Rumsfeld In Hell

When I spotted Donald Rumsfeld at the Reagan Airport in DC some years ago, striding along with his leather valise, I could not help myself.  

"Aren't you Donald Rumsfeld?" I asked, just to be sure before I let loose.

He pulled up short and, with head cocked toward me and smiling wryly, said, "Why, yes I am." The valise changed hands.

"I thought so," I said. "I just wanted to let you know how many nights I have laid awake cursing your fucking name."

His relaxed eyebrows crunched, and his grin puckered.  "Well, that's your problem," he snarled, with the same nasal sarcasm that he used on reporters during the Iraq War that his lies had started.

"No, it's really your problem," I yelled after him, as he strode away down the concourse.

If it ever was my problem, it is no longer.  It really is his, all the way down through the burning light years of endless and indistinguishable days and nights.

A Few Pennies the Stupider, Perhaps

When corporate education reformers wring their hands and cluck about "learning loss" among K-12 students, they are, of course, talking about a drop in test scores.  How else would they ever think to measure such a thing!  

That drop in test scores is due to a decline of in-person close surveillance and prodding (teaching) during the pandemic to increase test scores (learning).  

As E.M. Forster observed early in the last century,

As long as learning is connected with earning, as long as certain jobs can only be reached through exams, so long must we take the examination system seriously. If another ladder to employment was contrived, much so-called education would disappear, and no one would be a penny the stupider.

 

Sports and Watching

 Development of competence in sports obviously requires actual playing but I think we have not recognized the value of watching. I think that it is no accident that ALL accomplished athletes had been (and mostly still are) sports fans.  

I can’t discuss soccer. I have never played or watched it. But I can talk about other sports.

 

Baseball: When I was ten (circa 1950), I had acquired all the mannerisms of the entire Chicago Cubs players, both functional and nonfunctional. Nobody had to teach me the basics of throwing, catching and hitting. It came “naturally,” that is, it was acquired, not through trial and error in throwing and catching and hitting, but largely from watching. 

 

There was an element of instruction, and what I learned consciously often did help, but it was extra, fine-tuning: e.g. keep your eye on the ball. And of course we consciously learned elements of strategy, eg the catcher should back up the first baseman, and less observable elements, such as efficient sliding. 

But most of it felt natural and even felt like they were innate. If we were right handed, we didn’t step forward with our right leg when throwing. 

 

When we watched baseball, we didn’t watch for form, eg notice the second baseman throwing the runner out side-arm, not overhead. We watched the game, rooting for our team.

 

I also noticed the improvement in form when martial arts movies became popular. I had tried judo and a little karate in the late 1960’s and it always felt odd. But Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan and Chuck Norris made a difference. We all improved.  When a local theater had a martial arts festival, showing the same three movies all weekend, nearly everyone from our Tae Kwon Do studio was there nearly the entire time. NOBODY was interested in details of style, it was pleasure watching. 

 

 

Corporate Welfare Charter Kingpins Try to Buy a New NYC Mayor

With the clueless Bill Deblasio soon vacating the Mayor's office, the hedge funders and the box store  billionaires who want to crush public schools and unionism in order to advance paternalist corporate charters and chain gang pedagogy are dumping tons of dollars into the trough where Eric Adams and Andrew Yang feed. From the NYTimes today:

. . . . Steven A. Cohen, the hedge fund billionaire who owns the Mets, donated $500,000 to Mr. Yang’s super PAC and $500,000 to Mr. Adams’s in mid-May, when the two candidates were leading the polls. But as Mr. Yang’s support appeared to wane and Mr. Adams’s grew, Mr. Cohen cut off Mr. Yang and donated another $1 million to Mr. Adams.

A similar trajectory characterizes the giving patterns of Daniel S. Loeb, another hedge fund billionaire and an outspoken supporter of charter schools and former chairman of Success Academy Charter Schools. He donated $500,000 to Mr. Adams’s super PAC and $500,000 to Mr. Yang’s super PAC in mid-May. Three weeks later, as Mr. Adams was cementing his front-runner status, Mr. Loeb gave Mr. Adams’s super PAC another $500,000.

Both Mr. Adams and Mr. Yang have expressed support for charter schools.. . .

. . . .One thing some may hope to get is an expansion of charter schools in the city. Other billionaires financing super PACs in this primary include four investors who support charter schools, a favored cause of financiers skeptical of district public schools: Stanley Druckenmiller and Paul Tudor Jones, who donated $500,000 and $600,000, respectively, to the Adams super PAC; Kenneth Griffin, another hedge fund manager, who has donated $750,000 to both the Adams and Yang super PACs; and Pennsylvania investor Jeffrey Yass, who donated $500,000 to Mr. Yang’s super PAC.

As it happens, the president of Mr. Adams’s super PAC is Jenny Sedlis, who is on leave from a charter school advocacy group, Students First NY, and co-founded Success Academy, which has received direct financial support from Mr. Griffin.

If you support public education, do everything you can to make sure that Eric Adams and Andrew Yang are defeated.

"We, the undersigned educators, refuse to lie to young people . . ."

From Valerie Strauss at WaPo:

The backlash is sparking a backlash of its own.

On Saturday, thousands of educators and others gathered virtually and in person at historic locations in more than 20 cities to make clear that they would resist efforts in at least 15 Republican-led states to restrict what teachers can say in class about racism, sexism and oppression in America.

Organized by local educators across the country in association with several social justice organizations, the National Day of Action is meant to raise public awareness about the legislation and to send a message that they will not lie to students about the country’s racist past and present.

Several thousand teachers have signed a pledge that says: “We, the undersigned educators, refuse to lie to young people about U.S. history and current events — regardless of the law.” . . .

A New Study Shows Us the Single Biggest Motivation for the Jan. 6 Rioters

                                                

If you have not seen this yet, please take a few minutes to have a view. This research hammers the final nail into the coffin of the theory that white supremacists are motivated by economic anxiety.  

It has never been the case that democracy in this country has been wide open. There [has] always been some kind of presumption that certain people are fit for self-government and certain people aren't. And that's a phrase that we don't use anymore. In fact, from the beginning, democracy and racism have been [inextricably linked, and] the notion of democracy was based on racial presumptions, about fitness for self-government for that very narrow circle in the late eighteenth century of "We the People," and that circle has been expanding over two centuries and more now. But I don't think that the presumption [is] that democracy is just something you can throw the doors open to and allow anyone to participate. And I think that's something that a lot of Americans misunderstand about their political culture.  --Mathew Jacobsen

Tennessee Outlaws Critical Race Theory in Schools on Anniversary of George Floyd's Murder

 A central tenet of critical race theory (CRT) acknowledges

. . . that racism is a normal feature of society and is embedded within systems and institutions, like the legal system, that replicate racial inequality. This dismisses the idea that racist incidents are aberrations but instead are manifestations of structural and systemic racism.

Today Tennessee's GQP governor, Bill Lee, signed into law a bill that offers empirical evidence that CRT is not a theory at all but, rather, an incisive description of the factual state of affairs at the Tennessee Capitol.  

The law, which goes into effect July 1, prohibits even the mention of white privilege, male privilege, or white, male oppressors:

Among other things, Tennessee's teachers can't instruct that “an individual, by virtue of the individual’s race or sex, is inherently privileged, racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or subconsciously.”

 If teachers dare bring up the subject of racism, it is only allowed as “[i]mpartial discussion of controversial aspects of history.” No editorializing here, teachers.  After all, we know there are plenty of "very fine people on both sides." 

Penalties for breaking the new law include loss of state funding for schools or school systems.

Vouchers in FL Create Black Christian Madrassahs in Strip Malls

(AP photo: Alfredo Lee)

Although this commentary by Billy Townsend describes a seed of hope in Florida's education desert, the bigger message points to what you get with laws that allow unregulated and unaccredited private "schools" to replace public schools that have been malignantly-neglected by segregationists who want to close them.

Orlando Sentinel, May 16 

Jones High success story illustrates inadequacy of voucher schools

Six years ago, essentially zero Jones High School students took physics. Today, more than 250 do. That means 250 Orlando-area young people per year now have a better chance of becoming engineers or scientists or doctors. We should celebrate that. Physics is crucial to many educational and professional journeys. 

Unfortunately, as a recent former Polk County school board member, I know all too well the rarity of serious growth in Florida’s education capacity. Our state is steadily dismantling education capacity everywhere through its contempt for public schools and indifference to voucher-school performance. Capacity destruction drives Florida’s chronic educator shortages. 

It’s one reason Florida has among America’s worst state test score “learning rates,” according to The Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University. Capacity destruction particularly harms children and communities that lack capital. Quite often, these low-capital communities are also historically black communities. A thriving physics program — one that exceeds enrollment for most other wealthier schools in Florida — demonstrates real capital investment in community capacity. 

That makes the Jones physics story all the more important — and a powerful counterpoint to Florida’s failed state voucher programs, particularly the Florida Tax Credit (FTC) voucher. Like many voucher schools, the Jones enrollment of nearly 1,600 is almost entirely Black. A casual observer may see it as “segregated,” in the sense we’ve come to popularly understand segregation. 

But there is a massive difference between the Jones community-support “segregation” and the “segregation” of schools in Florida’s low-capital voucher-school marketplace. The Sentinel’s invaluable “Schools without Rules” series in 2017 documented the failures of many voucher schools and how little Florida leaders care about it. 

It also illustrated how Florida’s testing system and barbaric mass third-grade retention policies drive children into voucher schools in a disfigured conception of “choice.” But the Sentinel did not delve deeply into the extreme racial segregation of Florida’s voucher-school marketplace, as I did in Polk County. 

As of last month, the Step Up for Students voucher marketplace shows 16 Polk County voucher schools have enrollments of at least 76 percent Black children. Twelve of the 16 schools are at least 95 percent Black. Six are 100 percent Black. Not one of those schools has any accreditation. None of them have any state or local oversight. 

There is no elected board member or unelected bureaucrat to call when these schools defraud you. More than 800 Black children in Polk County attend these segregated, low-capital so-called schools at any given time. Moreover, the Urban Institute’s 2017 study of Florida’s voucher marketplace, the only recent study of its kind, found that 61 percent of voucher recipients abandon their FTC voucher within two years. 75 percent abandon the voucher within three years. That’s an extraordinary record of failure and churn. 

Voucher advocates twist themselves into knots insisting this is not a 75-percent 3-year program dropout rate. But it is. Many voucher schools resemble the worst of pre-Brown vs. Board of Education American schools — operating in strip mall storefronts with names like “Endtime Christian School of Excellence.” That is the name and description of a very real and very typical voucher school in Lake Wales. 

Yet, Florida is expanding the roughly $1 billion a year in direct tax money and corporate tax-shelter cash it spends each year to defraud black children and parents – and everyone else. Runaway voucher spending with no oversight has built zero capacity to actually provide education. That’s because money alone cannot buy education capacity; only consistent, focused effort. 

There are very few decent voucher products to buy. And decent private schools, almost without exception, do not rely on vouchers for survival or take many voucher kids. Vouchers do not cover the tuition of serious private schools, which have full-tuition paying customers and endowments and capital and accreditation. Such private schools are also very, very white. School segregation, integration and equity pose some of society’s hardest, most complex challenges. 

In my experience as a school-board member and advocate, human beings want to attend schools that reflect their communities; they want to avoid busing; they want equality — or advantage — in resources; they (often) want diversity in faculty and fellow students; and they want to be in the majority of a school population. 

People want all of this at the same time in the same school. Jones provides a far better model for addressing that challenge than vouchers. Indeed, I would not call the Jones model of schooling “segregation.” I would call it “community ownership” and Jones is literally a “Community Partnership School.” 

That means it works rigorously with the Children’s Home Society of Florida, Orange Blossom Health, and the University of Central Florida to provide “wraparound” social services and slowly, painstakingly build capacity for the Parramore/Lorna Doone community and its high school. 

Today, the Jones community school model is building capacity in physics while most of the rest of Florida is destroying it. That is a public-school accomplishment to celebrate from a model far superior to the failed voucher model state power prefers. 

Billy Townsend served on the Polk County School Board from 2016 to 2020.

 

Dear Sen. Bennet: The best way to help "high poverty schools" is to eliminate "high poverty schools."

Call me excited about the many billions of dollars that Team Biden is planning to invest in new and renewed education initiatives, from pre-K through college.  Even more exciting is the total absence (so far) of systemic efforts to bribe and/or extort states to adopt corporate policies favored by the profiteers of the education industrial complex.  It's too early to know for sure, but it looks as if these unprecedented education investments now on the horizon actually acknowledge the massive education debt owed to public institutions that have been deprived for decades of needed funds for staffing, physical plants, transportation, and instructional resources.

As these new funding streams come closer to reality, the Biden Team has also targeted child poverty, with tax credits in the Covid relief legislation that will cut child poverty almost in half. If these cuts can be made permanent, the reductions in child poverty would constitute, in themselves, the most important education reform of the past 50 years.  For as child poverty rates decrease, we may certainly expect increases in student achievement.

But old habits of thought die slowly, it seems.  For as we stand on the cusp of dramatically cutting poverty rates and addressing other structural issues that have helped preserve segregation based on race and class, some politicians remain focused on treating the symptom, rather than the disease.  

Senator Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) offers a good example of politicians who believe that the performance, behavior, and morale problems associated with high poverty schools can be solved by using funding as both carrot and stick to "drive policy."  

This has been tried, and we know it doesn't work. James Coleman knew it didn't work in 1966 when the Coleman Report was issued and then quickly shelved by the Johnson Administration, for fear that the Report's findings would expose the shallowness of federal priorities to send more money to high poverty schools, while ignoring the structural issues that insure the continuation of poverty and inequity.  

From WaPo:

Sen. Michael F. Bennet (D-Colo.), a former superintendent of the Denver Public Schools, generally supports the new spending but said he would like to see some fundamental changes in the Title I formula to direct more money to high-poverty schools if the government is going to increase spending so dramatically. He’d also like to see the money used to drive policy. For instance, he said, he’d like to see schools incentivized to pay teachers at high-poverty schools more.

“It would be a shame if we spend all this money and we do it in ways that don’t transform outcomes for kids,” Bennet said. “We’ve got to change the system. I don’t believe the system works well for kids living in poverty.”

Senator Bennet, there is NO system that "works well for kids living in poverty." Poverty makes sure of that.

Scandal-Ridden TN DOE Lies to Parents about Opting Out of Tests

Andy Spears recently shared a memo from the TN Department of Education denying denying parents the right to opt out of annual state testing.  Even though the invalid, unreliable, and racist tests have never been morally defensible, they are particularly indefensible during the present pandemic. 

Tennessee's corrupt Education Commissioner and former charter school CEO, Penny Schwinn, continues to circulate a one-page lie that tells parents that opting out of state testing is prohibited by state and federal laws. Any parent receiving this ridiculous memo should ignore it and keep their children safe from these irrelevant, racist, and mideducative tests that only companies that use public education as another vast revenue stream. 

Speaking of revenue streams, Broad Center alum Penny Schwinn has an established reputation for using her office to arrange lucrative no-bid contracts for her cronies in the ed industry. Before coming to Tennessee, she was caught up in a Texas-sized scandal based on playing favorites and passing out no-bid contracts.  

Since coming to Tennessee, Schwinn has continued her corrupt practices in awarding a no-bid management contract for a school voucher program and, more recently, another multimillion dollar no-bid contract for a  company to screen results on third grade reading tests.

As Bill Lee's mentor always said, only the best people.