We're thankful for these Twitter superstars | Schott Foundation for Public Education

We're thankful for these Twitter superstars | Schott Foundation for Public Education

We're thankful for these Twitter superstars 

For those of you who tweet entirely too much (which applies to many of us at Schott!) we've assembled our first annual Twitter list of Education Justice Superstars, individuals who are helping to expand the education conversation online. They’re leading the way, pushing racial and gender equity, fair funding, community schools, grassroots organizing and other crucial issues to the fore.

So while you're sitting back after a plate full of turkey tomorrow, don't forget to add these superstars to your feed:

	Jitu Brown @brothajitu Jitu is a veteran community organizer and the National Director of Journey for Justice Alliance. His feed is filled with updates on J4J’s work and the movement for equity in public education!
	Zakiyah Ansari @Zansari8 Advocacy Director of the Alliance for Quality Education and relentless advocate for equity in public education, Zakiyah’s feed is a great place to go for all things civil rights, racial equity and NYC progressive politics!
	Diane Ravitch @DianeRavitch Diane is the Founder of the Network for Public Education and longtime advocate for quality education. She tweets about all things public education; attempted charter schools takeovers to the damaging effects of overtesting. Diane also blogs at dianeravitch.net.
	Maisie Chin @itzmemaisie Maisie is the Executive Director and Co-Founder of Community Asset Development Re-defining Education (CADRE) in Los Angeles and serves on the board of directors at the Schott Foundation. Her Twitter feed is all about public education and education justice organizing!
	Jose Luis Vilson @theJLV “The Math teacher Gotham deserves.” Jose is a career public educator and author of This is Not a Test. Jose tweets about teaching, public education equity, and provides plenty of everyday inspiration! He writes at thejosevilson.com.
	Jesse Hagopian @JessedHagopian Jesse Hagopian is an educator and a lifelong promoter of public education funding and is the co-editor of the new book Teaching for Black Lives, and the Editor of the book More Than a Score. Jesse also posts on his blog iamaneducator.com.
	Judith Browne Dianis @jbrownedianis A civil rights lawyer, racial justice advocate, and executive director of the Advancement Project, Judith’s feed is awesome for updates on AP’s work, racial justice and immigrant rights!
	Dmitri Holtzman @DmitriHoltzman Dmitri is the Director of Education Justice Campaigns for Center for Popular Democracy in Brooklyn, NY. His twitter feed is full of everything having to do with education, Civil Rights and New York politics.
	Jeff Bryant @jeffbcdm Jeff has written about education for the Washington Post, Salon, Alternet, and the Progressive. He heads the Education Opportunity Network and tweets on public education, charter schools, and has been a lifelong champion of equity and equality in education!
	Geoffrey Winder @GeoffreyWinder Geoffrey is the Co-Executive Director of the Gay Straight Alliance Network and an LGBT youth organizer. He tweets about LGBT rights, civil rights, philanthropy and education!

We're thankful for these Twitter superstars | Schott Foundation for Public Education

John Thompson: Goliath, King of the Zombies | Diane Ravitch's blog

John Thompson: Goliath, King of the Zombies | Diane Ravitch's blog

John Thompson: Goliath, King of the Zombies

John Thompson here writes about his reaction to the annual conference of the Network for Public Education, where the implicit theme was that David is beating Goliath, but Goliath just keeps stumbling forward, crushing public schools and advancing privatization, with no evidence of success. I argued, in the opening address of the conference, that the Reformers are akin to Goliath, and that Goliath has failed and failed again but is so powerful that he continues to wreak destruction on communities. He is among the Walking Dead. He is, in fact, a zombie.

Thompson was a teacher in Oklahoma; he recently retired. He lives in the belly of the beast, a state where Goliathians control the legislature and the governorship. At least they don’t pretend to be “progressives.” They are DeVos-Trump extremists, with links to ALEC and the Koch brothers.

Thompson admits that he was slow in realizing that the Reformers are intent on undermining public schools and that they were acting in concert. But he is convinced now, not only that they are doing so, but that their promises have not been kept and that, in fact, they have failed wherever they set their sights.

He ends with this:

Knowing that Indianapolis is at the heart of the dying, but still dangerous corporate reform movement, I expected that Chalkbeat would choose its words carefully and make sure that its reporting didn’t threaten its donations from Goliath. Chalkbeat Indianapolis didn’t cover the NPE conference but Matt Barnum of Chalkbeat New York has been covering Indiana’s Mind Trust and its successor, the City Fund. (Chalkbeat Indiana has since linked to WFYI Indianapolis’s report on one of the city’s 20 “innovation schools” which is receiving $1.3 million in management fees.)

This leads to the biggest question that I brought to the NPE. We Oklahomans have failed to communicate with our state’s edu-philanthropists on how their science-based, holistic early education and trauma-informed instruction programs and the Indianapolis Goliath are Continue reading: John Thompson: Goliath, King of the Zombies | Diane Ravitch's blog

Toward a Consensus Approach to Evaluating State School Finance Systems! (and dumping the others!) – School Finance 101

Toward a Consensus Approach to Evaluating State School Finance Systems! (and dumping the others!) – School Finance 101

Toward a Consensus Approach to Evaluating State School Finance Systems! (and dumping the others!)

Over the past decade, there has been an emerging consensus regarding state school finance systems, money and schools. That consensus is supported by a growing body of high-quality empirical research regarding the importance of equitable and adequate financing for providing quality schooling to all children. As guideposts for this new and improved annual report on state school finance systems, we offer the following five core principles:

1. The level and distribution of school funding matters;
2. Achieve higher outcomes and a broader array of outcomes often requires additional resources and may require substantial additional resources;
3. Achieving competitive student outcomes depends on adequate school resources, including a competitively compensated teacher workforce;
4. Closing achievement gaps between children from rich and poor neighborhoods requires progressive distribution of resources targeted toward children with greater educational needs;
5. Both the adequacy of students’ outcomes and improving the equity of those outcomes are in our national interest.

But US public schooling remains primarily in the hands of states. On average, about 90 percent of funding for local public school systems and charter schools comes from state and local tax sources. How state and local revenue is raised and distributed is a function of seemingly complicated calculations usually adopted as legislation and often with the goal of achieving more equitable and adequate public schooling for the state’s children.

Core Principles of Funding Fairness

Beginning in 2010, in collaboration with the Education Law Center of New Jersey, we laid out a methodology and series of indicators for comparing state school finance systems using available national data sets. With support from the William T. Grant Foundation, we dramatically expanded our analyses and developed publicly accessible district and state level databases – The School Funding Fairness Data System. More recently, we have combined our data with those of the Stanford Education Data Archive to estimate a National Education Cost Model. Concurrently, we have begun to expand our state funding equity analyses to include public two- Continue reading: Toward a Consensus Approach to Evaluating State School Finance Systems! (and dumping the others!) – School Finance 101

The New Stupid Replaces the Old Stupid (Rick Hess) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

The New Stupid Replaces the Old Stupid (Rick Hess) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

The New Stupid Replaces the Old Stupid (Rick Hess)

From an interview conducted in 2009 with Rick Hess, then Resident Scholar at The American Enterprise Institute. I have lightly abridged the interview. The original article upon which this interview is based is here.

Q: Rick, you recently published an article in Educational Leadership
arguing that the ways in which we rely on data to drive decisions in
schools has changed over time. Yet, you note that we have unfortunately only
succeeded in moving from the “old stupid” to the “new stupid.” What do you do
you mean by this?

