Archives for the month of: November, 2019
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Politico Playbook: Trump’s Grueling Work Schedule This Week

By dianeravitch
November 17, 2019 //
30

Politico Playbook regularly posts the president’s schedule for the coming week.

This week leaves him plenty of time to watch FOX News, Tweet, and maybe play a few rounds of golf.

 

THE PRESIDENT’S WEEK AHEAD: TUESDAY: The president will hold a Cabinet meeting and have lunch with VP Mike Pence. WEDNESDAY: Trump will visit the Apple manufacturing plant in Austin. THURSDAY: Trump and First Lady Melania Trump will present the National Medal of Arts and the National Humanities Medal. FRIDAY: The president will participate in the NCAA Collegiate National Champions Day.

Categories Education Reform

In DeVos-Trump Era of Alternative Facts, Belief in Flat Earth Grows

By dianeravitch
November 17, 2019 //
43

If all facts are subjective and dependent on religious and personal views, there is no such thing as fact, truth, objectivity or science.

Ohio’s dumb Republican-controlled legislature isn’t on the verge of passing a law that puts religious belief and science on the same plane.

So it is not surprising that believers in a Flat Earth are on the rise., according to CNN.They can’t find proof that the world is round, so they don’t believe it, even though you can see the curve of the earth’s surface from an airplane window at 35,000 feet, even though astronauts and satellites have taken pictures from outer space of the earth as a sphere.

Faked photos, say the Flat Earthers.

Is stupidity contagious?

Or does it flow from the top?

Categories Accountability, Fake News, Science

Peter Greene: Betsy DeVos Blames Public Schools for Everything Bad

By dianeravitch
November 17, 2019 //
17

Peter Greene reports that Betsy DeVos won an award from an anti-feminist women’s group. She used the occasion to lambaste public schools (again).

You won’t hear her complain about the Ohio legislators who hope to outlaw facts. You won’t hear her complain about the religious schools that use the Bible as a science textbook.

Categories Betsy DeVos, Education Reform, Ignorance, Stupid

Maine: Legal Groups Join Lawsuit to Block Public Funding of Religious Schools

By dianeravitch
November 17, 2019 //
1

Two prominent civil rights legal groups joined to support the decision by the state of Maine not to use public funds for religious schools.
November 14, 2019
PFPS Urges Appellate Court to Uphold Maine’s Decision Not to Send Public Funds to Religious Schools
Public Funds Public Schools (PFPS) has filed an amicus curiae (friend of the court) brief in federal appellate court in Carson v. Makin, a case challenging the State of Maine’s decision not to use public education funding to pay for tuition at private religious schools.
PFPS, a joint initiative of Education Law Center (ELC) and the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), is a national campaign to ensure that public funds are used to support and maintain public education and are not diverted to private schools.
As in other states, Maine’s constitution contains an education clause requiring the State to maintain and support a system of public schools available to all Maine children. To carry out this mandate, the State Legislature permits “school administrative units” that do not operate their own public schools for geographic or historical reasons to pay tuition to approved, nonsectarian private schools on behalf of resident children. Participating private schools must comply with a host of legal requirements to ensure they meet State education standards for an appropriate, nondiscriminatory education.
In 2018, three Maine families filed a federal lawsuit challenging the Legislature’s longstanding decision to limit the program to nonreligious schools. The district court rejected the plaintiffs’ arguments that the State’s exclusion of religious schools from the tuition program violates their rights under the First and Fourteenth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution.
The plaintiffs appealed, and the case is now before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. PFPS submitted an amicus brief in support of the Maine Commissioner of Education’s defense of the law, urging the appellate court to affirm the lower court’s decision.
PFPS’s brief emphasizes Maine’s compelling interest under the state constitution to preserve the carefully regulated tuition program in its current form. The brief explains that inclusion of religious schools would undermine the State’s construction of a limited program to fulfill its education clause duty in the narrow circumstances where a traditional public school is not available.
The amicus brief also details how expanding the program to religious schools would divert significant resources from Maine’s already underfunded public education system. Finally, it warns that, because religious schools often discriminate based on characteristics such as religion and disability, including them in the tuition program would entangle the State in regulating matters of religion or force it to fund discrimination.
“PFPS supports Maine’s decision not to spend limited public education funds on tuition for religious schools,” said Jessica Levin, ELC Senior Attorney and PFPS Director. “Unnecessarily expanding the tuition program would undermine the State’s constitutional commitment to provide an adequate public education to every child because it would divert funding away from a public school system that needs more, not fewer, resources.”
 “Our brief highlights Maine’s longstanding commitment to providing every child with an opportunity to attend school in an environment free from discrimination. We urge the court to uphold the legal framework promoting this essential goal,” said Sam Boyd, SPLC Senior Staff Attorney.”
For more information on voucher litigation and PFPS amicus briefs, visit the Litigation page of the PFPS website.
Press Contact:
Sharon Krengel
Policy and Outreach Director
Education Law Center
Public Funds Public Schools | 60 Park Place, Suite 300, Newark, NJ 07102
Sent by news@pfps.org
Categories Education Reform, Maine, Religion, Separation of church and state, Vouchers

