Archives for category: Democracy

The 74 Million—a news site funded by charter supporters and billionaires—reports that Rep. Hakeem Jeffries will downplay his support for charter schools now that he is Minority Leader of House Democrats. Charters have lost ground among Democrats, and Jeffries wants to unite the party. Importantly, he doesn’t want to alienate the teachers’ unions, which are an important part of the Democratic Party’s base.

Most Democratic members of Congress realized that charters were a step towards vouchers, and that both were deeply embedded in the Trump MAGA agenda.

For a time, during the Obama years, Obama and his Secretary of Education Arne Duncan sold charters as a “progressive” idea that would nurture innovation. After thirty years, the charter claims dimmed. Too many scandals, too little innovation. Too many charter chains making profits or paying outlandish salaries. Too many charters that opened and closed within three years. Too many charters that believed harsh discipline was “innovative.”

The charter lobby considered Hakeem Jeffries one of its best friends, but that was before Trump chose Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education. She was an outspoken friend of School choice, including charter schools. In recent years, red states have embraced charters and vouchers in their frenzy to privatize public schools and transfer public funding to private organizations.

Now, it’s clear to most Democrats that Republicans own the issue of charters and vouchers, not Democrats.

When Biden’s Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona proposed modest rules to clean up the federal Charter Schools Program, which hands out $440 million a year to start new charter schools, the charter lobby made wild claims about how any accountability would irreparably harm new charters, but Democrats didn’t go along. The usual charter supporters in the Senate—Booker, Bennett, and Feinstein—complained about the new rules, but when the Senate voted on a motion to overturn them, not a single Democrat voted for the motion.

Today, the strongest allies of charter schools in Congress are conservative Republicans, like Virginia Foxx (NC), chair of the House Education Committee.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Bloomberg, Michael, Broad Foundation, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Democracy, Democrats, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, Obama, School Choice, U.S. Department of Education, Unions

Researchers: Vouchers Swindle Taxpayers, Students, and Families

By dianeravitch

February 21, 2023 //

David DeMatthews of the University of Texas and David S. Knight of the University of Washington wrote this article, which appeared in The Hill, a D.C. site. It’s by now well-established that students who take vouchers suffer academically; that vouchers will sudsidize the students already enrolled in private and religious schools; and that states will pay huge sums to underwrite affluent families. The Texas Observer, for example, estimated that if the 309,000 students currently in private schools get vouchers, the state’s public schools will lose $3 billion in the first year alone. What is more, voucher schools are free to discriminate on any basis, and they are exempt from any accountability.

They write:

School vouchers are a taxpayer swindle that fails to raise achievement while eroding public schools and the principle of equal protection under the law outlined in the U.S. Constitution. If more states adopt school voucher systems, most parents will find their top choice — a neighborhood public school — largely defunded and unable to recruit and retain high-quality teachers due to a transfer of funds into unregulated private schools.

Americans from all backgrounds have fought to gain access to public schools, including freed slaves, immigrants and people with disabilities. These struggles have led to a free universal public education system that propels each child into our democracy, communities and economy. Public schools also serve as community hubs where neighborhoods gather to vote, watch sports, participate in townhalls, among many other public events.

Vouchers jeopardize all of this because they transfer money from public schools to individual parents through grants, savings accounts or scholarships to pay private school tuition. It is a system where self-interest replaces the common good, culminating in separate education systems for children living on the same street in the same community.

Voucher supporters say parents know what is best for their children, but that is not necessarily the case. As education researchers, we know that voucher systems have led to significant declines in student achievement for voucher users in Louisiana, Indiana, New York City and Washington, D.C., especially for low-income students. In a study on the effects of the Louisiana Scholarship Program — a large voucher program established in 2008 and expanded in 2012 — researchers found that students participating in the voucher program were significantly behind their peers in reading and mathematics after four years.

There should also be concern that despite these well-documented failures, billionaires such as Betsy DeVos of Michigan and Charles Koch of Kansas use their fortunes to reportedly subvert state elections from thousands of miles away. This is not about parent choice or student achievement. It is political. null

Sadly, some state policymakers adopt equally hypocritical policy positions as they support vouchers. For example, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) has become a vocal voucher supporter, yet he’s also a supporter of high-stakes accountability. Texas battled in court for years to take control of the Houston Independent School District due to low performance. So, on one hand, the state is supporting accountability for public school performance, and on the other hand, there is support for vouchers — a policy where taxpayer dollars are transferred to private schools that do not follow state accountability standards and where the state has virtually no oversight.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) is also a voucher supporter. In 2022, DeSantis signed legislation dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill that banned classroom instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity — yet, his state’s voucher program has no oversight over private school curricula. This means a private school receiving taxpayer dollars can teach about sexual orientation and gender identity without any legal recourse from the state.

In Arizona, former Gov. Doug Ducey (R) supported voucher legislation based on his belief that it would “offer all families the option to choose the school setting that works best for them.” Nevertheless, Arizona’s voucher system has been overwhelmingly used by wealthy families that were already sending their children to private schools before voucher legislation. Few low-income families could afford private school tuition and transportation with the voucher — a predictable policy shortcoming.

To make matters worse, current and pending voucher legislation could even reportedly fund racist curricula. Recently, a Nazi homeschooling group in Ohio stated they were creating “Nazi-approved homeschool material.” Under Ohio state law and many current and proposed voucher laws, states would be left powerless to intervene if a private school adopted such a curriculum.

Vouchers just do not make sense, and we should recognize that vouchers offer a false choice. What parent wants the choice to defund public education while transferring taxpayer money to unaccountable private schools that do not improve student achievement but can deny admission, discriminate against children and develop ineffective or harmful curriculum without any recourse?

David DeMatthews is an associate professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy at The University of Texas at Austin.

David S. Knight is an associate professor of education finance and policy at the University of Washington.

Categories Accountability, Curriculum, Democracy, Education Industry, Inequality, Koch Brothers, Privatization, Propaganda, Religion, Republicans, Segregation, Students, Vouchers

Wisconsin: The Most Important Election of 2023

By dianeravitch

February 20, 2023 //

Here is the most important election of 2023: Control of the Wisconsin Supreme Court. The election is April 4, 2023.

The current Court is 4-3, with a Republican majority. A win by Democrats will reverse the balance and be crucial on issues of abortion, gerrymandering, and schools. It is also a chance to reverse the damage done by Republican Scott Walker.

Charlie Sykes writes in The Bulwark, a site established by Never-Trumpers:

The election that the media has dubbed “the most important election nobody’s ever heard of,” is just weeks away, and has already drawn international attention.

The “Stakes are monstrous,” declared Britain’s Guardian. “Wisconsin judicial race is 2023’s key election.”

Voting is under way in an under-the-radar race that could wind up being the most important election in America this year.

The NYT headlined: “2023’s Biggest, Most Unusual Race Centers on Abortion and Democracy.” Within weeks, the Times reported, “Wisconsin will hold an election that carries bigger policy stakes than any other contest in America in 2023.”

The state’s high court now has a 4-3 conservative majority, but one of the conservative members is retiring, which has created an opening for progressives to flip the high court for the first time in decades.

And everything is on the line: from Act 10, which limited public employee collective bargaining rights, to gerrymandering, abortion, and the way presidential elections are decided.

“If you change control of the Supreme Court from relatively conservative to fairly liberal, that will be a big, big change and that would last for quite a while,” said David T. Prosser Jr., a conservative former justice who retired from the court in 2016.

The contest will almost certainly shatter spending records for a judicial election in any state, and could even double the current most expensive race. Wisconsinites are set to be inundated by a barrage of advertising, turning a typically sleepy spring election into the latest marker in the state’s nonstop political season.

The Wapo reports that the election “will have sweeping consequences, as the court in the coming years is likely to decide whether to uphold the state’s near-total ban on abortion. It also could wade into disputes over gerrymandering and the outcome of the next presidential election.”

The Bulwark’s headline also captured the stakes “Wisconsin Supreme Court Race a Test for Democracy.”

