Board of UNC-Chapel Hill Denies Tenure to Distinguished Journalist | Diane Ravitch's blog

Board of UNC-Chapel Hill Denies Tenure to Distinguished Journalist | Diane Ravitch's blog

Board of UNC-Chapel Hill Denies Tenure to Distinguished Journalist

The faculty at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill selected the highly accomplished Nikole Hannah-Jones to serve as the Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism at the UNC Haussmann School of Journalism and Media.

She was quite a catch: she has won a Pulitzer Prize, a coveted MacArthur Fellowship, has worked for major newspapers. She’s even an alumna of UNC. The committee that interviewed her was impressed. They offered her the chair and tenure. All previous holders of the chair at UNC were awarded tenure.

But the board of the university withdrew the offer of tenure. They said she lacked academic qualifications. They made that lie up on the spot, because the position CONTINUE READING: Board of UNC-Chapel Hill Denies Tenure to Distinguished Journalist | Diane Ravitch's blog

North Carolina: Voucher Zealots Want to Destroy Public Schools | Diane Ravitch's blog

North Carolina: Voucher Zealots Want to Destroy Public Schools | Diane Ravitch's blog

North Carolina: Voucher Zealots Want to Destroy Public Schools

The editorial board of the News & Observer, the state’s largest newspaper sharply criticized the Republicans in the General Assembly for rushing to expand the state’s voucher program. They plan to raise the income requirement so that many more families are eligible, and they expect to increase the size of the voucher.

Senate leader Phil Berger peddles the same lie that Betsy DeVos so often spewed: that the voucher program would give poor families the same educational opportunities as affluent families.

The current size of the voucher is $4,200. Even if that is increased by $1,650, as proposed, it will still be far less than the tuition at a first-rate private school.

The editorial board writes:

Senate leader Phil Berger has long described the school voucher program he pushed through in 2013 as a way to enable poor families to afford private school tuition. Now that claim is being dropped in favor of offering vouchers to families earning well over the state’s median income.

At a 2019 news conference, Berger, an Eden Republican, CONTINUE READING: North Carolina: Voucher Zealots Want to Destroy Public Schools | Diane Ravitch's blog

Ed Tech Spending Rampaging through North Carolina Public Schools | tultican

Ed Tech Spending Rampaging through North Carolina Public Schools | tultican

Ed Tech Spending Rampaging through North Carolina Public Schools

By Thomas Ultican 10/27/2020

A North Carolina cabal of school superintendents, republican politicians, consultants and technology companies has gone wild over the past seven years. In Chapel Hill, Education Elements obtained an illegitimate $767,000 contract. Chapel Hill-Carborro City Hills Schools (CHCCS) Assistant Superintendent of Business and Finance, Jennifer Bennett, supposedly ignored school board policy and agreed to the contract in secret. It seems that when the state and local schools are spending on education technology, policies and law are being ignored.

After the Education Elements negotiations, Bennett sent a message to their Managing Partner, Jason Bedford, saying, “Need to get you guys to modify the [contract] if you can since if we include the whole potential payment value, then we have to take this to the Board since over our $90K threshold ….” This seems very damning, however, local citizens think they are being gas lighted. In the comments section on the school boards web site, several parents expressed the same opinion as parent Jeff Safir who wrote,

“I find it hard to believe that Jennifer Bennett acted alone and was the only person aware of the money being spent on the Education Elements engagement and I don’t understand why she is able to serve out the rest of her contract in an alternate capacity when the position is at-will ….”

Education Elements was created with funding from NewSchools Venture fund and a few other venture capital groups that invest in education startups. As noted in a previous article, “There are few districts in America that do not have CONTINUE READING: Ed Tech Spending Rampaging through North Carolina Public Schools | tultican

North Carolina: Segregation and Charter Schools | Diane Ravitch's blog

North Carolina: Segregation and Charter Schools | Diane Ravitch's blog

North Carolina: Segregation and Charter Schools

The National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, recently released a major study of segregation and charter schools by Dr. Helen Ladd and Muvzana Turaeva of Duke University.

Dr. Samuel Abrams introduced it here.

The issue of school choice and segregation has been central to education policy debates for decades. In his initial argument for vouchers, published in 1955, Milton Friedman conceded that segregationists stood to employ vouchers to enroll their children in all-white private schools instead of public schools mandated to integrate a year earlier by Brown v. Board of Education. But to Friedman, the answer was not regulation but moral suasion. Friedman’s opinion was rendered technically moot in 1976 by Runyon v. McCrary, which barred private schools from making admissions decisions based on race, yet it nevertheless indicated a fundamental problem with systems of school choice.

With the introduction of charter schools in the early 1990s, commentators raised concerns about school location, inadequate transportation, contracts mandating significant parental involvement, and shared parental proclivities as implicit mechanisms or pathways to CONTINUE READING: North Carolina: Segregation and Charter Schools | Diane Ravitch's blog