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Network for Public Education Goals

10 Nov

By Thomas Ultican 11/10/2023

Network for Public Education (NPE) issued two agendas at the conclusion of the October Washington DC Conference. NPE Director, Carol Burris, announced, “A Resolution in Support of Community-based Public Education, a Pillar of our Democracy” and Julian Vasquez Heilig, Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs Western Michigan University, put forward “Freedom to Learn,” a kindergarten through university agenda.

Freedom to Learn

Since “A Nation at Risk” in 1983, public education has been under serious attack. In the 21st century, the attacks have become well-financed, deceptive and mean-spirited.

Christopher Rufo became the darling of autocracy with his attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). In 2017, he was working at the Discovery Institute in Seattle, Washington which focuses on intelligent design and opposes Darwinian-based biology. When President Trump decided that DEI training for federal workers was deeply infected with critical race theory, Rufo, now at the rightwing Manhattan Institute, stated on the Tucker Carlson show, “It’s absolutely astonishing how critical race theory has pervaded every institution in the federal government.”

 He trained his sights on public schools, disingenuously claiming they were teaching critical race theory (CRT). Soon CRT became the name for anything bigots did not like. Billionaire-funded think-tanks, Manhattan Institute, Heritage Foundation and CATO Institute beat homophobia drums and blew bigotry trumpets against DEI.

Hostile state legislatures enacted laws that undermined public schools, community colleges and universities. They instituted curriculum bans, eradicated DEI programs and attacked science, as well as public health programs. Laws were passed allowing terrorist groups, like Mom’s for Liberty, to push mindless, censorship agendas while attacking librarians and teachers, branding them as groomers and child molesters. They also cut public school funding while promoting vouchers and other privatization schemes.

Time magazine ran an opinion piece by American Federation of Teachers President, Randi Weingarten, and Stand for Children’s CEO, Jonah Edelman. They observed:

“In a recent lecture at ultra-conservative Hillsdale College, culture war orchestrator Christopher Rufo detailed the strategy for replacing public education with a universal voucher system. ‘To get to universal school choice, you really need to operate from a premise of universal public school distrust,’ Rufo explained. Earlier in that same lecture, describing how to lay siege to institutions, he noted the necessity to create your own narrative and frame and advised his audience they ‘have to be ruthless and brutal.”’ (Emphasis Added)

Interestingly, the closer to the classroom, the better the image of public schools will be. In the 2022 Gallup survey, 84% of the general public rated their district’s public schools as passing. Parents gave them an 89% passing rates while they rated the entire nation at 73%.

The steady drumbeat of attacks on public education, starting with 1983’s “A Nation at Risk,” has harmed peoples’ view of public education but less than one might imagine. 

Professor Heilig introduced three targets:

  1. Promote “freedom to learn and access to education through working with coalition partners to support bills to increase federal and state funding for all levels of public education and protect the freedom to teach and the freedom to research.”
  2. Fight back “against legislative bans on the teaching of U. S. history, science and psychology, and other educational gag orders, and by defending individual educators who face harassment, discipline or termination as a result of these laws.”
  3. Support “efforts to provide more resources to our public schools, colleges and universities and the students who depend on them every day, resisting efforts to defund our preK-12 and higher education systems.”

Community-based Public Education

Carol Burris stated public education is the pillar of democracy and should be based on the common school design originally envisioned by Horace Mann. Public schools teach all who live within their boundaries, “regardless of race, ethnicity, creed, LGBTQ+ status, or learning ability.”

It is taxpayers who bear the responsibility for funding such schools and have the right to examine how tax dollars are used to educate children. Schools should be accountable to community residents who have the right and responsibility to elect those who govern them.

Extreme Instability of Charter Schools from NPE’s Broken Promises

In 2019, Jeff Bryant and Carol Burris co-authored “Asleep at the Wheel,” about the federal Charter School Program (CSP):

“We estimate that program funding has grown to well over $4 billion. That could bring the total of the potential waste to around $1 billion.”

This claim by NPE was widely criticized as an over-statement. Carol Burris and her small team made a very detailed study of the CSP program producing “Still Asleep at the Wheel.” They discovered the estimates were low and 40% of charter schools receiving CSP grants had closed or did not open.

Charter schools were introduced in the 1990s as an education experiment with the potential to significantly improve American education. Since then, there were no positive changes, including no significant improvement in standardized test scores. On the other hand, they have divided communities, undermined public schools and driven up segregation.

It is legitimate to conclude the charter school experiment has been a three-decade failure but the federal government continues lavishly funding the CSP.

Burris shared a growing concern with efforts to privatize public education, remove governance from school communities and divert power to private boards, religious institutions, and both nonprofit and for profit corporations.

Therefore, NPE calls for a series of reforms to “preserve our public education system and protect the students who attend public schools.”

Recommended reforms include:

  • An immediate moratorium on creating new charter schools, including no replication or expansion of existing charter schools.
  • End CSP that subsidizes and encourages charter expansion.
  • Require certification of all charter school teachers and administrative staff in accordance with public school requirements.
  • All properties and equipment owned by charter schools become the property of the local public school district if the charter closes.
  • Prohibit charter schools from refusing transfer students mid-year if they have available space.
  • Pro rata reimbursement for school districts (or states) when students leave a charter school during the school year.

In 2018, the Center for American Progress, who would never be mistaken as hardcore lefties, wrote about the first five large scale voucher studies ever. They summed up the report stating:

“How bad are school vouchers for students? Far worse than most people imagine.”

Josh Cowen, University of Michigan, has studied vouchers for close to 30 years. At the conference, he stated, “If we were using evidence informed education policy, vouchers would have died 5 years ago.” Cowen also noted test score losses from voucher students are as large as or larger than those experienced in either Katrina or Covid-19. Data since 2013 shows that vouchers have been catastrophic.

Nevertheless, Carol Burris said, “We support a parent’s right to educate their child in a private school; however, we believe that private services should be funded privately and not by the public.”

Vouchers were originally the choice of southern segregationist in the late 1950s after the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision. In 2002, the Supreme Court ruling in the Zelman v. Simmons-Harris case held that publicly funded vouchers could be used to send children to religious schools. It was a 5-4 decision, authorizing state legislators to force taxpayers to send their dollars to religious schools.

Voucher programs are always instituted by legislative bodies. There has never been an education voucher program voted for by the public.

Carol Burris stated, “We advocate for the phase-out of all voucher programs.”

Until that happens, NPE is calling for several legislative actions including:

  • An immediate moratorium on the creation of new voucher programs or their expansion.
  • Require private schools that receive vouchers cannot discriminate in any form, including based on religion, gender, marital status, disability, achievement and LGBTQ+ status.
  • Mandate financial audits of voucher programs, participating private education providers and third-party voucher-granting organizations.
  • State to collect data on voucher school closures and year-to-year changes in tuition.
  • Require certification of all school teaching and administrative staff in schools that receive vouchers in accordance with public school requirements.
  • Require that voucher students, including micro and homeschool students, participate in the same state testing programs as public and charter students and the results be made publicly available.
  • Voucher school facilities are obligated to meet building codes.
  • Require pro rata voucher funding be returned to local, state, and federal sources if a student returns or transfers to public school.

Wrap-Up

Ever since the Clinton administration, there has been a well-financed attack on public education. Much of this has come from billionaires and the Catholic Church has played a key role in advancing the voucher movement. Ten years-ago NPE was formed by mostly educators to save public schools. During its first decade, NPE fought against the privatization movement through social media by raising awareness and giving teachers a voice.

As it heads into the second decade, NPE is promoting an agenda to undo the recent damage to public schools, calling for the common sense changes listed above.

Let’s do it!

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Network for Public Education Was in Washington DC

2 Nov

By Thomas Ultican 11/2/2023

NPE met at the Capitol Hilton for a weekend conference beginning on Friday, October 27. The old hotel seemed well maintained. That first evening, Diane Ravitch interviewed James Harvey who was a key contributor to “A Nation at Risk.” We gathered in a larger conference room which caused Mr. Harvey to comment, “I remember being at a meeting in this room fifty years ago when we heard that Alexander Butterfield had just testified that there were tapes of the oval office.”

With that historical reference, the conference was off to a wonderful start.

“A Nation at Risk” is seen as an unfair turning point that undermined public education. Mr. Harvey’s job was to synthesize the input from members of the National Commission on Excellence in Education, created by Secretary of Education, Terrence Bell, and produce the report. He shared that two famous academics on the panel, Nobel Prize winner, Glen Seaborg, and physicist, Gerald Holton, were the driving forces for politicizing public education.

Diane Ravitch and James Harvey

That first night’s presentation was actually an added event for the benefit of us coming in on Friday afternoon. The conference had three keynote addresses, two panel discussions and seven breakout sessions. It was difficult to choose which breakout sessions to attend.

Pastors for Children

For session one, I attended “Mobilizing Faith Leaders as Public Education Allies.”  The amazing founder of Pastors for Children, Charles Foster Johnson, and his two cohorts were well reasoned and did not proselytize us. Their movement really does seem to be about helping communities and not building their church. Among Johnson’s points were:  

  • “Privatized religion teachers believe ‘God likes my tribe best.”‘
  • “We are the reason there is not a voucher program in Texas.”
  • “Conservatives and liberals come together over education.”
  • “Faith leaders have a different effect when lobbying politicians.”
  • “We are making social justice warriors out of fundamentalist Baptist preachers.”

Houston School Takeover

I have no intention of writing about each of the 7 sessions I attended, but the session on the Houston School District takeover needs mention.

