Archives for category: Accountability
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

How Dangerous Is Children’s Literature?

By dianeravitch
March 12, 2022 //
40

Toby Price, an assistant principal of an elementary school in the Hinds County School District in Mississippi, was fired because he read a book to second graders on Zoom called I Need a New Butt! The school board did not approve. Nor did the superintendent.

The school was participating in “Read Across America” day to honor Dr. Seuss’s birthday and to encourage children to love reading. Mr. Price thought the children would find the book hilarious, and they did. But they also got a lesson in the power and danger of books when Mr. Price was fired a few days later. He’s trying to get his job back and has a GoFundMe to support his family and pay a lawyer.

When I first read this story, I sent it to Carol Burris, my friend and executive director of the Network for Public Education. She immediately responded that she must be a criminal grandma because she’s shared that same book with her grandchildren many times, and they love it.

She drafted a confession:

True confession. I am a terrible grandma to my five grandkids. I confess. I bought little Phinney I Need a New Butt! I did not even wait for second grade—I bought it for him when he was two. We would laugh all the way through and he would beg me to read it… again and again and again.

But I did not stop there. I bought a copy for my other two grandkids, Merek and Reeve, then four and two. That’s me, a serial corrupter of young children’s minds.

And if there were a grandma license in the State of Mississippi, then mine would surely be snatched away. I am referring, of course to the tragic ridiculousness of the firing of an assistant principal in Mississippi for reading I Need a New Butt! to second-graders over Zoom.

Anyone who has ever spent any time with young kids knows that silliness is a magnet that draws kids into stories. I devoured Dr. Seuss, limericks, and rhymes as a child. My daughters loved the hilarity of Where the Sidewalk Ends with its rhymes about a child poet in a lion’s belly, baby brothers that ran away, and of course that sack with its mysterious contents (perhaps an extra butt is inside?) Stories with rich rhymes and rhythms build literacy. And maybe a sense of humor—something the world sorely needs.

I worked in schools long enough to figure out the back story on this one. Some self-righteous fool, who likely never liked the man, heard the story and called their friend on the school board. And then a spineless administrator complied, rather than standing up for a man whose life work was spent among children.

It’s a chilling tale of power and fear and extremism. And worst of all, the children of Gary Road Elementary lost someone who understands them, only to be left with school leaders whose butts may be tight and intact, but most certainly have cracks in their hearts and heads.

So, here’s the irony: I Need a New Butt! is now #1 bestseller on Amazon’s list of beginning readers for children.

The word should go out to every school board and legislature in the nation: whenever you ban a book, its sales will soar! Authors will wear your ban as a badge of honor. They may even ask you to ban their books so they too will benefit. Don’t do it!

Categories Accountability, Censorship, Childhood, Literature, Mississippi

Kentucky: Charter Schools Will Harm Public Schools and End Local Control

By dianeravitch
March 12, 2022 //
7

Tina Bojanowski is a teacher who ran for the Kentucky legislature after the teachers’ strike and won. She is the only active teacher serving in the legislature.

Right now, the legislature is debating whether to fund new charter schools. Tina wrote the following opinion piece. It does make you wonder when the Republican Party turned against local control, which they once championed.

I can testify to the pride that Kentucky communities feel in their public schools. A few years ago, I spoke to the Kentucky School Boards Association and, while waiting to go on, I wandered around the public space outside the meeting room. In the hall outside, the walls were covered with posters made by the children in each school district. Each one reflected their love of community and schools.

Tina wrote in the Lexington Herald Leader:

Kentucky families are proud of our public schools, and we should be. Our caring public schools staffed with dedicated professional educators are also wonderful reflections of our communities, even when there are challenging differences in ideas about the details of public education.

I would hate to lose that community identity, our local control of public schools, and the ability to have a say in how our taxpayer dollars are spent on educating our children. All of those blessings would be threatened if HB 9, pending in the legislature, is passed.

We have never funded charter schools because we have never wanted to take funding from our public schools. However, HB 9 would do just that. With every child who goes to a charter, all federal, state, and, yes, local tax dollars would go with him. And with HB 9, our school districts would even have to pay all the transportation costs.

Schools would immediately feel the pain as they transferred money out of their budget with little to no, if any, savings at all. That is because stranded costs are left behind. Lights must go on. Roofs must be repaired. Administration, school nurses, bus drivers, and other staff must still be paid. Unless large numbers of students leave, you cannot even reduce staff by one teacher. But thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dollars would leave the school. That means either local taxes must go up or children get less as programs are cut.

Right now, only our school districts and our mayors decide where a charter school pops up. If this bill is passed, political appointees, universities, and even nonprofits that have nothing to do with education at all will be the deciders. And they will all rush to authorize charters to cash in on the 3% cut of ALL tax dollars that will go to the charter school.

It doesn’t matter where you live in Kentucky, I am sure we all agree that we should be empowered to make our own decisions about our public schools and whether we want charter schools. Our strong sense of local control integrates parents into the education process that has created a successful and thriving recipe Kentucky students benefit from each year.

But you will never have local control over a charter school. You will never be able to vote for a charter school board member. That is because they will be appointed. Even though they will spend your hard-earned tax dollars, they can have unlimited terms, never being voted in or removed from office by the taxpayers who fund their schools. And all you need to do is to look to neighboring Ohio to see how that works out. Nearly half of their charter schools are run by for-profits, often with out-of-state corporate offices that run the schools for a nonprofit board that is merely a facade. Given the financial generosity and loose regulations of HB 9, they will rush into Kentucky. We will not have a few charter schools. We will have a tsunami of charter schools. It’s clear that HB 9 was written by the charter lobby headquartered in the DC beltway.

I ask everyone to join me in opposition to this naked financial and political power grab that robs local communities of political power, local students of education-centered schools, and taxpayers of funding for our communities’ common schools. Let’s work together to improve our public schools and say “no” to HB 9. Tina Bojanowski serves District 32 of the KY House of Representatives. She is also a teacher for JCPS and is the only active K-12 teacher in the General Assembly.

Read more at: https://www.kentucky.com/opinion/op-ed/article259276709.html#storylink=cpy

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Kentucky

No More Hot Air About Swedish Schools!

By dianeravitch
March 10, 2022 //
15

Sweden is debating the effects of its program for school privatization, which began under a conservative government in 1992.

The following article, translated from Swedish, was written by Lars Anell. Anell is an economist with a degree from the Stockholm School of Economics. He has worked at the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He was head of the development agency SAREC 1980-83, and was on the Prime Minister’s Committee under Olof Palme. In the years 1994–2001, he was responsible for social issues at Volvo. He has also been chairman of FAS, the Research Council for Working Life and Social Sciences, as well as UN Ambassador and EU Ambassador. Lars Anell is currently Chairman of the Board of the Arena Group.”

The article has lessons for the U.S. First, the bold promises of privatization are seldom, if ever, realized. Second, once privatization takes root, its economic and political beneficiaries strongly defend it, regardless of the consequences for students and society.

