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Law Professor: Barrett’s “Originalism” Is Incoherent

By dianeravitch
October 21, 2020 //
61

Kevin Tobia, an assistant professor of law at Georgetown Law Center, wrote in Salon that Amy Coney Barrett’s “originalist” interpretation of law is incoherent.

Tobia writes:

Many fear that Amy Coney Barrett’s Supreme Court confirmation will erode the established rights of women and LGBTQ+ persons, given Barrett’s private convictions. At last week’s hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Barrett responded clearly: “A judge must apply the law as written, not as the judge wishes it were.” Barrett is an originalist and textualist, who prioritizes “what people understood words to mean at the time that the law was enacted.” In pointing outward to the people, originalism conveys an alluring humility. Originalism is not personal; its conclusions reflect the objective fact of “public meaning.” 

But are originalists right about the facts? I ran experiments to test whether originalism’s tools actually reflect public meaning. The results are surprising and troubling. In a forthcoming article in the Harvard Law Review, I found that the tools originalists rely upon support false conclusions about public meaning — and often conflict with each other. Until originalists like Barrett articulate better methods, Americans have no good reason to believe the theory is succeeding, even on its own terms.

In historical interpretation, originalists rely on tools like dictionary definitions: How was the contested term defined? They also rely on patterns of language usage: What was the most common way to use the term? A “big data” version of this approach called legal corpus linguistics has gained popularity.

I tested whether these tools actually reflect public meaning today, with a simple experiment. Consider a well-known example from legal philosophy: What is the meaning of the term “vehicle”? Three different groups participated in an experiment. The first made judgments about vehicles (e.g., “Is an airplane a vehicle: Yes or no?”). The second made judgments equipped with a dictionary definition of “vehicle” and the third with data from legal corpus linguistics (e.g., data about how the word “vehicle” is most commonly used).

Those groups reached radically different conclusions. For example, about 50% of people today say that a canoe is a vehicle. Yet nearly all participants using a dictionary definition reached that judgment (95%), while nearly all the participants using the corpus linguistics data reached the opposite judgment (only 10% agreed). Similar divergences arose across many different examples, and across groups of ordinary Americans, law school students and United States judges...

A broader problem for originalism concerns the concept of “public meaning” itself. If originalists can identify how the public understood our Constitution in 1787, surely they can identify the “public meaning” of very simple terms today. Justice Brett Kavanaugh, also an originalist, invites us in a recent opinion to consider again the meaning of “vehicle.” Clearly a car is a vehicle, but what about a canoe, an airplane or a baby stroller? Kavanaugh provides straightforward answers: “the word ‘vehicle,’ in its ordinary meaning does not encompass baby strollers.”

Does the American public agree? About 75% of Americans agree that baby strollers are not “vehicles.” But 25% disagree. Other cases are even more difficult. People are divided 70-30 concerning whether airplanes are vehicles, divided 60-40 on bicycles and divided 50-50 on canoes. It’s not obvious what originalists should make of these facts. Is “public meaning” the same as “75% meaning” or “50% meaning”?

What does the Constitution say about computers, the Internet, and data privacy? What does it say about equal rights for African Americans, women, and gay people? What does it say about corporations and their “rights”? What does it say about in vitro fertilization (which Barrett has called “manslaughter”)? These “what ifs” can go on and on and on because the white men who wrote the Constitution lived in a very different world from 2020. They wrote a Constitution for their time and laid out general principles for the future, which subsequent Courts have adjusted to meet the issues of changing times.

It seems like the height of hubris to try to think as if he (certainly not she) could imagine what was in the minds of the Founders.

Of one thing we can be sure: The Founders did not imagine women sitting on the Supreme Court or voting in elections or serving on juries. If they wanted equality between men and women, they would have said so. They didn’t. They would be appalled that Amy Coney Barrett is joining two other women–Justice Sonia Sotomayor and Justice Elena Kagan–on the Supreme Court. A true originalist would immediately recognize that the Founders did not envision women on the Court. And Judge Barrett–if she is true to her philosophy–would decline a seat on the Court.

Categories Justice

The Reading Wars Are Over! Lucy Calkins Endorses Phonics

By dianeravitch
October 21, 2020 //
74

Lucy Calkins is one of the most influential reading researchers In the nation. She created the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, whose teaching materials have been widely adopted and is a proponent of “balanced literacy.” BL prominently opposed the “phonics first” approach.

In my book Left Back: A Century of Battles Over School Reform,” I described in detail the long-standing debates about teaching reading, which dates back to the mid-nineteenth century. The phonetic approach was the conventional method until the advent of the very popular “Dick and Jane” reading books in the late 1920s. Those readers relied on the “whole word” method, in which children learned to recognize short words (“Run, Dick, run.” “See Sally run.”) and to use them in context rather than sound them out phonetically. In the 1950s, the debate came to a raging boil after publication of Rudolf Flesch’s “Why Johnny Can’t Read,” which attacked the whole word method. Many more twists and turns in the story, which should have been settled by Jeanne Chall’s comprehensive book, Learning to Read: The Great Debate (1967). Chall supported beginning with phonics, then transitioning to children’s books as soon as children understood phonetic principles. Nonetheless, the 1980s experienced the rise and widespread adoption of the “whole language” approach, which disdained phonics. Then came Calkins and “balanced literacy,” claiming to combine diverse methods. Critics said that BL was whole language redux.

According to this post by Sarah Schwartz in Education Week, Professor Calkins has called for a rebalancing of balanced literacy to incorporate more early phonics. I continue to object to the use of the phrase”the science of reading,” which I consider to be an inappropriate use of the word “science.” Reading teachers should have a repertoire of strategies, including phonics and phonemic awareness.

Early reading teachers and researchers are reacting with surprise, frustration, and optimism after the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, the organization that designs one of the most popular reading programs in the country, outlined a new approach to teaching children how to read. 

A document circulated at the group’s professional development events, first reported on by APM Reportson Friday, calls for increased focus on ensuring children can recognize the sounds in spoken words and link those sounds to written letters—the foundational skills of reading. And it emphasizes that sounding out words is the best strategy for kids to use to figure out what those words say. 

