Archives for the month of: February, 2021

The Terror of the Impeachment Trial

February 11, 2021 //

I was glued to the television yesterday, watching the impeachment trial in the Senate.

It’s supposed to be a done deal: the Republicans are so frightened by Trump and his base that only a handful will vote to convict. It seems he will not be held accountable for inciting a violent mob to invade the U.S. Capitol.

The impeachment managers methodically described how Trump had prepared his base long before the election to believe that it would be rigged, unless he won. After the election, he said louder and louder that the election had been stolen, that it was rigged, that he had won in a landslide. He whipped his followers up to a frenzy of rage. After he lost the Electoral College, he stepped up his efforts to reverse the results, putting pressure on state legislators.

Finally, he bullied Vice President Mike Pence, trying to compel him to refuse to certify the votes on January 6. But Pence knew the Constitution did not give him that power, and he refused to do what Trump wanted.

Trump had one last ploy. He called his base to come to D.C. to “stop the steal.” He held a rally and urged his followers to March to the Capitol and “fight like Hell” to stop the Electoral count.

We all know what happened next. An enraged mob overran the Capitol Police, and went hunting for their enemies, especially Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi. They set up a scaffold with a noose to hang Pence. They chanted “hang Mike Pence,” and “get Nancy,” “where’s Nancy.” They ransacked her office while her staff hid.

What we saw was how close the mob came to meeting their goals. The mob breached the building and surged in while both Houses of Congress were in session. The speakers showed with graphic detail how close the mob came to breaking into the Congress and confronting their targets. At one point, the mob was very close to Pence and his family. At one point, Senator Romney was walking towards the incoming mob, but was turned away by an alert Capitol Policeman, Eugene Goodman. Officer Goodman then led the mob away from the Senate while it was still in session.

Our democracy hung in the balance. The mob came within minutes of breaking into both chambers. They could have assassinated Pence, Pelosi, and others. Some had baseball bats, some had stun guns, some were equipped with flex cuffs, ready to take hostages. The mob brutally attacked Capitol Police officers, beating them with bats, clubs, even the poles attached to American flags. The terrorists were in a hot fury.

For many members of Congress, this might have been the first time they saw a complete video of what was happening while they were in seclusion.

It is astonishing that any Senator watched the proceedings and concluded that Trump was not responsible and that the events of the day were no big deal.

January 6 was one of the worst days in our history. It will live in infamy.

Categories Accountability, Elections, Pence, Trump

Jan Resseger: Republican Moderates Want to Reduce COVID Relief Bill by Cutting Out Help for Children

By dianeravitch

February 10, 2021 //

Jan Resseger reminds us of the traditional Masai greeting, “How are the children?” The assumption is that if the children are well, the village or society is well. Many of our children are not well. Too many live in poverty and lack adequate nutrition, decent medical care, and a safe place to live.

Sadly, as Jan explains, the Republican moderates who asked Biden to cut his COVID relief package focused their cuts on aid to children.

She begins:

This week a group of so-called moderate U.S. Senate Republicans proposed to negotiate with President Joe Biden about his proposed $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan stimulus bill. But even the ten senators, who profess themselves to be moderates and who came forward with a $618 billion alternative proposal, proved themselves willing to neglect the needs of America’s children. The United States, the world’s richest nation, posts an alarming child poverty rate, but, apart from the voices of a handful of social justice advocates, any level of concern about child poverty is inaudible. Hardly anybody seems to have noticed that one of the great strengths of Biden’s American Rescue Plan is the President’s inclusion of funding for programs that would significantly ameliorate suffering among America’s poorest children.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities’ Chuck Marr did recently recognize the significanceof the pro-child provisions in Biden’s new American Rescue Plan: “President Biden’s $1.9 trillion emergency relief plan includes a Child Tax Credit expansion that would lift 9.9 million children above or closer to the poverty line, including 2.3 million Black children, 4.1 million Latino children, and 441,000 Asian American children. It also would lift 1.1 million children out of ‘deep poverty,’ raising their family incomes above 50 percent of the poverty line. To do that, the Biden plan would make the credit fully available to 27 million children—including roughly half of all Black and Latino children—whose families now don’t get the full credit because their parents don’t earn enough….”

Do Republicans not care about our children? Why is military spending more desirable than spending to save the lives of the neediest and most helpless?

Everyone should read The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger, which demonstrates that societies are happier when there is more equality.

Categories Budget Cuts, Childhood, Equity, Funding, Health

Why Does the Thomas B. Fordham Institute Control Education Policy in Ohio?

By dianeravitch

February 10, 2021 //

Writing in ohiocapital.com, Jeanne Melvin and Denis Smith denounced the central role that the Thomas B. Fordham Institute plays in directing education policy in Ohio. TBF is the think tank of the Ohio Republican Party; that party has controlled the state in recent years. It is curious that TBF directs education policy in Ohio since TBF is based in Washington, D.C.

