Archives for the month of: July, 2020
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A Clarification about Los Angeles Police in Schools V. New York City

By dianeravitch
July 2, 2020 //
6

Anna Bakalis of United Teachers of Los Angeles writes a clarification:

Got this from the LASPD site:  Los Angeles School Police Department (LASPD)is the largest independent school police department in the United States, with over 410 sworn police officers, 101 non-sworn school safety officers (SSO), and 34 civilian support staff dedicated to serving the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD). It is the fifth largest police department in Los Angeles County, and the 14th largest in California

The NYPD officers in New York City public schools are part of the New York Police Department, not an independent school police department.

Categories Los Angeles, New York City, Safety

Leonie Haimson: New York City Has the Largest Police Presence in Schools

By dianeravitch
July 2, 2020 //
7

Leonie Haimson, executive director of Class Size Matters, takes issue with the claim that Los Angeles has the largest police force in schools in the country.

LAUSD does not have the “largest school police force in the country” as claimed above (in UTLA press release). NYC DOE has more than 5,000 School Safety Officers who work for the NYPD, at a cost of nearly $500M — more than seven times the cost of the police at LAUSD.

According to the LAUSD website, they have only “10 sworn police officers, 101 non-sworn school safety officers (SSO), and 34 civilian support staff,“ far less than the 5,000 in NYC schools.

https://achieve.lausd.net/Page/15609

Categories Accountability, Los Angeles, New York City, Safety

UTLA Approves Reallocation of Funding for Police in Los Angeles Public Schools

By dianeravitch
July 2, 2020 //
15

https://www.utla.net/news/utla-statement-lausd-vote-defund-school-police-budget-35

For immediate release
July 1, 2020
Media Contact: Anna Bakalis 213-305-9654

UTLA Statement on LAUSD vote to defund school police budget by 35%

The LAUSD School Board yesterday approved an immediate 35% cut to the LAUSD school police, after weeks of protests organized by Students Deserve and Black Lives Matter-LA that amplified the movement to eliminate school police. The cut equals a reduction of $25 million to the school police budget — the biggest reduction to school police in the country since George Floyd’s murder triggered a worldwide uprising against police violence and in support of Black Lives Matter.

The news came the eve of July 1, when Cecily Myart-Cruz officially became UTLA president – the first woman of color president in the union’s 50-year history.

“The school board’s action is a huge first step in the campaign for police-free schools and ground-breaking in terms of our movement for supporting Black lives in our schools,” said UTLA President Cecily Myart-Cruz. “It was the power and passion in the streets across LA and this country, uplifting the voices of Black students, educators and families that made this happen. We can’t let up. We must keep fighting for our babies and our students.”

Prior to the 4-3 vote, the LA School Police Department budget was $70 million, which paid for the largest school police force in the country. The money saved will fund staff to serve the needs of Black students and a task force to re-envision school safety. The board motion also calls for officers to give up their uniforms and patrol off campus until a district task force meets and issues a report, according to media reports.

The late-night school board vote on Tuesday followed powerful testimony by LAUSD students who detailed the academic and emotional fallout from the criminalization of students by the daily presence of law enforcement and the use of weapons like pepper spray on children. Their stories were bolstered by years of research that shows that the presence of school police lowers graduation rates, does not make schools safer, and negatively impacts student learning.

L.A. Unified now joins several other school systems, including in Oakland, San Francisco, Richmond, Denver, Portland, Minneapolis, Milwaukee, and Charlottesville, in moving to defund school police and remove armed officers from campus.

Last week, the policy-making body of UTLA, the House of Representatives, overwhelmingly endorsed a call to eliminate the LAUSD school police and shift funding to student needs — needs like counselors, psychologists, psychiatric social workers, and pupil services and attendance counselors.

In advance of the school board vote, UTLA joined a coalition of organizations, including Black Lives Matter LA, ACLU of Southern California, California Association of School Counselors, CHIRLA, Asian Americans Advancing Justice Los Angeles, and California National Organization of Women in calling for a disinvestment from school police and an investment in students (letter attached).

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Categories Education Reform, Los Angeles, Safety

Nancy Bailey: 22 Reasons Why Schools Should Not Open This Fall

By dianeravitch
July 2, 2020 //
56

Nancy Bailey has 22 reasons why schools should not open this fall.

