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Nancy Bailey: How Betsy DeVos Fostered Squalid Learning Conditions in Detroit

By dianeravitch
May 7, 2020 //
8

Nancy Bailey just keeps getting better and better as she points her pen and her blog at malfeasance in education.

In this post, she points to the recent landmark decision that recognized that the children of Detroit have a right to literacy, a right not previously acknowledged by any court (or overturned on appeal). The court quite correctly decided that young people cannot exercise their rights and responsibilities as citizens if they can’t read.

What is DeVos’s role in the Detroit debacle? She has spent large sums of money to promote the false idea that the way to improve education is to expand school choice. Detroit is her handiwork, and it proves the failure of school choice. What she purchased was widespread inequity and inadequacy.

Open the link to read the full article and see the links to other sources.

Bailey writes:

The Detroit landmark decision that children deserve to learn to read in school is a case that reflects decades of troubled education in Detroit. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and school privatization are not mentioned in this case. But school privatization initiatives have been failing children in the Motor City for years. DeVos is the current face of a long line of those peddling such reforms.

Harmful school reform initiatives go back to Gov. John Engler’s administration. Many school reformers, both Republican and Democrat, have their fingerprints on the crime scene. The DeVos family is from Michigan and has affected Detroit and school reform there for years.

The U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled in favor of Detroit students who claim they were denied their rights to a “basic minimum education.” Called the “Right to Read” lawsuit, Gary B. v. Whitmer exposes the decrepit conditions found in schools run by State leaders who failed to support Detroit’s students. The case was originally filed under former Gov. Rick Snyder’s administration.

It’s critical to recognize DeVos’s connection to the Detroit school failures. During this pandemic she is flagrantly redirecting public money to the same privatization agenda. It puts democratic public schools in jeopardy, like schools were put at risk in Detroit. Here’s a petition you can sign now to try and stop her.

School privatization cheerleaders have for years promoted the idea that choice will equalize education by giving parents choices. They’ve pushed for online charter schools and school turnarounds that get tough on teachers and students of color. Choice failed in Detroit.

Reading

Schools had no literacy programs.

The case describes what good reading instruction should consist of in school. Sometimes it appears to be delving into the Reading Wars, emphasizing the loss of explicit phonics.

The trouble is, one can’t get to a debate over how students learn to read, without overcoming the fact that students have untrained teachers and an atrocious learning environment.

It’s troubling to think the case might result in only professional development and a push for unproven programs, even online reading programs, that don’t address the need for creating quality schools, professional teachers, and more individualized attention for the children of Detroit.

School Buildings

Poor school conditions have been a part of Detroit’s schools for years. Students struggle to learn in slum-like conditions, no air-conditioning in the summer, freezing temperatures in the winter. Who can forget these pictures from 2016, the year the case was filed?

Vermin, mold, and contaminated drinking water plague the schools. Bullets, dead vermin, condoms, and sex toys have been found on the playground. Fire safety equipment and fire regulations are missing.

Betsy DeVos’s mantra is that education is about students and not buildings. She has done nothing to improve the condition of schools in Detroit or around the country.

Lacking Resources

Teaching resources were deficient. The case describes classrooms without enough textbooks, and old books that haven’t been updated in years.

The only school library mentioned had no librarian and was locked!

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Detroit, Education Industry, Failure, Funding, Inequity, Injustice, Privatization

Steven Singer: Save Our Schools from the Biggest Budget Cuts in History

By dianeravitch
May 6, 2020 //
5

Steven Singer warns that public schools are facing deep cuts in state funding due to revenue losses caused by the pandemic.

Hey, it’s Teacher Appreciation Week, just the time to start mobilizing against cuts that could cause the layoff of nearly 300,000 teachers.

That means larger class sizes, fewer electives, cuts to the arts, to everything that is not tested.

Don’t expect Trump to stand up for teachers. He said famously in 2016 that he “loves the uneducated.” He wants more of them. They are the ones who march around with their weapons demanding freedom from public health measures to protect lives.

A society that is unwilling to invest in its children is sacrificing its future.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Cruelty, Education Reform, Funding, Ignorance, Students, Teachers

Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren: There’s No Oversight of Coronavirus Relief–Because That’s What Trump Wants

By dianeravitch
May 5, 2020 //
32

Presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden and Senator Elizabeth Warren wrote this opinion piece, which appeared in McClatchy newspapers across the country, including the Miami Herald.

Please open the link and read it in full.

Biden and Warren write:

Relief legislation passed by Congress provides critical support for hospitals, families, small businesses and local governments — efforts that will save lives and help cushion the economic blows of this pandemic.

As the price of their support for these measures, Trump and the Republicans insisted on a $500 billion slush fund for big businesses with minimal conditions — a fund Trump could use to reward his political friends and punish his political enemies. They also jammed in a tax cut that overwhelmingly benefits millionaires. This tax break will be particularly helpful to hedge funds and real estate investors like the president’s friends and family — on top of the $1 trillion in giveaways to the wealthy and big corporations Trump previously pushed through Congress. The administration has even allowed a fund meant for America’s small businesses to be used by wealthy, well-connected investors. The cost is more than simply tax dollars — Americans’ faith in government is undermined when the price of helping everyone else is more giveaways for those at the top.

The coronavirus rescue package imposed some oversight of these programs, but when he signed it, Trump said he’d ignore the law and prevent a new inspector general from communicating with Congress. He then appointed a White House loyalist to serve in that role. And just to be sure there was no real accountability, he fired another inspector general independently designated to oversee the bailout…

Trump seems to think he can direct funding for the response to this crisis based on which politicians are nice to him, which states he’s trying to win in November and which businesses he wants to enrich — all without any accountability. We have a different view.

Taxpayer relief should go to those most in need. Hospitals, essential workers, small businesses, and state and local governments should get the help they need immediately. If large corporations want help, they should agree not to turn around and fire all their workers. The relief bill’s unconscionable tax giveaway that overwhelmingly benefits millionaires should be repealed. But that is not enough.

They go on to write about barring conflicts of interest, noting that neither of them owns individual stocks as a matter of policy.

They warn about the power of lobbyists and the need for public disclosure of lobbying for special favors by big corporations.

And they call for strict oversight of the massive spending bills, including protection for Inspectors General and whistleblowers.

The corruption built into the coronavirus relief funds is appalling, and it is heartening to see Biden and Warren–both experienced pros on matters of oversight–insisting on transparency and regulation of this vast spending. It gives me hope that we might be able to get our country back, come November 2020.

Read more here: https://www.miamiherald.com/article242350451.html#storylink=cpy

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Ethics, Funding

John Ewing: We Should Listen to the Real Education Experts: Teachers

By dianeravitch
May 4, 2020 //
34

John Ewing, a mathematician and president of Math for America, wrote in Forbes about a conference he recently attended about education. He noticed that none of the experts at the conference were teachers. When he asked the conference leader, his question was dismissed.

He remembered that Mike Rose had done a check of articles in the “New Yorker.” Most of the articles about medicine were written by doctors. None of the articles about education were.

Ewing maintains that teachers should make major policy decisions, not politicians. I say, “Hurray for John Ewing!” (By the way, he wrote one of the best takedown of value-added assessment of teachers published anywhere, in 2011, called “Mathematical Intimidation: Driven by the Data.”)

Ewing writes:

Teachers are the ones who drive reform forward, not policy makers. Should teachers weigh in on issues that affect their students? It seems absurd to even ask such a question. Good teachers know their students best. When we ignore this, we make colossal mistakes, like creating bizarre testing regimes or proposing misaligned curricula.

Education suffers when we don’t value teacher expertise, but the worst consequence is something more lasting: The teaching profession becomes less attractive. The best eventually leave, fewer of the best enter, and over time teacher expertise declines, creating a downward spiral.

Yes, I know, not every teacher is an accomplished expert, just as not every doctor is. But many are, and they are the ones we need most. Instead, they leave. Worse, they tell brilliant young people who think about teaching as a career: “You can do better.” A 2019 PDK survey asked teachers whether they would advise their own children to follow in their footsteps; less than half (45 percent) said they would.

The week of May 4 is Teacher Appreciation Week in the United States. This year, instead of giving teachers a plant or a letter or a video (all suggestions from the internet), why not give them something they can use? Give them respect—the kind that recognizes their expertise. Otherwise, we might all soon be asking … “Where are the teachers?”

Categories Education Reform, Funding, Harlem Success Academy

New York City: Don’t Cut the Budget of Our Public Schools!

By dianeravitch
May 3, 2020 //
3

Parents in New York City are pleading with Mayor DeBlasio NOT to cut the budget of the public schools. Please add your name to their petition to Corey Johnson, Speaker of the City Council.

All –

Please help NYC public school students by signing and circulating this petition directed to Corey Johnson, Speaker of City Council, to stop Mayor DeBlasio’s proposed 827 million dollar budget cut to NYC public schools. The idea that when our kids – and kids across NYC – return to school they will have even fewer resources than they had pre-COVID, at a time when so many need more, is simply wrong. After months of compromised learning and, for many students tremendous loss in their families and communities, children will need additional academic and socio-emotional support – but the proposed budget cuts will guarantee they get less.

There are many competing needs in our city right now. As public school parents and educators who have worked in and with high schools for over 25 years, we can confidently say that if school funding is not prioritized in the upcoming budget, it will be an unmitigated disaster – not only for the next school year, but for the long term. Please read this petition, sign it and circulate it far and wide. For this to make a difference, it needs to reach thousands of people.

Thank you!

xox,
Lori and Ben

Categories Bill de Blasio, Budget Cuts, Funding, New York City

Elite Private Schools Collect Federal Aid, Including Barron Trump’s

By dianeravitch
May 3, 2020 //
48

Barron Trump’s elite private school collected federal coronavirus relief aid, as did several other private schools with multi-million dollar endowments. That includes the private school that Stephen Mnuchin’s children attend in Los Angeles.

The elite Maryland private school attended by Donald Trump’s son Barron is collecting taxpayer stimulus aid — and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin is demanding that money to wealthy schools be returned.

The Brentwood School in Los Angeles, attended by Mnuchin’s own children, is also collecting public funds as part of the administration small business stimulus program meant to help mitigate the economic damage from the coronavirus pandemic, the Los Angeles Times reported.

Neither school plans to return the money.

Another handout to the super-rich from funds intended to help small businesses.

Categories Funding

Peter Greene: What Happens to “Accountability” After the Pandemic?

By dianeravitch
May 1, 2020 //
10

Peter Greene thinks that we should use this respite from the pressure of high-stakes testing to rethink accountability.

Our current accountability system was cobbled together hastily in 2001 during the writing of George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind law. The NCLB law was based on a hoax, a fallacious claim that there had been a Texas miracle, all due to testing every child every year. Congress bought the lie and enacted the law. Since then, Congress has been unwilling to review the creaky and ineffective accountability system that it mandated.

No high-performing nation in the world tests every child every year. But we do. We have done it for 20 years and have little or nothing to show for it. The students who were left behind in 2001 are still left behind. Then Obama-Duncan brought in their “Race to the Top,” doubling down on standardized testing, and spent more than $5 billion without reaching “the top” or closing gaps or raising test scores.

Greene says: Let’s think about what happens next.

The defining question for any accountability system is this:

Accountable to whom, for what?

The “to whom” part is the hard part of educational accountability, because classroom teachers serve a thousand different masters.

Teachers need to be accountable to their administration, to their school board, to their students, to the parents of their students, to the taxpayers who fund the school and pay their salaries, to the state, to the students’ future employers, and to their own colleagues. School administrators also need to be accountable to those various stakeholders, but in different ways. Each set of stakeholders also has a wide variety of concerns; some parents are primarily concerned with academic issues, while others give priority to their child’s emotional health and happiness.

Parents may want to know if their children are on track for future success, or how their children’s progress compares to others. Those are two different measures, just as “How tall is my child” and “Is my child the tallest in class” are two different questions, each of which can be answered without answering the other.

Taxpayers want to know if they’re getting their money’s worth. State and federal politicians may want to see if benchmarks they have imposed on schools are being met. Teachers want to know how well their students are learning the various content the teachers have been delivering. Administrators may want to identify their “best” and “worst” teachers. School boards may want to know if their new hires are on track.

Answers to every single one of these questions require different measures collected with different tools. Some questions can’t be answered at all (there is no reliable way to rank teachers best-to-worst). One of the biggest fallacies of the ed reform movement has been the notion that a single multiple-choice math and reading test can somehow measure everything.

The reform dream was to be able to reduce school quality to a simple data point, a score or letter grade that tells us whether a school is any good or not. This is foolish. Ask any number of people to describe their idea of an “A” school; no two descriptions will match. A single grade system must by definition be reductive and useless for anything except as a crude tool for punishing some schools and marketing others.

Teachers and their unions are not opposed to accountability; they are opposed to accountability measures that are random and invalid. Meanwhile, accountability discussions never seem to include measures that would hold politicians accountable for getting schools the support and resources that they need. A good example would be the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), a law that Congress passed to hold schools accountable for properly educating students with specials needs, and also a law that Congress has never come close to fully funding.

My view: Accountability starts at the top, not the bottom. Congress has never been willing to hold itself accountable for the mandates it imposes. State legislatures have been unaccountable as well, never having provided the funding that schools require to provide the resources that schools need.

Yes, let’s have that conversation about who should be accountable and how will it be measured and what matters most.

Categories Accountability, Common Core, Education Reform, Funding, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top, Testing

Michael Hynes: A New Vision for Education After the Pandemic

By dianeravitch
April 26, 2020 //
58

Michael Hynes is the superintendent of schools in the Port Washington school district on Long Island in New York. He is one of the most creative, innovative, and unconventional thinkers in education today. His new book was just published, offering advice to school leaders and, frankly, to everyone, about what is most important in life.

Mike Hynes is my candidate for the next State Commissioner of Education in New York. He has fresh ideas, deep experience, and values the well-being of children more than test scores.

In this brief essay, he outlines what schools should do after the pandemic.

He writes:

Now is the time for our school leaders to generate a new compelling philosophy of education and an innovative architecture for a just and humane school system. We must refocus our energy on a foundation built on a sense of purpose, forging relationships and maximizing the potential and talents of all children. Let’s take advantage of the possibility that our nation’s attention can shift 180 degrees, from obsessing over test scores and accountability to an entirely different paradigm of physical, mental, and emotional well-being for students and staff.

It is our collective responsibility to foster engaging and meaningful environments when educating our children in the new era of a post pandemic education. As the great philosopher John Dewey stated over one hundred years ago, “If we teach today’s students as we taught yesterday’s, we rob them of tomorrow.” The first sentence in the 2018 World Bank Group’s Flagship Report- Learning: To Realize Education’s Promise states, “Schooling is not the same as learning.” I couldn’t agree more. The report continues to speak about that as a society, we must learn to realize education’s promise.

Now is this the time to revolutionize this antiquated system built on old structures and ideologies. I recommend we change the purpose of schooling to the following core values:

· Emphasize well-being. Make child and teacher well-being a top priority in all schools, as engines of learning and system efficiency.

· Upgrade testing and other assessments. Stop the standardized testing of children in grades 3-8, and “opt-up” to higher-quality assessments by classroom teachers. Eliminate the ranking and sorting of children based on standardized testing. Train students in self-assessment, and require only one comprehensive testing period to graduate from high school.

· Invest resources fairly. Fund schools equitably on the basis of need. Provide small class sizes.

· Boost learning through physical activity. Give children multiple outdoor free-play recess breaks throughout the school day to boost their well-being and performance. We observed schools in Finland that give children four 15-minute free-play breaks a day.

· Change the focus. Create an emotional atmosphere and physical environment of warmth, comfort and safety so that children are happy and eager to come to school. Teach not just basic skills, but also arts, crafts, music, civics, ethics, home economics and life skills.

· Make homework efficient. Reduce the homework load in elementary and middle schools to no more than 30 minutes per night, and make it responsibility-based rather than stress-based.

· Trust educators and children. Give them professional respect, creative freedom and autonomy, including the ability to experiment, take manageable risks and fail in the pursuit of success.

· Improve, expand and destigmatize vocational and technical education. Encourage more students to attend schools in which they can acquire valuable career/trade skills.

In short, if we learn anything at all from this pandemic, we should clearly recognize that we need our teachers more than ever before. It’s imperative that schools focus on a balanced approach to education, one that embraces physical, emotional, cognitive and social growth. We have an enormous amount of work to do, but our children deserve nothing less.

If you agree, please send his essay to every school board member you know and to anyone else who is interested in finding a new way to educate our children, one that develops their well-being and joy in learning, instead of subjecting them to an endless and useless series of standardized tests.

Categories Character, Citizenship, Creativity, Education Reform, Equity, Funding, Hope, Innovation, Joy, Play

Texas: Charter Schools Grow Rapidly Despite Inferior Performance Compared to Public Schools

By dianeravitch
April 25, 2020 //
8

William Gumbert prepared a graphic portrayal of the dramatic growth of privately managed charter schools in Texas.

Two facts stand out from his presentation:

1) Charter schools are diverting billions of dollars from the state’s underfunded public schools.

2) Public schools perform better than charter schools.

Public officials are turning public money over to entrepreneurs at a furious pace without regard to the results.

Charter schools this year will take more than $3 Billion away from the state’s public schools, despite the poor performance of the charter schools. Since their inception, charters have diverted more than $23 Billion from the state’s public schools.

Public schools in Texas are underfunded and have been underfunded since 2011, when the state legislature recklessly cut $5.4 Billion from the schools’ budget. That cut was never fully restored.

Diverting money to charter schools adds more damage to the public schools that continue to enroll the vast majority of students in the state.

Texas has about 5.4 million students. More than half of all its students are Hispanic. About 12-13% are African American. About 28% are white. The majority (58.7%) are identified by the state as “economically disadvantaged.”

The legislature does not look like the people of Texas, most of whom are people of color. Almost two-thirds of the state legislature are white. More than three-quarters are men. Why does the legislature substitute charter schools for adequate funding?

Read the whole report here.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Failure, Funding, Privatization, Texas

David Dayen: Who Will the Federal Reserve Bail Out? Big Corporations? Wall Street?

By dianeravitch
April 23, 2020 //
20

David Dayen writes a daily report on COVID-19 for The American Prospect.

Today’s post is very disturbing, and it has so many links included that you will have to open the post to read the source of his data and assertions. Bear in mind that the Fed is giving away OUR money, not theirs and certainly not Trump’s.

Who is getting it? That’s a secret.

Dayen writes:

Yesterday we found out that two luxury hotel companies made off with $46 million in PPP forgivable small business loans, for such high-end brand locations as Ritz-Carlton, Marriott and Sofitel. The companies paid a combined $13 million to top executives last year. We know this because Braemar Hotels and Ashford Hospitalty Trust were required to disclose the loans in SEC filings.

Disclosure, in other words, brought these distortions in PPP lending to light. But those are relatively small sums compared to what the Federal Reserve’s money cannon is about to shoot out. And if the Fed gets its way, there won’t be any way to discover hundreds of billions if not trillions of dollars put into the hands of companies.

The Fed has not committed to releasing detailed, transaction-level information about its lending. It has interpreted the CARES Act disclosure requirements to mean that they only need to give aggregate disclosure of the terms and rules of the various lending facilities they set up, not the names of the individual companies getting the loans. And then every 30 days, they have to supply the total amount lent out and the interest received.

This is being driven by the business community, which doesn’t want “bailout stigma” after receiving support from the Fed. I’m not sure why they think it won’t arouse suspicions if a travel company or some other large firm suddenly starts expanding out of nowhere after months without revenue.

The airline bailout in the CARES Act had very different disclosure rules: the Treasury Secretary had to post the amounts, interest rate, conditions, and even the term sheet for each recipient. But when it came to the Fed, the disclosure reverted back to the central bank’s Section 13(3) emergency lending authority. Somebody changed the rules, a mystery that ought to be unraveled. It may have come from the Fed writing the language itself, along with the CARES Act provision freeing it from open meetings laws.

Austan Goolsbee, of all people, explained pretty clearly to Politico why the Fed doesn’t want to disclose company names. “The reason they’re not releasing the list… people will start holding them accountable for who’s getting the money,” Goolsbee said. [I]t’s kind of the flashbacks of 2008 2009 that it’s going to matter for the credibility of this program and whether we the American people think it is working and want to keep engaging in it.”

Bharat Ramamurti, one of four members of the bailout oversight panel, has been among the few calling for detailed transparency around who is getting a piece of what could be as much as $4.5 trillion in loans. For all we know, some of that money has already been released, without any information about who got what. After pressure from Bharat and Americans for Financial Reform, the Fed has only committed to “information regarding participants” in the corporate credit facilities, without any details about what that information will be (will it even be the identity of the participants?), or what they will do in its numerous other lending facilities. It could mean industry-level aggregates, or a raw number of borrowers, or anything.

It’s true that, like with the hotel chains, public companies might have to file something with the SEC. But the beneficiaries of Fed lending may not all be public companies. Private equity portfolio companies could use Fed resources, for example. The press will be vital, and have already ferreted out some information. But there’s no substitute for systematic, transaction-level transparency.

There aren’t many conditions being placed on this money to begin with, to ensure it stabilizes the real economy, rather than flowing up to executives and investors. But transparency can help raise the pressure. Once you see that Company X received several billion in low-cost loans, you can tie it to what we already know about Company X: its executive compensation, use of financial engineering to reward investors, average worker pay. If conditions will ever be placed, they will happen because of the “name and shame” possibilities that accompany disclosure.

Relying on the Fed so heavily to save the economy already will shuttle the relief through large corporations and Wall Street banks. That’s how the Fed operates as an institution, and it colors our pandemic response. Operating in the dark is even worse.

We’ve already had this fight during the last bailout. The Fed claimed they were only giving banks “liquidity assistance” in the short-term to deal with a credit crunch. But this bailout will go to companies throughout the economy, with loans up to four years. Knowing this information is vital to knowing whether the taxpayer has been ripped off, on a galactic scale compared to the penny-ante small business loan schemes.

Eventually, Bloomberg sued the Fed and got some information about the 2008-2009 bailout. It may take that again. But career staff inside the Fed making the decision on what to disclose should know: they will lose credibility as an institution if they once again opt for secrecy. The public has a right to learn what’s being done in their name.

Funny, I had this antiquated idea that with public money goes public accountability. Apparently, the deal here is that our money to “save the economy” is going to unknown recipients. What, wait?

Categories Funding
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