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Education Deans Issue a Statement in Support of Public Education and Democracy

By dianeravitch
January 13, 2017 //
7

Nearly 200 education deans from across the nation released a “Declaration of Principles,“calling on Congress and the Trump Administration to advance democratic values in America’s public schools.

 

Press Release:
Contact:
Dean Kevin Kumashiro: (415) 422-2108, kkumashiro@usfca.edu
Dean Kathy Schultz: (303) 492-6937, katherine.schultz@colorado.edu
William J. Mathis: (802) 383-0058, wmathis@sover.net

 
BOULDER, CO (January 13, 2017) – As the nation watches this month’s transition to a new administration and a new Congress, a growing alliance of deans of colleges and schools of education across the country is urging a fundamental reconsideration of the problems and possibilities that surround America’s public schools.

 

In a Declaration of Principles released today, 175 deans sounded the alarm: “Our children suffer when we deny that educational inequities exist and when we refuse to invest sufficient time, resources, and effort toward holistic and systemic solutions. The U.S. educational system is plagued with oversimplified policies and reform initiatives that were developed and imposed without support of a compelling body of rigorous research, or even with a track record of failure.” The deans called upon federal leaders to forge a new path forward by:

 

Upholding the role of public schools as a central institution in the strengthening of our democracy;
Protecting the human and civil rights of all children and youth, especially those from historically marginalized communities;
Developing and implementing policies, laws, and reform initiatives by building on a democratic vision for public education and on sound educational research; and
Supporting and partnering with colleges and schools of education to advance these goals.
Signing the statement are current and former deans of colleges and schools of education from across the United States, as well as chairs of education departments in institutions with no separate school of education.

 

The statement was authored by Education Deans for Justice and Equity (EDJE) and prepared in partnership with the National Education Policy Center. EDJE was formed in 2016 as an alliance of deans to address inequities and injustices in education while promoting its democratic premises through policy, research, and practice.

 

The entire Declaration of Principles by Education Deans for Justice and Equity on Public Education, Democracy, and the Role of the Federal Government, as well as an online form for additional education deans to sign on, can be found on the NEPC website at http://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/deans-declaration-of-principles.

Categories Academic Freedom, Civil Rights, Democracy, Teacher Education

People for the American Way Opposes Nomination of Betsy DeVos, Calls It Part of “Right-Wing War on Public Education”

By dianeravitch
January 13, 2017 //
25

People for the American Way has released a well-documented statement about the danger that Betsy DeVos and the Trump agenda poses to American public education. Her nomination, says PFAW, is “a new high-water mark in Right-Wing’s Long War on Public Education.” The one positive consequence of DeVos’s nomination is that it has awakened the nation’s leading civil rights and civil liberties organizations to the war on public schools that has been waged quietly since the passage of No Child Left Behind in 2001, and some might say since Ronald Reagan’s “A Nation at Risk” in 1983.

 

The PFAW document is an excellent analysis of the attack on the nation’s public schools. It is a must-read!

 

The right wing’s long-term campaign to undermine public education is a battle being waged on multiple fronts. Public education’s enemies include religious conservatives who want public tax dollars to support schools that teach religious dogma, ideological opponents of government and public sector unions, and sectors of corporate America who see profits to be skimmed or scammed from the flow of tax dollars devoted to education. Billionaire Betsy DeVos, Donald Trump’s nominee to be U.S. Secretary of Education, has been actively engaged on all these fronts. DeVos, who like Trump celebrates being “politically incorrect,” has harsh words for the education establishment, declaring in a 2015 speech at an education conference, “Government really sucks.”

 

DeVos has been, in the words of Mother Jones’s Kristina Rizga, “trying to gut public schools for years.” Indeed, as the New York Times noted, it is “hard to find anyone more passionate about the idea of steering public dollars away from traditional public schools.” In addition to these ideological concerns, DeVos is simply unqualified for the job: she has never been a teacher, school administrator, or even state-level education policy bureaucrat. She did not attend public schools and neither did her children.

 

With the DeVos nomination, Religious Right activists have drawn a step closer to achieving the anti-public-education dream that the late Jerry Falwell did not live to see fully implemented: “I hope I live to see the day when, as in the early days of our country, we won’t have any public schools,” Falwell wrote in 1979. “The churches will have taken them over again and Christians will be running them. What a happy day that will be!”

 

At the same time, if DeVos is confirmed, anti-government and anti-union ideologues will have taken a major step toward the late Milton Friedman’s vision of completely privatizing public education. Friedman, intellectual godfather of the voucher movement, said “Vouchers are not an end in themselves; they are a means to make a transition from a government to a free-market system.”

 

There is some ideological overlap between the libertarian and Christianist designs on public education. Many Religious Right leaders have embraced the teaching of Christian Reconstructionists that the Bible does not give the government any role in education; hard-core limited government “constitutional conservatives” believe there is no legitimate federal role in education. Milton Friedman, an intellectual godfather of the privatization movement, told a 2006 meeting of the American Legislative Exchange Council that it would be “ideal” to “abolish the public school system and eliminate all the taxes that pay for it,” but since that wasn’t politically feasible, money spent on education should be converted into vouchers.