On paper, the contest is non-partisan, but nobody even bothers to pretend anymore. Next Tuesday’s free-for-all primary includes four candidates: two progressives: Janet Protasiewicz and Everett Mitchell; and two conservatives: Dan Kelly and Jennifer Dorow.

The conventional wisdom (which is likely correct) is that the primary will set up a contest between left and right. The same conventional wisdom (on both sides of aisle) thinks that Protasiewicz is the strongest progressive candidate, while Dorow — who achieved a sort of media stardom for presiding over a high-profile criminal case — is the most electable conservative. Kelly, who was named to the Court by former Governor Scott Walker at the urging of the Federalist Society, has already lost a statewide election — a rare defeat for an incumbent justice.

But now we get to the strangest twist in this high-stakes story: After decades of ignoring or downplaying crucial judicial elections like this one, Democrats and their allies are very much focused on the Wisconsin contest.

Meanwhile, Wisconsin conservatives have chosen this moment to crack up.

While progressive dollars pour into the state, Republicans have launched a bitter, high-stakes, and often quite personal, civil war that seems designed to take out the candidate who may give them the best chance to hold onto control of the state’s high court…

To finish the article, subscribe to The Bulwark.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Democrats, Education Industry, Education Reform, Elections, Republicans, Unions, Vouchers, Walker, Scott, Wisconsin

Chicago Mayoral Election: Parent Says NO, NO, NO to Paul Vallas

By dianeravitch

February 19, 2023 //

The Chicago mayoral election is February 28. Nine candidates are running. If no candidate wins a majority, there will be a runoff on April 4. You can read about the candidates here.

One of the candidates who is faring well in the polls is Paul Vallas. He is of interest to parents and educators because most of his professional career has been spent as a leader of school districts, although he is not an educator. He introduced a bold experiment in privatization in Philadelphia, which failed. After Vallas left Philly, the district was taken over by the state. He lost his position as superintendent in Bridgeport, Connecticut, because of his lack of credentials. If Vallas should win, the charter crowd would descend on Chicago to reap their rewards.

Julie Vassilatos is the parent of two students who graduated from the Chicago Public Schools in 2017 and 2021. She was outraged that the Chicago Tribune endorsed Vallas. (The tribune is behind a paywall.) She wrote a response to the editorial. The Tribune was impressed by Vallas’ long resume, but Julie writes that he left behind chaos and budget deficits wherever he was in charge of a school district.

She writes:

It’s unclear to me exactly what motivated the members of the Chicago Tribune editorial board to endorse Paul Vallas for mayor in our upcoming election.

Vallas has run for mayor before. In 2018 I wrote about why he was not a good candidate, and these reasons all hold true today. I could simply re-run that piece today on its own and that would be nearly sufficient as a response to the Tribune’s endorsement. (Notably, they didn’t endorse him last time around.) But there are specifics in Sunday’s editorial that require a response, so I will do that here, with the former piece, from my now-disappeared blog “Chicago Public Fools,” appended below.

The Tribune editorial board gave their reasons. But they’re poor reasons at best, and at worst, wrong or disingenuous. Let’s go through their claims.

I. First, the Tribune editorial highlights Vallas’s “expertise in city financing, policing, and public education.” Expertise can mean, I suppose, “someone did a thing, maybe a lot.” But doing it well and successfully should be inherent in the word. “Expertise” in this case is absurdly unsupported by facts. Cities he’s worked in—rapidly, and left rapidly—were left with complicated budget problems, vast deficits, and controversy. He was superintendent of schools in Philadelphia for 5 years (ousted after causing ballooning budget deficits, OR he resigned in order to gallop to New Orleans, you pick), New Orleans for 4 (he left in order to run unsuccessfully for Cook County Board President), and Bridgeport, CT for 2 (ousted because he did not meet the job qualification of being an educator, OR he resigned to run unsuccessfully with IL gubernatorial candidate Pat Quinn, you pick). A quick recap of each stint:

In Philadelphia

Vallas’s record here is complicated. From The Notebook in 2007:

One thing is certain – Paul Vallas certainly shook up the Philadelphia School District.

Full of energy and confident that he could solve any problem, Vallas’s five-year tenure was a whirlwind of bold initiatives and dramatic changes in policy.

At the same time, he is leaving a district in tumult, with the same deep financial problems that he inherited – running a large deficit, and still without stable, reliable funding that meets the extraordinary needs of the city’s students.

His legacy here has much to do with the Broad Institute’s brand of “reformers.” Recapping the history of “reform” in Philadelphia, Thomas Ultican writes of Vallas in 2018’s “Philadelphia Story: Another School Choice Failure”:

He also opened the door for billionaire Eli Broad to infest Philadelphia with administrators trained at his unaccredited Broad Academy.

Broad believes that leaders of school district need financial and business management skills but require little or no experience in education. He also says that the best way to reform education is through competition and market forces.

Vallas is an example of the kind of school leader Broad sought to foster. He was someone who had little to no experience in education but understood finance.

We have some experience of the Broad Academy here in Chicago. You remember. Barbara Byrd-Bennett was a Broadie. [She was convicted of taking kickbacks and sent to prison.]

In New Orleans:

Even those who accept the rising test scores narrative know there are vast problems in New Orleans post Vallas, as recounted in a 2015 New York Times article. “The rhetoric of reform often fails to match reality.” Privatization here, as elsewhere, hurts the most disadvantaged students.

“We don’t want to replicate a lot of the things that took place to get here,” said Andre Perry, who was one of the few black charter-school leaders in the city. “There were some pretty nefarious things done in the pursuit of academic gain,” Mr. Perry acknowledged, including “suspensions, pushouts, skimming, counseling out, and not handling special needs kids well.”

Privatization, writes teacher, scholar, and author Mercedes Schneider, was not a better way to run schools. Schneider has researched and written substantially on this topic, speaking of expertise; if you have any interest in the long-term effects of school privatization, do yourself a favor and learn from her.

Has Vallas’s brand of reform been sustainable in New Orleans? In a 2008 piece in nola.com, a principal presciently considered this question:

Cheryllyn Branche, the principal of Bannecker Elementary School, wonders about sustainability. ‘I have a vested interest in this community. No matter what, it will always be home,’ she said. ‘If we don’t have people who have a commitment to this place in the long term, it won’t come back.’

‘Sometimes I want to ask him, “What happens when you are gone?”’

In Bridgeport CT:

Vallas was hired shortly after the state takeover of Bridgeport, CT public schools, subject to his fulfilling CT law that he be trained as an educator. A special condition was created just for him, non-trained-educator that he was: that he complete an educational leadership program. Instead of doing this he took a single independent study course that was later deemed not to fulfill the special condition. The whole thing ended in a tangled lawsuit, explained in this 2013 piece in the Stamford (CT) Advocate:

[I]t is a case study about the arrogance and abuse of power that have become the hallmark of the so-called reform movement.

The Vallas saga is the story of how an infamous reformer broke the law — a law written expressly for him — and how senior officials put personal and political connections above the law and welfare of Bridgeport’s children.

The court ruled against Vallas, but later reversed the decision in an appeal; Vallas had already left to join Pat Quinn’s IL campaign for governor. His short tenure in Bridgeport was largely colored by this controversy.

It’s clear that the expertise the Tribune touts, based largely on his school district leadership, is fraught with complications and possibly wildly overrated. The parts that worry me in this history include the rapid fire breaking and destruction coupled with simultaneous rapid spending and rapid budget slashing. The failure to listen to constituents. The repeated disadvantaging of already-disadvantaged children.

I know reformers like Vallas do not see that the upshot of their work turns out to be racist. But oddly, districts subjected to the Vallas type of reform somehow get a whole lot whiter—from administrators, through teachers, and on down to students. Saying “choice is the civil rights issue of our time” over and over like a magic spell does not make it true. School choice has never, and will never, increase equity in a school district. School choice originates in the racist response to Brown v. Board of Education and the creation of schools not subject to federal oversight. Today choice is instrumental in breaking down democracy in our communities. [These claims were the subject of my blog that ran for 7 years; though I want to go on and on about this, we’ve got to keep moving or I’ll never get through this post!]

