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Headline Says Don’t Protect Worst Teachers

18 Aug

By Thomas Ultican 8/18/2017

Another editorial in the San Diego Union attacks teachers and the California public education system. The author has a personal work history of harming California’s public schools by scheming to privatize them. The editorial was written by Rae Belisle. She is identified as a former member of California’s State Board of Education, but she is so much more than that.

Ms. Belise opened her attack,

“Competition for success in the 21st-century economy is increasingly tied to an educated workforce with strong science, technology, engineering and math skills.

“Parents, community and business leaders, and policy makers trying to keep and grow jobs in California should be shocked that in just a few short years California has won the race to the bottom.”

It is true that education is important to the future of any society, however, it is also important that education policy not be driven by a false narrative.

Her first sentence alludes to the widely promoted fraud that there is a Science Technology Engineering and Math (STEM) deficit in the US. There is not and there never was (see evidence here, here, here, here, and here). In fact, many American graduates have a difficult time finding jobs because the H1B visa program makes foreign graduates more attractive. Foreign workers are cheaper and corporations have more control over them.

Belisle echoed the language form employed by the forces for public school privatization. She says we should be SHOCKED at how California’s fourth graders living in poverty have the nation’s lowest scores on the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP). Her data is correct but the implication is disinformation.

Her clear innuendo is that public schools are failing and that bad teachers are a big part of the problem.

In her editorial she does note, “Over half of California’s K-12 students are in poverty, which makes our academic decline particularly alarming.” She does not mention that in addition to shocking student poverty, California has by far the largest percentage of language learners in the nation. The National Center for Education Statistics reports that in 2015, the national percentage of English language learners was 9.4%. California’s percentage was 22.4% followed by the state with next largest percentage of language learners, Texas at 15.4%.

A fair reading of the 2015 8th grade math data would note that California’s fourth graders are at the bottom of the nation but by the time they get to the eighth grade they have moved up nine places. Those not living in poverty are 30th out of 51 (data incudes District of Columbia). In other words, the teachers and the schools are doing their jobs in the face of a 50% poverty rate and having 22.4% of their students learning English.

Average 4-Math Calif vs Nation

A NAEP Graphic

It did not help that in the 1990’s, Belisle used her position as legal counsel for the State Board of Education to fight against bi-lingual education.

Schools cannot fix social conditions. It is political leaders that have failed to successfully address poverty and other social ills. In East Los Angeles, children are joining gangs that their great grandfather was in and we just let that disease fester. Political lawyers like Belisle blame teachers and schools for their failures and those of their paymasters.

Who is Raneene “Rae” Belisle

Belisle’s Bio at the Sacramento County Office of Education says,

“Formerly Chief Counsel to the California State Board of Education for many years, Ms. Belisle successfully defended the constitutionality of charter schools and the STAR test, and was most recently involved in the settlement of the Williams litigation.”

“… she served as Associate General Counsel and Team Leader for Government Relations with the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD).  Her focus at LAUSD was the implementation of all aspects of the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act.”

When writing about the privatization of public schools in California, I recounted,

“Three key players in the assault on California’s public schools are Walmart heiress, Carrie Walton Penner, Netflix CEO, Reed Hastings and nativist republican politician, Steve Poizner. In 2001, they started EdVoice a lobbying organization that claims California schools are broken and must be reformed. In 2003 Poizner founded the CCSA. Walton Penner and Hastings remain as board members of both EdVoice and CCSA.”

After her stint, as chief counsel for the State Board of Education, she became the CEO of EdVoice. She remained in that position until 2010.

In 2009, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger appointed her to be a member of the State Board of Education. A blogger name Sharon Higgins reported the strong opposition to her appointment.

“She was a full SBE participant for one year until March 2010 when the Senate refused to give her a confirmation hearing. They had received staunch opposition to Belisle. For instance, this was the first time in its 39-year history that the Association of California School Administrators had taken an active stance against a state board appointee, …. Belisle is a strong charter school advocate, who had previously given controversial legal advice to the SBE.”

The California Senate’s Rules Committee decided to let Belisle’s term expire and not hold a confirmation hearing. The California Watch described:

“The opposition came from some of the most influential educational and ethnic groups in the state. Several minority groups said Belisle’s legal advice to the education board during the late 1990s to early 2000s, stripped non-English speaking students of culturally sensitive textbooks and other classroom tools.

“The California Federation of Teachers, California School Board Association and Association of Calfornia School Administrators also questioned Belisle’s objectivity.”

It is fascinating why the Hindu America Foundation opposed her so vigorously. In a legal dispute with the State Board of Education, it appears that in defending the Board, Chief Counsel Belisle tried to bully the Hindus. They conveyed:

  • Belisle warned the law firm representing HAF to “watch out” because its client [HAF] had repeatedly threatened and harassed the CDE and SBE staff.
  • Belisle claimed that everyone at the SBE was fearful of them [HAF as well as other members of the Hindu American community].
  • Belisle repeatedly referred to HAF and members of the Hindu American community as “those people” who were “very dangerous.”
  • She made it clear to HAF’s attorney that she considered the Hindu Americans challenging the Board to be religious zealots and extremists.
  • During the course of HAF’s litigation, a thorough investigation of the public records was conducted. Not a single threatening letter nor record of threatening or harassing phone calls from HAF or members of the Hindu American community were found.

Belisle’s Main Point

In this editorial, she was advocating against a proposed amendment to California’s education law, AB 1164. On Facebook, EdVoice her old company informs us Belisle was right.

AB 1164 seems to be mostly about rules for money saved by districts, but it does have one section about probationary teachers. Belisle wrote,

“If passed, AB 1164 would only allow new teachers with two years of consecutive unsatisfactory ratings — the lowest rating possible — another year in the classroom along with increased job guarantees. Other new staff who may have struggled but showed signs of promise, and earned higher ratings such as needing improvement, would not even be eligible for another year of probation.”

The paragraph of AB 1164 that offends Belisle and EdVoice says:

“Before offering a third complete consecutive school year of employment as a probationary employee to an employee of the county superintendent of schools in a teaching position in schools or classes maintained by the county superintendent of schools requiring certification qualifications, the county superintendent of schools shall provide the probationary employee with written notice that includes, at a minimum, specific information on what performance-related improvements the probationary employee must achieve in order to obtain permanent employment status after the third year of probationary status. The information provided in the written notice shall be based on evaluations or reviews conducted by a permanent employee designated to conduct the evaluations or reviews pursuant to a collective bargaining agreement or by a school administrator.”

All this paragraph does is optionally extend the probationary period for one more year. That way the district does not have to discharge a teacher they think has promise while maintaining the option to release the teacher before they earn permanent status.

The California Teacher Association takes a position on all education law. They say very little about AB 1164 other than CTA Supports.

Oddly, Belisle wrote in her editorial:

“Discouraging principals from releasing the least effective adults on probation makes no sense. Why give adults who have already proven they are failing our children an easier path to a guaranteed lifetime job? This will make things harder, especially for our most vulnerable students and the hard-working effective teachers and school leaders who are doing the difficult work every day to improve results in the most challenging classrooms.”

