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Democrats in House Accelerate Hearings on Postal Service

By dianeravitch
August 16, 2020 //
41

Trump is obsessed with the U.S. Postal Service. He is certain that the U.S. mail is his enemy. One of his aides told him that he lost the 2016 popular vote because of mail fraud, and he’s ranted about the USPS ever since. He openly admitted in a recent news conference that he wants to block mail-in voting in hopes of cutting Democratic votes. Trump forced out the career professional who was running USPS and replaced with a donor to his campaign, Louis DeJoy. In the name of “efficiency,” USPS has been removing hundreds of high-speed sorting machines and thousands of mailboxes. At a time when millions of people count on the mails for their prescriptions and Social Security checks, the slowdowns are wreaking havoc. Even Republicans from heavily rural states whose constituents rely on the local post office have remained silent, as Trump orders the dismantling of USPS.

Democrats scheduled a hearing with Trump’s Postmaster General, Louis DeJoy, who gave $2 million to the Trump coffers, but decided to move up the date to August 24. Trump and his wife voted by mail in Florida.


The House Oversight Committee will hold an emergency hearing on mail delays and concerns about potential White House interference in the U.S. Postal Service, inviting Postmaster General Louis DeJoy and Postal Service board of governors Chairman Robert M. Duncan to testify Aug. 24, top Democrats announced on Sunday.

Democrats have alleged that DeJoy, a former Republican National Committee chairman, is taking steps that are causing dysfunction in the mail system and could wreak havoc in the presidential election. The House had earlier not planned a hearing until September.

“The postmaster general and top Postal Service leadership must answer to the Congress and the American people as to why they are pushing these dangerous new policies that threaten to silence the voices of millions, just months before the election,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), House Oversight Chair Carolyn B. Maloney (D-N.Y.), Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.) said in a statement announcing the hearing.

The Postal Service is beset with delays because of policy changes implemented by DeJoy, a former logistics executive and ally of President Trump. DeJoy banned postal workers from making extra trips to ensure on-time mail delivery and cracked down on overtime hours. Localities across the country have struggled with USPS backlogs of up to a week, hamstringing local businesses and delaying the arrival of crucial mail items, including prescription medications, Social Security checks and bills.

The Postal Service is in the process of removing 671 high-speed mail-sorting machines nationwide this month, a process that will eliminate 21.4 million items per hour’s worth of processing capability from the agency’s inventory.

On Thursday and Friday, it began removing public collection boxes in parts of California, New York, Pennsylvania, Oregon and Montana. The agency said Friday that it would stop mailbox removals, which it said were routine, until after the election.

And White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows said on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday that it would also halt sorting-machine removals.

Meadows also said the White House is open to Congress passing a stand-alone measure to ensure the U.S. Postal Service is adequately funded to manage a surge in mail voting in November.

“The president of the United States is not going to interfere with anybody casting their votes in a legitimate way whether it’s the post office or anything else,” he said.

Both statements would appear to step back from the president’s comments Thursday when he said he opposed Postal Service funding because he wanted to restrict expanding voting by mail.

Meadows insisted the president is only opposed to states sending ballots directly to all registered voters — not to a more common practice in which states send mail ballots only to registered voters who request them. Trump, however, attacked all forms of mail voting for months before recently dialing back his criticism in particular states, including Florida, where he voted by mail himself this year.

“The president doesn’t have a problem with anybody voting by mail if you would look at it in terms of a no-excuse absentee ballot,” Meadows said. “What he opposes is universal mail-in ballots.”

There are five states that voted nearly entirely by mail before the pandemic and four more that have announced plans to do so since the pandemic hit. Meadows suggested more states will attempt to shift to sending ballots directly to all registered voters between now and the election.

“This is more about states trying to re-create how they get their ballots and they’re trying to do it on a compressed timeline that won’t work,” he said.

