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Leonie Haimson: Why Did the de Blasio Administration Drag Its Feet on Investigation of Yeshivas?

By dianeravitch
December 21, 2019 //
15

New York City investigators began examining the city’s yeshivas in 2015 in response to complaints from graduates of the Yeshivas that they had not received an education that met state requirements. It is 2019 and there is still no report. Leonie Haimson writes about the growing suspicion that the de Blasio administration sat on the investigation in order to win key votes from Orthodox Jews and their allies in the Legislature on the renewal of mayoral control.

The report was finally released on December 19, four years after it was initiated.

Only two of the 28 ultra-orthodox yeshivas visited by the city Education Department over the past three years are providing an education that meets state legal standards, according to a long-awaited report released Thursday.

Schools examined by the city ran the gamut from teaching a full range of subjects in English, to offering no math or English courses, and providing students with no access to textbooks written in English. Of almost 140 elementary and middle school classes officials attended, about a third were taught exclusively in Yiddish, with the remainder taught in a mix of English and Yiddish.

The DOE classified 8 of the 28 schools as well on their way to meeting the state standard of providing an education “substantially equivalent” to the one offered in public schools. Another 12 met parts of the criteria, and five schools had almost no overlap with the requirements.

Naftuli Moster, the executive director of YAFFED, a group dedicated to reforming ultra-orthodox yeshiva education, said the report “reaffirms what we already know: That tens of thousands of children in New York City, including those in nearly 40 Yeshivas the city investigated and those which the city failed to monitor for decades, are being denied a basic education as required by law.”

Here is another report, this one in The Forward, a Jewish-oriented newspaper. 

The mixture of religion and the state is always volatile.

The Yeshiva graduates who demanded the investigation said they had not learned secular subjects, they had learned most of the curriculum in Hebrew, and they were ill-equipped to function in contemporary society.

Why did it take four years to investigate 28 schools?

The NYC publication Gothamist reported:

Probe Finds De Blasio Administration Stalled Report on Academic Standards at Yeshivas

The de Blasio administration engaged in political maneuvering to stall the release of a report on education standards in Hasidic yeshivas, according to city investigators. A joint report from the Department of Investigations and the Special Commissioner of Investigation for city schools released Wednesday found representatives of the mayor and state legislators took part in “political horse trading” in 2017 as part of a ploy to delay an interim Department of Education report on whether the yeshivas were proving education on par with the city’s public schools.

The effort was part of a plan to secure support for extending mayoral control for city schools, investigators found, which was approved by the legislature in 2017. But investigators determined the agreement “had no substantial effect on the inquiry’s conclusion or the progress of the inquiry,” which was delayed by several other factors, according to a statement from the Department of Investigations, including a generally accommodative stance by the DOE to the yeshivas it was attempting to investigate.

Investigators did not determine whether the mayor personally approved the delay of the DOE report, but the statement noted, “the totality of evidence did indicate the Mayor was aware that the offer to delay had been made.” The report concluded that no laws were violated. The final report from the DOE has still not been released, though de Blasio administration officials indicated it would be coming soon, years after it was promised.

In a statement following the revelations Wednesday, Naftuli Moster, executive director of YAFFED, an educational advocacy group operating in Orthodox Jewish communities, said, “What a disgrace. The DOI/SCI investigation shows the City is willing to trade away the education of tens of thousands of students for power and political influence. These findings also raise concerns as to whether the City will provide an accurate assessment of what is happening inside Yeshiva schools when it finally releases its report.”
*****

Haimson writes:

It is hard to know which is more toxic – the system of autocratic mayoral control which I and others critiqued at Assembly hearings this week;  or the damaging political deals the Mayor has made to keep it – which include not just a delay in issuing a report on the Yeshivas in 2017,  but also that same year, his agreement to an increase in the number of NYC charter schools. 

Before that, as part of the deal to extend mayoral control in 2014 , de Blasio agreed to either co-locate charter schools in public school buildings or help pay for rent in private buildings – a legal obligation which no other district in the state or the nation has been saddled with, and that the DOE is now spending more than $100M per year on.

A question which the DOE/SCI statement does not answer is why the DOE inquiry into the Yeshivas was still in its early stages in June 2017 – given that the initial complaint was made in the July 2015.  See Yaffed’s timeline here.

Another question is what is now holding up the release of the DOE’s final report, given that that the DOE visits to Yeshivas concluded last spring and that  “Although the DOE has now visited all 28 yeshivas [originally named in the complaint that are still open], more than four years after the initial complaints, the DOE’s Inquirycontinues.”

If the visits ended last spring, why does the DOE Inquiry continue and why has no report has yet been issued?  No explanation is provided.

All this makes one suspect that the political influence of the ultra-Orthodox community with the Mayor and City Hall continues to hamper DOE’s actions and reporting on this issue.

If the United States Supreme Court rules against state prohibitions on vouchers for religious schools in the coming term, the public will fund many such schools, including those governed by all religious groups that will step forward to claim their share of the public purse.

If the Supreme Court decides that the state must pay for religious schools, will the state also have the power to regulate those schools and require that they teach subjects in English and meet the same academic standards as other publicly-funded schools?

Categories Bill de Blasio, Education Reform, New York City, Religion, Separation of church and state

Four Views: Why Mayoral Control of the NYC Schools Should Be Ended or Modified or…..?

By dianeravitch
December 21, 2019 //
9

Attached are four statements that were delivered (in person or by email in my case) to the New York State Assembly Education Committee Hearing on Mayoral Control. The hearings won’t result in immediate action since mayoral control was recently renewed for three years.

It is hard to believe but there was a time, about a decade ago, when corporate reformers believed that mayoral control would lead to a dramatic transformation of schools. The problem, they believed, was democracy. When people have a chance to elect a board, the “reformers” said, they make bad choices, the unions have too much power, and the result is stasis. Chicago has had mayoral control since 1995, and the newly elected Mayor Lori Lightfoot has agreed that the city should have an elected board. Here is a list of mayoral-controlled school systems.

In New York City, Michael Bloomberg asked the Legislature to give him complete and unfettered control of the New York City public schools in 2002, soon after his election in 2001. He received it, and he promised sweeping changes. He closed scores of large schools and broke them up into four or five or six schools in the same building (escalating the cost of administration). Parents, students, and teachers objected passionately, but the mayor’s “Panel on Education Policy” ignored them. Bloomberg favored charter schools over the public schools he controlled, and their number multiplied. He tightly centralized the operations of the system and appointed a lawyer with no education experience (Joel Klein) to be his chancellor. Bloomberg was all about test scores and data and privatization.

When Bill de Blasio was elected in 2013, he embraced mayoral control.

What follows are three views, all concluding that mayoral control as presently designed should end.

And here is a fourth view, a dissent from the other three, by veteran education watcher Peter Goodman, who wonders whether an elected school board would be controlled by parents or captured by a billionaire, or by charter advocates (the latter two have far more money to spend than parents).

 

To see Kemala Karmen’s footnotes and the other two views (including mine), open the PDF files attached.

TESTIMONY submitted by KEMALA KARMEN on 12/16/2019 

For NYS ASSEMBLY EDUCATION COMMITTEE HEARING ON MAYORAL CONTROL

My older child, who just returned home from her first semester of college, was five years old when I attended my first city council hearing. Michael Bloomberg was mayor and Joel Klein was his chancellor, and a fellow kindergarten parent had encouraged me to attend the hearing. I no longer remember the precise topic of the hearing. What I do remember is that council member after council member spoke passionately and convincingly against some DOE policy, and yet, when all was said and done, and the mayor’s “accountability czar” had spoken, it was clear that the chancellor would do exactly what he had wanted to do all along, undeterred by the opposition of a room full of people who had been directly elected by their constituents. 

I was floored.

I am a relatively privileged person in terms of my class and education, and while my color, gender, cultural, and religious background have marked me as “other” for most of my life, I had never felt as disenfranchised as I did at that moment, when I realized that when it came to my children’s public school education, I had NO voice, and neither did anyone I could vote for, apart from the mayor, whom one must vote for based on an array of issues in addition to education.

In fact, even if you were a single-issue voter, investing all of your hopes in a candidate based on that candidate’s professed positions on education, you could still find yourself unrepresented. Take our current mayor.  At an education forum held in 2013, at the time of his initial run, Candidate de Blasio said, among other things, that he opposed high-stakes standardized testing and its stranglehold on our schools. As mayor, he would stand with parents like me who called for more teaching and less testing. 

In reality, our now second-term mayor, presides over a Department of Education that has recently instituted even more tests for our city’s public school children. Facing mounting evidence that a generation of test-based “reform” has not improved the academic standing of America’s students, other municipalities, including Boston, are starting to cut back on the number and frequency of tests they impose on students. Here, however, mayoral control lets the mayor and his representatives do whatever they want, even if it flies in the face of evidence or reason. The city council can ask questions about NYCDOE policies, but they are powerless to actually do anything other than ask questions, collect data, and maybe bring to light what otherwise might be happening without public awareness, never mind input. 

