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NYC: There IS a Better Way to Support Students with Disabilities

By dianeravitch
December 16, 2022 //
8

The effects of the pandemic show themselves in every survey of post-pandemic behavior, among students and adults. The pandemic isn’t over but the isolation and anxiety it produced had long-lasting effects.

Dorothy Siegel, Elise Cappella and Kristie Patten describe what they call “a better way” to help students with disabilities.

On December 1, 2022, New York City Schools Chancellor David Banks announced a path forward for transforming and rebuilding trust in the city’s programs serving students with disabilities. This plan includes the sustaining and scaling of four successful and innovative programs serving students with disabilities across the city, the creation of a new paid internship program for high school students in Occupational, Physical and Speech Therapy for students with IEPs, as well as the empowerment of families and community through a new advisory council that will make bold recommendations on reimagining special education in the New York City Public Schools.

This announcement demonstrates the city’s commitment to address the systemic and historic marginalization of students with IEPs, a marginalization that has disproportionately impacted the city’s Black and Brown students with IEPs.

A recent Chalkbeat article, “Public schools are NYC’s main youth mental health system. Where kids land often depends on what their parents can pay,” exposed to public view the growing number of New York City students with serious mental healthissues and behavioral problems that get in the way of their education. Because New York State has inadequately funded mental health services, the onus falls on local school districts, which don’t have the option to turn students away. “The entire state of New York has shifted the burden of mental health to the school districts,” said a social worker quoted in the article.

Under federal law, school districts must provide all students with disabilities, including those with mental health and behavioral problems, a “free and appropriate public education.” And many such students in New York City do receive a high-quality education with therapeutic supports in the public schools.

But serious inequities abound. As Chalkbeat noted, in the New York City public schools,

“Black boys get classified with emotional disabilities at a far higher rate than other kids. In the 2020-2021 school year . . . Black students made up less than a quarter of students overall, yet they accounted for nearly half of students classified as having an emotional disability. White students, who made up 15% of all students in New York City public schools, accounted for just 8% of emotional disability classifications.”

As we can see, Black students, especially boys, are overwhelmingly overrepresented in the emotional disability classification. This matters because students with this classification have much worse outcomes than other students. As per Chalkbeat, in 2020-21 only 12% of students classified with an emotional disability received a Regents diploma in four years, compared to 73% of all New York City students.

For decades, New York City students who are classified with an emotional disability have found themselves on a path to highly segregated classrooms and schools, and, ultimately, limited life options. Neighborhood schools are not able to meet the needs of such challenging students, especially in inclusive settings. A recent report by NYU Research Alliance for NYC Schoolsstated that in 2016-17 only 33% of students with an emotional disability were served in an inclusive setting, compared to 66% of students with all disabilities. These young people often drop out and may fall into the juvenile justice system.

In the past few years, an increasing number of students with mental health and behavioral problems, no doubt exacerbated by two years of Covid, are showing up at the schoolhouse door. Of these, some find their way to private schools whose tuitions arepaid by the public school system – close to $1 billion in the last school year alone for students with autism, learning disabilities or mental health/behavioral issues.

Predictably, the overwhelming majority of these private school students are White and hail from more advantaged backgrounds. According to the Chalkbeat analysis, most students who are able to attend private schools on the public dime “live in just four of the richest and whitest districts,” including the Upper East Side and the Upper West Side of Manhattan and Park Slope in Brooklyn. As noted above, racially disparate classification is onemajor inequity in the system. But another is family wealth.

Clearly, New York State can and must do more, especially the restoration and rebuilding of mental health services for children and adolescents with mental health and behavioral issues.

But there is much that the New York City public school system can do as well, in particular at the beginning of a child’s educational journey. Students at risk of being classified with an emotional disability can and should be diverted from that drop-out/juvenile justice path onto a much better life path, as early as possible.

There IS a better way: The Path Program.

The New York City Department of Education (DOE), in close collaboration with researchers at New York University’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development (NYU), have developed a better way to educate these students: the Path program, which is based on the highly successful ASD Nest Program for autistic students. Path, like Nest, is a comprehensive, cohesive, collaborative, fully inclusive program that serves students at risk of an emotional disability (ED) classification. Path redirects these students onto a more hopeful path.

ASD Nest Program

The ASD Nest Program has developed over the past twenty years as a collaboration between the DoE and NYU. Launched in 2003, the DoE’s ASD Nest Program works with autisticstudents who are capable of doing grade-level academic work. The goal is to help these students develop competence in their academic, social and behavioral functioning, in order to realize their full, unique potential as independent and fulfilled adults.

In the 2022-23 school year, 69 New York City public schools are educating approximately 1,700 ASD students in 350+ integrated co-taught K-12 classrooms. The vast majority of Nest students stay in the program through twelfth grade, where 95% of Nest high schoolers graduate with a Regents diploma.

