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North Dakota Becomes 47th State to Authorize Charter Schools Despite Decades of Broken Promises

By dianeravitch
April 25, 2025 //
2

North Dakota became the 47th state to authorize charter schools. There are three states that do not have a charter sschool law. Nebraska, South Dakota, and Vermont. Kentucky has a law but its courts declared them unconstitutional.

When charter schools first began in 1991, they were sold to the public as a miracle cure. Their promoters said they would operate with greater accountability, no bureaucracy, and the freedom to hire and fire at will. Because of this flexibility, charters would produce higher test scores, would cost less, would “save” the failing students, would close if they didn’t get the promised results, and would produce innovations that would help public schools.

None of these promises came true. The charters are no better than public schools, and many are far worse. The ones that produce higher scores choose their students carefully and avoid the neediest, most difficult students. Charters have produced no innovations. They have a well-funded lobby that fights accountability and seeks more funding. They close at a startling rate: more than one of every four are gone within five years of opening.

Charters have also been notorious for waste, fraud, and abuse. Scores of charters have been rife with fraud and outright theft. One online charter operator in Ohio collected $1 billion over twenty years, donated generously to elected officials, and when confronted by an audit and demand for repayment, declared bankruptcy. An online charter operator in California stole nearly $100 million. Some operators of brick-and-mortar charter schools have gone to jail for financial fraud.

The Network for Public Education keeps track of charter frauds. All this information is freely available. Yet North Dakota Governor Kelly Armstrong recited the same broken promises in signing charter legislation. The charters will not produce higher student scores, will push out students they don’t want, and will not produce innovation. In coming sessions of the legislature, their lobbyists will weaken or eliminate the provisions they don’t like. If North Dakota is fortunate, the big charter chains will ignore them because the market is small.

Edsource reported:

North Dakota Gov. Kelly Armstrong signed Senate Bill 2241 Monday, allowing public charter schools to operate in the state.

The legislation takes effect Aug. 1.

Charter schools are state-funded public schools that have greater flexibility in hiring, curriculum, management and other aspects of their operations. Unlike traditional public schools that are run by school districts with an elected school board and a board-appointed superintendent, most charter schools are run by organizations with self-appointed boards.

Senate Bill 2241 requires charter schools to operate under a performance agreement with the state Superintendent of Public Instruction, according to a media release from the governor’s office. The schools must meet or exceed state academic and graduation requirements and be open to all North Dakota students.

“The public charter schools authorized by this bill can drive innovation, improve student outcomes and increase parent satisfaction,” Armstrong said in a statement.

Categories Charter Schools, Data, Hoax

ProPublica: Trump’s War on Data Undermines Public Policy

By dianeravitch
April 22, 2025 //
1

Trump’s war on our federal government continues unabated. Among his least noticed targets is data collection. If we don’t collect data, we don’t know where to focus our efforts and where we are succeeding or failing. Trump is not smart enough to figure this out on his own. Someone put this malevolent plan in action on his behalf. We know he is destroying our government, firing essential personnel, closing down Congressionally authorized agencies by eliminating their staff. But we don’t yet know why. He is not cutting waste, fraud, and abuse. He is literally disabling every department. Is he the Manchurian Candidate or is it Musk? The attack on data collection appears to be a direct hit on knowledge.

Alec MacGillis of Pro Publica wrote this report:

More children ages 1 to 4 die of drowning than any other cause of death. Nearly a quarter of adults received mental health treatment in 2023, an increase of 3.4 million from the prior year. The number of migrants from Mexico and northern Central American countries stopped by the U.S. Border Patrol was surpassed in 2022 by the number of migrants from other nations.

We know these things because the federal government collects, organizes and shares the data behind them. Every year, year after year, workers in agencies that many of us have never heard of have been amassing the statistics that undergird decision-making at all levels of government and inform the judgments of business leaders, school administrators and medical providers nationwide.

The survival of that data is now in doubt, as a result of the Department of Government Efficiency’s comprehensive assault on the federal bureaucracy.

Reaction to those cuts has focused understandably on the hundreds of thousands of civil servants who have lost their jobs or are on the verge of doing so and the harm that millions of people could suffer as a result of the shuttering of aid programs. Overlooked amid the turmoil is the fact that many of DOGE’s cuts have been targeted at a very specific aspect of the federal government: its collection and sharing of data. In agency after agency, the government is losing its capacity to measure how American society is functioning, making it much harder for elected officials or others to gauge the nature and scale of the problems we are facing and the effectiveness of solutions being deployed against them.

