What to expect from Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch | Seattle Education

What to expect from Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch | Seattle Education:

What to expect from Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch

This article was originally posted on The Progressive last week.

Gorsuch’s Record Reveals Ruthless and Cruel Decisions

by Dora Taylor

Many people know about Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch’s role in the Hobby Lobby case, which helped establish that corporations can cite religious beliefs to deny contraception coverage to employees.

We’ve also been hearing about the case of a truck driver who was fired after sitting for three hours in his cab in freezing temperatures waiting for emergency services to fix the brakes on a truck trailer he was pulling. His employer dismissed him after he chose to unhitch the trailer and drive for help to get the brakes repaired. The National Labor Relations Board sided with the driver and so did two judges who heard his appeal. But Judge Gorsuch dissented, saying the law didn’t protect the driver from losing his job.

Some of Gorsuch’s lesser-known decisions, involving the American Disability Act and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, are equally egregious.

• Thompson R2-J School District v. Luke

In this disability-rights case, a hearing officer, judge, and federal district court judge unanimously agreed that a student with autism should be placed in a residential school because the student showed a lack of progress in transferring what he was learning in his regular public school to everyday life.

Judge Gorsuch ruled that the student had made “some progress,” although he conceded it was “de minimus.” By setting the bar exceedingly low, he determined that the school district had met its obligation under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, which guarantees people with disabilities a free and appropriate public education.

The precedent that Gorsuch set in this case was recently overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court.

• Garcia v. Board of Education of Albuquerque Public Schools

A student with a learning disability dropped out of school after the school failed toWhat to expect from Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch | Seattle Education: 

Sean Spicer. The Stranger. | Fred Klonsky

Sean Spicer. The Stranger. | Fred Klonsky:

Sean Spicer. The Stranger.

One of my favorite Orson Welles movies is The Stranger.

Welles plays a German Nazi who escaped the Homeland after the Allied victory. He speaks without a hint of a German accent and hides out as a professor in a small New England Town, takes up with a Supreme Court justices daughter and works on the town’s clock.

Edward G. Robinson plays a government Nazi hunter on the chase for the Welles character. His investigation has led him to the town, but not to who the Nazi is.

In a dinner conversation with the family of the Supreme Court justices daughter, the conversation involves a discussion of post-war Germany. In order to disguise his identity, Welles comes off more anti-German than anybody.

He asks, “What have the Germans ever contributed to culture and philosophy?”

The son of the Supreme Court justice offers up Marx. “Workers of the world unite,” he says.

“But Marx wasn’t a German. He was a Jew,” responds the Welles character.

A lightbulb goes off, and then Edward G. Robinson knows.

Only a Nazi would think that because someone was Sean Spicer. The Stranger. | Fred Klonsky:

DeVos dials back consumer protections for student loan borrowers - The Washington Post

DeVos dials back consumer protections for student loan borrowers - The Washington Post:

DeVos dials back consumer protections for student loan borrowers

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos on Tuesday withdrew a series of policy memos issued by the Obama administration to strengthen consumer protections for student loan borrowers.

The Education Department is in the middle of issuing new contracts to student loan servicing companies that collect payments on behalf of the agency. These middlemen are responsible for placing borrowers in affordable repayment plans and keeping them from defaulting on their loans. But in the face of mounting consumer complaints over poor communication, mismanaged paperwork and delays in processing payments, the previous administration included contract requirements to shore up the quality of servicing. Companies complained that the demands would be expensive and unnecessarily time consuming.

“This process has been subjected to a myriad of moving deadlines, changing requirements and a lack of consistent objectives,” Devos said Tuesday, in a letter addressed to James  W. Runcie, who heads the Federal Student Aid office at the department. “We must promptly address not only these shortcomings but also any other issues that may impede our ability to ensure borrowers do not experience deficiencies in service. This must be done with precision, timeliness and transparency.”

[Government gets tough on student loan servicers, but will it be effective?]

DeVos has withdrawn three memos issued by former education secretary John King and his under secretary Ted Mitchell. One of the directives, which was later updated with another memo, called on Runcie to hold companies accountable for borrowers receiving accurate, consistent and timely information about their debt. The 56-page memo called for the creation of financial incentives for targeted outreach to people at great risk of defaulting on their loans, a baseline level of service for all borrowers and a contract flexible enough to penalize servicers for poor service, among other things.