Categories Accountability, Elections, Fraud, Hoax, Trump

Katherine Stewart: Betsy DeVos’s Plot to Transfer Public Funds to Private Schools During the Pandemic

By dianeravitch
August 16, 2020 //
24

Katherine Stewart, a scholar of rightwing evangelicals, writes in The New Republic about Betsy DeVos’s brazen transfer of public funds to private schools during the pandemic. Stewart is the author of The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism. Stewart surveys the generous distribution of federal funds to private and religious schools, far more generous than the federal money for public schools. As you have read in numerous posts and in a study by the Network for Public Education, charter schools, which enroll about 6% of American students collected $1 billion to $2 billion from the Paycheck Protection Program. Stewart shows that private and religious schools collected even more. This was no accident. It is part of DeVos’s long-term goal of destroying public education.

She writes:


How much more does the Trump administration value the children of elite private and religious schools than the children who attend public schools? We can answer the question with some hard numbers. Public school students merit something like $266 apiece in extra pandemic-related funding. Kids attending the right private schools are worth $5,000 each or possibly much more.

That $266, by the way, is an overestimate. It’s what you get when you take the $13.5 billion allocated for K-12 education in the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act of this past March and divide it up among the nation’s 50.8 million public school students. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos made sure to siphon some of that money for private and religious schools, which she has long favored, although she did receive pushback: On July 22, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), joined by school districts in California, Connecticut, and Colorado, sued DeVos and her department over the policy, calling it “as immoral as it is illegal…”

The $5,000 per student figure for some private schools cited above comes out of the Paycheck Protection Program, which was established by the CARES Act and implemented by the Small Business Administration. Public schools aren’t eligible for PPP money, which is technically a loan but will be forgiven if the funds are used for expenses that meet certain criteria. Although the SBA does not disclose exact loan amounts, it does make public the recipients receiving more than $150,000 and identifies amounts within broad ranges.

With this information, we know that Buckingham Browne & Nichols School, a private pre-K–12 school in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with a $75 million endowment and a student body of around 1,013, where annual tuition runs up to $52,300, collected a loan of between $5 and $10 million—or roughly $5,000 to $10,000 per student. (The school did not respond to multiple requests to confirm the exact amount.)…

Georgetown Preparatory School, which serves about 500 students on 93 acres in North Bethesda, Maryland, and whose notable alumni include Supreme Court Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, collected a $2.7 million PPP loan, which works out to $5,440 per student. According to an analysis by Americans United for Separation of Church and State, the total amount of large PPP loans given to private and religious schools was at least $2.67 billion and as much as $6.47 billion—or about half as much as the total for all schools under the CARES Act, even though private and religious schools educate only 10 percent of the nation’s schoolchildren.

And these schools could potentially receive even more. DeVos stuffed a provision in the CARES Act for “equitable services” that may send another $1.35 billion, which might otherwise have gone to public schools, to private schools. She’s also giving them a cut of the $3 billion Governor’s Emergency Education Relief Fund…

The religious school beneficiaries remain free, as they always have been, of the anti-discrimination laws that apply to public schools. For example, Cathedral High School in Indiana took in a PPP loan of between $2 and $5 million ($1,700 to $4,200 per student), but it fired a teacher for having a same-sex spouse. The Foundation Academy in Winter Garden, Florida, whose 2016-17 handbook informs school families that the husband “has the God-given responsibility to provide for, to protect, and to lead his family” while “a wife is to submit herself graciously” and which groups “homosexuality, lesbianism bisexuality” along with “bestiality” as grounds for expulsion, took in between $1 and $2 million in PPP money. Americans United estimates that at least 4,006 religious schools, or about 70 percent of private school recipients, received large PPP loans.

There is no indication, however, that the private schools receiving PPP money are under anything like the pressure the Trump administration is applying to public schools to fully reopen in the coming school year. When Fairfax County public schools offered parents a choice between in-person and remote learning, DeVos denounced the move in vehement terms. (The district has since announced that the 2020-21 school year will be fully remote.) But the Fairmont Preparatory Academy of Anaheim, California, which took in a minimum of $5 million, or $7,700 per student in PPP money, is offering families the same choice, so far with no criticism from the Department of Education…

Betsy DeVos did not take over the Department of Education in order to improve public education as we know it but to degrade it. She came to office with an ideology as simple as it is destructive: Government should get out of the business of education, she has consistently maintained. DeVos brought with her two powerful interest groups. On the one hand are the privatizers, on the other are the proselytizers, and both paws are reaching for the same pot of taxpayer money.

In a May radio interview, Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the Catholic archbishop of New York, asked DeVos whether she was trying to “utilize this particular crisis to ensure that justice is finally done.” “Yes, absolutely,” she replied. Alluding to her longstanding efforts to divert taxpayer money to sectarian schools, DeVos said, “For more than three decades that has been something that I’m passionate about.”

The public has consistently underestimated the extremity of the agenda against public schooling. Listen more carefully to what DeVos and her backers are actually saying. For decades, Christian nationalist leaders have denounced public schools as hotbeds of secularism. For just as long, reactionary economic ideologues have condemned them as breeding grounds for socialism. DeVos’s boss simply repeats the message at a louder volume: During his Fourth of July speech at Mount Rushmore, Donald Trump said public schools are teaching kids to “hate our country” with a “far-left fascism that demands absolute allegiance.” They all understand at some level that a robust public school system is one of the pillars of a modern, progressive, pluralistic, and democratic society. That’s why they want to destroy it.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Education Industry, Funding, Privatization, Religion, Separation of church and state, Vouchers

Gary Rubinstein: Success Academy Pays $1.1 Million to Settle with Parents on “Got to Go” List

By dianeravitch
August 16, 2020 //
19

Gary Rubinstein writes here about a lawsuit filed by parents of children on Success Academy’s “got to go” list. The celebrated charter chain settled for $1.1 million. The corporate chain fought the lawsuit for 4.5 years, refused to turn over documents but finally settled.

Gary writes:

Success Academy is the largest and most controversial charter chain in New York. By one measure — state test scores — it is the most successful. But over the years they have been embroiled in several significant scandals. The two most prominent was the ‘rip and redo’ incident, where a teacher was caught on tape screaming at and ripping up a paper of a very well behaved young child, and the ‘got to go’ list where a principal created a list of students he planned to either expel or otherwise compel to leave.

But beyond these two high profile scandals, there are thousands of unreported mini-scandals that are just as harmful to the students who suffer them. Over the years hundreds, if not thousands, of families have suffered from the way that Success Academy gets those families to transfer their children out of the school. One trick they use a lot is threatening to leave back — or actually leaving back — students who are passing their classes and the state tests. This was documented nicely in a podcast about them last year. But the most heartless way they get parents to ‘voluntarily’ switch to another school is through coordinated harassment. When Success Academy has students who do not respond to their strict disciplinary code, what they do is start calling the parents day after day and demand that the parents come get their children. Sometimes the phone calls start at 8:00 AM. If the parents are at work and they are not able to come and get the child, Success Academy threatens to call Administration for Child Services (ACS) on them and, in some cases, actually does call ACS or the police or has the child picked up by an ambulance and brought to the emergency room. Even with all this, Success Academy is still the darling of the education reform movement since, I guess, the ends (high state test scores) justify the means (abusing — in my opinion — families and children).

In December 2015, five families of Success Academy students filed a civil suit against them. The five families had similar complaints about how Success Academy created what the lawsuit called a ‘hostile learning environment.’ Many of the children had various disabilities, like ADHD. Some of the court filings that I have read describe how Success Academy did not modify their protocols to address these disabilities. Also in the documents the families filed, we learn that Success Academy was not cooperative during the five year trial.

Gary wonders whether other families treated shabbily by Success Academy be encouraged to sue by this precedent?

Categories Accountability, Discipline and Suspensions, Harlem Success Academy, New York City

Trump Acts to Dismantle U.S. Postal Service to Deter Mail-in Voting

By dianeravitch
August 15, 2020 //
70

Trump has convinced himself that the only way he can win is by suppressing the vote, by any means possible.

He has repeatedly attacked mail-in voting as fraudulent, although both he and his wife filed to vote by mail in Florida and he hailed that state’s mail-in plans.

He appointed Louis DeJoy, a major Republican donor, as Postmaster General of the United States. DeJoy has begun systematically undermining the United States Postal Service. He reassigned the top leadership of the agency. The USPS has dismantled the machinery that sorts high-volume mail. Postal drop boxes are being removed. Post offices with low volume are closing.

Kimberly Karol, president of the Iowa Postal Workers Union, spoke to NPR and described what is happening.

Last night, Karol was interviewed by Rachel Maddow.

Maddow explained how Montanans blocked the USPS efforts to remove half the mailboxes across the state. Her conclusion: Pressure works. “They are stealing the mailboxes.”

The removal of mailboxes is not limited to Montana. It’s happening across the nation.

Before DeJoy’s appointment, the USPS warned 46 states that it lacked the capacity to guarantee that all mailed ballots would be counted:

Anticipating an avalanche of absentee ballots, the U.S. Postal Service recently sent detailed letters to 46 states and D.C. warning that it cannot guarantee all ballots cast by mail for the November election will arrive in time to be counted — adding another layer of uncertainty ahead of the high-stakes presidential contest.

The letters sketch a grim possibility for the tens of millions of Americans eligible for a mail-in ballot this fall: Even if people follow all of their state’s election rules, the pace of Postal Service delivery may disqualify their votes.

The Postal Service’s warnings of potential disenfranchisement came as the agency undergoes a sweeping organizational and policy overhaul amid dire financial conditions. Cost-cutting moves have already delayed mail delivery by as much as a week in some places, and a new decision to decommission 10 percent of the Postal Service’s sorting machines sparked widespread concern the slowdowns will only worsen. Rank-and-file postal workers say the move is ill-timed and could sharply diminish the speedy processing of flat mail, including letters and ballots.

The ballot warnings, issued at the end of July from Thomas J. Marshall, general counsel and executive vice president of the Postal Service, and obtained through a records request by The Washington Post, were planned before the appointment of Louis DeJoy, a former logistics executive and ally of President Trump, as postmaster general in early summer. They go beyond the traditional coordination between the Postal Service and election officials, drafted as fears surrounding the coronavirus pandemic triggered an unprecedented and sudden shift to mail-in voting.

Democrats sought additional funding for the Postal Service, but Trump blocked it.

The United States Postal Service is established in the Constitution, but since Trump has never read that document, he doesn’t care. He named a Postmaster General and replaced most of its governing board with lackeys who are loyal to him, not the Constitution.

Article I, Section 8, Clause 7 of the United States Constitution, known as the Postal Clause or the Postal Power, empowers Congress “To establish Post Offices and Post Roads.The Post Office has the constitutional authority to designate mail routes. The Post Office is also empowered to construct or designate post offices with the implied authority to carry, deliver, and regulate the mail of the United States as a whole. The Postal Power also includes the power to designate certain materials as non-mailable, and to pass statutes criminalizing abuses of the postal system (such as mail fraud and armed robbery of post offices”

Trump corrupts the rule of law and the Constitution with equal diffidence. He believes that as president, he can do whatever he wants. Having survived impeachment, he is above the law.

Categories Accountability, Trump

Attention, Parents! A Statement on EdTech from the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood

By dianeravitch
August 14, 2020 //
12

The arrival of COVID-19 has made children and educators across the nation dependent on distance learning for since March. Many parents recognize the defects of distance learning and eagerly await the opportunity to send their child back to real school when it is safe. They understand that an iPad or computer can’t take the place of a real teacher.

Meanwhile the for-profit edtrch industry sees the pandemic as a golden opportunity to cash in on a crisis.

For sound guidance at this perilous time, please read the statement released by the Campaign for Commercial-Free Childhood:

See the statement here.