Path Program:

The Path program promotes the inclusion of students with emotional disabilities within community schools and strives to disrupt the historical segregation of Black and brown children in restrictive special education settings. The program employs many of the same evidence-based principles, practices, and structures developed for the Nest program, with the addition ofevidence-based trauma-informed and social-emotional learning strategies known to work well for students with this classification. Path classes are small co-taught integrated classes, with no more than four students classified with ED in each class, alongside twelve to twenty typically developing peers. Teachers provide the general education curriculum, using specialized supports and a variety of co-teaching models. With related services integrated into the day, Path classrooms incorporate supports typically provided by outside therapists to foster a safe environment in which Path students can comfortably interact with peers. Whole-class social, sensory, behavioral and academic strategies form a foundational level of support, consistent across all settings.

All school staff – teachers, therapists and administrators — receive high-quality pre- and in-service training and on-site support. Path staff meet weekly as a team to create comprehensive support plans for each student, which involve classroom and individual supports and family partnership.

The DoE piloted the model in one District 9 school in 2021-22 with a grant through the Fund for Public Schools. In 2022-23, the DoE opened four Path classrooms in three District 9 neighborhood schools: three kindergartens and one first grade class. Three more kindergarten classes will open this year in three other districts in Manhattan, Queens and Brooklyn, with the goal to eventually have Path programs in most NYC neighborhoods.

Path and Nest are two examples of the DoE’s “specialized programs,” differentiated program models for different disability categories. So far, the DoE has created specialized programs for students with autism (Nest and Horizon), emotional disabilities (Path), and intellectual disabilities (ACES). Importantly, all specialized programs – and their students — are fully integrated into their neighborhood school communities.

Over time, the ASD Nest Program has proven to be the program of choice for many, if not most, parents of autistic students, even those with the means to go to private school. The main admission requirement for Nest is an autism classification.

Similarly, Path is intended to level the playing field for Black and Brown students at risk of an emotional disability who don’t come from advantaged backgrounds. It is commendable that the DOE has chosen to invest in this research-based model – in some of the poorest community school districts in the city – to create inclusive pathways to school and life success.

With the chancellor’s commitment to the expansion of the ASD Nest and Path programs, the future looks much brighter for New York City’s students with significant disabilities.

Dorothy Siegel, Co-founder, ASD Nest Program

Elise Cappella, Professor of Applied Psychology, PI of NYU Path Program, NYU Steinhardt School

Kristie Patten, Professor, Department of Occupational Therapy,PI of NYU ASD Nest Support Project, Co-Investigator of NYU Path Program, NYU Steinhardt School

Categories Education Reform, New York City, Special Education

Ed Johnson: Atlanta Schoools Could Be the Linchpin for Reducing Crime and Violence

By dianeravitch
December 16, 2022 //
4

Ed Johnson is an Atlantan who acts as a watchdog for the Atlanta Public Schools. He is also a systems thinker, influenced by the seminal work of W. Edwards Deming.

He recently wrote about how the Atlanta pPublic Schools could help revitalize the city by thinking systematically instead of following its course of jumping from reform to reform.

His post begins:

Loopy APS is my mental model of interrelated causal factors exposed for all to see, question, and critique in a spirit of collaborative discourse. It began as a visual representation of my thinking about why Atlanta Public Schools cannot improve and why it can improve dumped out onto paper, static. The 2009 APS cheating scandal prompted doing so.

Then, during April 2017, by chance I discovered the cleverly named Loopy™ and promptly rendered my mental model in it. Hence the name Loopy APS.

Created by systems thinker Nicky Case, Loopy™ is “a tool for thinking in systems” and for simulating systems. It is highly effective and simple but not simplistic to use. If you can think, you can use Loopy™. It is freely available.

Loopy APS allowed seeing the dynamic behavior of a vicious causal loop that went unnoticed on paper. The vicious causal loop simulates interrelated factors influencing violence and crime in Atlanta to continually worsen amid a great deal of systemic instability.

It wasn’t clear at first why the vicious causal loop was in Loopy APS, as I did not knowingly model it. It was only after being able to see my thinking play out dynamically in Loopy APS did I notice it. So, to find out why, I ran Loopy APS, time and again, observing its behavior until a particular story became clear.

Reading from the snapshot image, in Figure 1, below, the story, told tersely, goes like this:

Greatly influenced by Partner Purposes, Atlanta BoE (Board of Education) and APS Superintendency provide for frustrating Authentic Education by employing SEL & Police (behavioristic practices) to favor inculcating routinized Teacher Learning and Student Leaning that obviate Wisdom, so as to obscure Democracy to allow Selfishness to flourish as Violence & Crimeto entangle Civil Society, while Atlanta BoE (Board of Education) and APS Superintendency are ever more greatly influenced by Partner Purposes.

Note the end of the story goes right back to its beginning. This makes the story a closed loop. Being a closed loop means every “thing” in the loop represents a causal factor that influences the behavior of every other “thing” or casual factor in the loop, including itself.

In other words, influence that goes around, comes around, whether directly or indirectly. Or, as Martin Luther King Jr tried to help us know and understand: “What affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

Systems thinker Nick Chase did this short video honoring systems thinker Martin Luther King Jr. But, alas, I guess it takes one to know one, because being a systems thinker is not ordinarily ascribed to Dr. King. To many, he remains the guy who had a dream.

