The state’s so-called Education Savings Accounts (or Empowerment Scholarship Accounts) were enacted by the Legislature in 2011. Whatever they are called, they are vouchers, which violate Arizona’s Constitutional ban on public funds for religious schools. They initially contained restrictions as to which students qualified to receive a voucher. The usual claim for vouchers was that they would “save poor kids from failing public schools.” However, that never happened.
From the start, the Republicans in control wanted vouchers for all students, not just those from low-income families. Even though there was a state referendum in which voters overwhelmingly rejected voucher expansion in 2018, the Legislature ignored the vote and passed universal vouchers in 2022. Any student, whatever their family income, is entitled to use public money for tuition in a private or religious school or for home schooling.
The result: few students from low-income families use vouchers.
The article in ProPublica explains why.
Vouchers don’t cover the cost of most private schools.
Most private schools are not located in low-income neighborhoods.
Low-income families can’t afford the cost of transportation to and from private schools.
In Arizona, as in other states, most students who take vouchers were already enrolled in no public schools. Their parents can afford to pay the tuition. Now the state subsidizes them. And in many cases, the schools raise their tuition in response to the state subsidy.
Barack Obama is a skilled orator, probably the best of our time. In this 3-minute clip, he asks the quintessential question. Trump says to Kamala, “You were there for four years, why didn’t you solve the border problem?” Obama asks of Trump, “Dude, you were there for four years, why didn’t you solve the problem?”
This post is about the misinformation that Republicans are spreading in light of recent disasters. Two of the deadliest hurricanes have swept through Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, East Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia and then through Florida again.
Millions of Floridians were displaced by one of the fiercest storms of the century to strike the west coast of the state. I saw some of the displaced people as they escaped Hurricane Milton to Atlanta and beyond.
Life in our warming world is becoming more dangerous. Many have been forced to flee their homes two times in the past month. They know that hurricanes are part of life living where they do. One person wrote that her house has been demolished three times by hurricanes before Milton came roaring into the St Petersburg-Tampa Bay shoreline cities.
The rescue efforts by first responders are planned by folks that take their life saving work seriously. The people in need during these disasters look for help from first responders and local, state, and federal government.
THE DESPICABLES
But lurking in the bushes are two despicable liars, Donald Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Donald Trump is the one who never changed a tire or diaper (accord, but can spread misinformation about the weather (remember Sharpie), immigration, political rivals, the press, etc.
Marjorie Taylor Greene, a do-nothing conspiracy theorist. She thinks “they” cause Hurricanes. Not so.
One is a convicted felon, a sex offender and rapist, and a fraudster. He also was impeached twice and indicted for trying to overthrow the results of the 2020 election and stealing classified documents from the U.S. government.
The other is a known bully, liar, and conspiracy storyteller. She is a Republican representative from one district in Georgia. During her first term in Washington, she was barred from serving on any committees because of one of her conspiracy theories. She has done nothing in Congress except shout, insult, argue, and defame others.
DISINFORMATION: AN INSULT TO FIRST RESPONDERS AND PEOPLE IN NEED
Deliberately spreading false informationamid national disasters should be a crime, as Donald Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene have done. We call this disinformation.
“Disinformation is designed or spread with full knowledge of it being false (information has been manipulated) as part of an intention to deceive and cause harm. The motivations can be economic gain, ideological, religious, political, or supporting a social agenda. Misinformation and disinformation may cause harm, which comprises threats to decision-making processes and health, environment, or security. The critical difference between disinformation and misinformation is not the content of the falsehood but the knowledge and intention of the sender.” (Source: World Health Organization).
Trump is spreading lies about the government’s ability and will to help people recover from these hurricanes. He’s said that FEMA has no money for disaster relief because they gave it to migrants. This is not true.
He says that folks in need will only get $750. This is not true. These lies have caused great harm, and he doesn’t care. He will continue with these lies forever. He lacks empathy. Instead, he kicks people when they are down.
According to the World Health Organization, spreading disinformation is considered one of the top five threats to human health.
“THEY”
CLIMATE CHANGE
Marjorie Taylor Greene believes that “they” control the weather. In fact she reports that “they” direct hurricanes over people living in red states such as Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina. Well, let’s see. Georgia has two blue Senators, and NC has a blue governor. That should debunk her theory, but not in MAGA land nor in Greene’s conspired mind. Scientists have had to publicly admit that we humans can’t control hurricanes, or tornadoes, and any other weather phenomenon.
Neither Trump or Greene have clue about the effect of the earth’s warming on hurricanes and other environmental disasters inciting fires, flooding and drought.
