Cathy Rubin interviewed several well-known educators and asked what they would do if they were Secretary of Education. I was one of them. Here is the interview. The interview was conducted about four or five years ago. I focused on the errors of the Bush-Obama agenda of test-and-punish. It was a bad idea in 2002, a worse idea in 2009, and today it is a proven failure.
If I were Secretary of Education, I would focus federal funding on greater resources for the neediest students. My theme would be equity and equality of educational opportunity. I would create a fund to promote increased desegregation. I would campaign for community schools and wraparound services. I would not fund privately managed charters. I would fund only charters that are created and supervised by school districts to meet needs. I would be a champion for the principles and values of public education and a champion for teachers.
On September 28, Eva Moskowitz closed her Success Academy charter schools for the day so her students, teachers, and families could attend a political rally. Alan Singer wonders why this is permitted? The students, the staff, and families are used as pawns to advance Moskowitz’s political goals. Certainly, the children don’t need more charters. They already attend one. They can’t attend two or three. Eva is using them for her own benefit.
Who pays the bills? Families for Excellent schools. They are not the families of the students. They are billionaires and hedge fund managers whose excellent schools are private and have a tuition of $50,000 or more. You surely won’t see them hanging out with the children at these political rallies.
Face it: the kids are pawns being cynically used to advance adult interests.
In New Jersey, David M. Aderhold, the superintendent of schools of West Windsor-Plainsboro, called out Governor Christie’s “reforms” for the frauds they are. He says it is time to fight back. I add him to the honor roll for his independence and support for children and public education.
“The unspoken message is that the New Jersey Department of Education and the New Jersey State Board of Education believe they can change educational outcomes by implementing a system of standardized tests, data points, and accountability measures. They believe that if you create “valid” and “reliable” assessment instruments, that all students will magically succeed. Through a blind allegiance to standardized assessments, the NJDOE and NJSBOE have failed to provide the support, programs, and professional development that would work to ensure that all students succeed….
“As a community of parents and educators, we must come together to rebuff the politicization of public education and insist that these changes are met with opposition and disapproval. We cannot remain on the sidelines as upheaval from the politics of education clouds what is best for our children. We must remain vigilant and centered on the essence of our work, which is to ensure the highest-quality educational experience for all students.”
Not long ago, I established a fund at my alma mater, Wellesley College, to encourage the study of public education in the United States. The fund gives support to students for research and internships; many of them are preparing to teach. The most important public activity of the fund is to present an annual public lecture about public education. I gave the first lecture. The second annual Diane Silvers Ravitch 1960 Lecture will be given by the distinguished Finnish scholar Pasi Sahlberg.
If you live anywhere near Wellesley, which is near Boston, I hope you will attend.
The lecture will be October 13, 2016, at 7 pm at Alumnae Hall.
Pasi is a brilliant thinker and speaker. He spent the last two years teaching at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He has a broad and deep understanding of American education and international education.
Jim Horn has a website called “Schools Matter.” He opposes corporate reform, as I do.
I have never met him. I hear he doesn’t like me. I don’t know why. I thought we were fighting for the same goals.
The first time I became aware of his hostility was when he posted a photograph of me with the caption, “Nice face job, Diane.” Very puzzling as I have never had a facelift. Sexist too. I ignored him.
When Anthony Cody and I decided to create the Network for Public Education, aiming to build alliances among the many individuals and groups fighting against corporate reform, we selected a board and announced our existence. Horn emailed to say that he was going to attack us because we included a much admired NBCT African American teacher from Mississippi. Horn discovered that she had written an article praising merit pay. Many emails went back and forth among him, Anthony, and me. He decided not to poison us at our birth.
But he has an intense and personal animus towards me. Again, I can’t explain it. I don’t know why.
I thought I would share with you his latest blast, which was (I assume) a response to my post about how progressive movements die when they turn on one another. In the post, I urged us all to work together towards our shared agenda. Apparently he is angry that I supported ESSA; I supported it because it eliminated NCLB (No Child Left Behind), AYP (Adequate Yearly Progress), and VAM (value-added modeling or test-based teacher evaluations). If ESSA had not passed, NCLB would still be federal law, and John King would have the authoritarian power that Arne Duncan had over the nation’s schools. If I were writing the law, I would have eliminated all federal mandates for accountability and testing, but I was not writing the law.
Despite what he writes, we are on the same side of the issues. Like him, I oppose standardized testing, other than for sampling purposes. I oppose evaluation of teachers by test scores. I oppose segregation. I support equitable and ample funding of schools. I support teacher professionalism and collective bargaining. I support public education and oppose privatization. Yet he says I am his enemy. He wants us to fail.
