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Texas: School District Votes to Delete Textbook Chapters on Climate Change, Cultural Diversity, Vaccines

By dianeravitch
June 18, 2024 //
37

The school board of the Cypress-Fairbanks district (Cy-Fair) in Texas voted to delete chapters they didn’t like from textbooks in science. Science teachers in the district were taken aback.

Cy-Fair is located in the Houston suburbs and is one of the largest districts in the state.

Elizabeth Sander of The Houston Chronicle wrote:

The former science coordinator at Cypress-Fairbanks ISD was “appalled” as she watched the conservative stronghold on the school board vote to remove 13 chapters from science, health and education textbooks last month, scrapping in just minutes countless hours of work done by both state and local textbook review committees.

“Chapters are not independent entities. They’re put in an order purposefully, and they build off of prior knowledge, and they reference information in prior areas,” said Debra Hill, who has 40 years of experience in science education. “It’s like saying, ‘I’m going to take off the chapter on adding and subtracting, and we’ll just skip ahead to multiplication.’”

The material that was deleted will be covered by state tests.

One Cy Falls High School teacher, who served on the review committee for the earth systems course materials, has filed a grievance with the board that will be discussed at Thursday’s board workshop, according to information shared on social media by Trustee Julie Hinaman, the lone opposing vote on removing the chapters. Critics question whether students will get all the information the state intends — and will test for — in a last-minute effort to replace the materials. 

The earth science textbook had three entire chapters removed, titled, “Earth Systems and Cycles,” “Mineral and Energy Resources” and “Climate and Climate Change.”

Other content removed from the textbooks included chapters on cultural diversity, vaccines, COVID-19 and climate change. Courses impacted include education, health science, biology and environmental science.

Cy-Fair ISD’s Chief Academic Officer Linda Macias assured board members when they made the vote in May that it would be possible for their curriculum staff to make these changes, even as the staff has been slashed in budget cuts for the 2024-2025 school year. 

But Hill isn’t so sure it will actually be possible for Cy-Fair teachers to teach the required Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills next year, she said. 

Creating a new curriculum is hard enough, and the district must also provide students with materials that pertain to every single science TEK, she said. Cy-Fair’s curriculum staff and other educators may be responsible for creating their own textbook pages to replace the ones that were deleted, a process that could take countless hours outside of instruction that could drive teachers from the profession altogether, she said.

Plus, Hill hasn’t seen any clarity on who would approve the new instructional materials. The board could theoretically reject new chapters created by the district if it included too much of the type of climate change material that the deleted textbook chapters covered, Hill worried.

“If you want to drive teachers out of education, this is what you should do to them,” she said. “I am just very afraid that students are not going to get access to accurate, TEKS-aligned content.”

Last month, the school board voted to eliminate discussions of vaccines and other topics, while cutting the budget and eliminating 600 positions.

More than a dozen chapters including content on vaccines, cultural diversity, climate change, depopulation and other topics deemed controversial by conservative Cypress-Fairbanks ISD trustees will be removed from textbooks in the state’s third largest school system for the 2024-2025 school year.

Trustees voted 6-1 late Monday to omit the material, after an hourslong discussion about a $138 million budget deficit that is forcing the district to eliminate 600 positions, including 42 curriculum coaches, dozens of librarians and 278 teaching positions.

What were the school board members thinking? Did they think if you don’t teach about climate change, it doesn’t exist?

Who will remove the chapters? Will the publisher? Will teachers cut them out of the textbooks? Will they paste the pages together?

A big thank-you to Trustee Julie Hinaman, who believes in education, not censorship or indoctrination.

Categories Bigotry, Censorship, Curriculum, Environment, Extremism, Fascism, Freedom to Read, History, Ignorance, Stupid, Texas

BREAKING NEWS: Federal Judge in New Hampshire Strikes Down “Divisive Concepts” Law

By dianeravitch
May 28, 2024 //
7

Good news in New Hampshire! Federal Judge Paul Barbadoro threw out the state’s “divisive concepts” law, which banned the teaching of anything that might be “divisive.” The same kind of law has been used in other states to ban the teaching of historical facts and literature about Blacks and gays. The judge declared it was too vague to be Constitutional and created confusion about what was and was not allowed in the classroom. In an ironic twist, the law that censors teaching and curriculum is titled “The Law Against Discrimination.”

Nancy West of InDepthNH.com wrote about the decision, which certainly must have upset State Commissioner Frank Edelblut and Governor Chris Sununu, as well as the state’s busybody Moms for Liberty.