The data collection efforts that have been shut down or are at risk of being curtailed are staggering in their breadth. In some cases, datasets from past years now sit orphaned, their caretakers banished and their future uncertain; in others, past data has vanished for the time being, and it’s unclear if and when it will reappear. Here are just a few examples:

The Department of Health and Human Services, now led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., laid off the 17-person team in charge of the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, which for more than five decades has tracked trends in substance abuse and mental health disorders. The department’s Administration for Children and Families is weeks behind on the annual update of the Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System, the nationwide database of child welfare cases, after layoffs effectively wiped out the team that compiles that information. And the department has placed on leave the team that oversees the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System, a collection of survey responses from women before and after giving birth that has become a crucial tool in trying to address the country’s disconcertingly high rate of maternal mortality.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has eviscerated divisions that oversee the WISQARS database on accidental deaths and injuries — everything from fatal shootings to poisonings to car accidents — and the team that maintains AtlasPlus, an interactive tool for tracking HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases.

The Environmental Protection Agency is planning to stop requiring oil refineries, power plants and other industrial facilities to measure and report their greenhouse-gas emissions, as they have done since 2010, making it difficult to know whether any of the policies meant to slow climate change and reduce disaster are effective. The EPA has also taken down EJScreen, a mapping tool on its website that allowed people to see how much industrial pollution occurs in their community and how that compares with other places or previous years.

The Office of Homeland Security Statistics has yet to update its monthly tallies on deportations and other indices of immigration enforcement, making it difficult to judge President Donald Trump’s triumphant claims of a crackdown; the last available numbers are from November 2024, in the final months of President Joe Biden’s tenure. (“While we have submitted reports and data files for clearance, the reporting and data file posting are delayed while they are under the new administration’s review,” Jim Scheye, director of operations and reporting in the statistics unit, told ProPublica.)

And, in a particularly concrete example of ceasing to measure, deep cutbacks at the National Weather Service are forcing it to reduce weather balloon launches, which gather a vast repository of second-by-second data on everything from temperature to humidity to atmospheric pressure in order to improve forecasting.

Looked at one way, the war on measurement has an obvious potential motivation: making it harder for critics to gauge fallout resulting from Trump administration layoffs, deregulation or other shifts in policy. In some cases, the data now being jettisoned is geared around concepts or presumptions that the administration fundamentally rejects: EJScreen, for instance, stands for “environmental justice” — the effort to ensure that communities don’t suffer disproportionately from pollution and other environmental harms. (An EPA spokesperson said the agency is “working to diligently implement President Trump’s executive orders, including the ‘Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing.’” The spokesperson added: “The EPA will continue to uphold its mission to protect human health and the environment” in Trump’s second term.) The White House press office did not respond to a request for comment.

Laura Lindberg, a Rutgers public health professor, lamented the threatened pregnancy-risk data at the annual conference of the Population Association of America in Washington last week. In an interview, she said the administration’s cancellation of data collection efforts reminded her of recent actions at the state level, such as Florida’s withdrawal in 2022 from the CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey after the state passed its law discouraging classroom discussion of sexual orientation. (The state’s education secretary said the survey was “inflammatory” and “sexualized.”) Discontinuing the survey made it harder to discern whether the law had adverse mental health effects among Florida teens. “States have taken on policies that would harm people and then are saying, ‘We don’t want to collect data about the impact of the policies,’” Lindbergsaid. “Burying your head in the sand is not going to be a way to keep the country healthy.” (HHS did not respond to a request for comment.)

Making the halt on data gathering more confounding, though, is the fact that, in some areas, the information at risk of being lost has been buttressing some of the administration’s own claims. For instance, Trump and Vice President JD Vance have repeatedly cited, as an argument for tougher border enforcement, the past decade’s surge in fentanyl addiction — a trend that has been definitively captured by the national drug use survey that is now imperiled. That survey’s mental health components have also undergirded research on the threat being posed to the nation’s young people by smartphones and social media, which many conservatives have taken up as a cudgel against Big Tech.

Or take education. The administration and its conservative allies have been able to argue that Democratic-led states kept schools closed too long during the pandemic because there was nationwide data — the National Assessment of Educational Progress, aka the Nation’s Report Card — that showed greater drops in student achievement in districts that stayed closed longer. But now NAEP is likely to be reduced in scope as part of crippling layoffs at the Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics, which has been slashed from nearly 100 employees to only three, casting into doubt the future not only of NAEP but also of a wide array of long-running longitudinal evaluations and the department’s detailed tallies of nationwide K-12 and higher education enrollment. The department did not respond to a request for comment but released a statement on Thursday saying the next round of NAEP assessments would still be held next year.

Dan Goldhaber, an education researcher at the University of Washington, cast the self- defeating nature of the administration’s war on educational assessment in blunt terms: “The irony here is that if you look at some of the statements around the Department of Education, it’s, ‘We’ve invested X billion in the department and yet achievement has fallen off a cliff.’ But the only reason we know that is because of the NAEP data collection effort!”

