Like everyone else, Jan Resseger has seen the repeated pleas for Big Data to measure “learning loss.” She knowscth
Archives for the month of: February, 2021
The Sun-Sentinel in South Florida wrote a scathing editorial about the Senate Republicans who failed to convict Trump of inciting an insurrection that endangered the lives of members of Congress as they fulfilled their Constitutional duty to certify the winner of the election.
It begins:
The Republican Party was on trial along with Donald Trump. Both now stand convicted, if not by the Senate, then definitely in the eyes of the nation and the world: The ex-president for planning, inciting and inflaming a deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol to keep himself in power, and the party for excusing that monumental crime against the American people.
The seven Republicans who voted him guilty were 10 too few to convict him, but they deserve the nation’s love and thanks for their devotion to the Constitution. So do the House impeachment managers, who made a virtually flawless case leading to the most bipartisan impeachment vote ever, 57 to 43.
The 43 senators whose votes acquitted him chose the wrong side in the eternal conflict between conscience and cowardice. They prostituted our democracy to a demagogue and despot. They made a dead letter of impeachment and set history’s stage for others like him.
Those contemptible senators, including Florida’s Rick Scott and Marco Rubio, have cost their party any claim to the respect and trust of the American people.
The damage is beyond repair. It has betrayed the nation. The moment calls for the remaining responsible Republicans, however few or many, to break away. The case for a new party is as urgent as when the GOP was founded in 1854 to oppose the spread of slavery.
The nation cannot do without the political balance provided by a center-right party proudly bound to constitutional principles, such as the peaceful transfer of power. Until now, no president of either party had defied the expressed will of the voters.
But the party of Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower has become the party of Trump, who holds it in such thrall that only 10 of its House members and seven of its 50 senators dared to hold him responsible for the worst crime it was possible for an American president to commit.
That so many others could accept his having put their own lives at risk on Jan. 6 can be understood only in the context of their political ambitions. Their careers matter more to them than anything else, least of all their oaths of office.
The party of Trump is extremist and infested with cadres of domestic terrorists like the Proud Boys, the Boogaloo Bois and the Oathkeeepers.
An example of its moral bankruptcy was the vote of the Wyoming party to censure Rep. Liz Cheney, the third-ranking House Republican, for her courageous vote to impeach Trump.
Abraham Lincoln would not recognize what Trump has made of the party, but Adolf Hitler, Vladimir Putin, Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez very well might.
The House impeachment managers proved beyond reasonable doubt every element of a cynical and criminal conspiracy on Trump’s part.
The editorial continues, and it is worth reading in full.
Mull over this line: “only 10 of its House members and seven of its 50 senators dared to hold him responsible for the worst crime it was possible for an American president to commit.”
As Cong. Jamie Raskin asked on the Senate floor, “If these acts do not deserve impeachment, what does?”
It is hard to imagine anything worse for a president to do, unless he lined up his opposition and shot them. Would the 43 Republican Senators have held Trump accountable if he did that? One wonders.
Steve Chapman is a member of the editorial board of The Chicago Tribune. He wrote here what I was thinking. Trump did profound damage to our democracy, and a majority of Republicans endorsed his vicious attack on our Capitol and on democracy itself. He spent months complaining that the Presidential election was “rigged,” unless he won, in which case it would be valid. When he lost the election decisively, he refused to concede and launched a barrage of lawsuits, all claiming “voter fraud.” His lawyers never produced any proof of fraud, his obeisance Attorney General told him there was not enough fraud to change the outcome of the election, his director of election cyber security told him the election was fair (and was fired for it). YetTrump and his lackeys continued to rage about fraud, even though all his lawsuits were thrown out. He couldn’t even get a win from judges he appointed, which baffled him. Unwilling to admit defeat, he summoned his MAGA followers to DC on January 6, promising them a “wild” day.
Wild, it was, beginning with an incendiary 70-minute speech by Trump, urging the mob to March on the Capitol and “fight like hell” or lose their country. They did as he instructed. They broke through police lines. They were enraged and violent, beating the po’ice who tried to keep them out of the Capitol, which had not been invaded since the war of 1812. They sacked and ransacked the Capitol, while members of Congress, assembled to certify Joe Biden’s election, were hurriedly evacuated. There were only minutes between the physical evacuation of the legislators and the rush of the mob into their chambers. We can only speculate what would have happened if they had seized Mike Pence, Nancy Pelosi, and other members of Congress. It might have been a bloody massacre. Trump watched the horror on television and did nothing to call off his followers. How close we came to a violent coup!
The whole world was watching as our democracy hung in the balance.
Was Donald Trump responsible? Of course he was. Mitch McConnell admitted as much after he voted to acquit him because he was a “private citizen.” This is the same McConnell who refused to start the trial while Trump was still in office.
The seven Republicans who voted to defend our democracy instead of licking Trump’s soiled boots deserve our thanks: Mitt Romney of Utah, Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Richard Burr of North Carolina, Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, Ben Sasse of Nebraska, and Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania. Some of them, like Liz Cheney of Wyoming, were condemned by the leaders of their state Republican Party, for daring to defend the Constitution and their oath of office.
This is what Steve Chapman wrote (in part):
One of the most familiar lessons of the Donald Trump era is that no matter how bad today is, tomorrow can always be worse. We learned over and over that there is no bottom to his capacity for outrageous conduct, and there is no limit to his party’s tolerance for it.
Jan. 6 was one of the greatest catastrophes in the history of the American republic. An incumbent president who had decisively lost his reelection roused his deranged disciples to launch a massive attack on the U.S. Capitol in an effort to keep him in office. It was an attempted coup, nothing less. Lives were lost, members of Congress and their aides were traumatized, and the president who instigated the attack took pleasure in it.
But Saturday’s Senate vote to acquit Trump in his impeachment trial was worse. Forty-three duly elected representatives of the people of their states chose to ignore or rationalize his shocking blitzkrieg. They repudiated their sworn duty to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”
No American president has been so openly contemptuous of the constraints of the Constitution as Trump. He decided long ago to treat any defeat at the polls as the result of fraud, regardless of the reality. If the democratic processes of our system did not give him what he wanted, he would wage war on them. And he did — starting months before Americans went to the polls and continuing for months afterward.
Any elected government can be hijacked by a skilled and ruthless demagogue. But in the design of our system, Congress is supposed to serve as a counterweight to the president, jealous of its prerogatives and independent of the executive branch. The impeachment power is the ultimate check, allowing legislators to remove any president who abuses his office.
But the impeachment power now has about as much importance as the Third Amendment — which forbids quartering of soldiers in private homes during peacetime. Trump’s second acquittal leaves no doubt that for most Republican members of Congress, party comes before country, now and forever...
Congressional Republicans, with a handful of noble exceptions, are more than willing to excuse the inexcusable if it comes from a president who shares their partisan affiliation. Maybe they are afraid of the political consequences they would face for breaking with Trump. Maybe they think what he did to advance the GOP agenda — tax cuts, deregulation, conservative judges — is bigger than what he did to sabotage constitutional government.
Maybe some even relish the idea of right-wing extremists terrorizing elected officials to advance Republican policies. Whatever the motive, the damage is deep and possibly irreparable.
The danger produced by this dismal outcome is not so much that Trump will run again in 2024. Chances are good that by then, he will be indicted and convicted for at least one felony, whether for tax evasion, campaign finance violations, solicitation of election fraud or other crimes. He would have trouble running for president from a correctional institution. Likewise if he decides to flee to a country that has no extradition treaty with the U.S.
The real significance of the Senate’s refusal to convict Trump is that it normalizes behavior that once would have been anathema to either political party. It assures his followers that he did nothing wrong. It eats away at the foundation of our form of government. It invites a future Republican president — shrewder and more disciplined than Trump — to install himself permanently in the White House.
It may sound impossible in a republic as long-lasting and resilient as ours. But since Jan. 6, a lot of things that seemed impossible have come to pass. And they have inflicted a wound on our democracy that may never heal.
Donald Trump should face the full force of the law for his multiple crimes. He may be convicted for interfering with the election in Georgia, for tax evasion in New York, or for many other crimes. But he escaped punishment for violating his oath of office and unleashing a blood-thirsty mob on his Vice-President and the members of Congress, a crime that sits at the feet of the 43 senators too spineless to hold him accountable.
 SB 48 Will Be Heard at 3:30 p.m. on 2/17/21 in the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Education Your Voice is Needed! What you can do . . . 1) Make calls and/or send emails – We are urging all those connected to Pastors for Florida Children to contact the members of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Education and encourage them to vote “NO” on this bill! We are hoping to flood their offices with calls/emails up until the committee discussion on SB 48 at 3:30 p.m. on 2/17. If you live within the districts of any of the Senators on the subcommittee, be sure to indicate that in your call/email. Ask your family members, friends and colleagues to contact them as well. Below is some more information as well as talking points about the bill: SB 48 is moving through the legislative process and will divert more tax dollars away from public schools and further remove public oversight, transparency and accountability. If passed, SB 48 would expand eligibility for school-voucher programs, consolidate existing choice programs and allow parents to use taxpayer-backed education savings accounts for private schools and other costs. Private schools that take state scholarships also do not have to meet state standards for teacher qualifications, facilities, curriculum or finances. Also, within the last calendar year, evidence has been presented that private schools that accept state money are currently able to discriminate against some of the state’s students without any repercussions. SB 48 will outsource the oversight of Florida’s $1 billion voucher program to private organizations that will profit from the program expansion. There is no local oversight from elected officials and private organization audits are also reduced from annually to every three years. The almost 3 million schoolchildren in Florida deserve better! Every child in Florida deserves to have access to a high quality education as is mandated by the Florida Constitution. Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Education Members and Contact Information:Chair Doug Broxson (R)broxson.doug@flsenate.gov850-487-5001@DougBroxson Vice Chair Manny Diaz (R) — *Bill Sponsordiaz.manny@flsenate.gov850-487-5036@SenMannyDiazJr Sen. Janet Cruz (D)cruz.janet@flsenate.gov850-487-5018@SenJanetCruz Sen. Audrey Gibson (D)gibson.audrey@flsenate.gov850-487-5006@SenAudrey2eet Sen. Joe Gruters (R)gruters.joe@flsenate.gov850-487-5023@JoeGruters Sen. Travis Hutson (R)hutson.travis.web@flsenate.gov850-487-5007@TravisJHutson Sen. Kathleen Passidomo (R)passidomo.kathleen@flsenate.gov850-487-5028@Kathleen4SWFL Sen. Tina Polsky (D)polsky.tina@flsenate.gov850-487-5029@TinaPolsky Sen. Tom Wright (R)wright.tom.web@flsenate.gov850-487-5014@SenTomWright 2) Get Educated – The League of Women Voters of Florida hosted a Lunch & Learn program dedicated solely to the detriments that this legislation will cause, featuring Rev. Rachel Gunter Shapard, one of the co-founders of Pastors for Florida Children. If you would like to view it to learn more about SB 48 click here. If you were not able to attend the webinar hosted by Public Funds Public Schools entitled “Fighting Voucher Legislation in 2021: An Update on State Voucher Bills and Tools to Oppose Them,” you can view the recording here. The webinar featured representatives of Public Funds Public Schools (PFPS), the Network for Public Education (NPE), and the National Coalition for Public Education (NCPE). It is worth your time! 3) Write an Op-Ed – if you are a writer, we need you! It is imperative that we tell the other side of the story. Privatizers are bringing in parents and students who have benefited from vouchers to testify before legislative committees, but the problem is that private school students only represent 10% of the school-age population in Florida. We need to help amplify the stories of students who attended voucher schools and due to a negative experience had to return to public schools, or of public schools that are in underfunded that are doing incredible work, but need more resources to make a truly transformative impact. Contact us if you would like to write an Op-Ed. 4) Make a connection – If you know of students who have utilized a voucher “scholarship” who had a negative experience and had to return to a public school, please connect us to them! Now more than ever it is imperative to share the other side of the story. Sincerely, Rev. James T. GoldenChair, Social Action Committee,Florida African Methodist Episcopal Church Rev. Joyce Lieberman Executive/Stated Clerk,Synod of South Atlantic – Presbyterian Church (USA) Rev. Rachel Gunter ShapardRegional Vice President, Together for Hope – Black Belt  Contact us:pastorsforflchildren@gmail.com |
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Charles Foster Johnson, Pastor, Bread Fellowship of Fort WorthExecutive Director, Pastors for Texas ChildrenP.O. Box 471155Fort Worth, TX 76147
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As someone who graduated high school in 1956, this film reminds me of the world I grew up in.
Gary Stein, a teacher in his last year of teaching, read the post by retired superintendent Teresa Thayer Snyder and was inspired to share this message:
After reading Ms. Snyder’s article and all of the responses to it on the dianeravitch.net page, I was reminded of the best advice for all teachers, and what seems to me the best advice for teaching, always, regardless of social circumstance or historical situation. It comes from Chaim Ginott, (1922-1973), teacher, psychologist, theorist.
Dear Teacher,
I am a survivor of a concentration camp. My eyes saw what no man should witness:
Gas chambers built by learned engineers,
Children poisoned by educated physicians,
Infants killed by trained nurses,
Women and babies shot and burned by high school and college graduates,
So, I am suspicious of education.
