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Herschel Walker Lost, But Is He the ”New Normal” for the Republican Party?

By dianeravitch
December 7, 2022 //
28

Tom Nichols, a staff writer for The Atlantic, posed the question that is the title of this post. Nearly half the voters of Georgia cast a ballot for a man who was manifestly unqualified for the office, by any measure. Republicans thought it was cunning to pick a Black candidate, hoping to peel support away from Senator Warnock. It didn’t work. Walker got very few Black votes. Warnock won with unified Black support and a multiracial coalition.

Nichols fears that Trump has dumbed down expectations for Republican candidates to an alarming degree. Following his model, they can be stupid, they can be immoral, they can be liars, they can be adulterous and flaunt it, they can mock democracy. There is no low too low for them.

Nichols writes:

Walker’s candidacy is a reminder of just how much we’ve acclimated ourselves to the presence of awful people in our public life. Although we can be heartened by the defeat of Christian nationalists and election deniers and other assorted weirdos, we should remember how, in a better time in our politics, these candidates would not have survived even a moment of public scrutiny or weathered their first scandal or stumble.

And yet, here we are: An entire political party shrugs off revelations that a man running on an anti-abortion platform may have paid for an abortion (possibly two), has unacknowledged children, and may also be a violent creep. Not long ago, Walker would have been washed out of political contention as a matter of first principles.

Think of how much our civic health has declined in general. Only 35 years ago, during the long-ago Camelot of the late 1980s, Gary Hart had to pull out of the Democratic primaries for getting caught with a pretty lady on a boat named “Monkey Business,” and the televangelist Jimmy Swaggart stood with tears streaming down his face because he’d been caught with a prostitute in a Louisiana motel. In 1995, Senator Bob Packwood (again, more tears) resigned in the aftermath of revelations of sexual misconduct just before being expelled from the Senate.

The Republicans were once an uptight and censorious party—something I rather liked about them, to be honest—and they are now a party where literally nothing is a disqualification for office. There is only one cardinal rule: Do not lose. The will to power, the urge to defeat the enemy, the insistence that the libs must be owned—this resentment and spite fuels everything. And worst of all, we’ve gotten used to it. I’m not sure who said it first, but the Doobie Brothers said it again in the title of their 1974 album: What Were Once Vices Are Now Habits.

There’s a lot of blame to go around, but no one did more to pioneer the politics of disgust than Donald Trump, who took the outrageous moments of his two presidential campaigns and turned them into virtues. Trump ran, and still runs, as something of a dare, a challenge to see if we’re just a bunch of delicate scolds who get the vapors over things like veterans or foreign influence or nepotism. Are you really going to let the commies and immigrants from the “shithole countries” take over? he seems to ask at every turn, just because of little nothing-burgers like whether I’m keeping highly classified documents in the magazine rack next to my gold toilet?

As usual, however, the real problem lies with the voters. The Republicans are getting the candidates they want. This is not about partisanship—it’s about an unhinged faux-egalitarianism that demands that candidates for office be no better than the rest of us, and perhaps even demonstrably worse. How dare anyone run on virtue or character; who do they think they are?

It’s terrifying to realize that totally unhinged candidates, not only in Georgia but in other states, like Arizona, received almost half the vote.

My hope lies with changing demographics and our youth. Young people who have grown up in the 21st century are likely to replace the shrinking generations of old white bigots, who are now the GOP base. America will be a better nation in the years ahead, as these voters make better choices and choose a better future where all of us make progress. Together.

Categories Character, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Georgia, Ignorance, Insane, Republicans, Trump

Florida: Why Does Governor DeSantis Appoint Local School Board Members?

By dianeravitch
December 3, 2022 //
20

This is a question that I hope someone in Florida will answer.

On several occasions in the past year, Governor DeSantis has appointed his loyalists to fill vacancies on local school boards.

In one county, his appointees fired the district superintendent and school board attorney at their first public meeting.

Just days ago, he appointed a campaign donor to the Miami-Dade school board.

Categories DeSantis, Ethics, Florida

Connecticut: The Biggest Charter Scandal Of All Time

By dianeravitch
November 6, 2022 //
12

Back in 2014, a prominent charter school leader in Connecticut resigned after it was revealed that he had been convicted of felonies many years earlier, and that he did not have a doctorate, although he claimed he did. Michael Sharpe resigned as CEO of Jumoke Academy, which ran charter schools in Connecticut and planned to expand to Louisiana.

