You won’t want to miss this great show!
The celebrated acrobatic troupe Cirque du Soleil will be live-streaming a 60-minute performance TONIGHT of a show called ZED.
It was performed only in Tokyo.
I have seen this group perform twice, and each time was thrilling. Their aesthetic is dazzling. Their physical grace is astonishing.
If you tried to catch their show in Las Vegas, the ticket would cost more than $100.
Don’t miss the chance to see them tonight for free.
Trump would like everyone to forget what he said in January, February, and March to minimize the danger of the coronavirus. Other nations acted, we did not. He continually gave false assurances that the disease was no problem, that it was under control, that people should proceed with their lives as usual.
Fintan O’Toole wrote in the New York Review of Books about the contradictory impulses of Trump’s base. On the one hand, all dangerous things come from The Other, and Trump alone has the courage to save us (from outsiders, Muslims, Mexicans, socialists, Communists, Democrats, etc.) On the other hand, his base embraces risk. They love guns. They want everyone to have one. They don’t like regulation. They want the government to stay out of their lives, not regulating the water or the air.
The article is called “Vector-in-Chief.” It might have also been called “Trump and the Paranoid Style.”
Strangest of all, however, is that Trump is a germaphobe, yet didn’t worry about this germ, which can cause death. Maybe it is because he is personally protected, surrounded by minders. He famously said that the CDC believes everyone should wear a face mask, but that he wouldn’t do it. Count on his faithful base to take his advice to “do as I say, not as I do.” They will crowd the pews in church, and they will not wear face masks. Someone on Twitter put the social risk best: “Telling states and counties to make their own decisions about whether to impose social distancing is like setting aside a peeing section in a pool.”
O’Toole writes:
On July 4, 1775, just his second day serving as commander-in-chief of the American revolutionary forces, George Washington issued strict orders to prevent the spread of infection among his soldiers: “No person is to be allowed to go to Fresh-water pond a fishing or any other occasion as there may be a danger of introducing the small pox into the army.” As he wrote later that month to the president of the Continental Congress, John Hancock, he was exercising “the utmost Vigilance against this most dangerous Enemy.” On March 8, 2020, well over two months after the first case of Covid-19 had been confirmed in the United States, Dan Scavino, assistant to the president and director of social media at the White House, tweeted a mocked-up picture of his boss Donald Trump playing a violin. The caption read: “My next piece is called Nothing Can Stop What’s Coming.” Trump himself retweeted the image with the comment: “Who knows what this means, but it sounds good to me!”
It is a truth universally acknowledged that Donald Trump is no George Washington, but his descent from commander-in-chief to vector-in-chief is nonetheless dizzying. Trump’s narcissism, mendacity, bullying, and malignant incompetence were obvious before the coronavirus crisis and they have been magnified rather than moderated in his surreal response to a catastrophe whose full gravity he failed to accept until March 31, when it had become horribly undeniable. The volatility of his behavior during February and March—the veering between flippancy and rage, breezy denial and dark fear-mongering—may not seem to demand further explanation. It is his nature. Yet there is a mystery at its heart. For if there is one thing that Trump has presented as his unique selling point, it is “utmost Vigilance,” his endless insistence that, as he puts it, “our way of life is under threat.”
If the United States is to be run by a man who has perfected the paranoid style, the least its citizens might expect is a little of that paranoia when it is actually needed. Yet even on March 26, when the US had surpassed China and Italy to become the most afflicted country in the world, Trump continued to talk down the threat from the virus.
“Many people have it. I just spoke to two people. They had it. They never went to a doctor. They never went to anything. They didn’t even report it…The people that actually die, that percentage is much lower than I actually thought…The mortality rate, in my opinion…it’s way, way down.”
I have been thinking about writing a post about the uselessness of standardized tests as a measure of learning, which I may yet do, but then discovered Peter Greene had done his own take on this timeless question: What should we measure? How? Why?
If you want a description on my dislike for standardized testing, read my latest book SLAYING GOLIATH. The tests are administered in the spring. The results are reported in September, give or take a few weeks. The “results” have no diagnostic value. They mainly serve to label children, using instruments that give advantages to those who are already privileged. The outcomes are tightly correlated with family income and education. The same kids always end up in the bottom half, year after year, test after test. And the lesson that all children learn is that every question has a right answer.
Here is a standardized test question: When will the quarantine of social life end? When will life resume, more or less to normal? The answer: No one knows.
How can we expect to teach uncertainty and indeterminacy to students when we grill them for years on finding the one right answer.
Peter Greene writes:
Lots of folks are worried about–or at least pretending to be worried about–the notion that students may lose a step or two during the coronahiatus, and that’s reasonable concern. Every teacher knows that September, not April, is the cruelest month, the month in which you discover just how much information just sort of fell out of students’ heads under the warm summer sun. This pandemic pause is undoubtedly going to set some educational goals back.
But which goals? Exactly what kind of ground do we think we’re going to lose?
Of course, the testing companies will try to convince us that our kids are in a terrible crisis, which can be solved only by more testing.
Peter warns: Please do not confuse “student achievement” and “test scores.”
But most people in education do that as a matter of course.
Look, there’s no shame in the folks at NWEA taking a wild-ass guess because nobody has data for anything like this. And there’s no shame (well, maybe there’s some) in talking about test scores on narrowly focused standardized tests. But say what you mean. Use the right words. Don’t grab a bunch of figures about the price of oranges and start making declarations about how to grow apples. Words mean things, even in 2020. Particularly as a journalist, you should use the exact, correct, accurate word. And “student achievement” is not the exact accurate phrase to use in place of “test score.”
This matters right now, first of all, because it mis-represents what people have on their minds. “Will my child fall far behind on the content? When will she learn the rest of her physics stuff? How will the school band survive all this? Will she get the knowledge and skills she’ll need in college? How will she stay in touch with her friends? How will she get better at writing when she’s doing so little? Is she going to get enough education to succeed in the future?” The list of parent and students goes on and on and on and I’ll bet you dollars to coronadonuts that very few parents have, “Oh my God! What if her standardized test scores drop!” near the very top of their list.
But it especially matters because when schools head back, folks in charge are going to need to make some decisions about what is really important, what really needs attention. If we keep letting people pretend that “test score” is the same as “student achievement,” the new school year will be immediately mired in test prep test prep test prep. The wise thing to do? Scrap the test for at least another year and focus on actually educating students.
Resources like time and focus and money and emotional fortitude are going to be limited, and policy makers, actual educators, and people with education flavored products to sell are going to be locked in debate over where those resources should be focused. “Getting test scores back up” should not be the answer. Let me remind you that even many of the reformsters have finally concluded that the Big Standardized Test isn’t really telling us anything useful about students’ futures, and students’ futures should be the number one priority going back, and that means focusing on actual education and not test scores.
Yes, that will be hard to measure. For folks worried about that, I have just one question:
Which is more important– getting students what they need, or getting them what can be most easily measured?
Read what Peter wrote and tell me what you think? Is there any way to avoid getting mired in even more high-stakes standardized tests to measure what kids supposedly do and do not know?
Jack Schneider, historian of education at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, says that the pandemic lays bare the fact that vast social inequality produces vast educational inequality. So-called reformers have argued that “fixing the schools” will “fix society.” Schneider shows that this is backwards. Readers, please send this article to the teacher-bashers and public-school-bashers at Education Post, Teach for America, the Walton Foundation, the Gates Foundation, and the many other organizations who insist that public schools alone can fix the inequities that harm children before they enter school.
He writes, on Valerie Strauss’s blog:
For the past generation, we have been talking about the achievement gap in American public education — the fact that low income students and students from historically marginalized racial groups, on average, score lower than their more privileged peers. Chiefly, this matter has been treated as a problem with the schools. In a news release accompanying No Child Left Behind legislation, for instance, president George W. Bush celebrated that “An ‘age of accountability’ is starting to replace an era of low expectations” in our schools. His Democratic successor, Barack Obama, went a step further, pinning responsibility on educators. “The single most important factor” in determining student achievement, Obama insisted, is “who their teacher is.”
Scholars, meanwhile, have made a very different case. In the research community, it is widely recognized that students transition into schools not from a blank slate, but from an unequal society. Because of that, young people enter school with vastly different levels of preparation. As renowned teacher educator Gloria Ladson-Billings argued in a celebrated address to the educational research community, the “achievement gap” is a misnomer, implying an expectation that all children would perform equally at school. Instead, she suggested, we should train our collective gaze on the “education debt” — the damage done to particular communities by “the historical, economic, sociopolitical, and moral decisions and policies that characterize our society.”
The achievement gap, in this framing, is merely a symptom of broader inequality, past and present. The implication is that maybe schools are not to blame, after all. Such a position is well-supported by educational research. But for many Americans, it remains relatively abstract.
The covid-19 outbreak, then, may be the best time to actually see the education debt in action. The playing field across schools has been leveled with a bulldozer — differences in school funding, facilities, curricular resources, teacher experience, arts and music education and more are essentially moot. With students at home, schooling has shifted online, dramatically reducing what can happen educationally.
Assume, then, that the schools are now more or less equal. An outgoing tide has lowered all boats. Yet, some students will make significant educational progress during this hiatus from school, even as many of their peers lose ground.
Consider, first, the parental supports some young people have. Roughly 69 percent of students will have two parents at home with them, tag-teaming to offer support and encouragement. Some of those parents — disproportionately drawn from those with extended formal education — will feel at ease generating a school-like environment.
Those adults who successfully navigated school themselves, especially the minority of Americans who have college degrees, will be more likely to press their children to stay focused on academic work for several hours a day. That is not because they are better parents; it is because they are better situated to pass on their educational privilege.
Parents are a child’s first teachers — teaching language, social skills, dispositions and more — and remain the primary influence on how young people approach school. Consider, too, the resources that are now differentially available to students.
Unlike their high-poverty peers, children from middle-class and affluent households almost all have high-speed Internet access at home, as well as web-enabled devices. They’ve got enough books to see them through the end of the crisis — twice as many, on average, as low-income families and African American families. Their homes are more likely to be set up in a manner that supports school learning.
Such differences explain why summer breaks from school widen the achievement gap.
Finally, it is important to consider the way that basic needs will be met, or not, in American households over the next several months. Many families have well-stocked pantries and a satisfying rotation of takeout orders; others will struggle to put food on the table.
In Somerville, Mass., where I live, the district is preparing “grab and go” meals to replace the free and reduced-price breakfasts and lunches that children here — and 20 million students across America — ordinarily receive at school.
To relax, some families will take day trips for nature walks or retreat to their second homes; their less privileged counterparts will be stranded in place, often without heat.
Twenty-two percent of the homeless population are children. Our schools are not equal.
Schools in affluent neighborhoods often have more resources than their counterparts in poor neighborhoods, even as research demonstrates a need for the opposite. White children and middle-class children are generally taught by more experienced teachers than their peers and are less likely to experience schooling as an unending preparation for standardized tests. Privileged students receive a more well-rounded curriculum and maintain better access to arts and music education.
Yet even if our schools were equal, they would not produce equal results. They would reflect the different circumstances that characterize the home and neighborhood environments in which young people spend a majority of their time. For the poorest and most marginalized, this means not just present disadvantage, but also the cumulative effects of intergenerational poverty.
Right now, this is what you will see. Gaps are not closing; they are beginning to yawn.
For two decades, we have been trashing schools and blaming teachers. It is easy to assume responsibility rests with them. But the achievement gap is a product of our unequal society — the reflection of an education debt that has never been settled.
It is not something schools alone will fix; and as they remain shuttered, that fact will become painfully clear. Perhaps the present crisis, then, will prompt some deeper reflection about why students succeed. And perhaps we will awaken to the collective obligations we have for so long failed to fulfill.
Schools will eventually reopen. When they do, we should return with eyes unclouded. Rather than finding fault with our schools and the educators who bring them to life, we might begin to wrestle with what it would take for all students to enter on equal footing. Until then, even an equal education will not produce equal outcomes.
Our reader Laura Chapman explains what the phrase “the money follows the child” really means. It’s another way of saying that every child should have “a backpack full of cash” strapped on them, to be spent anywhere. Another way to see it is as a jackhammer to destroy our democratically-controlled system of public schools and turn children over to the tender mercies of the free market. The billionaires—the Waltons, Bloomberg, Koch, Gates, Broad, Hastings, Anschutz, Sinquefeld—love the free market. They think it’s best for everyone.
Chapman writes:
The new phrase for money-follows-the-child policies favored by those who want privatized education is this:
We have a “pluralistic system of education.” That phrase is already being used in promote subsidized choice, with everyone eligible for federal funds and expansion of state-level choice programs.
Pluralistic education means that the great American way to educate children will support–
homeschoolers,
free-lance education service providers,
charter schools,
private schools,
religious schools,
traditional public schools,
online instructional delivery,
pay-for-success ventures,
specialty programs for the talented and those in need of therapeutic support (whether in homes, commercial facilities, or brick and mortar schools).
and other possibilities.
In this pluralistic system, market forces and innovative forms of instruction flourish, unimpeded by regulation. Federal subsidies are “fair” when money follows the student.
Proponents claim that all of these flavors of education can and should be subsidized with public funds, eithe in proportion to their market share or their performance on the optional “normative pluralistic standards and curriculum.”
