From now until February 1, Cambridge University Press is offering free access to the top ten articles that have appeared in the History of Education Quarterly, following a poll of its members. These articles are drawn from sixty volumes of HEQ. Take a look. As Jack Schneider, the editor of the HEQ, and I would attest, the study of the history of education is fascinating.
Archives for the month of: January, 2021
This is an informative interview of Nancy Pelosi by Lesley Stahl.
During the riot, her staff locked themselves in one of the rooms in her office and hid under a table, fearful for their lives.
Pelosi showed the damage done to her office.
Good Jobs First has studied the distribution of COVID relief funds in depth. It created a site called COVID Stimulus Watch. It published an article about the depth of corruption in the Trump administration, which distributed COVID relief funds.
In this post, the researchers at Good Jobs First reveal the federal funding in the Paycheck Protection Program for all 50 states, distributed to charter schools, religious schools, and private schools.
As you review the funding for your own state, please bear in mind that public schools received an average of $134,500 each. Also, public schools were not allowed to apply for PPP funding. Charter schools were, however, allowed to get a portion of the public school funding and then to apply for PPP funding as if they were small businesses.
Check out your own state. You will find that elite private schools with high tuition and large endowments received grants that often were millions of dollars.
The Washington Post just reported that the FBI had advance warning of the violence on January 6 from one of its offices in Norfolk, Virginia.
A day before rioters stormed Congress, an FBI office in Virginia issued an explicit internal warning that extremists were preparing to travel to Washington to commit violence and “war,” according to an internal document reviewed by The Washington Post that contradicts a senior official’s declaration the bureau had no intelligence indicating anyone at last week’s pro-Trump protest planned to do harm.
A situational information report approved for release the day before the U.S. Capitol riot painted a dire portrait of dangerous plans, including individuals sharing a map of the complex’s tunnels, and possible rally points for would-be conspirators to meet up in Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and South Carolina and head in groups to Washington.
“As of 5 January 2021, FBI Norfolk received information indicating calls for violence in response to ‘unlawful lockdowns’ to begin on 6 January 2021 in Washington. D.C.,” the document says. “An online thread discussed specific calls for violence to include stating ‘Be ready to fight. Congress needs to hear glass breaking, doors being kicked in, and blood from their BLM and Pantifa slave soldiers being spilled. Get violent. Stop calling this a march, or rally, or a protest. Go there ready for war. We get our President or we die. NOTHING else will achieve this goal.”
BLM is likely a reference to the Black Lives Matter movement for racial justice. Pantifa is a derogatory term for antifa, a far-left anti-fascist movement whose adherents sometimes engage in violent clashes with right-wing extremists.
Yet even with that information in hand, the report’s unidentified author expressed concern that the FBI might be encroaching on free speech rights.
The warning is the starkest evidence yet of the sizable intelligence failure that preceded the mayhem, which claimed the lives of five people, although one law enforcement official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to avoid disciplinary action, said the failure was not one of intelligence but of acting on the intelligence.
An FBI official familiar with the document said that within 45 minutes of learning about the alarming online conversation, the Norfolk FBI office wrote the report and shared it with others within the bureau. It was not immediately clear how many law enforcement agencies outside the FBI were told, but the information was briefed to FBI officials at the bureau’s Washington field office the day before the attack, this official said.
Ed Johnson, fearless advocate for public schools in Atlanta, obtained a list of the charter schools in that city that received Paycheck Protection Program funding from the first CARES Act. Public schools were not allowed to apply for PPP funding. But charters were, because…they are not public schools!
After reviewing the millions in CARES money that went to Atlanta charters, Ed Johnson wrote to members of the Atlanta Board of Education:
Atlanta Board of Education members:
Some of you are, of course, pro-school choice and pro-charter school, thus serving contrary to your sworn Oath of Office vis-à-vis the Charter of the Atlanta Independent School System.
Nonetheless, hopefully all of you now know and understand the truth that charter schools in Atlanta are not Atlanta public schools, to wit:
Thus:
· Public schools must be spoken truthfully of as public schools, and as public goods.
· Charter schools must be spoken truthfully of as charter schools, and as private businesses and corporations.
· Partner schools must be spoken truthfully of as partner schools, and as public schools the Board outsourced to private businesses and corporations.
Just three types of school, thank you.