Sharpe was part of a management organization called Family Urban Schools of Excellence or FUSE, created in 2012. The state had given millions of dollars to Jumoke to take over low-performing schools and turn them around.

The controversy over Sharpe was embarrassing to Democratic Governor Dannell Malloy, who was a cheerleader for charter schools. Malloy chose Stefan Pryor to be the State Commissioner of Education. Pryor had no experience in the classroom but was a co-founder of the no-excuses charter chain Achievement First. Charter schools in the state were allowed to have only 30% of their staff with state certification. The charter industry was strong in Connecticut due to the financial power of hedge funders and the Sackler Family (of opioid fame), which launched Conn-CAN, a charter advocacy group, which became the national 50CAN.

But the biggest scandal of all came to light in the past week, when the same Michael Sharpe was convicted of breaking into the homes of four women in 1984, kidnapping them, threatening the women with a firearm, sexually assaulting them, then stealing money and valuables.

Sharpe was convicted of kidnapping and faces a sentence of 25-100 years in prison. The statute of limitations had expired on the sexual assault charges. Sharpe’s DNA was found at the four scenes. The case was solved by the state’s cold case unit.

Back in the days of his charter fame, the Center for Education Reform identified him as a national leader.

Dr. Sharpe is president of the Connecticut Charter School Association and founding member of the Legacy Project and Family Urban Schools of Excellence (FUSE). He also sits on the boards of the National Charter School Leadership Council, St. Agnes Home, Inc., the CT Chapter of Lupus Foundation of America and Connecticut Landmarks.

Dr. Sharpe began work at Jumoke Academy in 1998 and was appointed its CEO in 2003. Under his leadership, Jumoke Academy’s middle and elementary schools were cited for three consecutive years as one of the top ten performing urban schools in the State of Connecticut.

Jumoke Academy is committed to developing the whole child, and as such, offers programs that ensure our children become competent in the arts, humanities, civic and social responsibilities, and that they understand the value and importance of good character.

In 2015, after Sharpe had resigned, civil rights attorney Wendy Lecker wrote about the strange trajectory of Jumoke Academy, FUSE, and Michael Sharpe.

Earlier this month, the Connecticut Department of Education quietly distributed a scathing investigative report on the Jumoke/FUSE charter chain, conducted by a law firm the department retained. The report reads like a manual on how to break every rule of running a non-profit organization.

The investigators found that although FUSE and Jumoke were supposed to be two separate, tax-exempt organizations, both were run by Michael Sharpe alone. FUSE, formed in 2012, never held board of directors’ meetings until after the public revelations in the spring of 2014 of Michael Sharpe’s felony record for embezzlement and falsification of his academic credentials. FUSE entered into contracts with the state to run two public schools without approval by its board. In fact, it is unclear that FUSE even had a board of directors then. Jumoke, too, played fast and loose with board meetings. Jumoke’s board gave Sharpe “unfettered control” over every aspect of the organization. Even after he left Jumoke for FUSE, Sharpe still ran Jumoke, leaving day-to-day operations to his nephew, an intern there.

Hiring and background checks were in Sharpe’s sole discretion. He placed ex-convicts in the two public schools run by Jumoke, Hartford’s Milner and Bridgeport’s Dunbar. Dunbar’s principal, brought in by Sharpe, was recently arraigned on charges of stealing more than $10,000 from the school.

Nepotism was “rampant.” Sharpe’s mother founded Jumoke. Sharpe moved from paraprofessional to CEO in 2003, with no additional training. His unqualified daughter and nephew were hired, as well as his sister.

The investigation found extreme comingling of funds and of financial and accounting activities, noting that it “would be difficult to construct a less appropriate financial arrangement between two supposedly separate organizations.”

Jumoke/FUSE used state money to engage in aggressive real estate acquisition, some not even for educational purposes, and some inexplicably purchased above its appraised value. Properties were collateral and/or were mortgaged for one another. Loan rates were excessive. To date, loans are guaranteed by FUSE, which is not operational.

Jumoke leased Sharpe part of a building who, violating the lease, sublet it and collected rent. Sharpe hired Jumoke’s facilities director’s husband to perform costly renovations on the parts of the building, his bedroom and bathroom, paid by Jumoke.

These are just some of the misdeeds that occurred without oversight by the State Board of Education or the State Department of Education. The board approved contracts to run two public schools without verifying that FUSE had no board of directors. It approved millions to be paid to FUSE/Jumoke to buy non-educational buildings, charge excessive consulting fees to public schools and engage in possibly fraudulent activities. Worse still, the board allowed Jumoke/FUSE to run Milner schoolinto the ground, jeopardizing the education of Milner’s vulnerable students.

“Dr. Sharpe’s” Linked-In profile has not been updated. It’s very impressive.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Connecticut, Corporate Reformers, Corruption, Education Industry, Ethics, Failure, Scandals

Justice Amy Coney Barrett Gets $2 Million Book Deal

By dianeravitch
October 31, 2022 //
40

Blogger Robert Hubbell reports that Justice Any Coney Barrett has won a $2 million advance on a book that explains how her personal views don’t affect her judicial decisions. Tell me another. Must be a very short book.

Hubbell writes:

Why does this feel like a “reward” for overruling Roe v. Wade?

Justice Amy Coney Barret has secured a $2 million advance from Penguin Random House for a book that will reportedly discuss “how judges are not supposed to bring their personal feelings into how they rule.” Given the dissonance between the proposed topic and Justice Barrett’s religiously motivated ruling in Dobbs, it is possible that the book is intended to be satirical, but there is little evidence that Barrett has a sense of humor.

So, the most reasonable explanations are that Justice Barrett (a) lacks self-awareness and any sense of shame, and (b) the shocking advance is an indirect “reward” for being the final vote necessary to overrule Roe v. Wade. To be fair, Barrett secured the $2 million advance for a book that can be summarized in a sentence fragment before she overruled Roe. To be fairer, there is little evidence that the German conglomerate that owns Penguin Random House has any interest in US politics—apart from monetizing controversy. A group of publishing professionals is calling on Penguin Random House to reconsider its deal with Barrett.

I, for one, cannot wait not to read Justice Barrett’s explanation of how her deeply held faith did not influence her vote to impose Catholic dogma on 320 million Americans. Perhaps future confirmation hearings can ask nominees for the Supreme Court if they intend to accept an obscene advance for writing a book of judicial fairy tales. That will give nominees something else to lie about besides their respect for precedent.

If you read Hubbell’s post, be sure to see his critique of the blunders of the Democratic Party’s Progressive Caucus, which released a statement calling on Biden to negotiate with Putin about ending the war in Ukraine, then withdrawing their statement as a mistake. I agree with Hubbell. Any negotiation that doesn’t include Ukraine is ridiculous. Any negotiation that rewards Putin with Ukrainian territory for his aggression encourages more aggression. I fully support the heroism and courage of the Ukrainian people in resisting Putin’s naked aggression.

Categories Ethics, Hypocrisy, Lies, Religion

New York: Hasidic School Will Pay $8 Million After Admitting Fraud

By dianeravitch
October 25, 2022 //
19

The New York Times reported that the largest private Hasidic Jewish school in the state of New York—the Central United Talmudical Academy— admitted in federal court that it had stolen millions of dollars from government programs. The school enrolls 2,000 boys and is located in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. The leaders of the school acknowledged that they had taken money intended for “school lunches, technology and child care” They created no-show jobs for some employees and paid others in cash, so they could receive welfare. The school will pay $5 million in fines in addition to more than $3 million that it has paid for restitution. .

State law requires all private schools to provide an education comparable to what is in public schools. In 2015, New York City’s education department said it would investigate complaints about the quality of secular education in schools in the Hasidic Jewish community.

The school will be overseen by an independent monitor for the next three years.

The Central United Talmudical Academy, an all-boys private religious school, factored prominently in a New York Times investigation last month that found that Hasidic boys’ schools across the state had received hundreds of millions of dollars in government funding while denying their students a basic secular education.

The Williamsburg school received about $10 million in government funding in the year before the pandemic, according to a Times analysis. Its leaders, who are affiliated with the Satmar group of Hasidic Judaism, also operate several other schools in the state.

There are more than 100 Hasidic boys’ schools in Brooklyn and the lower Hudson Valley, and they have received a total of more than $1 billion in taxpayer money over the past four years, The Times found. They focus on providing religious instruction, with most offering little instruction in English reading and math and almost no classes in history, science or civics.

In general, many Hasidic boys’ schools score lower on state standardized tests than any other schools in the state, public or private.

In 2019, The Times reported, the Central United Talmudical Academy agreed to give state standardized tests in reading and math to more than 1,000 students. Every one of them failed.

Categories Ethics, Fraud, New York, New York City, Religion

Florida: Did DeSantis Break the Law When He Took Contol of Redistricting the State?

By dianeravitch
October 15, 2022 //
11

ProPublica, the journalistic voice of integrity, suggests that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis may have broken the law when he took personal control of redistricting the state’s Congressional seats. The Miami Herald reported the story.

“May have broken the law” is an understatement.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was incensed. Late last year, the state’s Republican Legislature had drawn congressional maps that largely kept districts intact, leaving the GOP with only a modest electoral advantage. DeSantis threw out the Legislature’s work and redrew Florida’s congressional districts, making them far more favorable to Republicans. The plan was so aggressive that the Republican-controlled Legislature balked and fought DeSantis for months. The governor overruled lawmakers and pushed his map through.

DeSantis’ office has publicly stressed that partisan considerations played no role and that partisan operatives were not involved in the new map. A ProPublica examination of how that map was drawn — and who helped decide its new boundaries — reveals a much different origin story. The new details show that the governor’s office appears to have misled the public and the state Legislature and may also have violated Florida law. DeSantis aides worked behind the scenes with an attorney who serves as the national GOP’s top redistricting lawyer and other consultants tied to the national party apparatus, according to records and interviews.

Florida’s Constitution was amended in 2010 to prohibit partisan-driven redistricting, a landmark effort in the growing movement to end gerrymandering as an inescapable feature of American politics. Barbara Pariente, a former chief justice of the state Supreme Court who retired in 2019, told ProPublica that DeSantis’ collaboration with people connected to the national GOP would constitute “significant evidence of a violation of the constitutional amendment.” “If that evidence was offered in a trial, the fact that DeSantis was getting input from someone working with the Republican Party and who’s also working in other states — that would be very powerful,” said Pariente, who was appointed to the Supreme Court by Democrat Lawton Chiles.

A meeting invite obtained by ProPublica shows that on Jan. 5, top DeSantis aides had a “Florida Redistricting Kick-off Call” with out-of-state operatives. Those outsiders had also been working with states across the country to help the Republican Party create a favorable election map. In the days after the call, the key GOP law firm working for DeSantis logged dozens of hours on the effort, invoices show. The firm has since billed the state more than $450,000 for its work on redistricting. A week and a half after the call, DeSantis unveiled his new map.

No Florida governor had ever pushed their own district lines before. His plan wiped away half of the state’s Black-dominated congressional districts, dramatically curtailing Black voting power in America’s largest swing state.

One of the districts, held by Democrat Al Lawson, had been created by the Florida Supreme Court just seven years before. Stretching along a swath of North Florida once dominated by tobacco and cotton plantations, it had drawn together Black communities largely populated by the descendants of sharecroppers and slaves. DeSantis shattered it, breaking the district into four pieces. He then tucked each fragment away in a majority-white, heavily Republican district….

Analysts predict that DeSantis’ map will give the GOP four more members of Congress from Florida, the largest gain by either party in any state. If the forecasts hold, Republicans will win 20 of Florida’s 28 seats in the upcoming midterms — meaning that Republicans would control more than 70% of the House delegation in a state where Trump won just over half of the vote.

The reverberations of DeSantis’ effort could go beyond Florida in another way. His erasure of Lawson’s seat broke long-held norms and invited racial discrimination lawsuits, experts said. Six political scientists and law professors who study voting rights told ProPublica it’s the first instance they’re aware of where a state so thoroughly dismantled a Black-dominated district.

If the governor prevails against suits challenging his map, he will have forged a path for Republicans all over the country to take aim at Black-held districts. “To the extent that this is successful, it’s going to be replicated in other states. There’s no question,” said Michael Latner, a political science professor at California Polytechnic State University who studies redistricting. “The repercussions are so broad that it’s kind of terrifying.” Al Lawson’s district, now wiped away by DeSantis, had been created in response to an earlier episode of surreptitious gerrymandering in Florida.

Read more at: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics-government/article267118181.html#storylink=cpy

Categories Accountability, Corruption, DeSantis, Elections, Ethics, Florida, Fraud, Racism

Bob Shepherd: Why Extremists Fund Christian Madrassas

By dianeravitch
October 5, 2022 //
77

In response to a post about the generous public funding of yeshivas that fail to teach English, science, mathematics, or history, our resident polymath Bob Shepherd compared these schools to Islamic madrassas.

Well, traditionally, in the Arab world, young men interested in following a religious vocation would go to one of the schools attached to a mosque, a madrassa, to study. These madrassas were Islamic seminaries. During the Russo-Afghan War, powerful, wealthy traditionalists in Saudi Arabia started funding madrassas throughout the Middle East and other parts of the Islamic war to inculcate a new generation of young people, mostly very poor young people, in an extremist version of Sunni Islam that is the de facto official religion in Saudi Arabia, Wahhābīsm. At the time, the U.S. was supporting the Afghan resistance, supplying training and weapons to resistance fighters like the young Osama bin Ladin, who made his name among the resistance fighters when he and others stopped a convoy of Russian tanks with American-supplied Stinger missiles. Well I remember Ronald Reagan speaking of those Afghan “freedom fighters” and saying that they were “Good, God-fearing people, just like us.” Those fighters were the Taliban. Yup. Same Taliban. Now, bin Laden and other young people in that movement were followers of an Egyptian named Sayyed Qutb, who had come to America to study, had been horrified by things like seeing women singing on television, and went back and started writing books about how decadent Western culture was going to inundate and overwhelm Islam and the only way to stop that was to fight back vigorously. To that end, he coopted a word that had referred to spiritual struggle toward enlightenment, jihad. So, the combination of the Saudi-funded fundamentalist madrassas and the work of Qutb helped create a powerful Islamicist movement, with consequences that included the events of 9/11.

Well, flash forward to today. The Extreme Court, formerly the Supreme Court of the United States, has been taken over by a supermajority of religious nutcase Republican appointees, including three appointed by the areligious Donald Trump (his worships only himself and Mammon). That Extreme Court is busily clearing the way for taxpayer funding of religious schools in order to create vehicles for indoctrination of a new generation of kids in fundamentalist, nationalist Christian ideology (see, for example, the Hillsdale 1775 curriculum), just as extremist traditionalists in Saudi Arabia funded the training of extremists in religious schools, madrassas, all over the Middle East and beyond. Why is the Extreme Court doing this? Because educated Republicans can see from polls and from the culture at large that the youth and the cultural avant-garde are against them ON EVERY ISSUE. So, they want to create a mechanism for turning that back, and religious schoolings is such a mechanism. Institutions for indoctrination.

It’s ironic, isn’t it? The Pugs HATE Islamic fundamentalist education, but fundamentalist education is precisely what they want the rest of us, here, to pay for.

Categories Academic Freedom, Accountability, Bigotry, Education Industry, Ethics, Religion, Separation of church and state

Mississippi Corruption: Funds for the Needy Used for a Volleyball Stadium

By dianeravitch
October 5, 2022 //
18

Investigative journalists Ashton Pittman and William Pittman exposed a major scandal in Mississippi. The governor misappropriated millions of dollars intended for the needy and diverted the money to build a volleyball stadium to please NFL star Brett Favre. They gained access to text messages among the major actors.

They begin:

Between 2016 and 2019, the Mississippi Department of Human Services and nonprofits associated with it allegedly misspent more than tens of millions of dollars in federal Temporary Assistance For Needy Families funds that should have gone to the poorest families in the poorest state. More than $5 million of those funds went toward a volleyball-stadium project at the University of Southern Mississippi favored by retired NFL quarterback Brett Favre and $1.1 million went to Favre himself.

This timeline focuses on that element of the welfare scandal, including text messages with Favre and others revealed in court filings by former Gov. Phil Bryant and by Nancy New’s nonprofit, the Mississippi Community Education Center. The text messages are not a complete record, however; Bryant’s texts include redactions; New’s texts do not indicate redactions, but nevertheless appear to leave out important exchanges. When necessary, text exchanges that were spread across multiple pages in the court filings have been stitched together.

Though New, former MDHS Director John Davis, and four others have faced criminal charges, prosecutors have not accused Favre nor Bryant of a crime.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Ethics, Mississippi

Should Admission to Middle Schools Be Competitive?

By dianeravitch
September 25, 2022 //
12

New York City has long had a significant means of sorting and labeling students. When Michael Bloomberg became mayor, he expanded the number of selective middle schools. It’s not clear whether he was trying to lure white parents to stay in the city or whether he was a dyed-in-the-wool believer in test-based meritocracy.

Whatever the case, New York City has large numbers of selective middle schools. The New York City Bar Association, through its Civil Rights and Education and Law committees, issued a call to eliminate selective admissions in middle schools.

For what it’s worth, when I attended public schools in Houston, Texas, many years ago, there were no selective schools. I attended my neighborhood elementary school, junior high school, and high school.

Things have changed. For better or worse?

Contact: Eric Friedman

efriedman@nycbar.org

Eli Cohen

Eecohen@nycbar.org


PERMANENTLY ELIMINATE COMPETITIVE ADMISSIONS TO NEW YORK CITY MIDDLE-SCHOOLS

Chancellor Banks and the New York City Department of Education Should Not Reinstate Screens

New York, September 19, 2022 – The New York City Bar Association (City Bar), through its Civil Rights and Education and the Law Committees,[1] renews its calls for the New York City Department of Education (DOE) to eliminate competitive admissions to the City’s public middle schools. We are concerned by reports that DOE is considering reinstating the screens for middle school students and we urge that this practice not be restored.

 

The City Bar first called for the elimination of competitive admissions for the City’s public elementary and middle schools during the de Blasio Administration, arguing that the policy unnecessarily segregates our students, schools and educational programs, leaving some students without the opportunity for enriched learning that all of our children deserve.[2] In support of those conclusions, our letters noted that:

 

 

  • Measures of young children’s ability and behavior through competitive admission screening and testing are unreliable and racially biased.

 

  • Competitive admissions for very young children are pedagogically unsound because research demonstrates that all children derive educational and social benefits from diverse classrooms with students of differing races, economic backgrounds and learning abilities.

 

  • The practice of excluding the majority of certain socioeconomic and racial groups of young children from a large percentage of public institutions, through the use of middle school screens was inequitable, conducive to racial hierarchy and inconsistent with our democratic ideals.[3]

 

It would be deeply problematic to reinstate middle school screens and allow public schools and programs within schools that opt for that process to effectively close their doors to the majority of students. Student-assignment methods for middle school should take into account the characteristics of individual students only for the purpose of achieving balanced and equitable access for all students – not for the disproportionate exclusion of historically disadvantaged groups.

 

For all the reasons outlined in our previous letters, and as was most recently argued in the New York Appleseed’s September 16 letter,[4] the City Bar calls on Schools Chancellor David Banks and DOE to permanently end the use of middle school screens.

 

[1] The Civil Rights Committee addresses issues affecting the civil rights of New Yorkers, especially the rights of marginalized communities. The Education and the Law Committee addresses K-12 and higher education, and legal and policy education issues affecting the city, state, and nation. Both Committees’ memberships include attorneys from state and local government agencies, law firms, not-for-profit organizations, and law-school faculty. Education and the Law members also include K-12 educators and education consultants. Committee members are acting in their respective individual capacities as members of the City Bar, not in their professional or academic roles.

2 “Eliminate Competitive Admissions to NYC Public Elementary & Middle Schools,” New York City Bar Association, May 1, 2019, https://www.nycbar.org/member-and-career-services/committees/reports-listing/reports/detail/eliminate-competitive-admissions-to-nyc-public-elementary-and-middle-schools; see also “Letter in Support of Eliminating Competitive Admissions in NYC’s Public Elementary and Middle Schools,” New York City Bar Association, Nov. 1, 2019, https://www.nycbar.org/member-and-career-services/committees/reports-listing/reports/detail/letter-in-support-of-eliminating-competitive-admissions-in-nycs-public-elementary-and-middle-schools.

3 Please note that we do not include in these recommendations programs or schools in which facility with a certain language or demonstrated capability in the Arts is a prerequisite.

4 Letter to Chancellor David C. Banks, NYC. Dept. of Education, “Call to Permanently End Middle-School Screens,” NY Appleseed, Sept. 16, 2022, https://www.nyappleseed.org/wp-content/uploads/LetterToChancellorBanks_-End-MS-Screens-Permanently_Sept22.pdf.

 

About the Association

The mission of the New York City Bar Association, which was founded in 1870 and has over 23,000 members, is to equip and mobilize a diverse legal profession to practice with excellence, promote reform of the law, and uphold the rule of law and access to justice in support of a fair society and the public interest in our community, our nation, and throughout the world. www.nycbar.org

[1] The Civil Rights Committee addresses issues affecting the civil rights of New Yorkers, especially the rights of marginalized communities. The Education and the Law Committee addresses K-12 and higher education, and legal and policy education issues affecting the city, state, and nation. Both Committees’ memberships include attorneys from state and local government agencies, law firms, not-for-profit organizations, and law-school faculty. Education and the Law members also include K-12 educators and education consultants. Committee members are acting in their respective individual capacities as members of the City Bar, not in their professional or academic roles.

[2] “Eliminate Competitive Admissions to NYC Public Elementary & Middle Schools,” New York City Bar Association, May 1, 2019, https://www.nycbar.org/member-and-career-services/committees/reports-listing/reports/detail/eliminate-competitive-admissions-to-nyc-public-elementary-and-middle-schools; see also “Letter in Support of Eliminating Competitive Admissions in NYC’s Public Elementary and Middle Schools,” New York City Bar Association, Nov. 1, 2019, https://www.nycbar.org/member-and-career-services/committees/reports-listing/reports/detail/letter-in-support-of-eliminating-competitive-admissions-in-nycs-public-elementary-and-middle-schools.

[3] Please note that we do not include in these recommendations programs or schools in which facility with a certain language or demonstrated capability in the Arts is a prerequisite.

[4] Letter to Chancellor David C. Banks, NYC. Dept. of Education, “Call to Permanently End Middle-School Screens,” NY Appleseed, Sept. 16, 2022, https://www.nyappleseed.org/wp-content/uploads/LetterToChancellorBanks_-End-MS-Screens-Permanently_Sept22.pdf.

_._,_._,_

Categories Competition, Education Reform, Ethics, Inequity, Injustice, New York City

New York: Hasidic Private Schools Are Failing But Flush with Public Funds

By dianeravitch
September 12, 2022 //
33

The New York Times conducted an investigation of Hasidic religious schools and reported that they are failing schools but have received more than $1 Billion in government funds in public funds in the past four years.

The Hasidic Jewish community has long operated one of New York’s largest private schools on its own terms, resisting any outside scrutiny of how its students are faring.

But in 2019, the school, the Central United Talmudical Academy, agreed to give state standardized tests in reading and math to more than 1,000 students.

Every one of them failed.

Students at nearly a dozen other schools run by the Hasidic community recorded similarly dismal outcomes that year, a pattern that under ordinary circumstances would signal an education system in crisis. But where other schools might be struggling because of underfunding or mismanagement, these schools are different. They are failing by design.

The leaders of New York’s Hasidic community have built scores of private schools to educate children in Jewish law, prayer and tradition — and to wall them off from the secular world. Offering little English and math, and virtually no science or history, they drill students relentlessly, sometimes brutally, during hours of religious lessons conducted in Yiddish.

The result, a New York Times investigation has found, is that generations of children have been systematically denied a basic education, trapping many of them in a cycle of joblessness and dependency.

Segregated by gender, the Hasidic system fails most starkly in its more than 100 schools for boys. Spread across Brooklyn and the lower Hudson Valley, the schools turn out thousands of students each year who are unprepared to navigate the outside world, helping to push poverty rates in Hasidic neighborhoods to some of the highest in New York.

The schools appear to be operating in violation of state laws that guarantee children an adequate education. Even so, The Times found, the Hasidic boys’ schools have found ways of tapping into enormous sums of government money, collecting more than $1 billion in the past four years alone.

City and state offficials have failed to enforce laws requiring religious schools to offer a curriculum that is substantially equivalent to those in public schools. The politicians defer to Hasidim because they vote as a bloc.

Their graduates are ill-prepared to enter society. Their knowledge of math, science, history, and basic grammar is meager.

The students in the boys’ schools are not simply falling behind. They are suffering from levels of educational deprivation not seen anywhere else in New York, The Times found. Only nine schools in the state had less than 1 percent of students testing at grade level in 2019, the last year for which full data was available. All of them were Hasidic boys’ schools.

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Ethics, Failure, Funding, Religion, Separation of church and state
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