The overall, systemic behavior of a causal loop may be vicious or virtuous, or status quo-keeping. In the story above, pulled from Figure 1, it is vicious systemic behavior influencing violence and crime in Atlanta to continually worsen.

Now, given that story, the question becomes: What needs to change, so as to transform the closed loop of causal factors influencing violence and crime in Atlanta to continually worsen into one influencing violence and crime in Atlanta to continually lessen?

This question, of course, comes from recognizing that every vicious cycle holds the potential to reverse and become virtuous and, conversely, every virtuous cycle holds the potential to reverse and become vicious.

To follow Ed Johnson’s analysis, open the link and view his graphs and finish reading.

Categories Atlanta, Education Reform, Georgia

Boston: Mayoral Control Is the Wrong Answer

By dianeravitch
December 13, 2022 //
31

Retired teacher Christine Langhoff calls out the editorial board of The Boston Globe, which advocates for mayoral control of the schools, despite the wishes of the citizenry. Langhoff is right. Mayoral control is undemocratic, and it does not have a record of success. The mayor is not an educator. She or he may stack the leadership of the school system with cronies or—best case scenario—clueless business-school graduates. Mayoral control was tried and failed in Detroit and Chicago. New York City has had mayoral control since 2002 and that political arrangement has increased the number of charter schools, closed scores of schools, destabilized neighborhoods, and produced no notable improvements.

Langhoff writes:

Last year, 80% of Boston voters approved an elected school committee (a campaign that owes much of its organizing to a presence on Twitter, by the way). Now the process is underway, as the state would have to approve such a move.

This morning, the Boston Globe has published a disgusting editorial, calling for the abolition of any school board in the capital city. Reed Hastings would be proud. Who cares what citizens want, when the billionaires hellbent on privatization want something else?

“There are certainly problems with the city’s current school governance system, in which the mayor appoints all members of the seven-person school committee. But if the city is to overhaul school governance, the way forward shouldn’t be to switch to a popularly elected school committee — an antiquated way of managing schools in the 21st century. Instead, Boston should get rid of the body and centralize control of the schools in the mayor’s office.” (Boston Globe)

And while the Supreme Court looks to originalism to undermine our rights, The Globe (or more likely the Barr Foundation, to whom the newspaper of record outsources its education coverage) would throw out centuries of history of governing public schools in Massachusetts:

“Ending a school committee may seem radical, since local school board elections are so ingrained in American tradition. But the local school board, and its considerable power over the education of children in a geographic area, is a particularly North American phenomenon, and something of an accident of history. The colony of Massachusetts required towns to establish and pay for schools in 1647, in a law known as the Old Deluder Satan Act, and local control of schools — and local responsibility for funding them — has endured since.” (Boston Globe)

Funny, I doubt the same people would call for dissolving all school boards across the state, especially not in those wealthy towns where these writers likely live, and whose elected school boards they serve on.

Categories Accountability, Boston, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Democracy, Education Reform, Massachusetts

Maté Wierdl: The Unending Hungarian Teachers’ Strike

By dianeravitch
December 10, 2022 //
33

Professor Maté Wierdl teaches college-level mathematics in Tennessee; he is a native-born Hungarian and travels there regularly. In this post, he reviews the teachers’ strike in Hungary, which has dragged on for more than a year.

Throughout the strike, the Hungarian government has shown its disdain for the teachers’ union and the teachers. American right-wingers love the growing authoritarianism of the Hungarian government, even inviting Hungarian President Victor Orban to speak at the annual meeting of CPAC, the conservative political action committee.

Wierdl writes:

Hungarian teachers have been openly protesting for almost a year now. The formal protests began in January. As a response, Orbán, Hungary’s Prime Minister, basically took away the teachers’ right to strike (they cannot skip their teaching obligations while they “strike”), and quite a few protesters have been fired from their jobs. Just this week, 8 teachers were fired since they protested during school hours.

Why the protests? I think Hungarian teachers used to have a pretty good job. But in recent years, their load increased a great deal, more testing was introduced and kids need to go to school more. I have to say, I see the US influence, which shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone after seeing in the news that Orbán was invited to the US to give the keynote address at CPAC, and then he paid a visit to Trump.

I have many teacher friends and they say the main issue is not just about money but the general worsening conditions of teachers, and as a result, there is a huge teacher shortage.

Though numbers don’t tell everything, they clearly indicate serious problems. For example, here is a chart showing teachers’ salaries relative to other college educated people’s salaries (I think most of the countries’ names are recognizable; EU22 is the EU average). Note how the US (Egyesült Államokin Hungarian) and Hungary are the last two

The next chart shows the mandatory classroom hours in several European countries. Hungary is at the top (meaning, most hours) and in fact, since there aren’t enough teachers, the average teaching load is close to 27 hours. (US teachers teach even more, like 6 classes per day which means a 30 hour load)

Below, I put together some reports of the protests in the international media in the last two months.

Bloomberg writes this about today’s (Dec 2) protests

“Hundreds of Hungarian teachers joined a widening strike action across the nation’s school system following a government decision to fire more educators for protesting low pay.

“Almost 700 teachers from 71 schools walked off the job on Friday, forcing several institutions to suspend classes, according to the Teacher for Teachers Facebook page, which compiles the information.

“Thousands of students joined in solidarity, many of them placing black tape over their mouths. They decried what they called a hardline response by Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s government to silence teachers who earn among the lowest wages in the European Union.”

Nov 18

BUDAPEST, (Reuters) – Hungarian teachers, students and parents stepped up their protest calling for higher wages and education reforms on Friday, forming a 10-km (six-mile) human chain in central Budapest, with smaller rallies held across the country.

Teachers launched their “I want to teach” movement in September, calling for civil disobedience to demand higher wages for teachers and an adequate supply in the workforce. They are also protesting against restrictions on their right to strike.

Here is a video of the protests a few weeks earlier. As you can see many students support the teachers.

Oct 6:

Wednesday’s rally, which started with students forming a chain stretching for kilometers (miles) across Budapest in the morning grew into the biggest anti-government demonstration since nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s April re-election.

 Protesters carrying banners saying “Do not sack our teachers” and “For a glimpse of the future, look at the schools of the present” crammed a Budapest bridge near parliament, blocking traffic amid light police presence.

Categories Education Reform, International, Teachers, Unions

Florida: State Will Investigate “Woke” School Boards

By dianeravitch
December 10, 2022 //
28

Earlier this year, the Florida legislature and Governor Ron DeSantis passed a bill that they called the Parental Right in Education law, but it is widely known as the “Don’t Say Gay” law. It forbids any recognition of gender identity in grades K-3, as well as careful scrutiny of any such instruction in higher grades to be sure that it is “age appropriate” (i.e., in the eye of the beholder). Gov. DeSantis boasted on election night that Florida is where “woke goes to die.” As you will read in the article below, the governor’s general counsel defined “woke” as the “belief there are systemic injustices in America society and the need to address them.”

Surely, doesn’t everyone agree that there are no “systemic injustices in American society,” and never was such a time or thing ever ever. Since they don’t exist, the reasoning goes, there is no need to address them. The state of Florida believes that it must be illegal to teach about any systemic injustices that exist now or might have existed in the past. This law is a denial of academic freedom, plain and simple.

It is a kind of poetic justice that the sponsor of this law–Rep. Joe Harding– was indicted for wire fraud and money laundering—for claiming $150,000 in COVID recovery funds from the Small Business Administration for two businesses he owned that had no employees and no revenues. He has resigned his seat in the legislature. Karma.

The Miami Herald reported:

Florida’s State Board of Education will meet next week to scrutinize whether 10 school districts — including Miami-Dade, Broward and Hillsborough counties — are carrying out the state’s parental rights law, which have become a political lightning rod in local school board meeting and national politics in recent years.

The Florida Department of Education put the districts on notice last month when it sent superintendents letters detailing the policies and procedures that each of their districts “may not comport with Florida law.”

The law, titled Parental Rights in Education, but which critics have dubbed “don’t say gay,” prohibits classroom instruction and discussions about sexual orientation and gender identity in grades K through 3 — and in older grades if they are not “age appropriate or developmentally appropriate.”

Many of the policies the state has flagged offer protections to LGBTQ students who confide personal information to school employee by requiring their consent to divulge aspect of their sexual orientation and gender identity to guardians and parents.

In letters sent Nov. 18, Senior Chancellor Jacob Oliva flagged a range of policies and procedures at the 10 school districts and requested a status update on those policies by Friday.

In addition to Miami-Dade, Broward and Hillsborough, letters were also sent to Alachua, Brevard, Duval, Indian River, Leon, Palm Beach and the Florida School for the Deaf and the Blind.

The State Board of Education will meet on Wednesday.

Some of the policies that were flagged by the state include “best practices” policies for school personnel to not disclose the sexual orientation or gender identity of students without their input or permission; policies that say all students should be referred to by the gender pronouns and name that is consistent with their gender identity, and rules that allow students to access locker rooms and restroom that are consistent with their gender identity.

The state has also raised questions about a “racial equity policy” at the Indian River County School District. The district’s policy says it is mean to confront “the institutional racism that results in predictably lower academic achievements for students of color than for their white peers.”

Gov. Ron DeSantis has targeted such policies as he declares Florida to be the state where “woke goes to die.” During a federal court trial last week, DeSantis’ general counsel Ryan Newman, said the term “woke” refers to the “belief there are systemic injustices in America society and the need to address them.”

In Miami-Dade, the state has zeroed in on policies that aim to support transgender and “gender expansive students” in sports, locker rooms, and manners that pertain to which pronouns students want to use and what private information they want to disclose. In Broward County, policies that aim to create a “safe space for LGBTQ+ students” have come under the microscope.

The state wants to hear the status of five policies, including one that says “it is never appropriate to divulge the sexual orientation of a student to a parent without the student’s consent.” And in Hillsborough County, the state is asking the district to provide an update on two policies: a “racial equity” policy that aim to increase academic achievement for “ALL students,” and LGBTQ policies that deal with “coming out and confidentiality.”

Read more at: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/education/article269802507.html#storylink=cpy

Categories Education Reform

Welcome Home, Brittney Griner!

