Randi Weingarten and I talked about what happens next: after the pandemic, how we protect schools and children from “opportunistic” tech entrepreneurs, what does Cuomo have up his sleeve, can we trust Biden to ditch Race to the Top bogus ideas?
Our conversation was recorded and live-streamed by the Network for Public Education. Carol Burris introduced us. The conversation wa facilitated by Darcie Cimarusti and Marla Kilfoyle, the fabulous staff of NPE.
The College Board offered 45-minute Advanced Placement tests online for 1 million students, but at least 10,000 of those students submitted their test answers and they were rejected. The College Board blamed the failure on the students’ browsers and said they were “only 1%” of all test-takers. Shrug. We have to take the College Board’s word that the technical failure was limited to 10,000 students, who must take the test again.
Aidin Vaziri of the San Francisco Chronicle wrote:
AP testing meltdown dismays high schoolers, who may have to retake tests
Michele Glazer Jones’ daughter, a junior at San Francisco’s Ruth Asawa San Francisco School of the Arts, spent months studying for her Advanced Placement calculus exam.
But with the high-stakes tests moving online for the first time ever due to the coronavirus pandemic, a widespread technical glitch may have wiped out all her effort.
The exams, which help determine whether students earn college credit for high school coursework, rolled out this week. After the first two days of testing, frustrated teenagers and their parents took to social media to vent about a glitchy system that prevented some students from submitting their finished work — and lack of support from the College Board, the non-profit organization that administers the exams.
“My daughter was absolutely hysterical,” Jones told The Chronicle, saying the AP website would not accept a digital image of the completed exam before timing her daughter out of the system. “I sat on hold waiting for them for 45 minutes before (her daughter) said, ‘Don’t bother, I’ll take it again.’
Ava Osborn, a senior at Oakland Tech who took her AP physics test on Tuesday, was also confounded by the online testing system and could not get answers when her answers failed to process correctly.
“We spent two hours on hold with the College Board and the woman on the phone basically said she couldn’t help me,” Osborn said. “I still haven’t been able to file for the makeup test.”
The College Board said on Tuesday that approximately 1% of the more than 1 million students who took the exams, given in 38 subjects, encountered technical difficulties.
That’s roughly 10,000 kids who prepared, paid $94 each and sat through the 45-minute online program.
Laura Chapman reports on budget cuts to schools in Ohio, which hurt public schools but protect charters and vouchers.
She writes:
Bad news from Ohio again. Not quite Lord of the Flies (fiction or non-fiction truth)
This week, Governor DeWine is proposing $355 million in K-12 education cuts with $300 million coming out of foundation aid to local school districts from the current state budget that expires in July.
While public education accounts for about 42% of state expenditures, it will absorb about 45.8% of the loss.
He has not asked private schools that take public funds to sacrifice anything. This proposed cut will exacerbate the underfunding of public schools in favor of EdChoice vouchers that raid public school dollars for private schools.
In addition public school funds should not be supporting charter schools that are the pet project of billionaires who think they are entitled to raid public dollars for their preferred undemocratic system of education.
This proposed cut will shift a large portion of public school funding from the state to local districts. I have not looked at all of DeWine’s proposed budget cuts but these sure look like they are designed to hit public schools and favor private schools as well as charters schools that have declared they are eligible for small business loans, these likely to be foregiven.
If you are in Ohio, please open the link below and follow-up with emails to the people who are planning for this cut to be passed well before school starts. Start with this link:
https://mailchi.mp/ac594ace4a33/action-alert-355-million-in-education-cuts-in-ohio?e=ba8653e702
Tom Ultican spent many years in Silicon Valley. Then he switched careers and became a teacher of advanced mathematics and physics. He frequently taught AP courses. He recently retired.
He explains in this article why he turned into a critic of AP classes. He engaged in a dialogue with Jay Mathews, the veteran education journalist at the Washington Post. Mathews creates a method for ranking high schools based in the proportion of students who took and passed AP courses.
Mathew’s methodology has now become the US News and World report ranking of “the best high schools” in the nation. Ultican shows why this list favors charter schools, which may have small numbers of graduates and high rates of attrition. It is biased against large high schools that educate all kinds of students, not just survivors.
It’s a great read.
Perhaps you have never heard of State Senator Andrew Brenner. Read Denis Smith’s recent post about Brenner, and you will learn about an elected official who is “radioactive,” “disingenuous,” tone-deaf, and possibly the dumbest elected official in Ohio.
While chairing the education committee, he described public education as “socialist.”
But that’s only a small part of his infamy.
Smith writes:
Yes, the ever-radioactive Andrew Brenner who with his meanness and bountiful bile is capable of producing Strontium-90 by the megaton, set off yet another chain reaction through his defense of his wife Sara Marie Brenner and her comments about state policies intended to deal with the pandemic.
It was only fitting that Brenner, whose use of social media to heap scorn on his opponents and ridicule those not of the lunatic fringe, set off a barrage from critics when he responded to a posting by his wife:
“This actually feels like Hitler’s Germany,” Sara Marie posted on her Facebook page.
“Sen. Brenner responded: “We will never allow that to happen in Ohio.””
Brenner’s targeting of Ohio Governor Mike DeWine and state health director Dr. Amy Acton generated this retort from Darrel Rowland of the Columbus Dispatch.
That the comments came on Holocaust Remembrance Day and that Acton is Jewish ensured their enshrinement in the crowded hall of fame for political stupidity.
With Brenner, the half-life of his tone deafness, aka political stupidity, is another measure of his increasing radioactivity among Ohio voters.
Lest we forget about Brenner’s serial bad behavior, let’s examine a few milestones in his less than illustrious history as a member of the Ohio General Assembly.
In 2014, as part of a blog post, Brenner made national headlines when he wrote that “Public education in America is socialism… Privatize everything and the results will speak for themselves.” He must have forgotten about other public functions, including our socialist public safety departments, socialist public libraries, socialist highway department, and the socialist state health department headed by Dr. Acton.
In 2015, Brenner compared Planned Parenthood to Nazis. (There’s something about Andy and Nazis, isn’t there?)
He is a pro-gun zealot, of course.
With a guy like this shaping education policy, you can understand why Ohio is in trouble.
Nancy Bailey just keeps getting better and better as she points her pen and her blog at malfeasance in education.
In this post, she points to the recent landmark decision that recognized that the children of Detroit have a right to literacy, a right not previously acknowledged by any court (or overturned on appeal). The court quite correctly decided that young people cannot exercise their rights and responsibilities as citizens if they can’t read.
What is DeVos’s role in the Detroit debacle? She has spent large sums of money to promote the false idea that the way to improve education is to expand school choice. Detroit is her handiwork, and it proves the failure of school choice. What she purchased was widespread inequity and inadequacy.
Open the link to read the full article and see the links to other sources.
Bailey writes:
The Detroit landmark decision that children deserve to learn to read in school is a case that reflects decades of troubled education in Detroit. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and school privatization are not mentioned in this case. But school privatization initiatives have been failing children in the Motor City for years. DeVos is the current face of a long line of those peddling such reforms.
Harmful school reform initiatives go back to Gov. John Engler’s administration. Many school reformers, both Republican and Democrat, have their fingerprints on the crime scene. The DeVos family is from Michigan and has affected Detroit and school reform there for years.
The U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled in favor of Detroit students who claim they were denied their rights to a “basic minimum education.” Called the “Right to Read” lawsuit, Gary B. v. Whitmer exposes the decrepit conditions found in schools run by State leaders who failed to support Detroit’s students. The case was originally filed under former Gov. Rick Snyder’s administration.
It’s critical to recognize DeVos’s connection to the Detroit school failures. During this pandemic she is flagrantly redirecting public money to the same privatization agenda. It puts democratic public schools in jeopardy, like schools were put at risk in Detroit. Here’s a petition you can sign now to try and stop her.
School privatization cheerleaders have for years promoted the idea that choice will equalize education by giving parents choices. They’ve pushed for online charter schools and school turnarounds that get tough on teachers and students of color. Choice failed in Detroit.
Reading
Schools had no literacy programs.
The case describes what good reading instruction should consist of in school. Sometimes it appears to be delving into the Reading Wars, emphasizing the loss of explicit phonics.
The trouble is, one can’t get to a debate over how students learn to read, without overcoming the fact that students have untrained teachers and an atrocious learning environment.
It’s troubling to think the case might result in only professional development and a push for unproven programs, even online reading programs, that don’t address the need for creating quality schools, professional teachers, and more individualized attention for the children of Detroit.
School Buildings
Poor school conditions have been a part of Detroit’s schools for years. Students struggle to learn in slum-like conditions, no air-conditioning in the summer, freezing temperatures in the winter. Who can forget these pictures from 2016, the year the case was filed?
Vermin, mold, and contaminated drinking water plague the schools. Bullets, dead vermin, condoms, and sex toys have been found on the playground. Fire safety equipment and fire regulations are missing.
Betsy DeVos’s mantra is that education is about students and not buildings. She has done nothing to improve the condition of schools in Detroit or around the country.
Lacking Resources
Teaching resources were deficient. The case describes classrooms without enough textbooks, and old books that haven’t been updated in years.
The only school library mentioned had no librarian and was locked!
Shawgi Tell, professor at Nazareth College in New York, describes the multiple ways in which corporate charter chains are cashing in during the pandemic.
He begins:
While private businesses like non-profit and for-profit charter schools have been seizing enormous sums of public money for decades,1 they continue to seize hundreds of millions of public dollars during the “COVID Pandemic”—a move that further undermines the nation’s public education system and economy.
The latest example of this massive transfer of public funds to segregated charter schools involves $200 million set aside a few weeks ago for large corporate charter school chains by billionaire Betsy DeVos, U.S. Secretary of Education. This pay-the-rich scheme is taking place in the context of more brutal cuts to public school budgets around the country.
On top of this, in the current crisis, which is worse than the 2008 economic collapse engineered by Wall Street, charter school advocates are also taking virtue-signaling to new heights, casually and repeatedly lauding themselves as saviors and as “tried-and-true online experts,” even though many have ironically(?) turned away from notoriously poor-performing cyber charter schools in this disruptive transition to inefficient digital “communication” at all levels of education. Most people have simply not turned to online charter schools during this crisis. They recognize that online charter schools are subpar and not the way forward. Even well-funded organizations that support charter schools, like the neoliberal Center for Research on Education and Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford University, bemoan the persistently abysmal performance of cyber charter schools.
The conceited charter school sector believes, however, that this virtue-signaling will suddenly cause people to forget that charter schools are notorious for all sorts of corruption, fraud, and scandal. While the “COVID Pandemic” has overwhelmed many, people have not spontaneously forgotten the poor track record of cyber charter schools or brick-and-mortar charter schools.
The necessity today is for governments at all levels to cease funneling much-needed public funds to private business like charter schools and to direct these funds to public schools that serve 90% of the nation’s students. Public funds belong to public schools and charter schools are not public schools. There is no such thing as a public charter school, especially given the fact that charter schools are now openly claiming to be small private businesses so as to obtain public Small Business Administration money (from the CARES Act) that regular public schools, precisely because they are actually public, do not have access to.
Read on.
Donald Cohen of the nonpartisan “In the Public Interest” has assembled a brief history of anti-government rhetoric.
He has assembled quotations from the anti-government crowd. It is only 12 pages and a quick, enlightening read.
It is called The Anti-Government Echo Chamber.
Here is the introduction on the ITPI website:
“They play to your fear, government plays to your fear.”
“Will you resist the temptation to get a government handout for your community?”
“Most businesses would tell you that they presently take care of their employees. They don’t need government telling them how to do it.”
“Government is a dangerous thing.”
No, these quotes aren’t from a recent Fox News broadcast about the coronavirus crisis. They’re examples from a decades-long, relentless attack on government by corporations, conservative politicians, and right wing think tanks.
Over the past few months we’ve been collecting anti-government rhetoric from Ronald Reagan to the Cato Institute to the mid-20th-century white supremacist Sen. James Eastland. We’ve dubbed it “The Anti-Government Echo Chamber.”
What stands out is that anti-government rhetoric has gotten clearer and more consistent over time. It’s come from diverse right-wing voices, from white supremacists to the religious right. It’s been weaponized to oppose a wide range of policies and programs, from education to ensuring civil rights. Of course, it’s been selective—focused on the safety net and public services we all rely on but silent about tax cuts, subsidies, and other benefits for corporations.
And it’s been effective—dramatically so. Taxes on corporations and the wealthy have been slashed. Public budgets have been cut. Public goods and services have been privatized, from highways to education. Nearly every state’s tax code is regressive, meaning they collect more taxes from low-income people than high-income people as a share of their income. At the federal level, spending on public health, education, and other nondefense discretionary programs is at a historic low.
Despite what these voices have said, government is the only institution capable of ensuring that things like quality health care, clean water, a good education, well-paid work, and equal voice are available to all. There are just some things that private markets can’t do.
We published “The Anti-Government Echo Chamber” also as a call to action to progressive leaders, thinkers, strategists, organizations, organizers, and activists.
Virtually every policy, program, and issue we focus on relies on using public power to create a fairer, healthier, and safer country and world. Yet, progressives rarely talk about government successes and progress except when under attack. The language we use is often tinged with anti-government attitudes.
Conservatives have long been clear about what they want—less government, a weaker democracy, and more power for corporations, the bigger the better. Progressives have focused on specific issues and campaigns and remained silent on the ideas that unite those issues.
The coronavirus crisis is revealing the dire need for effective, democratic, adequately funded public institutions. We must create our own “Pro-Public Echo Chamber” until our ideas become the new popular conventional wisdom and a governing reality. Are you with us?
The Anti-Government Echo Chamber begins like this:
“The emancipation of belief is the most formidable tasks of reform and the one on which all else depends.”
– John Kenneth Galbraith
“The power of the [corporation] depends on instilling the belief that any public or private action that serves its purposes also serves the purpose of the public at large.”
– John Kenneth Galbraith
“The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the Government, and I’m here to help.”
– President Ronald Reagan
“The folks who run Koch [Industries] are very clear. They would love to have government just get out of the way and allow companies to compete, whether in their particular sectors or other sectors. They are true believers in small government.”
– Congressional candidate Mike Pompeo when asked if he was influenced by Koch Industries, his largest donor.
“Expansive government undermines the moral character that is necessary to civil society.”
– Cato Institute 2017 Handbook for Policymakers
Anti-government sentiment by corporations and conservative intellectuals isn’t new. In 1914, three years after the Triangle Shirtwaist Company Fire killed 145 women and girls, real estate interests lobbied against new building safety codes.“The experience of the past proves conclusively that the best government is the least possible government, that the unfettered initiative of the individual is the force that makes a country great,” said Laurence McGuire, chairman of the Real Estate Board of New York.
But since the 1960’s (particularly after Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign), anti-government rhetoric has gotten clearer, more consistent, and has come from diverse right-wing voices, from white supremacists to the religious right. It’s been weaponized to oppose a wide range of policies and programs, from education to ensuring civil rights. The attack on government is often selective—focused on the safety net and public services we all rely upon but silent on tax cuts, subsidies and other benefits for industry.
I think you will want to read it all.
Valerie Jablow, parent activist in the District of Columbia, posts often about the D.C. government and its passion for giving away public property.
In this post, she questions what happened to the playing field of a Duke Ellington High School of the Arts.
Some time in February, Ellington Field–the field that belonged for most of a century by court order to DCPS’s Duke Ellington High School of the Arts–was officially transferred from DCPS to the department of parks and recreation (DPR). Despite many appeals to the DC city council and to the deputy mayor for education (who has oversight of both DPR and DCPS) explicitly asking for the terms of the use agreement before the transfer and assurance that Duke Ellington high school would have first priority use among all users, no one in the public knows what the terms of that transfer really are; what use of the field the high school (or any DCPS school) is allowed; and whether Duke Ellington will be able to provide credited programming there ever again.
The Ellington transfer happened because Mayor Bowser gave Maret, a private school, exclusive use of a nearby public field, Jelleff. In the wake of public protest against the Jelleff deal, Bowser then transferred Ellington Field from Duke, to make it a public recreation center kinda sorta standing in for Jelleff.
So it was that despite opposition of parents, neighbors, and many others (see here and here for a few), this unprecedented transfer of an asset of a DCPS school, actively used by students, for the immediate and lasting benefit of those not necessarily affiliated with DCPS happened without much fanfare.
A short time later, on the afternoon of March 3, the private Maret school (yes, that same one) was photographed using Ellington Field. On its website, Maret had posted a spring schedule of activities it was hosting at Ellington Field.
All of this was quite some news to Duke Ellington HS staff, who apparently had no idea of Maret’s activities at the field that day beforehand–much less that the field had been, by that point, officially transferred from Duke’s control.
Dr. Theresa Trevino, a public school parent in Austin, wrote to Texas Commissioner of Education Mike Morath to complain about the insertion of a BASIS charter school into a community where the school is neither wanted nor needed. BASIS is owned by a couple who pay themselves $10 million a year. Their charter schools require students to pass multiple AP exams, which effectively winnows out low-performing students, who no longer bother to apply. Most of their charters are in Arizona, where they are celebrated for their high scores. Their high scores are achieved by excluding students who might get low scores.
See the letters here and here.
