Archives for category: Education Reform
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DeVos to Judge: “Don’t Lock Me Up”

By dianeravitch
October 16, 2019 //
25

Politico reports that the Trump administration is apologizing profusely for hounding students whose loans for attending the predatory (now closed) Corinthian Colleges should have been forgiven. The judge in the case had threatened to punish Betsy DeVos for violating her court order. This is a case of “accountability for thee, but not for me.”

MAKING THE CASE AGAINST CONTEMPT FINDING: The Trump administration, in a court filing on Tuesday night, outlined why the Education Department and DeVos shouldn’t be held in contempt or face fines for violating U.S. Magistrate Judge Sallie Kim’s May 2018 order to stop collecting the student loans of former Corinthian Colleges students.

— Justice Department attorneys wrote that the Education Department “has been working diligently and in good faith to correct the errors” that led to the agency collecting on the student loans of thousands of borrowers despite the order. Kim is now deciding whether to hold the department and DeVos in contempt and impose sanctions, including fines, against them.

— “Loan servicers made an error on a small # of loans,” DeVos tweeted last week. “We know & we’re fixing it.” She also accused Sen. Elizabeth Warren of lying about the issue.

— The Trump administration’s filing mostly strikes a conciliatory tone. The department said it appreciates the “gravity” of the situation and the effect it had on affected borrowers. The department also said it was committed to coming into full compliance with the court’s order and asked that any sanctions be “forward-looking” rather than punitive.

— The Education Department conceded, though, that it had been “negligent” in its oversight of student loan companies. The “errors at issue here were not the result of any willful or intentional conduct on the part of the Department, but, as the Court has recognized, gross negligence, including negligent oversight of the Department’s servicers,” attorneys for the department wrote.

— Education Department officials last week sent letters admonishing its loan servicers over the issue and moved to discipline two department officials.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Education Reform, Fraud, Higher Education, Student Financial Aid and Student Debt

Jan Resseger: State Takeover Fails in Youngstown, Ohio, So State Kills Elected Local Board

By dianeravitch
October 16, 2019 //
15

 

The State Legislature and Governor in Ohio must be the dumbest in the nation. They responded to low test scores in Youngstown by imposing state control of the district. Needless to say, the state did not have a clue about how to improve the schools, so the state is now replacing the powerless elected local board with mayoral control.

Jan Resseger writes here about this absurd turn of events. 

Officials from the Ohio Department of Education have begun replacing the locally elected school board in Youngstown with a mayoral appointed school board.

This week we learned about one more extension of autocratic state power backloaded in 2015 into the HB 70’s school district takeover of Youngstown. Because at the end of four years of state takeover, the Youngstown school district earned another “F” on the state report card, the state is now imposing a previously unknown provision of the 2015, HB 70, which established state takeover in the first place.

The replacement of the elected school board in Youngstown with a state-approved, mayoral-appointed school board is designed to punish Youngstown for not raising its grade to “C” during four years of state takeover. What is particularly shocking about the new development is that the locally elected school board has had no role to play in the operation of Youngstown’s schools since the time of the state takeover in 2015. The state has been running the district through a state appointed Academic Distress Commission which appointed a CEO to lead the school district.

Krish Mohip, the state-appointed CEO whose term ended on July 31, was never happy in his position, and last spring, several months prior to the end of his term, Mohip took family medical leave. At the time The Youngstown Vindicator‘s Amanda Tonoli reported that Mohip explained: “I’m going to take care of some issues that have accumulated at home, and I’m going to focus my attention there… I don’t see my absence as being a hindrance to all the great work that’s happened and will continue to happen over the next few years.” Mohip left, but he did not resign.  Instead he collected the rest of his $170,000 salary.  Tonoli added: “A longevity provision in Mohip’s contract allows him a $10,000 payout if he completes his full contract.”

Nobody was sorry to see Mohip go. The chair of the Academic Distress Commission explained: “We have to uphold what the contract says… We are following the law and following the contract that was agreed upon with Krish Mohip.” The blatant arrogance of Mohip’s mode of departure was merely the latest example of his abuse of the public trust.  He did not ever move his family to Youngstown, for example.

