Alabama NAACP leaders arrested after sit-in at Session's office.
After months of suffering in despair and taking badly-needed recovery time from Trump shock and awe, many left and progressive activists, including education activists, are awakening, finding their bearings and hitting the ground running in the days leading up to the inauguration. A new resistance movement is building and gathering momentum.
Signs of the awakening this morning...
Full-page ad in today's Times
A full-page ad in the Times this morning reads: "In The Name of Humanity, We Refuse To Accept A Fascist America". The call to action is signed by activists and celebs like Ed Asner, Cornel West, Thurston Moore to Debra Messing, Saul Williams, Henry Giroux, Bill Ayers, John Landis and hundreds more. I signed it, as I hope you will, without any hesitation or concern over which "left" faction or sectarian group initiated it. When it comes to resistance, let a hundred flowers bloom.
In Alabama, six NAACP activists, including President and CEO Cornell William Brooks have been arrested during a sit-in staged at the Mobile office of Sen. Jeff Sessions, protesting his appointment as Trump's Attorney General.
Sessions's appointment is also opposed by more than 1,100 law school professors nationwide who sent a letter to Congress urging rejection. Signatories include: Laurence H. Tribe of Harvard Law School, Geoffrey R. Stone of the University of Chicago Law School, Pamela S. Karlan of Stanford Law School and Erwin Chemerinsky of the University of California at Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: 2017 will be a year of resistance:
Senate schedules confirmation hearing for Betsy DeVos, Trump’s pick for education secretary
The Senate education committee has scheduled a confirmation hearing for Betsy DeVos, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to helm the education department, for Jan. 11.
DeVos, who has spent more than two decades advocating for charter schools and taxpayer-funded school vouchers, is one of eight Trump nominees that Democrats have singled out for additional scrutiny. Two of the others are Sen. Jeff Sessions, Trump’s pick for attorney general, and ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson, Trump’s pick for secretary of state.
DeVos’s hearing is scheduled to take place on the second day of Sessions’s scheduled two-day hearing with the Judiciary Committee and the same day that Tillerson is tentatively scheduled to face the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
A billionaire power broker and major Republican donor, DeVos has not held elected public office nor worked as an educator. She is likely to face questions about her advocacy track record, particularly in her home state of Michigan, where she played a key role in shaping a fast-growing charter-school sector that even many charter-school supporters criticize as lacking in oversight and quality. Senators also are likely to ask her about her support for using public money to pay tuition at private and religious schools — one of the most polarizing ideas in education.
But committee members also likely will use the confirmation to question DeVos about her views on a range of other Education Department subjects about which she has previously said little or nothing publicly. Those include her view of for-profit colleges, which have faced intense scrutiny under the Obama administration; her plans for implementing the new Every Student Succeeds Act; and her plans for the Office for Civil Rights, which is responsible for enforcing anti-discrimination laws in schools and which some Trump surrogates have said should be stripped of power.Senate schedules confirmation hearing for Betsy DeVos, Trump’s pick for education secretary - The Washington Post:
The Hillsdale College connection links Trump to the right-wing evangelical community of Betsy DeVos.
Donald Trump’s election to the U.S. presidency left education policy experts at a complete loss to explain what this would mean for the nation’s schools. During his campaign, Trump gave few clues about what would inform his education leadership, only that he had some antipathy for the Department of Education, he was no fan of Common Core and he would advocate for more “school choice.”
After his election, experienced education journalists at Education Week predicted Trump would embrace conservative Beltway think tanks and state education policy leaders who had bristled under the rule of Obama’s education department, and would reject the influence of teachers unions, civil rights groups, and politically centrist education “reform” groups.
Many who pointed out “personnel is policy,” speculated Trump would pick an education secretary from the ranks of his transition advisers who came mostly from the above-mentioned DC-based circles and state government centers. Other knowledgeable sources predicted Trump might draw education policy knowhow from “outsider” sources, such as the military, big business or the charter school industry.