Examples of optional “normative pluralistic standards” are those present in current federal and state legislation, in national campaigns for standards and tests such as those launched to support the “Common Core State Standards,” and the proliferation of rating schemes such as those at GreatSchools.org, US News and World Reports, and EdWeek’s “Chance of Success” reports.
This Pluralism R-US meme is being promoted by EdChoice, the organization once known as the Milton & Rose Friedman Foundation, also Jeb Bush and his Chiefs for Change organization, and scholars.
Key scholars are at the Walton funded University of Arkansas Department of Education Reform; Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes; the University of Washington Bothell’s Center on Reinventing Public Education; Harvard University’s Program on Education Policy and Governance; and Johns Hopkins School of Education Institute for Education Policy.
For a brief look at the rationale for this meme and the policy agenda see
“Pluralism in American School Systems,” https://edpolicy.education.jhu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/PluralismBrief-Jan2018.pdf
For a look at other promotions, see this recent 74 Million.org call for the use of stimulus money for “all types of schools.”
The College Board relies on the revenues produced by its premier product, the SAT.
What to do in a global pandemic?
Normally the College Board is very obsessed with test security.
But now it has decided students can take the SAT online at home.
How will they know who is answering the questions?
Dana Milbank of the Washington Post peers into Trump’s erratic and self-aggrandizing behavior, as tests for coronavirus continue to be few in number and very difficult to obtain for ordinary citizens.
Well blow me down and shiver me timbers.
As our ship of state founders in tempest-tossed seas, our captain has just likened himself to one of the most reviled villains in maritime history.
President Trump, disappointed that governors rejected his assertion that his “authority is total,” called them insurrectionists. “Tell the Democrat Governors that ‘Mutiny On The Bounty’ was one of my all time favorite movies,” he tweeted Tuesday. Operating from his customary position of near-total ignorance, he continued: “A good old fashioned mutiny every now and then is an exciting and invigorating thing to watch, especially when the mutineers need so much from the Captain. Too easy!”
Thus did the president find common cause with Captain William Bligh of the HMS Bounty, whose crew forced him off the ship in the South Pacific in 1789 because of his cruel and tyrannical ways. The real Bligh narrowly survived, but literature and Hollywood made him into a legendary antihero.
AD
Trump threatens to adjourn Congress to make appointments
President Trump on April 15 threatened to use Article II of the Constitution to force Congress to adjourn to make recess appointments. (The Washington Post)
“I’ve never known a better seaman, but as a man, he’s a snake,” says Clark Gable as mutineer Fletcher Christian in the 1935 version. “He doesn’t punish for discipline. He likes to see men crawl.”
Full coverage of the coronavirus pandemic
In the 1962 film, a court-martial judge says: “Justice and decency are carried in the heart of the captain, or they be not aboard. It is for this reason that the Admiralty has always sought to appoint its officers from the ranks of gentlemen. The court regrets to note that the appointment of Captain William Bligh was, in that respect, a failure.”
Is it possible Trump is more self-aware than we thought?
Like Bligh, he is abusive. Unlike Bligh, he is a poor navigator. The Trump-as-errant-captain theme has been explored, delightfully, by novelist Dave Eggers in his recent allegory, “The Captain and the Glory”:
“He nudged the wheel a bit left, and the entire ship listed leftward, which was both frightening and thrilling. He turned the wheel to the right, and the totality of the ship, and its uncountable passengers and their possessions, all were sent rightward. In the cafeteria, where the passengers were eating lunch, a thousand plates and glasses shattered. An elderly man was thrown from his chair, struck his head on the dessert cart and died later that night. High above, the Captain was elated by the riveting drama caused by the surprises of his steering.”
So it is with our captain, who claims absolute authority but takes no responsibility. He announces he’s cutting off funding to the World Health Organization in the middle of the pandemic. He condemns the WHO for praising China’s transparency, even though he said in January he “greatly appreciates [China’s] efforts and transparency.” His conflicting messages about reopening the economy throw the country into confusion. He assembles so many coronavirus task forces that he will need another to keep track of them all. And after his long delayed and botched virus response, even now the number of tests in U.S. commercial labs is falling.
At Wednesday evening’s session, Trump turned the tiller randomly. After proclaiming the United States has “passed the peak” of the virus, he swerved into complaints about “partisan obstruction” holding up his nominees and threatened the never-before-tested “constitutional authority to adjourn both houses of Congress,” which would provoke another crisis in the middle of the pandemic.
