Ed Notes Online: Take me home, West Virginia - How will Red for Ed respond as Extreme Voucher Law passed to decimate Public Ed?

Ed Notes Online: Take me home, West Virginia - How will Red for Ed respond as Extreme Voucher Law passed to decimate Public Ed?

Take me home, West Virginia - How will Red for Ed respond as Extreme Voucher Law passed to decimate Public Ed?

I see some of my colleagues salivating over the state teacher strike in West Virginia. Don't hold you breath here in NY. Maybe when the conditions of teachers ... Ed Notes, 2018 -

March 29, 2021

There was much hope here in Mudville about a trigger of militancy in NYC -  but I pointed out teachers in West Virginia were eating pet food - don't forget  - it's the economy, stupid, not the ideology.

One of my fave warriors against ed deform, Jennifer Berkshire with her writing

partner Jack Schneider, authors of Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door were interviewed today with one of my fave podcasters, Sam Seder, on Majority Report - listen to the wide ranging discussion of how ed deform got into the door and where it intends to take us to the end of public ed  - (https://youtu.be/ZX05_S17u9M). But let me focus on just one aspect of the interview.

Jennifer (also check out their podcast - Have you Heard) pointed out that West Virginia legislature passed the most oppressive voucher law you can imagine which fundamentally can kill the entire WV public school system and turn the state into what happened in New Orleans. I've been worried since the pandemic began that this will be an opportunity to tie a noose around public school systems - and watch all the people who are screaming about how important it is for kids to be in school jump ship to virtual learning when it becomes convenient. Jennifer pointed out how fundamentally this is all about saving money and since labor is the major cost of education, de-unionizing and de-skilling teachers is the goal. Since teacher unions are one of the major bulwarks of the Dem Party, I see the threat of killing our unions as greater than the voter suppression movements by Republicans.

The West Virginia story also got mentioned in the libertatian anti-union publication of Mike Antonucci - with maybe a bit of glee CONTINUE READING: Ed Notes Online: Take me home, West Virginia - How will Red for Ed respond as Extreme Voucher Law passed to decimate Public Ed?

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

An Interview with Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider About ”A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door” | Diane Ravitch's blog

An Interview with Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider About ”A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door” | Diane Ravitch's blog

An Interview with Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider About ”A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door”

This interview was recorded by Town Hall in Seattle, which is a great venue for speakers but in COVID Times was recorded remotely. I interviewed them about their important new book, A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door.

They had some very valuable insights, and the time flew by. I hope you will take a few minutes and join us.

An Interview with Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider About ”A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door” | 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

Steve Hinnefeld Reviews “A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door” by Schneider and Berkshire | Diane Ravitch's blog

Steve Hinnefeld Reviews “A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door” by Schneider and Berkshire | Diane Ravitch's blog

Steve Hinnefeld Reviews “A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door” by Schneider and Berkshire

Steve Hinnefeld, an Indiana blogger, reviews Jack Schneider and Jennifer Berkshire’s new book A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door and finds that it resonates with his own experience in Indiana.

He writes:

“A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door” focuses on a fundamental debate on the nature of schools. Education, the authors argue, is best treated as a public good that belongs to everyone.

“Like clean air, a well-educated populace is something with wide-reaching benefits,” Berkshire and Schneider write. “That’s why we treat public education more like a park than a country club. We tax ourselves to pay for it, and we open it to everyone.”

The alternative: education as a private good that benefits and belongs to those who consume it. In that increasingly influential view, families should choose schools – or other education products and services — the same way they CONTINUE READING: Steve Hinnefeld Reviews “A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door” by Schneider and Berkshire | Diane Ravitch's blog

John Thompson Reviews “A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door”: A Frightening Future Ahead | Diane Ravitch's blog

John Thompson Reviews “A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door”: A Frightening Future Ahead | Diane Ravitch's blog

John Thompson Reviews “A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door”: A Frightening Future Ahead

John Thompson, historian and retired teacher in Oklahoma, reviews historian Jack Schneider and journalist Jennifer Berkshire’s A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door. Schneider and Berkshire have collaborated on podcasts called “Have You Heard.”

Thompson writes:

The first 2/3rds of A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door, by Jack Schneider and Jennifer Berkshire, is an excellent history of attacks on public education. It taught me a lot; the first lesson I learned is that I was too stuck in the 2010s and was wrong to accept the common view of Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos as a “joke” and a “political naif.” The last 1/3^rd left me breathless as Schneider’s and Berkshire’s warnings sunk in.

A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door starts with an acknowledgement that DeVos isn’t the architect of the emerging school privatization tactics. That “radical agenda” has been decades in the making. But she represents a new assault on public education values. As Schneider and Berkshire note, accountability-driven, charter-driven, corporate reform were bad enough but they wanted to transform, not destroy public education. They wanted “some form” of public schools. DeVos’ CONTINUE READING: John Thompson Reviews “A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door”: A Frightening Future Ahead | Diane Ravitch's blog

Wendy Lecker: Two Books That Demonstrate Why Public Education Matters | Diane Ravitch's blog

Wendy Lecker: Two Books That Demonstrate Why Public Education Matters | Diane Ravitch's blog

Wendy Lecker: Two Books That Demonstrate Why Public Education Matters

Wendy Lecker is a civil rights attorney who writes frequently for the Stamford Advocate. In this column, she reviews two important books: One shows how deeply embedded public schools are in our democratic ideology, the other describes that coordinated assault on the very concept of public schooling. The first is low professor Derek Black’s Schoolhouse Burning, the other is A Wolf at the Schoollhouse Door, by journalist Jennifer Berkshire and historian Jack Schneider.

Lecker writes:

In his scrupulously researched book, Derek Black emphasizes that the recognition that education is essential to democracy predated public schools and even the U.S. Constitution. He describes how the Northwest Ordinances of 1785 and 1787, which applied to 31 future states, mandated funding and land for public schools, declaring that education was “necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind.” Education was not explicitly included in the U.S. Constitution. However, after the Civil War, the United States required Southern states guarantee a right to education in their state constitutions as a condition for readmission. Northern states followed suit. State education articles CONTINUE READING: Wendy Lecker: Two Books That Demonstrate Why Public Education Matters | Diane Ravitch's blog

Democracy and Education | tultican

Democracy and Education | tultican

Democracy and Education

By Thomas Ultican 12/19/2020

Democracy and free universal public education are foundational American ideologies. They have engendered world renowned success for our experiment in government “by the people”. Two new books – Schoolhouse Burning by Derek Black and A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door by Jack Schneider and Jennifer Berkshire – demonstrate that these principles which were integral to the American experiment are shockingly under serious attack by wealthy elites.

After his father Fred died in 1967, Charles Koch took a disparate set of assets – a cattle ranch, a minority share in an oil refinery and a gas gathering business – and stitched them together. Today it is the second largest privately held corporation in the world. In the excellent 2019 book, Kochland, Christopher Leonard states, “Koch would eventually build one of the largest lobbying and political influence machines in US history.”

Both the introduction to A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door and the “Through History’s Eyes” chapter of Schoolhouse Burning mention the same quote from Charles Koch. In 2018, the Koch network held its annual three day gathering near Palm Springs, California. It was a 700-person confab of some of the richest people in America. Black wrote,

“Charles Koch told the audience that ‘we’ve made more progress in the last five years than I had in the last 50…. The capabilities we have now can take us to a whole new level…. We want to increase the effectiveness of the network … by an order of magnitude. If we do that, we can change CONTINUE READING: Democracy and Education | tultican

We Are All Afraid of the Big, Bad Wolf | Teacher in a strange land

We Are All Afraid of the Big, Bad Wolf | Teacher in a strange land

We Are All Afraid of the Big, Bad Wolf

I just finished reading A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door: The Dismantling of Public Education and the Future of School, by Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider. Berkshire and Schneider are co-hosts of the podcast Have You Heard, which is the best $2 I spend every month—and, as journalist and historian, both bring interesting perspectives to the ongoing discourse about what used to be called, without a trace of irony or bitterness, education reform.

It’s not a long book—217 pages plus another 40 pages of notes and references—and it’s eminently readable. It would be an excellent choice for anyone who cares about public education—parents and grandparents, policy-makers, teachers and school leaders—to use as concise handbook explaining what the hell happened to public schools over the last couple of decades. There’s a bit of history, a good look at failed-over-time policies, and a clear analysis of the intersecting factors that got us to this point.

Who wants to see public education die, and why? Berkshire and Schneider tell you, but like all interesting and disturbing stories, you have to trace backward first, to the origins and mission of public schooling and the conflicting values America assigned to education, as a start-up nation. This sounds tedious, but it’s not. In short, succinct chapters, the authors spend the first quarter of the book laying the groundwork for the rapid changes—the dismantling of a once-noble idea—we’ve seen in the 21st century.

Ernest Boyer once said that public school is a stage upon which Americans play out CONTINUE READING: We Are All Afraid of the Big, Bad Wolf | Teacher in a strange land

Big Education Ape: 100th Episode: A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door – Have You Heard - https://bigeducationape.blogspot.com/2020/10/100th-episode-wolf-at-schoolhouse-door.html

CURMUDGUCATION: The 2020 Edubook Christmas List

CURMUDGUCATION: The 2020 Edubook Christmas List

The 2020 Edubook Christmas List

Time to go hunting for books for the people on your Christmas list, and I have some recommendations for you if there are people on your list who care about public education (and really, everybody should). 

Before we start shopping, let me also direct your attention to Bookshop.org, an online vendor set up to benefit local independent booksellers instead of, say, giving Jeff Mezos his next gazillion dollars. You can also use it to locate a local bookstore and then shop even more directly. 

Now, here's my handful or recommendations for this year.

Black Lives Matter In School

This book does not actually ship for another week, but based on the fact that it's edited by Jesse Hagopian and Denisha Jones, my copy is already on order. 

Know Your Price  

Andre Perry brings a really unique collection of hats to this work, from Brookings scholar to education journalist, and this work is an impressive distillation of it all. At some points, it's a powerful personal reflection on his own experience, and at others, a scholarly look at how Blacks in the US have had value systematically stripped from them in ways that have lasting financial and social consequences. This book is huge help in understanding the how of racism in not just abstract or social ways, but in concrete, practical financial ways. 

Schoolhouse Burning & The Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door

Schoolhouse Burning by Derek Black and A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door by Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider are two entirely separate books, but they make a perfect pairing. It enhances both to read them back to back.

Black is a legal scholar whose book traces the importance of education in this country as reflected CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: The 2020 Edubook Christmas List

A Well-Rounded Education Cannot be Digitized | deutsch29: Mercedes Schneider's Blog

A Well-Rounded Education Cannot be Digitized | deutsch29: Mercedes Schneider's Blog

A Well-Rounded Education Cannot be Digitized

I am about one-fourth of the way into Jack Schneider’s and Jennifer Berkshire’s A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door: The Dismantling of Public Education and the Future of Public School. As I experience one in three of my students in quarantine related to COVID-19, I am keenly aware of how limited computer-delivered education is absent immediate, in-person, teacher-student and student-student relationships.

Human beings grow and learn best in relationship, which should come as no surprise since humans are social beings.

And yet, as Schneider (no relation) and Berkshire so deftly explain, the likes US ed sec Betsy DeVos– who would like nothing more than to erase public education from existence– would just as soon also eliminate as many teachers as possible in favor of students interacting with machines– and all in the name of reducing human beings to “career ready” servers of the market. After all, machines are cheaper and cannot unionize, and a *successful* outcome is one that serves business and industry.

However, in this time of pandemic-induced, online-ed proliferation, it is the rare person who sees isolated students sitting in front of computer screens as pedagogically desirable. Having my students in quarantine connected to my classroom only via their Chromebooks is not an “answer” but a tolerated necessity during this COVID crisis, and it has me constantly trying to figure out ways to keep my students’ education afloat until next I see them in person– a “figuring out” that is tedious, time-consuming, and exhausting.

I am not saying I am against quarantining, but I sure do understand the push by some CONTINUE READING: A Well-Rounded Education Cannot be Digitized | deutsch29: Mercedes Schneider's Blog