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Gary Rubinstein: The Disaster Facing Houston Under Mike Miles

By dianeravitch
August 11, 2023 //
8

Gary Rubinstein has been a teacher since 1991. Four of those years were spent teaching in Houston. Gary has been watching what’s happening since Mike Miles arrived and was taken aback when Miles imposed sweeping changes on the district without spending time getting to know it. Miles’ “reforms,” Gary predicts, are heading for trouble. Those reforms come out of the “corporate reform” playbook. Maybe Miles took a page or two from the Broad Academy guidelines, applicable in all situations.

Gary writes:

With around 200,000 students, Houston Independent School District (HISD) is the 8th largest school district in the United States. For years there was talk about the state possibly taking over the district and this finally happened on June 1, 2023. The board was fired and replaced by Texas Education Agency (TEA) appointees. Mike Miles, who founded a charter school network called Third Future Schools and was previously the head of Dallas Schools for three years, was hired as the new HISD superintendent. While most people new to a job like this would take some time to get the ‘lay of the land,’ Miles instantly proposed some radical, and in my estimation, terrible, reforms which I will outline in this post.

He identified the three lowest performing high schools in HISD: Wheatley, Kashmere, and North Forest. Those three schools together with the 26 middle and elementary schools that feed into those high schools were to become part of a new ‘New Education System’ known as NES. This NES is the latest ‘turnaround’ district. Over the past 20 years there have been several of these, the most prominent are the Recovery School District (RSD) in New Orleans, set up after Hurricane Katrina in 2003 and the Achievement School District (ASD) in Tennessee, created in 2011 with Race To The Top money. There was also Michigan’s Education Achievement Authority (EAA) in 2011 as well as a few more that have popped up around the country. To my knowledge, there has never been a successful takeover of this sort in the history of this country. The EAA has been shut down, the RSD has been merged back into the New Orleans school system and the ASD has floundered, never having any success at all in improving the test scores of the schools it took over. It is funny/sad to see this hopeful panel discussion by the leaders of these districtsbefore it was known how badly they would fail. (I’ve written a lot about the ASD, but here is something I wrote summarizing the history of these turnaround efforts.)

These turnaround efforts sometimes have school closures or staffs at schools having to reapply for their jobs and often have the schools converted into charters. For the HISD NES model, the schools are not getting taken over by charters but teachers do have to reapply for their jobs. Teachers at these schools will get raises and opportunities for bonuses with test score based merit pay. Other changes that will happen at these 29 schools are a restructuring of the teacher role where the teacher is like a ‘surgeon’ doing the most important part of the job while other tasks like grading, lesson planning, and discipline are done by others. Also, you may have read about elsewhere, libraries at these schools are converted into discipline centers where students are sent to watch a live streamed version of the lesson on a computer screen.

The reason that no turnaround effort like this has ever worked is that it is based on faulty assumptions about what the cause of the low test scores are at those schools so any solution based on those assumptions is doomed to fail. It is like trying to treat a broken leg by giving a patient a complete blood transfusion.

As someone who has been teaching since 1991 – and my first four years were in HISD actually, looking at the list of changes makes me shudder. Anyone who ever taught can see how most of these changes will make the schools worse but I want to summarize some of them here.

All teachers have to reapply for their jobs – When students come back and learn that many of their favorite teachers were not hired back, this can be very traumatic. There is no guarantee that the teachers who replace those who weren’t hired back, even if those teachers have been successful at a different school, will necessarily be a good fit at this school. This uncertain improvement coupled with guaranteed disruption is a pretty big risk. Why not first see how the current staff does with these new supports?

Please open the link to finish this important article.

Gary reviews the other major elements of Miles’s prepackaged plan and explains why they are unlikely to make a difference. They haven’t worked before, why will they work now? As Gary writes, takeovers typically fail because they are based on fake assumptions and prepackaged cures.

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reform, Democracy, Education Industry, Houston, Parents, Teachers and Teaching, Texas

Nancy Bailey: The Takeover of Houston Schools Is a Dire Warning for Other Districts

By dianeravitch
August 9, 2023 //
14

Nancy Bailey fears that the takeover of the Houston Independent School District should set off alarm bells in other districts. The new superintendent Mike Miles is taking steps to de-professionalize teaching and to impose untested programs on the schools. He is the tip of the spear of destructive education “reform.” Please recall that the Texas Education agency took control of the entire district because one high school—with disproportionate numbers of students who are in need of special education and in high poverty—was not getting the test scores the state expected (even though its scores increased in the year before the state takeover and the school rose to a C grade). Is Mike Miles a harbinger of the future or an echo of failed policies forged by No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top?

She writes:

I think there is a likelihood that we will be seeing more state takeover of districts. 

~Kenneth Wong, education policy researcher and former advisor to U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, March 28, 2023

Houston faces harsh public school reforms, a sad example of the continuing efforts in America to destroy all public education and end professional teaching.

State takeovers aren’t new. Nor are they known for innovation, but for creating school voids, cutting services, and firing key staff, promising to close learning gaps. Takeovers usually only weaken schools, breaking them up and leaving communities with fewer and poorer schools.

The Superintendent

Superintendent Mike Miles has never been a classroom teacher. Miles replaces Superintendent Millard House II, hired in 2021, only there two years before being hired elsewhere.

As CEO of Third Future Schools, Miles ran a network of public charter schools in Colorado, Texas, and Louisiana. The Texas Tribune describes his leadership in the Dallas Independent School District as tumultuous after six years as superintendent of the smaller Harrison School District in Colorado Springs.

The Dallas Morning News claims the district has few academic gains to show for all the disruption.

Miles participated in the Eli Broad program at Yale. On his LinkedIn page, another school reformer writes they matriculated through the Broad Academy now within the Yale School of Management.

The late Eli Broad pushed school privatization with a 44-page document to show how to break up public schools, originally reported by Howard Blume in the LA Times $490 Million Plan would Put Half of LAUSD Students in Charter Schools.

Those who subscribe to Broad’s philosophy disrupt public education to privatize it. Realizing Miles is a Broadie (name reflecting Broad’s agenda), makes what’s happening in Houston clearer.

Miles has degrees from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, served in the army, and attended the University of California at Berkeley and Columbia University. His degrees are in engineering, Slavic languages and literature, and international affairs and public policy. He has no known formal education about running a school considering student developmental needs.

The New Education System (NES)

Miles’s program is called the New Education System (NES) and HERE. Principals, teachers, and staff join.

Under the NES, according to the Houston Chronicle, administrators will handle discipline, stand in hallways patrolling, and make children walk in single file, quietly, and schools look sterile, cold, and cookie-cutter. If they use the bathroom, they must carry an orange parking cone. Teachers might get to keep their desks.

Compensation under the NES will be differentiated. Teachers will likely be evaluated with test scores, and their autonomy is stifled. Curriculum developers will provide lesson plans and materials for grades 2-10, removing the teacher’s instructional expertise. Student work will be graded by support personnel, even though teachers glean information about students by grading their work.

The district will hire apprentice teachers. They will expand the reach of the best and brightest teachers. How will they make this determination? Shouldn’t all teachers be hired with the credentials they need to do the job?

The plan calls for four periods of the staff performing duties each month (75 minutes each time), and this is unclear.

Replacing School Libraries and Librarians with Disciplinary Centers

Most controversial is that when principals join the NES they can lose their school libraries and librarians. From Click2Houston: 85 schools that have joined Miles’ program, and of those, 28 campuses will lose their librarians. The district said they will have the opportunity to transition to other roles within the district.

Instead of school libraries, children with behavioral difficulties will face screens in “Teams Centers” or “Zoom rooms.” There’s concern they’ll associate libraries as punishing. Students who misbehave need human interaction and support, not to be left to face screens.

Librarians with advanced degrees in library science will be removed, despite being knowledgeable and critical to a child’s learning. They could be transplanted to non-NES schools, which will get school libraries and librarians.

Miles states:

We’re not doing things that are just popular. We’re not doing things that we’ve always done, we’re not doing things that are just fun, we’re not doing things that are just nice to have or good unless we can measure its success.

He’s not doing what works! It’s common knowledge among those who understand children that when children have access to great school libraries learning results improve.

Losing Teachers: Moving to Online Amplify to Teach Reading

HISD is losing qualified teachers, school libraries, and librarians, and advertising for 350 long-term substitutes who don’t require a college degree. The online program, Amplify, will be used.

In State Legislative news in May, Education Bill “Amplifies” StatePower, Threatens Teacher Autonomy, Jovanica Palacios states:

Despite promises to the contrary, this bill [House Bill 1605] would cut a slice out of Texas’ education funding, taking money out of school districts and giving it to a vendor. The proposed legislation is actually dubbed “the Amplify bill” due to its association with curriculum development company Amplify, which received a $19 million emergency state contract during COVID.

At least 85 NES schools under Miles will use Amplify, which advertises the Science of Reading, an online program once owned by the education division of Rupert Murdock’s News Corp. and purchased by Laurene Powell Jobs. Where’s independent research providing proof that this program is effective?

Please open the link to finish reading her important post.

Categories Broad Foundation, Curriculum, Discipline, Disruption, Education Industry, Houston, Standardized Testing, Students, Teachers and Teaching, Technology, Texas

Texas: New Law Will Bankrupt Small Bookstores

By dianeravitch
August 5, 2023 //
16

The Texas legislature passed a law in its last session requiring booksellers to rate any books they sell to public schools for its sexual content. And to rate any book they have ever sold in the past to public schools or to teachers.

The law threatens the survival of some 300 independent bookstores across the state. “And by April of next year, every bookseller in the state is tasked with submitting to the Texas Education Agency a list of every book they’ve ever sold to a teacher, librarian or school that qualifies for a sexual rating and is in active use. The stores also are required to issue recalls for any sexually explicit books.”

Small bookstores, like Blue Willow in Houston, may be bankrupted if they are compelled to comply. Blue Willow has two full-time employees and 12 part-time employees. It sells books to 21 school districts. Sales to schools comprises about a fifth of the store’s business.

The law is set to take effect on September 1.

Blue Willow has joined a lawsuit to block the bill. The lawsuit was filed by Austin’s BookPeople, the American Booksellers Association, the Association of American Publishers, the Authors Guild and the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. “The lawsuit argues booksellers will suffer financial damage if they lose school-related business. Koehler estimates that a fifth of Blue Willow’s business is with schools.”

The legislature doesn’t care about the financial impact on small bookstores like Blue Willow.

Let’s see if the courts do.

Categories Censorship, Freedom to Read, Houston, Librarians, Libraries, Literacy, Teachers, Texas

Houston: Miles Seeks Approval to Hire Uncertified Principals and Teachers

By dianeravitch
August 3, 2023 //
15

Mike Miles is asking the Texas Education Agency to allow him to recruit uncertified teachers, principals, and deans. This move follows the Broadie playbook that education experience doesn’t matter. Broadies are known for their love of TFA. Miles may be reaching even lower since uncertified teachers do not require a college degree.

Houston ISD is seeking board approval this month for a waiver from the Texas Education Agency to hire uncertified deans and assistant principals for the next three years.

This follows the district asking for state approval to have an uncertified superintendent and uncertified teachers.

HIRING HUNDREDS HISD to seek TEA approval to hire uncertified teachers to fill classroom vacancies

The HISD Board of Managers is set to meet Thursday evening for a work session, where they’ll discuss the agenda for the board’s regular Aug. 10 meeting. Next week, the board is expected to vote on whether to approve an application for a certification waiver to employ assistant principals and deans without a certification through the 2025-2026 school year.

To be an assistant principal in Texas, an educator must have a certificate as an administrator, assistant principal, mid-management administrator, principal or superintendent.

Texas no longer issues an assistant principal certification, but the requirements for a principal certification in Texas include a master’s degree, a valid classroom teaching certificate, two years of teaching experience, and completion of a principal educator preparation program and two principal certification exams.

According to the TEA, districts can request a teacher certification waiver for someone to serve as a principal or assistant principal if an education does not currently hold a state certification. The request needs board approval before it is submitted to TEA for review and approval.

The board’s Thursday agenda also includes the topics of teacher vacancies and teacher certification waivers. In addition to a waiver for principals and deans, the district is seeking to waive Texas certification requirements for teachers to reduce vacancies on campuses before the school year begins.

Categories Administrators, superintendents, Deregulation, Education Industry, Houston, Principals, Teacher Shortage, Teachers, Texas

Charles Pierce: Mike Miles Brings Chaos to Houston

By dianeravitch
August 2, 2023 //
54

There is one good reason to subscribe to Esquire: to read Charles Pierce, one of the most perceptive writers of our time. Pierce writes about education on occasion, and he’s always on target. In this column, he skewers the casual cruelty of Texas Governor Greg Abbott , who seized control of the Houston public schools on the flimsiest of pretexts, and Houston’s new superintendent Mike Miles, who’s pushing his top-down ideas without regard to anyone else’s views. Miles is a military man who learned about education at the Broad Academy, where one of the central teachings was to ignore public opinion, as well as the views of local teachers.

Pierce writes:

This week, something altogether remarkable, and not in a good way, happened in the city of Houston in the state of Texas. On June 1, the state of Texas, which is wholly governed by Greg Abbott and a compliant, and heavily gerrymandered state legislature, took over the Houston Independent School District. The pretext was flimsy, as so many of Abbott’s pretexts are, where he even bothers to provide them. (That legislature again.) The decision was, well, unpopular. From Texas Monthly:

Mike Miles, the state-appointed superintendent of the Houston Independent School District, might be the most hated person in Harris County. At last week’s school board meeting—the first since Miles was officially hired—residents crowded HISD headquarters, in northwest Houston, to oppose the state’s takeover of the school district. One speaker compared Miles, who is the son of a Black father and a Japanese mother, to a Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. Another described the state’s recent seizure of HISD, which serves a student population that is 62 percent Hispanic and 22 percent Black—as an “act of racial violence.” Larry McKinzie, an educator and former State Board of Education candidate, appeared to make a physical threat against Miles: “Realize this: you’re safe at forty-four-hundred West Eighteenth”—the location of the board meeting—“but you’ll have to go back [home].” Not one of the 33 attendees who gave public comments had anything good to say about their new superintendent.  It was hard to gauge Miles’s reaction to the criticism, because he spent the entire public-comment period in a back room, watching the meeting on TV.

A meeting the night before this one had dissolved into chaos, so the new HISB rescheduled the meeting for the next night, using a plan that had the lovely tang of East Germany to it.

 In an apparent effort to keep order, the board allowed only 35 members of the public into last week’s meeting room, which can accommodate more than 300. The remaining 100 or so attendees were relegated to an overflow room. Several attempted to force their way into the main room, only to be turned back by armed police officers. One teacher who had registered to speak at the meeting was arrested for criminal trespassing and spent the night in jail. 

Houston officials tried to fight the takeover, and they even got it stalled for four years. But the puppet show that is the government of Texas has many fail-safe devices and they all work.

Houston leaders overwhelmingly opposed the takeover, citing HISD’s overall B rating from the state and strong financial position. In 2019 the district sued the state, delaying the takeover for four years. The legal battle ended in January, when the Texas Supreme Court—whose nine members are all Republicans—sided with the TEA. 

Miles beta-tested his sophisticatedly named New Education System in Dallas, where it proved to be a matter of long-term pain for short-term gain. This week, its implementation in Houston was widely interpreted as equally ominous. From Texas Public Media:

Librarian and media specialist positions are being eliminated at 28 campuses designated to be part of Miles’ New Education System (NES), which entails premade lesson plans for teachers, classroom cameras for disciplinary purposes and a greater emphasis on testing-based performance evaluations, among other initiatives. The libraries at those schools will continue to include books that can be read or checked out by students but are otherwise being reimagined as “team centers” where special programming will be held and disruptive students will be sent so as not to interfere with their classmates’ learning, according to HISD spokesperson Joseph Sam. The library-related changes also could be coming to the 57 schools where principals elected to be NES-aligned campuses, with Sam saying that would be determined on a campus-by-campus basis.

If this seems extreme, that’s only because it is — homogenized lesson plans, surveillance in the classroom, “special programs” for “disruptive students.” And libraries turned into “discipline centers,” which, truth be told, are not as dungeon-adjacent as their name might imply, although their name so clearly implies it that the NES folks like to call them “team centers.”

That most of the affected students will be from low-income communities of color should be obvious from jump, which means god alone knows what the NES definition of “disruptive” in practice is going to be. (In some places, “disruptive” students have drawn the attention of the local police. So maybe things are looking up.) What is also obvious is that any complaints will go into a political meat-grinder that is rigged in such an ironclad fashion that an fair outcome is nearly impossible. And around and around it goes.

Categories Accountability, Discipline, Education Industry, Extremism, Houston, Libraries, Texas

Texas: Why Governor Abbott Keeps Losing on Vouchers

By dianeravitch
August 1, 2023 //
6

Josephine Lee of The Texas Observer conducted the following interview with the leaders of Pastors for Texas Children, Dr Charles Foster Johnson and Dr. Charles Luke.

The Texas Observer is a wonderful publication.

This year, Governor Greg Abbott made “school choice,” or vouchers, one of his top legislative priorities. He counted on riding the wave of “parent rights” crusades into the national political arena. But Texans didn’t buy it.

Since 1995, the Coalition for Public Schools in Texas has assembled a broad spectrum of religious, child advocacy, and education organizations, now with 50 groups representing some 4 million Texans. Its member organizations range from the American Civil Liberties Union to the Texas Baptist Christian Rights Commission. For 28 years, the coalition has beaten repeated efforts to privatize public schools through a voucher system. This year’s regular legislative session was no different.

Abbott and the state Senate made multiple attempts to implant vouchers—after the House voted not to use public dollars for private schools—including offers to buy off rural school districts, back-door deals to vote without any hearing, and busing in a scant showing of supporters at the governor’s expense. These were countered by thousands of emails and phone calls and dozens of opposition rallies featuring coalition members. Still, Abbott has promised a future special session on vouchers. The Texas Observer spoke with Charles Luke, who coordinates the coalition, and the Rev. Charles Johnson, who leads the member organization Pastors for Texas Children, who together suggest that Abbott give up and focus on Texans’ real needs.

TO: Can you describe Abbott’s attempts to convince rural residents to support vouchers and pit them against urban communities?

Charles Luke: There was a measure that would have given districts $10,000 for each student on a voucher if that district had less than 20,000 kids. It would be a period of two years and then after that it was upped to five years. Also, the lieutenant governor, when he was running for office and doing his tour of Texas, said he was going to bracket out the rural districts from the voucher programs. He got a lot of pushback from people saying, “If this is such a good idea, why are you leaving us out of it?” So he quickly changed his opinion and even reportedly told senators who were also using that as a talking point in their campaigns to stop talking about vouchers because it’s not popular.

What are the conditions in rural schools?

Charles Johnson: The big headline is we’re sitting on a $33 billion pot of money. And the governor wants the money to go to private schools instead of public schools. That’s the nub of the matter right there. So we didn’t get the classroom support we needed; we didn’t get the teacher salary increases, even though our classes are too full. And with teacher retention so low, you have fewer teachers working harder, longer hours without the fair pay associated with that extra effort. All this time, we have money in the bank; we have all these infrastructure needs, and we’re spending all our time using the voucher issue to hold hostage school finance.

Luke: The other issue that hasn’t been talked about is that schools are trying to make it under double-digit inflation. Everything they’re purchasing, from construction materials to food for the cafeteria, has gone up since COVID. So they’re doing all of this without any extra money. At the same time, we’re limiting their ability to raise local taxes.

Why did Abbott’s fearmongering about “critical race theory” and other efforts fail?

Johnson: Because it’s ludicrous. When [rural Texans] really look around the school, they see their family members and their church members. For example, the Baptist preacher’s wife is the principal or their teacher is the mayor’s daughter. In a rural community, where people know each other and have organic relationships, this is the key. They’ve grown up together, the children have been in school together. There are cross-racial relationships. The teacher who harbors a humanistic concern for the well-being of every child is going to guard the freedom and dignity of the child’s religious expression. But there are shrill and well-funded political interests in this country that do not want to have that kind of diversity. It does not advance a particular right-wing political agenda.

Do you think the anti-”critical race theory” narrative is on its way out then?

Johnson: Absolutely. We’re addressing all these manufactured crises that don’t have any real direct existential connection to where Texans live and what they need: a great public school for ranch kids, roads to get products to market, broadband, water. All those things are very important. That’s what we ought to be addressing here in Austin.

Luke: I think the people of Texas are just worn out. They’re angry and frustrated, and then there’s this narrative that keeps on coming up, this baloney narrative that we don’t really see happening anywhere. After decades of being in the schools, I can count on one hand the number of times somebody taught something that shouldn’t be taught. But here’s the problem: A lot of these people, who are pushing this problem and pushing the privatization of public schools, haven’t been inside a public school in years. And every time I hit a pothole that didn’t get filled in because the state spent money fighting “critical race theory,” well, that’s a frustration for me.

What should religious liberty look like in the public schools?

Johnson: This is our number one objection to the privatization of public education. The public school is the laboratory of American democracy, where children learn to respect each other across all kinds of differences. And the protection of religious liberty is a fundamental human right. Government has no proper authority over religion. Period. Now our children can already express themselves religiously in schools in all kinds of ways. They can have a silent prayer. Religious organizations can meet on their own time before or after school or during lunch hour for a prayer group. Principals spend a good bit of their time protecting individual religious expressions of children and teaching tolerance to children for all the diverse expressions of religion. One of the foundational pieces of curriculum in a public school is tolerance, respect, and anti-bullying. It is the social and emotional support that children need to grow up into full adulthood. So, it is an egregious violation of human rights for public dollars to advance a religious doctrine.

Dr. Luke gave the best response this session to [Republican state] Senator Mayes Middleton.

Luke: Mayes Middleton had asked me [during a Senate Education Committee hearing] to explain a tweet from Pastors for Texas Children: “The governor is leading in the indoctrination of children by promoting vouchers.” Well, if you’ve got a child in a religious school, be it Christian, Muslim, Jewish, or whatever, they’re gonna teach that child their religious doctrines and that’s the dictionary definition of indoctrination.

What do you foresee for Abbott’s special session on vouchers?

Johnson: If Abbott calls a special session to get a voucher program, we’ve been told by a lot of House members that the opposition to a voucher program will increase. This has already been quite an embarrassment for Abbott. Now, he wants to call the legislature back into session, after what they’ve been through these past 140 days, just to once again vote on something that they have defeated time after time after time for the last 28 years.

Categories Accountability, Education Reform, Funding, Religion, Separation of church and state, Texas, Vouchers

Houston: Takeover Superintendent Will Turn 28 Libraries into Discipline Centers

By dianeravitch
July 29, 2023 //
25

The Texas Department of Education decided to take over Houston, one of the largest school districts in the nation, because one high school was not improving fast enough for state commissioner Mike Morath. The state ousted the elected school board and replaced a strong superintendent with military man Mike Miles, who had a rocky tenure when he led Dallas schools a decade ago.

Miles has launched a campaign of disruption—the signature move of “reformers,” especially Broadies, and he is offering what he calls a New Education System (NES). The details are not yet fully developed, but here is one aspect: 28 of the schools that are part of Miles’s NES will close their libraries and use them for other purposes. One such purpose is to serve as a “discipline center” for students who act out.

Houston Independent School District will be eliminating librarian positions at 28 schools this upcoming year and converting the libraries into ‘Team Centers” where kids with behavioral issues will be sent, the district announced.

This comes as part of the new superintendent Mike Miles reform program, New Education System (NES). Currently, there are a total of 85 schools that have joined Miles’ program, and of those, 28 campuses will lose their librarians. The district said they will have the opportunity to transition to other roles within the district.

The remaining 57 NES schools’ librarians will be assessed on a case-by-case basis, according to the district.

Retired HISD Teacher in Charge of Library, Lisa Robinson, believes the library is full of some of the greatest stories ever told.

“It was such a joy to help them find the perfect book,” said Robinson.

She said those stories are now ripped to shreds.

“My heart is just broken for these children that are in the NES schools that are losing their librarians,” said Robinson.

Librarian positions have been an ongoing debate in HISD. Robinson said the former superintendent, Millard House II, made efforts to keep library staff.

“The mandate for librarians had been put back in place. With one swipe of a pen that has been destroyed,” said Robinson.

Superintendent Mike Miles said students are behind on reading levels, especially in 4th grade.

Former HISD Librarian and Manager of Library Services, Janice Newsum believes eliminating librarian positions could hurt reading performance even more.

“When students engage in reading as an activity of choice, they are not only building that reading muscle, but they are also developing their vocabulary they are understanding a bit about the world that exists outside their block radius,” said Newsum.

Mayor Sylvester Turner believes the move is unacceptable.

“You don’t close libraries in some of the schools in your most underserved communities, and you’re keeping libraries open in other schools,” said Turner.

What’s the logic here? Many students are not reading well, therefore eliminate the librarians who might find books that interest them?

Categories Broad Foundation, Discipline, Disruption, Education Industry, Houston, Librarians, Libraries, Texas

Beto O’Rourke to Biden: Stop Abbott’s Cruelty at the Border

By dianeravitch
July 27, 2023 //
119

Beto O’Rourke, who ran unsuccessfully against Governor Greg Abbott, calls on President Biden to intervene and stop Abbott’s cruel tactics on the Texas-Mexico border.

He wrote in the New York Times:

Gov. Greg Abbott’s escalating political stunts have killed migrants at the Texas-Mexico border. Operation Lone Star — the dangerous, illegal and ineffective border mission that Mr. Abbott has been running separately from the federal government for over two years — must be stopped. It’s time for President Biden to step up.

The Supreme Court has consistently upheld that immigration enforcement is a power exclusive to the federal government — not the states. Elements of Mr. Abbott’s border operations have been found unconstitutional, violate federal law and conflict with U.S. treaty obligations to Mexico. Mr. Biden has every right — in fact, every responsibility — to intervene and enforce the federal government’s clear authority to regulate the border without state interference.

The lawsuit that the Department of Justice filed on Monday calls on Mr. Abbott to remove the dangerous floating barrier of buoys that he has installed in the Rio Grande. It is a good first step, but it is far from sufficient. Mr. Abbott has made clear that he does not intend to comply and isn’t going to wait for litigation to move through the courts to add to the gantlet of misery he’s constructed on the border.

Every day that Mr. Biden fails to stop Mr. Abbott leads to unnecessary, preventable suffering — and often death. Last week, a medic with the Texas Department of Public Safety blew the whistle on the governor’s deadly border operation, reporting that troopers have been ordered “to push small children and nursing babies back into the Rio Grande.”

Texas troopers have also installed razor “traps” in addition to a floating wall of buoys that are funneling asylum seekers into more dangerous parts of the river. The whistle-blower medic also reported cases in which the obstructions have contributed to drownings, maimed young children, snapped migrants’ legs and entangled a pregnant woman who ultimately miscarried her baby.

The Houston Chronicle recently published an internal memo from the U.S. Customs and Border Protection that states Operation Lone Star is preventing Border Patrol agents from carrying out their legal duties to process migrants and provide humanitarian aid. The memo was written just days before four migrants — including an infant — all drowned within a short period of one another while trying to cross to safety near Eagle Pass, Texas.

Governor Abbott claims to be a Christian but what kind of Christian sets out razor wire to entangle men, women, and children?

Categories Bigotry, Texas

DeMatthews and Knight: Texans Don’t Want Vouchers!

By dianeravitch
July 27, 2023 //
3

Texas Governor Greg Abbott wants vouchers. He claims that polls show parents want vouchers. But they don’t, as this article shows. He says he wants “education not indoctrination,” yet advocates public money to fund schools that explicitly indoctrinate students.

He’s annoyed that he has not yet been able to twist enough arms in the Legislature to get them. He even visited private and religious schools to spread the message that parents would get tuition help from the state. But a strong coalition of Democrats and Republicans has returned him down repeatedly.

Two Texas scholars, David DeMatthews and David S. Knight, wrote an opinion piece in The Houston Chronicle explaining that the public wants better-funded public schools, not tuition for kids in private and religious schools.

They wrote:

Governor Abbott will likely call a special session on school vouchers after House Bill 100 failed to pass during the regular legislative session. But we believe a special session should instead be called to improve school safety and teacher retention, not a voucher scheme that runs counter to what Texas families want for their children.

Texas families want safe schools with a stable teacher workforce, especially following the mass shooting in Uvalde and the fact that roughly 50,000 teachers left their positions last year. In a recent statewide poll, 73 percent of Texans identified school safety, teacher pay, curriculum content and public school financing as top priorities.

In the same poll, few Texans viewed vouchers as a priority, although stark differences in opinion emerged between Democrats and Republicans. Only eight percent of Texans prioritized vouchers.

Historically, Americans with children report strong support for public schools when polled. In 2022, 80 percent of parents across the nation were completely or somewhat satisfied with the quality of education their oldest child was receiving, with little change over 20 years.

Unfortunately, some state policymakers continue to push vouchers by attacking public schools. Abbott has overseen the state’s public education system since he took office in 2015, yet only recently has he begun to claim that schools are sites of “indoctrination.”

These attacks likely contribute to Americans’ loss of confidence in public schools. In January 2019, Gallup reported that 50 percent of Democrats and 50 percent of Republicans were satisfied with public schools. By January 2022, Republican support dropped sharply to 30 percent. Democratic support remained stable.

With that background, it’s easy to believe that Texans have grown interested in vouchers. But polls showing that, we believe, are misleading.
For example, a University of Houston poll asked a sample of 1,200 Texans about their support of vouchers. The researchers concluded that 53 percent of respondents supported the policy. Yet a close examination of the data shows that the statistic leaves out approximately 12 percent of respondents — the ones who said that they “don’t know” enough to express an opinion. When the “don’t know” group is added back in, voucher supporters are in the minority.

Polls asking Texans whether they support vouchers are of little value if Texans are unfamiliar with the policy. And to make matters worse, advocacy groups have invested significant resources to mislead the public.

Texans would not support vouchers if they knew the truth. Ask yourself the following questions. What Texan would support vouchers if they knew recent studies found students using vouchers underperformed on standardized tests relative to their public school peers?

What Texan would support vouchers after learning that the cost of Arizona’s voucher program ballooned from $65 million to a projected $900 million in a few years? And that vouchers disproportionately benefited families who were already sending their children to private schools?

State policymakers pushing vouchers are not asking the right questions or presenting adequate evidence. They are being disingenuous.
A special session should focus on school safety and teacher retention, not vouchers. As more families become aware of the harm vouchers cause students, we can’t imagine that most Texans will support them.

David DeMatthews is an associate professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy at the University of Texas.

David S. Knight is an associate professor of education finance and policy at the University of Washington.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Elections, Extremism, Funding, Privatization, Religion, School Choice, Separation of church and state, Texas, Vouchers

Texas: Biden Administration Sues Gov. Abbott Over His Razor Wire Blockade of Rio Grande

By dianeravitch
July 25, 2023 //
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Governor Greg Abbott deployed 1,000 feet of buoys and razor wire on the border with Mexico to deter immigrants. Many migrants have been seriously injured by the razor wire, but Governor Abbott feels that as a Christian, it’s right to inflict maximum pain on immigrants from Mexico. The Biden administration is suing Abbott because he did not ask for approval before obstructing an international border.

The U.S. Justice Department sued Gov. Greg Abbott on Monday after he refused to remove a wall of buoys in the Rio Grande.

The move was expected after Abbott made clear to President Joe Biden in a letter earlier in the day that he would not remove the barriers and blamed the White House for making him have to take action on the border.

“The fact is, if you would just enforce the immigration laws Congress already has on the books, America would not be suffering from your record-breaking level of illegal immigration,” the Republican wrote.

The U.S. Justice Department had given Abbott until Monday to commit to removing the buoy barrier that they say he has illegally deployed into the river to block migrants. The agency filed the civil lawsuit with the U.S. District Court in the Western District of Texas.

The Justice Department says Abbott violated the federal Rivers and Harbors Act, which requires the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ approval before any barriers can be placed in any navigable water in the United States. Abbott and the Texas Department of Public Safety, which has overseen the project, did not get prior approval from the Army Corps of Engineers.

“This floating barrier poses a risk to navigation, as well as public safety, in the Rio Grande River, and it presents humanitarian concerns,” Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta said in a statement announcing the suit. “Additionally, the presence of the floating barrier has prompted diplomatic protests by Mexico and risks damaging U.S. foreign policy.”

In his letter Monday, Abbott denied that anything Texas has done has violated the Rivers and Harbors Act. And the governor argued that the buoy barrier the state is putting in the river is deterring migrants from entering the Rio Grande.

The threat of legal action comes after a Texas DPS officer sent emails to a supervisor warning of injuries that Abbott’s Operation Lone Star has caused migrants. He detailed finding a pregnant woman having a miscarriage tangled in the state’s razor wire, doubled over in pain. He also described a 4-year-old who girl passed out from heat exhaustion after she tried to go through the razor wire and was pushed back by Texas National Guard soldiers, and a teenager who broke his leg trying to navigate the water around the wire and had to be carried by his father….

Customs and Border Protection has warned internally that Abbott’s use of concertina wire is making it harder to reach at-risk migrants and increasing the risk of drownings. An administration official said Monday that agents are now having to cut through multiple layers of razor wire to respond to medical emergencies. They said that in one week alone, Border Patrol agents reported encountering dozens of migrants with injuries, including broken limbs.

“President Biden’s plan to manage the border through deterrence, enforcement, and diplomacy after the Title 42 public health order lifted has led to the lowest levels of unlawful border crossings in over two years,” said Abdullah Hasan, White House assistant press secretary. “Gov. Abbott’s dangerous and unlawful actions are undermining that effective plan and making it hard for the men and women of Border Patrol to do their jobs of securing the border. The governor’s actions are cruel and putting both migrants and border agents in danger.”

Categories Cruelty, Ethics, Evil, Texas
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