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Samuel Abrams Is Stepping Down at the National Center on the Study of Privatization in Education

By dianeravitch
May 7, 2024 //
4

Educators and policymakers need unbiased analyses of the effects of privatization of education, and that is what the National Center on the Study of Privatizatuon in Education at Teachers College, Columbia University has provided since it was founded by noted economist Henry Levin in 2000. In 2015, Levin stepped down and was succeeded by Samuel Abrams, who wrote a superb study of The Edison Project called Education and the Commercial Mindset. For the best nine years, Abrams has run NCSPE with integrity. Privatization is rapidly spreading around the globe, and the public needs a reliable source to keep watch on it. I hope that TC can find someone as able and thoughtful to succeed him.

Samuel Abrams wrote this letter about his decision and the next chapter in his career:

After nine years as the director of NCPSE, I’m writing to share that I’m stepping down to become the director of the International Partnership for the Study of Educational Privatization (IPSEP).

IPSEP will be anchored at the National Education Policy Center (NEPC) at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Partner institutions will include, to start, the Department of Economics at Stockholm University in Sweden; and the Turku University of Applied Sciences as well as the School of Education at the University of Turku in Finland. To receive IPSEP publications, please sign up here to join the NEPC mailing list (in case you’re not already a subscriber).

The idea for IPSEP derived from my time last year as a Fulbright visiting professor at the University of Turku, where I studied the role of public-private partnerships central to apprenticeship programs at vocational secondary schools. Nearly 50 percent of secondary students in Finland attend vocational schools (in comparison to about 5 percent in the U.S.). Such public-private partnerships make such robust participation in vocational education possible and pave the way to impressive job training and placement.

The private sector has nevertheless failed to distinguish itself in other educational domains in Finland. For example, commercial firms are playing a growing role in managing preschools and running teacher professional development. In both cases, significant questions have been raised about quality. In addition, school districts have allowed tech companies to play a growing role in determining curricula, with iPads and tablets replacing books, which may explain to a significant degree the plunge in reading proficiency among Finnish youth. The mean score for reading for the Finns on PISA dropped from 520 in 2018 to 490 in 2022, which amounts to nearly a year of learning, generating alarmist headlines in newspapers across Finland. A country known since the publication of the first PISA results in 2001 as an education mecca for policymakers seeking pedagogical solutions had lost its shine.

The realm of preschools may be most telling. A company called Pilke is now running 227 preschools across Finland, up from 19 in 2013. Pilke, in turn, was acquired in 2020 by a Norwegian preschool operator called Læringsverkstedet. Both Pilke and Læringsverkstedet now operate as subsidiaries of a parent company called Dibber, which counts over 600 preschools in its portfolio across several countries, from Norway, Sweden, and Finland to Latvia, Poland, Germany, South Africa, the UAE, India, and Hong Kong. In the spring of 2023, workers at Pilke went on strike twice to protest low pay and poor working conditions.

Such outsourcing in Finland echoes what’s happening in its Nordic neighbors as well as countries around the world. Across the Gulf of Bothnia, after all, Sweden went much further in introducing vouchers in 1992, allowing parents to send their children to private schools with public funds and permitting commercial firms to run such schools. Three decades later, about 15 percent of students at the primary and lower-secondary level and 30 percent of students at the upper-secondary level employ vouchers to attend private schools, about 75 percent of which are managed by commercial firms. On top of substantial documentation of corner-cutting by such commercial firms in the name of profits, segregation, grade inflation, and poor academic outcomes overall have been attributed to this dramatic transformation of the Swedish system.

With educational privatization clearly now a multifaceted global phenomenon, there is a need for an international multi-institutional version of NCSPE involving scholars abroad to conduct comparative research and disseminate findings. The outsourcing of management of preschools as well as teacher professional development, the prominence of vouchers in countries like Sweden as well as Chile, and the encroachment of ed tech on classrooms represent merely a slice of this story. Educational privatization has taken many other forms around the world: low-fee private schooling has proliferated across Sub-Saharan Africa, India, and Pakistan; “free schools” and “academies” in England (functioning much like charter schools in the U.S.) now enroll more than 50 percent of the nation’s primary and secondary students; and “shadow education” in the mold of after-school tutoring to aid students prepping for exams for admission to secondary schools as well as universities dominates the lives and strains the budgets of many families in many countries.

With NCSPE, Henry Levin laid the foundation for how a research center can address such issues in a dispassionate, rigorous way. While a professor at Stanford serving on an advisory board to assess the implementation of school vouchers in Cleveland in the mid-90s, Levin concluded that a glaring absence of reliable information on educational privatization precluded informed debate. To fill that void, Levin set to work on creating a research center that would provide impartial documentation, publish working papers, conduct research, and hold conferences. Lured in 1999 to Teachers College by then-President Arthur Levine to assume an endowed professorship and establish this center on Morningside Heights, Levin launched NCSPE the following year and ran it until 2015, when he asked me to take over.

It has been an honor to serve as the director of NCSPE. Following 18 years as a high school history teacher, I joined NCSPE as a visiting scholar in 2008 to work on a book on educational privatization. That book became Education and the Commercial Mindset (Harvard University Press, 2016), an exploration of the impact of market forces on public education in the U.S. and abroad. The last two chapters concern educational reform in Sweden and Finland, respectively. In doing the research for those two chapters, which involved school visits and interviews in Denmark and Norway as well as Finland and Sweden, I quickly learned the immense value of comparative analysis. To know one’s home, one must leave it.

In running NCSPE, I have had the privilege of collaborating with a range of gifted scholars in editing their working papers and contextualizing them in my announcements to the listserv. I have also had the privilege of getting to know a parade of visiting scholars from numerous countries and of working with a group of talented research associates who wrote book reviews and news commentaries for the NCSPE site. To all, I express my profound gratitude for all they have taught me. Finally, to Henry Levin, I am indebted for his faith in me to run this center and for his example of erudition, diligence, and openness. Levin has indeed been a role model for scholars everywhere and in all fields.

Going forward, I would like to thank Faith Boninger, Alex Molnar, and Kevin Welner, professors of education at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and experts on privatization, for their warm welcome to NEPC. In addition, for making this partnership international, I would like to thank Jonas Vlachos, a professor of economics at Stockholm University and an expert on privatization; Vesa Taatila, the rector of the Turku University of Applied Sciences and an expert on public-private partnerships; and Mirjamaija Mikkilä-Erdmann and Anu Warinowski, professors of education at the University of Turku and experts on teacher education. A board of advisors for IPSEP will be posted on the NEPC site in due time.

NCSPE is slated to remain operating at Teachers College. An update about the center’s status should appear on this site before long.

As I have continued to serve as a visiting scholar at the University of Turku, you may reach me with any questions at samuel.abrams@utu.fi.

Samuel E. Abrams
NCSPE Director
May 6, 2024

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, Privatization, Vouchers

Carl J. Petersen: The GOP Politician Who Is Tough Enough to Kill a Puppy

By dianeravitch
May 7, 2024 //
33

Carl J. Petersen is a parent in Los Angeles who writes here about a politician who is mean enough and dumb enough to kill a 14-month dog. Cricket didn’t obey her orders so she took him to the bottom of a gravel pit and shot him in the head. Governor Kristi Noem of South Dakota justly earned national scorn for her act of animal cruelty.

Next to holding a baby at a campaign rally, nothing does more to humanize a political candidate than a video of them frolicking with the family dog. The love of man’s best friend is bipartisan with dog owners “just as likely to come from either side of the political spectrum.” A Pew Research Center survey found that 97% of pet owners consider their pets part of their family.

Like everything else that has changed since Trump descended his golden escalator to announce his first candidacy, a dog’s status on the campaign trail is now threatened. As part of her campaign to become Trump’s running mate, Kristi Noem, the governor of one of the Dakotas, is set to release an autobiography where she brags about killing two of her family’s pets.

Governor Kristi Noem (CC BY 4.0)

As a dog lover, I have made the wrenching decision to help faithful companions cross the rainbow bridge. It is always difficult, but we owe it to our pets to allow ourselves to let go rather than let them suffer. I held each of them as the doctor injected the fatal shot, making sure that they left us knowing the answer to “Who is a good dog?”

Noem provided no such comfort to her dog. According to her account, Cricket was dragged to a gravel pit and shot dead in front of a startled construction crew. Like a serial killer discovering pleasure in taking a life, she then set her sites on one of the family’s goats. The goat did not fare as well as Cricket and did not die with the first shot. Noem had to “run back to her truck for more ammo to finish off the wounded animal….”

According to Trump’s first wife, Ivana (the one he cheated on with his second wife Marla), “Donald was not a dog fan” and was hostile to her poodle, Chappy. Like most Americans, she was perplexed by this hostility; “How can you not love a dog that acts like he’s won the lottery for life just because he sees you walk through the door?”

The Trumps were the first modern First Family not to have any pets when they were in the White House. James K. Polk and Andrew Johnson were the only other Presidents without pets while they were in office. Many people are saying that this is an example of Trump’s narcissism. It is hard to have unconditional love for another creature when you are too busy admiring the greatness of the man in the mirror.

Categories Accountability, Character, Cruelty, Elections, Trump

Russians and Ukrainians March Together to Demand an End to Putin’s War

By dianeravitch
May 7, 2024 //
60

Now here is a wonderful protest. Russians and Ukrainians marched across the Brooklyn Bridge in a protest against Putin’s war in Ukraine.

They joined together to denounce the war, to oppose fascism in Russia, and to counter Russian propaganda. They mocked Putin as a modern-day Hitler. The two allied groups live in harmony in Brooklyn.