Don’t Count on Grading, Ranking Educational Quality
Having been a long-time advocate for and practitioner of de-testing and de-grading the classroom, I also reject the relentless obsession of mainstream media to grade and rank educational quality among states as well as internationally (see Bracey and Kohn).
As Kohn recognizes: “Beliefs that are debatable or even patently false may be repeated so often that at some point they come to be accepted as fact.”
And thus, with the monotonous regularity and mechanical lack of imagination of a dripping faucet, Education Week once again trumpets Quality Counts.
Like a college course no one wants to register for, Quality Counts 2017 gives the nation a C while no state makes an A or an F.
The appeal of all this much ado about nothing includes:
People love the overly simplistic use of charts and interactive maps.
These grades and rankings always confirm the enduring narrative that public schools are failing.
However, the real problem is not how states and the nation rank, but that we persist at the grading and ranking as if that process reveals something of importance (it doesn’t) or as if that process somehow is curative (it isn’t).
How, then, does grading and ranking educational quality fail us?
As with regularly changing standards and high-stakes testing as part of accountability, grading and ranking educational quality is part of the larger failure of imagination, a belief in doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results. Media have been grading and ranking for decades, and the narrative of failing schools has continued; in other words, this process has no positive impact on education reform—but it feeds a media and social need to bash public schooling.
A new report from the University of Arkansas Department of Education Reform claims that Texas voucher legislation would reduce crime and thereby save the state a cumulative $194 million by the end of 2035. This claim is not warranted and has, in fact, already been discredited.
The report’s calculations arise from another University of Arkansas analysis, by the same authors. The Arkansas researchers had argued that some subgroups of voucher-receiving students in Milwaukee, Wisconsin were less likely to commit crimes as adults. That earlier analysis was reviewed in April 2016 by Clive Belfield, Professor of Economics at Queens College, City University of New York.
There exist multiple errors and limitations in the two Arkansas analyses, but perhaps the most important are the poorly grounded claims regarding causation. As Professor Belfield explained, no causal inferences can be drawn from the type of data and analyses used by the researchers. This means that the researchers cannot responsibly make claims about “results” and “impacts”, as they do in their Texas report.
Professor Belfield observed that, far from establishing a causal relationship between voucher program participation and a reduction in criminal behavior, the Arkansas researchers had not even established meaningful and consistent correlations. As Belfield pointed out, one valid interpretation of the data and analyses presented in the earlier report is that vouchers and crime are, in fact, not correlated.
Instead of engaging with Professor Belfield’s critique of their Milwaukee report, the Arkansas authors used the unconvincing results of that study, plugged in crime numbers from Texas, and estimated that if that state’s legislators were to create a type of voucher program called “Education Savings Accounts” they would (19 years from now) have, in the aggregate, saved their state almost two-hundred million dollars.
“This is a textbook example of garbage-in, garbage-out,” said Professor Kevin Welner of the University of Colorado Boulder, who directs the National Education Policy Center. “A figure derived from a study that does not allow for causal inference cannot then be brought back from the dead and magically support a causal inference in another study six months later. This sort of zombie causation could not possibly be of use to lawmakers looking for trustworthy information.”Education Research Report: Do vouchers reduce crime?:
Argument preview: What level of educational benefit is “appropriate” for children with disabilities?
The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act gives federal funds to states that agree to offer a “free appropriate public education” (FAPE) to children with disabilities. An important part of providing a FAPE is the IEP, or individualized education program, which – among other things – must set forth a plan that is tailored to the unique needs of each child with a disability. In 1982, the Supreme Court ruled in Board of Education v. Rowley that an IEP must be “reasonably calculated to enable the child to receive educational benefits.”
Next week, the court will hear oral argument in the case of a Colorado boy who has asked the justices to clarify exactly what kind of “educational benefits” an IEP must provide: Is it enough that the benefit is simply non-trivial, or does the IDEA require more? The boy and his family argue that a greater benefit is required, and that a ruling to the contrary will directly affect the quality of the education that is offered to millions of children with disabilities. But the school district where the boy attended school counters that imposing the kind of specific standard proposed by the boy and his family will create its own set of difficulties, including entangling courts in complicated inquiries that they are not qualified to undertake.
The student, Endrew F. (also known as Drew), is autistic. He began as a student in Douglas County School District in preschool and stayed there through fourth grade. During each of those school years, he had an IEP, through which he received a special-education program. However, Drew did not return to the public-school system for fifth grade, because his parents disagreed with school officials about the IEP proposed for him for that year. For example, they say, the fifth-grade IEP contained goals that closely resembled the goals for earlier years, such as mastering multiplication of single-digit numbers. Instead, Drew’s parents enrolled him in a private school – where, they note, “he has made academic, social, and behavioral progress.”
According to an event invitation on the Portland Student Action Network’s Facebook page, more than 300 students are planning to meet January 19 at Pioneer Courthouse Square. The walk-out is scheduled for the day before Trump’s inauguration.
On the page, students say they worry DeVos doesn't understand the needs of public schools, and will "accelerate the corporate privatization of education."
After nominating DeVos, the incoming president called her "a brilliant and passionate education advocate.”
SESSIONS, Jefferson Beauregard III (Jeff), (1946 - )
In the coming days, Congress will decide if a states rights segregationist from Alabama will be the next Attorney General of the United States.
Jeffrey Beauregard Sessions III has a long history of working to fortify the commitment to white supremacy in his state, and if Donald Trump gets his way, Sessions will bring his racist reading of the law to the national stage. If you have not seen this piece on Sessions' role in maintaining separate and unequal schools in Alabama, please take a moment to read it in order to understand why the Sessions appointment must be stopped.
During the early 90s, Sessions, as State Attorney General of Alabama, led an effort to overturn a state court decision aimed to establish more equity in public school funding.
. . . .Attorney General Sessions led the battle against the decision. He argued that Judge Reese had overreached. It was a familiar war cry on the segregationist right: An activist court was usurping the power of the state’s duly elected officials to solve the problem on their own. For the next two years, Mr. Sessions sought to discredit Judge Reese and overturn his ruling. In one of the twists of austerity budgeting in the mid-1990s, Mr. Sessions had laid off 70 lawyers in the attorney general’s office, and had to find outside counsel to handle the case. Lawyers working on contract for the office were to be paid no more than $85 per hour, but for the challenge to the equity case, the fee cap was lifted. . . .
He included one by my friend Karen Lewis, President of the Chicago Teachers Union.
“[Illinois Gov.] Bruce Rauner is a liar. You know, I’ve been reading in the news lately about all of these ISIS recruits popping up all over the place — has Homeland Security checked this man out yet? Because the things he’s doing look like acts of terror on poor and working-class people.” —Chicago Teachers Union president Karen Lewis, in remarks to the City Club of Chicago on April 20.
Now, Antonucci doesn’t live in Illinois and he doesn’t qualify as one of our poor or member of our working class. To those of us in Illinois who do qualify as poor and Quoting President Karen Lewis. | Fred Klonsky:
Facing pressure to cut special education, Texas schools shut out English Language Learners
Photo: Marie D. De Jesus, Houston Chronicle Alexia Stamatis, 13, has been diagnosed with autism, epilepsy and hypotonia, a muscle disorder. But when her mother asked Houston Independent School District to evaluate her for special education, a teacher told her there was a “waiting list.”
VICTORIA – Refugees, immigrants and other kids who do not speak English are entitled to the same special education services as native speakers. But in this Southeast Texas city, they seldom get them.
Just 39 of the nearly 1,000 English Language Learners here receive services like tutoring, counseling and speech therapy, 70 percent fewer per capita than a decade ago.
Many more need help, but usually, teachers say, their pleas are ignored.
"It's almost impossible to get my kids into special ed," said Arlene De Los Santos of Patti Welder Middle School. "They have to have very, very severe needs for the school to even consider it."
The situation in Victoria exemplifies a new reality playing out across Texas.
From Beaumont to El Paso, school districts facing pressure to lower their special education numbers have decided to do it by shutting out thousands of English Language Learners, the Houston Chronicle has found.
ALISON STEWART: We continue our look at the Obama years and his legacy.
Tonight, we focus on a subject that often gets less attention, public education.
Much of what happens in the classroom is decided at the state and local level. But the federal government can also be a big player in some of the most personal issues for families, which is also the focus of our weekly segment Making the Grade.
Throughout most of his term, President Obama and his former education secretary, Arne Duncan, exercised far more power and influence in education than many of their predecessors.
One major focus, a demand for greater student testing tied directly to teacher evaluation and, crucially, federal money for schools. Duncan was essentially the gatekeeper of billion of stimulus money known as Race to the Top.
Districts could qualify if they agreed to meet those criteria. Initially, many states joined in. But, over time, resistance began building to testing, data-driven metrics, and whether teachers were being judged unfairly.
The president himself addressed those concerns.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: When we talk about testing, parents worry that it means more teaching to the test. Some worry that tests are culturally biased. Teachers worry that they will be evaluated solely on the basis of a single standardized test. Everybody thinks that’s unfair.
It is unfair. But that’s not what Race to the Top is about. What Race to the Top says is there’s nothing wrong with testing, we just need better tests applied in a way that helps teachers and students, instead of stifling what teachers and students do in the classroom.
ALISON STEWART: It also led to a backlash of state standards known as the Common Core.
JULIA SASS RUBIN, Save Our Schools New Jersey: They’re impacting the kind of education kids are getting, because they’re eating up a lot of introduction time with test preparation and test drilling.
The Carolina Coup and the Fight for Public Education
The nation’s eyes are on my home state of North Carolina, where what many are calling a coup has shown the lengths to which Republicans will go to protect and expand their political power.
The naked power grab by Republicans has shocked the nation. But few people really understand that a struggle over public education is at the center of the fight against an authoritarian government in the era of Donald Trump.
What did Republicans do? In a nutshell, according to a review of the carnage by David Graham for The Atlantic, “Having lost the governor’s seat in November’s election, the GOP legislature opted to simply reduce the governor’s power drastically. The two most prominent bills involve the elections system and the governor’s right to make appointments.”
Specifically, on the elections front, Republicans robbed incoming Democratic Governor Roy Cooper of his ability to change the composition of state and county boards of elections, diluted the governor’s appointment authority, and rigged the timing of county board leadership to favor Republicans.
Republican lawmakers took away the incoming governor’s ability to make appointments to the State Board of Education and the boards of trustees of University of North Carolina system, made cabinet appointees subject to approval by the senate, and cut the number of appointments the governor can make for government jobs from 1,500 to 425.
The attack on the incoming governor’s power over education appointments is especially radical, as it transfers power from the state board to the new state superintendent of public instruction, Republican Mark Johnson, who defeated the Democratic incumbent, June Atkinson, in November.
The Texas Special: Purge Students with Disabilities
Identifying students with a disability is not an exact science. Scholars have long-since documented both the over- and under-identification of certain demographic groups with certain disabilities. As Theresa Glennon argued in Race, Education and the Construction of a Disabled Class, educational disabilities can be a proxy for the perception that a student diverges from the cultural norm. Thus, year-to-year variances in the number of students identified as having a disability that affects educational opportunity are to be expect. Minor upward and downward shifts are not necessarily an indicator of negligence or ulterior motives.
With that said, the Houston Chronicle has made the case that the state of Texas has systematically reduced its special education population for no legitimate reason. This chart shows that the state's special education population has shrunk by more than 25% in the past decade. The numbers are even more drastic when the state is broken down by region. A number have seen their special education population shrink by a third. See here.
The reason, cites the Chronicle, is clear: the state mandated a cap on the number of students in special education.
Over a decade ago, the officials arbitrarily decided what percentage of students should get special education services — 8.5 percent — and since then they have forced school districts to comply by strictly auditing those serving too many kids.
Their efforts, which started in 2004 but have never been publicly announced or explained, have saved the Texas Education Agency billions of dollars but denied vital supports to children with autism, attention deficit Education Law Prof Blog:
On January 11, the Senate will hold confirmation hearings on Betsy DeVos. Since Trump nominated her for Secretary of Education, a great deal has been written about how she has used her money, power and influence to destroy public education in Michigan, and advance her religious beliefs. See here and here. Jersey Jazzman wrote two important pieces within the past few days.
So, what can you do? Well, if you think 'Nothing', keep reading. Yesterday, House Republicans ditched plans to eliminate the Independent Ethics Office in part because of all the phone calls they received from angry constituents. Heck, even Donald Trump wasn't thrilled:
Standardized science standoff: California, feds at odds again over a statewide test
There's a standoff brewing between education officials in Sacramento and Washington, D.C., over what standardized science test California students should take this spring.
California Department of Education officials want to administer a new statewide science test to all fifth, eighth and tenth graders this spring; a test tailor-made to match the new science standards teachers are following this year.
But so far, the new test only exists in a shortened, pilot form; California would need an exemption from federal laws that require the state to report the scores of a benchmark science test every year.
U.S. Department of Education officials don't want to grant that exemption, saying California can't ignore the federal requirement to measure students' progress in science annually. Until the new exam is ready, the feds said the state's schools must at least continue administering the old test.
The catch? The old test is based on an old set of science standards, written in 1998, that California teachers no longer follow. California teachers are in their first full year using the new Next Generation Science Standards, which been rolling out since 2013.
"Teachers don’t want to give students a test without preparing them for it," said Jessica Sawko, executive director of the California Science Teachers Association.
Officials at the two departments will hold a hearing via teleconference this Friday, Jan. 6, in hopes of breaking the deadlock — but unless either state or federal officials change course, the two are bound for collision:
Robert Cotto Jr. – Disciplining Connecticut’s Schools: A critique of the Judge’s Decision on the CCJEF Education Funding Case
Disciplining Connecticut’s Schools: A critique of the Judge’s Decision on the CCJEF Education Funding Case – by Robert Cotto Jr. –
“If the emperor was a weak man, the sight of his mark would evoke laughter and contempt, but if he was a stern and powerful ruler, his mark would instill fear and obedience.”
The Lords of Discipline, Pat Conroy, p. 213.
In the book Lords of Discipline, based on the Citadel military college, the general offered his cadets words of advice at their ring ceremony: be the powerful ruler that instills obedience and fear, otherwise suffer defeat. When I first read the judge’s decision in the CCJEF v. Rell school funding case, it struck me as similarly militaristic. Judge Moukawsher, a lawyer and graduate of the Citadel military college, ruled that his problem with Connecticut public education was an issue of discipline, not necessarily a lack of resources. Rather than declaring a war on inequality or inadequacy, the judge declared war on a “slack system”. While news accounts called the judge’s decision an “overhaul”, the ruling was more of a directive to continue public education’s most regressive tendencies.
The valiant CCJEF argument against the State relied on a common-sense idea: every child has a right to a rich, well-rounded education for all children that is adequately funded by the State. Advocates and parents in towns and cities brought the case forward as a Constitutional challenge more than a decade ago believing that public education was inadequately funded, particularly in less wealthy towns and cities. Past court cases, Robert Cotto Jr. - Disciplining Connecticut’s Schools: A critique of the Judge’s Decision on the CCJEF Education Funding Case - Wait What?:
What the Washington Post’s Editorial Promoting School Privatization Neglects to Consider
In an editorial earlier this week, Fred Hiatt the editorial page director of the Washington Post, endorses marketplace school choice along with Betsy DeVos, President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Education. Trump and DeVos are both strong supporters of private school vouchers and the rapid expansion of unregulated charter schools. Hiatt writes from the point of view of individual parents and endorses the ethos of the American Dream, the individualistic notion that school choice should not be merely the privilege of the rich who can afford to move to exclusive suburban school districts or to enroll their children in private schools.
Advocates for school choice like Hiatt propose to reward poorer parents who demonstrate gumption by searching for a school, filling out what may be a complex application, and then, in many cases providing their own transportation to a distant school or letting their children ride the subway. Embodying America’s ethos of individual success, school choice is designed to reward strivers. But such a plan also concentrates, in what quickly become schools of last resort, the children in families who are doubled up or moving from shelter to shelter and isolates these children in even poorer public schools. Are these children less worthy than the children of the parents who have the time and stability to enter the school choice marketplace?
The Rev. Jesse Jackson identifies the primary flaw in school choice: “There are those who make the case for a ‘race to the top’ for those who can run. But ‘lift from the bottom’ is the moral imperative because it includes everybody.” Marketplaces are races—competitions to see who can get a place. Races and competitions reward winners and leave the losers behind. These days as states evaluate (and even close schools) according to the test scores their students produce, the schools themselves have an incentive to steer away (sometimes reject and sometimes quietly counsel out) students who struggle academically and children with What the Washington Post’s Editorial Promoting School Privatization Neglects to Consider | janresseger:
In previous posts in this series on grading, I have argued first that grades fail to motivate genuine learning and second, that they provide only vague unhelpful feedback to students. But what about parents? Many teachers say that they must give grades because parents demand them. It is true that most parents view grades as useful feedback, primarily, I believe, because we teachers have sold grades as effective feedback for 150 years. Parents want an answer to the question, "How is my child doing?" For most parents, grades seem to provide the answer to that question.
But what if we showed parents that that question is only poorly answered by a letter or number grade and that we can provide them with much richer information? What if we could provide parents with the answer to that question and at the same time let them know what we can do together to help the child achieve even more? The transition might be bumpy, but ultimately, I think parents will see that a different approach to answering the "How is my child doing?" question will be much more rewarding.
First, let's understand that the question, "How is my child doing?" is a complex one. Parents want to know how their child is doing academically, but they also want to know that their child's social and emotional needs are being met. Educators have long recognized that a grade on a report cardRuss on Reading: Beyond Grades: How is My Child Doing?:
Technology Trade-offs in a Physics Classroom (Alice Flarend)
“Alice Flarend is a National Board Certified Teacher and is the physics teacher at Bellwood-Antis High School in Pennsylvania. She holds a B.S and M.S in Nuclear Engineering from University of Illinois and University of Michigan respectively. Alice caught the teaching bug while doing engineering doctoral work at the University of Michigan and has been teaching for over twenty years. She is currently working part time on a Science Education Ph.D at Penn State. She plans on remaining in her classroom to be a bridge between the worlds of higher education and public K-12 schools.”
One of the first uses of computers in many physics classes decades ago was to graph data using Excel. This innovation prompted lengthy discussions among physics teachers at meetings and conferences about the trade-offs of having students use this aid rather than graphing by hand. Excel could make graphing so easy, but the students could lose the skill of creating axes, legends, and interacting with their data.
A number of individuals have submitted responses, and based upon the quality of the writing (and the sophistication of the cheating), it is obvious that these former (and current) cheaters are intelligent individuals.
Even the capable cheat– the “good students.” In fact, it seems to me that highly intelligent individuals make the best cheaters.
All of this, of course, seriously undermines the infallibility and trustworthiness of high-stakes testing.
One of the more recent entries concerns Thai medical students using cameras embedded in the frames of their glasses to transmit content of a May 2016 exam to an outside source, who then fed answers created in real time to a receiver in the cheater’s Smartwatch.
Here is one of the more creative schemes, useful only if one has an identical twin– and a restroom:
Being an identical twin, I’ve always wanted to cheat on an exam by switching with my brother. Fortunately for me (or unfortunately?), we never did switch.
Although I once had a friend who is an identical twin who DID switch. It was for one of those SAT subject tests. One of them studied for one of the topics very thoroughly, while the other studied for another of the topics. During the
