Now is the time to register for the best conference you have ever attended!
You will meet the bloggers you read here regularly.
You will meet leaders of the Resistance from across the country.
You will have to choose among amazing panels.
Join me in Philadelphia, March 28-29!
This is the current (and evolving) list of my speaking engagements in connection with the publication of my new book: SLAYING GOLIATH: THE PASSIONATE RESISTANCE TO PRIVATIZATION AND THE FIGHT TO SAVE AMERICA’S PUBLIC SCHOOLS.
I am trying not to wear myself out. Ten years ago, I hopped from city to city like a mountain goat.
But now I am 81 years old, and my knees are worn out. I have to pace myself.
Come out and say hello if you are in one of these cities.
SLAYING GOLIATH is a pro-public education, pro-teacher, pro-social justice, pro-common-good book. It is a book meant to give hope and encouragement to those who stand up to the billionaires and fight the status quo of choice and high-stakes testing. It contains inspiring stories of parents, students, teachers, and civil rights activists who took action against the powerful and won. At some of these events, the bookstore charges a modest fee to cover its expenses. Most are free.
Nimet Eren, principal of the public Kensington Health Sciences Academy, runs a public school for 465 students that is open to all and offers four career pathways. Recently the school learned that a new charter would open nearby offering the same program.
The principal was told that the competition would “help” her school by providing a “model” of what her school was already doing successfully.
She writes:
During the summer of 2019, the Philadelphia School Partnership (PSP), a nonprofit organization that invests in educational projects across the city, met with me to discuss the goals we had for our school. We talked extensively about what we have learned from the partnerships we have created, especially in medical settings. Then, PSP asked to visit us on Sept. 25 for the morning. It was a wonderful visit, and our teachers and students were engaged in great learning, as they are every day. The day finished with an in-depth conversation about the challenges of building partnerships with settings such as hospitals and clinics.
Then, before Thanksgiving break, I received an email from PSP stating that they had “an exciting opportunity for KHSA” and that they wanted to share it with me. I was, of course, elated and scheduled a meeting with them on Dec. 2.
The news they wanted to share was that they were giving seed money to a potential charter founder to form a health sciences charter high school in North Philly. I was confused. How was this an exciting opportunity for KHSA?
It actually felt like creating unfair competition for my school for resources that are already scarce, especially because charters can manipulate admissions and enrollment policies to their benefit, and neighborhood schools cannot.
I asked PSP how this charter school would be helpful to KHSA, and they said that my school “could learn from their charter model.” I replied that we are trying to build a model for our neighborhood students and that we need support. They then explained what I believe is the real answer as to why they were not investing in us: Because KHSA is a neighborhood school and not a charter school, they cannot control enrollment for their dream school.
Although it might appear that KHSA does not want a health sciences charter school to exist just because they copied our school’s theme, that is not the reason. The reason actually is that many charter schools create the illusion that they are educating children better than neighborhood high schools. The reality is that neighborhood high schools are serving our highest-needs children and that society should be investing the most in them.
The children who come to my school each day are the most resilient, charismatic, and loving people I have ever known. Some of my students’ reading and math levels are not as high, but that’s not their fault. It is society’s fault for not better supporting the children who are most in need. PSP’s explanation of why it is not investing in a neighborhood high school perpetuates this inequity.
I testified at the school board meeting on Dec. 12 and a charter school hearing on Dec. 20. I have had countless conversations with colleagues and opponents and have thought tirelessly about the charter vs. traditional school debate. I have heard so many arguments for both sides of the story, but the idea that I find the most compelling is one shared by one of my teachers, Jenifer Felix: Parents want what’s best for their own children. Teachers want what’s best for all children.
The problem with school choice is that it creates segregation. Choice takes away limited resources from inclusive neighborhood schools and leads to even fewer resources being spent on our students who are most in need.
A few weeks ago, Democrats in the New Hampshire legislature’s Fiscal Oversight Committee rejected $46 million from Betsy DeVos and the federal Charter Schools Program. The vote was 7-3 on partisan lines.
The grant would have doubled the number of charters in the state at a time of declining enrollment statewide.
The Republican State Commissioner of Education, Frank Edelblut, came back to the committee with the same request, reminding the committee that the previous Democratic Governor Maggie Hassan had supported charter schools.
The Democratic-controlled committee again voted 7-3 to reject the $46 million, warning of additional costs to the state when the federal funds were expended.
Edelblut is a home schooler who was appointed by the far-right Republican Governor Chris Sununu.
Congratulations to the wise Democrats of New Hampshire, who practiced fiscal restraint and protected the state’s public schools.
Be sure to read Peter Greene’s detailed account of this happy event. He points out that the existing New Hampshire charter schools have produced no lessons for public schools and they have empty seats.
If you believe that any genuine parent organization is funded by the Waltons, Eli Broad, and the City Fund (which was funded by the Reed Hastings, John Arnold, and other billionaires), please contact me at once, as I have a bridge in Brooklyn that I can sell you for a reasonable fee. Really! I’ll even print up a gen-u-wine bill of sale!
One of the leaders of the National Parents Union, Keri Rodrigues, runs the Massachusetts Parents Union, which was also bankrolled by the Waltons. Her group was one of the prominent voices demanding more charters in a state referendum in 2016, which was overwhelmingly defeated. The Waltons invested a few million in that referendum. Keri’s MPU reported revenues of $957,683 in 2018, half from the Waltons. Her salary at MPU, that grassroots parent group, is $172,500, according to Dark Money specialist Maurice Cunningham, a political science professor at U Mass. Just an average parent.
Many grassroots parents groups belong to the Network for Public Education. None of them have bank accounts with six figures or nearly seven figures. All are powered by volunteers.
New Orleans is an apt place for the big launch of NPU. It is the first (and thus far the only) school district that has eliminated all public schools and the teachers’ union. According to the latest reports, 49% of its highly segregated schools received a D or an F from the state. The selection of NOLA suggests the goal of this faux “parent union”: the elimination of public schools.
Here is an announcement of the organizing event of the new Walton-funded NPU:
NPU is launching on the streets of New Orleans (1/16-/18) with delegates from all 50 states with parents of color, low-income parents, special needs parents, single moms and dads, grandparents, formerly incarcerated parents, and parents in recovery. Led by Alma Marquez and Keri Rodrigues, National Parents Union co-founders, Ilyasah Shabazz, Community Organizer and daughter of Malcolm X and Sharif El Mekki, Black Male Educators for Social Justice.
Keri is an education activist (and a Democrat) who is launching a new organization, the National Parents Union, which will heed the call to organize otherwise independent and uncoordinated parent organizing efforts into a national voice and movement to ensure teacher unions no longer have a stranglehold on the education system in America. She’s a former labor activist who plans to use the tactics that make unions so powerful and apply them to this movement led by parents.
MEDIA ADVISORY
FOR PLANNING PURPOSES ONLY
Contact: NPU@mercuryllc.com
THE REVOLUTION IS COMING… NATIONAL PARENTS UNION TO OFFICIALLY LAUNCH AT PARENT POWER 2020 IN NEW ORLEANS
Kick-off summit will bring parent activists and organizations to New Orleans to define a national K-12 agenda and make education equity a reality for all children
New Orleans, LA – The National Parents Union (NPU), an intersectional, parent-led organization, will hold its inaugural summit in New Orleans to advance education reform and define a new K-12 national agenda.
Parent Power 2020 (January 16-18) will bring over 100 delegates and organizations from all 50 states for a series of skills-building workshops, campaign clinics and activations designed to provide parents with the tools and infrastructure to effect change in their own communities and exert greater influence on the national conservation around education reform. Parent Power 2020 will feature several notable speakers, including keynotes from journalist and activist Felipe Luciano, and author and activistIlyasah Shabazz, the daughter of the late Malcom X.
The summit will also include a Jazz Funeral through the French Quarter in New Orleans on January 17, to officially bury the status quo that has been plaguing education in America for decades and commemorate the dawn of a new day in our schools.
The convening will conclude with a vote and ratification of NPU’s Statement of Values that lays out the goals and objectives of parent activists ahead of the 2020 Presidential election. At the conclusion of the summit, delegates will vote in a straw poll assessing the education proposals and policies of the 2020 Presidential Candidates.
Parent Power 2020 is open to press. Please contact Dan Bank npu@mercuryllc.com to register for credentials.
Click here to learn more about NPU’s mission.
WHO:
Featured speakers at Parent Power 2020 will include:
· Alma Marquez and Keri Rodrigues, National Parents Union co-founders
· Ilyasah Shabazz, Community Organizer and daughter of Malcolm X
· Antonio Villaraigosa, Former Mayor of Los Angeles
· Felipe Luciano, The Young Lords
· Colleen Cook, National Coalition for Public School Options
· Gerard Robinson, Center for Advancing Opportunity
· Sharif El Mekki, Black Male Educators for Social Justice
WHEN:
Parent Power 2020
January 16 –January 18, 2020
Jazz Funeral
Friday, January 17
6:30pm-7:00pm local time
Additional details will be provided
WHERE:
Parent Power 2020 will be held in New Orleans. The exact location will be shared during the registration process.
About National Parents Union:
The National Parents Union is a network of parent organizations and grassroots activists across the country committed to improving the quality of life for children and families in the United States. NPU unites these organizations behind a common set of principles that put children and families at the center of education politics and policy. With delegates representing each of the 50 states, NPU disrupts the traditional role of parent voice in policy spaces and develops a new narrative that is inclusive of families from a wide variety of intersectional perspectives.
The Texas-based IDEA charter chain, along with the Noble Network in Chicago and the Match charter school in Boston, is trying to boost its college graduation rates by encouraging its former students who dropped out of college to enlist in an online college program where requirements are minimal.
By partnering with Southern New Hampshire University, which enrolls tens of thousands of students from across the country in its low-cost online college programs, the charter operators are coaching students through college. The university provides the coursework and confers degrees, while an arm or affiliate of the charter networks recruits and mentors students.
The Noble charter network in Chicago launched its partnership last year, following the IDEA network in Texas and Match Charter School in Boston. Together, the three programs now enroll nearly 1,000 students, and other charter operators say they’re watching closely.
It’s a notable extension of those networks’ mission, which for years has been to send their mostly low-income students of color to college. More recently, though, it’s become harder to ignore the reality that many of their alumni are leaving higher education without degrees…
If successful, these programs will provide students another chance to earn a degree that could bolster their financial futures, while also boosting the charter networks’ college completion rates…
So far, though, students in the programs have earned only a few dozen bachelor’s degrees. And the expansion of these programs worries some observers, who question whether students are getting a high-quality college experience — and whether the degrees students do earn will pay off in the job market.
IDEA launched IDEA-U in 2017 with around 40 students, including Chapa. Now, the program has around 400 students from across Texas enrolled, about half of whom are IDEA graduates.
Around 95 students are enrolled in Noble’s program, known as Noble Forward, which launched last year. Nearly all are graduates of a Noble school in Chicago.
Match’s program, initially called Match Beyond, began in 2013 by enrolling mostly Match alumni, but was spun off as a nonprofit called Duet in 2018. It now serves around 500 students who graduated from high schools across the Boston area.
The programs differ slightly, but the academics work the same way. Students enroll in one of a handful of “competency-based” degree programs offered by Southern New Hampshire University and progress by completing projects designed to show they’ve mastered key skills.
There are no lectures, professors, or class discussions, but students are assigned readings and videos. Students work at their own pace — instead of on a set academic calendar — re-submitting projects as many times as they need, though the university says students average around two tries. Their projects are evaluated by a university “reviewer” with at least a master’s degree.
Underlying question: Is the goal of this program to provide a valuable education to students or to improve the data of the sponsors?
Bob Shepherd is a polymath, a man of remarkable learning, an author, a scholar, and at the capstone of his career, a classroom teacher.
Regular readers of this blog know him as a frequent contributor and a source of wisdom and humor.
Here is his review of my new book, SLAYING GOLIATH: THE PASSIONATE RESISTAMCE TO PRIVATIZATION AND THE FIGHT TO SAVE AMERICA’S PUBLIC SCHOOLS, which will be released on January 21 by Alfred A. Knopf, one of the nation’s finest trade publishers.
He begins:
In these dark days of Trumpism, reasons for optimism are the spar to which the rest of us, the passengers on the now disastrously helmed ship of state, attempt to cling. Diane Ravitch’s new book, Slaying Goliath is such a spar. It’s a celebration of those who have pushed back against the oligarch-led disruption and attempted privatization of our preK-12 educational system. But it’s more than just a lot of cheering stories (though it is that, and we need those; reading this, you will find yourself cheering again and again). It’s also, effectively, a manual for the Resistance, a how-to book detailing a way forward not only for parents and teachers but for workers generally (and so, like classrooms themselves, it has profound import beyond the classroom)….
Like Uncle Tom’s Cabin or Silent Spring, Slaying Goliath is one of those books that can make important change happen. Tremble, oligarchs, for our Jeanne d’Arc, our Boadicea, our David is in the field, and millions are ranged behind her, not many millions of Gates or Koch or Walton dollars, mind you, but millions of teachers and students and parents and others who care about public schools and other democratic institutions. As Ravitch explains in this book, education disruption and deformation (so-called “Reform”) is not a real movement. It depends entirely on paid, Vichy collaborators with a handful of profiteering oligarchs in the Billionaire Boys and Girls’ Club. But that makes it all the more insidious, pernicious, dangerous.
The Eau Claire County Board was asked to endorse a resolution saluting “School Choice Week,” but homeowners turned out to denounce the loss of money from their public schools that was sent to voucher schools.
One after another, homeowners asked why they were supporting two school systems, why the money intended for their public schools was being diverted to religious schools, why their taxes were being used to subsidize the tuition of students who had never attended public schools.
That discussion followed a report by the state Department of Public Instruction showing Wisconsin taxpayers will spend $349.6 million on school vouchers this school year, up from $302 million the previous year. A total of 43,450 students are receiving voucher funds this year, an increase of 3,411, or 8.5 percent, from last school year..
Concerns about the impact of that funding shift on public schools surfaced at a December meeting of the Eau Claire County Board, where residents spoke against a resolution proclaiming Jan. 26 to Feb. 1 as Eau Claire County “School Choice Week.” Speakers told board supervisors that school choice is just another term for voucher schools, and that taxpayer funding for those schools hurts Wisconsin’s public schools.
After hearing from eight speakers, County Board supervisors voted 24-2 against the measure. The city of Eau Claire is home not only to a public school district but to the Regis Catholic Schools system, where 182 of the 800 students (22.8 percent) enrolled this school year receive voucher scholarships, according to DPI data.
The County Board action in Eau Claire is a sign that public school advocates are being increasingly vocal about the expansion of private school vouchers at the expense of public school districts and making taxpayers fund two different education systems.
Yes, your voice matters. Speak up against the diversion of money from public schools to privately operated charters and religious school vouchers.
Eight homeowners spoke out, and the board voted 24-2 NOT to pass a resolution supporting “school choice week.”
“School Choice Week” is “Defund Public Schools” week.
Do not celebrate the underfunding of your public schools!
One of the very exciting episodes in my new book SLAYING GOLIATH describes the struggle in Massachusetts surrounding a 2016 referendum to expand the number of charter schools in the state. The referendum was called Question 2. Yes on 2 received funding from billionaires (the Waltons and Bloomberg), DFER (hedge fund managers), and out-of-state groups whose donors were unknown. The last group is called “Dark Money” because it hides the names of the donors.
On February 26, I will be at the First UU Church in Cambridge at an event sponsored by Citizens for Public Schools, joined in conversation with two of the prominent figures in that campaign, Barbara Madeloni (who was president of the Massachusetts Teachers Union) and Maurice Cunningham (a professor of political science at the U of Mass whose blogs reported on Dark Money in the campaign),
The groups that fought Question 2 were teachers’ unions, civil rights groups, and local school boards.
The referendum was overwhelmingly defeated.
After the election, the Massachusetts Office of Campaign and Political Finance investigated the funding of the campaigns. It found that one of the funders of the “Yes on 2” side was a Dark Money front based in New York City. It required the group to disclose the names of its donors and fined the group nearly $500,000, which cleaned out its bank account. Not long after, the Dark Money Group (which had also stacked the deck in New York State without being exposed) collapsed and closed its doors.
Recently, the director of this state office retired, and parents thanked him for upholding the integrity of state elections.
This letter to the editor by a parent activist appeared in the Boston Globe.
What a pleasure to read Matt Stout’s folksy portrait of Michael Sullivan, who retired last month as director of the Office of Campaign and Political Finance (“A career spent helping people ‘do things right,’ ” Business, Dec. 25). I met Sullivan at a “hackathon” sponsored by the New England Center for Investigative Reporting. The center needed volunteers to test computer software. We got pizza, and a little orientation from the state’s campaign finance chief, who trained neophytes to navigate Office of Campaign and Political Finance databases.
Behind the scenes, Sullivan’s staff investigated an unusual pattern of financial transactions. They discovered that Families for Excellent Schools – Advocacy Inc. of New York illegally solicited, received, and funneled funds to the Great Schools Massachusetts ballot question committee to influence the 2016 Massachusetts election and increase charter school market share. Sullivan skillfully negotiated a six-figure fine.
Thanks to Sullivan, citizens can comb campaign finance data for evidence of expenditures that reveal fake-news media events. Remember those rallies with people wearing blue T-shirts demanding “Great Schools Now”? It turns out Great Schools Massachusetts paid for the T-shirts and had people show up at events to give the illusion of massive dissatisfaction with our public schools.
If only I had a “Great Schools Now” campaign T-shirt, I would give it to Sullivan in gratitude for providing me a political education I never received in school.
Peggy A. Wiesenberg
Boston
Jan Resseger asks the ultimate cost about vouchers, in response to the Ohio legislature’s recent decision to expand vouchers to two-thirds of all school districts in the state, including high-performing districts.
Should public money be subtracted from public schools to underwrite vouchers for private and religious schools? The state’s public schools will be hit hard by the voucher law. And since research funded by the rightwing Thomas B. Fordham Institute showed that kids lose ground in voucher schools, the expansion of vouchers will lower the overall quality of education in the state. Does Ohio have a death wish?
As Resseger shows, the expansion of vouchers is not about education; it is not about improving opportunities for poor kids. It is about damaging public schools and compelling the public to pay for religious education for children who never attended public schools, ever. All the blather about opportunity is blather.
She writes:
Wisconsin and Ohio were the pioneers, the states which launched school vouchers—public tax dollars covering private school tuition. Wisconsin launched Milwaukee vouchers in 1990, and Ohio followed suit in 1996 with a Cleveland voucher program.
What are the problems with the idea of vouchers?
Vouchers have always been endorsed by their proponents as providing an escape for promising students from so-called “failing” public schools—as measured by test scores. But research demonstrates (see here and here) that test scores correlate not with school quality but instead with the aggregate income of the neighborhoods where public schools are located and the families who live there. Research demonstrates that ameliorating student poverty would more directly address students’ needs.
The idea that vouchers help students academically hasn’t held up either. A study by the pro-voucher Thomas Fordham Institute demonstrates that in Ohio, voucher students regularly fall behind their public school counterparts. But proponents of school privatization (including the Thomas Fordham Institute itself) regularly ignore the evidence.
In a recent summary published in The Nation, Jennifer Berkshire explains that while there is a lack of empirical evidence justifying vouchers, their proponents support them ideologically: “But the GOP’s true policy aim these days is much more ambitious: private school vouchers for all. In Ohio, students in two-thirds of the state’s school districts are now eligible for vouchers, a ballooning program that is on track to cost taxpayers $350 million by the end of the school year. And in Florida, school vouchers are now being offered to middle-class students, the latest gambit by conservatives in their effort to redefine public education as anything parents want to spend taxpayer money on. ‘For me, if the taxpayer is paying for the education, it’s public education,’ Florida’s governor Ron DeSantis proclaimed earlier this year.”
In Ohio, based on state report card grades which legislators from both parties seem to agree are deeply flawed, vouchers are now to be awarded to students in so-called ‘under-performing’ schools in 400 of the state’s 610 school districts. The Columbus Dispatch‘s Anna Staver explains, “(T)he legislature has widened the definition of a low-performing school to the point of absurdity, expanding the list of districts with ‘under-performing’ schools from 40 in the fall of 2018, to 139 in 2019, and around 400—nearly two-thirds of all districts in the state—by 2020.”
And EdChoice, one of the Ohio’s four statewide voucher programs, takes the money through the deduction method, counting the voucher student as enrolled in the local school and then extracting $4,650 for each elementary school voucher and $6,000 for each high school voucherright out of the public school district’s budget. But a serious problem arises because in Ohio, state funding is allocated at different rates from school district to school district, and in many cases the vouchers extract more dollars per pupil from the local school budget than the state awards to that district in per pupil state aid.
This year’s state budget brought a new threat to public schools via an amendment quietly added and never debated. Until this year, to qualify for a voucher, an Ohio student must have been enrolled in the public school in the year previous to applying for the voucher. But, secreted into the state budget last summer was an amendment providing that high school students may now receive a voucher even if they have never been enrolled in a public school…
What is rarely mentioned in the voucher debates is that no state legislature creating a voucher program has added a new tax to pay for it. Instead the money always comes out of the coffers of the state education budget and, as in Ohio today, out of local school district budgets.
Please read the rest. As usual, Resseger is right on target with deep context and analysis, informed by her keen sense of social justice and equity.
