“Educational Pluralism” Another Name for Privatization

5 Mar

By Thomas Ultican 3/5/2025

Johns Hopkins University and The 74 teamed up one more time to satisfy their billionaire donors and promote privatizing public education. Ashley Berner, Director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy, is featured in a The 74 interview entitled “‘We’re the Outliers’: Ashley Rogers Berner on Public Funding for Private Schools.” She notes that many other countries openly pay for religious schools and calls for America to follow their lead.

In this interview, Berner tells many half-truths dripping with deception. She states:

“There’s dogmatism on both the left and the right. On the left, it’s tied into the unions and their claim to sole authority — that only the district schools, which they run, are legitimate. And on the right, you have the argument that parent autonomy is the desired end goal, that it’s sufficient to determine school quality and the government has no legitimate role.”

I do not agree that on the right “parent autonomy is the desired end goal.” Their goal is ending public education. And Berner’s claim that unions have “sole authority” over education policy or the district schools she says they run is farcical. Teachers unions certainly have an influence but so does the business community and the voting public of which they are members.

She is implying that it is mainly teachers unions that are opposed to privatizing public education. This dismisses the rest of us who believe that public schools are the bedrock that created the world’s greatest, freest and most powerful nation. It is this school system that people like Ashley Berner, Johns Hopkins University and the billionaires funding The 74 are out to end.

Berner’s Argument

In 2017, Berner published her book “Pluralism and American Public Education: No One Way to School.” In it she describes how many European and Asian countries pay for various types of schools. They fund private schools, religious schools and district schools. Because they fund all types of schools, there are no warring sides. She is spreading this argument widely in conservative circles.

Her essay at the Manhattan Institute starts:

“For more than a century, public education in the U.S. has been defined as schools that are funded, regulated, and exclusively delivered by government. The past 25 years have brought some diversified forms of delivery through charter schools and various private-school scholarship mechanisms. Nevertheless, most discussions and debates over school reforms take place within the existing paradigm: only district schools are considered truly public, and all alternative models (whether charters, tax credits, or vouchers), must justify themselves on the basis of superior test scores.”

This 2019 article continues in the same misleading vain. Charter schools are the privatized alternative schools that were originally an experiment. The charters that were given to these schools by states had some performance demands attached. The reality is that these demands were never onerous and in most cases not equivalent to the demands put on district schools. Voucher schools have no demands attached and for two decades the results posted by voucher schools have been horrible.

At the Manhattan Institute, researchers know that even oblique shots at government schools plays real well and Berner does not miss the opportunity. In the interview she stated, “Meanwhile, many critics of the ubiquitous district public school also seek independence from state control and accountability, even if it comes with funding attached.”

In her book, she applies the noun pluralism to education. While for more than a century Americans have been paying for public schools, that is not good enough for Berner. She is calling for school choice paid for by taxpayers. Quite unlike former President Grant’s position:

 “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)

At the Fordham Institute, they published Berner’s article “3 ways to increase choice and decrease polarization in U.S. schools.” In it she asserted:

“Third, build the infrastructure to support both choice and quality. A great example is Indianapolis’s The Mind Trust, a nonprofit that, since 2006, has recruited teachers into the state, launched four dozen charter schools and partnered with the city’s public school district to design schools that by design meet their communities’ specific needs.

In 2018, I wrote a piece about The Mind Trust. My conclusion stated:

“Lubienski and Lubienski conducted a large scale research of education data and came to the surprising conclusion that public schools outperform privatized schools. They also saw that most of the “studies” that claimed otherwise were paid for by advocates and not peer reviewed. The claims of success by The Mind Trust seem to fit this description like print to wood block.”

It should be noted; the Mind Trust bringing in hundreds of Teach for America teaching candidates with 5 weeks of training and a two year commitment harmed Indianapolis’s teaching corp.

Berner Ignores Why America has a Separation between Church and State

There is a document in the library of Congress called “Religion and the Founding of the American Republic.” The first line of the document states, “Many of the British North American colonies that eventually formed the United States of America were settled in the seventeenth century by men and women, who, in the face of European persecution, refused to compromise passionately held religious convictions and fled Europe.”

Eighteenth century Americans knew of the suffering brought by the Anglican and Catholic churches. They saw theocracies as the road to terror and wanted strict boundaries separating the secular government and religious life.

In The 74’s interview, Burner speaks about finding an elementary school for her children when she was studying at Oxford:

“The Anglican Church was the top local provider of elementary education, but there was a state-funded Jewish school down the street. There was a Montessori school, all kinds of secular schools.”

This does not seem like enough of a justification for the United States to abandon its constitution and tear up the world’s foremost K-12 education system. But strangely enough, that is exactly what the extreme right has been angling to achieve. This is not conservatism. This is radical anti-Americanism.

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Teach Truth

23 Feb

By Thomas Ultican 2/23/2021

In “Teach Truth: The Struggle for Antiracist Education,” Author Jesse Hagopian takes his readers inside the struggle and shares Black culture. At the 2018 Indianapolis Network for Public Education conference, Journey for Justice Chairman, Jitu Brown, introduced Jesse as “a freedom fighter who happens to be a teacher.” What I did not understand then is that he also happens to be man who can write.  This book is exceptional.

Jesse defines two concepts that he uses throughout the book: uncritical race theory and truthcrime law.

He states, “Uncritical race theory denies that racism exists at all, or maintains that racism primarily victimizes white people, or rejects any systemic or institutional analysis in favor of an inter personal explanation that understands racism as only sporadic and merely the product of individual bias.” (Page 7)

He explains:

“A truthcrime is any act of honest pedagogy in a jurisdiction where truthful teaching has been outlawed. Truthcrime is enforced disremembering. A truthcrime law, then, is one that makes lying to children obligatory and effectively renders honest educators as truthcriminals.” (Page 16)

Interesting Take on CRT

A goofball white guy from Seattle, Washington became famous by attacking critical race theory (CRT) in a completely dishonest way. Unfortunately, right-wing billionaire money trumpeted his assertions. At a time when the vast majority of America’s teachers had never heard of CRT, he claimed that public schools were indoctrinating students with CRT. For a short period of time, CRT became the racist rights number one anti-public schools slogan and a Republican campaign tool.

CRT emerged amongst scholars and lawyers in the late 1970s and early 80s as a way to understand the forces upon Black citizens after Brown v. Board of Education in 1955, The Civil Right act of 1964 and the Voting Rights act of 1965. It was pretty much the purview of graduate school seminars. (Page 6)

At a June, 2022 “Road to Majority Policy Conference” in Nashville, Tennessee, Texas Senator Ted Cruz declared, “Let me tell you right now, critical race theory is bigoted, it is a lie, and it is every bit as racist as the Klansmen in white sheets.” Hagopian observed, “The irony here is profound; while Cruz compares those who teach CRT to the KKK, his own attack on antiracist education aligns with one of the Klan’s primary objectives: thwarting Black education and antiracist pedagogy—which they have done ferociously throughout US history.” (Page 40)

Hagopian discusses why feckless Democrats did not effectively respond to the GOP’s CRT attacks. He gives the example of Democrat Terry McAuliffe’s race for the Virginia Governorship against Glenn Youngkin. When Youngkin made a full throated attack on CRT calling it “toxic” and “flagrant racism, plain and simple” that is a “poisonous left-wing doctrine,” McAuliffe replied, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” This response might have cost him the race. (Page 150)

Why was McAuliffe’s answer so weak in this contest between two multimillionaire white men? Hagopian think he knows. He says, “Because many liberal politicians don’t actually support CRT, they are placed in a difficult spot during elections when Republicans attack it.” Although opposing bigotry, they do not want to support a movement that could upset their corporate sponsors. (Page 150)

Diane Ravitch wondered why so many people were silent in the face of a coordinated effort to teach inaccurate history? She wrote:

“Where was Bill Gates? Although right-wing nuts attacked Bill Gates for spreading CRT, Gates said nothing to defend schools and teachers against the attacks on them. He is not known for shyness. He uses his platform to declare his views on every manner of subject. Why the silence about teaching the nation’s history with adherence to the truth? Why no support for courageous teachers who stand up for honesty in the curriculum?” (Page 153)

Hagopian concludes, “Their lack of gusto for racial, economic, and social justice stems instead from the fact that, as with the GOP, they are predominantly funded by white billionaires who see no advantage to teaching students about systematic racism or capitalist exploitation.” (Page 156)

President Trump invokes maximum hyperbole with his unenlightened view of CRT:

“Getting critical race theory out of our schools in not just a matter of values, it’s also a matter of national survival. We have no choice, the fate of any nation ultimately depends upon the willingness of its citizens to lay down—and they must do this—lay down their very lives to defend their country” (Page 79)

Billionaire Dollars Push the Lie

Jesse began his career as a teacher at Hendley Elementary School in South Washington DC. The school’s neighborhood had a dearth of grocery stores and jobs. Hendley had a completely segregated 100% African American student population. It was 2001 and that September, the World Trade Center attack was coincident with him becoming an educator.  (Page 223)

He tells the story of his first year teaching noting seeing a police officer jack-up a fifth grade boy against a wall; the boys feet were dangling. The student was accused of throw paper in class. Jesse also describes a whole in the middle of the classroom chalkboard that his students called a bullet hole.

A poster session on US history revealed another hole in the classroom. The posters were all hung on a Friday and that weekend it rained. Upon arriving at school on Monday morning, Jesse found the floor flooded and the posters soaked. After the second classroom flooding, he wised-up and put a large trash bin below the hole in the roof. His work orders to fix the roof were never filled.

Hagopian observes, “I received a graduate degree in education theory that year by witnessing the cynicism of our nation’s ability to mobilize armies to bomb people on the other side of the world while refusing to find the money to fix the hole in the ceiling of my classroom or properly care for these children in the shadow of the White House.” (Page 224)

The attack on teaching truth in America’s classrooms is being financed by right-wing billionaires. People like Julie Fancelli, an heir of the Publix grocery fortune, former secretary of public education, Betsy DeVos, oil magnate, Charles Koch, the secretive electronics billionaire, Barre Seid, and so many more.

Jesse notes that:

“Maintaining an economic system such as ours, where eighty-one billionaires have more wealth than the bottom half of all people on Earth, doesn’t just happen by accident. It takes careful investment in institutions that shape ideas, and those investments see the biggest returns in the mass media and the system of schooling.” (Page 157)

A Surprise to Me

I was aware that homosexuality was illegal in America until the 1970s and that the legal turning point came in 1969 at the Stonewall Inn. This gay bar in Greenwich Village was the site of a gay uprising when police raided the bar. Today’s annual pride festivals originate from and celebrate the Stonewall riot.

What I did not know until reading Teach Truth is that the rebellion was led by Marsha P. Johnson and a host of Black and Brown queer people. (Page 97-98)

I highly recommend reading this book. It is full of surprises like this one.

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Strange Science of Reading Law Suit

20 Feb

By Thomas Ultican 2/20/2025

December 4, 2024, two law firms from New York and Chicago respectively filed a class action law suit against reading curriculum developers not steeped in science of reading (SoR).  One of the attorneys behind this Massachusetts suit, Benjamin Elga, said he listened to the Sold a Story podcast and immediately saw “an injustice that cried out for redress.” Their main claim is that “the National Reading Panel commissioned by Congress in 1997 confirmed, all credible education and literacy research shows that daily phonics instruction is necessary for literacy success” and that these curriculum developers were deliberately deceiving schools and parents when they did not focus on systematic phonics instruction.

The suit was brought against: Lucy Calkins and her Units of Study, Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell and their Reading Resources, The Reading and Writing Project at Mossflower, Teachers College Columbia University, Greenwood Publishing Group, Heinemann Publishing and HMH Education Co.

First of Its Kind Law Suit

Never before have curriculum providers been targets of this type of suit.

In paragraph-22 of the filing, the plaintiffs claim, “For decades, scientists and educators have understood that the first step in teaching literacy is robust, daily, and extensive instruction in phonics.” Unfortunately, this statement is not true.

The ideology supporting phonics comes from the National Reading Panel (NRP) that was supervised by the National Institute of Child Health and Development (NICHD). NRP was founded in 1997 and presented its findings in 2000. The report was supposed to end the reading wars but it came under immediate attack including in the minority report by Joanne Yatvin, who wrote: “At its first meeting in the spring of 1998, the Panel quickly decided to examine research in three areas: alphabetics, comprehension, and fluency, thereby excluding any inquiry into the fields of language and literature.”

Yatvin was the superintendent of a school district in Oregon, held a PhD in education and was the only panel member with classroom experience teaching reading.

Yatvin published “Babes in the Woods: The Wanderings of the National Reading Panel” for Kappan (January 1, 2002) in which she directly addressed the phonics piece:

“The situation worsened when the phonics report was not finished by the January 31 deadline. NICHD officials, who wanted it badly, gave that subcommittee more time without informing the other subcommittees of this special dispensation. The phonics report in its completed form was not seen, even by the whole subcommittee, of which I was a member, until February 25, four days before the full report was to go to press. By that time, not even all the small technical errors could be corrected, much less the logical contradictions and imprecise language. Although a few changes were made before time ran out, most of the report was submitted ‘as is.’ Thus the phonics report became part of the full report of the NRP uncorrected, undeliberated, and unapproved. For me, that was the last straw, and I informed my fellow panel members that I wanted my minority report to be included.”

The blow-back to the original report was strong. Elaine Garan is an award-winning researcher, author of “Resisting Reading Mandates” and educator with 24 years of experience as a reading teacher.  In March 2001, she wrote, “Beyond the Smoke and Mirrors: A Critique of the National Reading Panel Report on Phonics” published by Kappan. When two NRP panel members, Linnea Ehri and Steven Stahl, attacked her in their Kappan article, she responded:

“I used the data and words of the National Reading Panel (NRP) to establish that its report was fatally flawed in terms of the fundamental research protocols, including validity, reliability and generalizability.  I established that, rather than living up to the highly publicized claims of ‘scientific’ accuracy, the report was riddled with errors.”

Garan was right. There are no “strong correlative and causal relationships between systematic phonics instruction and reading success.”

Despite the suits claim that “all credible education and literacy research shows that daily phonics instruction is necessary for literacy success”, there are in truth many highly credentialed scholars who disagree.  Posted on Ferman University Professor Paul Thomas’s blog are many articles with links to hundreds of scholars opposing SoR. In a recent post, he noted,

“The hand wringing over the 2024 NAEP reading results, however, seems to focus on learning loss and post-Covid consequences—not that reading achievement on NAEP was flat during the balanced literacy era and now has dropped steadily during the SOR era:”

Peter Johnston and Deborah Scanlon of the University at Albany debunked the Science of Reading (SoR) in this report.

Maren Aukerman is currently a Werklund Research Professor at the University of Calgary who focuses on literacy education and formerly served on the faculties at Stanford University and the University of Pennsylvania. She warns of journalists using logical fallacies to promote science of reading (SoR). For example, not reporting research showing students taught to read without systematic phonics “read more fluently.”

In 2023, a major study of teaching reading in the United Kingdom was released. The UK embraced a phonic first reading paradigm similar SoR in 2012. The researchers conclude an over-emphasis on phonics instruction caused reading test scores to go down. This matches what we have seen with this year’s National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) testing.

2024 NAEP Reading Results

Both nationally and internationally, many education researchers are openly opposed to SoR. Its support comes almost exclusively from billionaire sponsored researchers and publications.

Lawyers versus Educators

Two scholars, Robert J. Tierney, Dean Emeritus of the Faculty of Education at University of British Columbia, and Paul David Pearson, Evelyn Lois Corey Emeritus Professor of Instructional Science in the Berkeley School of Education at the University of California Berkeley, published the free to download “Fact-Checking the Science of Reading.”  

Lawyer Benjamin Elga said he listened to the Sold a Story podcast and it motivated his law suit. The education professionals wrote:

“Undoubtedly, for both of us, the precipitating event was Emily Hanford’s (2022) release of the six-part podcast, Sold a Story, broadcast by American Public Media beginning in late 2022. Hanford’s series motivated us to accelerate our response for many reasons—two of which were most pressing to us:

  1. A consistent misinterpretation of the relevant research findings; and
  2. A mean-spirited tone in her rhetoric, which bordered on personal attacks directed against the folks Hanford considered to be key players in what she called the Balanced Literacy approach to teaching early reading.” (Pages xiii and xiv)

Paragraph 39 of the law suit states, “Cueing methods have been roundly criticized for teaching children to guess rather than read.”

This above is a diagram of what they mean by cueing. Orthography uses phonics type approaches to sound out unknown words. Does it look right? With the second cue, syntactic, a student tries to understand what is written. Does it sound right? What would make it conform to grammar rules? Semantics is the last of the three cues. Does it make sense?

Cueing methods like all widely used reading curriculums embrace phonics as a tool but not as part of a daily structure.

Tierney and Pearson observed,

“It seems overly limiting to discredit the use of cueing systems based on what some might consider a restrictive assumption—that reading is entirely the accurate naming of words, rather than an act of meaning making that involves hypothesizing. To dismiss the use of context as an over-reliance on ‘guessing’ or ‘predicting’ ignores important evidence.” (Page 65)

Who Are These People?

With five lawyers listed on the class action law-suit, Kaplan & Grady is a firm in Chicago specializing in commercial and civil rights cases. Justice Catalyst Law (JCL) is a non-profit law firm from New York with two lawyers listed on the case. Both firms are fairly new, Kaplan & Grady was founded in 2022 and JCL was formed in 2018 per their tax filings (TIN 83-0932015).

Not much is known about the private company but in 2022, the non-profit took in $2,185,000 in contributions and Partner Benjamin Elga has connections to big Silicon Valley money. He is a Senior Fellow at American Economic Liberties Project to which The Irish Times reports that eBay founder Pierre Omidyar is a large contributor.

New court filings are due in March and the lawyers are demanding a jury trial.

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Billionaire Purchased Research Hawks Virtual Tutoring

12 Feb

By Thomas Ultican 2/12/2025

Billionaires have enlisted the aid of Universities in their push to sell kids-at-screens education. The latest effort, dutifully reported in The 74, claims that Johns Hopkins University has shown “Done Right, Virtual Tutoring Nearly Rivals In-Person Version.” They say two new studies performed there show “how high-quality virtual tutoring can help struggling students.” In Massachusetts, they are testing virtual tutoring programs on 6-year old students, which is morally repugnant.  

The 74 reports,

“In a quasi-experimental study published in December, Neitzel and her colleagues found that first-graders in Massachusetts who used Ignite Reading, a one-to-one virtual tutoring program, made substantial progress in reading, with the percentage of students reading on grade level rising from just 16% in the fall to about 50% by spring.”

Neitzel is Assistant Professor Amanda Neitzel, Deputy Director of Evidence Research at Johns Hopkins University. Ignite Reading is a for profit company specializing in science of reading (SoR) approaches to virtual tutoring. The bill for this program, which was run in 13 Massachusetts elementary schools, was paid by One8 Foundation (TIN: 04-6836735), a three-quarter-billion dollar Jewish centric foundation that regularly gives to privatizing organizations like Teach For America, KIPP and Success Academy.

The quasi-experimental study was published in December, 2024. Quasi-experimental research is research that resembles experimental research but is not true experimental research. While quasi-experimental designs don’t offer the same level of control as true experimental designs, they are still useful for studying situations where randomization is difficult or impossible. However, they can be misleading.

Page 4 of the study described Ignite Reading, as a one-to-one virtual tutoring program, fostering early literacy development. The paper states, “As part of the program, students attend daily 15-minute virtual tutoring sessions with specially paired Ignite Reading tutors who leverage a sequenced, research-based instructional plan designed to develop students’ early-literacy skills, related basic alphabetic knowledge, phonemic awareness, phonics, decoding, and fluency.” The SoR curriculum was assessed using DIBELS’s basic early literacy skills test.

The DIBELS use throws some shade on Neitzel’s research. Many educators and scholars loudly detest DIBELS. Berkley’s P. David Pearson wrote, “I have decided to join that group of scholars and teachers and parents who are convinced that DIBELS is the worst thing to happen to the teaching of reading since the development of flash cards.” DIBELS focuses on phonics and sounds and not words and meaning. Many of DIBELS assessment phrases are purposefully gibberish.

While I question the assessment methodology, I would think first graders who were forced to participate with an on-line tutor 15 minutes every day of the school year would improve somewhat. Even a bad methodology will produce some results though it might poison a baby’s mind about reading.

Billionaire Funded Air Reading

The second Johns Hopkins research article cited is about San Mateo, California’s Air Reading which was founded in 2021. Crunchbase reports that Air Reading’s last two rounds (2023 and 2024) of funding were financed by Accelerate which highlights how billionaires are bending research to their liking.

They self-claim, “Accelerate actively builds the country’s knowledge of tools and practices that significantly advance student learning.” The reality seems quite different. Accelerate appears more like a pass-through portal for billionaire dollars. The 2022 tax form 990 (TIN: 88-3207484) shows CEO Kevin Huffman’s Tennessee company has just over $14-million in assets yet they seem to be Air Reading’s main funding source. Accelerate’s funds were recently augmented with $10-million from John Arnold.

Accelerate’s Posted Funders

Arrow Impact is a $60-million dollar non-profit established by wealthy Stanford financial professor, Mark Wolfson (TIN 83-1423625). In 2023, Wolfson added another $7.5 million to Arrow Impact and he seems to be the poor guy here. Former Tennessee Governor and billionaire Bill Haslam with his wife Crissy operate a $100-million tax free foundation (TIN 62-1867423). Griffin Catalyst belongs to billionaire Ken Griffin founder of Citadel Financial. John Overdeck is the billionaire founder of Two Sigma Investments. His Overdeck Family Foundation has over $850-million in assets (TIN 26-4377643). Arnold Ventures (TIN 26-3241764), Gates Foundation (TIN 86-1065772) and the Walton Family Foundation (TIN 58-1766770) complete the list of billionaires putting investments through Accelerate.

The Johns Hopkins report informs:

“Air Reading is grounded in the Science of Reading. Comprehensive, one-on-one diagnostics identify students’ learning needs and inform group placement and bi-weekly assessments to track student progress.”

“During the 2023-24 school year, six elementary schools in a district in Texas took part in a randomized controlled trial to evaluate the impact of Air Reading on reading outcomes for first through sixth grade students.” (Page 4)

The fundamental outcome is they once again showed that students getting extra tutoring outperform students who do not. The study was monitored using the corporate supported NWEA MAP testing scheme. Neitzel et al explain that based on these outcomes, “the control group who scored at the 50th percentile would increase their score to the 55th percentile if they participate in the tutoring.” (Page 10) The report admits it was, “comparing the reading achievement of students receiving the Air Reading intervention to those receiving the standard classroom instruction.” (Page 11) In other words, the study compared those receiving 40-minutes of tutoring four days a week with those who were not.

This result is so unsurprising that it is difficult to fathom why they bothered other than billionaires want to sell putting “those people’s children” at screens.

SoR is key to putting kids a screens. That is why billionaires are pushing it down America’s throats.

Insights

Before billionaire education reform, education research was much more honest. Typically, an education researcher would study some aspect of teaching or learning, gather data, write up the study and submit it to some journal for publication. The study would go through a peer-review process in which several experts in the field would review the paper and then at a large gathering the researcher would defend the paper. If the defense went well, the respected journal would publish the paper.

Billionaires have to some extent eliminated the peer review process when their organizations like TNTP publish a paper that is promoted by billionaire funded media like The 74. Once the paper is published other billionaire funded organizations cite the sham papers in their reports or like the University of Arkansas’s School Demonstration Project financed by the Walton family, just cite their own previous bogus work.

The 74, claimed that Johns Hopkins has shown “Done Right, Virtual Tutoring Nearly Rivals In-Person Version.” If a school can convince students to log on to tutoring and pay for the online tutors, this might be true. However, the demonstrations that virtual tutoring can “nearly” rival the in person versions were extremely well resourced and had the ability to force children to log in. Even if the downside health problems associated with kids at screens are ignored and “nearly” rival is a good enough goal for your schools and their parents, it is unlikely they will get an equivalently well resourced program.

Billionaires like Laurene Powell Jobs and Bill Gates want to put kids at screens in the worst way. Unfortunately, it is a method that seriously degrades education. Their kids will never be subjected to this kind of diminished education and no other American student should be either.

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New NAEP Scores No Reason to Panic

4 Feb

By Thomas Ultican 2/4/2025

Billed as the Nations Report Card, the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) just released data from the 2024 testing window. The first NAEP assessments occurred in 1969 and in 1996 school testing in all states became mandatory every two years. Almost since the beginning, the testing results have been treated as a crisis moment. This year, both math and reading data came in lower than pre-pandemic levels. To the reform group, Education Trust, this is a time for action but it seems more likely that less action might be in order. The last two decades of education reform have been a harmful disaster. So prudence in our response is a better course.

The problem with all this data is summed up nicely by Peter Greene:

“As long time readers know …, I’m not one to get excited about scores on the Big Standardized Test, despite the claims that it will tell us How Schools Are Doing. There are lots of reasons to suspect that America’s Gold Standard of Testing is not all the gold standardy. And there is one serious lesson to be learned, which is that having all this cold hard data doesn’t actually change a damned thing— everyone just “interprets” it to support whatever it is they wanted to do anyway.

Plots of the average testing results covering math and reading for the past 32-years do not inspire much insight even if you believe in standardized testing.

The plots above were created from NAEP Data. Since 1992, both sets, which are plotted on a 500 point scale, wiggled up and down within a 10 point range.

In 2020, COVID-19 happened and this year’s 4th graders joined in-school classes a year or more late. The 8th graders missed at least their 5th grade in-school classes and some of them missed significantly more. During that year or more out of school, a tendency for truancy developed. So it is not surprising that their testing scores are not stellar, but they are still within the 10-point historical range.

Reading Scores Down

Peggy Carr, Commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) said, “Student achievement has not returned to pre-pandemic levels, reading scores continue to decline, and our lowest performing students are reading at historically low levels.”

For the past decade, there has been a major dispute over how to teach reading in the United States. Dozens of states have overhauled their reading instruction to adopt so called science of reading (SoR) methods. These changes came about largely due to a well financed corporate driven campaign that has drowned out literary experts.

NAEP created charts based on reading data disaggregated by scoring percentiles are shown below.

In both the 4th grade and 8th grade charts reading scores started declining about 2015 and have fallen every testing window since. At about the same time, balanced literacy, which was the nation’s most popular method for teaching reading, started being replaced by SoR. The correlation between SoR and the dip in reading scores is obvious but may be misleading. Chalkbeat reports, “And while federal education officials are usually reticent to explain what caused a particular increase or decrease in scores, Carr cautioned that the near-universal dips in reading should not be taken as evidence that reading reforms have not worked.”

I have believed for some time that SoR is less about good teaching and more about profits, so it is tempting to discount Dr. Carr’s warning. Standardized testing has serious limitations and it would be hypocritical to discount it only when I did not like the results and then hale the outcomes that I liked.

However, the NAEP data since 2017 certainly provides NO support for SoR.

Math Staying Steady

The 2024 math results for fourth-grade improve by 3% over 2022 but were still 2% lower than the pre-pandemic 2019 testing. Eighth-graders treaded water in 2024 with scores that were not significantly different from 2022 and were 8% lower than 2019.

NAEP allows researchers to break down scores by region. I created this bar graph of fourth grade math for the last five testing windows. The South, Midwest and Northeast had almost identical scores while the west lagged by 4-6 percent. Would we all like to see better scores? of course. On the other hand, there is nothing here that looks dire. In 2022, there was a small drop in scores and in 2024 about half of the drop was overcome.

Absenteeism is probably holding back score recovery in both math and reading. It is generally considered that when a student misses more than 10% of the school year they are chronically absent. National Public Radio (NPR) has reported, the rates of chronic absenteeism doubled during the pandemic. NAEP also asked students, during this last testing cycle, how many days they had missed in the previous month. NPR notes that, “Across the board, lower-performing students were more likely to report missing five or more days of school in the previous month, compared with higher-performing students.”

Some Final Observations

 In 2007, NCES performed a study on what happened to the 1992 NAEP participants. They were interested in how the four attainment level, Below Basic, Basic, Proficient and Advanced, matched student outcomes.

The key results are shown in the table above. It looks like the levels have misleading names. Half of the students in the Basic group achieved a bachelor’s degree or higher. This means that they were college ready and academically proficient. The NAEP labels are aligned too high; therefore misleading.

In 2019, Diane Ravitch commented on that year’s NAEP data: “After a generation of disruptive reforms—No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, VAM and Common Core—after a decade or more of disinvestment in education, after years of bashing and demoralizing teachers, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) for 2019 shows the results:

‘“Over the past decade, there has been no progress in either mathematics or reading performance, and the lowest-performing students are doing worse,”’ said Peggy Carr, the associate commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, which administers the NAEP. ‘“In fact, over the long term in reading, the lowest-performing students—those readers who struggle the most—have made no progress from the first NAEP administration almost 30 years ago.”’

SoR became the billionaire reform de jure in 2019. No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, VAM and Common Core had come to be seen as either failures or frauds. Profiteers hoped the new SoR strategy would lead to privatizing and controlling all aspects of education and they made great efforts to promote it. Will the 2024 NAEP results be the beginning of the end for their greedy dreams?

Whatever the case, Ravitch’s 2019 NAEP analysis still holds true. The 2024 NAEP results are nothing to celebrate but certainly are not a crisis. After all, they are based on standardized testing that is not capable of measuring learning or teaching. Family wealth is about the only thing to which NAEP data correlates.

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FCMAT Attacks Weed Elementary

28 Jan

By Thomas Ultican 1/28/2025

In 1992, California inaugurated the Fiscal Crisis Management Assist Team (FCMAT) in the aftermath of the Richmond School District bankruptcy. It was set up as a quasi-autonomous non-governmental organization headquartered in Bakersfield. Unfortunately, from the beginning, FCMAT functioned as a tool of the politically connected and never provided actual assistance to districts dealing with financial matters. FCMAT, which is pronounced fick-mat, recently started attacking the Weed Union Elementary School District, a single-school district, based on little more than feelings and rumors.

Weed Elementary School is in Weed, California on the foothills of Mount Shasta, one of the twelve 14,000+ feet high mountains in California. Weed is 230 miles north of Sacramento along interstate-5 in Siskiyou County. Abner Weed came to the county in 1889 and became a business and political success. Weed founded the Weed lumber company and at one time his sawmills were the largest producers in the world. The town he built and its schools bear his name.

Weed California Entrance

Today, this small town of 2,900 people is not wealthy. The Weed Elementary school accountability report card shows 78% of its students are socioeconomically disadvantaged. This is the target of FCMAT’s warrantless attack.

Attack Background

Over the Thanksgiving break in 2019, there was some sort of flood at Weed Elementary School. The district took measures to clean up the district office, a conference room, two special day classrooms and the library. They believed that this was all that was required.

Soon after, the superintendent resigned and the district hired Jon Ray for the job in April, 2020. When Ray entered the school, he smelled an odder reminiscent of the mold infestation at a school where he previously worked. Ray hired a vendor to investigate and they found significant mold hidden in the walls.

Weed Elementary School

It seems that there was some bad blood between the Siskiyou County Office of Education and Jon Ray at Weed Union Elementary School District. In an interview, Ray voiced the opinion that most of those bad feelings were generated by his decision to open school for in person classes in August, 2020.

When the county superintendent received anonymous allegations of possible fraud, misappropriation of funds or other illegal fiscal practices at the Weed Union Elementary School District, he decided to call in FCMAT at a cost of $250,000. This is probably a decision he now regrets.

As Superintendent Ray was informed, FCMAT was not here to help. They were there to find issues and concluded in their report, “Based on the findings in this report, there is sufficient evidence to demonstrate that fraud, misappropriation of funds and/or assets, or other illegal fiscal practices may have occurred specific to bid splitting and other areas reviewed.”  (Report Page 28)

However, Mr. Ray’s response to FCMAT’s report is more convincing than the report. Most of the criticism of Weed Elementary was cited as feelings. For example, FCMAT stated:

“The district’s decision to use construction management multiprime (CMMP) as its construction method seemed questionable to both FCMAT and the county superintendent. … To the county superintendent and FCMAT, it seemed the district was reacting to issues as they arose rather than following a comprehensive plan”. (Report Page 6)

Superintendent Jon Ray responded:

“These comments are exemplary of the type of impressions and feelings that permeate the entire Report. Since FCMAT is claiming that its evidence supports grave accusations like fraud and misappropriation, it is shocking to find so many instances where the basis for these charges is solely the way it ‘seemed’ to FCMAT.” (Response Page 3)

Once you go thru the FCMAT report and all of its feelings you come to one substantive charge, bid splitting. The California Department of Education web site definition of bid splitting states:

“Bid splitting is intentionally dividing purchasing to avoid getting price quotes or going out to bid using a more formal procurement method. Per Public Contract Code 20116, It shall be unlawful to split or separate into smaller work orders or projects any work, project, service, or purchase for the purpose of evading the provisions of this article requiring contracting after competitive bidding.

Mr. Ray and the district responded, “FCMAT has not provided any evidence, fact, or document indicating that the District ever split any bid to avoid a bid limit; they did not because none exists.”

Several of the FCMAT report findings seem to undermine the fraud and bid splitting allegations. Starting on page 6 in the report they site (1) the District determined that managing smaller contracts without paying a general contractor’s mark-up provided a cost savings; and (2) the district determined that it could purchase equipment, materials and supplies for projects to both reduce a contractor’s mark-up and to ensure supplies would be available during a country-wide supply chain crisis.

In 2021 and 2022, due to COVID, prices for raw materials were exploding and contractors were reticent to make commitments. Jon Ray and the board at Weed Elementary saw no choice but to act as contractor and purchase the needed materials. This was not something they wanted to do but while operating their K-8 school, concluded it was something they had to do.

Michael Fine Behind the Scenes was the Problem

Michael Fine is the chief executive officer of FCMAT. He and his team have found a Bakersfield, California money tree. Transparent California reveals that in 2023, Fine was paid $383,879.87 and there were 11 other FCMAT employees who received more than $279,000 for the year and five more workers made more than $158,000. It is a lot cheaper to live in Bakersfield than Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco or Sacramento. To keep their money tree alive, they just need to keep the rich and powerful happy. That is not the people in Weed, California.

The Data Center Reported that in 1992 that FCMAT had a budget of $562,000 which ballooned to $35.6 million by 2002. They also criticized its use of no-bid contracts and lack of accountability. Los Angeles State Assembly Woman Jackie Goldberg called for an audit of FCMAT in 2003. The state auditor reported that FCMAT was providing value to districts but did criticize the over use of no-bid contracts. That appears to be the only audit ever done of FCMAT.

FCMAT actually does bad financial investigating. For example, in 2022, a FCMAT study claimed that Stockton Unified School District (SUSD) was headed for serious financial difficulties when the one time spending from the federal government is gone in fiscal year 2024-25. They said the district is spending one time funding on $26.3 million in salaries, benefits and services that appear essential.

It turned out that a FCMAT consultant who previously worked for the Stockton schools, Susan Montoya, apparently created phantom positions that were the source of the $30 million dollar shortage. It was SUSD that discovered that the $30 million budget deficit was a rouge not FCMAT.

Time to Audit and End FCMAT

There are terrible FCMAT experiences all over the Golden state. What is never found is a good experience or a story of how FCMAT helped a school district. School leaders just talk about how they survived FCMAT, how costly it was and in the happy cases how they finally got FCMAT off their back.

The money going thru FCMAT needs to be examined. The salaries are outrageous and the services worse than stink.

California schools could use some expert help not a police force making money from struggling schools by finding something on them so the state can takeover.

Time to end FCMAT and start over.

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Billionaires Driving Science of Reading

21 Jan

By Thomas Ultican 1/21/2025

On January 2nd, billionaire created education news source, The 74, declared there is a reading crisis in Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD). This was based on an LA School Report article stating that on the 2023-24 California assessments “43.1% of all LAUSD students met state proficiency targets in reading, compared with 44.1% in the 2018-19 school year, the last before the pandemic.” In math, 32.8% met standards, compared to 33.5% in 2018-19. It seems ludicrous to believe that a 1% drop in testing results, that are known to wiggle up and down, is a crisis. Furthermore, in 2021-22 those proficiency numbers were 41.7% ELA and 28.5% math and in 2022-23 were 41.2% ELA and 30.5% math which suggests that school district testing results are on an upswing.

The 74 was founded in 2015 by former CNN news anchor, Campbell Brown, along with Michael Bloomberg’s education advisor, Romy Drucker. Its original funding came from billionaires via the Dick and Betsy DeVos Family Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, the Doris and Donald Fisher Fund and Bloomberg Philanthropies. Since then, it has been the vehicle for spreading their message of school privatization. In 2016, The 74 took over the LA School Report.

Creating an Expert

The title of The 74’s crisis article is “Reading Crisis in LAUSD: ‘This is… a Problem With a Responsibility That Falls on All of Us’.” And it has the subtitle, “Literacy Activist Olga de la Cruz says the science of reading is the will solve (sic) literacy losses suffered mostly by poor kids of color in the pandemic.” Literary activist Olga has a BA from UCLA and a Masters of Public Administration from USC. What makes her a literary expert is mystifying. She is also senior campaign director at Families In Schools.

“Reading Crisis in LAUSD …” is an edited version of The LA School Reports interview with Olga. She states, “We need to be more intentional about listening to families, collaborating with community leaders, designing programs that directly support the needs of our students.” The LA School Report asked, “Why is the science of reading important as part of that effort?” Olga answered:

“Science of reading is not a method nor a curriculum nor an approach. It is a body of evidence based on decades of research that explains how the brain learns to read and the foundational skills that students need to become proficient readers.

“It’s about how the brain works and how children learn to read. So this requires explicit, systematic instruction, what are called the foundational skills, which are phonics, phonemic awareness, vocabulary, comprehension, fluency and oral language.”

Olga’s employers, Families In Schools, just published a report which reads more like propaganda for the Science of Reading (SoR) than a scientific review of reading education methodologies. They claim:

“Unfortunately, in many classrooms, students are still receiving reading instruction that is not based on evidence about what works …. For example, the ‘whole language’ approach is based on the idea that students learn to read naturally through exposure to literacy-rich environments, the use of context clues, and word memorization. “Balanced literacy” is a variation thereof that embraces elements of multiple approaches, including small doses of phonics instruction while retaining ineffective elements from the whole language approach.”

Last year, two highly regarded literary professors, P David Pearson of UC Berkeley and Robert J. Tierney of University of British Columbia, published “Fact-Checking the Science of Reading.” Unlike Olga de la Cruz, these are two actual literary experts.

In looking at the charges against balanced literacy, they detect bad testing science and assert, “As current policy pundits and reporters have done, we ask more of these assessments than they were designed to accomplish, as they spread unwarranted—and potentially harmful—claims about both the positive (phonics first will solve our woes) and negative (Balanced Literacy is the culprit) effects of curricular change.” (Page 78)

Person and Tierney also addressed Olga’s claim about “research that explains how the brain learns to read”. The professors noted, “Many fail to understand that the contribution of neuroscience to the practical task of assessment and intervention in reading disability is still rudimentary, and scientific understandings continue to be undermined by methodological difficulties and the selective use of evidence.” (Page 97)

Maren Aukerman is currently a Werklund Research Professor at the University of Calgary who focuses on literacy education and formerly served on the faculties at Stanford University and the University of Pennsylvania. She warns of journalists using logical fallacies to promote science of reading (SoR). For example, not reporting research showing students taught to read without systematic phonics “read more fluently.”

The Orwellian labeled SoR is not based on sound science. In 1997, congress passed legislation, calling for a reading study. Establishment of the National Reading Panel (NRP) was a doomed effort. They were given limited time for the study (18 months), which was a massive undertaking, conducted by twenty-one unpaid volunteers. NRP fundamentally did a meta-analysis in five reading domains, ignoring 10 other important domains. They did not review everything and there was no new research. Their search for reading studies and averaged results is the basis for “science of reading.”

SoR’s real motivation is to sell products, not helping children struggling to read. Scholars like Pearson and Tierney are ignored while pseudo-experts with limited credentials are trumpeted.

 In 2021, EdReports, which rates curricula for their alignment to Common Core or similar standards, gave both Lucy Calkins’s Units of Study and Fountas and Pinnell’s curriculum its lowest ratings. In January 2020, Student Achievement Partners (SAP) issued a report finding that Calkins’ approach to phonics was “in direct opposition to an enormous body of settled research.” Both EdReports and SAP are billionaire founded and financed companies.

Billionaire Financed Companies Selling SOR

The Families In Schools report was funded by the following philanthropies.

Supporting Families In Schools Report

The Ballmer Group is financed by the former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer.

Sobrato is a Silicon Valley real estate developer’s philanthropy.

Heising-Simons is also a bay area foundation which last year co-created the Early Educator Investment Collaborative, a group of early-childhood funders that also includes the Ballmer Group, the Bezos Family Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Buffett Early Childhood Fund, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the Foundation for Child Development and the Stranahan Foundation.

EdVoice was established in 2003 by Eli Broad, John Walton, John Doerr, Don Fisher, Reed Hasting, Laurene Jobs Powell, Buzz Woolley and others to advance their billionaire public school privatization agenda. (See 2003 form 990 TIN 94-3284817)

GPSN is led by former charter school executives and Eli Broad employees.

Billionaires are the main support driving SoR. One of the reasons for that is having a tightly defined curriculum makes it much easier to develop a software-driven-kids-at-screens program and profit while reducing costs; think iReady or Amplify.

Conclusion

SoR advocates are trying to force everyone to use a reading education approach that is not proven and failed miserably in England. Authoritarians want to take over public education and turn it into a profit center, claiming it’s based on decades of research. That is not true and it is more likely to harm children than help. Forty states have already adopted laws that comply with billionaire wishes and in California legislation has been written and submitted. It was tabled this year but it is sure to come up again.

This is a billionaire sponsored tragedy requiring as many people as possible to become aware and oppose it.

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TIMSS Scores Down Don’t Panic

13 Jan

By Thomas Ultican 1/13/2025

The latest round of international testing showed that US math scores fell between the 2019 assessment and the 2023 exam. Every four years the US participates in the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS). In the 2023 cycle, fourth grade math fell by 18 points and eighth grade math fell by 27. An ABC News headline states, “US students’ declining math scores are ‘sobering,’ expert says’” and the New York Times claims, “U.S. Students Posted Dire Math Declines on an International Test.” The reality is that these results are not wonderful but they are neither “sobering” nor “dire.”

It seems that every year there is a new data dump from a large scale assessment (LSA). Regular updates arrive from the National Assessment of Education Progress (NEAP) or the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) or the testing sponsored by the international banking community, Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). This winter the TIMSS data was released.

TIMMS and PIRLS

In 1958, a group of scholars, educational psychologists, sociologists, and psychometricians met at the UNESCO Institute for Education (UIE) in Hamburg, Germany, to confer about school effectiveness and student learning. In 1967, these early discussions led to the legal creation of the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) headquartered in Amsterdam with a major data processing and research center in Hamburg. The every four years TIMSS assessment of math and science plus the every five years PIRLS assessment of reading are two of IEA’s major ongoing efforts.

The first IEA study began in 1959 and the completed report was published in 1962. In the forward, it stated:

“If the results so far, … are little more than suggestive, at least they offer real encouragement for believing that such researches can, in the future, lead to more significant results and begin to supply what Anderson has lamented as ‘the major missing link in comparative education’, which in his view is crippled especially by the scarcity of information about the outcomes or products of educational systems.” (Emphasis Added)

“Certainly the international group itself was sufficiently encouraged by the results of its first exploratory study to embark on a more ambitious one during which, at several key points in the secondary school cycle, as comparable samples of schoolchildren as can be obtained will be subjected to tests which bear close reference to curricula and educational aims in all the participating countries.” (Emphasis Added)

From their statements, it is clear that mathematically adept researchers saw testing as a valid way to study teaching and learning. The problem is they did not properly understand the tremendous influence of error in education testing. Family situations have extraordinarily greater influence on outcomes than either schools or teachers. These errors are so great that they obscure testing results.

The reporting on this first study was quite crude. Their use of standard deviations to communicate the results was difficult for non-experts to follow and their graphics were not well designed. These graphics came without legends and were therefore indecipherable but one graphic on page 29 did give a sense of comparison.

Looking at this graphic we can see that in 1959, the USA was pretty good in “Non-verbal Aptitude” whatever that is. It was relatively poor in math, OK in reading, weak in geography and super in science. This trend of the US being mostly average on international standardized assessments has persisted until today.

New Data from TIMSS

Forty-seven countries participated in the 2023 TIMSS 4th grade math study. Many of the countries studied were quite small with only Japan and the United States having populations of more than 100 million people. Using the World Population Review, I added population data to the TIMSS data and have put it into the following table for the 10 most populous countries assessed.

