Maurice Cunningham is perpetually amazed that the mainstream media—and even Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona—take the so-called National Parents Union as an authentic parents’ group. Without the generous funding of Charles Koch, the Waltons, and other rightwing billionaires, there would be no NPU.
Archives for category: Education Reform
The IDEA charter chain in Texas was one of Betsy DeVos’s favorite grantees. She handed over $200 million from the federal Charter Schools Program to IDEA to spur its expansion. With so much money, the management of IDEA indulged in luxuries. They planned to lease a private jet for $2 million a year but backed off because of adverse publicity. They bought season box seats at the San Antonio Spurs basketball games. When the founder resigned, he was given a $1 million golden parachute.
But the IDEA spending spree didn’t end there. The board of the charter chain received a whistleblower’s letter and commissioned an independent audit of its finances. When the audit was completed, the board fired the chief executive officer and the chief operating officer. Go to this link to read the board’s letter to the public and its recognition of the leadership’s corruption.
This scandal goes to the heart of the basic lie behind the charter industry: their lobbyists have waged bitter fights against transparency and accountability. They have sold the lie that private entrepreneurs should get millions and millions of public dollars without oversight. “Trust us,” they said. They lied.
In state after state, charter schools do not get better test scores than public schools, unless they choose their students carefully and kick out the ones they don’t want.
The IDEA scandal should bring renewed scrutiny to the federal Charter Schools Program, which currently receives $440 million a year. As the Network for Public Education documented in two reports (see here and here), about 37% of the federally-funded charter schools either never opened or close within a few years. There is now a campaign in Congress, led by the charter lobby, to increase its funding from $440 million to $500 million per year.
Let’s be clear: the charter school industry is amply funded by billionaires, mostly hedge fund managers as well as Silicon Valley titans and billionaires like Charles Koch and the Walton Family. It attracts the support of libertarians and right wingers who want to privatize public schools.
The federal Charter Schools Program should NOT be expanded. It should be eliminated.
In the GOP’s race to the bottom on teaching about racism, Texas takes the lead. The legislature passed a bill limiting what teachers can teach in history and social studies about race. Rightwing Governor Greg Abbott will sign it.
Here’s a description of the legislation from the Texas Tribune, written before it was passed by the Senate:
The Senate-approved version revives specific essential curriculum standards that students are required to understand, including the Declaration of Independence and the Federalist Papers. But it stripped more than two dozen requirements to study the writings or stories of multiple women and people of color that were also previously approved by the House, despite attempts by Democratic senators to reinstate some of those materials in the bill.
The Senate did vote to include the Federal Civil Rights Act of 1964, the 13th 14th and 19th amendments to the U.S. Constitution and the complexity of the relationship between Texas and Mexico to the list of required instruction.
Yet the most controversial aspects of the bill remain, including that teachers must explore current events from multiple positions without giving “deference to any one perspective.” It also bars students from getting course credit for civic engagement efforts, including lobbying for legislation or other types of political activism.
Educators, historians and school advocacy groups who fiercely oppose the bill remained unswayed by arguments that the bill is merely meant to ensure students are taught that one race or gender is not superior to another.
“Giving equal weight to all sides concerning current events would mean that the El Paso terrorist ideology would have to be given equal weight to the idea that racism is wrong,” said Trinidad Gonzales, a history professor and assistant chair of the dual enrollment program at South Texas College. “That is the problem, white supremacy would be ignored or given deference if addressed. That is the problem with the bill.”
Hughes denied that the bill would require teachers give moral equivalency to perpetrators of horrific violence.
Sen. Brandon Creighton, R-Conroe, who sponsored the Senate version of the bill, said in a statement to the Tribune that Texas schools should emphasize “traditional history, focusing on the ideas that make our country great and the story of how our country has risen to meet those ideals.”
But Sen. Royce West, D-Dallas, raised concerns on the Senate floor that the historical documents required in the bill only reflect the priorities of white senators.
After the bill passed both houses, the Huffington was blunt about its purpose: Teachers should not teach about racism or white supremacy.