This is what Jim Horn wrote yesterday:
Today’s Communique to the Ravitch Forces
After what seems to me to have been a pretty effective skirmish, the Ravitch forces have climbed out of their tent at their permanent Basecamp, stomping the ground and waving their, um, whatevers. For those Ravitch acolytes who are not too drunk on revenge to read, here’s something to ponder, as I am working on a next book today and don’t have time to attend to your whining.
In everything I have seen from D. Ravitch and the band of intellectual eunuchs who comprise the NPE echo chamber, a theme stands out, which is that we cannot afford to fight among ourselves, that allies cannot be ripped asunder, that we must stick together in the same tent, blah blah. So let me speak to Diane directly here, and I hope that all of her disciples will read this carefully.
The problem is, Diane, our goals are not the same. My goals are ending testing accountability in all forms, ending segregated classrooms in all forms, and ending corporate education reform in all forms. I can’t work toward those goals with any effect while misleaders like you and the union suits are cutting deals on ESSA to guarantee another generation of testing accountability, segregated classrooms, and corporate control. Have you read the history of NCLB?
We are on different sides of these issues, regardless of how much braying and foot stomping you are able to stir up. We are not allies. I am your enemy. Get used to it.
Critics of Competency Based Education have concluded that the fight must shift away from opt out to a fight against online testing. Unfortunately they go on to say that people like the leaders of New York’s historic opt out movement are dupes or are purposely shielding the corporate agenda.
Anthony has long been a critic of CBE.
He writes:
I do not see things unfolding this way. First of all, opting out of a state test is an act of civil disobedience. It is an act of individual and collective defiance of a top-down mandate.
Powerful interests NEVER want people to engage in acts of defiance. Once such acts are successful, people learn that they have a power that system managers and the ruling class do not want them to have. Bill Gates and company are literally spending hundreds of millions of dollars trying to kill the opt out movement.
Opting out is a transcendent act of defiance that opens the door to all sorts of defiance of the controls and systems we are expected to engage in. It should not be abandoned. It should evolve. It has been necessary to Opt Out of annual standardized tests – and it still is, as long as they are being used to rank and sort students and teachers. Now it may be l be necessary to opt out of excessive screen time. Opt out of online systems that track and share highly sensitive personal information about your children with for-profit vendors, or others who are using this information not to educate them but to market to them and treat them as consumes. Parents Across America has posted a useful toolkit and opt out form.
The state annual test may or may not be dead in a few years. In any case, the spirit of Opting Out will live on, and the success of the movement is inspiring parents to take control into their own hands and resist abusive practices. The movement of defiance, one of non-compliance, is growing, and that spirit should live on as long as technology and tests are used to manipulate and control teachers and students against their wills and against their best interests.
The New York State Allies for Public Education have already made an enormous difference. Governor Cuomo has gone silent about “reform.” The chancellor of the State Board of Regents stepped down instead of running for another term (she was a big supporter of high-stakes testing, VAM, and charters). The new chancellor is a friend of NYSAPE. The whole tone in the state has changed and will keep changing because the parents are not quitting. They will keep opting out until they get the changes they seek in Common Core and testing.
Mary Holden was thinking of starting her own blog. She had plenty to say. But she want ready. Then she retired as a teacher, and she realized there is no time like the present.
Our reader Jack Covey watched the Boston Globe debate about Question 2 closely and reports here, with links. Question 2 seeks to add a dozen charter schools every year without end. The state board already demonstrated in Brockton that it is willing to impose a charter school even if the community opposes it. The “choice” is made by the state board, not by parents.
Charter critics complained that charter boards have few if any parents of the children or members of the local community on them. The charter advocate explained that it’s a very good thing to have school boRds run by financiers because democracy is the problem. Charters can simply close if they don’t produce test scores. Of course, we know that’s not true. There are thousands of charter schools that have lower scores than the neighborhood public schools, and the charters are not closed. As many readers on this blog have noted, scores are not the only or best way to measure the value of community public schools. Closing public schools doesn’t help them, and a policy of charter churn doesn’t help children or communities.
What the charter advocates seem to say is that affluent communities can have democracy, but poor communities are not ready for self-governance. I think that’s called colonialism.
How embarrassing for Massachusetts that the “reformers” there rely on the Waltons and Wall Street to extinguish democracy in black communities.
At one point, the Female Moderator cites how,
with rare exceptions almost none of the Board
Members for charter schools are parents, or
live in the community. Instead, they are
corporate and financial executives who are
not elected by onyone. The charters are in
low income communities, and everyone on
their boards of directors are businesspeople
from upscale communities. Therefore, there’s
no mechanism by which thisparents or taxpaying
citizens in the communities in which these
charters are locatedcan execute any kind of
decision-making power, or that those charter
boards can be held accountable.
The response from Charter Lady Marty Walz is
basically.
“So what?”