Texas took-over Houston Independent School District (ISD) on June 1, 2023. It is the largest school district in the state and eighth largest in the country with more than 180,000 students attending 274 schools. The student demographics are 62% Hispanic, 22% African-American, 10% White and 4% Asian, with 79% identified as economically disadvantaged.

In 2021, Millard House II was selected by a unanimous vote of the Houston ISD school board to be Superintendent. Under his leadership, Houston ISD was rated a B+ district, a school in one of Houston’s poorest neighborhoods, and used to excuse the takeover received a passing grade on Texas’s latest STAR testing. The takeover board replaced House with Mike Miles, a charter school operator from Colorado, previously lasted 2 years of his five-year contract, to lead the Dallas ISD.

Ruth Kravetz talked at some length about the how angry Houstonians are and their effective grassroots organizing. Kravetz stated, “We want Mike Miles gone.” She noted that the local media started turning against the takeover when citizens were locked out of the first takeover board meetings.

Kravetz intoned:

  • “Teachers no longer need a certificate or college degree to teach in Houston ISD.”
  • “Seven year-olds are not allowed to use restrooms during instructional times. They must wait.”
  • “People are being fired for ridiculous reasons. Five people were fired last week over a made up story.”
  • Expect more student action against the takeover.
  • “Rolling sickouts are coming.”

Jessica Campos is a mother in one of Houston’s poorest communities. She said her school is made up of 98% Mexicans with 68% of them being Spanish speakers. She claims, “Our school community has been destroyed”, and reported all teachers were removed with many, replaced by uncertified teachers.

Daniel Santos (High School social studies teacher) said:

“It is all about dismantling our school district. We wear red-for-Ed every Wednesday and Mayor Turner lights up city hall in red.”

The Keynote Addresses

Gloria Ladson-Billings from the University of Wisconsin Madison delivered the first Keynote address on Saturday morning.

She said that we were really dealing with 4 pandemics:

  1. Covid-19
  2. George Floyd murder
  3. “Economic Shesession” (Large numbers of women were forced to leave the workforce.)
  4. Climate catastrophe

Professor Ladson-Billings claims the larger agenda is the complete eradication of public education in what she sees as an evolving effort:

  • The evacuation of the public spaces which are being privatized.
  • Affordable, Reliable and Dependable (public space keys) is being undermined.
  • Public housing is closing.
  • The last domino is public education!

Ladson-Billings says, “choice is a synonym for privatization.” There is money in the public and wealthy elites do not think the public should have it. Also noted was “We are in the business of citizen making.”  We do not want to go back to normal because it was not that great and ending on a positive note, “All is not lost – people on the ground in Florida are working hard to reverse it.”

History Professor Marvin Dunn from Florida was the lunch time keynote speaker. He has been working hard to educate the children of Florida about the states’ racist past, including giving guided tours of the site of the 1923 Rosewood Massacre of an African American community.

He noted that “Racism is in our national DNA” and shared that George Washington owned 500+ slaves. When he was 11 years-old, Washington was given his first slave. Still, 500 black soldiers were with him at the crossing of the Delaware river.

Another American icon mentioned by Professor Dunn was Thomas Jefferson. The third president of the United States was 41 years-old when first having sexual relations with Sally Hemings; she was 14.

Julian Vasquez Heilig, Josh Cowen and Jon Hale held a late afternoon public discussion on Saturday. The moderator, Heilig, made the point that instead of funding one system, now many states are funding three systems with the same amount of dollars.

Josh Cowen, from Michigan State University, noted that using evidence based data since 2013, vouchers have been catastrophic. If we were using evidence informed education policy, vouchers would have died 5 years ago. Test score losses from voucher students are greater than those experienced in either Katrina or Covid-19. He also noted that 20% – 30% of children give up their voucher each year.

He added don’t believe a word coming out of Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds’ mouth. She has instituted vouchers, opposed abortion and supported child labor.

Reynolds is pushing Christian nationalism.

Jon Hale, from the University of Illinois says white architects of choice have a 70 year history. He says it was never about improving schools. The white supremacist movement sprung up after Brown versus the Board of Education in 1954.

Becky Pringle of the National Education Association and Randi Weingarten of the American Federation of Teachers joined in conversation with Diane Ravitch.

Becky Pringle stated that the attack on public education is deliberate and schools must be reclaimed as a common good noting that more than 50% of today’s students are of color.

Pringle claimed that every single social system in the country is under attack and declared forcefully that elections matter!!

Weingarten asked how many schools are not talking about what is going on in the Middle East right now because they are scared stiff? She made three important points:

  • “The tool of the autocrat is apathy.”
  • “Find the things that unite us.”
  • “Make schools fun.”

The last Keynote speaker was Georgina Perez, Texas State School Board member from 2017 until January 2023.

Georgina introduced herself as a chick from west Texas and obviously there was real steel there. She said, regarding vouchers, “It is completely asinine to take a nickel from the 95% of students and give it to the 5%.”

Being from the border area, she naturally was looking out for the border raised students. Georgina said I could see that all of the “Spanish language EL’s were not dropping out; they were being pushed out.” In order to get what she wanted for them, she needed to work with some very staunch conservatives and was quite successful at it. For example, she got ethnics studies by having a steak dinner and drinking with David Bradley, making a friend. She is a powerful example of how conservatives and liberals can work together for education.

What I Found

Several participants showed up kind of down in the mouth. However, by the end of the conference they were heading back home with new energy and resolve. Billionaires are spending vast sums of money trying to end public school because if public education goes then all of the commons will follow. Their big problem is that vast wealth and spending is not a match for the grassroots organizing that is happening throughout America.

Diane Ravitch, Carol Burris and the members of NPE have become a bulwark for democracy and public education.

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My First NPE Conference Revisited

2 Oct

By Thomas Ultican 10/2/2023

I traveled from San Diego to Chicago’s famous Drake Hotel for the Network for Public Education (NPE) conference in 2015. Karen Lewis, President of the Chicago Teachers’ Union and her union hosted the event and leaders of the National teachers unions, Lily Eskelsen García from the National Education Association and Randi Weingarten of the American Federation of Teachers were present.

Scholar author, Yong Zhao, was the day-one keynote speaker.

At the hotel early Friday evening, Anthony Cody, co-founder of NPE, standing on the entry stairs, greeted new arrivals. This tall man had developed a reputation as a renowned champion for public education. Steve Singer from Pennsylvania and T.C. Weber from Tennessee arrived right after me and I knew it was going to be special.

Karen Lewis was fresh-off leading a stunning victory by the Chicago teachers’ union. She had been planning to run for Mayor of Chicago but unfortunately was diagnosed with brain cancer. With her amazingly big heart, for the next several years, we communicated by telephone. It was stunning how she always had time for me even when sick. I miss her.

Day One

Next morning at breakfast, I met Professor Larry Lawrence, a lifelong education professional and friend of public education who just happens to live 20-miles up old Highway 101 from me. We became quite close. I wrote about Larry in my post, Breakfast with Professor Lawrence, laying out some of his awesome contributions to public education.

The first session kicked off with addresses by Chicago’s Jitu Brown and Newark student union leader, Tanisha Brown.

Jitu heads Journey for Justice and would become nationally recognized when he led a 34-day hunger strike, saving Chicago’s Dyett High School from Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s chopping block. He shared that once, a man from Chicago, claiming to be a community organizer, dipped his toe in the ocean and when it was cold, moved on. It was Barak Obama.

Tanisha Brown was part of a student movement to save Newark’s schools from being privatized and from, the authoritarian control of a former TFA member, Cami Anderson.

These two speakers got the conference off to a rousing start.

During graduate school at UCSD in 2001, I spent a lot of time looking at various reforms. Then, it meant improving education, not privatization. The work of Deborah Meyer particularly stood out. Her small class-size and student-centered efforts in both New York City and Boston were inspirational. Getting to meet her at this conference in Chicago was a special treat. She and her niece talked with me for almost an hour. NPE is one of the few places this could happen.

On the way to lunch, I encountered Annie Tan, a special education teacher, then working in Chicago. The tables were round and could seat more than 10 people. We found a table right next to the stage. It turned out that four people at our table were going to be holding the lunch-time discussion: Jennifer Berkshire, Julian Vasquez Heilig, Peter Greene and Jose Vilson.

Today, almost everyone in the fight to save public education knows Jennifer Berkshire but up until 2015, she was hiding her identity under the pseudonym, Edu-Shyster. Julian Vasquez Heilig is now the head of education at the University of Kentucky; then, he was a department chief at Sacramento State University in California. Peter Greene was a teacher blogger from rural Pennsylvania and known to some of us as the author of Crumuducation. Jose Vilson was a teacher blogger from New York City, with a large following. 

Also at the table was Adell Cothorne, the Noyes Elementary school principal, famous for exposing Michelle Rhee’s DC cheating scandal.

I will always appreciate Annie Tan, leading me up to that table. It was interesting that Peter Greene, his wife, Jose Vilson and I all play the trombone. Everyone knows that trombone players are the coolest members of the band.

The main event was a presentation by Professor Yong Zhao. Everybody was impressed and highly entertained. He had just published Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Dragon?: Why China Has the Best (and Worst) Education System in the World. His book and presentation thoroughly discredit standards and standards-based testing.

Zhao is a funny guy. In 2015, readiness was a big education issue for the billionaire boys club … readiness for college, high school and even kindergarten, were written about in all big money education publications.

He said kindergarten readiness should mean “kindergartens are ready for children.” What he wanted for his children was “out of my basement readiness” and shared a personal experience of being in a Los Angeles elevator with Kim Kardashian, observing she had “out of my basement readiness”!

