Trump kept up his attacks on athletes who “take a knee” during the playing of the National Anthem, as a protest against racism or a protest against Trump. And he urged fans to boycott their games.
Some teams stayed in their locker rooms during the playing of the Anthem. Some took a knee. Some didn’t.
On Twitter, there is a hashtag #takeaknee
As usual, Trump used his loose lips to sow dissension and chaos. That is his specialty.
Everything is all about him.
Peter Greene read a report published by the Center for the Reinention of Public Education at the University of Washington, a leading advocate for charters, choice, and the portfolio model. The report offers advice to district leaders about how public schools can deal with declining enrollments by working with charter schools and putting them on an equal footing as partners, not competitors.
Maybe I am being a Pollyanna, but I see this report as a sign of weakness, a recognition by privatizers that they must develop strategies to get embedded because the tide of public opinion is turning against them. The opinion poll in the conservative journal EdNext recently reported that public support for charters dropped from 51% to 39% in one year. The NAACP statement criticizing charters undermined their claims about being leaders of the civil rights movement. The almost daily reports of charter scandals in many states is undermining their credibility. Betsy DeVos’s enthusiastic embrace hurts their carefully cultivated public image. Watch for more statements aimed at normalizing charters. They are worried.
Peter reviews the CPRE list of problems and remedies and he is not impressed.
So how do we fix all of these things? CRPE has some thoughts.
Districts need to close schools and negotiate contracts that don’t spend so much money. The closing school solution seems to run up against the “don’t take on long-term debts and costs” solution, as schools frequently manage consolidation of schools by taking on construction projects.
They would like to see more partnership, but their example is “if charters find a way to give cheap retirement plans might encourage public systems to adopt similar systems.” So, yeah, charters that want to pay teachers less could, I suppose, try to convince public schools not to outbid them. That’s cooperation, sort of.
And there would need to be city-level strategy sessions. Which should be a hoot as long as nobody ever addresses the underlying zero-sum game that is charter vs. public schools. But that’s not going to happen, since one proposed solution is that districts “publicly identify” their legacy costs in exchange for a charter funding formula that more closely resembles public per-pupil costs:
For example, charter schools might receive less per-pupil funding under such an agreement but would be able to tell the public, with confidence, that charter and district students received the same classroom funding and that charter schools weren’t contributing to a district’s impending insolvency.
Yeah, that doesn’t even make sense. “Getting same classroom funding” doesn’t equal “not sucking public school dry.” So maybe the suggestion here is that charter’s get their funding and public schools admit that they’re insolvent because their buildings and pensions and teacher pay are all just way expensive. In other words, charters agree to get paid public tax dollars, and public schools agree to publicly say it’s their own damn fault they’re having financial problems. Why would public schools want to enter into this deal, exactly? And would the funding formula include all the “philanthropic” contributions to charters?
CRPE also suggests that public schools be given some limited extra funding to be used only as a means of down-sizing. Or if districts can prove they’re shrinking as fast as possible, charters would agree to a voluntary growth slow down. Or some other grand bargain that basically involves charters conducting business as usual while public schools agree to work harder at dying, already.
CRPE also has a list of Things To Discuss and Research Further. Gather more data about how much financial vampirage charters are really committing, and how much is just, you know, other reasons for districts to lose money. More data about “fixed costs” and just generally how teachers are draining money by wanting to be paid. Figure out the greatest number of students the charters could handle, because that’s the ideal, apparently– as many students taken out of public school as possible. More power for superintendents. They don’t say which power, exactly, but context suggests that old favorite– hire, fire and set salaries without stupid rules and unions. Learning from other sectors like energy and healthcare, because they’re just like schools.
Bottom Line
CRPE is correct in one thing– we do have to look at how charters affect the whole local educational eco-system. But their belief in the inevitable supremacy of charters gets in the way of a useful conversation.
The report seems to boil down basically to “Charters and public schools should work together to make employment conditions worse for teachers. Also, they should team up to help charters thrive and to help public schools die more efficiently and without making charters look bad. For The Children.”
Maybe this is supposed to be an innovative approach to the Socratic method, and public schools are just supposed to take a hemlock bath because it would make life easier for charters. But I don’t imagine many takers will line up to take CRPE’s offer. Not even for the children.
Trump went to Alabama to support Republican Senator Luther Strange in a primary fight with alt-right flamethrower Roy Moore.
The Washington Post reported his bizarre endorsement of his candidate.