… or that such a “local control” democratic system —
via democratically elected school boards — sucks
and should be done away with anyway.
BOSTON GLOBE:
“It is local control that got us into this situation that we’re in, where tens of thousands of children are being left behind by their local district schools,” said Marty Walz, a former Democratic state representative, fending off a question about the large number of corporate and financial executives who sit on the boards of Massachusetts charter schools.
MARTY WALZ:
“The reason charter schools exist is because local school districts have wholly failed to educate far too many children in this state,”
Walz said at the debate, which featured an audience of partisans hissing and clapping at various points.
Walz then says that the accountability mechanism — the only one needed, she claims — is that if the charter schools fail to perform, they can be closed. That’s ultimate accountability, she argues.
That’s like recommending the Death Penalty — going only to that — rather than fixing the schools while the schools are alive.
I guess the response to that is …
“How about parents and taxpaying citizens being able to hold charter governance accountable WHILE THOSE CHARTER SCHOOLS ARE STILL IN OPERATION… before the “ultimate accountability” of closing those schools occur?
… is complaining about. The scenario that Charter Lady Walz is defending and promoting creates a scenario for major corruption and egregious mis-management … and discovery and correction of such malfeasance can only happen IF— and it’s a big IF — the charter industry operates with some transparency in regards to the tax money is is spending, which they, as a rule, most certainly DO NOT. Indeed, it’s a big IF because those same charter folks fight tooth-and-nail any attempts to audit their books, or their admissions and expulsions policies, etc.
Eva at Success Academy has sued multiple times to prevent any examination of her organization.
The whole controversy regarding funding S.A.’s Pre-K is about this.
KIPP got Arne Duncan’s Ed. department’s okay to hide all this information from the public
The Center for Media and Democracy’s PR Watch reported that the KIPP charter chain received permission from Arne Duncan and U.S. Dept. of Education one that can only be discovered and corrected AFTER these outrages occur.
Here’s that part from the debate:
(34:30 – )
(34:30 – )
FEMALE MODERATOR: “Representative Walz, for some who oppose Question 2, one of the issues that it comes down to is this, and I’m going to paraphrase Carol Burris, she’s a former New York high school, and she says:
CAROL BURRIS:
” ‘The democratic governance of our public schools is a American tradition worth saving.’
” … and then the Annenberg institute for school reform at Brown University earlier this year released a study, and they analyzed EVERY board for EVERY charter school in the state of Massachusetts. and they found that ..
“31% of trustees (school board members) statewide are affiliated with the financial services or corporate sector. Only 14% were parents.
“60% of the charter boards had NO parent representation on their boards WHATSOEVER.
“Those that DID were largely confined to charter schools that served MOSTLY WHITE students.
“Here’s an example: City on a Hill (Charter) Schools in Roxbury — again, this is according to the Annenberg Institute Report — has schools in Roxbury and New Bedford, (has a) 14-member board, trustees for all three of those schools.
“ONLY ONE member of the board lives in New Bedford. Three live in Boston, but NONE in Roxgury. The rest live in (upscale communities) Brookline, Cambridge, Cohasset, and Hingham.
“So they (at Annenberg) ask:
” ‘How can those charter schools be considered locally controlled and locally accountable?’ ”
Charter Lady Walz responds by claiming — and winning applause from the charter folks stacked in the audience — that local control through school boards has “wholly failed’ to produce quality schools and educate children, and need to be wiped out. Those in the audience are cheering the end of democracy? Really?
Wait. Isn’t Massachusetts the highest achieving state in the U.S.? Really? She says that democratically-governed schools with elected school boards in Massachusetts have “wholly failed” students? Really?
At another point in the debate, Charter Lady claims their group is about improving all types of schools, but here she is recommending replacing all of them with privately-managed charter schools. So which is it?
The Moderator interrupts by insisting that Charter Lady answer the question about accountability, and Charter Lady brings up the only method needed — the Death Penalty AND THAT’S IT…. but no accountability while those schools are actually open. And we need to watch John Oliver again to find out how well that works out:
Rhode Island voters elected several progressive candidates to the legislature.
Most startling was that a public school teacher in Providence beat the House Majority leader!
The votes were close, but a victory is a victory.
Rhode Island is a small but important state. In 2010, Central Falls fired every employee in the high school, with the support of the State Superintendent Deborah Gist (now superintendent in Tulsa). Rhode Island win a Race to the Top grant. The Governor supports corporate reform.
Robert Jackson is a great champion for public schools. He is running for State Senate in District 13 in New York City. In this post, parent activist Tory Frye explains why you should help him, work for him, and vote for him. Tory Frye is long-time public school parent activist in Upper Manhattan who served as an elected parent member of Community Education Council in District 6 and two School Leadership Teams. Robert Jackson is running for the Democratic nomination this tomorrow, September 13, in NY Senate District 31, which includes parts of the Upper West Side, Harlem, Inwood and Washington Heights. The New York Daily News reported just today that one of his opponents in the Democratic primary has received more than $100,000 from hedge fund managers who are Republicans and who support more charters. Isn’t it amazing that som many wealthy people, who don’t send their children to public schools, are so deeply committed to privatizing the public schools?
Tory Frye writes:
For weeks I have been getting glossy brochures from Micah Lasher who us running for NY State Senate. These tout his devotion to public education, in particular his aversion to high stakes standardized testing and his desire to direct money owed by New York State to NYC public school students.
Here’s the thing; actually it’s two things.
First, the whole reason the state owes NYC public school students money is because his opponent in this senate race, ROBERT JACKSON, led the lawsuit in the 1990s (!!!) that established that the state was denying our kids the money they needed to get a decent public education. The settlement of the Campaign for Fiscal Equity established that the state owed our children billions; in fact, New York state STILL owes city students 2.2 (maybe 3) BILLION dollars! And it is all because Robert Jackson sued the State back then.
Second, Micah Lasher built his career promoting policies that totally UNDERMINE public education in NYC! He was the chief lobbyist for Joel Klein at the NYC Department of Education and then for Mayor Bloomberg when their approach to improving education included: 1) closing schools (labeling them and their students “failures”); 2) using standardized tests to hold children back and evaluate/fire teachers (despite ZERO evidence of efficacy); 3) cutting school budgets and threatening teacher lay-offs; 4) co-locating charter schools with public schools (using a flawed formula for space allocation that had students getting services in closets and hallways) and 5) pushing for a version of mayoral control over our schools that vested all power in one man, Mayor Bloomberg, and none for parents or community members
Lasher then went on to lead StudentsFirstNY, the state affiliate of a national organization (started by none other than Michelle Rhee) that sought to increase the numbers of charter schools, demand space in already crowded public schools, evaluate teachers, students and schools primarily by means of standardized test scores and all sort of corporate education “reforms” that act only to undermine actual public schools and open the “industry” to privatization.
And Lasher has left ALL of this off his campaign literature. Indeed, he has scrubbed any mention of his year running StudentsFirstNY as its first executive director from his biography in LinkedIn.
And what was Robert Jackson doing during these five years? What was he speaking out for ALL that time? Well, I went through my District 6 public school records and my Facebook feed and can attest to the fact that Robert Jackson stood by and actively advocated on behalf of Washington Heights and Inwood public schools – but more importantly for all NYC public school students and families; for example:
• June 2011: fighting against Mayor Bloomberg’s threatened school-based budget cuts and teacher lay-offs.
• June 2012: addressing and trying to limit the damage done by high-stakes standardized testing
• October 2012: fighting Bloomberg’s plan to close PS 132, the Juan Pablo Duarte school in District 6.
• May 2013: advocating for protections of student data, including private health and disability information, that would have been sold and monetized via inBloom.
• June 2013: questioning why the Bloomberg administration was pushing to remove school attendance zones in District 6, a nearly 100 block district, making it likely that many parents would no longer have a neighborhood public school within walking distance that their children had a right to attend;
• May 2014: demanding that the Mother Cabrini Educational Complex be rented to house Mott Hall, the ONLY middle school for gifted students in District 6 currently occupying a dilapidated and antiquated building.
• June 2014: demanding that the DOE remove trailers from PS 48 in District 6.
• October 2014: educating parents about their children’s constitutional rights to a sound, basic education including equitable funding and smaller classes.
In short, Robert Jackson has been a strong and consistent advocate for fighting with parents so that our public schools will be preserved and strengthened, while Lasher has advocated for closing them and turning them into corporate-led charters.
There is another candidate in the race, Marisol Alcantara, who also supports the expansion of charter schools and whose campaign has been funded almost exclusively from the IDC, the renegade breakaway group of Democratic Senators who consistently vote with the Republicans, allowing them to keep control of the State Senate. The Republicans running the State Senate (whose campaigns are ironically now being funded by the hedge-fund billionaires behind StudentsFirstNY) have consistently voted against fairly funding NYC public schools and voted for encouraging unlimited charter school expansion, which are already draining more than a billion dollars from the DOE budget and taking previous space from our overcrowded public schools.
The choice is clear: if you care about our public schools and our children’s right to a quality education, you must support Robert Jackson in Tuesday’s primaries.
–Tory Frye is long-time public school parent activist in in Upper Manhattan who served as an elected parent member of Community Education Council Six and two School Leadership Teams in District Six. Robert Jackson is running for the Democratic nomination this Tuesday, September 13 in NY Senate District 31, which includes parts of the Upper West Side, Harlem, Inwood and Washington Heights.
