is this a democracy? One man, One Vote?
Clinton now has a 2 million vote lead over Trump in the popular vote.
Archives for category: Education Reform
This is a statement by Parents United for Public Schools, on the news that their Superintendent is moving to D.C.
“Parents United for Public Schools released the following statement on the announced departure of OUSD Superintendent Antwan Wilson:
“The departure of Superintendent Antwan Wilson midway through his contract to lead our schools presents Oakland with a unique opportunity to learn from the mistakes of the past, and select a new leader who is committed to making a difference in our students’ lives and who will stay in Oakland long enough to see those changes through.
“The past two years have seen a decline in enrollment while upper-level administrative salaries have skyrocketed more than 500%. Major changes in the Programs for Exceptional Children and Student Enrollment have come without meaningful input from parents, teachers, staff or community, and the departure of long time administrators has further destabilized the district. Planning for major district initiatives has been made in closed meetings with charter leaders, but without input from our public school community. It is time for our District to put our public schools first by hiring a superintendent who believes in our public school system, who will work to create true community schools that will support and educate the whole child, and who will stay at least long enough to see those changes through.
“We call on the School Board to conduct an open and transparent search for a new superintendent in partnership with those most impacted by District policies: students, parents, teachers, staff and true community-based organizations. Our children deserve a leader with deep connections to Oakland, a strong belief in its public schools and a commitment to following through with the transformation of OUSD as a quality full-service community school district.”
According to New York magazine, the votes in three swing states--Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin–are suspicious and should be audited. Clinton’s lead over Trump in the popular vote is now 1.75 million and still rising.
Hillary Clinton is being urged by a group of prominent computer scientists and election lawyers to call for a recount in three swing states won by Donald Trump, New York has learned. The group, which includes voting-rights attorney John Bonifaz and J. Alex Halderman, the director of the University of Michigan Center for Computer Security and Society, believes they’ve found persuasive evidence that results in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania may have been manipulated or hacked. The group is so far not speaking on the record about their findings and is focused on lobbying the Clinton team in private.
Last Thursday, the activists held a conference call with Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta and campaign general counsel Marc Elias to make their case, according to a source briefed on the call. The academics presented findings showing that in Wisconsin, Clinton received 7 percent fewer votes in counties that relied on electronic-voting machines compared with counties that used optical scanners and paper ballots. Based on this statistical analysis, Clinton may have been denied as many as 30,000 votes; she lost Wisconsin by 27,000. While it’s important to note the group has not found proof of hacking or manipulation, they are arguing to the campaign that the suspicious pattern merits an independent review — especially in light of the fact that the Obama White House has accused the Russian government of hacking the Democratic National Committee…
The Clinton camp is running out of time to challenge the election. According to one of the activists, the deadline in Wisconsin to file for a recount is Friday; in Pennsylvania, it’s Monday; and Michigan is next Wednesday. Whether Clinton will call for a recount remains unclear. The academics so far have only a circumstantial case that would require not just a recount but a forensic audit of voting machines. Also complicating matters, a senior Clinton adviser said, is that the White House, focused on a smooth transfer of power, does not want Clinton to challenge the election result. Clinton communications director Jennifer Palmieri did not respond to a request for comment. But some Clinton allies are intent on pushing the issue. This afternoon, Huma Abedin’s sister Heba encouraged her Facebook followers to lobby the Justice Department to audit the 2016 vote. “Call the DOJ…and tell them you want the votes audited,” she wrote. “Even if it’s busy, keep calling.”
Another busy day in the transition of President-elect Trump.
He won’t prosecute Hillary Clinton for the “crimes” that he said were “worse than Watergate.” The crowds chanting “lock her up” surely must have known he never meant to follow through.
Yesterday, Trump met with leaders of the TV networks and told them he didn’t like their coverage. Has anyone briefed him on the First Amendment?
Here’s the deal with Trump. He is vain. He has no sense of humor. He is thin-skinned. He can’t laugh at humself. He is in for a very rough four years. And so are we.
His is vanity and touchiness make him a rich target for satirists, artists, and the entertainment industry.
This is a very interesting and important graphic about “The Quantified Student.”
If you are concerned about data mining of your child or yourself, you are right to be concerned.
Our government and the corporate sector wants to know everything about us. They want to quantify our lives and use what they know to create Big Data.
Big Data can be useful in tracking public health trends and needs, but it can be destructive in defining solely as our data.
We are humans. We are not robots. Take a look at the graphic.
We must protect our privacy, our individuality, our voice, our uniqueness as human beings.
Please watch this short video, which was posted by the Atlantic, about a Syrian refugee family adapting to life in Chicago. The children learn English faster than their parents, and they learn through dance and movement. It is a lovely film, directed by Colleen Cassingham and Alex Lederman.