“HUNTSVILLE, Ala. — President Trump spent the first 25 minutes of a Friday night campaign rally explaining and defending his decision to endorse the Republican establishment’s pick for the Alabama Senate race.
“Then, he basically took it all back.
“I might have made a mistake. I’ll be honest, I might have made a mistake,” Trump told a crowd of several thousand gathered at the Von Braun Center that cheered much louder for him than for the candidate he was there to support, Sen. Luther Strange, who was appointed earlier this year to fill the seat vacated by Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
“If Strange loses a Republican primary runoff election Tuesday, the president said that the media will accuse him of being “unable to pull his candidate across the line” and cast the loss as a “total embarrassment.” Strange is polling behind rival Roy Moore, a former Alabama Supreme Court chief justice who is popular with evangelical Christians and many Trump supporters.
“And, by the way, both good men. Both good men,” the president said of the two Republican candidates. “If his opponent wins, I’m going to be here campaigning like hell for him. But, I have to say this … Luther will definitely win.”
Just to be clear, he doesn’t care who wins.
Who teaches? A post at Spoon Vision:
Those who can’t,
Teach.
For example,
Those who can’t sit alone at a desk all day,
Whose energy demands movement and interaction,
Teach.
Those who can’t abide platitudes like, “kids these days,”
Who take the time to know every young person,
Teach.
Those who can’t be satisfied with a job or even a career,
Whose everyday work must be filled with passion,
Teach.
Those who can’t look the other way while our schools resegregate,
Who believe the moral arc of the universe bends toward justice,
Teach.
Those who can’t stand by while our public institutions are privatized,
Whose collective conscience sees through the rhetoric of “choice,”
Teach.
Those who can’t ignore the history of organized labor in the U.S.,
Who know that “the union makes us strong,”
Teach.
Those who can’t punch a clock,
Whose passion can’t be confined to 8-4 or to August through May,
Teach.
Those who can’t care only about some children,
Who are committed to the success of every student,
Teach.
Those who can’t avoid conflict,
Whose acumen can diffuse the most hostile situations,
Teach.
Those who can’t be happy climbing the corporate ladder,
Who will master their craft, and stay in the classroom for decades,
Teach.
Those who can’t settle for anything less than constant improvement,
Whose minds are always searching for innovative new methods,
Teach.
Those who can’t quit,
Who will continue to educate more students with less money,
Teach.
But please know.
Those who can’t be fooled by political schemes,
Whose organizing can create a political revolution,
Teach.
Remember when Trump said he knew how to act “presidential”? Remember when he said he would be even more presidential than any president except “the late, Great Abraham Lincoln”?
As we say in Brooklyn, fuhgedaboutit! (Translation: forget about it.)
Last night in Alabama, he ranted and raved and led cheers of “lock her up.” Did the late, great Abraham Lincoln do that in the middle of the Civil War?
He was there to support the aptly named Senator Luther Strange, who was appointed by the disgraced ex-governor Robert Bentley to fill Jeff Sessions’ term in the Senate. His opponent, ahead in the polls, is the far-far-far right extremist Roy Moore, who was twice removed as Chef Judge of the Alabama Court for refusing to remove a plaque of the Ten Commandments from public grounds. Now he is running against homosexuality. Moore is supported by Steve Bannon, the deep thinker of the alt-right, and Sarah Palin, the paragon of morality.
But read what he said!
“The campaign has largely focused on McConnell. Moore has attacked the Senate majority leader as a creature of the “swamp” that Trump wishes to drain while Strange has tried to distance himself from the Kentucky Republican. Strange went as far as to assert in his brief introductory remarks on Friday night that Trump was backing him so that he could have the votes in the Senate to “stand up to Mitch McConnell.” The President later asserted that Strange “didn’t know” the Senate majority leader…
“Hours after John McCain torpedoed Republican hopes to repeal and replace Obamacare, Trump expressed his disappointment. He said McCain’s opposition was “totally unexpected and terrible”. He also chided the Arizona Republican for what he saw as hypocrisy. “Repeal and replace, John McCain if you look at his last campaign it’s all about repeal and replace and that’s fine, we still have a good chance [of repealing and replacing Obamacare.” He described his attempts to court senators on health care, saying “I’m on the phone screaming at people all day long for weeks”.
Trump also returned to some of his favourite topics. He talked at length about the wall he hopes to build on the Mexican border, insisting it needed to be see-through. Trump said this was because drug dealers are currently using catapults to send 100 pound bags of drugs over the existing concrete wall and they are landing on people’s heads in the United States. He also responded the familiar cheers of “lock her up” directed at Hillary Clinton by telling the crowd “you gotta speak to Jeff Sessions about that”.
“The president also dwelled on NFL players who take a knee during the National Anthem in peaceful protest. He asked the crowd, “Wouldn’t you love one of the NFL owners when someone disrespects our flag, ‘get that son of a bitch off the field right now.’” He told attendees, “If you see it, leave the stadium, I guarantee things will stop.”
Trump uses his platform not to appeal to “the better angels of our nature” or to educate, but to rant, pander, and vent.
This is one of Gary Rubinstein’s best posts ever.
He watched Laurene Powell Jobs’ extravaganza about her efforts to redesign the American high school into XQ Super Schools. The one where she bought time on four networks.
The one where celebrities said again and again that high schools have not changed in 100 years; Gary does a good job of shredding that myth. Yes, high schools have changed in the past 100 years, but some things should never change and will be found in high schools all over the world.
He notes that the show has had no effect. It seems to have disappeared as soon as it was on the air.
But it didn’t disappear for him because he realized that he taught at one of the XQ Super Schools, a high school in Houston that allegedly was a failing school that was miraculously transformed.
Gary shows that it was not the nightmare school that the producers claimed it to be, nor has it had the miraculous transformation that the show now boasts about.
It was a good school when he was there, even though there was a gang population in the ninth grade.
What he discovers is that the school now has a charter school on campus, which apparently serves as a dumping ground for the kids who are not going to graduate. The regular school raised its statistics by pushing out the bad kids.
No miracle there!
But the school does have a really nice garden. That’s new. That’s good. Is that what caused the claimed spike in test scores? Not likely.
He writes:
One thing that this program definitely accomplished is product placement. It seems that one feature of innovative high schools is that students use a lot of laptops and it seems like most of those laptops are Apple products. While iPads were once considered to be something that was going to be a big part of education, the thing most schools are actually using are a type of laptop called a Chromebook, which is an inexpensive Google product. Since the kids in these schools are using Apple laptops, maybe one purpose of this show was to help with Apple’s competition with Google for the education market.
One thing we did not see a lot of in this was overt teacher bashing. I suppose this is why Randi Weingarten attended and tweeted about how wonderful a program this is. Now even though there wasn’t overt teacher bashing, there was some less direct bashing like the part where celebrities were asked what they wish they learned in high school. Based on their answers, the only conclusion is that their teachers must not have taught those things to them very well.
This program didn’t really seem to resonate with anybody and most people on both sides of the education reform wars have pretty much forgotten about it already. It was a colossal waste of money and shows that being rich doesn’t mean that you necessarily have the right to dictate education policy.
I think that it is not an accident that there was no mention of evil unions or miracle charter schools or school choice in this program. My sense is that reformers realize that most of the talking points from Waiting For Superman don’t work anymore. The public has wised up. They don’t believe as much that teacher’s unions are the problem or that charter schools are the solution. So this program is an attempt to get a new rationale that the public can believe and get behind whatever reforms the reformers want to try, which of course will be more union busting and charters and vouchers. So the new thing is that schools haven’t evolved much in the past 100 years and that’s a problem. All that matters is that the public believes there is some problem, whatever it is. It doesn’t need to be the unions, but it must be something so the 100 year thing will likely be repeated a lot of over the next decade as the new villain for them to save us from.
Lawyer Robert Amsterdam was hired by the Republic of Turkey to investigate the Gulen charter school movement in the United States.
The Turkish government is headed by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who is engaged in political struggle with Fethullah Gulen. Gulen is a cleric who lives in seclusion in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania. The Turkish government is Islamic, and Gulen is an Islamic cleric. I can’t say that I understand the political issues, but I do know that Erdogan is not a democratic leader, and there are no heroes here. After a recent failed coup attempt, Erdogan blamed Gulen and proceeded to repress civil liberties and jail thousands of suspected Gulenists.
Fethullah Gulen remains safely ensconced in his mountain retreat. He controls one of the biggest charter chains in the United States. It was surpassed in numbers recently by KIPP as the largest corporate charter chain.
American film maker Mark Hall recently produced a film about the Gulen schools. It is called “Killing Ed.” He tried to interview Gulen but was not admitted to the compound. He interviewed former Gulen teachers and they told him about kickbacks and other dubious practices that would not be tolerated in public schools.
