The first thing Biden promised to do...

 

Biden was at a candidates event in Houston with National Education Association members in July 2019 when he said: “First thing, as president of United States — not a joke — first thing I will do is make sure that the secretary of education is not Betsy DeVos. It is a teacher. A teacher. Promise.” -- WaPO

Biden's cabinet is filling up fast. So far, once you get past all the chatter about a "second Obama presidency"; or about slipping a disgraced Rahm Emanuel in through the back door (NO, NO, NO please), or even about appointing Trump Republicans as opposed to anyone from the left, the process has been pretty transparent and necessarily fast-moving. 

But we're still waiting for more than whispers about his pick for Secretary of Education. This may be the most important pick of all given that most school districts remain in limbo or possibly on the brink of collapse because of the pandemic and Trump/DeVos's disastrous response. But even under the new administration, plans for a necessary, safe reopening are going nowhere without an immediate influx of cash -- possibly a trillion dollars or more -- to the districts. 

And it's not just about money. It's about radical transformation and the re-imaging of public education. We will never be able to go back to the old "normal". So where's the transformational leadership going to come from?

There are big questions to resolve about, systemic racial inequality, current, and post-pandemic standardized testing, privatization, student loans, universal pre-K and so much more. It will take much more than the new D.O.E. to undo the damage done these past four years under Betsy DeVos. Not to mention, that done under the previous decades of No Child Left Behind and Race To The Top. 

But the appointment of a new ed secretary will be a signal about which way the new regime is headed. So how did the first thing on Biden's to-do list move to near-last? Where is this teacher that been promised us? Why the hush hush?

Progressives have been pushing some good people for consideration. So have the influential, pro-privatization, anti-union hedge-fund reformers like DFER. 

I have a few recommendations myself. But I'm dubious that the left will be allowed any input into the decision. That's certainly been the case so far.

Unpacking the 'data-driven' war against COVID-19

“We are way ahead on testing. We are the best in the world on testing. We’ve tested much more than anybody else, times two — or every country combined. We’ve tested more than every country combined.” -- Trump, remarks at the White House, April 28, 2020

The good news this morning is that Hong Kong and South Korea, two places among the hardest hit by the virus, are reporting zero new COVID-19 cases. This the result social distancing, mask wearing and of quick conducted widespread testing and contact tracing of new infections to halt the virus's spread.

Contrast that with the U.S. where coronavirus infections have soared past the million mark with more than 60,000 reported deaths. The U.S. has far more COVID-19 cases than any other country. Spain, which has around 50 million people compared with some 332 million in the U.S., has 232,128 cases. Italy, which has a population of around 62 million people, has 201,505 cases. China, where the outbreak began, is reporting fewer than 84,000 cases. Those numbers are as of Tuesday afternoon.

The World Health Organization warned the world of the virus in early January and declared a public emergency on January 30th. On that day, Trump said, "we think we have it very well under control".  All through January, February, and March, Trump minimized the threat. His tweet on March 9th likened the virus to the common flu. Two days later, the WHO declared a global pandemic. It wasn't until March 13th that DT declared a national emergency. That was six weeks after the WHO had declared a public emergency.

I say reported cases because of the likelihood that there may be severe undercounting. For example, the number of COVID-19 cases in L.A. County may be as much 50 times greater than the official count, according to preliminary results from a new study by the University of Southern California.

The good news is that if the USC study is accurate and in reality we’re identifying only one in 50 infections, that would make COVID-19 a lot less deadly than previously believed, while also making it a lot more contagious (and asymptomatic “silent carriers” a lot more widespread). That would also call for a paradigm shift in how to combat the virus.

The problem of course is that data collection, like testing itself, has become a political tool rather than a scientific one. Trump is now claiming that we have more than adequate testing and that the U.S. will soon be running "5 million" tests per day and that would explaim the discovery of a million cases.

But as WaPo's Glenn Kessler points out,

Trump is trying to make lemonade out of lemons. Many countries with significant case loads are testing, often at greater rates than the United States. The United States has such a huge case load because it failed to ramp up testing at the speed of other countries, so the virus spread silently before Trump finally took the problem seriously and advocated mitigation and social distancing efforts.

Having 1 million cases of covid-19 is nothing to brag about, but Trump still finds a way.

Those of us educators, who've had to deal with decades of school reform, can easily understand this phenomena. We are all too familiar with the way testing and data collection have been misused to promote political ambitions while tracking and sorting children and punishing teachers and schools.

Testing dust-up at CPS misses the point.

SCHULER: “I think it would basically be naive to not mention the possibility of cheating or gaming,” Schuler said. “I think we’ve been pretty fair that it’s in the mix, we can’t quantify it. ... I think what we reported is very measured.”

BOARD MEMBER SOTELO:  “If you can’t [prove it], don’t make those assertions. Because now you are taking away the credit of all the hard work of all the teachers...”

Outgoing Chicago Public Schools IG Nicholas Schuler is probably well-intentioned as he hassles with the CPS board about possible test "cheating." He's sharp on issues of security but clueless about the real role of high-stakes, standardized testing. And like all teachers, principals, and CPS board members themselves, he's caught up in a toxic system that misuses tests as a weapon for tracking and sorting children and for penalizing schools and teachers for the students that they teach.

Testing madness has once again moved to center-stage in Chicago's school reform debate, driven in recent years by national policies like No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top. Its corrosive and divisive effects are revealed in the current battle. The cost to cash-starved school systems like CPS, can't be measured in just payments to profit-hungry testing, security and textbook companies, but in teaching time wasted in test prep as well. 

The Sun-Times reports:

Nearly every one of the board’s seven members peppered CPS Inspector General Nicholas Schuler with questions about his office’s investigation that found “unusual patterns” and “irregularities” in some test results. He told board members they would be “naive” to think his findings didn’t include attempts to game testing procedures.

 But the core of the debate between Schuler’s office and CPS is whether using the word “cheating” was appropriate in a report that didn’t necessarily substantiate any concrete examples of wrongdoing.  

While the board tweaks CPS’s highest-stakes NWEA test for its reliability and validity, Schuler claims he's convinced that teachers, who are being evaluated on the basis of student test scores, are cheating to protect their jobs. He offers no evidence. But being an IG has made him sensitive to the imagined evil that lurks in the minds of teachers and administrators. He's like the cop who sees everyone on the street as a potential perp.

