Archives for the month of: April, 2020
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Stuart Egan: The Step-by-Step Destruction of Democracy in North Carolina

By dianeravitch
April 22, 2020 //
7

In this powerful post, NBCT teacher Stuart Egan describes the calculated attack on democracy and social justice in North Carolina.

The state was once considered one of the most enlightened in the South. It is now one of the most regressive, taken down by the Tea Party, by a legislature dominated by ALEC, and by politicians determined to destroy opportunity for people of color and poor people.

Egan provides a timeline of North Carolina’s descent, which accelerated after the Tea Party capture of the General Assembly in 2010. Behind the scenes, big money pushed ALEC bills.

Egan writes:

That timeline is filled with actions that are calculated, highly crafted, delicately executed, and driven by dogma deliberately done to hurt public education and communities that rely on public schools. Each occurred before the May 16th, 2018 march in Raleigh.

Citizens United, you may remember, allowed for corporations and other entities to donate to political candidates. It gave rise to PACs and SUPERPACs. It’s why you now see an incredible amount of money in political races donated by people who have a vested interest in a race or candidate but cannot vote in that race.

HB17 was the legislation produced in a special session in December of 2016 right before Roy Cooper took office. It was a power grab that granted the incoming state superintendent, Mark Johnson, the most power any state super had ever had. Johnson might be the most unqualified person to ever hold the job. What ensued was a lawsuit between Johnson and the State Board of Education that lasted for 18 months. Ultimately, it cemented Johnson’s role as a puppet and led to DPI’s reorganization and reduction of personnel.

The Innovative School District is an educational reform that allows the state to select “poor” performing schools to be taken over by an out-of-state entity. In three years, it has only one school under its umbrella, but has gone through multiple leaders.

And then there was the Voter ID law, racially driven gerrymandered political maps, and the abolishment of automatically paycheck deductions for groups like NCAE. (Yes, the Voter ID law and the gerrymandered districting has been overruled, but we still as a state have not had an election cycle since both were overturned.)

It used to not be this way, but after the Great Recession of 2008 and the rise of a new wing of the Republican Party, a noticeable shift occurred in North Carolina politics. Decades ago, public education was championed by both Democrats and Republicans alike. Think of governors like Holshousher and Martin and you will see a commitment to funding public education like NC saw with Sanford, Hunt, and Easley. The governor’s office and the General Assembly were often in different hands politically speaking, but on the issue of public education, they stood much more united than it is today.

That unification is not there anymore. And it wasn’t caused by public education or its advocates. It was planted, fed, fostered, and championed by those who came to power after the Great Recession. These are not Eisenhower Republicans or Reagan Republicans; they are ALEC Republicans whose sole purpose is to politicize all things and try and privatize as many public goods as possible. And on a state level, nothing is more of a public good than public schools.

They have been very adept at combining racial and social issues with public education to make it hard not only to compartmentalize each through legislation, but easy to exploit how much social and racial issues are tied to public education without people thinking they are interlinked. Laws and mandates like HB2, the Voter ID Law, the gerrymandered districts, and the attempted judicial system overhaul have as much to do with the health of public schools as any other factor.

When you keep people from being able to vote, you affect public education. When you keep people below the poverty line, you affect public education. When you gerrymander districts along racial lines, you affect public education. You cannot separate them exclusively. And we have lawmakers in power who know that very well. It’s why when you advocate for public schools, you must be aware of social and racial issues and be willing to fight along those lines.

Public school advocacy that was “successful” before 2008 will not work as effectively in 2020. No ALEC aligned politician who is in a right to work state that outlaws collective bargaining is going to “work with” advocacy groups like NCAE.

For NCAE and other groups to truly advocate for public schools, they must fight for issues outside of school rooms that affect the very students, teachers, and staff who come into those school rooms.

By every measure, North Carolina has regressed and opposed equity and democracy.

For example, “Now name the only state in the country with the lowest legal minimum wage, no collective bargaining rights, no Medicaid expansion, loosely regulated voucher and charter school expansion, and a school performance grading system that measures achievement over growth. North Carolina.“

The legislators who have passed regressive laws are not interested in dialogue or reason. They knew exactly what they were doing. They don’t negotiate. They don’t listen. They must be voted out of office.

Categories Accountability, ALEC, Corruption, Cruelty, Dark Money, Democracy, Education Reform, Inequality, Inequity, Injustice, North Carolina

Andy Hargreaves: What to Do and What Not to Do When You Are Teaching Kids at Home

By dianeravitch
April 22, 2020 //
27

Andy Hargreaves recently retired from his position at Boston College, where he won international acclaim for his work supporting teachers and promoting excellence and equity in schooling. He has been a leader in researching and disseminating strategies for educational effectiveness.
In this article that was published on Valerie Strauss’s Answer Sheet blog in the Washington Post, Hargreaves offers sound advice to parents who are helping their children at home during the pandemic crisis.

He writes:

Educators are doing extraordinary things in the face of the coronavirus crisis. They are our invisible heroes, supporting health services and reinventing the way they provide education. They are achieving miracles in the most challenging circumstances.

I work with education ministers, secretaries of education and teacher-leaders around the globe (as president of the ARC Education Project), and in the continuous white-water world we are all navigating at the moment, it’s just not possible to see everything ourselves all at once, especially what’s ahead.

So here are 19 things for covid-19 that may have been overlooked by school districts and politicians in the rush to do the right thing by students and teachers.

Some will surely need to be revised as the crisis develops, and the list by no means covers everything. I’m in the white water, too, so please bear with me.

1. Don’t send parents heaps of worksheets.

Instead, encourage and support them to learn with what they have available — kitchens, gardens, paper, etc. Give them ideas on how to do this. The most important thing in the next two months is not keeping up, step-by-step, with a prescribed curriculum, but keeping kids engaged with learning and the idea of learning.

2. Treasure the fact that some kids are escaping from hours of test preparation each day.

This could be a chance to engage in wider learning, make up stories, memorize epic poems, sing karaoke with YouTube, make things, play outside, write letters (on paper) to grandparents, or friends they can’t have playdates or get-togethers with, etc. In other words, for these kids, this could now be a time for more learning, rather than less. They can try to learn a new skill — juggle, play a musical instrument, pick up a modern or classical language, knit, skip, bake, garden (including indoor plants), help parents hang pictures and fix things in the house. I’m at the end of two weeks of self-isolation, and I’ve just bought a set of clubs for juggling. Getting on to another level on a video game isn’t the best way for teenagers to occupy themselves. Starting another interest while they have time will not only occupy them now, it will impress their friends later.

