Teresa Hanafin: Trump Reduces More Environmental Regulations, While Treasury Secretary Mnuchin Hides Trump’s Travel Expenses

By dianeravitch
January 9, 2020 //
56

I fear we are becoming insensitive to shock in the Trump era. And the very concept of “government ethics” seems to be an oxymoron in this era. Here are two shocking reports by Teresa Hanafin, who writes the Fast Forward commentary of the Boston Globe:

Trump holds another campaign rally tonight, this time in Toledo. Earlier in the day, he’s scheduled to announce some proposed National Environmental Policy Act regulations, and that’s never a good thing.

Trump is dramatically reducing the authority of the act, signed by Richard Nixon in 1970. The idea was that the federal government would protect the environment from excess by assessing the impacts of major projects — and include the public in the deliberations. Trump’s instinct is to protect private companies from any restrictions, nature be damned.

His action will make it easier to for companies to build pipelines, clear-cut forests, dig mines, drill for oil, etc.

It’s in keeping with the entire anti-environment stance of his administration. The New York Times found that Trump has reversed 58 policies related to air pollution and emissions, drilling and extraction, infrastructure, animals, toxic substances and safety, water pollution, and more. And he is in the process of rolling back another 37 regulations, for 95 in all.

Some of his actions have been reversed by courts because they violated the environmental policy act, so now he’s gutting the act. Scientists say Trump’s rollbacks could significantly increase greenhouse gas emissions and lead to thousands of extra deaths from poor air quality every year. Economist Paul Krugman predicts that environmental destruction will be a lasting legacy of what he calls the Republican Party of Pollution.

Ho hum, another day, another Trump coverup. This time Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin is trying to prevent Congress from finding out how much the Secret Service is spending on protecting Trump and his family during their frequent and extensive travels until after the November election.

This issue has arisen because Mnuchin is asking Congress to move the Secret Service back into his department — it was moved to Homeland Security after 9/11 — and congressional Democrats are using the request to try to pry travel cost information out of the service.

Despite the service’s failure to file reports about its spending on Trump’s travel, and the White House’s refusal to answer congressional questions about travel spending (what are they trying to hide?), there are some things we do know, according to The Washington Post:

— Trump has visited his properties outside of the D.C. area, such as Mar-a-Lago in Florida and his golf club in New Jersey, more than 50 times in the past three years.

— The government spent about $96 million on travel by Barack Obama during his eight years as president. Trump’s travel cost taxpayers $13.6 million in just one month in early 2017. At that pace, Trump would have exceeded Obama’s eight-year total in just seven months. Nothing succeeds like excess!

— Every time Trump goes to Mar-a-Lago, it costs taxpayers $3.4 million.For each trip.

— The Secret Service has spent $588,000 just on golf cart rentalsfollowing around the guy who said during his campaign that he was going to be too busy working to golf.

— Trump’s adult children also are gorging at the taxpayer trough. Even though they could easily afford private security, Don Jr. and Eric Trump,who don’t have a government job like Ivanka and aren’t students like Tiffany, take Secret Service protection when they travel overseas for their private business or go on illegal hunting trips.

One example: When Eric visited Uruguay in 2017 to promote the Trump Organization, he stuck US taxpayers with a bill of nearly $100,000 for hotel rooms to put up Secret Service and embassy staff. As the Post pointed out:

The Uruguayan trip shows how the government is unavoidably entangled with the Trump company as a result of the president’s refusal to divest his ownership stake. In this case, government agencies are forced to pay to support business operations that ultimately help to enrich the president himself. Though the Trumps have pledged a division of business and government, they will nevertheless depend on the publicly funded protection granted to the first family as they travel the globe promoting their brand.

Apparently Mnuchin’s refusal to tell Congress how much taxpayer money Trump is spending on travel security until after the election is causing some Democrats to withdraw their support for his request.

Categories Environment, Ethics, Trump

Newark: Superintendent Wants to Close Four Charters and Limit New Ones

By dianeravitch
January 9, 2020 //
8

Roger Léon, superintendent of Newark schools, wants to close four charter schools and ban most new ones. 

Patrick Wall of Chalkbeat reports:

The head of the Newark school system is calling for the closure of four local charter schools and a ban on most new charter schools, a clear signal that the district hopes to rein in the city’s fast-growing charter sector.

The schools — M.E.T.S., People’s Prep, Roseville Community, and University Heights — are up for renewal, meaning they must apply for state approval to continue operating after this academic year. In a series of letters this month, Newark Public Schools Superintendent Roger León asked the state to reject their applications, arguing that the publicly funded, privately managed charter schools sap funding from traditional public schools and are failing to serve their fair share of students with special needs.

The state education commissioner is expected to make a decision by Feb. 1.

León also urged the state to deny “any and all” applications for new charter schools or the renewal of existing charter schools unless they serve “a specific educational need.” While other local officials have sought to halt the expansion of Newark’s charter sector, whose student population quadrupled over the past decade, León is taking a more extreme position by demanding that existing charter schools be phased out.

“The writing is on the wall for corporate charter schools,” said Newark Teachers Union President John Abeigon, an outspoken critic of charter schools, which tend to be non-unionized. “The days of unchecked charter school applications are over.”

Poor Mark Zuckerberg! He dropped $100 million into Newark to make it the “New Orleans of the North.”

Now that 49% of New Orleans’ charters are rated D or F by the state, why would anyone follow that model.

Superintendent Léon has made clear that he’s not taking that route.

Categories Accountability, Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, New Orleans, Newark, Privatization

I Endorse Andy Saultz for State Legislature in Oregon

By dianeravitch
January 9, 2020 //
1

Andrew (Andy) Saultz is running for the Oregon State Legislature in District 33 (Northwest Portland).

I am pleased to endorse his candidacy.

The legislature will be fortunate to have Andy Saultz, an experienced and knowledgeable educator, among its members.

Education is the most important of every state’s responsibilities. Nothing matters more than making sure that the children and young people of every state are prepared to take their place as responsible and thoughtful citizens.

Andy has been a teacher and a scholar of education.

I asked Andy to spell out his vision for education and he sent this statement:

 

My views

Education is a right for every child regardless of race, gender, class, ability, sexual orientation, or religion.

Education is fundamental in a democracy.

That workers should have the freedom to collective bargain, to form unions, to have safe workplaces, and to have sustainable working conditions.

Our schools should be racially and socio-economically integrated. Segregated communities led to segregated schools, which is bad for kids and for society. Richard Rothstein’s work has shaped my understanding of the relationship between housing and educational policy.

Our school system was established to socially reproduce society. Jean Anyon and others have shaped my views on the hidden curriculum and how different social classes are treated in our schools.

We have to actively work against racism, classism, xenophobia and white supremacy in our schools and social structures.

All children deserve access to the arts, PE, recess, social studies, and science.

 

What I believe

I believe in public education. That education is a public good. That a diverse, liberal arts education creates well rounded citizens.

I believe that we know what ‘works’ in education. We need high quality teachers, with manageable class sizes, schedules, and pay.

I believe we need a system that trusts teachers and listen to them.

I believe we need to elect people with classroom experience.

I believe teaching is really challenging, and cannot be taught in a six week course.

I believe in community centered schools that engage families and center the lives of students.

I believe in John Dewey’s approach that centers students.

I believe in union workers. I oppose the privatization of bus drivers, custodians, food workers, or any other workers. I am proud to have voted against privatization as a school board member.

I believe that all workers deserve quality health benefits and a retirement system that rewards public service.

 

What I hope to accomplish

Increase the number and percentage of teachers of color

Increase the number and percentage of principals of color

Improve special education funding and the SPED system overall.

Better serve the ELL community

Improve teacher pay

Transform teacher professional development to give teachers autonomy over what they need

Lengthen the school year (Oregon currently has the shortest school year in the country). This negatively impacts students in poverty.

Expand before and after school options, particularly in communities of color and low income neighborhoods

Expand computer science in k-12 schools. These courses are disproportionately offered in high income, white neighborhoods.

Invest in public higher education to combat the student debt crisis.

Increase the number of mental health professionals in schools.

Reform our state revenue system to increase revenue through a more progressive taxation system.

 

His vision is just right for the young people of Oregon.

I am happy to endorse his candidacy and wish him the best of luck.

andyfororegon.org

Categories Oregon

Jan Resseger: The Empowering and Hopeful Message of “SLAYING GOLIATH”

By dianeravitch
January 9, 2020 //
4

In this post, Jan Resseger reviews my new book SLAYING GOLIATH: THE PASSIONATE RESISTANCE TO PRIVATIZATION AND THE FIGHT TO SAVE AMERICA’S PUBLIC SCHOOLS.

Jan is an expert on the damage imposed by so-called “reformers.” Several years ago, when I was in Cleveland, she took me on a tour of devastated neighborhoods. Ohio legislators and local leaders responded to growing poverty by creating charters and vouchers and tearing down empty houses. The city center was filled with empty stores and neighborhoods had gaping holes where houses once stood. According to federal data, the enrollment in Cleveland public schools is 100% poor. Talk about a mismatch between problems and “solutions!”

Resseger begins:

In her new book, Slaying Goliath: The Passionate Resistance to Privatization and the Fight to Save America’s Public Schools, Diane Ravitch summarizes, defines, and humanizes the widespread attack that has threatened public education across the United States in the past quarter century. And she tracks an encouraging backlash, a growing resistance led by dogged individuals, community organizations, and organized schoolteachers.

What’s been called corporate-accountability-based, test-and-punish school reform is something we’ve all watched over the years—nationally in No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top—statewide as school budgets have been stretched to pay for privatized charters or vouchers—and locally as our children began taking too many standardized tests, our local schools began receiving letter grades on state report cards, or students left the local public school for a nearby charter school.

With only scanty newspaper coverage to guide us, however, we may have struggled grasp the ideology behind this war on public education or see how all the lines of attack were converging to discredit public schools and the work of local teachers.  Diane Ravitch, the education historian, has done us all an enormous favor with this new book.

Ravitch defines the ideology of the war being waged on public education by a giant army. Ravitch names the so-called “school reform” movement a Goliath-sized experiment in disruption.  Goliath’s work can be seen in “the wreckage that the so-called ‘reform’ movement had created by demonizing teachers as if they were adversaries of their students and treating them as malingerers who required constant evaluation lest they fail to do their duty…. (in) the damage inflicted on public schools, their students and teachers, by heedless billionaires who had decided to disrupt, reinvent, and redesign the nation’s public schools…. (in) the work of some of the richest people in this nation: the Walton family, Bill Gates, Betsy DeVos, the Koch brothers, Michael Bloomberg, Laurene Powell Jobs, Reed Hastings, Eli Broad, and a bevy of other billionaires, most of whom had made their fortunes on Wall Street, Silicon Valley, or the tech industry.” These people and their organizations “often say their goal is to ‘disrupt’ public education, and I think in this instance they have accurately named themselves. They are Disrupters…. (T)he current disruption movement… is in fact a calculated, insidious, and munificently funded campaign to privatize America’s public schools, to break teachers’ unions, to tear apart communities, and to attack teacher professionalism… Disrupters are proponents of privatization… Disrupters view education as an entrepreneurial activity that should be ‘scalable’ and should produce ‘return on investment.’”

Read on. As always, Resseger is incisive and puts things in perspective.

Categories Education Reform

Daniel Koretz: American Students Are Not Getting Smarter, and Test-Based “Reforms” Are to Blame

By dianeravitch
January 9, 2020 //
67

Daniel Koretz is one of the leading authorities on testing in the United States. A professor at Harvard University, he has written two important books about testing–its uses and misuses.

The first was Measuring Up: What Educational Testing Really Tells Us.

His latest is The Testing Charade: Pretending to Make Schools Better. 

He recently wrote an article about how the federal government’s demand for high-stakes testing has actually undermined education.

He wrote:

In December, we received more bad news about the achievement of American students: Our 15-year-olds made no significant progress in math and reading on PISA, the largest of the international tests. This followed on the heels of a new report from our National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which showed no real progress in reading or math for fourth or eighth grade students for the past decade, and longer for reading.

The routine debate is underway about how bad this news is, but such arguments mostly miss a core lesson: America’s school reform movement has plainly failed. It’s time to face up to this failure and think about new approaches for improving education.

The routine debate is underway about how bad this news is, but such arguments mostly miss a core lesson: America’s school reform movement has plainly failed.

There have been numerous reforms over the past two decades, but at the heart of them are efforts to pressure educators to raise test scores. The idea is deceptively simple. Tests measure important things we want students to learn. Hold educators accountable for raising scores, and they will teach kids more. And by focusing accountability on low-scoring groups — most often by setting uniform targets via state or federal laws, such as No Child Left Behind and the Every Student Succeeds Act — we will close achievement gaps.

Unfortunately, this concept has turned out to be more simplistic than simple, and it hasn’t worked. Even though the primary focus has been reading and math tests, reading hasn’t improved. Test-based accountability has contributed to math gains among younger students, but these improvements ended a decade ago, were achieved in part by taking time away from other subjects, and don’t persist until students graduate from school, making them of questionable value. The effort to improve equity has also failed.

As I showed decades ago, the gap between racial and ethnic minorities and non-minority students started to narrow before the rush into test-based accountability, but that progress has ground to a halt in recent years. At the same time, as Sean Reardon at Stanford University has shown, the gap between rich and poor students has widened on a variety of independent tests. The gap between high- and low-scoring students overall has also recently grown larger.

“Reform” that involves mandating high-stakes testing is a farce. Some politicians have claimed that the way to make kids smarter is to test them more frequently and to make the tests harder and harder. Koretz says this is nonsense. I say that the politicians should be required to take and pass the tests they mandate for helpless students.

It is good to have our concerns and doubts about the pernicious effects of high-stakes testing confirmed by one of the nation’s leading testing experts.

Categories Accountability, Education Reform, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top, Testing

Texas: State Judge Temporarily Blocks State Takeover of Houston Schools

By dianeravitch
January 9, 2020 //
1

A state judge in Texas blocked the state takeover of the Houston Independent School District until she issues a final order in June. 

A state judge Wednesday evening immediately blocked Texas from taking over the Houston Independent School District until she issues a final ruling on the case, complicating the state’s plan to oust the district’s school board by March.

In doing so, Travis County District Judge Catherine Mauzy preliminarily sided with Houston ISD, the state’s largest school district, in a legal battle that will ultimately determine whether Texas can indefinitely seize power from its elected school board.

Calling the injunction a temporary setback, the TEA vowed in a statement to appeal the ruling.

The Texas Education Agency had planned to seize control of the district, oust the elected school board, and replace it with a governing board appointed by State Commissioner Mike Morath in March. Now the state must wait for the judge’s ruling in June.

The takeover was prompted by the persistent low test scores of Wheatley High School, which has a higher proportion of students in need than other schools in the district of 280 schools.

The state has failed to improve other, smaller districts that it has taken over.

Morath is a software developer, not an educator. He thinks that fixing a school district, one of the largest in the nation, is akin to ironing out bugs in a software program.

Critics in Houston think that Morath’s goal is to replace public schools with charter schools. During his single term on the Dallas school board, Morath led a failed effort to turn Dallas into a charter district, a goal he shared with billionaire John Arnold (Ex-Enron).

Mauzy hinted at her decision just before she stood to leave the courtroom Tuesday afternoon.

“Democracy is not always pretty,” she said. “But I am convinced it’s the best system we have. If we applied some of [the state’s arguments] to the Texas Legislature, I don’t know where we’d be.”

Now there is an interesting thought. Judge the members of the Texas legislature by their thoughtfulness, their diligence, and their intelligence, and how many would be ousted?

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Democracy, Education Reform, Houston, Injustice, Privatization, Texas

Louisiana: John White Submits His Resignation

By dianeravitch
January 8, 2020 //
18

Uber-reformer John White announced that he is resigning as superintendent of Louisiana.

He has sterling disrupter credentials.

Teach for America. Broad Academy. Joel Klein’s inner circle. Briefly leader of New Orleans’ charter district.

Mercedes Schneider has the story here. She thinks the next state superintendent might actually be an experienced educator.

Under White’s leadership, Louisiana dropped to nearly the very bottom of NAEP.

Watch to see which disruption group or leader picks him up next: the Waltons? The City Fund? John Arnold? Charles Koch? Bill Gates? Jeb Bush?

 

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Louisiana, Privatization, Vouchers, Walton Foundation

Bernie Sanders Calls for an End to Annual Standardized Testing

By dianeravitch
January 8, 2020 //
52

Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders was one of the few members of the U.S. Senate to vote against No Child Left Behind when it was approved by Congress in 2001.

Today is the anniversary of the signing of that law.

Sanders writes that the federal mandate for annual testing in grades 3-8 has been an expensive failure.

In this article in USA Today, Sanders calls for an end to the NCLB mandate, which remained in place through Race to the Top and the Every Students Succeeds Act of 2015 (Every student succeeds is another way of saying “no child left behind.”)

He writes:

Wednesday marks 18 years since the signing into law of No Child Left Behind, one of the worst pieces of legislation in our nation’s history. In December 2001, I voted against NCLB because it was as clear to me then, as it is now, that so-called school choice and high-stakes standardized testing would not improve our schools or enhance our children’s ability to learn. We do not need an education system in which kids are simply taught to take tests. We need a system in which kids learn and grow in a holistic manner. 

Under NCLB, standardized tests were utilized to hold public schools and teachers “accountable” for student outcomes. As a result, some schools that underperformed were closed and their teachers and unions blamed. 

The long-term effects of this approach have been disastrous. NCLB perpetuated the myth of public schools and teachers as failing, which opened the door for the spread of school voucher programs and charter schools that we have today. Some of these charter schools are operated by for-profits; many of them are nonunion and are not publicly accountable.

One error here: 90% of charters are non-union, not “many.” That is why charters have the enthusiastic support of right-wingers like the Waltons, DeVos, Koch, and other billionaires (see Slaying Goliath for a comprehensive list of the billionaires, foundations, and corporations that support testing and charters)

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), Failure, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Privatization, Race to the Top, Testing

NCLB Was Signed into Law By President George W.Bush on This Day in 2002

By dianeravitch
January 8, 2020 //
22

On January 8, 2002, President George W. Bush signed the No Child Left Behind law.

Thus began an unprecedented federal intrusion into state and local education.

The law was sweeping in imposing federally mandated annual tests from grades 3-8.

No high-performing nation in the world tests every child every year.

The law mandated that every school must achieve 100% proficiency by 2014 or face increasingly onerous consequences, culminating in being privatized, taken over by the state or closed.

The law made appeals to research repeatedly, but there was no research whatever for its claim that pressure and punishment would ever produce 100% proficiency nor was there any evidence for the “remedies” it proposed.

NCLB was a hoax buil on a lie. The lie was Bush’s campaign claim that there had been a “Texas miracle,” the result of annual testing and accountability. We need only look at Texas’s middling standing on NAEP to see that there was no miracle. The hoax was the law itself, which threatened punishment to those who could not meet impossible goals and offered remedies that had never produced results for any district or state.

Today marks a sad day in the history of American education, when politicians proclaimed that they knew how to fix America’s schools.

They didn’t, and a new era of test abuse, failure, hubris, profiteering, consultants, and other ways to defund the nation’s public schools began.

The spirit of this failed law animated Race to the Top (President Obama said publicly that his RTTT was built on the foundation of NCLB) and survives in the current Every Student Succeeds Act, which continues to require annual testing and gives the Secretary of Education the power to review state plans for compliance with federal law.

NCLB was a noon for the testing industry and consultants but a tragedy for students and teachers. Teachers lost autonomy. Students lost the arts, recess, history, and the love of learning for its own sake. Test scores became the purpose of education.

The restoration of the promise of public education will begin when we have a President and Congress who expunge the legacy of this dreadful law from the books.

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top

North Carolina: State Officials Are Embarrassed by Facts about their Charter Sector

By dianeravitch
January 8, 2020 //
2

Peter Greene writes that state officials in North Carolina keep getting embarrassed by the facts about their charter schools.

In 2016, when the first report came out, the state sent it back to have the data massaged because it turned out that charters were effectively resegregating the students in the state.

This year, a similar problem arose when it was time to release the annual report.

The charters are highly segregated, and their grades reflect which students enroll in them. (Surprise!)

It is a well-known fact that the demographics of a school predict its test scores.

Charter officials don’t like those facts. They want different facts. They are still trying to find a way to hide the reality of charters.

Greene writes:

North Carolina’s 2020 Annual Charter Schools Report has caused some consternation among members of the state’s Charter Schools Advisory Board (CSAB). They’ve seen the first draft and requested a rewrite, because, well, members of the public might become confused by the information that suggests Bad Things about North Carolina’s charter industry.

This is not the first time the issue has come up. Back in 2016 the Lt. Governor called the report “too negative” and pushed to have it made “more fair.” The report was not substantially changed– just more data added. But in 2016 it still showed that North Carolina’s charter schools mostly serve whiter, wealthier student bodies. This prompted a remarkable explanation:

Darrell Allison, president of Parents for Educational Freedom in North Carolina, said that fact is simply a reflection of which families are applying to charters.

Well, yes. Education reform in North Carolina has been about crushing the teachers’ unions and teachers themselves,while also being aimed at enabling white flight and accelerating segregation. One might be inclined to deduce that they hope to set up a spiffy private system for whiter, wealthier folks (including a corporate reserve-your-own-seats policy) along with vouchers, while simultaneously cutting the public system to the bone so that wealthy taxpayers don’t have to spend so much educating Those People’s Children. North Carolina has done plenty to earn a spot in the education policy hall of shame, enabled by some of the worst gerrymandering in the country.

But while NC legislators don’t seem to experience much shame over what they do, they sometimes worry about how they look (remember the great bathroom bill boycott of 2017). So now the charter report is going to be carefully whitewashed.

For instance, the report included a section about the racial impact of charter schools. But amid concerns that it might contain “misleading” wording that could be “blown out of proportion,” that section will apparently be removed. Regarding the report, ” I think it doesn’t actually represent what I believe to be true,” said Alex Quigley, chairman of the CSAB. “And given the choice between facts and the stuff I choose to believe, well, my beliefs and our charter marketing should come first.” Okay, I made up the last part, but that first part he totally said.

What data said is that 75% of charter schools have a white student enrollment that is more than 10% “off” from the surrounding district. Well over 50% of charters were off by more than 10% on black enrollment numbers. State law says that charters have to “reasonably reflect” the makeup of the district’s where they are located…

 

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Data, Education Industry, Education Reform, North Carolina, Privatization, Segregation
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