Belisle is a lawyer who is steeped in education law, so, she must have another agenda. This law does none of these things. It gives principal’s more options and allows them to be more critical of a teacher’s performance during the probationary period without destroying careers. This law improves professional development and seems to make developing good teachers more likely.

Belisle adds, “Thurmond’s AB 1164 is the embodiment of back-room deals in Sacramento that sell out our children.” She charges Oakland Assembly member Tony Thurmond of some sort of back-room corruption of the worst type, but it is difficult to see his motives. Maybe this is like her charge that the members of the State Board of Education feared Hindus.

Conclusion

There is some sort of agenda here, but it is not clear what it is. Why did a lawyer with a long association to the education privatization movement in California write this article? I do not know. But her associations are clear: Schwarzenegger, Hastings, Walton, EdVoice.

These are not friends of public education, unless you include the unaccountable charter school industry as public schools. I don’t. They are privatized schools run by private boards with little or no public scrutiny.

The San Diego Union continues to run anti-public-school editorials. Belisle is just another paid mouthpiece for the billionaire agenda to monetize public schools and the paper is a willing megaphone.

Board Run Public School Districts

1 Aug

By Thomas Ultican 8/1/2017

It is not always pretty when the public gets a chance to voice its opinion, but it is democratic. In the last week, I attended the Sweetwater Union High School District (SUHSD) and the San Diego Unified School District (SDUSD) school board meetings. It was reminiscent of Dicken’s depiction of Paris and London.

Sweetwater which has been living a nightmare for most of the previous decade was like being at camp sitting around a bonfire singing “John Jacob Jinglehimer Smith.” It wasn’t quite Kumbaya but it was close.

SDUSD was the opposite. Parents, teachers and various community leaders came to engage in public debate. It was a war of words and philosophy. It was far from a Kumbaya moment. People made their case in a public forum and with one dreadful exception they did so in a respectful manner.

At SDUSD it was Sex and Islamophobia

There were two contentious issues at the SDUSD meeting; sex education and protecting Muslim students from bullying. At the July 24th school board meeting, the sex education issue was raised under the agenda item E.1, called Vision 2020 Quality Schools in Every Neighborhood or LCAP goal four.

Let me explain some school speak. There was a 2013 change in how California divides up money to districts. The new system was named the local control funding formula (LCFF). It required money earmarked for certain categories of spending – for example bilingual teacher training programs – to be bundled and distributed to districts under a certain set of rules for how the money is spent.

The California Department of Education describes the Local Control and Accountability Plans (LCAP),

“The LCAP is an important component of the LCFF [Local Control Funding Formula]. Under the LCFF all LEAs [Local Education Agencies] are required to prepare an LCAP, which describes how they intend to meet annual goals for all pupils, with specific activities to address state and local priorities identified pursuant to EC Section 52060(d).

In other words, these are the plans that allow districts to spend money that used to be earmarked for certain state directed categories of spending.

LCAP goal four, focuses on SDUSD’s wellness initiative including health education and the sexual health curriculum. When the district staff finished their presentation for this initiative, the public comment period allowed anyone who wanted to make a comment speak for three minutes. To speak all people were required to do is fill out a small request form and hand it to a Board staff member.

It was like living the movie “Back to the Future” where our DeLorean had just arrived in good old 1955. A relatively large group of people apparently from the same Christian sect started denouncing the sex education curriculum as pornographic and against God’s Law. People in the audience were holding up Bibles and cheering on their speakers. The speakers were protesting the curriculum from Advocates for Youth that SDUSD adopted.

One of the main points many speakers made is that some research used by Advocates comes from the University of Indiana’s, Kinsey Institute. The institute’s web-site tells readers, “Learn more about the science-based discoveries—both past and present—that reveal the complexity of sexuality and relationships.” It also says, “Since Dr. Alfred Kinsey’s groundbreaking research in 1948, the Kinsey Institute has changed the world’s understanding of human sexuality.” Many of the opponents of Advocates for Youth indicated that the research at the Kinsey Institute is evil.

One speaker who identified himself as John Moore, a retired engineer, said we cannot trust SDUSD to select a good curriculum because they are doing such a bad job of educating students. To bolster his point, he claimed that in the latest high school exit exam (2014) there was only a 30% pass rate. A check of state education department statistics revealed that  public schools in San Diego Unified had a more than 94% pass rate.

A well-coiffed handsome man in his forties said that he was Mr. Brookes here on behalf of Ernie Sanders or at least it sounded like he said Ernie Sanders. I am pretty sure it wasn’t Bernie Sanders.

Mr. Brookes said that this sex education program was against God’s Law and that it promoted deviance and rebellion. He cited Mathew 7-12 as evidence. How “do unto others as you would have done unto yourself” fits this debate is unclear. He also said that Planned Parenthood is evil and that they support this curriculum.

More speakers advocated for the sex-education curriculum than spoke against it. A teacher who taught the program refuted many of the claims as being misinformed or just untrue. Other speakers made the case that this is a well-researched and widely used program. Advocates for Youth is the basis for sex-education in major cities throughout America.

Although disagreeing with the opposition to the new sex-education curriculum, my impression was that these were moral people who truly care about their community and family. For one who values democracy, seeing this free exchange of ideas was witnessing community based democracy at its essence. Meetings of publicly elected school boards are incubators of Americana.

The Environment Became Disrespectful

Agenda item E.2 was called “Addressing Tolerance Through the Comprehensive School Counseling and Guidance Plan.” The summary in the Board Documents says:

“… the District will not tolerate the bullying of any student; and clarifies that our Muslim students will be treated equally with respect to bullying.   A calendar of observances to be created shall include holidays of all faiths for the purpose of enhancing mutual understanding and respect ….  Staff have not been assigned specifically to address the bullying of students of any single religion; rather, ….  The District’s instructional materials are and will continue to be consistent with state standards which address all major world religions in the context of world history and culture.  …  Finally, staff is redirected from forming a formal partnership with CAIR to forming an intercultural committee which shall include representatives of from all faiths and cultures and which shall provide input to District staff on issues of cultural sensitivities and the individual needs of various subgroups within our diverse community.”

This statement modifies much of the stance the school board took on April 4 when it adopted its plan to deal with Muslim students being bullied. The April 4 board document summary covering this topic said:

“This report will focus on the district’s plan to address Islamophobia and discrimination against Muslim students and their families, as directed by the Board of Education on July 26, 2016.  This plan, developed in collaboration with the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), and in alignment with AB 2845, is being brought forward for formal board adoption.”

That April 4, staff presentation listed several actions the district would take including:

  • Review district calendars to ensure Muslim Holidays are recognized
  • Provide resources and strategies to support students during the upcoming month of Ramadan
  • Explore and engage in formal partnerships with the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR)

Charles LiMandri, President and chief council for the Freedom of Conscience Defense Fundfiled a lawsuit in federal court may 22, 2017 on behalf of Citizens for Quality Education San Diego; San Diego Asian Americans for Equality Foundation; Scott Hasson; Haoyin He; Xuexun Hu; Kevin and Melissa Steel; and Jose Velazquez. The individuals all were on behalf of their minor children. The key complaint in the lawsuit is:

“Under the guise of this antibullying program, Defendants have fallen in with the aforementioned religious organization to set up a subtle, discriminatory scheme that establishes Muslim students as the privileged religious group within the school community. Consequently, students of other faiths are left on the outside looking in, vulnerable to religiously motivated bullying, while Muslim students enjoy an exclusive right to the School District’s benevolent protection.”

Charles Limandri the Rancho Santa Fe lawyer who filed this lawsuit is a well-known activist in conservative causes. He was a vocal supporter of Proposition 8, the 2008 California initiative that banned same-sex marriage. His Defense Fund profile says of Limandri:

“Since 1983, he has handled numerous high-profile civil law and pro-bono religious liberty cases including defending the Mt. Soledad Cross, San Diego Firefighters, Priests for Life, JONAH and many other organizations in state and federal courts, as well as before the United States Supreme Court. Currently, Mr. LiMandri is defending David Daleiden, Founder of the Center for Medical Progress, who is being investigated for his Human Capital Project, which used undercover video to expose the abortion industry’s buying and selling of aborted baby body parts.”

The San Diego Union reported on some of Limandri’s comments about this lawsuit.

“LiMandri said parents and his law firm have other problems with the district’s actions, including its partnership with the Council for American-Islamic Relations, which he said has a mission ‘to change American society and advance radical Islam.’”

‘“Of particular concern is the School District’s active collaboration with CAIR, which has longstanding, verified ties to radical Islam,’ LiMandri said in a statement ….”

“LiMandri said the lawsuit against the district is not asking for any monetary relief, although San Diego Unified could face a hefty legal fee if the case continues into a lengthy fight.”

The Freedom of Conscience Defense Fund which runs out of LiMandri’s law office in Ranch Santa Fe is associated with a national network of conservative legal organizations under the umbrella of The Alliance Defending Freedom. This association of more than fifty organizations includes The Heritage Foundation, National Organization for Marriage, and the Federalist society.

The San Diego Asian Americans for Equality Foundation which put its name on the lawsuit seems to be an active political organization in San Diego working to protect the rights and further the interests of Asian Americans. The other organization that is party to the lawsuit, Citizens for Quality Education San Diego was founded by Mary Baker and is almost non-existent with no web-page or Facebook page.

Mary Baker is acting President of the San Diego/Orange County Chapter for the non-profit organization, Citizens’ Alliance for Property Rights and is co-founder and member of Citizens for Quality Education—San Diego. Mary serves on two Executive Boards as President of California Federation of Republican Women—Southern Division and Rancho Bernardo Republican Women Federated.

At the school board meeting, so many people signed up to speak on this issue that the board limited everyone to one minute. Almost all speakers spoke in support of the boards original April decision and urged the board to continue with its plan to create formal partnership with Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).

The speaker representing the Jewish Defense League said that if one community is unsafe then all communities are unsafe.

The San Diego Education Association representative called for profession development highlighting the needs to combat Islamophobia.

Mr. Contreras from the San Diego High School PTA urged the board to work with CAIR and address Islamophobia.

A former SDUSD student said that Muslim hate crimes have increased 800% since 2001 and that his little sister in middle school was being bullied – including having students try to pull off her hijab.

Board member, John Lee Evans, made the point that all students needed to be protected from bullying but from time to time in America, certain communities become targets and they need special attention.

A man in the audience started screaming: “obey the law you criminals”, “we don’t want sharia law”, “you’re a bunch of criminals that’s why you are being sued”. He continued angrily screaming over speakers especially board members for an extended period.

A very frustrated looking school board President, Richard Barrera responded, “If we are getting this kind character attack, we can see what our students are dealing with.”

All the board members of SDUSD seem to be quality reasoned people. They clearly backed down on this issue and I don’t blame them. Even if they feel the lawsuit against them is without merit, they must deal with the reality of budget constraints. Limandri said he is not asking for any monetary relief, but pointed out that SDUSD could face a hefty legal bill if a lengthy fight ensues. Limandri’s allies have very deep pockets and this seems to be an issue they want to embrace.

A Trauma Informed District

In Chula Vista, the new school year has started with many words of praise for the school board and Superintendent Karen Janney. For many years construction company money influenced board elections and successive superintendents had used access to that money to control board members. Through these dark times, people like Nick Marinovich of the Bond Oversite Committee spoke out about the excesses and blocked many corrupt actions by publicly airing them at board meetings.

Eventually members of the construction industry, the superintendent of schools and four of five board member of Sweetwater Union High School (SUHSD) district pleaded guilty to felony corruption charges. A newly elected board has been in place for three years and they have brought such positive change that Marinovich and several other community members who used to battle against a corrupt board are giving heartfelt praise. At the same time, saying they will still be watching and taking positions that the board and the superintendent might not like.

The big news at the July 24th board meeting was that SUHSD starting this school year will be a 100% trauma informed district. A new district discipline policy was presented. The presenter made it clear that this was not a plan in which students can do whatever they want with no consequences, but a constructive plan that includes restorative justice principles. Dr. Joe Fulcher and his team have been working on this plan for the past two years and they feel ready for full implementation in the 2017-2018 school year.

SUHSD Discipline Plan

Only at public schools with elected school boards, is the public allowed meaningful participation. Democracy is messy but it engenders the wisest outcomes. Don’t allow public schools to be stolen from your community by fantasy reform like Betsy DeVos’s siren song of school choice.

Editorial Peddles School Privatization Agenda

16 Jul

By Thomas Ultican 7/16/2017

The San Diego Union editor deserves the bunkum efficiency award for packing so much baloney in a scant four paragraphs. The first sentence of the editorial headlined “Still more bad faith from state ED board” says:

“The State Board of Education’s defining characteristic is its ardent defense of an education establishment more worried about the interests of teachers than students.”

It is true that the education establishment in California does listen to input from teachers and their unions, however, today the establishment is dominated by billionaires like Reed Hasting and Carrie Walton Penner. There are many other establishment powerhouses like the California Charter School Association (CCSA), representatives of the education testing industry and education technology profiteers.

As your newspaper reported, by May, 2016, the CCSA was spending heavily to win seats on the San Diego County Board of Education:

“The political arm of the California Charter Schools Association has spent $220,000 so far on the San Diego County Board of Education election this year, following a difficult period for the independently operated campuses in the region — one that’s been marked by unsuccessful appeals and a string of legal challenges.”

After the recent LA school board election, the LA Times wrote in an article titled “How L.A.’s school board election became the most expensive in U.S. history,”

“It’s an oversimplification to say the outcome was all about money, but charters spent more ($9.7 million compared with $5.2 million), and their candidates finished first in both races on Tuesday’s ballot.”

Clearly these forces for privatizing public schools in California are a significant part of the education establishment. They are anti-teachers’ unions, pro testing and have huge political clout. Governor Jerry Brown, who started two charter schools himself, has vetoed every piece of legislation that proposed any increased accountability on charter schools.

