Why Are School Districts Closing Schools When Students Don’t Benefit?

By dianeravitch
March 20, 2022 //
25

The National Education Policy Center has published a thoughtful critique of the strategy of closing schools. This approach was encouraged by George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind and by Barack Obama’s Race to the Top. Typically, the local board (or mayor) claims that the district will save money or the students will surely move to a better school. But what if this is not the case. NEPC identifies Oakland, California, as the district planning to close several schools. But it is not alone. In Chicago, Mayor Rahm Emanuel closed 50 schools in a single day, the largest school shutdown in U.S. history. Studies subsequently showed that the students did not benefit. School closures typically harm students of color more than white students. The same is true in Oakland.

NEPC writes:

Like others before it, the latest round of urban school closures disproportionately impacts people of color and students from low-income families. Yet there’s limited evidence that closures achieve their stated goals of saving money or improving academic outcomes.…

It’s happening again.

Another urban school district, this time Oakland Unified in California, has voted to close schools that serve a disproportionate number of students of color from low-income families.

Two schools will close this year, and five more next year, according to the plan the school board approved last month. Black students comprise 23 percent of the Oakland school dis- trict but 43 percent of the students in the schools slated for closure.

Oakland is the latest in a growing collection of urban school districts that have decided in recent years to close schools that disproportionately enroll students of color and students from low-income families. Other examples include Chicago, which closed or radically recon- stituted roughly 200 schools between 2002 and 2018, St. Paul Minnesota, which approved six school closures in December, and Baltimore City, where board members decided in Jan- uary to shutter three schools.

“Closures tend to differentially affect low-income communities and communities of color that are politically disempowered, and closures may work against the demand of local ac- tors for more investment in their local institutions,” according to an NEPC brief authored in 2017 by Gail Sunderman of the University of Maryland along with Erin Coghlan and Rick Mintrop of UC Berkeley.

In Oakland, community members and educators reacted to the closures with protests, marches and a hunger strike.

When urban school boards close campuses, they typically cite the schools’ poor academic performance or to the need to save money by shuttering buildings that are under enrolled

Yet it’s unclear that closures serve either goal.

In their policy brief, Sunderman, Coghlan, and Mintrop find limited evidence that student achievement improves as a result of school closures designed to improve academic performance.

“[S]chool closures as a strategy for remedying student achievement in low-performing schools is a high-risk/low-gain strategy that fails to hold promise with respect to either stu- dent achievement or non-cognitive well-being,” they wrote.

It causes political conflict and incurs hidden costs for both districts and local communities, especially low-income communities of color that are differentially affected by school closings. It stands to reason that in many instances, students, parents, local communities, district and state policymakers may be better off in- vesting in persistently low-performing schools rather than closing them.

Similarly, NEPC Fellow Ben Kirshner and his CU Boulder colleagues Matt Gaertner and Kristen Pozzoboni found several harms for the high school closure they closely studied. Writing in the journal, Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, they identified declines in the displaced students’ academic performance after transferring to their new schools, and they found that these students had difficulty adjusting to their new schools after their old relationships were disrupted.

The Oakland closures have mainly been justified as saving money by closing under enrolled schools that can’t take advantage of the economies of scale available to larger schools. Similar arguments were made in Baltimore and St. Paul…

In Oakland, a combination of factors, including gentrification and pandemic-related enroll- ment declines, caused the student population to decline 11 percent over the past five years to just over 37,000. The school closures were touted as a way to address the district’s $90 million budget shortfall.

Yet in a commentary in The Mercury News, NEPC Fellow and CU Berkeley professor Janelle Scott pointed out that even the claimed fiscal savings are minimal. A consultant’s report estimates the Oakland closures could save as little as $4.1 million.

“These estimates don’t fully account for disillusioned families and school staff who will like- ly leave OUSD for private, charter and public schools, fatigued by the constant threat of closure and consolidation,” Scott wrote.

Please open the link and read the full report. Many schools have been closed since the passage of No Child Left Behind. Arne Duncan, among others, celebrated these closings, promising to replace the closed schools with even better ones. That didn’t happen.

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Categories Chicago, Closing schools, Corporate Reform, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry

Jill Lepore: The War Against Public Schools

By dianeravitch
March 20, 2022 //
20

Jill Lepore is a historian at Harvard University and a writer for The New Yorker. In this recent article, she reviews a history of attacks on one of our nation’s most important democratic institutions: our public schools. To read the complete article, subscribe to The New Yorker. It is a wonderful magazine.

