Archive | July, 2024

Kamala Harris and Public Education

31 Jul

By Thomas Ultican 7/31/2024

Democratic presidential candidate, Kamala Harris, has a good record with public education. Her opponent, who appointed Betsy DeVos Secretary of Education, disagrees and says she is a “radical liberal,” responsible for Mr. Biden’s most left-leaning policies. It is unlikely he has any actual knowledge of what she might have been responsible for. To this fascist leaning fellow, the entire Democratic Party and a slice of the GOP look like “radical liberals.” With the two major candidates for president, there is a clear difference in education policy: Harris is pro-public education, Trump wants to end it.

Ruby Bridges’ Shadow and Kamala Harris

Her Record

In a 2020 run for President, Harris stated at a Houston rally, “You can judge a society by the way it treats its children, and one of the greatest expressions of love that a society can give to its children is educating those children with resources they need.” At that time, she identified the “pay gap” between teachers and other college graduates, as undermining the required resources. She wrote in the Washington Post:

“As president, I will make the largest federal investment in teacher pay in U.S. history. We will fully close the teacher pay gap during my first term, and provide the average teacher a $13,500 raise.”

Her plan would have included $315 billion in federal funding over 10 years to subsidize pay for K-12 educators and reward state and local governments for raising teacher’s salaries. This was to be paid for by adjusting estate taxes.

She has yet to mention teachers’ pay in 2024 but, obviously, it is something to which she has given a lot of thought and believes needs attention.

In 2019, as California’s U.S. senator, considering a presidential run, she supported the teachers strike in Los Angeles. Harris wrote, “Los Angeles teachers work day in and day out to inspire and educate the next generation of leaders.” Besides wage increases, teachers were demanding smaller class sizes and more support staff. The union victory in the strike was a defeat for pro-charter school billionaire Eli Broad and the California charter school movement.

Cecily Myart-Cruz, current president of the United Teachers of Los Angeles, remembered Harris’s support “was such a boost.”

In July 2020, the President of the United States and his Secretary of Education demanded schools open with in-person classes five days a week. Parents were worried about the safety of their children and teachers were frightened.

President Trump tweeted,

“In Germany, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and many other countries, SCHOOLS ARE OPEN WITH NO PROBLEMS. The Dems think it would be bad for them politically if U.S. schools open before the November Election, but is important for the children & families. May cut off funding if not open!”

Michelle Goldberg of NY Times wrote, “… with their crude attempts at coercion, they’ve politicized school reopening just as Trump politicized mask-wearing and hydroxychloroquine.” It was the beginning of a rightwing offensive toward public schools, eventually leading to open bigotry, attacks on school board meetings and book banning.

Harris and Orange County Congresswoman, Katie Porter, responded to Trump with a letter agreeing that in-person schooling was crucial for children’s well-being and for parents’ ability to work. They also wrote that lives could be at risk if schools reopened without stringent safety measures such as social distancing, regular randomized virus testing and virus contact tracing.

These were never seriously addressed by Trump.

In some liberal-leaning states, including California, millions of students went 18 months without in-school classes. However outcomes have not matched expectations. In New York, which opened schools in fall 2020, their 2022 reading and math scores fell while in Los Angeles, math and reading scores improved. Commissioner, Peggy Carr, of the National Center for Education statistics reported, “There’s nothing in this data that tells us there is a measurable difference in the performance between states and districts based solely on how long schools were closed.”

Last week, when Harris addressed the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) convention in Houston, Michael Whatley, chairman of the Republican National Committee, accused her of “already ignoring parents and getting cozy with the same teachers union bosses who she allowed to dictate school reopening guidance and keep kids out of the classrooms.”

Republicans believe that by not enthusiastically embracing Trump’s open school edict and siding with teachers unions made her vulnerable to political attack. However, his “divide-and-conquer” incompetent management of the COVID crisis and demand to open schools without preparations makes him more exposed to current criticism.

At last Tuesday’s AFT convention, Harris shared education issues to be focused on between now and Election Day: student loan forgiveness, protecting schools from gun violence and resisting Republican attempts to restrict curriculums.

In 2023, she flew to Florida to take on Gov. Ron DeSantis’ attacks on what he dismissed as “woke indoctrination” in schools. Harris was particularly incensed by the state’s middle school standards, arguing that enslaved people “developed skills that could, in some instances, be applied for their personal benefit.” 