West writes:

CONCORD – A federal judge on Tuesday struck down the state’s controversial ‘divisive concepts’ law, which had its roots in an executive order by former President Trump, that limited how teachers can discuss issues such as race, sexual orientation and gender identity with students.

The law, passed in a budget rider in 2021, created a chilling atmosphere in classrooms around the state with teachers unsure of what they could discuss about those issues without fear of being suspended or even banned from teaching altogether in the state.

The four banned concepts include:  That one’s age, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, race, creed, or color is inherently superior or inferior; that an individual, by virtue of age, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, race, creed, color…is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously; that an individual should be discriminated against  because of his or her age, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, race, creed, color; and that people of one age, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, race, creed, color…cannot and should not attempt to treat others without regard to age, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, race, creed, color…., according to the judge’s ruling.

In New Hampshire it’s called the Law Against Discrimination and makes it unlawful for a public employer to “teach, advocate, instruct, or train” the banned concepts to “any employee, student, service recipient, contractor, staff member, inmate, or any other individual or group.”

U.S. District Court Judge Paul Barbadoro ruled the law is unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment because it is too vague.

In the suit filed against Education Commissioner Frank Edelblut and the Department of Education by the National Education Association of New Hampshire and the American Federation of Teachers of New Hampshire, Barbadoro sided with the teachers and granted their motion for summary judgment.

  “The Amendments are viewpoint-based restrictions on speech that do not provide either fair warning to educators of what they prohibit or sufficient standards for law enforcement to prevent arbitrary and discriminatory enforcement. Thus, the Amendments violate the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution,” Barbadoro wrote…

The controversy escalated after Edelblut posted a page of the Department of Education website to file complaints against teachers for allegedly discriminating and a group called Moms for Liberty offered a $500 reward “for the person that first successfully catches a public school teacher breaking this law.”

Barbadoro wrote: “RSA § 193:40, IV provides that a “[v]iolation of this section by an educator shall be considered a violation of the educator code of conduct that justifies disciplinary sanction by the state board of education.

“An ‘educator’ is defined as ‘a professional employee of any school district whose position requires certification by the state board [of education].’ RSA § 193:40, V. Potential disciplinary sanctions include reprimand, suspension, and revocation of the educator’s certification.

“In other words, an educator who is found to have taught or advocated a banned concept may lose not only his or her job, but also the ability to teach anywhere in the state,” Barbadoro wrote…

Barbadoro was critical of Edelblut’s two op-ed pieces in the New Hampshire Union Leader.

“Despite the fact that the articles offer minimal interpretive guidance, Department of Education officials have referred educators to them as a reference point. For example, after showing two music videos to her class as part of a unit on the Harlem Renaissance, Alison O’Brien, a social studies teacher at Windham High School, was called into a meeting with her principal and informed that she was being investigated by the Department of Education in response to a parent’s complaint.

“Department of Education Investigator Richard Farrell recommended that Windham’s administrators consult Edelblut’s April 2022 opinion article to understand the context of the investigation against O’Brien, without otherwise explaining why O’Brien’s lesson warranted investigation. After witnessing her experience, O’Brien’s colleagues grew anxious about facing similar actions,” Barbadoro wrote.

What did she do wrong? She doesn’t know.

Edelblut, the state’s top education official, homeschooled his children. He was appointed by Governor Sununu. The governor likes to pretend he is a Republican moderate. Don’t be fooled.

Judge Barbadoro was appointed by President George H.W. Bush.

Open the link to finish reading the article.

.

Categories Bigotry, Censorship, Corruption, Cruelty, Curriculum, Democracy, Disruption, Extremism, Freedom to Read, Gender, History, Lies, Literature, New Hampshire

Texas: Book Banning Gets Nuttier, Along with Efforts to Ban DEI in Higher Education

By dianeravitch
April 23, 2024 //
16

When PEN America released its latest national report on book banning, the state with the worst record was Florida. If you hear any bragging about test scores in Florida, think twice. Educated people typically don’t fear books; uneducated people do.

Chris Tomlinson, columnist for The Houston Chronicle, reports that book banning is getting more absurd in Texas. Why do school board members think they can censor ideas and images that are widely available on the Internet? At the same time, the state has barred public universities from administering programs that promote “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

Tomlinson writes:

The Fort Bend Independent School District superintendent would have to ban department store catalogs and National Geographic magazines if the school board goes through with its latest book ban measure.