The New York Times has reported on the Gulen practice of handing out big contracts to Turkish contractors, without choosing the low bidder. Similar practices triggered a state audit in Georgia. The FBI raided Gulen schools in the Midwest as part of an investigation of white-collar crime.
A couple of years ago, I was interviewed by Mr. Amsterdam. He told me he had uncovered gross violations of law and ethics by the Gulen schools. I told him that what bothers me about the Gulen schools is the idea that American public schools are controlled by foreign nationals. One of the central purposes of the American public school is to teach children their rights and responsibilities as citizens. How can that be outsourced to foreign nationals? As a thought experiment, I asked, how would Americans feel about their public schools being taken over by nationals of Russia? Chile? Cambodia? Are Americans so hapless and incompetent that we can’t manage our own public schools and staff them with American teachers? It is perfectly reasonable to hire foreign teachers, especially to teach their own language, but why should an American “public school” be turned over lock, stock, and barrel to a Turkish organization? It is not as if Turkey is one of the best performing nations in the world. It is not.
Amsterdam listened patiently but said his primary concern was massive corruption.
He has just published a very large book called “Empire of Deceit,” documenting the massive misuse of public funds for Gulen schools, the misuse of the H-1B visa program to import Turkish teachers, the practice of tithing to the Gulen organization, and the way that Gulen schools steer contracts to Turkish contractors. He has documented practices that would never be tolerated in public schools.
You can go to his website and find a list of all the Gulen schools in every state.
You can also download the book for free.
All of this is troublesome, but for me the most troublesome aspect is the idea of outsourcing public schools to foreign nationals, no matter which nation they represent. Public schools belong to the public, and they should not be outsourced or given to private corporations.
Andy Borowitz, humorist for the New Yorker, finds it interesting that Trump supporters are passionate about their guns, but not about their health insurance.
On October 19, the distinguished scholar Linda Darling-Hammond of Stanford University will speak at Wellesley College in the Annual Diane Silvers Ravitch Class of ’60 Lecture on Education and the Common Good.
The lecture is free and open to all. It begins at 7:30 pm in Alumnae Hall Auditorium.
Please mark the date on your calendar.
The first speaker in the series in 2015 was me.
Last year’s speaker was Pasi Sahlberg of Finland.
Linda D-H is the speaker for 2017.
The series will feature a leading educator and/or scholar every year. The thread that binds them all is concern for “the common good,” the public welfare of America’s children.
Please join us for what promises to be a great, thought-provocative, informative evening!
Steve Nelson, veteran educator and board member of the Network for Public Education, warns that we must protect outrselves against lies and propaganda. Ken Burns’ brilliant series on the Vietnam War shows how we blundered into a horrific war and picked to the burden of defending the French colonial empire.
There are other lies and propaganda that surround us every day. One is the lie that our public schools must be “saved” by privatization. Not true.
He writes:
“The war on public education, like the war in Vietnam, is being prosecuted on the basis of propaganda. In the 1960’s it was the myth of the threat of communism toppling one nation after another like dominos. It wasn’t true and it certainly wasn’t implicit or explicit in the conflict between South and North Vietnam.
“Now, in the 21st century, the war on education is being prosecuted in the name of another set of myths: that public schools are failing – they are not; that school choice gives families more opportunity – it does not; that teachers unions serve only to protect incompetence – a vile, unsupportable lie; and that competition and free markets can deliver everything, including education, with greater quality and efficiency – a heroically grandiose and inaccurate assertion.
“The other striking facet of the wars that bookend my adult life is the way in which the least advantaged among us are used as fodder for the ambitions of those most privileged.
“America’s casualties in Vietnam were disproportionately skewed toward young men of color and relatively poor, rural white men. The draft was ostensibly color blind, but privilege finds it way through the law. As most folks know, deferments for education and other dodges were easily sought and obtained for those with privilege. The cases of George W. Bush and Donald Trump are particularly vivid examples. But if you were poor and black, the choices were jail or service, not Yale or the podiatrist’s office.
“At least in 1967 no one claimed that the Vietnam War was being waged on behalf of the black men and boys who crawled through the jungle. But now, in the 21st century, the war on public education is being waged on the disgusting false propaganda that suggests education reform as a way of improving life for poor folks, particularly girls and boys of color. That is a bald-faced lie too.
“Education reform, particularly in urban charters, is touted as the salvation for communities of color when, in fact, education reform is furthering the decimation of poor communities of color. Education is a $700 billion “market.” As in the 60’s, there is money to be made.”