3. Make covid-19 an opportunity for learning and not just an interruption of it.

Help parents to do science experiments with soap so kids can understand how it kills covid-19. Teach them all about germs. When you can make coronavirus an opportunity for learning and not just an obstruction to it, loads of work can be done in math with graphs, probabilities and equations of how it spreads under different conditions. Kids can study the history of polio, smallpox and the Spanish flu (including the fact that it started in Kansas).

Geography can examine the patterns of covid-19 spread and create hypotheses explaining those patterns. Social studies can look at the relationship between government anti-covid-19 measures and protecting the principles of democracy. Ethics and religion electives can consider the principles that should guide decisions about who should live or die, or get treatment first, when resources are scarce.

4. Distinguish between online learning and on-screen learning.

Online may sometimes be continuous on-screen interaction — a math game, or Minecraft, for example. But it could also be setting up an activity involving making collages from pasta, or models from mud, or doing origami, or constructing a robot from Lego. In fact, this is better viewed as distance learning. I started my university career at the Open University in England when it was the first distance learning institution in the world. We wrote materials by building in tasks and activities (think workbooks delivered to kids), and we also made TV programs on the BBC. (The BBC has now launched a whole new schedule specifically for kids in this crisis). Not all online learning is screen learning, and not all distance learning needs to be online.

5. Get materials to parents who don’t have them.

For some, this means digital tablets. But for many other families with few resources and no Internet connections, this could also mean pencils, coloring pens, Play-Doh, glue, paper, Scotch tape, books, magazines, etc. Some school districts are doing things like having teachers deliver materials in plastic boxes on families’ doorsteps, or having school bus drivers drop off stashes of materials instead.

6. Develop strategies for children who are just “above the line.”

These are children who are not vulnerable enough to have a formal special education identification, but are in the group just above. They are often most at risk as they are not explicitly targeted and don’t usually qualify for a lot of extra support. Such children may have parents who can’t or don’t read, parents whose first language is not English, separated parents in conflict, or families that live in cramped spaces with no room for outdoor play.

7. Concentrate teacher resources and time on children who need it most.

Many middle-class parents will be able to self-organize learning at home with some online help. As a middle-class grandparent for example, I can support my grandchildren and their parents with knowledge of where resources and platforms are, which ones are most relevant, and how to navigate them and make specific selections once they find the website. But many people don’t have this knowledge. So instead of always trying to do whole classes online, concentrate disproportionate amounts of teacher instructional time and support on smaller numbers of high-risk children who are struggling learners.

8. Target support for students with learning and emotional difficulties.

This can happen by teachers and special education resource teachers calling parents and students one-to-one, emailing, going through individual education plans, maintaining personal relationships by Skype or other platforms where possible (vital with vulnerable children), giving structured feedback on work done online (it can be handwritten, colored or constructed, then photographed on a smartphone and sent back where possible) to ensure these students don’t struggle more than they need to and don’t fall behind.

9. Think about how communications can be inclusive of all kinds of students and their families.

Canadian TV had an item on how parents are dealing with learning at home — the family was a mixed-race lesbian couple with a single child. Include students and student voice in communications on national TV — Norway, Canada and New Zealand have done this especially well. Don’t just pitch to the same median middle-class white students all the time. This is a time when our values come alive. Being inclusive in our communications isn’t just something we should do when things are going well and we have extra time, but it also should define how and to whom we communicate, all the time, unless it creates excessive delay regarding the urgency of the message itself.

10. Consider an early, phased start to the new school year.

Children will have had a long time away from classroom routines. Many will have forgotten how to line up, sit in a circle, listen to others and wait their turn. Some will have spent months in close quarters with parents and siblings plunged into poverty, hardship and stress. They will have had fewer learning supports than modal middle-class families. So, school may need to start a bit earlier in the calendar. Some “normal” professional development days may need to be sacrificed and the rest redirected to dealing practically with the issues of the vulnerable and the left behind. Students who are known to be more vulnerable (through contacts that teachers will have kept with families over the isolation period) may need to start school before the rest — as often happens when phasing in arrivals in kindergarten or junior-kindergarten. This will be hard on teachers, but for a few months they may need to be as turbocharged in their professional approach as health workers have had to be, because this will save a lot of disruption later on.

11. Promote positive family and friendship relationships

Part of being at school is feeling safe and being cared for. Socio-emotional learning is definitely looking like a need that’s fundamental right now; not an indulgent frill. The most important thing in stressed-out families, at this time, more than rushing through planned lessons, is making children feel loved, safe and reassured. So, communicate the importance of simply spending time with kids for part of the day, hugging them, talking and listening to them, enjoying some moments of silliness and laughter, and doing things together like cooking or reading. Remind parents and other caretakers about this on a regular basis. Help children communicate with their friends by writing them a postcard, Skyping or face-timing their grandparents and showing them what they’ve been doing, etc. Now, more than ever, kids, especially younger vulnerable kids with emotional or learning difficulties who are in stressed-out families, need to see and hear their teachers as part of their distance experience. Be empathetic about and supportive toward how parents themselves are feeling and about what they have to cope with, too. Understand they may be dealing with family illnesses, their own work demands, loss of income and other problems. Let them know it’s also okay to lower their standards a bit for their kids sometimes in terms of tidiness and other things.

12. Value play.

Play, especially outdoor play in the garden or the driveway (if families have them), is always a vital part of learning — a way to develop the imagination, engage in conversation, build relationships with others or work through anxieties. During nature study, for example, my grandchildren have named natural objects as their friends — like sticky and buddy — cute, of course, but also a possible sign they are missing their friends. Many education systems in the past few years have tended to play down “play” in favor of more work, test preparation and downloading serious study to younger and younger age groups. Older kids have also been spending more and more time indoors on their smartphones in a world where even before the crisis, that was already too much. This is actually an opportunity to reverse the cycle for some kids at least — to let them make up their own activities with perhaps just a few materials thrown their way, like balls of wool, or pebbles, or cardboard boxes, to get them started. Play can work for teenagers, too — singing online together, making up ridiculous skits, building things from junk around the house, and so on. More play, less work, might actually be a good direction to take in these unique circumstances.

