RECAP OF DAY 1 OF LOS ANGELES TEACHERS STRIKE TO DEFEND PUBLIC SCHOOLS FROM THE PRIVATIZERS #UTLA #REDFORED #UTLAStrong #StrikeReady #March4Ed #WeAreLA

RECAP OF DAY 1 OF LOS ANGELES TEACHERS STRIKE TO DEFEND PUBLIC SCHOOLS FROM THE PRIVATIZERS

Flying to Los Angeles | Diane Ravitch's blog - https://wp.me/p2odLa-ly1 via @dianeravitch

Billionaires vs. LA Schools - https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/01/la-teachers-strike-charters-privatization

Teachers, undeterred by more rain, flood picket lines for Day 2 of the LAUSD strike - Los Angeles Times - https://www.latimes.com/local/education/la-me-edu-lausd-strike-day-two-20190115-story.html via @latimes

L.A. Teachers Strike Against Privatization & Underfunding - https://freespeech.org/?p=150027 via @freespeechtv

Stand With Los Angeles Teachers on Strike | The Nation - https://www.thenation.com/?p=302065 via @TheNation

LA Teachers Strike: Absent Students Cost District $25M On Day 1 | Northridge, CA Patch - https://patch.com/california/northridge/la-teachers-strike-absent-students-cost-district-25m-day-1

LA Teachers Strike: Democrats Stay Quiet on Charter Schools - https://theintercept.com/2019/01/15/la-teachers-strike-charter-schools/ via theintercept

Why the Los Angeles Teachers' Strike Is Different - The Atlantic - https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/01/why-los-angeles-teachers-are-striking/580360/?utm_source=feed on @theatlantic

L.A. teachers' strike throws a wrench in administrators' dreams of privatization | Salon.com - https://www.salon.com/2019/01/14/l-a-teachers-strike-throws-a-wrench-in-administrators-dreams-of-privatization/

Los Angeles Teachers Strike To Defend Public Schools From The Privatizers | PopularResistance.Org - https://popularresistance.org/?p=141640

Striking in the Rain - LA Progressive - https://www.laprogressive.com/?p=321862

“Welcome to the Revolution”: LA Teachers Strike Pits Working-Class Power Against Privatization - In These Times - http://inthesetimes.com/article/21684/los-angeles-teachers-strike-education-charter-privatization-la via @inthesetimesmag

Los Angeles Teachers Strike In Second Largest School District In US | PopularResistance.Org - https://popularresistance.org/?p=141636

Overcrowded classrooms, privatization schemes force LA teachers to strike – People's World - https://www.peoplesworld.org/?p=82235

30,000 Teachers in Los Angeles Strike | National News | US News - https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2019-01-14/30-000-teachers-in-los-angeles-strike on @USNews

Why the Los Angeles Teachers' Strike Is Different - The Atlantic - https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/01/why-los-angeles-teachers-are-striking/580360/?utm_source=feed on @theatlantic

What Could Be Wrong With The “Community School” Model? Revisiting A November 2015 Piece, Post-FEPA – Wrench in the Gears

What Could Be Wrong With The “

Community School” Model? Revisiting A November 2015 Piece, Post-FEPA – Wrench in the Gears
What Could Be Wrong With The “Community School” Model? Revisiting A November 2015 Piece, Post-FEPA

I wrote the piece below in November 2015 during the lead up to the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), which passed the following month and cemented into place “Pay for Success” finance of education delivery in the United States. The Alliance for Philadelphia Public Schools hosted that post, since I had not yet started my own blog. I am thankful for the hospitality they extended to me then.  I want to re-share it here on Wrench In The Gears, because yesterday Trump signed the bi-partisan HR4174 bill, “Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act” (FEPA).

This legislation will advance the pay for success model by requiring extensive data collection with delivery of all public services. As a result, all those receiving services, including public school students, will be sucked into a never-ending cycle of micro-data collection for analysis of program “efficacy” in a world where neoliberal austerity, predictive analytics, and digital surveillance has come to rule. It is exactly what the tech, finance, and non-profit sectors have been setting up for many years.

We will soon seen more and more “wrap around” services ushered into schools where student data has much weaker protections under FERPA, which Obama gutted, than under HIPPA. Non-profits will be incentivized to see students as potential interventions to be churned through systems of data-collection, offered up to justify their existence and maintain their payrolls. We will see more and more instruction delivered online so that “data” can be captured as “evidence.” This “evidence” will document not just the cognitive skills of children, but their social-emotional states and behavioral “competencies” as well. Of course the venture capitalist “social entrepreneurs” hold all the money and pull all the strings. “Pay for Success” is their game. They will remake the world, including our schools, to deliver the digital “evidence” needed to keep them in yachts and champagne. This will happen against a backdrop of grinding poverty, economic precarity, and militarized policing of low income communities.

