Archives for the month of: July, 2019

NYSAPE-New York State Allies for Public Education-is the leading voice for parents and educators who want a forward-looking education agenda, not one that slavishly promotes No Child Left Behind-style policies of test-and-punish. It has led the state’s successful opt-out movement. NYSAPE consists of 70 groups of parents and educators from every part of the state.

NYSAPE was delighted to learn that Commissioner MaryEllen Elia was resigning.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: July 16, 2019
More information contact:
Lisa Rudley (917) 414-9190; nys.allies@gmail.com
Jeanette Deutermann (516) 902-9228; nys.allies@gmail.com
NYS Allies for Public Education – NYSAPE

As New York Closes the Door on Commissioner Elia’s Corporate Reform Agenda, NYSAPE Urges the Board of Regents to Include All Stakeholders When Choosing Our Next Commissioner

MaryEllen Elia was the wrong choice for NY in 2015 when she was appointed as Commissioner by the Board of Regents and former Regent Chancellor Merryl Tisch. The Commissioner continued to demonstrate throughout her tenure an unwillingness to move beyond her corporate reform agenda, resulting in NYSAPE’s repeated call for her resignation. The children of NY deserve a state education leader who will put their well-being at the forefront of all education policies.

“In 2015, NYSAPE sounded the alarms when Commissioner Elia was recruited by national and local education leaders to run NY’s education department as she did in Florida, with privatizing, common core, and high stakes testing, as her main priorities. As the new leadership and education philosophy of the Board of Regents shifted towards child-centered learning, Commissioner Elia was focused on creating a culture of fear, misinformation, and intimidation throughout NYS school districts,” said Jeanette Deutermann, co-founder of NYSAPE and founder of Long Island Opt Out.

“Under Commissioner Elia’s direction, our children and schools continued to endure abusive, excessive testing, developmentally inappropriate state standards and data privacy breaches. At every turn, Elia circumvented the Board of Regents and failed to steer public education policies in the right direction,” said Lisa Rudley, Westchester public school parent, Executive Director and co-founder of NYSAPE.

“The student privacy regulations just released by the State Education Department were the last straw,” said Leonie Haimson, Executive Director of Class Size Matters and co-chair of the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy. “After waiting five years for NY Education § 2-d to be enforced, state officials just proposed regulations that would allow contractors to sell and use personal student data for marketing purposes, in direct violation of the language of the law. And she has failed to deliver any of the annual reports required since 2014 that would detail the progress in following up on data breaches and parental privacy complaints.”

“We urge the Board of Regents to work with parents, advocates and other stakeholder groups in appointing the next Commissioner. Our children deserve a Commissioner who will move past the current test-and-punish regime, and towards a whole-child education and project-based learning,” said Chris Cerrone, a Western NY school board member, teacher and a co-founder of NYSAPE.

“The New York State Education Department under Commissioner Elia was never straight with parents regarding the state’s high-stakes testing program. Rather than present neutral information, the department engaged in deceptive practices, including creating PR “toolkits” designed to persuade families of the legitimacy of the tests, even though a growing number of respected educators and researchers have questioned their effectiveness. I hope her successor will be more focused on equity and partnering with schools rather than punishing them,” Kemala Karmen, co-founder of NYC Opt Out.

Elia repeatedly feigned inclusivity, exaggerating stakeholder input, such as the role of teachers in creating standardized exams, the ESSA implementation workshops where a popular Opportunity Dashboard was stealthily removed, and the “public” comments on teacher evaluations which were never made public. Elia also never responded to requests asking for the research showing the scientific validity of standardized testing, nor would she make public the invisible scoring formulas which make the results unverifiable,” said public school parent and NYC educator Jake Jacobs.

New York must get it right this time. The children of New York and our public schools can’t afford to wait any longer for the education leadership they deserve.

NYSAPE is a grassroots coalition with over 70 parent and educator groups across the state.

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Categories Administrators, superintendents, Education Reform, New York

Nikole Hannah-Jones: Busing Did Not Fail, We Did

By dianeravitch

July 16, 2019 //

In this article, Nikole Hannah-Jones reviews the history of racial desegregation and the term “busing.” This article is a good reason to subscribe to the New York Times. Nikole Hannah-Jones is a staff writer for the New York Times Magazine.

“Court-ordered desegregation worked. But white racism made it hard to accept.”

When Senator Kamala Harris confronted former Vice President Joe Biden at the second Democratic presidential debate about his support of bills to ban busing for school desegregation during the 1970s and early ’80s, he gave a sort of denial. “I did not oppose busing in America,” he said. “What I opposed is busing ordered by the Department of Education. That’s what I opposed.”

This quickly became one of the most talked-about moments of the debate. Many pundits suggested it was unwise for Ms. Harris to dredge up the racial hurts of a decades-old “failed” policy at a time when the Trump administration is caging children along the border and when Democrats are seeking to retake the White House.

But tellingly, there was little discussion about busing’s efficacy, at least not with facts, or about whether or not busing served its purpose of breaking apart the educational caste system.

That we even use the word “busing” to describe what was in fact court-ordered school desegregation, and that Americans of all stripes believe that the brief period in which we actually tried to desegregate our schools was a failure, speaks to one of the most successful propaganda campaigns of the last half century. Further, it explains how we have come to be largely silent — and accepting — of the fact that 65 years after the Supreme Court struck down school segregation in Brown v. Board of Education, black children are as segregated from white students as they were in the mid-1970s when Mr. Biden was working with Southern white supremacist legislators to curtail court-ordered busing.

The term “busing” is a race-neutral euphemism that allows people to pretend white opposition was not about integration but simply about a desire for their children to attend neighborhood schools. But the fact is that American children have ridden buses to schools since the 1920s. There is a reason the cheery yellow school bus is the most ubiquitous symbol of American education. Buses eased the burden of transportation on families and allowed larger comprehensive schools to replace one-room schoolhouses. Millions of kids still ride school buses every day, and rarely do so for integration…

During the late 1950s and early ’60s, white politicians used every possible means to challenge the legitimacy of the Supreme Court and subvert its integration mandate. They siphoned state tax dollars — dollars that black residents also paid — to fund a separate system of all-white private schools that came to be known as segregation academies, paying teacher salaries and offering white children tuition vouchers to attend. All-white legislatures shuttered schools and entire school systems rather than allow a single black child to attend a “white” school.

Starting in 1959, Prince Edward County in Virginia went without a public school system for five years until the Supreme Court finally ordered the schools to reopen. What happened there is perhaps the most glaring example of the absurdity of Mr. Biden arguing on the debate stage that he did not oppose busing, just federal intervention. The federal government got involved precisely because local and state governments had openly rebelled against the Supreme Court, refusing to undertake even token desegregation.

Just a few years before Mr. Biden was attempting to curtail desegregation, white Southerners were bombing schools. They beat children and civil rights activists. They blackballed parents who dared sign their names to lawsuits suing for compliance with Brown, keeping them from employment and evicting them from their homes. Mobs blocked the doors to schoolhouses to keep handfuls of carefully selected black children from entering….

Many white Northerners initially applauded the Brown ruling, believing it was about time the South behaved when it came to its black citizens. But that support hinged largely on the belief that Brown v. Board of Education did not apply to them and their communities. When black activists in cities such as Chicago, Detroit and Dayton, Ohio, pushed to dismantle the de jure segregation that existed in their cities, white support for the integration mandate of Brown faded….

By the early 1970s, the South had been blanketed in desegregation orders pursued by the Justice Department and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and put in place by federal judges who often faced down death threats and political and social ostracization with stunning courage.

It was a remarkable time…

Mr. Biden flipped. Between 1975 and 1982, he teamed up with ardent segregationists in Congress, including Mr. [James O.] Eastland, to support no fewer than five antibusing measures. Despite Mr. Biden’s recent claims that he only opposed busing ordered by the Department of Education, the bills tried to curtail the ability of federal courts to order busing and even to limit busing in places where courts had already ordered it.