The faculty at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill selected the highly accomplished Nikole Hannah-Jones to serve as the Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism at the UNC Haussmann School of Journalism and Media.
She was quite a catch: she has won a Pulitzer Prize, a coveted MacArthur Fellowship, has worked for major newspapers. She’s even an alumna of UNC. The committee that interviewed her was impressed. They offered her the chair and tenure. All previous holders of the chair at UNC were awarded tenure.
But the board of the university withdrew the offer of tenure. They said she lacked academic qualifications. They made that lie up on the spot, because the position is designed not for academics but for people with real world experience of journalism.
Twenty-two holders of the Knight Chair at other universities wrote a joint letter in support of Hannah-Jones and told the UNC-Chapel Hill board that they should be ashamed of themselves.
The NC Policy Watch boiled the issue down to one word: Race.
The Trumpian right is abuzz with fear about the 1619 Project and critical race theory. Nikole Hannah-Jones was in charge of producing the 1619 Project for the New York Times. it seeks to place slavery and racism at the center of the American experience. White traditionalists prefer to think only about the grand achievements of the Founding Fathers. This is the culture war issue that they have put front and center. They are not letting go.
Billy Townsend doesn’t pull any punches. In this post, he tears into the State Commissioner for thinking he can indoctrinate the students of Florida with lies.
He titles his piece:
Indoctrinate this, part 1: The voices of the Great Migration laugh at Richard Corcoran
A grifter who can’t make finalist in a university president search rigged for him is no match for the honest, competitive study of America — which is an unpoliceable classroom without walls.
I was already in the process of writing and documenting this piece about The Great Migration’s relevance to today’s economic and social moment when the comical ball of failure and grift that is Florida Education Commissioner Richard Corcoran did what he tends to do.
He helped me — by saying really dumb stuff.
Indeed, it’s hard to quantify all the usefully dumb stuff he said to an audience at Hillsdale College during his recent freestyle Facebook rant dressed up as a Q&A. I will try, bit by bit, in weeks to come.
But the passage that follows is most relevant to this article. It’s about the importance of indoctrinating your kids and mine with whatever nonsense Richard Corcoran claims to believe at any given time. I see no evidence he actually believes in anything but petty personal dominance, which means the “indoctrination” will morph from moment to moment if he thinks he can bully you with it. Indeed, note the part in bold at the end. I think it illustrates pretty well Corcoran’s embarrassing sense of himself as tiny dictator.
But you have to police it on a daily basis, it’s 185,000 teachers in a classroom with anywhere from 18-25 kids and it you’re not physically there in the classroom. I will tell you it’s working in the universities and it’s starting to work in… I’ve censored or fired or terminated numerous teachers for doing that. I’m getting sued right now in Duval County … because it was an entire classroom memorialized to Black Lives Matter… we made sure she was terminated and now we’re being sued by every one of the liberal left groups for “freedom of speech” issues and I say to them … “look let’s not even talk about whether it’s right or true or good …
That, of course, directly conflicts with this laughably vague, unenforceable, and undefinable rule Corcoran is now pushing though the Florida Department of Education as some kind of poor man’s performative “Cultural Revolution.”
Instruction on the required topics must be factual and objective and may not suppress or distort significant historical events, such as the Holocaust, and may not define American history as something other than the creation of a new nation based largely on universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence.
Keep this Corcoran prologue in mind as you read the rest of this article, which is Part 1 of 2. And remember that I didn’t know any of what follows about Florida and American history, really, until about 12 years ago.
That’s because of the “indoctrination” of “traditional,” inaccurate, and woefully incomplete American History standards taught by my public schools in Florida and my elite private college in Massachusetts.
I had to teach myself — with help from microfilm, Google, and some great historians — through engaging the actual words and behaviors of people who lived the history as it happened.
Kids today are so far ahead of me at their age. They already know so so so so much more than I did. I’ve maybe helped a little with my books and countless vibrant discussions with young people inside classrooms and outside classrooms. I find them insatiably hungry to know who they are and how they came to fit into America in the way they do.
If that frightens Corcoran, perhaps he should come “police” me, if he can. But I’m not very important, obviously. And I’m not the reason Corcoran has already lost.