“LilSis” Maps the Walton Billionaires Who Are Crushing the Teachers, Parents, and Public Schools of Little Rock

By dianeravitch
November 17, 2019 //
10

LilSis (also known as the Public Accountability Project) pays careful attention to the networks and money behind nefarious efforts to destroy the public sector.

In this report, LilSis describes the corporate backers of school privatization against whom Little Rock teachers went on strike. The money behind this network of interlinking organizations and individuals is the Walton family, whose wealth clocked in at $163 Billion (that’s Billion with a B) in 2018.

LilSis writes:

A major backer of the anti-union, pro-charter agenda in Arkansas is the Walton family, whose foundation is a huge funder of the school privatization infrastructure that exists across the state. In addition to the Waltons, corporate elites from Murphy Oil, the Arkansas State Chamber of Commerce, the Arkansas Democrat Gazetteand others are backers of the school privatization efforts. These corporate interests are close to Governor Hutchinson, who supports their agenda, and they have close ties to the state Board of Education. In addition, they are also interlocked with a host of lobbyists and academics that push their agenda…

The Waltons are major advocate of charter schools nationally, and they carry out their school privatization agenda through their Walton Family Foundation, which showers hundreds of millions on pro-charter groups and schools. The foundation claims it has invested a whopping $407 million into pushing charter schools since 1997.According to a recent report put out by the Arkansas Education Association, the Waltons pump millions into propping up the state’s school privatization infrastructure – or what the report calls the “Arkansas’s School Privatization Empire.” 

It’s not just that the Waltons give big money to a few groups – it’s also that these groups then distribute that money to other organizations, lobbyists, consultants, and academics, creating a vast network of billionaire-funded activity to attack unionized teachers and push charter schools. 

For example, the Walton family Foundation gave $350,000 to the Arkansans for Education Reform Foundation (AERF) in 2017 – around 80% of all the contributions the organization took in that year. 

The AERF board includes other powerful funders and advocates of school privatization in the state, such as Claiborne Deming, the former CEO of Murphy Oil, a big backer of charter schools in Arkansas; William Dillard III, part of the Dilliard family that owns the Dilliard’s department stores; and Walter Hussman, publisher of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, the state’s flagship newspaper. Jim Walton is also on the board.

In addition to the $350,000 that the Walton donated to the AERF in 2017, Deming gave $60,000 and Dilliard III gave $10,000, while the National Christian Foundation gave $15,000, according the the group’s 2017 990 form.

AERF has in turn used the money it receives from the Walton billionaire fortune and other Arkansas elites to fund other school privatization efforts. For example, it gave $115,000 to Arkansas Learns, which describesitself as “the Voice of Business for excellent education options – including industry-relevant career pathways…” The CEO of Arkansas Learns, Gary Newton, is also the Executive Director of the AERF (for which he earned $189,639 in compensation in 2017). 

In turn, Arkansas Learns has the same board members as AERF, and Randy Zook, the CEO of the Arkansas Chamber of Commerce, whose wife Dianne Zook is on the state Board of Education that decided to end recognition of the Little Rock teachers’ union, is also a board member. Dianne Zook is also the aunt of Gary Newton.

What a cozy and mutually beneficial arrangement: The Waltons have a lot of money to hand out to achieve their goal of privatizing public schools and breaking unions, and the recipients take the money and carry out the Waltons’ wishes.

Any time you see a group called “XXXXXXX for Education Reform,” you can be sure it is committed to charter schools, union-busting, and privatization, and the odds are high that there is Walton money behind it.

The Waltons have claimed credit for subsidizing one of every four charter schools in the nation.

LilSis creates wonderful graphical depictions of networks.

Here is the LilSis graphic of the Little Rock school privatization network. 