“[P]oring over the work of contemporary reading researchers has led us to believe that aspects of balanced literacy need some ‘rebalancing,'” the document reads.

While the document suggests that these ideas about how to teach reading are new and the product of recent studies, they’re in fact part of a long-established body of settled science . Decades of cognitive science research has shown that providing children with explicit instruction in speech sounds and their correspondence to written letters is the most effective way to make sure they learn how to read words. 

But it’s significant to see these ideas coming from the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project. The program, founded by Lucy Calkins and housed at Columbia University, has long downplayed the importance of these foundational skills in early reading instruction, and has pushed other, disproven strategies for identifying words. 

In a statement to Education Week, Calkins said that the document reflects work they have done with researchers at the Child Mind Institute, a nonprofit that supports children with mental health and learning disorders. 

“Those who know us well, know that we are a university-based learning community, and that the knowledge we offer is constantly evolving and expanding. The document reflects my strong belief that children will benefit when people with diverse perspectives and backgrounds sit at the same table and listen carefully to each other,” Calkins wrote. 

Calkins also noted that the document has been shared at dozens of TCRWP events, including a virtual reunion for teachers this past weekend. 

Mixed Signals on Cueing

The Units of Study for Teaching Reading, the TCRWP curriculum for reading instruction in grades K-5, is one of the biggest players in the early reading market. A 2019 Education Week Research Center survey found that 16 percent of K-2 and special education teachers use the Units of Study to teach reading. 

But as APM Reports noted, the curriculum has faced increased scrutiny, including from reading researchers. Some states and districts have reconsidered its use. 

The curriculum doesn’t include systematic, explicit teaching in phonemic awareness or phonics in the early grades, as Education Week has reported. The company started publishing a supplemental phonics program in 2018, but marketing materials for the new units imply that phonics shouldn’t play a central role in the early years classroom. “Phonics instruction needs to be lean and efficient,” the materials read . “Every minute you spend teaching phonics (or preparing phonics materials to use in your lessons) is less time spent teaching other things.”

But it’s not only that the materials sideline phonemic awareness and phonics—they also teach reading strategies that can make it harder for students to learn these skills. 

Calkins’ materials promote a strategy called “three-cueing,” which suggests that students can decipher what words say by relying on three different sources of information, or cues. They can look at the letters, using a “visual” cue. But they can also rely on the context or syntax of a sentence to predict which word would fit, the theory goes. Reading researchers and educators say that this can lead to students guessing: making up words based on pictures, or what’s happening in the story, rather than reading the words by attending to the letters.

This new document seems to signal a major change in instructional theory from the organization. 

It emphasizes the importance of foundational skills, recommending that students in kindergarten and the fall of 1st grade receive daily instruction in phonemic awareness, and saying that all early readers could benefit from frequent phonics practice. It recommends decodable books—those with a high proportion of letter-sound correspondences that students have already learned—be a part of young children’s “reading diets.” And it suggests regular assessments of phonemic awareness, as problems in that area can indicate reading difficulties. 

Especially notable, the document seems to do an about-face on cueing. Students should not be “speculating what the word might say based on the picture,” the document reads. Instead, teachers should tell children to “respond to tricky words by first reading through the word, sound-by-sound, (or part by part) and only then , after producing a possible pronunciation, check that what she’s produced makes sense given the context,” it reads.

The statement on cueing contradicts advice Calkins was giving less than a year ago. In November 2019, Calkins released a statement pushing back on those whom she called , “the phonics-centric people who are calling themselves ‘the science of reading.'”

In that statement last year, Calkins said teachers shouldn’t encourage students to guess at words. But she did say that students could create a hypothesis based on the context of the sentence. 

In a response to Calkins’ statement, reading researcher Mark Seidenberg wrote at the time, “Dr. Calkins says she disdains 3-cueing, but the method is right there in her document.” 

Teachers Need ‘Fine-Grained Guidance’

The past couple of years have marked an evolution of publishers’ and reading organizations’ public positions on reading science and how it should guide instruction, spurred in large part by media coverage of best practice from Emily Hanford of APM Reports, and other outlets, including Education Week. 

In July of last year, for example, the International Literacy Association published a brief emphasizing the importance of systematic, explicit phonics instruction, a clear distinction of stance from an organization that has long included members on opposing sides of the “reading wars.” 

But it’s not a given that any of Calkins’ or TCRWP’s statements will change classroom practice, said Julia Kaufman, a senior policy researcher at the RAND Corporation, who studies how school systems can support high-quality instruction. Past research from RAND has also found that Calkins’ materials are widely used in U.S. schools. 

“I don’t think there’s any way that we can expect a shift in [TCRWP’s] philosophy and ideas to change anything unless it’s documented and really clear to teachers where they need to change,” she said. 

Curriculum and implementation is complex, Kaufman added: “Teachers need specific and detailed and fine-grained guidance in order to know what they need to do in the classroom.”

In their reporting on this recent document, APM Reports noted that educators at a recent TCRWP training received supplemental curriculum materials that encouraged decoding. 

The core curriculum, though, still promotes cueing. For example, a strategies chart from a sample 1st grade lesson tells students to “Think about what’s happening,” “Check the picture,” and “Think about what kind of word would fit,” as ways to solve hard words. 

Unless and until TCRWP puts out a new edition of the Units of Study for Teaching Reading, with detailed teacher guidance that reflects these philosophical shifts, Kaufman said she wouldn’t expect to see much change in elementary classrooms. 

Some educators were optimistic that TCRWP’s new position could lead to more widespread adoption of evidence-based instruction and higher reading achievement. “Lots of changes still to make but this is encouraging!” wrote Erin Beard, a literacy coach, on Twitter.

Others expressed frustration over a move they saw as too little, too late. 

“Is she handing out refunds for all the intervention needed for the missed learning opportunity?” LaTonya M. Goffney, the superintendent of Aldine Independent School District, wrote on Twitter . “Our most vulnerable students – black, brown, poor, ELL, & special education students paid the ultimate cost!”