Board members are right to challenge him on this. I would think that the CTU should be standing right with them.

One of his recommendations is that teachers, whose own performance ratings partially depend on the results of the NWEA, shouldn’t be the test monitors. That's exactly where he's wrong. Curriculum and assessment rightfully belong in the domain of educators, not cops, politicians or inspectors.

When testing is high-stakes, tests no longer measure what they were intended to measure. But so far, neither side is talking about eliminating high-stakes, standardized testing completely and making testing a teaching/learning tool, a part of every teacher's repertoire, to assess how well students are progressing, free from punishment and reward.

 Finally, a missing component in this current debate is the thousands of parents and students who shook the system's testing foundation with their "Opt-Out" movement four years ago. It's needed now, more than ever.

Sun-Times' phony support for CPS sports teams

Sun-Times says, Simeon needs the teachers strike to end sooner than the rest of the Public League 

We have to wonder, if the strike continues through the coming week, how many students this school year will score just a little lower on standardized tests, hurting their chances of getting into a top college or winning a scholarship. -- Sun-Times editorial

I expect anti-union, anti-teacher rants from the likes of Greg Hinz at Crain's or Kristen McQueary (and now Eric Zorn) at the Trib. But I must say, I flipped out after reading today's editorial in the Sun-Times, a paper owned in part by the unions, which hit too close to home.

The editorial calls on striking CTU teachers to return to work immediately or risk hurting CPS sports teams.

If the strike does not end on or before Tuesday, all 78 CPS football teams — some 2,300 kids — will not play their Week 9 games.

It's not just football. Girls tennis teams will miss their scheduled tournament and Class 2A and 3A boys soccer teams had to forfeit every game this weekend.

And the topper...

...if the strike continues through the coming week, how many students this school year will score just a little lower on standardized tests, hurting their chances of getting into a top college or winning a scholarship.

The best solution there is, stop giving them.

First, let me say that as a former CPS basketball coach and IHSA referee, I am sympathetic to the coaches and players whose games have been put on hold, just as I am with inconvenienced parents and teachers who long to be in the classroom with their kids.

But I've always thought that educators talking to their students about a teacher strike and about the whole collective-bargaining process, can provide just as authentic a learning experience on democracy than the ordinary goings-on in the school building or out on the football field for those few days.

But I still have to call B.S. at S-T's sudden phony concern for CPS sports programs. This is a newspaper that remained silent when Mayor Rahm Emanuel was slashing sports programs for all but the elite schools.

As a coach, taking my players to suburban schools, only six miles up the lakeshore, was always a lesson in class warfare. My westside kids would walk into carpeted locker rooms in suburban schools that looked like health-club spas, past fancy offices for large athletic departments, training tables where opposing players were having their ankles wrapped by professional trainers. Courtside was often a doctor or at least a skilled nurse so injuries could be treated on the spot.

These wealthy public schools all had expanded counseling services, full-time nurses, psychologists, and well-staffed libraries. Not just because it was written into their union contracts, but because these districts received two-to-three times the per/student allotment as did city schools.

Back at CPS, I was given a tiny stipend for the hours I spent each afternoon and evening after school and at games. I often came out-of-pocket for after-practice bus fare home or for a meal at McDonald's, or for new Nikes so our players wouldn't have to play in their streetwear. We asked players' parents -- often unemployed or minimum-wage workers -- to kick in for new uniforms that fit the kids. I even had to collect the unis after each game and launder them at home.

I had to purchase a $60 book on first aid, told to read it and then given an online, true-false and multiple-choice test to pass. I was then left to my own devices, with no equipment or first-aid materials (maybe ice from the kitchen) or resources to treat ankle sprains, open wounds, asthma attacks, splint broken bones, or things much more serious until the ambulance came. All this while the game was going on.

CPS has a two-tier system of highschool sports, where the gap between the haves and have-nots was noticeably widened by Rahm Emanuel. He made sure that there were always plenty of resources for elite sports schools like Simeon (see S-T's "Why Simeon needs the teachers strike to end sooner than the rest of the Public League"), Whitney Young and Phillips, but not for the rest of us.

See also: How did a CPS high school get in line for a $13M gym to lure a star basketball coach? All one of Rahm Emanuel’s campaign donors had to do was ask.

Sun-Times sports writers help widen the gap by covering the high school sports star system as if it were big-time college or the NBA or NFL.

On the strike line this morning.

As my readers know, I have been out on the picket line supporting the just demands of the teachers for better pay and working conditions, including nurses, social workers and librarians in every school.

I don't equate our progressive mayor with Rahm. Nor do I know what the current budget will allow for sports programs. But oh, how I wished for a full-time nurse to treat sports injuries back then.

However, we were lucky enough to have a wonderful librarian who I often sent my struggling student/athletes to for extra academic help in order to keep them eligible. Yes, we need one of those in every school as well.

Today, at a union news conference, CPS sports coaches talked about the need for higher stipends, better staffing, facilities and busing for sports programs. That's something worth fighting for, during the strike and after. I'm out of the game now, but I hope they get them.

I also hope the Sun-Times editorial board members get their heads out of their rear ends. 

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Raise Your Hand on return of PARCC

“To have the Illinois test ready for spring, ISBE has basically adopted PARCC for one more year,” the group said in a statement. -- Sun-Times

John Dingell's last words

Opponents of the Medicare program that saved the elderly from that cruel fate called it “socialized medicine.” Remember that slander if there’s a sustained revival of silly red-baiting today. -- Washington Post

Amy Klobuchar's poke at Clinton

"I think we're starting in Wisconsin because as you remember there wasn't a lot of campaigning in Wisconsin in 2016. With me, that changes." -- The Hill

Toni Preckwinkle

 “Can we count on you when it’s needed to say no to the teachers union?” Flannery asked. “Of course,” Preckwinkle said. “Of course.” -- Chicago Tribune

Robert Reich

 America will never be a socialist country,” Donald Trump declared in his State of the Union address. Someone should alert Trump that America is now a hotbed of socialism. But it is socialism for the rich. Everyone else is treated to harsh capitalism. -- Guardian

The mayor's one-sided narratives about CPS progress couldn't save him

Citywide, 45 percent of black students attend Level 1 or 1-plus schools, while 91 percent of white students attend the top rated schools. (Tribune)

Rahm Emanuel may have dropped out of the upcoming mayor's race, but he continues to boast and take credit for the reported bumps in CPS test scores and graduation rates. I think, one of the reasons he dropped out of the race is because his (and CEO Janice Jackson's) one-sided narrative has lost credibility in the media, in the community and with the voters.

