Defend Public Education NOW
Defend Public Education NOW is a group of activists dedicated to protecting & furthering democratically governed, teacher-student centered public education
Japan School teachers on leave due to mental illness stay above 7,000
www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/16245582
By YOSHIKA UEMATSU/ Staff Writer
December 23, 2025 at 17:48 JST
The number of public school teachers on leave due to mental disorders remains high at 7,078, accounting for 0.77 percent of all teachers in fiscal 2024, the education ministry announced on Dec. 22.
The ministry released the survey results that covered 67 boards of education in all 47 prefectures and 20 ordinance-designated cities.
Although the number taking leave due to mental illness is 32 fewer than the previous year, which marked the highest figure in three consecutive years, it remains high.
The figure shows the need for work-style reforms and enhance support to keep teachers in their classrooms, amid the serious shortage of educational personnel.
In fiscal 2024, the proportion of mental disorders among those on sick leave was 76.5 percent.
In addition, 46.4 percent of those who took leave due to mental illness had been at their current school for less than two years. Difficulty in adjusting to the school environment is also considered a factor in causing mental illness among teachers.
“Under the ‘Team School’ concept, it is important for those around them to firmly support teachers who are new to the school,” an education ministry official said.
By age group, the largest proportion of teachers with mental struggles was in their 30s at 29.9 percent, followed by those 50 and older at 26.7 percent, those in their 40s at 24.9 percent and those in their 20s at 18.5 percent.
In addition, the number of newly appointed teachers who quit within a year of being hired hit a record high of 897, an increase of 106 from the previous year. Of these, 35.8 percent cited mental illness as the reason.
The survey asked boards of education about the reasons for leaves of absence due to mental struggles.
The most common reasons cited were matters related to instructing children at 26.5 percent, followed by relationships with other teachers in the workplace at 23.2 percent and being overwhelmed with clerical tasks at 12.7 percent.
“Matters related to instruction” include issues such as bullying, school absenteeism and responding to children with diverse backgrounds.
Relationships with parents and local residents accounted for 6.1 percent, and long working hours for 0.5 percent.
While these two factors were not high as direct reasons, an education ministry official said, “Responding to parents cannot be overlooked in terms of stress. It is also possible that instruction and clerical work lead to long working hours.”
The education ministry revised the three categories of who should carry out each duty so that teachers can focus on their essential tasks in September. Through the revision, the ministry aims to improve teachers’ work environment to reduce the number of those taking sick leave.
www.asahi.com
The number of public school teachers on leave due to mental disorders remains high at 7,078, accounting for 0.77 percent of all teachers in fiscal 2024, the education ministry announced on Dec. 22.
OECD: Japanese teachers still working longest hours in world
www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/16076842
By YOSHIKA UEMATSU/ Staff WriterOctober 7, 2025 at 17:58 JST
Facebook
Twitter
list
ZoomPhoto/Illutration
Photo/Illutration
Japanese teachers continue to work the most hours among educators in major countries and regions, according to a survey by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
The weekly working times for full-time teachers in Japan were 55.1 hours at junior high schools and 52.1 hours at elementary schools, according to the 2024 OECD survey released on Oct. 7.
Both times were four hours shorter than in the previous OECD survey in 2018 due to workstyle reforms.
However, as in the previous 2018 survey, Japan recorded the longest hours among all participating countries and regions.
Japanese junior high teachers worked 14.1 hours more a week than the international average while Japanese elementary teachers worked 11.7 hours more than the norm.
Specifically, Japanese junior high teachers worked 9.8 hours more a week than their counterparts in the United States, 12 hours more than South Korean teachers, and 16.4 hours more than those in France.
The survey, called the Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS), is conducted every five years, mainly among OECD member countries.
The first survey was compiled in 2008. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the latest survey, the fourth in the series, was delayed by a year and co0nducted for the first time in six years.
The 2024 survey covered 55 countries and regions for junior high schools and 16 for elementary schools.
Around 200 schools were sampled for each level.
In Japan, 7,316 principals and teachers from public and private institutions responded.
The results showed that Japanese teachers were largely preoccupied with out-of-classroom activities.
They spent 17.8 hours a week on teaching, which is shorter than the international average of 22.7 hours.
However, lesson preparation in Japan took 8.2 hours a week (international average 7.4 hours); extracurricular activities, such as supervising clubs, consumed 5.6 hours (international average 1.7 hours); and administrative tasks, such as paperwork, took 5.2 hours (international average 3 hours).
Compared with the previous survey, Japanese teachers reduced their extracurricular activities time by 2.5 hours, lesson preparation by 0.7 hours, and administrative tasks by 0.9 hours.
But these times still remained above international averages.
The survey also revealed a growing sense of teacher shortages.
The survey asked teachers if they felt that a shortage of instructors was hindering high-quality education.
Among Japanese elementary school teachers, 40.7 percent answered “very much so” or “quite a lot,” up from 19.2 percent in the previous survey, while 35.6 percent of junior high teachers had the same replies, up from 27.5 percent.
Both figures for 2024 were about 12 points higher than the international average.
Japan’s education ministry has been working to reduce the long working hours of teachers. It set guidelines on overtime limits in 2019 and has promoted the transition of school club activities to community-based programs.
“Although Japan still has the longest hours globally, there has been significant improvement,” a ministry official said.
Sent from my iPhone
www.asahi.com
Japanese teachers continue to work the most hours among educators in major countries and regions, according to a survey by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
She looked like a pro-worker Trump cabinet appointee. But now she’s gutting the Labor Department
www.latimes.com/business/story/2025-07-17/she-looked-like-a-pro-worker-trump-cabinet-appointee-bu…
Chavez-DeRemer
Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer touring a union shop in 2024, when she was a pro-labor member of Congress. (Mark Z. Barabak / Los Angeles Times)
Los Angeles Times columnist Michael Hiltzik
By Michael Hiltzik
Business Columnist
July 17, 2025 3 AM PT
You may have detected a cautious note of relief among worker advocates when Donald Trump named Lori Chavez-DeRemer as his secretary of Labor.
During her sole term as a Republican member of Congress from Oregon (2023-25), Chavez-DeRemer was one of only three House Republicans to vote in favor of the so-called PRO Act, which would significantly strengthen collective bargaining rights. The measure passed the House in 2019 and 2021 but has been stifled ever since.
Her nomination and subsequent Senate confirmation elicited optimistic noises from the pro-union camp, as I reported in December.
This is an onslaught on people’s basic protections at work.
— Rebecca Reindel, AFL-CIO
“Her record suggests real support of workers & their right to unionize,” tweeted Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, when Trump nominated Chavez-DeRemer in November.
AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler said she was “encouraged” by Chavez-DeRemer’s confirmation in March, “given her history of supporting the freedom of workers to organize, join unions and other fundamental values of the labor movement.”
The union leaders tempered their optimism with concerns about the anti-labor policies emanating from the Trump White House: Weingarten said she hoped the appointment signaled that “the Trump administration will actually respect collective bargaining and workers’ voices,” and Shuler said the AFL-CIO was “clear-eyed” that Chavez-DeRemer would be “joining an administration that’s been openly hostile to working people on many fronts in its first two months.”
On May 1, the Labor Department ordered its staff to cease enforcing a Biden administration rule that had raised the bar preventing businesses from designating their workers as independent contractors instead of employees, depriving those workers of the legal protections and wage and hour benefits typically due employees.
A few days later, Chavez-DeRemer submitted a proposed budget to Congress that would slash her agency’s discretionary funding by more than 35%, to $8.6 billion from $13.2 billion, and cut its workforce by nearly 4,000 full-time workers, a reduction of more than 26%. Among the services to be eliminated would be the Job Corps, which assists low-income youth to complete their high school education and provides job training and placement. (A federal judge in New York has blocked the suspension of Job Corps services and set a hearing for Monday.)
On July 1 came what could be the biggest blow. Chavez-DeRemer announced a plan to rescind 63 regulations that had been designed to help workers. With language that sounds cribbed from the MAGA playbook, she said her goal is to “eliminate unnecessary regulations that stifle growth and limit opportunity.”
FILE – Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent speaks to reporters in the James Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House, April 29, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta, File)
VOICES
Hiltzik: Claiming a historic gain in blue-collar wage growth, Trump shows how to use statistics to mislead
She boasted of launching “aggressive deregulatory efforts in push to put the American worker first,” and added that “these historic actions will free Main Street, fuel economic growth and job creation, and give American workers the flexibility they need to build a better future.”
I’ve asked the Labor Department to provide specific rationales for the deregulatory actions but haven’t received a reply.
The effects, however, are clear. “Two-thirds of these have to do with worker health and safety protections,” says Rebecca Reindel of the AFL-CIO. “They’re being proposed to be either eliminated or severely weakened.”
Chavez-DeRemer’s actions as Labor secretary resemble less the image she fostered as a member of Congress than the policymaking of Trump’s first term. Then, as I wrote at the time, the Department of Labor was “a black hole for worker rights.” His second Labor secretary, Eugene Scalia (son of the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia), had made his name professionally as a corporate lawyer fighting pro-worker government initiatives.
The standards on the chopping block include those issued by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, a unit of the Labor Department, that were developed after years of effort. OSHA standards, Reindel told me, take an average of seven years — and as long as 20 years — to draft. “This is an onslaught on people’s basic protections at work.”
One category of threatened regulations applies to standards for respirators and filters to screen out workplace pollutants including asbestos, arsenic and lead. The department proposes to eliminate requirements that workers exposed to occupational pollutants be medically evaluated to ensure that their respirators fit properly and don’t cause health problems on their own.
The agency, asserting that such rules are “unnecessarily prescriptive,” proposes to give employers “greater flexibility in the respirators they select for exposed workers.” Removing some of these regulations, Reindel says, “basically would allow employers to make the determination if a respirator is needed for specific chemicals. They’d give employers more flexibility at the expense of workers’ health.”
One of the more potentially far-reaching proposals would narrow the application of OSHA’s “general duty clause,” which requires employers to maintain safe workplaces even when no specific OSHA regulation applies. In the most notable case, OSHA cited the clause in fining SeaWorld of Florida $12,000 in connection with the 2010 killing of trainer Dawn Brancheau by an orca during a performance. SeaWorld sued to overturn the penalty but lost in a 2-1 decision by the federal appeals court in Washington, D.C.
The three-judge panel found that even though the dangers of cavorting with wild animals for a public show were understood, SeaWorld should have done more to protect its human performers. (Who represented SeaWorld in that case? Eugene Scalia.)
The department is proposing to exempt from the rule “professional, athletic, or entertainment occupations” that are intrinsically dangerous. In justifying its proposal, the department cites a dissenting opinion in the appellate case by then-Appeals Judge Brett Kavanaugh, who is now on the Supreme Court.
In his dissent, Kavanaugh maintained that the agency exceeded its Congressional mandate: “The bureaucracy at the U.S. Department of Labor has not traditionally been thought of as the proper body to decide whether to ban fighting in hockey, to prohibit the punt return in football, to regulate the distance between the mound and home plate in baseball, to separate the lions from the tamers at the circus, or the like,” he wrote. The Department of Labor now maintains that Kavanaugh’s analysis, even though it was a minority finding, was right.
The department also proposes to rescind a 2024 regulation that guaranteed the right of migrant agricultural workers to host union organizers in company-owned housing.
The Biden administration asserted that the regulation was needed to “protect workers’ fundamental rights of association” and observed that the isolation of workers in company-furnished quarters and their “unique vulnerabilities renders them particularly at risk of … workplace abuses, labor exploitation, and trafficking.”
The department, however, cites several court rulings in red states that have held that the regulation was “an infringement on the property rights of employers.” Indeed, that was the reasoning of the Supreme Court in overturning a California law providing for similar access on farm property in 2021.
“The access regulation grants labor organizations a right to invade the growers’ property,” wrote Chief Justice John Roberts for a 6-3 majority, with the court’s three liberal justices dissenting. “It therefore constitutes a per se physical taking” without compensation.
Worker advocates fear that the July 1 announcement is a precursor of more rollbacks to come. “I think the announcement is just the beginning of their deregulation effort,” says Margaret Poydock, a senior policy analyst at the labor-affiliated Economic Policy Institute. “These 63 rules they referenced were just two days’ worth of posting.”
One rulemaking effort that worker advocates are watching closely involves heat-related injuries. A proposed rule was posted in August and is still under consideration, with bipartisan support; public hearings on the rule were completed earlier this month, and final action is expected by the end of September. The Trump administration hasn’t taken any steps to quash it, thus far. But it has been fiercely opposed by business interests.
President Donald Trump speaks during a news conference in the Rose Garden of the White House, Friday, June 5, 2020, in Washington. White House chief economic adviser Larry Kudlow, left, and Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia, top right listen. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, for instance, submitted a 20-page comment arguing that the proposal “would result in OSHA micromanaging workplaces, imposing unreasonable burdens, and creating confusion as to what employers would be required to do.”
The proposal, which would apply to almost all employers, would be triggered whenever employees were exposed to a heat index — a measure taking into account heat and humidity — of 80 degrees or higher for more than 15 minutes in an hour-long period.
In those conditions, employers would be required to supply cool drinking water, break areas with cooling and paid rest breaks, among other measures. A heat index of 90 degrees would require mandatory rest breaks of 15 minutes every two hours and other heightened measures.
In the absence of a specific federal heat regulation, workplaces are subject to the general duty clause. But that’s inadequate, worker advocates say. “The general duty clause is reactive — it addresses what happens once a worker is already exposed,” Poydock told me. “It does not prevent workers from becoming sick from heat or having heat stroke or dying from heat.”
The Chamber’s objection is that the current proposal is a “one-size-fits-all approach” that fails to account for regional conditions.
“Businesses operating in consistently high-heat regions, such as Arizona, Florida, and Texas, where these temperatures are the norm,” would be disproportionately affected. “People in hotter climates tend to be more acclimatized to heat, including working in temperatures above 80° F, and thus have a lower risk of heat injury or illness.”
The labor leaders who once saw a glimmer of light in Chavez-DeRemer’s appointment have seen their hopes dashed. Until recently, one might have said that the jury was out on whether she would be a good Labor secretary or another MAGA cabinet member. Now, sadly, the jury’s verdict is in.
www.latimes.com
Unions were optimistic about the appointment of Lori Chavez-DeRemer as Labor Secretary, but her actions have dashed their hopes.
CFT Wants To Keep Charter Schools By Auditing Them
California is in the midst of several multi-million dollar charter school scandals that are defrauding the public and abusing taxpayer funds.
For example, in 2019 A3 Charter School operators stole $400 million of public school dollars. Just this year, operators of Elite Charter Schools in San Diego and Highlands Charter Academy in Sacramento have abused the public coffers to the tune of more than $180 million combined.