Just on a practical level, Vallas’s plans for keeping schools open on nights and weekends baffle me. How does he propose to pay for all that staffing? Our schools don’t even have libraries. They have hardly any extracurriculars. Some of them are lacking in utter basics. What is he talking about? I can’t even imagine the epic Godzilla versus Mothra battles that would ensue between him and the CTU over this.

No, Chicago Tribune. No. No to someone who is a serial privatizer. No to someone who set corporate ed reform in motion in Chicago decades ago. No to someone who blows things up and leaves. No to someone who’s left increased racial inequity in his wake. We don’t need a mayor who has this kind of proven track record on education.

II. Next, the Tribune loves that Vallas “has the ear of rank and file police officers on the street.”What they mean by this is that he is very cozy—one could say uncomfortably cozy—with FOP president and disgraced cop John Catanzara. Last month the FOP endorsed Vallas; this week Vallas spoke at an FOP event for retired police officers alongside Catanzara; and he recently accepted a $5K donation from a retired policeman involved in the Laquan McDonald murder. When WBEZ reported on that connection, his campaign acknowledged that, and rather than returning the money, they gave $10K to Parents for Peace and Justice.

His public safety plan is full of dog whistles, like so: “Our city has been surrendered to a rogue element who act with seeming impunity in treating unsuspecting, innocent people as prey.” Kicking CPD Superintendent David Brown to the curb is Job One. Bypassing Kim Foxx when necessary is key. And adding thousands of police officers is a priority, so that CPD is staffed “like it was under Rahm Emanuel.” Said new cops would be recruited from military bases (?!), the fire department, retirees, and private security forces; residency requirements would be waived (but wait, didn’t he say having cops from the local community was best?). Every CTA station would be staffed with cops. In a just and good world, these are not inherently problematic proposals. In the world we live in, with out of control, hostile, already overly militarized cops, these ideas would implement a semi-privatized dystopian police state with watchful cops on every corner trying to snatch the city back from the rogue element. Of course rank and file cops like these ideas.

The Tribune is hopeful that Vallas would use the trust of the police “to improve police conduct.” Again with the saying it/wishing it connection. I think the next mayor needs more concrete proposals about improving police conduct than we see in Vallas’s plan.

III. In discussing some of Vallas’s challengers, the Tribune is “troubled by [their] associations”(in this case, Chuy Garcia’s connection to Madigan). But how can the editorial board overlook Vallas’s own troubling associations? Let me detail a few.

He spoke at an Awake IL event this past summer. Days later, after he was roundly criticized for joining forces with the group, he walked back his connection with them, assuring folks that he, himself, is not in any way homophobic or racist. It would have taken a 5 second internet search to see that Awake IL has a history of being unhinged about covid restrictions, threatens trans people regularly, refers to the governor as a “groomer,” was instrumental in the vandalism of UpRising Bakery, and is connected to the Proud Boys. But Vallas didn’t make a 5 second internet search when he was invited to serve on a panel that Awake IL leader Shannon Adcock called “the Continental Congress of school choice.”

He received a $7.5K donation from disgraced former CPS Board of Ed member Deborah Quazzo, whose notoriety derives chiefly but not solely from the large profits she secured as a result of contracts obtained while serving on the Board of Ed. Her husband threw in another $10K for good measure. Interestingly, in his last at-bat for mayor, Vallas received a much smaller donation from Quazzo, then returned it after he was asked about it by WBEZ. Time heals all wounds, apparently. Vallas now says, 4 years ago there were allegations being made about her that didn’t seem great, and his campaign was wary. Now he thinks “nothing came of those investigations” into what Quazzo did on the Board, and besides, “She has a reputation for being very active in school reform.” (Again, a 5 second internet search would yield the CPS Inspector General’s report on all matters Quazzo. Allegations sustained.)

I’ve already mentioned the deeply problematic John Catenzara. At least the $5K donation of the Laquan McDonald-involved cop, Richard Hagen, did cause a twinge of conscience.

Disgraced Barbara Byrd-Bennett partner in crime Gary Solomon was also an associate of Vallas’s—for years. Solomon went with Vallas to Philadelphia, then New Orleans. “In a series of letters to Louisiana officials who oversaw the New Orleans district, Vallas vouched for Synesi Associates,” Gary Solomon’s education consulting firm. “Synesi landed two no-bid contracts worth nearly $893,000 in New Orleans during Vallas’ time running the Recovery School District from 2007 to 2011, records obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times show.” Solomon’s prison term for his involvement in the Barbara Byrd-Bennett kickback scandal ended early because of covid. He’ll be released from home confinement in October.

Vallas owes one of his jobs to yet another shady connection, former governor Bruce Rauner, who set him up as Chief Administrative Officer of Chicago State University, in hopes of turning it around. This scenario didn’t end well—CSU cut ties with Vallas when he announced his run for mayor in the middle of his tenure. “I find it unfortunate that he would attempt to use Chicago State University as a platform to run for the mayor of the city of Chicago,” [Board Vice President Nicholas] Gowen said. “It is not the role of Mr. Vallas to try to use Chicago State University to try to bolster his bona fides to the black community.”

IV. The Tribune touts the need for “turnaround specialists” like Vallas and hopes others join him. But what is this? Do we want this? What does a turnaround actually do beyond slash-and-burn destruction of communities and gentrification outcomes that turn out looking quite racist? Educator and author Larry Cuban asks if turnaround “experts” are what struggling school districts (and presumably by extension, cities) really require.

Vallas is (or was) the premier “turnaround specialist.” Whether, indeed, Vallas turned around Chicago, Philadelphia, and New Orleans is contested. Supporters point to more charter schools, fresh faces in the classroom, new buildings, and slowly rising test scores; critics point to abysmal graduation rates for black and Latino students, enormous budget deficits, and implementation failures.

“Turnarounds” as a school strategy have been notorious, and notoriously ineffective. On the school level, a turnaround means every staff member of a school is fired, down to the last lunch lady, and replaced with new staff members. These supposedly higher quality (and perplexingly, usually way whiter) staff members are supposed to fix everything. Break it all fast. Rebuild it fast. Voila! It is fixed. On the district level, it means replacing traditional public schools with charters, lots of firing, much slashing of budgets. Poof! District is fixed, and it is a miracle! Until said turnaround experts leave town with the district and city holding the bag—and the bag is usually empty.

What in the world does a “turnaround expert” do in charge of a whole city? What parts are going to be dismantled? What parts remade? What parts gentrified? What budgets slashed and burned?

I can’t picture it. More significantly, Vallas hasn’t really articulated it.

The Tribune lauds Vallas for his expertise in education—which is questionable—and his rapport with CPD—which is dubious. It overlooks some super sketchy connections and wants to bring down the cursed turnaround upon Chicago. You know, and I know, that Paul Vallas is not the mayor we Chicagoans need—not in 2019 and not now.

If you want to read the author’s appraisal of Vallas in 2018, when he captured a little more than 5% of the vote, open the link. It follows this post.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Chicago, Closing schools, Corporate Reform, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry

“Democracy”: The Myths of AP Courses

By dianeravitch

February 18, 2023 //

A reader who calls him/herself “Democracy” writes a thoughtful comment on the Advanced Placement courses offered by the College Board, responding to the controversy over the College Board’s retreat from its AP African American studies course. The College Board excised content to placate rightwing critics.

Democracy writes:

Well-established myths die hard. Very hard. Scientific evidence doesn’t always sway minds. Parents and students and educators – and reporters – assume that Advanced Placement (AP) courses are inherently superior to other high school classes. The assumption is that AP are more rigorous, offer deeper conceptual knowledge and lead to better performance in college. The problem with the assumption is that it is largely perception; there is little research to support it.

Michael Hiltzik’s column ought to be one of the final nails in the coffin of the College Boards Advanced Placement courses. But it will not be. Hiltzik’s criticisms of the College Board are sound, and calling the College Board “cowards” is more than just a little bit accurate. It’s spot on. But Hiltzik perpetuates the College Board mythology.

A 2002 National Research Council study of AP courses and tests concluded that they were a “mile wide and an inch deep” and they did not comport with well-established, research-based principles of learning. The study was an intense two-year, 563-page detailed content analysis, and the main study committee was comprised of 20 members who were not only experts in their fields but also top-notch researchers who wrote also about effective teaching and learning.

The main finding of the 2004 Geiser and Santelices study was that “the best predictor of both first- and second-year college grades” is unweighted high school grade point average, and a high school grade point average “weighted with a full bonus point for AP…is invariably the worst predictor of college performance.”

Klopfenstein and Thomas (2005) found that AP students “…generally no more likely than non-AP students to return to school for a second year or to have higher first semester grades.” Moreover, they write that “close inspection of the [College Board] studies cited reveals that the existing evidence regarding the benefits of AP experience is questionable,” and “AP courses are not a necessary component of a rigorous curriculum.

College Board-funded research is more than simply suspect. The College Board continues to perpetrate the fraud that the SAT actually measures something important other than family income (for perhaps the single best read on this, see: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2005/11/the-best-class-money-can-buy/4307/). A favorite of mine is the College Board-produced “study” that claimed PSAT scores predicted AP test scores. A sidebar comment in the study, however, undermined its validity. The authors noted that “the students included in this study are of somewhat higher ability than…test-takers” in the population to which they generalized. Upon further scrutiny, however, that “somewhat higher ability” actually meant students in the sample were a full standard deviation above those 9th and 10th graders who took the PSAT. And even then, the basic conclusion was that students who scored well on the PSAT had about a 50-50 chance of getting a “3” on an AP test, the most common score. Holy moly!

In the ‘ToolBox Revisited’ (2006) Clifford Adelman noted that “a spate of recent reports and commentaries on the Advanced Placement program claim that the original ToolBox demonstrated the unique power of AP course work in explaining bachelor’s degree completion. To put it gently, this is a misreading.”

A 2006 MIT faculty report noted “there is ‘a growing body of research’ that students who earn top AP scores and place out of institute introductory courses end up having ‘difficulty’ when taking the next course.” Two years prior, Harvard “conducted a study that found students who are allowed to skip introductory courses because they have passed a supposedly equivalent AP course do worse in subsequent courses than students who took the introductory courses at Harvard” (Seebach, 2004). Students admit that ““You’re not trying to get educated; you’re trying to look good,” and, “the focus is on the test and not necessarily on the fundamental knowledge of the material.”

The Sadler- and Klopfenstein-edited book, “AP” A Critical Examination” (2010) lays out the research that makes clear AP has become “the juggernaut of American high school education,” but “ the research evidence on its value is minimal.”

A 2013 study from Stanford noted that “increasingly, universities seem
to be moving away from awarding credit for AP courses.” The study pointed out that “the impact of the AP program on various measures of college success was found to be negligible.” And it adds this: “definitive claims about the AP program and its impact on students and schools are difficult to substantiate.”

But you wouldn’t know that by reading any of the current articles — including that by Michael Hiltzik — about the “controversial” AP Black History course or by listening to the College Board, which derives more than half of its income from AP.

AP may work well for some students, especially those who are already “college-bound to begin with” (Klopfenstein and Thomas, 2010). As Geiser (2007) notes, “systematic differences in student motivation, academic preparation, family background and high-school quality account for much of the observed difference in college outcomes between AP and non-AP students.” The Texas, College Board-funded studies Mathews salivates over do not control well for these student characteristics (even the College Board concedes that “interest and motivation” are keys to “success in any course”).
Klopfenstein and Thomas (2010) find that when these demographic characteristics are controlled for, the claims made for AP disappear.

Do some students “benefit” from taking AP courses and tests? Sure. But, students who benefit the most are “students who are well-prepared to do college work and come from the socioeconomic groups that do the best in college are going to do well in college.”

So, why do students take AP? Because they’ve been told they have to. Because they’re “trying to look good” to colleges in the “increasingly high-stakes college admission process,” and because “high schools give extra weight to AP courses when calculating grade-point averages, so it can boost a student’s class rank.”

One student who got caught up in the AP hype cycle –– taking 3 AP courses as a junior and 5 as a senior –– and only got credit for one AP course in college, reflected on his AP experience. He said nothing about “rigor” or “trying to be educated” or the quality of instruction, but remarked “if i didn’t take AP classes, it’s likely I wouldn’t have gotten accepted into the college I’m attending next year…If your high school offers them, you pretty much need to take them if you want to get into a competitive school. Or else, the admissions board will be concerned that you didn’t take on a “rigorous course load.” AP is a scam to get money, but there’s no way around it. In my opinion, high schools should get rid of them…”

But what do students actually learn from taking these “rigorous” AP tests?

For many, not much. One student remarked, after taking the World History AP test, “dear jesus… I had hoped to never see “DBQ” ever again, after AP world history… so much hate… so much hate.” And another added, “I was pretty fond of the DBQ’s, actually, because you didn’t really have to know anything about the subject, you could just make it all up after reading the documents.” And another AP student related how the “high achievers” in his school approached AP tests:

“The majority of high-achieving kids in my buddies' and my AP classes couldn’t have given less of a crap. They showed up for most of the classes, sure, and they did their best to keep up with the grades because they didn’t want their GPAs to drop, but when it came time to take the tests, they drew pictures on the AP Calc, answered just ‘C’ on the AP World History, and would finish sections of the AP Chem in, like, 5 minutes. I had one buddy who took an hour-and-a-half bathroom break during World History. The cops were almost called. They thought he was missing.”

An AP reader (grader) noted this: “I read AP exams in the past. Most memorable was an exam book with $5 taped to the page inside and the essay just said ‘please, have mercy.’ But I also got an angry breakup letter, a drawing of some astronauts, all kinds of random stuff. I can’t really remember it all… I read so many essays in such compressed time periods that it all blurs together when I try to remember.”

Students, parents, teachers, and school leaders –– not to mention politicians and reporters –– would do well to heed the research and ignore the propaganda and lies spewed by the College Board.

Belief is a powerful thing. Sadly, people too easily believe things that are not true. And public education — not to mention American democratic governance — suffers for it.

Editor’s note: All standardized tests reflect family income. Those whose families have the highest income have the highest scores. Some rich kids score poorly. Some poor kids get high scores. They are outliers that do not change the overall trend.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Education Industry, Standardized Testing

Michael Hiltzik: Of Course the GOP Wants to Cut Social Security and Medicare

By dianeravitch

February 17, 2023 //

During President Biden’s State of the Union address, he said that Republicans want to cut Social Security and Medicare, and the Republican side of the chamber erupted in jeers and shouts of “liar!” Two of those loudly jeering—Senators Rick Scott of Florida and Mike Lee of Utah—had explicitly made those proposals. Biden then masterfully got the Republican caucuses in both Houses to declare their support for both big entitlement programs.

Michael Hiltzik, business columnist for the Los Angeles, sets the record straight about the Republican stance on Social Security.

From left, U.S. Sens. Rick Scott and Mike Lee jeer.

From left, GOP Sens. Rick Scott of Florida and Mike Lee of Utah jeer during the State of the Union address when President Biden accused Republicans of wanting to cut Social Security. Both senators have proposed exactly that.

(Andrew Caballero-Reynolds / AFP/Getty Images)

Hiltzik writes:

President Biden has congressional Republicans all asquirm as he conducts a post-State of the Union speech national tour.

Why? Because Biden has doubled down — or as Fox News has it, “tripled down” — on his assertion during the speech that the GOP has been planning to cut Social Security.

Not so, they say. Never happened. Sens. Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Rick Scott (R-Fla.) were even caught on camera during the speech wearing “Who, me?” expressions of injured innocence.

It will be my objective to phase out Social Security, to pull it out by the roots.

— Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), during his 2010 campaign for the Senate

Unfortunately for them, we have the evidence, as does Biden. Cutting Social Security along with Medicare has been part of the Republican platform for decades.

As I’ve reported before, they often hide their intentions behind a scrim of impenetrable jargon, plainly hoping that Americans won’t do the necessary math to penetrate their subterfuge.

Let’s take a jaunt through the GOP approach to Social Security and Medicare.

Start with their description of these programs as “entitlements,” which they’ve tried to turn into a dirty word. The truth is that they are entitlements, in the sense that most Americans have been paying into these programs for all their working lives, mostly through the payroll tax. So, yes, they’re “entitled” to receive benefits in return.

Republicans, including former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), have consistently blamed the federal debt on “entitlements” — never mind that their 2017 tax cut for the wealthy has blown a multitrillion-dollar hole in the budget.

They know they’re on thin ice with the public when they talk about benefit cuts, which is why Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) once recommended discussing their ideas only “behind closed doors.”

Now we can turn to the specifics of Lee’s and Scott’s plans. In widely circulated videos from Lee’s first successful Senate campaign in 2010 he can be seen and heard stating as follows: “It will be my objective to phase out Social Security, to pull it out by the roots.” He said that was why he was running for the Senate, and added, “Medicare and Medicaid are of the same sort. They need to be pulled up.”

As for Scott, his 12-point “Rescue America” plan, issued last year, included a proposal to sunset all federal legislation after five years. “If a law is worth keeping, Congress can pass it again.” The implications for Social Security and Medicare, which were created by federal legislation, were unmistakable — so much so that the proposal made Republican officeholders’ skin crawl.

Vice President Mike Pence speaks to reporters during a visit to the Manning Farms, Wednesday, Oct. 9, 2019, in Waukee, Iowa. (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall)

Column: Mike Pence, would-be president, has a plan to kill Social Security. It will cost you

McConnell disavowed the proposal on the spot and has continued to do so, telling a home-state radio host after the Biden speech that the sunset provision is “not a Republican plan.That was the Rick Scott plan.”

That said, it’s a priceless foil for Biden. When Republicans brayed during his speech that he was lying about it, he offered to make Scott’s manifesto available to anyone who called his office for it. At one of his subsequent appearances, a copy of Scott’s plan was placed on every seat.

The GOP can’t easily wriggle away from its intentions. Let’s examine the fiscal 2023 budget proposal issued by the Republican Study Committee, a key policy body, last June under the title “Blueprint to Save America.”

This plan would increase the Social Security full retirement age, which today is 66 or 67 (depending on one’s year of birth), to 70 by 2040. According to Kathleen Romig, the Social Security expert at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, this would translate into a 20% cut in lifetime benefits compared with current law.

As I’ve reported before, raising the full retirement age is a Trojan horse that would affect all retirees across the board, but harm Black workers, lower-income workers and those in physically demanding jobs the most.

It would create particular hardships for those choosing to retire early and collect their benefits prior to their full retirement age.

Doing so exacts a lifetime reduction in monthly benefits, based on a formula aimed at equalizing the lifetime benefit among those who retire early, those who wait until their full retirement age, and those who defer collecting until that age (they receive a bump-up in benefits for every year they delay, topping out at age 70).

Raising the full retirement age to 70, Romig calculates, would mean that retirees who start collecting at the minimum age of 62 would receive only 57% of their full benefit….

The Republican Study Committee also would make it harder for disabled workers to qualify for benefits, and would lengthen the period before those who are disabled and younger than 65 qualify for Medicare to five years from two. This falls into the category of balancing the budget on the backs of the most vulnerable members of society.

As for Medicare, the Republican Study Committee proposes raising the eligibility age, currently 65, so it matches the Social Security retirement age. It also would transfer many more Medicare accounts to private insurance. The committee claims this would save money.

The rest of his incisive analysis is behind a paywall, unfortunately. He demonstrates beyond doubt that Republicans have wanted for years to put these big programs on the chopping block, which are lifelines for senior citizens. They have no objections, however, to cutting the taxes of the wealthiest. That was Trump’s biggest accomplishment: tax cuts for those with the most.

Categories Accountability, Biden, Budget Cuts, Democracy, Disruption, Economy, Ethics, Health, Lies

Jamelle Bouie: The Attacks on Transgender People Are Undemocratic

By dianeravitch

February 16, 2023 //

Jamelle Bouie is an opinion writer for the New York Times. He is brilliant. He writes essays about politics, philosophy, and culture. I subscribe to his opinion feed, where he writes about which books he is reading and what he’s cooking. I have never met him but I love him.

He published his thoughts about why transgender people deserve the same rights, respect, and dignity as others.

Over the past year, we have seen a sweeping and ferocious attack on the rights and dignity of transgender people across the country.

In states led by Republicans, conservative lawmakers have introduced or passed dozens of laws that would give religious exemptions for discrimination against transgender people, prohibit the use of bathrooms consistent with their gender identity and limit access to gender-affirming care.

In lashing out against L.G.B.T.Q. people, lawmakers in at least eight states have even gone as far as to introduce bans on “drag” performance that are so broad as to threaten the ability of gender-nonconforming people simply to exist in public.

Some of the most powerful Republicans in the country want to go even further. Donald Trump has promised to radically limit transgender rights if he is returned to the White House in 2024. In a video address to supporters, he said he would push Congress to pass a national ban on gender-affirming care for transgender youth and restrict Medicare and Medicaid funding for hospitals and medical professionals providing that care.

He wants to target transgender adults as well. “I will sign a new executive order instructing every federal agency to cease all programs that promote the concept of sex and gender transition at any age,” Trump said. “I will ask Congress to pass a bill establishing that the only genders recognized by the United States government are male and female, and they are assigned at birth.”

There is plenty to say about the reasoning and motivation for this attack — whether it comes from Trump, Gov. Ron DeSantis in Florida or Gov. Greg Abbott in Texas — but the important thing to note, for now, is that it is a direct threat to the lives and livelihoods of transgender people. It’s the same for other L.G.B.T.Q. Americans, who once again find themselves in the cross-hairs of an aggressive movement of social conservatives who have become all the more emboldened in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade last year.

This is no accident. The attacks on transgender people and L.G.B.T.Q. rights are of a piece with the attack on abortion and reproductive rights. It is a singular assault on the bodily autonomy of all Americans, meant to uphold and reinforce traditional hierarchies of sex and gender.

Politicians and those of us in the media tend to frame these conflicts as part of a “culture war,” which downplays their significance to our lives — not just as people living in the world, but as presumably equal citizens in a democracy.

Democracy, remember, is not just a set of rules and institutions, but a way of life. In the democratic ideal, we meet one another in the public sphere as political and social equals, imbued with dignity and entitled to the same rights and privileges.

I have referred to dignity twice now. That is intentional. Outside of certain select phrases (“the dignity of labor”), we don’t talk much about dignity in American politics, despite the fact that the demands of many groups for dignity and respect in public life have been a driving force in American history since the beginning. To that point, one of the great theorists of dignity and democracy in the United States was none other than Frederick Douglass, whose experience in bondage gave him a lifelong preoccupation with the ways that dignity is either cultivated or denied.

Douglass observed “that although dignity seems to be woven into human nature, it is also something one possesses to the degree that one is conscious of having it,” the historian Nicholas Knowles Bromell writes in “The Powers of Dignity: The Black Political Philosophy of Frederick Douglass,” “and one’s own consciousness of having it depends in part on making others conscious of it. Others’ recognition of it then flows back and confirms one’s belief in having it, but conversely their refusal to recognize it has the opposite effect of weakening one’s confidence in one’s own dignity.”

Nicole Walker, a writer and editor, in “My Abortion at 11 Wasn’t a Choice. It Was My Life.”Read the guest essay.

“It’s important that the government is in sync with the public opinion, but I don’t think they are.”

Dwyarrn, one of the participants in an Opinion focus group with 12 pro-life voters.Read the focus group’s discussion.