Here are the first four:

1. Illness and Russian Roulette

According to the CDC, the risk might seem low for children, but they still get sick, some seriously. Children and teenagers have died. Questions still surround the disease. It’s not worth the risk. Maybe the situation will improve by January, or next summer. Currently we’re experiencing a pandemic and safety is the number one concern.

2. How Will the Flu and Covid-19 Tango?

Maybe Covid-19 alone doesn’t affect children as badly as adults, but what if you mix it with the flu? Every year the flu kills children. Last January, before Covid-19 became well known, 27 children had died of the flu. What will the dance of these two illnesses look like in the fall?

3. Adults Matter Too!

A large concern with children is that they can spread the disease to teachers, parents, and grandparents who could be vulnerable. It isn’t fair to risk their health by reopening schools. Teachers and staff should not have to fear their workplace.

4. Lacking Consensus

Adults can’t agree on recommendations surrounding Covid-19, so how can teachers protect children brought together in the classroom? Some students will want to wear their masks, others won’t. Some students will take the virus seriously, others won’t.

Agree or not, Nancy is always thoughtful.

Categories Accountability, Health

Peter Greene: Supreme Court Just Poked Another Hole in Wall of Separation Between Church and State

By dianeravitch
July 2, 2020 //
9

Peter Greene worries that the Espinoza decision is another step in the movement to establish the principle that the public should fund religious schools. He believes this is ominous.

I don’t disagree. That’s why Trump and DeVos celebrated the Court’s decision that all state scholarships for private schools must include religious schools. I was pleased that the Court did not take the final step that would completely eliminate any state bans on funding religious schools. That would have the public pay for thousands of religious schools, as well as ersatz religious schools, of meager or low quality. They left open the future disposition of cases that test the legitimacy of state constitutional prohibition of paying for religious school tuition. This underscores the importance of the 2020 election and of ousting Trump. No more justices who would destroy public education.

Greene begins:

The Supreme Court has, as expected, poked another hole in the wall between church and state; it will weaken public education and open the door to making taxpayers foot the bill for religious discrimination.

Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue has further extended the precedent set by Trinity Lutheran v. Comer, a case that for the first time required “the direct transfer of taxpayers’ money to a church.” Historically, the free exercise clause of the First Amendment has taken a back seat to the establishment clause; in other words, the principle was that the government’s mandate to avoid establishing any “official” religion meant that it could not get involved in financing religious institutions, including churches or church-run private schools.

This has been a big stumbling block for the school voucher movement, because the vast majority of private schools that stand to benefit from vouchers are private religious schools. In fact, where school vouchers have been established, they are overwhelmingly used to fund religious schools.

But for several years, conservative fans of school choice (including Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos) have been pushing the argument that a religious school is not free to exercise its religious faith if it does not get to share in taxpayer dollars. The wall between church and state has thus been characterized as discrimination against religion, and as conservatives celebrate this decision, they repeatedly characterize it as a blow for freedom. Turns out you can’t be really free without taxpayer funding.

There are a host of problems with the SCOTUS decision and the arguments behind it.

For one, the freedoms that private religious schools wish to enjoy include the right to discriminate. Choicers like to argue that vouchers make families free to choose, but private schools are free to reject students for any reason they choose. Investigations found that Florida’s robust voucher program funnels millions of dollars to schools that reject or expel LGBTQ students and faculty. Because Florida imposes little accountability on its private schools, the Orlando Sentinel also found private schools teaching about the happy co-existence of white owners and Black slaves in the pre-Civil War South as well as how men and dinosaurs once lived together.

For taxpayer dollars to flow to private religious schools, one of two choices has to be made. Either private schools retain their freedom to operate as they please, or they are accountable to taxpayers for living under the same rules as a public school. The former opens up the possibility of students being taught ideologically based falsehoods, even as taxpayers fund schools to which their own children would not be admitted. The latter means that private schools would trade a financial windfall for a loss of autonomy, maybe even have to accept some of Those Peoples’ Children in their private school. Sometimes we forget that the wall between church and state was also meant to protect the church; when you mix religion and politics, you get politics.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Bigotry, Religion, Separation of church and state, Vouchers

Steve Hinnefeld: The Supreme Court’s Mistaken View of American History in the Espinoza Decision

By dianeravitch
July 2, 2020 //
2

Steve Hinnefeld blogs about education. He is based in Indiana, which has funded charters and vouchers, the latter despite a state constitution that bans funding religious schools.

He writes here about the Supreme Court’s Espinoza decision that held that religious schools must be included in state programs that fund private schools (almost all state voucher programs already fund religious schools, in fact, I can’t think of one that does not do so).

Hinnefeld interviewed a legal scholar, who explained how misinformed the Court was:

The majority opinion — and especially concurring opinions by Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas — framed the decision as a blow against anti-Catholic bias enshrined in state constitutions via 19th century “Blaine amendments.” But that view papers over complex history, said Steven K. Green, a legal scholar at Willamette University and a leading expert on church-state issues.

Green told me it was disappointing that the court, in a highly consequential decision, “relied, to a certain extent, on a shortsighted view of history, not recognizing the nuances behind the development of the no-aid provisions.” Green elaborates on that history in an amicus brief submitted to the court on behalf of several Christian religious organizations that supported Montana’s position.

Blaine amendments get their name from James Blaine, a Maine congressman and senator and U.S. secretary of state in the late 1800s. In 1875, Blaine introduced a constitutional amendment to prohibit federal funding of religious institutions. It failed, but some states adopted similar provisions for state funding.

The late 1800s were a time of rising anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant bias. In Indiana, the nativist Know-Nothing Party gained a large following. But restriction on state funding of religion “predates the Know-Nothings and the Blaine amendment,” Green said. “And it occurred in places where there was not that much religious strife.

“Without a doubt, a lot of people, during the Blaine amendment arguments, certainly raised anti-Catholic rhetoric,” he said, “But that misunderstands the origins and purpose of the no-funding provisions. The nuance is just left out.”

For one thing, 15 of the state Blaine amendments predated Blaine and his proposal. Michigan was the first state to put a ban on state funding for religion in its constitution – in 1835, when Blaine was 5 years old.

Wisconsin followed in 1848 and Indiana in 1851. I’ve read the notes from the Indiana constitutional convention, and there is no anti-Catholic animus there. In Indiana and in other states, the primary concern was to ensure adequate funding for the public schools they were beginning to establish.

Green said the Supreme Court also ignores history when it downplays the importance of keeping church and state separate.

The First Amendment includes two clauses concerning religious freedom: it forbids “the establishment of religion” and bans laws that prohibit “the free exercise” of religion. The framers of the U.S. Constitution, especially Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, were deeply concerned that state support for religion would entangle government with churches: hence the establishment clause and Jefferson’s famous words about “a wall of separation” between church and state.

“The court seems to say the provision on establishing religion has to take a back seat to the free exercise clause,” Green said.

Consequential Court decisions based on misinformation and error should be overturned.

Categories Accountability, History, Religion, Separation of church and state, Vouchers

Derek Black: Untangling the Supreme Court’s Espinoza Decision

By dianeravitch
July 2, 2020 //
25

Derek Black is a law professor at the University of South Carolina who specializes in education, civil rights, and equity. His new book, which I have read and intend to review here, is Schoolhouse Burning. It is phenomenal. It is a new history of American education that documents the historic role of public education in our democracy from the Founding Fathers to the recent past.

Black writes:

Through a political lens, the Supreme Court decision in Espinoza v. Montana requiring the state to include religious schools in its voucher program makes perfect sense. Conservatives have long decried the fact they must foot tuition at their private religious schools while other students receive free education at public schools. Today they got their shot at fixing that.

But through a constitutional lens, the decision can be confusing to all but the constitutional experts.

First is the question of “mootness.” The dissent argues that the case should never have been decided at all because Montana’s voucher program is no longer in operation, but the majority decided the case anyway, reasoning that but for a flaw— the lower court’s flaw in striking the entire program down—the program would be operating to exclude religious groups.

With that out of the way, the majority hinges its opinion on the notion that a refusal to fund religious education is the same thing as religious discrimination. That logic, however, dismisses the tension between the constitution’s competing religious clauses: one barring the establishment of religion and the other guaranteeing the free exercise of religion. Because a state cannot establish or promote religion, it is understandable why it would not want to fund religious education–and that decision is distinct from actively discriminating against or limiting religious activities or adherents. The Court recognized as much in Locke v. Davey in 2003, when it held that Washington did not have to fund college scholarships for students pursuing degrees in devotional theology just because it provided scholarships to other students.

The majority in Espinoza acts as though it is flummoxed in understanding what Montana was trying to achieve. It cannot imagine any legitimate reasons. The most the Court can discern is that Montana’s bar on funding religious education is a hold-over from an anti-Catholic period in history. But there, too, the Court is overly simplistic. Without question, nativist and Protestants were hostile toward Catholics during the second half of the 19th century and hoped to “Americanize” them in public schools. But reducing states’ prohibitions on funding religious institutions solely to anti-Catholicism or nativism ignores the development of public education against the backdrop of religious education.

These no-aid rules also coincided with the rise of formal systems of public education. Prior to those systems, states had funded and relied on religious institutes for education. The patchwork of religious schools, however, eventually proved insufficient to meet the nation’s vast and growing educational needs. Public education at public expense was the solution.

When states like Pennsylvania, for instance, included public education obligations in their state constitutions, many began cutting ties with private institutions. They did not want to, in effect, finance the competition. Of course, the only notably private institutions out there were religious ones—hence the laws that prohibited aid to religious schools rather than the broader category of private schools.

In fact, when Montana revised its constitution in 1972, it made its shift away from any prior questionable motives clear. As the 1972 Constitutional Convention delegates explain in their amicus brief, Montana sought to build a wall around public funds because the “breathtakingly ambitious goals for Montana’s educational system—guaranteeing equal educational opportunity—required strict protection of the State’s funds for its public schools.” As to the specific prohibition on funding religious schools, the delegates wrote that “[r]ather than being motivated by anti-religious animus, many delegates urged adoption of the no-aid clause to protect religious institutions from government interreference” that would follow from becoming entangled with religious education.

Therein lies an important lesson for us: states’ prohibition on financing religious education represents the broader principle that government should not be in the business of financing private education—religious or not. And now that states are crossing that line, they are getting themselves into all sorts of legal problems, including finding themselves on the wrong side of a Supreme Court predisposed to find religious discrimination. And this is to say nothing of the fact that they are asking their public schools and students–which their state constitutions obligate them to support–to make sacrifices so that they can pursue policy fads in the form of vouchers. This, I explain in Schoolhouse Burning: Public Education and the Assault on American Democracy (https://www.publicaffairsbooks.com/titles/derek-w-black/schoolhouse-burning/9781541774384/), endangers not only public education but core values of American democracy.

All these flaws aside, the case immediately impacts only a few states because most of the states currently operating voucher and tax credit programs already permit their use at religious schools. But the case does portend another set of legal problems. Those states that don’t fund religious education have valid reasons. Staying true to those reasons demands that those states must regulate religious schools. As a result of Espinoza, they now have to worry about what is being taught in religious schools and how students are being treated. One way to fix that is to require that religious schools comply with all the same anti-discrimination protections that public schools do—the exact type of “interference” Montana’s 1972 Convention sought to avoid. This, of course, will open new debates about whose values should control—those of the wider public and government or those of religious schools–and further test our democratic values. The other easier fix is to just end their voucher programs altogether.

Categories Accountability, Religion, School Choice, Separation of church and state, Vouchers

Woman, Know Your Place. I Don’t.

By dianeravitch
July 1, 2020 //
87

I saw this a long while ago and thought it was wonderful social satire.

It reminded me just a little of myself after my college graduation in 1960, when women’s voices were devalued. That was before the feminist movement. I married right after I graduated college and aspired to be the perfect wife. I wasn’t very good at it but it took a long time to figure that out. I identified with the woman in this video.

It is funny. You deserve a laugh today.

Categories Humor

My Knee, and Why I Can Walk Again

By dianeravitch
July 1, 2020 //
29

Six years ago, I fell and broke my knee. That event changed my life in unexpected ways. For the first time in my life, I felt physically unsteady and vulnerable. My sense of invincibility disappeared. After a lifetime of bounding up and down stairs, I learned to hold onto a railing and watch my step.

In April 2014, I was running to the postoffice on a Saturday, hoping to get there before it closed, and I tripped down the stairs outside my house. My left knee landed on a flagstone, and I felt a horrible crushing sensation. I was alone at the time. My partner Mary was in Georgia, visiting with her college classmates. I just lay there on the ground for about five minutes, waiting to see how bad it was.

