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!

Robots Will Never Replace Teachers. They Can Only Displace Us

January 10, 2020 stevenmsinger Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Bill Gates, capitalism, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Compassion, computers, Corporate Education "Reform", Credibility, Data, Data Mining, edtech, Education, Healthcare, history, immigration, Junk science, Labor, Learning, Media, Parents, Philosophy, Politics, Poverty, Prejudice, privatization, Propaganda, Racism, School Funding, school segregation, Schools, segregation, Social Justice, Standardized Testing, Students, teacher autonomy, Teachers, Technology, Unions, Value Added Measures, VAM artificial intelligence, edtech, education, Education Week, intelligence, Learning, Politics, robots, schools, Students, supercomputers, teachers, technology, thought, Watson

My favorite movie of all time is “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

And my favorite character is the computer HAL 9000.

In the future (now past) of the movie, HAL is paradoxically the most human personality. Tasked with running the day-to-day operations of a spaceship, HAL becomes strained to the breaking point when he’s given a command to lie about the mission’s true objectives. He ends up having a psychotic break and killing most of the people he was supposed to protect.

It’s heartbreaking finally when Dave Bowman slowly turns off the higher functions of HAL’s brain and the supercomputer regresses in intelligence while singing “A Bicycle Built for Two” – one of the first things he was programmed to do.

I’m gonna’ be honest here – I cry like a baby at that point.

But once I clean up my face and blow my nose, I realize this is science fiction – emphasis on the fiction.

I am well aware that today’s calendar reads 2020, yet our efforts at artificial intelligence are not nearly as advanced as HAL and may never be.

That hasn’t stopped supposedly serious publications like Education Week – “The American Education News Site of Record” – from continuously pretending HAL is right around the corner and ready to take over my classroom.

What’s worse, this isn’t fear mongering – beware the coming robo-apocalypse. It’s an invitation!

A few days ago, the on-line periodical published an article called “Teachers, the Robots Are Coming. But That’s Not a Bad Thing” by Kevin Bushweller.

It was truly one of the dumbest things I’ve read in a long time.

Bushweller, an assistant managing editor at Education Week and Executive Editor at both the Ed Tech Leader and Ed Week’s Market Brief, seems to think it is inevitable that robots will replace classroom teachers.

This is especially true for educators he describes as “chronically low-performing.”

And we all know what he means by that!

These are teachers whose students get low scores on high stakes standardized tests.

Which students are these? Mostly poor and minority children.

These are kids without all the advantages of wealth and class, kids with fewer books in the home and fewer native English speakers as role models, kids suffering from food, housing and healthcare insecurity, kids navigating the immigration system and fearing they or someone they love could be deported, kids faced with institutional racism, kids who’ve lost parents, friends and family to the for-profit prison industry and the inequitable justice system.

And what does our society do to help these kids catch up with their more privileged peers? It underfunds their schools, subjects them to increased segregation, narrows their curriculum, offers them as prey to charter school charlatans – in short, it adds to their hurtles more than removes them.

So “chronically low-performing” teachers would be those who can’t overcome all these obstacles for their students by just teaching more good.

I can’t imagine why such educators can’t get the same results as their colleagues who teach richer, whiter kids without all these issues. It’s almost like teachers can’t do it all, themselves, — and the solution? Robots.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Bushweller suggests we fire all the human beings who work in the most impoverished and segregated schools and replace them… with an army of robots.

Yeah.

Seriously.

Black and brown kids won’t get interactions with real adult human beings. Instead they can connect with the ed tech version of Siri programmed to drill and kill every aspect of the federally mandated standardized test.

Shakespeare’s Miranda famously exclaimed:

“O brave new world, That has such people in’t!”

But the future envisioned by technophiles like Bushweller has NO such people in’t – only robots ensuring the school-to-prison pipeline remains intact for generations to come.

In such a techo-utopia, there will be two tiers of education. The rich will get human teachers and the poor and minorities will get Bluetooth connected voice services like Alexa.

But when people like me complain, Bushweller gas lights us away as being narrow-minded.

He says:

“It makes sense that teachers might think that machines would be even worse than bad human educators. And just the idea of a human teacher being replaced by a robot is likely too much for many of us, and especially educators, to believe at this point.”

The solution, he says, isn’t to resist being replaced but to actually help train our mechanistic successors:

“…educators should not be putting their heads in the sand and hoping they never get replaced by an AI-powered robot. They need to play a big role in the development of these technologies so that whatever is produced is ethical and unbiased, improves student learning, and helps teachers spend more time inspiring students, building strong relationships with them, and focusing on the priorities that matter most. If designed with educator input, these technologies could free up teachers to do what they do best: inspire students to learn and coach them along the way.”

To me this sounds very similar to a corporate drone rhapsodizing on the merits of downsizing: Sure your job is being sent overseas, but you get to train your replacement!

Forgive me if I am not sufficiently grateful for that privilege.

Maybe I should be relieved that he at least admits robots may not be able to replace EVERYTHING teachers do. At least, not yet. In the meantime, he expects robots could become co-teachers or effective tools in the classroom to improve student learning by taking over administrative tasks, grading, and classroom management.

And this is the kind of nonsense teachers often get from administrators who’ve fallen under the spell of the Next Big Thing – iPads, software packages, data management systems, etc.

However, classroom teachers know the truth. This stuff is more often than not overhyped bells and whistles. It’s stuff that CAN be used to improve learning but rarely with more clarity and efficiency than the way we’re already doing it. And the use of edtech opens up so many dangers to students – loss of privacy, susceptibility to being data mined, exposure to unsafe and untried programs, unscrupulous advertising, etc.

Bushweller cites a plethora of examples of how robots are used in other parts of the world to improve learning that are of just this type – gimmicky and shallow.

It reminds me of IBM’s Watson computing system that in 2011 famously beat Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, some of the best players, at the game show Jeopardy.

What is overhyped bullcrap, Alex?

Now that Watson has been applied to the medical field diagnosing cancer patients, doctors are seeing that the emperor has no clothes. Its diagnoses have been dangerous and incorrect – for instance recommending medication that can cause increased bleeding to a hypothetical patient who already suffered from intense bleeding.

Do we really want to apply the same kind of artificial intelligence to children’s learning?

AI will never be able to replace human beings. They can only displace us.

What I mean by that is this: We can put an AI system in the same position as a human being but it will never be of the same high quality.

It is a displacement, a disruption, but not an authentic replacement of equal or greater value.

In his paper “The Rhetoric and Reality of Anthropomorphism in Artificial Intelligence,” David Watson explains why.

Watson (no relation to IBM’s supercomputer) of the Oxford Internet Institute and the Alan Touring Institute, writes that AI do not think in the same way humans do – if what they do can even accurately be described as thinking at all.

These are algorithms, not minds. They are sets of rules not contemplations.

An algorithm of a smile would specify which muscles to move and when. But it wouldn’t be anything a live human being would mistake for an authentic expression of a person’s emotion. At best it would be a parabola, at worst a rictus.

Screen Shot 2020-01-09 at 7.59.43 PM — Picture of an actual Japanese robot teacher in use.

In his recent paper in Minds and Machines, Watson outlines three main ways deep neural networks (DNNs) like the ones we’re considering here “think” and “learn” differently from humans.

1) DNN’s are easily fooled. While both humans and AIs can recognize things like a picture of an apple, computers are much more easily led astray. Computers are more likely to misconstrue part of the background and foreground, for instance, while human beings naturally comprehend this difference. As a result, humans are less distracted by background noise.

2) DNN’s need much more information to learn than human beings. People need relatively fewer examples of a concept like “apple” to be able to recognize one. DNN’s need thousands of examples to be able to do the same thing. Human toddlers demonstrate a much easier capacity for learning than the most advanced AI.

3) DNN’s are much more focused on details and less on the bigger picture. For example, a DNN could successfully label a picture of Diane Ravitch as a woman, a historian, and an author. However, switching the position of her mouth and one of her eyes could end up improving the confidence of the DNN’s prediction. The computer wouldn’t see anything wrong with the image though to human eyes there definitely was something glaring incorrect.

“It would be a mistake to say that these algorithms recreate human intelligence,” Watson says. “Instead, they introduce some new mode of inference that outperforms us in some ways and falls short in others.”

Obviously the technology may improve and change, but it seems more likely that AI’s will always be different. In fact, that’s kind of what we want from them – to outperform human minds in some ways.

However, the gap between humanity and AI should never be glossed over.

I think that’s what technophiles like Bushweller are doing when they suggest robots could adequately replace teachers. Robots will never do that. They can only be tools.

For instance, only the most lonely people frequently have long conversations with SIRI or Alexa. After all, we know there is no one else really there. These wireless Internet voice services are just a trick – an illusion of another person. We turn to them for information but not friendship.

The same with teachers. Most of the time, we WANT to be taught by a real human person. If we fear judgment, we may want to look up discrete facts on a device. But if we want guidance, encouragement, direction or feedback, we need a person. AI’s can imitate such things but never as well as the real thing.

So we can displace teachers with these subpar imitations. But once the novelty wears off – and it does – we’re left with a lower quality instructor and a subpar education.

The computer HAL is not real. To borrow a phrase from science fiction author Philip K. Dick, Artificial intelligence is not yet “more human than human.”

Maybe it never will be.

The problem is not narrow minded teachers unwilling to sacrifice their jobs for some nebulous techno-utopia. The problem is market based solutions that ignore the human cost of steam rolling over educators and students for the sake of profits.

As a society, we must commit ourselves to a renewed ethic of humanity. We must value people more than things.

And that includes a commitment to never even attempting to forgo human teachers as guides for the most precious things in our lives – our children.

“Algorithms are not ‘just like us’… by anthropomorphizing a statistical model, we implicitly grant it a degree of agency that not only overstates its true abilities, but robs us of our own autonomy… It is always humans who choose whether or not to abdicate this authority, to empower some piece of technology to intervene on our behalf. It would be a mistake to presume that this transfer of authority involves a simultaneous absolution of responsibility. It does not.”

–David Watson

Economists Ate My School – Why Defining Teaching as a Transaction is Destroying Our Society

January 4, 2020 stevenmsinger Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Budget, capitalism, Charter Schools, Child Predators, Civil Rights, Compassion, Corporate Education "Reform", Education, Journalism, Labor, Learning, Local Control, Media, Parents, Philosophy, Politics, Prejudice, privatization, Propaganda, School Choice, School Funding, school vouchers, Schools, Social Justice, Social Justice Unionism, Standardized Testing, Students, Taxation, teacher autonomy, Teachers, union busting, Unions business, capitalism, charter schools, Corporate Education Reform, disaster capitalism, economics, economists, education, labor, parents, Politics, public schools, school vouchers, socialism, standardized testing, Students, teachers, teaching, transaction, union busting, vulture capitalism

Teaching is one of the most misunderstood interactions in the world.

Some people see it as a mere transaction, a job: you do this, I’ll pay you that.

The input is your salary. The output is learning.

These are distinctly measurable phenomena. One is calculated in dollars and cents. The other in academic outcomes, usually standardized test scores. The higher the salary, the more valued the teacher. The higher the test scores, the better the job she has done.

But that’s not all.

If the whole is defined in terms of buying and selling, each individual interaction can be, too.

It makes society nothing but a boss and the teacher nothing but an employee. The student is a mere thing that is passively acted on – molded like clay into whatever shape the bosses deem appropriate.

In this framework, the teacher has no autonomy, no right to think for herself. Her only responsibility is to bring about the outcomes demanded by her employer. The wants and needs of her students are completely irrelevant. We determine what they will become, where they will fit into the burgeoning economy. And any sense of curiosity or creativity is merely an expedient to make children into the machinery of industry and drive the gross domestic product higher to benefit our stock portfolios and lower corporate taxes.

And since this education system is merely a business agreement, it must obey the rules of an ironclad contract. And since we’re trying to seek our own advantage here, it’s incumbent on us to contain our workforce as much as possible. This cannot be a negotiation among equals. We must keep each individual cog – each teacher – separate so that they can’t unionize together in common causeand equal our power. We must bend and subject them to our will so that we pay the absolute minimum and they’re forced to give the absolute maximum.

That’s just good business sense. It’s the best way to establish this relationship.

Moreover, since we see education in terms of pure capital – human financial units flowing through a systemic framework – the same rules that govern business will govern our schools.

We can pit one student against another, one school against another, one district against another, one race, one gender – anything quantifiable can and should be placed in competition. Because that’s how you maximize outputs.

We can initiate hostile takeovers, engage in vulture capitalism where the loser schools are stripped of resources and to the victor go the spoils.

But who is the victor?

It’s getting confusing here. Do we give the plunder to the students at the schools with the highest outcomes? That’s illogical. After all, this whole process isn’t about what’s best for the students, per se. It’s about the system of profit and loss. So any profit squeezed from the defeated should go to the winners – the investor class who put forward the capital to start this whole process.

But that’s not how public school is organized. There are rules and regulations you have to follow – outdated legislation that doesn’t define the process in terms of economics.

We have to redefine those laws, rewrite them so that our goals are aligned. So we can enshrine virtues like choice and disruption over anything as old fashioned and pedestrian as the good of the child.

Thus we invent charter schools – institutions funded with tax dollars but not necessarily subjected to any other regulations – not run by elected school boards, not accountable to the public for how they spend that money or educate the children under their authority. They are subject only to the rules of the free market. The invisible hand guides all.

Thus we invent school vouchers – take that tax money and give it directly to the customer – the parents – to spend however they wish. If they squander it or are fooled by unscrupulous school systems and education purveyors, that is their fault. And, in fact, we will ensure that there are multiple pitfalls, deathtraps, blind alleys and snake oil salesmen in their way. Because competition maximizes profits.

Caveat emptor is the only rule.

Because, you see, the hidden premise in all this nonsense is that you are not the boss.

The community is not in control of this system – the business world is. Everyday people who might be parents or taxpayers or voters or concerned citizens – at best we are just consumers. It’s not our role to do anything but choose the simple, watered down options presented to us. If we try to exercise our rights through collective action – including our right to vote – that’s unfair and will be met with the rule of capital as speech until we’re drowned in it – in fact, drowned out.

This is how many people today envision teaching.

This is what has become of our schools.

This is what is being done to our children.

It’s obvious in the ways our laws are structured, the ways the media covers our schools and the ways our students are mistreated.

And it is mistreatment.

Because teaching is none of those things.

Teaching is not a transaction. It is relational.

Teaching is not about inputs and outputs. It’s about curiosity and knowledge.

It shouldn’t be governed by market forces that dehumanize all those involved into mere widgets to be manipulated in a systemic framework. Teaching should be governed by empathy, art and science.

The driving force behind any education system must be what’s best for the child. And that “best” ultimately must be defined by parents and children.

The goal of education can never be to prepare kids for a career. It must be to eradicate ignorance, to quench curiosity, to aid self-expression and guide students toward becoming whatever it is they want to become.

Measuring learning outcomes by standardized test scores can never achieve this goal. That’s like trying to monetize a rainbow or putting the ocean in a cage.

School privatization can never achieve this goal. That’s like treating human beings like cash, like thinking the rules of football can govern architecture.

And treating teachers like worker drones can never achieve this goal. You can’t entrust a whole class of people with the most precious thing you have – your children – and then treat them like dirt.

Teaching is hard to define.

It is messy and unruly and doesn’t fit into many of our society’s preconceptions.

But it is optimism made real.

It is an investment in the future. A mark of value and love.

It is the most vital and important thing a society can do.

And we’re messing it up – big time.

Why is Accountability Too Much to Ask of Charter Schools?

December 20, 2019 stevenmsinger Accountability, Bernie Sanders, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Corporate Education "Reform", Credibility, Democrat, Donald Trump, Education, Election, Local Control, NAEP, Obama, Parents, Politics, Poverty, Prejudice, privatization, Racism, Republican, School Choice, School Funding, school segregation, school vouchers, Schools, Social Justice, Standardized Testing, Students, Teachers 2020, Accountability, ALEC, Bernie Sanders, Center for Education Reform, charter schools, Democrats, education, Elizabeth Warren, Jeanne Allen, Politics, public schools, Republicans

Screen Shot 2019-12-19 at 11.23.34 PM — **NOTE:** Not an exact quote but Allen wrote a book “Charting a New Course The Case for Freedom, Flexibility & Opportunity Through Charter Schools” that proposes just this idea.

If you hire someone to buy your groceries, you’ll probably ask for a receipt.

That’s really all education advocates want from the charter school industry.

Charter schools are bankrolled with tax dollars but often run by private businesses.

Is it too much to ask these businesses to account for how they spend the money?

Apparently it is because Jeanne Allen has been sending her representatives all over the country to harass Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders and any other candidate with the audacity to demand charter schools be transparent and accountable.

Yesterday she wrote another blistering press release with the title:

“Democratic Candidates Asked to Listen to Voices of Struggling Parents Following Them Across Nation”

Allen is CEO and Founder of the Center for Education Reform – a billionaire backed lobbying firm for school privatization.

Not exactly a “struggling parent” or anyone who speaks for them. But she is a former member of the Heritage Foundation and current member of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

She doesn’t speak for parents. She speaks for the billionaires who pay her salary.

Armed with bundles of cash from the Walton Family and others, Allen has been organizing functionaries to disrupt Democratic rallies across the country including a speech by Warren in Atlanta last month. I wonder how she’s moving her protestors around – perhaps utilizing $2 million a year private jets like the one leased by Texas-based charter chain IDEA.

Oh! Wait! The Texas branch of the American Federation of Teachers made such a stink about that use of public dollars, the charter chain had to give up its lease.

States shouldn’t have to rely on teachers unions and the media to shame charters into being accountable. That should be the price of accepting public money.

But Allen doesn’t want to hear it. Back in 2016, she wrote a book called “Charting a New Course The Case for Freedom, Flexibility & Opportunity Through Charter Schools” that put forward the libertarian idea that charter schools need not be held accountable by anything other than the invisible hand of the market.

Unsurprisingly, such far right radicalism didn’t result in an invitation to last weekend’s Education Forum in Pittsburgh for candidates seeking the Democratic 2020 Presidential nomination.

Instead the room was full of public school parents, students, teachers, advocates and civil rights leaders.

Allen was furious. How dare they leave out charter school flunkies!?

It wasn’t so long ago that Democrats like Barack Obama and Bill Clinton were staunch supporters of school privatization. But many in this new batch of progressives typified by Sanders and Warren are demanding real reform.

According to reports by the Network for Public Education “Asleep at the Wheel” and “Still Asleep at the Wheel,” more than $1 billion in federal funds were wasted on charters that either never opened or closed not long after opening. And now Congress has appropriated $440 million more dollars for the federal Charter School Program, a slush fund to open even more charter schools across the country even in states like New Hampshire that don’t want them.

Isn’t it fair to demand a few receipts?

Thank goodness there’s Republicans like Betsy DeVos who make no such demands. Allen has the entire Trump administration willing to listen to her anytime she wants. But ironically for someone who champions schools be run like businesses, she wants to corner the market and eliminate any political choice or competition.

In yesterday’s press release, Allen demanded the seven leading Democratic candidates at last night’s Los Angeles debate sit down and listen to her particular special interest group.

And – make no mistake – it is a special interest group.

Charter schools are the very definition of special interest.

According to the Oxford Dictionary, Special Interests are:

“A group of people or an organization seeking or receiving special advantages, typically through political lobbying.”

That’s exactly what Allen is trying to do.

She is challenging the request that charter schools meet the same accountability standards as authentic public schools.

She wants charter schools to be held to a lower standard – that they can enroll just the students they choose instead of having to accept everyone in their coverage areas like authentic public schools are required to do. She wants charter schools to be able to narrow the curriculum and get rid of extraneous classes and student services so that the business folks running the place can take the money that had funded these things home as a bonus. She wants to ensure charter schools can continue to operate with appointed bureaucrats and not be required to be managed by elected school boards drawn from everyday citizens in the community.

Authentic public schools aren’t allowed to skirt these rules. Why should charter schools? If they’re public schools, shouldn’t they have to abide by the same safeguards?

Allen claims she’s just looking out for children of color.

Yet the overwhelming majority of black students enrolled in authentic public schools – 7 million strong – would probably disagree with her. She certainly isn’t speaking for THEM.

Here’s this white woman telling the black community she knows what’s best.

Only about 800,000 black kids are enrolled in charter schools nationwide and that number is dropping.

Black people know how charter schools disproportionately locate in the inner cities to target them – just like those other markers of the predatory economy: takeout liquor stores and payday lenders.

Ex-journalist Roland Martin, who at least is black, held a streaming event a few days ago to reiterate his support for charter schools.

He used to be backed by the billionaire funded Black Alliance for Education Outcomes (BAEO) which praised DeVos to the heavens when she was chosen as Education Secretary.

In a press release, the organization enthused:

“BAEO congratulates Betsy DeVos on becoming our next Secretary of Education. She is a very gifted and well-respected education leader with a proven track record of advancing excellence and equity for students. She has been a strong advocate of parental choice, ensuring that all children regardless of race or economic status have access to excellent schools.

“DeVos has spent much of her life working on behalf of low-income and working class Black families who just want access to better educational options for their children. She will be a strong supporter of parental choice policies and education reform initiatives that we believe will help close the academic achievement gap.”

However, after DeVos championed cutting civil rights guidelines for students, slashing funding for everything other than school vouchers and advised teachers to report their undocumented students to ICE, the civil rights community revolted.

Both the NAACP and Black Lives Matter have condemned DeVos and demanded a moratorium on new charter schools. These huge people powered groups represent the will of the black and brown community – not Allen, Martin and their billionaire backers.

BAEO was so overcome with negative publicity, the group disbanded.

Allen claims charter schools are necessary because of low standardized test scores at public schools.

However, she’s just parroting the same school privatization talking points of the past three decades. Increasing charter schools didn’t raise test scores in the 90s, the 00s or the 10s.

Moreover, the test scores she’s referring to are international comparisons between the US and other industrialized countries that don’t take many relevant factors into account. Most importantly, the US is committed to educating all of its students while many of these other nations are not. They weed out the lower achieving students by middle and high school. They don’t educate all of their students with special needs. And they don’t have the same level or scale of poverty. In short, these are not apples to apples comparisons and have little to tell us about the quality of the American system unless it’s that our ideals are better than most international systems.

Finally, Allen neglects to mention that charter schools have never outperformed authentic public schools. They are not a solution to falling test scores, because charter school kids get the same scores or often worse ones. Cyber charter schools in particular are notorious for achieving worse academic outcomes for students than literally not going to school at all!

The fact that many of the current Democrats have embraced charter school criticism may be a sign of real reform on the horizon.

And that’s what terrifies Allen and her rich backers.

The school privatization industry relies on being held to a lower standard than authentic public schools. That’s all a charter is, anyway – an agreement NOT to hold the business running a taxpayer funded school to the same standards as the authentic public ones.

It’s time those charter agreements were ripped to pieces.

All public schools should have to reach the same standards.

If there are charters that can do so, we should allow them to continue running as public schools. But those who cannot should be closed.

That’s just fiscal responsibility.

I say it is NOT too much to ask of any public school – including charter schools.

Like authentic public schools, charter schools should be required to show us the money, present the receipts and be accountable for their actions.

Top 10 Lessons From the 2020 Public Education Forum

December 15, 2019December 15, 2019 stevenmsinger #BlackLivesMatter, Accountability, Badass Teachers Association, Bernie Sanders, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Corporate Education "Reform", Credibility, Democrat, Donald Trump, Education, Election, Elizabeth Warren, Labor, Learning, Parents, Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh, Politics, Poverty, Prejudice, President, privatization, protest, Race to the Top, Racism, Republican, School Choice, school closings, School Funding, school segregation, Schools, segregation, Social Justice, Special Education, Standardized Testing, Students, Teachers, Unions, Value Added Measures, VAM, voting Amy Klobuchar, Bernie Sanders, charter schools, Democrats, education, Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden, Michael Bennet, MSNBC, Pete Buttigeig, Pittsburgh, Politics, President, public education forum, public schools, Rehema Ellis, Tom Steyer

The school bell chimed and the class shuffled home.

