More than 190,000 Americans have died of the coronavirus. The United States leads the world in infections, and the virus is still claiming lives. Soon, it will exceed 200,000.
Today is the premiere of, American Pathogen, a 30-minute documentary puts on record Trump’s historic mishandling of the Coronavirus pandemic. The message is clear: this tragedy was avoidable.
Watch it here (and share!) – AmericanPathogen.com.
Send it to your friends and spread the message: Vote 2020!
Mike Rose blogs once every few weeks. One day I will copy his excellent model. But this season it is hard to cut back, in view of the pandemic, the uncertainty about keeping our students and staff safe, and the most consequential national election of many, many years. Those who know Mike Rose’s work usually become Mike Rose Fan Boys or Fan Girls
I am grateful that he shared his latest post, in which he offers advice to Joe Biden and Kemala Harris.
In this post, Mike captures the anxiety that so many of us feel about the polls. Biden is leading in all of them but we remember what happened in 2016. Trump is like a monster who lurks behind every door and in every dark alley, ready to spring at a moment’s notice to swallow our democracy.
Rose is worried about the so-called “enthusiasm gap.” Trump supporters remain fervently loyal. Biden-Harris voters express a commitment that is rational but not as intense. Will that matter on November 3?
Rose offers advice:
Be more than “not-Trump.”
Educate the public, starting with what Trump wants to do to health care. He is a consummate liar and many of his own followers have no understanding of his malign plans for the future.
Get out and meet with large crowds, safely.
When you visit towns and cities, highlight the good work happening in those places.
He adds:
You are both skilled retail politicians, a talent constrained by COVID, because, unlike Trump, you believe in the basics of public health. There is a great challenge before you, and I hope all the bright campaign people around you are focused on it: How to integrate the potency of human encounters on the campaign trail with the communication possibilities of virtual technology. Unfortunately, you have to solve this problem while the campaign is in high gear, steer the boat while building it. But if you can do it, you will make history – and reclaim what remains of our democracy.
Tom Torkelson, former leader of the free-spending IDEA Network, has landed in San Antonio, where he hopes to flood the city and its surrounding districts with charter schools and obliterate public schools that belong to the community. Torkelson hopes to place 150,000 students in charters, draining funding from public schools.
Not long ago, the IDEA corporate chain bought out Torkelson’s contract for $900,000. Torkrlson will be the new CEO of a local group called Choose to Succeed. “Choose to Succeed backs a portfolio of charter operators they deem high-performing including IDEA, KIPP Texas, Great Hearts Academies, and BASIS Schools.”
Torkelson will grow the charter sector and crush the local public schools, which will be nothing more than dumping grounds for the kids who can’t meet the demands of the “high-performing” charter schools that have such requirements as passing AP exams.
IDEA, you may recall, wanted to lease a private jet for its executives (but backed off because of bad publicity), treated them to firs-class air travel, spent $400,000 a year for premium seats at professional basketball games, was gifted with nearly $250 million by Betsy DeVos from the federal Charter Schools Program. IDEA picked up nearly $5 million from the Walton Family Foundation. Money, money, money!
As the largest charter school network in Texas fights to keep its momentum to open new campuses amid backlash caused by its controversial spending decisions, its ex-CEO has landed in San Antonio.
Tom Torkelson, who co-founded IDEA Public Schools and led the network for two decades before stepping down in April, is now CEO of Choose to Succeed, a nonprofit organization that since 2011 has been a driving force and relentless cheerleader for charter expansion here.
The group has helped raise more than $100 million to recruit high-performing charter networks to plant schools in San Antonio. Its initial focus — creating educational alternatives in the city’s low-income areas — soon widened to include every part of the city. Leaders of traditional public school districts have pushed back with increasing vigor in recent years, arguing against the need for new charters but unable to slow their growth.
Will public education survive in San Antonio? It’s doubtful.
Peter Greene warns us not to let down our guard. DeVos, with the help of the loathsome Ted Cruz, wants to use the pandemic to sneak in $5 billion for vouchers.
Remember that DeVos has not had a new idea for at least thirty years and she is obsessed with taking money away from public schools and giving it to private and religious schools.