Categories Fascism, International, Resistance

John Thompson: The Cruelty of Doubling Down on the Big Standardized Test

By dianeravitch
May 7, 2024 //
12

John Thompson, historian and retired teacher, reports on the cruelty of Oklahoma’s new crackdown on test scores.

He writes:

I wonder how most teachers responded to Nuria Martinez-Keel’s Tulsa Public Schools Ups the Intensity to Prepare for High Stakes Testing. I’m confident that few educators would be surprised by the language used by those who are implementing Oklahoma State Superintendent Ryan Walters’ teach-to-the-test program.  But, how many would believe that fellow educators really believe it will work? 

Martinez-Keel reports that “Angie Teas, a Tulsa Public Schools (TPS) instructional leadership director spoke positively about “a renewed focus on both academic standards and preparing students to take the standardized exams.” I was struck, however, by Teas’ words, “state tests are ‘part of our lives’ every year in public schools, but this testing season is ‘important for its own outside reasons.’” 

It seems likely that the “outside reasons” she cites are Superintendent Walters’ threats to takeover the TPS, as well as his order to immediately “elevate 12 of its schools off of the ‘F’ list.” In response to this seemingly impossible target, “the district provided high-dosage tutoring to 470 fourth and fifth graders, launched a campaign to combat chronic absenteeism and focused on credit-deficient seniors at struggling high schools to boost graduation rates, among other initiatives district leaders highlighted.” (A total of 1,125 elementary students will be served in a district with more than 33,000 enrollees.) 

I suspect that most educators would be supportive of efforts to assist small numbers of students if those policies were disconnected from test results, and they did not have the potential to undermine meaningful teaching and learning in the district as a whole. I find it hard to believe that teachers  who saw the harm inflicted by No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and Race to the Top (RttT) on students would not recognize why this new, stress-driven approach is also doomed to fail.

The narrative of educators in the story about upping the intensity of high-stakes testing is interesting, and it reminds me of the scripts my administrators would use as my colleagues repeatedly shouted back when ordered to do what virtually everyone saw as educational malpractice.  As Martinez-Keel reported:

Burroughs Elementary is one of the schools identified for improvement. Principal Dee Tisdale said the school has added academic rigor, focused on testing data and added extra resources, and it “all ties back” to individualized, small-group instruction between students and their teacher.

With state testing only days away, the mentality at Burroughs is “now it’s showtime.”

“I think in terms of the big championship game,” Tisdale said. “We’re just preparing, and we’re hoping that all of our practices will give us the trophy in June or July when the results come back.”

And as the TPS instructional leadership director Angie Teas said:

It’s nerve-wracking to feel the pressure of, ‘Oh my God, it feels like the world is watching,’ yeah,” … “But it’s also exciting to recognize that we’ve had an opportunity, like with OTEP (Oklahoma Teacher Empowerment Program) to be more all-parts-equal to the entire whole. We all see our part in the district that in a way I don’t think we have in a really long time.”

Martinez-Keel also cited an elementary teacher:

She felt ‘a little bit of pressure’ to make academic gains in only six small-group sessions. [Charity] Hargrave teaches fourth grade at Skelly but, through the OTEP program, was assigned 27 fifth graders at her school for extra instruction.

She said she had a ‘very short period of time’ to review benchmark test scores for each student, group them based on their performance level and plan lessons for each session.

But the experience has been positive, she said, and she hopes it will continue in the future.

Similarly, Asriel Teegarden said “Sometimes, there’s a little bit of fear about the unknown.” After a “30-minute lesson – featuring a space-themed reading comprehension exercise,” she asks her students “how did they feel about the ‘big test’ next week?” Then, “Teegarden said there’s a ‘different intensity level’ ahead of the most important testing period of her career.” But then she concluded: 

Usually, I would be nervous for these children, but I’ve gone about it like, ‘I’m excited you’re going to take this because you’re going to all do great,’… ‘Everything has got to be positive, giving them a lot of positive feedback. I think they’re going to do excellent.’

Of course, that sounds like wishful thinking to me. But I used to engage in a forced optimism in order to remain in the classroom and serve my students. Being an award-winning, veteran teacher who was successfully engaged in meaningful, challenging instruction, I was able to negotiate compromises with my principals who knew I would not participate in teach-to-the-test. I even agreed to an experiment in teaching a class in a way that would raise test scores without undermining my students’ meaningful learning. We produced the school’s highest History test results, but despite our best efforts, the stress overtook both my students and me. I swore to never again let testing influence our lessons.

Holistic instruction became more difficult over the years when my students from the poorest elementary schools volunteered that they had been “completely robbed of an education” by test prep.

