Annual National Give-A-Kid-A-Book Day (NGKBD)

Today, July 6, 2025 is the 11th Annual National Give-A-Kid-A-Book Day (NGKBD). It was started by Russ Walsh. In 2021 he wrote:

This is the yearly celebration dedicated to getting books into children's hands over the summer. Literacy research has shown that the single best way to extend children's literacy learning beyond the school year is to get books in kids hands..

Participation in National Give-A-Kid-A-Book Day is easy. All you need do is find a child and give that child a book. The child could be your own, a neighbor's child, a student, a grandchild, one of your kid's friends, or children in a homeless shelter. Just give the child a book and say, I thought you might enjoy this." You might want to include a note with the book. This personalizes the gift (and provides another reason to read something). Some participants like to include a lollipop or other small treat with the book to send the message "Reading is sweet," but the most important thing is to give a kid a book.

National Give-A-Kid-A-Book Day is dedicated to the many hard-working people and organizations who have gone to extraordinary lengths to make sure that all children have access to books.

…such as Dolly Parton, whose Imagination Library has finally come to the Fort Wayne area. 

I recommend reading the National Give-A-Kid-A-Book Day post, his Bill of Rights for School Children blog entry (which can also be found in his excellent book, A Parents Guide to Public Education in the 21st Century).

Russ no longer posts to his reading blog, though you can still read his writing by visiting his Substack — Levittown Boy

Jim Trelease, 1941 – 2022

EVERY DAY SHOULD BE TEACHER APPRECIATION DAY

No.

Today is not Teacher Appreciation Day

Or Teacher Appreciation Week

Although, every day should be teacher appreciation day. It's likely that you wouldn't be reading this if not for teachers.

Teachers help the majority of American children learn how to read.

Someone taught the programmers of this blog application how to code and how to design and construct the device on which you're reading this post.

Someone taught your dentist how to check and repair teeth. Someone taught your veterinarian how to care for animals.

...and so on...

For me, the concept of teacher appreciation brings to mind the most memorable teachers from whom I've learned. One of my elementary school teachers stands out in my mind...several of my high school teachers...and several of my college teachers. My parents, too, as my first, and most important teachers, are important...most important (You parents should remember that you are your child's first, and most important teacher).

There is one person, however, who stands above all the other teachers I've had (aside from my parents) as the man who had the greatest impact on my career as an elementary school teacher...and made an important contribution to my parenting skills.

THE READ-ALOUD HANDBOOK

In 1979, when I was relatively new to teaching, I ordered a booklet from the Weekly Reader Book Club titled, "Jim Trelease's Read-Aloud Handbook for Parents and Teachers."

I had been reading aloud to my students since I started teaching. One of my education school professors had emphasized the importance of reading aloud to our classes, so, from my first class to my last, I tried to make time every day for read aloud. Looking back on my 35 year career I can remember only a handful of times I skipped reading aloud...whether I taught Kindergarten or sixth grade, or something in between, reading aloud was always the most important part of my reading program.

When I saw the pamphlet on reading aloud from the Weekly Reader Book Club I decided that it might be helpful. Thus began my relationship with Jim Trelease's books and research which lasted the more than four decades I spent in elementary school classrooms (as a teacher and volunteer).

I've written about Jim Trelease often on this blog. In 2008 I posted my congratulatory letter to him when he announced his retirement (and I reproduced his response in the comments). In 2017 I wrote a Teacher Appreciation post about him and his Read-Aloud Handbook, now in its eighth edition (the seventh edition is the last one edited by Trelease).


LESSONS FROM JIM TRELEASE

Some of the books listed in the Treasury of Read-Alouds which comprises the second half of the Read-Aloud Handbook might be outdated, but the information about the importance of reading aloud to children and the tips on how to read aloud are still valuable.

There are so many lessons to learn from his book (get a copy of the book!). Here are just two...

Lesson #1 (quoted from the Reading Research Quarterly. See #3, here)

...how exactly does a person become proficient at reading? It’s a simple, two- part formula:

• The more you read, the better you get at it; the better you get at it, the more you like it; and the more you like it, the more you do it.
• The more you read, the more you know; and the more you know, the smarter you grow.

Lesson #2 (emphasis added)

The single most important activity for building the knowledge required for eventual success in reading is reading aloud to children...It is a practice that should continue throughout the grades.

The second lesson was also quoted from another source. It came from Becoming a Nation of Readers published some years after the first Read-Aloud Handbook.

JIM TRELEASE, March 23, 1941 – July 28, 2022

Jim Trelease died on Thursday, July 28, 2022. I'm glad I was able to thank him for his help throughout the years I spent in classrooms. I can't imagine what my teaching career would have been like if not for his influence.

My collection of Read-Aloud Handbook editions,
several of which have been signed by the author, Jim Trelease.

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2018 Medley #20

Segregation, Testing Toddlers, VAM, Duncan Still Unqualified, Why Teachers Quit, Giving Kids Books, Charters

SCHOOL SEGREGATION

Why Is This Happening? Investigating school segregation in 2018 with Nikole Hannah-Jones: podcast and transcript

The U.S. gave up on integrattion. Public school systems are more segregated than when Brown vs. Board of Education was handed down sixty-four years ago. This is all complicated by our underfunding of public education, especially for black and brown students.

So where is the concept of the public good -- where is the concept of "promote the general welfare"?

Nikole Hannah-Jones is one of the few voices calling for Americans to teach their children...all their children...together.

...who the hell pays your social security one day?

Right, when we're a country that is very quickly going to be a minority white country and you're gonna continue to under-educate half of the population of your country, then what jobs are they gonna get that are gonna help pay for the infrastructure of this country, that are gonna help pay your social security.

TESTING

Toddlers and Preschool Testing? Don’t Steal the Joy of Reading!

From the makers of DIBELS comes a new test...this one for toddlers. The next step in educational malpractice.

A child three years old is still a toddler. What demands, if any, should be placed on a child this young when it comes to learning to read? Will it harm their chances of enjoying reading in the future? This is what we should ask when it comes to the new PELI testing.

The same creators of DIBELS (Dynamic Indicators of Basic Literacy Skills), the controversial assessment started with the controversial program Reading First, following the recommendations of the controversial National Reading Panel, now have reading assessment for children as young as three years old.

DIBELS uses nonsense syllables which might not mean anything to a child. There are other problems with the assessment according to reading expert Ken Goodman who edited Examining DIBELS: What it is What it Does.

Top 10 Reasons You Can’t Fairly Evaluate Teachers on Student Test Scores

Using student test scores to evaluate teachers isn't appropriate, yet we still do it. There's no rational reason for continuing a practice that even the American Statistical Association says is statistically unreliable and invalid. This ignorant use of numbers is just another example of America's anti-science and anti-intellectualism.

Steven Singer lists 10 reasons why VAM is junk science...

2) You can’t assess teachers on tests that were made to assess students.

This violates fundamental principles of both statistics and assessment. If you make a test to assess A, you can’t use it to assess B. That’s why many researchers have labeled the process “junk science” – most notably the American Statistical Association in 2014. Put simply, the standardized tests on which VAM estimates are based have always been, and continue to be, developed to assess student achievement and not growth in student achievement nor growth in teacher effectiveness. The tests on which VAM estimates are based were never designed to estimate teachers’ effects. Doing otherwise is like assuming all healthy people go to the best doctors and all sick people go to the bad ones. If I fail a dental screening because I have cavities, that doesn’t mean my dentist is bad at his job. It means I need to brush more and lay off the sugary snacks.

Former Education Secretary Arne Duncan says U.S. education system "not top 10 in anything"

I agreed with some of what Duncan had to say in his interview on Face the Nation. Unfortunately, when he had the chance to change things he made them worse.

In 2015 I wrote,

Look what we got...Arne Duncan -- who never set foot in a public school as either a student or a teacher -- and Race to the Top which doubled down on No Child Left Behind's labeling of low test takers as losers. Arne Duncan, who cheered when an entire school full of teachers in Rhode Island were fired because the school was "low achieving" (aka filled with high poverty students). Arne Duncan, who manipulated federal dollars meant for low income students so that it became a contest to see which states could raise the caps on Charters fast enough and evaluate teachers based on test scores.

It's the ultimate of ironies that this man wrote a book called "How Schools Work."

"We say we value education, but we never vote on education. We never hold politicians accountable — local, state or national level — for getting better results," Duncan, the education secretary under President Obama, said on "Face the Nation" on Sunday. He added that the "toughest lie" for him personally is that "we say we value kids, and we've raised a generation of young people, teens, who have been raised on mass shootings and gun violence, and that simply doesn't happen in other nations."

"I don't look at what people say. I look at their actions, their policies. I look at their budgets. Our values don't reflect that we care about education or we care about teachers or that we truly care about keeping our children safe and free of fear," Duncan said.

WHY TEACHERS QUIT

Brittani Pollock: "I Left Teaching. I Had To."

Here is yet another story about a teacher who left teaching. In this case it's because of lack of funding in poorly funded Oklahoma. Americans are so intent on paying no taxes that we're sabatoging our future.

I'm donating my blog today to a former student, now friend, Brittani. She was my student and an officer in my club, Teen Volunteers, at Norman North. I always knew she wanted to be a teacher, you could see her deep love of children when she volunteered. I watched her get her teaching degree and watched as she began what we both thought would be a long career in the classroom. I planned to watch her become a National Board Certified Teacher. Things did not work out the way we hoped. And my heart is broken for every student who will never know Miss Pollock's love.

GIVE KIDS BOOKS

Dolly Parton's literacy program donates its 100 millionth book to Library of Congress

Before LeBron James, there was Dolly Parton. She started the Imagination Library in 1995. From the Imagination Library web site...

...a book gifting program that mails free, high-quality books to children from birth until they begin school, no matter their family’s income.

After launching in 1995, the program grew quickly. First books were only distributed to children living in Sevier County, Tennessee where Dolly grew up. It became such a success that in 2000 a national replication effort was underway. By 2003, Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library had mailed one million books. It would prove to be the first of many millions of books sent to children around the world.

Earlier this year the Imagination Library sent out its 100 millionth book.

Alongside Carla Hayden, who heads the Library of Congress, the iconic country singer dedicated the 100 millionth book from her Imagination Library to the research library. Through the nonprofit, she has been donating millions of books to children for more than 20 years.

...as of August 1, 2018

The 4th Annual National Give-A-Kid-A-Book Day

Speaking of giving kids books, last July 6 was the fourth annual Give-A-Kid-A-Book day. Did you remember? Russ Walsh reminds us every year.

It's not too late...give-a-kid-a-book today.

Literacy research has shown that the single best way to combat summer reading loss is to get books in kids hands. One way to do this is to give children books.

Participation is easy. All you need to do to is find a child and give that child a book. The child could be your own, a neighbor's child, a student, a grandchild, one of your own kid's friends, children in a homeless shelter. Just give the child a book and say, "I thought you might enjoy this." Some participants like to include a lollipop or other small sweet treat to send the message, "Reading is Sweet!", but the most important thing is to give a kid book.

CHARTERS

In the Public Interest’s weekly privatization report

In the Public Interest posts a weekly privatization report. The reports cover more than just the privatization of public schools. Here is just one of eleven different reports about charter schools from this week's report.

You might also be interested in taking a look at Breaking Point: The Cost of Charter Schools for Public School Districts.

29) Pennsylvania Just a few weeks before the start of the new school year, Wonderland Charter School in Ferguson Township is closing its doors, sending students and parents scrambling after they received email notification. “During the charter review, several people associated with Wonderland, including board members, teachers and parents, informed the board of directors of their concerns with the charter: ‘long-standing, calculated, inappropriate, and unlawful practices with respect to students with special needs,’ according to a letter to the board from Superintendent Bob O’Donnell.”

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My Year-End Favorites

The "Year's Bests" and "Year's Mosts" list...images, blog posts, quotes, podcasts, and books.

Thanks for reading...

MY FAVORITE BLOG POST OF THE YEAR: by SOMEONE ELSE

The Success of America's Public Schools

U.S. Public Schools Are NOT Failing. They’re Among the Best in the World

In which Steven Singer teaches us how well our public schools are doing. Facts matter.

From Steven Singer

...America’s public schools are NOT failing. They are among the best in the world. Really!

Here’s why: the United States educates everyone. Most other countries do not.

We have made a commitment to every single child regardless of what their parents can afford to pay, regardless of their access to transportation, regardless of whether they can afford uniforms, lunch or even if they have a home. Heck! We even provide education to children who are here illegally.

FAVORITE BLOG POSTS: MINE

My Own Favorite Blog Post of the Year

The Myth of America's Failing Public Schools

I follow Steven Singer's post with one of my own about the amazing success of America's public schools.

When she looks at the U.S. international test scores, Secretary DeVos, and other policy makers see "failing schools." This is wrong. The low average scores, and the even lower scores aggregated for low income students, indicate that economic inequity is overwhelming the infrastructure of our public school systems. Instead of blaming public schools, politicians and policy makers must take responsibility for ending the shameful rate of child poverty and inequity in America.

My Most Popular Blog Post of the Year

Kill the Teaching Profession: Indiana and Wisconsin Show How It's Done

This post about how Indiana and Wisconsin are destroying the teaching profession,  received the most attention of anything I wrote this year, picking up several thousand hits.

From Live Long and Prosper

...in order to offset the loss of teaching staff in the state, rules for becoming a teacher have been relaxed...

...because nothing says increased achievement more than hiring under qualified personnel.

FAVORITE IMAGE

Trump fires Lady Liberty.

Retired Chicago-area teacher Fred Klonsky provides an editorial comment about the nation's immigration policy. This sums up the year accurately...

From Fred Klonsky

FAVORITE ED PODCAST

Have you Heard: Truth in Edvertising

With a "market-based" education economy comes advertising. Jennifer Berkshire, Jack Schneider, and their guest, Sarah Butler Jessen, discuss "edvertising". If you are at all concerned about the privatization of public education you owe it to yourself to listen to this.

From Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider

...in schooling certainly there is a private good aspect to it. But schooling is also a public good. It's something that benefits our society, our neighborhoods, our communities. It benefits the most advantaged, but it also benefits the least advantaged at least theoretically. So when we acting as consumers, we're only acting in alignment with the private good aspect of education.

So think for instance, buying an alarm for your house versus trying to cultivate safer cities or safer neighborhoods. Whereas one of those is an inherently private good. The alarm is only going to protect me and my family. The public good is going to benefit everyone in the community and that's not something I can promote via shopping.

FAVORITE QUOTABLES

My favorite quotes from the year...from actual, real-life educators.

The Hypocrisy of "Choice"

Testing Opt Out: Parent Wants Conference; School Calls Police *Just in Case*

From Mercedes Schneider

One of the great contradictions within corporate ed reform is the promoting of a “parental choice” that stops short of the parent’s choice to opt his or her children out of federal- and state-mandated standardized testing.

Poverty

School Choice Opponents and the Status Quo

From Russ Walsh

Those of us who continue to point out that poverty is the real issue in education are accused of using poverty as an excuse to do nothing. Right up front let me say I am against the status quo and I have spent a lifetime in education trying to improve teacher instruction and educational opportunities for the struggling readers and writers I have worked with. To point out the obvious, that poverty is the number one cause of educational inequity, does not make me a champion for the status quo. It simply means that I will not fall prey to the false promise of super-teachers, standardized test driven accountability, merit pay, charter schools, and vouchers, all of which are futile efforts to put a thumb in the overflowing dyke that is systematic discrimination, segregation, income inequity, and, yes, poverty.

2 School Districts, 1 Ugly Truth

From John Kuhn

Educational malpractice doesn't happen in the classroom. The greatest educational malpractice in the Unites States happens in the statehouse not the school house.

If we truly cared about how our students end up, we would have shared accountability, where everyone whose fingerprints are on these students of ours, has to answer for the choices that they make.

MOST IMPORTANT BOOK I READ IN 2017

On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century

We need to learn from history.

By Timothy Snyder

Lesson 10: Believe in Truth: To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.

Publisher's Description

The Founding Fathers tried to protect us from the threat they knew, the tyranny that overcame ancient democracy. Today, our political order faces new threats, not unlike the totalitarianism of the twentieth century. We are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience.

Here's a video of Timothy Snyder talking about his book, HERE.

2018 TO-READ BOOK LIST

Books I hope to get to in 2018...

The Testing Charade: Pretending to Make Schools Better, by Daniel Koretz

Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America, by Nancy MacLean

These Schools Belong to You and Me: Why We Can't Afford to Abandon Our Public Schools, by Deborah Meier and Emily Gasoi

Addicted to Reform: A 12-Step Program to Rescue Public Education, by John Merrow

The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, by Richard Rothstein

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From NPE 2017 – Wrap Up

The NPE conference ended on Sunday, October 15. Below are some quotes made, or referred to on the last day, some books I heard about at the conference and now have on my to-read list, and some articles about the conference, or referred to on the last day. My comments, included.

QUOTES

From Garrison Keillor

When you wage war on the public schools, you're attacking the mortar that holds the community together. You're not a conservative, you're a vandal.

From President John Adams

If you read this blog regularly, you'll note the following quote is at the top of this page.

The whole people must take upon themselves the education of the whole people and be willing to bear the expenses of it. There should not be a district of one mile square, without a school in it, not founded by a charitable individual, but maintained at the public expense of the people themselves.

From Rev. Charles Foster Johnson, Executive Director Pastors for Texas Children

Pastors for Texas Children were instrumental in preventing the passage of a voucher bill in the recent Texas legislature.

Vouchers divert money from the public schools to religious schools (98% of voucher accepting schools in Indiana are parochial schools). We don't do that with any other public good. We don't divert money from the public library for vouchers to privately owned book stores. We don't divert money from public parks for private country club vouchers. Why is public education different?

If you don't believe in the public trust, leave your car in the parking lot and don't drive home on the roads paid for by the citizens of the community.

From Nikole Hannah-Jones, Investigative Journalism, New York Times.

The last time the black/white achievement gap lowered nationally was when cities and states were required, under Brown v. Board of Education, to integrate schools. The current voucher/charter "reform" movement has resulted in the resegregation of public schools.

The fight for public schools must be a fight for integration. Period.

and

The longer a black child stays in a segregated school, the wider her achievement gap grows and the further she falls behind her white peers.

Nikole Hannah-Jones speaking at the NPE Conference, 2017

BOOKS

Here is a list of books I've added to my to-read list...publisher's descriptions are included.

United We Stand Divided We Fall: Opposing Trump’s Education Agenda

Quite a few familiar names in this book. This collection of essays includes as authors some folks who I have been reading for years, including Steven Singer, Russ Walsh, P. L. Thomas and George Lakoff. It also includes a selection by NPE Conference Keynote speaker, Yohuru Williams.

In United We Stand Divided We Fall: Opposing Trump’s Agenda – Essays on Protest and Resistance Garn Press has gathered together essays by great scholars and renowned teachers who oppose the direction in which President Trump is leading the country. These are essays, to quote George Lakoff, which frame American values accurately and systemically day after day, telling truths by American majority moral values.

These are essays of protest against and resistance to Trump’s presidency, to his billionaire cabinet, to the privileging in the White House of white supremacists, the promulgation of “alternate facts”, the denigration of media sources, the purges of State Department personnel, the gag orders at the EPA and scientists placed on “watch lists”, the travel bans on people from wide swaths of U.S. society and on refugees … the list is long.

The One Percent Solution: How Corporations Are Remaking America One State at a Time by Gordon Lafer

In an era of growing economic insecurity, it turns out that one of the main reasons life is becoming harder for American workers is a relentless—and concerted—offensive by the country’s best-funded and most powerful political forces: corporate lobbies empowered by the Supreme Court to influence legislative outcomes with an endless supply of cash. These actors have successfully championed hundreds of new laws that lower wages, eliminate paid sick leave, undo the right to sue over job discrimination, and cut essential public services.

Lafer shows how corporate strategies have been shaped by twenty-first-century conditions—including globalization, economic decline, and the populism reflected in both the Trump and Sanders campaigns of 2016. Perhaps most important, Lafer shows that the corporate legislative agenda has come to endanger the scope of democracy itself.

For anyone who wants to know what to expect from corporate-backed Republican leadership in Washington, D.C., there is no better guide than this record of what the same set of actors has been doing in the state legislatures under its control.

Addicted to Reform: A 12-Step Program to Rescue Public Education by John Merrow

I first heard about this book in a podcast interview of John Merrow by Will Brehm on FreshEd. I'm glad I was given the opportunity to get the book at the NPE conference last weekend. You can listen to the podcast here.

This insightful book looks at how to turn digital natives into digital citizens and why it should be harder to become a teacher but easier to be one. Merrow offers smart, essential chapters—including “Measure What Matters,” and “Embrace Teachers”—that reflect his countless hours spent covering classrooms as well as corridors of power. His signature candid style of reportage comes to life as he shares lively anecdotes, schoolyard tales, and memories that are at once instructive and endearing.

Addicted to Reform is written with the kind of passionate concern that could come only from a lifetime devoted to the people and places that constitute the foundation of our nation. It is a “big book” that forms an astute and urgent blueprint for providing a quality education to every American child.

Democracy in Chains by Nancy MacLean

Gordon Lafer, author of the One Percent Solution (above), recommended this book during his conference session.

Behind today’s headlines of billionaires taking over our government is a secretive political establishment with long, deep, and troubling roots. The capitalist radical right has been working not simply to change who rules, but to fundamentally alter the rules of democratic governance. But billionaires did not launch this movement; a white intellectual in the embattled Jim Crow South did. Democracy in Chains names its true architect—the Nobel Prize-winning political economist James McGill Buchanan—and dissects the operation he and his colleagues designed over six decades to alter every branch of government to disempower the majority.

In a brilliant and engrossing narrative, Nancy MacLean shows how Buchanan forged his ideas about government in a last gasp attempt to preserve the white elite’s power in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education. In response to the widening of American democracy, he developed a brilliant, if diabolical, plan to undermine the ability of the majority to use its numbers to level the playing field between the rich and powerful and the rest of us.

Corporate donors and their right-wing foundations were only too eager to support Buchanan’s work in teaching others how to divide America into “makers” and “takers.” And when a multibillionaire on a messianic mission to rewrite the social contract of the modern world, Charles Koch, discovered Buchanan, he created a vast, relentless, and multi-armed machine to carry out Buchanan’s strategy.

ARTICLES/BLOG POSTS

A Brief Overview of the NPE Conference in Oakland

Diane Ravitch gives her overview of last week's conference. She refers to posting the videos of some of the sessions as well as the keynote addresses. I urge you, if you weren't at the conference, to watch however much you can once they're published...especially the two keynote addresses by NPE Board Member, Yohuru Williams, and by Nikole Hannah-Jones, investigative reporter for the New York Times, and 2017 recipient of the MacArthur Foundation "Genius Award."

The most important things that happened at the conference were not on stage, but in the hallways, where people from across the country met others they had only heard of. We had parents, teachers, principals, superintendents, local school board members, state school board members, journalists, students. The conversations were buoyant.

No one was paid to attend. Almost everyone paid their own way. The speakers were not paid. This was truly a grassroots effort, run on a shoestring, but a very beautiful, unencumbered shoestring. Nearly 500 people came together to find comfort, fellowship, solidarity, and hope.

Michelle Gunderson on Teaching in the Time of Trump

...One of our students who has been struggling to learn was sitting with his reading partner sharing a book when his partner came running over to us. “He read it! He really read it! All by himself.” In the field, this is sometimes referred to as “breaking the code,” or the time a child launches as a reader. When young students begin to read at first they break down each sound and word. Then, suddenly, the walls collapse, and reading becomes smooth.

I am here to tell you that it is one of our miracles, and the reason I teach first grade.

So, how do we teach in the time of Trump? We wake up and be our best selves, and everything we do has meaning and importance. There are no small things right now...

Yohuru Williams at the NPE Conference, 2017

An Interview With Yohuru Williams about Betsy DeVos

This is a must-read blog post by Mercedes Schneider. She interviewed Yohuru Williams and included a link to his powerpoint presentation which accompanied his keynote address to the NPE Conference. I hope to post the video of his presentation at a later date.

Schneider: What do you consider the major threat of the placement of B DeVos as US ed sec?

Williams: There are essentially two major problems with Betsy DeVos. The first is her overall lack of qualification for the position. The second is her open hostility to public schools. We have never had an Education Secretary in the history of the United States History who has exhibited such hostility toward public schools.

Schneider: What do you perceive to be DeVos’ “Achilles heel”?

Williams: Secretary DeVos’ Achilles heel might very well be her singular focus on school choice as the panacea for what she and other Education Reformers have problematically labeled as a “failing system of education” in America. Her arrogance may very well prove her undoing.

Schneider: Arrogance?

Williams: By arrogance I mean her deep sense of entitlement and privilege and her inability to see beyond her own experience.

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Now is a Good Time to Learn From History

Americans today are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism in the twentieth century. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience. Now is a good time to do so.

Timothy Snyder's new book, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century tells us that history does not repeat, but it does instruct, invoking half of Santayana's warning – that we would do well to learn from history.

Snyder's twenty "lessons" relate to the Nazis in Europe during the 1930s and 40s, the Soviets throughout most of the 20th century, and America in 2017. The two former are the examples of tyranny from which we must learn. If we don't, we risk following them down the road to fascist self-destruction.

IT CAN HAPPEN HERE

In both Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, tyranny succeeded because "average" people easily slipped into the role of oppressor in order to support the national tyranny. Austrians who were not Nazis in 1938 looked on in amusement as Austrian Nazis forced Jews to

scrub the streets to remove symbols of independent Austria.

Ordinary people disregarded the obvious signs of tyranny.

On February 2, 1933, for example, a leading newspaper for German Jews published an editorial expressing this mislaid trust:

We do not subscribe to the view that Mr. Hitler and his friends, now finally in possession of the power they have so long desired, will implement the proposals circulating in [Nazi newspapers]; they will not suddenly deprive German Jews of their constitutional rights, nor enclose them in ghettos, nor subject them to the jealous and murderous impulses of the mob. They cannot do this because a number of crucial factors hold powers in check...

The Checks and Balances of society would hold them back, the editorialist believed, but that didn't happen.

TRUTH

The death of truth...Lesson Ten teaches a subject with obvious parallels to today's tweets and news reports.

...the open hostility to verifiable reality, which takes the form of presenting inventions and lies as if they were facts.

Sound familiar? Just think about one and a half million attendees at the inauguration, the largest electoral victory since Ronald Reagan, the highest homicide rate in 47 years, the Bowling Green massacre, the terrorists in Sweden, and so on. Falsehoods abound in the attempt to create a fictional world.

The next mode is magical thinking, or the open embrace of contradiction.

How is the President able to reconcile the promise of lower taxes for everyone, increased health coverage in which everyone will be taken care of, and increased spending on social programs as well as national defense? Where will the money come from? As we've seen with the recent budget, the promises based on magical thinking had to be altered.

The final mode is misplaced faith. It involves the sort of self-deifying claims the president made when he said that “I alone can solve it” or “I am your voice.” When faith descends from heaven to earth in this way, no room remains for the small truths of our individual discernment and experience.

CLEAN UP THE INTERNET

Snyder urges us to learn the truth for ourselves, to recognize propaganda, and be responsible not to pass it on through social media, to our friends and neighbors.

It is your ability to discern facts that makes you an individual, and our collective trust in common knowledge that makes us a society. The individual who investigates is also the citizen who builds. The leader who dislikes the investigators is a potential tyrant.

Promoting propaganda harms all of us.

...although we may not see the other person in front of his or her computer, we have our share of responsibility for what he or she is reading there. If we can avoid doing violence to the minds of unseen others on the internet, others will learn to do the same. And then perhaps our internet traffic will cease to look like one great, bloody accident.

PATRIOTISM

Finally, patriotism is not the same as nationalism.

It is not patriotic to dodge the draft and to mock war heroes and their families...It is not patriotic to avoid paying taxes, especially when American working families do pay...

It is not patriotic to call upon Russia to intervene in an American presidential election...It is not patriotic to appoint as secretary of state an oilman with Russian financial interests who is the director of a Russian-American energy company and has received the “Order of Friendship” from Putin.

The point is not that Russia and America must be enemies. The point is that patriotism involves serving your own country.

The president is a nationalist, which is not at all the same thing as a patriot. A nationalist encourages us to be our worst, and then tells us that we are the best...

A patriot, by contrast, wants the nation to live up to its ideals...

Living up to the Enlightenment ideals of the Founders has been a difficulty for the United States since its beginning. "All men are created equal..." was tainted from the first moment of the Republic by the "three-fifths clause" and "manifest destiny." The founders themselves had trouble living up to the ideals enshrined in the Declaration and Constitution (ten of the first twelve U.S. presidents owned slaves -John and John Quincy Adams were the exceptions). We're still working on giving every American full citizenship. We're still working on ways to "promote the general welfare."

America is a work in progress and the ideal should be to follow the lead of the nineteenth century Senator from Missouri, Carl Schurz who said,

My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right.

Our goal should be to "set right" the country.

THE ONLY THING WE HAVE TO FEAR

In an interview with Steven Rosenfeld on Bill Moyers and Co., Snyder compares the President's
attacks against Muslims to the Nazi anti-semitism of the 30s.

...if you can pick some group and make them stand in for some international threat, then you can change domestic politics, because domestic politics then is no longer about compromises and competing interests, domestic politics is about who inside the society should actually be seen and outside the society.

Fear is the catalyst that changes freedom to tyranny, and right now, a lot of Americans are fearful.

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2016 Medley #12

Testing, Losing Our Way,
Vouchers, Charters, the Right-Wing

INAPPROPRIATE TESTS

The following passage has no link. It was posted on Facebook by my wife who supervises student teachers for Indiana University. The passage below is from one of her students, a student teacher, who can already see what damage we are doing to our children. This is what happens when lobbyists for testing companies buy legislators.

I guess I didn't realize how draining ISTEP was on students (especially those with disabilities) until I experienced it myself. Their patience, motivation to do any work, and stamina was extremely low. I tried my best to help keep students motivated/upbeat but it did not work very well. I really did not do a lot of teaching this past week which is sad to me because there are a ton of kids not getting services...it is painful to watch these kids struggle through these tests.... It's just really tough to see students not even come close to being able to accomplish what is expected of them. These tests are not designed with students with any sort of special need at all.

LOSING OUR WAY

America, You Great Unfinished Symphony

I read Bob Herbert's Losing Our Way: An Intimate Portrait of a Troubled America last summer (2015). I had read an excerpt on Bill Moyer's web site and immediately got a copy. So far I've read it twice and both times I've been amazed at the insanity that is driving our nation to the brink of disaster.

• We're sending our young men and women off to war without preparing for their return (not to mention that we're sending them off to war for no apparent reason).

• We're letting our highways, bridges, and other necessary infrastructure deteriorate to a dangerous level because of tax inequality. We aren't collecting enough money to keep the country running (e.g. from large profitable companies paying no taxes such as Merck, Seagate, GM).

• We're selling off our school system to people like Eva Moskowitz and companies like Pearson because the privatizers have sold American people the lie that our public schools are failing and only privatization can help.

• ...much, much, more

The book review below (written by my daughter) asks

Why don’t we act? Why do we keep voting for candidates who don’t represent our interests? Herbert doesn’t have an answer for that–just a call to action that we keep refusing to take.

Click the link to read the whole review (at the original site, all ad revenue goes to fight cancer, so be sure to read it there). Then get a copy of Losing Our Way and read it. This is an important book.

Losing Our Way is just about the saddest book I’ve ever read. It took me well over a month to read it, even though it’s great, because I had to keep stopping so I wouldn’t sink into a terrible depression.

Losing Our Way is basically the story of everything that’s wrong with the United States today, from our failing infrastructure, to struggling schools, to wage stagnation and income inequality, to endless wars in the Middle East. Bob Herbert knows his stuff, and he doesn’t pull any punches. He illustrates the alarming statistics with stories of Americans, like the teenager who is struggling to finish high school while also working third shift to support her family, the woman whose back was broken in a bridge collapse in Minnesota, and the soldier whose legs were blown off by an IED in Afghanistan. Each story is alarming, depressing, and enlightening. I think a lot of Americans have felt for years that something was not quite right in the United States, and Herbert is able to connect the dots.

Here is Herbert's keynote address at this year's NPE National Conference in Raleigh.

PRIVATIZATION: VOUCHERS

School Daze: Some Colo. Parents Are Demanding Taxpayer Money For Religious Education

Americans United for Separation of Church and State understands what the Indiana Supreme Court does not – that students have a right to a taxpayer funded education, not a taxpayer funded religious education. No other public service allows citizens to earmark their tax money for a privatized version of the service (although there are people who wish that weren't so).  We don't give vouchers for books and deduct that from the public library fund. We don't give vouchers for private security services and then shortchange city, county, and state police departments. People can't refuse to pay for public parks because they have a nice yard...or refuse to pay for road maintenance because they don't drive.

Public education should be no different.

The thing is, no parent is being denied a religious education for their child if that’s what they want. Just because they have to pay for that education themselves without government assistance doesn’t mean anyone is being treated unfairly.

Americans United opposes vouchers because they are so frequently government bailouts for religious schools. That’s what IJ is seeking in its lawsuit and while all students have the right to a quality public education, none have the right to publicly funded religious instruction.

Fortunately the Colorado Supreme Court has already weighed in on this matter. Let’s hope this latest attempt to force taxpayers to subsidize sectarian education is quickly dismissed.

Maryland’s Mistake: Vouchers Comes To The Free State

The Washington Post, owned by privatizer billionaire Jeff Bezos, was thrilled that the Democrats, who have a majority in the Maryland legislature, passed a voucher bill for their state. Apparently the Post thinks that the lead poisoning that started Freddie Gray on his way towards his death at the hands of the police could have been prevented had he gone to a private or parochial school.

Observed the newspaper, “They stressed the urgency of helping young black men in the city. Education…is key to better futures, and the unrest that followed the death of Freddie Gray last April shone new light on the shortcomings of the public school system and the injustice that does.”

Freddie Gray was a 25-year-old man who was arrested by Baltimore police in April of 2015 for possessing a switchblade. He received rough treatment in police custody and later died of a broken neck. Six police officers have been charged in his death. The legal cases against them are ongoing.

It’s clear this was a tragic incident. What’s not so clear is how vouchers might prevent it from happening in the future.

Public funds ought to go to public services which serve everyone. Voucher schools, too often, don't.

Instead of weakening public education by siphoning money away to private, religious schools that elevate preaching over teaching and retain the right to kick anyone out who doesn’t agree, Maryland lawmakers would have done better to focus on the public schools that need help. After all, these are the institutions that are educating the vast majority of Maryland’s young people.

PRIVATIZATION: CHARTERS

Charter School Begins Shutting Down—Students are Pushed Out

If you don't think "it's all about the money," think again.

Real public schools, belong to their community. Community public schools build a history of children and grandchildren attending the same school that parents and grandparents attended. There is stability in the teaching staff...teachers at such schools often spend their entire careers in one school. That stability and continuity is good for children and the community.

"reform" has given us instability in the form of charter schools which can, and often do, close at a moment's notice...charter schools which take the money and run...charter schools with no publicly elected school board, high teacher turnover, and profit for shareholders driving the bottom line.

Here we have a charter school which closed, leaving parents and children to scramble for a new school. This is the "free market" at work. A private school that can't make it closes and students are returned to the public school...which, by law, must take everyone. We should not be spending public funds on charter schools. We should be repairing and improving our community, neighborhood and small town schools instead.

Milwaukeeans were shocked to find out that the troubled North Point Lighthouse Charter School gave parents just a few days’ notice in February that it would shut down three grades before closing down entirely at the end of the school year.

But as the Shepherd can report exclusively, the school, chartered by the City of Milwaukee, will keep the state aid for the estimated 60 students who have been transferred from the school, even though they won’t finish the school year there.

How Charters Destabilize Public School Districts: Let Us Count the Ways

Charters don't succeed any better than real public schools. They have ways of avoiding hard-to-educate students. They have ways of avoiding the accountability that is required of real public schools. Patrons of charter schools can't go to a publicly accountable school board with questions or complaints.

Charters are private corporations taking our tax money and only sometimes using that money for the benefit of students.

Three recent press reports—from Nevada, Chicago, Illinois, and Massachusetts—document how expansion of charter schools is undermining the public schools that serve the majority of students including those with the greatest needs. The same theory of charter school expansion operates all three locations—competition, innovation, and growing opportunity for students who have been left behind. Instead all three recent articles describe diversion of desperately needed public tax dollars, destabilization of public schools, lack of regulation, and all sorts of ways that students with the greatest needs get left farther behind.

Charter schools exploit accountability loophole

Charters can legally work "behind closed doors." What could go wrong?

But the accountability promise made in 2001 counts for little when the authorizer is a private college or an appointed state board filled with a majority of charter-friendly members. When Ball State threatened to revoke charters for poor-performing schools, some charter operators simply shopped for another sponsor. Thus, Timothy L. Johnson Academy – formerly sponsored by Ball State – is now overseen by Trine University. In total, four schools facing the loss of their BSU charters operate today under private oversight.

How did Trine, Grace College and others determine that failing schools deserve a second chance? Only they know – Indiana law allowed the private schools to tap into millions of dollars in taxpayer-provided tuition support with no public oversight.

THE EXTREME RIGHT WING

Cruz is Right to Blame Public Schools for People Not Buying His Crackpot Ideas

What used to be "extreme right-wing" has now become mainstream.

This is funny for other reasons too. Really. It is. Because Ted Cruz is right about something. But he thinks it’s a bad thing when really, it’s good. Because it shows that the educational system works by teaching kids history and geography – the old “reading, writing and arithmetic.” But it also teaches kids to think for themselves.

Ted Cruz and his type call being taught to think “indoctrination,” when in fact is an immunization against indoctrination. The indoctrination Cruz is pushing with his “constitutional conservatism.”

As Thomas Jefferson said in a letter to Charles Yancey in 1816, “if a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilisation, it expects what never was and never will be.”

Which is why Republicans hate public education with a purple passion.

Bruner: Pre-K Programs Are Federal Plot to Make Children Gay

This candidate for the Texas State School Board will likely be elected. She follows in the tradition of Don McLeroy who famously said, "Somebody's gotta stand up to experts..." because those same "experts" disagreed with his religious beliefs. There are way too many people who will vote for her because they believe that being educated corrupts you. [See Listen to Experts]

As with pretty much all of her other comments, she offers no evidence to back up any of her claims and we’re left to offer only wild guesses as to where in the world she got this one. Or where she got the one about President Obama working as a gay prostitute to finance a drug habit. Or the one about LBJ assassinating JFK. Or the one about baby dinosaurs starving themselves into extinction after they left Noah’s ark. Or that there are cobras sneaking into the country.

If you’re just finding out about Bruner, you probably think we’re making this up. But we’re not. Here’s our blog file on her to prove it.

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Life is Like a Sonnet

Today would have been Madeline L'Engle's 97th birthday. She was born on November 29, 1918 in New York.

L'Engle's writing was, according to an article in the Huffington Post today by Claire Fallon, for the oddball in everyone.

Madeleine L'Engle, The YA Author For The Oddball In Everyone

L’Engle’s Wrinkle in Time quintet isn’t just for the oddballs, though. It’s for the oddball in every single one of us. In L’Engle’s books, there’s no one standing onstage who’s simply normal, accepted, whole. Reading the series is a course in learning that every person faces their own path to feeling normal, and their own obstacles to feeling special.

L'Engle was best known for her Wrinkle in time Quintet, A Wrinkle in Time, A Wind in the Door, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, Many Waters, and An Acceptable Time. The books trace the adventures of the Murry children: Meg, her brother Charles Wallace, twins Sandy and Dennys, and others, as they travel through the tesseract.

A Wrinkle in Time is a frequently challenged book because it refers to witches and crystal balls. L'Engle herself was a strong Episcopalian...and a universalist, which resulted in objections to her work from those who insisted that their truth was the only truth.

Her biography on Wikipedia claims that she...

...wrote her first story at age five and began keeping a journal at age eight.[5] These early literary attempts did not translate into academic success at the New York City private school where she was enrolled. A shy, clumsy child, she was branded as stupid by some of her teachers. Unable to please them, she retreated into her own world of books and writing.

A writer's personal history is always instrumental in their creativity. However I have to believe that, had she been better served at school, she still would have written her stories...another reason to encourage creativity, originality, and problem solving over test and punish education.

As I was reading about her I noticed her wonderful attitude about aging. She once wrote,

The great thing about getting older is that you don't lose all the other ages you've been.

Here's to the oddballs among us.

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A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words - July 2013

Here are some pictures, graphic images and cartoons from around the net -- plus my own 2 cents worth of comments. Click on any image to see the full sized version.

Where is Your Money Going?

The Walton Family Foundation is just one of the billionaire's clubs currently funding the destruction of public education.

This is for the millions of public school teachers who shop at Walmart...just so you know where your money goes...

When Billionaires Become Educational Experts

Current reforms are allowing certain individuals with neither scholarly nor practical expertise in education to exert significant influence over educational policy for communities and children other than their own...

Who’s involved? Who are they connected to?

John Walton: ...assisted in the creation of the right-wing advocacy group Alliance for School Choice.

Carrie Walton Penner: Penner, who graduated from a private boarding school and attended two elite universities, sits on the boards of the KIPP Foundation (to which the Walton Family Foundation recently gave $25 million) and the California Charter Schools Association...

Greg Penner: Greg Penner, Carrie Walton Penner’s husband, is on the National Board of Directors for Teach for America, and is a director of the Charter Growth Fund, a “non-profit venture capital fund” investing charter in schools.

Alice Walton

Walton is a registered voter in Texas. She registered in the state in June 2008...

...Alice Walton was the top individual contributor to winning state legislative candidates in the 2010 elections that put [Wisconsin] Republicans in control of the state government. Under the first budget passed by Gov. Scott Walker and the Republican-majority legislature, funding for public schools was cut by $800 million over two years, while funding for programs that funnel public money to private schools increased by $17 million over two years.

Marchers denounce Walton Family Foundation for undermining Chicago's public school system

The Walton family, the richest family in America and heirs to the Walmart fortune, have given millions of dollars to initiatives which strip money from public schools, including nearly half a million dollars in support of Chicago Public Schools’ proposed school closures. Meanwhile, in 2012, the family spent $3.8 million—more money than they spent in any other city—opening new charter schools. The vast majority of the schools closing in Chicago serve low-income neighborhoods and communities of color, leaving many of these areas without neighborhood schools.

Art, Music and PE

The overuse of testing has squeezed the arts and physical education out of many school programs. Here's a great comment.

Do More With Less

It's not just budget cuts -- it's time cuts as well. Teachers are required to spend more and more of their time "teaching to the test" which reduces time spent on other things like read aloud, free silent reading time, history, civics and government, science, current events...

Teachers are being told what to teach, how to teach it, when to teach it, then being punished because students aren't successful...

Where is Accountability for Policy-Makers

Legislators and politicians, who have never set foot (or allowed their children to set foot) in a public school make the rules and then blame schools for not performing miracles. Think about the statistical impossibility of No Child Left Behind's requirement that, by 2014, 100% of students will be proficient on achievement tests. They make it harder and harder for public schools to operate, and for public school teachers to teach and then punish the schools for not doing more with less.

Where's the accountability on our politicians and policy makers? Why aren't they held accountable for the enormous level of child poverty in America?

Get Inside Someone Else's Brain

...on the value of reading and books...

"Reading aloud with children is known to be the single most important activity for building the knowledge and skills they will eventually require for learning to read." — Marilyn Jager Adams

"The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more you learn, the more places you'll go." — Dr. Seuss, "I Can Read With My Eyes Shut!"

"There is more treasure in books than in all the pirate's loot on Treasure Island." — Walt Disney

Don't Give Up

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Sign An Education Declaration to Rebuild America

All who envision a more just, progressive and fair society cannot ignore the battle for our nation’s educational future. Principals fighting for better schools, teachers fighting for better classrooms, students fighting for greater opportunities, parents fighting for a future worthy of their child’s promise: their fight is our fight. We must all join in.

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Stop the Testing Insanity!

Sign the National Resolution on High Stakes Testing!

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