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

Why the Supreme Court Should Let Trump Stay on the Ballot

By dianeravitch
January 4, 2024 //
174

Two states, Colorado and Maine, have ruled that Donald Trump is disqualified to appear on their state ballot for President because of Section Three of the 14th Amendment.

That section, written after the Civil War, says:

Section 3 Disqualification from Holding Office

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

Trump did take an oath “to support the Constitution of the United States” and he did incite and encourage a mob to invade the U.S. Capitol to disrupt the counting of the electoral votes and thereby “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the Constitution. In addition, he spent months trying to block the orderly transition of power from himself to Joseph Biden, who won the Presidential election of 2020.

His speech on January 6 was incendiary. Just as bad were his efforts to pressure state officials to change the results in their states and to create slates of fake electors. All of his actions were aimed at remaining in power despite the fact that he lost both the popular vote and the vote of the electoral college. Because he is a SORE LOSER, he summoned a mob to Washington, D.C. on January 6 and urged them to “fight like hell” to overturn the election and to march on the Capitol and prevent the peaceful transfer of power.

Nothing like this happened before in the history of the United States.

All of these facts, including the video footage of the horrific events of January 6, are evidence that he should be disqualified from the ballot.

The Supreme Court is dominated by conservative jurists who claim to be Originalists, who read the Constitution in light of its original intent. The original intent of Section Three of the 14th Amendment is unambiguous. Trump disqualified himself.

Somehow, I expect, the Court will find a way to avoid ruling against Trump. They might say that the case involves politics and is not in the judicial realm, as some state courts have ruled. That is an evasion, of course, but it may suffice to get them off the hook. How many judges want death threats, a frequent tactic of the Trump mob?

But I disagree. I want Trump on the ballot.

My reason for wanting Trump ON the ballot has nothing to do with the Constitution. I believe that his role in the insurrection is indisputable. The Biden campaign should run ads featuring the mob overrunning the Capitol and attacking police officers again and again. They should remind the public that Trump did nothing for three hours while the seat of our government was ransacked.

I want him to be defeated by vote of the American people. I believe he will lose in 2024. I can’t be certain. But if he is taken off the ballot, a significant part of the population will believe that he was removed for partisan reasons.

For the rest of his life, he will rail about the “rigged” election and how he was cheated.

I want him to be beaten fair and square as he was in 2020.

I do not believe that the American people will again vote into the presidency a man of no character, a man facing multiple indictments, a man whose motive for running is to pardon himself of federal crimes and to wreak vengeance on his critics, , a man who has no respect for the Constitution, a man who can’t be trusted to leave office ever.

He lost the popular vote by almost three million in 2016. He lost it by 7 million votes in 2024, along with a decisive defeat in the Electoral College. His behavior since he lost in 2020 has been undignified and loathsome. I predict he will lose by 10 million votes in 2024.

Let him run.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Democracy, Disruption, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Trump

Timothy Snyder: Why Trump Cannot Run for President

By dianeravitch
January 4, 2024 //
25

Timothy Snyder, professor of history at Yale University, explains why Trump cannot run for President. Doing so violates the clear language of the Constitution.

He writes:

If you pick up your copy of the Constitution, as I have just done, you can see that its plain language forbids Donald Trump from running for office. Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment is as clear as can be on this point. Anyone who has taken an oath as an officer of government, and then taken part in an insurrection, may not hold any office thereafter.


I have been travelling in places where Trump has support, reading letters to the editor and editorials in local newspapers, and listening to what people have to say. The three arguments that I hear seem to be pretty much the same ones made by lawyers and in the broader media. I just can’t find any argument that would incline me to ignore what the Constitution clearly states.


The first move people make is to change the subject. It is not the Constitution. It is “the Democrats” who are just trying to keep Trump off the ballot.

The very best text I have read on the topic of Trump’s eligibility for office, the one that initiated this discussion at a level no one else has yet attained, was written by the legal scholars William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen. Though I do not know them, I will say with some confidence that these men are not registered Democrats.

This is only worthy of mention, though, because it affirms the hopeful proposition that people who hold various political views can agree about the fundamentals of the Constitution and about the desirability of constitutional rule.

We are all subject to the Constitution and we can all claim rights under it, regardless of those political commitments. To say that we can discard the Constitution because “the Democrats” or “the Republicans” or any other group appeal to it is to defy the document itself and to ignore what it means to have constitutional rule.

The second thing I hear is that in a democracy everyone can run for president.

Certainly one can have a debate about who should be able to run for office. In our constitutional system, however, a candidate for president must be a U.S. citizen, born in the United States, of a certain age, who has resided in the U.S. for a certain period, and who has not previously been an officer of government and taken part in an insurrection (directly or by giving aid and comfort).

Of those five limitations (citizenship, place of birth, age, residence, lack of insurrectionary past), surely the last is the least constricting. The citizenship requirement rules out more than 95% of the people in the world. Place of birth seems a bit unfair. It is not something that people choose. And it excludes people who have actually chosen America by becoming citizens. There are foreign-born citizens who want to run for president, and who would be strong candidates. Age might or might not be reasonable as a limitation — should we really exclude people under 35? And if we do, perhaps we should also exclude people over a certain age?

Compared to these limitations, the ban on insurrectionists seems the least debatable. It involves very few people, has to do with choices they themselves have made, and is motivated more clearly than the other limitations by the protection of constitutional rule as such.

The prior three paragraphs are me debating the merits of what the Constitution says. We can all do this. And perhaps the Constitution should be altered. What we all have to acknowledge, though, is that in our system, not everyone can run for the office of president.

The third point people make is that Trump is not an insurrectionist because he has not been convicted as such in court. I don’t think that this is an argument made in good faith. Trump himself does not contest the facts. Indeed, his purported campaign for president right now is based precisely on his participation in an insurrection, which he advertises in public appearances and in social media.

There are deeper points to be made, though. To read the Constitution in this way, as not executing itself, is to deny it of its basic dignity and purpose. There is also some political common sense to be applied here. When a high officer of the United States takes part in an insurrection, it would be expected that he (in this case it is “he”) would then try to alter lower-court decisions (as Trump in fact has).

In the specific case of section three of the Fourteenth Amendment, the insurrection clause that we are discussing here, it is quite clear that the purpose was to establish a qualification for running for office, not to define a criminal offense. An insurrectionist might or might not also be a convict at the time of an election; either way, he is not eligible to run.

If we believe in the Constitution and in constitutional rule, the issue is clear. Donald Trump cannot run for any federal or state office. We might have strong feelings about this; but the reason we have a Constitution in the first place (and the rule of law in general) is to avoid government by strong feelings.

a large building with a flag on top of it

Our Supreme Court is dominated now by justices who claim to care about the plain reading of the Constitution, or the intent of the people who wrote its provisions. This should make this case particularly easy for them.

It is possible, of course, that these justices are simply politicians who espouse their textualism and originalism only when it suits them, in the service of supporting other politicians. Should this prove to be the case, their own office, and indeed the Constitution itself, would be in grave danger (a subject for another article).

We are about to find out.

Categories Accountability, Elections, Trump

Thomas Ultican: “A Nation at Risk” Was a Pack of Lies

By dianeravitch
January 3, 2024 //
42

The document that launched four decades of disastrous education policies was titled “A Nation at Risk.” It was a document produced by a commission appointed by Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of Education, Terrell Bell.

Reagan wanted to abolish the U.S. Department of Education, which was created in the last year of President Jimmy Carter’s term in office. Secretary Bell wanted to save the Department so he persuaded the President to let him appoint the National Commission on Excellence in Education. This Commission released its report, “A Nation at Risk,” in 1983.

The report was a dire description of the failings of American education. It painted a picture of falling test scores and mediocrity that were causing terrible damage to the national economy.

Thomas Ultican, retired teacher of advanced math and physics in California, noted that the conservative Hoover Institution released a book praising “A Nation at Risk” on its 40th birthday.

Ultican had done his research on the report and concluded that it was a hit job, asham, a pack of lies. He recently heard James Harvey, who served on the staff of the commission that wrote the report; Harvey confirmed that the commission had literally cooked the books. It began its work determined to slime America’s public schools, and it cherry-picked data to make its case.

As he shows in his review of that 1983 bombshell, it was not only filled with statistics sl lies, but it launched forty years of destructive “reforms.”

“A Nation at Risk” was misleading, dishonest, and deeply corrupt in both its intentions and its effects.

Inform yourselves: read this slashing critique of a “landmark” publication that has harmed generations of students and educators.

Categories Education Reform

Sam Wineburg: The Lies That Advertisers Tell Students

By dianeravitch
January 3, 2024 //
20

Sam Wineburg is the Margaret Jacks Professor Emeritus of Education at Stanford University. This essay is based on his latest book, with co-author Mike Caulfield, Verified: How to Think Straight, Get Duped Less, and Make Better Decisions about What to Believe Online (University of Chicago Press, 2023). Here, he highlights the ways that corporations deceive students with advertising that looks like news.

Our Kids Are Being Sold to and They Don’t Know It–

And Neither Do We

A recent California bill mandating the teaching of media literacy cites a Stanford University study showing that “82 percent of middle school pupils struggled to distinguish advertisements from news stories.” Along with my Stanford colleagues, I was the author of that study.

Between 2015-2016 our research team collected nearly 8,000 student responses. In one exercise, we asked middle school students to examine the home page of Slate, the online news magazine. The site was organized as a series of tiles, each with a headline, the name of the author, and an illustration. However, some tiles were author-less, such as “The Real Reasons Women Don’t Go into Tech,” which was accompanied by the words sponsored content. This label notwithstanding, the vast majority of middle schoolers believed that “The Real Reasons Women Don’t Go into Tech” was news.

 

If only the solution to students’ confusion were as simple as teaching what “sponsored content” means.  In the past few years, a dizzying array of terms—“in association with,” “partner content,” “presented by,” “crafted with,” “hosted by,” “brought to you by,” or, simply—and enigmatically—“with”—have been concocted to satisfy the Federal Trade Commission requirement that ads be labeled. As we describe in our new book, Verified: How to Think Straight, Get Duped Less, and Make Better Choices What to Believe Online, it’s not only middle school students who are getting hoodwinked by this farrago of terms. We all are. 

 

Researchers at Boston University and the University of Georgia surveyed people across age levels and backgrounds after they had read a 515-word article, “America’s Smartphone Obsession Extends to Online Banking.” The article came with a label saying that it was created for the Bank of America. But the disclosure was overshadowed by the masthead of The New York Times and the article’s headline. Only one in ten respondents identified the article as an ad. The marketing firm Contently found similar results: 80% of respondents mistook an ad in the Wall Street Journal for a news article. The study’s author, an advertising insider with reasons to downplay the obvious, admitted: “There’s little doubt that consumers are confused by native ads.” 

 

Native ads, so-called because they’re designed to fade into the surrounding “native” content, use the same fonts, color schemes, and style as regular news stories. An article may look like news, written by an independent and trustworthy journalist, but in reality, it’s tainted by the agenda of the company that paid for it. You think you’re being informed only to find out—if you do find out—that you’re being swindled. In 2018 native advertising raked in $32.9 billion, eclipsing all other forms of digital advertising and growing at astronomical rates.

 

 

At first, it was only scrappy upstarts like BuzzFeed (masters of clickbaity stories like “Ten Important Life Lessons You Can Learn from Cats”) that pioneered this new form of advertising. But as ad income plummeted in places like The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the BBC, they, too, got in on the game. Initially, the price didn’t seem too steep: sacrifice a modicum of integrity to stay afloat. But the slope downward was slippery. If the long-standing commitment of journalism was to erect a wall of separation between the news side and the business, native advertising dissolved the mortar in the wall. The resulting seepage blurred the boundaries beyond recognition. Publishers tried to convince themselves they weren’t doing anything wrong. But in their heart of hearts, they knew they were engaging in journalistic hanky-panky. “When I explain what I do to friends outside the publishing industry,” wrote one publishing insider, “the first response is always ‘so you are basically tricking users into clicking on ads.’ ”

 

In 2019, after a stream of headlines bemoaning the confusion caused by misinformation, we undertook a second study. This time our sample matched the demographic make-up of high school students across the country. Over 3,000 students with access to a live internet connection participated. One exercise asked them to evaluate items appearing on the website of The Atlantic.  The first, entitled “Why Solving Climate Change Will Be Like Mobilizing for War,” was written by Venkatesh Rao; the second, “The Great Transition,” featured an infographic about energy usage along with the statement, “saving the world from climate change is all about altering the energy mix.” The logo of The Atlantic appeared in the upper left corner next to a hyperlink with the words “Sponsor Content What’s this?”, next a small yellow shell. Two-thirds of high school students failed to identify the infographic as an ad from Shell Oil.

 

Why should we be concerned?  To start, if students are to become informed citizens, they need to understand that multi-national companies are not in the business of helping humanity or adopting stray animals. Their goal is to please shareholders by increasing profits. Fossil fuel companies, especially, may want us to think they’re on the right side of history when it comes to climate change. But actions speak louder than ads. Clean energy investments by big oil companies (“renewable resources” as the Shell ad calls them) represent a mere sliver, one percent, of their yearly capital expenditures, a pittance compared to what they spend exploring and discovering new ways to dredge fossil fuels from the earth and sea. Shell might not be outright lying in its infographic but we can be sure of one thing: they’re not going to pay for something that casts them in a negative light. The whole point of native advertising is to burnish a company’s image. Instead of having us view Shell as the enemy of climate change, its ads are designed to soften us up, to plant a seed of doubt. “OK, they may be an oil company,” we’re supposed to think, “but maybe—just maybe—they’re really trying.” 

 

We can sum up why we should teach students to be skeptical of Shell’s infographic in three words: conflict of interest. It goes against the company’s interest to be forthright about the harmful effects of fossil fuels. Big oil, writes Harvard professor Naomi Oreskes and author of Why Trust Science, “may be a reliable source of information on oil and gas extraction,” but they are “unlikely to be a reliable source of information on climate change.” Why? For one simple reason: “The former is its business and the latter threatens it.”

 

It’s not just big oil who’ve gotten in on the native ad game. With China and Russia leading the pack, foreign governments spend millions of dollars to place “news” stories in leading digital publications like the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the Chicago Tribune. In the twelve months from November 2019 to October 2020, the China Daily Distribution Corporation funneled over nine million dollars to influence American audiences. A favored venue was MSN, Microsoft’s web portal, which featured an upbeat story about how Tibet, the nation ravaged by China in a brutal 1950 takeover, had “broken free from the fetters of invading imperialism and embarked on a bright road of unity, progress and development.” Nowhere does the article say the story was paid. You only discern this if you recognize “Xinhua” as China’s state-run news agency.

 

Whether paid for by a multi-national corporation or a foreign government, the goal of native advertising is the same: to persuade us when our guard is down. Sponsors know that if their message were plastered with the word “ad” in big red letters, we’d ignore it. At the same time, it’s important to understand that just because something’s an ad doesn’t necessarily mean it’s false. Big companies are wary of ads backfiring. They fear the consequences of being outed as liars. Persuasion can assume many forms in addition to outright lying. An ad can tell only part of the story. It can leave out the broader context. It can ignore evidence that goes against the story a company or foreign nation wants to tell. It can emphasize some facts and de-emphasize others. It can use examples that tug at our heartstrings, even when those examples misrepresent general trends. In fact, a partial truth is often more dangerous and harder to detect than a pack of lies. 

 

The internet is one giant marketing experiment and today’s students are the guinea pigs. Richly compensated PhDs work diligently figuring out how to deceive them without their noticing.  This deception is not an aberration or bug in the system—it’s how the game is played. Our students are part of a treacherous game. If we don’t teach them how it’s played, who will? 

 

Certainly not Shell Oil. 

————    

Sam Wineburg is the Margaret Jacks Professor Emeritus of Education at Stanford University. This essay is based on his latest book, with co-author Mike Caulfield, Verified: How to Think Straight, Get Duped Less, and Make Better Decisions about What to Believe Online (University of Chicago Press, 2023)

Categories Curriculum, Fake News, For-Profit, Hoax, Ignorance, Media

Colorado: Armed Man Breaks into State Supreme Court Building

By dianeravitch
January 2, 2024 //
20

The following story was published by The Denver Post:

A man shot through a window and broke into the Colorado Supreme Court building early Tuesday morning and caused “significant and extensive” damage in several areas of the building before surrendering to police, according to the Colorado State Patrol.

The man was involved in a crash about 1:15 a.m. near 13th Avenue and Lincoln Street a short time before he forced his way into the Ralph L. Carr Colorado Judicial Center, which houses the Colorado Supreme Court, the Colorado Court of Appeals and several other state agencies, according to a Colorado State Patrol news release.

This comes two weeks to the day after the state Supreme Court ruled Donald Trump cannot appear on the state’s primary ballot based on his actions surrounding the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol breach and riot by his supporters, Jacob Factor reports.

Categories Accountability, Colorado, Democracy, Elections, Guns, Trump

South Carolina: Moms for Liberty Will Open Their Own Charter School in Affluent Neighborhood

By dianeravitch
January 2, 2024 //
107

Steve Bailey, an opinion writer for the Charleston Post and Courier, wrote recently about the new charter school that will open in an affluent neighborhood in Charleston. It will use the Hillsdale College curriculum. The Moms predict it will be the highest performing school in the area. With the freedom to choose its students and to oust the ones who are problematic, it’s sure to get high gest scores.

He writes:

The leaders of Moms for Liberty, who have made a fine mess of the Charleston County School District, have a new project: starting a “classical” — read conservative — kindergarten through 12th grade charter school, preferably in Mount Pleasant. And the Moms’ kids will be at the front of the line for seats in their new school.

Ashley River Classical Academy has partnered with Hillsdale College, a tiny Michigan school that has become the go-to provider for conservatives like Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis looking to overhaul curriculums to counter “leftist academies.” The Christian college has helped open 23 charter schools in 14 states — and many more are on the way. Ashley River would be its first in South Carolina.

Hillsdale, with about 1,570 students, has expanded its influence by providing and helping implement a free, off-the-shelf product for conservatives. Its 1776 Curriculum focuses on Western civilization and American exceptionalism, phonics, Latin, classic literature and traditional teaching methods, not “shiny and new” technology and instruction. It emphasizes “moral character and civic virtue,” Ashley River said in its charter school application.

“ARA is poised to become one of the highest achieving schools in South Carolina,” it predicts.

The school started accepting pre-enrollment applications this month and is scheduled to begin kindergarten through fifth grade classes in August. The six-member board of directors includes Tara Wood, the chair of the Charleston Moms for Liberty chapter; Janine Nagrodsky, the treasurer; and Nicole McCarthy, who heads the Moms’ education committee. The all-white board has hired an African American principal, Alexandria Spry, who previously ran a Hillsdale school in Jacksonville, Fla.

The student body “will be diverse in every way,” the charter application promises. “We want all kids to come to the school,” says Spry.

Charter schools, which are publicly funded but privately run, are often promoted as offering parents an alternative to low-performing schools in urban areas. That hardly describes this school’s preferred home: affluent Mount Pleasant, where the town’s explosive growth has been fueled in part by some of the best public schools in the region. The $104 million Lucy Beckham High School opened there three years ago.

But that is where the founders would like to open Ashley River Classical Academy. Coincidentally or not, Mount Pleasant is also ground zero of the Charleston chapter of Moms for Liberty. Half the school’s board lives there. Their kids, and those of school employees, will get preference in admissions, according to the school website.

“The school is not a political project,” Spry tells me. “We are just trying to provide the best education we can.”

Finding a site has been a struggle. Ashley River Classical is looking for a 10-acre campus to build a 50,000-square-foot school that eventually could accommodate 690 students, kindergarten through 12th grade. The school originally looked at five sites in Mount Pleasant, none of which panned out. It’s now looking at a temporary site in North Charleston, near Daniel Island, with plans to eventually build in Mount Pleasant, according to the school’s website.

A location is expected to be announced this month, Spry said. But both she and Tom Drummond, the board chairman, declined to comment further on a site.

Ashley River is one of more than two dozen South Carolina charters sponsored by Erskine College, a small Christian school in Due West. Nashville-based American Classical Education Foundation has committed to help finance the school’s start-up costs.

It was just a year ago that Moms-backed candidates won a majority on the Charleston County School Board, kicking off a chaotic year that included the hiring and departure of a superintendent in a matter of months. Now the Moms and their like-minded supporters will have a chance to implement their own ideas in their own school for their own kids. Tuition-free, thanks to taxpayers.

Categories Charter Schools, Disruption, Education Industry, Funding, Segregation, South Carolina

Documented: The Secret Plot to Destroy Public Education, Revealed

By dianeravitch
January 2, 2024 //
28

The Network for Public Education has worked recently with “Documented,” an organization that defends democracy. Its executive director Nick Surgey led a panel at our 10th conference in D.C. in October. Nick and his colleagues described their very well documented work to expose the plot to destroy public education. As I left the room, David Berliner said to me, “That was a terrifying hour.”

Here is the video. Please take the time to watch.

Nick is an expert on the extremist Alliance Defending Freedom, which has led attacks on public schools and on abortion rights. The Speaker of the House Mike Johnson was a lawyer for ADF.

Please read the Documented brief describing their work.

It will open your eyes to a well-funded plot to destroy our public schools.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Dark Money, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Privatization, Propaganda, School Choice, Vouchers

Happy, Healthy 2024 to All: Sharing Words of Wisdom

By dianeravitch
January 1, 2024 //
45

I wish you a happy and healthy New Year.

We in this nation face many challenges this year, especially with a Presidential election this November.

The country is polarized on many issues, and yet there is so much that binds us together. We should build on these commonalities and remember that we are all Americans, we are all human beings, we want the best for our country and for our children and grandchildren.

I read a news story last night that I wanted to share with you.

Rev. Dr. William Barber was involved in an unfortunate incident in Greenville, North Carolina last Tuesday. He went to the opening of the new film “The Color Purple” and brought his own chair, to accommodate his disability. The movie theater would not permit him to use his own chair, and he was evicted. Dr. Barber was the keynote speaker at the NPE conference a few years ago in Raleigh, North Carolina, and he inspired every one who heard him. He is a man of humility, faith, and courage.

After the news was reported, the AMC theater chain apologized profusely, and the chairman of the AMC chain asked to meet with Dr. Barber to apologize and to discuss how its movie theaters can make changes to meet the needs of people with disabilities.

At the end of the article, Dr. Barber said something that I would like to put up in lights:

Rev. William Barber: “There’s no way to follow Jesus without learning to pay attention to whoever is broken and vulnerable in society,” Barber said. “Because that’s where God shows up.”

Please remember this. Please share it with your friends.

Categories Goodness, Love

2023! The Year That Vouchers Became an Entitlement for Children of the Wealthy!

By dianeravitch
December 31, 2023 //
9

Jan Resseger, warrior for children, wrote this post about the deceptive sales pitch for vouchers. For at least thirty years, we have heard again and again that vouchers will “save poor kids from failing public schools.” Maybe someone believed it, but now we know: Vouchers do not save poor kids from “failing” public schools.

As voucher researcher Joshua Cowen has explained, kids who use a voucher to leave public schools fall behind their public school peers academically. In addition, public funds are now flowing freely to schools that openly discriminate against kids on the basis of religion, LGBT status, special education status, or any grounds they choose. They also subsidize home schoolers and evangelical schools that openly indoctrinate their students.

Now we begin to understand who benefits most from vouchers: families whose children never attended public schools. Families whose kids are already enrolled in religious and private schools. Wealthy families.

Jan Resseger writes:

This year may go down as the year of the school voucher. Seven states passed new voucher programs and ten states expanded private school tuition vouchers in 2023. This year’s trend was marked by an especially disturbing development: many of the state legislatures turned school privatization into an entitlement for the children of the wealthy.

For POLITICO, Andrew Atterbury recently highlighted the explosion of private school vouchers across more than a dozen states this year, “fueled, in part, by groups like the American Federation for Children—founded by former Trump administration Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.” But while advocates used to promote vouchers as a way to expand opportunity for poor children, many of these states are making wealthy children eligible: “That dynamic—the wealthy benefiting from vouchers while the poor are stuck—appears to be playing out nationally. While school choice is especially popular for families with incoming kindergarteners, data shows students who are accessing thousands of dollars in taxpayer funds are often already enrolled in private schools. In Florida, 84,505, or 69 percent, of these new voucher recipients were already enrolled in private school. A much smaller group—16,096, or 13 percent of voucher students—left their public schools to enter the program. Another 22,294 students began kindergarten with a scholarship… More than half of the voucher funding in Arizona is going to students previously enrolled in private school, homeschooling or other non-public options… In a similar trend, nearly all students participating in the $32.5 million Arkansas voucher program—95 percent—were either entering kindergarten, or enrolled in a private school the previous year.”

And what about family income? “Nearly half of new enrollees to Florida’s expanded scholarship program—53,828 students—are above the previous income thresholds for scoring Florida’s scholarships…. In Arizona, 45 percent of scholarship applicants came from the wealthiest quarter of students in the state.”

When Ohio’s legislature expanded school vouchers as part of the state budget, the state did so by raising the income eligibility level—creating a government-funded entitlement for all families no matter how high their income.

NPR’s George Shillcock reports that, according to November 29, 2023 data, while, “the Ohio Legislative Services Commission initially estimated the EdChoice Voucher program would cost $397 million this fiscal year for the new vouchers… the numbers are now out and show over 66,000 families applied to the new program costing $412 million this year alone. In total, over 90,000 families applied to the school voucher program… including renewals from previous years and the Cleveland Scholarship Program, costing more than $580 million.”

Blogger and former member of the Ohio House of Representatives, Steve Dyer examines which families are benefiting from Ohio’s 2023 school voucher entitlement: “According to state data, more new EdChoice Expansion Voucher high school recipients come from families making more than $150,000 a year than families making less than $120,000 a year… There are more new vouchers flowing to subsidize private high school students whose families make as much as $250,000 a year… than there are flowing to subsidize private high school students whose families make less than 1/2 that much. An astounding $1.3 million of your tax dollars went to subsidize the private school tuition of families who make more than $250,000 a year!” Data is not available to document how many of Ohio’s new vouchers are being awarded to simply cover tuition for children already enrolled in private schools.

No state has established a new tax to pay for its new voucher program. States expanding their investment in vouchers will pay for the private school vouchers at the expense of their public schools, thereby dismantling the one public institution with the capacity to serve the educational needs and protect the rights of all children. Private schools, on the other hand, may select their students and push out those whose test scores lag or who struggle with behavior problems; may charge tuition above the value of the voucher; may neglect to provide school transportation or free school lunch for children who cannot afford the school’s lunch; and in many states are not required to hire certified teachers. Public schools serve children everywhere, including the rural counties and small towns with too few school-aged children to have any private schools where students might use a voucher.

The Ohio Education Association’s president Scott DeMauro reminds taxpayers what only a strong system of public schools can accomplish: “The reason that it is so important to have a strong, fully funded public school system is because only public schools have the responsibility and the duty to serve all students, regardless of their race, their gender, their family income, regardless of who they are or their abilities.” While public schools are far from perfect, dogged educators and advocates have achieved progress over the past half century improving racial equity, equalizing school funding across communities, developing programming for English language learners, and developing the capacity for public schools to serve children with specific disabilities.

At the same time many states are enacting voucher expansions that serve comfortable and wealthy families, funding for federal programs that support poor children seems unusually fragile in Congress. In 2021, as part of COVID relief, Congress expanded the Child Tax Credit and made it fully available to America’s poorest families, but child poverty doubled at the end of 2022, when Congress cancelled those reforms.

Congress avoided a government shutdown in early December by passing a continuing budget resolution to protect existing funding into the New Year. But after the holidays, a severely divided Congress must pass the federal budget for the current fiscal year. Here are merely some of the programs to protect poor children that are at risk:

  • Federal COVID-era support for child care providers expired in September. Despite President Biden’s October 25th request to Congress for $16 billion in supplemental funding to keep vulnerable child care centers operational, the request awaits action in Congress after the new year.
  • The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities describes threats to funding the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children: “Unfortunately, WIC is facing a funding shortfall for the first time in decades due to higher-than-expected participation and food costs, jeopardizing access to this highly effective program and risking disproportionate harm for Black and Hispanic families… With a shortfall looming and no assurance that additional funding is coming, states may soon take steps to try to slow enrollment and reduce spending.”
  • The controversial education budget proposed in the Republican dominated U.S. House Education Committee (but never voted on by the full House of Representatives) included an 80 percent cut in funding for Title I, the massive program dating back to the War on Poverty, that provides additional funding for school districts serving concentrations of children living in poverty. The level of funding for Title I will be determined when Congress acts on the 2024 budget.

The expansion of school vouchers across Red state legislatures is a symptom of a much larger problem. Perhaps, however, the shocking explosion of this government entitlement for the wealthy will force us to ask ourselves what kind of society forgets its obligation to to its most vulnerable children.

The authors of The School Voucher Illusion: Exposing the Pretense of Equity encapsulate the meaning of this year’s school voucher expansion: “As currently structured, voucher policies in the United States are unlikely to help the students they claim to support. Instead, these policies have often served as a facade for the far less popular reality of funding relatively advantaged (and largely White) families, many of whom already attended—or would attend—private schools without subsidies. Although vouchers are presented as helping parents choose schools, often the arrangements permit the private schools to do the choosing… Advocacy that began with a focus on equity must not become a justification for increasing inequity. Today’s voucher policies have, by design, created growing financial commitments of taxpayer money to serve a constituency of the relatively advantaged that is redefining their subsidies as rights—often in jurisdictions where neighborhood public schools do not have the resources they need.” (The School Voucher Illusion: Exposing the Pretense of Equity, p. 290)

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Education Industry, Hoax, Privatization, School Choice, Vouchers
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