Then, I came back from retirement to teach at an alternative charter school that was like my first school which served students with felony convictions. But then the top administrator ordered the principal to order me to focus solely on the few who had a chance to pass the Common Core high stakes tests. My principal asked me to briefly comply while she tried to persuade the district administration to cancel that plan. She said that they didn’t understand that this year’s end-of-instruction-exam was just a pilot, and thus wasn’t a graduation requirement. She was confident she could persuade them to withdraw the order to just assign most students worksheets, and focus solely on 3, 4, or 5 students per class.

Of course, my students were horrified by the new system, but they trusted me to not follow those rules except for a brief time.  However, when my principal apologized and said that the new system had to become permanent, she knew I’d resign, and I did.

So, I won’t criticize the 45 teachers who are each trying to help 25 or so students in the hope that they will benefit. I also appreciate journalists who are reporting on the stress being inflicted on teachers, and whether the data-driven, rushed interventions will somehow produce more good than harm. But I hope students will be their new priority as they review the research and the history of the failure of these sorts of mandates. And above all, I hope we will listen to our kids as the stress of test-prep is added to the stress of poverty, and attending high-poverty schools that are under attack by Ryan Walters.   

Categories Cruelty, Extremism, Oklahoma, Standardized Testing

Netanyahu Threatens to Expand an Already Disastrous War in Gaza

By dianeravitch
May 6, 2024 //
42

Benjamin Netanyahu has warned the people of Rafah in the Gaza Strip to evacuate, signaling that he intends to invade that city. Such military action would be a disaster for the people who are sheltering there and for Israel as well, whose military aggression has turned it into a pariah state.

Netanyahu’s initial response to the atrocities of October 7 was justifiable under the principle that a nation has the right to defend itself. The war has continued for seven months, with tens of thousands of civilian casualties.

Meanwhile, the Israeli hostages continue to die, many killed by Israeli bombs.

Nothing that I write here will affect what happens in the Middle East. Nor do campus protests affect what happens.

I have condemned both Netanyahu and Hamas for failing to stop the killing. Both remain intransigent. Both find reasons not to sign a peace agreement.

The culture of death and destruction must end.

I hope, I wish, I pray that Netanyahu steps back from the brink and pursues peace as tirelessly as he has pursued war and death.

Categories International

Michael Tomasky: Does Joe Biden Have “Absolute Immunity?” If He Does…

By dianeravitch
May 6, 2024 //
19

Michael Tomasky came up with an interesting thought. Writing in The New Republic, he speculated on what Joe Biden could accomplish if the Supreme Court rules that Presidents have absolute immunity for anything they do in their official capacity. Time for Dark Brandon!

During last week’s oral arguments in United States v. Trump, it sure sounded like there might be five Supreme Court justices willing to conclude that a president should indeed have lifetime immunity from legal reprisal for official acts committed as president. This prospect is terrifying because it would hand a President Trump a nearly blank check to do anything he wants—to the Constitution, to his political opponents, to the executive branch—and there will be no way to stop him unless 67 votes emerge in the Senate to convict him of high crimes and misdemeanors and remove him from office, which seems a near impossibility, given Republicans’ excessive fealty to and fear of the man and his movement.

But then it occurred to me over the weekend: Well, wait a second. Donald Trump isn’t president. Joe Biden is. And if presidential immunity for official acts were to apply to a future President Trump, would it not also apply to current President Biden?

Of course it would. And I hope that fact has them doing some thinking in the Biden White House. Democrats should drive the point home to Republicans and the nation that two can play this game.

What “official acts” might Biden undertake once Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Bret Kavanaugh, and possibly John Roberts declare him to be above the law? Well, let’s have some fun here.

Let’s start with the Supreme Court itself. Biden could wake up one day and announce that the court should have 13 members, or 15, and he could set about appointing the new associate justices and doing his best to ram them through the Senate, offering Joe Manchin trillions in economic development for West Virginia to secure the retiring senator’s support, between now and Election Day.

Politically risky? Sure. But maybe not as politically risky as most pundits would assume—and not nearly as costly to the republic as the things Trump is contemplating doing. Remember, the Constitution calls for no set number of justices. Biden would be within even his pre-immunity rights to try to change it. Two polls came out last fall asking respondents whether they’d favor court expansion, and the affirmative view prevailed in both: It was 54-46 in one, and 44-35 (with 22 percent having no opinion) in the other. That looks like a winnable political fight to me.

Biden would need only to make two arguments. Number one, this court delegitimized itself when it took away a half-century-old right, the right to a safe and legal abortion, in the Dobbs ruling. Every one of the justices who voted to strip that right away from women vowed in his or her confirmation hearing about their deep respect for precedent. They all lied. Number two, this very court gave me the power to do this! I’m only doing what this very Supreme Court just ruled a president was within his rights to do.

Okay. We all know Biden is not going to do that. He’s too respectful of tradition, and Democrats are too fearful of the right-wing noise machine, which would kick into an unprecedented outrage gear if Biden actually tried to make use of the tools the Supreme Court just handed him.

But here’s my point. If this court were to give presidents a grant of immunity for official acts, Biden should most certainly use the occasion to play some hardball. Make some threats about what he might do with this power. Get the American public thinking about some things they just don’t think about enough, leading public opinion in the direction of reforming aspects of our democratic system that badly need reform.

Take the Electoral College. Democrats have won seven of the last eight presidential elections, in popular vote terms, but this archaic and reactionary system that was put into place to give presidential candidates from slaveholding states an advantage has helped elect two Republicans who lost the popular vote.

I don’t think Biden should just unilaterally end the Electoral College—although, if he had immunity for all official acts, he could certainly give it a whirl, let conservatives bring a civil lawsuit, and see what his new 13-member Supreme Court thinks of the idea.

Less audaciously, he could certainly find some legal way to put an end to all these MAGA-driven attempts to seat alternate electors in states whose outcomes they dispute, which they did in seven states in 2020 and by all accounts are preparing to do again this year. Yes, the GOP-led House would impeach him, but so what? There’d never be 67 votes in the Senate to convict. And as with court expansion, if it were clear that he had really won the disputed states, public opinion would be on Biden’s side, and he’d have pushed the Overton window dramatically in the direction of eventual abolition of the Electoral College.

Okay, this, too, is a little out there for Biden. More seriously, he could use an immunity grant to issue a series of rulings and orders that would be aimed toward two ends: one, shoring up some of his policy decisions against the inevitable Trump reversals should Trump be elected, and two, preemptively making it harder for Trump to do some of the things that the infamous Project 2025 pledges he will do.

On the former, for example, the Biden administration could undertake a number of administrative moves on the civil rights and labor fronts to make it harder for Trump to undo what Team Biden has done. And on the latter, Biden can find a way to make it basically impossible for Trump to implement his so-called Schedule F plans, under which Trump would give himself the authority to fire more federal workers and replace them with lackeys. And that’s just for starters. With immunity for official acts, Biden could preemptively defang a lot of what promises to be undemocratic and authoritarian about a Trump second term.

Of course, the Supreme Court might not even issue a ruling on immunity. It might just remand it back to the Washington, D.C., appeals court that ruled in February that Citizen Trump was not immune from prosecution—that is, the high court’s real intent may just have been to delay the prosecution of Trump on January 6 insurrection charges, not to shield him from prosecution.

But I hope we’ve all learned by now never to underestimate the cynical perfidy of this court majority. They may well limit presidential immunity, thinking they’re helping Trump remake the country in his fascist fashion. They’ll calculate that the old institutionalist Biden would never use his new powers in the closing months and weeks of his term. It would be delicious to see him prove them wrong.

Categories Accountability, Biden, Civil Rights, Democracy, Elections, Trump

Jan Resseger: How Book Bans and Censorship Are Hurting Children

By dianeravitch
May 6, 2024 //
7

Jan Resseger explains how young people are injured when adults censor what they read and teach them inaccurate history.

She writes:

Public schools, which serve more than 50 million of our nation’s children and adolescents are perhaps our society’s most important public institution. Unlike private schools, public schools guarantee acceptance for all children everywhere in the United States, and they protect the rights of all children by law. And unlike their private school counterparts, public schools are also required to provide services to meet each child’s educational needs, even children who are disabled or who are learning the English language.

Today’s culture war attacks on public education drive fear of “the other” and attempt to frighten parents about exposing their children to others who may come from other countries, from other cultures, from a different race or ethnicity, from a different religion, or from a gay or lesbian family.

The idea of insulating children is, however, counter to the whole philosophical tradition that is the foundation for our system of public schooling.

More than a century ago, education philosopher John Dewey declared: “What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must the community want for all of its children… Only by being true to the full growth of all the individuals who make it up, can society by any chance be true to itself,” (The School and Society, p. 5)

For Dewey, however, educating all children together without insulating them was important as more than an abstract principle. Dewey believed that the experience of school was itself a way of learning to live in a broader community: “I believe that the school is primarily a social institution. Education being a social process, the school is simply that form of community life… I believe that much of present education fails because it neglects… the school as a form of community life… I believe that… the best and deepest moral training is precisely that which one gets through having to enter into proper relations with others in a unity of work and thought.” (My Pedagogic Creed, January 1897)

A hundred years later, in 1998, the political philosopher Benjamin Barber defended the idea of public schools as a microcosm of the community: “America is not a private club defined by one group’s historical hegemony. Consequently, multicultural education is not discretionary; it defines demographic and pedagogical necessity.  If we want youngsters from Los Angeles whose families speak more than 160 languages to be ‘Americans,’ we must first acknowledge their diversity and honor their distinctiveness.”( “Education for Democracy,” in A Passion for Democracy: American Essays, p.231).