Sharon Contreras, the superintendent of Guilford County schools, noted that any changes would likely come at a cost for districts using Calkins’ materials. 

“Millions of dollars wasted. Thousands of students cannot read proficiently. Districts spending a small fortune on new curriculum & to retrain teachers. All totally avoidable,” she wrote, on Twitter .

Categories Curriculum, Education Reform, Language, Literacy

Former Director of CDC: The Pursuit of “Herd Immunity” Would Cost Half a Million Lives

By dianeravitch
October 21, 2020 //
13

Tom Frieden, a physician, is former director of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). His article appeared in the Washington Post.

He writes:

As the covid-19 pandemic continues in the United States and many parts of the world, millions of Americans are increasingly impatient for the economy and society to regain a more normal footing. Some “maverick scientists” with “an audience inside the White House,” as The Post reported last week, argue for “allowing the coronavirus to spread freely at ‘natural’ rates among healthy young people while keeping most aspects of the economy up and running.”

Their aim is to achieve “herd immunity,” the concept that if enough people are immune, those without immunity can be protected. Usually this refers to immunity gained from vaccination; the goal of herd immunity has typically not been applied to a disease for which there is no vaccine.

There is a saying that for every complicated problem, a solution exists that is quick, simple — and wrong. That applies here: Pursuing herd immunity is the wrong, dead wrong, solution for the pandemic. Discussing such a reckless approach shouldn’t be necessary, except that it echoes the misguided ideas of neuroradiologist Scott Atlas, who in recent months has become an influential medical adviser to President Trump.

Atlas, The Post reported, has relied on similar-minded scientists “to bolster his in-house arguments.”

Less than 15 percent of Americans have been infected by the virus that causes covid-19. If immunity among those who have been infected and survived is strong and long-lasting (and it may well be neither), and if herd immunity kicks in at 60 percent infection of the population (and it might be higher), with a fatality rate of 0.5 percent among those infected, then at least another half-million Americans — in addition to the 220,000 who have already died — would have to die for the country to achieve herd immunity. And that’s the best-case scenario. The number of deaths to get there could be twice as high.

The route to herd immunity would run through graveyards filled with Americans who did not have to die, because what starts in young adults doesn’t stay in young adults. “Protecting the vulnerable,” however appealing it may sound, isn’t plausible if the virus is allowed to freely spread among younger people. We’ve seen this in families, communities and entire regions of the country. First come cases in young adults. Then the virus spreads to older adults and medically vulnerable people. Hospitalizations increase. And then deaths increase.

The vulnerable are not just a sliver of society. The 65-and-over population of the United States in 2018 was 52 million. As many as 60 percent of adults have a medical condition that increases their risk of death from covid-19 — with many unaware of their condition, which can include undiagnosed kidney disease, diabetes or cancer. The plain truth is that we cannot protect the vulnerable without protecting all of us.

A one-two punch is needed to knock out the virus — a combination approach, just as multiple drugs are used to treat infections such as HIV and tuberculosis. That in turn will allow the accelerated resumption of economic and social activity.

First, knock down the spread of the virus. The best way to do this is — as the country has been trying to do, with uneven success — to reduce close contact with others, especially in crowded indoor spaces with poor ventilation. Increase adherence to the Three W’s: wear a mask, watch your distance and wash your hands (or use sanitizer). Where restrictions have been loosened, track early-warning triggers and activate strategic closures to prevent an explosive spread.

Second, box the virus in to stop cases from becoming clusters and clusters from becoming outbreaks. Rapid testing should focus on those at greatest risk of having been exposed. The sooner people who are infectious get isolated, the fewer secondary cases there will be. That means rapid testing and rapid action when tests are positive. Close contacts need to be quarantined so that if they develop infection, the chain of transmission will stop with them.

A safe and effective vaccine may become available in the coming months — or it may not. Yet even if it were widely administered (a big if), it wouldn’t end the pandemic. Even if a vaccine that’s 70 percent effective is taken by 70 percent of people — optimistic estimates — that leaves half of the population unprotected. For the foreseeable future, masks will be in, at least indoors, and handshakes will be out.

Although there’s no quick fix, this pandemic will end one day. In the interim, there are actions individuals, families and communities across the country can take to reduce risk. The sooner the virus is under control, the quicker and more complete the recovery will be.

Categories Accountability, Health, Science, Trump

Jan Resseger: An “Originalist” Judge Cannot Understand Education

By dianeravitch
October 21, 2020 //
53

Jan Resseger writes here about the misfit between an “originalist” interpretation of the Constitution and the field of education, which has evolved very far from its condition in the 1770s. It is likely that an originalist, as Judge Amy Coney Barrett claims to be, would have nothing to say about contemporary issues in education, since there were no public schools, no Catholic schools, no organized system of education at all in the time that the Constitution was written.

Resseger writes:

For a couple of weeks now, since the publication of Derek Black’s history of the constitutional basis for American public education, this blog has been reflecting on the meaning of constitutional principles in our nation’s founding documents and the 50 state constitutions for defining the role and meaning of our nation’s system of public schools.  (See here, here, and here.)

But this week, Judge Amy Coney Barrett, who defines herself as a constitutional originalist, went through hours of Senate confirmation hearings leading to a Senate vote on her confirmation in the next week or two as President Trump’s latest appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court. All week we have been considering what it means for our society today when members of the U.S. Supreme Court define themselves as originalists who are bound to interpret the constitutionality of today’s laws according to the precise wording of the U.S. Constitution of 1787.

The other day when Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, trained in the law and formerly a federal prosecutor, was asked whether she is an originalist, Mayor Lightfood replied: “You ask a gay, black woman if she is an originalist? No, ma’am, I am not. The Constitution didn’t consider me a person… because I’m a woman, because I’m black, because I’m gay.  I am not an originalist. I believe in the Constitution. I believe that it is a document that the founders intended to evolve and what they did was set the framework for how our country was going to be different from any other. But originalists say that, ‘Let’s go back to 1776 and whatever was there in the original language, that’s it.’ That language excluded, now, over 50 percent of the country. So, no I’m not an originalist.”

Like Mayor Lightfoot, many people today worry about originalist legal interpretation.  In Linguistics 101, students learn that language changes and evolves over time as particular words become archaic, fall out of common usage, or evolve to mean something different. Dictionaries are descriptive, not prescriptive. We cannot know precisely what the founders intended, but we can be sure that the words they used in 1787 may connote something much broader or narrower today.

Schoolhouse Burning, Derek Black’s new book is, in essence, the history of how the meaning of the guarantee of public education as a right for every child has changed and become more inclusive in the over two hundred years since our nation’s founding. Some people say that because the Constitution itself does not mention public education, public education is not a fundamental right, but Black disagrees because public education is so carefully planned in the Northwest Ordinance, passed as a sort of companion document in the same year as the Constitution.  As Black traces the history of our understanding of the right to public education, it’s clear that Derek Black is certainly not an originalist.  His book is the story of how our history—the civil war, the development of the constitutional principles of the 50 states, Jim Crow, the Civil Rights Movement—has informed and further defined the meaning of the founding principles: “The foregoing principles—the right to an adequate and equal education, making education the state’s absolute and foremost duty, requiring states to exert the necessary effort (financial or otherwise) to provide quality educational access, placing education above normal politics, and expecting courts to serve as a check—are all in the service of something larger: the original idea that education is the foundation of our constitutional democracy.  Education is the means by which citizens preserve their other rights. Education gives citizens the tools they need to hold their political leaders accountable…  Democracy simply does not work well without educated citizens.” (Schoolhouse Burning, p. 224)  Black reminds us, however: “The founders articulated educational goals not with any certainty that they would spring into reality simply by writing them down, but in the hope that we might one day live into them.” (Schoolhouse Burning, p 71)

“Originalist” legal interpretation doesn’t pay much heed to how we have lived into the goals and principles declared all those generations ago. How has the meaning of the constitutional protection of equal education evolved over the history of our country?

Categories Accountability, History, Justice

Michigan: Gary Peters Deserves Our Support

By dianeravitch
October 21, 2020 //
1

Senator Gary Peters is in a close race for re-election. He is a strong supporter of public schools. He has shared reports of the Network for Public Education with his colleagues. He needs us. I just sent him a contribution. I hope you will do the same. Gaining the majority in the Senate is crucial. Gary Peters deserves our support.

Four years ago, Donald Trump won Michigan by only a few thousand votes — and immediately, Democrats here got to work. Thanks to a swell of grassroots support, two years later we made massive progress with victories across Michigan.
And now once again, our battleground state of Michigan is in the spotlight as all eyes turn here to re-elect Senator Gary Peters. And this race couldn’t be more important — analysts at CBS News are reporting that Democrats can’t win the Senate majority if we don’t first win here in Michigan.
Here’s the bad news: far-right billionaires like Betsy DeVos’ family are trying to buy Michigan’s Senate seat, and now Gary’s officially been outraised for four of the last five quarters. That’s because the GOP is dumping millions of dollars to try and defeat Gary — and if they succeed, we can say goodbye to the future of the Supreme Court and hello to at least two more years of Mitch McConnell calling the shots in Washington.
Gary is in the final two weeks before Election Day, so he reached out to ask me if I could help him close the gap on his $20,000 goal for today — and right now, we’re still falling $13,582 short. Can you chip in $100 (or whatever you can) to make sure Gary doesn’t get outraised again so we can send him back to the Senate?
If you’ve saved payment info with ActBlue Express, your donation will go through immediately:Click to donate $100Click to donate $200Click to donate $400Or click here to donate another amountIt’s never been more important for us to elect Democrats like Gary Peters who are going to continue fighting the good fight to move Michigan forward. And with control of the Senate and the future of the Supreme Court on the line, we need a fighter like Gary standing up for Michiganders in Washington. So I’m asking one more time — with a recent poll showing Gary down by nearly two points, I’m asking you to donate $100 today to help secure victory for Gary Peters in Michigan to help us win back the Senate.

Sincerely,

Gretchen Whitmer
Governor of Michigan  
Categories Education Reform, Elections, Michigan, Network for Public Education, Networkfor Public Education Action Fund

Trump’s Coronavirus Advisor Says Masks Are Ineffective; Experts Say He is Wrong

By dianeravitch
October 20, 2020 //
25

In recent months, Trump has increasingly turned to Dr. Scott Atlas for advice on the coronavirus, even though Dr. Atlas is a radiologist with no experience in epidemiology or infectious diseases.

A few days ago, Dr. Atlas tweeted that masks don’t work, and Twitter blocked his tweet because it is inaccurate and misleading. People’s lives are at stake.

MarketWatch reported:

Twitter Inc. on Sunday blocked a post by Dr. Scott Atlas, one of President Donald Trump’s top health advisers, after he claimed face masks were ineffective in preventing the spread of the coronavirus.

“Masks work? NO” he tweeted Sunday, following by a thread of posts that misrepresented scientific findings on masks.

Twitter TWTR blocked the post citing a violation of its policy against sharing false or harmful information.

Atlas’s tweet also contradicts the official guidance from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which recommends wearing a mask when outside one’s home. There is widespread agreement among health experts that wearing face masks is the simplest and most effective way to curtail the spread of COVID-19 until a vaccine is developed.

Atlas, a Stanford radiologist with no background in infectious diseases, joined the White House coronavirus task force in August. He has been a vocal supporter of Trump and opposes lockdowns in favor of pursuing a strategy of herd immunity. 

Also Sunday, Dr. Michael Osterholm, an infectious-disease expert, told NBC’s “Meet the Press” that Atlas’ herd-immunity theory “is the most amazing combination of pixie dust and pseudoscience I’ve ever seen.” Osterholm said herd immunity requires 50%-70% of the population getting infected — far more than Atlas claims — which would likely cause tens of thousands of preventable deaths.

Others have been similarly dismissive of Atlas. Last month, CDC Director Robert Redfield was overheard on a phone call saying of Atlas:  “Everything he says is false.”

Categories Health, Science

Commonweal: Stop Using Catholic Schools to Shame Public Schools

By dianeravitch
October 20, 2020 //
54

There was a time long ago when public schools were thriving, and Catholic schools were also thriving. They were not in competition for students or money. But as our financial demands began pressing on both sectors, Catholic schools began closing and struggling to survive. Among rightwing ideologues, it became conventional to proclaim Catholic schools as “better” than public schools because they were free to kick out the students they didn’t want.

Mollie Wilson O’Reilly, an editor at Commonweal, calls on certain tabloids (i.e. Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post) to stop using Catholic schools to shame public schools. She hearkens back to that long-ago ethic when the different sectors served different populations and knew it.

The Post is unlikely to cease its attacks on the city’s public schools, because Murdoch loves school choice and lionizes charter schools. The Post eagerly prints press releases from Success Academy without ever bothering to fact-check or to acknowledge that SA is an exemplar of high attrition rates and high teacher-turnover rates.

O’Reilly writes (and this is only part of her article):

I can’t comment on the soundness of the decisions being made by the New York City Department of Education. But I know who I see using the pandemic to stuff their pockets, and it isn’t fat-cat maintenance workers. The Post’s implication that public-school educators are unconcerned with their students’ wellbeing is disgraceful. And while it is true that Catholic schools can be a lifeline for students served poorly by public education, I have also known families who have moved their children out of Catholic schools because the public system provides—is required to provide—services for learning disabilities and other special needs that Catholic schools can’t always accommodate. “Putting education first” is not as simple as it sounds.

Catholics should be standing in solidarity with all our neighbors as we do our best to cope with this crisis. We degrade our witness when we allow Catholic schools to be used in a propaganda campaign against public services—or against an honest reckoning with the facts. As the 2020 election approaches, conservatives are eager to exploit the Catholic school success story to advance the claim—let’s call it what it is, a conspiracy theory—that liberals are dishonestly playing up the threat of COVID-19 to make President Donald Trump look bad.

The truth is, my kids and their schoolmates are part of a broad experiment to find out whether masks and distancing and all the other safeguards in place are enough to prevent the spread of the virus. All of us, public and private, parents, teachers, and administrators, are looking for the best way forward in a highly unstable situation. That situation is not the fault of teachers’ unions, or lazy public-school janitors, or even (despite his many sins) Bill de Blasio. It is a direct consequence of the reprehensible failure of the Trump administration to protect Americans from COVID-19. We are all still scrambling, months after schools first shut down in March, because we have inadequate testing and tracing, no national recovery plan, and a president who undermines public trust and sneers at his opponent for wearing a mask. The real scandal we’re all facing isn’t the lack of a functional school system. It’s the lack of a functional federal government.

Categories Catholic Schools, Competition, Education Reform, Inequity, New York City

Washington Post: Trump’s Coronavirus Task Force Squabbles Over Direction

By dianeravitch
October 20, 2020 //
45

Trump saw Dr. Scott Atlas on FOX News and decided to bring him onto the administration’s coronavirus task force. Since Atlas’s arrival, the task force has been riven with dissent. Drs. Birk and Fauci have fallen out of favor. Atlas has been accused of favoring “herd immunity,” which he denies. But he is close to Trump, and Trump listens to his advice.

As summer faded into autumn and the novel coronavirus continued to ravage the nation unabated, Scott Atlas, a neuroradiologist whose commentary on Fox News led President Trump to recruit him to the White House, consolidated his power over the government’s pandemic response.

Atlas shot down attempts to expand testing. He openly feuded with other doctors on the coronavirus task force and succeeded in largely sidelining them. He advanced fringe theories, such as that social distancing and mask-wearing were meaningless and would not have changed the course of the virus in several hard-hit areas. And he advocated allowing infections to spread naturally among most of the population while protecting the most vulnerable and those in nursing homes until the United States reaches herd immunity, which experts say would cause excess deaths, according to three current and former senior administration officials.

Atlas also cultivated Trump’s affection with his public assertions that the pandemic is nearly over, despite death and infection counts showing otherwise, and his willingness to tell the public that a vaccine could be developed before the Nov. 3 election, despite clear indications of a slower timetable.

Atlas’s ascendancy was apparent during a recent Oval Office meeting. After Trump left the room, Atlas startled other aides by walking behind the Resolute Desk and occupying the president’s personal space to keep the meeting going, according to one senior administration official. Atlas called this account “false and laughable.”

Discord on the coronavirus task force has worsened since the arrival in late summer of Atlas, whom colleagues said they regard as ill-informed, manipulative and at times dishonest. As the White House coronavirus response coordinator, Deborah Birx is tasked with collecting and analyzing infection data and compiling charts detailing upticks and other trends. But Atlas routinely has challenged Birx’s analysis and those of other doctors, including Anthony S. Fauci, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield, and Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Stephen Hahn, with what the other doctors considered junk science, according to three senior administration officials.

Birx recently confronted the office of Vice President Pence, who chairs the task force, about the acrimony, according to two people familiar with the meeting. Birx, whose profile and influence has eroded considerably since Atlas’s arrival, told Pence’s office that she does not trust Atlas, does not believe he is giving Trump sound advice and wants him removed from the task force, the two people said.

In one recent encounter, Pence did not take sides between Atlas and Birx, but rather told them to bring data bolstering their perspectives to the task force and to work out their disagreements themselves, according to two senior administration officials.

The result has been a U.S. response increasingly plagued by distrust, infighting and lethargy, just as experts predict coronavirus cases could surge this winter and deaths could reach 400,000 by year’s end.

This assessment is based on interviews with 41 administration officials, advisers to the president, public health leaders and other people with knowledge of internal government deliberations, some of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to provide candid assessments or confidential information.

Atlas defended his views and conduct in a series of statements sent through a spokesperson and condemned The Washington Post’s reporting as “another story filled with overt lies and distortions to undermine the President and the expert advice he is being given.”

Atlas said he has always stressed “all appropriate mitigation measures to save lives,” and he responded to accounts of dissent on the task force by saying, “Any policy discussion where data isn’t being challenged isn’t a policy discussion.”

On the issue of herd immunity, Atlas said, “We emphatically deny that the White House, the President, the Administration, or anyone advising the President has pursued or advocated for a wide-open strategy of achieving herd immunity by letting the infection proceed through the community.”

The doctor’s denial conflicts with his previous public and private statements, including his recent endorsement of the “Great Barrington Declaration,” which effectively promotes a herd immunity strategy.

On Saturday, Atlas wrote on Twitter that masks do not work, prompting the social media site to remove the tweet for violating its safety rules for spreading misinformation. Several medical and public health experts flagged the tweet as dangerous misinformation coming from a primary adviser to the president.

“Masks work? NO,” Atlas wrote in the tweet, followed by other misrepresentations about the science behind masks. He linked to an article from the American Institute for Economic Research — a libertarian think tank behind the Barrington effort — that argued against masks and dismissed the threat of the virus as overblown.

Trump and many of his advisers have come to believe that the key to a revived economy and a return to normality is a vaccine.

“They’ve given up on everything else,” said a senior administration official involved in the pandemic response. “It’s too hard of a slog.”

Infectious-disease and other public health experts said the friction inside the White House has impaired the government’s response.

“It seems to me this is policy-based evidence-making rather than evidence-based policymaking,” said Marc Lipsitch, director of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “In other words, if your goal is to do nothing, then you create a situation in which it looks okay to do nothing [and] you find some experts to make it complicated.”

These days, the task force is dormant relative to its robust activity earlier in the pandemic. Fauci, Birx, Surgeon General Jerome Adams and other members have confided in others that they are dispirited.

Birx and Fauci have advocated dramatically increasing the nation’s testing capacity, especially as experts anticipate a devastating increase in cases this winter. They have urged the government to use unspent money Congress allocated for testing — which amounts to $9 billion, according to a Democratic Senate appropriations aide — so that anyone who needs to can get a test with results returned quickly.

But Atlas, who is opposed to surveillance testing, has repeatedly quashed these proposals. He has argued that young and healthy people do not need to get tested and that testing resources should be allocated to nursing homes and other vulnerable places, such as prisons and meatpacking plants.

White House spokeswoman Sarah Matthews defended Trump and the administration’s management of the crisis.

“President Trump has always listened to the advice of his top public health experts, who have diverse areas of expertise,” Matthews said in a statement. “The President always puts the well-being of the American people first as evidenced by the many bold, data-driven decisions he has made to save millions of lives. Because of his strong leadership, our country can safely reopen with adequate PPE, treatments, and vaccines developed in record time.”

Yet 10 months into a public health crisis that has claimed the lives of more than 219,000 people in the United States — a far higher death toll than any other nation has reported — a consensus has formed within the administration that some measures to mitigate the spread of the virus may not be worth the trouble.

The president gave voice to this mind-set during an NBC News town hall Thursday night, when he declined to answer whether he supported herd immunity. “The cure cannot be worse than the problem itself,” Trump told host Savannah Guthrie.

But medical experts disagreed, saying it is dangerous for government leaders to advocate herd immunity or oppose interventions.

“We’d be foolish to reenter a situation where we know what to do and we’re not doing it,” said Rochelle Walensky, chief of the division of infectious diseases at Massachusetts General Hospital and a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. “This thing can take off. All you need to do is look at what’s happened at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue over the last two weeks to see that this thing is way faster than we’re giving it credit for.”

After Trump came home from the hospital this month, he all but promised Americans that they could soon be cured from the coronavirus just as he claimed to have been. In a video taped at the White House on Oct. 5, he vowed, “The vaccines are coming momentarily.”

Then, at a rally last Tuesday night in Johnstown, Pa., Trump told supporters, “The vaccines are coming soon, the therapeutics and, frankly, the cure. All I know is I took something, whatever the hell it was. I felt good very quickly . . . I felt like Superman.”

Trump’s miraculous timeline has run headlong into reality, however. On the same day that he declared “the cure” was near, Johnson & Johnson became the second pharmaceutical giant, after AstraZeneca, to halt its vaccine trial. A third trial, a government-run test of a monoclonal antibody manufactured by Eli Lilly & Co., was also paused. Each move was prompted by safety concerns.

And on Friday, Pfizer said it will not be able to seek an emergency use authorization from the FDA until the third week of November, at the earliest, seemingly making a vaccine before Election Day all but impossible.

Trump’s notion of a vaccine as a cure-all for the pandemic is similarly miraculous, according to medical experts.

“The vaccines, although they’re wonderful, are not going to make the virus magically disappear,” said Tom Frieden, a former CDC director who is president of Resolve to Save Lives. “There’s no fairy-tale ending to this pandemic. We’re going to be dealing with it at least through 2021, and it’s likely to have implications for how we do everything from work to school, even with vaccines.”

Frieden added: “Remember, we have vaccines against the flu, and we still have flu.”

The article goes on to describe the pressure that Trump and his chief of staff Mark Meadows are putting on the CDC, the FDA, and the NIH to accelerate the approval of a vaccine before November 3, election day. Pence has been assigned the job of smooth-talking the governors and assuring them that a vaccination will soon be available. Meanwhile, the politicization of the vaccine approval process has caused a decline in the proportion of the public that is willing to take a new vaccine if it becomes available.

Trump and his close advisor Scott Atlas have pointed to the Great Barrington Declaration as evidence for their views; it was allegedly signed by 15,000 scientists. However, the Daily Beast was able to scrutinize some of the signers, and among them were obviously fake names.

The White House has reportedly embraced a declaration by a group of scientists arguing for a “herd immunity” strategy to deal with America’s coronavirus pandemic—days after the validity of the declaration came under question due to a number of apparently fake names among its expert signatories, including “Dr. Johnny Bananas.” According to The New York Times, on a call convened Monday by the White House, two anonymous administration officials cited the petition, titled The Great Barrington Declaration, which argues that COVID-19 should be allowed to spread through the population. The declaration’s website claims the petition has been signed by more than 15,000 scientists, but, last week, Sky News found dozens of fake names on the list of medical signatories, including Dr. I.P. Freely, Dr. Person Fakename, and Dr. Johnny Bananas.

Categories Accountability, Health, Science, Trump

Brookings: What Happens if the Supreme Court Overturns Obamacare?

By dianeravitch
October 20, 2020 //
26

Christen Linke Young explains what would happen if the U.S. Supreme Court strikes down the Affordable Care Act (aka ACA or Obamacare): chaos.

The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments about the future of ACA on November 10. The Republican-controlled Senate is rushing through the confirmation vote on Judge Amy Coney Barrett so that she can be seated before the election. Her writings indicate that she will vote to overturn the ACA.

Young writes:

If the Court strikes down the ACA in its entirety, 20 million people would lose health insurance, a variety of protections for people with pre-existing conditions would be eliminated, and an extensive set of policies affecting Medicare, Medicaid, prescriptions drugs, and other parts of the health care system would be reversed.  Significant attention has been paid to the policy changes that elimination of the ACA would bring when fully implemented, but there has been more limited analysis of how health care stakeholders would cope with the sudden elimination of myriad ACA provisions in the short-term. This piece considers some of the major changes (outside the private insurance market) that would follow in the wake of Supreme Court decision eliminating the ACA and concludes that implementation is likely to be quite chaotic. While Congress could in theory ameliorate some of this chaos by quickly enacting legislation, the political trajectory of the ACA to-date does little to inspire confidence that such action would be forthcoming.

To begin with, she writes, there would be a “payment paralysis” in Medicare.

The ACA made many changes to Medicare, generally designed to reduce unnecessary spending and improve quality of care.  Those new rules are fully “baked in” to Medicare’s policies for making $800 billion in annual payments.  In many instances turning off these ACA provisions would not be straightforward and would require the federal government to conduct a careful legal analysis to understand what the statute requires once the ACA provision is removed. This undertaking would be particularly complex in instances where Congress has passed legislation since 2010 that either amended or presupposed the existence of an ACA provision. It would often raise novel questions of statutory interpretation, which would likely spur additional litigation given the financial stakes involved. These problems would play out in a range of concrete settings:

  • Health care providers and health insurers would face tremendous uncertainty in payments. The ACA made changes to how traditional Medicare pays virtually every category of health care provider, including hospitals, physicians, skilled nursing facilities, and many others, as well as major changes to how Medicare pays private Medicare Advantage plans. Reverting Medicare’s payment rules to a pre-ACA state would require revisiting dozens or even hundreds of policy choices the agency has made since 2010, which would likely take months or years. It might be particularly difficult to determine how Medicare should make payments to physicians since the 2015 Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act made significant changes to how Medicare pays physicians presupposed the existence of a number of ACA policies. It is unclear how CMS would make payments to providers and insurers while this process was ongoing, as it would face a choice between failing to make timely payments or making payments inconsistent with the law.
  • Re-opening the Medicare “donut hole” would be chaotic for insurance companies, drug manufacturers, pharmacies – and consumers. The ACA closed the Medicare Part D “donut hole.” In doing so, it required drug manufacturers to offer discounts for certain prescriptions to plans and changed the cost-sharing plans could charge enrollees. In the aftermath of a decision to eliminate the ACA, those manufacturer discounts might immediately end, and it would be unclear what beneficiaries in a newly reopened donut hole should be charged when filling prescriptions.  Nor would it be clear how to interpret many existing contracts that assumed ACA policy was in effect.  The agency would also need to determine how to interpret a 2018 law that made modifications to this ACA provision, which could generate additional litigation.
  • Health care systems that have invested in Accountable Care Organizations would face significant additional uncertainty.Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) deliver care for about a quarter of Medicare beneficiaries, but all existing ACO payment models derive from the ACA. ACOs have made significant investments in redesigning care on the assumption that they could receive incentive payments if they met certain standards for the quality and efficiency of the care they delivered.  The federal government might attempt to resurrect some aspects of ACO models under non-ACA authorities, but its success is likely to be limited, and the scope of any new program will be quite uncertain as policy is developed, likely for years.  There would also be considerable uncertainty about how ACOs that had already signed contracts with CMS would be treated if the legal authority undergirding those agreements vanished.
  • Medicare’s authority for a variety of other demonstrations and quality improvement projects would be eliminated, disrupting all the payment streams impacted by those projects. As just one example, the Innovation Center’s Comprehensive Primary Care Initiative (one of about 50 active Innovation Center projects), has more than 3000 participating providersacross the country. As with ACO payment models, federal agencies might be able to resurrect portions of these initiatives using non-ACA authorities but doing so would be complex and time consuming. In the meantime, many of the payment changes bound up in these complex projects would need to be undone, impacting a wide variety of types of health care providers in uncertain ways.
  • The Medicare Hospital Insurance Trust Fund would face insolvency far sooner, and there would be significant uncertainty about when. Elimination of the ACA would eliminate taxes on high income household’s investment earnings that support the Medicare Hospital Insurance Trust Fund and require Medicare to pay more to insurance companies and providers, accelerating the insolvency of the trust fund, already projected for 2024. Some of these changes could also be retroactive, with insurance companies, providers, and high-income taxpayers seeking compensation (through the agencies, or through the courts) for past years. Therefore, the magnitude of the near-term impact on the Trust Fund is difficult to predict and might be affected by subsequent litigation.

And that is only the beginning of the problems that would be caused by tossing out a government health insurance plan that currently protects 20 million people. Read the whole essay.

Categories Education Reform, Health, Trump

Stephen Dyer Evaluates Flawed Fordham Charter Report

By dianeravitch
October 20, 2020 //
17

The Thomas B. Fordham Institute released a report on Ohio charters, claiming that they were very successful. (TBF is a rightwing organization that supports charters and vouchers.) The Columbus Dispatch wrote that the report demonstrated that charter schools in Ohio are more successful than the state’s public schools. But Stephen Dyer reviewed the report and concluded that its findings are based on cherrypicking schools and manipulating data. In fact, he writes, Ohio’s charter sector continues to be low-performing compared to the state’s public schools, whose students lose funding to charters. The state has recently taken almost $900 million annually from its public schools to pay for a mediocre charter sector.

Dyer is a former state legislator who has written often about the charter industry. He is now Director of Government Relations, Communications and Marketing at the Ohio Education Association. (I served on the board of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation/Institute from 1998-2009).

He writes:

Fordham Strikes Again

Cherry picking schools; manipulating data; grasping at straws

Look, the Fordham Institute has been improving lately, calling for more charter school oversight and talking a good game. But I guess sometimes old habits die hard, and in Ohio – the cradle of the for-profit charter school movement – those habits tend to linger especially long.

Take the group’s latest report – The Impact of Ohio Charter Schools on Student Outcomes, 2016-2019 – is yet another attempt to make Ohio’s famously poor performing charter school sector seem not quite as bad (though I give them kudos for admitting the obvious – that for-profit operators don’t do a good job educating kids and we need continued tougher oversight of the sector).

But folks, really. On the whole, Ohio charter schools are not very good. For example, of all the potential A-F grades charters could have received since that system was adopted in the 2012-2013 school year, Ohio charter schools have received more Fs than all other grades combined.

So how could the Fordham report claim, as the Columbus Dispatch headline writers put it: “Students at Ohio charter schools show greater academic gains”?

Simple.

Fordham ignored all but a fraction of the Ohio charter schools in operation during the FY16-FY19 school years, including Ohio’s scandalously poor performing e-schools (yes, ECOT was still running then), the state’s nationally embarrassing dropout recovery charter schools (which have difficulty graduating even 10 percent of their students in 8 years), and the state’s special education schools – some of whom have been cited for habitually billing taxpayers for students they never had.

In other words, they only looked at the best possible charter clusters in the state. And even though they essentially ignored the worst actors in the state (effectively ignoring how more than ½ of all charter students perform), the “performance gains” they point to are not impressive.

For example, “Students attending charter schools from grades 4 to 8 improved from the 30th percentile on state math and English language arts exams to about the 40th percentile. High school students showed little or no gains on end-of-course exams.”

Really? A not-even-10-percentile improvement? And none in high school? That’s it?

How about this: “Attending a charter school in high school had no impact on the likelihood a student would receive a diploma.”

So we spend $828 million a year sending state money to charters that could go to kids in local public schools to have literally zero impact on attaining a diploma?

Egad.

Another problem: the report says charter students have better attendance rates. No word on whether the fact all charter students must be bused by local school districts, which in turn don’t have to bus district students, had any impact on that metric.

(Hint: it does.)

The report found better performance from charter students in at least one of the math or English standardized tests in 5 of Ohio’s 8 major urban districts (Akron, Canton, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Dayton, Toledo and Youngstown). Only in Columbus did they outperform the district in both reading and math.

The report ignores that ECOT took more kids from Columbus in these years than any other charter school in Columbus. And, of course, those kids did far worse than Columbus students.

But even cherry picking students. And data. And methodology, Fordham only found slightly better performance in one of two tests the study examined (again, Ohio requires tests in many subjects, but I digress) in 5 urban districts, better performance in both tests in 1 and no better performance in Cincinnati and Toledo, which lost about $500 million in state revenue to charters during these 4 years the study examined.

Of course, the study also ignored that about ½ of all charter school students do NOT come from the major urban districts, including large percentages of students in many of the brick and mortar schools Fordham examined for this study. For example, about 30 percent of Breakthrough Schools students in Cleveland don’t come from Cleveland. Yet Breakthrough’s performance is always only compared with Cleveland.

Ohio charter school performance isn’t complicated. Overall, it’s really not good, especially when you look at the approximately 50 percent of students who attend online, dropout recovery or special needs schools. Are there exceptions? Of course. But here’s what the most recent data tell us:

  • More than 34% of Ohio public school graduates have a college degree within 6 years. Just 12.7% of charter school graduates do
  • More than 58% of Ohio public school graduates are enrolled in college within two years; only 37.2% of Ohio charter school graduates are.

Why is this important? Because if charter schools performed the same as Ohio’s public schools, 750 more charter school students would have college degrees. Why does that matter? Because a college degree will allow you to make about $1 million more during your lifetime than not having it. So it can be said that Ohio charter schools are costing Ohioans about $750 million in potential earnings, just from one class of students!

Some more:

  • The average dropout recovery charter school has less than 0.5% of its students earning an industry recognized credential within 9 years and less than 0.2% of those students earn at least 3 dual enrollment credits within 4 years.
  • In 52 of the state’s 68 dropout recovery charter schools, no kids earned at least 3 dual enrollment credits within 4 years
  • In 33 of the state’s 68 dropout recovery charter schools, no kids earned an industry recognized credential within 9 years!
  • In more than 1 in 5 Ohio charter schools, more than 15% of their teachers teach outside their accredited subjects
  • The median percentage of inexperienced teachers in Ohio charter schools is 34.1%. The median in an Ohio public school building is 6%.

During the time period this report examined, nearly $4 billion in state money was transferred from kids in local public school districts to Ohio’s privately run charter schools. And even if you look at the very best slice of the mud pie that is Ohio’s charter school sector, you get perhaps modest gains – not even 10 percentiles worth though – in a few of the schools.

But that didn’t stop Fordham from excitedly declaring at the beginning of its report that this study demonstrates that “Ohio’s brick-and-mortar charters have proven themselves capable of providing quality options—and it’s time to give families across the state similar opportunities.” Or that “high-quality” charters should be expanded.

One more dirty little secret about “high-quality” charters? Historically, the “high-quality” school buildings in Ohio’s major urban districts actually outperform the “high-quality” charter schools in those districts.

So maybe the answer, especially during this pandemic, is expanding “high-quality” local public school buildings, or investing at least some of the $828 million currently being sent to Ohio’s mostly poor performing charter schools back to local public schools so they have a better shot at being dubbed “high quality”, thereby expanding the number of “high-quality” options for students?

Just a thought…

Categories Charter Schools, Education Reform, Ohio, Research, School Choice
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