Dr. Mike DeGuire, a retired principal in the Denver Public Schools, has been keeping track of the money flowing into Denver’s mayoral race, which will be held tomorrow.

There are 17 candidates in the race. If no candidate wins a majority, there will be a runoff on June 6.

The two leading candidates are corporate education reformer Mike Johnston and Kelly Brough. Brough was CEO of the Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce and is supported by the business community. Johnston was endorsed by the Denver Post , which gives a tremendous boost to his campaign. He previously ran for Governor in 2018 but ran third behind Jared Polis. He ran for the Senate in 2020 but dropped out after former governor John Hickenlooper entered the race.

This is what Mike DeGuire discovered about the funding of Mike Johnston’s campaign:

Denver will select a new mayor for the first time in 12 years on April 4, 2023. Money has been pouring into the campaigns of Kelly Brough and Mike Johnston from rich developers, investors, and corporate executives. While Brough has received almost $1 million in independent expenditure money for her campaign, Mike Johnston has topped that amount by more than double, at $2.3 million as of April 2.

As reported in the Denverite on March 31, 2023, “The lion’s share of the reported contributions into Advancing Denver, the IE supporting Johnston, came from a group of out-of-state donors (between his campaign and his super PAC, 67% of his non-Fair Elections Fund contributions come from out of state): $779,804 from Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, who lives in California; $250,450 from Steve Mandel, a hedge fund billionaire who lives in Connecticut. Another $100,000 came from John Arnold, a former Enron trader from Texas known as the “King of Natural Gas,” who along with his wife gave to Advancing Denver. (Arnold was cleared of wrongdoing in the collapse of Enron.)”

The money from Hoffman, the Arnolds, and Mandel are only the beginning of outside support from rich donors. Yet why are the billionaires and millionaires giving so much to Johnston’s campaign? The article continues to state, “It’s unknown how they crossed paths, what issues exactly they worked on together in the past, and why they care specifically about Denver. Johnston “has a history of billionaire donors backing him through independent groups. Donors he likely met through his work on education reform issues, giving him a national profile.”

And there is the probable connection: Education Reform! Mike Johnston was the primary author of SB-191, Colorado’s controversial teacher evaluation bill, passed in 2010. He supported using testing to determine teacher evaluations and the closing of schools if students did not show improvements over time. His career has been heavily tied to the reform movement privatizers who have been working to promote increased expansion of charter schools. In addition to his work on the infamous teacher evaluation SB191 bill, he serves on the Board and co-founded New Leaders for New schools, an organization established to teach” a pro-privatization and business focused ideology to prospective school leaders.” He also participated in the Aspen-Pahara Institute fellowship training in 2012, which is designed to provide participants with strategies to spread the message of corporate reform in public schools.

While his role as Mayor would not directly enable him to impact the Denver Public schools, there is no question that he wants to be involved in the city’s school system. His responses to an Educate Denver survey indicate his desire to influence and possibly control how the district makes decisions on governance and other policies. In response to one of the questions from the Educate Denver survey, he stated, “As Mayor, my goal is to work closely with teachers, administrators, and parents to make sure the City is supporting DPS while using my position to push for better outcomes.”

Over the past decade, Johnston developed connections with a number of hedge fund investors and corporate executives who are committed to privatizing the public education system. WHO are they?

Reid Hoffman donated $904,678 to Johnston’s campaign. Hoffman is worth $2–3 billion. In 2011, he supported pro-charter candidates in Louisiana and he gave similar monetary support in 2018 in the same state.

Steve Mandel donated $250,000. He is worth $3.6 billion. For years, Mandel has given large amounts of money to candidates who support charter school expansion.

John and Laura Arnold donated $99,000.Their net worth is $3.3 billion. In the last decade, they have given millions to candidates across the country who support charter schools and who will push to privatize education.

Kent Thiry donated $300,000. His net worth is $44 million. Over the last ten years, he has given thousands of dollars to candidates who are committed to expanding charter schools and opposing teacher unions.

Reuben Monger donated $100,000. He is a former director of Stand for Children, an organization focused on spreading charter schools in cities across the U.S.

Lawrence Berger donated $100,000. He is the CEO of Amplify, a curriculum and assessment company worth millions which has been supporting charter schools as it sells its education technology systems to schools across the country.

Josh Bekenstein donated $50,000. He is worth over $6 billion. He is the co-chairman of Bain Capital, and has contributed to candidates and referendums supporting charter school expansion in several states.

Katherine Bradley donated $25,000. She is on the Board of Kipp Charter schools, the largest charter school chain in the country. She donated to candidates supporting charters for decades.

Emma Bloomberg and David Youngren each donated $10,000, and for years, they donated to candidates who want to expand the charter network schools.

Other investors who represent the hedge fund industry and who seem to be looking to make profits in the Denver mayoral race include: Art Reimer, a private wealth advisor with Raintree Solutions, donated $100,000, and Eric Resnick, CEO for KSL Capital Partners,another private equity firm, donated $50,000, and he was also part of the Vail Valley Foundation, where he knew Johnston. There are almost ten other investors who have contributed $5–10,000 to his Advancing Denver IE.

Denver citizens should think twice about this blatant monetary influence of wealthy investors who are trying to buy the mayoral election for Johnston.

Johnston is clearly the favorite in the race due to his Denver Post endorsement.

Mike Johnston began his career in Teach for America, then became a principal, then won a seat in the State Senate. He is a solid corporate reformer.

I was in Denver in 2010 and was scheduled to debate State Senator Mike Johnston before a room full of civic leaders. He had proposed a law to evaluate teachers based on the test scores of their students, with 50% of their evaluation based on test scores. The debate didn’t happen because Johnston was delayed. As I concluded my remarks, he arrived, jubilant that his legislation (SB191) had just passed. He then spoke about the dramatic transformation that his legislation would bring about. Bad teachers and bad principals would be exposed and fired.

In the future, Johnston claimed, all of Colorado would have great teachers, great principals, great schools, thanks to the law he put in place.

None of those bold promises came true. As his reform ally Van Schoales wrote in Education Week in 2017, the reformers were gravely disappointed to discover that most teachers in the state were not teaching tested subjects. Every single one of the state’s 268 charter schools waived out of the evaluation plan.

Educators were overwhelmingly against SB191. They knew something that the reformers didn’t know: student test scores measure not teacher quality, but the students in the classroom. Teachers in affluent districts got high scores; teachers teaching the most vulnerable students (SPED and ELL) tended not to see big test score gains or none at all.

The results were appalling:

Colorado Department of Education data released in February show that the distribution of teacher effectiveness in the state looks much as it did before passage of the bill. Eighty-eight percent of Colorado teachers were rated effective or highly effective, 4 percent were partially effective, 7.8 percent of teachers were not rated, and less than 1 percent were deemed ineffective. In other words, we leveraged everything we could and not only didn’t advance teacher effectiveness, we created a massive bureaucracy and alienated many in the field.

Broken promises. But no matter. The money is flowing in, and Mike Johnston—reformer extraordinaire—is likely to be the next mayor of Denver.

Categories Education Reform

Illinois: District Fires Outstanding Teacher Because of Book She Ordered

By dianeravitch

April 3, 2023 //

While traveling in the Midwest, I visited Illinois State University, which has an excellent teacher education program. A leader of that program recently wrote me while in a state of distress. One of her best students, she said, was just fired by her district. Why? One parent objected to a book in her classroom.

Who will want to teach when teachers’ lives and reputations can be jeopardized by one angry parent? Maybe that is the point: Demonize public schools and their teachers to build support for vouchers, where uncertified teachers are hired and the Bible is the beginning and end of all knowledge.

Here is an excerpt from the letter I received:

Tonight, I’m writing to you to share the story of the most amazing teacher I have ever worked with in my nearly 25 years in education–except she is no longer a teacher as of last Thursday. I know you have committed your career to fighting injustices like hers, so it is my hope that you might amplify her story in the fight against misinformation and teacher defamation.

As a teacher educator at Illinois State University, I met Sarah Bonner 10 years ago when she was in my action research capstone class as the final requirement for her master’s degree. During the year I worked with her, I was struck by her approach to education, and I encouraged her to continue working toward a doctorate degree. Since that time, I have had the opportunity to work closely with her, co-designing a framework that paired literature and inquiry as a way to expand 8th grade students’ in rural Illinois worldviews; co-teaching alongside her to maintain my connection to the classroom and to continue to evolve our work; guiding her in her dissertation work where she connected with teachers who were interested in transforming their own teaching; watching her mentor emerging, new, and experienced teachers; and witnessing the blossoming of students under her guidance–especially those who are often marginalized in largely conservative, small schools. I can honestly say that I have never had the opportunity to work with a more compassionate, innovative, and thought-provoking teacher. She’s by far a better teacher than I was when I was still in the middle school classroom, and working alongside her has pushed me to be an even better teacher educator than I was before.

For this reason, I cannot begin to describe the devastation that I experienced when I learned less than two weeks ago that not only was she being attacked by our local conservative “news” station, but that her district advised that she seek union representation to represent her while they investigated the story. She received this news on Wednesday, March 15. By Friday March 17 she learned that she was being put on paid leave the next week so they could investigate–and they hadn’t even talked with her yet.

What was the story? As a part of a book tasting day, Sarah consulted NCTE, ALA, and Good Reads to find award-winning and notable books that would reflect her students’ interests–and checked out nearly 100 books from the public library. One of those books was Juno Dawson’s “This Book Is Gay.” A student picked up the book, a sex education book for LGBTQ+ youth, snapped some pictures of its pages, and sent those pages home. Rather than approaching Sarah with questions or concerns, this child’s parents alerted the media outlet, and a witch-hunt began.

Suddenly, the wild and false allegations began: Sarah was requiring this book; the book was a regular part of her classroom library; she was sharing pornography with children; she was grooming children. And then, they went to her class website, which shared a link to Common Sense Media’s Netflix Documentary page, which so happened to feature Moneyshot, and now she was encouraging students to watch and learn about porn. Ironically, this film hadn’t even been released when she was last in the classroom. The story just kept growing until this award-winning teacher realized that she could not go back to that community again. And so, by this past Thursday, she had officially resigned. In just over a week, a teacher’s reputation, livelihood, and life was completely upended.

Sarah is fortunate brcause she’s got the deep knowledge and experience to bounce back and counter the current narrative. Unfortunately, this kind of experience is not unique, and too often teachers who aren’t equipped to handle it take huge hits. It’s impacting their mental health, their careers, their entire livelihoods. We have a narrative around a teacher shortage. We don’t have a teacher shortage—we have a shortage of respect and support for teachers. And we live in Illinois, a liberal state that requires LGBTQ+ history and contributions to be taught by 8th grade. Too many people are watching the antics happening in states like Florida and thinking those are outliers. They are not. Sarah is an award-winning teacher. She is a leader in and on the executive board of the National Council Teachers of English. And yet, she will no longer impact the lives of so many students.

Democracy is in peril as we continue to bow to pressures to restrict the books students can read. We cannot normalize allowing a few loud voices’ the power to destroy careers and lives. I have attached the statement she wrote and read to her board upon her resignation.

Here is Sarah Bonner’s statement to her school board:

Thank you to the Heyworth Board and Administrative team for allowing me to speak this evening. If you know anything about me as a professional, you know that this is not the way I would have chosen to be here tonight. Twenty years ago when I was given the keys to my very first classroom, I knew teaching was my calling. And, while I’ve taught in previous school districts over the years, Heyworth was the place that allowed me to become the professional I was meant to be.

Throughout my time here, I earned both my Masters and Doctorate degrees with the help of district tuition waivers. I became the National Council of Teachers of English (or NCTE) Media Literacy Teacher of the Year in 2018 along with the national Outstanding Middle Level Educator award the following year. I wrote and published a book through Teachers College Press to further the teaching field. Additionally, I hosted and supported numerous future teachers from Illinois State University as they began their journey into the classroom. Lastly – most importantly – I had the opportunity to connect with the best kids I’ve ever worked with in my career.

Our community – or even our nation – may never know the gravity of what teachers bear on a regular basis. For me, I not only worked tirelessly on designing and cultivating meaningful learning experiences for my students, but I also worked hard to maintain healthy relationships with students and families, upheld weekly and transparent communication among all shareholders, contributed regularly to the junior high teacher team, worked a second teaching job at Illinois State University to better support my family, served as the Middle Level Section Steering Committee Chairperson for NCTE, wrote a doctoral dissertation, published a book for teachers, along with being a partner, a mother, and a human wrestling with being newly diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.

With all of this weighing heavily on my plate, I depended on national communities like the American Library Association and NCTE as well as reading communities like Goodreads to help generate texts that engage all readers with a vast collection of interests. The activity my students and I participated in last week was made up of close to 100 different books recommended from these spaces. Given the nature of the lesson compressed with a heavy list of responsibilities, vetting each and every single text for explicit details was impossible. Should the book in question be available to students? Yes. However, should this specific book have been a part of the 100 choices during this class activity? No. Simply put, the title was on the ALA Rainbow Reading Awardee list and I picked it along with a few others because I knew students in my class had interests. To make students, families, community members feel unsafe was never the intention of my decision making.

While I’m saddened by how the events have played out over the last week, there’s a piece of me that isn’t surprised. Being an innovator in teaching means that boundaries, perspectives, and ideas need to be pushed. When I realized years ago that our kids who would receive these amazing scholarships to these Big 10 schools were coming back the following year because they couldn’t adjust to life outside of a rural small town, I knew I needed to do something. I knew I needed to disrupt traditional learning practices to embody the needs of today’s world. Our kids deserve learning experiences that prepare them for our world and not just our town. However, being a changemaker often comes with a cost…especially if you’re one of the only ones willing to take risks and think differently.

London’s favorite soccer coach, Ted Lasso – the man who makes us all believe in the power of believe – said it best ”You know, people have underestimated me my entire life. And for years, I never understood why. It used to really bother me. But then one day, I saw this quote by Walt Whitman. It said, “Be curious, not judgmental.” All of a sudden it hits me. Of all those that used to belittle me, not a single one of them was curious. They thought they had everything all figured out. So they judged everything, and they judged everyone. And I realized that their underestimating me… who I was had nothing to do with it. ‘Cause if they were curious, they would’ve asked questions.”
As I leave here tonight, I hope you will remember a few things:

Sometimes things need to break in order to rebuild it stronger. Encourage
curiosity. As you enter a space of healing, I hope the district and Heyworth community can find a place to listen and understand that you all want the best for our kids. Our teachers especially deserve to be heard and questioned in responsible ways.
Remember to support your teachers moving forward. If I were them at this point, I would feel scared, unsafe, and paralyzed knowing that I could be next. Our teacher community needs reassurance that innovation is still supported and protected as time moves on.
And, remember the good I brought to our kids and community by taking innovative risks in Language Arts. While I’ve been here, I have witnessed students stand up for other students with disabilities, fight against racism, organize trash clean ups, create documentaries that tell the untold stories of their community, advocate for safe spaces, strengthen their own beliefs, shape their own personal identities, and critically think about the world around them. With the work I’ve been able to do with students, I’m reminded on a daily basis that our kids will be the hope our future needs.

The Heyworth school district has lost a teacher who is dedicated to their children and her profession.

Categories Accountability, Censorship, Creativity, Democracy, Extremism, Illinois, Teacher Shortage, Teachers and Teaching

Katherine Marsh: Why Children Don’t Fall in Love with Reading

By dianeravitch

April 3, 2023 //

Katherine Marsh is an award-winning novelist who writes for children in grades fifth-through-eighth. At that age in the 1980s, she remembers falling in love with books. But she knows that children today are not reading for fun as much as they used to. NAEP data say so; parents as well. She knows that the ubiquity of cell phones, the Internet, abd television explain some of that decline in reading.

But she believes there is a problem with the way children are taught reading. No, she’s not talking about phonics and how children learn to read. She refers to the pedagogical approach that is required by the Common Core. children in school are taught to analyze what they read. This technical mindset, she believes, kills the joy of reading.

She writes in The Atlantic:

What I remember most about reading in childhood was falling in love with characters and stories; I adored Judy Blume’s Margaret and Beverly Cleary’s Ralph S. Mouse. In New York, where I was in public elementary school in the early ’80s, we did have state assessments that tested reading level and comprehension, but the focus was on reading as many books as possible and engaging emotionally with them as a way to develop the requisite skills. Now the focus on reading analytically seems to be squashing that organic enjoyment. Critical reading is an important skill, especially for a generation bombarded with information, much of it unreliable or deceptive. But this hyperfocus on analysis comes at a steep price: The love of books and storytelling is being lost.

This disregard for story starts as early as elementary school. Take this requirement from the third-grade English-language-arts Common Core standard, used widely across the U.S.: “Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text, distinguishing literal from nonliteral language.” There is a fun, easy way to introduce this concept: reading Peggy Parish’s classic, Amelia Bedelia, in which the eponymous maid follows commands such as “Draw the drapes when the sun comes in” by drawing a picture of the curtains. But here’s how one educatorexperienced in writing Common Core–aligned curricula proposes this be taught: First, teachers introduce the concepts of nonliteral and figurative language. Then, kids read a single paragraph from Amelia Bedelia and answer written questions.

For anyone who knows children, this is the opposite of engaging: The best way to present an abstract idea to kids is by hooking them on a story. “Nonliteral language” becomes a whole lot more interesting and comprehensible, especially to an 8-year-old, when they’ve gotten to laugh at Amelia’s antics first. The process of meeting a character and following them through a series of conflicts is the fun part of reading. Jumping into a paragraph in the middle of a book is about as appealing for most kids as cleaning their room.

But as several educators explained to me, the advent of accountability laws and policies, starting with No Child Left Behind in 2001, and accompanying high-stakes assessments based on standards, be they Common Core or similar state alternatives, has put enormous pressure on instructors to teach to these tests at the expense of best practices. Jennifer LaGarde, who has more than 20 years of experience as a public-school teacher and librarian, described how one such practice—the class read-aloud—invariably resulted in kids asking her for comparable titles. But read-alouds are now imperiled by the need to make sure that kids have mastered all the standards that await them in evaluation, an even more daunting task since the start of the pandemic. “There’s a whole generation of kids who associate reading with assessment now,” LaGarde said.

Under the duress of Commin Core, students are analyzing passages without reading the whole book. They are getting read to do the same on the tests. This is a sure fire way to make reading a chore, not a pleasure.

The architect of the Common Core standards, David Coleman, used to claim all sorts of miraculous things that would happen, if everyone taught the way he wanted. Test scores would rise, achievement gaps would close, etc. in the decade after Commin Core was introduced in 2010, none of those miracles came to pass.

Coleman believed that children needed to interpret what was put in front of them, without context. Understand the four corners of the text in front of them. This may make sense for a test, where the only thing in front of the student is a short passage, but it’s no way to read for pleasure.

Worse, this approach is a sure fire way to turn reading into a dull exegesis of language, not into a source of joy.

Categories Childhood, Common Core, Creativity, Curriculum, Education Reform, Failure, Literacy, Literature, Real Education, Students

Professor Amy Wax Makes Racist, Homophobic, Sexist Statements: Should She Be Fired?

By dianeravitch

April 2, 2023 //

The New York Times published an article about a tenured professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, Amy Wax, who has frequently made statements that are racist, homophobic, sexist, xenophobic, the whole range of prejudices, not what you expect of someone who supposedly teaches students that everyone is equal in the eyes of the law.

Amy Wax, a law professor, has said publicly that “on average, Blacks have lower cognitive ability than whites,” that the country is “better off with fewer Asians” as long as they tend to vote for Democrats, and that non-Western people feel a “tremendous amount of resentment and shame.”

At the University of Pennsylvania, where she has tenure, she invited a white nationalist to speak to her class. And a Black law student who had attended UPenn and Yale said that the professor told her she “had only become a double Ivy ‘because of affirmative action,’” according to the administration.

Professor Wax has denied saying anything belittling or racist to students, and her supporters see her as a truth teller about affirmative action, immigration and race. They agree with her argument that she is the target of censorship and “wokeism” because of her conservative views.

All of which poses a conundrum for the University of Pennsylvania: Should it fire Amy Wax?

The university is now moving closer to answering just that question. After long resisting the call of students, the dean of the law school, Theodore W. Ruger, has taken a rare step: He has filed a complaint and requested a faculty hearing to consider imposing a “major sanction” on the professor…

For years, Mr. Ruger wrote in his 12-page complaint, Professor Wax has shown “callous and flagrant disregard” for students, faculty and staff, subjecting them to “intentional and incessant racist, sexist, xenophobic and homophobic actions and statements.”

The complaint said she has violated the university’s nondiscrimination policies and “standards of professional competence.”

The article goes on to cite the many times that Professor Wax has offended women, Blacks, gays, foreign students, or anyone else who does not agree with her idyllic view of the culture of the 1950s. Implicitly she means an era when Blacks were subservient, women were compliant wives, gays were in the closet, and foreigners were tourists.

What should the university do?

…many free speech groups, including the Academic Freedom Alliance, PEN America and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, have criticized the dean and said that Professor Wax should not be fired because of her public statements.

My view: She should not be fired. Perhaps she should be admonished for behavior that is insulting to students, but her academic freedom and tenure protect her job.

Academic freedom protects not just the views that one likes, not just the views of the majority, but the views you hate. I might wish that Professor Wax were open-minded and wish that she had a keener sense of humanity, but I defend her right to be offensive, inconsiderate, and obnoxious. Students are not required to take her courses. Those who take her courses should challenge her views if they disagree.

But academic freedom must prevail.

Voltaire: “I may not agree with what you have to say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

Categories Academic Freedom, Accountability, Bigotry, Civil Rights, Democracy, Education Reform, Freedom of Speech, Higher Education, Language, Pennsylvania

Chicago: Vote for Brandon Johnson for Mayor

By dianeravitch

April 2, 2023 //

Julie Vassilatos, a parent activist and blogger in Chicago, writes here about the case for Brandon Johnson. She and others have written passionately against Paul Vallas, but here she explains why Brandon Johnson is well prepared to serve as Mayor. Because of his knowledge and experience, he not only knows the city’s budgetary issues well, but he is able to address the root causes of crime and the real needs of students.

She writes:

Friends, so many of us have been carrying on about the dangers of Paul Vallas so incessantly, you’d be forgiven for thinking that he’s running for mayor of Chicago unopposed.

But Vallas does have an opponent—one who is talented, thoughtful, experienced, and a real true Chicagoan raising his family on the west side: Brandon Johnson.

Johnson is getting a lot of heat from Vallas and his supporters right now. No lesser a personage than Darren Bailey, defeated far-right candidate for IL governor and unofficial endorser of Vallas, has announced that if Johnson is elected, it will be a “dark day” for Chicago. Yes. A dark day indeed. Get it?

I’m pretty sure Darren Bailey fans get it.

Then there’s FOP president/disgraced cop John Catanzara, who foresees that 1000 cops will walk off the job if Johnson wins, and there will be blood in the streets.

Vallas himself, who routinely speaks of Johnson in kind of Godzilla terms, has called him and the CTU a destructive force wreaking devastation on the city.

In addition to its coded race language, this election has rather inflated rhetoric.

I’m trying to keep mine toned down, or at least backed up by evidence. While it’s hard to pin “generational” devastation on Johnson or the CTU, it’s actually possible to do this for Vallas. He has set many destructive policies in motion in urban areas globally that have left decades of harm in their wake. Also financial calamity. But I and many others have told you all this over and over again. And this post is not about that guy.

This post is about Brandon Johnson.

Truth to tell, at the outset of the race I was slow to warm up to Johnson the candidate. But then I remembered that he was at the front lines of a struggle I will never forget—the 2013 mass school closures. So many folks did all we could do to try and stop that, well, generationally damaging policy. And those who led the way in that effort? I’d probably follow them into a fire.

But what about Brandon Johnson now? What are his credentials? Haven’t you, like me, read all that stuff about how he has no experience? How he’s never managed a budget? How he seems (unfathomably) to like crime and together with CTU wants our city to be unsafe, because….because….well, because reasons?

Well, maybe we need to look a little deeper than the media/social media blah blah blah.

In a recent mayoral forum Vallas asserted that “Brandon has run nothing.” Since Vallas hasn’t really lived here much I guess he may not know that Johnson has served on the Cook County Board of Commissioners since 2018 and has managed a great deal, including the $8.75B Cook County budget. The Cook County Board has wide ranging responsibilities, and if you’ve always wondered but never known what the Board does, you should take this time to educate yourself, starting at the Cook County Board website. Here’s a basic summary:

The Cook County Board of Commissioners oversees County operations and approves the budget of elected County officials including the Assessor, Board of Review Commissioners, County Clerk, Clerk of the Circuit Court, Recorder of Deeds, Sheriff, States Attorney and Treasurer.

The Commissioners also serve as the Board of the Cook County Forest Preserve District, a special purpose taxing district. The Board also sets policy, levies taxes, passes ordinances, approves all county purchases over $10,000, and adopts the annual budget for the entire county government.

That 2023 Cook County Budget was praised by the Civic Federation:

The Civic Federation supports the Cook County FY2023 Executive Budget Recommendation of $8.75 billion because it reflects strong financial management and puts the County in a good position moving forward post-pandemic. The County’s FY2023 proposed budget includes a strong level of reserves and positive revenue projections, without any increases in taxes or fees.

The budget gap is smaller than it’s been in years, supplemental payments to the pension fund have been made for the eighth year in a row, and the County’s fiscal position is “strong…following robust revenue performance and built-up reserves.” And observe that there are in this budget, no tax increases. (Here I note we can be grateful to Board President Toni Preckwinkle who has shepherded this budget for 13 years. And I note further, she has endorsed Johnson.)

Now let’s review the budgets Vallas has overseen.

In Philadelphia, Vallas managed a $2B budget and left a surprise $73M deficit on his way out the door. In the Louisiana Recovery District his budget was $176M. He got an extra $1.8B to work with from FEMA, and before he was done with the NOLA job he wandered repeatedly over to Haiti, missing weeks at a time of work in New Orleans (that’s beside the point, but I just thought you should know). And in Bridgeport CT, his budget was $232M. Of course he was pushed out of that job before he could really do much financial damage there.

For those of you keeping score, Vallas hasn’t ever drafted, managed, or implemented a budget even close to the size that Brandon Johnson has worked with as a member of the Cook County Board.

Before his County Board days, Johnson was a teacher. He taught middle school social studies at Jenner from 2007 to 2010 (years when most of his students were able to watch, right from school windows, wrecking balls demolishing their homes as the city brought down public housing), and then at Westinghouse for a year. He then became a CTU organizer and the leader of its Black Caucus. In those years he had a front row view on lots of turmoil in the district: school closures and turnarounds via the failed Renaissance 2010 initiative, the loss of Black teachers in the classroom as a result of closures and CPS policy choices, the 2012 teacher strike, the 2013 mass school closures, a churn of district CEOs, some of whom ended up in prison, illegal special education cuts, and rapid charter expansion.

While Johnson was organizing teachers and collaborating with parents in response to district policies that were crushing schools and services (and I do mean that literally, with at least one occasion of bulldozers bringing down a school library on a day when parents were instead expecting a meeting), he lived the experience of the folks who’ve been at the mercy of “education reform” for decades. He saw first hand what disinvestment has done to CPS students—resulting in teacher cuts, special ed cuts, after-school cuts, nursing cuts, and the whittling away of libraries, down to only 90 remaining in a total of 513 schools. He’s seen the violent legacy of closing the community anchor that is a public school. He’s watched, along with all of us, poor choices at the top—everything from grifting, self-dealing, and bribery, to no-bid contracts and cronyism—and how those things bust budgets and destroy trust. He stood with community members on a hunger strike to save a school, then joined in it himself. He’s seen the negative academic and social impacts of excessive testing, privatization, and vouchers. He’s seen these things from the perspective of 25,000 teachers and hundreds of thousands of public school families.

Vallas, meanwhile, has been the man who set those policies. He set them in motion right here in Chicago in 1995, and traveled the country and globe continuing to implement them from then until now.

He may talk a good game about Doing It All For The Children, but the fact of the matter is, Vallas has never had to stick around and watch the long term impacts of his policy decisions on The Children. Those impacts have caused years of student protests in Chile. Have kept special ed kids struggling for spots in schools in New Orleans. Have left Philadelphia in “constant crisis mode.” Led directly to our own CPS budget crisis.

Brandon Johnson has large scale urban management experience with a Board that’s closing budget gaps and overseeing a vast array of county services. He manages a bigger budget right now than Vallas ever has. And Johnson has face-to-face, personal experience with the folks who live and work and raise their children in Chicago. His years as a teacher and with CTU have given him the perspective of individuals and families on a hyper-local basis. His work has encompassed both the broad span of countywide planning and management, and the particular lens on particular people and particular struggles.

Brandon Johnson is obviously qualified for the job.

You can check out how his qualifications and vision work themselves into a platform on his website. It’s practical and passionate and outlines a vision for the city that benefits everyone, even those struggling folks who never seem to catch a break from city leaders.

Johnson understands we cannot solve violence without dealing with its root causes; more policing, surveilling, and arresting alone won’t do the trick. We can’t fix the schools without listening to communities, parents, and educators; we must reject the failed status quo of Vallas’s “education reform.” And we can’t expect our teachers and police to solve poverty and homelessness all on their own.

The choice we have before us, it seems to me, is whether we’re going to listen to the incessant hype about a “fix-it man”—who has never fixed anything. Or dig a little deeper ourselves and see that the mayor we need has been here all along, working to make our city better for his entire career, with poise and passion.

Are we going to listen to voices that allude to “dark days” and blood baths in the streets? Or are we going to listen to a man who has a vision for his city rooted in love and practical experience?

You pick, Chicago.

Categories Accountability, Character, Charter Schools, Chicago, Closing schools, Community Schools, Courage, Creativity, Democracy, Education Reform, Elections, Funding, Supporting public schools, Vallas, Paul

John Thompson: Why Are Big Corporations Avoiding Oklahoma?

By dianeravitch

April 2, 2023 //

Historian and retired teacher John Thompson updates us on the toxic MAGA politics that is undermining the state’s economy and the future of the state.

Republican politicians are competing to see who can be more extremist, more MAGA than the other far-right zanies. Although an unreleased poll conducted by a Republican pollster found that Oklahomans are overwhelmingly opposed to vouchers, the Governor, the state commissioner of education, and legislators are competing to see who can offer the biggest voucher and who is most indifferent to public schools. Quality of education is a lure for corporations; indifference is not.

Similarly, MAGA Republicans are competing to denounce corporations that are committed to socially responsible policies regarding ESG (environmental, social, and corporate governance). Corporations don’t usually like government interfering in their internal policy making, especially those attempting to present a public face of social responsibility.

Thompson writes:

Monday marked the beginning of the second half of the Oklahoma legislative session. The first half was largely dominated by the MAGAs rhetoric, and led by Gov. Kevin Stitt, Secretary of Education Ryan Walters, and the House leader Charles McCall, as they tried to be tougher than Ron DeSantis and the other extremists. But the top headlines, recently, have shifted to the state’s failure to persuade Panasonic and Volkswagen to make major investments in Oklahoma.

On National Public Radio, Sen. Pro Temp Greg Treat sounded like a timid version of old school, adult Republicans. Treat seemed to be pushing back on the $300 million House voucher bill (called a tax credit), saying we need to protect funding for the 90% of students who will remain in public schools. But, the House bill then advanced in the Senate Education Committee with 100% of Republican votes. Perhaps the timid nature of Treat’s comments about pushing back on the House’s demands foreshadowed the Senate increase in the size of tax credits (vouchers) by 50% per student.

Although the Senate committee increased the size of the teacher pay raise, it also provided steps towards Ryan Walters’ merit pay for 10% of educators, which would promote even more of a reward and punish school culture.

Democrat Sen. Julia Kirt explained that the private school tax credit cap is $250,000 which is almost ten times as great as the average Oklahoma wage. Only 3% of taxpayers would hit that limit, so “almost any Oklahoman could claim $7,500 tax credit for private school.”

Moreover, education supporter Greg Jennings gave examples of two private religious schools that are being constructed which could undermine the survival of two rural districts (serving 3,800 students combined). Even when the goal was $5,000 vouchers, these religious schools showed how private schools could be replicated, with serious negative consequences, in rural areas. The plan is to expand from pre-k to 8^th grade by 2024. Students would be taught a “Christian Based Education.”

In other words, the MAGA culture wars may have undermined corporate investments seeking to create good-paying, 21^st century jobs, but vouchers could spark a boom in Christian Nationalism.

Then, Treat addressed the loss of the Volkswagen plant to Canada and called for a study as to why it happened. He compared it to the bipartisan study which launched Oklahoma City’s growth in the 1990s after United Airlines rejected the city’s bid because of our lack of social, cultural and educational institutions. As the Oklahoman’s Ben Felder reported, despite a $700 million incentive, Volkswagen chose to invest in Canada with its “strong ESG practices,” rather than the mindset expressed by Jonathan Small, the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs’president:

Not only do ESG policies penalize energy production to prop up “green’ companies, but they also pressure businesses to take stances on non-economic issues such as redefining gender, promoting Critical Race Theory, and abortion tourism.

Surely, even the most extreme MAGAs know that those beliefs would make investors cautious about coming to Oklahoma after the state’s “Legislature and governor banned state investment funds from working with companies that utilize ESG policies.” After all, Stitt had said, “don’t expect support from us unless you reject ESG.”

Neither would investors be encouraged by State Treasurer Todd Russ, who “issued letters to more than 160 companies giving them an April 1 deadline to confirm they don’t ‘boycott energy companies.’” Russ further explained:

I took office on January 9 and began compiling a list of companies, banks, and other entities that act against Oklahoma’s interests because of their ESG stance. … It is my responsibility to ensure Oklahomans’ tax dollars will not be used to enrich organizations that act counter to our taxpayers’ interests and our values.

Getting back to Monday’s education debate, Democratic Sen. Carri Hicks said, “We’re asking taxpayers to fund a second school system when we haven’t funded the first.” She then explained, “Struggling schools mirror struggling communities. Oklahoma legislature has ignored the urgent need to address the 60 percent of Oklahoma’s children who live in poverty in our public schools.” Then she closed with a message that Treat should understand. “When we are looking at removing additional funding that could be invested in all of our kids’ futures — I think this is a misstep.”

And this brings back Treat’s call for remembering the lessons learned in the 1990s after Oklahoma City lost in the effort to attract 1,000 United Airlines jobs. During the deindustrialization spurred by the Reagan administration’s Supply Side Economics, Oklahoma received national and international attention for scandals ranging from the bank and saving and loans collapses; the Housing and Urban Development and County Commissioners scandals; and corruption in juvenile justice, prison, and county jails. Even the CEO of the Chamber of Commerce acknowledged that Oklahoma City “was a really destitute place to live.”

It took a two-pronged, collective response to turn Oklahoma City around. The first was bipartisan campaigns to raise taxes and rebuild abandoned neighborhoods; invest in parks, libraries, and sports and cultural institutions; and invest in public schools. As Sam Anderson of the New York Times Magazine explained:

After all of that sacrifice — the grind of municipal meetings and penny taxes and planning boards, the dust and noise and uncertainty of construction, the horror of 1995 — the little city in the middle of No Man’s Land has finally arrived on the world stage.

I would add in regard to the horror of the Murrah Building bombing on the second anniversary of the Waco tragedy, with the loss of 86 lives, nobody bought Timothy McVeigh’s justification for terrorism as a response to federal intervention in Waco.

Finally, I guess it’s is too much to ask of Treat et.al, but if we want to thrive in the 21^stcentury, don’t we need a bipartisan rejection of Trump’s beginning his presidential campaign on the 30^th anniversary of Waco with dog whistle calls for violence? Why can’t Republicans distance themselves from Trump’s supporters like the Proud Boys who cite Waco as justification for more violence? And why do they support a candidate who has “vowed retribution;” proclaimed, “PROTEST, TAKE OUR NATION BACK!;” and warned of “potential death & destruction” if he is prosecuted?

So, when Republican leaders like Treat are reluctant to speak out against ideology-driven policies that they know will fail, the damage from that timidity – though significant – is not the biggest problem. It’s their silence in the face of attacks on our democratic systems that should be the #1 concern.

Categories Accountability, Economy, Education Reform, Extremism, Funding, Ignorance, Oklahoma, Trump

Jan Resseger: Consumerism Is Destroying the Commons

By dianeravitch

April 2, 2023 //

Jan Resseger spent her waking years as a warrior for social justice in her church. Now she writes a brilliant and thoughtful blog.

Her recent post made me reflect on the fact that groups like “Moms for Liberty” and “Parents Defending Education” create turmoil and chaos over the issue of the day (masking, vaccines, school closings, trans kids, books about race or gender identity), then use the issues and conflict they created to demand vouchers to send their kids to schools with like-minded parents.

These Astroturf groups are funded handsomely by the Walton Family Foundation, Charles Koch, Betsy DeVos, and other billionaires to act as shock troops for their paymasters.

Jan Resseger wrote recently:

I cannot even keep track of all the press coverage I have seen in the past couple of weeks about school privatization proposals under discussion in the state legislatures. And in almost all of the articles I read, the move to privatize schools is accompanied by descriptions of culture war fights about book banning, interference with curricular standards, and elimination of programs that encourage “diversity, equity, and inclusion” in public schools and public universities. I have a stack of very recent articles about Florida, Ohio, Virginia, Texas, Missouri, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, and New Hampshire, and I am sure I have missed others.

What is the cause of today’s attack on public schools and the kind of programming that many of us believe is essential to help our children live well in our diverse society?

In her Washington Post piece about a battle between two parent groups, Concerned Taxpayersand Support Education, in Mentor, Ohio——Hannah Natanson blames COVID for the controversy: COVID Changed Parents’ View of Schools—and Ignited the Education Culture Wars.

And in a powerful report from the Network for Public Education, Merchants of Deception, political scientist Maurice Cunningham identifies the role of Astroturf parents’ groups that present themselves as though they are a spontaneous welling up of parent outrage. Even though financial support for these groups is untraceable dark money, here is how Cunningham tracks evidence that these supposedly local groups are well connected from place to place and supported by powerful, far-right political interests: “First we should watch for groups that have “grown at a pace that only a corporation’s monetary resources could manage.” Then we should identify the group’s allies to “get a better idea of the real powers behind” the organization. Additionally: “We’ll use another tool to draw telling inferences about these fronts: identification of their key vendors, such as law firms, pollsters, and public relations firms, which we’ll see are often instruments of conservative… networks… Another recurring clue… is the ‘creation story.’ A new non-profit group bursts forth with some version of claiming that two or three moms began talking over what they see as problems in schools and resolve to start a nonprofit to take on the teachers’ unions, administration, or school board. By some form of miracle, they almost immediately receive hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars in funding from billionaires. Next, they find themselves gaining favorable coverage on right-wing media—Daily Caller, Breitbart, and Fox News…. ”

Of course both the disruption COVID thrust upon our communities and the use of parents by far-right groups trying to ban “WOKE” policies represent what many of us have been watching in the past couple of years. But on a deeper level, it is not a coincidence that the outrageous school board disruptions and the attempts by the far right to scrub the textbooks, and the legislatures considering parents’ bill of rights legislation also seem to be happening in places where slate lawmakers are also pushing vouchers, and not merely the old-fashioned tuition vouchers for private schools, but the new Education Savings Account universal programs to provide wider parental “freedom” and lack of oversight of the public dollars being diverted to these plans. These new vouchers are being designed to give parents the ultimate latitude in school choice—homeschooling and micro-schools where parents put their vouchers together to pay for a teacher for several families. Lack of regulation is a key ingredient in most of these plans. In every case the worldview underneath the proposals involves extreme individualism along with marketplace consumerism.

In her new book, The Teachers: A Year Inside America’s Most Vulnerable, Important Profession, Alexandra Robbins describes parents who view themselves and their children as the customers teachers must please: “At a candidate forum during the COVID pandemic, a Maryland school board member called students the ‘customers in our school system,’ as if teachers existed to satisfy students rather than to educate them… On a broader level, the student-as-customer attitude has contributed to a growing politicized movement pushing for parents to have authority over what is taught in schools.” (pp. 66-67) Believing your child is the client who must be pleased by services rendered is a very different conception of the parent-teacher relationship than believing that the teacher is a professional whose expertise and cooperation you can and should consult for guidance about your child’s education.

Please open the link and read the remainder of this very important post.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Billionaires, Corruption, Curriculum, Dark Money, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Extremism, Fake, For-Profit, Fraud, Hoax, Koch Brothers, Privatization, School Choice, Segregation, Teachers, Vouchers, Walton Foundation

Hillsdale College Cuts Ties to Florida Charter School That Fired Principal After Showing of Michelango’s “David”

By dianeravitch

April 1, 2023 //

Conservative Hillsdale College in Michigan has a chain of charter schools that use its “classical” curriculum. One of its affiliate schools, the Tallahassee Classical Charter School, made headlines last week when the principal was fired after a teacher showed the statue of Michelangelo’s “David” to an art class.

Apparently Hillsdale was appalled, it severed its connection to the school. Even super-conservative Hillsdale was mortified by the prudery of DeSantisland.

A Michigan college has ended its relationship with the Florida charter school whose principal was pressured to resign after parents complained that her Renaissance art syllabus, which included a picture of Michelangelo’s David, was inappropriate for sixth-graders.

The Tallahassee Classical School, which was licensed to use Hillsdale College’s classical education curriculum, is no longer affiliated with the small, Christian college, Hillsdale spokesperson Emily Stack Davis said in a statement to MLive.com.

“This drama around teaching Michelangelo’s David sculpture, one of the most important works of art in existence, has become a distraction from, and a parody of, the actual aims of classical education,” Davis said. “Of course, Hillsdale’s K-12 art curriculum includes Michelangelo’s Davidand other works of art that depict the human form.”

The chair of the board of the school explained that children should see only parts of the statue, depending on their age.

“Showing the entire statue of David is appropriate at some age,” said Bishop.

“We’re going to figure out when that is,” he added. “And you don’t have to show the whole statue! Maybe to kindergartners we only show the head. You can appreciate that. You can show the hands, the arms, the muscles, the beautiful work Michelangelo did in marble, without showing the whole thing.”

Yahoos are gonna yahoo.

Categories Art, Arts Education, Censorship, Charter Schools, DeSantis, Florida

Omaha: High School Students Walk Out to Protest Hate Laws

By dianeravitch

April 1, 2023 //

Yesterday, hundreds of Omaha high school students walked out to protest the anti-trans legislation moving through the Nebraska legislature. The youth are our hope for a better future, one where hate is stigmatized.

As many as several hundred students at Omaha’s Central High School braved dropping temperatures Friday and walked out of class to protest two pending bills in the Nebraska Legislature.

Armed with bright, colorful signs and a microphone, students used speeches and poetry to protest Legislative Bills 574 and 575, which focus on transgender youths. Both bills were introduced by State Sen. Kathleen Kauth of Omaha.

The Central students were joined by others, including parents, young children and community members, to hear a number of student activists talk about the potential impact of the bills.

Several students said the legislation would prevent transgender youths from accessing lifesaving medical care and limit how they participate in sports or the bathrooms they can use.

“I am a human being. I am not defined by my gender,” said Harley Lawton, a junior at Central High. “They are trying to take away our rights. They are trying to define us as what they first saw us as, not what we became, not what we decide to be.”

Categories Courage, Cruelty, Disruption, Gender, Nebraska, Students

March for Our Lives: We Call BS!

By dianeravitch

April 1, 2023 //

March for Our Lives is the organization created by students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, after the massacre of 14 students and three staff members on February 14, 2018. The students organized massive rallies demanding gun control. Florida Governor Rick Scott signed gun control legislation: however, in the past few days the Florida legislature rolled back the post-Parkland gun control and made it legal to carry a gun without so much as a permit.

Please note that Rep. Andy Ogles, pictured below with his family, brandishing guns, represents the district in Nashville where the Coventry School is located. His district was created as a result of a gerrymander when the legislature split Nashville in two.

This Monday, we lost three children and three adults to gun violence in yet another school shooting in Nashville, Tennessee: Cynthia Peak, 61, Katherine Koonce, 60, Michael Hill, 61, Evelyn Dieckhaus, 9, Hallie Scruggs, 9, and William Kinney, 9.

The perpetrator used an AR-15 rifle to kill three children and school staff, including a substitute teacher, custodian, and school head. Instead of using their power to act, two Tennessee Congressmembers are treating calls for gun safety legislation as a joke. Rep. Andy Ogles represents the district in Nashville where the Covenant School shooting occurred. Do you know what his response was? Thoughts and prayers. This is the same congressman who glorified guns with his family in this holiday photo:When reporters asked him if he regrets even sharing that photo, he doubled down by saying, “Why would I regret a photograph with my family exercising my rights to bear arms?”

Another Tennessee lawmaker, Rep. Tim Burchett, told reporters, “We’re not gonna fix it. Criminals will be criminals.” In other words, get used to it. Of course, both of these elected officials have accepted campaign contributions from the NRA.

When corrupt, pro-NRA legislators throw their hands up and claim there’s nothing they can do to stop this country’s rampant gun violence crisis, we call BS. It’s their JOB to come up with solutions to our country’s problems — especially the number one cause of death amongst children and teenagers.

Any politician who cares more about protecting the gun lobby’s profits than saving our children from gunfire does NOT belong in Congress.

We’re calling on these two clowns— Rep. Burchett and Rep. Ogles — to resign immediately. If you agree that failure and incompetence have no place in Congress, sign our petition today →SIGN PETITION

Politicians like Rep. Burchett and Rep. Ogles have grown too comfortable repeating thoughts and prayers instead of actually delivering solutions. But we’re paying attention to their empty words, and we are prepared to do the work to elect gun safety champions to replace them in office.Thank you for all your support.In solidarity,

March For Our Lives

(P.S. Our movement is powered by grassroots supporters committed to ending gun violence. Chip in to fuel our year-round organizing work→) DONATE NOWContributions will benefit March For Our Lives Action Fund, a 501(c)(4) social welfare organization. Contributions or gifts to March For Our Lives Action Fund are not deductible for federal income tax purposes as charitable contributions.