Justin Parmenter: Will North Carolina Adopt the Hillsdale 1776 “Patriotic” Curriculum?

By dianeravitch
May 12, 2023 //
13

The blog of the Network for Public Education posted Justin Parmenter’s concern about the latest meddling into education by the state’s Republican-dominated General Assembly. The NPE blog is curated by the estimable Peter Greene. Justin Parmenter is an NBCT high school teacher in North Carolina.

Teacher Justin Parmenter monitors anti-public ed shenanigans in North Carolina. He explains in a recent post a bill to force adoption of Hillsdale College’s “patriotic” curriculum.

Parmenter writes:

Legislation filed in the North Carolina General Assembly last week would authorize Beaufort County Public Schools to ignore the state’s standard course of study and instead teach a controversial social studies curriculum developed by a conservative Michigan college with close ties to former President Donald Trump.

The bill was filed by Rep. Keith Kidwell, who represents Beaufort, Dare, Pamlico and Hyde counties.

The curriculum Kidwell is proposing be used in Beaufort County’s public schools was created by Michigan-based Hillsdale College after white fragility over Nikole Hannah-Jones’s 1619 Project prompted former president Donald Trump to issue an executive order setting up what he called a “patriotic education” commission.

Trump said at the time that the commission was intended to counter “hateful lies” being taught to children in American schools which he said constituted “a form of child abuse.”

Trump appointed Hillsdale College President Larry Arnn to chair the 1776 Commission near the end of his presidency in 2020.

The commission’s report, published on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day in January 2021, was widely criticized by actual historians as a whitewashed take on American history for its downplaying of Founding Fathers’ support for slavery and quoting Dr. Martin Luther King out of context in order to create a falsely rosy view of race in the United States, among other reasons.

Hillsdale College released the “1776 curriculum” in July 2021. In its “Note to Teachers,” the curriculum reminds anyone who will be using the curriculum to teach children that “America is an exceptionally good country” and ends with the exhortation to “Learn it, wonder at it, love it, and teach so your students will, too.”

In North Carolina, current state law gives the State Board of Education the authority to develop a standard course of study which each school district is required to follow. The state’s current social studies standards were adopted in 2021 over objections of Republican state board members who said the standards portrayed America in a negative light and amounted to critical race theory.

Kidwell’s bill comes just days after Representative Tricia Cotham’s party switch handed North Carolina Republicans a veto-proof supermajority in the legislature. That means there’s a good chance this Trump-inspired, whitewashed version of American history will end up on desks in Beaufort County, and there’s no reason to think other counties won’t follow suit.

According to DPI’s Statistical Profile, more than half of Beaufort County’s 5,821 public school students are students of color. Those students deserve to have their stories and their ancestors’ stories told. Those students and all students deserve to learn real American history, warts and all, not a watered-down, Donald Trump-conceived version designed to make white people feel comfortable.

Read the full post here.

Categories Academic Freedom, Accountability, Bigotry, Curriculum, Education Industry, Ethics, Extremism, Fraud, Lies, North Carolina, Racism, Republicans

Jim Hightower: Chicken Little Attacks America’s Teachers

By dianeravitch
May 12, 2023 //
18

Jim Hightower is a Texas populist who has observed the state’s hard rightward swing with dismay. In this post, he flays the profiteers who are attacking teachers and public schools. You should consider subscribing to his blog.

He writes here in honor of teachers:

I’m a child of privilege. Not the privilege of money (I come from a family of small-town working people). But it was my privilege to grow up in the public schools of Denison, Texas.

There I received the rich blessings of dedicated classroom teachers, a diverse student body, playground socialization, librarians, coaches, cafeteria and custodial workers, student politics, vocational training… and a deep appreciation for the unifying value of community and the Common Good.

That’s why I’m flabbergasted by today’s clique of corporate profiteers, theocratic zealots, and laissez-faire knuckleheads who’re lobbying furiously across the country to demonize, defund, and dismantle this invaluable social benefit. If ignorance is bliss, they must be ecstatic!

Public schools do have some real problems: Politicians constantly slashing education budgets, professional burnout created by understaffing and low pay, the devastating strain of a killer pandemic, and a new-normal of assault-rifle murders. But the profiteers, theocrats, and knuckleheads aren’t interested in those, instead focusing on what they say is the fatal flaw in public education: Teachers.

Yes, the claim is that diabolical educators are perverting innocent minds by teaching America’s actual history, showing students that the full diversity of humankind enriches our society, and presenting our Earth as something to be protected, not plundered. And worse – OMIGOSH – many classroom teachers are union members! So, teachers suddenly find themselves political pawns in the GOP’s culture war. “Our schools are a cesspool of Marxist indoctrination,” squawked Sen. Marco Rubio, and Donald Trump squealed that schools are run by “radical left maniacs” and “pink-haired communists.”

These right-wing Chicken Littles are demonizing America’s invaluable educators because they need someone for people to hate, providing cover for their unpopular plot to privatize education. But hate can easily backfire on hatemongers – and local teachers are a whole lot more popular than conniving politicos and profiteers.

Categories Censorship, Corporate Reform, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Supporting public schools, Teacher Pay, Teachers, Teachers and Teaching, Texas

John Merrow: There Are No Alphabet Wars

By dianeravitch
May 12, 2023 //
36

John Merrow is sick of the “reading wars.” So am I. I studied them intensively and wrote about their history in my book Left Back: A Century of Battles Over School Reform (2000).

In my opinion, Jeanne Chall (kindergarten teacher turned Harvard professor of literacy) settled the issues in her book called Learning to Read: The Great Debate. Her authoritative book, commissioned by the Carnegie Corporation, was published in 1967. She came out in favor of both early phonics and a rapid transition to children’s literature. She insisted that learning to read was never either-or. I wish she were alive to slap down the journalists and pundits who are now insisting that phonics and phonics alone is “the science of reading.” I feel sure she would laugh and say there is no science of reading. She warned that if we didn’t avoid either-or thinking, we would continue to swing from one extreme to another.

I am patiently waiting for evidence of any district (not counting affluent suburban districts) where “the science of reading” brought every child of every demographic and economic group to proficiency (not grade level, proficiency). The New York City Department of Education recently announced that it was mandating “the science of reading” across the entire city school system. We will be sure to check back in a few years and see how that worked out. Under Michael Bloomberg, Chancellor Joel Klein mandated “balanced literacy” (specifically, the work of Lucy Calkins of Teachers College, Columbia University, which was heavy on “whole word” and light on phonics). Phonics advocates were outraged, but they were ignored. Now the NYC Department of Education is swinging to the other extreme; balanced literacy is out, phonics is in.

John Merrow’s recent post about the “reading wars” reminded me of Jeanne Chall, who was a good friend.

I will post here a bit of it and urge you to open the link and read it all.

Learning the alphabet is a straightforward 2-step process: Shapes and Sounds. One must learn to recognize the shapes of the 26 letters and what each letter sounds like. There’s no argument about this, and certainly there has never been and never will be an “Alphabet War.”

The same rule–Shapes and Sounds–applies to reading. Would-be readers must apply what they learned about Sounds–formally called Phonics and Phonemic Awareness–to combinations of letters–i.e., words. They must also learn to recognize some words by their Shapes, because many English words do not follow the rules of Phonics. (One quick example: By the rules of Phonics, ‘Here’ and ‘There’ should rhyme; they do not, and readers must learn how to pronounce both.) To become a competent, confident reader, one must rely on both Phonics and Word Recognition.

Ergo, there’s absolutely no need, justification, or excuse for “Reading Wars” between Phonics and Word Recognition. None! And yet American educators, policy-makers, and politicians have been waging their “Reading Crusades” for close to 200 years. As a consequence, uncounted millions of adults have lived their lives in the darkness of functional illiteracy and semi-literacy.

Here’s something most Reading Crusaders don’t understand: Almost without exception, every first grader wants to be able to read, because they understand that reading gives them some measure of control over their world, in the same way walking does. And skilled teachers can teach almost all children–including the 5-20 percent who are dyslexic–to become confident readers.

Skilled teachers understand what the Reading Crusaders do not: Reading–again like walking–is not the goal. It’s the means to understanding, confidence, and control. Children don’t “first learn to read and then read to learn,” as some pedants maintain. That’s a false dichotomy: they learn to read to learn. And so skilled teachers use whatever strategies are called for: Phonics, Word Recognition, what one might call Reading as Liberation, and more.

Categories Education Reform, Extremism, Language, Literacy, Literature

Nikhil Goyal: Helen Gym Has a Plan to Make Philadelphia Safe

By dianeravitch
May 11, 2023 //
10

Nikhil Goyal works on the staff of Senator Bernie Sanders. His new book is about Philadelphia, which will hold the Democratic primary for Mayor on May 16. He writes in the Nation about why he supports Helen Gym.

Goyal begins by explaining why Brandon Johnson beat Paul Vallas in the Chicago mayoral election. He highlighted Vallas’ destructive record as a school privatizer in Chicago, Philadelphia, and other cities.

He writes:

A key critic of this scheme was Helen Gym, founder of Parents United for Public Education, who lamented the violence of underfunded, understaffed schools that were falling apart and mold-ridden and argued that children’s pronounced social and emotional needs were not served by zero-tolerance punishment. “We have policies to suspend, arrest, punish, and potentially imprison our children,” she wrote in the Philadelphia Public School Notebook in 2007, “but we can’t have a policy for reduced class size or textbooks or open libraries in our schools.… So what’s really violent here?”

Today, Gym is one of the leading candidates for mayor of Philadelphia and hoping to join a new class of progressive urban mayors: Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, and Boston Mayor Michelle Wu. (Disclosure: I have known Gym for several years through organizing and policy work, and she is discussed in my forthcoming book about Philadelphia, Live to See the Day: Coming of Age in American Poverty.)

A zigzag line can be drawn from social movements such as Occupy Wall Street, Fight for 15, Black Lives Matter, teachers’ strikes, and Sanders’s presidential campaigns to the rise of these mayors. Together, with the backing of organized labor, they have an opportunity to reverse austerity, invest in public goods, reimagine and strengthen public safety, and save lives in American metropolises.

The next mayor of Philadelphia, the poorest large city in the country, will face daunting challenges: joblessness; poverty; gun violence; inequitable, unsafe publicschools; an opioid epidemic; and substandard, unaffordable housing. The past three years have been the deadliest in the history of the city, with some 500 killings annually—the highest per capita homicide rate among large US cities. Recently, the school district announcedthat 100 students have already been shot, including 20 killed, this year. A recent survey found that two-thirds of residents said Philadelphia is on the wrong track and identified crime as their top issue.

With election day next week, the first independent public poll shows a dead heat between the top five candidates. There’s ShopRite oligarch and chauvinist Jeff Brown, who owns a chain of supermarkets and was recently accused by the city’s ethics board of violating campaign finance law for colluding with an affiliated super PAC and a nonprofit. Real estate mogul and former city councilman Allan Domb is largely self-funded to the tune of more than $7 million. Former city controller Rebecca Rhynhart is running as a pro-charter technocrat, in the style of former mayors John Street and Michael Nutter, who have both endorsed her. Former city councilwoman and lobbyist Cherelle Parker, who backs stop-and-frisk policing, rounds out the top tier.

Like Brandon Johnson, Gym is a former public-school teacher and came of age organizing against the market-based urban school reform project. Pick virtually any social justice fight in the city since the 1990s: the closures and privatization of public schools, budget cuts, school funding lawsuits, the eviction crisis, the fight for a $15 minimum wage, the closure of Hahnemann Hospital, and the abuse scandal at the reformatory Glen Mills Schools, and one will find that Gym, who served as a city councilwoman for six years, was on the picket line, getting arrested for civil disobedience, building coalitions, testifying at or organizing hearings, or drafting and passing legislation.

As mayor, she pledges to advance an agenda that would “restore the village to our city.” Her policy platform is, naturally, centered on education, and she calls for turning every school into a community school with wraparound and trauma-informed supports; providing after-school and summer programming in schools, recreation centers, and libraries; modernizing school infrastructure; creating playgrounds for every school; and expanding youth employment. Not only will these investments improve educational outcomes, but research indicates that they will also reduce crimeand other social dislocations. Gym released a comprehensive anti-violence plan that would invest in mental health crisis response units, violence interrupters, an improved 911 response system, more detectives to improve homicide clearance rates, and other ideas. She and Johnson share a recognition that the hackneyed tactic of simply hiring more cops cannot slow the bloodshed. Gym and several candidates are also pushing for place-based interventions, such as cleaning up vacant lots, rehabilitating abandoned houses, and improving street lighting, all of which have been found to cut down on crime.

Recently, hundreds of youth engaged in raucous flash mobs and violent skirmishes in downtown Chicago and Philadelphia. Immediately, there were calls to impose a curfew, despite little to no data validating the efficacy of the measure. Mayor-elect Johnson condemned the unrest while acknowledging that we should not “demonize youth who have otherwise been starved of opportunities in their own communities.” In Philadelphia, it was telling that Gym was the only mayoral candidate to firmly oppose the new ban on unaccompanied minors after 2 PM at the Fashion District shopping mall. “We cannot criminalize young people,” she said. “There is nothing for young people to do. We actually have to go out and create some of these things for young people to go to.”

The American Rescue Plan poured billions into Philadelphia, including historic sums for public education and before-school, after-school, and summer programs. Philadelphia’s next mayor must prepare for the imminent fiscal cliffs as those Covid-19 federal relief dollars dry up in the next year or two. Pennsylvania’s regressive uniformity clause mandates flat local and state taxes, where low-income earners are effectively charged higher tax rates than the wealthiest. So the mayor will need to be creative and bold to raise new revenue—push Harrisburg for fair funding, identify and divert wasteful spending into productive programs, and crack down on corporate welfare.

If Gym is also elected, the question will be: How can Johnson and Gym wield their power to benefit working people in the face of expected relentless obstruction by corporate interests, real estate, anti-public education billionaires, and police unions? Seventy years ago, Joseph S. Clark Jr., a postwar mayor of Philadelphia, describedNew Deal/Fair Deal liberalism as “utilizing the full force of government for the advancement of social, political, and economic justice at the municipal, state, national, and international levels.” This is the vision the next mayors of Chicago and Philadelphia should renew.

Categories Education Reform, Elections, Philadelphia, Safety

Michael Hiltzik: In Defense of Gerontocracy

By dianeravitch
May 11, 2023 //
51

Michael Hiltzik is a columnist for the LA Times. Although supposedly a business columnist, he writes about cultural topics that shape our world. In this column, he takes issue with media bias against older people. As a woman approaching her 85th birthday, I share his view. Fifty years ago, I was physically vigorous, not so much now. But I know so much more now than I did when I was 35. I dare say I’m less impetuous, less likely to be caught up in fads, less likely to be fooled. I would rather be led by a wise person than a relatively youthful fascist like DeSantis or an old liar like Trump. Age is of far less consequence than character and beliefs. (I was going to say “convictions,” but that word favors Trump, who is probably going to have at least one conviction by November 2024, an unenviable record.)

Hiltzik writes:

The cry is heard that America has become a “gerontocracy.” That’s supposed to be bad, it’s argued, because our superannuated political leadership is out of touch with the electorate and blocking younger and (theoretically) more vigorous and intellectually vibrant leaders from taking their hour upon the stage.

Earlier this year, CNN called President Biden’s age a “hot topic.” Leaving aside that news organizations such as CNN have helped make it a hot topic, the real question is whether it’s anything more than that. The answer is no….

The gerontocracy critique also threatens to deprive us of our most experienced leaders. Rather than remove poor performers from their sinecures, the current fixation on age could remove from our political and economic structures men and women who have spent decades learning about the world and offering the wisdom born of long professional experience.

The U.S. State Department, for example, requires its professional foreign service staff to retire at 65, “when they are at the height of their wisdom and knowledge,” publishing executive and author Michael Clinton observed recently, a rule he attributed to “toxic ageism.” Some corporations require their top officers to retire at 60 or 65, while most are still willing to make a professional contribution….

Claims that a political gerontocracy is somehow undermining American democracy — the theme of so much political navel-gazing— simply don’t hold water. They depend on the notion that as we grow older, our political outlooks coalesce into something at odds with the public interest. Where’s the evidence for that?

It’s widely noted that Biden and his likeliest presidential challenger, Donald Trump, would be the oldest president if either wins election in 2024. Biden would be 82 on inauguration day 2025 and Trump nearly 80. Does that tell us anything about how their administration would unfold? Obviously not.

Biden would almost certainly run on his record of creating remarkably inclusive and progressive White House policies and overseeing an economy of job growth and economic expansion in the wake of the pandemic; Trump, judging from his most recent speeches, would continue to flog personal grievances based on his groundless claims of fraud in his 2020 loss…

Some of our political leaders have notched their most outstanding achievement at an age decades later than when conventional wisdom holds that they should have retired.

The questions raised about the physical and mental capacity of Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), 89, didn’t apply to former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco), who compiled what might be the most successful record in House history by shepherding the Affordable Care Act through Congress in 2010 at 70 and Biden’s progressive policies to enactment after the age of 80….

As for whether older politicians are out of step with the younger members of the American electorate, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) didn’t seem to have much trouble connecting with youthful voters when he ran for president in the run-up to the 2016 election, at age 75.

Nor are there signs that the liberal Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has lost the youth vote because of her age, 73. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) seemed to have little trouble getting reelected in the last election, when they were, respectively, 80 and 89….

Quite plainly, the best guides to politicians’ adequacy are their words and actual performance in office. Few reach the highest echelons of American politics without leaving a record to be examined.

Republican presidential hopeful Nikki Haley, a former South Carolina governor, recently took a swipe at Biden’s age, remarking that he would be unlikely to live to the end of his next term.

Does that tell you anything about what she has to offer as an alternative? No; for that you’d have to delve into her positions on gun control (after a deadly school shooting in Nashville, she called for more metal detectors at schoolhouse doors but not more gun legislation) or abortion rights (she’s against them).

Who shows more mental acuity? Joe Biden, who occasionally stumbles over his words (apparently an artifact of his youthful stuttering)? Or Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), who recently called for a “national divorce,” i.e., secession by red states, at the age of 48?

Does the age of Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott explain his boasting about signing a 2021 law allowing almost any Texan to carry a gun in public — “No license or training is needed,” he bragged in a tweet. Abbott was 63 at the time, a relative spring chicken. How has that worked out for his Texas constituents?

Categories Biden, Character, Democracy, DeSantis, Elections, Ethics, Fascism, Health, Trump

Colorado: What Happened When MAGA Extremists Gained Control of a School District

By dianeravitch
May 11, 2023 //
27

NBC News reported on the takeover of Woodland Park, Colorado, by rightwing extremists. Woodland Park is a mostly white district with 8,000 residents. Colorado is a bluish state. The governor is a Democrat, as are the two Senators. But the state, like other states, has deep red districts. The new board wasted no time in pushing their ideological agenda, which apparently concerns even some Republicans.

WOODLAND PARK, Colo. — When a conservative slate of candidates won control of the school board here 18 months ago, they began making big changes to reshape the district.

Woodland Park, a small mountain town that overlooks Pikes Peak, became the first — and, so far, only — district in the country to adopt the American Birthright social studies standard, created by a right-wing advocacy group that warns of the “steady whittling away of American liberty.” The new board hired a superintendent who was previously recalled from a nearby school board after pushing for a curriculum that would “promote positive aspects of the United States.” The board approved the community’s first charter school without public notice and gave the charter a third of the middle school building.

As teachers, students and parents began protesting these decisions, the administration barred employees from discussing the district on social media. At least two staff members who objected to the board’s decisions were later forced out of their jobs, while another was fired for allegedly encouraging protests.

These rapid and sweeping shifts weren’t coincidental — instead it was a plan ripped from the MAGA playbook designed to catch opponents off guard, according to a board member’s email released through an open records request.

“This is the flood the zone tactic, and the idea is if you advance on many fronts at the same time, then the enemy cannot fortify, defend, effectively counter-attack at any one front,” David Illingworth, one of the new conservative school board members, wrote to another on Dec. 9, 2021, weeks after they were elected. “Divide, scatter, conquer. Trump was great at this in his first 100 days.”

The leaders of the Woodland Park School District are enacting an experiment in conservative governance in the middle of a state controlled by Democrats, with little in the way so far to slow them down. The school board’s decisions have won some praise in heavily Republican Teller County, but opposition is growing, including from conservative Christians and lifelong GOP voters who say the board has made too many ill-advised decisions and lacks transparency.

“I think they look at us as this petri dish where they can really push all their agenda and theories,” said Joe Dohrn, a Woodland Park father who described himself as a staunch Republican and “very capitalistic.” “They clearly are willing to sacrifice the public school and to put students presently in the public school through years of disarray to drive home their ideological beliefs. It’s a travesty.”

Teachers grew particularly alarmed early this year when word spread that Ken Witt, the new superintendent, did not plan to reapply for grants that covered the salaries of counselors and social workers.

At Gateway Elementary School in March, Witt told staff members he prioritized academic achievement, not students’ emotions. “We are not the department of health and human services,” he said, as teachers angrily objected, according to two recordings of the meeting made by staff members and shared with NBC News.

Someone in the meeting asked if taxpayers would get a say in these changes, and Witt said that they already did — when they elected the school board.

Over the past two years, school districts nationwide have become the center of culture war battles over race and LGBTQ rights. Conservative groups have made a concerted effort to fill school boards with ideologically aligned members and notched dozens of wins last fall.

In Colorado, conservatives started making gains earlier because school board elections are held in off years. Woodland Park offers a preview of how quickly a new majority can move to reshape a district — and how those battles can ripple outward into the community. Some longtime residents say that the situation has grown so tense, they now look over their shoulder when discussing the school board in public to avoid confrontation or professional consequences.

David Rusterholtz, the board’s president, believes that chasm predates his election in November 2021.

“This division is much more than political — this is a clash of worldviews,” Rusterholtz said at a board meeting in January. He concluded his remarks with a prayer for the district: “May the Lord bless us and keep us, may His face shine upon us and be gracious to us…”

When asked to respond to criticism from school personnel and parents, Illingworth, the board’s vice president, replied in an email: “I wasn’t elected to please the teacher’s union and their psycho agenda against academic rigor, family values, and even capitalism itself. I was elected to bring a parent’s voice and a little common sense to the school district, and voters in Woodland Park can see I’ve kept my promises.”

As the school year winds down, many of the Woodland Park School District’s employees are heading for the exit, despite recently receiving an 8% raise. At least four of the district’s top administrators have quit because of the board’s policy changes, according to interviews and emails obtained through records requests. Nearly 40% of the high school’s professional staff have said they will not return next school year, according to an administrator in the district.

The board’s critics have pinned their hopes on the next election in November — when three of the five school board members are up for a vote — to claw back control of the community’s schools.

“This is an active case study on what will happen if we allow extremist policies to start to take over our public education system,” said David Graf, an English teacher who recently resigned after 17 years in the district. “And the scariest part about it, they knew that this community would bite on it.”

The new board approved the district’s first charter school without any public notice. The approval of Merit Academy was listed on the board agenda as “board housekeeping.”

The district’s teachers union complained in an email to middle school staff that the board’s action was “underhanded, and at worst illegal.” A parent sued, aiming to force the board to follow open meetings law. A trial court judge did not rule on the legality of the board’s actions but ordered the board to list agenda items “clearly, honestly and forthrightly.”

In response to the teachers’ complaints, Illingworth accused the union of attempting to organize a “coup,” and instructed then-Superintendent Mathew Neal to make “a list of positions in which a change in personnel would be beneficial to our kids” and “help the union see the wisdom in cooperation rather than conflict.”

Illingworth’s emails spread after parents obtained them through open records requests. Subsequent board meetings attracted boisterous crowds, as teachers accused board members of creating a hostile environment, while other community members spoke in favor of the board for supporting “school choice” and quoted Scripture. A handful of parents, including some lifelong Republicans, tried to organize a recall, but failed to get enough signatures to force a vote.

The district’s superintendent resigned and was replaced by Ken Witt, who had been active in conservative politics in Jefferson County, CO., schools.

A week before Witt was hired, on Dec. 13, students in a class called Sources of Strength, which is part of a national suicide prevention program, asked their teacher what should they know about him as the sole finalist for the superintendent job.

Sara Lee, a longtime teacher at Woodland Park High School, responded, “You should Google him.”

The students did, and they didn’t like what they learned.

They discovered that Witt, as president of the school board in neighboring Jefferson County, supported a plan in 2014 to ensure the district’s curricula would promote patriotism and not encourage “social strife.” Witt said students who protested the board policies at the time were “pawns” of the teachers union. After he and two other conservative members of the board were recalled, Witt became executive director of an organization that oversees charter, online and other schools and helped launch Merit Academy.

The teacher, Sara Lee, had taught high school for 25 years, 18 of them in the district. The board reassigned her to an elementary school to punish her for sharing information about Witt. She resigned and was promptly hired by another district.

Please open the link and keep reading. The story gets worse. Parents and teachers tried to persuade Witt to reapply for mental health funds to support counselors and social workers. He refused, insisting that such problems should be handled by parents, not schools. The district’s mental health supervisor, unable to persuade him to ask for the funds, submitted her resignation.

Categories Censorship, Charter Schools, Colorado, Curriculum, Democracy, Education Reform, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Failure, Ignorance, Teachers, Trump

Wisconsin: Voucher Schools Openly Discriminate Against LGBT Students and Students with Disabilities

By dianeravitch
May 10, 2023 //
2

A nonpartisan journalism project called Wisconsin Watch released an alarming report about voucher schools that openly discriminate against LGBT students and students with disabilities. State law requires them to admit all who apply but not to enroll those from these disfavored groups.

State law for public schools prohibits discrimination on these very same grounds. In other words, public schools may not discriminate against these two groups, but publicly-funded voucher schools may and do.

Among the voucher schools, discrimination against gay students and families is usually on religious grounds. Voucher schools may exclude students with disabilities for any reason, such as lack of staff or resources.

Wisconsin has funds 52,000 students in 373 private voucher schools, or 6% of all students in publicly funded schools. This year the state spent $444 million on vouchers. “About one-fifth of voucher schools have 90% or more of their students on vouchers, what one scholar describes as “private in name only.” Republicans want to expand voucher availability by removing any limits, so that public funds underwrite tuition for rich kids.

Wisconsin is considered the birthplace of the “school choice” movement. The nation’s first publicly funded private voucher program began in Milwaukee in 1990. Initial restrictions, such as limiting vouchers to secular schools, have disappeared as the program has expanded. Today, 32 schools — including at least one with an anti-LGBTQ+ stance — have their entire student bodies on publicly funded vouchers.

Legal discrimination against students who are LGBTQ+ or have disabilities results from a lack of state-level protections; a federal exemption that allows religious entities to discriminate against LGBTQ+ students and another that requires schools taking federal funds to make only minor adjustments for students with disabilities; and a state education agency constrained by punctilious rules and decades of litigation.

One of the cardinal goals of publicly-funded education is equal opportunity for all. In voucher schools, it’s equal opportunity for some. We are reminded once again that “school choice” means SCHOOLS CHOOSE.

Categories Bigotry, Cruelty, Education Industry, Ethics, Extremism, Privatization, School Choice, Shame, Special Education, Vouchers, Wisconsin

Social Work Graduate School at Smith College Bans Use of the Word “Field”

By dianeravitch
May 10, 2023 //
268

This is a weird example of censorship. The Graduate School of Social work at Smith College will no longer permit the use of the word “field” to describe an area of study. As you may know (or not), I wrote a book about censorship of language and images called The Language Police. If I have a chance to update it, this one goes in.

What, you may wonder, is objectionable about “field?” Reader, I don’t know. Does it suggest someone who works in a field? Why would that be objectionable? Again, I don’t know.

Masslive reports:

The Smith College graduate School for Social Work announced last week it will no longer use the word “field” due to “negative associations.”

“We recognize that language is powerful and that phrases such as ‘going into the field’ or ‘field work’ may hold negative associations,” administrators said in a message to the school community last week….

Author Tracy Kidder, who recently spoke to MassLive about his new book “Rough Sleepers,”also commented on the use of words, particularly on the controversy over the word “field.”

“I have a young friend who is brilliant from Burundi, who grew up in a civil war. And so when I told him this, I said, ‘What do you make of this?’ He said, ‘Anyone who was troubled by a word like field must live in paradise….’”

In a Facebook comment, Robert Cunningham implied that the changing of the word field would be a problem for many Massachusetts communities.

“Let’s see…. Ashfield, Brimfield, Chesterfield, East Brookfield, Greenfield, Hatfield, Lynnfield, Mansfield, Marshfield, Medfield, Middlefield, North Brookfield, Northfield, Pittsfield, Plainfield, Sheffield, Springfield, Topsfield, Wakefield, West Brookfield, West Springfield, Westfield.”

Categories Censorship, Language, Stupid

Perry Bacon, Jr.: Education “Reform” Is Dying, Now We Can Begin to Improve Education

By dianeravitch
May 10, 2023 //
15

Perry Bacon, Jr. is a relatively new columnist at the Washington Post. He joined the Post a year ago and writes about national and state politics and race. His latest column in the Post startled me and perhaps others, because the Post editorial board has been an enthusiastic supporter of the worst kinds of punitive corporate reform. The Post editorial board frequently defended No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, and the teacher-bashing by Michelle Rhee and Arne Duncan. Seldom was a contrary view expressed, except on Valerie Strauss’ Answer Sheet blog, which was a haven for critics of the failed reforms based on testing, punishment, and privatization.

The article begins:

America’s decades-long, bipartisan “education reform” movement, defined by an obsession with test scores and by viewing education largely as a tool for getting people higher-paying jobs, is finally in decline. What should replace it is an education system that values learning, creativity, integration and citizenship.

Joe Biden is the first president in decades not aggressively pushing an education agenda that casts American schools and students as struggling and in desperate need of fixing. He has not stated that “education is the civil rights issue of our time,” a sentence said by presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump. His administration has backed policies, such as an expanded child tax credit, that view giving people more money, not more education, as the main way to reduce poverty.

There is a push from experts and politicians across partisan lines, including from Biden, to get employers to stop requiring college degrees for so many jobs. There is also a growing defense of college students who study English, literature and other subjects that don’t obviously lead to jobs in the way that, say, engineering does.

An education gospel is being dismantled, one that was 40 years in the making. In 1983, the Reagan administration released a report called “A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform.” It warned that America’s status as an economic powerhouse was under threat because its students were doing so much worse than those from other industrialized nations on standardized tests. That report put education reform on the national agenda and explicitly tied it to economic growth.

But this education fixation wasn’t just about the economy. The two parties couldn’t agree on racial policy. Democrats wanted more funding and explicit policies to help Black people and heavily Black areas to make up for past discrimination, and the Republicans largely opposed them.
What Democrats and Republicans could agree on was making education a priority. So Republican politicians, particularly Bush, pumped more money into schools, as Democrats wanted. And Democrats broadly adopted the view that education was the main way for Black people to make up for the effects of racism, thereby shifting responsibility for Black advancement from the government to individual African Americans, as Republicans wanted.

Eventually education, particularly getting a college degree, became viewed as the primary way for economic advancement for not just Black people but people of all races who weren’t born into the middle class.
The result was a bipartisan education fixation for much of the period between 1990 and 2016. It included the expansion of charter and magnet schools as an alternative to traditional public schools; an obsession with improving student test scores; accountability systems that punished schools and teachers if their kids didn’t score well; increased government spending on college loans and grants as part of a movement to make college essentially universal; and a push for Black students in particular not to just get college degrees but ones in “STEM” fields (science, technology, engineering and math) that would help them get higher-paying jobs.

This agenda was racial, economic and education policy all wrapped into one.

The problem is that this education push didn’t work. While the number of Americans who have graduated from high school and college have skyrocketed in the past three decades, wages and wealth haven’t grown nearly as much. Black people in particular haven’t seen economic gains matching these huge increases in education levels.

The remainder of the column nails the point: the education reform movement of the past few decades is a failure. It’s time for fresh thinking, centered on the idea that education is first and foremost about learning, not test scores.

But if the real aim of education policy is no longer really economic and racial policy, what should its goals be? Neither party seems to have a clear answer. Most Democrats defend teachers, a core party constituency, and extol public schools and community colleges, trying to shed the Democrats’ reputation as the party for graduates of Ivy League schools. But they don’t have a broader theory of education policy.


The Republicans are doing something much worse. At the state level, they are largely abandoning public schools and instead aggressively pushing universal voucherlike programs for K-12 education to help as many families as possible to enroll their kids in private and/or religious schools. They are also casting K-12 public school teachers and in particular college professors as propagandists who impose liberal values on students. At the college level, Republicans are trying to force out left-leaning faculty and push campuses to the right.


I certainly prefer the “teachers, professors and public schools are good” perspective (the Democratic one) over “teachers, professors and public schools are bad” (the Republican one). But neither is a real vision for American education.


Here’s one: Our education system should be about learning, not job credentialing. Schools and universities should teach Americans to be critical thinkers, not automatically believing whatever they heard from a friend or favorite news source. They should make sure Americans have enough understanding of economics, history and science to be good citizens, able to discern which candidate in an election has a better plan to, say, deal with a deadly pandemic. They should foster interest and appreciation of music, arts and literature.


They should be places where people meet and learn from others who might not share their race, class, religion or ideology. Our schools and universities should of course also provide people the core skills for jobs that actually require higher education. They should provide a path to becoming a doctor, lawyer, professor or any profession that requires specialized training without going into debt.


What our education system should not be is 16 years of required drudgery to make sure that you can get a job with stable hours and decent benefits — or a punching bag for politicians who have failed to do their jobs in reducing racial and economic inequality.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Competition, Corporate Reform, Cruelty, Curriculum, Disruption, Education Industry, Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), Joy, Merit pay, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Privatization, Race to the Top, Standardized Testing

Philadelphia: Charter-Loving Billionaire Jeff Yass Funds Attack Ads Against Helen Gym in Mayoral Race

By dianeravitch
May 9, 2023 //
22

The Philadelphia Inquirer reports that billionaire Jeff Yass is behind a new super-PAC that is attacking progressive candidate Helen Gym in the closing days of the mayoral campaign.

ProPublica wrote about Jeff Yass and so did I.

Jeff Yass is a major funder of charter schools. Although he attended New York City public schools, he hates public schools and supports privatization. He is a MAGA Republican. He opposes abortion. He is a major funder for MAGA Republicans and grievances. The anti-public school lobby called the Center for Education Reform administers the annual Yass Award to charter schools (public schools need not apply).

I hope the Democrats who vote in Philly know who is behind the anti-Gym ads.

Vote for Helen Gym for Mayor of Philadelphia!

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Corruption, Education Industry, Elections, Philadelphia, Privatization, Trump
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