As attorney-general in the state of California, she went after for-profit colleges, accusing them of false advertising and intentionally misrepresenting to students the benefits provided. She won a $1 billion judgment  against the California-based Corinthians Colleges Inc. stating, “For years, Corinthian profited off the backs of poor people – now they have to pay.”

Harris was not blowing political smoke when kicking off her campaign saying in her long career as a prosecutor, she has taken on all kinds of predators:

“Predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So hear me when I say, I know Donald Trump’s type.”

EducationWeek says Harris is unlikely to stray far from Biden’s education agenda. She will continue working to overcome court challenges against forgiving student loan debt and expanding protections for LGBTQ+ students and school staff through a rewrite of rules for Title IX, the nation’s landmark sex discrimination law.

It also states, “On the Republican side, the party has proposed a platform that calls for eliminating the U.S. Department of Education, defunding schools that teach ‘critical race theory’ or ‘gender ideology,’ and universal private school choice.”

This is disingenuous. No k-12 schools teach “critical race theory” and never have nor do they teach “gender ideology.” These are false claims designed to scare and divide people in order to garner votes. “Universal private school choice” is a scheme to end universal taxpayer funded public education.

Conclusions

Kamala Harris is a strong supporter of public education and embraces our nation’s outstanding teaching force which she wants to enhance. She will be dealing with people who believe public education is too expensive and charter schools are helpful but her track record says she will protect this important foundation for American democracy and national achievement.

The soon-to-be Madam President has good instincts and I look forward to her pro-public education administration!

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The Undermining of Rhode Island Public Schools

23 Jul

By Thomas Ultican 7/23/2024

Gina Raimondo, Rhode Island’s unpopular governor, appointed the clearly unqualified Angélica Infante-Green as Commissioner of Education, in 2019. That was the year before Joe Biden selected Raimondo as Secretary of the Treasury. Infante-Green’s qualifications amounted to recommendations from New York’s Joel Klein and Jeb Bush. She was a former Teach For America (TFA) teacher in New York city who had never led a district nor been a school principal. Her first action on the job was to take over the Providence school district, the state’s largest.

Like all corporate sponsored “reformers,” Infante-Green took to propaganda rag, The 74, and updated on when, if ever, Providence will exit state control. However, Rhode Island exiting state control matters less than in most states with elected school boards because Mayors run schools. Providence Mayor Jorge Elorza officially petitioned the state to take over his schools, one of the poorer school districts in America. Politicos decided that schools were “failing” because of poor test scores.

Besides poverty, Providence’s schools are almost 70% latinx with 40% language learners. Famous educators like Pestalozzi, Herbert and Dewey would not have gotten test scores acceptable to the local business community. It was a case of testing to privatize, without care for public education and little comprehension of teaching or learning.

Hope High School in Providence

Infante-Green did not actually give much information about her plans for turning over management of the Providence school district to the city. She only shared:

“We said that in 2024, we’d look at how much progress has been made. But when that was decided in 2019, nobody anticipated a pandemic.”

Does she envision semi-permanent state control?

Feeding Corporate Friends

Part of the requirements in Rhode Island for a school to exit state receivership is an independent review. Of course, Infante-Green did not ask Brown University, Providence College or University of Rhode Island to conduct the review. She contracted with Massachusetts-based consulting firm, SchoolWorks, to lead an independent review.

SchoolWorks has a long history of supporting charter schools and privatization of public education. A tab on their web page advertises the only two categories of training they offer: For Charter School Authorizers and For Charter School Founders.

About For Charter School Founders, SchoolWorks says:

“Behind every successful charter school is a passionate group of individuals who dedicated their time and talent to envisioning a new school, garnering community support, and crafting a thoughtful and comprehensive charter school application. These are challenging, time-consuming tasks; and we celebrate pioneers like you for your commitment to innovating education.”

A link on the LittleSis data base provides some historical background for SchoolWorks. The CEO in 2016, Scott Blasdale, was a founding board member of the Massachusetts Charter School Association. He also was executive director and founding teacher of Academy of the Pacific Rim Charter Public School.

In the period that Richard Daley and Rham Emanuel were mayors of Chicago, SchoolWorks held consulting contracts for local public schools. They also consulted for KIPP schools, the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and National Heritage Academies. The billion dollar Kauffman Foundation’s (EIN: 43-6064859) spending aligns with funding by Arnold, Dell, Gates and Walton, including generous gifts to TFA, Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, TNTP and Digital Promise.