Shelly Burns, a mathematical statistician who worked at NCES for about 35 years before her entire team was laid off in March, made a similar point about falling student achievement. “How does the country know that? They know it because we collected it. And we didn’t spin it. We didn’t say, ‘Biden is president, so let’s make it look good,’” she said. “Their new idea about how to make education great again — how will you know if it worked if you don’t have independent data collection?”

“Reality has a well-known liberal bias,” Stephen Colbert liked to quip, and there have been plenty of liberal commentators who have, over the years, taken that drollery at face value, suggesting that the numbers all point one way in the nation’s political debates. In fact, in plenty of areas, they don’t.

It’s worth noting that Project 2025’s lengthy blueprint for the Trump administration makes no explicit recommendation to undo the government’s data-collection efforts. The blueprint is chock full of references to data-based decision-making, and in some areas, such as immigration enforcement, it urges the next administration to collect and share more data than its predecessors had.

But when an administration is making such a concerted effort to stifle assessments of government and society at large, it is hard not to conclude that it lacks confidence in the efficacy of its current national overhaul. As one dataset after another falls by the wayside, the nation’s policymakers are losing their ability to make evidence-based decisions, and the public is losing the ability to hold them accountable for their results. Even if a future administration seeks to resurrect some of the curtailed efforts, the 2025-29 hiatus will make trends harder to identify and understand.

Who knows if the country will be able to rebuild that measurement capacity in the future. For now, the loss is incalculable.

Jesse Coburn, Eli Hager, Abrahm Lustgarten, Mark Olalde, Jennifer Smith Richards and Lisa Song contributed reporting.

Categories Data, Disruption, Environment, Extremism, Health, Ignorance, Research, Stupid, Trump

Can You Trust Government Data Anymore? NO!

By dianeravitch
March 19, 2025 //
6

This may be one of the more ominous moves in a deeply troubling environment. Trump officials killed a low-cost statistical advisory committee at the Department of Commerce. This could be the beginning of a trend where MAGA is free to doctor economic data. Remember how Trump used to complain that he didn’t trust the government data, produced by nonpartisan statistical agencies like the Bureau of Labor Statistics? In the future, government data will be produced by MAGA partisans. Will we get regular reports showing that everything is great and getting better every day? Will statisticians who tell the truth be fired?

The title of the article is: “The War on Government Statistics Has Quietly Begun.”

Claudia Sahm is the chief economist at New Century Advisors and a former Federal Reserve economist. She is the creator of the Sahm rule, a recession indicator.

Claudia Sahm writes in Bloomberg News:

In a time of great economic uncertainty, President Donald Trump’s administration quietly took a step last week that could create even more: Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick disbanded the Federal Economic Statistics Advisory Committee.

I realize that the shuttering of an obscure statistical advisory committee may not strike anyone as a scandal, much less an outrage. But as an economist who has presented to the committee, known as FESAC, I know how it improved the information used by both the federal government and private enterprise to make economic decisions. Most Americans do not realize how many aspects of their lives rely on timely and accurate government data.

One of FESAC’s official responsibilities was “exploring ways to enhance the agencies’ economic indicators to make them timelier, more accurate, and more specific to meeting changing demands and future data needs.” In the complex and highly dynamic US economy, this is an ongoing effort — not a one-time task that has been “fulfilled,” which was the Commerce Department’s stated reason for terminating the committee.

The 15 members of the advisory committee, who were unpaid, brought deep technical expertise on economic measurement from the private sector, academia and the non-profit world. They were a sounding board for the Census Bureau, Bureau of Labor Statistics, and Bureau of Economic Analysis, which produce much of the nation’s official statistics.

If statistics fail to keep up with the changing economy, they lose their usefulness. When the committee last met in December, one focus was on measuring the use and production of artificial intelligence. Staff from the agencies shared existing findings on AI, such as from the Business Trends and Outlook Survey that began in 2022, and outlined new data collection efforts. AI’s current use among businesses has nearly doubled since late 2023, and even more businesses expect to adopt AI in the next six months.

Categories Data, Economy, Ethics, Lies, Trump

Trump Wipes Out NCES in Department of Education

By dianeravitch
March 17, 2025 //
10

Trump or Musk or a bunch of kids who work for DOGE decided that the U.S. doesn’t need to collect statistics or conduct research about the condition of education. So they wiped out the National Center for Education Statistics at the U.S. Department of Education. This is akin to closing down the Bureau of Labor Statistics. NCES is literally the only reliable, nonpartisan source of information about U.S. education. It is not partisan.

