2021 Medley #7 – Playing catch up

Teacher shortage, Punishing schools, Privatization, Facts, Rationality

Apparently, retirement is needed so there’s enough time to go to all the doctor appointments you’re going to need as you age.

Things have been quiet on this blog lately…for a variety of reasons. Now that things are a bit better I have a backlog of unposted Medley entries. To make it a bit easier, I’ll limit my own comments to one, or sometimes two, sentences max (Warning…prepare yourself for compound and run-on sentences)…

THE TEACHER SHORTAGE HASN’T GONE AWAY

‘Perfect storm’ of events causing teacher shortage crisis in Michigan

Who would have guessed that demonizing, overworking, reducing job security, and underpaying an entire profession of people would make that profession unattractive…leading to a shortage of teachers nationwide. Legislatures in large part caused the problem, and are now scrambling to fill classrooms with anyone, even those who are unqualified.

Carol Baaki-Diglio, Assistant Superintendent of Human Resources Oak Park Schools, says districts across the state are seeing an increase in retirements. She says it is part of a trend schools have seen for the past decade, that has been made worse by the pandemic creating more work, stress, and health fears.

“Our staff has also experienced loss. Loss of parents. Loss of colleagues,” said Baaki-Diglio.

She says we are seeing the perfect storm for a crisis.

“The perfect storm being far fewer people are choosing education, so we have fewer coming in, and then we have a mass exodus going out,” she said.

PUNISHING SCHOOLS FOR THE FAILURES OF SOCIETY

In Camden, School Closures Revealed How Unequal the System Can Be

Public schools are name-called as “failing” while legislatures, unable or unwilling to solve problems of unemployment and poverty, ignore their own impact on student achievement. It’s much easier to blame public schools than to accept one’s own responsibility.

During the Obama Administration, thousands of public schools were closed due to being deemed “low performing” because of their students’ test scores [Blogger’s Note: This is also true for the Bush Administration’s No Child Left Behind plan]. This was part of Obama’s Race to the Top initiative, and it resulted in school closures in cities across the United States—including Chicago, Cleveland, New York City, and Philadelphia—in a misguided attempt to improve the education of Black and brown children.

In 2012, Race to the Top caught on in New Jersey, where state officials determined that twenty-three of Camden’s twenty-six traditional public schools were “failing.” After taking over the Camden school district in 2013, state lawmakers made school closures their go-to strategy to remedy poor academic performance or budget shortfalls, despite the negative consequences school closures often led to.

Closing schools continues to be a popular “school improvement” strategy well into this new decade. But based on results in Camden, it’s clearly failed.

Education “ratings” are inherently biased against schools serving racially minoritized and economically marginalized students.

I heard a quote recently (forgot where and from whom) that goes something like, “The way to get rid of high poverty schools is to get rid of high poverty schools.” Legislatures insist on “rating” schools without doing anything to ease the problems of economic and racial segregation. In Indiana, the legislature passed a law that will end the punishment of “F” schools. Now it’s just a tool for shaming them. (I know…more than two sentences. Further down is one with no comment, so we’re even.)

The correlation between the percentage of “at-risk” students and standardized test score “proficiency” (high school) is 0.8

That’s…massive. That’s like the correlation between rain and rainclouds.
Meanwhile…

The correlation between the % of at-risk students in a school and that school’s GROWTH RATE on standardized test scores is…like…zero.

Wow.
OK not wow. Because…well…that’s exactly the point of growth scores. They are designed to take into account the uneven distribution of students across schools.
Schools serving privileged kids are not “better” just because they have higher test scores. Those students would score roughly the same no matter where they went to school.

We can’t say, just by looking at proficiency rates, what the quality of a school is. Because…demography.

CONSERVATIVE PRIVATIZATION AT THE UNIVERSITY LEVEL

Why Conservatives Want to Cancel the 1619 Project

Conservatives claim that America’s public universities are hotbeds of liberal (or socialist) subversion, and UNC is willing to do what they can to “suppress ideas they consider dangerous.”

The prevailing conservative view is that America’s racial and economic inequalities are driven by differences in effort and ability. The work of Hannah-Jones and others suggests instead that present-day inequalities have been shaped by deliberate political and policy choices. What appears to be an argument about reexamining history is also an argument about ideology—a defense of the legitimacy of the existing social order against an account of its historical origins that suggests different policy choices could produce a more equitable society.

Campus Cancel Culture Freakouts Obscure the Power of University Boards

One only needs to look at the billions of dollars of influence the Koch brothers have had on public schools and especially on college campuses to see how the fringe right-wing, now the base of the Republican Party, has had an impact on education in America.

…the right is not underrepresented in higher education; in fact, the opposite is true: The modern American university is a right-wing institution. The right’s dominance of academia and its reign over universities is destroying higher education, and the only way to save the American university is for students and professors to take back control of campuses.

Judge: Betsy DeVos Cannot “Quash” Deposition About Her Actions Re: Defrauded Corinthian College Students

Koch supporter, and billionaire anti-public school advocate, Betsy DeVos is stymied by a federal judge.

Former US ed sec Betsy DeVos did not want to give a formal, in-person account of her decision to side with defunct, for-profit, California-based Corinthian Colleges by not granting monetary relief to hundreds of thousand of students defrauded by this federal-aid-sucking monster.

However, on May 19, 2021, US District Judge William Alsup refreshingly denied DeVos’ “motion to quash a subpoena for her deposition.”

FACTS HAVE A WELL-KNOWN LIBERAL BIAS

Opinion: The Trumpy right is violating everything our children are taught

…only a quarter of U.S. students are proficient in civics, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress. And apparently, the right wants to keep it that way.

A bipartisan bill in Congress sponsored by Republican Sen. John Cornyn of Texas and Republican Rep. Tom Cole of Oklahoma (Disclosure: My wife’s stepmother, Rep. Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, is one of the bill’s Democratic sponsors), would authorize $1 billion a year in grants to pay for more civics and history programs that teach children “to understand American Government and engage in American democratic practices as citizens and residents of the United States.” It’s as American — and as anodyne — as apple pie.

But, as The Post’s Laura Meckler reported over the weekend, “Conservative media and activists are pelting the Republicans who support the bill to abandon it. They call the grant program a ‘Trojan horse’ that would allow the Biden administration to push a liberal agenda.”

Fossil Fuel Interests Caught Peddling Propaganda to Schoolchildren

Science teachers, who work to help students understand climate change, are undercut by propaganda from the fossil fuel industry — funneled through the Heartland Institute — denying science.

Fossil fuel companies and climate denial groups have long sought to shape how the next generation perceives climate change, turning the classroom into a battleground for what the country’s future ideology will be. In 2012, leaked documents revealed that the oil and gas-funded Heartland Institute, a conservative and libertarian public policy think tank that promotes climate denialism, planned to spend $200,000 over two years to sow doubts about the scientific consensus on climate change in K-12 classrooms. Years later, the think tank mailed 350,000 booklets titled, “Why Scientists Disagree About Global Warming” to students across the country.

The Heartland campaign is an overt example of fossil fuel interests attempting to influence children’s understanding of climate change, but groups also employ more subtle methods to paint a favorable picture of the fossil fuel industry.

The Age Of Misinformation

Will teachers be able to leave their own tribal biases behind and help students become critical thinkers? If not, will we ever live in a nation with a shared fact base again?

In one particularly troubling analysis, researchers found that when a fact-check revealed that information in a post was wrong, the response of partisans wasn’t to revise their thinking or get upset with the purveyor of the lie.

Instead, it was to attack the fact checkers.

TIME FOR SOME RATIONAL THINKING

19 Rules for Life (2021 Edition)

Read all 19 of Peter Greene’s rules for a refreshing taste of rational thinking.

1. Don’t be a dick.

There is no excuse for being mean on purpose. Life will provide ample occasions on which you will hurt other people, either through ignorance or just because sometimes life puts us on collision courses with others and people get hurt. There is enough hurt and trouble and disappointment and rejection naturally occurring in the world; there is no reason to
deliberately go out of your way to add more. This is doubly true in a time like the present, when everyone is already feeling the stress.

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DeVos Still Haunts Indiana

ADVANCEMENT OF GOD’S KINGDOM

Betsy DeVos is gone…and her boss will be gone in less than a week, but that doesn’t mean that the party of low taxes for the wealthy has forgotten what Princess Betsy stood for…the advancement of God’s Kingdom in the battleground of “educational reform.”

The Indiana General Assembly for the 2021 session already has thirty-seven bills dealing with “school.” Most notable among them is House Education Committee chair, Bob Behning’s HB 1005 which would…

…create state-funded Education Savings Accounts that certain K-12 students could use for various educational services, including private school tuition.

Just a reminder…in Indiana “private school tuition” means parochial schools more than 99% of the time. Advancing God’s Kingdom, indeed.

Remember when Governor Mitch Daniels told us that it was important for anyone using vouchers to attend a public school for at least a year? Remember when Governor Mitch Daniels told us that vouchers were for poor kids to “escape” from “failing schools?“

You probably wouldn’t be surprised to learn that fewer than half of 2019-2020 voucher recipients ever attended a public school.

And that thing about kids in poverty escaping “failing schools?” That was never the actual intent.

…the real intention of voucher supporters was and is: 1) hurt teacher’s unions; 2) subsidize religious education; and 3) redirect public education money to friends and well-wishers of voucher supporters. Also, a reminder: vouchers do not improve educational outcomes.

This year, the “advancers of God’s Kingdom” in our legislature want to offer more voucher money to more, and wealthier, people. Steve Hinnefeld in his School Matters blog, explains…

Legislators propose expanded vouchers, ESA’s

Under HB 1005, families that make up to three times the limit to qualify for reduced-price school meals – which is over five times the federal poverty level — would become eligible for vouchers in 2022-23. For a family of five, that’s $170,274 a year, more than three times the median household income in Indiana.

Meanwhile, the legislature will likely neglect schools filled with poor kids who need extra help.

And will standardized tests, which are good for only one thing — identifying which schools enroll children of poverty — still be given this year of the pandemic? After all, that’s how schools are labeled “failing.”

Betsy DeVos still haunts Indiana!

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2021 Medley #1: Bye, Bye Betsy and other stories

DeVos Resigns, End wasteful testing,

COVID and education, Choice for schools,

Blaming teachers, The “Science of Reading”

BYE, BYE BETSY

Betsy DeVos Resigns

I was ready to publish the rest of the articles in this post on Wednesday, but I got sidetracked by the horrible events in Washington D.C. Since then I have paused, while I figured out what I wanted to say. Then, last night, Betsy DeVos resigned…

I am against nearly everything DeVos has done during her term as Secretary. She has pushed her agenda of privatization and has rejected pleas to support students overwhelmed by debt. She has ignored racist education policies and neglected the students who need the most help. She hates public education and public educators. I doubt that she cares much for public school students, either. She was never qualified for her job. She never attended a public school. She never worked in a public school. She never sent her children to a public school. She’s an elitist billionaire who cares only about what she can control with her money.

I’m sure she will now return to private life and continue to wreak havoc on public education by buying legislators and using her billions to support private, religious education.

There are a lot of articles discussing DeVos’s resignation — the nation’s worst Secretary of Education appointed by the worst President. Mitchell Robinson verbalizes how I feel about her. After all the terrible things her boss has done over the last four years, she has finally had enough, apparently…

I wish I could find more satisfaction in something I’ve hoped would happen for 4 years.

But as usual, Ms. DeVos did the absolute least she could do (resign), well past the time when it could have made a difference (with 13 days left in her lamest of all duck terms), and is probably only doing it to avoid doing something she doesn’t want to do (invoke the 25th Amendment).

DeVos resigned, allegedly, because her boss’ insurrection attempt was an “inflection point” she simply couldn’t ignore.

TIME FOR TEST WITHDRAWAL

The Tests Are Lousy, So How Could the Scores Be Meaningful?

If anything good can come out of the devastating pandemic still terrorizing the nation, then it’s that there is absolutely no reason to continue our overuse and misuse of standardized tests. Alfie Kohn pens another excellent, thought-provoking piece…

Standardized tests are so poorly constructed that low scores are nothing to be ashamed of — and, just as important, high scores are nothing to be proud of. The fact that an evaluation is numerical and the scoring is done by a computer doesn’t make the result “objective” or scientific. Nor should it privilege those results over a teacher’s first-hand, up-close knowledge of which students are flourishing and which are struggling.

Sadly, though, some educators have indeed come to trust test scores more than their own judgment. One hears about parents who ask a teacher about problems their child is having in school, only to have the teacher reach into a desk and fish out the student’s test results. Somewhere along the way such teachers have come to discount their own impressions of students, formed and reformed through months of observation and interaction. Instead, they defer to the results of a one-shot, high-pressure, machine-scored exam, attributing almost magical properties to the official numbers even when they know those exams are terrible.

SCHOOLS AND COVID-19

COVID and Schools: The Data and Science Then and Now

The conventional wisdom is that it’s safe to send kids back to school. The need for students to be in face-to-face school situations is so important that we should not worry about adults in the building and their susceptibility to COVID, but send the kids so they can get an education (Note: this is often said by the same people who lobby for online charter schools!).

It turns out that the conventional wisdom is wrong. Schools are not always the safest place for kids or adults.

…internationally, they have already figured out in the public consciousness that schools are platforms for superspreading. It is very clear that Covid has taken advantage of some of American’s most challenging traits— denial and hubris— in the debate about reopening schools.

So what does the national data reported in early December by US News tell us about the situation with communities, schools, and Covid?

• 
  Their analysis of their national data shows that the high school student case rate (13 per 1,000 students enrolled for in-person classes) is nearly three times that of elementary school students (4.4 per 1,000).
• 
  They observed that the higher the community case rate, the higher the school district case rate…

THE MYTH THAT TURNS OUT TO BE TRUE

Can charter schools pick the best students? No, but many believe the myth.

Jay Matthews, the reformist Washington Post education writer without any educational training, writes this article about how it’s not true that charters can pick and choose their students…and then proceeds to tell us how charter schools pick and choose their students.

So it’s wrong to say that charters are allowed to pick whatever students they want. But that’s not to say some of them haven’t skirted those rules.

In 2016, the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California and the Public Advocates civil rights law firm found that at least 253 of California’s roughly 1,200 charter schools maintained policies that illegally prevented students from enrolling or remaining at their schools.

A school in Hemet, Calif. said that to apply as a sophomore a student “must be earning an ‘A’ or ‘B’ in both Geometry and Biology.” A school in Redlands said “only students who show steady academic progress . . . will be eligible for enrollment.” Within a few months of the report’s publication, more than 100 charter schools contacted the authors to say they were correcting their policies to get off the bad list…

IT’S ALL THE TEACHERS’ FAULT

The New York Times Adds One Plus One And Gets Three

When the pandemic hit and schools closed, teachers were lauded for their heroism…changing their entire jobs overnight and taking care of their students online. As the public has tired of the pandemic, however, the inconvenience of not having all schools open — despite the danger to those who work in education — has opened teachers up for derision. The very fact of teachers as essential workers has given many the opportunity to blame teachers for inconveniencing their lives.

Peter Greene, in the following two posts, explains some things about education and teaching…

…what the heck do people think teachers do every fall? Seriously. Do they imagine that teachers just assume that all their new students know X, Y and Z because it’s in the curriculum. Do folks imagine that teachers spend the weeks before school poring over BS Test results to learn where their students are? Because, no– mostly the test results aren’t available yet and because teachers are forbidden to see the actual question, all they get is the test manufacturer’s “analysis” of the results, which is mostly hugely broad and unhelpful.

No, in the fall, teachers use a large array of formal and informal assessments to figure out student’s individual weaknesses and strengths. Teachers do this daily, and then they keep doing it all year. This remains one of the great, silly fictions of the BS Test–that the results are useful to teachers who would be lost without them. In reality, the BS Test is like a guy who shows up at the office of a general who is commanding thousands of troops on dozens of fronts and this guy–this guy shows up with a pop gun and announces, “I am here to win this war for you.”

Another Round Of Teacher Bashing

The level of bash, of demeaning insult, in this “selfish teachers close our schools” argument is huge. Because there are only a couple of possible explanations for the picture critics like FEE [Foundation for Economic Education] paint:

Teachers are stupid people who don’t understand the settled science.

Teachers are stupid and also lazy people who went into teaching hoping they would have to never actually work and the pandemic shut-downs are their idea of a gift from God, and they want to stretch out this paid vacation for as long as possible.

Teachers are big fat liars who are pretending not to understand the settled science so they can milk the taxpayers while providing nothing in return.

Teachers should be martyrs who want to give up their entire lives for their students, and if they don’t want to do that (or, incidentally, want to be well-paid for it), they’re lousy teachers and terrible human beings.

Note that all of these include the assumption that distance learning is a big fat vacation. Also, people who chose teaching as their life’s work don’t actually want to teach. Also, as FEE makes explicit, teachers do not have students’ interests at heart. They don’t care about the kids at all (which adds to the assumption of their stupidity, because if you don’t care about children, teaching seems like a pretty dumb career choice, but hey–maybe you became a teacher because you couldn’t manage a real job).

A TAKE ON THE “SCIENCE OF READING”

The Critical Story of the “Science of Reading” and Why Its Narrow Plotline Is Putting Our Children and Schools at Risk

Last one for today, an essential article for teachers of reading and literacy.

#1. Hijacking Terminology
Words have power. The term science connotes credibility, but it also represents evolution and diversity. The “science of reading” has stripped away the dynamic interplay of experiences that grow a child into a reader and a writer and centered the literacy process solely atop phonics. This narrow plotline disregards the impact of writing, comprehension, culture, play, mentor texts, family, and the power of a teacher-researcher to individualize instruction…

#2. Reframing the National Reading Panel…

#3. Attacks on Higher Education and the Problems with NCTQ…

#4. “The Sky Is Falling” atop Declining NAEP Scores…

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2020 Medley #26 — Articles you shouldn’t miss

DeVos’s warning,

Learning during the pandemic,

We don’t need testing this year,

Children are people, too,

The Doctor is in.

Bye-bye!

SPOILER ALERT: DEVOS IS IGNORANT

Betsy DeVos Warns That Biden Will Pick Education Secretary with Background in Education

Andy Borowitz reminds us, in his own entertaining way, that Betsy DeVos hates public schools and knows nothing about education.

While Borowitz’s article is satire, it sadly describes more than one of the nation’s Secretaries of Education (and Bill Bennett probably hated public schools just as much as Betsy…and he was only barely better at keeping it hidden). In fact, knowing nothing about education seems to have been a prerequisite for most of the eleven secretaries. Only three of eleven Secretaries of Education have any experience in K-12 education. And, as far as I know, only one of those three, Terrel Bell, ever actually taught in a public K-12 classroom. John King Jr., who was President Obama’s Secretary of Education for one year, taught in charter schools for three years.

We’ve had lawyers, scientists, political science majors, and athletes as Secretary of Education. Some of them, but certainly not all, attended public schools. Some of them, but certainly not all, sent their children to public schools. DeVos might have been the worst, but she was not the first who knew nothing about education nor the first who didn’t care a hoot about public schools.

When was the last time we had someone without a law degree as Attorney General? When was the last time we had someone without a medical degree as Surgeon General?

Fifty-six million children attend schools in the United States. Ninety percent of those children attend public schools. It’s time for someone who knows something about education, and public education specifically, to be Secretary of Education.

Calling the prospect a “nightmare scenario,” Betsy DeVos warned that President-elect Joe Biden will pick an Education Secretary with a background in education.

The outgoing Education Secretary warned that putting someone with a “pro-education bias” in her job would be like “naming a fox to be Secretary of Hens.”

“For the past four years, I have worked tirelessly to keep our schools free from education,” she said. “It deeply saddens me to think that all of my hard work will go to waste.”

TODAY’S STUDENTS ARE STILL LEARNING

Kids Are NOT Falling Behind. They Are Surviving a Pandemic

Imagine a time when education policy is developed and implemented by people who actually know something about child development and education.

The key is providing people with the opportunities and the circumstances that maximize the likelihood of learning. Not pedantically checking off skills and benchmarks.

None of this is new.

I am not putting forward a radical theory of cognitive development.

Every teacher with an education degree is taught this in their developmental psychology courses. That’s why so many educational leaders don’t know anything about it.

Policymakers rarely have actual education degrees. In fact, many of them have never taught a day in their lives – especially at the K-12 level.

For example, Teach for America takes graduates from other fields of study (often business), gives them a couple weeks crash course in basic schoolology before throwing them in the classroom for a few years. Then they leave pretending to know everything there is about education, ready to advise lawmakers, work at think tanks, or otherwise set policy.

Imagine how things would change if we expected our educational leaders to actually comprehend the field of study they’re pretending to steer.

END WASTEFUL TESTING

Testing Students This Spring Would Be a Mistake: Especially now, high-stakes tests tell us very little we can’t know in other ways

Dr. Shepard has spent more than fifty years working and researching education topics. She’s much more qualified in the field of education than the “reformers” who insist on yearly national testing. She’s more qualified than the politicians and policy-makers who lobby for high stakes “accountability” in public education. She knows that there’s no reason to give wasteful and unreliable tests to students who have been traumatized by a pandemic for the better part of two school years.

Even under normal circumstances, high-stakes testing has negative consequences. State assessment programs co-opt valuable instructional time, both for weeklong test administration and for test preparation. Accountability pressures often distort curriculum, emphasizing testlike worksheets and focusing only on tested subjects.

Recent studies of data-driven decisionmaking warn us that test-score interpretations can lead to deficit narratives—blaming children and their families—instead of prompting instructional improvements. High-stakes tests can also lead to stigmatizing labels and ineffective remedial interventions, as documented by decades of research.

Most significantly, teachers report that they and their students experience high degrees of anxiety, even shame, when test scores are publicly reported. These stressors would undoubtedly be heightened when many students will not yet have had the opportunity to learn all of what is covered on state tests. A high proportion of teachers are already feeling burnt-out.

CHILDREN ARE PEOPLE

Children are not our future

Children will become adults. In future years they will be the leaders and policy-makers of our society. It’s our job to teach them now, and raise them now, so that they grow and develop into compassionate, rational, competent human beings.

In the meantime, we need to treat them like people.

Plenty of adults act as if children are a mystery, as if nobody can know how to talk to this alien species. There is no mystery. Children are people. People who haven’t yet developed some physiological and psychological aspects, people without limited experience in the world, but people all the same. Not future people. People right now, today.

This “children are the future” talk makes it easy to justify the kinds of bad policy we’ve seen in the last few decades. Sure, let’s start sitting them down to study academic subjects earlier and earlier because there’s nothing about what’s going on in a four-year-old’s life right now that could possibly be as important as getting her packed full of employer-desired skills for the future. It’s easy to deny childhood when you think that all of a child’s Real Life is in the future.

“Children are the future” is often used as a motivational nudge for funding and/or supporting education and can feel like part of a larger conversation that started with “We don’t need to spend money on that–they’re just children.” It’s a conversation one would expect from people who measure a person’s worth in their utility (in particular, their utility to employers). It’s a hard conversation, because if you don’t know that you should care about, look after, cherish and hold close our children, I don’t know how to explain it to you. They are bundles of raw humanity, undiluted and unvarnished. That ought to be good enough.

THE DOCTOR IS IN

“Dr.” Jill Biden Is Fine with Me.

Anti-intellectualism continues to rear its ugly head in the U.S. The Wall Street Journal article and other articles denouncing Jill Biden as somehow fraudulent for using the title “Doctor” (see here, here, and here) are just the most recent indications that ignorance is “in” — knowledge, experience, and competency is “out.”

Last month Marco Rubio denigrated President-elect Biden’s choice of “Ivy League” graduates for his cabinet because they were “normal.” I assume he, like the leader of his party, prefers the “poorly educated.“

That trend against education and competency has been clear in the current federal administration. Take a look at the Secretary of Education (a political science major) and the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (a neurosurgeon), for example. Neither has any experience or training in the field that their government department oversees. They might be intelligent in their own way (and you have no idea how hard it was for me to type that!), but that doesn’t mean that they are competent at what they have been charged to do over the last four years.

My hunch is, however, that the uproar about Dr. Biden’s degree has more to do with the low opinion the academically snobbish have for teachers than whether non-medical doctors deserve the title “Doctor.” It has more to do with her field of study than with insulting people who are educated. Why is there a lower opinion of the field of education in academia? In the US, at least in the last one-hundred years, teaching has been a job for women. Two-thirds of America’s teachers are women, and the male-dominated culture can’t imagine that a “woman’s job” takes any skill.

I know people with Ed.D degrees. I know people with Ph.D. degrees. They have all earned the title “Doctor.”

Biden is headed for the White House, and given her newly-heightened profile, I am not surprised that someone rose to the ugly occasion of trying to cheapen her educational achievement, not because Biden herself was using her title to market herself or some ed-reform product, nor because she was using the title to leverage some other personal gain, but just because an opportunity to show oneself to be a horse’s posterior presented itself.

Jill Biden is widely known as an educator; therefore, her use of the title, “Dr.,” is reasonably associated with that well-known context, even on Twitter. There is no “MD” confusion, and therefore, no problem.

As for her dissertation, I read it. Given the criticism levied against Biden for her Ed.D., I wanted to gauge the effort she had to expend in writing her dissertation and whether her work might be considered a useful contribution to her field (i.e., whether someone might use the findings to inform either practice or future research). After examining her work, I see her effort on its pages, and I believe what she has to offer does indeed contribute to the knowledge base of student experience at the community college level.

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Choose a Teacher!

IN NOVEMBER: DUMP DEVOS

The upcoming election gives us the chance to change the occupant of the White House, which would also, thankfully, remove the person who purchased the office of Secretary of Education.

Betsy DeVos’s tenure at the US Education Department has not gone well. From her lack of educational qualifications to the “Where are the pencils” tweet to the attempt to “strip public money from public schools,” she has shown, to put it mildly, a general lack of interest in public schools.

The vast majority of American students attend public schools and they will all benefit when “dead end” DeVos goes back to her Michigan mansion and her yachts.

But who should replace her? Joe Biden, should he take the Presidential 0ath of Office on January 20, 2021, will nominate someone other than DeVos for Secretary, and he has promised to nominate a teacher.

But if you’ve been a public school educator in the last 20 years, you know that a promise from any presidential candidate, Republican or Democratic, about public education is questionable. Before DeVos, public schools suffered through sixteen years of attack from two different administrations. Peter Greene, in Forbes, tackles the question. Read the entire article…I’ll wait…

Who Should Biden Pick As Education Secretary?

Of course, he has to win first. But Joe Biden comes into the race carrying the education baggage of the Obama administration, and an announcement of a good ed secretary, even a short list, could help whip up some teacher enthusiasm. Also, it’s far more pleasant to imagine what Biden could do than to contemplate more years of Betsy DeVos in the office…

…when the campaign puts together a search committee to narrow down the field, that committee should be loaded with public school teachers as well. Start soon; teachers are going to be extra busy this fall. And teachers—if you don ‘t get the call to help out, send the campaign your picks anyway.

AN UNFORTUNATE TRADITION

It’s been a tradition for American presidents – since Jimmy Carter – to nominate someone unqualified to the office of Secretary of Education. A quick glance at past Secretaries would give you enough information to understand that the position is not reserved for educators, but for political boosters and hacks.

Of the eleven past and current Secretaries of the US Education Department, only a handful have had any experience in public education or even K-12 education.

John King, the previous Secretary, taught for 3 years (yep…three whole years) and became the hated state education chief in New York. Terrell Bell, who got fired from his job as Secretary after one term because he knew too much about education, was a high school teacher and administrator. Rod Paige, who equated teachers who belonged to their teachers’ union with terrorists, also had education training and earned his stripes as the Superintendent of Schools in Houston during the “Texas Miracle” which turned out to be no miracle at all.

Arne Duncan was the “CEO” of Chicago Public Schools – because “CEO” means that we’re running a school system like a business so it’s all good – and he got that job because…why? His mom was a tutor and he watched her (see here, here, and here).

The rest of the pack’s knowledge of public education was either as a parent, such as Margaret Spellings whose web page at the U.S. ED said that she was qualified because she was a mom or because they might have been a student in a public school…once.

In other words, knowing anything about K-12 public education has rarely, if ever, been a requirement for the job of U.S. Secretary of Education.

It’s time to change that!

CHOOSE A PUBLIC SCHOOL TEACHER

Nearly any American public school teacher would make a better Secretary of Education for the United States than Betsy DeVos.

Take me for example…

Like DeVos, I have no experience at running any organization the size of the U.S. ED. And I don’t have her millions of dollars to purchase politicians. On the other hand, I have more than sixty years of experience as a student, teacher, parent, and volunteer in public education compared to DeVos’s zero years. I have been a teacher of students from age 4 through adult at the elementary school, community college, and university levels. In fact, I have more K-12 teaching experience than any previous Secretary of Education.

And like most American educators…

• I know the difference between growth and proficiency.

• I understand that federal laws apply to all schools receiving federal dollars.

• I believe that all children are entitled to a free, appropriate, public education.

• I believe that public education is a public responsibility which, if fully supported, benefits all citizens, and provides for a more productive society.

• I believe that if private or privately run schools accept public dollars then they should be held to the same standards and restrictions as public schools.

• I believe that all schools accepting public funds should accept and provide an appropriate education for all students no matter how expensive they are to educate.

• I don’t think that grizzly bears are a sufficient reason for arming school employees.

But I’m not the only one.

Most American public school teachers know more about public education than most of the previous Secretaries of Education, and it’s likely that any public school teacher in America knows more about public education than Betsy DeVos.

The nation’s children would be better served with an education professional as the U.S. Secretary of Education, than with someone like Betsy DeVos, who has no understanding of teaching and learning, and whose only interest in public education is to destroy it.

Peter Greene suggests that you send the Biden campaign your suggestions for a qualified, public-school-experienced, Secretary of Education. I think that’s a good idea.

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