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Frank Splitt Reviews SLAYING GOLIATH

By dianeravitch
June 14, 2020 //
8

Frank Splitt is a retired electrical engineer with a distinguished resume and wide-ranging interests, including education. A friend gave him the hostile review of SLAYING GOLIATH that appeared in The New York Times. He decided to read the book and reach his own judgment. He wrote the following review for Amazon:

An Educational Whodunit with a Happy Ending

For anyone still wondering about what happened to the highly touted education reform programs, such as Common Core, Race to the Top, and Value Added Measures, wonder no more. Diane Ravitch puts on her education historian hat once again—telling a page-turning story.

It’s a whodunit that begins by naming the villains (Goliaths), the millionaires and billionaires who targeted America’s public schools—labeling these schools as poorly managed havens for bad teachers who are protected by their powerful unions.

The villains aimed to replace public schools with charter schools and/or voucher programs while ferreting out so-called bad teachers on the basis of student test scores. For some, public schools presented a rich marketing opportunity ripe for the taking. And take they did with the cooperation of federal, state, and local governments. At the federal level, the U.S. Department of Education under the administrations of President’s George W. Bush, Barack H. Obama, and Donald J. Trump have all been deeply complicit to varying degrees.

The heroes (Davids) in the story are the teachers, students, administrators, and parents who formed the ill-funded, passionate resistance to the privatization and corporatization of America’s public school system. It was this passionate resistance that slayed Goliath.

I would also count Diane Ravitch among these heroes. She sees public education as a basic public responsibility—warning Americans not to be persuaded by a false crisis narrative to privatize it while urging parents, educators, and other concerned citizens to join together to strengthen our public schools and preserve them for future generations.

In this book, Ravitch has exposed the rampant corruption involved with the villain’s takeovers, the baseless notion of evaluating teacher via student test scores, as well as the damage done to communities, schools, students and teachers that will take years to heal, especially so while dealing with the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Although this is not another book about education reform per se, one is left to wonder where American public education would be today if the Goliaths respected the sound principle of giving to meet needs instead of giving to impose their ideas and take control of K-12 education in America.
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My thanks go to primary teachers Holly Rothstein Balk, Katianne Rothstein Olson, Chelsea Gabzdyl, and Margaret Zamzow Wenzelman, as well as high school teachers Margaret Mangan, (the late) Joseph Hafenscher and to retired Illinois State Board of Education staff member Michael Mangan, for their insights into the Common Core State Standards, Value Added Measures, and the impact of the standards and related over-the-top testing regimes on school administrators, teachers, and their students.

This is a must read book for parents, teachers, government officials, and other concerned citizens as well.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, For-Profit, Privatization, Testing, Vouchers

Trump vs. Congress and the Military re Renaming Bases

By dianeravitch
June 12, 2020 //
10

Trump tweeted that he absolutely opposed renaming military bases named to honor Confederate heroes. The renaming was proposed by military leaders and the Defense Department.

Hours later, the Republican Senate Armed Services Committee voted to rename the bases.

The Democratic Appropriations Committee Will attach a requirement to the $740 billion defense budget that the bases must be renamed.

Will Trump veto the defense appropriations—which includes pay raises for the troops—to protect the names of the bases that honor Confederate heroes (who made war against their nation and killed more Americans than all other wars combined)?

From The NY Times:

WASHINGTON — A key Senate committee voted on Wednesday to require the Pentagon to strip military bases and equipment of Confederate names, monuments or symbols within three years, setting up an election-year clash with President Trump on the issue amid a rapidly building national outcry against historical representations of racism.

The move by the Armed Services Committee to insert the mandate into a must-pass defense authorization bill, which was supported by Republicans and Democrats alike, came as Mr. Trump publicly declared his refusal to even consider removing any of the names. He raged about it on Twitter on Thursday, exhorting members of his party to resist the effort even as a growing number of Republicans on Capitol Hill said they were open to removing symbols of the Confederacy.

The conflict underscored how isolated the president is becoming, even from members of his own party, as protests of police brutality against black people fuel a broader discussion of race and identity in America.

The break is more than rhetorical. The move to include the proposal, written by Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, raised the prospect of an election-year Senate vote on the issue.

“The American people know these names have to go,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi said at a news conference on Thursday. The president, she continued, “seems to be the only person left who doesn’t get it.”

Republican lawmakers’ willingness to break with the president on the issue comes as they have also distanced themselves from his bellicose response to the protests, instead scrambling to come up with a plan to combat racism in policing.

Dramatizing the rift between Mr. Trump and members of his own party, he lashed out on Twitter on Thursday afternoon, apparently dismayed by the support the measure was picking up in Congress.

“Seriously failed presidential candidate, Senator Elizabeth ‘Pocahontas’ Warren, just introduced an Amendment on the renaming of many of our legendary Military Bases from which we trained to WIN two World Wars,” Mr. Trump tweeted. “Hopefully our great Republican Senators won’t fall for this!”

But the president’s message came as many Republicans on Capitol Hill had already endorsed or expressed openness to the idea, including the top leader in the House and several Republican senators. He posted it the day after the closed-door vote on the proposal, which would require the Defense Department to set up a panel to develop a plan to rename, within the next three years, military bases and other assets currently named for Confederate figures. The vote happened after Mr. Trump announced that his administration would not consider the idea.

Categories Education Reform

Doyle and Sahlberg: Reopen Schools with a Golden Age of Play!

By dianeravitch
June 12, 2020 //
16

William Doyle and Pasi Sahlberg have reimagined the school: Let the children play!

They are the authors of a new book with that title.

They write in an article for CNN:

When the novel coronavirus is no longer as great a threat and schools finally reopen, we should give children the one thing they will need most after enduring months of isolation, stress, physical restraint and woefully inadequate, screen-based remote learning. We should give them playtime — and lots of it.

As in-person classes begin, education administrators will presumably follow the safety guidelines of health authorities for smaller classes, staggered schedules, closing or regularly cleaning communal spaces with shared equipment, regular health checks and other precautions. But despite the limitations this may place on the students’ physical environment, schools should look for safe ways to supercharge children’s learning and well-being.

We propose that schools adopt a 90-day “golden age of play,” our term for a transitional period when traditional academic education should be balanced as much as possible with learning through play, physical and creative outlets and mental health counseling to provide support for children who will need it.

Play gives children a wide range of critical cognitive, physical, emotional and social benefits. The American Academy of Pediatrics, representing the nation’s 67,000 children’s doctors, stated in a 2012 clinical report that “play, in all its forms, needs to be considered as the ideal educational and developmental milieu for children,” including for children in poverty, and noted that “the lifelong success of children is based on their ability to be creative and to apply the lessons learned from playing.”

Categories Education Reform, Play

Join Me and Julian Vasquez Heilig in a Zoom Conversation on June 17

By dianeravitch
June 12, 2020 //
0

Please join me in a zoom discussion with Julian Vasquez Heilig, dean of the College of Education at the University of Kentucky.

We are talking On June 17 at 7:30 pm.

Julian Vasquez Heilig is a brilliant researcher and champion of equity. JVH had a stellar academic career at California State University, where he also served as chair of the education committee of the state NAACP. He was recently chosen as dean of the University of Kentucky College of Education, where he promises extraordinary leadership in a state beset by battles over charters and vouchers and teachers’ pensions. Dean Heilig has researched and written extensively about Teach for America and charter schools.

He blogs at “Cloaking Inequity,” where he displays his wit, erudition, and insight.

We will talk about his work, his research, his vision for the future.

Join us!

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

Harold Meyerson: If Biden Wants to Be Like FDR, He Should Dump Summers and Rahm

By dianeravitch
June 12, 2020 //
15

Now that Joe Biden is assured the Democratic nomination, lots of advisors will clamor to get his ear. As Harold Meyerson of The American Prospect warns, he should be careful about from whom he takes advice. If he cares about rebuilding America’s public schools, he should avoid anyone connected to Race to the Top, which was a hyper-version of George W. Bush’ failed No Child Left Behind. He should certainly avoid a Rahm Emanuel, not only because of his role in covering up the police murder of Laquan MacDonald, but because of his disastrous stewardship of Chicago’s public schools. It is rumored that Rahm wants to be Secretary of Education. Heaven forbid.

Biden: The 21st-Century FDR?

Joe Biden and his campaign are waging a determined campaign to demonstrate he knows that a page has been turned—that the restorative, incremental presidency he promised as a primary candidate is no longer capable of dealing with the crises the nation now encounters. I expect Biden will soon be quoting Lincoln’s annual message to Congress of 1862:

The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves and then we shall save our country.

As The Washington Post reports, however, the president who Biden now hopes to model himself on isn’t so much Lincoln as it is Franklin Roosevelt—specifically, the FDR who tilted public policy in favor of workers and a more and better managed capitalism.

But as my colleagues Bob Kuttner and Dave Dayen have pointed out, some of the eminences now advising Biden are architects of that “quiet past [which is completely] inadequate to the stormy present”—in particular, Larry Summers and Rahm Emanuel. At the same time, Biden has set up policy committees that include left leaders like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and is communicating somewhat regularly with Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Which group will have the louder voice in a Biden administration will determine just how transformative—or ineffectually ancient-regime-esque—his presidency could be.