“The Little Things”
https://theaudienceawards.com/videocontests/2016-socialpoliticalfilmfestival
(Alex is the son of Bruce and Sheri Lederman, the lawyer and teacher who successfully challenged New York’s evaluation of teachers by test scores in court.)
Helen Ladd of Duke University debated Marty West of the Harvard Kennedy School about the cost and quality of American education. It is a podcast and I think you will enjoy listening when you have time.
They were invited to talk about whether the U.S. spends more money than other countries and gets worse performance than other countries on international tests. Ladd disputes both parts of the question, while West is on the side that says we spend more to get less quality.
I would like to see a debate about how the U.S. could have such a “terrible” school system, as the reformers allege, yet have the world’s most powerful economy, with the most innovation, the best military, and the best technology. It is a puzzle.
Peter Greene notes the terrible pickle that the “reformers” are in. They were trying so hard to prove their bona fides as leaders of the “civil rights movement of our time,” trying so hard to claim that they really were pushing school choice “for the kids,” trying so hard to call themselves progressives…and Donald Trump, the arch reactionary, has embraced their cause. The hedge fund managers, the billionaires, and the corporate titans pushed charters and school choice, and Donald Trump wants charters and school choice too! He goes a step further, and he wants vouchers too.
Peter Greene calls the current state of affairs the “Faux Progressive Polka.”
Their dilemma is laid bare: Real progressives support public schools, not school choice. School choice was the battle cry of the segregationists in the 1950s and 1960s, and today school choice is promoting greater resegregation and at the same time, defunding public schools that serve all children. The voters in Massachusetts saw through the facade. The NAACP saw through it too.
Now Trump’s embrace makes it harder for the Wall Street crowd and the billionaires to pretend to be progressives. They aren’t and they never were.
To understand Greene’s argument, you must first read Rick Hess’s post-election article, in which he claimed that education is so far to the left that it can’t begin to understand the right. He had an audacious analysis of what he calls the split among Democrats about education:
Hess writes:
One of the reasons that right-left differences get ignored is that people in and around education think they have the whole spectrum covered: there is, after all, the fierce conflict between the “reform” camp and the union-establishment. What usually gets missed, however, is that for the past decade, this clash has primarily existed between two wings of the Democratic Party. The “reformers” have mostly been passionate, Great Society liberals who believe in closing “achievement gaps” and pursuing “equity” via charter schooling, teacher evaluation, the Common Core, and test-based accountability. And their opponents have been the Democratic Party’s more traditional, New Deal wing.
Greene writes:
If reformsters are Great Society Liberals, I am the Queen of Rumania. He is not the Queen of Rumania.
Some of us, like Greene and me, have called out the “reform” movement as a mighty hoax, a pretense of liberalism powered by billionaires, financiers, and rightwing think tanks. The same phony lingo about “closing achievement gaps” and “equity” has been used by rightwing governors, as they replace public schools with charter schools and vouchers. Ideologically, it is hard to decipher the “sides,” but one thing I can say with certainty is that the effort to privatize public education and eliminate teacher unions is not a project of Great Society liberals.
Greene continues:
But now everybody has to confront a grim reality– Donald J. Trump thinks charters and choice are awesome and the Common Core sucks (though he doesn’t really understand it). What’s a DFER to do? On the one hand, they are trying to look like Democrats. On the other hand, they agree with every dot and tittle of Trump’s likely ed policy.
There are any number of explanations– Trump has no actual convictions on any political scale, the backers for various policies have shifted, blah blah blah. I think the most likely explanation is that privatization was never a progressive idea, ever, but when faux progressives were controlling the political conversation, it behooved people in search of power and support to put on their own progressive masks.
So what’s the play now? Stop pretending to be progressives and throw in their lot with the Trumpians (who are themselves only pretending to be conservatives)?
But modern charter schools, the testing industry, the data mining of America– none of that was ever governed by a political ideology as much as it’s guided by a deep love of money. In this, as in many other areas, Trump has if nothing else ripped the pretense off a lot of high-flung baloney. Trump is about power and profit, and power and profit are all the motivation you need to come up with a program of privatizing, monetizing, and digitizing US education. You can add some political philosophizing after the fact, but it’s really beside the point.
Modern corporate reform is congealed around neither right nr left; it’s heart beats to the neo-liberal rhythm which means we shall have social programs (yay, liberals!) that are contracted out to the free market (yay, conservatives!) But neo-liberalism serves righties far better than it serves lefties. They get their money, but privatized programs have yet to show real quality.
And then there’s the dark underbelly of modern reform, particularly charter choice programs that remove democratic process from non-wealthy non-white neighborhoods, giving our lesser what we think is best for them and, in the case of No Excuses schools, the kind of tight domination and control that Those People need. This view of Those People is also not incompatible with Trumpism.
