After years of perpetuating the myth that the public schools are failing, Time Magazine is finally setting the record straight.
In 2008 Time featured D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee on its cover with a broom, as she fired hundreds of teachers working in the district’s poorest schools. Rhee ended up resigning in disgrace before investigators could link her to widespread fraud and corruption in a group of charters she established.
Then there was the “Rotten Apples” cover in 2014, which basically accused unions of protecting bad teachers, with the underlying message, “that’s why public schools are failing.”
But it turns out it’s politicians who are failing our schools.
That’s why this week’s Time has three teachers on different versions of its cover, sharing stories about their struggles to make ends meet, while facing the challenges of teaching in some of the nation’s most underfunded schools.
“Teachers are out to regain the upper hand.”
“And they promise to turn out in force for November’s midterm elections, where hundreds of teachers are running for office on platforms that promise more support for public schools. They have also sought to remind the public that they are on the front lines of America’s frayed social safety net, dealing with children affected by the opioid crisis, living in poverty and fearful of the next school shooting.” http://time.com/longform/teaching-in-...
Keep in mind, there are schools where every student lives in poverty. These kids arrive years behind their middle class counterparts in reading and writing skills. Every summer they get farther behind in their math skills. They suffer from malnutrition, inadequate healthcare, and serious trauma at several times the national average. We should be supporting the teachers whose work it is to bring these kids up to grade level.
And the public is figuring this out for themselves. In fact, recent polling suggests 60% of Americans think teachers should have the right to strike. Even in the reddest states, voters are backing tax increases for education spending, teachers are winning their bids for elected office, and communities are fighting back when corporate charters come to town.
But the fight to take back our schools has only just begun. Good thing November sixth is right around the corner.
AMAZON FOUNDER JEFF Bezos is the latest tech giant to splash onto the education philanthropy scene, announcing plans to develop a network of preschools funded through an initial $2 billion commitment.
"The Day 1 Academies Fund will launch an operate a network of high-quality, full-scholarship, Montessori-inspired preschools in underserved communities," Bezos wrote in a letter posted to Twitter on Thursday morning. "We will build an organization to directly operate these preschools."
In doing so, Bezos follows in the footsteps of other tech giants, like Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and Laurene Powell (the widow of Steve Jobs), who have all directed through their foundations hundreds of millions of dollars – billions, in the case of Gates – to various education initiatives.
To be sure, Bezos – who also plans to use some of the money to aid nonprofits that help homeless families – is not new on the education scene. The Bezos Family Foundation, founded in 2000 and run by Bezos' parents, focuses solely on education, and earlier this year Bezos gave $33 million to a scholarship program for children brought to the United States illegally, TheDream.us.
But the uptick in philanthropic giving from such organizations has sparked heated debates about the influence they wield over public education and their overall impact.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has been involved in education for nearly two decades and has directed billions of dollars into advancing policies that gave rise to the education reform movement.
Some of the foundation's biggest bets have been in its decision to back the Common Core State Standards – academic benchmarks for what students should know by the end of each grade – and its push to reimagine teacher evaluation and compensation systems based in part on student test scores.
But the foundation has been widely criticized for funneling funding into what some consider silver-bullet policies or the latest education fad.
In May 2016, Sue Desmond-Hellmann, CEO of the Gates Foundation, apologized for the foundation's misread of how ready – or not ready, as it turned out – states were to handle implementation of the Common Core standards. And last year, Gates himself offered somewhat of a mea culpa for the foundation's involvement in teacher evaluation.
The event was sponsored by the rightwing, anti-union Walton Family Foundation, Campbell Brown’s “The 74,” and Education Reform Now. Campbell Brown is a close friend of Betsy DeVos; Education Reform Nowis affiliated with Democrats for Education Reform (DFER), the hedge funders’ organization. Education Reform Now and DFER exist to promote charter schools.
Like so many privately managed charter schools, the new award is segregated, for blacks only.
We’re All Civics Teachers – Constitution Day, 2018
WE’RE ALL CIVICS TEACHERS
A middle school social studies teacher once commented to me that he had trouble teaching his curriculum because so many of the students in his classroom were reading “below grade level.” My response was, “We’re all reading teachers.”
A few days ago, the Annenberg Public Policy Center released its annual Constitution Day Civics Survey. The results of the survey suggest that we’re all civics teachers, as well – or we ought to be.
The survey found that Americans don’t know enough about how our government works. Some highlights:
A quarter (27 percent) incorrectly said the Constitution allows the president to ignore a Supreme Court ruling if the president believes the ruling is wrong;
A plurality (41 percent) incorrectly said that both the House and Senate must approve before a nominee becomes a justice on the Supreme Court (30 percent correctly know that the Senate alone confirms);
Only a third of Americans (32 percent) can name all three branches of government.
BRANCHES OF GOVERNMENT
It’s only slightly comforting that Americans probably know that we have the freedoms guaranteed in the Bill of Rights even though they might now know which Amendment they’re in. But it is very disturbing (at least to me) that only about one-third of Americans surveyed can name all three branches of the government.
Can you?
Can you name the President Pro Tempore of the Senate? Did you know that he is third in line for the presidency after the Vice President and the Speaker of the House? (It’s Orrin Hatch. Are you surprised that it isn’t Mitch McConnell?)
How many members of the House of Representatives are there? How was that number arrived at? What is the “System of checks and balances?” How many members are there of the Supreme Court? Why did the founders decide that the President should be chosen by Electors instead of the people themselves?
Despite F Ratings, Dyslexia Charter School Has Gotten Repeated State Approval
Interest in charter schools for students with disabilities is on the rise. Will such schools destroy the Individuals with Disabilities Act’s (IDEA) rights of children?
IDEA is the reauthorization of the 1975 Public Law 94-142. While parents might be dissatisfied with dyslexia programming in public schools, how can they be assured charter schools will provide better assistance including inclusion in charter schools?
A school for students with dyslexia continues to stay open despite two F grades from the BESE, Louisiana’s Board of Elementary and Secondary Education. The Louisiana Key Academy is run by Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA) and his wife, Laura. Both are physicians. Neither are specialists in reading disorders, although they have a child with dyslexia.
Multifaceted reforms needed to reach California’s education goals, research project finds
Studies organized by Stanford document need for better data systems, more funding and more early ed
Researchers on Monday released a massive collection of education studies timed to inform the next California governor’s and Legislature’s preK-12 agenda.
Among the findings of Getting Down to Facts II:
The big achievement gap for California’s low- and middle-income children relative to their peers in other states starts in kindergarten, indicating a need to significantly expand preschool and quality child care.
California would have to increase K-12 funding by 32 percent — $22 billion — to prepare all children adequately in the state’s academic standards, according to experienced educators and analysts who did the math.
California has fewer adults in schools, with higher ratios of students to teachers, administrators and counselors than in most states.
The lack of effective data systems is preventing schools and districts from determining which programs and practices are effective and which aren’t.
Two years in the making, Getting Down to Facts II consists of 36 reports and 19 briefs by more than 100 authors, including many prominent researchers from California. They took deep looks into a range of long-standing and pressing issues: the teacher shortage, inadequate funding, disparities in achievement, charter school oversight and English learner achievement. They examined unmet challenges in special education, school facilities, children’s mental health and other issues. Stanford University and Policy Analysis for California Education or PACE, which is affiliated with Stanford, USC, UC Davis, UCLA and UC Berkeley, coordinated the project.
The research comes at a pivotal time, with the retirement of State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson, Gov. Jerry Brown and longtime Brown confidant Michael Kirst, president of the State Board of Education. Sweeping changes they initiated have altered the K-12 landscape since the first Getting Down to Facts studies were published in 2007.
In surveys detailed in the studies, educators argued strongly that California should stay committed to the major reforms already in place. These reforms include academic standards in math, English language arts and other subject areas; a funding formula championed by Gov. Brown that targets more funding to low-income students, English learners and other high needs students; and a new school accountability system that views counties and the state as partners with schools and districts, not overseers. Three-quarters of superintendents agreed that the new flexibility under the Local Control Funding Formula has enabled their district to spend in ways that match local needs.
But the funding formula, which remade school funding and shifted decision-making over how state funds are spent, has yet to significantly narrow the wide gaps in achievement among ethnic and racial groups in California. And California students, with the exception of wealthy children, continue to lag a full grade behind the nation, according to a study led by Sean Reardon, an education professor at Stanford University.
But the studies underscored that the principal goal of the funding formula — to give all students the opportunity and resources to achieve their post-high school ambitions — may be unattainable without not only additional funding but also policy changes, including:
Placing fully prepared teachers, led by the most skilled leaders, in the highest-need schools. A disproportionate share of inexperienced teachers and principals staff those schools.
Giving districts the resources, guidance and opportunities to improve. The state’s system of support will rely on the coordinated help from the California Department of Education, county offices of education and a new state agency, the Collaborative for Educational Excellence — all of which, researchers concluded, have limitations. The California Department of Education, largely staffed to oversee compliance with federal laws and programs, lacks subject matter experts that districts may look to for help and has experienced high staff turnover because of competitively low pay. County offices of education, many with small staffs, face a steep learning curve to switch from enforcers of regulations to first responders for districts seeking help to improve academic outcomes.
JOIN US NEXT MONTH IN INDY TO DISCUSS PRIVACY & ONLINE LEARNING!
Next month in Indianapolis, the Network for Public Education will be holding our annual conference on Saturday and Sunday, Oct. 20-21. More info and how to register here.
I will be participating in two amazing panels focused on how protect students and teachers from the growing threat to data privacy and resist the the expansion of online learning which is undermining the quality of public education.
The first workshop, to be held on Saturday Oct. 20 morning at 10:50 AM is entitled Outsourcing the classroom to ed tech & machine-learning: why parents & teachers should resist . Presenting with me are two brilliant bloggers and thinkers whose work I never fail to learn from, Audrey Watters and Peter Greene.
Audrey has single-handedly and fiercely taken on the ed tech industry for many years and critiques their claims on her essential blog, Hack Education. If you haven’t subscribed to her newsletter, you absolutely should do so. She is currently writing a book to be published by MIT Press called Teaching Machines.
Peter is a Pennsylvania teacher who retired last year, but even while teaching was among the most prolific and incisive education bloggers at Curmudjucation. He also now writes a regular column for Forbes. In his writings, he deconstructs and eviscerates the agenda of the corporate reformers and faux philanthropists, whether it be the promotion of online education, Common Core, high-stakes testing or any of the other snake oil disseminated by private interests bent on disrupting public education. He shows how they are based neither on research, common sense, or the experience of teachers or parents.
During the second workshop, held later the same day, our panel will present A Teacher Data Privacy Toolkit: How to protect your students’ privacy and your own. Marla Kilfoyle and Melissa Tomlinson of the Badass Teachers Association, Rachael Stickland co-chair of the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy and I will offer some of the highlights and practical tips of our yet-to-be released Toolkit, the product of a year-long collaboration between the PCSP and the BATs, with support from the Rose Foundation, the NEA and the AFT.
From responses to an online survey and focus groups of teachers, administrators and other school staff, we heard loud and strong how educators were deeply frustrated by the lack of training and knowledge they had about how to minimize and safeguard the increasing amount of personal data being collected by schools and vendors, and how they can work to ensure it isn’t breached or improperly used. This toolkit, like the Parent Toolkit for Student Privacy we along with Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood released in 2017, represents an attempt to provide the support and information that teachers need to act as responsible guardians of their students’ privacy — and their own.
Please join us in Indianapolis – more amazing speakers and panels are described here. — Leonie Haimson