“Sometime soon, I am going to meet a patient who has no ability to leave the state, and I am going to have to tell her that her baby has a lethal condition, and she is going to have to carry a pregnancy to term against her will.”

David N. Hackney, a maternal-fetal medicine specialist, in “I’m a High-Risk Obstetrician, and I’m Terrified for My Patients.”Read the guest essay.

“There are more of us than there are of them. That’s especially true if American men recognize that their way of life is also under attack. Men also have sex for pleasure. This is not just a women’s issue.”

“My fellow pro-lifers and I will also need to make the case to expectant mothers, and fathers too, that their unborn children are, like the rest of us, dependent and needy persons.”

Erika Bachiochi, a conservative legal scholar, in “What Makes a Fetus a Person?”Read the guest essay.

“The overturning of Roe v. Wade reveals the Supreme Court’s neglectful reading of the amendments that abolished slavery and guaranteed all people equal protection under the law. It means the erasure of Black women from the Constitution.”

It is easy to see how this relates to chattel slavery, a totalizing system in which enslaved Black Americans struggled to assert their dignity and self-respect in the face of a political, social and economic order that sought to rob them of both. But Douglass explored this idea in other contexts as well.

Michele Goodwin, a professor of law at the University of California, in “No, Justice Alito, Reproductive Justice Is in the Constitution.”Read the guest essay.

Writing after the Civil War on women’s suffrage, Douglass asked his readers to see the “plain” fact that “women themselves are divested of a large measure of their natural dignity by their exclusion from and participation in Government.” To “deny woman her vote,” Douglass continued, “is to abridge her natural and social power, and to deprive her of a certain measure of respect.” A woman, he concluded, “loses in her own estimation by her enforced exclusion from the elective franchise just as slaves doubted their own fitness for freedom, from the fact of being looked down upon as fit only for slaves.”

Similarly, in her analysis of Douglass’s political thought — published in the volume “African-American Political Thought: A Collected History” — the political theorist Sharon R. Krause shows how Douglass “clearly believed that slavery and prejudice can degrade an individual against his will” and generate, in his words, “poverty, ignorance and degradation.”

Although Douglass never wrote a systematic account of his vision of democracy, Bromell contends that we can extrapolate such an account from the totality of his writing and activism. “A democracy,” Douglass’s work suggests, “is a polity that prizes human dignity,” Bromell writes. “It comes into existence when a group of persons agrees to acknowledge each other’s dignity, both informally, through mutually respectful comportment, and formally, through the establishment of political rights.” All of our freedoms, in Bromell’s account of Douglass, “are meanstoward the end of maintaining a political community in which all persons collaboratively produce their dignity.”

The denial of dignity to one segment of the political community, then, threatens the dignity of all. This was true for Douglass and his time — it inspired his support for women’s suffrage and his opposition to the Chinese Exclusion Act — and it is true for us and ours as well. To deny equal respect and dignity to any part of the citizenry is to place the entire country on the road to tiered citizenship and limited rights, to liberty for some and hierarchy for the rest.

Put plainly, the attack on the dignity of transgender Americans is an attack on the dignity of all Americans. And like the battles for abortion rights and bodily autonomy, the stakes of the fight for the rights and dignity of transgender people are high for all of us. There is no world in which their freedom is suppressed and yours is sustained.

Categories Bigotry, Cruelty, Democracy, DeSantis, Extremism, Freedom, Gender, Inequality, Injustice, Racism, Trump

Stephen Owens: The Public School Is the Best Choice for a Just Society

By dianeravitch

February 15, 2023 //

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Stephen Owens is an evangelical Christian who has thought deeply about the importance of public schools in our society. He has a Ph.D. In education policy from the University of Georgia and is Director of Education at the Georgia Budget and Policy Institute. His blog is called “Common Grace, Common Schools.”

Let’s begin my argument for public schooling by making the familiar strange. There are aspects of public schooling that you do not see in any other facet of American life that need to be evaluated to better understand the institution’s value. Our familiarity with them takes away their novelty, but they are unique nonetheless. I think of us like a child who has Kelly Clarkson as an aunt. Just because she thinks of the singer as “Aunt Kelly” doesn’t mean we all have aunts who can sing like an angel.

Not only are parts of American public schooling unique, but reflect central tenets of the Christian faith. I want to explore three of them in the next few posts: inclusion, equity and accountability.

To put it concisely: I believe in the American cultural and political environment the public school is best situated to offer the highest quality service for all and, most specifically, the poor. I believe this is known, in my faith tradition, as common grace.

Now when I say the “poor” I’m not just talking about those who have more needs than resources, but a more generalized group of people that, for one reason or another, have structural obstacles to academic success. Students with disabilities and children who speak a language other than English at home are two perfect examples. Further, I don’t mean to imply that the state of a family’s bank account should be conflated with a child’s worth. Being “poor” in this sense cannot mean a person has less intrinsic value. The poor in this blog instead denotes a looser title for those children for which a neutral bystander might say, “good for them!” if the child were to perform a task common to the ruling class such as graduating from college.

I believe public schools are most valuable as a tool to lessen human suffering on the poor–one of the primary, and possibly only, ends of good governance—but that is not to say that its benefits end with this group. In fact, with few exceptions, I’m convinced that public schools are a service that have shown to support allpeople groups in our country. Foundational to this belief is the fact that public schools are required to provide services to every single child that arrives.

Inclusion. Public schools (in their current state) are for everyone. The road to the schools I attended in the 90s is paved with hard-fought legal protections for children that the majority culture would rather not teach. Throughout American history school leaders had to be forced to educate women, immigrants, Black people, students with disabilities and undocumented students via government compulsion. Each of these groups had to wait for laws to be changed to gain the advantages that white, rich, Protestant males shared since before our country was founded. This is not ancient history. My mom was a junior in high school when disabled kids got the right to a public education (1975). Undocumented children were guaranteed the same right two years before I was born (1982).

Inclusion, at least by this definition, has required blood, sweat and tears. It would be foolish to assume that inclusion is natural. In fact, inclusion is so unnatural to the way we consider schooling that its inverse remains a feature of excellence in the public mind. Consider elite schools’ relationship to exclusion: the ability to reject applicants based on test scores or income signals quality in a way that other schools could never replicate with performance alone. Post-secondary education is our best example here. Rejection rates for the Ivy Leagues not only “prove” their superiority but create it. For how could Harvard do poorly as a school if they’re allowed to choose to only educate the top seven percent of all those that apply?

It is only the common, or public, school which is left to teach all who enter her doors and, once inside, compelled to provide basic opportunities to each by threat of legal action. Inclusion, since it has been won, can be demanded.

Here I need to be explicit: inclusion is a good thing. Too often advocates for public schools treat inclusion as a burden to bear—“we can’t turn away students like private schools…”—instead of their greatest strength. Inclusion at some level acknowledges dignity in every person; Christians ought to be familiar with the concept via imago dei (the image of God). Early in Genesis the reader learns that God created humans in His image, bearing His likeness. Theologians have explained this concept differentiates humans from any other created thing by our spiritual/moral/missional similarity to the Creator. There is nothing that can remove this distinction, so every person you and I have ever met “looks” like God in some form. I’m convinced that this concept should be celebrated as the starting place for who is allowed where.

Now consider: where else is this the case? Think about your daily life, what physical spaces are compelled to not only accept everyone, but to give them foundational services? The other day a family came into a coffee shop where I was working and just sat. I will admit to being surprised. They didn’t buy anything, just sat on a couch near me while the kids looked at their iPads. I’m so used to private spaces that I did not think those people belonged until they bought something. This belief did not come out of thin air, many of the places that we imagine as public are only available if we have money, genius, status or some other item to trade. Outside of government programs (public parks, public transit, etc.) it’s hard to imagine a comparable institution to public schools besides hospitals. While I believe there are several similarities between schools and hospitals (nurses and teachers have long seen commonalities between how they are treated, for example), two major differences are apparent: 1) hospitals don’t exist in many rural communities and 2) no one has gone into debt because of the services provided by public schools.

I am, as I hope I’ve made clear up to this point, big on inclusion. But what are the public schools forced to include all children to? What occurs in the inner circle that has for generations been open only to the few? The generally-accepted answer to this question, and more broadly the question of “what is the purpose of education” usually falls into two categories–socialization and skill acquisition. When I describe the need for public schools to include all people it is with the latter purpose in mind. Poor children have been historically kept from learning the skills that are needed to earn living wages. A strong school system can help ensure higher wages, better health outcomes and decreased likelihood of entering the criminal justice system. On the path to living wages (and therefore less human suffering) there are few hurdles higher than failing to graduate high school and college.

The need for public education, and the majority-culture’s attempt to restrict it to the few, has a long history in our country. Tunis Campbell, the father of public education in Georgia, recognized a strong education as necessary to support formerly-enslaved people in post-Civil War Georgia. Without the ability to read, Campbell knew that freed men would continue to be subject to, among other racist practices, predatory labor contracts. Rev. Campbell spent the years following Sherman’s march setting up schools for freed people and is as responsible as any person for the state constitution’s inclusion of a right to public education for all children. He believed education sat alongside land ownership, a just court system and community service as necessary keys to a good life for Black Georgians.

Bringing it back to the present, I will put socialization to the side for now and will describe how the very nature of common schools supports poor families more than their richer neighbors. There are many facets of public schooling which we take for granted but that are frankly unbelievable. Every morning a transit system crawls cities, towns and rural counties to pick up any child that arrives to the stop on time and take them to their school. This service is provided at no additional cost to the child’s family whether they live one mile from the building or 30. In a country that tends to require the ownership and maintenance of a personal-transport vessel as the price for admission to society, the school bus itself is a marvel. It’s far from the only one. Health care, multiple meals and career guidance are all things that richer families can pay for but are often out of reach for the poor. In the public school each (via school health clinics, free food and school counseling) are provided part and parcel to poor public school children. If any one of these services were not already a part of schooling in America, it is impossible to imagine them being created and, more importantly, paid for with public funds. It is services like these that do not neatly fit into a definition of schooling but have become a pivotal safety net for struggling families in our nation. To ignore the role of public schools as welfare is convenient but unhelpful.

To ignore the role of public schools as welfare is convenient but unhelpful.

I’d go as far as to say that the true measure of a school is their support for the poor. The brutal truth of schooling in the U.S. is that parental income is strongly predictive of educational outcomes. While we like to imagine a true meritocracy, the real difference is whether your parents have enough money to provide 1) security (food and housing), 2) accountability, 3) targeted support and 4) social capital. So, any time I come across the “conventional wisdom” of the superiority of private schools it sounds like someone bragging that Georgia beat Vanderbilt in football. Duh: Kirby and…whomever is coaching Vandy… are dealing with two qualitatively different pools of players. If we’re really going to provide the measure of a school, look to the services provided to those that the Bible refers to as “the least of these.”

When you compare the test performance of wealthy Americans to other nations it’s clear we are on par with, or outperforming, every other country in the world. What makes our system “mediocre” is our treatment of poor children. Generations of white supremacist policies have ensured that wealth is concentrated in white families. So, the limitations of our public school system cannot be separated from our nation’s original sin. The good news is that income does not have to equal destiny. Research has shown that investment in public schools can and does level the playing field, but the investments have to go to the schools and/or children that need them the most. Another word for this is equity. I will write about equity in the next post.

–Stephen

Categories Civil Rights, Democracy, Ethics, Goodness, Supporting public schools

Michael Podhorzer: The Supreme Court Wants to Roll Back the Past Century

By dianeravitch

February 14, 2023 //

Michael Podhorzer is a keen political analyst who the assistant to the president for strategic research for the AFL-CIO, a federation of 55 labor unions representing 12.5 million members. His observations in this post are well worth reading.

His insightful article begins:

When, in the Dobbs decision, Samuel Alito declared that Roe v. Wade had been “wrongly decided,” he succinctly stated the credo of a resurgent revanchist coalition that believes the Twentieth Century was wrongly decided. Over the last two decades, the Supreme Court has been instrumental in advancing this coalition’s agenda, which is to dismantle the New Deal order and reverse the civil and social rights gains made since the postwar period.

The execution of this agenda has been nothing short of a slow-motion coup against our freedoms. The Supreme Court has not only transformed itself into a democratically unaccountable lawmaking body; it has used this illegitimate power to create a one-way ratchet that makes the rest of our system less democratically accountable. Yet no matter how many times the Court tightens this ratchet, our political and opinion leaders keep asking whether the Court risks losing its legitimacy if it keeps this up – not what we should do now that legitimacy is a distant memory at best.

We hear of “conservative” judges, yet not one of the six Republican-appointed justices demonstrate fealty to any consistent set of principles beyond giving more power to the gatekeepers who put them on the Court. Instead, we must call them the Federalist Society justices. All six are current or former members of the Federalist Society, an enterprise sponsored by right wing billionaires and corporations whose intention was capture of the legal system – and capture it they did. They knew this capture would be necessary in order to implement their agenda, since they couldn’t count on the majority of Americans to vote against their own rights and freedoms.

The campaign to repeal and replace the 20th century is an extremely well-funded enterprise, organized by people who have never made any secret of their plans. None of this is happening by accident.

Yet for the most part, media coverage of SCOTUS continues to focus on the details of the individual cases on the docket: the arguments each side is putting forth, the likelihood that certain justices will find those arguments persuasive, and what a “win” for either side could look like. In the context of our current crisis, however, doing this is like narrating each segment of a bullet’s trajectory without naming the assassin or his target.

In this post, we’ll take a few steps back from that “what did the bullet do today” perspective.

The Coalition Against the Twentieth Century – This section identifies the antagonists, outlines how they came together through the Southern Strategy, and shows how two historical accidents – the 2000 presidential elections and the 2010 midterms – enabled the massive power grabs that have brought us to our current crisis.
The Originalist Con – This section reveals just how blatant and unprincipled the Federalist Society Majority has been in its execution of the coalition’s agenda.
The Federalist Society Majority Juggernaut – This section lays out the enormous progress the Federalist Society Majority has already made to overturn the “wrongly decided” 20th century. This has included giving MAGA state legislatures new license to curtail voting rights and gerrymander themselves impregnable majorities that closely resemble the region’s one-party authoritarian rule during the Jim Crow era.
No Longer Legitimate? We conclude with a look at how the Court’s “crisis of legitimacy” is actually a crisis for American democracy as a whole.

The Coalition Against the Twentieth Century

This revanchist coalition has two factions, which have come together through the Federalist Society to capture the nation’s legal system. One faction, which I call the MAGA industrial complex, is a symbiotic combination of white grievance media (e.g. Fox, Breitbart), white Evangelical churches and their political expressions dedicated to white Christian nationalism, as well as supremacist militias and the NRA.

When most of us hear “Make America Great Again,” we think of voters in their MAGA caps being stoked on by white grievance entrepreneurs like Trump and Tucker Carlson. We should instead be thinking of the elites and institutions that helped make MAGA one of America’s most successful political movementsto date. We know, for instance, that the white Christian nationalist movement was built not around a moral concern for fetal life, but around panic over the court-ordered revocation of tax-exempt status for religious schools—particularly Bob Jones University, as well as the private religious “segregation academies” that were founded in response to Brown v. Board of Education.¹

The other faction in the coalition against the 20th century consists of the plutocrats and rapacious capitalists whose efforts long predate Trump and MAGA. Their efforts were largely unsuccessful until the 1960’s. Until then, the Republican Party, which was the party of business, nonetheless acquiesced to the New Deal order. This sentiment was famously expressed by President Eisenhower:

Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or businessman from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.