At the time, some criticized my analysis. They couldn’t see it three years ago. Re-reading it today, it is clear we are much father down this road. ESSA and WIOA (Workforce Innovation and Opportunities Act) and SIPPRA (Social Impact Partnerships Pay for Results Act) and IIOA (Investing in CONTINUE READING: 

What Could Be Wrong With The “Community School” Model? Revisiting A November 2015 Piece, Post-FEPA – Wrench in the Gears

Opinion: Charter schools are draining LA’s public schools. That’s why I’m on strike | PBS NewsHour #REDFORED #UTLAStrong #StrikeReady #March4Ed #WeAreLA

Opinion: Charter schools are draining LA’s public schools. That’s why I’m on strike | PBS NewsHour

Opinion: Charter schools are draining LA’s public schools. That’s why I’m on strike

On paper, my school looks good: high test scores, 100 percent graduation rate, an award-winning journalism program (my humble brag) and the smallest comprehensive high school in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD). But we fight a constant battle against low enrollment due to competition from charter schools.

Due to our school’s low enrollment, an English teaching position was cut halfway through the fall semester, leaving only two English teachers to teach some 330 ninth through 12th graders.

Inheriting a year-long class halfway through the school year isn’t ideal.

As the new spring semester began last week, I was assigned a new class to teach: 9th grade English. As a credentialed English teacher, I have been used to teaching a full day of introduction to journalism, newspaper and yearbook production. Teaching another course, which I haven’t taught in 10 years, brings me up to four different preps on top of an already demanding load.

I’m striking to stop charter schools from draining our schools. In addition to seeking lower class sizes, more counselors, nurses and librarians and a pay raise, the United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) is asking that LAUSD stop approving charter schools, which have seen a 287 percent increase in the district’s boundaries since 2008. The loss of enrollment across the district means a $600 million loss from our public schools every year. CONTINUE READING: Opinion: Charter schools are draining LA’s public schools. That’s why I’m on strike | PBS NewsHour

UTLA president calls for more money for teachers ‘in a city rife with millionaires’ - Los Angeles Times #REDFORED #UTLAStrong #StrikeReady #March4Ed #WeAreLA

UTLA president calls for more money for teachers ‘in a city rife with millionaires’ - Los Angeles Times

UTLA president calls for more money for teachers ‘in a city rife with millionaires’

UTLA President Alex Caputo-Pearl addressed a crowd of teachers and children through a bullhorn in front of Marshall High School on Monday morning, raising his voice over chants and honking cars as the first teachers strike in 30 years kicked off.

Caputo-Pearl called on federal and state leaders to increase funding for schools, including the sources identified in Gov. Newsom’s proposed budget. He also urged the Los Angeles Unified School District to spend its reserves.

“Here we are on a rainy day in … a state as blue as it can be and in a city rife with millionaires, where teachers have to go on strike” to get basic needs met for children, Caputo-Pearl said. He called on Supt. Austin Beutner: “Do not hoard LAUSD’s reserve in order to move your cuts and privatization agenda.”

peaking to the children in the crowd, which included his daughter, Caputo-Pearl said: “The next time someone tells you that you are the future, tell them to prove it to you by investing in you.”

To teachers, he said: “Feel your power. Feel your organized power, feel your pride. ...Until we get the district to reinvest in our kids, chant on that picket line with pride.”

State and national union leaders, including Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, joined Caputo-Pearl at the news conference to express support as people continued to chant and drum in front of the school.

“The eyes of the nation are watching, and educators and nurses … all over the country have the backs of the educators in L.A.,” Weingarten said. “We need the conditions to ensure that every child … gets the opportunity he or she or they deserve.”

Los Angeles teachers’ strike: 5 things you need to know »

At one point during the news conference, a police officer pushed through the crowd of picketers, journalists and students, escorting inside two students trying to enter Marshall High School.

Watching the speakers shortly before 8 a.m., three seniors debated whether they should go CONTINUE READING: UTLA president calls for more money for teachers ‘in a city rife with millionaires’ - Los Angeles Times

3 reasons to pay attention to the LA teacher strike #REDFORED #UTLAStrong #StrikeReady #March4Ed #WeAreLA

3 reasons to pay attention to the LA teacher strike

3 reasons to pay attention to the LA teacher strike

The first mass teacher labor action of 2019 is unfolding in California as the United Teachers Los Angeles walked out for the first time in 30 years.

