We have all read stories about anti-vaxxers who pleaded for the vaccine on their deathbed. it turns out that there is a website that keeps track of anti-vaxxers who were hospitalized and/or died of COVID. At first, I thought the site was an exercise in schadenfreude—enjoying the suffering of others—but after I read many sad stories, I concluded that its purpose was to persuade anti-vaxxers to take the vaccine.
Open it. It’s worth reading, as it helps to explain the anti-vaxxer mindset.
Under the combined influence of Donald Trump and Governor Gregg Abbott, a considerable number of Texas parents have become convinced that their public schools have become hotbeds of Marxism and malignant “critical race theory.” Any discussion of racism is interpreted to mean CRT. Opponents of CRT oppose any recognition of racism in the past or present. This story in The Texas Monthly documents the mass hysteria now sweeping the Republican Party.
It describes a meeting in one of the state’s most successful schools: high test scores, high graduation rates, high college acceptance rates, award-wining teams. Yet the parents are furious because the school hired a diversity consultant from Teachers College, Columbia University!
About 99 percent of the 2021 senior class at Westlake High School was accepted to college, superintendent Tom Leonard tells the audience at the June 22 meeting of Eanes’s board, recapping another year of high achievement. The robotics team won a state championship, he adds, which could improve the school’s third-place standing in the Lone Star Cup, awarded to the state’s winningest schools. Westlake also won a state football championship, and the boys’ golf team won state too, as it has four years running. By the standards of Texas public schools, Eanes is an idyll.
Soon after Leonard stops speaking, however, loud yelling commences, and it continues for the better part of an hour. According to most of the 38 people who have come to give public testimony, the district’s schools have become beholden to “post-Marxist critical theory,” as one speaker puts it—“an updated version of Marxism focusing on differences between people.” The school board, says another, has opened the doors of Eanes to “antifa and BLM,” forces that “salivate after war” and “burn down” communities.
On the agenda today are two items that might seem unlikely reasons to go to battle. One is the contract of Mark Gooden, a professor at the Teachers College at Columbia University, in New York City, and, since 2020, the diversity, equity, and inclusion consultant for Eanes. The second is a rewrite of the district’s mission statement. After workshopping the document for more than a year, the board had settled on “Unite. Empower. Inspire . . . Every Person, Every Day.”
The angry parents are certain that these two items are evidence that the district has become “woke,” even anti-white.”
Mass madness.
Jan Resseger provides a useful and disturbing overview of vouchers, which began in 1991 in Milwaukee. The funder that inspired the Milwaukee voucher program, paid its legal costs, and kept it going while it was challenged in court was the rightwing Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, led by Mike Joyce. When vouchers were launched thirty years ago, their promoters said they would “save” poor black children who were “trapped” in “failing public schools.” Five years later, Cleveland adopted its own voucher program. Vouchers have not been an academic success, as promised, but libertarians and conservatives continued to demand more vouchers and charters because choice is choice, even when it doesn’t produce the promised results. A while back, while doing research for a book, I interviewed Alan Borsuk, who has been writing about Milwaukee schools for years, and he gave me this summary: the three sectors–charters, vouchers, public–get about the same results, and the results are low for all three sectors (the public sector has a disproportionately large number of students with disabilities who are not wanted by the other two sectors). On the National Assessment of Educational Progress, black students in Milwaukee score at about the same level as their peers in poor, underfunded southern states.
Jan writes:
Milwaukee, the oldest publicly funded, private school voucher program in the United States just marked its 30th anniversary. Wisconsin vouchers have been a model for voucher expansion all over the country, which makes this a good time to review the impact of the growth of diversion of tax dollars to cover private school costs.
In a two part review for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Alan J. Borsuk, senior fellow in law and public policy at the Marquette University Law School reflects on the operation and public policy impact of the now 30-year-old Milwaukee voucher program, and more generally on the implications of the growing use of school vouchers.
Borsuk begins by noting that in Wisconsin, vouchers are now so old they have lost some of their luster. He believes the public ought to be watching more closely: “In Wisconsin, the sector wars between public school people and school choice people are kind of old hat. The hottest cup of coffee served in the last generation of education around here seems lukewarm now. But that is also a good reason to re-cap the impact of providing public support for thousands of children to attend private and religious schools….”
Based on his study of the Milwaukee voucher program over its 30 year history, Borsuk offers 10 primarily descriptive observations:
Borsuk’s analysis presents a pretty objective analysis of many aspects of Wisconsin vouchers, but he entirely fails to address what across many states is the most serious concern: vouchers eat up a huge and growing portion of state education funding in Wisconsin and other states where voucher programs have grown over the years. Borsuk points out that the Milwaukee school district’s loss of students has been bad for the public schools. What he doesn’t mention is that as students leave for private schools, in some states they carry the voucher funding out of their local school district’s budget. But even when the state pays directly for the cost of the voucher, the school district loses the voucher student’s per-pupil state funding, and because many school district costs are fixed, the district loses funds needed for programming for the majority of a community’s students—the children enrolled in the public schools.
While Borsuk doesn’t mention the fiscal impact on public schools of the growth of vouchers across his state, in a 2017 brief from the National Education Policy Center, the University of Wisconsin’s Ellie Bruecker does evaluate the fiscal impact of Wisconsin’s vouchers on the state’s public schools: “The program as currently structured appears likely to exacerbate existing inequities in state school financing. Taxpayers in many communities will be burdened with higher tax costs without seeing that burden translate into more spending on students attending local public schools. Moreover, the relative amount of money the state allocates to each public school student it supports is likely to decline. As more states enact or expand voucher programs, the case of Wisconsin offers a cautionary tale. Statewide voucher programs have the potential to seriously exacerbate funding disparities in the public system.”
Additionally voucher programs educate the few at the expense of the millions of children who continue to be enrolled in the public schools which lose the funding. For the Phi Delta Kappan, Mark Berends explains that today, while they are expensive, voucher programs serve relatively few students: “The number of school voucher programs has increased dramatically over the last two-decades. In 2000, there were just five such programs in operation in school districts and states… by 2010, the number had increased to 12, and by 2021, it had climbed to 29… (T)he number of students participating in voucher programs… has increased significantly in the last decade, though the total number of students receiving vouchers remains a tiny fraction of the total number of students in the U.S. (about 0.5%).” (Emphasis is mine.)
And while the voucher program in Wisconsin may have reached a stable plateau, in Ohio, like many other states, legislatures are making big new investments in private school vouchers. Writing for the Columbus Dispatch, Anna Staver and Grace Deng report: “School choice advocates say… they want Ohio and eventually the country to give a voucher to any kid who wants one. ‘People are cutting their cable and buying individual channels and personalizing what they want for their own entertainment,’ said Greg Lawson, a research fellow at the… Buckeye Institute. ‘It’s about choice. It’s about empowering folks. People want choice in their food, in their entertainment. Education should be that too.’”
Staver and Deng summarize the history of the recent rapid expansion of these programs, “(T)he rules that govern eligibility get a little more expansive every year. At first, only students assigned to schools in ‘academic emergency’—the state’s lowest rating—for three consecutive years could apply for a voucher. A year later it became schools in either academic emergency or academic watch for three years. Six months after that, the requirement dropped to two of the last three years. In 2013, lawmakers created an income-based scholarship for all kids regardless of their home district… Today, roughly half of Ohio’s families are eligible for an income-based voucher because the limit for a family of four (is) $65,500 of annual household income.”
In the state budget passed at the end of June, the Ohio Legislature raised the size of each voucher in another program, EdChoice, from $4,650 for students in grades K-8 to $5,500 and for students in high school from $6,000 to $7,500. Previously only 60,000 students could qualify for EdChoice statewide, but in the new budget, the Legislature eliminated any cap on the program’s size While there used to be a 75 day window for submitting an application for an EdChoice voucher, there is now a rolling window with no closing date. And beginning with the FY 26 school year students will no longer be required to attend a public school in the year prior to qualifying for a voucher. Today high school students need not attend a public school in the year before qualifying, but as of 2026, no student will need to have attended a public school prior to qualifying.
In Ohio, it never seems to stop. Last Wednesday members of the Ohio House held a press conference to promote House Bill 290, introduced last spring as what its sponsor is reported to have called “a legislative intent bill” for the purpose of promoting widespread discussion of universal vouchers.
Open the link and read the rest. The legislative strategy for vouchers is the camel’s nose under the tent. The first act is to provide vouchers for poor students trapped in failing schools, so there are income limits and requirements that students were enrolled in a low-performing school. In the second act, the income limit for eligible students is raised, or vouchers are enacted for students with special needs (even though these students abandon their federally-guaranteed rights when they leave public schools). Next step, students applying for vouchers need never have attended public schools, so they are not being “saved from failing schools” because they never attended public schools. The ultimate goal is universal vouchers, because choice may be academically ineffective but choice is good. In reality, as Jan points out, choice defunds the public schools that most students attend, so choice is not good after all.
Nancy Bailey is a retired teacher who battles misinformation and propaganda. In this post, she dissects a new film called “The Truth About Reading,” which is riddled with half-truths and omissions. It is yet another alarmist film that calls parents to the barricades to engage in another round of The Reading Wars.
She begins:
Americans are getting primed with a trailer for a new documentary called The Truth About Reading. It’s said there needs to be a grassroots movement of parents and educators who are angry and say enough is enough.
Wouldn’t it be better if teachers and parents met and shared their concerns about reading at their schools? Schools do various reading programs that might need review, especially if students have difficulty learning.
Open the link and read on.
Eric Adams, the Democratic candidate for mayor, is sure to be elected mayor of New York City in November, succeeding Bill De Blasio. The current Mayor Bill De Blasio announced the end of testing four-year-olds for entry into gifted programs. Adams asserted his intention to keep gifted programs, but without details.
Eric Adams said on Friday that he would keep New York City’s elementary school gifted and talented program if, as expected, he wins the general election for mayor next month — a clear rebuke to Mayor Bill de Blasio, who recently announced plans to eliminate the program.
“There’s a new mayor next year, that mayor must evaluate how he’s going to deal with the gifted and talented program,” Mr. Adams, the Democratic nominee for mayor, said in an interview with CNN. “He can’t get rid of it until next year,” he added of Mr. de Blasio.
Asked directly whether he would eliminate the gifted program, Mr. Adams replied, “no I would not, I would expand the opportunities for accelerated learning.”
In another break with Mr. de Blasio, Mr. Adams said in a radio interview on Friday that he supported requiring students to receive a coronavirus vaccine to attend class — an action the mayor has steadfastly resisted over concerns it could motivate some parents to keep their children home.
Peter Greene points out that U.S. News used to be a news magazine, but has turned itself into a ranking agency, mainly of colleges, then high schools, and now…wait for it…elementary and middle schools! Does it get any more ridiculous than that?
Its rankings are based mainly on test scores, which are guaranteed to favor schools that are the whitest and most affluent.
US News was once a magazine, but these days it’s arguably most famous as a Ranker of Things, especially schools. They rank colleges and high schools annually, and despite the fact that these rankings are hugely questionable (see here, here and here), they are uncritically reprinted, quoted, and used by the fortunate top tier as a marketing tool.
So I’m sure from their perspective it makes sense to extend the brand by ranking elementary and middle schools. This is just as bad an idea as you think it is, and raises some big questions.
How do they do it?
I first guessed a system that used darts, a blindfold, and the broad side of a barn. But no–it’s worse than that.Scoring was almost entirely rooted in students’ performance on mathematics and reading/language arts state assessments.So, standardized test scores from 2018-2019. But also demographics worked in by soaking the test results in a sophisticated stew of argle-bargle fertilizer, because US News employs data strategists instead of journalists….
As many Wags on Twitter (a fine band name) observed, we can look for US News to continue to expand its brand. First obvious choice is rankings for pre-schools, but why stop there? America needs to know–where are the top-ranked playgrounds in the country? Whose mini-van back seat is producing the leaders of tomorrow? Which were the top-ranked fetuses of the year, and which uteruses are the best? Top-ranked sperm?
My dream is that the world greets this latest rank adventure with a massive yawn, but they won’t. People love rankings, love them so much that too many don’t even pause to ask, “Rank based on what, exactly?” Nobody anywhere is going to benefit from the sophistication of their analysis; the best we can hope for is that schools do not follow the lead of colleges and some high schools and start trying to game the system (“Sorry, Mrs. Potts, but your child is going to bring down our ranking with their test scores, so we’re booting little Pat out of kindergarten.”)
Just stop, US News. Just stop.
“In the Public Interest” is our best source for alerts about privatization. Here is their latest warning.
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Odds are, the $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act—which is still up for debate but is expected to be passed by Congress later this month—will incentivize privatization in some form or fashion.
As it stands, the bill would allow for more use of private activity bond financing. Private activity bonds, or PABs, are a key financing tool for so-called “public-private partnerships,” or P3s.
P3s are essentially expensive loans that hand some level of control over roads, water systems, school buildings, and other public infrastructure to corporations and private investors. Meaning, despite the warm and fuzzy name, they’re definitely a form of privatization.
Particularly worrying, the bill would also require the use of a problematic procurement tool—called a “value for money” analysis—that’s been causing issues for state and local governments for years.
When a state, locality, or school district wants to explore using a P3 instead of using tried-and-true traditional public financing, they often perform one of these analyses. Sparing you the wonky details, value for money analyses are often biased towards the private sector and chocked full of unfounded assumptions. In other words, they don’t provide an accurate comparison between private and public financing.
Ontario, Canada, learned that the hard way. After going on a P3 frenzy starting in 2001, they decided to take stock of their decision-making. A 2014 audit found that 74 out of 75 projects ended up being more expensive than their initial value for money analyses had estimated—a total of $8 billion more expensive.
Why would our federal government want to incentivize these types of deals? You tell me.
Senators Rob Portman (R-OH) and Joe Manchin (D-WV) slipped the requirement for value for money analyses on federally supported transportation loans into the bill in August. Maybe the fact that Manchin has received more campaign contributions from financial firms than any other industry—including from CBRE, a real estate firm actively pushing P3s—has something to do with it.
Regardless of why, we should prepare ourselves. That’s why we just put out some guidance on value for money analyses—why they’re often problematic and how to do them better.
It’s wonky stuff—so don’t be surprised if your eyes glaze over. The point is to get it into the hands of decisionmakers in your town, city, council, school district, and state.
Email this to your representatives and let them know what’s coming with the infrastructure bill. As always, if you need help understanding or explaining things, get in touch.
Jeremy Mohler
Communications Director
In the Public Interest
In the Public Interest
1305 Franklin St., Suite 501
Oakland, CA 94612
United States
As part of the Republican effort to eliminate teaching about slavery, racism, and other injustices, the state has banned “critical race theory” and requires teaching “both sides” of controversies.
In the Carroll Independent School District, teachers were told that if they teach about the Holocaust in Europe, they must teach “the other side.” Understandably, teachers were confused. Are they supposed to give equal time to the genocide of millions of men, women, and children, and those who say that the genocide never occurred? When they teach about slavery, must they give equal time to the atrocities of enslavement and to apologists who say that slavery was benign?
Teachers in a Texas city have been told that if they have a book on the Holocaust in their classroom, they should also have one that offers an “opposite” view.
A school head’s instruction to staff in Southlake, which is 26 miles northwest of Dallas, was secretly captured on an audio recording obtained by NBC News.
Gina Peddy, executive director of the Carroll Independent School District, spoke during a training session on what books teachers can keep in classroom libraries.
It came four days after the Carroll school board, in response to a parent’s complaint, voted to reprimand a teacher who had an anti-racism book in her classroom.
In the recording, Ms. Peddy told staff to “remember the concepts” of a new state law that requires teachers to present different points of view when discussing “widely debated and currently controversial” topics.
Referring specifically to the Nazi genocide of six million Jews in wartime, he said: “And make sure if you have a book on the holocaust that you have one that has an opposite, that has other perspectives. “
In response, a teacher said, “How do you oppose the Holocaust?”
Mrs. Peddy told them, “Trust me. That has come up.”
Speaking later, a teacher from Carroll told NBC News: “Teachers literally fear that we will be punished for having books in our classes.
“There are no children’s books that show the ‘opposite perspective’ of the Holocaust or the ‘opposite perspective’ of slavery.
“Are we supposed to get rid of all the books on those topics?”
Another teacher hung caution tape in front of books in a classroom after the new guidelines were distributed.
In a statement issued following Ms. Peddy’s comments, Carroll’s spokeswoman Karen Fitzgerald said the district was trying to help teachers comply with the new state law and an updated version that will take effect in December.
Subsequently, the district superintendent publicly apologized.
As the Superintendent, I express my sincere apology regarding the online article and news story. During the conversations with teachers, comments made were in no way to convey the Holocaust was anything less than a terrible event in history.
This statement does not explain how Texas teachers can teach both sides of every issue. There is no doubt that the purpose of the law is to make teachers fearful of teaching anything about racism or any other atrocities that are matters of fact.
On September 22, the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools put out a press release boasting of unprecedented enrollment growth during the pandemic. The report asserted that charter school enrollment increased during the pandemic in at least 39 states, with a 7 percent overall increase. The charter lobby said that this growth “is likely” to be “the largest rate of increase in student enrollment increase in half a decade,” as charter schools added nearly a quarter million students.
Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, conducted a state-by-state analysis of their claim and discovered that it was a half-truth at best. Maybe a quarter truth. Maybe less.
What she discovered was that most of the enrollment gains occurred at the worst-performing segment of the charter industry: virtual charter schools. Many brick-and-mortar charter schools actually lost enrollment.
Writing on Valerie Strauss’s “Answer Sheet” blog at the Washington Post, Burris documented the hollowness of the charter lobby claim.
She began:
The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools (NAPCS) has been broadcasting a 7 percent surge in charter school enrollment during the 2020-2021 pandemic school year. Parents are “voting with their feet,” according to its new report, preferring charters to their local public schools. What the authors of the report avoid telling readers is that much of the increase — and likely most of it — was in virtual charter schools, the worst-performing in the charter sector. This occurred even at the expense of brick-and-mortar charters.
The report says this:
“Although a school-level analysis was not conducted as a part of this paper, in some states (e.g., Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, and Utah), charter school enrollment increases were primarily driven by enrollment in virtual charter schools. This explains some but not all of the enrollment increases experienced by the charter school sector nationwide last year.”
What exactly does “primarily” mean? How bad is the problem? To find out, the Network for Public Education did a school-by-school analysis of virtual charter growth in the states with the largest proportional enrollment increases.
We began with the three mentioned states. In Oklahoma, the virtual charter-school sector more than doubled enrollment. Ninety-seven percent of the more than 35,000 new students in charters enrolled in virtual schools — most in the for-profit EPIC, which has been repeatedly under investigation for misreporting costs to state officials, improper financial transfers and more.
In Pennsylvania, 99.7 percent of the charter enrollment growth occurred in virtual charter schools. Enrollment in the Commonwealth’s traditional brick-and-mortar charter schools increased by a mere 78 students.
Cyber charters accounted for over 131 percent of the growth in Utah, with enrollment in traditional charters declining.
We expanded our analysis to see if this trend occurred in other states. We began with Michigan, a state whose auditor general had recently released an audit finding that cyber charters could not document participation in at least a single course in more than half of the inspected student records.
The enrollment surge in that state’s cyber charters accounted for 237 percent of the increase. Cyber charters enrollment increased by 5,071 students, while traditional charter enrollment dropped by nearly 3,000.
We then looked at Arizona, a state where families have been bombarded with cyber charter ads and billboards. Over 94 percent of the charter enrollment growth in that state was in the cyber charter sector.
Burris then includes a graph of every state that experienced at least a 10% increase in charter enrollments; there were 13. The graph shows how many students switched to online charters and how many to brick-and-mortar charters. In sum, 95.5% of the enrollment growth was virtual charters. Some brick-and-mortar charters lost enrollments.
Why does this matter? The virtual charter schools have a record of low academic achievement, high attrition, and low graduation rates. In addition, the sector has experienced massive scandals, like the A3 chain in California, whose founders pleaded guilty to phantom enrollments and are repaying the state hundreds of millions of dollars. Like ECOT (Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow) in Ohio, which collected $1 billion over 20 years, gave generously to politicians, then declared bankruptcy rather than comply with a court order to repay $67 million to the state for padded enrollments.
Seeing this increase in schools with abysmal performance is cause for alarm. A study of virtual schools by CREDO in 2015 concluded that students who attend these schools lose ground. While findings vary for each student, the results in CREDO’s report show that the majority of online charter students had far weaker academic growth in both math and reading compared to their traditional public school peers. To conceptualize this shortfall, it would equate to a student losing 72 days of learning in reading and 180 days of learning in math, based on a 180-day school year. This pattern of weaker growth remained consistent across racial-ethnic subpopulations and students in poverty.
Students may have”voted with their feet” to enroll in virtual schools during the pandemic, but we have to wait for the evidence to find out if they stayed or returned to public schools. If they decide to stay in virtual schools, we should be alarmed.
A few days ago, I was driving across the Brooklyn Bridge heading towards Brooklyn and saw that the Manhattan-bound side of the bridge was closed by a demonstration. I couldn’t make out what the signs said, so I turned on the local all-news radio station, 1010 WINS, to learn what was happening. It turns out it was a protest against the city’s vaccine mandate for teachers. About 90% or more of the city’s school staff are vaccinated. This was a demonstration by the holdouts.
One of them was interviewed. She said it was unfair that she is locked out of museums, Broadway plays, and soon, her workplace, because she refused to be vaccinated with a new and untested drug.
As it happened, we were returning from a visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where we saw a fascinating show about the Medicis. In order to enter the musum, we had to show proof that we were fully vaccinated.
I didn’t feel sorry for Ms. Anti-Vaxxer, but I realized that many doors are closed to her, and the number of closed doors will grow.
So the anti-vaxxers may talk about their “freedom,” but the reality is that their refusal to get vaccinated is limiting their freedom.
To go to a new doctor, I had to show the vaccine card that documents that I have had all my shots (Moderna). Some shops wouldnt let me in without it. Some restaurants won’t let you in without it. The number of employers requiring that their employees get vaccinated is constantly growing. Broadway plays require them, as do other performance spaces.
The world is closing its doors to the anti—vaxxers.
They say they are waiting for more evidence, as if they regularly read The Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine. I doubt they do.
In every state, the hospitals are overflowing with the unvaccinated. The unvaccinated are 10 times more likely to get sick, to be hospitalized, and to die from COVID, compared to those who got two jabs.
I don’t understand their reasoning. I don’t understand why they demand the ”right” not to protect themselves and their children from a deadly virus. I don’t understand why they willingly accept many other vaccines but not this one. Why dont they take this pandemic seriously? Why are they not convinced by 700,000 deaths?
They are losing their freedom by refusing the vaccine. I feel sorry for them but also angry at them for perpetuating the pandemic.
Diane Ravitch's blog 