As a parent stakeholder in the schools, I find mayoral control, as currently practiced, and as outlined above, profoundly undemocratic. At this particular moment in our country’s history, that is especially demoralizing. Moreover, it makes a mockery of the supposed progressivism of our city. Here again, I can use high-stakes testing to illustrate that point, this time referring to the annual state testing of 3rd-8th graders. Rates of state test refusal or “opt out” are in the double digits or even high double digits in most of the rest of the state, but in NYC, although opt out rates have doubled over the last few years, they still remain in the low single digits. Why is that? Do parents in NYC just love standardized testing more than their counterparts elsewhere? Or could it be that everywhere else in the state elected school boards are responsive to the parents who elect them, so when parents make it clear to their boards that they reject a test-centric focus their boards actually listen, and do things like send home form letters where a parent can check a box that says, “Yes, my child will take the state test” or “No, my child will not take the test?” In NYC, by contrast, many parents don’t even know they have a right to refuse and those of us grassroots-organizing against the tests must contend with directives from the DOE that tell would-be test refusers that they need to meet with their principals if they want to opt out. This is little more than intimidation and it works; parents are reluctant to go against the authority figure who controls their child’s day-to-day environment. The City Council tried to counter this in 2015 by unanimously passing a resolution that called on the NYCDOE to inform parents of their opt out rights. Again, because of mayoral control, the NYCDOE can, and did, ignore the wishes of every single council member elected by the people of NYC, from the Bronx to Staten Island. To this day, almost 5 years later, the NYCDOE has failed to implement the resolution.

I’ve focused on the suppression of parent voice under mayoral control, but there are so many more problems I could list. For example, as a tax-paying citizen, I believe the system of mayoral control leads to a lack of transparency in financial matters, which could mean that my tax dollars are being spent unwisely or even fraudulently. I serve on the steering committee of New York State Allies for Public Education, and when I mentioned the new NYCDOE tests in an email to my fellow committee members, some of whom are elected school board members or trustees in their districts elsewhere in the state, the very first reply I received was, “How will they pay for that?” Indeed, how will they? Or even how much will it cost to administer computer-based tests multiple times a year to tens of thousands of students–or perhaps hundreds of thousands? What other things is NYCDOE forfeiting for our children that could have been paid for with that money? And why does no one know the answers to any of these questions?

We have no avenue for objecting if the mayor decides to appoint a chancellor who has never worked a day of their lives in a school, or that chancellor appoints a superintendent who has never been a principal. We have no protection from a mayor who might go so far as to hand over our schools to the opaque private management of the charter sector. 

I am a parent, not an expert in governance, and I realize that school boards aren’t perfect. All over the country, we are seeing money from outside a district swoop in, essentially buying seats, often to advance a school privatization agenda. That’s twisted, and if we did go back to an elected  school board, we’d have to be attentive to things like that, perhaps strictly regulating campaign contributions. 

I can’t wrap this up with a neat solution as to what the best course of action forward is. Nonetheless, I do know that the mayoral control that we have now is fundamentally flawed, and should not continue in its present form if we value democracy.

 

For Leonie’s statement click here.

For Kemala’s statement click here.

For my statement click here.

 

Categories Accountability, Bloomberg, Michael, Democracy, Education Reform, New York City, Testing

Jesse Sharkey: How to Avoid Teachers’ Strikes in 2020

By dianeravitch
December 21, 2019 //
8

Jesse Sharkey is president of the Chicago Teachers Union.

 
Diane-

Last week, schools across the country sat through the most recent episode of a show that jumped the shark years ago: “Test Score Blues.” This particular episode featured the release of Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) scores showing that the U.S. wasn’t at the top (again) of national rankings. Of course, the test itself doesn’t matter. The performative outrage that follows is the main event, headlined by predictable hand-wringing editorials about how schools need to do better.

Those editorials don’t address the massive increase in student poverty across the country, or discuss any history since the Coleman Report in 1966 showed that poverty and segregation have horrific negative impacts. They also don’t examine the more recent history of constant educational social experiments in places like Englewood’s Hope High School, which Chicago Public Schools plans to close after years of neglect.

CPS has, in fact, been ground zero for testing mania. The district labels schools according to those tests via the School Quality Rating Policy (SQRP), the so-called standard of school comparisons that is the basis for principal evaluations and is two-thirds based on test scores in elementary schools. Poverty isn’t included. A school’s suite of art offerings isn’t included. A school’s curriculum, debate program or robotics team isn’t included. Faulty school “quality” metrics like the SQRP reinforce continued tests through perverse incentives that legitimize gaming of the system to goose test scores, but lose focus on things that matter.

It’s clear why teachers across the country have gone on strike after strike after strike, and that’s to save one of our country’s hallmark institutions: public education. The way forward is to invest in public education. Ensure that schools have sufficient revenue and distribute it to those most in need; ensure that every school has a social worker and a nurse; ensure that students with special needs have appropriate staff to meet those needs; ensure that class sizes are developmentally appropriate; and ensure that students have arts curriculum and sports and other extracurricular programs that teach creativity and collaboration.

Teaching to the test does not work. Well-rounded curriculum, hands-on experiential learning, proper nutrition and exercise, and positive and loving schools do work, but they aren’t counted so they don’t count, according to CPS. The district instead looks to SQRP, which relies on metrics like test scores, attendance and school culture surveys that directly harm our most vulnerable students—including students in poverty, students in unstable housing arrangements, students with disabilities and students learning English as a second language.

The fact that test scores are stagnant, or growing in some places, is incredible given that students—especially those in Chicago—come to school with more challenges: language, trauma, malnutrition, and a lack of physical and mental health care. We accept sports teams that intentionally lose so they can improve in the future, but schools that give their all for students in the face of great obstacles are punished for not churning out the same student “product” as schools with fewer challenges. This is backwards, and presents an obstacle to school districts making better decisions.

Our union will continue to push the district to abolish the SQRP system, and abolish all measures that have adverse affects on students in high-poverty school communities, special education students, homeless students and refugee/recent immigrant students.

In the end, why does any of this matter? How does an analysis of our PISA scores explain anything? Why is a test score the barometer as opposed to the elimination of illiteracy and poverty, eradication of communicable diseases, and an end to sexual and physical violence?What is this country really doing to help lower-achieving students?

Educators have the answers. Fortunately, for those who get tired of the same old tropes, we are actually good at facilitating learning, and many people—from parents to presidential candidates—are joining us in standing up for what truly matters.

In solidarity,


Jesse Sharkey
CTU President
Chicago Teachers Union • 1901 W. Carroll Ave. • Chicago, IL 60612 • 312-329-9100
www.ctulocal1.org
for the schools Chicago’s students deserve
Sent via ActionNetwork.org. To update your email address, change your name or address, or to stop receiving emails from Chicago Teachers Union, please click here.

Categories Chicago, Education Reform, Teachers, Unions

Trump Enraged by Rebuke of Evangelicals

By dianeravitch
December 20, 2019 //
56

Trump can’t understand why evangelicals would turn against him. He gave them dozens of federal judges, including two Justices of the Supreme Court. Son they will get rid of abortion, gay rights, Obamacare. How dare they?


Trump’s rage at Christianity Today gives away his scam

By Greg Sargent Opinion writer covering national politicsEmail BioFollow

Washington Post |

President Trump just erupted in a rage at the magazine Christianity Today over its scathing, moralistic call for his removal over the Ukraine scandal. In so doing, Trump shed light on his understanding of the oft-debated oddity that millions of evangelical Christians remain loyal to the most hateful, depraved, self-dealing and self-aggrandizing individual to occupy the Oval Office in modern history.

In an unwittingly self-revealing moment, Trump responded to the magazine’s indictment of his profound moral failings with an argument that is thoroughly transactional and megalomaniacal: How dare you criticize me, after all the power I’ve granted to your movement? You’re breaking our deal, and now you’re dead to me.

Trump raged:

The magazine’s core indictment is that Trump “attempted to use his political power to coerce a foreign leader” to “discredit” one of his “political opponents.” It adds that Trump “abused his authority for personal gain” in a “profoundly immoral” manner that damages the presidency, the country, and “the spirit and the future of our people.”

This depiction is unequivocally correct. The White House’s own summary of the July 25 call captures Trump doing just this: While withholding hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid from a vulnerable ally, Trump pressed the Ukrainian president to announce an investigation that would smear potential 2020 opponent Joe Biden with an entirely fabricated narrative.

Trump’s response again called this “perfect” conduct, reminding us that he is thoroughly unrepentant about all of it.

Christianity Today also indicts Trump’s personal immorality, his nonstop lies and his serial degradation of others, concluding that Trump is “morally lost and confused.”

This nonbeliever will not grapple with the deep spiritual currents underlying this phrasing, and will only note that Trump plainly hasn’t spent a second wrestling with the morality of these actions or their impact on others, and that his only discernible reigning ethic is that if you can get away with grabbing something, it’s rightfully yours.

Indeed, the transactional cast to Trump’s rage over this is particularly instructive, once you understand that Trump and his top advisers have consciously enlisted the nation’s evangelicals as an army of Trump defenders in the war against impeachment, which is widely depicted in the evangelical movement as a kind of epic persecution of Trump carried out by the godless and the damned.

As Sarah Posner details in a terrific piece, this effort is concerted, multifaceted and highly organized. Numerous high-profile evangelicals regularly depict impeachment as a disruption of God’s plan for America to be governed by Christians in accord with “biblical” values.

Impeachment is merely the weapon that the secular, satanic left is wielding to carry out its broader pro-abortion, anti-religious-liberty agenda, which requires the removal of Trump, the savior of Christian America, all to keep the persecution of Christians going at full throttle.

And on top of all that, as Posner notes, Trump is giving evangelicals unprecedented power and access:

With him in the White House, Christian right ideologues have virtual carte blanche to run his administration, as he has handed them control over personnel and policy at a level they could have only dreamed of, even under admired presidents like George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan. Trump has handed them conservative judicial nominees, from the Supreme Court down to federal trial courts, and also has installed longtime evangelical allies at key Cabinet posts.

For all these reasons, the Christianity Today editorial won’t diminish Trump’s evangelical support. As Ezra Klein notes, the conviction that evangelicals are on the losing end of the “post-Christian culture war” is powerfully and deeply felt.

The result of this, according to Robert Jones, a longtime tracker of evangelical attitudes, has been a broad shift of evangelical opinion from Bill Clinton’s time, when personal morality in leaders was a central preoccupation of the movement, to the present.

“In theological terms, Trump has been able to convert evangelical political ethics from an ethic of principle to a consequentialist ethic, where the ends justify the means,” Jones, the author of “The End of White Christian America,” told me.

Trump’s promise to evangelicals, Jones added, was to “restore power and dominance to the Christian churches” at a time when “the demographics of the country are changing, you’re on the losing end of that, I’m going to turn back the clock, I’m the only one who can do that.”

The unacceptable bargain with Trump

Responding to this whole controversy, Christianity Today’s editor in chief, Mark Galli, has now directly engaged with this bargain that many evangelicals have made with Trump.

As Galli noted, there is no longer any way to avoid acknowledging Trump’s moral and temperamental unfitness for the presidency. Continuing to look the other way to get more judges and so forth is no longer worth the moral and spiritual costs to Christianity itself.

“The moral scales no longer balance,” Galli told the Atlantic. “We’ve been a movement that has said the moral character of our leaders is really important,” Galli continued, adding that the association of evangelicals with Trump will do “horrific” damage to their ability to share the Gospel with others.

It’s perversely revealing that Trump’s response to all this is to rage that evangelicals are indeed getting a good deal

For some evangelicals, at least, this bargain has crossed over into a species of scam that they can no longer accept.

Categories Education Reform

Commonweal Endorses Impeachment

By dianeravitch
December 20, 2019 //
1

The liberal Catholic publication Commonwealth defended the impeachment proceedings. 

It was right for Democrats in the House to proceed with impeachment, both how and when they did. The articles of impeachmentare narrow in scope but nevertheless damning. The first charges Trump with abusing the power of the presidency. In secretly withholding nearly $400 million in military aid to Ukraine until it announced an investigation of Joseph Biden for nonexistent acts of “corruption,” the president “[ignored and injured] national security and other vital national interests to obtain an improper personal political benefit. He has also betrayed the nation by abusing his office to enlist a foreign power in corrupting democratic elections” (the House Judiciary Committee report alleges multiple federal crimes, including criminal bribery and wire fraud, under this charge). The second article charges Trump with obstructing Congress’s investigation into these abuses. In defying subpoenas for documents and blocking staff members from testifying about the Ukraine scheme, Trump engaged in “categorical and indiscriminate defiance” that prevented the House from conducting its oversight role and violated the separation of powers. These actions meet the definition of “high crimes” as the Constitution’s framers understood the term. Envisioning (or dreading) such behavior by the executive, the framers were clear that it could not be countenanced. They “provided for impeachment of the president because they wanted the president, unlike the king, to be controlled by law,” as legal scholar Noah Feldman told the Judiciary Committee earlier this month, “and because they feared that a president might abuse the power of his office to gain personal advantage, corrupt the electoral process, and keep himself in office.”

These are risks the Democrats have to take. They cannot just stand by as a president violates the Constitution in full view.

Trump’s supporters in Washington and on Fox News often cite the approaching election in inveighing against impeachment, arguing that the voters themselves, through a free and fair election, can get rid of Trump if they don’t like him. But there is nothing in the Constitution restricting impeachment to non-election years or to second terms. In any case, the framers made explicit that cases of executive corruption are to be settled by Congress, not at the ballot box. This is partly because such corruption can make elections themselves less “free and fair.” Had details of the Ukraine scheme not come to light, Trump might have succeeded in abusing his power to damage the reputation of a possible opponent in the November 2020 election. Even after that scheme was discovered, the president publicly invited China to investigate the Bidens, and continued to recommend that the Ukranian government undertake “a major investigation” into a Democratic presidential candidate. It was precisely the risk that Trump might corrupt the 2020 electoral process that made it necessary to expedite the impeachment inquiry. Any later might have been too late.

By now the nation is used to the unwillingness of Republicans to criticize Trump’s behavior. Yet as impeachment grew more likely, the Republicans not only defended that behavior but also imitated it—the stonewalling, the lying, the intimidation and belittling of respected government officials, the peddling of debunked conspiracy theories—often in a state of performative high dudgeon. Perhaps that is the only option when there’s no disputing the facts at hand.

 

Categories Education Reform

The Most Important Article Written about Common Core

By dianeravitch
December 20, 2019 //
94

Lyndsey Layton of the Washington Post interviewed Bill Gates in 2014 and told the full story of the origin of the Common Core “State” Standards.

In case the Washington Post is behind a paywall, the full text of the Layton article is here.

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and other friends of the CCSS insisted that the standards were developed by governors, state superintendents, education experts, and teachers. No, they were developed by David Coleman, formerly of McKinsey, now CEO of the College Board, and a committee whose members included no working teachers but a full complement of testing experts from ACT and SAT. Google David Coleman and “architect” and you will see that he is widely credited with shepherding the CCSS to completion.

It would not have happened without the enthusiastic support and funding of Bill Gates.

Layton writes:

On a summer day in 2008, Gene Wilhoit, director of a national group of state school chiefs, and David Coleman, an emerging evangelist for the standards movement, spent hours in Bill Gates’s sleek headquarters near Seattle, trying to persuade him and his wife, Melinda, to turn their idea into reality.

Coleman and Wilhoit told the Gateses that academic standards varied so wildly between states that high school diplomas had lost all meaning, that as many as 40 percent of college freshmen needed remedial classes and that U.S. students were falling behind their foreign competitors.

The pair also argued that a fragmented education system stifled innovation because textbook publishers and software developers were catering to a large number of small markets instead of exploring breakthrough products. That seemed to resonate with the man who led the creation of the world’s dominant computer operating system.

“Can you do this?” Wilhoit recalled being asked. “Is there any proof that states are serious about this, because they haven’t been in the past?”

Wilhoit responded that he and Coleman could make no guarantees but that “we were going to give it the best shot we could.”

After the meeting, weeks passed with no word. Then Wilhoit got a call: Gates was in.

What followed was one of the swiftest and most remarkable shifts in education policy in U.S. history.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation didn’t just bankroll the development of what became known as the Common Core State Standards. With more than $200 million, the foundation also built political support across the country, persuading state governments to make systemic and costly changes.

Bill Gates was de facto organizer, providing the money and structure for states to work together on common standards in a way that avoided the usual collision between states’ rights and national interests that had undercut every previous effort, dating from the Eisenhower administration.

The Gates Foundation spread money across the political spectrum, to entities including the big teachers unions, the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association, and business organizations such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — groups that have clashed in the past but became vocal backers of the standards.

Money flowed to policy groups on the right and left, funding research by scholars of varying political persuasions who promoted the idea of common standards. Liberals at the Center for American Progress and conservatives affiliated with the American Legislative Exchange Council who routinely disagree on nearly every issue accepted Gates money and found common ground on the Common Core.

One 2009 study, conducted by the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute with a $959,116 Gates grant, described the proposed standards as being “very, very strong” and “clearly superior” to many existing state standards.

Gates money went to state and local groups, as well, to help influence policymakers and civic leaders. And the idea found a major booster in President Obama, whose new administration was populated by former Gates Foundation staffers and associates. The administration designed a special contest using economic stimulus funds to reward states that accepted the standards.

The result was astounding: Within just two years of the 2008 Seattle meeting, 45 states and the District of Columbia had fully adopted the Common Core State Standards.

Even Massachusetts, the state with the highest academic performance in the nation, replaced its excellent standards with CCSS and won a federal grant for doing so.

Some states adopted Common Core before it was publicly released. The state chief in Texas, Robert Scott, refused to adopt the CCSS sight unseen, but he was a rarity.

Without Gates’ money, there would be no Common Core.

Opposition came from Tea Party groups, then from independent teacher groups like the BadAss Teachers Association.

The promise of the Common Core was that it would lift student test scores across the board and at the same time, would close achievement gaps.

The Common Core was rolled out in 2010 and adopted widely in 2011 and 2012.

Districts and states spent billions of dollars on new textbooks, new tests, new software and hardware, new professional development, all aligned to the CCSS.

This was money that the districts and states did not spend to reduce class sizes or to raise teachers’ salaries.

Test scores on NAEP and on international tests have been stagnant since the rollout of the Common Core.

Teacher morale down. New entries into teaching down. Test scores flat. Achievement gaps larger.

Edu-entrepreneurs enriched. Testing industry happy. Tech industry satisfied.

Disruption achieved.

If you want to read more about the origins of the Common Core, read Mercedes Schneider’s Common Core Dilemma: Who Owns Our Schools? and Nicholas Tampio’s https://www.amazon.com/Common-Core-Nicholas-Tampio-ebook/dp/B079S2627M/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_1?keywords=nicholas+campion+common+core&qid=1575909356&s=books&sr=1-1-fkmr0Common Core: National Education Standards and the Threat to Our Democracy.

Bottom line: What the Gates’ billions spent on Common Core proved was that the basic problem in American education is not the lack of common standards and common tests, but the growing numbers of children who live in poverty,  who come to school (or miss school) ill-nourished and lacking regular medical care and a decent standard of living.

He spent more than $4 billion on failed experiments in education over the past 20 years. Wouldn’t it be great if he invested in children, families, and communities and improved their standard of living?

 

 

 

Categories Accountability, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Poverty, Resistance, Technology, Testing

Jan Resseger: Are the Common Core Standards Dead or Alive?

By dianeravitch
December 20, 2019 //
39

Jan Resseger is upset that the New York Times posted an article seeking to revive the moribund Common Core standards.

Some states dropped the CC standards; some kept them but gave them a new name. Most dropped the CC-aligned tests.

In her view, the CCSS died because it was hated by significant numbers of teachers and parents. It launched the Opt Out movement in New York State, which annually enlists the non-cooperation of nearly 20 percent of the state’s test-eligible students.

They were hated because it was not “developed by governors, educational experts, state superintendents, and teachers,” as the founding myth claims, but by a small number of people who wrote them with minimal consultation of classroom teachers.

They were hated because they were funded by one man–Bill Gates–and never validated by any field trial in real classrooms.

They were pushed on the states not by consent but by the lure of $5 billion in Race to the Top funding. The only state officials who had to agree were the governor and the state superintendent, and most of those have since moved on. The states that did not agree to accept the CCSS were not eligible to compete for RTTT billions

They fell into disfavor because activists on the right saw them as federal overreach and activists among teachers and parents in the center and on the left disliked the standards and hated the tests.

They lost support when the testing consortia that Arne Duncan funded with $360 million arbitrarily decided to align the CCSS test standards with those of the NAEP, which was totally inappropriate. The NAEP standard for “proficiency” is not grade-level, nor is it pass-fail. It represents a high level of achievement, like a B+ or an A-. Massachusetts is the only state in the nation where as much as 50% of students score NAEP proficient, yet the Common Core testing groups expected that most American students would reach that high mark. They did not, and the CCSS tests wrongly generated headlines that inaccurately labeled students, schools, and districts as “failing” when they did not reach an impossible benchmark.

 

Categories Accountability, Common Core, Education Reform, Testing

Prominent Evangelical Magazine Says It’s Time for Trump to Go

By dianeravitch
December 20, 2019 //
16

Christianity Today was founded by the late Reverend Billy Graham, the leading figure in evangelical Christianity. Its publication is Christianity Today. CT published an editorial today saying that it was time for Trump to leave. it received national attention.

The editorial was signed by its editor-in-chief Mark Galli:

Let’s grant this to the president: The Democrats have had it out for him from day one, and therefore nearly everything they do is under a cloud of partisan suspicion. This has led many to suspect not only motives but facts in these recent impeachment hearings. And, no, Mr. Trump did not have a serious opportunity to offer his side of the story in the House hearings on impeachment.

But the facts in this instance are unambiguous: The president of the United States attempted to use his political power to coerce a foreign leader to harass and discredit one of the president’s political opponents. That is not only a violation of the Constitution; more importantly, it is profoundly immoral.

The reason many are not shocked about this is that this president has dumbed down the idea of morality in his administration. He has hired and fired a number of people who are now convicted criminals. He himself has admitted to immoral actions in business and his relationship with women, about which he remains proud. His Twitter feed alone—with its habitual string of mischaracterizations, lies, and slanders—is a near perfect example of a human being who is morally lost and confused.

Trump’s evangelical supporters have pointed to his Supreme Court nominees, his defense of religious liberty, and his stewardship of the economy, among other things, as achievements that justify their support of the president. We believe the impeachment hearings have made it absolutely clear, in a way the Mueller investigation did not, that President Trump has abused his authority for personal gain and betrayed his constitutional oath. The impeachment hearings have illuminated the president’s moral deficiencies for all to see. This damages the institution of the presidency, damages the reputation of our country, and damages both the spirit and the future of our people. None of the president’s positives can balance the moral and political danger we face under a leader of such grossly immoral character….