To say the establishment is “more worried about the interests of teachers than students,” is wrong. Or is it just a purposeful lie?

The interests of teachers and students are very similar and neither is getting a fair deal. Teachers and students are in the same overcrowded rooms, using the same facilities and have the same half-hour lunches. No one cares more for the welfare of students and understands more about good teaching than California’s professional educators.

The first paragraph concludes:

“This is once again on display with the state board’s response to the Every Student Succeeds Act, the 2015 federal law that replaced the 2002 No Child Left Behind measure and governs how school systems that receive federal funds must operate. While the new law is much less strict than the old one, it still mandates that schools must be taken over by state governments if they are at the bottom 5 percent of statewide assessments, graduate less than two-thirds of students or have ethnic groups with consistently weak test results.” (bolding added)

Here, I am ready to join with my conservative friends and call for the abolition of the United States Department of Education. Schools should be in the control of parents, teachers and students in the local community. The federal government has no business dictating school policy and especially dictating policy that is a known failure.

In 2009, the Obama administration announced plans to rapidly turn around 5,000 of the nation’s lowest performing schools. It was called the Scholastic School Improvement Grant program (SIG). Today, there is consensus among researchers that SIG was a complete failure. A study by Tina Trujillo, University of California, Berkeley and Michelle Renée, Annenberg Institute for School Reform, Brown University stated one its conclusions:

“Conceptually, one of the most frequent critiques of these studies was that they relied on a single measure of effectiveness standardized test scores. While relying on standardized test scores was methodologically problematic because it falsely assumed that the assessments were valid and reliable, doing so as the sole measure of effectiveness also led to narrow conceptions of student success and the purposes of education ignoring the social, civic, and broader academic aspects of schooling. … Student scores on standardized tests are far too narrow to be the sole indicators of school success in the democratic model of schooling.”

For three-decades, states have been taking over local schools. Unfortunately, we have a three-decade record of failure. Dale Russakoff’s book The Prize tells the story of Newark New Jersey’s thirty-years with state run schools including how they squandered a $100,000,000 gift from Mark Zuckerberg. In Newark, the teachers were never the problem and neither was tenure or the union. It was always corrupt politicians and grinding poverty creating traumatized children. The state only made it worse when it disenfranchised local citizens.

Detroit is another horrifying example of the complete failure of a state led turn around. A Michigan state officials, Barbra Byrd Bennett, is now serving time for taking kick-backs  and the schools are worse off. After two decades of state control we read in the New York Times,

“Michigan leapt at the promise of charter schools 23 years ago, betting big that choice and competition would improve public schools. It got competition, and chaos.

“Detroit schools have long been in decline academically and financially. But over the past five years, divisive politics and educational ideology and a scramble for money have combined to produce a public education fiasco that is perhaps unparalleled in the United States.”

The editor at the Union should be praising not denigrating the State Board of Education for trying to do the right thing in a tough spot. You should be pointing out how the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) is terrible legislation that is more about selling technology, mandating testing and privatizing schools than it is about improving education.

As I wrote to Diane Feinstein, ESSA continues the testing mandate and spends large amounts of money promoting dubious technology initiatives such as “personalized learning” and “blended learning.” If these are truly good ideas they will be adopted without federal coercion. Every student in America is required to take a big standardized test in grades 3 – 8 and grade 11.

The big standardized test is useless. It tells us nothing about the quality of teachers or schools. Peter Greene known for his wonderful education blog, “Curmudgucation”, responded to an essay by Morgan Polikoff (USC Rossier), a long-time Big Standardized Test supporter:

“Polikoff’s problem remains– the BS Tests are junk that provide junk data and damage schools in the process. Accountability is a good idea, but the standards-based high-stakes tests that we’ve been subjected to for the past more-than-ten years are junk, and they do not provide a useful, reliable, or valid measure of school quality– not even sort of. Nor have they helped– not even incrementally.”

Like the way that ESSA supports social impact bonds which profit bankers and 1:1 initiatives which profit the technology industry; mandated testing is fueling the testing industry. These bad ideas are being used to transform tax money meant to benefit students into revenue streams for corporations.

These are the kind of corrupt purposes you should denounce instead of school leaders who are trying to finesse this horrible federal law and our thoroughly unqualified Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos.

MAD-Magazine-We-the-Unqualified_589a0ac137da99.50962775

Instead, you tacitly support high stakes testing as a way of evaluating schools. You legitimize the federal government and the state of California taking over San Diego’s schools. How big government of you.

Your editorial continues:

“But the State Board of Education is instead on track to approve vague, mushy Every Student Succeeds standards by the U.S. Education Department’s September deadline that appear designed to impede accountability, not guarantee it.”

In May, your paper editorialized with the headline, “Board of Education is missing mark on college readiness.” The lead paragraph said:

“An unsatisfactory process is expected to come to a disappointing conclusion Wednesday when the State Board of Education grudgingly adopts measures to gauge student progress — forced to do so to ensure California receives federal education aid.”

That editorial also emphasized:

But it still requires that schools be taken over by state governments if they graduate less than two-thirds of their students, are at the bottom 5 percent of statewide assessments or have ethnic groups that have consistently weak test results. Under the proposal before the State Board of Education, beginning in fall 2017, schools will be evaluated on high school graduation rates; student results in English and math Common Core tests; gains made by English-language learners; and student suspension rates. Test scores in third-grade reading and eighth-grade math would be given additional emphasis.” (bolding added)

When coercing states to accept Common Core, Arne Duncan said state standards had to prepare students for “college and career readiness.” It was completely up to the states, but the department of education told them that Bill Gates’ Common Core satisfied “college and career ready.” It was a statement based on nothing; no research or historical evidence. In fact, California’s previous standards are widely viewed as better standards than common core.

A core problem is that standards based education is bad education. Along with the common core, the NGSS science standards are bad standards. Most states are moving away from them. So, I am ready to join you in beating up California’s education leaders for adopting bad education policies like NGSS and Common Core. They richly deserve the flogging.

However, it looks like you advocate these education standards and are for standardized testing as the only criteria for measuring schools and holding them accountable. That is just ignorance.

We have a wonderful method for holding schools accountable and giving them a constant path of improvement. In California, it is the Wester Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC) accrediting process. I have been through several WASC reviews and they are thorough and rigorous. A team of professional educators comes to the school and spends a week looking at everything and interviews as many stake holders as possible. Their report comes back with expectations to be met. This is real accountability performed by professionals that know education and can help. Testing is expensive and  worse than useless; it is misleading and destructive.

Your third paragraph says,

“Now The New York Times reports Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has rejected such attempts to game the federal law by other states, upending expectations that she would defer to local control.”

In an interview by EdWeek, the Senator who led the writing of ESSA and is also a former US Secretary of Education, Lamar Alexander, was not impressed. The interviewer writes,

‘”I think we have a case of an assistant secretary who hasn’t read the law carefully,’ Alexander, chairman of the Senate education committee, said in an interview. ‘The heart of the entire law … was that it’s the state’s decision to set goals, to decide what ‘ambitious’ means, to make decisions to help schools that aren’t performing well.’