By dianeravitch
December 9, 2022 //
30

I was thrilled when I heard the news that Brittney Griner was being released and thrilled today to learn that she had landed in San Antonio, where she will have a thorough medical examination.

I naively assumed that everyone would be thrilled that this young woman was released, but soon realized that that was not the case.

Republicans quickly seized on her exchange–release of Brittney in a trade for Viktor Bout, notorious arms dealer known as the “Merchant of Death”–to say that Biden had committed a terrible sin. He got a mere basketball player in return for a dangerous criminal who had spread arms throughout the world to terrorize and kill people, including Americans. Republican politicians wasted no time denouncing the deal on Twitter as a show of Biden’s naivete and incompetence. He left a Marine behind enemy lines, crowed Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn. Trump denounced the deal as “stupid” and “unpatriotic.” He assumed that Biden simply forgot about Paul Whelan, who has served four years behind bars in Russia for alleged espionage.

But that was not true. Biden has been in contact with the Whelan family. Whelan’s brother made clear that he agreed with Biden.

The reports from inside the Biden administration make clear that Putin was unwilling to make a 2-for-1 trade. He offered to release Griner in exchange for Bout. The deal was 1-for-1. Only Griner was on offer, not Whelan.

Putin had leverage: he was holding three Americans in Russia’s grim prison system: Griner, Whelan, and an American teacher named Marc Vogel, aged 60, who has been imprisoned for more than a year for possession of medical marijuana on entering the country. Vogel and his wife were teachers at the Anglo-American School in Moscow, a pricey private school for the elite. The Russian negotiators were clear: only one American would be released, and it would be Griner.

Biden’s choice: Trade Bout for Griner or no deal at all.

He chose to give up Bout in return for bringing Griner home.

From the vitriol being thrown at Biden by Republicans, I assume they would prefer to have made no deal at all. They would have let Griner serve out her 9-year sentence or wait until Putin was prepared to release Griner, Whelan, and Vogel. Some GOPers say on Twitter that the only reason she was chosen by Biden (Biden did not make the choice) is that she is lesbian and gay. Absurd.

What would you have done?

I, for one, welcome Brittney Griner home.

Categories Education Reform

Why Reading Fiction Matters

By dianeravitch
December 8, 2022 //
49

As educators know, the Common Core standards emphasize the reading of informational text and downgrade the reading of fiction and poetry. The CC standards actually set percentages for how much time should be devoted to informational text vs. literature. In the elementary grades, the CC advises, instruction should be divided 50%-50% between literary sources and informational text. In grade 8, the CCSS recommended division is 45%/55%, diminishing literature. In grade 12, it should be 30%-70%, a huge reduction in reading literature. These percentages are based on the federal NAEP test guidelines for test developers; they were not intended to be guidance for teachers. In fact, as Tom Loveless showed, the Common Core affected teaching and curriculum by downgrading literature. In 2021, Loveless published a book about the failure of the CC.

In the past few weeks, I have seen some strong refutations of this downgrading of literature. Literature sharpens the mind and memory, teaching readers to be attentive to experiences, feelings, insights.

In July, the New York Times published an article about how to prevent cognitive decline. It was a summary of a book by a noted neurologist. It offered several key findings based on brain research. One was: read more novels.

Hope Reese wrote:

As we age, our memory declines. This is an ingrained assumption for many of us; however, according to neuroscientist Dr. Richard Restak, a neurologist and clinical professor at George Washington Hospital University School of Medicine and Health, decline is not inevitable.

The author of more than 20 books on the mind, Dr. Restak has decades’ worth of experience in guiding patients with memory problems. “The Complete Guide to Memory: The Science of Strengthening Your Mind,” Dr. Restak’s latest book, includes tools such as mental exercises, sleep habits and diet that can help boost memory…

One early indicator of memory issues, according to Dr. Restak, is giving up on fiction. “People, when they begin to have memory difficulties, tend to switch to reading nonfiction,” he said.

Over his decades of treating patients, Dr. Restak has noticed that fiction requires active engagement with the text, starting at the beginning and working through to the end. “You have to remember what the character did on Page 3 by the time you get to Page 11,” he said.

A few days ago, an article by Washington Post technology columnist Molly Roberts opined that the failure to read novels was a serious error by Sam Bankman-Fried, whose crypto-currency businesses collapsed in November, evaporating billions of dollars in real currency.

The problem with SBF, she wrote, was that he doesn’t read books. He only reads quick, informational summaries.

She wrote:

Amid all the bombshell revelations about fallen crypto king Sam Bankman-Fried, a seemingly trivial bit of information might tell us everything we need to know: He doesn’t read books.

If you’re anticipating a caveat or qualifier, you’re as out of luck as the FTX investors whose money SBF allegedly lost. “I’m addicted to reading,” a journalist said to the erstwhile multibillionaire in a recently resurfaced interview. “Oh, yeah?” SBF replied. “I would never read a book.”

Now, there are plenty of people who don’t read. This does not indicate that they are likely to end up accused of having robbed thousands of others of their fortunes in a speculative adventure that is part financial experiment, part Ponzi scheme. Some prefer to listen; some prefer to do something else altogether. The thing is, the reason counts.

Behold, then, SBF’s reason: “I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that. … If you wrote a book, you f—ed up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post.”

Now, this is paragraph five of this column, so we’re running short on worthwhile words. But this means-to-an-end worldview might be the key to understanding SBF’s character, and his career. The point for SBF, it seems, isn’t the book itself but what he takes away from it — the instrumental knowledge that, presumably, he can gather more efficiently from a SparkNotes version of any opus than from the work itself.

Part of the problem might be an unspoken focus on nonfiction versus fiction, and maybe highly technical nonfiction in particular. After all, it’s easier to argue that you can learn everything you really need to know about the history of securities regulation from a cleverly constructed issue brief than it is to insist that if someone tells you Elizabeth Bennet ends up marrying Mr. Darcy, you’ve absorbed the sum total of “Pride and Prejudice.”

But no matter the type of book he’s talking about, what SBF is missing is the experience. You’re supposed to read not in spite of the digressions and diversions that stand between you and the denouement, but because of them; the little things aren’t extraneous but essential. And what you come out of a book with isn’t always supposed to be instrumental at all, at least not in any practical sense. You read to read; you don’t read to have read.

Editor’s note: the words in the Times article in bold print were emphasized by me. In the Washington Post article, the bold words appear in the original.

Categories Common Core, Education Reform, Literacy, Literature

Good News! New Mexico Will Provide Free Childcare for Most Families

By dianeravitch
December 6, 2022 //
8

In an impressive achievement for families and children, New Mexico passed an amendment to its state constitution guaranteeing free childcare to families that need it most. New Mexico is one of the poorest states in the nation. Free childcare will enable mothers to work to support their children. Unlike “reform” programs that emphasize standardized testing, New Mexico’s pioneering emphasis on child wellbeing really does put children first.

New Mexico in May became the first state to offer free child care to most of its residents. Now, after a November referendum, it’s also the first state to enshrine child care funding in its constitution, effectively making the service a universal right – and perhaps offering a model for how other states could serve their youngest residents and working parents.

Nationwide, the average cost of child care for families outpaced the rate of inflation in 2021, according to analysis from Child Care Aware of America. A low-income family should have to spend only 7% of its income on child care, per a federal benchmark based on an average of census data. But the national average cost of child care – $10,600 annually – is roughly 10% of a married-couple family’s average annual income and 35% of a single parent’s income, the analysis found…

The scheme – hatched by a willing governor, state lawmakers and determined child advocates – effectively makes child care free to families making up to 400% of the federal poverty level, or about $111,000 for a family of four. The state’s median household income is $51,243.

At its core, the program aims to provide a safe environment for children at a stage of critical brain growth and development. Further, saving caregivers money on child care lets them invest more in their families, from putting healthy food on the table to home ownership, a key official said….

More than 70% of state voters approved the proposition, which will be funded by oil and gas revenues.

There has been a strong will in New Mexico to improve its slice of the widely broken US child care system, mainly because it is one of the poorest states and consistently ranks among the worst for child well-being, state officials and child advocates say.

Child advocates some 12 years ago sparked the movement to get a permanent funding source for child care enshrined in the state’s constitution. It was a long-game strategy for a coalition of non-profit, grassroots groups, including New Mexico Voices For Children.

That organization in 2010 first brainstormed using funds from oil and gas production revenue to fund child care and early education, said Amber Wallin, its executive director….

Under Democratic Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, New Mexico has established a minimum wage for child care workers: Entry-level employees now earn $15 dollars an hour, and more experienced lead teachers earn $20 dollars an hour. The pay raises aim to help improve workforce retention; before the raises, workers could earn a higher wage working at a fast-food restaurant than providing child care, child advocates told CNN.

New Mexico also created the first state agency and cabinet post focused on early childhood education and care. Also, “we were the first state to set our cost of what we reimburse child providers for child care at the actual cost of delivering care, and we were the first state to make child care free for most families,” said Elizabeth Groginsky, the state’s first secretary for early childhood education.

Categories Childhood, Courage, Creativity, Economy, Education Reform, New Mexico, Parents

Thom Hartmann: Why the GOP Wants to Destroy Public Schools

By dianeravitch
December 6, 2022 //
28

Thom Hartmann is a journalist and blogger who hits the nail on the head with this post. I would add one suggestion to his post, under the heading of “what can I do?” Run for your local school board. Don’t let wacky rightwing extremists buy it.

Former Tea Party congressman and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo recently put a bulls-eye on the back of the president of the 1.7 million-member American Federation of Teachers.

“I tell the story often — I get asked ‘Who’s the most dangerous person in the world? Is it Chairman Kim, is it Xi Jinping?’” Pompeo told Semafor’s Shelby Talcott. 

“The most dangerous person in the world is Randi Weingarten. It’s not a close call. If you ask, ‘Who’s the most likely to take this republic down?’ It would be the teacher’s unions, and the filth that they’re teaching our kids…”

I’ve known, respected, and admired Randi for years and she’s been a frequent guest on my program: her number one interest is providing the highest quality education to as many American children as possible. Full stop.

So why would Pompeo, pursuing the 2024 Republican nomination for president, risk triggering an American domestic terrorist to train his sites on her? Why would an educated man have such antipathy toward public school teachers?

Public schools are on the GOP’s hit list, just as they were in Chile during the Pinochet regime, and for the same reasons:

— Fascism flourishes when people are ignorant.

— Private for-profit schools are an efficient way to transfer billions from tax revenues into the coffers of “education entrepreneurs” who then recycle that money into Republican political campaigns (just like they’ve done with private for-profit prisons).

— Private schools are most likely to be segregated by race and class, which appeals to the bigoted base of the Republican party.

— While public school boards are our most basic and vigorous form of democracy, private schools are generally unaccountable to the public. 

— Most public school teachers are unionized, and the GOP hates unions.

— Whitewashing America’s racial and genocidal history while ignoring the struggles of women and queer folk further empowers straight white male supremacy.

Umberto Eco, who had a ringside seat to the rise of Mussolini, noted in his “14 indicators of fascism” that dumbing down the populace by lowering educational standards was critical to producing a compliant populace.

“All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks,” he wrote, “made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.”

Ironically, this very use of public schools to promote a political agenda was the foundation David Koch cited when, in 1980, he attacked American public schools during his run for Vice President on the Libertarian Party ticket.

“We condemn compulsory education laws … and we call for the immediate repeal of such laws,” proclaimed his platform. “We advocate the complete separation of education and State. Government schools lead to the indoctrination of children and interfere with the free choice of individuals. Government ownership, operation, regulation, and subsidy of schools and colleges should be ended.”

It was a stark contrast from the founders of our nation, who well understood the importance of universal quality public education. The first law mandating public schools paid for with taxpayer dollars was passed in Massachusetts in 1647: to this day, that state is notable for its historic emphasis on education.

As Thomas Jefferson, who founded America’s first tuition-free public college (the University of Virginia), noted in a letter to Colonel Charles Yancey on January 6, 1816:

“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”

The American president who immediately preceded him, our second, John Adams, also weighed in on the importance of public education in a letter to his old friend John Jebb when, in 1785, Adams was serving in London as America’s first Minister to Great Britain.

He’d seen the consequences of poverty and illiteracy in both the US and England and was horrified:

“The social science will never be much improved, until the people unanimously know and consider themselves as the fountain of power, and until they shall know how to manage it wisely and honestly. Reformation must begin with the body of the people, which can be done only, to effect, in their educations.

“The whole people must take upon themselves the education of the whole people, and must be willing to bear the expenses of it. There should not be a district of one mile square, without a school in it, not founded by a charitable individual, but maintained at the expense of the people themselves.”

But the United States spends almost a trillion dollars a year on primary school education, an expense category just below healthcare and even more than the Pentagon budget: there are massive profits to be made if privatized entities can skim even a few percent off the top.

Those profits, in turn, can be used — with the Supreme Court’s blessing — to legally bribe elected officials to further gut public schools and transfer even more of our tax dollars to private schools and their stockholders.

This pursuit of America’s education dollars is nothing new. The first American president to put an anti-public-schools crusader in charge of the Education Department was Ronald Reagan.

At the time, our public schools were the envy of the world and had recently raised up a generation of scientists and innovators that brought us everything from the transistor to putting men on the moon.

Reagan’s Education Secretary Bill Bennett is probably most famous for having claimed that, “You could abort every Black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down.” And then aggressively standing behind his quote in repeated media appearances.

Reagan and Bennett oversaw the gutting of Federal support for civics education, cutting the nation’s federal education budget by 18.5%.

This lead to the situation today where the group that runs national exams of eighth-graders across the country, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, determined in 2018 that only 24% of US students were “proficient in civics.” It’s gotten so bad that the Lincoln Project is launching a K-12 civics program of their own called the Franklin Project.

George W. Bush continued the tradition, proposing an 8% cut to education and welfare budgets.

After initiating the privatization of Medicare in 2003 with the Medicare Advantage scam (a model for privatizing education), his Education Secretary, Rod Paige, calledthe nation’s largest teacher’s union, the National Education Association, a “terrorist organization.”

Donald Trump and Betsy DeVos then proposed cutting 12% or $8.5 billion out of the federal education budget, while allocating over $5 billion in taxpayer dollars to flow into the money bins of their private school cronies.

I started this article with Pompeo’s essentially calling Randi Weingarten a terrorist. Unions as saboteurs is a viewpoint widely held across the Republican Party and among rightwing billionaires.

But it’s simply not true: teachers’ unions have been a primary force in improving the quality of American education for almost a century.

Eunice S. Han is an economics professor and researcher at the University of Utah, and formerly was with Wellesley College. She did exhaustive research into the impact of teachers’ unions on teacher quality and educational outcomes: it’s the single-most definitive study done on the subject to date.

Her findings were unambiguous and rebut the GOP’s talking point that teachers’ unions “protect bad teachers”:

“[T]eachers unions, by negotiating higher wages for teachers, lower the quit probability of high-ability teachers but raise the dismissal rate of underperforming teachers, as higher wages provide districts greater incentive to select better teachers.”

