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Texas A&M President Resigns After Failed Effort to Recruit an Esteemed Black Journalist

By dianeravitch
July 24, 2023 //
66

Kate McGee of The Texas Tribune reported on an academic mess in Texas that turned into a national scandal. Texas A&M, one of the state’s premier universities recruited veteran journalist Kathleen McElroy to serve as Dean of Journalism at A&M. Dr. McElroy was considered a prize catch after years of experience at the New York Times and her doctorate in journalism. In addition, she is a tenured professor at the University of Texas in Austin and a graduate of Texas A&M.

A&M wooed Dr. McElroy, offered her a position with tenure, and held a celebration when she accepted.

When Texas A&M University announced last month that it had hired a director to revive its journalism school, it included the kind of fanfare usually reserved for college coaches and athletes.

The university set up maroon, silver and white balloons around a table outside its Academic Building for an official signing ceremony. It was there that Kathleen O. McElroy, a respected journalist with a long career, officially accepted the position to run the new program and teach as a tenured professor, pending approval from the Texas A&M University System Board of Regents.

McElroy, a 1981 Texas A&M graduate, was the director of the University of Texas at Austin’s School of Journalism between 2016 and 2022, where she is a tenured professor. Earlier, she spent 20 years in various editing roles at The New York Times until heading to UT-Austin to pursue her doctorate.

But apparently some conservative members of the A&M board objected to Dr. McElroy’s concern for diversity and inclusion, as well as her career at the New York Times, and the offer was whittled down to a position without tenure. Dr. McElroy withdrew her acceptance, and in the ensuing publicity, the president of the multi-campus university resigned.

McGee wrote:

After a week of turmoil over the botched hiring of a Black journalist to revive the Texas A&M University journalism department, M. Katherine Banks has resigned as the university’s president.

Mark A. Welsh III, dean of the Bush School of Government and Public Service, will serve as acting president until the Board of Regents can meet to name an interim president. Texas A&M System Chancellor John Sharp has recommended they appoint Welsh as an interim until the board can do a national search for a new president. Banks’ resignation is effective immediately.

In a letter sent to A&M System Chancellor John Sharp Thursday evening, Banks wrote, “The recent challenges regarding Dr. [Kathleen] McElroy have made it clear to me that I must retire immediately. The negative press is a distraction from the wonderful work being done here.”

The fallout over McElroy’s hiring, which has garnered national media attention, marks the culmination of Banks’ two-year tenure, which was often met with pushback from faculty and students who consistently raised concerns with the direction she was taking the university and the way in which her administration was communicating its vision.

During that time, faculty leaders have passed resolutions calling for more involvement in university decisions, and research leaders on campus raised concerns with her administration’s decision-making. She was forced to walk back the decision to abruptly end the print publication of the university’s student newspaper, The Battalion, after students and alumni protested. Her administration also faced pushback from students after the school decided to cut funding and sponsorship of an annual campus drag show, known as Draggieland. Throughout all of that, Sharp has remained supportive of Banks’ leadership.

In response to the news, McElroy told the Tribune in a text message Friday evening: “I’m deeply grateful for the groundswell of support I’ve received, especially from Aggies of all majors, and my former and current students. There’s much more I could say and will say about what has unfolded. But for now, I’ll reserve those statements for a future date.”

The latest fracas on campus that led to Banks’ resignation comes after the university’s faculty senate passed a resolution Wednesday to create a fact-finding committee into the mishandling of the hiring of McElroy. During that meeting, Banks took responsibility for the flawed hiring process but told faculty members that she did not approve changes to an offer letter that led a prospective journalism professor to walk away from negotiations amid conservative backlash to her hiring.

However, Hart Blanton, the head of the university’s department of communications and journalism who was closely involved in McElroy’s recruiting, said in a statement Friday that Banks interfered with the hiring process early on and that race was a factor in university officials’ decision to water down the job offer…

McElroy, an experienced journalism professor currently working at the University of Texas at Austin who previously worked as an editor at The New York Times, turned down an offer to reboot A&M’s journalism program after a fraught negotiation process first reported by The Texas Tribune. What originally was a tenure-track offer was reduced to a five-year position, then to a one-year position from which she could be fired at any time.

“This offer letter … really makes it clear that they don’t want me there,” McElroy said last week about the one-year contract. “But in no shape, form or fashion would I give up a tenured position at UT for a one-year contract that emphasizes that you can be let go at any point.”

Initially, Texas A&M celebrated hiring McElroy with a public signing ceremony to announce her hiring. But in the weeks following, vocal groups from outside the university system expressed issues with her previous employment at The New York Times and her support for diversity in newsrooms. McElroy has said she was told that not everyone was pleased by her joining the faculty. Critics of her hiring focused on her prior work on diversity and inclusion.

McElroy said she was further told by José Luis Bermúdez, then interim dean of Texas A&M’s College of Arts and Sciences, that there was “noise in the [university] system” about her, though he did not give specifics. When she pressed him, she said he told her, “you’re a Black woman who worked at The New York Times.” He told her that in some conservative circles, The New York Times is akin to Pravda, the newspaper of the Communist Party in Russia that began in the early 1900s.

McElroy said that Bermúdez ultimately told her he could not protect her from university leaders facing pressure to fire her over “DEI hysteria” surrounding her appointment and advised McElroy to stay in her tenured role at UT-Austin.

Earlier this week, Bermúdez announced he would step down from his role as interim dean at the end of the month.

Categories Ethics, Failure, Higher Education, Race, Racism

Dan Rather and Elliot Kirschner: Teach the Truth

By dianeravitch
July 23, 2023 //
18

Dan Rather and his associate Elliot Kirschner explain here why it is important to teach the truth, no matter how unpleasant it is.

They write:

I was born 66 years after slavery was legally abolished by the 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution. Not exactly ancient history. Today, that’s how long ago the Eisenhower administration was, or Elvis Presley’s first number one hit.

And the legacies of slavery — lynchings, Jim Crow, disenfranchisement — were woven tightly into the American tapestry of my youth. They still echo with us. Loudly and persistently. No matter how much some would want us to ignore the clamor of justice.

As much as we wish American history were different, tragedy is part of our reality. We do a grave disservice to future generations if we sanitize the truth. People can behave horribly. Societies that profess noble values can countenance violent bigotry. We can either look back from whence we have come with clarity, or we can try to muddy the roots of the present and weaken ourselves in the process.

This week, the Florida State Board of Education reworked its standards for teaching Black history. The changes come in response to the state’s so-called “Stop W.O.K.E. Act.” Passed last year, it limits training and education around issues of race, sex, and other criteria for systemic injustice. At its heart is a core belief that has animated right-wing culture warriors: that people alive today should not be made to feel bad or even uncomfortable by the sins of the past. The thinking goes, that was a long time ago.

But of course it really wasn’t. And the legacies of the past live on. And if we don’t learn from history, we are bound to repeat it.

Proponents of these new standards, especially their biggest cheerleader, Governor Ron DeSantis, say they promote teaching positive achievements of Black Americans in history. No problem there. It’s when it comes to the other side of the coin that we have a big issue — the new lessons seem intent on downplaying the horrors of the Black experience. In other words, once again, the truth. The truth revealed by hard facts.

One passage that has gotten a lot of attention is for middle schoolers. It states they should learn that “slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.” The danger of this narrative is striking. A system that brutalized, raped, and killed human beings while stealing their freedom and denying their humanity is rotten to its core. That enslaved people were able to find resilience and build lives in some form is a testament to their courage and spirit. There is no “other side” to the story of slavery.

It is true that these new standards, as horrific as they are, would have been a great improvement over what I learned in my segregated middle school. We have come a long way. But that was because of the bravery of civil rights leaders and activists who fought, sometimes with their lives, for a full realization of American values. Any receding from progress — as this surely is — represents a threat to our democracy. We have been strengthened as a nation, all of us, by a national movement to right the wrongs of our past.

It is tempting to try to ignore DeSantis. He is a bully. He wants a reaction. He uses cruelty and disingenuity to garner headlines. He feeds off the anger of his adversaries.

But he also has power. And the lessons of history tell us that we should not ignore would-be autocrats.

The generation that lived through the fights over civil rights in the 1950s and ‘60s is passing away, much as the generation that remembered the Civil War did during my own youth. The loss of the earned knowledge of living through and fighting for change is profound.

This makes it all the more important that when we teach history, we teach the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Or as close to it as is humanly possible.

Categories DeSantis, Education Industry, Extremism, Fake News, Florida, Fraud, Freedom to Read, History

Heather Cox Richardson: Florida’s Distorted Standards for African American Studies

By dianeravitch
July 23, 2023 //
78

The people in Florida who wrote the standards for African American studies had a challenge: how to write them to satisfy Governor DeSantis’ hatred for anything that speaks about racism and injustice. Admitting that whites who enslaved Blacks were racist might make whites today feel “uncomfortable” and would be “woke.” So how is it possible to paper over the brutality and inhumanity of slavery?

Heather Cox Richardson explains how they did it.

The Florida Board of Education approved new state social studies standards on Wednesday, including standards for African American history, civics and government, American history, and economics. Critics immediately called out the middle school instruction in African American history that includes “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.” (p. 6). They noted that describing enslavement as offering personal benefits to enslaved people is outrageous.

But that specific piece of instruction in the 216-page document is only a part of a much larger political project.

Taken as a whole, the Florida social studies curriculum describes a world in which the white male Founders of the United States embraced ideals of liberty and equality—ideals it falsely attributes primarily to Christianity rather than the Enlightenment—and indicates the country’s leaders never faltered from those ideals. Students will, the guidelines say, learn “how the principles contained in foundational documents contributed to the expansion of civil rights and liberties over time” (p. 148) and “analyze how liberty and economic freedom generate broad-based opportunity and prosperity in the United States” (p. 154).

The new guidelines reject the idea that human enslavement belied American principles; to the contrary, they note, enslavement was common around the globe, and they credit white abolitionists in the United States with ending it (although in reality the U.S. was actually a late holdout). Florida students should learn to base the history of U.S. enslavement in “Afro-Eurasian trade routes” and should be instructed in “how slavery was utilized in Asian, European, and African cultures,” as well as how European explorers discovered “systematic slave trading in Africa.” Then the students move on to compare “indentured servants of European and African extraction” (p. 70) before learning about overwhelmingly white abolitionist movements to end the system.

In this account, once slavery arrived in the U.S., it was much like any other kind of service work: slaves performed “various duties and trades…(agricultural work, painting, carpentry, tailoring, domestic service, blacksmithing, transportation).” (p. 6) (This is where the sentence about personal benefit comes in.) And in the end, it was white reformers who ended it.

This information lies by omission and lack of context. The idea of Black Americans who “developed skills” thanks to enslavement, for example, erases at the most basic level that the history of cattle farming, river navigation, rice and indigo cultivation, southern architecture, music, and so on in this country depended on the skills and traditions of African people.

Lack of context papers over that while African tribes did practice enslavement, for example, it was an entirely different system from the hereditary and unequal one that developed in the U.S. Black enslavement was not the same as indentured servitude except perhaps in the earliest years of the Chesapeake settlements when both were brutal—historians argue about this— and Indigenous enslavement was distinct from servitude from the very beginning of European contact. Some enslaved Americans did in fact work in the trades, but far more worked in the fields (and suggesting that enslavement was a sort of training program is, indeed, outrageous). And not just white abolitionists but also Black abolitionists and revolutionaries helped to end enslavement.

Taken together, this curriculum presents human enslavement as simply one of a number of labor systems, a system that does not, in this telling, involve racism or violence.

Indeed, racism is presented only as “the ramifications of prejudice, racism, and stereotyping on individual freedoms.” This is the language of right-wing protesters who say acknowledging white violence against others hurts their children, and racial violence is presented here as coming from both Black and white Americans, a trope straight out of accounts of white supremacists during Reconstruction (p. 17). To the degree Black Americans faced racial restrictions in that era, Chinese Americans and Japanese Americans did, too (pp. 117–118).

It’s hard to see how the extraordinary violence of Reconstruction, especially, fits into this whitewashed version of U.S. history, but the answer is that it doesn’t. In a single entry an instructor is called to: “Explain and evaluate the policies, practices, and consequences of Reconstruction (presidential and congressional reconstruction, Johnson’s impeachment, Civil Rights Act of 1866, the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, opposition of Southern whites to Reconstruction, accomplishments and failures of Radical Reconstruction, presidential election of 1876, end of Reconstruction, rise of Jim Crow laws, rise of Ku Klux Klan)” (p. 104).

That’s quite a tall order.

But that’s not the end of Reconstruction in the curriculum. Another unit calls for students to “distinguish the freedoms guaranteed to African Americans and other groups with the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution…. Assess how Jim Crow Laws influenced life for African Americans and other racial/ethnic minority groups…. Compare the effects of the Black Codes…on freed people, and analyze the sharecropping system and debt peonage as practiced in the United States…. Review the Native American experience” (pp. 116–117).

Apparently, Reconstruction was not a period that singled out the Black population, and in any case, Reconstruction was quick and successful. White Floridians promptly extended rights to Black people: another learning outcome calls for students to “explain how the 1868 Florida Constitution conformed with the Reconstruction Era amendments to the U.S. Constitution (e.g., citizenship, equal protection, suffrage)” (p. 109).

All in all, racism didn’t matter to U.S. history, apparently, because “different groups of people ([for example] African Americans, immigrants, Native Americans, women) had their civil rights expanded through legislative action…executive action…and the courts.”

The use of passive voice in that passage identifies how the standards replace our dynamic and powerful history with political fantasy. In this telling, centuries of civil rights demands and ceaseless activism of committed people disappear. Marginalized Americans did not work to expand their own rights; those rights “were expanded.” The actors, presumably the white men who changed oppressive laws, are offstage.

And that is the fundamental story of this curriculum: nonwhite Americans and women “contribute” to a country established and controlled by white men, but they do not shape it themselves.

One senses the hand of advisors from Hillsdale College in this prettified version of U.S. history.

To read the standards, open the link and see the footnote.

Categories Censorship, Corruption, Cruelty, Curriculum, DeSantis, Ethics, Evil, Failure, Florida, History

Pollsters: 2024 Will not Be a Rerun of 2020

By dianeravitch
July 23, 2023 //
16

Celinda Lake and Mac Heller have written a hopeful analysis of the 2024 electorate. The voters of 2024 are different from the voters of 2020 or any other year. To read their article in full, open the link.

They write:

It’s easy to envision the 2024 presidential election becoming the third straight contest in which a veteran Democrat goes up against Donald Trump. Once again, the Democrat wins the popular vote but swing states are tighter. Could go either way — and has, right?

But things are very different this time, and here’s why: The candidates might not be changing — but the electorate has.

Every year, about 4 million Americans turn 18 and gain the right to vote. In the eight years between the 2016 and 2024 elections, that’s 32 million new eligible voters.

Also every year, 2½ million older Americans die. So in the same eight years, that’s as many as 20 million fewer older voters.

Which means that between Trump’s election in 2016 and the 2024 election, the number of Gen Z (born in the late 1990s and early 2010s) voters will have advanced by a net 52 million against older people. That’s about 20 percent of the total 2020 eligible electorate of 258 million Americans.

And unlike previous generations, Gen Z votes. Comparing the four federal elections since 2015 (when the first members of Gen Z turned 18) with the preceding nine (1998 to 2014), average turnout by young voters (defined here as voters under 30) in the Trump and post-Trump years has been 25 percent higher than that of older generations at the same age before Trump — 8 percent higher in presidential years and a whopping 46 percent higher in midterms.

Similarly, though not as drastic, we have seen a 7 percent increase in voter registration among under-30 voters since Gen Z joined the electorate. In midterm elections, under-30s have seen a 20 percent increase in their share of the electorate, on average, since Trump and Gen Z entered the game.

Yet Trump is not the deciding factor for these voters. When pollsters ask why, Gen Z voters say their motivation is not a party or candidate. It is, instead, strong passion on one or more issues — a much more policy-driven approach than the more partisan voting behavior of their elders.

Celinda Lake, a Democratic Party strategist, was one of two lead pollsters for Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign. Mac Heller is a documentary film producer, most recently of “Rigged: The Voter Suppression Playbook.”

Categories Biden, Elections, Trump

Frank Breslin: How to Combat Cancel Culture at Universities

By dianeravitch
July 22, 2023 //
65

We are familiar with stories of controversial speakers who were shouted down on campuses. Not long ago, students at Stanford Law School disrupted the appearance of Kyle Duncan, a federal appeals court judge appointed by Trump who was invited to address the conservative Federalist Society. The university apologized to Judge Duncan.

Retired teacher Frank Breslin offered some valuable advice about how students should act when a controversial speaker comes to campus.

Critically Responding to Guest Speakers

If these student protestors are convinced that they’re right and can make their case, why don’t they do so and teach these speakers why they are wrong? Why protest when they could simply let these speakers have their say, then refute them publicly?

Then during the Q & A period have these students come to the microphone to ask their questions and have those speakers respond? Wouldn’t this be better than protesting and giving their college a black eye in the media?

Unfortunately, however, they fail to do this, but pressure their colleges and universities to disinvite these speakers, or protest against them if they do come, and demand that even their own professors whose courses challenge their beliefs be fired because this is the only way they can cope with ideas that frighten them.

College & the World Not One’s Personal Nanny

Somehow these 18- to 21-year-olds have never learned that their college is not their Personal Nanny, who should dry their tears when something upsets them. What they need is a crash course in Real Life 101 that would teach them to accept the world as it is while at the same time trying to change it by learning to deal with ideas critically in a calm and dispassionate manner rather than running away to hide in “safe places.”

Raising Objections

They must learn to raise objections that challenge these speakers by questioning their assumptions, exposing fallacies if present, and determining whether their claims are certain, probable, or only possible. Many claims may sound impressive, but cannot be proven, and the ability to point this out publicly will weaken a speaker’s case.

Many explanations may not be true, but only arguable, and if a claim is based upon arguable assumptions or debatable value judgments, that claim can also be weakened. Or a claim that is offered as a fact may not be a fact at all, but only a hope, a fear, a wish, or bigotry.

How many arguments have you heard in your lifetime that were nothing more than appeals to the man, fear, authority, or antiquity?

The ability to stand back from a line of argumentation and see at once whether any of two dozen different kinds of fallacies are present, or whether the various statements that make up that argument are not facts, but arguable value judgments, explanatory or metaphysical theories would also weaken a case.

It goes without saying that the self-confidence that comes with this ability to refute an argument can be a life-altering experience for students and the mark of trained young scholars well-read in the humanities and afraid of nothing but running away. Tragically, however, the ability to do this in these colleges rarely occurs.

Instead, the spirit of dogmatism has these students tight in its grip, There is no compromise, no attentive listening to what a speaker is saying, no opening oneself to another’s truth. There is only digging in and defending one’s turf as each surveys the other from within one’s own fortress mentality.

What an anti-climax to spending years in educating themselves! Instead of becoming more aware, open-minded, and tolerant, these young protestors make a virtue of closed-minded belligerence.

There may be other protestors motivated by a love of political theater, headlines, and the local celebrity these protests confer, while for others it may be the need for a permanent grievance to give their lives meaning or themselves an identity, both of which they may see as more urgent than resolving their grievance.

These reasons are especially likely if those leading these protests are zealots with private agendas, whereas some of their followers may simply be bored, in need of excitement, or victims of Groupthink.

Danger of Groupthink

If you’re one of those few high-school graduates trained in critical thinking, you should be able to cope with this anti-intellectualism — up to a point. I say this because there is one conditioning factor you yourself may have to overcome upon entering college or becoming a member of any group or organization later in life.

I am referring, of course, to the power of Groupthink that may pressure you into becoming part of this irrationalism should you find yourself on one of these campuses.

As usually happens in “closed universes” like prisons, hospitals, monasteries, or the military, for instance, a form of Groupthink inevitably occurs. In colleges and universities, it will be only a segment of the school population that over-identifies with the particular viewpoint of this group.

As a new freshman on campus, one will naturally want to be welcomed and accepted by those in this new social environment where one will be spending the next four years of one’s life.

Once on campus, however, one may not want to protest but feel that one must or lose acceptance by failing to do so, and so will “go along to get along.” Some of this may explain the more reluctant protestors who don’t want to disappoint or alienate the “pack” or its leader….

Being Taught “the Right Answers” is Indoctrination

Strive for the kind of knowledge that will make you aware of all the competing answers to the questions you study, for all of them contain some measure of truth, and some of them may even be misrepresented by the accepted theories. Beware of the delusion that you’re being taught “the right answers,” but if you’re told that you are, give yourself a quiet chuckle.

If you leave a course with more questions than when you entered because the answers you received didn’t satisfy you, consider yourself lucky because you’ve gotten your money’s worth just by realizing this. A good course will teach you how to look at things differently and to judge them within a broader context that will enhance the quality of your critical judgment.

People often don’t need more arguments, but more air to breathe, a longer view and broader perspective by stepping back to see the bigger picture. They need to discover that what they once thought was important is really not that important at all in the overall scheme of things.

Wherever you go, college or university, with or without protests, what you’ve learned about critical thinking in high school and college will become supremely yours as you struggle against human inertia.