“The technical, but important back story: Alexander was referring to a feedback letter Botel sent to Delaware on its ESSA plan, telling the state that it hadn’t been ‘ambitious’ enough in setting long-term goals for student achievement, sparking wonky outrage inside the Beltway and beyond.

“The education chairman noted in an interview that ESSA includes language specifically prohibiting the U.S. secretary of education from telling states what their goals can or can’t be—and that 85 senators voted to approve the new law.”

You end with;

“Will this lead to the board to do the right thing and adopt meaningful standards? There is no reason for optimism — because the board has a very different definition of what is the right thing to do than Californians who care about public schools.”

Common Core and NGSS standards and standardized testing are about monetizing schools and privatizing them. It appears that promoting that path is what you mean by “Californians who care about public schools.” Please realize that you and your fellow travelers are working to destroy a great public trust and a main pillar of democratic freedoms for “a few pieces of silver.”

Credit Recovery Farce Generates Spectacular Graduation Rates

8 Jun

By Thomas Ultican 6/8/2017

A miracle has occurred. America’s high school graduation rates peaked at about 77% in 1970 and then drifted down for almost four decades to 69% in 2007. Astoundingly, even with increased graduation requirements rates have shot up.

Many school districts in California now require all students to meet course requirements for entering the University of California system to graduate from high School. That is a dramatic increase in academic rigor. Yet, in 2016, over 83% of California’s freshman cohort graduated on time. In 2012, 81% of the freshman cohort in America graduated on time. These record setting numbers are the result of knuckleheaded political policy, cheating and credit recovery.

What is Credit Recovery and Where did it Come from?

In the 1990’s politicians like Bill Clinton and Jeb Bush were pushing for standards in education and accountability measures. Jeb Bush’s infamous school grading system called for 25% of a high school’s grade to be based on graduation rates. Bill Clinton wrote in 1998,

“We have worked to raise academic standards, promote accountability, and provide greater competition and choice within the public schools, including support for a dramatic increase in charter schools.”

“We know that all students can learn to high standards, and that every school can succeed if it has clear instructional goals and high expectations for all of its students; ….”

Donald T. Campbell’s 1976 paper presented a theory about social change that is now widely revered as Campbell’s Law: “The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.”

Exactly as the Social Scientist, Campbell, postulated, this national push to increase the standards of school rigor and to use social indicators (graduation rates and high stakes testing) to evaluate schools has introduced distortion and corruption.

How were school leaders going to protect their institutions and their own jobs from the ravages of horribly shortsighted and uninformed education policy? The solution was obvious; teach to the test and find a way to raise graduation rates.

To the rescue, came both the Walton Family Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation along with many other lesser contributors. They perceived it was time for advancing the privatization of public education and accelerating the adoption of technology in education. Credit recovery was a perfect vehicle.

A mouthpiece for these foundations, the Education Commission of the States, explains:

“Credit recovery is an alternative to course repetition for students who have previously failed a course needed for high school graduation. Programs may be offered via computer software, online instruction (including through a state’s virtual high school or a local virtual school) or teacher-guided instruction (small group or one-on-one), and are typically targeted at the standards in which students were deficient, rather than all standards in the original course.

“Programs should be self-paced and competency-based ….”

Another organization significantly financed by Walton and Gates iNACOL (International Association for k-12 Online Learning) promotes a virulent form of computer based education known as CBE. I discussed CBE in a previous post: “CBE is basically outcome based education moved to digital space. Outcome based education was the new 1990’s name given to a previously failed strategy known as mastery education (AKA ‘seats and sheets’).” The fundamental theory of CBE is that education can be reduced to discrete pieces of knowledge. It’s bad theory.

iNACOL also weighed in on credit recovery:

“Our country has been trying to address the graduation crisis in many ways.”

“Today, one of the root issues is the older students who are missing a significant number of credits do not have the time to sit in class again, thus competency-based programs are a better option.”

Echoing the unsubstantiated “Nation at Risk” iNACOL does not see foolish policy or growing poverty leading to stagnate or falling graduation rates. It sees a CRISIS!

With credit recovery students are able to gain graduation credits in as short a time as a day. According to several teacher friends who have taught teacher led credit recovery, there is no real instruction, just filling in packets (“seats and sheets”). I have heard many students say, “I don’t care if I fail, I’ll do credit recovery.” Why not? It’s easier.

How Fraudulent is Online Credit Recovery?

At the high school where I taught this year, I overheard a pair of administrators speaking in hushed tones about the fraud going on in the learning center. In our district, there are twelve learning centers which are technically separate schools. They provide online credit recovery for students who have not earned enough credits. The discussion was about seeing students using smartphones to answer the test questions provided by Apex Learning. The fact that this behavior was being tolerated was what galled them.

As is made clear in a recent series of eight article about credit recovery published by Slate Magazine, cheating on credit recovery is not unique at all.

Zoë Kirsch wrote in her Slate article, The New Diploma Mills:

“Almost 90 percent of school districts use some form of credit recovery, according to a 2011 report from the National Center for Education Statistics (the center doesn’t distinguish between online and other forms). And data cited by the International Association for K-12 Online Learning, a trade group, shows that at least 75 percent of districts use some form of online learning. So, we can say this about online credit recovery: It’s pretty big.”

Kirch’s article also reports that in Nashville, graduation rates increased from 70 percent in 2007 to 81.6 percent in 2015 following the introduction of online credit recovery. Even more stunning, in Los Angeles the graduation rate grew from 54 percent to 75 percent in a single year when credit recovery was introduced in 2015.

A supervisor of credit recovery at East Gadsden High in Florida was informed that some students there were paying one another to do online coursework. When she reported it to the district, an administrator there told her to “leave it alone.” “There’s some things you can’t fix.”

The article “Fast. Isolating. Superficial.” by Stephen Smiley shares,

“She [Elizabeth Bieze, the guidance counselor who oversees the virtual lab at Sullivan High School Chicago] adds that it’s not atypical for students to recover credits for yearlong classes in under a week. ‘They do really well in the pretest, they get to skip a bunch of stuff, and they just take the final exam,’ she says. ‘It has helped our graduation rate immensely.’”

Stephen also found this:

“‘Anyone wanna do a math credit recovery for me I’ll pay you,’ read one tweet posted by a student in Erie, Pennsylvania, in August. ‘If anyone wants to go online and do my chemistry credit recovery I’d be more than happy to give you my username and password,’ wrote another student in Arkansas. Naturally, online learning companies like Edgenuity and Apex insist that most don’t actually follow through and that the chatter is mostly empty boasting.

“That may be so, but I didn’t have too much trouble finding students online who insisted they had cheated without being caught. One of them, Joseph, who is a 17-year-old senior at a Long Island high school in New York, said his online English class was uninspiring, so he paid a buddy $200 to complete it.”