Testing to Privatize

Johns Hopkins University was integral to the attack on public schools in Providence, Rhode Island. In May 2019, at the invitation of Infante-Green, Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy led a review of the Providence Public School District. The Partnership for Rhode Island, a group of local business leaders, funded the review.

The Johns Hopkins study was commissioned in May and presented in June. Based on the report, Providence Mayor Elorza officially petitioned the state to takeover Providence Public School District on July 19, 2019.

This request was based on testing data and Johns Hopkins not so unbiased report. In 2020, the Institute for Education policy at Johns Hopkins joined Jeb Bush’s Chiefs for Change to write a paper, calling for more standardized testing. This collaboration clearly indicated a penchant for school privatization and a tilt against public schools.

Adopting the Science of Reading

Infante-Green defended her school takeover methods stating:

“We have something called the Right to Read Act [which requires teachers to be trained in the science of reading]. By 2025, our K-8 teachers will all be trained, but we’re at about 75 percent.”

Science of Reading (SoR) is much more about profits and control than good teaching. SoR is not based on sound science and, more accurately, should be called “How to Use Anecdotes to Sell Reading Products.”

Professor Maren Aukerman, currently Werklund Research Professor at the University of Calgary, focuses on literacy education and democratic citizenship. She previously served on the faculty at Stanford University and University of Pennsylvania. Her recently published paper in the Literary Research Association on work by Goldstein, Hanford and others promoting SoR noted:

“The problem is not with recognizing that teaching phonics can play a facilitative role in having children learn to read; that insight is, indeed, important, if not particularly new. The problem is that this narrative distorts the picture to the point that readers are easily left with a highly inaccurate understanding of the so-called ‘science of reading.”’

Professor Paul Thomas of Furman University, with a deep background in teaching and education research, criticized of American Public Media’s Emily Hanford writing:

“As I have pointed out numerous times, there is a singular message to Hanford’s work; she has never covered research that contradicts that singular message.

“For example, not a peep about the major study out of England that found the country’s systematic phonics-first policy to be flawed, suggesting a balanced approach instead.

“And not a peep about schools having success with one of Hanford’s favorite reading programs to demonize.”

Nancy Bailey is an expert in special education and early reading instruction. In a recent posting, she declared:

“A troubling feature of the Science of Reading (SoR) is the connection between those who believe in the power of phonemes (and more) and those who want to privatize public schools. The old NCLB crowd has been rejuvenated and seems onboard with digital instruction replacing public schools and teachers.“

Infante-Green’s claim that SoR is something wonderful and positive for public schools in Rhode Island is malarkey. It is a giveaway to corporations that harms students and undermines educators.

An Intriguingly Strange Claim

Infante-Green is quoted by The 74 stating:

“What’s interesting about Providence is that about 19,000 children apply to charter schools and there are only 22,000 students in the district. So they want charter schools.”

This assertion makes no sense. While it is not surprising that charter school enrollment in Rhode Island increased, the most recent (2021) available enrollment data showed 10,547 charter students. Claiming 19,000 student applications for privatized schools in Providence alone strains credibility.

Rhode Island’s Commissioner of Education promotes privatization.

It is true that since the pandemic, student enrollments have dropped and chronic absenteeism has grown throughout the nation. In Providence, both of these have soared. Even Central Falls, the most impoverished school district in Rhode Island, had a significantly lower absentee rates and better attendance than Providence. Commissioner of Education, Angelica Infante-Green, took over Providence schools five years ago, making no effective action while dropout rates climbed, students disappeared and many scholars coming to class sporadically.

Clearly, these schools would be in a better state if her takeover never happened.

It is time to quit playing privatization games with the public school system and return them to professionals in the district.

State takeovers have a nationwide record of failure and Providence is adhering to that history.

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SOUTHLAKE INTOLERANCE fueled by Christian Nationalism

14 Jul

By Thomas Ultican 7/14/2024

Mike Hixenbaugh’s They Came for the Schools tells the story of a suburb of Dallas, purposefully divided by Christian nationalists. He shared a magazine story claiming, “Southlake had become the “It” suburb of the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex, …” The glossy September 2007 D magazine used the headline: “WHY YOU SHOULD Hate Southlake.”