Melvin is a parent activist, and Smith worked for the Ohio Department of Education.

In Ohio, TBF has been a strong advocate for high-stakes testing and school privatization. It has pushed charter schools and other conservative reforms in Ohio.

As the article says, TBF is an advocacy organization, not a think tank. Its policy positions are aligned with other conservative organizations, still promoting the failed reforms of the past two decades, unable to imagine schools that are not subject to high-stakes testing, unable to imagine schools that are not governed by carrots-and-sticks. TBF is also a charter school authorizer and collects a percentage of the state revenue for every student who enrolls in one of their charter schools. Many of their charter schools have failed. Most charter schools in Ohio are rated low-performing by the state.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Disruption, Education Industry, Ohio, School Choice, Standardized Testing

Peter Greene’s Favorite Blogs

By dianeravitch

February 10, 2021 //

In case you can’t find enough to read here, Peter Greene offers you a list of his favorite blogs.

Some will be familiar to you, because they appear here too. But others will be new. People who devote their time to writing about the events and trends in education that the mainstream media usually neglect deserve readers.

Reading them all is almost a full-time, unpaid job, and we are lucky to have Peter to sort through them all!

Categories Education Reform

Nicholas Kristof: We Are a Nation of Child Abusers

By dianeravitch

February 10, 2021 //

Nicholas Kristof wrote an important article in the New York Times about our national indifference to the well being of our children. Kristof knows that nothing we do is more important than reducing the child poverty rate, which is scandalously high. We have hundreds of billionaires, but millions of children who live in extreme poverty. Instead of spending billions of dollars on standardized testing, what if we directed that money to helping children have a safe and healthy childhood and helped their families achieve a decent standard of living?

Kristof begins:

Imagine you have some neighbors in a mansion down the road who pamper one child with a credit card, the best private school and a Tesla.

The parents treat most of their other kids decently but not lavishly — and then you discover that the family consigns one child to an unheated, vermin-infested room in the basement, denying her dental care and often leaving her without food.

You’d call 911 to report child abuse. You’d say those responsible should be locked up. You’d steam about how vile adults must be to allow a child to suffer like that.

But that’s us. That household, writ large, is America and our moral stain of child poverty.

Some American children attend $70,000-a-year nursery schools, but 12 million kids live in households that lack food. The United States has long had one of the highest rates of child poverty in the advanced world — and then the coronavirus pandemic aggravated the suffering.

Now we could have a thrilling breakthrough: President Biden included a proposal in his $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan that one studysays would cut child poverty by half. We in the news media have focused on direct payments to individuals, but the historic element of Biden’s plan is its effort to slash child poverty.

“The American Rescue Plan is the most ambitious proposal to reduce child poverty ever proposed by an American president,” Jason Furman, a Harvard economist, told me.

A couple of decades from now, America will be pretty much the same whether direct payments end up being $1,000 or $1,400. But this will be a transformed nation if we’re able to shrink child poverty on our watch.

So the most distressing part of 10 Republican senators’ counterproposal to Biden was their decision to drop the plan to curb child poverty. Please, Mr. President, don’t budge on this.

Categories Biden, Education Reform, Poverty

Matt Farmer: The Unforgettable Karen Lewis

By dianeravitch

February 9, 2021 //

Matt Farmer is a lawyer, public school parent, and occasional songwriter who lives in Chicago. Matt had been writing articles about the needs of the public schools in Chicago when he got a message on December 22, 2011, from CTU President Karen Lewis. He had never met her. She wrote:

“I am truly, madly deeply in love with your soul. May I buy you lunch early next year?”

He couldn’t resist, of course. They met and became fast friends.

He wrote about his remarkable friend:

Karen was funny as hell (she’d done some stand-up comedy in the past). Like me, she was an absolute music geek. And when it came to caring about students and teachers, she took a back seat to no one.

I was honored to attend her bat mitzvah in June 2013, and I was proud to go door-to-door fifteen months later to circulate petitions for her brief mayoral run, which was quickly derailed by an October 2014 brain cancer diagnosis.

On May 23, 2012, at a meeting of CTU delegates, Matt Farmer conducted a mock trial of billionaire heiress Penny Pritzker, who was a member of Rahm Emanuel’s school board and later served as President Obama’s Secretary of Commerce.

Matt compared Penny Pritzker’s concept of what Chicago school children were entitled to receive (workforce preparation) with the rich curriculum, library, arts programs, and other necessities at the school her own children (and Rahm’s children) attended, the University of Chicago Lab School. Matt Farmer brought the house down. Sitting behind him is Karen Lewis and Jesse Jackson. It is a tour de force and you must watch! If you do one thing this day, watch this five-minute “trial.”

Categories Chicago, Education Reform, Equity, Unions

Paul Thomas: The “Science of Reading” Is Recycled from the Past

By dianeravitch

February 9, 2021 //

Paul Thomas, an experienced high school teacher who became an experienced college professor at Furman University in South Carolina, writes here about the ongoing controversy surrounding claims for “the science of reading.” As he notes (and as I wrote about in my book Left Back: A Century of Battles Over School Reform), the “crisis” in reading instruction and literacy has recurred with stunning frequency over the course of the past century, plus.

Debates about how to teach reading can be traced back to the early 19th century, when Horace Mann derided the teaching of the alphabet and advocated learning whole words. Warring camps argued over the best way to teach reading. In 1955, Rudolf Flesch published Why Johnny Can’t Read, denouncing whole-word instruction and insisting on a revival of phonics. In 1967, literacy expert Jeanne Chall published what was supposed to be the definitive work on the teaching of reading, called Learning to Read: The Great Debate; she recommended phonics in the early grades and a rapid transition to worthy children’s literature. In the 1980s, the whole-language movement swept through the reading field, deriding phonics as Mann had. In the 1990s, the National Reading Panel emphasized the importance of phonics. No Child Left Behind absorbed the conclusions of the National Reading Panel Report and included a large grant program called Reading First, requiring that schools use “scientific methods” of teaching reading. The program, however, was marred by scandals and self-dealing. Some consultants hired by the U.S. Department of Education recommended programs in which they were coauthors and stood to profit.

Thomas writes:

The SoR [Science of Reading] movement is a bandwagon with its wheels mired in the same muddled arguments that have never been true and silver-bullet solutions that have never worked.

My conclusion: There is no one best way to teach reading. Experienced teachers have a toolkit of methods, and they use whatever method works best for their students. All reading teachers should know how to teach phonics, and all reading teachers should understand when it is appropriate to teach phonics. All reading teachers should prioritize the joy of reading and the love of literature.

In time, almost everyone learns to read, regardless of method. John Dewey, it should be noted, recommended that children begin reading instruction at the age of 8. Currently, many states punish students who have not learned to read fluently by the age of 8.

Categories Education Reform, History, Literacy, Research

Emma Tai: Karen Lewis Taught Us to Believe That We Could Win

By dianeravitch

February 9, 2021 //

Emma Tai is executive director of United Working Families of Chicago. She describes in Jacobin the powerful lesson that she learned from Karen Lewis.

She writes:

At a time of austerity and teacher demonization, Chicago Teachers Union president Karen Lewis — whose death at age sixty-seven was announced today — dared to believe that educators and the working class as a whole could fight back and win...

The 2012 strike put tens of thousands of people in the streets of Chicago. At a time of austerity and widespread demonization of teachers, both in Chicago and around the country, the CTU walked off the job insisting that we deserved, and could actually win, schools and a city that served Chicago’s working class. The strike put black, Latinx, and working-class people, and a workforce that is overwhelmingly women, in the streets by the tens of thousands against a neoliberal mayor, Rahm Emanuel, to say that the schools and city belonged to us. Astonishingly, they won.

That strike changed the political landscape of Chicago and the whole country, touching off a wave of teachers’ strikes that continue to this day and that have even put ideas like a general strike back on the table for the first time in generations.

Up to that point, I had been trained as an organizer to pick winnable fights. I had been to dozens of Board of Education meetings where community members and students waited in line for hours in order to compete for a lottery spot to have two minutes to speak to the school board — a board that, in a travesty of basic democracy, was and still is handpicked by the mayor rather than elected by Chicagoans, and thus has no form of accountability to the average parents, students, and residents of the city they serve. I had watched parents and students, crying, dragged out of those meetings by security guards, their voices going unheard by the board.

But seeing the streets filled with tens of thousands of teachers and supporters in red changed my whole conception of what I thought we could win and transformed what I let myself imagine. We didn’t have to fight for crumbs from the people who ran the city. We, the working class, could run the city ourselves...

Karen Lewis taught all of us a lesson: Not to settle. If you fight, you can win. If you capitulate early, you never win. If your cause is just, don’t give in.

Categories Chicago, Education Reform, Resistance, Teachers, Unions

Historian Warns Iowa: Fix Public Schools, Don’t Destroy Them

By dianeravitch

February 9, 2021 //

Randall Balmer is one of Iowa’s most accomplished sons. After growing up in Iowa and attending its public schools, he went on to success as a historian, author, and professor, now at Dartmouth College. In addition to writing award-winning books about religion, he wrote a biography of President Jimmy Carter and won an Emmy for a three-part PBS series on the Evangelical church.

He wrote a compelling editorial warning Iowans against the Republicans’ plans to introduce a sweeping choice plan, which will divert students and funding from community public schools. He called school choice a “mirage.”

He began with plain truths:

As a graduate of Iowa public schools, I was saddened to read about the governor’s “school choice” proposal. Public education is one of our nation’s best ideas, and the persistent attempts on the part of politicians to undermine it with the misleading rhetoric of “choice” represents a real threat to the future of democracy.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Democracy, Hoax, Iowa, School Choice, Vouchers