Top brass at NBC thought it was a brilliant idea to hire Ronna McDaniel, former chair of the Republican National Committee, as a paid contributor. They did not check with their on-air commentators, who had taken the brunt of McDaniels’ criticism of the “fake news” on behalf of Trump. They knew she had fiercely defended his lies about election fraud. She has now retracted her lies, but that didn’t erase her history as a liar.
When the on-air commentators lambasted the hiring of McDaniel during their shows on Sunday and Monday, NBC leadership withdrew their offer.
But they had signed a contract to pay McDaniel $300,000 a year for two years, and she’s expecting to be paid in full.
If NBC wanted to add a Republican commentator who did not participate in the effort to overthrow the election and subvert the Constitution, they could have hired Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, or Mitt Romney (Ronna McDaniel’s uncle). She used to call herself Ronna Romney McDaniel but Trump insisted that she drop her middle name and she did.
Michelle Davis writes a blog called TurnLeftTexas. Texas used to elect Democrats. Texas used to elect Democrats like Lyndon B. Johnson, Ralph Yarborough, and Ann Richards. Now the state is ruby red. What happened?
I’ve often said Texas Democrats are a whole other breed. We have to be, after the decades of abuse we’ve suffered from the opposing party. For those who watch the legislative sessions and follow our lawmakers on social media, we know that Texas Democrats have been David, staring down Goliath.
They say that Texas is the right-wing sandbox, the place where far-right institutions spend millions to test their fascist-aligned ideas. Radical legislation like the abortion ban, the DEI ban, or the ban on gender-affirming care are all being rolled out in Texas as testing grounds so that right-wing institutions can take these radical policies nationwide.
Texas Democrats never get enough credit for the work they put in while in Austin. Texas Democratic Lawmakers are literally on the front lines of democracy, fighting to block awful GOP policies and keep Texans from harm. Whether calling points of order, filibustering, or breaking quorum, Texans know that we can rely on most Texas Democrats to stand tall with a heart and a spine.
With so much at stake in this election cycle, you must ask yourself, “Is it enough?”
Of course, it isn’t “all Democrats.” Too often, from too many districts in all corners of the states, people are saying that they live in blue areas, have a Democrat as representation, and are telling people that their elected official isn’t showing up.
Some elected Democrats are doing great; they show up and have a high turnout for elections. Again, this isn’t “all Democrats,” but the occurrences of Democrats not showing up in Texas are widespread.
It shouldn’t surprise you that people talk. Precinct chairs talk to grassroots organizers, political clubs talk to the city council, and commissioners’ court talks to various political candidates. If you aren’t showing up to your local Democratic events, engaging with your local grassroots organizers, and communicating with your local precinct chairs, you’re not doing enough.
The political chatter from South Texas to North Texas, from East to West, is that not enough elected Democrats are doing enough to turn out the vote when they are in safe blue districts. And they aren’t doing enough to help other Democrats get elected.
Why is there voter apathy in Texas?
This is an important question that many intelligent people are spending a lot of money on trying to change. I think it’s a complex issue that includes generations of voter oppression, lack of infrastructure, and lack of engagement, among other things.
One thing Beto O’Rourke always used to say was, “There’s no one coming in to save us.”
He was right. Texas is royally screwed as long as Republicans are leading the charge. No one is going to save us from that other than ourselves. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We have the numbers on our side and must convince them of them.
You know who I mean when I say “them.”
It will take all of us, and if you have already been elected in a safe blue district and you have no opponent, it will take you, too. It will take helping your neighboring districts and getting your own voters to show up.
Of all people, Texas Democrats know how far-right the Republicans have moved in recent years. You know the threats we face.
Too much is at stake.
If Democrats in Texas do not make gains this year, the first thing Texans may lose is our right to vote. We already saw several of the ALEC-backed authoritative legislation that came through the 88th Legislature and how Republicans have already tested the waters on stripping Texans of their rights to vote. Banning specific poll locations, like on college campuses, or massive data purges on the voting rolls are all real possibilities if Republicans can’t be stopped.
What about our rights to freedom of expression and privacy? The GOP has already banned certain forms of art in Texas. Why do you think they’ll stop there?
Republicans passed a bill to give protesters at least 10 years if they are protesting a pipeline. The rights to freedom of assembly are at risk.
We already have an abortion ban and travel restrictions on women; IVF and birth control are next.
The civil rights of all marginalized groups are at risk.
We change this by changing the culture of not voting.
We need to do many things to change the culture of not voting. Still, as Democrats who have already been elected, you serve as a leader in your community. It would be best to actively work to foster a culture of engagement, participation, and voting within your communities. Your role isn’t just legislating but inspiring, educating, and actively participating in the democratic process.
Your presence in the community should be a constant, not just during election cycles. Attend local events, hold town halls, and visit schools and community centers to discuss the issues that matter most to your constituents. Your visibility and accessibility can bridge the gap between the electorate and the political process, making democracy feel more tangible and immediate to the people you serve.
Knowledge is power, and too many people feel disconnected from the political process because they don’t understand how it affects their daily lives. Lead educational initiatives that demystify the legislative process, explain the importance of local elections, and highlight the impact of specific policies on the community. Work with schools, universities, and community groups to develop programs that engage young people and first-time voters early.
Grassroots movements and community organizations are the lifeblood of democratic engagement. Support these groups with endorsements by actively participating in their events, sharing their successes, and facilitating connections that can amplify their impact. Empower these organizations with resources and platforms to reach a wider audience.
As an elected Democrat, you have a unique opportunity and responsibility to lead the charge in changing the culture around voting and civic engagement.
By being accessible, engaging in education, and supporting grassroots movements, you can inspire a wave of active, informed participation that strengthens the foundations of our democracy. Remember, leadership is not just about holding a position; it’s about the action you take and the example you set for others to follow.
To change Texas, it’s going to take all of us. We believe in you and need your help.
Josh Cowen of Michigan State University is a veteran voucher scholar. He has been doing voucher research for nearly two decades. For years, he was hopeful about the outcomes for students. He recently realized that the results were appalling. Students who took vouchers and left their public school actually lost ground academically. The real benefits of vouchers went to students who were already enrolled in private schools; their family, which could afford the tuition, won a subsidy from the state. In some states, even wealthy parents won a state subsidy for their children. vouchers do not help poor students; instead, they are harmed.
If you’ve ever run a small business or talked to a business owner, you might have heard the phrase “under promise, over deliver” as a strategy for customer service.
Unfortunately, when it comes to school voucher plans like those being considered by Pennsylvania lawmakers this spring, what happens is the opposite of a sound investment: a lot of overpromising ahead of woeful under-delivery.
As an expert on school vouchers, I think about the idea of what’s promised in the rhetoric vs. what actually happens when the realcost sets in. To hear voucher lobbyists tell it — usually working for billionaires like Betsy DeVos, or Pennsylvania’s own Jeff Yass — all that’s needed to move American education forward is a fully privatized market of school choice, where parents are customers and education is the product.
One promise that never holds up is the idea that states can afford to create voucher systems that underwrite private tuition for some children, while still keeping public school spending strong.
Other states that have passed or expanded voucher systems have rarely been able to sustain new investments in public schools. Even when those voucher bills also came with initial increases in public education funding. Six out of the last seven states to pass such bills have failed to keep up with just the national average in public school investment.
But for children and families — especially those who have been traditionally underserved by schools at different points in U.S. history — the cost of school vouchers goes beyond the price for taxpayers.
Although most voucher users in other states (about 70%) were, in fact, in private schools first, the academic results for the kids who transfer are disastrous. Statewide vouchers have led to some of the largest academic declines in the history of education research — drops in performance that were on par with how COVID-19 or Hurricane Katrina affected student learning.
Although school vouchers have enjoyed fits and starts of bipartisan support from time to time, today’s push for universal voucher systems across the country is almost entirely the product of conservative politics. All 12 states that created or expanded some form of a voucher system in 2023 voted for Donald Trump in 2020. Of those that passed voucher laws since the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020, only two (Arizona and New Hampshire) voted for Joe Biden that election year.
In states like Arkansas and Iowa, voucher laws either immediately followed or immediately preceded extreme new restrictions on reproductive care, a weakening of child labor laws, and other conservative policy priorities.
And this isn’t just about electoral politics. The right-wing origins of school vouchers have real day-to-day implications for who gets to use them and who is left out. We know from states like Florida, Indiana, and Wisconsin that the latest voucher bills allow schools to discriminate against certain children if schools can claim they do so for religious reasons.
Who pays that particular price? Examples include students with disabilities and children and parents from LGBTQ families, who may be asked to leave or not even admitted at all. And that’s because when it comes to vouchers, it’s not really school choice at all. Families don’t get their choice of schools; instead, schools get their choice of which families to admit.
And the price tag for all of this usually comes in wildly over budget anyway. The big culprit for those cost overruns goes back to who actually gets a voucher. Because most voucher users were in private schools first— paid by the private sector before — voucher costs are actually new expenditures taxpayers have to make. In the worst-case scenario, Arizona, vouchers cost more than 1,000% beyond what their advocates first promised.
Despite claims some supporters make that vouchers are part of an efficient education market, the result is really the opposite of any strategy a successful business would recognize.
To put it plainly: The promises rarely pan out, and eventually, the check comes due.
The ASD was launched by the Obama-Duncan Race to the Top on the theory that charter schools were a magic solution to low test scores. Duncan awarded $500 million to Tennessee, one of the first RTTT winners; $100 million was allocated to the ASD.
The ASD gathered the lowest-performing public schools in the state and clustered them into a new, all-charter district. Chris Barbic, leader of YES Prep charter schools in Houston, was selected to lead the ASD. He boldly predicted that within five years, the ASD schools would rank among the top 25% in the state. ASD started with six schools and eventually expanded to 33..
Blogger Gary Rubinstein has followed ASD over the years, with growing disillusionment. None of the ASD schools ever broke into the top 25%.
The state has spent more than $1 billion to help the ASD.
Chalkbeat wrote a few weeks ago that the Legislature is ready to throw in the towel:
After a decade of painful takeovers of neighborhood schools, contentious handoffs to charter networks, and mostly abysmal student performance, Tennessee’s Achievement School District appears to be on its way out.
Several of the GOP-controlled legislature’s top Republicans are acknowledging that the state’s most ambitious and aggressive school turnaround model has failed — and should be replaced eventually with a more effective approach.
Meanwhile, Democrats continue to push for legislation designed to end the so-called ASD, created under a 2010 state law aimed, in part, at transforming low-performing schools.
“I expect we will move in a different direction,” Sen. Bo Watson, the powerful chairman of his chamber’s finance committee, recently told reporters.
The Hixson Republican called the charter-centric school turnaround model an “innovative” idea that fell flat, at least in Tennessee. It would be foolish, Watson added, to keep spending money on an initiative that isn’t working and already has cost the state more than $1 billion — a sentiment echoed by Lt. Gov. Randy McNally and House Speaker Cameron Sexton.
But if the legislature decides to shutter the ASD and Gov. Bill Lee signs off, important questions remain about how Tennessee will support thousands of students in its lowest-performing schools.
There are currently 4,600 students enrolled in ASD schools, 12 in Memphis and one in Nashville.
Initially, the ASD attracted some of the nation’s biggest charter chains.
Evaluations showed that students in ASD schools gained no more in tested subjects than students in schools that received no interventions at all.
Now Tennessee must revise its contract with the federal government to revise its plans to help the lowest performing students.
Chalk up another loss for the “Disruption Doctrine” imposed by Bo Child Left Behind and Race to the Top. One can only imagine the difference that might have been made if the same sums were invested in full-service community schools and reduced class sizes.
NBC decided not to hire Ronna McDaniel, former chair, of the Republican National Committee, after an on-air revolt by its biggest stars.
Her loud defense of Trump’s lies about the 2020 election were unacceptable to the NBC and MSNBC commentators.
Amid a chorus of on-air protest from some of the network’s biggest stars, NBC announced on Tuesday night that former Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel will no longer be joining the network as a paid contributor.
The announcement came in a memo from NBCUniversal News Group Chairman Cesar Conde, who said he had listened to “the legitimate concerns” of many network employees. “No organization, particularly a newsroom, can succeed unless it is cohesive and aligned,” he wrote. “Over the last few days, it has become clear that this appointment undermines that goal.”
Conde also apologized to employees “who felt we let them down” and took “full responsibility” for the hiring…
But the company’s on-air personalities — especially those on NBC’s liberal-leaning cable affiliate MSNBC — disagreed vehemently, saying that McDaniel’s promotion of Donald Trump’s media-bashing and false election-fraud claims disqualified her for a role in their news divisions.
And one by one, they took to the airwaves to deliver that message to their bosses in front of their live audiences Monday.
“Take a minute, acknowledge that maybe it wasn’t the right call,” MSNBC’s top-rated star Rachel Maddow said on her show that night. “It is a sign of strength, not weakness, to acknowledge when you are wrong.”
The commentators at NBC and MSNBC are furious that NBC top brass hired Ronna Romney McDaniel as a paid commentator for the network. Presumably, the executives thought it would broaden their audience to bring on someone who had led the Republican National Committee for the past eight years.
They now face an internal rebellion. As Dan Rather explains on his blog Steady, prominent newscasters at NBC were apoplectic. The commentators at MSNBC—where Trump is despised—were assured that they did not have to invite her onto their programs.
Last night, I watched MSNBC, and every commentator lashed out against the hire. Joy Reid, Jen Psaki, Rachel Maddow, and Laurence O’Donnell expressed their outrage. They did not care that she was a Republican. They did not care that she was a conservative. They cared that she was an election denier and a liar. She did whatever Trump wanted, and he booted her anyway. She was actively involved in the fake electors scheme in Michigan. She even dropped her middle name (Romney) to please Trump. She lacks integrity. She insulted the media, as Trump did. As Jen Psaki said, she is not honest.
The mainstream media should not normalize Donald Trump’s behavior, nor should they give a platform to his lies or those of his sycophants, who for years have spread disastrous untruths that may have irreparably damaged our nation.
But in one fell swoop, NBC News has managed to do both. By hiring former Republican National Committee chief Ronna McDaniel, NBC has given credence and legitimacy to a Republican who has been in lockstep with the lies, helping spread plenty of the former president’s falsehoods. Allowing McDaniel to be in the same area code as NBC News is a huge mistake and will only further shred the small amount of trust Americans still have in the mainstream media. I don’t blame journalists at NBC. They have long been some of the finest in the business. But one wonders what the hell executives at the network were thinking.
Before she sold her soul, Ronna McDaniel was considered Republican royalty. She’s the granddaughter of George Romney, former GOP governor of Michigan, and niece of Senator Mitt Romney, former Republican presidential nominee and former governor of Massachusetts. She has been the chair of the RNC since the day Donald Trump took office in 2017. And she has been loyal to him at all costs, especially the truth.
During her tenure, she was a prolific fundraiser yet oversaw the net losses of Republican governorships and congressional seats. But her biggest claim to fame during her seven years on the job is that she was a Trump supporter, loyalist, and apologist above all else.
One could argue that this is the role of the head of a political party: to support the highest-ranking member of said party. Yes, that is typically true. But McDaniel spent years repeating Trump’s disinformation, making cases for his lies and paying his legal bills. Here are just a few of her misdeeds:
Told CNN’s Chris Wallace of Joe Biden’s election win, “I don’t think he won it fair.”
Characterized the January 6 insurrection as “legitimate political discourse.”
Orchestrated the censure of Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, the two Republican January 6 Committee members.
Encouraged Michigan canvassers not to certify the 2020 election results, promising them lawyers.
Took part in Trump’s scheme to assemble fake electors.
Refused to condemn QAnon to George Stephanopoulos on ABC News.
Mocked Senator John Fetterman and President Biden for speech impediments.
Warned that those Republicans who didn’t embrace Trump’s policies “will be making a mistake.”
McDaniel made her NBC News debut on this Sunday’s “Meet the Press.” At the top of the broadcast, host Kristen Welker disclosed McDaniel’s new role. She said, “This interview was scheduled weeks before it was announced that McDaniel would become a paid NBC News contributor. This will be a news interview, and I was not involved in her hiring.”
During the interview, McDaniel defended her time as chair with what may be the quote of the year. “When you’re the RNC chair, you kind of take one for the whole team. Now I get to be a little bit more myself, right?”
No, Ms. McDaniel, you don’t get to have it both ways. The truth does not change depending on who signs your paycheck. Whom are we supposed to believe, your RNC or NBC self?
McDaniel walked back some of her more outrageous statements, sort of. As of yesterday, she now admits that Joe Biden won the election “fair and square.” However, she continued to insist there were issues with the election. When pushed, she mentioned the huge increase in mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania and suggested voter fraud. Reminder: No significant fraud of any kind was found in any state in the 2020 election.
In defending their hire, NBC News’s Carrie Budoff Brown, senior vice president of politics, said, “It couldn’t be a more important moment to have a voice like Ronna’s on the team.”
Many on the NBC team vehemently disagreed. “We weren’t asked our opinion of the hiring, but, if we were, we would have strongly objected to it for several reasons,” Joe Scarborough, the “Morning Joe” co-host, said at the top of the broadcast Monday. Mika Brzezinski added, “We hope NBC will reconsider its decision. It goes without saying that she will not be a guest on ‘Morning Joe’ in her capacity as a paid contributor.”
Chuck Todd, NBC’s chief political analyst, could barely contain his anger and disbelief on “Meet the Press.”. “She [McDaniel] wants us to believe that she was speaking for the RNC when the RNC was paying for it. So she has — she has credibility issues that she still has to deal with. Is she speaking for herself or is she speaking on behalf of who’s paying her?”
He continued, “There’s a reason why there’s a lot of journalists at NBC News who are uncomfortable with this because many of our professional dealings with the RNC over the last six years have been met with gaslighting, have been met with character assassination.”
Now we come to the why. Why would NBC News hire someone as controversial as Ronna McDaniel?
News gathering is a business, as unfortunate as that is. As a business, it needs to make money. In television news, more viewers equals more money. So news organizations feel they need to appeal to the broadest spectrum of viewers possible. We will exempt Fox, which calls itself a news organization but is more of a propaganda outfit for the GOP.
The mainstream middle is a much more crowded field that is bombarded by accusations of bias and liberalism. So they feel the need to show their Republican bona fides by hiring conservative voices.
But that is the crux of the problem. Which Republicans? Trump loyalists who are election deniers and January 6 apologists? Never-Trumpers who are as likely to appeal to many Republican viewers as progressives? How do they represent the political right without alienating their loyal viewers and their correspondents? These are the new political realities ushered in by Donald Trump. And another reason independent journalism is essential right now, essential to provide unvarnished coverage in one of the most important elections in American history and to hold the mainstream media accountable.
Since the state put Mike Mikes (ex-military, Broadie, briefly Superintendent of Dallas ISD) in charge of the Houston Independent School District, Miles has cemented his reputation as a leader who issues orders and doesn’t listen to critics. It’s his way or Mr get out. Many teachers and principals have left rather than comply with his scripted curriculum and mandates.
But, says the Houston Chronicle editorial board, he actually listened and put on hold his intention to fire dozens of principals, including some from Houston’s best schools. It’s worth pausing to remember that the state took control of the entire district because one high school (disproportionately enrolling students with disabilities, ELLs, and high needs) posted low test scores for several consecutive years. Rather than focus on helping that school, the state placed the entire district under the thumb of an autocrat and know-it-all.
Miles is testing out the proposition that the way to “fix” education is by standardization, mandates, data, rigid worship of test scores, and one-man control.
The editorial says:
Late this week, the state-appointed superintendent of Houston ISD did something many thought impossible: he listened.
It took several protests, community outcry and some three hours of overwhelmingly negative public comment during Thursday’s school board meeting, but Mike Miles seems to have heard the message.
The uproar began with the leaked release of a list of 117 principals the district said weren’t performing well enough yet to secure their spot for next year. Several of the principals at top-rated schools were on the list.Parents and students from those campuses showed up in force. Early Friday morning, with the meeting still plodding along, Miles announced that he and the board of managers changed course and said they wouldn’t make any adverse employment decisions this year based off of these proficiency screenings, which broadly measure student achievement with a variety of test data, quality of instruction gathered during spot observations and professionalism judged by a rubric that includes how well principals reinforce “district culture and philosophy.” But, he made clear, he would still usethe more comprehensive principal evaluation system approved last fall to make those decisions at the end of the school year.
Miles told us the next day he’d already gotten some emails from anxious community members “saying thank you” for the decision late last week.
“I’m proud of the board who worked so hard to listen,” Miles added.
We’re glad to see Miles pay attention to optics for once. No matter how good his intentions, his reforms won’t succeed long-term without community buy-in. That said, we’re struggling to see how Miles changed his overarching approach on principal evaluations.
Miles never planned to can those 117 principals — in fact, he expected the overwhelming majority of them would return — based on the proficiency screenings but the handful who were already deemed unsatisfactory don’t seem to suddenly be in a different position as best we can tell. Miles insisted those few failing principals not getting asked back didn’t just fail the proficiency screening and that the decision to let them go was based on other input.
“We were looking at all the data for them,” he told us.
And the principals who were told they need to improve, aren’t really in a different position either.
In practice, then, very little seems to have changed for the campus leaders who will still be judged on some of the same metrics, including spot reviews by the district’s so-called independent review teams. Instead, he said the decision was meant to allay some community confusion and ease some anxiety about principal turnover, something he’d been trying to combat since the leaked list was published by the Chronicle ahead of spring break on March 8.
“People have made it a bigger deal than it is,” Miles insisted when he met with the editorial board Wednesday ahead of the school board meeting. “You keep your job if you’re an effective principal,” he said, adding that he expects the majority, at least 80 percent, of the principals to return next year.
What Miles didn’t seem to grasp until he heard from a whole new set of angry parents — not the “usual suspects” who have protested the state takeover from the outset — was how nonsensical his list appeared.
Some of the schools aren’t just top-ranked in the district but in the country. Carnegie. HSPVA. T.H. Rogers. If people had doubts before about Miles’ priorities and evaluation criteria, the inclusion of these high-achieving campuses heightened them. It’s possible a high-performing school can still have a weak leader, just as it’s possible that a low-performing school can have a great one. But the list begged the question.
“You start to wonder what he is evaluating,” a parent with a student at Carnegie told us outside the State of the District event Thursday. She said the school’s principal, long-time veteran Ramon Moss, is an integral piece of the school’s success.
“He’ll be the first to tell you that the success of the school is due to the teachers and students and community even though his leadership is a big reason why the community is there,” she said.
Miles has declined to talk about specific campuses and what landed them on the list. So while this decision might relieve some momentary angst, it doesn’t address the lingering doubts aboutwhether the district’s measures of quality instruction and effectivenessare so narrow they fail to recognize the best educators, a concern that extends well beyond the star campuses.
This principal evaluation chaos is just the latest example of a breakdown of communication and trust.
We don’t disagree with the idea of evaluations or consistent standards across the district. It’s entirely possible that an overall A rating at a campus masks concerning disparities. Or that high-achieving campuses don’t show a ton of growth on standardized tests over the course of a school year.
What concerns us about the entire saga of the principal list is how, whether it’s intentional or not, Miles contributes to fear and uncertainty. He hasn’t effectively communicated his vision to the public or to the people tasked with carrying it out, despite his copious slideshows and sincere efforts to clear up the confusion over principals with follow-up press conferences, statements and even interviews with this board.
Last week,Miles and team showed greater sensitivity to the environment. It’s a good start. But they should make more effort to respond to the substance of the criticisms and not just the volume of them.
It has always been a goal of the billionaires who fund privatization to block accountability and democracy. Eli Broad once memorably said that he prefers to invest in districts under mayoral control so he doesn’t have to deal with the public. The public asks questions and wants to know who is making decisions about their children’s education. So much simpler to have one person to handle problems.
The charter school lobby has persistently fought public oversight and accountability. They are more than willing, even eager, to take public money. But they don’t like public officials asking questions about how the money was spent.
The big battle over public oversight is happening right now in Colorado. All the major right wing groups—the Koch machine, ALEC, Philip Anschutz (producer of “Waiting for Superman”) are there, battling against public schools.
On March 7, three Colorado legislators introduced a charter school accountability bill to establish improved guidelines for authorizing and renewing charter schools by local school districts. The bill would strengthen the authority that elected school boards have regarding their governance of charter schools, and it also provides citizens with expanded information about the operations of charter schools in their districts.
According to its backers and public education advocacy groups, this is the first major legislation to prescribe more charter school accountability since the first Charter Schools Act was passed in 1993. Current state legislation often limits local control over the charter school approval process, funding requirements, and waivers from state legislation. Given that nearly two-thirds of the state’s 64 counties experienced an “absolute decline in the under-18 population over the last decade,” the charter school accountability bill would empower local school boards to address the overall enrollment needs of the district. While charter schools primarily utilize taxpayer dollars for their funding, many charter schools allow private interests to invest in their growth and development, which can create potential conflicts of interest.
Pro-charter school organizations don’t agree with this legislative effort to increase accountability as they believe this bill would “kill” charter schools. Republicans have been especially vocal in their opposition to this bill, even though the bill promotes increased local control over charter schools. The pro-charter organizations hired over 30 lobbyists to oppose the bill. Lobbying can be expensive, but the organizations opposing the bill have connections to several billionaire-funded foundations.
American for Prosperity and Advance Colorado issued a press release on X stating the bill would “mark the beginning of the end of charter schools in Colorado,” and together, the two groups “would work overtime to make sure the bill was soundly defeated.” According to the Colorado Times Recorder, Advance Colorado is a conservative dark money group said to be funded by billionaire Phil Anschutz. Formerly known as Unite Colorado, Advance Colorado has “given over $17 million to support major Republican political groups and efforts in Colorado.” Colorado Dawn, another dark money group headed by State Board of Education member Steve Durham and Colorado state Sen. Paul Lundeen, gave millions to Ready Colorado, which also has lobbyists opposing this bill.
The upcoming lobbying effort in Colorado’s legislature is not unique, as similar high-paid lobbying efforts occur wherever there is significant charter school legislation. In Nashville, a local news reporter exposed who 67 pro-charter lobbyists worked for during legislative hearings on several charter bills in 2022. In the video that accompanied his report, Phil Williams highlighted the direct connections that the pro-charter lobbyists have with billionaires. His investigative report documented that “Americans for Prosperity is linked to billionaire Charles Koch,” and they also “received funding from billionaire Bill Gates and the Walton family of Walmart fame.”
As in Tennessee, the Colorado lobbyists will meet frequently with legislators to convince them this bill is not necessary. The legislators will need to weigh the benefits of the bill with the concerns of those who participate in a massive letter-writing campaign initiated by the lobbying organizations to oppose the legislation. The bill’s backers hope this will be the legislators’ opportunity to update 30-year-old legislation and begin to ensure increased local control and accountability for the millions of taxpayer dollars that fund the charter schools educating 15% of the state’s K-12 student population.
Peter Greene warns teachers not to fall for the cheap and lazy artificial intelligence (AI) that designs lesson plans. He explains why in this post:
Some Brooklyn schools are piloting an AI assistant that will create lesson plans for them.
Superintendent Janice Ross explains it this way. “Teachers spend hours creating lesson plans. They should not be doing that anymore.”
The product is YourWai (get it?) courtesy of The Learning Innovation Catalyst (LINC), a company that specializes in “learning for educators that works/inspires/motivates/empowers.” They’re the kind of company that says things like “shift to impactful professional learning focused on targeted outcomes” unironically. Their LinkedIn profile says “Shaping the Future of Learning: LINC supports the development of equitable, student-centered learning by helping educators successfully shift to blended, project-based, and other innovative learning models.” You get the idea.
LINC was co-founded by Tiffany Wycoff, who logged a couple of decades in the private school world before writing a book, launching a speaking career, and co-founding LINC in 2017. Co-founder Jaime Pales used to work for Redbird Advanced Learning as executive director for Puerto Rico and Latin America and before that “developed next-generation learning programs” at some company.
LINC has offices in Florida and Colombia.
YourWai promises to do lots of things so that teachers can get “90% of your work done in 10% of the time.” Sure. Ross told her audience that teachers just enter students’ needs and the standards they want to hit and the app will spit out a lesson plan. It’s a “game changer” that will give teachers more time to “think creatively.”
We’re nowhere near the point where an AI can do your job, but we’re well past the point where your boss can be suckered into firing you and replacing you with a bot that fails at doing your job.
Look, if you ask AI to write a lesson plan for instructing students about major themes in Hamlet, the AI is not going to read Hamlet, analyze the themes, consider how best to guide students through those themes, and design an assessment that will faithfully measure those outcomes. What it’s going to do is look at a bunch of Hamlet lesson plans that it found on line (some of which may have been written by humans, some of which may have been cranked out by some amateur writing for online corner-cutting site, and some of which will have been created by other AI) and mush them all together. Oh, and throw in shit that it just made up.
There are undoubtedly lessons for which AI can be useful–cut and dried stuff like times tables and preposition use. But do not imagine that the AI has any idea at all of what it is doing, nor that it has any particular ability to discern junk from quality in the stuff it sweeps up on line. Certainly the AI has zero knowledge of pedagogy or instructional techniques.
But this “solution” will appeal because it’s way cheaper than, say, hiring enough teachers so that individual courseloads are not so heavy that paperwork and planning take a gazillion hours.
Shirley Moody-Turner wrote in the Washington post about a forgotten hero of American education: Dr. Anna J. Cooper. Cooper was the principal of the M Street School in the District of Columbia, one of the most successful schools in the city. She insisted on a demanding academic curriculum for her Black students. Despite the school’s success, she was removed on trumped-up charges. The Black community fought back but lost. The M Street School eventually became the celebrated Dunbar High School.
Moody-Turner begins:
In January 1902, Anna Julia Cooper, one of the most highly educated Black women in the country, was appointed the seventh principal of Northwest D.C.’s famed M Street High School, the first and most prestigious public high school for Black education. Black people from around the country aspired to send their children to M Street, and its roster of teachers and graduates read like a Who’s Who of Washington’s Black educational and cultural elite. Under Cooper’s leadership, M Street students won scholarships and gained admissions to top colleges and universities — including Harvard, Brown, Yale and Dartmouth.
But just four years into her tenure, days before the start of a new school year, the White director of Washington high schools convinced the D.C. Board of Education not to reappoint M Street’s acclaimed principal. When Cooper arrived for the first day of school, the school janitor barred Cooper from entering the building. Police officers observed from across the street. They were ordered to arrest Cooper if they deemed she was creating a disturbance. With her students watching from the windows, Cooper — always a model of dignity and decorum — exited the school grounds.
Cooper’s story, now largely forgotten, was part of a wider movement to control the direction of Black public education in the early 20th century. Then, like now, battles over education — and especially the question of who was permitted to lead elite institutions, training the next generation to excel — were proxies in the larger culture wars. Today, with female and minority leaders of universities facing resistance from people who assume they have not earned the right to hold their positions, Cooper’s story is an illuminating one. What happened to her illustrates not only how the tactics around removing such leaders have persisted for more than a century, but also what was at stake — and still is — in the battles over educational access and leadership.
Born enslaved in Raleigh, N.C., in 1858, Cooper began her fight for an equal education early in life. As a student at St. Augustine’s Normal School and Collegiate Institute, she successfully petitioned for the right to take what were designated as “boys” classes, including courses in Greek, Latin, French, science and math. She went on to Oberlin College in Ohio, where she again protested for access to the full curriculum. She graduated Oberlin with a BA and MA in mathematics and began writing, teaching and lecturing around the country on Black civil rights and gender equality. In 1892, she published a book called “A Voice from the South: By a Black Woman of the South,” arguing for Black women’s unique role in the struggles for racial and gender equality, which garnered international acclaim.
In 1887, Cooper was recruited to join the faculty at the famed M Street High School. She taught there for 14 years and served one year as vice principal before agreeing to serve as the school’s principal. She did so, however, at precisely the moment when the sovereignty of Black public schools — M Street, in particular — was under attack.
For decades, the public school system in D.C. was looked to as a shining example of what was possible for Black education. Since 1868, M Street had operated under a Black superintendent, and through a combination of Black political influence, community support, committed teachers and congressional appropriations, the Black community managed to secure the resources and maintain relative autonomy to create a model public school system for Black students in the District.
By the end of the 19th century, however, with the backlash over Reconstruction gains in Black civil and political rights and the national ascendancy of Jim Crow segregation, Black control over Black schools came under attack. In 1900, Congress restructured school oversight in the District so that the Black superintendent — now reassigned to be an assistant superintendent — no longer oversaw M Street High School directly, instead placing it under the supervision of the White director of public high schools, Percy M. Hughes. As Hughes took his post, Cooper took hers.
Hughes was determined to remove her, and he did. He wanted to impose a “colored curriculum” on the school but she insisted on a college prep curriculum. As the author put it, Cooper was “punished for leading.” After she left, she earned a doctorate at the Sorbonne. She later returned to the M Street School as a teacher for another 20 years.
Diane Ravitch's blog 