I was on Long Island, and none of my neighbors was home. I tried to stand but I couldn’t. I dragged myself on my back up the stairs (three of them) and into the house. I pulled down the phone and called a neighbor who lived a few doors away and she called an ambulance. I was transported to the closest hospital, in the small town of Greenport. They couldn’t help me. The next day my son took a bus out to pick me up and bring me to the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York City. There, the doctor x-rayed my knee and told me I had well and truly broken it and needed a total knee replacement. Mary had already had double knee surgery, and I had some idea of what was in store for me.

I had to wait two weeks to get into surgery, and during that two weeks I traveled to Louisville, Kentucky, using a walker, to receive the Grawemeyer Award for my 2010 book The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education. When I walked to the podium at the University of Louisville to accept my award, I did not use a crutch or a walker, and I thought maybe the diagnosis was wrong. But when I got home, I was dressing to go out, lost my balance, and almost crashed through a wall. Surgery it would be.

After the surgery, I went to rehab diligently, but my leg simply would not straighten out. It was bent. The physical therapist assured me I would wake up one morning and it would be straight, but day after day I felt my leg locked into a bent shape. I could not straighten it. I fell into the deepest depression of my life. I believed I would never walk again without a walker.

Then a dear friend from college days told me to go at once to a different physical therapist. I did, and the therapist told me that my knee was encased in scar tissue. I went back to the surgeon, and he performed a “manipulation.” That means that I was given morphine, knocked out, and while I was unconscious, he forced my leg straight. He took pictures to show me that my leg was straight. But when I woke up, my leg almost immediately sprung back into a bent position.

Back to the physical therapist, who said there were only two people who could help me: One was a sports medicine doctor in Vail, the other was a sports medicine doctor in Cincinnati. I chose the latter because the flight was nonstop and closer. I went to Dr. Frank Noyes at the Noyes Knee Institute at Mercy Hospital. As it happened, he literally wrote the book on scar tissue (arthrofibrosis). He told me I was too old for surgery but that he could fix my leg. We went into a small room, where I sat on the edge of a table and stretched my bent knee so that my heel was on another table. Then two very large men on either side of me pressed my leg down until it was straight. The pain was intense, and I was crying, but while they forced my leg straight, they quickly built a plaster cast around it, then cut the cast open, filled it with cotton and gauze, put it into a large box, and presented it to me. Dr. Noyes told me to wear it eight-ten hours a day for at least six weeks, wrapping it tightly with ace bandages.

After six weeks, the cast straightened my leg. I was able to walk again. I could no longer run or even walk fast, but I could walk without any help.

I asked my surgeon why no one in New York City was able to perform such a simple procedure. He explained that he was a surgeon not a rehabilitation specialist.

I mention this story not to share my personal pain, depression, and recovery but to share the understanding that there are sometimes ways to fix what seem to be impossible physical conditions. Not always. I thought I would never be able to walk again without a walker. My gait is somewhat stilted, but I walk without crutches or a walker.

If you need the same kind of help, you now know where you can get it. Dr. Noyes may have retired by now, but he trained others in his methods. Every time I see someone with a bent knee, on a walker, I long to tell then this story. That’s why I’m telling it now. It might help someone else.

Categories Health, Personal

Maria Popova on Keith Haring, Art, Love and Courage

By dianeravitch
July 1, 2020 //
5

I chose to include this link on my birthday because it gave me an hour of aesthetic joy, following its links.

Maria Popova is a Bulgarian-born polymath who lives in Brooklyn and reads voraciously with deep understanding and love of knowledge.

On June 26, she wrote about the artist Keith Haring and his love of life and art, and how his art inspired her and others, and how his life demonstrated “the courage to be yourself.”

As I began reading, I started opening links, one of which sent me to her archive (not easy to find), and I was soon reading about Mary Wollstonecraft, the world’s first radical feminist, who died giving birth to Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein, who survived the death of three of her children and her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley.

Reading Maria Popova is sheer bliss and an invitation to share her joy of reading. I signed up to send her a small monthly gift, to sustain her as she pursues knowledge and shares its fruits.

Categories Art, Joy, Literature
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