Ed Johnson
Advocate for Quality in Public Education
Atlanta GA | (404) 505-8176 | edwjohnson@aol.com
As noted in the link in Mr. Johnson’s letter, here are a few of the big winners of federal dollars (they also received a proportionate share of the meager dollars allotted to public schools, so they were double-dipping in both funds):
- Purpose Built Schools Atlanta, Inc., received a PPP loan in the amount of $4,822,200.00, based on the business needing to protect 408 reported jobs, which figures to $11,819.12 per reported job. SBA reported the business as being located at 1670 Benjamin Weldon Bickers Drive SE, Atlanta, GA 30315.
- Form-990 #employed (#volunteers): 2018, 395 (1). 2017: 241 (2). 2016: 118 (2).
- Drew Charter School, Inc., received a PPP loan in the amount of $4,039,752.60, based on the business needing to protect 279 reported jobs, which figures to $14,479.40 per reported job. SBA reported the business as being located at 301 East Boulevard, Atlanta, GA 30317.
- Form-990 # employed (volunteers): 2017: 354 (356). 2016: 346 (327). 2015: 280 (220).
- Educational Holdings Foundation Inc
- Form-990 #employed (#volunteers): 2019: 0 (3). 2018: 0 (3). 2017: 0 (7).
- The Kindezi Schools Atlanta, LLC, received a PPP loan in the amount of $3,855,982.00, based on the business needing to protect 300 reported jobs, which figures to $12,853.27 per reported job. SBA reported the business as being located at 950 Joseph E Lowery Blvd, Atlanta, GA 30318.
- Form-990 #employed (#volunteers): 2017: 391 (50). 2016: 268 (50). 2015: 298 (50).
- Atlanta Neighborhood Charter School, Inc., received a PPP loan in the amount of $1,850,000.00, based on the business needing to protect 120 reported jobs, which figures to $15,416.67 per reported job. SBA reported the business as being located at 688 Grant St SE, Atlanta, GA 30315.
- Form-990 #employed (#volunteers): 2018: 173 (75). 2017: 171 (200). 2016: 158 (200).
Unlike small businesses which lost revenue and were forced to lay off employees or close their doors, charter schools never lost revenue during the pandemic. Their stream of government revenue never was cut off. Meanwhile, as they sucked up CARES dollars, hundreds of thousands of small businesses that needed the money went bankrupt and closed forever.
No public school received this large amount of money. The average public school received $134,500 in federal aid in the first CARES Act.
Consider what might have happened on January 6, 2021, if the members of the House and Senate had not been evacuated in time.
A CNN documentary on Sunday night (“The Trump Insurrection”) showed how close their escape was, as does this timeline in the New York Times. The Senate and House were both in session as the mob was battling the police inside the building. The Senate seems to have been moved first. The mob was trying to break through the doors of the House of Representatives while members were still on the second floor gallery. They were sheltering under their desks, lying on the floor, wearing gas masks, aware that the terrorists were trying to smash through the doors. The members seem to have gotten out only seconds or minutes before the terrorists broke in.
What if the terrorists had broken into the chambers while the members were still huddled on the floor? How many would have been taken hostage? How many would have been killed by the mob? Would Nancy Pelosi have been beheaded on national television? When you see the intensity of the mob, none of this seems unlikely. They were raging for blood. They chanted “Hang Mike Pence!” They wanted Pelosi. They wanted the House leaders. They wanted to capture and eliminate the leadership of the Congress.
White House aides said that Trump watched the spectacle with “enthusiasm.” He loves chaos and he got what he wanted. When he spoke of “American Carnage” in his inaugural address in 2017, we did not know it was a prediction of what he would create. When Trump was finally persuaded by his aides to tell his mob to go home, he added, “I love you. You are very special.” Not exactly discouraging words to a bloodthirsty mob.
Dozens of Capitol Police officers were injured. Two died, one when he was hit over the head with a fire extinguisher, the other by suicide. So far, the death toll is six. Will anyone be held accountable for this failed coup?
One Capitol Police officer, Eugene Goodman, has been hailed as a hero. He single-handly misdirected an angry mob away from the entrance to the Senate Chamber and led them up the stairs where reinforcements were waiting. His timely action may have saved the lives of the Senators.
Despite the mob violence, Senator Ted Cruz and Senator Josh Hawley emerged from their hiding places, along with several Senate colleagues, to vote against certifying the Electoral College count for Biden. They continued to peddle Trump’s Big Lie about voter fraud, knowing full well that it was a lie. Surely they did not believe that hard-right Republican governors like Doug Ducey of Arizona and Brian Kemp of Georgia “rigged” the vote for Biden. If Democrats were so successful at “rigging” the vote for president, why were they unsuccessful at doing the same for Senate seats? It defies the imagination. Cruz and Hawley are trying to draw support from the Trump world of the deluded and the gullible. Trump’s bottom line has been consistent since he starting running for president: If he lost the election, it was “rigged.” If he won, it was not “rigged.”