She begins:

In 1925, Lela V. Scopes, twenty-eight, was turned down for a job teaching mathematics at a high school in Paducah, Kentucky, her home town. She had taught in the Paducah schools before going to Lexington to finish college at the University of Kentucky. But that summer her younger brother, John T. Scopes, was set to be tried for the crime of teaching evolution in a high-school biology class in Dayton, Tennessee, in violation of state law, and Lela Scopes had refused to denounce either her kin or Charles Darwin. It didn’t matter that evolution doesn’t ordinarily come up in an algebra class. And it didn’t matter that Kentucky’s own anti-evolution law had been defeated. “Miss Scopes loses her post because she is in sympathy with her brother’s stand,” the Times reported.

In the nineteen-twenties, legislatures in twenty states, most of them in the South, considered thirty-seven anti-evolution measures. Kentucky’s bill, proposed in 1922, had been the first. It banned teaching, or countenancing the teaching of, “Darwinism, atheism, agnosticism, or the theory of evolution in so far as it pertains to the origin of man.” The bill failed to pass the House by a single vote. Tennessee’s law, passed in 1925, made it a crime for teachers in publicly funded schools “to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.” Scopes challenged the law deliberately, as part of an effort by the A.C.L.U. to bring a test case to court. His trial, billed as the trial of the century, was the first to be broadcast live on the radio. It went out across the country, to a nation, rapt.

A century later, the battle over public education that afflicted the nineteen-twenties has started up again, this time over the teaching of American history. Since 2020, with the murder of George Floyd and the advance of the Black Lives Matter movement, seventeen states have made efforts to expand the teaching of one sort of history, sometimes called anti-racist history, while thirty-six states have made efforts to restrict that very same kind of instruction. In 2020, Connecticut became the first state to require African American and Latino American history. Last year, Maine passed “An Act to Integrate African American Studies into American History Education,” and Illinois added a requirement mandating a unit on Asian American history.

On the blackboard on the other side of the classroom are scrawled what might be called anti-anti-racism measures. Some ban the Times’ 1619 Project, or ethnic studies, or training in diversity, inclusion, and belonging, or the bugbear known as critical race theory. Most, like a bill recently introduced in West Virginia, prohibit “race or sex stereotyping,” “race or sex scapegoating,” and the teaching of “divisive concepts”—for instance, the idea that “the United States is fundamentally racist or sexist,” or that “an individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously.”

While all this has been happening, I’ve been working on a U.S.-history textbook, so it’s been weird to watch lawmakers try their hands at writing American history, and horrible to see what the ferment is doing to public-school teachers. In Virginia, Governor Glenn Youngkin set up an e-mail tip line “for parents to send us any instances where they feel that their fundamental rights are being violated . . . or where there are inherently divisive practices in their schools.” There and elsewhere, parents are harassing school boards and reporting on teachers, at a time when teachers, who earn too little and are asked to do too much, are already exhausted by battles over remote instruction and mask and vaccine mandates and, not least, by witnessing, without being able to repair, the damage the pandemic has inflicted on their students. Kids carry the burdens of loss, uncertainty, and shaken faith on their narrow shoulders, tucked inside their backpacks. Now, with schools open and masks coming off, teachers are left trying to figure out not only how to care for them but also what to teach, and how to teach it, without losing their jobs owing to complaints filed by parents.

There’s a rock, and a hard place, and then there’s a classroom. Consider the dilemma of teachers in New Mexico. In January, the month before the state’s Public Education Department finalized a new social-studies curriculum that includes a unit on inequality and justice in which students are asked to “explore inequity throughout the history of the United States and its connection to conflict that arises today,” Republican lawmakers proposed a ban on teaching “the idea that social problems are created by racist or patriarchal societal structures and systems.” The law, if passed, would make the state’s own curriculum a crime.

Evolution is a theory of change. But in February—a hundred years, nearly to the day, after the Kentucky legislature debated the nation’s first anti-evolution bill—Republicans in Kentucky introduced a bill that mandates the teaching of twenty-four historical documents, beginning with the 1620 Mayflower Compact and ending with Ronald Reagan’s 1964 speech “A Time for Choosing.” My own account of American history ends with the 2020 insurrection at the Capitol, and “The Hill We Climb,” the poem that Amanda Gorman recited at the 2021 Inauguration. “Let the globe, if nothing else, say this is true: / That even as we grieved, we grew.”

Did we, though? In the nineteen-twenties, the curriculum in question was biology; in the twenty-twenties, it’s history. Both conflicts followed a global pandemic and fights over public education that pitted the rights of parents against the power of the state. It’s not clear who’ll win this time. It’s not even clear who won last time. But the distinction between these two moments is less than it seems: what was once contested as a matter of biology—can people change?—has come to be contested as a matter of history. Still, this fight isn’t really about history. It’s about political power. Conservatives believe they can win midterm elections, and maybe even the Presidency, by whipping up a frenzy about “parents’ rights,” and many are also in it for another long game, a hundred years’ war: the campaign against public education.

Please subscribe and finish reading.

Categories Censorship, Democracy, Education Industry, Education Reform, History, Privatization, Race, Racism, Tennessee, US Education, Vouchers

NBC News: The Rumor about “BioLabs” in Ukraine Spread by QAnon, Tucker Carlson, Russia

By dianeravitch
March 19, 2022 //
93

NBC News debunks the conspiracy theorists who have claimed that Russia invaded Ukraine to eliminate biolabs funded by the United States. The main promoters of this claim are QAnon, Tucker Carlson, and the Russian propaganda machine.

It begins:

Russia’s early struggles to push disinformation and propaganda about Ukraine have picked up momentum in recent days, thanks to a variety of debunked conspiracy theories about biological research labs in Ukraine. Much of the false information is flourishing in Russian social media, far-right online spaces and U.S. conservative media, including Tucker Carlson’s show on Fox News.

The theories, which have been boosted by Russian and Chinese officials, come as U.S. officials warn that Russia could be preparing a chemical or biological weapons attack of its own in Ukraine.

Most of the conspiracy theories claim that the U.S. was developing and plotting to release a bioweapon or potentially another coronavirus from “biolabs”’ throughout Ukraine and that Russia invaded to take over the labs. Many of the theories implicate people who are often the targets of far-right conspiracy thinking — including Dr. Anthony Fauci and President Joe Biden — as being behind creating the weaponized diseases in the biolabs.

Disinformation experts said the biolabs theory echoes other Russian propaganda meant to justify its military efforts, which often makes allegations against other countries and populations that reflect similar attacks it plans to make.

Question: If this was the Russian goal, why are they also bombing apartment houses, maternity hospitals, schools, and residential areas? Is all of Ukraine one giant biolab?

Categories Lies, Media, Propaganda

ProPublica: Russian Trolls Churn Out Phony Pro-Putin “Fact Checks”

By dianeravitch
March 19, 2022 //
48

Pro Publica warns about the fake news and doctored videos that are circulating on the Internet. While some are pro-Ukrainian, most are designed to support Putin’s narrative. The famous Russian troll farm that was active on behalf of Trump in 2016, ProPublica says, is now busily creating phony “fact checks” and disinformation.

It begins:

On March 3, Daniil Bezsonov, an official with the pro-Russian separatist region of Ukraine that styles itself as the Donetsk People’s Republic, tweeted a video that he said revealed “How Ukrainian fakes are made.”

The clip showed two juxtaposed videos of a huge explosion in an urban area. Russian-language captions claimed that one video had been circulated by Ukrainian propagandists who said it showed a Russian missile strike in Kharkiv, the country’s second-largest city.

But, as captions in the second video explained, the footage actually showed a deadly arms depot explosion in the same area back in 2017. The message was clear: Don’t trust footage of supposed Russian missile strikes. Ukrainians are spreading lies about what’s really going on, and pro-Russian groups are debunking them. (Bezsonov did not respond to questions from ProPublica.)

In another post, ProPublica reports that the Russian troll farm is branding current events happening in Ukraine as “fake” and “Ukrainian propaganda.” The same sources are creating phony videos and branding them as Ukrainian propaganda. Experts say a recent wave of pro-Putin disinformation is consistent with the work of Russia’s Internet Research Agency, a network of paid trolls who attempted to influence the 2016 presidential election...

The pro-Putin network included roughly 60 Twitter accounts, over 100 on TikTok, and at least seven on Instagram, according to the analysis and removals by the platforms. Linvill and Warren said the Twitter accounts share strong connections with a set of hundreds of accounts they identified a year ago as likely being run by the IRA. Twitter removed nearly all of those accounts. It did not attribute them to the IRA...

The most successful accounts were on TikTok, where a set of roughly a dozen analyzed by Clemson researchers and ProPublica racked up more than 250 million views and over 8 million likes with posts that promoted Russian government statements, mocked President Joe Biden and shared fake Russian fact-checking videos that were revealed by ProPublica and Clemson researchers earlier this week. On Twitter, they attacked jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny and blamed the West for preventing Russian athletes from competing under the Russian flag in the Olympics...

The Internet Research Agency is a private company owned by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a Russian entrepreneur known as “Putin’s Chef.” Prigozhin is linked to a sprawling empire ranging from catering services to the military mercenary company Wagner Group, which was reportedly tasked with assassinating President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The IRA launched in St. Petersburg in 2013 by hiring young internet-savvy people to post on blogs, discussion forums and social media to promote Putin’s agenda to a domestic audience. After being exposed for its efforts to influence the 2016 U.S. election, the IRA attempted to outsource some of its English-language operations to Ghana ahead of 2020. Efforts to reach Prigozhin were unsuccessful.

But it never stopped its core work of influencing Russian-speaking audiences. The IRA is part of a sprawling domestic state propaganda operation whose current impact can be seen by the number of Russians who refuse to believe that an invasion has happened, while asserting that Ukrainians are being held hostage by a Nazi coup.

Categories Fake News, Fraud, International, Lies

Rodney Pierce: Hiring More Black Male Teachers is a Great Investment

By dianeravitch
March 19, 2022 //
29

Rodney Pierce is a seventh-grade teacher in North Carolina. He writes here on the Public Voices, Public Schools site sponsored by the Network for Public Education.

He writes:

“These are all our children. We will profit by, or pay for, whatever they become.”

Though made over 30 years ago by African American writer and social critic James Baldwin, this statement still emphasizes the choice that sits before us as a nation.

The choice of whether or not we make the investment in our public schools to the benefit of our students.

While that investment can be presented as one of physical capital, i.e., real estate, equipment, inventory, etc., the more significant expenditure is that of human capital, which is namely teachers.

From student performance and achievement, their social and emotional well-being, or the development of non-cognitive skills, a wealth of research shows the impact of teachers on student outcomes.

And if, like Baldwin, we believe these are “all our children,” we should be deeply concerned about the status of Black boys.

Looking at my state of North Carolina, Black male students in 2019 ranked last or near the bottom in Reading and Mathematics scores among 4th, 8th and 12th graders (NAEP). They made up the lowest percentage of students identified as Academically and Intellectually Gifted (AIG) despite making up a higher percentage of male students overall (13 percent) than American Indian, Hispanic and Asian males combined. Black males had the highest rate of short-term and long-term suspensions, the fourth highest dropout rate and were placed more frequently in ALP (Alternative Learning Programs) than any other student groups. Black students as a whole are much more likely than their White counterparts to be arrested as they made up 49 percent of juvenile complaints at school.

These dismal educational scenarios lead to even more somber results in their lives, as Black males in North Carolina have one of the highest unemployment rates, one of the lowest life expectancies and the highest incarceration rate (49 percent of all state inmates as of December 2021).

Despite these grim statistics, the plight of Black male P-12 students can be alleviated by making the aforementioned investment in the recruitment AND retention of Black male teachers.

Research indicates Black male students having Black male teachers leads to lower dropout rates, fewer disciplinary issues, more positive views of schooling, better test scores and increased college aspirations. Our very presence undermines Black male stereotypes and we are more likely to be familiar with the cultural needs of our Black male students, as we were once these students ourselves. These students identify with us, and are able to see themselves working later in life as educated professionals. Black students taught by Black teachers are three times more likely to be assigned to AIG services than those taught by non-Black teachers and are more likely to take AP (Advanced Placement) courses taught by Black teachers.

Students of all races benefit in that they not only have lower likelihoods of discipline when taught by a Black male teacher, but the social and emotional impact of our presence lessens the possibility of those students developing implicit bias as adults. Simply put, seeing Black men in positions of authority helps all students develop dispositions for not only civic life but the  workforce. In several models controlling for student, teacher and school conditions, researchers have continuously found students expressed more favorable perceptions of Black male teachers than non-Black ones.

But there’s an impediment to these benefits of having Black men in P-12 classrooms.

In North Carolina, Black male teachers made up only 3% of teachers in 2017-18. We make up only 2% nationwide.

How do we solve this?

By making that investment.

The model is already available from groups and organizations like Call Me MISTER (South Carolina), the He Is Me Institute, Profound Gentlemen (Charlotte, NC), the BOND Project, the Center for Black Educator Development, the Boston Public Schools Male Educators of Color Program, etc.

If you want to recruit, develop, retain and ultimately, empower Black male teachers, you need to listen to the Black men who run these entities. Unfortunately, our country doesn’t have the best track record when it comes to that.

But if we don’t make the investment now, we will be making the investment later when it comes to Black male outlooks in unemployment, incarceration and health (life expectancies).

“These are all our children. We will profit by, or pay for, whatever they become.” Let’s ensure that we profit.

Rodney D. Pierce is a seventh-year middle school Social Studies teacher in eastern North Carolina. He was the 2019 North Carolina Council for the Social Studies Teacher of the Year and the inaugural Teacher Fellow for the NC Equity Fellowship through the Center for Racial Equity in Education (CREED). He is a Fellow of Carolina Public Humanities, the UNC-Chapel Hill Southern Oral History Program, and the NC Public School Forum’s Education Policy Fellowship.

Pierce has appeared on MSNBC’s The Reidout and the Tamron Hall Show on ABC to speak about the teaching of American history in public schools. An avid historian, his research on re-segregation in his native Halifax County was featured in the Washington Post. 

He serves on the Governor’s Teacher Advisory Committee. 

Categories Education Reform

Statement by Russian Anti-War Committee

By dianeravitch
March 18, 2022 //
70

I just watched a documentary about Mikhail Khodorovsky called Citizen K. It is streaming on Prime Video. He was one of the original oligarchs in Russia, said to be the richest man in Russia, with a fortune of $15 billion. He began to criticize Putin and to speak out for democracy, and no surprise, he was arrested for tax evasion and given a long prison sentence. He was then charged with embezzlement, and his sentence was increased. After 10 years in prison, Putin granted him and others clemency, as a gesture of mercy when opening the Sochi Olympics. Khodorovsky lost his billions, but still has a few hundred million that he was wise enough to hide in places like Ireland. He now lives in London and supports civil society efforts to build a democratic future for Russia.

The following statement was posted on Khodorovsky’s website.

The world is watching as Russian dictator Vladimir Putin’s war of choice on Ukraine becomes a slaughter. Unable to topple the government in Kyiv promptly, Putin’s forces are now bombarding civilian populations day and night. Humanitarian catastrophe is imminent as electricity and water supplies fail in besieged cities. A million refugees have left and many more are trying to escape. Urgent action is required.

Meanwhile, Putin and his propagandists continue to tell lies about “liberating” Ukraine. Russian TV spews hateful lies about Nazis in Kyiv while the regime blocks social media to prevent Russians from seeing the bloody truth. Ukraine did want liberation—liberation from the grasp of Putin’s dictatorship. They paid a price in blood in 2014 to eject his puppet ruler and move toward Europe and real democracy. This was unacceptable to Putin, who swore to either recapture Ukraine or destroy it if he couldn’t. He is now fulfilling this promise on a raft of spurious pretexts that barely show any effort to disguise his imperialist aims.

The world is not only watching. Sanctions against Russia and Putin’s oligarchs that would have deterred Putin years ago are being applied. Russians are being made aware that Putin’s dictatorship is a dead end for them and the country. Weapons that would have prevented Putin’s invasion are now being sent. It is already too late to save thousands of lives lost in the past week, casualties that are added to the thousands more from the start of Putin’s invasion and occupation of Ukraine in 2014.

It is not enough. It is too late for deterrence when bombs are falling. We know from the horrors of Grozny and Aleppo that Putin has no regard for human life. We know from his track record that he will not stop until he is stopped. NATO, the greatest military alliance in human history, sits on the Western border of Ukraine, a front-row seat to a modern genocide.

There is no gray area here, no room for doubt. Hundreds of international reporters all over Ukraine are documenting atrocities by the hour. Putin’s war is a rare moment of moral clarity, a case of good versus evil rarely seen outside of fables and fantasy novels. No competing ideologies or religions, no disputed claims—nothing but war for the sake of war. There is no NATO treaty obligation to defend Ukraine, it is true, but nor is there any prohibition from doing so.

The West already has Ukrainian blood on its collective hands. In 1994, Ukraine signed away its giant nuclear arsenal in exchange for territorial guarantees by the US and UK (and Russia). Putin’s 2014 invasion of Eastern Ukraine and annexation of Crimea received international condemnation but no action.

Had the international community rushed to Ukraine’s defense then, the nightmare unfolding today could have been avoided. All the sanctions and weapons shipments happening now could have taken place eight long years ago. Instead, we heard it was too risky to confront Putin, that it could lead to war. Now the war has come regardless, as was inevitable. Success emboldens dictators, a lesson from history that has been ignored.

Even as Putin’s army surrounded Ukraine over the past few months, the West did nothing but issue warnings. Instead of rushing to fortify Ukraine with armaments and showing Putin that this time sanctions would be painful, the free world again waited and watched until Russian tanks were rolling in.

Now we are witnessing the third betrayal of Ukraine, the refusal to intervene when the scope of Putin’s murderous intentions have become clear. Ukraine’s heroic president Volodymyr Zelensky, who has refused to flee Kyiv at great personal risk, has pleaded with the international community to clear the skies over Ukraine. NATO and member nations have refused, on the grounds it would be an escalation. Instead, they will wait until Putin escalates on his own terms, as he always does, while the Ukrainian death count grows.

Now more than ever, being pro-Russian and anti-war means being anti-Putin. Putin can only be toppled by Russians, as his mafia cronies, security apparatus, and ordinary citizens are forced to choose between their own lives and his. Russians do not want this war, or any war, but they must see the truth and act. We believe it can and will happen. But it will not be in time to end the slaughter in Ukraine.

Thrice betrayed and now sacrificed for the West’s sins of appeasement of Putin, Ukraine is a tragedy of Biblical dimensions. We call upon the free world to exercise its vast power and clear moral authority to save innocent lives.

Members of the Russian Anti-War Committee:

  • Mikhail Khodorkovsky, public figure
  • Garry Kasparov, politician, 13th world chess champion
  • Sergey Aleksashenko, economist
  • Yuri Pivovarov, historian, member of Russian Academy of Sciences
  • Yevgeny Kiselyov, journalist
  • Vladimir Kara-Murza, politician, historian
  • Dmitry Gudkov, politician
  • Boris Zimin, entrepreneur
  • Yevgeny Chichvarkin, entrepreneur
  • Viktor Shenderovich, writer
  • Yulia Latynina, writer, journalist
  • Elena Lukyanova, lawyer

Categories Accountability, International

Dan Rather: Never Give Up!

By dianeravitch
March 18, 2022 //
0

Dan Rather has a terrific blog that he writes with Elliott Kirschner, where he relies on his long experience to put the current world into perspective.

In this post, he tells a story of a runner who injured his leg in the middle of a race but refused to give up.

Please watch the video. It’s an inspiring story.

Categories Courage, Grit

Arizona: Cyber Ninjas Owe More Than $2 Million for Refusal to Release Records

By dianeravitch
March 18, 2022 //
14

Remember the Cyber Ninjas? This Florida-based group was hired by the Arizona State Senate to recount the ballots in the state, which had previously been recounted multiple times. Arizona Republicans we’re hoping for evidence that the recount would reverse Biden’s narrow win in the state and feed Trump’s Big Lie that the election was “stolen” from him. The Cyber Ninjas had no experience in recounting ballots, and their owner was a Trump true believer. Nonetheless, there count turned up no evidence of fraud and confirmed Biden’s victory in Arizona.

The Arizona Republic asked the Cyber Ninjas to release the records of the recount, and the Cyber Ninjas refused. Then the newspaper sued for the records, on the grounds that they were public documents. They Cyber Ninjas still refused. An Arizona judge slapped a penalty of $50,000 a day on the company until it releases the records. The fines are over $2 million. The company is defunct but still fighting the court order.

The Arizona Supreme Court won’t review the $50,000 per day penalties a lower court imposed on the now-defunct Cyber Ninjas, at least not yet.

Cyber Ninjas was hit with the penalty by the Maricopa County Superior Court, and the company’s attorney Jack Wilenchik — who is now working for free because the company isn’t paying him — tried to skip the Court of Appeals and went right to the Supreme Court to seek relief earlier this week.

But for the second time, the Supreme Court told him in an order dated Thursday it won’t take up the issue of whether the company records are public and whether it should have to release them.

Meanwhile, penalties continue to accrue, and are at more than $2 million today.

The Supreme Court already declined to act on an appeal in the case in November when Cyber Ninjas filed a similar petition, before the fines were imposed. Its most recent order said the Arizona Court of Appeals was the proper venue to address whether the records are public.

Cyber Ninjas “has not adequately explained why it cannot initially seek relief from that court,” the Supreme Court wrote in its order.

Maricopa County Superior Court Judge John Hannah hit Cyber Ninjas with the lofty penalties in January because, he said, the company has continued to defy his orders to produce emails, text messages and other documents generated from the unusual “audit” of the Maricopa County 2020 election.

Republicans in the Arizona Senate hired Cyber Ninjas for the job.

The Arizona Republic requested the documents via the state’s Public Records Law. When that request was denied, The Republic sued Cyber Ninjas and the Senate in June. Separately, a left-leaning watchdog group called American Oversight sued the Senate for similar records….

Two superior court judges and the Court of Appeals have determined Cyber Ninja’s records are public documents under state law.

But Cyber Ninjas continues to argue that just because it was working for the government doesn’t mean the records are government documents. The company maintains that it does not need to turn over the records.

After months of litigation, The Republic asked for sanctions against the company of $1,000 a day.

Hannah on Jan. 6 found Cyber Ninjas in contempt of orders to turn over the records and fined the company 50 times that amount.

Soon after, Superior Court Judge Michael Kemp consolidated The Republic’s case with American Oversight’s. Kemp also declined to waive the penalties issued by Hannah…

To address Cyber Ninjas’ contention that it is unable to comply with the Public Records Law because it is dissolved as a company, The Republic asked the court aon Feb. 23 to make the company’s former CEO and his wife, Doug and Meghan Logan, the proper defendants.

Categories Arizona, Elections

Steve Hinnefeld: Indiana Legislature Ends Session with Minimal Damage to Schools

By dianeravitch
March 18, 2022 //
3

It’s pretty sad when the best thing you can say about the state legislature is, “It could have been worse.”

But that’s blogger Steve Hinnefeld’s conclusion. You can almost hear him breathing a sigh of relief that the Republicans didn’t do more harm.

The 2022 session of the Indiana General Assembly produced plenty of bad news, but at least there’s this: When it comes to education, it could have been worse. Much worse.

Republican legislators failed in their all-out effort to ban the teaching of what they misleadingly call “critical race theory” in schools. They also fell short in their efforts to politicize school board elections, encourage book-banning, and make public schools share funding with charter schools.

Their one truly harmful action regarding schools was the approval of House Bill 1041, which prohibits transgender girls from playing girls’ sports. This cruel legislation was designed for one purpose only: to toss a bone to the GOP’s right wing. Maybe – hopefully — Gov. Eric Holcomb will veto it.

Other than that, Republicans wasted people’s time and energy with lots of sound and fury about education, but it ultimately signified almost nothing.

House Bill 1134, which would have prohibited teaching “divisive concepts” supposedly deriving from critical race theory, was approved by the House but watered down and then abandoned by the Senate. Legislative leaders talked about reviving parts of the bill but didn’t manage to do so.

It’s a bit of a mystery why anti-CRT bills failed in Indiana when they were being approved in other conservative, Republican-controlled states. They weren’t helped when the author of one of the bills said teachers should be impartial when teaching about Nazism, prompting mockery on late-night TV.

Categories Education Industry, Indiana, Race

Kentucky: Charter Bill Appears to be Dead for Now

By dianeravitch
March 18, 2022 //
1

Tina Bojanowski, a teacher and member of the Kentucky legislature, tweeted last night that HB 9, the charter funding bill, appears to be dead for this session. A great victory for parents, students, teachers, and taxpayers in Kentucky!

She tweeted:

HB9, the charter school bill, was pulled from the committee agenda. It’s likely we stopped it – for this session.

@TinaForKentucky

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Education Industry, Kentucky, Resistance
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