DeVos Provides Evidence of Devolution

The brittle crone billionairess, Betsy Devos, went before a House committee this week to answer questions regarding her bullish support for a 12 percent cut to the federal education budget that has been proposed by the sado-conservatives now in charge at the White House.

Included in the cuts are after-school programs and mental health services for America's poorest communities.  Because the program previously have had so little money spread so thin, DeVos said, we may as well just kill the whole thing.  After all, as Trumpian reason goes, if a most people are starving, we should go ahead and eliminate food for the ones that we're feeding. 

If you're still uncertain about where the Trump/Devos ed budget registers on the inhumanity meter, it also zeroes out federal funding for Special Olympics.  All of it.  By the way, the entire $17.5 million federal commitment to Special Olympics would pay for 5 Trump trips to Mar-a-Lago.

We should prepare for more of this kind of brazen cruelty masked as fiscal responsibility.  After all, this week, we saw, too, the opening salvos in a new war to be waged in the courts, this time, to take away health care away for millions of Americans and to allow insurance companies, once again, to make insurance unaffordable for those with pre-existing conditions.  Does the Trump Party really believe that an effort to kill Obamacare will make its likely preservation the default choice among the populace, rather than the hugely popular option of Medicare-for-All? Probably.

Meanwhile, the spiriting away of the Mueller Report by Trump's AG has left much of the Resistance in a stunned whimper.  I am wondering when Barr's well-choreographed castration attempt will register among the vast majority of citizens who we might have been expected to be marching on the White House for a lesser crime against justice just a week ago.

If you want a larger future that is not ruled by a smaller past, it's time to force all of that generalized disappointment and sadness into a righteous anger that the moral universe demands.  The voting that culminates next year has to begin today.  See below.

Indivisibles,

Last night, in a stunning, reckless, and baseless two-sentence letter, the Trump administration’s Department of Justice announced it won’t defend any part of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). This is the Trump administration’s clearest attempt yet, not just to sabotage, but to completely annihilate the ACA -- and in doing so, unleash chaos on our health care system and on millions of Americans lives.

We’re pissed. And we know you are too.

→ It would jeopardize Medicaid expansion in 37 states.
→ It would end protections for preexisting conditions.
→ It would end coverage for young people who’d otherwise be able to stay on their parents’ plans until they turn 26.
→ It would end required coverage of preventive care -- like cancer screenings, vaccines, birth control, blood pressure tests and more.

And so, so much more.

Look, we know we don’t need to tell you what’s at stake -- you’ve been fighting this fight with us for the last two years. But, we’ve got three things we can do right now to beat back these latest Republican attempts to take away our healthcare, and we need your help. We’re making an urgent appeal to ensure our movement has everything it needs to respond in full force. So, if you’re ready to pitch in $5, $10, $25, or more to help fund this work, click here. Otherwise, read more about our plan below. Contribute >>

So, what happens now? To be clear, the Affordable Care Act is still the law of the land. Republicans have tried repeatedly for 9 years to repeal, undermine, and sabotage the ACA, and this is just one more attempt at that. It was because of grassroots pressure that it exists today. What’s important to remember is that this fight is now in the courts -- and there are plenty of stakeholders ready to do the job that Trump’s DOJ won’t (check out our resource with more on the upcoming legal battle here). 

Right now, there are three meaningful things that you can do to protect health care for millions while this makes its way through the courts:

1. Pressure House Democrats to use their oversight and investigatory power to hold the Trump administration accountable for their sabotage. Call them and demand that they ask the tough questions -- ask them what they’re doing about Trump’s attack on our health care right now.
2. Keep calling to get your members of Congress to commit to building on the success of the ACA and lay the groundwork for a single-payer system. Yes, ask your representatives to cosponsor Rep. Pramila Jayapal’s Medicare For All Act (we’ve got a call script!), but go a step further. Demand your members of Congress lay the groundwork now for what comes next: that means holding hearings, hearing from experts, working through the policy debates, building consensus, and drafting legislation so that it’s ready when we take power. Your continued pressure can ensure that they do this.
3. Organize, organize, organize to reverse the radical, conservative transformation of our judicial system (read: win in 2020). Right now, that means asking your senators to fight like hell to block additional Trump appointees to district and circuit courts. It also means knocking doors to take back power in the Senate and the White House to ensure that our district and federal courts are occupied by qualified judges dedicated to safeguarding our rights and promoting justice -- not advancing partisan political goals.

The good news is that our team is working day in and day out to put resources and tools in the hands of Indivisibles across the country to build local power and do just that: hold members of Congress accountable for oversight, demand bold policy alternatives to Trump’s hateful agenda, and win in 2020. 

The not-so-good news is that we’re working against the clock, and the administration isn’t showing any signs of slowing down. Your contribution can help us fight back. If you can pitch in $5, $10, $25, or more right now your dollars will go directly toward our efforts to ramp up this work. 

Right now, we’re:

→ Launching a $25,000 rapid response digital ads campaign to make more people aware of Trump’s latest attempts to destroy the ACA and mobilize more folks to take action and get involved on their home turf.
→ Rolling out a state-of-the-art membership management platform for Indivisible groups, allowing them to better engage with their members, organize their events, and build long-term power.
→ Putting the final touches on our new click to call tool to make it easier for people to get connected to their members of Congress and get the right information to make the most strategic ask with a single click of a button.
→ AND we’re planning major campaigns to double down on oversight efforts, protect communities under attack by the administration, and strengthen our democracy.

Two years to the week after their unsuccessful first attempt at repealing the Affordable Care Act in the House, Trump and Republicans are still in relentless pursuit of your care. And they’ll do whatever it takes, no matter how lawless -- and no matter how many people it hurts.

We. Will. Fight. Back. And we will win.

In solidarity,Indivisible Team

Improving foreign language competence in the US by reading

Submitted to the NY Times,March 26, 2019

To the editor:

Bénédicte de Montlaur (“Do you speak my language? You should.” March 26, 2019) is right: There has been a move toward “holistic” foreign language education. This development is based on solid research done over the last four decades published in numerous scientific journals and books. 

These studies show that we acquire language when we understand what we hear or read, not when we memorize vocabulary or study grammar rules. Those who hear and read more of the language acquire more of it.  

Reading is especially powerful: Even when we lack the opportunity to have conversations in a second language, if we can find interesting books, and develop a reading habit, we will continue to improve after the school program finishes. Sadly, there are few libraries and few bookstores that take pleasure reading in other languages seriously.

If we are serious about improving foreign language competence, our school and public libraries need to be filled with comprehensible and highly interesting reading material at all difficulty levels.  

Stephen Krashen

Sources: 

Krashen, S. 2004. The Power of Reading. Englewood, CO: Libraries Unlimited. (second edition)

Krashen, S. 2011. Free Voluntary Reading. Westport: Libraries Unlimited.

McQuillan, J. (1998). The Literacy Crisis: False Claims, Real Solutions. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

A Half Century of Segregated Schools in NYC

Important piece of journalism today in the Times.  Here's a clip:

New York City is starkly different today than it was 50 years ago. It is politically more liberal, and far more racially diverse. Yet one aspect has barely changed: The city’s public schools remain among the most segregated in the nation. 

The deep racial divide was highlighted last week, when eighth graders who had taken the specialized high school admission test received offers to attend New York’s highly selective public high schools. The statistics were striking: out of 895 slots in Stuyvesant High School’s freshman class, only seven were offered to black students. 

Racial and socio-economic segregation is even more pronounced in some parts of the city now than it was a five decades ago, though research released in the intervening years has shown that integration benefits all children. . . .

The Horrors of Glen Mills Schools

From a long investigative piece by the Philadelpha Inquirer:

. . . .Serious violence is both an everyday occurrence and an open secret at Glen Mills, and has been for decades, an Inquirer investigation has found. Internal documents, court records, incident reports, and more than 40 interviews with students, staff, and others show top leaders turn a blind eye to the beatings and insulate themselves from reports while failing to properly vet or train the school’s counselors.

When students and their families try to report these attacks, the Inquirer found, Glen Mills staff uses the school’s prestige as a weapon: They say Glen Mills is as good as it gets, and that if students complain, they’ll be shipped off to a state-run facility crowded with boys who are mentally ill or have committed sex offenses. . . .

-->

Re: “Deeper phonics and other reforms.” [https://hechingerreport.org/opinion-phonics-and-other-ways/]

Submitted to the Hechinger Report, March 22, 2019

When we argue for increased phonics instruction, we need to distinguish between heavy phonics instruction (“systematic, intensive”) and “basic phonics.”  Systematic intensive phonics means teaching all the rules relating spelling to pronunciation to all students in a strict sequence. This is impossible:  Specialists admit that they haven’t yet described all the rules, and many rules are much too complicated to teach, and even remember.  Also, many of the rules don’t work very well: For example, in one study the famous rule, “when two vowels go walking the first does the talking” (say the letter name of the first vowel, as in “bead) held in less than half of the cases. Most instances of two vowels back to back were exceptions (e.g. “chief”, “captain”). 

Teaching the basic rules can be useful in helping children understand texts, but it is limited to the simpler rules, eg initial consonants and a few vowel rules. Basic Phonics appears to be the position of authors of Becoming a Nation of Readers, a book widely considered to provide strong support for phonics instruction:

“…phonics instruction should aim to teach only the most important and regular of letter-to-sound relationships … once the basic relationships have been taught, the best way to get children to refine and extend their knowledge of letter-sound correspondences is through repeated opportunities to read. If this position is correct, then much phonics instruction is overly subtle and probably unproductive” (Anderson, Hiebert, Scott and Wilkinson, 1985, p.38).

Stephen Krashen

“Basic phonics appears to be the position …”: Anderson, R., Hiebert, E., Scott, J., and Wilkinson, I. (1985) Becoming a Nation of Readers: The Report of the Commission on Reading. Washington, D.C.: National Institute of Education.

 “In one study”: Clymer, T. (1963) The utility of phonics generalizations in the primary grades. The Reading Teacher. 16(4: 252-258.

Stuyvesant High School's Talented .00878 Percent

A hundred years ago W.E.B. Dubois advocated for selecting that most "Talented Tenth" of African Americans to receive the best education available and, thus, become the leaders for efforts to integrate a virulently-racist American society. 

Today black youngsters seeking to attend New York City's best high schools must view Dubois's goal as purely aspirational.

Like thousands of other school systems in America, New York City's public school system is using the same standardized testing techniques that public and private schools (and colleges) have been using for over hundred years to keep back the black, put down the brown, and detour the poor. 

The students pictured above (from the New York Times) are some of the 29 black students of the 3,300 students of Stuyvesant High School.  Story here.

Kentucky Teachers Strike as Union Leaders Sit on Hands

The continuing waves of job actions across the country demonstrate the irrelevance of AFT and NEA top-heavy and top-down misleadership.  As Kentucky teachers and parents plan an execute sick-outs to shut down schools in protest of a toxic package of state legislation to rob schools and crush teacher voices, the union misleaders continue to urge teachers to go to work and, instead of striking, to send a delegation of beggars to the state capital to "lobby" corporate legislators.   Teachers are not having it.

From Nation of Change:

Don’t call what Kentucky teachers just did a “wildcat” labor action, at least not when you’re speaking with Tim Hall. Hall, a classroom teacher at Shawnee High School in Louisville, answered my phone call as he was driving to the state capitol in Frankfort to protest the latest slate of education-related bills being considered in the legislature. He and hundreds of other teachers in Jefferson County Public Schools, the state’s largest school district that includes Louisville, called in sick, prompting the district to close schools for over 100,000 students. 

Hundreds of those teachers joined Hall at the state capitol. It was the third time in a week and the second day in a row that enough JCPS teachers called out sick to trigger a full district shutdown. The sick-out spread to four other districts that also had to close. But neither the state teachers’ union nor the local union for Jefferson County had anything to do with organizing the action. In fact, union leaders urged teachers to show up for work, preferring instead to have districts send small teams of teachers to lobby state lawmakers. 

Yet Hall bristled at using “wildcat” to describe what JCPS teachers were doing. “I don’t like that word,” he said. “I think our concerns are reflective of teachers not only in JCPS but also across the state.” 

The Kentucky teachers’ actions are the latest in what has become a wave of teachers using their collective power to influence legislation in state governments, but the sick-out in Kentucky is also a sign of how teacher protests are evolving. 

Teachers who once saw labor actions as effective tactical responses to attacks on their financial well-being are now understanding that their labor power is part of a broader strategy to even the playing field in a political landscape that is increasingly unequal. And there’s strong evidence they’re having an impact. 

Teacher strikes are evolving 

The teachers, joined by parents and other public education activists, organized the sick-out action on social media sites including the Facebook page for JCPS Leads, which Hall helps facilitate. Teachers went back to work at one point, but then extended their protest to a fourth, fifth, and then a sixth day to ensure controversial bills were killed in the legislature. 

The roots of this year’s labor action are in last year’s statewide strike when teachers closed schools across the Bluegrass State to protest a new pension bill that would have put retirement earnings for new teachers at greater risk and shortchanged retirees and senior teachers. This year’s sick-out is different. 

First, teachers have a much broader array of targets for their protests. “We want a whole package of bills voted down,” Hall explained. 

Once again, a threat to teachers’ pensions, House Bill 525, has stirred the teachers’ ire because it would reduce the participation of educators on the state employee pension board. But two other bills go beyond wage-and-benefits grievances: House Bill 205 that would establish a statewide school voucher program giving tax breaks to those who donate to private school scholarships for special-needs and low-income students, and Senate Bill 250 that would take school principal hiring decisions away from local, site-based committees, which include teachers, and give the district superintendent sole responsibility for the hiring process – the bill applies to JCPS only. 

Hall sees all three bills as attacks on democracy. “They’re about taking away our ability to collaborate on how our schools operate,” he said. By removing educators from the pension board, ramping up a statewide voucher program, and undermining teachers’ influence on principal hiring, teachers are being pushed further out to the periphery of decision making, he explained, and in turn, are less able to make their voices heard as advocates for their schools and their students.

Also, there’s a good reason why Jefferson County teachers are taking it upon themselves to lead the labor action and go it alone in speaking out for their colleagues elsewhere in the state. Not only is JCPS the only district affected by the bill to change principal hiring; JCPS is also the only district currently under threat of state takeover. Proponents of charter schools and vouchers are generally seen as the most ardent backers of the takeover effort. 

And Hall and other teachers see all three bills as efforts to further undermine their participation in governance of their schools and usher in more state control and privatization of schools. 

A movement about democracy 

In taking their demands beyond economic grievances to include issues of governance and local community voice, the Kentucky teachers are joining a strong new trend in the teacher movement. 

When West Virginia teachers walked off the job last year and started what’s become known as RedForEd, they generally made wages and benefits the core of their grievances. But in their labor action this year, West Virginia teachers expanded their protests to include issues with privatization, specifically, to fight new legislation that would take public money from traditional districts and use it for charter schools and for private and religious school tuition. 

Also this year, teachers in Los Angeles and Oakland, California, made opposition to the unchecked growth of charter schools and their lack of transparency and accountability a centerpiece of the unions’ demands. 

Education journalists and “experts” have noticed this trend and described it as mostly a battle over funding for public schools vs. charter schools, voucher programs, and other forms of privatization. But that misses the broader argument teachers make that all education mandates that stem from top-down authority and big money interests are meant to rob teachers of having a voice in how schools are governed. 

Teachers are making RedForEd a fight not just for funding but also for political power. 

Teacher strikes work 

There’s evidence that the teachers’ change in strategy will work. 

Last year’s RedForEd protests clearly affected state legislation where the protests occurred. According to a new analysis, in four states where teachers walked off the job, state legislatures responded by increasing baseline state funding for schools by 3-19 percent. 

This year, teacher strikes in Los Angeles and Oakland led to calls from local governments for moratoriums on new charters and increased regulation of the industry. In response, California state lawmakers acted with “lightning speed” to enact new laws that require more transparency in charter school operations. 

How successful were the Kentucky teachers? As of this writing, on the final day of the legislative session, two of the three bills teachers targeted in their protests appear to be dead – the bill restructuring the state pension board and the bill creating a statewide school voucher program. The bill targeting the principal hiring process in JCPS appears to have passed in both chambers and will likely be signed by Governor Matt Bevin. 

Two out of three is not a bad batting average in a “red state” where Republicans hold a trifecta of strong majorities in both branches of the state legislature and the governor’s seat. And should the dead bills come back to life, Hall assures me, or similar bills spring up, teachers will return to the capitol. 

“We’re tired of being unsupported and messed with,” he said. “Teachers want to have fair ways for us to ensure the public education system continues to provide access to well-supported schools for all kids.”

Admissions Scandal Reminds Us Again of the College Caste System

From CNN:

. . . .The separation of young people into this two-track system matters so much because the outcomes vary so much for students at the most and least selective institutions. Among black and Latino students with above-average SAT scores, 81% at selective public institutions complete their degrees, compared with just 46% at the less selective public schools, the Center on Education and the Workforce found in "Our Separate & Unequal Public Colleges," a comprehensive study released last fall. 

The disparity isn't difficult to explain: The selective public institutions can afford to spend about three times as much on their students as the least selective institutions. Amid sustained cuts in taxpayer funding for public higher education, that spending gap is now about one-fourth larger than it was a decade ago. It's one reason why the gap in college completion is also widening between whites on the one hand and African-Americans and Latinos on the other, even though the latter groups have significantly increased their share of the total postsecondary population.. . . .

NYC Keeps Access to Top High Schools Away from Black Kids

Ten years ago Catherine Rampell published a piece in the NYTimes that showed ever so clearly how standardized tests continue to protect the privileged and to punish the poor.  This chart sums up the connection between standardized test scores and family income.  The same correlations will be found, regardless of the standardized test used:

In 2019, the same standardized exclusion instruments are still used, even as the use of a single high stakes test to seat students in the best public high schools of New York is getting new scrutiny.  Politicians of all stripes continue their silence on the issue:

. . . Mr. de Blasio’s proposal to scrap the entrance exam for the schools and overhaul the admissions process has proved so divisive that the state’s most prominent politicians, from Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo to Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have mostly avoided taking a definitive position — even as black and Hispanic students are grappling with increasingly steep odds of admission into the city’s eight most selective public schools.

Meanwhile, 7 out of 895 students at Stuyvesant High School are black.

Students gain entry into the specialized schools by acing a single high-stakes exam that tests their mastery of math and English. Some students spend months or even years preparing for the exam. Stuyvesant, the most selective of the schools, has the highest cutoff score for admission, and now has the lowest percentage of black and Hispanic students of any of New York City’s roughly 600 public high schools.

Schools That Matter!

A clip from Jacobin on the New York City Schools' involvement in the student climate strike:

. . . .Like the Urban Assembly students, Meremetoh and her schoolmates credit their school with their engagement on this issue. Melanie Mueses, eighteen, said, “The school really pushed me to understand how the environment is crumbling and how we are affecting it,” she says. “I wasn’t like that before.” Meremetoh tells me about an art project she did, showing the sun going from cold to warm to hot. “A lot of people don’t pay attention, and don’t realize the world could be ending in a couple years.”

Mueses suspects policymakers don’t care since they think they’ll be dead when problems caused by climate change get more serious. “I feel people in power don’t feel as deeply about this as us because they’re not going to be here,” she explains. “Us, as ‘the future,’ we are the ones who are going to be most affected.”

Emmanuel Pimentel, eighteen, also a student at High School for Environmental Studies agreed: “We need the world.”

Said Meremetoh, “We have to stand up to everything Trump is saying because he’s crazy. We have to continue to fight. We can’t stop.” Asked what she hopes comes out of these actions, she says, “I hope the future president listens. We have to start taking care of the environment. I really hope the government listens to us, the young people.”

Climate strikers at City Hall were mostly high school kids, but there were younger children, too. A growing movement, #Fridays4Future will continue the Friday strikes that Greta Thunberg began.