Mr. Biden, echoing a sentiment repeated again and again by progressive and conservative commenters in the past few weeks, says he is not and was not opposed to desegregation, just the tool most likely to achieve it…

When people call busing ill conceived or the worst means of ensuring integration, they conveniently obscure that busing was almost always a tool of last resort, mandated by courts only after lengthy battles with school boards and state officials, by black parents and civil rights groups, failed to produce even modest integration for black children. Judges and attorneys and activists were trying to destruct a racist and segregated educational system in the face of enormous resistance, subterfuge and violence, even in the most ostensibly liberal places…

For years, North Carolina’s Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools, where the community decided to make busing work, were some of the most integrated in the country, and both black and white students saw achievement gains. The district was forced to return to neighborhood schools after a white family brought down the desegregation order, and Charlotte is now the most segregated district in North Carolina. We should question why in the narrative of busing we remember Boston but not Charlotte.

To summarize: Black children attended schools that were typically under resourced in comparison to schools for white children. Oliver Brown sued so his daughter Linda could attend her neighborhood school in Topeka, which was designated as whites-only. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the 1954 Brown decision that segregating children by their race was unconstitutional but allowed states to move slowly in dismantling segregation. Over time, federal district courts and federal appeals courts demanded demonstrable compliance with the Brown decision and struck down evasions like choice programs. Eventually, the south became the most desegregated section of the nation, and the northeast became the most segregated. Today, New York, Illinois, Maryland, and Michigan are the most segregated states, in relation to schools.

It is now evident that “busing”—that is, desegregation—worked. Test scores rose for both black and white children, and the gap between them narrowed significantly. But white racism never abated, and as the courts became more conservative, they retreated from their commitment to enforce desegregation. Resegregation increased, reversing the gains of the 1970s and early 1980s, because white racism remained strongly opposed to desegregation.

It was not “busing” that whites opposed. It was desegregation.

Categories Education Reform, Racism, Segregation , Racial Isolation and Integration

Mercedes Schneider: The Very Profitable Career of an ex-TFA-er

By dianeravitch

July 16, 2019 //

Mercedes Schneider writes here about the itinerant but very profitable career of Alison Serapin. A Texan, She went from a short stint in TFA to working as a TFA executive to somehow getting herself on the Nevada State Board of Education, where she was vice-president. She had to resign because of a potential conflict of interest when she decided to apply for a $10 million grant. Fancy that!

Schneider writes:

In April 2016, the Las Vegas Review-Journal published an article about former VP of the Nevada State board of Education, Allison Serafin, who resigned from the board in December 2015 because of a conflict of interest involving her decision to apply for state money to partially fund a charter-promoting nonprofit that Serafin started in 2014, Operation 180. In April 2016, Serafin’s nonprofit, Opportunity 180, won a state contract. From thr LV Review-Journal:

The former vice president of the State Board of Education, who resigned last year citing a potential conflict of interest, won a $10 million contract Tuesday to recruit high-quality charter school operators to Nevada.

When she stepped down from the state board in December, Allison Serafin noted her intent to submit a bid for the state’s new charter harbormaster fund, which matches grants from private philanthropic groups to attract the “best-in-class” national charter management organizations.

The contract authorizes Opportunity 180, an educational nonprofit group that Serafin founded in 2014, to drive two key components of Gov. Brian Sandoval’s education reform agenda: expanding access for low-income families to high-performing charter schools and creating a state-run Achievement School District to take over and turn around chronically underperforming campuses. …

As of Friday, Opportunity 180 already had collected more than $4.1 million in committed or cash donations from the Englestad Family Foundation and three other philanthropic groups, Serafin said.

So, Serafin arguably saw an *opportunity* to tailor her nonprofit toward creating Nevada’s newly-legislated Achievement School District and chose to pursue it.

Schneider traces the remunerative path of this TFA entrepreneur.

The good news in this story of “follow the money” is that the Nevada Legislature voted in May 2019 to abolish its failed Achievement School District. So Alison quickly adjusted to find new opportunities in the EdDeform world.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry

Bob Shepherd Invites Yew to Enroll in His Brand New Skule

By dianeravitch

July 16, 2019 //

Bob Shepherd invites Yew!

Come on down to our “Race to the Top of Mount Zion Enrollment Jubilee” in the old K-Mart parking lot this Saturday and sign yore kids up for Bob Shepherd’s Real Good Florida School. You can use yore Florida State Scholarships to pay for it, and so it’s absolutely FREE!!!! No longer due you havta send yore children to them gobbermint schools run by Socialists whar they will be taut to be transgendered! We offer a complete curriculem, including

World HIS-tory (from Creation to Babylon to the Rapture)
Political Science (We thank you, Lord, for Donald Trump; the Second Amendmint; and protecting our Borders from invading hordes of rapists and murderers)
Anglish (the official language of the United States, and the language the Bible was written in)
Science (the six days of creation; how to make yore own buckshot; and how Cain and Abel survived among the dinosaurs)
Economics (when rich people get tax brakes, that makes you richer)
Art (making a Nativity Scene from Popsicle sticks)

And much, much more!!! Plus, you don’t havta worry yore hed about safety, cause all are teachers is locked and loaded!

Categories Education Reform

New York: Time for the Regents to Chart a New Course

By dianeravitch

July 16, 2019 //

Note to the Regents: Parents and teachers have had it. They are sick of the same old, same old, test-and-punish, top-down mandates. Isn’t it time to pick a leader who is not in love with high-stakes testing and lockstep policies?

John Ogozalek, teacher and thinker, speaks for many others when he wrote this morning:

Maybe at this point someone in charge should apologize to the children, parents, teachers and taxpayers of New York State for 8 years of chaos and waste and harm.

But I’m not holding my breath waiting for that.

I’m going to go water the garden.

Enjoy this beautiful, summer day all!

I agree that the state owes everyone an apology. But I don’t agree that we should sit back and wait to see what happens. Speak up, contact your Regent if you live in New York, demand a new approach that respects the intelligence of parents, teachers, students, and taxpayers. All over the country, parents and educators are starting to demand fresh thinking, free of the shackles created by No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top. New York should lead, not follow, in breaking free of the status quo.

Categories Accountability, Administrators, superintendents, Education Reform, New York

Nancy Bailey: How Does Common Core Affect Reading Instruction?

By dianeravitch

July 16, 2019 //

Recently there has been a flurry of articles criticizing teachers and teacher educators for the way that reading is taught.

But, writes Nancy Bailey, none of them has looked at the effects of Common Core on reading instruction.

She wonders why the omission, why the indifference to the elephant in the room.

Categories Common Core, Education Reform, Teachers and Teaching

George T. Conway III: Trump is a Racist

By dianeravitch

July 15, 2019 //

George T. Conway III, a lawyer in New York, happens to be the husband of Kellyanne Conway, senior advisor to Trump. The conversations at the Conway dinner table must be very interesting, to say the least.

He wrote an opinion piece for the Washington Post in which he reached the unavoidable conclusion that the president is a racist. He tried, he wrote, to give him the benefit of the doubt.

No, I thought, President Trump was boorish, dim-witted, inarticulate, incoherent, narcissistic and insensitive. He’s a pathetic bully but an equal-opportunity bully — in his uniquely crass and crude manner, he’ll attack anyone he thinks is critical of him. No matter how much I found him ultimately unfit, I still gave him the benefit of the doubt about being a racist. No matter how much I came to dislike him, I didn’t want to think that the president of the United States is a racial bigot.

But Sunday left no doubt. Naivete, resentment and outright racism, roiled in a toxic mix, have given us a racist president. Trump could have used vile slurs, including the vilest of them all, and the intent and effect would have been no less clear. Telling four non-white members of Congress — American citizens all, three natural-born — to “go back” to the “countries” they “originally came from”? That’s racist to the core. It doesn’t matter what these representatives are for or against — and there’s plenty to criticize them for — it’s beyond the bounds of human decency. For anyone, not least a president.

What’s just as bad, though, is the virtual silence from Republican leaders and officeholders. They’re silent not because they agree with Trump. Surely they know better. They’re silent because, knowing that he’s incorrigible, they have inured themselves to his wild statements; because, knowing that he’s a fool, they don’t really take his words seriously and pretend that others shouldn’t, either; because, knowing how damaging Trump’s words are, the Republicans don’t want to give succor to their political enemies; because, knowing how vindictive, stubborn and obtusely self-destructive Trump is, they fear his wrath.

The Republican Party has lost its soul. Conway worries that the nation may lose not only its ideals but its soul with this “pathetic bully” in the White House.

Categories Education Reform

Breaking News! NY Commissioner Elia Resigning

By dianeravitch

July 15, 2019 //

The news just broke on Twitter and on Orthodox Jewish websites.

New York Commissioner MaryEllen Elia is resigning at the end of August. No reason given.

She was a champion of testing, Common Core, and sanctions for parents to dared to opt out of state testing.

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, New York

Our Divider-in-Chief: Master of the Swamp

By dianeravitch

July 15, 2019 //

108

Trump is a master at appealing to the lowest fears and hatreds of the Swamp that is his base.

Like other demagogues in history, he knows how to unleash rage and envy.

He says he is a “stable genius.” He says he is the “least racist person” you will ever meet.

He teaches us what? Lie. Boast. Bully. Insult. Demean all those whom you see as a threat. Demean those who not like you. Demean the Other.

Now he says that certain members of Congress should “go back where they came from.”

How low can he go?

When you think he has touched bottom, he goes even deeper, reaching into the subconscious to stir fear, anxiety, hatred among his base.

I try to ignore him, to never watch or listen. But his pudgy little finger controls the nuclear codes.

He has taught us a lesson about who we are. We are not exceptionable. Any country that could nominate a man with no character, no ethics, no morals, no principles, must look hard in the mirror and ask “Who are we?”

The Republican Party has destroyed itself by falling in step behind the least qualified man, most vicious, most incompetent man in our history. Their silence speaks volumes. They have become spineless creatures in Trump’s Swamp.

If only he would go back where he came from.

https://apple.news/A3T3DtsypRMy8uC1lUTlvJg

Teresa Hanafin of the Boston Globe said it best in her daily Fast Forward column:

Trump’s racist tweets Sunday telling four Democratic congresswomen of color to go back to their countries — all are US citizens and three were born in the US — isn’t really about those four young women. It’s about all of us.

It’s about all among us who are people of color, awaking today to a world deliberately made more dangerous for them by the occupant of the Oval Office. As New York Times columnist Tom Friedman said, Trump’s tweets make them targets in a country full of guns.

It’s about all of us who are too gutless to condemn the phrase popular with white supremacists — “Go back where you came from” — and the divisive us vs. them mentality that is the hallmark of the Trump presidency.

It’s a phrase one expects to hear on the street from knuckle-draggers, not from the West Wing.

British PM Theresa May condemned the tweets — “The language that was used to refer to these women was completely unacceptable” — but a) she didn’t mention Trump by name and b) she’s a short-timer with nothing to lose.

Yet even she was more forthright than Republicans in Congress, only two of whom have addressed the issue. Representative Chip Roy of Texas tweeted: “POTUS was wrong to say any American citizen, whether in Congress or not, has any ‘home’ besides the U.S.”

And then came the predictable “but:” “But I just as strongly believe non-citizens who abuse our immigration laws should be sent home immediately, & Reps who refuse to defend America should be sent home 11/2020.” In other words, “Sorry for criticizing you, boss; I’m really on your side so please please please don’t hurt me.”

Ditto Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who this morning offered mealy-mouthed advice to Trump — “Aim higher” — before launching his own attack against the young women, calling them anti-Semitic and saying they hate the US.

The calculus of GOP members of Congress is purely political: They are deathly afraid that Trump will primary them, finding more sycophantic Republicans to challenge them. They value power more than principle, incumbency more than integrity, muscle more than morality.

This feels like a turning point in our country: When there are no repercussions for racism, what’s next?

Remember when Hillary Clinton said during the 2016 campaign that Democrats have to understand and empathize with Trump supporters who “feel that the government has let them down?” And that many others belong in a “basket of deplorables” because they have racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic tendencies that Trump elevates and celebrates, and the world went nuts that she would dare to call them out?

What’s funny is that many Americans wish Trump would go back to the country where his allegiance really lies: Mother Russia. I hear the meatloaf in the Kremlin is delicious.

Categories Education Reform

Norm Scott: Experience Counts

By dianeravitch

July 15, 2019 //

Retired New York City Teacher Norm Scott explains here why experience counts.

He writes:

I’ve been watching D-Day movies and finally saw Saving Private Ryan. In pretty much all war movies we see the big differences between grizzled war veterans and the rookies who are often scared to death. It is so clear how important experience is in warfare. I mean what commander wouldn’t want troops who knew the ropes?

In education we often find just the opposite where newbies are preferred. Low salaries. Non-tenured. They won’t talk back and will often do anything asked by administrators, no matter how stupid. And wise in education combat zones like those grizzled sergeants. Too many principals love newbies who they can manipulate.

Over the past few decades the idea that experience makes a difference for a teacher has been disparaged by the ed deformers. Note the growth of Teach for America and the Teaching Fellows where you get 6 weeks of boot camp and are sent into the world to make guinea pigs of students while you learn the ropes.

I was one of those. In 1967 grad students were losing their deferments and going into a 6 week boot camp for new teachers and teaching for two years was a way out and I took it and became a newbie teacher. You know those war movies where the guy is sweating and wracked with fear – Corporal Upham in Private Ryan is the prototype – a coward afraid of combat. I was Upham my first year of teaching. Facing a class of children and keeping them under control was my greatest fear. They were often off the wall. I was envious of these little ladies in my school who had perfect control. When I finally learned how to control a class it was one of the major achievements of my life. I never would have survived as a teacher if I couldn’t. Well, I could have become an administrator.

My friend Arthur Goldstein, who is an ESL teacher and the union leader at Francis Lewis HS, one of the largest and most overcrowded in the city, for the past 15 years has written a very influential education oriented blog called NYC Educator sharing a lot of insights into the many facets of the process and often mystery of teaching.

I wanted to share an excerpt from his posting on June 12 about the coming end of the school year. Arthur has given his finals but still has to keep the students interested. He gives them a surprise test with questions such as: When was the War of 1812? Where does Chinese food come from? What color is the white board? He wondered about a student who got one of these wrong.

Arthur has many decades of teaching and here he gets to some of the essence of why experience matters for teachers.

[Arthur writes:]

“One of the things Cuomo didn’t consider when pushing the miserable evaluation law is what it’s like to bomb in front of 34 teenagers. This, of course, is because he’s never taught, and he’s never been through what we go through each and every day. I don’t know about you, but I fear that more than I fear some supervisor with an iPad. I remember it happening to me in my first few years. I remember watching other teachers and wondering exactly what they were doing that I was not. Why are their classes calm while mine is off the wall? I’m not sure there’s an easy response to that. I’d say things got just a little better when I started calling houses. And maybe I’ve grown more confident or authoritative over the years. Mostly, I have more experience and more go-to lesson plans. If I see something not working I can usually push it in another direction and try something at least different, if not always better.”

That’s it. Arthur has the experience to see what is not working and has the confidence he can figure things out. Like the great pitcher whose slider is not working but adjusts. Not to compare teaching to baseball. Or combat. Welllll, maybe. One of my old pals and colleagues, Rockaway resident David Bentley used to tell the story of his first year in a tough school in 1967-68 when a class of children was so out of control he walked into the office of the principal, a tough old bird named Sophie Beller (Lagosi was her nickname) and told her he was quitting and would rather go to Vietnam. She sent him home for the day to recover and he ended up becoming one of the great teachers in my school. Ahhhh, that good ole experience does count.

Categories Teach for America, Teachers and Teaching

NYSAPE Calls for a Commissioner Who Puts the Needs of Students First

Nikole Hannah-Jones: Busing Did Not Fail, We Did

Mercedes Schneider: The Very Profitable Career of an ex-TFA-er

Bob Shepherd Invites Yew to Enroll in His Brand New Skule

New York: Time for the Regents to Chart a New Course

Nancy Bailey: How Does Common Core Affect Reading Instruction?

George T. Conway III: Trump is a Racist

Breaking News! NY Commissioner Elia Resigning

Our Divider-in-Chief: Master of the Swamp

Norm Scott: Experience Counts

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