And in the same year, another philosopher of education, Walter Feinberg explained that in public school classrooms students should learn to tell their own stories, to listen and respect the stories of others, and through that process prepare for democratic citizenship: “That there is an ‘American story’ means not that there is one official understanding of the American experience but, rather, that those who are telling their versions of the story are doing so in order to contribute to better decision making on the part of the American nation and that they understand that they are part of those decisions. The concept is really ‘Americans’ stories.’” (Common Schools: Uncommon Identities, p. 232) (emphasis in the original)

Today, of course, the culture wars attacks on public education seek to reshape the curriculum, silence controversial discussion, and ban books.

Massachusetts political science professor Maurice Cunningham explains that well-funded advocates for reshaping school curricula—including the Heritage Foundation, the Manhattan Institute, the Council for National Policy and a number of dark money groups—are spending millions of dollars to fan the fears of parents by supporting local advocates in organizations like Moms for Liberty and Parents Defending Education. The goal is to agitate against overly “woke” public school curricula and to frighten parents by telling them that teachers are frightening children by including the nation’s sins as well as our society’s virtues as part of the American history curriculum, and by encouraging children to listen to the voices of people who have traditionally been marginalized.  There is, however, no evidence that our children have been personally or collectively frightened when they learn about slavery as the cause of the Civil War or when they learn about gender identity as part of a high school human sexuality curriculum. Accurate and inclusive curricula and open class discussion where all voices are heard and considered are essential for truly public education.

Robert Samuels’ When Your Own Book Gets Caught Up in the Culture Wars profoundly explains the damage wrought by book banning, Samuels, a Washington Post reporter and his colleague Toluse Olorunnipa, had just won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction last fall when they were invited to a Memphis high school to discuss their new book, His Name Is George Floyd: One Man’s Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice.  Samuels describes why he wanted to share his book with the Memphis high school students: “I had once been told that the answer to anything could be found in a book… One day, during my senior year, I was browsing an airport bookstore when I saw Stokely Carmichael’s autobiography, “Ready for Revolution.” A whole chapter was devoted to Bronx (High School of) Science, which he had also attended. I was riveted. It started with an officer hassling him on the street, only to be stunned when Carmichael shows him a book with the school’s logo. Although our time there was separated by four decades, we both had the same confusion upon discovering that white classmates had grown up reading an entirely different set of material….  We were both surprised by how little dancing there was at white classmates’ parties. ‘It was at first a mild culture shock, but I adapted,’ he wrote. I, too, had to learn to adapt, to not be so self-conscious about getting stereotyped because of my speech, my clothes, my interests. It was the first time I had ever truly felt seen in a book that was not made for children.”

Samuels and Olorunnipa received a call just before their Memphis visit warning them they could not read from the book and that the school could not distribute copies to students. And during their visit, it became evident that students’ questions had even been carefully edited by their teachers.  Then, in the weeks after the visit, the Memphis-Shelby County school staff and event sponsoring organization stepped all over themselves trying to apologize to Samuels and Olorunnipa.  It became evident that school staff had been frightened and intimidated by school district regulations; the penalties were severe while the rules themselves remained unclear.

Samuels describes what happened: “(T)he spokesperson for the school district e-mailed… to apologize for the miscommunication and misinformation ‘surrounding your recent visit’… (She) defended prohibiting the book itself, on the ground that it was not appropriate for people under the age of eighteen… (She) then admitted that no one involved in the decision had actually read it. The district’s academic department didn’t have time… A staff person in the office searched for it in a library database, noting that the American Library Association had classified it as adult literature.” There was one positive result of the whole fiasco:  with a donation from Viking Books, the publisher, a Memphis community development group, promised any student from Whitehaven High School a free copy of His Name is George Floyd: One Man’s Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice.

Philosophers of education, academic researchers, educational psychologists, and the students in America’s classrooms all tell us that young people are hurt when the school is forced to remove the books that tell students’ own stories.

Young people are made invisible when state laws suppress accurate teaching about all the strands of the American story including slavery, and what happened during the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Civil Rights Movement. Children who are gay or lesbian learn that they should withdraw and hide when the words that describe them are banned. Experts also tell us that the other children in the classroom are not frightened when, for example, a classmate shares the challenges his or her family faced as immigrants trying to find a place to feel welcome.

Please open the link and finish reading this important article.

Categories Bigotry, Censorship, Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Education Reform, Libraries, Literacy, Literature, Racism

Good News! Connecticut Eliminates Religious Exemptions for Vaccines

By dianeravitch
May 6, 2024 //
20

In recent years, religious freedom has been used to undermine public schools and public health. This trend damages communities and endangers children. In the following post, an authority praises Connecticut for eliminating the religious exemption for vaccination.

Dr. Paul Offit is a pediatrician who specializes in infectious diseases and vaccines. He is currently  the Maurice R. Hilleman Professor of Vaccinology, professor of pediatrics at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. He writes a blog where he warns about the dangers of refusing to vaccinate against diseases.

