Diane Ravitch's blog
A site to discuss better education for all
Saturday, March 9, 2019
Diane Ravitch's blog | A site to discuss better education for all
Diane Ravitch's blog | A site to discuss better education for all
Diane Ravitch's blog | A site to discuss better education for all
DeVos Illegally Delayed Special Education Rule, Judge Says - The New York Times
DeVos Illegally Delayed Special Education Rule, Judge Says - The New York Times
DeVos Illegally Delayed Special Education Rule, Judge Says
DeVos Illegally Delayed Special Education Rule, Judge Says
WASHINGTON — A federal judge has ruled that Education Secretary Betsy DeVos illegally delayed an Obama-era rule that required states to address racial disparities in special education programs.
In a decision on Thursday, Judge Tanya S. Chutkan of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia called the Education Department’s delay of the special education rule “arbitrary and capricious.” The rule, drafted under the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act, would require states to identify districts with “significant disproportionality” in the number of minority students channeled into special education services, segregated in restrictive classroom settings or disciplined.
The rule, passed in the final weeks of the Obama administration, required districts to examine policies and practices that contributed to the disparities and fund remedies.
The judge’s ruling vacates Ms. DeVos’s decision to put off the regulation by two years. Instead it will take effect immediately. Leaders in the Education Department said last summer that they needed time to study the rule’s potential consequences because they were concerned that it could promote unconstitutional “racial quotas.”
Civil rights groups hailed the ruling as a victory over one of the most significant policy moves that Ms. DeVos has made to date. While the department has rescinded nonbinding guidance documents, which championed Obama-era practices for addressing racial bias, the special education rule is binding, and states had been preparing to enforce it for more than a year.
Denise Marshall, executive director for the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates, an advocacy organization that sued the department over the delay last year, said the decision, “assures states CONTINUE READING: DeVos Illegally Delayed Special Education Rule, Judge Says - The New York Times
Bill & Melinda Gates Don’t Discuss Their Takeover of America’s Public Schools
Bill & Melinda Gates Don’t Discuss Their Takeover of America’s Public Schools
Bill & Melinda Gates Don’t Discuss Their Takeover of America’s Public Schools
Bill & Melinda Gates Don’t Discuss Their Takeover of America’s Public Schools
Bill and Melinda Gates’s 2019 letter “We Didn’t See This Coming,” is filled with their concerns and optimism about everything from commodes to climate change. Always eager to discuss their global initiatives to help the poor, and a variety of other endeavors, they say little about the aggressive ways they are remaking public education to their liking.
Almost every nonprofit created to disparage public schools or the teaching profession has the Gates Foundation as a major donor.
Maybe they don’t notice, or didn’t see coming, how they promoted charters at the expense of public schools. Perhaps they didn’t mean to criticize the teaching profession by meddling with their teacher effectiveness initiative, and supporting Teach for America types. Didn’t they realize the hubbub they’d create wanting to collect massive amounts of data on children?
They don’t seem to understand that public ownership of public schools is critical to a democracy. That’s what is at stake here.
Many educators and parents, however, insist that Bill and Melinda Gates are about privatizing public schools, making the workers they want for the future economy, and replacing teachers with technology.
Yet the dynamic duo dodge discussion about how they’re dismantling public CONTINUE READING: Bill & Melinda Gates Don’t Discuss Their Takeover of America’s Public Schools
Jonathan Sackler’s Bouncer Foundation: Opioid-Funded Ed Reform | deutsch29
Jonathan Sackler’s Bouncer Foundation: Opioid-Funded Ed Reform | deutsch29
Jonathan Sackler’s Bouncer Foundation: Opioid-Funded Ed Reform
Jonathan Sackler’s Bouncer Foundation: Opioid-Funded Ed Reform
Purdue Pharma is the company that produces the opioid, OxyContin.
The Sackler family– including noted ed reformer Jonathan Sackler— owns Purdue Pharma.
Jonathan Sackler
In June 2018, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts sued Purdue Pharma and Sackler family; on January 31, 2019, Massachusetts attorney general, Maura Healy filed an amended, longer, suit, for Purdue Pharma’s having “created the [opioid drug] epidemic and profited from it through a web of illegal deceit.” From the amended lawsuit:
Dangerous opioid drugs are killing people across Massachusetts. Prescription medicines, which are supposed to protect our health, are instead ruining people’s lives. Every community in our Commonwealth suffers from the epidemic of addiction and death.Purdue Pharma created the epidemic and profited from it through a web of illegal deceit. First, Purdue deceived Massachusetts doctors and patients to get more and more people on its dangerous drugs. Second, Purdue misled them to use higher and more dangerous doses. Third, Purdue deceived them to stay on its drugs for longer and more harmful periods of time. All the while, Purdue peddled falsehoods to keep patients away from safer alternatives. Even when Purdue knew people in Massachusetts were addicted and dying, Purdue treated doctors and their patients as targets to sell more drugs. At the top of Purdue, a small group of executives led the deception and pocketed millions of dollars. …Defendant Purdue Pharma Inc. is a drug company incorporated in New York with its principal place of business in Connecticut. …The seventeen individual defendants are current and former directors of Purdue Pharma Inc. …Defendants Richard Sackler, Beverly Sackler, David Sackler, Ilene Sackler Lefcourt, Jonathan Sackler, Kathe Sackler, Mortimer Sackler, and Theresa Sackler controlled Purdue’s misconduct. Each of them took a seat on the Board of Directors of Purdue Pharma Inc. Together, they always held the controlling majority of the Board…. They directed deceptive sales and marketing practices deep within Purdue….
According to March 04, 2019, STAT News, Purdue Pharma has filed a motion to CONTINUE READING: Jonathan Sackler’s Bouncer Foundation: Opioid-Funded Ed Reform | deutsch29
#RedforEd Protests Driving 'Substantial' Increases in Education Funding
#RedforEd Protests Driving 'Substantial' Increases in Education Funding
#RedforEd Protests Driving ‘Substantial’ Increases in Education Funding
Arizona, North Carolina, Oklahoma and West Virginia are among the states that made the deepest cuts to education in the decade since the Great Recession. In 2018, however, lawmakers in these states boosted school funding. It’s no coincidence, according to a new paper issued by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), that these improvements came soon after educators launched successful strikes to protest the chronic underfunding of their public schools.
“Educators all over the country are #RedforEd,” said Eskelsen García. While specific issues vary state to state, “there are some issues they all share: The concern that CONTINUE READING: #RedforEd Protests Driving 'Substantial' Increases in Education Funding
#RedforEd Protests Driving ‘Substantial’ Increases in Education Funding
Arizona, North Carolina, Oklahoma and West Virginia are among the states that made the deepest cuts to education in the decade since the Great Recession. In 2018, however, lawmakers in these states boosted school funding. It’s no coincidence, according to a new paper issued by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), that these improvements came soon after educators launched successful strikes to protest the chronic underfunding of their public schools.
“Protests by teachers and others helped drive substantial school funding increases over the last year,” writes Michael Leachman, Senior Director of State Fiscal Research at CBPP and co-author of the paper.
The funding gains were significant, especially in Oklahoma, where lawmakers increased formula funding per student by 19 percent, adjusting for inflation. Arizona, North Carolina, and West Virginia also saw significant gains, ranging from 3 percent to 9 percent per student, again after adjusting for inflation.
“Oklahoma became the poster child for the funding crisis that led to teacher walkouts in numerous states and cities,” said David Blatt, executive director for the Oklahoma Policy Institute, in a conference call on Tuesday with Leachman and reporters. “For the first time since 2013, we’re no longer No. 1 among states making the deepest cuts to education.” (That would be Texas, where funding per student is now 20 percent below 2008 levels.)
Whether it’s in Oklahoma, Arizona, West Virginia, or most recently in Oakland, CA.,educators are hitting the picket lines to demand a reinvestment in public education, says NEA President Lily Eskelsen García.
“Educators all over the country are #RedforEd,” said Eskelsen García. While specific issues vary state to state, “there are some issues they all share: The concern that CONTINUE READING: #RedforEd Protests Driving 'Substantial' Increases in Education Funding
Oklahoma Prosecutors Defy the Will of Voters Seeking Criminal Justice Reform - Living in Dialogue
Oklahoma Prosecutors Defy the Will of Voters Seeking Criminal Justice Reform - Living in Dialogue
Oklahoma Prosecutors Defy the Will of Voters Seeking Criminal Justice Reform
Oklahoma Prosecutors Defy the Will of Voters Seeking Criminal Justice Reform
A first post described Oklahoma Christian University’s Complex Dialogues with Bryan Stevenson, and Stevenson’s passionate call for ending mass incarceration. His keynote address followed a series of panel discussionson the criminal justice system that appealed to both our emotions and intellects.
Christy Sheppard’s introductory presentation personified the forum’s balanced appeal to “the Head” and “the Heart.” She poignantly introduced a fact-driven discussion on the injustices of our system, as well as Stevenson’s call for grace and mercy. Ms. Sheppard is the cousin of Debbie Carter, whose murder in Oklahoma led to the wrongful convictions featured in Netflix’s “The Innocent Man,” based on the true story which inspired John Grisham’s famous novel. The two men convicted for the crime spent more than a decade in prison before being exonerated by DNA evidence. Sheppard is now a widely admired reform advocate.
Other forum participants included the ACLU/OK’s Ryan Kiesel, former Speaker of the Oklahoma House Kris Steele, a public defender, an assistance district attorney, a judge, a journalist, former inmates, and many others who are intimately familiar with Oklahoma’s horribly flawed criminal justice system.
Stevenson’s keynote was devoted to a renunciation of the “politics of revenge,” and a call for “friends of faith … to lift up our voices.” However, the noted attorney and author was free to make such a passionate case because he has three decades of experience in using facts to defend his clients. Stevenson also made an understated observation which helps explain what may be the greatest flaw of the system. He explained, “Our courts are too committed to finality, not fairness.”
Ryan Kiesel was more blunt in describing what I (a former legal historian) would indict as the original sin of the system. Prosecutors drive a system where 95 or more percent of cases are settled with a plea bargain. The system would break down if many defendants asserted their right to a jury trial. This means that district attorneys exercise their unchecked power to overcharge, to intimidate defendants into accepting a plea CONTINUE READING: Oklahoma Prosecutors Defy the Will of Voters Seeking Criminal Justice Reform - Living in Dialogue
Really, the United States has to tear down its public schools and start over? | Crazy Normal - the Classroom Exposé
Really, the United States has to tear down its public schools and start over? | Crazy Normal - the Classroom Exposé
Really, the United States has to tear down its public schools and start over?
Really, the United States has to tear down its public schools and start over?
I do not know how I ended up on a list that keeps sending me e-mails from The Medium. Most of the time I delete those e-mails without opening them, but recently I noticed that The Medium was publishing a series of posts that attacked America’s public schools and teachers and it seems every day there was another assault.
This is one of those hatchet jobs: 20 Ways American Schools Fail Students.
Megan E. Holstein starts with, “Everyone knows the American school system is broken.” A few sentences later, she says, “American Education is broken beyond repair. We need to scrap the entire thing and start over.”
Here is my response (revised for this post) that I left in a comment following Holstein’s alleged propaganda hack piece that I think was written to help destroy what’s left of the U.S. public education system. To be clear, the American school system is not broken. Public education is underfunded and teachers are being blamed for the results of too much useless testing that only benefits the corporations that profit from it.
If the American school system is broken, then some very wealthy and powerful individuals like Betsy DeVos, David Coleman, Arne Duncan, Bill Gates, and the Walmart Walton family are responsible.
However, the NAEP is the Nation’s Report Card, and it clearly shows improvement and progress in the nation’s public schools starting in 1969 up until NCLB in 2001. After that, the progress flattened out. The No Child Left Behind Act ushered in an era of high-stakes, rank-and-punish tests and abandoned what was working.
The NAEP report said, “As noted earlier, one of the national educational goals calls for increases in students’ academic achievement. A stated objective of this goal is that the performance distribution for minority students will more closely reflect that of the student population as a whole. In some of the subject areas assessed by NAEP, results indicated progress toward meeting this goal.” — Page xi
In addition, a study released by Stanford University offers more evidence that America’s public school are not failing: “Poor ranking on international test misleading about U.S. student performance, Stanford researcher finds”
“There is an achievement gap between more and less disadvantaged students in every country; surprisingly, CONTINUE READING: Really, the United States has to tear down its public schools and start over? | Crazy Normal - the Classroom Exposé
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