Chicken Little Journalism Fails Education (Again and Again): Up Next, the Science of Science? – radical eyes for equity

Chicken Little Journalism Fails Education (Again and Again): Up Next, the Science of Science? – radical eyes for equity

Chicken Little Journalism Fails Education (Again and Again): Up Next, the Science of Science?

Often education journalism is disturbing in its “deja vu all over again“: Why Other Countries Keep Outperforming Us in Education (and How to Catch Up).

Criticizing U.S. public education through international comparisons is a long-standing tradition in the U.S. media, reaching back at least into the mid-twentieth century.

This is one of many crisis approaches to covering education—Chicken Little journalism—that makes false and misleading claims about the quality of U.S. education (always framed as a failure) and that because of the low status of the U.S. in international comparisons of education, the country is doomed, economically and politically.

Oddly enough, as international rankings of education have fluctuated over 70-plus years, some countries have risen and fallen in economic and political status (even inversely proportional to their education ranking) while the U.S. has remained in most ways the or one of the most dominant countries—even as we perpetually wallow in educational mediocrity.

Yet, this isn’t even remotely surprising as Gerald Bracey (and many others) CONTINUE READING: Chicken Little Journalism Fails Education (Again and Again): Up Next, the Science of Science? – radical eyes for equity

Education Research Report: NAEP Report Card: 2019 NAEP Science Assessment - http://educationresearchreport.blogspot.com/

Shawgi Tell: Charter School Promoters’ War on Consciousness | Dissident Voice

Charter School Promoters’ War on Consciousness | Dissident Voice

Charter School Promoters’ War on Consciousness

Charter school promoters have always relied on disinformation and irrationalism to justify the existence of charter schools, but in recent weeks and months it appears that a new, more pernicious, form of self-serving disinformation and irrationalism has reared its head.

This new disinformation and irrationalism seeks to further debase social consciousness and takes the form of casually and repeatedly declaring the exact and complete opposite of what research and experience confirm. The hope is that just by asserting and declaring something repeatedly, people will spontaneously believe it and abandon any conscious act of investigation.

Charter school promoters are increasingly desperate to make their pay-the-rich schemes look and sound like they are harmless and exist for the good of humanity. They have to do this because consciousness of the retrogressive character of privately-operated charter schools keeps steadily growing.

Several forms of this newly concerted strategy of disinformation and irrationalism have emerged.

The main one, however, has to do with school funding. Common sense, CONTINUE READING: Charter School Promoters’ War on Consciousness | Dissident Voice

MICHELLE GOLDBERG | Why the Right Loves Public School Culture Wars - The New York Times

Opinion | Why the Right Loves Public School Culture Wars - The New York Times

Why the Right Loves Public School Culture Wars

There is a quote from Ralph Reed that I often return to when trying to understand how the right builds political power. “I would rather have a thousand school board members than one president and no school board members,” the former leader of the Christian Coalition said in 1996. School board elections are a great training ground for national activism. They can pull parents, particularly mothers, into politics around intensely emotional issues, building a thriving grass roots and keeping it mobilized.

You could easily write a history of the modern right that’s about nothing but schools. The battles were initially about race, particularly segregation and busing. Out of those fights came the Christian right, born in reaction to the revocation of tax exemptions for segregated Christian schools. As the Christian right grew, political struggles over control of schools became more explicitly religious. There were campaigns against allowing gay people to work in schools and against teaching sex education and evolution.

Now the Christian right has more or less collapsed as anything but an identity category. There are still lots of religious fundamentalists, but not, post-Donald Trump, a movement confidently asserting itself as the repository of wholesome family values. Instead, with the drive to eradicate the teaching of “critical race theory,” race has moved back to the center of the public-school culture wars.

I put critical race theory in quotes because the right has transformed a term that originally referred to an academic school of thought into a catchall for resentments over diversity initiatives and changing history curriculums. Since I first wrote about anti-critical race theory activism in February, it’s become hard to keep up with the flurry of state bills aimed at banning the teaching of what are often called “divisive concepts,” including the idea, as a Rhode Island bill puts it, that “the United States of America is fundamentally racist or sexist.” “We will reject Critical Race Theory in our schools and public institutions, and we will CANCEL Cancel Culture wherever it arises!” the irony-challenged Mike Pence tweeted last week.

As The Washington Post’s Dave Weigel pointed out, Glenn Youngkin, a candidate in Virginia’s Republican primary, recently released four anti-critical race theory videos in 24 hours.

Part of the reason the right is putting so much energy into this crusade is because it can’t whip up much opposition to the bulk of Joe Biden’s agenda. Biden’s spending plans are much more ambitious than Barack Obama’s were, but there’s been no new version of the Tea Party. Voters view this president as more moderate than Obama, a misconception that critical race theory scholars would have no trouble explaining. Republicans have groused about how hard Biden is to demonize. They need a more frightening, enraging villain to keep their people engaged.

Critical race theory — presented as an attack on history, a program to indoctrinate children and a stealth form of Marxism — fits the bill. The recent elections in Southlake, Texas, show how politically potent the backlash to critical race theory can be.

In 2018, the affluent Texas suburb was in the news for a viral video of a group of laughing white students shouting the N-word. Black residents told reporters about instances of unambiguous racism, like a sixth grader joking to a Black student, “How do you get a CONTINUE READING: Opinion | Why the Right Loves Public School Culture Wars - The New York Times

Schools Matter: Scandal-Ridden TN DOE Lies to Parents about Opting Out of Tests

Schools Matter: Scandal-Ridden TN DOE Lies to Parents about Opting Out of Tests

Scandal-Ridden TN DOE Lies to Parents about Opting Out of Tests

Andy Spears recently shared a memo from the TN Department of Education denying denying parents the right to opt out of annual state testing.  Even though the invalid, unreliable, and racist tests have never been morally defensible, they are particularly indefensible during the present pandemic. 

Tennessee's corrupt Education Commissioner and former charter school CEO, Penny Schwinn, continues to circulate a one-page lie that tells parents that opting out of state testing is prohibited by state and federal laws. Any parent receiving this ridiculous memo should ignore it and keep their children safe from these irrelevant, racist, and mideducative tests that only companies that use public education as another vast revenue stream. 

Speaking of revenue streams, Broad Center alum Penny Schwinn has an established reputation for using her office to arrange lucrative no-bid contracts for her cronies in the ed industry. Before coming to Tennessee, she was caught up in a Texas-sized scandal based on playing favorites and passing out no-bid contracts.  

Since coming to Tennessee, Schwinn has continued her corrupt practices in awarding a no-bid management contract for a school voucher program and, more recently, another multimillion dollar no-bid contract for a  company to screen results on third grade reading tests.

As Bill Lee's mentor always said, only the best people. 

Schools Matter: Scandal-Ridden TN DOE Lies to Parents about Opting Out of Tests

Group accuses Times of bias in LAUSD coverage - Los Angeles Times

Group accuses Times of bias in LAUSD coverage - Los Angeles Times

Group affiliated with teachers union accuses Times of bias in L.A. Unified reopening coverage

A coalition of teachers, parents and community activists on Wednesday accused The Times of giving disproportionate coverage to those who want to quickly reopen Los Angeles Unified School District campuses, and short shrift to those in minority communities who urge a more deliberate approach during the coronavirus pandemic.

Reclaim Our Schools L.A., a group aligned with the United Teachers Los Angeles union, released a report analyzing seven months of columns, editorials and news articles, saying the newspaper demonstrated bias in its coverage of school reopening issues.

The group claims that the paper has relied too heavily on voices from wealthier communities where support for reopening quickly is stronger.

Teachers, parents, business people and others have been discussing for months when to bring back 465,000 K-12 students since the district moved to online learning about a year ago.

Alicia Baltazar, a Reclaim Our Schools member and parent of a fifth-grader in Wilmington, said during a news conference that she was disturbed seeing “stories about it’s parents against teachers.”

She added: “That simply is not true. Parents like myself and other members of Reclaim Our Schools Los Angeles have been working hand in hand with our teachers to keep our schools closed and to open only when it’s safe to do so.”

Reclaim Our Schools said that after receiving complaints from parents about The Times’ coverage, it examined 105 articles published between June and January and logged the identities of individuals who provided a total of 304 quotes to the newspaper.

The review concluded that 58% of the voices “elevated” by The Times came from three categories: professional/higher income individuals, small-business owners or millionaires, even though more than 80% of families in the L.A. district have low enough incomes to qualify for free and reduced-price meals.

The report said that fewer than 9% of those quoted were people it identified as working-class or low-income.

The report did not list the specific stories or provide the names of people whose quotes were analyzed. The Times has published more than 300 stories about L.A. schools since the pandemic began, far more than the number of stories the group said it analyzed.

Times spokeswoman Hillary Manning defended the newspaper’s coverage of schools in the pandemic. She said that hundreds of stories had included an array of voices, including students, parents, teachers, administrators, along with union leadership and education organizations.

“We have been guided by a mission of helping parents and students navigate these unprecedented times,” Manning said. “The Times’ education coverage has focused on the wrenching inequities brought on by closures and remote schooling, showing how CONTINUE READING: Group accuses Times of bias in LAUSD coverage - Los Angeles Times

Civility and the Steady Retreat from Truth – radical eyes for equity

Civility and the Steady Retreat from Truth – radical eyes for equity

Civility and the Steady Retreat from Truth

“I hope I live to see the day,” reads the subject line of an email I received a few days ago; the body continues: “That you are dead and rotting in hell along with your grandparents.”

This email arrived two days after another email posed two questions: “Did you really say those vile comments about Rush Limbaugh? Do you like civility or have you been misquoted?”

In the wake of Limbaugh’s death from cancer, conservatives and right-wing media have rushed to confront and chastise the incivility of anyone (especially professors) who expressed everything from glee to stating the facts around Limbaugh’s hate-mongering career, swamped with daily examples of mean-spiritedness, blatant racism, xenophobia, and misogyny.

In my own social media situation concerning Limbaugh, let me return to the two questions above. To whether or not I expressed “those vile comments” or if I have been misquoted, the answer is very complicated.

Of the handful-plus angry emails and voicemails I have received, a couple included my university president and other administrators (those annoying efforts at passive-aggressive intimidation); in one of those I can see the source of outrage at my claimed lack of civility since one email quoted from a right-wing media posting that in effect literally added words to my Tweet CONTINUE READING: Civility and the Steady Retreat from Truth – radical eyes for equity

CURMUDGUCATION: Pandemic Lesson #1: Trust Matters

CURMUDGUCATION: Pandemic Lesson #1: Trust Matters

Pandemic Lesson #1: Trust Matters

There are many lessons to be learned from this mess, including lessons about the usefulness of government. Also, I'm sure, plenty of scientific disease stuff.

But I notice that, particularly in the education arena, we keep coming back to trust. Black and brown families are hesitant to return to school buildings because they aren't sure they can trust the institutions that have failed them so often before. Teachers are reluctant to return to the buildings in those districts where they don't believe they can trust their district to keep them safe and/or follow through with their promises to do so. Critics of teachers unions don't trust (or at least pretend not to) teachers to do their jobs, or to even want to do their jobs. And distance learning, lacking the immediacy of face-to-face gathering in the same room, suffers from students and teachers unsure of just how much they can trust each other.

Where trust is strong, these issues shrink to insignificance. And that provides a major--well, two really--lesson about trust.

Trust is a basic, absolutely essential part of the foundation of a functioning school (any workplace, really--go reread the works of W. Edwards Deming). It has been demonstrated time and time again (here's a source for examples). And yet so many leaders resort to the stick, to management based on fear and distrust. 

I've watched school administrators who approach every discussion with staff worried first and fore CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: Pandemic Lesson #1: Trust Matters

Capital Union President Lied To Every Single Teacher In Capital School District | Exceptional Delaware

Capital Union President Lied To Every Single Teacher In Capital School District | Exceptional Delaware

Capital Union President Lied To Every Single Teacher In Capital School District

For the past several months, teachers at Dover High School have been grappling with Covid, remote learning, hybrid learning and the district itself. But it appears their greatest enemy might just be their own union that is supposed to protect teachers.

This past Monday, WDEL had an explosive article about teachers at Dover High School. The news shocked Delaware teachers up and down the state but it didn’t come as a surprise to many. For Leann Ferguson, her actions in reporting the incidents to WDEL were met with mixed results. Many teachers hailed her as a hero for finally reporting things many would not. Others branded her a traitor to the district and Dover High School.

The article dealt mainly with accommodations teachers could get through the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and how the district responded to those requests. According to the article and Ferguson, one teacher was fired after they were denied an CONTINUE READING: Capital Union President Lied To Every Single Teacher In Capital School District | Exceptional Delaware

The Hierarchy Of The Teachers Union In Delaware | Exceptional Delaware - https://wp.me/p4JboV-5Mb via @ExcptlDelaware

Biden Announces: Science and Facts Are Back! | Diane Ravitch's blog

Biden Announces: Science and Facts Are Back! | Diane Ravitch's blog

Biden Announces: Science and Facts Are Back!

After four years of science-denial, Biden is introducing a new era. Science and facts are in again. Truth matters. No alternative facts. Ignorance and stupidity are no longer honored or tolerable.

President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. said on Saturday that he was “always going to lead with science and truth” as he announced top science and technology officials on his White House staff, reaffirming trust in the kind of expert research that the Trump administration often ignored or disdained.

Extolling what he called “some of the most brilliant minds in the world,” Mr. Biden said his new team’s mission would be to ask: “How can we make the impossible possible?” He vowed to elevate scientific research and thinking on topics like the coronavirus, cancer research, climate change, clean-energy jobs, artificial intelligence, 3-D printing and other fast-advancing technologies.

The appointees included Eric S. Lander, whom Mr. Biden will nominate to be director of the White House Office of CONTINUE READING: Biden Announces: Science and Facts Are Back! | Diane Ravitch's blog

New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chait Is Bragging Again About Charter Schools | janresseger

New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chait Is Bragging Again About Charter Schools | janresseger

New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chait Is Bragging Again About Charter Schools

Last week, New York Magazine‘s Jonathan Chait published another of his long rants about the failure of public schools, the glories of charter schools, and all the reasons he disdains teachers unions.  Chait begins:

“In the dozen years since Barack Obama undertook the most dramatic education reform in half a century—prodding local governments to measure how they serve their poorest students and to create alternatives, especially charter schools, for those who lack decent neighborhood options—two unexpected things have happened.  The first is that charter schools have produced dramatic learning gains for low-income minority students… What was ten years ago merely an experiment has become a proven means to develop the potential of children whose minds had been neglected for generations. And yet the second outcome of the charter-school breakthrough has been a bitter backlash within the Democratic Party.  The political standing of the idea has moved in the opposite direction of the data, as two powerful forces—unions and progressive activists—have come to regard charter schools as a plutocratic assault on public education… ‘I am not a charter school fan because it takes the options available and money for public schools,’ Biden told a crowd in South Carolina during the Democratic primary, as the field competed to prove its hostility toward education reform in general and charters in particular.”

Chait is honest about his personal connection with the charter school sector—through his wife, Robin Chait, a Senior Policy Advisor at WestEd, whose website describes her work: “Chait’s primary responsibility is to manage WestEd’s work on the National Charter School CONTINUE READING: New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chait Is Bragging Again About Charter Schools | janresseger

Education Matters: DCPS is either deceptive or incompetent about COVID numbers and either is unacceptable.

Education Matters: DCPS is either deceptive or incompetent about COVID numbers and either is unacceptable.

DCPS is either deceptive or incompetent about COVID numbers and either is unacceptable.

There have been 7236 cases of pediatric COVID in Duval; of that, only 519 have made DCPS's dashboard. (see the links below). Absolutely nothing DCPS says can be taken seriously. Either their deception or incompetence is unacceptable.

Now I want to be fair the COVID Dashboard didn't even exist until August, so cases from April to them wouldn't make the dashboard. Likewise, the board doesn't include charter, homeschool, or just not in school kids. That being said, DCPS would have us believe that from August to today, as the pandemic has raged out of control, it's only affected, 519 students? I call bull sh*t.

Teachers have told me all year long that they know students who have had it, but they don't hear it from the school or see it on the dashboard. They hear it from the kids or families.

This is reckless and deceptive, and if the district doesn't know it, then they should.     

Pediatric cases in Florida by county.

http://ww11.doh.state.fl.us/comm/_partners/covid19_report_archive/pediatric-reports/pediatric_report_latest.pdf?fbclid=IwAR1mGVpbTy_uGt6GL9hnUoVfseYW9Z0nTttSvswBNImjF6gODK7Sbvye4ic

DCPS Covid Dashboard

https://c19sitdash.azurewebsites.net/

Education Matters: DCPS is either deceptive or incompetent about COVID numbers and either is unacceptable.

Education Matters: Nothing the FLDOE does should be taken seriously. - https://jaxkidsmatter.blogspot.com/2021/01/nothing-fldoe-does-should-be-taken.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+blogspot/iYxgC+(Education+Matters)

Right Wing Disinformation Targets San Diego Schools

Right Wing Disinformation Targets San Diego Schools

Right Wing Disinformation Targets San Diego Schools

An error filled online posting, devoid of context, with misleading assumptions has led to death threats and vile messages aimed at staff in the San Diego Unified School District, according to Board of Education Vice President Barrera.

Efforts to create awareness of racism as a systemic rather than an individual problem have stoked indignation in far right circles during the Age of Trump. Authors and publications seeking to educate the public and provide previously unheard historical context have been denounced as being racist themselves and part of a left wing conspiracy.

Now San Diego has its own mini-scandal, which should be laughable, except that threats and violence from right wing extremists have become normalized. Ninety percent of extremist-related killings in 2019 were attributable to right wing groups, according to the Anti-Defamation League.

What’s at issue here is a segment of an SDUSD staff development program concerning racial injustice, based on the Racial Healing Handbook by A.A. Singh, which was wildly misrepresented in a “drum up the outrage” article by the Discovery Institute’s Christopher F. Rufo.

The story has been picked up by Murdoch’s New York Post, The Daily Wire (the top right-wing publisher on Facebook), the San Diego County Republican Party’s “News Desk,” and spread via social media nationwide.

KUSI-TV interviewed Barrera, and -to their credit– gave him a decent amount of time to discuss the issues CONTINUE READING: Right Wing Disinformation Targets San Diego Schools

Nancy MacLean: How the Koch Network Fosters Disinformation | Diane Ravitch's blog

Nancy MacLean: How the Koch Network Fosters Disinformation | Diane Ravitch's blog

Nancy MacLean: How the Koch Network Fosters Disinformation

If you have not read Duke Professor Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains, you should. I reviewed it for the New York Review of Books here. It describes in great detail how the Koch brothers created an academic foundation for their extremist libertarian views. In this paper, MacLean goes into new detail about the workings of the Koch network and its efforts to undermine democracy. The Koch network knows that it does not have popular support so it has developed ways to “work around” the will of the majority. Currently, its major project is to block any effort to confront climate change.

The paper is titled “Since We Are Greatly Outnumbered: Why and How the Koch Network Uses Disinformation to Thwart Democracy.” The essay appears in a publication called The Disinformation Age, published by Cambridge University Press.

Thanks to “Unkoch My Campus” for bringing this paper to a large audience.

Nancy MacLean: How the Koch Network Fosters Disinformation | Diane Ravitch's blog

Sam Wineburg and Nadav Ziv: We Must Teach Students to Recognize Misinformation | Diane Ravitch's blog

Sam Wineburg and Nadav Ziv: We Must Teach Students to Recognize Misinformation | Diane Ravitch's blog

Sam Wineburg and Nadav Ziv: We Must Teach Students to Recognize Misinformation

Sam Wineburg and Nadav Ziv, professor and student at Stanford University, maintain that it is crucial to teach students how to recognize misinformation, a point that the recent election made clear. The Republican Party repeatedly called Democratic candidates “radical socialists” and smeared any proposal to improve the lives of people as “socialism.”

They wrote in the Los Angeles Times:

The 2020 election has once again demonstrated how easy it is to spread misinformation online. And universities across the U.S. are failing in teaching students how to identify it. Many colleges offer students guides to evaluate the trustworthiness of websites. But too many of them base their advice on a report from 1998. That’s nine years before the first iPhone, and 18 years before Russian interference sparked an urgent discussion on how we interpret information online.

There’s something deeply wrong with using advice on the internet of 20 years ago to teach students how they CONTINUE READING: Sam Wineburg and Nadav Ziv: We Must Teach Students to Recognize Misinformation | Diane Ravitch's blog

Shawgi Tell: Charter School Disinformation About "Choice" | Dissident Voice

Charter School Disinformation About "Choice" | Dissident Voice

Charter School Disinformation About “Choice”

Perhaps no other word is more central to charter school discourse than the word “choice.” “Choice” is not only a central concept in charter school discourse but a persistent source of disinformation. Disinformation refers to the deliberate hiding of the real context and relations of things so as to disorient people and cause them to act against their own interests while making them think that they are acting in their own interests. It is a form of false consciousness or anti-consciousness, and we all pay a heavy price for it.

Advocates of privately-operated non-profit and for-profit charter schools that siphon billions of dollars a year from public schools have long valorized “choice” and used the rhetoric of “choice” to distort thinking, mislead the public, and promote the private interests of owners of capital. Under the veneer of high ideals, “choice” has consistently been used by school-choice advocates and corporate school reformers to eliminate a modern conception of government, education, rights, and social responsibility, and to promote the outdated idea and practice of an education marketplace where education is seen as nothing more than a commodity and parents and students are treated as consumers, not humans or citizens with rights that belong to them by virtue of their being.

Confounding Two Different Notions of “Choice”

“Choice” in the most basic and straightforward sense of the word is simply the act of selecting something from a list of alternatives. It is something people CONTINUE READING: Charter School Disinformation About "Choice" | Dissident Voice