Archives for category: Education Reform

Russian government operatives used social media in 2016 to help the Trump campaign.

A sophisticated effort targeted African Americans to suppress their enthusiasm for Hillary Clinton.

From the New York Times:

“The Russian influence campaign on social media in the 2016 election made an extraordinary effort to target African-Americans, used an array of tactics to try to suppress turnout among Democratic voters and unleashed a blizzard of activity on Instagram that rivaled or exceeded its posts on Facebook, according to a report produced for the Senate Intelligence Committee.

“The report adds new details to the portrait that has emerged over the last two years of the energy and imagination of the Russian effort to sway American opinion and divide the country, which the authors said continues to this day.

“Active and ongoing interference operations remain on several platforms,” says the report, produced by New Knowledge, a cybersecurity company based in Austin, Texas, along with researchers at Columbia University and Canfield Research LLC. One continuing Russian campaign, for instance, seeks to influence opinion on Syria by promoting Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian president and a Russian ally in the brutal conflict there.

“The New Knowledge report, which was obtained by The New York Times in advance of its scheduled release on Monday, is one of two commissioned by the Senate committee on a bipartisan basis. They are based largely on data about the Russian operations provided to the Senate by Facebook, Twitter and the other companies whose platforms were used.”

From the Washington Post:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/daily-202/2018/12/17/daily-202-russian-efforts-to-manipulate-african-americans-show-sophistication-of-disinformation-campaign/5c1739291b326b2d6629d4c6/?utm_term=.a31b381ef19b

THE BIG IDEA: A new report prepared for the Senate Intelligence Committee reveals that the Russians, in their bid to boost President Trump, have been more fixated than previously understood on trying to dampen African American political engagement.

“Researchers at Oxford University’s Computational Propaganda Project and Graphika, a network analysis firm, spent seven months analyzing millions of social media posts that major technology firms turned over to congressional investigators. Their goal was to understand the inner workings of the Internet Research Agency, which the U.S. government has charged with criminal offenses for interfering in the 2016 election.

“It turns out that African Americans were targeted with more Facebook ads than any other group, including conservatives.

“Three of the four most-liked Facebook posts put up by the Russian influence effort came from an account called Blacktivist that urged the community to be more cynical about politics. African Americans were urged to vote for Green Party candidate Jill Stein throughout the month before the 2016 election. A post on Oct. 29 that year declared: “NO LIVES MATTER TO HILLARY CLINTON. ONLY VOTES MATTER TO HILLARY CLINTON.” A message on Nov. 3 added: “NOT VOTING is a way to exercise our rights.”

“On Twitter, four of the Russian agency’s five most‐retweeted accounts catered exclusively to African Americans.

“On Instagram, all five of the most-liked posts created by the Russians were aimed at African American women. They included the hashtags #blackpower, #blackpride, #unapologeticallyblack, #blacklivesmatter, #icantbreathe, #riot and #blackgirlskillingit.

“The influence operation – run out of St. Petersburg – was sophisticated, relentless and became more effective with time. Its goal was to manipulate identity politics to tear America apart. The Soviet Union had also tried to heighten racial divisions during the Cold War, but their operatives lacked access to the technology platforms that now make it so easy.

“Messaging to African Americans sought to divert their political energy away from established political institutions by preying on anger with structural inequalities … including police violence, poverty, and disproportionate levels of incarceration,” the report says. “These campaigns pushed a message that the best way to advance the cause of the African American community was to boycott the election and focus on other issues instead.”

Fred Smith is a genuine Testing Expert. He has the technical expertise to dig deep into the numbers and understand what they mean and what they don’t mean. He spent most of his career at the New York City Board of Education. Now he is a valued consultant to the Opt Out Movement in New York. He knows fraud in testing and he’s not afraid to call it out.

Fred Smith is a hero of American education, and he here joins the honor roll.

Read this article about him, which contains links to his latest work.

In this short video, veteran kindergarten teacher Jim St. Clair explains why play-based learning is important for young children and illustrates with examples from exemplary practice.

The video was produced by DEY (Defending the Early Years), a consortium of early childhood education practitioners and academics.

Caleb Rossiter taught in both the charter schools and public schools of Washington, D.C.

In this post, he reviews Arne Duncan’s recent book about his seven years as Secretary of Education.

He came away from the experience convinced that everyone lies.

Rossiter wonders what he learned.

“”Duncan says he first encountered school lies 30 years ago, when during college he tutored at his mother’s after-school program in a poor black neighborhood in Southside Chicago. Duncan, who is white, also lived on the Southside, near his father’s job as a professor at the elite University of Chicago. His tutee was a black high school basketball star who assumed that his “B” average guaranteed a college scholarship. Duncan soon realized that the boy’s pathetic academic level meant he had no hope of even getting into college.

“The memoir makes it clear that schools are still at it, hiding from poor parents their children’s low effort, achievement, and readiness for college or work, which will keep them trapped in the underclass. That’s a depressing conclusion coming from someone who presided over a generation of accountability policies as head of the Chicago schools and then as President Obama’s secretary of education.”

Apparently, he sees nothing wrong about the high-stakes Testing and accountability regime that he promoted and has no regrets. Reflection is not his thing. He remains all in for the principles behind No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top.

The New York Times published a story about an undocumented immigrant who worked at Trump’s New Jersey golf club. If he actually built a wall, who would work the low-wage jobs in his hotels and golf clubs?


BEDMINSTER, N.J. — During more than five years as a housekeeper at the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, N.J., Victorina Morales has made Donald J. Trump’s bed, cleaned his toilet and dusted his crystal golf trophies. When he visited as president, she was directed to wear a pin in the shape of the American flag adorned with a Secret Service logo.

Because of the “outstanding” support she has provided during Mr. Trump’s visits, Ms. Morales in July was given a certificate from the White House Communications Agency inscribed with her name.

Quite an achievement for an undocumented immigrant housekeeper.

Ms. Morales’s journey from cultivating corn in rural Guatemala to fluffing pillows at an exclusive golf resort took her from the southwest border, where she said she crossed illegally in 1999, to the horse country of New Jersey, where she was hired at the Trump property in 2013 with documents she said were phony.

She said she was not the only worker at the club who was in the country illegally.

Sandra Diaz, 46, a native of Costa Rica who is now a legal resident of the United States, said she, too, was undocumented when she worked at Bedminster between 2010 and 2013. The two women said they worked for years as part of a group of housekeeping, maintenance and landscaping employees at the golf club that included a number of undocumented workers, though they could not say precisely how many. There is no evidence that Mr. Trump or Trump Organization executives knew of their immigration status. But at least two supervisors at the club were aware of it, the women said, and took steps to help workers evade detection and keep their jobs.

“There are many people without papers,” said Ms. Diaz, who said she witnessed several people being hired whom she knew to be undocumented.

Mr. Trump has made border security and the fight to protect jobs for Americans a cornerstone of his presidency, from the border wall he has pledged to build to the workplace raids and payroll audits that his administration has carried out.

During the presidential campaign, when the Trump International Hotel opened for business in Washington, Mr. Trump boasted that he had used an electronic verification system, E-Verify, to ensure that only those legally entitled to work were hired.

“We didn’t have one illegal immigrant on the job,” Mr. Trump said then.

But throughout his campaign and his administration, Ms. Morales, 45, has been reporting for work at Mr. Trump’s golf course in Bedminster, where she is still on the payroll. An employee of the golf course drives her and a group of others to work every day, she says, because it is known that they cannot legally obtain driver’s licenses.

A diminutive woman with only two years of education who came to the United States speaking no English, Ms. Morales has had an unusual window into one of the president’s favorite retreats: She has cleaned the president’s villa while he watched television nearby; she stood on the sidelines when potential cabinet members were brought in for interviews and when the White House chief of staff, John Kelly, arrived to confer with the president.

“I never imagined, as an immigrant from the countryside in Guatemala, that I would see such important people close up,” she said.

But Ms. Morales said she has been hurt by Mr. Trump’s public comments since he became president, including equating Latin American immigrants with violent criminals. It was that, she said, along with abusive comments from a supervisor at work about her intelligence and immigration status, that made her feel that she could no longer keep silent.

“We are tired of the abuse, the insults, the way he talks about us when he knows that we are here helping him make money,” she said. “We sweat it out to attend to his every need and have to put up with his humiliation.”

Ms. Morales and Ms. Diaz approached The New York Times through their New Jersey lawyer, Anibal Romero, who is representing them on immigration matters. Ms. Morales said that she understood she could be fired or deported as a result of coming forward, though she has applied for protection under the asylum laws. She is also exploring a lawsuit claiming workplace abuse and discrimination.

In separate, hourslong interviews in Spanish, Ms. Morales and Ms. Diaz provided detailed accounts of their work at the club and their interactions with management, including Mr. Trump. Both women described the president as demanding but kind, sometimes offering hefty tips.

While they were often unclear on precise dates of when events occurred, they appeared to recollect key events and conversations with precision.

Ms. Morales has had dealings with Mr. Trump that go back years, and her husband has confirmed that she would on occasion come home jubilant because the club owner had paid her a compliment, or bestowed on her a $50 or sometimes a $100 tip.

To ascertain that she was in fact an employee of the club, The Times reviewed Ms. Morales’s pay stubs and W-2 forms, which list the golf course as her employer. She also made available her Individual Taxpayer Identification, a nine-digit number that is issued by the Internal Revenue Service to foreigners to enable them to file taxes without being permanent residents of the United States. Having a number does not confer eligibility to work.

The Times also examined the documents Ms. Morales presented as proof that she was entitled to work — a permanent resident card, or green card, and a Social Security card, both of which she said she purchased from someone in New Jersey who produced counterfeit documents for immigrants.

The Times ran Ms. Morales’s purported Social Security number through several public records databases and none produced a match, which is often an indication that the number is not valid. The number on the back of the green card that Ms. Morales has on file at the golf course does not correspond to the format of numbers used on most legitimate resident cards. For example, it includes initials that do not match those of any immigration service centers that issue the cards.

Ms. Diaz produced similar documents, though since she has gained legal residence she has been issued a genuine Social Security card and green card.

The Trump Organization, which owns the golf course, did not comment specifically on Ms. Morales or Ms. Diaz. “We have tens of thousands of employees across our properties and have very strict hiring practices,” Amanda Miller, the company’s senior vice president for marketing and corporate communications, said in a statement. “If an employee submitted false documentation in an attempt to circumvent the law, they will be terminated immediately.”

The White House declined to comment.

Mr. Trump opened the golf club in 2004 and has spent all or part of about 70 days at Bedminster since taking office.CreditChristopher Gregory for The New York Times
That Ms. Morales appeared able to secure employment with what she said were fake documents is not surprising: An estimated eight million unauthorized immigrants are in the labor force, and it is an open secret that many businesses, especially in the service sector, hire them.

Mr. Trump has a long history of relying on immigrants at his golf and hotel properties. Though he signed a “Buy American, Hire American” executive order in 2017 tightening the conditions for visas for foreign workers, his companies have hired hundreds of foreigners on guest-worker visas.

In hiring workers who are already in the United States, employers are required to examine identity and work authorization documents and record them on an employment eligibility form. But companies are not required in most cases to take additional steps to verify the authenticity of documents. Because falsifying these documents is so easy, E-Verify, which is required in 22 states, goes the extra step of checking them against records kept by the Social Security Administration and the Department of Homeland Security.

The federal list posted online of employers who use the E-Verify system includes Mr. Trump’s golf club in North Carolina, a state that requires it, but the Bedminster club in New Jersey, where it is not required under state law, does not appear on the list.

During his campaign, Mr. Trump called for expanding the program to workplaces around the country. So far, that has not happened.

Mr. Trump opened his trophy club in the affluent horse country of Somerset County, N.J., in 2004. After buying the 504-acre property from a group of investors in 2002, Mr. Trump planted a sweeping colonnade of maple trees at the entrance and built two 18-hole golf courses, their design inspired by the gardens of Versailles. The membership initiation fee is more than $100,000.

The property has an estimated 40 to 80 employees, depending on the season; the bulk of the basic service workers are foreign-born. Immigrants keep the greens watered and manicured. They clean and maintain the cottages and suites that surround the junior Olympic-size heated pool.

The president has spent all or part of about 70 days at Bedminster since taking office. He has a two-story residence on the property; his daughter Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, were married at the club in 2009, and also have a cottage.

The job at Bedminster, at which Ms. Morales earns $13 an hour, is one of several she said she has held since arriving in the United States in 1999, crossing undetected into California after a journey of nearly six weeks by bus and on foot.

After she first arrived in Los Angeles, a contact provided her with a false Social Security number and an identification card that she was told would enable her to secure employment. She then flew to New Jersey, where she joined her husband, who had arrived months earlier.

In early 2013, a friend who worked at the Trump golf club told her that management was looking for housekeepers.

Ms. Morales was keen: The pay would be $10 an hour, higher than the $8.25 that she was earning cleaning guest rooms at a hotel.

According to her account, when she arrived for her interview, the housekeeping supervisor showed her around and asked her to demonstrate how she cleaned. The supervisor asked her to report to work the next morning at 6 a.m. — with her documents.

Ms. Morales said she told her she had no legal working documents. “I told her I don’t have good papers. She told me to bring what I used at the hotel,” Ms. Morales recalled.

By the time Ms. Morales was hired, Ms. Diaz had been working at the club since 2010 and had the job of cleaning Mr. Trump’s residence.

She said she washed and ironed Mr. Trump’s white boxers, golf shirts and khaki trousers, as well as his sheets and towels. Everything belonging to Mr. Trump, his wife, Melania, and their son, Barron, was washed with special detergent in a smaller, separate washing machine, she said.

“He is extremely meticulous about everything. If he arrives suddenly, everyone runs around like crazy” because Mr. Trump inspects everything closely, Ms. Diaz said.

She recalled a nervous moment in 2012, when Mr. Trump approached her and asked her to follow him to the clubhouse, a renovated 1930s Georgian manor, where he proceeded to run his fingers around the edges of frames on the wall and over table surfaces to check for dust.

“You did a really great job,” she said he told her, and handed her a $100 bill.

That same year, she said, Mr. Trump had an outburst over some orange stains on the collar of his white golf shirt, which Ms. Diaz described as stubborn remnants of his makeup, which she had difficulty removing.

When Ms. Morales joined the housekeeping team in 2013, Ms. Diaz was in charge of training her, and began to take her to tend to Mr. Trump’s house. In November of that year, when Ms. Diaz quit, Ms. Morales and the housekeeping supervisor took on the job of cleaning Mr. Trump’s house together.

Ms. Morales said she will never forget the day Mr. Trump pulled up to the pro shop in his cart as she was washing its large, arched windows. Noticing that Ms. Morales, who is shy of five feet tall, could not reach the top, he said, “Excuse me,” grabbed her rag and wiped the upper portion of the glass.

Mr. Trump then asked Ms. Morales her name and where she was from, she recalled. “I said, ‘I am from Guatemala.’ He said, ‘Guatemalans are hard-working people.’” The president then reached into his pocket and handed her a $50 bill.

“I told myself, ‘God bless him.’ I thought, he’s a good person,” Ms. Morales recalled.

Soon after Mr. Trump launched his campaign for the presidency, in June 2015, Ms. Morales recalled, one of the managers summoned her to tell her that she could no longer work inside Mr. Trump’s house.

Around the same time, she said, several workers, who she said were also working illegally, had their work days shaved from five days to three days. “The workers panicked. A lot of people just left,” she said.

Two months after Mr. Trump’s inauguration, in March 2017, Ms. Morales said that she and other workers received a new employee handbook.

Under a section titled “Immigration Compliance,” the handbook stated that employees were required to present documents specified by the federal government. “Those that are found to have falsified information will not be eligible for employment,” the handbook stated.

Ms. Morales said she was given a new employment form to sign. She could not understand the form, she said, but her lawyer, Mr. Romero, said it was likely an updated I-9 employment eligibility document — a form that, like the previous one, referenced her falsified documents.

Sometime last year, she said, one of the managers told her she must get both a new green card and new Social Security card because there were problems with her current ones.

Ms. Morales provided a detailed account of what transpired, but it was not possible to independently confirm what happened. According to her recollection, she told the manager that she did not know how to obtain new forgeries.

“I don’t know where to get them,’ ” she said she told him.

The manager, she said, suggested she speak with a maintenance employee who he said knew where to acquire new documents. When the maintenance employee told her that the new papers would cost $165, Ms. Morales told the manager that she did not have the money. “He said, ‘don’t worry. I will lend you the money,’” she said.

Ms. Morales said the maintenance worker drove her to a house in Plainfield, N.J., where she waited in his car while he met with someone inside. Ms. Morales said that she had no record or recollection of the address.

The next day, she said, the maintenance worker brought her a new Social Security card and a realistic-looking green card to replace the one that had “expired.” She said the manager made copies of them for files kept at the club’s administrative headquarters.

Now that Mr. Trump was president, there was more than the usual excitement whenever he arrived. Ms. Morales was still asked to clean Mr. Trump’s residence on occasion, and had to wear a Secret Service pin whenever the president was on site, she said, most likely identifying her as an employee, though the pins did not mean employees had a security clearance.

As the months went on, she and other employees at the golf club became increasingly disturbed about Mr. Trump’s comments, which they felt demeaned immigrants from Mexico and Central America. The president’s tone seemed to embolden others to make negative comments, Ms. Morales said. The housekeeping supervisor frequently made remarks about the employees’ vulnerable legal status when critiquing their work, she said, sometimes calling them “stupid illegal immigrants” with less intelligence than a dog.

Ms. Morales expects she will have to leave her job as soon as her name and work status are made public. She understands she could be deported. On Thursday, she spent the day with her lawyer, and as news of her disclosures spread, she did not answer a phone call from her supervisor at the golf course. She said she did not expect to return to work.

She said she is certain that her employers — perhaps even Mr. Trump — knew of her unlawful status all along.

“I ask myself, is it possible that this señor thinks we have papers? He knows we don’t speak English,” Ms. Morales said. “Why wouldn’t he figure it out?”

Maggie Haberman and Ben Protess contributed reporting from New York. Kitty Bennett contributed research.

Miriam Jordan is a national immigration correspondent. She reports from a grassroots perspective on the impact of immigration policy. She has been a reporter in Mexico, Israel, Hong Kong, India and Brazil. @mirjordan • Facebook

A few days ago, I took my grandchildren to see a magic show on Broadway called “The Illusionists.”

As we were fooled again and again, we said to one another, “How did he do that?”

We are fooled by sleight of hand, distracted by a flash of light as the magician pulls his trick.

Trump plays the fool and the bully, and we are outraged.

But behind the scenes, he is appointing people who hate their agencies or leaving crucial positions unfilled or putting people in charge who have a financial conflict or who are totally incompetent and unqualified but worked in the campaign.

Michael Lewis wrote a book about it called “The Fifth Risk.”

Read about it here in the New York Review of Books.

Or here in the New York Times.

Peter Greene asks us to imagine a country that cared about the loss of innocent lives.

Imagine.

Has it been six years? It seems forever, and yet it seems yesterday.

There will be many retro pieces today, looking at the events at Sandy Hook, the children, the families, the killer, the damaged whack jobs who have denied its existence, and of course many reflections about the turning point where we chose as a culture not to turn.

I’ll leave all of that to others. I just want to imagine.

Imagine a country where people rose up and said decades ago, “Guns are nice and important and all, but nothing is more valuable than the lives of innocents. We’re going to have reasonable gun controls in this country before another young life is lost.” Don’t imagine it happening after Sandy Hook. Imagine it years earlier, after the death of just one or two children by gunfire. In this world, Sandy Hook is just one more small school most people never heard of.

Imagine that when people marched against abortion, they simultaneously marched against gun violence. “We are pro-life,” they yelled, “and that means that we want to see every step necessary to preserve the lives of children.” Imagine a world in which pro-life activists chained themselves to the gates of gun factories and shamed gun company executives on their way to work every day.

Imagine that these attitudes were part of a culture wide valuing of children, a culture that loved children so much that it took extraordinary steps to preserve their lives. The government provided free health care for every single child, regardless of family income. People brought their children here from other countries for our free health care and we said, “Great. Bring them. Children are so precious and valuable that we wouldn’t sleep knowing that there was a suffering child in the world that we could have helped, but didn’t.”

Imagine that this love of children extended to education. In fact, imagine that education was one of the biggest budget items for federal and state spending. “Nothing is too good for our children,” said political leaders. “We will make sure that every school has nothing but the newest and best facilities and enough qualified teachers that class sizes can be small. Every child has the personal attention of excellent teachers, and that goes double for children growing up in poor neighborhoods.” Not all the politicians believed this, of course, but in this world, the only way you could get elected was by being a good friend to public schools. And no, there aren’t any charters or vouchers in this world– why would you need them when every public school had the very best in resources, staff and facilities, with the necessary resources to meet the individual needs of each child. “Man,” groused the Pentagon in this world. “I wish we could get the kind of unwavering support public schools get. We have to fight and scrape and argue for every cent.”

The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development convened a meeting last spring in Portugal to discuss the condition and future of the teaching profession. Each nation present discussed its perspective. The following is the official summary of the presentation by the Minister of Education from Sweden.

To download the full report click here.

SCHOOL CHOICE

Sweden:

In the early 1990s, Sweden moved to a school choice system in which the education system changed from one where the vast majority of students attended the public school in their catchment area to one where many students opt for a school other than their local school, and where schools that are privately run and publicly funded compete with traditional public schools.

Over the past twenty-five years of this unlimited choice system in Sweden, student performance on PISA has declined from near the OECD average to significantly below the OECD average in 2012, a steeper decline than in any other country. The variation in performance between schools also increased and there is now a larger impact of socioeconomic status on student performance than in the past.

Swedish participants described Sweden’s education system as an object lesson in how not to design a school choice system. Housing segregation leads to school segregation, and if you add to that market mechanisms and weak regulation, the result is markedly increased inequity.

The decline in achievement has fueled a national debate about how to improve the Swedish education system, from revising school choice arrangements to improve the access of disadvantaged families to information about school choices and the introduction of controlled choice schemes that supplement parental choice to ensure a more diverse distribution of students among schools. The Swedish government wants to modify its school choice system but this is politically difficult.

The Swedish government is increasing resources to poor schools but has not been able to solve its problem of teacher shortages, which affect the poorest schools the most. The poorest schools have the least experienced teachers, who are overwhelmed by the many problems they face. Teachers also lack time to work with students, and surveys of students report a lack of trustful relations with teachers.

K12 Inc., widely criticized for low-quality online K-12 education, has decided to pivot its offerings to a new market: teaching job skills online.

https://www.usnews.com/news/education-news/articles/2018-12-10/controversial-virtual-school-operator-k12-pivots-to-job-training

Let’s hope they stop sucking dollars out of public school budgets.

Great news!

The Montana Supreme Court declared a law unconstitutional that was intended to offer tuition tax credits (aka vouchers) for private schools.

See here and here

“The justices ruled 5-2 that the program giving tax credits of up to $150 for donations to organizations that give scholarships to private-school students amounts to indirect aid to schools controlled by churches. There is a ban in the Montana Constitution on any direct or indirect state aid to such schools, regardless of how large or small the amount is, the opinion by Justice Laurie McKinnon said.

“The Legislature’s enactment of the Tax Credit Program is facially unconstitutional and violates Montana’s constitutional guarantees to all Montanans that their government will not use state funds to aid religious schools,” McKinnon wrote.”

Read more here: https://www.thestate.com/news/business/national-business/article223011635.html#storylink=cpy

Also, in another Montana newspaper:

“Montana’s high court on Wednesday struck down the state’s tax credit for school scholarships because it primarily benefited religious schools, running afoul of Montana’s Constitution.

“The state program allowed donors who contributed to scholarship funds for students to reduce their state taxes by $1 for every $1 they gave to the fund.

“The Montana Department of Revenue had excluded religious programs from participating in the tax credit program because it allowed religious schools to benefit from public dollars.

“But parents of students at a religious private school in Flathead County had challenged the department’s decision, arguing the ban was discriminatory.

“In Wednesday’s opinion, Justice Laurie McKinnon said the program, enacted by the 2015 Legislature, was a violation of the Montana Constitution’s ban on aid to religious schools.

“The court’s majority said it doesn’t matter that the money benefiting religious schools does not come directly from state coffers because the constitutional article at hand prohibits indirect payments, in this case dollar-for-dollar tax breaks.

“Here, the taxpayer ‘donates’ nothing, because for every dollar the taxpayer diverts to the (school), the taxpayer receives one dollar in consideration from the State in the form of a lower tax bill,” the opinion states.”

Ninety percent of the private schools that signed up for the program were religious.