On this question, the history of Roosevelt’s presidency affords us some lessons. In FDR’s first year in office, one of his most important lieutenants was conservative Lewis Douglas, who made sure FDR’s budget was as close to balanced as possible, even as unemployment reached 25 percent of the workforce. Eventually, Douglas’s un-Keynesian counsels of austerity were overridden by liberal FDR lieutenant Harry Hopkins, who saw the need for and persuaded Roosevelt to establish a massive public-jobs program. Liberals like Hopkins, Labor Secretary Frances Perkins, and White House aide Tommy Corcoran held sway until 1937, when Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau persuaded FDR to balance the budget again—triggering a huge and swift rise in the unemployment rate that the administration had until then been steadily reducing, thereby ending the New Deal’s string of systemic reforms.

If Biden is serious about initiating the huge economic reforms and the economic recovery the country so manifestly needs, not to mention the reforms required to move us toward more actual, more lived racial equality, he’ll need to rely on advisers who aren’t the 21st-century versions of Douglas and Morgenthau—who aren’t, in short, Summers and Emanuel. He shouldn’t take my word for it; he should ask what would Roosevelt and Lincoln do?

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

Categories Accountability, Biden, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Emanuel, Rahm, Privatization

Tom Ultican: The NewSchools Venture Fund, Masters of Disruption

By dianeravitch
June 11, 2020 //
9

This is one of the most important posts you will read today, this week, this month. If you want to understand the hoax of so-called “education reform,” read this post. Share it with your friends. Tweet it. Put it in Facebook. It rips the veil away from the wolf in sheep’s clothing.

Thomas Ultican has found the beating heart of the Disruption movement, the organization where plans are hatched and funded to destroy public schools. He tells the story of the NewSchools Venture Fund, where very wealthy people collaborate to undermine and privatize one of our most essential democratic institutions: our public schools.

He begins this important post:


The New Schools Venture Fund (NSVF) is the Swiss army knife of public school privatization. It promotes education technology development, bankrolls charter school creation, develops charter management organizations and sponsors school leadership training groups. Since its founding in 1998, a small group of people with extraordinary wealth have been munificent in their support. NSVF is a significant asset in the billionaire funded drive to end democratically run public schools and replace them with privatized corporate structures.

Read this remarkable account that ties together the masters of the universe, who have decided to rearrange the lives of lesser mortals, that is, people who lack their vast wealth and political connections.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, California, Charter Schools, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, Technology

Gates-Funded Fordham Institute Says New Florida Standards Are No Good

By dianeravitch
June 10, 2020 //
12

The rightwing Thomas B. Fordham Institute has rejected Florida’s effort to replace the Common Core standards, which were wholly funded by the Gates Foundation. When the Common Core was released a decade ago, Gates paid millions to Fordham to evaluate them.

Politico Morning Education reports:

GATES FOUNDATION-BACKED INSTITUTE CALLS FLORIDA’S NEW K-12 STANDARDS ‘WEAK’: The Fordham Institute said the state’s Benchmarks for Excellent Student Thinking standards, which came from a push from Gov. Ron DeSantis to replace Common Core and to set a national example, are in need of “significant and immediate revisions.” The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, a supporter of Common Core, backs the institute.

— “As for other states, they should indeed look for model standards, but they won’t find them in Florida,” wrote Fordham Institute President Michael Petrilli and Amber Northern, senior vice president of research. The study also says Florida leaders are unlikely to reexamine the new standards “anytime soon.”

Categories Accountability, Common Core, Education Reform, Florida, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates

Watters: Toward a Future Of Humanity, Caring, and Grace

By dianeravitch
June 10, 2020 //
8

Audrey Watters gave a talk at the Academic Technology Institute. I am always interested in her writing because she is truly an original thinker. She sees the future of surveillance, control, and loss of human agency. She is our Cassandra. Some things never change. Some things seem to change despite our efforts. Audrey gives up hope in a desperate time that we can still stop the machines that seek to own us.

Categories Democracy, Education Reform, Freedom, Technology

Arkansas: Preparing to Sell the Children to Tech Entrepreneurs

By dianeravitch
June 10, 2020 //
13

Cathy Frye is a veteran journalist who worked for the Arkansas Public School Resource Center, then quit when she decided she could no longer stomach being part of the Walton Goubdation machine.

She writes here about the plan to outsource schooling this fall to a tech corporation that is under investigation.

She writes:

I got curious and took a little gander today at the Arkansas Public School Center’s website. And yep, there it was – APSRC’s latest attempt to help its digital “learning” providers by – once again – taking advantage of the pandemic’s effects on public schools.

