How the Centner Academy Became a Beacon for Anti-Vaxxers - The New York Times

How the Centner Academy Became a Beacon for Anti-Vaxxers - The New York Times

How a Miami School Became a Beacon for Anti-Vaxxers

The Centner Academy barred teachers newly vaccinated against the coronavirus from being near students. Some parents threatened to withdraw their children. Others clamored to enroll.

MIAMI — A fifth-grade math and science teacher peddled a bogus conspiracy theory on Wednesday to students at Centner Academy, a private school in Miami, warning them that they should not hug parents who had been vaccinated against the coronavirus for more than five seconds because they might be exposed to harmful vaccine shedding.

“Hola Mami,” one student wrote in an email to her parents from school, saying that the teacher was “telling us to stay away from you guys.”

Nearly a week before, the school had threatened teachers’ employment if they got a coronavirus vaccine before the end of the school year.

Alarmed parents frantically texted one another on WhatsApp, trying to find a way to pull their children out at the end of the term.

Inside the Centner Academy, however, “hundreds of queries from all over the world” came in for teaching positions, according to the administration. More came from people who wanted to enroll their children at the school, where tuition runs up to $30,000 a year.

The small school in Miami’s trendy Design District became a national beacon for anti-vaccination activists practically overnight last week, just as public health officials in the United States wrestled with how to overcome vaccine skepticism.

The policy barring teachers from contact with students after getting the vaccine brought a flurry of television news crews who parked outside the school for days, prompting teachers to keep children indoors for physical education and recess. Leila Centner, the school’s co-founder, who says she is not against fully tested vaccines, wrote on Instagram that the media “are trying to destroy my reputation because I went against their narrative.”

Devoted supporters cheered her on.

“We won’t let them take you down!” one of them wrote on CONTINUE READING: How the Centner Academy Became a Beacon for Anti-Vaxxers - The New York Times

Eli Broad, Who Helped Reshape Los Angeles, Dies at 87 - The New York Times

Eli Broad, Who Helped Reshape Los Angeles, Dies at 87 - The New York Times

Eli Broad, Who Helped Reshape Los Angeles, Dies at 87

The businessman, who made a fortune in home-building and insurance, spent lavishly to try to make the city a cultural capital.

Eli Broad, a businessman and philanthropist whose vast fortune, extensive art collection and zeal for civic improvement helped reshape the cultural landscape of Los Angeles, died on Friday at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. He was 87.

Suzi Emmerling, a spokeswoman for the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, confirmed his death but did not specify the cause.

Mr. Broad (pronounced “brode”) made billions in the home-building and insurance businesses and spent a significant part of his wealth trying to make Los Angeles one of the world’s pre-eminent cultural capitals.

Few people in the modern history of Los Angeles were as instrumental in molding the region’s cultural and civic life as Mr. Broad. He loved the city and put his stamp — sometimes quite aggressively — on its museums, music halls, schools and politics. He was, until he began stepping back in his later years, a regular figure at cultural events and could be seen holding court in the V.I.P. founders’ room at the Los Angeles Opera between acts.

Mr. Broad played a pivotal role in creating the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art and brokered the deal that brought it Count Giuseppe Panza di Biumo’s important collection of Abstract Expressionist and Pop Art. When the museum teetered on the verge of financial collapse in 2008, Mr. Broad bailed it out with a $30 million rescue package.

He put his name on the Los Angeles landscape as well. The best known of his many contributions to the city is the Broad, a $140 million art museum that he financed himself that houses Mr. Broad’s collection of more than 2,000 contemporary works. It opened in 2015.

He also gave $50 million to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and led the fund-raising campaign to finish the Walt Disney Concert Hall when that project was dead in the water.

The museums, medical research centers and cultural institutions emblazoned with the names of Mr. Broad and his wife, Edythe, include the Broad Art Center at the University of California, Los Angeles; the Broad Center for the Biological Sciences at the California Institute of Technology; and centers for regenerative medicine and stem-cell research at three California universities.