Open sessions at CPS board meetings have become a nightmare for the mayor and the board. So much so that they are making it much more difficult for school/community members to participate.

So why the loss of credibility?

First, because neither Jackson nor the mayor can offer any explanation or rationale for the claimed rise or why the mayor and his schools chief deserve credit for the bumps. After all, they reported come despite years of state underfunding of CPS.

Is there some new policy that came from the 5th floor at City Hall or from his hand-picked board that drove test scores up a notch or kept students from dropping out? Rahm may attribute it to "choice". But a closer look should debunk that theory. Thirty years of "choice" (privately-run charters, selective-enrollment schools, and now vouchers) have left us with this  --  45% of black students attending so-called Level 1 or 1-plus schools, while 91% of white students attend the top rated schools.

Also, is the reported bump system-wide? The answer is no. A new CPS report shows, the city's South and West sides have lower concentrations of highest-rated schools than other areas, and black and Latino students attend top schools at far lower rates than their white counterparts.

While at several selective enrollment schools, like Lane Tech on Chicago’s north side, 100% of students are testing at or above standards, at resourced-starved neighborhood schools like Englewood results were much different. At Nicholson Public School for example, only 13.8% of the students at the STEM Academy reached or exceeded math standards. At Auburn Gresham’s Barton Elementary School, 18.1% reached or exceeded standards, and at Dett Elementary near the United Center, just over 15% were meeting standards.

Stats like these leave us wondering if Levels are determined mainly by the color and family income of the attending students or by anything different going on in the classroom? In other words if the 45% and the 91% switched school and teachers, would the Levels travel with them? Or is reform simply another way of reproducing inequality?

Rahm's cheerful narrative omits any mention of the loss of thousands of students from CPS schools, mainly students of color, from low-income families and underserved or closed schools. CPS' own report also makes clear the district, which has seen enrollment dwindling for years, is operating vastly under capacity. There is space for about 150,000 more students in a district that last year had enrollment of about 371,000 in 650 schools. And enrollment is expected to decline by another 5% over the next three years. Could this exodus of poor and black students from CPS account for the reported jump in test scores? Yes, it could and likely did, minus any other credible explanation.

Finally, Rahm's political boasting ignores the continuing stories of widespread sexual abuse and cover-ups and mistreatment of children with disabilities often resulting from privatization of school nurses.  Neither of those things correlate with improved measurable learning outcomes.

I'm not trying to lay all this at Rahm's feet. Selective and political spinning of school data and lack of transparency have long been a central part of the culture of a school system run autocratically by the mayor. For example, the reported cover-up of sexual abuse at CPS goes back the Daley era, when current mayoral candidates Paul Vallas and Gery Chico ran the mayor's school system. 

Now, with Rahm out of the race, it's important that we demand of all potential candidates, an honest, balanced assessment of school progress, a commitment to an elected school board, a cap on charter school expansion, and an end to privatization of essential school functions. If they can't or won't make those commitments, they don't deserve our support. 

The 'Summer Slide' myth

Testing companies continue to perpetuate the myth of the so-called "summer learning gap", where children supposedly forget most of what they learned in the classroom in a matter of a few weeks of vacation. If this were true, it would speak more to an irrelevant school curriculum than anything else. But it's not true.

According to an article by Sarah Shupe in today's Edweek, 

...what students forget over the summer becomes more damaging over time as students make less progress during the school year, according to an ongoing study by NWEA, the Northwest Evaluation Association.

"As kids grow less and less during the school years, they are still seeing the same summer drop—so they are losing proportionately more," said Megan Kuhfeld, a research scientist at NWEA and the author of the study.

According to this theory, kids grow dummer and dummer as they progress through school and therefore can ill-afford to spend more time playing and with their friends and families.

NWEA tracked the reading and math test scores of students grades 3 to 6, and nearly 40,000 students from grades 5 to 8 in an "unnamed southern state" and concluded that the more time they spent with family, fishing, working, at summer camp, hanging out with friends -- or whatever students do on vacation in this southern state -- the less bright they got.

Not only that, but things got worse as the kids grew older.

On average, students lost about 2 points out of a possible 250 each summer in reading, and a little more than 4 points each summer in math. But as the charts below show, students gain less during each school year as they grow. 

In other words, hardly anything measurable that was being taught in their schools lasted in children's consciousness for more than a few weeks. This generates an obvious call for perpetual schooling and even more standardized testing.

But it should be even more obvious to the evaluators that students continue learning during the summer, the same way that they learned before they were in school, experientially and largely through play. How well they learn depends on what kind of learning and play experiences are available to them in their family and community life. But that's true within school as well.

Authentic learning is deep and enduring. It goes on all the time, all year round, including summer. Perhaps especially in summer. If children lose academic skills over the few weeks of summer, then did they really ever learn those skills?

Then there's the question what's tested, what's not tested, and how real learning is measured. Reading and math scores are but one small indicator.

All this leaves open the question of what happens when these kids graduate, become adults and spend the rest of their lives forgetting how to solve a quadratic equation, the shape of states on the map, or the color of Laura Ingalls dress. Do we call that the life slide? Hopefully, what stays with them are critical thinking and life skills, habits of the mind and body.

I think it was Albert Einstein who first said it: "Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school?"

Fact-checking the checkers on miraculous CPS test score bump

Stanford researcher Sean Reardon conflated test scores with learning. 

I don't trust meteoric rises in student test scores or graduation rates. I didn't buy George Bush'"Texas Miracle" or Arne Duncan's "Chicago Miracle". I don't want to bust anyone's bubble, but there is no "magic sauce" leading to such miraculous gains. If there was, everyone would be eating it.

Neither do I accept the idea that student learning can be accurately or usefully measured by high-stakes standardized testing. More on that later.

Chicago's Better Government Association (BGA) just fact-checked the claim that “CPS students are learning and growing faster than 96% of students in the United States.” I'm glad somebody checked. But unfortunately the BGA got it only partly right and ended up joining CPS in conflating test score gains with learning.