They deny global warming and claim it’s a hoax. Trump thinks the Chinese created the hoax. Their denial is dangerous. They deliberately harm others by refusing to accept the established truth that earth’s climate has warmed because of fossil fuel burning.
For decades, science education researchers have explored trends in proposed US state legislation employed from 2003 to 2023 by anti-evolution and anti-climate change education movements to constrain the teaching of these sciences. This is a critical issue in the education of students who will live in rapidly changing world.
Two hundred and seventy-three climate and evolution-related House and Senate bills, concurrent resolutions, and joint resolutions were identified, coded, and analyzed.
Eleven anti-science education legislative tactics were employed from 2003 to 2023. Five were first identified in the literature review: academic freedom (42.1%), rebranding (12.1%), balanced treatment (12.1%), censorship (2.6%), and disclaimers (2.6%).
The analysis revealed six new tactics: anti-indoctrination (16.8%), standards (12.1%), instructional materials (10.3%), religious liberty (8.8%), avoidance (4.4%), and religious instruction (4.0%).
One-quarter of bills and resolutions employed a combination of tactics. The most ubiquitous tactics were academic freedom bills, which urge science teachers to introduce ideas like intelligent design or climate change denial under the mantle of academic freedom, and anti-indoctrination bills, which prevent teachers from advocating for controversial topics deemed political.
Since 2017, anti-indoctrination has become the preferred tactic. Southern, southeastern, and midwestern states were the most prolific in their contribution to anti-science education legislation. Qualitative analysis revealed that bill and resolution language was often recycled across years and states, with slight changes to wording. From 2003 to 2023, the total number of anti-science education state legislative efforts increased, as did the number of passed bills and resolutions.
CLIMATE RESOURCES
Why do disasters like Hurricane Helene and Milton unleash so much misinformation? FEMA is not seizing anyone’s property. The agency did not prevent evacuations. Its grant programs generally don’t require repayment. FEMA’s disaster relief funds were not diverted to assist migrants at U.S. borders. Chimney Rock doesn’t have any lithium mines. Uncle Sam can’t control storms.
The charter lobby has created a mythology that charter schools are more successful than public schools. As the study shows, the mythology is not true. What parent would choose a school that is likely to close in a few years?
Parents want to know if they can depend on a school being there not only when their children start but also when they finish. Based on a marketplace model with fewer regulations, the charter school sector is far more unstable than local public schools.
While the fate of each school cannot be predicted, we can show trends.
Doomed to Fail: An analysis of charter school closures from 1998-2022 uses data from the Common Core of Data, the primary database on non-private elementary and secondary education in the United States, to determine charter school closure rates and the number of students affected when closures occur. The report analyzes charter school closures from 2022 to 2024 to determine the reasons why schools close and how much notice families receive.
Charter schools come with no guarantees. And, as this report shows, in far too many cases, these schools were doomed to fail from the very start.
Here are some of the key findings of the report:
-By year five, 26% of charter schools have closed
-By year ten, nearly four in ten charters fail, rising to 55% by year twenty.
-More than one million students have now been stranded by charter closures
-Eight states have closure rates that exceed 45%.
-The inability to attract and retain students is the primary reason for failures.
-The second most frequent reason is fraud and gross mismanagement.
-Forty percent of closures are abrupt, giving insufficient warning.
-School operators, not authorizers, initiate the majority of closures (blowing a hole in the “accountability” myth..
The report includes some pretty startling examples of charter shutdowns during the last two years, exposing corruption, mismanagment, and operators who did not bother to tell parents the school would be closing until just before it happened. There is also a section written by Gary Rubenstein on the failure of the Tennessee Achievement District. The report can be found here and the Executive Summary here.
Leonie Haimson, executive director of Class Size Matters, writes about the latest developments in New York City. Mayor Eric Adams was indicted on multiple charges of corruption. His top aides resigned, including his schools chancellor David Banks. Adams says he is innocent and won’t resign. Leonie worries about what will happen to the city’s public schools, which are controlled by the mayor. Some of us–Leonie and I–long for the end of mayoral control and a revival of an independent Board of Education. Checks and balances are a very important part of democratic government. Under mayoral control, there is more cronyism than accountability.
She writes:
Mayor indicted, Chancellor resigning, and the Panel for Educational Policy eliminates its Contract Committee; so much for Mayoral control!!