A new CEO, Justin Jennings, formerly the school superintendent in Saginaw, Michigan, was recently appointed by the state-appointed, Youngstown Academic Distress Commission.

Under HB 70, the residents of the school district have been permitted by the state to elect a local board of education, but its only power has been to decide whether and when to put a property tax levy on the ballot.

Corporate reformers have run out of ideas. They continue to believe that democracy is the problem, that democracy causes low test scores. Everything they try has failed. They fail and fail. They are shameless.

 

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Failure, Ohio, Privatization

Trump Acts on “Gut Instinct”

By dianeravitch
October 15, 2019 //
50

James Hohmann of the Washington Post writes that Trump makes consequential decisions without consulting people who are deeply knowledgeable about the consequences.

IDEA: President Trump tweeted last week about his own “great and unmatched wisdom” as he defended his controversial conversation with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. It was a window into his certitude and self-confidence that belies a lack of careful study or deep knowledge of the world.

That Oct. 6 call, just like his July 25 phone conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, would have played out very differently if Trump had listened to the warnings of his advisers at the White House and appointees in the national security apparatus.

“Mr. Trump’s error, some aides concede in off-the-record conversations, was entering the Oct. 6 call underprepared, and then failing to spell out for Mr. Erdogan the potential consequences — from economic sanctions to a contraction of Turkey’s alliance with the United States and its standing in NATO. He has since threatened both, retroactively,” David Sanger reports in today’s New York Times. “The horrors that have played out with lightning speed were clearly not anticipated by Mr. Trump, who has no fondness for briefing books and meetings in the Situation Room intended to game out events two or three moves ahead. Instead, he often talks about trusting his instincts. ‘My gut tells me more sometimes than anybody else’s brain can ever tell me,’ he said late last year.”

— Some of this is a result of Trump surrounding himself with more “yes men” than during the first two years of his administration. Jim Mattis, you might recall, resigned as secretary of defense last December after Trump initially announced he would withdraw U.S. troops from Syria.

“During deliberations in the past, Trump has repeatedly pushed to remove troops from Syria but has usually been dissuaded by top officials, such as John F. Kelly, his former chief of staff,” Seung Min Kim and Josh Dawsey reported on Sunday. “The usual argument against removing troops, according to former senior administration officials, would be that doing so would cause widespread deaths and chaos and Trump would be blamed for it. ‘Normally, convincing him he would be blamed for death and chaos could keep it from happening at least at that moment,’ one former senior administration official said. But current administration officials say many moderating officials like Kelly are gone, and longtime friends say the move is consistent with Trump’s worldview — and that he has long wanted to do this.”

Categories Education Reform

Teresa Hanafin: British Couple Arrested, Sent to Detention Center

By dianeravitch
October 15, 2019 //
19

Teresa Hanafin of “Fast Forward” of the Boston Globe wrote the following:

 

While you were sleeping: The BBC reported a stunning story about a British couple, their 3-month-old baby, and their relatives on vacation in Vancouver who accidentally crossed the border into the US back on Oct. 3. They were pulled over by a cop, arrested, separated, put in freezing cold cells at a detention center, and forced to sleep on the floor. The woman refused to let her infant sleep on the “filthy” floor, so she tried balancing him on her chest. Food and blankets were woefully inadequate.

Then they were flown to a family detention center in Pennsylvania, known as a “baby jail,” where the infant — who hasn’t had all of his immunization shots yet — was exposed to dozens of other kids. Again, dirty conditions, with sheets and blankets that the mother said smelled like a dead dog. It was close to a week before they were allowed to call their embassy, and today, two weeks after they were first nabbed, they’re still in custody.

Why weren’t they allowed to just turn around and drive back into Canada? Because this is who we are now, abusing and alienating allies around the world, one family at a time.

Welcome to America!

Categories Education Reform

Politico: Another Not Busy Week at the White House

By dianeravitch
October 13, 2019 //
11

Lots of executive time for watching FOX News and tweeting. Lunch with lackeys. Plenty of time for golf. His favorite lunch Partners: Pence and Pompeo. Will they discuss the slaughter of our Kurdish allies? Probably not.  Not important to the Stable Genius, he with “unmatched wisdom.”

 

SNEAK PEEK … THE PRESIDENT’S WEEK AHEAD … Tuesday: THE PRESIDENT will have lunch with VP Mike Pence and will meet with the St. Louis Blues, which won the Stanley Cup. The president will also meet with Defense Secretary MARK ESPER. Wednesday: PRESIDENT TRUMP will host the president of Italy, and the two will hold a news conference. He will also have lunch with Secretary of State MIKE POMPEO. TRUMP will speak at an “Italian-American reception.”

Thursday: THE PRESIDENT will travel to Texas. He will participate in a roundtable and speak at a luncheon in Fort Worth. He will visit and cut an opening ribbon at the Louis Vuitton-Rochambeau Workshop in Johnson County, Texas. And he’ll hold a rally in Dallas.

Categories Education Reform

Tim Jackson: Why Little Rock Parents Cannot Trust Arkansas’ Governor or State Board

By dianeravitch
October 11, 2019 //
3

Tim Jackson is a parent with children in the Little Rock School District and an active member of Grassroots Arkansas, which has been fighting for the restoration of democratic control of the LRSD public schools. He is also a film-maker. He attended the state school board meeting that theoretically restored local control.

He wrote this account:

ARKANSAS STATE BOARD OF EDUCATION MEETING – 10.09.19

Yesterday’s meeting of the Arkansas State Board of Education was another exercise in futility for the true stakeholders in the Little Rock School District. Don’t believe the headlines that local control of the district has been returned or will be retuned anytime soon to an elected school board. All the State Board did yesterday was trash an ill conceived and inequitable framework for reconstituting the district that it announced last month but could not sustain in the face of political and public opinion headwinds.

Board Chairman Diane Zook made it clear – much to the chagrin of Board members who were trying to appear conciliatory – that nothing changed yesterday. And Zook has no intention for things to change until the District is recreated in the image of the prevailing “business knows best” education model that bedevils American public education. As if American public education needed another self-important, self-entitled, shortsighted, external force bedeviling it.

I sat on the front row at yesterday’s meeting for eight hours until I was invited to leave by the Arkansas State Police who were brought in as a show of force by the board. Chairman Zook – whose personal animus toward the Little Rock School District is both unreasonable and inexhaustible – read twice from a prepared statement that anticipated more public outcry to what she knew was coming later in the meeting. We were told yesterday that 1) Police officers would escort anyone who spoke out of turn from the building. 2) Anyone who was escorted from the building yesterday would be banned from speaking in future meetings. 3) The Chairman would decide what constituted “out of turn.”

One of Ms. Zook’s frequent rebuttals when we cry “taxation without representation” over the State’s heavy-handed and demonstrably underhanded takeover is to remind us that we have a Community Advisory Board. Under the terms of the State takeover the Community Advisory Board of the Little Rock School District has no authority, no public accountability, and members serve solely at the pleasure of the State’s Education Commissioner, Johnny Key – a man so unqualified for the job that the Arkansas Legislature had to reduce the qualifications for the job in order for Governor Asa Hutchinson to appoint him.

An influential member of that Citizens Advisory Board stood in the parking lot of the Arkansas Education Building a month ago and told me that the nine members of the State Board of Education are the Governor’s choice for overseeing public education in Arkansas. This CAB member elaborated that under the Arkansas Constitution those nine appointed people don’t owe the people of Little Rock “a vote, a voice, or an explanation for anything they do.” I was told that if I didn’t like, I should go change the Arkansas Constitution.

So, that’s our representation. That’s what Diane Zook wants us to feel good about.

The State Board never fails to create chaos at the end of its meetings – at least at meetings in which the Little Rock School District is on the agenda. Yesterday was no exception. In a flurry of confusion and a complete flaunting of acceptable procedure the Board voted 9-0 to cease recognition of the Little Rock Educators Association as the sole contract negotiator for teachers and other full time support staff in the Little Rock School District. The LREA has been under attack since the State takeover and FOIA requests bear out that the Board’s plan for the LREA hasalways been death for the union by a thousand cuts. Yesterday the Board twisted the knife.

This action did not kill the union. But it is another serious attack and clear evidence that Zook and Company do not have a plan for the Little Rock School District but they do have a vision for it. It’s a vision that values the haves and patronizes the have-nots while expanding a privatized system of public education that we will pay for as a society for the next 50 years.

Tim Jackson | tjackson@category-one.com 

Categories Accountability, Arkansas, Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, Lies, Little Rock, Privatization, Walton Foundation

Peter Greene: A Teacher’s Final Lesson

By dianeravitch
October 10, 2019 //
10

 

This post is a moving tribute to a teacher who died of cancer at the age of 32.

Ashley Kuzma exhausted every possibility, holding on to life as long as she could.

She wrote her obituary.

She reminds us about what matters most.

I urge you to read it.

 

Categories Education Reform

North Carolina: A Sad Bedtime Story about a Failed State Takeover

By dianeravitch
October 10, 2019 //
11

This is a story so nutty that it would be hilarious if there were no children involved. Instead, it is an outrage.

When the fringe rightwingers of the Tea Party won control of the North Carolina legislature in 2010, they promptly passed laws authorizing charters and vouchers and transferring the funding from the state’s successful N.C. Teaching Fellows Program (which prepared career teachers) to the temps in Teach for America.

Then they looked wistfully to Tennessee and realized that what they were missing was a mechanism for state takeover of low-scoring public schools. Tennessee had its very own “Achievement School District,” funded by $100 million of federal Race to the Top money, and North Carolina wanted to do the same thing. The Tennessee ASD  took control of the state’s lowest-performing schools and pledged to catapult them into the top 20% of schools in the state.

By 2016, it was clear that the ASD was a total failure but that did not deter North Carolina lawmakers. Give them credit for a combination of gullibility and ignorance.

To help the state takeover pass, a very wealthy conservative entrepreneur from Oregon named John Bryan funded a campaign for the state takeover legislation. Bryan handed out about $600,000 to Legislative candidates from 2011 to 2016.

The bill passed, and now North Carolina had its very own Innovative School District. The law said the state would take over up to five low-performing schools in its first year, which would be turned into charter schools.

But now the story gets even better! Oregon entrepreneur John Bryan had his very own charter chain, called TeamCFA, which already operated 13 charters in North Carolina.

Why not give the contract for the ISD to TeamCFA?

The only problem was that no public school wanted to be part of the ISD. Each time a school was designated by the state, the parents fought back, contacted their legislator, and avoided the state takeover.

Ultimately, only one school joined the ISD: Southside Ashpole Elementary School in Robeson County. The school was turned into a charter school operated by a new company called Achievement for All Children.

Achievement For All Children is heavily connected to Oregon resident John Bryan, a generous contributor to political campaigns and school-choice causes in North Carolina. He has taken credit for passage of the law creating the Innovative School District.

The board of directors for Achievement for All Children includes former Rep. Rob Bryan, a Republican from Mecklenburg County who introduced the bill creating the new district. John Bryan contributed about $17,000 to Rob Bryan’s campaigns for the state legislature from 2013 to 2016.

Tony Helton is chief executive officer of both Achievement For All Children and TeamCFA, a charter school network founded by John Bryan.

But most of the questions this week focused on the qualifications of AAC, which was formed in February 2017.

An independent third-party evaluation by education consulting firm SchoolWorks said it’s unclear whether AAC “is legally eligible to operate and manage” Southside Ashpole because state law says the company chosen must have a record of results in improving performance for low-performing students or schools.

The company plans to partner with TeamCFA, which has 13 charter schools in North Carolina. But SchoolWorks says TeamCFA’s schools have “a mixed record of student achievement.”

https://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/education/article208006534.html#storylink=cpy

The new Innovative School District had a new principal and its own Superintendent, quite a lot of leadership for one little school.

The State Board of education just got an evaluation of its takeover school.

Test scores, already low, dropped a bit. The new charter got a grade of F.

The school saw high administrative turnover:

Behind the scenes, the report says rifts developed between the principal and some faculty, which were due in part to the significant leadership changes in the district. In the past two years, the program has seen three superintendents, two principals and two different peoplerunning Achievement For All Children.

And despite the experiment’s negative evaluation, the state is supposed to throw more public schools into the “Innovative School District.”

Under state law, four more schools have to be added to the district for the 2020-21 school year. A list of 12 schools being considered for takeover (none in the Triangle) was released in September.

State board members and State Superintendent Mark Johnson met Wednesday with state lawmakers to ask them to approve a delay in selecting any new schools this year.

Expect public schools chosen to enter the failed ISD to fight back.

This is not funny. This is education malpractice.

 

 

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Failure, North Carolina, Privatization

Washington Post: Trump’s Claims of Immunity from Impeachment Are Unprecedented

By dianeravitch
October 10, 2019 //
37

 

Article 1, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution gives the House of Representatives the power to impeach the president. Any president who is impeached is tried by the Senate.

The relevant sentence says:

The House of Representatives shall chuse their Speaker and other Officers; and shall have the sole Power of Impeachment.

The White House sent a letter to the House declaring that its impeachment inquiry was “unconstitutional.”

The Washington Post wrote about this bizarre opinion and cited various legal scholars.

In a series of legal maneuvers that have defied Congress, drawn rebukes from federal judges and tested the country’s foundational system of checks and balances, President Trump has made an expansive declaration of presidential immunity that would essentially place him beyond the reach of the law.

In courts and before Congress, Trump’s legal teams are simultaneously arguing two contradictory points: that the president can’t be investigated or indicted by prosecutors because Congress has the sole responsibility for holding presidents accountable, and that the House’s impeachment inquiry is an unconstitutional effort that the White House can ignore.

“We have a president who simply doesn’t believe that Congress is a coequal branch of government,” said Elliot Williams, who helped run the Justice Department’s legislative affairs office during the Obama administration. “That’s a huge departure from anything we’ve seen in our lifetimes.”

The broad legal effort escalated on Tuesday when the White House counsel sent a letter to House Democratic leaders dismissing Congress’s impeachment inquiry as “illegitimate” and stating that the entire executive branch would refuse to cooperate with it…

In his eight-page letter to Congress on Tuesday, White House counsel Pat A. Cipollone declared that “the President has a country to lead” and claimed that Congress’s attempts at oversight were overly partisan, lacked due process and ran afoul of constitutional principles. Echoing Trump, Cipollone made several political points in his letter, accusing Democrats of trying to overturn the results of the 2016 election….

Several legal scholars panned Cipollone’s letter as a political document with little legal relevance.

Michael J. Gerhardt, a University of North Carolina law professor, said the White House letter amounted to “a bunch of political talking points” with a “completely backwards” interpretation of the Constitution.

The Constitution gives the House the “sole power of impeachment” and does not prescribe how the process should unfold, said Gerhardt, author of “Impeachment: What Everyone Needs to Know.”

“The president doesn’t get to dictate to the House how it should do its job,” he said. “This is an attempt to flout the law and place the president above the law.”

Ilya Somin, a professor at Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University, joked in a Facebook post that the Trump administration’s legal reasoning made him wonder “whether the White House counsel was sick the day they taught law at law school.”

Somin also rejected the assertion from the White House that the inquiry violates “constitutionally mandated due process.” An impeachment inquiry, he said in an interview, is not a criminal trial.

“What’s at stake is losing a position of power,” Somin said. “None of the rights the White House demands” are required by the Constitution.

But Trump has long held an expansive view of executive power and has cited Article II of the Constitution, which defines the powers of the executive branch, as a catchall that gives him wide latitude.

“Article II allows me to do whatever I want,” Trump said in a June interview with ABC News.

Several federal judges have disagreed with the administration’s claim that the president is above the law.

A federal judge in New York this week called Trump’s claims of immunity “repugnant to the nation’s governmental structure and constitutional values.” The judge denied the president’s request to block the Manhattan district attorney from accessing Trump’s tax returns. “The Court cannot square a vision of presidential immunity that would place the President above the law with the text of the Constitution, the historical record, the relevant case law” or any other authority, wrote U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero.

In an earlier ruling in Washington, issued before the start of the House impeachment inquiry, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta refused to stop a House subpoena for Trump’s accounting firm records.

“It is simply not fathomable,” the judge wrote, “that a Constitution that grants Congress the power to remove a President for reasons including criminal behavior would deny Congress the power to investigate him for unlawful conduct — past or present — even without formally opening an impeachment inquiry.”

Clearly, Trump has never read Article II of the Constitution, which does not allow him to do whatever he wants.  His lawyer seems to think that Trump is just too darn busy running the country to be impeached, but the Constitution gives the House the sole power of impeachment, notwithstanding the president’s busy schedule (Trump’s schedule consists mainly of watching FOX News, tweeting, lunching with Mike Pence, and playing golf).

If the House votes to impeach, Trump will have the rights of due process at his Senate trial.

That is, if the Constitution means what it says.

 

 

 

 

Categories Education Reform

Trump Hates the Government He Leads

By dianeravitch
October 9, 2019 //
44

The deranged man in charge of the federal government despises the people who work for the federal government.

If they dare to dissent from his unhinges behavior, he says they are spies or they are part of the “deep state” that is determined to thwart his self-aggrandizing policies.

Yet there are some who have spoken out, most recently 90 who served as national security professionals, including some on the Trump administration.

The key to understanding this disagreement is that Trump hates anyone who disagrees with him and everyone who knows more than he does. That’s almost everyone who is a career professional in the foreign service.

An article in the Washington Post describes the concerns of national security officials, who fear what Trump is doing but worry that speaking out will reinforce his idiotic complaints about a “deep state.”

Trump has feuded with the national security community since many in the Republican establishment opposed his candidacy in 2016. And throughout the investigation into Russian interference in that election, the president sought to disparage U.S. intelligence agencies as a part of a politically motivated campaign to sabotage his presidency and sought to target some who spoke against him as partisan foils.

Those who have come forward since the Ukraine impeachment inquiry was announced said they are determined to make clear that Trump’s conduct falls well outside the institutional boundaries of the presidency.

“What is happening currently is not normal,” said Andrea Kendall-Taylor, who served as a U.S. intelligence officer on Russia and Eurasia before stepping down in 2018. “This represents a deviation from the way that these institutions regularly function. And when the institutions don’t work, that is a national security threat.”

She was among 90 national security veterans who signed an open letter published Sunday in support of the anonymous whistleblower who filed a complaint that Trump had acted improperly in asking the Ukranian president to investigate Biden in a July phone call.

Trump has attempted to intimidate other government officials into not cooperating by casting those who offered information to the whistleblower as “close to spies.” The open letter emphasized that the whistleblower “is protected from certain egregious forms of retaliation.”

White House officials did not respond to a request for comment.

Trump’s critics have seized on criticism from ex-officials as evidence that Democrats have more than enough material to justify the impeachment proceedings against him and to try to remove him from office.

McGurk, the former special envoy charged with coordinating the global campaign against the Islamic State, issued a scathing series of tweets Monday calling Trump “not a Commander-in-Chief” for his abrupt decision to order U.S. troops out of northern Syria. The move could put Kurdish forces, longtime partners in the fight against ISIS, in jeopardy.

Trump makes “impulsive decisions with no knowledge or deliberation,” said McGurk, who registered similar concerns in December when he resigned in protest.

 

Categories Education Reform
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