Religious Freedom Day, 2016

JANUARY 16, 1786

Today is Religious Freedom Day.

National Religious Freedom Day commemorates the January 16, 1786 adoption of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom by the Virginia General Assembly. The statute was written by Thomas Jefferson and is the basis for the establishment clause of the First Amendment.

REDEFINING RELIGIOUS FREEDOM

The Religious Right has worked hard in the last few decades to redefine the term, "Religious Freedom." In the U.S. today we have governors, politicians, and public officials supporting attempts to discriminate based on religious beliefs. We have candidates for public office promising to limit the immigration of certain religious groups. We have religious organizations which seek to limit the rights of their employees. In other words, the attempt has been made to define Religious Freedom in such a way as to coerce and manipulate the rights of others.

Rob Boston, Director of Communications for Americans United for Separation of Church and State, has written,

The term religious freedom means the right to make decisions about theology for yourself. It's the right to worship God – or not to worship at all – as you see fit...

...It's not the right to tell other people what to do. It's not the right to make decisions for others. It's not the right to use the power of government to impose your theology on anyone else.

...Somehow the actions of others are seen as a threat to someone else's religious liberty.

Thus, an employee's decision to use birth control becomes a threat to her boss's religious freedom. An expectation that young children will learn about evolution in a public school endangers the religious freedom of an evolution-denying family in that district. A woman who shows up at a pharmacy and expects the pharmacist to do his job by giving her the medication her doctor has prescribed is threatening the pharmacist's religious freedom. A same-sex couple's decision to get legally married somehow threatens the religious liberty of a person across town who doesn't even know them.

...Unless the actions in question involve busting down church doors, thrashing the implements of worship, and threatening the people inside, very little of what one person does affects the religious liberty of another.

Religious freedom does not mean that you can prevent me from doing something that offends your religious beliefs if my action doesn't harm you. Believe what you choose...and let me believe what I choose.

TWENTY GODS OR NO GOD

Jefferson understood the impact of his Virginia Statute. He understood that many people were against acknowledging religious liberty for everyone. In a column about Religious Freedom Day, Frederick Clarkson wrote:

Thomas Jefferson was well aware that many did not like the Statute, just as they did not like the Constitution and the First Amendment, both of which sought to expand the rights of citizens and deflect claims of churches seeking special consideration.

So before his death, Jefferson sought to get the last word on what it meant. The Statute, he wrote, contained "within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mohametan, the Hindoo and Infidel of every denomination."

In his own words he reminds us that the first amendment protects all citizens' religious expression no matter who they are, or what their religion might be. The only restriction is that which is "injurious to others."

The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.

RELIGIOUS FREEDOM DAY, 2016

President Obama's 2016 Religious Freedom Day Proclamation includes the following...

When the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom was adopted on January 16, 1786, it formed a blueprint for what would become the basis for the protection of religious liberty enshrined in our Constitution. Drafted by Thomas Jefferson, the statute proclaims that "all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities." The First Amendment prohibits Government from establishing religion, and it protects the free exercise of every faith. Our Government does not sponsor a religion, nor does it pressure anyone to practice a particular faith, or any faith at all. The United States stands for the protection of equal rights for all people to practice their faith freely, without fear or coercion, and as Americans, we understand that when people of all religions are accepted and are full and equal members of our society, we are all stronger and freer.

###

Baseball Interlude: Monte Irvin

"Baseball has done more to move America in the right direction than all the professional patriots with their billions of cheap words." -- Monte Irvin, quoted by MLB historian, John Thorn

Monte Irvin died Monday, January 11, 2016. He was 96.

Irvin played in the Negro Leagues and the Mexican League before coming to the Major Leagues in 1949. He played alongside, and mentored Willie Mays, and was part of the New York Giant's 1951 World Series Championship team.

From the Giant's web site tribute to Irvin:

Monte Irvin was a mentor to Willie Mays and a friend to Ted Williams. He was in the Polo Grounds' home dugout when Bobby Thomson hit the "Shot Heard 'Round the World" and was visiting Havana when the Cubans ran out a hotshot pitching prospect named Fidel Castro.

Irvin's long, wonderful life was the stuff of dreams, a uniquely American story and an enduring testament to talent, perseverance, grace and dignity. Perhaps it is the greatest tribute to this remarkable man, who died Monday night in Houston of natural causes at age 96, that he'll forever be remembered as much for his decency and sense of humor as for his amazing skills.

Monte Irvin played his last year in professional baseball (as a player) with the Chicago Cubs. It was 1956 – my first year as a (8 year old) Cub fan.

Al Yellon, author of the Bleed Cubbie Blue blog, wrote of a milestone game in which Irvin particpated,

His one year with the Cubs was decent, as he hit .271/.346/.460 with 15 home runs in 111 games at age 37. Irvin's addition to the team in 1956 meant that in the first game Sam Jones started that year, April 20 against the Cardinals, the Cubs fielded a majority African-American lineup for the first time (Irvin, Jones, Ernie Banks, Gene Baker and Solly Drake). They were the second team to do so. (First was the Dodgers, July 17, 1954.)

Irvin was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1973.

###

2016 Medley #1

Hope for Public Education, Duncan, Privatization, Elections, 
Children As Products, ESSA, Testing

EXPERTS SPEAK

Can Schools Be Fixed? Experts on K-12 education offer their reasons for optimism and pessimism going forward.

This article has the wrong title.

Herein we get predictions from people who are "experts" in education (In this case, there are some people who have actually taught school and studied education, for a change). Some of their comments are thought provoking. Many of the writers claim that ESSA is a reason to hope for improvements to public education. Diane Ravitch, on the other hand, ignores ESSA which will do little to help our children escape test-and-punish education which is now the norm in America (see ESSA is a Lot of Suds, below). Instead she writes of the trust American's have with their own, local school systems. She says she is hopeful for two reasons...

The reasons for hope are two-fold: first, the public doesn’t want to abandon its community public schools. No district or state has ever voted to privatize its schools. Second, every so-called “reform” has failed to promote better education or equal opportunity for the neediest children. Neither charters nor vouchers consistently get better results for children, unless they exclude the weakest students. Measuring teachers by student test scores has been a costly failure. The great majority of the public admires their public schools and their teachers and wants them to be better, more equitably funded, not eliminated. If democracy works, these misguided “reforms” will be consigned to the ashcan of history.

But the focus of this article's title is wrong. "Can Schools Be Fixed?" In their introduction the authors themselves explain why there's more that must be fixed besides America's schools [emphasis added].

...Education is often touted as a means for boosting social mobility and making communities more equal, but inequality in school funding and resources has made that difficult to achieve, especially amid increasing poverty rates. Segregation in districts, both tacit and explicit, is holding scores of children back, and performance on math and reading assessments has remained relatively stagnant...

QUESTIONS FOR DUNCAN

Race To the Top Redux

Arne Duncan is gone and John King is the new acting Secretary of Education. The damage done by Obama's Education Department remains, however. Mark Naison lists questions which need to be answered. [bullets added to improve readability]

When the full accounting of the Obama Administration's Race to The Top is made, the following questions will have to be answered

• How many schools were closed?

• How many great teachers were fired or forced into retirement?

• How many teachers still on the job were placed under a doctors care because test based accountability had destroyed their self-confidence

• How many communities experienced sharp declines in the number of teachers of color working in their schools?

• How many new charter schools were created which were embroiled in controversy because of financial irregularities or abusive practices?

• ....

SCRAPING

WEEKEND QUOTABLE

Mike Klonsky and his brother Fred are edu-bloggers from Chicago. The picture below is one done by brother Fred and posted on brother Mike's blog. It depicts Arne Duncan looking for his replacement, John King.

A PRIMER ON PRIVATIZATION

A primer on the damaging movement to privatize public schools

Marion Brady provides an excellent summary of the test-blame-privatize movement. This is a must-read for anyone who is interested in preserving public education.

Look at standardized tests from the kids’ perspective. Test items (a) measure recall of secondhand, standardized, delivered information, or (b) require a skill to be demonstrated, or (c) reward an ability to second-guess whoever wrote the test item. Because kids didn’t ask for the information, because the skill they’re being asked to demonstrate rarely has immediate practical use, and because they don’t give a tinker’s dam what the test-item writer thinks, they have zero emotional investment in what’s being tested.

As every real teacher knows, no emotional involvement means no real learning. Period. What makes standardized tests look like they work is learner emotion, but it’s emotion that doesn’t have anything to do with learning. The ovals get penciled in to avoid trouble, to please somebody, to get a grade, or to jump through a bureaucratic hoop to be eligible to jump through another bureaucratic hoop. When the pencil is laid down, what’s tested, having no perceived value, automatically erases from memory.

POLITICS

Bernie Sanders: I Oppose Charter Schools

At last Bernie gives us a glimpse – but only a glimpse – of his K-12 education agenda. It's nice to know that he is against privatization through charters. Now, what about excessive testing, accountability based on test scores, vouchers, "turnaround schools," and the rest?

“I’m not in favor of privately run charter schools. If we are going to have a strong democracy and be competitive globally, we need the best educated people in the world. I believe in public education; I went to public schools my whole life, so I think rather than give tax breaks to billionaires, I think we invest in teachers and we invest in public education. I really do.” – Bernie Sanders (Quote begins at 1:48:32)

For a more detailed discussion see the following two entries in Anthony Cody's blog, Living in Dialogue.

• Bernie Sanders Talks Education at the Massachusetts Teachers Association

• Time for Education Advocates to Get Behind Bernie Sanders?

Cruz campaign official says Christians must take over public schools to stop ‘deception of the seed’

Elections matter. Voting matters [emphasis added].

Dunbar said nearly all American students attend public schools — which she warned were a secular plot to turn children away from Republican values.

“When we have 88 to 90 percent, which is approximately the number of the students that are being educated within our socialized education system, effectively indoctrinating our children with our own tax dollars, guess what?” she said. “We lose every other issue. We lose life, we lose marriage — we lose all of it. So I think this is the linchpin issue.”

CHILDREN ARE NOT PRODUCTS

My Daughter is Not a Widget

Here's a beautiful piece by Steven Singer (the gadflyonthewall) about why Exxon-Mobile's CEO's view of America's children is misguided. Children are not products. Education is not a business. There's more to educating children than "college and career-ready standards."

I am but a simple man. I don’t bring in a six-figure salary. I’m a teacher in that same public school system. I’m also the father of an elementary student. I am a man of no monetary means and thus little merit. But I say this: the Tillersons of this world are wrong. Our children are worth more than these tiny bean counter brains realize. The purpose of education is not to provide more resources for their pointless game of Monopoly.

My daughter has a life, and her education is a tool to enrich that life. It is her vehicle of understanding the world around her. It is a process to invigorate her sense of wonder. It is a method of understanding how things work and where she fits in the universe.

Yes, she will one day need to seek employment. But what she chooses as her occupation will be up to her. SHE will decide where she fits in, Mr. Tillerson, not you. SHE will decide what is valuable in her life. SHE will decide if she wants to spend her hours in the pursuit of profits or less tangible enterprises.

As such, she needs literature – not standardized tests. She needs mysteries to solve – not Common Core. She needs equitable resources – not charter schools. She needs teachers with advanced degrees and dedication to their jobs – not Teach for America temps... [emphasis in original]

ESSA IS A "LOT OF SUDS"

New education law: a lot of suds

A lot has been written about the new education law, ESSA. Here are four point that must be remembered when thinking about the new law. In essence, the horrible parts of NCLB and RttT are not necessarily gone...they've just been handed over to the states to oversee. The overemphasis on testing is still there. The developmentally inappropriate standards are still there. The accountability (aka punishment) based on test scores is still there. The financial incentive for charters is still there. The last paragraph in the quote below is a call to action [emphasis added]!

— Testing: The issue of greatest public concern was too much standardized testing, which generated a parents’ rebellion. The administration said the onerous requirements should be relieved. So what got relieved? Well, nothing. The same grades still have the same tests. In addition, some states are developing “interim” assessments. Psychometricians are getting apoplexy trying to figure out how such Rube Goldberg contraptions can work. Tighter restrictions are placed on testing severely handicapped children and on those who do not speak English. The quadra-power may not be so mountain fresh.

— Standards: The Common Core State Standards were reviled on both the left and the right. So the new law contains tough, unequivocal “ultra deep” language prohibiting the U. S. secretary from forcing or even encouraging states to adopt the common core or any other particular set of state standards. Instead, states must still adopt federally approved “challenging,” state standards, at a “comparable” level.

— Accountability: Previously, schools had to meet ever-increasing goals for each year or be subject to state intervention. Whereas the new system requires the state to intervene in the lowest performing 5 percent, any high school that has a low graduation rate, and those schools that are not making sufficient progress in closing the achievement gap. In the old system, all schools faced sanctions if every student could not meet very high standards. In the new system, since every state has a lowest 5 percent, schools in high-scoring states will be subject to intervention no matter how high they score. (You may be having problems telling the difference between the 100- and the 92-ounce jugs).

— Federal spending: Here’s where the price increase slides in. Much was hurrahed about the increase in federal spending of $1.4 billion. That’s a nice piece of change until you consider that the nation currently spends about $650 billion per year on education — which makes the increase a touch over one-fifth of 1 percent. Not mentioned is that federal education spending was cut 20 percent over the past five years. We haven’t caught up with where we were before the recession. The new law also slips $333 million of the money to charter schools.

As weak and inadequate as this effort is, we can be pleased our federal government was able to act on something. We can also take some limited comfort in this token effort to address the needs of our economically deprived and children of color.

Unfortunately, the new suds look disappointingly like the old suds. But it isn’t the similarity of the old and new that is the problem — it is the mindless repetition and continuation of an utterly ineffective test-based reform system that must concern us.

ISTEP IS "ILL-SUITED"

United on ISTEP+: State leaders show they grasp test's weaknesses

Ok, so I'm beating a dead horse...the state has decided that student achievement testing should be used to evaluate teachers and schools, whether or not the practice is invalid. Not much that I say is going to change that (although I'll continue to write about this to Senator Kruse and Representative Cox, my local, running-in-the-election-unopposed, legislators).

Maybe, just maybe, however, if enough people hear this and raise the question often enough, the policy can be revisited.

ISTEP is an "ill-suited tool for measuring the performance of students, teachers, schools and school corporations." The problem is not that the testing process had some problems last year (although that surely is an issue to correct). The problem is that, as Linda Darling-Hammond has said, "We're using the wrong kinds of tests...We're using the tests in the wrong kinds of ways."

ISBA’s position speaks to the much larger problem with ISTEP+: It is an ill-suited tool for measuring performance of students, teachers, schools and school corporations. The push to do so comes from so-called school reform groups like Stand for Children and the pro-voucher Institute for Quality Education, both of which testified Wednesday in opposition to the accountability delay.

###

Invalid Use of Tests Must End

NO SURPRISE, TEST SCORES DROP

The predictions were, of course, correct. Nearly all of Indiana schools which used ISTEP to assess students saw a drop in their scores.

Democrats and Republicans are jumping on the bandwagon to #pauseaccountability. Bills are before both houses in the Indiana General Assembly which would allow school systems to ignore 2015 ISTEP scores when evaluating teachers, and would allow the state to ignore 2015 ISTEP scores when grading schools and school districts.

The ISTEP won't be going away, however, and it doesn't matter if the state improves the test. It doesn't matter if teachers learn how better to teach to the test. It doesn't matter because, unless the ISTEP is validated for use as a tool to evaluate teachers and schools, using the test in that manner is inappropriate and invalid.

WHY USE ISTEP FOR TEACHER AND SCHOOL EVALUATION?

Standardized tests yield simple numbers to explain a complicated process. Look at the list of schools and their test scores. All you see are the percentage of students who passed. Schools are given minimal information about the difficulties students have in various areas of the test and that information is often too little and too late (in the current situation, nearly a year later) to actually help students learn content related to the state standards. [Are the state standards all that schools should be responsible for? Is there nothing more to an educated citizenry than what's in the standards? Should schools, teachers, and students be held accountable for only the standards and nothing else?]

The state uses those numbers to grade teachers and schools. A school's or school system's grade of A, B, C, D or F is based on the percentage of students passing the test and improving their scores. Some students score lower on standardized achievement tests due to the effects of poverty while out of school factors contribute more to a student's score on a test than does the classroom teacher.

Yet the state still insists on using student achievement test scores to evaluate the school's performance. [Since the correlation between achievement tests scores and poverty is so strong perhaps we ought to use student achievement test scores to evaluate government officials' effectiveness at improving the economy.]

THE MISUSE OF TESTS

The ISTEP has never been validated as a tool to evaluate teachers. In a process which is apparently meant to punish teachers who work with hard to educate students (students in poverty, students for whom English is a second language, and students with learning differences), the state continues to insist on using test scores as part of teacher evaluations despite the lack of validity.

THE PAYOFF – PRIVATIZATION

Misusing test scores for evaluating schools creates more privatization and "turnaround" schools. The more public schools that are graded F, the more public schools can be turned over to charter operators and the more students can be enticed to leave the public schools for parochial and private schools with vouchers. The connection between privatization and political donors is clear – money is now the guiding force in our state's education system, not the needs of students.

Despite the fact that Indiana's students outperform the national average on the NAEP, the legislature and the government refuse to admit that our public schools are working.

The state has an obligation to fully fund public education. It has an obligation to help public schools succeed, not replace them with privately run charter schools. It has an obligation to help public schools filled with students who struggle, not entice students to leave the public schools.

Evaluating teachers and schools with student achievement test scores is invalid and it needs to end.

###