Archives for the month of: May, 2020
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Luxury Hotel Provides Free Housing for Health Care Workers

By dianeravitch
May 1, 2020 //
5

The New Yorker describes an act of civic generosity:

The New York Four Seasons is not the most welcoming hotel, architecturally speaking. Designed by I. M. Pei and situated on East Fifty-seventh Street, between Madison and Park, it greets visitors with an intimidating slab of limestone façade and a metal awning that seems to want to clobber you. Reviewing the building in the Times when it opened, in 1993, Paul Goldberger was taken by “a reception desk that looks like a Judgment Day platform.” Rooms now start at twelve hundred and ninety-five dollars. Or they did, two months ago.

Like so many businesses, the Four Seasons closed in March. On April 2nd it reopened, transformed into the city’s cheapest and most civic-minded hotel—the first to host health-care workers free of charge. As of last week, there were a hundred and sixty such guests, sleeping, showering, and enjoying grab-and-go meals between long shifts of attempting to save the lives of covid-19 patients. All are screened each time they enter the hotel, which is now using its more human-scaled entrance on East Fifty-eighth Street. Nurses take temperatures and run through checklists of symptoms before people are admitted to the “green zone” (or banished to the “red zone” for possible off-site treatment). Videos provided by the Four Seasons show that the lobby’s usual cadre of super-attentive valets, bellhops, and concierges has been replaced by impassive metal stanchions, green directional arrows, and yellow crime-scene tape to enforce social distancing, although the onyx, marble, and soaring ceilings remain.

The New Yorker’s coronavirus news coverage and analysis are free for all readers.
“It’s basically hospital housing, but Four Seasons-style,” explained Dr. Dara Kass, an E.R. physician at Columbia University Medical Center, speaking on the phone from her eighth-floor room. “You know why you’re here when you walk into the building,” she said, describing the lobby’s vibe as “purposeful.” But, she added, “the bed itself is still a Four Seasons bed.” Like many guests, she was keeping away from home so as not to expose her family to the virus; Kass has a son with a compromised immune system due to a liver transplant. “This room was really a godsend,” she said. “I have so many doctor friends who are living in their basements, or a closet. I have friends who have rented Airbnbs. I have a friend who rented an R.V. She and her husband are both E.R. doctors, and their daughter had a liver transplant like my son did, so they moved to the R.V. in the driveway and their au pair is living with the children inside the house.”…

The New York Four Seasons took this mission on at the prompting of its owner, Ty Warner, the Beanie Baby mogul. Rudy Tauscher, the hotel’s general manager, organized the operational changes—effected in a mere five days—with the help of International SOS, a medical and travel-security consultancy.

Categories New York City

Edweek: A Third of Teachers Are at Risk of Severe Illness from COVID-19

By dianeravitch
May 1, 2020 //
52

Education Week warns that almost a third of teachers are at risk of severe illness if schools reopen before COVID-19 is contained.

Madeline Will writes:

As states begin to consider what reopening schools might look like, a new analysis of federal data warns that teachers could be more susceptible to severe illness from COVID-19.

About 29 percent of teachers are aged 50 and older, federal data show. Older adults are at higher risk for severe illness from COVID-19—92 percent of deaths related to the disease in the United States were of people aged 55 and older, and that age group also has higher rates of coronavirus-related hospitalizations than younger adults. And as the brief report by the research group Child Trends points out, teachers have significantly more social contact than the average adult, since they’re in close quarters with dozens of students every day.

Already, teachers’ workplaces rank among the “germiest”—one study found that teachers have nearly 27 times more germs on their computer keyboards than other professions studied. Teachers report that they frequently come down with colds and other garden-variety illnesses over the course of the school year. After all, children are “effective transmitters of respiratory germs,” Donna Mazyck, the executive director of the National Association of School Nurses, told Education Week earlier this year.

The immune system naturally deteriorates with age, the Child Trends report notes. Also, teachers are more likely to report being stressed at work than average people, and some research suggests that stress can weaken the immune system.

Decisionmakers “responsible for reopening schools should weigh not only the health of their students, but also that of their teachers who are at elevated risk,” wrote Renee Ryberg, a research scientist at Child Trends. “Education administrators who choose to proceed with reopening should coordinate closely with health agencies to enact policies to keep teachers, as well as students, safe.”

Categories Health, Safety, Teachers

Dana Milbank: Can the Coronavirus Be Defeated by Lies?

By dianeravitch
May 1, 2020 //
13

Dana Milbank is an opinion writer for the Washington Post. In this recent column, he suggests that Trump hopes to defeat the pandemic by lying about how successful he is in responding to it.

In his “whole of America” approach to fighting the pandemic, President Trump has begun clinical trials testing his most promising antidote: Can the novel coronavirus be killed with a lie?

Trump has at times speculated that the virus could be killed by an antimalarial drug and an antibiotic, or by ingesting bleach or other household disinfectants. But he has never abandoned the regular application of disinformation as his primary defense against the coronavirus.

“Some health experts say the U.S. needs 5 million tests per day by June in order to safely reopen,” NBC’s Kristen Welker told Trump in an East Room Q&A Tuesday afternoon. “Can you get to that benchmark?”

“We have tested much more than anybody else times two,” Trump replied. “We’ve tested more than every country combined.” He went on to say, “We inherited a very broken test, a broken system and a broken test, and within a short period of time we were setting records. We have done more than the entire world combined.” And he said the United States would “very soon” surpass 5 million tests per day — a figure beyond his own administration’s rosy forecasts.

Let’s leave aside the credibility of Trump’s claim that the U.S. would “very soon” test more people each day than the country has managed to test in all of the past four months. And set aside, for the moment, Trump’s claim to have inherited a “broken” test for a virus that did not exist when he took office.

Focus on just one of his falsehoods: his statement that the country has done more tests “than the entire world combined.” Trump has said this over and over, and it has been corrected over and over, for it is demonstrably false.

According to an updated tally by Worldometers, the United States, after a painfully slow start, has done 5.8 million tests. But the rest of the world has combined done far beyond that number. Russia alone reports 3.1 million, Germany 2.1, Italy 1.8, Spain 1.3, the United Arab Emirates 1.1 million, and other countries have performed well more than 10 million additional tests. And the Worldometers testing tally doesn’t even include China.

Yet this disinformation, which in its repetition has become an obvious lie, is at the core of Trump’s coronavirus response. As he pushes to reopen commerce and schools, the country is relying on luck (a viral lull during the summer) and the ability to test people and track the spread. Though we are accustomed to Trump’s nonsense, we are now in a position where lives depend on the capability of a testing system Trump has repeatedly and consistently misrepresented.

Post Fact Checker Glenn Kessler and his colleagues explore Trump’s tendency to double down on falsehoods in their forthcoming book, “Donald Trump and His Assault on the Truth.” “One hallmark of Trump’s dishonesty is that if he thinks a false or incorrect claim is a winner, he will repeat it constantly, no matter how often it has been proven wrong,” they write. Though “many politicians are embarrassed,” Trump “keeps going long after the facts are clear, in what appears to be a deliberate effort to replace the truth with his own, far more favorable, version…”

Now the country, fed a diet of such disinformation about the virus, is preparing to reopen workplaces based on the false assurance — 5 million tests a day! More than the rest of the world combined! — given by Trump’s repeated lies. What could possibly go wrong?

Categories Lies, Trump

John Merrow: What’s Needed Now: Think Like a Librarian!

By dianeravitch
May 1, 2020 //
4

John Merrow has some good suggestions in this essay about the month of May and how to use it wisely and well:

May has been an educational ‘dead zone’ for years. Because of our national obsession with standardized test scores, teachers–particularly in low income areas–spend class time showing students how to guess at answers, giving practice tests, and even teaching children how to fill in bubbles for the standardized, multiple choice ‘bubble’ tests that await them. These activities come with a huge opportunity cost for students, because they are of no educational benefit whatsoever and probably set their learning back; for teachers, they are an insult to their profession. And school districts spend billions of dollars buying, administering, and grading the bubble tests required by their states and the federal government.

When I was reporting I occasionally heard people complaining–in song–about “the morbid, miserable month of May,” riffing off an old Stephen Foster tune, “The Merry, Merry Month of May.” As I recall, the expression surfaced in 2003 or 2004, which is when the unintended consequences of the 2001 federal “No Child Left Behind” law became apparent. Because NCLB penalized schools that didn’t achieve what it called ‘adequate yearly progress’ on standardized tests, many districts eliminated art, music, drama, journalism, and even recess in order to concentrate on ‘the basics.’

That’s when the month of May became a ‘morbid’ dead zone, educationally speaking.

I don’t remember where I first heard the expression. It might have been in the suburban North Carolina elementary school that held ‘pep rallies’ in advance of the upcoming state exams, or in Richmond, Virginia, where a veteran middle school teacher told me “Teaching and learning are done; now it’s all test prep.” Or perhaps it was the Chicago high school teacher who confessed that he vomited in his wastebasket when he saw his students’ scores, or the custodian in a Success Academy charter school in New York City who said he rinsed out classroom trash cans every night because students regularly threw up in them during testing. Another possibility is the Washington, DC, parent whose young son couldn’t sleep because his teacher said she’d get fired if they didn’t do well on the tests.

The good news is that May 2020 does not have to be ‘morbid,’ ‘miserable,’ or ‘malignant.’ Because schools are closed and state standardized testing has been cancelled, May is a blank slate–and an opportunity for us to make it ‘magical’ and ‘memorable.’

News reports indicate that many parents are unhappy in the role of ‘teacher at home.’ (They are also coming to realize just how hard it is to be an effective teacher!) Teachers are frustrated because nothing in their training prepared them for teaching remotely. And so, because the March-April experiment in ‘remote learning’ hasn’t been a rousing success and because May is a tabula rasa, let’s embrace ‘out of the box’ thinking. Stop thinking like educators whose jobs depend on high test scores. Think differently!

(An earlier blog post about librarians, swimming instructors, highway engineers, and gardeners is here.)

Imagine for a moment that you don’t have a captive audience (because right now you don’t). IE, think like a librarian. Public libraries are different from schools in one important way: they do not have required attendance. But even though no one is forced to attend the library, library usage continues to climb. To survive and prosper, librarians have had to identify their audiences and find ways to draw them into their buildings and electronic networks. For the most part, they’ve succeeded without pandering. That’s what’s called for in education at this moment.

Categories Accountability, Creativity, Education Reform, Librarians, Parents, Teaching, Testing

Peter Greene: What Happens to “Accountability” After the Pandemic?

By dianeravitch
May 1, 2020 //
10

Peter Greene thinks that we should use this respite from the pressure of high-stakes testing to rethink accountability.

Our current accountability system was cobbled together hastily in 2001 during the writing of George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind law. The NCLB law was based on a hoax, a fallacious claim that there had been a Texas miracle, all due to testing every child every year. Congress bought the lie and enacted the law. Since then, Congress has been unwilling to review the creaky and ineffective accountability system that it mandated.

No high-performing nation in the world tests every child every year. But we do. We have done it for 20 years and have little or nothing to show for it. The students who were left behind in 2001 are still left behind. Then Obama-Duncan brought in their “Race to the Top,” doubling down on standardized testing, and spent more than $5 billion without reaching “the top” or closing gaps or raising test scores.

Greene says: Let’s think about what happens next.

The defining question for any accountability system is this:

Accountable to whom, for what?

The “to whom” part is the hard part of educational accountability, because classroom teachers serve a thousand different masters.

Teachers need to be accountable to their administration, to their school board, to their students, to the parents of their students, to the taxpayers who fund the school and pay their salaries, to the state, to the students’ future employers, and to their own colleagues. School administrators also need to be accountable to those various stakeholders, but in different ways. Each set of stakeholders also has a wide variety of concerns; some parents are primarily concerned with academic issues, while others give priority to their child’s emotional health and happiness.

Parents may want to know if their children are on track for future success, or how their children’s progress compares to others. Those are two different measures, just as “How tall is my child” and “Is my child the tallest in class” are two different questions, each of which can be answered without answering the other.

Taxpayers want to know if they’re getting their money’s worth. State and federal politicians may want to see if benchmarks they have imposed on schools are being met. Teachers want to know how well their students are learning the various content the teachers have been delivering. Administrators may want to identify their “best” and “worst” teachers. School boards may want to know if their new hires are on track.

Answers to every single one of these questions require different measures collected with different tools. Some questions can’t be answered at all (there is no reliable way to rank teachers best-to-worst). One of the biggest fallacies of the ed reform movement has been the notion that a single multiple-choice math and reading test can somehow measure everything.

The reform dream was to be able to reduce school quality to a simple data point, a score or letter grade that tells us whether a school is any good or not. This is foolish. Ask any number of people to describe their idea of an “A” school; no two descriptions will match. A single grade system must by definition be reductive and useless for anything except as a crude tool for punishing some schools and marketing others.

Teachers and their unions are not opposed to accountability; they are opposed to accountability measures that are random and invalid. Meanwhile, accountability discussions never seem to include measures that would hold politicians accountable for getting schools the support and resources that they need. A good example would be the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), a law that Congress passed to hold schools accountable for properly educating students with specials needs, and also a law that Congress has never come close to fully funding.

My view: Accountability starts at the top, not the bottom. Congress has never been willing to hold itself accountable for the mandates it imposes. State legislatures have been unaccountable as well, never having provided the funding that schools require to provide the resources that schools need.

Yes, let’s have that conversation about who should be accountable and how will it be measured and what matters most.

Categories Accountability, Common Core, Education Reform, Funding, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top, Testing
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