Hixenbaugh wrote:

‘“They’re good at everything in Southlake,’ the magazine declared, noting that, in addition to football, Carroll had won state championships in cross-country, swimming, baseball, soccer, theater, accounting, and robotics. ‘If you’ve never been, there’s something a little Pleasantville about it. The streets are cleaner than your streets, the downtown more vibrant, the students more courteous, their parents more prosperous. Everyone is beautiful in Southlake. Everyone smiles in Southlake. Everyone is a Dragon in Southlake.” (Page 25)

The pride of Southlake is Carroll Independent School District, home to Carroll Dragons, which produces some of the highest SAT averages in Texas. Even better, Carroll is a perennial state football championship contender. People in Southlake wear green tee shirts with “Dragon Pride” stenciled on them and the S emblem on street signs are shaped like curvy little dragons.

Underneath all of this wonderful stuff, latent racism was smoldering in schools. The year after Donald Trump was elected president, some Carroll students posted a video of themselves doing a call and response. One girl calls “nig” and other students respond with “ger.” After two repetitions, she says, “Ay, we up on that Black shit, ay?” This event triggered a wide recognition in Southlake of a problem that needed addressing, especially after several Asian, Black, Hispanic and gay students related tales of bullying at the schools. (Page 35)

Hixenbaugh describes how many civic-minded parents (Republicans, Democrats, Whites, Blacks, Asians and Hispanics) came together to address the problem. The school board directed that a committee of parents, teachers, students and community members be established to create proposals for a more inclusive district. Most of the committee members were volunteers. Some like Russell Maryland, former Dallas Cowboy and three times Super Bowl champion, were recruited to be on the new District Diversity Council (DDC). (Page 45)

In early 2020, the DDC was about finished with their Cultural Competence Action Plan (CCAP), needing one more meeting in April to go over details with the full committee before presenting it to the school board in May. This plan began imploding when COVID-19 became apparent in early March and a week later Texas Governor Abbott ordered an emergency closure of all Texas schools. (Page 58)

On May 25, video of George Floyd being murdered by white Minneapolis police officers appeared. That came two months after nurse Breonna Taylor was killed in Louisville during a botched drug raid. Three months prior to that, Ahmaud Arbery was shot to death by three white men while jogging. These events and the brutality of Floyd’s death sparked a nationwide protest.

By August 3, when the CCAP initiative was finally presented to the school board, confusion reigned. A protest group organized by former and current Carroll High Schools students, known as Southlake Anti-Racism Coalition (SARC), sent the mayor a list of demands, including defunding the police. Residents began to conflate CCAP with the SARC letter. That night, more than 100 people signed up to speak mostly supporting CCAP. However, three board members asked for more time to evaluate the plan. (Pages 68 and 69)

Sharks Smelling Blood

Southlake Family PAC, originally formed in 2011 to oppose retail liquor sales in Southlake, reemerged from a long dormancy, just ahead of the August 3 school board meeting. This PAC was now headed by two connected conservatives. Tim O’Hare, former chair of the Tarrant County Republican Party, as mayor of Farmington Branch, made national headlines for passing a law banning undocumented immigrants from renting homes or apartments in the town and was now a Southlake resident. He joined forces with Leigh Wambsganss, a previous leader of the Northeast Tarrant County Tea Party. She had drawn notoriety for a Facebook comment, saying of Black Lives Matter activists, “sadly, they need to die.” (Pages 76 and 77)

The PAC’s priorities were spelled out in a short manifesto online:

“Southlake Families is unapologetically rooted in Judeo-Christian values. We welcome all that share our concerns and conservative values…. Conservative principles have made Southlake an extraordinary city in which to live and raise a family and we believe Southlake Carroll’s tradition of excellence must be protected. We reject recent campaign smears calling our tradition of excellence ‘racist.’ … We must rise up and work hard to protect our traditional way of life, which is currently under attack by extremists. … We believe in faith, freedom and family.” (Page 77)

They declared that CCAP forced kids to complete “social justice training” for graduation. A volunteer diversity council developed under the plan was labeled “diversity police,” creating “an environment where you are guilty until proven innocent of ‘microaggressions.’” They claimed it would “require students and teachers to take a ‘cultural competence test’ that can be used for shaming and discipline.” (Page 77)

Maryland and others who worked on CCAP were certain those claims bore little resemblance to the plan they produced. However as political scientist Brandon Rottinghaus stated:

“Whether it’s true or not is irrelevant. If people believe that its true, then it’s politically potent.” (Page 78)

The Southlake saga became a Christian right victory story and an example for the nation. Mike Hixenbaugh, a reporter for NBC, continued by chronicling the story of Patriot Mobile in Southlake which aligns with the Seven Mountains dominionism. He documents west Texas billionaires, Farris Wilks and Tim Dunn, putting huge dollars into promoting Christian Nationalism and attacking gay people.

