The Wisdom and Wit of Diane Ravitch: A Review - Living in Dialogue

The Wisdom and Wit of Diane Ravitch: A Review - Living in Dialogue

The Wisdom and Wit of Diane Ravitch: A Review

The Wisdom and Wit of Diane Ravitch 

By Anthony Cody.

We think of historians as observers after the fact. They pore over the ephemeral and permanent records of past times and, from that evidence, construct stories that help us understand, and see the larger patterns at work. Diane Ravitch is a historian working in the now. She has an understanding of the history of our nation and education system that enables her to place current events in a schema that makes sense.

Part of her relevance is that Diane Ravitch is more than a historian. She is an active participant in public discourse, and the essays captured in this book are among her most important contributions over the past decade. When she joined me in launching the Network for Public Education back in 2013, she stepped even further into the arena. In January she was seen speaking in support of the Los Angeles teachers strike.

Her latest book, The Wisdom and Wit of Diane Ravitch, published by Garn Press, is an invaluable guide to the past decade of education “reform.” It is a contemporaneous history of a host of fatally flawed projects, including the Common Core standards, charter schools, vouchers, Race to the Top, and paying and/or evaluating teachers based on their students’ test scores.

Some of these issues remain hotly contested. We do not hear a lot about the Common Core these days, but the standards struggle on, often under aliases. The history of these standards is a subject where there has been an active effort to hide the machinations at work behind the scenes. How many articles have appeared in education publications and web sites purporting to “bust myths” about the Common Core– often denying basic facts about how these standards came into being. The most valuable history lessons in this book are in the middle section, where we see Ravitch systematically come to terms with what the Common Core is all about.

Ravitch does not treat her subjects lightly. When she takes on something like teacher evaluation, she goes into depth on why using test scores will damage our students. She explains the track record for the practice,  CONTINUE READING: The Wisdom and Wit of Diane Ravitch: A Review - Living in Dialogue

The Wisdom and Wit of Diane Ravitch 

The Wisdom and Wit of Diane Ravitch 

The Wisdom and Wit of Diane Ravitch
ISBN: 9781942146742
6 x 9 | 466 pages
Print: Available April 2, 2019

Julia Keleher: The Destroyer of Public Schools in Puerto Rico | Diane Ravitch's blog

Julia Keleher: The Destroyer of Public Schools in Puerto Rico | Diane Ravitch's blog

Julia Keleher: The Destroyer of Public Schools in Puerto Rico

Julia Keleher will one day have engraved on her tombstone: “She Destroyed the Public Schools in Puerto Rico.” She joins the blog’s Wall of Shame for her shameless assault on public schools, the teachers’  union, and the students of Puerto Rico.

Keleher resigned her position as Puerto Rico’s Secretary of State earlier this week. Her resignation comes after two years of top down education reform. She was hated by the Island’s teachers. She’s closed more than 350 schools in Puerto Rico, worked hand in hand with Betsy DeVos to undercut public schools by bringing vouchers and charters to the island, undermined special education services for students and threatened to turn over 30 schools to fly-by-night companies with no experience who want to cash in on schools.

She is the Betsy DeVos of Puerto Rico, although she was neither born nor raised there. She was born in Philadelphia, where she attended Catholic school. She received her BA from the University of Pennsylvania and graduate degrees from the University of Delaware and the for-profit Strayer University. There is no indication on her Wikipedia bio that she ever taught, though she has done consulting, data-driven management, web-based stuff, project management, and worked for the for-profit Sylvan tutoring services. She is a Republican. She was imported to Puerto Rico to disrupt the public schools on behalf of Wall Street and the power elite.

After she resigned, she was initially given a $250,000 a year job in the treasury department but she was forced to resign that backup position after newspapers in Puerto Rico questioned her ethics.

The Yale Education Leadership conference still invited her to keynote its ed reform conference yesterday that’s supported by the Walton Foundation, Broad, 50CAN (funded by Jonathan Sackler of the opioid industry) and other right-wing organizations. Puerto Rican students from Yale wrote an open letter to Yale and to Julia Keleher which they distributed before she spoke. Imagine that: A conference on education funded only by right-wing foundations! Now there is a balanced discussion!

The letter is below.

To the Yale School of Management Education Leadership Conference:

I am disappointed, yet not surprised, that this year’s Education Leadership Conference has chosen to host Julia Keleher as one of their keynote speakers for leaders in education reform. Keleher’s “reform” of the Puerto Rican public education system does not serve to solve CONTINUE READING: Julia Keleher: The Destroyer of Public Schools in Puerto Rico | Diane Ravitch's blog

2019 Medley #7: Things I didn’t get to edition | Live Long and Prosper

2019 Medley #7: Things I didn’t get to edition | Live Long and Prosper

2019 Medley #7: Things I didn’t get to edition

I often bookmark an article that I’d like to use as a basis for a blog entry…and then a week later, it seems like there are more important things I have to do so it gets pushed down the list until I forget about it completely. So today I’d like to look back at some still-relevant articles from the last few months that I found interesting, but got buried by other things on my to-do list.

HOLD POLITICIANS ACCOUNTABLE

Politicians Forget that Cut Scores on Standardized Tests Are Not Grounded in Science

The Every Child Succeeds Act still requires states to test every child every year. There are no longer federal consequences to “failure,” but the federal government still requires the states to tell them what the state-level consequences for low scoring schools are.

Here’s an idea…we know that test scores “correlate with family and neighborhood income” so why should all accountability be dumped on teachers and students? Why should third-graders who fail IREAD3 in Indiana be forced to repeat third grade when it’s possible that the child’s academic struggles are caused by the effects of poverty?

So how about if we put the accountability and consequences where they belong…on state and national politicians and legislators.

As John Kuhn wrote a few years ago…

…where is the label for the lawmaker whose policies fail to clean up the poorest neighborhoods? Why do we not demand that our leaders make “Adequate Yearly Progress”?

Politicians and legislatures are “failing” when poverty is unaddressed or when progress towards easing poverty isn’t enough to qualify as “adequate yearly progress.”

Politicians and legislatures are “failing” when they don’t spend enough on public education or waste money on mismanaged private schools (charter or voucher).

Politicians and legislatures are “failing” when they sign or pass laws such as third-grade retention laws, or laws which misuse standardized tests, which force educators into doing things that are educationally questionable.

It’s time to attach sanctions to states which allow their public schools to suffer while wasting billions of dollars on misused standardized tests, on vouchers, and on charters.

It’s time to attach sanctions to states which spend more money on wealthy CONTINUE READING: 2019 Medley #7: Things I didn’t get to edition | Live Long and Prosper

NYC Public School Parents: Will the Mayor and the Chancellor allow the School Siting Task Force to comply with Open meetings law, or insist on keeping their deliberations private?

NYC Public School Parents: Will the Mayor and the Chancellor allow the School Siting Task Force to comply with Open meetings law, or insist on keeping their deliberations private?

Will the Mayor and the Chancellor allow the School Siting Task Force to comply with Open meetings law, or insist on keeping their deliberations private?

In City Limits, Jarrett Murphy reports on the continuing lack of transparency of Mayor de Blasio and this administration.  Freedom of Information requests take months, sometimes years to be responded to.  Meetings of public bodies are closed when they should be open.

In January 2015, we were forced to sue Chancellor Farina and the NYC Department of Education to keep School Leadership Team meetings open to the public.  When Farina decided to close these meetings, we intervened in a lawsuit to keep them open, along with Public Advocate Letitia James, and our pro bono attorneys Advocates for Justice and NY Lawyers for Public Interest.  When we won in the Supreme Court in April 2015, Chancellor Farina still insisted on keeping these meetings closed, and appealed the decision to the Appellate Court.

We eventually eventually succeeded in our lawsuit in October 2016, in a unanimous decision of the Appellate court, but only after Farina had effectively kept these meetings private for nearly two years.

Now there is a new example of the Mayor and his administration to keep private what should be public.  This fall, the City Council passed Local Law 168, to create a School Siting Task Force that would include representatives from several city agencies and government bodies, including the DOE, the City Council, City Planning and the School Construction Authority.  This Task Force is supposed to meet and come up with a report by July 31 about how the city can more quickly acquire sites for new schools to alleviate school overcrowding.

This is a crucial issue, because in many cases, twenty years or more have lapsed because of the apparent inability of the SCA and the DOE to find sites, even when the neighborhood schools are at 120% or more.  This happened in Sunset Park Brooklyn before parents, members of the community and CM Carlos Menchaca became involved in pushing for new schools and identifying appropriate sites.

The SCA itself has very few people on staff and only four real estate companies citywide on retainer tasked with this assignment, and we've been told that they never "cold call" or reach out to owners to see if they might consider selling their properties before they are put up for sale, even though this is the best way to acquire sites for development in CONTINUE READING: NYC Public School Parents: Will the Mayor and the Chancellor allow the School Siting Task Force to comply with Open meetings law, or insist on keeping their deliberations private?

Public Education 'Ground Zero' in Radical Right's Assault on Democracy, Says Historian

Public Education 'Ground Zero' in Radical Right's Assault on Democracy, Says Historian

Public Education ‘Ground Zero’ in Radical Right’s Assault on Democracy, Says Historian

Nancy MacLean is an American historian and the William H. Chafe Professor of History and Public Policy at Duke University, where she teaches courses on modern U.S. history and the history of social movements. NEA Today caught up with MacLean for an in-depth conversation of her recent book Democracy in Chains, in which she details the decades-long effort of the radical right-wing to undermine U.S. democracy by establishing footholds in government, think tanks, media, the courts, and academia. The privatization of public education is a priority of this “stealth” campaign. In the book, MacLean introduces the reader to an important but overlooked player.

While many of us are familiar with Charles and David Koch—the Koch brothers—you introduce us to a new figure: James Buchanan, who would go on to win the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1986. Who was he and how did you discover him?

Nancy MacLean: James McGill Buchanan supplied the ideas that the Koch network has weaponized to achieve an agenda they know the people do not want: what amounts to a stealth plan to change our country.

I came across him when researching the State of Virginia’s fight against the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. This “massive resistance” mandated tax-funded vouchers for private schools and also the closure of any public school that planned to desegregate. Even after the forced closures left 10,000 white children school-less throughout the fall of 1958 and the courts ruled them unconstitutional, Buchanan wanted to keep the fight going. He urged, in essence, the privatization of public schools, which would have put them beyond reach of the courts.

Why, I wondered, would a believer in freeing markets with a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, be allying, in effect, with the most arch segregationists? I learned that the contest over Brown v. Board shaped Buchanan’s career. He arrived in Virginia in 1956, just as its conservative leaders were goading southern states to fight the ruling. Like them, he saw Brown not through the lens of equal protection of the law for all citizens, but rather as another wave in a rising tide of unwarranted federal interference in the affairs of the states going back to the New Deal. In his view, all this violated individual liberty, private property rights, and states’ rights.  Given a center to run at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, he made it his life’s work to understand how the other side became so powerful and, then, to devise a strategy for breaking down the liberal state they had created.

Buchanan and Charles Koch shared the same libertarian political views and espoused the same vision of what the United States should look like—specifically when it came to economic liberty. What defines the economic liberty worldview of Buchanan and Koch? Why should their views make the rest of us so nervous?

NM: Those who subscribe to this philosophy believe that government should have only three roles: to provide for the national defense, ensure the rule of law, and CONTINUE READING:  Public Education 'Ground Zero' in Radical Right's Assault on Democracy, Says Historian

Schools Matter: TN Commish Blames Teachers for Not Improving More

Schools Matter: TN Commish Blames Teachers for Not Improving More

TN Commish Blames Teachers for Not Improving More

Published at the Tennessean:

After reading the Tennessean article “Large numbers of Tennessee students not ready for college, new state data show,” I was scratching my head and wondering why alarm bells are going off now about high numbers of high school graduates needing college remediation. Especially so as we find out near the end of the article that college remediation rates have actually improved by 20 percentage points in the past five years.

Furthermore, why would the executive director of the Tennessee Higher Education Commission, Mike Krause, be bad-mouthing teachers and the education colleges that prepare them, in light of these improvements in college readiness?  Why wouldn’t a 20-percent improvement at least warrant a nod of approval for heading in the right direction?

I am not suggesting that we ignore the fact that some schools across the state still have very high percentages of graduates needing college remediation in both reading and math.  And we know those schools are in both rural and urban areas that are economically distressed. Whether Hardeman County in West Tennessee or Austin-East High School in Knoxville, we know that high remediation rates go hand in hand with high poverty rates.

It is unfortunate that Krause and his chief ally in the state Senate, Republican Jon Lundberg, ignore the economic and educational disparities that are at the source of the remediation problem.  Instead, they continue to blame the problem on educators and teacher educators whose life work is to help those struggling students whose disenfranchisement remains a principal predictor for their adult life outcomes.

Sadly, Krause’s former boss, former Gov. Bill Haslam, spent the waning days of his governorship trying unsuccessfully to kill the most recent manifestation of school funding lawsuits that have been ongoing in one form or another since 1987. If CONTINUE READING: Schools Matter: TN Commish Blames Teachers for Not Improving More

The Arne Duncan rumor. – Fred Klonsky

The Arne Duncan rumor. – Fred Klonsky

THE ARNE DUNCAN RUMOR.

If you don’t spend an unhealthy amount of time on social media you might have missed the breaking news the other day that Lori Lightfoot had put Arne Duncan on her transition team.

The news wasn’t that she planned to do it.

It was a fact.

And that fact – with no sources cited – was repeated and repeated and repeated.

Only it wasn’t true.

“Facebook friends” said that they knew it was true because they were told it was a fact at a CTU House of Delegates meeting. But I don’t know if that even happened.

Sometimes social media can be toxic.

If you live in the regular world of people who don’t spend an unhealthy amount of time scanning Twitter and Facebook, the Arne Duncan story may have gone right by you.

Other things may occupy your life. Like the poor pitching start of the Cubs. Or our CONTINUE READING: The Arne Duncan rumor. – Fred Klonsky

Lisa Haver: How Many Lawyers Does It Take to Close Down a Failing Charter School? | Diane Ravitch's blog

Lisa Haver: How Many Lawyers Does It Take to Close Down a Failing Charter School? | Diane Ravitch's blog

Lisa Haver: How Many Lawyers Does It Take to Close Down a Failing Charter School?

Lisa Haver is a public school activist in Philadelphia. Here she writes about the long, drawn-out and very expensive proceedings to close down a failing charter school in that city.

She writes:

When the School District of Philadelphia targeted Germantown High School for closure just one year before its 100th anniversary, there was no legal recourse for students or families. No law required the District to conduct an inquiry or call witnesses in order to hear testimony from those fighting to save the school. While the administration of Superintendent William Hite did hold an informal meeting at the school, the community’s pleas fell on deaf ears. Germantown High, along with 23 other neighborhood schools that had served generations of Philadelphians, was closed by vote of the School Reform Commission in a matter of months.

Closing a charter school is a very different story. The Pennsylvania Charter Law mandates a lengthy legal process, beginning with weeks of hearings at the District level. Thousands of pages of documents are entered into evidence. Should the hearing examiner rule in the District’s favor, the charter school can appeal to the state’s Charter Appeal Board in the hope that the 6-person board of political appointees, most of whom have ties to the charter sector, will overrule the decision of the local board. Should that fail, the school can appeal to Commonwealth Court.

Not only is the process is long and expensive, but the public must pay for both sides of the dispute while the CONTINUE READING: Lisa Haver: How Many Lawyers Does It Take to Close Down a Failing Charter School? | Diane Ravitch's blog

How Come Schools and Teachers Change Yet Both Remain So Familiar?* | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

How Come Schools and Teachers Change Yet Both Remain So Familiar?* | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

How Come Schools and Teachers Change Yet Both Remain So Familiar?*

Why has the act of teaching in public schools (including charters) that serve wealthy, middle-class and poor children looked so familiar to past generations of journalists, researchers, parents and grandparents who enter classrooms? In short, why has there been so much continuity in schools and classroom teaching over the 20th and early 21st centuries?

Surely, teaching has changed. Many classrooms now dispense with rows of desks and have students at tables and pods of desks facing one another. Laptops and tablets are prevalent in schools; teachers use the Internet for videos in lessons; students give PowerPoint presentations; teachers take immediate polls of student answers to multiple choice questions with clickers; new textbooks, some of which are online.These changes have occurred in classrooms across the nation.

Yet amid those changes, there is a commonness in the classroom furniture, the unfolding of a lesson, the activities that teachers direct students to do, and Q & A that characterizes the back-and-forth between teacher and students. How to explain that familiar continuity in schooling and teaching?

I offer two explanations:

First is the organizational concept of “dynamic conservatism.” The idea involves both continuity and change by maintaining a tenuous balance in classrooms and schools. Institutions often embrace change in order to remain the same. Families, hospitals, companies, courts, city and state bureaucracies, and the CONTINUE READING: How Come Schools and Teachers Change Yet Both Remain So Familiar?* | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

The LAUSD School Board’s Secret Committee – Carl J. Petersen – Medium

The LAUSD School Board’s Secret Committee – Carl J. Petersen – Medium

The LAUSD School Board’s Secret Committee
Board President Monica Garcia and Vice-President Nick Melvoin both make reference to a Rules Committee that has not held any public meetings. Where is the transparency?

“Let’s go to that committee.”

- LAUSD Board President Monica Garcia

At the April 2, 2019 “special” meeting of the LAUSD School Board, the charter school industry was once again permitted to stack the public speaker list so that only their viewpoint was heard before action was taken on the renewal of Summit Preparatory Charter. Knowing that there was at least one person who was denied the ability speak against this renewal, Board Member Scott Schmerelson asked how he could institute a pilot program that would enable speakers to use Skype to address the Board remotely from local district offices. In response, Board President Monica Garcia suggested that “Mr. Melvoin’s group and Mr. Crain (the Board’s Secretary)…could probably figure out how to do a pilot.” Melvoin followed up by saying “I think that it’s a great thing for the Board Rule Committee to consider.” Garcia agreed by saying “Let’s go to that committee.”

“The committee is coming back with their recommendations before the end of April”

- LAUSD Board Vice-President Nick Melvoin

According to Melvoin, the committee is supposed to present proposed new rules to the Board at the end of this month (before a representative for Board District 5 can be seated), but the official calendardoes not show that any public hearings have been held by this committee, nor have any been scheduled. This committee has not released any agendas or minutes from their meetings. Therefore, the public has no idea what is being discussed by Melvoin’s group or what entities are presenting information to CONTINUE READING: The LAUSD School Board’s Secret Committee – Carl J. Petersen – Medium

Standardized Testing is a Tool of White Supremacy | gadflyonthewallblog

Standardized Testing is a Tool of White Supremacy | gadflyonthewallblog

Standardized Testing is a Tool of White Supremacy

Let’s say you punched me in the face.

I wouldn’t like it. I’d protest. I’d complain.

And then you might apologize and say it was just an accident.

Maybe I’d believe you.

Until the next time when we met and you punched me again.

That’s the problem we, as a society, have with standardized tests.

We keep using them to justify treating students of color as inferior and/or subordinate to white children. And we never stop or even bothered to say, “I’m sorry.”

Fact: black kids don’t score as high on standardized tests as white kids.

It’s called the racial achievement gap and it’s been going on for nearly a century.

Today we’re told that it means our public schools are deficient. There’s something more they need to be doing.

But if this phenomenon has been happening for nearly 100 years, is it really a product of today’s public schools or a product of the testing that identifies it in the first place?

After all, teachers and schools have changed. They no longer educate children today the same way they did in the 1920s when the first large scale standardized tests were given to students in the US. There are no more one-room schoolhouses. Kids can’t CONTINUE READING: Standardized Testing is a Tool of White Supremacy | gadflyonthewallblog

Jeff Bryant: I asked these 3 simple questions of Betsy DeVos’ Education Department. It ‘created havoc’ among the staff. – Alternet.org

I asked these 3 simple questions of Betsy DeVos’ Education Department. It ‘created havoc’ among the staff. – Alternet.org

I asked these 3 simple questions of Betsy DeVos’ Education Department. It ‘created havoc’ among the staff.

U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos is famous for giving nonresponses to fairly straightforward questions. More than one commentator has had fun with her contorted evasions, but her inability to…

U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos is famous for giving nonresponses to fairly straightforward questions. More than one commentator has had fun with her contorted evasions, but her inability to explain the rationale for current education policies isn’t confined to her own personality and ideology. It’s actually been endemic in the education policy world for years, particularly in how the federal government continues to hide its agenda to further privatize the nation’s public school system by creating and expanding charter schools.

Arne Duncan, who served as secretary for the longest period of time before DeVos, was famous for being the consummate non-listener, often talking over people with his prepared remarks and ignoring the advice of teachers and education experts.

This is not a partisan issue. Teachers demanded Duncan’s resignation, and Republican members of Congress have complained that DeVos’ department isn’t responsive to requests for information.

Of course, any comparison between DeVos and Duncan can find some very big differences, but a constant throughout both administrations has been to ignore, wall-off, or obfuscate when confronted with any inquiry aimed at the federal government’s efforts to create and expand charter schools.

A History of Hiding

My latest brush with the education policy edifice’s imperviousness to outside inquiry occurred while researching and writing a new report on the education department’s Charter School Program (CSP). I coauthored the report “Asleep at the Wheel: How the Federal Charter Schools Program Recklessly Takes Taxpayers and Students for a Ride” with Network for Public Education Executive Director Carol Burris.

Burris and I found that up to $1 billion awarded by the CSP—in more than 1,000 grants—was wasted on charter schools that never opened or opened for only brief periods before being shut down for mismanagement, poor performance, lack of enrollment, and CONTINUE READING: I asked these 3 simple questions of Betsy DeVos’ Education Department. It ‘created havoc’ among the staff. – Alternet.org