The table is organized in order of their average 2023 assessment results. Even though the US had an 18 point drop between 2019 and 2023, it still ranked fourth among the larger countries. The US had the second largest drop, but all of the large countries also had scoring decreases. The table reveals that the  US has a population almost three times the next largest country and the top two scoring countries have homoginous student populations with little diversity.

The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) receives an expanded data set that they use to make many presentations of the outcomes. In a revealing set, NCES shows the effect of poverty on the US data with the following table which is reformatted.

This table strongly suggests that the US decrease in scores was concentrated in the 24% of students among the group with 75% free and reduced price lunches, which is believed to be a good proxy for poverty. There are many reasons to think this group was more profoundly affected by the pandemic than other students. They were less likely to participate in virtual school, were living with people in high risk of contracting the disease and were more likely to be absent once schools opened.

LSA Reliability

Recently a British group, Assessment and Quality Insights, noticed that the PISA and TIMSS testing data showed opposite trends for British math, science and reading. TIMSS tests 12 year olds while PISA tests 15 year olds, but it is remarkable that the two assessments came up with opposite trends. Since 2012, PISA has reported falling scores in the three disciplines while TIMSS has shown rising scores.  

In 2020, Jake Anders et al, published “Is Canada really an education superpower? The impact of non-participation on results from PISA 2015.” They stated:

“In this paper, we consider whether this is the case for Canada, a country widely recognised as high performing in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). Our analysis illustrates how the PISA 2015 sample for Canada only covers around half of the 15-year-old population, compared to over 90% in countries like Finland, Estonia, Japan and South Korea.“

This highlights a common problem with comparing international test scores. It is not clear who the student are that are being tested and if countries are juking the scores for political purposes.

Another problem with LSAs is highlighted by a paper from the University of Kansas, “Side Effects of Large-Scale Assessments in Education.” They note that LSAs distort the purpose of education by misleading the public into believing these assessments reflect the quality of teaching. Also curriculums get narrowed when only core subjects of math and reading are assessed. Plus the assessments cause many educators to “teach to the test” and exam induced suicides are reported in “China, Hong Kong China, Taiwan China, Korea, Singapore, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Japan (Cui, Cheng, Xu, Chen, & Wang, 2011).”  (Page 9)

LSAs also bring moral corruption to education. According to psychologist Donald Campbell’s law, “The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.” LSAs are not above this law. (Page 9)

Conclusion

LSAs are very expensive and more liable to mislead than enlighten. A lot of testing companies are making money, but education is not being well served. I have the same puzzlement as Professor Yong Zhao, who wrote, “It doesn’t make sense: Why Is the US Still Taking the PISA?” His arguments against PISA make a strong case against continuing with TIMSS and PIRLS as well.

To me this testing malarkey is how Corporations like Pearson get their hands on American taxpayer dollars and the taxpayers get worse than nothing for their spending.

Scrap all this international testing nonsense.

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Network for Public Education 2025 Conference

1 Jan

By Thomas Ultican 1/1/2025

I am going to Columbus, Ohio for the 2025 NPE conference the weekend of April 5 and 6. Since 2015, these conferences have been a forward looking delight for me. (I missed the 2014 conference in Austin, Texas.) It is a place to hear from heroes of human rights and amazing defenders of public education. It is here where we unite and organize to take on ruthless billionaires; out to end taxpayer funded free education for all. Meeting and hotel reservations are still available.

Chicago 2015

My first NPE conference, in 2015, was held in the historic Drake Hotel on the shore of Lake Michigan. I had been reading blogs by Diane Ravitch, Mercedes Schneider and Anthony Cody. They were all there. In fact, when I arrived the quite tall Cody was walking down a staircase to greet new arrivals. This got my conference off to a thrilling start. Yong Zhao, the keynote speaker, was amazing plus I personally met Deborah Meier and NEA president, Lily Eskelsen García. Always close to my heart will be the wonderful and all too short relationship I developed with our host, Karen Lewis.

Raleigh 2016

In Raleigh, I met Andrea Gabor, who was working on a book that was released in 2018, “After the Education Wars; How Smart Schools Upend the Business of Reform.” She had been an agnostic on charter schools until she went to New Orleans and discovered a mess. The amazing speaker, Rev. William Barber, gave the keynote address. This leader of the “poor people’s campaign” is a truly gifted speaker.

Oakland 2017

Nicole Hanna-Jones who had just won the MacArthur Foundation genius award and recently published the 1619 Project was our keynote speaker. Susan Dufresne lined the walls of the Oakland Marriot’s main conference room with her art depicting institutional racism that was published in book form 6-months later (The History of Institutional Racism in U.S. Public Schools). At a KPFA discussion featuring Diane Ravitch and Dyett High School hunger strike hero, Jitu Brown, I ran into Cindy Martin, then the Superintendent of San Diego Unified School District. She has been the number two at the Department of Education for most of the past four years. Too bad she was not the number one.

Indianapolis 2018

Diane Ravitch opened the conference declaring, “We are the resistance and we are winning!” Finish educator, Pasi Sahlberg, coined the apt acronym for the worldwide school privatization phenomena by calling it the “Global Education Reform Movement (GERM).” In Indianapolis, we met many new leaders in the resistance like Jesse Hagopian from Seattle. In his introduction, Journey for Justice leader, Jitu Brown, declared, “Jesse is a freedom fighter who happens to be a teacher.” Jesse’s new book “Teach Truth; the Struggle for Antiracist Education” was just released.

America’s leading civil rights fighter and president of the NAACP, Derrick Johnson, was our keynote speaker. He said the NAACP was not opposed to charter schools, but is calling for a moratorium until there is transparency in their operations and uniformity in terms of requirements is repaired. Derrick noted the NAACP had conducted an in depth national study of charter schools and found a wide range of problems that needed to be fixed before the experiment is continued.

Derrick Johnson, President of NAACP, Speaking at #NPE18Indy – Photo by Anthony Cody

Philadelphia 2022

Like the entire world, NPE activities were seriously interrupted by COVID-19. We were finally able to meet on Broad Street in Philadelphia March 19-20, 2022. This gathering was originally scheduled in 2020. My good friend Darcie Cimarusti, who worked for NPE, called me about joining her for a breakout session on The City Fund, the billionaire founded organization pushing the portfolio model of school management. By 2022, she was so weakened by cancer that I ended up leading the session. Sadly, Darcie passed a few months after the conference.

At the 2022 meeting, we also paid tribute to Phyllis Bush, an NPE founding board member and wonderful person. She was dealing with cancer at the Indianapolis conference and passed some time afterward.

The lunchtime conversation between Diane Ravitch and social activist, musician and actor, Stevie Van Zandt, was special. “Little Stevie” co-founded South Side Johnny and the Asbury Jukes, became a member of the E-Street band with Bruce Springsteen and starred on the Sopranos. It turned out that Diane and Stevie became friends when they were walking a picket line in support of LA teachers.

Ravitch posted afterwards, “I wish you had been in Philly to hear the wonderful “Little Stevie” (formerly the EST band and “The Sopranos”) talk about his love for music, kids, teachers, and arts in the schools at #npe2022philly. Everyone loved his enthusiasm and candor.”

Diane Ravitch and Steven Van Zandt at NPE Philadelphia

Washington DC 2023

October 28-29, 2023, brought the Washington DC NPE conference, a special event. Of particular interest to me was the preconference interview (October 27 evening) of James Harvey by Diane Ravitch. Harvey is known as the author of a “Nation at Risk.” There were so many more of us there than expected; the interview was moved to the old Hilton Hotel’s large conference room. After the change and everyone settled down, Harvey commented, “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.” There is nothing like being there with people who made and witnessed history.

