Archives for the month of: July, 2020
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Teachers: Why Not Shift to Outdoor Learning?

By dianeravitch
July 18, 2020 //
32

A group of New York City teachers argue in The New York Daily News that the best way to restart the schools, especially for young children, is to hold classes outdoors. They do not address the problems of rain and freezing weather.

Liat Olenick, Darcy Whittwmore, and Heather Costanza see many virtues in outdoor learning.

Holding classes indoors in a city with over one million students, they write, will create dangerous and unhealthy conditions. Why not grab this opportunity for creative solutions?

Move the younger children outdoors, they say, while keeping high school students online.

Outdoor learning is a tried and tested fit for early childhood. There are all-day outdoor kindergartens in wintery Maine and Vermont, in which children dress for the weather and learn outside nearly every day. Vaunted models of early childhood education like Reggio-Emilia emphasize outdoor exploration because ages 4-8 comprise the crucial stage in which multisensory, interactive learning is essential for children’s cognitive growth. Outdoor learning offers children authentic, stimulating experiences that foster skills like creative problem solving, independence, flexibility and resiliency as they form a deep connection to the natural world. Learning outdoors also offers possibilities for culturally responsive, place-based learning, giving students hands-on, meaningful opportunities to engage and connect with their communities.

In the context of COVID, outdoor learning becomes even more appealing. Elementary students are more likely to live near school, making finding a space that works for families without needing public transit more feasible.

And per current guidelines, the requirements of indoor learning — sitting six feet apart, no contact, no sharing materials, and staying in one enclosed space for hours on end — are not developmentally appropriate for young children.

If we move outdoors, kids will have room to be kids without fear of punishment or infecting someone they love. Given the ongoing criminalization of students of color in schools, we fear the consequences of imposing new, high stakes social-distancing rules on all, but particularly on our youngest students.

We have the space to make outdoor learning work. New York City is home to 28,000 acres of public parkland, more than 1,100 school and community gardens, plus schoolyards, rooftops, cemeteries, beaches, private outdoor space and even parking lots or closeable neighborhood streets which could be spruced up with benches and planters.

These investments in public space might even foster greater equity in our city; experiences in nature are essential for children’s mental health, but green space is often concentrated in wealthier, whiter neighborhoods.

Transforming our streets and playgrounds into possibility-rich outdoor classrooms could be a way to equalize access to nature at a time when many outdoor programs serving children of color have been shuttered.

Outdoor learning will not be perfect. It will require support from schools, parks, neighborhood institutions and families to plan for site-specific challenges. But compare that with our other two options: Fully remote learning, which means zero childcare for caregivers and especially fails our young students, or a blended, classroom model for 1.1 million students that is likely to put our most vulnerable communities in grave danger.

This is our clarion call. We hope it spurs intrepid leaders to consider outdoor learning as a viable option for all of our youngest students during COVID and beyond. Organizations around the country, including New York private schools, are already developing proposals to take learning outside. With a little imagination and support from our city, we could make it happen here — not just for the privileged few, but for all.

Olenick, Whittemore and Costanza are public elementary school teachers in Brooklyn.

Categories Early Childhood Education, New York City, Play, Students, Teachers

John Lewis: An American Hero (1940-2020)

By dianeravitch
July 18, 2020 //
9

John Lewis died of cancer at the age of 80. As a young man, he offered his services to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and worked alongside him in the critical and most dangerous moments of the civil rights movement. Only 23, he spoke at the historic March on Washington in 1963. He was elected to Congress in 1987, where he served until his last day.

He led a life of courage, principle, and honor.

John Lewis is an American hero, a man who advanced the cause of democracy, freedom, and equality. These are our core American ideals, and the only monuments that should be erected should recognize those who stood for them.

He tells his story in this video.

Categories Courage

Parent: Why Not Open Outdoor Classrooms in Tents and Other Temporary Structures?

By dianeravitch
July 18, 2020 //
62

Josh Bell is a New York City public schools parent. He wrote this article for the New York Daily News. The article reminded me that New York City public school officials in the early 20th century conducted outdoor classes for students with tuberculosis.

He writes:

Last weekend, the city started closing down sections of dozens of busy streets for several blocks in all five boroughs so that restaurants could set up more tables outside. If the city can do this for dining, surely it can do the same for learning. Schoolyards and athletic fields, of which there are hundreds, could be repurposed as well.

It’s really not that complicated. Put up tents — the big ones used for weddings, with sides that roll down for bad weather — add desks, chairs and a whiteboard, and boom: you just made a classroom. The bonus is that air circulation would be much better than indoor classrooms, a major concern for teachers and parents alike.

For schools with already adjacent outdoor space, and there are many, a big part of the solution is already on their doorsteps. And just think of how much street space there is on one block with no parked cars: It’s thousands of square feet. The classrooms could be separated with simple dividers.

In parks and elsewhere, we had field hospitals when we thought we needed them to treat a coronavirus surge. Why not field schools?

Brilliant.

Outdoor classrooms would be a snap in regions with mild weather. As Josh Bell points out, they would work anywhere.

The healthiest place to be is in the open air.

Categories Closing schools, Health, New York City, Safety, Science

Trump Surpasses 20,000 Lies

By dianeravitch
July 17, 2020 //
48

Salvador Rizzo, fact checker for the Washington Post, marvels that Trump has surpassed 20,000 lies in his term in office, surely a record. Trump is definitely Number One!

20,000

“What we do have is we have perhaps the lowest, but among the lowest, but perhaps the lowest, mortality rate — death rate — anywhere in the world,” President Trump said July 9, 2020, the day he surpassed 20,000 false or misleading claims since taking the oath of office.

It was the 13th time the president spread this particular falsehood, and it is entry No. 20,036 in our ever-metastasizing database of Trump’s deceitful claims. Nearly 40 Americans had died of the novel coronavirus per 100,000 people, the second worst rate in the world, according to a tally from Johns Hopkins University.

When we started the Trump database project for the president’s first 100 days in office, we could not imagine he would exceed 20,000 false or misleading claims before the end of his term. Trump averaged fewer than five claims a day in his first 100 days, which would have added up to about 7,000 claims in four years.

But the snowball quickly became an avalanche, the false statements a routine. In the last 14 months, Trump averaged 23 claims a day for The Fact Checker’s database. No setting or subject is spared by Trump.

In Rose Garden remarks, at coronavirus briefings, in tweetstorms at odd hours, in press gaggles near a whirring chopper, the Trumpian stream of misinformation engulfs every topic nowadays, from his impeachment in Congress to his Democratic opponent in the presidential race, from the worldwide pandemic that crashed the economy to the protests across the country calling for racial justice and an end to police brutality.

As of July 9, the tally in our database stands at 20,055 claims in 1,267 days.

Categories Lies, Trump

Stop Tax Breaks for the 1%. Fund Schools If You Want Them Open

By dianeravitch
July 17, 2020 //
11

Everyone wants schools to open but Congress and the Trump administration don’t want to pay for it. That cost includes reduced class sizes for social distancing, additional teachers, cleaning services, nurses, ventilation improvements, personal protective equipment, and whatever is recommended by CDC.

In places where the disease is out of control, reopening will not be possible. First control the disease, then reopen schools. Trump could start the process by wearing a mask in public, whenever he is in public. His refusal to do so has spread the virus by encouraging his admirers to do as he does, which violates the strong advice of medical professionals.

Where reopening is possible, Congress must foot the bill because the stayes’s coffers have been depleted by the economic toll of the pandemic.

Thus far, Congress has been generous to high-income individuals and employers, but stingy with the nation’s schools, as David Dayen of “The American Prospect” explains here. To see the links and open them, go to his post here.

Dayen writes:

As we head into crunch time on coronavirus relief, the demands coming from the White House threaten to upset the entire deal. Donald Trump remains obsessed with a payroll tax cut, which nobody in Congress, really, wants. Any payroll tax cut with any real impact on people—a three-month holiday would run around $300 billion—would cut deeply into the other White House demand for a relief bill topping out at no more than $1 trillion.

The proper amount of spending for this bill is “whatever it takes.” If you don’t like the cost, maybe you shouldn’t have completely botched the policy response such that major regions of the country have to shut down again. The same people whining about expense are the ones who drove the country into despair. The cost of a continued runaway virus is much higher than the cost of emergency measures to ensure millions of people have adequate food and shelter during this crisis.

But if you really, really must constrain the response, and you really, really must have this payroll tax cut, then I have an idea: get rid of all the other long-term tax cuts mostly targeted toward the rich, many of them passed in the very last coronavirus relief bill.

They don’t get much discussion but there were a host of tax provisions in the CARES Act, passed in March. In fact there was a payroll tax holiday, but for the employer side, not the employee. Not only can employers delay payroll taxes to next year, they can eliminate them if they retain employees. The two measures are estimated at about $66 billion, and the savings falls on the business.

A bigger tax break has been termed the “Millionaire’s Giveaway” by Americans for Tax Fairness. This $135 billion tax break allows people with partnerships or other structures to carry forward losses from previous years and offset gains in their taxes in future years. It only affects people making half a million dollars in income from the partnership or more. The same type of deduction for businesses costs another $25 billion; the oil and gas industry in particular has been using that one, converting their losses in recent years into corporate welfare checks. There’s also an interest deduction available to larger corporations ($13 billion). Certain aviation taxes were suspended ($4 billion); see if that shows up in a lower ticket fare.

Add it up and that’s $243 billion in tax giveaways to rich people and corporations in the CARES Act. If the White House wants a payroll tax cut it can come out of that. Most of the benefits from those changes don’t hit until next year and the payment of 2020 taxes, and beyond. It makes sense to pull up spending (tax breaks are spending through the tax code) to when it’s needed now.

The Heroes Act, the House Democratic bill, actually accomplished a form of this, by cancelling the Millionaire’s Giveaway permanently, as it was due under the Trump tax cuts to come back in 2026 anyway. That brings in $246 billion overall, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation, enough for a decent-sized payroll tax holiday.

And as long as we’re talking about the Trump tax cuts, we could eliminate the measures most tilted to the rich and powerful—the corporate tax cut, the S-corporation pass through for rich people who set up partnerships, the deducations for dividends on foreign earnings, and the inheritance tax cuts—and take in about $3 trillion. If the next relief bill simply has to be capped at $1 trillion, then you could do $4 trillion in spending and add these measures in and hit that number.

Again, I think it’d be ridiculous to offset anything for emergency relief. But playing by the rules set up by the White House isn’t an obstacle, thanks to the trillions of dollars in offsets Trump created with his tax law. There is also a case to be made that rebalancing the inequality baked into the tax code is good public policy anyway, and if it can facilitate critical crisis spending under the stupid strictures of straitjacket budget politics, all the better.

Unfortunately, Chuck Schumer is trying to leverage the new bill to get a tax cut for well-off people, particularly in his own state, by removing the cap on the state and local tax deduction imposed in the Trump tax cuts. That was also in the Heroes Act (albeit just a two-year suspension). There’s no need whatsoever for this kind of long-term help for people who itemize when the unemployed and the poor are in desperate trouble right now. Wealthy people don’t need another champion to engage in special pleading for them.

Categories Accountability, Economy, Funding, Health, Safety

McConnell Is Shaping a New Relief Bill—But Not for You

By dianeravitch
July 17, 2020 //
3

David Dayen of The American Prospect reports in his series “Unsanitized” that Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans are hammering out a new coronavirus relief bill, but its main beneficiaries will be businesses and hospitals that want liability protection. Are you surprised?

There might be funding to help schools reopen but it will likely be too little and too late. It’s tough to plan an opening in late August or early September in the midst of a pandemic when the money to pay for health measures does not yet exist.

Categories Accountability, Funding, Health, Safety

Illinois: Governor Pritzker Seeks Court Order to Require Masks in Schools

By dianeravitch
July 17, 2020 //
16

Governor J.B. Pritzker is acting like a responsible, intelligent leader. Imagine that! He actually wants to protect the lives and health of the children and adults in school. He won’t permit them to decide whether they can be free to infect others with a deadly disease. He understands that public health takes precedence over private whim.

Gov. J.B. Pritzker took the unusual step Thursday of preemptively filing a lawsuit to ensure school children wear face coverings to prevent the spread of the coronavirus when schools reopen in a few weeks.

The action filed late Thursday in Sangamon County Circuit Court by the state attorney general seeks a judge’s approval of Pritzker’s order that schoolchildren, teachers and staff wear coverings over mouths and noses among other measures to reduce the chance that the highly contagious and potentially deadly virus can spread.
‘As a father, I would not send my children to a school where face coverings are not required because the science is clear: face coverings are critical to prevent the spread of coronavirus,’ Pritzker said in a prepared statement.

It’s typical for the governor to be in court as a defendant seeking validation of a policy or action. In this instance, no lawsuit has been filed, but a public school district and two private academies have informed the Illinois State Board of Education that Pritzker no longer has authority under emergency rule-making to require face masks in schools and that they will be developing their own safety rules.

It was time to get ahead of the issue, Ann Spillane, Pritzker’s chief legal counsel, told The Associated Press.

‘Students need to prepare, parents need to know what’s coming, administrators need guidelines. Confusion on these things leads to risk,’ Spillane said. ‘œWe’re sending a signal that this issue is not up for debate. The governor doesn’t have an option.’

A lawyer representing Hutsonville Community Unit School District No. 1 in southeastern Illinois, Parkview Christian Academy in Yorkville and Families of Faith Christian Academy in Channahon wrote letters in the last month to the state board explaining that the Illinois Supreme Court ruled in a 1922 case that government cannot make rules ‘œwhich merely have a tendency to prevent’ the spread of infectious diseases, particularly if ‘œarbitrary and unreasonable.’
Thomas DeVore of Greenville also noted that Pritzker has said there’s not enforcement for violators of the guidelines, which DeVore contends turns ‘œrules’ into ‘œrecommendations.’ He did not return a message left at his office after hours Thursday.

With the surging spread of COVID-19, the illness caused by the coronavirus, Pritzker on March 13 ordered public schools closed – eventually for the rest of the term. Despite a leveling off of cases in Illinois, there are concerns here and, especially in other parts of the nation where case numbers are rising again, about reopening the classic community center, the school, in an age where people are urged to wear face masks, stay 6 feet apart, and step up the hygiene protocol dramatically.

Pritzker in June released of a set of guidelines for safe congregation in schools from kindergarten through college, but among others, the state’s two major teachers’ unions have continued worries about keeping congested classrooms, hallways and playgrounds safe.

With public health officials announcing 25 additional deaths Thursday among 1,257 newly confirmed COVID-19 cases, the state has now lost 7,251 lives to virus-related complications. Nearly 160,000 have been infected; tens of thousands of those have recovered.

Dissidents who bristle at government telling them what to wear and how to act in public gained traction last spring when Republican Rep. Darren Bailey of Xenia, represented by DeVore, won an opaque victory in Clay County against Pritzker, arguing that his ability under state law to impose emergency rules ended after 30 days – on April 8.

Despite the fact that it only applies to Bailey, and the ruling precludes further challenge, supporters have taken up the charge. DeVore has notified the government on behalf of individuals, retail establishments, and now schools, that they don’t plan to comply.

Categories Health, Illinois

Peter Greene: The Modern School Choice Movement Was Created by Southern Segregationists

By dianeravitch
July 17, 2020 //
14

Peter Greene read Steve Suitts’ book about the origins of the modern school choice movement—Overturning Brown— and highly recommends it.

Suitts demonstrates beyond doubt that the school choice movement was launched by southern segregationists to fight the Brown decision.

Standards were also used to sort students by race.

Greene writes:

These segregationists developed strategies and language that are strikingly familiar. Seven Southern states developed voucher programs, aimed mostly at creating three parallel systems of white, black and segregated schools. Various school choice programs were promoted without ever discussing segregation or even race, but by focusing on “freedom” and the necessity for parents to choose their own child’s educational setting. South Carolina’s governor argued that competition would help schools improve. Georgia enacted tuition tax credits, an early version of Betsy DeVos’s Education Freedom vouchers, in 1958. In 1964, a Mississippi defender of segregation stopped talking about “states’ rights” to segregate and started speaking out against the “monopoly” of “government schools.”

An early version of the standards movement, allowing states to sort students by supposed academic, behavior and cultural criteria, became a mechanism for maintaining segregation without actually talking about race, substituting rhetoric about “quality education.” An Alabama school leader explained, “Our primary interest is educating people basically of like learning capacities. We adopt a school system to meet their needs.” In other words, we’re not segregating the races; we’re just helping students find a school that best meets their needs. That was in 1972.

To find the roots of our current policies and the rebirth of segregation, read Undermining Brown.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Privatization, Racism, Segregation, Vouchers

Steve Suitts: The Supreme Court is Reversing the Landmark Brown Decision

By dianeravitch
July 17, 2020 //
47

Steve Suitts is a civil rights lawyer who has worked for the Southern Education Foundation for many years. His recent book Overturning Brown documents the segregationist history of the school choice movement.

He wrote recently that the Espinoza decision, which awards public money to religious schools, is another step in the Supreme Court’s reversal of the Brown decision.

In a case decided on the grounds of religious freedom, the US Supreme Court took another big step on June 30 in supporting religious discrimination in publicly financed schooling and, more broadly, in overturning Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 landmark opinion that promised the end of racial segregation in public education.

The Court ruled in Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue that the US Constitution’s guarantee of religious freedom prohibits a state from excluding religious schools when it finances attendance in private schools. There should be no misunderstanding about what this case means in regard to religion: states are now free to finance private schools that discriminate against students on the basis of students’ religions.

As troubling as that holding is, the opinion also constitutes a major, often ignored long-term impact on school desegregation. Today most students attending private schools are in religious schools, and most religious schools are effectively segregated and exclusionary by race. For this reason, Espinoza constitutes a regrettable, and significant, decision in the Supreme Court’s long and certain movement over the last forty years to overturn the Brown decision…

Advocates of “school choice” claim they are advancing religious freedom, social justice, and civil rights when in fact, as I document in “Segregationists, Libertarians, and the Modern ‘School Choice’ Movement,” they echo the language and tactics used by southern segregationists in their efforts to evade school desegregation after Brown. It is there—in the history of the segregationists’ fight against Brown and in how the federal courts addressed their strategies—that the long-range impact of Espinoza becomes evident.

In the years following Brown, southern states passed dozens of bills to condemn and frustrate school desegregation. The overall strategy of massive resistance was based on two basic tactics. One was placing pupils in public schools according to what the segregationists claimed were children’s “ability to learn”—which they believed, but after Brown carefully avoiding saying, was inherently different due to race. The other was funding vouchers for private academies where segregationists were free to set up exclusionary admission standards.

Categories Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Privatization, School Choice, Segregation, Vouchers

Florida: Nearly One-Third of Those Tested Under 18 Were Positive for Coronavirus

By dianeravitch
July 17, 2020 //
19

This is worrisome. Those demanding the speedy and full reopening of schools have taken for granted that children are unlikely to become infected with coronavirus.

But the latest data from Florida show that complacency is unwarranted. 

Those localities where the pandemic is growing and out of control should be cautious and aware of the risk to children.

The Huffington Post reports:

Nearly one-third of children who have been tested for the coronavirus in Florida have tested positive, according to data from the state’s Department of Health that comes amid ongoing debate and uncertainty over whether schools will reopen this fall.

Of the 54,022 people under the age of 18 who have been tested for COVID-19 in Florida, 16,797 of them, or roughly 31%, have tested positive, data released Friday shows. In comparison, roughly 11% of everyone in the state who has been tested for the virus — roughly 2.8 million people — has tested positive.

Nearly half of the state’s positive cases among children were in the counties of Broward, Dade, Hillsborough and Palm Beach.

Cases throughout the Sunshine State have risen at alarming rates in recent weeks. On Thursday the state set a new one-day coronavirus death record while also reporting nearly 14,000 new cases of COVID-19 ― the second-highest daily total that the state has seen. Its highest total reported last weekend set a national record.

Amid this growth, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) has continued to push for schools to reopen this fall, with him on Tuesday telling mayors in south Florida — the state’s hardest-hit area for cases — that doing so is low-risk.

Categories Florida, Health, Safety, Students
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