13. Protect teacher well-being.

Teachers are under stress too. They’ll be worrying about how to prepare and deliver lessons at a distance. They’ll be anxious about those kids for whom home is not usually a safe haven. They’ll be uncertain sometimes about how much initiative they can take in communicating with homes and families without guidance from principals, school districts, governments and their unions, or without getting sued for failing to provide for every student equally. And this guidance may not always be clear or consistent. They’ll be working at full tilt but not always sure about the impact of what they are doing. They’ll be missing their kids and their colleagues. And many will be looking after kids of their own at home. Unlike health workers whose heroic efforts are publicly very visible, what they’re doing is less visible, and the public may start to wonder about and criticize what they’re actually (not) doing. So, supporting teachers now is critical — providing counseling to teachers who are stressed, anxious and depressed; ensuring there are virtual forums for teachers to collaborate — not just to plan and prepare but also to provide moral support; and communicating clearly, accessibly and transparently what it is that teachers are doing for parents and kids rather than disguising everything with bureaucratic edu-speak.

14. Underline the value of expertise.

This crisis has elevated the importance of expertise in the public imagination. After years when government has cast aspersions on professional expertise in favor of popular opinion and common sense, state and federal leaders are having public health professionals stand alongside them to explain and legitimize scientific expertise as a basis for decision-making. We need to ensure the same thing happens for teaching and learning. Many parents and other caretakers will do a heroic job with learning at home in the coming weeks and months. The task of teachers and leaders is to support and guide what parents are now doing based on the science and expertise of effective learning, and to communicate this when it is asked for and needed, clearly, without talking down to people. Teachers must be confident in their own professional expertise, share that collaboratively with other teachers to strengthen that confidence, and communicate it clearly to others.

15. Keep up collaborative professionalism

Working together collaboratively is always important and never more so than now. Try to ensure that time is built in for professional collaboration, department planning, learning teams and so on within the school. Also leverage networks of ideas and support across schools at this time, especially where those networks already exist. There will be a temptation to think there’s no time to collaborate with adults or engage in existing networks because everyone is too busy churning out stuff for their kids. The role of all kinds of leadership here is not to abandon networks and meetings but to ensure they are used to provide the best possible learning and caring at a distance for all students in these unprecedented circumstances.

16. Promote public professional leadership.

Many parents are unsure and unclear about so many issues concerning their children now. Will there be quality support, ideas and activities for them to help their children with? How long will this go on? Will their teenagers be able to graduate and get to college? Will their children fall behind in their reading, their mathematics and other areas? Many governments have provided excellent public communication about health and the economy, standing alongside experts in those fields as they do so. The same needs to happen in education — regular public announcements about education, and learning at home, and about what teachers are and will be doing. These announcements need to be made by state and federal leaders standing together with accredited education professionals from teacher unions, boards of professional standards, leadership organizations, and so on.

17. Applaud our educators.

Within a couple of weeks, after the initial scramble to get resources up and make connections with families, parents and the public will start to understand the many extra miles teachers have been going during lockdown — sometimes literally, door to door to give out and collect resources and paper — to keep their kids learning, engaged and well. Parents at home trying to fulfill their demanding job responsibilities while their kids run riot in the background will be figuring out pretty fast that online learning is often overrated, that it can’t keep the undivided attention of kids unable to self-regulate, or concentrate, and that those darned teachers go the extra mile all the time and deserve every cent they make — and then some. So by the time we hit May 1, the day the international community celebrates the value of people’s labor, let’s open our windows, and lean off our balconies, to give three cheers and three minutes of applause for all our teachers — in districts and charters, schools and colleges, public and private — for all the work they’ve been doing for all our students and their families.

18. Beware: perfect is the enemy of good.

One of my favorite books on school leadership is “Imperfect Leadership” by Steve Munby. Imperfect leadership, Munby says, is not the leadership of superheroes. It’s “messy leadership, trial and error leadership, butterflies in the stomach leadership.” It’s about stepping up to lead even when you feel completely out of your depth. It’s about being unafraid to admit you don’t know what to do sometimes. And it’s about being ever ready to ask for others’ help. In these times that are without parallel, imperfect leadership doesn’t and can’t wait until everything is perfectly mapped out, where all risks have been eliminated, and every student is guaranteed equal access to the same curriculum. Perfect is the enemy of good. Educators will make some mistakes right now. They won’t be perfect with everybody, all the time. But that is better than waiting for the perfect plan, holding off and doing nothing at all until it’s ready.

19. Let teachers take the lead.

In the early days of the pandemic, there has been a lot of unavoidable confusion about what kinds of online platforms and resources can be set up for all teachers to use in districts or entire state systems. This can be frustrating for teachers and for parents and kids, too. Let’s not show the worst face of school district and national bureaucracies. Let’s not have the teacher wait for the principal, and the principal for the state department, before anything gets done, in those outdated hierarchies of top-down control. Teachers need to be allowed to be the heroes of learning, like our health workers are being the heroes of combating infectious disease. Teachers are professionals. They know where they are in the curriculum. They know their kids, what point each of them is at, which ones have greater needs than others. So with just a few basic guidelines — keep kids learning and interested in learning, actively care for and support them, and communicate with them personally, individually and collectively, as often as possible — unleash teachers as professionals to use whatever platforms they can to get things started and get connected as fast as possible. And then give them ways to connect with each other as colleagues as they move forward together.

Don’t make teachers wait. Let them go, go, go.

Categories Creativity, Parents, Students, Teachers

NYC: Success Academy Lays Off Employees, Fires Teachers

By dianeravitch
April 22, 2020 //
28

Alex Zimmerman of Chalkbeat reports that Success Academy is laying off employees and firing teachers. The layoffs, about 4% of “non-core” employees, were laid because of the financial crunch caused by the pandemic. The teachers were fired, the chain said, because of their performance.

SA has a board of billionaires and millionaires and is known for its lavish spending on test prep rallies (“Slam the Exam”) in expensive facilities like the Barkley Center in Brooklyn and its graduation ceremony at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It regularly holds plush dinners where hedge fund managers and other moguls announce multimillion-dollar gifts.

One network employee who was laid off and spoke on condition of anonymity said employees were not offered severance, though healthcare benefits would extend into the summer.

“Success Academy is an incredibly well-resourced organization,” the staffer said. “For them to offer no financial assistance for laid off employees in these economic conditions speaks to what the executive office values, which is certainly not its employees.”

Success officials did not immediately respond to a question about severance packages.

One former Success official said the staff cuts could foreshadow staffing shifts in the rest of the city’s charter school landscape.

“I think Success does do a really good job of seeing around the corner,” said the official who still works in the charter sector and spoke on condition of anonymity. “Are they reading the moment a little bit more in advance and some of the difficulties that are coming down the line for the whole sector?”

Success, for instance, was the city’s first big charter network to announce its move to remote learning, making the call two days before the de Blasio administration closed the city’s district schools. The organization has also launched a more regimented approach to remote learning, with caregivers asked to help monitor hours of daily instruction even among the network’s youngest students.

The move to reduce staff is likely to raise eyebrows, as the network has a reputation for spending lavishly on everything from advertising and rallies to executive compensation. Moskowitz earns roughly $890,000 a year, according to the organization’s most recent tax filing.

Categories Education Reform, Funding, Harlem Success Academy

An Open Letter to Joe Biden, by Diane Ravitch and Carol Burris

By dianeravitch
April 22, 2020 //
45

Carol Burris and I wrote “An Open Letter to Joe Biden,” which was published by Valerie Strauss on her blog “The Answer Sheet” at the Washington Post.

Valerie Strauss begins:

During the Obama administration, public school advocates led by Diane Ravitch opposed the education agenda of Education Secretary Arne Duncan, who had embraced standardized testing, charter schools and the Common Core State Standards as the way to improve America’s schools.
Ravitch, an education historian and research professor at New York University, became the titular leader of the grass-roots movement against the privatization of public education in 2010, when she published her best-selling book, “The Death and Life of the Great American School System.” It detailed her conversion from a No Child Left Behind supporter to an opponent.

From 1991 to 1993, Ravitch served as assistant secretary of research and improvement in the Education Department under President George H.W. Bush. She was, too, an early supporter of No Child Left Behind, the chief education initiative of his son, President George W. Bush, which ushered in the high-stakes standardized-testing movement. But when she researched the effects of the measures, she saw that NCLB’s testing requirements had turned classrooms into test prep factories and forced schools to narrow the curriculum to focus on tested subjects.

She changed her long-held views about how to improve schools and for the last decade has been speaking and writing about education reform. She also co-founded and heads the nonprofit Network for Public Education, which links people and groups that advocate to improve public schools and fight school privatization.
Ravitch became a lightning rod for criticism by supporters of President Barack Obama’s Race to the Top initiative, which made standardized tests more important than ever. But, at 81 years old, she is still writing and advocating for public schools. Her most recent book was published this year, “Slaying Goliath: The Passionate Resistance to Privatization and the Fight to Save America’s Public Schools.”

The Network for Public Education that she leads opposes charter schools — which are publicly funded but privately managed — seeing them as part of a movement to privatize public education. It published two reports last year about how the federal government wasted millions of dollars on a program aimed at expanding the charter sector.

Charter supporters criticized the reports, but the overall story of waste and abuse in the federal Charter Schools Program helped to prompt Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) to promise to end funding for the program when they were both running for the Democratic presidential nomination. Some Democratic legislators in the House also expressed concern about the program after the reports were released.
Joe Biden was Obama’s vice president but was not in the forefront of the administration’s education agenda. He has promised that if elected, he would, among other things, triple the federal funding for high-poverty schools, increase teachers salaries and ban for-profit charter schools. He has also expressed opposition to standardized testing.

In the following open letter to Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, Ravitch and Carol Burris write about public education and their reaction to his public comments about school policy, saying they are encouraged.

Burris, a former award-winning principal in New York, is the executive director of the Network for Public Education. Burris has been writing for this blog for years, chronicling the effects of Race to the Top and about charter schools.

Here is the open letter to Biden about education policy, written by Diane Ravitch and Carol Burris:</strong

Dear Vice President Biden,

We write on behalf of the Network for Public Education, the nation’s largest group of volunteers and advocates for public schools in the nation, with more than 350,000 followers spread across all 50 states.
We have strongly opposed the education agenda of Donald Trump. For the first time in the history of the Department of Education, its secretary seems dedicated to the destruction of public schools. From her enthusiastic support of private school vouchers, charter schools, and virtual charter schools, Betsy DeVos has made clear that she believes that schools should be run by private agencies and as entrepreneurial start-ups, not as centers of community life, subject to democratic governance by elected school boards.

Our public schools and their students desperately need a champion. We hope you will be that champion. For two decades, our schools and their teachers have been micromanaged by misguided federal mandates that require states to judge students, teachers, and schools by standardized test scores, as though a test score could ever be the true measure of a child, a teacher or a school.

We know that you know better. At the Public Education Forum in Pittsburgh in December 2019, NPE Board member Denisha Jones asked you whether you would commit to ending standardized testing in public schools. You did not hesitate when you said, “Yes. You are preaching to the choir.”

You continued by saying, “Teaching to a test underestimates and discounts the things that are most important for students to know.” You explained that what is most important is building a child’s confidence and you referred to evaluating teachers by test scores as a “big mistake.”

You are right in your assessment of standardized, high-stakes tests and we appreciate your response. Hold firmly to those beliefs. We understand that federal law must be rewritten to free the schools from their fixation on test scores. We count on you to make that happen, and to put an end to the legacy of President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind law. Billions of dollars have been wasted on testing during these past twenty years. It is time for a fresh vision of what education can be.

Former supporters of President Obama’s Race to the Top program will whisper in your ear to persuade you to double down on failed policies. They will try to convince you that testing is a “civil right.” It is not. In fact, standardized testing has its roots in eugenics — it was used for years as a means by which to shut out immigrants, students of color, and students who live in poverty in order to reserve privilege for affluent students, who more typically excel on standardized tests.

All children deserve a well-resourced public school filled with high-quality educational experiences. All children deserve experienced and well-prepared teachers. All children deserve schools that have counselors, social workers, librarians, and nurses. All children deserve a full curriculum, with science labs and arts programs. When schools become test-prep factories, the civil rights of children to equal education opportunities are denied.

Others will tell you that funding does not matter and that only choice and competition will improve public schools. They are wrong. Research consistently demonstrates that increases in funding make a difference in the educational outcomes of children. But we cannot tinker around the edges and expect to get dramatic results. That is why we fully support your plan to triple Title I funding while giving educators voice in how that money should be best spent.

We are pleased that you support community schools as a pathway for school improvement. During the forum, you said that “Betsy DeVos’s whole notion from charter schools to this [her blame the victim position on sexual harassment on campus] is gone,” if you are elected. We are glad that you endorse district public school improvement instead of embracing the expansion of what has become a competing alternative system whose growth has drained funding from public schools.

Banning for-profit charter schools is not enough. There are only a handful of for-profit charters, and they exist only in Arizona. There are, however, many for-profit charter management companies as well as nonprofit charter management companies whose CEOs enjoy exorbitant salaries, far exceeding the salaries of district school superintendents. These charter chains hide their lavish spending on travel, marketing, advertising, rental payments to related companies, and administrative salaries from community, state and federal taxpayers even as they claim to be public schools.

