Politico: Partisan Battles Over School Boards Continue Unabated

By dianeravitch
December 20, 2022 //
15

Politico reports that there was no sweep for partisans of the culture war issues. We can expect to see more attacks on teachers, students, and school boards in the next election, based on hyped-up falsehoods about race and gender. Support from rightwing conservative foundations—the usual suspects—will keep alive the battles and the fake organizations leading them. (Expect a special report soon from the Network for Public Education on these front groups attacking school boards, written by an authority on Dark Money).

Juan Perez Jr. of Politico writes:

THE DIVIDED CLASSROOM — In case you missed it amid the advertising noise and campaign spending avalanche of November’s midterms, 2022 proved to be an incredibly busy — and contentious — year for education elections.

Fifteen states and the District of Columbia held state school board or education superintendent races this year. Roughly 1,800 local board seats across some 560 districts in 26 states were also up for grabs on Nov. 8, according to the nonpartisan nonprofit Ballotpedia.

Who came out on top? Nobody. Neither Democrats nor Republicans managed a clean sweep.

This means the state of education in the United States remains divided sharply along partisan lines — and the education wars are likely to continue unabated in 2023 and beyond.

The bitter differences between the two sides and lack of consensus between the poles of both parties — over everything from teaching about slavery and gender identity to childhood vaccinations – offer little incentive for either side to back down.

“We are stopping Critical Race Theory from being taught, stopping access to obscene pornography in our schools, and ending the tenure of radicalism and indoctrination of our kids because the left is waging a civil war in our classrooms,” newly-elected Oklahoma State Superintendent Ryan Walters recently wrote in the Daily Caller.

Candidates who supported having race and sex-related curricula or Covid-19 safety requirements in schools won about 40 percent of the roughly 1,800 local board elections tallied by Ballotpedia this year, and tended to win in counties President Joe Biden carried in the 2020 election. Candidates with opposing views won about 30 percent of their elections, often doing so in counties held by former President Donald Trump.

Nearly one-third of incumbent school board members also lost to their challengers on Nov. 8.

“People didn’t feel listened to. Parents felt they lost agency and power over their kids’ education,” Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers labor union, recently told Nightly. “My concern is that we can’t have two countries. This is one United States of America, and we have an obligation to help kids — regardless of whether they’re in South Carolina, Tennessee, New York or California — to learn how to critically think.”

As they turn toward 2023, Democrats take solace in battleground state victories for governor, successful education-related ballot measures and local school board races where moderate incumbents defeated far-right challengers in Louisville, Ky., the suburbs of Austin, Texas, and other places.

Sure, conservatives lost plenty of races. But they won more than enough to show their brand of culture-based education politics thrives in areas controlled by the party faithful. Trump seems to have this on his mind, too. The former president promised schools would lose their federal funding if they don’t get rid of critical race theory, and what he described as “radical civics and gender insanity,” when he announced his reelection bid.

No state school boards with elections this year flipped partisan control, according to the National Association of State Boards of Education. But majority parties did expand their influence on boards in Colorado, Kansas and Utah while conservative incumbents often lost primary challenges.

Candidates endorsed by two upstart GOP-aligned political committees also won roughly half of their midterm elections.

Candidates backed by Moms for Liberty, a group formed by a former Florida school board member to fight school Covid-19 mask requirements and controversial library books, won about half of their 2022 elections, according to the organization. The 1776 Project PAC, a group opposed to the critical race theory academic framework that examines how race and racism have become ingrained in American institutions, saw a similar win-loss ratio.

Open the link to read more.

Categories Bigotry, Censorship, Curriculum, Dark Money, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Elections, Fascism, Fraud, Freedom, Freedom of Speech, History, Privatization, Racism, Religion

A Book You Might Enjoy

By dianeravitch
December 19, 2022 //
7

David Berliner and Carl Hermanns edited a book about the value and importance of public schools in a democratic society. Its title is Public Education: Defending a Cornerstone of American Democracy, and it was published by Teachers College Press. I was one of the contributors, along with other well-known figures in the field.

The book would be a terrific Christmas gift for an educator.

This review will give you a good look at the contents.

Public Education is a 346-page book containing 29 chapters penned by some of America’s most eminent scholars, including Diane Ravitch, Jennie Oakes, Sonia Nieto, H. Richard Milner, Deborah Meier, Ken Zeichner, Gloria Ladson-Billings, Michael Apple, William Ayers, and of course, co-editor David Berliner. The late Mike Rose has a chapter in the book as does Edward Fiske, the longtime New York Times education reporter and author of the ubiquitous Fiske Guide to Colleges.

While the themes of the book are quite varied, all the contributors to the book seem to agree that a child’s prospects in life, the quality of America’s public schools, and the country’s future as a democracy are all intimately intertwined. The importance of high-quality public education has been covered by Berliner previously in co-authored books such as The Manufactured Crisis (with Bruce Biddle, 1996) and 50 Myths and Lies that Threaten America’s Public Schools (with Gene Glass, 2014), and in well over a hundred articles.

However, in comparison with Berliner’s earlier works, this book has a stronger sense of urgency and a more dispiriting sense of disappointment in the ways in which federal and state governments have undermined, underfunded, and underappreciated the singular accomplishments of public education. In Berliner’s chapter on charter and voucher schools, for example, he uses the word scandalous over thirty times.

The very first sentence of the book’s introduction states, “The belief in the vital importance and central role of public education in the development of our country and the sustenance of our democracy runs deep.” When discussing the history and future of American public education, the specter of Horace Mann is always difficult to ignore. Indeed, more than half of the contributors explicitly discuss Mann’s ideas concerning the importance of a free education, sometimes in great detail. Even when he goes unnamed, Mann runs like a powerful current throughout these pages.
To offer a sense of the content and variety of the chapters, citations from four contributors follow.

Mark Weber
“Reform has become the core of the resistance to meaningful and sustained investment in schools. Education reformers are providing cover for those who fear that the United States might take its obligation to fund schools more seriously—starting with raising taxes on the wealthiest of its citizens.” (p. 205)
“A 2017 meta-analysis of merit pay experiments found ‘a modest, statistically significant, positive effect on student test scores (.053 standard deviations).’ This is the equivalent of moving a student at the 50th percentile in test scores to the 52nd percentile.” (p. 207)

Gloria Ladson-Billings
“Currently most major cities do not have enough white students attending their schools to adequately desegregate them.” (p. 227)
“The number of the most intensively segregated schools—with more than 90% of low-income students and students of color—more than doubled [from 2001 to 2014].” (p. 229)
“Beyond the crudeness of the per pupil expenditure measure is also the way ‘average daily attendance’ is derived. In Wisconsin, ADA is calculated on ONE day per year–September 15.” (p. 230)


Diane Ravitch

“After the Civil War, no state was admitted to the Union without an education clause in its constitution.” (p. 21)

“For many years, the term ‘school choice’ was stigmatized because of its association with advocacy for school segregation.” (p. 23)


Carol Burris

“The term public school is generally not viewed as a pejorative, which is why those who oppose public schools are so anxious to either exclude the term from the discourse, blur the definition, or hijack it for privatized systems.” (p. 236)

“We need to mind our words, being cognizant of how language has been used to shift the perception of privatized choice. Terms like privately-run charter schools and neighborhood public schools should replace public charter and traditional.” (p. 240)

As with any edited book, one chapter may seem nondescript while another may seem absolutely indispensable. For example, James Harvey’s chapter, “Education is our only political safety,” (pp. 214–225), a clearly written, tour-de-force about how education in the U.S. is funded, would be a perfect fit for an undergraduate foundations of education course.


Some of the book’s chapters are quite short and informal; others are fully realized, in-depth academic papers, replete with conclusions and recommendations. Most authors use APA bibliographic style, but a few use Chicago, and some chapters include no list of references at all. The chapters are divided into six “interrelated” parts that are so interrelated as to be indistinguishable from one another. Sections are identified not by titles but by Roman numerals, I–VI.

The divider pages indicating a transition to a “new part” often feature historical photos and text. For example, on p. 233, the divider page for Part V shows a picture of 16 very young child- employees of an oyster plant in a small town in Mississippi located on the Gulf of Mexico. The children depicted in the photo look to be between the ages of 5 and 8, and one of the 8-year-olds is struggling to hold another child-worker who appears to be around 2. The caption reads:

Before America had child labor laws and school attendance requirements….all [these children] worked from before daybreak until 5 p.m. for extremely low wages.”

Child Labor laws in the United States were ratified less than a century ago, in 1938. When children were liberated from the chains of illiteracy and the drudgery of working long hours for near-starvation pay, public schools emerged as welcoming, empowering institutions that offered the possibility of a better life. Rather than submit to a permanent sentence of indentured servitude, an American child—every American child—was suddenly given the opportunity to be treated as an equal among peers, regardless of race, religion, wealth, or family connections.

One can argue about the extent to which America has fallen short of its promises. But, powerful forces at work in the United States today are working to obliterate public schools and debunk the idea that every child deserves a fair chance. As noted repeatedly by the contributors to Public Education, if our public schools go down, our democracy seems likely to follow.


Author Biography
LAWRENCE BAINES, Ph.D., writes on educational policy and multisensory learning. He is the author of 13 books, including What’s a Parent to Do? How to Give your Child the Best Education (2022, Rowman & Littlefield). His homepage is http://www.lawrencebaines.com.

Categories Education Reform, History

Congress Votes to Remove Roger Taney’s Marble Bust from Place of Honor

By dianeravitch
December 19, 2022 //
33

Roger Taney was the Supreme Court justice who wrote the Dred Scott decision, one of the worst decisions in the history of the Court. Its ruling upheld slavery. Taney’s bust will be replaced by a bust of Thurgood Marshall.

NPR wrote:

The House gave final passage to legislation to replace the bust of Roger Taney, the Supreme Court justice who wrote the Dred Scott decision, in the Capitol with one of Thurgood Marshall, the first Black person to serve on the high court.

The notorious 1857 Dred Scott decision upheld slavery and established that Black people were not U.S. citizens. The legislation, which passed Wednesday and now heads to President Biden’s desk, says the bust is “unsuitable for the honor of display to the many visitors to the Capitol.”

The statue of Taney sits at the entrance of the Old Supreme Court Chamber in the Capitol where the Supreme Court met from 1810 to 1860. Taney, the fifth chief justice, led the court from 1836 to 1864.

“While the removal of Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney’s bust from the Capitol does not relieve the Congress of the historical wrongs it committed to protect the institution of slavery, it expresses Congress’s recognition of one of the most notorious wrongs to have ever taken place in one of its rooms, that of Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney’s Dred Scott v. Sandford decision,” the legislation says.

“Taney’s ruling denied Black Americans citizenship, upheld slavery, and contributed, frankly, to the outbreak of the Civil War,” Rep. Steny Hoyer, D-Md., said on the U.S. House floor on Wednesday. “That’s why I and so many others advocated for his statue’s removal from the Maryland State House.”

Categories Education Reform

National Education Policy Center: The Outcomes of For-Profit Charter Schools in Ohio

By dianeravitch
December 19, 2022 //
5

Josh Cowen of Michigan State University reviewed a report by the rightwing Thomas B. Fordham Institute about for-profit charter schools in Ohio. It was published by the National Education Policy Center.

The summary:

The Thomas B. Fordham Institute recently published For-Profit Charter Schools: An Eval- uation of their Spending and Outcomes. The report examines academic outcomes in Ohio’s nonprofit and for-profit charter schools; in addition, it explores whether differences in contracted services in for-profits appear to correlate with differences in their outcomes. Although the report finds that charters generally have higher academic outcomes relative to traditional public schools, for-profit schools perform slightly lower academically than their nonprofit counterparts, and they perform worse than traditional schools in some areas as well. In addition, the report finds that for-profits typically contract for either staffing or other services and that those contracting for staffing perform especially poorly. Based on these findings, the report includes cautions about overregulation of for-profit charters but also raises concerns about virtual and charter schools that contract out for nearly all services. Contrary to the report’s enthusiastic Foreword, written by Fordham executives Amber Northern and Michael Petrilli and containing implications that somewhat vary from those in the report’s body, there is little in the report to remove skepticism from the debate over for-profit status. Rather, the report includes negative findings such as fewer students in for-profit charters earning diplomas, and it reinforces concerns about for-profit schools— particularly those that contract out for staff. In addition, the report is limited in its focus on only Ohio, which has substantially more transparency than many states require for school choice options. As a result, the report offers little to inform policy and practice in dissimilar or nationwide contexts.
http://nepc.colorado.edu/thinktank/for-profit-charters

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, For-Profit, Ohio

Texas: Battle Over Vouchers Looms in Legislature

By dianeravitch
December 18, 2022 //
31

Texas Governor Greg Abbott is determined to pass a voucher bill in the upcoming legislative session, along with voucher zealot Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick. They hope to use the culture war nonsense about public schools “indoctrinating” students on race and gender issues. They pay no attention to the research showing that students who use vouchers are likely to lose ground, academically, and learn less than in public school. Does the legislature really want to harm the state’s public schools while sending kids off to religious and private schools where they are likely to get a worse education than in public schools?

Edward McKinley of the Houston Chronicle wrote recently:

Private school vouchers were within a handful of votes of becoming Texas law in May 2005. Former Rep. Carter Casteel still remembers the constituent who confronted her in her office that day.

“He kind of threatened me, not to harm me, but that I wouldn’t be reelected if I didn’t vote for the vouchers,” Casteel, a New Braunfels Republican, said in an interview. A public school teacher and school board member before she served in the Legislature, Casteel is and was a staunch opponent of private school vouchers.

“I explained to him my position, and he wasn’t very happy, I remember that,” she said. “If you want your child to go to a private school, then that’s your choice and you spend your money, but you don’t take taxpayer dollars away.”

Debate on the floor of the Texas House stretched on for hours, and the voucher bill was gutted following a series of back-and-forth, close votes. Casteel voted no, saying publicly that she was willing to lose her House seat over it.

In a dramatic capstone to the proceedings, Rep. Senfronia Thompson ran across the floor and yanked the microphone out of the bill author’s hand, yelling for attention to a procedural mistake in the bill that led to its death.

That day was the high-water mark in efforts to pass private school vouchers in Texas.

They have been blocked by a powerful coalition of Democrats and rural Republicans in the House. In fact, the House has routinely and overwhelmingly supported a statement policy that outright bans taxpayer funds from going to private schools in sessions since.

But advocates for vouchers believe that those legislative dynamics that have been frozen for the last 17 years may finally be thawing.

As Republicans for the past year have raised alarms over what they see as liberal indoctrination in the public school curriculum — especially in the way racism and LGBT issues are taught — they’ve chalked up victories in statehouses across the country. Texas parents have carried that same fight to school board meetings, their local libraries and trustee elections. Now, Gov. Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick are calling for more of the same in the upcoming legislative session, with pledges to back ‘parents matter’ initiatives that include another voucher push.

“Families started to see there’s another dimension to school quality that’s arguably more important, which is whether the school’s curriculum aligns with their values,” said Corey DeAngelis, senior fellow with the American Federation for Children, which advocates for vouchers. “And I think that’s sparked a wave of support for school choice around the country.”

Abbott earlier this year announced his support for a policy that would allow public funds to follow students, regardless of whether they attend public schools or private schools. Shortly after, DeAngelis posted a photo of himself meeting with the governor, and “it’s happening, Texas,” has become a refrain on his popular Twitter account.

“With all the national momentum, I think a lot of people are looking toward Texas as the next step,” DeAngelis said. “It’s going to be all eyes on Texas coming up this session. And people are going to be watching.”

Eyes on Arizona, Virginia

The argument for vouchers has traditionally been that children, particularly in urban areas, are forced to attend struggling schools, when the state could instead subsidize them attending private schools nearby. One problem with this argument is that polling has often found that while people have critical views of public schools generally, they often like their own public schools just fine.

“In the past, they’ve tried to get vouchers by saying we’ve got to do something about kids trapped in failing schools. And so we’d say we’ve got all these failing schools. And then you’d look at the data and you have about 80 campuses out of about 8,500 or so that were ‘improvement required.’ So you’re looking at 1 percent,” said Charles Luke, head of the Coalition for Public Schools, which represents education groups opposing voucher policies.

“So when you’re talking about how horrible the public school system is, 99 percent of them are doing fine,” he said. “A kid takes a test and he gets a 99 on it, you wouldn’t say ‘he’s failing, I’m failing him, The system is failing him.’ You’d say, he’s doing great!”

But instead of school budgets or test scores, this time it’s culture war issues with spinoffs that include whether teachings on racism damage the self-esteem of white kids, and if it’s OK for young children to see a drag show or discuss gender identity.

“There’s this misalignment to what parents thought was going on in their schools and now their eyes have been opened, and now they say hey, hey lets fix this,” said Mandy Drogin, with the Texas Public Policy Foundation. “No more of this social justice warrior, whatever the teacher or administrator feels about pushing into our classrooms. I think that’s where you see so much momentum, and everybody feels and sees that momentum.”

The issue of private school vouchers has historically hewn closely to the culture war issues of the day. The modern voucher advocacy movement has roots connecting to efforts to resist racial integrationafter the Brown v Board of Education U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1954.

In the 1950s and ‘60s, supporters of vouchers wanted to leave “government schools” because they argued such schools were experimenting with “social engineering” and radical ideologies, education historian Jon Hale has noted, particularly desegregation. The debates from yesterday over leaving public schools because of their values mirror contemporary political arguments over how LGBTQ+ issues are discussed or the children who are undocumented immigrants attending American public schools.

One question legislative observers have had is whether those pushing vouchers will attempt to pass a universal program or a more limited one.

Teachers unions, Democrats and other public school advocates have traditionally opposed any voucher program, no matter how small, but voucher advocates have seen success in other states starting small and building out from there.

This year, however, Arizona passed a universal program, and advocates say that should be the goal in Texas.

Mayes Middleton, who served in the House in the 2019 and 2021 sessions and was elected this year to the state Senate, has filed one such bill. His would create education savings accounts, a form of vouchers, that could be used by anyone to send their kids to public school, private school, community college classes, virtual schools or home school.

This approach is the best way to maximize “parental empowerment,” he said in a Friday interview, and to capitalize on the momentum behind that movement that helped carry Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin to victory last year. There were also Republicans unseated in the primaries earlier this year across the state who were less supportive of voucher policies, Middleton said, which could help win additional support.

He says his bill could be particularly helpful for rural Texans who want their kids to access more flexible, hybrid home school models, as well as for people who want to send their kids to private Catholic schools but cannot afford it, many of whom he said are Hispanic. Those are groups who would need to support voucher policies for them to win passage in the Legislature.

“Look in Arizona what they did it with one-seat GOP majority in their house and senate,” DeAngelis said. “If every Republican in Arizona can show up for their platform issue, other red states should be able to follow suit as well.”

Vouchers fell far short in 2021

Public school advocates and opponents of vouchers acknowledge that the fight is going to be tighter and more intense than it has been in many years, but they feel that even with intense lobbying in support, the policies will ultimately fall short.

“These are the same issues that raised their ugly head in past sessions,” said Rep. Harold Dutton, a Houston Democrat who chaired the House Public Education Committee last session, noting that more than 100 of the 150 House members voted in favor of an amendment last year barring the state from spending public funds on private schools. “I don’t see that changing a whole lot, and certainly not being able to get a majority.”

Members of the GOP’s right wing have called for House Speaker Dade Phelan to end the practice of naming Democrats to head a limited number of committees. Some have named Dutton in particular as an obstacle last session to school choice legislation.

Dutton said he hadn’t thought about whether or not he’ll be chair again, but noted: “When vouchers failed before, the person in the chair of public education was a Republican, so what does that tell you?”

Several Republican members of Public Education, who might be in line for the chairmanship if Dutton is not selected again, have also expressed skepticism or opposition to voucher proposals. Rep. Ken King from Canadian has said, “If I have anything to say about it, it’s dead on arrival. It’s horrible for rural Texas. It’s horrible for all of Texas,” while Rep. Gary VanDeaver has said, “This sense of community is what makes Texas great, and I would hate to see anything like a voucher program destroy this community spirit.”

As promised, after Casteel’s role in the demise of the voucher bill in 2005, she lost her seat in 2006.

She noted that a prominent San Antonio businessman and GOP donor who was present in the House the day of the vote and advocated strongly for vouchers donated more than $1 million to her opponent, as the donor did for other Republicans who opposed the voucher bill that day.

“I’ve got a great family, I’ve got a great law profession, and whether I’m (there) or I go home it doesn’t make a bit of difference to me. I didn’t go there to do nothing but what’s right,” Casteel said.

“And I did. I went home. And it never came back up — until this year.”

edward.mckinley@chron.com

Categories Education Industry, Privatization, Propaganda, Religion, Separation of church and state, Texas, Vouchers

Julia Davis Watches Russian Television to Learn What the Russian People Are Told

By dianeravitch
December 18, 2022 //
13

I know that many readers of this blog are not on Twitter. One of the reasons I remain there is Julia Davis. She watches Russian television and reports on what she sees, with video clips. She writes for The Daily Beast and is creator of The Russian Media Monitor. @JuliaDavisNews

A few days ago, she wrote this:

Meanwhile in Russia: the host and his guest concur that Ukraine should be erased off the map and even the memory that it existed should be destroyed. The host says that Russia will always be an empire and being in a state of war is only natural for any empire of Russia’s size.

The text is accompanied by a video clip.

And this:

Meanwhile in Russia: in all seriousness, pundits and experts on Russian state TV argue whether President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky is the Antichrist or just a small demon.

And she retweeted a photo of Kiev last Christmas, two months before Putin’s brutal, pointless invasion:

She also retweeted a video of Mariupol last winter, its trees and buildings bedecked with festive lights, completely unaware that the city would be reduced to rubble in two months, all that beauty utterly destroyed, its people dead or dispersed.

Categories Accountability, Cruelty, International, Media

The Schools That Indoctrinate Students

By dianeravitch
December 18, 2022 //
53

The claim that public schools “indoctrinate” their students is an integral part of the rightwing attack on public schools . This is a canard, a bald-faced lie.

The rightwingers insist that any efforts to teach tolerance and acceptance of others is “indoctrination.” Teaching children the importance of justice, they say, is “woke.”

This is the mission of public schools: to teach children academic skills and knowledge, of course, but also to teach them to work with people who are different from them and their family.

Teaching children to live, work, and play with others and to respect others is important to the functioning of our democracy. We are a people of many diverse origins, different nationalities, different religions. One of the implicit functions of public schools is to help bind us together as one nation, one people who share civic values.

Do you know which schools truly indoctrinate students? Religious schools. That is one of the essential goals of religious schools. They teach the doctrines of their faith. That is why they exist.

Yet, driven by religious zealots, red states are draining public money from public schools for religious schools.

The latest movement is to allow religious schools to become charter schools, enabling them to access public funds for teaching their doctrine.

Politico wrote:

CHURCH V. STATE — Oklahoma’s departing attorney general just took a big step toward achieving a conservative education milestone.

— A state law that blocks religious institutions and private sectarian schools from public charter school programs is likely unconstitutional and should not be enforced, Attorney General John O’Connor and Solicitor General Zach West wrote in a non-binding legal opinion this month .

— Their 15-page memo leans on a trio of recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions that favored religious schools and won rapt attention from conservative school choice advocates and faith groups. Oklahoma Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt said the advisory opinion “rightfully defends parents, education freedom, and religious liberty in Oklahoma.” Newly-elected state Superintendent Ryan Walters called it “the right decision for Oklahomans.”

— “The policy implications are huge because this is the first state that is going to allow religious charter schools,” said Nicole Stelle Garnett , a University of Notre Dame law professor and influential religious charter school supporter who wants other states to follow Oklahoma’s lead . “The legal implications are huge because this is the first state that says that they have to,” she told Weekly Education.

— Now it’s time to see if faith-based Oklahoma institutions successfully apply for taxpayer support to create charter schools that teach religion as a doctrinal truth just like private schools do today, and if legislators will push to change state law.Also watch if legal authorities in other Republican-led states pen similar opinions.

— Those looming decisions and court fights will set the stage for renewed constitutional debates about the line between church and state.

Make no mistake: the bogus claim that public schools “indoctrinate” students is being used to advance the public funding of religious schools whose very mission is indoctrination.

Categories Bigotry, Education Industry, Extremism, Hoax, Privatization, Religion, Separation of church and state

Mississippi: Ethics Commission Rules that State Legislature Is Not a “Public Body”

By dianeravitch
December 17, 2022 //
20

Imagine a crusading news site in Mississippi, one of the poorest and most corrupt states in the nation. That news site is the Mississippi Free Press. It recently filed a complaint with the state ethics commission after it was excluded from a meeting of the GOP caucus, which is so large that it constitutes a quorum.

The ethics commission ruled that the state legislature is not a “public body.”

The Mississippi Ethics Commission held its likely final discussion on the Mississippi Free Press’ complaint against the State House of Representatives today, restating their disagreements over the commission’s decision to declare the Mississippi Legislature not a public body under the Open Meetings Act. The Zoom stream of today’s meeting had high attendance of up to 70 viewers at one time, including representatives of multiple media outlets.

The Mississippi Free Press first filed a complaint in April 2022, after this reporter was barred from a meeting of the House GOP Caucus at the Mississippi Legislature. The caucus, which contains 75 of the 122 members of the chamber, represents a quorum of the Legislature, and is a powerful, secretive driver of key legislative agendas. Later, attorney Rob McDuff filed an additional complaint on behalf of the Mississippi Free Press.

Last week, Ethics Commission Executive Director Tom Hood recommended that the commission rule in favor of the Mississippi Free Press, writing that “it is essential to the fundamental philosophy of the American constitutional form of representative government and to the maintenance of a democratic society that public business undertaken by a quorum of the House of Representatives be performed in an open and public manner.”

But the commission overruled his recommendation 5-3, substantially rejecting the argument that the House of Representatives constituted a public body, but pushing off a final decision to the debate this week.

Stephen Burrow, who argued against the Legislature’s inclusion in the Open Meetings Act, summed up the perspective of his five fellow commission members who voted against the Mississippi Free Press’ complaint. “(The Legislature is) constitutionally obligated to keep (its) doors open,” Burrow said, referring to Section 58 of the Mississippi Constitution. It states: “The doors of each House, when in session, or in committee of the whole, shall be kept open, except in cases which may require secrecy.”

Furthermore, Burrow said, he agreed with this reporter’s complaint in principle. “I think I speak for every member of this commission that we believe that the Legislature should be open, is required to be open and that meetings of the (House Republican) caucus should be open, but that’s not what’s before us.”

“What is before us is whether or not the Legislature chose to include itself within the definition of a public body, and it’s very plain to me that while they included (legislative) committees, they excluded other committees from this for whatever reason. When the Open Meetings Act was passed in 1975, they chose not to include themselves.”

Apparently, in the view of the Ethics Commission, the State Legislature is a private club. Sounds about right seeing how they take care of public needs.

Categories Accountability, Mississippi

Activists to Denver School Board: Grow Up and Take Charge!

By dianeravitch
December 17, 2022 //
1

Jeannie Kaplan is a former elected board member of the Denver Public Schools and a supporter of public schools. Alan Gottllieb is a journalist and a supporter of school choice.

They write:

A piece co-authored by the two of us will undoubtedly shock many people in the Denver education community because we frequently fall on opposite sides of the local education debate.

For example, Jeannie believes that the proliferation of charter schools is directly responsible for many of the challenges facing Denver Public Schools today. Alan sees charter schools as a net benefit to Denver’s families and students. Jeannie believes former superintendents Michael Bennet and Tom Boasberg did deep and permanent damage to DPS, with growing achievement gaps and too much emphasis placed on high-stakes testing. Alan counters that the district improved steadily, across all student groups, during their regimes.

But we, as Denver grandparents, are putting our differences aside for now because we agree on one key issue: DPS is seriously adrift, and it is time for the school board and the administration to get their acts together.

It’s irrelevant at this point to argue over which individual board members or district leaders are to blame for the current mess. The indisputable fact is that until the board can begin acting professionally, which includes providing clear direction to the superintendent, DPS will continue being a national embarrassment that gives the city as a whole a black eye.

No city in this country can hope to grow and thrive without at least a functioning public education system. Denver faces a host of challenges, to be sure, ranging from its failure to deal with the explosion in the number of people experiencing homelessness to crime to economic inequality.

But we believe that no issue is of greater consequence at this moment than the unraveling of DPS. To be sure, educators across the city are performing heroically on a daily basis. But given persistent dysfunction at the top, those educators are succeeding in spite of rather than because of district leadership.

Who could blame anyone a year after the current Denver school board took office for saying they’ve seen enough to have concluded the situation is hopeless with the current cast of characters in place?

There have been multiple instances of dysfunction, incompetence, and unseemly infighting. The board more often than not has proved unable to perform its core functions.

Combine this mess with the inept moves and general tone-deafness of Superintendent Alex Marrero and his team and what you’ve got is a school district in crisis, and distracted from addressing its most glaring issues.

But hope springs eternal. So, rather than despairing, we are going to suggest some ways out of the current morass.

One glimmer of hope is that we have a school board election coming up next November, in which three seats are up. Elections have a way of focusing incumbents’ attention. It gives them an opportunity to reflect upon, if not their shortcomings (that’s probably wishful thinking), at least their electoral vulnerabilities.

The public at large, as well as influential advocacy groups, need to make it crystal clear to the board that any incumbent who continues to feed the dysfunction without offering constructive solutions to the board and district’s issues will not be reelected.

They need to deliver those messages in stark terms beginning right now.

Next, individuals and groups on both sides of the Denver education ideological divide need to join forces, as we are doing here, to deliver a clear message to all board members, including those not up for reelection.

It’s a simple message:  Your behavior is unacceptable. You are not  serving our children. You are embarrassing yourselves and us. Get to work on what matters.

Surely there are enough shared interests that people passionate about public education can bridge their differences to deliver this message. It’s no exaggeration to say the future of the city hinges on its public education system improving, not spiraling into deep and permanent dysfunction.

Finally, Marrero needs to step forward and lead. This includes meeting one-on-one with his bosses, the seven board members, to tell them their behavior is making it all but impossible for him to get anything done.

Marrero has some public apologizing of his own to do as well. His mishandling of the school closure conversation last month left the district with no plan for addressing declining enrollment and related budget challenges. While some schools undoubtedly will have to close, it’s unclear how this will happen or when the decisions will be made. This uncertainty puts enormous stress on potentially affected communities.

Pressure on the district and board members over the lack of community closure conversations led six of seven board members to vote down Marrero’s ever-dwindling number of closure recommendations.

This provides a blueprint for how the citizens of Denver could force the board and the district to change course. Withering criticism from a diverse collection of voices could eventually prove too much for DPS to withstand.

People need to keep up the unrelenting pressure strategy across a host of issues. It is clear the board and the district aren’t going to fix themselves.

We’re going to have to show them the way. Or show them the door.

Categories Education Reform

David Herman: What If a Machine Writes a Better Essay Than a Student?

By dianeravitch
December 17, 2022 //
187

David Herman is a high school teacher. He wrote an essay in The Atlantic that asks whether the English essay is obsolete, replaced by a computer that does it better. The machine may write a well-worded essay, but we should not forget the warning from MIT Professor Les Perelman, who has studied writing machines extensively. The computers don’t have any knowledge. They don’t know any history. They ignore factual errors. Here is one of his critiques of the SAT essay, titled “Mass-Market Writing Assessments as Bullshit.” Or there is this nonsensical essay that he wrote for a machine. Is ChatGPT superior to the SAT machine reader? I will ask Dr. Perelman.

Teenagers have always found ways around doing the hard work of actual learning. CliffsNotes date back to the 1950s, “No Fear Shakespeare” puts the playwright into modern English, YouTube offers literary analysis and historical explication from numerous amateurs and professionals, and so on. For as long as those shortcuts have existed, however, one big part of education has remained inescapable: writing. Barring outright plagiarism, students have always arrived at that moment when they’re on their own with a blank page, staring down a blinking cursor, the essay waiting to be written.

Now that might be about to change. The arrival of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, a program that generates sophisticated text in response to any prompt you can imagine, may signal the end of writing assignments altogether—and maybe even the end of writing as a gatekeeper, a metric for intelligence, a teachable skill.

If you’re looking for historical analogues, this would be like the printing press, the steam drill, and the light bulb having a baby, and that baby having access to the entire corpus of human knowledge and understanding. My life—and the lives of thousands of other teachers and professors, tutors and administrators—is about to drastically change.

I teach a variety of humanities classes (literature, philosophy, religion, history) at a small independent high school in the San Francisco Bay Area. My classes tend to have about 15 students, their ages ranging from 16 to 18. This semester I am lucky enough to be teaching writers like James Baldwin, Gloria Anzaldúa, Herman Melville, Mohsin Hamid, Virginia Held. I recognize that it’s a privilege to have relatively small classes that can explore material like this at all. But at the end of the day, kids are always kids. I’m sure you will be absolutely shocked to hear that not all teenagers are, in fact, so interested in having their mind lit on fire by Anzaldúa’s radical ideas about transcending binaries, or Ishmael’s metaphysics in Moby-Dick.

To those students, I have always said: You may not be interested in poetry or civics, but no matter what you end up doing with your life, a basic competence in writing is an absolutely essential skill—whether it’s for college admissions, writing a cover letter when applying for a job, or just writing an email to your boss.

I’ve also long held, for those who are interested in writing, that you need to learn the basic rules of good writing before you can start breaking them—that, like Picasso, you have to learn how to reliably fulfill an audience’s expectations before you get to start putting eyeballs in people’s ears and things.I don’t know if either of those things is true anymore. It’s no longer obvious to me that my teenagers actually will need to develop this basic skill, or if the logic still holds that the fundamentals are necessary for experimentation.

Let me be candid (with apologies to all of my current and former students): What GPT can produce right now is better than the large majority of writing seen by your average teacher or professor. Over the past few days, I’ve given it a number of different prompts. And even if the bot’s results don’t exactly give you goosebumps, they do a more-than-adequate job of fulfilling a task.

Herman goes on, adding examples of essays that the writing machine produced.

What do you think?

Categories Creativity, Education Industry, Literacy
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