Dear Commons Community,

Teachers in Oakland, California went on strike on Thursday and continue a wave of activism that started last year when educators across West Virginia were out of the classroom for nine days. The movement spread to five more states before the school year was over.  As reported by NPR:

“New data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that almost a half a million U.S. workers were off the job in strikes or lockouts during 2018, and nearly 400,000 of them were teachers. It was the biggest year for work stoppages since 1986.

This year, individual districts — such as Denver and Los Angeles — have picked up where states left off. Teachers in Oakland, Calif., were on the picket lines Thursday and Friday, and Sacramento, Calif., teachers could be next.

Educators say they’re angry. They don’t like how states and school districts treat them and their students. A lot of the frustration comes down to money, but dignity and respect are touchstones, too.

Why are teachers striking?

Teachers earn less than other workers with comparable experience and education — a gap that’s widened in recent years. More than a million teachers aren’t covered by Social Security. An NPR/Ipsos Poll conducted last April found that 59 percent of teachers have worked a second job, and 86 percent say they’ve spent their own money on classroom supplies.

In most states where teachers walked out of their classrooms last year — like Oklahoma, Arizona and Colorado — teachers make even less than other educators across the country, especially after their pay is adjusted for cost of living.

Many of these educators were pressing for better pay and more funding for schools. Some got what they wanted — at least, they were promised it.

Then, a major Supreme Court decision last year dealt a blow to teachers unions. In Janus v. AFSCME, the court ruled that public sector unions can no longer collect money from nonmembers covered by collective bargaining agreements. That decision could potentially weaken teacher unions by cutting them off from money.

Many scholars predicted after the Janus decision that there would be more militant organizing, including more strikes. That’s because unions may feel forced to prove their value to potential members, as the strength of bargaining agreements — which tend to include costly strike penalties — erodes along with union power.

In Los Angeles, educators got pay raises, smaller class sizes and more support personnel, among other things. Denver teachers secured better pay and changes to their controversial bonus system.

Compared with states, districts have been left in a tough spot when responding to teacher demands. During the strike in Los Angeles, for example, district leaders blamed the state for their funding woes. Funding to school districts comes from shifting, complicated combinations of local, state and federal sources, and in California, funding per student is well below the national average.

When the strike ended in Denver, Superintendent Susana Cordova said, “We’re in the shape we’re in because of the lack of will and the lack of collaboration at the state level to invest in our schools,” as Colorado Public Radio reported.

Charter schools are part of the story, too

Teachers in two Chicago charter school networks have gone on strike, asking for better pay and smaller classes.

Meanwhile, public school teachers have long argued that charters siphon public funds and fail to serve all students. In Oakland and Los Angeles, teachers are asking for more restrictions on these schools.

West Virginia educators walked off the job again for two days this week to protest a bill making its way through the statehouse that could have introduced charter schools to the state. Lawmakers effectively killed the bill on Tuesday, and union leaders called the strike off on Wednesday evening after the time for lawmakers to reconsider the measure had passed.

How are teachers organizing?

A lot of the walkouts last year happened in right-to-work states, where unions are smaller and weaker. Grassroots groups teamed up with unions to plan strikes and walkouts.

Districtwide strikes this year have been led by local unions, like United Teachers Los Angeles, the Denver Classroom Teachers Association and the Oakland Education Association.

Unions and grassroots groups have both relied on social media to coordinate. The slogan #RedforEd became widespread last year and has picked up again in Denver, Los Angeles and Oakland.

Putting the strikes in political context

Is this movement a partisan one? Largely, if not entirely.

Picketing teachers have often, though not always, faced off against Republican lawmakers. In Colorado and Arizona, for example, Republican lawmakers introduced bills that were seen as direct retaliation against strikers: to jail teachers for walking off the job or punish them for discussing politics in the classroom.

When teachers in Kentucky walked out of their classrooms last spring, Gov. Matt Bevin, a Republican, told reporters, “I guarantee you somewhere in Kentucky today, a child was sexually assaulted that was left at home because there was nobody there to watch them.” He later apologized.

Republican Mary Fallin, then governor of Oklahoma, told CBS News last year that teachers on strike were “kind of like having a teenage kid that wants a better car.”

Meanwhile, conservatives heralded the Janus decision as a victory for the “individual rights of teachers” as well as the “lessened ability for unions to block education reform generally,” as Lindsey Burke of the conservative Heritage Foundation told NPR last spring.

Some scholars say striking teachers fit the profile of a broader movement within the Democratic Party.

Dozens of teachers ran for state office during midterm elections, mostly on Democratic tickets, according to an analysis by Education Week. Jahana Hayes, the 2016 National Teacher of the Year, became the first black Democrat elected to Congress from Connecticut, on a child-centered, progressive platform.

Democratic presidential candidates, notably, are throwing their support behind striking teachers. Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., tweeted in January that she was standing in solidarity with the striking Los Angeles teachers.”

In solidarity!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Justin Gerald, a student in Hunter College’s EdD Program, alerted me to this article that appeared in The Atlantic that women now make up a larger share of educators than they have in decades. According to the study, led by the University of Pennsylvania professor Richard Ingersoll, the nation has witnessed a “slow but steady” increase in the share of K–12 educators who are women. During the 1980–81 school year, roughly two in three—67 percent—public-school teachers were women; by the 2015–16 school year, the share of women teachers had grown to more than three in four, at 76 percent. (From 1987 to 2015, the size of the teaching force increased by more than 60 percent, from about 2.5 million to about 4.5 million, according to the recent report, which helps explain why the field tipped further female despite the rising number of men in the profession.)  Ingersoll’s data is important although not necessarily startling at least not for those of us in teacher education programs.  Regardless it would be beneficial if more men were in the profession especially in the primary and middle schools.  Below is the full article

Tony

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The Atlantic

The U.S. Teaching Population Is Getting Bigger, and More Female

Alia Wong

Feb 20, 2019

A teacher and her students (ages 8 and 9) observe a globe in 1900.Bettmann / Getty

Teaching in the United States was once considered a career for men. Then the profession’s gender composition shifted dramatically around the mid-19th century, when the country’s public-school system was born. As schoolhouse doors opened to children of all social classes and genders, so too did the education profession. By the late 1880s, women made up a majority—63 percent—of all the country’s teachers (though men continued to make up most of the high-school teaching force until the late 1970s). Within a few decades, the choice to teach young children was solidified as an inherently “feminine” pursuit; in fact, girls who couldn’t or didn’t want to be homemakers had few other job options.

In the mid-20th century, however, cultural and political shifts prompted a surge in the number of women seeking employment in traditionally “masculine” sectors. These changes also prompted the reverse—albeit to a lesser extent: The number of men seeking classroom careers rose and has grown by 31 percent since the early 1980s.

Yet despite this, the gender distribution in the profession has strangely grown more imbalanced, according to recently released data, largely because women are still pursuing teaching at far greater rates than men. According to the study, led by the University of Pennsylvania professor Richard Ingersoll, the nation has witnessed a “slow but steady” increase in the share of K–12 educators who are women. During the 1980–81 school year, roughly two in three—67 percent—public-school teachers were women; by the 2015–16 school year, the share of women teachers had grown to more than three in four, at 76 percent. (From 1987 to 2015, the size of the teaching force increased by more than 60 percent, from about 2.5 million to about 4.5 million, according to the recent report, which helps explain why the field tipped further female despite the rising number of men in the profession.)

The trend is “odd,” Ingersoll and his co-authors—all education scholars, and most of them former classroom teachers—write in the report. Generally speaking, starting in the 1970s the country’s occupations witnessed a significant decline in gender segregation, as the number of women in the workforce soared. An index that measures how many women or men would need to change jobs to achieve equal gender distribution across occupations fell 26 percent from 1972 to 2002, when it was at its lowest point, according to a 2010 report by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research.

Ingersoll and his research team highlight the rising proportion of women who are, for example, physicians (from 10 percent in 1972 to 40 percent in 2018, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data and federal surveys), lawyers (from 4 percent to 37 percent over the same time period), and pharmacists (13 percent to 63 percent). Other research shows that fewer female college students are seeking teaching degrees: In the late 1970s, roughly a third of the women enrolled in U.S. colleges were majoring in education; today the share has dropped to 11 percent.

What explains these contradictory trends? Much of it comes down to misunderstandings of what teaching entails and how those assumptions intersect with gender norms. Unlike in many other countries, in the United States, teaching has long been seen as a relatively low-status profession. In 2018, a survey of people in roughly three dozen countries asked respondents to rank 14 different professions—including teaching, medicine, law, social work, and website engineering—by each career’s perceived social status. On the one hand, survey participants in the United States gave teachers a middling ranking, and tended to liken them to librarians; respondents in countries such as China and Malaysia, on the other hand, put teachers in first place, analogizing them to doctors.

This cultural disregard for teaching has a gendered consequence: The status of a given career tends to correlate with the share of men in that profession—higher status equals more men, generally speaking. And that has its own consequence: Research has found that employers place less value on work done by women than on that done by men. These trends reinforce each other in perpetuity.

Within a given field, the more prestigious positions attract more men. Notably, close to half of all principals today, including two-thirds of those serving high schools, are men, as are more than three-quarters of school-district superintendents. Additionally, nine in 10 elementary-school educators are women, according to Ingersoll’s study, compared with six in 10 of their high-school counterparts. Prekindergarten in particular is heavily dominated by women, perhaps because younger kids might be dismissed as requiring little more than “Wheels on the Bus” sing-alongs.

Julio González, a 23-year-old pre-K educator at a public bilingual school on Chicago’s Lower West Side, admitted that he bought into such stereotypes when Teach for America first offered him the job a little more than a year ago, straight out of the University of Texas at Austin. “I made sure to ask people, like, ‘Is this an actual job, or am I just a glorified babysitter?’ ” he recalls. A first-generation Mexican American who dreamed of becoming a lawyer so he could advocate for low-income communities like his own, González eventually realized that teaching might be a more effective way to serve those communities. After all, an individual’s racial and gender biases tend to develop at a very young age.

Prestige is not a merely notional idea, as it tends to correlate tightly with compensation. The fact that prekindergarten classrooms have difficulty “attracting men as early-childhood teachers is hardly surprising,” Marcy Whitebook, who co-directs UC Berkeley’s Center for the Study of Child Care Employment, said in an email, given that work as a pre-K teacher “is seen as a pathway to poverty.”

Teachers overall tend to have pretty meager salaries. The ACT, which every year surveys a pool of test-takers on their career aspirations, found that among respondents who said they were “potentially” interested in a job as a K–12 teacher, as opposed to definitely interested or definitely not interested, low pay was the sticking point that made them unsure. Average teachers’ salaries have remained essentially flat since the 1990s after controlling for inflation, according to a report published last year by the nonprofit Education Resource Strategies (ERS), and grew just 7 percent in the two decades before that. Using a metric developed by MIT researchers, the ERS report found that in most states, K–12 educators’ salaries fall below the living wage. And usually, the younger the students, the lower their teacher’s pay, as a 2018 report on early-childhood educators shows.

Women might be more willing to accept teaching’s low wages because the profession is, in theory, more amenable than other careers to the needs of women. Mothers, for instance, are more likely now than ever before to desire employment, yet still tend to bear most of the child-rearing responsibilities. The school day tends to end two or so hours before that of typical American workers. A 9-to-5 workday, as Kara Voght has reported for The Atlantic, creates a challenge for parents who have to coordinate and pay for child care (or leave their kids unsupervised) during that time gap. The notion that teachers enjoy shortened work days and summers exempt from work-related duties is little more than a myth, but teachers who are parents are often at least on a schedule a little more conducive to their children’s needs.

One effect of the gender imbalance could be that younger students have fewer opportunities to interact with positive male role models. “As a black male teacher, sometimes I feel like a unicorn,” said Charles Jean-Pierre, a D.C. Public Schools art and French teacher. He said the black male teachers he had as a child of immigrants in Chicago motivated him to embrace his passion for art and become a teacher himself. “I think it’s important for students to experience joy, nurturing, and compassion from men … Male teachers embody hope and love for many students who do not see that on a daily basis [from men] in their homes.”

But men who do this work might confront wariness about their abilities, or suspicions about their intentions for working with young children. Ingersoll cited research published in one 1993 book about men in traditionally “feminine” occupations finding that among elementary-school teachers, men who were perceived as too “male” were dismissed as incapable of working with young children, while men who weren’t “male enough” were suspected of being child molesters. “You have to sort of work it out so you’re the right amount of maleness,” Ingersoll told me. “It’s tiresome, and so a lot of the male elementary teachers say after a while, ‘This is just too draining.’ ” Both González and Jean-Pierre said that they’re always aware of the latter concern, ensuring that another adult is always in the classroom and forging strong relationships with parents.

But the fact that male teachers have to consider this at all traces back to the entrenched stereotypes that underpin teaching’s gender imbalance. Given that low pay—and accompanying low social standing—is both a result of and driving force behind men’s underrepresentation in the profession, it stands to reason that salary hikes could help stem the imbalance. A pay bump could in theory spur a virtuous cycle in which greater representation of men in the profession could slowly shift perception, which Ingersoll in 2016 suggested to The New York Times could then beget even greater representation.

That said, some research suggests that pay hikes will only go so far in boosting the share of male teachers—attitudes about caregiving will need to change, too. “Two years ago, if someone had told me that the most important role you can play as a teacher is to be a caregiver, I probably would’ve said, ‘Well, that’s not what I’m signing up for,’ ” González acknowledged.

Today he—echoing Jean-Pierre—embraces the fact that caregiving is, indeed, integral to his responsibility as a teacher, and that it’s just as valuable as all the other parts of his job.

Dear Commons Community,

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is following up on a budget proposal he suggested earlier this year  to provide free on-campus child care for single parents attending community college.

Cuomo said on Thursday that he’ll ask the NYS Assembly and Senate to approve a pilot program for up to 400 students at community college campuses around the state.

Single parents participating in the program would also have access to tutoring and help applying to four-year schools.

Cuomo says child care can be a significant challenge for single parents who want to earn a college degree.

The governor inserted the measure into his state budget proposal, which lawmakers hope to pass by April 1. It’s also a part of Cuomo’s 2019 women’s justice agenda, a list of legislation that Cuomo says will address the gender wage gap and other gender inequities.

Excellent move!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Below is a list of all gifts of $100 million or more made to colleges and universities in 2018. The gifts and biographical information were compiled by The Chronicle of Higher Education from news articles, news releases, and The Chronicle of Philanthropy’s database of charitable gifts. The database compiles gifts of $1 million or more from 2005 to the present. The Chronicle of Higher Education maintains a separate list of major gifts of $50 million or more to colleges and universities, dating back to 1967. The value of gifts is based on information from institutions or donors at the time the gifts were promised or received.

Thank you to these donors for their generosity!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Officials in North Carolina ordered a new election after a GOP political operative engaged in an illegal voter-turnout fraud.  Mark Harris, the Republican candidate who led in the voting and whose campaign paid the operative, agreed to the new election upon a ruling of the North Carolina Board of Elections. Below is a recap of this story via the New York Times.

Tony

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New York Times

New Election Ordered in North Carolina Race at Center of Fraud Inquiry

By Alan Blinder

Feb. 21, 2019

RALEIGH, N.C. — North Carolina officials on Thursday ordered a new contest in the Ninth Congressional District after the Republican candidate, confronted by evidence that his campaign had financed an illegal voter-turnout effort, called for a new election.

The unanimous ruling by the five-member Board of Elections was a startling — and, for Republicans, embarrassing — conclusion to a case that has convulsed North Carolina since November.

And it followed testimony that outlined how a political operative had orchestrated an absentee ballot scheme to try to sway the race in favor of Mark Harris, the Republican candidate. It is now the single undecided House contest in last year’s midterms.

Robert Cordle, the state board’s chairman, cited “the corruption, the absolute mess with the absentee ballots” when he called for a new election. “It was certainly a tainted election,” he said.

Mr. Harris had a 905-vote lead over his Democratic opponent, Dan McCready, but his success in Bladen County — where he won 61 percent of absentee ballots even though Republicans there accounted for just 19 percent of them — alarmed regulators.

When he finally took the stand Thursday morning, Mr. Harris denied knowing of any wrongdoing in the voter-turnout effort led by L. McCrae Dowless Jr., a veteran political operative known as a local “guru of elections.”

But in a series of questions, Mr. Harris stumbled and appeared to mislead the board. When he returned to the crowded courtroom after a lunch recess, he asked whether he could read a statement. He apologized to the board and explained that recent medical issues, including two strokes, had impaired his abilities and recall.

And then he asked for a new election.

“It’s become clear to me that the public’s confidence in the Ninth District’s general election has been undermined to an extent that a new election is warranted,” Mr. Harris said to audible gasps.

Mr. Harris’s surprise announcement represented an abrupt collapse of the Republican effort to stave off a new vote in the Ninth, which includes part of Charlotte and runs through much of southeastern North Carolina.

His political surrender came after a damaging 24 hours for him and his supporters. He acknowledged that some of his testimony on Thursday morning had been “incorrect.” Hours earlier, state officials had accused the Harris campaign of withholding incriminating records that were subpoenaed months ago.

The board’s decision will leave the Ninth District without representation in Congress for at least several months. It was not clear whether Mr. Harris would run in the new election, which has not been scheduled.

Mr. McCready said, “Today was a great step forward for democracy in North Carolina.”

“From the moment the first vote was stolen in North Carolina, from the moment the first voice was silenced by election fraud, the people have deserved justice,” he said.

Robin Hayes, the chairman of the North Carolina Republican Party, said the party supported Mr. Harris’s decision “on behalf of the voters.”

The Ninth District controversy ranks among the highest-profile examples of modern election fraud, and also underscores how absentee ballots remain susceptible to abuse.

Witnesses this week have described an enterprise that was rife with misconduct, including the collection and completion of absentee ballots. Witnesses said that both actions, which are illegal in North Carolina, had occurred repeatedly.

If Mr. Harris does run, he will almost certainly be seen from the start as a hobbled candidate. Even before allegations of fraud swamped his bid, Mr. Harris was far from a universally beloved figure in his party. A campaign for Senate in 2014 faltered. So, too, did a run for the Ninth District’s House seat in 2016.

By Mr. Harris’s own account on the stand Thursday, it was his narrow defeat in the 2016 race that set a course toward the board’s decision. By March 2017, according to a text message turned over to investigators only on Wednesday, Mr. Harris was communicating with a political ally in Bladen County, a rural part of the district, about “the guy whose absentee ballot project for Johnson could have put me in the US House this term, had I known, and he had been helping us.”

“Johnson” was Todd Johnson, one of Mr. Harris’s rivals in the 2016 race, and “the guy” was Mr. Dowless, a Bladen County operative with a felony record and a reputation for shadowy work for Democratic and Republican politicians. Mr. Dowless and Mr. Harris met in a furniture showroom about a month later.

“How did you beat us so bad?” Mr. Harris said he had asked Mr. Dowless about the 2016 race. Mr. Dowless then explained a two-phase effort that concentrated on absentee ballots.

In the first phase, Mr. Harris testified, Mr. Dowless and his associates would help voters submit requests for absentee ballots — an ordinary and legal political activity in North Carolina. In the second, workers would ensure that voters had received the ballots and would inquire whether they needed assistance.

But under no circumstances, Mr. Harris was assured, were the workers to collect the ballots.

Two weeks after the meeting, Mr. Harris pulled out his personal checkbook and paid a $450 retainer. The next month, before Mr. Harris entered the congressional race, he paid Mr. Dowless another $2,890.

Mr. Dowless and his associates, who were often his acquaintances or relatives with little interest in politics but hoping for fast cash, went to work. Mr. Dowless, who refused to testify before the board, has not been charged with any crimes in connection with the 2018 election, nor have any of his workers. Prosecutors are examining the operation, though, and are considering whether to bring any criminal charges.

Within weeks of the election, state officials opened an investigation and declined to certify Mr. Harris as the winner, setting up this week’s extraordinary proceedings.

For Mr. Harris’s campaign, the hearing was disastrous from its opening moments, when Kim Strach, the executive director of the state board, said investigators had found “a coordinated, unlawful and substantially resourced absentee ballot scheme” that appeared to have cost tens of thousands of dollars.

Two witnesses described an array of misdeeds that they committed at Mr. Dowless’s behest — accounts that observers believed that, on their own, might have been enough to warrant a new election. But the state’s investigators had a surprise witness: one of Mr. Harris’s sons, John Harris, a 29-year-old Justice Department lawyer who, as a high school student, had been elected president of the honor council.

In testimony before a riveted courtroom on Wednesday, the younger Mr. Harris said he had been wary of Mr. Dowless after analyzing returns in the 2016 election. In an email the day after Mr. Harris and Mr. Dowless met, John Harris explained the stakes.

“The key thing that I am fairly certain they do that is illegal is that they collected the completed absentee ballots and mail them all at once,” John Harris wrote in an email that he shared with investigators — a document his father’s campaign had not done weeks ago, when it said it had complied with a subpoena’s demands.

Even though John Harris explicitly noted that he did not believe his father had known of any specific misconduct last year, the email and the testimony crippled the Harris campaign’s assertion that there had been no grounds to be suspicious of Mr. Dowless or his methods.

“I love my dad, and I love my mom,” John Harris said in his closing remarks, as his father wept. “I certainly have no vendetta against them, no family scores to settle. I think they made mistakes in this process, and they certainly did things differently than I would have done them.”

Out of public view, Mark Harris’s perils were mounting. Just before his son climbed the witness stand, the campaign’s counsel acknowledged that they had more undisclosed documents to share with investigators. That revelation, which a lawyer for Mr. Harris attributed to differing interpretations over a subpoena’s scope, stunned state officials.

Board members, who had seemed mostly impassive through days of testimony, were outraged.

Then, with Mr. Harris testifying just before lunch on Thursday, Josh Lawson, a lawyer for the state board, posed a series of questions that suddenly sped up what had been a slow-motion political unraveling: Before Wednesday afternoon, had Mr. Harris told anyone that the email his son disclosed was not part of the evidence in the case?

Mr. Harris did not recall any such conversations. His lawyer soon asked for a recess.

When the hearing resumed, Mr. Harris asked to read a statement. On Tuesday night, he acknowledged, he had spoken to his other son “about the fact that I did not think John’s emails would be part of this hearing.”

Genevera Allen

Dear Commons Community,

Dr.  Genevera Allen, associate professor at Rice University, at the 2019 Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS),  warned researchers in the field of machine learning that they have spent so much time developing predictive models that they have not devoted enough attention to checking the accuracy of their models, and that the field must develop systems which can assess the accuracy of their own findings. 

“The question is, ‘Can we really trust the discoveries that are currently being made using machine-learning techniques applied to large data sets?’” Allen said in a statement. “The answer in many situations is probably, ‘Not without checking,’ but work is underway on next-generation machine-learning systems that will assess the uncertainty and reproducibility of their predictions.”  As reported by the BBC and other media:

“Machine-learning techniques used by thousands of scientists to analyse data are producing results that are misleading and often completely wrong.

Dr. Genevera Allen from Rice University in Houston said that the increased use of such systems was contributing to a “crisis in science”.

She warned scientists that if they didn’t improve their techniques they would be wasting both time and money. Her research was presented at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington.

A growing amount of scientific research involves using machine learning software to analyse data that has already been collected. This happens across many subject areas ranging from biomedical research to astronomy. The data sets are very large and expensive.

‘Reproducibility crisis’

But, according to Dr. Allen, the answers they come up with are likely to be inaccurate or wrong because the software is identifying patterns that exist only in that data set and not the real world.

“Often these studies are not found out to be inaccurate until there’s another real big dataset that someone applies these techniques to and says ‘oh my goodness, the results of these two studies don’t overlap‘,” she said.

“There is general recognition of a reproducibility crisis in science right now. I would venture to argue that a huge part of that does come from the use of machine learning techniques in science.”

The “reproducibility crisis” in science refers to the alarming number of research results that are not repeated when another group of scientists tries the same experiment. It means that the initial results were wrong. One analysis suggested that up to 85% of all biomedical research carried out in the world is wasted effort.

It is a crisis that has been growing for two decades and has come about because experiments are not designed well enough to ensure that the scientists don’t fool themselves and see what they want to see in the results.

Flawed patterns

Machine learning systems and the use of big data sets has accelerated the crisis, according to Dr. Allen. That is because machine learning algorithms have been developed specifically to find interesting things in datasets and so when they search through huge amounts of data they will inevitably find a pattern.

“The challenge is can we really trust those findings?” she told BBC News.

“Are those really true discoveries that really represent science? Are they reproducible? If we had an additional dataset would we see the same scientific discovery or principle on the same dataset? And unfortunately the answer is often probably not.”

Dr. Allen is working with a group of biomedical researchers at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston to improve the reliability of their results. She is developing the next generation of machine learning and statistical techniques that can not only sift through large amounts of data to make discoveries, but also report how uncertain their results are and their likely reproducibility.

“Collecting these huge data sets is incredibly expensive. And I tell the scientists that I work with that it might take you longer to get published, but in the end your results are going to stand the test of time.

“It will save scientists money and it’s also important to advance science by not going down all of these wrong possible directions.”

Dr. Allen offers important commentary on the state of machine learning and big data statistical analysis.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

West Virginia teachers agreed to return to their schools yesterday after two days on strike. Their announcement came when a bill pushing charter schools and education savings accounts died in the state legislature.  As reported by the Associated Press and The Review:

“The teachers successfully beat back a legislative effort that they viewed as a push to privatize public education. The strike came almost exactly a year after a nine-day walkout that helped create a wave of teacher protests around the country.

Leaders of three unions representing teachers and school service personnel said at a news conference that classrooms would reopen statewide today.

The bill “is now dead. It’s gone,” said Fred Albert, president of the American Federation of Teachers’ West Virginia chapter. “So our voices were heard.”

Schools in 54 of the state’s 55 counties were closed for a second day Wednesday. The lone holdout again was Putnam County.

Unions for teachers and school service workers went on strike Tuesday over the legislation that they said lacked their input and was retaliation for a nine-day walkout last year. That strike launched the national “Red4Ed” movement, which included strikes in Kentucky, Oklahoma, Arizona, Washington state, and more recently, Los Angeles and Denver.

The unions and teachers opposed provisions in the legislation that, among other things, would have created the state’s first charter schools and allow education savings accounts for parents to pay for private school. Proponents said the moves would have given parents more school choices.

“This was once again a united effort,” said Dale Lee, president of the West Virginia Education Association. “The winners in this, once again, are the children of West Virginia (who) are assured of a great public education for all of them, not just a select few.”

The union leaders said they reserve the right to call teachers back out on strike before the end of the legislative session in early March to take action as they see fit. Portions of the complex bill could still be offered through amendments to other legislation in the final two weeks of the session.

The unions have trust issues with lawmakers, especially becoming wary of leaders in the Senate after actions during the 2018 strike and again this month when the chamber rushed to act on the bill.

“I feel cautiously optimistic,” said Sarah Duncan, a visual arts teacher at Walton Elementary-Middle School in Roane County. “I hope that (lawmakers) continue to do the right thing. I hope that they don’t try and bring back those parts of the bill that got the bill killed in the first place, like education savings accounts and charter schools.”

Duncan said “a lot of people think that teachers get two days off, that it’s a lot of fun. But being on strike is a lot more stressful. It’s not fun.”

Like the House, the Senate, reversing course from its original bill, removed a clause that would invalidate the entire legislation if any part is struck down, and took out language requiring teachers sign off annually on union dues and requiring teacher pay to be withheld during a strike.

Earlier Wednesday a House committee endorsed a pay increase for teachers, school service workers and state police. The teacher pay raise was part of the original legislation that the House tabled. The House plans a public hearing on the raises Friday. It would give annual salary increases of $2,120 to teachers, $2,370 to state police and $115 per month for school service workers.

Last year state teachers received an average 5 percent raise to end the nine-day strike.”

Congratulations to the West Virginia teachers and their union leadership!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times (see article below) and the Associated Press are reporting this morning that the House of Representatives Education Committee is getting ready to call Betsy Devos to report and/or testify regarding several education policy and positions that the US DOE has taken.  At the top of the Committee’s agenda are examining the carrying out of the Every Student Succeeds Act and the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act; recommendations from the Federal Commission on School Safety led by Ms. DeVos in response to the mass school shooting last year in Parkland, Fla.; and the department’s role in the rebuilding of schools in Puerto Rico, in the Virgin Islands and in other areas affected by disasters. In the higher-education sector, the committee also plans to scrutinize the department’s administration of financial aid programs particularly with regard to for-profit colleges.

I hope Secretary DeVos’ appearances before the House Committee are more than just theater.

Tony

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New York Times

House Democrats Prepare to Scrutinize DeVos’s Education Department!

By Erica L. Green

Feb. 19, 2019

WASHINGTON — The last face-to-face meeting between Representative Robert C. Scott and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos ended in an awkward cliffhanger.

At a hearing last May of the House Education Committee, Mr. Scott, Democrat of Virginia, challenged the secretary’s assertion that she was holding states accountable for achievement gaps between white and minority students as required by a new federal education law, the Every Student Succeeds Act. Mr. Scott, unconvinced, asked more pointedly: How can you assure us that you are following the law if you do not even make states calculate the performance of the different student groups we want to measure?

Ms. DeVos dodged the question.

Mr. Scott is now the chairman of the committee, and he is not taking silence or evasion for an answer. With control of the House and Senate divided, and President Trump in charge of the executive branch, the prospects for the House Democrats’ legislative agenda for education may be limited, but their appetite for oversight of the Education Department appears limitless.

“One of the problems we had in the minority is we asked a lot of questions that have not been answered,” Mr. Scott said in an interview. “Now that we’re in the majority, we can ask the same questions with the expectation that we’ll get an answer.”

On Tuesday, Mr. Scott added to a pile of inquiries stacking up at the department, this time questioning a recent move to replace the Education Department’s acting inspector general, who is investigating Ms. DeVos’s decision to reinstate a troubled accreditor of for-profit colleges and universities. Among other answers he is still waiting for is Ms. DeVos’s justifications for rescinding policies meant to protect black students from being disproportionately suspended and placed in special education and student borrowers from predatory lenders and higher-education diploma mills.

Mr. Scott said he is not itching to haul Ms. DeVos and her staff to Capitol Hill hearings to get the answers. “Theater doesn’t advance anybody’s agenda,” Mr. Scott said. “I’m interested in what research and evidence they used to come to these conclusions.”

Under the leadership of Representative Virginia Foxx, Republican of North Carolina, the committee passed laws strengthening career and technical education as well as juvenile justice programs. She also proposed an aggressive higher-education bill that gutted regulatory requirements and championed work force training programs. She called on Ms. DeVos to testify only once.

Ms. Foxx said she hoped the committee would maintain its bipartisan spirit. “It’s my hope that we exercise our oversight responsibilities by asking the right questions for the right reasons to ensure faithful execution of the laws we’ve written,” she said.

Mr. Scott, the first African-American man elected to Congress from Virginia since the 1890s and the third to lead the Education Committee, has outlined a wide-ranging oversight agenda for the committee.

Among the issues it plans to examine: the carrying out of the Every Student Succeeds Act and the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act; recommendations from the Federal Commission on School Safety led by Ms. DeVos in response to the mass school shooting last year in Parkland, Fla.; and the department’s role in the rebuilding of schools in Puerto Rico, in the Virgin Islands and in other areas affected by disasters. In the higher-education sector, the committee also plans to scrutinize the department’s administration of financial aid programs.

Mr. Scott plans to champion bills that would pump $100 billion into public school infrastructure, limit the use of restraint and seclusion practices of special-education students and increase low-income and minority students’ access to a four-year college or university.

But when it comes to oversight, “just asking the questions usually gets people to act,” he said.

That approach has gotten results. A recent move by the White House to replace the Education Department’s acting inspector general, Sandra Bruce, was reversed shortly after Mr. Scott, joined by other Democratic leaders, sent a letter to Ms. DeVos questioning the decision.

The move, first reported by Politico, revealed the partnership developing between Mr. Scott and Representative Elijah E. Cummings of Maryland, chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform.

Mr. Cummings said in a statement that he plans to scrutinize “countless decisions that have negatively impacted students across the country, including dismantling protections against predatory for-profit lenders.”

In the letter on Tuesday, Mr. Scott and Mr. Cummings posed a second round of questions to the Education Department about perceived attempts to intervene in the inspector general’s investigation into the secretary’s reinstatement of the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools.

The accreditor’s recognition was revoked by the Obama administration in 2016 after the collapse of two for-profit chains, ITT Tech and Corinthian Colleges, and a history of failing to comply with federal rules. Ms. DeVos reinstated the agency last year after a judge found that the Obama administration’s decision was “arbitrary and capricious.”

According to the Democrats’ letter, Ms. DeVos’s deputy secretary, Mick Zais, wrote to Ms. Bruce in the weeks before her replacement and asked that any investigation of the accreditor include a review of the Obama administration’s actions.

“We are concerned that these actions by the Deputy Secretary represent a clear attempt to violate the statutory independence of the OIG,” the Democrats wrote, referring to the Office of Inspector General.

Liz Hill, a spokeswoman for the Education Department, said the department “would never seek to undermine the independence of the inspector general.”

“For anyone to state otherwise is doing so with no basis in fact and purely for political gain,” she said.

Ms. Hill said the Education Department “has been and will continue to be responsive to information requests from Congress,” and that Ms. DeVos has an open invitation to meet one on one with members of both parties.

“The secretary will continue to work with lawmakers who share the goal of rethinking education in order to improve opportunities for all students, expand K-12 education options and ensure students have a multitude of pathways to success post-high school,” she said.

Ms. DeVos has some ground to make up with Democrats. According to an analysis of Ms. DeVos’s calendar by Education Week, she had more than 130 meetings or phone calls with Republican lawmakers or their top aides in the first year and a half of her tenure compared with about a dozen with Democrats.

Representative Rosa DeLauro, Democrat of Connecticut, who will lead the appropriations subcommittee that funds education, said Ms. DeVos is one of the few cabinet secretaries she has not met with.

“They’re hell bent to do what they want to do, and think we don’t count for anything,” she said.

Ms. DeLauro, who has clashed publicly with Ms. DeVos, said she plans to “hold the secretary accountable for the hollowing out of the Education Department” through staffing and program cuts. She said she will fight recurring proposals to create a $1 billion program to finance vouchers for private and parochial school tuition, cutting after-school programs for low-income students and zeroing out funding for teacher training. Instead, Ms. DeLauro said she wants to champion new investments like community schools and early childhood education.

“I believe that, overall, the mission of the Department of Education these days is to privatize public education, and I want to block them,” she said. “On the other hand, I view this as my opportunity to look at how we can provide new opportunities for new people.”

Representative Mark Takano of California, the chairman of the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, said he will scrutinize how Ms. DeVos’s proposals to deregulate for-profit colleges could allow for abuses of the G.I. Bill, which provides veterans with tuition assistance for higher education. He recently told a group of college accreditors, “I promise to continue to do my part to crack down on predatory institutions.”

When the Democrats took the House, Michael J. Petrilli, the president of the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute, urged Ms. DeVos to step down rather than subject herself to “show trials.”

Now that Ms. DeVos has shown no signs of resigning, Mr. Petrilli anticipates that Democrats will discover they have limited power and the department will carry on, immune to bad press.

“This is a department that doesn’t have much to lose,” he said.

Dear Commons Community,

As the Democratic field of candidates for president grows, they are beginning to be scrutinized by the party faithful such as the unions for their views on education.  In the past, Cory Booker has been an associate of Betsy DeVos and has taken controversial stands in supporting charter schools.  Below is an article that appeared in Mother Jones and written by reporter Kara Voght.  She makes a number of excellent points such as:

“Charter schools have become much more politicized than they were 5 or 10 years ago. … Having Trump and DeVos attached to the ideas of charters and choice have changed the minds of a lot of Democrats.”

Democrats like Booker and Barack Obama and Arne Duncan were able to walk a fine line in their support of charter schools in the past.  With such hatred of anything Trump including DeVos permeating the Democratic Party, it will not be possible for Booker or any other candidate to do the same in 2020.

It is a good piece of reporting and analysis by Ms. Voght.

Tony

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Mother Jones

Cory Booker Has a Betsy DeVos Problem!

“I became a pariah in Democratic circles for taking on the party orthodoxy on education.”

Kara Voght

February 7, 2019 6:00 AM

In the spring of 2012, Cory Booker delivered the keynote address at the third annual School Choice Policy Summit at a Westin hotel in Jersey City, New Jersey. For a half hour, the then-Newark mayor told hundreds of attendees dining in the hotel ballroom that the traditional public school system “still chokes out the potential of millions of children…Your destiny is determined by the zip code you’re born into, [and] some children by law are locked into schools that fail their genius.” The most promising solution, he said, was one aligned with the sweeping educational reform he was currently undertaking in Newark that was replacing failing neighborhood schools with publicly funded, privately managed charters that students could opt into based on their desires and needs.

Booker’s address that evening was notable for a number of reasons. He was one of the only Democrats speaking in a lineup that included Louisiana GOP Gov. Bobby Jindal and Fox News commentator Juan Williams. The school choice plan he championed had become a plank of the Republican platform, while many of his fellow Democrats, who generally preferred direct investment in public education and enjoyed political backing from teachers’ unions, opposed it.

And then there was the group that organized the event. His appearance that evening was at the invitation of the American Federation for Children, a group chaired by Betsy DeVos. Booker told attendees he’d been involved with AFC “in its most nascent stages,” and his relationship with the DeVos family dated back to his days on Newark’s city council. DeVos, a Republican megadonor, had become known as one of the fiercest proponents of school choice—especially of for-profit charter schools and voucher programs that would allow students to use public funds to attend private schools. She also addressed the group that evening, and in a press release announcing the event’s speakers, DeVos, who had served with Booker on the board of AFC’s predecessor organization, said she was “proud and honored” to include Booker in the “committed group of education leaders who have courageously stood up to put the interests of children first by supporting expanded educational options for families.”

Nearly seven years later, Cory Booker has announced he would like to be the Democratic candidate for president in 2020, and Betsy DeVos is in her second year as President Donald Trump’s controversial secretary of education, still championing school choice as one of the priorities of her administration. Booker’s vision once enjoyed traction in Democratic circles, particularly under President Barack Obama, whose Education Department implemented policies to expand charter growth. But today, Democrats are backing off their support, especially given the wave of teachers’ protests that has renewed attention on long-term divestment in public education. For example, Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vt.), who’s likely to seek the 2020 Democratic nomination, tweeted his support of the Los Angeles teachers’ strike that had been organized, at least in part, in opposition to the city’s reliance on charters, and included a link to a Jacobin essay about the dangers of school privatization.

“Charter schools have become much more politicized than they were 5 or 10 years ago,” says Jon Valant, an education fellow at the Brookings Institution who has studied the politics of school choice. “Trump didn’t say much about education policy, with the exception of the fact that he was generally supportive of school choice. And then he nominated a secretary of education whose only real experience with education has been with school choice. Having Trump and DeVos attached to the ideas of charters and choice have changed the minds of a lot of Democrats.”

“I don’t necessarily want to depend on the government to educate my children—they haven’t done a good job in doing that,” Booker said.

But as the party moves on, Booker has not. He remains a staunch defender of school choice, a policy he believes levels the playing field for low-income students whose local schools fail to realize their academic potential. His stance has put him on the opposite side both of teachers’ unions and other dependable Democratic allies, like civil rights groups, which worry that charters may actually exacerbate the inequality they were established to address. And while his ties to some of the right’s most ardent school choice advocates have long been known—attracting particular scrutiny during DeVos’ fraught 2017 confirmation—the shifting politics makes the 2020 contender an outlier among his fellow contenders, whose records align more closely with the current moment in this perennial education debate.

School choice hasn’t always been controversial. In 1988, when Booker was an undergraduate at Stanford University, the American Federation of Teachers president Albert Shanker proposed charter schools as laboratories where teachers could test out new teaching methods before sharing them in traditional school settings. Civil rights reformers in Milwaukee, meanwhile, worked with Democratic allies to establish the nation’s first school voucher program in 1990 so that low-income minority students, otherwise stuck in the failing public school assigned to their neighborhood, could use public funds to attend private schools.

Booker’s interest fits squarely in that latter push. After graduating from Yale Law School in 1997, Booker moved into low-income housing in Newark’s rough-and-tumble Central Ward and worked as an attorney for the Urban Justice League before winning a seat on the City Council in 1998. It was there that Booker first proposed vouchers as a means of revamping the city’s failing public schools, citing the Milwaukee example as rationale for his support. “It’s one of the last remaining major barriers to equality of opportunity in America, the fact that we have inequality of education,” Booker told the New York Times in 2000. “I don’t necessarily want to depend on the government to educate my children—they haven’t done a good job in doing that. Only if we return power to the parents can we find a way to fix the system.”

But the decade between Shanker’s proposal and Booker’s advocacy politicized school choice and turned an educational experiment into Republican dogma. Conservatives appreciated the notion of imposing market discipline and choice on public education, which had the added benefit of taking away another government program and replacing it with the private sector. Their enthusiasm for private school vouchers and for-profit, privately managed charters took place at the same time that teachers’ unions began to see the experiment as a drain on public resources and their nonunionized workplaces as bad for their profession and their students.

In 1999, when he was still a city councilman, Booker worked with a conservative financier and a New Jersey Republican mayor to co-found Excellent Education for Everyone, a group dedicated to establishing a school voucher program in the Garden State. The following year, Dick DeVos—the Republican megadonor, school choice evangelist, and husband to the nation’s 11th education secretary—invited the 31-year-old Newark councilman up to his home base of Grand Rapids, Michigan, to speak in defense of a ballot measure that would lift the state’s ban on school voucher programs. “We wanted someone who wasn’t from the suburbs,” DeVos explained of Booker’s interstate invitation—not knowing, perhaps, that his guest grew up in the affluent suburbs of Newark. Bob Braun, a columnist writing for Newark’s Star-Ledger, observed that Booker fit in this group “about as comfortably as Madonna in a home for retired nuns.” Reflecting on the experience to The New Yorker, Booker said, “I became a pariah in Democratic circles for taking on the party orthodoxy on education.”

Booker’s association with the DeVos couple continued as he progressed from City Council to Newark’s mayoral seat in 2006 to the US Senate in 2013. In the mid-2000s, Booker and DeVos served together on the board of directors of Alliance for School Choice (AFC), the precursor to the American Federation for Children, which DeVos eventually chaired. Booker twice spoke at the AFC’s annual School Choice Policy Summit: once in 2012 as a mayor and again in 2016 as a senator. DeVos congratulated Booker and other school-choice-minded politicians in an AFC press release that followed Booker’s 2014 Senate win. Booker, in turn, was complimentary of the initiatives the American Federation for Children pursued under DeVos’ leadership.

But a belief in school choice did not necessarily mean a commitment to school vouchers, and here is where Booker and DeVos parted company. When Booker ran for mayor in 2006, he distanced himself from them: “My plan right now doesn’t include having anything to do with vouchers,” he said. Instead, he favored a system of publicly funded charters that replaced failing traditional neighborhood schools—one accountable to student outcomes, not teachers’ unions’ demands. During his second term as mayor, with $100 million from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and millions more from donors on both sides of the political aisle, Booker replaced many of the city’s neighborhood schools with charters, recruited teachers and principals through national school reform organizations like Teach for America, and weakened existing tenure protections for teachers by tying job performance to student outcomes. The early reviews were poor: Student performance worsened in the short term, parents panicked over student reshuffling, and, as school choice detractors had warned, the district schools that remained served a disproportionate number of students who needed the most help.

“I became a pariah in Democratic circles for taking on the party orthodoxy on education.”

By this time, Booker’s vision was in keeping with mainstream Democratic policy. Arne Duncan, Obama’s Education Department secretary, promoted a similar model for schools nationwide. Several Democrats, including Booker, supported this—even as teachers’ unions, longtime Democratic allies, did not. DeVos, meanwhile, had successfully lobbied state legislatures across the country to adopt school choice models that relied heavily on vouchers and minimally on regulation and accountability. In her home state of Michigan, roughly 4 out of 5 charter schools were run by for-profit companies. “There’s a distinction between Obama-style charter schools, which are public and have accountability measures, and Trump-DeVos style, which are for-profits and don’t,” explains Shavar Jeffries, the president of Democrats for Education Reform, a group that, like Obama and Booker, advocate public charters as a means for education improvement.

But those distinctions grew fuzzy during the 2016 presidential election as Democrats took a hard line on the school choice debate. Hillary Clinton surprised pro-school-choice allies by voicing opposition to for-profit charters early in her campaign. Meanwhile, civil rights groups, which once backed charters as a means of leveling the playing field, pulled back: The NAACP and Black Lives Matter organizers both called for a moratorium on more charter schools, citing concerns about investment in public education and practices that promote racial inequality. Teachers’ unions continued to beat the drum that the school choice experiment had led to a divestment in traditional schools that left the nation’s neediest children high and dry.

Trump’s victory and his nomination of DeVos only heightened concerns—and renewed media scrutiny of Booker’s ties to DeVos. The New Jersey senator was initially mum when Trump picked her, but ended up joining his Democratic colleagues in rejecting her nomination. He cited concerns about her answers to questions about the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights on “issues of equity that were unacceptable to me,” Booker said. Even so, he still affirmed his support for school choice in the process. “I didn’t want to support her to be the secretary of education, but when it comes to my record for supporting what I believe, that any child born in any zip code in America should have a high quality school…I haven’t changed one iota,” Booker said in an interview with CNN after the confirmation hearings.

Then, in 2018, teachers across the country walked out of their classrooms to demand greater investment in public education, pointing to low wages, small school budgets, and large class sizes as symptoms of systemic divestment. Protests that began in West Virginia inspired similar movements in Arizona, California, Colorado, and Oklahoma, and the efforts have been viewed, by and large, as successful. There isn’t a straight line connecting the walkouts to DeVos and charter schools, Brookings’ Valant explains—charter school policy varies widely across states and cities. “But where I think this is all connected is the teachers’ unions feel more emboldened to oppose charters than they have in the past because the public sees charters as tied to DeVos,” he says. “It makes it easier for unions to mobilize public opposition to charter schools.”