Categories Accountability, Arkansas, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Little Rock, Privatization, Teachers, Unions, Walton Foundation

Eric Blanc: Why Little Rock Teachers Went on Strike

By dianeravitch
November 17, 2019 //
3

If you want to understand what is happening in the Little Rock school District today, read Eric Blanc’s article. 

Eric Blanc has covered every one of the teachers’ strikes since the West Virginia strike in the spring of 2018. Now he is in Little Rock, where he interviewed teachers who went on strike yesterday to protest the State Board of Education’s heavy-handed control of the district and its decision to strip school employees of collective bargaining rights.

Teachers are outraged that the State Board of Education, which took control of the district in 2015, utterly failed to improve student outcomes, yet refuses to relinquish control to a democratically elected board. Teachers believe that the state wants to resegregate the district.

Blanc writes:

Little Rock teachers today are not demanding raises for themselves, but an end to the state’s push to resegregate schools, its takeover of their district, its decertification of their union, and its disrespect for school support staff. As second grade teacher Jenni White explains, “this is literally about standing up for our kids and not dividing our community…

The immediate roots of this week’s action go back to January 2015 when the Arkansas State Board of Education announced that it was taking over Little Rock’s schools due to low standardized test scores. By all accounts, the ensuing state takeover failed to accomplish its nominal goal of improving stability and educational opportunities for the town’s low-performing schools. Yet rather than return Little Rock School District to local control in 2020 as promised, the state board instead proposed in September of this year that it would continue to oversee so-called “F”-rated schools, those with the lowest test scores.

Since all but one of the “F” schools were in black and brown neighborhoods south of I-630, teachers and parents saw this an attempt to create a two-tier school system. “The plan was blatantly racist, it separated the haves and the have notes,” Jenni White told me.

In a dramatic protest on the evening of October 9, thousands of teachers, support staff, students, and community members congregated on the steps of Central High, where the Little Rock Nine had famously confronted the National Guard decades earlier. Teresa Knapp Gordon, president of the Little Rock Education Association (LREA), closed the rally with the following declaration: “Either we accept segregation, or we stand and fight.”

This public outpouring forced the state board to change tactics. At the next evening’s contentious Arkansas Board of Education meeting, it dropped the proposal to split Little Rock’s school district. But surprisingly, the board then immediately proceeded to cease recognition of the LREA as the educators’ representative, thereby scrapping the last remaining collective bargaining agreement for school workers in Arkansas. The decision was blatant retaliation against not only teachers but also Little Rock’s school support staff, who were in the midst of negotiating a pay raise.

Next, the board issued a draft “Memorandum of Understanding” explaining that instead of returning full local control to the school board set to be elected in November 2020, the state would appoint a parallel “advisory board” that could veto local decisions. The Memorandum also insists on closing up to eleven neighborhood schools — which would thereby accelerate privatization, since state law gives charters first access to any vacant school. Stacey McAdoo, a teacher at Central High, told Labor Notes, “they are trying to charterize the [district] like what happened in New Orleans and disenfranchise people and make a separate school system out of the areas that are primarily Black and Latino.”

As in so many other states across the country, this offensive against the labor movement, public education, and working-class communities of color is being directly funded by billionaires. And it’s not just any billionaires: Little Rock teachers and students are up against the Arkansas-based Waltons, founders of Walmart and the richest familyin America.

The Walton family: the Death Star of Public Education. The ingrates who graduated from Arkansas public schools but now want to destroy them and public schools everywhere. Rich and shameless.

Categories Arkansas, Charter Schools, Democracy, Education Reform, Failure, Fraud, Little Rock, Resistance, Segregation, Teachers, Unions

Glenn Sacks in the Wall Street Journal: Teachers’ Unions Have the Cure for What Ails America’s Schools

By dianeravitch
November 17, 2019 //
52

Wow! Talk about a surprise! Teacher Glenn Sacks managed to get an article with the title of this post in the Wall Street Journal, the newspaper that regularly vilifies teachers’ unions and praises privatization of public funds.

Yes, Sacks–a teacher in Los Angeles–contends that teachers’ unions fight to get teachers the time and support staff they need to do their jobs, so they are necessary and valuable.

The link that Sacks provided is not behind a pay wall.

The article begins:

The rookie science teacher looks at me with the same “Am I understanding this job correctly or am I crazy?” look I’ve often seen in the eyes of new teachers.

