Gene V. Glass: The Sky Truly Is Falling, Somewhere

By dianeravitch
July 13, 2023 //
35

Perhaps you saw the story in the New York Times a few days ago, lamenting that American students were not making up the ground they lost academically during the pandemic. This was presented as a full-blown crisis. The period from March 2020 to the fall of 2022 included many disruptions: family members died or were very sick, teachers and other school staff died or were very sick, many schools closed, many adopted online classes, normal life came to an end for more than two years, affecting family life and mental health.

When I read the panicked discussion in the New York Times, based on a study by NWEA, a major standardized testing company, I reached out to one of the wisest people I know and asked him to discuss the issues. That’s Gene V. Glass, one of the nation’s eminent education researchers. He wrote the following commentary for the blog.

He wrote:

The New York Times is worried — no, it’s panic-stricken.

Jeremiah — the weeping prophet of the Torah — was a veritable Pollyanna compared to today’s policy wonks and political animals when it comes to delivering bad news.

Journalists — like the New York Times education reporter Sarah Mervosh — envision the half-dozen NAEP score point loss from 2019 to 2022 to result in fewer students accepted to college with a resulting lifetime loss of $70,000 income. Does anyone seriously entertain the possibility that colleges will forego the tuition & fees payments of students who scored 5 points lower in the eighth grade on the NAEP test? Nor did anyone weep in 1990 when the scores were 30 points lower and lifetime incomes were doing just fine, thank you?

Three weeks ago, Dana Goldstein reported, again in the New York Times, that on the October 2022 administration of the NAEP test, the 13-year-olds scored an average of 256 in reading – down 4 pints — and 271 in math — down 9 points — from the averages in 2019. What happened between 2019 and 2022? The COVID pandemic, of course.

Conjuring up the causes of NAEP fluctuations has grown into a widespread academic game since the NAEP Governing Board decided to call some scores “Advanced” and other scores “Basic” — euphemisms for “Excellent!” and “My, my; we have a problem here.” When the U.S. History NAEP scores dropped 9 points from 2014 to 2022, no one panicked, or even cared apparently. The Civics NAEP score never wavered more than 1 or 2 points between 1998 and 2022; the average was 150 in 1998 and 150 again in 2022, never rising above 153. Again, a big nothing, though arguably the nation needs better citizens than it needs better calculators.

NAEP scores jump around for all sorts of reasons, mostly a host of very small reasons that are impossible to unravel. Readers can exercise their own analytic muscles puzzling over NAEP scores. Reading scores were already declining from 2017 to 2019 before the pandemic. In 2019, NAEP Mathematics scores increased at grade 4, but decreased at grade 8 compared to 2017. Moreover, the percent of 13-year-olds taking algebra declined from 34 percent in 2012 to 24 percent today. I don’t disapprove of such a decline; I merely advance it as one of a number of reasons why NAEP scores might be wiggling from time to time. And even bigger forces are afoot.

A couple dozen Red states are experiencing a mass migration of middle-class and upper-class white students to private and charter schools, all driven with barely a whimper by crypto-privatization backers. It would be remarkable for NAEP scores to hold steady under these circumstances alone. Arizona’s universal school voucher program is expected to cost the taxpayers $900 million for the 2023-24 year, more than ten times initial estimates. Three-quarters of the initial voucher applicants are students already in charter, private, and parochial schools. The U.S. percentage of white K-12 students in public schools is projected to decline by 20% between 2010 and 2030.

But the occasion of the COVID pandemic has become a good excuse for policy analysts to propose their favorite solution to the crisis, indeed a “manufactured crisis” in the words of my friend and colleague David Berliner who introduced the term in 1995. Experts have offered no fewer than a dozen emergency measures needed for the nation’s recovery. Nine of these follow: 1. Smaller classes; 2. Tutoring; 3. Extending the school year; 4. Adding a fifth year of high school; 5. Focused funding on minority students; 6. Focusing on math, not reading; 7. Full-time summer school; 8. Increased teacher pay; 9. Focusing on students’ mental health. A fifth year of high school?! Seriously? Now I’m in favor of most of these things, except focusing on math. How about Civics?

Some seem to favor no solution at all. A leitmotif of the NYT article is that the federal government’s billions of dollars in pandemic emergency aid to schools were misspent. The trouble is, less will be heard of any of these “solutions” after NAEP scores wiggle up a couple of points in the next testing.

The ravages of the pandemic were caused by a White House of Dunces. Incompetence cost the nation 1.1 million lives, two or three times more than the irreducible number. It will never happen again — at least not with COVID. The stewardship of all children’s education is a responsibility of every citizen, regardless of the next year’s tweak in NAEP scores. Put that on NAEP’s next Civics test.

Gene V Glass

Emeritus Regents’ Professor

Arizona State University

 

The New York Times is worried — no, it’s panic-stricken. https://shorturl.at/mtI15

 

Jeremiah — the weeping prophet of the Torah — was a veritable Pollyanna compared to today’s policy wonks and political animals when it comes to delivering bad news. 

 

Journalists — like the New York Times education reporter Sarah Mervosh — envision the half-dozen NAEP score point loss from 2019 to 2022 to result in fewer students accepted to college with a resulting lifetime loss of $70,000 income. Does anyone seriously entertain the possibility that colleges will forego the tuition & fees payments of students who scored 5 points lower in the eighth grade on the NAEP test? Nor did anyone weep in 1990 when the scores were 30 points lower and lifetime incomes were doing just fine, thank you? 

 

Three weeks ago, Dana Goldstein reported, again in the New York Times, that on the October 2022 administration of the NAEP test,  the 13-year-olds scored an average of 256 in reading – down 4 pints —  and 271 in math — down 9 points — from the averages in 2019. https://shorturl.at/DFHZ5  What happened between 2019 and 2022? The COVID pandemic, of course. 

 

Conjuring up the causes of NAEP fluctuations has grown into a widespread academic game since the NAEP Governing Board decided to call some scores “Advanced” and other scores “Basic”  — euphemisms for “Excellent!” and “My, my; we have a problem here.”  When the U.S. History NAEP scores dropped 9 points from 2014 to 2022, no one panicked, or even cared apparently. And the Civics NAEP score never wavered more than 1 or 2 points between 1998 and 2022; the average was 150 in 1998 and 150 again in 2022, never rising above 153. Again, a big nothing, though arguably the nation needs better citizens than it needs better calculators.  

 

NAEP scores jump around for all sorts of reasons, mostly a host of very small reasons that are impossible to unravel. Readers can exercise their own analytic muscles puzzling over NAEP scores at www.nationsreportcard.gov. Reading scores were already declining from 2017 to 2019 before the pandemic. In 2019, NAEP Mathematics scores increased at grade 4, but decreased at grade 8 compared to 2017. Moreover, the percent of 13-year-olds taking algebra declined from 34 percent in 2012 to 24 percent today. I don’t disapprove of such a decline; I merely advance it as one of a number of reasons why NAEP scores might be wiggling from time to time. And even bigger forces are afoot. 

 

A couple dozen Red states are experiencing a mass migration of middle-class and upper-class white students to private and charter schools, all driven with barely a whimper by crypto-privatization backers. It would be remarkable for NAEP scores to hold steady under these circumstances alone. Arizona’s universal school voucher program is expected to cost the taxpayers $900 million for the 2023-24 year, more than ten times initial estimates. Three-quarters of the initial voucher applicants are students already in charter, private, and parochial schools. The U.S. percentage of white K-12 students in public schools is projected to decline by 20% between 2010 and 2030. 

 

But the occasion of the COVID pandemic has become a good excuse for policy analysts to propose their favorite solution to the crisis, indeed a “manufactured crisis” in the words of my friend and colleague David Berliner who introduced the term in 1995. Experts have offered no fewer than a dozen emergency measures needed for the nation’s recovery. Nine of these follow: 1. Smaller classes; 2. Tutoring; 3. Extending the school year; 4. Adding a fifth year of high school;  5. Focused funding on minority students; 6. Focusing on math, not reading; 7. Full-time summer school;  8. Increased teacher pay; 9. Focusing on students’ mental health. A fifth year of high school?! Seriously? Now I’m in favor of most of these things, except focusing on math. How about Civics? 

 

Some seem to favor no solution at all. A leitmotif of the NYT article is that the federal government’s billions of dollars in pandemic emergency aid to schools were misspent. The trouble is, less will be heard of any of these “solutioins” after NAEP scores wiggle up a couple of points in the next testing. 

   

The ravages of the pandemic were caused by a White House of Dunces. Incompetence cost the nation 1.1 million lives, two or three times more than the irreducible number. It will never happen again — at least not with COVID. The stewardship of all children’s education is a responsibility of every citizen, regardless of the next year’s tweak in NAEP scores. Put that on NAEP’s next Civics test.

 

Gene V Glass

Emeritus Regents’ Professor

Arizona State University

Categories Disruption, Health, NAEP, Standardized Testing

Peter Greene: Oklahoma Superintendent Tries to Define “Woke,” But Can’t

By dianeravitch
July 12, 2023 //
86

Peter Greene discovered that Ryan Walters, the State Superintendent of Education in Oklahoma, attempted to define “Woke” on a far-right website. WOKE is one of those new terms of opprobrium, like “critical race theory,” that Republicans despise but can’t define. Peter eagerly read Walters’ effort to defund Woke, but came away disappointed. It seems that Woke is whatever you don’t like. You may have seen the stories recently about Walters insisting that the Tulsa race massacre of 2021 had nothing to do with skin color, although as the Daily Beast reported, “white mobs killed as many as 300 Black residents and burned some 1,600 homes and businesses in what was known as Black Wall Street.”

Peter Greene writes:

Oklahoma’s head education honcho decided to pop up in The Daily Caller (hyperpartisan and wide variation in reliability on the media bias chart) with his own take on the Big Question–what the heck does “woke” mean? (I’ll link here, because anyone who wants to should be able to check my work, but I don’t recommend clicking through).

Walters tries to lay out the premise and the problem:

Inherent to the nature of having a language is that the words within it have to mean something. If they do not, then they are just noises thrown into a conversation without any hope of leading it anywhere. And when the meaning is fuzzy, it becomes necessary to define the terms of discussion. To wit, the word “woke” has gained a lot of popularity among those of us who want to restore American education back to its foundations and reclaim it from the radical left.

I’m a retired English teacher and I generally avoid being That Guy, particularly since this blog contains roughly sixty gabillion examples of my typo issues, but if your whole premise is that you are all for precise language, maybe skip the “to wit” and remember that “restore back” is more clearly “restore.”

But he’s right. The term “woke” does often seem like mouth noises being thrown into conversations like tiny little bombs meant to scare audiences into running to the right. However, “restore American education back to its foundation” is doing a hell of empty noising as well. Which foundation is that? The foundation of Don’t Teach Black Folks How To Read? The foundation of Nobody Needs To Stay In School Past Eighth Grade? Anyone who wants to talk about a return to some Golden Age of US Education needs to get specific about A) when they think that was and B) what was so golden about it.

But since he doesn’t. Walters is also making mouth noises when he points the finger at “opponents of this movement.” If we don’t know what the movement is, we don’t know exactly what its opposition is, either. Just, you know, those wokes over there. But let’s press on:

Knowing that many such complaints are made in completely bad faith because they do not want us to succeed, it would still be beneficial to provide some clarity as to what it means and — in the process — illustrate both the current pitiful state of American education and what we as parents, educators, and citizens can do about it.

Personally, I find it beneficial to assume that people who disagree with me do so sincerely and in good faith until they convince me otherwise. And I believe that lots of folks out on the christianist nationalist right really do think they’re terribly oppressed and that they are surrounded by evil and/or stupid people Out To Get Them. It’s a stance that justifies a lot of crappy behavior (can probably make you think that it’s okay to commandeer government funds and sneakily redirect them to the Right People).

But I agree that it would be beneficial for someone in the Woke Panic crowd to explain what “woke” actually means. Will Walters be that person? Well….

In recent years, liberal elites from government officials to union bosses to big businesses have worked to co-opt concepts like justice and morality for their own agendas that are contrary to our founding principles and our way of life.

I don’t even know how one co-opts a concept like justice or morality, but maybe if he explains what agenda he’s talking about and how, exactly, they are contrary to founding principles or our way of life, whatever that is.

But he’s not going to do that. He’s going to follow that sentence with another that says the same thing with the same degree of vaguery, then point out that “naturally, this faction of individuals” is after schools to spread their “radical propaganda.” Still no definition of woke in sight. No–wait. This next start looks promising–

Put simply, “woke” education is the forced projection of inaccurately-held, anti-education values onto our students. Further, to go after wokeness in education means that we are going after the forced indoctrination of our students and our school systems as a whole.

Nope. That’s not helping, either. “Projection” is an odd choice–when I project an image onto a screen, the screen doesn’t change. There’s “projection” when I see in someone else what is really going on in me, which might have some application here (“I assume that everyone else also wants to indoctrinate students into one preferred way of seeing the world”) but that’s probably not what he has in mind. I have no idea how one “forces” projection. “Inaccurately-held” is also a puzzler. The values are accurate, but they’re being held the wrong way? What does this construction get us that a simple “inaccurate” would not? And does Walters really believe that schools are rife with people who are “anti-education,” because that makes me imagine teachers simply refusing to teach and giving nap time all day every day, except for pauses to explain to students that learning things is bad. I suspect “education” means something specific to him, and this piece (aimed at a hyperpartisan audience) does seem to assume a lot of “nudge nudge wink wink we real Americans know what this word really means” which would be fine if the whole premise was not that he was going to explain what certain words actually mean.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Censorship, Civil Rights, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Equity, Ethics, Extremism, Fake, Fraud, Gender, History, Hoax, Hypocrisy, Oklahoma, Politics, Privatization, Propaganda, Racism

Stephen Owens: What Home Schooling Christians Fear

By dianeravitch
July 12, 2023 //
15

Stephen Owens was raised in an evangelical Christian family. He writes a blog call Common Grace, Common Schools. He is the Education director at the Georgia Budget and Policy Institute. He sends his own children to public schools. In this post, he explains why many homeschooling Christians fear public schools. I posted only half the essay. Please open the link to read the other half.

Owens writes:

The Washington Post had an article that feels tailor-made to produce schadenfreude in progressive circles. Titled The revolt of the Christian home-schoolers, the reporter detailed the experiences of a couple that chose to send their kids to public school after rethinking their own upbringing in closed, homeschool Christian communities. White evangelical readers will not be shocked by most of what’s written, as I believe most of us worshipped next to families that tsk-tsked mundane cultural experiences such as Halloween, dating, or public education.

Some folks almost gleefully shared the summary quote from the father, Aaron Beall: “People who think the public schools are indoctrinating don’t know what indoctrination is. We were indoctrinated.” After reading the piece I’m struck by my own ignorance of how many people’s experience with homeschooling is similar to the Beall’s. I’ve encountered dozens of (current and former) homeschool families in the churches I attended, the private school where I worked, and even in the real world! (That last part is a joke—homeschooled children become adults and usually don’t want to be labeled with the mean stereotypes of the schooling any more than those people who went to private or public school). The families I’ve encountered fall on a spectrum ranging from “act typical of any public/private school people” to “believed Song of Solomon was smut” but I’ve yet to meet anyone as extreme in their beliefs as who this article is describing.

Now you might say that the close-knit nature of these communities would explain both the siloed thinking and the reason that people like me haven’t met many of them, and that’s fair. I want to, however, make sure not to paint with too broad of a brush even as I think through some of my own concerns around homeschooling. If you’re considering keeping your children from communal schooling, I’ve framed this post as a series of questions for you.

What are you scared of?

Like the article’s subjects, at the root of many people’s decision to homeschool is the desire to limit exposure. On some level every parent practices guarding the minds of their children—oh that I was more aware of this when I took my then-four-year-old on the Monster Mansion(née Monster Plantation) ride. The tricky part is that just because some things seem scary it doesn’t make them evil.

So what are we scared of? Curriculum? Other people? The story people like those in the WaPo article tell about public schools is that they’re filled with Godless liberals who push students (purposefully or accidentally) into leaving the faith of their parents. Children, by comparison, are treated like clean sponges that will soak up any and all ideas without discrimination. I think the both conceptions are comically far from reality and the second specifically runs counter to scripture.

There are enough public schools in the U.S. that I’m sure you’ll find individual instances of a teacher preaching some faith other than Christianity, but I would bet $1,000,000 there are many more instances of Christian public school teachers influencing students. The teachers (Christian or not) I have met are, to the person, unwilling to use precious minutes of class time trying to evangelize to students—jeopardizing their jobs at the same time.

The pupils of these teachers are also not clean slates waiting to be written upon. The Bible states clearly that we are all born wicked. From that birth we spend the first few years developing rapidly—physically, mentally and spiritually. By the time your child enters kindergarten their brain has already developed 90 percent. They have deep imprints of how to handle stress, joy, want and plenty. The idea that your child’s school teacher will be able to quickly undo what your child has learned in the home makes no sense.

Categories Childhood, Home Schooling, Religion

Ohio: Legislature Gives More Money to Students in Private Schools Than Those in Public Schools

By dianeravitch
July 12, 2023 //
16

Stephen Dyer, former Ohio legislator, closely follows school funding in the state. After studying the latest budget, he realized that the Legislature was sending more money to private school students than to public school students. The Ohio legislature loves charters, Cybercharters, and vouchers. Apparently, the Republicans who dominate the Legislators don’t care about public schools. Nor do they care about accountability.

Dyer begins:

Look, I’m really excited that the Ohio General Assembly followed through on its promise to continue implementing the Fair School Funding Plan — the state’s second attempt at meeting its constitutional mandate to provide a thorough and efficient system of public schools for its 1.7 million students.

I mean, in nearly 2/3 of Ohio school districts, the state is already meeting or exceeding its promised funding amounts from two years ago. And while the lion’s share of the remaining shortage is felt in the state’s most needy districts (something I expressed concern about earlier this year), the fact that the state is actually starting to fulfill promises made to Ohio’s 1.7 million public school students is encouraging. Again, though, only if they finish the job, of course..

But the massive increase to private school tuition subsidies that accompanied the public school increase is a colossal turd in the punchbowl. How colossal?

Try this on for size:

Because the state increased the private school tuition subsidy to $8,407 per high school student, the state will now provide $210 more per student to parents whose kids are already in private schools than they will to public school students in Ohio’s urban core of Akron, Canton, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Dayton, Toledo or Youngstown schools, which educate 173,000 students.

In fact, that $8,407 per pupil amount is greater than the per pupil state aid for nearly 8 in 10 Ohio students. A remarkable 1.13 million Ohio students will get less state aid than the parents of a private school student will receive next year.

Oh, and did I mention that not a penny of these tuition subsidies will be audited by a public entity? So we have no idea if the money is being spent educating kids or buying sweet rides for private school administrators. (Because that’s never happened in this state).

And the disparity is despite Ohio’s historic public school funding increase that occurred in this budget — again, a great accomplishment.

But man. This is crazy….

It would be one thing if vouchers (taxpayer provided private school tuition subsidies) provided better options for students. But study after study has demonstrated pretty clearly that even in urban districts, generally the public schools do better than the private schools — in Ohio, it’s almost in 9 of 10 instances that the public outperforms the private. Never mind that vouchers have also delayed critical investment in the educations of the 1.7 million Ohio public school students or added significantly to racial segregation.

Please open the link to read the rest of this shocking story.

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reform, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Funding, Ohio, Privatization, School Choice, Vouchers

Heather Cox Richardson: The GOP Attacks the Military and Officers of the Law

By dianeravitch
July 11, 2023 //
39

Heather Cox Richardson describes the bitter factionalism among Republicans. They are going ever more extreme; the Freedom Caucus expelled Marjorie Taylor Greene for not being extreme enough. They spend their time attacking the military, the FBI, and the CIA. In addition to the time they spend attacking the integrity of elections. The Republican Party has become a wrecking ball for democratic institutions.

For the first time since 1859, the Marine Corps does not have a confirmed commandant. For five months, Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) has held up the confirmation of about 250 Pentagon officers in protest of the Defense Department’s policy of enabling military personnel to travel to obtain abortion care. So when Commandant General David Berger retired today, there was no confirmed commandant to replace him. Assistant Commandant General Eric Smith will serve as the acting commandant until the Senate once again takes up military confirmations.

That a Republican is undermining the military belies the party’s traditional claim to be stronger on military issues than the Democrats. So does the attack of House Republicans on our nation’s key law enforcement entities—the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation—after traditionally insisting their party works to defend “law and order.”

David Smith of The Guardian this weekend noted that those attacks are linked to former president Trump’s increasing legal trouble.

MAGA Republicans are seeking to protect Trump by calling for impeaching President Biden, Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas, Attorney General Merrick Garland, FBI director Christopher Wray (a Trump appointee), and U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia Matthew Graves, who has prosecuted those who participated in the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

The House Judiciary Committee, chaired by Jim Jordan (R-OH), and a subcommittee of the Judiciary Committee, also chaired by Jordan, have been out in front in the attacks on the DOJ and the FBI. The Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government has been trying to dig up proof that Biden has “weaponized” the DOJ, the FBI, and the Department of Education against Republicans, especially those supporting former president Trump.

They have not turned up any official whistleblowers—the word “whistleblower” in government context means someone whose allegations have been found to be credible by an inspector general, but House Republicans seem to be using the word in a generic sense of someone with complaints—to support the idea that Biden has weaponized the government.

But Trump did. Last summer the New York Times reported that under Trump, the IRS launched a rare and invasive audit of former FBI director James Comey and Comey’s deputy Andrew McCabe, and Trump talked of using the IRS and the DOJ to harass Hillary Clinton, former CIA director John Brennan, and Jeff Bezos, owner of the Washington Post.

On Thursday, a sworn statement from Trump’s former White House chief of staff John F. Kelly confirmed that Trump asked about using the IRS and other agencies to investigate Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, two FBI agents looking into his 2016 campaign’s ties to Russia.

Another investigation has also backfired on the Trump Republicans. The House Ways and Means Committee has highlighted the testimony of Gary Shapley, a “whistleblower” from the Internal Revenue Service claiming that Attorney General Merrick Garland interfered with the investigation into Hunter Biden. Shapley said that Garland denied a request from U.S. attorney David Weiss, who was in charge of the case, to be appointed special counsel, which would officially have made him independent. On June 22 the committee released a transcript of Shapley’s testimony.

Garland promptly denied the allegation, but on June 28, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, sent a letter to David Weiss, U.S. attorney for Delaware, repeating the allegations. Weiss, a Trump appointee, replied today, saying he never requested special counsel status. Representative Jordan got around this direct contradiction of Shapley’s testimony by lumping Weiss in with those he’s attacking: “Do you trust Biden’s DOJ to tell the truth?” he asked.

And while the radical right has claimed that Biden is on the take for millions of dollars from foreign countries, today the key witness to that allegation was indicted for being a Chinese agent. Also today, LIV Golf, which is funded by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, announced it is moving its $50 million team championship from Saudi Arabia to Trump National Doral in Miami this October.

In May, LIV Golf allied with the nonprofit PGA Tour to create a new for-profit company in May, but today a prominent member of the PGA board, Randall Stephenson, resigned, saying he and most of the rest of the board were not involved in the deal and that he cannot “in good conscience support” it, “particularly in light of the U.S. intelligence report concerning Jamal Khashoggi in 2018.” (The report concluded that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman ordered the killing of Washington Post journalist Khashoggi.) Stephenson had delayed his resignation at the request of the board’s chair while the PGA Tour commissioner was on medical leave.

The Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations is scheduled to start hearings on that merger tomorrow, but they are having trouble lining up witnesses who were involved in making the deal, which was achieved in secret negotiations and has infuriated many of the PGA Tour players.

The MAGA attacks on the Biden administration are part of a larger story. Trump supporters are consolidating around the former president and so-called Christian democracy. They are enforcing loyalty so tightly that the far-right House Freedom Caucus recently expelled Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) either because she is too close to House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) or because she called Representative Lauren Boebert (R-CO) a “little bitch” on the floor of Congress, or both. Like the far-right Southern Baptist Convention, which is hemorrhaging members but which nonetheless recently expelled one of its largest churches for permitting a female pastor, the MAGAs are purging their members for purity.

But their posturing worries Republicans from less safe districts who know such extremism is unpopular. Today, 21 members of the far right in the House wrote a letter to McCarthy saying they would oppose any appropriations bills that did not reject the June debt ceiling deal that kept the U.S. from defaulting on its debts, threatening to shut down the government. They also rejected any further support for Ukraine.

Larry Jacobs, who directs the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, told The Guardian’s Smith: “Independent voters, who tend to swing US elections that have become so close, don’t buy into the Trump line. You don’t see support for this unhinged view that the justice department and the FBI are somehow corrupt. There’s not support for that except in the fringe of the Republican party. The question, though, is does the fringe of the Republican party have enough leverage, particularly in the House of Representatives, to force impeachment votes and other measures?”

Alex Isenstadt of Politico wrote today that a new group called Win It Back, tied to the right-wing Club for Growth, which has ties to the Koch network, will run anti-Trump ads starting tomorrow. Americans for Prosperity, linked to billionaire Charles Koch, will also run ads opposing Trump.

Meanwhile, President Biden is on his way to Vilnius, Lithuania, for the 74th North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) summit. NATO was formed in 1949 to stand against the Soviet Union, and now it stands against an expanding Russia. Today, NATO secretary general Jens Stoltenberg announced that Turkey has dropped its opposition to Sweden’s NATO membership. Hungary, which had also been a holdout, said earlier this month it would back Sweden’s entry as soon as Turkey did.

This means that the key issues before NATO will be Ukraine’s defense, and climate change, a reality that U.S. politicians can no longer ignore (although MAGA Republicans later this month will start hearings to stop corporations from incorporating environmental, social, and governance (ESG) goals into their future plans). Currently, forty-two million people in the U.S. South are locked in a devastating heat dome, and Vermont and New York are facing catastrophic flash floods.

President Biden told CNN yesterday that he does not support NATO membership for Ukraine while it is at war, noting that since NATO’s security pact means that a war on one automatically includes all, admitting Ukraine would commit U.S. troops to a war with Russia. Instead, NATO members will likely consider continuing significant military support for Ukraine.

Categories Accountability, Biden, Bigotry, Corruption, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Republicans

Arthur Goldstein: NYC Retirees Are Fighting Their Union and the City to Stay on Medicare

By dianeravitch
July 11, 2023 //
37

New York City’s retired municipal employees are battling the Eric Adams administration and their own unions, who want the retirees to switch from Medicare to a for-profit Medicare advantage program run by Aetna. The city expects to save $600 million a year by switching its employees to Aetna. (Aetna’s CEO is the highest paid person in the health insurance industry at $27.9 million per annum.)

Arthur Goldstein recently retired after a teaching career of nearly forty years, mostly teaching English language learners in high school. He is outraged that the city and his union want to take away the health insurance that he worked for and substitute an inferior Medicare Advantage plan. The city claims that MA is better than Medicare, but where will that $600 million in savings come from? Where will Aetna’s profit come from?

Two sources of savings and profits:

1. Denial of service. If Aetna does not approve a major procedure recommended by your doctor, you won’t get it. You can appeal; maybe your appeal will win. Maybe not. Medicare does not question your doctor’s medical advice.

2. If your doctor is not in network, he or she won’t be paid.

Arthur Goldstein writes:

I need a union to protect me, along with my brothers and sisters, from our adversaries. Our number one adversary is our employer, currently embodied in Mayor Eric Adams. When Mayor Eric Adams says he wants to degrade our health benefits, I’m glad to stand with my union to fight. When Mayor Eric Adams says he wants to give us a compensation increase barely one-third of inflation, I’m ready to descend upon City Hall with all my union brothers and sisters.

Our leadership, though, has asked for neither. Instead of that, they’ve asked me to stand up for a “fair contract.” The contract, though, contained both of the glaring flaws noted above. Leadership wanted me to go to Starbucks and have people there see me work. I don’t set foot in Starbucks unless one of my students gives me a gift card. Starbucks is virulently anti-union, and I have better coffee at home.

I’ve been writing for months about how our leadership has sold out our retirees (and now I am one). I have been quite active opposing private corporate insurance for retirees. I don’t want some clerk at Aetna determining I don’t need care my doctors deem necessary. In service members do not need a plan that’s 10% cheaper than GHI-CBP. How many more doctors need to drop our plan before Mulgrew climbs out of bed with Adams?

Last week, on one of the hottest days of the year, I stood outside with both retirees and active members while the independent Organization of NYC Retirees went to court to stand for us. By the next day, there was a ruling that this downgrade could cause us “irreparable harm.” They embodied not only activism, but successful activism.

Let me ask you this—if our union leadership supports things that cause us irreparable harm, why should we be at their beck and call? Why should we get out there and demand a sub-inflation raise? Why should we demand a contract that does nothing to address the downgrade of our health care?

As I’m asking this, a lot of members have more fundamental issues. A few years back, I was chapter leader of the largest school in Queens (an odd position for someone who opposes activism). I was ready to strike for safety. Members announced, with no shame whatsoever, that they’d be scabs. This tells me they don’t even know what union is.

Whose fault is that? We, as a society, don’t really teach about labor and union. I kind of learned as I went along. There is a great book called Beaten Down, Worked Up by Steven Greenhouse. If you read it, you’ll get a laundry list of things that UFT does NOT do. We could strike, or we could do a whole lot of things short of that. But that’s not how our leadership thinks. I’ll bet you dimes to dollars Michael Mulgrew, except possibly when he read my blog, has never even heard of this book.

That’s why we are asleep. We call Mulgrew and the Unity Caucus “the union,” as though we aren’t even part of it. Whole swaths of us think of Mulgrew as our mommy, and think he should come around and personally help when we are in trouble. Mulgrew’s caucus encourages that false dependency.

In fact, they are the ones who don’t want activism. The very notion of it makes them quake in their boots. If we were truly active, we would not stand for their sellouts. We would not stand for diminished health care. We would not stand for wholly insufficient compensation increases. We would not have 20% participation in union elections. Crucially, we would not have a caucus that doesn’t even know what union is running our union.

I wholly support activism. What I just saw in union leadership was a carefully choreographed rush to a contract. There were few opportunities to examine, discuss or question it. There was a kabuki dance of demonstrations to support whatever leadership wanted, and we were all supposed to believe that these petty actions had something to do with realizing a contract. The fact is the contract was set once DC37 agreed. We had absolutely nothing to say about compensation or health care, our most critical issues.

Leadership thinks we are stupid. Leadership hires people solely for the quality of obsequiousness, and many of these hires may indeed be stupid. But I know a whole lot of smart teachers. They can’t fool all of us. A lot of us who won’t be fooled are, in fact, the most active members they have.

I admire activism. That’s why I contributed to NYC Retirees, who went out and protected us from the machinations of Mulgrew and his fellow union bosses. You should do so as well, and here is how.

Let’s be active. Let’s promote activism. And let’s be done with the delusion activism what current leadership wants from us. We are union, we will stand up, and we will protect ourselves.

And very soon, we will vote those bastards out and take charge.

Open the link to read in full.

Categories Accountability, Disruption, Ethics, Health, New York City, Unions

Florida: Vouchers for All, Rich and Poor, Cut Public School Funding

By dianeravitch
July 11, 2023 //
32

Remember back in the day when vouchers were sold as a way to “save poor kids from failing schools”? Those days are over. The new Republican pitch is “universal vouchers,” vouchers for all, regardless of family income, regardless of whether the students ever attended public schools.

Florida is one of several Republican-led states that have passed universal vouchers. With the new money free-for-all, public schools are hiring marketing directors and communications staff to persuade students to enroll in public schools.

Katherine Kokal of the Palm Beach Post describes how public schools in Palm Beach have responded to the introduction of universal vouchers.

For first time, the Palm Beach County School District will actually need to start convincing parents to send their kids to public school.

That’s because Florida’s expanded school voucher program, which went into effect July 1, opens the door for parents of all incomes to use taxpayer money for tuition at private schools. That money is taken away from the student’s public school district at a cost of about $8,000 per student. In March, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed legislation that removed the previous income and enrollment limits on the program.

The program has left loads of uncertainty in the school district’s budget, but one thing remains clear to school leaders: Public schools need to better “market” themselves if they’re going to compete.

Superintendent Mike Burke announced an idea in the spring to market public schools to families weighing their options. The district launched a kindergarten registration campaign to get Palm Beach County’s youngest students in public school classrooms. Their thinking was that if students start in public school, they’re more likely to stay.

Among the first orders of business for the district’s new chief communications strategist will be expanding its marketing campaign to try to prove to parents considering vouchers that public schools are their best choice.

“I think we’re going to have to dedicate real resources to this beyond our website,” Burke said. “We’ve been competing with charter schools for 20 years. We’ve never competed with private schools.”

New voucher options arrive on Florida’s education scene at a time when public school districts are fighting pressure from fringe candidates, library book bans and new limitations on what teachers can talk about in the classroom.

Coupled with new obligations to pay millions for private school vouchers, some education experts say Florida is eroding its public education system altogether.

“It’s hard not to look at all of this and grieve,” said Joshua Cowen, a professor of education policy at Michigan State University. “Every school has a pitch. What’s different now, particularly in Florida, you’re going to see schools thinking very carefully about how to market themselves vis-à-vis the culture war stuff.”

Not all private schools in Palm Beach County are religious schools, and they’re also separate from charter schools, which are public schools run by private companies.

Palm Beach County is home to 161 private schools registered with the Florida Department of Education as of July 6. Of those schools, 44% are religiously affiliated.

And most accept vouchers.

While 109 private schools accept Family Empowerment Scholarships right now, Burke anticipates that number growing over the next several months.

“I think we’re going to see proliferation of small, ‘mom-and-pop’ private schools,” he said. “Private schools in a strip mall where people think they can turn a profit.”

Please open the link to finish reading the article.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Competition, DeSantis, Disruption, Education Industry, Florida, Funding, Hoax, Privatization, Religion, School Choice, Vouchers

Nancy Flanagan: Why Do Moms for Liberty Support the “Science of Reading”?

By dianeravitch
July 10, 2023 //
163

Nancy Flanagan, retired teacher in Michigan, wonders why the extremist Moms for Liberty have jumped into the reading wars on the side of the “Science of Reading.” The politicization of reading is not new. Phonics has long been a rightwing cause, unfairly, in my view. Every reading teacher should know how to teach phonics.

What’s new is the idea that only phonics can be considered “the science of reading.” This conceit was hatched by the National Reading Panel in 2000. The new Bush administration was super pro-phonics and inserted a $6 billion phonics program called Reading First into No Chikd Left Behind. After six years, Reading First was abandoned because it was riddled with conflicts of interest and self-dealing, and an extensive evaluation concluded that it didn’t make a difference.

Flanagan is especially interested in reading instruction in middle school.

She begins:

I am fascinated by the increasing politicization—no other word for it—of reading instruction. How to best teach reading has always been contentious in the United States, from the 1950s look-say method featuring Dick and Jane, accused of letting Ivan slip ahead of us in the space race, right up until last week, when Moms for Liberty jumped into the Faux Science of Reading (FSoR) fray.

It’s unclear why Moms for Liberty has aligned itself with the phonics-forward FSoR movement. I get that white parents, accustomed to being first in line for educational goodies, feel threatened when they’re told that other children may be having their needs met first. I know racism is a thread that has run through the entire history of public education in America. I also know that many ordinary citizens feel bewildered and angered by rapidly changing social beliefs and customs around acceptance of the LGBTQ+ community.

A friend of my says you can measure social progress by observing who can be beat up on Saturday night without consequences—Wives and girlfriends? Ethnic minorities? Gentle souls like Matthew Shepherd and Elijah McLain? I hate living in a country where threats align with archaic ideas about who’s in charge of our customs and institutions, including public schools. I hate it, but I understand why it happens.

What I do NOT understand is why a far-right, power-grabbing, deep-pocket-funded group of purported “concerned moms” are choosing to endorse One Right Way to learn the skill of reading.

Surely some of their children learned to read using cuing systems or word walls or balanced literacy. Surely some of their children picked up reading quickly and easily reading stories on grandma’s lap. Surely some of their children had caring and creative teachers who employed multiple strategies to nurture genuine literacy.

Which makes me think that a lot of the enmity around learning to read stems from free-floating hostility toward public education and schoolteachers in general, greatly exacerbated by recent events: a pandemic, a child-care crisis, growing and dangerous inequities, and terrible political leadership that plays to the worst in human nature.

Please open the link and read her account of how impassioned this debate has become and her experience teaching music to students in middle school.

Categories Curriculum, Education Reform, Extremism, Literacy

John Thompson: A Warning about Domestic Terrorism

By dianeravitch
July 10, 2023 //
29

John Thompson, retired teacher and historian, reviews a new book by Jeffrey Toobin about the connection between the horrific Oklahoma City bombing of 1993 and the January 6 insurrection.

Thompson writes:

Jeffrey Toobin’s Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism has been published just in time. Based on the evidence in 635 boxes of case files, and interviews with more than 100 participants, Toobin draws a “direct line” between the Oklahoma City bombing, which killed 168 people, and the January 6 insurrection. Moreover, he shows how digital technology has made right-wing extremism more dangerous.”

Dog whistle heard ’round the world. When Donald J. Trump decided to kick off his latest presidential campaign on March 25 with a rally at Waco, Texas, he was issuing a call to the far-right fringe that was earsplitting, even by his own standards. It wasn’t simply the location but also the timing: a month shy of the 30th anniversary of April 19, 1993 — a date that marked the fiery, deadly end of the 51-day standoff between the F.B.I. and David Koresh at his Branch Davidian compound near Waco.

Toobin provides a balanced analysis of both – why McVeigh was not a “lone wolf,” and how conspiracy theories went overboard. But, he was influenced by multiple propaganda networks and violent insurrectionists who even preceded the Ruby Ridge violence. McVeigh “would talk about his belief that an ‘Army’ of fellow believers was somewhere out there, but he admitted that he never figured out how to reach them.”

Toobin had reported on the McVeigh prosecution for The New Yorker, and now understands that he and other journalists were too focused on “the trail of evidence presented in the courtroom,” instead of stepping back to grasp McVeigh’s “place in the broader slipstream of American history.” Today, he warns of the dangers of not coming to grips with the great threats that have grown worse since then.

Toobin gives credit to President Bill Clinton who quickly understood that, “This was domestic, homegrown, the militias. … I know these people. I’ve been fighting them all my life.” However, Merrick Garland, now the Attorney General, led a prosecution that “actively discouraged the idea that McVeigh and Nichols represented something broader — and more enduring — than just their own malevolent behavior.” Toobin now believes, “This was a dangerously misleading impression.”

After interviewing Garland in 2023, Toobin concluded:

Garland appears to see the courtroom — and the law — as an almost sacred refuge from the tumult of modern life. The law, he believes, must be protected from not just the vulgarities of show business but also the passions of politics. This is why he has proceeded with such caution in the Trump investigation and especially why he has said so little about it in public.

There is much to be commended in this kind of reticence, because it projects fairness and even-handedness. But there is a cost, too, in Mr. Garland’s approach. As attorney general, Mr. Garland is responsible not just for bringing cases but also for warning the public of ongoing threats, including from political actors like Mr. Trump and his allies. The question is whether Mr. Garland’s silence protects the law but also misses the chance to defend democracy.

Today, Toobin says that criticism of Garland for the slow pace of the investigation of Jan. 6 “seems unfair, or at least premature.” But, he concludes, “it is fair to question why Mr. Garland continues to be a quiet, if not silent, public voice about the Trump investigation.”

As the Times’ Szalai notes, when bringing this history together, “It’s almost as if Toobin were addressing his book to Garland, as a cautionary tale.” Homegrown provides reminders of how Rep. Newt Gingrich told Republicans to describe Democrats as “sick, pathetic, traitors, radical and corrupt,” while describing himself as standing “between us and Auschwitz.” Rush Limbaugh, who McVeigh followed, said the “second violent American revolution” was “just about … a quarter of an inch” away. Toobin recalls book titles such as Sean Hannity’s Deliver Us from Evil: Defeating Terrorism, Despotism and Liberalism, and Ann Coulter’s Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism.

Now, when the Department of Homeland Security finds social media being used in 90% of US extremist plots, Toobin writes: “More than any other reason the internet accounts for the difference between McVeigh’s lonely crusade and the thousands who stormed the Capitol on January 6.”

Oklahomans are likely to be especially interested in two other aspects of Homegrown. Toobin takes a deep dive into McVeigh’s lead attorney Stephen Jones, as well as Jones’ conflicts with the rest of his defense team and McVeigh. The $20 million federally funded defense budget paid for Jones’ continuous off-the-record discussions with journalists and his trips around the world, ostensibly to find evidence of conspiracies.

Also, Toobin notes that state trooper Charles J. Hanger arrested McVeigh for carrying a handgun without a permit as he drove away from the bombing. But, “If Hanger had stopped McVeigh under the new law,” Toobin writes, “he could not have arrested him. … All Hanger could have done was give McVeigh a ticket.”

Getting back to the key lesson that Americans should not ignore, right-wing extremists have launched a “widespread wave of violence.” Toobin shows that today’s insurrectionists are McVeigh’s “ideological successors.” These threats to democracy are driven by:

The obsession with gun rights; the perceived approval of the Founding Fathers; and the belief in the value and power of violence. These feelings were replicated, with extraordinary precision, in the rioters on January 6 as well as many of the other right-wing extremists who have flourished in the quarter century since the bombing.

Given the evidence against Trump, we will likely have to deal with extremists’ violence as the prosecution proceeds. I sure hope A.G. Garland will have read Homeland if or when he has to explain the interconnected roots of rightwing violence.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Evil, Extremism, Fascism

Reid Friedson: DeSantis Is a Homegrown Fascist

By dianeravitch
July 10, 2023 //
14

The Republican primary is shaping up as a carnival of horrible. Coasting in the lead is former President Donald Trump, whose ignorance, lying, and braggadocio are well-documented and on display whenever he speaks. His indictments tend to increase his poll numbers, and apparently are no bar to bring re-elected.

In the second spot, far ahead of the rest of the pack is Ron DeSantis, who wants to be known as the meanest one in the race. He will boast about how he crushed academic freedom, how he outlawed drag queens and demonized gays, how he made honest teaching of history illegal, how he encouraged book banning.

In this article, Reid Friedson contends that DeSantis’s full-blown fascism should disqualify him from office. But if the public wants fascism, there he stands, ready to suppress and criminalize dissent, debate, anyone who offends him.

Categories Bigotry, Censorship, Cruelty, DeSantis, Education Industry, Elections, Extremism, Fascism, Florida, Freedom, Freedom of Speech, Freedom to Read
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