My request is: Help your students become human. Your efforts must never produce learned monsters, skilled psychopaths, educated Eichmanns.
Reading, writing, arithmetic are important only if they serve to make our children more humane.
For those of you who know this quote, I hope this isn’t perceived as either ‘trite’ or too idealistic. This passage has guided my teaching for over 30 years, including this year, my last as a certified public school teacher. For those of you new to either teaching/learning, or ‘education’, I hope you take this quote to heart as you engage with young citizens in every interaction. Peace.
By the way, Superintendent Snyder’s post went viral; it has been opened more than 500,000 times on this blog.
Distinguished economist Helen Ladd and her husband, journalist Edward Fiske, studied the accountability system for charter schools in Massachusetts. They specifically addressed equity issues of access, fairness, and availability of a high-quality education, not test scores. They found considerable variation among charter schools, as one would expect. They also found that some charter schools had unusually high attrition rates and unusually high suspension rates. These should concern policy makers, whose goal is to offer better opportunities for disadvantaged students. Their aim in writing the paper is to alert policymakers to the value of an equity-oriented accountability system that goes beyond test scores.
Arthur Goldstein has taught ESL for decades in New York City. He is tired of being lectured by billionaires like Michael Bloomberg about how to teach or what a slacker he is.
He writes in The New York Daily News:
There’s lots of talk about whether or not school buildings should be open. European school buildings recently shut over concerns that children do indeed spread the virus. Yet former Mayor Mike Bloomberg now says, “It’s time for Joe Biden to stand up and to say, the kids are the most important things and important players here. And the teachers just are going to have to suck it up and stand up and provide an education.”
In fact we’ve never stopped doing that, but Bloomberg seems not to have received the memo. Bloomberg says kids are most important. Twelve years of working in New York City schools under Mike Bloomberg tell me to him, that really means adults are not important at all.
It’s particularly galling, after having devoted your life to help children, to be told you don’t care about them because you question the wisdom of risking your life, the lives of the children, and the lives of all our families.
In fact, here in New York City, elementary and middle-school buildings are open. A distinct minority of students can come in, masked and socially distanced, and get tested regularly in order to ensure safety. I can’t read Bloomberg’s mind, but if he actually wants buildings to be safe, I have no idea how he wants to change that.
Regardless, Bloomberg’s views, shared by many in media and elsewhere, reflect an utter lack of respect for those of us who work in schools. This is beneficial to neither teachers nor students. Who is going to fight for better conditions in schools? Is it people like Bloomberg, who cavalierly threaten teacher layoffs in a city with exploding class sizes, unreduced in 50 years? Do people really think young people would get the attention they need, or benefit in any viable fashion from the classes of up to 70 he proposed?
It doesn’t really matter. Mike Bloomberg, like Donald Trump, has more money than most and he knows things. When you have that much money, many accept your opinions. Publications of all stripes mirror them. And years of such treatment has had a distinct effect on those of us who work in schools. Many of us are afraid to speak out. It took an awful lot for the red-state strikes to happen. We’re more fortunate and better organized here, but we still face dire and deadly consequences of ill treatment. Many of us simply will not speak not speak out. It’s too risky.
Please open the link and read the rest of the article.
I have been writing for many years about the low quality “education” that virtual charter schools provide their students. They make fabulous promises in their marketing materials, but the results for their schools are awful. Their students have low test scores, low graduation rates, and high attrition rates. Their teachers often have huge classes. Study after study has demonstrated that those who attend these virtual charters get a very poor quality education. One CREDO study found that it was equivalent to not going to school at all. K12 Inc. is fabulously profitable, but not for its students.
A teacher responded to this post by writing the following comment on this blog:
Indeed, “It IS worth pondering why and how the Democratic Party abandoned its longstanding belief in equitable, well-resourced public schools as a common good.” As a newly credentialed secondary school teacher in California, my first (and, to date, last) full-time “public school” employment occurred at CA Virtual Academies, a subsidiary of K12, inc. (now a.k.a. Stride).
Little did I know when I began that the challenges of public school teaching would extend far beyond meeting with students and striving to my utmost ability to connect them with subject matter discipline in authentic and invigorating ways, especially via remote learning in the “virtual” world of computer technology. Most challenging and ultimately most responsible for my having to leave teaching (hopefully temporarily) was the for-profit, private publicly traded corporation’s administrators’ demands not only that I perform an inhuman amount of work but that I do it without thought for the quality of education my students received and for less money than my brick-and-mortar school teacher counterparts.
When my human system (body, heart, and mental health) broke under the strain of their inhuman work schedule, CAVA’s corporate policy to prohibit supervisors from writing professional letters of recommendation for their former teachers sounded the death knell for my up-until-then promising teaching career.
Now, heart-broken and soul-sick from losing a job I loved while I WAS able to perform it and a career I relied upon for survival, I am struggling to muster the strength and humility necessary to begin substitute or part-time teaching again, essentially starting my career all over again as no school will hire me without professional letters of recommendation written within the past one to three years.
I am incredulous, especially in light of COVID-19’s inevitable effect on public education, that the federal government allowed for-profit corporations K12, inc. and Pearson Education to develop and mass distribute their Virtual Academies and Connections Academies across the nation over the past decade or so primarily at the tax-payers’ expense without at least also developing a state-sponsored and US Education Department “owned” Virtual School program as well.
Though it seems nauseatingly naive in retrospect, I had hoped and at one time believed that “free and fair education for all” could and logically should include our nation’s public schools having efficient access to the technologies and mass deployment systems for online education which our tax dollars have paid for.
Instead, I now realize that an otherwise logical process of voting tax payers receiving the public education they deserve has been perhaps irrevocably hijacked and perverted by the “double-speak” of “school choice” proponents and the contemporary scourge of insatiably greedy corporations.
You have my profoundest albeit bitter-sweet Gratitude, Ms. Ravitch, for your having the courage, tenacity, and strong stomach to share the truth about public education in this nation: If I did not have you and a few others like you to read and learn from, I would be hopelessly lost in despair and disbelief. Thank you and please keep searching out the truth behind lies.
The Financial Times reports on a new phenomenon: educators around the world see the pandemic as an opportunity to break free of standardized exams.
Tony Stack, a Canadian educator, was developing a new way to assess children even before coronavirus. The decision to scrap end-of-year assessments after the pandemic struck presented the chance to put the “deep learning” approach into practice. “It offered an opportunity for an authentic learning experience, outside some of the constraints of an exam,” said Mr Stack, director of education for Newfoundland and Labrador province. This alternative model, used in 1,300 schools across eight countries, that prioritises skills and independent thinking “set a way forward for a more ethical approach to assessment,” he explained. “Skills that students need to learn through the pandemic cannot be assessed in a single test,” he added.
Most viewed the abrupt cancellation of exams in countries around the world as a regrettable loss that would diminish learning and life chances for a cohort of young people. A vocal group of educators also saw an opportunity to call time on the traditional exams system they say is unjust and outdated. “The pandemic has exacerbated all these problems that were already there with exams,” said Bill Lucas, director of the Centre for Real-World Learning at the UK’s Winchester university.
He believes traditional assessments unfairly standardises children of different abilities, fail to capture essential skills and put young people off through its rote-learning, one-size-fits-all approach. “Survey after survey says creativity, critical-thinking and communications are what we need. Exams don’t assess those things,” Mr Lucas said. “Covid has forced us to ask the question: ‘do we want to go back to where we were or do we want to stop and think?’” Rethinking Assessment, the advocacy group he co-founded to push for change, has attracted support from teachers, trade union leaders, policymakers and academics. Among them is Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, a Cambridge university neuroscientist who argues that exams such as the GCSEs taken by 16 year-olds in England exaggerate stress and anxiety at a time when teenagers’ brains are still evolving. “We need to reassess whether high intensity, high stakes, national exams such as GCSEs are still the optimal way to assess the academic achievements of a developing young person,” she wrote late last year.
https://www.ft.com/content/9d64e479-182c-4dbd-96fe-0c26272a5875
He believes traditional assessments unfairly standardises children of different abilities, fail to capture essential skills and put young people off through its rote-learning, one-size-fits-all approach. “Survey after survey says creativity, critical-thinking and communications are what we need. Exams don’t assess those things,” Mr Lucas said. “Covid has forced us to ask the question: ‘do we want to go back to where we were or do we want to stop and think?’” Rethinking Assessment, the advocacy group he co-founded to push for change, has attracted support from teachers, trade union leaders, policymakers and academics. Among them is Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, a Cambridge university neuroscientist who argues that exams such as the GCSEs taken by 16 year-olds in England exaggerate stress and anxiety at a time when teenagers’ brains are still evolving. “We need to reassess whether high intensity, high stakes, national exams such as GCSEs are still the optimal way to assess the academic achievements of a developing young person,” she wrote late last year.
Diane Ravitch's blog 