June 4, 2019
For more information contact Leonie Haimson, leoniehaimson@gmail.com; 917-435-9329.
US Department of Education finds Eva Moskowitz and Success Academy repeatedly violated a child’s privacy according to FERPA
On Monday, June 2, 2019, Fatima Geidi finally received a response to a FERPA complaint she filed more than three and half years ago with the US Department of Education. The Student Privacy Policy Office of the Department of Education found that her FERPA complaint against Eva Moskowitz and Success Academy charter schools was justified and that they had indeed repeatedly violated her son’s privacy rights. The official findings letter to Ms. Moskowitz, dated May 31, 2019, is here.
On October 31, 2015, Ms. Geidi filed a complaint detailing how Eva Moskowitz, CEO of Success Academy charter schools, had revealed details of her son’s disciplinary records to the media and on her website. Ms. Moskowitz made these disclosures in order to retaliate against Ms. Geidi and her son after they had appeared on the PBS News Hour to report how he had been repeatedly suspended at one of her schools. Her original FERPA complaint is posted here.
Yet the US Department of Education waited more than two years to even launch an investigation into her complaint. In the meantime, Ms. Moskowitz included many of the same exaggerated charges against Ms. Geidi’s son on several pages of her memoir, The Education of Eva Moskowitz, that was published in September 2017. When Ms. Geidi noticed these passages in a bookstore, she filed a second FERPA complaint on December 20, 2017.
Last week, the US Department of Education refused to accept the weak rationalizations offered by the Success Academy legal staff about these disclosures and found that in both cases, they were flagrant violations of FERPA.
Yet in order to address these violations, Frank Miller, Deputy Director of the Student Privacy Policy Office, wrote that Success Academy must merely ensure that “school officials have or will receive training on the requirements of FERPA as they relate to the issues in this complaint.” He refrained from imposing any penalties or demanding that the offending passages be deleted from Eva Moskowitz’ book – a book that is still for sale on Amazon and in bookstores all across the United States.
As Fatima Geidi said, “While I am glad that the US Department of Education agreed that Ms. Moskowitz and Success Academy repeatedly violated my child’s privacy by disclosing trumped-up details of his education records to the media, on the Success website and in her book, I am furious that they failed to fine her, or at the very least, demand that she take the offending passages out of her book. Because the Department of Education waited over two years to respond to my initial FERPA complaint, Eva Moskowitz illegally put the same information (false by the way) about my child in a book where it may remain forever. This is unacceptable, and I demand that the illegal passages from the book be deleted.”
Leonie Haimson, co-chair of the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy, said, “Ms. Moskowitz and Success Academy have repeatedly violated FERPA in order to retaliate against parents who dare reveal how she abuses children and pushes them out of her charter schools. These illegal disclosures happened again just last month, in the case of Lisa Vasquez and her daughter, as reported in a Chalkbeat article. On May 9, 2019, Ms. Vasquez filed a FERPA complaint with the US Department of Education and the NY State Education Chief Privacy Officer. Her FERPA complaint is posted on our blog, where we point to other privacy violations by Success charter schools. Simply asking for Success staff to receive privacy training will likely prove no real deterrence to Eva Moskowitz. Instead she and her staff will likely continue to flagrantly violate their students’ privacy with impunity in the future.”
The US Department of Education has provided more than $37 million in discretionary grants to Success Academy since 2010, including nearly $10 million awarded in April 2019. Its officials should be required to explain why they chose not to withhold any federal funds from her schools, and worse, will allow the offending passages in Ms. Moskowitz’ book to remain in perpetuity. The unacceptable delay of more than three and a half years in responding to Ms. Geidi’s initial complaint and the lack of an meaningful response by the Department provides further evidence as to why parents should be able to sue for damages under FERPA when their children’s right to privacy has been violated.
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Diane Ravitch's blog 