He veered into complaints about the “disgusting” Voice of America and the “impeachment hoax.” He lurched into attacks on the World Trade Organization , various Democrats and governors generally, asserting that “we have the right to do whatever we want.” He accused the WHO of a conspiracy to hide the virus and boasted about his name going on government-issued relief checks: “People will be very happy to get a big fat beautiful check, and my name is on it.”
The ship has become accustomed to such unpredictable steering: He touts a virus treatment that so far shows more alarming side effects than efficacy. He announces virus-testing schemes that don’t exist. He talks about pardoning Joe Exotic. He blames everybody except his own administration, which is doing things very, very strongly and powerfully. “The Defense Production Act was used very powerfully, more powerfully than anybody would know, in fact, so powerfully that, for the most part, we didn’t have to officially take it out,” he proclaims.
The Opinions section is looking for stories of how the coronavirus has affected people of all walks of life. Write to us.
As the captain propounds powerful gibberish, the mutiny builds. Regional blocs make their own pandemic-recovery plans. Allies condemn his assault on the WHO. Republican Sen. Susan Collins (Maine) tells Politico that Trump has been “very uneven.” Even Trump-friendly outlets such as Fox News and the Wall Street Journal editorial page offer some criticism.
“WSJ is Fake News!” shouts the captain.
“What the hell is happening to @FoxNews?”
What’s happening, captain, is you’ve hit the rocks.
Doctors in Arizona saved a Phoenix man With COVID 19, who was at death’s door, using a rare and risky procedure. This story, written by Alison Steinbach, appeared in The Arizona Republic.
A Phoenix man is the first in Arizona to survive COVID-19 through a rare form of treatment called extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) therapy.
Enes Dedic, 53, was on the brink of death with a ventilator until his doctors at HonorHealth used ECMO as a last resort. Dedic is among the first U.S. COVID-19 patients to survive the disease by using the treatment and is among around 10 worldwide.
ECMO works by helping oxygenate blood outside the body so blood doesn’t need to transfer through damaged or filled lungs. Instead, tubes carry blood from the body to an external artificial lung that removes carbon dioxide and adds oxygen, at which point an artificial heart pumps the blood back into the body.
As a public service, The Arizona Republic is offering coronavirus coverage relating to public safety free of charge. Support The Republic by subscribing to azcentral.com.
It’s a last hope treatment, as the mortality rate on ECMO is around 40% — “extraordinarily high for almost any medical procedure” — according to Dedic’s doctors.
After 10 days in a medical coma on ECMO, Dedic woke up responsive and soon was able to FaceTime his wife.
“I can’t even express myself,” his wife Olivera Dedic said. “I was jumping through the roof when I heard that they woke him up and he’s doing better.”
After returning from travel overseas, Enes Dedic spent a few weeks at home in the Deer Valley area of Phoenix battling fevers, chills, aches and nausea.
He first checked into HonorHealth’s Deer Valley Medical Center on March 15 and quickly deteriorated. He was intubated and transferred to the HonorHealth John C. Lincoln Medical Center in Phoenix for increased mechanical ventilation.
A team of doctors tried everything to save him, said Dr. Anselmo Garcia, a pulmonologist and critical care physician. Enes Dedic was treated with all the potential drugs used for COVID-19 including hydrochloroquine, azithromycin, Kaletra, Actemra, antibiotics and anti-inflammatories.
None of these worked.
As a last resort, doctors turned to ECMO, said Dr. Robert Riley, chief of cardiothoracic surgery at HonorHealth. Riley performed the surgical procedure for ECMO.
Stephen Dyer of Innovation Ohio points to the central hypocrisy of charters seeking Coronavirus Relief funds.
Public schools are not eligible to request these funds.
Thus, charter schools acknowledge that they are NOT public schools. They seek money reserved for small businesses.
The squalid aspect of this maneuver is that any money they get is taken away from a business that was forced to close, to lay off employees, and to operate without revenues. Charters suffered not at all. They never lost funding. They want to take money out of the mouths of those small business owners who suffered real harm.
Veteran journalist Seth Sandronsky interviews Louisiana teacher and blogger a Mercedes Schneider about how the coronavirus affected state standardized testing.
Schneider makes a bold prediction that states will cut their budgets for testing due to the economic stress caused by the virus.
I hope she’s right. Up until now, state legislators have been willing to sacrifice the arts, recess, school nurses, class size, and almost everything else, while protecting the Sacred Tests.
Diane Ravitch's blog 