I hope you will join me by donating to Bread for Ed, which supports the strike of the teachers in Little Rock.
The Walton-controlled State Board stripped them of their collective bargaining rights.
They are demonstrating for their students, their right to organize, and for democracy.
Political Morning Education reports a big event in D.C. tonight where partisans of the test-and-punish education policies of the past twenty years will gather to rededicate themselves to their failed programs. Will these advocates for accountability accept any accountability for the misguided practices they have foisted on American education? Will they hold themselves accountable for the billions of dollars spent on testing and privatization that should have been spent on reducing class sizes and raising teachers salaries and opening health clinics in schools? Wouldn’t it be something if they invited someone like Jonathan Kozol or Anthony Cody to explain why NCLB and RTTT failed and how to have a better approach to teaching and learning other than carrots and sticks?
BUSHES SPOTLIGHT READING, LITERACY AMID GRIM ASSESSMENTS: Events starting tonight at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts will bring together members of the Bush family, best-selling authors and entertainers, philanthropists, and education and business leaders to celebrate reading and mark the foundation’s 30th anniversary.
— “I believe that literacy is an essential foundation for democracy,” former first lady Laura Bush said in a statement provided to POLITICO. Bush, one of tonight’s honorary co-chairs, will deliver remarks during a program that will include a special performance by country music singer Tim McGraw and Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Jon Meacham, co-authors of “Songs of America: Patriotism, Protest, and the Music that Made a Nation.”
— The events, including the foundation’s inaugural summit on adult literacy on Wednesday, coincide with grim results on the Nation’s Report Card and an announcement today from the Collaborative for Student Success about an effort with 11 other organizations to address the results.
— Among the organizations are The Education Trust, the National Urban League, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and the National Association of Elementary School Principals. They’re calling for, among other things, increasing federal investment in evidence-based, comprehensive literacy efforts at the state and local levels.
— “The persistent gaps in reading achievement for students from low-income backgrounds, students of color, English learners, and students with disabilities on the NAEP require urgent action,” said John B. King Jr., former Education secretary and president and CEO of The Education Trust.
Grassroots Arkansas reports that the teachers of Little Rock will strike this Thursday. It will be a one-day strike. The State Board of Education (a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Walton family) stripped the local union of its collective bargaining rights and is trying to destroy and privatize public education in that city. For the billionaire Waltons, Little Rock is the petri dish that is near at hand. They have so many petri dishes, all of which have failed. Why don’t they leave this small but historic district alone? (Answer: Because the Waltons want everything; having $150 billions has made them willful and arrogant.) The state took control of the district in 2015 and has agreed to return limited control, with a powerless board still controlled by the state.
Little Rock educators have announced a strike this Thursday, November 14, to demand that the state stop its re-segregation plan, return democracy through full local control of the LRSD, and recognize the union’s bargaining rights. Our educators and students need all of us to stand up for them before unlicensed subs and private companies complete the destruction and further segregation of our public education system.
There are several ways that you can support students and teachers. If you are a caregiver, please do whatever you can to keep your students home on Thursday, or send them to one of the childcare sites to be announced soon. The money follows the students, and the only power we have is if the students stay home. If they go to school, they will be babysat by unlicensed subs. Other ways you can support include:
Donate and share the Bread for Ed campaign to feed kids while the schools are shut down.
Tuesday and Wednesday: Pass out flyers at schools during drop-off and pickup times. Go by the AEA building at 1500 W 4th Street or call them at (501)375-4611 to see which schools most need coverage.
Tuesday and Wednesday: 4:00-7:00 Sign making at the AEA building. 1500 W 4th St by the Capitol.
Thursday: Picketing at schools from 7-9:30. Picket the State Board of Education meeting at 11:00. Sign up here.
STRIKE DATE SET IN ARKANSAS: The Little Rock Education Association is calling for one locally elected city school board with full decision-making authority following the state’s takeover of the district in January 2015. The union planned the strike for the day of the next state board of education meeting, when the district is on the agenda.
— The state board last month voted to stop recognizing the union as a bargaining agent for its members. The state board also voted to return control of Little Rock schools to a locally elected school board by 2020, but limited its authority.
— “They specifically stated that the school board, once elected, would not be able to reinstate our recognition, nor would they be able to hire or fire a superintendent and that the commissioner of education would still have veto power over any decisions that the state or that the school board makes,” Knapp Gordon said.
— The announcement said the union is working with #OneLRSD to stop Gov. Asa Hutchinson and his appointed state board from “segregating the city’s public schools.” The board last month backed away from a plan to divide the district under separate governing systems amid complaints that it would segregate the district. But Knapp Gordon said “by retaining control over the district, they still get to make those decisions that will lead to the resegregation of our school district.”
The federal government has an important role in the support and advancement of science. Science should be free of political influence. Decision making should not be based on partisanship.
Yet, as science professor John Richard Schrock shows, politics have often intruded on decisions about which policies to fund and what to make public. He cites bad decisions over the years under both Republican and Democratic administrations.
But nothing in the past equals the Trump administration’s open was against science. Trump has placed non-scientists into key roles, where they are able to suppress or manipulate scientific findings to satisfy his po,itical base. His much-ridiculed effort to compel the National Weather Service to defend his absurd claims about the likely path of a hurricane were a small example of his efforts to suppress science in the Environmental Protection Administration, the Agriculture Department, and other agencies. While the rest of the world worries about climate change, Trump insists that there is no threat and that what scientists call climate change is merely the weather, about which we can do nothing.
In addition to teaching science, teachers must teach the ethics of science, the importance of reaching conclusions based on evidence, and the necessity of excluding politics from the work of scientists.
Mike Klonsky explains why he in not excited about the prospect of Michael Bloomberg’s candidacy for president.
He writes:
Why is this billionaire Republicrat media tycoon and former New York mayor even considering jumping into a crowded Democratic primary as a 14-to-1 longshot? He knows the odds as well as anyone. One, because he can afford to, and two, he wants to be a hedge against the progressive insurgents like Warren and Sanders.
If either of them won the primary, I could even imagine Bloomberg running as an independent or third-party candidate in key battleground or swing states to draw away votes. Bloomberg is worried much more about the progressive ascendency than about his off-and-on frenemy Trump (who calls Bloomberg “Little Michael”).
Known as the stop-and-frisk mayor in New York, Bloomberg once claimed that the biggest problem was his cops “over-stopping whites”, and that he was just evening the score.
During his time in office, Bloomberg wielded his personal power against New York’s communities of color and their public schools. He imposed a tidal wave of privatization on the city, including a big swing towards privately-run charter schools. What pissed me off most was how he used our “small schools” rhetoric to promote charters.
He was an advocate of using standardized testing results as the main vehicle for evaluating school and teacher performance.
If you open the link, you will see a photo of Mike and Eva Moskowitz. He gave her whatever she wanted for her “no excuses” empire.
Bloomberg as mayor was an avid proponent of the main tenets of George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind law: high-stakes testing; closing schools with low scores; opening charter schools; opening scores of small schools and allowing them a “grace period” during which they were not required to admit students with disabilities or English learners. Bloomberg’s Leadership Academy (now closed) tried to lure non-educators into the role of principal and accelerated the careers of teachers into the principalship without the necessity of spending time as an assistant principal.
A headline from the Boston Globe, just posted (I don’t have a link because, although I am a subscriber, the Globe website does not permit me to log in.)
The Supreme Court is letting a lawsuit proceed against the maker of the rifle used in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.
The justices rejected an appeal Tuesday from Remington Arms that argued a 2005 federal law shields firearms manufacturers from most lawsuits when their products are used in crimes.
The court’s order allows a survivor and relatives of nine victims who died at the Newtown, Connecticut, school in 2012 to pursue their claims.
Jane Nylund, parent activist in Oakland, wrote the following warning after reading about the ouster of the Disrupters in Denver. Parents and activists and concerned citizens must organize and oust the agents of Disruption:
Oakland also must flip 4 board seats next year. The Walton-bought board has recently closed two schools, Roots and Kaiser Elementary, and there is talk of accelerating the “Blueprint process”, which is basically a plan to close and consolidate schools. Oakland’s portfolio model, which was only supposed to close “low performing” schools (nearly all of which were privatized into charters), has now morphed into the Citywide plan, in which no school is safe from the threat of closure. Kaiser was an exemplary model for a popular, well-supported, diverse neighborhood public school that attracted families both within and outside its boundaries. It also supported a significant number of LGBT families. It’s enrollment had been steady for years. Its closure (and planned consolidation with Sankofa, a struggling elementary school several miles away with a freeway in between) means that the beautiful piece of property where Kaiser is located (with SF bay views) will either be sold or handed over to a charter. Kaiser’s closure was a sacrifice, a political pawn in the school closure game, to show that the school board can be “bold” and not just close schools in high-needs neighborhoods. Look at us, we can close anything, and we will! This is the not-so-new normal for OUSD.
The New York Times published an analysis of how Elizabeth Warren’s tax plan would affect the giant fortunes of the nation’s billionaires.
If you subscribe to the Times, you can see how each of the biggest billionaires is affected.
Although they would pay big taxes, they would still be billionaires. Bill Gates denounced Warren’s plan at a Times-sponsored event, claiming that Warren would tax away $100 billion from him, leaving him a virtual pauper. Not so.
“Yes, billionaires will have to pay a little more,” Senator Elizabeth Warren said of the revised tax package she introduced recently, “six cents on each dollar.”
This modest-sounding proposal, though, would have a far-reaching impact on the wealthiest Americans when combined with her other tax plans — shrinking colossal fortunes over time and making it much more difficult to hand down multibillion-dollar legacies.
The tax bite for any individual would not equal the $100 billion that Bill Gates jokingly cited, but over time it would still sting, according to estimates by two economists who advised Ms. Warren. If her wealth tax had been in effect since 1982, for example, Mr. Gates, who had made his first billion dollars by 1987, would have had $13.9 billion in 2018 instead of $97 billion.
Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest person, would have had $48.8 billion last year instead of $160 billion. And Michael Bloomberg, who is considering running for president himself, would have had $12.3 billion instead of $51.8 billion….
Today in the New York Times, columnist Charles Blow wrote a scathing critique of Bloomberg, based on his “stop and frisk” policy.
He wrote:
Let me plant the stake now: No black person — or Hispanic person or ally of people of color — should ever even consider voting for Michael Bloomberg in the primary. His expansion of the notoriously racist stop-and-frisk program in New York, which swept up millions of innocent New Yorkers, primarily young black and Hispanic men, is a complete and nonnegotiable deal killer.
Stop-and-frisk, pushed as a way to get guns and other contraband off the streets, became nothing short of a massive, enduring, city-sanctioned system of racial terror…
In 2002, the first year Bloomberg was mayor, 97,296 of these stops were recorded. They surged during Bloomberg’s tenure to a peak of 685,724 stops in 2011, near the end of his third term. Nearly 90 percent of the people who were stopped and frisked were innocent of any wrongdoing.
A New York Times analysis of stops on “eight odd blocks” in the overwhelmingly black neighborhood of Brownsville in Brooklyn found close to 52,000 stops over four years, which averaged out to “nearly one stop a year for every one of the 14,000 residents of these blocks.”
In 2009, there were more than 580,000 stop-and-frisks, a record at the time. Of those stopped, 55 percent were black, 32 percent Hispanic and only 10 percent white. Most were young, and almost all were male. Eighty-eight percent were innocent. For reference, according to the Census Bureau, there were about 300,000 black men between the ages of 13 and 34 living in the city that year.
Not only that, but those who were stopped had their names entered into a comprehensive police database, even if they were never accused of committing a crime. As Donna Lieberman, then the executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said in 2010, the database became a place “where millions of completely innocent, predominantly black and Latinos have been turned into permanent police suspects.”
The state outlawed the keeping of these electronic records on the innocent, over the strong objections of Bloomberg and his police chief…
Bloomberg’s crime argument was dubious. The Columbia Law School professor Jeffrey Fagan produced a report that became part of a class-action lawsuit against the city in 2010. It found that: “[s]eizures of weapons or contraband are extremely rare. Overall, guns are seized in less than 1 percent of all stops: 0.15 percent … Contraband, which may include weapons but also includes drugs or stolen property, is seized in 1.75 percent of all stops.”
As Fagan wrote, “The N.Y.P.D. stop-and-frisk tactics produce rates of seizures of guns or other contraband that are no greater than would be produced simply by chance…”
A federal judge ruled in 2013 that New York’s stop-and-frisk tactics violated the constitutional rights of racial minorities, calling it a “policy of indirect racial profiling.”
Yet, a little over a month before that ruling, Bloomberg said on a radio show, “I think we disproportionately stop whites too much and minorities too little.”
Teresa Hanafin writes Fast Forward for the Boston Globe almost daily
She wrote about Nikki Haley’s new book and her defense of Trump.
Haley was on one of the cable talk shows and she said Trump should not be impeached because he did not get the Ukrainian president to hold a press conference and he did give Ukraine the money that Congress appropriated. This is akin to saying that a bank robber should not be charged with a crime if he didn’t get the money, and an attempted murder is not a crime because no one died.
She is not the “moderate” Republican that the press hoped for. She is a Trumper through and through. We know Trump admires loyalty above all else.
Nikki Haley, who’s either angling to replace VP Mike Pence on the 2020 ticket or positioning herself for a presidential run in 2024, took a whack at former chief of staff John Kelly and former secretary of state Rex Tillerson in her new book, which is out tomorrow.
She wrote that the two men, alarmed by some of Trump’s words and actions, approached her about joining them in trying to save Trump from some of his worst impulses and steer him toward more rational and reasonable decisions. Otherwise, Tillerson told her, some of Trump’s actions could cause people to die (um, such as Kurds?).
Haley chose to characterize their efforts as “undermining” Trump, substituting their judgment for his even though he was elected and they weren’t. “It was their decisions, not the president’s, that were in the best interests of America, they said. The president didn’t know what he was doing,” she wrote about their attitude, evidently unaware that half the country agrees with them.
It’s interesting that she has revealed that concerns about Trump weren’t confined to mid-level officials; those who worked with him closely every day were alarmed. Yet this is the guy she has chosen to embrace.
