Archives for the month of: April, 2020
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Watch George Gilder Pander to Trump’s Gut

By dianeravitch
April 13, 2020 //
33

Happily, I’m on the mailing list of Frank Splitt, who sent me this Wall Street Journal article by George Gilder and his response to it. Gilder thinks that the nation should be grateful that we have a wise president like Trump to make decisions, and we should listen to Trump, not the scientists or medical professionals. Trump has said many times that he listens to his gut and that he knows more than the experts in every field. Gilder never explains why Trump spent more than two months denying that the coronavirus was dangerous.

Dear Friends and Family,

The forwarded message is my response to the appended opinion piece by George Gilder, author of “Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy. .

Apparently, Mr. Gilder has not paid careful attention to President Trump’s decision making while in office prior to and after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The president’s decisions precipitated the loss of competent members of his cabinet, White House staffers, and a bevy of inspector generals. Consider Generals H.R. McMaster, John Kelly and James Mattis who are long gone when we need them most, replaced by sycophantic yes men.

Close observation of the president’s self-serving performance at the Task Force daily briefings should have supplied Mr. Gilder with ample evidence that his decision making is all about him and enhancing his re-election prospects.

Frank
——————–
We Need Politicians in a Pandemic
The conceit that everyone must bow to ‘science’ is not only undemocratic but dangerous in its own right.

By George Gilder
April 13, 2020, Print page 17
Online at https://www.wsj.com/articles/we-need-politicians-in-a-pandemic-11586710824

The U.S. economy has been cratered less by the coronavirus than by the response to it—driven by the undemocratic idea that “science” should rule, even when much of the science and the data behind it remain in dispute.

We’re told in this plague year that politicians have no role—in essence, that the people have no real rights against consensus science, which can demand that we forfeit our liberties and suspend the Constitution. Political leaders, elected to exercise judgment on our behalf, must defer to doctors, because the viral threat is addressable only through medical expertise.

Yet since many liken fighting the coronavirus to war, we should remember that in war admirals and generals defer to civilian authority—to the president, as commander in chief, on matters of strategy and to Congress on matters of budget. This is not a design flaw but how a free people governs itself, even in a perilous crisis. It is how we bring the largest possible perspective to decision-making.

The demands of health-care experts are not greater than the demands of the economy, for a very simple reason: The health-care system is not separate from the economy but a crucial part of it. The health-care system saves lives; the economy provides everything we need to live. The damage being done to the economy—if sustained—could easily cost more lives world-wide than the coronavirus.

There are not, and never will be, scientific answers to all public problems. Scientific expertise and specialization inform good policy, but they should never be the final word. To navigate successfully between competing interests or competing calamities, between war and peace, and even between deadly pandemics and deadly economic depressions, we need politics—and politicians.

The American system of government asserts these truths: that the people have an ineradicable right to govern themselves, that politics is how we exercise our free will, and that rather than reflexively deferring to experts, we should defer as much as possible to the principles of freedom and common sense.

Common sense says that if a disease threatens to kill millions of elderly people already afflicted by disease, those people should be sequestered and protected. But the rest of us should proceed with our work, taking prudent precautions, even if some of us die anyway.

Anthony Fauci is undoubtedly a fine physician, but he is not in a position to cure what ails us. We are beset by more than a virus; we are beset by bad ideas about what government can and should do, and about who should be making crucial decisions.

It may be a hard truth for many to grant, especially because so many in the media hate the president with a fever that itself seems a contagion, but an optimistic, patriotic, practical-minded politician like Donald Trump, who over the past few years presided over a period of singular economic success, is exactly the man to provide the correct, if undoubtedly painful, cure for the current crisis. We may not envy him his decisions, but he is in the best position to make them.
###

—–Original Message—–
From: fnjsmp
To: wsj.ltrs
Sent: Mon, Apr 13, 2020 3:49 pm

Pandering for the president

George Gilder opines: “an optimistic, patriotic, practical-minded politician like Donald Trump, who over the past few years presided over a period of singular economic success, is exactly the man to provide the correct, if undoubtedly painful, cure for the current crisis. We may not envy him his decisions, but he is in the best position to make them,” (“We Need Politicians in a Pandemic,” Opinion, April 13).

Mr. Gilder is blatantly pandering for the president. That’s precisely what many, if not most, intelligent Germans thought about Adolf Hitler, their pathologically narcissistic leader in the 1930s.

Frank G. Splitt
Mount Prospect, Ill

Categories Accountability, Education Reform, Trump

National Education Leaders Worry That Students Will Fall Behind During School Closures

By dianeravitch
April 13, 2020 //
44

The Washington Post reports that education leaders are worried that students are falling behind due to school closures and extraordinary measures must be taken so they can “catch up.”

Of course, there is good reason to worry about children who have experienced months without formal schooling. Many, however, do have access to emergency remote teaching. The children likeliest you have no educational opportunities are those who are already farthest behind, those with no access to a computer or the internet, those who get no academic support or direction at home.

When school ultimately reopens, the children who need the most help should have extra-small classes and intensive time with experienced teachers. That requires more money, however, and states are unlikely to increase spending when their revenues are plummeting. The poor kids are likely to get testing and lamentations, not the small classes and instruction they need.

Here is the latest:

Only weeks after the coronavirus pandemic forced American schools online, education leaders across the country have concluded that millions of children’s learning will be severely stunted, and are planning unprecedented steps to help them catch up.

In Miami, school will extend into the summer and start earlier in the fall, at least for some students.

In Cleveland, schools may shrink the curriculum to cover only core subjects. In Columbia, Mo., this year’s lessons will be woven into next year’s.


Some experts [i.e. Mike Petrilli of the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute] suggest holding back more kids, a controversial idea, while others propose a half-grade step-up for some students, an unconventional one. A national teachers union [i.e., the AFT] is proposing a massive national summer school program.




Graduates from the Class of 2020 shared how they’re coping after the coronavirus outbreak brought senior year to an abrupt ending.

The ideas being considered will require political will and logistical savvy, and they are already facing resistance from teachers and parents. They’ll also require money, and lots of it, at a time when a cratering economy is devastating state and local budgets, with plunging tax collections and rising costs.

As Congress considers another coronavirus spending package, schools’ ability to make up ground may hinge on how much more they can pry from Washington.


The $2.2 trillion stimulus package approved last month included $13.5 billion for K-12 education. In the next round, a coalition of school administrators and teachers unions is seeking more than $200 billion, citing those depleted state budgets.

In New York state, for instance, schools were poised for deep cuts, with the state anticipating revenue losses as high as $10 billion. The stimulus package will reverse those cuts, but without more bailout money, schools won’t get any extra funding to deal with the crisis.


Just a month ago, most American children were attending school as normal. Today, virtually every U.S. school building is closed. Seventeen states have ordered campuses shuttered through this academic year, another three recommend it, and educators and parents across the country are bracing for a lost spring — and maybe more.



Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said last week that he expects schools can reopen in the fall. But he can’t be sure, he said.


Whenever schools return, researchers say, the likely result is a generation of students forced to play catch-up, perhaps for years to come. Most vulnerable are those who are always the most vulnerable: homeless children, those living in deep poverty and students with disabilities. While some students are adapting to distance learning, others are struggling to find quiet spaces to study, lack reliable Internet access or must care for younger siblings during the day, among other barriers.


“ This may be the biggest challenge public education has had to face in the four-plus decades I’ve been doing this work,” said Michael Casserly, executive director of the Council of the Great City Schools, a nonprofit coalition of 76 of the nation’s largest urban public school systems. He said that online learning is likely failing many low-income families and that without “substantial” new spending, schools won’t have the money to reverse the damage. “We are facing an educational catastrophe.”


In some districts, the problem is just getting kids to show up.
In the Los Angeles Unified School District, the country’s second-largest system, 1 in 4 students has not logged on at all. Older students were more likely than elementary children to be connected, but on any given day in one recent week, a quarter of high school students didn’t log in.




Before the coronavirus crisis, only about 1 in 4 students in the high-poverty Baltimore City Public Schools had computers. More Chromebooks are on order, but for now teachers are trying to reach families by phone and Instagram, and the district is broadcasting lessons over its television station.
“What we are providing now is not going to make up fully for all of the time lost,” chief executive Sonja Brookins Santelises said.


In Atlanta’s public schools, about 6,000 children still don’t have computers, and about 10 percent of students have not yet logged in to the remote-learning system, Superintendent Meria Joel Carstarphen said.
One recent day, Carstarphen visited the home of a family whose children had not logged in. She found their mother struggling to provide food, and discovered the house was in an Internet “dead zone.” She also realized she knew the family’s oldest child, a “super sweet kid,” from her visits to his high school football team.
“He’s the man of the house and he’s only a junior right now,” Carstarphen said. “He has not been doing his work and neither have his siblings for three weeks.”


Even when students have computers, parents and caregivers fear that minimal learning is underway. Billie Stewart is raising her 8-year-old grandson, Tony, on Detroit’s east side. She’s received little direction from his school, she said, and trying to keep up with the school’s online offerings has been “almost overwhelming.”
Stewart, 73, has worked hard to lay out a daily schedule for Tony but finds herself unable to keep up. “If I get asked for another password, I don’t know what I’ll do.”