Mayor Adams has now been indicted on five federal charges of bribery, fraud and soliciting illegal foreign campaign donations. Chancellor Banks is resigning as of Dec. 31, 2024, to be replaced by Melissa Aviles-Ramos, current Deputy Chancellor for Family Engagement. This follows the announced resignations of other top officials, including the Police Commissioner and Commissioner of Health, in the last two weeks.
We should recall the false narratives promoted by those including Governor Hochul who insisted on extending unchecked Mayoral control for two more years last April, with no strings attached: that any other system invited corruption, instability, and inefficiency. The Mayor himself insisted on renaming Mayoral control “Mayoral Accountability”, and Chancellor Banks threatened to resign if the governance system was altered in any significant way. And look at what has happened since.
The only minor tweak the Legislature made to Mayoral control was that the Chair of the Panel for Educational Policy chair would be appointed by the Mayor from among three nominees put forward by leaders of the Legislature and Board of Regents. And yet it turns out that the new Chair will be exactly the same man who already held that seat as a Mayoral appointee, Greg Faulkner. The only difference is that now the Mayor will get an extra PEP appointee, to further cement his control over controversial educational policies, as well as questionable contracts and spending.
The Chancellor himself was reported having privately met with the CEO of 21stCentEd in October of 2022, and subsequently greenlit a major contract with this company that had hired his brother, Terrence Banks, as a lobbyist. According to the Daily News, 21stCentEd has since received more than $1.4 million in business from the Department of Education for providing a variety of services. In cases where a family member is involved, the city requires that a Conflict of Interest waiver be obtained. And yet Banks never applied for one. Both Chancellor Banks and Terence Banks have had their homes raided and their telephones seized by federal investigators.
Terence Banks also apparently lobbied for a Florida-based tech firm called Saferwatch which markets “panic button” apps to be used to alert authorities in case of school emergencies such as fires or active shooters. The NYPD signed a contract with Saferwatch which was piloted in several schools last year.
We have seen tremendous privacy problems with Teenspace, an online mental health program for NYC students 13 and up, relentlessly promoted by the Mayor andthe Chancellor, after the Department of Health signed a $26 million dollar with the parent company Talkspace last year. And yet as we have discovered, Teenspace collects, shares and uses personal student data for marketing and commercial purposes with multiple social media “partners” that would be illegal if the contract was with the DOE rather than the Department of Health. When a NYC student visits the Teenspace website on their phone, their personally identifiable information is collected by 34 cookies, and shared with 15 ad trackers, as well as Facebook, Amazon, Meta, Google, and Microsoft among other companies. The company has also been sued in Californiafor sharing personal data with TikTok, including the mental health data of minors. One should not be surprised to learn that lobbying firm for Talkspace is Oaktree Solutions, the firm owned by Frank Carone, a close associate and a former chief of staff to the Mayor who was with him last night when Adams was huddling with his attorneys after learning of his federal indictments.
Shortly after he was elected, Mayor Adams own partner, Tracey Collins, who already worked at DOE, was promoted and named the “senior adviser to the deputy chancellor of school leadership,” and received a 23% boost to her salary to $221,597 a year. Shortly thereafter, Sharon Adams, the wife of the Mayor’s brother Bernard Adams, was hired by DOE, at a salary of $150,000-a-year .
The whirlwind of scandals and investigations surrounding the Mayor and his top appointees, including the Chancellor, should give rise to a new call for more accountability, oversight and checks and balances at DOE, but I fear that no lessons will be learned by those in power, because their interests lie in maintaining one-person rule, and ignoring the voices of parents and teachers. Indeed, there have been many cases of large-scale corruption at the DOE under previous administrations.
Eric Goldstein was hired in 2004 during Bloomberg/Klein years as a deputy overseeing food, transportation and high school sports, and promoted to chief executive in 2007. Goldstein was just recently sentenced to two years in prison, for a corrupt scheme he was involved in 2015-2016, during the De Blasio administration, by receiving bribes in exchange for turning a blind eye to tainted food served to public school kids — including chicken tenders laden with plastic, bones and metal, causing choking.
There is also the recently revealed, shocking case of DOE staffers in the Queens office who took their own kids on trips to Disneyland and other trips by using federal funds meant to provide educational experiences for homeless children. For some reason, the DOE failed to ask for restitution for the money stolen; and neither the DOE nor the Special Investigator for Schools reported the alleged fraud, forgery and misuse of federal funds to any authorities for possible prosecution. To make things even more bizarre, the SCI held off posting its findings report, dated January 2023, for nearly two years after it was completed, and when they did so, they posted it quietly without any press release or notification, perhaps in hopes it would be ignored by the media focused instead on the allegations and investigations surrounding the Mayor. I have since reported these alleged crimes to the Inspector General’s office of the US Department of Education, and the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York.