Stephen also wrote a second article for Slate, “I Am an Online Credit Recovery Dropout.” In it he describes a personal experience of taking a few online courses. Stephen concluded,

“But I also came to appreciate what many students had told me about virtual learning: Compared with regular school, there’s less interaction with teachers, fewer opportunities for creative expression, and little chance to bounce around ideas with classmates. While online learning clearly has some strengths (programs can be tailored to individual needs, for instance), it’s hard to get away from an overarching conclusion: The experience as a whole can be pretty boring and lonely.”

Why is Credit Recovery Flourishing?

Francesca Berardi wrote “Take These Students, Please” about online credit recovery in Chicago. Surprising to me, it turns out that former basketball star Magic Johnson is a significant participant in the industry. Francesca notes,

“During Emanuel’s administration, Magic Johnson has become a major player in Chicago’s education world: Bridgescape operates five programs across the city, serving more than 850 students, and as the Chicago Tribune reported, in March 2015 another of Johnson’s companies, SodexoMAGIC, received an $80 million contract to take over janitorial services for several Chicago Public School buildings. Following the contract, Johnson donated $250,000 to Emanuel’s campaign for re-election.

“Not surprisingly, last September, Emanuel announced that in just five years the high school graduation rate had jumped from roughly 50 percent to 73.5 percent.”

‘’’The district is giving high school diplomas for programs that are nowhere near comparable to regular high schools,’ said Troy LaRaviere, president of the Chicago Principals & Administrators Association and a fierce critic of Emanuel’s administration.”

Zoë Kirsch and Stephen Smiley teamed up to write “Why Bad Online Courses Are Still Taught in Schools.” The article opens with this story from Florida:

“Last year, the Florida Department of Education rejected the company Online Education Ventures, which failed to provide descriptions of its virtual courses in science, social studies, and English (it provided descriptions of the math courses, but they didn’t meet state standards). A year earlier, the state disqualified Mosaica Online because the company didn’t show it could provide timely information about its courses. And it said no to Odysseyware, since it failed to outline student anti-discrimination policies or show how its products could meet the needs of students with disabilities.

“But here’s the rub: Those companies are still allowed to sell their products to schools in Florida. Public school districts can still use public money to educate students with discredited products like Online Education Ventures.’”

“The conservative American Legislative Exchange Council has made expanding online learning—unfettered and in all of its forms—one of its priorities. … ALEC has quietly but effectively helped mostly Republican lawmakers pass the kinds of laws the online learning companies want—laws that, for instance, require all graduating high school students to complete at least one virtual class.”

According to Zoe and Stephen, no states are doing a good job of regulating online learning and credit recovery. “As it happens, one of the most rigorous judges of online credit recovery classes is the NCAA. The NCAA’s standard is higher than what any state government requires for its students.”

Some Conclusions and Recommendations

Credit recovery has introduced a corruption into public education.

Online learning is only better than no other alternative. It is lifeless and dull. Some people claim there are ways to make it better, but I seriously doubt that it will ever match a classroom with a teacher to stimulate supervised dialog as a learning vehicle.

The push for credit recovery is a blatant scheme to impose privatized online learning.

Until this corruption has been eradicated, diplomas that are awarded based on credit recovery should have a reduced status to legitimately earned high school diplomas. That will at least reduce the incentive to “get it in credit recovery.”

Of all the increased academic requirements, the requirement for advanced mathematics to graduate from high schools is the most counterproductive. Most college graduates will never have a reason to make a binomial expansion or mathematically describe a conic section. Roll back these stupid requirements. Every student is not going to Berkeley.

Notes:

The five Slate Magazine articles I cited above are more on point for my article but these three articles cited below are also valuable reads.

Bottom of the Class By Francesca Berardi and Zoë Kirsch highlights some of the worst online companies.

Online Education Doesn’t Have to Be Isolating By Sarah Carr discusses some ways online learning can be done well.

Just Take It Again By Stephen Smiley describes how some of the online design makes it easy but not authentic.

I Am Done – I Hope Public Education is Not

24 May

By Thomas Ultican 5/24/2017

June 2nd will be my last day as a classroom teacher. For the past 15 years, I have been teaching mathematics and physics. It has been exhilarating, it has been heart breaking. It reminds me of the way Charles Dicken’s opened A Tale of Two Cities,

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, ….”

During my tenure in education, costly efforts were made to improve schools. However, the welfare of country and children were too often ignored in pursuit of new markets. Vast fortunes were spent by philanthropists mostly on foolish and destructive agendas which often appeared self-serving.

In 2010, Rupert Murdock stated, “When it comes to K through 12 education, we see a $500 billion sector in the US alone ….” From one point of view, our commitment to children is laudable, but this huge amount of money has engendered darkness. Integrity and community too often succumbed to greed. Corporate and political leaders regularly bowed to dark human tendencies.

Difficult Time for a New Teacher

In 1998, Prince rereleased “Party like its 1999.” In 1999, I didn’t feel it. I was driving around Silicon Valley ready to move on. The party seemed over. Hearing co-workers drone on about stock options or being regaled by stories of new startups creating instant millionaires got stale. I enjoyed my work but hated the traffic. It was time to go home to San Diego and become a teacher.

By 2001, I was in graduate school at the University of California San Diego. At the same time, Ted Kennedy was teaming up with George W. Bush to federalize public education with the “No Child Left Behind” rewrite of the education law. When, I earned a master’s degree in education, NCLB was the law of the land.

The new federal law mandated standards based multiple choice exams. These exams were completely useless for measuring school or teacher quality or for guiding instruction. The only outcome from these tests with statistical significance is that they accurately identified the economic health of the school’s community.

Standards based testing has been both cynically and foolishly used to claim that public schools are failing thus opening the door to a national tragedy. The world’s greatest public education system and our bulwark for democracy is being privatized. Wonderful and venerable institutions in tough neighborhoods like Crenshaw High are being destroyed. The generational legacy that spawned the likes of Ice-T, Darryl Strawberry and Marques Johnson has been stolen from its community.

My second year of teaching was one of my favorite years. I was given a one year temporary contract to teach at Mar Vista Middle School. I really enjoyed the kids (me and middle schoolers think alike), but it was my interactions with the staff that always engenders fond joyful memories. I was incredulous a few years later, when the middle school was reconstituted because of failing test scores. At the time I wrote about the “Unwarranted Demise of Mar Vista Middle School.”

It seems there was an effort to charterize Mar Vista Middle School, however, the community quickly rejected that. The school was reconstituted by firing half of the staff and reopened as Mar Vista Academy. The only result of the reconstitution was disruption in the lives of teachers, parents and students. The school still serves the same neighborhood. At the high school where I now work, we have seen no substantive change in the readiness of students coming from this feeder school.

I Was Victimized by the First Honored DFER

In the master’s program, we did some student teaching during the first year and then in the second year we were given paid intern positions to teach three classes a day. When that school year ended most of my classmates were offered a position. I wasn’t. It could be that I was not a very good teacher or it might have been that I was 52 years-old and schools wanted younger new teachers.