Union Leaders

In 2015, Bill Gates spent lavishly to control the direction of public education, giving large handouts to education journalists, education schools and teachers unions, in support of his proposal for the national Common Core State Standards. Activists at the Chicago meeting wanted the teachers unions not to accept Gates money, the underlying issue facing Lily Eskelsen García and Randi Weingarten as they took the stage in the main room for a Q & A session moderated by Diane Ravitch.

Both García and Weingarten were excellent presenters, consummate professionals, who did not disappoint. Most of the hour, Ravitch asked questions about topics, like teacher tenure and the scurrilous attack on classroom teachers. Answers from both union leaders received big positive responses.

The last question of the day was about the unions taking donations from Bill Gates. García and Weingarten both swore that their unions would no longer accept his gifts. This was not entirely true but did lead to that outcome eventually.

I personally got a chance to speak with García about diversity, saying in southern Idaho where I grew up, it might have a larger percentage of Mormons than Utah. She joked that in the Salt Lake school district, where she taught, diversity meant there were some Presbyterians in the class. Lily was genuine and warm.

Some Thoughts on NPE

Be careful about your travel itinerary… had to leave before the conference ended to catch the flight home, not realizing how much time was needed to get to the airport … will not make that mistake again.

The next NPE conference will be my sixth. That first one in Chicago awakened me to the crucial efforts Diane Ravitch, Carol Burris and the NPE board are making.

NPE is our most important organization in America fighting to preserve public education, the foundation of democracy. When we meet in Washington DC October 28 and 29, some of America’s most brilliant educators and leaders will be sharing information and firming up plans for our country. I hope you can be there.

Remember, the way public education fares directly affects how American democracy fares.

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Gompers Preparatory Academy is Non-Union

25 Sep

By Thomas Ultican 9/25/2023

This June, the school named after famed labor leader Samuel L. Gompers voted 25-17 to become non-union. The San Diego Unified School District middle school was converted to a charter school in 2005. The final class of high school aged students graduated in 2007. New school staff came in without a union but formed one in 2019. Almost immediately some teachers, led by chemistry teacher Christie Chiscano, began working to leave the union, aided by The National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation.

The Fascinating Gompers Story

In the 19th and early 20th century, Samuel Gompers rose up to be a major force in labor. He founded the American Federation of Labor in 1886 and led it as president until his death in 1924, with the exception of 1894. Among the many honors bestowed on him, several K-12 schools were named after him.

His San Diego namesake school opened in 1955 as a junior high and later became a secondary school.

In 2004, Gompers, struggling academically, was split into separate middle and high schools. The San Diego Unified School District (SDUSD) converted the 47th and Market streets campus into a charter middle school a year later. The high school was closed when its last students graduated in 2007.

In the fall of 2009, Gompers Charter Middle school started transitioning to Gompers Preparatory Academy (GPA) by adding one more grade each school year. By 2011, GPA enrolled the first senior class.

Unfortunately, these changes in the early 21st century were accompanied by student violence, subterfuge and bad management.

In the 1980s, SDUSD adopted a new strategy to integrate schools in poor neighborhoods with predominately brown and black students. Gompers became a science-focused magnet school. By the late 1990s, two problems arose. People living in the neighborhood were unhappy with the white kids being bused in while their children were shut out. Secondly, the business-friendly San Diego school board hired a lawyer named Alan Bersin to lead a district reform movement. Bersin wanted to use the magnet school funding for his “blueprint for success” and ended the magnet school programs at Gompers and other schools.

In her seminal book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System, Diane Ravitch shared about the San Diego school reform effort:

“What happened in San Diego from 1998 to 2005 was unprecedented in the history of school reform. The school board hired a non-educator as superintendent and gave him carte blanche to overhaul the district’s schools from top to bottom. Major foundations awarded millions to the district to support its reforms. Education researchers flocked to San Diego to study the dramatic changes. The district’s new leaders set out to demonstrate that bold measures could radically transform an entire urban district and close the achievement gap between students of different racial and ethnic groups.” (Page 47)

Ravitch pointed out that San Diego was an unusual place to pick for this kind of reform experiment because it was “widely perceived as one of the nation’s most successful urban school systems” (Page 48). There was nothing timid about Bersin’s reform efforts. Many changes based on his “blueprint for success” came, driven from top down with no discussion.

Curiously, a major component of “blueprint for success” was three hours of balanced literacy instruction in elementary school reading. Yet, today’s inheritors of Bersin’s reform ideology are all in on “science of reading,” meaning phonics, and disdain balanced literacy.

Gompers Preparatory Academy

By the spring of 2004, discipline at Gompers, a middle school and a high school on the same lot, had broken down. Bersin called Vincent Riveroll, the principal at nearby Keiller Leadership Academy, to Gompers. He was to help with lunch supervision and bring as many Keiller staff as could be spared.

Following that spring, Bersin asked Riveroll to become the principal of Gompers. Riveroll took the job and proceeded to charterize Gompers. He worked toward that goal throughout his first semester and by the second half of the 2004-2005 school year, Gompers became Gompers Middle School charter. That was also Alan Bersin’s last semester as superintendent of SDUSD.

A driving force for education research and experimentation in San Diego is the University of California San Diego (UCSD). The Center for Research on Educational Equity, Access and Teaching Excellence (CREATE) is a campus-based organization, particularly invested in closing learning gaps. In 1999, CREATE was involved in establishing a model charter called Preuss School on the UCSD campus. Similar to GPA, Preuss is a grade 6-12 school. When Gompers Middle School charter was established, then CREATE Director Hugh “Bud” Mehan became a founding board member and still serves on the board. Today, Mehan is joined on the 14-member board by current CREATE Director Mica Pollock and UCSD professor Rafael S. Hernandez.

Students at Gompers and Preuss get special admissions and scholarship benefits at UCSD.

The Preuss school students are chosen by lottery. There is a low income preference with no one in the family having graduated from college. The Gompers students come from the low income neighborhood that surrounds the school.

In the eyes of many people, Vincent Riveroll is a superhero for his work at Gompers.  A 2009 article in the San Diego Reader noted:

“Violence reigned supreme at Gompers. The school sits in a neighborhood that is home to more than 50 known gangs, and gang culture wasn’t suspended at school. If anything, it was exacerbated by kids from rival gangs being thrown together on one campus.”

“So, like Julius Caesar who crossed the Rubicon in 49 B.C. and started civil war in Rome, Vincent Riveroll, “with a group of committed teachers and staff members,” crossed 47th Street and started the war to reclaim Gompers.”

Teachers who have worked with Riveroll describe him as an inspiring leader and a visionary, possessed with charisma and passion. Parents like this man who has been named teacher of the year, educator of the year and selected as one of four principals nationwide to participate in the Public Education Leadership Program at Harvard University.

Every morning he greets the students ringing his large school bell and on Friday mornings he leads them in song and dance.

Dede Albert is a local San Diego County politician who served in both the state assembly and the state senate. She served on the Gompers Board of Directors from 2005 – 2010. Albert observed that no one other than Riveroll could have improved Gompers culture so dramatically. She claimed to have “often stood in awe” of his dedication and service.

With the strong connections Gompers has created with UCSD, nearly half the graduating seniors are accepted to the highly-selective university. Almost all students who decide to attend UCSD are given a full scholarship.

News Week credits Gompers Preparatory Academy with an incredible 94% graduation rate.

However, all is not sunshine and flowers. Inewsource, a respected non-profit publication focused on local news, ran a series of articles about Gompers in 2017.

Teacher Donny Powers said he realized within a short time that despite the public performances and constant promotion of the Gompers metamorphosis, it was all “this great kind of show, with nothing behind it and nothing deeper.”

Inewsource reported:

“Standardized tests show proficiency in math and English language arts at Gompers has gotten worse from 2011 to 2016. Forty percent of 11th-graders are below basic proficiency in English. Ninety-one percent didn’t reach the state standard for mathematics.”

The chart of SAT scores shown is from the Inewsource report. It clearly indicates that there is no way Gompers students could legitimately have more than half their students qualify for UCSD. One student got a 900 on his original SAT exam and on the second try he got 1100 out of the possible 2400 points. His application was turned down by San Diego State University but he got into UCSD with a full ride. This was not unusual.

Riveroll and his administrative staff put pressure on teachers to give good grades. Teachers were not ordered to change grades but they got the message.  A former 11th grade chemistry teacher described a review, in which Riveroll said:

“You killed these kids … These kids are not going to be able to graduate high school, they’re not going to be able to go to college, they’re going to end up in jail, because of you. How do you feel about yourself right now?”

Gompers and the Union

The Inewsource articles are credited or blamed for the teachers union coming to Gompers. Teacher Azucena Garcia was a Teach For America teacher from Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon who also grew up in the Gompers’ Chollas View neighborhood. She came to Gompers in 2013 and became a full-time staff member in 2015.

Garcia felt that the administration was embarrassed by the articles so in the summer of 2018 they worked the teachers hard, preparing for classes. Already working 20 days longer than SDUSD teachers, the complaining began with the sentiment that decisions were too much top-down. She said, “We wanted to have a greater voice at the school.”

In 2019, the NEA had established a bargaining unit at Gompers. Immediately, long-time chemistry teacher, Cristy Chiscano started working on what became a 197-page document challenging the union. However her group’s lawyer missed the 2019 filing deadline and did not file the document until January 2020.

Teachers, like Chiscano, remembered Gompers when it was ruled by gangs and feared that a union would take them back to those days. Other teachers felt that the special arrangements they had with management were threatened. Basically a divide developed between the older teachers who opposed the union and the newer teachers who wanted a union.

In the summer of 2020, Gompers laid off 26 of 75 staff members. Many union members were suspicious that these layoffs were retaliation. However, by July the school rescinded the layoff when state budget numbers for 2020-2021 became clearer.

