A month ago, I wrote to tell you that I was going to the hospital for open-heart surgery. I lined up guest bloggers who filled in for me in my absence, and I thank them all for keeping the conversation going.

I checked into the hospital in NYC on April 7. Surgery was early the next morning. I had an ascending aortic aneurysm and a leaky heart valve that had to be replaced. The surgeon explained that he would cut upon my breast bone to gain access to my heart.

Needless to say, I have no recollection of the surgery or its aftermath. I was sedated for five days. One member of my family was allowed to visit each day. When I was finally allowed to regain consciousness, I had no voice (due to intubation), a bad cough, and could not walk. I spent two weeks in the Intensive Care Unit, two days in regular care, then moved to the Rehabilitation Unit, where I am relearning how to walk.

I’m going home on May 7 and bringing a walker with me until I have fully regained the use of my legs and can walk without fear of falling.

I want to express gratitude to the many friends who sent good wishes my way.

I want to thank the great doctors and nurses who made sure I pulled through an arduous procedure.

I thank Medicare, an incredible federal program that assures that everyone enrolled gets the same quality care. Wouldn’t it be great if everyone could enroll in Medicare?

And of course I thank my sons Joe and Michael and my partner Mary, who were always there for visiting hours and always brought a CARE package of a favorite food.

Several years ago, the Walton Family Foundation and the Gates Foundation decided that it was not enough to open new charter schools. No, they had to devise mechanisms to make sure that school officials put charters on an equal footing with public schools and that the public didn’t care whether schools were run by their elected school board or a private board of directors.

The Gates Foundation created something called “the Gates Compact,” paying districts to treat public and charter schools the same.

The Waltons played a different angle. To advance their agenda of embedding charters and wiping out any differences between public schools and charter schools, they pushed for the adoption of a common enrollment form. The two sectors are intermingled, and neither students nor parents know which schools are public and which have private or corporate management.

In Oakland, where a slate of pro-public school parents won the last school board election, the board voted to eliminate the OneApp system.

Jane Nylund, a parent activist in Oakland, sent the following report:

Elections matter. In a complete turnaround to the common enrollment momentum that we have seen since 2015, our newly elected school board voted by 4-3 to pass the Enrollment Stabilization Policy, which eliminates the ability of OUSD to participate in marketing and supporting charter schools with our tax dollars. The policy ends the shared enrollment system put into place in 2015 by former superintendent Antwan Wilson, who had actively steered the district towards a common enrollment system. When the board voted it down, Antwan Wilson, undeterred, supported the implementation of an electronic school finder, Schoolmint, which combined both district and charter schools on a single platform, thus placing both types of schools on the same footing, which was the intent all along. Families searching for schools using their neighborhood zip codes, would often find charter schools at the top of their search feed, rather than the neighborhood school within their boundary.

Key point of the Enrollment Stabilization Policy: “This prohibition applies (but is not limited) to OUSD’s enrollment system, school maps, family guides and other enrollment materials, any OUSD website, OUSD facilities, enrollment fairs, and teacher recruitment events. Competing schools shall not be invited to participate in or be included in OUSD- or site-run recruitment fairs or OUSD- or site-run enrollment events or to recruit students on OUSD-operated campuses.”

For the first time, district legislation is acknowledging that marketing and competition vs. “quality” are the key strategies to the growth of charter schools in Oakland. While charter proponents have argued that the district is trying to “hide” “quality schools” and that families can pick whatever type they want (district, charter, or private), that’s not the reality of what families do. According to OUSD feeder patterns, it is clear that charters are marketed aggressively as “high quality” from the elementary schools onward and that elementary charter enrollment is the key to future charter school demand at the secondary level. Charter proponents have always known this and have relied on the “all charters are high-quality” tag line to sell this school model to families.

None of this would have happened without constant vigilance and involvement from teachers, as well as support from grassroots parents’ groups such as Parents United. For too long, charter schools have had it both ways: operate like a business with all the usual trappings, but pretend to be a public entity for purposes of revenue generation. If charters want to be in the education business using marketing and competition as proxies for authentic “achievement”, then they need to play by the rules of that game and find their own customer base using their own funds (our taxpayer dollars). While much work remains to be done to defeat privatization in Oakland, the days of feeding at the OUSD trough at the expense of our own district students are finally coming to an end.

https://ousdparentsunited.com/

Michael Sean Winters of the National Catholic Reporter expressed my reaction to President Joe Biden’s speech to Congress. No boasting. No narcissism. A strong assertion that government must work for the people and use its resources to improve the lives of the people.

The most abnormal thing about Biden’s speech, however, was how normal it was. After four years of Donald Trump spewing his particular brand of dyspeptic, self-absorbed oratory, it felt a bit unfamiliar, and a bit exhilarating, watching Biden calmly discuss the challenges and the opportunities facing the nation, and discuss how he proposed to confront the one and exploit the other. A sense of déjà vu does not usually mix with the emotions kindled by promise, but when they do, the experience is centering. The speech felt like the country was getting back to normal. 

The United States, in normal, pre-Trump times, believed democracy worked. Regrettably, Ronald Reagan pitted democracy against government, and set the terms of public policy for 40 years. The pandemic brought into sharp relief what had long been obvious to those of us schooled in Catholic social doctrine: Reaganism hollowed out the government’s ability to achieve its foremost objective, the common good. 

But, the will of the people continued to voice skepticism about government overreach and the most memorable line from a State of the Union speech by the first Democratic president after Reagan, Bill Clinton, had the flavor of capitulation: “The era of big government is over.”

Biden announced that government focused on the common good was back and that the democratically expressed will of the people insisted on a more activist government.

Kathleen Cashin has been a teacher, a principal, and a superintendent in New York City in high-needs districts. She is currently a member of the New York State Board of Regents, which sets policy for the state.

In this article, which appeared in the New York Daily News, she explains her hope that school district will use their new money to invest in most successful school reform that works: reduced class size. (Mayor de Blasio, by contrast, says he wants to pour $500 million of the city’s windfall into more testing and tutoring.)

Cashin writes:

In 1999, when I was superintendent of the city’s District 23 in Ocean Hill Brownsville, fourth graders had to take a multi-faceted standardized state test for the first time, which included reading, writing and listening. The first thing I did was to reduce class size as much as possible.

The results were astounding. Not only were there significant gains in test scores the following year, but I noticed a stunning development: Students were able to forge closer relationships with their teachers, and their teachers had their morale lifted because no longer did they have an overwhelming number of students with high needs to address.

Most disciplinary problems vanished overnight, even among students who were most prone to act up. Teachers were now keeping their doors open, and welcoming administrators and other teachers to visit, because their classes were running smoothly, and it was evident how much learning was going on. They were no longer fearful that someone would notice chaotic classrooms and blame it on them. They began to enthusiastically collaborate with each other, and this collaboration helped to further sharpen their skills and fostered a strong sense of professionalism.

In 2003, I was appointed Superintendent of Region Five, encompassing Districts 19 and 23 in Brooklyn and District 27 in Queens, including some of the poorest neighborhoods in the city. Aided by a state program that helped fund class size reduction, I lowered class sizes in as many schools as I could. Over the next three years, our elementary and middle schools achieved the greatest test score gains of any region in the city.

It was a revelation. And now for the first time, NYC has the opportunity to transform all our schools and classrooms in a similar fashion.

New York City will receive about $7 billion from the federal government over the next three years to help our schools reopen to in-person learning safely, with additional support students will need to recover from more than a year of disrupted learning and the losses that so many suffered due to the pandemic. President Biden has also proposed to more than double Title I funding, which could mean an additional $700 million annually to the city’s schools.

In addition, after many years of reneging on their promise, the state has now pledged to provide the city with full Foundation Aid, starting at $530 million and increasing over three years to about $1.3 billion in annual funding. This is the result of the Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit, in which the excessive class sizes in our schools were central to the judgment of the state’s highest court that students were deprived of an equitable opportunity to learn. In 2003, the New York Court of Appeals wrote: “[T]ens of thousands of students are placed in overcrowded classrooms…and provided with inadequate facilities and equipment. The number of children in these straits is large enough to represent a systemic failure.”

Unfortunately, class sizes have only increased since then, particularly in the early grades. More than 300,000 students were in classes of 30 or more last year, with average class sizes 15% to 30% larger than those in the rest of the state.

Research shows that while all children benefit from smaller classes, those who make the greatest gainsare students of color, those who are economically disadvantaged, English Language Learners and those with special needs. These students collectively make up the majority of students in the NYC public schools.

The City Council has now proposed that $250 millionbe spent on a targeted program to lower class size next year. This is a good beginning. I hope Mayor de Blasio and Chancellor Meisha Porter will enthusiastically accept this proposal, so that class size reduction can begin to be phased citywide over the next three to four years.

We have a crisis in teaching, with high teacher attrition rates, particularly in those schools with the most disadvantaged students. This emanates in part from these teachers having class sizes too large. Educators are not being provided with the opportunity they need to succeed in their jobs.

It’s simply too difficult for one person to handle 30 young students and know all their abilities and disabilities, no less be able to address them effectively. But if you have 20 students or fewer, and in the upper grades 25 or fewer, suddenly what was impossible before becomes possible.

Poverty drains everyone it comes in contact with. But when children are provided the chance to have the close personal attention and connection with their teachers, made possible by a small class, it can change their lives. We believe they deserve that chance.

Cashin represents the borough of Brooklyn on the state Board of Regents.

During the Obama administration, Roberto Rodriguez was the White House advisor on education. He vigorously supported the Race to the Top program, the Common Core standards, and high-stakes testing. All of these initiatives failed to improve student test scores and wasted billions of dollars.

Andrew Ujifusa wrote in Education Week (April 28) about the return of Rodriguez. He joins former Obama official Carmel Martin, another zealous advocate of those failed policies. Basically, they are switching places, with Rodriguez taking the job that Martin held, and Martin moving into the slot previously occupied by Martin. There is no indication that either has modified their support for the Bush-Obama bipartisan agenda.

President Joe Biden announced Wednesday that he plans to nominate Roberto Rodriguez, one of former President Barack Obama’s top education advisers, to lead one of the most important divisions of the U.S. Department of Education.

Biden wants Rodriguez to lead the Education Department’s office of planning, evaluation and policy development. Rodriguez, a former special assistant to Obama on education policy who also previously worked in the Senate, is currently the president and CEO of Teach Plus, a teacher-advocacy organization.

The office Rodriguez would lead, if confirmed, has played a significant part in past presidential administrations. For example, Carmel Martin, who oversaw the development of the Race to the Top competition and the expansion of School Improvement Grants in the early part of the Obama administration, led the office. Under former U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, the office was led by Jim Blew, who came to the department after many years of working to promote school choice.

As a deputy assistant to Obama, Rodriguez played a major role in developing and advocating for the president’s K-12 policy priorities.

Rodriguez defended Race to the Top in a 2012 Education Week article, saying that it was sparking major shifts for schools, such as the adoption of the Common Core State Standards. Both Race to the Top and the standards, of course, became controversial as time went on, and attracted criticism from Democrats as well as Republicans.

It would be gratifying to hear either or both explain why they the multi-billion Race to the Top failed, why Common Core had no impact (yet cost hundreds of millions) to implement, whether they have changed their views about VAM (evaluating teachers by student test scores) and charter schools.

It appears that Rodriguez and Carmel Martin will make policy, not Secretary Cardona or Deputy Secretary-designate Cindy Martens.

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.