He wrote:

On February 13, 2024, National Geographic published a book I wrote called, TELL ME WHEN IT’S OVER: AN INSIDER’S GUIDE TO DECIPHERING COVID MYTHS AND NAVIGATING OUR POST-PANDEMIC WORLD. For the past few months, I have been writing about various issues discussed in that book.

Between January 2020 and March 2024, the CDC reported 338 cases of measles in 30 US states and jurisdictions. These outbreaks were consistent with a CDC survey showing that more parents are choosing non-medical vaccine exemptions, such as religious or philosophical exemptions, for their school children. Connecticut, however, is standing up to those who, in the name of religious freedoms, are putting children at unnecessary risk.

In 2000, the United States eliminated measles, the most contagious of the vaccine-preventable diseases. Success centered on the enforcement of school vaccine mandates that have existed in all 50 states since 1981. Unfortunately, during the past few years, legislative efforts by anti-vaccine groups have made it easier to opt out of vaccines for non-medical reasons. As a consequence, immunization rates among school children have dropped and measles has come back.

In Connecticut, on the other hand, immunization rates have risen for two straight years, exceeding pre-pandemic levels. During the 2022-2023 school year, more than 97 percent of Connecticut kindergartners were vaccinated against measles, up from 95.7 percent the year before and 95.3 percent the year before that. Why? The answer can be found in a 2021 law that eliminated the state’s religious exemption to vaccination.

Immunization rates of 95 percent or higher are required to provide herd immunity against measles. When rates drop, which is true in many states that now offer either religious or philosophical exemptions, measles comes back. The most dramatic example being an outbreak in Philadelphia in 1991 that centered on two fundamentalist churches that refused vaccines. During a three-month period, measles virus infected 1,400 people in the city and killed nine. All the deaths were in young children.

On its face, the phrase “religious exemptions to vaccination” is a contradiction in terms. All religions teach us to care about our children and our families and our neighbors. Choosing to put our children and those with whom they come in contact at risk is the opposite of a religious act. Further, about 9 million people in the United States, because they are on immune suppressive therapies for their cancers or transplants or autoimmune diseases, can’t be vaccinated. They depend on those around them for protection. Do we have a responsibility to love our neighbor?

Amy Pisani, a Connecticut resident, and head of the national group Vaccinate Your Family, praised the hard work required to counter the efforts of anti-vaccine groups to overturn vaccine mandates. “From the top down, we have incredibly supportive legislators,” said Pisani. “And when you have government agencies that are supportive at that level, it allows our public health officials to do their job.” As measles cases rise this year, and will no doubt return next winter, parents in Connecticut can feel more comfortable that state health officials and legislators have their backs.

Standing in stark contrast to efforts to protect children in Connecticut are those in Mississippi. In July 2023, Mississippi, which had up to that point only offered medical exemptions, became the most recent state to offer a religious exemption to vaccination. More than 2,000 parents immediately chose to exempt their children. The effort was not spearheaded by a religious group, but rather a virulent anti-vaccine group called Informed Consent Action Network. The lawyer who headed that effort paradoxically declared, “Freedom wins again.” Freedom to catch and transmit potentially deadly infections. Hardly a victory for children.

Categories Accountability, Connecticut, Ethics, Health, Science

Jonathan V. Last: Biden Won the War on Crime!

By dianeravitch
May 5, 2024 //
15

Jonathan V. Last writes for The Bulwark, a website for Never Trumper Republicans that has some of the best writing on the current state of politics. In this post, Last explains that Trump presided over a period of crime “American carnage,” Trump called it), but crime has dropped during Biden’s term in office.

Last writes:

Remember the bad old days when people lost their minds about the crime wave Joe Biden had unleashed on America with his woke whatever-whatever policies?

Pepperidge Farm remembers.

There was so much of this. 

Well I’ve got some great news for you: Joe Biden has won the war on crime.

Here’s a headline from the WSJ that Heather Mac Donald might want to see: Homicides Are Plummeting in American Cities.

And this isn’t a one-time drop. It’s an acceleration of a trend that began in 2023.

How many stories have the Washington Examiner and the WSJ op-ed page written about these facts?

I’ll let you guess. But wait—there’s even more good news.

The “Biden crime wave” was always proffered in bad faith because the “crime wave” appeared in 2020, while Donald Trump was president: 2020 saw the largest rise in the murder rate in American history.

Now just because Biden inherited a problem doesn’t mean he gets a pass on its existence. When you’re president, you’re supposed to solve everyone’s problems, not just the ones that crop up during your administration.

And here’s the data: All crime is down under Biden, with one exception.

Violent crimes like murder and rape? Down. Property crimes like burglary and theft? Down. Crime in cities? Down. Crime in rural areas? Down.

The lone exception is that car theft in metropolitan areas has gone up. That’s it.

Like the man said: Take the W.

In Donald Trump’s final year in office the murder rate rose by 30 percent, which was the largest jump in U.S. history. Over Joe Biden’s last 16 months, we’ve had the biggest drop in the murder rate in U.S. history.

