The hits just keep on coming!
Betsy DeVos just hired a former dean from for-profit online DeVry University to police fraud in higher education.
DeVry was forced to pay $100 million for defrauding students.
Archives for the month of: August, 2017
Which is the incompetent? Which is the malevolent? Or are they both? Neither is qualified by experience or temperament for the jobs they hold. This story was posted on the Politico website:
The controversial attorney who runs the Education Department’s civil rights division cited her work attacking Bill and Hillary Clinton at the top of her resume when she applied to work for President Donald Trump, according to a copy of the document obtained by POLITICO.
Candice Jackson, who brought a group of women who had accused President Bill Clinton of sexual misconduct to a presidential debate last year between Trump and Hillary Clinton, listed that event as one of her “top five qualifications” for working in the administration.
At the Education Department, Jackson has taken a prominent role helping Education Secretary Betsy DeVos shape federal policy pertaining to protections for transgender students and the handling of campus sexual assault cases. She drew fire in June for telling The New York Times that 90 percent of campus sexual assault cases “fall into the category of ‘we were both drunk.'”
On her resume, Jackson noted that she had steadfastly attacked Hillary Clinton’s “lifelong corruption and hypocritical claim to defend women and children” in ads and videos and brought a “unique perspective due to also being a gay Republican.”
Jackson joined the Education Department in the spring.
POLITICO obtained the resume from American Oversight, a watchdog group that acquired it using a Freedom of Information Act request. It’s not clear whether the document was submitted directly to the Education Department or by another means, such as to the Trump transition team.
Melanie Sloan, senior adviser at American Oversight, said Jackson’s hiring is an example of Trump’s “clear pattern of filling important roles in his administration with ideologues and political hacks.
“Nowhere is this more evident than at the Department of Education, where Secretary DeVos — despite a total absence of experience in management or education policy — now oversees thousands of employees and over $60 billion in taxpayer money,” Sloan said.
When reached by telephone, Jackson referred questions to the Education Department’s press office, which did not respond to questions.
DeVos has previously defended Jackson as “a valuable part of the administration and an unwavering advocate for the civil rights of all students.”
Reposted: new link.
John Merrow recalls an anti-Semitic incident on the playing fields from his youth. He recently heard from the boys (men) involved and found that their views were unchanged, except that now the anti-Semite was now openly racist.
Remember the song in “South Pacific”? “You’ve got to be carefully taught” to hate. We aren’t born hating. At the time Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote that song, they were called Communists.
John’s post reminded me of an incident last week. I went to a splendid wine-tasting and dinner at Paumonok Vineyards on the North Fork of Long Island. I was sitting next to a very pleasant and intelligent young man. As we got into dinner, we inevitably reached the subject of politics, and he told me that he enthisuasically voted for Trump. He is certain that Democrats want socialism and the next step is Communism. I learned that he is the son of Italian immigrants and an engineer who went to a state university. He saw no contradiction in Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric or his contempt for public education. As we talked, he expressed resentment about the lazy people who were getting government benefits. Why should he be taxed to pay for them? The longer the conversation went on, the more I realized that he was expressing deepseated racism. When the subject turned to education, he made clear that in his view, teachers are ignorant, have an easy job, are overpaid, should not have unions or tenure or pensions. Nothing I said changed any of his beliefs. I wondered why he was so bitter. I never found out. He is a solid member of Trump’s base.
The New America Foundation released three emails in response to articles about the firing of Barry Lynn, who was planning an event critical of Google, the major funder of the think tank. Lynn is a specialist in the danger of monopolies.
I read them, and it sure looks like Lynn was fired for offending Google. At one point, Anne-Marie Slaughter, president of NAF, mentions a meeting including Susan Molinari, a former GOP member of Congress from New York who is currently a registered lobbyist for Google.
Message to the New America Foundation: When you are in a hole, stop digging.
Fred Smith is a testing expert who knows how test scores can be manipulated and statistics can be twisted into data pretzels.
