Want proof of systemic racism in the United States today? Look no farther than this article by Annie Waldman, who wrote the following article for ProPublica. She tells the story of a district that was abandoned by the state; a district that whites fled from; a teacher doing her best during a year of COVID; and the idiotic state policy of imposing a third-grade retention policy in the midst of the pandemic.

The teacher, Ashlee Thompson, was a graduate of the Benton Harbor Public Schools. She had other career choices and other districts where she would have been paid more. But she chose to teach elementary school in Benton Harbor. In addition to the stress of teaching students who were far behind, she had another burden:

The Michigan legislature had chosen this year, of all years, to enforce a strict new literacy law: Any third grader who could not read proficiently by May could flunk and be held back.

For Benton Harbor, a small, majority-Black city halfway between Chicago and Detroit, the implications were immense. As Thompson screened her 35 students that fall, she realized 19 were not at grade level. She worried that holding them back could do more harm than good, and studies supported this fear; it could bruise their confidence, lead them to act out and even decrease their odds of graduating from high school.

As if Thompson did not have enough to worry about, there was this: The existence of her entire school district hung in the balance, and with it, the very fabric of her hometown.

For the last quarter century, schools in Benton Harbor had struggled to survive as students fled for charters and majority-white districts in neighboring towns. Because a district’s funding is tied to its number of students, Benton Harbor’s budget shrank. It cut academic offerings, froze teacher pay, closed school buildings and consolidated students into crowded classrooms. As its resources eroded, so did students’ performance on tests.

Michigan had found a remedy for such ailing districts: dissolving them. It had happened eight years ago to two other majority-Black cities, Inkster and Buena Vista. Students were absorbed into surrounding districts without a guarantee they would be attending better schools. Inkster residents, who feared losing their sense of identity, scrambled to start a museum so that their children would know they had once rallied at homecoming games around the Vikings football team.

This existential threat has loomed over Benton Harbor since 2011, when former Gov. Rick Snyder began to consider whether the state should install an emergency manager to run the city’s schools, a takeover Inkster once faced before it was ultimately dissolved.

Will majority-black, under resourced Benton Harbor schools survive? There is little evidence that the children will benefit if the district is dissolved. Disruption—not better education—is the name of the game. No one remembers why someone thought it was a good idea to dissolve struggling districts or to hand them over to emergency managers or to let the state take control. Those strategies are relics of a generation of failed reforms.

Hundreds, soon to be thousands, of teachers, scholars, parents, and students signed a statement denouncing House Bill 3979, passed by the Republican legislature and signed into law by Governor Gregg Abbott. It bans honest and accurate teaching about racism in American history or other courses.

TEACH Coalition 

Statement on Texas House Bill 3979

We are a collective of teachers, professors, community workers, parents, and students across Texas who are committed to teaching the histories of race, racism, slavery, and settler colonialism. We strongly oppose the new law signed by Governor Greg Abbott that prohibits educators from teaching about the history and social impacts of systemic racism in the U.S.

Silencing the discussion of any aspect of these histories in our classrooms goes against the professed values of freedom and equality offered to everyone under the United States Constitution. 

We stand firmly in solidarity with freedom in education for students and with protecting academic freedom, which is fundamental to any society that believes in equity. Texas House Bill 3979 is a blatant attempt at political and governmental overreach. It was not written in consultation with teachers and students and is an authoritarian directive that interferes with education from a partisan viewpoint. 

We cannot understand our present without understanding our past. Knowing the truth of the origins of the U.S. nation-state requires acknowledging the full truths of settler colonialism that took land from Indigenous peoples, forcibly displaced them, and decimated their populations. It also requires understanding the full facts about the transatlantic slave trade that brought Africans in bondage across the Middle Passage to lives of enslavement. The wealth of the U.S. was created by the enslaved labor of millions of Black people who were never paid for their work and who lived their lives in unfreedom. We are still living with the visible consequences of this tragic and violent past. Teaching systemic racism allows us to see how housing, health outcomes, access to education, wealth, clean water and air, all of these aspects of life that are fundamental to freedom and happiness remain severely curtailed along racial lines. 

HB 3979 means that teachers cannot safely teach, for example, the facts of Juneteenth, a key event in Texas history which has just been declared a national holiday; the facts of Jim Crow laws that legalized racial segregation; the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882; the facts of the forced removal of Indigenous peoples from their lands; Executive Order 9066, which led to the internment of tens of thousands of US citizens of Japanese descent; and the present-day facts of racialized inequities in the U.S. All of these and many more aspects of U.S. history must be part of students’ education if we are to learn from the past.

These historical facts are not a threat to anyone who believes in justice and equity. Learning about these histories is difficult and can be uncomfortable, but failing to deliver fairness and equal opportunities for all children is not merely uncomfortable: it is damaging to everyone and perpetuates the traumas and inequities of the past into the future. Knowing the truths of slavery and colonialism is not divisive: it will give us all the understanding needed to abolish systemic inequities and to bring us together. Armed with knowledge and truth, we can all work in community for a better future. 

Learning the truth about the past, especially about how their communities have been affected by racism, helps students to understand the world around them, to value the contributions of their own multicultural, diverse society, and to acquire the racial literacy needed to navigate professional, academic, and civic spaces. Students want to develop this understanding and gain this knowledge, and they need this education in order to succeed in our multiracial society that should ideally respect all communities equally.

We recognize that the current legislation in Texas was mobilized by well-funded and highly influential political forces that seek to erase the work of scholars who study the impact of racism in U.S. history. These organizations perpetuate the false narrative that racism was not a foundational aspect of this state’s history. 

We stand in full solidarity with Texas teachers who teach the truth about U.S. History and who encourage students to seek justice, equality, and freedom, especially for communities that continue to experie

Linda Lyon was a blogger until two years ago. She stopped because she realized the country was too divided to listen to different views. Fake news proliferated. A military veteran, she decided to step back for a while. This is her return column. She was a school board member and president of the Arizona School Boards Association.

She writes:

Hello. Let me reintroduce myself. Linda Lyon. Retired Air Force Colonel, school board member, very happily married to my best friend, who is also a woman. Previously married to a great guy. Enthusiastic fly fisher, own a gun, love to camp. A patriot who believes in our Constitution and progressive policies but also that our system works best when we have a balance of power between two parties so they must compromise to get things done. In other words, please don’t write me off with just one label. You’d be wrong.

I’ve been blogging on RestoreReason.com since 2013, with a hiatus since mid-2019. There are multiple reasons for my break to include some hard-fought political losses that were near and dear to my heart. More than anything though, I think there was just too much craziness in the news and I didn’t think I had anything constructive to add. Whatever I had to say would just be drowned out, and even if anyone was listening, it was probably only the people who agreed with me.

The last post I wrote on in 2019 titled “Teachers are the Real Patriots”, was written in response to a letter to the editor in the Arizona Daily Star. In it, a veteran made the point that “Now all enemies are Democrats and liberals” and he went on to say, “There are many retired military who will protect our president. He has only to say where and when, we will be there and the wrath of Hell will descend. We will take our country back.”

At the time, I had no clue what was to come, and in my response as an ardent public education advocate, I focused on teachers as patriots.

Please read the rest and think about what patriotism is.

We have seen for many years that celebrities and billionaires love charter schools, though it is not apparent why since they are typically no better–and often much worse–than district public schools.

But there are a few signs of change.

The legendary singer Tony Bennett created the Frank Sinatra School of the Arts as part of the New York City school system. He and his wife Susan Crow Benedetto have established arts partnerships in nearly 40 more public schools, located in New York City and Los Angeles. They created an organization called “Exploring the Arts,” which promotes the arts in public schools and encourages youngsters to develop their creative talents. They began their mission in 1999, and it continues to grow.

In Los Angeles, two well-known figures in the entertainment industry asked Superintendent Austin Beutner if they could sponsor a public high school modeled on a successful program that they had created at the University of Southern California. He gave his consent.

This account appeared in Valerie Strauss’s Answer Sheet blog:

“It can take years for a public school district to conceive, design and build a new school — but here’s a story about the incredibly fast creation of what could be America’s coolest new high school.

“It started a few months ago, when a friend asked Austin Beutner, superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, if he wanted to open a new public high school. He wasn’t asking for himself but, rather, on behalf of Andre Young, better known as Dr. Dre, and Jimmy Iovine.

“Young and Iovine, both successful producers and entrepreneurs, had, nearly a decade earlier, helped found a namesake school at the University of Southern California. It combines art, design, technology and entrepreneurship in a multidisciplinary academy that has about 120 to 130 undergraduates and at least 200 graduate students.

“The two men, along with Erica Muhl, dean of USC’s Jimmy Iovine and Andre Young Academy, wanted to introduce younger students to the same ideas being taught in the academy, so they investigated the best way to bring their program to the high school level. They decided they wanted to do it in a public district school — not a private or charter school — and that’s where Beutner and Los Angeles Unified came in.

“After a difficult year leading the country’s second-largest school district through the coronavirus pandemic, Beutner is ending his three-year tenure as superintendent on June 30, turning down an offer from the school board to stay. He could have dismissed the idea as too difficult to get through the bureaucracy in the short amount of time he had left in the district, whose student body is 84 percent Black and Latino.

“He didn’t. Instead, he jumped in.”

George Clooney and a bevy of other entertainment industry figures recently announced that they are also underwriting a new high school in the Los Angeles public school system. Clooney is a graduate of Augusta High School in Augusta, Kentucky.

“For the entertainment industry in Los Angeles, the phrase “giving back to the schools” has often meant a cameo appearance on career day or, perhaps more typically, a fat check made out to your own child’s elite private academy.

“But on Monday, the nation’s second-largest district unveiled the latest in a string of star-studded collaborations: a new high school underwritten by, among others, George Clooney, Don Cheadle, Eva Longoria and principals at Creative Artists Agency.

“The magnet school is intended to diversify the pipeline of cinematographers, engineers, visual effects artists and other technical workers in the city’s signature job sector, and is one of at least three joint initiatives started in the past two months between the Los Angeles schools and entertainment industry benefactors.

“Last week, the music producers Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine announced they were starting their own specialized high school in South Los Angeles. In May, a few hundred middle schoolers performed on free guitars with the pop artist H.E.R., signaling the expansion of a yearlong partnership with the Fender Play Foundation. And more high-profile initiatives involving robotics and music are in the works with major entertainment figures, district officials said.”

The chair of the California State Board of Education, Linda Darling-Hammond, disparaged these efforts as “charity,” when what is need is justice.

Since so many media stars like John Legend and a bevy of billionaires from the Walton family to the Broad Foundation to the DeVos family to Charles Koch, and billionaire hedge funders with less familiar names have spent hundreds of millions to support alternatives to public schools, I salute those celebrities who put their money into public schools, not charter schools.

“The Frank Sinatra School of the Arts, founded by the singer Tony Bennett, has operated for decades within New York’s public school system, for example. And LeBron James has opened a highly successful public school with wraparound social services in Ohio. But a group of Texas charter schools founded in 2012 by Deion Sanders, the former N.F.L. player, closed in insolvency after three scandal-plagued years.”

It seems unfair to criticize private philanthropy to public schools while remaining silent about the billionaires (and the federal government with its Charter Schools Program, funded at $440 million annually) pouring hundreds of millions every year into the aggressive expansion of corporate charter chains that defund public schools.

Star journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones has decided not to accept a chair in the Hussman School of Journalism after the Board of UNC first denied her tenure, then reversed their decision after widespread protests. Hannah-Jones has accepted a journalism chair at historically black Howard University instead, along with author Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Journalists Nikole Hannah-Jones and Ta-Nehisi Coates are joining Howard University’s faculty, school officials announced Tuesday in a major recruiting victory for the private institution in the nation’s capital. It was a simultaneous setback for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to lose Hannah-Jones after a long and remarkably contentious effort to recruit her.

The surprising development came less than a week after trustees for UNC-Chapel Hill voted to award tenure to Hannah-Jones. Initially, the public university hired her as a professor without the job-protection status. But its board of trustees approved tenure for her on Wednesday, after faculty members and students at Chapel Hill protested that she had been mistreated.

In an interview Tuesday on “CBS This Morning,” Hannah-Jones said she would not join the UNC faculty. “Very difficult decision,” she told Gayle King. “Not a decision I wanted to make.” The Pulitzer Prize winner said she believed a decision about tenure for her at UNC was delayed because of political opposition to her work and discrimination against her as a Black woman.

Bob Shepherd, resident polymath, has been a teacher, a textbook writer, an assessment developer, and a curriculum writer. I am grateful that he shares his thoughts on this blog on a daily basis.

He recently wrote a post about the Republicans’ obsession with critical race theory, which turns out in most states to be an effort to suppress any discussion of racism, past or present. The war on CRT is an effort to censor teachers and college professors and to make sure that they eliminate any unpleasant or downright disgraceful aspects of American history and society. To teach accurate history, it now seems, is “indoctrination.”

Shepherd writes, in part:

It’s another example of the same phenomenon that occurred a few years back when red state Repugnicans started passing ludicrous legislation against teaching Sharia Law in K-12 pubic schools, even though no U.S. K-12 Public School ever did this, not one. NOT. A. SINGLE. ONE.. The whole business reminds me of when a Flor-uh-duh Mayor issued a proclamation banning the nonexistent medieval bad boy Satan from her town. (Yes, this actually happened.) However, the latest wave of legislation is much, much worse than was that nonsense, for it attempts to ban any and all informed teaching about the history of race in America. It is Thought Control legislation that attempts to dish up for kids a mythologized history that serves the ends of white supremacists, and CRT in K-12 public schools is just the fabricated excuse for this.

BTW, if you are a Repugnican all worked up about CRT, consider this: 

Why this particular obsession with what is obviously a phantasm? 

Why does CRT in K-12, of all things, which doesn’t even exist, get your panties in a wad, but not, say, the facts that if you are black in America you will pay more for the same house, get paid less for the same job, get a stiffer sentence for the same crime, and on and on and on and on? These are examples of SYSTEMS in America that are racist, of Systemic Racism. And we won’t fix these and other similar problems until we face, squarely, our execrable history and the execrable current state of affairs. You might also want to ask yourself, Karen or Chad or whoever you are, why you are all worked up about the same stuff that works up overt, declared White Supremacists and Nazis. You are concerned about the same stuff that matters to ACTUAL NAZIS. Think about that. Think. Think for a freaking change.

In the second part of his two-part essay about the education technology industry, Tom Ultican reviews the highly profitable side of so-called “personalized learning,” where investors profit, not students.

He recognizes that not all EdTech is bad, but goes on to explain how many popular EdTech programs are based on bad pedagogy or are designed to make money.

The pandemic brought a bonanza for online content providers and classroom organizing software. Programs like Google Classroom and Class Dojo which previously seemed superfluous performed a needed service during the crisis. Unfortunately, some of the edtech companies whose businesses spiked were taking advantage of the situation to sell profitable but harmful products based on bad education theory…

As an example:

The Khan Academy is another content provider that saw their traffic soar in 2020. Originally, the academy generated an image of this selfless Silicon Valley guy, Sal Khan, making math education videos and distributing them for free. In 2007, he formed his non-profit but it was not until 2010 that Bill Gates (EIN 56-2618866) and other billionaires began sending him money.

It turns out that Sal Khan is not so selfless. His non-profit is making him wealthy. Khan Academy tax records (EIN 26-1544963) reveal that between 2010 and 2019 his salary totaled $6,009,694 and since 2015 his yearly salary has been more than $800,000. Between 2012-2017, the Gate Foundation gifted the Khan Academy $12,951,598 and the Overdeck Foundation (EIN 26-4377643) has kicked in $2,154,300.

In 2019, Khan Academy took in $92,559,725 of which only $27,629,684 was from contributions. The Academy has turned into a big-revenue generating non-profit.

In October 2020, Khan Academy announced a new joint effort with NWEA called Khan Academy Districts. There sales pitch says “Khan Academy has partnered with NWEA, creators of MAP® Growth™, to empower teachers to differentiate their instruction based on assessment results and meet the needs of all students.”

NWEA is the company that generated a lot of buzz with their covid-learning loss “research.” NWEA sells standardized math and English testing. They take in noisy data (All standardized testing data is noisy and fraught with error) 3-times a school year, do some fancy arithmetic and report out student growth determinations.

Tom Ultican, retired teacher of advanced mathematics and physics, studied the Ed-Tech industry, which now passes itself as “personalized learning.” He reminds us that Ed-Tech is first and foremost about business and profits, not learning.

He writes:

Not all edtech is negative but it is important to remember that private companies are in it for the money. Giant corporations and private equity firms require return on investment. Improving education comes in second to making profits and everyone in the business knows that the real edtech gold comes from data mining.

Dr Velislava Hillman is a visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). In a post on the LSE blog she writes,

“It is hard, perhaps impossible, to go to school and not be registered by a digital technology. Cameras wire the premises; homework is completed using one business’s software application (eg Microsoft Word) that may be embedded onto another business’s platform (shared via Google); emails, bathroom trips, assessments, parental backgrounds  – all feed into digital systems that are owned, managed, used and repurposed by hundreds of thousands of invisible business hands.”

“Edtech companies thrive on digital data.”