Five Reasons to be Cautiously Optimistic About the Biden Presidency

However, now that the dust has cleared and all the states but Georgia, Alaska and North Carolina have been called, I’m starting to have some thoughts about what a Biden administration might actually look like.

And it might not be too bad.

So here are what I see as the five main hurdles coming up for the Biden administration and why we might be cautiously optimistic about their outcomes:

1) Trump Will Fail to Successfully Challenge the Election Results

As of this writing, Biden has 290 electoral votes to Trump’s 214.

Alaska will probably go to Trump and North Carolina is a bit of a toss up. Georgia will almost certainly go to Biden.

It actually doesn’t really matter.

The world and the media have already accepted the results.

Biden has been elected the 46th President of the United States.

In the absence of solid evidence of massive voter fraud in multiple states – many of which are controlled by Republican governments – it is unlikely that these results can be successfully changed.

Many Republican leaders like Pat Toomey, Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney have already accepted this fact. Far right leaders of other countries like Boris Johnson and Benjamin Netanyahu have already congratulated Biden.

It’s over.

And if there were any doubt about it, the Trump administration accidentally booking a press conference at Four Seasons Total Landscaping in Philadelphia instead of the Four Seasons hotel – and then pretending that’s what they intended all along – should put the final nail in the coffin.

You don’t know Four Seasons Total Landscaping? It’s a landscape gardeners located between a crematorium and a dildo shop.

That is not the work of people capable of running an effective challenge to a national election.

Yes, there are enough far right justices on the Supreme Court to pull off this Coup d’état. But I don’t think even they would have the guts to do it in light of the world’s acceptance of Biden, the acceptance of many in the GOP and the blatant incompetence of the Trump administration.

I admit that I could be wrong. And I certainly don’t think we should underestimate these neofacists.

Trump is a cornered rat, and that is when rats are at their most dangerous.

However, I think there is good reason to think he will not be able to steal this election no matter how many tantrums he throws on the floor of the Oval Office or Mar-a-Lago.

2) Control of the Senate Rests on Georgia

It appears that the election will not, by itself, change the balance of power in Congress.

The Democrats have lost seats in the House but not enough to lose a majority. They do not appear to have picked up enough seats in the Senate to rest control away from the GOP.

However, on January 5th there will be runoff elections for both U.S. Senate seats in Georgia.

Yes, you read that right – Georgia!

If Democrats Raphael Warnock and Jon Osoff both win, Joe Biden will have a congressional majority to actually get his policies passed.

No more Mitch McConnell as Senate Majority Leader.

No more obstruction.

It would be HUGE.

And it is incredibly positive that this is taking place in Georgia where Stacey Abrams has done an amazing job organizing grassroots efforts to turn the state blue.

We have a real chance here.

No doubt Republicans will try to throw whatever they have left to stopping the Dems in these races. But how much do they really have after being beaten nationwide?

Will momentum and an existent grassroots network be enough to flip the script for Dems?

Chances are good. It all depends on what we do in the next few months.

3) Progressives Will Not Let Neoliberals Ignore Them

A huge hurdle for the Biden Administration and the Democratic Party will be how we try to move forward together.

Biden won a huge national majority of votes – 75 million – the most any candidate ever has received.

However, a similar record was true of Hillary Clinton in 2016 and she still lost because of the electoral college.

Thankfully things are not playing out that way in 2020. But they could have very easily.

Frankly, the fact that Biden didn’t beat Trump by an even greater margin is extremely troubling.

Almost half of the voting public – 71 million – support this racist, neofacist, incompetent fool. And only a slight majority oppose him.

I believe firmly that this is because of the Democrats’ strategy in this campaign.

Both this year and in 2016, there was very little positive policy being offered – very little popular positive policy positions that would have directly impacted the majority of Americans.

Many folks voted for Trump out of despair. They wanted a change – any change – burn it all down if necessary.

Had Medicare For All or the Green New Deal been on the ballot, things might have gone differently – or more emphatically – our way.

But, instead, it was all about getting rid of Trump.

Thankfully, that was enough. But had the party actually offered voters something more – things that are overwhelmingly popular with everyday people but unpopular with party elites and their wealthy backers – the results could have been a landslide in Biden’s favor.

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez spoke for many progressives in a New York Times interview.

She said that every candidate that co-sponsored Medicare for All in a swing district was reelected. Even Mike Levin, who many thought had committed political suicide by co-sponsoring the Green New Deal, kept his seat.

Supporting progressive policies did not sink anyone’s campaigns. In fact, that’s how insurgent Democrats have been unseating centrists across the nation.

“I’ve been unseating Democrats for two years,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “I have been defeating D.C.C.C.-run campaigns for two years. That’s how I got to Congress. That’s how we elected Ayanna Pressley. That’s how Jamaal Bowman won. That’s how Cori Bush won. And so we know about extreme vulnerabilities in how Democrats run campaigns.”

This is a fight for the heart and soul of the Democratic party.

We cannot continue to move to the right and expect the base – which are much further left – to continue to vote for increasingly conservative candidates.

There is already a party for that – it’s the Republicans.

“I need my colleagues to understand that we are not the enemy,” she said. “And that their base is not the enemy. That the Movement for Black Lives is not the enemy, that Medicare For All is not the enemy. This isn’t even just about winning an argument. It’s that if they keep going after the wrong thing, I mean, they’re just setting up their own obsolescence.”

We will see if the Biden administration learns these lessons or not.

I think there is good reason to be cautiously optimistic here. It is in the party’s own self interest.

But only the future will tell.

4) Biden will Take Steps to Control the Coronavirus

Unlike his predecessor, Biden has been a consistent voice of sanity on the COVID-19 pandemic.

Yesterday, he tweeted:

“We cannot repair the economy, restore our vitality, or relish life’s most precious moments — hugging a grandchild, birthdays, weddings, graduations, all the moments that matter most to us — until we get this virus under control.”

And true to his word, this appears to be the first thing on his agenda.

Tomorrow he is expected to name a group of leading scientists and experts as transition advisers so his administration can get started combating the virus on inauguration day, Jan. 20, 2021.

The Coronavirus Task Force is expected to be led by former Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy and Dr. David Kessler, who led the Food and Drug Administration during the 1990s.

Specifically, Biden’s plan calls for empowering scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to help set national guidance based on evidence to stop outbreaks, work on a vaccine, testing, contact tracing and other services.

His administration would use the CDC to provide specific guidance — based on the degree of viral spread in a community — for how to open schools and businesses, when to impose restrictions on gathering sizes or when stay-at-home orders may be necessary.

He would create a national “pandemic dashboard” to share this information with the public.

He would work with every governor to make mask-wearing in public mandatory in their state – a measure that, alone, could save more than 100,000 lives.

He would make sure that everyone has access to regular, reliable, free testing.

He would hire 100,000 additional public health workers to coordinate with local organizations around the country to perform contact tracing and other health services. These people would help with everything from food insecurity and affordable housing to training school officials about when and how to make it safe to reopen buildings.

He proposes the federal government cover 100% of the cost of Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act (COBRA) coverage for the duration of the crisis for people who get sick from the virus. If someone loses employer-based health insurance, they would still have health insurance through this plan.

He also will push to strengthen the Affordable Care Act, expanding coverage by making more people eligible.

He’d use the Defense Production Act to increase production of masks, face shields and other personal protective equipment so that supply exceeds demand.

I don’t know about you, but to me this seems a breath of fresh air. It is what the federal government should do and what it hasn’t been doing under Trump.

And I see no reason why the Biden administration can’t get it done.

5) Biden Can’t Afford to Re-up Betsy DeVos’ Education Policies

When it comes to public education, neither party has really been an ally to teachers and students.

Betsy DeVos was worse than President Obama’s Education Secretaries – Arne Duncan and John King. But let’s not fool ourselves that these Democratic functionaries were any good, either.

They all supported charter schools, high stakes testing, increased segregation, the school-to-prison pipeline, evaluating teachers on student test scores, targeted disinvestment to schools in poor neighborhoods serving mostly students of color, and more.

Duncan and King were competent at destroying public education while hiding behind neoliberal rhetoric. DeVos was incompetent in every conceivable way and could barely hide her glee at the prospect of destroying public education.

Since Biden’s wife, Jill, was an actual teacher, he has more to lose than previous chief executives if he gets this wrong. He can’t take schools for granted and he can’t appear to be doubling down on the same policies of Trump and DeVos – which to be honest were mostly the same as those of Obama and Bush but on steroids.

Biden promised a public school teacher would be his next education secretary and Politico is already making predictions. The media outlet suggests ex-National Education Association (NEA) President Lily Eskelsen Garcia, American Federation of Teachers (AFT) President Randi Weingarten or Stanford Education Professor Linda Darling-Hammond.

Frankly, we could do much worse than any of these people. Hammond, in particular, was Obama’s education policy advisor UNTIL he was elected and changed courses to the neoliberal set.

Of all the hurdles coming his way, I have the least hope Biden will overcome this one.

Pressure will be huge for him to pick another supply side hack with little actual education experience.

But who knows? The stakes are high. Jill has his ear.

We can make our voices heard, cross our fingers and hope for the best.