Lars Anell writes:

The author of the book Barnexperimentet, Per Kornhall, wrote an article in Dagens Nyheter in 2012 under the heading The principle of a good school for everyone no longer applies in Sweden. He had then decided to leave the National Agency for Education but was formally still employed there – and realized that he had probably crossed the line of what an official should say in public. When he entered the coffee room on Monday morning, the employees raised a spontaneous applause. Those who worked with school issues knew that the activities no longer met the school law’s requirements for an equivalent school. But politically, nothing happened. There was no debate at all

There is a short narrative about how this came about. When joint-stock companies were allowed to run tax-financed schools in the early 1990s, they received compensation that corresponded to 85 percent of the municipal cost per student. An inquiry found this too generous and suggested a level of 75 percent. Instead, a Social Democratic government gave the school entrepreneurs more than what they could have dreamt of – 100 percent. This story is not entirely true. Many would probably say that it is misleading. On the other hand, it is obvious that no one thought about the consequences of allowing schools run for profit.

Stage 1

In September 1991, Ingvar Carlsson’s Social Democratic government commissioned the school director in Stockholm, Mr Sven-Åke Johansson, to investigate “certain issues concerning fees at independent schools.” At this time, there were no for-profit schools. The assignment essentially concerned Waldorf schools, Montessori-inspired and confessional schools that were largely financed by fees and parents’ voluntary efforts. In total, less than 1 percent of pupils with compulsory school attendance were in the schools affected.

The investigator emphasized that the basis for assessing student costs was shaky. Questionnaires were “incomplete and forms not properly filled in.” All schools concerned were dependent on extensive voluntary efforts, but “only a small number of schools in the survey have been able to assess this value.”

If you took the actual cost per pupil, it stayed at SEK 28,000 – 40 percent less than the municipal schools´ average cost. After trying to estimate the value of parents´ voluntary contributions, the investigator calculated that the student cost in independent schools was 13 percent lower.

An interesting aspect is that the investigator took a clear political position. The activities at the independent schools were characterized by a lack of money, low salaries and large non-profit efforts. “Now we notice,” writes the lone investigator, “a clear will to change these unfair conditions. The change is justified and positive. “

However, the investigator was bypassed by Carl Bildt´s right-of center government, which took office after the 1991 election. The new Minister of Education, Ms Beatrice Ask, proposed, in bill 1991/92:95, that municipalities should be allowed to reduce the compensation to private for-profit schools by 15 percent.

The investigator nevertheless completed his assignment and pointed out that the municipalities responsibility for the whole system justified a larger deduction. Most independent schools would fully cover their costs with a public subsidy of 75 – 85 percent of the municipal average cost. He also pointed out that the establishment of independent schools inevitably led to increased costs – especially for premises.

The central conclusion in this context is:

“The basic and statutory grant percentage for independent schools must be set so that competition between municipal and independent schools takes place on equal terms. According to my analysis, its lowest limit can then not exceed 75 percent of the municipality’s average cost per pupil.”

But this conclusion must be qualified. The investigator was tasked to design a system that would free non-profit schools from the obligation to charge fees to finance the activities. He also suggested that these schools should continue to be able to charge certain student fees.

Stage 2

The above-mentioned bill 1991/92:95 on Freedom of choice and independent schools is surprisingly short, which is due to the fact that there was no basis whatsoever to refer to. The ongoing inquiry is mentioned in passing but its report was not yet available. The dramatic change in the Swedish school system, unparalleled in the surrounding world, which this bill portended was not preceded by any preparation and was not met by any organized political opposition.

As said, one explanation is that there were no profit-driven schools yet – dreaming was allowed. And Swedish pupils still scored exceptionally well in international competition.

It is quite clear that Ms Ask, wanted to see more alternatives to the municipal school in order to increase the opportunity for students and parents to choose freely. This would also increase parental involvement and municipalities’ sensitivity to citizens’ wishes. Above all, there was a need for new ideas and pedagogical creativity. “It can be about parent cooperatives, focus on special subjects or schools in sparsely populated areas that can get a new chance under new leadership.” Ms Ask said that this would lead to “better incentives for cost-effectiveness” so that we get “a more efficient use of resources within the overall school system.”

She emphasizes commitments that independent schools can avoid (health care, school transport, home language teaching, especially resource-intensive students and the obligation to take care of students who have left an independent school) but still maintains that the student grant may not be reduced by more than 15 percent. But nowhere is it said that a municipality must adapt the grant to the independent school’s lower cost. It is worth adding that neither Mr Johansson’s 75 nor Ms Ask’s 85 percent are based on any reported analysis.

We must continue to keep in mind that this bill was presented when all independent schools were non-profit and still had the right to charge tuition fees. Ms Ask announces that she intends to return to the Riksdag in the matter. Bill 1991/92: 95 is therefore in many ways a signal of what is yet to come.

However, two sentences are worth remembering:

“My aim is to control the activities of independent schools as little as possible. At the same time, however, there are strong reasons to make it clear that, as they receive general grants similar to the public school system, they must not contribute to economic and social segregation “

The Bildt Government´s second bill on freedom of choice in schools (1992/93: 230) is a somewhat more comprehensive document that is based on an internal paper (Ds 1992: 115) and a public report on grants and student fees (SOU 1992: 38).

The paper dealt with opportunities to choose a school, financial conditions for independent upper secondary schools and opportunities to outsource all or part of an education to another principal. The proposal is that “municipalities and county councils may enter into agreements with a joint-stock company, a trading company, an economic association, a non-profit association or a foundation to perform some of the tasks for which the municipalities and county councils are responsible according to the Education Act.” However, the public responsibility for the school system may not be transferred. The municipality must have full control and a municipal employee must “perform some of the principal’s tasks that involve the exercise of authority, e.g. the issuance of grades. ” Swedish Employers´ Association and the Swedish Association of Local Authorities were in favor of outsourcing schools, but most other consultative bodies were negative. The National Audit Office pointed out that the memorandum did not contain any impact assessment or even a discussion of whether there was a need for contracting solutions.

In the above-mentioned public report, reference was made to the Riksdag decision that the minimum contribution to independent schools shall be 85 per cent of the municipality’s student costs. ” This means that “there is a risk that the independent schools will have more favorable conditions for running activities than the municipal schools.” To create equal conditions, the level should be 75 percent. Only a few of many institutions that provided comments (Nacka and Västerås municipalities and the National Association for Waldorf Pedagogy) wanted to keep a minimum contribution corresponding to 85 percent of the municipality’s own costs. Virtually everyone else wanted to reduce it to 75 percent – some municipalities (Haninge, Hudiksvall and Sundsvall) wanted to go even further. Several consultative bodies pointed to the risk that municipal schools will be disadvantaged.

The bill is interesting in several ways. The ideological attitude is that more independent schools is positive in all dimensions – above all, it leads to pedagogical renewal and increased freedom of choice – and problem-free for all concerned. Even increased bureaucracy is welcomed – “the municipal accounting systems have become more sophisticated when the municipalities have been forced to produce different types of costs and average costs for the school system.” The fact that parents and pupils will be forced “to make an active choice of school” is seen as progress. For some unknown reason it is asserted that competition between several principals is expected to give “the municipalities completely new opportunities to achieve coordination and synergy benefits.”

Against this background, it is interesting that the actual proposals are so timid. “I am not prepared to propose a general opportunity to outsource primary schools,” writes Ms Ask. However, it will be possible for the government to grant an application from a municipality to contract out a school to another principal.” As regards upper secondary schools, the area that will primarily be relevant is vocational training related to relevant companies. Education in economics, technology and aesthetic subjects may also be considered if the teaching has a “vocational character.” In other respects, special reasons are required for the government to approve an independent school.

Most surprising is that the principal and her duties cannot be relinquished. The municipality’s control is thus guaranteed by the requirement to appoint a head-master for independent schools. This means that the term grades are set by teachers, while the principal is responsible for the grade documents issued in the municipality’s name.

The consultative bodies’ solid support for lowering the minimum level for the student allowance to 75 per cent is rejected. But the only argument is that the decision of 85 percent was made less than a year ago.

This bill was written when the expansion of independent schools had begun. In just one year, the number of students had doubled. But there are no thoughts at all about what this development could lead to. The language is toned down. In the internal paper there was talk of joint-stock companies. The bill calls the contractors natural and legal persons and the word profit is never mentioned. But there was nothing that presaged the coming of a capitalist school market.

Stage 3

After the 1994 election, responsibility for the country’s education system again fell to a government led by Ingvar Carlsson. The first measure was to give municipalities the opportunity to reduce the student grant to independent schools by a maximum of 25 percent of their own average cost (Bill 1994/95: 157). The Minister of Education, Ms Ylva Johansson, bases this position entirely on the investigation Mr Johansson made three years earlier. Nothing is said about the risk that independent schools will still receive more than the full cost. The municipalities are not forced to stay at the minimum level.

One year later, in bill 1995/96: 200, the minimum level is replaced by the rule that a student in an independent school must receive a grant according to the same principles that apply to the municipality’s own schools based on the school’s commitment and students’ needs. This opens the way for a powerful overcompensation of independent schools.

The bill is based on two investigations. The report Equal education on equal terms is permeated, like all other documents from this time, by the notion that independent schools are a complement that enriches the municipal school system by increasing diversity and pedagogical creativity. Equal conditions for schools with different principals are seen as “a prerequisite for all parents and students to have freedom of choice and not just financially strong groups.”

The report emphasizes the teachers’ competence as a prerequisite for a school to be able to respond to the requirements of the School Act and the goals of the curriculum. No special admission principles should be applied, but the Education Act should not force an independent school to accept a student “if the reception would lead to significant organizational or financial problems.” The municipality’s contribution shall be based on “the school’s commitment and the students’ needs on the same grounds and according to the same principles” that apply to its own compulsory school. A municipality must be able to prevent the establishment of an independent school if it has “significant negative consequences for other students” or if it “can have serious effects on the municipality’s compulsory school activities as a whole.”

The report Independent upper secondary schools (SOU 1995: 113) initially states that independent schools often “received grants that were higher than the amounts prescribed by the government” and emphasized that equal conditions are a prerequisite for equivalent education. It is then determined that “nationally prescribed amounts” shall no longer occur. Municipalities must calculate the student allowance on the basis of the school’s actual costs, based on the school’s commitments and the students’ needs. The calculation shall be made on the same basis and according to the same principles that the municipality applies in terms of costs for students who attend a corresponding program in a municipal school. “

Bill 1995/96: 200 is dominated, like all other texts, by promises of a good and equal education for all students, regardless of where they live, socio-economic conditions and the school’s owner. This will be achieved through competition on equal terms between municipal and independent schools. “Diversity itself is positive and does not stand in opposition to equality and good quality. On the contrary, diversity is usually a prerequisite for development and pedagogical renewal.” Great emphasis is placed on the influence of parents and students over school and teaching, while the role of teachers is given a less prominent place.

Ms Johansson, followed the inquiry’s (SOU 1995:109) advice regarding the size of school fees. The current order was considered to have been too rigid. The proposal was thus that grants should be given “according to the same principles that are applied to the municipality’s own” schools “based on the school’s commitment and the students’ needs.” If the establishment of a school can have significant negative consequences for a municipality’s school system, the National Agency for Education may refuse to pay grants.

A key aspect that was only touched on by a few consultative bodies was that the municipalities have dual roles – they finance and compete with independent schools. Surely there was a risk that a municipality would favour its own schools? I do not see that Ms Johansson answered this question. The only thing said is “that the municipalities develop clear rules for their resource allocation that can be evaluated.”

This bill sets out the basics for calculating school fees, which does not mean that all schools should receive the same amount. According to the public report A common concern (SOU 2020: 46), however, an agreement with the Green Party led to the level of compensation being raised to 100 percent in 1997. This laid the foundation for the sharp overcompensation and competitive advantage for profit-driven schools that still applies.

It is worth mentioning that the Bildt government’s proposal was to outsource teaching. This indicates an agreement between the municipalities and the contractor in which the assignment to be performed is specified. The Social Democrats did not argue against the idea of independent schools but opposed it being done on a contract basis. In reality, the joint-stock companies that established themselves came to enjoy almost total freedom from oversight.

In the rearview mirror:

With the fragile authority of hindsight, it is easy to judge these bills, investigations and memoranda as clueless and vacuous – and full of hopes that proved pious. If you want to find a single insight into possible consequences, you have to look in the rich harvest of comments from consultative bodies – and even there they are thin on the ground. It must therefore be repeated that even in the mid-1990s, only a few percent of the students went to what could still be called independent schools. And most of them applied an alternative pedagogy. There were not yet any school companies with the venture capitalist’s required rate of return and tax domicile in Luxembourg.

It is only in the rearview mirror that we see that it was unfortunate to abandon the model with a recommended minimum level for grants to independent schools. Judging by the consultation responses to the report Grants and student fees (SOU 1992:38), there was solid support for a compensation level of 75 percent. The argument in Bill 1995/96:200 that it means “an overly rigid allocation of resources, without regard to the needs of the students or the commitment of the schools” is not true. It is not a standard rigidly applied but a guaranteed minimum level for the entrepreneur who wants to establish an independent school and takes into account the fact that municipalities have a greater and more costly responsibility. From this floor, municipalities have all the flexibility in the world to adapt the grant to the commitment of independent schools in addition to the minimum requirements.

Another fundamental condition is that the market to be exposed to competition is autonomous in the sense that effects do not spill over into the surrounding society. If we accept that human capital is a nation’s most important asset – a rule of thumb says that it is worth five times more than other physical production resources – then the school market is by far the least autonomous. This is also a reason to nationalize the school. The state has an extraordinarily strong reason to guarantee that that all young people receive a solid education and opportunities to realize their full potential. This incentive is not at all as strong in municipalities that lose all their young people to universities in larger cities.

Why did we not see it coming?

In fact, it should have been possible to see what would happen. It is extremely attractive to sell goods and services to public authorities. The customer is not only flushed with cash but legally obliged to buy; the cost of capital is low; it is easy to enter the market; the risk is almost non-existent; advance payment is common and the cost of product development is negligible. In the early 1990s, the “school market” in Sweden was opened to virtually anyone who could rent a square room for thirty students. The state abdicated and during the first fifteen years, in practice, all applicants were approved.

The main players in this market were municipalities; a number of companies of varying size that ran schools for profit as well as students and parents who were free to choose school. Students brought with them a voucher of a fixed value. Crucial to the success of private actors was therefore to fill the classrooms. They could choose between two strategies. The hope expressed in the government’s bills was that they would invest in high quality and pedagogical renewal at the same time as competition would guarantee a wise management of resources. This strategy requires investment over a longer period of time. The company must be able to recruit the best teachers; provide attractive premises; have a well-equipped library and access to various types of support staff. It may work, but it requires at least two things. There must be an independent body that evaluates and informs about the high quality and customers must demand a good education and not primarily be interested in good grades. A faster way is to keep costs down. If this strategy is chosen, the quality-adjusted teacher density will be lower; the school library may be missing; premises and schoolyards are less efficient and the nurse is seldom seen. The most important thing for frugal school entrepreneurs is to be able to select students. If it succeeds, the dividend will be doubled. Caring and problem-free students with highly educated parents create an attractive study environment that attracts other students and teachers while keeping costs down. A troubled boy with reading and writing difficulties costs more than school fees. For a school that invests in reducing costs, it becomes almost inevitable to dog-whistle that high grades can be obtained without too much work.

That competition would lead to grade inflation should not have come as a surprise. It arises in all markets where schools have a financial incentive to compete for students. This is very true for many American universities. Michael Parkin states in his textbook Macroeconomics that “grade inflation, well documented in many schools, is particularly characteristic of Ivy League universities.” The cost of studying at the top universities is very high. It is then natural that the customer wants value for money and the universities have every reason to oblige. At Princeton, the situation became so alarming that management was forced to decide that only a third of the students could be considered for the highest grade. It is actually quite obvious that schools-for-profit will provide high grades if that is what the customer demands. Swedish parents and students are very keen to get good grades – they may be worth millions – and Swedish for-profit schools have at least as strong arguments as American universities to satisfy the customer’s wishes. However, we are alone in letting the taxpayer foot the bill.

If high grades become a desirable benefit for students and parents (regardless of whether they reflect knowledge and skills), we should expect that this demand is primarily met in municipalities where private and municipal schools compete. Profit-driven schools must fill the classrooms and the municipal ones must keep up. The high grades are then not necessarily a result of increased knowledge but of the competition itself. The effect is likely to be visibly greater in upper secondary schools than in primary schools.

We can now see the results. The quality-adjusted teacher density is and has always been much higher in municipal schools and the difference is greatest at upper secondary school level. The cost of students is clearly lower in schools run by joint-stock companies. These companies have been extremely successful in selecting students from socio-economically strong backgrounds. Admission on the basis of queuing time practically excludes newly arrived young people.

High school diplomas are worth many millions because they provide access to attractive higher education. All indications show that parents and students prioritize grades over education and educational experiments. Children of highly educated parents manage even if the school’s teaching is mediocre. Teachers complain about late evening calls from aggressive parents. Complaints are almost always about grades – rarely about substandard education. It is therefore inevitable that competition drives joy ratings. At the same time as Swedish students’ performance according to all measurements has fallen since the mid-1990s, the grades have skyrocketed. The tendency to give joy ratings is greater in profit-driven schools and in municipalities where competition with municipal schools is stronger.

When the state handed over the responsibility of education to the municipalities, several school politicians warned of what would happen. What no one seems to have expected is that many municipal politicians would abandon their own schools and wholeheartedly invest in attracting profit-driven schools to establish themselves. The large school groups, especially the International English School, have not only been overcompensated by the regular school fees. In many cases, they have also received bespoke subsidies from municipalities.

Who gets the money and what did we get for it?

Despite the fact that schools run by joint-stock companies since almost thirty years have received 10 – 25 percent more than they have earned, they apparently have a hard time making ends meet. The standard answer from the National Association of Independent Schools is that the profit margin is a modest 3,5 percent. This is reminiscent of the old story of the CEO who asked his auditor what the profit was and got the counter-question: What do you want it to be? When Mr Ilmar Reepalu was commissioned to investigate a profit ceiling of 7 percent, we were told that the industry would wither away if this became a reality. The finance company in Luxembourg, Paradigm Capital, which in 2020 bought out the International English School from the stock exchange for just over SEK 3 billion, is not known for investing in low-yielding assets. The capital that forms the basis for the percentage is a highly malleable entity. The traditional way to hide an uncomfortably large profit is to buy services from other companies in the group (which are often in a more attractive tax jurisdiction) at a premium. For instance, school companies can pay high rents for the premises they have in many cases acquired for a song from a friendly-minded municipality. High executive salaries also lower profits. Managers in private companies have a remuneration that the country’s prime minister does not even dare to dream of. Ann-Marie Lindgren reports, in her well-documented paper Every wasted tax crown, that the CEO salaries in the six largest health and care companies in 2019 averaged 7 million or 580,000 a month. In the same year, the directors general who led three authorities with supervisory responsibility for healthcare (the National Board of Health and Welfare, the Swedish Public Health Agency and the Swedish Health and Care Inspectorate) together received a monthly salary of approximately 370,000.

We can also be sure that the money does not go to high teacher salaries and student care. In both these respects, private schools have clearly lower costs. Many municipalities have also used the opportunity to subsidize rents. Mr Tobias Johansson-Berg, professor of business administration, has recently suggested that instead of limiting profits, school companies should open their books and openly show what money is used for.

But more important, of course, is the added value we are promised as a result of competition between municipal schools and those run as joint-stock companies. The award-winning journalist Mr Kristoffer Örstadius has for several years studied results and grades in Swedish schools. In a popular article, he anonymised some schools’ PISA results and was able to show that the students in the acclaimed English school in Bromma had clearly worse results in mathematics than those who went to the municipal low-performing Petrus Magni school in Vadstena – but the girls and boys in Bromma received better grades. His latest fact-checked article in Dagens Nyheter (2022-02-18) is mainly about primary schools and is based on a comparison between the schools’ final grades and the national tests. It then turns out that “the grades are…systematically more generous in independent schools than in municipal schools. The difference is significant in all school subjects with national tests except Swedish” An interesting circumstance is that the independent schools that are run as joint-stock companies are more likely to give joy ratings than those that are run in the form of foundations. It is also clear that national tests have a restraining effect. In uncontrolled subjects such as art, music and home economics, all inhibitions are thrown to the winds as far as grade inflation is concerned in private schools – especially in the three largest groups.

Örstadius refers to several studies that show that independent upper secondary schools give more generous grades than municipal ones. But despite its lower grade point average, “municipal” students perform better in the first year of university than students from high schools that are run as joint-stock companies. This is in line with the conclusion of a study from the National Agency for Education, From upper secondary school to university, which studied the students who went directly from high schools to the university in the academic year 2014/15:

“The students who have attended an independent upper secondary school have lower performance – despite the fact that this group generally has slightly higher grades from upper secondary school. This difference applies to students at different levels of grade points, and to each of the college preparatory programs.”

The School Commission stated, like many others, that the Swedish schools no longer provide equivalent education for all pupils. Above all, the young people who have the worst conditions have been left in the lurch. The growing segregation is essentially due to other factors, but the promised reduction has not materialized. That competition would contribute to cooperation and synergy was never credible. Home and School associations no longer have a meaningful role in municipalities with a fragmented school system. The pedagogical renewal is not visible. If we accept that higher education credits are an adequate way of measuring the quality of the school, the experiment that began in 1991/92 seems to have produced negative added value.

Towards a brighter future?

The legal institution of limited companies was created in order to give entrepreneurs the opportunity to run profitable businesses with limited personal risk. As long as we allow these companies to sell educational services in Sweden, it will be difficult and expensive to steer development in the right direction with rules and controls. The incentives to provide customers with joy ratings and keep costs down by choosing “cheap” students are compellingly strong. When the “children’s experiment” (Barnexperimentet) began shortly after the school was communalized, the state largely relinquished responsibility for the activities. For a short time, even the activities of private schools were classified. As the need for transparency and control increases, a chorus of teachers testifies to the documentation hysteria that has befallen them.

Nationalizing the school is a step in the right direction, even if part of the business is still run by profit-motivated joint-stock companies. Education from an early age to university studies is society’s most important “production” of genuine public benefit. As shown, the state has a clearly stronger interest than municipalities in giving students a solid foundation for a future professional career and competence to pursue university studies. No matter how a grant system is designed, it must be equal in all municipalities according to the Education Act.

It is of course possible to let university entrance exams determine who gets admission to university studies. However, it will be expensive and opportunistic. The training would focus on passing a test. But above all, we would lose the information value of the grades. An old-fashioned high school diploma – a teacher’s assessment after following their students for three years – has proved to be an excellent and broad proof of competence. The focus should preferably be on strengthening the legitimacy of the grades.

Magnus Henrekson et. al. mention, in the book Kunskapssyn och pedagogi the possibility of having anonymised tests corrected by independent assessors. One such system – the International Baccalaurate Diploma Program – is available in 127 countries and offers tuition at 30 upper secondary schools in Sweden. It is expensive but possible.

Penalty fees against schools that obviously issue joy grades are not appealing. Neither is it possible to tolerate that some schools raise the grades and steal university places from young people who have earned them. In a state system, it would be easier to solve this problem for the simple reason that the state really wants to do something about it.

A simpler alternative is to set the minimum subsidy at 75 percent of the average municipal school fee (it was enough once upon a time) and pay private schools for reported extra costs. This would require the open accounting of the school groups that professor Johansson-Berg advocates.

All these proposals will be met with furious criticism from the school groups’ advocates. It is then important to remember that the experiment was never aimed at creating profitable joint-stock companies that ran schools, but at developing a school system that give all children and young people a chance to “realize the desire of their best moods.”

The program that the present Minister of Education, Ms Lina Axelsson Kihlbom, recently announced is very promising. It addresses a number of issues. Student admission should be fair. The school’s focus on knowledge must be strengthened. We will have better conditions for security and study peace – and the teachers will decide in the classroom. Municipalities should be given the opportunity to reduce the compensation to profit-driven schools because they have a lower cost responsibility. It is all well and good but what happens if municipalities want to overcompensate the school groups?

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Equity, International, School Choice

Leonie Haimson: Legislative Hearings on Mayoral Control of NYC Schools Were “the Best Ever”

By dianeravitch
March 7, 2022 //
17

Leonie Haimson watched five hours of a legislative hearing about mayoral control of the NYC public schools. She writes that it was “the best ever” because legislators asked tough questions and did not accept the party line from the Chancellor, who was appointed by the new mayor Eric Adams, who naturally wants mayoral control. Governor Kathy Hochul has proposed a four-year extension of mayoral control.

When Michael Bloomberg was elected in 2001, he said he would take control of the schools and fix everything. The legislature gave him what he wanted.

Mayoral control was passed by the legislature in 2002, at Bloomberg’s request.

NYC has had mayoral control for 20 years, and its problems remain critical. Thus, legislators were in no mood to hear rosy promises.

Haimson wrote:

I’ve testified at countless mayoral control hearings since it was instituted nearly 20 years ago. Yesterday’s joint Senate and Assembly hearings far surpassed any of them. You can watch the video here. Sorry to say there were very few news stories about it, because most of the education reporters were covering the Mayor’s announcement about lifting the mask mandate in schools. It was their loss, since the questioning by legislators was sharp and had a new seriousness about it, and the testimony from parent leaders was passionate and incisive.

In recent years, the opposition to Mayoral control has grown, here in the city and nationwide. As I point out in my testimony, the system has never been popular among average voters. But the evident dysfunctionality of the system and the way it allows autocracy to override the wishes of parents and the needs of children, no matter who is Mayor, is now more widely recognized. Many districts such as Detroit and Newark that once suffered under mayoral control or worse, state control, have returned to an elected school, and Chicago will soon do so.

This was the first time in my experience that influential legislators seem really intent about making improvements to the law. Sen. John Liu, chair of the NYC Education Senate committee, and Sen. Shelley Mayer, chair of the NY State Senate Education Committee, along with Assemblymembers Harvey Epstein and Jo Anne Simon, closely questioned Chancellor Banks about what changes could be made that would ensure that parents have a real voice in the system. Yet he seemed strangely unprepared for their pointed questions.

Chancellor Banks had the chutzpah to claim that the new mayor and he had brought down the COVID positivity rate. Supermen. The legislators weren’t buying it.

Another problem that both Mayor Adams and Chancellor Banks encountered is a glaring contradiction in their rhetoric . Both repeated their now-familiar refrain about how terrible our schools are, especially for Black and brown kids. But of course, if true, this failure persists after twenty years of mayoral control – the very system that they claim is necessary to solve the problem.

Categories Accountability, Bloomberg, Michael, Corporate Reform, Democracy, Education Reform, New York City

Naomi Klein: What Putin, Trump, and the Truckers Have in Common

By dianeravitch
March 7, 2022 //
35

Naomi Klein writes at The Intercept about the common thread that links Trumpism, the “Freedom Convoys,” and Putin: nostalgia for the past.

NOSTALGIA FOR EMPIRE is what seems to drive Vladimir Putin — that and a desire to overcome the shame of punishing economic shock therapy imposed on Russia at the end of the Cold War. Nostalgia for American “greatness” is part of what drives the movement Donald Trump still leads — that and a desire to overcome the shame of having to face the villainy of white supremacy that shaped the founding of the United States and mutilates it still. Nostalgia is also what animates the Canadian truckers who occupied Ottawa for the better part of a month, wielding their red-and-white flags like a conquering army, evoking a simpler time when their consciences were undisturbed by thoughts of the bodies of Indigenous children, whose remains are still being discovered on the grounds of those genocidal institutions that once dared to call themselves “schools.”