Every kid is their own teacher
HBO has put Tulsa on film twice in the last 18 months in two different series. “Drunk History” is more factual and more fun than Corcoran’s grifter drivel. YouTube blows up lies as often as it creates them. Knowledgable “amateurs” on Twitter embarrass grifter clowns and gatekeeping blowhards alike every single day. Of all subjects a teacher “teaches,” history and its adjacent social topics are the least like syringes of content to inject.
Whatever side you take, the ongoing battle for historical memory and its modern application isn’t occurring within walled classrooms. No one can police it; and no one can make a kid — or even an adult — swallow an obvious lie, even if it’s important to the brittle self-identity of the liars. You might test a lie and get a kid to bubble in the lie you want them to for the sake of a cheap grade; but that’s not indoctrination. Not even close.
Keep reading. There’s lots more about the Great Migration and the lies taught about it.
Richard Corcoran, state commissioner of education in Florida, announced that he fired Amy Donofrio, a teacher in Duval County, because she supported #BlackLivesMatter.
Corcoran made his decision known during a lecture at conservative Hillsdale College in Michigan. He was speaking about “critical race theory” and curriculum oversight and used her as an example of his cleansing of the ranks. Donofrio learned of her termination on a YouTube video. If you look at the photograph accompanying the story, you will see that she teaches at Robert E. Lee Hgh School. (Irony alert.)
Richard Corcoran is not an educator. He was the Speaker of Florida’s House when he was appointed to run the state system. His wife is or was a board member of a charter school associated with Hillsdale College. The Corcorans’ six children were home-schooled.
Corcoran has made clear his hostility to public schools and his desire to voucherize all the state’s schools. You may get the sense that he is totally unqualified to be state commissioner of education, and you would be right.
Bill Phillis is a retired state education official who writes frequently about the Republican war against public schools and against the education provisions of the state constitution. He created the Ohio Coalion for Equity and Advocacy of School Funding to publicize his campaign for equitable funding and his opposition to privatization.
He writes:
SENATE PRESIDENT HUFFMAN: THE EDUCATION IN OHIO NEEDS TO BE STUDENT-OR USER-BASED, NOT INSTITUTION-BASED
The Senate President, in response to the Universal Voucher bill (HB 290), is quoted in the May 9 Gongwer, as saying:
“The education in Ohio needs to be student-or user-based, not institution-based.” The Ohio constitution (Article VI, section 2) requires the legislature to secure and fund a thorough and efficient system of common schools. The common school system is “institution-based” as required by the constitution.
It appears that the oath of office taken by all legislators means nothing to some of them. HB 290 is treachery; Betrayal of the Ohio constitution; Subversion.
The No Child Left Behind Act Has Put The Nation At Risk
Vouchers Hurt Ohio
Universal Voucher Bill Drops Amid K-12 Budget Debate
Placeholder legislation aimed at giving parents multiple options for using state primary and secondary education funding has spurred strong pushback despite a lack of firm details.
The bill (HB 290) as introduced by Rep. Marilyn John (R-Shelby) and Rep. Riordan McClain (R-Upper Sandusky), which currently consists of two sentences, calls for the creation of a funding formula that “allows families to choose the option for all computed funding amounts associated with students’ education to follow them to the schools they attend.”
Rep. John said in an interview Friday the legislation was inspired in part by the coronavirus pandemic, which led many parents to reevaluate their children’s educational options after schools shut their doors to slow the spread of COVID-19.
“The vision is really to provide greater choice for students and parents,” she said, “I think we have found during the pandemic that each child’s needs when it comes to education can be different. It is our goal to provide resources so that each child can receive a quality education in the way that they best learn.”
She said the measure could end up providing funding for students taught in private schools or at home, with the best interest of each child being the sponsors’ focus.
Rep. McClain said in an interview one potential model to follow is legislation recently signed by West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice creating a system of educational savings accounts. The law gives families the ability to access to up to $4,600 per student in state funding to spend on private school tuition or other education-related expenses.