My colleague Elizabeth Sander reports that school trustees debated giving the superintendent sole authority over library books and textbooks, mandating that none “stimulate sexual desire” among students. 

Have none of them encountered an adolescent? The only books left would center on mathematics; even then, geometry would be iffy.

Fort Bend ISD is not the only public school system in which activists have seized control. Parents are challenging books at Lake Travis ISD, and a citizen panel will review books at Montgomery County public libraries, not librarians.

Nationwide, PEN America, a nonprofit that advocates for free expression, this week reported more than 4,000 instances of book banning during the first half of the current school year, more than in the entire previous 2022-23 school year.

Conservative book banners continue to shock and dismay with their absurdity, anti-intellectualism and renunciation of reality. Before there was online porn and young adult books about LGBTQ love, there was Sears Roebuck selling lingerie and National Geographic photographing semi-nude indigenous women.

Book bans don’t stop at nudity and sexuality; extremists are also targeting ideas they don’t like. For example, teachers may not discuss anything that might make a child uncomfortable lest they face a penalty under state law.

If my fourth grade teacher were subject to the same law, she could have lost her job for telling me enslavers brutalized the African Americans they held in bondage, contradicting my grandfather, who taught me our ancestors were “good slaveholders.”

Lately, it seems any state employee who acknowledges racism in our nation’s history or our present will lose their jobs. The University of Texas is cleaning house, firing dozens of educators dedicated to helping people from disadvantaged communities succeed in higher education.

UT-Austin President Jay Hartzell says the ideological purge is necessary to protect the long-term outlook of the institution. His shameful cowardice in the face of fascist bullies will forever mark him as a collaborator, not a hero.

Free speech and decades of progress toward a more honest assessment of who we are and where we come from are under attack. The wannabe oppressors are organized and winning, and yet, too many of us still don’t take the threat to our liberty seriously.

Categories Censorship, Curriculum, Democracy, Extremism, Freedom to Read, Texas

DeSantis Signs Law to Start Teaching About Communism in Kindergarten

By dianeravitch
April 17, 2024 //
60

In Florida, it is never too soon to learn about the dangers of Communism! Governor DeSantis just signed a bill to teach about Communism in schools from K-12.

Some questions:

1) Will students learn about the dangers of Communism or the dangers of dictatorship?

2)Will students learn only about Communism only in Cuba or will they also learn about it in Russia, China, Vietnam, and Cambodia, and elsewhere?

3) Will they learn about the dangers of fascism and study the Nazis and their ideology?

4) Will students learn about dictatorship, whether Communist or fascist, and the ideology and practices they have in common, e.g. censorship of books and public media, suppression of dissent, jailing of dissidents, subservience of the judicial and legal authorities to the dictator, control of what is taught in schools and universities, persecution of ideological enemies, etc.? Assignment of books such as Brave New World, 1984, and Animal Farm. Will students be allowed to study examples of censorship and suppression in our society?

Ryan Dailey writes in The Orlando Sentinel:

Flanked by veterans who served in the Bay of Pigs invasion, Gov. Ron DeSantis on Wednesday signed a measure that will lead to the history of communism being taught from kindergarten to the 12th grade in public schools.


“We’re going to tell the truth about the evils of communism,” DeSantis said at the bill signing in Hialeah Gardens.


State lawmakers overwhelmingly approved the measure (SB 1264) during the 2024 legislative session that ended last month. Under the bill, lessons on the history of communism will be added to required instruction in public schools starting in the 2026-27 school year.


The lessons would have to be “age appropriate and developmentally appropriate” and incorporate various topics related to communism, its history in the United States, including tactics used by communists.

“Atrocities committed in foreign countries under the guidance of communism,” also would be required as part of the lessons.


“All of this will be spread across the curriculum K through 12,” said Education Commissioner Manny Diaz Jr. The Department of Education will draw up academic standards for the lessons.


DeSantis signed the bill on the 63rd anniversary of the Bay of Pigs Invasion and was joined at the bill-signing event by people who fought in the invasion in an attempt to overthrow the Fidel Castro regime…

Florida students are already taught about communism in high-school social studies classes and in a seventh-grade civics and government course. A high-school U.S. government class required for graduation also includes 45 minutes of instruction on “Victims of Communism Day.”

Categories Curriculum, DeSantis, Florida

Peter Greene: How to Ease the Burden of Teachers Who Are Overworked

By dianeravitch
April 17, 2024 //
43

Peter Greene was a classroom teacher for 39 years, and he knows that teachers are overworked. There are not enough hours in the day for them to meet all their obligations. He considers in this post what to do. He certainly does not think that AI or scripted curriculum is the answer.