In this post, he calls out Mayor de Blasio for hyping the numbers to make the gains far larger than they were. Leave aside for the moment that test scores are a ridiculous way to measure the quality of education. Leave aside the fact that using them as measures of progress feeds into the privatizers’ narrative. Smith caught the Mayor juking the stats for Political gain.
He writes:
Ignore that tall man behind the curtain as he cranks up the volume.
Bearing a strong resemblance to Mayor de Blasio, he is there to proclaim that, “Since 2013, English proficiency has increased by 54 percent and math proficiency has increased by 27 percent.” But the noise machine can’t hide the fact that there is little substance in all the thunder.
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So, the mayor’s Tuesday press release leads with huge gains in reading and math scores—the major, if-you-don’t-remember-anything-else point he wants us to take away as he seeks re-election.
But the percentage gains are statistical smoke that befogs the mayor’s already clouded efforts in education. And, frankly, they raise questions about the incumbent’s honesty.
Three tricks prop up the testing headline:
1. The DOE press release emphasizes percentage gains, which are current results minus previous results divided by previous results. Evidently, the increase in English scores of 14.2 percent (26.4 percent to 40.6 percent) from 2013 to 2017 wasn’t good enough news. Nor was the 8.1 percent gain (29.6 percent to 37.8 percent) in math. So, the press office reaches into its bag of tricks and insists there has been a 54 percent gain in English proficiency under de Blasio—14.2 divided by 26.4 and a 27 percent boost in math—8.1 over 29.6.
Now, can you imagine the mayor doing this if there had been an increase in the murder rate. Let’s say homicides were up from 6 to 7 killings per 100,000 New Yorkers. Would de Blasio say that murders rose by one percent or by 16.7 percent? You know he would minimize the negative outcome.
2. – De Blasio’s spinners also present 2013 as their baseline year. But Mayor Bloomberg owned the 2013 results and most of 2014’s, as well. De Blasio didn’t arrive at City Hall until January 1, 2014. The English test was given on April 1, 2014.
Why would they go back to 2013? It allows de Blasio to start his story the year the ELA and math results tanked–creating a fictional narrative of tremendous achievement. For 2013 was the year the Common Core-aligned tests descended on the schools and rained rigor down on 440,000 New York City students. De Blasio wants to embrace Bloomberg’s bottomed-out, third-term school years as his starting point, because things could only improve after that.
Had the Mayor begun his account with the 2015 results, he would still have a 10.2 percent increase to boast about in English proficiency (from 30.4 percent to 40 percent6 percent), but only a 2.6 percent gain to show in math (35.2 percent to 37.8 percent) under his control of the schools. That would be nothing to brag about.
Ironically, as he notes, Joel Klein too tried to claim credit for test score increases that occurred before he took office.
Sad that test scores are now a political talking point. Just proves how meaningless they are.
Johann Neem is a historian who specializes in the study of colonial American education. He wrote the following wonderful post that summarizes his excellent new book, “Democracy’s Schools: The Rise of Public Education in America.”
He rejects the Trump-DeVos conception of education as a private choice.
He writes:
“this conception of public education ignores our collective interests as a society. America’s public schools developed because after the Revolution, Americans realized that leaving education to parental whims and pocketbooks created vast inequalities and could not ensure an educated citizenry. A return to this type of system threatens to exacerbate educational inequality, which already plagues modern America and weakens our democracy. The Founding Fathers saw freedom as the cornerstone of the nation and public schools as essential vehicles to secure it. Guided by their vision, we should work to fix America’s public schools, not abandon them.
“During the Colonial era and into the early American republic, most Americans shared DeVos’s notion that education was a family responsibility. Parents who could afford it taught their children at home, hired itinerant men or women who “kept” school for a fee, or sent older children to charter schools called academies. Most Americans had little formal schooling.
“The Revolution transformed how some Americans thought about education. These Americans agreed with Thomas Jefferson that the future of the republic depended on an educated citizenry. They also believed that the opportunities offered by schooling should be available to rich and poor alike. Many state constitutions included clauses like Georgia’s in 1777: “Schools shall be erected in each county, and supported at the general expense of the State.” But how to execute this directive? The best way, American leaders ultimately concluded, was to encourage local public schools and to limit the growth of academies.
