Biden Chooses Ex-Obama Official for Key Position in Department of Education | Diane Ravitch's blog

Biden Chooses Ex-Obama Official for Key Position in Department of Education | Diane Ravitch's blog

Biden Chooses Ex-Obama Official for Key Position in Department of Education

During the Obama administration, Roberto Rodriguez was the White House advisor on education. He vigorously supported the Race to the Top program, the Common Core standards, and high-stakes testing. All of these initiatives failed to improve student test scores and wasted billions of dollars.

Andrew Ujifusa wrote in Education Week (April 28) about the return of Rodriguez. He joins former Obama official Carmel Martin, another zealous advocate of those failed policies. Basically, they are switching places, with Rodriguez taking the job that Martin held, and Martin moving into the slot previously occupied by Martin. There is no indication that either has modified their support for the Bush-Obama bipartisan agenda.

President Joe Biden announced Wednesday that he plans to nominate Roberto Rodriguez, one of former President Barack Obama’s top education advisers, to lead one of the most important divisions of the U.S. Department of Education.

Biden wants Rodriguez to lead the Education Department’s office of planning, evaluation and policy CONTINUE READING: Biden Chooses Ex-Obama Official for Key Position in Department of Education | Diane Ravitch's blog

CURMUDGUCATION: Dammit, Joe

CURMUDGUCATION: Dammit, Joe

Dammit, Joe

So up on my screen pops the headline "Biden says K-12 education isn't working--calls for fgre pre-K to 'grade 14'"

The good news is that the headlines is, as headlines will be, a bit inaccurate. The bad news is everything else. Starting with this lede:

President Joe Biden on Wednesday praised the nation's K-12 education system for fueling America's economic growth for almost a century. But, he stressed, that system may no longer be sufficient as the foundation for future prosperity.

We've been here before, starting with this fundamental misunderstanding of the problem:

Mr. Biden's American Families Plan is taking aim at an issue that has bedeviled economists as well as millions of families struggling to stay afloat financially: A high school diploma is no longer enough to secure a middle-class life.

If the situation has changed, if all the good stuff has been moved to a shelf that is too high for regular folks to reach, is the problem that regular folks are too short, or that somebody moved the good stuff to a too-high shelf? The democratic/neo-lib theory is based on the too-short-humans theory, in part because the MarketWorld thinking of neo-libs is that the economic CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: Dammit, Joe

State of Siege: What the Free State Project Means for New Hampshire’s Public Schools – Have You Heard

State of Siege: What the Free State Project Means for New Hampshire’s Public Schools – Have You Heard

State of Siege: What the Free State Project Means for New Hampshire’s Public Schools

Two decades ago, the Free State Project announced an audacious plan to make New Hampshire a utopia for libertarians. Now one of their central goals – privatizing education – appears within reach. Have You Heard heads to the Granite State to explore New Hampshire’s shifting political terrain and why what began as a fringe political movement is no laughing matter. Guests: Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling, author, A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear. 

Episode transcript is here. The financial support of listeners like you keeps this podcast going. Subscribe on Patreon or donate on PayPal.

Have You Heard · #111 State of Siege: What the Free State Project Means for New Hampshire’s Public Schools

State of Siege: What the Free State Project Means for New Hampshire’s Public Schools – Have You Heard

San Francisco “Progressives” Promote Gentrification Undermine Democracy | tultican

San Francisco “Progressives” Promote Gentrification Undermine Democracy | tultican

San Francisco “Progressives” Promote Gentrification Undermine Democracy

By Thomas Ultican 4/16/2021

A new political PAC, “Campaign for Better San Francisco Public Schools,” demands that schools be opened for in person classes immediately. They also make two dubious claims, “The election process for choosing the Board of Education is not meeting the needs of San Francisco” and “Many large cities successfully use an appointment process to choose a Board of Education.”

San Francisco Democrats Embrace the Open Schools Now Agenda

Neoliberal forces especially from the Republican Party have been campaigning for schools to be opened immediately for more than a year. Republicans see it as a wedge issue that could help them win back suburban women. Carl Hulse’s New York Times article noted that “congressional Republicans have begun to hammer relentlessly on President Biden, Democrats and teachers’ unions to open schools quickly.”

Surprisingly, San Francisco Democrats have joined with the former president’s open-schools-now campaign. Mayor London Breed has even sued the school board trying to force them to reopen schools. Breed explained,

“Families right now aren’t able to plan for their futures. They can’t decide whether to accept a job offer because they don’t know when they’re going to be able to once again have their kids returned to the classroom. This is paralyzing our city and our residents, and I know that this is a drastic step, but I feel we are out of options at this point.”

Seeyew Mo, a computer scientist who uses his skills to develop political CONTINUE READING: San Francisco “Progressives” Promote Gentrification Undermine Democracy | tultican

A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door: If It’s Publicly Funded, We Want to Kill It. | deutsch29: Mercedes Schneider's Blog

A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door: If It’s Publicly Funded, We Want to Kill It. | deutsch29: Mercedes Schneider's Blog

A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door: If It’s Publicly Funded, We Want to Kill It.

I have been reading in Jack Schneider and Jennifer Berkshire’s excellent book, A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door, the chapters, “Teaching Gigs” and “Education à la Carte,” which only solidify in my mind the end game of organizations like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and the likes of ALEC associates, billionaire Koch brothers, former US ed sec Betsy DeVos, and former Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal:

Privatize all public entities, including schools. To the greatest degree possible, abolish professions by replacing said professionals with minimally-trained, temp workers who move from gig to gig and have no leverage in their own right (no unions, no expectation of benefits like health insurance or retirement plans).

Send the money to the top, and provide CEOs with bloated salaries and abundant perks at the expense of workers.

Package it all as favoring consumer individualism and worker freedom–

–all while encouraging those scraping-by workers to file for public assistance and telling the “empowered” public in the fine print that beyond what turns out to be a token of public money, the brunt of funding their empowerment rests with them.

Of course, the irony of this privatization push is that in destroying professions and minimally paying workers in the name of cost cutting, ultra-billionaires like the CONTINUE READING: A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door: If It’s Publicly Funded, We Want to Kill It. | deutsch29: Mercedes Schneider's Blog

Biden Administration Continues to Hire Key Staff for ED Department Before Confirmation of Secretary or Deputy Secretary | Diane Ravitch's blog

Biden Administration Continues to Hire Key Staff for ED Department Before Confirmation of Secretary or Deputy Secretary | Diane Ravitch's blog

Biden Administration Continues to Hire Key Staff for ED Department Before Confirmation of Secretary or Deputy Secretary

Thirty-one years ago, I was invited by Secretary of Education Lamar Alexander to join him at the U.S. Department of Education as Assistant Secretary of Education in Charge of Research and Improvement. Before he invited me, he learned a lot about my work and my views. It was a big jump for me because I had never planned to work in government and was surprised to be invited. After I was confirmed by the Senate, I selected the person I wanted as my Deputy Assistant Secretary of Education. It was Francie Alexander, who had been Deputy Superintendent of Curriculum and Assessment in the State of California. I had gotten to know her when I worked on the California history-social science framework in the late 1980s.

Given this brief personal history, I am puzzled that the Biden administration is staffing up the key jobs in the U.S. Department of Education before any of the top officials (Secretary of Education, Deputy Secretary of Education, Undersecretary of Education) have been confirmed. The next layer of officials–the Assistant Secretaries–have not even been named.

Yet the administration continues to roll out lists of people who will be deputies to Assistant Secretaries who are as yet unknown; “chief of staff” to an official who has not been confirmed; “confidential assistant” to a high official. CONTINUE READING: Biden Administration Continues to Hire Key Staff for ED Department Before Confirmation of Secretary or Deputy Secretary | Diane Ravitch's blog

The Bipartisan Assault on Public Schools | The New Republic

The Bipartisan Assault on Public Schools | The New Republic

The Bipartisan Assault on Public Schools

Betsy Devos was no exception in education. She pushed an agenda that Republicans and Democrats have strangely united behind for years.

Two years ago, Margaret Spellings, George W. Bush’s secretary of education, and Arne Duncan, Barack Obama’s secretary of education, wrote an opinion article in The Washington Post lamenting the decline of public support for the bipartisan consensus about education policy that began under Ronald Reagan. Elected officials strongly supported a regime of testing, accountability, and school choice, they wrote, but public enthusiasm was waning due to a lack of “courage” and “political will.”

They were right. Elected officials, educators, and parents were rapidly losing faith in the bipartisan consensus. For a decade, it had failed to produce any improvement on national tests. Parents were opting their children out of the annual testing mandated by federal law; in New York, 20 percent of eligible students refused to take them. Teachers went to court to fight the test-based evaluation methods imposed by Duncan’s Race to the Top. Communities from Los Angeles to Philadelphia were complaining about the growth of charter schools, which diverted funds away from public schools. A year after Spellings and Duncan’s essay appeared, teachers across the nation, from West Virginia to California, went on strike to protest low wages, low funding, and large class sizes, issues that were ignored during the era of bipartisan consensus.

What went wrong? Why did the bipartisan consensus that Spellings and Duncan praised fall apart? In their new book, historian Jack Schneider and journalist Jennifer Berkshire provide a valuable guide to the history and the politics of the rise and fall of the bipartisan consensus. Theirs is indeed a cautionary tale, because they show how Republicans and Democrats joined to support failed policies whose ultimate goal was to eliminate public education and replace it with a free-market approach to schooling. Betsy DeVos was publicly reviled for her contemptuous attitudes toward public schools, but she was not an exception to the bipartisan consensus: She was its ultimate embodiment. She was the personification of the wolf at the schoolhouse door.  CONTINUE READING: The Bipartisan Assault on Public Schools | The New Republic

Shawgi Tell: Biden Swiftly Disappoints Educators and Students | Dissident Voice

Biden Swiftly Disappoints Educators and Students | Dissident Voice

Biden Swiftly Disappoints Educators and Students

Months before he became president, many pointed out that harmful neoliberal policies would continue unabated in K-12 education under a Joe Biden administration. Indeed, there is a long record of both democrats and republicans supporting harmful education policies like high-stakes standardized testing, charter schools, performance-based pay schemes, NCLB, ESSA, and more.

But U.S. presidential elections always have a way of successfully enforcing amnesia and intensifying false hope in the context of a discredited political set-up that has long failed to affirm the interests of people. To be fair though, there has emerged in recent years a level of social consciousness that did in fact enable more people than usual to take a more measured conscious approach toward presidential candidates and political realities. More people are increasingly adopting a “we’ll believe it when we see it” attitude because they have come to learn, often the hard way, that politicians are usually unaccountable, break promises regularly, rarely respond to endless begging by the polity, and typically don’t do “the right thing.” It is hard to ignore cumulative experience.

It is no accident that Biden, who has previously claimed he is opposed to high-stakes standardized tests, chose a major promoter of charter schools and high-stakes standardized testing like the neoliberal Ian Rosenblum to make the recent antisocial announcement that punitive high-stakes standardized tests CONTINUE READING: Biden Swiftly Disappoints Educators and Students | Dissident Voice

Education Research Report: Education Equity in Michigan

Education Research Report: Education Equity in Michigan

Education Equity in Michigan

The Michigan Civil Rights Commission has released a 62-page report describing inequities in Michigan’s K-12 education system and detailing specific recommendations for action that policy makers and educators can implement to make achieving educational equity a priority in all Michigan schools.

The report is the culmination of a series of public hearings and a year-long examination of disparities in K-12 education in Michigan. From May 2018 through the end of March 2019, the Commission held five public hearings around the state and heard from dozens of subject matter experts, school administrators, teachers, parents and students on the ways Michigan is falling short in its obligation to effectively educate all its children.

“This Commission believes that an adequate education is the key to unlocking a lifetime of opportunities and also is a basic civil right,” said Stacie Clayton, Chair of the Michigan Civil Rights Commission. “We learned during our education hearings that not all children receive the kind of education they deserve as their birthright. We urge policy makers, educators and other stakeholders across the state to view this report as a roadmap they can follow to help schools achieve educational equity and give all Michigan children – regardless of household income, race, residency or ability -- the education they need to lead productive and fulfilling lives.”

The Commission became increasingly concerned about educational disparities in 2016 during their examination of the racial implications in the causes of, and response to, the Flint water crisis. What they learned during these hearings led directly to their decision in 2018 to launch an exploration of inequity in Michigan’s education system.

Through the hearing process, Commissioners became increasingly aware that the effectiveness of public school systems is directly determined by the racial and economic makeup of the community. They also found that instead of a cohesive, statewide education system, Michigan is made up of independent systems that operate differently and are resourced in a variety of ways, leading to disparities between high-performing districts and those considered “failing.”

Specific obstacles identified to equity in education include:

• Lack of access to early childhood education
• Varying degrees of parental involvement
• Funding based on declining enrollment that leaves schools grossly underfunded
• Food insecurity
• Lack of specialized instruction, after school and summer school programs
• Lack of qualified, experienced minority teachers

To achieve equity, the report says public school systems must recognize differences and distribute resources based on an understanding of how differences impact equitable access. They must also implement strategies to break down biases and barriers to equity, including:

• Educating on implicit biases
• Developing racially conscious strategies for school integration
• Changing per-student funding and Proposal A
• Eliminating competition between schools
• Increasing teacher pay
• Eliminating legacy debt
• Increasing special education opportunities and funding

The report concludes with a list of recommendations for action, starting with the expansion of the Council for Government and Education on Equity and Inclusion, an MDCR-led initiative, to include representatives of the Michigan Department of Education, and establish the Council as the entity responsible for implementing and overseeing the following additional recommendations:

• Develop a Statewide Educational Equity Plan to enhance policies and accountability.
• Ensure that all data collected by government entities be disaggregated by race and ethnicity.
• Encourage schools to create local equity plans and contribute information and resources to support equitable practices.
• Provide year-round cultural competency/race and equity education and coaching.
• Increase internet access for students and families.
• Support a quality teacher training program, encouraging diversity in teaching roles and student enrollment.
• Encourage the placement of affordable public housing only in school districts that are educationally successful and can support new students who have additional needs.
• Recognize the overlapping roles that housing discrimination, employment discrimination, environmental racism and other racial disparities play in perpetuating educational inequity.
• Create a multicultural, student-led component of the Council for Government and Education on Equity and Inclusion to engage students and parents/guardians on the local level.

Education Research Report: Education Equity in Michigan

The Rich and the Rest – Have You Heard

The Rich and the Rest – Have You Heard

The Rich and the Rest

Have You Heard episode #98: The Rich and the Rest

There is a vast gulf between the public education priorities of most voters and the favored policies of the very wealthy. Nowhere is that gap more visible than in Arizona, where support for public education has emerged as a central issue in 2020. Complete transcript of the episode is here.

The financial support of listeners like you keeps this podcast going. Subscribe on Patreon or donate on PayPal. Jennifer and Jack’s forthcoming book, A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door, will be out on November 17 and is now available for pre-order.

Have You Heard · #98: The Rich and the Rest

The Rich and the Rest – Have You Heard

Education Improvement Thwarted by “Reform” | tultican

Education Improvement Thwarted by “Reform” | tultican

Education Improvement Thwarted by “Reform”

By Thomas Ultican 10/1/2020

For more than two decades, bureaucratic style top down education “reform” has undermined improvement efforts by professional educators. For budding teachers, beginning in college with the study of education and their own personal experience as students, an innate need to better education develops. However, in the modern era, that teacher energy to improve education has been sapped by the desperate fight to save public education from “reformers,” to protect their profession from amateurs and to defend the children in their classrooms from profiteers. 

Genuine advancements in educational practices come from the classroom. Those edicts emanating from government offices or those lavishly financed and promoted by philanthropies are doomed to failure.

The writer Kristina Rizga conducted a four years’ study of Mission High in San Francisco. She discovered a great school whose students do not test especially well. One of her clarion observations that almost all teachers would hardily CONTINUE READING: Education Improvement Thwarted by “Reform” | tultican

CURMUDGUCATION: Dear Joe Biden:

CURMUDGUCATION: Dear Joe Biden:

Dear Joe Biden:

If someone has a pipeline to the campaign, please feel to send this along.

Dear VP Biden:

I know that this evening, you have your hands full with the Great Orange Loon in Cleveland. But you've got an education flavored fundraiser tomorrow night, and we really need to talk.

Here's the event:

It might have been of interest to educators, except, of course, the price of admission is, well-- a "champion" ponies up $5,600, and on the bottom end, an "attendee" pays $100. I mean, I was sorely tempted, but as a retired teacher with two toddlers at home, I don't have $100 to spend on something that will probably horrify me anyway.

Because here's the thing.

I really cannot state strongly enough how much actual working classroom teachers don't really like or trust Arne Duncan. Truthfully, they mostly don't know John King all that well--unless they're from New York, in which case they still have a bitter taste in their mouths from his disastrous tenure there.

I'm sure your campaign has a lovely working relationship with union leaders. But the rank and file, the teachers in the trenches, the people who represent millions of actual votes-- they are not so CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: Dear Joe Biden: