Author Archives: Lloyd Lofthouse

Larry Cuban turned his blog over to retired Swedish teacher Sara Hjelm, a reader of his blog, who took the opportunity to warn American readers about the dangers of the free-market reforms adopted in Sweden.

Sweden adopted the “reforms” in 1992, allowing families to choose any school, public or private, and send their child there with his/her taxpayer dollars. It is the “backpack full of cash” theory behind the demand for school choice, as advocated here by Betsy DeVos and Jeanne Allen of the Center for Education Reform. The voucher system has led to a growing industry of private, for-profit schools, called “free schools.” Two of the companies that run “free schools” are listed on the stock exchange. They are comparable to our charter schools.

Hjelm writes:

The huge private for profit school companies exist on all these levels, competing for student vouchers. Largest part is in the upper secondary…

The American Prospect has advice for Joe Biden about how he can make dramatic changes on Day One.

Pick your topic: Corporate taxes, the War on Terror, student debt.

Everything is here except for what he can do on Day One to help American education. He can end the Reign of Error of NCLB, Race to the Top, Every Student Succeeds Act, and Common Core. On Day One, he could waive all federal testing mandates for 2021. That would be a start.

President-Elect Joe Biden will soon announce his choice for Secretary of Education. He promised to choose a person with experience as a teacher. He said he wants a Secretary who is committed to public education. Here is my choice.

I can’t think of anyone better qualified to be Secretary of Education than Dr. Leslie T. Fenwick, other than Dr. Linda Darling-Hammond, who is chair of the Biden education transition team and has taken herself out of the running.

Dr. Leslie T. Fenwick is Dean Emeritus of the School of Education at Howard University.

She has been a teacher, a teacher educator, a scholar, and a dean. She taught middle school science in Toledo, her hometown.

She understands the most important needs of American education: adequate and equitable funding; experienced teachers; and a commitment to equity and inclusion.

I have watched her lectures online, and I was blown away by her wisdom…

Bob Shepherd, a frequent commenter here, has been a curriculum writer, as assessment developer, a publisher, and a classroom tea her. As frequent readers of this log know, he is also a polymath, with a broad, nearly encyclopedic range of knowledge.

In this essential post, he explains why standardized testing is invalid and useless for accountability purposes.
They do not measure what they claim to measure.

Here is a brief excerpt from a brilliant explanation:

Nothing that students do on these exams even remotely resembles what real readers and writers do with real texts in the real world. Ipso facto, the tests cannot be valid tests of actual reading and writing. People read for one of two reasons—to find out what an author thinks or knows about a subject or to have an interesting, engaging, significant vicarious experience. The tests, and the curricula based on them, don’t help students to do…

During the campaign, Joe Biden made clear commitments to support community public schools. He promised transparency and accountability for privately managed charter schools, as well as a ban on federal funding for charters operated for profit. He also unequivocally took a stand against standardized testing in a public meeting with hundreds of educators in Pittsburgh. NPE board member Denisha Jones asked him at that time if he would commit to ending standardized testing in the schools. He unequivocally said yes.

The Network for Public Education, joined by dozens of other groups, calls on President-Elect Biden to keep his promises.

To add your group’s name, contact NPE.
https://networkforpubliceducation.org/about-npe/

The charter industry and the billionaires want to replace Scott Schmerelson with a charter employee. They want to buy control of the LAUSD school board.

Don’t let them! Stand with Scott, a veteran educator and a champion of public schools.

Tell the billionaires that the public schools of Los Angeles are not for sale!

Joe Biden needs to have a talk with his policy director Stef Feldman. During the campaign, Biden made specific commitments to reduce the mandates for standardized testing and to reduce the stakes attached to testing. But Stef Feldman met with the Education Writers Association and she didn’t seem to know anything about what Biden had repeatedly said about the misuse and overuse of standardized testing. She said the question should be left to the transition team and the new administration. What?

Feldman refused to commit to granting waivers to the states to bypass the federal mandate for annual testing in spring 2021. DeVos granted waivers in 2020 after almost every school closed down due to the pandemic but said she would not do it again in spring 2021 (hopefully by then she will be back in one of her mansions or on one of her yachts).

It is now late…

A reader who is a scientist wrote to ask why I posted the views of an economist about children and COVID instead of those of a medical researcher. She sent me this interview of Angela Rasmussen that appeared in Science Friday. Rasmussen is a professor at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health.

In the interview, she says:

ANGELA RASMUSSEN: Well, teachers and parents should definitely not think that children are immune or more resistant to the virus. Just because they don’t develop a severe of disease [sic], that doesn’t mean that they can’t be infected and it doesn’t mean that they can’t bring the virus home with them to transmit to other people in their household. It also doesn’t mean that they would be incapable of transmitting it to faculty and staff in schools.

And in general, we– I think a lot of the discussion about schools has…

The National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education has released a study of charter schools and special education by doctoral candidate Katherine Parham at Teachers College, Columbia University.

From the dawn of the charter movement, the subject of charter schools and special education has generated significant controversy.

Albert Shanker cautioned in a Washington Post op-ed in 1994 that the freedom from state and local regulations sought for charter schools would mean control over admissions and thus exclusion of “difficult-to-educate students.” A decade later, Martin Carnoy and his co-authors documented in The Charter School Dust-Up: Examining the Evidence on Enrollment and Achievement (2005) that high-achieving charter middle schools enrolled far more students with strong academic records than neighboring public schools as well as far fewer English-language learners and students with special needs. Similarly, Gary Miron and his co-authors documented in a 2011 study of a major charter management organization…

In this article in the New York Daily News, constitutional lawyer Derek Black explains how Betsy DeVos used her authority as Secretary of Educatiin to send federal dollars intended for public schools to elite private schools and religious schools. Black’s new book, “School House Burning,” is an outstanding read.

He writes:

Betsy DeVos’ agenda to expand private education has floundered for three years. In 2017, public schools’ financial hole was too deep for either party in Congress to consider digging it deeper. But since March of this year, amidst a pandemic that has killed more than 170,000 Americans, cratered the economy and underlined the importance of public education, the U.S. secretary of education has made more headway than in the last three years combined.

Naively, Congress assumed that DeVos would put coronavirus response ahead of her ideological agenda. They were wrong, and now she is on the verge of turning…