Scott Walker is a puppet of the Koch brothers and has laid waste to education in what was once a great state for K-12 and higher education.
Vouchers, charters, budget cuts, attacks on unions. The whole package.
But now he is running scared.
Let’s hope it is true and work to make it true.
Teachers in many districts in Kentucky closed down public schools in response to the Republican attack on their pensions.
Schools in eight Kentucky school districts were closed Friday as teachers across the state protested Republican changes to their pension system, CBS News reports.
In Lexington and Louisville — the state’s two largest school districts — hundreds of teachers took sick days or refused to show up for work after state lawmakers passed a bill changing the structure of pension benefits for future teachers.
The strike may be hard for reformers and the libertarians in the GOP to understand: the teachers in Kentucky are not striking for themselves but for their profession.
This wildcat strike follows weeks of protest by teachers to the Legislature and the Governor.
CNN says that the legislature pulled a bait-and-switch, dropping the original bill against which teachers were protesting and putting the changes into a bill about sewage services. Was that a direct insult to teachers?
The action in Kentucky follows the wildcat strike in West Virginia and precedes the likely walkout in Oklahoma, scheduled for Monday April 2. Teachers in Oklahoma demand higher pay (pay in Oklahoma is at or near the worst in the nation despite a booming energy industry in the state that gets huge tax breaks).
These strikes and walkouts are happening in states where unions are not strong. In fact, Kentucky, West Virginia, and Oklahoma are “right to work” states.
Note to reformers: If the Janus decision goes against the unions, you will still have to contend with the power of organized teachers. No matter what law is passed, teachers who are underpaid and disrespected have the power to walk out. There are not enough TFA scabs in the nation to replace them all.
No teachers, no schools.
This is a sad day for Puerto Rico.
The Governor imagines he will save money by handing public money over to charters and vouchers.
Does he know that charters demand equal funding and choose the students they want?
Does he know that voucher students get worse results than their peers in public schools?
Probably the hedge funds that own the Commonwealth’s debt didn’t tell him.
Puerto Rico is now open to edupreneurs, no-excuses charters, and corporate exploitation of its children.
This is a really good article by Rick Hess of the DeVos-funded American Enterprise Institute about reformers’ credulous embrace of every claim made by D.C. and using it as their model for the success of “reform.” Having elevated D.C. as their paradigm, they were unprepared for and blindsided by the recent graduation-rate scandal.
He faults the Washington Post, for its infatuation with Michelle Rhee and Kaya Henderson. And he faults President Obama for saluting a fake graduation rate increase.
Kudos to Rick for his fearless chastising of his compatriots.
He writes:
“Lots of self-styled “reformers” had good reason to observe DCPS through rose-tinted glasses. A wealth of advocates, funders, consultants, researchers, and friends had a rooting interest in DCPS’s success — and had every incentive to focus on the good news. This includes the senior author of this piece, who counted many DCPS leaders as friends of long standing — and who wrote admiringly about some of their efforts.
“After all, Washington, D.C., as much as any city over the past decade, served as a laboratory where philanthropists, policy analysts, and high profile media outlets converge. Philanthropists have poured more than $120 million into the school system since 2007. By 2010, the nation’s largest 15 philanthropies were spending more on K-12 education in D.C. than in any other school district in America.”
Curiously, he places some of the blame on critics of these fraudulent reforms, because their criticism made the reformers circle their wagons.
Maybe the reformers should have listened to critics like Guy Brandenburg and others who blew the whistle early on, instead of closing their ears and circling the wagons. Maybe they should have taken seriously the testing scandal that USA Today reported in 2011, instead of sweeping it under the rug.
Arthur Camins reflects here about the importance of the common good. He writes about a society in which we care about one another, as opposed to a me-first individualism that currently commands our public discourse.
There is a play on Broadway right now and in touring companies outside New York City called “Come from Away.” It is about 9/11. It takes place in Gander, Newfoundland, when airplanes were ordered not to enter American air space, and the town of 9,000 people discovered that it had 7,000 guests for several days. They provided them with foood, places to sleep, and friendship. They asked nothing in return. Not me-first but “here is help, here is welcome and respite for the stranger.”
Camins writes:
“Without one another we are diminished. The more we have others around us, the stronger we can become. That is the idea of the common good.
“It’s not a uniquely American idea, but it is one with which many of us identify.
“Republicans in Congress have a different idea. It applies to guns, health care, retirement, and education.
“Their value is a strain of individualism that stands in opposition to the common good. Their strategies are: Promote fear and undermine public confidence in government as a vehicle to keep people safe. The goal is the further enrichment of the already privileged.
“The Second Amendment was written to address maintenance of state militias (albeit, in part, to capture escaped slaves), not individuals with rifles. Fomenting fear of rampant crime and with it, the incompetence of government to protect people has become the go-to strategy to increase gun sales. It has been remarkably successful.
“Similarly, conservative efforts to replace Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act, and public education with individual vouchers appeal to the value of individualism that is in opposition to common-good collective solutions that depend on honest, effective government. Once again, the conservative strategy has been to undermine confidence in government by defunding it and thereby making it appear incompetent. Then, fear and just-worry-about-me individualism kick in as self-preservation.
“Conservatives have been remarkably successful, as Republicans are now dominant across federal and state governments and public confidence in government has declined…
”Progressives, need not shame individualism, but rather reframe it. That is, we become our best selves through others. We can only become our best selves when we are all safe, healthy, well-fed, and well-housed. We can only learn to be our best selves when we are educated with the benefits of diversity and equity. Hopeful, but hard.”
Sorry but this post was deleted due to political pressure on the author.
Gary Rubinstein has wondered about attrition at the Success Academy charter chain. The chain claims its schools are public schools, but public schools don’t hide their data. Finding out about SA data is a detective hunt. He found much of what he was looking for not in city data but in state data.
Gary writes here about what he has learned.
“Success Academy opened in 2006 with 156 students — 83 kindergarteners and 73 first graders. Now, eleven years later, they have their first graduating seniors, though just 17 of them. In my last post I wondered what can be learned about the Success model by examining who exactly those 17 students are.
“A big question, and one that might never be answered, is how many of those 17 students were actually among the original 73 first graders. Since Success allows transfers up until 4th grade it is possible that some of those 17 students transferred in which would make their attrition rate even worse than the 77% that it is at a minimum.
“New York State has a pretty good data site which I used to look at the most recent data from the 2016-2017 school year. I then compared the data about the 10th and 11th grade from 2016-2017 to the data of their kindergarten and 1st grade from 2006-2007…
”For the class of 2018, the 17 who are about to graduate and who have been celebrated in the media, what we can say from the data from last year was that they had 20 students of which 9 qualified as economically disadvantaged. So there are at most 9 out 17 (53%) now or, depending on which three students left, as few as 6 out of 17 (35%). This does not support the claim that the Success survivors have the same demographics as their neighboring schools.
“If the net result of eleven years of Success Academy is to get 9 low-income students into college, that’s a lot of hype and a lot of money to be spent for that, not to mention all the loss of resources to the 1,099,991 other students in New York City schools who had to suffer a loss of resources as Success used their influence and marches and wealthy donors money to stage publicity stunts in Albany and to get the Governor to go to battle with the Mayor about having the city pay charter school rents.”
Read his detective work. He dug deep. It shouldn’t be this hard.
Earlier today, I saw that the vile Alex Jones of InfoWars—the same Jones who spread the conspiracy theory that the Sandy Hook Massacre never happened, it was performed by child actors—had posted a doctored video portraying Emma Gonzales and the other kids of MSD as Nazi youth.
Now the New Yorker sees a striking resemblance between Emma and a classic pottrayal of Joan of Arc.
I much prefer the latter. Though not Joan’s Fate.
On Saturday, the world witnessed an amazing outpouring of energy and passion to protest gun violence. The students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School (a public school) organized a mass demonstration in Washington, D.C. that drew hundreds of thousands of supporters, accompanied by like demonstrations across the nation and the world.
The media have rightly commended the remarkable young people who brought these events together with amazing skill in a very short time.
But what about their teachers?
Other than those who died protecting their students, we don’t know their names.
We don’t know the names of those who taught them debating skills.we don’t know the names of those who taught them government, civics, and history. We don’t know the names of the English teachers who taught them clarity of thinking and expression and correct use of language.
They too are heroes.
They are unsung heroes. They deserve to be acknowled and thanked publicly.
If you know them, please thank them. Please send me their names, so they get the recognition they so richly deserve.
Shaina Cavazos writes in Chalkbeat that Indiana has pushed back by two years its decision to require all high school students to take a college entrance exam.
Neither the ACT nor the SAT are designed to measure high school students’ academic progress, and they are not even the best measure of student readiness for college (the four-year GPA is better than either of the tests).
ACT and SAT should oppose this blatant misuse of their tests, if they care more about integrity and professional ethics than profits.
The state is also confused about which standardized test to use in 3-8. Should they use the Common Core-aligned Pearson test? Didn’t Trump say CCSS was a disaster? Where does Pence stand?
”Lawmakers were expected to approve a House bill proposing Indiana use a college entrance exam starting in 2019 as yearly testing for high schoolers, at the same time state works to replace its overall testing system, ISTEP. But the start date for using the SAT or ACT was pushed back from 2019 to 2021, meaning it’s unclear how high schoolers will be judged for the next two years.
“This is the latest upheaval in testing as the state works to replace ISTEP in favor of the new ILEARN testing system, a response to years of technical glitches and scoring problems. While a company has already proposed drafting exams for measuring the performance of Indiana students, officials now need to come up with a solution for the high school situation. ILEARN exams for grades 3-8 are still set to begin in 2019…
”It’s just the latest road bump since the legislature voted last year to scrap ISTEP and replace it with ILEARN, a plan that originally included a computer-adaptive test for grades 3-8 and end-of-course exams for high-schoolers in English, algebra and biology. Indiana is required by the federal government to test students each year in English and math, and periodically, in science.
“The Indiana Department of Education started carrying out the plan to move to ILEARN over the summer and eventually selected the American Institutes for Research to write the test, a company that helped create the Common-Core affiliated Smarter balanced test. AIR’s proposal said they were prepared to create tests for elementary, middle and high school students.”
Fourteen states are now using college entrance exams to assess high school students, even those who want to enter the workforce, not go to college.
Perhaps Indiana should hire Duane Swacker to explain to lawmakers that the standardized tests are not reliable or valid measures of student learning. Or they might read Harvard Professor Daniel Koretz’s “The Testing Charade: Pretending to Make Schools Better.”