In Philadelphia’s public schools, teachers have been told not to teach new material, due to concerns that lessons cannot be equitably provided to all. Philadelphia plans to begin remote education later this month, but for weeks families have been left largely on their own.


“

We’ve been looking for guidance from teachers, but they don’t really know what they’re supposed to be doing,” said Stacy Stewart, who has two children in a North Philadelphia elementary school, plus 1-year-old twins. “Ever since they’ve been out of school, there’s been no structured virtual learning. It’s just been flying by the seat of their pants.”
The school provided a study packet for Mikail, a second-grader, but no direction for Abdul Malik, who’s in kindergarten, other than links to a few education websites. There’s only one computer in the house, which Stewart needs for work, and it’s been a struggle to keep her kids engaged in anything that looks like learning. “I mean, I’m not really a teacher,” she said.


To understand how deep the setbacks may be, researchers are examining data on the so-called “summer slide,” in which students, particularly those in low-income families, lose months of reading and math knowledge. Research differs on the magnitude of the loss, but there’s broad agreement that this year’s losses will be greater than normal.

Categories Accountability, Education Reform, Testing

Los Angeles: No Student Will Get an F and Schools Will be Closed Until the Fall

By dianeravitch
April 13, 2020 //
6

Howard Blume of the Los Angeles Times reports that no student will get an F grade during the coronavirus closure, and schools will remain closed this summer.

Blume writes:

No student will receive a failing grade on their spring report card and Los Angeles campuses will be closed not only for the remainder of the academic year, but throughout the summer as well, the district announced Monday.

The actions are the latest sweeping measures taken by the nation’s second-largest school system in response to the coronavirus pandemic.

“There is still no clear picture in testing, treatments or vaccines and we will not reopen school facilities until state authorities tell us it is safe and appropriate to do so,” L.A. schools Supt. Austin Beutner said during a Monday video briefing. “The remainder of the school year … will be completed in the current, remote fashion and we will have a summer session in a similar manner.”

The no-fail policy was posted in a late morning bulletin and confirmed by Chief Academic Officer Alison Yoshimoto-Towery, who spoke of educators’ concerns about the family hardships that are likely to limit students’ ability to learn in the district, where 80% of them come from low-income families.

Beutner praised the work of all district staff, especially teachers, during his video briefing, but acknowledged that all students have not had the same access to academic work since campuses closed on March 16.

“Many of the examples we see of successful video learning have a significant selection bias,” Beutner said. “Affluent families with resources at home, schools with years of training and limitless budgets and students with demonstrated aptitude to learn independently. Public schools have in their DNA the commitment to serve all students, irrespective of circumstance, and it will not be so simple.”

The state did not issue a universal mandate on grading, but California Department of Education guidelines say that schools should “enable students to complete state graduation requirements with needed flexibilities” associated with online learning. In their briefings, state officials have stressed that local educators intend to be understanding of students’ situations.

The state guidelines say that schools “should weigh their policies with the lens of equity and with the primary goal of doing no harm to students.”

Categories Closing schools, Education Reform, Health, Los Angeles

Tom Ultican: Billionaire-Funded Group Claims Progressive Are Most Inequitable

By dianeravitch
April 13, 2020 //
37

Tom Ultican reports on a billionaire-funded paper that makes the strange claim that the most progressive cities are the most inequitable. The “study,” he points out, was not peer-reviewed nor was it written by scholars with academic credentials. Its central thesis is that progressive cities are less able to educate students of color than conservative cities.

Since conservative cities spend less than progressive ones, is the underlying message that we should spend less on schools?

The paper is titled: “The Secret Shame: How America’s Most Progressive Cities Betray Their Commitment to Educational Opportunity for All.”

Was it produced by a right wing think tank? No, it came from the media website Education Post, which regularly touts school choice and critiques public schools.

As you will see, the methodology and the conclusions are strained, if not downright bizarre. as Ultican puts it, the paper is a polemic, a word salad, not a study.

The billionaires funding the organization called Brightbeam that produced this paper are Michael Bloomberg, the Waltons, Mark Zuckerberg, and Laurene Powell Jobs.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization

Peter Greene: Betsy DeVos Shows Why We Need a Secretary of Education Who Is an Educator

By dianeravitch
April 13, 2020 //
33

During her tenure as Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos has taught the public many lessons, most of which she did not intend. Her radical agenda educated the public about the privatization movement and its ambition to cripple public schools. She taught us that there really are people who put the profits of for-profit colleges above the students who were defrauded by them.

PeterGreene says she taught us why the Secretary of Education should be an educator.

He quotes a recent conference call that’s head with reporters. One thing is clear: she has no empathy or understanding of those who work in the schools. She is utterly indifferent to their knowledge and experience.

He writes:

Meanwhile, privatizers are chomping at the virtual bit to get students shoved into more profitable avenues of education-flavored products, like her old friends at the Heritage Foundation who are cheering her on to keep pushing the product because this is ed tech’s Katrina and by God they are going to cash in or know the reason why.

The Koch-funded Mercatus Center has more of the same. “Leverage the near-ubiquity of cellphones and internet to deliver instruction online,” but near-ubiquity is a lame measure, indeed. I imagine that none of these deep thinkers would like to be shot into space in a rocket that contains a near-ubiquity of oxygen tanks nor live in a home with a near-ubiquity of food. Worried about students with special needs? Senior policy analyst Johnathan Butcher reads the fed instructions as saying, “Give it a shot, but hey, if you have to leave them, leave them with our blessing.” Butcher adds “Parents, taxpayers, and policymakers should not allow traditional schools to claim they do not have the resources or expertise to deliver instruction online” based on God only knows what. And he touts the Florida Virtual School, Florida’s experiment in cyber-schooling that just keeps failing upward because Florida’s political leaders would rather finance a profitable turd than support public education.

In short, the amateurs are out in force, yammering about how schools should now see things their way, even though they don’t know what the hell they’re talking about.

It would be great, in the midst of all this, to be able to turn to a secretary of education who actually knew something–anything– about the inside of a classroom, who actually had a grasp of the many issues involved in the current crisis. I don’t mean to pick on DeVos, who is basically the Herbert Hoover of education right now– I can’t think of any secretary of education, not Arne “Katrina is super-duper” Duncan, not John King, not Rod Paige, not any of them, who would be worth a spoonful of rat spit right now.

But we could really use someone who knows what they’re talking about and isn’t just salivating at the chance to push some more anti-public ed policies. Of course, what any classroom teacher would know includes this– that when times get tough and crisis rear their heads, you can absolutely depend on the government bureaucrats to be largely useless, and you’d better figure out how to navigate this on your own. Which sucks, but it’s one of the many “hard things” that teachers already do, all the time.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, For-Profit, Online Education, Privatization, Teachers, Technology

Vicki Cobb: Why Do So Many People Refuse to Believe Proven Facts?

By dianeravitch
April 13, 2020 //
46

Vicki Cobb, a writer of science books for children, ponders the question that puzzles so many of us at this time:

Why do so many people refuse to believe proven facts?

Why do so many prefer to believe myths instead of facts?

As Groucho Marx used to say, “Who are you gonna believe? Me or your own lying eyes?”

She begins:

Recent resistance by some people who refuse to believe the science that predicts the course of covid 19 through a population, reminded me of a post I wrote several years ago that bears revisiting.

When Galileo discovered the moons of Jupiter in his telescope, he couldn’t wait to share it with the world. So, in 1610 he hurriedly rushed The Starry Messenger, the story of his discovery, into print. Now in those days they didn’t have talk shows. So, to promote his book, Galileo took his telescope to dinner parties and invited the guests to see Jupiter’s moons for themselves. Many refused to look claiming that the telescope was an instrument of the devil. They accused Galileo of trying to trick them, painting the moons of Jupiter on the end of the telescope. Galileo’s response was that if that were the case they would see the moons no matter where they looked when actually they could see them only if they looked where he told them to look. But the main objection was that there was nothing in the Bible about this phenomenon. Galileo’s famous response: “The Bible shows the way to go to heaven, not the way the heavens go.”

Galileo is considered the father of modern science, now a huge body of knowledge that has been accumulated incrementally by thousands of people. Each tiny bit of information can be challenged by asking, “How do you know?” And each contributing scientist can answer as Galileo did to the dinner party guests, “This is what I did. If you do what I did, then you’ll know what I know.” In other words, scientific information is verifiable, replicable human experience. Science has grown exponentially since Galileo. It is a body of knowledge built on an enormous quantity of data. And its power shows up in technology. The principles that are used to make a light go on were learned in the same meticulous way we’ve come to understand how the carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have risen over the past 100 years leading to ominous climate change or that Darwin was right, and living species are interconnected “islands in a sea of death.”

Yet there are many who cherry pick science—only believing its findings when they agree with them.

Categories Hoax, Ignorance, Lies, Science

David Berliner: How “Successful” Charter Schools Cull and Skim Students They Don’t Want

By dianeravitch
April 13, 2020 //
33

I recently wrote an article that referred to charter schools that succeed by excluding students with disabilities, English learners, and others unlikely to get high scores. The editor questioned if this claim was accurate. I turned to several expert researchers to ask their view, and they all agreed with my assertion. David Berliner of Arizona State University—one of the nation’s pre-eminent researchers and statisticians—had data to back it up, and I invited him to write an essay addressing this issue.

He wrote:

Culling, Creaming, Skimming, Thinning: Things We Do to Herds and School Children

To cull is to select things you intend to reject, often in reference to a group of animals. An outbreak of hoof-and-mouth disease can cause authorities to order a cull of farm pigs. An outbreak of low-test scores or a meeting with undesirable parents can promote the culling of charter students. To cream is to remove something choice from an aggregate, such as selecting the best and the brightest appearing students and families for acceptance to a charter or private school.

Diane Ravitch was recently criticized for writing that charter schools, supported by public tax money, engage in skimming and creaming students and families. Ravitch, however is right! Public charter schools, and private schools that accept public monies through vouchers, admit only certain students, often those predicted most likely to succeed and whose parents are “acceptable.” And, if these schools choose “wrong,” they cull the herd later. Between selective admissions and culling the student body, the data ordinarily used to describe a school’s accomplishments will make charter and voucher schools look quite good.

Let me illustrate with data collected by my wife, Dr. Ursula Casanova, by a former student (Assistant Professor Amanda Potterton, of the University of Kentucky), and from the ACLU of Arizona.

Dr. Casanova wrote in the Washington Post about the Basis (charter) school in Scottsdale, Arizona, enrolling students in grades 5-12. Based on its test scores that year, it was named the top high school in Arizona. But the year it was so honored, Casanova found enrollments from 5th to 8th grade to be 152, 138, 110, and 94. Then, the high school enrollments, in grades 9-11, were 42, 30, and 23. Finally, the 12th grade graduating class had 8 students! With no shame whatsoever the Basis school was able to claim they graduated 100% of their seniors and that all were accepted at college!

The Basis school of Tucson, part of the same chain of about a dozen charter schools, mostly in Arizona, presented data with a similar pattern. In the year for which Casanova reported, the school started out with 127 students in the fifth grade. But they had only 100 students in eighth grade, 69 in the 9th grade, 45 in 10th grade, and 27 in 11th grade. At the end of 12th grade they had only 24 seniors left at graduation. The graduating class was only 35% of the ninth-grade cohort, and they were less than 20% of that fifth -grade cohort. Culling the herd seems to describe school policy.

Potterton wrote in Teachers College Record about four highly rated charter schools in Arizona, the two Basis schools reported on above, and two other schools from the Great Hearts Academy chain, which run more than 20 schools in the Phoenix area.

In the year of her study she found that the average rate for free and reduced lunch in Arizona schools was 35%. The average for free and reduced lunch in these the four charter schools? 0%, 0%, 0%, 0%. Highly selective admissions and culling work quite well. That same year the state average for English language learners in our schools was 7.5%. The English language learners in these four schools? 0%, 0%, 0%, 0%. The percent of students with IEPs in the state was about 12%. But the percent of such students in these four schools was between, .6% and 3.5%.

Arizona is not unique. In a recent year the federal government reported in the Common Core of data that in 2014 the Boston public schools graduated 85% of its grade 9 students. But the “City on A Hill” Charter school graduated 46% of its grade 9 class; while the “Boston Preparatory Academy,” “Boston Collegiate Charter,” and “Academy of the Pacific Rim Charter” each graduated about 60% of its 9th grade class. Culling in charters seems to be widespread.

Another example comes from Philadelphia’s Boys Latin Charter, as analyzed by Jersey Jazzman in his column of July 28th, 2017. Boys Latin proudly boasted that 98% of its students were accepted into college. But in the years 2011-2015 the school graduated about 60% of its 9th grade class, culling approximately 40% of its student body, and thus allowing the school to make a claim that 98% of its students are accepted to college.

Charter schools cull families with special needs too. Arizona’s ACLU in 2017 noted that state law forbade charter schools from limiting the number of special education students they accept. But “The Rising School” in Tucson advertised blatantly that the school’s special education and resources department “is currently full.… Thus, any student with an IEP will be put on our waiting list.” Also in apparent defiance of the law, “AmeriSchools Academy” (in Phoenix, Tucson, and Yuma) blatantly noted that “Special Education placements are limited to a capacity of ten (10) students for each school site. Students in excess of this number are to be wait listed with provisional registration.”

Further, by state law, Arizona’s charter schools may not require students or their parents to complete pre-enrollment activities, such as essays, interviews or school tours. Nor can charter schools use students’ performance on interviews or essays, or the student’s decision not to complete requested pre-enrollment activities, to determine which students to accept. But the ACLU found that at the “Flagstaff Arts and Leadership Academy” students must write a one-page essay as part of their enrollment application. As part of the enrollment process at the “Satori Charter School” in Tucson, parents and students must meet with a school administrator. These are all excellent, though illegal ways to cull potentially undesirable families.

State law also directs charter schools not to require parental involvement as a condition of admission. And furthermore, charter schools must not pressure parents into donating money. As in many states, the Arizona Constitution guarantees students the right to a free public education, and charter schools are supposed to be public schools. Yet the same Great Hearts Academy charter schools reported on above asked each family to contribute $1,500 per student per year. Parents were also encouraged to donate anywhere from $200 to $2,000 to the school. The “Mission Montessori Academy” of Scottsdale asked parents to volunteer 15 hours every year per child enrolled, or make a contribution of $150 to the school in lieu of volunteer hours. The “Montessori Day Public School” chain noted that “All parents are expected to contribute 40 hours of volunteer time per family, per year.” The “Freedom Academy” in Phoenix and Scottsdale required a non-refundable $300 “Extracurricular Arts Fee,” due at enrollment. The “San Tan Charter School (in Gilbert, AZ)” required parents to provide a credit card the school can keep on file to pay several fees, including a $250 technology rental fee for grades 9-12. These are all great ways to cull families, illegality be damned!!

In many states, private schools receive public monies through vouchers, and still discriminate against certain children and families, culling them as needed! One of the most blatant examples I know of is the Fayetteville Christian School in North Carolina, a recipient, in a recent school year, of $495,966 of public money. But it is not open to the public! It says, up front, that it doesn’t want Jews, Muslims, Hindu’s and many others. At this school a student, and at least one parent, have to have taken Jesus Christ as their personal savior, or they cannot be admitted. They also cannot engage in sexual promiscuity, illicit drug use and homosexuality—or anything else that scripture defines as deviate or perverted. Any report of such activities by parents or the students is grounds for expulsion. This is culling of the student body by religion and life style, in a school receiving about a half million dollars of public funds per year!

Many of the schools I mentioned above, are considered great public and/or great private schools. Creaming and culling really do pay off in terms of a school’s reputation, as long as the schools’ policies are not examined too closely. But Dr. Casanova asked an excellent question of our citizenry when she reported on the graduation rates of various charters and private schools, and compared them to the reports from San Luis High School, in San Luis, AZ, on the Mexican border, part of the Yuma, Arizona school system. Data from different sources informs us that in recent years this public high school serves almost 3,000 students a year, almost 100% of whom are Hispanic, half of whom are limited English proficient, and most are classified as economically disadvantaged. But this public high school manages to graduate over 80 percent of their freshman class, and almost 90 percent of its senior class. They also do this with a teacher/pupil ratio well in excess of the U.S. average, and working with Arizona’s per pupil school funding formula, which is among the lowest in the nation. Why isn’t San Luis High School, and others like it, compared to the culling and creaming charters and voucher schools, considered among our great American high schools?

So many of our public schools deserve our gratitude for doing such a good job educating all our citizenry, many under difficult conditions. The Darwinian approach, to push the weakest students out of school, to cull the herd, should not be tolerated in a democracy, and therefore is absolutely inappropriate behavior for a school receiving public money. But Darwinism really is the philosophy guiding some of the highest rated charters. A respondent to a blog by my colleague Gene Glass, where he too criticized the culling and creaming practices of charters, stated the following: “Basis schools does not engage in any form of thinning across any grade. Students do drop out because they are not fit to thrive in the difficult curriculum ….”

Let’s think about what “not fit to thrive” might look like as a guiding philosophy for our public schools. We could do away with special education, bilingual education, counseling and guidance, transportation, free and reduced breakfasts and lunches, school nurses, etc. The Darwinian approach to schooling is not merely undemocratic,….. it is evil! If it were me, I wouldn’t give another public dollar to any charter or voucher school that culls, skims, or creams. They are all patently undemocratic.

David C. Berliner
Regents’ Professor Emeritus
Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College
Arizona State University

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Reform, English Language Learners, Privatization, School Choice, Special Education

South Dakota: Major Meat Processor Closing

By dianeravitch
April 12, 2020 //
61

South Dakota is one of a very few states that has refused to take steps to protect their citizens from the pandemic. The governor said it’s a rural state and doesn’t need extraordinary measures.

She was wrong. One of the nation’s largest meat processors is located in South Dakota and it is closing down because so many of its employees have the coronavirus. Smithfield employees account for half the coronavirus cases in the state.

The owner of the plant says that other plants are in the same trouble and warns of a threat to the nation’s food supply.

