John H. Loflin: Indianapolis Public Schools For Sale

By dianeravitch
July 25, 2020 //
8

John Harris Loflin assembled the following description of the privatization and takeover of the Indianapolis Public Schools by out-of-state interests, aided by local “reformers.”

He writes:

Purchasing the 2012, 2014, and 2016 IPS school board elections

According to the truly transformative IPS Racial Equity Policy and Black Lives Matter Resolution (REP/BLM), racism is social and institutional power combined with racial prejudice. IPS defines racial prejudice as a system of advantage for those considered white, and of oppression for those who are not considered white

The IPS resolution mentions years 1922 (the year the IPS board created Attucks) and 1968/1970 of IPS history (the era when the board was sued by the feds for maintaining segregated schools long after Brown). IPS histories of the Citizens School Committee or 1950s-early 1960s events leading to 1970 lawsuit aren’t noted. And, it skips the 1990’s era and notably, major board changes of the 2010-2020 decade.

The 2010-2020 decade

REP/BLM also states “[IPS] has participated in maintaining a system of racial inequality in Indianapolis through its actions and inactions, policies and practices, budgets and priorities, advocacy and silence, and by too often privileging the prejudice of white parents over the well-being of Black students.”

A review and analysis of “Purchasing the IPS school board elections” shows that the majority of donors to the winning candidate were mainly white wealthy males. Some were very wealthy.

The white money and power represented by the donations, whether intended or not, reveal a “system of advantage for those considered white.” This made the board members who decided to take the donations (note: the IPS candidates did not have to take the money), whether they knew it or not, beholden to the donors.

  •   It is naïve to assume there were no strings attached to the money contributed to campaigns.
  •   It is naïve to think the donations did not represent white corporate and philanthropic foundation

    patriarchy.

  •   It is naïve to think the donations, intended or not, did not privilege white parents, and wealthy

    white parents in particular.

    The question: Does the 2012, 2014, and 2016 purchase of IPS school board seats discredit and delegitimize the past and current board members and the Supt. Ferebee and Supt. Johnson regimes?

    “Then there’s the obscenity of outside influence and $300,000 to $500,000 in outside money which bought three seats on the IPS school board.”

    ~ Amos Brown, commentator, Indianapolis Recorder, 10.23.14

Part of the shameful history of IPS began in 1922, but where does it end?

Today’s board construes a current picture of the bad part of the Indianapolis Public Schools as out there in the waters of history. The board criticizes this past, saying it’s time for change. The dilemma for IPS is: if Supt. Johnson and the board take time to look down, they are standing in the water too.

Purchasing the 2012, 2014, and 2016 IPS school board elections

What started out as a push for a few local charters (given freedom from certain traditional public education policy requirements) has grown. Now, Indy is home of America’s 2nd most privatized public school system! New Orleans Public Schools is ranked first where every school is privatized.

Local citizens were not told back when the 2011 Mind Trust Opportunity Schools report came out, that possibly in 10 years 63.7% of Indianpolis students would be in privatized schools. For more on charters, read closely: Portfolio models: private ways of running public schools. Check out the IPS Portfolio Management scheme here.

To the dismay of the Mind Trust leadership, its 2011 $700.000 Opportunity Schools study and proposals never caught on. And, neither did Indy’s NEO Plan–Mayor Ballard’s Office of Education Innovation proposal called “Neighborhood of Educational Opportunity” or NEO.

The NEO Plan’s use of the term to “high quality seats” turned people off. As well, the Recorder’s Amos Brown wrote a Feb 28, 2013 commentary ,”‘White flight’ reason education reformers pushing change in Indy” (http://m.indianapolisrecorder.com/mobile/opinion/article_0cbb6212-81f4-11e2- a215-001a4bcf887a.html) followed by a Jul 13, 2013 column, ”NEO Plan harmful for Black, minority students” (http://www.indianapolisrecorder.com/opinion/article_eef46606-ea3b-11e2-b6fc- 0019bb2963f4.html). The NEO Plan was shelved.

In fact, the NEO Plan was so bad, Cincy rejected it too. See Jan 24, 2017 Cincinnati Inquirer story “CEO quietly quits school accelerator.” “When it launched in 2015, Accelerate Great Schools promised to attack poverty in Cincinnati and smash the divide between the haves and have-nots in education.” Evidently, it did not. The Mind Trust’s Pat Herrel came back to Indy. http://vorcreatex.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Mind-Trust-NEO-Plan-Pat-Herrel-flop-in- Cincy.pdf

So what to do next? Buy IPS!

Mind Trust’s efforts to work with IPS had failed. Plan A, Opportunity Schools was ignored. Plan B, the NEO Plan got over scrutinized, critiqued, and finally rejected. The Mind Trust went into a long closed door session and came out with a plan that skipped the middle of the alphabet: Plan Z—just buy the IPS board.

Working with Stand for Children and their ground crew, Teach for America, the Mind Trust went about “Plan Z.”

The privatization of public education

All this must be appreciated over a background of the 2012, 2014, and 2016 IPS school board elections which were bought by local and national corporate school reform supporters, consequently engineering the consent of the Indianapolis public for the privatization of their very own public schools.

“Privatization is a kind of reverse social contract: it dissolves the bonds that tie us together into free communities and democratic republics. It puts us back in the state of nature where we possess a natural right to get whatever we can on our own, but at the same time lose any real ability to secure that to which we have a right… Private choices rest on individual power… Public choices rest on civic rights, common responsibilities, and presume equal rights for all.” ~ Benjamin Barber

A national movement to privatize public education

To understand more of the national background on IPS privatization, view The corporate assault on public education.

Also read, Corporate Makeover of Public Education: What’s at Stake?, Fabricant & Fine’s 2012 book.

For the scenario on the corporate takeover of our IPS, see Amos Brown’s, “Is Stand for Children buying IPS school board election?” (Indianapolis Recorder 10.23.14) and other news stories and info on IPS board candidate’s campaign funding:

 Commissioner Sam Odle http://vorcreatex.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Samuel-Odle-2012-Campaign-Contributions- IPS-School-Board-Election.pdf $61,924.56
 Commissioner Kelly Bentley http://vorcreatex.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/Kelly-Bentley-2014-Campaign-Contributions- IPS-School-Board-Election-1.pdf $52,677.73
 Commissioner Lanier Echols http://vorcreatex.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/Lanier-Echols-2014-Campaign-Contributions- IPS-School-Board-Election-1.pdf $52,677.73
 Commissioner Michael O’Connor http://vorcreatex.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Michael-OConnor-2016-Campaign- contributions-IPS-School-Board-Elections.pdf $33,985.75

 Commissioner Venita Moore http://vorcreatex.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Venita-Moore-2016-Campaign-Contributions- IPS-School-Board-Elections.pdf $25,711.61
 Commissioner Diane Arnold http://vorcreatex.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Diane-Arnold-2016-Campaign-Contributions- IPS-School-Board-Elections.pdf $16,353.60

For more read:

  •   Indianapolis Education Reform Player Profiles
  •   Corporate School Boarding Indy Style
  •   Hoosier School Heist: How Corporations and Theocrats Stole Democracy From Public Education

    Here’s info on IPS Supt. Ferebee’s million dollar team he brought in with him from North Carolina:

    http://vorcreatex.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/IPS-2016-17-pay-info-Dr.-Ferebees-NC- team.pdf

    Another group of publications takes a look at this time period where unprecedented amounts of money came into IPS elections, especially from out of state contributors:

  •   http://vorcreatex.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Democracy-for-Sale-What-happened-in-

    Denver-in-2011-will-happen-in-Indianapolis-in-2012.pdf

  •   http://vorcreatex.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Who-Runs-Our-IPS.pdf
  •   http://vorcreatex.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Corporate-School-Boarding-Indy-Style.pdf

    More news stories and columns on the overkill of IPS pro-reform candidate campaign finances against their poorly funded opponents

  •   Academic shame for charter schools! Amos Brown Nov 6, 2014
    “Maybe if the school reformers spent some of their filthy lucre they wasted in the IPS race on improving the quality of charter school board members and teachers and encouraged real instruction instead of listening to out-of-town educational scam artists, the majority of Indy’s charters would be ‘high performing’ schools for our kids.” http://www.indianapolisrecorder.com/opinion/article_10ff4c0c-65e2-11e4-8df2- 03f7d5b55bcf.html
  •   Don’t bet on big bucks in IPS election Dan Carpenter Oct 30, 2014
    “Convince them [the public], in short, of the wisdom of the Mind Trust and Stand for Children and Democrats for Education Reform and the billionaires behind the industry of professional critics and charter school entrepreneurs who seek to own the operation.” http://thestatehousefile.com/commentary-dont-bet-big-bucks-ips-election/18192/
  •   Indy’s Chamber wants to elect an un-diverse IPS school board slate Amos Brown Sep 4, 2014 “Voters, parents and students in IPS don’t need Michael Bloomberg or other out-of-town fat cats to decide our school board election. Indianapolis voters and Indianapolis dollars and resources should decide who governs all of our city/county’s eleven school districts. Not out-of-town cash and meddlers like the Chamber’s Star Chamber selection committee.” http://www.indianapolisrecorder.com/opinion/article_6c06aa28-344b-11e4-b8fc- 0019bb2963f4.html
  •   The Mind Trust is a Trojan Horse That Is Destroying Indianapolis Public Education Jim Scheurich https://kheprw.org/the-mind-trust-is-a-trojan-horse-that-is-destroying-indianapolis-public- education/
  •   Who’s giving money to IPS school board candidates? Campaign finance filings reveal contribu- tions from Indianapolis philanthropists, out-of- state reformers and more. Oct 17, 2014 Chalkbeat https://in.chalkbeat.org/2014/10/17/21094278/who-s-giving-money-to-ips-school-board- candidates#.Colombo.
  •   2014 elections disaster for Dems, except for Indianapolis seats Amos Brown Nov 13, 2014 http://www.indianapolisrecorder.com/opinion/article_08ab7088-6b5c-11e4-abe4- 0f389a79a5e5.html?mode=image&photo=0
  •   IPS’ corporate-bought board needs to pay attention to real crises in IPS Amos Brown Jan 29, 2015 http://www.indianapolisrecorder.com/opinion/article_61c555c8-a7d7-11e4-ac39-d31c221ea357.html

    2017 IPS high school choice experiment: IPS and Radio One inveigle students and parents into accepting the district’s new Career Academy model

    Note, especially, the late 2017 commentary, “Without parents present: IPS tries to engineer the consent of students to accept its plan to reinvent high school.” The meetings discussed are examples of the extent to which the district and the local business community went to justify the manipulation of students and families—and public opinion—to accept an IPS high school corporate Career Academy model of public education.

    Where does the Indianapolis Community stand? Corporatocracy or Democracy?

    “Market competition favors the already powerful and if you unleash competition, then schools which are powerful from the start, are going to thrive and those that are not powerful are not magically somehow able to develop the ability to compete.”

    ~ Pamela Grundy, Parents Across America, Charlotte, NC

Another way to misuse democratic processes is a sort of “reverse takeover” move where groups like Stand for Children become akin to “corporate raiders” when they lead the organization of persons or entities to “buy” school board seats with thousands, even hundreds of thousands of dollars.

~ Amos Brown, 2014

Superintendents Ferebee and Johnson obtained their status and power to privatize the district by an unprecedented (and successful) effort to buy the IPS school board

These raw histories of facts and news commentaries directly challenge the political authenticity of the Ferebee and/or Johnson regimes. The antics of the Mind Trust and their sidekick Stand for Children, can now be viewed as shady local and national-level political deals. Here, according to Amos Brown, school reformers, “…spent some of their filthy lucre…” to grab control and privatize public education.

Yes, the above elections are over; yet, were the 2012, 2014, and 2016 IPS school board races corrupted by big money—indeed a “coup” by local and national entities to take over the school district?

To help unpack and analyze the 2012, 2014, and 2016 IPS elections and put them in perspective, let’s take seriously the points and concerns of 2 Black American educators:

Prof. Lester Spence

 “To the Black Education Reform Establishment: Be Real with Who You Are and Whose Interest

You Represent”

http://vorcreatex.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/To-the-Black-Education-Reform- Establishment-Be-Real-with-Who-You-Are-and-Whose-Interest-You-Represent.pdf

“Purchasing the 2012, 2014, and 2016 IPS school board elections” is essay, analysis, and commentary by John Harris Loflin, researcher for Parent Power, the Indianapolis affiliate of Parents Across America and Indy’s Education-Community Action Team.

© 2020 johnharrisloflin@yahoo.com

 

Categories Education Reform

Marion Brady: When Face-to-Face Learning Is Impossible

By dianeravitch
July 25, 2020 //
17

Marion Brady is a veteran educator who has been trying to reform the school curriculum for many years. He persists.

He writes:

When face-to-face schooling isn’t possible

There’s no getting around it. Firsthand experience is the best teacher. If what’s attempting to be taught is worth knowing, it’s going to be complicated. And if it’s complicated, firsthand experience isn’t just the best teacher, it’s the only teacher.

That’s the main reason most adults remember so little of what they were once “taught.” Information delivered by teacher talk, textbooks and computer screens is dumped on kids’ mental “front porch”—short-term memory—but gets no farther. To be useful, information has to be interesting enough to be picked up, taken inside, and a place in memory found for it that allows logic to access it weeks, months, or years later.

That rarely happens. Most classrooms are purpose-built for delivering information, making it hard to create firsthand experience. It’s even harder to do it via laptops, which goes far toward explaining the usual failure of virtual, remote, and distance instruction.

Alfred North Whitehead, in his 1916 Presidential Address to the Mathematical Association of England, identified a fundamental problem with traditional schooling:

“The second-handedness of the learned world is the secret of its mediocrity.”

Schooling’s bottom-line aim is societal survival in an unknowable future. Survival requires new knowledge—continuous evolution of citizens’ mental models of reality. An honest look at the world today says time is growing short for creating schooling that teaches kids the most important of all survival skills—how to turn information into knowledge and knowledge into wisdom.

That’s doable, but it requires changing the primary aim of middle school-level instruction from covering the content of the core curriculum to improving the ability to think—to hypothesize, generalize, synthesize, imagine, relate, integrate, predict, extrapolate, and so on.

There are dozens of thought processes and countless combinations of thought processes that make humanness possible, but they’re not being taught because they’re too complex to be evaluated by machine-scored standardized tests.

Make maximizing adolescents’ ability to think the aim, and the resulting efficiency from the sharpened focus will be revolutionary. Reducing the hours each day devoted to the soon-forgotten conceptual chaos of the core curriculum will make available a big chunk of time for programs keyed to individual learner interests and abilities.

Dealing with Covid-19

Nothing really substitutes for face-to-face schooling, but when that’s unwise or impossible, learning’s fundamentals still need to be respected.

–          Real-world experiences

–         Teachers or mentors who ask thought-stimulating questions

–         Keeping a journal

–         Instruction paced by learner understanding rather than the calendar

–         Learning teams small and intimate enough for dialogue—”thinking out loud” about matters of significance.

Textbooks, teacher talk and laptop screens give kids a steady stream of information, but it’s been “processed.” The interesting, creative, intellectually challenging work has already been done, leaving nothing to do but try to remember it.

Would newspapers publish completed crossword puzzles? What the young need that they’re not getting is “raw” reality to chew on—reality in a form that lends itself to description, analysis and interpretation.

Primary data—the “residue” of reality—provides it. However, for kids to engage, data has to come in the form of puzzles, problems and projects, with lesson aims they consider important enough for attention to be paid, and content interesting enough to be self-propelling.

But guidance is necessary. Teams of teachers with varied expertise need to monitor the teams and sometimes comment or pose questions.

Below is an illustrative activity consistent with the above that meshes with existing middle-level curricula and bureaucratic requirements.

Use the present crisis to give education back to educators, and make middle-level schooling’s aim maximizing the quality of thought, and adolescents will demonstrate abilities only long-experienced teachers knew they had.

 A Project: Town Planning, 1583

Big idea: Humans shape habitats that then shape humans.

Age group: Middle school and older learners.

Instructional organization: Small, three-to-five-member work teams.

Technology requirements: Broadband internet access, laptop computer.

App: Zoom or another screen-sharing program

Primary data:

Page 2@https://www.marionbrady.com/documents/AHHandbook.pdf

 

 

 

 

Categories Curriculum, Education Reform, Online Learning

Harold Meyerson: The Electoral College is a Shameful Vestige of Slavery

By dianeravitch
July 25, 2020 //
25

Harold Meyerson of The American Prospect wrote recently that while people are pulling down statues of Confederate leaders, they should also turn to scrapping the Electoral College as a legacy of slave owners that warps our democracy.


Meyerson on TAP

One More Confederate Monument to Destroy: The Electoral College

For anyone who still wonders why Confederate monuments need to come down, let me refer you to a famous line from the great bard of the white South, William Faulkner. In the white Southern universe—that is, in matters of white racism—Faulkner wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

The statues of Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and their traitorous ilk were erected to perpetuate and reinforce white supremacy, and hence are completely valid targets for teardowns. But America suffers from one particular legacy of racism more damaging than the monuments, and the great Black Lives Matter movement that is seeking to create a more egalitarian nation needs to target that legacy, too.

I refer to the Electoral College…

The Supreme Court, by striking down…the ability of a presidential elector to vote for a candidate other than the one that their state’s voters supported, affirmed that popular majorities determine whom a state will support for president—but not whom the nation will support. Al Gore received half a million more votes than George W. Bush in 2000 but lost the Electoral College vote to him. Hillary Clinton received nearly three million more votes than Donald Trump, but also lost in the Electoral College…

The Electoral College was one of the last particulars that the Constitution’s drafters settled upon. Two factors led to its creation. The first was the pre-democratic belief that only a handful of men drawn from the nation’s elite had the brains and dispositions to select a president. The second was the insistence of the drafters from slave states that the presidency should not be determined by popular vote, as the eligible electorate (at that time, white men of property) in Northern, non-slave states exceeded and would likely continue to exceed the eligible electorate in the South. Their fear, of course, was that under a popular-vote system, an anti-slavery candidate might one day win the presidency. Hence, they created the Electoral College, which benefited slavery and the South by giving every state, no matter its population, two extra votes (reflective of its Senate representation) and by lumping slaves into their population count by tallying them as three-fifths of a person.

From a Southern perspective, the system worked brilliantly. Had the Democratic Party not split in two (into a Northern indifferent-to-slavery wing and a Southern rabidly pro-slavery wing) in 1860, the Electoral College would have perpetuated slavery until God knows when. Once slavery was abolished and the 15th Amendment to the Constitution ratified in 1870, the South had to find other ways to suppress Black voting, and with its current Republican friends on the Supreme Court, it has managed to do so to this very day.

But as the United States becomes more racially diverse, and as the governing principle of the Republican Party has overtly become white supremacy, that racist Republican right can only cling to power through its reliance on the Electoral College, which stands athwart the principle and reality of majority rule. (Having long favored suppressing minority rights, Republicans have also come to favor suppressing majority rule, now that it’s clear they can’t win majority support among the nation’s voters.)

In short, the Electoral College reflects and perpetuates the same values that those Confederate monuments reflected and perpetuated. Those who believe that Black Lives Matter need to topple this deeply undemocratic monstrosity, too.

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

Categories Accountability, Democracy, History, Politics

Mercedes Schneider: No State Has Met CDC Guidelines But Schools Are Opening Anyway

By dianeravitch
July 25, 2020 //
28

Mercedes Schneider reviews the current condition of many states and points out that no state has met the conditions described in the CDC guidelines.

As of this writing, no state has met the May 2020 Center for Disease Control (CDC) guidelines for moving into Phase 1 (“Downward trajectory or near-zero incidence of documented cases over a 14-day period) muct less the additional criteria for entering Phase 2 (“Downward trajectory or near-zero incidence of documented cases for at least 14 days after entering Phase 1).

That’s 28 days of supposed “downward trajectory” prior to entering Phase 2, and that assumes increased testing.

Also in phase 2, COVID-19 test results are supposed to be available in three days or less. That is not happening.

In most states, cases are increasing.

Nonetheless, many states are moving towards reopening their schools so parents can get back to work.

Children can get sick with COVID-19. So can teachers.

Schools are asking teachers to risk their lives for their livelihood.

If a teacher or student does get sick, expect schools to close again.

Categories Health, Science

AOC Delivers Brilliant Speech on Crude Sexism

By dianeravitch
July 24, 2020 //
60

Twenty years ago, I edited a collection of speeches, songs, and statements that in my opinion defined the nation. It is called “The American Reader: Words That Shaped a Nation.” If I were revising it today, I would add the brilliant, unscripted speech that Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes delivered yesterday about the crude remarks that a Florida Republican made to her face.

What is so impressive about her remarks is that–as you will see– she does not have a written speech in front of her. She has a few notes. She speaks spontaneously from her heart. Those are the best speeches.

She is eloquent and brilliant.

Alexandra Petri wrote in the Washington Post about Rep. Yoho’s apologetic non-apology.

“I cannot apologize for my passion, or for loving my God, my family, and my country! I yield back!”

— Rep. Ted Yoho (R-Fla.), apologizing(?) to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.)

You may wonder, “Ted, how did you get so good at apologizing?” What can I say? It’s a gift. I’ve literally never done it before. Some (the recipient of my apology, technically) would say that I still haven’t! Welcome to my master class, where I’ll showcase just a few of the tricks that I employed in my apology on the House floor to my colleague from New York!

“Wait, I thought he called Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez a ‘f—ing b—-’ under his breath in front of a reporter!” those who heard this apology said. “But I guess what happened was that he said, ‘I LOVE MY COUNTRY AND I LOVE MY GOD,’ in a very garbled mutter under his breath, and some member of the lamestream media badly misheard him!”

Most people say that a good apology accepts responsibility, acknowledges the harm done and seeks to make amends. This is not true. A good apology does none of these things! A good apology is like the Battle Hymn of the Republic: It is a patriotic song about America that never says it’s sorry, not even one bit.

To apologize or otherwise take responsibility for something you have said or done in the past is deeply un-American, and you must put your foot down and refuse in no uncertain terms, or an eagle will lose its wings.

Every good apology contains five parts:

1) What sounds like the beginning of a normal apology. Announce that you are going to apologize, because you are a bigger person. Do not be afraid to expatiate on all the ways you are a bigger person — there are probably lots! That is what the apology is about: to remind people how great you are, and how you have never done anything wrong, ever, in your life.

2) Denial that the event in question even happened. Try to obfuscate, because a good apology is full of suspense. Like “Memento”! And also, like “Memento,” your audience should spend the majority of it wondering (a) what even happened and (b) whether the guy in question did anything bad at all.

3) Apology for something that someone else did wrong. Now for the best part of any apology: the unexpected twist! “The offensive name-calling words attributed to me by the press were never spoken to my colleagues, and if they were construed that way, I apologize for their misunderstanding.” Wow! What even happened? It sounds like this man is magnanimously apologizing for somebody else’s misunderstanding — which he should not have to do! Whatever this guy has to say, I’m listening!

4) Panegyric about yourself. Be sure to indicate that whatever it was that happened, it was not your fault; you were too busy thinking Great Thoughts About the People’s Well-Being to do anything that could be unworthy of a patriot and statesman. Be sure to mention that you are a father of daughters, no matter what you are ostensibly apologizing for. Make it clear that you are only apologizing because you are such a bosom companion of Jesus Christ …

5) Refusal to apologize! … and that you will not apologize for any of these things! “I cannot apologize for my passion, or for loving my God, my family, and my country! I yield back!”

Now that’s an apology!

People should start your apology thinking they understand that you are asking forgiveness for calling your colleague a sexist obscenity under your breath and end it by being confused and thinking that maybe you are being asked to apologize for being too good a person, who loves America too much? By the time you are done speaking, your listener should be saying to himself, “Well, what could be more American than insulting a woman of color who is supposed to be your respected colleague!”

Sign up for this master class now for further tips and tricks! A few spots are still remaining, but they are going fast!

Coming soon: How to make the person you are apologizing to the villain in this situation if she tries pointing out that this wasn’t an apology at all.

Categories Education Reform

CDC Caves to Political Pressure, Waters Down Guidelines for Reopening Schools

By dianeravitch
July 24, 2020 //
55

Trump decided a few weeks ago that he could help his prospects for re-election if he could get schools across the nation to reopen fully, regardless of the state of the pandemic in their community, regardless of the risks to students and staff. He has threatened to cut off federal funding to schools that refuse to reopen fully, and he proclaimed that he and Pence were pressuring the CDC to weaken its guidelines.

At first, the CDC held firm, urging schools to practice social distancing, to require personal protective equipment, and not to reopen unless all safety precautions were in place.

But the CDC buckled to the White House pressure. It changed the tone of its guidance, now stressing the necessity of reopening over the importance of safety.

Now the CDC sings the song that Trump, Pence, and DeVos want to hear.

The top U.S. public health agency issued a full-throated call to reopen schools in a package of new “resources and tools” posted on its website Thursday night that opened with a statement that sounded more like a political speech than a scientific document, listing numerous benefits for children of being in school and downplaying the potential health risks.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published the new guidance two weeks after President Trump criticized its earlier recommendations on school reopenings as “very tough and expensive,” ramping up what had already been an anguished national debate over the question of how soon children should return to classrooms. As the president was criticizing the initial C.D.C. recommendations, a document from the agency surfaced that detailed the risks of reopening and the steps that districts were taking to minimize those risks [the document was incorrectly dated 2019].

“Reopening schools creates opportunity to invest in the education, well-being, and future of one of America’s greatest assets — our children — while taking every precaution to protect students, teachers, staff and all their families,” the new opening statement said.

The package of materials began with the opening statement, titled “The Importance of Reopening America’s Schools This Fall,” and repeatedly described children as being at low risk for being infected by or transmitting the coronavirus, even though the science on both aspects is far from settled.

“The best available evidence indicates if children become infected, they are far less likely to suffer severe symptoms,” the statement said. “At the same time, the harms attributed to closed schools on the social, emotional, and behavioral health, economic well-being, and academic achievement of children, in both the short- and long-term, are well-known and significant.”

While children infected by the virus are at low risk of becoming severely ill or dying, how often they become infected and how efficiently they spread the virus to others is not definitively known. Children in middle and high schools may also be at much higher risk of both than those under 10, according to some recent studies.

Beyond the statement, the package included decision tools and checklists for parents, guidance on mitigation measures for schools to take and other information that some epidemiologists described as helpful.

The new materials are meant to supplement guidance the C.D.C. previously issued on when and how to reopen schools, with recommendations such as keeping desks six feet apart and keeping children in one classroom all day instead of allowing them to move around.

The new statement released on Thursday is a stark departure from the 69-page document, obtained by The New York Times earlier this month, marked “For Internal Use Only,” which was intended for federal public health response teams to have as they are deployed to hot spots around the country.

That document classified as “highest risk” the full reopening of schools, and its suggestions for mitigating the risk of school reopenings would be expensive and difficult for many districts, like broad testing of students and faculty and contact tracing to find people exposed to an infected student or teacher.

An Associated Press/NORC poll this week found that most Americans said they were very or extremely concerned that reopening K-12 schools for in-person instruction would contribute to spreading the virus. Altogether, 80 percent of respondents said they were at least somewhat concerned, including more than three in five Republicans.

Thanks to Trump, the public can no longer trust the impartiality of the CDC. Under pressure, it revised its guidelines to please the president. Science will not “get in the way” of Trump’s political campaign. Any student or teacher or other school personnel who dies because of a premature opening will be blood on the hands of Trump, Pence, DeVos, and the CDC.

The CDC and its director, Dr. Robert Redfield, are hereby enrolled on the blog’s Wall of Shame.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Health, Pence, Safety, Trump, Wall of Shame

Washington Post Fact-Checks DeVos on COVID-19 Claims

By dianeravitch
July 24, 2020 //
24

Betsy DeVos wants schools to open. She wants to help Trump win re-election. Trump wants schools to open so the economy will restart. DeVos claimed that children don’t get sick from the virus, so they won’t spread it. She thinks they might even be a brake on the virus. The Washington Post gave her claims a fact check.

The Fact Checker wrote:

“More and more studies show that kids are actually stoppers of the disease and they don’t get it and transmit it themselves, so we should be in a posture of — the default should be getting back to school kids in person, in the classroom.”

— Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, in an interview on “The Conservative Circus” (iHeart radio), July 16

Our eyes popped out when we first heard this comment by Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, as she pressed the administration’s case for reopening schools in the fall with in-person classes.

Could children actually be “stoppers” of covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus? That would be great news — if true. The interruption of school threatens to create a learning deficit — and many parents may find it difficult to return to work if children are not in classes.

Let’s examine DeVos’s evidence that children do not transmit the coronavirus, as it appears to be influencing administration policy. President Trump echoed her claim in a news briefing Wednesday evening. “They do say that [children] don’t transmit very easily, and a lot of people are saying they don’t transmit,” he said. “They don’t bring it home with them. They don’t catch it easily; they don’t bring it home easily.”

The Facts

An Education Department spokesperson supplied four reports from around the world:

American Academy of Pediatrics: Evidence suggests that children don’t contract or spread the virus the way adults do, in contrast to how they spread influenza.

New South Wales, Australia: Eighteen infected people who had contact with nearly 900 people resulted in only two additional infections, with “no evidence of children infecting teachers.”

France: An infected 9-year-old in France came into contact with 172 people while attending three ski schools, and none of them — not even the child’s siblings — appeared to contract the virus.

Saxony, Germany: A study (in German) found no evidence that schoolchildren play a role in spreading the virus, with a researcher quoted in a news report as saying that “children may even act as a brake on infection.”
“We’re mainly looking at the German study — one of the people who helped run it is the one who first said that kids can act as ‘brakes’ on virus transmission,” the Education Department spokesperson said.

Well, there’s a problem with that. The German study has not been peer-reviewed; it is still in preprint review by the Lancet, meaning it should not be used to guide clinical practice.

Moreover, the German researchers told The Fact Checker that the results do not apply to a country such as the United States, where infections have been soaring. Germany, by contrast, is among the countries that are considered to have handled the outbreak with skill and diligence, keeping infections per million people relatively low.

“Our results depict a situation with low infection rates after the initial transmission peak is under control,” Jakob Armann, a pediatric infectious-disease specialist at University Children’s Hospital in Dresden and co-author of the study, said in an email. “If you have rising infection rates — as in the United States currently — putting people in close contact will obviously lead to transmission of respiratory viruses as SARS-CoV-2.”

The key, he said, is to get the situation under control, as most Europeans countries have. Then “there is a way to safely reopen schools and schoolchildren are not ‘hidden’ hotspots of transmission.”

Reinhard Berner, Armann’s colleague, made the “brake” comment, but Armann said his quote was “widely exaggerated through in the media.” (The phrase does not appear in the study.)

“The point he was trying to make is that these findings are in contrast to the earlier assumptions that children will spread the virus to a much higher degree than adults,” Armann said. “We are not trying to argue that children do not spread the virus at all, and you are absolutely right that in high-infection communities, children will get infected and will transmit to close contacts.”

It’s easy to find studies and news reports that contradict DeVos’s assertion:

South Korea: A large study using contact tracing found that children ages 10 to 19 can spread the virus at least as much as adults do; children younger than 10 were half as likely to transmit the virus, but there was still a risk.

Israel: At least 1,335 students and 691 staff members contracted the coronavirus after Israel reopened its entire school system without restrictions on May 17, believing it had beaten the virus. The spike in infections among the children spread to the general population, according to epidemiological surveys by Israel’s Health Ministry. As of mid-July, 125 schools and 258 kindergartens have been closed because of infections. (One study suggested that the disease spread quickly at a high school, affecting more than 260 people, during a heat wave, when mask rules were suspended and air conditioning was in constant use.)

In the United States, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics, 241,904 child coronavirus cases were reported as of July 16, with children representing 8 percent of all cases. There was a 46 percent increase in child cases from July 2 to July 16, although mortality remains low, with 24 states reporting no child deaths so far.

Although there have been relatively few deaths of children — fewer than 70, according to state reports — about 3.3 million adults ages 65 and older live in a household with school-age children, according to a July 16 analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation. That’s about 6 percent of all seniors in the United States, who have a greater chance of becoming severely ill from the virus if a child becomes infected.

Michael T. Osterholm, director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, said that too often people have latched on to studies that later turn out to be flawed. “There have been so many studies, sometimes with strident conclusions, only to be blown out of the water later” when conditions change, he said. “The bottom-line message is that school-age kids will see transmissions. How much is unclear, but they definitely are not brakes.”

After we communicated the response from the German researchers, we received this statement from the Education Department: “The science remains on the side of reopening schools, even at the highest levels of the medical field. As the Secretary has said, we have to think about the impact on the whole child if schools continue to remain closed. In addition to a quality education, students need the peer-to-peer interaction, access to mental health care, and nutritious food that schools provide. As she has said previously, decisions on schools fully reopening will need to be made on case-by-case basis depending on the local health situation, and the goal should be fully reopening in the fall.”

The Pinocchio Test

As a Cabinet secretary, DeVos has a responsibility to provide accurate information to the public. It’s easy to pick and choose medical studies to assert a political point. But it’s irresponsible to mainly rely on a news account of a report that has not even been peer-reviewed yet — and that concerns a low-infection environment not yet applicable to the United States.

There is evidence that children may not get as sick as adults, and younger children especially may not transmit the virus as easily. From an educational perspective, certainly it would be better to provide in-class instruction than to continue remote learning. But to claim that children actually may stop the spread of the disease shows a stunning lack of due diligence.

DeVos earns Four Pinocchios.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Health, Lies

Teaching in Troubled Times: A Q&A with a Trauma Expert

By dianeravitch
July 24, 2020 //
3

The National Education Policy Center posted this interview with Elizabeth Dutro, whose work centers on teaching children who have experienced traumas.

We live in traumatic times. The COVID-19 pandemic has killed over 135,000 thousand in the U.S., and has sickened many more. The economic downtown has resulted in more than 50 million unemployment claims. Police have continued to kill unarmed people of color, touching off nationwide protests that may or may not lead to widespread permanent reforms. All of this has disproportionately impacted people of color and low-income families, who have been more likely to get sick and die from the virus, lose their jobs, and face violence at the hands of law enforcement. 

Throughout it all, schools, which serve not only as a place to learn but a sanctuary and source of comfort for many, have been closed since March to slow the spread of the coronavirus. With the resurgence this summer of the disease, remote instruction may continue in many places through the fall.

In the Q&A below, trauma and learning expert and National Education Policy Center Fellow Elizabeth Dutro responds to difficult questions about how teachers can effectively and respectfully address the traumas that are touching so many of their students’ lives, either in person or from afar, even as they, themselves, may be experiencing similar traumas of their own. A professor of education at the University of Colorado Boulder, Dutro is the author of The Vulnerable Heart of Literacy: Centering Trauma as Powerful Pedagogy (Teachers College Press, 2019).She is currently collaborating with children and teachers to examine what trauma means and how it functions in classrooms. Her other research interests include teachers’ opportunities to learn together in the context of their daily work and relationships with children, as well as the role of teacher education in critical and affective teaching.

Categories Education Reform

Dave Grohl: In Defense of Our Teachers

By dianeravitch
July 24, 2020 //
29

Musician Dave Grohl wrote this article in The Atlantic in honor of his mother, who was a dedicated teacher. America’s teachers need a plan, not a trap, he writes.

My mother was a public-school teacher.

As a single mother of two, she tirelessly devoted her life to the service of others, both at home and at work. From rising before dawn to ensure that my sister and I were bathed, dressed, and fed in time to catch the bus to grading papers well into the night, long after her dinner had gone cold, she rarely had a moment to herself. All this while working multiple jobs to supplement her meager $35,000 annual salary. Bloomingdale’s, Servpro, SAT prep, GED prep—she even once coached soccer for a $400 stipend, funding our first family trip to New York City, where we stayed at the St. Regis Hotel and ordered drinks at its famous King Cole Bar so that we could fill up on the free hors d’oeuvres we otherwise could not afford. Unsurprisingly, her devoted parenting mirrored her technique as a teacher. Never one to just point at a blackboard and recite lessons for kids to mindlessly memorize, she was an engaging educator, invested in the well-being of each and every student who sat in her class. And at an average of 32 students a class, that was no small feat. She was one of those teachers who became a mentor to many, and her students remembered her long after they had graduated, often bumping into her at the grocery store and erupting into a full recitation of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, like a flash mob in the produce aisle. I can’t tell you how many of her former students I’ve met over the years who offer anecdotes from my mother’s classroom. Every kid should be so lucky to have that favorite teacher, the one who changes your life for the better. She helped generations of children learn how to learn, and, like most other teachers, exhibited a selfless concern for others. Though I was never her student, she will forever be my favorite teacher.

It takes a certain kind of person to devote their life to this difficult and often-thankless job. I know because I was raised in a community of them. I have mowed their lawns, painted their apartments, even babysat their children, and I’m convinced that they are as essential as any other essential workers. Some even raise rock stars! Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine, Adam Levine, Josh Groban, and Haim are all children of school workers (with hopefully more academically rewarding results than mine). Over the years, I have come to notice that teachers share a special bond, because there aren’t too many people who truly understand their unique challenges—challenges that go far beyond just pen and paper. Today, those challenges could mean life or death for some.

When it comes to the daunting—and ever more politicized—question of reopening schools amid the coronavirus pandemic, the worry for our children’s well-being is paramount. Yet teachers are also confronted with a whole new set of dilemmas that most people would not consider. “There’s so much more to be addressed than just opening the doors and sending them back home,” my mother tells me over the phone. Now 82 and retired, she runs down a list of concerns based on her 35 years of experience: “masks and distancing, temperature checks, crowded busing, crowded hallways, sports, air-conditioning systems, lunchrooms, public restrooms, janitorial staff.” Most schools already struggle from a lack of resources; how could they possibly afford the mountain of safety measures that will need to be in place? And although the average age of a schoolteacher in the United States is in the early 40s, putting them in a lower-risk group, many career teachers, administrators, cafeteria workers, nurses, and janitors are older and at higher risk. Every school’s working faculty is a considerable percentage of its population, and should be safeguarded appropriately. I can only imagine if my mother were now forced to return to a stuffy, windowless classroom. What would we learn from that lesson? When I ask what she would do, my mother replies, “Remote learning for the time being.”

Remote learning comes with more than a few of its own complications, especially for working-class and single parents who are dealing with the logistical problem of balancing jobs with children at home. Uneven availability of teaching materials and online access, technical snafus, and a lack of socialization all make for a less-than-ideal learning experience. But most important, remote setups overseen by caretakers, with a teacher on the other end doing their best to educate distracted kids who prefer screens used for games, not math, make it perfectly clear that not everyone with a laptop and a dry-erase board is cut out to be a teacher. That specialized skill is the X factor. I know this because I have three children of my own, and my remote classroom was more Welcome Back, Kotter than Dead Poets Society. Like I tell my children, “You don’t really want daddy helping, unless you want to get an F!” Remote learning is an inconvenient and hopefully temporary solution. But as much as Donald Trump’s conductor-less orchestra would love to see the country prematurely open schools in the name of rosy optics (ask a science teacher what they think about White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany’s comment that “science should not stand in the way”), it would be foolish to do so at the expense of our children, teachers, and schools…

America’s teachers are caught in a trap, set by indecisive and conflicting sectors of failed leadership that have never been in their position and can’t possibly relate to the unique challenges they face. I wouldn’t trust the U.S. secretary of percussion to tell me how to play “Smells Like Teen Spirit” if they had never sat behind a drum set, so why should any teacher trust Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos to tell them how to teach, without her ever having sat at the head of a class? (Maybe she should switch to the drums.) Until you have spent countless days in a classroom devoting your time and energy to becoming that lifelong mentor to generations of otherwise disengaged students, you must listen to those who have. Teachers want to teach, not die, and we should support and protect them like the national treasures that they are. For without them, where would we be?

Categories Health, Safety, Teachers

New Study: There Is NO Relationship Between International Test Scores and Economic Growth

By dianeravitch
July 24, 2020 //
48

This is the most important post you will read this month or maybe even this year. It refutes the basis of American education policy.

This is major study of the relationship between scores on PISA and economic growth. It demonstrates that there is none.

It was written by Hikaru Komatsu (Associate Professor at National Taiwan University) and Jeremy Rappleye (Associate Professor at Kyoto University, Graduate School of Education) for the Network for International Policies and Cooperation in Education and Training. The authors criticize the work of Hoover economist Eric Hanushek and demonstrate how his theories of human capital development were widely adopted by American and European organizations and became the convention wisdom.

Komatsu and Rappleye demonstrate the flaws in Hanushek’s theories, which have led to unprecedented emphasis on improving standardized test scores in many nations.

They begin by reviewing a paper published by the European Commission, based on Hanushek’s human capital theories. Open the link to see the graphs.

The EC report was written by Eric Hanushek (Hoover Institute, a think tank on the campus of Stanford University) and Ludger Woessmann (University of Munich, ifo Center for Economics of Education). It laid out the same findings, methods and arguments that can be found in a range of publications in the United States dating back to the early 2000s (e.g., Hanushek & Kimiko, 2000), and reaching back even – with a bit more historical awareness – to the heady Anglo-American neo-liberalism of Reagan and Thatcher in the 1980s (e.g., Hanushek, 1981, Hanushek, 1986). These claims were articulated strongly in a 2013 book by the same authors, published by the Brookings Institute and intended to reach US policymakers, entitled Endangering Prosperity: A Global Look at the American School. These same findings were also publicized in major reports by the World Bank (2007) and the OECD (2010, 2015), both of which commissioned Hanushek and Woessmann to write their findings into development policy. The World Bank would later officially adopt the model as the underpinning logic of Learning for All (2011) (see Auld, Morris, and Rappleye, 2019), while the OECD’s 2010 report entitled The High Cost of Low Educational Performance – The Long-Run Impacts of Improving PISA Outcomes would be virtually transferred carbon copy into the EC’s 2019 report. That is, the EC 2019 Report claims that an aggressive, focused 15-20 year reform push to raise scores by 25-points would “add €71 trillion to EU GDP over the status quo” and which “amounts to an aggregate EU gain of almost 3 times current levels of GDP and an average GDP that is seven percent higher for the remainder of the century”. Based on the Hanushek and Woessmann numbers, Andreas Schleicher enticed European leaders with precisely that same narrative in 2010, as shown here in a slide from his presentation below (Slide 34 in the original presentation). Schleicher claimed that a PISA-improvement reform add 30% of the current GDP in 2100, which makes the total economic value of this reform is equivalent to 340% of the current GDP – the exact value shown in Figure 2…

For quite some time, we and others (here, here, here, and here) have pointed out that the Hanushek and Woessmann “findings” are deeply flawed. Our work includes a number of published papers, newspaper articles, and blogs published since 2016. We have tried to call attention to this situation in two previous NORRAG blog pieces here and here. Our argument in the main 2017 paper was simple. Hanushek and Woessmann used a relationship between students’ performance in international tests and economic growth for estimating the economic value of improving 25 points of PISA scores. However, Hanushek and Woessmann surprisingly compared students’ performance for a given period and economic growth for the same period. However, as it logically takes several decades for that cohort of students to occupy a major portion of workforce and then contribute to economic growth. We logically compared students’ performance for a given period and economic growth for a subsequent period. Surprisingly, in doing so we discovered virtually no relationship between them, casting strong doubts on the purportedly strong causal claims (Komatsu & Rappleye, 2017). While we find it disheartening that there has been no response to our work, it is far more disappointing that find that now the EC have turned to Hanushek and Woessmann, paying them hefty consultancy fees to write policy recommendations for Europe. We wonder aloud: Why does the EC Directorate for Education, Youth, Sport, and Culture need to turn to American think tanks to generate new policy ideas?…

Returning again to the larger picture, it seems that now the EU and OECD, alongside the World Bank, OECD and often highly influential figures in UNESCO, are now utilizing the same Hanushek and Woessmann Knowledge Capital claims. What makes this ‘Western consensus’ so alarming – at least to us – is not simply that education and economics are being so tightly coupled or that PISA is being embedded deeply into policymaking goals through these works. It is, instead, that so many leading minds in the West seem unable or unwilling to think differently.

A decade ago, when I wrote The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education, I quoted a study by Keith Baker, a statistician who worked for many years in the U.S. Department of Education. Baker pointed out that the U.S. had placed last in the first international assessment in 1964, yet over the next half-century had outperformed the eleven nations with higher scores. He concluded then that test scores do not predict economic growth or anything else. Every time the results of a new international assessment are released, whoever is in charge says that the performance of the U.S. students is horrible, shameful, alarming, and proclaims “a new Sputnik moment.” And every time I point out that the U.S. has never been number one on international assessments and that these scores are meaningless. But the press reports the lamentations without contradiction anyway.

Categories Accountability, Economy, Education Reform, International, Standardized Testing
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