Ohio: KIPP Columbus Schools Seek to Unionize Despite Leaders’ Opposition

By dianeravitch
January 17, 2023 //
14

KIPP leadership is not pleased by the efforts of KIPP teachers and other staff in Columbus who want to join a union. Major funders of KIPP, like the Walton Family Foundation, don’t like unions. Some of their teachers object to their “Union-busting” tactics.

Megan Henry of the Columbus Dispatch wrote this article, which was also published in USA Today.

The Ohio Federation of Teachers is accusing KIPP Columbus of using a “unionbusting persuasion campaign” as the charter school’s employees attempt to unionize.

The campaign has involved mandatory and voluntary meetings with “antiunion consultants” and a visit from KIPP’s new CEO Shavar Jeffries, according to OFT President Melissa Cropper.

“Public education funding should be used to educate Ohio students. It should not be used to persuade and intimidate workers who are exercising their legally protected right to organize a union,” Cropper said.

KIPP Columbus received at least $15 million in public funding for the 2021-22 school year, which represents the majority of its funding, union organizers said.

“It is incumbent on KIPP to spend that funding on education, not union-busting,” Cropper said. “If KIPP wants to claim that they are paying for their union-busting through a different source of funding, we feel that is essentially a shell game.”

Teachers, social workers, paraprofessionals, intervention specialists and student life coordinators from KIPP’s primary, elementary, middle and high school are attempting to organize as the KIPP Columbus Alliance for Charter Teachers and Staff (KIPP Columbus ACTS) through OFT.

“We believe that unfair labor practices have occurred, and we may file formal charges on that,” Cropper said. “Currently, we are calling on KIPP to do the right thing and allow their employees to have a secret ballot union election without intimidation and anti-union lobbying from management.”

The Dispatch asked KIPP Columbus officials to address the allegations of union-busting, but they didn’t respond to those specific questions in their written response.

“We are encouraging all of our colleagues to consider all relevant information – from multiple sources – about what it could mean to join a union and what the collective bargaining process entails,” KIPP Columbus said in a statement. “Many of our colleagues have asked questions about these topics, and we are working diligently to ensure that those questions are answered promptly.”

Zach Usmani, a social worker at KIPP elementary and a member of the organizing committee, said the anti-union consultants didn’t share their names during the two-hour meeting he was required to attend.

“It seems very strange that they don’t want to share any information,” Usmani said. “It makes me question what’s going on. People are now even more frustrated because they are getting pulled from their students to go to these meetings.”

Jeffries took over as KIPP’s CEO the first week of January and visited KIPP Columbus that same week, but staff questioned the purpose of his visit.

KIPP Columbus, which is part of a national network of college preparatory schools, has about 2,000 students.

“He used this platform to again push anti-union messaging on our staff,” Usmani said.

Jeffries is planning a tour of all KIPP regions and has already been to Atlanta, Boston, New York and Philadelphia, said KIPP Foundation spokesperson Maria Alcón-Heraux. He also plans to go to Washington, D.C. and New Orleans in the coming weeks, Alcón-Heraux said.

“Shavar Jeffries spoke to KIPP Columbus staff and students about his vision for more alignment across KIPP regions as we deliver educational excellence and equity at a nation-leading level,” Alcón-Heraux said of the visit here.

In December, KIPP Columbus charter schools administration declined to voluntarily recognize KIPP Columbus ACTS.

“While we respect our colleagues’ rights to join a union, we believe that our current model is the best way to create an innovative learning environment for students while supporting and empowering our valued teachers and staff,” KIPP Columbus said in a statement.

Seventy-eight percent of KIPP Columbus’ roughly 130-person staff signed union cards. Union cards were filed with the National Labor Relations Board on Nov. 15, but KIPP Columbus hired the Vorys legal firm, which filed a legal challenge with the NLRB on Nov. 16, which has delayed a secret-ballot union election. An NLRB election won’t be scheduled until the legal challenge is resolved, which could take months, Cropper said.

KIPP Columbus began in 2008 as KIPP Journey Academy with 50 students in the fifth grade at a former Columbus City Schools building in Linden and has since expanded to its present 150-acre campus at 2900 Inspire Drive on the city’s Northeast Side. That campus houses the KIPP Columbus Elementary, KIPP Columbus Primary, KIPP Columbus Middle, KIPP Columbus High, the KIPP Columbus Battelle Environmental Center, the KIPP Columbus Early Learning Center, and the KIPP Athletics & Wellness Complex.

KIPP teachers and staff are unionized at the nonprofit public charter school’s operations in New York City, Baltimore and St. Louis.

If the union is approved by KIPP Columbus’ educators, it would be the 10th charter school to join the OFT. The other OFT unionized charter schools in Ohio are in the Cleveland area: Stepstone Academy in Cleveland, Menlo Park Academy in Cleveland, three schools in the Summit Academy chain (Parma, Painesville and Lorain) and four schools in the ACCEL charter chain.

mhenry@dispatch.com @megankhenry

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, KIPP Charter Schools, Ohio, Unions

Peter Greene: Vouchers Are a Disaster By Any Name

By dianeravitch
January 17, 2023 //
17

Peter Greene explains school issues better than anyone. In this post in the Bucks County Beacon in Pennsylvania, he explains why vouchers fail, why renaming them doesn’t make them better, and why anyone who cares about the quality of education should forget about vouchers/ESAs.

He writes:

School Vouchers Have Been A Disaster—Now Advocates Are Trying To Rename Them

What you need to know about education savings accounts, a kind of “super-voucher.”

Although a sizable number of Republican candidates in the 2022 midterm elections who were counting on school vouchers to be a winning issue—including Tudor Dixon in Michigan, Kari Lake in Arizona, and Tim Michels in Wisconsin—went down to defeat, school vouchers are not about to go away. Voucher advocates are instead changing the name and pushing for education savings accounts (ESAs).

ESAs are legal in around 10 states so far, but if this new idea for promoting school choice hasn’t already been proposed in your state, it may be appearing there soon. Here’s what education savings accounts are, how they work, and what policymakers and families in your state should consider before rushing headlong into adopting this idea.

What Are ESAs?

Education savings accounts are a kind of super-voucher. While traditional vouchers give parents a chunk of taxpayer money that they could use for tuition at the school of their choice, an ESA gives parents a chunk of taxpayer money that they can spend on private school tuition or a variety of other educational expenses.

Tennessee’s ESA law offers a typical list of eligible expenses that not only include private school tuition and fees but also textbooks, school uniforms, tutoring, transportation to and from school, computer software, tech devices, summer school tuition, and tuition and fees at a postsecondary school.

ESAs provide a wider range of choices—and a wider range of ways for vendors to get their hands on education tax dollars without having to open a whole school to get voucher money.

ESAs also provide political cover. Vouchers have frequently been rejected by voters, so voucher proponents, on Twitter and in legislative discussions, have opted not to use the label of “voucher” for ESAs. They may further try to sweeten the rebranding by using terms such as “education scholarship accounts” and “education freedom accounts.”

The money comes to parents by way of a company hired to handle these funds. Step Up for Students and ClassWallet are two examples of these “scholarship management” companies. These companies handle the actual disbursement of the monies, often through debit cards; they also take a cut of the funding.

Where Does ESA Money Come From?

Funding for an ESA program can come from several different paths.

One pathway is via tax credit programs that allow corporations and individuals to contribute directly to “scholarship” funding while getting a dollar-for-dollar tax credit. Former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos proposed this on a national scale with her failed Education Freedom Scholarships.

Proponents like to say that tax credit funding does not involve any government spending, which is technically correct because the money never touches government hands. But because it is a tax credit, it does cost the taxpayers. A million dollars in tax credit scholarships means $1 million of revenue the government does not get, leaving a hole that must be made up either by raising taxes or cutting other state and federal programs. Kentucky set up tax credit scholarships to fund its ESA program; the tax credit scholarship program was thrown out in December 2022 by the state’s supreme court for being “unconstitutional.”

Another pathway to ESA funding comes from new laws enacting “backpack funding,” where per-pupil funding that would have gone to the student’s home school district goes to the student’s ESA instead. This can be particularly damaging in states like Arizona, where the money is pulled from the student’s assigned district even if the student has always attended private school. In other words, the school’s operating revenue is reduced by the per-pupil funding, but its operating costs are reduced by zero dollars.

ESAs can also be funded by taking the money off the top of the state’s education budget, meaning the costs of the vouchers hit all school districts, whether they have students choosing vouchers or not.

In addition, a suggestion was made that pandemic relief funds be distributed via ESA-style programs (Oklahoma was one state that tried it).

GOP legislators have also tried to propose that federal funding intended for poor students or students with special needs, such as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), be turned into school voucher programs, a particularly ironic proposal, as students usually give up their rights under IDEA when they move out of the public education system. This repurposing of federal funding for education will no doubt become part of the rhetoric used for ESA funding.

How Are Tax Dollars in ESA Spent?

Tracking how tax dollars are spent in ESA programs is difficult if not impossible because these programs have hardly any accountability.

ESAs, like vouchers, have proven to be a way to use public tax dollars to fund private religious schools. In fact, in states where voucher programs exist, vouchers primarily fund religious schools (particularly Catholic ones). While the separation of church and state, when it comes to education, is already being increasingly whittled away, ESAs, like vouchers, allow states to circumvent that wall entirely.

Further, there are few checks in place to ensure that ESA money is spent on legitimate education expenses. In Arizona, parents spent $700,000 of their ESA money on beauty supplies, clothes, and other questionable expenses. In Oklahoma, pandemic relief funds were disbursed ESA-style, and when news broke that about half a million dollars in funds had been used to buy things like Christmas trees, gaming consoles, and outdoor grills, the state passed the buck.

Ryan Walters, who was just elected as Oklahoma’s education chief, bragged that the private sector would be a “more efficient way” to handle the funds, and he gave ClassWallet freedom to administer the state’s ESA program. But ClassWallet has admitted that it has “neither responsibility for, nor authority to exercise programmatic decision making with respect to the program or its associated federal funds and did not have responsibility for grant compliance.” In other words, nobody is checking to see how the money is really spent.

In most ESA programs, parents can select from an official list of vendors. One might assume that such a list would include vendors that have been screened to make sure that they are qualified providers of high-quality materials and instruction, but one would be wrong. In many states, a vendor is included in the list after simply meeting some very basic requirements. Tennessee’s ESA program leaves oversight of education vendors largely up to the management of its private contractor. Arizona’s ESA program doesn’t even have a list of approved schools, vendors, or providers, leaving the destination of taxpayer funding up to the “discretion” of the account holder.

The argument is that free market forces will keep vendors in line and that parents’ ability to make choices will work better than government regulations. One might also argue that the Food and Drug Administration should be shut down and the market should be allowed to regulate food manufacturing behavior. If a company gets sloppy or cheap and starts producing poisoned food, the market will correct it. All we have to do is let some consumers be poisoned in the process.

Not only are taxpayers’ interests unguarded in ESA systems, but parent and student interests are unguarded as well. Parents have to navigate an unregulated marketplace, an asymmetrical market where sellers have far more information than buyers, and where marketing materials take the place of useful information.

What Risks Do ESAs Pose to Students and Families?

Whether school choice advocates are pushing vouchers or ESAs, they frequently fail to mention the most fundamental issue for students and their families—private schools do not have to admit anyone they don’t wish to admit, either by placing various barriers in the way (not offering transportation or meals) or by simply putting restrictions in place.

That was one of the takeaways from Carson v. Makin, a Supreme Court decision that declared that Maine must allow voucher money to go to religious private schools, even if they are clearly discriminatory. Many ESA laws include a sort of non-interference clause that declares that accepting voucher money does not make the school a state actor, and the state may in no way dictate to the school how it will operate. In other words, they may teach what they want and discriminate as they like, even if they accept taxpayer dollars. Students with special needs, as well as LGBTQIA+ students, find they may have far fewer “choice” options than others.

ESA programs fail to protect students in other important ways. Should a family run out of ESA money, or find that they’ve been bilked by a bad vendor, or even be dumped by a vendor that goes out of business midyear, there are no real protections for families of students. Some school choice advocates have suggested that this risk would be minimized by providing third-party consumer reviews via a service like Yelp. But generally, it’s assumed that the invisible hand of the market, wearing its caveat emptor ring, is supposed to do the job of quality oversight.

In one striking example, an ESA bill proposed in Utah in 2022 included a requirement that parents sign a statement that they “assume full financial responsibility for the education” of their child. That means if they run out of voucher money or get left high and dry by a bad vendor or find the vendor incompetent, they are on their own. Presumably, in such a situation, a student would have no recourse but to return to a public school, though that school might get zero funding for that student.

Do ESAs Improve Education Results?

Most importantly, study after study shows that voucher programs in all their forms do not foster excellence in education. ESAs are a newer creation and so have been studied less, but given that the ESA system has even fewer guardrails than traditional vouchers, there’s no reason to think that the educational results would be any better.

In any case, under ESA, poor educational outcomes would be the parents’ problem, and the solutions we’ve seen for this problem are grim.

For instance, some voucher proponents (including DeVos) suggest a low-cost use for vouchers would be microschools, in which a handful of students gather in someone’s home around a computer with some online lessons while an adult “coach” keeps an eye on things. It’s not anyone’s first choice for a great education, but if that’s what you can afford—well, enjoy your choice.

That is the heart of voucher programs, whether you call them vouchers or education savings accounts or freedom scholarship accounts; they get the government out of the school business and turn education into a commodity that is the responsibility of parents alone. In voucher world, the state hands you your debit card and washes its hands of you. “Enjoy your freedom, and good luck.” And if an excellent education is not readily available because the ESA money is inadequate or your child has special needs, and your local public school is struggling with reduced funding, well, that’s your problem.

It’s all about the three D’s—disrupt, defund, and dismantle. Call the voucher system whatever you would like, but it is about reducing education from a public good and shared societal responsibility to a simple consumer good.

This article was produced by Our Schools, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Peter Greene

Peter Greene is a recently retired classroom secondary English teacher of 39 years. He lives and works in a small town in Northwest Pennsylvania, and blogs at Curmudgucation.

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, For-Profit, Fraud, Hoax, Pennsylvania, Vouchers

Pastors for Texas Children and Dr. MLK: A Shared Mission

By dianeravitch
January 16, 2023 //
3

Dr. Charles Foster Johnson, founder of Pastors for Texas Children, is a dear and beloved friend. I can’t give him enough praise for the work he does every day to protect the public schools of Texas and the five million children enrolled in them. He shared the following message today.

Dr. King and the Work for Justice

Dear PTC Pastor and Friend,

 

It is good to set aside a day as a nation to remember the world-changing life, ministry, and legacy of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. The prophetic vision he cast for our nation is far from realized.

 

As a 65-year-old white man from Alabama, I remember very well how Dr. King was vilified by the white power structure of this nation. What the Hebrew prophet Isaiah said about the suffering servant was true for Dr. King: he was “despised and rejected.” He was assassinated not because he was popular but because he was hated. Indeed, God has used his death and martyrdom as means to bring our nation into a “more perfect union.”

 

In 2008, I was privileged to be inducted into the Martin Luther King, Jr. Board of Preachers at Morehouse College. I knelt with other ministers before the full congregation in the King Chapel that day, vowing before God that I too would dedicate my life and ministry to the justice of Christ. It was one of the most moving moments of worship Jana and I have ever experienced.

 

The Rev. Dr. Billy Kyles, Pastor of the Monumental Baptist Church of Memphis, was the day’s keynote speaker.

Rev. Kyles was on the balcony when Dr. King was murdered. They were on the way to the Kyles’ home for supper. He retold the story that day, moment by moment, building to the awful instant when the shot rang out.

 

Rev. Kyles began musing to himself in his sermon why God placed him on that Lorraine Motel balcony that day, at that historic moment, standing beside Dr. King. Then he paused, with the perfect timing of a great preacher, and said, “Now I know. I know why the Lord had me right there. Because every crucifixion has to have a witness.”

 

We dishonor Rev. Martin Luther King’s life and legacy with easy platitudes or historical whitewashing. We honor him– and our Lord who led him– only with the painful, painstaking work of justice-making.

 

That is why we stand strong for quality public education for all children. We have a long way to go in delivering this promise of justice. But, no private model of education will ever ensure this provision of God. Only the public trust can and will do this.

 

Thank you for bearing witness so faithfully to this call!

 

Rev. Charles Foster Johnson, Executive Director

DONATE TO PTC

 

PO Box 471155, Fort Worth, Texas, 76147

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Categories Civil Rights, Courage, Democracy, Education Reform, Funding, Privatization, Texas

If You Do One Thing Today, Do This

By dianeravitch
January 16, 2023 //
20

I just read Dr. Martin Luther King’s last speech out loud.

It was an enthralling experience. Uplifting, inspiring, and a bit depresssing to realize what has not happened, the persistence of racism and poverty and inequality, the scoundrels who distort his message and try to prevent the honest teaching of our history. The racist legislators who say that teaching honest history is a “divisive concept” that will make white children uncomfortable. That assumes they will identify with the oppressors. That assumes that the truth will make them woke. I assume they willl identify with the oppressed and join with those who want change.

Read it. Out loud.

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/martin-luther-kings-final-speech-ive-mountaintop-full/story?id=18872817

Categories Civil Rights, Democracy, Poverty, Racism

I Interview Josh Cowen about the Hoax and Failure of Vouchers

By dianeravitch
January 16, 2023 //
5

Periodically, the Network for Public Education sponsors a conversation with an important voice in education policy. On January 11, I interviewed Josh Cowen, Professor of Education Policy at Michigan State University.

Josh has been an insider in voucher research for almost 20 years. It’s a small club, and he knows the research and the researchers. Josh came to the conclusion that vouchers have been a disaster for the students who leave public schools, supposedly to be “saved” by them.

But he points out that 70-80% of the students who use vouchers were never enrolled in public schools. Many return to the public schools. The political pressure for vouchers comes from politicians and parents seeking a subsidy for students already attending private and religious schools. The claim that they will help “save kids from failing schools” is a hoax to cover up the real purpose of vouchers: to transfer funds to private and religious schools.

The discussion was oversubscribed. Many people who wanted to watch the zoom were turned away. You can watch the recording here. The link is at the bottom of the page.

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reform, Disruption, Education Industry, Failure, Fraud, Funding, Lies, Privatization, Research, Vouchers

Heather Cox Richardson: Where Are Our Heroes?

By dianeravitch
January 16, 2023 //
4

Historian Heather Cox Richardson reflects on the anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday. We now look on him as a hero, but during his lifetime, he was treated shamefully by many whites, and militant African-Americans scorned him as well, preferring the angry approach of Stokely Carmichael and Malcolm X. Dr. King was principled and fearless. He faced death daily, and he never back down. It is usually forgotten that he was assassinated in Memphis while there to support striking sanitation workers, who were trying to organize a union. He knew that unions offered the best protection for working people. White conservatives who fraudulently praise him now, claiming that racism is a thing of the past and should not be taught or discussed (so that everyone can be judged by “the content of their character, not the color of their skin”), oppose everything he fought and died for.

You hear sometimes that, now that we know the sordid details of the lives of some of our leading figures, America has no heroes left.

When I was writing a book about the Wounded Knee Massacre, where heroism was pretty thin on the ground, I gave that a lot of thought. And I came to believe that heroism is neither being perfect, nor doing something spectacular. In fact, it’s just the opposite: it’s regular, flawed human beings, choosing to put others before themselves, even at great cost, even if no one will ever know, even as they realize the walls might be closing in around them.

It means sitting down the night before D-Day and writing a letter praising the troops and taking all the blame for the next day’s failure upon yourself, in case things went wrong, as General Dwight D. Eisenhower did.

It means writing in your diary that you “still believe that people are really good at heart,” even while you are hiding in an attic from the men who are soon going to kill you, as Anne Frank did.

It means signing your name to the bottom of the Declaration of Independence in bold print, even though you know you are signing your own death warrant should the British capture you, as John Hancock did.

It means defending your people’s right to practice a religion you don’t share, even though you know you are becoming a dangerously visible target, as Sitting Bull did.

Sometimes it just means sitting down, even when you are told to stand up, as Rosa Parks did.

None of those people woke up one morning and said to themselves that they were about to do something heroic. It’s just that, when they had to, they did what was right.

On April 3, 1968, the night before the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated by a white supremacist, he gave a speech in support of sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee. Since 1966, King had tried to broaden the Civil Rights Movement for racial equality into a larger movement for economic justice. He joined the sanitation workers in Memphis, who were on strike after years of bad pay and such dangerous conditions that two men had been crushed to death in garbage compactors.

After his friend Ralph Abernathy introduced him to the crowd, King had something to say about heroes: “As I listened to Ralph Abernathy and his eloquent and generous introduction and then thought about myself, I wondered who he was talking about.”

Dr. King told the audience that, if God had let him choose any era in which to live, he would have chosen the one in which he had landed. “Now, that’s a strange statement to make,” King went on, “because the world is all messed up. The nation is sick. Trouble is in the land; confusion all around…. But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough, can you see the stars.” Dr. King said that he felt blessed to live in an era when people had finally woken up and were working together for freedom and economic justice.

He knew he was in danger as he worked for a racially and economically just America. “I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter…because I’ve been to the mountaintop…. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life…. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!”

People are wrong to say that we have no heroes left.

Just as they have always been, they are all around us, choosing to do the right thing, no matter what.

Wishing you all a day of peace for Martin Luther King Jr. Day, 2023.

—

Notes:

Dr. King’s final speech:

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/martin-luther-kings-final-speech-ive-mountaintop-full/story?id=18872817

Categories Character, Civil Rights, Courage, Democracy, Freedom, Goodness, History, Hope, Injustice, Justice, Racism, Resistance

Stop the Lies About Dr. Martin Luther King’s Legacy

By dianeravitch
January 16, 2023 //
36

Donna Ladd, editor and CEO of the Mississippi Free Press, writes here about the sustained rightwing effort to co-opt Dr. Martin Luther King’s legacy of militant resistance to racism and his dedication to telling the truth about our tarnished history. This is an important essay. It’s about a concerted attempt to hijack the words of Dr. King by those who hate his message. It’s about conservative white people like Chris Rufo and Ron DeSantis trying to use his words to prevent honest teaching about the history of racism. I have left the fund-raising appeals in the article because I hope you will send some money to this brave publication.

She writes, powerfully:

I grew up hearing people around me badmouthing Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. To hear white folk in east central Mississippi in the 1960s and 1970s tell it, he was the very root of all evil, and everything wrong in their lives was his damn fault. He had marched in my hometown of Philadelphia, Miss., in 1966 amid violent chaos when I was a kid—he spoke near the murderers of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner by law-enforcement officials.

Yes, Dr. King gave his life in the search for more love and less hate, but he was not only spreading a message of love, as so many white thieves of his legacy try to say today. His message was pure fire. And he was out to hold a mirror up to our nation about white Americans—not only Mississippians and southerners—using terror to maintain power over everyone else and to enjoy the fruits of that terrorism.

Throughout his life, Dr. King toiled and ultimately sacrificed his life in the fight to change power structures and systems established and enforced to keep white people on the top and Black people on the bottom. He wanted America to understand that enslaved people built this nation—after many of their enslavers figured out how to steal the land from Indigenous Americans and forcefully remove them from the land they coveted.

None of this history is pretty or honorable, and Dr. King never tried to say it was or to cover up any of it. He wanted it taught to every person in this country and certainly wanted children to grow up having learned the lessons of the past. He knew that the “arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” And he was blunt that he was not likely to live long enough to see that happen.

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When a white man shot him at the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis, Dr. King was more focused than ever on systemic racism and its links with poverty, and he was a harsh critic of capitalism and the Vietnam War. He was putting together the Poor People’s Campaign intending to occupy Washington, D.C., to bring more attention to the racism-poverty connection.

Of course, I didn’t know all that until I was well into adulthood. I knew most white folks in Mississippi hated him, and he was a martyred hero against racism. Like many Americans, I was fed the whitewashed version of Dr. King, which has worsened over the decades. I was nearly 40 when I studied with Dr.Manning Marable at Columbia University and learned the larger and more accurate history of Dr. King, Malcolm X, Marcus Garvey, and many Black freedom fighters. I’ve also read his speeches; I know fully what Dr. King was about and what he supported.

Just read his “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop Speech” in Memphis.

Now, 54 years after Dr. King went to Memphis to support a labor strike by sanitary workers, we see so many arrogant efforts by white Americans to remake him into their preferred hero—you know, the one who would tell us all now to forget all that sticky history and get along despite the systemic inequities our history embedded into our nation’s DNA.

It would be funny if it weren’t so sick and offensive. Right here in Jackson, a public-policy institute led by a former Brexiteer from the U.K. used a photo of Dr. King and his words out of context in a report a year ago to push legislation against so-called “critical race theory” in schools. Their report argued the precise opposite of what the Black freedom hero said or wanted. They even twisted his call for “being judged by the content of their character” out of context to make absurd statements about Dr. King, like this one: “Instead of celebrating the enormous achievements made since the Civil Rights Movement, critical race theory specifically rejects King’s color blind ideal and seeks to racialize every aspect of culture, sport, and public discourse.”

“Color-blind ideal”? That’s what this institute—and its board of prominent white Mississippians—think Dr. King meant by the need for white Americans to stop judging people by the color of their skin? Seriously? That’s some shoddy thinking. Or propaganda, as it were. Such cynicism can explain why this institute claiming Dr. King’s moral ground as its own has nine white men and two white women on its board.

January is Member Month! Join now to support our work and take advantage of special programming for MFP VIP members.

As we consider Dr. King’s legacy this weekend, we must study the whole legacy. No serious person can argue that he would want this nation to block the teaching of our full race history from colleges, schools and homes. No serious person would say that he would want us to simply be proud of how far we’ve come and not examine how far we’ve got to go—until that arc bends toward actual justice and inequity is no longer baked into our systems. No serious person thinks Dr. King would not want us to interrogate how and why inequity became baked into our systems and how to fix them so they don’t keep replicating themselves.

And no serious person would argue that Dr. King would not want the systemic history of slavery, massacres and lynchings that helped end Reconstruction and install Jim Crow, the story of little Ruby Bridges or our Medgar Evers or Lamar Smith down in Brookhaven, the story of ongoing attacks on public education since integration—or the full story of his real dreams taught to every American on this road to eradicating the baked-in legacies of racial suppression and white supremacy.

I get it. Complaining that teaching real race history is somehow “Marxism”—which no serious person would do, either—is bringing back the stunts and propaganda the rich and powerful white people used successfully to scare white folks back in the 1950s and 1960s and even inspire violence against Dr. King and Mr. Evers. The rewriting of history is sick politics. But it is a stunt that all serious people of any party who are, indeed, working not to judge people by their skin color must reject loudly and definitively.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his life to speak truth to power. We owe it to him to continue doing just that.

Donna Ladd, Editor and CEO

[I am not inserting a link because I can’t find one. Google Mississippi Free Press. If you find a link, please send it.]

I am sending my third contribution this year to MFP.

Categories Accountability, Civil Rights, Democracy, Education Reform, Equity, Ethics, Fake, Fraud, Freedom, History, Hope, Racism

Alexandra Petri: Missouri Legislature Bans Bare Shoulders!

By dianeravitch
January 15, 2023 //
61

Alexandra Petri is a humorist who writes for the Washington Post. Here she puts tongue in cheek to praise the Missouri Legislature’s bold stance on its female dress code.

She writes:

On Wednesday, the Republican-dominated Missouri House of Representatives decided to spend its one wild and precious legislative life focusing, laser-like, on the issues that matter most to the people of the state: the dress code for female legislators. All I can say is: Thank goodness!

The good people of the state of Missouri had been cowering for months in a state of panic, knowing that unless prompt, legislative action was taken on the very first day of the new session, some Missourian lawgiver might, without any warning, see a woman’s shoulder. I almost do not want to type it! I am sorry that you had to read the word, which may have forced you to picture one in your mind and derailed your legislative business for the month. Sh***der. That is better. I have already done too much harm.

Imagine the shock and horror of seeing a shoulder that belonged to a woman who was using it at the time! The mind reels. The jaw drops to the floor. I can think of nothing less respectful. A shoulder, covered not with a blazer, but with some sort of unstructured wrap — unthinkable! An abomination in the eyes of the law, and of all right-thinking citizens!

The new rule states that “proper attire for women shall be business attire, including jackets worn with dresses, skirts, or slacks, and dress shoes or boots.” Sweaters, formerly permitted, are right out! Cardigans were a subject of debate on the floor — could one possibly be adequate to do the duty of a blazer? After all, this is the Missouri legislature, not a Taylor Swift album! They had to think of the consequences.

I once saw a woman’s shoulder — in fact, two shoulders — not covered by a blazer. She was in a dress, supplemented by a drape of some kind, but that, as the legislators wisely noted in their statute, was not enough. It was a statue, on the top of the United States Capitol; I do not know what sick, disrespectful pervert put it there, but I am still recovering from the ordeal.

I thank the gods that I am not a male legislator (the ones most devastatingly affected by such sights). I read a story that one saw the Venus de Milo by mistake (he heard it was art) and is still in a hospital, groaning in agony.

We all know how many male legislators have suffered this fate, thanks to a previous dress code that did not pause for a moment to consider them as people. Those legions of men glimpsed a wrap, sliding precipitously down a human shoulder in the Missouri Capitol, and have had to give up public life entirely to spend their days screaming and staring at the wall.

Sometimes, at night, I still hear them, howling. Their lives, as they know them, have ended. So many lives, taken completely out of their owners’ hands and made to serve the whims of a legislature that didn’t think it was a big deal to allow shawls and sweaters, that didn’t take into account the impact on people’s lives of their careless words.

The people of Missouri sat there last year in the midst of major flash floods worrying: “Are my legislators going to protect their eyes from sh***ders? They had better focus on that,” they thought, “rather than the infrastructure. I know it is also important to try to make it more difficult to change the state constitution by ballot initiative, since the voice of the people might be heard, and that could be very awkward. But first! First, they must look to swaddling all those hideous, loathsome appendages and hiding them from view! Ugh, ugh!”

You would think that people so horrified by the sight of an innocent shoulder would not want to, voluntarily, delve any deeper into other people’s bodies and enact cruel, dehumanizing restrictions about their medical choices, but — you would be wrong.

Categories Humor, Missouri

John Thompson: Emily Oster Was Wrong About the Pandemic

By dianeravitch
January 15, 2023 //
43

John Thompson is a historian and a retired teacher in Oklahoma. He is also a meticulous researcher. Emily Oster is an economist at Brown University who said early in the pandemic that it was safe to open schools.

Thompson writes:

New post on Network for Public Education.

John Thompson: COVID and Schools

John Thompson takes a look at Emily Oster’s crusade to get school buildings open.

He writes:

When I started following Emily Oster’s links and critiquing her analyses of COVID in schools, I first worried about her simplistic conclusions such as, “The evidence is pointing in one direction. Schools do not, in fact, appear to be major spreaders of COVID-19.” Since Diane Ravitch posted on epidemiologists Abigail Cartus’ and Justin Feldman’s research, I better understand where Oster was coming from, and how “Oster’s emphasis on individualism and personal choice ring sweetly in the ears of the rightwing philanthropists.”

Oster went “viral” when arguing that educators’ fears were “overblown,” and that kids are “simply very unlikely to be infected.” But, as she made those claims, Oster ignored evidence that schools were significant spreaders, such as the CDC’s summaryof Wisconsin infections from Sept 3 to Nov16, 2020. That state’s schools were the 4th largest source of infections, following long term care and corrections facilities, and colleges; an estimated 14% of infections were linked to schools.

On the eves of Thanksgivings, when common sense said that holiday surges through Christmas and the New Year would be inevitable, Oster would double down on attacks on educators for not immediately reopening classrooms.As Rachel Cohenexplained, Oster’s 2020 data “reflected an extremely small and unrepresentative sample of schools.” There was not a single urban traditional public school reporting data across 27 states in her dataset, including from Florida [and] Texas…” Then, in November, Texas became the first state to have a million infections.

Worse, Cohen reported, “Rebekah Jones, a former Florida Department of Health data scientist who says she was fired in May over a refusal to manipulate her state’s COVID-19 stats, has publicly pushed back on Oster’s claims.” Jones “offered Oster full and free access to their data. ‘But she [Oster] basically decided to just pick what data she wanted, not what’s available.’” Jones added, “‘It’s offensive to researchers, when you see something so unabashedly unscientific, and when the opportunity to do something scientific was there.’”

Before long, I worried that Oster, an economist, was following in the path of economists who didn’t know what they didn’t about public schools and didn’t listen to educators regarding the flaws in their data-driven corporate school reforms. For instance, Oster seemed to disregard about 20% of the U.S. population [who] lived in homes with at least two adult generations or grandparents and grandchildren under 25 in 2016, according to an analysis of census data by the Pew Research Center. And the dangers of spreading COVID from students to older family members was greater in low-income Black and Brown households.

Also, Oster ignored qualifications made by researchers, such as the Duke University study finding that masks can minimize the spread in schools. Inresponse to my questions on methodology, co-author Daniel Benjamin volunteered what it takes to safely reopen schools:

Is that there is 99% mask compliance for every person in the mainstream curriculum that steps on school property. It’s the mitigation strategies—distancing, masking, hand hygiene that are crucially important. If a school district does not do these things, they will likely make the pandemic worse by being open. This is why we don’t advise “you should open” or “you should go remote”…. It’s all about the public health measures.

At that time, I worried about Gov. Ron DeSantis and Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt citing Oster while pressuring schools to open up and drop protections. Neither did I understand why more journalists were not challenging her misuse of sources, and her repeated attacks on teachers unions, especially in publications funded by the Billionaires Boys Club. I sensed Oster’s methodology would cost lives. But, I didn’t want to prejudge researchers at a time when lives were on the line, so I didn’t connect the dots.

But Cartus and Feldman connect the dots and write about Oster’s important role in making:

The “data-driven” case for peeling away successive layers of COVID mitigations: first ending remote instruction in favor of hybrid learning, then ending hybrid learning in favor of a full return to in-person instruction, then eliminating quarantine for those exposed to the virus. … Her vision for schooling during the pandemic ultimately involves abandoning universal public health measures altogether, turning masking and vaccination into individual, personal choices.

Cartus and Feldman address my question why her work “attracted little scrutiny.” It was more than journalists and experts being unaware of the differences between the highest poverty schools and the schools their children attend. Most importantly her work:

Has been funded since last summer by organizations that,without exception, have explicit commitments to opposing teacher’s unions, supporting charter schools, and expanding corporate freedom. In addition to grants from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the Walton Family Foundation, and Arnold Ventures, Oster has received funding from far-right billionaire Peter Thiel. The Thiel grant awarded to Oster was administered by the Mercatus Center, the think tank founded and financed by the Koch family.

Cartus and Feldman went deeper than I did in explaining the damage that Oster prompted. For instance, in her “2020 article in The Atlantic, ‘Schools Aren’t Super-Spreaders,’ Oster “assured readers in no uncertain terms that COVID transmission simply did not occur in schools at a rate that would necessitate closures.” But the analysis underlying the piece “drew on a sample of miniscule size—a mere two weeks of school data, reported in the second half of September 2020.” The sample was also biased by the fact that it was collected only from schools voluntarily participating in the Dashboard.

Cartus and Feldman then noted what so many journalists ignored, “The second half of September 2020 coincided with the very beginning of a national uptick in cases that would eventually become the punishing surge of winter 2020-21.”

When the press mostly failed to investigate the red flags that Oster’s work should have raised, “it became an article of faith that the laws of physics governing viral transmission don’t apply to schools, even as evidence of in-school viral transmission has mounted throughout the pandemic.”

Oster et.al’s “declarations of victory ignore[d] a growing body of research that has found schools contribute substantially to community coronavirus transmission, especially in the absence of adequate mitigation. The proclamation of “choice” that she justifies is really:

The ‘choice” to cast off obligations to others: the permission she offers affluent parents to disengage from the social contract. While the privileged seek a return to normalcy—or some sicker, poorer approximation of it—COVID will continue to infect and kill the working class and people of color at disproportionate rates.”

Now, history may be repeating itself. To quote National Public Radio, “People say they are done with COVID, but COVID is not done with us.” When we take stock of the interrelated harm done by anti-vaxers, anti-maskers, rightwingers, and their funders, as well as mistakes made by the CDC, we must draw upon Cartus’ and Feldman’s first draft of the history Emily Oster’s stardom.

You can view the post at this link : https://networkforpubliceducation.org/blog-content/john-thompson-covid-and-schools/

———-

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Data, Economics, Health, Science

Texas: Court Clears the Way for State Takeover of Houston Schools

By dianeravitch
January 15, 2023 //
14

The Texas State Supreme Court gave the green light yesterday to a state takeover of the Houston Independent School District, based on the low performance of one school, which has high proportions of the neediest students. This will allow State Superintent Mike Morath (not an educator) to appoint a “board of managers.” Will the board reflect the anti-public school bias of Governor Abbott? Will HISD be purged of imaginary CRT and other fantasies of the far-right? It doesn’t matter to the Court or to Morath that state takeovers have a very poor record. See Domingo Morel’s book Takeover: Race, Education, and American Democracy.

Houston Public Media reports:

State-appointed managers can replace elected school board members in the largest district in Texas, according to a decision released by the state’s Supreme Court Friday morning.

Justices overruled an appellate court’s decision that had blocked TEA from taking over the district. The case isn’t over, though. A lower court will hear further arguments.

“No basis exists to continue the trial court’s temporary injunction against the Commissioner’s appointment of a board of managers,” the opinion read.

It is not clear if TEA will use the decision to replace the Houston ISD board.

“TEA is currently reviewing the decision,” a spokesperson wrote.

The Texas Education Agency first attempted to seize control of the Houston Independent School District in 2019. The agency pointed to dysfunction at the school board, as well as years of what TEA deemed unacceptable academic performance at Houston ISD’s Wheatley High School.

Invoking a 2015 state law, TEA argued the circumstances allowed education commissioner Mike Morath to appoint a group of managers in place of the elected school board trustees.

While the takeover was stalled, all but two of the elected Houston ISD board members departed, the board hired a new superintendent, and Wheatley High School received a passing grade from TEA.

The Houston Chronicle wrote:

The takeover issue has been simmering for years. Education Commissioner Mike Morath first made moves to take over the district’s school board in 2019 after allegations of misconduct by trustees and after Phillis Wheatley High School received failing accountability grades….

Advocates and education researchers have called into question the effectiveness of takeovers, and even the process can upend a district and create distraction.

“The back and forth over this issue has created significant chaos in HISD,” said Brandon Rottinghaus, professor of political science at University of Houston. “That’s problematic from a governing perspective and the ability to right the ship and move forward.”

The looming possibility of a takeover makes Mary Hendricks, a third-grade HISD teacher, a little nervous.

“I’m concerned for the students because I’ve been teaching for 16 years, and they’ve been through a lot of changes, like Hurricane Harvey and COVID,” Hendricks said. “I don’t think another catastrophic change would be what’s best for our kids.”

Some students have become aware of the possibility of a takeover. Elizabeth Rodriguez, a senior at Northside High School heard about it at an after-school club she is in called Panthers for Change, a teen advocacy group.

Rodriguez is skeptical of using test scores as a measure of school success and thinks they should not be a major deciding factor in whether the district is taken over.

“There are some students who are really smart and do well in classes, but don’t do well on the STAAR,” Rodriguez said. “Not everyone is the same, and everyone works differently.”

A Brown University study from 2021 looked at 35 school districts from across the country that were taken over by states between 2011 and 2016. It found takeovers typically affected districts where the vast majority of affected students were Black or Hispanic and from low-income families.

Ruth Kravetz, co-founder of Community Voices for Education, a Houston-based advocacy group that focuses on education, said the state should focus its energy on investing in public education, especially for at-risk students in the state’s largest school system.

“Takeovers have historically had horrible outcomes and are used overwhelmingly for students of color,” Kravetz said. “What the state is doing is starving are schools of money and narrowing the curriculum by spending so much money on testing. If the governor really wanted to improve the state of schools he would spend the money on all the schools in the state of Texas better.”

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reform, Disruption, Education Industry, Houston, Texas
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