He writes:

When I was ploughing through the Pew Center survey of teachers, I thought of Robert Pondiscio.

Specifically, it was the part about the work itself. 84% of teachers report that there’s not enough time in the day to get their work done, and among those, 81% said that a major reason was they just have too much work (another 17% said this was a minor reason, meaning that virtually no overstretched teachers thought it wasn’t part of the problem at all). The other reasons, like non-teaching duties, didn’t even come close.

Meanwhile, in another part of the world this weekend, Pondiscio was presenting on something that has been a consistent theme in his work– Teaching is too hard for mere mortals, and we need a system that allows teachers to focus on teaching. 

Pondiscio has long argued that some aspects of teaching need to be taken off teachers’ plates so that they can put more of their energy into actual classroom instruction. I’ve always pushed back, but maybe I need to re-examine the issue a bit. 

Plugging 47 Extension Cords Into One Power Strip

Certainly every teacher learns that there’s never enough. One of my earliest viral hits was this piece about how nobody warns teachers that they will have to compromise and cut corners somewhere. It touched many, many nerves. We all have stories. My first year of teaching I worked from 7 AM to 11 PM pretty much every day. I had a gifted colleague who couldn’t bring herself to compromise on workload, so once every nine weeks grading period, she took a personal day just to sit at home and grade and enter papers. And let’s be honest–being the teacher who walks out the door as the bell rings, and who carries nothing out the door with them–that does not win you the admiration of your colleagues.

Being overworked is part of the gig, and some of us wear our ability to manage that workload as a badge of honor, like folks who are proud of surviving an initiation hazing and insist that the new recruits should suck it up and run the same gauntlet. On reflection, I must admit this may not be entirely healthy, especially considering the number of young teachers who blame themselves because they can’t simply gut their way past having overloaded circuits. 

There’s also resistance because the “let’s give teachers a break” argument is used by 1) vendors with “teacher-assisting” junk to sell and 2) folks who want to deprofessionalize teaching. That second group likes the notion of “teacher-proof” programs, curriculum in a box that can be delivered by any dope (“any dope” constitutes a large and therefor inexpensive labor pool).

We could lighten the teacher load, the argument goes, by reducing their agency and autonomy. Not in those exact words, of course. That would make it obvious why that approach isn’t popular.

Lightening the Load

So what are the ways that the burden of teaching could be reduced to a size suitable for actual mortals. 

Some of the helps are obvious. Reduce the number of non-teaching duties that get laid on teachers. Study halls. Cafeteria duty. Minute-by-minute surveillance and supervision of students. 

Some of the helps are obvious to teachers, yet difficult to implement. Most schools has a variety of policies and procedures surrounding clerical tasks that are set up to make life easier for people in the front office, not teachers in the classroom (e.g. collecting students excuses for absence, managing lunch money, etc). Then there’s the tendency to see new programs adopted at the state or district level with a cavalier, “We’ll just have teachers do that” as if there are infinite minutes in the teacher day and adding one more thing won’t be a big deal. Imagine a world in which preserving teacher time was a major sacred priority. 

Some of the helps would be hard to sell because they would cost real money. Quickest way to reduce teacher workload? Smaller classes. Or more non-teaching hours in the day for teachers to use for prep and paperwork (hard sell because so many boards believe that a teacher is only working when she’s in front of students). These are both tough because they require hiring more staff which 1) costs a bunch of money and 2) requires finding more of the qualified teachers that we already don’t have enough of.

So what are we left with?

Hiring aids to do strictly clerical stuff like scoring objective tests and putting grades into the gradebook. There are also plenty of folks trying to sell the idea of suing AI to grade the non-objective stuff like essays; this is a terrible idea for many reasons. I will admit that I was always resistant to the idea of even letting someone record grades for me, because recording grades was part of how I got a sense of how students were doing. Essentially it was a way to go over every single piece of graded work. But that would be a way to reclaim some time.

But after all that, we’ve come down the biggie, and the thing that Pondiscio has always argued is a huge lift for mere mortals–

Curriculum and instructional planning.

The Main Event

As a classroom teacher, the mere suggestion of being required to use canned curriculum made my hackles climb right up on my high dudgeon pony. For me, designing the lessons was part of any important loop. Teach the material. Take the temperature of the students and measure success. Develop the next lesson based on that feedback. That’s for daily instruction. A larger, longer, slower loop tied into larger scale feedback plus a constant check on what we’d like to include in the program. 