There have been many more multi-million dollar DOE corruption scandals under Mayoral control over the last 20 years, a selection of which I summarized in my testimony to the State Education Department and my presentation last year to the NYC Bar Association, both posted here.
And yet despite all these allegations of cronyism and worse, the first thing that the newly reconstituted Panel for Education Policy did in its first meeting of the new school year on September 25 is to eliminate its Contracts Committee by amending their Bylaws as depicted below.
This committee, whose meetings have been livestreamed and recorded, has provided the only public airing of discussion and questioning of DOE officials by PEP members of the rationale behind hundreds of millions of dollars of questionable DOE contracts before the final Panel vote. The approval to ditch the committee was 13-6, with one abstention. As usual, every Mayoral appointee plus the new, supposedly “independent” Chair voted in lockstep to eliminate the Contracts Committee and its monthly public meetings. So much for so-called Mayoral accountability!
David Frum wrote a scathing article about the state of the presidential campaign in the current Atlantic magazine. Frum was a speech-writer for President George W. Bush who turned Never Trumper. He’s one of the best writers about American politics. His article asks, “Are these guys even trying to win?” There is Vance on Twitter, firing off angry ripostes. There is Trump, spending a day on the golf course only 50 days before the election. There is Trump, posting on his own social media, I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT. There is Vance, telling Dana Bash on CNN that he didn’t care whether the story about Haitians is true because it gets his anti-immigrant point across to the American people.
He writes:
A first draft of this story opened: “It’s not every day that a candidate for vice president of the United States rage-tweets at you.”
Backspace, backspace, backspace. Although it’s not every day that a candidate for vice president of the United States rage-tweetsat me personally, it is almost every day that Senator J. D. Vance rage-tweets at somebody. (I had tweeted, in part, this: “The difference: The upsetting things said by Trump and Vance are not true. The upsetting things said about Trump and Vance are true.” Vance responded: “I’d say the most important difference is that people on your team tried to kill Donald Trump twice.”)
But then here he was yesterday, for example, quote-tweeting one of the English-speaking world’s premier apologists for the Assad dictatorship in Syria, in order to assail Hillary Clinton. On September 14, he was mixing it up in the X comments with a reporter for The Intercept and the host of an online talk show.
In other words, to have J. D. Vance as your own personal reply guy is not such an accomplishment.
But it raises the question of how a nominee for vice president has so much time on his hands. Can you imagine, say, Dick Cheney, scrolling through his mentions, getting irritated, and firing off a retort? Neither can I.
So here’s my second draft: What we’ve been seeing from Trump-Vance is not the behavior of a winning campaign.
The day before Vance tweeted at me, former President Donald Trump was livestreaming to promote a dubious new cryptocurrency venture. That same day, he gave an interview to the conspiracy theorist Wayne Allyn Root in which Trump reverted to old form to denounce mail-in voting because the U.S. Postal Service could not be trusted to deliver pro-Trump votes fairly…
Trump golfs a lot, and campaigns surprisingly infrequently. When he does campaign events, he makes odd choices of venue: Today, he will appear in New York’s Nassau County. New York State has not voted Republican for president since 1984. In 2020, Trump won 38 percent of the New York vote. Yet Trump has convinced himself, or somebody has convinced him, that this year he might be competitive in New York.
Yesterday, Trump posted a pledge on his Truth Social platform to restore the deductibility of state and local taxes. That’s an important issue for upper-income taxpayers in tax-heavy New York. Trump did not mention that he himself, as president, signed the legislation that capped state and local deductibility at the first $10,000, to help fund the Republican tax cut of 2017…
Rarely, if ever, has a presidential campaign collapsed from seeming assurance into utter chaos as Trump-Vance has. The campaign seems to have stumbled into a strange unintended message: “Let’s go to war with Taylor Swift to stop Haitians from eating dogs.” The VP candidate wants to raise tariffs on toasters and worries that with Roe v. Wade overturned, George Soros may every day fill a 747 airliner with abortion-seeking pregnant Black women.
The stink of impending defeat fills the air—and so much of the defeat would be self-inflicted.
I hope this observation doesn’t upset Vance again. But he’s got 10 fingers, a smartphone, and the time, so he may want to express himself.
In an article yesterday about Trump’s incoherent and rambling response to a question about whether he planned to lower the cost of child care for American families, the Times published his comments in full.
The article attempted to make sense of what he said, commenting that he believed the vast sums of money collected by tariffs would pay for everything, including child care. Trump thinks that tariffs are a tax on foreign nations.
As O’Donnell explains, tariffs raise the price of imported goods. They are not a “tax” on foreign nations.
But the Times does not explain this basic fact. Instead the article says, “In itself that would be a disputable policy assumption.”
Watch Lawrence O’Donnell eviscerate this lame article and the Times‘ failure to acknowledge that Trump’s claims were demonstrably wrong, not “a disputable policy assumption.”
After Richard Nixon resigned the Presidency in 1974, his successor Gerald Ford pardoned him to unite the country and end “the nation’s long national nightmare.”
Just a few weeks ago, the question seemed almost preposterous: What should happen to the federal prosecutions of Donald Trump if he is defeated in November? Today, it might be premature to imagine a President Kamala Harris grappling with whether to allow the cases against Trump to go forward or whether, before or after any convictions, to grant him a pardon. But this is a discussion worth launching now, in part because, as the prospect of a Harris victory comes into focus, there could be a “long national nightmare” impulse to put all things Trump in the rearview mirror. Under more ordinary circumstances, in more ordinary times, my sympathies would tend toward such calls for national reconciliation, the sentiments that animated Gerald Ford, 50 years ago next month, to pardon Richard M. Nixon.
In pardoning Nixon, Ford invoked the continued suffering of Nixon and his family, along with Nixon’s years of public service, but said his decision was driven by the need for national healing.
In retrospect, that decision looks wise and selfless. But it’s not the right template for thinking about Trump. Harris should allow special counsel Jack Smith to proceed with his prosecutions against the former president, or what’s left of them after the Supreme Court’s ruling on presidential immunity. If Trump is convicted and the conviction is upheld, Harris should not use her power to pardon Trump or commute his sentence.
Why? What’s the difference between Ford and Nixon then and Harris and Trump in a not-so-theoretical future?
First is the matter of consequences for bad acts, something that Trump has magically managed to avoid for most of his 78 years. Short-circuiting his prosecutions or upending his convictions would be the maddening capstone to a life of evading responsibility for wrongdoing.
A sitting president can’t be prosecuted, under long-standing Justice Department policy, so the findings by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III that Trump might have committed 10 acts of obstruction of justice went nowhere. The House of Representatives voted twice to impeach Trump, but the Senate failed to convict — the second time largely because Republican senators (and Trump’s own lawyers) pointed to the prospect of criminal prosecution for efforts to interfere with the election results. Then the Supreme Court carved out a broad sphere of immunity for Trump, jeopardizing at least part of Smith’s prosecution.
When it comes to Trump, accountability is a can endlessly kicked down the road. That’s not in the interest of justice — and it sets a bad precedent for future presidents. We can hope that it doesn’t take the threat of criminal consequences to dissuade presidents from wrongdoing, but rules and laws without consequences are meaningless. And the charges against Trump — that he plotted to overturn election results and obstructed justice to improperly retain classified documents — involve serious misconduct that calls out for enforcement.
Second, Trump is no Nixon, and I don’t mean this in a good way. Nixon’s wrongdoing was egregious, and criminal. But he did not pose a threat to democracy on the same level as Trump, with his incessant claims of a system rigged against him, of elections stolen and politically motivated prosecutions. Nixon left office under political pressure, but, still, he left office.
Nixon cannot accurately be called repentant, but in accepting the pardon he acknowledged “my own mistakes and misjudgments,” adding, “No words can describe the depths of my regret and pain at the anguish my mistakes over Watergate have caused the nation and the presidency — a nation I so deeply love and an institution I so greatly respect.” It is impossible to imagine anything approaching this degree of contrition from Trump. Those who accept no responsibility deserve no mercy. Those who continually incite discord should not receive a pass in the name of calming the turmoil.
Third, about that turmoil: Times have changed since Ford pardoned Nixon. The country has grown angrier and more divided. Ford openly worried about this in his day, warning that if he allowed a criminal case to proceed, “ugly passions would again be aroused. And our people would again be polarized in their opinions. And the credibility of our free institutions of government would again be challenged at home and abroad.”
Back then, for all the fury generated by the pardon, it was a reasonable judgment that it would calm the waters overall. Today, I wonder whether that would happen. If Harris were to order the prosecutions dropped or grant a pardon, would that have the same salutary effect as Ford envisioned in 1974? Polarization has edged into antipathy, not mere disagreement but vehement disdain for the other side. Political tribalism reigns; it takes precedence over the national interest. It is hard to imagine an act by Harris toward Trump that would magically alter this ugly reality.
So, my advice for former prosecutor and possible president Harris is to let Smith do his job and the criminal justice system work its will. She can decide down the road about a pardon, but she should be wary of taking the lessons of a half-century ago as a road map for what is best for the nation today.
Backed by millions from the rightwing Bradley Foundation, voucher advocates promised that competition would produce gains for all sectors. It didn’t.
Milwaukee has a significant number of charter schools and voucher schools. About 55% of all students are enrolled in traditional public schools. The public schools enroll a disproportionate share of students with disabilities.
Rory Linnane of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported:
Three decades since their beginnings in Milwaukee, publicly funded private school programs and independently run charter schools now enroll over 40% of the city’s students.
Reflecting on the city’s shifting education landscape, a new report from the Wisconsin Policy Forum examines enrollment, financing and academic outcomes for Milwaukee schools in every sector, including traditional public schools, private schools and charter schools…
‘Transformed system has not transformed outcomes for children,’ researchers say
Milwaukee in the ’90s was “widely seen as the epicenter of ‘education reform’ in the country,” the forum noted, as state lawmakers opened the door for private operators to start their own schools. Proponents argued that the free-market competition would push all city schools to improve.
In 1990, state lawmakers created the country’s first “voucher” program in Milwaukee, providing public funding for students to attend private schools. Soon after, Minnesota lawmakers were the first to write legislation for charter schools, allowing teacher-led nonprofits to operate schools. Wisconsin was one of the first states to follow in 1993, but without the requirement that teachers lead them.
Thirty years later, the forum noted there is “little evidence … that the average Milwaukee child receives a higher quality education today.”
When Broad-trained military man Mike Miles was superintendent of the Dallas Independent School District, the district experienced a mass exodus of teachers in response to Miles’ top-down style of management. Houston is experiencing the same phenomenon, the Houston Chronicle reported.
More than 4,000 employees left Houston ISD in June, bringing the total departures since the state takeover to over 10,000.
The record number is three times higher than the June departure average for the past five years, according to a Houston Chronicle analysis of district employment records. Over 75% of the departures were recorded as “voluntary,” including retirements and resignations.
Teachers accounted for more than 2,400 of the employees who left in June, with the monthly tally exceeding the total number of teachers who typically leave HISD over an entire school year, according to the analysis. About 4,700 of HISD’s roughly 11,000 teachers left the district during the 2023-24 school year.
Some teachers cited state-appointed Superintendent Mike Miles’ strict new reforms and sudden class assignment changes as the reasons they left. June’s bloated number of departures includes job cuts and terminations linked to job status notices.
Jackie Anderson, president of the Houston Federation of Teachers, called the teacher departures “unprecedented.”
June’s HISD staff departures surged to three times the average
Over 4,000 staff members left the district this June. The record number of departures was more than triple the average for the past five years….
Bellaire High School teacher Brady Mayo, who taught business law and International Baccalaureate business management, said he chose to retire after seeing teachers hesitate to use time off and deal with new district-mandated policies, such as requiring classroom doors to stay open, at the campus he loved.
There was a culture of fear under new district leadership, he said, even though his campus was not a school in Miles’ New Education System.
“I mean, nobody asked me to leave. But I felt run off, just like most teachers. And nobody ran me off. It’s just the way I felt,” the 33-year educator said. “I felt like Mike Miles was going to put his teachers in place, whether they’re certified or not, his yes men.”
Askew Elementary School teacher Karen Calhoun said the district-imposed strategies did not allow teachers to use techniques that they knew worked for students. Calhoun, who retired in June ahead of Askew formally becoming an NES school this fall, said many “top-tier” teachers left the school. She had never seen turnover like this in her 40 years at the school.
“I decided to retire because I could see the change happening,” Calhoun said. “It’s obvious. People come in all the time (for classroom observation). They don’t identify themselves when they come in. You don’t know who they are. They take notes, they go back and they talk to the principal. You don’t even know what’s going on….”
School staff felt micromanaged, said Lea Mishlan, former principal of West Briar Middle School. Mishlan was told to resign by the district or face board termination.
“We were constantly — I mean, even the last week of school, we were expected to be in their rooms,” the 20-year educator said. “And so they just felt like they were being nitpicked. And so every time I had to present something to them, it was just like, what? Like, again? Like, another change? So, the morale was horrible, and it was really hard to maintain positivity throughout the craziness.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 