Looking at the most comprehensive set of national data available on teacher quality and educational outcome from “the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES): the School and Staffing Survey (SASS) for three waves (2003-2004, 2007- 2008, and 2011-2012), its supplement Teacher Follow-up Survey (TFS) for each wave of the SASS, and the School Districts Finance Survey (SDFS),” she found:

“The data confirms that, compared to districts with weak unionism, districts with strong unionism dismiss more low-quality teachers and retain more high-quality teachers. The empirical analysis shows that this dynamic of teacher turnover in highly unionized districts raises average teacher quality and improves student achievement.”

But don’t bother trying to tell that to Republicans: they know that unions are terrorists, or at least give nightmares to bad bosses and poorly run businesses that exploit their workers. As Trump’s Education Secretary Betsy DeVos told an ALEC meeting of Republican state legislators and corporate lobbyists in July, 2017:

“They’ve made it clear that they care more about a system, one created in the 1800s, than they do about individual students.”

In other words, “Don’t bother me with facts.”

John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were right about public education, and privatizing it is as much a crime against the commons and our democracy as was privatizing our prisons, over half the Pentagon budget, and Medicare.

Rightwing billionaires are now funding “Liberty” and “Freedom” groups to attack and take over public school boards, seeking to ghettoize their schools, drive out unionized teachers, and impose a gender-bigoted, white supremacist, and anti-science curriculum. (Only 40% of our schools today even teach evolution, as that’s become so “controversial” again.)

Of all our democratic institutions, from Congress to state houses to city councils, the most on-the-ground, closest-to-the-people are school boards.

They’re the most vibrant and often most important of our governmental bodies, designed to express and facilitate the will of local parents and voters. And a great springboard to other elected offices: many members of Congress began their political careers running for a school board.

Private schools, of course, don’t have school boards. They’re accountable to their shareholders and CEOs.

Steve Bannon and other rightwing personalities have, for the past several years as part of their effort to destroy public education, been aggressively encouraging their followers to run for public school boards and, where they don’t win, show up at every meeting to make their members lives miserable.

It’s an area where Democrats and progressives have dropped the ball, big time.

If you’re a parent or grandparent, or even just a concerned citizen, there is no better or more crucial time to show up at your local school board than now. And bring your friends and neighbors with you.

Categories Education Reform, Privatization, Republicans

New York: Appointment of John King as SUNY Chancellor Draws Sharp Rebuke from Parent Group

By dianeravitch
December 5, 2022 //
67

The State University of New York announced the appointment of John King as chancellor of its large system of universities across the state. He will receive a salary of $750,000 plus a monthly stipend of $12,500 for renting a place in New York City, plus many other perks. King was previously state commissioner of education in New York, where he oversaw the implementation of the Common Core standards and tests, which led to widespread opting out from the tests. He was subsequently appointed U.S. Secretary of Education for the last year of the Obama administration. Most recently, he led Education Trust. He is a strong proponent of standardized testing.

The New York State Allies for Public Education issued this press release:

Parents and advocates speak out against appointment of John King as SUNY Chancellor

Parents and advocates from throughout the state criticized the appointment of John King as SUNY Chancellor based upon his dismal record as NY State Education Commissioner. 

Said Jeanette Deutermann, founder of Long Island Opt­­­ Out, “As Education Commissioner, John King was a disaster,  pushing the invalid Common Core standards and redesigning the state tests to be excessively long, with reading passages far above grade level, and full of ambiguous questions. He worked to ensure that the majority of kids would fail the state tests and be labelled not college-ready, including in many districts where nearly every student attends college and does well there.  His actions led directly to massive opposition among parents and the largest testing opt out movement in the country.  Many schools are still dealing with the destructive impact of his policies; I would be very sorry if SUNY students are faced with a similar fate.”

Lisa Rudley­­, the executive director of NY State Allies for Public Education, said, “SUNY Faculty and students should be forewarned! John King consistently ignored the legitimate concerns of parents and teachers regarding the policies he pursued as NY State Education Commissioner, by rewriting the standards, imposing an arduous high stakes testing regime, and basing teacher evaluation on student test scores, none of which had any research behind it and all of which undermined the quality of education in our public schools.  This led to a no-confidence vote of the state teachers union, and if the state’s parents had been able to carry out such a vote, you can be sure they would have done so as well.“

Leonie Haimson, the co-chair of the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy, explained, “Under John King, New York State was the worst state in the country in its failure to protect student privacy and the last state to pull out of inBloom, the hugely invasive data-collection and data-sharing corporation created with $100 million of Gates Foundation funds.  New York was the only state whose Commissioner refused to listen to the outraged cries of parents concerning the plan to share the most intimate details of their children’s educational records with inBloom, which in turn planned to share the data with other ed tech corporations to build their programs around.  New York was also the only state in which an act of the Legislature was required to prohibit this plan from going forward.  Has John King learned his lesson regarding the importance of protecting student privacy?  For the sake of SUNY students, I surely hope so.” 

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Categories Common Core, Education Reform, Higher Education, New York, Standardized Testing
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