At a time when teachers are struggling just to have a safe environment in which to work, actual education policy is almost a distant luxury.

For the meantime, I’ll give Joe a chance and remain cautiously optimistic.

The ball is in Biden’s hands. He deserves the right to make a shot.

And if he misses, at least we can celebrate the end of the Muslim ban, reinstating the DREAM Act, rejoining the Paris Climate Accords, rejoining the World Health Organization and the restoration of a functioning federal government to the USA.

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Why High Stakes Testing Was Cancelled This Year (and Probably Will Be Next Year, Too)

May 16, 2020 stevenmsinger Accountability, Betsy DeVos, capitalism, Charter Schools, Child Predators, Civil Rights, college, Competency Based Education, computers, Corporate Education "Reform", Cyber Charter Schools, Data, Democrat, Democrats for Education Reform, Donald Trump, edtech, Education, Eugenics, Every Student Succeeds Act, John King, Learning, Local Control, Parents, Pennsylvania, Politics, Poverty, Prejudice, privatization, Racism, Republican, School Choice, school closings, School Funding, school vouchers, Schools, small class size, Special Education, Standardized Testing, standards, Student Mobility, student privacy, Students, Teachers, Technology Competency Based Education, coronavirus, COVID-19, Depersonalized Learning, distance learning, ed-tech, edtech, education, high stakes testing, personalized learning, Politics, schools, standardized testing, virtual learning

There are at least two silver linings to the current Coronavirus catastrophe for education.

One – with nearly all public schools closed, March was the first month since 2002 without a school shooting.

Two – districts nationwide cancelled high stakes standardized tests in April and May.

Taken together, these are two victories that no one could have predicted before November.

Gun safety restrictions remain laughably lax in the US compared to the rest of the world. And our system’s reliance on high stakes testing to hold schools and teachers accountable for economic inequalities and racially biased standards has been thoroughly criticized for nearly a century.

In short, the virus succeeded where policy did not.

The pandemic’s other effects have been more damaging as students, parents and teachers have struggled to move education online at home.

Teachers are seeing high absences especially among poor, underprivileged and special needs children. Not to mention worries about the quality and depth of education provided virtually and the stress it places on families.

To make matters worse, the situation seems likely to continue in some form when next school year begins in the fall.

With the COVID-19 virus likely to endure spreading unchecked due to a lack of adequate health screenings, the time it takes to make a vaccine, and an unwillingness by the government to save everyday people from the economic consequences of a nearly stopped economy, not to mention an increasing unwillingness among people to continue thorough social distancing procedures, schools may be left to solve the crisis themselves.

There’s been talk that when schools start up in August and September they may simply continue with cyber curriculum. Or they may open the physical buildings with safety protocols including half day classes of smaller size to keep students a safe distance apart.

In any case, the question of standardized testing arises again with a vengeance.

While there is some wiggle room, federal law (The Every Student Succeeds Act) requires all public school students be given standardized tests in grades 3-8 and once in high school.

The U.S. Department of Education waived that mandate this year because of the virus.

That was great news – a sound decision from a government agency known more for market solutions than rationality.

The question remains: why did the department do it?

Whether staffed by Democrats or Republicans, this doesn’t sound like them.

Why was this exception made and will it be extended again given that the circumstances may be little different in 2020-21 than they were in 2019-20?

The answer seems to be rooted in the tests, themselves, and the economic circumstances which create and sustains them.

WHY TESTS WERE CANCELLED

In late March, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos said that her department would streamline the paperwork for states to request a waiver allowing them not to give high stakes testing this year and that the government wouldn’t use this year’s testing data in future school accountability ratings.

DeVos said in a statement:

“Students need to be focused on staying healthy and continuing to learn. Teachers need to be able to focus on remote learning and other adaptations. Neither students nor teachers need to be focused on high-stakes tests during this difficult time.”

How did we get here?

Well, imagine a world where this didn’t happen.

Before DeVos made her statement, some states like Colorado and Texas had already eliminated testing requirements without waiting for a response from DeVos.

If the federal government hadn’t answered these requests in the affirmative, it would have had to engage in an open power struggle with the states over control of public schooling.

This would be especially damaging for a Republican administration because of the party’s stance on state’s rights.

However, even if we put aside this power dynamic, the decision was inevitable.

CORPORATIONS FIRST

All of these assessments are the property of private corporations. These include Harcourt Educational Measurement, CTB McGraw-Hill, Riverside Publishing (a Houghton Mifflin company), and NCS Pearson.

States purchase the right to use these tests but assessment material is the ideological property of the parent corporation. And so they want it guarded from theft.

That’s why nearly all high stakes testing requires proctors – people whose job it is to set up, monitor and secure the testing environment. They make sure test takers don’t cheat, but they also are responsible for ensuring no information about specific test questions leaves the assessment environment.

This is true for standardized assessments at the K-12 level as well as college and certification tests.

I know because I’ve spent every year of my teaching career employed as a proctor throughout most of April as my students take the Pennsylvania System of School Assessments (PSSA) tests. But also when I got my degree I had to go to a designated testing center where I could be monitored as I took a series of assessments necessary to get my certification.

I had to sign in, empty my pockets including giving over my cell phone, and submit to being observed by the proctors and video surveillance. I even had to sign out and back in when I needed to use the restroom.

With physical classrooms closed, there was simply no way effectively to do this.

The College Board tried anyway with an abbreviated Advanced Placement test taken online from home this month to disastrous results – glitches, server issues and a failure by the organization to take responsibility.

However, the problem isn’t essentially technological. These assessments could be given online. Many districts do exactly that, but with teachers in the room acting as proctors.

The technological infrastructure may not yet be in place for widespread virtual testing, but that’s not an insurmountable hurdle.

Test security is a much stickier issue – without real, live people policing the environment, testing information would be at risk.

Rival companies could get access to trade secrets. The value of scores could come under scrutiny due to concerns of student cheating. And the tests, themselves, would for the first time be visible to parents and the general public.

TESTING SECRECY

As a classroom teacher, I get to see these infernal tests. I get to see the questions.

They are not good. They are not well-written, well considered, developmentally appropriate or even good at evaluating student understanding of the knowledge they claim to be assessing.

But up to this point, anyone who gets to see the tests is sworn to secrecy including the students.

The kids taking these exams – regardless of age – are no longer treated as children. They are clients entering into a contract.

At the start of these tests, they are warned of the legal consequences of violating the terms of this agreement.

THE PSSAS

In particular,the PSSAs require students to read the following warning on the first day of the assessment:

DO NOT PHOTOGRAPH, COPY OR REPRODUCE MATERIALS FROM THIS ASSESSMENT IN ANY MANNER. All material contained in this assessment is secure and copyrighted material owned by the Pennsylvania Department of Education. Copying of material in any manner, including the taking of a photograph, is a violation of the federal Copyright Act. Penalties for violations of the Copyright Act may include the cost of replacing the compromised test item(s) or a fine of no less than $750 up to $30,000 for a single violation. 17 U.S.C. $ 101 et seq

So the first act of testing is a threat of legal consequences and possible fines.

In the commonwealth, we also force kids to abide by a specific code of conduct for test takers. They must enter a quasi-legal relationship before they are even permitted to begin.

Much of this code is common sense. Get a good night’s sleep. Fill in bubbles completely using a number two pencil.

But some of it is deeply disturbing.

For example, students are told to “report any suspected cheating to your teacher or principal.”

They have to agree to be an informer or snitch to a government agency. My students aren’t old enough to vote or even drive a car, but they are directed to collaborate with the government against their classmates.

In addition, they are told NOT to:

-talk with others about questions on the test during or after the test.

-take notes about the test to share with others.

Students are compelled into a legalistic vow that they won’t break this code. On the test, itself, we make them fill in a bubble next to the following statement:

By marking this bubble I verify that I understand the “Code of Conduct for Test Takers” that my Test Administrator went over with me.

As a test administrator, I am not allowed to move on until all students have filled in that bubble.

Technically, we are not making them promise TO ABIDE by the code of test takers. Perhaps we lack that legal authority. We are, however, making them swear they understand it. Thus we remove ignorance as an excuse for noncompliance.

As a proctor, I have to sign a similar statement that I understand the “Ethical Standards of Test Administration.” Again, much of this is common sense, but it includes such statements as:

DO NOT:

-Discuss, disseminate or otherwise reveal contents of the test to anyone.

-Assist in, direct, aid, counsel, encourage, or fail to report any of the actions prohibited in this section.

So even teachers technically are not allowed to discuss the test and should report students or colleagues seen doing so.

And according to the “Pennsylvania System of School Assessment Directions for Administration Manuel”:

Those individuals who divulge test questions, falsify student scores, or compromise the integrity of the state assessment system in any manner will be subject to professional disciplinary action under the Professional Educator Discipline Act, 24 P.S. $ 2070. 1a et seq, including a private reprimand, a public reprimand, a suspension of their teaching certificate(s), a revocation of their teaching certificate(s), and/or a suspension or prohibition from being employed by a charter school. [emphasis added]

CORPORATE VULNERABILITY

If students were allowed to take these tests unsupervised at home, all of this legal protection would disappear.

The corporations would be much more exposed and defenseless.

THAT’S why the tests were cancelled this year.

It wasn’t because anyone rethought the value of high stakes tests – though they should have. It wasn’t because anyone had considered standardized testing’s history in the eugenics movement – which they should have. It wasn’t because anyone was worried that giving these tests would take away precious academic time – though they should have.

It was to protect the business interests that would be at risk otherwise.

THE DYSTOPIAN TESTING FUTURE

The need for proctors is a problem that the testing companies know about and are working to eliminate.

In fact, they’ve been trying to line things up in their favor for years.

Their answer is something called Competency Based Education (CBE) or Proficiency Based Education (PBE). But don’t let these names fool you. It has nothing to do with making children competent or proficient in anything except taking computer-based tests.

Paradoxically, it’s sold as a reduction in testing, but really it’s about changing the paradigm.

It’s a scheme that ed tech corporations privately call stealth assessments. Students take high stakes tests without even knowing they are doing it. They’re asked the same kinds of multiple-choice nonsense you’d find on state mandated standardized assessments but programmers make it look like a game.

This safeguards the tests because kids aren’t aware of being tested. Constant micro-assessments blend in with test prep curriculum until there is little to no difference between the two. Academics gets dumbed down to the level of multiple choice and critical thinking is redefined as asking “What does the questioner want me to think?”

Yet the results could still be used to label schools “failing” regardless of how under-resourced they are or how students are suffering the effects of poverty. Mountains of data will still be collected on your children and sold to commercial interests to better market their products.

But that’s just how it is used in schools today.

The potential is to make this a replacement for physical schools.

It’s a disaster capitalism reform tailor made for the Coronavirus age, but not yet ready for large scale implementation.

Imagine a world where there are no schools – just free range children plopped in front of a computer or an iPad and told to go learn something.

No schools, no teachers, just gangs of students walking the streets, stopping along the way to thumb messages to each other on social media, play a video game or take an on-line test.

That’s the world many ed tech entrepreneurs are trying to build.

One thing they need is a pet policy of DeVos and the Trump administration – Education Savings Accounts (ESAs).

Normally, the federal, state and local government collect taxes to fund an individual child’s education, which is then spent at a public or charter school.

However, ESAs would allow that money to go elsewhere. It could go to funding the tuition at a private or parochial school like a traditional school voucher.

Or it could be used for discrete education services provided by the ed tech industry.

It’s almost like homeschooling – without a parent or guardian in charge.

The idea is often called a learning ecosystem.

But it’s just a single person cyber school with little to no guiding principles, management or oversight.

Education is reduced to a series of badges students can earn by completing certain tasks.

Reading a book or an article gives you a badge. Answering a series of multiple-choice questions on a reading earns you more badges. And if you’ve completed a certain task satisfactorily, you can even earn a badge by teaching that same material to others.

It’s the low wage gig economy applied to education. Children would bounce from a few hours of Khan Academy videos here to a software package there and Voila! “Modern” education!

And as an added benefit, the badge structure creates a market where investors can bet and profit off of who gains badges and to what degree on the model of crypto-currencies like Bitcoin!

Make no mistake, it’s not about improving the quality of education. It’s about providing the cheapest possible alternative and selling it to the rubes as innovation.

It’s school without the school or teachers.

CONCLUSIONS

This is where the testing industry is going.

This is where we would be today if the legal framework were in place and the technology were widespread, adequate and capable of safeguarding corporate intellectual property without the need for test proctors.

In the short term, this is good news.

As long as the pandemic keeps school buildings closed or keeps them running at less than capacity, the chances of mandating high stakes testing during the crisis goes down.

On the flip side that’s detrimental to student learning in the here and now, but it does offer hope for the future. It at least opens the door to cancelling high stakes testing in 2020-21 like we did this year. And the longer we keep those tests at bay, the greater likelihood they will go away for good.

However, the people at the testing corporations are far from stupid. They know that each year we forgo the tests proves how unnecessary they are.

A coalition of six neoliberal organizations warned against cancelling the tests nationwide in March.

“As the coronavirus pandemic evolves on a daily basis, it would be premature to issue blanket national waivers from core components of the law. Thus, case-by-case consideration of each state’s needs is, at this time, most appropriate,” said a letter signed by testing industry lobbyists including John King, the former secretary of education and head of the Education Trust.

They have the future mapped out – a future with immense earnings for their companies and shareholders.

We must be fully aware of what is happening and why if we are to have any chance of opposing the next disaster and coming out of the current crisis with better school policy than we went in.

If we are to safeguard an authentic education for our children, we must learn these lessons, ourselves, now.

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AstroTurf Alert: National Parents Union is Thinly Veiled Union Busting Backed by Billionaire Cash

January 16, 2020January 16, 2020 stevenmsinger Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Bill Gates, capitalism, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Common Core, Corporate Education "Reform", Credibility, Data, Democrat, Democrats for Education Reform, Education, history, John King, Labor, Learning, Local Control, New Orleans, Obama, Opt Out, Parents, Politics, Poverty, Prejudice, privatization, Propaganda, Republican, School Choice, school closings, School Funding, Schools, small class size, Social Justice, Standardized Testing, Strike, Students, Taxation, Teachers, union busting, Unions astroturf, Bill Gates, billionaires, charter schools, Democrats for Education Reform, education, John King, Keri Rodriguez, labor, National Parents Union, Politics, public schools, schools, Shavar Jeffries, teachers, union busting, unions, Walmart, Walton Family

How do you do something disgusting without hurting your image?

If you’re the Walton Family, you hide behind a mask.

That’s what their latest AstroTurf front group is – the so-called National Parents Union (NPU).

It’s a way to bust teachers unions, destroy public schools and profit off of students behind the guise of a friendly parents organization.

Oh, it’s all funded with oodles of cash from the Walton family and other billionaires but they get to pretend to be nothing but supporters on the sidelines.

The people who bust unions before most of us have even had breakfast yet claim they have nothing to do with this anti-union movement. It is all the parents doing. The Walmart heirs just put up the money to let these parents live their dream of union free schools – as if schools where educators have no rights or intellectual freedom were somehow in the best interests of students.

The group is set to officially launch operations on Thursday, Jan. 16.

It is very different to another organization with the same name – the National Parents Union founded by Mona Davids and other New York parents. That organization which has existed since 2012 fights for the rights of students at both charter and authentic public schools and is not funded by supply side billionaires.

The NEW and unimproved National Parents Union is simply co-opting the existing organization’s name.

This shell group for corporate profiteers and union busters formally begins operating today at a meeting in New Orleans.

The site is well chosen. It’s where Hurricane Katrina allowed radical Republicans and neoliberal Democrats to demolish the public schools and replace them with a nearly all charter school district to disastrous effect. Neighborhoods were destroyed more by the redistricting than the natural disaster, many poor and minority families and teachers were forced out, and those left behind were forced to subsist on low quality schools obsessed with test prep and zero tolerance discipline policies. THIS is where NPU expects to trumpet the same policies that have devastated the Big Easy.

And it’s not just the Waltons behind the curtain.

Backers include a veritable who’s who of education disruption, school privatization, and failed programs that treat education like a floundering business that needs dismantling and fed to vulture capitalists.

We’ve got Barack Obama’s former education secretary John King who now serves as president and CEO of The Education Trust – itself an AstroTurf standardized testing lobbying firm funded by another billionaire, Bill Gates.

King has a record of union busting and corporate collaboration at the expense of children and parents. He was also New York Commissioner of Education, where he refused to fix a school system he was responsible for destroying all the while pointing his finger at teachers. He tied teacher evaluations to unproven and inferior Common Core tests, approved an obviously fraudulent charter school run by an obviously fraudulent con man, ignored and dismissed parents at various education forums, and sparked the largest opt out movement in the country.

And don’t forget Shavar Jeffries, the president of Democrats for Education Reform (DFER) – a right wing school privatization lobbying firm that pretends to represent progressives. DFER is notorious for laundering billionaire cash and trying to make its initiatives look like they come from the grass roots. The organization is bankrolled by Rupert Murdoch and other conservative billionaires. It’s so antithetical to the Democratic Party platform that the California and Colorado Democratic State Assemblies voted to demand DFER remove “Democrat” from its name.

However, DFER demurred and continues to pass itself off as part of a political movement that wants nothing to do with it.

In similar fashion, NPU is lead by Keri Rodriguez. She’s on the advisory board of DFER.

But she also spearheaded an effort to set up a referendum in Massachusetts to raise the cap on charter schools in 2016. The measure would have allowed a dozen new charters every year forever, located wherever they chose. But voters overwhelmingly defeated the proposition.

All of these individuals have deep ties to the Walton Family.

You might even say they are puppets of the oligarch family.

In just 2018 alone, the Walton Family Foundation awarded more than $595 million in grants, according to its own financial reports, much of which funded the efforts of the same folks behind NPU.

Rodrigues’ school privatization lobbyist group, Massachusetts Parents United, got more than $886,000 just in two years – 2017 and 2018.

Maurice Cunningham, a Dark Money investigator, estimates the total is up to at least $1 million by now.

If we add DFER and other NPU associated groups, Walton funding tops at least $5 million for the fiscal year 2018, alone.

But somehow NPU expects us to believe this is a parent lead movement.

The facts don’t back it up.

In 2018, the country was rocked by a wave of teacher walkouts mostly in red states beginning with West Virginia. In every state parents and students overwhelmingly supported the teachers.

The movement to fight for better working conditions for educators is also a fight to increase learning conditions for students.

Teachers aren’t just fighting for higher wages. They’re fighting for smaller class sizes, more tutors, counselors and librarians. They’re fighting for more funding and resources for students. They’re fighting for relief from school privatization and high stakes standardized testing.

In short, teachers, parents and students are fighting against exactly the same kind of nonsense the Walmart heirs are hoping they can get the gullible public to believe parents actually really, REALLY want.

It’s ridiculous when you look at it.

The same company that pays poverty wages wants you to believe parents support policies that help enable low paychecks.

The same billionaires terrified their workers will unionize want you to believe that parents barely making ends meet are also horrified that people like them might have dignity at work.

The same corporation making record profits wants you to believe that hurting the people who volunteer to help your kids learn will somehow help them learn better.

A National Parents Union that’s anti-teacher and pro-corporation is like Chickens for McNuggets.

They think you’re that stupid.

And if these rich folks continue to get their way, they’ll ensure that the next generation is as dumb as they hope we are today.

Like this post? I’ve written a book, “Gadfly on the Wall: A Public School Teacher Speaks Out on Racism and Reform,” now available from Garn Press. Ten percent of the proceeds go to the Badass Teachers Association. Check it out!

Charter School Teacher Introduces Elizabeth Warren at Rally

June 4, 2019June 7, 2019 stevenmsinger Accountability, Bernie Sanders, Betsy DeVos, California, capitalism, Charter Schools, church and state, Civil Rights, Corporate Education "Reform", Democrat, Donald Trump, Education, Election, Elizabeth Warren, John King, Labor, Network for Public Education, Politics, privatization, Republican, School Choice, School Funding, school vouchers, Schools, Standardized Testing, Students, Teach for America, Teachers, Toxic Testing, union busting, Unions, voting 2020, California, charter schools, Corporate Education Reform, corporate school reform, Election, Elizabeth Warren, Go Public Schools Oakland, Oakland, Politics, President, standardized testing, Teach for America

CORRECTION:

In the first draft of this article, I called Sonya Mehta a “Charter School Lobbyist” in the title. On further examination of the facts, I realize this is unfair. She was a charter school TEACHER. I apologize to Ms. Mehta and truly regret any harm I have done her. I have changed the title to better reflect the facts. However, be advised that the text of the article, itself, has remained almost completely unchanged. Everything in the article is true to the best of my knowledge and backed up with sources that the reader can see by following the links in the text. My concern remains centered on Warren and what exactly her intentions are via education policy.

The biggest news from Elizabeth Warren’s rally in Oakland, California, on Friday wasn’t what she said.

It was who introduced her and what that says about Warren and her 2020 Presidential campaign.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, “Warren was introduced by Sonya Mehta, a former Oakland schoolteacher.”

However, this characterization is inaccurate.

Mehta was not an authentic public school teacher. She taught in a non-union charter school called “Learning Without Limits.” She also was a policy fellow at GO Public Schools Oakland, which is a toxic charter promoter focused around that city.

In her introduction, Mehta didn’t explicitly advocate for school privatization. She promoted Warren’s early education and free college policies (Her speech can be seen here beginning at 57:30). But why would Warren, one of the smartest and most knowledgeable candidates in the race for the White House, let herself be associated with such a divisive and toxic legacy?

Only 6% of all U.S. students attend charter schools, yet with little accountability, selective enrollment, and the ability to pocket taxpayer money as profit, they cannibalize the funding necessary for the 90% that attend authentic public schools.

Warren should know better than this. Along with Bernie Sanders, Warren sits on the Senate Education Committee (HELP – Health, Education, Labor, Pensions).

So the question is this: was this a mistake made by her campaign staff or is this indicative of where Warren is on education policy?

She has said some very positive things in this campaign, not the least of which is that if elected, she would nominate someone with teaching experience as Secretary of Education.

But if Mehta is what she thinks an authentic teacher looks like, we are in big trouble.

We don’t need another Betsy Devos or Arne Duncan clone who just so happens to have taught at a regressive charter school. In fact, we already had that, too, in John King.

Sadly, that’s not even where the story ends.

Warren’s senior education policy advisor is Josh Delaney, a Teach for America temp who turned a 5-week crash course in education into two years in the classroom and then a career as an “expert” on our schools.

This is simply not acceptable for anyone courting education voters.

You can’t go to Oakland, a city which just experienced a massive teacher strike caused by school privatization, and then let yourself be introduced by someone with ties to school privatization!

Go Public Schools Oakland, the organization Mehta is associated with, is the major charter organization in city battling the union.

Who knows if Warren was intending to take sides on this issue, but she certainly seems to be signaling that if she did, it might not be with parents, teachers and students. It could be with the hedge fund billionaires backing school privatization.

How can she be so strong against these same people when it comes to Wall Street and economic inequality but appear completely ignorant (at best) or disingenuous (at worst) when it comes to school policy?

A look at Warren’s stated education policies over her history in public life doesn’t exactly calm the waters, either.

According to the Network for Public Education, Warren holds some regressive views when it comes to our schools.

The non-profit gives her a C on charter schools.

She has spoken out against some of the worst excesses of the industry, but supports the concept of schools that are publicly financed but privately operated.

In 2016 Warren strongly opposed lifting the cap on charter schools in Massachusetts. In 2017, Senator Warren expressed deep concern regarding the “waste, fraud, and abuse of federal money” at the hands of for-profit charter schools and charter school management organizations.

Unfortunately, she also praised the charter industry:

“Many charter schools in Massachusetts are producing extraordinary results for our students, and we should celebrate the hard work of those teachers and spread what’s working to other schools.”

Warren earned a B for her stance on school vouchers.

She had the courage to criticize DeVos, but her history with the concept of using public money to finance private education is complicated.

In a 2017 letter to DeVos, prior to her confirmation as Secretary of education, Senator Warren said the evidence on private school vouchers is “mixed at best” and called them “expensive and dangerous failures that cost taxpayers billions of dollars while destroying public education systems.”

However, back in 2003, she seems to have thought differently. She wrote a book with her daughter called “The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers and Fathers are Going Broke.” In it, she makes a case for a universal school voucher program. She strongly supported giving parents taxpayer-funded vouchers they could use at any school – public, private or parochial. This would “relieve parents from the terrible choice of leaving their kids in lousy schools or bankrupting themselves to escape those schools.”

Later she said she never meant those vouchers to be used at private schools, but that is unclear from the text.

However, as spotty as Warren’s history is on school privatization, it is much worse when it comes to high stakes testing.

The Network for Public Education gives her a F on this issue.

In 2015, as Congress debated rolling back high stakes testing requirements that have unfairly assessed students for decades and used test scores as an excuse to deny poor and minority students the resources they need to succeed, Warren demanded testing stay in place. Along with three Democratic senators endorsed by Democrats for Education Reform (DFER), a lobbyist organization for the testing and school privatization industry, she insisted on stronger accountability measures based on testing to gain their support for the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA).

Let me be clear: none of this is intended to be a purity test.

If the only candidate we can support is a perfect one, we will never find any politician to support.

But Warren has to make a decision whose side she is on.

At very least, she needs to come out and make a public statement clarifying her views here. She needs to say that she does not support charter schools or vouchers. Shouldn’t every Democratic candidate who wants the votes of educators do that?

Watch the whole rally here. Mehta’s introduction begins at 57:30.

NEWSFLASH: Betsy DeVos Opens Mouth. Nonsense Falls Out

March 30, 2017 stevenmsinger Accountability, Arne Duncan, Betsy DeVos, Campaign Donations, Charter Schools, Corporate Education "Reform", Credibility, Donald Trump, Education, John King, Media, Politics, Poverty, privatization, Propaganda, Republican, School Choice, School Funding, school vouchers, Schools, Standardized Testing, Teachers Betsy DeVos, Corporate Education Reform, Donald Trump, education, education reform, international test scores, NAEP, PISA

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Betsy DeVos opened her mouth-hole today and a load of crap fell out.

And somehow that’s news!

Our federal Education Secretary said Wednesday, “I’m not sure how [U.S. public schools] could get a lot worse on a nationwide basis than they are today.”

Let’s add that to the list of things she’s already admitted she’s not sure of:

-Whether charter and voucher schools should be held to the same standards as traditional public schools.

-Whether guns belong on school campuses in reach of children.

-Whether the Department of Education should protect students with special needs.

-Whether the Individuals With Disabilities Act is a federal law (Spoiler Alert: It IS!).

-Oh! And what the heck’s the difference between proficiency and growth?

This woman is an idiot. Worse – she’s a rich idiot.

She only holds this office because she bought off the entire Republican Party and she still needed a historic tie breaking vote by the vice-president to get confirmed!

Why are we publishing a thing she says as anything other than standup comedy?

She knows nothing about public schools. She never went to them as a student. She never sent her own children to them. In fact, she only started visiting them in her official role as Secretary of Education!

Yet she has spent her entire life bribing policymakers to replace public schools with charter and voucher schools.

She is a saleswoman for privatization and she thinks public schools suck.

Well whoop-de-do!

They say opinions are like assholes. Everyone’s got one.

What makes DeVos’ opinion worth anything more than yours or mine?

Nothing.

But since you asked, there is a heck of a lot that makes our opinion better than hers.

Ninety percent of Americans have actually attended public schools. Ninety percent send their own children to public schools. And though popular opinion of public schools nationwide has suffered after an endless barrage of corporate propaganda against them, most people have a very high view of their own neighborhood school.

So if the media wants to publish a valuable opinion about public schools, they should publish what almost anyone ELSE has to say other than Betsy DeVos.

What does a Flat Earther have to say about constructing a globe? WHO CARES?

What does a skeptic about the moon landing have to say about NASA? WHO GIVES A CRAP?

What does Betsy DeVos have to say about public schools?

NO ONE CARES.

But fine. I’ll bite. Why does the billionaire heiress think our public schools stink?

She trots out the usual nonsense about international test scores:

“I mean, the fact that our PISA scores have continued to deteriorate as compared to the rest of the world and that we’ve seen stagnant at best results with the NAEP scores over the years. I’m not sure we can deteriorate a whole lot.”

First of all, she’s wrong about the facts.

PISA scores did not deteriorate. Like NAEP scores, they’ve remained pretty much the same for all the decades we’ve been making these comparisons.

Internationally, our test scores have always been in the middle of the pack. And that shouldn’t be surprising.

We provide every child with an education. Many of the countries we’re compared with internationally don’t. That means we’re going to have lower test scores. You’re comparing ALL of our kids with only the best academic achievers in Asia, Scandinavia and other countries.

Add to that the overwhelming child poverty rate in the United States – something completely absent in most of these other nations we’re being measured against. Obviously our poorer kids who get fewer resources than your richer kids won’t do as well on standardized tests. You’re not comparing apples-to-apples. And whenever you make the adjustment for poverty, our students score at the top of the scale!

I’m not saying we can’t improve. There’s plenty we could be doing such as providing more resources for our poor and minority students. But opportunists like DeVos have always tried to use this test score myth to justify destroying the public school system and giving it away to private interests.

Betsy, please just stop. The blatant ignorance coming out of your mouth hurts. It’s embarrassing.

But perhaps there is a silver lining here. We’re used to hearing these lies from more credible sources. Before becoming Education Secretary, Arne Duncan and John King had advanced degrees. They ran major metropolitan school systems. DeVos is just rich.

And having such an obvious fool repeat these same lies pulls back the curtain.

There is no longer any question about their veracity.

Good luck trying to fool people with this same snake oil anymore. Just by opening her mouth, DeVos has poisoned the entire corporate school reform narrative.

Thanks, Betsy!

Congress Frees Public Schools From Federal Test & Punish – Where’s the Catch?

March 12, 2017March 12, 2017 stevenmsinger Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Common Core, Congress, Corporate Education "Reform", Credibility, Democrat, Donald Trump, Education, Every Student Succeeds Act, Gerrymandering, John King, Local Control, Obama, Parents, Politics, President, privatization, Racism, Republican, School Choice, school closings, school segregation, school vouchers, Schools, segregation, Standardized Testing, Teach for America, Teachers, VAM Betsy DeVos, Donald Trump, education, ESSA, Lamar Alexander, Politics, Senate, Students, transparency

Trump+Selection+Education+Secretary+Betsy+kBaA0SDAd_tx

Let’s say you were kidnapped and kept in a small basement room where you were routinely beaten and starved.

Then after years of this treatment, your captors brought in a massage table and offered you a filet mignon after your spa treatment.

You’d be more than a little bit confused.

That’s the position of parents, students and teachers today.

After almost two decades of punishing public schools and their students for low test scores, Congress suddenly decides to step back and leave it to the states!?

Until now the federal government had mandated increasing high stakes standardized tests and forcing schools that don’t meet a certain threshold to be stripped of their school boards, turned into charters or simply closed. Until now, the federal government coerced states to enact every fly-by-night corporate education reform from Common Core to Teach for America to evaluating teachers based on student test scores.

But now the feds are just walking away!?

First, in 2015 lawmakers passed the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), a reauthorization of federal K-12 education policy that (depending on how you interpret it) limited federal power over public schools. However, the Obama administration offered guidelines that put much of that federal power back in place.

Now both the House and Senate have voted to repeal those Obama administration guidelines in favor of… well… some other interpretation.

Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tennessee), chairman of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee and one of the architects of the ESSA, says states can just follow what’s written in the law. But this is a 1,061 page document full of legalese, meandering bipartisan compromises and – frankly – contradictory language. Even the most simple legislation needs interpretation, and in this case it needs extensive interpretation.

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is expected to offer her take on what all this means by Monday. So buckle up for that one. I’m sure the nation’s Grizzlies are so upset they can barely finish their picnic baskets.

As for the rest of us, it’s hard to know what this all will mean.

Alexander offered a detailed explanation that anyone interested in this issue should read.

I’m no fan of the Senator’s. I think he’s a blatant opportunist, an unapologetic partisan and out to protect only one person – numero uno.

But he makes some excellent points about federal overreach in the Department of Education under the previous two administrations.

Moreover, unlike DeVos, the supremely unqualified Education Secretary he helped ram through Congress over bipartisan objections, he knows something about schools. He was Secretary of Education, himself, from 1991-93 under President George H. W. Bush.

First, the ESSA still mandates annual testing. Even without the Obama guidelines, students will still be tested in grades 3-8 and once in high school.

Second, Alexander says the law still requires each state to hold its public schools accountable. Each state must submit a plan detailing how it intends to do that by September of 2017. There is plenty of latitude on exactly how states will do this, but whatever they decide, this new accountability system must be implemented by next school year (2017-2018).

Moreover, he says, states have to identify and provide support to at least the lowest performing 5% of their schools. This must be done by the beginning of the 2018-2019 school year.

They also must use academic and English language proficiency indicators in their accountability systems. Which indicators? Standardized testing? Maybe – maybe not.

Many accountability provisions, such as the requirement that educators measure reading scores, math scores, and graduation rates, are specifically mentioned in the ESSA.

Still, many questions remain.

For instance: if the Department of Education isn’t allowed to tell states what to do, how is it supposed to help them comply with the law?

Alexander cites “Non-regulatory guidance; Dear Colleague letters; Frequently-Asked-Questions documents; Webinars, phone calls, and in-person conferences.”

Alexander stresses that repealing the Obama regulations does not open to door for the Department of Education to mandate a nationwide school voucher plan – unfortunately.

He writes, “A school choice program cannot be unilaterally created by the Department of Education. Only Congress could create a voucher program, and, unfortunately, Congress has rejected doing that.”

However, the Trump administration and DeVos have already made their intentions known about school vouchers. They intend to use Title I dollars – money usually earmarked for the most impoverished students – as federal bribes to enact vouchers. It’s basically the same thing Obama did with Race to the Top – promising federal money to states if their schools do what the feds want them to do.

For all his talk about states rights, Alexander appears to have no problems with this same kind of Obama-style coercion.

But he does appear to be correct about the transfer of power.

Apparently, the states really will regain control over their public schools.

This could be a very positive thing. And it’s not the only one.

In addition to repealing Obama’s accountability regulations, Congress scrapped Obama’s teacher preparation rules.

This change was less controversial. Eight Democrats joined Republicans in voting to repeal the teacher preparation regulations. By comparison, no Democrats voted to dismantle the accountability rules and one Republican joined them in opposition.

The teacher preparation rules were released in October after years of delay.

The main point of contention was the requirement that states develop a rating system aimed at evaluating the success of their teacher preparation programs. This would have included how programs’ teachers perform based on a measure of student academic achievement. Though the final version gained some flexibility with how to determine student academic success beyond just test scores, it remained a hot mess.

Any programs that didn’t perform well on the state’s rating system would have lost access to federal grants aimed at supporting teachers who work in high-need certification areas and in low-income schools (or TEACH grants). In effect, it would have pushed for a new generation of teachers dedicated to test prep and Common Core.

And these repeals of Obama regulations – these seeming improvements just waiting for Donald Trump’s signature – are brought to us by the same people who support removing protections for trans students. These are the same legislators who gave us an unexperienced mega-donor as Education Secretary.

Frankly, I’m having trouble believing it.

I hope I’m wrong, but I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Perhaps the standardized testing industry has consolidated so much support at the various Republican controlled state legislatures that it no longer needs support in Washington. Perhaps our ridiculously gerrymandered state legislative districts will make any resistance even more difficult. Perhaps a completely toothless Department of Education will embolden the most racist state legislators to dramatically increase segregation and civil rights abuses for the poor and minorities.

Or perhaps Republicans actually got one right?

Betsy DeVos and the Cowardice of Republicans

February 7, 2017 stevenmsinger Accountability, Arne Duncan, Betsy DeVos, Campaign Donations, Charter Schools, Common Core, Congress, Corporate Education "Reform", Democrat, Donald Trump, Education, Election, Gerrymandering, Green Party, John King, Obama, Parents, Pennsylvania, Politics, President, privatization, protest, Republican, School Choice, school vouchers, Schools, Standardized Testing, Teachers, voting

Betsy DeVos testifies before the Senate Health, Education and Labor Committee confirmation hearing

“If all your friends jumped off a bridge, would you, too?”

If you’re a Senate Republican, the answer is apparently “YES!”

Otherwise, why would all but two such lawmakers vote to confirm Betsy DeVos, the most unqualified candidate for Education Secretary in U.S. history?

During a hearing of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP), DeVos showed herself to be hopelessly out of her depth.

She wouldn’t commit to protecting students with special needs.

She wouldn’t commit to keeping guns out of school campuses (because of rampaging Grizzlies).

She wouldn’t commit to holding charter and voucher schools to the same standards as traditional public schools.

She didn’t know the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) was a federal law.

And she couldn’t explain the difference between proficiency and growth, two extremely common education terms.

Yet only Republican Sens. Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) and Susan Collins (Maine) joined all Democrats to vote against her. It took Vice President Mike Pence to cast the deciding vote and break the 50-50 tie – the first time that has happened for a Cabinet position.

This is a classic example of money speaking louder than people.

DeVos is a Republican mega-donor. She’s given $200 million to GOP candidates over the years – including many of the Senators who voted to confirm her.

Constituents flooded Senator’s phone lines in the past week, demanding they vote against DeVos. The progressive network CREDO Action received over 1.4 million signatures on a petition opposing DeVos ― the most a petition from the organization has ever received.

In a satirical move, Katherine Fritz, a Philadelphia teacher started a GoFundMe page to “buy back” Sen. Pat Toomey’s (R-PA) support of DeVos. Though the stunt generated more than $71,000, Toomey still voted for the woman who gave him $60,500 in campaign funds.

Sen. John McCain (Arizona), known as a maverick, also voted along with the crowd. He has the courage to speak up against Donald Trump’s advocacy of torture – having endured it, himself, as a POW during WWII – but when it comes to our nation’s children, he chose to hide behind his party.

At least the Democrats showed a little bit of life, having held the Senate floor for 24 hours straight before the vote. Ostensibly this was to pressure another Republican to join their side, but they had to know it was merely a stunt. If Republicans refused to listen to their own constituents for this long, another 24 hours probably wouldn’t have mattered that much.

To be fair, Democrats deserve a lot of the blame for what happened – for everything that happens under President Steve Bannon – I mean Trump. It was their hubris, political weakness and willingness to go further and further right that gave us this disaster. Not only couldn’t they defeat the least popular Presidential candidate in history this November, they paved the way for much of the corporate education reform we can expect from the DeVos administration.

Both of President Barack Obama’s Education Secretaries were clearly more knowledgeable and qualified than DeVos. But they all think public schools should be run like businesses. They all think the way to improve public schools is to make them less public – more charter schools, more Common Core, more standardized testing. They’ve all given up on committing to quality schools and instead push choice – as if choice and quality were somehow the same. They aren’t.

When Democrats don’t show a strong contrast to Republicans, Republicans win. After all, why would someone vote for a Conservative-wannabe when they can just as easily have the real thing?

However, there is a ray of hope.

This fight has shown that a considerable grassroots network exists to both fight Trump and to champion public education.

What the Trump administration is doing is not at the behest of the people of the United States. He is a rogue leader who only gained power because of antiquated election laws, gerrymandering and the appalling weakness of corporate Democrats.

Already the grassroots has pushed the Democrats to wake up and actually fight for things again. Admittedly, it’s been too little too late. It remains to be seen whether the party has enough life in it to pose a real resistance to the Trump status quo.

But if it can’t, the people will not be contained. We will start our own third party from the ground up.

The pushback against DeVos shows that the resistance is out there. It shows our strength.

We just need to turn that into real victories. We have two years until the midterm elections and four years until we send Trump packing (assuming he doesn’t implode first).

If I were one of the Senate Republicans who voted for DeVos, I would not feel at all safe about my chances for re-election.

Ignorance and Arrogance – the Defining Characteristics of the Betsy DeVos Hearing

January 18, 2017 stevenmsinger Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Campaign Donations, Charter Schools, Common Core, Congress, Corporate Education "Reform", Credibility, Democrat, Donald Trump, Education, Gun Control, Guns, John King, Obama, Politics, President, privatization, Republican, School Choice, school vouchers, Schools, Teachers children, education, Politics, Students, teaching, transparency

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Betsy DeVos wouldn’t commit to protecting students with special needs.

She wouldn’t commit to keeping guns out of school campuses.

She wouldn’t commit to holding charter and voucher schools to the same standards as traditional public schools.

She didn’t know the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) was a federal law.

And she couldn’t explain the difference between proficiency and growth.

That’s your nominee for Secretary of Education, America!

During a hearing of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) tonight, DeVos showed herself to be hopelessly out of her depth.

She tried to cover her ignorance by being noncommittal. But it was obvious that she had no idea what she was talking about more than half the time.

And far from being a fair arbiter, Senator Lamar Alexander, the Republican chairperson of the committee, did everything he could to shield her from further embarrassment. He artificially limited each member of the committee to only five minutes of questions.

Why? Because in the past the committee had fewer questions for President Barack Obama’s nominees for the position, Arne Duncan and John King.

What a farce! Duncan and King were terrible Education Secretaries, but at least they had some experience in the field! Duncan was Superintendent of Chicago Public Schools. King started his own charter school and was New York Commissioner of Education.

Betsy DeVos was never anything. She has never held a real job. She’s never had a job interview, nor has she ever been hired by anyone!

Her entire portfolio is being a rich Republican mega-donor. All she’s ever done is use her and her family’s obscene fortune to push for school vouchers, remove charter school accountability, advocate for Common Core and persecute LGBT people.

Of course there will be more questions! It’s not because she’s a Republican or that she was nominated by GOP President-elect Donald Trump!

It’s because she’s a twit!

Moreover, she hasn’t yet been cleared of conflicts of interest from the ethics commission nor have her financial disclosures been made public.

But no worries. Big Daddy Alexander was there to protect her from Senators on both sides of the aisle who had pointed questions for her about her experience, knowledge and about what she planned to do to public education if confirmed.

Never in the history of this nation has a more unqualified candidate been presented for such an important job.

How ironic that under the Trump administration we’re presented with a potential Education Secretary so in need of education, herself!

It’s an insult to the nation’s parents, students and teachers.

So how did she even get here?

Money.

She’s given nearly $2.7 million in political donations to 370 individuals and causes over the past 20 years through 819 total contributions, according to the National Institute on Money in State Politics. A little more than $2 million of that has gone to Republican candidates or causes, while a mere $8,000 went to Democratic candidates or groups.

That includes at least five members of the HELP Committee who will get to vote on her nomination. Sen. Tim Scott (R–SC) has received $49,200 from the DeVos family and was a keynote speaker at DeVos’ American Federation for Children annual summit in May 2016. Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) has received at least $70,200 from the DeVoses. Two other HELP committee members, Sens. Richard Burr (R-NC) and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), each have received $43,200 from the family. Newly elected Sen. Todd Young (R-IN) got $48,600 from the DeVos family in 2016.

However, those are just direct donations. Ten members of the HELP committee have received donations from Alticor Political Action Committee, or ALTIPAC. This PAC belongs to Alticor, the DeVos family company and parent company of Amway—the multilevel marketing giant that fueled the DeVos family fortune—and receives nearly half of its funds from the DeVos family. This includes Sen. Alexander, himself, who received $4,500 from ALTIPAC.

Devos has been rather upfront in the past about why she’s donated so much money to politicians.

In a 1997 op-ed she wrote for the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call, DeVos explained: “[M]y family is the largest single contributor of soft money to the national Republican party… I have decided, however, to stop taking offense at the suggestion that we are buying influence. Now, I simply concede the point… We expect a return on our investment.”

This is something she shares with Trump, who has also bragged about paying for influence with his own campaign donations. “I’ve given to everybody. Because that was my job,” Trump bragged at a rally last January. “I gotta give it to them. Because when I want something, I get it. When I call, they kiss my ass.”

That’s what we saw tonight on Capital Hill. It wasn’t a confirmation hearing. It was a bunch of bought politicians lining up to kiss DeVos’ white privileged butt.

There was resistance, but to what end?

Reason, knowledge, ethics – none of that matters here. We are truly in the age of the plutocrats where money has arrogantly attempted to buy governmental power outright. Right in front of our noses.

Only time will tell if she is ultimately confirmed.

In the meantime, our system of public education hangs in the balance.

Goodbye, 2016, and Good Riddance – Top 10 Blog Post by Me From a Crappy Year

December 27, 2016December 28, 2016 stevenmsinger #BlackLivesMatter, Accountability, Antonin Scalia, Arne Duncan, Bernie Sanders, Betsy DeVos, bloggers, Charter Schools, Child Predators, Civil Rights, Congress, Corporate Education "Reform", Democrat, Donald Trump, Education, Hillary Clinton, John King, John Podesta, Journalism, Labor, Local Control, Media, Obama, Parents, Politics, Prejudice, President, privatization, Propaganda, Racism, Republican, School Choice, School Funding, school segregation, school vouchers, Schools, segregation, Standardized Testing, Teachers, union busting, Unions, White Allies, White Fragility, White Privilege 2016, 2017, blogs, children, culture, education, end of the year, Politics, Students, teaching, year in review

Is it just me or did 2016 really stink?

Both personally and publicly, it was a year I’d rather not revisit. I lost family. I lost idols (RIP, David Bowie and Prince). And we lost a horrible, protracted Presidential election.

But as has become a tradition, I find myself in front of the computer compelled to compile this list of the best of my own writings.

It would be easy to just say nothing much of value happened in 2016 so let’s just move on. But that wouldn’t be true.

There were good things. I’m just stumped to remember many of them right now. Perhaps as time goes on we’ll look back fondly on a smattering of events from this year that was. Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature. That was kinda cool. There were some decent movies and a heck of a lot of good TV shows. The Arrival, Star Trek Beyond, Deadpool… Game of Thrones, American Horror Story, two excellent series about O. J. Simpson. We got a Harry Potter sequel of sorts – and another movie! I thought “Underground Airlines” by Ben H. Winters was quite good. We got an amazing musical in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s “Hamilton.” Technically it opened in 2015, but it swept the Tonys this year. And hey! We stopped the Dakota Access Pipeline – for now.

It was certainly a productive year for blogging.

There was so much to write about.

This little education and civil rights blog went into overtime. I almost doubled traffic to the Website and got 2,145 more followers for a total of 11,335.

Gadflyonthewallblog, or if you prefer Gadfly on the Wall Blog, has been going strong since July 2014. In those two and a half years, I’ve gotten 849,000 hits – 363,000 just this year, alone. I also increased the number of posts I write a year. Last year, I only managed about 90 posts. This year it was 120 posts – a full 30 additional articles.

I hope you’ve enjoyed them. I hope you’ve found them valuable.

Sometimes readers send me a note saying that they’re going to share this post or that post with their school board or their representative in the House or Senate. I’m always very flattered to hear that something I wrote is helping someone else fight for what’s right. Of course, I do get a lot of hate mail, too. No death threats yet, but it’s getting awfully close. Readers have wished I was dead, but no one has offered to give me that little push to the other side.

I hope that no matter what your reaction, you’ll remember these are just the writings of a humble public school teacher and father. No one pays me, though sometimes I do get donations for the right to reprint something elsewhere. I write all this stuff because I have to. So few people seem to care what people like me have to say – even in my own profession. Like many others, I’ve stopped waiting to be asked.

So for your end of the year amusement, I offer this top ten list of my most popular writing from 2016. And here’s to a better 2017.

10) F is for Friedrichs… and Freeloader: A Supreme Court Nightmare

Published: January

Views: 5,550

Description: Some crazy lady didn’t want to pay the union for benefits that she got as a member and didn’t want to give them up. And rich folks everywhere had her back. They slobbered all over and pushed forward a bull crap case through the Supreme Court that probably would have made it much more difficult for labor unions everywhere had not Justice Antonin Scalia died deadlocking the vote. This article was my attempt to show how absolutely absurd the argument was against being forced to pay for something that benefits you.

Fun Fact: Now that Congress blocked President Obama’s Constitutional right to appoint a replacement for Scalia, and Donald Trump will probably get to pick a replacement, look for a similar case to come down the pike and win! Oh, 2016, will you ever truly leave?

9) The Charter School Swindle – Selling Segregation to Blacks and Latinos

Published: June

Views: 6,489

Description: Charter school promoters often sell these institutions to minorities as being “Separate but Equal.” Hm. Didn’t Brown v. Board outlaw that kind of practice because if schools were separate, they usually were anything but equal? This article is my attempt to explain how charter marketers are really selling minorities on segregation and trying to talk them out of their own civil rights.

Fun Fact: During the Obama years, it was common practice to sell corporate education reform as a way of increasing civil rights while it actually violated them. It will be interesting to see if that rhetoric gets left behind in the Trump years when lawmakers already seem to have little interest in them at all.

8) ‘We’re Sorry Teachers are Unfairly Blamed’ says John King – Man Responsible for Unfairly Blaming Teachers

Published: February

Views: 6,832

Description: When John King became temporary Secretary of Education, he went on an apology tour telling educators that the federal government was sorry for how terribly it had treated teachers. In particular, he was sorry the department had blamed educators for societal problems that our schools need to fix without giving them the resources necessary to actually correct them. However, King was personally guilty of many of these same practices in his old job in New York. It was typical disingenuousness from the Obama administration and the Democrats – ignore and abuse their key constituents until election time and then make positive noises in their general direction hoping we’d support them at the polls.

Fun Fact: It didn’t work.

7) Bernie Sanders is Right: We Should Federalize Public School Funding

Published: January

Views: 6,947

Description: The way we fund public schools in this country is messed up. In many states, we rely heavily on local property taxes which result in poor communities being substantially underfunded and rich ones having more than enough of everything. In most of the world, funding is done much differently – the burden is handled mostly by the federal government who then distributes it equitably from place-to-place. Bernie Sanders proved he was the real deal by suggesting we do the same thing here in the US, a suggestion that no one in either party was ready for.

Fun Fact: Even some of my readers were uncomfortable with this one. They feared that if the federal government took responsibility for funding, it would increase their ability to micromanage local school districts. This is a fair concern, but there is a way to do this without increasing federal control of education policy, just funding. In any case, funding disparity is an issue that hardly ever even gets acknowledged less than discussed. Thank you, Bernie!

6) Summer Break – the Least Understood and Most Maligned Aspect of a Teacher’s Life

Published: June

Views: 7,429

Description: Just about every teacher gets crap from non-educators about summer break. Everyone thinks they know what it’s like to be a teacher and how easy we’ve got it. This post was my way of shutting up the ignorant. It explains why educators aren’t teaching in summer, what they’re actually doing and how the public benefits from giving teachers this time. Share it with someone you love.

Fun Fact: Or just shut someone up with it.

5) Hillary Clinton’s Campaign Manager is a Longtime Corporate Education Reformer

Published: March

Views: 9,268

Description: Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, John Podesta, is not a nice man. I unearthed a speech he gave to corporate school reformers including Jeb Bush in 2012 where he pledges his allegiance to conservative, market-driven school policies. And THIS is the guy who was influencing Hillary’s approach just like he influenced Obama’s when he worked on that campaign. Legend has it, Podesta is responsible for giving us Arne Duncan. He suggested Duncan over Obama’s campaign education advisor Linda Darling Hammond, a critic of high stakes testing. These were truths that needed to be told and tell them I did.

Fun Fact: That this came out was a huge embarrassment to the Clinton campaign. All they could do was suppress it. Even dedicated supporters who read the article had to admit that she would probably not be very good for education – but she’d be better than Trump. It’s these kinds of Faustian bargains that derailed her campaign. How much better off we would have been had we had a real progressive to vote for than just another Democrat in Name Only!

4) What Antonin Scalia’s Death Means to the People I Love

Published: February

Views: 14,001

Description: Scalia was a terrible Supreme Court judge who used his position to justify hurting a lot of people. While others tried to hide their excitement at his passing, I let mine show. It might not be nice to say, but the world is a better place without him in it. I had hoped my honesty would make it harder for anyone like him to ever reach that office again. Unfortunately, weak Democrats and an incoming Republican President mean his replacement will probably be just as bad as he was.

Fun Fact: Originally my title was much more provocative – something like “Antonin Scalia was a Terrible Person and I’m Glad He is Dead.” It got over 10,000 hits in a few hours, but then I reconsidered and changed the title. People almost immediately stopped reading it.

3) Without Black Culture There Would Be No American Culture

Published: June

Views: 15,519

Description: We often talk about black people as victims. Police brutality, civil rights violations, economic disparities – but this is only half of the story. There is a buried history of success that rarely gets mentioned. Think of what American culture would look like without black people. It would be something completely different. This was my attempt to tip my hat at the incredible ways black Americans have made their mark on our society especially in the field of music.

Fun Fact: Black Twitter really liked this article. It was especially gratifying to see how appreciative people were. Of course, at the same time, some folks’ white fragility couldn’t handle it, either. Some readers tried to bully me into making changes here or there for no reason other than that it made black people look too good. Sorry, folks, no one determines what I put on this blog but me.

2) The Essential Selfishness of School Choice

Published: November

Views: 40,268

Description: School choice is less an education policy than a propaganda effort. Most people don’t understand what it really is. They don’t understand how essentially selfish it is like cutting a piece of pie from the middle of the dish so no one else can get a whole slice. I tried here in the most simple, direct language I could to explain why.

Fun Fact: With the nomination of Betsy DeVos for Education Secretary and Trumps’ promise to spread school choice across the land like a Trump University franchise, the article remains popular. A lot of readers told me that it helped make sense of the issue for them for the first time. No doubt it’s been sent to policymakers across the nation. And it all started when I saw that picture of a ruined pumpkin pie on Reddit. I started to think – isn’t that a lot like school choice?

1) Top 10 Reasons School Choice is No Choice

Published: January

Views: 77,139

Description: Both Democrats and Republicans love school choice. So I thought that real education advocates needed a quick list of the main reasons why it is bad policy. There’s nothing really new or amazing here. We’ve known this for decades, but this keeps getting brought up again and again like zombie legislation. The wealthy will push this forward whether we want it or not. There’s just too much money they can make if it passes. That’s why it’s good to know why what they’re peddling is so harmful to students, parents and communities. Consider it ammunition for quick come backs.

Fun Fact: I wrote this long before the Trump administration was a prospect to be taken seriously. This was long before DeVos or the Donald pledged to bring this to the national stage. It has continuously gotten a steady flow of hits since it was published. If my goal as a blogger is to be useful, I think this post more than any other written this year fits the bill. You can quibble with one or two points here, but all ten are enough to show any rational person why school choice is no choice.

The Ongoing Resistance to Trump, Neoliberals & Anyone Else Trying to Destroy Our Schools

December 21, 2016December 22, 2016 stevenmsinger #BlackLivesMatter, Accountability, Arne Duncan, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Common Core, Corporate Education "Reform", Credibility, Democrat, Donald Trump, Education, Election, John King, Obama, Politics, Poverty, Prejudice, President, privatization, Propaganda, protest, Republican, School Choice, school closings, Schools, Social Justice, Standardized Testing, Teachers, White Privilege Barack Obama, Betsy DeVos, children, Corporate Education Reform, Donald Trump, education, neoliberal, plutocracy, Politics, Rex Tillerson, Steve Bannon, Students, teaching, Trump

“Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no help at all.” —Dale Carnegie

“It always seems impossible until it’s done.”

-Nelson Mandela

Buck up, Education Activists.

I see that hopeless look on your faces. I see it because it’s the same look reflected back at me in the mirror every morning.

Donald Trump will be our next President, and he’s filling his cabinet with people who are determined to destroy the very offices where he’s putting them in charge.

His Education Secretary doesn’t believe in public schools. His Labor Secretary doesn’t believe in worker’s rights. His Housing chief doesn’t believe in public housing. His head of Environmental Protection doesn’t believe in protecting the environment. Heck! You pick a department and he’s found someone to lead it who doesn’t believe in doing that job!

And to top it all off, he’s got a literal white supremacist as his chief strategist.

But you know what? I’m not scared.

You know why? Because I’m still here.

Seriously.

The forces of greed and ignorance have been salivating all over the prospect of destroying public education for decades, and they haven’t been able to do it.

We’re still here. In almost every municipality, district or borough, our public schools remain open.

Sure, they’re a bit worse for wear in some neighborhoods. But despite billions of dollars being spent to crush them under foot, we survive to fight another day.

And that day is today.

Why should we despair when we behold the glass menagerie of fools Trump has assembled to populate his administration? Glass breaks.

Why despair when hearing the tired rhetoric of Nazi Germany and the Jim Crow South coming out of his mouth? We defeated both! We can do so again.

Take Betsy DeVos, Trump’s pick for Education Secretary. She’s a religious fanatic who’s dedicated her life to destroying public schools.

I’m not scared of her. We just fought off Arne Duncan and John King – two of the Democrats Ivy League privateers who actually knew what they were doing! If we can stop those jackholes from giving away community schools to rich corporations, we can take this rich Republican lady who never held down a real job and only knows how to get her way by bribing people to do her bidding.

Sorry, Miss Betsy, but your school vouchers aren’t driving my family out of our neighborhood school so my kid can be taken advantage of by multinational corporations and Christian Cult madrasas. We’re wise to your B.S. “School Choice” fantasies.

Then there’s Rex Tillerson, another corporate vampire who’d like to suck our classrooms dry. The Exxon CEO and Trump’s pick for Secretary of State is a climate denying gasoline peddler who’s dimwitted enough to think he knows everything. Drawing on his zero years of experience with children, he actually said aloud that struggling students were “defective products” as if they were irregular widgets being pressed out on the assembly line and unfit for service at his service stations.

I’m not worried about that gashole. He’ll be too busy enriching himself in backroom deals with foreign leaders to pay much attention to our schools. He’s no threat.

Okay. I’ll admit Steve Bannon makes my skin crawl. Trump’s picked a literal neo-Nazi propagandist as chief strategist, an alleged wife beater who apparently thinks black people don’t necessarily deserve the right to vote. Well, my grandfathers taught me how to deal with jackbooted Eurocentric thugs. Bannon can goosestep his way back to Brietbart and take his orange-faced Reality TV star Commander in Chief with him.

Look, Trump is a monster and he’s assembling a cabinet of monstrosities to back him up. But that doesn’t make him scary. The best way to fight monsters is to turn on the light. And we have the brightest light of all – the light of knowledge, experience, and wisdom.

We’ve been doing it for the past 8 years with the Democrats, people who were supposed to be our friends and allies. You think it’ll be harder with GOP nitwits declaring themselves our enemies!?

For all the cosmetic ways the Obama Administration was better, they were almost as enthusiastic about boosting privatization and making sure every child had a standardized test that was written above their level and biased towards rich white kids. All their talk about championing civil rights didn’t stop them from closing poor black kids schools and forcing them into unaccountable charter operations that often provided fewer services, achieved dismal academic results and boosted racial segregation. All their talk about equity didn’t result in any more funding for minority children – only more Common Core, unqualified Teach for America temps and testing, testing, testing. Yet their donors in the standardized testing, publishing and privatization industry raked in obscene profits.

I’m sorry if this hurts some people’s rosy-eyed view of politics, but Obama was no friend to education. Plutocracy isn’t just a practice on the other side of the aisle. The Democrats are almost as beholden to their corporate masters, and like good servants, they do what their rich donors tell them to do.

This isn’t news to us. We’ve been on the outs before. In fact, we’ve never been on the ins.

Donald Trump? Shit! We lived through an administration that wanted to destroy us and actually knew how to do it! We can take Tiny Hands, the Bankruptcy King any day! This is a guy who couldn’t make a profit running casinos – you know, a business where the house always wins! You expect us to cower in fear that he’s going to take away our schools. Son, we’ve fought better than you!

We just need to stop, take a deep breath and re-energize ourselves.

We need a moment of rededication, time to size up our newest antagonists, and prepare for the battles ahead.

Yes, we’re surrounded on all sides. But it’s never been any different.

Yes, we don’t have any political party that supports us. So we’ll either take over the Democrats or build our own legislative network.

I don’t mean to minimize the threat. Trump represents a clear and present danger to our nation, our people and our schools. But we represent a clear and present danger to him. He hasn’t even been sworn in yet and the clock is already ticking. He’ll be lucky to last four years in the ring with us.

So in that spirit, I offer the following advice. And not just to you, my brothers and sisters at arms. I’m speaking to that broken down father, teacher and activist in myself, too.

Chin up, Bucko. We aren’t done yet. Not even close.

Together we can win this fight. We’ve been doing just that for years.

We have nothing to fear from Trump. He and the neoliberals have much to fear from us.

“Fate whispers to the warrior ‘You cannot withstand the storm.’ The warrior whispers back ‘I am the storm.’ ”

– unknown

“If you want to make a permanent change, stop focusing on the size of your problems and start focusing on the size of you!”

–T. Harv Eker

gadflyonthewallblog

"To sting people and whip them into a fury, all in the service of truth."

John King

Five Reasons to be Cautiously Optimistic About the Biden Presidency

1) Trump Will Fail to Successfully Challenge the Election Results

2) Control of the Senate Rests on Georgia

3) Progressives Will Not Let Neoliberals Ignore Them

4) Biden will Take Steps to Control the Coronavirus

5) Biden Can’t Afford to Re-up Betsy DeVos’ Education Policies

Why High Stakes Testing Was Cancelled This Year (and Probably Will Be Next Year, Too)

WHY TESTS WERE CANCELLED

CORPORATIONS FIRST

TESTING SECRECY

THE PSSAS

CORPORATE VULNERABILITY

THE DYSTOPIAN TESTING FUTURE

CONCLUSIONS

Charter School Teacher Introduces Elizabeth Warren at Rally

CORRECTION:

NEWSFLASH: Betsy DeVos Opens Mouth. Nonsense Falls Out

Congress Frees Public Schools From Federal Test & Punish – Where’s the Catch?

Betsy DeVos and the Cowardice of Republicans

Ignorance and Arrogance – the Defining Characteristics of the Betsy DeVos Hearing

Goodbye, 2016, and Good Riddance – Top 10 Blog Post by Me From a Crappy Year

10) F is for Friedrichs… and Freeloader: A Supreme Court Nightmare

9) The Charter School Swindle – Selling Segregation to Blacks and Latinos

8) ‘We’re Sorry Teachers are Unfairly Blamed’ says John King – Man Responsible for Unfairly Blaming Teachers

7) Bernie Sanders is Right: We Should Federalize Public School Funding

6) Summer Break – the Least Understood and Most Maligned Aspect of a Teacher’s Life

5) Hillary Clinton’s Campaign Manager is a Longtime Corporate Education Reformer

4) What Antonin Scalia’s Death Means to the People I Love

3) Without Black Culture There Would Be No American Culture

2) The Essential Selfishness of School Choice

1) Top 10 Reasons School Choice is No Choice