Carol Burris: The Secretary of Education We Need–and Those We Don’t

By dianeravitch
November 19, 2020 //
43

Carol Burris wrote the following post. Marla Kilfoyle provided assistance. They asked me to add that there are dozens more exceptionally well qualified people who should be considered for this important post: they are career educators who believe in public education, not closing schools or privatization.

The media has been filled with speculation regarding Joe Biden’s pick for Secretary of Education. Given the attention that position received with Betsy De Vos at the helm, that is not a surprise. 

In 2008, Linda Darling Hammond was pushed aside by DFER (Democrats for Education Reform) for Arne Duncan, with disastrous consequences for our public schools. Race to the Top was a disaster. New Orleans’ parents now have no choice but unstable charter schools. Too many of Chicago’s children no longer have a neighborhood school from the Race to the Top era when it was believed that you improved a school by closing it.

But the troubling, ineffective policies of the past have not gone away. Their banner is still being carried by deep-pocketed ed reformers who believe the best way to improve a school is to close it or turn it over to a private charter board. 

Recently, DFER named its three preferred candidates for the U.S. Secretary of Education. DFER is a political action committee (PAC) associated with Education Reform Now, which, as Mercedes Schneider has shown, has ties to Betsy De Vos. DFER congratulated Betsy DeVos and her commitment to charter schools when Donald Trump appointed her.  They are pro-testing and anti-union. DFER is no friend to public schools.

The DFER candidates belong to Jeb Bush’s Chiefs for Change, an organization that promotes Bush/Duncan education reform, as Jan Resseger describes here. “Chiefs for Change,” you support school choice, even if it drains resources from the public schools in your district, of which you are the steward. In their recent letter to President Biden, Chiefs for Change specifically asked for a continuance of the Federal Charter School Program, which has wasted approximately one billion dollars on charters that either never open or open and close. They also asked for the continuance of accountability systems (translate close schools based on test results) even as the pandemic rages.

We must chart a new course. We cannot afford to take a chance on another Secretary of Education who believes in the DFER/Chiefs for Change playbook. 

We don’t have to settle. The bench of pro-public education talent is deep. Here are just a few of the outstanding leaders that come to mind who could lead the U.S. Department of Education. Marla Kilfoyle and I came up with the following list. There are many more. 

Tony Thurmond is the State Superintendent of Public Instruction, California. Tony deeply believes in public schools. Prior to becoming his state’s education leader, he was a public school educator, social worker, and a public school parent. His personal story is both moving and compelling. 

Betty Rosa dedicated most of her adult life to the students of New York City.  She began her career as a bi-lingual paraprofessional in NYC schools, became a teacher, assistant principal, principal, superintendent, state chancellor, and now New York State’s interim commissioner. 

Other outstanding superintendents include Joylynn Pruitt -Adams, the Superintendent of Oak Park and River Forest in Illinois, who is relentlessly determined to provide an excellent education to the district’s Black and Latinx high school students by eliminating low track classes, Mike Matsuda, Superintendent of Anaheim High School District and Cindy Marten, the superintendent of San Diego.  

Two remarkable teachers with legislative experience who are strong advocates for public schools and public school students are former Teacher of the Year Congresswoman Jahana Hayes and former Arkansas state senator Joyce Elliot. 

There is also outstanding talent in our public colleges. There are teachers and leaders like University of Kentucky College of Education Dean, Julian Vasquez Heilig, who would use research to inform policy decisions.  

These are but a few of the dedicated public school advocates who would lead the Department in a new direction away from test and punish policies and school privatization. They are talented and experienced leaders who are dedicated to improving and keeping our public schools public and who realize that you don’t improve schools by shutting them down. Any DFER endorsed member of Chiefs for Change is steeped in the failed school reform movement and will further public school privatization through choice. They had their chance. That time has passed. 

 

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Categories Accountability, Biden, Bush, Jeb, Charter Schools, Chicago, Chiefs for Change, Closing schools, Corporate Reform, Democrats, Democrats for Education Reform, DFER, Disruption, Education Industry, Education Reform, Equity, Philadelphia, Portfolio District, Privatization

Federal Judge Permanently Bars DeVos from Diverting CARES Funds to Private Schools

By dianeravitch
November 19, 2020 //
16

While Trump appointees are doing their best to impose their policies before January 20, a federal judge in California told Betsy DeVos in no equivocal terms by a federal judge that she cannot divert CARES money to private schools. The nation’s nearly 100,000 public schools received $13.2 billion in CARES funding, which they were required to share with charter schools and to private schools with low-income students. However, charter schools, religious schools, and private schools also qualified for billions more from the CARES Payroll Protection Program, which excluded public schools. DeVos initially tried to wedge private schools into the public schools’ $13.2 billion fund, even if the private schools had no low-income students. But three federal judges rejected her efforts. Now she is permanently enjoined.

LANSING, Mich — A judge has formally closed the case on U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’ efforts to rewrite a section of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act that would have diverted $16 million in funding away from public schools in Michigan.

The lawsuit against DeVos was co-led by Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel and California Attorney General Xavier Becerra. On Nov. 9, U.S. District Court Northern District of California Judge James Donato approved a permanent injunction, thus formally closing the case. He then entered a judgement in favor of all plaintiffs.

“This pandemic has greatly impacted students across the country. The CARES Act is imperative as it provides critical funding for our public schools and the resources teachers need to continue safely teaching our youth,” Nessel said. “This permanent injunction sends a clear message that the publicly funded CARES Act dollars should be used as Congress intended – to educate our public students, and not to serve the political agendas of a select few.”

Categories Betsy DeVos, Privatization

NYC Schools Will Close, Despite Low Infection Rates in Schools

By dianeravitch
November 18, 2020 //
162

As the coronavirus surges across the nation, infections are returning to the east coast cities and states that hoped they were done with it.

After New York City suffered more deaths than many states, the city for months boasted a low infection rate. But that rate recently hovered just below 3%. Mayor de Blasio said he would close the schools and revert to remote instruction if the positivity rate reached 3%. It did and today Mayor de Blasio announced that he was closing the schools even though they have a positivity rate well below 1%, even below 0.2%. Strangely, the city is not closing indoor dining and gyms. About 300,000 students returned for in-person instruction. Their parents will now have to make arrangements for childcare.

It’s sad that the mayor is taking an all-or-nothing approach to closing the schools. Schools that have been successful in avoiding transmission should stay open. The data show that schools are not super spreaders.

Categories Education Reform

NYC Parents Criticize de Blasio for His Inflexibilty

By dianeravitch
November 18, 2020 //
39

Mayor de Blasio has wavered about when and how to open the schools since the pandemic began. Now he has drawn a line in the sand and threatens to close all the city’s schools if the city reaches a certain level of infections. Some schools are in danger zones. Others are not. Some parents—and the New York Daily News editorial board—think the mayor should recognize that some schools are safe and allow them to remain open.

Categories Accountability, Bill de Blasio, Health, New York City

Arthur Camins: How Do We Persuade Nearly Half of Voters that A Better Society for All is Good for Them Too?

By dianeravitch
November 18, 2020 //
119

Arthur Camins, retired science and technology educator, knows that Democrats must do a better job of reaching out and persuading nearly half of voters that we all have a stake in a better, fairer society.

He writes:

Celebrate! Breathe a very, very big sigh of relief. Among the record number of Americans who went to the polls and mailed in their ballots, over half voted for Joe Biden to reject and decisively defeat Donald Trump!! At least five million more. I wish it was a landslide, but still, big, big whew!

However, don’t stop worrying. Be vigilant. Organize.

Roughly 47% of voting Americans, (including 58% of exit-polled whites) were willing to accept an openly racist, xenophobic, misogynistic, corrupt, wealth-protecting tax cheat, as well as his many elected Republican sycophantic supporters. The causes go way back and continue to this day. We ignore that history and current precipitants at our grave peril.  The depth of racism, appeal of authoritarianism, and continued of be-out-for-yourself cynicism will not fade away soon.  The danger of armed right-wing violence is ever-present.

This deep polarization is unacceptable, he writes. We must find a way forward that changes the mindset of those who fail to see that our society rises or falls together. He has some suggestions.

Categories Citizenship, Education Reform

Nancy Bailey: Business Terms Should Be Expelled from Our Schools

By dianeravitch
November 18, 2020 //
74

Last year, Nancy Bailey and I co-authored a glossary of words, terms, and the names of organizations in education today. It is called Edspeak and Doubletalk: A Glossary to Decipher Hypocrisy and Save Public Schooling. Truly, folks, you can’t tell the players without a scorecard, and this book is the scorecard for education policy today.

Nancy has a great eye for how language is used to deceive, and in this post, she warns educators to beware of the infiltration of business language into education. When those terms are used, she says, there is an effort underway to turn parents into customers and promote privatization.

Beware when your superintendent is called a “CEO” instead of a school superintendent. In some districts, the switch covers up the superintendent’s lack of proper education credentials.

Beware “alignment,” which is an effort to standardize curriculum, instruction and testing, and to squelch teacher creativity and autonomy.

Beware “benchmarks” and “data-driven” anything, which fit widgets but not students.

Beware the use of “customers” instead of “parents”:

With privatization, parents are customers who choose the school they want because the school is a business.

When communities are devoted to their public schools, they follow and attend Friday night football games. They attend class plays and cheer for student accomplishments. They visit student art fairs and help with school fundraisers. Public schools can be a source of pride for the community.

Parents and those in the community never used to be called customers because they had ownership of the schools. The schools belonged to them.

Open the link and see many other examples of business language that does not belong in the lexicon of educators.

Categories Accountability, Competition, Corporate Reform, Corporate Reformers, Corruption, Education Industry, Education Reform

Peter Greene: What the Charter Industry Hates About the Biden Plan

By dianeravitch
November 18, 2020 //
10

If you subscribe to Peter Greene’s blog Curmudgucation, as you should, you know that Peter can toss off one or two or three fresh, smart posts a day without breaking a sweat. Here is another excellent post, on the subject of Biden’s plans for holding charter schools accountable and why the charter industry finds his plans offensive.

I was in Washington, D.C., in the early 1990s when the charter idea took off. Its advocates (and I was one at the time) said that charter schools would be more accountable and more innovative than public schools. And, even sweeter, they would cost less than public schools. We now know, thirty years later, that none of that turned out to be true. The charter industry believes fervently in deregulation and hates any efforts by states to hold them accountable. They are not more innovative than public schools, unless you consider a “no-excuses” regime of strict rules and rigid enforcement to be “innovative.” The charter industry continually complains that they are not given as much money as public schools, even when they are given more, so cost-efficiency is not one of their strong points.

Greene explains here that the charter industry is angry that Biden wants to hold them accountable. They are furious that Biden might want them to be supervised by an elected board. The same accountability that public schools experience is anathema to charter advocates. They would be “hamstrung” and “paralyzed” by oversight and supervision.

Shouldn’t public money be accompanied by public accountability? If not, why not?

Categories Accountability, Biden, Charter Schools

Oklahoma: Governor Removes Chair of Virtual Charter Board Who Was Cleaning Up Conflicts ofInterest

By dianeravitch
November 18, 2020 //
6

John Harrington, chair of Oklahoma’s Statewide Virtual Charter School Board, wanted to force out two members of the board who apparently had conflicts of interest in their connection to scandal-scarred Epic charter schools. One is related to a founder of Epic, who made millions; the other received campaign donations from Epic. But before Harrington could act, Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt fired him and replaced him with a Christian school leader.

Gov. Kevin Stitt on Friday removed the president of the Statewide Virtual Charter School Board who recently led the initiation of termination proceedings against Epic Charter Schools and challenged two other board members about potential conflicts of interest with Epic.

John Harrington was notified Friday morning by Stitt’s newly appointed secretary of education that his service on the Statewide Virtual Charter School Board was over effective immediately.

Stitt’s office told the Tulsa World on Friday evening that the governor has appointed the former president of a private Christian school in Edmond in Harrington’s place.

Harrington said that only two days earlier, he had notified Stitt’s office, as well as the office of House Speaker Charles McCall, R-Atoka, of his intent to call a special meeting Nov. 18 so the board could consider voting to force members Mathew Hamrick and Phyllis Shepherd to recuse themselves from any matters related to Epic.

He provided copies of his emails to Stitt’s and McCall’s offices to the Tulsa World...

In late October, Assistant Attorney General Marie Schuble recommended that the Statewide Virtual Charter School Board enter into termination proceedings against Epic, the operator of Oklahoma’s largest online public school, called Epic One-on-One, based on the state’s new investigative audit findings that Epic’s operators might have violated fiscal management standards in their contract and various state laws, as well as for “good cause.”

The board voted 3-1 in favor, with Shepherd casting the lone “no” vote and Hamrick absent from the meeting...

As first reported in the Tulsa World, Shepherd is a relative of one of Epic’s two co-founders, who reportedly have become millionaires through their deal to manage the school, and Hamrick accepted campaign donations from one of the Epic co-founders in Hamrick’s failed bid for a state Senate seat.

In response to the Tulsa World’s reporting about Shepherd’s family tie, Speaker McCall sent Shepherd a letter and provided a copy to the Tulsa World that stated: “As an appointee to the House, my expectation is that if it is found that a conflict does exist for you to vote on matters related to Epic, that you would abstain from all future votes that are or could be encompassed by that conflict.”

In September, Harrington led Hamrick’s censure and removal from the board’s newly formed audit committee, accusing Hamrick of intentionally avoiding public votes by the board in 2019 and 2020 on matters seeking to unmask Epic’s use of tens of millions of taxpayer dollars to date budgeted for student learning that Epic is keeping private.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Oklahoma, Virtual Charter Schools

Trump Fires Director of Election Security for Saying the Election Was Fair

By dianeravitch
November 17, 2020 //
36

The Boston Globe has the story, as does every other news outlet:

President Trump on Tuesday fired the director of the federal agency that vouched for the reliability of the 2020 election.

Trump fired Christopher Krebs in a tweet, saying his recent statement defending the security of the election was “highly inaccurate.”

The firing of Krebs, a Trump appointee and director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, comes as Trump is refusing to recognize the victory of Democratic President-elect Joe Biden and removing high-level officials seen as insufficiently loyal.

Categories Accountability, Elections, Trump

Trump Administration Hurries to Auction Off Alaska Wilderness for Drilling

By dianeravitch
November 17, 2020 //
20

Dino Grandoni writes in the Washington Post that the Trump administration is rushing through actions that will be difficult for the Biden administration to reverse. One of them involves formerly protected wilderness in Alaska.

President Trump refuses to acknowledge his defeat in the 2020 election. But his outgoing environmental deputies are still hurrying to complete more than a dozen agency actions in expectation of hitting the exits.

With just two months until Joe Biden becomes president, Trump appointees at the Environmental Protection Agency and elsewhere are up against the clock to lock in rules changes. The last-minute efforts could affect everything from vast tracts of remote Arctic wilderness and air quality nationwide to the everyday showers and clothes dryers in people’s homes.

Biden has promised to undo many of the regulatory rollbacks completed over the past fours years. But some of the Trump administration’s under-the-wire rules could end up hampering the Biden administration from aggressively tackling climate change and other issues right out of the gate.

“The last gasps of the administration,” said David J. Hayes, executive director of the State Energy and Environmental Impact Center at the New York University School of Law, “have the potential to either be a speed bump or a potential roadblock for the new administration coming in.” His group has launched the “Midnight Watch Project” to track the end-of-term efforts.

One of the first of the last-minute moves since Election Day is in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. 

The Interior Department is set this week to ask oil and gas companies to choose where they want to drill in the untouched Alaskan wilderness. Should the Trump administration sell drilling rights within the refuge before Jan. 20, it may be very hard for Biden’s team to take back those leases.  

In 2017, Republicans in Congress opened nearly 1.6 million acres of caribou and polar bear habitat there to potential petroleum extraction. But it has taken until this year for the department to be ready to hold a sale on drilling rights.

Caribou in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in northeast Alaska. (U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service via AP)Caribou in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in northeast Alaska. (U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service via AP)
 

Frank Macchiarola, senior vice president of policy, economics and regulatory affairs at the American Petroleum Institute, told my colleague Juliet Eilperin that Trump’s team is “under a tight timeline.” But he added that the department is on legally solid footing: “Our view is that Congress has acted.”

Yet despite the 2017 law mandating a lease sale, Biden has promised to oppose drilling in the refuge, calling it “a big disaster to do that.”

When it’s all said and done, the Trump administration may finish a dozen significant actions before Biden’s inauguration.

In addition to potentially leasing within the Arctic refuge, officials aim to complete a plan to open up another vast area in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska to drilling and to auction off extraction rights on more than 4,100 acres in central California on Dec. 10.

Interior may also formalize a more narrow definition of habitat for endangered species before Jan. 20. It could also further water down prohibitions on the incidental killing of migratory birds — a change long sought by some oil companies whose uncovered oil waste pits attract waterfowl.

At the Energy Department, officials may exempt some clothes washers and dryers from energy-efficiency requirements and change the definition of a showerhead to allow more water to flow before Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris take office.

This last action reflects Trump’s pet peeve that his showerhead does not produce enough water when he shampoos his hair.

Categories Biden, Environment, Trump
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