I finally got a position at Bell Junior High School teaching four sections of physics and one section of honors physics to 9th graders. Each class had 36 students. My classes scored amazingly well on the district end of course exams. They scored especially well at the end of semester 2. San Diego Unified School District has more than 130,000 students. My honors physics class at Bell was the second highest scoring honors class in the district and my 4 regular classes were the top scoring out of the 13 sections of physics at Bell.

Bell junior high school consisted of mostly minority students including many language learners and free lunch recipients. Several or my students were afraid to walk home after school. The neighborhood was that tough. It was at Bell that I started to realize that the experienced teachers were amazing and not the worthless slugs that I had heard so much about.

In her book The Death and Life of the Great American School System, Diane Ravitch wrote about Alan Bersin a lawyer with no education experience being tapped to run what was arguably the top performing urban school systems in America. I have written about the Democrats for Education Reform (DFER) and Bersin. The following citation honoring Bersin is from the DFER web presence (it has since been removed):

“Appointed in 1998 as Superintendent of Public Education of the San Diego Unified School District, Bersin led the eighth largest urban school district in the country. In 2005, Governor Schwarzenegger appointed him as California’s Education Secretary. Bersin led the way as one of the nation’s first ‘non-traditional’ big city school leaders, promoting ambitious reform to raise the quality of education and bolster student achievement. …. Bersin was a founding board member of DFER.”

One feature of the “non-traditional” superintendent’s leadership was fear. At Bell, I witnessed three tenured teachers lose their jobs. Yes, a determined administrator can get rid of a tenured teacher. It appears there were targets for the number of teachers to be fired each year. It also seems that a certain percentage of new hires were required to be given unacceptable evaluations. I suspect being a new hire in my 50’s made me a target.

My final evaluation said that I was not able to control my classes and was not moving them towards achieving standards. The not moving them towards achieving standards comment meant that I could not even apply to be a substitute teacher. Ironically, my evaluation the next year by the principal at Mar Vista Middle School referenced classroom management as a particular strength.

Conclusions and Concerns

Standards based education is bad education theory. In the 1960’s Benjamin Bloom proposed mastery education in which instruction would be individualized and students would master certain skills before they moved ahead. By the 1970’s this idea had been married with B.F. Skinner’s behaviorist philosophy and teachers were given lists of discrete items for their students to master. The “reform” became derisively known as “seats and sheets.”

By the 1980’s corporate leaders and many politicians were turning these mastery skills into standards. In the 1990’s the IBM and former RJR Nabisco CEO, Louis Gerstner, made instituting education standards and standards based testing his mission in life. The result of his almost two decade effort are the Next Generation Science Standards and they are awful. I wrote about them here, here and here.

The other corporate leader that loves the concept of education standards is Bill Gates. Without him, there would be no Common Core State Standards. Bill Gates and Louis Gerstner share two traits, neither of them have any real experience or training in education and the education standards they have forced on America are horrible. I wrote about the Common Core standards here and here.

Vouchers have not led to better education outcomes. Allowing the privatization of public schools is foolhardy. Public schools are wonderful crucibles of democracy where parents have input. Vouchers undermine this democratic principle and they can be misused. Vouchers have been employed to force all taxpayers to fund religious schools and to promote segregation.

This March (2017) a Texas Superintendent of Schools, John Kuhn, informed the Association of Texas Professional Educators about vouchers. “Three different research studies published recently have found that voucher programs harm student learning—including one study sponsored by the Walton Family Foundation and the Fordham Institute, both proponents of vouchers. Students who use vouchers underperform their matched peers who stay in public schools.”

It is in all of our interest to adequately fund public education. Even if you do not want your children to attend a public school. On the other hand, tax money should not be spent on private or religious schools. If parents want that option, that is their right, but it is not the responsibility of society to fund their decision.

Charter schools are bad policy. There are some absolutely wonderful charters schools but the money they remove from the public system is causing significant damage to the schools that serve the vast majority of students.

If taxpayers want to fund charter schools they need to understand that it will cost more than just funding public schools. It costs more money to run multiple systems. Not providing adequate funding degrades the public system – bigger classes and less offerings. In extreme cases like Detroit, we see a complete collapse of both the public and charter systems.

Albert Shanker thought that charters could be used to unleash the creativity of teachers, but once he saw the early direction of the charter movement, he became a charter opponent. In her book School Choice, Mercedes Schneider shares this quote from Shanker:

“A pluralistic society cannot sustain a scheme in which the citizenry pays for a school but has no influence over how the school is run. … Public money is shared money, and it is to be used for the furtherance of shared values, in the interest of e pluribus unum. Charter schools and their like are definitely antithetical to this promise.” (Page 57)

When writing about Schneider’s School Choice I paraphrased her:

“Charter schools have never honestly out performed elected board directed public schools. In some cases, charter schools have gotten relatively good testing results, but on closer inspection these good testing results are not the result of good pedagogy. There are three common practices that help charters look good on testing; (1) instead of a balanced curriculum they focus on preparation for testing, (2) through various techniques, they only accept easier to educate students and (3) they do not back fill when students leave the school.”

Another bad idea is CBE. This big school privatization effort could be called the make Silicon Valley “great again” effort. It is known by various names: one-to-one, personalized education, blended learning, competency based education, etc. Its supporters, like Billionaires Reed Hastings and Bill Gates, are spending huge amounts of money promoting computer delivered education.

In 2010, the President-CEO of the Charter School Growth Fund (a Walton family effort), Kevin Hall, decided to purchase the struggling Dreambox Inc. of Bellevue, Washington for $15,000,000. He subsequently invested another $10,138,500 into Dreambox. [data from 2014 form 990]

A recent National Public Radio report on the Rocketship schools reported:

“Rocketship students often use adaptive math software from a company called Dreambox Learning. The company was struggling when Reed Hastings, the Netflix founder turned education philanthropist and investor, observed it in action at a Rocketship school several years ago. His investment allowed Dreambox to become one of the leading providers of math software in North America, currently used by about 2 million students.”

Reed Hastings is a funder of the Rocketship schools, a board member of the Charter Schools Association of California and the primary owner of Dreambox Learning. What he is not is a highly trained experienced educator.

An Organization for Economic-Cooperation and Development study concludes, “Investing heavily in school computers and classroom technology does not improve pupils’ performance.” The last thing 21st century children need is more screen time.

San Jose State’s education Professor Roxana Marachi provides access to information about the possible health risks involved with screen time and juvenile cell phone use. I recommend her Educational Psychology & Technology page. The CBS news magazine 60 Minutes, recently presented information about tech addiction being purposefully designed into digital devices.

Of course there is a place for technology in education, but that place should be driven by professionally experienced educators and not technology companies looking to enhance profitability.

My biggest take-away is that professional educators should be running education. The Regan era idea that business people, lawyers and Nobel Prize winning scientists were more equipped to lead America’s schools than experienced professional educators was a foolish error. Today, we have an amateur politician rich guy trying to run the country. His lack of experience is showing.

In the same way, insurance salesmen (Eli Broad), retailers (Doris Fisher) and technologists (Bill Gates) are harming America’s schools, because they do not know what they are doing. Experience and training matter in all fields of human endeavor and education is no different.