For his effort, Hixenbaugh was labeled “Fiction-baugh” but the story he told is chilling.

Rafael and Ted Cruz

At CPAC, just in case anyone was wondering, tough guy Ted Cruz declared, “My pronouns are ‘Kiss my ass!” This line got a standing ovation. Crazy Ted looks balanced, compared with his father, Rafael who in 2021, led weekly Bible studies at Patriot Mobile’s corporate office in Grapevine, live-streamed for customers.

Hixenbaugh noted:                                                                                                    

“In one Patriot sermon, Cruz, an immigrant from Cuba and the father of the firebrand senator Ted Cruz, dismissed the concept of separation of church and state as a myth, arguing that America’s founders meant that ideal as a ‘one-way wall’ preventing the government from interfering with the church, not preventing the church from having dominion over the government-a widely disputed claim popularized by David Barton.” (Page 177) (See Katherine Stewart’s The Power Worshippers Page 127) 

Reporting on an early 2022 Patriot Mobile Bible study by Rafael Cruz, Hixenbaugh writes:

‘“I am so thankful also for what happened in Southlake,’ Cruz said, ‘where Christians got involved and transformed a school board from having seven evil, liberal people promoting all this garbage … some committed Christian people said, ‘Enough is enough.” Left unsaid was the fact that most of the supposedly evil liberals on Carroll’s school board were in fact churchgoing Republicans and that one of them was the spouse of one of Patriot Mobile’s founders.” (Page 178)

Rafael Cruz is one of the leading proponents of the Seven Mountains mandate. It is a pretty good bet that his son, Ted Cruz, agrees with him.

Hixenbaugh, aka Fiction-baugh, has written a terrific book detailing how Christian Nationalists promoted intolerance, racism and homophobia to divide a community and advance their Seven Mountains agenda. He describes how they used the Southlake experience to spread a hateful doctrine among neighboring communities.

Intolerance, racism and homophobia are not ideals based on the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. They are not Christian… just evil.

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That Way Madness Lies

4 Jul

By Thomas Ultican July 4, 2024

Valerie Strauss introduced America to Karen McKeegan Fraid and her That Way Madness Lies blog in 2013. In the pre-corporate billionaire-owned Washington Post, Strauss wrote the pro-public education Answer Sheet blog. Fraid created the “Reformy to English” dictionary as an aid for understanding the world of billionaire funded school-reform with her motivation being:

“I have done fairly extensive reading into their ideas as well as about their actions, and something struck me last week while I was rereading the Broad Foundation’s School Closure Guide (yes, It really exists): it is like an English-speaker reading Voltaire in the original French.”

The “Reformy to English” dictionary is still presented in three volumes:

  1. http://karenfraid.tumblr.com/post/52189780597/reformy-to-english-dictionary-volume-one
  2. https://karenfraid.tumblr.com/post/52356987097/reformy-to-english-dictionary-volume-two
  3. https://karenfraid.tumblr.com/post/53900029533/reformy-to-english-volume-three

The question is after more than a decade, how are Fraid’s translations doing? For example, her quote about the Broad Foundation lost some of its relevance when Eli Broad died in 2021, two years after he paid $100 million to establish the Broad Center at Yale University.

“Reformy to English” Translations Review

“Market-Based Reform (noun): A school of thought that relies on the financial and social studies illiteracy of the general population in order to convince the public that codifying the market power of campaign donors and tying the invisible hand’s ability to expose shitty and overpriced products and services for what they are (and thus allowing the free market to eliminate those companies and products from the economy through a lack of demand) will somehow avoid the inevitable market failure in the form of corruption, decreased productivity and out of control wealth gaps and a resulting economic collapse.  Market-Based Reform is a euphemism for “Corporate Subsidy Disbursement,” “Economic Power Grab” and “Fear-Based Economic Policy.”

This translation seems spot-on today but not quite as central like in 2013. The charter school movement was the big dog in market-based reform; however, the effort to privatize schools with vouchers recently has taken on a central role in the effort to destroy public education.

In an 2016 article for AlterNet, Jeff Bryant shared about his conversation with Jeffry Henig of Teachers College:

“Henig believes many conservatives view charter schools as a way to ‘soften the ground’ for potentially more private options, though he isn’t entirely sure ‘the Waltons view charters as a Trojan Horse for eventually providing vouchers universally.’”

21st Century Skills (plural noun): These are what students gain when an educator is replaced with an iPad.  How else will kids ever get enough screen time if we don’t provide it in schools?

This definition is still 100% accurate.

 “School Choice (noun): This is when politicians choose to close a public school and instead choose to pay their campaign donors to operate a charter school.  School choice also refers to subsidizing upper-income families and religious institutions with tax dollars, often redirected from “failing schools.”  School choice also refers to the choice made by charter and private schools to discriminate against students with disabilities, students in extreme poverty and high-risk students by choosing policies guaranteed to skim only the students that they choose.  School choice is also used as a tool to stem the tide of white flight, without having to convince white folks to spend time with those unlike themselves.

Fraid’s school choice definition holds up pretty well, with a caveat. In 2013, charter school discrimination was slowed down by state accountability regulations. With the ascendance of vouchers, laws were written to make discrimination based on race, religion, sexual orientation, scholastic strength, etc. acceptable. In fact, voucher school accountability is generally against the law; seen as government interference.

“Outcome-Based Learning (noun): (Synonyms include Proficiency-Based Learning, Standards-Based Reform, Performance-Based Education, and any combination of any of the previous words that include at least one hyphen and no awareness of irony.)  An education philosophy in which the outcome or performance on assessments is the goal in and of itself.  Any learning that does not assist the student immediately in test performance is a waste of time and resources, since Reformers know that they never use anything that they learned in school in their jobs today.”

Outcome-based learning is a renamed attempt to promote the 1970’s “mastery learning” theory, a major flop. Today, competency-based education (CBE) is a digital screen approach for replacing the often derided outcome-based learning. These schemes all posit that drilling and mastering small skills is the best way to teach. It has not worked yet.

CBE is required to get rid of teachers and further develop kids learning at screens.

Fraid’s 2013 definition can be updated with competency-based learning but would still be the same drill-and-skill bad pedagogy.

“High-Stakes Test (noun): An assessment in which the margin of error is often greater than the desired gains; nevertheless, such assessments have the power to close schools, fire teachers, cause children to repeat a grade, defund districts or schools, cause states and municipalities to lose funding, fire administrators, shame communities, stifle economic growth, increase dropout rates, disenfranchise parents and children, increase race-based segregation, increase crime rates, raise taxes, burden local governments, increase poverty, pit neighbors against each other, determine which students can attend well-funded schools or institutes of higher learning.”

Since 2013, parents and educators have come out so strongly against these tests that their destructive power was reduced. The fact that these norm-referenced exams are incapable of identifying learning or good teaching has not caused them to go away. Big testing corporations like Pearson, College Board and ACT make too much money from parents, schools and states to let it go. Testing is still being used as metrics for comparing schools, judging college acceptance and evaluating teachers.

“No Child Left Behind (NCLB) (noun): Landmark piece of bipartisan legislation which basically codified the Lake Wobegon mantra that all children need to be above average, while also starting the push to make percentiles reign supreme.  That would now serve as a phenomenal example in a lesson on irony, except the forced over-reliance on standardized tests in said legislation has resulted in 10 years of skipping extended lessons on literary devices and understanding of statistics in favor of test-prep reading and math exercises that suck all of the joy out of life as we know it.  That fact is also ironic, but the kids will never know that now.”

The reference to Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon is dated but the claim that NCLB was mathematically-challenged is true. In 2001, many scholars and educators were looking to improve student learning and teaching. NCLB put an end to these scholarly efforts and replaced them with test-based accountability. The fundamental problem is standards-based testing only reveals the financial condition of people in a schools’ zip-code. Based on misunderstood data and erroneous testing regimes, many great schools were labeled failures and shuttered.

It was a tragedy that still plagues America.

In 2013, I wrote “The Unwarranted Demise of Mar Vista Middles School.” I had worked there for one year and knew it to be a solid school with an excellent staff. Unfortunately, the student demographics shifted to the point that 76% were from low social-economic families, 75% were Hispanic students and 44% were language learners. There was just no way MVMS could meet the ill-designed testing targets demanded by NCLB.

Karen McKeegan Fraid deserves high praise for her often funny and irreverent but mostly prescient definitions. Eleven years ago, she made fun of the scoundrels who worked to end free taxpayer supported public education, some just being drawn to the scam for the $$$.

But, billionaire financiers are in it to destroy America’s public school system.

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