We can play the left-right game all day. Schools tend to attract people who are oriented toward helping and uplifting other people, so the school world should skew left. But schools are also old, hidebound institutions that rely heavily on tradition and stability– so, conservative. But that left-right dichotomy is not the problem reformsters face.
What they face is a unique and striking dilemma. Under Trump, they can have every policy they ever wanted, save Common Core. But they can only have the policies bare and stripped of any pretense. DFER and Jeanne Allen’s Center for Education Reform can have almost everything they want, but they can only have it in a Trump-tied bow. They can only have their policies by admitting that their policies are not progressive at all (and by admitting they’re totally okay with Trumpian awfulness as long as they get choice and charters). They can only oppose Herr Trump by disowning their own policies. Or they can dance around in a faux progressive polka, doing their best to respond to the music they never asked for, but which is everything they want. For grifters like She Who Will Not Be Named (formerly of DC schools) this is just a practical problem of angling for success; for sincere reformsters (yes, I believe such things exist), it’s a real moral dilemma.
Donald Trump owns a sprawling international empire of scores of business interests, many of them in other countries. Other presidents have placed their assets in a blind trust to remove any conflict of interest. Trump has refused to do so. He says his adult children will manage the business but he can’t be unaware that his decisions as president will affect the success of his empire.
During the campaign, Trump broke tradition by refusing to release his tax returns. Now it appears there is no likelihood that he will seaparate himself from his far-flung business interests.
Turkey is a nation in crisis, scarred by government crackdowns following a failed coup attempt and on a potential collision course with the West. It is also home to a valuable revenue stream for the president-elect’s business empire: Trump Towers Istanbul.
Donald Trump’s company has been paid up to $10 million by the tower’s developers since 2014 to affix the Trump name atop the luxury complex, whose owner, one of Turkey’s biggest oil and media conglomerates, has become an influential megaphone for the country’s increasingly repressive regime.
That, ethics advisers said, forces the Trump complex into an unprecedented nexus: as both a potential channel for dealmakers seeking to curry favor with the Trump White House and a potential target for attacks or security risks overseas.
The president-elect’s Turkey deal marks a harrowing vulnerability that even Trump has deemed “a little conflict of interest”: a private moneymaker that could open him to foreign influence and tilt his decision-making as America’s executive in chief.
But the ethics experts eyeing Trump’s empire are now warning of many others, found among a vast assortment of foreign business interests never before seen in past presidencies. At least 111 Trump companies have done business in 18 countries and territories across South America, Asia and the Middle East, a Washington Post analysis of Trump financial filings shows….
Some companies reflect long-established deals while others were launched as recently as Trump’s campaign, including eight that appear tied to a potential hotel project in Saudi Arabia, the oil-rich Arab kingdom that Trump has said he “would want to protect.”
Trump has refused calls to sell or give his business interests to an independent manager or “blind trust,” a long-held presidential tradition designed to combat conflicts of interest. Now, policy and ethics experts are scrambling to assess the potential dangers of public rule by a leader with a vast web of private business deals.
“There are so many diplomatic, political, even national security risks in having the president own a whole bunch of properties all over the world,” said Richard Painter, chief White House ethics lawyer under President George W. Bush.
“If we’ve got to talk to a foreign government about their behavior, or negotiate a treaty, or some country asks us to send our troops in to defend someone else, we’ve got to make a decision. And the question becomes: Are we going in out of our national interest or because there’s a Trump casino around?” Painter added.
Karen Wolfe, a public school parent and blogger in Los Angeles, reports on the upcoming battle royal for control of the school board.
The charter ndustry is planning a raid on the school board, and their candidates can expect to be showered with money from billionaires who want to privatize more of the public schools. As karen points out, most of the donors will be able to hide their names until the primary is over, so voters won’t know which billionaires have decided to buy their public schools.
Steve Zimmer, president of the school board, will be challenged by a parent organizer for the California Charter School Association, the mother lode of privatization. Zimmer started his career as a TFA teacher, but stayed in the classroom for 17 years. The billionaires raised nearly $5 million to beat him last time he ran, but he prevailed.
Carl Petersen, a staunch friend of public schools, is running for a seat.
In another board race, the queen of corporate reform, Monica Garcia, is being challenged by teacher Lisa Alva. This will be an interesting contest because Lisa Alva started her career on the reform team but fell off the bench when she happened to participate in a conference call in 2013 that disillusioned her.
There is another candidate, Nick Melvoin, with sterling reformer credentials. He has raised $161,000. Garcia has raised $132,000. Zimmer has raised $29,000. So far. The billionaires and PACs haven’t weighed in yet. They will. The LAUSD is a big prize. The second largest district in the nation. Nearly a quarter of the students in the district attend charter schools. Billionaire Eli Broad wants half the kids in charters. He is persistent.
Will the people of Los Angeles allow the billionaires to take control of their public schools?
The primary election will be held on March 7, 2016 and the general on May 16.
We will watch this election closely as it develops.