“As early as the 1780s, Massachusetts Gov. Samuel Adams asserted that academies increased inequality because well-off families chose them over local district schools. Citizens, Adams argued, “will never willingly and cheerfully support two systems of schools.” Others shared his concern. New York Gov. George Clinton argued in 1795 that academies served “the opulent” and that all children deserved access to “common schools throughout the state.”
“Adams and Clinton identified a fundamental problem. If too many parents opted out, education would remain a private good, parceled out on the basis of economic means. Reformers, by contrast, hoped to convince Americans that education was a public good and that everyone benefited from high-quality public schools. It would not happen naturally, as Pennsylvania schools superintendent Francis Shunk observed in 1838: “It may not be easy to convince a man who has educated his own children in the way his father educated him, or who has abundant means to educate them, or who has no children to educate, that in opposition to the custom of the country and his fixed opinions founded on that custom, he has a deep and abiding concern in the education of all the children around him, and should cheerfully submit to taxation for the purpose of accomplishing this great object.”
“Horace Mann, secretary to the Massachusetts Board of Education in the 1830s, believed the only solution was to make every family a stakeholder in the public schools. Wealthier families would invest in other people’s children only if their own children attended the same schools and benefited from them. If some families decided to “turn away from the Common Schools” and send their children to a “private school or the academy,” poorer children would end up with a second-class education. To ensure that students and their parents came together as a public, “there should be a free school, sufficiently safe, and sufficiently good, for all the children” in every district. The constituency for the public schools would be forged through the schools themselves as more and more Americans sent their children to them and became devoted to their success.
“And it worked. As more and more families enrolled in the public schools, Americans developed a commitment to sustaining them. By the Civil War, most Northern states offered tuition-free, tax-supported common schools…
“Americans invested in educating one another’s children when most families had a stake in their local schools. The schools themselves fostered this commitment: The public good was not sustained by abstract principles alone but through actual institutions and investments. Certainly, parents have an obligation to look out for their children’s interests, as DeVos observes. Yet, unlike DeVos, Mann did not see this obligation as conflicting with a devotion to public schools. Every family benefited from successful public schools, not just society. But Mann recognized that widely attended public schools would also encourage Americans to fulfill their democratic obligations to one another. Making education a public good was one of the hard-fought victories of reformers after the Revolution, one that safeguarded the spirit of the Revolution and that now risks being reversed.”
Robert Shepherd is a teacher, curriculum developer, author, and much more. Here is how he describes himself on his website:
“Interests: curriculum design, pedagogical approaches, assessment, educational technology, learning, open source and crowd sourced educational materials, linguistics (syntax, semantics, child language acquisition, history of writing systems), hermeneutics, rhetoric, philosophy (Continental philosophy, Existentialism, metaphysics, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, epistemology, ethics), classical and jazz guitar, poetry, the short story, theater, archaeology and cultural anthropology, prehistory, cultural history, history of ideas, sustainability, Anglo-Saxon literature and language, systems for emergent quality control, heuristics for innovation.”
You can download the piece here.
On the Pseudoscience of Strategies-Based Reading Comprehension Instruction, or What Current Reading Comprehension Instruction Has in Common with Astrology
Bob Shepherd
Permit me to start with an analogy.
As a hobby, I make and repair guitars. This is exacting work, requiring
precise measurement. If the top (or soundboard) of a guitar is half a millimeter
too thin, the wood may crack along the grain. If the top is half a millimeter too
thick, the guitar will not properly resonate. For a classical guitar
soundboard made of Engelmann spruce (the usual material), the ideal thickness is
between 1.5 and 2 mm, depending on the width of the woodgrain. However,
experienced luthiers typically dome their soundboards, adding thickness (about
half a millimeter) around the edges, at the joins, and in the area just around
the soundhole (to accommodate an inset, decorative rosette and to compensate
for the weakness introduced by cutting the hole).
To measure an object this precisely, one needs good measuring equipment. To measure around the soundhole, one might use a device like this, a Starrett micrometer that sells for about $450:
