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New York City: End Mayoral Control of the Schools!

By dianeravitch
February 15, 2024 //
21

Politico reported recently that Mayor Eric Adams is pulling out all the stops in his campaign to persuade the legislature to extend mayoral control of New York Ciry’s public schools.

That’s understandable. Every mayor wants as much power as he can gather. Guiliani wanted mayoral control. The legislature turned him down. Michael Bloomberg got it after he won the mayoralty in 2001, pledging to make the schools run efficiently and successfully after years of political squabbling and disappointing academic results.

A historical note: the last time that the independent Board of Education was abolished was in 1871, when Boss Tweed pushed through state legislation to create a Department of Education, in charge of the schools. The new Department immediately banned purchase of any textbooks published by Harper Bros., to retaliate for the publication of Thomas Nast cartoons ridiculing the Tweed Ring in Harper’s magazine. The new Department steered lucrative contracts to Tweed cronies, for furniture and all supplies for the schools.

Two years later, the corruption of the Tweed Ring was exposed, and criminal prosecutions ensued. In short order, the Department of Education was dissolved and the independent Board of Education was revived.

In the 2001 race for Mayor, billionaire Mike Bloomberg campaigned on promises to rebuild the city’s economy after the devastating attacks of 9/11/2001. He also promised to take over the school system, make it more efficient, improve student performance, and able to live within its budget of $12 billion plus. He won, and many people were excited by the prospect of a successful businessman taking over the city and the schools.

In 2002, the State Legislature gave Mayor Bloomberg control of the schools in New York City. It replaced the independent Board of Education, whose seven members were appointed by the five borough presidents and the mayor. Bloomberg had complete control of the school system, with its more than 1,000 schools and more than one million students. The new law allowed him to appoint the majority of “the Panel on Education Policy,” a sham substitute for the old Board of Education.

The new law still referred to “the Board of Education,” but the new PEP was a shell of its former self. It was toothless, as Bloomberg wanted. He picked the Chancellor, and he had the policymaking powers. Early on, in 2004, he decided that third graders should be held back based on their reading scores. Some of his appointees on the PEP opposed the idea and he fired them before the vote was taken. He wanted all his appointees to know that he appointed them to carry out his decisions, not to question them. The retention policy was later expanded through eighth grade but quietly abandoned in 2014 because it failed.

I won’t go into all the missteps of the Bloomberg regime, which lasted 12 years, but will offer a few generalizations:

1. The mayor should not control the schools because they will never be his first priority. The mayor juggles a large portfolio: public safety, the economy, transportation, infrastructure, public health, sanitation, and much more. On any given day, he/she might have 30 minutes to think about the schools; more some days, none at all on others.

2. Mayoral control concentrates too much power in the hands of one person. One person, especially a non-educator, gets an idea into his head and imposes it, no need to talk to experienced educators or review research.

3. Mayoral control marginalizes parents and community members, whose concerns deserve to be heard. At public hearings of the PEP, parents testified but rightly thought that no one listened to them. In the “bad old days,” they could speak to someone in their borough president’s office; now the borough presidents have no power. No one does, Except the mayor.

4. The Mayor picked three non-educators as Chancellor. Joel Klein disdained educators and public schools, even though he was a graduate of the NYC public schools. He created a “Leadership Academy” to train non-educators and teachers to bypass the usual path to becoming a principal by serving for years as an assistant principal. Klein surrounded himself with B-school graduates and looked to Eli Broad, Bill Gates, and Jack Welch for advice. Large numbers of experienced teachers and principals retired.

5. Bloomberg loved churn and disruption. He closed scores of schools and replaced them with many more small schools. Some high schools that had programs for ELLs, special education, career paths for different fields, were closed and replaced by schools for 300/400 students, too small to offer specialized programs or advanced classes.

6. New initiatives were announced with great fanfare (like merit pay), thanks to a vastly enlarged public relations staff, then quietly collapsed and disappeared.

7. Bloomberg and Klein imposed a new choice system. But all high schools and middle schools became schools of choice. A dozen students of the age living in the same building might attend a dozen different schools, some distant from their homes. One retired executive told me that this dispersal was intended to obstruct the creation of grassroots uprisings against the new dictates.

8. Bloomberg and Klein favored charter schools. In short order, more than 100 opened. The charters were supported financially and politically by some of the wealthiest Wall Street titans. When there was any threat to charters, their wealthy patrons quickly assembled multi-millions dollar TV campaigns to defend them. Because of the deep pockets of the charter patrons, the charter lobby gave generous contributions to legislators in Albany. The legislature passed laws favoring the charters, including one that required the public schools to provide free space for them or, if no suitable space was available, to pay their rent in private facilities.

9. Bloomberg and Klein made testing, accountability and choice the central themes of their reforms. Their approach mirrored President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind law, which began at the same time. Raising test scores became the goal of the school system. Schools were graded A-F, depending primarily on their ability to raise test scores. Eventually, teachers were graded by the rise or fall of their students’ scores. NYC faithfully mirrored the tenets of the national corporate reform movement.

10. NYC test scores improved on NAEP during the Bloomberg years, but not as much as in other cities that did not have mayoral control.

11. To get a great overview of “The Failure of Mayoral Control in New York City,” read this great summary by Leonie Haimson, which includes links to other sources. See, especially, the recent article in Education Week on the decline of mayoral control. Chicago had mayoral control similar to that in New York City, which allowed Mayor Rahm Emanuel to close 50 schools in black and brown communities in one day, completely ignoring the views of parents. It was an ignominious example of the danger of one-man control.

12. There is no perfect mechanism to govern schools, but any kind of oversight should allow parent voices to count. 95% of the nation’s school districts have elected school boards. Sometimes a small faction gains control and does damage. That’s the risk of democracy. Whatever the mechanism, there must be an opportunity for the public, especially parents, to make their voices heard and to have a role. The mayor controls the budget: that’s as much power as he should have.

History is an excellent overview of New York City school governance—history and myths. Again, by Leonie Haimson. (Note: her history leaves out the two years of mayoral control from 1871-1873.)

Categories Billionaires, Bloomberg, Michael, Democracy, Education Reform, Elections, Failure, New York, New York City

Heather Cox Richardson: History Is Watching!

By dianeravitch
February 14, 2024 //
20

Heather Cox Richardson writes about the supine behavior of Republicans in the House of Representatives, as they worship at the shrine of Trump. The Senate passed a bipartisan bill to fund Ukraine, Taiwan, and Israel: 22 Republican Senators voted for it, openly defying the Orange Menace. But in the House, Speaker Mike Johnson says he won’t allow the bill to come to a vote because it is likely to pass. Johnson is collaborating with Trump who is collaborating with the enemies of freedom (aka Putin).

She writes:

History is watching,” President Joe Biden said this afternoon. He warned “Republicans in Congress who think they can oppose funding for Ukraine and not be held accountable” that “[f]ailure to support Ukraine at this critical moment will never be forgotten.”

At about 5:00 this morning, the Senate passed a $95 billion national security supplemental bill, providing funding for Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan, and humanitarian aid to Gaza. Most of the money in the measure will stay in the United States, paying defense contractors to restock the matériel the U.S. sends to Ukraine. 

The vote was 70–29 and was strongly bipartisan. Twenty-two Republicans joined Democrats in support of the bill, overcoming the opposition of far-right Republicans.

The measure went to the House of Representatives, where House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) said he will not take it up, even though his far-right supporters acknowledged that a majority of the representatives supported it and that if it did come to the floor, it would pass. 

Yesterday, House Intelligence Committee chair Mike Turner (R-OH)—who had just returned from his third trip to Ukraine, where he told President Volodymyr Zelensky that reinforcements were coming—told Politico’sRachel Bade: “We have to get this done…. This is no longer an issue of, ‘When do we support Ukraine?’ If we do not move, this will be abandoning Ukraine.” 

“The speaker will need to bring it to the floor,” Turner said. “You’re either for or against the authoritarian governments invading democratic countries.… You’re either for or against the killing of innocent civilians. You’re either for or against Russia reconstituting the Soviet Union.”

Today, Biden spoke to the press to “call on the Speaker to let the full House speak its mind and not allow a minority of the most extreme voices in the House to block this bill even from being voted on—even from being voted on. This is a critical act for the House to move. It needs to move.”

Bipartisan support for Ukraine “sends a clear message to Ukrainians and to our partners and to our allies around the world: America can be trusted, America can be relied upon, and America stands up for freedom,” he said. “We stand strong for our allies. We never bow down to anyone, and certainly not to Vladimir Putin.”

“Supporting this bill is standing up to Putin. Opposing it is playing into Putin’s hands.”

“The stakes were already high for American security before this bill was passed in the Senate last night,” Biden said. “But in recent days, those stakes have risen. And that’s because the former President has sent a dangerous and shockingly, frankly, un-American signal to the world” Biden said, referring to Trump’s statement on Saturday night that he would “encourage [Russia] to do whatever the hell they want” to countries that are part of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)—the 75-year-old collective security organization that spans North America and Europe—but are not devoting 2% of the gross domestic product to their militaries. 

Trump’s invitation to Putin to invade our NATO allies was “dumb,…shameful,…dangerous, [and] un-American,” Biden said. “When America gives its word, it means something. When we make a commitment, we keep it. And NATO is a sacred commitment.” NATO, Biden said, is “the alliance that protects America and the world.”

“[O]ur adversaries have long sought to create cracks in the Alliance. The greatest hope of all those who wish America harm is for NATO to fall apart. And you can be sure that they all cheered when they heard [what] Donald Trump…said.”

“Our nation stands at…an inflection point in history…where the decisions we make now are going to determine the course of our future for decades to come. This is one of those moments.

And I say to the House members, House Republicans: You’ve got to decide. Are you going to stand up for freedom, or are you going to side with terror and tyranny? Are you going to stand with Ukraine, or are you going to stand with Putin? Will we stand with America or…with Trump?”

“Republicans and Democrats in the Senate came together to send a message of unity to the world. It’s time for the House Republicans to do the same thing: to pass this bill immediately, to stand for decency, stand for democracy, to stand up to a so-called leader hellbent on weakening American security,” Biden said. 

“And I mean this sincerely: History is watching. History is watching.”

But instead of taking up the supplemental national security bill tonight, House speaker Johnson took advantage of the fact that Representative Steve Scalise (R-LA) has returned to Washington after a stem cell transplant to battle his multiple myeloma and that Judy Chu (D-CA) is absent because she has Covid to make a second attempt to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas for “high crimes and misdemeanors” for his oversight of the southern border of the United States. 

Republicans voted to impeach Mayorkas by a vote of 214 to 213. The vote catered to far-right Republicans, but impeachment will go nowhere in the Senate.

“History will not look kindly on House Republicans for their blatant act of unconstitutional partisanship that has targeted an honorable public servant in order to play petty political games,” Biden said in a statement. He called on the House to pass the border security measure Republicans killed last week on Trump’s orders, and to pass the national security supplemental bill.

House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) has said he will use every possible tool to force a vote on the national security supplemental bill. In contrast, as Biden noted, House Republicans are taking their cue from former president Trump, who does not want aid to Ukraine to pass and who last night demonstrated that he is trying to consolidate his power over the party by installing hand-picked loyalists, including his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, who is married to his son Eric, at the head of the Republican National Committee (RNC). 

This move is likely due in part to outgoing RNC chair Ronna McDaniel’s having said the RNC could not pay Trump’s legal bills once he declared himself a presidential candidate. After his political action committees dropped $50 million on legal fees last year, he could likely use another pipeline, and even closer loyalists might give him one. 

In addition, Trump probably recognizes that he might well lose the protective legal bulwark of the Trump Organization when Judge Arthur Engoron hands down his verdict in Trump’s $370 million civil fraud trial. New York attorney general Letitia James is seeking not only monetary penalties but also a ban on Trump’s ability to conduct business in the New York real estate industry. In that event, the RNC could become a base of operations for Trump if he succeeds in taking it over entirely. 

But it is not clear that all Republican lawmakers will follow him into that takeover, as his demands from the party not only put it out of step with the majority of the American people but also now clearly threaten to blow up global security. “Our base cannot possibly know what’s at stake at the level that any well-briefed U.S. senator should know about what’s at stake if Putin wins,” Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) told his colleagues as he urged them to vote for the national security supplemental bill.

Politicians should recognize that Trump’s determination to win doesn’t help them much: it is all about him and does not extend to any down-ballot races. 

Indeed, the attempt of a Republican minority to impose its will on the majority of Americans appears to be sparking a backlash. In today’s election in New York’s Third Congressional District to replace indicted serial liar George Santos, a loyal Trump Republican, voters chose Democrat Tom Suozzi by about 8 points. CNN’s Dana Bash tonight said voters had told her they voted against the Republican candidate because Republicans, on Trump’s orders, killed the bipartisan border deal. The shift both cuts down the Republican majority in the House and suggests that going into 2024, suburban swing voters are breaking for Democrats. 

As Trump tries to complete his takeover of the formerly grand old Republican Party, its members have to decide whether to capitulate.

History is watching.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Failure, Fascism, Freedom, Funding, Republicans, Trump

Houston: Principal Turnover Hits 20% After State Takeover

By dianeravitch
February 6, 2024 //
47

The Houston Chronicle reports an acceleration in principal turnover since the state took over control of the Houston Independent School District and placed non-educator Mike Miles in charge. The principals of nearly 60 schools have resigned or been removed. A military man, Miles was “trained” by the Broad Superintendents Academy. He is imposing standardized curriculum and instruction across the schools he directly controls (called the “New Education System”).

Even the principal of an A-rated school lost his job.

The memos came in one after the other, a laundry list of grievances listing all the ways Federico Hernandez was supposedly failing as principal of Houston ISD’s Middle College High School.

A teacher used Post-It notes rather than index cards during a lesson, according to one complaint from Hernandez’s supervisor. Others allowed students to sit in the back of a classroom or kept a light off during class. Some implemented multiple response strategies, “but not correctly,” read the memo shared with the Houston Chronicle.

Even though the campus run on Houston Community College’s Felix Fraga campus boasts an A-rated academic performance, those were among the infractions that got Hernandez removed from his job less than two months into the school year.

He is one of at least 58 principals who left their schools, involuntarily or otherwise, in 2023 since Superintendent Mike Miles was appointed to his post by the Texas Education Agency on June 1, according to a Houston Chronicle analysis of HISD staffing records. After taking into account schools that share a principal, such as Jane Long Academy and Las Americas Newcomer School, or those that recorded multiple changes between June and December, such as Madison High School, the Chronicle confirmed there have been at least 61 leadership changes across 59 campuses…

Erica Harbatkin, an education policy expert at Florida State University who studies principal turnover, said it is not unusual for administrators to reassign principals in an attempt to shake up under-performing schools. They typically don’t do so during the school year, though, because principals need time to plan and coordinate their staff, and “coming in after the school year started… obviously undermines some of those strategies.”

Harbatkin said replacing a principal is one of the quickest ways to effect change at a school, for better or worse.

“The theory of action behind more contemporary school turnaround and improvement policy is that these schools are in this pattern of low performance, and they need something to get them out, some sort of big external shock … and one of the ways that happens is through replacing the principal,” Harbatkin said.

If not done carefully, however, principal turnover can lead to negative effects on student achievement, Harbatkin said. Her research found that principal turnover “is associated with lower test scores, school proficiency rates, and teacher retention.”

“When principals turn over teachers tend to turn over as well, and if that turnover is not well-planned, if there’s not good distributed leadership in the school or someone who can step into the role, that’s likely to make those negative effects even larger,” Harbatkin said.

No one explained the theory or rationale for removing a principal from a high-performing school. Maybe he failed to comply with an order…

Ebony Cumby, who served as principal at Askew Elementary in west Houston for 12 years, resigned within a week of Miles’ appointment after sitting through the first couple days of principal meetings.

“Throughout that period, there were things that I thought were exciting changes that needed to be made in the district, and there were other things that I could foresee being problematic, especially for a district as large as HISD,” Cumby said.

Cumby said she appreciated Miles’ attempts to “bring more consistency” to the district by standardizing the curriculum and other elements, but she was put off by what she described as “a cookie-cutter way of teaching” that she would be expected to enforce. After over two decades at HISD, she ended up leaving public education altogether for another industry.

“I noticed early on that there were things in place that, whether it was intentional or not, were going to take autonomy away from teachers and require them to conform to a certain way of doing things and really take away their creativity, which as a principal was a big deal to me,” Cumby said. “To kind of hear that its ‘our way or the highway’ did not sit well with me.”

Categories Accountability, Administrators, superintendents, Disruption, Extremism, Failure, Houston, Principals, Texas

Uvalde Report: A Failure of Leadership

By dianeravitch
January 29, 2024 //
24

The Justice Department recently released a lengthy report on the massacre of 19 students and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas, on May 24, 2022.

The report concluded that teachers and students have more training about how to react to an active shooter than the nearly 400 law enforcement officers who converged on the school. No one was sure who was in charge. The children had been trained to be silent, and they were. The officers assumed that the silence meant that the shooter was barricaded in an empty classroom, despite numerous 911 calls by terrified students. For over an hour, no one confronted the killer. The mistakes cost lives. When the killer was dead, the medical response to the situation was bizarre. Dead children were placed in ambulances, while children with gunshot wounds were loaded onto school buses.

ProPublica and the Texas Tribune published and summarized the findings:

UVALDE, Texas — Law enforcement agencies across the country should immediately prioritize active shooter training, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said Thursday as he released a scathing report about the handling of the 2022 massacre in Uvalde, Texas, in which lives could have been saved if training protocols had been followed.

The Justice Department’s long-anticipated report about the shooting found that “cascading failures of leadership, decision-making, tactics, policy and training” led to the bungled response, which Garland said should never have happened. Nineteen children and two teachers were killed on May 24, 2022.

“Had law enforcement agencies followed generally accepted practices in an active shooter situation and gone right after the shooter to stop him, lives would have been saved and people would have survived,” Garland said during a news conference on Thursday.

The report’s findings about the failure to follow protocol and the lack of sufficient training to prepare officers for a mass shooting largely mirrored the flaws revealed in a Texas Tribune, ProPublica and FRONTLINE investigation published last month that found that states require students and teachers to receive far more training to prepare them for a mass shooting than they require for the police. At least 37 states require schools to conduct active-shooter-related drills, nearly all on an annual basis. But Texas is the only state that mandates that all of its police officers complete repeated training, at least 16 hours every two years. That requirement was implemented after the Uvalde shooting.

Garland said the report was produced in an effort to offer lessons that would hopefully better prepare law enforcement across the country to respond to future mass shootings. It offered recommendations that included requiring all agencies in a region to train together and providing officers across the country with at least eight hours of active shooter training annually.

The vast majority of at least 380 officers from about two dozen local, state and federal agencies who responded to the school had never trained together, “contributing to difficulties in coordination and communication,” the report stated.

“Our children deserve better than to grow up in a country where an 18-year-old has easy access to a weapon that belongs on the battlefield, not in a classroom,” Garland said. “And communities across the country, and the law enforcement officers who protect them, deserve better than to be forced to respond to one horrific mass shooting after another. But that is the terrible reality that we face. And so it is the reality that every law enforcement agency in every community across the country must be prepared for.”

Mo Canady, executive director of the National Association of School Resource Officers, said in an interview that he appreciates the emphasis the Department of Justice placed on widespread active-shooter training. Still, Canady said he is frustrated that leaders have not already learned that “25-year-old lesson” after the shootings at Columbine High, Sandy Hook Elementary and Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.

Since the 1999 Columbine shooting, law enforcement officers have been trained to prioritize stopping the shooter. The report stated that everything else, including officer safety, should be secondary, adding that efforts to engage the shooter “must be undertaken regardless of the equipment and personnel available.”

“We’ve got to understand what the priorities are and, quite frankly, I see there are not a lot of priorities greater than keeping students safe at school,” Canady said.

Kimberly Mata-Rubio, whose 10-year-old daughter Lexi was killed in the shooting, said she hopes the report’s findings lead to action, that “the failures end today and that local officials do what wasn’t done that day, do right by the victims and survivors of Robb Elementary: terminations, criminal prosecutions and that our state and federal government enacts sensible gun laws…”

The district attorney and the Texas Department of Public Safety have fought the release of records related to the shooting, prompting news organizations, including ProPublica and the Tribune, to sue. A Travis County district judge ruled in the newsrooms’ favor last month, but DPS appealed. The agency did not respond to requests for comment about the Justice Department’s report.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who initially praised the response and later said he was misled, released a statement thanking the Justice Department. He said the state has already adopted some of the recommended measures and would review others.

The report, which offers the most comprehensive account to date from authorities about the shooting, echoes many findings from a probe released by a state House committee two months after the shooting…

The report noted that the “misguided and misleading narratives, leaks, and lack of communication about what happened on May 24 is unprecedented and has had an extensive, negative impact on the mental health and recovery of the family members and other victims, as well as the entire community of Uvalde.”

The previous mayor of Uvalde requested the federal review days after the shooting when it became clear that the response was flawed. The review was led in part by Sheriff John Mina of Orange County, Florida, who was the incident commander during the 2016 Pulse Nightclub massacre in Orlando.

An outside review of that incident found that Florida officers, who waited three hours to take down the shooter, mostly followed best practices, although it stated that the law enforcement agencies in Orlando should update their training and policies.

In multiple after-action reviews, including the Pulse report, authors opted not to criticize significant law enforcement delays during mass shootings, according to an analysis of more than three dozen of these reports by ProPublica, the Tribune and FRONTLINE.

The Uvalde report was far more critical, finding failures in leadership, command and coordination.

It stated that officers wrongly treated the situation as a barricaded suspect incident instead of one in which a shooter was an active threat to children and teachers. Officers should “never” treat an active shooter with access to victims as a barricaded suspect — especially in a school, where there is a “high probability” of potential victims and innocent civilians being present, the report stated.

Officers had multiple indicators that should have made it clear they were facing an active shooter, including 911 calls from children and teachers pleading for help, a dispatcher’s announcement minutes after officers arrived that students were likely in the classroom with the shooter, and an Uvalde school police officer announcing that his wife had called to tell him she had been shot, according to the report.

Gupta condemned the medical response, saying that after police breached the classroom and killed the gunman, dead victims were placed in ambulances while children with bullet wounds were put on school buses. Many of those findings were revealed in a 2022 investigation by the Tribune, ProPublica and The Washington Post that determined medical responders did not know who was in charge and that two students and a teacher who later died still had a pulse when they were rescued from the school.

In its blistering criticism of responding officers, the report said that supervisors from various law enforcement agencies “demonstrated no urgency” in taking control of the incident, which exacerbated communication problems and added to overall confusion.

Uvalde school district Police Chief Pete Arredondo, who was listed as the incident commander in the district’s active-shooter plan, had the “necessary authority, training and tools” to lead the response but did not provide “appropriate leadership, command and control,” the report found. Arredondo could not be reached for comment Thursday through his attorney. He has previously defended his actions and those of others involved in the response.

Beyond that, no leader from any of the other responding agencies “effectively questioned the decisions and lack of urgency” demonstrated by Arredondo and Uvalde Police Department Acting Chief Mariano Pargas, who both arrived at the school within minutes of the first round of gunfire. The report listed Uvalde County Sheriff Ruben Nolasco, Uvalde County Constables Emmanuel Zamora and Johnny Field, and an unidentified Texas Ranger as examples of such leaders.

“Responding officers here in Uvalde, who also lost loved ones and who still bear the emotional scars of that day, deserved the kind of leadership and training that would have prepared them to do the work that was required,” Garland said.

The report also found that key officers, including Pargas, had no active shooter or incident command training despite, in some instances, having decades of law enforcement experience. Nolasco, the sheriff, also had no active shooter training and “minimal” incident command training.

Categories Accountability, Courage, Failure, Guns, Texas

Tennessee: Governor Lee Wants to Expand Vouchers Statewide Despite Failure of Pilot Program

By dianeravitch
January 26, 2024 //
15

Tennessee’s Governor Bill Lee pushed through a voucher program in 2019 that was limited to two counties, Shelby and Davidson, which are where the two biggest cities, Memphis and Nashville, are located. A third county, Hamilton, was added this year. Under his leadership, Tennessee joined Arkansas and other red states in expanding vouchers. 

Now Governor Lee wants to expand vouchers to every county in the state and to remove income limits. Florida and other states have enacted this program, known as universal vouchers.

There are two certain results of universal vouchers:

1. They are very expensive to the state. Most of the students who obtain them are already enrolled in private and religious schools. The state assumes responsibility for subsidizing the tuition of parents who can afford to send their child to private schools. The parents now paying $25,000-30,000 annually will be happy to collect $7,000-8,000 from the state.

2. The public school students who use them fall behind their public school peers because they attend religious schools or low-quality schools (not elite private schools) that do not have certified teachers. Michigan State University Professor Josh Cowen, who has spent two decades as a voucher researcher, has written that the academic impact of vouchers on these students is worse than pandemic learning loss.

Governor Lee’s plan has encountered two obstacles. First, a group of parents who want to block vouchers won the right to sue in the state court of appeals. 

Chalkbeat Tennessee reported that: 

A legal challenge to Tennessee’s private school voucher law is back on track after a state appeals court ruled that a lower court erred in dismissing the case.

The three-judge Court of Appeals said Wednesday that a trial-level judicial panel acted prematurely in 2022 when it declared that Davidson and Shelby county governments, along with a group of parents, had no legal standing to challenge the 2019 Education Savings Account law, which provides families with taxpayer money to pay toward private school tuition.

The appellate court, in sending the case back to the trial court, also said the case’s remaining legal claims are “ripe for judicial review.”

The unanimous decision breaks a string of legal victories for voucher backers in Tennessee, where Gov. Bill Lee’s administration is proposing an expansive new program that would ultimately make vouchers accessible to all students in all 95 Tennessee counties, without the family income limits that are part of the current program.

The second problem for Governor Lee’s expansion plan is that the test scores came back for the first year, and they dashed the expectation that going to a voucher school would produce impressive academic results. In other words, the scores were bad. 

Meanwhile, Tennessee Education Commissioner Lizzette Reynolds told lawmakers Wednesday that the first state test scores of students using vouchers to attend private schools in Shelby and Davidson counties were lackluster.

“The results aren’t anything to write home about,” Reynolds told the Senate Education Committee. “But at the end of the day, the parents are happy with this new learning environment for their students.”

The first results came out of Davidson and Shelby counties in 2022-23, before the legislature added Hamilton County to the program this school year. According to data from the state education department, most of those 452 students performed worse than their peers in public schools after the program’s swift rollout early that school year.

Democratic legislators asked why the program should be expanded if the results were not good. But Republicans were not dissuaded. 

Of course, if they conducted any research, they would find that voucher students who leave public schools typically fall behind their public school peers. This is not a one-time occurrence. 

The biggest beneficiaries of vouchers are affluent families who get a tuition subsidy. 

The new state commissioner of education, Lizette Reynolds, was asked whether the voucher schools would be held accountable as public schools are. She couldn’t give a straight answer. Because voucher schools will not be held accountable. 

Governor Lee has a compliant legislature with a supermajority of Republicans. They don’t care about results.

Categories Failure, Religion, Republicans, Tennessee, Vouchers

Yoav Fisher: Israel Has Lost the War

By dianeravitch
January 23, 2024 //
9

While rummaging around the Internet, I came across two connected articles by a writer I had not heard of. I was so impressed by his clarity that I wanted to share his analysis with you. Fisher is Head of Health Innovation at HealthIL.org in Tel Aviv.

Part 1 is titled: Israel Has Lost the War.

Part 2 is titled: Hamas Has Lost the War.

This is the first part of a two-part series.

We will cover how Israel lost on the domestic front, on the Jewish Community front, and on the Global front. And then some ideas of what to do.

Harsh truths coming your way…

Make sure to read Part 2 on how Hamas Has Lost The War — as I have stated before, it is imperative to look at both sides.

ISRAEL LOST THE DOMESTIC WAR

On Oct. 7th Hamas Terrorists instigated a war — killing civilians, including children and babies, and taking hostages — of which over 100 are still in captivity.

Israel responded by launching an assault on the Hamas Terrorists in the Gaza strip, of which thousands of Gazan civilians have also tragically perished.

Israel effectively lost the second they decided to respond because they played directly into Hamas’ well-known trap of forcing a strong response from Israel, which galvanizes Jew Hatred, which forces Israel to back down and let Hamas replenish for the next round. Lather, rinse, repeat.

As Tom Friedman suggested recently in the NYT, maybe it would have been better for Israel to think strategically instead of instinctively and let the atrocities of Hamas resonate across the globe and create an alternative plan with the help of allies (what few remain).

But Israel’s true failure isn’t tactical, it is internal.

Ever since Netanyahu started his 16 year choke-hold on Israel, his government has failed to treat Hamas as the Jihadi terrorist organization it really is, turning a blind eye toward repeated warnings, and all for the sake of narcissism, holding on to power, appealing to far right settler/ultra-orthodox crazies, and actively avoiding any conversation about “Peace.”

In fact, in the weeks before Oct 7, the Netanyahu government moved soldiers from the Gaza border to the West Bank, allegedly to “protect” a bunch of settler crazies who wanted to build a Sukkah in the West Bank to provoke the Palestinian population.

And then everything blew up.

The longer-term result of the October 7th Massacre is the complete destruction of internal trust. Israelis no longer trust the government to protect them. Israelis no longer trust each other — and there is a fear that the already tenuous relationship between Israeli Jews and Muslims will erode into chaos.

And Israelis no longer trust in the future of the country.

There is little doubt that this Netanyahu government will screw it up, and there doesn’t seem to be any plan for the future — whether it is dealing with Hamas, dealing with Hizballah, or anything else. So far Israelis have received no cogent plan for anything; just pomposity and calls from crazy right wingers to create new settlements in Gaza.

Israel Lost the Jewish Front

…Let’s be real for a second. Israel, and Jews, have lost credibility. It doesn’t matter how many times Israel (or Jews) call out blatant one-sided hypocrisy, it falls on deaf ears.

Support from the global community is quickly waning, and even Israel’s historic allies like Canada, Australia, and the UK are backpedaling.

And can you blame them? How do Israeli politicians expect anybody in the world to trust Israel? The country has a prime minister who is a criminal, but is un-convicted. It has far right settler crazies who go on violent rampages in the West Bank but are never prosecuted. And very recently, Simcha Rothman, an ultra-conservative member of parliament (Knesset) submitted a proposed bill to the government denying due process to Hamas terrorists.

This creates a moral conundrum: is Israel a country that respects the rule of law for all, or is the rule of law selective only to Jewish Israelis? Keep in mind this is the same Simcha Rothman who was put in charge of ramrodding the preposterous Judicial Reform in Israel — moving the country markedly away from Democracy and toward a theocratic dictatorship.

Long gone is the Israel of the Biden generation — when Israel granted even Eichmann a trial and due process of law, and even paid for Eichmann’s legal fees (!!!). The Israel of today, as seen from the global lens, is one where morality is tossed aside in favor of courting favor with far-right extremists and Ultra-Orthodox religious fanatics, all so Netanyahu can maintain his seat on the throne.

David Ben Gurion spoke passionately of Israel as the “Light Unto the Nations” — a moral and social beacon in the middle of a violent and backwards Middle East. Over the last two decades Israel has had a number of opportunities to rise above and build long term strategic plans to ensure stability and possibly even Peace. Instead, Israel decided to cave to the short-sighted whims of far right extremists and the Ultra-Orthodox.

Turns out that Israel isn’t a “Light Unto the Nations”, but is just as crappy as every other country…

So what to do now?

This part is much easier said than done.

1. Halt all expansion in the West Bank; immediately and permanently.

This is not a PR trick. Continued Israeli expansion in the West Bank is untenable in the long run, politically, morally, and economically. (I wrote that article in 2014! Think how much worse it is now). I don’t know what to do with the settlements going forward, but stopping expansion needs to happen now.

2. Get rid of the crazies.

All of the fanatic right wingers need to leave. They are causing material damage to Israel, politically, economically, internationally. Of course, this requires voting them out (yes, Israel is a democracy).

3. Support non-Jewish Israelis

This may come as a shock to many readers, but Israel is not, in fact an Apartheid state. Non-Jewish citizens get full rights as Jewish citizens, as protected by law. But (big but), inequalities are persistent and have been neglected for decades. Israel needs to do more to address inequality for Arab Israelis (Muslims, Christians, Druze, etc…). They are a vital and vibrant part of the country and represent over 20% of the population.

4. End this silly “Judicial Reform”

Obvious.

5. Stop bankrolling Ultra-Orthodox idleness

Israel is a global powerhouse of technological innovation in all sectors. Every single country in the world benefits from Israeli innovation, directly or indirectly. I firmly believe that shared economic well-being can be a major impetus toward coexistence (see Israel and the UAE). The Israeli health-tech sector (near and dear to my heart) has the potential to improve lives across the globe, especially across the greater MENA region.

But tech innovation and the shared prosperity and progress that comes with it has one major prerequisite — smart human capital. Every cent that goes toward unproductive aims — like massive subsidies to the Ultra Orthodox — do damage to Israel’s future.

Plus, I don’t want to live in a theocracy.

6. Admit you can’t “Destroy Hamas”

I get the need to rally around the flag, but it is also impossible. You can’t “eliminate Hamas” because Hamas is not a person or a group — it is an ideology. Much like ISIS was never really eliminated.

This means Israel needs to shift focus toward strategic longer term approaches and not pure militant approaches.

Good luck to all of us.

My view: I endorse Yoav Fisher’s views. But I would go even farther than him regarding the West Bank settlements, which is easy for me to say since I don’t live in Israel. I think they should be completely removed from the West Bank, because that area would be part of any future Palestinian state. Ariel Sharon dismantled Israeli settlements in Gaza in 2005, despite angry protests. But he knew it had to be done. The West Bank settlements don’t belong there; they were intended to be an obstacle to a new Palestinian nation.

And as a note to readers, I want to explain Fisher’s reference in point 5 to “Ultra-Orthodox idleness.” These groups, known as Haredi in Israel, believe that boys and men should devote themselves to studying Torah. They are exempt from military service, and they pay little, if any, taxes. Their wives, who are second-class citizens, work at low-wage jobs to support the family. The Haredi are politically powerful, even though they are only 10% of the population (and growing), and they are subsidized by the government.

An article in Foreign Policy—written before October 7– claimed that Haredi power had peaked, but that may have been wishful thinking. After that fateful day, some Haredi volunteered and some even joined the military. But secular Jews like Fisher nonetheless believe that the government should not subsidize their life of Torah study.

Categories Extremism, Failure, History, International

John Thompson: Oklahoma’s State Chief Clings to Failed Reforms

By dianeravitch
January 20, 2024 //
8

John Thompson, a historian and retired teacher in Oklahoma, reviews the stalemate in education in the Sooner State. The cause: a state superintendent who will not abandon failed reforms.

He writes:

As School Superintendent Ryan Walters ramps up his attacks on public education, resisting his false, rightwing agenda has become Oklahoma educators’ top priority. While we need to unite and put the school reform wars of the last two decades behind us, the lessons of corporate reforms must be remembered. As Walters puts the doomed-to-fail, test-to-punish No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 (NCLB) “accountability” mandates on steroids, I’ve tried to be as diplomatic as possible in reminding educators how and why data-driven, competition-driven “reforms” did so much damage. Reading the Tulsa World editorial, “Current Public Accountability Systems Always Leaving Kids Behind” by Bixby Superintendent Rob Miller, brought me back to a time when I was one of many educators trying to reason with corporate school reformers. Then I read Peter Greene’s “VAM: Why Is This Zombie Policy Still Around?, and I was reminded of the history of so many Oklahoma administrators failing to push back against the Billionaires Boys Club.

My favorite memories of Rob Miller was when he pulled no punches in telling legislators the hard truths about NCLB. Miller is still candid about it, illustrating education’s “gap between those who make policy and those who suffer the consequences.” Research made it clear that “standardized tests are unreliable indicators of school quality,” and “nothing more than an elaborate sorting and labeling system.” Non-educators dismissed the experience of teachers, concluding they were “just falling back on excuses about student poverty, adverse childhood experiences, teacher shortages and unstable families.”

Miller recounts the loss of “recess, music and arts, field trips, class discussions and reading books for pleasure when we need to get these kids proficient at bubbling correct answers on multiple-choice tests.” He then writes:

Who cares if a 10-year-old learns to hate school because he’s been retained in third grade and his days are now filled with worksheets, practice tests and repetitive drill-and-kill curriculum in place of projects, puzzles and hands-on activities which nurture his natural curiosity and develop thinking skills? Suck it up, kid!

In my experience, the overwhelming majority of education leaders knew that test-driven accountability would inevitably lead to “tedious, time-wasting, high-pressure, spirit-killing, highly scripted instructional programs.” But few would go on the record about the harm done by focusing on test scores, as opposed to improving learning. And few of them were as eloquent as Miller when standing up for students.

Then, I read Peter Greene’s summary of what I believe was the worst of the worst corporate reform mandate, Value Added Models (VAMS). When the Billionaires Boys Club” saw the way that NCLB wasn’t working, they blamed Baby Boomers for accepting “Excuses!” and targeted individual educators, using invalid and unreliable algorithms to punish and replace veteran teachers with 23-year-olds they could train. I will always love President Obama, but his Race to the Top was even more destructive than NCLB. Virtually every educator and student above 2ndgrade were held accountable for increased “outputs.”

Greene first explained the inherent flaws in VAMS, doing an intensive analysis of the model’s flaws for teacher evaluation, and surveys documenting teachers rejecting them. He also wrote:

We used to talk about this a lot. A. Lot. But VAM … has departed the general education discussion even though it has not departed the actual world of education. Administrators still brag about, or bemoan, their VAM scores. VAM scores still affect teacher evaluation. And VAM scores are still bunk.

And that leads to what may be the most disturbing aspect of Greene’s piece for states like Oklahoma. He reviewed a range of studies around 2014 and 2015 that made the overwhelming case for abandoning the use of VAMs for accountability purposes. Since Ryan Walters has said he’s been consulting with the architects of the Houston IDS regarding a plan for taking over the Tulsa Public Schools, the most relevant and frightening research Greene cites for Oklahoma document the destructive role that VAMs played in Houston.

Reading Superintendent Miller’s and Greene’s work makes me, once again, rethink my efforts to persuade administrators and politicians to reject test-driven accountability. I worry that education leaders will revert back to the “culture of compliance,” and obey Walters’ demands. I keep remembering the time when one of the nation’s top experts, John Q. Easton of the Chicago Consortium on School Research, came to Oklahoma City and explained why it is impossible to improve schools without first building trusting relationships, and warning about untrustworthy accountability metrics. Afterwards, in the parking lot where administrators were more likely to feel free to speak their minds, the OKCPS’s top researchers agreed, but warned that the new types of tests resulting from NCLB (with Criterion Based Tests replacing Norm Referenced Tests) would completely corrupt our data.

Then, we had an agreement with MAPS for Kids volunteers that the OKCPS would be clear in telling teachers that their job was teaching to state standards, not standardized tests. When NCLB was implemented, however, I was in the meeting where top administrators recalled years of ridiculous mandates and then jolted us all by saying the district had no choice but to expand high-stakes testing. I was the only one who pushed back. A smart, sincere, veteran administrator replied, “John, I always say you don’t make a hog bigger by weighing it. But this is politics. We have no choice.”

On the state level, I joined an informal committee with superintendents trying to draft NCLB policies that would be less destructive. I was tasked with studying the Ohio standards. Because it was then a swing state, Ohio was granted the most freedom to get around the most destructive accountability mandates. The thought was that NCLB’s worst aspects would not survive the 2004 elections, so we sought to kick the ball down the field until evidence-based policies returned!?!?

So, I kept trying to be diplomatic, bridging differences with both – corporate reformers who would not reconsider their ideology-driven mandates and educators who felt they had to comply with those mandates. On one hand, unity is more important when our democracy – not just public education – faces existential threats. On the other hand, discussing these historic facts could be a unifying force. After all, so many of today’s teachers and parents have experienced the damage done by test-driven, competition-driven schooling. I suspect that many of them would appreciate a discussion of the history of those failures.

The 21st century is full of hard truths about the way that the holistic instruction students need for a better future was undermined. And then came Covid, and then came the Moms for Liberty. Reading Rob Miller and Peter Greene, and the science they present, is convincing me that I also must learn from failures to openly oppose corporate school reforms, in addition to fighting back against fanatics like Ryan Walters.

By the way, Walters just announced his plan to create a “one-stop shop” for teacher training, development and financial services. He unexpectedly ended the state’s relationship with:

The three organizations, which have wide membership throughout the state are the Oklahoma State School Boards Association (OSSBA), the Cooperative Council for Oklahoma School Administration (CCOSA) and the Oklahoma Public School Resource Center (OPSRC). In a news release, Walters said without providing examples that the three organizations “work in tandem with national extremist groups that seek to undermine parents, force failed policies into the schools, and work against a quality education in Oklahoma.”

The Cooperative Council for Oklahoma School Administration responded, “Last year, over 5,400 educators attended CCOSA’s professional development events to serve those members, focusing on topics such as school finance, special education law and teacher evaluations.” The OPSRC did not reply, but apparently, Walters broke ties with them because they hired a former district superintendent, April Grace, who was his Republican opponent for state superintendent. Before education leaders try to cooperate with Walters in order to avoid his full fury, they should remember that the OPSRC is funded by the Walton Family Foundation and other philanthropies that support corporate school reforms! That’s one more reminder that revenge, not school improvement, is his focus.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Closing schools, Corporate Reform, Disruption, Education Industry, Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), Failure, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Oklahoma, Race to the Top, Teachers, VAM (value-added modeling)

Jamelle Bouie: If Trump Is Not an Insurrectionist, What Is He?

By dianeravitch
January 8, 2024 //
55

Jamelle Bouie is one of the best opinion writers at the New York Times. In addition to reading his regular columns, I subscribe to the newsletter he writes, where he shares ideas, tells you what he is reading and what he is cooking.

In this post, he wrote persuasively about why Donald Trump is an insurrectionist and should not be allowed to run for the office he defiled.

Bouie wrote:

Last month the states of Colorado and Maine moved to disqualify Donald Trump as a candidate in the 2024 presidential election, citing Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. In response, Trump has asked the Supreme Court to intervene on his behalf in the Colorado case, and he has appealed Maine’s decision.

There is a real question of whether this attempt to protect American democracy — by removing a would-be authoritarian from the ballot — is itself a threat to American democracy. Will proponents and supporters of the 14th Amendment option effectively destroy the village in order to save it?

It may seem obvious, but we should remember that Trump is not an ordinary political figure. And try as some commentators might, there is no amount of smoke one could create — through strained counterfactuals, dire warnings of a slippery slope or outright dismissal of the events that make the Trump of 2024 a figure very different from the Trump of 2020 — that can obscure or occlude this basic fact.

In 2020, President Trump went to the voting public of the United States and asked for another four years in office. By 51 percent to 47 percent, the voting public of the United States said no. More important, Trump lost the Electoral College, 306 to 232, meaning there were enough of those voters in just the right states to deny him a second term.

The people decided. And Trump said, in so many words, that he didn’t care. What followed, according to the final report of the House select committee on Jan. 6, was an effort to overturn the result of the election.

Trump, the committee wrote, “unlawfully pressured state officials and legislators to change the results of the election in their states.” He “oversaw an effort to obtain and transmit false electoral certificates to Congress and the National Archives.” He “summoned tens of thousands of supporters to Washington for Jan. 6,” the day Congress was slated to certify the election results, and “instructed them to march to the Capitol” so that they could “‘take back’ their country.’” He even sent a message on Twitter attacking his vice president, Mike Pence, knowing full well that “a violent attack on the Capitol was underway.”

In the face of this violence, Trump “refused repeated requests over a multiple hour period that he instruct his violent supporters to disperse and leave the Capitol, and instead watched the violent attack unfold on television.” He did not deploy the National Guard, nor did he “instruct any federal law enforcement agency to assist.”

Trump sought and actively tried to subvert constitutional government and overturn the results of the presidential election. And what he could not do through the arcane rules and procedures of the Electoral College, he tried to do through the threat of brute force, carried out by an actual mob.

Looked at this way, the case for disqualifying Trump through the 14th Amendment is straightforward. Section 3 states that “No person shall … hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state, who, having previously taken an oath … to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”

As the legal scholar Mark A. Graber writes in an amicus brief submitted to the Colorado Supreme Court, “American jurists understood an insurrection against the United States to be an attempt by two or more persons for public reasons to obstruct by force or intimidation the implementation of federal law.” There was also a legal consensus at the time of the amendment’s drafting and ratification that an individual “engaged in insurrection whenever they knowingly incited, assisted or otherwise participated in an insurrection.”

We also know that the framers of the 14th Amendment did not aim or intend to exclude the president of the United States from its terms. In 1870 the Republican-controlled Senate refused to seat Zebulon Vance, the former Confederate governor of North Carolina. It strains credulity to think that the same Republicans would have sat silent if the Democratic Party had, in 1872, nominated a former Confederate leader for the presidency.

Under a plain reading of Section 3 — and given the evidence uncovered by the Jan. 6 committee — Trump cannot stand for the presidency of the United States or any other federal office, for that matter.

The real issue with disqualifying Trump is less constitutional than political. Disqualification, goes the argument, would bring American democracy to the breaking point.

In this line of thinking, to deny Americans their choice of presidential candidate would destroy any remaining confidence in the American political system. It would also invite Trump’s allies in the Republican Party to do the same to Democrats, weaponizing Section 3 and disqualifying candidates for any number of reasons. Disqualification would also give far more power to the courts, when the only appropriate venue for the question of Trump is the voting booth.

But these objections rest on a poor foundation. They treat Trump as an ordinary candidate and Jan. 6 as a variation on ordinary politics. But as the House select committee established, Jan. 6 and the events leading up to it were nothing of the sort. And while many Americans still contest the meaning of the attack on the Capitol, many Americans also contested, in the wake of the Civil War, the meaning of secession and rebellion. That those Americans viewed Confederate military and political leaders as heroes did not somehow delegitimize the Republican effort to keep them, as much as possible, out of formal political life.

What unites Trump with the former secessionists under the disqualification clause is that like them, he refused to listen to the voice of the voting public. He rejected the bedrock principle of democratic life, the peaceful transfer of power.

The unspoken assumption behind the idea that Trump should be allowed on the ballot and that the public should have the chance to choose for or against him yet again is that he will respect the voice of the electorate. But we know this isn’t true. It wasn’t true after the 2016 presidential election — when, after winning the Electoral College, he sought to delegitimize the popular vote victory of his opponent as fraud — and it was put into stark relief after the 2020 presidential election.

Trump is not simply a candidate who does not believe in the norms, values and institutions we call American democracy — although that is troubling enough. Trump is all that and a former president who used the power of his office to try to overturn constitutional government in the United States.

Is it antidemocratic to disqualify Trump from office and deny him a place on the ballot? Does it violate the spirit of democratic life to deny voters the choice of a onetime officeholder who tried, under threat of violence, to deny them their right to choose? Does it threaten the constitutional order to use the clear text of the Constitution to hold a former constitutional officer accountable for his efforts to overturn that order?

The answer is no, of course not. There is no rule that says democracies must give endless and unlimited grace to those who used the public trust to conspire, for all the world to see, against them. Voters are free to choose a Republican candidate for president; they are free to choose a Republican with Trump’s politics. But if we take the Constitution seriously, then Trump, by dint of his own actions, should be off the board.

Not that he will be. The best odds are that the Supreme Court of the United States will punt the issue of Section 3 in a way that allows Trump to run on every ballot in every state. And while it will be tempting to attribute this outcome to the ideological composition of the court — as well as the fact that Trump appointed three of its nine members — I think it will, if it happens, have as much to do with the zone of exception that exists around the former president.

If Trump has a political superpower, it’s that other people believe he has political superpowers. They believe that any effort to hold him accountable will backfire. They believe that he will always ride a wave of backlash to victory. They believe that challenging him on anything other than his terms will leave him stronger than ever.

Most of this is false. But to the extent that it is true, it has less to do with the missed shots — to borrow an aphorism from professional sports — than it does with the ones not taken in the first place.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Failure, Fraud, Lies, Republicans, Trump

Mercedes Schneider: U.S. Education Suffers from a Bizarre, Bipartisan Love of Standardized Testing

By dianeravitch
January 6, 2024 //
30

Mercedes Schneider is heartened by the signs of disillusionment with standardized testing, which has been federally mandated since 2002 and which has enjoyed bipartisan support. Nothing seems to shake the bipartisan obsession with standardized testing.

She writes:

I am encouraged by the recent kerfluffle over the almighty standardized overtesting that is occurring across America as such is featured in this December 03, 2023, Politico piece,“‘A Bizarre Coalition’: Red and Blue States Weigh Big Changes to Testing Requirements.”

The piece focuses on goings-on surrounding “strict standardized testing and graduation requirements” in Florida, New York, and Louisiana.

If one offers even a cursory consideration of the legislative novelties foisted upon America’s K12 classrooms in recent decades, the red-and-blue “bizarre coalition” noted in the Politico title is not all that bizarre. Indeed, “coalition” of red and blue has introduced a lot of chaos into American education, including the pinnacle test-and-punish legislation, No Child Left Behind (the reauthorization of which was abandoned by Congress in 2007 because by then NCLB was seen as a political liability).

Red and blue also stood behind Common Core. Republican lawmakers were for it until they were against it, but former Florida governor and 2015 presidential hopeful Jeb Bush held onto Common Core but avoided calling it by its “poisonous” name on the 2015 campaign trail. “Rebrand” became the name of the game. Both national teachers unions accepted money from the Gates Foundation to promote it, then turned. Regarding Common Core backlash, Democratic secretary of ed Arne Duncan blamed “white suburban moms who — all of a sudden — their child isn’t as brilliant as they thought they were, and their school isn’t quite as good as they thought they were.”

And charter schools: Still bipartisan despite rampant fraud and waste of underregulated taxpayer money (including embezzlement, wire fraud, corruption, graft, and scandal after scandal).

So, yeah, the “bizarre ” as it concerns modifying state standardized overtesting comes in the form of surprise at officials’ once sold on standardized testing even considering scaling back the testing.

The supposed reason for common standards and the NCLB-reworked, appendaged testing was to make students “ready for college and careers” and to make the US “globally competitive.”

Obama’s Race to the Top was little more than federal funding doled out for a Common Core fizzle.

Of course, at the official release of Common Core in June 2010, no one saw a pandemic coming ten years down the road, and it takes no test scores to know that the US has exceeded expectations for 2023 as concerns the state of our post-pandemic economy. And here is another important point: Nations worldwide must balance international competition with international cooperation.

It must be both.

I have yet to read any expert research crediting standardized testing in schools as contributing to post-pandemic economic recovery, for better or worse, for that matter.

I suspect that some of the Republican softening on standardized testing might reflect the rift in the party as moving away from the education agenda preferences of the likes of George and Jeb Bush. What’s fashionable now is the far-right purge of library books.

The library book purge central force is facing its own bad press as the Florida Republican power couple, Christian and Bridget Ziegler, are apparently living lives that are making the morality policing of Moms for Liberty, group that the Zieglers fiscally and politically enabled, difficult to carry off.

You know you’re in a bad spot when the phone video of you (top-ranking conservative fire-breather) having sex with a woman who is not your wife (but whom your wife also had sex with in a previous three-way) is the best way you have to counter the rape charge brought by that woman. And you stiff-neckedly refuse to resign from your conservative perch. And so does your wife.

Now that’s bizarre.

Please open the link to finish the post.

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), Failure, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top, Standardized Testing

Maurice Cunningham on the Rise and Fall of Moms for Liberty

By dianeravitch
December 21, 2023 //
5

Maurice Cunningham, a retired professor who is a specialist in dark money in education politics, surveys the meteoric rise and fall of the rightwing group Moms for Liberty in The Progressive. First, the recently formed organization gathered plenty of publicity as a fearsome force censoring books, accusing teachers of “indoctrinating” students, attacking anything in the schools that acknowledged the existence of gay students or families, and opposing teachers unions. The Moms launched with a big budget, more than anyone could gather at a bake sale. But came the school board elections of 2023, and their candidates took a shellacking. Recently came news that one of their prominent co-founders, Bridget Ziegler, was caught in a sex scandal—a threesome—and the organization was publicly humiliated.

Maurice Cunningham wonders how this checkered organization will survive.

He writes:

On June 30, 2023, a Washington Post headline declared “Moms for Liberty didn’t exist three years ago. Now it’s a GOP kingmaker.” On November 10, 2023, after a raft of school board elections across the country, the Post ran another headline: “Voters drub Moms for Liberty ‘parental rights’ candidates at the ballot.” Moms for Liberty (M4L) not only didn’t make any kings, it didn’t even make many school board members. What happened?

The pre-election headline reflected the messaging skills that M4L has carefully honed to make itself more palatable. By November, however, the reality on the ground became clear.

To learn the origins and context of this group, open the link and read on. The article doesn’t mention the Ziegler sex scandal. Cunningham wrote about that in an article in the Tampa Bay Tribune, but it’s behind a paywall. The Moms are on a downhill slide as a result of their election losses, followed by Bridget’s bisexual tryst. Her ex-friends removed her name from the Moms website.

Categories Bigotry, Censorship, Cruelty, Dark Money, Democracy, DeSantis, Elections, Extremism, Failure, Florida, Freedom to Read, Gender, Hypocrisy
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