“Working that into our funding formula would be a path that I would like to pursue, but I’m certainly not entrenched in any one manner,” he said. “I just want to make sure that parents at the end of the day have access funds for the use of the education of their child and that they have greater flexibility in the education that they give their child.”
The bill’s introduction came after the House voted to pass a state operating budget (HB 110) that largely incorporates a school funding formula (HB 1) developed in part by Speaker Bob Cupp (R-Lima). Senate President Matt Huffman (R-Lima) has said the upper chamber could keep some aspects of plan but is unlikely to pass a budget containing the entirety of the House’s proposal. (See Gongwer Ohio Report, April 21, 2021)
Rep. John called it a “great time” for lawmakers to expand the debate over the future of school funding in the state. She said she and Rep. McClain are “waiting to see what happens in the Senate” and having discussions on their bill as they work to craft a more-detailed version of the measure.
The introduction of HB290 drew immediate criticism from public school officials and advocates.
“Harmful universal vouchers are a reckless abrogation of the Ohio General Assembly’s responsibility to provide a high quality education to every child in this state,” Dan Heintz, a member of the Cleveland Heights-University Heights City School District Board of Education, said in a statement. “Lawmakers don’t get it. Vouchers are like termites eating away at the very foundation of our communities,”
Bill Phillis, executive director of the Ohio Coalition for Equity and Adequacy of School Funding, said in a statement that the proposal is an attempt to undermine traditional public schools.
“This is a direct assault on the Ohio Constitution,” he said. “We know vouchers are primarily a refund and a rebate program for parents who never intended to send their children to public schools. Vouchers disproportionately harm impoverished and minority students and reward the well-to-do.”
The coalition is behind a long-simmering legal effort over existing state voucher programs that help qualifying families pay private school tuition. (See Gongwer Ohio Report, December 18, 2020).
When Gina Raimondo was Governor of Rhode Island (she is now Biden’s Secretary of Commerce), she determined that the only way to fix the Providence schools was a state takeover. Raimondo, a former hedge fund manager, hired Angelica Infante-Green as state commissioner, although Green’s experience was limited to two years of Teach for America and a few years as a state bureaucrat (she was never a principal). Green promptly joined Jeb Bush’s Chiefs for Change, whose members favor privatization and oppose unions.
Green hired Harrison Peters as superintendent of schools for the troubled Providence district. Peters hired ex-Tampa administrator Olayinka Alege to be the Providence network superintendent of secondary schools.
Then parents and students began to complain that Alege liked to massage their feet and pop their toes. More boys came forward to report toe-popping incidents. Alege said it was discipline, but some of the toe-popping occurred in private gyms.
Infante Green asked both Harrison Peters and Alege to resign. Peters leaves with a buyout of $170,000. Legislators are outraged that he wasn’t fired “for cause” without severance pay.
Senator Louis P. DiPalma, chairman of the Senate Rules, Government Ethics and Oversight Committee, called the Peters payout “unconscionable.”
“I’m not a lawyer, but I think there could have been termination for cause,” he said. “And there should have been 11 months ago.”
DiPalma, a Middletown Democrat, noted that Peters on Monday told the committee he knew about news reports from 2009 that Alege had been accused of squeezing the toes of multiple boys in Florida – a practice referred to as “toe popping” – but Peters did not tell the hiring committee about that information.
Infante-Green is undeterred. The turnaround will continue.
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Billy Townsend served as a school board member in Polk County, Florida. He now blogs about the schools in his state and takes aim at the state’s determination to cripple public schools while shifting more than a billion dollars to voucher schools.
In this article in the Orlando Sentinel, he compares a public high school to the inferior voucher schools that the state wants more of.
He writes:
Six years ago, essentially zero Jones High School students took physics. Today, more than 250 do. That means 250 Orlando-area young people per year now have a better chance of becoming engineers or scientists or doctors. We should celebrate that. Physics is crucial to many educational and professional journeys.
Unfortunately, as a recent former Polk County school board member, I know all too well the rarity of serious growth in Florida’s education capacity. Our state is steadily dismantling education capacity everywhere through its contempt for public schools and indifference to voucher-school performance.