This was not just a fight between teachers at Gompers. The anti-union publication, California Globe, reported:

“National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation staff attorneys are providing free legal aid to Gompers computer teacher Sean Bentz, who just submitted a petition to the California Public Employment Relations Board (PERB), requesting the agency hold a vote among his colleagues on whether to oust the union. The petition contains signatures of a majority of the teachers under the SDEA union’s control.” (That is the petition Cristy Chiscano put together evidently with the aid of the foundation.)

 The National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation is a long-time player in the fight against unionism. Supported by such right-wing stalwarts as the Bradley Foundation, they never miss an opportunity to undermine unions and won in this effort to stop the union at Gompers.

Some Observations

SDUSD students who don’t attend Gompers go to Lincoln High school which is just 1.2 miles away. The demographics of the two schools are almost identical except that Gompers has middle-school aged children. 86% of Lincoln’s students are socioeconomically disadvantaged, yet they never had the discipline problems, like Gompers in 2004.

In other words, the gang problem was real but over-hyped at Gompers. It became a charter school for other reasons which did not make it better than nearby Lincoln High School.

Vincent Riveroll probably is a charismatic and effective leader, but he may have been at the school too long.

The Gompers’ connections to UCSD need to end. For more than a decade, students from this charter school have been taking seats away from more qualified students. It was a great experiment but its time has passed.

Cristy Chiscano, Sean Bentz and other staff at Gompers were able to get help from some hard-core right-wing anti-union leaders to rid the campus of the union. Bentz gets to keep his special extra work benefit and Chiscano maintains the status quo.

Today, teachers at Gompers are making significantly less than SDUSD teachers, work more hours, have less representation and substandard benefits. How is this acceptable???

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Roll-Back Advanced Placement

29 Aug

By Thomas Ultican 8/29/2023

Advanced Placement (AP) in high school is an assault on good pedagogy. Teacher and author, Annie Abrams, reports, “The College Board is closing in on ownership of a national curriculum that holds not only high schools, but also universities to the company’s academic standards and its philosophy of education.” (Page 6) Pricey private high schools and colleges are abandoning AP but public schools are short changed.

John Dewey studied life and how it functions. In the first half of the twentieth century, America’s preeminent philosopher advanced pragmatism. Stanford University’s philosophy department states, “Use of Dewey’s ideas continues apace in aesthetics and art criticism, education, environmental policy, information theory, journalism, medicine, political theory, psychiatry, public administration, sociology, and of course in the philosophical areas to which Dewey contributed.”

In his book, Democracy and Education, Dewey wondered:

“Why is it, in spite of the fact that teaching by pouring in, learning by passive absorption, are universally condemned, that they are still so intrenched in practice? That education is not an affair of ‘telling’ and being told, but an active and constructive process, is a principle almost as generally violated in practice as conceded in theory.” (Page 46)

Alfred North Whitehead, a famous educator, philosopher and scientist, active in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, wrote the three-volume Principia Mathematica (1910–1913), with his former student, Bertrand Russell. This was the 23rd of the 100 best non-fiction books in the century. Whitehead founded process philosophy and in his amazing essay, “The Aims of Education,” shared:

“In training a child to activity of thought, above all things we must beware of what I will call ‘inert ideas’—that is to say, ideas that are merely received into the mind without being utilized, or tested, or thrown into fresh combinations.” (Page 1)

“And I may say in passing that no educational system is possible unless every question directly asked a pupil at any examination is either framed or modified by the actual teacher of that pupil in the subject.” (Page 5)

“But the first requisite for educational reform is the school as a unit, with its approved curriculum based on its own needs, and evolved by its own staff. If we fail to secure that, we simply fall from one formalism into another, from one dung-hill of inert ideas into another.” (Page 13)

The greatest philosophers and education theorists of the twentieth century warned, in no uncertain words, against the College Board style of cram and exam. Instead of pragmatism and process philosophy, behaviorism is implemented with standards and standardized tests, accompanied by a trophy or punishment.

Short Changed: How Advanced Placement Cheats Students

Standardization in public schools began in 1892 with the Committee of Ten. There was consternation among elite schools over student quality. Charles William Elliot, President of Harvard University and a former chemist, led the group of men—all men—establishing the first standards. This was the terrible idea which opened the road for College Board and AP programs.

Annie Abrams’s Short Changed documented the road to AP and identified James Bryant Conant, Harvard University President <another chemist>, as leading the way. He believed in standards and standardized testing. Abrams stated, “Conant’s advocacy for reform based on intellectual merit and technocracy set the stage for the Advanced Placement program” (Page 23) and shared:

“ETS would produce test with scientific precision and the other organizations would guide the programs of testing. The College Board, the American Council on Education, and the Carnegie Foundation would come together under the aegis of the Educational Testing Service. The new agency’s trustees elected Conant chairman of the board.” (Page 41 and 42)

“Conant’s position of power represented a victory by believers in the notion of quantifiable IQ … Conant was obsessed with testing and admitting students on the basis of ‘aptitude’ instead of ‘achievement’ …” (Page 42)

“For Conant, an objective metric like the SAT would ensure rational, impartial selection of the next generation of leaders based on intellectual merit, which tests would be able to identify.” (Page 43)

Beginning in 1951 a major force, the Ford Foundation, supported four different approaches to the same goal of enriching education for the superior student. In 1953, it issued a paper on the four strategies, including the Blackmer report and the Kenyon plan. (Page 72)

The Kenyon plan, led by Gordon Keith Chalmers, produced “School and College Study of Admission with Advanced Standing.” Abrams noted it as the “most immediate blueprint for the AP program.” The Blackmer Committee developed “General Education in School and College,” recommending schools and colleges reconsider their roles in making education more efficient and meaningful.  

These two plans became the Advanced Placement program. (Page 13)

(Page 14)

The founders of AP did not want a national curriculum. However, beginning in 1955, with the first AP exams, the College Board started moving toward that eventuality.

Inside Higher Education reported in 2020:

“Ten years ago, AP teachers were given a course description with a brief curriculum outline and sample exams to study. They were given a fair amount of autonomy that replicated the academic freedom of a college professor. That is no longer the case.”

Bad Pedagogy from the Uninformed

In 2012, former college professor and AP teacher, John Tierney, wrote “AP Classes are a Scam” for Atlantic magazine, stating:

“To me, the most serious count against Advanced Placement courses is that the AP curriculum leads to rigid stultification — a kind of mindless genuflection to a prescribed plan of study that squelches creativity and free inquiry. The courses cover too much material and do so too quickly and superficially. … The AP classroom is where intellectual curiosity goes to die.”

Peter Gray PhD, writing for Psychology Today, learned that a group of high school teachers could not use his teaching methods. The classes were so scripted that to prepare the students for end of course exams, they could not make time for anything else.

Gray also noted, “The College Board has been a failure as an aid to education, but a resounding success as a business.” It continuously strives to bring in money, expand its customer base and add new fees. The president makes over a million dollars per year and upper executives, $300,000 to $500,000.

Nicholas Tampio, Professor of Political Science Fordham University, noted “AP courses should only count for high school credits and no more,” and shared “The AP has ‘quietly emerged as a below-the-radar national curriculum for able high school pupils and top-notch teachers.”’

Unfortunately, big money drives AP.

“Rising Above the Gathering Storm” is another polemic.

In 2005, Lamar Alexander announced one of the day’s star witnesses for the education committee:

“Peter O’Donnell is here, who is a member of the National Academy’s Committee that produced ‘The Gathering Storm,’ and his work in Dallas is one reason for the inclusion in ‘The Gathering Storm’ report of the advanced placement recommendations.”

Another modern edu-philanthropists with no education experience nor training, O’Donnell testified:

“The Advanced Placement Incentive Program succeeds because of three fundamental concepts: the high standards of Advanced Placement, which is built on a strong curriculum, rigorous national exams, and measurable results; emphasis on excellent teacher training; and financial incentives for teachers and students. Incentives are key to the success of our program. They provide extra pay for extra work and are paid by private donors.”

His program became the National Math and Science Initiative (NMSI). It calls for teacher merit pay, a hundred-year-old idea with a hundred-year failure record. Students get cash when they pass the AP exam!

Peter Greene wrote:

“While there may be similar-ish programs in districts across the country, the big dog in the AP bribery biz is the National Math and Science Initiative. NMSI is an organization that was launched ‘to address one of this nation’s greatest economic and intellectual threats – the declining number of students who are prepared to take rigorous college courses in math and science and are equipped for careers in those fields.’ You may recognize that as a classic reformster talking point– low test scores are a threat to our national security– and in fact, the big launching funders of NMSI include Exxon, the Michael and Susan Dell foundation, and the Gates Foundation.”

Elite private schools have been dropping AP courses. In 2018, Sidwell Friends, Georgetown Day, National Cathedral and St. Albans in the District of Columbia, as well as Landon and Holton-Arms School in Bethesda, Maryland and Potomac in McLean, Virginia all ended their relations with AP. That was just in the Washington DC area after querying 150 colleges and discovering students won’t face entrance penalties.

A Personal Experience

In 2004, I moved from middle school to high school to teach a combined regular and AP physics class. My eight AP students were taking six AP classes each. Flabbergasting!

There used to be an aphorism, saying, American high school students were the laziest in the world. They played sports, partied, did very little academic work, graduated and three months later, showed up in college as the top students in the world.

Low-pressured high schools were what students of the 1950s through the 1970s needed. They were not mature enough for college. Today, suicide rates are skyrocketing and intellectual curiosity has cratered.

·  AP classes are Not needed in high school!

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NPE Throws Cold Water on CREDO Paper

23 Jul

By Thomas Ultican 7/23/2023

The Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) just released another pro-charter school study, “CREDO also acknowledges the Walton Family Foundation and The City Fund for supporting this research.” It is not a study submitted for peer review and so opaque that real scholars find the methodology and data sets difficult to understand. Carol Burris and her public school defenders at the Network for Public Education (NPE) have provided an in-depth critical review.

With the new CREDO study, Education Week’s Libby Stanford said that “charters have drastically improved, producing better reading and math scores than traditional public schools.’’  Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal declared charter schools are now “blowing away their traditional school competition.” Burris retorted with “despite the headlines, the only thing ‘blown away’ is the truth.” (Page 3)

Putting a CREDO Thumb on the Scale

CREDO uses massive data sets, unavailable to other researchers, getting minuscule differences which are statistically significant. No one can check their work. They employ a unique and highly discredited statistical approach called “virtual twins” to compare public school with charter school testing outcomes. Instead of reporting the statistical results in standard deviations, CREDO uses their “crazy pants” days of learning scheme.

NPE discovered that the “blowing away” public school results amounted to 0.011 standard deviations in math and 0.028 standard deviations in reading. The minuscule difference is “significant statistically but is meaningless from a practical standpoint” according to CREDO. In a 2009 report showing public schools with a small advantage, CREDO declared, “Differences of the magnitude described here could arise simply from the measurement error in the state achievement tests that make up the growth score, so considerable caution is needed in the use of these results.”

To give these almost non-existent differences more relevance, CREDO reports them as “days of learning” instead of standard deviation. “Days of learning” is a method unique to CREDO and generally not accepted by scholars. They claim charter school math students get 6 more “days of learning” and English students, 16 days.

CREDO Days of Learning Conversions

The above chart comes from the Technical Appendix of a previous CREDO study, which reveals that Eric Hanushek and Macke Raymond used NAEP data from 2017 to create the table. No justifications for the conversions are given. It appears to be sloppy science and headlines generated by its use are unfounded propaganda.

Bad Methodology

The CREDO method does not compare charter school performance to actual public schools. It creates mathematical simulations. Professor Andrew Maul of UC Santa-Barbara stated, “The study’s ‘virtual twin’ technique is insufficiently documented, and it remains unclear and puzzling why the researchers use this approach rather than the more accepted approach of propensity score matching.”

CREDO’s stipulation that “virtual twins” comes from “feeder schools,” favors charter schools. Management expert, Andrea Gabor, explained that CREDO used less than five student transfers to a charter school as the cutoff for a particular public school’s data. She notes the “study excludes public schools that do NOT send students to charters, thus introducing a bias against the best urban public schools, especially small public schools that may send few, if any, students to charters.”

This study is singularly focused on test results as determinate of school quality. Many charter systems, like IDEA and Success Academy, spend an inordinate amount of time preparing for standardized tests. This biases results.

Professor Mark Weber of Rutgers University adds a few more observations:

The NPE report highlights another source of bias for charter schools:

“In addition to their presence in a CREDO-identified feeder school, students are matched by gender, grade level, scores, race, and special education and English language learner status. Yet special education students are not a monolith. Research has consistently shown that charters take fewer special education students and enroll fewer students with more challenging disabilities than public schools.” (Page 9)

The combination of rejected methodologies, murky data studies and biases toward charter schools render the CREDO study useless. Minuscule advantages reported, favoring charter schools, indicate that in reality, public schools outperform charters.

The CREDO Story

In 1981, Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained economist, Eric Hanushek, wrote “Throwing Money at Schools.” Right-leaning philanthropies and institutions were drawn to his declaration:

“The conventional wisdom about public schools is that they face serious problems in terms of performance and that improving schools requires additional money. However, the available evidence suggests that there is no relationship between expenditures and the achievement of students and that such traditional remedies as reducing class sizes or hiring better trained teachers are unlikely to improve matters.”

In a 1981 Ed Week commentary referencing this paper, Hanushek points to SAT testing as the gold standard for judging school performance. He claims, “Advanced statistical techniques are employed to disentangle the influences on achievement of schools and teachers from those of other factors such as family backgrounds and student abilities.” This motivated him to push for teachers to be evaluated, using “value added measures”, that since have been thoroughly discredited.

At the time, he was teaching political science and economics at Rochester University and meeting his future wife, a significantly younger student, named Margret (Macke) Raymond. She completed her Rochester University political science PhD in 1985.

A 1999 announcement from the school said, “The Center for Research on Education Outcomes has been established at the University of Rochester’s Wallis Institute of Political Economy…” In the same posting, it revealed, “Two foundations have committed $1.25 million to fund a three-and one-half year initiative to address the current shortage of evaluation research in education policy matters.” CREDO never made the names of the two foundations public but a knowledgeable academic disclosed one of them was the Walton Family Foundation. It is documented that the Waltons give generously to CREDO.

The announcement listed Eric Hanushek first and Macke Raymond as founding Director.

CREDO moved to Stanford University’s Hoover Institute in July 2000 which made networking in conservative circles much easier.  Their 2nd year report stated that moving to the Hoover Institute brought many new contacts, including the New Schools Venture Fund, the District of Columbia Charter School Board, the Teacher Union Reform Network and others.

Public Schools are Superior to Charter Schools

Staffing in public schools is made up of mostly college graduates with certified state teaching credentials. Before the appearance of the billionaire-created Teach For America (TFA), nearly 100% of public school teachers had a year of teacher training and a bachelors degree or higher. A significant percentage of charter school teachers come from TFA with just five weeks of education training. Charters are typically not required to use certificated teachers.

The depth of experience in the public school teaching corps is larger than that of charter schools. A Fordham Institute article states:

“That being said, there is a bona fide but often unaddressed teacher shortage: experienced teachers in charter schools. In the United States, a third of charter teachers have fewer than three years of teaching experience, compared to only a fifth of public school teachers.”

“Comparative inexperience and youth in front of classrooms carries costs. More than any other school-related factor, a teacher’s efficacy matters most to student learning. And especially in the early years, nothing improves a teacher’s efficacy quite like experience.”

Stability is important for school-aged children and especially for those growing up in difficult home environments. In 2020, NPE conducted an in-depth look at charter schools since their inception. They discovered that charters were closing at extremely high rates; 18% by year 3, 25% by year 5, 40% by year 10 and 50% by year 15. In some cases, charters closed their doors mid-semester without warning; this never happens in public schools.

Management in public schools must meet state credentialing requirements. They focus on good pedagogy, safe schools and parent engagement. In charter schools, supervisors are often untrained in education and make return on investment, a key goal.

Safety in public schools is state-mandated but charter schools can ignore some rules. In California, all public schools must be earthquake-safe facilities. Charter schools may not heed this requirement.

In 2013, Christopher A. Lubienski and Sarah Theule Lubienski published The Public School Advantage – Why Public Schools Outperform Private Schools. Nothing has happened over the last ten years that invalidates this scholarly work. Charter schools are private schools with a state contract, similar to garbage collection companies, contracting with a city. They are private companies, paid with taxpayer funds.

Charters are substandard education organizations that only survive because of marketing.

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GOP Activist Attacks Teachers’ Contract

16 Jul

By Thomas Ultican 7/16/2023

On June 12 2023, San Diego Unified School District (SDUSD) ratified a new 3-year contract with the teachers and paraeducators unions (San Diego Educators Association (SDEA) – California School Employees Association Paraeducators Chapter 759). Before the month ended, Todd Maddison of the conservative Parents Association placed a scathing indictment of the new contract in the Voice of San Diego. This relentless GOP led disparagement of teachers and public schools has become the standard operating procedure throughout America.

It is not obvious what Maddison wants. The headline for his opinion piece says “San Diego Unified Is Putting Adults First, Not Students.” It is incongruent with the new contract. He apparently thinks teachers are overpaid and a 15% pay raise is a theft of public money.

Contract Details

SDEA had been negotiating this 3-year deal with the district for more than a year. The last contract expired June 30, 2022. They demanded an 18% pay raise and settled for 15%.

Several other issues were also negotiated.

SDEA Chart Negotiated Pay Raise

The contract was ratified on June 12th by a 98% positive vote from SDEA members. Board Trustee Richard Barrera said, “With the agreement, we’re on our way to being able to tell young people you can pursue a career as an educator and still be able to raise a family in a place like San Diego at the same time.” He said that first-year teachers can make $64,000 a year, those in the middle of their careers $105,000 and veterans, up to $124,000.

Other issues agreed to included:

  1. Community schools require a part-time community school coach at each campus
  2. Elementary schools, with more than 250 students, get a counselor three days a week, those with more than 375 students get one four days a week and schools with more than 500 students get a full-time counselor
  3. Full-time nurses remain in every comprehensive high school
  4. Middle and high school physical education classes capped at 50 students, down from 60
  5. Middle and high schools add a part-time restorative-justice position
  6. Transitional kindergarten classes are capped at 24 students and first grade through third-grade capped at 29 – all were previously capped at 35
  7. Every transitional kindergarten classroom will have an early-childhood teacher and a teacher with multiple-subject credentials
  8. Paid maternity leave doubled to six weeks

This negotiation ended with a substantial pay raise for teachers. Students got smaller classes throughout the K-12 system and improved staffing ratios in kindergarten. Both administration and teacher negotiators actually paid considerable attention to improving the plight of students.

Yet, Maddison claimed, “San Diego Unified Is Putting Adults First, Not Students,”

More Maddison Assertions…

He opened by saying:

“Anyone who follows K-12 education will tell you we’re facing a crisis. The latest National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) numbers expose declines in academic performance to unprecedented levels …”

I follow K-12 education closely and do not see a crisis because the 2022 test scores wiggled down a few points. We just came through a pandemic and test preparation was not a priority. Give the children a chance to recover from the recent trauma and they will be fine unless faux educators convince us to do crazy things like high intensity tutoring, double math and mandatory summer school.

Maddison, the data analyst for Transparent California said:

“From SDUSD’s own payroll records, obtained using a legal public records request and posted for anyone to see on the Transparent California website, data show in 2022 the median total pay of a full time certificated employee was $102,024. For comparison, the latest U.S. Census Bureau data shows private workers with equivalent education in San Diego County made $87,784.”

His teacher salary data seems reasonable but professionals with “equivalent education” and time on the job are generally paid more than teachers.

San Diego is very expensive. Multiple rent tracking web sites report that the average two-bedroom apartment rents for over $3,200 a month. To attract and retain quality educators, a living wage is required to support more than bare survival.

Maddison writes:

“Last year, teachers had 27.8 percent of their pay contributed to their retirement. That’s a whopping 17.6 percent more than private workers, where total retirement contributions typically average 10.2 percent.”

This is disingenuous.

California teachers are not part of the Social Security system. They and their employers pay into the California teachers’ retirement system and have to contribute more to match the amount non-teachers accumulate.

He concludes his editorial claiming that SDUSD is financially unsound and quotes from the County Board of Education July 2022 response to the district’s budget proposal: “[T]he district will need to make budget reductions of approximately $129 million by fiscal year 2024-25 and an additional $53 million in 2025-26 in order to remain fiscally solvent and meet the required minimum reserve.”

On the same issue, he ignores the County’s September 2022 comment:  

“The Adopted Budget shows the district will be unable to meet its multi-year financial commitments in subsequent fiscal years without additional budget solutions; however, the district’s adopted budget was developed prior to adoption of the 2022-23 state budget. Actual state budget data should be incorporated into the district operating budget and multi-year projection during the First Interim Report process. Any necessary budget reductions should be detailed and approved by the board along with submission of the First Interim Report.”

The County was not concerned with the district’s solvency. They merely stated that under the current revenue stream, the budget needed to be adjusted for future requirements. As of September 2022, without knowing how much money was coming from the state, once enrollment was finalized and state contribution known, the district was directed to make any necessary budget adjustments and report.

The Parent Association

Todd Maddison’s biography says, “Todd is also a founding member of the Parent Association and is the San Diego County Chair of the California School Choice Foundation.”

Parent Association apparently grew out of the loud, right-leaning, pandemic protest movement. They were responding to President Trump and Education Secretary DeVos who were calling for schools to be opened in person. Maddison immediately joined in the call. In 2020, a July 12th Union Tribune article on the protest quoted him extensively.

It is true that children are less susceptible to COVID-19 infections but not immune. People working in schools, especially teachers, would be at risk, as would the children’s adult family members. On July 12 2020, with the first vaccines more than six months away, San Diego County reported 508 new infections with 2 more deaths. By November, the number of new cases was more than 1,000 per day.

On April 21 2021, the IRS granted the Parent Association tax exempt status as a charity under the 501-c3 rule (EIN 87-1693090), meaning donations are tax deductible. In July, their sister organization, the Parent Advocacy Center, was granted 501-c4 status (EIN 87-1487817). This means they don’t pay taxes but because they are a political action group, donations to them are not tax deductible.

Both organizations are registered in San Francisco, care of the James Sutton law firm, the campaign lawyers. The executive director of the Parent Association is Ginny Merrifield, a very connected operator in San Diego Republican circles and trustee of the E3 Civic High. She was also co-founder and trustee of the private and pricey Pacific Ridge School in Carlsbad, California and boardmember of governors for the $750 million San Diego Foundation. Her husband, Marshal, ran for San Diego city council as a Republican but was not elected.

When billionaire, Arthur Rock, put up hundreds of thousands to remove the San Francisco school board, Sutton and hedge fund founder Patrick Wolff of Grandmaster Capital, took the lead. Wolff founded Grandmaster Capital with seed funding from his billionaire friend, Peter Thiel. According to the hedge fund journal, they were initially brought together by a common interest in chess.

As county chair of the California School Choice foundation, Maddison campaigns for Education Savings Accounts, another name for vouchers. He writes about not being able to make the changes that failing public schools need and realized “The best way to give parents real power over school districts is to have the ability to take their money somewhere else.”

Are you sure that is not taxpayer money?

Observation

Research paper after research paper have over the last more than a decade consistently found terrible results from voucher schools. Last year, Professor Joshua Cohen wrote in the Hechinger Report, “After two decades of studying voucher programs, I’m now firmly opposed to them.”

Todd Madison and the wealthy right want to privatize public education and undermine teacher professionalism.

That is a mistake.

Public schools have been under assault by a well-funded group of oligarchs for more than 40 years. We have the best school system in the world. They are not now nor ever have been “failing.”

It is the height of foolishness to diminish this national treasure, the bedrock of American democracy. 

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Chartered to Indoctrinate

3 Jul

By Thomas Ultican 7/3/2023

Carol Burris and team at Network for Public Education (NPE) just published, “A Sharp Turn Right” (STR). NPE President Diane Ravitch noted there are several problems associated with charter schools’ profiteering, high closure rates, no accountability…

“This new report, A Sharp Turn Right, exposes yet one more problem — the creation of a new breed of charter schools that are imbued with the ideas of right-wing Christian nationalism. These charter schools have become weapons of the Right as they seek to destroy democratically governed public schools while turning back the clock of education and social progress by a century.” (STR Pages 3 and 4)

STR focuses on two types of charter schools. One characterizes themselves as “classical academies” and the other touts “back to basics,” without noting they also employ the same “classical” curriculum. Both provide right-wing clues on their web-sites, alerting parents of alignment with Christian nationalism. Marketing is often red, white and blue, with pictures of the American founding fathers, and discussions on patriotism and virtue. Some schools include direct references to religion like Advantage Academy’s claim of educating students in a “faith-friendly environment.”

STR further clarifies,

“These schools are distinguished by a classical “virtuous” curriculum combined with hyper-patriotism for Christian nationalist appeal. They are exemplified by charters that adopt The Hillsdale College 1776 Curriculum…” (STR Page 7)

Using keyword searches, NPE identified 273 active charter schools fitting this description and noted they surely missed more. Nearly 30% of them were for-profit; about double the rate for the charter sector in general. Almost 50% of them have opened since Donald Trump was inaugurated president in 2017. (STR Page 7)

Apparently the school founders want to turn the clock back to the nineteenth century. STR states,

“Founders of classical charters view the rejection of modern instructional practices as a selling point. Proponents of classical education vilify the progressive movement, accusing John Dewey and his followers of removing Christian ideals and redesigning schools to achieve social goals.” (STR Page 9)

It identifies the largest charter school systems indoctrinating students with Christian nationalist ideology and discloses where they are operating. Discussing, in some depth, Hillsdale College with its Barney charter schools and the large number of new charter affiliates, the report asserts:

“What they all have in common is teaching Hillsdale’s prescriptive 1776 curriculum, which disparages the New Deal and affirmative action while downplaying the effects of slavery. Climate change is not mentioned in the science curriculum; sixth-grade studies include a single reference to global warming.” (STR Page 15)

The reality is today’s taxpayers are forced to pay for schools teaching a form of Christianity associated with white superiority; politically indoctrinating students with specific rightist orthodoxy. What happened to the principal of separation of church and state? This charter schools for indoctrination movement must be stopped before American democracy is sundered.

Church and State

James Madison proposed the Bill of Rights to codify protections not addressed in the constitution. In the first article, four freedoms are guaranteed – freedom of speech, freedom the press, freedom of peaceable assembly and freedom of religion.

In an 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptist association of Connecticut, Thomas Jefferson explained,

“Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.” (Emphasis added)

Katherine Stewart’s deeply researched book, The Good News Club, shares that tensions between Protestants and Catholics became fever-pitched in the 19th century. A student in Boston, named Thomas Whall, refused to recite the Protestant version of the Ten Commandments and was beaten for thirty minutes. In 1869, the Cincinnati Bible War over classroom Bible use raged in the streets. (Good News Pages 72 and 73)

Stress over religion in school mounted to the point that President Ulysses S. Grant in an 1876 speech counseled,

“Leave the matter of religion to the family altar, the church, and the private school, supported entirely by private contributions. Keep the church and state forever separate.” (Good News Pages 73-74)

Clarification of the Establishment Clause came in a 1947 Supreme Court decision over a New Jersey school board providing transportation costs for schools run by the Catholic Diocese. In Everson v. Board of Education, Justice Hugo Black stated in his majority opinion:

“The ‘establishment of religion’ clause of the First Amendment means at least this: Neither a state nor the Federal Government can set up a church. Neither can pass laws which aid one religion, aid all religions or prefer one religion over another. Neither can force nor influence a person to go to or remain away from church against his will or force him to profess a belief or disbelief in any religion. No person can be punished for entertaining of professing religious beliefs or disbeliefs, for church attendance or non-attendance. No tax in any amount, large or small, can be levied to support any religious activities or institutions, whatever they may be called or whatever form they may adopt to teach or practice religion.” (Emphasis added)

The 1962 Supreme Court decision in Engle v. Vitale ended prayer in school. This was not a particularly close call, with only Justice Potter in descent. Justice Black, writing for the majority, stated:

“We think that, by using its public school system to encourage recitation of the Regents’ prayer, the State of New York has adopted a practice wholly inconsistent with the Establishment Clause. There can, of course, be no doubt that New York’s program of daily classroom invocation of God’s blessings as prescribed in the Regents’ prayer is a religious activity.”