The Obama administration requested routine audits of records, systems, complaints and a compliance-review process. It also directed Runcie’s team to base compensation on response time to answering calls, completing applications for income-driven repayment plans, errors made during communications and the amount of time it takes to process payments. Another memo insisted FSA consider a company’s past performance in divvying up the student loan DeVos dials back consumer protections for student loan borrowers - The Washington Post:

Ravitch: Why the Supreme Court should not force the public to pay for religious schools - The Washington Post

Ravitch: Why the Supreme Court should not force the public to pay for religious schools - The Washington Post:

Ravitch: Why the Supreme Court should not force the public to pay for religious schools

If you don’t know what the Blaine Amendments are, it’s time to learn, because they may be gone soon, and that would affect the United States in a major way.

The Blaine Amendments are provisions in a majority of U.S. state legislatures that prohibit or limit the use of public funds for religious schools, helping maintain a separation of church and state that has long been seen by many Americans as a central tenet of U.S. democracy.

Some school choice supporters, however, oppose these amendments. U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has long advocated for using public funds to pay for private and religious school tuition and other education expenses. And the Trump administration may propose a federal tax credit to support programs that encourage and facilitate the use of public funding for religious school.

Last year, the Supreme Court agreed to hear Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia v.Pauley. The case involves the appeal of a Lutheran church in Missouri and its preschool that had sought a grant from a state program to use scrap tires for a playground but was denied because of the 1875 provision in the state constitution — known as a Blaine Amendment — that forbids using any public money “directly or indirectly, in aid of any church, sect, or denomination or religion.”  The church and preschool sued the state, citing the First Amendment, but lost in a federal district court and a federal appellate court upheld the decision by the state.

Now the Supreme Court will hear the case, with arguments set to begin April 19, and the decision could determine the fate of Blaine Amendments across the country. The high court just returned to a full complement of justices, with President Trump successfully placing his first nominee, the conservative Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, on the court to take the seat of Antonin Scalia. Gorsuch may well be the deciding vote in this case.

The phrase “separation of church and state” are not in the Constitution, but was first used by the 17th century theologian Roger Williams and later by presidents Thomas Jefferson and James Madison as a way to express their views of the function of the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause and Free Exercise Clause: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” In the landmark 1947 Everson v. Board of Education of the Township of Ewing case, the Supreme Court wrote that the Establishment Clause does create a “wall of separation” between church and state, and that this means that, at the very least, no “tax in any amount, large or small, can be levied to support any religious activities or institutions, whatever they may be called, or whatever form they may adopt to teach or practice religion.”

Opponents argue that the Blaine Amendments discriminate against religious institutions.

In this post, Diane Ravitch, education historian and public school advocate, explains the history of the Blaine Amendments and why she thinks the Supreme Court should leave them in place. Ravitch worked as assistant education secretary in the administration of former president George H.W. Bush but later underwent a radical change in her views about corporate-based education reform after seeing the consequences of school choice and standardized test-based accountability systems on students and teachers. She became the titular leader of the movement against school reform based on standardized-test accountability systems and school choice after the 2010 publishing of her book, “The Death and Life of the Great American School System.” This appeared on her blog, and she gave me permission to republish it.

By Diane Ravitch

Robert Natelson, a retired constitutional law professor who is allied with the ultraconservative Heartland Institute, writes in this opinion article that the Supreme Court may well strike down the state prohibitions on public funding of religious schools — known as “baby Blaine Ravitch: Why the Supreme Court should not force the public to pay for religious schools - The Washington Post:

The Tripod Student Survey Instrument: Its Factor Structure and Value-Added Correlations | VAMboozled!

The Tripod Student Survey Instrument: Its Factor Structure and Value-Added Correlations | VAMboozled!:

The Tripod Student Survey Instrument: Its Factor Structure and Value-Added Correlations

The Tripod student perception survey instrument is a “research-based” instrument increasingly being used by states to add to state’s teacher evaluation systems as based on “multiple measures.” While there are other instruments also in use, as well as student survey instruments being developed by states and local districts, this one in particular is gaining in popularity, also in that it was used throughout the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s ($43 million worth of) Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) studies. A current estimate (as per the study discussed in this post) is that during the 2015–2016 school year approximately 1,400 schools purchased and administered the Tripod. See also a prior post (here) about this instrument, or more specifically a chapter of a book about the instrument as authored by the instrument’s developer and lead researcher in a  research surrounding it – Ronald Ferguson.

