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Donald Trump Is "an Existential Threat to Public Schools"

by Carol84Iwbrct Posted on January 9, 2017

Mother Jones

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On the day President-elect Donald Trump announced Michigan billionaire philanthropist Betsy DeVos as his pick for education secretary, the heads of the country’s two largest teachers unions jumped to condemn the choice. American Federation of Teachers (AFT) president Randi Weingarten called DeVos “the most ideological, anti-public education nominee put forward since President Carter created a Cabinet-level Department of Education.” National Education Association (NEA) president Lily Eskelsen García noted the administration’s choice “demonstrated just how out of touch it is with what works best for students, parents, educators, and communities.”

Educators have worried that DeVos, a prominent Republican fundraiser, and her support for “school choice” and the use of vouchers would endanger public education. With the billionaire’s confirmation hearing slated for Wednesday, the nation’s two biggest teachers’ unions have gone on the offensive with grassroots campaigns to challenge DeVos’ nomination.

Neither group anticipated Donald Trump to win the election. “We did everything in our power to get Hillary Clinton elected. We didn’t have a plan B,” Weingarten says. “We always thought Donald Trump would be as dangerous as he’s showing he is.” But both unions say they were unsurprised by Trump’s selection of DeVos, whose past work in Michigan align with the president-elect’s proposals to direct federal dollars toward private and charter schools. “We have many, many years of experience with her and her undermining of the public education system in Michigan. We have frontline stories about what her agenda and the Trump agenda has meant to communities and to students,” says Mary Kusler, senior director of the NEA Center for Advocacy. “She was not somebody who was plucked out of thin air for us.”

Education historian Diane Ravitch, who founded the advocacy group Network for Public Education in 2013, described unions as “shocked and worried” by the DeVos selection in an email to Mother Jones. “The previous Republican administrations did not threaten the very existence of public education and teachers unions,” she added. “This coming four years is an existential threat to a basic Democratic institution: public schools. Trump has picked a Secretary who is hostile to public schools. This is unprecedented.”

In the weeks following the election, the unions at the national and local levels turned their attention to trying to disqualify DeVos by emphasizing her lack of experience in public education and her work in Michigan. Last month, the AFT, which has 1.6 million members, went on an education campaign, unveiling fact sheets on DeVos and other Cabinet picks like Labor Secretary-designee and fast-food executive Andrew Puzder and Health and Human Services Secretary-designee Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.). At these agencies, Weingarten says, are “people who have been appointed whose ideology seems antithetical to the mission of these agencies.”

On December 6, the AFT and NEA released a joint open letter condemning Trump’s pick, stating that her “sole ‘qualification’ for the job is the two decades she has spent attempting to dismantle the American public school system.” The letter has amassed more than 130,000 signatures from parents, teachers, and other supporters. Representatives from both unions say that members have been arranging meetings with senators. Meanwhile, local affiliates for both unions have encouraged members to flood senators with calls, emails, and letters in opposition.

Though activity settled down leading up to the holidays, the NEA—the nation’s largest union with 3 million members—expects to ramp up calls from members to speak on behalf of students in the next week to senators on the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, which will oversee DeVos’ hearing. When asked if current efforts to organize around the confirmation hearing was enough to oppose DeVos, Kusler said the union’s members were doing what they could. “At the end of the day, you’ve got to remember: Our members are teaching kids during the day,” she added, likening the current grassroots efforts to that of 2015, when both unions engaged in separate campaigns during the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, now known as the Every Student Succeeds Act. “We’ve never been in this situation around the confirmation for a secretary of education that has looked like this,” Kusler says. “So engaging our members using the tactics we use anyway for a legislative fight around a confirmation of a secretary is unprecedented.”

Katharine Strunk, an associate professor of education at the University of Southern California who studies teachers’ unions, noted that unions would be able to activate their base of support, but that they may have less sway in lobbying efforts, given Republicans’ firm control of the Senate. “If you don’t have the majority,” the AFT’s Weingarten says, “it’s a pretty uphill battle.” Voters who sided with Trump may have wanted to shake up the system, Weingarten adds, but she doesn’t believe that they “voted to end public education as we know it.”

Carol Burris, executive director of Ravitch’s Network for Public Education, says she anticipates a difficult four years for teachers’ unions. The organization engaged in its own campaign, urging its supporters to send letters to senators over the holidays and to call and visit their offices. This week, the network called on members to make phone calls to senators in each state, particularly those on the committee overseeing DeVos’ hearing. “Betsy DeVos and the people who believe what she believes have no patience for unions in any form and certainly not teachers’ unions,” she says. “They see teachers’ unions not as partners in providing a good education for kids, but as adversaries.”

Future challenges from the unions will largely depend on the policies the Trump administration chooses to pursue. In a speech at the National Press Club on Monday, Weingarten warned that DeVos’ nomination threatened the bipartisan agreement around the federal government’s role in shaping education and could undermine the public education system DeVos would be charged with overseeing.

“Betsy DeVos lacks the qualifications and experience to serve as secretary of education,” Weingarten told the audience. “Her drive to privatize education is demonstrably destructive to public schools and to the educational success of all of our children.”

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Donald Trump Is "an Existential Threat to Public Schools"

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"I Fight Back.” Jonathan Kozol’s Plan to Stop Bigotry in Trump’s America

by ModestoBrickhou Posted on November 24, 2016

Mother Jones

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As exit poll numbers rolled in and it became clear that the majority of white voters chose Donald Trump despite the bigotry, misogyny, and xenophobia that came to define his campaign, I thought about the prescient warnings in the work of education journalist Jonathan Kozol. For nearly 50 years, this educator, author, and civil rights activist sounded the alarm about the damage done to pluralistic democracy by our increasingly polarized education systems. He argued that fewer integrated public schools mean fewer opportunities to learn mutual understanding and collective responsibility, essential qualities for a tolerant democracy. With his landmark New York Times best-sellers—Savage Inequalities, Amazing Grace, The Shame of the Nation—Kozol shaped a generation of teachers and writers covering schools and inequality.

Our public schools today are more racially segregated than they were shortly after Brown v. Board of Education was decided in 1954. White children, in particular, are growing up in homogenized environments, attending schools, on average, where 77 percent of students are white. White kids are also less likely than children of color to interact with students from different racial or ethnic backgrounds in their neighborhoods. Understanding and respecting different communities has to start early, and that becomes more and more unlikely if Americans don’t have daily opportunities to interact and connect with each other, a position Kozol has championed for decades.

A week after the election results, I called Kozol—who describes himself as an “eternal optimist”—to ask what advice he has for parents, teachers, and progressives across the country who want to turn their anxiety over the rise of extremism and bigotry into working toward positive changes in our schools and in our society.

Mother Jones: How is your mood as we enter the beginning of the Trump administration?

Jonathan Kozol: I don’t remain low for too long. I fight back. I went through the moment when Richard Nixon was elected in 1968, and I’ve lived through the moment when Ronald Reagan won in 1980. This is worse, but only by degrees. We’ve never had such overt extremism before—that’s new and scary.

MJ: Do you think that the declines in the amount of time students spend learning social studies, humanities, and civic education—especially in underfunded schools serving working-class, rural, and inner-city students—has contributed to the deep divides and the rise of bigotry in the U.S.?

JK: Yes, it did contribute to what just happened in this country. I’ve been worried about this for many years. The loss of social studies eclipses our memory of historical atrocities; it eclipses our memory of the damage done to social orders by extreme racists and xenophobes.

The humanities at their best, especially fiction and poetry, refine the souls of human beings. They open our hearts to compassion, give a profound sense of human vulnerability, and open our hearts to identifying with those who suffer most. The virtual decapitation of humanities and social studies in our public schools over the past 15 years has, I think, helped to narrow our sense of civic decency, collective responsibility, and moral generosity. I don’t think the decline of social studies and humanities explains the election, but these two factors heightened the distrust between the races and the classes in this country.

MJ: How should our civic education—including social studies and humanities—change to help young people appreciate the fragility of democracy and understand and reject extremism?

JK: I’d give the development of critical consciousness the highest priority right now: Empowering young people to ask discerning questions and to feel that it’s okay to challenge the evils and injustices they perceive. The civic education and engagement is being beaten out of kids by this tremendous emphasis on authoritarian instruction and emphasis on one right answer on the test. We need to empower young people to understand that the most important questions that we face in life have limitless numbers of answers and that some of those answers will be distressing to the status quo.

In teaching history, it’s very important to enable students to recognize the very high toll these extremist, racist values have taken in the past. Not only on Latino and African Americans, which is obvious to us, but in earlier generations to Jews, Italians, and Irish people, among others. The cruelty against children of color is part of an old pattern. The best part of the American story is that we ultimately did welcome all of these minorities to the United States and, in time, we saw how beautifully they enriched the fabric of this country.

It’s also important to avoid giving the impression that history is something that is done by famous people who lived 200 or 2000 years ago. When I speak to students, I always say: ‘History is also something you can do. It’s what you do Monday morning about the ideals and longings you felt the night before. You don’t need to look at history, you can enter it.’

MJ: When we talk about the benefits of integration, the emphasis these days has often been on how students of color can benefit from going to schools with higher test scores. What often gets lost is your longstanding argument that integration offers white children the opportunity to fully develop as human beings and responsible citizens who have skills to integrate multiple perspectives. There is a high cost if white children are spending most of their life segregated from daily interactions with people from other racial or ethnic backgrounds.

JK: That’s right. I don’t think standardized test scores can tell us anything significant about what children are learning. One of the greatest gains made during integration was not something that can be reduced to numbers: mutual understanding and respect for each other. It was simply a much higher, richer, fuller, culturally more capacious quality of education, because kids were in schools with students from other backgrounds, and parents with clout made sure that all kids in the school were receiving a full breadth of learning.

MJ: Given that the Trump campaign signaled its preference to use government funding to expand vouchers and charter schools rather than promote integration, what can progressive parents do if they want to promote stronger democratic values and reduce bigotry in our country?

JK: There are plenty of ways in which privileged people could confront the hyper-segregation of our public schools and the profound residential segregation of this nation. And I would argue that they don’t have the right to use the outcome of this election as an excuse to abdicate their own responsibility. The local districts—especially historically liberal districts that surround major metropolitan areas—have a perfect opportunity to expand the kinds of voluntary integration programs that have thrived for many years in places like Boston. At some point there were 27,000 kids on the waiting list for the voluntary integration program in Boston, even though the program can only admit 400 kids every year. The program is still thriving, because there is still state funding—not enough, but it’s there to cover the significant extra costs: transportation, highly qualified teachers, mentors to students who need extra supports.

Any enlightened metropolitan area could create the same kind of program so long as they can convince their legislators to provide what is ultimately a tiny portion of any state budget to make this happen. But even if parents can’t obtain enough money from the state, most of these districts can easily afford to pump some of their own local property tax wealth into receiving schools to make sure it works in a really good, creative way.

One reason this option hasn’t been on the table is that major media outlets avoid drawing attention to these successful programs. That’s a part of the neoliberal drift—don’t talk about segregation. Let’s instead use the latest, so-called data-based, research-driven, miracle solution to create high-scoring, happy, apartheid schools in America. That’s the agenda.

MJ: What is your advice to dispirited progressives? How can they turn their anger toward meaningful action?

JK: Don’t mourn. Organize. That’s the most important part.

If we are going to build a powerful movement to resist these ugly trends that have swept across the nation, we have to build a movement that can sustain itself after the immediate moment of outrage. It’s not too hard to get tens of thousands of people into the streets to protest Trump’s election. One of the weaknesses of the left has been a reluctance to create any kind of structure that could perpetuate the struggle beyond a single incendiary incident. Obviously, movements have to have a good amount of participatory democracy, but there has to be a way to generate and sustain leadership from the grassroots. I don’t mean a single individual, but a cadre of leadership that can guide us to be wise rebels and bring things to completion.

Sometimes we spend too much time—and I’ve done this for years—testifying to Congress and subcommittee hearings. Congress people pat you on the back and say, “I’m on your side.” Then years go by and nothing happens. Political change on that level never happens unless there is a powerful movement comparable to the Civil Rights Movement that was coordinated by the SNCC the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, CORE Congress of Racial Equality, and SCLC The Southern Christian Leadership Conference. These groups scared the establishment enough where they passed the Civil Rights Act and the war on poverty.

At the government level, I think we need to struggle hard to turn around the Democratic Party into a genuine opposition party that it has to be. I think we should move the party in the direction charted out by Elizabeth Warren and resist gravitating to the innocuous center of the spectrum, which the party has been doing for the past 30 years. Bush, Obama, Clinton didn’t do a single thing to deal with the sweeping segregation of our public schools.

We have to struggle hard to make sure that the Democratic party upholds a truly bold vision of what a noble society should be and not just tinker around the edges of injustice. I am convinced that I will live long enough to see that happen.

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"I Fight Back.” Jonathan Kozol’s Plan to Stop Bigotry in Trump’s America

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New Research Confirms Guns on College Campuses Are Dangerous

by tfem31x Posted on November 2, 2016

Mother Jones

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Eight states currently have laws that allow people to carry guns on college campuses. In 24 others, individual colleges can decide whether to allow firearms on the premises. The primary rationale for these laws, according to their supporters, is safety: School shooters, they say, are less likely to succeed in their attacks if students and teachers are armed and able to fight back.

But a new study from Johns Hopkins University shows that campus carry laws are unlikely to deter rampage shooters and may in fact lead to more injuries and deaths. Here are the main takeaways from the research:

Concealed-carry laws do not deter mass shootings

Advocates for looser gun laws have popularized the idea that armed criminals are more likely to attack in “gun free” zones where nobody can fight back against them. Colleges that ban students from carrying weapons are consequently more dangerous, according to proponents of campus carry laws. But this theory is not supported by data, the Johns Hopkins study found. From 1966 to 2015, only 12 percent of 111 high-fatality mass shootings in the United States—at college campuses or elsewhere—took place in “gun free” zones, and only 5 percent took place in “gun restricted” zones, where security guards were armed but civilians were banned from carrying weapons. Another analysis, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, drew similar conclusions: Only 13 percent of mass shootings from 2009 to 2015 occurred in gun-free or gun-restricted zones. What’s more, allowing people to carry concealed weapons has been connected with an increase in violent crime, according to researchers at the Brennan Center for Justice. They noted a 10 percent average increase in violent crime in states that adopted right-to-carry laws.

Armed civilians are not likely to stop a rampage shooter

When a mass shooting does occur, campus carry advocates say, it helps to have responsible gun-toting civilians in the area, so they can thwart the attacker. Pro-gun economist John Lott and other advocates point to 39 incidents where they say armed civilians have helped stop gunmen. But when the Johns Hopkins researchers looked into the cases, they found that only 4 of 39 actually involved an armed civilian stopping a rampage shooter. What about the other 35 alleged incidents? As with various past cases debunked by Mother Jones, they did not stand up to scrutiny: Twenty-two of them weren’t actually mass shootings—sometimes a gun was never even fired. In two mass-shooting incidents, an armed security guard or a law enforcement officer, not a civilian, intervened. In two other incidents, armed civilians helped detain a perpetrator after the shooting had already ended, and they didn’t use guns to do so. In five mass shootings, armed civilians tried but failed to stop the attacker—and three of them were shot in the process.

Separate research from the FBI shows similar results. The bureau looked at 160 active-shooter situations from 2000 to 2013 and found only one case where an armed civilian intervened to stop an attack that was underway. (And that civilian was a US Marine.) In 21 cases, an unarmed civilian interrupted the attack and restrained the gunman. In other words, unarmed civilians were far more likely than those with guns to stop an active shooting in progress.

Respond effectively in an active-shooting situation requires extensive training, the Johns Hopkins researchers noted. “There is no reason to believe that college students, faculty and civilian staff will shoot accurately in active shooter situations when they have only passed minimal training requirements for a permit to carry,” they wrote.

Campus carry could lead to more suicides and other gun violence

College students are much less likely to stop a rampage shooter than they are to use firearms to inflict harm on themselves or others, the researchers found. The brains of young adults are still developing, they explain, and that can compromise impulse control and judgment—both of which “are essential for avoiding the circumstances in which firearm access leads to tragedy.” That could be one reason why 19- to 21-year-olds have the highest rate of homicide offenses, according to FBI data. The risk of violent confrontations increases when you throw alcohol and binge-drinking into the mix, the researchers added.

The risk of suicidal behavior, which peaks at age 16, is also high through the mid-20s, the researchers wrote, noting the prevalence of depression, anxiety, and other mental illnesses on college campuses. “Research demonstrates that access to firearms substantially increases suicide risks, especially among adolescents and young adults, as firearms are the most common method of lethal self-harm,” they explained. In one study of 645 college campuses, guns were used in about a third of suicides by male students.

The Johns Hopkins study also broke down gun violence on campuses another way: Of 85 shootings or “undesirable discharges of firearms” on colleges from 2013 to June this year, only 2 percent involved rampage shooters. Much more common were interpersonal arguments that turned into gun violence (45 percent), premeditated attacks on a single person (12 percent), suicides or murder/suicides (12 percent), or unintentional discharges (9 percent).

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New Research Confirms Guns on College Campuses Are Dangerous

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Supreme Court Will Weigh In on Transgender Bathroom Use

by FrancisFinch Posted on October 28, 2016

Mother Jones

Gavin Grimm Steve Helber/AP

For the first time, the Supreme Court will weigh in on the question of whether transgender students should be allowed to use bathrooms matching their gender identity, rather than the sex listed on their birth certificates.

On Friday, the justices announced they would hear the case of 17-year-old Gavin Grimm, a trans boy in Virginia who sued his school board last year after it blocked him from using the boys’ bathroom at his school. In 2014, doctors diagnosed Grimm, who was born female, with gender dysphoria and recommended that he live and be treated as a boy. Grimm argues that the school board’s bathroom policy singles him out for being different and violates Title IX, a civil rights law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in schools that receive federal funding.

The case comes as the national debate about transgender bathroom access has reached a fever pitch. The Obama administration, which has thrown its support behind Grimm, told public schools in May that they could lose federal funding if they blocked trans kids from the bathrooms of their choice. Twenty-three states have since sued the Department of Education over this directive. They argue that Title IX applies only to sex discrimination, not gender identity discrimination, and that allowing trans kids to use the bathrooms of their choice could violate the privacy rights of other children.

Grimm, who is represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, initially lost his case in district court. But in April, the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in his favor, kicking the case back to the lower court and urging it to respect the Obama administration’s trans-friendly guidance on bathroom access. The district court then granted an injunction allowing Grimm to use the boys’ bathroom while it considered his case again.

In July, the school board filed an emergency appeal with the Supreme Court, asking the justices to temporarily block Grimm from the boys’ room while they decided whether to review the appeals court decision; otherwise, the school board argued, parents might pull their kids out of school. In August, the Supreme Court agreed and temporarily blocked Grimm from the boys’ room. That decision remains in place until the case is resolved.

If the justices are divided and the case results in a 4-4 split, the appeals court’s ruling in Grimm’s favor would stand.

For Grimm, the decision can’t come soon enough. Right now, he has two options: use a single-stall bathroom or visit the bathroom in the nurse’s office. “I feel the humiliation every time I need to use the restroom and every minute I try to ‘hold it’ in the hopes of avoiding the long walk to the nurse’s office,” he wrote recently. A few weeks ago, he had to go to the bathroom at an evening school football game. “Suddenly a night out with friends was marred by the realization that someone was going to have to take me to a gas station if I needed to use the restroom,” he wrote.

He continued, “If you told me two years ago that the Supreme Court was going to have to approve whether I could use the school restroom, I would have thought you were joking…If the Supreme Court does take up my case, I hope the justices can see me and the rest of the transgender community for who we are—just people—and rule accordingly.”

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Supreme Court Will Weigh In on Transgender Bathroom Use

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Obama Fights Back in the Battle Over Where Transgender Kids Pee

by EdwardoIks Posted on October 21, 2016

Mother Jones

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The Obama administration is pushing back against a ruling by a Texas judge that dealt a serious blow to its fight for transgender rights.

On Thursday, the Department of Education announced that it would appeal an August decision by US District Judge Reed O’Connor. O’Connor’s decision temporarily allowed schools across the country to block trans students from the bathroom of their choice until the courts decide whether doing so violates federal civil rights law.

The judge’s decision came in response to a lawsuit filed by Texas and 12 other states against the Department of Education, after the department threatened to pull federal funding from schools that did not allow trans kids to use bathrooms matching their gender identity, rather than the sex listed on their birth certificate. With its appeal, the Obama administration will take the case to the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, one of the country’s most conservative appellate courts.

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Obama Fights Back in the Battle Over Where Transgender Kids Pee

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Here’s Why Some Black Leaders Are Fighting the NAACP Over Charter Schools

by NellDooley Posted on September 28, 2016

Mother Jones

In late July, the NAACP called for a national moratorium on charter schools, claiming they target low-income and minority communities with practices mirroring the predatory subprime mortgage lending industry. Now a group of more than 160 black civic leaders is asking the civil rights group to reconsider, arguing that charters create opportunities for black families that could allow minority students to excel.

In a September 21 letter, a coalition of educators, current and former politicians, public officials, and black leaders claimed that a charter school moratorium would deny parents the opportunity to choose “what’s best for their children”—and restrict access to high-quality alternatives to traditional public schools.

“The proposed resolution cites a variety of cherry-picked and debunked claims about charter schools,” the letter reads. “The notion of dedicated charter school founders and educators acting like predatory subprime mortgage lenders—a comparison the resolution explicitly makes—is a far cry from the truth.”

The NAACP’s proposed resolution, which will be voted on at the national board meeting next month, said that charter schools contribute to racial and socioeconomic segregation and raised concerns over disproportionately “punitive and exclusionary” disciplinary practices, fiscal mismanagement, and lackluster oversight. A few weeks earlier, the Movement for Black Lives, a network of 50 organizations brought together by Black Lives Matter, released a policy agenda that included a similar call to curb the growth of charters.

While the charter school industry is littered with the occasional bad actor, and some charters have even been found to practice “skimming”—illegally screening out potentially challenging students, according to a 2013 Reuters investigation and a recent report by the ACLU and Public Advocates, a public interest law firm—the pro-charter letter highlighted research showing the positive academic benefits and opportunities for black students at charters. Here are three of its main arguments:

1. Black students stand to make short-term academic gains: The letter, citing a study from Stanford’s Center for Research on Educational Outcomes (CREDO), argues that black students benefit from added exposure to charter schools. The 2015 study of 41 cities in 22 states found that students attending charter schools in those areas made slightly higher academic gains in both math and reading compared to students in traditional public schools. The gains were particularly pronounced for low-income, black, and Hispanic students, as well as English-language learners. Poor black students, for instance, received the equivalent of 59 additional days of math learning and 44 days of reading learning. For poor Hispanic students, the gains were 48 days of math instruction and 25 days of reading.

Andrew Maul, an assistant professor at the University of California-Santa Barbara’s Graduate School of Education, questioned the CREDO report’s research methods, including that the sizes of the effects “are very small.” (In response, CREDO noted that the study looked at the change in student test scores from year-to-year as a sign of academic growth, rather than the test scores themselves.)

An earlier study commissioned by the US Department of Education in 2010 showed modest improvements for low-income and underachieving students who attended urban charter middle schools. They scored higher on math tests but fared the same on reading scores as their peers at traditional public schools. Students from higher-income backgrounds saw adverse outcomes in math and reading scores. Overall, on average, attending charter middle schools with lotteries had no “significant impacts” on student achievement.

2. There are long-term gains, too: As Kristina Rizga wrote in her latest magazine story, 35 percent of Philadelphia students attend charter schools. While the growth of charters has put a financial strain on the local school district—and contributed to school closures and the push out of black educators—many students have seen improvements in academic performance. Between 2006 and 2012, 61 percent of Philadelphia charters posted higher scores in math and reading than peers at traditional public schools, according to CREDO. In the long run, according to a study of outcomes for students in Chicago and Florida, students attending charter high schools were more likely to graduate, stay in college, and earn more money than students in traditional public schools, according to a 2014 report by Mathematica.

Still, the 2015 CREDO report notes that the effects vary by region. Students in urban areas such as Boston, Memphis, and Newark, for instance, saw positive gains in math and reading. But in the Southwest, Florida, and Texas, students saw adverse outcomes.

3. Black families view charter schools as “immensely popular”: The letter also notes that charters are a popular alternative to traditional public education—in fact, tens of thousands of students across the country are currently on charter school waitlists. A recent survey conducted by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools showed that at least 80 percent of black, Hispanic, and low-income parents supported the opening of charter schools in their area. And since 2000, the number of charters nearly quadrupled, from about 1.7 percent to 6.6 percent of public schools. The letter notes that the moratorium would affect 700,000 black families, as black students make up 27 percent of those enrolled in charter schools.

In Massachusetts, voters will decide this year on a ballot measure seeking to expand the state’s annual quota on charter schools to add 12 more to the current limit. A Brookings study in mid-September found that charter schools benefited students in the state’s urban areas, particularly for traditionally disadvantaged students. For students in rural and suburban areas, those benefits disappear.

“For many urban Black families, charter schools are making it possible to do what affluent families have long been able to do: rescue their children from failing schools,” the letter notes, adding: “Making charter schools the enemy in a fight for adequate education funding doesn’t serve the interest of all students. We cannot sacrifice another generation of students to the status quo.”

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Here’s Why Some Black Leaders Are Fighting the NAACP Over Charter Schools

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Here’s Where Vaccine Skeptics Live Around the World

by MurrayWakefield Posted on September 12, 2016

Mother Jones

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More than 13 percent of Americans disagree with the statement that “vaccines are safe,” according to a new study by researchers at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. That puts America in the middle of the pack of 67 countries where researchers examined views towards immunizations in what they believe to be the largest survey on vaccine confidence to date.

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Published last week in Ebiomedicine and based on surveys of 66,000 people, the findings show stark variations among countries. France took the lead of vaccine skeptics, with a staggering 41 percent of respondents disagreeing with the statement that vaccines are safe. Authors attribute the country’s “extreme negative sentiment” to controversies over the past two decades around the unproven side effects of a range of vaccines, from hepatitis B to H1N1. (The hesitancy reflects what the French are hearing from their doctors: One in four general practitioners said that vaccines recommended by public health authorities aren’t useful, according to a study last year.)

Meanwhile, in Bangladesh, Saudi Arabia, and Argentina, less than two percent of respondents were skeptical of vaccine safety.

Authors observed a counterintuitive finding: countries with higher education rates were generally more skeptical of vaccine safety, but within countries, more educated citizens were less skeptical. (Clusters of vocal vaccine skeptics in areas with a highly educated population—like California’s Marin County and Boulder, Colordo—appear to be exceptions to this rule.) “Our research thus stresses the emerging shift away from access to vaccines as the primary barrier to vaccination in many countries,” the authors write.

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Here’s Where Vaccine Skeptics Live Around the World

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Will Hillary Clinton’s Education Policy Break From Obama’s in a Huge Way?

by LatonyaRaymond Posted on September 9, 2016

Mother Jones

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Before Hillary Clinton gave her speech at the Democratic National Convention in July, organizers fired up the crowd with a video extolling President Barack Obama’s key policies: health care reform that extended coverage to an estimated 20 million more people; the $62 billion bailout of General Motors and Chrysler that saved about 1.5 million jobs; the killing of Osama bin Laden.

But one major issue was conspicuously missing from the highlight reel of Obama’s achievements: education.

This glaring omission is just one of many signs that Clinton is distancing herself from Obama’s education policies. On her campaign website, Clinton’s K-12 page avoids any discussion of testing, accountability, or expansion of charters—the main focuses of Obama’s administration. Perhaps most telling, Clinton’s choices of advisers signal her attempt to move Obama’s test-driven K-12 agenda toward the center.

Clinton’s K-12 working policy group, according to a Democrat close to the campaign, comprises a mix of teachers’ union leaders, proponents of test-driven reforms, and advocates for increased investments in underfunded schools.

The previously unreleased list includes:

Chris Edley Jr. the president of the Opportunity Institute, a California-based think tank that works mostly on early-childhood and college access initiatives
Lily Eskelsen García, the president of the National Education Association, the nation’s biggest teachers’ union
Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, the second-biggest teachers’ union
Carmel Martin, the executive vice president for policy at the Center for American Progress and onetime adviser to former Education Secretary Arne Duncan
Catherine Brown, the former vice president of policy at Teach for America and current vice president of education policy at the Center for American Progress
Richard Riley, the secretary of education under Bill Clinton who’s known for his views that don’t neatly fit into the pro-reform or pro-teachers’ union wings of the Democratic Party. Riley supported testing and accountability but also pushed with equal fervor for smaller classes and more funding for schools.

The inclusion of teachers’ union leaders—who were not advising Obama’s campaigns and are among some of the most powerful opponents of his education policies—marks an especially sharp break from his administration. By contrast, many of Obama’s advisers—and later staffers at the Department of Education—viewed teachers’ unions as obstacles to school improvement and had close ties to the Gates Foundation, which championed many federal policies that encouraged both numbers-driven teacher evaluations and charter schools.

But while Clinton’s K-12 advisers may suggest a more teacher-friendly approach to policy, they don’t exactly indicate that, if elected, she would push for the end of test scores in policy decisions. The Center for American Progress, a progressive DC-based think tank closely aligned with Clinton, has been generally supportive of Obama’s test-based education policies; meanwhile, as education secretary, Riley helped lay the foundation for the modern standards and accountability movement.

Still, Clinton’s teacher-friendly speeches and lack of emphasis on test-based accountability are making many of the reform groups that had influence in the Obama administration nervous. “There’s a lot of anxiety about the transition from this president to the next administration,” said Shavar Jeffries, the president of a think tank affiliated with Democrats for Education Reform, a powerful pro-testing group, during a recent education forum.

“Obama had positioned himself as a reformer who was unapologetically for charter schooling, teacher evaluations, the notion of common standards,” said Rick Hess, a veteran education policy expert with the conservative American Enterprise Institute. “With Clinton, you see an agenda that leans much more toward teacher unions than the Democrats for Education Reform.”

We’re Losing Tens of Thousands of Black Teachers. Here’s Why That’s Bad for Everyone.

Most of Clinton’s shift has to do with two of Obama’s relatively small but widely unpopular federal programs: Race to the Top and School Improvement Grants. These initiatives offered about $9 billion in grants that were tied to prescriptive policies like evaluating teachers based in part on student test scores and to dramatic school “turnarounds,” which included closings and mass firings of teachers. Even though these grants contributed just a tiny fraction to state education budgets (for example, Race to the Top accounted for 0.63 percent in New York in 2011), they had an outsize impact on schools: The numbers of standardized tests and curricula that mimicked multiple-choice questions exploded, especially in schools serving low-income black and Latino students. And as districts fired staff or closed schools with low scores, thousands of educators, especially black teachers, lost their jobs or left teaching all together.

In the last three years, opposition to these policies has gained a lot of steam. Last year, for example, 1 in 5 students in New York opted out of standardized tests, forcing policymakers to remove test scores from teacher evaluations. In August, Black Lives Matter organizers called for a moratorium on both public school closures based on test scores and the expansion of charters to replace them. Many of these opponents argue that test-based reforms haven’t been working: While racial achievement gaps have narrowed slightly since 2001, they remain stubbornly large and shrank far more dramatically before No Child Left Behind (NCLB), when policies focused on equalizing funding and school integration, rather than on test scores.

Perhaps because of how divisive school reform has become among Democrats, Clinton’s education campaign so far has poured most of its energy into its early-childhood initiative—an education issue that has more allies in Congress than any other and has been one of Clinton’s signature issues for decades. There is also a growing pile of evidence that investments in early childhood for poor kids may have bigger returns than a focus on raising test scores. Obama already pushed for expansion of pre-K education, and Clinton wants to make preschool universal for four-year-olds and double the number of children enrolled in Early Head Start, which includes home visits by a social worker or nurse during pregnancy and parent coaching in the child’s first three years. Paul Tough, the author of Helping Children Succeed, found that the United States spends only 6 percent of all public early-childhood dollars on interventions targeting the child’s first two years, even though that’s when kids’ brains are most malleable for positive development. (The rest goes to kids ages three to six.)

When it comes to reform ideas after preschool, Clinton’s campaign page contains relatively few policy details. It does call for investing in K-12 teachers and schools through a “national campaign to elevate and modernize the teaching profession,” rebuilding crumbling public school buildings, and increasing funding for teaching computer science. The boldest and most detailed section discusses the need to disrupt the “school-to-prison pipeline”; Clinton promises to send $2 billion to states to reduce suspensions and expulsions that disproportionately affect black students and “implement social and emotional support interventions.”

Clinton has made clear in speeches that she supports testing, but she has said she wants to have “better and fewer tests”—a position that mirrors comments from both Obama and Duncan over the past two years. Meanwhile, on accountability—which measures to use to evaluate schools and teachers, and what to do when they are not meeting the mark—Clinton’s campaign pages and speeches haven’t offered much detail. But that’s in large part because the new Every Student Succeeds Act, which replaced No Child Left Behind last year, moves these decisions largely to states, and the specifics of its implementation are still being hashed out in Congress.

Many nations with higher-performing students, like Finland, Singapore, and Australia, already use fewer and broader tests for accountability. In these countries, standardized tests are used in combination with real student work, graded by trained teachers, to measure the performance of schools, as NPR’s lead education blogger, Anya Kamenetz, documents in her book The Test. Stanford professor Linda Darling-Hammond—who was considered for the secretary of education job after Obama was first elected, and could again be a top contender if Clinton is elected—has been calling for a similar accountability system in the United States. A 2014 testing-reform plan co-authored by Darling-Hammond recommends fewer multiple-choice tests and increased capacity at the local and state level to develop yearly “performance assessments”—student work that reflects what professionals actually do in the real world, like essays, group work, individual presentations, and science projects.

But that’s just one piece of the larger puzzle, according to José Luis Vilson, a veteran math teacher in New York City and the author of This Is Not a Test: A New Narrative on Race, Class, and the Future of Education. Vilson hopes to see increased investments in professional development and coaching of teachers, far beyond the three to five hours a week that’s typical in American public schools. Teachers in Finland, Singapore, and South Korea spend 15 to 25 hours each week working to improve their craft.

Today, the push to create fewer and better tests and improve teacher training faces the biggest obstacles in the schools that need them the most: those with large numbers of low-income students. In the past 10 years, the per-student funding gap between rich and poor schools has grown by 44 percent. The Title I program, a federal initiative created to equalize these disparities, is broken: A 2016 investigation by USA Today found that 20 percent of Title I money ends up funding affluent school districts. Meanwhile, a majority of US public school students come from low-income families, and about 10 percent of them live in deep poverty—in families that earn less than $11,000 a year.

Clinton has expressed support for more federal funding for poor students and those with special needs in her speeches. In a radio interview this year, Clinton said, “The federal government has an opportunity—and I would argue an obligation—to help equalize spending” on schools.

Jonathan Stith, who as national coordinator of the Alliance for Educational Justice worked closely on the development of the Black Lives Matter policy agenda, said he is encouraged to hear a call for higher investments in struggling schools. But he’s disappointed that Clinton’s K-12 agenda lacks detail and doesn’t include any discussion of systemic racism in education. “The agenda’s vague language can be seized by states to continue to do these same school ‘turnaround’ and push-out policies that have contributed in part to the rise of the Movement for Black Lives,” Stith said.

Ultimately, Stith and others agreed that Clinton’s biggest choices are still in front of her. Whether issues of race, better tests, and access to high-quality education will be addressed with meaningful policy will depend a great deal on the types of advisers and staffers she’d select as president, said Samuel Abrams, professor of education at the Columbia Teachers College and author of Education and the Commercial Mindset. Abrams, who taught in public schools for 18 years, argued that most advisers, staffers, and policymakers in the Education Department must have a proven record of success with the hardest-to-reach kids. “I failed so many times as a teacher,” he said. “Until you understand the complexities of why and how that failure happens, you won’t make good policy in education.”

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Will Hillary Clinton’s Education Policy Break From Obama’s in a Huge Way?

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A Tip for Parents as the School Year Begins: You’re Not Totally in Control, and That’s Okay

by WendyWWQHcs Posted on September 5, 2016

Mother Jones

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For more than a quarter century, psychologist and author Ross Greene specialized in the most challenging children. Last year, I wrote about how his collaborative approach to discipline is diverting the school-to-prison pipeline. Schools trained in his method reported suspensions falling by as much as 80 percent. And after implementing his model, youth prisons and an adolescent psychiatric ward saw recidivism, injuries, and the need for restraints drop by more than half.

Greene’s new book, Raising Human Beings: Creating a Collaborative Partnership With Your Child, addresses a broader audience and articulates a discipline and parenting framework for all children. One day, after he dropped his oldest child off at college, he spoke to me about the biggest parenting challenges, raising kids in a scary world, what parents should know as they face the back-to-school season, and what truly builds grit in children.

Mother Jones: This is your first book for a general parenting audience, as opposed to focusing on behaviorally challenging kids. What is different here?

Ross Greene: For a very long time, people have been saying to me, “What if you want to do this approach with every kid?” For a behaviorally challenging kid, you’re parenting this way just to help bring the kid’s behavior under control and to greatly reduce conflict. But you want to teach all kids the skills that are on the better side of human nature: empathy, appreciating how one’s behavior is affecting other people, resolving disagreements in ways that do not involve conflict, taking another’s perspective, honesty.

READ: What If Everything You Knew About Disciplining Kids Was Wrong? Tristan Spinski/GRAIN

MJ: What are the most common mistakes you see parents make?

RG: The biggest mistake is overdoing it on the unilateral approach. Thinking you have more control than you really do. Losing sight of the fact that you’re your kid’s partner, not the person who’s pulling all the strings. Not letting them struggle. Swooping in and fixing everything and being way too punitive when punitive really doesn’t accomplish very much.

MJ: You write that modern parents are rejecting both authoritarian and permissive parenting—you call the approaches the “Dictatorial Kingdom” and the “Pushover Provinces.” But parents report feeling lost. Why is it so hard for parents to find a new path?

RG: Reason No. 1 is because of how they themselves were raised. Reason No. 2 is we’ve been lacking the technology. A lot of parents aren’t exactly sure how to go about solving a problem with a kid in a way that’s mutually satisfactory—doing that with their child feels very foreign to a lot of people. It probably explains why so many parents tell me their kids don’t listen to them and why so many kids tell me that they don’t feel heard.

MJ: Your discipline model has three specific steps. First, reflective listening to gather information from a child about the problem; second, sharing your concerns with the kid; third, working toward mutually satisfactory solutions. This can appear complicated and time-consuming, but when we wrote about it, some readers said it seemed intuitive and plain common sense. Which is it?

RG: I like to call it uncommon common sense. There is still quite the vibe out there that as a parent you have to be completely in control and in charge. This model acknowledges that being completely in control is a fantasy. This kid was someone the minute he or she popped out, and the idea that we can take this lump of clay and mold it into a form of our choosing is absolutely ludicrous. People still look askance at a kid in the supermarket who’s pitching a fit and think the parent is not sufficiently in control or not being sufficiently punitive. That’s an issue for a lot of parents as well.

MJ: Your chapter on “Parental Angst” resonated with me. It’s one thing to read a book and decide to change your parenting—it’s another thing to stick with it. What gets in the way of parents implementing your model?

RG: It does take practice. It’s not something you do well the first time. Another huge challenge is that most parents are accustomed to dealing with problems in the heat of the moment. When people are rushed, they’re stressed and you greatly increase the likelihood of being punitive and unilateral just because you’re trying to grasp control. The vast majority of things parents and kids get in conflict over are highly predictable. We’re disagreeing about the same expectations the kid is having difficulty meeting every hour, every day, every week. Because it’s predictable, we can have these conversations proactively. That is very hard for people.

MJ: Why is it useful to shift one’s view from “this child is misbehaving” to “the child is having difficulty meeting expectations”?

RG: Parents are much more likely to be attuned to what they don’t like than they are to the expectations that the kid is having difficulty meeting. Challenging behavior is just a signal, the fever, the means by which the kid is communicating that he or she is having difficulty meeting an expectation. Everybody is talking about the behavior. Behaviors float downstream to us. We need to paddle upstream. The problems that are causing the behaviors, that’s what’s waiting for us. It’s a crucial paradigm shift. We’re moving away from carrots and sticks, and time-outs and privileges gained and lost, and suspensions and detentions in schools, none of which will actually solve the problems that are actually causing the behaviors. It’s a whole lot more productive to be in problem-solving mode than it is to be in behavior modification mode. We’re focused on what’s causing the fever.

MJ: Can you explain how compatibility informs parents’ actions?

RG: When there’s a good fit between skills and expectations, there’s what we call compatibility, and we would expect a good outcome. When there’s a poor fit between expectations and the capacity of the kid, there is incompatibility, and that’s when we see people exhibit challenging behavior. People don’t scream or swear or pout or sulk when there’s compatibility. But most growth occurs when there’s incompatibility. When it comes to resilience, when it comes to pulling yourself up when you’ve fallen down, you don’t learn those things when things are going well. You learn those things when you’re struggling. So that’s when parents have to decide: “Am I going to swoop in and take control here to make sure that things go really well for my kid? Or am I going to do this in a collaborative fashion so that the problem ultimately does get solved but I’m involving my kid in the process so he learns how to do it for himself?” How I conduct myself when I get involved goes a long way to determining whether my kid is going to have the skills to solve the problem themselves in the long run.

MJ: What are the most common conflict areas between parents and kids?

RG: Homework. It’s so crucial to really get a good handle on what’s getting in the way of the kid completing a homework assignment. It can be so many things. Kids are overprogrammed these days. School is very demanding these days. No kid should be getting three or four hours of homework a night. There’s no breathing time, there’s no family time, there are just extracurriculars and homework and then go to bed. That’s a solution that has to involve the school as well.

Screen time is another very common one. It’s become a really important way for people to communicate with each other these days. But if we’re sitting at dinner and there’s no conversation going on because everybody’s got their head someplace else in their iPhone, that’s a family problem that needs to be solved. Solutions can’t be imposed. That just fosters resentment. If a solution isn’t mutually satisfactory, it’s not going to stick.

MJ: You write about kids who become suicidal, cut themselves, struggle to succeed in life. Parental fear is behind a lot of the controlling behavior. What can parents do to let go a bit and follow your advice to raise human beings?

RG: I just dropped my 18-year-old daughter off at college. I have fears about how she’s going to do academically. I have fears about how she’s going to do socially. I’m worried. I also have faith. Over 18 years of us solving problems together, my daughter has shown me that she’s got a good head on her shoulders, that she is pretty good at solving the problems that affect her life. If she wants my input, she gets it. If we’re being unilateral, then communication does not happen, the relationship does not happen. We never get to see that our kid is capable of solving problems on her own. We never start to build up the faith that they can actually do it.

We have forgotten that those skills on the more positive side of human nature have to be taught, have to be modeled, have to be practiced. The method of parenting described in Raising Human Beings is a perfect mechanism for teaching those skills. This is not me in sales mode, I fervently believe there’s never been a more important time for this book. It’s a scary world out there.

MJ: As we go into a new school year, what’s the one takeaway you want parents to have from your book?

RG: Be your kid’s collaborative partner, but also be a collaborative partner with the folks at school. Schools can be pretty unilateral too. Show them you know how to collaborate. Show them this is not about power. Let them know detentions and suspensions and paddling don’t solve the problems that are affecting kids’ lives. Those problems can be identified and solved but not by being punitive. My advice to educators is collaborate with parents; they know a lot about their kids.

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A Tip for Parents as the School Year Begins: You’re Not Totally in Control, and That’s Okay

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Here’s the Problem With California’s Groundbreaking Sex Ed Law

by KayleigXuo Posted on September 2, 2016

Mother Jones

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Five years ago, budget cutbacks in the Fresno Unified School District put an end to “Sociology for Living,” a half-year course for ninth graders—and the only mandatory class taught in the 74,000-student district that involved sex education. Fresno has some of California’s highest rates of gonorrhea and chlamydia, plus the sixth-highest teen birth rate in the state. Yet school officials dismantled the curriculum, according to an investigation by the Fresno Bee, passing off lessons from the class, including HIV prevention, to other teachers. They explained the cut as a way for students to fit more AP classes and electives into their schedules.

A local teen pregnancy prevention group, Fresno Barrios Unidos, soon began a four-year effort to institute comprehensive sex education, according to executive director Socorro Santillan. They met with school board officials and trained youth to advocate comprehensive sex education in their high schools. But only after California passed the Healthy Youth Act in October 2015, making sex education mandatory in all districts, were they able to reach an agreement with the district. Classroom teachers would cover basic lessons like goal setting and life planning, while Fresno Barrios Unidos volunteers would teach subjects that were, Santillan says, “a little more touchy,” like STDs and birth control.

When the Healthy Youth Act passed last fall, California joined 23 other states in requiring that all schools teach teenagers about sex. But California’s law goes further, mandating that comprehensive lessons start in middle school and include information on abortion, sexual assault, and sexual harassment. It’s also the only state to require sex education be medically accurate, age-appropriate, and culturally inclusive, without promoting religion. Sharla Smith, who has overseen HIV and sex education for the California Department of Education since 2005, calls the new law “the most robust sex education law in the country.” Most lessons will start this school year.

There’s just one problem: The state has little way to ensure school districts teach to these new standards. While Smith heads a team that keeps in touch with counties and districts, the state stopped auditing districts for compliance about four years ago because of dwindling funding from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “We’re trying to do the best we can by hook or by crook,” Smith said. “I literally just do not have the money.”

“How will we know that everyone is actually being taught this? Because the law has gotten a lot of publicity,” said Christopher Pepper, who oversees San Francisco Unified’s sex education program. “I’m hoping that leads to greater compliance.”

While districts like San Francisco and Los Angeles Unified have long taught comprehensive sex education and are simply tweaking parts of their curriculum or adapting existing lessons for middle school use, it’s a different story in poor, rural areas like the Central Valley, according to Phyllida Burlingame, who works on the issue for the American Civil Liberties Union’s Northern California office. With fewer resources and a more conservative culture, some of those districts have a history of ignoring even the state’s old, looser requirements. That was the case in Clovis Unified School District, which the ACLU sued in 2012 for inadequate sex education—including using a textbook that lacked a single mention of condoms. (A judge ruled against the district last year.) “School district administrators feel that this is a complicated and challenging subject and parents in their community may not support it,” Burlingame said. “They tend to self-censor what they teach.”

Since 2003, the state has told schools that if they chose to teach sex education, they had to make sure lessons were comprehensive rather than focused on abstinence until marriage. Yet a 2011 survey from researchers at the University of California-San Francisco found that many school districts were not complying with the law. Forty-two percent did not teach about FDA-approved contraception methods in middle and high school, and only 25 percent mentioned emergency contraception. Sixteen percent told their students that condoms “are not an effective means” of protecting against pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease—an inaccurate statement, the study noted.

“California’s state financial crisis has eroded much of its network of valuable preventative health programs for young people, making schools one of the last strongholds for providing adolescents with comprehensive sex education,” the authors wrote. “Policies set at the district level may not correspond to the actual instruction taking place.”

After the financial crash, many schools also stopped teaching health classes or changed them from a graduation requirement to an elective, Smith says, and lessons on HIV and STD prevention were incorporated into science or English classes instead. Schools that dropped their health programs will not be subject to a second law, also passed last year, requiring health curricula to include information on affirmative consent—the “yes means yes” standard for consent on California college campuses.

Smith is optimistic, though, that schools will continue to react to rising STD rates among teenagers by implementing the comprehensive lessons required under the new law. “Schools have really been clamoring to teach more sex education, saying we need to do this for our students’ health,” she said.

Still, in the absence of state oversight, the task of ensuring that school districts are talking to kids about safe sex will fall to local groups like Fresno Barrios Unidos. And as the schools get back into gear for the fall and begin implement their lessons, the ACLU will be watching and lending support, Burlingame says: “Districts are aware of this new law and understand they should be implementing it. We’re counting on them to do so.”

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Here’s the Problem With California’s Groundbreaking Sex Ed Law

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