 

The DeVos Family Has Played a Key Role in Building Right-Wing Anti-Public-Education Infrastructure
Betsy DeVos is the daughter of a wealthy industrialist, Edgar Prince, and married the son of a wealthy businessman, Richard DeVos; the families have been major funders of the Republican Party and right-wing think tanks and advocacy organizations. For example, the Family Research Council’s Washington, D.C. headquarters and distribution center in Michigan were built with millions from the DeVos and Prince clans. DeVos also served for a decade on the board of the Acton Institute, which provides religious rationales for right-wing economic policies. The DeVos family has promoted anti-LGBT policies and its anti-union lobbying helped turn Michigan into a so-called “Right to Work” state.

 

Betsy DeVos and her extraordinarily wealthy family have helped to build the Religious Right’s political and policy infrastructure; lobbied for legislation to expand charter schools programs and protect them from regulation and oversight; promoted vouchers and related tax schemes to steer money away from public schools; and poured money into political attacks on elected officials, including Republicans, who resist their plans for the privatization of education. Putting DeVos in charge of the Department of Education is not just having the fox guard the henhouse, says writer Jay Michaelson, it is giving the job to the slaughterer.

 

An April 2016 report from Media Matters on the “tangled network of advocacy, research, media, and profiteering that’s taking over public education” highlighted some of the many organizations DeVos has been involved in:

 

Betsy DeVos is also the co-founder and current chair of the boards at the anti-teachers-union state advocacy groups Alliance for School Choice and American Federation for Children (AFC) and a close friend of teachers union opponent Campbell Brown, who also serves on AFC’s board. DeVos also sits on the board of the Foundation for Excellence in Education. Through the DeVos Family Foundation, the DeVoses have given millions to anti-teachers union and pro-privatization education groups; recent tax filings show donations to the Alliance for School Choice, the American Enterprise Institute, the Black Alliance for Educational Options, the Foundation for Excellence in Education, the Heritage Foundation, the Hispanic Council for Reform and Educational Options, and the Institute for Justice. The foundation is listed as a supporter of Campbell Brown’s The 74 education website. Betsy DeVos’ American Federation for Children further connects the DeVos family to right-wing corporate reform groups; it is listed as an education partner of the right-wing-fueled National School Choice Week campaign and counts at least 19 additional groups in this guide as national allied organizations, and its affiliated Alliance for School Choice group is an associate member of the State Policy Network of conservative think tanks.

As the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer has noted, Trump’s chief strategist Steve Bannon mocked “the donor class” during the presidential campaign, but “it would be hard to find a better representative of the ‘donor class’ than DeVos.”

 

School Choice as P.R. Campaign vs. School Choice in Reality
Among the many efforts supported by DeVos and her organizations is a national “School Choice Week” held every year in January. It’s all about putting a shiny happy face on school privatization efforts, complete with bright yellow scarves for kids, an “official” dance to be performed at local events, and national publicity support for what organizers say will be more than 20,000 events this January 22-28 – more than 2,000 of them held by homeschooling groups. The President of National School Choice Week, Andrew Campanella, used to work at the Alliance for School Choice, whose board is chaired by Betsy DeVos.

 

School Choice Week is intentionally designed to blur the very real and significant differences between policies that fall under the broad banner of “school choice.” There’s a huge difference between a school district offering magnet schools and the diversion of funds away from school districts to for-profit cyberschools, but National School Choice Week treats them all the same, with a “collective messaging” approach that hides the anti-public-education agendas of some education “reformers” by wrapping them all together in the language of parental empowerment and student opportunity.

 

The Failures of Market Fundamentalism
Advocates for school choice tend to promote “magic of the marketplace thinking,” believing that deregulation, competition and limited government oversight will automatically produce better results than “government schools.” But while DeVos and her fellow “revolutionaries” posture as champions for children against an indifferent “blob” of self-interested teachers and bureaucrats, the “reformers” don’t have a convincing track record when it comes to improving student accomplishment overall. Indeed, as Tulane University’s Douglas Harris argues, “The DeVos nomination is a triumph of ideology over evidence that should worry anyone who wants to improve results for children.”

 

CHARTER SCHOOLS AND MICHIGAN’S MESS
Advocates for various forms of “school choice” can point to mixed results from programs that they have put in place. Some charter schools, for example, do a good job, but many do not. And the biggest cautionary tale for those who want to expand such programs is, interestingly enough, precisely the place where DeVos has played the biggest role. As The New York Times reported:

 

Michigan is one of the nation’s biggest school choice laboratories, especially with charter schools. The Detroit, Flint and Grand Rapids school districts have among the nation’s 10 largest shares of students in charters, and the state sends $1 billion in education funding to charters annually. Of those schools, 80 percent are run by for-profit organizations, a far higher share than anywhere else in the nation…

 

But if Michigan is a center of school choice, it is also among the worst places to argue that choice has made schools better. As the state embraced and then expanded charters over the past two decades, its rank has fallen on national reading and math tests. Most charter schools perform below the state average.

 

And a federal review in 2015 found “an unreasonably high” percentage of charter schools on the list of the state’s lowest-performing schools. The number of charter schools on that list had doubled since 2010, after the passage of a law a group financed by Ms. DeVos pushed to expand the schools. The group blocked a provision in that law that would have prevented failing schools from expanding or replicating.

 

An earlier New York Times story reported, “Michigan leapt at the promise of charter schools 23 years ago, betting big that choice and competition would improve public schools. It got competition, and chaos…”

 

While the idea was to foster academic competition, the unchecked growth of charters has created a glut of schools competing for some of the nation’s poorest students, enticing them to enroll with cash bonuses, laptops, raffle tickets for iPads and bicycles. Leaders of charter and traditional schools alike say they are being cannibalized, fighting so hard over students and the limited public dollars that follow them that no one thrives.

 

Politico has also turned a skeptical eye toward the DeVos-backed experiment in Michigan:

 

Critics say Michigan’s laissez-faire attitude about charter-school regulation has led to marginal and, in some cases, terrible schools in the state’s poorest communities as part of a system dominated by for-profit operators. Charter-school growth has also weakened the finances and enrollment of traditional public-school districts like Detroit’s, at a time when many communities are still recovering from the economic downturn that hit Michigan’s auto industry particularly hard.

 

The results in Michigan are so disappointing that even some supporters of school choice are critical of the state’s policies.

 

Education “revolutionaries” like DeVos argue that expanding charter school operations will boost public schools through competition. But a November 2016 report by the Economic Policy Institute on the consequences of charter school expansion in America’s cities found that charter expansions put increased stress on public schools. It also documented problems with conflicts of interest and financial malfeasance among private managers and charter management firms.

 

Corruption in the charter school industry has also been identified as a problem by education historian Diane Ravitch. “There are all kinds of deals,” she says. “And the biggest and sleaziest deal of all is the charter operators, the for-profit operators, in particular, who buy a piece of property and then rent it to themselves at a rental that’s three, four, five, 10 times the market rate, and they make tons of money, not on the school, but on the leasing.” In a 2014 exposé on charter schools’ lack of accountability, the Detroit Free Press reported, among other things, that one charter school had spent $1 million on swampland.

 

The EPI report found another major problem:

 

Expansion of charter schooling is exacerbating inequities across schools and children because children are being increasingly segregated by economic status, race, language, and disabilities and further, because charter schools are raising and spending vastly different amounts, without regard for differences in student needs. Often, the charter schools serving the least needy populations also have the greatest resource advantages.

 

The report’s authors concluded:

 

To the extent that charter expansion or any policy alternative increases inequity, introduces inefficiencies and redundancies, compromises financial stability, or introduces other objectionable distortions to the system, those costs must be weighed against expected benefits.

 

The American Federation of Teachers’ Randy Weingarten describes DeVos as “a principal cheerleader of the practice of using the exponential growth of unregulated and unaccountable charters to destabilize, defund, decimate and privatize public education.” Adds Weingarten, “These consequences are why the NAACP and Black Lives Matter have called for a moratorium on charter schools and why the mayor of Detroit worked to establish some commonsense oversight of this sector. They’re also why voters rejected charter expansion initiatives in Georgia and Massachusetts this November.”

 

There is more. DeVos is the “four-star general of the voucher movement.” Vouchers would “gut” public education while providing no benefit to anyone.

 

Ultimately, what is at stake is the future of public education as a core democratic institution that has provided generations of Americans, including immigrants, with the means to become full participants in American society. Several years ago, educator Stan Karp argued that what is ultimately at stake in school reform debates is “whether the right to a free public education for all children is going to survive as a fundamental democratic promise in our society, and whether the schools and districts needed to provide it are going to survive as public institutions, collectively owned and democratically managed — however imperfectly— by all of us as citizens. Or will they be privatized and commercialized by the corporate interests that increasingly dominate all aspects of our society?”

Categories Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Education Industry, Privatization, School Choice, Virtual Charter Schools, Vouchers

Over 200 Civil Rights Groups Oppose Betsy DeVos to Lead U.S. Secretary of Education

By dianeravitch
January 13, 2017 //
23

The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights issued a strong statement in opposition to the nomination of Betsy DeVos for Secretary of Education. While the so-called “reformers” like to claim that they are fighting for minority kids and civil rights, the actual civil rights organizations know that DeVos and Trump want to weaken and destroy public schools, which are open to all students. They also are aware that the origins of school choice were in the racial segregation movement of the 1950s, when the most racist governors and senators in the South rallied around the idea of school choice to protect the status quo.