NCES is the heart of the U.S. Department of Education. Its purpose is to study “the progress and condition” of American education. It collects data and statistics about every aspect of American education. A bill was passed in 1867 to create an agency with that mission, and that was the beginning of NCES. At first, it was called the Department of Education, but two years later, it was renamed the Office of Education and placed in the Department of the Interior. In 1939, it was shifted to the Federal Security Agency, and in 1953 it became part of the newly created Departnent of Health Dducation and Welfare. In 1979, President Carter signed legislation creating the U.S. Department of Education, and in 1980, the Department began to function.

NCES has always been nonpartisan. It publishes an annual report called The Condition of Education, which is a valuable compendium of facts and trends that covers almost every aspect of education, from preschool through graduate studies. If you want to know the high school graduation rate over the past century, that’s the source. If you want to compare the graduation rates by gender or race, that’s there too.

NCES also oversees the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the federal testing program known as “the nation’s report card.” NAEP has a bipartisan governing board, which is appointed by the Secretary of Education and serves as a policymaking body.

During my time as Assistant Secretary of Education for the Office of Education Research and Innovation from 1991-93, NCES was in my domain. In 1998, Secretary Richard Riley appointed me to serve on the governing board of NAEP, which I did for seven years. There were parts of my domain that I might have offloaded, but with a scalpel, not a chainsaw.

Musk and his DOGE team just eviscerated not only the Department of Education by firing half its employees, but they laid waste to NCES.

Jill Barshay of The Hechinger Report has the story. The staff of NCES has been reduced from about 100 to 3. Three! I think that’s called a death certificate.

She began:

President Donald Trump promises he’ll make American schools great again. He has fired nearly everyone who might objectively measure whether he succeeds.

This week’s mass layoffs by his secretary of Education, Linda McMahon, of more than 1,300 Department of Education employees delivered a crippling blow to the agency’s ability to tell the public how schools and federal programs are doing through its statistics and research branch. The Institute of Education Sciences (IES) is now left with fewer than 20 federal employees, down from more than 175 at the start of the second Trump administration, according to my reporting. It’s not clear how the institute can operate or even fulfill its statutory obligations set by Congress. 

IES is modeled after the National Institutes of Health and was established in 2002 during the administration of former President George W. Bush to fund innovations and identify effective teaching practices. Its largest division is a statistical agency that dates back to 1867 and is called the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), which collects basic statistics on the number of students and teachers. NCES is perhaps best known for administering the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which tracks student achievement across the country. The layoffs  “demolished” the statistics agency, as one former official characterized it, from roughly 100 employees to a skeletal staff of just three. 

“The idea of having three individuals manage the work that was done by a hundred federal employees supported by thousands of contractors is ludicrous and not humanly possible,” said Stephen Provasnik, a former deputy commissioner of NCES who retired early in January. “There is no way without a significant staff that NCES could keep up even a fraction of its previous workload…”

The mass firings and contract cancellations stunned many. “This is a five-alarm fire, burning statistics that we need to understand and improve education,” said Andrew Ho, a psychometrician at Harvard University and president of the National Council on Measurement in Education, on social media.  

Former NCES Commissioner Jack Buckley, who ran the education statistics unit from 2010 to 2015, described the destruction as “surreal.” “I’m just sad,” said Buckley. “Everyone’s entitled to their own policy ideas, but no one’s entitled to their own facts. You have to share the truth in order to make any kind of improvement, no matter what direction you want to go. It does not feel like that is the world we live in now.”

The deepest cuts

While other units inside the Education Department lost more employees in absolute numbers, IES lost the highest percentage of employees — roughly 90 percent of its workforce. Education researchers questioned why the Trump administration targeted research and statistics. “All of this feels like part of an attack on universities and science,” said an education professor at a major research university, who asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation. 

The future of NAEP is up in the air. The staff to oversee contracts for data collection, testing, and analysis of results is gone.

Please open the article and read it. This is a deliberate death-blow to the most important function of the U.S. Departnent of Education: the collection and dissemination of facts, data, statistics, and trends in the states and the nation.

Categories Data, Ignorance, Literacy, Musk, Elon, NAEP, Research, Stupid, Trump, U.S. Department of Education

Texas: State Will Not Release Data on Pregnancy-Related Deaths

By dianeravitch
December 4, 2024 //
5

Houston Chronicle reporter Jeremy Wallace wrote that state officials have decided not to release information about pregnancy-related deaths in the years following the state’s harsh ban on abortion. Under Governor Gregg Abbott’s lead, the less the public knows, the better off he is.

Bypassing data

Texas officials will not investigate pregnancy-related deaths for 2022 and 2023, skipping over the years immediately following the state’s controversial abortion ban, which critics say has led to more dangerous and sometimes fatal pregnancies. 