By the time Ronald Reagan was elected the 40th president of the United States, the “separation of church and state” had been firmly established.

America’s Riven Rights

Reagan’s nomination of the proclaimed originalist, Anthony Scalia, to the Supreme Court began the attack on the Establishment Clause. According to Jeffrey Toobin, author of The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court, Scalia maintained that the Constitution not only permits entanglement between church and state, but encourages it. (Good News Page 85) 

Katherine Stewart observed,

“According to Scalia, the secularism of today’s liberals is really just another religion – and an unattractive one at that, suitable for the weak of mind and character. It is the creed of relativism, which says that no belief is better than any other, and no value is better than any other. This philosophy of religion is the genuinely immovable part of Scalia’s judicial philosophy in cases involving religion, and it has proven to be the real source of his disdain for the Establishment Clause.” (Good News Page 86)

Scalia was a lonely voice on the court until 1991 when President Bush appointed Clarence Thomas.

The first big break for the anti-establishment forces came in the case of the LAX Board of Airport Commissioners v. Jews for Jesus. In the case, Jay Sekulow defended the constitutional right to stand in an Airport and hand out tracks about Jesus. The case was not controversial. Sekulow achieved a unanimous victory but more importantly, the new legal concept of speech from a religious viewpoint being protected was created.

Stewart writes, “Henceforth, Sekulow would appear repeatedly before the Supreme Court, playing a song with just one note: religious activity is really just speech from a religious viewpoint; therefore, any attempt to exclude religious activity is an infringement of the freedom of speech.” (Good News Page 90)

When Center Moriches Union School District turned down James Dobson’s request to use their facilities for a religious film series based on a no religious groups policy, Dobson sued. Sekulow claimed they were engaging in speech from a religious viewpoint and in 1991, the court ruled for Dobson, based on freedom of speech.

The Rosenberger v. University of Virginia case was decided in 1995, favoring Rosenberger with a split 5-4 decision. University student Rosenberger had asked for several thousand dollars from a student activity fund to subsidize the cost of “Wide Awake”, a Christian magazine. The court ruled that denial of funding based on the religious message amounted to viewpoint discrimination. Justice Souter noted that the University of Virginia was directly subsidizing religion by paying for a magazine that exhorts its readers to convert to Christianity.

In 1996, the Child Evangelism Fellowship applied to establish a Good News Club at the K-12 Milford Central School. The New York school had a policy of restricting the use of its property by organizations and individuals for religious purposes. In 2001, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in favor of the plaintiffs in Good News Club v. Milford Central School.

Stewart reports, “In his majority opinion, Justice Thomas laid out a philosophy that essentially destroyed the postwar consensus on the separation of church and state.” Scalia conquered with Thomas’s reasoning and said religion is such a complicated thing that the court should refrain from even attempting to define it. (Good News Page 95)

With their newfound allegiance, to the Free Speech clause the court majority created a dubious attack on the Establishment Clause. In Widmar v. Vincent, Justice Byron White observed:

“A large part of respondents’ argument … is founded on the proposition that, because religious worship uses speech, it is protected by the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment. Not only is it protected, they argue, but religious worship qua speech is not different from any other variety of protected speech as a matter of constitutional principle. I believe that this proposition is plainly wrong. Were it right, the Religion Clauses would be emptied of any independent meaning in circumstances in which religious practice took the form of speech.”

In this light, Stewart asks the obvious question, “Was it the intention of the country’s founders to include redundant or meaningless clauses in the Constitution?”

Conclusion

Time to wake up and smell the coffee; the modern Supreme Court is corrupt and needs reformation. Instead of deciding issues based on law and precedence, they create theories designed to support a political philosophy rather than showing fidelity to the constitution. This reflects a complete degradation of jurisprudence. The poorly formed decisions regularly undermine the rights and protections the founders bestowed on citizens; all while some Justices appear to be ethically compromised.

For the first time in American history, billions of taxpayer dollars are flowing to private religious schools.  The STR report shines a light on charter schools with religious agendas. Even more disturbing, these new taxpayer funded privatized schools are literally indoctrination centers, teaching a depraved political ideology.

This cannot stand!

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“The Right to Read” is Horse Manure

27 May

By Thomas Ultican 5/27/2023

The new 80-minute video “The Right to Read” was created in the spirit of “Waiting for Superman.” It uses false data interpretations to make phony claims about a non-existent reading crisis. Oakland’s NAACP 2nd Vice President Kareem Weaver narrates the film. Weaver is a full throated advocate for the Science of Reading (SoR) and has many connections with oligarch financed education agendas. The video which released February 11, 2023 was made by Jenny Mackenzie and produced by LeVar (Kunta Kinte) Burton.

Since 2007, Jenny Mackenzie has been the executive director of Jenny Mackenzie Films in Salt Lake City. Neither Mackenzie nor Burton has experience or training as educators. However, Burton did star on the PBS series “Reading Rainbow.” He worked on the show as an actor not a teacher.

One of the first media interviews about “The Right to Read” appeared on KTVX channel 4 in Salt Lake City. Ben Heuston from the Waterford Institute answered questions about the new film and the supposed “reading crisis” in American public schools. Heuston who has a PhD in psychology from Brigham Young University claimed that two-thirds of primary grade students in America read below grade level. That is a lie. He is conflating proficiency in reading on the National Assessment of Education Performance (NAEP) with grade level and should know better.

Diane Ravitch who served for seven years on the National Assessment Governing Board explained NAEP rating levels,

“Proficient is akin to a solid A. In reading, the proportion who were proficient in fourth grade reading rose from 29% in 1992 to 34% in 2011.”

“Basic is akin to a B or C level performance. Good but not good enough.”

“And below basic is where we really need to worry.”

Peggy Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, which administers NAEP, has stated that the basic level is generally viewed as grade-level achievement.

“The Right to Read” was filmed in Oakland, California with some of it done in first-grade teacher Sabrina Causey’s classroom at Markham Elementary School. There have been many public showings scheduled around the country but strangely none in Oakland. Causey claims she was using a bad Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) reading curriculum until Kareem Weaver brought her a program based on the SoR. She adopted it without OUSD approval. The film claims “The results were astounding.”

The Chart was Clipped from “The Right to Read” Trailer

Selling SoR

LeVar Burton and Jenny Mackenzie made media rounds to promote “The Right to Read.” They were booked on major shows like CBS’s “Good Morning America” and on cable news.  US News conducted an interview sharing that Burton and Mackenzie spoke “about the film and what they are calling ‘the literacy crisis’ within the United States.”

In the interview, Mackenzie claimed, “We need to have policy that supports scientifically proven evidence-based curricula.” While Burton asserted,

“The balanced approach doesn’t work. Whole language doesn’t work.”

“We also have a sort of an old boys’ network that has been established, and there are companies that make millions of dollars a year publishing and selling to schools curricula that do not work.”

There are two obvious observations here. Number one is that neither Mackenzie nor Burton have any professional expertise in reading pedagogy. Number two, it is their team that is setting the stage for businesses to make “millions of dollars a year” selling phonics centric reading curricula.

The chart in the graphic above is the same lie Ben Heuston from the Waterford Institute told on KTVX. Heuston’s father Dustin founded the Waterford Institute in 1976 to develop computer based education. He was using the world’s first commercial computer with the Motorola 68000 chip. Today, the institute is selling the digitally based Waterford Upstart reading program.

Heuston and colleagues are making great money working at the nonprofit. The twenty-two employees listed in the 2021 form 990 tax document are averaging a yearly income of $225,571 (TIN: 51-0202349). Those are some big salaries out in Utah. Maybe that explains the lying to support SoR.

Ben has stepped down as Waterford CEO and Andy Meyer has assumed the role. Waterford reports that Andy’s background includes several leadership positions in sales and marketing before becoming COO for Pearson’s digital learning business unit and later Senior VP of Digital Product Development for Pearson’s U.S. K-12 curriculum division. More recently, Andy served as CEO at Scientific Learning and as CSO at Renaissance.

Kareem Weaver is a shameless promoter of anything oligarch funded. He is a Fellow at the Pahara Institute which was organized to train new privatization friendly education leaders. His bio there shares that he was a managing partner at the NewSchools Venture Fund and also executive director for the western region of New Leaders that received big financing from Walton, Broad, NewSchool Venture Fund and Gates. Weaver is also a member of the National Council on Teachers Quality.

Just this week Weaver was a featured presenter for a Reading Week edWebinar held by Lexia, a Cambium Learning Group company. They claim, “K12 educators and administrators will now have another opportunity to learn about aligning teaching practices with scientifically-researched methods.” Lexia is looking to cash in on SoR and Weaver is down in the muck slopping with them.

It is hard to imagine anyone being more sold out than Kareem Weaver.

Professionals Shake Their Heads in Frustration

Misinterpreting the data shown above is the basis for the specious crisis in reading claims. It is known that students develop at different rates and in the lower grades the differences can be dramatic. That explains some of the low scoring. All but a very small percentage of these fourth grader will be reading adequately when they get to high school.

America’s leading authorities on teaching reading are frustrated. Their voices are being drowned out by forces who want to monetize reading education and privatize it.

Peter Farruggio is a professor of bilingual education from the San Francisco Bay area and an organizer of anti-KLAN actions throughout California. Although his specialty was not teaching reading his experience with bilingual education and federal law caused him to work in the field. In our conversation, he explained to me how some of the data supporting high dose phonics instruction came about.

