Nicole Shanahan, the billionaire selected by Robert Kennedy Jr. as his running mate, suspects that childhood vaccines may have caused her daughter’s autism. Glenn Kessler, the Fact Checker for the Washington Post, asked for the reactions of several autism experts, who disagreed with Shanahan. Kessler gives her four Pinnochios, the highest ranking for falsehood.
Archives for category: Fake
Peter Greene writes here about two basic facts: 1) vouchers are unpopular; and 2) because they are unpopular, their supporters call them something else, not vouchers. There have been more than 20 state referenda on vouchers. None passed. So voucher advocates had to become creative and come up with new names for them.
In Florida, the state constitution forbids spending public money on religious schools. So Jeb Bush, a fervent voucher guy, became creative. He proposed a referendum to remove that wording from the state constitution in 2012. The referendum was titled “The Religious Freedom Amendment.” Opponents of vouchers cried foul, but the misleading title remained. Others had to vote against “religious freedom” to oppose vouchers. Some were undoubtedly fooled, but the Religious Freedom Amendment was defeated anyway; only 44% supported it. Nonetheless, the Florida legislature enacted vouchers, ignoring the referendum failure, and in the past year, removed all income limits. As in every other state with universal vouchers, the majority of students applying for vouchers were already enrolled in private and religious schools.
Peter Greene writes:
Voucher supporters have one major problem: school vouchers are unpopular.
The term doesn’t test well. Measure of public support is iffy– if you ask people if they would like every student to have the chance to ride to a great school on their own pony, people say yes, but if you ask a more reality-based framing (“should we spend education dollars on public schools or subsidies for some private schools”) the results look a bit different.
But one clear measure of public support for vouchers is this; despite all the insistence that the public just loves the idea, no voucher measure has ever been passed by the voters in a state. All voucher laws have been passed by legislators, not voted in by the public.
Voucher supporters have developed one clear strategy– call them something else.
The basic school voucher idea is simple– the state takes money that it was going to spend on public education (either after that money has been paid in taxes, or by having someone trade a “contribution” to a voucher fund in exchange for tax credit) and giving it to parents, who in turn can go out and buy education services on their own.
They’re not taxpayer-funded vouchers–they’re “tax credit scholarships.” They’re not vouchers– they’re an Education Freedom Account. And if you want to get in a twitter battle, go ahead and call education savings accounts “vouchers,” because part of the whole point of education savings account was to create an instrument that was both a super-voucher and not-something-we’ll-call-a-voucher-at-all-so-stop-doing-that-dammit.
I expect that behind the curtain there have been folks fervently doing messaging testing on other names for vouchers, and from the results around the nation, we can deduce that words that tested well were “education” and “freedom” and “scholarship.” Also, “empowerment” is coming on strong. States with education savings accounts have the chance to play with the initials ESA.
So what pops out of the branding machine is Empowerment Scholarship Accounts (Arizona), Education Freedom Account (Arkansas, New Hampshire), Family Empowerment Scholarship Program (Florida), Choice Scholarship Program(Indiana), Opportunity Scholarship Program (North Carolina), Education Choice Scholarship (Ohio), and, of course, who could forget Betsy DeVos’s national tax credit scholarship voucher program, the Education Freedom Plan.
You can mad lib your way to a voucher program of your own. Education Freedom Scholarship Opportunity Program! Family Freedom Education Scholarships! Family Freedom Empowerment Education Scholarship Opportunity Choice Program Plan! Just don’t call it a voucher.
Bonus credits to Louisianna, where someone took the trouble to write a bill pushing the Louisiana Giving All True Opportunity to Rise– LA GATOR. And in California, legislature voucherfiles are trying “Education Flex Account” for their latest attempt to pass an ESA voucher.
But a voucher by any other name still smells the same. It’s a payoff to parents so that they’ll exit public education, a false promise of education choice, a redirection of public taxpayer dollars into private pockets, an outsourcing of discrimination, a public subsidy for private religious choices, a means of defunding and dismantling public education as we understand it in this country, a transformation of a public good into a market-based commodity. Call it what you like. There isn’t enough air freshener in the world to make it smell like a rose.
Trump claims to love “law and order,” but he continually incites violence. He incited the single most violent uprising in our history against the law and the Constitution on January 6, 2021. And he treated the Capitol police with contempt, those defending law and order.
He regularly attacks the judicial system—the bastion of law and order—because he is under multiple indictments.
He writes posts on social media intended to incite hatred, division, and yes, violence.
He recently paid a visit to the wake of a New York City policeman who was murdered by a criminal. It was performative politics.
The father and brother of Officer Brian Sicknick, who died after defending the U.S. Capitol, slammed Trump for playing politics. Trump did not pay a condolence call to the families of police officers who died after the riot that Trump incited. He didn’t visit any injured police officers in the hospital. Instead, he refers to those who beat up the police as “patriots.” This is sick and twisted. The people who menaced the Congress, threatened to kill the Vice-President, and damaged the seat of government are, to Trump, “patriots” and those who were convicted for their violence are “hostages.” Not the police who defended Congress. Not those who defended law and order.
Tom Nichols wrote in The Atlantic about Trump’s obsession with violence, about his encouragement of violence, about his threats and intimidation.
He wrote:
On Good Friday, Donald Trump shared a video that prominently featured a truck with a picture of a hog-tied Joe Biden on it. I’ve seen this art on a tailgate in person, and it looks like a kidnapped Biden is a captive in the truck bed.
The former president, running for his old office, knowingly transmitted a picture of the sitting president of the United States as a bound hostage.
Of course, Trump’s spokesperson Steven Cheung quickly began the minimizing and what-abouting: “That picture,” he said in a statement, “was on the back of a pick up truck that was traveling down the highway. Democrats and crazed lunatics have not only called for despicable violence against President Trump and his family, they are actually weaponizing the justice system against him.”
I cannot recall prominent elected Democrats calling for hurting Trump or his family. The closest Biden got was when he once lost his temper six years ago and said that if he and Trump were in high school, he’d have wanted to beat him up behind the gym, a comment Biden later said he regretted. And there is certainly no evidence to suggest that Biden or his spokespeople ever promoted the idea that the 45th president should be taken hostage. Over the weekend, Trump’s defenders took to social media to keep raising the 2017 picture in which the comedian Kathy Griffin held up an effigy of Trump’s severed head. So let us all stipulate: Her stunt was ghastly. Griffin’s comedy—or parody, or protest art—was in bad taste and potentially a risk to a sitting president. She paid for it: The Secret Service investigated her, and her career at CNN was torched.
But Griffin is not a former president seeking once again to become commander in chief of the armed forces and the top law-enforcement authority in the United States. And Griffin did not incite a mob of rioters—some of whom were bent on homicide—to attack the Capitol. Donald Trump is, and he did.
Meanwhile, Trump also had words last week for the people trying to hold him accountable—or, more accurately, for their children. The day before he promoted imagery depicting the torture of the sitting president, Trump fired off a Truth Social post in which he mentioned the daughter of Juan Merchan, the judge presiding over his hush-money criminal trial: “Judge Juan Merchan is totally compromised, and should be removed from this TRUMP Non-Case immediately,” Trump wrote. “His Daughter, Loren, is a Rabid Trump Hater, who has admitted to having conversations with her father about me, and yet he gagged me.”
Then, on Saturday, Trump blasted out a New York Post article that included Loren Merchan’s picture to his followers.
Trump’s fan base will shrug off its leader’s condoning of violent fantasies and implied threats of violence as more harmless lib-owning. But what Trump is doing is dangerous, and the time is long past to stop treating support for his candidacy as just one of many ordinary political choices. As the historian of authoritarianism Ruth Ben-Ghiat posted on Friday on X: “This is an emergency. This is what authoritarian thugs and terrorists do. Trump is targeting the President of the United States.”
Other Americans are well within their rights to wonder if this is what Trump supporters actually want to see in 2024.
Perhaps a thought experiment might help: Would today’s Trump supporters think it hilarious, say, to see Ronald Reagan or Jimmy Carter bound in the same way that Biden was depicted? Perhaps Bill Clinton or the Bushes tied up like hostages? (We can only begin to imagine what kind of ugly end the truck Rembrandts might have portrayed for Barack Obama.)
After seeing Trump post this video, I found myself wanting to ask his voters the questions that always occur after one of his outrages: Is this okay with you? Is this something you’d want your children to see?…
Unfortunately, we’re not getting much help in making those determinations from some of the media. On Sunday morning, for example, Kristen Welker of Meet the Press noted that Trump had “stepped up his attacks on the judge and his family in the New York hush money case” and is “falsely calling the criminal proceedings ‘election interference.’” Her verdict: “It is yet another reminder that we are covering this election against the backdrop of a deeply divided nation.”
Well, sure, that’s one way to put it. More accurately, however, we might say that a mostly coherent and decent nation is under electoral assault from a violent seditionist minority that has captured one of our two national parties, and its leader encourages and condones threats against officials at every level across the country, including threats of violence against the sitting president of the United States.
Every ardent Trump supporter should be asked when enough’s enough. And every elected Republican, including the sad lot now abasing themselves for a spot on Trump’s ticket or in his possible Cabinet, should be asked when they will risk their careers for the sake of the country, if not their souls. We have reached an important moment—one of many over the past years, if we are to be honest. After all we have learned and seen, and all of the questions we might ask of Trump supporters, perhaps only one simple and direct question truly matters now:
Is this who you are?…
In my view, Trump’s behavior towards others is vile, immature, narcissistic, and pathological. Anyone who is a critic or antagonist to Trump is treated with hatred and contempt. They deserve punishment. They should be hog-tied and beaten. They should be publicly shamed. They are not competitors, they are enemies. When Trump identifies them as such, they are certain to get death threats, threats of violence.
This is not normal. Trump has the mind of a mafia boss or a ruthless authoritarian.. He demands total loyalty. Those unwilling to embrace him and his lies and hatreds are cast out. This is not normal.
Peter Greene warns teachers not to fall for the cheap and lazy artificial intelligence (AI) that designs lesson plans. He explains why in this post:
Some Brooklyn schools are piloting an AI assistant that will create lesson plans for them.
Superintendent Janice Ross explains it this way. “Teachers spend hours creating lesson plans. They should not be doing that anymore.”
The product is YourWai (get it?) courtesy of The Learning Innovation Catalyst (LINC), a company that specializes in “learning for educators that works/inspires/motivates/empowers.” They’re the kind of company that says things like “shift to impactful professional learning focused on targeted outcomes” unironically. Their LinkedIn profile says “Shaping the Future of Learning: LINC supports the development of equitable, student-centered learning by helping educators successfully shift to blended, project-based, and other innovative learning models.” You get the idea.
LINC was co-founded by Tiffany Wycoff, who logged a couple of decades in the private school world before writing a book, launching a speaking career, and co-founding LINC in 2017. Co-founder Jaime Pales used to work for Redbird Advanced Learning as executive director for Puerto Rico and Latin America and before that “developed next-generation learning programs” at some company.
LINC has offices in Florida and Colombia.
YourWai promises to do lots of things so that teachers can get “90% of your work done in 10% of the time.” Sure. Ross told her audience that teachers just enter students’ needs and the standards they want to hit and the app will spit out a lesson plan. It’s a “game changer” that will give teachers more time to “think creatively.”
These stories are going to crop up over and over again, and every story ought to include this quote from Cory Doctorow:
We’re nowhere near the point where an AI can do your job, but we’re well past the point where your boss can be suckered into firing you and replacing you with a bot that fails at doing your job.
Look, if you ask AI to write a lesson plan for instructing students about major themes in Hamlet, the AI is not going to read Hamlet, analyze the themes, consider how best to guide students through those themes, and design an assessment that will faithfully measure those outcomes. What it’s going to do is look at a bunch of Hamlet lesson plans that it found on line (some of which may have been written by humans, some of which may have been cranked out by some amateur writing for online corner-cutting site, and some of which will have been created by other AI) and mush them all together. Oh, and throw in shit that it just made up.
There are undoubtedly lessons for which AI can be useful–cut and dried stuff like times tables and preposition use. But do not imagine that the AI has any idea at all of what it is doing, nor that it has any particular ability to discern junk from quality in the stuff it sweeps up on line. Certainly the AI has zero knowledge of pedagogy or instructional techniques.
But this “solution” will appeal because it’s way cheaper than, say, hiring enough teachers so that individual courseloads are not so heavy that paperwork and planning take a gazillion hours.
This is a video listing some of Trump’s biggest business failures.
What’s especially amusing about the video is the archival footage of Trump, boasting about the success of a venture he just launched and praising himself for his latest venture. It’s the best, the most, the greatest. Then it goes bust. As you watch, you realize that his greatest talent is as a pitchman, the guy who gets you to buy or invest in his latest moneymaking scheme. He is the guy selling snake oil to cure everything that ails you. They did not include “Trump University,” surely a major fraud and a financial disaster. Trump claimed that those who enrolled in his online “university” would learn how to get rich, learning his secrets. He hoodwinked widows and vets. Trump was ordered to repay $25 million to people who registered for his fake university.
One of the top-rated shows on Netflix is The Program: Cons, Cults, and Kidnapping.
It’s a three-part docuseries that tells the story of the abuse suffered by young people sent to a facility for troubled teens in upstate New York called the Academy at Ivy Ridge. It was produced by a young woman who spent time there, accompanied by other of the program’s unwilling participants.
The facility, now closed, is part of a national chain of similar ones. The brochure advertises a camp-like atmosphere, but once there, the teens are not allowed to speak to one another or to go outside. They are incarcerated in a brutal prison where they experience brainwashing and physical and mental abuse.
When they try to tell their parents the truth, they are labeled manipulative liars.
The producer was taken from her home at 3 am in handcuffs, with her parents’ permission.
When boys break a rule—of which there are many—they are beaten by staff members.
If some of this sounds vaguely familiar, it may be because it sounds like a “no-excuses” school.
It turns out that Ivy Ridge is staffed by untrained, uncertified locals working for minimum wage. The school is part of a Utah-based organization called the World Wide Association of Specialty Programs (WWASP). It’s a very profitable business.
As the “troubled teen” industry has grown, it’s become politically powerful and fights efforts at regulation.
This expose is very important. You should see it.
The editorial board of Cleveland.com and the Plain-Dealer were taken aback by the facts reported about vouchers by their reporter Laura Hancock (posted in previous time slot). The Ohio legislature expanded vouchers so almost every family is eligible, even if they never sent their child to public school. The editorial board believed that vouchers were supposed to help poor kids escape low-performing schools, and they urge the legislature to return to the original purpose.
What is disappointing about this editorial is that it fails to recognize that the original purpose of vouchers has already proven to be a disaster. In the only statewide evaluation of vouchers, sponsored by the choice-friendly Thomas B. Fordham Institute, poor children who took vouchers fell even farther behind their peers in the public schools they left. (See summary, on p. 7, concluding that students who left public schools for voucher schools performed worse than if they had remained in their public school).
This finding—that voucher students who leave public schools perform worse—has been replicated in every voucher program. Voucher students don’t go to elite private schools. Typically they go to voucher schools that do not have certified teachers and that are allowed to discriminate on any grounds.
Voucher scholar Josh Cowen of Michigan State University has assembled the powerful negative effects of vouchers on kids who transfer from public schools. The results in Ohio are the worst.
I wish the editorial board of Cleveland.com and the Plain-Dealer had seen these data before they wrote the following editorial. The facts are in: Vouchers don’t help poor kids who leave struggling public schools.
Last June, when the Ohio House passed Amended Substitute House Bill 33, the two-year state budget, sending it to Gov. Mike DeWine’s desk for his signature, House Majority leadership celebrated the “landmark” expansion of EdChoice school vouchers, loosening income caps to make voucher benefits available to all Ohio families.
“Along with funding public education, the budget makes a landmark investment in school choice with a universal voucher program,” the statement from House Republican leadership said. “This program is designed to safeguard lower-income families and offers options beyond traditional public schools. By expanding access to vouchers, Ohio ensures parents can make the best decisions for their children’s education.”
But data from implementation of this “landmark investment in school choice … designed to safeguard lower-income families” suggest it did very little to provide school choice or to help low-income families.
Instead, parents in affluent communities like Rocky River, Westlake and Bay Village with kids already in private and parochial schools appear to have taken immediate advantage of the new eligibility rules. Families of four up to 450% of poverty levels (that is, earning up to $135,000 a year) now qualify for full taxpayer-funded vouchers, and those making more money qualify for partial vouchers.
Ohio’s legislature, to be true to its stated school-choice motive, should rewrite the rules to guarantee that this money goes to children in underperforming schools, possibly relying on state report cards to set the standard.
Cleveland.com’s Laura Hancock looked at before-and-after numbers and found that students on EdChoice vouchers shot up from 16 to 309 in the Rocky River school district; 41 to 581 in Westlake; and 13 to 229 in Bay Village.
Hancock then compared public-school enrollment trends to judge if this was primarily a move out of public schools, or a subsidy for kids already in private and parochial schools.
The evidence points strongly to the latter. Rocky River public school enrollment dropped by only 22 students, not 309. Bay Village enrollment dropped by 30 students, not 229. Westlake schools recorded 19 fewer students this year compared with last academic year — not 581. Similar patterns were seen in other affluent school districts, from Strongsville and North Royalton to Brecksville-Broadview Heights.
By contrast, in the Cleveland public schools, where more than 8,000 students now get school vouchers through the much-older Cleveland school voucher program, which dates to 1996, those on EdChoice vouchers increased only slightly, from 9 to 28.
In even more impoverished East Cleveland, EdChoice recipients dropped from 12 last academic year to less than 10 this year.
And the money is now almost gone.
“The legislature budgeted $397.8 million for EdChoice-Expansion this year,” Hancock reports. “As of Feb. 26, the state had spent $387.5 million.”
Advocates of the universal voucher program suggested to Hancock that, as word gets out, more people will use the vouchers as intended next school year, to switch from low-performing public schools to a private or parochial option.
But it seems unlikely those now on the EdChoice expansion vouchers would be displaced to make room for lower-income students.
In other words, lacking conscious, targeted efforts to make sure low-income Ohioans in poor-performing schools primarily benefited, Ohio’s EdChoice expansion as implemented was not the school-choice program Statehouse leaders promised.
The data suggest instead it became just a big taxpayer subsidy for those students already in private schools.
That should outrage every Ohio taxpayer — and every parent of students in struggling districts who were supposed to benefit.
Also raising red flags were the absence of reciprocal obligations on the part of private and parochial schools taking these taxpayer-funded vouchers to show they are a higher-quality alternative to public schools.
The lack of transparency and data-reporting guardrails forces parents making “school choice” for academic reasons, rather than out of religious or other motivations, to blindly assume that a private or parochial school is the best choice, without actual data on educational performance.
This is particularly troubling given Ohio’s history of funding for-profit charter schools without such guardrails. That’s how the now-shuttered Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow managed to make off with $117 million in wrongly paid taxpayer funds, based on a 2022 state audit — mostly for falsely reporting students ECOT never had.
The General Assembly needs to revisit its universal vouchers program to ensure that this nearly $400 million in Ohio taxpayer money is buying true school choice as promised for students mired in poor-performing public schools who most need quality alternatives.
Former federal prosecutor Barbara McQuade writes on the website Cafe Insider that social media should require commenters to use their real name. Anonymity enables trolls and invective.
We have seen what happens on this blog. Anonymous posters attack others, make wild accusations, and vent their inner demons. I take down as many of these comments as I can, but I’m not online 24/7. One Trump troll repeatedly changes his IP address to evade being blocked.
There are a number of rules in this blog. First, I don’t allow comments that insult me; the blog is my online living room and I eject offensive visitors. Second, I don’t tolerate conspiracy theories: Sandy Hook happened, 9/11 was not “an inside job,” Trump lost the 2020 election. I also will not post racist, sexist, anti-Semitic, xenophobic, or homophobic comments.
The reason I allow anonymous comments is because many educators are afraid to speak their mind about what they know. They fear retribution from their superior.
What do you think?
McQuade writes:
Dear Reader,
One of my favorite New Yorker cartoons depicts two dogs sitting at a computer with one saying to the other, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”
This image came to mind recently when one of my hometown newspapers, The Detroit Free Press, announced it would no longer post reader comments on its website. In a letter to readers, Editor Nicole Avery Nichols explained the decision was necessary “due to the time investment needed to produce a safe and constructive dialogue.” The real culprit, I believe, is anonymity.
Reader comments became commonplace when news outlets went online in the 1990s. The idea for such comments is laudable. Members of the community may engage with writers, editors, and each other to discuss a matter in the news, adding to the discussion the perspectives of other voices and experiences.
Yet, the Free Press has decided to eliminate reader comments, following the lead of other media outlets such as NPR, CNN and the Washington Post. The Free Press now invites readers to comment on social media, where it has no duty to moderate the conversation, or through letters to the editor, which are screened before publication. Letters to the editor of the Free Press also require one important component that online comments do not – the identity of the author. To have a letter considered for publication, writers must include their “full name, full home address and day and evening telephone numbers.” The Free Press may be onto something.
In researching my forthcoming book on disinformation, Attack From Within, one of the things I learned was the danger of anonymity online. When people can hide behind a false name, they have license to say all manner of inappropriate things. As Free Press columnist Mitch Albom wrote regarding the new policy, a typical commenter can use a pseudonym like SEXYDUDE313 and say all manner of despicable things with no accountability. And so, instead of a thoughtful discussion exchanging diverse viewpoints, the conversation quickly devolves into a barrage of insults aimed at not only the reporter, but also other readers posting comments. Commenters typically attack one another with slurs based on their presumed political affiliation, their level of education, or even their race. Comments have become a sort of online heckling, but in real life, even hecklers can be thrown out of the nightclub.
The danger of anonymity online was a key finding of Robert Mueller’s special counsel report on Russian interference in the 2016 election. Mueller’s report noted that members of the Internet Research Agency, a Russian organization alleged to have engaged in a disinformation campaign, used false names, such as “Blacktivist,” “United Muslims of America,” and “Heart of Texas,” to pose as members of various groups and sow discord in American society. Operatives, posing as members of certain racial or ethnic groups, would post inflammatory content to provoke outrage. Some posts were designed to favor Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton, and some discouraged minority voters from casting a ballot at all. While we will never know the full extent to which Russia’s influence campaign affected the outcome of that election, this kind of foreign interference in political discourse is a danger to our democracy.
To combat disinformation on social media, one easy step could be to eliminate anonymous users. The Free Press’s example demonstrates that anonymity enables behavior that is rude, harassing, and deceptive. Congress could mandate that social media platforms require users to verify their identities. At one time, before Twitter became X, a user could become verified by providing identifying information to the platform. A blue check signaled that the person was who they said they were. Mandatory verification could help reduce threats, trolling, and the spread of disinformation. Although it would be resource-intensive, to be sure, it should be part of the cost of doing business for social media platforms.
Such a policy could face First Amendment challenges. As a general matter, the First Amendment protects anonymous speech because it permits people to engage in political speech even when it’s unpopular, and to criticize powerful people without fear of retribution. But, like all rights, the right to free speech is not absolute. The Supreme Court has routinely held that fundamental rights, such as freedom of speech, may be limited when the government has a compelling interest in the restriction and the measure is narrowly tailored to achieve that interest. Here, Congress could investigate whether eliminating anonymity online effectively reduces threats, harassment, and disinformation, serving a compelling government interest. By limiting the restriction to social media, and not all speech, the law could be sufficiently narrow.
Requiring people to use their real names when posting comments online could make digital spaces safer. It would also allow readers to assess the credibility of those posting comments, making it much more difficult to be fooled by manipulative political operatives and hostile foreign actors.
And perhaps even by dogs.
Stay Informed,
Barb
I served on the National Assessment Governing Board from 1998-2004. NAGB is the governing agency for NAEP, the federal test. I was appointed by President Bill Clinton. I learned about the inner workings of standardized testing, much of which made me skeptical of it.
I have often observed that critics of public schools assume that NAEP Proficient is the same as “grade level,” when in fact NAEP warns readers explicitly in every score report that NAEP Proficient is NOT “grade level.” In fact, NAEP Proficient represents mastery of what was tested, which I would characterize as an A or A-.
In 2010, when the anti-public school documentary “Waiting for ‘Superman’” was released, I reviewed it for The New York Review of Books and criticized it for confusing NAEP Proficiency with grade level, then claiming that most American kids can’t read, all because of their terrible public schools, their terrible teachers and those awful unions. The way to a better future, the documentary claimed, was charter schools. Not true. Even Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona has repeated this erroneous claim. Apparently neither he nor his speech writers reads NAEP reports with care and no one has briefed them.
I have explained this confusion on several occasions on the blog. I even called the Commissioner of the National Center on Education Statistics and proposed that NAEP Proficient be renamed “NAEP Mastery,” to clarify its meaning. She sounded enthusiastic about the idea (which came from a reader of this blog) but nothing changed.
I am very happy to see that Professor Paul Thomas at Furman University in South Carolina has launched a series called “Big lies in Education,” and this claim is one of the Big Lies. It is a lie because the fact that NAEP Proficient is not grade level is stated plainly in every release of NAEP scores.
Thomas begins:
One of the most bearish statistics for the future of the United States is this: Two-thirds of fourth graders in the United States are not proficient in reading,” wrote Nicholas Kristof in The New York Times.
Kristof’s piece in 2023 can be traced back to a similar claim by Emily Hanford in 2018: “More than 60 percent of American fourth-graders are not proficient readers, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, and it’s been that way since testing began in the 1990s,” including a surprisingly ineffective graphic.
Open the link to see this and other graphics.
The student reading proficiency Big Lie grounded in misrepresenting or misunderstanding NAEP is likely one of the most complicated Big Lies of Education.
In media and political rhetoric, first, the terms “reading proficiency” and “grade level reading” are commonly jumbled and used inappropriately as synonyms.
Achievement levels such as “basic” and “proficient,” such as used in NAEP for reading, are misleading and complicated for most people not familiar with technical terminology.
NAEP “basic” is approximately grade level (although even that claim is problematic since no standard exists in the US for “proficient” or “grade level”), and “proficient” on NAEP is high:
Another important graph. Open the link.
Hanford’s and Kristof’s Big Lie, then, is a combination of blurring NAEP achievement levels with grade level reading achievement and manufacturing a reading crisis with that misinformation.
Ironically, NAEP grade 4 reading scores for a decade show that 2/3 of students are reading at or above grade level, the inverse of the false crisis claims of the media:
Open the link for the graph.
This is an excellent expose, which everyone should read. The claim that most kids read below grade level is foundational to the claim that public schools are in crisis. Its a Big Lie.
Peter Greene writes about the latest nonsense proposed by legislators in Iowa. These proposals are a solution in search of a problem. Students, teachers, and schools have genuine needs, like decaying buildings, underpaid teachers, and overcrowded classrooms. None will be solved by hiring unlicensed chaplains or singing the National Anthem.
He writes:
Some Iowa legislators want to offer public school students both chaplains and a daily dose of the “Star Spangled Banner.”
Chaplains
House Bill 2073 authorizes school districts to hire school chaplains while stipulating that the district shall not require the chaplain “to have a license, endorsement, certification, authorization or statement of recognition issued by the board of educational examiners.”
Supporters argue that it would provide additional mental health supports for students, or provide a religious support for students who were not able to attend a private religious school. Opponents argue it’s a violation of church-state separation, and a misapplication of the idea of a chaplain.
A similar bill passed in Texas last year, and over 100 Texas chaplains urged school districts not to take advantage of it. The chaplains pointed out that professional chaplains have “specific education and expertise,” including, typically a graduate theological degree and support from an organization connected to their religious tradition. Professional chaplains may also acquire two years of religious leadership experience.
Besides the problems that come with letting just anyone declare themselves a chaplain, the Texas chaplains also saw problems with placing a chaplain in a school setting:
Because of our training and experience, we know that chaplains are not a replacement for school counselors or safety measures in our public schools, and we urge you to reject this flawed policy option: It is harmful to our public schools and the students and families they serve.
Iowans should be able to predict exactly what comes next, considering the noisy controversy over the December display at the capital by the Satanic Temple as a display of what happens when you open the door to religious expression by the government.
Sure enough. The Satanic Temple has expressed its excitement for the “opportunities [the bill] presents for the Satanic Temple to support services and programs to school children in our state.” While one of the bill’s authors seems to have suggested that she had Christian ministers in mind, the bill as written would allow for any religion to be represented, and by any person who feels like representing it.
The National Anthem
House Bill 587 is simple enough. To promote patriotism, the bill adds this paragraph to the subject areas to be taught in grades 1 through 12:
The social studies curriculum shall include instruction related to the words and music of the national anthem, the meaning and history of the national anthem, the object and principles of the government of the United States, the sacrifices made by the founders of the United States, the important contributions made by all who have served in the armed forces of the United States since the founding, and how to love, honor, and respect the national anthem.
To make this happen, schools are instructed to have all classroom teachers lead students in at least one verse of the anthem every day. On specially designated “patriotic occasions,” they are required to sing all four verses. The local board may also require all four verses before certain school activities.
Students or teachers “shall not compelled” to sing over their objections, but all are required “to show full respect to the national anthem” by standing at attention, if physically able, “and maintaining a respectful silence.”
Private schools, even those accepting taxpayer-funded vouchers, are exempt from the proposed law.
Please open the link to finish the article.
Diane Ravitch's blog 