Archives for the month of: September, 2021
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Today: The Salem Witch Trials

By dianeravitch
September 22, 2021 //
9

The following appeared in The Writer’s Almanac:

On this day in 1692 eight citizens of the colony of Massachusetts were hanged for their supposed connections to witchcraft. Theirs were the last of the deaths caused by the Salem Witch Trials, preceded by 11 other hangings, plus five who died in prison, and one who was crushed to death for refusing to enter a plea.

A period that roughly spanned the spring and summer of 1692, the Salem Witch Trials started when two young girls began displaying bizarre behaviors — convulsing, shouting blasphemy, and generally acting like they were possessed. The girls were the daughter and niece of Samuel Parris, a minister relatively new to town but already divisive. He’d moved from Boston where an account of young children who were supposedly “bewitched” by a laundress was published. Parris had insisted on a higher salary and certain perks as the village reverend and insinuated in his sermons that those who opposed him were in cahoots with the Devil.

After the girls’ behavior gained attention and was pronounced the result of an evil spell, several other girls in town began acting strangely too … and began naming individuals in town as the cause. The town was whipped into a frenzy and soon dozens of people — women, men, and children — were accused of and often jailed for practicing or supporting witchcraft. Many of the accusations seemed to fall along the lines of existing feuds or were directed at people who were — because they were poor, not upstanding members of the church, or marginalized in some way — not likely to mount a convincing defense.

By the time the final eight people were hanged on September 22 word about the trials was spreading throughout the state. Within weeks the governor of Massachusetts declared “spectral evidence,” or visions of a person’s spirit doing evil when in fact their physical body was elsewhere, was inadmissible. Soon after he barred any further arrests, disbanded the local court, and released many of the accused. It wasn’t until the following spring that he finally pardoned those who remained in jail. A full decade passed before the trials of 1692 were officially declared illegal, another nine before the names of the accused were cleared from all wrongdoing and their heirs given a restitution, and 265 years before the state of Massachusetts apologized for the events of that most infamous witch hunt.

Categories Evil, Ignorance, Massachusetts

Aaron Regunburg: Rhode Island Governor McKee Awards Fat Contract to Political Donors

By dianeravitch
September 22, 2021 //
12

Aaron Regunburg began his career as a leader of the Providence Student Union. He subsequently served in the legislature and ran in the Democratic primary for lieutenant governor, capturing 49% of the vote. He lost to Dan McKee, who is now Governor, after succeeding Gina Raimondo when Biden appointed her to his cabinet.

Regunberg wrote in the Providence Journal that McKee seems to be engaging in pay-for-play with his financial backers at Chiefs for Change (started by Jeb Bush).

He wrote:

Governor McKee’s string of recent scandals raises the question of whether he may be dragging our state back to the bad old days of pay-to-play governance.

Take the recent story of a $5-million “school reopening” contract given to Governor McKee’s longtime financial backers at the corporate education reform group Chiefs for Change (CFC). The head of CFC, Mike Magee, has directly contributed thousands of dollars to the governor, and his brother leads the Super PAC that spent hundreds of thousands supporting McKee during my primary challenge to him in 2018. As has been reported extensively by WPRI, just two days after Mr. McKee took office, the chief operating officer and director of operations of CFC incorporated a brand-new company, ILO Group, which almost immediately received a state contract to the tune of $5.2 million — an amount many millions of dollars more than the next-highest bid.

Disgustingly, it appears ILO felt comfortable enough with this scheme that they barely pretended to provide useful services to our schools. As WPRI reported, almost no districts in the state received school reopening assistance from the company. In fact, the day after Governor McKee pointed to ILO’s work with Westerly to justify the millions they received, the chair of the Westerly School Committee wrote, “ILO is not doing any work in Westerly. At all.” She went on to stress she was “still unclear on exactly how this company can support RI school districts.” 

Categories Education Reform

Iowa: School Board Rejects Mask Mandate After Some Parents Threaten to Remove Their Children

By dianeravitch
September 22, 2021 //
22

The school board of Waukee, Iowa, planned to mandate masks, but then a campaign started in the community against the mandate. Faced with threats to “make the district pay” by withdrawing students, the board voted down the mask mandate. The only dissenting vote was a physician. The anti-maskers prefer to expose their children to a highly contagious and deadly disease.

Categories Health, Iowa, Safety

Linda Lyon: How to Make a Difference as a Citizen

By dianeravitch
September 21, 2021 //
5

Linda Lyon is a local school board member and former president of the Arizona School Boards Association. she is a retired military officer. She expresses great concern about the tumult and anger at many school board meetings and speculates that some of the outrage is generated by paid shills. She writes here about why school boards matter and how citizens in every community can make a difference:

Although I can understand how the current climate would discourage good people from wanting to serve on school boards, it is exactly the time that they must. Otherwise, the bad guys win. What we’ll end up with is school board members who thrive on hateful discourse and self-destructive environments. We’ll end up with an exodus of good school board members, good administrators, and good teachers. Eventually, we’ll end up with a system of public education that is circling the drain. 

I don’t think of myself as a conspiracy theorist, but neither do I think we should be so naive, to think that all this is happening organically. Of the April Vail protests for example, Superintendent Carruth said, 

“There was a handful of people – I don’t know exactly how many – who either don’t have kids in the school district, don’t live in the school district, don’t live in the county, who came with the express purpose of whipping up that group.”

Yes, around the country, administrators and school board members have suspected outsiders of coming in to school board meetings to wreak havoc for political purposes. This is not a new strategy, as conservative strategist Ralph Reed, (former executive director of the Christian Coalition), once said he would “exchange the presidency for 2,000 school seats”. But the current political climate and ease message spreading via social media has whipped it into a frenzy. 

For those who are shocked at how low we’ve sunk at a country, and are committed to do their part to “Build Back Better”, there is almost no better place to start than to serve on your local school board. Ensuring our students are prepared to build a better future is why I first ran for the school board in 2012, and why I continue to serve. I can assure you that the other side is feverishly working to ensure they win this battle for hearts and minds and they’ve been very successful thus far in using school board seats as stepping stones to higher political offices.

Categories Education Reform

Nancy Flanagan: School Boards at the Center of Political Conflict

By dianeravitch
September 21, 2021 //
20

Nancy Flanagan describes the political battles that have descended on school boards. Elected members probably thought they ran for office so as to oversee the budget and represent their constituents. They didn’t know that they would be constantly targeted by angry mobs, fighting over masking, vaccination mandates, and critical race theory.

She writes:

I am stunned by the vicious nature of the anti-mask, anti-vax protests—like this one in Oregon, which left the veteran superintendent, who simply followed state law, weeping as he was fired. Or this one—where parents literally pushed their unmasked teenagers past school administrators blocking the way.

How do parents expect their children to respect the rules and authority necessary for safe and productive schooling when those same parents are physically pushing the students to disobey?

The answer is: They don’t, anymore.

And it’s gone way beyond hot tempers at a school board meeting. There are firings and shouting and pushing and shoving. There are also death threats and other aggressions. There’s been a national paradigm shift around whom to trust, and who’s in charge.

Open the link and read the entire post.

Categories Education Reform

Steve Hinnefeld: Polls Show Public Support for Public Schools

By dianeravitch
September 20, 2021 //
12

Steve Hinnefeld, Indiana blogger, reviews recent polls and reports that the public continues to prefer public schools to school choice. The public schools are the heart of their communities. They are democratic, overseen by elected boards. They belong to the public.

If ever there was a time for parents and the American public to turn against public schools, you’d think this would be it. But two recent polls show it hasn’t happened.

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted schooling for a year and a half, forcing children to learn online. Schools have been under relentless attack for requiring masks and teaching about racism. State legislators have bashed public schools as they pushed to expand school choice.

Categories Opinion Polling, Support for public schools

Parent: Why I No Longer Support Vouchers

By dianeravitch
September 20, 2021 //
28

Dountonia Batts is a parent advocate and community organizer in Indianapolis. she is a member of the board of the Network for Public Education. She explains here why she once supported vouchers but no longer does.

I can remember exactly when my thinking about school vouchers began to change. I was attending a community meeting, waiting to find out whether my small children, then in kindergarten and first grade, were going to receive vouchers to attend a private school. The meeting was almost over when a community member stood up and told us how disturbed she was by the way we all kept talking about ‘my children.’ “We have to be focused on the children who do not have the choices you have,” she told us solemnly. “They’re going to fall through the cracks.” It would take me years to see for myself what she meant, but the seed was planted that night.

My two sons did get school vouchers and were accepted to a private Baptist K-12 school. As the years passed, I became more aware of the impact of the decision I’d made. It started with my own children. After the murder of Trayvon Martin in 2012, my oldest son wore a hoodie to school and it was viewed as a political statement. The signs that he wasn’t really welcome at a school that got less diverse in each successive grade became more apparent. I saw the eyes and heard the comments in the bleachers. My youngest son was the only Black child in his class. He started to get discouraged, convinced that he wasn’t smart. He never found his people at that school. I began to understand that school is about more than academics. The social element really matters too.

My perspective really began to change when my husband, Dr. Ramon Batts, decided to run for school board in Indianapolis. He could see what I’d been missing—that as charter schools and vouchers expanded, the school system in Indianapolis was falling apart. All of the high schools in our neighborhood had been shut down, even as charter high schools were popping up. Here was the neediest school system in the state, serving the neediest kids, and yet funds were being systematically drained away. And it was only getting worse. In the years that my children had been attending their private school, Indiana had expanded eligibility for the voucher program again and again. Today, families earning up to $140,000 can attend private schools at public expense. 

For the first time I really began to think about the impact of the decision I’d made on everybody else. By pulling away from the public system, I was leaving less for the kids who’d been left behind, including the ones who couldn’t get into private schools, or who got kicked out because they didn’t conform to what the schools wanted. The more I saw, the more it bothered me. I was using public dollars to perpetuate discrimination in the name of school choice. I decided that I could no longer accept school vouchers for my children because it was unethical. 

Today, both of my children attend public schools, and my younger son has finally found “his people.” And I’m now an advocate for public education. I try to get parents to understand that if we defund, undermine or privatize public schools we’re doing a disservice to the majority of parents for whom private schools are not an option. I try to help them see what I finally did: that the decisions we make when it comes to our own children have an impact on everybody else. All those years ago, that woman at the community meeting warned that we were drifting dangerously away from the idea of a common good. At the time, I couldn’t understand what she meant. I do now.

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Indianapolis, Parents, Supporting public schools, Vouchers

Manufacturing Consent for Market-Driven Schooling

By dianeravitch
September 19, 2021 //
11

Christopher A. Lizotte of the University of Washington and Dan Cohen published an interesting research paper about how market-driven policies have been promoted and sold. The paper was published in 2014-2015, and the trends described here have become more powerful, promoted by some of the wealthiest people in the nation. The title of the paper is “Teaching the Market: Fostering Consent to Education Markets in the United States.”

Abstract. Marked-based reforms in education have garnered the support of politicians, philanthropists, and academics, reworking the nature of public education in the United States. In this paper we explore the methods used to produce consent for market-based reforms of primary and secondary (K-12) schooling in the United States, focusing on two case studies to interrogate how this consent is generated as well as how these reforms are resisted in place. In doing so we illustrate how market-making in public services is a contested terrain and the importance of understanding the nature of their roll-out at the local level.

Here is a brief excerpt:

We understand this shift toward marketization in education and its recent acceleration as being situated within the broad neoliberal shift towards privatization and deregulation of formerly public goods that has taken place over the past thirty years. As in other sectors that have been subject to this treatment, this process has occurred not simply through the retreat of the state but through the deliberate repurposing of the state to reshape its institutions in the image of a market (Peck and Tickell, 2002); indeed, many of the reforms that have taken place within education are the result of explicit state policies to create market pressures within education (Lubienski, 2005): These policies include (to name a few): the imposition of standardized testing as a method through which schools can be ‘judged’ by the market, the threat of school closures for ‘failing’ schools, and the use of selective grants to reward schools and districts conforming most closely to principles of deregulation and privatization. Crucially, however, these marketization processes require careful priming in order to generate public consent for market-based reforms. In particular, the marketization of education is powerfully promoted through the notion of school ‘choice’. Presented as an apolitical and socially neutral mechanism for allowing parents to maximize their children’s educational opportunities, choice is endowed with a moral authority that obscures the power inherent in who can exercise the power to choose and the available range of choices. This choice, it is argued, finds its natural expression in the expansion of markets as a supposedly level playing field where the best-performing options rise to the top and those that fail are eventually discarded. Indeed, as Rose (1999) claims, choice, defined as the individual maximization of opportunities, has become the litmus test by which good membership in the polity is defined. In this light, the term, like those used to describe other market-making projects in public services, hides assumptions about what kinds of choice can be legitimately exercised and under what circumstances. The power to ‘choose’ as it is understood under contemporary capitalism is a highly individualized capacity that seeks to maximize one’s return on investment. Other alternative possibilities tend to fade out of view in the language of most market-based school reformers.

Categories Charter Schools, Closing schools, Education Industry, For-Profit, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Global Education Reform Movement (GERM), NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Philanthropy, Portfolio District, Privatization, Race to the Top, School Choice, Standardized Testing, Walton Foundation

Bill Phillis: A Major Difference Between Public Schools and “School Choice”

By dianeravitch
September 19, 2021 //
11

Bill Phillis of the Ohio Coalition for Equity and Adequacy of School Funding is a champion of public schools in a state with many charters and vouchers.

He writes:

A primary purpose for the creation of the common school system for all the children of all the people was to maintain a republican form of government. Knowledgeable people in unity with one another will ward off tyranny, in favor of liberty and equality. A virtuous government operating for the common good is the goal.

Common is a term of art that has universally-accepted meaning. As applied to school, it indicates a place or institution that serves all children free of charge, paid for by taxation. It relates to the community at large, in a symbiotic relationship.

Common means “belonging to all, used jointly, shared by all.” The “common” system is required by the Ohio constitution, and the “system” must be thorough and efficient.

Tax-supported vouchers and charters are foreign to the common school system required by the constitution. They are not only foreign to the system, but are parasitical in taking funds away from the common system. These schemes divide, rather than unite. They serve not all, but selected students. Their goal does not necessarily match the goal of the common system—to maintain the republican form of government. Their relationship to the community is often strained or non-existent, as opposed to symbiotic.

The No Child Left Behind Act Has Put The Nation At Risk

Vouchers Hurt Ohio

William L. Phillis | Ohio Coalition for Equity & Adequacy of School Funding | 614.228.6540 |ohioeanda@sbcglobal.net| http://ohiocoalition.org

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, Equity, Ohio, School Choice, Virtual Charter Schools, Vouchers

A Fun Task for Middle-Schoolers

By dianeravitch
September 18, 2021 //
5

I received this request, which looked as though it might be fun.

Please consider sharing this nation-wide challenge for middle school students with your audience. There are images and a video link below. Please let me know if you have questions or would like to talk with leaders at the Benjamin Harrison Presidential Site. Thank you! 


Indianapolis, IN …The Benjamin Harrison Presidential Site has just announced the launch of Project POTUS, an opportunity for students in grades 6-8 across the nation to put their research, writing and video editing skills to the test.

Since the founding of our nation, there have been nearly half a billion American citizens. Of those, over 12,000 of us have served in Congress. Just 115 have become Supreme Court Justices. Only 46 citizens have become President of the United States. There’s something exceptional about each POTUS – good, bad, or otherwise. And the Benjamin Harrison Presidential Site wants students’ help to tell the world why … in one minute or less.

Project POTUS calls on students to research an American President and create a one-minute video representing the president selected. Student videos are then submitted for review by a citizen jury, who will select a winning video project for each American president. The results from the inaugural Project POTUS initiative will be featured in the first ever ’46 Presidents in 45 Minutes,’ a compilation of students’ winning projects to be released following the closing of the contest in May 2022.

“The value of Project POTUS comes not only from the potential for it to be fun and original, but also from how closely it matches up to standards teachers use in the classroom,” said Molly Beausir, Russell and Penny Fortune Project POTUS Presidential Fellow with the Benjamin Harrison Presidential Site. “The project emphasizes civics, history, research and communication skill building. And with the shift of project-based classroom learning to include virtual and hybrid options during the pandemic, the timing couldn’t be better to put those school laptops to good use.”

“It’s a fun and unique initiative for students, individually or in groups, to get creative and participate in a national video project with their peers,” said Benjamin Harrison Presidential Site President and CEO Charles Hyde. “The program is an interactive way for students across the country to share what they’ve learned about our country’s presidents firsthand, drawing from their knowledge of history, civics, and leadership. Ultimately, we’re excited to help facilitate peer to peer learning, which Project POTUS plans to do in a nationally significant way.”

It’s also an opportunity for students, caregivers and educators to take part in an educational project that could possibly win students and classrooms scholarships. For the inaugural Project POTUS in 2022, the citizen jury will award over $5,000 in prizes to students, with one grand prize winner for the best video overall winning a $500 award and a VIP prize package. There’s plenty of time to pick a president and work on the project – video submissions begin on Presidents’ Day, February 21, 2022 and will be accepted through Tax Day, April 15, 2022.


Have a video-savvy student or budding history buff in mind? For more information, and for project guidelines, please visit projectpotus.org.

View a quick video explaining the project: here.


Downloadable graphics/images available here.  
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About the Benjamin Harrison Presidential Site

Recognized as one of the top 5 things to do in Indianapolis by Tripadvisor, the Benjamin Harrison Presidential Site celebrates the remarkable legacy of America’s Hoosier President. The museum is a national historic landmark situated within easy walking distance of downtown Indianapolis and the bustling 16th Street corridor. The 1875 Italianate mansion is exquisitely restored and has an exceptional collection of more than 10,000 artifacts. Daily tours of the property include a 75-minute guided tour through the Harrison house and private quarters. Highlights include an awe-inspiring collection of Gilded Age finery, paintings, furniture and personal presidential gifts and mementos. The privately operated, non-profit organization receives no direct tax support and is dedicated to sharing the life stories, arts and culture of an American President to increase public participation in the American system of self-government. Find out more at PresidentBenjaminHarrison.org.
Media Contact: Angela Tuell | angela@commredefined.com | 317.567.9126

Angela Tuell, APR | PrincipalCommunications Redefined317.567.9126 office 410.430.9518 mobileangela@commredefined.com

Categories History, Play
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