Democratic voters may join them. A 2017 Gallup poll found that 48 percent of Democratic voters supported charter schools, down from 61 percent five years earlier. A ballot measure to lift the cap on charter schools in Massachusetts was handily defeated that year—a measure other 2020 hopefuls, Sens. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) and Sanders, both opposed. The outcomes of the 2018 midterms offer a vision of how the new political environment has played out. Teachers’ unions, buoyed by the voting public, secured victories in states once thought to be inhospitable to their cause. Democrat Tony Evers, Wisconsin’s former state superintendent of education, ousted Republican union-buster Scott Walker in a race dominated by concerns over the underfunding and understaffing of the state’s public school system. Kendra Horn shocked politicos when she flipped an unlikely House seat in Oklahoma, aided by a last-minute $400,000 advertisement blitz from former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg that tied GOP incumbent Rep. Steve Russell to public school decline.

The members of the nascent 2020 field have records that indicate they’ve read the room. “Sen. Warren has worked relentlessly on the issue of student debt and higher education and how an economy has to work for all,” Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, explains. “Sen. Harris has worked on education. Sen. Brown is working hand in hand with us on the dignity of work. We’ve worked with Sen. Gillibrand on issues of campus sexual assault. Even right now, there’s a lot of people in this race who actually have a very pro-public-education lens with which they look at these issues.” Nearly every Democratic contender, including Booker, tweeted solidarity with the Los Angeles teachers (though none of them directly tied the strikes back to charter schools). “I think most of these candidates want to be understood and identified as progressive, and to do that right now is not to actively support charter schools,” Valant says.

Will Booker be among them?

“Maybe Sen. Booker will, maybe he won’t,” Weingarten explains. “He’ll have to answer a lot of questions.” Lily Eskelsen García, the president of the National Education Association, wouldn’t comment on individual candidates beyond acknowledging that the NEA is in the process of meeting with announced and prospective 2020 contenders. But she and her fellow NEA members are well-acquainted with each candidate’s record, and for them, the top priority will be the vision they suggest going forward. “They’ll want very much to make a case for their agenda as president, which may be very different than their agenda as mayor of Newark,” García says. “And we want to hear, ‘So, where are you going on this agenda of privatized education?’”

Consider Diane Ravitch, who served as an assistant secretary of education under President George H. W. Bush. Ravitch had been a staunch proponent of No Child Left Behind but later changed course, renouncing charter schools and test-based accountability as a means to educational improvement. “When she saw the effects of the reform agenda, she turned around and said just as quickly and strongly, ‘I made a mistake,’” García explains. “It would be interesting to see which politicians, Democrat or Republican, are willing to be that honest.” This week, another school reform-minded mayor, Chicago’s Rahm Emanuel, also withdrew his support for the practice, explaining his reasons in an essay he wrote for The Atlantic.

So far, Booker has taken neither Ravitch’s nor Emmanuel’s path. Though he’s been relatively quiet on the subject of school choice as of late, he’s been pushing back against the characterization of his school choice project as a failure. As he’s prepared for a 2020 run, Booker has twice sat down with education website The 74 to defend his work in Newark, citing new research that attributes the educational gains of the city’s students to the closing of low-performing schools and the introduction of charters. “I’ve never seen such a disconnect between a popular understanding and the data,” he said in an interview this week. “I can find no other urban district with high poverty—with high numbers of kids who qualify for free school lunches—that has shown this kind of dramatic shift in a 10-year period.”

Dear Commons Community,

Here is the Associated Press account of voter fraud in the North Carolina Congressional race between Republican  Mark Harris and Democrat Dan McCready.  The results have not been certified and a new election may be required.

Tony

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Associated Press

Carolina elections head says ballots handled illegally

Emery P. Dalesio   

Feb 18th 2019 5:22PM

RALEIGH, N.C. — A Republican operative, who last year rounded up votes for a GOP candidate running for Congress, conducted an illegal and well-funded ballot-harvesting operation, North Carolina’s elections director said Monday.

The director’s testimony came on the first day of a hearing into whether mail-in ballots were tampered with a in race for the state’s 9th congressional district seat that saw Republican Mark Harris narrowly defeat Democrat Dan McCready.

The race wasn’t certified, leaving the country’s only congressional election without a declared winner. The elections board is expected to either declare a winner or order a new election after the hearing.

“The evidence that we will provide today will show that a coordinated, unlawful and substantially resourced absentee ballot scheme operated in the 2018 general election” in rural Bladen and Robeson counties, which are part of North Carolina’s 9th congressional district, state elections director Kim Strach said at the start of a state elections board hearing.

Harris held a slim lead over Democrat Dan McCready in unofficial results following November’s election, but the state elections board refused to certify the contest after allegations of potential ballot manipulation surfaced.

An investigation targeted a political operative working for Harris’ campaign named Leslie McCrae Dowless Jr . He paid local people he recruited $125 for every 50 mail-in ballots they collected in Bladen and Robeson counties and turned in to him, Strach said. That means they could have been altered before being counted.

The operation’s scope allowed Dowless to collect nearly $84,000 in consulting fees over five months leading into last year’s general election, said Strach, adding that in addition to reviewing financial and phone records investigators questioned 142 voters in the south-central North Carolina counties.

Dowless was hired to produce votes for Harris and Bladen County Sheriff Jim McVickers, but his methods last year included paying people to visit potential voters who had received absentee ballots and getting them to hand over those ballots, whether completed or not, Dowless worker Lisa Britt testified.

It’s illegal in North Carolina for anyone other than a guardian or close family member to handle a voter’s ballot.

Britt testified she sometimes completed unfinished ballots and handed them to Dowless, who kept them at his home and office for days or longer before they were turned in, said Britt, whose mother was formerly married to Dowless. While the congressional and sheriff’s races were almost always marked by voters who turned in unsealed ballots, Britt said she would fill in down-ballot local races — favoring Republicans — to prevent local elections board workers from suspecting Dowless’ activities.While Dowless and Harris’ main campaign consultant were in constant contact, she didn’t have any indication Harris knew about the operation, Britt said.

“I think Mr. Harris was completely clueless as to what was going on,” Britt said.

Harris received 679 mail-in ballots in Bladen and Robeson counties, compared to 652 for McCready, Strach said. But McCready’s lawyers contend nearly 1,200 other mail-in ballots were sent to voters and never returned — enough to erase Harris’ 905-vote lead after Election Day.

Strach was expected to touch on the unreturned ballots later in the hearing lasting at least until Tuesday.

“It’s not just about those that have been returned. It’s potentially about those that haven’t been returned,” she said.

Dowless and Harris attended Monday’s hearing. McCready did not.

Four of the five members on the elections board — composed of three Democrats and two Republicans — would need to agree a new election is necessary.

If that doesn’t happen, McCready’s lawyers said state officials should send their findings to the Democrat-dominated U.S. House and let it decide whether Harris should be seated — arguing that the U.S. Constitution gives the House authority over the elections and qualifications of its members.