CFT is working to solve this crisis, and we need your help. Please take a moment and send a letter to your state assembly member and your state senator, urging them to vote YES on AB 84 and NO on SB 414.
AB 84 provides crucial oversight for charter schools by increasing audit reports, a change in policy that is the recommended best practice of multiple government agencies.
SB 414 does very little to create accountability and, in fact, gives charter schools immunity from most lawsuits, like the ones that Elite and Highlands are correctly facing.
Please send a message to your legislators – urge them to vote YES on AB 84 and vote NO on SB 414 to stand with public schools and to protect the public school dollars that they depend on.
In Unity,
Jeff Freitas
CFT President
On Children and Education in the United States
www.counterpunch.org/2025/06/13/on-children-and-education-in-the-united-states/
JUNE 13, 2025
On Children and Education in the United States
GRANT INSKEEP – JUSTIN CLARKatoa-print-icon.png
Screenshot-2025-06-12-at-12.52.27-PM-680×454.png
Photo by Mark Stuckey
“When you want to teach children to think, you begin by treating them seriously when they are little, giving them responsibilities, talking to them candidly, providing privacy and solitude for them, and making them readers and thinkers of significant thoughts from the beginning. That’s if you want to teach them to think.”
— Bertrand Russell
To discuss the topic of education in the US, one must understand that adequate education hardly exists in this country, but it didn’t have to be that way. The US was an early pioneer in mass public education. Thomas Jefferson’s work to establish the University of Virginia in 1819 was an extension of the Enlightenment, communitarian ethic which aroused the founding period. As he wrote to William Roscoe in 1820, “this institution will be based on the illimitable freedom of the human mind. For here we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.” Another reformer, Horace Mann, known as the “Father of American Education,” believed in the development of “common schools,” supported by their communities, which would provide education to all American children.
As mass public education in the US developed in the 19th century, elites began to conceive of public education as a means of subverting independent farmers, many of them overtly radical. If you go back to the end of that century, the Farmer’s Alliance emerged from Texas as one of the most radical popular democratic organizations anywhere in human history (something unheard of in Texas today). They stuck up for their rights—not wanting to be slaves to the big financial trusts—and they had to be driven into factories and turned into tools for corporate and governmental power. It’s hard to believe for many, but a lot of public education was, in fact, concerned with trying to teach independent people to become interchangeable workers in an industrial system.
But, there was more to it than that. Actually, Ralph Waldo Emerson commented on it. In his 1844 essay, “New England Reformers,” he noted that tyrants are often motivated to provide education as a means of social control. “I notice too,” Emerson wrote, “that the ground on which eminent public servants urge the claims of popular education is fear: ‘This country is filling up with thousands and millions of voters, and you must educate them to keep them from our throats.’” In other words, we have to train them for obedience and servility, so they’re not going to think through the way the world works and threaten our privileged interests. So, it’s kind of a mixture. There’s a lot of good things about it, such as the development of skills and promotion of social bonds, but there were also the interests of the propertied class. The people who concentrate wealth don’t do things out of the goodness of their hearts, but in order to maintain their position of dominance and extend their power. Part of that dominance is predicated on keeping the masses pacified enough to not consider revolt. And it’s been kind of that battle all the way throughout organized human history. Right now, we happen to be in a general period of regression, not just in education but in democratic accountability. A lot of what’s happening is still rooted in the backlash to the 1960’s; the 1960’s were a democratizing period. The society became a lot more civilized and there was a lot of concern about education across the mainstream spectrum—liberals and conservatives alike.
It’s interesting to read liberal literature of the 1970’s, but there was concern about what they called “the failures of the institutions responsible for indoctrinating the young.” That’s the exact phrase that was used, which expresses the liberal view quite accurately. So the indoctrination of the young wasn’t working properly. This was the view of people like Samuel Huntington, former professor of government at Harvard, who was a liberal guru. He co-authored a report called “The Crisis of Democracy.” There was something that had to be done to increase indoctrination in order to beat back the democratizing wave.
A major component of this change came with the Governorship of Ronald Reagan in California. Prior to Reagan, under the leadership of Governor Edmund “Pat” Brown, the University of California was an emblematic example of a successful, free public college system. With the free tuition and the commitment to academic freedom, the Berkeley Free Speech movement grew in the 1960s, challenging the establishment within the University of California and the broader powers controlling the state. Reagan’s election in 1966 saw him oversee a massive change of the University of California system, introducing austerity and limitations on academic freedom. He also spearheaded the charge to fire Dr. Angela Davis as a professor for her political commitment to communism, a chilling of free speech that altered the UC system forever.
Reagan understood, much like Richard Nixon did, that if you changed the public university in America from a place of free education and academic openness, you could control both the students and the broader public. Other public colleges and universities followed Reagan’s plan with the UC system, instituting tuition fees for the first time and placing a major financial burden on students. This has only grown more so in the following decades, with student debt skyrocketing to an unbelievable $1.77 trillion today. When students are burdened with so much debt, they’re unlikely to become dissidents or activists. This is a form of social control that stifles free speech, academic excellence, and progress—instituting subtle forms of indoctrination against democratic principles.
One can be, at minimum, reasonably suspicious that skyrocketing student debt is a device of indoctrination. It’s very hard to imagine that there’s any economic reason for it. Other countries’ education is essentially free, like Mexico—a relatively poor country. Finland, which has perhaps the best education system in the world, by the outcomes and records at least, is free. Germany’s education is free. The US in the 1950’s was a much poorer country than it is today, but education was basically free with things like the GI Bill. So there’s no real economic reason for high-priced higher education and skyrocketing student debt. But there are other reasons. And one of them, the primary reason as mentioned, is just that students are simply trapped. The other is what’s happening to teachers who are being turned into glorified babysitters and temporary workers who have no rights, such as adjunct professors. Just go ask any public school teacher in the US. The more you can make the lives of graduate students, temporary workers, and two-tiered payment workers more precarious, then the more people you have under control—and all of that’s been going on continuously since the assault on public education began at the onset of the neoliberal era.
At this point it’s institutionalized with No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, bipartisan education overhauls led by Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, respectively. These reforms forced teachers to teach students only what was on standardized tests, which is the worst possible way of teaching. But it is a disciplinary technique. Schools in the US are simply designed to teach to the test. You don’t have to worry about students thinking for themselves, challenging entrenched ideas, and raising provocative questions. Students and teachers go along with this because their economic futures and salaries depend on it. And it has the obvious effect of dumbing down the population and turning people into obedient workers—thereby controlling them. And, as mentioned before, it’s bipartisan; The Carter, Clinton, Obama and Biden administrations all pushed it.
Also, other efforts to kill education—such as vouchers for charter schools or private schools—are nothing but an attempt to destroy the public education system. As journalist Katherine Stewart has written extensively about, the modern private school movement in the US grew out of an intense backlash to the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which desegregated the public school system. Southern whites were appalled at the thought of their children going to school with black children, so they led efforts to develop private schools that could remain segregated. They were known as “segregation academies” for this very reason. The development of private, religiously motivated segregated schools went hand-in-hand with the development of the religious right as a political force in American life. Today, the effort to provide private schools with public dollars is known as “school choice,” but that’s patently ridiculous. It’s an attempt to profit off education and hand it to private power while simultaneously undermining public education for all American children.
For most people, they can’t make the choices; there are not any choices for poor kids in the urban slums or rural backwaters across the US. It’s like saying everyone has a choice to become a millionaire or billionaire. You do, in a sense that there’s no law against it, but you likely won’t. Just like poor communities likely won’t be able to send their kids to private schools. They’re trying to make it so poor people can’t even send their kids to school, thus they will labor endlessly to help support their families’ ever increasing living expenses just to stay alive—effectively wage slaves—while those who have the privilege of getting an education will be indoctrinated to fill the institutional roles, say and do all the things corporate America wants them to, and become consuming cogs in a machine of profit and death. We’re well on our way to this reality, especially with the fascist Republicans taking the dismantling of the American state and its already horribly limited social support system to new, and rather grotesque, levels.
Education in this country, as discussed, is primarily about off-job control, and there are many devices for that. Education is one but advertising is another. The advertising industry is a huge industry, and anyone with their eyes open can see what it’s for. First off, the existence of the advertising industry is a sign of an unwillingness to let markets function. If we had markets, we wouldn’t have advertising, and if somebody has something to sell, they say what it is and you buy it if you want to. Second, advertising exists to manufacture wants rather than needs, which further subverts traditional market mechanisms. The techniques of advertising and public relations, what another generation would’ve called propaganda, were pioneered by Dr. Edward Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud, who developed elaborate techniques of propaganda to sell products to consumers. Once advertising became a mainstay in American life, the average person didn’t stand a chance.
Additionally, the concentration of corporate power led to efforts to stifle competition, as many corporate dictatorships wanted to stop price wars. Needing some product differentiation, they turned to deluding people into thinking they should buy this rather than that, or just getting them to consume. If you can get them to consume, they’re trapped—that’s advertising. By now there’s a huge part of the advertising industry which is designed to capture children, and it’s destroying childhood. Anyone who has any experience with children can see this. It’s literally destroying their childhoods. Kids don’t know how to play. They can’t go outside like when other generations in the 20th century did, since the suburban neighborhoods they live in aren’t walkable and parents are more uneasy about letting their children out of their sight. In earlier eras, children with a free Saturday afternoon could go out to a field or park and find other kids to play a game or sport. Kids today can’t really do much like that. It has to be organized by adults, or else you’re at home with gadgets, video games, and social media.
But the idea of children going out just to play with all its benefits—that’s gone, and it’s done consciously to trap children from infancy to turn them into consumer addicts. This means you’re out for yourself and have the Ayn Rand-type of sociopathic behavior, which comes straight out of the consumer culture. Consumer culture means going out for myself; I don’t give a damn about anyone else. This kind of thinking and practice is really destroying society in a lot of ways, and education is a huge part of it.
Much has to do with the catastrophe that’s looming—the climate crisis and environmental breakdown. It’s very serious. It’s not generations from now; it’s people’s children, their grandchildren, etc. And the public is essentially in agreement with the scientific consensus, aside from fascist supporting republicans and conspiratorial nut jobs. If you look at polls, it will say it’s a serious problem; we’ve got to do something about it. The US Government doesn’t want to, and corporate America not only doesn’t want to, but is strongly opposed to it.
So now, take the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). It’s funded by the Koch brothers and other likeminded corporate oligarchs. It’s an organization that designs boilerplate, pro-corporate legislation for state legislatures. They have plenty of clout, so they can get a lot of it through. They have a program which sounds very nice on the surface. It’s supposedly designed to increase “critical thinking.” And the way you increase critical thinking is by having “balanced education.” “Balanced education” means that if you teach kids something about the climate, you also have to teach them about climate change denial, usually referred to as “climate skepticism.” This is like teaching evolutionary biology and creationism as two sides of a debate, which provides the appearance of “critical thinking” but actually muddies the waters concerning established concepts of knowledge. All of this is a way of turning the population into a bunch of ignorant and mindless imbeciles. That’s really serious. I mean, it’s literally life and death at this point, not just making society worse. This is an existential problem for humanity, especially for children, who are naturally creative, inquisitive, and looking to learn. Hence why they’re asking, “Why?” all the time.
Education should be about laying out a thread for children to connect the dots in their own creative ways—not opening a textbook or PowerPoint and asking them to take notes and study for a test they’re largely going to forget about shortly after. Imagine thinking that’s going to make kids want to learn. The reason many “hate school” isn’t because they’re inherently lazy, but because of how it’s structured. Public education in the US today has a funny effect of getting the population used to the 9-5 grind, the work off the clock (homework), the monotonous work tasks we don’t want to do but have to, etc. It’s effectively training people for their future subservience to corporate America. If teachers were allowed to be free and creative agents, there’s every reason to believe they’d opt for a more flexible approach to education. One geared more towards students and teaching them to think rather than simply test well.
But that’s what’s being destroyed: teachers’ control of the classroom, like worker control of the shop floor. For the ruling class, you can’t allow that; you must have obedience. It wouldn’t be the least bit surprising to one day see education in US public schools reduced to some sort of AI-generated curriculum and teaching that’s incredibly harmful to learning outcomes. For parents who can afford to do so, they will simply opt out of this into the private school system where real teaching remains. For private power, why use teachers you have to pay continuously for public schools when you can simply use AI to run the lessons? Then you don’t have to worry at all about any teachers actually interested nurturing their students’ critical thinking abilities.
Control from above, control by the administrators. No respect for the working person, whether it’s a teacher or machinist. And it’s amazing how this is done. I mean, there’s been great studies on this. One studied the machine tool industry in the 1950’s and 1960’s. There was a move towards computer control of machines. Numerical control of machine process, a big advance. There were two tracks that could be followed. One was letting skilled machinists run the system with their detailed knowledge and ability to fix things that went wrong and develop new ideas. The other was to let the managers run it. And there were studies, and the ones where the machinists ran it were successful and profitable and everything else, but they picked the opposite way. And they picked it for a very simple reason: they received disciplined workers. Even if that overcomes profit, it’s much more important to have a disciplined, obedient workforce. Not workers who can do things for themselves, for pretty obvious reasons. If they can do things for themselves, they’re pretty soon going to ask: “why do we need bosses?”
And then you’re in trouble. Just like sit-down strikes, that’s why they’re so dangerous. This happened, and it’s the same thing in schools. You can’t let teachers control the classroom. You must have teaching to the test; then the teachers are disciplined, obedient, and controlled. They do what you tell them. As mentioned, their salaries depend on it; their jobs depend on it; their lives depend on it. They become as controlled by the system as everyone else, and this is why parents are frustrated with their kids’ teachers. If you have a society where it’s only, “Look after me; I’ll forget everyone else,” then they can get rid of public education, and then Social Security and Medicare. You get thinking like, “Why should I pay for the kid across the street going to school; my kid is not going to school. Why should I care about disabled widows?”, etc.
Dismantling public education also has the consequence of cutting creativity and independence with regard to the arts. Adolescence is a phase when children express and learn about themselves. It’s important for privileged interests to cut that back. My grandfather grew up in the depression of Youngstown, Ohio. Back when that city was three times the size of today. His family was employed working class and many never made it past grade school but were familiar with what could be called “high culture.” That is to say the plays of Shakespeare, the literature of people like John Steinbeck or Sinclair Lewis, the concerts of artists like Duke Ellington or Frank Sinatra, etc. It was a part of life to my grandfather’s family, just like working in steel mills. In fact, there was once a detailed scholarly study of working class people in England in the 19th century and what they were reading, and it’s pretty remarkable. The people mostly didn’t go to school but they had quite a high level of culture. They were reading contemporary literature and the classics. In fact, the authors of the study concluded that they were probably more educated than the aristocrats themselves.
The working class must defend public education against the attacks of the corporate elite and the political leaders who are bought by them. We must reform education so that it’s more important to teach children how to think critically than what to think about on a standardized test. We must continue to build labor and solidarity movements that bring education to the people, such as book swaps, book clubs, and free lectures. Children should be given the opportunity to find what they’re good at and what they’re passionate about, which will instill a lifelong love of learning. The great Issac Asimov once said that “self education is the only kind of education there is.” We can’t develop self-education without strong public schools, vibrant communities, and a communitarian ethic that binds people together. Only then can real education begin.
Grant Inskeep is an activist from Denver, Colorado currently based out of Phoenix, Arizona. He writes on socioeconomics, philosophy and geopolitics on Instagram @the_pragmatic_utopian. Justin Clark is a public historian based in Indiana and the co-host of Red Reviews. A specialist in intellectual history and digital history, his writing has appeared on the Indiana Historical Bureau’s Untold Indiana blog and in The Sower and the Seer: Perspectives on the Intellectual History of the American Midwest
On Children and Education in the United States
www.counterpunch.org
“When you want to teach children to think, you begin by treating them seriously when they are little, giving them responsibilities, talking to themThis is so moving. I am reflecting on my own teaching in my classroom and i give both sides and I dont think i muddy the water doing it because I stress making inferences and drawing conclusions with a bits of science observation and data.
Exclusive: City College of San Francisco poised to select outsider as chancellor over interim chief
www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/ccsf-selecting-outsider-chancellor-over-interim-20337125.php
By Nanette Asimov,
Higher Education Reporter
Updated May 22, 2025 7:37 p.m.
Veteran educator Carlos Cortez is in contract negotiations to become City College of San Francisco's next chancellor.
Veteran educator Carlos Cortez is in contract negotiations to become City College of San Francisco's next chancellor.
Provided by the San Diego Community College District
Veteran educator Carlos Osvaldo Cortez is expected to be named next week as the 11th chancellor in 13 years to lead the financially troubled City College of San Francisco, edging out the interim chancellor, the Chronicle has learned.
The seven trustees are in contract negotiations with Cortez, and a majority favor him over Interim Chancellor Mitch Bailey, said knowledgeable sources who asked not to be identified because they were not authorized to discuss the matter. Bailey has fallen out of favor with the faculty union, which strongly influences the majority on the seven-member board of trustees.
The chancellor selection echoes a constant debate at City College over the best approach to restoring the college to good fiscal health and increasing enrollment. The faculty union and its supporters on the board want to dip into reserves to boost spending, saying this approach is the best way to attract more students.
By contrast, Bailey says he wants to “adjust college operations to align with current resources,” a practice that matches expectations of accreditors and state officials. The college has been under an accreditation warning sanction over its governance and finances since early 2024.
Chancellor selections are secretive, with deliberations happening behind closed doors. At City College, they are a near-annual ritual. If approved, possibly at the May 29 board meeting, Cortez would become the school’s fifth permanent head since 2012. There have been six interim chancellors during that time.
The selection of Cortez over Bailey would be the second time in a year that the trustees have replaced a chancellor who sought greater financial stability by aligning spending with revenue.
Cortez is seen as faculty-friendly. In the San Diego Community College District, where Cortez was chancellor from summer 2021 through spring 2023, faculty pay increased modestly, by an average of 2.5% in 2022 and 4.5% a year later, after a period of small increases before he arrived.
Cortez quit that job after a year and a half. He was paid a total of $1.36 million during his short tenure, including $546,601 for his final four months, according to Transparent California, a database of California public employee salaries.
While chancellor in San Diego, Cortez made news in 2022 when he was forced to cancel his belated welcoming ceremony at Petco Park after receiving complaints for inviting Alice Walker as keynote speaker. The Pulitzer-Prize winning author of “The Color Purple” has for years been accused of antisemitism, including for penning a poem in which she called the Talmud, the book of Jewish law, “poison,” and for her support of conspiracy-theorist David Icke.
After 20 months on the job, Cortez announced in March 2023 that he was taking “extended emergency leave” to care for his ill parents. On May 1, district officials announced that he had resigned to be with his parents in Florida. By that fall, however, he was a finalist for the chancellor’s job in three Bay Area college districts: Peralta in the East Bay, Contra Costa and San Mateo.
Court records show that on Jan. 19, 2024, police in Florida arrested Cortez on suspicion of driving under the influence. Ultimately, he pled no contest to the reduced charge of reckless driving.
In a phone conversation, Cortez declined to answer a reporter’s questions without authorization from City College. But he said the Florida charge was due to a “mixture of prescription medicine.”
The trustees installed Bailey as interim a year ago after they ousted Chancellor David Martin, the college’s former financial chief who, as its top administrator, oversaw faculty layoffs.
While Bailey has not suggested layoffs, he has adopted an approach that acknowledges financial instability at the college of 44,000 full- and part-time students. Salaries eat up 90% of the general fund, compared with 82% statewide, and next year the college will lose millions of dollars in extra state funding that has kept it afloat since 2018 due to severe enrollment loss. Reserves are at 16% of general fund expenditures, far below the 33% average across other colleges.
Among the ideas Bailey references in a May 8 budget update are reducing the number of single classes that attract few students and currently make up 70% of academic offerings. Instead, Bailey wants faculty to consider teaching more groups of classes that carry large numbers of students toward their degrees.
It’s an idea that does not sit well with the union, the American Federation of Teachers, Local 2121.
“In a dizzyingly shallow presentation, Interim Chancellor proposes cuts to 70% of College with no analysis,” the union headlined its essay accusing Bailey of targeting ethnic studies classes. The union essay called for “serious leadership” that would tap into its $31 million reserves to pay for more academics, not less.
Bailey did not respond to requests for comment.
Alexis Litzky, a communications professor and outgoing chair of the Academic Senate, called the union’s description of Bailey’s idea for boosting more popular classes a “mischaracterization of the chancellor’s presentation.” She said Bailey is not suggesting that the college axe classes but that faculty review course offerings so that City College can “evaluate options for updating our programs and schedules.”
The Academic Senate works with both the union and administrators.
Litzky said the college has been confronting its accreditation missteps by working with a state assistance team, and that Bailey’s budget workshops have been helpful in educating the college community about its finances.
“It actually feels like we’re going in the right direction,” she said.
Cortez, 50, earned his doctorate at the University of Southern California, focusing on “African American Womanist political historical contributions to social welfare and education policy reform,” according to his employment bio. During his academic career as an instructor and administrator, Cortez served as dean of instruction at Berkeley City College and, before becoming chancellor in San Diego, was president of San Diego College of Continuing Education.
The Chronicle reached out to trustees in each of the Bay Area college districts where Cortez applied since leaving San Diego, as well as to trustees of Madison College and Pasadena City College, where he was a finalist in April 2024 before he withdrew his name from consideration. Cortez told the Chronicle he had decided he didn’t want to live in Madison.
Only one trustee responded, agreeing to comment without being identified because the person was not authorized to speak about it publicly.
“He is very charismatic. He dazzled us,” said the board member from Pasadena. But the college did not select Cortez as its leader. The trustee declined to say why.
San Diego trustees did not respond to requests for comment.
Professor Inna Kanevsky, who teaches psychology at San Diego Mesa College and got into a public dispute with Cortez over the Alice Walker episode, said she was “sad to hear” that he was the leading candidate at City College.