Greene writes:
Betsy DeVos has been pitching “Education Freedom” as long as she’s been in office. It’s a tax credit scholarship scheme, which is to say, a voucher program that would blow a $5 billion hole in the federal budget, but would be a real treat for rich folks who A) like private schools better than public ones and B) would rather not pay taxes to the feds.
The Education Freedom pitch has landed with a thud every time. But more recently what has been new about it is that, somehow, DeVos got Senator Ted “Least Loved Man In The Senate” Cruz to pitch it. And right this moment, Cruz is doing what he does best– being an absolute pain in everyone’s ass–and he’s doing it over DeVos’s pet project.
Yesterday, CNN reported that the Senate’s new stimulus bill (which has been a the focus of a spectacular display of GOP dysfunction for months) may be hung up over Cruz’s insistence that the DeVos Voucher Bill be included in the stimulus package.
Peter reminds us of the fact that voters have always overwhelmingly rejected vouchers.
Even in states where vouchers are freely available, tiny numbers of students use them, but the loss of revenue damages public schools that accept all students.
Watch out!
The Network for Public Education will be all over this sneak attack.
Mercedes Schneider has written an indispensable post about standardized testing: She noticed that the annual testing mandated by the federal government is beloved by those who are farthest from the classroom and have nothing to do with teaching and learning.
Perhaps she is responding to the recent report that Betsy DeVos will not allow waivers from the mandated testing next year, since the tests are so vital, and her announcement was cheered by the Center for American Progress (a neoliberal think tank), Education Trust (led by former Secretary of Education John King), the Council of Chief State School Officers, Senator Patty Murray (ranking Democrat on the Senate HELP Committee), and Rep. Bobby Scott (chair of the House Education Committee).
Schneider writes:
This is what standardized testing has been in public schools across America ever since No Child Left Behind (NCLB):
It’s like some president-backed, bipartisan Congress decided that we need to measure student physical health based on student weight. Of course, student physical health is by far too complex a concept to be captured by student weight, but let’s just put that reality aside in favor of the appearance of being able to pack a huge, complex package into a matchbox by getting those kids on the scale and putting the onus on teachers and schools to make students weight what the state (answering to the federal government in exchange for funding) decides those students should weigh.
Now, it is ridiculous on its face to hold teachers and schools responsible for student weight– which is why no bathroom scale company will guarantee that their scales are meant to be used to determine anything beyond the weight of the person standing on the scale. However, that president-backed, bipartisan Congress has decided that schools and teachers must ensure that their students achieve some predetermined optimal weight.
So. Weight-prep programs are instituted for students at risk of not achieving their state-determined optimal weights, the point of which is to drill students in scale-optimizing strategies (i.e., where to stand on the scale in order to make the weight appear higher or lower; how to push down on the scale to “weigh more”). In order to make time in the school day for these at-risk weighers to be drilled and redrilled, they must miss lunch, group sports, and playtime, but what is important to the school and to the teacher is achieving the optimal weight number so that we can tout that number, tag the student as physically healthy, keep our jobs, and collect federal dollars.
Surely we also congratulate the hungry and lethargic student for achieving that state-determined weight number. And if anyone points out that the student is hungry and lethargic, supporters of the process ignore the child and tout the number.
Be it noted that the annual standardized testing mandated by NCLB has led to cheating scandals, narrowing of the curriculum, and teaching to the test. For the past decade, there has been no change in NAEP scores.
NCLB failed. Why not admit it and move forward? Why continue to inhale the stale fumes of past policies that failed?
Why won’t prominent Democrats stop embracing NCLB and develop a vision of their own that actually helps students and teachers?
Dana Milbank, regular columnist for the Washington Post, has some fundraising tips for the Trump campaign.
Well, this is embarrassing.
Seems President Trump has run his reelection campaign into financial distress, a status that will not surprise those familiar with the Trump Taj Mahal, the Trump Castle, the Trump Plaza Atlantic City, the Trump Plaza New York, Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts, Trump Entertainment Resorts, the Trump Tower Tampa, the Trump Shuttle, Trump: The Game, Trump magazine, Trump Mortgage, Trump Steaks, Trump mattresses, Trump pillows, Trump perfume, Trump shirts, Trump underwear, Trump shoes, Trump eyeglasses, Trump University, Trump Vodka, the Trump Foundation and the U.S. Treasury.
The New York Times’s Shane Goldmacher and Maggie Haberman report that Trump and the Republican National Committee squandered their $200 million cash advantage, spent $800 million of the $1.1 billion raised and now face the possibility of a “cash crunch.” The culprit: “profligate habits” such as a car and driver for the now-former campaign manager, payments to Trump businesses, and a “vanity splurge” on Super Bowl ads.
Now, the cash-strapped campaign has had to abandon a $3 million plan to put the Trump name on a NASCAR race car. Sad!
Bloomberg News reports that Trump might pump $100 million of his own money into his campaign. But this raises another disturbing matter: Does he have any money? The president is still fighting to keep his tax returns hidden, and he has been using his official powers to direct commerce and tax breaks to his struggling properties.
Happily, there is a solution at hand to save the billionaire’s campaign from financial ruin! TMZ reports that a Bible signed by Trump is being sold through a memorabilia company, Moments In Time, for $37,500. In the photo on the merchant’s website, Trump’s Sharpie signature is scrawled generously across the title page, where the author’s name might go, right below “HOLY BIBLE/KING JAMES VERSION.”
TMZ reports that the Bible was signed at the White House during the first week of June, “just a couple of days after he’d ordered federal law enforcement to fire pepper spray and rubber bullets at peaceful George Floyd protesters” for his Bible photo op at St. John’s Episcopal Church. The photo-op Bible is not the one for sale.
But what if it were?
If an ordinary Trump-signed Bible can fetch $40k, surely the photo-op Bible would bring in a cool six figures for Trump’s struggling campaign from a wealthy Trump sucker supporter. (I’m looking at you, Postmaster General Louis DeJoy and MyPillow guy Mike Lindell.)
Heck, Scott Pruitt, then-head of the Environmental Protection Agency, once sent an aide to buy a used Trump Hotel mattress to curry favor with the boss.
And if Trump is good at anything, it is getting people to pay money for his name — whether it’s on their condos or, in one failed-to-launch scheme, Trump-branded urine tests. In 2016, people paid $49 each just to be listed on a wall in Trump Tower.
There was also that time Trump got a “fake bidder” to pay $60,000 in a 2013 auction for a life-size portrait of Trump. According to former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, Trump’s charitable foundation then reimbursed the fake bidder, a pharmaceutical billionaire.
Imagine the millions Trump could raise for his campaign by selling articles from historic moments of his presidency. It wouldn’t be legal, strictly speaking, but when has that mattered?
Trump could autograph rolls of the “beautiful, soft” paper towels he tossed at Puerto Ricans struggling to recover from a hurricane.
He could inscribe chunks of the border wall, built by a group affiliated with Steve Bannon (who is now under indictment for improperly profiting from the scheme). The shoddily built wall is at risk of crumbling into the Rio Grande.
He could sign the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration weather map he doctored with a Sharpie to show a hurricane heading toward Alabama.
He could auction off autographed pill bottles with the 63 million surplus doses of hydroxychloroquine the federal government ordered.
He could even sell, with autographed plaques affixed, the cages he used to detain migrant children after separating them from their parents.
David Dayen covers the daily news, usually related to the coronavirus crisis. This post is about political corruption, or the giant swamp surrounding Trump. As usual, open the post to read the links.
Dayen writes:
Straw Postman
Let’s check in on our favorite Postmaster General, Louis DeJoy. When we last left our hero, he was implementing policy changes at the post office that were demonstrably slowing down the mail. It was just as clear that this was a political influence operation to seek long-desired privatization goals, which just happened to align with a presidential election dependent on mail-in voting amid the pandemic.
Donald Trump has shut up about the post office now that his plot was discovered, but the House is continuing to investigate. And they were fed a gem about DeJoy’s origins as a postmaster fixer. According to the Washington Post, DeJoy engaged in a straw donor operation. He would force employees to give to Republicans and then reimburse them with bonuses later. This led to his rise in standing within the party as a donor, and his appointment to USPS to degrade its functions. Straw donor schemes are a felony; the former head of the school board in Los Angeles [Ref Rodriguez] had to step down over something similar, and pleaded out to avoid jail time.