Shakespeare and the “Ocean Genius”

9 May

By Thomas Ultican 5/9/2017

Fortune smiled on me in April. I was invited to the “Folly Garden Theater” for a benefit supporting theater arts for middle and high school students. The open air theater sits in Walter and Mary Munk’s back yard. We were also celebrating the Bards 453 birthday.

When I arrived three middle schools students were performing a scene from ‘Much Ado about Nothing’ and there was the great man himself giving them his full attention. For the past seventeen years Walter and his wife have opened their home for this event. At 99 years-old, the man the New York Times called the “Einstein of the Oceans” is still encouraging students.

The outdoor theater stage is at the bottom of a terraced incline. Each of the four grass covered terrace levels are wide enough for one row of folding chairs. A large cement balcony with room for more than 50 people tops off the seating. Behind the stage area is an unmolested canyon leading down to the beach at the Scripps Institute, where Walter has been affiliated since the late 1930’s. It is an amazing ocean view in which colorful hang gliders arc gracefully on ocean breezes.

The students were in full costume. In a scene from ‘Henry IV’, the young man playing Fallstaff was particularly amusing in both dress and demeanor. The stage sound system made the flawless delivery of the almost 450 year-old lines by the Bard’s newest enthusiasts easy to hear. Clearly, the students involved had spent many hours perfecting their performances and were truly enjoying their day in the sun. Doctor Munk rose from his wheel chair multiple times to express appreciation for their performances.

This is one of many events sponsored by the San Diego Shakespeare Society. Inspired by the idea “Teach a child Shakespeare at an early age and they can learn anything,” the Society sponsors many events for K-12 students. Amongst the largest of these is the annual event held on the various stages in Balboa Park’s Prado area at which about 500 students perform 10-minute scenes.

The Adults

The emcee for our event was author and performer, Richard Lederer. Among his many credits, Richard founded the PBS show “A Way with Words.” Richard who came dressed for the occasion in a costume topped off by a giant felt hat, seems to feel that his best credits are his champion poker playing son and daughter (Howard Lederer and Annie Duke) and his poet daughter, Katy Lederer.

Mr. Lederer showed off his word mastery whenever he spoke. He was also the fund raiser auctioneer. One of the items he auctioned was poker lessons. He claimed that his having sired two national poker champions was proof of the value his lessons would bring. His light hearted style was a delight.

Alex Sandie, the President of the Shakespeare Society delivered a few brief remarks. Not only did he grow up in Sean Connery’s home town of Edinburgh, he also bears a remarkable resemblance. He lamented bad things coming in threes by noting that he is 3 inches shorter, 30 pounds lighter and $300 million poorer than his famous Scottish doppelganger. For the past 16 years this delightful man has been leading the Society’s effort to educate the public, especially youths.

The “Einstein of the Oceans”

For me meeting Walter Munk was a special treat. And like all truly great people, he was a humble delightful person who shows gratitude and appreciation for any effort. Kasey Kay wrapped up the afternoon by playing some wonderful renditions of Chopin and other classics. Walter was there listening intently and applauding enthusiastically. In one touching moment while Kasey was playing, Walter’s wife Mary stood behind him with her hands on his shoulders – Walter reached up with his left hand and held her right hand affectionately.

In 2015, Kate Galbraith wrote about Walter for the New York Times. She began the article:

“In 1942, with World War II in full swing, a young military scientist learned of the Allies’ plans to invade northwestern Africa by sea to dislodge the nearby Axis forces.

“The scientist, Walter Munk, who was in his mid-20s, hastily did some research and found that waves in the region were often too high for the boats carrying troops to reach the beaches safely. Disaster could loom. He mentioned it to his commanding officer, but was brushed off.

“’They must have thought about that,’ Dr. Munk, now 97, recalled being told. But the young scientist persisted, calling in his mentor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography to help.

“They devised a way to calculate the waves the boats could expect to face. Their work helped the boats land in a window of relative calm, and the science of wave prediction took off, becoming part of the planning for the D-Day landings in 1944.”

I was standing in the entryway garden in front of the Munk home talking with a friend when we noticed a meter by meter bronze plaque memorializing Roger Revelle. Walter Munk and Roger Revelle are widely considered the two most important scientists in the history of global climate change studies. The meaning behind the plaque is revealed in a 2013 UC San Diego news release about Munk being presented the Revelle award. From the release:

“Commonly referred to as the “greatest living oceanographer,” Munk is widely recognized for his groundbreaking investigations of wave propagation, tides, currents, circulation and other aspects of the ocean and Earth. The 95-year-old scientist is still active at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego. His accomplishments have been recognized by a lengthy list of organizations from around the world. He won the National Medal of Science and the Kyoto Prize in Basic Sciences. He was the inaugural recipient of the Prince Albert I Medal in the physical sciences of the oceans, which Prince Rainier of Monaco created in cooperation with the International Association for the Physical Sciences of the Oceans. Most recently, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced Munk’s receipt of the Crafoord Prize.

“Yet for Munk, the Roger Revelle Medal is especially meaningful. ‘Roger was my best friend and the person who had the greatest influence on my career,’ said Munk, who received his Ph.D. in oceanography in 1947 from Scripps, where he went on to spend his entire academic career.”

Munk played a lead role in the Acoustic Thermometry of Ocean Climate (ATOC) project. Because sound travels through water at different rates depending on the temperature, Munk realized he could use sound to measure ocean temperatures. It gave him a method for tracking climate change.

Munk and Revelle cemented their long professional and personal relationship during a 1952 year long research voyage. They first went to the Eniwetok Atoll to monitor the hydrogen bomb test for possible tsunami issues. They didn’t find a tsunami but they did have to strip off their clothes and throw them overboard when they were doused with a nuclear polluted rain. This was Munk’s second trip to monitor the effect of nuclear testing on the oceans. He was also at the Bikini Atoll for the 1946 atomic bomb test where he put dye in the lagoons to see where the currents would disperse the radioactive products of the test.

1952 at Eniwetok Atol

New York Times Photo

After the hydrogen bomb test, Munk and Revelle spent many months doing ocean research in the beautiful islands of Tonga, Fiji, Tahiti, and the Marquesas, taking a full year to make their way back to San Diego.

In the 1960’s, the new University of California at San Diego campus quickly gained a reputation as one of the top public universities in America. This was due in no small measure to Revelle and Munk’s ability to recruit top young scientists.  Munk describes how they did it:

‘“Roger was a tremendous recruiter.… He became so interested in the work of these people and what they were doing that he could explain to them how they could do their work better at UC San Diego. He was a genuine participant in their dreams.”’

“Munk reminisced about his role in the recruiting effort. ‘Magically, Roger would turn up at our house with the recruits around martini time,’ said Munk. ‘He would show them the ocean view and we would have the martinis ready.’”

After my afternoon watching Shakespeare at that same house, I can see how effective the recruiting team of San Diego, Munk and Revelle was.

It was such a pleasure to see how great people share their largess. After years of watching pseudo philanthropy harm public schools, it was refreshing to see genuine public spirit on display.