Thank you,BGA, for pointing out that CPS leaders were cherry-picking the results of a recent Stanford study  reporting miraculous test score gains. Unfortunately, they confined their fact-checking to the study's own limited, narrow use of test data and therefore missed the forest (no Claypool pun intended) for the trees.

BGA fact checkers missed the forest for the trees.

The Stanford study shows CPS students making the fastest academic progress of the 100 largest school districts in the country. But even the researchers aren't quite sure how or why that happened or what to make of it all. For one thing, the gains are uneven across the grades. For another, they are percentage gains, and use a metric that can be interpreted in many ways.

Let me use a baseball analogy to explain. A batter strikes out his first 8 times at bat. Then he gets two hits, thereby raising his pitiful batting average from zero to .200, a 200-point increase in just one game. It's the fastest rise of any of his teammates. But at the end of the day, he's still a weak .200 hitter and will likely soon be sent down to the minors to work on his batting stroke.

In other words, rapid percentage increases often mean that the counting began and ended in a very low place. That's the most credible interpretation of the Stanford/CPS study.

According to the BGA:

CPS’ fast-paced gains were assessed in a report prepared recently by Sean Reardon, a professor of education inequality at Stanford’s Center for Education Policy Analysis.

By comparing Chicago Public Schools students’ scores on standardized tests to those of students nationally, Reardon found that the scores of CPS students in grades three through eight improved more from 2009-14 than did the average scores of all U.S. students during that time.

But, asks the BGA,

Improvement aside, how does CPS’ overall academic performance stack up against the rest of the country? Here, the picture was not as rosy. Third- through eighth-graders in the nation’s third-largest district still perform at roughly one half to one-and-a-half grade levels below the national average, which the report describes as a “significant concern.” 

In short, CPS test scores started low, may have improved rapidly, but remain subpar. District leaders, however, were jubilant about the report, even though earlier in the week, the state released scores from the PARCC test it has administered for the past few years, showing that barely more than one in four CPS elementary students can read, write and do math at grade level. CPS officials have refused many requests to discuss those scores.

But I will.

By looking only at standardized test scores, Reardon's study is limited in the insights it can offer as to  whether or not real progress is taking place at CPS. Dramatic increases or sudden drops in test scores could be the result of many things, completely unrelated to any change in district policies or anything new going on in the classroom. For example, they could be driven by a dangerous overemphasis on test prep or a dramatic loss of student population.

Reardon's team never set foot in a CPS classroom.

CPS' student population has decreased by nearly a hundred thousand as more than a quarter-million mostly-black Chicagoans left the city over the past few decades. Many of these children in the out-migration were likely among CPS' poorest and most academically challenged students. This alone could account for the increase in scores, since standardized test scores have been shown to more closely align with parent incomes that with any district policies or professional development strategies.

Stanford researcher Reardon doesn't believe this is the case since

"...the consistency across race as well as similar growth on a nationally administered no-stakes NAEP test convinced him that CPS’ growth was real and not from a demographic shift in students or from holding lots of kids back a grade."

It may have convinced him, but not me. Test score growth may be real. But what does it really show?

As for consistency across race, CPS remains 93% students of color going to mostly segregated schools. Even if test scores increase across race, the gap across race and class remains intact. Inequality is merely reproduced. Not exactly a recipe for increased learning or for educational equity. As for the similar gains in the more highly-regarded NAEP exam, they could also be connected to changes in demographics.

CPS Chief Education Officer Janice Jackson attributes the gains to staffers now "using data to guide instruction", and principals being "empowered to lead schools." You'd think she would have at least tossed a bone to the district's classroom teachers, especially those in special ed, who have been working overtime, with reduced staff and severe district program cuts.

Stovall & Radinsky

Even if the test-score gains are real, this doesn't mean that authentic student learning has improved. As UIC prof and CReATE researcher David Stovall put in on our Hitting Left show Friday,

"We're conflating test taking with learning and if you remove thousands of the poorest students who are are struggling, why wouldn't you have an increase (in CPS test scores)?

 HL guest Josh Radinsky, another CReATE researcher, called all the focus on test scores a "dangerous discourse." The danger being how you generate higher test scores in Chicago Public Schools by minimizing subject areas that aren't tested. There's also danger in the way these reported test score increases are used to justify bad school reform policy.

Says Radinsky:

We have been trying to get reading and math scores pumped up by artificially stimulating student performance on these bubble tests...Walk into any school in Chicago and ask, what are you doing in social studies right now. Social studies has been eviscerated by the focus on test scores. This is one example among many and we can talk about music and art. Teachers who love their kids and teach their hearts out every day are put into this straitjacket of test prep. 

I'm going to save my last point for a future post. But here it is in short. If in fact, dramatically rising test scores show that Rahm/Claypool/Jackson reform policies are working and that increased student learning has brought CPS to number-one in the race to the top, then why did the mayor support the recently-passed voucher bill to grease the exit of students from public to private schools?


Meanwhile in the burbs...While parents and students in mainly white, wealthy, high-scoring suburban districts decry the debilitating pressure resulting from high-stakes testing, CPS continues to mandate more and more testing along with more time spent on test prep.

The Tribune reports:

Parents are sending their kids to therapeutic day schools at hospitals that treat adolescent mental health issues. Teachers are changing their curriculum to factor in students' anxiety and stress. And kids are facing what they say is a constant, grinding strain throughout their academic careers. 

"There is a double-edged sword. We want kids to challenge themselves, but not at the expense of their mental well-being," said Emily Polacek, a social studies teacher at Hinsdale South High School in west suburban Darien.

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

UIC Prof. Josh Radinsky 

"We're getting the (CReATE) band back together... Vouchers or vouchers by any other name is just onc way of minimizing choices. They call it 'school choice' but it's actually forced choice and lack of choices." -- Hitting Left

UIC Prof. David Stovall

"We're conflating test taking with learning and if you remove thousands of the poorest students who are are struggling, why wouldn't you have an increase (in CPS test scores)? -- Hitting Left

Gloria Ladson-Billings, new president of the National Academy of Education

 "For kids, it's the 'so what' question, and we typically don't have good answers for them. Our answer typically is, 'You're going to need this next year,' and kids figure out by 4th or 5th grade that we're lying." -- EdWeek  

Judge Roy Moore tells Hannity

I don't remember ever dating any girl without the permission of her mother. -- Real Clear Politics

Alabama State Auditor Jim Ziegler

“Take Joseph and Mary. Mary was a teenager and Joseph was an adult carpenter. They became parents of Jesus.” -- ShareBlue Media 

Report...

 “Our wealthiest 400 now have more wealth combined than the bottom 64% of the US population, an estimated 80m households or 204 million people,” the report says. “That’s more people than the population of Canada and Mexico combined.” -- Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Warren Buffett are wealthier than poorest half of US

Letter: Say no to vouchers

Not only does it allow individuals to take money meant for public funding and put it in their private little piggy bank, but it will ultimately put a greater burden on the rest of us to come up with more money to fund our school system. -- Wayne Fuller, Concord Monitor 

John King's 'worries' about DeVos don't include "choice" or vouchers

Duncan & King

As N.Y.'s Education Commissioner, John King's top-down imposition of corporate-style reform policies, including Common Core testing mania, led to a revolt among parents and teachers.

As Arne Duncan's appointed successor to a short-lived stint as Pres. Obama's Ed Secretary, King continued Duncan's push for mass closings of public schools in black communities and replacing them with privately-run charters. In many ways, the Duncan/King failed Race to the Top program, set the table for Betsy DeVos' current school "choice" agenda which now threatens to decimate public schooling altogether.

As his reward for causing all this mayhem and division, King landed softly at the top of the Education Trust, which supposedly looks out for poor and minority children but instead has been a bulwark of destructive, top-down imposed testing madness going back to the now thoroughly-discredited No Child Left Behind law.

While King and Duncan have been critical of DeVos, they have steered clear of saying anything strongly critical about the bedrock of her "reform" strategy -- privatization, "choice" and vouchers.

In an interview with EdWeek's Alyson Klein, King reveals his and Ed Trust's affinity with Trump/DeVos on ed policy by omitting any criticism or even mention of their push for privatization and school vouchers. While King shares some of his legitimate "worries" about the DeVos administration's funding cuts to education and it's recent moves when it comes to civil rights enforcement, his concerns sound rather tepid.

"All of those things suggest that there's not a full commitment to civil rights protection," King said.

Not a full commitment? A duh statement if I ever heard one. Especially when you consider the lengths to which Trump/DeVos have already gone to turning the Office of Civil Rights into its opposite. 

And then there's the reality that King and Duncan's regimes also failed (by Duncan's own admission) on what Duncan called "forced integration", at times disparaging Obama's own Justice Department on civil rights enforcement.

But King's main concern isn't about the Trump regime's bent toward white supremacy. Rather it's that DeVos may not be tough enough on states and school districts when it comes to enforcing test-score accountability,

He tells Klein that he concerned that DeVos and even Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown aren't intervening severely enough in low-performing (high poverty) schools --"intervening" meaning labeling them as failures, closing them, and replacing them with charters.

"I am worried about the clarity for parents about school performance ... I'm very worried about the California dashboard," he said, referring to the state's proposed accountability model, which considers school performance on a host of factors, but doesn't come up with an overall rating. "I think it's very confusing."

While in previous interviews, King has called the voucher issue a "distraction", his list of current concerns expressed in the EdWeek interview include not even a mention of "choice" or school vouchers. This omission is most revealing. 

Juking the stats on graduation rates

Bernard Gassaway is a former New York City public schools teacher, principal, and superintendent of alternative schools and programs of more than two decades. So he knows from where he speaks. In the Aug. 29 issue of EdWeek Gassaway shines a light ("Public School Officials Are Artificially Inflating Graduation Rates. I've Seen It Myself")  on the way school officials have used various tricks to juke the stats on graduation rates.

As a direct result of a public thirst for schools to show progress, boards of education pressure superintendents, superintendents squeeze principals, principals ride teachers, and teachers stress students. The ultimate measure of progress for schools nationwide is high school graduation rates.Public school officials use a variety of schemes to give the appearance of progress.

This is nothing new of course. Some of you will harken back to the so-called Texas Miracle, one of the great school reform frauds of all time, engineered by then Texas Gov. George W. Bush and his school chief Rod Paige. Together, they rode the myth of zero dropouts all the way to the White House.

Here in Chicago, where the mayor runs the schools and his political success depends in large part on showing miraculous gains in standardized test schools and grad rate bumps, there a long history of juking the stats. In 2015, CPS was forced to lower four years of inflated high school graduation rates to account for a "higher-than-advertised" dropout rate, another blow to a district beset by financial and professional turmoil. The accuracy of the district's numbers had been called into question in a report by CPS' inspector general. But CPS officials did not announce the revised graduation rates until months after Mayor Rahm Emanuel won re-election.

Gassaway brings us up to date on the stats-juking process in New York City where incremental bumps in grad rates have been induced through the misuse of credit recovery, virtual learning, or reclassifying students with disabilities to lower the graduation standards bar.

But the real kicker comes next. It's all about getting rid of low-scoring or other problem students as a way to produce statistical gains in measurable student achievement.

Gassaway writes:

...when education officials cannot use any of the aforementioned tactics to get struggling students through high school, they transfer or push out students who are off-track for graduation—dropping the dead weight that is dragging down graduation statistics. Pushing students out is the most efficient way to increase a school's graduation rate. Principals transfer overage and under-credited students to alternative schools.

He could well have included the statistical impact produced by the mass out-migration of poor, African-American and their families from cities like Chicago in recent years. As urban public school populations shrink, and the poorest kids leave, schools in the black community are shuttered and resources are redirected towards selective-enrollment schools and charters, average test scores and graduation rates tend to rise.

Gassaway's expose may ring truest for those educators in urban districts who have toiled so long and hard, without adequate resources or support, to bring about academic success for students most at risk for dropping out, only to hear politicians like Rahm taking credit for supposed test score and grad rate gains. 

This is not to say that some of those gains aren't real. But the mayor's boasting about rising grad rates at CPS makes no sense unless he can point to some dramatic changes, either in the classroom (beyond the tracking of freshman students) or in the community that would keep kids from dropping out. So far neither he nor CEO Claypool have. Which leads me to believe that it's more about the whitenizing of the city. 

My last point on this, which I've made several times this week is: If the mayor really believed his own claims about dramatic improvements at CPS under his leadership, why would he be supporting school vouchers as an "escape route" from "failing schools"?

You say you want a revolution? Go to post-Rhee D.C. says Toch

Okay, now that I'm done FBing about #convfefe, I can get down to more serious business -- revolution. It seems a revolution has taken place in D.C. and I somehow missed it.

But Tom Toch didn't. Toch, a leading pro-reform, education policy expert and a highly regarded education writer, has published his study of the progress of school reform in the district, titled, "How D.C. Schools Are Revolutionizing Teaching." 

I'd say, it's about time somebody did it. But who?

Toch says, it all began with former D.C. schools chief Michelle Rhee, who, despite her various "mistakes," cheating scandals and unfortunate picture on the cover of Time Magazine, got the ball rolling. But Toch's study concludes that it was her successor chancellors who carried the rev forward, bringing radical changes to the teaching profession and miraculous gains in student achievement. DCPS has not merely revolutionized teaching, says Toch; it has created a "reform blueprint" for the rest of us to follow.

No credit given to teachers, of course. In fact, Toch clearly sees bad teachers and their over-protective unions as the problem, and different performance-based evaluations with high stakes attached as the r-r-r-revolutionary solution.

According to Toch:

Building on Rhee’s early work, and learning from her mistakes, her successors have effectively transformed it into a performance-based profession that provides recognition, responsibility, collegiality, support, and significant compensation—features that policy experts, including many of Rhee’s harshest critics, have long sought but never fully achieved.

Ironically, Rhee’s successors at DCPS have redesigned teaching through some of the very policies that teachers’ unions and other Rhee adversaries opposed most strongly: comprehensive teacher evaluations, the abandonment of seniority-based staffing, and performance-based promotions and compensation. They combined these with other changes, like more collaboration among teachers, that these same critics had backed. Just as notably, the transformation is taking place not at charters but in the traditional public school system, an institution that many reformers have written off as too hidebound to innovate.

At last, a reformer who offers the possibility hope and transformation within the public schools themselves. A ray of sunshine in a very gloomy period.

Toch reports that as a direct result of performance-based teacher evals, daily attendance in D.C. has reached 90%, up from 85% in 2010–11. Chronic truancy is down by nearly 40% over the past four years and graduation rates (however they're defined) have climbed to 69%, the highest in the city’s history.

And student achievement has begun a long climb toward respectability. While Washington’s test scores have traditionally been among the lowest in the nation, the percentage of fourth graders achieving math proficiency has more than doubled on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) over the past decade, as have the percentages of eighth graders proficient in math and fourth graders proficient in reading. Scores have risen even after accounting for an influx of wealthier students. And DCPS has caught up to the middle of the pack of other urban school districts at the fourth-grade level on the national exams.

In addition, the school system’s strongest teachers are no longer leaving in droves for charter schools. In many cases, the flow has been reversed, leaving even Washington’s most prominent charters struggling to compete for talent.

Now, don't mistake my cynicism about the "revolution" for the joy I feel over any reports of progress in urban school districts, especially when that progress is reported in neighborhood schools competing for resources, students and teachers with privately-operated charters and private-school voucher programs like the ones started by Rhee in D.C. and now championed by Ed Secretary Betsy DeVos. Yes, I'm glad D.C. 4th-graders are scoring higher on the NAEP and that the district has finally made it to the middle of the urban school district pack score-wise.

If that is really happening, and I have no reason to doubt Toch's numbers, credit should mostly go those hard-working and dedicated teachers, not just to the string of top-level administrators like Rhee and her mentee and former D.C. Teach For America Director Kaya Henderson, and the others who followed in Rhee's wake, usually lasting about 2 years each before they are run out or quit.

But as Toch himself points out:

Achievement levels among Hispanic and black students, who make up 82 percent of enrollment, lag badly behind their white peers. Only 15 percent of black students scored “proficient” in reading last year on Washington’s new, more demanding, Common Core–aligned exams, compared to 74 percent of white students.

If that's his idea of  a "revolution," leave me out.

But it's mostly Toch's line about how his study "takes into account the influx of [white] wealthier students" that gets me twitching. It's such an easy way of dismissing the effects of concentrated poverty on measurable learning outcomes, and of the most dramatic democratic changes in D.C., Chicago, Philly and dozens of other large urban school districts. It's what I and others have referred to as the whitenizing of the cities.

In Chicago, for example, where a quarter of a million African-Americans have been pushed out of the city over the past three decades, by gentrification, de-industrialization and job loss, lack of social services, closing of neighborhood schools, gun violence, etc... Mayor Emanuel and his appointed school district leaders are also now reporting corresponding "miraculous" gains in reading scores and graduation rates.

In 2008, DCPS was reportedly 84.4% black, 9.4% Latino, and 4.6% white.The racial breakdown of students enrolled in 2014 was 67% black, 17% Latino, 12% white, and 4% of "other races".

Now, for the first time in decades, the district itself no longer a majority-black city. Gentrification and demographic changes in many D.C. neighborhoods has increased the white and Latino populations in the city, while dramatically reducing the black and lowest-income population.  And isn't this the exact recipe of today's school reformers who claim poverty is just "an excuse" for low scores?

Of course, as anyone who went to D.C. schools back in the day will tell you, things weren't so great in the district's predominantly black and poor, racially segregated schools back before reform. And any improvements are welcomed, especially by parents and community members.

But good researchers never claim more than they should, especially for a small-scale study. Tom Toch should know that. A few reforms do not a revolution make. And if we are really serious about reform or revolution, we need to look well beyond the classroom for answers.

Whitenizing Chicago

UNEMPLOYMENT AND DISINVESTMENT by the city and its corporations are destroying neighborhoods and pushing thousands of African-American families out of Chicago and other big cities. Some call it "reverse migration" but the net effect is the whitenizing or gentrification of the cities. 

Another driving force behind this push-out of black and poor from the city, is Mayor Rahm Emanuel's capital investment plan and his closing of schools, mental health facilities, and other city services. While investment-starved neighborhoods suffer, Rahm has pumped millions into ill-conceived projects like the new DePaul basketball arena.  Rahm's policies have further isolated, destabilized and blighted south and west-side neighborhoods, creating conditions for more crime and violence. Whole neighborhoods are now marked by boarded-up homes, stores and schools as thousands of families lose homes to foreclosure.

DePaul's new $200M basketball arena.

An article in Monday's Reader calls Chicago's South Shore neighborhood, "the eviction capital" of the county. Real estate owners and management companies like Pangea and Kass are doing most of the evicting. Last year, Pangea filed more than 1,000 eviction cases, usually also seeking back rent, and won about 60 percent of them.

 "If you want to know Pangea's ambitions, they named themselves after the ancient supercontinent," says Mark Swartz, director of the Lawyers' Committee for Better Housing. "They are buying up the south side."

 "The issue is unemployment, and lack of investment by the city and by companies," says alderman Leslie Hairston, whose Fifth Ward includes parts of northern South Shore. Though she says she doesn't hear much about evictions from her constituents, she wasn't surprised to learn about the higher-than-average eviction rate in South Shore. "You look at the number of people working two, three jobs just to try to make ends meet—it's challenging," she says.

Impact on education...The next time you hear Rahm or schools chief Claypool boasting about rising standardized test scores or graduation rates, consider how these jumps (if they are to be believed) correspond to the loss of CPS enrollment, especially on the part of poor and black students.

WEEKEND QUOTABLES 'Move fast and break things...'

Bannon: "Move fast and break things" 

Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)

“We have got to have the guts to take on the insurance companies and the drug companies and move forward toward a Medicare-for-all, single-payer program, And I’ll be introducing legislation shortly to do that.” -- All In with Chris Hayes

Chicago Ald. Roderick Sawyer

"I just don't know what value he [Paul Vallas] adds to this university, that's my concern. I don't even know what a crisis intervention specialist means." -- Chicago Tribune

 Allyson Moloney, a K-4 special education teacher

“All of our paraprofessionals are tied up with testing. Even our ‘specials’ teachers — gym and tech — are tied up with PARCC testing. We don’t have a lot of extra bodies that can help us out.” -- Sun-Times

Reince Priebus

"I'm not in any trouble." -- Politico

Nicole Jorwic, dir. of rights policy for the Arc, an advocacy organization for people with intellectual disabilities 

We would hope that in his future rulings, Judge Gorsuch would see that the purpose of IDEA is to help students with disabilities achieve more meaningful progress that can ultimately lead to their success and full life in their communities." -- New York Times

Mara Keisling, executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE)

“By appointing Mr. Severino to enforce the life-saving protections that he has made his personal mission to dismantle, the Trump administration has once again put the fox in charge of the hen house." -- LGBTQ Nation

Gwenda Blair, Trump biographer 

...said of Trump’s supporters: “They voted for a guy who could fix it, the CEO, on The Apprentice for 10 years, who could make a deal with anybody.”  -- Guardian

QUOTABLES

Yesterday was a travel day, so I was unable to post Weekend Quotables. So today, it's just plain Quotables.

White House OMB Director Mick Mulvaney

Mick Mulvaney on after-school programs that feed kids

"The way we justified it was: these programs are going to help these kids do better in school and get better jobs. And we can’t prove that that’s happening.” -- Undark

James Comey

In his opening statement, Comey confirmed -- for the first time publicly -- that the FBI was investigating "the Russian government's efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election," an inquiry which includes "individuals associated with the Trump campaign and the Russian government and whether there was any coordination between the campaign and Russia's efforts." -- CNN

Author and journalist Masha Gessen

“The danger of having these two unhinged, power-hungry men at their respective nuclear buttons cannot be overestimated.” -- POLITICO

Rep Luis Gutierrez on being handcuffed at ICE's Chicago office

"It shows you what happens with a system that is run by bullies" #DNlive 

Donald Trump

 "You don’t understand, he can hear everything we’re saying! Obama can even hear my thoughts! I have to get it out!" -- The Onion

Did Arne Duncan's attack on suburban parents help Trump win the election?

Arne Duncan at Boston DFER meeting supporting unfettered charter expansion. MA voters disagreed and defeated Question#2 and Trump in the process. 

It was back in 2013 parent protests against Common Core testing were bubbling up around the country and the opt-out movement was moving ahead full-steam.

Instead of uniting with or at least trying to understand parent/teacher discontent with testing madness, former Ed. Sec. Arne Duncan, representing Pres. Obama, lashed out at what he called, "White suburban moms’ upset that Common Core shows their kids aren’t ‘brilliant’".

At anther appearance at the National Press Club in Washington, Duncan claimed that opposition to the Common Core testing had been fueled by “political silliness.” He told a convention of newspaper editors that his critics were misinformed at best and laboring under paranoid delusions at worst.

Aside from being a terribly misleading statement -- tens of thousands of urban parents, black, white and Latino joined the opt-out movement -- it was an insulting sting, not only for parents, but their children, that left a permanent mark. 

As a parent and grandparent of public school students, in a city like Chicago, where Duncan once ruled the education roost, I can tell you that calling parents "paranoid" and "delusional" is probably not the best way to win an election for your party. 

Did Duncan's disdain for white suburban parents have an impact last week's election results and the Democrat's failure to pull votes from suburban districts that went for Obama in '08 and 2012? Especially in the swing states of Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania. 

It's hard to document that right now. 

But we do know... Duncan, who in the past has been on the stump for Democrat corporate-reform Democrats, was kept well-hidden during the Clinton campaign. Not only were the words, "Race To The Top" never once mentioned by Hillary and the Dems, issues confronting public education, which are of prime importance to parents, were consciously left out of the policy debates with the Republicans.

We also know that the Democratic Party's education platform, adopted by the delegates at the convention, was in many ways, a repudiation of Duncan's "reform" agenda. But those platform points never made their way into any of Hillary's campaign speeches.

Last point on this... In Massachusetts, where education issues were made a centerpiece of the campaign and where leading Democrats like Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Boston Mayor Marty Walsh opposed Duncan-supported unfettered charter expansion, the Democrats defeated the charter expansion bill and Trump, handily. 

New legislators' report on reform is a step up from current policies

“High-performing countries have consciously decided to prioritize education over testing.” — State Senator Joyce Elliott, D-Ark.

Will a Clinton administration bring a shift in federal education policy? Will we see a break from corporate-style reform practices--racing to the top, no child left behind, testing madness, school closings and the unfettered move to privately-run charter schools that marked the Obama/Duncan era? We can only guess right now.

Recent Clinton speeches to the teacher union conventions sounded good. But we've all been there before. The new party platform plank on education reflects some positive changes pushed mainly by Sanders members of the platform committee. But platforms are soon forgotten once November is in the rear view.

The latest indicator that change may be in the wind comes from a new report from a bipartisan group of state legislators who studied and were impressed by the most successful approaches in Finland and other developed countries. "No Time to Lose: How to Build a World-Class Education System State by State’. 