I like to think that I was pretty good at instructional design. But I must also admit that not everyone is, and that teachers who aren’t can create a host of issues. I will also fly my old fart flag to say that the last twenty years have produced way too many neo-teachers who were taught that if you design your instruction about the Big Standardized Test (maybe using select pieces of the state standards as a guide) you’re doing the job. I don’t want to wander down this rabbit, but I disagree, strenuously. 

So is there a place for some sort of high-quality instructional design and curriculum support for mere mortal teachers. Yes. Well, yes, but.

While I think a school should have a consistent culture and set of values, I think a building full of teachers who work in a wide variety of styles and approaches and techniques is by far the best way to go. Students will grow up to encounter a wide variety of styles and approaches in the world; why should they not find that in school (and with that variety, a better chance of finding a teacher with whom they click)?

Please open the link to finish reading.

Categories Curriculum, Education Reform, Teachers and Teaching

SAVE THE DATE: The Ravitch Lecture at Wellesley Is April 18, This Thursday!

By dianeravitch
April 16, 2024 //
12

All are welcome to a very important lecture at Wellesley College in Wellesley, Massachusetts. Admission is free. Join me!

The speaker is a pioneer of critical race theory.

Professor Soo Hong, chair of the Education Department at Wellesley, released the following announcement.

We are thrilled to announce that our 2024 Ravitch Lecture in Education will be presented by Professor Patricia Williams ’72, University Distinguished Professor of Law and Humanities at Northeastern University. Professor Williams’s talk is titled, “Burying the Bodies: Book-Banning and the Legacy of Anti-Literacy Laws in Constructing Erasures of History.”

This is a topic that feels relevant now more than ever. 

The lecture will be held on Thursday, April 18, 4:30 PM in Jewett Auditorium. Please share the details of this event widely!

************************************************************

Description of “Burying the Bodies: Book-Banning and the Legacy of Anti-Literacy Laws in Constructing Erasures of History” 
We live in an oddly contradictory moment: politicians who position themselves as supporters of “absolute” freedom of speech simultaneously enact laws that restrict access to books about race, gender, or critical theory, and seek to constrain conversations about diversity, equity, and inclusion. There have always been “culture wars” in America—it is not surprising that conversations about traumatic histories and contested historical perspectives might be fractious. In a civil society, we commit to arguing our way to consensus, however noisily or uncomfortably, and even if it takes generations. But it is the mark of an uncivil—or authoritarian—society when we find ourselves without the right to speak, hear, write, publish, dissent, or share common space even in our disagreement. The First Amendment rightly allows us to curtail speech that poses an “imminent threat of physical harm.” But recent “anti-woke” laws banish from public spaces books and ideas that merely might inspire “shame,” “guilt,” or “discomfort.” This lecture will ponder the conceptual chasm between those two notions of constraint upon speech. What power imbalance, what uses of force are rationalized in erasing whole histories from collective contemplation? What civic dispossession is enacted when certain lives or lived narratives are discounted as intolerable, unknowable–whose mere recounting is silenced as illegal?

Wellesley Logo

Soo Hong

The lecture will be taped and available online at a later time.

Categories Bigotry, Censorship, Corruption, Cruelty, Curriculum, Democracy, Disruption, Education Reform, Extremism, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, Freedom to Read, Racism

Bob Shepherd: A Review of a Review of “Slaying Goliath”

By dianeravitch
April 9, 2024 //
16

Forgive me for posting two reviews of my last book, which was published on January 20, 2020.

As I explained in the previous post, I did not see either of these reviews until long after they appeared in print. Slaying Goliath appeared just as COVID was beginning to make its mark, only a few weeks before it was recognized as a global pandemic. In writing the book, I wanted to celebrate the individuals and groups that demonstrated bravery in standing up to the powerful, richly endowed forces that were determined to privatize their public schools through charters or vouchers.

America’s public schools had educated generations of young people who created the most powerful, most culturally creative, most dynamic nation on earth. Yet there arose a cabal of billionaires and their functionaries who were determined to destroy public schools and turn them into privately-managed schools and to turn their funding over to private and religious schools.

Having worked for many years inside the conservative movement, I knew what was happening. I saw where the money was coming from, and I knew that politicians had been won over (bought) by campaign contributions.

Publishing a book at the same time as a global pandemic terrifies the world and endangers millions of people is bad timing, for sure.

But the most hurtful blow to me and the book was a mean-spirited review in The New York Times Book Review. The NYTBR is unquestionably the most important review that a book is likely to get. Its readership is huge. A bad review is a death knell. That’s the review I got. The reviewer, not an educator or education journalist, hated the book. Hated it. I found her review hard to read because she seemed to reviewing a different book.

I was completely unaware that Bob Shepherd reviewed the review. I didn’t see it until two or three years after it appeared. He wrote what I felt, but I, as the author, knew that it was very bad form to complain, and I did not.

So I happily post Bob Shepherd’s review of the review here.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Common Core, Corporate Reform, Corruption, Curriculum, Dark Money, Democracy, DFER, Disruption, Education Industry, Failure, History, Hoax, Lies, Network for Public Education, Parent Groups, Privatization, Propaganda, Race to the Top, Racism, Religion, Segregation, Unions, Virtual Charter Schools, Vouchers, Walton Foundation

David C. Berliner and Gene V. Glass Review “Slaying Goliath”

By dianeravitch
April 9, 2024 //
15

I am almost four years late in discovering this review by two scholars for whom I have the greatest respect: David C. Berliner and Gene V. Glass.

I was happy to read this review because Slaying Goliath had a checkered fate. It was published in mid-January 2020. I went on a book tour, starting in Seattle. By mid-February, I made my last stop in West Virginia, where I met with teachers and celebrated the two-year anniversary of their strike, which shut down every school in the state.

As I traveled, news emerged of a dangerous “flu” that was rapidly spreading. It was COVID; by mid-March, the country was shutting down. No one wanted to read about the fight to save public schools or about its heroes. The news shifted, as it should have, to the panicked response to COVID, to the deaths of good people, to the overwhelmed hospitals and their overworked staff.

To make matters worse, the New York Times Book Review published a very negative review by someone who admired the “education reform” movement that I criticized. I thought of writing a letter to the editor but quickly dropped the idea. I wrote and rewrote my response to the review in my head, but not on paper.

Then, again by happenstance, I discovered that Bob Shepherd had reviewed the review of my book in The New York Times. He said everything that I wish I could have said but didn’t. His review was balm for my soul. Shepherd lacerated the tone and substance of the review, calling it an “uniformed, vituperative, shallow, amateurish ‘review.’” Which it was. His review of the review was so powerful that I will post it next.

Then, a few weeks ago, I found this review by Berliner and Glass.

The review begins:

Reviewed by Gene V Glass and David C. Berliner Arizona State University, United States

They wrote:

In a Post-Truth era, one must consider the source. 

In this case, the source is Diane Rose Silvers, the third of eight children of Walter Silverstein, a high school drop-out, and Ann Katz, a high school graduate. The Silvers were a middle-class Houston family, proprietors of a liquor store, and loyal supporters of FDR.

After graduation from San Jacinto High School, she enrolled in Wellesley College in September, 1956. Working as a “copy boy”for the Washington Post, Diane met Richard Ravitch, a lawyer working in the federal government and son of a prominent New York City family. They married on June 26,1960, in Houston, two weeks after Diane’s graduation from Wellesley. The couple settled in New York City, where Richard took employment in the family construction business. He eventually served as head of the Metropolitan Transit Authority and Lieutenant Governor in the 2000s, having been appointed by Democratic Governor David Paterson.

 Diane bore three sons, two of whom survived to adulthood. Diane and Richard ended their 26-year marriage in 1986. She had not been idle. For a period starting in 1961, Diane was employed by The New Leader, a liberal, anti-communist journal. She later earned a PhD in history of education from Columbia in 1975 under the mentorship of Lawrence Cremin.

Diane was appointed to the office of Assistant Secretary of Education, in the Department of Education by George H. W. Bush and later by Bill Clinton. In 1997, Clinton appointed her to the National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB), on which she served until 2004. 

Ravitch worked “… for many years in some of the nation’s leading conservative think tanks.

Read the full pdf here.

ravitch-reviewDownload
Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Billionaires, Broad Foundation, Charter Schools, Common Core, Corporate Reform, Curriculum, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Ethics, Failure, Funding, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, History, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Parents, Privatization, Ravitch, Diane, Resistance, School Choice, Standardized Testing, Students, Teacher Evaluations, Teachers, Walton Foundation

Houston: Democratic Legislators Demand an Investigation of Mike Miles’ Tactics

By dianeravitch
April 9, 2024 //
2

The Texas Education Agency, under Republican control, took over the entire Houston Independent School district last year because one high school—with disproportionate numbers of at-risk students—had low test scores for several years in a row. Even though that school, Wheatley High School, was showing marked signs of progress, State Commissioner Mike Morath, fired the elected school board and hired Mike Miles as superintendent with expansive powers and selected a hand-picked “board of managers.”

Morath, a software executive, was appointed by Governor Gregg Abbott, who surely enjoys punishing a mostly Black and Hispanic district that did not vote for him. Of course, Morath must know that state takeovers seldom lead to improvement. This is especially the case in a hostile takeover, like this one.

Houston Democrats are waking up and taking action. At last. How can they allow Gregg Abbott to do a hostile takeover of HISD and install a man with a grandiose sense of his own importance, a man who previously failed in Dallas? Given the Republican super-majority in the state and Abbott’s vengeful nature, there’s probably not much that can change his stranglehold over Houston’s public school students and teachers. But it’s always good to protest and make noise.

Several Houston-area Democratic legislators are calling for a formal hearing to address “potential violations of state law” in Houston ISD in the aftermath of the Texas Education Agency stripping elected leaders from the school district.

The lawmakers asked in a letter sent Friday that the House Committee on Public Education host a hearing to address reports of “unqualified, non-degree holding teachers” working in classrooms and a lack of accommodations for students with disabilities. They also requested independent research proving the benefits of state-appointed Superintendent Mike Miles’ New Education System. 

The request comes after the state takeover of HISD in March 2023 and the Texas Education Agency’s appointment of the Superintendent and nine members of the Board of Managers. Due to the takeover, the nine lawmakers who signed the letter said it is “imperative that the state assume full responsibility for HISD students and hold the board of managers accountable”

“As their duly elected State Representatives, we must hold a hearing to learn more about these concerning reports and efforts to subvert state laws and requirements,” the letter states.

Reps. Christina Morales, Ann Johnson, Jarvis Johnson, Penny Morales Shaw, Mary Ann Perez, Jon Rosentahl, Shawn Thierry, Hubert Vo and Gene Wu all signed the letter, which was addressed to Speaker of the Texas House Dade Phelan and the House education committee. Phelan and TEA did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the letter. 

“Teacher reports and parent concerns are uncovering troubling developments at our schools,” Morales wrote in a statement. “The community can no longer vote on who represents us on the school board, so we as the state representatives must hold the appointed board accountable.”

In a response to the letter, HISD said it was going to stay focused on “the critical work of serving students and families,” and it had already seen positive impacts for kids after implementing reforms.

“HISD has invited dozens of elected and community leaders into our schools to see the work happening first-hand,” the district wrote. “We are pleased to share our progress with any other leaders who want to better understand what’s happening in the schools.”

Miles has implemented the New Education System program, a controversial model that includes standardized curriculum, the conversion of libraries to Team Centers and courses focused on critical thinking and the “Science of Reading,” at 85 schools this year. The campuses also have longer hours, timed lessons, higher pay for educators and additional staff who support teachers.

“Teachers have expressed that some of our most at-risk students are not receiving the services and support that they legally have the right to receive,” lawmakers wrote. “They have also shared with us that their students feel discouraged and constantly berated by the continuous assessments and instructional method prescribed in the New Education System.”

According to the letter, the district has circumvented the law requiring teachers to obtain a bachelor’s degree, a certification and other requirements to work in a classroom by assigning certified teachers as the teacher of record for more than one classroom.

“These efforts are not only detrimental to the continued learning and development of our students, but also a violation of state law,” lawmakers said.

The Democratic lawmakers also said the district has shared plans with teachers and administrators to address a teacher shortage by hiring community college students as teacher apprentices and learning coaches. 

Under the NES model, teacher apprentices work with teachers to plan and implement lesson plans, provide instruction and support classroom management, and they can serve as the teacher when the primary instructor is absent. Learning coaches provide support to teachers by supervising students, making copies, grading papers and completing paperwork.

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reform, Curriculum, Democrats, Disruption, Ethics, Extremism, Houston, State Takeover, Texas

North Carolina: Michelle Morrow Is Not Qualified to Be Superintendent of Public Instruction

By dianeravitch
April 8, 2024 //
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Gwen Frisbie-Fulton is a columnist for the News & Observer in North Carolina. She explains in this column why extremist Michelle Morrow is unqualified to be elected as state superintendent of public instruction. What the public knows about her is that she homeschools her children, she has called the public execution of Obama, Biden, Clinton, and other leading Democrats. But there’s more.