In a study recently released in the esteemed American Educational Research Journal (AERJ), and titled “What Can Student Perception Surveys Tell Us About Teaching? Empirically Testing the Underlying Structure of the Tripod Student Perception Survey,” researchers found that the Tripod’s factor structure did not “hold up.” That is, Tripod’s 7Cs (i.e., seven constructs including: Care, Confer, Captivate, Clarify, Consolidate, Challenge, Classroom Management; see more information about the 7Cs here) and the 36 items that are positioned within each of the 7Cs did not fit the 7C framework as theorized by instrument developer(s).

Rather, using the MET database (N=1,049 middle school math class sections; N=25,423 students), researchers found that an alternative bi-factor structure (i.e., two versus seven constructs) best fit the Tripod items theoretically positioned otherwise. These two factors The Tripod Student Survey Instrument: Its Factor Structure and Value-Added Correlations | VAMboozled!:

Torlakson Announces Record High School Grad Rates - Year 2017 (CA Dept of Education)

Torlakson Announces Record High School Grad Rates - Year 2017 (CA Dept of Education):

State Schools Chief Tom Torlakson Reports Record High School Graduation Rates and Seventh Consecutive Year Increase

SACRAMENTO—State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson reported today that California’s graduation rate increased for the seventh year in a row and is now at a record high for the class of 2016, with the biggest increases during that period taking place among English learners and African American and Latino students.

Among the cohort of students who started high school in 2012–13, 83.2 percent graduated with their class in 2016, up 0.9 percent from the year before. (See Table 1.) This increase means that 4,917 more students received their high school diploma last year than the year before.

The state’s graduation rate has increased 8.5 percentage points since the class of 2010 posted a 74.7 percent rate.   

The graduation rate of almost every student subgroup calculated by the California Department of Education (CDE) also rose in 2016. (See Table 2.) The rate of increase among English learners was 2.7 percentage points, African Americans went up 1.8 percentage points, and Latino students increased by 1.5 percentage points.

“This is great news for our students and families,” Torlakson said. “Graduation rates have gone up seven years in a row, reflecting renewed optimism and increased investments in our schools that have helped reduce class sizes; bring back classes in music, theater, art, dance, and science; and expand career technical education programs that engage our students with hands-on, minds-on learning.

“The increasing rates show that the positive changes in California schools are taking us in the right direction. These changes, which I call the California Way, include teaching more rigorous and relevant academic standards, which provides more local control over spending and more resources to those with the greatest needs.”

Torlakson cautioned, however, that much work remains. “We still have a long way to go and need help from everyone—teachers, parents, administrators, and community members—to keep our momentum alive so we can keep improving.”

A critical job, he said, is to keep working to narrow the achievement gap between Asian and white students and Latino and African American students.

The latest statistics show the gap has narrowed. For African American students, the graduation rate reached a record high of 72.6 percent, up 1.8 percentage points from the year before and up 12.1 percentage points from 2010. For Hispanic or Latino students, the graduation rate climbed to a record high of 80 percent, up 1.5 percentage points from the year before and up 11.9 percentage points from 2010.

English learners saw a second consecutive year of big increases with the graduation rate reaching 72.1 percent, up 2.7 percent from the previous year and up 15.7 percentage points from the class of 2010. (See Table 3.)

Along with the record rise in the graduation rate, fewer students dropped out of school. The dropout rate declined from 10.7 percent in 2015 to 9.8 percent in 2016, down 0.9 of a percentage point.

The state dropout rate does not have a precise correlation with the graduation rate because some students are still pursuing a high school degree or its equivalent after four years. These students have neither graduated nor dropped out. Last year, 6.1 percent of students in the cohort were in that category, a decline of 0.2 percent from the year before.

Graduation and dropout rates for counties, districts, and schools across California were calculated based on four-year cohort information using the state's California Longitudinal Pupil Achievement Data System (CALPADS). Cohort means the same group of students entered ninth grade for the first time and were followed for four years.

This is the seventh time this cohort information was calculated, meaning data may only be compared accurately over the seven-year period from 2009–10 to 2015–16. Prior to 2009–10, graduation and dropout rates used different calculation systems.

To view and download state, county, district, and school graduation and dropout rates, visit the California Department of Education's DataQuest. Downloadable data sheets are available on the California Department of Education Cohort Outcome Data Web page. Caution is urged when comparing graduation or dropout rates across individual schools and districts. For example, some county office schools, alternative schools, or dropout recovery high schools serve only those students who are already at the greatest risk of dropping out, compared with the broader population at traditional high schools.

# # # #

Attachments

Table 1: Difference Between Class of 2015 and Class of 2016 Cohort Graduation and Dropout Rates

Year	Cohort Students	Cohort Graduates	Cohort Graduation Rate	Cohort Dropouts	Cohort Dropouts Rate	Cohort Special Ed Completers	Cohort Special Ed Completers Rate	Cohort Still Enrolled	Cohort Still Enrolled Rate
2014-15	488,612	401,957	82.3	52,249	10.7	3,192	0.7	30,775	6.3
2015-16	489,036	406,874	83.2	48,118	9.8	3,442	0.7	29,991	6.1
Difference	424	4,917	0.9	-4,131	-0.9	250	0.0	-784	-0.2

Table 2: Cohort Increase or Decrease from the Class of 2015 to Class of 2016 by Subgroup and Program

Ethnic/Racial Designation or Program	Cohort Graduation Rate 2015-16	Cohort Graduation Rate 2014-15	Graduation Rate Difference	Cohort Dropout Rate 2015-16	Cohort Dropout Rate 2014-15	Dropout Rate Difference
Hispanic or Latino of Any Race	80.0	78.5	1.5	11.6	12.6	-1.0
American Indian or Alaska Native, Not Hispanic	73.8	73.1	0.7	16.2	18.1	-1.9
Asian	93.4	92.6	0.8	3.5	4.5	-1.0
Pacific Islander, Not Hispanic	81.9	82.2	-0.3	10.7	11.5	-0.8
Filipino, Not Hispanic	93.6	93.0	0.6	3.1	3.5	-0.4
African American, Not Hispanic	72.6	70.8	1.8	17.1	18.8	-1.7
White, Not Hispanic	88.1	88.0	0.1	6.9	7.4	-0.5
Two or More Races, Not Hispanic	84.9	86.0	-1.1	8.0	8.5	-0.5
Not Reported	57.7	57.9	-0.2	35.5	37.5	-2.0
English Learners	72.1	69.4	2.7	15.8	17.6	-1.8
Foster Youth	50.8	49.7	1.1	30.7	29.8	0.9
Migrant Education	81.6	80.7	0.9	10.4	11.2	-0.8
Special Education	65.5	64.5	1.0	13.8	14.9	-1.1
Socioeconomically Disadvantaged	79.3	77.7	1.6	11.9	13.1	-1.2
All Students	83.2	82.3	0.9	9.8	10.7	-0.9

Table 3: Cohort Graduation Increase from the Class of 2010 to Class of 2016 by Subgroup and Program

Ethnic/Racial Designation or Program	Cohort Graduation Rate 2015-16	Cohort Graduation Rate 2009-10	Graduation Rate Difference
English Learners	72.1	56.4	15.7
Hispanic or Latino of Any Race	80.0	68.1	11.9
African American, Not Hispanic	72.6	60.5	12.1

# # # #

Tom Torlakson — State Superintendent of Public Instruction
Communications Division, Room 5602, 916-319-0818, Fax 916-319-0100

Torlakson Announces Record High School Grad Rates - Year 2017 (CA Dept of Education):

Cohort Outcome Data

California Longitudinal Pupil Achievement Data System (CALPADS) cohort outcome data reported by race/ethnicity, program participation, and gender.



 Files include state, county, district, and school level data. Please refer to the file structure for details on what data are contained in the file.

Year of Data	File	File Structure
2015-16	cohort16 (TXT; 8MB; Posted 11-Apr-2017)	File Structure: Cohort Outcome Data 2010–16
2014–15	cohort15 (TXT; 8MB; Posted 17-May-2016)	File Structure: Cohort Outcome Data 2010–16
2013–14	cohort14 (TXT; 8MB; Posted 24-Apr-2015)	File Structure: Cohort Outcome Data 2010–16
2012–13	cohort13 (TXT; 8MB; Modified* 21-Jul-2014)	File Structure: Cohort Outcome Data 2010–16
2011–12	cohort12 (TXT; 8MB; Posted 19-Apr-2013)	File Structure: Cohort Outcome Data 2010–16
2010–11	cohort11 (TXT; 7MB; Modified* 12-Mar-2013)	File Structure: Cohort Outcome Data 2010–16
2009–10	cohort10 (TXT; 7MB; Modified* 13-Mar-2012)	File Structure: Cohort Outcome Data 2010–16

To use a file, click on the file name you wish to download and save the file to your computer. To view the file, open the file in a database or spreadsheet program. For further instructions, choose a link below or contact our office for assistance.

Special instructions for Excel and Access users

*For details on specific file modifications, refer to the File Modifications Web page.

Questions: Data Reporting Office | dro@cde.ca.gov | 916-327-0219 

Cohort Outcome Data - Student & School Data Files (Downloadable) (CA Dept of Education) - http://www.cde.ca.gov/ds/sd/sd/filescohort.asp

For Public Schools, It's Been '1984' For Quite A While | The Huffington Post

For Public Schools, It's Been '1984' For Quite A While | The Huffington Post:

For Public Schools, It’s Been ‘1984’ For Quite A While
Education was barely a blip on the screen in the presidential race—which is ironic, since the education divide determined the election.

In this post-truth age that’s done away with facts, George Orwell’s 1984 has soared to the top of the charts. But in the world of public education, it’s been 1984 for quite some time. And we didn’t even need the clumsy apparatus of a totalitarian dictatorship to bring it about. All we needed was some slick PR and smiley corporate faces and a media ready to spit back the buzzwords they’d been fed— failing public schools, no excuses, accountability, choice, access for every child, closing the achievement gap—repeating them so often that they passed for truth.

In Orwell’s dystopia, WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH. The Ministry of Truth spawns lies and propaganda, the Ministry of Love supervises torture and brainwashing, and the Ministry of Peace promulgates war and atrocity. Turn the words on their heads, and you get a glimmer of the truth. And the Ministry of Education? There is no Ministry of Education. So now we have a Secretary of Education who’s a dedicated enemy of public education. Betsy DeVos has, for the past decade, used her fortune to privatize education in her home state, Michigan, where 80% of charters are for profit and beyond accountability, and student performance has plummeted.

But DeVos should come as no surprise: She is the culmination of the way things have long been headed. No Child Left Behind, signed into law in January 2002, brought to us by George W. Bush and the moneyed interests he represented, arrived in clouds of rhetoric about “access” and “civil rights.” It announced itself as “an act to close the achievement gap with accountability, choice, flexibility, so that no child is left behind.” But in fact it was never about access or leveling the playing field or even about “reform”: it was about opening up public education as a market, siphoning off tax dollars to charters and for-profit vendors, shifting public funds from a system that had public oversight and control to private interests. Education was a rich, untapped market with billions of federal dollars there for the taking. Schools, panicked at having their survival based on standardized test scores, invested heavily in testing technology. Multinational testing corporations, publishing companies, ed-tech ventures rushed in with their wares: software for administering tests, test preps, pre-tests, post-tests, tests scoring, lesson plans, teaching modules, assessment devices; entire new industries sprang into being.

Diane Ravitch, assistant Secretary of Education under GWB, was initially a proponent of NCLB, but recoiled in horror when she saw what it was doing, routing public funds into private profits, and realized this had been its purpose all along. She has told this story in The Death and Life of the Great American School System and Reign of Error ― so have Noam Chomsky, Henry Giroux, and dozens of teacher bloggers exposed corporate reform. But their voices are not heard in mainstream media; most people I know are incredulous For Public Schools, It's Been '1984' For Quite A While | The Huffington Post:

How a Community Copes When a School Shuts its Doors

How a Community Copes When a School Shuts its Doors:

How a Community Copes When a School Shuts its Doors
Shuttered schools can devastate communities. For a small Iowa town, losing its high school felt like losing a member of the family.

After 34 years of teaching math and science at Farragut Community High School in Fremont County, Iowa, Harold Dinsmore officially retired in 1992. Nine years later, he “retired” again, after he was called back to finish out the 2001 school year while administrators found a permanent chemistry teacher. In 2015, he went back again to close out the school’s last semester. This time, there would be no going back to the town’s only high school.

Last summer the school—a fixture in the community, since its creation in the 1920s—was “involuntarily dissolved.”

“It tears me up. It shouldn’t have happened,” says Dinsmore. “I was fortunate to have all my children go to that high school, and I’m very proud of [it].”

Dinsmore says his colleagues were proud of the school, too, and their pride made them active in the school’s life. “We all worked together and all of our school programs were strong,” he says, noting that when there was a game, Farragut’s bleachers were usually filled to capacity. “The school gave everyone a great foundation to succeed in life,” he adds.

Hometown Pride

Farragut is a small farming town established in 1870, and named after Admiral David Farragut—the nation’s first vice admiral to the U.S. Navy. He is remembered for making the cry, “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead,” (paraphrased) during the victorious 1864 Battle of Mobile.

Dinsmore’s daughter, Marcia Johnson, lives and works in Shenandoah—a neighboring school district—where she teaches third grade and serves as the local president for the Shenandoah Education Association.

We all worked together and all of our school programs were strong. The school gave everyone a great foundation to succeed in life” – Harold Dinsmore

Johnson attended Farragut in the 1980s, and her high school memories are fond. “I loved being in a small school. We were involved in everything,” she says, firing off a laundry list of activities from music to sports, and “all” of the school clubs. She knew everyone, too: classmates and their siblings, teachers and their children.

During Johnson’s era, the school was known for the girls’ basketball team, which traveled to state championship games every year. “That was our claim to fame,” she proudly says.

The classes that followed Johnson’s won state competitions in speech, volleyball, and softball. Trophies filled display cases. And graduates’ academic efforts led How a Community Copes When a School Shuts its Doors:

School Choice Spread in The Avocado – Cloaking Inequity

School Choice Spread in The Avocado – Cloaking Inequity:

School Choice Spread in The Avocado

Check out the new school choice spread in The Avocado! The Avocado is a monthly newsletter focused on “educating, uniting, and motivating through an open discussion of relevant political and social issues.” I was honored to be interviewed for Issue 3 (April 7, 2017) which takes on education and school choice.

In your opinion, what is the biggest issue the American public school system faces today? And how is this affecting the quality of education available to students on a ground-floor, day-to-day basis?
 
The worst kept secret in the United States is that we have created a system in which the children of the wealthy receive the most educational opportunities. This inequality is historical and is also readily apparent in every city on the other side of the tracks, highway, river etc. This means that the poor have lesser educational facilities and technology, nutritional opportunities, more police in their schools, less counselors, less experienced and more new teachers etc. The structural inequalities in our system are on purpose and it is the shame of our nation.

It seems that many DeVos supporters actually do understand that vouchers and “school choice” only benefit the upper class, but are simply willing to sacrifice the needs of others for a system that will benefit themselves and their kids. How do we target those people and help them to better understand the ways that a thriving public school system can have widespread benefits?
 
First, I believe it is important to introduce evidence into our national conversation about school choice to counter the common sloganeering that’s heard. Vouchers, because of their design, allow researchers to the opportunity conduct high-quality, rigorous studies. The latest research on vouchers is actually showing that they either have no appreciable impact on students and some studies are actually finding that they reduce student success. Second, worldwide examples of voucher experiments in Sweden and Chile have enhance social inequity and had dismal results for poor children. Finally, I think it should also be known that vouchers have a sordid racist history because they were used after Brown v. Board for purposes of “all deliberate slowness” in the South to ensure the continued segregation of students.
 
There are some people in the school choice conversation that can’t be reached with evidence or reason, but as evidenced by the recent Intelligence Squared debate in New York City, if you provide evidence to the public about school choice they readily understand the problems.
 
You run the education publication Cloaking Inequity—what specifically is your position on and mission in speaking out for public education?
 
To create more clarity and truth around equity and social justice issue in the public space around charters, Teach For America, vouchers and other important educational policy issues, I created the blog Cloaking Inequity. I named the blog Cloaking Inequity as homage to the concept of camouflage from Critical Race Theory (CRT). The core mission of the blog is to uncloak the inequities are often camouflaged and hidden in education and public policy.  Cloaking Inequity is scholarly, yet accessible and engaging for a variety of stakeholders in the educational policy community. It provides a public platform to release recent book chapters, peer-reviewed articles, and policy reports. Furthermore, instead of only publishing in the traditional journal format, I can provide rapid scholarship to the public via statistical analyses that are relevant for the discourse surrounding hot education reform topics. The blog is also a tool by which I invite colleagues across the nation to contribute critical perspectives in posts examining various timely educational policy issues. I am also able to provide voice to teachers and others who have important educational reform counter-narrative to share. Cloaking Inequity has now reached nearly a million readers from more than 190 countries and is typically ranked one of the top 50 education websites in the world by Teach100.
 
At one point, Trump hilariously proclaimed that nobody knew health care could be so complicated—in many ways, it seems like the same applies to education; it’s deceivingly complex. What issues might Trump and DeVos encounter in trying to “reform” the American school system?
 
To this point in his presidency, Trump has only made Americans uncomfortable with his rhetoric and actions— our daily lives haven’t changed much beyond constant text notifications about the most recent Trump gaffe. The exception to this reality is of course immigrants who have been targeted relentlessly in his first month in office. However, if Trump delivers on his campaign promise to spend $20 billion on school choice in the first 100 days of his presidency, he will likely create chaos in public districts nationwide due to the drain on their resources. The financial disruption would directly impact communities nationwide and would likely have considerable political ramifications if implemented at the scale he has promised.
 
The White House budget office has plans to eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts and the Humanities. If this funding is pulled, what is at risk for public schools?
 
Attacks on the arts is a longstanding Republican tradition that can be tracked back to Reagan and beyond. In fact, in the article From Dewey to No Child Left Behind: The Evolution and Devolution of Public Arts Education, we discussed the Republican focus on testing and standards in Texas-inspired No Child Left Behind also had a negative impact on the arts. Countries around the world, including China, envy the creativity and independence of our students that is fomented by the arts. This is a case of politicians using the strategy “if it ain’t broke, fix it.”
 
Are there any states leading the way in education reform? If so, what are the ways in which they are doing so and are there any state leaders that are responsible for the progress?
 
There are many states that have incredible education systems. For example, the research shows that only four countries in the world perform better than Massachusetts in Math and Science. Only five countries in the world perform better than eight other states (Vermont, Minnesota, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Maine, Wisconsin, Montana, New York and New Jersey). In fact, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) test – the so-called National Report Card — shows us that the kids of today are smarter than they ever been and the nation’s graduation rates are at an all-time high. We can also tentatively look to Miami Florida for an example of how investments in education positively impact students over the long run in various types of communities (rural, urban, suburban) and for students of different kinds (socio-economic status, immigrants and students of color).
 
Our public education system deserves credit for making this happen. We’ve made real progress. However, as discussed above, the problem in those states, and across the nation is the severe inequality perpetrated by policymakers on poor students and communities. What we don’t want to do is replicate the failed top-down, anti-democratic policies implemented in places like New Orleans, Detroit and Chicago.
 
Nine college campuses are self-declared sanctuary campuses, while over two dozen colleges and universities have protest activity in support of becoming a sanctuary school. What are the pros and cons of sanctuary campuses? 
 
Our American institutions of higher education have the sacred responsibility to foment knowledge and create safe learning spaces for our nation and world. We must not bow to authoritarian pressures that limit these responsibilities.
 
In many ways, Trump is waging war against the “other”—minorities, immigrants, Muslims, English learners, etc. How do you see this administration’s vision of the American public school system—especially considering DeVos’ lack of knowledge about the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) and Trump’s recent reversal of Obama’s transgender bathroom directive—to be a microcosm of the ableist, white, wealthy narrative being pushed by this new regime?
 
DeVos is the least qualified US Secretary of Education in the history of the United States. She demonstrated this lack of preparation for the job in “grizzly” detail during her Senate confirmation hearing. The challenge with the attacks on the “other” in society today is the covert approach is a departure from the overt racism, sexism, xenophobia of the past. Even the neo-Nazis that I have seen interviewed recently won’t admit that their views are racist, instead they say they are White Nationalists. It is much more difficult now that hate has gone underground and is instead delivered with eloquence— but is no less insidious.
 
We have entered an era of Politics of Provocation. Donald Trump and his supporters are always looking for equivocation and excuses for their actions. As a result, people who support the American dream for minorities, immigrants, Muslims, English learners, etc. must be disciplined in their approach to the constant reality show type provocation. In response, the strategy should not be different than the last civil rights movement. I recently visited The Center for Civil and Human Rights in Atlanta. There is an exhibit in the center where you can sit at a lunch counter and via headphones relive the experience of Jim Crow protestors receiving verbal and physical abuse from segregationists. I only lasted five seconds at the counter before it became too disturbing. However, just as Jim Crow protestors did during the civil rights movement, we must respond to the Politics of Provocation with reason, evidence and love. We must do this because it is the right and moral response to hate.

This interview appeared here first in The Avocado.

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