Was there a larger plot? Were members of the Trump administration or others complicit? We must wait for a thorough investigation before we can know the answers to those questions.
Well, that didn’t take long!
The Biden administration has selected a TFA person for one of the plum jobs in the White House.
At least half a dozen individuals recently appointed to positions in the White House include those with teaching experience and others who have worked with education-focused organizations. While several have most recently worked on the Biden-Harris campaign — and didn’t necessarily jump straight from the classroom into government — they’ll still have direct knowledge of issues that matter to both teachers and parents.
The incoming White House staff, for example, includes Kaitlyn Hobbs Demers, who taught fifth grade in the Gwinnett County Public Schools in Georgia and spent 2013 and 2014 advising Teach for America “corps members” and interviewing future candidates. Demers has been appointed special assistant to the president and chief of staff for the Office of Legislative Affairs.
The director of policy at DFER (Democrats for Education Reform), which consists of hedge funders who oppose teacher tenure and advocate for high-stakes testing, expressed his pleasure at the appointment.
I wonder if the Bidens know that TFA is a favorite recipient of gifts from the anti-union, anti-public school Walton Family Foundation.
Jan Resseger writes here about the absurdity of the demand by major editorial boards (the New York Times and the Washington Post) to resume standardized testing.
Under normal circumstances, without a pandemic, the tests are useless. As I have written before (and Jan quotes in her article), the tests do not provide teachers or parents with timely or useful information about students’ progress, as the editorial writers wrongly assume. The teachers typically are not allowed to see the questions on the tests, they are never allowed to discuss them with students or other teachers, and they never see how their own students responded (rightly or wrongly) to specific questions. The scores are reported 4-6 months after the tests were given. The scores become a way to tell students how they ranked, but not what they need to learn. They serve no diagnostic purpose. Imagine going to your doctor with a sharp pain in your stomach, taking a battery of tests, then learning that you will get the results in 4-6 months, but no prescriptions since you are not permitted to know how you did on the tests, just how you did in comparison to others of your age and weight.
Resseger writes that if parents want to know how their child is doing, they should rely on the professional teachers who see them every day:
The Post would appear to trust big data and distrust educational professionals. As soon as schools can be opened in person, professionally educated and prepared teachers and public school staff will be assessing what students need, adapting curricula accordingly, and helping parents support their children’s learning. Teachers have been doing their best throughout this school year to meet children’s and parents’ needs, although the disruption of switching back and forth from online to in-person to on-line learning as COVID-19 infections have surged and abated and surged has made the year chaotic for families and for educators.
The standardized tests will tell the public what it already knows. Students in affluent districts will have higher scores than students who live in under-resourced districts. The scores will be highly correlated with family income.
Resseger writes:
Injustice in American public education has been defined for generations by what Jonathan Kozol in 1991 described as Savage Inequalities in investment between wealthy and poor school districts. Programs like the federal Title I program for compensatory funding for schools serving concentrations of poor children as well the states’ school funding distribution formulas are intended, despite their inadequacy, to invest federal and state dollars in the school districts lacking local property taxing capacity. Inequities will persist until our society finds a way, in the poorest school districts, to invest in pre-Kindergarten and wraparound Community Schools; small classes; plenty of counselors, nurses and librarians; and the kind of curricular enrichment children in wealthy exurbs take for granted.
This COVID-19 year is an excellent time for the federal government to invest in educational equity and to incentivize states to increase their investments in the poorest school districts. It is a bad time to relaunch the failed high-stakes testing regime of No Child Left Behind and the Every Student Succeeds Act.
Major newspaper editorial boards love standardized testing. They write from a position of complete ignorance of how useless these tests are and how little information of value they produce. Recently the New York Times came out in favor of resuming the spring tests–even though the scores won’t be returned for several months–and now the Washington Post has endorsed the annual testing.
Peter Greene explains why they are wrong. If parents want to know how their children are doing, they should ask their children’s teachers. They know far more than a standardized test will show and can answer without waiting for six months.
This article in Mashable contains a gripping video in which Arnold Schwarzenegger compares the Trump coup attempt to Kristallnacht, “the Night of Broken Glass.” He remembers his childhood, surrounded by broken men, swept up and destroyed by the powerful men who ruled their society.
Diane Ravitch's blog 