The 28 legislators and staff members focused on the highest performing countries on PISA to discover commonalities across their policies and practices. They met with education leaders from these countries, along with national and international experts who study their systems. They also visited several countries to see the differences firsthand.

I read the report with a skeptical eye, especially after I saw AFT President and Clinton cheerleader-in-chief Randi Weingarten giving it a giddy endorsement, calling the report "a model" and claiming that "the committee sets aside political ideologies to work together for what’s best for students and educators."

Doubtful.

AFT is listed as a partner on the project though it appears, after scanning the list of partners and consultants, that no k-12 educators were involved in creating he report. So no, Randi -- not a "model".

Actually, the report does represent a step up from where we've been for the past three decades since A Nation at Risk" set us on our current destructive course. In some ways, both documents are similar with each taking globalism and the race for American supremacy as its starting point. The new report is filled with much of the same empty reformy rhetoric about our failing schools and the need for "world standards" and "alignment."

“In several of the countries studied, teaching is regarded as an honorable and respected profession, comparable to medicine and law, and not a burden on the local property tax.” — State Representative Mary Stuart Gile, -- D-N.H.

On the positive side, the report contains no mention of standardized testing, school choice, charter schools or privatization in its list of recommendations. Instead it calls for "a strong early education system, a re-imagined and professionalized teacher workforce [I sensed Linda Darling-Hammond's presence here], robust career and technical education programs, and a comprehensive, aligned system of education."

Most importantly, there was a strong statement on the effects of poverty as a key determinant in student academic success.

In the United States, children in poverty now account for about a quarter of all children in public schools. Large numbers of American children enter first grade with disadvantages that may overwhelm the school’s capacity to provide an adequate education. Because high-performing countries provide supports to ensure that children are ready for school, their schools typically do not face similar challenges.

Once students in top-performing countries are in school, those who struggle receive extra help to reach the same high standards other students will reach more easily. Providing additional resources to schools serving disadvantaged, struggling students is a priority.

More teachers are typically allocated to such schools, with the best teachers serving in the most challenged ones. Resources are also reallocated within schools to reach those most in need of extra support. These countries demonstrate that, with added support, struggling students can meet high expectations. Inversely, American students from the wealthiest communities are most likely to get the best teachers and the finest facilities because of the way we structure our finance systems.

A far cry from the reformers' current "no excuses" rhetoric.

The report takes notice of Finland's focus on equity:

Finland prides itself on providing equity of opportunity to learn and inclusion. Resources are directed to the most high-need students and schools. Students with special needs are often mainstreamed in regular classrooms but receive significant additional support. Ninety-eight percent of the cost of education is covered by government.

However, no mention of the effects of race, racism or segregation. The word, unions, appears only once in the report. This, despite the fact that most of the countries investigated have a strong unionized teacher force. But the one reference is positive, a recommendation that unions have a seat at the reform table. No wonder Randi is so enthusiastic.

How much influence "No Time To Lose" will have is anyone's guess. With the passage of ESSA and the weakened federal role in influencing state ed policy -- in part, a backlash against Duncan's overreach, Common Core and Race To The Top -- it's doubtful that this report will have much weight in red states.

Unless of course, the Republican crisis that is Trumpism, turns many of them blue or at least purple.

Are Dems abandoning corporate reform? Some are giddy over Kaine pick.

Kaine never mentioned education reform in his DNC speech. 

Lots of ed activists are sending me this piece by Jeff Bryant at Campaign for America's Future. Jeff is a good education writer and usually knows what he's talking about.

Here he says that by adding Tim Kaine (no, Donald, he's not the governor of NJ) to the Clinton ticket, Dems may be abandoning current corporate-style school reform policies, which have plagued public education for the past few decades.

I'm for keeping hope alive, but not convinced.

If true, this would really piss off the likes of DFER, Gates/Broad/Walton power philanthropists, Arne Duncan, John King, Peter Cunningham and Wall St. hedge-fund reformers.

It could also pull opt-out parents and anti-Common Core folks closer to Clinton and  away from Trump.

AFT and NEA leaders are likely gleeful over this supposed shift and see it as redemption (payback) for their premature Clinton endorsement. We'll see.

Bryant writes:

The policy outline for K-12 education coming from the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign remains vague, but supporters of Vermont U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders have substantially altered how public education is framed in the Democratic Party platform, and Clinton has become more strident in her attacks on “for-profit” charter schools and vouchers that allow parents to transfer their children to private schools at taxpayer expense.

Vague indeed.

He refers to a recent piece by Lauren Camera for U.S. News and World Report on Kaine's "hefty education resume." Camera points to the significance of the Kaine choice over New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, who is "someone who would have been more favorable to big supporters of the high-stakes testing and charter school expansions that come with reform orthodoxy."

True about Booker.

Then there's Kaine's wife Anne Holton, who is VA's secretary of education and who has tried to reform the standardized testing regime in her state. She's also opposed the expansion of charter schools. And  -- stop the presses -- the Kaines even send their kids to public school.

Good for Anne. We need more like her.

Diane Ravitch is passionate about the Kaine's.

On top of that come the victories won by union activists and Sanders supporters in reshaping the party's ed plank in the platform committee. Victories, by the way (without being giddy with success), that offer activists a reason to stay and fight instead of walking out on the inner-party struggle after the convention.

Having said that, I don't read much into the V.P. choice and I generally see Kaine as a pro-Wall St. guy, someone who is malleable and will toe the party line on education (or TPP), whatever that is.

BTW, what is the party line? Obama said the word education only twice in passing references during his speech. Of course that's two more than he mentioned Iraq or Afghanistan. But who's counting?

In Bill Clinton's ("In the spring of 1971, I met a girl") speech, there were 4, but none substantive.

The word was mentioned only twice in Kaine's own speech with not a word about reform, testing, or charter schools.

Maybe Hillary will mention education in passing, tonight.

I'm thinking back to 2008 when Pres. Obama teased us by making progressive Linda Darling-Hammond the head of his ed transition team and then sent her back to Stanford in favor of corporate reformer Arne Duncan who became his pick for ed secretary.

From what I can see, the fight to save and transform public education will still have to be fought under and throughout a Clinton administration. But the fight may be on more favorable grounds. Certainly better than under a Trump presidency.