A: A decade ago, it was only too easy to find education leaders who dismissed
student achievement data and systematic research as having only limited utility
when it came to improving schools. Today, we’ve come full circle. You can’t
spend a day at an education gathering without hearing excited claims about
“data-based decision making” and “research-based practice.” Yet these phrases
can too readily serve as convenient buzzwords that obscure more than they
clarify and that stand in for careful thought. There is too often an unfortunate
tendency to simply embrace glib solutions if they’re packaged as “data-driven.”
Today’s enthusiastic embrace of data has waltzed us directly from a petulant
resistance to performance measures to a reflexive reliance on a few simple
metrics–namely, graduation rates, expenditures, and grade three through eight
reading and math scores. The result has been a race from one troubling mindset
to another–from the “old stupid” to the “new stupid.”

Q: Can you give us an example of the “new stupid”?

A: Sure, here’s one. I was giving a presentation to a group of aspiring
superintendents. They were eager to make data-driven decisions and employ
research to serve kids. There wasn’t a shred of the old stupid in sight. I
started to grow concerned, however, when our conversation turned to value-added
assessment and teacher assignments. The group had recently read a research brief
highlighting the effect of teachers on achievement and the inequitable
distribution of teachers within districts. They were fired up and ready to put
this knowledge to use. One declared to me, to widespread agreement, “Day one,
we’re going to start identifying those high value-added teachers and moving them
to the schools that aren’t making AYP.” [AYP is the acronym from No Child Left Behind law (2002-20015); it means “Adequate Yearly Progress” in test scores for different groups of students.]

Now, I sympathize with the premise, but the certainty Continue reading: The New Stupid Replaces the Old Stupid (Rick Hess) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Truly Public Schools Must Form Engaged Citizens and Then Engage Those Citizens in Shaping School Policy | janresseger

Truly Public Schools Must Form Engaged Citizens and Then Engage Those Citizens in Shaping School Policy | janresseger

Truly Public Schools Must Form Engaged Citizens and Then Engage Those Citizens in Shaping School Policy

This blog will take a week long Thanksgiving break.  Look for a new post on November 29.  Good wishes for Thanksgiving!

In its October 2018 issue, Phi Delta Kappan magazine features a pair of articles that, from two entirely different perspectives, trace declining civic engagement around public education to the philosophy at the heart of the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act.

In Preparation for Capable Citizenship: The Schools’ Primary Responsibility, Michael Rebell worries that schools driven by a pinched, test-and-punish agenda—schools designed to force all students to demonstrate basic proficiency in language arts and math—have narrowed the curriculum and dangerously reduced what has been understood historically a primary purpose of public schools: the formation of engaged citizens.  Rebell is the executive director of the Campaign for Educational Equity at Teachers College, Columbia University.  He is an attorney and one of the founders of the Campaign for Fiscal Equity, Inc.  He was executive director when the Campaign for Fiscal Equity successfully sued the state for more adequate and equitably distributed school funding.

Rebell argues that high-stakes, test-based school accountability—the system which rates and ranks schools and school districts on standardized tests of language arts and math and punishes the lowest scoring schools and teachers—has squeezed out much that is important: “Over the past half century, the scope of American democracy has expanded to include a more diverse population and a greater understanding of the need to respect and embrace the needs and aspirations of all our citizens, yet the schools’ civic focus has eroded, leaving our democratic institutions substantially at risk. Interestingly, a series of recent cases regarding the adequacy of funding for public schools has led state courts to examine the meaning of state constitutional clauses—most of which were written in the 18th and 19th centuries…. The courts have consistently emphasized the continuing importance of educating students to be effective citizens.  For example, the New York Court of Appeals held that the purpose of public education today is to provide students the skills they need to ‘function productively as civic participants capable of voting and serving on a jury’ (Campaign for Fiscal Equity,Inc. v. New York State, 2003).”

Rebell defines the skills he believes are needed for citizenship: “(1) basic civic knowledge of government, history, law and democracy; (2) verbal and critical reasoning skills; (3) social and participatory experiences, and (4) responsible character traits and acceptance of democratic Continue reading: Truly Public Schools Must Form Engaged Citizens and Then Engage Those Citizens in Shaping School Policy | janresseger