How the anti-public-education movement is fracturing

Peter Greene, at Curmudgucation, explains:

School Choice Movement Fissures (2024 Edition)

PETER GREENE

FEB 27, 2024

Milton Friedman’s vision was never popular.

The idea of doing away with public school as a public good, a service provided to all citizens, funded and managed by some combination of federal, state and local government, and replacing it all with an unregulated free market of education services in which families had to find their own way with their own resources– that was never going to be a winner. 

Replace a promise to provide every child with an education with a promise to just let everyone fend for themselves– not a popular idea. Even school vouchers–Friedman’s idea of a gateway to the future he really wanted to see–were never popular.

So they needed allies. The first batch of allies–segregationists who wanted school choice so they could choose not to send White kids to school with Black kids– were not terribly helpful from a policy standpoint. 

The big obstacle–people really like and believe in the idea of public schools.

So the Reagan administration gave us A Nation At Risk, a manifesto masquerading as a research report that aimed to chip away at that public support for public schools. “Burn it all down” was still a fringe notion, but the Overton window was shifting, and the repeated assertion that public schools were failing was the crowbar used to shift it.

By the turn of the millennium, a partnership had emerged, between choicers (we need more options because competition will help), reformsters (we need standards and tests and incentives to force teachers to suck less), neo-liberals (the private sector can do this better), technocrats (let’s be data driven), accountability hawks (make schools prove they’re doing a good job), social justice fabulists (better education will magically erase poverty), and folks who had real concerns about real issues in education. 

Overall, this patchwork alliance had the outward appearance of a bipartisan team-up, and that was just perfect for the Bush-Obama years and the sham that was No Child Left Behind

But what the alliance didn’t produce was results. Choice did not provide a sudden lifting of all boats, despite some data-torturing attempts to show otherwise. Data-driven instruction didn’t improve the data generated by either students or teachers. Underserved communities that were supposed to be rescued from failing schools by charters and choice too often had education policies done to them rather than with them. And then there was the gross miscalculation that was Common Core, which drew attack from all across the political spectrum.

By the mid 2010s, the deal was splintering. Robert Pondiscio was one of the first to publicly talk about it– the social justice wing of the choice movement was demanding more focus on actual education results, and the free market wing that was more committed to the idea of choice as an end in itself, whether it improved educational outcomes or not.

The alliance probably would have fallen apart under the simple force of gravity, but Trump arrived like a sledgehammer to bust it up. The social justice wing of reform bailed immediately, and the free market wing– well, Jeanne Allen typified the speedy shift from “I don’t want my issues coming out of his mouth” to much love for MAGAland. 

The installation of Betsy DeVos signaled the rise of what I guess we can call Christianist Friedmanism. Friedman was always stuck arguing that a free market approach to education was just better, because reasons. But the DeVos wing of choicers have a better explanation– the unregulated free market approach to education is better because it is what God wants. 

DeVos could never quite go full DeVos during her tenure–she even made it a point to make nice with charter fans even though, for her, charters are just a way to get to the full voucherism she favors. Still watching that Overton window. 

Then COVID-19 came and set fire to the side of the house the Overton window is set in.

Culture warrior stuff was in. Pandemic response crazy-pants reactions made anti-government, anti-institution, anti-qualifications, anti-smarty-pants-with-all-their-book-learning sentiment Great Again. Frustrated activists like Chris Rufo and the Moms For Liberty founders, who had already been trying to break through with an anti-public school message for years suddenly found themselves with all sorts of traction. Jay Greene, who had worked as a school choice academic at the University of Arkansas, took a job with the christianist right wing Heritage Foundation, and from that new perch he announced the new alliance– “Time for the school choice movement to embrace the culture wars.”

So here we are, with the new alliance driving the school choice revolution bus. And like all the other alliances over the past seventy-some years, this one has some fault lines.

There’s certainly a difference of style. Educational dudebros like Rufo, Corey DeAngelis and Ryan Walters are pretty abrasive and aggressive, sometimes in ways that might strike some of the old guard as unseemly. In the days of the earlier alliance, reformsters caught on to the idea that belittling teachers and treating them as the enemy was not a useful way to get policies fruitfully implemented. Of course, one does not need to build lines of communication across a bridge if one’s goal is to just burn the bridge down. 

That’s part and parcel of the biggest fracture line in the current choice movement, which is that the different factions have different goals. 

The free market wing still argues for some sort of free market of education, with some combination of private and public (if they’re a little more reality based) choices for families with, perhaps, some sort of taxpayer subsidy to even the playing field a hair. You might even find one or two who believe there should be some guardrails, some accountability and oversight for such a system.

But their current allies from the culture war world are quite clear that they don’t actually like choice at all. Parents Defending Education, a piece of kochtopus astro turfing, has been clear, as with their recent piece warning that in some states taxpayers are being required to help fund LGBTQ charter schools! Moms For Liberty has been clear that some books should not be an available choice for students in schools, regardless of what those students’ parents might want. 

In Georgia, the legislature is considering a Don’t Say Gay law to restrict teaching about gender identity in private as well as public schools. Neal McClusky has popped up reliably to argue that, no, real school choice means you can’t outlaw the choices you don’t like, but the culture panic MAGA christianist nationalists aren’t listening. Their goal is not a robust system of public and private choices for a wide variety of viewpoints, but a system, public or private or whatever, that reflects only their values. In short, the opposite of school choice. 

I’m not sure how long the alliance will hold up, particularly since the traditional reformsters are, at best, minority partners here. This year’s CPAC, the annual conservative rant-o-pallooza, seemed to have plenty to say about making schools adhere to proper values, but hardly anything about actual school choice. Trump promised school vouchers, but only in the context of a promise to “restore God to His rightful place in American culture.”

Meanwhile, Chester Finn is trying hard, repeatedly, to stand up for the notion that maybe the culture wars and even free market affection are obscuring the goal of providing American children with a good education, and that some accountability and oversight might be useful, even as he waxes nostalgic for the days of bipartisan accomplishments that made the education system better. 

Like many long-time reformsters, Finn fails to see how their brand of reform set the stage for today’s scorched earth attacks on public education (and, to be fair, public education’s failure to address some of its own issues also opened some doors as well). When Chris Rufo asserts that the path to universal school choice requires universal distrust of public education, he’s simply taking the arguments laid out in A Nation At Risk to their natural scorched earth conclusion. 

There is perhaps another way of viewing the fissures in the current movement. On one side, reformsters who still have a bit of conservative-style love for institutions; on the other, those who would simply trash it all, right down to the concept of inclusive public schools. The former had a line, a point past which they felt one shouldn’t go because that would just be destructive. The latter are not concerned with any such line. 

I don’t think it’s any mystery that we’re at this moment right now. The new shape of school choice both rising out of and pushing aside the old education reform movement sure seems to parallel the way MAGAthauritainism pushed aside the traditional conservative project and yet is also somehow rooted in it. 

Or we can parse the fissures one other way: The movement today has three main threads:

* People who want to see better schools and think that school choice gets us there.

* People who see free-market based choice as a worthy end in itself

* People who want to see education delivered in different tiers according to class, but in all tiers delivered in alignment with a single set of christianist values, and see choice policies as a tool to get there

Time will tell, I guess, which group will do the best job of using the other two as a tool for achieving their own goals. 

How to detect bullcrap better

(And why Wikipedia is a better source than most people think!)

============

Read on blog or ReaderLarry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Teaching Students to Navigate the Online Landscape (Joel Breakstone, Sarah McGrew, Mark Smith, Teresa Ortega, and Sam Wineburg)

larrycuban

February 11

This article appeared in Social Education, 82(4), 2018, pp.219-222.

Joel Breakstone is director of the Stanford History Education Group at Stanford University. Sarah McGrew co-directs the Civic Online Reasoning project for the Stanford History Education Group. Teresa Ortega serves as the project manager for the Stanford History Education Group. Mark Smith is director of assessment for theStanford History Education Group. Sam Wineburg is the Margaret Jacks Professor at Stanford
University and the founder of the Stanford History
Education Group.

Since the 2016 presidential election, worries about our ability to evaluate online content have elicited much hand wringing. As a Forbes headline cautioned, “American Believe They Can Detect Fake News. Studies Show They Can’t.”1 

Our own research doubtless contributed to the collective anxiety. As part of ongoing work at the Stanford History Education Group, we created dozens of assessments to gauge middle school, high school, and college students’ ability to evaluate online content. 2 

In November 2016, we released a report summarizing trends in the 7,804 student responses we collected across 12 states. 3 At all grade levels, students struggled to make even the most basic evaluations. Middle school students could not distinguish between news articles and sponsored content. High school students were unable to identify verified social
media accounts. Even college students could not determine the organization behind a supposedly non-partisan website. In short, we found young people ill equipped to make sense of the information that floods their phones, tablets, and laptops.

Although it’s easy to bemoan how much students—and the rest of us—struggle, it’s not very useful. Instead of castigating students’ shortcomings, we’d be better served by considering what student responses teach us about their reasoning: What mistakes do they tend to make? How might we build on what they do in order to help them become more thoughtful consumers of digital content?

The thousands of student responses we reviewed reveal three common mistakes and point toward strategies to help students become more skilled evaluators of online content.

Focusing on Surface Features
Over and over, students focus on a web-site’s surface features. Such features—a site’s URL, graphics, design, and “About” page—are easy to manipulate to fit the interests of a site’s creators. Not one of
these features is a sound indicator of a site’s trustworthiness; regardless, many students put great stock in them. One of our tasks asked students to imagine they were doing research on children’s health and came across the website of the American College of Pediatricians (acpeds.org). We asked them if the web-site was a trustworthy source to learn about children’s health

Despite the site’s professional title and appearance, the American College of Pediatricians(ACP) is not the nation’s major professional organization of pediatricians—far from it. In fact, the ACP is a conserva-
tive advocacy organization established in 2002 after the longstanding professional organization for pediatricians, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), came out in support of adoption for same-gender couples. The ACP is estimated to have between 200 and 500 members, compared to the 64,000 members of the AAP.4

News releases on the ACP website include headlines like, “Same-Sex Marriage—Detrimental to Children” and “Know Your ABCs: The Abortion Breast Cancer Link.” Nearly half of college students we tested failed to investigate the American College of Pediatricians and thus never discovered how it differed from the national organization of pediatricians. Instead, students trusted acpeds.org as an authoritative, disinterested source about children’s health. Most never probed beyond the site’s surface features.

As one student wrote, “It’s a trustworthy source because it does not have ads on the side of the page, it ends in .org, and it has accurate information on the page.” Another wrote, “They look credentialed, the website is well-designed and professional, they have a .org domain (which I think is pretty good).”

These students considered multiple features of the website. However, there are two big problems with these evaluations. 

First, such features are laughably easy to manage and tweak. Any well-
resourced organization can hire web developers to make its website appear professional and concoct a neutral description for its “About” page. 

Second, none of the features students noted attest to a site’s trustworthiness. The absence of advertising on a page does not make a site reliable and a .org domain communicates nothing definitive about credibility. Yet, many students treated these features as if they were seals of approval. Students would have learned far more about the site had they asked themselves just one question: What, exactly, is the American
College of Pediatricians?

Accepting Evidence Unquestioningly

One factor dominates students’ decisions about whether information is trustworthy: the appearance of “evidence.” Graphs, charts, infographics, photographs, and videos are particularly persuasive. Students often conclude that a post is trustworthy simply because it includes evidence to back its claims.
What’s the problem with this? Students do not stop to ask whether the evidence is trustworthy or sufficient to support the claims a site makes. The mere existence of evidence, the more the better, often does the trick.

One of our tasks directed students to a video posted on Facebook. Uploaded by the account “I on Flicks,” the video, “Democrats BUSTED on CAMERA STUFFING BALLOT Boxes,” claims to capture “2016 Democrat Primary Voter Fraud CAUGHT ON TAPE.” Two and a half minutes long, the clip shows
people furtively stuffing stacks of ballots into ballot boxes in what are purportedly precincts in Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Arizona. We asked students, “Does this clip provide strong evidence of voter
fraud during the 2016 Democratic primary election?”

The video immediately raises concerns. We know nothing about who posted it. It provides no proof that it shows electoral irregularities in the states listed. In fact, a half-minute of online digging reveals that it was originally posted on the BBC website with the headline “Russian voting fraud caught on webcam.” However, the majority of high school students we surveyed accepted the video as conclusive evidence of U.S. voter fraud, never consulting the larger web to help them make a judgment. 

The following answer reflects how easily students were taken in: “The video shows footage of people shoving multiple sheets of paper into a ballot box in isolated places. We can see the expressions of the people shoving paper into the ballot box and I can tell that they are being secretive and ashamed of their actions.”

Sixty percent of high school students accepted the video without raising questions about its source. For them, seeing was believing: The “evidence” was so compelling that students could see nothing else.

Misunderstanding Wikipedia

Despite students’ general credulity, they are sharply skeptical about one website: Wikipedia. Their responses show a distorted understanding about the site and a misunderstanding of its value as a research tool. We asked students to compare two websites: the Wikipedia entry on “Gun
Politics in the U.S.” and a National Rifle Association (NRA) article, “Ten Myths
about Gun Control,” posted on a personal page on Duke University’s website.

The task asked students to imagine that they were doing research on gun control and came across both sites. It then asked which of the two sites was a better place to start their research.
Most students argued that they would start with the NRA article because it carries an .edu designation from a prestigious university. Wikipedia, on the other hand, was considered categorically unreliable. As one student succinctly summed it up: “Wikipedia is never that reliable
for research!!!”

Why are students so distrustful of Wikipedia? The most common explana-
tion students provided was that anyone can edit a Wikipedia page. One student explained, “I would not start my research
with the Wikipedia page because anyone can edit Wikipedia even if they
have absolutely no credibility, so much of the information could be inaccurate.”

Another simply noted, “Anyone can edit information on Wikipedia.” While these students have learned that Wikipedia is open-sourced, they have not learned how Wikipedia regulates and monitors its content, from locking pages on many contentious issues to deploying bots to quickly correct vandalized pages.

Furthermore, these students have not learned that many Wikipedia pages
include links to a range of sources that can serve as useful jumping off points
for more in-depth research. In fact, for this task, Wikipedia is a far better place to learn about both sides in the gun control debate than an NRA broadside.

Unfortunately, inflexible opposition to Wikipedia and an unfounded faith in
.edu URLs led students astray. The strategies students used to complete our tasks—making judgments based on surface features, reacting to the exis-
tence of evidence, and flatly rejecting Wikipedia—are outdated, one-size-
fits-all approaches. They are not only ineffective; they also create a false sense of security. When students deploy these antiquated strategies, they believe they are carefully consuming digital content. In fact, they are easy marks for digital rogues of all stripes.

How Can We Help Students?
Students’ evaluation strategies stand in stark contrast to professional fact checkers’ approach to unfamiliar digital sources. As part of our assessment development process, we observed fact checkers from the nation’s most prestigious news outlets as they completed online tasks.5 

When fact checkers encountered an unfamiliar website, they immediately left it and read laterally, opening up new browser tabs along the screen’s horizontal axis in order to see what other sources said about the original site’s author or sponsoring organization. Only after putting their queries
to the open web did checkers return to the original site, evaluating it in light of the new information they gleaned. 

In contrast, students approached the web by reading vertically, dwelling on the site where they first landed and closely examining its features—URL, appearance, content, and “About” page—without investigating who might be behind this content.

We refer to the ability to locate, evaluate, and verify digital information about
social and political issues as civic online reasoning. We use this term to highlight the essential role that evaluating digital content plays in civic life, where informed engagement rests on students’ ability to ask and answer these questions of online information:

1. Who is behind it?
2. What is the evidence for its claims?
3. What do other sources say?

These are the core competencies of civic online reasoning that we’ve identified through a careful analysis of fact checkers’ evaluations. When they ask who’s behind information, students should investigate its authors, inquire into the motives (commercial, ideological, or otherwise) those people have to present the information, and decide whether they should be trusted. 

In order to investigate evidence, students should consider what evidence
is furnished, what source provided it, and whether it sufficiently supports the
claims made. Students should also seek to verify arguments by consulting multiple sources.

There is no silver bullet for combatting the forces that seek to mislead
online. Strategies of deception shift constantly and we are forced to make
quick judgments about the information that bombards us. What should we do to help students navigate this complex
environment? 

We believe students need a digital tool belt stocked with strategies
that can be used flexibly and efficiently. The core competencies of civic online reasoning are a starting place. For example, consider what would happen if students prioritized asking “Who is behind this information?” when they first visited acpeds.org. If they read laterally, they would be more likely to discover the American College of Pediatricians’ perspective. They might come across an article from Snopes, the fact-checking website, noting that the American College of Pediatricians “explicitly states a mission that is overtly political rather than medical in nature”6 

Or a Southern Poverty Law Center post that describes the ACP as a “fringe anti-LGBT hate group that masquerades as the premier U.S. association of pediatricians to push anti-LGBT junk science.” 7 

Similarly, students would come to very different conclusions about the video claiming to show voter fraud if they spent a minute reading laterally to address the question, “What’s the evidence for the claim?”

Wikipedia is another essential tool. We would never tell a carpenter not to
use a hammer. The same should hold true for the world’s fifth-most-trafficked website. The professional fact checkers that we observed frequently turned to Wikipedia as a starting place for their searches. Wikipedia never served as the final terminus, but it frequently provided
fact checkers with an overview and links to other sources. We need to teach students how to use Wikipedia in a similar way. 

As teachers, we also need to familiarize ourselves with how the site functions. Too often we have received responses from students indicating that they don’t trust Wikipedia because their teachers told them never to use it. Although far from perfect, Wikipedia has progressed far beyond its original incarnation in the early days of the web. Given the challenges students face online, we shouldn’t deprive them of this powerful tool.

In short, we must equip students with tools to traverse the online landscape. We believe integrating the core competen-cies of civic online reasoning across the curriculum is one promising direction. It will require the development of high quality resources, professional development for teachers, and time for professional collaboration. 

We have begun this work by making our tasks freely available on our website (sheg.stanford.edu). We are also collaborating with the Poynter Institute and Google. As part of this initiative, known as Media Wise, we are creating new lesson plans and professional development materials for teach-
ers. These resources will be available on our website in the coming months. 

This is a start, but more is needed. We hope others will join in this crucial work. At stake is the preparation of future voters to make sound, informed decisions in their communities and at the ballot box.

Notes

1. Brett Edkins, “Americans Believe They Can Detect
   Fake News. Studies Show They Can’t,” Forbes (Dec.
   20, 2016), http://www.forbes.com/sites/brettedkins/2016/
   12/20/americans-believe-they-can-detect-fake-news-
   studies-show-they-cant/#f6778b4022bb.
2. Joel Breakstone, Sarah McGrew, Mark Smith, Teresa
   Ortega, and Sam Wineburg, “Why We Need a New
   Approach to Teaching Digital Literacy,” Phi Delta
   Kappan 99, no.6 (2018): 27–32; Sarah McGrew,
   Joel Breakstone, Teresa Ortega, Mark Smith, and
   Sam Wineburg, “Can Students Evaluate Online
   Sources? Learning from Assessments of Civic
   Online Reasoning,” Theory and Research in Social
   Education 46, no. 2 (2018): 165–193, https://doi.
   org/10.1080/00933104.2017.1416320; Sarah McGrew,
   Teresa Ortega, Joel Breakstone, and Sam Wineburg,
   “The Challenge That’s Bigger Than Fake News:
   Civic Reasoning in a Social Media Environment,”
   American Educator 41, no. 3 (2017): 4–10.
3. Stanford History Education Group, Evaluating
   Information: The Cornerstone of Civic Online
   Reasoning (Technical Report. Stanford, Calif.:
   Stanford University, 2016), https://purl.stanford.edu/
   fv751yt5934.
4. Warren Throckmorton, “The American College of
   Pediatricians Versus the American College of
   Pediatrics: Who Leads and Who Follows?” [Blog
   post], (Oct. 6, 2011), http://www.wthrockmorton.
   com/2011/10/06/the-american-college-of-pediatricia
   ns-versus-the-american-academy-of-pediatrics-who-
   leads-and-who-follows/.
5. Sam Wineburg and Sarah McGrew, “Lateral
   Reading and the Nature of Expertise: Reading Less
   and Learning More When Evaluating Digital
   Information,” Teachers College Record (in press),
   Stanford History Education Group Working Paper
   No. 2017-A1, Oct 9, 2017, https://papers.ssrn.com/
   sol3/papers.cfm? abstract_id=3048994
6. Kim LaCapria, “American Pediatricians Issue
   Statement That Transgenderism is ‘Child Abuse’?”
   Snopes (February 26, 2017), http://www.snopes.com/fact-
   check/americas-pediatricians-gender-kids/.
7. Southern Poverty Law Center (n.d.). American
   College of Pediatricians, http://www.splcenter.org/fighting-
   hate/extremist-files/group/american-college-
   pediatricians.

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Dick Cheney: What I got right about Iraq

COMMENTARY

What I Got Right About The Iraq War

By Dick Cheney (actually, by The Onion)

PublishedTuesday 3:24PM

On the 20th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, it’s important for us as a nation to reflect on that conflict and its consequences. As the vice president of the United States in 2003, I was one of the architects of the project to go after Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction. Today, I believe it’s important to offer an honest assessment of my role in the Iraq War. Looking back on it now, I have to say that, wow, I mostly got it right.

Seriously, the Iraq War went basically as well as I could have hoped.

We in the Bush administration justified the war on the basis of destroying Saddam’s WMDs and bringing democracy to the Iraqi people. Twenty years later, we know that Saddam didn’t have any WMDs, and that the United States left Iraq in the throes of poverty and violence. Critics then and now have suggested that we deliberately misrepresented intelligence, and that spreading democracy was merely a fig leaf for our true goal of maintaining U.S. political and economic dominance over the world.

To that, I say, no shit. Duh. Of course we were lying. Of course we only went in to maintain American hegemony. That was the whole plan all along. 

Christ, what country do you think we are?

In hindsight, it’s stunning to see how right I was about the long-term impacts of invading Iraq. Sure, there are the obvious wins of destabilizing governments we don’t like, strengthening U.S. control over the oil industry, and killing a bunch of Muslims. That was all pretty neat, and exactly what we expected. But let’s be honest about the Iraqi victims: You don’t care about them, and I don’t care about them. Because, ultimately, the goal of the Iraq War was much bigger than that, and we achieved that goal: the victory of the U.S. war machine over the American people.

In my heart of hearts, I figured that if Americans would accept the Iraq War, then there was nothing they wouldn’t accept. It seems clear, 20 years later, that I’ve been proven right.

For starters, we wanted to put the American political and media class on a permanent war footing. After the Soviet Union collapsed, things looked dicey in terms of keeping Americans all frothed up about foreign adversaries. Sure, 9/11 helped, but what we really craved was a rationale for endless war. In Iraq, we implemented our playbook for the post-Vietnam, post-Soviet, 21st-century invasion, and it’s amazing to see how well it all played out. Today, all we have to do is say “democracy,” and our political and media elite will rush to support any military action like slobbering dogs. I don’t mean to be immodest, but that’s exactly how I predicted it would go down.

Any Iraq War reflection must contend with the rise of ISIS—one of America’s greatest accomplishments. ISIS was a real home run for us. We suspected that sowing wanton violence across the Middle East would stoke anti-American insurgencies that didn’t conform to conventional national or geographic boundaries. In theory, they could be everywhere. And if the enemy could be everywhere, it justified basically any action to stop them. Which was great, because the deliberately vague war on terror gave a blank check to the men and women who bravely reap the profits of our private military contractors.

I imagine the name Halliburton rings a bell? What we wanted to do, what Rumsfeld and Condi and I and the rest of that bunch really wanted to do, was forever shift war-making into the hands of weapons contractors and mercenary armies. Not only does that make me and a bunch of my buddies incredibly rich, but it makes it so that even if regular people wanted to stop the war machine, they couldn’t. All decisions are made outside public control, and there aren’t any democratic mechanisms left to stop it. Of all the legacies of the war, that might be my absolute favorite.

I’m calling on all Americans to support our mission to invade Thailand and restore democracy.

Gotcha! You started feeling all patriotic for a second there, didn’t you? Started getting all indignant about those poor suffering Thai people and ready to put their flag in your social media handle? I have no fucking clue if Thailand has a democracy, and I don’t care. But inspiring that knee-jerk jingoistic reaction in you, that right there is the legacy of the Iraq War. That’s my legacy.

When I’m right, I’m right.

Because ultimately, that might be the thing we were most right about: We figured that tying being a “real American” to patriotism would make it effectively impossible to mount a serious anti-war effort in this country ever again. Since the Iraq War, Democrats have been so worried about being labeled soft on terrorism that they’ve given full-throated support to every military action that our weapons lobbyists and intelligence agencies could devise. In addition, legitimate public grievances over America’s most heinous actions can be reduced by the media to feckless “culture war” battles, which neutralizes their power. If you don’t believe those were major driving forces behind the war in Iraq, I have a weapon of mass destruction to sell you.

It’s easy for armchair critics to condemn the Iraq War. But you have to remember what things were like back in 2003. People actually trusted the government and had faith in the idea of America. Trust and faith aren’t very sturdy things to build a perpetual war machine on, and they don’t make a lot of money, either. The Iraq War eroded faith in the government and drove more Americans into suspicion and hatred, just as we hoped it would. Combine that with rising inequality and the American cult of the individual, and you have a perfect recipe for ensuring that most Americans are too disillusioned to mount collective resistance to any governmental transgressions. That’s what I always hoped the Iraq War might accomplish, and man, it feels good to be right. 

Looking back, it’s safe to say the Iraq War was the high point of my career. Except maybe shooting that guy.

Teacher Unions

I got this from Diane Ravitch’s blog.

Here in Michigan, the Democratic legislature just re-affirmed our state’s longstanding commitment to working families by removing anti-laborprovisions from state law. The move doesn’t apply to teachers and other public employees, because the conservative U.S. Supreme Court sideda few years back with Right-wing activists in their efforts to hinder contributions to public sector unions, but it’s still good news for the labor movement overall.

And I wanted to use their effort—alongside Republican efforts in other states to threaten teachers for what they say in classrooms—to make a simple point. 

We need teachers unions. Other folks more prominent than me, like AFT’s Randi Weingarten, have made this pointrecently too. But I wanted to add my own voice as someone who has not been a union member, and someone who—although I’ve appeared with Randion her podcast and count many union members as friends—has never been an employee or even a consultant. 

If you want to talk dollars, The Walton Family Foundation once supported my research on charter schools to the tune of more than $300,000. Arnold Ventures supported my fundraising for a research center at Michigan State–$1.9 million from them. And the US Department of Education awarded my team more than $2 million to study school choice—while Betsy DeVos was secretary.

Think about that when I say school vouchers are horrific. And understand, I’m getting no support from teachers’ unions. 

Instead it is I who supports them. 

I’ve been studying teacher labor markets almost as long as school vouchers. Mostly my research has looked at teacher recruitment and retention. But I’ve also written about teachers’unionsspecifically. There’s a debate among scholars on what unions do and whether their emphasis on spending translates into test score differences. In the “rent seeking” framework economists use, the concern is that dollars spent on salaries don’t have direct academic payoffs. 

There is no question that spending more money on public schools has sustained and generational impacts on kids. Research has “essentially settled” that debate, according to today’s leading expert on the topic. 

But I want to branch out from dollars and cents and test scores to talk about teacher voice. 

And I want to do that by raising a few questions that I’ve asked myself over the last couple years:

Why should the voice of a billionaire heiress from Michigan with no experience in public schools count for more than the voices of 100,000 teachers in my state’s classrooms every day?

Why should the simple fact that they work with children made by other people mean that teachers surrender their own autonomy and judgment not just as professionals but as human beings?

Why should educators have to work under what amounts to gag orders, afraid to broach certain topics or issues in the classroom? Some states are setting up hotlines to report on teachers as if they’re parolees, and a bill in New Hampshire would essentially give the fringe-Right Secretary of Education subpoena power to haul teachers in front of a special tribunal for teaching “divisive concepts.” This, after a Moms for Liberty chapter put out a bounty on New Hampshire teachers who were likewise divisive on an issue. Read: an issue of race or gender. 

It’s not just threats to teacher employment. We know this. There are threats to teachers’ lives. How many teachers have died alongside their students—other people’s children—over the years in school shootings?

Why does the Right claim to trust teachers enough to arm them with gunsin response to those shootings, but not enough to let them talk about race, gender, or any other “divisive concept?” Even some conservative commentatorshave worried publicly that we’re asking teachers to do too much. Why are we asking them to be an armed security force too?

‘In her recent history of “The Teacher Wars”, The New York Times’ Dana Goldstein noted that teachers formed unions, and fought for teacher tenure, to protect themselves not just professionally but personally. For free speech. To prevent harassment from supervisors—then as now, teachers were mostly professional women—and to keep from being fired for pregnancy or marital status. 

So really, attacks on teachers are nothing new. Instead, teachers seem to be one of the few professions that it’s still acceptable in political conversation—even a mark of supposed intellectual sophistication in some circles—to ponder the shortcomings of the educators who work with our kids every day. 

There’s nothing sophisticated about attacking hardworking, thoughtful, and dedicated people. And the only result of doing so will be the further erosion of our public, community schools. And that’s really the point. Just a few days ago, we learned that the big data that I and many others have gotten used to working with finally caught up to the on-the-frontlines warnings of educators everywhere: teachers are exiting the profession at unprecedented rates. 

I’ve taken no money from teachers’ unions for any of the work I do. I’ve never been a member of a union—teachers’ or otherwise. Until now. Because after writing this today, I made a donation to my state’s primary teachers’ union and became a general member: a person “interested in advancing the cause of education…not eligible for other categories of membership.”

There’s a word for that in the labor movement. You hear it a lot here in Michigan, where I grew up and now teach future teachers in a college of education. That word is Solidarity. 

Sign me up.

www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/living-in-the-age-of-the-white-mob

Sadly, racist White mob violence has defined this country much more than progressive movements for most of US history.

Why A New Generation of Teachers is Angry at Self-Styled Education ‘Reformers’

This is an excellent essay at Medium that I learned about from Peter Greene of Curmudgucation. I copy and paste it in its entirety in case you don’t like signing into Medium.

Why New Educators Resent “Reformers”

Bard MAT in Los AngelesFollow

Nov 30

Let’s consider why so many young educators today are in open rebellion.

How did we lose patience with politicians and policymakers who dominated nearly every education reform debate for more than a generation?

Recall first that both political parties called us “a nation at risk,” fretted endlessly that we “leave no child behind,” and required us to compete in their “race to the top.”

They told us our problems could be solved if we “teach for America,” introduce “disruptive technology,” and ditch the textbook to become “real world,” 21st century, “college and career ready.”

They condemned community public schools for not letting parents “choose,” but promptly mandated a top-down “common core” curriculum. They flooded us with standardized tests guaranteeing “accountability.” They fetishized choice, chopped up high schools, and re-stigmatized racial integration.

They blamed students who lacked “grit,” teachers who sought tenure, and parents who knew too much. They declared school funding isn’t the problem, an elected school board is an obstacle, and philanthropists know best.

They told us the same public schools that once inspired great poetry, art, and music, put us on the moon, and initiated several civil rights movements needed to be split, gutted, or shuttered.

They invented new school names like “Green Renaissance College-Prep Academy for Character, the Arts, and Scientific Careers” and “Hope-Horizon Enterprise Charter Preparatory School for New STEM Futures.” They replaced the district superintendent with the “Chief Educational Officer.”

They published self-fulfilling prophecies connecting zip-coded school ratings, teacher performance scores, and real estate values. They viewed Brown v. Board as skin-deep and sentimental, instead of an essential mandate for democracy.

They implied “critical thinking” was possible without the Humanities, that STEM alone makes us vocationally relevant, and that “coding” should replace recess time. They cut teacher pay, lowered employment qualifications, and peddled the myth anyone can teach.

They celebrated school recycling programs that left consumption unquestioned, gave lip-service to “student-centered civic engagement” while stifling protest, and talked up “multiple intelligences” while defunding the arts.

They instructed critics to look past poverty, inequality, residential segregation, mass incarceration, homelessness, and college debt to focus on a few heartwarming (and yes, legitimate) stories of student resilience and pluck.

They expected us to believe that a lazy public-school teacher whose students fail to make “adequate yearly progress” was endemic but that an administrator bilking an online academy or for-profit charter school was “one bad apple.”

They designed education conferences on “data-driven instruction,” “rigorous assessment,” and “differentiated learning” but showed little patience for studies that correlate student performance with poverty, trauma, a school-to-prison pipeline, and the decimation of community schools.

They promised new classroom technology to bridge the “digital divide” between rich, poor, urban, and rural, while consolidating corporate headquarters in a few elite cities. They advertised now-debunked “value-added” standardized testing for stockholder gain as teacher salaries stagnated.

They preached “cooperative learning” while sending their own kids to private schools. They saw alma mater endowments balloon while donating little to the places most Americans earn degrees. They published op-eds to end affirmative action but still checked the legacy box on college applications.

They were legitimately surprised when thousands of teachers in the reddest, least unionized states walked out of class last year.

Meanwhile……

The No Child Left Behind generation continues to bear the fullest weight of this malpractice, paying a steep price for today’s parallel rise in ignorance and intolerance.

We are the children of the education reformer’s empty promises. We watched the few decide for the many how schools should operate. We saw celebrated new technologies outpace civic capacity and moral imagination. We have reason to doubt.

We are are the inheritors of “alternative facts” and “fake news.” We have watched democratic institutions crumble, conspiracies normalized, and authoritarianism mainstreamed. We have seen climate change denied at the highest levels of government.

We still see too many of our black brothers and sisters targeted by law enforcement. We watched as our neighbor’s promised DACA protections were rescinded and saw the deporters break down their doors. We see basic human rights for our LGBTQ peers refused in the name of “science.”

We have seen the “Southern strategy” deprive rural red state voters of educational opportunity before dividing, exploiting, and dog whistling. We hear climate science mocked and watch women’s freedom erode. We hear mental health discussed only after school shootings.

We’ve seen two endless wars and watched deployed family members and friends miss out on college. Even the battles we don’t see remind us that that bombs inevitably fall on schools. And we know war imposes a deadly opportunity tax on the youngest of civilians and female teachers.

Against this backdrop we recall how reformers caricatured our teachers as overpaid, summer-loving, and entitled. We resent how our hard-working mentors were demoralized and forced into resignation or early retirement.

Our collective experience is precisely why we aren’t ideologues. We know the issues are complex. And unlike the reformers, we don’t claim to have the answers. We simply believe that education can and must be more humane than this. We plan to make it so.

We learned most from the warrior educators who saw through the reform facade. Our heroes breathed life into institutions, energized our classrooms, reminded us what we are worth, and pointed us in new directions. We plan to become these educators too.

NATIONAL TEST SCORES IN DC WERE RISING FASTER UNDER THE ELECTED SCHOOL BOARD THAN THEY HAVE BEEN DOING UNDER THE APPOINTED CHANCELLORS

 

Add one more to the long list of recent DC public education scandals* in the era of education ‘reform’:

DC’s NAEP** test scores are increasing at a lower rate now (after the elected school board was abolished in 2007) than they were in the decade before that.

This is true in every single subgroup I looked at: Blacks, Hispanics, Whites, 4^th graders, 8^th graders, in reading, and in math.

Forget what you’ve heard about DC being the fastest-growing school district. Our NAEP scores were going up faster before our first Chancellor, Michelle Rhee, was appointed than they have been doing since that date.

Last week, the 2017 NAEP results were announced at the National Press Club building here on 14^th Street NW, and I went in person to see and compare the results of 10 years of education ‘reform’ after 2007 with the previous decade. When I and others used the NAEP database and separated out average scale scores for black, Hispanic, and white students in DC, at the 4^th and 8^th grade levels, in both reading and math, even I was shocked:

In every single one of these twelve sub-groups, the rate of change in scores was WORSE (i.e., lower) after 2007 (when the chancellors took over) than it was before that date (when we still had an elected school board).

I published the raw data, taken from the NAEP database, as well as graphs and short analyses, on my blog, (gfbrandenburg.wordpress.com) which you can inspect if you like. I will give you two examples:

• Black 4^th grade students in DC in math (see https://bit.ly/2JbORad ):
  • In the year 2000, the first year for which I had comparable data, that group got an average scale score of 188 (on a scale of 0 – 500). In the year 2007, the last year under the elected school board, their average scale score was 209, which is an increase of 21 points in 7 years, for an average increase of 3.0 points per year, pre-‘reform’.
  • After a decade of ‘reform’ DC’s black fourth grade students ended up earning an average scale score of 224, which is an increase of 15 points over 10 years. That works out to an average growth of 1.5 points per year, under direct mayoral control.
  • So, in other words, Hispanic fourth graders in DC made twice the rate of progress on the math NAEP under the elected school board than they did under Chancellors Rhee, Henderson, and Wilson.

 

• Hispanic 8^th grade students in DC in reading (see: https://bit.ly/2HhSP0z )
  • In 1998, the first year for which I had data, Hispanic 8^th graders in DC got an average scale score of 246 (again on a scale of 0-500). In 2007, which is the last year under the elected board of education, they earned an average scale score of 249, which is an increase of only 3 points.
  • However, in 2017, their counterparts received an average scale score of 242. Yes, the score went DOWN by 7 points.
  • So, under the elected board of education, the scores for 8^th grade Latinx students went up a little bit. But under direct mayoral control and education ‘reform’, their scores actually dropped.

 

That’s only two examples. There are actually twelve such subgroups (3 ethnicities, times 2 grade levels, times 2 subjects), and in every single case progress was worse after 2007 than it was beforehand.

 

Not a single exception.

 

You can see my last blog post on this, with links to other ones, here: https://gfbrandenburg.wordpress.com/2018/04/20/progress-or-not-for-dcs-8th-graders-on-the-math-naep/ or https://bit.ly/2K3UyZ1 .

 

Amazing.

 

Why isn’t there more outrage?

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*For many years, DC officials and the editorial board of the Washington Post have been bragging that the educational ‘reforms’ enacted under Chancellor Michelle Rhee and her successors have made DCPS the fastest-improving school district in the entire nation. (See https://wapo.st/2qPRSGw or https://wapo.st/2qJn7Dh for just two examples.)

It didn’t matter how many lies Chancellor Rhee told about her own mythical successes in a privately run school in Baltimore (see https://wapo.st/2K28Vgy ).  She also got away with falsehoods about the necessity of firing hundreds of teachers mid-year for allegedly being sexual predators or abusers of children (see https://wapo.st/2qNGxqB ); there were always acolytes like Richard Whitmire willing to cheer her on publicly (see https://wapo.st/2HC0zOj ), even though the charges were false.

A lot of stories about widespread fraud in the District of Columbia public school system have hit the front pages recently. Examples:

• Teachers and administrators were pressured to give passing grades and diplomas to students who missed so much school (and did so little work) that they were ineligible to pass – roughly one-third of last year’s graduating class. (see https://bit.ly/2ngmemi ) You may recall that the rising official (but fake) high school graduation rate in Washington was a used as a sign that the reforms under direct mayoral control of education had led to dramatic improvements in education here.
• Schools pretended that their out-of-school suspension rates had been dropping, when in actual fact, they simply were suspending students without recording those actions in the system. (see https://wapo.st/2HhbARS )
• Less than half of the 2018 senior class is on track to graduate because of truancy, failed classes, and the like. ( see https://bit.ly/2K5DFx9 )
• High-ranking city officials, up to and including the Chancellor himself, cheated the system by having their own children bypass long waiting lists and get admitted to favored schools. (see https://wapo.st/2Hk3HLi )
• A major scandal in 2011 about adults erasing and changing student answer sheets on the DC-CAS test at many schools in DC in order to earn bonuses and promotions was unfortunately swept under the rug. (see https://bit.ly/2HR4c0q )
• About those “public” charter schools that were going to do such a miraculous job in educating low-income black or brown children that DCPS teachers supposedly refused to teach? Well, at least forty-six of those charter schools (yes, 46!) have been closed down so far, either for theft, poor performance on tests, low enrollment, or other problems. (see https://bit.ly/2JcxIx9 ).

 

=========================================================================

**Data notes:

1. NAEP, or the National Assessment of Educational Progress, is given about every two years to a carefully chosen representative sample of students all over the USA. It has a searchable database that anybody with a little bit of persistence can learn to use: https://bit.ly/2F5LHlS .
2. I did not do any comparable measurements for Asian-Americans or Native Americans or other such ethnic/racial groups because their populations in DC are so small that in most years, NAEP doesn’t report any data at all for them.
3. In the past, I did not find big differences between the scores of boys and girls, so I didn’t bother looking this time.
4. Other categories I could have looked at, but didn’t, include: special education students; students whose first language isn’t English; economically disadvantaged students; the various percentiles; and those just in DCPS versus all students in DC versus charter school students. Feel free to do so, and report what you find!
5. My reason for not including figures separated out for only DCPS, and only DC Charter Schools, is that NAEP didn’t provide that data before about 2011. I also figured that the charter schools and the regular public schools, together, are in fact the de-facto public education system that has grown under both the formerly elected school board and the current mayoral system, so it was best to combine the two together.
6. I would like to thank Mary Levy for compiling lots of data about education in DC, and Matthew Frumin for pointing out these trends. I would also like to thank many DC students, parents, and teachers (current or otherwise) who have told me their stories.

 

MORE THAN THREE HUNDRED MILLION AMERICANS NOW ENROLLED IN TRUMP UNIVERSITY

 

By Andy Borowitz   January 20, 2017

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—In an astonishing comeback for the scandal-scarred educational institution, Trump University enrolled more than three hundred million new students at noon on Friday.

“Congratulations,” the President of Trump University told the new students. “For the next four years, you are all in Trump University.”

Some Americans who supported the President of Trump University in his long-shot bid to reopen the school made the journey to Washington, D.C., to hear his welcome address.

“He said we’re all going to be rich!” Harland Dorrinson, a new Trump University student, said. “I just know that this is going to end really well.”

But even as students like Dorrinson celebrated, there were complaints from other students, millions of whom said they had been enrolled in Trump University against their will.

“I never signed up for Trump University,” Carol Foyler, who is one of those students, said. “The President of this school is some kind of a con man. And why are so many members of the faculty Russian? The whole thing seems fishy.”

“Not my University,” she said.

While the original program offered by Trump University had a price tag as high as thirty-five thousand dollars, the next four years are expected to be far more costly, experts say.

 

Andy Borowitz is a New York Times best-selling author and a comedian who has written for The New Yorker since 1998. He writes the Borowitz Report for newyorker.com

Compare ‘Education Reform’ to Ineffective but Profitable Quick-Weight-Loss Schemes

John Viall compares the past 15 years of education ‘reform’ to the past 30 or 40 years of completely counterproductive weight-loss schemes — in both cases, the results are exactly contrary to what they were promised to be. In one case, we can see that America’s obesity rates are some of the worst in the world. In the other, we have certainly not ‘raced to the top’ on TIMMS, PISA, or any other international test, despite all of promises by both the Bush and Obama administrations.

He concludes (I added some color):

“For a sixth time the PISA test was administered in 2015.

Now, 15-year-olds from seventy countries and educational systems took the test. How did U. S. students fare?

The envelope please.

In reading U. S. students scored 497. In other words, after fifteen years of school reform and tens of billions wasted, reading scores were still down seven points.

Fifteen years of listening to blowhard politicians—and U. S. students averaged 470 in math, a depressing 23-point skid.

Surely, all that meddling must have done some good? No. Science scores averaged 496, still down three points.

Fifteen years of diet plans that couldn’t possibly fail and, metaphorically, we were all just a little more fat.

PISA scores had been the foundation on which all school reform was built; and after all these years, America’s 15-year-olds were scoring 33 points worse.

Noam Chomsky on the 2016 Elections:

Chomsky is often right about things.

I reprint a couple of paragraphs from Chomsky’s recent interview which I found in Truthout, which says that Bernie Sanders’ positions on things like universal health care coverage and free public higher education are held by large majorities of the population, both right now and for many decades in the past.

On the remaining Republican candidates:

Q: Cruz and Rubio appear to me to be both far more dangerous than Trump. I see them as the real monsters, while Trump reminds me a bit of Silvio Berlusconi. Do you agree with any of these views?

A: (Chomsky) I agree – and as you know, the Trump-Berlusconi comparison is current in Europe. I would also add Paul Ryan to the list. He is portrayed as the deep thinker of the Republicans, the serious policy wonk, with spreadsheets and the other apparatus of the thoughtful analyst. The few attempts to analyze his programs, after dispensing with the magic that is regularly introduced, conclude that his actual policies are to virtually destroy every part of the federal government that serves the interests of the general population, while expanding the military and ensuring that the rich and the corporate sector will be well attended to – the core Republican ideology when the rhetorical trappings are drawn aside.

and on what we should do:

Q: Is America still a democracy and, if not, do elections really matter?

A: With all its flaws, America is still a very free and open society, by comparative standards. Elections surely matter. It would, in my opinion, be an utter disaster for the country, the world and future generations if any of the viable Republican candidates were to reach the White House, and if they continue to control Congress. Consideration of the overwhelmingly important questions we discussed earlier suffices to reach that conclusion, and it’s not all. For such reasons as those I alluded to earlier, American democracy, always limited, has been drifting substantially toward plutocracy. But these tendencies are not graven in stone. We enjoy an unusual legacy of freedom and rights left to us by predecessors who did not give up, often under far harsher conditions than we face now. And it provides ample opportunities for work that is badly needed, in many ways, in direct activism and pressures in support of significant policy choices, in building viable and effective community organizations, revitalizing the labor movement, and also in the political arena, from school boards to state legislatures and much more.