The state’s Maternal Mortality and Morbidity Review Committee, which announced the decision this fall after years of trying to catch up on its count, said it was jumping ahead to provide “more contemporary” data for state lawmakers.

Dr. Carla Ortique, who chairs the committee, said the Texas Department of State Health Services will still release some mortality data from 2022 and 2023, even though the committee is not providing an in-depth analysis of causes and trends. Reached for comment this week, Ortique said the committee had been planning to skip forward since earlier this year.

The move comes after the committee delayed the release of its last major review, in 2022, which showed a higher rate of life-threatening hemorrhaging among Black women during childbirth in Texas through 2020. Critics at the time accused Gov. Greg Abbott, who appoints the committee members, of pushing it off until after his reelection bid. 

The committee now says its 2024 review, which would be the first glimpse into impacts from the period after the fall of Roe v. Wade, will be ready sometime in 2026, the same year Abbott has already said he will run for a record-setting fourth term.

Reporters Taylor Goldenstein and Julian Gill have more on the decision here.

Categories Data, Extremism, Gender, Texas

Former FBI Agent: What Trump Says About Guns, Crime, and Drugs Is Wrong

By dianeravitch
October 9, 2024 //
9

Retired FBI agent Frank Figliuzzi writes on the MSNBC website about the internal dangers to America. It’s not from immigrants, who are typically more law-abiding than the native-born, but from Neo-Nazi gangs.

He writes:

The federal indictment of 68 defendants accused of being members of (or being associated) with a criminal gang driven by race-based hate followed an investigation that led to the seizure of Nazi paraphernalia, including Adolf Hitler posters, and 97 pounds of fentanyl, federal officials said Wednesday. U.S. Attorney Martin Estrada, who announced the charges, called it one of the “largest takedowns in the history of the Department of Justice against a neo-Nazi, white supremacist, violent extremist organization.”

That announcement landing in the final weeks of a presidential election prompts us to contrast the facts of our crime problem with the fiction that Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance, would have us believe.

The dismantlement of the group that called itself the Peckerwoods, a San Fernando Valley arm of the notorious Aryan Brotherhood white supremacy organization, came in the form of charges for allegedracketeering, firearms trafficking, drug trafficking and financial fraud. If convicted as charged, some members, who adorn themselves with tattoos of swastikas and other hate symbols, could face life behind bars. The group was so heavily armed and so violent that the FBI deployed its elite Hostage Rescue Team from Quantico, Virginia, to support the arrests. According to the U.S. attorney for the Central District of California, the Peckerwoods, a derogatory name historically used against white people, “has as its mission to plan attacks against racial, ethnic, religious minorities.”

Agents seized an arsenal of illegal guns, “bomb-making components” and dozens of kilograms of fentanyl, methamphetamine and heroin, according to law enforcement officials.

The details of this multifaceted investigation reveal a significant component of America’s crime problem: hardened, U.S.-born criminals who traffic in the drugs, guns and violence plaguing our country. This contrasts with the fact-free fearmongering fabrications being sold to MAGA believers. It’s not that minorities don’t commit crimes; nor is that migrants never murder or rape. But Trump and Vance want voters to believe our gun, drug and violence problems are being driven by migrants when the opposite is true…

During the vice presidential debate, Vance claimed the vast majority of illegal guns used in crimes here come from Mexican cartels. The truth is quite different; it’s the U.S. that’s arming Mexican cartels. We have detailed data demonstrating the extent to which American weapons are fueling the violence in Mexico, right down to the make and model of the guns found at crime scenes across the border.

Please open the link to read more about crime statistics and Trump-Vance’s hateful and phony war against immigrants.

Categories Cruelty, Data, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Guns, Hoax, Lies, Trump

Jonathan V. Last: Biden Won the War on Crime!

By dianeravitch
May 5, 2024 //
15

Jonathan V. Last writes for The Bulwark, a website for Never Trumper Republicans that has some of the best writing on the current state of politics. In this post, Last explains that Trump presided over a period of crime “American carnage,” Trump called it), but crime has dropped during Biden’s term in office.

Last writes:

Remember the bad old days when people lost their minds about the crime wave Joe Biden had unleashed on America with his woke whatever-whatever policies?

Pepperidge Farm remembers.

There was so much of this. 

Well I’ve got some great news for you: Joe Biden has won the war on crime.

Here’s a headline from the WSJ that Heather Mac Donald might want to see: Homicides Are Plummeting in American Cities.

And this isn’t a one-time drop. It’s an acceleration of a trend that began in 2023.

How many stories have the Washington Examiner and the WSJ op-ed page written about these facts?