Categories Accountability, For-Profit, Online Learning, Technology

Oklahoma: Judge Fines Virtual Charter School $500,000

By dianeravitch
August 13, 2020 //
8

A judge in Oklahoma Fined the company that manages EPIC virtual charter school $500,000 for trying to suppress the fre speech of a critic, plus his legal fees.

Unfortunately, despite poor results and ongoing legal controversies, enrollment at EPIC and other virtual charter schools is soaring due to the pandemic.

An Oklahoma County district judge leveled a $500,000 fine against the nonprofit overseeing Epic Charter Schools on Wednesday.

Judge Cindy Troung sanctioned Community Strategies Inc. for filing a libel and slander lawsuit against state Sen. Ron Sharp last year. Truong dismissed the lawsuit in February. On Wednesday, she ruled the case was an attempt to censor Sharp’s free speech.

The judge decided the nonprofit was subject to a fine under Oklahoma Citizens Participation Act, a law that sanctions plaintiffs who file meritless lawsuits intended to silence critics.

Troung also awarded Sharp $35,912 to cover all of his legal fees. A news release from Sharp said the senator is “very pleased” with the judge’s decision.

Epic will appeal the ruling, said Shelly Hickman, assistant superintendent of communications…

Sharp, R-Shawnee, has been one of Epic’s most outspoken critics. In multiple news releases and comments to media, he alleged Epic unlawfully counted student enrollment and misused taxpayer dollars.

Truong threw out the lawsuit and said Sharp’s public comments about Epic did not rise to the level of actual malice, which is the standard to prove libel and slander against a public entity.

“Clearly, Epic was trying to do this to destroy my credibility and to divert attention from what I was asking,” Sharp said after the lawsuit was dismissed in February. “The fact that they filed this just before the deadline for legislation, they clearly wanted legislators to be intimidated by this lawsuit.”

The Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation alleged Epic illegally inflated its enrollment counts and embezzled millions in state funds, according to court documents filed last year. Epic has denied any wrongdoing. No charges have been filed.

Categories Accountability, Oklahoma, Virtual Charter Schools

Chalkbeat: Trump, DeVos Demand Reopening Despite Risks

By dianeravitch
August 13, 2020 //
17

Matt Barnum reports that Trump and DeVos renewed their pressure to reopen schools despite the fact that most large districts have ignored their previous threats to cut funding. They and their Senate allies have refused to provide the funding necessary to enable schools to open safely, in accordance with CDC guidelines. Please open the article and read it in full, both for the links and the content. The Trump administration apparently believes that safety measures—like masks and social distancing—are unnecessary except for “high risk” individuals. Trump’s politicization of reopening will not assuage any parent’s fears. No child should be compelled to return in a district where the risk is high to help Trump’s re-election campaign.

He writes:

The Trump administration mounted a pressure campaign last month aimed at getting America’s schools to reopen their doors. To a large extent, it didn’t work.

Now, officials are trying again, in a move that might signal that Republican leaders are unlikely to relent in their push to tie additional school funding to physical reopening.

At a White House event Wednesday, President Trump and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos continued to make the case that schools must reopen because children benefit from in-person learning and the economy benefits from the de facto child care that schools provide. They cast opposition to reopening as driven by teachers unions, while pushing aside concerns about virus transmission.

“For students and their families, they can’t be held captive to other people’s fears or agendas,” said DeVos. “We have got to ensure that families and parents have options that are going to work for their child.”

“We cannot indefinitely stop 50 million American children from going to school and harming their mental, physical, emotional, and academic development and inflicting long-term, lasting damage,” Trump said at a Wednesday evening press conference.

The comments signal that President Trump continues to see school reopening as key to the country’s, and perhaps his electoral, fortunes. But it’s unclear whether he will find any more success. Most of the country’s largest districts are starting the year virtually, and most parents, teachers, and voters are skeptical of the push to reopen school buildings — even as many worry about child care and the ability of students with disabilities, among others, to get the support they need at home.

The administration’s messaging has contributed to a deep political polarization on the issue of reopening, a divide that may have affected which districts reopen buildings. A Brookings Institution analysis found that schools were more likely to open for in-person instruction in areas where Trump got more votes….

At Wednesday’s event, Trump reiterated his argument that schools that reopen shouldn’t get money from the federal government. “I would like the money to follow the student,” he said. “If the school is closed, why are we paying?”…

On Wednesday, White House officials argued the public is on its side. “Parents overwhelmingly are saying yes when they are asked do you feel it is safe for your son or daughter to return to school,” said counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway.

“Teachers want to be back in the classroom with their kids, even if they have an underlying condition,” said Florida education commissioner Richard Corcoran, who has pushed schools in the state to reopen and has been sued by the state teachers’ union.

Polls tell a different story, though. Most parents, especially parents of color, say they prefer that schools err on the side of safety rather than push to reopen quickly. A July poll, for instance, found that 60% of parents prefer that school reopen later to reduce risk…

The White House event will likely do little to assuage those concerns. Two of the participants — Paul Peterson, a Harvard education professor, and Scott Atlas, a medical doctor and fellow at a conservative think tank — recently co-authored an op-ed suggesting that schools forgo many widely recommended safety precautions.

“Even in states and districts where schools are allowed to re-open, unnecessary restrictions and requirements will seriously jeopardize our children’s education,” they wrote in The Hill. “Masked teachers can hardly be effective … Repetitive sanitation and temperature-taking activities subtract from the time on educational tasks that students need … Worst of all, social distancing rules will disrupt regular, full-schedule attendance.”

Paul Petersen is a professor of education policy at Harvard who relentlessly promotes charters and vouchers. He has no credentials in public health. He and Dr. Atlas are both fellows at the conservative Hoover Institution. Atlas is an advisor to Trump on COVID-19 and advised Trump’s presidential campaign.

Categories Accountability, Health, Safety, Trump

Leonie Haimson: The Risks and Benefits of Opening New York City Schools

By dianeravitch
August 11, 2020 //
10

Leonie Haimson summarizes the pluses and minuses of reopening schools in New York City.

She points out:

Many public health experts and epidemiologists agree that NYC schools seem to be in the best position of any large district in the country to offer face-to-face learning, with an COVID positivity rate of only about one percent.

Our positivity rate is very low and the lowest we are likely to see until there is an effective vaccine, which could take a year or more to be developed and widely adopted. By borough, according to the state, the current positivity rates ranges from 1.3% in the Bronx, .9% in Staten Island and Brooklyn, .8% in Queens and .6% in Manhattan.

However, and this is a big however, schools should be reopened only if they can adopt rigorous safety and health protocols.

One of the biggest risks to safety right now is the poor ventilation in many NYC schools. Ventilation is a critical issue, as closed and stuffy rooms will intensify the risks of infection and virus spread. Many schools have lousy or broken ventilation systems, and/or classrooms with windows that don’t open or no windows at all, as I pointed out in this article. According to a principal survey we did ten years ago, 40% reported they had classrooms with no windows – and I doubt the situation has improved…

While many parents and teachers have been pushing for outdoor learning for safety reasons, the DOE has not provided them with any support to achieve this important goal. In fact, I have heard that some schools have said the DOE is discouraging them from providing outdoor recess or learning…

Another critical issue is the lack of testing with results fast enough to ensure that students and staff who are ill know to stay home and quarantine rather than infect others. Right now, many testing sites across the city take 5-15 days to deliver results, which is nearly useless. More and more, states are realizing that to safely reopen schools, they should adopt rapid antigen testing, which gives results within minutes and cost only $1-$2 each. Six governors from Maryland, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Ohio and Virginia have teamed up to buy large quantities of these quick testing kits, but not Governor Cuomo, for some reason.

Rather than join this consortium and help schools reopen safely, Gov. Cuomo has lambasted schools over the weekend for not having their own testing procedures in place, something they do not have the funds, the staffing or the expertise to do. Though he rightfully stepped in to help hospitals by purchasing PPE and helping to quickly expand testing sites when the COVID crisis first hit, he now acts that he has no responsibility to do the same to help and support schools in this difficult time.

Understandably, many parents are confused and ambivalent. Despite the Mayor’s spin that more than 700,000 students chose to engage in some form of in-person learning in the fall, it appears that fewer than half NYC parents registered any preference on the online survey, with 264,000 parents opting into remote learning and 131,000 blended learning. Many families seem to be waiting to see what the plan is for their schools, after which they can choose full-time remote learning at any time.

Categories Accountability, Bill de Blasio, Cuomo, Andrew, Health, New York City, Safety

Is Brian Kemp of Georgia the Dumbest Governor?

By dianeravitch
August 11, 2020 //
18

That’s a trick question because a Governor Kemp has stiff competition from several other governors, such as Florida’s Ron DeSantis.

Politico interviewed Georgia Governor Brian Kemp. He said his early reopening of schools for full-time in-person instruction was going really well, except for the photo that went viral of high school students packed together in a hall while changing classes.

Under Kemp’s abdication of leadership, Georgia is fifth in the nation on the number of cases of COVID-19.

Photos shared widely on social media last week showed hallways packed shoulder to shoulder with students at North Paulding High School northwest of Atlanta. School officials later announced that six students and three staff members had tested positive for the coronavirus, and that the school would be closed Monday and Tuesday while the building is disinfected.

In nearby Cherokee County, 12 students and two staff members from a dozen schools tested positive for the virus during their first week back at school. The Cherokee County school system reported that more than 250 students with potential exposure had been sent home to quarantine for two weeks.

Cherokee County also drew attention because of online photos. Dozens of students at two of its high schools squeezed together for first-day-of-school senior photos. None wore masks.

Categories Accountability, Florida, Georgia, Health, Safety

Gary Rubinstein Reviews Thomas Sowell’s Book About Charter Schools

By dianeravitch
August 10, 2020 //
23

Gary Rubinstein reviews Thomas Sowell’s recent book about charter schools and their enemies.

Thomas Sowell is an economist and a senior fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution. He is African American and has long been highly critical of affirmative action and anything that smacks of lowered standards for black students. He is a hard-right libertarian. Many years ago, we were friends, and I invited him to lecture at Teachers College, where his views were not well received. He is 90 years old and still fighting, which I respect.

Rubinstein writes that the first four chapters of his six chapter book are a rehash of “Waiting for ‘Superman’” myths, such as the long discredited claim that the children in charters are precisely the same as those who are not in a charter. He loathes teachers’ unions and thinks that their opposition to charters is purely greed and self-interest. He identifies Mayor Bill DeBlasio as a fierce enemy of charters, which is absurd, since he gave up fighting them in 2014, after Governor Cuomo and the hedge funders defeated DeBlasio’s efforts to limit their expansion.

I gather from Gary’s review that Sowell singles me out as a critic, appropriately, but I have no idea what motive he attributes to me since I have no financial interest or self-interest in opposing charter growth.

After the first four chapters, he segues into a different mode, acknowledging that students who enter charters are more motivated than those who are not.

Gary concludes:

Chapter 6, the final chapter, is called ‘Dangers’ and it is about other ways that politicians and teacher’s unions undermine charter school growth. There are unfair charter caps. There are people who want charters to teach social justice to their students which he calls ‘indoctrination.’ He also does not like charters having to teach ‘sex education’ or ‘ethnic studies.’ Finally, he resents that some charter critics want the charters to have their meetings open to the public and to have their records open to public scrutiny. He says that this will make the board members targets of smear campaigns and have their homes vandalized.

All in all, this was quite a strange read. I don’t imagine that many reformers want to be identified with his arguments from the last two chapters and since the first four chapters have already been done in 2010 with “Waiting For Superman”, this book is not one that I imagine will be remembered for being very relevant.

Still it is interesting to see how little is left in the reform defender’s arsenal.

It is interesting too that this most recent defense of charter schools comes from an economist who has long been recognized as a hard-edged rightwinger.

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