Capacity destruction drives Florida’s chronic educator shortages. It’s one reason Florida has among America’s worst state test score “learning rates,” according to The Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University.
Capacity destruction particularly harms children and communities that lack capital. Quite often, these low-capital communities are also historically black communities. A thriving physics program — one that exceeds enrollment for most other wealthier schools in Florida — demonstrates real capital investment in community capacity.
That makes the Jones physics story all the more important — and a powerful counterpoint to Florida’s failed state voucher programs, particularly the Florida Tax Credit (FTC) voucher.
Like many voucher schools, the Jones enrollment of nearly 1,600 is almost entirely Black. A casual observer may see it as “segregated,” in the sense we’ve come to popularly understand segregation. But there is a massive difference between the Jones community-support “segregation” and the “segregation” of schools in Florida’s low-capital voucher-school marketplace.
The Sentinel’s invaluable “Schools without Rules” series in 2017 documented the failures of many voucher schools and how little Florida leaders care about it. It also illustrated how Florida’s testing system and barbaric mass third-grade retention policies drive children into voucher schools in a disfigured conception of “choice.”
But the Sentinel did not delve deeply into the extreme racial segregation of Florida’s voucher-school marketplace, as I did in Polk County.
As of last month, the Step Up for Students voucher marketplace shows 16 Polk County voucher schools have enrollments of at least 76 percent Black children. Twelve of the 16 schools are at least 95 percent Black. Six are 100 percent Black.
Not one of those schools has any accreditation. None of them have any state or local oversight. There is no elected board member or unelected bureaucrat to call when these schools defraud you. More than 800 Black children in Polk County attend these segregated, low-capital so-called schools at any given time.
Moreover, the Urban Institute’s 2017 study of Florida’s voucher marketplace, the only recent study of its kind, found that 61 percent of voucher recipients abandon their FTC voucher within two years. 75 percent abandon the voucher within three years. That’s an extraordinary record of failure and churn. Voucher advocates twist themselves into knots insisting this is not a 75-percent 3-year program dropout rate. But it is.
Many voucher schools resemble the worst of pre-Brown vs. Board of Education American schools — operating in strip mall storefronts with names like “Endtime Christian School of Excellence.” That is the name and description of a very real and very typical voucher school in Lake Wales. Yet, Florida is expanding the roughly $1 billion a year in direct tax money and corporate tax-shelter cash it spends each year to defraud black children and parents – and everyone else.
Runaway voucher spending with no oversight has built zero capacity to actually provide education. That’s because money alone cannot buy education capacity; only consistent, focused effort.
There are very few decent voucher products to buy. And decent private schools, almost without exception, do not rely on vouchers for survival or take many voucher kids. Vouchers do not cover the tuition of serious private schools, which have full-tuition paying customers and endowments and capital and accreditation. Such private schools are also very, very white.
School segregation, integration and equity pose some of society’s hardest, most complex challenges. In my experience as a school-board member and advocate, human beings want to attend schools that reflect their communities; they want to avoid busing; they want equality — or advantage — in resources; they (often) want diversity in faculty and fellow students; and they want to be in the majority of a school population. People want all of this at the same time in the same school.
Jones provides a far better model for addressing that challenge than vouchers. Indeed, I would not call the Jones model of schooling “segregation.” I would call it “community ownership” and Jones is literally a “Community Partnership School.” That means it works rigorously with the Children’s Home Society of Florida, Orange Blossom Health, and the University of Central Florida to provide “wraparound” social services and slowly, painstakingly build capacity for the Parramore/Lorna Doone community and its high school.
Today, the Jones community school model is building capacity in physics while most of the rest of Florida is destroying it. That is a public-school accomplishment to celebrate from a model far superior to the failed voucher model state power prefers.
Dana Milbank believes that Republicans are terrified of restoring civics education for fear that the younger generation will learn how our government is supposed to work.
He wrote in the Washington Post:
Pretty much everything the Trump-occupied Republican Party has been doing these days violates the basic tenets of democracy that American schoolchildren are taught.