But the students weren’t little children.

They were Democratic Presidential candidates!

And boy-oh-boy did they get sent packing with a ton of homework!

Teachers, students, parents and community members from all over the country sat them down with instructions on how to improve the public education system.

Kudos to the candidates for agreeing to listen.

It was billed as the MSNBC “Public Education Forum 2020: Equity and Justice for All” – and though it’s over now, its effects may be felt for months or years yet to come.

The fact that it happened at all is almost miraculous.

Who would have thought Presidential hopefuls would care enough about public schools to address education issues and answer our questions?

Who would have thought it would be broadcast live on TV and the Internet?

And – come to think of it – who would have EVER thought it would happen in my hometown of Pittsburgh!?
But it did.

I was there – along with about 1,500 other education activists, stakeholders and public school warriors from around the country.

It was an amazing day which I will never forget.

Perhaps the best part was getting to see so many amazing people in one place – and I’m not talking about the candidates.

There were members of the Badass Teachers Association, the Network for Public Education, Journey for Justice, One Pennsylvania, the American Federation of Teachers, the National Education Association, and so many more!

I wish I could bottle up that feeling of commitment to our children and hope in the future.

Perhaps that’s kind of the point behind this article.
So much happened and there is so much worth noting, let me put my impressions down as a series of takeaways or lessons for us to savor between now and the primary election – maybe even until the general.

Here’s my top 10 most important lessons:

1) Charter School Support is Weak

When the forum was announced, Jeanne Allen of the Center for Education Reform wrote a blistering memoabout how the charter school community would not put up with politicians listening to constituents critical of their industry. Allen is a far right Republican with close ties to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) who even used Donald Trump’s public relations firm to publicize her protest. But when we got to the forum, all it amounted to were a dozen folks with matching yellow signs trudging through the rainwho didn’t even stay for the duration of the forum. YAWN! Silly school privatizers, that’s not how you protest!

2) Michael Bennet Doesn’t Understand Much About Public Education

The Colorado Senator and former school superintendent really doesn’t get a lot of the important issues – even when they intersect his life. As superintendent, he enacted a merit pay initiative for teachers that resulted in a teachers strike. He still doesn’t comprehend why this was a bad idea – that tying teachers salaries to student test scores makes for educators who only teach to the test, that it demands teachers be responsible for things beyond their control, etc. Moreover, he thinks there’s a difference between public and private charter schools – there isn’t. They’re all bankrolled by tax dollars and can be privately operated.

But I suppose that doesn’t matter so much because few people know who Michael Bennet is anyway.

3) Pete Buttigeig is Too Smart Not to Understand Education – Unless He’s Paid Not to Understand

Mayor Pete came off as a very well spoken and intelligent guy. But he also seemed about as credible as wet tissue. He said a bunch of wrongheaded things. For instance, he said that “separate has never, ever been equal,” but he supports charter schools. Separate but equal is their business model.

It’s the kind of misunderstanding that only happens on purpose, and it’s not hard to see why. He’s taken so much money from anti-education billionaires like Netflix Founder Reed Hastings, no one else can trust him. How are we supposed to think he works for us when his salary comes from the super rich? You never recover from ignorance when it’s your job to be ignorant.

4) Gender Neutral Bathrooms Just Make Sense

I used a gender neutral bathroom for the first time at the forum. I figured I just had to pee so it didn’t matter. Inside were nothing but bathroom stalls – no standing urinals. People of all genders were in there using the facilities and it didn’t matter at all. In fact, it just made sense. It only seems strange because of what we’ve grown to expect. Gender neutral is just logical – no one uses the bathroom for anything but… using the bathroom. Try it and you’ll see – it’s the most logical and natural thing in the world.

5) Elizabeth Warren is a Star!

Warren simply electrified the room as soon as she entered it. She was at least as smart and well-spoken as Mayor Pete, but she was credible, too. She said all charter schools should have to meet the same requirements as authentic public schools. She said public school money should stay in public schools. She had detailed plans for how to fix what ails or school systemincluding a two cent wealth tax (three cents if you’re a billionaire) to pay for universal child care, universal pre-kindergarten, better pay for childcare workers, broader pell grants, and SO much more.

I was even more impressed with her in person and she got a standing ovation from the crowd. She would make a great President.

6) Bernie Sanders is a Superstar!

If Warren electrified the audience, Bernie was like a nuclear explosion. I don’t think anyone stayed in their seat when he entered. Fists pumping in the air, applause, chants of “Bernie! Bernie!” It was clear who the audience appreciated most.

And he was amazing. He said we need to break our dependence on property taxes to fund our schools. He said the problem with testing is we spend too much time teaching to the test. There are better ways to assess learning. He said we need a revolution in how we feel about education and learning. We’ve got to respect the educators who provide that education. He talked about criminal justice and unions and a broader range of issues and in more depth than any other candidate.

But my favorite moment was this.

Question: Should the federal government subsidize student lunch?

Bernie: “And breakfast and dinner as well.”

I think he solidified for most of us that he’s our number one candidate in this election. He would be a once in a lifetime President!

7) MSNBC Anchor Rehema Ellis Does Not Understand Standardized Testing

Throughout the forum, Ellis kept asking the same question over-and-over. She kept asking about America’s dismal standardized test scores compared to other countries. But we weren’t ignorant rubes. She was talking before an audience of teachers. It became clear she didn’t understand what these international test scores mean. First of all, she kept talking about US kids being behind grade level. Proficiency on tests like the NAEP isn’t the same as grade level proficiency. Moreover, comparing the US – which educates everyone – and other countries that do not is like comparing apples to oranges. But Ellis was part of NBC’s Education Nation initiative and has been spreading falsehoods and half-truths about testing for a decade. Maybe after educating the politicians we need to send the media back to school, too.

8) This is Not the Moment for Tom Steyer

Steyer is a billionaire self-funding his campaign in a time when voters are sick to death of the rich controlling our politics. He’s like a fox warning us all about foxes. It doesn’t make me want to vote for him. It makes me wonder if he thinks I’m lunch.

9) Amy Klobuchar is a Better Candidate Than I Expected

And the winner of most improved image is Klobuchar – by a mile. She came off so authentic and honest. She started with an emotional story about her mother – a teacher – which naturally lead into some really smart policy suggestions. And saying that she’d fire Betsy DeVos in seconds after becoming President and replace her with an educator was nice, too. I’m not saying I think she can or should win the nomination, but I’m glad she’s in the race and I hope we see more of her.

10) Joe Biden is Not Going to Beat Donald Trump

Biden came tottering onto the stage late like a friendly but lost old man. He flashed the charm and told us what his policies were but he couldn’t explain why he supported a single one of them.

He was the worst public speaker all day. His words rambled this way and that. At one point he told the audience to stop clapping so he could explain why he wanted to fully fund special education, but then he went off on a digression and got lost. At one point he rhapsodized about all the terrible teachers out there and said teachers touch students’ lives – “metaphorically speaking.”

Dr. Denisha Jones – an amazing activist and friend – asked him a pointed question about standardized testing and whether he was against it? He told her she was “preaching to the choir” but then rambled on for moments more about … something. I don’t know what.

Biden seems more like someone with Alzheimer’s Disease than aspirations to the chief executive. If he won, his wife or someone else would really be making the decisions. He isn’t well. And all you have to do is hear him speak for a few minutes to see it.

Bottom line: I don’t think he could beat Trump.

As terrible as Trump is, he can speak more coherently than Biden. That’s a horrible thing to admit, but it’s true.

So there you have it – my top 10 takeaways from the education forum.

It was a great way to spend a Saturday.

The candidates left knowing exactly where the education community stands. They know what they need to do to get our votes – and many of them are actively trying to do that.

We have several candidates that would make good Presidents – and several who stand a good chance against Trump.

Here’s hoping that we all learn our lessons and use them to win back our government in 2020.

thumbnail_IMG_9173 — Network for Public Education buddies – Carol Burris, Dan Greenberg, me and Peter Greene.

thumbnail_IMG_9186 — Pittsburgh strong – Kathleen Newman, me and Jesse Ramey

thumbnail_IMG_9187 — Mitchell Robinson and me

thumbnail_IMG_9188 — Keeping it Local – State Rep Summer Lee (Homestead), Mark Fallon and me.

If you missed the event, you can still watch it here:

Teachers Are Not Responsible for Student Growth or Achievement

November 29, 2019 stevenmsinger Accountability, Civil Rights, Common Core, Corporate Education "Reform", Education, Learning, Parents, Philosophy, Politics, Prejudice, privatization, School Funding, Schools, small class size, Standardized Testing, Students, teacher autonomy, Teachers Accountability, achievement, administration, annual testing, assessment, education, educators, growth, high stakes testing, Learning, Politics, principals, responsability, schools, standardized testing, teachers, teaching to the test, Test Prep, test-based accountability

Earlier this week, I was rushed to another urgent early morning staff meeting at my school.

I had my laptop with me and was frantically trying to get everything ready that I’d need for the day.

Text dependent analysis question? Check.

Discussion guide to introduce the concept of science fiction? Check.

Questions on literacy, analogy, vocabulary and sentence structure suitable for 7th grade? Check.

The same suitable for 8th grade? Check.

And as I was anxiously trying to get all this together in time for me to rush to my morning duty when the meeting was over, I quickly took a sip of my tea and tried to listen to what my administrator was saying from the front of the room.

He handed out two white sheets of paper with a compilation of standardized test scores – last year’s and those from the year before.

He asked us what we noticed about these two sets of scores and I almost spit out my tea.

“THIS IS WHAT YOU BROUGHT US HERE FOR!?” I wanted to shout.

“THIS IS WHAT YOU’RE STOPPING US FROM DOING OUR WORK TO DISCUSS!?”

But I choked down my response and waited for someone to tell him what he wanted to hear.

The scores have gone down in the preceding year.

Nothing drastic but enough.

When he got his answer – actually he had to say it himself because none of us were ready to play this game so early in the morning – he offered us an olive branch.

Isn’t that the way of it? Shame then reconciliation. Blame then peace.

Those are just the achievement scores, he said. Admin. generously doesn’t expect us to be able to do much about those. They go up one year and down the next.

But look at these growth scores!

That’s where we can have an impact!

And again I felt my throat convulse and a mouthful of Earl Grey came back up my gullet.

Growth!?

It doesn’t make that much difference whether you look at growth or achievement. If you’re holding teachers accountable for either, you’re expecting us to be able to do things beyond our powers as mere mortal human beings.

I hate to break it to you, but teachers are not magical.

We cannot MAKE things happen in student brains.

Nothing we say or do can cause a specific reaction inside a human mind.

That’s just not how learning and teaching works.

We can INFLUENCE learning.

We can try to create some kind of optimum condition that is most likely to spark learning.

But we cannot make it happen like turning on a switch or lighting a candle.

Let me give you a real world example.

The day before the meeting I was conferencing with a student about his essay on Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol.” I pointed out that he had misspelled Christmas as “Crismist.”

He refused to fix it.

Literally refused.

I pointed out that the word was already typed out and spelled correctly in the prompt. All he had to do was erase what he had written and rewrite it correctly.

He said he didn’t care – that it didn’t matter.

So I tried to explain how people who don’t know him would read this paper and make snap judgments about him based on simple mistakes like this.

I told him that I knew he was smart, that I had heard his verbal discussion of the story and was impressed by his arguments about Scrooge’s character. He had made good points about Scrooge’s guilt being motivated by fear and that once the ghosts were gone he might return to his old ways.

But no one was going to get that far or give him the benefit of the doubt if he didn’t even try to spell Christmas correctly!

And he still wouldn’t do it.

That is literally where I was yesterday – yet today my administrator wanted to hold ME accountable for this kid’s growth!

As this child’s teacher, it IS my responsibility to try to reach him.

I am responsible for providing him with every tool I know how that can help him succeed.

I am responsible for trying to motivate, inspire and explain. I am responsible for knowing what are best practices and using them.

By all means – evaluate me on that.

But I can do nothing about what a student actually does with all I give him.

To paraphrase the old adage about horses, I can lead a student to knowledge, but I can’t make him think.

And, moreover, I shouldn’t be forced, myself, only to be able to acknowledge certain kinds of thinking. If a student’s ideas don’t fit neatly into a multiple choice framework, I shouldn’t be impelled to ignore or constrain them.

That may seem simple or even obvious with reflection, but it also goes counter to nearly every teacher evaluation system in practice in the United States.

Because that’s really what’s motivating my administrator’s directives here.

He’s just being real, he said. This is what we’ll be evaluated on and it’s something we can impact.

Then he asked us what each of us can do to better impact student growth.

Hands went flying into the air to offer suggestions about how administration could help us better accomplish these goals.

How about some consistency in which courses we’re instructed to teach from year-to-year?

How about not splitting up classes so that students leave one room to have a special and then return to finish a course already in progress?

How about mandating fewer diagnostic tests so there’d be more instruction time?

Well that last one was just too much. We were told that Admin. planned to do just the opposite – to make the Classroom Diagnostic Tools (CDT) tests MORE invasive by changing the schedule to make them appear more like the end of the year state mandated tests.

He said eventually we could look at some of these other ways to change things administratively, but he wanted to put the onus on us. What can WE do to increase growth?

A hand went up.

If we help a student grow this year, won’t there be less room for him to grow next year – at least within a given academic standard? Don’t we reach a point of diminishing returns?

To which I wanted to add – where are we measuring growth from? One standardized test to another? That’s not authentic learning – it’s assessing how well students take a test and how well they think like the corporation that makes and grades it.

But the meeting was already over.

The bell rang and we had to rush to our duties.

I scrambled back to my classroom to deposit my computer before getting to the cafeteria just as student breakfast began.

This is madness, I thought.

Growth and achievement. It’s all just gas lighting educators for not being superhuman.

The decision makers either don’t understand how learning works or they don’t care to understand.

They are putting everything on teachers and students without providing either of us with the tools we need to succeed.

Students need more than another standardized test. And they need more than another teacher who only cares about their test scores – regardless of whether you measure them in growth or achievement.

These kids are stressed out, living under immense pressure, coping with poverty, prejudice, an unstable society, climate change, an uncertain future and an economy that promises them little more than crushing debt as a best case scenario.

Educators are supposed to wade into all that, say a few incantations and it will all just go away?

Many parents are struggling so much to provide for their kids they don’t have time to help with homework, provide guidance or support. And you think I’ve somehow got the secret sauce in my teacher’s bag?

Wake up, America.

It’s time we faced a truth about our schools.

Teachers can’t do it all alone.

Growth, achievement, whatever.

Until society commits to supporting its children with equitable resources, social justice and an evaluation system that’s more valid than standardized testing, the next generation will continue to struggle.

If you want to make an impact, a good place to start would be a realistic conception of what it means to be a teacher and what we actually can and should be held responsible for.

White Billionaires Cannot Buy the Charter School Debate

November 23, 2019November 23, 2019 stevenmsinger #BlackLivesMatter, Accountability, Bernie Sanders, Betsy DeVos, Bill Gates, Charter Schools, Child Predators, Civil Rights, Corporate Education "Reform", Democrat, Donald Trump, Education, Elizabeth Warren, Local Control, Parents, Politics, Prejudice, privatization, Propaganda, protest, Racism, Republican, School Choice, School Funding, school segregation, Schools, segregation, Social Justice, Students, Teachers astroturf, Bernie Sanders, Betsy DeVos, Bill Gates, charter schools, Democrats, education, Elizabeth Warren, grassroots, Politics, school privatization, school segregation, schools, Walton Family

Betsy DeVos is not woke.

Bill Gates has not been to the mountaintop.

Nor is the Walton Family Foundation concerned with promoting civil rights.

So when white billionaires pour cash to charter school lobbying groups – as the Walton’s did Thursday for charter school protestors at an Elizabeth Warren rally – it isn’t exactly convincing.

Speaking at the historically black college Clark Atlanta University, Warren, who is seeking the Democratic nomination for President in 2020, was interrupted by audience members chanting charter school slogans.

She eventually met with the protestors after the rally.

Strangely enough, Warren hasn’t suggested any policy position that would adversely affect the charter schools from which the protestors hail.

Along with Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, Warren has a progressive charter school platform calling for increased transparency and an end to federal funding of charters, which are paid for with tax dollars but privately run.

The Intercept journalist Rachel Cohen noted:

“Frankly suggesting that stronger transparency standards for publicly-funded charter schools would ‘limit parental choice’ is an incoherent talking point that really should not be taken seriously. Increased transparency only ‘limits choice’ if the charter schools themselves refuse to accept higher transparency standards.”

Intercept journalist Ryan Grim, who was present at the rally, noted that the group of protestors was funded by the Waltons.

The group was from Memphis Lift Parent Institute which bused in people from around the country. It was supported by a GoFundMe page showing numerous $1,000 donations from anonymous sources.

Published financial reports clearly show the Waltons backing Memphis Lift to the tune of $1.5 million since 2015. And since then, their 2017 filing shows $375,200 more, with a mere $200 coming from other public contributions. That’s pretty close to 100%. The Walton’s Website makes the connection even more undeniable.

Support also came from Nashville education consulting firm Strategy Redefined, the Tennessee’s chapter of Democrats for Education Reform and Chris Barbic, the original head of Tennessee’s disastrous Achievement School District.

That is not grassroots.

That is astroturf.

Both the NAACP and Black Lives Matter have called for a moratorium on new charter schools primarily because of how they increase school segregation and adversely affect children of color.

These are huge national organizations making decisions based on democratic input of their members. They are not solely representative of the tiny fraction of parents (6%) who send their kids to charter schools nationwide, nor are they funded primarily by corporations and billionaire investors who, in turn, make a profit off of the school privatization industry.

While it’s true that you’ll find polls showing strong support for charters among people of color, the overwhelming majority of these polls are conducted by pro-charter groups. They’re like the American Apple Foundation finding high support for U.S. apples – little more than paid advertising.

However, even a poll conducted by charter school lobbying organization Democrats for Education Reform found that both black and white respondents support a moratorium on new charter schools.

Billionaires like DeVos, Bill Gates and the Waltons have spent incredible amounts of money to convince the public that school privatization is grassroots, but we have the receipts.

The Walton foundation has promised $1 billion since 2018 to expanding charter schools.

Andre Perry, an education policy expert at the Brookings Institution, describes the Walton foundation as hiding behind black faces to obscure who’s really in charge – they’re exploiting black people for a “white agenda.”

“It’s a sad thing that education reform is about how much money you have and not about what connection you have with black communities,” Perry said.

The Walton Foundation gave $9 million to the United Negro College Fund for a scholarship to the organization’s fellowship program for students interested in education reform. They are literally paying to indoctrinate black people to the ideology that school privatization is in their best interests.

This also includes $530,000 to the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation to sponsor an affiliated education policy advocacy and campaign training workshop and an additional $170,000 to sponsor events.

Walton money has also gone to two other pro-charter groups – nearly $2 million to the 100 Black Men of America campaign and $7.3 million to the National Urban League.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Charter schools are not required to provide the same basic services that authentic public schools must.

To suggest that providing fewer services to black and brown children is somehow in their best interest should insult Americans of every race.

Black children – just like white children – deserve schools run by elected school boards.

Black children – just like white children – deserve schools that accept all comers, not institutions that cherry pick which kids to enroll and which to counsel out to other institutions.

Black children – just like white children – deserve schools that will provide them with robust services and don’t try to cut programs and pocket the savings as profit.

None of this is controversial.

It is common sense.

The problem is that after decades of misinformation, people are becoming ever more aware of how charter schools are scamming the public in general and black communities in particular.

The billionaires funding this industry are using their vast wealth to try and buy the debate.

It is up to every thinking American to look at the facts and understand the extent to which we are being bamboozled by white elites at the expense of our black and brown brothers and sisters.

Pittsburgh Mayor’s Tantrum About School Finances Proves He Doesn’t Understand Education or Equity

November 17, 2019November 17, 2019 stevenmsinger A+ Schools, Accountability, Budget, capitalism, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Corporate Education "Reform", Credibility, Data, Democrat, Education, Election, Harrisburg, history, Labor, Local Control, Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh Public Schools, Politics, Poverty, Prejudice, privatization, Propaganda, School Funding, school segregation, Schools, segregation, Social Justice, Students, Taxation, Teachers, Unions Anthony Hamlet, Bill Peduto, Budget, charter schools, education, finances, Local Control, Mayor, Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh Public Schools, Politics, public schools, school board, Taxation

Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto is steaming mad and he doesn’t care who knows it.

On Tuesday he raved that Pittsburgh Public Schools’ finances should be taken over by the state – the same fate the city had suffered during its own economic troubles from 2004-18.

The reason Peduto thinks the school should submit to a financial recovery plan overseen by a state appointed board? School Superintendent Dr. Anthony Hamlet is proposing a 2.3% tax increase in 2020 for a reserve fund while Peduto’s municipal government allegedly is managing with a surplus.

If the city can manage its finances without a tax increase, wonders Peduto, why can’t the school district?

However, the Mayor’s narrative conveniently leaves out a few pertinent facts.

Most importantly – during the city’s economic trouble 14 years ago, Pittsburgh Public Schools gave a portion of their tax revenue to the municipal government to help it pay the bills.

Now that the city is doing better, school officials are suggesting Peduto should give that tax revenue back to the schools. And that suggestion infuriates the mayor.

In addition, it’s not true that Pittsburgh’s 2020 budget includes no tax increase.

The city is raising taxes by about 6% to pay for upkeep at its parks. However, since this tax is the result of a referendum approved by the voters, it is being spun as a “no new taxes” budget.

The city has a surplus due to construction of new high-end apartments. City Council could have budgeted some of this money to pay for the parks. Instead, leaders like Peduto were too cowardly to take the blame, themselves, and put it out as a question to voters.

It is entirely unfair to criticize Pittsburgh Public Schools for raising taxes a smaller degree (2.3%) than the city is (6%).

Both entities spend about the same amount annually. In 2020, the city has a proposed $608 million budget, and the schools have a proposed $665.6 million budget.

Moreover, there is nothing unfair about school officials asking for the tax revenue back from the city that they generously offered it when the municipality was in need.

Now that the city is out of peril (and has been since 2018), it should pay back that money. To be honest, it should do so with 14 years worth of interest – but no one is suggesting that.

At least it is time for Pittsburgh to stop leeching off its schools and give this revenue back.

The fact that Peduto is whining about something so obviously fair and equitable makes him look like a spoiled child.

The same goes for his suggestion of state takeover of district finances.

Pittsburgh Public Schools already is audited by the state every year. It is not on the state watchlist for districts in financial distress.

District spokeswoman Ebony Pugh said, “There have been no significant issues raised related to how the district conducts its finances.”

Peduto just wants the schools to have to endure the same indignity the city did thereby putting municipal leaders in a better light.

After all, it was the school district which helped the city – not the other way round. And it was the city that needed the state to take over its finances, not the schools.

It was Pittsburgh Public School’s Chief Financial Officer Ronald Joseph who explicitly proposed a take-back of wage tax revenue that was diverted to the city in 2005.

City residents pay a 3% wage tax. Of this money, originally 2% went to the schools and 1% to the city.

When the city was placed under Act 47 state oversight, the formula was changed to give a quarter percent more to the city from the school’s allotment – thus 1.75% went to the schools and 1.25% went to the city.

Pittsburgh left Act 47 in 2018 but the wage tax distribution has remained the same.

“Why in the heck can’t the school board balance their budget?” Peduto said. “Where is all this money going?”

Answer: Some of it is still going unnecessarily to fill your municipal coffers.

Peduto added:

“If they are looking to have part of the city’s wage tax, then they should be willing to open the books and let the state come in and do exactly what we had to do through Act 47, which was difficult restructuring for the future. If we didn’t have that, the city would be bankrupt.”

So let me get this straight. In order to give back the revenue the schools generously loaned the city, you need a look at their finances? I sure wouldn’t lend you a dollar or else I’d have to show you my tax returns and checking account just to get the loan repaid.

Peduto went on:

“If they simply say, ‘We’re going to take your revenue to fix our hole,’ and not be the leaders that they were elected to be in making tough decisions like raising taxes, then I have no time for that, absolutely none, and I will fight them in Harrisburg.”

How generous! That’s like threatening to go to Mom and Dad to settle your dispute. A real leader would know he was in the wrong and just pay up.

This isn’t the first time Peduto has clashed with city schools.

He seems to think his role as mayor supersedes that of the school district which operates independently through an elected nine-member board.

He said as much in 2018 when district negotiations with the Pittsburgh Federation of Teachers (PFT) threatened to spill over into the first teachers strike in more than 40 years.

Peduto wanted to mediate between the teachers and school administrators – a measure Dr. Hamlet patently refused.

Peduto said:

“They have to remember they’re a board. They’re not a government. They’re no different than the water board or the Port Authority board or the airport board. They’re a board of education. Their job should be solely making sure that kids are getting a good education. When there becomes labor strife in the city, labor strife that could affect the economic development of the city for years to come, they need to move out of the way and let [elected] leaders lead.”

Dr, Hamlet said this was a “bargaining process, not a political” one, and that Peduto needed to let administration continue the process of bargaining with the teachers – a process that resulted in a new contract without a strike.

The relationship has been chilly even before Hamlet was hired in 2016.

In a community where district funding is constantly at risk from unregulated and unaccountable charter schools, Peduto actually presided over a 2014 ribbon cutting ceremony at the Hill House Passport Academy Charter School.

Charter school costs are one of the largest expenses the district pays annually.

According to PennLive.com, the district paid $79 million (or about 12% of its budget) in 2017-18 to these institutions which are funded with public tax dollars but privately run.

Like many charter schools, the Hill District institution is incredibly segregated. According to ProPublica, 96% of students are children of color. It has no gifted program, offers no AP courses, has no students taking the SAT or ACT test, no calculus classes, no advanced math, no physics, geometry, chemistry or 8th grade algebra courses.

In short, this is not the type of school the mayor of a major metropolitan center should be promoting.

And Peduto would know that if he had any knowledge of how school systems actually work. Before entering city politics, the Democrat ran a consulting business and served as Chief of Staff to City Councilman Dan Cohen.

Since his first successful campaign for mayor in 2013, Peduto has had a history of making bold promises to the Pittsburgh Public Schools that have not always come to fruition.

Peduto said he would lobby for additional funding for city schools in Harrisburg but district solicitor Ira Weiss said the mayor never followed through.

Peduto proposed increasing school revenue by helping to rent out unused school space. That hasn’t happened, either, said Weiss.

Peduto suggested increasing student after school programs by working together with the district and others like the YMCA and the Student Conservation Association. While a few such programs do exist, there is no broad collaboration, said Errika Fearby Jones, the executive director of Dr. Hamlet’s office.

Peduto’s summer reading program with the city and the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh likewise never materialized – though the library runs its own program.

Moreover, Peduto’s plan to restart the Generations Together program with the University of Pittsburgh to promote cross-generational learning never happened either. Pitt shut down the program in 2002.

Curtiss Porter, who served as Peduto’s chief education and neighborhood reinvestment officer during the first year of his administration, blames the problem on a disagreement about who should be in charge.

The city and school district had a good working relationship when he was there, he said, but there was “a clear demarcation” between the two bodies, which made it difficult to implement some of Peduto’s ideas.

“At critical junctures…the school district made it clear that they were willing partners but that they did not have to bow to the city,” he said. “[They] made it clear the city had no jurisdiction over education.”

And that disconnect appears to continue today.

Peduto is engaged in an ignorant and arrogant power struggle with city schools that helps no one.

Vulture Voucher Bill Latest in Mike Turzai’s Quest to Please Betsy DeVos in PA

November 15, 2019November 15, 2019 stevenmsinger Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Child Predators, church and state, Civil Rights, Corbett, Corporate Education "Reform", Democrat, Donald Trump, Education, Election, Harrisburg, Parents, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Politics, Poverty, Prejudice, private schools, privatization, Propaganda, Republican, School Choice, School Funding, school vouchers, Schools, Special Education, Students, Teachers, Tom Wolf #FairFundingPA, Betsy DeVos, cherry picking, education, Harrisburg, Mike Turzai, PA House, Pennsylvania, Politics, public schools, school vouchers, vulture capitalism

The best way to help a struggling public school is to cannibalize it.

At least that’s what Betsy DeVos thinks – and so does her Pennsylvania puppet Mike Turzai.

The Republican Speaker of the state House is expected to propose a school voucher bill Monday that will treat Harrisburg Schools as nothing more than carrion fit for plunder by school privatization vultures.

Sure the district is in state receivership after decades of neglect and bad decisions by five members of the elected school board and administrators.

But instead of helping the school and its students get back on their feet, Turzai proposes siphoning away as much as $8.5 million in state funding set aside for the school’s aide. Alternatively, that money would go to help offset some of the cost of sending Harrisburg students to private or parochial schools if they so desire.

There are already 612 children living in district boundaries who attend nonpublic schools who would immediately benefit. So even if no additional students decided to take advantage of the program, that’s a $2.5 million cost to cover partial tuition for students the state is not currently paying to educate. If any additional students decided to take advantage of the program, the cost would increase.

However in lieu of any safeguards to make sure these children fleeing from the public system receive the same quality of services required by state law, Turzai’s bill goes out of its way to protect the vultures!

Under House Bill 1800, private or parochial schools won’t be held as accountable for how they spend the money they plunder from Harrisburg nor will it force them to enroll all comers like authentic public schools are required to do.

Specifically, non-public schools would be allowed to take public tax dollars but refuse any students they wished – based on gender, race, religion, even special educational needs.

It’s bad policy and bad politics.

Essentially Turzai is proposing we swoop in and tear the district to pieces – for its own good.

The bill would force state taxpayers to pay for half the cost of the voucher program – essentially making us shell out our hard earned money for two parallel education systems.

It’s unclear where the other half of the money would even come from that the state is supposed to match.

Thinking people know this is nonsense on so many levels. If the public schools have problems, there’s no reason to believe school vouchers hold the answer. After all, the best way to save yourself from drowning is to patch up the boat you’re already on. You shouldn’t jump to a lifeboat willy-nilly with no assurance that your escape craft is more seaworthy than the one you’re already sailing on.

And in fact, there is no evidence that voucher schools are better than authentic public schools.

Countless academic studies back this up. A recent 25-year meta analysis from Stanford University concluded that school vouchers do nothing to improve student achievement and distract from real solutions that could yield better results.

A 2018 Study from the University of Virginia found that once you take family income out of the equation, there are absolutely zero benefits of going to a private school. The majority of the advantage comes from simply having money and all that comes with it – physical, emotional, and mental well-being, living in a stable and secure environment, knowing where your next meal will come from, etc.

A 2018 Department of Education evaluation of the Washington, D.C., voucher program found that public school students permitted to attend a private or parochial school at public expense ended up getting worse scores than they had at public school.

Their scores went down 10 points in math and stayed about the same in reading.

The results of these studies were so damaging that school voucher lobbyists no longer even try to make the argument that sending kids to private or parochial schools has academic benefits. Instead they rely on the ideological belief that privatization is always better than public services.

Turzai is literally proposing legislation on an outdated far right talking point. But his whole plan isn’t exactly fresh. We’ve seen versions of it almost every legislative session.

Once Turzai introduces the bill next week, it’s expected that his Republican colleagues who have a majority in both the House and Senate due to grossly gerrymandered districts will vote to pass it. Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf has promised to veto it.

While Republicans have the numbers to overturn any veto, it is doubtful they would actually do so. Historically they only need to show DeVos and her billionaire friends like the Koch Brothers that they tried to pass their ALEC-written legislation. They don’t actually have to pass it. In fact, doing so would make them responsible for it and could result in voters – even in such gerrymandered districts – turning against them.

After all, school vouchers are incredibly unpopular. Every time the issue has been left to a popular vote, it has been turned down.

And Republicans know that. This is just theater to please the wealthy donor class.

Unless people stop paying attention. Then they may try to sneak it through.

Because there’s a lot more at stake than just disrupting the recovery process at Harrisburg schools.

The bill as drafted would only currently apply to Harrisburg – specifically when a receiver is appointed in a school district of the second class located in a city of the third class, within a county of the third class.

But all it would take is a receiver to be appointed for the following districts to be affected:

Allentown City, Bethlehem Area, Coatesville Area, Easton Area, Erie City, Hazleton Area, Hempfield Area, Lancaster, Penn-Trafford, Reading, Wilkes-Barre Area and York City school districts.

So this could easily become a backdoor voucher initiative for our poorest districts to become the next course on the buzzards’ menu.

But perhaps the strangest turn in this whole concern is Turzai’s apparent ambition.

He seems to be trying to position himself once again as the next gubernatorial challenger to Democrat Wolf.

And how is he planning to define that challenge? As a clone of the last dope who tried it – Scott Wagner.

Republicans don’t seem to get the message. Voters – regardless of political affiliation – care about public schools.

They ousted Tom Corbett when he slashed school funding. They voted against Wagner in droves. And the best Turzai can think to do is ape these two fools?

DeVos, herself, is perhaps the most unpopular Education Secretary in history – and that’s even with the stiff competition of Arne Duncan and John King.

School privatization is a political loser.

No one wants to violate the separation of church and state just to give private businesses a larger cut of our tax dollars.

We want equity for our public schools so all our students can learn.

Why can’t birdbrains like Turzai get that through their skulls?

Perhaps if they stopped picking through the bones of struggling schools they would.

If you live in Pennsylvania, please click here to ask your state representative to vote against the bill.

Are Teachers Allowed to Think for Themselves?

November 7, 2019November 7, 2019 stevenmsinger Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Civil Rights, Common Core, Corporate Education "Reform", Data Driven Instruction, Education, Learning, Philosophy, Politics, privatization, Schools, Standardized Testing, standards, Students, teacher autonomy, Teachers, Toxic Testing annual testing, common core, education, free thought, high stakes testing, Politics, public schools, standardized testing, Students, teachers, teaching to the test, Test Prep, test-based accountability

As a public school teacher, I am often told what to do and how to do it.

Go teach this class.

Report to lunch duty at this time.

Monitor this student’s progress in this way, that student’s progress in another way, differentiate the following, document this medical condition, write up this behavior, check for that kind of hall pass, post and teach these academic standards, etc., etc., etc.

Some of these directives I agree with and others I do not. But that is treated as an irrelevance because the one thing I’m never told to do is to think for myself. The one thing that seems to be expressly forbidden – is that I think for myself.

In fact, it’s such a glaring omission, I often wonder if it’s actually prohibited or so obviously necessary that it goes without saying.

Am I expected to think or just follow directions?

Does society want me to be a fully conscious co-conspirator of student curiosity or a mindless drone forcing kids to follow a predetermined path to work-a-day conformity?

Most days, it feels like the later.

Every last detail of my job is micromanaged and made “foolproof” to the degree that one wonders if the powers that be really consider teachers to be fools in need of proofing.

Teaching may be the only profession where you are required to get an advanced degree including a rigorous internship only to be treated like you have no idea what you’re doing.

And the pay is entirely uncompetitive considering how much you had to do to qualify for the position and how much you’re responsible for doing once you get hired.

It makes me wonder – why did I take all those courses on the history of education if I was never supposed to have the autonomy to apply them? Why did I have to learn about specific pedagogies if I was never to have the opportunity to create my own curriculum? Why was I instructed how to assess student learning if I was never meant to trust my own judgment and rely instead solely on prepackaged, canned standardized tests?

And now after 16 years in the classroom, I’m routinely told by my principal to use student testing data to drive my instruction. And, moreover, to document how I am doing so in writing.

But what if I don’t trust the student testing data in the first place?

What if – in my professional opinion – I don’t agree that the state should have purchased this standardized assessment from some corporate subsidiary? What if I don’t think it does a good job evaluating a child’s aptitude as a prediction of subsequent achievement on the next test? What if I don’t think the test provides valuable data for actual, authentic learning? What if I want to do more than just improve test scores from one standardized assessment to another? What if I want to actually teach something that will affect students’ whole lives? What if I want to empower them to think for themselves? What if my goals are higher for them than the expectations thrown on me as shackles on an educator’s waist, hands and feet?

Because it seems to me that there is a bit of a mixed message here.

On the one hand, teachers are given so many directives there’s no room for thought. On the other, teachers can’t do their jobs without it.

So what exactly do they want from me?

The principal can’t educate classes from his desk in the administrative office. The school board director can’t do it from his seat in council chambers. Lawmakers can’t do it from Washington, DC, or the state capital. Only the teacher can do it from her place in the classroom, itself.

You have to see, know and interact with your students to be able to tell what their needs are. No standardized test can tell you that – it requires human interaction, knowledge and – dare I say it – discernment.

You need to gauge student interest, background knowledge, life skills, special needs, psychology and motivation. And you need to design a curriculum that will work for these particular students at this particular time and place.

That can’t be done at a distance through any top-down directive. It must be accomplished in the moment using skill, empiricism and experience.

The fact that so many lawmakers, pundits, and administrators don’t know this, itself, has a devastating impact on the education kids actually receive.

Instead of helping teachers do their jobs, policymakers are accomplishing just the opposite. They are standing in the way and stopping us from getting things done.

We’re given impossible tasks and then impeded from doing them. At least get out of the way and leave us to it.

It’s ironic. The act of removing teacher autonomy results in dampening our effectiveness.

So as many of these same bureaucrats complain about “failing schools” and “ineffective teachers,” it is these very same complaints and the efforts taken in their name that result in ineffectiveness.

If we trusted teachers to do their jobs, they would be empowered to accomplish more. And I don’t mean blind trust. I don’t mean closing our eyes and letting teachers do whatever they want unimpeded, unadvised and unappraised. I mean letting teachers do the work in the full light of day with observation by trained professionals that know the same pedagogy, history and psychology we do – trained administrators who are or were recently teachers, themselves.

That would be both accountable and effective instead of the present situation, which is neither.

Moreover, it might incentivize policymakers to realize teachers can’t do everything themselves. Hold us accountable for what we do – not what you’d like us to do but over which we have no control.

After all, home life has a greater impact on students than anything that happens in class. And helping students to self-actualize into mature, productive members of society requires we equip them with the ability to work things out independently.

However, that does not seem to be the goal.

We don’t want free thinking students just as we don’t want free thinking teachers.

We don’t want a school system that produces independent thinkers. We want it to simply recreate the status quo. We want the lower classes to stay put. We want social mobility and new ideas to be tightly controlled and kept only within certain boundaries.

And that is why our school system keeps teachers so tightly constrained – because we want status quo students.

Educators have always been the enemy of standardization, privatization and conformity. We are on the side of liberty, emancipation and release.

Which side are you on?

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

education

Teachers Are Not Responsible for Student Growth or Achievement

Vulture Voucher Bill Latest in Mike Turzai’s Quest to Please Betsy DeVos in PA

If you live in Pennsylvania, please click here to ask your state representative to vote against the bill.

Are Teachers Allowed to Think for Themselves?