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Mississippi Rejects Federal $$ for Summer Food for Kids

By dianeravitch
January 13, 2024 //
14

Congress extended a federal food program for hungry children in December 2022. Mississippi and several other Republican-controlled states chose not to accept the offer.

The Mississippi Free Press reported:

Nearly 21 million children in the U.S. and its territories are expected to receive food benefits this summer through a newly permanent federal program, but Mississippi will not be among them after the State rejected the funds. It is not clear whether the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians will participate.

The United States Department of Agriculture announced the program on Wednesday.

Thirty-five states, all five U.S. territories and four tribes opted into the Summer Electronic Benefits Transfer program, or Summer EBT, which the government says is meant to supplement existing programs during the summer that have had a more limited reach….

Alabama, Alaska, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Vermont and Wyoming chose not to participate this summer.

Nebraska, Iowa and Oklahoma cited existing programs that already feed children during the summer as reasons not to join Summer EBT.

Implementing a Summer EBT program this year was “not feasible” in Texas, state Health and Human Services Commission spokesperson Thomas Vazquez said in a statement to the AP. He said that was due to USDA guidance coming in late December, “the level of effort needed” to start a new program and the need for the state legislature to approve money for it.

Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt said in a statement that he doesn’t want “a single Oklahoma child to go hungry, and I’ll keep working to accomplish that, but large, duplicative federal programs don’t accomplish that goal.

“They cause more bureaucracy for families to wade through.”

I wonder if poor families are delighted that Governor Stitt saved them the trouble of doing paperwork to get free food for their children.

Categories Funding, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Poverty

Peter Greene: Is Ryan Walters the Worst State Chief in the Nation?

By dianeravitch
January 5, 2024 //
3

Funnily enough, both John Thompson and Peter Greene wrote about Oklahoma’s education chief, Ryan Walters. He seems to be in the news a lot.

Peter Greene wrote:

Education Dudebro Ryan Walters has been subpoenaed by House members of his own party to explain what the hell is going on in the department of education under his leadership.

Once upon a time, Walters was a history teacher, and pretty good it by many accounts. But his trek to the higher levels of Oklahoma politics has been accompanied by lurch into MAGAville, where he somehow became a chosen buddy of Governor Stitt. That’s despite the fact that he mismanaged a bunch of federal relief funds in an attempt to boost vouchers. He tried to make an example out of a school librarian who let students, you know, read books.

Once Walters was elected to the State Superintendent spot, he made it clear that his brand would be culture war baloney; one of his first acts was to take down the Oklahoma Educators Hall of Fame pictures, and when folks protested, he offered a statement:

“All the photographs will be sent to the local teachers’ unions. When my administration is over, the unions can use donor money and their lobbyists to take down photographs of students and parents and reinstall the photographs of administrators and bureaucrats.”

Walters drew headlines for moves like explaining that the Tulsa Race Massacre was not about race. He called the teachers union a “terrorist organization.” He also proposed a host of rules for restricting reading, mandatory outing of students, searching out the dread CRT, and backing it all up with threats to take away a district’s accreditation if they dared to defy him.

By February, Rep. Mark McBride of the Education Committee was ready to “put this gentleman in a box” and “focus on public education and not his crazy destruction of public education.”

Things have not improved since. Walters has tried to push school prayers, the proposed religious charter school, and a variety of other hard right christianist supremacy noises.

But while Walters’ ideological activism may draw the headlines, there also seems to be a problem with basic competence in the job.

Employees have been fleeing the department–80 gone by September. In May, one departed whistleblower said that Walters office had simply failed to follow through on millions of dollars in federal grant money. Terri Grissom estimated between $35 and $40 million hasn’t been given to districts to spend, and uncounted other millions hadn’t been applied for at all. And Grissom says that Walters simply lied to legislators about the state of grants. This fall, districts have discovered that Walters’ office has somehow gummed up the works so badly that millions in federal grants are not getting to the schools where they could do some good.

Another resignation came from Pamela Smith-Gordon, a handpicked Walters ally who left out of frustration with the lack of leadership. She sent an angry letter that said in part:

While desperately wanting to support you, the lack of leadership and availability within our own OSDE is impossible to ignore. If your physical presence is not required for leadership, then the question arises as to why the position exists with a salary attached to it.

The lack of Walters physical presence in the office has been a recurring theme. Reported Rep. Jacob Rosencrans

We’re hearing from folks that are looking in and they’re all saying the same thing. Ryan Walters isn’t there. I talked to someone who is a constituent of mine who said that he is not a mean guy. He is always there with a handshake and a smile, but he is never there, literally.

In response to Smith-Gordon’s departure, McBride (who is an actual Republican) said, “I really don’t know what’s going on over there. Nobody does. There is some lack of transparency.”

Walters’ department, which regularly cranks out Trump-style PR about how Walters is “driving change in education for Oklahoma students like never before” doesn’t just stonewall the legislature–they thumb their nose at it. When McBride made a second request for certain basic information from the department, Walters’ top advisor Matt Langston sent a note–which someone slipped under McBride’s office doors–saying “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” (Fun fact: Langston allegedly lives in Texas.) In another response was a letter from Langston, on OSDE letterhead, calling McBride a “whiny Democrat.“

In response to this petty dickishness, House Demnocrat Mickey Dollens proposed the “Do Your Job Act” aimed directly at Walters and his department. Well, he’s a Democrat, and angry at that.

But McBride and House Speaker Charles McCall and Rep. Rhonda Baker are GOP, and they signed off on the subpoena to get Walters to show up and answer some questions, including details –but not to the legislature. In interviews, McBride just sounds tired and frustrated.

“If there’s nothing there, show me,” said Rep. Mark McBride, ( R) House Education Budget and Appropriations Chair. “There’s no ‘I gotcha’ question’ here. It’s just questions about public education that any appropriator would ask.”

McBride says he tried to work with Walters and his chief policy advisor Matt Langston, but after many requests for basic information were left unmet, he says he had no other option but to issue the subpoena.

And McBride’s more formal statements don’t seem aimed at grinding axes.

As Chairman of the Appropriations and Budget Education Subcommittee, I am constitutionally bound to ask questions and statutorily entitled to have them answered of the leadership of the legislatively appropriated OSDE. As those questions have not been answered, and no voluntary answer is forthcoming, I have exercised my power as chairman to subpoena the superintendent to produce the records and communications requested by the committee. Where taxpayer money is concerned we must be diligent. The time for playing political games is over, and the time for answers is at hand.

Walters’ office has responded with its usual grace. Langston has called McBride a liar. And after initially not responding to the subpoena, Walters decided to give an “exclusive” to Fix affiliate Fox23, in which he said stuff like this:

It’s disappointing to see some folks in my own party decided to sell their souls for 30 pieces of silver from the teachers union, but I’m never going to stop or back down. I’m going to keep fighting for the parents of Oklahoma [and] the tax payers of Oklahoma. Your kids are too important. The future of this state is too important,

He also claims that his has been the “most transparent” administration. And he touts his “town halls,” some of which have been pretty contentious. And while Walters has often pointed to his meetings with superintendents around the state as a sign of his outreach and transparency,a survey of superintendents found that 150 of the 190 who responded had met with him exactly zero minutes. A touted Zoom meeting was about 15 minutes long, superintendents were not allowed to speak, and no questions were answered. They reported a “continued silence.” And they report that Walters’ culture war concerns do not reflect the day to day issues they actually deal with in the real world. From an NPR story:

Matt Riggs is the superintendent of the small, rural district of Macomb. He said Walters’ portrayal of schools is like a “caricature… so far outside of what is real.”

“What he has done through his entire approach to public life, from what I’ve seen, is create dragons for himself to slay,” Riggs said. “Do we have students here that, you know, some may identify in different ways? I’m sure we do. But our charge is to try to make those students’ lives better. Our charge is not to make them part of some kind of political conversation.”

Riggs said those dragons — leftist indoctrination, pornography pushing, terrorist teachers’ unions — just don’t exist. In a high-poverty area like Macomb, there are real problems, but Riggs says he doesn’t see a point in bringing those issues to Walters.

But the legislature sees a point in bringing Walters to address those issues. He might even have to explain his desire to slay his imaginary dragons instead of getting school districts the support they need and that their taxpayers deserve.

In the end, the worst thing about Walters may not be his Trumpian bombast, his thirst for media attention, his obsession with culture wars, or his ideological certainty that he need answer to nobody. The worst thing about Walters may be that he won’t actually do the job for which he campaigned so hard. Is incompetence worse than intolerance? I’m not sure even a legislative hearing can determine that one, but Walters is both, and that’s bad news for the children of Oklahoma.

Walters has till January 5 to answer the subpoena. Mark your calendar.

Categories Accountability, Administrators, superintendents, Disruption, Education Industry, Oklahoma

John Thompson: Oklahoma’s State Superintendent Wants to Destroy Tulsa Public Schools

By dianeravitch
January 5, 2024 //
9

Ryan Walters of Oklahoma may be the worst state superintendent in the nation. Read John Thompson’s latest report on Walters’s plans for the Tulsa public schools and see if you agree.

Thompson writes:

The Tulsa World reported that the Tulsa Public Schools (TPS) “is zeroing in on 6,200 students in grades four to eight who must improve on state tests to help the district avoid a state takeover.” Given the threats State Superintendent Ryan Walters has thrown at the district, I understand why the TPS is undertaking a probably doomed-to-fail intervention. By appeasing Walters (who now supports the Tulsa plan), they might save the school system from Walter’s most destructive attacks. But that shouldn’t be the issue.

The question we should be asking is: Will their rushed effort to increase test scores help the 18% of the district’s students who are targeted or will it do them more harm? This experiment will inevitably teach students a lot of things – including destructive lessons rooted in worksheet-driven malpractice. The question should be: Would the supposed gains justify the likely damage that will be done to those students? If history is the guide, it seems inevitable that the tragedies of No Child Left Behind and ESSA will be repeated, especially for the most-disadvantaged students. For instance: What are the chances that the $360,000 spent on state test-aligned test preparation materials will result in a drill-and-kill mindset which is antithetical to the meaningful learning students need?

One of many examples of research on why programs like Walters’ demands have failed is National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s 2011 study, Incentives and Test-Based Accountability in Education. It found:

Test-based incentive programs, as designed and implemented in the programs that have been carefully studied, have not increased student achievement enough to bring the United States close to the levels of the highest achieving countries. When evaluated using relevant low-stakes tests, which are less likely to be inflated by the incentives themselves, the overall effects on achievement tend to be small and are effectively zero for a number.

I was attending a rally of teachers when Walters announced his latest assaults on Tulsa schools, and the district’s response was outlined. On one hand, the conversations with Tulsa and Oklahoma City teachers were stimulating. I was impressed by their emphasis on trusting and loving relationships, and supporting students who face so many obstacles. I was inspired by the embraces of Social and Emotional Learning (SEL), and how overworked and stressed out teachers remained devoted to their kids. I was told about successful efforts in some schools to restore holistic and meaningful learning, as well as other schools where test prep was still dominant.

Moreover, I was consistently told about the exhaustion and anxiety the educators face, and how Walters’ attacks will force schools to ramp up test prep. These conversations brought me back to the first decade of the 21st century when low-performing schools were the primary focus of drill-and-kill, and where recess, field trips, arts, and music were taken away.

Then, I was brought back to the second decade when almost every student and educator was targeted for reward-and-punish accountability. Just as the Race-to-the Top (RttT) was doubly devastating because NCLB had already broken the resistance to test-driven accountability, today’s mandates are likely to be doubly dangerous because they follow Walters’ and the Moms for Liberty’s campaigns for Prager’s false, rightwing curriculum, attacks on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), LGBTQ and trans students, and public education’s principles.

By the way, who are the students TPS needs to immediately move up at least one achievement level from “below basic” on state tests? The World reports they are 92% are economically disadvantaged, 20% require special education services, 43% are multilingual learners. They will be the ones who will likely suffer the stress, the drill-and-kill instructional malpractice, and lower graduation rates that typically result from Walters-styled mandates. This raises the question: Wouldn’t they benefit more from properly funded social and emotional supports, equitable spending on holistic instruction, diversity, and inclusiveness?

Instead of asking those questions, as the Voice reports, Walters said he will be proposing a rule which says “sexual activity in public targeted towards kids” is inappropriate. He said “the rule is a direct result of a district hiring an administrator who dresses as a drag queen during non-work hours.” Walters said he would respond to out-of-state groups that oppose prayer in school by introducing “a rule that protects prayer in schools.”

Moreover, the TPS will be required to make “midyear changes in principal assignments and reassigning central office staff to support the Tulsa schools needing Most Rigorous Intervention, or MRI, based on federal education standards.” It will also need to restructure “the district’s leadership team, and aligning leadership priorities and strategic planning to the state’s demands.”

Even if Walters’ priorities and plans made sense, how could the TPS effectively implement them is such a rushed manner? While I’m not optimistic that the TPS will dare to heed research on why the federal School Improvement Grants largely failed, I hope it will not ignore (like many reformers have) the reasons why the billions of dollars invested in turnaround and transformation schools didn’t improve student outcomes.

I must emphasize a key difference, however, between the hurried transformations that backfired so badly over the last two decades, and those that Walters is coercing Tulsa into adopting. I spent hundreds of hours trying to explain to researchers and funders who hurriedly devised the previous turnaround attempts. Even though they were extremely smart, they didn’t know what they didn’t know about public schools. These venture philanthropists and their staff sought to “blow up” the status quo so that innovators could reinvent schools.

Walters is even more aggressive in trying to blow up public education, and he’s shown no interest in improving schools. He might be able to intimidate Tulsa into “knocking down the barn” but, even if he was interested in the welfare of students, there’s no way he would be interested in rebuilding public schools.

Categories Cruelty, Disruption, Evil, Extremism, Oklahoma

Leonard Leo Is Pushing for Public Funding of Religious Schools

By dianeravitch
December 10, 2023 //
11

Leonard Leo is one of the most powerful people in the nation. Get to know him. He led the conservative lawyer’s group The Federalist Society. He personally prepared the list of judges for Trump’s selection to the Supreme Court. He can take credit for the appointment of dozens of federal judges in district courts and appellate courts. In tribute to his effectiveness, a Chicago businessman gifted him with $1.6 billion to use as he wished to advance conservatism.

Politico reports that Leonard Leo’s latest cause is promoting religious charter schools, which would be fully funded by the public. The target, which he hopes to demolish, is separation of church and state.

At issue is the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Oklahoma’s push to create the St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, which would be the nation’s first religious school entirely funded by taxpayers. The school received preliminary approval from the state’s charter school board in June. If it survives legal challenges, it would open the door for state legislatures across the country to direct taxpayer funding to the creation of Christian or other sectarian schools.

Brett Farley, executive director of the Catholic Conference of Oklahoma, acknowledges that public funding of St. Isidore is at odds with over 150 years of Supreme Court decisions. He said the justices have misunderstood Thomas Jefferson’s intent when he said there should be a wall separating church and state, but that the current conservative-dominated court seems prepared to change course.

“Jefferson didn’t mean that the government shouldn’t be giving public benefits to religious communities toward a common goal,” he said. “The court rightly over the last decade or so has been saying, ‘No, look, we’ve got this wrong and we’re gonna right the ship here.’ ”

Behind the effort to change the law are Christian conservative groups and legal teams who, over the past decade, have been beneficiaries of the billion-dollar network of nonprofits largely built by Leo, the Federalist Society co-chairman.

Leo’s network organized multi-million-dollar campaigns to support the confirmation of most of the court’s six conservative justices. Leo himself served as adviser to President Donald Trump on judicial nominations, including those of Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett…

“The Christian conservative legal movement, which has its fingerprints all over what’s going on in Oklahoma, is a pretty small, tight knit group of individuals,” said Paul Collins, a legal studies and politics professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. “They recognize the opportunity to get a state to fund a religious institution is a watershed moment,” said Collins, author of Friends of the Supreme Court: Interest Groups and Judicial Decision Making, adding that“They have a very, very sympathetic audience at the Supreme Court. When you have that on the Supreme Court you’re going to put a lot of resources into bringing these cases quickly.”

In Oklahoma, the legal team representing the state’s virtual charter school board, the Alliance Defending Freedom, helped develop arguments that led to the end of Roe v. Wade. It is significantly funded by donor-advised funds that allow their patrons to keep their identities secret but which receive large amounts of money from Leo-aligned groups.

They include Donors Trust, often called the “dark money ATM” of the conservative movement. In recent years, Donors Trust has been the largest single beneficiary of Leo’s primary dark money group, the Judicial Education Project. Donors Trust, in turn, gave $4 million to Leo’s Federalist Society in 2022, according to the IRS filings.

Since 2020, when Leo received a $1.6 billion windfall from Chicago electronics magnate Barre Seid, among the largest contributions to a political advocacy group in history, other groups funded by Leo’s network have become substantial contributors to ADF. For instance, Schwab Charitable Fund, which has given at least $4 million to ADF, received $153 million in 2021 from a new Leo-aligned nonprofit that received the Seid funding.

ADF Senior Counsel Phil Sechler said in an emailed statement that his group is defending the board “in order to ensure people of faith are not treated like second-class citizens.” Sechler, who said he “cannot predict” whether the case will land at the Supreme Court, did not comment on the group’s funding.

St. Isidore is represented by the Notre Dame Religious Liberty Initiative, a legal clinic created by the law school at the University of Notre Dame. At Notre Dame, law professor Nicole Stelle Garnett has worked with St. Isidore from the start of its application process.

In the same timeframe, Garnett joined the board of the Federalist Society, where Leo is co-chairman. She also joined the advisory council of a Catholic University law school initiative funded by a $4.25 million anonymous gift directed by Leo, according to a March 2021 press release. Justice Samuel Alito is its honorary chairman.

The Notre Dame clinic’s director is another alumni of Leo’s network, Stephanie Barclay, an attorney who spent multiple years at another legal nonprofit named after a Catholic martyr where Leo sits on the board: the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty.

The clinic itself was announced a few monthsbefore the confirmation of Barrett, who was a Notre Dame law professor for 15 years. The June, 2020, announcement of the clinic’s creation stated that Barclay would take a leave of absence to clerk for Gorsuch during the same time period — 2021 and 2022 — that the group was working with the Oklahoma archdiocese on its St. Isidore application. In June of 2022, the court also overturned Roe; a month later, the clinic funded a trip for Justice Alito to be feted at a gala in Rome.

Clinic spokeswoman Kate Monaghan Connolly declined to say if Barclay has done any work on behalf of St. Isidore, including before, during or after her clerkship. The clinic declined comment on its funders.

The clinic “has defended the freedom of religion or belief for all people across a wide variety of projects,” including Jews, Muslims, Sikhs and an Apache tribe, said Monaghan.

As St. Isidore and its allies readied for legal battle, Farley said, Notre Dame brought in a corporate team at the law firm Dechert LLP, including Michael McGinley, who worked on selecting judicial nominees at the Trump White House at the time Leo was advising the president. McGinley clerked for Gorsuch when he was a 10th Circuit appeals judge and for Alito at the Supreme Court. He accompanied Gorsuch to his confirmation hearings. He is not employed by Notre Dame, said Connolly. He is working “pro bono” for St. Isidore, Farley said….

Those backing the St. Isidore application face a formidable array of critics and opponents. Charter schools are required by Oklahoma statute to be non-sectarian, and in its application, the archdiocese says the school would be part of the “evangelizing mission of the Church.”

Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond, a Republican, says the proposed school violates both the U.S. and the state Constitution, and he is suing to stop it. Separately, a group of 10 plaintiffs including public school parents and faith leaders represented by groups including Americans for Separation of Church and State filed a lawsuit warning that the creation of the school will erode a pillar of American democracy: the wall of separation between church and state.

The plaintiffs in that case are calling on the Oklahoma judge presiding over it, C. Brent Dishman, to recuse himself. Dishman sits on the board of the College of the Ozarks, an evangelical college that was represented by ADF in a suit against the Biden administrationover transgender bathroom policy.

The school’s detractors say the national implications of the dispute are not getting enough attention. They include Melissa Abdo, a practicing Catholic and school board member in Jenks, Oklahoma, and Robert Franklin, a Republican-appointed member of a state virtual charter school board who last summer voted against the school’s application.

If the law were to allow public funding of religious schools, legislatures in conservative states would come under immediate pressure to help bail out troubled religious school systems: Catholic and Protestant churches are shuttering due to significant declines in church attendance and financial support as Americans become increasingly secular.

The 1.8 million-student Catholic education system received a lifeline through the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in the case of Carson v. Makin, which required states with voucher systems to help students afford private schools to allow the money to be spent on religious academies. The influx of public money was already helping the Catholic Church to stave off parish closings, according to a 2017 National Bureau of Economic Research studythat called vouchers “a dominant source of funding for many churches.”

“It’s not about the 500 kids. The game is to get this to the Supreme Court,” said Franklin. “If the court approves this, it changes everything” about public education in America, he said.

“It’s been extremely unsettling,” said Franklin, noting that the state already has six virtual schools to serve children of all faiths and that some of the school’s biggest backers, including Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt, had previously bashed virtual learning as ineffective.

Please open the link to read the full article.

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, Elections, Funding, Oklahoma, Privatization, Religion, Republicans, Separation of church and state, Trump, Vouchers

John Thompson: What Do School Report Cards Mean?

By dianeravitch
November 28, 2023 //
7

John Thompson, historian and retired history teacher, analyzes the use and misuse of Oklahoma’s school report cards.

He writes:

As usual, the 2023 Oklahoma school Report Card prompted headlines about “struggling” students. But counter-intuitively, State Superintendent Ryan Walters stressed the declines during his time in office!?!?

Two tales of the Report Card are being told. As the Tulsa World reports, Walters “claimed that the data was from ‘previous years,’ even though all of the academic achievement indicators are from state tests administered just seven months ago.” Yes, taking office as State Superintendent in January 2023, Walters hasn’t had time to achieve many gains in learning, even if he’d really tried to. But the chaos during 2023, combined with the disruption he’d spread since 2020 as head of the Education Department, provided plenty of time for disruption.

As the Oklahoman reports, Walters cited the greatest decline under his watch, 8th grade reading proficiency which saw “a 5.7 percent decrease,” although “No other grade had more than a 0.4 percent decrease in reading scores, and some others “saw a very small uptick in reading scores.” Walters then promised “we are taking a Back to Basics approach,” which is the opposite of what it takes to increase proficiency.

The wisest narrative, illustrated by the Education Watch’s Jennifer Palmer, places the 2023 Report Card within the context of the massive decline of scores due to Covid, and the 2022 report. The 2023 report saw “no big swings in proficiency rates in any of the three tested subjects content,” while noting the overlooked fact that “a score of basic means a student demonstrated foundational knowledge and skills.”

Then Palmer tweeted background information on the differences between what basic means, as opposed to the widely misunderstood grade of proficiency which, I must add, has been misrepresented since the Reagan administration in order to denigrate public education. Oklahoma’s 8th grade reading proficiency grade requires that “students demonstrate mastery over even the most challenging grade-level content and are ready for the next grade, course or level of education.” It requires mastery of grade level skills that include interpretation, evaluation, analysis across multiple texts, and critical thinking. Mastery in requires use of evidence, argumentative response and synthesis of to create “written works for multiple purposes.”

As Palmer tweeted, we need a more nuanced” understanding of “reading.” And “the 8th graders who didn’t score proficient, but are in the ‘basic’ category, can still do all this” and then she linked to the challenging goals that are required for that grade, which include: partial mastery of interpretation, evaluation, analysis across multiple texts, critical thinking, use of evidence, argumentative response and synthesis.

Granted, these definitions are not necessarily the same as the more reliable NAEP scores. But as Jan Resseger explains, the nation’s NAEP proficiency grade “represents A level work, at worst an A-” and, basically, the same applies to Oklahoma’s tests. She asks, “Would you be upset to learn that “only” 40% of 8th graders are at an A level in math and “only” 1/3rd scored an A in reading?”

Ressenger also cites the huge body of research explaining why School Report Cards aren’t a reliable tool for measuring school effectiveness. We need a better understanding why the proficiency has been weaponized against schools, but we also need to master the huge body of research which explains why Report Cards aren’t a fair, reliable, and valid measure of how well schools are performing.

I’ll just cite one of the scholars that Ressenger draws upon. Stanford’s Sean Reardon’s 2022 research explained why “test score gaps may result from unequal opportunities either in or out of school; [but] they are not necessarily the result of differences in school quality, resources, or experience.” Reardon documented:

The socioeconomic profile of a district is a powerful predictor of the average test score performance of students in that district. The most and least socioeconomically advantaged districts have average performance levels more than four grade levels apart. … Achievement gaps are larger in districts where black and Hispanic students attend higher poverty schools than their white peers… and where large racial/ethnic gaps exist in parents’ educational attainment. The size of the gaps has little or no association with average class size, a district’s per capita student spending or charter school enrollment.

And that brings us to chronic absenteeism. As the New York Times reports, across the nation, “nearly 70 percent of the highest poverty schools experienced widespread, chronic absenteeism in the 2021-22 school year,” and “in these schools, about a third or more of the student body was considered chronically absent.” Of course, the Times notes, “Students cannot learn if they are not in school, and they cannot benefit from interventions, such as tutoring, that are supposed to help them make up pandemic losses.”

And Palmer reports:

Across the state, 20% of students were chronically absent last year, a half a percent increase over 2022. Some student groups were even higher: 24% of Hispanic students, 25% of economically disadvantaged and 31% of Black students were chronically absent …” Moreover, excessive absences are more prevalent now than before the pandemic. In 2019, 14% of Oklahoma students were chronically absent.

Tulsa World had previously reported that “About half of the Tulsa high school students are chronically absent” and explained why this complex and serious problem is “showing no signs of improvement.” The World cited the work of Georgetown’s Phyllis Jordan who explained the need to reconnect “what’s going on in the school and what’s going on outside the school.”

On one hand, that is why Patrick Forsyth, a University of Oklahoma professor who had analyzed the state’s A-F report card system, said “using attendance to measure school effectiveness is like using rates of tobacco use to measure hospital effectiveness.” On the other hand, as the Oklahoman reported, the Attendance Works’ Hedy Chang said, chronic absenteeism is an “all-hands-on-deck moment.” She also called on schools to “learn the specific barriers to attendance that their students experience before crafting a response to those unique challenges.”

That gets us back to the tragedy of two tales about what the Report Card means. Sadly, Ryan Walters uses it as one more weapon for disrupting public education. The other side must use these flawed metrics not to punish but for diagnostic purposes.

Categories Education Reform, NAEP, Oklahoma, Standardized Testing

John Thompson: Will Oklahoma’s Superintendent of Schools Finally Tell the Truth?

By dianeravitch
November 7, 2023 //
2

John Thompson, historian and retired teacher, wonders whether Ryan Walters, the state superintendent of schools, will at last tell the truth when he is in court? He’s been telling so many lies lately that it’s hard to know if he is aware of the difference between truth and lies.

Thompson writes:

In Oklahoma and across the nation, hate mongers like Oklahoma State Superintendent Ryan Walters have been willing to speak any falsehood they want, portraying them as political narratives, which are legal, even when they are lies. But if Walters repeats false claims when testifying in court, his lies could backfire.

Walters is facing lawsuits for wrongly firing Department of Education employees. One employee, the director of grant development, disproved Walters’ claim that, ‘We have applied for millions and millions of grants since I took office.’” She explained, “We have not applied for one single grant. That was a blatant lie.”

Moreover, State Auditor Cindy Byrd alleged that millions of COVID-19 relief money were misspent by Walters’ department, and the “Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond said he won’t rule out criminal charges against some state leaders after a report alleged misspending of COVID-19 relief money.” A.G. Drummond also has “described what was found as a pervasive culture of waste, mismanagement and apparent fraud. What concerned him the most was the mishandling of money that had been allocated for education expense accounts and tuition assistance programs.”

Walters also used state money to fund an inflammatory anti-union video which he called a “public awareness campaign” about teachers’ unions (which he labels as a “terrorist organization.”) As these investigations continue, Walters has doubled down on falsehoods such as testifying to Congress that the Tulsa Public Schools “maintains an active connection with the [Chinese government] through a program called the Confucius Classroom.”

But what is Walters doing now?

This week’s breaking news includes echoes of past lies. For instance, the Oklahoma Voice reports that the newly appointed Education Secretary Katherine Curry “said she resigned from her position after three months because the state superintendent’s administration limited her oversight of his agency.” Curry “said she repeatedly asked for financial documents showing how the agency budgeted and spent money, but the Oklahoma State Department of Education never provided them.” Curry said Walters’ refusal to respond was “‘100%’ the reason for her resignation.”

Second, two of the five state and federal suits by dismissed employees have gone to court. It is possible that he will be found accountable for both, his official role, and actions as an individual. 

Third, as the Oklahoman reports, after being fined for 14 cases of failure to report campaign donations, Walters now faces a possible fine for failure to report a donation from the 1776 Project PAC. The donor “says on its website it is ‘committed to abolishing critical race theory … from the public school curriculum.’” And his “amended pre-general election report still lists more than a dozen donors with an “x” before the last names, a mistake that prevents accurate searches of his contributions.”

The week’s fourth story may help explain Walters’ continuing lies and allegedly fraudulent behavior. He announced: 

“I fully stand behind President Trump, and I am excited to see him dismantle the Department of Education,”

“President Trump will be able to end radical indoctrination in our schools,” Walters said. “This woke ideology will be driven out of our schools. This cancer that is the teachers union will be driven out of our schools, and parents will be put in charge of their kids’ education.”

Finally, Jennifer Palmer reports that “the state Education Department is looking to hire someone to manage national media appearances, raising concerns the agency would be boosting Superintendent Ryan Walters’ national profile at taxpayer expense.” She adds:

A firm is being sought to provide print and digital op-eds to national outlets, coordinate national events and appearances for executive staff, write speeches and handle some communications. Records show the department wants a minimum of three op-eds, two speeches and 10 media bookings per month. 

Palmer explains that some Oklahomans have responded that “the public shouldn’t have to pay for Walters’ political ambitions.” But we shouldn’t overlook the costs to people across the U.S. They may have to deal with a new level of Walters’ propaganda.

Categories Accountability, Administrators, superintendents, Character, Lies, Oklahoma

Nora DeLa Cour: Religious Charter Schools Corrupt the Charter idea

By dianeravitch
October 29, 2023 //
11

Nora De La Cour was a teacher who now writes about education with sharp insight.

She warns about the danger of religious charter schools in Jacobin:

A church-run charter school is on track to open in Oklahoma — publicly funded but run by the archdiocese. The arrival of religious charter schools is one more piece of evidence that public charter schools are not so public after all.

In early October, Georgia state senator Elena Parent coauthored an op-ed for the 74 entreating her fellow Democrats to recall their former support for charter schools. Decrying the GOP-backed private-school voucher schemespassing in state after state, Parent warns that these programs’ unfairness “does not mean Democrats should abandon discussion around school choice.” Rather, she argues, they must reenergize their own liberal vision of school choice, focused on bringing opportunities to underserved populations.

A decade ago it was easier to make this sort of pro–civil rights, liberal defense of charter schools (albeit ignoring the gathering evidence about who is harmedby charterization and the attendant defunding and closure of neighborhood schools). Today though, it’s overwhelmingly clear that charters, like other forms of school privatization, are among the Right’s primary tools for advancing a decidedly illiberal vision of free-market fundamentalism and Christian nationalism. And recent decisions from our radicalized Supreme Court have suggested that, legally speaking, charter schools may not be all that different from voucher-supported private schools.

One of the most glaring examples of this is St Isidore of Seville, a virtual Oklahoma Catholic school that, if it opens in 2024 as planned, will be the nation’s first church-run charter. The archdiocese of Oklahoma City intends to use this publicly funded statewide school “as a genuine instrument of the Church, a place of real and specific pastoral ministry,” complete with religiously motivated discrimination against protected groups of kids. It’s just one more example of how privatization makes fertile ground for the desecularization of America’s schools — and the erosion of students’ rights.

St Isidore of Vanishing Civil Rights

Weeks before the Supreme Court elevated religious free exercise over the Establishment Clause by ruling that Maine’s town tuitioning program could not bar private schools from putting taxpayer money to religious uses, attorney and leading education policy scholar Kevin Welner made a prediction: such an outcome in Carson v. Makin, he argued, would act as an invitation for church-run charter schools.

Sure enough, Oklahoma’s virtual charter board (with two new right-wing appointees) voted in June to grant a charter for St Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School (SISCVS), which will be operated by the archdiocese of Oklahoma City and the diocese of Tulsa. This month the board approved the school’s contract, bringing it one step closer to furthering the “evangelizing mission of the Church” on Oklahoma taxpayers’ dime. But the board’s chairman is currently refusing to sign the contract — demonstrating the high level of contention surrounding SISCVS within the conservative Bible Belt state.

A religious charter school runs afoul of both the Oklahoma Constitution and the Oklahoma Charter Schools Act — to say nothing of the US Constitution’s promise of church/state separation. While Oklahoma’s Republican governor Kevin Stitt has been among the school’s most avid cheerleaders (along with the state’s previous attorney general), current attorney general Gentner Drummond — also a Republican — has vehemently opposed SISCVS, asserting that “Christian nationalism is the movement that is giving oxygen to this attempt to eviscerate the Establishment Clause.”

In the SISCVS charter application, the archdiocese of Oklahoma City states that the school “will operate in harmony with faith and morals, including sexual morality, as taught and understood by the Magisterium of the Catholic Church.” Instruction will assist parents in “forming and cultivating” children who believe, among other things, “that God created persons male and female,” and that if we “reject God’s invitation,” we will “end up in hell.”

In response to Drummond’s charge that the school appears intent on violating the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the archdiocese insists it is “committed to providing a school environment that is free from unlawful discrimination, harassment, and retaliation” (emphasis added). But, emboldened by Supreme Court rulings subordinating antidiscrimination laws to religious free exercise, they suggest that these practices are lawful when they’re required by faith….

Public Schools Are the Only Public Schools

School-choice Democrats like Cory Booker, Barack Obama, and Arne Duncan mastered the contortionist art of pitching school privatization — which strips families of their right to democratically elected school boards — as “the civil rights issue of our time.” Publicly funded, privately managed charter schools, they argued, would increase opportunities for marginalized students, leveling an unfair playing field.

It was never true, and decades of research have shown us that charter schools don’t outperform their publicly managed counterparts — but they do drain funding from neighborhood schools attended by poor kids. Nevertheless, a sheen of “equity” and “opportunity” sparkled around bipartisan charter school initiatives in the Bush and Obama days of education reform.

But in the Trump era, Besty DeVos, a privatizer laser-focused on state-funded Christian education, made the school-choice brand feel icky to its D-column champions. While DeVos treated the federal Charter Schools Program (CSP) as “a slush fund for large charter chains,” Carol Burris and her team launched a series of reports documenting the rampant waste, fraud, and abuse the program was enabling. By the 2020 presidential primary it was clear that Democrats were looking to distance themselves from the charter movement, taking their cues from organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which called for a moratoriumon new charters in 2016.

Biden’s education department attempted to make good on a campaign promise to eliminate federal funding for for-profit charter schools (thanks in no small part to the work of Burris and NPE, who marshaled a grassroots network of public education advocates willing to take on the charter sector’s powerful Washington guardians). And while the department’s new CSP rules don’t go quite that far, they do make it much harder for profit seekers to cash in on the program. They also increase transparency and accountability for grantees, and set up requirements aimed at combating resegregation and federally financed “white-flight charters.” In Congress, the 2023 House Appropriations Bill supported these tighter rules and reduced CSP funding by $40 million, seemingly in recognition that the federal government caused grave harm by promoting reckless charter expansion.

Open the link and read the article in full.

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, Oklahoma, Religion

Oklahoma: State Attorney General Sues to Block Religious Charter School

By dianeravitch
October 23, 2023 //
13

Gentner Drummond, the Attorney General for Oklahoma, sued to block the authorization of a Catholic charter school. Drummond disagrees with Governor Kevin Stitt and State Superintendent of Education Ryan Walters. Even the lobbyists for the charter movement oppose the religious charter school, which is a back door voucher.

Sean Murphy of the AP reported:

Oklahoma’s Republican Attorney General Gentner Drummond on Friday sued to stop a state board from establishing and funding what would be the nation’s first religious public charter school after the board ignored Drummond’s warning that it would violate both the state and U.S. constitutions.

Drummond filed the lawsuit with the Oklahoma Supreme Court against the Oklahoma Statewide Virtual Charter School Board after three of the board’s members this week signed a contract for the St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual Charter School, which is sponsored by the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City.

“Make no mistake, if the Catholic Church were permitted to have a public virtual charter school, a reckoning will follow in which this state will be faced with the unprecedented quandary of processing requests to directly fund all petitioning sectarian groups,” the lawsuit states.

The school board voted 3-2 in June to approve the Catholic Archdiocese’s application to establish the online public charter school, which would be open to students across the state in kindergarten through grade 12. In its application, the Archdiocese said its vision is that the school “participates in the evangelizing mission of the Church and is the privileged environment in which Christian education is carried out.”

The approval of a publicly funded religious school is the latest in a series of actions taken by conservative-led states that include efforts to teach the Bible in public schools, and to ban booksand lessons about race, sexual orientation and gender identity.

Oklahoma’s Constitution specifically prohibits the use of public money or property from being used, directly or indirectly, for the use or benefit of any church or system of religion. Nearly 60% of Oklahoma voters rejected a proposal in 2016 to remove that language from the Constitution…

Oklahoma’s Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt, who earlier this year signed a bill that would give parents public funds to send their children to private schools, including religious schools, criticized Drummond’s lawsuit as a “political stunt.”

“AG Drummond seems to lack any firm grasp on the constitutional principle of religious freedom and masks his disdain for the Catholics’ pursuit by obsessing over non-existent schools that don’t neatly align with his religious preference,” Stitt said in a statement.

Drummond defeated Stitt’s hand-picked attorney general in last year’s GOP primary and the two Republicans have clashed over Stitt’s hostile position toward many Native American tribes in the state.

The AG’s lawsuit also suggests that the board’s vote could put at risk more than $1 billion in federal education dollars that Oklahoma receives that require the state to comply with federal laws that prohibit a publicly funded religious school.

“Not only is this an irreparable violation of our individual religious liberty, but it is an unthinkable waste of our tax dollars,” Drummond said in a statement.

The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, a nonprofit organization that supports the public charter school movement, released a statement Friday in support of Drummond’s challenge.

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Education Industry, Oklahoma, Privatization, Religion, Republicans, Resistance

John Thompson: Oklahoma’s State Superintendent Ryan Walters Is a Shameless Liar

By dianeravitch
October 17, 2023 //
3

John Thompson, historian and retired teacher in Oklahoma, is appalled by the spread of a culture of lying. The state’s superintendent of schools is a textbook example of a man who lies openly, repeatedly, and without shame.

As the New York Times’ Peter Wehner wrote, “The first hours of the Trump presidency began with a demonstrable lie, when Mr. Trump, his press secretary and his closest advisers lied about the size of his inaugural crowd, photographic evidence to the contrary be damned.” Since then, state and federal officeholders, as well as Trump voters have become shockingly comfortable with “alt facts,” but as cases are heading to multiple courts, brazen falsehoods which have been portrayed as political narratives that are legal, even when they are lies, will become violations of law. Oklahoma’s State School Superintendent Ryan Walters is likely to become one case study in such transitions.

Walters is facing federal lawsuits for wrongly firing Department of Education employees. Another employee, the director of grant development, disproved Walters’ claim that, ‘We have applied for millions and millions of grants since I took office.’” She explained, “We have not applied for one single grant. That was a blatant lie.”

The Oklahoma Ethics Commission fined Walters $7,800 for filing late campaign reports 14 times. Most importantly, the state auditor alleged that $30 million of COVID-19 relief money was misspent by Walters’ department, and the “Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond said he won’t rule out criminal charges against some state leaders after a report alleged misspending of COVID-19 relief money.”

Moreover, Walters’ promotion of lies (that presumably were not illegal) by Libs of TikTokand other rightwingers likely contributed to bomb threats to Tulsa-area public schools. As the top Democrat in the Oklahoma Senate said, she supports her House colleagues’ request for an impeachment investigation because, “These threats are a direct result of reckless rhetoric and must be addressed.”

Then, as KGOU reported, “Walters put TPS (Tulsa Public Schools) in the national spotlight for participating in the Chinese language program Confucius Classrooms, which has indirect ties to the Chinese government.

It’s hard to understand how anyone could believe Walter’s narratives, especially Sen. James Lankford, R-Oklahoma City, who “is one of 18 members of the U.S. Senate who have called for an investigation into educational ‘funds from hostile foreign governments flowing into America’s K-12 schools.’” Lankford asserted “The CCP is the greatest threat to America’s security today,” and “The CCP’s involvement in the K-12 education system further demonstrates how far the Chinese government is willing go to expand its influence and promote its authoritarian agenda.”

But Walters’ recent stunt, testifying before Congress, should prove that he is willing to tell virtually any lie, defend it, and at least temporarily, convince some or many (or most?) Republican legislators to believe it. As the Oklahoman reports:

“Walters has often equated the nonprofit with the Chinese Communist Party and accused Confucius Classrooms of being part of a propaganda campaign by the party.

“He and the state Board of Education voted in August to require all Oklahoma school districts to report any foreign funding. Walters urged Congress and the state Legislature to prohibit schools from receiving funds from hostile foreign governments.”

Then, he testified to Congress, “We must protect our kids and not allow a hostile foreign government to indoctrinate them.”

In fact, as the Tulsa Public Schools replied:

All costs that related to the Confucius Classroom Coordination Office amounted to $6,240 over the 2022-23 school year. That included the price of the teacher’s training and travel, classroom supplies, cultural supplies and food for students.

The superintendent and founder of the Texas charter school which trained the Tulsa teacher, “Eddie Conger, drove to Oklahoma City to reiterate that to Walters and the Oklahoma State Board of Education during the board’s meeting Thursday. ‘I just want you to know that I’ve not sent any money to Tulsa Public Schools, not one dime,’ Conger said while speaking in public comment at the meeting. ‘I would have, but they said no.’”

Then, as reported by the Oklahoman, Walters testified to Congress on Sept. 19 that the ‘district maintains an active connection with the [Chinese government] through a program called the Confucius Classroom.’ But TPS says it ended its contract nearly a month before, on Aug. 25.”

It was reported by State Impact that according to:

Email correspondence obtained by State Impact between TPS and the State Department of Education, the district made the department aware of the contract termination the week before Walters testified otherwise, on Sept. 15. The department had asked for the information on Sept. 7.

Once upon a time we believed “A lie is a lie.” It’s been four decades since Ronald Reagan proclaimed, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” Since then, the Rightwing has been extremely successful in undermining public services by telling big lies, arguing that what we now call “alt facts” may not be true but that’s just politics.

But as rightwingers ranging from hate mongers like Ryan Walters to Trump have been willing to speak any falsehood they want, they seem to be forgetting the legal danger of spinning their tales under oath. As long as they keep repeating false claims, it seems inevitable to me that their habits of repeating concrete and documented lies will backfire in court.

Categories Accountability, Administrators, superintendents, Character, Fake News, Lies, Oklahoma

Peter Greene: Norte Dame Law School Joins Rightwing Extremists to Defend Religious Charter School in Oklahoma

By dianeravitch
October 5, 2023 //
7

Peter Greene reports on the status of Oklahoma’s attempt to open the nation’s first openly religious charter school. the State’s Attorney General thinks it’s wrong, so Oklahoma’s State Superintendent Ryan Walter (a MAGA-nut) is relying on outside help. As Peter explains, the rightwingers are flocking to Walters’ side.

He writes:

Earlier this year, Oklahoma State Attorney General Gentner Drummond issued an opinion about the prospect of the state approving a church-run charter school. He was reversing the opinion of his predecessor, saying that previous opinion “misuses the concept of religious liberty by employing it as a means to justify state-funded religion. If allowed to remain in force, I fear the opinion will be used as a basis for taxpayer-funded religious schools.”

In June, the Oklahoma Statewide Virtual Charter School Board ignored him and approved the St. Isidore of Seville virtual charter, a cyber school that was proposed by the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City in collaboration with the Diocese of Tulsa. It was in anticipation of this application that the virtual charter board asked the previous AG for an opinion in the first place.

As an AP report noted, “Archdiocese officials have been unequivocal that the school will promote the Catholic faith and operate according to church doctrine, including its views on sexual orientation and gender identity.”

And just in case you wonder if the state knew what it was doing, or was trying to preserve any plausible deniability, State Superintendent Ryan Walters supported the decision:

This decision reflects months of hard work, and more importantly, the will of the people of Oklahoma. I encouraged the board to approve this monumental decision, and now the U.S.’s first religious charter school will be welcomed by my administration.

And Governor Stitt hailed it as “a win for religious liberty and education freedom in our great state.”

Meanwhile, AG Drummond called the decision “contrary to Oklahoma law and not in the best interests of taxpayers.” Furthermore, “It’s extremely disappointing that board members violated their oath in order to fund religious schools with our tax dollars. In doing so, these members have exposed themselves and the state to potential legal action that could be costly.”

To the surprise of nobody, that lawsuit was filed before summer’s end with Oklahoma Parent Legislative Action Committee and individual parents as plaintiffs in a case that has already been busy and twisty.

The case has drawn a number of national groups to the case, including for the plaintiffs the ACLU, Americans for Separation of Church and State, and the Education Law Center.

The defendant side is a more interesting array. Drummond, having made it clear that he believes the charter proponents are dead wrong, is not using the attorney general’s office to defend them. So the school board, the state department of education, and Ryan Walters are being defended by private attorneys in Oklahoma and some other hired guns.

Two are part of the usual array of legal shops that work to defund and dismantle public education. There’s the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian advocacy group that was incorporated in 1993 by six right-wing luminaries, including Larry Burkett, Bill Bright, and James Dobson. They are supported by a host of right-wing foundations, including the Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation. And they oppose abortion, same-sex marriage, most all LGBTQ+ rights. Their track record is sadly successful; these are the Hobby Lobby lawsuit folks. They have a summer legal training program to get Christian law students whipped up for legal careers; Justice Amy Coney Barrett taught at it. They successfully litigated against Vermont, establishing that the state must include Catholic students in its voucher program, a sort of throat-clearing for Carson v. Makin.

There’s First Liberty Institute a Christian conservative firm based in Texas, which co-took Carson v. Makin all the way to SCOTUS, as well as the case of the praying coach.

These are to be expected; getting money away from public education and into church coffers is their thing. But you get a fuller idea of who has a lot riding on this case from the third set of lawyers– the Notre Dame Religious Liberty Clinic….

A Catholic charter in Oklahoma would pretty much erase the difference between charters and vouchers, and the Catholic charter in Oklahoma serves as a proof of legal concept, so this case is a good fit for the church. It is winding through various legal twists and turns (the defendants just moved to have it dismissed), but if it ends up before SCOTUS, it could represent one more reduction of the pile of rubble that now stands where the wall between church and state used to.

Please open the link and finish the article.

Categories Bigotry, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Extremism, Gender, Oklahoma, Religion
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