There are “very few in L.A.’s history who have come remotely close to his sense of duty and his willingness to put his own time and effort — pressing his political connections, strong-arming business peers into stepping up for the arts — the way he did,” said Joanne Heyler, the founding director of the Broad. CONTINUE READING: Eli Broad, Who Helped Reshape Los Angeles, Dies at 87 - The New York Times

Samuel Abrams: Why Does the New York Times Repeatedly Exaggerate the Selectivity of NYC’s Top High schools? | Diane Ravitch's blog

Samuel Abrams: Why Does the New York Times Repeatedly Exaggerate the Selectivity of NYC’s Top High schools? | Diane Ravitch's blog

Samuel Abrams: Why Does the New York Times Repeatedly Exaggerate the Selectivity of NYC’s Top High schools?

Samuel Abrams was a teacher at Beacon High Schools and is now a professor at Teachers College, Columbia University.

He wrote a few days ago in the Columbia Journalism Review about the insistence by the New York Times that admissions to schools like Beacon are even harder than they are.

Anxiety among eighth-graders and their parents persists about the selectivity of the city’s screened high schools, in no small part because of repeated misreporting by the Times and others. The paper’s coverage—exemplified by a 2017 piece headlined “Couldn’t Get into Yale? 10 New York City High Schools Are More Selective”—has even been blamed for fueling the segregation by discouraging students from underrepresented neighborhoods from applying to many screened high schools on the grounds that admission seems nearly impossible.

He describes his years-long effort to persuade the Times CONTINUE READING: Samuel Abrams: Why Does the New York Times Repeatedly Exaggerate the Selectivity of NYC’s Top High schools? | Diane Ravitch's blog

My New Band Is: The Indoctrinated Rich - My New Band Is

My New Band Is: The Indoctrinated Rich - My New Band Is

My New Band Is: The Indoctrinated Rich

On the Brearley dad, what indoctrination means in the context of education, and private schools that are segregation academies

If Bari Weiss has a post-New York Times “beat”, it’s defending rich white private school parents from the horrors of racial awareness. And credit where credit is due, she seems to have become the go-to writer on that beat for the aggrieved richies and kind of owns it now, which is what every niche reporter aspires to. 

That said, “reporter” is probably giving her too much credit since she seems willing to air the stories of her favored subjects without talking to any of the people on the other side of them. There are no comments from teachers, or administrators, or well, non-white parents. So really, it’s more like niche public relations, I suppose. But if you’re the kind of person who can afford to send your kid to a $54,000 a year school and have strong opinions about Critical Race Theory but have never read a single CRT text, Bari is the person you want to talk to. (I hope she’s willing to give me a commission on her new Substack subs for this endorsement.) 

But this column is not about Bari Weiss in particular; it’s about the parents whose grievances she’s presenting. They all have a problem with what they consider to be liberal overreach in schools, and particularly modern forms of addressing issues of race and equity, especially when they manifest in things like anti-racism training and deploy terminology that seems overly academic and abstract. 

The latest Mad Dad™ is a guy named Andrew Gutmann whose daughter went to Brearley, a famous all girls’ school in Manhattan. Gutmann wrote a letter to the entire school when he pulled her out of Brearley, because he thinks it exhibits the kind of CONTINUE READING: My New Band Is: The Indoctrinated Rich - My New Band Is

Parents, Stop Talking About the ‘Lost Year’ - The New York Times

Parents, Stop Talking About the ‘Lost Year’ - The New York Times

Parents, Stop Talking About the ‘Lost Year’

Teenagers and tweens will be fine, experts say — if adults model resilience.

They’re calling it a “lost year.”

On and offline, parents are trading stories — poignant and painful — about all of the ways that they fear their middle schoolers are losing ground.

“It’s really hard to put my finger on what happened exactly,” said Jorge Gallegos, whose son, Eyan, is in the seventh grade in Washington, D.C.

When Eyan was in fifth grade, he had a lot of friends, Mr. Gallegos said. He was home schooled for sixth grade, and he seemed to thrive.

But spending this year at home because of the pandemic has just been too much.

Eyan transferred to a new middle school for seventh grade, where nearly all of the other students had started in the sixth grade, prepandemic. He hasn’t met any of his classmates in person, and he hasn’t made a single friend.

Eyan has told his parents that he’s lonely. So lonely, in fact, that he has started posting on Discord and Reddit. Sometimes, when he’s bored, he even starts chatting with those strangers during class time.

His dad is sympathetic. “He wants to talk to people, and he doesn’t have anybody,” Mr. Gallegos said in a recent phone interview. But he’s also worried.

As a teenager, Mr. Gallegos went off the rails for a time. He was kicked out of high school, withdrew from community college twice and spent years fighting his way back, ultimately graduating from college and building a successful career with the federal government. There’s no way he’ll let the pandemic similarly spin his son’s life out of control.

“I’m going to make sure that we’re on top of this stuff,” he said. “I think as a parent, I have to do more.”

Virtually everyone has waded through hardships this past year — job losses, relationship struggles, chronic stress and, in the worst of all cases, the loss of loved ones to Covid-19. And parents with school-age children have battled the demands of combining their usual work and family responsibilities with at least some degree of CONTINUE READING: Parents, Stop Talking About the ‘Lost Year’ - The New York Times

How Teachers Handle the Death of George Floyd (Dan Levin) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

How Teachers Handle the Death of George Floyd (Dan Levin) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

How Teachers Handle the Death of George Floyd (Dan Levin)

Dan Levin writes for the New York Times. “He was a foreign correspondent covering Canada from 2016 until 2018. From 2008 to 2015, Mr. Levin was based in Beijing, where he reported on human rights, politics and culture in China and Asia. @globaldan“ This article appeared April 7, 2021.

At this point in the school year, Lacrissha Walton typically focuses her social studies lessons on the 50 U.S. states and their capitals. But last week, the Minneapolis teacher scrawled a question that had nothing to do with geography on her fourth-grade classroom’s whiteboard: “Have you watched the Derek Chauvin trial?”

While the murder trial of Mr. Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer charged with killing George Floyd, might not appear to be age-appropriate instruction for 9-year-old students, Ms. Walton said she felt compelled to use the event as a teachable moment. All of her students had seen their city consumed by protests in the months that followed Mr. Floyd’s fatal arrest, and some had seen the widely circulated video, filmed by a teenager, that captured his violent, slow-motion death.

“No little kid should watch that,” Ms. Walton said. “But when it’s plastered all over the news, they have questions.”

In Minneapolis, educators have grappled over the last few weeks with how to CONTINUE READING: How Teachers Handle the Death of George Floyd (Dan Levin) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Dana Goldstein: Does It Hurt Children to Measure Pandemic Learning Loss? - The New York Times

Does It Hurt Children to Measure Pandemic Learning Loss? - The New York Times

Does It Hurt Children to Measure Pandemic Learning Loss?

Research shows many young children have fallen behind in reading and math. But some educators are worried about stigmatizing an entire generation.

Over the past year, Deprece Bonilla, a mother of five in Oakland, Calif., has gotten creative about helping her children thrive in a world largely mediated by screens.

She signed them up for online phonics tutoring and virtual martial arts lessons. If they are distracted inside the family’s duplex, she grabs snacks and goes with the children into the car, saying they cannot come out until their homework is done. She has sometimes spent three hours per day assisting with school assignments, even as she works from home for a local nonprofit organization.

It all sometimes feels like too much to bear. Still, when her fifth-grade son’s public-school teacher told her he was years behind in reading, she was in disbelief.

“That was very offensive to me,” she said. “I’m not putting in myself, my hard work, his hard work, for you to tell me that he’s at second-grade reading.”

Ms. Bonilla’s experience illustrates a roiling debate in education, about how and even whether to measure the academic impact of the coronavirus pandemic on the nation’s children — and how to describe learning gaps without stigmatizing or discouraging students and families.

Studies continue to show that amid the school closures and economic and health hardships of the past year, many young children have missed out on mastering fundamental reading and math skills. The Biden administration has told most states that unlike in 2020, they should plan on testing students this year, in part to measure the “educational inequities that have been exacerbated by the pandemic.”

But others are pushing back against the concept of “learning loss,” especially on behalf of the Black, Hispanic and low-income children who, research shows, have fallen further behind over the past year. They fear that a focus on what’s been lost could incite a moral panic that paints an entire generation as broken, and say that relatively simple, common-sense solutions can help students get CONTINUE READING: Does It Hurt Children to Measure Pandemic Learning Loss? - The New York Times

Teachers' Unions Uncertain on C.D.C.'s New 3-Feet Limit - The New York Times

Teachers' Unions Uncertain on C.D.C.'s New 3-Feet Limit - The New York Times

Parents and school leaders celebrate new C.D.C. guidance lowering distance between students to 3 feet. Teachers aren’t on board yet.

Proponents of fully reopening schools got a major boost on Friday when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced that elementary school students and some middle and high school students could be spaced three feet apart in classrooms.

The previous guidance of keeping most students six feet apart had in many school districts become a big obstacle to welcoming students back for full-time instruction because it severely limited capacity. Many experts now say a growing body of research shows that six feet is not much more protective than three, as long as other safety measures are in place, like mask wearing.

Public health experts, parents and school officials cheered the new recommendation. Teachers’ unions, which have used the six-foot guidance to oppose bringing children back for normal schedules, did not.

EDUCATION BRIEFING: The pandemic is upending education. Get the latest news and tips.

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, the nation’s second-largest educators’ union, said in a statement that she would “reserve judgment” on the new guidelines pending further review of research on how the virus behaves in schools, especially those in cities or that are under-resourced. Becky Pringle, president of the largest teachers’ union, the National Education Association, raised similar concerns.

Nevertheless, the new guidance seemed to be having an immediate impact in some places. New York City, the nation’s largest school district, announced on Friday that it would give families another chance to select in-person instruction for their children. The city said that elementary schools, prekindergarten programs and CONTINUE READING: Teachers' Unions Uncertain on C.D.C.'s New 3-Feet Limit - The New York Times

Three Feet or Six? Distancing Guideline for Schools Stirs Debate - The New York Times

Three Feet or Six? Distancing Guideline for Schools Stirs Debate - The New York Times

Three Feet or Six? Distancing Guideline for Schools Stirs Debate

Some public health officials say it’s time for the C.D.C. to loosen its social distancing guidelines for classrooms, but the idea has detractors.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is clear and consistent in its social distancing recommendation: To reduce the risk of contracting the coronavirus, people should remain at least six feet away from others who are not in their households. The guideline holds whether you are eating in a restaurant, lifting weights at a gym or learning long division in a fourth-grade classroom.

The guideline has been especially consequential for schools, many of which have not fully reopened because they do not have enough space to keep students six feet apart.

Now, spurred by a better understanding of how the virus spreads and a growing concern about the harms of keeping children out of school, some public health experts are calling on the agency to reduce the recommended distance in schools from six feet to three.

“It never struck me that six feet was particularly sensical in the context of mitigation,” said Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health. “I wish the C.D.C. would just come out and say this is not a major issue.”

On Sunday, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said on CNN that the C.D.C. was reviewing the matter.

The idea remains contentious, in part because few studies have directly compared different distancing strategies. But the issue also boils down to a devilishly difficult and often personal question: How safe is safe enough?

“There’s no magic threshold for any distance,” said Dr. Benjamin Linas, a specialist in infectious diseases at Boston University. “There’s risk at six feet, there’s risk at three feet, there’s risk at nine feet. There’s risk always.” He added, “The question is just how much of a risk? And what do you give up in exchange?”

The origins of six feet CONTINUE READING: Three Feet or Six? Distancing Guideline for Schools Stirs Debate - The New York Times

New York Times: Readers Respond to Charter Debate | Diane Ravitch's blog

New York Times: Readers Respond to Charter Debate | Diane Ravitch's blog

New York Times: Readers Respond to Charter Debate 

You may recall that sociologist and author Eve Ewing wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times that said it was time to end the debate about charter schools and celebrate all good schools, whatever they are called. This is one of the talking points of the charter industry, which prefers the public not to notice how many charter schools close every year, how many are low-performing, and how many are run by non-educators who turn a handsome profit.

My response was here.

The New York Times published letters to the editor about the Ewing article. Only one was favorable, written by Jeanne Allen, who runs a charter advocacy organization called the “Center for Education Reform,” funded by rightwing billionaires and Wall Street financiers. CER promotes all kinds of school choice and is hostile to public schools.

The first letter was written by Denis Smith of Ohio, who has appeared on this blog:

To the Editor:

Re “End the Fight Over Charter Schools,” by Eve L. Ewing (Op-Ed, Feb. 23):

Why do we allow two separate but seemingly parallel systems of education, using scarce public funds that are taken from traditional public schools to fund charters, a seeming experiment gone awry? Why do we allow one entity that is accountable and has governance conveyed from the voters in each community and allow the other to CONTINE READING: New York Times: Readers Respond to Charter Debate | Diane Ravitch's blog

Dana Goldstein: Randi Weingarten Says She Can Get Teachers Back in Schools - The New York Times

Randi Weingarten Says She Can Get Teachers Back in Schools - The New York Times

The Union Leader Who Says She Can Get Teachers Back in Schools

In cities and suburbs where schools remain closed, teachers unions are often saying: not yet. Can Randi Weingarten change that?

Randi Weingarten, the nation’s most powerful teachers union president, has a message: She wants to get students back in the nation’s classrooms.

She spends 15 hours per day on the phone, she says — with local labor leaders, mayors, the White House, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — trying to figure out how to reopen the three-quarters of school systems that remain fully or partially shuttered.

But with the pandemic approaching its first anniversary, and a new president — a union ally — vowing to reopen elementary and middle schools within his first 100 days, she faces a difficult truth: In the liberal cities and suburbs where schools are most likely to remain closed, teachers unions are the most powerful forces saying no, not yet.

Not before teacher vaccinations, they say, or upgraded school ventilation systems, or accommodations for educators with vulnerable relatives.

The Chicago union had ground reopening to a halt before reaching a tentative deal Sunday with Mayor Lori Lightfoot, averting a strike and agreeing to return K-8 students to classrooms by early March. The Philadelphia local is threatening to refuse to enter school buildings this week.

And California unions have left that state’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, so frustrated that in a recent meeting he lashed out, saying, “If everybody has to be vaccinated, we might as well just tell people the truth: There will be no in-person instruction in the state of California.” CONTINUE READING: Randi Weingarten Says She Can Get Teachers Back in Schools - The New York Times

NYC Educator: NY Times Continues Its Battle on Common Sense

NYC Educator: NY Times Continues Its Battle on Common Sense

NY Times Continues Its Battle on Common Sense

I've been amazed for years as the NY Times, with some notable exceptions, offered the worst education reporting in Fun City. This is a revered name, with generations of history, and yet you always feel they hate union as much as the tabloids. Of course, the Times has had to deal with union and likely would have made more money if all those who worked for it were doing the whole $7.25 an hour thing. So much for the bastion of liberalism so reviled by Trump and his goons.

Over the last year, I've gotten the distinct impression its education reporter takes regular swipes at us, and why not? Teachers are public enemy number one. Who the hell do we think we are, getting paid to educate children? What the hell kind of public service is that? Wouldn't the world be better off if we were all writing for some fancy paper, filling our news stories with personal and/ or company bias, while wholeheartedly opposing Trump for doing precisely the same thing?

The big issue, of course, is opening schools. We aren't sufficiently pushing for it, evidently. Never mind that we're the only city in the country that's opened as long and far as we have. Perhaps we should be out striking for the right to fully open schools CONTINUE READING: NYC Educator: NY Times Continues Its Battle on Common Sense

Dana Goldstein: Biden Is Vowing to Reopen Schools Quickly. It Won’t Be Easy. - The New York Times

Biden Is Vowing to Reopen Schools Quickly. It Won’t Be Easy. - The New York Times

Biden Is Vowing to Reopen Schools Quickly. It Won’t Be Easy.

The slow vaccine rollout, and local fights between districts and unions, could make it hard for the president to fulfill his promise.

In his first 48 hours in office, President Biden sought to project an optimistic message about returning the nation’s many homebound students to classrooms. “We can teach our children in safe schools,” he vowed in his inaugural address.

The following day, Mr. Biden signed an executive order promising to throw the strength of the federal government behind an effort to “reopen school doors as quickly as possible.”

But with about half of American students still learning virtually as the pandemic nears its first anniversary, the president’s push is far from certain to succeed. His plan is rolling out just as local battles over reopening have, if anything, become more pitched in recent weeks.

Teachers are uncertain about when they will be vaccinated and fearful of contagion. With alarming case counts across the country and new variants of the coronavirus emerging, unions are fighting efforts to return their members to crowded hallways. Their reluctance comes even as school administrators, mayors and some parents feel increased urgency to restore educational business-as-usual for the millions of students who are struggling academically CONTINUE READING: Biden Is Vowing to Reopen Schools Quickly. It Won’t Be Easy. - The New York Times