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Harold Meyerson: How the Charter Lobby Is Corrupting the Democratic Party

By dianeravitch
August 28, 2016 //
30

Harold Meyerson, the editor of The American Prospect, published a very important article in the Los Angeles Times about the toxic effect of the powerful charter lobby on the Democratic Party and on democracy itself.

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-meyerson-charter-school-democrats-20160826-snap-story.html

He writes:

“At a time when Democrats and their party are, by virtually every index, moving left, a powerful center-right pressure group within the liberal universe has nonetheless sprung up. Funded by billionaires and arrayed against unions, it is increasingly contesting for power in city halls and statehouses where Democrats already govern….

“In California, political action committees funded by charter school backers have become among the largest donors to centrist Democratic state legislators who not only favor expanding charters at the expense of school districts, but also have blocked some of Gov. Jerry Brown’s more liberal initiatives.

In New York’s upcoming primary, such longtime charter supporters as Wal-Mart heiress Alice Walton have given hundreds of thousands of dollars to a PAC seeking to unseat several Democratic legislators who’ve defended the role and budget of traditional public schools.

In future decades, historians will have to grapple with how charter schools became the cause celebre of centrist billionaires – from Walton to Bloomberg to Broad – in an age of plutocracy. The historians shouldn’t dismiss the good intentions behind the billionaires’ impulse: the desire to provide students growing up in poverty with the best education possible. But neither should they dismiss their self-exculpation in singling out the deficiencies, both real and exaggerated, of public education as the central reason for the evisceration of the middle class….

“In their mix of good intentions and self-serving blindness, the billionaire education reformers have much in common with some of the upper-class progressives of a century ago, another time of great wealth and pervasive poverty. Some of those progressives, in the tradition of Jane Addams, genuinely sought to diminish the economy’s structural inequities, but others focused more on the presumed moral deficiencies and lack of discipline of the poor. Whatever the merits of charters, the very rich who see them as the great equalizer are no closer to the mark than their Gilded Age predecessors who preached temperance as the answer to squalor.”

Categories Charter Schools, Democracy, Democrats, Education Industry, Privatization

School Takeovers, Concentrated in Black Districts, Take Away Democracy

By dianeravitch
August 27, 2016 //
4

Thanks to Mike Klonsky for calling attention to this article about state takeovers of districts and schools. A takeover nullifies parent and community voice. A disproportionate number of takeovers have been inflicted on African-American communities. As we know from the failure of the Achievement School District, these takeovers have a bad track record. What do they accomplish? They nullify parent and community voice.

In New Jersey – which, in 1987, became the first state to take over a school district – Camden is among several urban districts that have come under state control. The state hired Camden’s superintendent, while the mayor appoints school board members – a practice that predates the state takeover of the district in 2013.

A judge last week dismissed a lawsuit from Camden residents seeking the right to elect school board members, questioning the rationale for electing a board that has been stripped of its power by the state.

In Pennsylvania, the Philadelphia School District is governed by a five-member School Reform Commission, with three members appointed by the governor and two by the city’s mayor. The Chester Upland district is also under state control. Camden, Philadelphia, and Chester Upland have large minority populations.

Be sure to read the descriptions of districts where democracy was snuffed out.

They are districts hollowed out by poverty, deindustrialization, and white flight. The state takeover didn’t help. It stripped away one of the few ways in which residents had a voice. Now they have lost that too.

This is how the story of Highland Park, Michigan, begins:

“Highland Park, Michigan, a small city within Detroit’s boundaries, was once called the “City of Trees.” Thick greenery lined suburban blocks crowded with single-family homes built for a growing middle class. Henry Ford pioneered the assembly line at his automobile plant on Woodward Avenue, the city’s main thoroughfare. The suburban school district was considered one of the top 10 in Michigan, according to a report from the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights in 1962.

“Today, most of Highland Park’s trees are gone. Overgrown, empty lots and burned-out houses outnumber occupied homes on some blocks. The Ford plant stands empty. And parents say Highland Park’s once-proud school district has collapsed, hastened by four years under state control.”

As you read these stories, ask yourself the question: seeing the problems, why was state takeover of the schools supposed to be a good idea?

Categories Arkansas, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Democracy, Michigan, New Orleans, Poverty, Race, Segregation, Turnaround

Economic Policy Institute: Making “Whole Child Education” the Norm

By dianeravitch
August 26, 2016 //
27

The Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., has published a major paper that describes a new vision for American education.

Instead of focusing on goals like raising test scores, which narrows the curriculum and produces perverse results (like cheating, excessive test prep, and gaming the system), educators should be encouraged to emphasize the development of the whole child. This is not a new idea; its roots go back to the early twentieth century. But it is a research-based idea that promises to change the direction of education and to align teaching and learning with what is in the best interests of students and society.

The report was written by Elaine Weiss and Emma Garcia of EPI.

Here is the introduction.

Traits and skills such as critical thinking, creativity, problem solving, persistence, and self-control—which are often collectively called noncognitive skills, or social and emotional skills—are vitally important to children’s full development. They are linked to academic achievement, productivity and collegiality at work, positive health indicators, and civic participation, and are nurtured through life and school experiences. Developing these skills should thus be an explicit goal of public education. This can be achieved through research and policy initiatives involving better defining and measuring these skills; designing broader curricula to promote these skills; ensuring that teachers’ preparation and professional support are geared toward developing these skills in their students; revisiting school disciplinary policies, which are often at odds with the nurturing of these skills; and broadening assessment and accountability practices to make the development of the whole child central to education policy.

Introduction and key points

The importance of so-called noncognitive skills—which include abilities and traits such as critical thinking skills, problem solving skills, social skills, persistence, creativity, and self-control—manifests itself in multiple ways throughout our lives. For example, having greater focus as a student improves the acquisition of skills, and creativity is widely associated with artistic abilities. Persistence and communication skills are critical to success at work, and respect and tolerance contribute to strong social and civic relationships.

But support for noncognitive skills—also commonly referred to as social and emotional skills—extends far beyond this casual recognition of their impact. Empirical research finds clear connections between various noncognitive skills and positive life outcomes. Indeed, researchers have focused on assessing which skills matter and why, how they are measured, and how and when these skills are developed, including the mutually reinforcing development of noncognitive and cognitive abilities during students’ years in school.1

At the same time, there are clear challenges inherent in this work, including those associated with data availability (in terms of measurement, validity, and reliability), the difficulty of establishing causality, and the need to bridge gaps across various areas of research. This points to the need to exercise caution when designing education policies and practices that aim to nurture noncognitive skills. Nonetheless, given the crucial role that noncognitive skills play in supporting the development of cognitive skills—as well as the importance of noncognitive skills in their own right—this is an issue of great importance for policymakers.

Moreover, there is increased recognition, both domestically and internationally, that noncognitive skills are integral to a wider conceptualization of what it means to be an educated person. Indeed, UNESCO’s Incheon Declaration for Education 2030, which sets forth an international consensus on the new vision for education for the next 15 years, states, “Relevant learning outcomes must be well defined in cognitive and non-cognitive domains, and continually assessed as an integral part of the teaching and learning process. Quality education includes the development of those skills, values, attitudes and knowledge that enable citizens to lead healthy and fulfilled lives, make informed decisions and respond to local and global challenges.”2

This policy brief, which focuses on a set of skills that can and should be taught in schools, is based on a body of scholarly literature that tends to use the term “noncognitive skills” over others. James Heckman, a prominent, Nobel Prize–winning economist, has dubbed these skills “dark matter” in recognition of their varied nature and the challenge of accurately labeling them. Various fields and experts call them social and emotional skills, behavioral skills, inter- and intra-personal skills, and life skills, among other terms, but this brief does not aim to settle this issue. We therefore use noncognitive throughout in many places, as well as social and emotional skills and other terms.

This brief explains why it is so important that we incorporate these skills into the goals and components of public education, and lays out the steps necessary to make that happen.

This is a report that will gladden the hearts of most educators. It calls for a paradigm shift at a time when policymakers are realizing that the past fifteen years of testing, carrots and sticks, and other efforts to raise test scores, has produced negative consequences. It is time to take another look at our goals and our vision. This is indeed a worthy project.

Categories Childhood, Civil Rights, Corporate Reform, Democracy, Education Reform, Joy, Real Education, Teachers and Teaching, Testing

Kevin Ohlandt: Delaware Is Leading the Wrong Way–to Destruction of Public Education

By dianeravitch
August 23, 2016 //
10

Kevin Ohlandt blogs at Exceptional Delaware.

He left the following comment in response to Peter Greene’s post about “Lab Rats for America.”

“But where oh where would all of this become incorporated? Look no further than the home of 85% of U.S. companies… the First State… Delaware. On May 2nd, Delaware Governor Jack Markell announced his state would begin to look at changes in state regulations and state code to allow for Blockchain start-ups to come to Delaware.

http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/governor-markell-launches-delaware-blockchain-initiative-300260672.html

“As well, we have a coding school in Delaware which was founded by Ben DuPont, of the legendary DuPont family of Delaware. The same family that actually created many of the “brown schools” in our state in the early 20th Century. Also a big supporter of charter schools.

“This is what is has all been leading up to. And opt out? They love it. As long as they resist it just enough to issues threats and build the base for more parents opting out. Not wholesale, but steady increases. That way they can “realize the error of their ways” and lead us to a digital personalized learning competency-based education paradise where the state assessment is no longer given once a year, but throughout – in the form of end of unit online assessments. At the end of the year, the total scores will be calculated and serve as the official state assessments.

“Because these are also part of students grades and their ability to move on, the ability to opt out becomes moot. Teachers (or rather, glorified digital moderators), will get immediate feedback. The tests won’t be as long, so parents won’t have to worry.
They are three steps ahead of us, always. While we are lashing out about PARCC, Smarter Balanced, and teacher evaluations, they are laying the groundwork for all of this.

“They can say this is an attempt to erase all inequity, but we know that is a false narrative. This is the corporate takeover of America. This is the end of public education.
But the question we ALL need to ask ourselves… how do we stop it? We are seeing coding classes in 3rd grade in Delaware. Are kids actually laying the groundwork for a lot of this already? You know this is a data-mining paradise for them.

“The Rodel Foundation of Delaware has been pushing this in our state for a long time. Our State Board of Education and Dept. of Education are the most deceptive and fraudulent parts of our state.

“If we want to save public education and, I’m going to say it, the future of the country, we have to act now.”

Categories Accountability, Data and Data Mining, Delaware, Democracy, Education Industry, Online Education, Standardized Testing, Technology, Computers, Testing

Dora Taylor: Snuffing Out Democracy with Mayoral Control and Emergency Managers

By dianeravitch
August 23, 2016 //
8

Dora Taylor, parent activist in Seattle, describes that city’s battle to prevent the mayor from taking control of the public schools. She notes that the reason for mayoral control is to avoid the messy business of democracy, where parents and ordinary citizens get the opportunity to influence decisions about their schools and their children. Mayoral control and the establishment of state or local “emergency managers” are flimsy but powerful means of eliminating democracy and allowing politicians and elites to exert total control of decisions. Mayoral control and emergency managers clear the way for school closings and privatization. Parents don’t like school closings, but under mayoral control, schools are easily closed and replaced by charter schools.

Philadelphia, under the autocratic School Reform Commission, is constantly teetering on the brink of bankruptcy and collapse, as the SRC closes schools, fires teachers, cuts costs, and opens charters. Its attempt to void the union contract was recently tossed out by the state supreme court. Philadelphia’s public schools have been stripped bare, while its charters are thriving (except the ones led by people who have been indicted).

In Chicago, Mayor Rahm Emanuel made history in an invidious way by closing 50 public schools in one day, claiming they were under enrolled, at the same time that he continued to open new charter schools.

One of the worst examples of the autocratic seizure of control occurred in Michigan under Democratic Governor Jennifer Granholm. She led the way to the establishment of an emergency financial manager for Detroit, under whose watch the district’s deficit tripled and charter schools proliferated. Detroit is now a worst case scenario, where there is plenty of choice, but none of them are good choices. The recent New York Times article about Detroit schools was titled, “A Sea of Charter Schools in Detroit Leaves Students Adrift.”

Dora Taylor writes in The Progressive:

The most egregious example of a politician’s undemocratic control of public schools can be seen in the state of Michigan with the decision by former Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm to hire Emergency Financial Managers. The emergency managers have the power to take control of a city’s government, reduce pay, outsource work, reorganize departments and modify employee contracts. Emergency managers can also deem school districts “failing,” close public schools and convert them into charter schools.

The first appointed emergency manager, Robert Bobb, took over the Detroit Public School system in 2009. The County Circuit Court in 2011 found this takeover illegal but soon after, emergency managers were appointed in mostly minority communities around the state, including the city of Flint. In several of these towns, such as Highland Park, Michigan the public schools were closed and taken over by charter operators.

Darnell Earley, the unelected manager of Flint, presided over the devastating decision to switch the city’s water supply to the Detroit River resulting in lead poisoning of residents throughout the city. After the water disaster, Mr. Earley was appointed by Governor Rick Snyder to become the CEO of Detroit Public Schools.

Now the Emergency Managers are being named CEOs, as in Chicago, and given tremendous powers. These CEOs can:

Assume the financial and academic authority over multiple schools;

Assume the role of the locally elected school board for those schools they have been assigned;

Control school funds without the consent of the locally elected board;

Permanently close a school without the consent of the locally elected board;

Sell closed school buildings without the consent of the locally elected board; and

Convert schools into charter schools without the consent of the locally elected board.

The people have no voice or control over how their children are educated or by whom. The same holds true for mayoral control. That’s why, in Seattle, people are fighting back.

This is the kind of nondemocratic governance that organizations like ALEC love. Governor Rick Snyder loved it too, since it gave him control of so many districts. The emergency manager gambit blew up in his face when his own appointee, Darnell Early, was responsible for the decision to switch the water in Flint from a safe source to one that was not safe.

All of this matters because the fight for democracy is being waged in state after state. Georgia, for example, will decide in November, whether to allow a state commission to open charter schools against the wishes of the local community.

Let’s hope that former Governor Granholm recognizes that her decision to allow the appointment of emergency financial managers was a disaster. She is a member of Hillary Clinton’s transition team.

Categories ALEC, Chicago, Corporate Reform, Democracy, Detroit, Education Industry, Philadelphia

Peter Greene: Lab Rats for America, A Kafkaesque Version of Our Future

By dianeravitch
August 22, 2016 //
36

Peter Greene writes here about a polished (and terrifying) video released by the ACT Foundation that portrays the programmed education of the future.

He begins:

Oh my God. Oh my effing God.

If you want to see where Competency Based Education, data mining, the cradle to career pipeline, the gig economy, and the transformation into a master and servant class society all intersect– boy, have I got a video for you. Spoiler alert: this is also one way that public education dies.

I’m going to walk you through the video, embed it for your own viewing, and tell you about the people behind this. Hang on. This is stunning. And I’ll warn you right up front– this is not some hack job that looks like amateur hour video production (like, say, an in house USED video). This is slick and well-produced. Which somehow makes it more horrifying.

The video is a little SF film taking us ten years into the future. Imagine you are one of the one billion people using a new technology called The Ledger. And our slogan…?

Learning is earning.

Peter patiently walks you through this dystopian vision of the future of training, disguised as “education.”

He writes:

Exactly what task will certify that you have acquired one hour’s worth of critical thinking?

And how do we even begin to discuss the notion that it doesn’t really matter whether you learn quantum physics from a PhD in the field or from a person who once sat in one class taught by that PhD?

And does anybody think that this is how the children of the wealthy will be educated? Will they accept this sort of “education”? Will they accept this total violation of data privacy?

This is not education. This is training. This is operant conditioning for the servant class that also provides the upper class with tools that let them trickle even fewer benefits down to the working class.

In fact, I would say that this is just training rats to run a maze, but it’s even worse than that, because ultimately even if we were to accept the premise that simply giving some job-ish training for the underclass is good enough, and even if I were to accept the racist, classist bullshit that somehow ignores the immoral and unethical foundations of such a system, the fact remains that this would be a lousy training system. To reduce any job of any level of complexity to this kind of checklist-of-tasks training provides the worst possible type of training.

So, no, this isn’t even sending rats into a maze to earn a pellet of food. This is carrying the pellet dispenser with you as an app. This is saying, “Well, the maze just involves twelve left turns and seven right turns.” Then I hand the rat a tiny phone with an app that measures his ability to turn corners, and once the rat has turned twelve left corners and seven right ones, the app spits out a food pellet.

This is also, not incidentally, the death of public education for any but the wealthy. In the world of the Ledger, there are no teachers, no schools, and no education for any purpose other than to satisfy the requirements of the people with power and money. In the world of the Ledger, education training exists only to help workers better react to the demands of employers. There is no benefit to education training except to trade for money. The Ledger is the wet dream of every corporate boss who said, “Why are they wasting time teaching these kids all this extra stuff. I’m not gonna pay them for that.”

It is important to know what the futuristic thinkers have in mind for us and our children, whether their vision will expand our ideals or contract them. This is most certainly the latter.

Categories Data and Data Mining, Democracy, Technology

Jean Haverhill on an Innovative Way to Govern Schools

By dianeravitch
August 10, 2016 //
54

Jean Haverhill is working to defeat the deceptive Question 2 on the ballot in Massacusetts, which would add new charter schools every year. It’s sponsors claim that new charter schools will “improve public education.” Jean and many parents know from the experience of other states that more charters mean less funding for public schools. She knows that charters undermine public schools. Why create a dual school system?

She commented earlier today:


“Haverhill [Massachusetts] loses 2.7 million in these funds that go to charter; the state of MA loses 400 million (there is a city by city of how much is being drawn off)…. Yes, the ad is deceptive when they say there is “more “money for public schools.”

She added:


I was very proud of the Mayor in Haverhill MA (and school committee resolution and talking with city council on this issue)

Marc Kenen, executive director of the charter school association, and Mayor James J. Fiorentini (Haverhill mayor) at last night’s Haverhill School Committee discussion of a resolution against lifting the cap. [The meeting tape is online. ]

Kenan: [2:09:00]:
We don’t have a traditional school committee like you. Our board of trustees is not elected, like you. It’s an innovative model. It’s a different model, we’re trying something different. [He went on to describe it as similar to the way non-profit boards are chosen.]

Mayor Fiorentini: [2:28:10]:

The gentleman that spoke said, “We don’t have an election, we have a new and innovative way of choosing people to run our schools.” Well, we have an innovative way of running them. It’s called “democracy.”

I wrote and thanked Mayor Fiorentini; we are doing telephone calls and canvassing with door hangers in Haverhill MA two or more days a week if anyone has any time; check your local area; I know Brockton MA has a team also SAVEOURPUBLICSCHOOLSMA.com

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Democracy, Education Industry, Fraud, Massachusetts, Privatization

Carol Burris: The NAACP Was Right to Call for a Moratorium on New Charters

By dianeravitch
August 9, 2016 //
6

Carol Burris, former high school principal and currently executive director of the Network for Public Education, wrote about the NAACP’s call for a moratorium on new charters.

Not surprisingly, Shaver Jeffries of Democrats for Education Reform (the hedge funders’ education reform organization) disagreed. So did John King, the U.S. Secretary of Education. King got his start in education running a no-excuses charter school in Massachusetts that was notable for having the highest suspension rate in the state.

Burris writes that self-named “education reformers” believe that the solution to education problems is to take away democracy from people of color; that they don’t know what is in their best interest; and that they should have no voice in what happens in their children’s schools.

The democratic governance of our public schools is an American tradition worth saving. Although results are not always perfect, school board elections represent democracy in its most responsive and purest form. Sadly, it has become no more than a memory in many communities — especially in urban neighborhoods of color where citizens are already disenfranchised in so many ways.

In those communities, privately managed charters have accelerated a decline that began with mayoral control of public schools. The good news is that there is a growing awareness and resistance to privately managed schools. This is evidenced by the remarkable stand taken by the NAACP at its recent annual convention in Cincinnati, during which members passed a resolution that called for a moratorium on these charter schools.

The private governance of charter schools usually excludes parents and local community members, she says.

Let’s take a look, for example, at the Board of Success Charter Schools in New York City to see what “private management” looks like. New York City’s Success Academy has 17 non-staff directors. They are overwhelmingly white and wealthy. Only one of the 17 board members is black — Shavar Jeffries, the president of Democrats for Education Reform and a former candidate for mayor of Newark.

The rest of the board reads more like a “who’s who” of the New York Times society page than the representatives of the economically disadvantaged families of New York City. Board President Daniel Loeb, founder of Four Point Capital, is a multi-billionaire. Six other board members are founders or directors of hedge funds or private investment firms. Campbell Brown, whose education reform website consistently comes to the defense of Success, also sits on the board.

The board of Success is not an anomaly. You can find the board of KIPP here. It includes Netflix billionaire Reed Hastings; Carrie Walton Penner, an heir to the Walmart fortune; and Philippe Dauman, president and chief executive officer of Viacom.

Why does it matter who sits on the board?

Elected boards that represent a community give parents voice. I served on a board of education for 10 years. In order to be reelected by residents, I had to be sensitive to the needs of parents and taxpayers, always balancing those needs with sound governance of the schools. Later, as a high school principal in a neighboring district, I was always cognizant that I worked for an elected board. If I suspended a student, for example, I needed to make sure that I did my due diligence and followed policy, knowing that the suspension could be appealed and the overturned by the board.

Public school principals know that the decisions they make are transparent to the public and that missteps or mistakes are likely to reach the ear of a member of the board. It is highly unlikely that a Success parent could pick up a phone and get the board chairman or even his assistant, if a problem at Success occurred.

Burris believes there are clear-cut solutions to the current undemocratic, non-transparent, non-accountable methods of charter schools. Read her article to learn what they are.

Please send a big THANK YOU to the NAACP for speaking out against the privatization of public schools.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Democracy, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization

Why I Will Vote for Hillary Clinton

By dianeravitch
July 27, 2016 //
122

I cast my first vote in 1960, when I was 22. That was before 18-year-olds were allowed to vote. I voted for John F. Kennedy, and I worked in his campaign. I was thrilled when he visited campaign headquarters, and I got to shake his hand. He was exciting and dynamic.

At the time, critics said he was no better than Richard Nixon.

They talked about his father, his money, his privilege, his Roman Catholicism; rumors swirled about his private life but were never reported by the media.

Public opinion was so divided about JFK, even among Democrats, that Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. felt compelled to write a short book called “Kennedy or Nixon: Does It Make Any Difference?” Of course, he argued that Kennedy was infinitely preferable to Nixon. Kennedy was elected by a narrow margin.

Democrats were even more divided in 1968 when Hubert H. Humphrey ran against Nixon. Liberals were angry at Humphrey because he had loyally served as LBJ’s vice-president and had not spoken against the war in Vietnam. I worked in the Humphrey-Muskie campaign and organized an event on October 31, 1968, in Manhattan. We didn’t have much money, so we rented a big, shabby labor hall on West 34 street in Manhattan. It was a ragtag affair with a lineup of wonderful speakers: John Kenneth Galbraith, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Herman Badillo, and a parade of other liberal notables of the time. Vice-Presidential candidate Ed Muskie was supposed to drop in. Actress Shelley Winters moderated. In the middle of Galbraith’s endorsement of the Democratic ticket, two people in the front row–a man and a woman–jumped up, took off their raincoats, and ran stark naked onto the stage, where they presented Galbraith with the head of a pig. Shelley Winters threw a pitcher of water at them. The one security officer on duty began chasing them around the stage, and it was like a scene out of the Keystone Kops. Meanwhile, in the back of the room, about 15 protestors marched in, carrying a North Vietnamese flag, banging a drum and chanting “Ho Ho, Ho Chi Minh, Viet Cong are gonna win!”

By the time the protestors moved out, the rally collapsed, Muskie didn’t drop in.

Nixon was holding his own rally across the street at Madison Square Garden, and he had no protestors. Security was tight, and no one got in without credentials.

Our event was a debacle. I knew that night in my heart that Nixon would win.

Fast forward to today.

There are two major party candidates for the presidency, and one of them will be elected in November.

I am an idealist and I fight for what I believe in, but I am also a realist. Either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton will be elected president.

I will support and vote for Hillary Clinton. I am not telling anyone else how to vote. I am telling you why I am voting for Hillary.

To begin with, I think that Donald Trump is the most unqualified person in my lifetime to be a major party candidate. I think that a presidential candidate should have some prior experience in public life; they should have demonstrated their ability to bring people together and to shape foreign and domestic policies that will advance our national goals and values. Trump represents a nativist view of America, with his open disregard for certain ethnic and religious groups. He openly speaks of “America First,” a long-discredited phrase associated in the 1930s with isolationism. Had we listened then to the America Firsters, Hitler would have conquered all of Europe. Like Nixon, Trump appeals to “the silent majority” and presents himself as the “law-and-order” candidate. His campaign plays on our fears: our fear of Others, our fear of weakness, our fear of decline. His “policies” are boasts: he will “make America great again.” He will turn back the clock. He will bring back all the jobs that were outsourced or that disappeared because of technological change. He will restore the America of a misty and idyllic past. He will revive torture to keep us safe. He believes climate change is a hoax. He thinks women who get an abortion should be punished, or at least their doctors should. He will eliminate gun control and gun-free school zones. He will appoint Supreme Court justices who will roll back reproductive rights, gay rights, and regulations on corporations. He opposes an increase in the minimum wage. He threatens to abandon NATO. He has a thin skin. If someone offends him, he lashes out. He ridicules them, belittles them. Can he be trusted with the nation’s nuclear codes? Will he get annoyed and nuke some country he doesn’t like?

I am not voting for Hillary as “the lesser of two evils.”

I don’t think she is evil. I don’t think she is ethically challenged. I have met her several times in the past and have been impressed by her intellect, her judgment, and her compassion. We all know the ordeal she endured because of her husband’s infidelities. That was not her doing. She tried to protect her family as best she could. We know now that other revered presidents, like FDR and Ike, had affairs; JFK was a serial womanizer. The media abandoned their code of silence about presidential privacy when Bill Clinton was president. Hillary can’t be blamed for Bill’s misadventures, and it was nearly 20 years ago, so who cares? God knows, there are plenty of members of Congress and governors in both parties who would not want their private lives revealed in the news. Remember the Republican Congressman who had a “wide stance” in the men’s bathroom in an airport?

I don’t think Hillary is a liar or a person of low character.

Trump has tried to brand her as “Crooked Hillary,” just as he branded Jeb Bush as “low energy,” Ted Cruz as “Lyin’ Ted,” and Marco Rubio as “Little Marco.”

She got large speaking fees but so what? So has every other major political figure when they left office, as well as every celebrity.

I give her credit for being able to withstand the constant barrage of hatred, vilification, smears, and mudslinging–and she has taken it for 25 years. Republicans blame her for everything.

She must have a very thick skin. They have called her every name in the book, and she is still standing. I admire her courage. I admire her resilience.

I know she is smart. She is super-smart. There are very few people who have run for president who are as well informed about the details of foreign and domestic policy as she is.

I am not happy with her qualified support for charter schools. I would like to explain to her that they are undermining the nation’s public schools, and in some cities, destroying them. I would like to explain to her that the problem is not just “for-profit charter schools.” The problem is setting up a dual publicly-funded school system, one that chooses its students and the other required to accept and enroll every student. It makes no sense.

Like me, she went to public schools. She knows how important they are to our democracy. I believe she would not knowingly sacrifice them to the entrepreneurs and privatizers who want to take them over.

We had a dual system before the Brown decision in 1954 (and for years afterwards). That was a very bad idea. Charters are typically more segregated than public schools. In some states, they are havens for white flight. They are not public schools. They are not accountable or transparent. They are privately managed. They are a form of privatization. They pave the way for vouchers. They encourage parents to think as consumers, not citizens. What we have learned from twenty-five years of charter schools is that deregulation opens the door to fraud, nepotism, and graft. Not all charter schools are bad, not all charter leaders are grifters, but those who are go undetected until a whistle-blower appears.

Hillary says she supports only “high quality charter schools,” but what does that mean? The charters with the highest test scores? Those are the charters that are most likely to exclude students who don’t speak English and students with disabilities and to push out problem students. Why should our government deliberately fund a two-track school system? Charter schools are NOT public schools. They are private schools that receive public funding.

If she is elected, and I hope she is, I will continue to fight for public education. Supporting public education is not a choice, it is a civic responsibility. It is a civic responsibility for those whose children are grown and for those who have no children. This is what good citizens do. I will continue to try to persuade the Democrats to oppose the school privatization policies promoted by ALEC, Scott Walker, Chris Christie, Rick Snyder, Rick Scott, Mike Pence, Pat McCrory, Donald Trump, the Republican Party, and the Tea Party.

The American public school is one of the bedrock ideas of our democracy. We must not abandon it. To privatize our schools betrays our democratic values.

I will vote for Hillary Clinton because I trust that she will have a steady hand on American foreign policy.

I will vote for her because I trust that she will shape domestic policies to strengthen our economy and to increase equity.

I will vote for her because I trust that she will reflect and think before making decisions and will not act or react impulsively.

I will vote for her because I trust she will appoint Supreme Court justices who will make decisions that protect our rights and strengthen our democracy.

I will vote for her because I trust that she will fight for a society that is more just for all.

I will vote for her because she has experience, wisdom, and deep knowledge of our nation and the world.

I will vote for Hillary Clinton because she is eminently qualified to be president of the United States.

Diane Ravitch

#Imwithher

Categories Clinton, Democracy, Equity, Trump

Carol Burris: Note to the Democratic Party: Charter Schools Are NOT Public Schools

By dianeravitch
July 26, 2016 //
28

Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, has written an excellent summary of the reasons that charter schools are not public schools. As she puts it, they are private schools that receive public funding. They are like private contractors who are working with a government contract; when they are sued in court, they claim they are not state actors, they are private contractors. That is, they plead that they can’t be held to the same laws as public schools because they are not public schools.

What makes public education advocates angry, she writes, is when charter schools claim “success” but play by different rules.

She uses the example of Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academy charters to show that her charters do not enroll the same proportions of children who are poor and children with disabilities as the neighborhood school. In addition, they don’t accept new students after a certain grade because they don’t want to ruin their “culture” by bringing in new students (this is called “backfilling”).

Public schools have public governance, with open meetings and financial transparency. Charter schools almost never do.

The differences between public schools and charter schools go well beyond issues of governance. One of the strengths of a true public school is its ethical and legal obligation to educate all. Public school systems enroll any student who comes into the district’s attendance zone from ages 5 to 21 — no matter their handicapping condition, lack of prior education, first language, or even disciplinary or criminal record. Not only will empty seats be filled at any grade, if there is a sudden influx of students, classes must be opened.

In contrast, charter schools control enrollment — in both direct and subtle ways. In 2013, journalist Stephanie Simon wrote a comprehensive report exposing the lengthy applications, tests, essays and other hurdles used by many charters schools to make sure they get the kind of student that they want.

Even when some charter chains, such as Aspire, Success Academy and KIPP, have simple applications and lottery entrance, student bodies are not necessarily representative of neighborhood schools.

Burris asks:

The Democratic National Convention is about to begin. Will the party show commitment to rein in the “Wild West” of charter schools, as new platform language suggests? Friends of public education will be watching.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Democracy, Democrats, Education Industry, Harlem Success Academy, Privatization
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