This is not the warm and cozy nostalgia of fuzzily remembered childhood pleasures; it’s an enraged and annihilating nostalgia that clings to false memories of past glories against all mitigating evidence.

All these nostalgia-based movements and figures share a longing for something else, something which may seem unrelated but is not. A nostalgia for a time when fossil fuels could be extracted from the earth without uneasy thoughts of mass extinction, or children demanding their right to a future, or Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports, like the one just released yesterday, that reads, in the words of United Nations Secretary General António Guterres, like an “atlas of human suffering and a damning indictment of failed climate leadership.” Putin, of course, leads a petrostate, one that has defiantly refused to diversify its economic dependence on oil and gas, despite the devastating effect of the commodity roller coaster on its people and despite the reality of climate change. Trump is obsessed with the easy money that fossil fuels offer and as president made climate denial a signature policy.

The Canadian truckers, for their part, not only chose idling 18-wheelers and smuggled jerry cans as their protest symbols, but the leadership of the movement is also deeply rooted in the extra-dirty oil of the Alberta tar sands. Before it was the “freedom convoy,” many of these same players staged the dress rehearsal known as United We Roll, a 2019 convoy that combined a zealous defense of oil pipelines, opposition to carbon pricing, anti-immigrant xenophobia, and explicit nostalgia for a white, Christian Canada.

Oil is a stand-in for a broader worldview.

Though petrodollars underwrite these players and forces, it’s critical to understand that oil is a stand-in for a broader worldview, a cosmology deeply entwined with Manifest Destiny and the Doctrine of Discovery, which ranked human as well as nonhuman life inside a rigid hierarchy, with white Christian men at the top. Oil, in this context, is the symbol of the extractivist mindset: not only a perceived God-given right to keep extracting fossil fuels, but also the right to keep taking whatever they want, leave poison behind, and never look back.

This is why the fast-moving climate crisis represents not just an economic threat to people invested in the extractive sectors but also a cosmological threat to the people invested in this worldview. Because climate change is the Earth telling us that nothing is free; that the age of (white, male) human “dominion” has ended; that there is no such thing as a one-way relationship comprised only of taking; that all actions have reactions. These centuries of digging and spewing are now unleashing forces that make even the sturdiest structures created by industrial societies — coastal cities, highways, oil rigs — look vulnerable and frail. And within the extractivist mindset, that is impossible to accept.

Given their common cosmologies, it should come as no surprise that Putin, Trump, and the “freedom convoys” are reaching toward one another across disparate geographies and wildly different circumstances. So Trump praises Canada’s “peaceful movement of patriotic truckers, workers, and families protesting for their most basic rights and liberties”; Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon cheer on Putin while the truckers sport their MAGA hats; Randy Hillier, a member of the Ontario Legislature who is one of the convoy’s loudest supporters, declares on Twitter that “Far more people have & will die from this shot [the Covid vaccines], than in the Russia/Ukraine war.” And how about the Ontario restaurant that last week put on its daily specials board the announcement that Putin “is not occupying Ukraine” but standing up to the Great Reset, the Satanists, and “fighting against the enslavement of humanity.”

These alliances seem deeply weird and unlikely at first. But look a little closer, and it’s clear that they are bound together by an attitude toward time, one that clings to an idealized version of the past and steadfastly refuses to face difficult truths about the future. They also share a delight in the exercise of raw power: the 18-wheeler vs. the pedestrian, the shouted manufactured reality vs. the cautious scientific report, the nuclear arsenal vs. the machine gun. This is the energy currently surging in many different spheres, starting wars, attacking seats of government, and defiantly destabilizing our planet’s life support systems. This is the ethos at the root of so many democratic crises, geopolitical crises, and the climate crisis: a violent clinging to a toxic past and a refusal to face a more entangled and interrelational future, one bounded by the limits of what people and planet can take. It is a pure expression of what the late bell hooks often described, with a playful wink, as “imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy” — because sometimes all the big guns are needed to describe our world accurately.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Environment

New York City: Unions, Parents Sue to Block New Charter That Busts State Cap

By dianeravitch
March 5, 2022 //
9

Like most states, New York has a limit (a “cap”) on the total number of charters permitted to open in New York State and in New York City. The state cap is 460 charters. The city cap is 242 (included in the state total). The charter lobby has urged an increase in the number allowed, because there is no room for growth. Recently, the State University of New York authorized a new charter high school in NYC, claiming that it was an expansion, not a new charter school. The city and state teachers’ union, along with parents, filed a lawsuit to require the State University of New York to follow state law.

From: UFT Press Office <press@uft.org>
Sent: Friday, March 4, 2022 3:09 PM
Subject: UFT, parents sue SUNY over charter school cap-busting scheme

For Immediate Release – Friday, March 4, 2022

Unions, parents sue SUNY over New York City charter school cap-busting scheme

NEW YORK March 4, 2022 — New York city and state teachers unions, joined by parents, have filed a lawsuit against SUNY and its Charter Schools Institute to block the creation of a new charter high school in New York City that would illegally pierce the state cap on new charters in the city.

The United Federation of Teachers, its state affiliate, New York State United Teachers, and parents allege that SUNY circumvented the clear statutory cap on new charters by authorizing a new Bronx high school, Vertex Partnership Academies, disguised as an expansion of existing charters through a new partnership, Ventoux Partnership Network. That partnership made between Brilla College Preparatory Charter Schools and Public Prep Charter School Academies would funnel students from both networks to the new high school, an agreement designed specifically to evade both the cap and statutory requirements for the creation of new charter schools.

The scheme not only was called out by the State Education Department and Board of Regents in July as clearly violating state law, the lawsuit states that SUNY itself is treating the high school as if it’s a new charter, requiring accountability measures that in SUNY’s own words are “normally reserved for new schools.”

What’s more, Ventoux founder Ian Rowe publicly touts in his biography for the Thomas B. Fordham Institute the creation of “a new network of character-based, International Baccalaureate public charter high schools to open in the Bronx.”

“Put simply, if it looks like a new charter, is held accountable like a new charter, and is structured like a separate and new charter, then it is indeed a new charter and not an expansion,” the lawsuit states.

The lawsuit can be read in full here: https://files.uft.org/nysutvny.pdf

“This is a clear end run around the charter cap. Once again, the charter sector is acting as if the rules don’t apply to them. We are here to say – you have to follow the law,” said UFT President Michael Mulgrew.

“The SUNY Trustees and their Charter Schools Institute may think this scheme to create new charter schools is clever, but the law is still the law,” NYSUT President Andy Pallotta said. “Those who view the charter cap in New York City as a suggestion instead of a statutory mandate are living in a fantasy land. We look to the courts to give them a reality check.”

“City schools already have struggled enough as these charters siphon resources away from our students,” said Ana Rivera, a plaintiff and mother of a Bronx 12th grader. “Enough is enough. We as parents won’t stand for charters that think they exploit the law and take more from our students.”

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, New York, New York City

After So Much Charter Failure and Fraud, Why Do State Legislatures Open More of Them?

By dianeravitch
March 5, 2022 //
19

I have always been puzzled by the indifference of state and federal legislators to widespread failure and fraud in the charter sector. The same mystery shrouds the decisions of the billionaires who keep pouring new money into new charters. No matter how many of the charters fail and close their doors, no matter how many of their founders are convicted of embezzlement or padding enrollment, no matter how many are in the state’s list of low-performing schools, the money keeps flowing.

The obvious reason that politicians support charters is because hedge funds and very wealthy donors make sizable campaign contributions. In New York, both Governor Kathy Hochul and NYC Mayor Eric Adams received millions in campaign donations from the charter boosters. We know why free-market zealots like Betsy DeVos and Charles Koch ignore the evidence: They want to privatize education. Why the Wall Street crowd continues to fund failure is a mystery.

A friend in Missouri sent me the previous post about a charter school that was taking in public money despite low academic performance. I asked him why the legislature wanted more charter schools, instead of supporting public schools. It wasn’t rational, I said.

He replied, you have to understand the Missouri legislature, and he sent me the following article. It was written by Stacey Newman, who served in the Missouri legislature for nine years. The picture she paints conjures up thoughts of Mark Twain, H.L. Mencken and Will Rogers. It’s a description of an institution where chaos, dysfunction, and drunkenness are par for the course.

Newman wrote that “dysfunction” was the legislature’s middle name.

As do most voters, I expect legislators to be serious when they take their oath of office. I want to trust they will treat their offices with reverence instead of middle school immaturity — I really do. My first late-night session as a freshman involved debate over a pornography bill. Arguments proceeded way past midnight as I was introduced to #molegafterdark. Coffee cups are allowed on House chamber desks, yet during evening sessions, many of those cups contain alcohol. I was appalled at the drunken debate, remembering how hard I campaigned just to be sitting at one of those desks. Surrounding us were the words carved at the very top of the House chamber: “Liberty, Justice, Law, Progress, Truth, Knowledge, Honor.” Yeah, right.

Hijinks abound every session — particularly as tempers flare between the Republican-controlled state House and Senate. It is routine for both chambers to be at odds as constitutional deadlines loom and members are often campaigning against each other for higher office. Legislators are permitted to carry concealed guns in the Capitol (really) and many pat their pants pockets during high stress debates, reminding everyone who has firepower. One year, I witnessed a screaming near-fistfight of legislators behind my seat as security rushed to intervene. On another late night, I prepared to hide under my desk as an armed inebriated state senator paced our side gallery in intimidation during a contentious House vote on her bill…

Yet we keep hoping for serious people to take over and heed the state motto, “Let the welfare of the people be the supreme law.” It doesn’t say anything about hijinks. There is plenty to do: Fund public schools instead of banning history and attacking teachers; provide access to health care to those who desperately need it and allocate federal relief education dollars, for starters. Accept that masks are not the enemy during a pandemic and that vaccinations, which most elected officials in Jefferson City have received, are lifesaving. Stop with the anti-science hooey left over from the 1692 Salem witch trials. Stop pretending you are aggrieved and, for once, leave your racism and hatred of transgender kids buried at home.

Read more at: https://www.kansascity.com/opinion/readers-opinion/guest-commentary/article258850773.html#storylink=cpy

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Elections, Guns, Missouri, Shame

Heather Cox Richardson: Trump, Putin, and Ukraine

By dianeravitch
March 3, 2022 //
33

The following is an excerpt from historian Heather Cox Richardson’s blog. The rest of the post is about the January 6 Commission’s efforts to get to the bottom of Trump’s role in the insurrection.

On July 27, 2016, even before the Republican National Committee changed the party’s platform to weaken the U.S. stance in favor of Ukraine in its struggle to fight off Russia’s 2014 invasion, U.S. News & World Report senior politics writer David Catanese noted that senior security officials were deeply concerned about then-candidate Trump’s ties to Russia.

July 27 was the day Trump referred at a news conference to his opponent and then–secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s emails that were not turned over for public disclosure from her private server and said: “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing, I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.” (We know now that Russian hackers did, in fact, begin to target her accounts on or around that day.)

Former secretary of defense Leon Panetta, who served under nine presidents, told Catanese that Trump was “a threat to national security,” not only because of his call for help from Russia, but because of his suggestion that he would abandon the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) if he were elected and, as Catanese put it, “his coziness toward Russian President Vladimir Putin.”

Former National Security Advisor Thomas E. Donilon also expressed concern over the hack of the Democratic National Committee by Russian operatives, and said that such an attack mirrored similar attacks in Estonia, Georgia, and, most prominently, Ukraine. He called on officials to confront Russian leaders publicly.

Cybersecurity expert Alan Silberberg told Catanese that Trump looked like an ally of Putin. “The Twitter trail, if you dig into it over the last year, the Russian media is mirroring him, putting out the same tweets at almost the same time,” Silberberg said.

“You get the sense that people think it’s a joke,” Panetta said. “The fact is what he has said has already represented a threat to our national security.”

Putin’s attempt to destroy democracy in Ukraine militarily has invited a reexamination of the cyberattacks, disinformation, division, attacks on opponents, and installation of puppet leaders he used to gain control of Ukraine before finally turning to bombs. This reexamination, in turn, has led journalists to note that those same techniques have poisoned politics in countries other than Ukraine.

Over the weekend, British investigative journalist Carol Cadwalladr warned that we are 8 years into “The first Great Information War,” a war sparked by Putin’s fury at the removal of his puppet Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014 from the presidency of Ukraine. Putin set out to warp reality to confuse both Ukrainians & the world. The “meddling” we saw in the 2016 election was not an attempt to elect Trump simply so he would end the sanctions former president Barack Obama had imposed on Russia in 2014 after it invaded Ukraine. It was an attempt to destabilize democracy. “And it’s absolutely crucial that we now understand that Putin’s attack on Ukraine & the West was a JOINT attack on both,” she wrote.

Today in The Guardian, political and cultural observer Rebecca Solnit wrote a piece titled “It’s time to confront the Trump-Putin network.”

Categories Accountability, Fascism, Fraud, Trump

Arizona: State Senate Censures Member Who Threatens Violence

By dianeravitch
March 2, 2022 //
16

Republicans and Democrats joined in a rare bipartisan vote to censure extremist Rep. Wendy Rogers. Rogers, a MAGA zealot, took part by video in a white nationalist conference where she called for “public hangings” of high-level officials and used anti-Semitic slurs.

During the conference, speakers made racist remarks and cheered on Russian President Vladimir Putin, comparing the Russian leader favorably to Adolf Hitler.

Rogers, in her remarks, praised Fuentes — an outspoken racist who has said he does not believe women should have the right to vote — as “the most persecuted man in America.”

Republican leaders joined Democrats in voting to censure Rogers.

