Audrey Watters is one of the leading voices among those who are concerned about student privacy.
In this post, she notes the growing attention to surveillance of children but observes that some parents are purchasing devices that facilitate surveillance.
Do you want your child to be surveilled by unknown persons and corporations?
Mercedes Schneider teaches high school English in Louisiana. She has been a close observer of the corporate reforms (the Disruption movement) under State Superintendent John White. White has been in charge since 2012. He has had the authority to pursue his own agenda, with the unwavering support of a state board elected by out-of-state money.
Schneider lays out his record, based on NAEP scores and ACT scores.
It is not a pretty picture.
Schneider is accustomed to John White’s cherry-picking of data. But she will not let him get away with it.
She writes:
On October 30, 2019, the 2019 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores were made public.
After seven years of John White as Louisiana’s state superintendent, the results were so unsavory White and his Louisiana Department of Education (LDOE) that his Louisiana 2019 NAEP Results Summary does not include a single actual NAEP scaled score.
Instead, the propagandistic flier advertises “change from 2017 to 2019” (differences in the actual scores that are intentionally excluded) and features “Louisiana ranks No. 1 in the nation for 2019 improvement in 8th grade math scale scores and
proficiency rates” and “Louisiana’s pace of improvement since 2009 in all subjects significantly exceeds national trends.”
So, let’s look at Louisiana’s NAEP average scaled scores across time– not just from 2017 to 2019.
She posts all the state’s NAEP scores from 2005-2019 (White has been superintendent since 2012)
But then there are the ACT scores.
She writes:
On the same day that 2019 NAEP scores were released, so were Louisiana’s Class of 2019 ACT scores.
Louisiana’s Class of 2019 composite was 18.9— the lowest since all Lousiana graduates began to be required to take the test, beginning with the Class of 2013. In that year, Louisiana’s baseline composite was 19.5 (or 19.1, depending which LDOE info one reads).
Louisiana’s ACT Composite Scores (2013 – 2019):
Not so surprisingly, White has no press release for Louisiana’s 2019 ACT dive.
That does not mean he has not been asked.
New Orleans Public Radio education reporter, Jess Clark, asked White to comment on Louisiana’s falling ACT score and received the following vague response, including NAEP-propaganda deflection:
Asked for comment on the latest ACT results, Louisiana State Superintendent John White sent an emailed statement pointing to progress the state made in 8th grade math on another national standardized test, the “Nation’s Report Card,” or NAEP.
“While the nation’s report card shows Louisiana tops the nation in 8th grade math progress, it’s important that we look at other indicators of our challenges,” he said.
John White wants to look at other indicators of “our” challenges.
I’ll bet he does.
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Gary Rubinstein, math teacher at Stuyvesant High School, is a skilled myth buster. He frequently unmasks “miracle” stories.
In this post, he demolishes the claim that Louisiana has improved faster in 8th grade math than other states.
This is the last gasp of the Disruption movement, which has controlled federal and state policy for 20 years but has little to show for it.
As Rubinstein shows, Arne Duncan and John White are leading the effort to find the “bright side” of the latest NAEP results, which were stagnant In 2019 and have been stagnant for a decade.
Duncan says the nation should look to Louisiana for inspiration. Louisiana ranked among the bottom states on NAEP, 44th to 49th, depending on the grade and the subject. But how creative to point to one of the lowest performing states as a national model! Do what Louisiana did and your state too can rank among the bottom five states in the nation!
Gary points out that Louisiana has indeed improved, but its 2019 scores on 8th grade math were actually a point lower than its scores were in 2007! In other words, Louisiana hasn’t gained at all for the past dozen years!.
Wouldn’t it be refreshing if the leaders of the Disruption movement admitted that their 20-year-long policy of test-and-punish is both stale and failed?
Wouldn’t it be great if they said, “Whoa! We’re on the wrong track. We’ve inflicted nonstop testing on the nation’s children since 2002. We have spent billions on testing and test-prep. Scores went up for a few years but leveled off in 2007. Enough! Our answers are wrong. Time for fresh thinking.”
Gay Adelmann, the mother of a recent graduate of the Jefferson County Public Schools, writes here to explain why voters in Kentucky should get rid of Matt Bevin and elect Andy Beshear as Governor.
She writes:
“During Kentucky’s past two legislative sessions, Gov. Matt Bevin lashed out at the record numbers of teachers descending upon Frankfort. But teachers are not the only ones who have been showing up in opposition to his attacks on public education. Many of us are also parents, retired teachers, students, business and community leaders, allied laborers and taxpayers. Our teachers are also taxpayers and often parents, after all.
“We aren’t just standing up for teachers’ pay or pensions, either. We are also pushing back on Bevin’s draconian education policies, inspired by wealthy elites like the Koch Brothers and Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. His solutions involve implementing the American Legislative Exchange Council’s carefully orchestrated schemes to underfund and undermine Kentucky’s public schools, turn our “persistently low-achieving” schools over to outside operators and drastically cut teacher compensation and benefits. This will not only destroy our public schools, it will further displace students (especially our “gap” students), and disenfranchise families across this commonwealth. Unfortunately, this austerity experiment comes at the expense of our community’s most vulnerable children and on Jefferson County taxpayers’ dime…
“Shortly after the 2015 election, Bevin declared, “We’re going to bring charter schools to Kentucky, and we’re going to start in west Louisville.” As a parent of a student in a “low-performing” West End school, this statement set off alarm bells for me. You see, my son’s school has long been the target of charter school wannabes. The entire time my son was in the aviation magnet at The Academy @ Shawnee, our building leaders and teachers lived under Jefferson County Public Schools’ former superintendent’s constant threat of “state takeover.” This often resulted in one failed change-for-the-sake-of-change maneuver after another, further making Shawnee a sitting duck for charter school sharpshooters…
”As a parent and taxpayer, I’m asking Jefferson County voters to stand with other public school parents, teachers and taxpayers and say “no” to four more years of out-of-touch, destructive education policy from the Bevin administration. Vote for Andy Beshear on Nov. 5.”
I received an e-mail from SPLC:
Tella Barnett fears she’ll end up behind bars again if she gets behind on her payments.
She’s one of thousands of people in Alabama who pay to stay out of prison. One day last March, she paid a $30 monitoring fee as well as a $40 supervision fee. She paid $40 in drug testing fees and $30 in “rescheduling fees.”
“Oh, my goodness, I can barely afford to eat,” said Barnett, 30. “I have three small children and I’m trying to pay for my home. I have $375 a month in rent, plus the power, plus the water, plus gas to get to work. It’s hard to pay that, it really is.”
No matter how hard it is – and no matter how little money she earns – she’ll have to pay those fees again next month and every month thereafter as long as she’s supervised by the community corrections program she reports to in northwest Alabama.
Many people in her situation do end up behind bars again.
Janet Gomez is one of them.
Last April, she was arrested and charged with first-degree escape after she got fed up with community corrections and stopped showing up for meetings and drug tests. Earlier, she had been ordered into a yearlong program at a Christian rehabilitation center called Center of Hope, apparently in violation of state rules because it was not a state-certified facility.
“[They] put me in a thrift store … they make you work there for free,” Gomez said. Like others sent there, she could not leave without permission from the community corrections program that was supervising her.
Though her escape charge eventually was dropped, Gomez was sent back to prison because she stopped taking drug tests.
In Alabama – where state officials are facing multiple lawsuits over inhumane conditions and rampant violence in the country’s most overcrowded prison system – community corrections programs have the potential to play a key role in reform efforts by safely reducing the number of people behind bars. Ideally, these programs allow people to stay in their communities, under supervision, while receiving rehabilitative services such as drug treatment or mental health counseling. The cost for each person is just a tiny fraction of what the state spends to incarcerate someone.
The problem, however, is that those costs are borne, overwhelmingly, by participants rather than the state.
An eight-month investigation by the SPLC – Opportunity Costs: Unequal Justice in Alabama’s Community Corrections Programs – reveals serious flaws in a loosely regulated, user-funded justice system that, in many locales, seems to be focused more on raising money from participants than on rehabilitation or public safety.
In a three-part series, investigative reporters Kathryn Casteel and Will Tucker expose a pay-to-play model that drains millions of dollars each year in fees from participants who mostly struggle to make ends meet. Many are under the constant threat of jail or prison if they’re unable to pay fees, which vary wildly from county to county and can be assessed for acts as innocuous as needing to reschedule an appointment.
This system [in Alabama] relies on a patchwork of largely autonomous nonprofit organizations and county agencies that in many cases stay afloat only by charging fees from people who, like Barnett, are often struggling to feed their children and pay their bills. These programs can, in fact, become violation traps for low-income people, some of whom cycle in and out of programs for longer than they were initially sentenced or even wind up in jail or prison. The system, in fact, creates unequal justice by placing greater burdens on the poor than on those with means.
The investigation identified numerous problems. In some cases, local judges were sitting on the boards of nonprofits that operated the programs while, at the same time, sentencing people into them.
In one such case, a judge in Walker County set a $30,000 bond for an indigent woman facing a first offense. When she couldn’t pay it, the judge lowered the bond to $0 but ordered her into pre-trial work release as a condition. She worked as a cook at a barbecue restaurant, earning $375 a week, and paid $85 each week to the community corrections program.
“It’s a beautiful system for sucking money out of the people who can least afford it,” public defender Sam Bentley told the SPLC. “Whether you call yourself a nonprofit or not, if you have a profit incentive – and somebody seems to have a profit incentive – then the cost is going to be borne on the backs of the indigent people who are charged, who are in the system.”
The SPLC investigation is already having an impact in Alabama.
Partly because of the way community corrections and separate but similar court programs overlap in some Alabama counties, Tella Barnett was charged twice each month for the same oversight services. When the SPLC brought it to light, a state agency terminated the contract with the nonprofit responsible for the duplicative fees.
In Walker County’s program, the subject of Part 2 of the series, the director resigned shortly after the SPLC requested detailed documents about the operation, and the judge who sat on the nonprofit’s board also resigned from the board. It’s the same county where one participant was improperly kept in the program, paying thousands in fees, for seven months after his sentence expired.
The interim director there acknowledges that the participant “fell through the cracks” and that “[a] lot of that could have been prevented.”
Despite the myriad problems uncovered by the SPLC, Casteel and Tucker found at least one community corrections program in the state that seemed to be a positive force in the lives of participants.
At the Southeast Alabama Court Services in Dale County, participants like Dixie Worrell say that the program administrators seem to truly care about helping the people put in their charge.
“It feels like a family, and I don’t have one,” Worrell said. “I’m grateful for this system … [Without it] I could still be a statistic in the jails.”
The program focuses more on rehabilitation and connecting participants with community resources than on supervision and revenue. Participants still have to pay a flat $100 monthly fee, which is more than many can afford. But the fee covers everything, including drug tests, and it’s far less than the total amounts charged by many other programs. For example, in Lauderdale County, a participant would pay $360 a month just for electronic monitoring, in addition to other fees.
And importantly, when they can’t pay, the program simply waives the fee, which happens about half the time.
“I’m not going to lean on clients for fees to increase revenue,” said the program’s director, Cheryl Leatherwood.
Leatherwood can relate to her clients because she overcame substance abuse earlier in her life.
“I always ask the question, in the back of my head, ‘Why is somebody in here? What did they not get?’ I treat them with respect. I don’t treat them as criminals. I treat them as if they are humans that made some very poor decisions.”
Community corrections programs hold promise. But the good examples cannot be sustained or replicated without statewide changes to the funding and supervision model. Even Dale County’s program is forced to solicit its own additional donations and charge a monthly fee that Leatherwood recognizes is a hardship for many clients.
The fundamental problem exposed in the SPLC investigation is a model that relies on forcing payments from those involved with the criminal justice system – a model that makes a person’s wealth or poverty a significant factor in the administration of justice.
The criminal justice system is a public responsibility and should be about rehabilitation and the safety of our communities – not about the pursuit of revenue from those involved with the system.
We’re committed to reforming the criminal justice system and we’ll continue to work in the courts and legislative arenas across the South – as well as to produce groundbreaking investigations – in pursuit of a more just system.
The Editors
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Do not read this post by Peter Greene unless you are a Christian. Do not read it unless you are a Dominionist and believe in the battle to advance God’s kingdom on this earth.
You see, our Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos just won an award for her work on behalf of God.
Peter Greene writes:
“Dominionism argues that the US should be a literal Christian nation, its government run by Christians. It comes in varying degrees of severity, with varying amounts of nationalism mixed in. One of the major proponents of American (i.e. US) dominionism was D. James Kennedy, a minister and broadcaster in Florida. Sample quote: To be a true Christian citizen means to “take dominion over all things as vice-regents of God.” Or there’s this one:
“Our job is to reclaim America for Christ, whatever the cost. As the vice regents of God, we are to exercise godly dominion and influence over our neighborhoods, our schools, our government, our literature and arts, our sports arenas, our entertainment media, our news media, our scientific endeavors—in short, over every aspect and institution of human society….
“It’s a view that represents what we think of as the culture wars, only on steroids. These are folks who see themselves as warriors for God, fighting to drive secularism and evil and wrong religions (like, you know, Islam) out of all aspects of US life….
“It should be said that plenty of folks within the Christian church are not fans of this stuff–but plenty of others are all too happy to see themselves as warriors for God, and many of those folks are in elected office right now. The Center stays in touch with many of these folks, holding Bible classes for Congress and support for those who are doing God’s work of reclaiming the seven mountains. The Center also gives out an annual award– the Distinguished Christian Statesman Award. You can see the kind of goals these folks support. Past recipients include Mike Pence, John Ashcroft, and Mike Huckabee. They just handed out the 2019 award.
“The recipient was Betsy DeVos.”
Forgive if I don’t applaud. As a Jew and a member of a very small minority, I find frightening this drive to restore the “Dominion.”
I believe in separation of church and state as the bulwark that protects religious freedom. That used to be the American Way, not the Amway.
The Coalition for Student Privacy writes here about a new book by Dianne Tavenner, who leads the Chan-Zuckerberg-funded Summit Charter Schools. The Summit approach is based heavily on screen time, and it has encountered student and parent protests in numerous cities.
Tavenner’s new book is called Prepared: What Kids Need for a Fulfilled Life.
The book will be launched at an event funded by the far-right Walton Family Foundation in New York City, where Tavenner will have a dialogue with Angela Duckworth, she of “Grit” fame. If you are in the area, why not drop in for free food and drinks on the Walton dime?
The Summit charters have had some little problems with their teachers, some of whom want to form a union. That’s a sure way to lose Walton funding!
Arthur Camins retired after a career as a teacher, aprofessor, a scientist, and director of a lab in charge of innovation.
In this post, he lays out the great mission of our era: take back our government, restore our democracy of the people. Start with public schools.
An excerpt:
Public schools are the bedrocks of democracy and equity. They are a great place to start reclaiming government because they are under assault by market enthusiasts who promote charter schools.
At best, charter schools–publicly funded but privately governed–benefit a few at the expense of the many. The evidence is in. At worst, they drain funds from public school districts, exacerbate segregation, facilitate corruption, and promote competition rather than solidarity among diverse constituencies for education quality and equity. It is time to hammer the nails in the charter school coffin.
In a dramatic and welcome shift for presidential candidates, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warrenhave announced their opposition to continued federal support for charter schools. However, don’t make plans for the Democratic funeral just yet. The charter school lobby has deep pockets for legislative and electoral influence. However, we are seeing a political shift in response to changing public opinion, possibly a reaction to Betsy DeVos’s flagrant distain for public schools and recurring charter school corruption.
Since Albert Shankar abandoned his flirtation with charter schools as an end run around stultifying bureaucracy, advocacy for so-called school choice has been primarily about undermining unions, avoiding systemic solutions to poverty, and promoting unregulated markets in opposition to government responsibility. Public acceptance of charter schools reflects a desperate response to years of abandonment and bipartisan support for and bashing of public schools. I don’t blame parents for choosing charter schools or the teacher who work in them. The responsibility falls on the politicians who allowed schools to deteriorate and poverty to continue, and with the profiteers who seek to make a buck at children’s expense. We will need to find a responsible way to reintegrate current charter school students into the public school system.
The market notion is that when schools compete for students and parent compete for their children’s entry into charter school equity and quality will improve. That is a zombie idea. The absence of evidence notwithstanding, it just will not die. With billionaire funding it just keeps coming back to life.
Just for fun, I did a search on the term, “How to kill a zombie.” It appears that the only way to kill off zombies is to attack their brains. We need to attack the brainchild of markets-fix-everything limited government enthusiasts The American majority needs to take back the role of government as an essential support of a decent life for everyone. We need to take back the idea of social responsibility. The education of our children– all of them –could be the vanguard of that struggle.
Former D.C. math teacher Guy Brandenburg attended the NAEP press conference in D.C. where Betsy DeVos explained what lessons the nation can lean from the NAEP results.
DeVos thinks the rest of the nation should learn from D.C., which has the largest racial gaps of any urban district tested by NAEP; Or Florida, where test scores went down; or Mississippi, where scores rose even though it is at the very bottom of all stages tested by NAEP. When you are at the very bottom, it’s easier to “improve” your scores.
When Betsy DeVos is long forgotten, please do not forget that she held up Mississippi as a model for the nation!
Brandenburg wants the world to know that D.C. made its greatest gains before mayoral control.
I found that it is true that DC’s recent increases in scores on the NAEP for all students, and for black and Hispanic students, are higher than in other jurisdictions.
However, I also found that those increases were happening at a HIGHER rate BEFORE DC’s mayor was given total control of DC’s public schools; BEFORE the appointment of Michelle Rhee; and BEFORE the massive DC expansion of charter schools.
He has the data and graphs to prove it.
A letter from a parent:
As a parent of a child with anxiety, the test driven culture of our local school has made my third grader hate school. Every day is a battle to get her to school. Her tardy and absentee record is deplorable. She is sick with stomach and gastrointestinal illness much too frequently for a child with no medical conditions. The crime is this is a bright child who loves learning but hates school and is beginning to believe she is “dumb”. In particular, the time limitations on all of the screening tests are crippling.
Don’t vote for any candidate unless he or she promises to stop the federal testing mandate for annual testing of every child.
