The Dark Secrets of the Privatization Movement: An Interview with Charles Siler | Diane Ravitch's blog

The Dark Secrets of the Privatization Movement: An Interview with Charles Siler | Diane Ravitch's blog

The Dark Secrets of the Privatization Movement: An Interview with Charles Siler

Jennifer Berkshire and I interviewed Charles Siler about his inside knowledge of the privatization movement.

Jennifer is co-author of the important new book (with Jack Schneider) called A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door.

As you will learn in the interview, Charles was brought up in a conservative environment. He studied at George Mason University in the Koch-funded economics department (you can read about it in Nancy MacLean’s excellent book Democracy in Chains, which I reviewed in The New York Review of Books). He worked for the Goldwater Institute and lobbied for ALEC and other billionaire-funded privatization groups.

At some point, he realized he was on the wrong side, promoting ideas that would do harm, not good. He wanted to do good.

He said unequivocally that the goal of the privatizers is to destroy public education. They promote charter schools and vouchers to destroy public education.

He explains that school privatization is only one part of a much broader assault on the public sector. The end game is to privatize everything: police, firefighters, roads, parks, whatever is now public, and turn it into a for-profit CONTINUE READING: The Dark Secrets of the Privatization Movement: An Interview with Charles Siler | Diane Ravitch's blog

Official: San Diego Unified Trained Employees to Delete Emails From Public Record — Voice of San Diego

Official: San Diego Unified Trained Employees to Delete Emails From Public Record — Voice of San Diego

Official: San Diego Unified Trained Employees to Delete Emails From Public Record

Technology personnel trained top-level district officials on how to permanently delete sensitive emails from the district server to subvert public records requests, an official who took part in the training told Voice of San Diego. 

School districts, like all government agencies, are required by law to preserve emails so they can be accessed by the public. But at San Diego Unified School District, officials devised a way to make their emails disappear permanently, according to interviews and documents obtained by Voice of San Diego. 

Technology personnel trained top-level district officials on a three-step procedure to permanently delete sensitive emails from the district server, an official who took part in the training told Voice of San Diego. The training took place two months after San Diego Unified entered into a court-approved agreement to keep emails for at least two years, as part of a lawsuit with Voice of San Diego.

“It seemed like the reason we were being trained to do this is because records requests were coming in and it was becoming a problem. And so we needed to understand how – when we sent things that we didn’t want the average Joe to see – to get rid of those emails,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. 

“I saw it as a training on how to protect the district,” the official said. 

The official also said that top district officials frequently chatted in Google Docs in order to avoid communicating by email — a strategy commonly used among students to chat with one another without leaving a paper trail.

Records retention law in the state of California can be murky. Most documents are supposed to be retained for at least two years. Others that are considered of lesser importance can be deleted sooner, said David Snyder, executive director of the First Amendment Coalition. San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria, when he was a state Assembly member last year, passed a law specifying that emails are among the types of communications that must be preserved for two CONTINUE READING: Official: San Diego Unified Trained Employees to Delete Emails From Public Record — Voice of San Diego

McKeesport Schools Are Hiding At Least Six More COVID Cases at the High School & Twin Rivers | gadflyonthewallblog

McKeesport Schools Are Hiding At Least Six More COVID Cases at the High School & Twin Rivers | gadflyonthewallblog

McKeesport Schools Are Hiding At Least Six More COVID Cases at the High School & Twin Rivers

At least six more cases of COVID-19 have been identified at McKeesport Area School District, but you wouldn’t know it from administrators.

The information at the Western Pennsylvania district is being kept quiet instead of being released to the public.

So at the high school, two students tested positive, and at Twin Rivers Elementary, three staff and one student were identified as having the virus last week, according to a reliable source close to the school board.

Of those, two of the three Twin Rivers staff are awaiting confirmation of their test results from Allegheny County Health Department. The rest have all been tested and their results confirmed.

However, there are a few additional potential cases that remain to be investigated, according to the same source.

The district used to send out telephone, email and conventional mail alerts when CONTINUE READING: McKeesport Schools Are Hiding At Least Six More COVID Cases at the High School & Twin Rivers | gadflyonthewallblog

Sam Wineburg on Teaching History | Diane Ravitch's blog

Sam Wineburg on Teaching History | Diane Ravitch's blog

Sam Wineburg on Teaching History

The Silence of the Ellipses: 

Or Why History Can’t Be About Telling Our Children Lies

Sam Wineburg is the Margaret Jacks Professor of Education & (by courtesy) History at Stanford University. His most recent book is Why Learn History (When It is Already on Your Phone), University of Chicago Press, 2018. He tweets at @samwineburg.

Aware his days were numbered, a tuberculosis-stricken George Orwell raced to finish the book that would make his name an adjective. Holed away in a remote cottage on the Isle of Jura off the Scottish coast, he left the island for the last time in 1949, the same year his novel appeared. He died a year later.

I read 1984 in my 11^th-grade English class in the weary rustbelt town of Utica, New York, at a time when Russia was still the USSR and the “focus of evil in the modern world.” With Cliff Notes at my side, I decodedthe book’s more obscure allusions (2 + 2 = 5, I learned, conjured up Stalin’s claim that his five-year plan had been completed in four). But you didn’t need a study aid to get the main point. We lived in a free society; they in a tyrannical one. We respected truth; they disfigured it. Russian-speaking Winston CONTINUE READING: Sam Wineburg on Teaching History | Diane Ravitch's blog

Nancy Bailey's Education Website – Revive, Rally and Recover Public Schools

Nancy Bailey's Education Website – Revive, Rally and Recover Public Schools

Impact of President Trump’s Covid-19 Deception on Public Schools

The chief function of a President is to make responsible decisions and to keep Americans safe, especially children and society’s most vulnerable. Bob Woodward, in his new book Rage tells of a president who was publicly playing down the coronavirus threat without acknowledging the severity of the virus, which has now claimed over 190,000 American lives.

The President understood the danger to the American public when he twitted:

Democrats, OPEN THE SCHOOLS (SAFELY), NOW! When schools are closed, let the money follow the child (FAMILY). Why should schools be paid when they are closed? They shouldn’t.

President Trump, and his accomplice, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, know the dangers of the virus to children, teachers, and parents. Yet, instead of keeping children safe, they use Covid-19 to promote their school choice plan. They intentionally ignore the threat to children and teachers.

DeVos recently said:

You were disappointed last spring when your kids couldn’t finish the school year with their friends. You tried your best to step up to the plate and become a full-time teacher CONTINUE READING: Nancy Bailey's Education Website – Revive, Rally and Recover Public Schools

When Should Journalists Speak Up? | The Merrow Report

When Should Journalists Speak Up? | The Merrow Report

When Should Journalists Speak Up?

By now everyone must know that President Trump has been lying about the coronavirus for months, telling us it would magically disappear when he knew all along that it was a killer threat. Trump admitted this in phone conversations with Bob Woodward recorded in February and March, but only now–in September–have some of the tapes been released.

That Trump is unfit to serve as our President has been clear for an awfully long time. That most Republicans don’t care what he does is also painfully clear.

So let’s ask another question: Should Bob Woodward have released those tapes months ago. If he had done so, would that possibly have saved thousands and thousands of lives?

At some time or other, every journalist is presented with this classic hypothetical situation: Suppose you are filming or photographing a raging river and you see a young child being swept downstream. The child is clinging to a piece of wood and is clearly in danger of drowning. Should you keep on filming, or do you jump in and try to save the child?

In other words, where is the line between a reporter’s job and their responsibility as a citizen? Which comes first?

Of course, it’s really a no-brainer: You must try to save the child, because public CONTINUE READING: When Should Journalists Speak Up? | The Merrow Report

Covid in School? Shhh. Some Schools Are Keeping It Quiet. - The New York Times

Covid in School? Shhh. Some Schools Are Keeping It Quiet. - The New York Times

Covid in the Classroom? Some Schools Are Keeping It Quiet
Some states and school districts provide detailed data on school outbreaks. Others choose to keep such information under wraps.

On the first day of school in Camden County, Ga., local Facebook groups were already buzzing with rumors that a teacher had tested positive for the coronavirus. The next day, a warning went out to school administrators: Keep teachers quiet.

“Staff who test positive are not to notify any other staff members, parents of their students or any other person/entity that they may have exposed them,” Jon Miller, the district’s deputy superintendent, wrote in a confidential email on Aug. 5.

In the weeks since, parents, students and teachers in the coastal community on the Florida border have heard by word of mouth of more positive cases linked to district schools. Some parents said they had been called by local officials and told that their children should quarantine.

But even as fears of an outbreak have grown, the district has refused to publicly confirm a single case, either to the local community or The New York Times.

“This is a danger to our community,” said Cheryl Honeycutt, the mother of an 8-year-old Camden student. “We’re safer if we know what’s going on, but their pan answer is, ‘We can neither confirm or deny.’”

As schools in parts of the country have reopened classrooms amid a still-raging pandemic, some districts have been open about coronavirus cases in their buildings. They send weekly — and in some cases, daily — reports to families and updating online dashboards with the latest positive test results and quarantine counts.

But other districts have been silent, sometimes citing privacy concerns to withhold information, to the dismay of some anxious parents, concerned educators and public health experts trying to combat the pandemic. CONTINUE READING: Covid in School? Shhh. Some Schools Are Keeping It Quiet. - The New York Times