You are better off now than you were four years ago.

Categories Accountability, Biden, Data, Elections, Fraud, Hoax, Safety, Trump

Should Librarians Be Jailed for Handing Out a Banned Book?

By dianeravitch
May 5, 2024 //
15

This article in The Washington Post by Hanna Natanson and Anymita Kaye provides a national review of states that are trying to stop book censorship and protect librarians and states that not only ban books for sexual and racial content but threaten jail time for librarians who dispense such books. The state-by-state descriptions on the legal status of librarians is valuable. Open the link if you can to see where your state ranks and what actions it is taking to protect or threaten librarians.

Sam Lee, a leader of the Connecticut Library Association, heads to work these days torn between hope and fear.

She’s encouraged because legislators in her state proposed a bill this year making it harder for school boards to ban library books. But she’s fearful because Connecticut, like America, is seeing a sustained surge in book challenges — and she wonders if objectors will see the legislation as a reason to file more complaints.
“I would like to be optimistic,” Lee said. “But having been in my position for the last few years … I don’t know, it really feels like it’s been forever. And I am worried the book banners are just going to be emboldened.”

The bill in Connecticut, pending before an education committee, is one of a raft of measures advancing nationwide that seek to do things like prohibit book bans or forbid the harassment of school and public librarians — the first such wave in the country, said John Chrastka, director of library advocacy group EveryLibrary.

Legislators in 22 mostly blue states have proposed 57 such bills so far this year, and two have become law, according to a Washington Post analysis of state legislative databases and an EveryLibrary legislative tracker.

But the library-friendly measures are being outpaced by bills in mostly red states that aim to restrict which books libraries can offer and threaten librarians with prison or thousands in fines for handing out “obscene” or “harmful” titles. At least 27 states are considering 100 such bills this year, three of which have become law, The Post found. That adds to nearly a dozen similar measures enacted over the last three years across 10 states.

Lawmakers proposing restrictive bills contend they are necessary because school and public libraries contain graphic sexual material that should not be available to children. Some books’ “sole purpose is sexual gratification,” said West Virginia Del. Brandon Steele (R), who introduced a bill that would allow librarians to be prosecuted for giving obscene titles to minors.
“It is strictly about pornography,” Steele said. “On that limited basis, this isn’t going to have the chilling effect people think it’s going to.”

But other lawmakers say bills like Steele’s are ideologically driven censorship dressed up as concern for children. They note that, as book challenges spiked to historic highs over the past two years, the majority of objections targeted books by and about LGBTQ people and people of color…

The protective library laws being pushed around the country run the gamut: From increasing funding to adding school librarians to campuses to forbidding “discrimination” in choosing which books to stock…

Some restrictive library bills give parents more power over book selection, for example requiring schools obtain parental sign-off before providing children sexually explicit content. Another common move is to require that libraries post lists of their books for parental review.

But the majority of the bills work the same way. They eliminate long-established exemptions from prosecution for librarians — sometimes teachers and museum employees, too — over obscene material. Almost every state adopted such carve-outs decades ago to ensure schools, museums and libraries could offer accurate information about topics such as sex education.

Removing the exemption means librarians, teachers and museum staffers could face years of imprisonment or tens of thousands in fines for giving out books deemed sexually explicit, obscene or “harmful” to minors. For example, an Arkansas measure passed last year says school and public librarians can be imprisoned for up to six years or fined $10,000 if they hand out obscene or harmful titles.

The law protects children and doesn’t harm librarians unless they’re doing something awful, bill sponsor Sen. Dan Sullivan (R) said at the time: “If they don’t knowingly violate [the law], they’re free and clear.”

Seventeen states are weighing some version of this measure, The Post found. That comes after at least eight states enacted such laws between 2021 and last year, although two were later vetoed and one was blocked by the courts.

The Post could not find an instance in which a librarian has been charged under these laws. But Peter Bromberg of the Utah Library Association pointed out several recent cases in which police were called to schools or launched investigations over books — in Missouri, Texas and South Carolina…

Tara White was appointed Elkhart Community Schools’ director of literacy in 2015. For the first several years, she never fielded a book challenge — until 2021, when community members objected to 60 titles, she said. When she defended the books, a conservative website claimed she was fighting for porn in school.

Then last year, Indiana passed a law declaring school employees can face criminal prosecution — leading to a possible $10,000 fine or 2½ years of jail time — for handing out sexual material that is “harmful to minors.”

White resigned.

“I loved being a librarian and … helping every student find themselves in a book,” White said. But while certain she wasn’t actually “breaking the law, nobody wants to go through that process.”

Nobody wants to go to jail, she said, for giving children books.

Categories Censorship, Courage, Cruelty, Disruption, Extremism, Fascism, Freedom to Read, Librarians, Libraries, Literacy
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