Pay attention, folks: This partnership – announced today – involves the Arkansas Public School Resource Center, the Arkansas Department of Education and an outfit known as Lincoln Learning Solutions. This partnership will affect how public schools operate during the 2020-2021 school year.

APSRC and the Arkansas Department of Education are endorsing a digital learning provider that is currently under investigation by the Pennsylvania State Auditor General’s Office.

Why an investigation? Because a five-year audit revealed that Lincoln Learning Solutions had received more than $110 million in taxpayer dollars. Now, Arkansas’ parents and schools are about to get sucker-punched in a similar fashion.

You can also be sure that someway, somehow, APSRC Executive Director Scott Smith will also find a way to profit from this. Smith does not believe in MOUs that offer no benefit to his Walton-backed empire – er, I mean, “non-profit” organization.

I dealt with digital-provider “representatives” – not educators but salesmen – for three years. They expected free vendor booths at each APSRC conference. They also expected to be wined and dined on APSRC’s tab. Initially, they got what they wanted via a grant awarded to APSRC’s teaching and learning department. But when the money ran out, they still expected to be wooed and catered to. And Smith didn’t seem to mind, which tells me that APSRC also was making money by supporting these digital providers.

APSRC has been trying for years – well before my time there – to sell this digital-learning crap to Arkansas schools. Problem is, this crap, aside from being crap, has been too pricey even for the better-off districts.

Open the link and read the rest. The Waltons are happy to disrupt public schools at any time.

Categories Accountability, Arkansas, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, For-Profit, Privatization, Technology, Walton Foundation

Colin Powell, GW Bush, Other GOP Leaderrs Will Not Vote for Trump

By dianeravitch
June 9, 2020 //
17

Trump is losing the support of prominent Republican figures and military leaders. They can’t support the re-election of a man who is systematically destroying the country.

WASHINGTON — It was one thing in 2016 for top Republicans to take a stand against Donald J. Trump for president: He wasn’t likely to win anyway, the thinking went, and there was no ongoing conservative governing agenda that would be endangered.

The 2020 campaign is different: Opposing the sitting president of your own party means putting policy priorities at risk, in this case appointing conservative judges, sustaining business-friendly regulations and cutting taxes — as well as incurring the volcanic wrath of Mr. Trump.

But, far sooner than they expected, growing numbers of prominent Republicans are debating how far to go in revealing that they won’t back his re-election — or might even vote for Joseph R. Biden Jr., the presumptive Democratic nominee. They’re feeling a fresh urgency because of Mr. Trump’s incendiary response to the protests of police brutality, atop his mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic, according to people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to disclose private discussions.

Former President George W. Bush won’t support the re-election of Mr. Trump, and Jeb Bush isn’t sure how he’ll vote, say people familiar with their thinking. Senator Mitt Romney of Utah won’t back Mr. Trump and is deliberating whether to again write in his wife, Ann, or cast another ballot this November. Cindy McCain, the widow of Senator John McCain, is almost certain to support Mr. Biden but is unsure how public to be about it because one of her sons is eying a run for office.

And former Secretary of State Colin Powell announced on Sunday that he will vote for Mr. Biden, telling CNN that Mr. Trump “lies about things” and Republicans in Congress won’t hold him accountable. Mr. Powell, who voted for former President Barack Obama as well as Hillary Clinton, said he was close to Mr. Biden politically and socially and had worked with him for more than 35 years. “I’ll be voting for him,” he said.

Former Secretary of State Colin Powell said he would vote for Joe Biden, telling CNN that President Trump “lies about things.”

None of these Republicans voted for Mr. Trump in 2016, but the reproach of big Republican names carries a different weight when an incumbent president and his shared agenda with Senate leaders are on the line.

Former Republican leaders like the former Speakers Paul D. Ryan and John A. Boehner won’t say how they will vote, and some Republicans who are already disinclined to support Mr. Trump are weighing whether to go beyond backing a third-party contender to openly endorse Mr. Biden. Retired military leaders, who have guarded their private political views, are increasingly voicing their unease about the president’s leadership but are unsure whether to embrace his opponent.

Mr. Biden himself, while eager to win support across party lines, intends to roll out his “Republicans for Biden” coalition later in the campaign, after fully consolidating his own party, according to Democrats familiar with the campaign’s planning.

The public expressions of opposition to Mr. Trump from parts of the Republican and military establishment have accelerated in recent days over his repeated calls for protesters to be physically constrained, “dominated,” as he put it, and his administration’s order to forcefully clear the streets outside the White House so he could walk out for a photo opportunity. His conduct has convinced some leaders that they can no longer remain silent.

Former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis’s blistering criticism of Mr. Trump and the admission this week by Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska that she is “struggling” with whether to vote for the sitting president of her own party have intensified the soul-searching taking place, forcing a number of officials to reckon with an act that they have long avoided: stating out loud that Mr. Trump is unfit for office.

“This fall, it’s time for new leadership in this country — Republican, Democrat or independent,” said William H. McRaven, the retired Navy admiral who directed the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. “President Trump has shown he doesn’t have the qualities necessary to be a good commander in chief.”

Admiral McRaven, in an interview on the 76th anniversary of D-Day, noted that those wartime leaders inspired Americans with “their words, their actions and their humanity.”

In contrast, he said, Mr. Trump has failed his leadership test. “As we have struggled with the Covid pandemic and horrible acts of racism and injustice, this president has shown none of those qualities,” Admiral McRaven said. “The country needs to move forward without him at the helm.”

Cindy McCain, the widow of Senator John McCain, is likely to support former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. in November.
Cindy McCain, the widow of Senator John McCain, is likely to support former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. in November.

Mr. Trump won election in 2016, of course, in spite of a parade of Republicans and retired military officers who refused to support him. Far more current G.O.P. elected officials are publicly backing Mr. Trump than did four years ago. Among his unwavering supporters are Republican leaders like Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, and past foes like Senators Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham. And polls today indicate that rank-and-file Republicans are squarely behind the president, although that is in part because some Republicans who can’t abide Mr. Trump now align with independents.

Yet it would be a sharp rebuke for former Trump administration officials and well-known Republicans to buck their own standard-bearer. Individually, they may not sway many votes — particularly at a time of deep polarization. But their collective opposition, or even resounding silence, could offer something of a permission structure for Trump-skeptical Republicans to put party loyalty aside.

John Kelly, Mr. Trump’s former chief of staff and a retired Marine general, would not say whom he would vote for, though he did allow that he wished “we had some additional choices.”

Dan Coats, the former Republican senator who was Mr. Trump’s director of national intelligence, “has been concerned about the negative effect on the intelligence community by the turmoil of turnover at D.N.I.,” said Kevin Kellems, a longtime adviser to Mr. Coats, adding that the former spy chief is “encouraged by the confirmation of a new D.N.I. and career intelligence deputy.”

As for whom Mr. Coats will vote for, “ultimately he remains a loyal Republican but he believes the American people will decide on Nov. 3,” said Mr. Kellems.

Joseph Maguire, a retired three-star admiral who served as Mr. Trump’s acting intelligence chief, invoked the comments of Mr. Mattis and two former chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who also criticized the president this week.

“Jim Mattis, Mike Mullen and Marty Dempsey are all good friends, and I respect them tremendously,” Admiral Maguire said in an interview. “I am in alignment with their views.”

Asked who Mr. Boehner and Mr. Ryan will vote for in November, representatives to both former House speakers declined to say.

Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, asked if she would support Mr. Trump for re-election, said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” that she didn’t want to discuss politics right now, adding that her focus was on addressing divisions in the country. She did not support Mr. Trump in 2016.

A number of current G.O.P. lawmakers and governors are also wrestling with what to do — and what to say — as they balance conscience, ideology and the risk to themselves and their constituents that comes from confronting Mr. Trump.

Representative Francis Rooney of Florida has donated millions of dollars to Republican candidates over the years, served as President Bush’s ambassador to the Vatican and hasn’t voted for a Democrat in decades.

But Mr. Rooney said he is considering supporting Mr. Biden in part because Mr. Trump is “driving us all crazy” and his handling of the virus led to a death toll that “didn’t have to happen.”

Mr. Rooney is not seeking re-election, so he is not worried about future electoral prospects. He said his hesitation with Mr. Biden owes to uncertainty about whether left-wing Democrats would pull the former vice president out of the political mainstream.

“What he’s always been is not scary,” said Mr. Rooney. “A lot of people that voted for President Trump did so because they did not like Hillary Clinton. I don’t see that happening with Joe Biden — how can you not like Joe Biden?”

Mr. Rooney has been gently lobbied by one of Mr. Biden’s closest allies in Congress: Senator Chris Coons of Delaware, who has effectively become the former vice president’s emissary to current and recent Republican lawmakers.

Mr. Coons said a number of G.O.P. senators, regardless of their public comments, would ultimately not pull the lever for Mr. Trump in the privacy of the ballot booth.

“I’ve had five conversations with senators who tell me they are really struggling with supporting Trump,” said Mr. Coons, who declined to give names.

Categories Education Reform
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