Frisbie-Fulton writes:

After years of being a science nerd, devouring books about space and astrophysics, my son recently became very athletic. This came as a surprise — he comes from a long line of artists and wanderers.

I embraced this new development wholeheartedly and cheered enthusiastically for his team from the sidelines. Next to me, always, was his coach, yelling support until his throat was raw.

A book-smart high school logic teacher, his coach was also learning the sport. He threw himself all in, researching and bringing different hill sprints and threshold runs into their practices. He read, researched and frequently solicited advice from others. The team never became top- tier, but every single runner improved their times and they made it to the regionals. Measured by wins, he might not have been the greatest coach — but he was a very solid leader.

This year, North Carolinians will head to the polls. While elections are inherently about politics, we will also be tasked to determine which candidates are equipped to lead.

To lead, someone must of course be experienced, but he or she also must be curious and open to about the world around them. And that is why I think that my son’s coach — whose politics I disagree with substantially —would be a better, more qualified candidate for superintendent of public instruction than GOP nominee Michelle Morrow.

Experience matters in leadership and Michele Morrow’s experience is extremely limited. While my son’s coach spends nine hours a day at the school, plus another two hours outside it on practice days, Morrow has homeschooled her children. Nonetheless, she has formed rigid opinions about North Carolina’s public schools, calling them “socialism centers” and “indoctrination centers” (WRAL).

Morrow not only lacks experience with public education, but she also lives a life very distant from what most students who rely on our schools know. While my son’s coach lives in an apartment complex where, no doubt, many of his students also live, Morrow lives in a wealthy suburb of Raleigh in a house valued at more than twice the average North Carolina home. In contrast to the Morrows, nearly half of all students in North Carolina are considered economically disadvantaged (with family incomes less than 185% of the federal poverty line). Morrow might believe that “the whole plan of the education system from day one has actually been to kind of control the thinking of our young people” (WRAL), but she fails to understand the supportive, stabilizing impact of public schools in children’s lives.

Good leaders are curious. While my son’s coach has a lot of experience with kids and schools, he didn’t have a much experience coaching — which is why he read, researched and sought advice from others. Morrow appears curiously uncurious. Active on the internet, she puts herself in an echo chamber of views, falling victim to conspiracy theories. During the pandemic, she used the QAnon hashtag #WWG1WGA multiple times and she spread disinformation about vaccinations (Fox 8).

Offline, Morrow further surrounds herself with people who will reinforce, not challenge or grow, her understanding of the world. She was photographed at a far-right candidate training session alongside John Fisher, a Proud Boy, and Sloan Rachmuth, an extremist provocateur who famously trolls and harasses her opponents on social media. Morrow served on the board of one of Sloan’s anti-public education projects (Libertas Prep, which appears to have never launched) alongside extremist Emily Rainey, who at one point claimed to have information about the attack on Moore County’s electrical grid. This insular clique mimics one anothers’ anti-diversity, anti-LGBTQIA+, and anti-education stances, just as Morrow parroted insurrectionist talking points while filming herself on her way to the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6: “If you’re going to commit treason, if you’re going to participate in fraud in a United States election, we’re coming after you,” she said into her livestream.

If you don’t have experience, and you don’t surround yourself with different ideas and opinions, you must at least have a deep, principled commitment to fight for everyone to be a leader. My son and his coach spar regularly about politics and culture, but he makes sure my kid is always included, respected and heard. On the contrary, Michele Morrow prides herself on her intolerance, calling repeatedly for the “execution” of people she disagrees with (CNN).

She supports banning Islam (HuffPost), though our state has the 10th-largest Muslim population in the country. She has made anti-inclusivity a cornerstone of her campaign, railing against the LGBTQIA+ community, saying “There is no pride in perversion” (Media Matters). Morrow’s ability to lead schools that include many Muslim and LGBTQIA children is, in a word, impossible.

Having opinions doesn’t make you a leader: Experience, curiosity and the desire to work for everyone does.

When fully funded and at their best, North Carolina’s schools are creating our state’s future leaders — and our students need to see what good leadership looks like. The many teachers and coaches who model good leadership to our children day in and day out are not running for office this year; unfortunately Michele Morrow is.

Categories Administrators, superintendents, Bigotry, Censorship, Curriculum, Democracy, Elections, Extremism, Freedom to Read, Home Schooling, North Carolina, Privatization
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