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Tuesday, August 19, 2014

Why the Jindal Loss Was Expected Regarding La.’s PARCC Injunction | deutsch29

Why the Jindal Loss Was Expected Regarding La.’s PARCC Injunction | deutsch29:



Why the Jindal Loss Was Expected Regarding La.’s PARCC Injunction

August 19, 2014
On August 19, 2014, District Judge Todd Hernandez ruled that the Jindal administration’s suspension of the Louisiana state testing contract was to be temporarily lifted until the pro-Common Core (CCSS) full case against Jindal and his administration goes to court. (For backstory, click here.)
I was surprised at the judge’s ruling because the Louisiana Department of Education(LDOE) spliced the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) assessment into an already-existing “sole source” testing contract with Data Recognition Corp (DRC).
Pearson has been awarded the PARCC assessment contract, not DRC.
It is possible that Pearson hire DRC as a PARCC subcontractor. As it is, DRC has been hired as part of a team to develop assessments for the other federally-funded consortium, Smarter Balanced. However, there is no way that DRC is the sole source for PARCC.
This means that Louisiana will fund an extra vendor (DRC) in its not-so-“sole source” procurement of PARCC.
Testing contract laundering.
Thus, the judge’s decision surprised me.
However, I have read pertinent sections of the court ruling, and it seems that Jindal’s attorneys tried to let the contracts “speak for themselves.” Thus, the judge appears to have missed the John White sleight-of-contract in grafting PARCC into what was supposed to be a contract used by DRC for transition to PARCC.
Consider this statement from the ruling:
Evidence presented proves there was much discussion among [the state board of education, the Division of Administration--DOA, and the Office of Contractual Review--OCR] relating to the contract with Data Recognition Corp (DRC) and its status as “Sole Source” vendor for the implementation of common core. This evidence indicates this activity took place as far back as December, 2010. The contract with DRC was eventually approved as a “Single 
Why the Jindal Loss Was Expected Regarding La.’s PARCC Injunction | deutsch29:

Part Two: Why is the Obama Administration Waging War on Teachers? | Living in Dialogue

Part Two: Why is the Obama Administration Waging War on Teachers? | Living in Dialogue:



shadow

By Paul Horton. Part two of three.
In the twenty-five years after the Civil Rights Act of 1868, most whites abandoned the Democrats in the South as white flight and the Southern Baptist Convention sought public support for private schools that were created in suburban areas like Cobb and northern Gwinnett counties that ring Atlanta, Georgia. Conservative Republicans demanded vouchers from President Carter, and his rejection of vouchers to protect public schools so outraged a Christian Coalition led by Richard Viguerie, that he organized a letter writing campaign to organize against Democrats for their support of public schools. When Ronald Reagan kicked off his Presidential campaign in the town of Philadelphia, Mississippi, the site of the murder of three Civil Rights workers, sent a not so covert message to the Christian Coalition and the Southern Baptist Convention that any Republican support for school desegregation, equitable funding for schools, and exclusive support for public schools was over. Reagan hinted that Freedom Summer had led to lawlessness in the South, and that if religious southerners wanted public monies for private schools, schools did not teach secular humanism and evolution, he was their man. So, under Reagan, the Republican base, the former conservative Southern Democrats, were reassured that evolution, secular humanism, and school integration could be avoided with Federal support for private schools in the forms of vouchers. But when Reagan’s voucher proposals were rejected by Congress, money flowed into conservative think tanks to create rationales for school privatization based on Milton Friedman’s idea of vouchers, according to journalist Greg Anrig in a Washington Monthlyarticle (“An Idea Whose Time Has Gone”).
Indeed, the consensus of peer reviewed studies of the country’s most ambitious voucher program in Milwaukee indicates that it is a failure: that voucher schools fare no better than pubic schools, but cripple public school finances. In a 2011 study that compared voucher school students with public school students, public school students performed significantly higher (Wisconsin State Journal, March 29, 2011, “DPI: Students in Milwaukee voucher program don’t score better in state tests,” for example).
Charter schools have become another reform alternative that have received increasing levels of state and federal support since the early 1990s. Heavy funding of private charters really took of in 2006 when President Bush asked for a total of $306 million to support the growth of the charter movement when many public Part Two: Why is the Obama Administration Waging War on Teachers? | Living in Dialogue:

Nite Cap 8-19-14 #BATsACT #RealEdTalk #EDCHAT


James Baldwin said it best: 

"For these are all our children, and we will profit by or pay for whatever they become."


A BIG EDUCATION APE NITE CAP



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YESTERDAY

Spring ’14 Conference Recap | CA STUDENT UNION
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Nite Cap 8-18-14 #BATsACT #RealEdTalk #EDCHAT
James Baldwin said it best: "For these are all our children, and we will profit by or pay for whatever they become."A BIG EDUCATION APE NITE CAPempathyeducates – I Don’t Know How to Talk to White People About Fergusonempathyeducates – I Don’t Know How to Talk to White People About Ferguson: I Don’t Know How to Talk to White People About FergusonPhotograph; Ali BarthwellAli Barthwell | Or