Thirteen Democrats and 11 Republicans voted for the censure language read on the Senate floor. It was the first time in three decades senators publicly censured one of their own members, and the move was applauded by Gov. Doug Ducey — who just days ago was criticized for his support of Rogers.

Arizona Republic columnist Laurie Roberts commented on the hypocrisy of Governor Doug Ducey, who first defended Rogers, then praised her censure. Ducey raised $500,000 to elect Rogers.

Well, it took a while – far, far too long, in fact – but the unmasking of state Sen. Wendy Rogers has finally begun and what a sight it is to behold.

At long last, a few Republican leaders are beginning to speak out about the far right rock star from Flagstaff, a first-term state legislator who has built a national following as she rants about election conspiracies and George Soros and the cabal of Jews, journalists, political elites and other nefarious characters who plot to create a New World Order.

The Senate on Tuesday actually voted 24-3 to censure her for inciting violence at a white nationalist conference on Friday and conduct unbecoming a senator … or any decent human being.

Gov. Doug Ducey isn’t speaking out, of course. Oh, he issued a statement after the censure vote, saying that “antisemitic and hateful language has no place in Arizona.”

Since Ducey’s comment, Rogers has gone on to speak to white nationalists at the America First Political Action Conference where she heaped praise on conference organizer Nick Fuentes, a Holcaust denier who has warned that America needs to protect its “white demographic core” and on Friday noted that people are comparing Russian President Vladimir Putin to Adolph Hitler, “as if that isn’t a good thing…”

During her pre-recorded speech, Rogers lauded the white nationalists as “patriots” and complained that the country is “forcibly vaccinating people with a bioweapon.” She followed that up with a call for public hangings.

“When we do take back our God-given rights, we will bring these criminals to justice,” she said. “We need to build more gallows. If we try some of these high-level criminals, convict them, and use a newly built set of gallows, it’ll make an example for these traitors who have betrayed our country. They have yet to be justly punished for the crimes they have committed.”

She was just getting started.

Over the weekend, Rogers took to Twitter to fire off post after post of antisemitic and just plain unhinged tripe, decrying the West’s treatment of Russia and calling Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy “a globalist puppet for Soros and the Clintons”. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, French President Emmanuel Macron and New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Arder, she said, “all report to the same Satanic masters.”

“I stand with the Christians worldwide not the global bankers who are shoving godlessness and degeneracy in our face,” Rogers wrote.

No matter what Rogers said, no matter how foul, Ducey remained silent.

FYI, Trump has endorsed Ducey’s opponent, because Ducey was in sufficiently loyal to him.

Categories Accountability, Arizona, Bigotry, Ethics, Fascism, Insane

Jennifer Berkshire: Who Is Driving Teachers Out of Their Profession?

By dianeravitch
March 2, 2022 //
29

Jennifer Berkshire, expert education journalist and co-author of A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door, writes in The Nation about the forces driving teachers out of the schools.

She interviewed many teachers who explained why they were leaving. Some cited ”the bad teacher” narrative promulgated by Arne Duncan and his insistence that teachers be evaluated, based on their students’ test scores, which is both ineffective and inaccurate. His and Obama’s “Race to the Top” was deeply demoralizing to teachers, and it accomplished nothing positive.

She begins:

Neal Patel survived teaching in the pandemic. It was the culture wars that did him in.

In the fall of 2020, Patel added two flags to the wall of his science classroom in Johnston, Iowa. Now, alongside images of energy waves and the electromagnetic spectrum were the Gay Pride rainbow flag and a proclamation that Black Lives Matter. The flags, says Patel, represented the kind of inclusive space he was committed to creating, sending a signal to all students that even in this conservative suburb of Des Moines, there was a place for them.

School administrators supported him—on one condition. “They’re just there as decoration,” Patel says. “The only time I discuss the flags is when a student asks me about them.”

Patel assumes it was a student who snapped a picture of the display. Somehow it ended up on the Facebook page of a conservative state legislator. Representative Steve Holt, who lives 100 miles from Johnston, pointed to the flags as evidence of creeping left-wing indoctrination in Iowa’s schools and encouraged his constituents to take a stand. Patel says he was shocked by the attention, then upset: “Holt thinks it’s a political issue to try to create an inclusive environment, and he’s using that to try to further divide our community.”Johnston has grown only more divided since Patel became Facebook fodder. At a school board meeting last fall, members debated whether to ban two books on race, including one by the Native American writer Sherman Alexie, after parents complained. The president of the Iowa State Senate, who represents a neighboring county, took the mic during the public comment period, calling for teachers who assigned “obscene” material to be prosecuted. Patel was in the crowd that night, to lend support to minority and LGBTQ students who’d come to speak out against banning the books. And he had an announcement of his own to make: This year would be his last as a teacher in Johnston.

The Obama administration made matters much worse for teachers when it imposed test-based evaluation as the heart of its “reforms.”

The thinking went something like this: Make teacher evaluations tougher, and teaching would get better, which would mean higher student achievement, more students graduating from college, and ultimately a country better able to outsmart China et al. “Tougher” meant holding teachers accountable for how their students fared on standardized tests…

In 2010, Colorado became one of the first states to enact a high-stakes teacher evaluation law; by 2017, nearly every state had one on the books. While the pandemic may have disrupted everything about schooling, policies like Colorado’s Senate Bill 10, with its 18-page evaluation rubric and 345-page user guide aimed at weeding out bad teachers, remain in place.

For Shannon Peterson, an English language acquisition teacher in Aurora, that meant leading her students through a writing exercise last fall as her principal observed. Peterson’s students, many of them immigrants who live in poverty, bore the pandemic heavily, she says: “The kids are stressed, all of their writing is about anxiety, and attendance is way down.”

To her delight, the students responded enthusiastically to the writing prompt she’d come up with: comparing and contrasting the Harlem Renaissance and Black Lives Matter, and how the entertainment industries in their respective eras related to both. In a year of stress and struggle for teachers and students alike, here was something to celebrate. “Excellent writing came out of this,” Peterson says.

Her principal wasn’t convinced. Peterson, he felt, hadn’t done enough actual teaching during the observation. “I just don’t feel comfortable checking off these boxes,” he told her.

The previous year, when the cash-strapped school district had offered teachers buyouts to leave, Peterson turned it down: “I felt an enormous obligation to go back for the kids and my colleagues.” After her evaluation, though, Peterson had reached a breaking point. She quit a week later, walking away from a career that spanned 23 years, 18½ of them in Aurora. “I’m not a box,” Peterson says.

Two weeks after Peterson resigned, a major study came out: The decade-long push to weed out bad teachers had come to naught. The billions of dollars spent, the wars with teachers’ unions, and the collapse in teacher morale had produced “null effects” on student test scores and educational attainment.

Please open the link and read the study. Billions of dollars wasted on ineffective and demoralizing teacher evaluations that produced tons of data but nothing else.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Corporate Reform, Democrats, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top, Teacher Evaluations, Teacher Shortage, Teachers, VAM (value-added modeling)
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »