Dr. Michael Hynes is the Superintendent of the Patchogue-Medford School District on Long Island in New York. He is a champion of child-centered education, has given TED talks, and has led his community in support of a vision of education that is good for children. He should be New York’s State Commissioner of Education.
In this video, he talks about women who informed and inspired him.
You will recognize some of them immediately, maybe all of them.
The Guardian view on the Trump-Putin summit: Russia is the winner
Posted on 7/18/2018
Editorial – The Guardian
Donald Trump was not adlibbing when he said his meeting with Putin might be the easiest part of his Europe trip. That was his intention too
Before he left Washington last week for the Nato summit, his UK visit and talks with Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump raised eyebrows by suggesting that the meeting in Helsinki on Monday might be the easiest one of the three. In retrospect, it is clear that this was not an off-the-cuff comment. It was his plan all along. First rough up Nato in order to damage transatlantic commitments, then stir things up in Britain in order to damage the EU, and, finally, play the cooperative statesman in his talks with the Russian president. Or, to put it another way: bully, bully and cringe.
The European visit and its outcomes have offered a chilling illustration of Mr Trump’s worldview. His strategy decries the values that endured in western policy since the defeat of Hitler. It is a conscious break with the postwar network of alliances and aspiration for universal standards. It is a return to the era in which big powers have self-interests not allies, little countries do not matter, and international standards are subordinate to military might. Because Russia is a significant military power, Mr Trump has brought it in from the cold. It is not just the cold war that is over. The post-1945 order of international values and ethics may be ending too.
Mr Trump went into the talks with Mr Putin offering bland banalities that signalled his readiness to resume business with Moscow: there were “a lot of good things to talk about”, the two sides had “great opportunities together”, it would be an “extraordinary relationship” and the world wanted “to see us get along”. Beside him, Mr Putin put on his stone face, saying little, giving nothing away. Five hours later, after two sets of talks, the leaders re-emerged. This time Mr Putin was garrulous. The talks had been successful and useful. Relations had moved to a different phase. There were no objective reasons why Russia and the United States could not cooperate strategically on military, anti-terror, economic and ecological issues. It was all smiles. Mr Putin even gave Mr Trump a football, to mark the end of Russia’s successful hosting of the World Cup.
As well he might, because the US president gave the Russian leader a far bigger present than a football. Mr Trump used the meeting to smooth Russia’s almost unconditional re-entry into his version of the international order. If the accounts that the leaders produced at their press conference on Monday evening are reliable, the issues that have made relations with Russia so difficult for so long – Ukraine, interference in elections, cyber disruptions and the Salisbury novichok attack – counted for very little in their talks. In his overeagerness, Mr Trump essentially gave Mr Putin a free pass.
Mr Putin was always likely to be the big winner from the Helsinki meeting. The mere fact that it took place was a victory for the Kremlin. But Mr Trump made it clear in Helsinki that he regards bygones as bygones. He is prepared to reset the dial. Mr Trump barely seems to have made an issue of Moscow’s unilateralism against Ukraine, so much so that Mr Putin was emboldened to suggest at the press conference that Washington was not putting enough pressure on Kiev to give in to Russian demands. The practical impact of the two men’s discussions on Syria and the Middle East remains unclear, but there was no suggestion that Mr Trump intends to take any kind of a stand here either. Russian interference in US elections – which has recently led to 12 Russians being charged – remains a very awkward obstacle. But not because of Mr Trump, who manifestly does not treat the issue seriously. Mr Putin returns to Moscow under less pressure than ever on all the difficult issues.
If Mr Putin is the big winner, Theresa May is one of the losers. The Salisbury novichok attack counted for nothing in Helsinki. In the Commons on Monday Mrs May talked about Nato to MPs as though nothing has changed. Britain and the US were on the same side on burden-sharing. Mr Trump’s approaches at Nato and in Britain had been constructive. This is nonsense. Mrs May talks as if the alliance is unchanged when in fact everything is changing. If she is to avoid Britain and her government becoming collateral damage in Mr Trump’s dangerous demolition of the global order, she will need to wake up very fast.
Our Poet, signing in as SomeDAM Poet writes:
“The shape of things to come”
The shape of things to come
Is everywhere we look
To Appalachia from
The streets of Stony Brook
The shape of things to come
Is poverty and want
It’s water full of scum
And lead in drinking font
The shape of things to come
Is bridges falling down
It’s children in the slum
And homeless all around
The shape of things to come
Is neighborhood that’s gated
It’s people under thumb
And spying unabated
The shape of things to come
Has stared us in the face
Though most of us are numb
And caught up in the race
NYC Educator, aka high school teacher Arthur Goldstein, opines on the plight of Eva Moskowitz, the charter chain CEO who is paid $782,000 a year to get high test scores and show that it is easy if you are willing to weed out the slackers.
Back in the good old days (for her) of the Bloomberg-Klein years, she called the tune. Klein gave her anything she wanted. He would kick kids out of their public school and give Eva the space; he would kick kids with disabilities out of their home school and give the space to Eva.
It is harder now. The schools are overcrowded. De Blasio is afraid to get into a fight with her, because she and her billionaire buddies kicked him senseless when he tried that.
Space is tight, so tight that in 2016, Eva spent $68 million to buy a condo for 2 new schools in prime Manhattan real estate.
The next time Ivanka Trump or Campbell Brown comes to visit her model schools, she needs a beautiful space in which to show her achievements. Who knows when Betsy DeVos herself might show up?
But NYC Educator sheds no tears for her.
No compassion for the privileged, Arthur?
Tennessee was one of the first states to win a grant from Arne Duncan’s Race to the Top. It won $500 million. It placed its biggest bet on an idea called the Achievement School District. The big plan was to have the state take over the state’s lowest performing schools and do a turnaround. The ASD was launched in 2012 with much fanfare. Its leader promised that the lowest performing schools would be turned around within five years. Reformers loved the idea so much that it was copied in Nevada, North Carolina, and a few other states. Most of the schools were converted to charter schools.
As Gary Rubinstein explains here, the ASD was a complete flop.
“Two years after they launched, an optimistic Chris Barbic, the first superintendent of the ASD, had a ‘mission accomplished’ moment when he declared that three of the original six schools were on track to meet the goal on or before the five year deadline. But the projected gains did not pan out and now, six years later, five out of six of the original schools are still in the bottom 5% with one of them not faring much better. Chris Barbic resigned in 2015 and his successor Malika Anderson resigned in 2017.
“The ASD was, at one time, an experiment that Reformers were very excited about. In 2015, just before Barbic resigned, Mike Petrilli hosted a panel discussion at the Fordham Institute celebrating the lofty goals of the ASD, the RSD, and Michigan’s turnaround district.
“Year after year, all the research on the Tennessee ASD has been negative (except for research that they, themselves, produced). In 2015, a Vanderbilt study found the district to be ineffective. In 2016, a George Washington study agreed. And now, as if we need any more proof, a new 2018 Vanderbilt study found that schools in the ASD have done no better than schools in the bottom 5% that had not been taken over by the ASD.”
A complete flop.
Which game shall we play: Follow the Money or Connect the Dots?
Only two days ago, the Education Research Alliance at Tulane University released a glowing report about the privatization of public schools in New Orleans.
Only one day later, the U.S. Department of Education awarded the team a grant of $10 Million to continue their work on market-driven school choice.
With $10 Million, maybe they will get around to checking with researchers who don’t agree with their findings, such as those I cited in this post.
And I hope the team at Tulane-ERA will answer this puzzle:
Louisiana is one of the lowest scoring states on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (“The Nation’s Report Card”). Its scores declined significantly from 2015-2017. New Orleans is the largest school district in the state. If its results are amazing, why did the state drop to 48th in the nation in 8th grade reading and 50th in the nation on the 8th grade math on NAEP? This doesn’t add up.
George Will is an uber-conservative. He has become an outspoken critic of Trump because he knows that Trump is a man who is wrecking conservatism, the Republican Party, and endangering our nation. Trump is no patriot. He always puts Trump First.
His latest column is worth reading.
It is titled “This Sad, Embarassing Wreck of a Man.”
America’s child president had a play date with a KGB alumnus, who surely enjoyed providing day care. It was a useful, because illuminating, event: Now we shall see how many Republicans retain a capacity for embarrassment.
Jeane Kirkpatrick, a Democrat closely associated with such Democratic national security stalwarts as former senator Henry Jackson and former senator and former vice president Hubert Humphrey, was President Ronald Reagan’s ambassador to the United Nations. In her speech at the 1984 Republican National Convention in Dallas, she explained her disaffection from her party: “They always blame America first.” In Helsinki, the president who bandies the phrase “America First” put himself first, as always, and America last, behind President Vladimir Putin’s regime.
Because the Democrats had just held their convention in San Francisco, Kirkpatrick branded the “blame America first” cohort as “San Francisco Democrats.” Thirty-four years on, how numerous are the “Helsinki Republicans”?
What, precisely, did President Trump say about the diametrically opposed statements by U.S. intelligence agencies (and the Senate Intelligence Committee) and by Putin concerning Russia and the 2016 U.S. elections? Precision is not part of Trump’s repertoire: He speaks English as though it is a second language that he learned from someone who learned English last week. So, it is usually difficult to sift meanings from Trump’s word salads. But in Helsinki he was, for him, crystal clear about feeling no allegiance to the intelligence institutions that work at his direction and under leaders he chose.
Speaking of Republicans incapable of blushing — those with the peculiar strength that comes from being incapable of embarrassment — consider Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.), who for years enjoyed derivative gravitas from his association with Sen. John McCain (Ariz.). Graham tweeted about Helsinki: “Missed opportunity by President Trump to firmly hold Russia accountable for 2016 meddling and deliver a strong warning regarding future elections.” A “missed opportunity” by a man who had not acknowledged the meddling?
Contrast Graham’s mush with this on Monday from McCain, still vinegary: “Today’s press conference in Helsinki was one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president in memory.” Or this from Arizona’s other senator, Jeff Flake (R): “I never thought I would see the day when our American president would stand on the stage with the Russian President and place blame on the United States for Russian aggression.” Blame America only.
President Trump’s news conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin was a disastrous capitulation, says Democracy Post editor Christian Caryl. (Gillian Brockell/The Washington Post)
Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly, Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats and others might believe that they must stay in their positions lest there be no adult supervision of the Oval playpen. This is a serious worry, but so is this: Can those people do their jobs for someone who has neither respect nor loyalty for them?
Like the purloined letter in Edgar Allan Poe’s short story with that title, collusion with Russia is hiding in plain sight. We shall learn from special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation whether in 2016 there was collusion with Russia by members of the Trump campaign. The world, however, saw in Helsinki something more grave — ongoing collusion between Trump, now in power, and Russia. The collusion is in what Trump says (refusing to back the United States’ intelligence agencies) and in what evidently went unsaid (such as: You ought to stop disrupting Ukraine, downing civilian airliners, attempting to assassinate people abroad using poisons, and so on, and on).
Americans elected a president who — this is a safe surmise — knew that he had more to fear from making his tax returns public than from keeping them secret. The most innocent inference is that for decades he has depended on an American weakness, susceptibility to the tacky charisma of wealth, which would evaporate when his tax returns revealed that he has always lied about his wealth, too. A more ominous explanation might be that his redundantly demonstrated incompetence as a businessman tumbled him into unsavory financial dependencies on Russians. A still more sinister explanation might be that the Russians have something else, something worse, to keep him compliant.
The explanation is in doubt; what needs to be explained — his compliance — is not. Granted, Trump has a weak man’s banal fascination with strong men whose disdain for him is evidently unimaginable to him. And, yes, he only perfunctorily pretends to have priorities beyond personal aggrandizement. But just as astronomers inferred, from anomalies in the orbits of the planet Uranus, the existence of Neptune before actually seeing it, Mueller might infer, and then find, still-hidden sources of the behavior of this sad, embarrassing wreck of a man.
Today, the NAACP released a statement (“issue guidance”) opposing the use of a single standardized test score to determine students’ promotion or graduation.
Instead, issue guidance calls for multiple measures.
Julian Vasquez Heilig, who attended the national convention of the NAACP as a delegate from California, released the issue brief on his blog, “Cloaking Inequity.”
I encourage the NAACP to delve further into the misuse of standardized testing, which is scored on a normal curve and should never be used to make high-stakes decisions about promotion or high school graduation, not even as part of multiple measures.
Tom Ultican has been documenting the advance of the Destroy Public Education Movement in different cities. Now, he shows, they are pushing into rural areas, into California’s San Joaquin Valley.
“Efforts to privatize public schools in the San Joaquin (pronounced: whah-keen) Valley are accelerating. Five disparate yet mutually reinforcing groups are leading this destroy public education (DPE) movement. For school year 2017-2018, Taxpayers sent $11.5 billion to educate K-12 students in the valley and a full $1 billion of that money was siphoned off to charter schools. This meant that education funding for 92% of students attending public schools has been significantly reduced on a per student basis.
“In July 2017, California’s State Superintendent of Education, Tom Torlakson, announced that the revised 2017-2018 budget for K-12 education totaled $92.5 billion. Dividing this number by the total of students enrolled statewide provides an average spending per enrolled student ($14,870). The spending numbers reported above were found by multiplying $14,870 by the number of students enrolled.
“The five groups motivating the privatization of public schools are:
“People who want taxpayer supported religious schools.
“Groups who want segregated schools.
“Entrepreneurs profiting from school management and school real estate deals.
“The technology industry using wealth and lobbying power to place products into schools and support technology driven charter schools.
“Ideologues who fervently believe that market-based solutions are always superior.
“The Big Valley
“The San Joaquin Valley is America’s top agricultural producing region, sometimes called “the nation’s salad bowl” for the great array of fruits and vegetables grown in its fertile soil. Starting near the port of Stockton, the valley is 250 miles long and is bordered on the west by coastal mountain ranges. Its eastern boundary is part of the southern two-thirds of the Sierra bioregion, which features Yosemite, Kings Canyon, and Sequoia National Parks. The valley ends at the San Gabriel Mountains in the south.
“Seven counties (Stanislaus, San Joaquin, Merced, Tulare, Kings, Fresno and Kern) govern the valley. Its three major cities are Fresno (population 525,000), Stockton (population 310,000) and Bakersfield (population 380,000). The entire valley has a population of more than 4 million with 845,369 K-12 students enrolled for the 2017-2018 school year….
“In her 2017 report on California’s out of control charter school system, Carol Burris made a point about the unsavory nature of the independent study charter school. She pointed out that these schools have poor attendance, and terrible graduation rates. Unfortunately, they are easy to set up and very profitable. Of all the independent study charters, the virtual charters have the worst performance data and are widely seen as fraudulent. About one-third of the valley’s charters are independent study and half of those are virtual.”
As I watched this video of Ronald Reagan in front of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, tears rolled down my cheeks.
See if it has the same effect on you.
I wasn’t in Berlin, but I watched it as a young adult.
I was happy when I heard it then.
Now it makes me weep.
