Portland Settles Teacher Strike with Big Gains

After 3 weeks of walking picket lines with parents and children, Portland's public school teachers have reached a tentative agreement that brings them much needed resources.  A clip below from The Guardian: 

“This contract is a watershed moment for Portland students, families and educators,” said Angela Bonilla, the president of the Portland Teachers Association. “Educators have secured improvements on all our key issues … Educators walked picket lines alongside families, students and allies – and because of that, our schools are getting the added investment they need.”

The deal would provide educators with a 13.8% cumulative cost-of-living increase over the next three years and about half of all educators would earn an extra 10.6% from yearly step increases, PPS said. The agreement would also add classroom time for elementary and middle grades starting next year and increase teacher planning time by 90 minutes each week for elementary and middle-aged classrooms.

The district would also triple the number of team members dedicated to supporting students’ mental and emotional health.

New Mainstream Research on Racist, Classist ACT and SAT

New research shows us what the old research has been saying for decades: wealth is its own qualification for getting the best education, just as poverty is its own disqualification.  Text clip and chart below from New York Times:

From the Times:

New data shows, for the first time at this level of detail, how much students’ standardized test scores rise with their parents’ incomes — and how disparities start years before students sit for tests.

One-third of the children of the very richest families scored a 1300 or higher on the SAT, while less than 5 percent of middle-class students did, according to the data, from economists at Opportunity Insights, based at Harvard. Relatively few children in the poorest families scored that high; just one in five took the test at all.

The researchers matched all students’ SAT and ACT scores for 2011, 2013 and 2015 with their parents’ federal income tax records for the prior six years. Their analysis, which also included admissions and attendance records, found that children from very rich families are overrepresented at elite colleges for many reasons, including that admissions offices give them preference. But the test score data highlights a more fundamental reason: When it comes to the types of achievement colleges assess, the children of the rich are simply better prepared.

The disparity highlights the inequality at the heart of American education: Starting very early, children from rich and poor families receive vastly different educations, in and out of school, driven by differences in the amount of money and time their parents are able to invest. And in the last five decades, as the country has become more unequal by income, the gap in children’s academic achievement, as measured by test scores throughout schooling, has widened.

“Kids in disadvantaged neighborhoods end up behind the starting line even when they get to kindergarten,” said Sean Reardon, the professor of poverty and inequality in education at the Stanford Graduate School of Education.

“On average,” he added, “our schools aren’t very good at undoing that damage.”

In the wake of the Supreme Court decision ending race-based affirmative action, there has been revived political momentum to address the ways in which many colleges favor the children of rich and white families, such as legacy admissions, preferences for private school students, athletic recruitment in certain sports and standardized tests.

Yet these things reflect the difference in children’s opportunities long before they apply for college, Professor Reardon said. To address the deeper inequality in education, he said, “it’s 18 years too late.” . . . .

At Liberty to Lie, But Is It Worth $43 Million?

Liberty University is the subject of a report by the U.S. Department of Education that finds Liberty U. in gross violation of a federal law requiring colleges and universities to report campus crime. Here's a clip from WaPo:

Liberty University has failed for years to keep its campus safe and repeatedly violated the federal law that specifies how it should do so, according to preliminary confidential findings from an Education Department inquiry.

The initial report on the school’s Clery Act compliance — which the university can respond to and dispute before the department makes a final determination — paints a picture of a university that discouraged people from reporting crimes, underreported the claims it received and, meanwhile, marketed its Virginia campus as one of the safest in the country.

Liberty failed to warn the campus community about gas leaks, bomb threats and people credibly accused of repeated acts of sexual violence — including a senior administrator and an athlete — according to the report, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Post. Two people familiar with the conclusions, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the confidential nature of the document, confirmed the findings.