 

The Leadership Conference issued this statement:

 

 

Dear Senator,

 

On behalf of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, a coalition of more than 200 national organizations committed to promote and protect the civil and human rights of all persons in the United States, we are writing to express our strong opposition to the confirmation of Betsy DeVos to be the next U.S. Secretary of Education. All parents and students in this country – a majority of whom are of color or are low-income[i] – want the best education, support and dignity for their own children. We stand with them and cannot support a nominee who has demonstrated that she seeks to undermine bedrock American principles of equal opportunity, nondiscrimination and public education itself.

 

DeVos argues her opposition to public education serves students, especially students who are the most vulnerable.[ii] We reject the notion that children are well served by the dismantling of a public school system that serves 90 percent of all American students[iii] or by the elimination of civil rights protections that require the federal government to intervene when students are discriminated against.[iv]. The civil rights community has served as agitator and critic of schools and school systems that failed to meet the needs of students of color and low income students since long before Thurgood Marshall successfully argued the Brown v. Board of Education decision.

 

Opportunity and achievement gaps that demonstrate longstanding bias against students of color, English learners, Native Americans, girls, students with disabilities, low-income students and other marginalized students are indefensible and unacceptable and we have fought at the federal, state, local and classroom level to ensure every student the quality education to which they are entitled by law and birth. Rather than joining with us in support of accountability, oversight and intervention, DeVos instead argues for an unaccountable education system which serves only to exacerbate inequality of opportunity.[v]

 

While parent frustration with schools failing to meet their child’s need is real and parents have waited far too long for meaningful action by policymakers, the result of anti-public education agendas such as DeVos’ has often, as in Louisiana[vi], been worse outcomes for vulnerable students. The Michigan example, where DeVos’ impact on education policy and the proliferation of unregulated and for-profit charter schools is considerable, demonstrates clearly that this agenda does not result in the improved outcomes students, parents and communities deserve.[vii]

 

Equal access to education is a cornerstone of the civil rights movement. The Secretary of Education’s role as the enforcer of education and civil rights laws[viii] is central to advancing our shared vision of an inclusive and diverse system of high-quality public education that enables every student to live up to their potential. DeVos has demonstrated no previous commitment to ensuring equal educational opportunity in schools.

 

While she is entitled to her personal views as a private citizen, government officials are charged with enforcing our laws equally. DeVos’ connections to anti-LGBTQ organizations including those that promote dangerous and discredited ’conversion therapy,’[ix] groups that seek to limit a woman’s right to health care[x] and civil rights protections for survivors of violence,[xi] and her opposition to affirmative action policies[xii] demonstrate a lack of respect and appreciation for the diversity of our nation’s classrooms and fail to recognize a long and pernicious history of discrimination against groups of students. While we have heard little of DeVos’ record with regard to the rights and interests of English learners, immigrant students, students with disabilities and religious minorities, we are deeply troubled by the unacceptable rhetoric of the President-elect during his campaign and the absence of a record of DeVos’ support for these students.

 

When compared with Secretaries of Education through the history of the department, DeVos’ lack of experience stands out.[xiii] She has never been an educator or worked directly with children and families in public schools. She has never led a school, district or state agency tasked with educating students. She has never been a public school parent or a public school student. This lack of experience makes her uniquely unfamiliar with the challenges and opportunities facing the nation’s students, families, educators and schools.

 

The U.S. Department of Education is responsible for implementing and enforcing laws protecting students from discrimination on the basis of race, color, national origin, sex and disability and those laws that provide for educational opportunity from early childhood through graduate school. The person responsible for leading that department must absolutely be committed to respecting, valuing and protecting every single student in this country – without regard to LGBTQI status, family income, race, home language, gender, religion, disability or immigration status. Our nation’s laws, economy, future and children deserve no less.

 

Sincerely,

 

Wade Henderson
President & CEO

 

Nancy Zirkin
Executive Vice President

 

[i] See: http://www.southerneducation.org/Our-Strategies/Research-and-Publications/New-Majority-Diverse-Majority-Report-Series/A-New-Majority-2015-Update-Low-Income-Students-Now

[ii] See: http://www.federationforchildren.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Betsy-SXSWedu-speech-final-remarks.pdf?e40fe9

[iii] See: https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=372

[iv] See: http://c.ymcdn.com/sites/www.copaa.org/resource/resmgr/2016_Conference/COPAA_Voucher_paper_final_R6.pdf

[v] See: http://www.politico.com/story/2016/12/betsy-devos-michigan-school-experiment-232399

[vi] See: http://www.nber.org/papers/w21839

[vii] See: http://bridgemi.com/2016/12/betsy-devoss-michigan-legacy/

[viii] Department of Education Organization Act (Public Law 96-88)

[ix] See: http://www.politico.com/story/2016/11/betsy-devos-education-secretary-civil-rights-gay-transgender-students-231837

[x] See: https://rewire.news/article/2016/03/21/devos-family-promoting-christian-orthodoxy-political-donations/

[xi] See: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/11/28/betsy-devos-trumps-choice-education-secretary-has-unclear-higher-ed-priorities

[xii] See: http://www.insidephilanthropy.com/home/2016/3/1/school-choice-but-much-more-making-sense-of-devos-family-phi.html

[xiii] See: http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/campaign-k-12/2016/12/betsy_devos_would_be_first_ed_.html

Categories Betsy DeVos, Civil Rights, School Choice, Segregation

A Petition by Members of the Technology Industry: Never Again!

By dianeravitch
December 20, 2016 //
17

This is an astonishing petition, created and disseminated within the technology industry, to protest the use of technology to carry out abhorrent policies against Muslim Americans, immigrants, and others who displease the incoming Trump administration. Please read the statement to see the links, recommended readings, and organizations. Some might say that it is too late, that the information is already collected, but it is nonetheless heartening to see so many sign this statement protesting the use of technology to invade privacy and violate human and civil rights.

 

Our pledge

 

We, the undersigned, are employees of tech organizations and companies based in the United States. We are engineers, designers, business executives, and others whose jobs include managing or processing data about people. We are choosing to stand in solidarity with Muslim Americans, immigrants, and all people whose lives and livelihoods are threatened by the incoming administration’s proposed data collection policies. We refuse to build a database of people based on their Constitutionally-protected religious beliefs. We refuse to facilitate mass deportations of people the government believes to be undesirable.

 

We have educated ourselves on the history of threats like these, and on the roles that technology and technologists played in carrying them out. We see how IBM collaborated to digitize and streamline the Holocaust, contributing to the deaths of six million Jews and millions of others. We recall the internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War. We recognize that mass deportations precipitated the very atrocity the word genocide was created to describe: the murder of 1.5 million Armenians in Turkey. We acknowledge that genocides are not merely a relic of the distant past—among others, Tutsi Rwandans and Bosnian Muslims have been victims in our lifetimes.

 

Today we stand together to say: not on our watch, and never again.

 

We commit to the following actions:

 

We refuse to participate in the creation of databases of identifying information for the United States government to target individuals based on race, religion, or national origin.
We will advocate within our organizations:
to minimize the collection and retention of data that would facilitate ethnic or religious targeting.
to scale back existing datasets with unnecessary racial, ethnic, and national origin data.
to responsibly destroy high-risk datasets and backups.
to implement security and privacy best practices, in particular, for end-to-end encryption to be the default wherever possible.
to demand appropriate legal process should the government request that we turn over user data collected by our organization, even in small amounts.
If we discover misuse of data that we consider illegal or unethical in our organizations:
We will work with our colleagues and leaders to correct it.
If we cannot stop these practices, we will exercise our rights and responsibilities to speak out publicly and engage in responsible whistleblowing without endangering users.
If we have the authority to do so, we will use all available legal defenses to stop these practices.
If we do not have such authority, and our organizations force us to engage in such misuse, we will resign from our positions rather than comply.
We will raise awareness and ask critical questions about the responsible and fair use of data and algorithms beyond our organization and our industry.

Categories Civil Rights, Technology, Trump

John Merrow: Remembering the Civil Rights Struggles of the 1960s, Part 2

By dianeravitch
December 14, 2016 //
16

John Merrow posted a moving description of a trip he made with his wife and a group of others to the landmarks of the civil rights movement. In part 1, the group visited Mississippi, revisiting the scene of brutal murders. Part 2 is an account of their visit to Alabama, which included the Rosa Parks Museum, the church where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was pastor, and Dr. King’s home, which was firebombed.

 

This is an important history lesson, although for John and me and others of a certain age, the events are fresh in our memories.

 

I found this passage especially poignant, when John and the group visits Dr. King’s home:

 

He writes:

 

Visitors are free to walk into Dr. King’s small study, even to touch his books and his collection of LP record albums. To pick up the rotary phone and imagine hate-filled voices threatening the King family. Or sit at the kitchen table where Dr. King prayed for guidance late on January 27, 1956, when he was plagued by doubts.

I was ready to give up. With my cup of coffee sitting untouched before me, I tried to think of a way to move out of the picture without appearing a coward. In this state of exhaustion, when my courage had all but gone, I decided to take my problem to God. With my head in my hands, I bowed over the kitchen table and prayed aloud.

The words I spoke to God that midnight are still vivid in my memory. “I am here taking a stand for what I believe is right. But now I am afraid. The people are looking to me for leadership, and if I stand before them without strength and courage, they too will falter. I am at the end of my powers. I have nothing left. I’ve come to the point where I can’t face it alone.”

At that moment, I experienced the presence of the Divine as I had never experienced God before. It seemed as though I could hear the quiet assurance of an inner voice saying: “Stand up for justice, stand up for truth; and God will be at your side forever.” Almost at once my fears began to go. My uncertainty disappeared. I was ready to face anything.”

 

Three days later his home was firebombed.

 

This is a must-read.

 

The night before John posted this, I spoke to a large group of Network for Public Education friends, and we discussed the present political situation, which is disheartening to say the least. We see a revival of openly expressed bigotry and a determination to roll back so much of the social progress of the past half century–in relation to race, climate change, labor, and education. I urged everyone to think of the civil rights movement. I cited John Merrow’s first piece, about Mississippi. He reminded me of those terrible times and how far we have advanced since then. We can’t go back.  I told my friends that the dark days ahead will not last. There will be another election in less than two years, and another one in four years. What we need to survive these years is to hold onto our vision of what is right and just. And to never lose hope. This is the lesson of the civil rights movement: courage, persistence, faith, and determination to stand up for justice, truth, and progress.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Categories Civil Rights

John Merrow: Revisiting the Brutal Trail of the Freedom Riders of the 1960s

By dianeravitch
December 10, 2016 //
6

John Merrow and his wife joined a group to tour historic sites of the civil rights movement in Mississippi. His post contains the stories and photographs of those frightening times when people put their lives at risk for the right to vote, the right to equal treatment before the law.

 

He recounts history that must not be forgotten: the story of Medger Evers, brutally assassinated; the story of the murder of Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman, brutally murdered and buried in an earthen dam; the black church, one among many, burned and rebuilt.

 

I remember these events vividly. I followed them daily in the news. This past is not past.

Categories Civil Rights

Politico: Will the ED Department’s Office of Civil Rights Survive?

By dianeravitch
December 8, 2016 //
11

Politico speculates that the Trump administration will get rid of the Office of Civil Rights in the U.S. Department of Education. This would satisfy the hard-right, which has always objected to federal enforcement of civil rights laws. If it is not abolished outright, it might be handed over to someone who is opposed to civil rights enforcement, which seems to be an emerging pattern in Trump’s hires. The Office then might exist to cancel out existing federal enforcement activities.

 

Politico reports:

 

THE OFFICE FOR CIVIL RIGHTS’ LAST HURRAH? The Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, which could be on the chopping block once Donald Trump takes office, is celebrating its work over the last eight years – a period in which it became significantly more aggressive than ever before. The office has cracked down on colleges that mishandle sexual assault allegations and used Title IX, a federal law that prohibits discrimination based on sex, to protect the right of transgender students to use the bathrooms and locker rooms of their choice – an issue now headed to the Supreme Court. The department this morning is releasing two new reports highlighting its work under the Obama administration at a celebration in D.C.

 

– The highlights: The office has been flooded with complaints during the Obama administration – more than 76,000 in all, with each year seeing more than the last. It has settled 66,000 of them. That work has been done with a near record-low staff of 563 full-time employees. The office had about 1,100 staff in 1981, according to the report. “Much progress has been made in the past eight years, but much work remains to ensure all children enjoy equitable access to excellence in American education,” U.S. Education Secretary John B. King Jr. said in a statement. “These two reports highlight the ongoing vital necessity of OCR’s work to eliminate discriminatory barriers to educational opportunity so our nation’s students may realize their full potential.”

 

– But the office faces an uncertain future. Civil rights groups say they’re “deeply concerned” that the extension of civil rights protections to gay and transgender students by the Obama administration will be dismantled by Betsy DeVos, who Trump has tapped to lead the Education Department. DeVos’ family has a long history of supporting anti-gay causes, POLITICO previously reported. Trump’s surrogates, meanwhile, have said there’s no need to have an Office for Civil Rights, period.

 

– Schools remain hostile environments for LGBT students, according to a new report by Human Rights Watch, a group that advocates for LGBT rights. The group conducted in-depth interviews with students, parents, teachers and administrators in Alabama, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Texas and Utah and found that in many schools “discriminatory policies and practices exacerbate the sense of exclusion students face.” Teachers still fear for their jobs if they identify as gay or support LGBT students, according to the report. Students in same-sex couples said they were discouraged – or even prohibited – from attending events as a couple. Many schools censor discussions about LGBT topics, and eight states restrict discussions of LGBT topics in schools, according to the report.

 

– The Office for Civil Rights has also become a watchdog over colleges that mishandle investigations of sexual assault on campus. This week alone, the office opened four new investigations, bringing the list of schools currently under investigation to 219. OCR is also currently investigating some high-profile cases, such as the sexual assault cover-up by coaches and administrators at Baylor University that led the Texas school to demote its president and fire its star football coach.

 

Politico also reports on the latest from two rightwing groups that have established themselves as gatekeepers of the teaching profession, although they themselves have no credentials or authority, other than wealth:

 

REPORT: TEACHER PREP PROGRAMS MAKE PROGRESS: Nearly 900 programs preparing elementary school teachers are showing “significant progress,” particularly when it comes to how reading instruction is taught. That’s according to a new National Council on Teacher Quality review. But programs aren’t selective – a little more than a quarter of programs draw aspiring teachers from the top half of college-goers based on GPA or SAT/ACT scores, the report says. Still, programs have improved their selectivity over the years, and programs that are selective have also shown they’re diverse. More.

 

– Speaking of teachers, the Fordham Institute finds that it’s still really difficult to remove an ineffective teacher from the classroom after a decade of teacher evaluation reform. In 17 out of 25 districts studied, “state law still allows teachers to earn tenure and keep it regardless of performance.” And in most districts, an ineffective teacher’s dismissal is “extremely vulnerable” to appeal, the report says.

 

Comment: NCTQ’s standards of quality for teacher education programs is whether they are faithfully teaching the Common Core standards. Wonder if they will stick to that criterion in the age of Trump? Their definition of good reading instruction is phonics. Their judgments are not based on campus visits, but on reading catalogs and websites.

 

TBF, of course, judges teacher “effectiveness” by test scores, or value-added measurement, a method that has been debunked by scholarly associations like the American Statistical Association.

 

 

Categories Bigotry, Civil Rights, National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ), Standardized Testing, Teacher Evaluations, VAM (value-added modeling)

Jeff Sessions, Attorney-General Designate, Fought to Preserve Separate but Unequal in Alabama

By dianeravitch
November 22, 2016 //
24

Jeff Sessions has a long history of racism. He was nominated for a federal judgeship and rejected by a Republican-led Senate because of his history of racist comments and actions. More recently, before entering the U.S. Senate, he was attorney general of Alabama. In that role, he fought to preserve the unequal funding of public schools in Alabama. 

 

President-elect Donald Trump has chosen Senator Jeff Sessions as Attorney General in his administration, the person who is supposed to enforce all the laws.

 

This is a dark time.

 

But it may lead to a rebirth of energy, vitality, and focus on the other side of the aisle.

Categories Accountability, Alabama, Civil Rights, Race

The Dangerous Awakening of the Dormant Monster of White Supremacy

By dianeravitch
November 2, 2016 //
23

Robin Darling Young, a native of Hampton, Virginia, writes in Commonweal magazine about the frightening possibility that Trump has rekindled the spirit of white nationalism and race hatred that she knew so well in her youth. https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/fence-water

“To comprehend fully the anarchic spectacle of Donald Trump—a show unhindered by the guiding political and religious institutions of the United States—it helps to have been a young white woman growing up a half century ago, as I did, inside the border of the Old Confederacy. In my Tidewater hometown of Hampton, Virginia, democratic hopes were abundant. The twenty years after World War II had seen American progressivism pry open the old Southern social order and force it to admit black Americans. Southern integrationists expected that another generation or two would banish Jim Crow forever, more or less as the scourge of polio had yielded to Salk’s vaccine. Such things were inevitable, after all, like the ever-rising prosperity guaranteed by American industry and empire.

“What the progressives of my girlhood did not foresee was the postindustrial impoverishment of the working class; furthermore, even as the Republicans’ Southern Strategy captured the Old South, those same progressives failed to reckon with the lasting wages of America’s original sin. In time these two phenomena combined with ominous ramification. The crash of 2008 underscored the insecurity of the white working and middle classes, and in the context of this abiding insecurity, Trump’s slogan of “Make America Great Again” now clearly signals its real meaning: bring back white jobs, and with it white male power, to quell the threat of dark-skinned immigrants and the menace of black urban neighborhoods. Like the witch of Endor, Trump has the power to summon America’s undead, in the form of the white nationalists now relabeled the “alt-right.” Seizing the legacy of the new Southern Republicanism rooted in Richard Nixon’s cynical appeal to Dixiecrats, he has reanimated the race-hatred of the Old South.

“The success of Trump’s dog-whistle appeal to race comes as no surprise to someone who observed firsthand the satisfactions that white Southerners took in segregation. In my 1950s childhood, Confederate statues and flags sanctified the landscape throughout the South. My nursery-school class marched, battle-flags clutched in our hands, to commemorate Confederate Memorial Day. My elementary school class watched Gone With The Wind during the Centennial. My Episcopalian parish featured a statue of a Confederate soldier in its graveyard, facing the town’s main street. My second-grade class excursion to Richmond included a devotional visit to Lee’s statue, where we learned that his boots had no spurs because the noble “General Lee would harm neither man nor beast.” At the time Virginia was fighting in vain to hold the line against miscegenation, its bitter defeat inscribed in the Supreme Court’s 1967 landmark ruling in Loving v. Virginia. Four decades after the last lynching in the state in 1926—which occurred after a white woman gave birth to a “mixed” baby and named a black man as the father—racial lines remained clear, and white women and black men knew all too well that they must not touch in public. Yet everyone also knew that the paler, blue-eyed blacks among us had come from precisely such unions….

“Though Donald Trump’s path to victory appears increasingly narrow as the election approaches, his ascendancy to the Republican nomination—boosted by his coded segregationist rhetoric—has left a mark on American politics. Even if he loses, he’s emboldened the dormant monster of white supremacy, in part by nurturing a pernicious lie that played to white resentment at the election of a black president. Assessing the significance of Trump’s appeal, John Cassidy, writing in The New Yorker, warned of a “long-term Trumpian movement —a nationalist, nativist, protectionist, and authoritarian movement that will forever be associated with him, but which also has the capacity to survive beyond him.” While Trump himself might lack the discipline of a serious candidate, Cassidy reasoned, another leader could arise in four or eight years to lead a movement like the Know Nothings of the 1840s or the America First Committee of the 1930s.”

We have been warned.

Categories Civil Rights, Race, Segregation

Schott Foundation: If You Care About a Better Education for All, Vote NO on Question 2 in Massachusetts

By dianeravitch
October 26, 2016 //
2

Dr. John H. Jackson of the Schott Foundation (Cambridge, Massachusetts) and Josie Greene, a director of another foundation (writing for herself, not her foundation), penned a powerful opinion piece about “a better education for all.”

As it happens, the purpose of this blog is to advocate on behalf of “a better education for all.” Not a better education for a few, or for some, but for all. That means better public schools for all children. That is why I oppose charter schools, school choice, and competition. As Jackson and Green post out, competition means winners and losers, and equality of educational opportunity will never be produced by competition but by a commitment great public schools in every district.

This is the letter that was posted by the Schott Foundation (I made two insertions of “bold” format):

A Question of Better Education for All

Dear Education Advocates,

Question 2, which will appear on Massachusetts voters’ ballots on Nov. 8, claims that it will increase educational choice and improve educational standards across the state. In fact, it would do the opposite.

For the past decade, Massachusetts has led the nation in academic achievement. Our students have even been top ranked internationally in a time when the country’s educational outcomes have slid year by year. Massachusetts accomplished this by taking bold steps that impact all students, most importantly changing the state’s school funding system to invest more in schools in high need, low-income areas so that all students have a better opportunity to achieve. There is still critical work to be done to close persistent opportunity gaps in the system, but we won’t get there if we go in completely the wrong direction. This would be to allow state officials to give up on investing in improving a system that serves all students in need.

Saying “yes” to Question 2 would move the Commonwealth off the path towards great public schools for all students. Question 2 proposes to use taxpayer resources to increase, by 12 per year, the number of charter schools that can only be attended by a few in the state.

When charter schools, which now serve only 4% of the state’s public school students, were added to the Massachusetts model, they were never intended to be a comprehensive “education plan” for a state or locality, but rather an experiment that might provide sparks of innovation whose best practices would be integrated into the main system. It is in that system that the great majority—a full 96%—of Massachusetts students are educated. While it’s true that, like any educational system, we have a mixed record on innovation as well as achievement—there are exemplary as well as troubled charter schools—the bigger issues we need to examine go to the heart of our commitment to high quality public education for all children in the Commonwealth.

Public schools and an equal commitment to all children are pillars of our democratic system. Accountability has been rooted in local control ever since Massachusetts pioneered the first statewide system focused on all children when it instituted compulsory K-12 education in 1852.

Charters run directly counter to this democratic value. The state can approve a charter school in a community over the strong objection of the school committee and all the other locally elected officials who are accountable to the voters in that town. Only the state, not any local officials, can examine the finances or exercise oversight over charter schools. As for their private boards, the Annenberg Institute for School Reform’s study of Massachusetts charter schools revealed that many board members do not even live in the district where the charter is located; 31% are financial or corporate executives, while only 14% are parents; 60% of charters in our state have no parent representation at all.

When the corporate concept of “competition” is used to justify the argument for increasing the number of charter schools (and student enrollment in them), we need only remind ourselves that competition means winners and losers.

When the corporate concept of “competition” is used to justify the argument for increasing the number of charter schools (and student enrollment in them), we need only remind ourselves that competition means winners and losers. Why would voters ever want to substitute that value for a commitment to ensuring a high quality education for every child? We should focus our attention and resources on what has been the most successful in proven outcomes in our state: Constantly improving our public education system. Charter schools draw funding away from public schools that educate the great majority of state students, ranging from accelerated learners to special education, and including English language learners, children with learning disabilities, and homeless children who register mid-year.

Expanding the number of charter schools reinforces a caste system of private, charter and public schools. This is not visionary leadership or the bold leap needed to keep all Massachusetts students advancing as leaders in the nation. There are social justice reasons for ensuring any changes to our current system are designed to improve the opportunity to learn for all students.

And there are compelling economic reasons as well. Equal education for all breaks the cycle of intergenerational poverty; it is the path to economic opportunity. Investing in a great education for all children in the Commonwealth is the only way to create a broad-based, diverse, well-educated workforce that is a magnet for employers and can fuel economic growth across the state. It also ensures full participation in our democratic society.

Voting “NO” on Question 2 will keep policymakers, educators, parents and students focused on the right question: What steps should we be taking to advance as the best public education system in the country for all Commonwealth students?

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Corporate Reformers, Equity, Massachusetts, Privatization
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