Cortez drew ire from the free-speech group FIRE — the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression — when he blocked Kanevsky on social media after she complained that the Walker invitation would harm Jewish students. FIRE told the college district that the action violated Kanvesky’s First Amendment rights.
The chancellor then deleted his own account.
City College of San Francisco poised to select outsider as chancellor over interim chief
www.sfchronicle.com
City College of San Francisco poised to select outsider as chancellor over interim chief
San Jose’s first charter school to close after 25 years, laying off 99 employees
www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/san-jose-charter-school-closure-20334288.php
By Aidin Vaziri,
Staff Writer
May 19, 2025
Downtown College Preparatory, San Jose’s first charter school for low-income students, will close after 25 years, resulting in 99 layoffs.
Downtown College Preparatory, San Jose’s first charter school for low-income students, will close after 25 years, resulting in 99 layoffs.
San Jose’s first charter school, founded in 2000 to serve low-income students of color, will permanently close at the end of the current school year, resulting in 99 employee layoffs.
Downtown College Preparatory will shutter its administrative offices and three sites — Alum Rock Middle School, El Camino Middle School and El Primero High School — on June 30, according to notices filed last week with the California Employment Development Department.
The decision, announced earlier this year by the school’s board of directors, stems from ongoing enrollment declines and deepening financial instability.
“Unfortunately, with the current limited financial resources and considering the overall trend of lower enrollment in San Jose, the Board made the extremely difficult decision to close all three schools,” the board wrote in a public letter.
DCP currently serves about 950 students across its three campuses, but enrollment has steadily dropped in recent years — a trend seen throughout the Bay Area following the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Over the course of the last several years, the combined enrollment of the DCP organization has suffered significant declines, which has put the organization in a precarious financial position,” the board said.
The network began downsizing in 2024, closing its Alum Rock High School campus after enrollment fell by 30% since 2019. At the time, CEO Pete Settelmayer said the campus’s 205 students would not generate sufficient state funding to cover operating costs.
DCP’s closure comes just weeks after a similar announcement from The Primary School in East Palo Alto, a tuition-free private school backed by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. That school, which also serves low-income Latino students and combines education with health care and family services, will close after the 2025-26 academic year.
Despite the setbacks, DCP highlights its track record in college access. The organization reports that 56% of its alumni have graduated or are on track to graduate from college within six years — four times the national average for similar student populations.
According to the organization, 56% of its alumni have graduated or are on track to graduate from college within six years — four times the national average for similar student demographics.
As the academic year winds down, DCP leaders say their focus remains on supporting students through the school’s closure.
“DCP’s legacy will forever remain,” the board wrote.
San Jose’s first charter school to close after 25 years, laying off 99 employees
www.sfchronicle.com
Downtown College Preparatory, San Jose’s first charter school for low-income students, will close after 25 years, resulting in 99 layoffs.
Silicon Valley schools superintendent to resign following spending on energy healer and other questionable expenses
www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/mountainview-19886203.php
A Silicon Valley schools superintendent is resigning amid scrutiny over the district’s finances, including money spent on an East Coast public relations firm and $1,200 per session for an energy healer to provide guided meditation for administrators.
Ayindé Rudolph — one of the highest paid superintendents in the state — announced Friday he would leave the Mountain View Whisman School District, a tiny elementary school district that struggles with a persistent achievement gap despite being in one of the region’s wealthiest areas. He resigned the same day Santa Clara County education officials were finalizing a contract to bring in a state fiscal oversight agency to perform an “extraordinary audit,” specifically a review to determine whether any illegal practices have occurred, including fraud or misappropriation of funds.
Rudoph is expected to leave following a Thursday vote by the school board on a separation agreement, which would include payment of three months of salary, or just over $98,000, with both sides giving up any present or future legal claims.
Some families questioned the severance package, which also gave him an extension on repaying a low-interest home loan for up to a $1.6 million loan
“Don’t the taxpayers deserve to know why the school board feels it necessary to give him $100K of our children’s educational money, when we are not obligated to give him anything?” said one parent, who the Chronicle agreed not to name under its confidential sources policy. “Can you think of any other job where an employee resigns amidst a pending audit for fraud, and his employers give him a gift of $100K and a release from all future claims and liabilities?”
The parent, who feared retaliation added, “Why is the school board trying to protect Dr. Rudolph instead of protecting our children’s interests?”
School board President Devon Conley told the Chronicle Monday that, if approved, “the three months severance is less than what is typical for such an agreement,” she told the Chronicle Monday.
The superintendent, who was hired in 2015, cited a need to focus on his health and family.
“After much reflection, following a health scare, I have come to realize that the demands of the job continue to have an adverse impact on my health,” he said Friday in a statement posted on social media. “As the scripture says in Micah 4:4, ‘Everyone will sit under their own vine and under their own fig tree, and no one will make them afraid.’
“I look forward to sitting under my own fig tree and starting the next chapter of my family’s life.”
Rudolph did not immediately return requests for comment.
Rudolph previously went on temporary leave after county education officials recommended the audit and following a closed-door school board meeting over the disciplining or firing of an employee, presumably the superintendent. No action was taken.
The Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team, or FCMAT, is expected to conduct the extraordinary audit, sampling transactions from 2022 to the present. FCMAT is often called in by state or county education officials to evaluate or help districts in financial distress.
The upheaval in Mountain View Whisman followed a Chronicle story in late August that outlined the district’s questionable spending on training executives, polishing the elementary school district’s image and administrator wellness, despite a significant achievement gap among the district’s 4,500 students.
Parents raised the alarm about spending after questioning budget cuts, which included reducing classes in middle schools.
Among the expenses was just over $315,000 in contracts for district leadership to receive $1,200 meditation sessions with a Sacramento woman who identifies as an energy healer and who uses sacred geometry and chakra clearing in her practice.
The district defended the spending as “research proven,” that could help lead to better productivity and performance.
The district’s $110 million budget also included $600,000 annually for leadership coaching from various companies across the country and a $180,000 contract with a Washington, D.C. public relations firm.
“I think down the road it’s going to pay off exponentially,” Conley, the school board president, said of the PR firm at the time of the Chronicle’s original reporting.
Rudolph also hired Peter Gorman, the former superintendent at the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools district in North Carolina, where Rudolph was a principal, to be his coach. Gorman’s contract was renewed annually starting in Rudolph’s first year in 2015, costing taxpayers a total of $370,000.
Yet parents, during public meetings, pointed to a growing achievement gap in the district, saying none of that money was helping students. More than 80% of white and Asian American students were proficient or above in math and English last spring, compared with 31% of Hispanic students measuring at grade level in English and 22% in math.
“Our district spends a considerable amount of money for both our teachers and our administrators to make sure they can perform at their highest rate to make sure they can close the achievement gap,” Rudolph said at a board meeting in late August after the Chronicle story.
Rudolph’s most recent salary is nearly $370,000.
In addition, the school board gave him the fringe benefit of a loan to buy a home, with the amount not to exceed $1.6 million. The loan agreement required Rudolph to pay off the loan within 180 days of leaving the job, with the district getting 40% of any appreciation on the property.
The separation agreement extends the timeframe and would require Rudolph to pay the loan back by June 30, 2025.
Reach Jill Tucker: jtucker@sfchronicle.com
www.sfchronicle.com
Silicon Valley schools superintendent set to resign after hiring energy healer to guide meditation
D.C. charter school accused of violating law for students with disabilities
A member of the D.C. Public Charter School Board called the findings “a parent’s worst nightmare.”
www.washingtonpost.com/education/2024/11/04/seed-dc-charter-school-students-disabilities/
D.C.’s public charter school board issued a “notice of concern” to the SEED School of Washington, D.C., after it was accused of flouting laws that protect students with disabilities. (Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post)
By Lauren Lumpkin
November 3, 2024 at 6:00 a.m. EST
The SEED School of Washington, D.C., a rare charter boarding campus in the District, has been accused of flouting local and federal education laws that protect students with disabilities — drawing outrage and a “notice of concern” from the city’s charter school board.
A September audit found the high school, one of D.C.’s oldest charter schools, suspended students without first holding federally mandated meetings that are supposed to determine whether a child’s behavior is the manifestation of a disability or the result of an IEP — or individualized education program — that has not been fully implemented. IEPs are legal documents that detail a student’s special education needs and how they should be met.
It also said SEED D.C. was unable to provide records of services provided for at least three students with disabilities who had been expelled or suspended for 10 or more days, suggesting legally required services “were not provided, representing a compliance breach,” Michele Gray, who oversees school performance for the D.C. Public Charter School Board, told the governing body last week.
The school’s officials also underreported the number of students they expelled last school year, the charter board’s staff said.
SEED D.C. leaders said the campus is improving its data-tracking practices and committed to regular internal audits. “We are absolutely committed to making sure that these deficiencies are addressed and rectified,” said Desa Sealy, who chairs the school’s board of trustees.
The charter board issued SEED D.C. a notice of concern, an official warning that prescribes changes the school needs to make to avoid more consequences. Staff recommended lifting the notice in June if the school complies.
Without making changes, the school could lose its charter and be forced to close.
The action comes after Eagle Academy Public Charter School, which had locations in Southeast and Southwest Washington, closed abruptly in August after years of financial problems and a failed plan to merge with a larger school. The debacle prompted the charter board to examine its oversight practices and has heightened public scrutiny of the privately run, taxpayer-funded network of schools that educate almost half of D.C.’s children.
SEED D.C., located in Southeast Washington, was lauded as the nation’s first public charter college-prep boarding school when it was founded in 1998. It now enrolls about 250 students, who attend free. Most students are Black and from lower-income homes, city data shows.
But after receiving complaints about discipline, understaffing and compliance with federal law, the city’s charter oversight agency started an audit of the school in July. One complaint claimed school officials had manipulated attendance data and were not recording suspensions.
The audit’s findings sparked scathing commentary from charter board members and questions about SEED D.C.’s practices.
“I’m the parent of a special-needs child, and I’ve got to tell you, reading what was happening in these pages, it’s like a parent’s worst nightmare,” charter board member Nick Rodriguez told SEED D.C. leaders. “I sincerely hope that you will take that seriously as you think about what needs to happen going forward.”
This is not the first time SEED D.C. has been scrutinized for its treatment of students with special education needs. An earlier audit published in March 2023 found high numbers of suspensions and expulsions at the school compared with other charters. In some cases that involved students with disabilities, the audit found there was limited rationale to explain why the child was disciplined.
The back-to-back reports paint a portrait of a “multiyear pattern of violations,” said Jim Sandman, vice chair of the D.C. charter school board.
Gray said SEED D.C. submitted inaccurate data, missed deadlines when the board asked for information and demonstrated problems with the legally required disciplinary meetings — called manifestation determination review, or MDR, meetings — during the 2022-2023 and 2023-2024 school years.
After the 2023 audit, the charter school board’s staff recommended several changes — such as confirming in meeting notes whether a child is getting special education services — and asked the school to show it had updated its practices to align with federal law. The school eventually complied, the charter board was “satisfied,” and the city closed the audit. Charter board staff members said they would “continue to monitor” SEED D.C.’s discipline data for students with disabilities and could take further action if the board received “a series of complaints that constitute a pattern of the same or similar issues.”
The findings of the latest audit led staff members to recommend the notice of concern.
At the charter board meeting, Roseyn Hood, SEED D.C.’s head of school, acknowledged there have been “gaps in [the school’s] processes” and shared plans to improve.
“This is unacceptable, and I am grateful this situation has afforded us the opportunity to strengthen, address and enhance our practices with regards to special education compliance and protocols at SEED,” Hood said. She added the school has started using new software to track data, hired an assistant director of student support services with a “strong background” in special education and expanded staff training, among other changes.
The audit studied violations during the 2023-2024 school year. City officials found that out of four students with disabilities who were expelled from the school, two did not have MDR meetings before they were dismissed. School leaders told the charter board’s staff that the students’ parents did not respond to requests to schedule meetings or appeal the expulsion decisions, according to the audit.
Meanwhile, the audit found just one out of five students suspended for more than 10 days last school year received an MDR meeting. Three teens were instead given “reflection” meetings — which do not meet legal requirements, “potentially leaving students without the necessary protections and interventions,” the charter board’s staff said. The final student did not get a meeting at all; school leaders said they were unable to get in touch with the child’s family.
The MDR meetings are “critical,” said Julie Camerata, executive director of the D.C. Special Education Cooperative, an advocacy group. Before a child is disciplined, a school should “at least make a decision based on whether or not the behavior was a manifestation of the child’s disability.”
If a student’s behavior is related to their disability, Camerata said, a meeting gives the school a chance to figure out whether it is providing that child with the right services, such as counseling or occupational therapy. “Because if it was related to the disability, you can’t discriminate and [exclude] a child.”
The audit also found the school broke D.C. data policy by reporting and validating inaccurate disciplinary figures. Officials discovered in February that SEED D.C. had not reported any expulsions, despite enrollment data that revealed 10 students had been removed from the school, according to the charter school board’s staff.
The findings led to a meeting between charter board staff members and SEED D.C. leaders in April, Gray said. Staff members found more data discrepancies in August and gave the school until Oct. 18 to make corrections. As of the Oct. 28 board meeting, that had not yet happened, Gray said.
“My view is that you’re on very thin ice,” Sandman told the high school’s leaders.
The data issues follow the March 2023 audit, in which the charter board’s staff noted that SEED D.C. had a “very high number of discipline incidents.” The high school had expelled 19 teens, according to data it shared with the charter board in October 2022. By the end of the 2022-2023 school year, nearly 8 percent of its students had been dismissed, city data shows. The expulsion rate across the city’s schools was a tenth of a percent that year.
Students with disabilities, who constituted more than 27 percent of SEED D.C.’s student body that year, also made up about a quarter of the expulsions. Across D.C., students with disabilities make up 18 percent of the student population but almost 30 percent of suspensions and expulsions, a report from the 2022-2023 school year shows.
Meanwhile, the boarding school’s overall out-of-school suspension rate by the end of that year was 29 percent — five times the charter-sector-wide suspension rate of 5.8 percent.
While SEED D.C. disciplines students at higher rates, as a boarding school it also keeps students for twice as long as the typical campus. This school year, Hood said, she has tried to make sure students have more structure at night, such as study hall or in-dorm activities — although students have about as many incidents during the day as they do in the evening.
“We’ve increased some of our safety protocols, too,” Hood said, including checking bags and using metal detectors.
D.C. charter school accused of violating law for students with disabilities
www.washingtonpost.com
The SEED School of Washington, D.C., a charter boarding campus in the District, has been accused of flouting local and federal education laws that protect students with disabilities.
Argentina University occupations: a new stage in the struggle against the Milei government
prensaobrera.com/english/university-occupations-a-new-stage-in-the-struggle-against-the-milei-gov…
Partido Obrero takes on the task of calling for Milei out!