Farruggio observed that often when there were groups of students with reading disabilities, graduate students would take the opportunity to conduct a study. The treatment would be for the grad students to give intense phonics lessons. The children would learn to decode words including nonsense words from lists. Then they would be given a reading test on the lists. The students would successfully decode the words and the results would be pronounced successful but the children still could not read a sentence with comprehension.

Worst of all, Professor Farruggio fears this kind of teaching is undermining the ability to think.

Observations like this are wide spread among education professionals. This week Valerie Strauss put a piece in her Answer Sheet blog at the Washington Post written by three highly credentialed scholars dismayed by the oligarch financed nationwide push for SoR.

David Reinking, Professor of Education, Peter Smagorinsky, Professor of Language and Literacy Education, and David Yaden, Professor of Language Reading and Culture, state,

“As researchers and teacher educators, we, like many of our colleagues, shake our heads in resigned frustration. We believe phonics plays an important role in teaching children to read. But, we see no justifiable support for its overwhelming dominance within the current narrative, nor reason to regard phonics as a panacea for improving reading achievement.”

“Specifically, we do not see convincing evidence for a reading crisis, and certainly none that points to phonics as the single cause or a solution.”

“But crisis or not, is there evidence that more phonics instruction is the elixir guaranteed to induce higher reading achievement? The answer isn’t just no. There are decades of empirical evidence that it hasn’t and won’t.”

They point out that even the National Reading Panel report that all of this SoR malarkey is supposedly based on states, “Phonics should not become the dominant component in a reading program, neither in the amount of time devoted to it nor in the significance attached.”

This understanding is not new. The Reading First program during the George Bush years spent big dollars to study the use of intense phonics. Teachers were trained to deliver “scientific” reading instruction that included a numbing 1.5 to 3 hours of phonics instruction each day. The lead sentence in a 2008 Washington Post article stated, “Students enrolled in a $6 billion federal reading program that is at the heart of the No Child Left Behind law are not reading any better than those who don’t participate, according to a U.S. government report.”

Conclusion

Big money from billionaires is funding an effort to take control of primary education by selling the Science of Reading as a silver bullet. In the early 2000’s, schools were blamed for not fixing failing communities. The “proof” offered was students living in poverty stricken communities did not do well on standardized testing.

It put schools in a no win situation because the only strong correlation in standardized testing is with family income. Obviously, the broken communities were the problem not their schools. This subterfuge led to claims that reforming “failing schools” was the civil rights agenda of our time. Now “The Right to Read” is playing that same phony civil rights card. It is a contemptuous lie used to profit off the backs of the poor and people of color.

There is no reading crisis and the lionization of SoR is a push toward bad pedagogy. It is a sinister ploy that will harm each student and not just those living in poverty. There is currently a concerted effort to legislate SoR use in all primary classrooms which has either passed or is proposed in every state capital.

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The Teachers

15 May

By Thomas Ultican 5/15/2023

Alexandra Robbins’ new book is an authentic look into the life, working environment, emotional struggles and triumphs of America’s K-12 teachers. The book opens up many unnecessary issues that America’s professional educators face as they try to give their best in the classroom. It also reminded me of my own teaching journey with its unjust treatments and eventual success.

The Book can be Purchased Here

It is Not Burnout

Teaching is a much higher stress job than it needs to be because of factors outside of the classroom. Robbins reports on a special education teacher named Prisha being left by herself in classes of 28 to 35 special education students when her co-teacher had to take a two month medical leave. The school’s staff was almost all first or second year teachers like Prisha who didn’t know what to do. The principal’s solution was to call all the special ed teachers “fucking morons” and start monitoring Prisha’s grade book. No actual support for a new teacher in a no win situation. (Teachers 217)

Robbins cites a gallop pole claiming that teachers tied with nurses for the highest rate of daily stress on the job among all occupations. She shares a study asserting, “It is confirmed that teachers have the highest burnout levels as compared to other professionals in social services.” (Teachers 218)

It needs to be noted that teaching only became high stress after the 1983 Department of Education report “A Nation at Risk.” That fraudulent polemic misused SAT data to cook the books and claim American public schools were failing. Later, Anya Kamenetz reported for NPR, “A 1990 report produced by the Energy Department’s Sandia National Laboratories broke down the flaws in the “A Nation at Risk” analysis but got little attention.”

“A Nation at Risk” was followed by a dramatic expansion of teacher responsibilities but no accompanying structural support. The report inspired a push for state-mandated testing. This led to a major demoralization of teachers when in 2002 No Child Left Behind (NCLB) became federal law. Robbins writes,

“NCLB, which mandated rigorous standardized testing and penalized schools and teachers based on students’ scores, remains ‘the worst federal education legislation ever passed by Congress. It was punitive, harsh, stupid, ignorant about pedagogy and motivation, and ultimately a dismal failure,’ as New York University research professor of education Diane Ravitch, a former assistant secretary of education and leading educational expert, has written.” (Teachers 224)

I remember in about 2007 a principal saying to me that school used to be fun; hopefully we’ll get back to that someday. Today, there is a large problem with teachers quitting the profession that is being attributed to burnout but it is more accurate to call it teacher frustration; a frustration with not being able to provide the kind of good pedagogy that their students and communities deserve.

Robbins points to a need for school leadership to step up to the plate. She writes,

“The responsibility for resolving teacher demoralization, or what the public calls burnout, should lie with districts and administrators. Telling teachers to relax doesn’t cut it. … Instead of halfheartedly attempting to mitigate the effects on teachers, school leaders should fix the underlying causes – their school climate, staffing numbers, and resources – not just to prevent employee demoralization, but because that’s how a proper workplace should operate.” (Teachers 228)

A Personal Experience with Education Reform

In Diane Ravich’s seminal book The Death and Life of the Great American School System, she describes how my home town of San Diego, California was chosen as an education reform test site. Ravitch noted that it was an unusual choice for where to launch a reform movement because San Diego was viewed as having “one of the nation’s most successful urban school systems.” (Page 50) In 1998, the former US Attorney for the southern district of California, Alan Bersin, was hired to be the school district superintendent and lead the reform experiment. The local education community was against hiring an uncertified non-educator to lead the district but the San Diego business community which held sway over the school board wanted it.

I started education graduate school at the University of California San Diego in 2001 and found that a few of my instructors were consulting on the district’s education reforms. Some of the changes being introduced were quite good but the authoritarian implementation alienated most of the district’s teachers who had no input into what was happening.

One major change affected me. It was mandated that all ninth graders take the new conceptual physics class. That caused the district a severe shortage of certified physics teachers. I had just completed my masters in education with a physics certificate. It was not long before I got an offer to be a probationary teacher via a telephone interview.

Turned out the Bell Jr. High principal was not being totally up front with me. Going to the district office to sign my contract, I was told the probationary positions were filled and was offered a temp contract. I discovered that teachers in California normally needed more than two years to become full time with job protections. Temp contracts do not count as tenure track teaching time.

The principal at Bell literally had a hole in her head having recently gone through brain surgery to remove a tumor. Two retired administers were convinced by the district to come back and serve as assistant principals, provide support during the convalescence and take over if medical issues arose. One of them became my evaluator.

In my first written evaluation, the AP wrote that discipline was a problem and that I never checked for student understanding. In a written response, I wrote that during the lab period she observed every team coming to me multiple times to have their lab progress reviewed and checked off before moving on to the next phase. I questioned her observation of not checking for student understanding? While my class may be a little free, all 36-students successfully completed and submitted their lab reports so class discipline was not leading to dysfunction. I should have added that the classes were too large for safe lab science activities.

One time the evaluator came in while I had the class working on a poster project. A student that had not had much success in school rushed up to her and proudly showed off his poster. She later told me that I should have written him a referral right then for leaving his group without permission. I was thinking what is wrong with a child engaged in learning? Why punish his new pride?

At Bell we had 13 sections of regular physics plus I taught the only section of honors physics. My classes tested amazingly well. The regular physics classes ranked 1, 2, 4 and 6 in comparison to all 13 sections at Bell. The honors physics class was the number 2 scoring class in the entire district. I was stunned at the end of the year when my evaluator said she could not recommend me for rehire because of “not moving classes toward achieving standards” and the lack of classroom disciple. The quoted line meant that I could not even apply for a substitute teaching position in San Diego Unified School District.

I talked to several district administrators who commiserated with me and even admitted how strange this looked but none of them felt they could do anything. The Bersin administration had set up an arbitrary quota system for teachers being fired and the percentage of new hires retained. It turns out a determined administrator can fire tenured teachers. This was aimed at keeping everyone following orders and not complaining. At Bell, I was the 50 year old new hire who was sacrificed to protect the younger teachers.

It is remarkable that the evaluation from my next school in another district noted discipline as one of my classroom strengths.

The Teachers is a Great Read

Alexandra Robbins uses the experience of three teachers during the 2021/22 school year as the backbone for her book. In the August chapter, she introduces Rebecca, Penny and Miguel. Month by month, Robbins reveals the sometimes horrific and sometimes triumphant experiences of these three amazing teachers. Along the way she shares insights, research and some eye-popping experience from other teachers. It is the most revealing and authentic view of teaching I have ever read.

I will end with this quote from page 279 which shows in gory detail why teacher opinions should be sought out and adhered to.

“Florida teachers compiled a mountain of evidence that public school was not the place for one particular student who had numerous mental health issues, was obsessed with guns, and was suspended 18 times in one school year. But it took five months to get him transferred to a special middle school – and when he was determined to attend public high school, Florida’s disability law allowed him to. The student was Nikola Cruz, the school Marjory Stoneman Douglas. In 2018, Cruz massacred 14 students and three staff members in one of the deadliest school shootings in history.”

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