Month: January 2017

Posted on in Uncategorized

Why Senator Cassidy Took DeVos’ Hearing for a Joke

One of the most infuriating moments from Betsy DeVos’ hearing is republican Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy’s line of questioning. He asked exceptionally vague questions with the expectation that DeVos’ answers were as equally vague. The main point of any public nominee hearing is for the public to get a taste of what a nominee is capable of through thoughtful and prudent questions from senators.

This Washington Post article explains why Cassidy didn’t care to ask a  more serious, challenging, and engaged set of questions that can provide his constituents in Louisiana with beneficial insight into the capabilities of the potential head of the federal Department of Education. We need to realize that the HELP Committee is voting on behalf of their states and the United States as a whole. So the committee’s questions should elicit and demand more than surface level answers from DeVos. Even if Senator Cassidy knew he was going to vote for her because his education policy initiatives align with DeVos’, the hearing wasn’t about what Cassidy wanted; it was for the benefit of the tens of millions of people who have never heard of DeVos and who don’t know or understand her initiatives. So what’s Cassidy’s issue?  Aside from taking a brief moment to ask DeVos about the highly important and laudable topic  of dyslexia and disability protections, why did he waste his precious, public five minutes of conversation with DeVos that illlustrated only DeVos’ ability to say yes or no to very broad questions? 

Senator Bernie Sanders later points out the DeVos and her family have donated more than $200 million to members of the Republican Party who push the same philosophies as the DeVos’. With that said, it’s no surprise that Cassidy, spreading charter schools and vouchers wherever possible in Louisiana (but especially in New Orleans), received thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from DeVos or her family members in the last three years. 4 out of the other 12 republican senators on the HELP Committee are in a similar position. Why this isn’t a conflict of interest is beyond me. 

In addition to all democrats voting against DeVos, we need three republicans to vote against her as well. Hopefully, republicans will take her poor performance, as noted in my last post, when voting tomorrow.

Posted on in Uncategorized

DeVos Proves to be Incompetent During Hearing

Billionaire Besty DeVos, Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Education, looked like a fool at her confirmation hearing last week. At first, I felt embarrassed and tried to give her the benefit of the doubt–maybe she was nervous. But I resigned that sentiment, as it became obvious that she is blatantly an inexperienced, unfit, visionless, uninformed, and one track minded puppet.

If we learned anything from DeVos’ hearing it’s that she does want to act on two initiatives as Trump’s Secretary of Education: decentralize federal education and privatize our public education system. DeVos seems to believe that most education policy issues should be left to the states, including whether guns should or shouldn’t be in schools. She continuously deferred responsibility to the states. This deferral of responsibility seems to act as both a way for DeVos to let Americans know that she plans on rolling back the federal government’s role in education while allowing her to avoid providing substantive answers that demonstrate her knowledge (or lack thereof) of education policy. Despite her efforts to conceal her ineptitude, senators Warren, Sanders, Murray and Kaine, to name a few, asked questions that revealed how little she knows outside the realm of right-winged charter and  voucher initiatives.

So although Americans can now say that while we know DeVos is likely to try to shed some of the current federal policies currently in place to protect students, such as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, we dont know much outside of that. DeVos did not engage in conversations that clearly illustrated some of her goals or helped America better understand how she would execute a single initiative. Most answers were so vague, she could have applied it to any question. 

It didn’t help when Chair Alexander continuously denied Democrat senators’ request for a second round. Citing precedents from Obama’s two Secretary nominees who brought with them an extensive available-to-the-public education history, Chair Alexander made an unfair decision to limit each senator to one round, five minutes. But Chair Alexander’s decision was all about politics. Anyone listening to DeVos’ answers can tell you they were shallow. He didn’t care that the reason more senators were requesting more time is because DeVos hardly answered questions and when she did, they were surface level. 

Here is the complete hearing:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jnn3T0GKtD8

Here are clips from the hearing:

Elizabeth Warren:

https://youtu.be/ld6k2b-AEfU

Tim Kaine

https://youtu.be/4kJb1wXCxfo

Maggie Hassan

https://youtu.be/fftskn5HFdA

Bernie Sanders

https://youtu.be/cjPHrKqYEgk

Al Franken

https://youtu.be/hMRX_21Le6I 

Posted on in Education

Only 3% Pass NYS Math Test at NYC Public School

I read a New York Times article about the closing or merging of more chronically underperforming middle schools and high schools. The article mentions that these schools are part of a de Blasio program that aims to rehabilitate schools through additional resources, rather than closing or “giving up on them.” de Blasio wanted to give these schools three years to improve under his program. The three years is almost up and some schools in the program, despite the additional resources, are still underperforming to the point where parents, teachers, and education advocates should be up in arms. The Times notes (emphasis mine):

The schools to be closed are all low-performing, to be sure. In the 2015-16 school year, only 8 percent of the students at J.H.S. 145 passed the state reading tests, and only 3 percent passed the state’s math tests. Even so, it is not clear that they are necessarily the worst among the schools in the program. All of the six schools met at least one of the goals assigned by the city last year. Some are being closed for low enrollment as well. 

What is the problem that a school given additional resources to combat the affects of poverty can’t even get grades to show that students are retaining anything? At this point, the middle schools mentioned, J.H.S. 145, should certainly not be considered a school, as learning of any sort doesn’t seem to be happening.

So what could be the problem?

My first thought was what kinds of resources does this school recieve? Perhaps this school, and schools like it, are not receiving enough of certain tyoes of resources or that they are not receiving the right set of resources.

The schools in this initiative receive extra educational instruction time, teachers received additional professional development training, and each school received more funding for ‘wraparound’ efforts that aim to take the effects poverty head on (mental health issues and lack of sufficient food).  What is not clear is how resources are being used, which resources seem to be working, and which resources are not as effective.

At first glance, it would seem that any amount of any of the above resources should have some kind of positive impact, no matter how small. However, on closer inspection, something like additional professional development training for teachers could be ineffective, if the additional training is does not impart new knowledge on the teachers or is not tailored to the needs of any given teacher/group of teachers. It could be that principals and school districts are wasting time and money of programs that don’t work, though they aim to address a serious issue.

As of now, we do not know enough of the how the additional resources are being used.

What else could the issue(s) be? 

This initiative rears away from the Joel Klein administration in many ways. Klein’s biggest initiative was to close down large, historically failing schools and open smaller schools, which turned out to not do any better than the schools they replaced. Between this finding and the fact that additional needed resources (though they may not be used effectively) aren’t changing the academic trajectory of New York City public schools, mayoral control of the citiy’s schools doesn’t seem to be working out in students’ favor.

With that said, I’ve been thinking more and more about school culture and how profound of a role it can play in a school’s success. All the resources and teachers provinding attention to fewer students can still turn out to be harmful when school culture and way of life is not moving along with those initiatives. What’s interesting is that we seem to be trying to jump in and help students at the junior high school level, but the Klein and de Blasio administrations have been ignoring the fact that these students come to junior high school with six years of school culture and attitude that developed  over a child’s most impressionable stages. The school culture in elementary schools is a students first understanding of what it means to be a student. Students and teachers who walk into middle schools and high schools like J.H.S 195 in the Bronx bring with them baggage tossed on them during their prior school experience.

I’m suggesting we’re intervening too late. I applaud de Blasio’s effort to try to mend failing schools but efforts need to start while students are in pre-k. It’s clear that a junior high schools 3% pass rate goes beyond the work done in junior high school. The students come in far more academically damaged and negatively influenced than most would admit, despite that fact being clear as day. I need to go into more detail on the effects of school culture in a later post.

Posted on in Uncategorized

School Choice Advocates Don’t See Flaw in Their View

School choice advocates have been applauding Donald Trump for nominating Betsy DeVos, a stalwart supporter of school choice and charter schools, as the Secretary of Education. DeVos and her family have a lobbied for and funded school choice initiatives in Michigan; DeVos’ husband went as far as starting a charter school. And with Trump’s campaign trail vow to defund public schools and increase school choice and charter school funds, DeVos’ most monumental goal is probably to do just that.

Fred Hiatt published an opinion piece in the Huffington Post that suggests how DeVos should go about this task. Hiatt makes three commendable points:

  1. Any school choice initiative should protect low-income students and families and students with disabilities.
  2. Test the possible school choice proposal on 1-2 volunteering states.

While I agree with the idea that a change of that magnitude should be tested on a micro-scale (Hiatt suggests that a couple of states should volunteer to act as guinea pigs) before being rolled out countrywide, his idea of protecting low-income and disabled students is limited to ensuring they are adequately funded. The article, and others like it, fail to address how these same vulnerable students would be shielded from bad, ill intentioned, inexperienced, for-profit charter, private, and parochial schools that would no doubt prey on these very families. While one could say that poor test scores would cause parents to send their child to another school, the truth is that the money has already been wasted; the child given a poor education and an unstable learning environment. Damage done. And since non-public schools under a school choice system would not be held to the same auditing requirements as today’s public schools, it would be harder to identify and stem financial abuse. Basically, it’s one of the reasons why I have an issue with charter school system.

My second issue lies with the market-based system school choice advocates. There would no doubt be an increase in schools across the board: public, private, charter, and parochial. Without a set of common core standards that states are not required to adopt, standards will undoubtedly be all over the place.

How would school choice cupporters go about fixing these detrimental flaws in their school choice argument?

It’s not that I am 100% against school choice. I just don’t see how deregulation of tax dollars and weak standards would be beneficial to low-income and disabled students.