The denouement of this saga comes with Trump saying he’d support an investigation into DeJoy’s actions. Loyalty is a one-way street for Trump, so no surprise there. The speed with which DeJoy went from unassuming appointee, to architect of one of the fulcrum points of the election, to persona non grata, however, is bracing.
New York City’s vaunted Success Academy, which boasts the highest test scores in the state, the highest teacher turnover rate, and very likely the highest student attrition rate (unsure because unreleased by city authorities), has announced that it will be all-remote until at least January.
Success Academy is famed for its strict no-excuses policy and its readiness to eject any student who does not comply.
Problems, as the New York Daily News reports.
Under the plan, kids as young as 5 have to log on by 8:50 a.m. wearing their checkered orange and blue uniforms, and sit still with their hands clasped for nearly seven hours of live video instruction.
They also have to ask permission to use the bathroom — and can get a virtual boot and be suspended if they act up, which would turn off their cameras and microphones for a day or more.
“I don’t think it’s right for a 6-year-old … they have to sit there like a robot with their hands folded,” said one mom of a Success first-grader in Far Rockaway, Queens, who asked to remain anonymous because she fears retaliation from the school.
“Every day she cries and says she doesn’t want to go to school,” the frustrated mom told The News.
The article includes the news that Fabiola St. Hilaire, a teacher at Success Academy who sparked a controversy over racism at Success Academy last year, has resigned, saying she could no longer be complicit.
“Working for this organization has truly showed me that as long as I stand with the inaction and blatant disregard for child morality and healthy development it in turn will make me complicit, which I will never be,” she wrote in her resignation letter, a copy of which was reviewed by The News.
The National Education Policy Center posted this notification about #ScholarStrike, inviting higher education professionals to speak out together against racial violence and injustice. I joined. Will you?
Today and tomorrow, scholars at colleges across America will follow in the footsteps of the NBA, Major League Baseball and celebrities in speaking out against racial violence and unjust policing in the wake of the police shooting of Jacob Blake, an unarmed Black man, in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
The effort, which is to include actions such as devoting class time to discussions of racial injustice, was started by a tweet from Anthea Butler, a professor of religious and Africana studies at the University of Pennsylvania.
“I would be down as a professor to follow the NBA and Strike for a few days to protest police violence in America,” Professor Butler wrote in her initial tweet.
The movement has since spread, via social media, to a diverse array of institutions and academic fields, including education. Although in-person demonstrations may occur, they may be impractical due to the pervasiveness of online learning.
The subjects of policing and race are particularly relevant to education scholars, given that the discriminatory law enforcement practices experienced by communities of color typically start in childhood and even occur within schools. “Systemic violence and disparate school discipline policies hinder equitable, just, and safe schooling,” according to Law and Order in School, an NEPC brief published in 2017 and authored by professors Janelle Scott, Michele Moses, Kara Finnigan, Tina Trujillo, and Darrell Jackson. “Research demonstrates that Black and Latinx students experience police violence and school discipline unequally,” the authors write. “Punitive educational and criminal justice policies disproportionately affect students, families, and communities of color, as well as the teachers and schools that serve them.”
Anticipating the current movement, the 2017 brief suggests addressing racially disparate school policing and discipline with such actions as redirecting funds for school police officers to expenditures such as guidance counseling, advanced and enrichment courses and other practices shown to “improve student engagement and social connectivity.”
For more information on #ScholarStrike, go to Butler’s Twitter profile.
Laura Chapman read Andy Hargreaves’ provocative article about the educational technology we will need in the future, and she responded with this comment:
Andy Hargreaves says: “We need to create conditions for technologically enhanced learning that are universal, public and free to those who need it.”
Yes. But that is unlikely to happen in the United States, even if available elsewhere. In our market-based economy, the expression “digital learning,” should be understood as the opportunity for tech companies to learn as much as they wish about the users of their devices and software. The best we seem able to do is offer legislation that attempts to limit exploitation of data being gathered by technologies.
For example, The National Biometric Information Privacy Act, proposed by U.S. Senators Bernie Sanders and Jeff Merkley, is not likely to pass. The Act would require a business to secure prior written consent from individuals before the business could use any of their immutable characteristics captured by facial recognition or any other biometric systems. See https://www.biometricupdate.com/202008/broad-biometric-protections-in-senate-bill-with-slim-prospects
Also dead in the water is S. 1341 (114th Congress): Student Privacy Protection Act, introduced May 15, 2015, read twice and referred to the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions. This bill was intended to prohibit the use of federal funds for tech-based data gathering enabled by technology. Here is a small sample of the intended prohibitions:
—No federal funds for analysis of facial expressions, EEG brain wave patterns, skin conductance, galvanic skin response, heart-rate variability, pulse, blood volume, posture, and eye-tracking.
—No measures or data about psychological resources, mindsets, learning strategies, effortful control, attributes, dispositions, social skills, attitudes, intrapersonal and interpersonal resources, or any other type of social, emotional, or psychological parameter.
—A special rule exempts data collection required by the Disabilities Education Act.
But there was more.
—No federal funds can be used for video monitoring of classrooms in the school, for any purpose, including for teacher evaluation, without the approval of the local educational agency after a public hearing and the written consent of the teacher and the parents of all students in the classroom. These restrictions apply to outside parties (e.g., researchers) as well.
—No federal funds for computing devices with remote camera surveillance software without the approval of the local educational agency after a public hearing, and for teachers or students without the written consent of the teacher and the parent of each affected student.
—Section 5 of the bill defines PII, personally identifiable information, and prohibited data-gathering that could reveal, without authorization, the identity of a student (e.g., SSNs, student numbers, biometric records), indirect identifiers (e.g., date of birth, place of birth, mother’s maiden name). As far as I know, that bill is the only legislation that has come close to putting some brakes on rampant data-gathering enabled by ed-tech.
It is easy to suppose that edtech will thrive in the midst of our COVID-19 pandemic. Not so fast warns Mark Schneiderman, the senior director of education policy for the Software & Information Industry Association. He claims the ed tech industry is facing downsizing from the pandemic’s crunch on school budgets. He says “Communication and information sharing platforms like Google, Zoom, and SchoolMessenger are among the big ‘winners’” but thousands of software companies may be in trouble. He offers predictions about the market for edtech and repeats talking points about the importance of edtech on behalf of the profit-seekers whom is represents.
Meanwhile the Gates-funded Data Quality Campaign, the major non-profit preoccupied with data-gathering on a large scale claims that data from edtech is necessary for “student success.” It postures about student privacy issues, but this “campaign” is eager to see more data gathering on students and teachers at scale and longitudinally, including results from the Common Core and associated state tests. https://dataqualitycampaign.org/why-education-data/make-data-work-students/
The Data Quality Campaign has just released a new messaging brief with two partners known for promoting the Common Core standards and testing–the Alliance for Excellent Education and the Collaborative for Student Success. The brief tells states how they should measure “student growth” in 2021, given that most states have no 2020 statewide assessment data.”
This brief is an effort to keep statewide testing (and the Common Core) alive through messaging and marketing. The brief cites and exaggerates the importance of three “push surveys” designed to asset that teachers and parents really want so-called “growth scores.” A growth scores is a euphemism for year-to-year gains in test scores. This brief also cites and promotes SAS, the marketers of discredited value-added calculations known as EVASS (Education Value-Added Assessment System). In other words, the drumbeat for terrible policies goes on and from unelected policy shapers who use their non-profit status for lobbying.
https://dataqualitycampaign.org/news/states-can-and-should-measure-student-growth-in-2021/
It is no surprise that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation funded the three organizations claiming credit for this brief. The Gates Foundation has sent the Data Quality Campaign $25.3 million in 15 grants and The Alliance for Excellent Education $27 million in 15 grants. The Collaborative for Student Success is described as “a multi-donor fund” investing in “messaging efforts that build support for high standards, high-quality aligned assessments, and systems of accountability that promote success for all students.” The Collaborative is funded by ExxonMobil and five major foundations, among them the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation as detailed by Mercedes Schneider here. https://deutsch29.wordpress.com/2014/11/12/gates-is-at-it-again-the-common-core-centered-collaborative-for-student-success/
This is to say that market forces are not just operating in public education but that the wealth of nonprofits is well-organized to push ed-tech.
We are not now, or in the foreseeable future likely to see anything close to “conditions for technologically enhanced learning that are universal, public and free to those who need it.”
Our national and state policies are designed to subsidize profit-seeking from education.
Diane Ravitch's blog 