One of the country’s largest pork processing facilities is closing until further notice as employees fall ill with Covid-19. The closure puts the country’s meat supply at risk, said the CEO of Smithfield, which operates the plant.

“The closure of this facility, combined with a growing list of other protein plants that have shuttered across our industry, is pushing our country perilously close to the edge in terms of our meat supply,” the meat processor’s chief executive, Kenneth Sullivan, said in a statement Sunday.

“It is impossible to keep our grocery stores stocked if our plants are not running,” he said. “These facility closures will also have severe, perhaps disastrous, repercussions for many in the supply chain.”

https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/12/business/meat-plant-closures-smithfield/index.html

Categories Accountability, Health

L.A. Times: Trump Scrambling to Restore Budget Cuts to Health Agencies

By dianeravitch
April 12, 2020 //
25

Trump and his merry band of budget cutters thought the federal government spent too much on public health. Year after year, they have slashed agencies whose mission was to protect the public from pandemics.

The Los Angeles Times has the story:


It’s an obscure U.S. government bureau with many missions, including this vital one: hunting down viral diseases like COVID-19 that spill over from animals to the human world.

But in late 2019 it found itself without a permanent leader, and squarely in the Trump administration’s budget-slashing sights.

That all changed with the coronavirus pandemic that has killed more than 20,000 Americans and more than 100,000 people across the world.

Now, the Global Health Bureau, part of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), has abundant government support. Congress and President Trump have agreed to multiply the budget for the bureau’s activities that can support “global health security” and related efforts as much as fivefold, to more than half a billion dollars. And its top leadership position — left empty for three years by the White House and a plodding Senate confirmation process — finally was filled in late March.

The funding boost, along with new leadership, will enhance the agency’s ability to respond to the immediate crisis and bolster foreign health systems to protect against future outbreaks. It also could reboot stalled efforts to have the U.S. help lead a global quest to corral an estimated 1.6 million animal-borne viruses that threaten to leap to human hosts.

“With support from policymakers and the scientific community, we can do this — we have all of the tools and just need to harness the energy and the resources to get it done,” said Jonna Mazet, executive director of the One Health Institute at the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine, who headed USAID’s previous initiative to track dangerous viruses.

Outside experts caution that they have seen the U.S. beef up global health programs during past emergencies, like the 2014-16 Ebola epidemic, only to see funding wither when the crises subsided. “The U.S. government funding for this kind of work is completely episodic. There will be another outbreak — that’s a given — and funding that comes in fits and starts doesn’t allow for any real preparations,” said Jennifer Kates, who heads global health policy research at the Kaiser Family Foundation. “Right now, we’re just in response mode. The money is really important, but if the outbreak is as devastating as it could be, it won’t go very far.”

The injection of new funds increases the budget USAID devotes to this work to as much as $535 million, dwarfing 2019 funding of roughly $100 million for the programs. (It’s unclear how much of the $535 million will be spent in the coming year.) That advance is even more notable given that the Trump administration’s budget team previously proposed trimming global health security funding at USAID by 10% to a maximum of $90 million, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.

The new money would be enough to allow the agency to extend the kind of work done by one of its key virus-hunting programs, called PREDICT. That program to allow early warnings about dangerous viruses had been allowed to go fallow, just two months before the deadly new coronavirus burst onto the world stage.

The failure to fully renew PREDICT dismayed infectious disease experts, who said chasing down the pathogens was a key to preventing future pandemics.

A Times story reporting on the demise of PREDICT created a furor and, like much of the responses to the coronavirus pandemic, quickly took on political overtones. Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden tweeted that the ending of the PREDICT program had been a mistake, adding: “Donald Trump’s shortsighted actions left our nation ill-prepared to deal with this outbreak.”

Categories Education Reform

Johann Neem: On Unbecoming American

By dianeravitch
April 12, 2020 //
14

Johann Neem is the author of Democracy’s Schools: The Rise of Public Education in America, in which he describes the creation of public education between the American Revolution and the Civil War and recognizes public schools as an essential building block of a robust democracy.

Neem’s family came to America from India when he was a. Dry young child. They settled in California and lived in a diverse, multiethnic America. He went to public schools, to college, to graduate school, and eventually became a historian of education.

He lived what was then considered the American Dream. But now he fears it is disappearing for reasons he explain in this essay.

He begins:

I arrived—as we all do—in the midst of history. I was not yet three, and my parents had migrated to San Francisco from Mumbai to start a new life. They had been sponsored by my dad’s sister, whose husband, an engineer, had come over to work for Bechtel. We were, in other words, part of the first wave of immigrants to crash into a changing America in the wake of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. Our arrival—among those of the numbers of Africans, Asians, and Latin Americans who came to the country—was largely unexpected. It was not what most Americans had anticipated when the law was passed during the civil rights era. But it was what brought me here, to a new country.