But the Trumpy right has come up with an elegant remedy to relieve the cognitive dissonance: They want to cancel civics education. If the voters don’t know how the government is supposed to function, they’ll be none the wiser when it malfunctions — which has been pretty much all the time.
First, Republican officials indulged President Donald Trump’s four years of sabotaging the rule of law and democratic norms.
Then, a majority of Republican lawmakers voted to overturn the election results and President Biden’s victory.
Then, they voted to excuse Trump’s role in fomenting a violent insurrection against Congress.
Then, some moved to whitewash the insurrection itself, pretending the deadly attack was just a “normal tourist visit.”
And, finally, they purged the No. 3 House Republican, Liz Cheney of Wyoming, for refusing to embrace Trump’s “big lie” about a stolen election.
How do they get away with such fundamental violations of America’s democratic traditions? Well, maybe it’s because only a quarter of U.S. students are proficient in civics, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress. And apparently, the right wants to keep it that way.
A bipartisan bill in Congress sponsored by Republican Sen. John Cornyn of Texas and Republican Rep. Tom Cole of Oklahoma (Disclosure: My wife’s stepmother, Rep. Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, is one of the bill’s Democratic sponsors), would authorize $1 billion a year in grants to pay for more civics and history programs that teach children “to understand American Government and engage in American democratic practices as citizens and residents of the United States.” It’s as American — and as anodyne — as apple pie.
But, as The Post’s Laura Meckler reported over the weekend, “Conservative media and activists are pelting the Republicans who support the bill to abandon it. They call the grant program a ‘Trojan horse’ that would allow the Biden administration to push a liberal agenda.”
Conservative writer Stanley Kurtz told Breitbart News that the bill would promote a “woke education” and a “Marxist-based philosophy” in which “teachers are forced to indoctrinate students with ideas like ‘systemic racism,’ ‘white privilege,’ and ‘gender fluidity.’ ” Kurtz wrote in National Review that the civics bill will promote a curriculum “built around radical Critical Race Theory.”
In reality, the civics bill does no such thing. The “Civics Secures Democracy Act” specifically states that it doesn’t “authorize the Secretary of Education to prescribe a civics and history curriculum.” That’s up to state and local leaders.
But the plain text of the bill didn’t stop Kurtz and his allies from spinning a conspiracy theory, based on their objections to another, unrelated grant program. (For that program, the Biden administration cited the New York Times’s “1619 Project” in touting the importance of teaching about the consequences of slavery.) So, now, it’s a safe bet that congressional Republicans will in large numbers oppose a bill promoting nothing more nefarious than civil discourse, voting, jury duty and volunteering.
Perhaps the Republicans would look more favorably on a civics bill if it mandated a curriculum that better reflects the way they’ve been governing. To assist them, I’ve combed through the civics questions for fourth-graders asked by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, and substituted answers more consistent with recent events than the outdated, “correct” answers.
Which event is Rosa Parks associated with?
Strike “A boycott of the buses in Montgomery, Alabama,” and substitute: “An ANTIFA plot to destroy the suburbs.”
July 4 is a national holiday that celebrates the day when . . .
Strike “the American colonies declared their independence” and insert “the Continental Army took over the airports.”
The purpose of the United Nations is to . . .
Strike “promote international peace and security” and insert “lead a takeover of the U.S. government by globalist pedophiles.”
Usually United States citizens elect a President by . . .
Strike “secret ballot on Election Day” and insert “Storming the Capitol and bludgeoning police officers with flagpoles.”
Which of the following ideas is in the summary of the Declaration of Independence?
Strike “People in the United States should have some control over the government” and insert “People in the United States should not wear face masks.”
What are the two main political parties in the United States?
Strike “Democrats and Republicans” and insert “Republicans and Far-Left Radical Socialists who are Against God.”
Who decides whether a law follows the Constitution or not?
Strike “The Supreme Court” and insert “Rudy Giuliani.”
Who is currently the President of the United States?
Strike “Joseph Biden” and insert “Donald Trump.”
Two decades ago, George W. Bush spoke the immortal words, “Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?” The survival of Trump’s Republicans depends on the answer being a resounding “no.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 