To the many evangelicals who continue to support Mr. Trump in spite of his blackened moral record, we might say this: Remember who you are and whom you serve. Consider how your justification of Mr. Trump influences your witness to your Lord and Savior. Consider what an unbelieving world will say if you continue to brush off Mr. Trump’s immoral words and behavior in the cause of political expediency. If we don’t reverse course now, will anyone take anything we say about justice and righteousness with any seriousness for decades to come? Can we say with a straight face that abortion is a great evil that cannot be tolerated and, with the same straight face, say that the bent and broken character of our nation’s leader doesn’t really matter in the end?

Categories Education Reform, Religion

ProPublica: Donald Trump Jr. Visits Mongolia, Gets Special Treatment, Kills an Endangered Sheep

By dianeravitch
December 20, 2019 //
23

Someday we won’t have to think about the Trump family and their misadventures. I look forward to that day.

Donald Trump Jr. went to Mongolia in the summer of 2019, and ProPublica explains what he did there.

What did  you do on your vacation? Did you slaughter a creature who is part of an endangered species?

The rocky highlands of Central Asia, in a remote region of Western Mongolia, are home to a plummeting population of the largest sheep in the world, the argali. The endangered species is beloved for its giant curving horns, which can run over 6 feet in length.

On a hunting trip this August, Donald Trump Jr. shot and killed one.

His adventure was supported by government resources from both the U.S. and Mongolia, which each sent security services to accompany the president’s eldest son and grandson on the multiday trip. It also thrust Trump Jr. directly into the controversial world of Mongolian trophy hunting — a polarizing practice in a country that views the big-horned rams as a national treasure. The right to kill an argali is controlled by an opaque permitting system that experts say is mostly based on money, connections and politics.

Trump Jr. received special treatment during his summer trip, according to records obtained by ProPublica as well as interviews with people involved in the hunt. Listen to the episode.

Listen to the Episode

The Mongolian government granted Trump Jr. a coveted and rare permit to slay the animal retroactively on Sept. 2, after he’d left the region following his trip. It’s unusual for permits to be issued after a hunter’s stay. It was one of only three permits to be issued in that hunting region, local records show.

 

Categories Education Reform

Houston: Founder of Houston Charter Chain Indicted and Arrested

By dianeravitch
December 20, 2019 //
7

For the fourth time in only five years, the leader of a charter school has been arrested for siphoning money away from the school.

The Houston Chronicle reports:

The founder of a now-closed Houston charter school network failed to properly disclose more than $1 million in payments to his brother’s companies and used taxpayer funds to cover costs associated with a timeshare in Hawaii, federal prosecutors said Wednesday.

Richard S. Rose, who served as superintendent, CEO and chief financial officer of Zoe Learning Academy, was arrested Monday after a grand jury returned an 18-count indictment against him. The charter school enrolled several hundred students per year at campuses in Houston’s Third Ward and Duncanville, a city south of Dallas, prior to its abrupt closure in 2017.

Rose is the fourth Houston-area charter leader in the past five years arrested on charges related to illegally taking money from a school.

The Varnett Public School founders Alsie and Marian Cluff were charged in 2015, and sentenced to prison last year for spending more than $4 million in campus funds to support their lavish lifestyle. Houston Gateway Academy Richard Garza awaits sentencing after pleading guilty in October to participating in a $160,000 kickback scheme involving an information technology contractor.

Investigators said Zoe Learning Academy paid bus service fees totaling more than $1 million over four years to companies owned by his brother, as well as about $60,000 to Rose’s wife and a company the couple owned. Rose failed to disclose the payments to the Texas Education Agency on annual governance forms, violating a state law that requires charter leaders to detail any school funds paid to their relatives, federal officials said.

Investigators also said Rose withdrew money from Zoe Learning Academy accounts and used the charter’s credit card to pay for a Honolulu timeshare, a $75,000 personal legal settlement and $30,000 in fees to a lawyer who represented him in matters unrelated to the school. Rose’s indictment did not detail the amount paid for the timeshare.

The charges against Rose include money laundering, conspiracy and theft from programs receiving federal funds. Rose did not have a defense lawyer listed in court records Wednesday. Efforts to reach him were unsuccessful.

The charter elementary opened in 2001 and shuttered in September 2017, weeks after Hurricane Harvey landed in Houston. At the time, Rose said the school’s enrollment was too low to generate enough revenue to remain open.

Zoe Learning Academy received a failing grade on the 2017 state financial integrity rating scale for schools, one of four Texas charters to receive the designation. The charter district also failed to meet state academic standards in 2013, 2015 and 2017.

Will Betsy DeVos and other charter cheerleaders claim that the parents chose Zoe Learning Academy and we should respect their choices regardless of its academic ratings or its founder’s financial practices?

After all, it is the parents’ choice and we should respect that choice, right? Even if the founder has been indicted and arrested.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corruption, Education Industry, Education Reform, Failure, Fraud, Houston, Privatization
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