CURMUDGUCATION: Five Reasons School Takeovers Fail

CURMUDGUCATION: Five Reasons School Takeovers Fail

Five Reasons School Takeovers Fail

At the May 22 meeting of the Florida State Board of Education meeting, Education Commissioner Richard Corcoran and some board members expressed frustration with the state of Duval County Schools. "At what point do you say, ‘Maybe we should put them in receivership. Maybe we should have legislation that allows us to go over there and take over,’ ” he said.

Meanwhile, Ohio is trying to come to grips with a spectacularly failing takeover policy, but progress in the legislature has hit a snag. The House passed a bill that would do away with Ohio's current takeover structure and create a new way for districts to respond to problems-- they've even incorporated the language into the budget. But the Ohio Senate has its own ideas about replacing the school state takeover bill with--another school state takeover bill, featuring a special state "transformation" board.

Since policy writers and thinky tanks first started pushing the idea of identifying "failing" schools, the search has been on for a way to fix those schools. A popular choice has been the school takeover model, where the state strips the local school district of authority and then waves some sort of magic wand to make things better.

The Obama administration used School Improvement Grants as a tool, offering federal funds to schools that were "failing," but those funds came with very strict rules about how they could be used. This is a good example of the Takeover By Puppetry model, in which the local officials are left in place, but they are only allowed to make certain government-approved CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: Five Reasons School Takeovers Fail

Washington Post: America’s First Gay First Lady Revealed | Diane Ravitch's blog

Washington Post: America’s First Gay First Lady Revealed | Diane Ravitch's blog

Washington Post: America’s First Gay First Lady Revealed

The Washington Post has a story today about America’s first gay first lady.

She was Grover Cleveland’s sister Rose, who acted as his first lady because he was elected without a wife.

In the summer of 1910, Evangeline Simpson Whipple told the caretaker of her home not to move anything in her absence. The wealthy widow was going on a trip, but would be back soon, she said.

She never returned. When she died in 1930, she was buried at her request in Italy next to the love of her life — a woman with whom she had a relationship that spanned nearly 30 years. That woman, Rose Cleveland, had served as first lady.

The letters, preserved by the caretaker at Evangeline’s Minnesota home, are collected in a new book, “Precious and Adored: The Love Letters of Rose Cleveland and Evangeline Simpson Whipple,” and make clear that they were more than just friends, according to its editors.

When Grover Cleveland took office in 1885, he was a 50-year-old bachelor, a fact that almost derailed his campaign when rumors spread that he had fathered achild out of wedlock. (He had.) Protocol for unmarried or widowed presidents called for a female relative to fill the role of first lady. In stepped his sister Rose.

She was seen as an important counterbalance to her brother’s scandalous baggage: She was respectable, CONTINUE READING: Washington Post: America’s First Gay First Lady Revealed | Diane Ravitch's blog

Walking Away From High Stakes Tests, A Noble Lie | Cloaking Inequity

Walking Away From High Stakes Tests, A Noble Lie | Cloaking Inequity

WALKING AWAY FROM HIGH STAKES TESTS, A NOBLE LIE

From Wikipedia: A noble lie is a myth or untruth, told by an elite to maintain social harmony or to advance an agenda. The noble lie is a concept originated by Plato as described in the Republic. Plato presented the noble lie in a fictional tale— Socrates provides the origin of the three social classes who compose the republic proposed by Plato:

. . . the earth, as being their mother, delivered them, and now, as if their land were their mother and their nurse, they ought to take thought for her and defend her against any attack, and regard the other citizens as their brothers and children of the self-same earth. . . While all of you, in the city, are brothers, we will say in our tale, yet god, in fashioning those of you who are fitted to hold rule, mingled gold in their generation, for which reason they are the most precious — but in the helpers, silver, and iron and brass in the farmers and other craftsmen. And, as you are all akin, though for the most part you will breed after your kinds, it may sometimes happen that a golden father would beget a silver son, and that a golden offspring would come from a silver sire, and that the rest would, in like manner, be born of one another. So that the first and chief injunction that the god lays upon the rulers is that of nothing else are they to be such careful guardians, and so intently observant as of the intermixture of these metals in the souls of their offspring, and if sons are born to them with an infusion of brass or iron they shall by no means give way to pity in their treatment of them, but shall assign to each the status due to his nature and thrust them out among the artisans or the farmers. And again, if from these there is born a son with unexpected gold or silver in his composition they shall honor such and bid them go up higher, some to the office of guardian, some to the assistanceship, alleging that there is an oracle that the city shall then be overthrown when the man of iron or brass is its guardian.

High-stakes tests are a noble lie. (See all of CI’s posts on high-stakes testing here)

I mentioned on Cloaking Inequity an academic paper about NAEP testing pre and post-NCLB by Sean Reardon, a Stanford Professor, presented at an Accountability conference in Rome a few months ago. He found our national NAEP improvement was more rapid prior to the implementation of NCLB. Furthermore, high-stakes tests have only inched us towards closing the achievement gap. At the rate of nationwide improvement we have seen over the past decade on the NAEP and state-mandated criterion-referenced tests, he found it will take us 80 more years to close the achievement gap. Remember with much ado that Bush and Kennedy said the achievement gaps would be closed by NCLB in 2014? It will not happen. What was Texas’, the birthplace of NCLB, response to this failure? We have tripled CONTINUE READING: Walking Away From High Stakes Tests, A Noble Lie | Cloaking Inequity

Peter Greene: Does The Most Interesting Teacher Pay Proposal Belong To A Billionaire Friend Of Trump?

Does The Most Interesting Teacher Pay Proposal Belong To A Billionaire Friend Of Trump?

Does The Most Interesting Teacher Pay Proposal Belong To A Billionaire Friend Of Trump?

Stephen Schwarzman might have an idea. Schwarzman, co-founder of the Blackstone Group, has been named a Bloomberg Most Influential person of the year more than once, and in 2007 he was one of Time's 100 Most Influential people of the year. He is a long-time friend and advisor of Donald Trump, including help set up Trump's Strategic and Policy Forum. He has given away a great deal of money and put his name on a wide variety of enterprises, from theSchwarzman Scholars program for global leadership at Tsinghua University in Beijing, to having his name inscribed six times on the New York Public Library. You may remember him from a donation to his old high school that turned into a flap about renaming the school, but he is most recently in the news for a huge donation ($188 million)to the University of Oxford to change the way the humanities departments at Oxford interact, and to study the ethics of artificial intelligence. That's in line with his donation last year to M.I.T. of $350 million to anchor a new billion-dollar Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing for the study of artificial intelligence.

Schwarzman is well connected and he lives large, but some of his ideas do always not match what we might expect from the typical plutocrat. His interest in AI ethics, for instance, is in part focused on the problem of displacing human workers. And when he spitballed an economic Marshall Plan for the middle class in April, he identified CONTINUE READING: Does The Most Interesting Teacher Pay Proposal Belong To A Billionaire Friend Of Trump?

The Tide Is Turning! We Need Your Help! | Diane Ravitch's blog

The Tide Is Turning! We Need Your Help! | Diane Ravitch's blog

The Tide Is Turning! We Need Your Help!

NPE Action is helping allies fight for their public schools across the country!

We are turning the tide against privatization!

We need your help!

The Tide is Turning But We Need Your Help

The narrative is shifting.

As candidates jockey for position, public education issues are no longer relegated to soundbites. Major media outlets are reaching out to NPE Action to better understand why candidates are backing away from charters schools. Our NPE Action articles about the role of education policy in the 2020 election have run in The New York Daily News and The Progressive.

We need your support to continue to change the conversation and move our issues forward.

Donate Now!

A donation of $20 helps us update the 2020 Presidential Candidates Project. Reporters have used the report as a resource to track the candidates’ positions on our issues.

A donation of $50 helps NPE Action continue to endorse candidates who will fight for our issues at the federal, state and local levels.

A donation of $100 helps us produce reports like Hijacked by Billionaires: How the Super Rich Buy Elections to Undermine Our Public Schools. That report exposed how money floods into elections to subvert the democratic process and spread corporate education reform.

A donation of $250 or more will help us bring advocates from coast to coast together in Philadelphia for our 6th National Conference. We hope you’ll join us for that conference and that you’ll consider submitting a panel to share the work you are doing in yourcommunity to keep your public schools alive.

And a recurring monthly donation of any amount becomes the income we can depend on to issue Action Alerts when we need to let our legislators know where we stand.

Donate Now!

In her new book, Slaying Goliath, Diane has called us “the Resisters,” the volunteer army “fighting back to successfully keep alive their public schools.” 

We simply can’t continue this work without contributions from “resisters” like you. Please give what you can today.

The Tide Is Turning! We Need Your Help! | Diane Ravitch's blog

How to Be a Better Ally | Schott Foundation for Public Education

How to Be a Better Ally | Schott Foundation for Public Education

How to Be a Better Ally

Since its founding the Schott Foundation has worked to help build a broad-based movement to ensure all children have an opportunity to learn. Importantly, a movement led by the grassroots leaders in communities of color who are most impacted by educational inequities and other barriers to opportunity. It’s not arms-length philanthropy, but close working partnerships with our grantees and allies that undergirds all our work. Schott's Vice President of Programs & Advocacy, Edgar Villanueva, adds his insight in How To Be a Better Ally and Why It Matters.

More foundations are deepening their understanding of the racial disparities that exist in the U.S. and adapting their work to be more responsive to what communities need. It’s also important for individual donors to learn about these issues, as donors can address racial justice by becoming allies to communities of color.

Many people are only now beginning to understand how systemic discrimination contributed to the wealth divide in this country. According to Prosperity Now, approximately 70 percent of black and Latino households fall below the $68,000 wealth threshold needed for middle-class status, compared to 40 percent of white households. Without this economic foundation, many people of color continue to be locked out of opportunities across all facets of life, from education to employment.

“When you’re talking about generations of economic opportunity, we’re not starting out at the same place so you can’t really get to the same place,” said Leslie Boissiere, Vice President, External Affairs, Annie E. Casey Foundation.

Although philanthropy has tried to remedy large social problems with good intentions, it also perpetuated these disparities. For more than 70 years, the sector has mainly invested in large, white-led organizations and marginalized small organizations led by people of color, according to Edgar Villanueva, vice president of Programs and Policy at the Schott Foundation for Public Education, and author of Decolonizing Wealth: Indigenous Wisdom to Heal Divides and Restore Balance.

Despite these mistakes, philanthropy is still being embraced with the hope that we can all do better together.

Read more >

How to Be a Better Ally | Schott Foundation for Public Education

Cartoons on Social Media | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Cartoons on Social Media | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Cartoons on Social Media

Ever bump into someone while walking and staring at your smart phone screen? Perhaps, even texting while walking. Lots do in cities nowadays. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and on and on have seized youth and adults (not yet those of my age cohort, however). Cartoonists, as always, capture the phenomenon. Enjoy!

MORE CARTOONS: Cartoons on Social Media | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

CA’s A3 Education Indictment: The Counts of Sean McManus et al. | deutsch29

CA’s A3 Education Indictment: The Counts of Sean McManus et al. | deutsch29

CA’s A3 Education Indictment: The Counts of Sean McManus et al.

In this post, I offer excerpts of the 67 counts detailed in the 235-page indictmentof Sean McManus, Jason Schrock, and nine others who used weaknesses in California’s charter school laws to construct a network of fraud and launder $50M in public funds into their own pockets over the course of years. These 11 individuals (and unidentified others) did so by opening multiple charter schools and using companies, both pre-existing and newly-created, to establish a complex system of self-dealing– with little to no education actually happening via those exploited, educational dollars.

McManus bio sketch for A3 Annual Conference

Courthouse News offers a summary of the fraud scheme and the resulting indictments in this May 29, 2019, article.

I wanted readers to be able to view some of the charges firsthand. I could not post all of them because of length. However, what I offer hear provides useful insight in how McManus’ et al. scheme operated.

Counts 1 and 4– Conspiracy to Commit a Crime

(Count 1) On or about and between January 1, 2016 and April 20, 2018, Sean Joesph McManus, Justin Kent Schmitt, Jason Alan Schrock, Nyla June Crider, Michelle Claudia Kalehua Kukahiko, and Kealii Troy Kukahiko did unlawfully conspire together and with another person or persons whose identity is unknown to commit the crime of Theft of Public Funds… Prodigy Athletes….

(Count 4) On or about and between January 1, 2016, and April 20, 2018,  CONTINUE READING: CA’s A3 Education Indictment: The Counts of Sean McManus et al. | deutsch29

A billionaire changes his mind about school reform and what kids really need — and Barack Obama has a surprising reaction - The Washington Post

A billionaire changes his mind about school reform and what kids really need — and Barack Obama has a surprising reaction - The Washington Post

A billionaire changes his mind about school reform and what kids really need — and Barack Obama has a surprising reaction

For years, many of the United States’ wealthiest people have poured money into school “reform” efforts that some predicted would lift generations of the poor out of poverty.

Now, one of those billionaires says he doesn’t believe it anymore. He is Nick Hanauer, a venture capitalist and entrepreneur who has been funding education initiatives for years.

This is what he says now:

“I woke up one day and realized that it is false to say that education is the principal way of distributing opportunity in this country,” he said in an interview. What will work, he said, is paying Americans a livable wage — and that is now his philanthropic focus.

And, perhaps surprisingly, his support for a $15-an-hour minimum wage has come to the attention of former president Barack Obama, who urged his Twitter followers to read a piece Hanauer wrote in the Atlantic titled “Better Schools Won’t Fix America." CONTINUE READING: A billionaire changes his mind about school reform and what kids really need — and Barack Obama has a surprising reaction - The Washington Post

Class Size Rally 2019 [VIDEO] | Class Size Matters

Class Size Rally 2019 [VIDEO] | Class Size Matters Class Size Rally 2019 [VIDEO] | A clearinghouse for information on class size & the proven benefits of smaller classes

Class Size Rally 2019 [VIDEO]

On Tuesday June 11 at noon, more than one hundred parents, students, advocates, elected officials and union members gathered on the steps of City Hall to urge the NYC Department of Education and the Mayor to allocate specific funding in next year’s budget towards reducing class size.

Below is a video of the rally. Thanks to Norm Scott for taping the whole rally!

Class Size Press Conf City Hall June 11 2019 from GEM/Education Notes on Vimeo.

Class Size Rally 2019 [VIDEO] | Class Size Matters Class Size Rally 2019 [VIDEO] | A clearinghouse for information on class size & the proven benefits of smaller classes