Juan-Garcia-1-1.jpg
Juan García
The proliferation of the occupation of university faculties and colleges throughout the country against Milei’s veto marks a qualitative leap in the struggle against the government. They were combined with strikes and public classes immediately launched by the militant teachers of AGD UBA, and also with the participation of the non-teaching staff. And throughout the country the student struggle conditioned the university unions, even those most closely linked to the rectorates. Occupations are a reaction to the failure of the parliamentary negotiation policy of the rectors, who, together with Peronism and radicalism, sought to restrict the budget fight to the parliamentary arena but could not ensure that their own blocs would uphold the rejection of the veto. The students reacted to official intransigence by stepping up the ante and resorting to student movement’s historic methods of direct action and struggle. For the first time in his presidency, Milei has to face a massive struggle that clearly goes beyond the corset of isolated mobilizations to negotiate, put up by both the employers’ opposition and the trade union bureaucracy.
Therefore, the ongoing student mobilization marks a turning point in the struggle against the government. The defense of the public university has become the focal point of the national debate. Students and teachers respond to Milei’s statements, that pointed out that the poor do not enter universities, by stating that his government is responsible for having accentuated the massive dropout rate among the poorest students. Contrary to what Milei argues, the university that the government wants to take away from young people is seen as a mechanism for social advancement by broad layers of workers, in a country where 70% of the youth population is below the poverty line.
This explains the enormous popularity of the university struggle, which garners massive support in the face of a government that has failed to isolate it from the workers as a whole. The other central point of this student strike is the struggle for wages, against a government that is condemning millions of workers across the country to wages below the poverty line. In this way, University struggle is connected to the struggle of the entire working class, which is being deprived by the government’s policies, in a country where consumption has fallen by 15% year-on-year. Without going any further, the workers of Garrahan Hospital are coming from days of strikes and massive mobilizations and are preparing a new large mobilization in unity with universities for next Tuesday 22nd. They were joined by residents from different hospitals, such as the Bonaparte Hospital against the closure. In Rio Tercero, four thousand people mobilized with the trade union and chemical workers against the closure of a large plant. As yesterday with the pensioners, popular sympathy is being expressed despite the collaborationism of the trade union bureaucracy.
Milei’s hypocrisy knows no bounds, because the taxes ‘paid by the poor’ have been reinforced by his government measures while those paid by the rich are reduced (as is the case with Personal Property) and because the whole intention of his budget is that these taxes do not go to universities but to finance the ultra-millionaire international creditors, beneficiaries of a clause that authorizes the entire budget to be adjusted to guarantee the payment of interest on the external debt.
The other argument, audits, falls apart when 92% of the budget is spent on salaries whose amounts are deposited by the national government and whose payroll is available to all state agencies, except for the thousands of ad honorem, who of course work for free, so their funds could not be misappropriated. The radical-peronist cliques manage the tendering and hiring regime, but that is another matter, perhaps the libertarian “fachos” would like to have that control as in Insfrán’s Formosa.
In this way, students speak out for the silent majority that had been abandoning Milei in the polls and that was the one that starred in the ratings blackouts of the last national presidential network. The atmosphere of struggle that the national crisis is taking on will challenge all political strategies of both the government and the opposition.
University of the workers, not of the cliques
The occupations also revealed a divergence of methods and objectives between the student movement and the university cliques that had been the visible expression of the demand.
While the university conflict develops, radicalism of Yacobitti and Lousteau, who governs Santa Fe with Maximiliano Pullaro, has just applied a brutal pension reform against teachers and provincial employees. Opposition to this reform gave rise to a large popular mobilization. The government of those who present themselves as progressives in the university had five teachers’ and provincial employee leaders of the province arrested and prosecuted. Radicalism applies its own blows to public education and wages, as well as to democratic freedoms.
Therefore, the clash between Milei and the university cliques should be characterized as a circumstantial dispute over the magnitude of the budget cut and the speed at which the university should be subjected to a privatization process. It is by no means a principled opposition. The radicals and Peronists who co-govern universities collaborate by appointing officials to Milei’s government in the PAMI. They have been pursuing a privatization policy in the university for decades and they never lost sleep over the fact that a full-time job was not enough to cover the family basket long before Milei applied the current cuts. Only extraordinary pressure from Milei’s government, which put them on the ropes, led them to stage two street demonstrations. That is why they are now going to aim all their intervention at deactivating the occupations. Inevitably, the independent intervention of the student movement and the militant teachers will draw conclusions about who is who in the university.
The coup is Milei’s and it’s against the people
The government’s other reaction to the mobilization was to denounce that students were hiding behind the left with the intention of destabilizing the government. This is the classic McCarthyist way of attacking the student movement, because what the students are demanding is the basic budget for the university to function. It is Milei who places them in a ‘destitute’ field because he understands that his government will falter if it is unable to bring the country into line with the demands of international financial capital in order to squeeze every last peso for the payment of the foreing debt.
As always, the appeal to McCarthyism seeks to avoid responding to the most basic demands. Gabriel Solano responded by pointing out that it is the government itself which, by vetoing every popular demand, raises the problem that it is incompatible with health, education and salaries. This incompatibility raises, in the eyes of people who see their basic rights confiscated, the question of the struggle for the fall of the government.
A government that closes hospitals, that intends to starve pensioners, that destroys jobs in factories, closes down and destock soup kitchens and liquidates labor rights and that proposes to align Argentina seamlessly with imperialism and the Zionist genocide and bring it to its knees in front of the international creditors, pouring every penny into the payment of foreing debt.
Milei Peronism debates its 2025 lists, whilst Partido Obrero how to defeat Milei
In light of this situation, it is of enormous significance for the popular movement that Máximo Kirchner returned with his argument that the veto is a presidential power, while calling to form lists to go to the polls in 2025, and that Juan Grabois, in the same vein, proclaimed his candidacy for deputy. Meanwhile, La Cámpora in all University faculties manoeuvred to avoid occupations or to submit to them when they were a fait accompli. The PJ of La Matanza even sent a mob against the students who occupied the local university. The call to fill the Congress with representatives of Peronism ‘against the veto’ comes just after the deputies elected by this force in Catamarca and Tucumán gave their votes to Milei’s veto against the public university.
Against this orientation, Partido Obrero takes up the challenge posed by the political situation as a whole, pushing for Milei Out! This slogan must be developed with the intervention of working class as a whole in the political situation. That is why we associate it with the support for all struggles and the preparation of the general strike. And to debate a political alternative and a programme to overcome the catastrophe to which all capitalist political forces have led the country. With this objective in mind, we call on all the sectors in struggle throughout the country to join forces, and we will develop a campaign and a big central event in Lezama Park on 9 November, as well as events and talks in the rest of the country.
We do it from the place we have conquered in national political life in decades of consistent struggle in factories, neighborhoods, universities, defending each of the popular demands against the governments of capital that have been sinking the country.
A place that makes us the target of an enormous persecution, which this week had its expression in the summons to question Vanina Biasi under the infamous accusation of anti-Semitism, in a case set up by the Daia and Zionism to silence her denunciation of the genocide in Palestine, while the mega-case against the Polo and the Partido Obrero continues. With this militancy, we launch a big campaign to end the anti-worker government of Milei, to lead the struggles to victory, to defeat all the causes of persecution and to strengthen the struggle for a workers’ government
University occupations: a new stage in the struggle against the Milei government
prensaobrera.com
Partido Obrero takes on the task of calling for Milei out! –