Stephen Singer describes how Governor Tom Wolf solved a knotty problem. The state Charter Appeals Board was appointed by his Republican predecessor seven years ago. When local districts rejected charter applications, the disappointed charter operators could count on the CAB to reverse the local decision. A former member of the CAB applied for a charter, was rejected by the district she was moving into, and was swiftly approved by her former CAB colleagues.

Governor Wolf solved the problem. He fired every single member of the CAB. He nominated a slate of local school board members, educators, and others concerned about the well-being of the public schools, which enroll the vast majority of the state’s students.

The CAB never took into account the fiscal impact of the charter on the local district.

The legislature, controlled by Republicans, can approve Governor Wolf’s nominees or leave the CAB with no members.

Election officials, most of them Republicans, sharply criticized the audit of 2020 ballots in Arizona’s Maricopa County. Trump apparently hopes that the findings, gathered by a private, pro-Trump firm called Cyber Ninjas, will enable him to call for similar recounts in other contested states. He continues to insist that Biden “stole” the election, despite his campaign’s failure to produce evidence in more than 60 state and federal courts.

The ballots in all the contested states have previously been suited two or three times.

The Washington Post reports:

The Republican-dominated Maricopa County Board of Supervisors on Monday denounced an ongoing audit of the 2020 election vote as a “sham” and a “con,” calling on the GOP-led state Senate to end the controversial recount that has been championed by former president Donald Trump.
In a fiery public meeting and subsequent letter to state Senate President Karen Fann, the board members said the audit has been inept, promoted falsehoods and defamed the public servants who ran the fall election.

Calling the process a “spectacle that is harming all of us,” the five members of the board — including four Republicans — asked the state Senate to recognize that it is essential to call off the audit, which officials have said is only about one-quarter complete.

“It is time to make a choice to defend the Constitution and the Republic,” they wrote. “We stand united together to defend the Constitution and the Republic in our opposition to the Big Lie. We ask everyone to join us in standing for the truth,” they added, using a term that refers to the false claim that the election was stolen.

[Read the Maricopa County officials’ letter]
In a calculated show of unity, they were joined by Maricopa’s other elected officials: the sheriff, a Democrat; and the Republican county recorder, who leads the elections office.

“Our state has become a laughingstock,” the county officials wrote. “Worse, this ‘audit’ is encouraging our citizens to distrust elections, which weakens our democratic republic.”

The pushback by Maricopa County officials amounts to their most vehement protest yet of the recount, which began in late April and is being conducted in Phoenix by a private Florida-based company, Cyber Ninjas, whose chief executive has previously echoed Trump’s false allegations that fraud tainted the 2020 election.

Upon his death recently, Eli Broad received many laudatory obituaries, describing his philanthropic contributions to the arts and medical research. He even built an art museum in Los Angeles, named for himself. Modesty was not one of his virtues.

Less noted was his determination to disrupt and destroy public education. Not only did he launch an ambitious plan to privatize 50% of the public schools in Los Angeles, but his Broad Superintendents Academy “trained” scores of aspiring superintendents in his philosophy, which meant top-down, tough management and a willingness to close schools with low test scores and replace them with charter schools, no matter how much the schools were loved by students, teachers, parents, and the local community. Anyone could apply to his Academy regardless of previous job experience or lack of education experience.

I was invited to meet Eli Broad at his penthouse apartment on Fifth Avenue in New York City about ten years ago. He explained to me that he didn’t know anything about education but knew management. Lack of management skills, he said, was the biggest problem in education.

I have yet to see any evidence that Broad leaders were more successful than those educators who rose through the ranks, and many examples of Broad leaders who failed. Nonetheless, Broad used his money and influence to put his people into important urban districts, even paying for staff to surround them and supplements to their salary.

He was one of the leading figures in the national effort to discredit and stigmatize public education, setting it up for privatization.

Los Angeles-based Capital & Main published the following article about Broad’s contempt for public schools, including the one he attended in Detroit.

Editor’s Note: Although most of Los Angeles’ news media praised the cultural largess and civic drive of Eli Broad after the businessman-philanthropist died April 30, many in the city and elsewhere will recall his obsessive promotion of charter schools with less charity. In 2019 longtime Broad critic Diane Ravitch accused him of being “aggressive in using his money and policy agenda to destabilize and disrupt public education.”

Around the same time, Capital & Main’s Bill Raden described the billionaire’s Broad Academy as training future public school superintendents “in the blunt art of disrupting communities, undermining school boards and alienating teachers through top-down district privatization techniques.”

From our archives we present a 2015 appraisal by veteran Los Angeles journalist Marc Haefele, originally titled “Eli Broad and the End of Public Education as We Know It.”

---

If there were still any doubt about Eli Broad’s desire to gut traditional public education, it has been erased by his much-discussed “Great Public Schools Now” initiative, a draft of which L.A. Times reporter Howard Blume obtained last month.

Broad’s 44-page proposal outlines plans to replace half of LAUSD’s existing public schools with charter schools. “Such an effort will gather resources, help high-quality charters access facilities, develop a reliable pipeline of leadership and teaching talent, and replicate their success,” states the document. “If executed with fidelity, this plan will ensure that no Los Angeles student remains trapped in a low-performing school.”

According to the proposal, Broad wants to create 260 new “high-quality charter schools, generate 130,000 high-quality charter seats and reach 50 percent charter market share.”

(Actually, LAUSD has 151,000 kids in charters now: 281,000 out of 633,000 LAUSD students is 43 percent. This isn’t the only imprecision in the proposal.)

The estimated cost of this LAUSD transformation would be nearly half-a-billion dollars.

By his own account, Broad is the fourth-richest resident of Los Angeles, with $7 billion in wealth. So he could easily finance this proposal out of pocket and still pay his property taxes in Brentwood.

But that’s not the plan.

Instead, Broad is shaking the can to his fellow foundationeers and squillionaires. The Gates Foundation of Seattle has already given $29 million for charter schools, while the Walmart-backed Walton Foundation of Bentonville, Ark. has invested over $65 million.

Broad says he’s “creating a more supportive policy environment for charters.” He hopes that virtually overturning the LAUSD in Los Angeles will set a revolutionary example that will enable charter schools to sweep the nation. The private sector would partially regain the control of public education that it lost in the 19th century, whose market-driven schools were excoriated by Charles Dickens.

But modern charter schools are a lot better, right? Some studies show a marked improvement in charters’ performance compared to traditional public schools in areas like reading and math. Others, however, suggest that the average results are about the same.

LAUSD already has more charters than any other U.S. school district. But supply-side institutions are risky. According to a new report by the Center for Media and Democracy, 2,500 have failed between 2001 and 2013 — 43 in Los Angeles alone — stranding their students and teachers and sinking many millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars. Charter teachers, lacking union support, appear to burn out faster.

According to his autobiography, “The Art of Being Unreasonable,” Broad blames school problems on administration (his signature educational achievement is the Broad Superintendent Academy, whose graduates include recently ousted LAUSD super John Deasy), with little attention to the actual rubber-meets-the road matter of better teaching. Like most charterites, Broad seems to feel that working under a tough superintendent without a union or tenure brings out the best in young teachers.

According to the bio, Broad resented attending Detroit’s Central High. “My high school teachers made it very clear that they found my constant questions annoying,” he recalls. It’s interesting that he doesn’t credit Central for any of his ample college success, not to mention his unparalleled business career.

He hasn’t always felt this hostility, though. In 2000, he persuaded former Colorado Governor Roy Romer to apply for LAUSD superintendent, the initial step in the steady if slow revival of the agency derided as “LA Mummified.” Romer and his board championed a $3.3 billion bond measure that studded the landscape with over 20 new LAUSD schools; Broad gave $200,000 toward its passage.

In 2007, he cofounded Strong American Schools, a lobby for better schooling that reportedly eschewed “controversial’’ topics like vouchers and charter schools. But soon his Strong American Schools partner Bill Gates was rooting for charters and Broad followed. Yet, as recently as his 2012 autobiography, he didn’t find conventional public education hopeless.

Now, at 82, Broad’s ambition apparently is to do away with public education as we know it.

“Part of it is ideological commitment to the deregulation notion, and part of it is practical – teacher unions are the last, biggest unions, and taking them down will create much more room for a broader deregulation of the economy and public sector,” said United Teachers Los Angeles chief Alex Caputo Pearl.

Ultimately, it should be about the students. My late friend, LAUSD teacher Alan Kaplan, struggled for over 30 years to teach “left behind” children to think and aspire, rather than just pass standardized tests. I wonder how long Al and others like him would last under a tenure-free, test-focused, supply-side charter school system.

---

Copyright 2021 Capital & Main

In several states, the Governor and Legislature have denounced “critical race theory” and even (in Idaho and some other states) banned it from their schools. The controversy over teaching about race gained ground when former President Trump condemned CRT as divisive and launched his own quickie commission to teach “patriotic” education. The object seems to be to minimize or eliminate teaching about racism, past or present.

Retired teacher Nancy Flanagan dissected the controversy here, in one of the best-informed analyses.

It seems that the white adults want children to think of their country as one without faults, flaws, blemishes, or systematic oppression. To see our history whole, the good and the bad, they think, will undermine love of country.

The National Education Policy Center published a useful overview of the controversy and concluded that teaching history must be based on evidence, not ideology.

It begins:

Here’s how NEPC Fellow Shaun Harper, of the University of Southern California, defines racism:

[I]ndividual actions (both intentional and unconscious) that engender marginalization and inflict varying degrees of harm on minoritized persons; structures that determine and cyclically remanufacture racial inequity; and institutional norms that sustain White privilege and permit the ongoing subordination of minoritized persons.

These individual, structural, and institutional factors exist. They cannot be factually denied or treated as opinion. Here are just a few of the hundreds of examples that could be mentioned:

• Experimental evidence demonstrates that, even when given vignettes about fictional Black and White students engaged in the exact same misbehaviors, teachers are more likely to label Black students as troublemakers and to view their actions as part of an ongoing pattern.
• A meta-analysis of hiring discrimination examined every available field experiment in which resumes that are identical in every way except for the race of the applicant are submitted for job openings. This study, which incorporated a total of 55,842 applications submitted for 26,326 positions, found that not only do White applicants receive 36 percent more callbacks than Black applicants, but that these differences have not changed over time. 
• Quasi-experimental research has found that racial discrimination explains two-thirds of the racial disparities in bail decisions in New York City.

Yet, in at least eight states across the country, legislators are trying to make it illegal for educators to teach students about the myriad ways that racial discrimination manifests itself in our nation in individual actions and prejudice as well as in the very institutions and systems that comprise the fabric of our society. Other targets of this silencing effort include sexism, equity, inclusion, and social justice.

Critical race theory—or at least a false caricature of CRT—is a particular concern of these efforts, many of which borrow language from the Trump administration’s (since-rescinded) September 2020 executive order banning federal trainings on “divisive” diversity issues. 

Rhode Island Republican Patricia Morgan told Education Week that critical race theory is “a divisive, destructive, poisonous ideology” that encourages people to judge each other by the color of their skin.

But NEPC Fellow Adrienne Dixson of the University of Illinois, who has edited books on critical race theory and education, explained in that same Education Week article that lawmakers had misunderstood the subject.

“Critical race theorists would say, absolutely, that people shouldn’t be discriminated against by virtue of their race or sex,” she said. “We don’t locate individuals as responsible for structural racism.” Instead, “scholars acknowledge that racism informed the country’s founding principles, and that some groups have to ‘agitate and organize and demand and protest’ to secure rights.”

The New York Times’s 1619 Project is another target of ire for many of these same state lawmakers. The ongoing effort of the Project, launched on the 400^th anniversary of the start of American slavery, describes the history of the country by centering slavery, and tracing contemporary issues to its consequences.

A report by the Heritage Foundation recommended banning it from classrooms, a call that multiple state legislatures have echoed. But an NEPC review of the publication by Brown University historian Seth Rockman found it to be grounded in the same sorts of misunderstandings flagged by Professor Dixson. “Disconnected from the current scholarly literature on both American slavery and history pedagogy, the report commits the exact sin with which it besmirches the 1619 Project: substituting ideology and political motives for an accurate engagement with the past,” according to Professor Rockman.

Some efforts to scrub the stain of racial discrimination from the curriculum have already fallen by the wayside. In Arkansas, for instance, the bill to ban the 1619 Project was rejected by lawmakers. 

Other efforts, however, have been more successful: In Idaho, for example, Governor Brad Little recently signed into law a bill banning critical race theory and related issues from public schools after Republican lawmakers refused to pass education budgets out of concerns that educators were teaching students about that subject. 

As a result, generations of students in that state and others that follow suit will receive an inaccurate and incomplete education concerning some of the most important and consequential issues of our nation’s present and its past.

Today’s is the anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education of 1954. Much has changed. Barack Obama was elected President twice. But much has not changed. The desegregation of schools that once seemed inevitable stalled, inhibited by white flight from urban districts and housing desegregation.

Historian Matthew D. Lassiter of the University of Michigan argues in this opinion piece in the Washington Post that desegregation failed because of white resistance and pusillanimous federal courts, which turned against desegregation as Republican presidents added conservative justices to the Supreme Court.

Fifty years ago today, the Supreme Court issued the landmark decision of Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg, the most far-reaching school desegregation case since Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. The Swann ruling upheld a lower court-imposed plan to integrate the public schools of metropolitan Charlotte through two-way busing between the segregated White suburbs and the all-Black central city neighborhoods.

During the next few years, busing helped transform the public schools in the states of the former Jim Crow South into the most racially integrated in the nation. The technique proved successful despite intense opposition that ranged from White resistance movements to the administration of president Richard Nixon.

But the Supreme Court deserves very little credit for this development, which depended on the NAACP’s visionary litigation and Charlotte having previously merged its schools with the outlying suburbs of Mecklenburg County. Chief Justice Warren Burger, the author of the Swann decision, actually wanted to overturn the Charlotte busing plan but could not achieve a majority to do so. Instead, he wrote a reluctant and convoluted opinion that provided a road map for metropolitan areas in the North and West to avoid meaningful school desegregation — something that became clear three years later in Milliken v. Bradley, when Burger helped invalidate an almost identical district court decision ordering two-way busing between the city and suburbs of Detroit.
The lesson? Then, and now, a supermajority of White Americans, both political parties and all three branches of the federal government have opposed the public policies necessary to dismantle housing and school segregation that stems from decades of government policy.

Indeed, by the mid-1970s, the Supreme Court established formidable barriers to meaningful integration and equitable access in urban and suburban neighborhoods that remain largely intact to this day, including decisions upholding the discriminatory policy of exclusionary zoning and allowing suburbs to ban low-income housing.
Despite popular narratives that focus on civil rights battles as a Southern issue, White resistance to substantive school desegregation happened across the country. In fact, the first organized antibusing movement in the nation began in 1964 in New York City, when several hundred thousand White families boycotted the public schools to protest a very modest desegregation plan that violated their racist conception of “neighborhood schools.”

During the mid-1960s, the NAACP launched an “all-out attack … against Jim Crow schools northern style.” But, the federal courts blocked its campaign, seeing segregated urban schools outside the South as a result of market-based patterns of neighborhood housing segregation and not unconstitutional state action.

This stark distinction between “de facto” segregation in the North and West and “de jure” segregation in the Jim Crow South was, however, a legal and political fiction. In fact, a vast array of government policies had divided metropolitan areas nationwide along racial lines, from redlining in the mortgage market to gerrymandered neighborhood schools.
The “de facto” defense soon became political ammunition for White resistance to integration in the metropolitan South. In fighting the Swann case, the White leaders and suburban parents in Charlotte insisted their “neighborhood schools” were not racially segregated by law or state action, a strategy they adopted directly from cities and suburbs in the North and West. Initially, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed the NAACP’s Swann lawsuit in a 1966 ruling that stated the city had complied with Brown by adopting the Northern model of neighborhood-based schools.
During the next few years, the NAACP built a new case, arguing that because the policies of the municipal and federal governments had caused nearly comprehensive housing segregation in Charlotte and its suburbs, the resulting racial segregation in its neighborhood school system violated the Brown mandate.

It worked. District Judge James McMillan had a conversion experience as the NAACP presented this evidence and later remarked that “I lived here 24 years without knowing what was going on.” He ordered two-way busing between White and Black neighborhoods based on the finding that government policies had shaped racial segregation in housing patterns so thoroughly that the direct effect on school enrollments “is not innocent or ‘de facto.’”

In response, more than 100,000 White suburban parents formed a powerful antibusing movement and promised to appeal to the Supreme Court. They argued that racism and segregation had nothing to do with their neighborhood schools because they had bought their homes through hard work in a free market. They rejected the judge’s repeated explanations that a history of state-sponsored housing segregation had made their version of the American Dream possible — and unconstitutionally excluded Black residents of the city from it.

So did President Nixon. Thousands of White parents from Charlotte wrote letters to the White House identifying themselves as members of the “silent majority” and demanding federal intervention to protect White Americans from the alleged “reverse racism” of “forced busing.” The Nixon administration responded with a major policy statement calling for one national standard on school desegregation. It argued that “de facto” segregation stemming from metropolitan housing patterns was legal, nonracial and exempt from the scope of Brown.

On April 20, 1971, the Supreme Court upheld the two-way busing order in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg. The text of the decision was intentionally vague and internally contradictory. Significantly, it evaded McMillan’s central finding that state culpability in housing segregation required a remedy in the public schools. Instead Swann announced a discretionary “reasonableness” standard to assess whether the scope and burdens of a desegregation formula were practical or not. In a revealing double negative, Chief Justice Burger wrote that “we are unable to conclude that the order of the District Court is not reasonable.”

The legacy of Swann therefore came to depend on the discretionary decisions of lower-court judges. In short, the constitutional right to desegregated schools promised in Brown meant different things across the country. Different political jurisdictions in the same metropolitan region often followed different rules.

Charlotte became one of the nation’s most integrated urban school systems because White families could not easily escape the metropolitan-wide desegregation plan. Court-ordered busing in a number of other Southern metropolises also achieved relatively high integration levels because many of them, too, had annexed their suburbs or already had consolidated countywide school districts.

This fact would become crucial after a federal district judge ruled that Detroit’s “de jure segregated public school system” resulted from local, state and federal government policies “to establish and maintain the pattern of residential segregation” throughout the metropolitan region. In Milliken v. Bradley (1973), the Supreme Court overturned this ruling based on Swann’s “reasonableness” standard and effectively exempted autonomous suburban districts nationwide from the scope of Brown. White parents in most cities knew that if they moved to the suburbs, their children would be beyond the reach of any busing plan.

In Boston, the violent White working-class resistance to school desegregation inside the city limits led to a new political consensus that court-ordered busing was a disastrous failure. But the problem was actually far too little court-mandated school desegregation because it exempted White residents of suburban Boston. This pattern prevailed throughout the North and West as well as in major Southern cities such as Atlanta.

Since the late 1980s the Supreme Court has first permitted the end of judicial supervision of school desegregation and then subsequently required the end of affirmative action to maintain integrated schools. The result has been a process of resegregation and the reversal of the progress achieved during the 1970s through court-ordered busing. In Charlotte-Mecklenburg, the federal courts have even banned the use of any race-conscious techniques to maintain integration by classifying them as reverse discrimination against White students.

The Supreme Court nationalized this evisceration of Brown in a 2007 case involving Seattle and Louisville where Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.’s controlling opinion invalidated modest voluntary integration strategies by equating them with the unconstitutional practices of Jim Crow. This deliberate inversion of the moral categories and the historical narrative of the civil rights movement went far beyond the Supreme Court’s poison pill of “reasonableness” in the 1971 Swann decision, but both landmark cases shared a common thread: the refusal to even acknowledge, much less confront, the burdens of White supremacy and government-sanctioned racial segregation nationwide.

For the federal judiciary, this civil rights history does not actually matter at all. But it should, and it shows the path forward for the very public policies needed to redress inequalities in housing and education.

The Arizona State Senate established an audit of the 2020 vote in Maricopa County, the state’s most populous county. After the election, the votes were recounted three times and certified.

The State Senate hired a private contractor who is a Trump supporter. Some Republicans are outraged.

A recount of the 2020 presidential election in Arizona’s largest county is becoming “dangerous,” the Republican chairman of the county board of supervisors declared in a fiery statement late Thursday, a sign of escalating tensions over the controversial election review commissioned by the GOP-led state Senate.
In a statement issued after a lengthy closed-door meeting of the Maricopa County board, whose five members include four Republicans, Chairman Jack Sellers blasted allegations made this week by a private contractor hired to reexamine the election that the audit has already identified problems with the vote.
Sellers said those claims, described in a letter by state Senate President Karen Fann (R), were “false and ill-informed.”
“I know you have all grown weary of the lies and half-truths six months after the 2020 General Election,” he wrote. He added that the private contractors — led by a Florida firm called Cyber Ninjas, whose founder has promoted baseless claims of widespread fraud in the 2020 election — “are in way over their heads.”
“This is not funny,” he wrote. “This is dangerous.”…

In Arizona, where President Biden was the first Democrat to win the state in nearly 25 years, the state Republican Party has strongly backed Trump’s claims, as have several members of Congress. But Republican Gov. Doug Ducey and Maricopa County officials have certified Biden’s win and said the election was fair and secure.


Republicans in the state Senate nevertheless ordered a new review of the results in Maricopa, where Biden won by more than two percentage points, even though state and federal judges had previously dismissed allegations of fraud in Arizona’s vote as lacking evidence.
Fann has insisted that the goal of the review is not to re-litigate the election, but instead to spot problems in election administration that could be corrected for the future. However, Trump and his supporters have made clear that they believe the Arizona audit is the first step to reexamining Biden’s victory across the country...

Last month, the Senate used a legislative subpoena to seize Maricopa’s 2.1 million ballots as well as the county’s voting machines, and turned them over to Cyber Ninjas, whose chief executive, Doug Logan, posted now-deleted tweets endorsing theories that the November vote was marred by fraud.




Logan also has ties to Sidney Powell and Lin Wood, two Trump-allied lawyers who filed unsuccessful lawsuits after the election challenging the results in multiple states.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/arizona-recount-gop/2021/05/14/330bc808-b4c7-11eb-a980-a60af976ed44_story.html

While Arne Duncan was superintendent of schools in Chicago, he received over $10 million from the Gates Foundation to begin “turning around” low-performing schools. He supported the creation of The Academy for Urban School Leadership (AUSL), which subsequently took over 31 schools, some of which raised test scores but were criticized for pushing out low-scoring students. One of AUSL’s goals was to train teachers for urban schools.

The leadership of Chicago Public Schools decided to absorb the 31 schools back into the school district, according to Chalkbeat. AUSL will continue training teachers.

Tapped in 2006 to steer improvements at some of the city’s lowest-performing schools, the nonprofit Academy for Urban School Leadership manages 31 schools that together enrolled 14,745 students this school year, mostly on the city’s South and West sides. The contractor oversees a yearlong teacher residency program that prepares educators to work with high-need students. In the past five years, enrollment across its schools has declined 12% compared to the district’s 10% drop, while year-to-year academic growth on standardized tests has shown some schools steadily improving and others struggling.

Mike Klonsky, veteran activist in Chicago, explains the spotty record of AUSL here. It was a key component of Arne Duncan’s “reform” agenda, handing over low-performing schools to private organizations and firing their teachers. It was a precursor to the massive failure of Race to the Top.

Klonsky wrote:

Lacking any research base and built on the false premise that private companies, hedge funders, and power philanthropists could best operate public institutions, AUSL’s school takeover turned out to be an expensive and dismal flop.

AUSL was founded and run by Chicago venture capitalist Martin Koldyke, who used his connections and big campaign donations to become a powerhouse in the school turnaround business. Koldyke, a golf buddy of then-Mayor Daley, decided he could save the public school system by running it like a business. Koldyke’s company, Frontenac, had been a big investor in for-profit colleges like DeVry and Rasmussen College.

Despite AUSL schools ranking at or near the bottom of the system, the company benefited from backing from Daley, and then from Rahm Emanuel. Rahm even selected a former AUSL top executive to oversee CPS’ finances and named AUSL’s previous board chairman, David Vitale, as president of the CPS Board of Education. With virtual control of the board and the central office, Koldyke was assured of a stable funding pipeline to his then 19 turnaround schools, even in the midst of a budget crisis when neighborhood schools were being starved of operating cash.

Jesse Sharkey, president of the Chicago Teachers Union, reacted gleefully to the news:

Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s outgoing CPS leadership team publicly confirmed today that it is dismantling the Academy of Urban School Leadership (AUSL), the district’s largest turnaround school network. Beginning in 2006, turnaround actions across the South and West sides of Chicago led to a sweeping purge of Black educators under the guise of “failing” schools, when in reality, mayoral control of CPS had long starved these school communities of resources needed to thrive.

Our beloved Karen Lewis led the charge to fight these racist purges when she became president of our union in 2010. The following year, we filed suit in federal court against CPS for violating the civil rights of displaced Black educators. The district fought for a decade to derail this case until a judge ruled this spring that without a settlement, the suit would proceed to trial.

None of this happens without educators’ vocal opposition to turnaround actions, and coalition and community support for the brave plaintiffs in our lawsuit, which have pushed CPS to tacitly end this practice. The same can be said about broad opposition among parents, students and traditional, neighborhood public school communities to uncontrolled charter expansion, which has helped stall school privatization in recent years.

We will continue our work to dismantle racist metrics — now branded SQRP by CPS — even as the mayor’s handpicked Board of Education lets these policies fester. We will continue to push the state legislature to give Chicagoans what residents in every other school district in the state have — the right to a fully elected school board that will not rubber stamp the racism of the past. We will continue to fight, and we will continue to win.

Unity and commitment to creating a truly sustainable community school district is what moves our struggle forward. Educators’ work is anchored in the fight for the schools our students deserve, and the right to recovery for every CPS student and family.

Our mission remains to reverse the harm of racist policies like turnarounds, and move our bosses to provide school communities the resources required to support every student’s needs.

Chester-Upland school district is one of the poorest in the state. Seventy percent of its students are black. One big charter school, owned and operated by a wealthy Republican lawyer from Philadelphia, already dominates the district with his Chester Community Charter School. The district has been in receivership and under state control for years. Even though CCCS is a low-performing charter, the state’s only idea is to hand over all the schools to charter operators.

This is an important story, well told by this reporter. It follows the template for charterization:  Underfund a predominately African-American school district for years, then have the state take control because of financial issues. Strip the school board of all power and appoint a single “receiver” to make all decisions. Begin the charterization process with as little transparency as possible knowing that parents and community do not want it. Put out RFPs to charter companies. Hold one meeting at which parents, educators and community make clear their opposition but feel that the fix is in despite their wishes. Receiver, who is not accountable to the community or the voters, makes his decision.

https://whyy.org/articles/chester-upland-school-district-confronts-the-prospect-of-charter-takeover/

A few years ago, someone coined the term “zombie policies” to describe policies that fail again and again, yet never go away. One such zombie is “merit pay,” which has never succeeded yet never dies an ignominious death or loss of reputation.

I mention this because our current education system is hampered by at least 20 years of zombie policies, beginning with No Child Left Behind, then Race to the Top, then Trump’s fervent support for privatization.

In 2010, when my book “The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing abd Choice are Undermining Education” was published, I participated in a debate with Carmel Martin, one of the key strategists of the Obama Department of Education. She defended every aspect of the Bush-Obama approach: high-stakes testing, closing low-performing schools, charter schools, evaluating teachers by student test scores, and so on.

A year or so later, I was invited to the White House Executive Offices to meet Obama’s top education team: Melody Barnes, chief of the White House domestic policy staff, Roberto Rodriguez, Obama’s White House advisor on education, and Rahm Emanuel, the President’s chief of staff.

Rodriguez asked me what I thought of merit pay, and I said candidly that it never succeeded. Why will students learn more to get a bonus for their teacher? He said, “We just put $1 billion into merit pay.” He said, what do you think of Common Core? I said, “give it a trial run in a few states before imposing it nationally. You will quickly learn how to make it better.”

Rodriguez said, “that’s too late; we have to roll it out in almost every state before the 2012 elections.”

Fast forward to the Biden administration. Carmel Martin now has Rodriguez’ old job as White House education advisor, and Rodriguez has Martin’s old job as assistant Secretary for Planning, Policy, and Evaluation.

This worries Jan Resseger. She had been hoping for a fresh vision. With the two powerhouses of the Obama in key roles, it looks like Biden is winding the clock backwards. The zombies are back!!

She writes:

At the end of his first hundred days, President Joe Biden deserves credit for taking important steps to help public schools serving children living in communities where family poverty is concentrated.

First, the President promised during the campaign to triple funding for Title I schools, and the federal budget he has proposed for FY22 would accomplish two-thirds of that promise by doubling the federal investment in Title I, whose funding has lagged for decades behind what is needed for equity.

Second, in the American Rescue Plan federal stimulus passed in March, the President expanded and made fully refundable the Child Tax Credit. In his new American Family Plan he has proposed to extend these urgently needed changes in the Child Tax Credit until 2025.  The expansion of the Child Tax Credit will make it possible for America’s poorest families with children to qualify for this program for the first time. We know that poverty is an overwhelming impediment for children, and ameliorating child poverty is an important step toward helping America’s poorest children thrive at school.

During the campaign, Biden also promised to move public school policy away from two decades of standardized testing.  That is a promise he has, at least until now, entirely broken.

In a letter, dated February 22, 2021, Acting Assistant Secretary of Education, Ian Rosenblum informed statesthey must test students this year on the mandated annual high-stakes standardized tests, the centerpiece of the test-and-punish school accountability scheme introduced in 2002 by the No Child Left Behind Act.  Rosenblum said the Department of Education would permit flexibility for states which applied for wavers, but Rosenblum described the flexibility in gobbledegook: “It is urgent to understand the impact of COVID-19 on learning. We know, however, that some schools and school districts may face circumstances in which they are not able to safely administer statewide summative assessments this spring using their standard practices… We emphasize the importance of flexibility in the administration of statewide assessments.  A state should use that flexibility to consider: administering a shortened version of its statewide assessments; offering remote administration, where feasible; and/or extending the testing window to the greatest extent practicable. This could include offering multiple testing windows and/or extending the testing window into the summer or even the beginning of the 2021 school year.”  Not surprisingly there has been enormous inconsistency in which some states have been allowed to cut back or delay or pretty much cancel testing, while others were denied their requests.

Rosenblum released the federal guidance on testing before Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona was confirmed, and everyone hoped he would rescind the policy.  But instead, Secretary Cardona  justified demanding standardized testing in this COVID-19 year, despite overwhelming problems with the practicality, consistency, reliability, and validity of the tests. The Washington Post‘s Valerie Strauss quoted Dr. Cardona: “He said student data obtained from the tests was important to help education officials create policy and target resources where they are most needed… Cardona said… that he would be willing to ‘reexamine what role assessments’ play in education—but not immediately. ‘This is not the year for a referendum on assessments, but I am open to conversations on how to make those better.'”

One would have hoped that Dr. Cardona would be familiar with the huge debate that has consumed education experts and also many parents who have been opting out for years now. He assures us that mandated testing during this school year, which has been utterly disrupted by COVID-19, will be used to drive federal investment into the school districts where tests show students are suffering most.  However, standardized tests, as mandated by No Child Left Behind and its successor, the Every Student Succeeds Act, were not designed to drive a system of test-and-invest. Instead federally mandated standardized tests are now the very foundation of a maze of policies at the federal level—and across the states—to identify so-called “failing schools” and to punish them with policies that rate and rank public schools, punish so-called failing schools by privatizing or closing them, evaluate schoolteachers by their students’ test scores, and require states to remove caps on charter schools.

Now, as the Biden Administration and Cardona’s Department of Education staff up, it is becoming apparent that Education Department and White House staff will include key people returning from President Barack Obama’s administration—people who helped design and implement these test-and-punish policies,

Last week, Education Week‘s Andrew Ujifusa reportedthat President Biden will nominate Roberto Rodriguez for the position of Assistant Secretary of Planning, Evaluation, and Policy Development in the Department of Education. Rodriguez was a special White House assistant to President Obama for education policy. And before that, he helped formulate accountability-based school reform as staff to the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pension Committee when the No Child Left Behind Act was formulated in 2001.

In 2012, Education Week‘s Alyson Klein quoted Rodriguez bragging about Arne Duncan’s Race to the Top program: “Mr. Rodriguez, the White house adviser, argues that the Race to the Top has spurred big and lasting change, including helping to advance the Common Core State Standards, which 46 states and the District of Columbia have adopted. ‘We are going to take credit for helping to accelerate the adoption of these standards throughout the country.  Race to the Top clearly did  that.'” You will remember that in order to be able to apply for a Race to the Top grant, states had to promise to adopt formal standards, and after Bill Gates had funded the development of the Common Core, most states grabbed onto what was available.

After serving in the Obama White House, Rodriguez became CEO of an organization called Teach Plus, whose website claims its mission is “to empower excellent, experienced, and diverse teachers to take leadership over key policy and practice issues that advance equity, opportunity, and student success.”  Progressive educator and writer,  Steve Nelson readsthat mission a little differently: “On the surface it is dedicated to developing ‘teacher leaders.’ The clear sub-text is to inculcate the values of anti-union reform in a generation of young teachers. Sort of like Teach for America, graduate school edition. They rail against seniority as job security, asserting with no basis that subpar teachers are retained in times of cost cuts because of union protection. They also claim that unions stifle innovation. Teach Plus has received more than $27 million from the Gates Foundation and has among its donors the Walton Family Foundation and an all-star roster of philanthropic sources dedicated to so-called reform… For several decades public education has been a battlefield between committed educators with little money or power and committed non-educators with lots of money and power.”

Roberto Rodriguez will face Senate confirmation to his new position. But if he is confirmed, he will join an administration that includes a former Obama era colleague now serving in the Biden White House.  Diane Ravitch reports that Carmel Martin holds the the same position—Special Assistant to the President for Education Policy—that Roberto Rodriguez held in the Obama Administration.

The 74‘s Kevin Mahnken provides some background on Carmel Martin: “Carmel Martin is one of the most powerful education experts in Washington, a top Democratic policy adviser…. So why haven’t you heard of her?  ‘Carmel’s a ghost,’ said Andrew Rotherham, a longtime education commentator and founder of the nonprofit Bellwether Education Partners. ‘You’re not going to find lots of published stuff by her. She’s that archetype that you can work with on various issues, an inside-game person, but she’s set herself up for this moment because she doesn’t have this crazy-long paper trail.'”  Martin also was staff to Senator Ted Kennedy back in 2001, when the No Child Left Behind Act gathered bipartisan steam. Mahnken describes Martin as a defender of Arne Duncan’s Race to the Top and the Common Core standards when she served in Obama’s White House and of Arne Duncan’s policy demanding that states evaluate teachers by their students’ scores.

Secretary Cardona’s has kept everyone’s eyes myopically focused on school reopening after COVID-19. But we all need to pay closer attention to the other policy initiatives that will emerge from Cardona’s Department of Education. Diane Ravitch worries: “that Rodriguez and Carmel Martin will make policy, not Secretary Cardona or Deputy Secretary-designate Cindy Marten. Biden is looking to the future with his sweeping domestic policy plans. But in education, he is looking in the rear-view mirror to the architects of Obama’s failed programs.”

---

---

​

janresseger | May 3, 2021 at 7:45 am | Tags: American Rescue Plan expandes Child Tac Credit and makes it fully refundable., Biden hires Carmel Martin and Rodriguez from Arne Duncan days., Biden’s proposed federal budge would double Title I., Cardona continues to require standardized testing., Carmel Martin, danger of test-and-punish school reform, Miguel Cardona, Roberto Rodriguez, Steve Nelson, Teach Plus, Will Biden repreat education poli