Although the policies of the states regarding charter schools are beyond your control, the Federal Charter School Program is not. A once modest program intended to spark innovation community-led charter schools is now a program that sends hundreds of millions of dollars each year to corporate charter school chains. Just last month, DeVos gave $72 million to the IDEA charter chain whose chief executive officer hired a private jet on which he was the only passenger to meet DeVos in Florida. That same charter chain received over $175 million from DeVos through the Charter Schools Program in 2017 and 2018.

It is time to eliminate the federal Charter Schools Program, which is no longer needed since billionaire-directed foundations supply ample funding for new charters and charter expansion. We issued two reports last year, demonstrating that the federal Charter Schools Program is riddled with waste and fraud, having spent approximately $1 billion on schools that never opened, or that opened and subsequently closed.

Your public statements encourage us to believe that you do not intend to follow the disastrous education policies of No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top. We are hopeful that you will renounce the status quo and bring a fresh vision that supports the work of teachers and public schools.

You will receive no better counsel on public education than you will from your educator wife, Jill Biden. We have no doubt that she will advise you well. It is time to turn the page on failed policies and invest in our nation’s public schools, which enroll nearly 90 percent of all American children.

The future of our nation depends on the success of public schools and their leaders, teachers, and support staff, who even, in this crisis, are working tirelessly to educate our students and keep them fed, well, and safe. Please stand with them and with the more than 50 million children who attend district public schools.

Diane Ravitch
Carol Burris

Categories Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, For-Profit, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Privatization, Race to the Top, Testing, Vouchers

CDC Director Warns of Resurgence of Virus Next Winter

By dianeravitch
April 21, 2020 //
50

The stringent restrictions in place are “flattening the curve,” but the director of the Centers for Disease Control warned of the possibility of a new outbreak next winter.

Even as states move ahead with plans to reopen their economies, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned Tuesday that a second wave of the novel coronavirus will be far more dire because it is likely to coincide with the start of flu season.

“There’s a possibility that the assault of the virus on our nation next winter will actually be even more difficult than the one we just went through,” CDC Director Robert Redfield said in an interview with The Washington Post. “And when I’ve said this to others, they kind of put their head back, they don’t understand what I mean.”

“We’re going to have the flu epidemic and the coronavirus epidemic at the same time,” Redfield said, and having two simultaneous respiratory outbreaks would put unimaginable strain on the health-care system. The first wave of covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, has already killed more than 42,000 people across the country. It has overwhelmed hospitals and revealed gaping shortages in test kits, ventilators and protective equipment for health-care workers.

In a wide-ranging interview, Redfield said federal and state officials need to use the coming months to prepare for what lies ahead. As stay-at-home orders are lifted, officials need to stress the continued importance of social distancing. Officials also need to massively scale up their ability to identify the infected through testing and find everyone they interact with through contact tracing. Doing so prevents new cases from becoming larger outbreaks.

Asked about the appropriateness of protests against stay-at-home orders and calls on states to be “liberated” from restrictions, Redfield said: “It’s not helpful.”

Categories Health

Betsy DeVos Hands Out Another $200 Million, Mostly to Rich Corporate Charter Chains

By dianeravitch
April 21, 2020 //
8

In 1994, the Clinton administration started a small federal program and funded it with $4.5 million to help launch new charter schools. At the time, charter schools were a new idea, and there were not many of them. The first charter school had opened in Minnesota in 1991, and six states passed laws authorizing charters in 1992. In 1994, the idea was too new to have produced results or research. So Congress allocated a measly $4.5 million.

In the 26 years since the federal Charter Schools Program started, the charter idea has burgeoned into an industry with state charter school associations, lobbyists in D.C. and in state capitols, and support from numerous foundations, billionaires, corporations, and Wall Street. There is considerable research about charters as well as controversy surrounding their methods of selecting and retaining or excluding students. Charters now enroll 6% of the nation’s students.

Two things are clear:

1. The charter sector today is very well funded by billionaire patrons such as the Walton Family Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Eli and Edythe abroad Foundation, the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, and Netflix founder Reed Hastings. It has no need of federal funding.

2. Some charters get high test scores (and are accused of skimming to get the “best” students), some get the worst scores in their states, and most get scores about the same as public schools with similar demographics. In the one all-charter district in the nation, New Orleans, about half the schools are rated D or F by the state. Although the charter industry sings their praises, it’s clear that charters have no secret sauce to lift up every child.

Yet despite the fact that charters have a huge number of financial angels with very deep pockets, despite the fact that they do not solve the deep-seated problems of American education, despite their spotty academic record, funding for the Federal Charter Schools Program has grown to $440 million per year.

Under Betsy DeVos, the CSP has become her personal slush fund to help The expansion of large corporate charter chains, like KIPP and IDEA. The original idea that the federal funds would launch entrepreneurial start-ups is long forgotten.

About two weeks ago, DeVos released the latest CSP funds and again favored the big corporate charter chains, which have many millions in reserve and long lists of billionaire patrons.

DeVos handed out the first $200 million to her favorite chain, IDEA, which has no financial need. IDEA won $72 million, having previously received more than $200 million from DeVos. IDEA, you may recall, is known for its lavish spending. Its board approved the lease of a private jet for nearly $2 million a year, but had to cancel the lease because of adverse publicity in Texas, where the chain is based. Its CEO hired a private jet to take him to meet with DeVos in Florida; he was the only passenger. The chain’s executives,lacking their own jet, are allowed to fly first class with their families, not exactly like public school employees on official travel.

The second biggest winner was Mater Academy, which won $57 million. It is affiliated with the for-profit (and very rich) Florida for-profit chain Academica.

The Network for Public Education published two reports about the CSP in 2019, documenting that the program is shot through with waste, fraud, and abuse. About 40% of the charters funded by CSP either never opened or closed not long after opening. The loss of federal funds was $1 billion. The first report—Asleep at the Wheel— is here. The second report—Still Asleep at the Wheel—is here.

Tom Ultican reviewed the two NPE reports and recounted Betsy DeVos’s unsurprising hostile response to them. Why would she relinquish control over $440 million, which helps corporate chains that divert money from public schools and advances DeVos’s long-term goal of wrecking the foundations of public education?

It is ironic that the Trump administration in its now forgotten budget for the coming year proposed to eliminate the federal Charter Schools Program by folding it and 28 other federal programs into a bloc grant to the states. At the same time, Trump and DeVos proposed The creation of a multi-billion dollar voucher program. The Democratic-controlled House of Representatives made clear that these proposals were Dead on Arrival. Nonetheless, the charter lobbyists were shocked to discover that charter schools are just a stepping-stone to vouchers for DeVos.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Billionaires, Broad Foundation, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Privatization, Trump, Vouchers, Walton Foundation

Peter Greene: Why Business Ideas Don’t Work in Education

By dianeravitch
April 21, 2020 //
17

Peter Greene once again nails a basic fact: education is not a business, and it can’t be run like a business.