I’ll let you guess. But wait—there’s even more good news.

The “Biden crime wave” was always proffered in bad faith because the “crime wave” appeared in 2020, while Donald Trump was president: 2020 saw the largest rise in the murder rate in American history.

Now just because Biden inherited a problem doesn’t mean he gets a pass on its existence. When you’re president, you’re supposed to solve everyone’s problems, not just the ones that crop up during your administration.

And here’s the data: All crime is down under Biden, with one exception.

Violent crimes like murder and rape? Down. Property crimes like burglary and theft? Down. Crime in cities? Down. Crime in rural areas? Down.

The lone exception is that car theft in metropolitan areas has gone up. That’s it.

Like the man said: Take the W.

In Donald Trump’s final year in office the murder rate rose by 30 percent, which was the largest jump in U.S. history. Over Joe Biden’s last 16 months, we’ve had the biggest drop in the murder rate in U.S. history.

You are better off now than you were four years ago.

Categories Accountability, Biden, Data, Elections, Fraud, Hoax, Safety, Trump

The Myth of an “Immigrant Crime Wave”

By dianeravitch
March 17, 2024 //
48

Republicans have followed their cult leader Trump in raising alarms about an “immigrant crime wave.” Which, of course, is Biden’s fault.

But as Judd Legum and Tesnim Zekeria explain at their blog “Popular Information,” these claims are not true. In fact, the crime rate is lower among undocumented immigrants than it is among American citizens.

They write:

Republican politicians and sympathetic media outlets are claiming that America is in the midst of a violent “crime wave,” driven in part by undocumented immigrants. New data, however, demonstrates that there was not a spike in violent crime in 2023. Instead, across America, rates of violent crime are dropping precipitously — and the decline is especially pronounced in border states. 

In January 2024, the Republican National Committee claimed that “crime continues at historic highs in Democrat-run cities.” Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH) declared in February 2024 that “[i]n Joe Biden’s America you get…cities plagued with crime.” These claims, however, are not supported by facts. 

The most comprehensive look at violent crime in the United States in 2023 will come when the FBI publishes its national Uniform Crime Report. But that will not happen until the fall. But, as crime analyst Jeff Asher explains in his newsletter, the FBI report is based on individual Uniform Crime Reports submitted by each state. Asher identified 14 states that have released their Uniform Crime Reports publicly. The data has not been completely finalized and could be adjusted slightly before formally submitting it to the FBI. But this data is the best early look at violent crime trends last year. 

Asher found that both murder and violent crime declined in 12 of 14 states. 

The only states that saw murders increase or stay flat, Rhode Island and Wyoming, had a very small number of total murders relative to other states — 28 and 14, respectively. This confirms previously available data from major cities in 2023 that showed sharp declines in murder and a smaller, but still significant, decline in violent crime. St. Louis and Baltimore saw their lowest murder rates in about a decade. Detroit was on pace for its lowest murder rate since 1966. 

Republicans and aligned media outlets claim that undocumented immigrants are driving the purported increase in crime. In a recent speech at the border, Former President Donald Trump falsely claimedthat the “United States is being overrun by the Biden migrant crime.” Trump has made the issue a central focus of his campaign. 

Other politicians are following Trump’s lead. On a March 3rd appearance on Fox News, Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) said that “[w]e face a growing migrant crime wave because Biden has released into America tens of thousands of illegal migrants who were criminals in their own country.” In Arizona, Kari Lake – a Trump ally who is currently running for Senate – claimed Biden was allowing “literal foreign armies” to cross the border. The House GOP also issued a press release this month with the headline: “Joe Biden’s Open Borders Have Unleashed A Catastrophic Crime Wave Across The Country.”

On Fox News, “migrant crime” has emerged as a coverage staple in less than two months. Host Jesse Watters told viewers in late February that “[t]here is a migrant crime spree killing Americans.” According to the Washington Post, “Fox News hosts, guests and video clips have mentioned ‘migrant crime’ nearly 90 times” in the month of February.

Notably, the two border states that have completed their Uniform Crime Reports saw particularly sharp declines in murder in 2023, with 15% drop in Texas and 8.8% drop in Arizona. Both states also saw significant declines in violent crime overall. If undocumented immigrants were driving a violent crime surge, as Republicans and some media outlets suggest, you would expect to see it show up in the data from Texas and Arizona. 

Every act of violent crime is significant, and the modern media environment allows news of individual offenses — like the alleged murder of Laken Riley by an undocumented immigrant — to travel widely. But Asher told Popular Information that “discussion of an increasing violent crime trend driven by migrants is lacking in any factual basis.” He noted that “violent crime rates in Texas border counties have remained relatively low and below both the rest of Texas and the US as a whole” over the last decade. That is not the kind of data one would expect to see “if a surge in violent crime was being driven by migrants.” Therefore, Asher said, “any hypothesized increases in crime committed by migrants is either too small to show up in reported crime data or the hypothesized increases are not occurring.”

Republicans, including the National Republican Campaign Committee (NRCC), are also claiming that “noncitizen crime including, homicide, burglary, battery, and sexual offenses has risen 514.7% since Biden took office.” This is false. 

The data linked to by the NRCC tracks people who are arrested at the border by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) that have a prior criminal record in any country. It has nothing to do with new crimes that occurred in the United States. The most common prior convictions for people arrested at the border are illegal crossing and other immigration offenses. As Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, an expert at the American Immigration Council, notes, the CBP arrested over 2 million people at the border in Fiscal Year 2023, which covers October 1, 2022 to September 30, 2023. Of those arrestees, just 6,477 (0.3%) had a prior criminal conviction unrelated to their immigration status. 

Researchers who studied the issue have found that undocumented immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than American citizens. From 2012 to 2022, undocumented immigrants were 14% less likely to be convicted of murder and 41% less likely to be convicted of any criminal offense. Similar research by Michael Light at the University of Wisconsin found lower rates of “homicides, sexual assaults, violent crimes, property crimes, traffic and drug violations” among undocumented immigrants. [Emphasis added.]

Categories Biden, Bigotry, Data, Elections, Evil, Extremism, Fraud, Hoax, Lies, Republicans, Trump

Gary Rubinstein: Success Academy and the Mysterious Disappearance of One of Its Schools

By dianeravitch
February 25, 2024 //
4

Gary Rubinstein is a teacher of mathematics and a strong proponent of evidence. Whenever a journalist or education evangelist claims to have found a “miracle school,” he goes for the data, and he digs deeper than test scores. The Success Academy Charter network, led by its founder Eva Moskowitz, has achieved national renown for its test scores. Gary has observed a winnowing of the students as they advance through the grades. He recently noticed that one of its schools had disappeared.

He wrote:

Success Academy is the largest charter school network in New York State. Starting in 2006 with one school, there are now around 40 Success Academy schools with around 20,000 students.  And with a recent $100 million grant from Bloomberg Philanthropies, it might seem that Success Academy will continue to grow at an exponential rate. But there is some evidence that growth at Success Academy is slowing down. In one case it seems that one of their schools, Fort Greene Middle School has shut down completely.

According to the New York State public data site, in 2022-2023, Success Academy Fort Greene was a middle school on Park Avenue in Brooklyn with 180 students from 5th to 8th grade. In classic Success Academy fashion, the 27 eighth graders is significantly fewer than the 55 fifth graders.

But when you look at the December 2023 enrollment data, suddenly Success Academy Fort Greene is no longer a middle school, but an elementary school located at 3000 Avenue X in Brooklyn. The enrollment of this school is 75 kindergarteners and 41 1st graders. I know that Success Academy is supposed to be capable of miracles, but turning 180 middle schoolers into 116 elementary schoolers is not one of them.

On the Success Academy website, however, there is no mention of a Fort Greene school of any type anymore, but instead there is a brand new elementary school called Success Academy Sheepshead Bay at the 3000 Avenue X address.

What happened is that Success Academy had to close down their Fort Greene middle school because of low enrollment. Why in the New York database, they let the new elementary take the name of the old middle school, maybe this is something they have to do for the charter cap, but I wouldn’t know. Still, any Success Academy school closing down is something that seems pretty newsworthy considering that they thrive on a reputation that they have cultivated that they must continually expand because of the demand for their schools…

Open the link to finish the post.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Data, Education Industry, Harlem Success Academy, New York, New York City

Legislatures Should Not Mandate How to Teach or Ban Instructional Strategies

By dianeravitch
January 31, 2024 //
24

Several states have endorsed legislation requiring teachers to use “the science of reading” in their classrooms. Only the “science of reading.” The legislators, of course, know nothing about teaching reading but they have it on good authority (reports in the media) that there is only one correct way to teach reading, so they feel it is appropriate to mandate that way and ban other ways.

As someone living in New York City, I don’t know whether to laugh or groan. In 2002, Michael Bloomberg, the new mayor, took control of the New York City public schools. He selected attorney Joel Klein as the city’s all-powerful chancellor. A year later, after much deliberation, Klein and Bloomberg announced a single citywide curriculum in reading and mathematics. With the exception of a few high-performing schools, all teachers were required to teach Balanced Literacy. Phonics advocates howled but they were dismissed. Any teacher who taught reading during the three terms of Mayor Bloomberg was mandated to teach Balanced Literacy.

But now, Balanced Literacy is out, and phonics is in. Are there new longitudinal studies showing the success of one and the failure of the other? No, but there is a new zeitgeist, and Americans are always ready to rally around the latest cure-all.

Some states are not only mandating “the science of reading,” but banning Balanced Literacy and its practices. Louisiana banned the use of three-cuing in 2022. In North Carolina, the General Assembly also banned the use of “three-cuing.” Three-cuing is a feature of Balanced Literacy.

As of last October, three-cuing has been banned in Arkansas, Indiana, Florida, Texas, Ohio, and Kansas.

What is three-cuing? The definition in Louisiana is quoted at the end of this post.

In addition, three states have banned the program called Reading Recovery: Arkansas, Louisiana, and Indiana.

I have not seen evaluations or experimental evidence proving that students read better and comprehend better if teachers use only one instructional strategy and no other. The fourth grade scores in states that hold back third graders with low scores are proof of nothing, other than the certainty that scores go up when low-scoring students are not in the testing pool.

Suppose a first-grade reading teacher is fully onboard with phonics; suppose she does everything exactly by the book and is devoted to everything associated with “the science of reading”? This otherwise blameless teacher must take care not to show students how to use context cues! If she does so, she has broken the law! Will she be subject to prosecution and imprisonment for using the wrong method?

There has been a vigorous campaign to install phonics as the best way to teach reading. I repeat for the nth time that I’ve always been a proponent of phonics. I remember when Balanced Literacy became a national fad in the 1980s and 1990s; every publisher endorsed it (except Open Court). And I opposed it because I typically look skeptically on fads, movements, and panaceas.

The struggle between phonics and “whole word” methods has been ongoing since the 1830s. The pendulum swings back and forth. Now, everything from the big publishers will be decodable. Wherever Rudolf Fleisch may be, he is very happy (he wrote a book in the 1950s called Why Johnny Can’t Read, calling for a revival of phonics, which had been replaced by the Dick and Jane readers and the “look-say” method).

But it’s irresponsible to pass laws banning other ways of teaching! Wouldn’t it be wise to wait for some solid results before declaring that there is one and only one way to teach reading?

My view: Teachers should be prepared to teach phonics and other methods. No instructional method should be banned. Teachers should know a variety of teaching strategies and do what’s best for the children in front of them.

Three-cuing as defined in Louisiana law:

Act 517 of the 2022 Louisiana Legislative Session prohibits the use of the three-cueing system, or the MSV technique, in curriculum and instructional materials. This approach has been proven ineffective by empirical research in teaching students to read. This guidance document provides an explanation of what the three-cueing system is, what to look for when identifying these strategies in curricular materials, why it is not best for students learning to read, and what instructional strategies are proven effective for teaching students to read and comprehend.


What is the “Three-Cueing System?”


The three cueing system is an approach to foundational skills instruction that involves the use of three different types of instructional cues: semantic (gaining meaning from context and sentence-level cues), syntactic or grammatical features, and grapho-phonic (spelling patterns). When students encounter words that they cannot read automatically, they are prompted to question themselves using the following three questions: Does it look right? Does it sound right? Does it make sense?

At the earliest stages of learning to read, students are prompted to default to semantic or syntactic cues before attempting to use grapho-phonic cues. Students are encouraged to use illustrations to “guess” the meaning of words in predictably-written texts.

As part of the three-cueing system, teachers analyze student reading errors using the “MSV” technique and seek to determine if reading errors are related to “meaning, structure, or visual” issues. If students’ errors are meaning-related, the teacher will focus instructional efforts on supporting a student in using semantic cues to read passages. If the issues are related to structure, the teacher will focus on supporting students’ use of syntactic cues, and if the errors are visual, the teacher will prompt students to use grapho-phonic strategies.

As evidence mounts against the three-cueing system, many programs no longer refer to this instructional approach using this terminology, so identifying three-cueing in curricular resources requires careful observation of the strategies used to guide students as they learn to read.

When Might I See “Three-Cueing?”

The three-cueing approach is most-often found during foundational skills instruction in grades K-2. Some of the common prompts associated with this approach – “Does this make sense?” or “Look at the picture” – can be appropriate in other instructional contexts, such as when a student is encouraged to use illustrations to support deeper comprehension of stories, or when students are monitoring their own reading, but they are not effective strategies or prompts for teaching students to read words on a page. Instead of relying on multiple, varied cues, students should instead be consistently prompted to decode words using learned spelling and syllabication patterns.
As the three-cueing approach typically involves teachers prompting students to use different cues, this type of instruction is often found in small-group or individual settings.

It is a hallmark of “Balanced Literacy.”

Categories Data, Education Industry, Literacy, Teachers and Teaching
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