Nancy Bailey is a retired teacher with long experience in the classroom. She has a talent for picking out charlatans from the pundits who make a living telling teachers what to do, despite their lack of experience. She gets irritated by purveyors of doom and gloom, especially when it is not warranted. Arne Duncan and Margaret Spellings inflicted irreparable harm on America’s public schools by their imposition of the failed No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top programs; these federal mandates continue to erode what’s left of the joy of learning by their emphasis on standardized testing and pressure to close public schools and open privatized charter schools.

Nancy and I collaborated on a book published by Teachers College Press called Edspeak and Doublespeak: A Glossary to Decipher Hypocrisy and Save Public Schooling. It names names and calls out the privatizers who call themselves “reformers.”

She wrote on her latest blog:

Arne Duncan (Obama) and Margaret Spellings (G. W. Bush), noneducators and former education secretaries, recently appeared on PBS News Hour, “Study shows parents overestimate their student’s academic progress” to dash any hope parents might have that their children are doing well in school. Who’s behind such gloomy reporting?

Here’s how PBS begins, and here’s the survey:

A survey conducted in March of 2023 for the group Learning Heroes found 90 percent of parents think their kids are doing fine, but standardized test scores show otherwise. Among eighth graders, for example, just 29 percent were proficient in reading either at or above their grade level. In math, just 26 percent were considered proficient. This sheds light on what’s being called the parent perception gap.

Learning Heroes? They’re a group called a campaign, seemingly to create divisiveness, sowing distrust in teachers and public schools, to tell parents about so-called gaps in student learning. They call parents learning heroes. They appear to be critical of grades and a teacher’s evaluation of the student, and they focus on standardized test scores.

Gaps have been the focus for 22 years since No Child Left Behind, and Duncan and Spellings had their chance to reduce the learning and opportunity gaps they speak about. They never discuss or seem to reflect on their accountability for public school problems, especially their emphasis on high-stakes standardized testing.

Learning gaps are the difference or disparities between what students learn and grade-level expectations. Adults create expectations with standardized tests. Few raise questions about whether such expectations could be developmentally inappropriate, and even when they do, they’re ignored.

Opportunity gaps are life factors children struggle with surrounding ethnicity, race, gender, disability, and income. Many children facing opportunity gaps attend poor schools without resources or quality curricula.

Learning Heroes receives support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Charles and Lynn Shusterman Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, and the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

None of the above champion public schools. Most promote school privatization and, for years, have praised charter schools, which continue to do poorly in many places.

Looking closer at the learning heroes team, many come from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

The PBS report also references Go Beyond the Grades, connected to the Chamber of Commerce, which has never been optimistic about public education either. Remember their state-by-state report called Leaders and Laggards?

What’s ironic is that these same individuals helped put high-stakes standardized testing and Common Core State Standards in place years ago, along with other bad reforms, and they still complain that public schools are failing. They’re criticizing their own failed ideology in the name of school privatization!

This is a wonderful post. Please open the link and read it all!

Inspired by Nancy’s post, I wrote a letter to PBS Newshour. I hope you will too. Write to: viewermail@newshour.org

Dear Newshour Staff, 

I was disappointed to see that you invited the overseers of the past two decades to discuss the situation of American education. 

No Child Left Behind (Spellings) and Race to the Top (Duncan) were both disasters. Both inflicted and intensified the overuse and abuse of standardized testing in America’s public schools. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of schools were closed based on these invalid and unreliable measures. 

Spellings and Duncan spent years promoting failed policies and are now called upon by PBS to comment on the outcomes of their punitive and ineffective ideas. They are in no position to say where we went wrong, because they were the architects of the disaster. 

You really should invite dispassionate experts to review their record, rather than invite those who imposed bad ideas. 

Can anyone honestly say that “no child was left behind” after more than a dozen years of NCLB? Can anyone say that the $500 billion spent on Race to the Top was successful in any respect? The answer to both questions is no. 

NCLB and RTTT have demoralized a generation of teachers; destroyed the joy of learning; and produced no improvement. Worse, they created a canard about “failing schools” that completely ignores the root causes of poor student performance. 

What if those billions had been spent on reducing class sizes; raising teachers’ salaries; upgrading obsolete facilities; ensuring that every child had access to nutrition and medical check-ups? 

It boggles my mind that the Newshour would buy into the myths of the past 20 years instead of digging deeper to understand the underlying issues. 

Diane Ravitch 

Author and Historian 

Heather Cox Richardson writes that the Republican Party has tied itself to unpopular issues—like banning abortion—and their only strategy now is to suppress the vote, not only the Black vote but the youth vote. The fact that they are defending other unpopular issues—like vouchers, tearing down the wall of separation between church and state, and eliminating any kind of gun control—also explains why they are blowing up “culture war” issues of litttle consequence, like their demonizing of trans youth and their faux outrage about drag queens. It’s all a smoke screen for their real agenda.

Yesterday’s vote in Wisconsin reinforces the polling numbers that show how overwhelmingly popular abortion rights and fair voting are, and it seems likely to throw the Republican push to suppress voting into hyperdrive before the 2024 election.

Since the 1980s, Republicans have pushed the idea of “ballot integrity” or, later, “voter fraud” to justify voter suppression. That cry began in 1986, when Republican operatives, realizing that voters opposed Reagan’s tax cuts, launched a “ballot integrity” initiative that they privately noted “could keep the black vote down considerably.”

That effort to restrict the vote is now a central part of Republican policy. Together with Documented, an investigative watchdog and journalism project, The Guardian today published the story of the attempt by three leading right-wing election denial groups to restrict voting rights in Republican-dominated states by continuing the lie that voting fraud is rampant.

The Guardian’s story, by Ed Pilkington and Jamie Corey, explores a two-day February meeting in Washington organized by the right-wing Heritage Foundation and attended by officials from 13 states, including the chief election officials of Indiana, Florida, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia. At the meeting, participants learned about auditing election results, litigation, and funding to challenge election results. Many of the attendees and speakers are associated with election denial.

Since the 2020 election, Republican-dominated states have passed “election reform” measures that restrict the vote; those efforts are ongoing. On Thursday alone, the Texas Senate advanced a number of new restrictions. In the wake of high turnout among Generation Z Americans, who were born after 1996 and are more racially and ethnically diverse than their elders, care deeply about reproductive and LGBTQ rights, and want the government to do more to address society’s ills, Republican legislatures are singling out the youth vote to hamstring.

That determination to silence younger Americans is playing out today in Tennessee, where a school shooting on March 28 in Nashville killed six people, including three 9-year-olds. The shooting has prompted protesters to demand that the legislature honor the will of the people by addressing gun safety, but instead, Republicans in the legislature have moved to expel three Democratic lawmakers who approached the podium without being recognized to speak—a breach of House rules—and led protesters in chants calling for gun reform. As Republicans decried the breach by Representatives Gloria Johnson, Justin Jones, and Justin Pearson, protestors in the galleries called out, “Fascists!”

Republican efforts to gain control did not end there. On Twitter today, Johnson noted that she had “just had a visit from the head of HR and the House ethics lawyer,” who told her “that if I am expelled, I will lose my health benefits,” but the ethics lawyer went on to explain “that in one case, a member who was potentially up for expulsion decided to resign because if you resign, you maintain your health benefits.”

The echoes of Reconstruction in that conversation are deafening. In that era, when the positions of the parties were reversed, southern Democrats used similar “persuasion” to chase Republican legislators out of office. When that didn’t work, of course, they also threatened the physical safety of those who stood in the way of their absolute control of politics.

On Saturday night, someone fired shots into the home of the man who founded and runs the Tennessee Holler, a progressive news site. Justin Kanew was covering the gun safety struggle in Tennessee. He wrote: “This violence has no place in a civilized society and we are thankful no one was physically hurt. The authorities have not completed their investigation and right now we do not know for sure the reason for this attack. We urge the Williamson County Sheriff’s office to continue to investigate this crime and help shed light on Saturday’s unfortunate events and bring the perpetrators of this crime to justice. In the meantime, our family remains focused on keeping our children healthy and safe.”

The anger coming from losing candidate Kelly last night, and his warning that “this does not end well….[a]nd I wish Wisconsin the best of luck because I think it’s going to need it,” sure sounded like those lawmakers in the Reconstruction years who were convinced that only people like them should govern. The goal of voter suppression, control of statehouses, and violence—then and now—is minority rule.

Today’s Republican Party has fallen under the sway of MAGA Republicans who advocate Christian nationalism despite its general unpopularity; on April 3, Hungarian president Viktor Orbán, who has destroyed true democracy in favor of “Christian democracy” in his own country, cheered Trump on and told him to “keep on fighting.” Like Orbán, today’s Republicans reject the principles that underpin democracy, including the ideas of equality before the law and separation of church and state, and instead want to impose Christian rule on the American majority.

Their conviction that American “tradition” focuses on patriarchy rather than equality is a dramatic rewriting of our history, and it has led to recent attacks on LGBTQ Americans. In Kansas today, the legislature overrode Democratic governor Laura Kelly’s veto of a bill banning transgender athletes who were assigned male at birth from participating in women’s sports. Kansas is the twentieth state to enact such a policy, and when it goes into effect, it will affect just one youth in the state.

Yesterday, Idaho governor Brad Little signed a law banning gender-affirming care for people under 18, and today Indiana governor Eric Holcomb did the same.

Meanwhile, Republican-dominated states are so determined to ignore the majority they are also trying to make it harder for voters to challenge state laws through ballot initiatives. Alice MIranda Ollstein and Megan Messerly of Politico recently wrote about how, after voters in a number of states overrode abortion bans through ballot initiatives, legislatures in Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Missouri, North Dakota, Ohio, and Oklahoma are now debating ways to make it harder for voters to get measures on the ballot, sometimes even specifying that abortion-related measures are not eligible for ballot challenges.

And yet, in the face of the open attempt of a minority to seize control, replacing our democracy with Christian nationalism, the majority is reasserting its power. In Michigan, after an independent redistricting commission redrew maps to end the same sort of gerrymandering that is currently in place in Wisconsin and Tennessee, Democrats in 2022 won a slim majority to control the state government. And today, Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer signed into law a bill revoking a 1931 law that criminalized abortion without exception for rape or incest.

Please open the link to see the sources.

Dr. Mike DeGuire, a retired principal in the Denver Public Schools, has been keeping track of the money flowing into Denver’s mayoral race, which will be held tomorrow.

There are 17 candidates in the race. If no candidate wins a majority, there will be a runoff on June 6.

The two leading candidates are corporate education reformer Mike Johnston and Kelly Brough. Brough was CEO of the Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce and is supported by the business community. Johnston was endorsed by the Denver Post , which gives a tremendous boost to his campaign. He previously ran for Governor in 2018 but ran third behind Jared Polis. He ran for the Senate in 2020 but dropped out after former governor John Hickenlooper entered the race.

This is what Mike DeGuire discovered about the funding of Mike Johnston’s campaign:

Denver will select a new mayor for the first time in 12 years on April 4, 2023. Money has been pouring into the campaigns of Kelly Brough and Mike Johnston from rich developers, investors, and corporate executives. While Brough has received almost $1 million in independent expenditure money for her campaign, Mike Johnston has topped that amount by more than double, at $2.3 million as of April 2.

As reported in the Denverite on March 31, 2023, “The lion’s share of the reported contributions into Advancing Denver, the IE supporting Johnston, came from a group of out-of-state donors (between his campaign and his super PAC, 67% of his non-Fair Elections Fund contributions come from out of state): $779,804 from Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, who lives in California; $250,450 from Steve Mandel, a hedge fund billionaire who lives in Connecticut. Another $100,000 came from John Arnold, a former Enron trader from Texas known as the “King of Natural Gas,” who along with his wife gave to Advancing Denver. (Arnold was cleared of wrongdoing in the collapse of Enron.)”

The money from Hoffman, the Arnolds, and Mandel are only the beginning of outside support from rich donors. Yet why are the billionaires and millionaires giving so much to Johnston’s campaign? The article continues to state, “It’s unknown how they crossed paths, what issues exactly they worked on together in the past, and why they care specifically about Denver. Johnston “has a history of billionaire donors backing him through independent groups. Donors he likely met through his work on education reform issues, giving him a national profile.”

And there is the probable connection: Education Reform! Mike Johnston was the primary author of SB-191, Colorado’s controversial teacher evaluation bill, passed in 2010. He supported using testing to determine teacher evaluations and the closing of schools if students did not show improvements over time. His career has been heavily tied to the reform movement privatizers who have been working to promote increased expansion of charter schools. In addition to his work on the infamous teacher evaluation SB191 bill, he serves on the Board and co-founded New Leaders for New schools, an organization established to teach” a pro-privatization and business focused ideology to prospective school leaders.” He also participated in the Aspen-Pahara Institute fellowship training in 2012, which is designed to provide participants with strategies to spread the message of corporate reform in public schools.

While his role as Mayor would not directly enable him to impact the Denver Public schools, there is no question that he wants to be involved in the city’s school system. His responses to an Educate Denver survey indicate his desire to influence and possibly control how the district makes decisions on governance and other policies. In response to one of the questions from the Educate Denver survey, he stated, “As Mayor, my goal is to work closely with teachers, administrators, and parents to make sure the City is supporting DPS while using my position to push for better outcomes.”

Over the past decade, Johnston developed connections with a number of hedge fund investors and corporate executives who are committed to privatizing the public education system. WHO are they?

Reid Hoffman donated $904,678 to Johnston’s campaign. Hoffman is worth $2–3 billion. In 2011, he supported pro-charter candidates in Louisiana and he gave similar monetary support in 2018 in the same state.

Steve Mandel donated $250,000. He is worth $3.6 billion. For years, Mandel has given large amounts of money to candidates who support charter school expansion.

John and Laura Arnold donated $99,000.Their net worth is $3.3 billion. In the last decade, they have given millions to candidates across the country who support charter schools and who will push to privatize education.

Kent Thiry donated $300,000. His net worth is $44 million. Over the last ten years, he has given thousands of dollars to candidates who are committed to expanding charter schools and opposing teacher unions.

Reuben Monger donated $100,000. He is a former director of Stand for Children, an organization focused on spreading charter schools in cities across the U.S.

Lawrence Berger donated $100,000. He is the CEO of Amplify, a curriculum and assessment company worth millions which has been supporting charter schools as it sells its education technology systems to schools across the country.

Josh Bekenstein donated $50,000. He is worth over $6 billion. He is the co-chairman of Bain Capital, and has contributed to candidates and referendums supporting charter school expansion in several states.

Katherine Bradley donated $25,000. She is on the Board of Kipp Charter schools, the largest charter school chain in the country. She donated to candidates supporting charters for decades.

Emma Bloomberg and David Youngren each donated $10,000, and for years, they donated to candidates who want to expand the charter network schools.

Other investors who represent the hedge fund industry and who seem to be looking to make profits in the Denver mayoral race include: Art Reimer, a private wealth advisor with Raintree Solutions, donated $100,000, and Eric Resnick, CEO for KSL Capital Partners,another private equity firm, donated $50,000, and he was also part of the Vail Valley Foundation, where he knew Johnston. There are almost ten other investors who have contributed $5–10,000 to his Advancing Denver IE.

Denver citizens should think twice about this blatant monetary influence of wealthy investors who are trying to buy the mayoral election for Johnston.

Johnston is clearly the favorite in the race due to his Denver Post endorsement.

Mike Johnston began his career in Teach for America, then became a principal, then won a seat in the State Senate. He is a solid corporate reformer.

I was in Denver in 2010 and was scheduled to debate State Senator Mike Johnston before a room full of civic leaders. He had proposed a law to evaluate teachers based on the test scores of their students, with 50% of their evaluation based on test scores. The debate didn’t happen because Johnston was delayed. As I concluded my remarks, he arrived, jubilant that his legislation (SB191) had just passed. He then spoke about the dramatic transformation that his legislation would bring about. Bad teachers and bad principals would be exposed and fired.

In the future, Johnston claimed, all of Colorado would have great teachers, great principals, great schools, thanks to the law he put in place.

None of those bold promises came true. As his reform ally Van Schoales wrote in Education Week in 2017, the reformers were gravely disappointed to discover that most teachers in the state were not teaching tested subjects. Every single one of the state’s 268 charter schools waived out of the evaluation plan.

Educators were overwhelmingly against SB191. They knew something that the reformers didn’t know: student test scores measure not teacher quality, but the students in the classroom. Teachers in affluent districts got high scores; teachers teaching the most vulnerable students (SPED and ELL) tended not to see big test score gains or none at all.

The results were appalling:

Colorado Department of Education data released in February show that the distribution of teacher effectiveness in the state looks much as it did before passage of the bill. Eighty-eight percent of Colorado teachers were rated effective or highly effective, 4 percent were partially effective, 7.8 percent of teachers were not rated, and less than 1 percent were deemed ineffective. In other words, we leveraged everything we could and not only didn’t advance teacher effectiveness, we created a massive bureaucracy and alienated many in the field.

Broken promises. But no matter. The money is flowing in, and Mike Johnston—reformer extraordinaire—is likely to be the next mayor of Denver.