Mine was an American childhood. We were middle class and lived on a cul-de-sac whose residents were diverse in many of the usual American ways. There were Japanese-Americans and Catholics and Protestants. There were people without college degrees, and others with graduate degrees. There were Republicans and Democrats. There were immigrants from Germany, and of course we were from India. But most of us kids went to public school together, and our parents would take turns carpooling us. Gathering on the court, we rode bikes, played football on our muddy lawn (I was never much good at sports), and pretended to be motorcycle officers Ponch and Jon from the TV series CHiPs. Together, we made up games and celebrated birthdays. We grew up knowing about our differences but caring about what we shared. What bound us together was America, although I’m not sure I would have been able to say that. Perhaps I didn’t have to.

I imagined that I could become anybody. I had no awareness then that this belief was the result of more than two centuries of activism on the part of African Americans, feminists, and their allies to earn equality within the American nation-state. It was California. The American Dream was alive. Of course, that dream had been deferred for so many Americans for too long. But after 1965, it was hoped, those obstacles would be behind us. Immigrants would be welcome. African Americans would be equal. And despite the thus-far unsuccessful effort to enact the Equal Rights Amendment, I grew up in a world that took for granted that women too could be whomever they wanted to be.

There was a kind of amnesia. Maybe that’s not the right word. We were new. So maybe it was that I just didn’t know the history, and my parents had experienced a different history. Whatever it was, America was, for us, a blank slate. But it was not fully blank. It had rituals and traditions for us to learn, such as giving gifts and spending time with family and friends on Christmas or having barbecues on the Fourth of July. We gathered with neighbors to hunt Easter eggs. It had norms, like saying “thank you” for any kind of service, a sign of the respect each American owed fellow Americans for their contributions to society. It had a creed, too—that the United States promised all people a better, freer, more prosperous life…

I lived in a world where we could all be American, not because of our cultural differences but because of what we could share. This shared culture—this sense of being a people—is a precondition to sustaining the universal ideals of American democracy. We like to pretend that principles are enough, but abstract ideas are thin gruel for flesh-and-blood human beings. We are not disembodied reasoners. We belong to groups. We have emotions. Culture connects us to our country and to one another. But that culture depends on shared rituals and experiences. Today, we are so afraid of offense that we risk privatizing the very culture we once could share together…

As I studied American history, I came to appreciate the struggles so many Americans had undertaken, often in the face of brutal violence, to create the California my parents and I had entered in 1976. As a professor, I want my students to know of these struggles, of the wrenching realities of slavery and Jim Crow, of the violence unleashed against labor unions, of why a human being could be beaten and left tied to a fence to die for being gay. These stories have to be told if we are to confront the truth about our past, which continues to shape the way many Americans experience the present.

But some felt threatened by these new stories. They worried that they represented the end of America because they dethroned many idols. Jefferson did look different from the perspective of an enslaved person or a Native American than he did from that of a white farmer in western New York State or Virginia. The culture wars reflected Americans’ disagreements over which perspectives mattered most, and how to fit them together into a coherent story about ourselves as a people…

I am outside two worlds—both defined by race. On the left, race seems to be everywhere, as something to celebrate but also to divide. On the right, whiteness represents a reracialized vision of America that denies black voters access to the polls, engages in race-baiting that targets immigrants of color, and insults people of non-Christian faiths. It authorizes a president who suggests that we should deal with the problem of illegal border crossings by shooting migrants in the legs.20 I see myself distorted through both sets of eyes. But neither defines me. I don’t want to be white. I am proud of my Indian heritage. I am an American.

This sense of who I am makes immigrants like me carriers of an American Dream that is being lost. I still believe in the Dream. Most white Americans are not white nationalists, and, because I work on a college campus, I hope that I exaggerate the divisive features of multiculturalism and whiteness studies. Having grown up in the San Francisco Bay Area at a particular moment in its history, I know from experience that diversity does not necessarily lead to fragmentation. Living in a diverse society depends on tolerance and mutual respect, and, I learned, both a willingness to share and to participate in American culture.

I don’t do justice to this thoughtful and provocative essay by citing disconnected excerpts. Neem analyzes the tensions created by too much pressure from the academic left, focused on identity politics, and the counter-response from conservative and radicalized whites, who assert their white identity and proclaim their grievances, with the encouragement of a president who loves divisiveness.

Read it.

Categories Bias, Bigotry, Citizenship, Civics, Civil Rights
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »