The Heroes of Snake Island

By dianeravitch
February 27, 2022 //
47

Thirteen Ukrainian soldiers were stationed on Snake Island, off the coast of Ukraine. A Russian warship approached and warned them to surrender. The response went viral.

As the Russian military pounded targets across Ukraine with an array of bombs and missiles, a small team of Ukrainian border guards on a rocky, desolate island received an ominous message: Give up or be attacked.

“I am a Russian warship,” a voice from the invaders said, according to a recording of the communications. “I ask you to lay down your arms and surrender to avoid bloodshed and unnecessary deaths. Otherwise, you will be bombed.”

The Ukrainians responded boldly.
“Russian warship,” came the reply, “go f— yourself.”

The Russians opened fire, eventually killing 13 border guards.

President Zelensky announced that the 13 would be named Heroes of Ukraine, the nation’s highest honor.

Categories Courage, International

Rick Scott’s Radical Far-Right Agenda to Roll Back the Clock

By dianeravitch
February 27, 2022 //
62

Florida Senator Rick Scott released his 11-point plan for the future. It contains every “culture war” issue that gets Republicans riled up. Abortion, gays, race, gender, patriotism.

It contains not a single proposal to address climate change, the economy, jobs, healthcare, or any other idea to address real problems of real people.

Rick Scott’s agenda:

  1. Our kids will say the pledge of allegiance, salute the Flag, learn that America is a great country, and choose the school that best fits them. We will inspire patriotism and stop teaching the revisionist history of the radical left; our kids will learn about the wisdom of the US Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the founding fathers. Public schools will focus on the 3 R’s, not indoctrinate children with critical race theory or any other political ideology. 
  2. Government will never again ask American citizens to disclose their race, ethnicity, or skin color on any government forms. We are going to eliminate racial politics in America. No government policy will be based on race. People “will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” We are all made in the image of God; to judge a person on the color of their epidermis is immoral.
  3. The soft-on-crime days of coddling criminal behavior will end. We will re-fund and respect the police because they, not the criminals, are the good guys. We will enforce our laws, all of them, and increase penalties for theft and violent crime. We will clean up our cities and stop pretending that crime is OK. We have zero-tolerance for “mostly peaceful protests” that attack police officers, loot businesses, and burn down our cities. 
  4. We will secure our border, finish building the wall, and name it after President Donald Trump. Nations have borders. We should give that a try. President Trump’s plan to build a wall was right. We welcome those who want to join us in building the American dream, immigrants who want to be Americans, not change America. We are a stronger nation because we are a nation of immigrants; but immigration without assimilation makes us weaker. Politicians from both parties talk big about border security and do nothing. We are done with that.
  5. We will grow America’s economy, starve Washington’s economy, and stop Socialism. Socialism is un-American and always leads to poverty and oppression. We will stop it. We will shrink the federal government, reduce the government work force by 25% in 5 years, sell government buildings and assets, and get rid of the old, slow, closed, top-down, government-run-everything system we have today
  6. We will eliminate all federal programs that can be done locally, and enact term limits for federal bureaucrats and Congress. Many government agencies should be either moved out of Washington or shuttered entirely. Yesterday’s old government is fundamentally incompatible with the digital era. The permanent ruling class in Washington is bankrupting us with inflation and debt, so they must be removed. For you to have more, Washington must have less.
  7. We will protect the integrity of American Democracy and stop left-wing efforts to rig elections. Today’s Democrat Party is trying to rig elections and pack the courts because they have given up on Democracy. They don’t believe they can win based on their ideas, so they want to game the system and legalize voter fraud to stay in power. In true Orwellian fashion, Democrats refer to their election rigging plans as “voting rights”. We won’t allow the radical left to destroy our democracy by institutionalizing dishonesty and fraud.
  8. We will protect, defend, and promote the American Family at all costs. The nuclear family is crucial to civilization, it is God’s design for humanity, and it must be protected and celebrated. To say otherwise is to deny science. The fanatical left seeks to devalue and redefine the traditional family, as they undermine parents and attempt to replace them with government programs. We will not allow Socialism to place the needs of the state ahead of the family. 
  9. Men are men, women are women, and unborn babies are babies. We believe in science: Men and women are biologically different, ‘male and female He created them.’ Modern technology has confirmed that abortion takes a human life. Facts are facts, the earth is round, the sun is hot, there are two genders, and abortion stops a beating heart. To say otherwise is to deny science.
  10. Americans will be free to welcome God into all aspects of our lives, and we will stop all government efforts to deny our religious freedom and freedom of speech. The Democrat Party and their Big Tech allies are not merely secular; they have virtually created a new religion of wokeness that is increasingly hostile toward people of faith, particularly Christians and Jews. They are determined to drive all mention of God out of public view. We will not be silenced, canceled, or told what words to use by the politically correct crowd. 
  11. We are Americans, not globalists. America will be dependent on NO other country. We will conduct no trade that takes away jobs or displaces American workers. Countries who oppose us at the UN will get zero financial help from us. We will be energy independent and build supply chains that never rely on our adversaries. We will only help countries that are willing to defend themselves, like Israel.

Categories Censorship, Charter Schools, Economy, Elections, Environment, Florida, Republicans, Vouchers

Bob Shepherd: The Dirty Secret of the Standardized Testing Industry

By dianeravitch
February 27, 2022 //
31

Bob Shepherd, a frequent contributor to the blog, is an education polymath. He has authored textbooks, written assessments, developed curriculum, and was most recently a classroom teacher in Florida. He has a long history in the education industry.

He explains here why standardized testing today is neither valid nor reliable.

He begins:

The dirty secret of the standardized testing industry is the breathtakingly low quality of the tests themselves. I worked in the educational publishing industry at very high levels for more than twenty years. I have produced materials for all the major textbook publishers and most of the standardized test publishers, and I know from experience that quality control processes in the standardized testing industry have dropped to such low levels that the tests, these days, are typically extraordinarily sloppy and neither reliable nor valid. They typically have not been subjected to anything like the validation and standardization procedures used, in the past, with intelligence tests, the Iowa Test of Basic Skills, and so on. The mathematics tests are marginally better than are the tests in ELA, US History, and Science, but they are not great. The tests in English Language Arts are truly appalling…

The Common Core tests, he says, are especially useless.

They are almost entirely content free. They don’t assess what students ought to know. Instead, they test, supposedly, a lot of abstract “skills”–the stuff on the Gates/Coleman Common [sic] Core [sic] bullet list, but as we shall see below, they don’t even do that.

Open the link and read on. This is a very important exposé by an expert.

Categories Common Core, Curriculum, Education Industry, Fraud, Hoax, Standardized Testing

Jill Underly: The Debate About Parental Rights

By dianeravitch
February 27, 2022 //
5

Jill Underly is the state superintendent of education in Wisconsin. In this article, she responds to the demands in red states for “parent rights,” which is usually premised on the belief that teachers are “indoctrinating” their students and can’t be trusted.

Superintendent Underly writes:

Dr. Jill Underly is the Wisconsin State Superintendent, and she offers thoughts to parents and teachers facing the current attacks by legislators.

Like you, I know what it means to be involved with my children’s education, and I love it.

But I look at the way politicians talk about parental involvement, and I don’t recognize it. Family engagement isn’t about yelling at school staff or suing your school board if they don’t do exactly as you demand.

It’s also not asking caregivers to homeschool or pay for private tuition if they feel unheard or unseen.

Family engagement is about having a real conversation about – and with – our children.

Like you, I build relationships with my children’s teachers, I reach out when I need to, and they know they can call if they need to.

As a parent, I love my children’s school, and I see the ways our district works to involve all families and the entire community, and how the entire community supports our school.

It’s an exchange, because what matters most to all of us is what we all have in common: our children.

Of course, this isn’t what politicians mean when they talk about protecting parental rights when it comes to children’s education. Rather, they’re talking about micromanaging curriculum and preying on our parental emotions during a traumatic time, all with the ulterior motive of placing suspicion on educators by weaponizing lessons about difficult topics, or by placing blame on schools for a pandemic they did not cause but are nonetheless supporting our children through.

As to my fellow educators, you and I all know that this isn’t the first time that politicians in this state have gone after teachers.

And as a former civics teacher, I know that teaching the history of this nation cannot – and should not – be done without tackling difficult topics.

Families know this and support these opportunities for our schools to engage our children to become critical thinkers and critical consumers of information. We want our students to grow up and be active participants in democracy, and that means they need to know how to examine their past, think critically about their present, and make informed decisions about their future.

I’m tired.

Like you, I’m tired of the pandemic. I’m getting tired of this winter. And I’m really, really tired of politicians pitting parents against teachers when our children are the ones who get hurt in the end.

Because they’re the ones who matter most in this conversation and who matter most for the future of our state. And that conversation – how to best meet the needs of our children and students – is one I’m excited to continue having as a parent and an educator, and to lead as your Wisconsin State Superintendent.

Read the full letter here.

Categories Administrators, superintendents, Parents, Propaganda, Teachers

South Carolina: It Doesn’t Matter What’s Taught If There’s No One to Teach It

By dianeravitch
February 26, 2022 //
17

Patrick Kelly, director of governmental affairs for the Palmetto State Teachers Association, warned in an opinion piece in the Charleston (SC) Post and Courier about the state’s teacher shortage. Teacher salaries are low, and legislators are obsessed with the idea of telling teachers what they may and may not teach. Meanwhile the state has a budget surplus, and Governor Henry McMaster will use it to lower taxes, not to raise abominably low teacher salaries or to feed the children in South Carolina who go hungry every day (about 15% of the children in the coastal counties of the state). Of course, I take issue with the headline: there’s no point trying to teach in a state that requires teachers to teach lies.

Kelly writes:

With the 2022 session of the S.C. General Assembly now more than a quarter complete, legislators have committed a significant amount of time and energy to bills that could have sweeping implications for what is taught in South Carolina classrooms as well as the very definition of what constitutes a public education.

Some of these debates address real, pressing challenges in our schools, while others are fueled by the desire of policymakers to respond to the very vocal concerns of select constituencies. However, in spite of all the time and energy dedicated to education, not enough has been accomplished to address the single problem that threatens to make all other education policy efforts moot: the state’s increasing teacher shortage.

The shortage of teachers in South Carolina has been growing steadily for years. In 2019, I wrote about how “the house is on fire” in schools due to the growing number of vacant teaching positions across the state. That year, schools had opened with 621 vacancies. This year, that number ballooned to 1,063 positions, a 71% increase. What looked like a house fire then has grown into a five-alarm inferno.

The timing of this shortage could not be worse for children. Right now, our students are facing unprecedented challenges, including increased incidents of school violence, depression and suicidal thoughts. At the same time, students are attempting to navigate the academic fallout of lost instructional time stemming from shifts to virtual learning, quarantines and student illness…

Education research universally agrees that the No. 1 in-school influence on student achievement is the quality of the teacher in the classroom. Given this fact, it is imperative to address the more than 1,000 classrooms that do not have access to any teacher at a time when students need more support than ever.

To date, though, there has been little done this legislative session to take the steps necessary to enhance educator recruitment and retention. One notable and important exception has been the advancement of a bill introduced by Sen. Stephen Goldfinch to guarantee 30 minutes of daily, unencumbered planning time for elementary and special education teachers, two groups that often go through an entire school day without a moment even to go to the restroom.

Other recently introduced bills hold promise, such as one introduced by Rep. Gilda Cobb-Hunter to address student debt for teachers and one from Senate Republican Leader Shane Massey to provide enhanced lottery scholarships to education majors.

But these bills have yet to receive committee review, a significant problem in the rapidly advancing second year of this General Assembly. As both the legislative calendar and our teacher supply dwindle, we need action now on these bills as well as other measures that could enhance education retention — steps such as reducing class sizes, providing enhanced mentoring support for new teachers and creating meaningful career pathways to keep our best teachers in the classroom.

The Legislature should also follow the lead of S.C. Education Superintendent Molly Spearman, who called on budget writers to do “as much as (they) can” to increase teacher salaries, including raising minimum starting pay to $40,000…

As our state continues to debate what is — or is not — taught in our classrooms, we should never lose sight of the indisputable fact that nothing is taught in a classroom without a teacher. A failure to put out this growing fire in our schools will deprive an ever-increasing number of students of access to the great teacher who can spark interests and abilities into their full potential.

Patrick Kelly is director of governmental affairs for the Palmetto State Teachers Association and has taught in S.C. schools since 2005.

Categories Education Reform, South Carolina, Teacher Pay, Teacher Shortage

Nevada: Most Charter Students Enrolled in Schools Managed by Florida For-Profit Firm

By dianeravitch
February 26, 2022 //
21

Back in the early days of charter schools, their advocates imagined that most would be run by teachers or local educators with a passion to run their own school. The charters would be innovative and accountable, working closely with public schools to share good ideas.

That was then, this is now.

No one back in the late 1980s envisioned huge charter chains like KIPP.

Nor did they imagine the emergence of for-profit chains owned by entrepreneurs.

Nor did they imagine that a state like Nevada would have most of its charter school students in schools managed by Academica, a Florida-based for-profit chain.

Academica’s politically connected owners have amassed over $100 million in Florida real estate. Real estate: that’s where the profit is. Running charters schools is a lucrative business, especially if you have influential friends and family in the legislature.

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Education Industry, Florida, For-Profit, Nevada

What the Kenyan Ambassador Said About National Borders

By dianeravitch
February 25, 2022 //
36

Fareed Zakaria said on CNN a few days ago that the Kenyan Ambassador to the UN gave the best response to Putin’s assertion about national borders. Basically, he said that all the borders in Africa were created by the colonial powers, but Africans have agreed to live with them because the alternative would be endless war.

Murtaza Hussain of The Intercept agreed.

He wrote:

AS EUROPE FACES the grim prospect of a land war on a scale it has not seen since World War II, it was Kenya’s ambassador to the United Nations, Martin Kimani, who delivered a message that struck at the heart of the crisis: a lingering nostalgia for empire.

At an emergency meeting of the U.N. Security Council, called to discuss the Russian aggression against Ukraine, Kimani did not just condemn the threat to Ukrainian sovereignty by President Vladimir Putin’s government. He went further, highlighting how an unceasing obsession over territory and borders is continuing to drive violence around the world, long after the European empires that drew those demarcations have vanished from the map. He offered an alternate vision of peace through acceptance of the borders created by the collapse of empires and nations in the 20th century, calling for economic and cultural integration instead.

“Kenya, and almost every African country, was birthed by the ending of empire,” Kimani said. “Our borders were not of our own drawing. They were drawn in the distant colonial metropoles of London, Paris, and Lisbon with no regard for the ancient nations that they cleaved apart. Today, across the border of every single African country live our countrymen with whom we share deep historical, cultural, and linguistic bonds. At independence, had we chosen to pursue states on the basis of ethnic, racial, or religious homogeneity, we would still be waging bloody wars these many decades later. Instead, we agreed that we would settle for the borders we inherited.”

Kimani’s remarks, which went viral on social media and in the African media, also criticized what he called the “dangerous nostalgia” for empire that leads countries to redraw borders by force to reunite with citizens of other nations with whom they share cultural affinity — the exact argument the Russian government has used to justify its invasion of Ukraine in support of Russian speakers there. Instead, Kimani called on Europe to follow the rules of the U.N. charter as the African Union countries have sought to do, respecting the sovereignty of neighboring countries “not because our borders satisfied us, but because we wanted something greater forged in peace.”

Now, let’s do a thought experiment and consider what it would mean if we reverted to the borders of olden times.

We Americans might start by returning Texas to Mexico, as well as large swaths of the Southwest, including the southern half of California.

Then we could give Florida back to Spain.

And if we are being truly considerate of historical claims, we should give everything else back to the Native Americans/American Indians who originally lived on the land.

Categories History, International

Is Ukraine a Sovereign Nation?

By dianeravitch
February 25, 2022 //
30

A few days before Russian troops invaded Ukraine, Putin justified the decision to make war by claiming that Ukraine did not exist. It was a fake nation, invented by Lenin.

But…

The Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler debunked Putin’s web of lies.

The reality is that Ukrainian culture and language have existed for centuries and a Ukrainian nationalist movement sprang up in the mid-1800s, angering the czars. While parts of what is now Ukraine was part of the Russian empire, the rest of the state was, at various times, under the control of Poland, Lithuania and Austria-Hungary.
Moreover, when Ukrainians were given a choice of remaining with Russia in a 1991 national referendum, 84 percent of eligible voters went to the polls — and more than 90 percent, including many non-Ukrainians, cast ballots for independence.

Putin made the absurd claim that Ukraine posed a threat to Russia because it was developing nuclear weapons.

The fact is that Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons in 1994 in exchange for recognition of its sovereignty. Russia signed the agreement, called the Budapest Memorandum.

Kessler writes:

This is sheer fantasy. There is no evidence that Ukraine wants to develop nuclear weapons — or that it even has the capacity to do so, given the ruined state of the economy.

There was a cache of more than 1,000 strategic nuclear weapons on Ukraine’s soil when the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991. That made Ukraine instantly the world’s third biggest nuclear power, with more weapons than Britain, France and China combined. But the country gave up the stockpile for what seemed like a good deal at the time. In the 1994 Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances, Russia, along with the United States and Britain, agreed to “refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine” in exchange for Ukraine’s joining the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Now that Russia has essentially ripped up the Budapest Memorandum, some Ukrainians have wondered whether it was a bad bargain. “Ukraine has received security guarantees for abandoning the world’s third nuclear capability,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a speech this month at the Munich Security Conference. “We don’t have that weapon. We also have no security.”

Categories International, Lies

Oakland: The Indispensable School that the Board Wants to Close

By dianeravitch
February 25, 2022 //
11

Community members and two members of the Oakland school board asked for a one-year delay in the decision to close schools. The board turned down their request. The two board members who have valiantly opposed the closures are Mike Hutchinson and VanCedric Williams.

Zack Haber wrote at Medium about one school on the closure list that is indispensable. It is Community Day School, which takes in students who have been expelled from other schools and provides the support they need to believe in themselves.

Community Day’s mission statement says they use a “therapeutic approach” by supporting students “academically, socially, and emotionally” both individually and in small groups through “instruction, counseling and career exploration.” Enrollment depends on expulsion rates, and has been low lately. Before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the school had 39 students. But during last school year, when OUSD students were almost entirely in distance learning, the district issued no expulsions, and the school now enrolls around 15 students, which allows for more individualized attention.

“You get more help here compared to a regular school,” said Luis Martinez, a Community Day student. “It’s calmer. You get away from big crowds of people and everyone gets along.”

The name “Luis Martinez” is a pseudonym as this reporter is granting this student anonymity due to his status as a minor navigating a school discipline process.

“Coming to Community Day and experiencing this small class size is sometimes the first step in our students seeing they can be successful in school,” said English Teacher Vernon ‘Trey’ Keeve III. “We’re also a staff that is constantly experimenting with new ways to get our students to express themselves.”

When the school is needed again, it won’t be there. That’s why parents, students, and educators continue to protest the school closures.

I wish I could explain why the board majority is so determined to lose schools in the face of enormous opposition. I don’t understand.

Categories Accountability, Class size, Closing schools, Cruelty, Education Reform, Oakland

Texas: Charter $$$ Flood Race for State Board of Education

By dianeravitch
February 25, 2022 //
20

The charter industry has set its sights on Texas, since the state has a rightwing Governor and Lieutenant Governor and Republicans control the state legislature.

So charter money is flowing to candidates for State Board of Education. In El Paso, board member Georgina Perez decided not to run again, so the charter industry is backing a charter school leader to take her place. Perez is a charter critic who recently joined the board of the Network for Public Education.

The charter industry has donated more than $200,000 to Omar Yanar. Yanar leads a small charter called the El Paso Leadership Academy.

The money behind the money: billionaires Reed Hastings and Jim Walton.

Charter Schools Now reported spending more than $1 million on various primary candidates throughout the state from Jan. 21-Feb. 19. That includes a $1,000 donation to state Sen. César Blanco, D-El Paso, who is unopposed in the March 1 primary, according to the PAC’s Feb. 22 filing.

The PAC gave to three Republican incumbent SBOE members’ reelection campaigns in addition to three Republican primary candidates and five Democratic primary candidates.

Charter Schools Now is heavily funded by two well-known charter advocates: Netflix co-founder and CEO Reed Hastings and Jim Walton, a member of the Walmart family.

Hastings is on the board of directors of KIPP Public Schools, a national charter school chain with campuses in Austin, San Antonio, Houston and the Dallas-Fort Worth area. He was previously on the national board of Rocketship Public Schools, which is opening its first Texas campus in August in Fort Worth.

Hastings gave $1.5 million to Virginia-based Educational Equity PAC on Feb. 15, the same day that PAC gave $570,000 to Charter Schools Now. Days earlier, Educational Equity gave Charter Schools Now $70,000.

Walton gave Charter Schools Now $450,000 in December 2021. The Walton Family Foundation has invested millions over the years to support public charter schools across the country.

One way to win elections is to buy them.

Reed Hastings lives in California.

Jim Walton lives in Arkansas.

Neither lives in Texas but they arrogantly assume that their money gives them the power to buy seats on the Texas Board of Education.

The charter industry wants to eliminate public schools or keep them as dumping grounds for students the charters don’t want.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Privatization, Texas
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