Business ideas work well in the world of commerce, where businesses compete to provide a better product or better service. Probably there will be readers who question how well business is functioning right now, as megastores like Walmart gobble up neighborhood stores, destroying Main Street, and as online giants like Amazon threaten to gobble up all brick-and-mortar stores, even Walmart.

Greene writes, and I quote him in part:

We are living through yet another demonstration of the ways in which market-based approaches fail, and in some cases, fail really hard.

Long Term Preparation Is Inefficient But Essential

Back when I was a stage crew advisor, there was a pep talk I had to give periodically to crew members, particularly those working in the wings as grips or fly. “I know that you sit and do nothing for a lot of this show,” I’d say, “but when we need you, we really need you. In those few minutes, you are critical to our success.” In those moments we were talking about, every crew member was occupied; there was no way to double up or cut corners.

Emergency preparation is much the same. It’s economically efficient to, for instance, keep a whole stockpile of facemasks or ventilators. Big-time businessman Trump justified his cuts to various health agencies by citing business wisdom:

And rather than spending the money—I’m a business person. I don’t like having thousands of people around when you don’t need them. When we need them, we can get them back very quickly.

This turns out to be just as smart as disbanding the fire department and figuring you’ll just round up personnel and equipment when something is actually on fire. It doesn’t work. And as we have witnessed, it leaves you unprepared to deal with the critical moment when it arrives.

But the market hates tying up money in excess capacity or emergency readiness, because you’re spending all that money on capacity that isn’t being used this second. Are those guidance counselors and school nurses seeing students every single minute of the day? Well then, we should be able to cut them back. Are we sure that every teacher is teaching the maximum number of students possible? Couldn’t we just put some of those students on software? This is why so many business heads are convinced that public education is simply filled with waste–because there seems to be so much excess capacity in schools.

But in many schools, there’s not enough excess capacity. When a student is in the middle of a crisis, we should be able to respond immediately, whether it’s a personal crisis, a medical crisis, or an educational issue. The response should not be “tough it out till the counselor is on duty tomorrow” or “we’ll just wrap that in some gauze until the nurse comes in three hours from now” or “I know you need help with the assignment, but I can’t take my attention away from the other thirty-five students in this classroom.” And that’s on top of the issue of preparedness, or having staff and teachers who have the capacity–the time and resources and help– to be prepared for the daily onslaught of Young Human Crises. When wealthy people pay private school tuition or raise their own public school taxes, this is what they’re paying for– the knowledge that whenever their child needs the school to respond, the response will come immediately.

Sure, you can cut a school to the bones in the name of efficiency, but what you’ll have is the educational equivalent of a nation caught flatfooted by a global pandemic because it didn’t have the people in place to be prepared.

Competition Guarantees Losers

Ed Reformsters just love the bromide about how competition raises all boats and makes everyone better. And yet, the pandemic’s free market approach to critical medical supplies doesn’t seem to bear that out. States are being forced to compete with each other and the federal government, and all it’s doing is making vendors rich. This is free market competition at its baldest– if you have more money, you win. If you have less money, you lose. At some point, if it has not already happened, some people in this country are going to die because their state, municipality or medical facility will not have enough money to outbid someone else.

The free market picks losers, and it generally picks them on the basis of their lack of wealth. The notion that losers can just compete harder, by wrapping their bootstraps in grit, is baloney. It’s comforting for winners to believe that they won because of hard work and grit and not winning some fate-based lottery, and it also releases them from any obligation to give a rat’s rear about anyone else (“I made myself, so everyone else should do the same”).

A system built on picking losers and punishing them for losing is the exact opposite of what we need for public education. You can argue that well, we just want free market competition for schools and teachers, but if that kind of competition is in the dna of the system, it will stomp all over students as well, just as all free market businesses pick customers to be losers who don’t get served because they aren’t sufficiently profitable. Kind of like a low-revenue state or old folks home that can’t get its people necessary supplies because they don’t have enough wealth to bid with.

“Compete harder” just means “be richer.” It is not helpful advice.

Please open the link and enjoy the rest of his good essay on why business thinking and cost cutting doesn’t work in education.

Categories Accountability, Competition, Corporate Reform, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, Testing

John Thompson Reviews Rachel Maddow’s Book “Blowout”

By dianeravitch
April 21, 2020 //
5

Who better to review a book about the depredations of the fossil fuel industry than John Thompson, who lives in Oklahoma, where that industry controls the legislature? Thompson pointed out when he sent this review that the federal governmentspends ten times more to subsidize fossil fuels than it spends on education.

He writes:
Rachel Maddow’s Blowout: Corrupted Democracy, Rogue State Russia, and the Richest Most Destructive Industry on Earth is a case study in the “Resource Curse,” the social science concept explaining why petroleum produces corruption and poverty. It’s presented in Maddow’s inimitable style, providing a “guided tour of some of the landmarks, like Oklahoma, and Equatorial Guinea, and Russia.”

Maddow describes the oil and gas industry as “essentially a big casino” that “invites gangsterism, extortion, thuggery, and the sorts of folks who enjoy these hobbies.” Of course, those behaviors are more extreme in Equatorial Guinea and Russia, but American companies also cause “mindless damage.” Big Oil is willing to profit in ways that stunts development in the Third World and funds dictators like Vladimir Putin. Moreover, minimizing damage to the planet “had never been a critical variable in oil and gas exploration.”

Blowout’s “narrative thread” starts with hydraulic fracking, a production technique developed by George Mitchell, and expanded by the Oklahoma-based corporations, Chesapeake Energy, Devon Energy, and Continental Resources. Ironically, Putin could have learned from the foul-mouthed Oklahoman Joe Mach and ExxonMobil’s Rex Tillerson, and built an oil industry that could have been Russia’s “Crown Jewel.” (That is not to say they would have been interested in sharing the benefits or minimizing the inevitable damage.)

Maddow explains that Tillerson, for instance, had a two part-mission, “maximize shareholder profits” and “bring the world’s most vital commodity to the market.” He and the other oilmen would gladly help Putin build a 21st century economy, extracting natural gas from the Artic (which, of course, is very threatening to the environment), while turning a blind eye to other behaviors. As long as Putin kept honoring “the sanctity of contract and implementing friendly tax laws,” oil interests “have shown little hesitation in making those deals.”

But, Putin chose to almost completely control Russia’s oil industry. And as he grew more paranoid and vindictive, Putin launched the assaults on American democracy that would be documented by Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller.

The American side of the narrative begins with Oklahoma’s Robert S. Kerr, the “Uncrowned King of the Senate.” During his reign, oilmen could have been satisfied with 5 to 10% tax break to spur exploration, but they obtained and protected their 27.5% break. Maddow describes it as the “longest-running welfare program” in US history.

Kerr was Aubrey McClendon’s great uncle. McClendon, a co-founder of Chesapeake, was the visionary character described in Sam Anderson’s Boom Town, the story of Oklahoma City becoming a “Major League City.” Like Anderson, Maddow details McClendon’s charm which explains why “people wanted to believe” him. But, “Accuracy just never really captured the expansiveness of his vision.” She says, “What he lacked in strict truthfulness, he made up for in boyish and enthusiastic sincerity.”

McClendon joked about “him and his Oklahoma redneck buddies pulling a fast one on the entire leadership suite of the City of Seattle” to bring the NBA “Thunder” basketball team to Oklahoma City. He was known for $100 tips, as well as his 100,000 bottle wine collection. McClendon invested in a 11,000 square foot mansion and a Whole Foods grocery next the Chesapeake campus, and he donated to the Sierra Club.

Chesapeake (and Devon) made $25 billion in 2008 by fracking for natural gas. By 2010, however, Oklahoma was racked by earthquakes, including the magnitude 5.7 quake in 2011. These hundreds of earthquakes were “largely caused by the underground disposal of billions of barrels of wastewater” from fracking.

McClendon’s generosity didn’t prompt an effort of dispose of toxic wastewater in a safe manner. And the quakes didn’t deter him from another “buying spree.”

The fracking pioneer, Mitchell, wasn’t surprised by what followed. He told the New Yorker’s Lawrence Wright, “’these damn cowboys will wreck the world in order to get an extra one percent’ of profit.”

By 2013, McClendon was removed from Chesapeake, and three years later he didn’t attempt to brake when speeding into a concrete bridge. After his death, Blowout focuses on Harold Hamm who used fracking to produce oil, as opposed to natural gas.

Hamm, the 13th child of sharecroppers, became the 24th richest man in America by 2014. He was worth at least $14.6 billion. Maddow says his wealth and fame “made him uncompromisingly certain of his own vision of national destiny.” He couldn’t understand the advocates for “green energy” incentives, regulations on fracking, or limits on tax breaks for oil and gas. She explains, “Hamm didn’t understand how anybody could argue against him …”

As Hamm grew richer, Oklahoma school funding dropped by 24% over ten years, making schools 49th in the nation in state funding. This prompted the 2014 walkout of 25,000 teachers. They came to the State Capitol with signs like, “We Will Not Be Silent!”

Hamm and other oil producers organized a counter-demonstration, “Rally for Rigs,” with signs like “Don’t Be a Fracking Idiot.”

The push for a tax increase for big oil and gas companies was assisted by Mike “Bubba” Cantrell, “Hamm’s former government affairs pro,” who didn’t believe his status made him better than other Oklahomans and who tried to get funding for cleanups. Cantrell said, “It’s only smart to play nice with everybody.” Also, small oil companies were paying taxes at a rate “seven times that of Continental, Devon, and Chesapeake.”

Even so, it took four years, and another teacher walkout, to raise taxes on horizontal drilling from 2 to 5%.

During that time, Hamm fought a bitter divorce battle with his wife, Sue Ann, before agreeing to a settlement of nearly a billion dollars. My only complaint with Blowout is that it didn’t describe the great good done by Sue Ann Arnall’s subsequent philanthropic efforts.

Hamm also fought aggressively against the scientific evidence that disposal of fracking waste caused earthquakes. In 2015, Oklahoma had 900 earthquakes over 3 points. The number dropped to 198 in 2018 after regulations were imposed.

Maddow described a meeting with University of Oklahoma President David Boren and Austin Holland of the Oklahoma Geological Survey (OGS). Hamm said OGS was aiding the “war on fossil fuels.” Holland said that Hamm was “just a little intimidating.”

OU Dean Larry Grillot “wrote an email a few hours after the meeting” that said, “Mr. Hamm is very upset at some of the earthquake reporting … to the point that he would like to see select OGS staff dismissed.”

After leaving Oklahoma, Holland said that “wastewater injection deep within the earth … is an ultrahazardous activity. Because you can’t control the risk.”

Hamm, a fervent Trump supporter, further expressed his views at the 2016 Republican convention where he said, “Every time we can’t drill a well in America, terrorism is being funded.” Moreover, “Every onerous regulation puts American lives at risk.”

Maddow closes the chapter on Hamm’s defense of fracking. He said Russia was playing a role in the battle. Hamm contended, “It all ties back.”

Maddow replies, “which was nuts, of course. But it wasn’t that more nuts than the truth.”

And that brings her narrative back to Putin’s assault on American democracy. She had previously shown examples of the incompetence of Russian efforts ranging from oil production to intelligence collection, as well as “Guccifer’s” primitive methodology when stealing and publishing electronic messages.

But, after Putin put $50 billion into the 2014 Sochi games, in “a festival of corruption,” and as violence in the Ukraine distracted from his extravaganza, Putin’s ego suffered and his attacks on western democracies became more sophisticated, leading to the infamous Trump Tower meeting, and the Internet Research Agency’s fake news. After more than 1000 Ukrainians were killed, “Putin’s longtime man in Ukraine, President Viktor Yanukovych lost control.” Paul Manafort’s efforts to support Yanukovych also helped Russian corruption intrude into American elections.

In 2013, there was also an intriguing effort to bring Oklahomans into Russian matters. Carter Page registered Global Natural Gas Ventures LLC at it’s headquarter four miles from Chesapeake. Apparently Page sought to follow Aubrey McClendon’s fracking path without realizing it was a “tad stale” by then. Page’s goal was becoming a “point of contact” between Russian and American oil companies. But, Page apparently was too incompetent to pull off anything like that.

Maddow concludes that Big Oil hasn’t changed much since the 19th century. She doesn’t say oil “is hellbent on bad government for some ideological reason; it’s just practical business sense.”

She also concludes the teachers who fought back were “superheroes.”

I agree on both points. When I was an Oklahoma oil rig roughneck in the 1970s, my first day on the job was very reminiscent of the days of Social Darwinism. Like all rookies, my unofficial job title was “worm.” Our tool pusher was yelling into the radio, “Frack after dark! Frack after dark! Call Western, they love to Frack after dark!” He then explained that we were supposed load explosives into a tool for perforating a pipe. After dark, any CB radio – even in a car a hundred miles away – could blow up the entire crew.