“No, you understand,” I say. “You’ve been thrown into a situation that requires an enormous amount of work and a good amount of ability, and it’s sink or swim. You might naturally expect the system to help you, or at least acknowledge the position you’ve been put in. It won’t.”

Teachers have come under considerable scrutiny in recent decades, and everybody claims to have the silver-bullet reform that will fix education. No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, Common Core, charter schools, raising the qualifications to become a teacher, limiting or abolishing tenure, and countless other measures have been taken up by Congress and state legislatures since I took my first teaching position in 1989.

Yet there is little public discussion about the education system’s central problem: Teachers don’t have enough time to do our jobs properly. Teachers unions understand this and fight to protect our ability to do our jobs.

He points out that some students can be assessed more accurately with an oral exam that with a written one, but teachers don’t have the time for that.

He writes:

Here are some ways to make teachers more effective:

  • Reduce class sizes, an issue in both the October teachers’ strike in Chicago and the Los Angeles teachers’ strike in January.
  • Provide teachers with support staff for clerical work.
  • Hire sufficient staff to eliminate extraneous chores.

Limiting class size and hiring sufficient staff would save teachers’ time from being squandered. That in turn would allow us to focus more on creating imaginative lessons and interacting with students.

Seeing Glenn Sacks’ article in the WSJ gives me hope that some people in the business world might read it and pay attention.

If they do, they will understand what real education reform looks like from the perspective of those who do the work, rather than those who sit in armchairs in think tanks.

 

Categories Class size, Education Reform, Teachers, Unions

Mercedes Schneider: Democratic Governor Re-Elected in Louisiana!

By dianeravitch
November 17, 2019 //
18

 

Mercedes Schneider explains why the re-election of Governor John Bel Edwards over his Trump-loving opponent is good news for education.

President Trump visited Louisiana three times in recent weeks to campaign for Republican gubernatorial challenger, Eddie Rispone.

As of this writing, Trump has been silent on Twitter regarding the Edwards win (Rispone loss).

Edwards’ win is critical for Louisiana’s infrastructure, including education, both K12 and postsecondary. Under Edwards’ leadership (see here also) in his first term (2016-2020), he fully funded Louisiana’s Taylor Opportunity Scholarship Program (TOPS); supported a state raise for teachers and other school personnel, and investing millions in early childhood education.

Rispone’s most notable connection to education is via US ed sec Betsy DeVos and her national, school-choice organization, American Federation for Children (AFC). Risponse is the former chair of the Louisiana branch of AFC, the Louisiana Federation for Children.

The Wahington Post said That Trump called conservative Democrat Edwards a “radical leftist.” That didn’t pass the laugh test.

Categories Education Reform

Yavanovich Reminded Us: This Is Not Normal

By dianeravitch
November 16, 2019 //
42

Susan Glasser explained in the New Yorker why the testimony of Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch was so powerful:

For a few hours on Friday, an unassuming career diplomat named Marie (Masha) Yovanovitch did something that I thought had become impossible in Donald Trump’s Washington: she managed to hold on to her amazement and outrage at the President’s amazing and outrageous actions. In this hyper-partisan, hyper-political time, she was neither. Nearly three years into this Presidency, that is no given. A state of weary cynicism has taken hold regarding Trump, among his supporters and also his critics. He is what he is. What can we do about it? Even impeachment has quickly come to be seen through this lens. Members of Congress are all too likely to vote the party line. Does any of it matter?

In hours of spellbinding testimony, on the second day of the House’s public impeachment hearings, Yovanovitch offered a decisive rebuttal to that way of thinking. She said that she had been surprised and appalled when Trump succumbed to a foreign disinformation campaign and fired her as the U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine based on false allegations trafficked by Rudy Giuliani, his private lawyer. She had taken on corrupt interests inside Ukraine, and those parties had, in turn, targeted her—and, unbelievably, it had worked. The President, the most powerful man in the world, had gone along with it. “It was terrible,” she said. Yovanovitch said that she was shocked when Secretary of State Mike Pompeo failed to issue a statement in her defense, although she had spent thirty-three years in the Foreign Service. She said that she was intimidated and incredulous when the President attacked her in a phone call with a foreign leader. She said that she felt threatened. These are simple truths, which is why they were so powerful. So was the question she posed to the members of the House Intelligence Committee arrayed on the dais in front of her: “How could our system fail like this?” That, of course, is a question for which Americans as yet have no real answer.

As with most truly memorable public moments, there was something raw and unexpected about Yovanovitch’s appearance on Friday; it cut through the rote posturing and partisanship to get at an essential fact. Yovanovitch reminded us that all of this is, in fact, amazing and shocking and outrageous. It is not normal. Trump is not on the brink of impeachment because of some arcane dispute over differing philosophies about anti-corruption policies in Ukraine. Yovanovitch, who spent her career fighting corruption in the former Soviet Union, was dumped because the President had allied himself with Ukrainians who wanted to stop America’s anti-corruption efforts. He personally ordered her fired. He spoke threateningly of her during a phone call with Ukraine’s new President and did it again, on Twitter, while she was testifying on Capitol Hill. No previous President—of either party—has ever acted in this way.

That is why Yovanovitch’s appearance was ultimately about what the hell the country is supposed to do with a President who is so manifestly unpresidential. Friday offered a chance to reflect on Trump’s conduct, to consider the extent of his boorishness, his poor judgment, his ignorance, his recklessness, and his callous disregard for anything other than his own personal interests. There will be many days and weeks to come in which to hash out what, if anything, in all this saga involving Ukraine, should be considered impeachable by Congress. But that is not the real import of Friday’s hearing, which was a rare opportunity for America to stop and take stock of Trump and what he has wrought. This was a day to contemplate the excesses of Donald John Trump…

For hours, she did not waver or change her demeanor. She was sincere and corny and old-fashioned in her insistence on the values that politicians often talk about but, in the Trump era, have more or less jettisoned. There was a moment when Yovanovitch reminded the committee about the oath that members of the Foreign Service swear to the Constitution. “We take our oath seriously—the same oath that each one of you takes,” she told the panel, looking directly at the dais where Nunes had just opened the session by speaking once again about a bizarre alleged plot by Democrats to obtain “nude pictures of Trump.” Earnestness, as Yovanovitch showed, is not entirely dead in American public life.

Several times, Yovanovitch was asked why it mattered that Trump had fired her, what his prerogative was, and why we should care about it. She reached back to the Truman era and to Arthur Vandenberg, the late Republican senator from Michigan, a prewar isolationist who became a pillar of the postwar internationalism that had been the hallmark of American foreign policy right up until Trump took office. “Partisan politics stops at the water’s edge,” Vandenberg was famous for saying, even if the two parties were never as bipartisan about foreign policy as his statement implied. At least the aspiration was there, even if the execution faltered. Yovanovitch still seemed to want to believe it. She insisted upon the idea that there remains an American national interest, as opposed to a Republican interest, a Democratic interest, or a Presidential interest. She was an Ambassador from our past, and maybe from our future. But not, sadly, from our present.

 

Categories Education Reform

Peter Greene: DeVos Picks Soul Mates for the Governing Board of NAEP

By dianeravitch
November 16, 2019 //
10

One of the perks of being Secretary of Education is that he or she selects member of the National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB), which is the oversight body for the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). The board is designed to be bipartisan and to represent people from different walks of life. As the NAGB website states, The Governing Board is made up of 26 members, including governors, state legislators, local and state school officials, educators and researchers, business representatives, and members of the general public. Members are appointed by the U.S. secretary of education.

When I was appointed to NAGB by Secretary Richard Riley on behalf of the Clinton administration in 1998, the board was truly representative and diverse and collegial. We worried constantly, as did Congress, about keeping “politics” out of the decision making process.

That was then, this is now. Now we have a Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, who is actively hostile to public education. It is reasonable to assume that she wants NAEP to show public schools in the worst possible light to provide ammunition for her crusade to destroy them. No one questions whether her selections are “political.” Of course they are. Unlike Secretary Riley and other secretaries, no one she selected disagrees with her dire diagnosis of public education.

Peter Greene writes here about her choices for NAGB here. Here are the folks who will shape future assessments. My only hope, as a former member of the board, is that their ability to mess up NAEP will be constrained by the professional staff, unless she has replaced them with rightwing zealots and by the limited nature of the decisions that the board makes (whether and when to test the arts or history or civics or “grit”).

After four years in which to replace retiring members, DeVos will have put her stamp on NAGB. Perhaps the standards will become so high that no one reaches NAEP Proficient, not in public schools or charter schools or religious schools, and we can declare all of American education a disaster and throw up out hands in feigned despair. Greene sees the slant of this board as reason not to take NAEP results seriously in the future. The media, however, will continue to see NAEP as the gold standard, so I am hoping the new additions will not render it useless.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Education Reform, NAEP, Testing
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