This strike, which began on Jan. 14, isn’t just important to people in Los Angeles. Here are three reasons the nation should pay attention.

1. The Los Angeles case is different

The Los Angeles strike stands out because of the size of the district.

With 640,000 students, and about 500,000 enrolled in the district’s public schools, Los Angeles represents the second largest school district in the United States. The only bigger district is New York City.

The Los Angeles strike involves 34,000 teachers. To compare, the statewide 2018 teacher strike in West Virginia – where I am researching teacher strikes and teacher shortages – involved about 20,000 teachers and affected approximately 270,000 students.

Also, the political context is different. When West Virginia teachers walked out of the classroom, they were battling a conservative state legislature in a largely rural, majority-white state. Los Angeles is urban, far more diverse, and located in a state that has voted mostly Democratic in presidential elections since 1992.

Los Angeles Unified School District’s student population is 73 percent Latino, 10.5 percent white, 8.2 percent black and 4.2 percent Asian. The district serves over 150,000 students whose first language is not English.

The situation for the Los Angeles teachers union is also different in several ways. For instance, it is engaged in an active fight against the rapid growth of charter schools. Los Angeles is home to the largest number of charter schools in the U.S. with 277.

Since 2008, the charter industry in Los Angeles has grown 287 percent. According to the Los Angeles teachers union, this is effectively siphoning US$550 million per yearfrom the district’s traditional public schools.

The union argues that Los Angeles Unified School District superintendent, Austin Beutner, is a pro-charter school superintendent with no education experience.

The teachers union has proposed greater transparency and more accountability for Los Angeles charter schools and has called for an immediate cap on charter school growth in the school district. The district has provided no counter offer to these demands.

Teachers in Los Angeles have negotiated the current contract under dispute for over 20 months, and have been working without a contract for over a year. This is not uncommon. For example, teachers in Oakland, California, have been working without a contract for more than a year. And a recent contract resolution following a Pennsylvania school district strike came after teachers worked without a contract for three and a half years.

2. It’s not just about better pay

Like strikes in Oklahoma, Arizona, Kentucky, Colorado and North Carolina, the Los Angeles teachers’ strike is essentially about greater investment in public education.

For the Los Angeles teachers, this includes a 6.5 percent salary increase to make up for what the union calls “stagnant wages.”

The average teacher makes almost 19 percent less in wages than comparable workers. In California, specifically, this figure is about 15 percent. Los Angeles teachers make between $50,000 and $80,000, but the cost of living in LA is so high that a two-bedroom apartment requires a six-figure income. This means many teachers have second or even third jobs.

But beyond wages, teachers have begun to demand a greater commitment to investment in public education from their governing bodies, either school boards or state legislatures.

In Oklahoma for example, striking teachers protested inadequate instructional materials, including outdated and deteriorating textbooks. And in Los Angeles, striking teachers are demanding, among other things, a reduction in classroom sizes, which can be up to 46 students in some classrooms based on their current contract. Teachers argue that the large class sizes make it difficult to meet the needs of their students.

They also want an increase in school nurses, librarians and counselors.

These issues get at the heart of student learning. Students need adequate supplies, individual teacher attention and access to mental health services, such as counselors, if they are expected to thrive in the classroom.

But the ability for public schools to provide for all of these instructional and social support needs has become increasingly difficult as states have continued to underfundtheir public education systems.

3. Los Angeles strike could spur other teacher strikes

The Los Angeles teachers strike suggests that the wave of teacher protests is not over.

Teacher strikes and work stoppages have been preceded by a nationwide teacher shortage that continues to grow across many states, which do not have enough certified math, special education, science, and in increasing cases, elementary teachers – to meet the needs of their students. In California 80 percent of districts reported a teacher shortage in the 2017 to 2018 school year. Teacher shortages are most often blamed on low teacher pay, one of the commonalities across teacher strikes.

These shortages are arguably exacerbated by an increase in the “teacher pay penalty,”the term used to describe disparities in teacher salary compared to professions requiring comparable levels of education.

At the same time teachers find themselves increasingly undervalued, most states are still funding their public education systems at levels below that of the 2008 recession. This includes California, which is ranked 41st nationwide in per pupil spending when adjusted for cost of living.

As long as public schools remain underfunded, the nation can expect to see more teacher strikes in other school districts and states in the near future.

Erin McHenry-Sorber, Assistant Professor of Higher Education, West Virginia University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

3 reasons to pay attention to the LA teacher strike

Opinion | What’s Really at Stake in the Los Angeles Teachers’ Strike - The New York Times #REDFORED #UTLAStrong #StrikeReady #March4Ed #WeAreLA

Opinion | What’s Really at Stake in the Los Angeles Teachers’ Strike - The New York Times

What’s Really at Stake in the Los Angeles Teachers’ Strike
Can California provide sufficient resources to support an effective public education system? Or will charter schools cripple it?

LOS ANGELES — For decades, public schools were part of California’s lure, key to the promise of opportunity. Forty years ago, with the lightning speed characteristic of the Golden State, all of that changed.

In the fall of 1978, after years of bitter battles to desegregate Los Angeles classrooms, 1,000 buses carried more than 40,000 students to new schools. Within six months, the nation’s second-largest school district lost 30,000 students, a good chunk of its white enrollment. The busing stopped; the divisions deepened.

Those racial fault lines had helped fuel the tax revolt that led to Proposition 13, the sweeping tax-cut measure that passed overwhelmingly in June 1978. The state lost more than a quarter of its total revenue. School districts’ ability to raise funds was crippled; their budgets shrank for the first time since the Depression. State government assumed control of allocating money to schools, which centralized decision-making in Sacramento.

Public education in California has never recovered, nowhere with more devastating impact than in Los Angeles, where a district now mostly low-income and Latino has failed generations of children most in need of help. The decades of frustration and impotence have boiled over in a strike with no clear endgame and huge long-term implications. The underlying question is: Can California ever have great public schools again?

The struggle in Los Angeles, a district so large it educates about 9 percent of all students in the state, will resonate around California. Oakland teachers are on the verge of a strike vote. Sacramento schools are on the verge of bankruptcy. The housing crisis has compounded teacher shortages. Los Angeles, like many districts, is losing students, and therefore dollars, even as it faces ballooning costs for underfunded pensions.

California still ranks low in average per-pupil spending, roughly half the amount spent in New York. California legislators have already filed bills proposing billions of dollars in additional aid, one of many competing pressures that face the new governor, Gavin Newsom, as he begins negotiations on his first state budget.

Unlike other states where teachers struck last year, California is firmly controlled by Democrats, for whom organized labor is a key ally. And the California teachers unions are among the most powerful lobbying force in Sacramento.

On paper, negotiations between the 31,000-member United Teachers of Los Angeles and the Los Angeles Unified School District center on traditional issues: salaries that have not kept pace, classes of more than 40 students, counselors and nurses with staggering caseloads. But the CONTINUE READING: Opinion | What’s Really at Stake in the Los Angeles Teachers’ Strike - The New York Times

CURMUDGUCATION: Jeanne Allen on LAUSD: Fire Them All #REDFORED #UTLAStrong #StrikeReady #March4Ed #WeAreLA

CURMUDGUCATION: Jeanne Allen on LAUSD: Fire Them All

Jeanne Allen on LAUSD: Fire Them All

The Center for Education Reform is a charter advocacy group whose most visible feature is Jeanne Allen, CEO and sometimes President of a board that includes pioneering privatize Chris Whittle. Allen loves charters and hates teachers unions. As you might guess, she has some thoughts about the LA teacher strike. After I wrote about the strike at Forbes.com, the Pinkston Group, a PR fit, shared some her thoughts with me. Let me just quote them in their entirety:

In a post-Janus world, teacher unions cannot exist and continue to gain members unless they demonstrate and prove their value. This strike, like others we're seeing around the country, is a desperate attempt by the union to maintain relevance in a day and age where they can
no longer require teachers to join.

California needs to break the district up into 100 different pieces, have much smaller units, and allow for the freedom, flexibility, access and innovation that’s happening in charters. If it weren’t for charter schools, education in L.A. would be at the level of Mississippi. The UTLA sees charters
as such a threat to the status quo that it is willing want to hurt students kids even more to score a victory against charters.

My advice to the district: Hold strong. Replace them all. If they want a dramatic impact on education, fire the union and begin to repair the schools, just like Reagan fired the air traffic controllers.

Allen's dream of a perfect union meeting

So that's what a leading charter advocate thinks about the strike. It's a union trick to hold onto power. Los Angeles would have terrible schools if not for the awesome charters. Teachers just want to hurt students so they can keep raking in the big bucks. There are, of course, no slices of evidence in the real world to back up any of this. Nor will turning LAUSD into hundreds of tiny districts serve anyone except the children of the wealthy.

But Allen's big solution is super dopey-- fire them all. The Reagan nod is not completely out of left field; Allen's website notes proudly that CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: Jeanne Allen on LAUSD: Fire Them All

The Meaning of the Los Angeles Teachers’ Strike | janresseger #UTLA #REDFORED #UTLAStrong #StrikeReady #March4Ed #WeAreLA

The Meaning of the Los Angeles Teachers’ Strike | janresseger

The Meaning of the Los Angeles Teachers’ Strike

Yesterday 30,000 Los Angeles school teachers went on strike. The Los Angeles Unified School District is the nation’s second largest, with 600,000 students enrolled in 900 schools.

The school district has been merely inching up its offers to more fully staff the meager institutions teachers have been describing—huge classes, inadequate student support, and a lack of enrichment staff.  But the District’s offer remains paltry. California’s schools have been underfunded since 1978, when Proposition 13 froze property taxes, and the situation has reached a level parents and teachers in most middle class communities would not tolerate.  The Los Angeles Times‘ Howard Blume reported on Friday: “The latest offer would provide a full-time nurse at every elementary school and lower class sizes by about two students at middle schools.  It builds on a proposal from Monday, in which the district also offered a small decrease in class sizes.  In that first proposal, maximum class sizes in grades four to six would drop from 36 to 35, and in high school from 42 to 39… Also, every secondary school would get a librarian, which some middle schools lack now. And high schools would get an extra academic counselor.”

Although the Los Angeles Unified School District has claimed an average class size of 26 students, the executive director of Class Size Matters, Leonie Haimson challenges the district’s numbers: “There is conflicting data on this, but suffice it to say that information on the LAUSD website supports the union’s position that average class sizes are probably far larger than 26 in every grade but K-3, with averages of more than 30 students per class in grades 4 through 8 and more than 40 in high school classes.  In addition a separate fact sheet prepared by the district says, ‘Nearly 60 percent of all Los Angeles Unified schools and 92 percent of the elementary schools have 29 or fewer students in each classroom.’ This means that 40 percent of Los Angeles public schools have 30 or more students per class on average.”

Haimson quotes a high school teacher, Glenn Sacks: “At my high school, for example, we have over 30 academic classes with 41 or more students, including nine English/writing classes with as many as 49 students, and three AP classes with 46 or more students.  One English teacher has well over 206 students—41+ per class.  A U.S. Government teacher has 52 students in his AP government class.  Writing is a key component of both classes—the sizes make it CONTINUE READING: The Meaning of the Los Angeles Teachers’ Strike | janresseger

Imbellus Assessments: Out of the Gate with $23M and McKinsey & Co. as Client | deutsch29

Imbellus Assessments: Out of the Gate with $23M and McKinsey & Co. as Client | deutsch29

Imbellus Assessments: Out of the Gate with $23M and McKinsey & Co. as Client

On January 11, 2019, Mark Bauerlein of the James B. Martin Center posted a piece entitled, “Be Wary of This Test,” about a testing startup, Imbellus, which has an impressive website deficient in any substance. Even so, Imbellus already has $23M in venture capital funding behind it.

According to Bloomberg, Imbellus was incorporated in 2015.

Imbellus is also on Twitter, with the last posting in June 2017.

The founder of Imbellus, 26-year-old Harvard dropout, Rebecca Kantar, is featured as one of Forbes’ “30 Under 30 2019 startups with $15 million plus in funding.”

What Kantar purports to do is create a cognitive assessment to rival– and apparently replace– the likes of the SAT and ACT. From Kantar’s Imbellus site:

Imbellus is reinventing how we measure human potential.

We build simulation-based assessments to evaluate how people think, not just what they know.

For nearly 100 years, college admissions tests have shaped our entire education system.

By rewriting this one line of code, we change the way the whole system operates.

Of course, Kantar cannot “rewrite the code” for ditching college admissions testing altogether; such rewriting would kill the market for her proposed product. No, she must keep the 100-years-of-college-admissions-testing market (for she hopes to make it her market) and simply offer a new and improved product.

But that product has yet to appear, even in fledgling form, for public inspection CONTINUE READING: Imbellus Assessments: Out of the Gate with $23M and McKinsey & Co. as Client | deutsch29