The last time they fracked after dark, had distant radio waves ignited an explosion a minute earlier, everyone would have died. But they had just put the tool in the hole. One roughneck was declared dead on the scene, but revived on the way to the hospital. My tool pusher said he was a high school dropout and, if necessary, he would have to take the risk.

“You have a future,” he advised, if we have to frack after dark, “quit this job and hitchhike home.”

Categories Education Reform

Steven Singer: No, You Can’t Risk My Children’s Lives to Restart Your Economy

By dianeravitch
April 21, 2020 //
94

Steven Singer hears the growing demand to reopen schools in the midst of the pandemic, and he sees an ulterior motive.

The clamor to reopen the schools is not about education or even the lives of children, but freeing their parents to go back to work.

He writes that despite the lack of testing or vaccines, the Trump administration is eager to open up the economy, and reopening schools is central to that goal.

The rich need the poor to get back to work. And they’re willing to put our lives on the line to do it.

What’s worse, they’re willing to put our children’s lives on the line.

I don’t know about you, but I’m not willing to risk my daughter’s life so that the stock market can open back up.

As a public school teacher, I’m not willing to bet my students lives so that the airlines and cruise industry can get back in the green.

Nor am I willing to gamble with my own life even if it means the NBA, NFL and MLB can start playing games and Hollywood can start premiering first run movies again.

There’s still so much we don’t know about COVID-19.

Initial reports concluded that older people were more susceptible to it, but as infections have played out worldwide, we’ve seen that 40% of patients are between 20-50 years of age. Children seem mostly asymptomatic. However, many immunologists suspect they are acting as carriers spreading the virus to the older people with whom they come into contact.

Children have a more difficult time with the constant hand washing and separating themselves at least 6 feet apart recommended by health experts. This is one of the justifications for closing schools in the first place. If we reopen schools too quickly, it could jumpstart another wave of infections.

Categories Accountability, Economy, Health

Charles Blow: Stop Covering Trump’s Fake Daily Briefings

By dianeravitch
April 20, 2020 //
68

For months, the Trump administration refused to hold press conferences to avoid answering questions from the press. Then came the pandemic, and two things happened. First, Trump stopped holding rallies for his base because it was too dangerous to hold them (ironic since he sides with the protestors who believe the pandemic is a hoax). Second, Trump realized that he could substitute daily “briefings” for his rallies, where he controls the venue and the actors, just like a reality show, with him playing the role of president.

Charles Blow of the New York Times says the free press should stop giving Trump free media in the run up to the election.

He writes:

“Around this time four years ago, the media world was all abuzz over an analysis by mediaQuant, a company that tracks what is known as “earned media” coverage of political candidates. Earned media is free media.

“The firm computed that Donald Trump had “earned” a whopping $2 billion of coverage, dwarfing the value earned by all other candidates, Republican and Democrat, even as he had only purchased about $10 million of paid advertising.

“As The New York Times reported at the time, the company’s chief analytics officer, Paul Senatori, explained: “The mediaQuant model collects positive, neutral and negative media mentions alike. Mr. Senatori said negative media mentions are given somewhat less weight.”

“This wasn’t the first analysis that found that something was askew.

“In December 2015 CNN quoted the publisher of The Tyndall Report, which also tracks media coverage, saying Trump was “by far the most newsworthy story line of campaign 2016, accounting alone for more than a quarter of all coverage’ on NBC, CBS and ABC’s evening newscasts.”

“Simply put, the media was complicit in Trump’s rise. Trump was macabre theater, a man self-immolating in real time, one who was destined to lose, but who could provide entertainment, content and yes, profits while he lasted.

“The Hollywood Reporter in February of 2016 quoted CBS’s C.E.O. as saying, “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS,” because as The Reporter put it, “He likes the ad money Trump and his competitors are bringing to the network.”

“I fear that history is repeating itself.

“For over a month now, the White House has been holding its daily coronavirus briefings, and most networks, cable news channels and major news websites have been carrying all or parts of them live, as millions of people, trapped inside and anxious, have tuned in.

“The briefings are marked by Trump’s own misinformation, deceptions, rage, blaming and boasting. He takes no responsibility at all for his abysmal handling of the crisis, while each day he seems to find another person to blame, like a child frantically flinging spaghetti at a wall to see which one sticks.

“He delivers his disinformation flanked by scientists and officials, whose presence only serves to convey credibility to propagandistic performances that have simply become a replacement for his political rallies.

“We are in the middle of a pandemic, but we are also in the middle of a presidential campaign, and I shudder to think how much “earned media” the media is simply shoveling Trump’s way by airing these briefings, which can last up to two hours a day.

“Let me be clear: Under no circumstance should these briefings be carried live. Doing so is a mistake bordering on journalistic malpractice. Everything a president does or says should be documented but airing all of it, unfiltered, is lazy and irresponsible.

“As the veteran anchor Ted Koppel told The New York Times last month, “Training a camera on a live event, and just letting it play out, is technology, not journalism; journalism requires editing and context.” He continued, “The question, clearly, is whether his status as president of the United States obliges us to broadcast his every briefing live.” His answer was “no.”

“We have trained the American television audience to understand that regular programs are only interrupted for live events when they are truly important, things that the viewers need to see now, in real time. These briefings simply don’t reach that threshold. In fact, some of what Trump has said has been dangerous, like when he pushed an unproven and potentially harmful drug as a treatment for the virus.

“No amount of fact checkers, balancing with the briefings of governors, or even occasionally cutting away, can justify carrying these briefings live. The scant amount of new information that these rallies produce could be edited into a short segment for a show. The major headlines from these briefings are often Trump’s clashes with reporters, the differences he has with scientists and the lies he tells. Just like in 2016, it’s all theater.

“Donald Trump doesn’t care about being caught in a lie. Donald Trump doesn’t care about the truth.

“Donald Trump is a bare-knuckled politician with imperial impulses, falsely claiming that, “When somebody’s the president of the U.S., the authority is total,” encouraging protesters bristling about social distancing policies to “liberate” swings states, and saying that Speaker Nancy Pelosi will be “overthrown, either by inside or out.”

“Trump has completely politicized this pandemic and the briefings have become a tool of that politicization. He is standing on top of nearly 40,000 dead bodies and using the media to distract attention away from them and instead brag about what a great job he’s done.

“In 2016, Trump stormed the castle by outwitting the media gatekeepers, exploiting their need for content and access, their intense hunger for ratings and clicks, their economic hardships and overconfidence.

“It’s all happening again. The media has learned nothing.”

Categories Lies, Politics, Propaganda, Trump
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