Across the country — and unfortunately, here in Massachusetts — we are seeing right-wing advocates mobilizing on behalf of narrowing school curricula, banning books, and erasing the experiences of LGBTQ youth.

That’s why it was great to hear that Governor Healey is taking steps to move Massachusetts in the opposite direction – that of inclusion.

According to Sex Ed for Social Change, which follows state trends in sex education, the curriculum framework for schools here in Massachusetts was last updated in 1999.

Healey’s proposed updated curriculum framework reflects the Healthy Youth Act (MA bills S.268 and H.544) by requiring that sex education be comprehensive, medically accurate, age-appropriate, consent-based, and inclusive — as it should be, and as it should have been a generation ago.

This legislation offers parents the ability to opt their children out of classes, and local schools the flexibility to shape their own curriculum. It is endorsed by the MA Healthy Youth Coalition (HYC) and has broad legislative support.

DESE will accept public comment on the Comprehensive Health and Physical Education curriculum for grades K-12 until August 28th, 2023.

You can submit public comment one of four ways:

1. Use the Public Comment Survey: https://survey.alchemer.com/s3/6646350/Comprehensive-Health-and-Physical-Education-Framework-Public-Comment

2. Email Kristen McKinnon at chpef@mass.gov

3. Contact the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, Attention: Kristen McKinnon, 75 Pleasant Street, Malden, MA 02148

4. Use some of these talking points

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I have been afraid of this for some time. The Dartmouth Schools are now indisputably under attack by right-wing fanatics. If you are a liberal or progressive who doesn’t want to see the banning of books and diversity programs come to our schools — and better yet, you are the parent of children in the school system — now is the time to stand up for those pretty words on the sign sitting on your front lawn — and run for School Committee.

The present Dartmouth School Committee consists of: conservative Chris Oliver; ultra-conservative and would-be book-banner John Nunes; liberals Mary Waite, Kathleen Amaral, and Shannon Jenkins. Kathleen Amaral and Mary Waite’s seats are up for re-election this year. Mary Waite has not filed papers. So assuming Kathleeen Amaral keeps her seat, it is Mary Waite’s now being challenged by Lynn Turner, Troy Tufano, and Erica Lyn Morney.

Now that we find ourselves in the George Santos era, it’s worth knowing something about the increasing number of reprobates running for office. So here’s my best attempt at a survey of the School Committee candidates.

I still don’t know much about Ms. Morney, so if anyone has any information to share, please contact me and I will update this post.

However, I am familiar with Lynn Turner — whom I wrote about the last time she ran for the School Committee. Turner is an evangelical book-burner who wants to dismantle diversity programs. I looked into Turner’s background last year and also reported on her campaign remarks at a candidate forum. She is a two-faced piece of work who literally quotes Martin Luther King as she tries to undermine everything he stood for.

Joining her this year is Troy Tufano, a self-described political consultant who has dabbled in both Republican and Democratic politics. Regardless of whatever party he is enrolled in, judging from his abandoned Twitter account Troy Tufano is also an evangelical book-burner who wants to dismantle diversity programs. Besides Tufano’s bromances with domestic right-wing personalities like Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, Ben Shapiro, Charlie Kirk, and prosperity gospel mega-preacher Joel Osteen, Tufano has frequently re-Tweeted European neo-fascists like: Ragnar Gardarsson of the Danish Nye Borgerlige Party; and Marine LePen of the Rassemblement National Party. Tufano has also retweeted conspiracy theories, such as the long-discredited accusation that the Clintons had Vince Foster killed. If Tufano’s tweets should mysteriously disappear during the run-up to the town election, you can find a zipfile of screen shots here.

Dartmouth’s Town elections are only two months away. This year the town election is April 4th. I hope that kind and decent people will step up. Candidates need to pick up filing papers at Town Hall no later than February 10th, collect 50 signatures (double or triple that in case of challenges), and submit the paperwork to the Town Clerk by February 14th.

Especially if you are the parent of children in the Dartmouth Schools, now is the time to step up. That sign on your lawn is nice and all, but British social philosopher and Liberal John Stuart Mill said it best: “Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.”

Data and analysis discussed in this paper can be found online in vocational-analysis.xlsx.

Massachusetts vocational programs

There are approximately 132 high school career and vocational technical education (CVTE) programs offered at 102 locations throughout Massachusetts. In 2020 these schools and districts served a modest 63,400 vocational students out of the state’s 911,465 students. Of the Commonwealth’s vocational students, 54% are male, 46% female, 57% white, 9% African-American, 25% Hispanic, 4% Asian and 4% multi-racial. Demographics for CVTE students are not significantly different from averages for all schools in the Commonwealth, but as we will see they are frequently not representative of the communities in which they are situated.

88 of the state’s 132 vocational programs are designated N74, Non-Chapter 74 Career Technical Education (Perkins) programs; 44 are C74, Chapter 74 Approved, and 57 locations offer both C74 and N74 programs. Massachusetts offers 10 career clusters, and student participation in them is depicted in a graphic from a 2020 DESE study of vocational school outcomes:

Student demographics

Racial compositiion of vocational programs varies greatly. The Edward M. Kennedy Academy for Health Careers in Boston, for example, is 97% non-white, while Somerset Berkley Regional’s vocational program is 97% white. 22 of the 102 districts are majority-minority, and 79 are majority white. Regardless of their demographics, however, the state’s vocational schools do not reflect the racial characteristics of the “sending” school districts from which vocational students are drawn.

While 43% of the Commonwealth’s students are non-white, with the exception of Boston and a handful of Gateway cities, Massachusetts vocational schools are as white as some of the whitest suburban school districts with the highest percentages of white teachers. The following table built combining multiple DESE data sources shows the general lack of diversity of both students (and teachers) in Barnstable, Bristol, Dukes, and Plymouth counties:

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Vocational teachers are overwhelmingly white

While student diversity is lacking, so also is staffing. Incredibly, in every technical schools of all four counties shown above, all except Brockton have teaching staffs that are more than 90% white. Only four of the 28 vocational school districts depicted above have more than 2% Black or 2% Hispanic teachers.

Under-representation

One consequence of this lack of diversity is under-representation of Black, Hispanic, and Asian teachers. Providing just one example of the importance of representation, a National Education Association study found that when Black students had at least one Black teacher in grades 3-5, dropout rates fell by 30%. That improvement was even more pronounced, 39%, when Black teachers worked in underserved neighborhoods.

In the table below we see the ratio (expressed as a percentage) of teachers/students by the three largest racial categories in the SouthCoast. With with the exception of Bristol Aggie, the Plymouth Schools, and the Silver Lake School District, all SouthCoast vocational schools over-represent white students. None of the vocational schools shown even came close to matching Black and Hispanic youth percentages with teachers of the same race.

And in Bristol County, regardless of the racial composition of the community, the percentage of white teachers is always close to 95%.

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GNBVT Data: a closer look

Using data we received from DESE for a previous look at the New Bedford schools, out of 259 Greater New Bedford Vocational Technical employees in 2020, we found 145 teachers and 18 co-teachers. Of the teachers 135 were white, only 5 were Black, and there were only 3 Hispanic teachers. Looking back as far as 2008, for every year until the present all of New Bedford Voke’s co-teachers have been white.

In line with the SouthCoast numbers above, we find diversity among GNBVT general staff is almost as bad as among teachers. The number of African-American employees at GNBVT reached a maximum of 8 in 2012 (in 2020 it was 5) and the highest number Hispanic employees over twelve years of data collection was 10 in 2017 (it has since dropped to 6). And it gets worse when you start looking at specific jobs.

All-White or Whites-Only?

All of the following job classifications at GNBVT have been all-white since 2008:

Superintendent; Principal; School Business Officer; Special Education Administrator; the Directors of English, History, Social Studies, Math, Science, Technology; Librarians; Media Center Director; School Psychologist; School Nurse; Special Education Administrative Aides; Information Technology Services; and Other Administrative Support Personnel.

The Director of Guidance and Curriculum Supervisor has been all-white since 2017. Support Content instruction has been all-white since 2012. School adjustment counselors have been all-white since 2012.

Numbers like this beg the question — is GNBVT’s overly white staffing a result of market forces or of policies and practices that lead to discrimination, such as patronage, unfair hiring practices, or outright racism?

Admissions

A common complaint about Vocational Technical schools is that they are not only disproportionately white, but that admission policies and informal recruitment and admission practices are designed to keep them that way.

Massachusetts currently has about 63,400 vocational students, a small portion of the state’s almost one million students. A 2019 a state study of vocational school admissions found that there were 1.75 applications for every admission.

Law- and policy-makers have been looking at ways to expand CVTE opportunities, but for now the goal is to make the admissions process fairer. The same study found that there were two main obstacles to admission for non-white children — (1) an “awareness gap,” basically student lack of familiarity with CVTE options; and (2) an “opportunity gap,” in which children are denied access by others.

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For most readers it will not come as a shock to learn that white students were most likely to be admitted, while students of color, English language learners, and economically disadvantaged had their applications placed on the back burner, receiving statistically lower admissions.

Worse, the applications process most schools use is a competitive system based on grades, discipline records, attendance, recommendations, and even interviews. In the past, if it is not still current practice, children are often given priority if a sibling already attends the vocational school. Jack Livramento of UIA objects to an application process that looks like an admission to Harvard. “Vocational schools are public schools.”

Community groups like United Interfaith Action, the NAACP, the American Federation of Teachers, the North Atlantic Carpenter’s Union, as well as a group of 23 mayors all weighed in on the results, urging reforms to the admission process. New Bedford mayor Jon Mitchell suggested a lottery. “It’s good enough for charter schools. It is above board. It is. It can be verified.” The Vocational Education justice Coalition, Citizens for Public Schools, UIA, La Collaborativa, and the Massachusetts Community Action Network have all backed the idea of a lottery.

The Vocational Educations Justice Coalition faults the admissions of students highly likely to abandon their learned trade in favor of a four-year college because it is both harmful to the trades as well as unfair to students not on an academic track. The DESE study cited previously notes that “CTE concentrators are less likely to complete a college degree than the statewide average.” And that “while CTE may be thought of as a means to increase earnings and education, it has also often been seen as an educational model that might reduce adverse outcomes. This is of particular importance for students who face social and economic disadvantages that may make them vulnerable to negative outcomes after high school.” In addition, a 2018 survey of CVTE outcomes currently only 33% of all Chapter 74 vocational students end up working in the career field for which they were trained, while that number is 12% for N74 programs. 18% never enroll in college and 45% enroll in college but never complete it.

State recognition of the problem

State Rep. Alice Peisch and state Sen. Jason Lewis, co-chairs of the Joint Committee on Education, have proposed the Educator Diversity Act (HD.3641/SD.2208), which has four parts that address hiring of minority teachers. The Educator Diversity Act simplifies the path to educator licensure, establishes hiring guidelines, mandates diversity programs and officers, and quantifies the efforts to increase diversity by collecting data and publishing statistics.

Addressing the “awareness gap,” Minuteman Regional Voke Superintendent Edward Boquillon suggests that vocational schools be given student information from the sending school district so that students who are not aware of the programs can be contacted and invited to apply. One of the key findings in a separate 2020 DESE study of vocational school outcomes was that a “majority of 8th grade students reported that they receive enough information to make an informed high school choice, but a significantly lower proportion of students of color reported this than did white students.”

From trades worker to trades teacher

White non-Hispanic Americans represent roughly 60.1% of the population, Hispanic Americans 18.5%, African-Americans 13.4%, Asians 5.6%, Multiple races 2.8%, Native American slightly under 1%, and Pacific Islanders 0.2%. We want workplaces to look like society in general, but we also want teachers, especially, to look like the students they instruct and for whom they serve as role-models.

We want to turn more trades people of color into trades teachers of color.

Since vocational teachers come straight from the vocations they teach, do enough non-white skilled technical workers exist to be able to move into teaching vocational courses? In order to explain an almost complete absence of vocational teachers of color we need to take a quick look.

For years the Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) has produced annual reports showing white, Black, Hispanic, and Asian labor participation in hundreds of job classifications. There are many BLS job classifications (Carpenters, Electricians, Plumbers, Hairdressers, etc.) that can be directly mapped to both the 10 career clusters mentioned previously and to specific vocations (Carpentry, Electrical, Plumbing, Cosmetology, etc). We chose over 70 classifications that mirror some of these career tracks..

Skilled Black workers are represented in the labor force in percents greater than representation in the general population for the following professions:

Building and grounds cleaning and maintenance occupations; Cardiovascular technologists and technicians; Child, family, and school social workers; Childcare workers; Correctional officers and jailers; Credit counselors and loan officers; Cutting, punching, and press machine setters, operators, and tenders, metal and plastic; Education and childcare administrators; First-line supervisors of correctional officers; Food preparation and serving related occupations; Hairdressers, hairstylists, and cosmetologists; Home health aides; Human resources workers; Industrial truck and tractor operators; Janitors and building cleaners; Licensed practical and licensed vocational nurses; Miscellaneous health technologists and technicians; Motor vehicle operators, all other; Office and administrative support occupations; Office and administrative support workers, all other; Other metal workers and plastic workers; Packaging and filling machine operators and tenders; Security guards and gambling surveillance officers; Stationary engineers and boiler operators; Television, video, and film camera operators and editors.

Skilled Hispanic workers are represented in the labor force in percents greater than representation in the general population for the following professions:

Building and grounds cleaning and maintenance occupations; Carpenters; Construction and extraction occupations; Construction laborers; Farming, fishing, and forestry occupations; Industrial truck and tractor operators; Janitors and building cleaners; Miscellaneous agricultural workers; Packaging and filling machine operators and tenders; Sewing machine operators.

Skilled Asian workers are represented in the labor force in percents greater than representation in the general population for the following professions:

Architecture and engineering occupations; Cardiovascular technologists and technicians; Computer hardware engineers; Computer, automated teller, and office machine repairers; Electrical and electronic engineering technologists and technicians; Food preparation and serving related occupations; Healthcare practitioners and technical occupations; Marketing managers; Massage therapists; Miscellaneous health technologists and technicians; Motor vehicle operators, all other; Other engineering technologists and technicians, except drafters; Sewing machine operators.

There is, then, absolutely no reason that many of these skilled trades people could not transition to vocational teachers. There is plenty of skill out there. All that’s lacking are the teacher certifications.

Becoming a vocational teacher

On May 20, 2021 the NAACP New Bedford Branch hosted Jarrod Lussier, an administrator at Greater New Bedford Voke, who addressed the monthly General Meeting and gave a short overview of the process of becoming a vocational teacher.

Lussier was previous a Chapter 74 plumbing instructor at Southeastern Regional Vocational High School. He invites anyone interested in becoming a vocational teacher to contact him and he is making his presentation available with the disclaimer that it is “on my own behalf and not as a representative of either [GNBVT or Southeastern] district.”

In 2017, the Standard-Times ran an article, “New Bedford school officials pleased with job fair turnout,” which covered the School District’s 4th Annual job fair at Keith Middle School and described the District’s hiring process:

“The setup reflects the hiring process. Dr. Pia Durkin, the superintendent, has the legal mandate to hire personnel. First, Durkin has principals screen applicants and interview them. The one a principal recommends will be sent to the Human Capital office to be vetted and interviewed [by Heather Emsley]. Then the nominee is sent to the superintendent for approval…

As the job fair wound down, Deputy Superintendent Jason DeFalco was beaming. Once again the schools have acted early on the calendar “and are scooping up the talent,” he said.”

The only problem is: NBPS seems to be scooping up mainly white talent.

Photos accompanying the article depicted hiring teams from each school — most of them white. Representatives of Congdon Elementary, which to this day still has an all-white teaching staff, sported t-shirts that read “Straight Outta Congdon.”

This was only months before current Superintendent Anderson’s arrival, but little appears to have changed in the three years since the Standard Times’ Job Fair article was written.

In a September meeting the NAACP New Bedford Branch held with Superintendent Anderson, Human Capital director Heather Emsley, and other members of the school administration, the Branch was informed that hiring is still left to individual principals. In describing how he intends to fix hiring inequities, Superintendent Anderson listed outreach and training programs intended to change the hearts and minds of prinicipals — but which leave NBPS hiring practices and processes unchanged.

To the NAACP New Bedford, this is worse than mere wishful thinking. The Superintendent doesn’t appear to be in full control of District-wide hiring.

In August we issued a report detailing systemwide racial inequities throughout the District. Upon discovering that the buck doesn’t stop at the Superintendent’s desk but at the desks of each of New Bedford’s 25 school principals, we took a second look at staffing by school.

Staffing, by School

A number of New Bedford schools are 100% white. Taylor, Swift, and Rodman have no employees of color. Zero. Winslow, Pacheco, Lincoln, DeValles, Congdon, and Ashley each have staffs that are more than 94% white.

Teachers, by School

When it comes to teaching, the inequities are even worse.

Taylor, Swift, Rodman, Pacheco, and Congdon teaching staffs are all 100% white. Teachers at Lincoln, Winslow, DeValles, and Campbell are all more than 95% white. Pulaski, Carney, Whaling City, Normandin, Jacobs, Ashley, and Keith Middle are all more than 90% white.

Representation, by School

Students achieve more when teachers look and sound like them. We took teacher race percentages and compared them to student race percentages throughout the District. You can view the raw data here but the graph below shows (for example) that at Gomes Elementary and Renaissance Community schools the percentage of white teachers is six times that of white students. There are only three schools in the District where Black teacher percentages match or exceed Black student percentages. Nowhere in the District is there adequate hiring of Latino teachers in terms of representation.

Lessons Learned

What School Superintendent Anderson and Human Capital director Emsley are doing simply isn’t working — and it’s never going to work as long as no one office is in charge of fixing the problem.

“Hoping” to change the hearts and minds of 25 school principals in order to fix systemic racism within the District is at worst folly, and at best wishful thinking. The ultimate responsibility for fixing the District’s systemic racism lies with the Superintendent.

At our September meeting with Superintendent Anderson we suggested that he:

1. Allow non-NBPS employees and qualified community members of color to sit on each hiring committee at the school site;
2. Mandate that all hiring positions have applicants of color represented in the top three candidates;
3. Make a public statement of intent, meet with principals around hiring POC, and address the issue publicly in a forum;
4. Meet with the NAACP General Body at our next General body meeting in October 2020 (we are awaiting the Superintendent’s response).

In discussions with Superintendent Anderson and director Emsley, we were told that the District has not had much success in recruiting from Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). Some of the institutions named are not known for their education programs. This makes us wonder if the District has tried others that are? Outreach, like anything, is all about relationships. What sorts of relationships has the District established with local alumnae of HBCUs? Are they part of recruiting efforts?

We think the District can do better. Fixing persistent racial inequities in New Bedford Public Schools staffing is going to take resolve, creativity, community involvement, a solid plan, measurable milestones for progress, transparency, and much greater control by the Superintendent himself over his hiring process.

A few days ago, ABC6 News reported that Peter Larkin, a former attendance officer with the New Bedford Public Schools, was fired over comments advocating violence toward Black Lives Matter protestors that could best be described as lynching:

“I would roll tanks and bulldozers. Mush any human in the way. Shoot everyone else. Pile up the bodies and burn them on national tv.”

Deirdre Ramos, the mother of two boys, one of whom is still a student at New Bedford High, alerted the School District to Larkin’s violent ravings. She told ABC6 reporter Amanda Pitts, “It makes me wonder, you know, what type of behavior was he displaying to the students of New Bedford?”

A great question. How many other racist lunatics are New Bedford students being exposed to?

On June 30th, Superintendent Thomas Anderson issued a statement decrying “individual statements” by racists and calling New Bedford Schools an “anti-racist organization” but did not specify whether Larkin would continue to be employed with the District. On July 2nd ABC6 reporter Pitts announced via Twitter that Larkin is no longer employed with the New Bedford Schools.

According to Larkin’s LinkedIn page, he is a 2005 graduate of UMass Dartmouth, has a masters degree in Education from American International College, and was employed by the Bristol County Sheriffs Department from 1991 to 2005 as a “Detective Lieutenant of Internal Affairs.” Larkin resigned from the Bristol County Sheriff’s Office (BCSO) three years after botching an investigation the BCSO undertook without “assistance from other police agencies.” He had failed Basic Interrogation 101: reading a suspect her Miranda rights. One lawyer described the low quality of BCSO investigators, “They’re not trained for investigative work,” while another called the BCSO itself “a task force of goofballs who couldn’t cut it as real cops.”

Larkin then tried his hand as a “Corporate/Private Security Agent” specializing in “sensitive employee” issues, “union strike and picket line security, and surveillance.” All this Pinkerton and inept police work apparently qualified Larkin to go to work for his wife’s employer as an attendance officer working “closely with school resource officer[s] and [the] juvenile court system.”

Despite his degree in education, Larkin’s professional background is mainly that of a cop. His homicidal fantasies on Black Lives are hardly unique to cops and may not be all that unique among school employees. ABC6 asked the School Department if another contributor to the same Facebook discussion was a School District employee but a spokesperson replied only “that NBPS does not comment on ongoing investigations or personnel matters.” We imagine this problem runs much deeper in the School District.

The Larkin incident, which necessitated a response from Superintendent Thomas Anderson, is bound to cause more ripples in New Bedford. In 2018, while Superintendent Anderson was being considered for the position he now serves in, so was Larkin’s wife Heather. And her candidacy was supported by an unlikely ally: the New Bedford police union.

One might ask why the New Bedford police union has any interest in the choice of a school superintendent, but in March 2018 union president Henry Turgeon endorsed Larkin with this rationale: “A safe and secure school system will directly translate into a more positive culture and climate,” Turgeon said. “Dr. Larkin’s expectations for the New Bedford Public Schools, both culturally and academically, are in line with our union platform and it is our opinion that safety, a climate of security, and positive police/student intervention will directly lead to our students academic and social success.”

While Heather Larkin may have been seen as ready to do her part for police culture in the schools and ultimately to keep the school-to-prison pipeline moving, hubby Peter wanted to skip the pipeline altogether and go directly to public lynchings.

We are gratified that Superintendent Anderson moved so quickly to address parent concerns and register NBPS disapproval of Larkin’s threats, but it is clear that Larkin is hardly an exception. How many other Larkins — owing their jobs to political or family connections, and with questionable or totally unsuitable professional backgrounds — are we imposing on the city’s children?

If the New Bedford Schools truly are an anti-racist organization — and we have every reason to take Superintendent Anderson at his word — NBPS must undertake a thorough review of its staff and teachers and begin to make it reflect the demographics of the community it serves. NBPS can start by examining the extent of racism in hiring and firing policies, and move on to assessing the extent of patronage and nepotism in the schools.

Massachusetts may sound like an odd state for Republican policies to be implemented by Democrats. Yet as I write this the “Democratic” Bristol County DA is lobbying for the Republican governor’s “Dangerousness” [mass incarceration] legislation. And the latest bipartisan attack on public education is from comrporate Democrats — Dartmouth state Rep. Christopher Markey and Westport Rep. Paul Schmid, whose pro-charter school bill, HD4174 turns state education law on its head to pay for Alma del Mar with public funds. As a charter, the school is less accountable to the public than to its trustees or its corporate board.

Though frequently described as an experiment, Alma del Mar’s charter is just another skirmish in a greater war for the privatization of American schools. Nationally, charter schools have already fleeced taxpayers to the tune of at least $1 billion. The Network for Public Education Action has documented the role of the super-rich in buying legislative approval for charter schools. Their ultimate goal is privatization. Now New Bedford in in their crosshairs.

HD4147 is opposed by numerous local community groups and organized labor, including NBCSOS (New Bedford Coalition to Save our Schools), the Greater New Bedford Labor Council and the NAACP. This corporate giveaway is the work of a couple of tony suburban Democrats working with the Republican governor and business interests to usher charter schools into Massachusetts through a back door.

In a recent op-ed co-signed by numerous corporate interests, Anthony Sapienza, who heads up the New Bedford Economic Development Council (NBEDC), assures us that the legislation is a “first-of-its-kind partnership” and “a solution that is critical to the stability of all other public schools and the city’s finances.” Sapienza gushes about “neighborhood schools,” arguing that giving Alma del Mar to a corporation is all part of “tangibly advancing strategies for sustainable and shared growth” in New Bedford. Alma del Mar will be a neighborhood school only in the narrowest sense — just as Stop and Shop is your neighborhood green grocer only in the narrowest sense. To echo the NBEDC‘s slogan, Alma del Mar will be “open for business.”

Sapienza rather disingenuously frames the question as a choice between the city raising $8 million to expand an existing school by 600 students — or giving away $4 million to a private corporation to outsource another 450 desks. Since Alma del Mar was built on city property at a cost of $16 million, the real question is whether any sane person thinks New Bedford will save $4 million — an amount less than 1% of the city’s FY2020 city budget — by giving away $16 million to a private entity.

HD4147 is plainly a raw deal for city residents — especially when you actually read the legislation yourself.

Section 2 of the bill says that — for purposes of all the expensive stuff — the school “shall be considered a public school.” But — to the great delight of the corporations pushing the bill — “for all other purposes, including but not limited to chapters 71A and 71B of the General Laws, Alma del Mar Charter School, including its second campus, shall be considered a Commonwealth Charter School.”

And Schmid and Markey are giving them both away.

Section 3 of the Markey-Schmid legislation gives the city permission to dispose of the physical buildings as it sees fit: “Notwithstanding any contrary provision in or interpretation of section 15A of chapter 40 of the General Laws, the School Committee may transfer custody of 135 Shawmut Avenue [the former Horatio A. Kempton School] to the City of New Bedford pursuant to a simple majority vote stating that said property is no longer needed by the New Bedford Public Schools.”

In what alternate reality does a school district give away $16 million of property because no further use is foreseen? The answer is — only in the world of corporatized education.

Section 4 provides the corporate school with guaranteed taxpayer-funded tuition payments. Section 5 cuts the public out of any review process for the transfers in the preceding sections.

Last Thursday billionaire public education wrecker Betsy DeVos spoke to the Conservative Political Action Conference, a right-wing revival meeting at which all conservatives must declare their belief in Free Market Capitalism, Christian Shariah, and Death to Big Government.

When it was her turn on stage, DeVos began by immediately trashing free school lunches:

“I’m Betsy DeVos. You may have heard some of the ‘wonderful’ things the mainstream media has called me lately,” she said. “I, however, pride myself on being called a mother, a grandmother, a life partner, and perhaps the first person to tell Bernie Sanders to his face that there’s no such thing as a free lunch.”

Perhaps this was just Betsy DeVos having a Rick Perry moment – being totally oblivious to the realities of her new job. But as the still-free press reminded her, there actually is a school lunch program that provides free lunches to 31 million children, almost a quarter of whom now live in poverty, and to others whose parents find it difficult to pay. Since there are roughly 78 million children in the U.S., the Lunch Program in fact feeds 40% of the nation’s children. Chopping this program would harm as many people as Trump’s plans to destroy the Affordable Care Act.

But this is not something that those in gilded palaces know.

DeVos’s defenders were quick to point out that the new Secretary of Educational Sabotage didn’t really mean that there was no such thing as a free lunch. Sheesh! It was just a metaphor, a joke, an expression! What DeVos really meant was that she liked putting wasteful programs on the chopping block.

Devos may have been speaking in metaphors and maybe she was even joking – unless she does happen to throw a grenade into the school cafeteria. But that’s the trouble with the Trump administration – you never know if they’re kidding, bullshitting, speaking in metaphors, secret codes, dog-whistles, are off their meds, or are making up alternate facts to suit some occasion. All the rules of communication that normal humans use have been suspended. Or maybe they just lie when they’re caught: “Just kidding!”

Although the apocryphal joke – “Let them eat cake” – was probably told by another contemptuous noblewoman a century before her, legend insists that Marie Antoinette went to the guillotine for the same crime as DeVos’s – making light of hungry kids – and for her generally snotty attitude.

For billionaires, school lunches may be an opportunity to laugh at the little people. But for everyone else it’s no joking matter.

In a comparative study of national literacy published by Connecticut State University, the United States of USA! USA! USA! ain’t doing so good.

http://www.ccsu.edu/wmln/rank.html

The United States comes out 7th overall, which doesn’t sound too bad until you actually read the report.

The U.S. is:

• 9th in money spent on education
• 12th in reading newspapers
• 12th in test scores (after “normalization” with other systems)
• 23rd in households with computers
• 30th in libraries

The amount of money thrown at education doesn’t matter: it should be the outcomes. As the study’s Methodology section admits: “There are virtually no meaningful correlations between the input measures and the output measures [for education].” So why were input measures given undue weight in the study? Similarly, test scores don’t matter: it’s what students actually know — which is often not much. Likewise, the number of computers in a household doesn’t matter if all family members do with them are tweeting, watching porn, streaming movies, or downloading music. The ranking of American libraries, while bad enough, is actually elevated by the number of university facilities, while at the community level libraries are poorly, grudgingly, and disgracefully funded. Newspaper rankings are also inflated by the number of local papers (not their quality) that exist solely for advertising revenue, while in smaller countries papers with national circulation are stronger and of better quality. When, for example, was the last time you saw a fuilleiton section in your local newspaper — or any real international news in it? No matter how many USA Todays, New York Posts, and National Enquirers exist, Americans still can’t find Brazil on a map.

Meaningful outcomes? These were given short shrift in this “study.”

And a final question:

How do weighted rankings of [ 9, 12, 12, 23, and 30 ] amount to a composite ranking of 7?

Tea Partier Linda Rapoza’s recent piece on school diets was just plain bizarre.

The fact that Democrats themselves squashed the issue didn’t stop Rapoza from fulminating at the “bake sale ban that never was” and using it as a springboard to unleash her kooky critique on liberal, socialist, and communist (I wish she’d try to keep them straight) “attacks” on individual civil rights.

Of course, when it comes to the Tea Party’s positions in support of government surveillance, attacks on a woman’s Right to Choose, sponsorship of anti-religious (anti-Muslim) laws, or intrusions into bedrooms via anti-gay positions, their views are diametrically opposite to those of most Americans: civil liberties be damned, coercion is warranted to move forward our conservative social agenda!

Rapoza whines about “Big Government’s” intrusion into religion. But again, the truth is quite the opposite. Instead, under Republicans there has been massive intrusion of [their – not my] religion into government and the public sphere, by politicians who seem to represent, or at least pander to, mainly a Christian constituency.

Dipping not just a toe but a whole leg into conspiracy theories, Rapoza claims Executive Presidential Order 13575 is part of a New World Order conspiracy (driven by the communist United Nations) to turn the future into an Orwellian nightmare. When you read this nonsense, take a deep breath. This is typical of who is running the Republican Party nowadays. In reality Order 13575 simply coordinates the various cabinet level organizations to better serve the 16% of the US population who live in rural America – basically the same principle behind DHS coordinating dozens of US security agencies. Glen Beck may be gone, but Rapoza is still spinning the same kind of chalkboard fantasies.

Rapoza goes on to elaborate her “1984” vision of the future, and it makes me wonder if she has a backyard bunker to go along with her bunker mentality. What she seems to find most nightmarish are government “approved” cars, trains, highways, and food. What she seems to prefer is a future in which poultry inspections are left to agribusiness, passengers fly in airplanes without inspections (er, “approval”), and highways are privatized. “Approved” versus “regulated.” It’s just a word, but one that demonstrates demagoguery, not faith in reason.

Rapoza goes on to claim, again without elaboration, that preparations for this nightmarish future are “already in the pipeline.” Really? I haven’t seen such disordered though since watching Mel Gibson in “Conspiracy Theory.”

Bob Unger gets a lot of it right in his essay on education (“Our nation has lost its edge”) in Sunday’s Opinion page. He asks what has changed from the decades of relatively good public education in the Fifties and Sixties, and concludes that it is the loss of a national mission toward excellence in education. However, Mr. Unger’s prescription for thousands of fresh-faced Harvard and Yale grads dedicating themselves to teaching is a little too “Hollywood” for my taste. Haven’t we seen Hillary Swank in “Freedom Writers”, or any number of movies in which a single, caring teacher turns around the lives of students in an uncaring institution? It’s the teacher version of “High Noon”.

Teachers alone, even a legion of them, cannot pull us out of the educational gutter we have thrown ourselves in. Our failures in education are less the result of single working moms and penurious taxpayers, and more the result of a general devaluation of education and literacy, as well as poor choices and self-delusion.

Our poor choices are reflected in the piles of money we throw at education without understanding the value we receive in return. Large proportions of educational budgets are spent on children with severe injuries and medical conditions who are housed in special care facilities where they receive medical, not educational, services. We pour money into acres and acres of football and soccer facilities sited on costly pieces of real estate. We are obliged by federal law to build computer labs with a certain number of workstations per student where, often without regard for how these resources should be used, children can Twitter and plagiarize from online versions of books that have long since disappeared from the stacks of libraries.

We delude ourselves by thinking our children can compete with those from other nations when they attend school 60 to 90 fewer days a year. Taxpayers and the school boards they elect delude themselves by thinking they can compete while they cut AP and enrichment programs, the arts, school days, school weeks, and even school years. Communities delude themselves by thinking that the little bumps in standardized test scores are really measures of success. While they read their Excel spreadsheets looking at financial tea leaves, qualitatively the schools continue their decline because the primary mission of education has long been abandoned to Quality Assurance metrics and proper business management techniques. The parents think that the experts have everything under control. The politicians have better things than education to fund, such as wars. And the students themselves, not easily deceived, know quite well that they are being cheated, scammed, and relegated to second-rate futures.

Add to this the general abandonment of a social contract which should commit us to the care of the next generation’s future, as we benefitted from the care of a previous generation, and you have all the ingredients for educational decline.

Don’t expect a first year teacher to fix it.

This was published in the Standard Times on April 29, 2009
http://www.southcoasttoday.com/20090429/opinion/904290314

School vouchers are not synonymous with school choice. Vouchers have a history of abuse, particularly in the South, as a tool for maintaining school segregation. They have been rejected by the AFT, the NEA, and most liberals as a tool for dismantling or undermining public schools, a potential cause of “white flight” from urban schools, and a means of damaging public schools further by concentrating students with learning, behavioral, and health problems. None of these criticisms can be ignored, and better solutions exist for providing parents with school choice, while preserving public education.

In the Fifties, Milton Friedman proposed a system of vouchers intended to promote competition and local control of schools. Another free market capitalist, Friedrich Hayek, even envisioned a school system funded entirely by vouchers, without a single public school. These politicized notions are at best wishful thinking. I would not expect to see many educational corporations clamoring to serve the predominantly poor student body in, say, nearby New Bedford’s West Side Junior-Senior High, a last resort school for predominately poor children, where not one eighth grader tested proficient in English or Science (according to the 2007 MCAS tests). Have the champions of a free market economy forgotten to follow the money? If I were a corporate education mogul, Manhattan would be my first choice as the best place to set up shop, New Bedford near the last.

One question not usually discussed in polite society is whether broken schools are the cause or the result of a broken community. It’s always convenient to accuse teachers of being the complacent, poorly-educated, self-interested cause of bad education. But no one ever takes the educational bureaucracy itself with its changing educational strategies and fashions, community, poverty, crime, dysfunctional or broken families, or the children themselves to task. And even if we do, we still expect a public school teacher to be able to reverse a lifetime of trouble or neglect in a single school year – and to see it reflected on a standardized test. The public that believes this is smoking more crack than some of the students in those roughest of neighborhoods. Schools that attempt to tackle these problems in a holistic manner are more likely to obtain results than by simply cashing vouchers. This is where charter schools offer the most promise.

The real problems in schools are ownership and quality. A parent in a private or religious school is asked to join committees, to help out in the school, to donate their time, and this establishes relationships with teachers and administration. While a child attends that school, both the student and parents are members of a community they have themselves chosen. Choice coupled with involvement produces a sense of ownership. Contrast this with the educational mills of today, institutions federally mandated to show more interest in standard deviations on test scores than on educational excellence or community building. Public schools today teach to the standardized test and spend too many of their resources dealing with the toughest educational problems. They increasingly provide less for the average or superior student, who is frequently pulled out and sent to private or religious school. Private schools, on the other hand, are not encumbered by SPED programs, MCAS tests, NCLB compliance, or health and behavioral problems, so it is not entirely fair to compare them. It is fair to say that social problems play a much greater negative role in public schools than their private counterparts. Again, public schools need to address these problems with more than a school psychologist or an IEP form.

If a voucher system were instituted, I can’t see how it would fail to accelerate the separation of “good” and “bad” students. Ultimately, the poorest children with the least concerned parents and the most problems would remain in the public schools. Everyone else would have bailed, including students from families who previously lacked the financial resources. Of course, if the vouchers were big enough to send any kid to, say, the Forman School in Connecticut, where annual tuition is approximately $49,000 a year, this would indeed raise standardized test results in the sending public school by taking the test takers out of the sampling population since private schools are not accountable to state standards. Vouchers are simply a Very Bad Idea.

On the other hand, if public schools were more like private schools (minus the exorbitant tuition), fewer families would seek other options and many would return to public school. What do suburban parents who flee from urban public schools want when they move Junior to Ye Olde Exclusive Academy? Safety, enrichment programs, small class sizes, excellent instructors, an approachable administration and staff, and a track record of producing students accepted at good colleges. Minority parents want no less for their children. NCLB is supposed to provide alternatives to failing schools and, increasingly, minorities have embraced privatization and the idea of vouchers as one means to provide these alternatives. But this doesn’t go far enough. No parent with financial resources waits until a school has hit absolute rock bottom before transferring their child to a private school. And not every child has the same experience at the same school, so even a choice between two adequately-performing schools is desirable. And choice is as American as Coke versus Pepsi.

In some communities, families do have the choice of leaving a comprehensive public school to attend a public vocational school. Aside from a few schools like Boston’s Latin Academy, there are very few options for students who want to pursue a more rigorous academic track. Just as there is a network of vocational schools supported in part by the federal Perkins Act, we should also be investing in public academic schools of excellence. Public schools should serve the entire public, from the most disadvantaged to the most gifted.

Charter schools are an option that gives communities more direct control over curriculum and school administration. Educational outcomes in charter schools are often better than in traditional schools, although one 2004 union study analyzing NEAP data showed lower test scores in charter schools. Massachusetts DOE figures show dropout rates in Massachusetts charter schools are higher than comprehensive schools, but these are often high-risk kids who drop out and are coaxed back to school. So why, despite any shortcomings, are charter schools so popular? I believe it is the ownership factor that makes students want to attend such schools. A Boston Globe article described the MATCH Charter School in Boston: > Once they begin classes at MATCH, students face an eight-hour school day, a dress code, a strict code of conduct, and academic standards that designate a D as a failing grade. They also are required to attend at least two hours of daily tutoring with a member of the MATCH Corps, a group of 45 tutors who live in a dormitory at the school. And their parents get contacted at least once a week by a teacher, tutor, or the principal. Propping up these high academic expectations is an underlying familial atmosphere.

Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick has proposed “readiness” schools, which sound rather similar to charter and pilot schools, and which insist on the same educational standards as conventional schools, assuring the unions they can be part of the solution rather than a fearful impediment, while improving administration and accountability. The governor’s plan would double the number of charter schools in Massachusetts with the next 4 years. This is a smart decision because these schools (by whatever name we choose to call them) have the greatest potential to introduce innovative programs, involve parents, and motivate students, as private schools currently do. Charter schools can promote school choice within a public education system, while not destroying the system altogether as vouchers would.

While the intent of Public Law 107-110, a bipartisan bill otherwise known as the 2002 “No Child Left Behind” act, is to impose outcomes-based education on individual states, it has also imposed a number of questionable practices. States have generally abandoned the pursuit of excellence in education for something that more closely resembles quality assurance metrics. We no longer care if students can compete in the global workforce or can master calculus or a second language. We now seem fixated on metrics to reduce the variability and defect rate (six sigma in QA parlance) of the widgets on our educational assembly line. Complaints that NCLB lowers educational goals, cheats students, and forces schools to “teach to the test” are all well-founded.

In addition to this myopic focus, NCLB forces schools to provide student information to military recruiters (one “outcome” of this is death), and drives up educational costs as teachers flock to educational mills to get masters degrees in education – not necessarily the subjects they teach – to become more “highly qualified.” These professional development costs are then passed along to the schools. NCLB also mandates the use of specific types of educational studies (again seemingly based on statistical/QA principles) and arbitrarily equates the adoption of expensive computer technology with excellence in education. Yet many school technology plans do not tie computer technology to particular uses or outcomes, merely hoping that computers will somehow prepare kids for the future.

Other provisions of NCLB claim to help minority and disadvantaged students, although in eight years it would appear that only the testing has improved – and then only by employing creative statistics – while dropout rates continue to rise, programs for medium- and high-performing students have disappeared, and school budgets have increased in order to comply. And here again, NCLB is of little help, since these additional costs must be borne by each state and school district. Individual programs within NCLB, such as the reading program, were flops. nochildleft.com lists 17 areas in which NCLB actually lowered standards, raised dropout rates, reduced teaching time, and made some of the best teachers leave for private schools.

It’s time for NCLB to be totally scrapped.

Last Sunday Ken Hartnett’s article quoted Jean Duval, the head of the New Bedford teacher’s union: “Sooner or later, people have got to talk about the human material in front of the teachers and administrators. They are doing the best they can with the material in front of them.”

Since then, Ms. Duval has been roundly vilified in the editorial pages. In a Wednesday editorial, Mara Honohan, a seventh-grader from Normandin Middle School, wrote of resenting being spoken of as “material.” Warren Berube sarcastically observed that a union person would never say such a thing. On Tuesday, Mary Worden’s editorial asked the rhetorical question, “What exactly is the human material in front of teachers today? Is it a person who shouldn’t be there?” And then she proceeded to put words in Ms. Duval’s mouth by assuming that was what she meant. The Standard Times’ own editorial unfairly rips Duval for her “negative attitude toward the students.”

It’s clear society wants teachers to see only an individual and not just a socioeconomic statistic. And teachers do precisely that in classrooms every day. But there is also a bigger view in which the statistics are shocking, shameful, and frightening –- and it serves no one’s interests to pretend they don’t exist. Most administrators and teachers (and I am one) don’t blame the students, but it is hard to ignore increasing percentages of kids working full-time jobs, falling asleep on their desks, or not showing up for class, living in cars when dad’s drunk, or changing foster families every other month. Add to this high numbers of special needs, intellectual challenges, juvenile offenses, substance abuse, teenage pregnancy, non-English speaking, and lack of parental guidance -– and all the innovative educational programs in the world can’t offset these strikes against learning.

And it’s worse than that. Perhaps someone should state the obvious even more forcefully than Ms. Duval –- that public schools in general -– forget New Bedford for a minute – have become a dumping ground for children no one seriously intends to educate. By “no one” I mean their parents and society. The absent or dysfunctional parent isn’t helping. Public schools are expected to work miracles with a student population that a Tabor Academy or a Bishop Stang would never admit. Meanwhile, the cities, states, and federal government play politics with education but never fund it adequately. New Bedford and the state of Massachusetts couldn’t even agree on the importance of the MCAS. We seem to want public education to deliver educational miracles and cure social ills, but we don’t want to talk about it unless it’s a four-letter word like “MCAS” – and we sure don’t want to pay for it.

So hats off to Ms. Duval for telling the Emperor that he’s buck-naked. It seems strange to me for a community to react so strongly to a little tactlessness on the part of someone stating the obvious, but not to concern itself at all with the real causes of student failures.

This was published in the Standard Times on September 1, 2006
http://www.southcoasttoday.com/article/20060901/opinion/309019917

Mayor Lang and the New Bedford School Committee want to issue diplomas to students who fail the MCAS. In crafting his argument, Mayor Lang questions the state’s (and presumably the Federal government’s) authority to set educational standards. “It comes down to this. Public school administrators and teachers are not trusted to accurately assess and pass a kid onto the next grade or course.” They also blame the MCAS for New Bedford’s high dropout rate. But let’s do a little math.

89% of New Bedford’s teachers are “highly qualified” versus 96% of Greater New Bedford Voc’s. Teachers at Voc make an average of $6000 a year more, the student ratio is lower, the number of non-English speakers is half that of the New Bedford public schools, and the number failing the English MCAS is almost half that of the New Bedford public schools. NB public schools have a whopping 18.6% of students in Special Education, while Voc has 11.3%. The dropout rate is half at Voc, and so on. When you look at the number of students in the NB public schools who failed 8th grade Math and Science, it was 53% and 63% respectively! These students’ problems started in Middle School and apparently the kids were promoted all the same. This completely undermines Mayor Lang’s remarks above. Somebody has to pull these kids off the assembly line. Accountability is not a bad thing.

It is pretty obvious that New Bedford’s schools do have problems not of their making, but are cranking out students with inferior educations all the same, and the MCAS tests unfortunately reveal this nasty little secret. Looking at the statistics, it’s also clear that New Bedford has a higher proportion of students with learning, social, economic, and language problems, and it’s probably not getting the funding it needs. Like it or not, the high dropout and MCAS failure rates indicate external problems. Whether these students pass or fail an MCAS test, they are still as much at risk for dropping out or failing other tests.

But denying the validity of the MCAS is shortsighted. And so is putting the District’s funding at risk at a time when it needs to be asking for more help.

The mayor should be working with the DOE, not fighting it, or with concerned Massachusetts legislators to demand the state’s fair share of federal “No Child Left Behind” funding. Besides opening up schools to military recruiters and imposing unrelenting standardized testing upon them, one of the things NCLB is supposed to do is to actually help school districts improve. Well, supposedly. Massachusetts could join Connecticut, Utah, Texas, California, Virginia, Maryland, and several others in fighting for more help than just better looking bubble test forms. The National Education Association estimates that the Bush administration’s NCLB act has actually taken $22 billion away from schools in 2005 and 2006. I wonder which defense contractor got that money? We surely could have used it.

The advice to “follow the money” always seems to hold. New Bedford should be going after the funding to deliver better education to its students rather than telling the world that the MCAS figures lie. Unfortunately, the figures are right on target.