Learning the theory of critical thinking isn’t enough, even overlearning it will never suffice. You have to embody the theory but, most of all, have the courage to use it.

Please open the link and read the section I omitted for reasons of space.

Frank Breslin is a retired high-school teacher in the New Jersey public school system.

Categories Accountability, Censorship, Democracy, Disruption, Freedom of Speech, Higher Education

Houston: Teachers Strong-Armed to Comply with State Takover

By dianeravitch
July 22, 2023 //
9

The following article from The Texas Observer was posted by the Texas Observer. Journalist Josephine Lee reports that teachers are under pressure to pledge their support for the sweeping plans of Broad-trained Superintendent Mike Miles. Miles was appointed city superintendent by the State Commissioner Mike Morath. Neither is an educator.

Houston is the site of yet another doomed takeover of a local school district by an anti-public ed activist with little real education expertise.

Mike Miles has a vision of a district that is narrow and meager, a system where teachers read from scripts developed by a charter chain that Mile happens to own. New schedules. New job assignments. 

Miles insists that Houston teachers are excited, that Houston parents are pumped. But reporter Josephine Lee went out and actually talked to them, and–surprise–it appears that Miles is blowing smoke.

“Our hours will change. Our schedules will change. Our curriculum will change. But we have no input in it,” said Michelle Collins, a teacher at DeZavala Elementary School. “Neither do parents.”

Texas requires a shared decision making committee that includes all stakeholders. Miles appears to be ignoring that.

While Miles has publicly asked principals to obtain school input, SDMC committee members from five schools in the program confirmed with the Observer that they never met to discuss the issue. SDMC members and teachers from other schools reported that even when they did meet, they did not have a vote in the decision. One teacher said their staff voted not to opt in, but then later saw their school’s name included in the list of 57 schools in the news.

In an audio recording of Wainwright Elementary School’s SDMC meeting held July 10 and shared with the Observer, Principal Michelle Lewis told committee members, “If you’re not willing to dive in and do this with us, then this is not the campus for you.” No teacher representatives attended the meeting.

Revere Middle School Principal Gerardo Medina did not consult with the school’s SDMC committee or with teachers. In lieu of discussion, he sent out an email on June 29 to campus employees informing them of his decision to join Miles’ NES-aligned program.

“If you decide this is not something you want to commit to, you will be allowed to transfer,” Medina wrote.

This gave teachers only a few days before this Friday to decide if they want to continue to work within the district. To avoid losing their state teaching certification, they have up to 45 days before the first day of school to withdraw from their contract.

Meanwhile, Houston doesn’t have enough teachers to fill the openings it has.

State takeovers virtually never work. This deep dive lets us see the Houston takeover start to unravel from the beginning. Read the full article here. 

You can view the post at this link : https://networkforpubliceducation.org/blog-content/josephine-lee-teachers-strong-armed-to-get-on-board-with-houston-schools-takeover/

Categories Accountability, Broad Foundation, Democracy, Education Industry, Houston, Teachers, Texas

Bob Shepherd: Past Time to End Our Obsession with Standardized Testing

By dianeravitch
July 22, 2023 //
175

I have come to believe that there is one way and one way only that we will eliminate the federal testing mandate, which has had such blood-sucking costs over the years, direct costs and opportunity costs in loss learning, and which has brought about a dramatic devolution in our curricula and pedagogy.

The tests will remain in place until the national teachers’ unions take up the cause of ending them, until they call a national strike to do that. This would take real guts, real leadership. But until the teachers’ unions do that, until they institute a national action to end the testing, they are COMPLICIT IN CHILD ABUSE. I mean that. It’s not hyperbole. The testing is child abuse. It robs kids of large percentages of the time that they could be spending learning. And it robs them of coherent curricula and pedagogy. Instead, they get random exercises on random “skills” from the puerile Gates/Coleman “standards” bullet list and its progeny around the country.

ENOUGH. It’s been an utter failure. It’s been devastating. Time to end it.

Categories Common Core, Corporate Reform, Education Industry, For-Profit, Standardized Testing, Stupid

The Stanford Freshman Who Brought Down the President of Stanford

By dianeravitch
July 21, 2023 //
24

The president of Stanford University announced he was stepping down after acknowledging serious issues with his research. The Los Angeles Times reports that the exposé of the president’s work was conducted by a freshman.

Rumors of altered images in some of the research papers published by Stanford University President Marc Tessier-Lavigne had circulated since 2015. But the allegations involving the neuroscientist got little attention beyond the niche scientific forum where they first appeared — until Stanford freshman Theo Baker decided to take a closer look.

Baker, a journalist for the Stanford Daily, published his first story on problems surrounding Tessier-Lavigne’s research in November. His dogged reporting kicked off a chain of events that culminated this week with the president’s announcement that he would step down from his post at the end of August.

Tessier-Lavigne acted Wednesday after an expert scientific panel convened by the university determined that he failed on multiple occasions to correct errors in his published research on Alzheimer’s disease and related topics, and that he managed labs that at times produced sloppy or even manipulated data.

Of course, Baker covered that too.

In February, the 18-year-old from the Washington, D.C., area became the youngest-ever recipient of journalism’s prestigious George Polk Award for his work on the investigation. Journalism runs in the family: Baker is the son of the New York Times’ chief White House correspondent, Peter Baker, and New Yorker columnist Susan B. Glasser.

The story includes an interview with Baker in which he explained how he contacted experts, then resisted university pressures to back down. Any threat was grounds for another story. He carefully sourced everything he wrote about.

Categories Academic Freedom, Accountability, Higher Education

Texas: How a Wealthy Conservative Bought His Own Government

By dianeravitch
July 21, 2023 //
4

Eric Dexheimer of The Houston Chronicle wrote an incredible—almost unbelievable—story about how political power works in Texas. You may recall that Disney has its own self-governing district in Florida. Florida has almost 2,000 “special districts.” Texas has more than 4,000. Read this story to see how the very rich and politically connected can frustrate public projects and expand their holdings.

Dexheimer wrote:

In 2019, the city of Dripping Springs was finalizing plans for a new pipeline to move wastewater from its busy north end to a regional treatment plant on the south. Half a decade in the making, planners said the line was essential to control development in the rapidly growing Austin suburb.

One of the dozen or so properties they identified for the pipeline to cross belonged to Bruce Bolbock, an anesthesiologist. Valued at more than $9 million, the bucolic Hill Country ranch rolls across 225 acres in Hays County, and he didn’t want a buried raw wastewater pipeline on even the narrow strip it required. In addition to having a delicate natural spring on the property, he raised bison and exotic toucans that “require a very consistent environment that’s free of noise [and] disturbance.”

With the looming threat of the city taking his land through eminent domain, Bolbock placed a phone call to a Dallas hotel magnate and generous supporter of conservative political causes named Monty Bennett. Bennett didn’t have a magic wand. But he did have a sort of superpower: his own government.

In 2011, then-state Sen. Lance Gooden — now a U.S. Congressman — whose candidacies Bennett supported financially and with whom he reportedly co-owned land, sponsored a new law forming the Lazy W District No. 1municipal utility district. Such special-purpose governments typically are created so developers can sell bonds to pay for water and sewer lines in new subdivisions. New residents then pay the MUD assessments to retire the loans.

But court records show the Lazy W was created at Bennett’s request and primarily for him; it is almost exclusively made up of his sprawling private family ranch in Henderson County, an hour-and-a-half drive southeast of Dallas. Although he has said he wanted to form the district to conserve its natural beauty, Bennett also was clear he wanted his own government to wage a personal battle against the Tarrant Regional Water District, which had proposed routing a pipeline across the ranch.

Broadly, Lazy W argued that one government can’t sue another for eminent domain. So once Bennett’s ranch became District No. 1, TRWD could not legally take its property. The water district ended up routing its line around Bennett’s ranch. Now the Bolbocks wondered if Bennett might be able to use his government — even though it was located 200 miles from their property — to protect their land, too.

They hit on a solution: Despite the distance, Bennett’s special district “purchased” a thin strip of land encircling the Bolbock’s spread. By surrounding the private ranch with a protective government moat, Lazy W, a special district based in an entirely different region of the state, has been able to prevent Dripping Springs from moving ahead on its preferred pipeline plan.

Bennett has used the district granted to him by the Legislature in other unusual ways. The Lazy W recently flexed its government muscle by seeking to condemn 55 acres of a neighbor’s private property against his will and absorbing it into the district. The neighbor argued Bennett simply wanted to add some land to his ranch.

“This taking is a sham whose sole purpose is to confer private benefits to private parties,” the neighbor, Arlis Jones, wrote in a legal filing.

While Jones tries to recover his property, however, Lazy W has already erected a fence around it.

‘The invisible government of Texas’

The Lazy W isn’t the only Texas special district to use its government powers in non-conventional ways unforeseen by the lawmakers who created them. Like tiny viruses unleashed on the state, some quietly mutate beyond their original purpose to upend local communities.

A 2014 legislative report on special districtscounted about 3,350 across Texas, including hospital, emergency services, utility, school and water districts, among others. There are hundreds in Harris County alone. In a recent hearing, Sen. Paul Bettencourt (R-Houston) said the number of them has since surpassed 4,000. Lawmakers this year have filed bills that would create dozens more.

Because there are so many and they are so hyperlocal, the districts can operate far under the radar of public scrutiny, even though they are vested with powers that can affect the daily lives of citizens. “There are appropriate purposes for these,” said Rod Bordelon, distinguished senior fellow for public affairs at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, who has studied the districts. “There’s just not a lot of oversight and review.”

While government leaders are elected by the people they represent, for example, special district officials generally are appointed, and often are the same developers — or their hand-picked representatives — who formed the district. “In general, most citizens know comparatively little about the jurisdiction, structure, functions, and governance of special purpose districts,” the 2014 report concluded, “thus making them the invisible government of Texas.”

Operating so far out of sight can lead to misuse, said Bettencourt. “They’re set up opaquely where things can happen that are at best poor policy, and at times borderline corrupt. It can become weaponized,” he said.

Last year, Hearst Newspapers detailed how a small group of Travis County developers were using their special district consisting of bare farmland to collect millions of dollars off taxpayers who in some cases lived far away.

The SH130 Municipal Management District No. 1 was established by the Legislature in 2019 to help develop a community near the Austin airport. But its directors discovered they could leverage the district’s status as a government entity to obtain generous property tax breaks for other developers even if the projects were nowhere near the district. In exchange, the developers paid SH130 millions of dollars in fees.

Local taxpayers must make up the difference in foregone property tax revenue. That meant citizens where the tax-break properties were located effectively have had to pay more to backfill the revenue lost to projects that neither they, nor their elected leaders had any say in, said Williamson County Treasurer Scott Heselmeyer. SH130 “is trying to fund its own development off the backs of taxpayers in other parts of the state,” he said.

When they learn of such unintended uses, lawmakers must scramble to fix them by amending the laws that created the districts. This year lawmakers proposed no fewer than three bills to rein in the SH130 Municipal Management District. Earlier this month, the Texas Senate voted to dissolve the district it helped create just three years ago.

Yet with so many special districts across the state, lawmakers concede it can feel like a game of legislative Whac-A-Mole. “It’s very rare that a taxing unit gets dissolved around here,” Bettencourt said.

Rep. Glenn Rogers (R-Mineral Wells), meanwhile, introduced a bill to protect cities such as Dripping Springs from, say, having to wage battle against a far-away a conservation district over their local development plans. It sought to remove the governmental immunity from eminent domain lawsuits of “certain water districts.”

“I was troubled by the abuse of special district powers I saw in this case,” Rogers said in a statement. The House Committee on Land & Resource Management “is determined to ensure that special districts serve their intended public purposes, and aren’t used improperly as personal fiefdoms to accomplish private purposes.”

Public park not so well-known

Bennett made his fortune acquiring and operating hotels and is a Texas political heavyweight, donating hundreds of thousands of dollars to support primarily conservative causes and candidates. But he’s also known as a dogged and creative legal opponent willing to wage long and expensive court battles to protect against what he sees as threats to his interests.

In addition to turning his ranch into a governmental entity, he buried the cremated remains of two family acquaintances on the Lazy W in the path of the proposed pipeline route, using the cemetery to help create another legal obstacle to the Tarrant water district’s plans. He supported candidates to replace the district’s incumbent board, as well.

Dissatisfied with media coverage of his business operations and politics, he resurrected the name of an old African-American newspaper, the Dallas Express. With Bennett as its publisher, it has produced friendlier coverage. When the Dallas Weekly labeled it a “right-wing propaganda site” he sued the paper for libel. After a Texas appeals court dismissed the lawsuit last summer, Bennett took it to the Texas Supreme Court, where it is currently pending.

The designated contact for the Lazy W, Traci Merritt, an employee of Bennett’s Remington Hotels, did not respond to emails or phone messages seeking to interview Bennett.

According to Henderson County court documents, Lazy W said it moved to absorb its neighbor’s 55.8 acres of private property because the land was needed to fulfill the special district’s mission of protecting nature. (The Lazy W changed itself from a MUD into a conservation district in 2013, according to the Texas Commission on Environmental Qualify, which registers the districts.) “The board of directors has determined that the current land is necessary for the provision of additional habitat for wildlife,” according to the September 2019 condemnation filing.

The neighbor responded that Bennett simply wanted his land for his own and so was using the government he controlled to take it.

“The sole purpose of this attempted condemnation is to add Mr. Jones’ 55 acres to the Lazy W Conservation District (and, by extension, to Bennett’s Lazy W Ranch),” Jones’s legal team wrote in a filing. “The public has no access to the 55 acres, legal or otherwise … Further, no plans or documents exist showing any access to or uses for the property by the public.”

Jones and his attorney, Andrew Cox, declined comment. Lazy W attorney Stephen Christy noted there was long-simmering tension between the property owners.

“Mr. Jones has a long history of aggravating his neighbors,” he wrote in an emailed response to questions. He added that “The purpose for the district to condemn land is for a public park, which is how it’s currently being utilized.”

It’s not a well-known public park.

“I know there’s a Lazy W Ranch, but it’s definitely not public land that’s available” for public access, said Mark Anderson, a Texas Parks and Wildlife Department game warden assigned to the area. “It’s not publicized, for sure. I’ve never heard of it.”

Internet and newspaper postings show a Frisbee golf tournament was held on the Lazy W last October. Christy said the course is available by reservation. Dwight Robson, who manages the 18-hole course, said it was built last fall, and while it is considered public, the only access is via Bennett’s private land so arrangements to play there must be made through him.

In March 2022, a jury found in Jones’s favor, concluding Lazy W’s taking of Jones’s property served no public purpose. Yet in what legal experts say is a near unheard-of event, the verdict was tossed when Lazy W appealed and the court reporter could not produce a full transcript of the trial.

With no official record of the trial, the 12thCourt of Appeals in January ordered the entire case to be re-heard back in Henderson County. The new trial is scheduled for the end of the year.

Project stopped in its tracks

A 3.5-hour drive away, Dripping Springs, too, has found that battles with the Lazy W can be protracted.

With its population soaring in recent years, the city has worked hard to keep up with infrastructure demand, said public works Director Aaron Reed. The state’s regional water plans prefer more pipelines running to fewer treatment plants, and planning for the new wastewater pipeline running along the eastern side of the city began in 2014.

Although attention was given to mapping a direct route, Reed said the 3-mile pipeline’s pathway was determined mostly by topography. Planners wanted a gravity-fed line, which doesn’t move liquids under pressure so produces fewer leaks and tends to last longer. The east side was selected because it was less developed and so would need to cross fewer individual properties, Reed said.

By 2019, Dripping Springs had a state permit and began contacting about a dozen landowners seeking their permission for a 30-foot-wide easement to lay the pipe through their properties. Mayor Bill Foulds said negotiations were proceeding well with the Bolbocks, until “Suddenly Lazy W is involved.”

Bruce Bolbock, who purchased his property in 1989, said he isn’t anti-development, but he was frantic to shield his land and its wildlife from a pipeline project that could harm them. “If it leaks, then what?” he said. “As just an individual landowner, you have zero protection.”

Bennett, who he learned of by reading articles about him, “was very sympathetic. He said, ‘I think I can help.’” With their shared commitment to conservation, “He offered to allow us to join the Lazy W.”

Foulds described the outline of property Bennett’s conservation district acquired surrounding the Bolbock’s ranch as a 30-foot-wide “picture frame.” Records show the land was conveyed to the Henderson County conservation district in February 2020. The Bolbocks maintain it, use it and have the right to buy it back for $10 if the city succeeds in condemning it, legal filings show.

Dripping Springs filed a condemnation notice in 2021. But last May, Hays County Court-at-Law Judge Chris Johnson concluded the Lazy W Conservation District had governmental immunity and Dripping Springs could not take any of its land, grinding the project to a halt.

The city has appealed, arguing Bennett’s North Texas special district is not being used to benefit Texas citizens, but only to preserve one family’s Hill Country estate. “The Lazy W Strip is being used to protect private property interests, not any public interest,” it wrote in a filing last summer. If this were allowed, Foulds warned, there was nothing to prevent any special district in any part of the state from inserting itself into a local government’s affairs.

Christopher Johns, the Bolbock’s attorney, said he understood the concern. But “The Legislature set up the rules,” he said. “And we played by the rules.”

eric.dexheimer@houstonchronicle.com

Categories Accountability, Ethics, Politics, Texas

Curt Cardine: Arizona Takes Steps to Eliminate Local Control of Schools

By dianeravitch
July 21, 2023 //
9

Curt Cardine, a veteran school administrator and researcher, has written frequently about Arizona Republicans’ efforts to privatize education.

Pathway Making Community Connections (MC2) Asset Management and Educational Consulting

Curtis J. Cardine MS Organizational Management, Leadership and Change

3873 E Cavalry Ct.

Gilbert, AZ 85297

603-209-0009 cjcardine@yahoo.com

 

Legislative Alert:

Recently the legislature requested the data on in-district “choices” and open enrollment data from districts other than the one that the child resides in.

The current way these placements from outside of your districts are “paid for” is that the child’s state dollars follow the child to their new district. This, of course, is not what it cost the receiving district to take on the out of district placement. This new “look” at how many parents take advantage of district choices is the prelude to an attempt to change how “choices” are funded.

I have been involved with the concept of school choice since my undergraduate days at University of Massachusetts at Salem. At that time I had the privilege of attending presentations by Dr. Ray Budd, the originator of the term, “Charter School” (UMass Amherst in 1973). Dr. Budd’s vision was locally controlled charters started by certified teachers with financial oversight by local school boards.

My district in NH was one of the ten school districts chosen to receive federal funding for five years for Public School Choice. At that time the federal government put up $180 M to fund “choice” of which $20 M went to school districts. The Department of Education managed this program for 5 years. The bias built into the first level of funding in 1999 was toward “Public privately owned, charter schools”.

Modifications of Dr. Budd’s vision by the charter industry and state legislatures have included:

• Private firms finances monitored by the school district, (California is an example)

• State Boards for Charter Schools or University oversight of finances and academic performance (Arizona Model)

In order to accommodate the ‘choice” of parents the first step in establishing “choice” was to create Open Enrollment. Arizona did this prior to initiating choice. The other first step was to declare the state to be a “Right to Work” state (first enacted in 1946 during the height of the effort by the federal government to fund other types of schools with federal funding).

As you know these steps preceded the establishment of privately owned charter schools in 1994. The antithesis of Dr. Budd’s model.

Through the efforts of “the Conservative Caucus” (state and national level) and ALEC (The American Legislative Exchange Council) and locally by the AZ Chamber of Commerce, The Goldwater Institute, and the Charter School Association charters, (followed by various scholarships, and now universal vouchers) have grown exponentially in this state.

Critical Analysis of this latest move by the “Conservative Caucus” and AZ Legislature

Why gather this data now?

This latest request for data on district choice is the next step in attempting to declare that district borders are not relevant. The data, which was recently shared in an AZ Administrator’s Association online presentation by Dr. Anabel, will show how many parents are choosing different schools than the one within their local schools’ boundaries and out of their district.

The “backpacks full of cash” theory of financing the myth of “choice” has always thought of local taxes as a method of funding ‘choice’. There has always been pushback to allowing this funding to “follow the child” whether it was to a charter or a private school.

It is the considered opinion of this researcher and experienced administrator that the next funding that the “choice” advocates will go after is through a state property tax replacing local and county taxes for education. This will be another blow for local control of education.

This new form of taxation for “all choices” needs to be fought from day one, i.e. before the legislature attempts to change things.

The lesson from the latest round of “universal vouchers” is indicative of the high cost to the state for this ‘choice” for people who were in private school already and paying, as they should, for their child’s education. The addition of home schooling to the voucher program and de-facto always in place at charter schools with online programs is creating an economic issue that this change in taxes will claim it is compensating for.

The state’s self-induced economic issue will be used to advocate for this change in taxation for “all choices”.

If you are receiving this notice it is because you have dealt with Pathway MC2 currently or in the recent past. Please feel free to share this with your colleagues.

Thank you for your time.

Curtis J. Cardine

Please feel free to contact me using the address and phone data in the header.

Categories Accountability, Arizona, Charter Schools, Data, Education Industry, School Choice
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