The draft also contends officials at Liberty destroyed evidence after a government inquiry began.“This is the single most blistering Clery report I have ever read. Ever,” said S. Daniel Carter, a campus safety consultant who reviewed a copy of the initial report obtained by The Post. Earlier in his career, Carter filed Clery Act complaints against multiple universities, including Liberty, as a victims advocate. “I cannot think of a single other comparable case in the entire 32-year history of the Clery Act.”

What Tenure-Track Professors at UF May Expect

The NYTimes has an extensive piece on Ron DeSantis's choice for president of Florida's flagship public university, and there's lots to consider, particularly if you are teaching in a tenured or tenure-earning position.  Here's a taste: 

Sasse’s words sometimes tumble out in a kind of techno-futurist patois that can be hard to follow. In response to a question about his perceived invisibility on campus, he veered off into something about the future of pedagogy. “And that requires us to unbundle cohorting, community and synchronicity from co-localities,” he said. Later, he added, “What will today’s generic term ‘professor’ mean when you disaggregate syllabus designer, sage-on-the-stage lecturer, seminar leader, instructional technologist, grader, assessor, etc.?”

When you cut through Sasse's murky McKenzie-inspired malarkey, what remains is a clear aspiration to apply a fragmentation grenade to the professoriate, so that what remains are exploded pieces to be swept up by gig workers doing epistemological piecework. This 21st Century Taylorism is the stock and trade of the philosophical eunuchs at McKinsey, who have a $4.7 million contract with Sasse to develop and impose a strategic plan that uses 21st Century tech talk to impose 19th Century business practices and cultural values upon an institutions once devoted to unencumbered human learning and inquiry.

While fixated on the glories of STEM education, Sasse has not forgotten that part of his assignment is to transform the teaching of history at UF.  It took Sasse only three months to turn over space on campus to create what appears to be the foundations for an alternative history department. 

 About three months after Sasse took over, the Republican-controlled Legislature allotted $10 million in recurring annual funds for the recently established Hamilton Center for Classical and Civic Education and an additional $20 million to renovate its building on the U.F. campus, a former infirmary. The entire budget for the school’s history department is about $4 million. No one at the university had requested the funds or even suggested the creation of the center. The idea came from a little-known organization called the Council on Public University Reform. The name attached to the “local funding initiative request” was Josh Holdenried, who has worked in Washington for the conservative Heritage Foundation and for Napa Legal, which assists faith-based nonprofits. He appears to have no links to the university or the state of Florida. (Holdenried could not be reached for comment.)

A proposal sent to U.F. administrators by the group’s lobbyist, Adrian Lukis, a former DeSantis chief of staff, made it clear that the center was not intended as a complement to what already exists at the university. Instead, the center is to “provide choice for Florida’s students and their parents dissatisfied with the present offerings.” (The proposal was originally obtained by The Chronicle of Higher Education.) According to the center’s website, there’s an additional mission, too: to participate in the implementation of the K-12 civics curriculum in Florida’s public schools. The curriculum is to include Portraits in Patriotism, featuring the stories of Floridians who fled leftist regimes in Cuba and Venezuela.

As other news outlets have documented, Sasse has a record of turning his faculty-smashing aspirations into reality. At Midland University, where Sasse served as President from 2009 to 2014, Sasse went to work immediately to blow up faculty tenure at the school. Sasse put together buyout contracts for tenured faculty, with the clear intent to replace them with part-time or adjunct faculty.

Sasse was up-front with them [tenured faculty members]: They could take the buyout or continue at the university with an uncertain future after he got rid of tenure.

Bracker remembers groups of five or six faculty members at a time would lose their tenure, she said. She was one of the last to finally lose it.

“You can usurp power, and then you can do certain things because you usurp power,” Scott told Mother Jones. “But there might have been a kinder, gentler way to do that than to say, ‘These are the new rules; this is what we’re gonna do.'” 

Longtime, established faculty members who took the buyouts were replaced with low-cost, part-time adjunct professors in a cost-saving move, some former faculty members said. 

If you are a tenure track assistant professor hoping for tenure a few years down the road, you should know that that track is sure to be bristling with mines that were not there prior to the arrival of Sasse. You may expect, too, that an invisible ideological gauntlet is being constructed that could require your syllabi, your research, and your truth to be compromised if tenure is to be granted.  

One thing is for sure: tenure is no longer the arduous journey that it once was but, rather, the arduous journey with the addition of professorial judges who must answer to a university administration approved by Florida's most prominent fascist politician.

The Evolution of Propaganda and the Dangerous Lies from PragerU

Back in the old days of the early 2000s, education reform propagandists and other enemies of the unfettered pursuit of knowledge through learning (democratic schools) depended upon conservative think tanks for the ammo to conduct their propaganda campaigns aimed to alter the realities both inside or outside of people's heads.  The "researchers" at the Fordham Foundation, Manhattan Institute, and the Hoover Institution were on the payroll to massage statistics, bend rhetoric, and to limit research questions in ways that produce the illusion of disinterested research that just happened to coincide with all the preconceived conclusions that undergird the neo-conservative political and social agendas. 

That was the way that "conservative" social steering was justified for those whose sought to return America to a golden age that never was--when white was right.  

Now that's all changed.

Shaped by the toxic bloom surrounding the entry of Donald T----- into our political moment, today's policy influencers opt for much coarser tactics and strategies to bend Americans to the will of liberated unabashed fascists and unashamed racists.  Spurred on as they are by their national spokesman for everything crude, rude, and previously unacceptable (either socially or politically), today's propagandists do not couch their lies in semantic niceties, charts, or turgid text.  It's all out front and in your face, in bald-faced lies captured with the cheapest, soul-expunged computer generated animation tools of the billionaire-funded ideological chop shop called Prager U.  

Take five minutes to learn some basics about these bare-knuckled social influencers and intellectual abusers of children and adults. Here is the intro from an excellent piece from The Guardian:

A rightwing media outlet promoting climate-change denialism and other “anti-woke” staples to young students and adults via social media has become a fundraising Goliath, raking in close to $200m from 2018 to 2022 with big checks from top conservative donors, tax records reveal.

Founded in 2009 by the conservative talkshow host Dennis Prager, the eponymous Prager University Foundation is not an accredited education organization. But via online media its PragerU Kids division has become a key tool in spreading false claims to young people with short videos aimed at undercutting widely accepted science that climate crisis disasters are accelerating due, largely, to fossil-fuel usage.

PragerU’s influence in pushing false narratives about climate change and other far-right shibboleths such as airbrushing the brutal reality of American slavery gained ground when the Florida board of education in July gave the green light to using its videos and other materials in classrooms, a move that PragerU is trying to capitalize on in Texas and other states. On Tuesday, Oklahoma’s school system also approved the use of PragerU’s materials. . . .

Read on here.

Ron's Florida: Where Shakespeare Goes to Die

Under the misleadership of the preening, petulant, charm-free prick, Ron DeSantis, Florida has become the laughingstock among civilized people everywhere on the globe. Today the Tampa Bay Times gives us another reason why, with its report on public schools in Florida that have succumbed to pressure to further Desanti-tize the school curriculum by encouraging teachers to have students read excerpts from literature rather than entire works, thus channeling students away from Shakespeare's insights into any of a growing list of topics that might rankle Moms for Liberty, the right-wing astroturf group that gave motherhood a bad name-- topics like gender, sexuality, romantic love.  

Can bans on the study of power-hungry narcissistic despots be far behind? 

From Tampa Bay Times:

English teachers in Hillsborough County are preparing lessons for the new school year with only excerpts from William Shakespeare’s works.

Students will be assigned pages from the classics, which might include “Macbeth,” “Hamlet” and the time-honored teen favorite, “Romeo and Juliet.” But if they want to read them in their entirety, they will likely have to do it on their own time.

School district officials said they redesigned their instructional guides for teachers because of revised state teaching standards and a new set of state exams that cover a vast array of books and writing styles.

“It was also in consideration of the law,” said school district spokeswoman Tanya Arja, referring to the newly expanded Parental Rights in Education Act. The measure, promoted and signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis, tells schools to steer clear of content and class discussion that is sexual in nature unless it is related to a standard, such as health class.

Teacher Joseph Cool told the Times, “There’s some raunchiness in Shakespeare. Because that’s what sold tickets during his time.”

The district said that, because students need to read more writers, they are no longer required to read the complete books. 

“We need to make sure our students are prepared with enough material during the year so they will be prepared for their assessments,” Arja said. . . .

Read on.

Oklahoma Approves Unconstitutional Religious Charter Schools

What's worse than a virtual charter school? A religious virtual charter school, the kind that Oklahoma's white christian nationalists recently approved.  Guest essay by Rachel Laser for the NYTimes:

Something deeply un-American is underway in the state of Oklahoma.

In June, Oklahoma’s Statewide Virtual Charter School Board approved the nation’s first religious public charter school. The Archdiocese of Oklahoma City and the Diocese of Tulsa were given permission to open St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School in August 2024.

That’s right, a religious public school, funded by the state’s taxpayers. Proponents hope this model will spread to the dozens of other states that allow charter schools. Seven percent of public school students in the country attended charter schools as of the fall of 2021, and that number continues to grow. That’s why Christian nationalist groups see charter schools as fertile ground for their full-on assault on the separation of church and state in public education.

In just the past year, significant progress has been made in infusing Christianity into public schools. Texas, for example, now allows public schools to replace certified school counselors with religious chaplains and came close to requiring every classroom to display the Ten Commandments. New laws in Idaho and Kentucky could allow teachers and other public school employees to pray in front of — and even with — students. Missouri and Louisiana authorized public schools to teach Bible classes. West Virginia nearly passed a bill that would allow public schools to teach intelligent design creationism. Accompanying these laws are increasingly successful efforts to ban books and lessons about race, sexual orientation, gender identity and even menstruation in public schools.

The establishment of a school that claims to be simultaneously public and religious — what has been a legal oxymoron in the United States since its founding — violates one of the foundational principles of American constitutional tradition: the separation of church and state. It also threatens religious freedom and undermines public education.

The United States Supreme Court has emboldened Christian nationalists by holding twice in the past three years that if a state funds private secular schools, it must also fund private religious schools. But charter schools are taxpayer-financed public schools — not private schools.

Oklahoma law stipulates that charter schools are public schools and “shall be nonsectarian in” their “programs, admission policies, employment practices and all other operations.” But late last year, the state’s attorney general at the time, John O’Connor, issued an advisory opinion requested by the executive director of the charter school board, in which he concluded that those restrictions most likely violated the First Amendment’s free exercise clause.

This is the same Mr. O’Connor who, in a speech to a Rotary Club earlier in 2022, expressed concern about a “godless America” and went on to say, according to The Sand Springs Leader, that a God-based country isn’t one in which “everybody is forced to believe the same thing. It means we acknowledge that there’s a God who has values and endows us or imbues us with those values that are not granted to us by the government. They are granted to us by God.”

Mr. O’Connor was defeated last summer in the state’s Republican primary, and his successor, a fellow Republican and the current attorney general, Gentner Drummond, rescinded his predecessor’s advisory opinion, called the charter school board’s decision “unconstitutional” and warned of possible legal action if a contract for the school is signed.

In a recent interview with Politico, Mr. Drummond said that he believed the “genesis” of efforts to have taxpayers pay for religious-based school instruction “is in Christian nationalism.” He told Politico’s Weekly Education newsletter that “this Christian nationalism is the movement that is giving oxygen to this attempt to eviscerate the establishment clause,” the doctrine of separation of church and state.

Indeed, it’s hard to think of a clearer violation of the religious freedom of Oklahoma taxpayers and public-school families than the state establishing a supposedly public school that is run as a religious school. Forcing taxpayers to fund religion, let alone a religion not their own, violates the Oklahoma Constitution’s explicit command that no public money or property “shall ever” be used to benefit or support religion. It’s exactly what Thomas Jefferson labeled “sinful and tyrannical.”

That is why the organization I head, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, together with the A.C.L.U., the Education Law Center and the Freedom From Religion Foundation, filed a lawsuit on Monday in state district court in Oklahoma to prevent the school from operating as a charter school.

Public schools must remain neutral when it comes to religion and must welcome all. St. Isidore claims it welcomes “students of all faiths or no faith.”

But here’s the catch: According to St. Isidore’s website, students must “appreciate and desire a robust Catholic education,” and students and families must have a “willingness to adhere with respect to the beliefs, expectations, policies and procedures of the school.” St. Isidore also said that it will operate “in harmony with faith and morals, including sexual morality, as taught and understood by the Magisterium of the Catholic Church based upon Holy Scripture and sacred tradition.” That’s a clear description of a Catholic school, not a public one.

A public school that is subsumed in any one church’s dogma is no longer a public school. Yet Oklahoma taxpayers will be on the hook to pay for it.

Rachel Laser is the president and chief executive of Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

HISD to eliminate librarians, turn libraries into discipline centers at neediest schools

Florida Curriculum Puts Focus on the Sunny Side of Slavery

Under the fascist renegade governor, Ron DeSantis, the State of Florida has become the destination for where decency and truth go to die. The latest example: Florida's public school curriculum now teaches middle school and high school students that enslaved people benefited from valuable skills that they would not have learned had it not been for slavery. 

This kind of rationalization first became part of the school curriculum during the post-Civil War period when Northern philanthropists promoted Hampton Institute's industrial education model as the solution to "the Negro problem." At Hampton and at other black schools inspired by Hampton's dehumanizing approach, white men taught black children and adolescents that slavery had, indeed, saved the black race from complete moral depravity by making sure that enslaved people were taught good Christian values and, thus, rescued from the certainty of eternal damnation that, otherwise, would have been their plight.  

Never mind that the enslaved were worked like mules, sold like cattle, and forced to accept the rape of their women as the legally-inscribed right of white men.

That we would ever see this kind miseducation written into public school curriculum could only have become possible with the rise of white supremacy as the ideological bedrock of the Republican Party. Read it and weep.

How Six Conservative Zealots in Black Robes May Have Gravely Injured A Racist and Classist Testing System

The 6-3 decision this week by the majority on the U. S. White Supremacist Court to kill affirmative action in college admissions underscores an elite antiquarian fixation as old and as morally debauched as the white supremacist plantation owners of the antebellum South.  

By stepping backwards toward a return of an apartheid Jim Crow society, this time attempting to hide its hideous naked racism behind the fig leaf of color-blindness, today's white power structure, ironically, may accomplish a feat that generations of social progressives and anti-racist education reform have been unable to pull off: the eventual elimination of racist and classist standardized testing for any high stakes purpose--be it at the individual or the institutional level).  

From the ACT and SAT up to the GRE and LSAT, and down to the TCAP and MCAS and a slew of other state exams suffered each year by K-12 students, this malign decision to kill affirmative action by the six right-wing radicals on the Court will highlight the roadblocks standardized tests impose on marginalized students, whether from income or ethnicity. 

To the extent that higher ed institutions continue, moving forward, their efforts to promote diversity among their student bodies, such tests, I predict, will be minimized or dropped entirely from admissions criteria (as they have been already in California's state colleges in universities).

Of course, in states with white nationalist super-majorities controlling legislatures, don't expect state institutions to be allowed any strategy to block the proliferation of the kinds of testing tools that have been used for over a hundred years to assure the dominance of a phony meritocracy based on white privilege and the oppression of minoritized groups.