James also shared that the two famous academics on the panel, Nobel Prize winner, Glen Seaborg, and physicist, Gerald Holton, were the driving forces for politicizing the report. Strangely these two scientists did not come to their anti-public school conclusions based on evidence and they were significant to the reports demeaning public schools using phony data.

Gloria Ladson-Billings from the University of Wisconsin Madison delivered the first Keynote address on Saturday morning. She claimed, “Choice is a synonym for privatization.”  And also stated there is money in the public which wealthy elites do not think common people should have. She also noted, “We are in the business of citizen making.”  Ladson-Billings indicated that we do not want to go back to normal because it was not that great.

Conclusion

From the beginning, NPE has not sought donations from wealthy elites. The organization is 100% grass roots supported mainly by educators. When it holds a conference, the information has one purpose and that is protecting public education. If you can break free on the first weekend in April and you regard saving public education important, I encourage joining us in Columbus, Ohio for the 2025 NPE conference.

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San Diego School Board Election Outcomes

17 Dec

By Thomas Ultican 12/17/2024

Before the recent election, I wrote recommendations for several school board seats in San Diego County. The San Diego County Registrar of Voters has posted the final official results which are transcribed here with a few comments.

San Diego County Board of Education

Gregg Robinson in district-1 and Guadalupe Gonzalez in district-2 ran unopposed and were easily reelected.

In district-4

ERIN EVANS174,25368.29%My Recommendation
SARAH SONG80,91631.71% 

NOTE: Song was an enthusiastic candidate with some support but Evans was clearly more qualified. The county board of education looks to be in good shape.

San Diego Unified School District (SDUSD)

Richard Barrera district-D and Sharon D. Whitehurst-Payne district-E, ran unopposed and were elected. 

SABRINA BAZZO40,28950.93%My Recommendation
CRYSTAL TRULL38,81849.07% 

NOTE: This result surprised me. Brazzo is a very qualified member of the board supporting public education. Trull has the academic qualifications to serve but she is also a Howard Jarvis anti-tax ideologue and seems to base her education evaluations exclusively on standardized testing. It appears SDUSD dodged a big problem by less that 1% of the vote.

Sweetwater Union High School District (SUHSD)

Trustee Area 2

ADRIAN E. ARANCIBIA21,22656.72%My Recommendation
ANGELICA S. MARTINEZ16,19543.28% 

Trustee Area 4

RODOLFO “RUDY” LOPEZ19,19262.68%My Recommendation
OLGA ESPINOZA11,42637.32% 

NOTE: Both outcomes seemed reasonable and SUHSD should be well served.

Poway Unified School District (PUSD)

Trustee Area A

TIM DOUGHERTY10,06355.09% 
DEVESH VASHISHTHA8,20544.91%My Recommendation

Trustee Area E

DAVID CHENG6,52838.34% 
CRAIG POND6,38637.51% 
CINDY SYTSMA4,11124.15%My Recommendation

NOTE: In Poway Area E, I recommended for Systema because of her strong background as an educator and former county sheriff however I think David Cheng is also an excellent choice. In Area A, I was bothered by two of Dougherty’s listed supporters, Carl DeMaio and Michael Allman. However, Dougherty looks like a normal civic minded guy and to be a supporter of public schools.

Chula Vista Elementary School District (CVESD)

Seat Number 2

LUCY UGARTE80,82469.85%My Recommendation
SHARMANE ESTOLANO34,88530.15% 

Seat Number 4

FRANCISCO TAMAYO34,22729.61% 
KATE BISHOP27,68123.94%My Recommendation
TANYA WILLIAM26,23222.69% 
JESUS F. PARTIDA15,97713.82% 
ZENITH KHAN11,4919.94% 

NOTE: Educator Lucy Ugarte was the logical choice for seat 2. I have always liked Francisco Tamayo but his odd decision to run for seat number 4 while holding seat 1 caused me to recommend against him. For outsiders, it is difficult to get a good feel for what is happening. It seems that incumbent, Kate Bishop, had alienated several people in the district including Tamayo. The new board should be fine but now has two seats to fill with Tamayo moving to seat 4 and seat 5 member, Caesar Fernandez, becoming a Chula Vista city council member.

Vista Unified School District (VUSD)

Trustee Area 1

MIKE MARKOV6,72851.91%My Recommendation
AMANDA “MANDY” REMMEN6,23448.09% 

Trustee Area 4

CIPRIANO VARGAS3,37139.06% 
FRANK NUNEZ3,07535.63% 
ZULEMA GOMEZ2,18425.31%My Recommendation

Trustee Area 5

SUE MARTIN9,54060.39%My Recommendation
ANTHONY “TJ” CROSSMAN6,25839.61%   

NOTE: The outcomes here seem fine for the school District. Incumbent, Cipriano Vargas, was the pick of the Democratic Party and many political heavy hitters but I was more moved by Gomez’s support from sitting school board members and fellow educators.

San Marco Unified School District (SMUSD)

Trustee Area A

HEIDI HERRICK7,04756.04% 
CARLOS ULLOA5,52743.96%My Recommendation

Trustee Area B

SARAH AHMAD7,09658.98%My Recommendation
BRITTANY BOWER4,93541.02% 

Trustee Area D

LENA LAUER MEUM5,94958.77% 
JAIME CHAMBERLIN4,17441.23%My Recommendation

NOTE: This new board could have problems.

Grossmont Union High School District (GUHSD)

Area 1

CHRIS FITE13,92343.30%My Recommendation
RANDALL DEAR10,48532.61% 
DEBRA HARRINGTON4,61414.35% 
AZURE CHRISAWN3,1329.74% 

Area 2

SCOTT ECKERT14,76836.64% 
JAY STEIGER13,64533.85%My Recommendation
JIM STIERINGER7,98019.80% 
MARSHA J. CHRISTMAN3,9149.71% 

NOTE: This looks like a decent outcome for GUHSD. Far right candidate, Randall Dear, was rejected even with his large cash advantage. Scott Eckert was not my first choice but he is a solid choice who cares about the district.

San Dieguito Union High School District (SDUHSD)

Trustee Area 2

JODIE WILLIAMS10,12651.22%My Recommendation
KELLY FRIIS9,64348.78% 

Trustee Area 4

MICHAEL ALLMAN8,99051.12% 
KEVIN SABELLICO8,59548.88%My Recommendation

NOTE: I was really sad to see MAGA man, Michael Allman, reelected. He has been a polarizing character since first being elected in 2020.

Escondido Union High School District (EUHSD)

Trustee Area 3

CHRISTI KNIGHT7,53865.36% 
CLAY BROWN3,99534.64%My Recommendation

Trustee Area 4

RYAN S. WILLIAMS7,84864.66% 
DARA CZERWONKA4,28935.34%My Recommendation

NOTE: In Area 3, Clay Brown dropped out of the race. Both incumbents, Christi Knight and Ryan S. Williams, were reelected. I felt there needed to be some people with education experience on the board.

Oceanside Unified School District (OUSD)

Trustee Area 2

ELEANOR EVANS6,17851.51%My Recommendation
EMILY ORTIZ WICHMANN5,81548.49% 

Trustee Area 5

MIKE BLESSING6,35453.44%My Recommendation
ROSIE HIGUERA5,53646.56% 

NOTE: The wins by incumbents, Eleanor Evans and Mike Blessing, were good news for Oceanside.

Twelve races were won by candidates I endorsed and ten went against my recommendations. Overall, there was only one of the ten districts I reviewed that I felt was hurt by this election. In San Marcos, they got rid of an incumbent with deep education experience, Carlos Ulloa, leaving SMUSD with little education knowledge. More troubling was they just elected a pro-school-choice trustee to its board.

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