The Southern Strategy

And then … in 1964 that “splinter” of “Texas oil millionaires” and “conservative” activists wrested the Republican presidential nomination for Barry Goldwater. Goldwater was trounced by 23 points. But rather than dispatching the Goldwater forces to the dustbin of history, this defeat simply convinced many that they would have to give ground on their ambition of electing anyone as “pure” as Goldwater. They were ready when, in 1968, Nixon reversed his position on civil rights, becoming the candidate that fused segregationists’ racist agenda with the traditional Republican business agenda. Nixon’s narrow victory in 1968 was deceptive. George Wallace siphoned off 14 percent of the most extremist voters, and combining Wallace’s and Nixon’s vote share reveals that there was a substantial majority consisting of Democrats (the backlash to the Civil and Voting Rights Acts) and traditional Republican voters. Kevin Phillips best laid out this blueprint in his book The Emerging Republican Majority.

We generally think of the success of the Southern Strategy depending on the direct appeals of national Republicans to southern segregationist Democrats, with those voters changing their party affiliation without changing any of their values. The following map makes vivid something that has gone remarkably unnoticed. As Robert Jones and others have documented, from even before the Civil War, Christian churches played a critical role providing the “moral” basis for white supremacy. In this period, southern Evangelical and Fundamentalist churches continued to provide essential organizational scaffolding for preserving those attitudes and the salience of “social” issues in the region.

Map of U.S. showing regions shaded by religious denomination

Source: American Theocracy, Kevin Phillips

The Tea Party & the Takeover of the Republican Party

Until the election of Barack Obama, Republican presidential candidates and congressional leaders placated the reactionary, nativist, white Christian faction of the party by nominating right-wing judges and embracing the dog whistles and symbolism of white Christian identity, while making little or no progress reversing the civil rights gains of the 1960’s. Indeed, as late as 2006, the Voting Rights Act was reauthorized with nearly unanimous congressional support, with Bush claiming credit. This White House press releaseannouncing Bush’s signing would be unimaginable coming from any MAGA Republican now.

We very much remember the 2000 election for its razor thin margin and the Supreme Court brazenly intervening to stop the count and select Bush. But we have all but forgotten that the reason the race was as close as it was can be attributed to Bush’s consolidation of the white Evangelical establishment, and with it, Bible Belt voters that made the race that close in the first place.² While Clinton won the Bible Belt by a hair in 1996, Gore lost it by 12 points – and more consequentially, he lost the electoral votes in 7 Bible Belt states Clinton had won.³ And Kerry would lose the region by an even larger margin, 16 points. Bush stressed his own born again experience and did much for the white Christian establishment, including his “faith based” initiatives.

In response to Obama’s victory – and McCain and the Republican establishment’s immediate acceptance of his legitimacy – the nativist faction formed the Tea Party and focused on developing a political strategy to purge the Republican Party of “RINOs.” The last straw for this faction was Romney’s nomination and defeat. They revolted against the business wing’s “Autopsy” report, which in 2013 urged the GOP to moderate on immigration policies and dampen its racial rhetoric to stay competitive in an increasingly diverse electorate. Trump rushed into that political vacuum, smearing Mexicans as rapists and drug dealers. Crucially, unlike Goldwater, who faced a uniformly hostile and demeaning national media, Trump now had the advantage of the extensive right-wing media system that had since been established, which proved essential to his nomination and victory.

Please continue reading this deeply informed post about the underlying trends that have shaped the present moment in American politics.

Categories Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Politics

Carol Burris on Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ Horrible Education Plan

By dianeravitch

February 13, 2023 //

Carol Burris is the executive director for of the Network for Public Education. in this post, which she wrote exclusively for the blog, she reveals the details of Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ plan to defund and destroy the public schools in her state.

Burris writes:

Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the daughter of Baptist minister and former Governor Mike Huckabee, missed learning the 9th commandment that prohibits telling a lie. As press secretary to Donald Trump, her distortions of the truth resulted in the editor of Forbes warning corporations against hiring Sanders and other Trump “propagandists,” writing, “Forbes will assume that everything your company or firm talks about is a lie.”

Now she is the Governor of Arkansas. On her first day in office and in her response to Biden’s State of the Union, she parroted the old “education is the civil rights issue of our time” line that has been used to justify horrible policies from school closures to charter schools and vouchers. However, the disconnect between what she says and what she does quickly became apparent. On her first day in office, she issued an executive order prohibiting “indoctrination and critical race theory in schools” and another banning the term “Latinx” from being used in state documents. State authorities are investigating AP African American Studies at Little Rock Central High School, where the majority of students are Black.

If we need further proof that this self-proclaimed champion of Civil Rights is more aptly described as a champion of Civil Wrongs, look at her recently leaked ed reform plan.

Here are its features:

The Privatization of Public Education:

· Her voucher plan is a universal ESA—the plan now favored by the far-right. These plans have few rules and no family eligibility requirements. They have become Entitlement Spending Accounts–cash going into the pockets of private school families regardless of income. The leaked plan does not say how taxpayers will pay for it. But everyone will be eligible by 2025. It includes Voucher funding for homeschools. The only restrictions will apply to vendors, so those who enroll their children in those recently uncovered Neo-Nazi homeschools can find ways to cash in.

· Increased tax credits for contributions to an existing voucher program.

· Local School Boards can contract with an open-enrollment charter school or private company to run a school campus at risk of state takeover due to low performance—and if they do, they get a financial incentive.

· Establishment of a charter-school construction fund for new charters and expansion.

· Elimination of the cap on charters.

· Charter school applications no longer need to be reviewed and approved by the local school district board of directors.

· All students attending a public school can take courses and earn credit for classes not offered in their school. By the beginning of the 2025-2026 school year, students attending a public school that receives a letter grade of “C”, “D”, or “P” from the Arkansas School and District Accountability System may take their required courses (i.e. math, English, etc.) through the course choice program. Bet your bottom dollar that these courses will be online, with vendors like Stride K12 making a fortune.

Censoring and Controlling Curriculum

· K-3 literacy evaluation will be aligned with the “science of reading.”

· Before grade 5, teachers cannot provide classroom instruction on the following topics: sexually explicit materials, sexual reproduction, sexual intercourse, gender identity, and sexual orientation.

· School districts must implement an age-appropriate child sexual prevention program for grades K-12, allowing parents to preview materials and exempt their children from instruction. (I have no idea what a child sexual prevention program even is.)

· The Secretary of Education will review the Department of Education regulations, policies, materials, and communications to ensure they do not indoctrinate students with ideologies that conflict with the principle of equal protection under the law.

· No school employee or student must attend training on prohibited indoctrination or Critical Race Theory.

Harmful Policies for Students

· 3rd-grade retention based on deficits in reading proficiency.

· An accountability system for pre-school education that includes student data.

· Literacy testing three times a year for all students in K-3.

· Curriculum tracking in Grade 8.

· Community service requirements, which may, for some students, be challenging to meet.

· Mandated cops on campus.

· Career-ready pathways in partnership with local business and industry leaders” translate workforce training programs to track students into low-paying and middle-wage jobs.

Punitive Policies for Teachers

· Elimination of due process in dismissals.

· Base salaries will no longer increase by years of experience or for Master’s degrees.

· Bonuses based on VAM.

There are a few likable initiatives in her plan, such as paid maternity leave for teachers, but if she makes districts fund them even as she drains their funding with charter schools and voucher expansion, a good initiative will be one more financial pressure on already underfunded schools.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ education plan is a hodgepodge of all the awful and ineffective ideas proposed since No Child Left Behind. The fingerprints of JEB! and the Walton family are over the leaked legislation.

Despite its hodgepodge nature, one thing is clear—its ultimate intent is to destroy public education in the state by slamming a fist down on students, public schools, and their teachers while propping up a wild and largely unaccountable privatized system.

Categories Accountability, Arkansas, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Corruption, Curriculum, Democracy, Education Industry, Extremism, For-Profit, Fraud, Funding, Ignorance, Inequity, Injustice, Privatization, Segregation , Racial Isolation and Integration, Separation of church and state, Vouchers

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Carol Burris on Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ Horrible Education Plan

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