Latest News and Comment from Education

Tuesday, January 29, 2019

Ten of 15 Cyber Charter Schools in PA Are Operating Without a Charter – Close Them All | gadflyonthewallblog

Ten of 15 Cyber Charter Schools in PA Are Operating Without a Charter – Close Them All | gadflyonthewallblog

Ten of 15 Cyber Charter Schools in PA Are Operating Without a Charter – Close Them All


Cyber charters schools are an experiment that failed.
First, let’s get straight exactly what we’re talking about here.
Like all charter schools, these are contracted institutions. In fact, that’s what charter means – they’re independent businesses that sign a deal with the state to teach kids.
So they’re publicly financed but privately run. And in the case of cyber charters, they agree to educate children online without the benefit of a physical building.
Students access lessons via computer or other device, submit work electronically, get virtual feedback and assessment.
At best, these institutions are the grade school equivalent of the University of Phoenix – good only for independent, self-motivated learners. At worst, they’re the kiddie version of Trump University – a total scam.
In Pennsylvania, 10 of the state’s 15 cyber charter schools are operating with expired charters, according to a report by the Philadelphia Inquirer.
That’s incredibly significant – especially for an industry that enrolls about 35,000 students across the state.
These are charter schools operating without a charter. They only get the right to CONTINUE READING: Ten of 15 Cyber Charter Schools in PA Are Operating Without a Charter – Close Them All | gadflyonthewallblog



Announcing the 2019 Curriculum Resource Guide – Black Lives Matter At School

Announcing the 2019 Curriculum Resource Guide – Black Lives Matter At School

Announcing the 2019 Curriculum Resource Guide


The national Black Lives Matter At School coalition’s brilliant Curriculum Committee worked this year to bring you lessons for every grade level that relate to the 13 principles of Black Lives Matter. Here now is the 2019 Curriculum Resource Guide–free, downloadable lessons to challenge racism, oppression and build happy, healthy classrooms.
Visit http://www.BlackLivesMatterAtSchool.com to find other resources for the BLM@School Week of Action…And to let us know which lessons you loved and used in your class this year.
Enjoy!
Announcing the 2019 Curriculum Resource Guide – Black Lives Matter At School


Andre Perry: Schools should not be battlegrounds for Trump’s fake war

Schools should not be battlegrounds for Trump’s fake war

Schools should not be battlegrounds for Trump’s fake war

Schools bear the brunt of the immigration crisis

Image result for Schools should not be battlegrounds for IMMIGRATION
We’ve all seen images of migrant caravans comprised of thousands of asylum seekers from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador making their way to the U.S. to find refuge from the poverty and violence in their home countries. “This,” according to President Trump via tweet, “is an invasion of our Country and our Military is waiting for you!”
Trump’s words have cast our neighbors as enemies.
And his inflammatory use of language is infecting others. An October 2018 Associated Press headline dubbed the caravan an “army of migrants.” While the AP changed the headline after the backlash they received, a commenter on Fox News Network’s Fox and Friends doubled down on the sentiment, saying, “They [terrorists] are a threat to our national security because today, war — it’s not only countries that go to war, it is groups such as ISIS, Hezbollah, Hamas, the Taliban, and they have declared war openly against the United States.” The Fox News commenters intimated that terrorists were among those in the migrant caravan.
To be clear, there isn’t an emergency at the border. Immigrants seeking asylum aren’t aiming to hurt us. Inward migration has slowed significantly, declining to its lowest levels in the past decade, according to a 2018 Pew Research Center report. Security seems to be working; there have been more arrests along the border than ever before. However, Trump’s manufactured war does have casualties: children. Thousands of immigrant youth have been traumatized from being separated from their families because of the administration’s policy to detain and prosecute illegal border crossers — even those with children in tow.
The maker of the policies may flit from one subject to the next on a whim, but schools will bear the brunt of the immigration crisis for CONTINUE READING: Schools should not be battlegrounds for Trump’s fake war

Lessons from the LA Teachers Strike

Lessons from the LA Teachers Strike

Lessons from the LA Teachers Strike


By Jim Miller
After a little more than a week of striking, the United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) captured the public’s imagination, helped transform the national narrative about education, won a solid new contract, and positioned themselves well for the battles to come.
For those of us in education this was an inspiring moment that showed the potential for smart organizing and activism to change the game in important ways.
As I wrote last week, UTLA was taking a lead from both the social movements of the sixties and other, more recent examples of militant protests and strikes by fellow educators elsewhere in the United States from Chicago to West Virginia.
The LA strike was a light in the greater darkness of the present American social and political landscape, and it offers some important lessons not just for teachers but for all unionists, Democratic politicians, and progressive activists moving forward.
What did we learn?
Social Justice Unionism Gets the Goods: By making real, solid community alliances and incorporating them into their demands, UTLA won over 80% approval by the public.  Thus, despite decades of anti-union “teachers. vs the children” narratives promoted by corporate education reformers and frequently parroted by the media, the teachers’ efforts to reach out to parents, community groups, and other allies paid off big time with an incredible display of solidarity coming from all quarters in Los Angeles and the country at large.  That doesn’t happen by accident; it takes long, hard, savvy organizing and commitment to a broader vision of social justice than simple bread and butter unionism allows.
As a recent Nation (insert link: https://www.thenation.com/article/los-angeles-teachers-strike-utla-organizing-solidarity/) piece on the teachers’ organizing efforts observes:
UTLA’s strategy has hinged upon making sure that their message is heard by parents, CONTINUE READING: Lessons from the LA Teachers Strike

‘It’s every educator standing up’: Virginia teachers march in Richmond - The Washington Post

‘It’s every educator standing up’: Virginia teachers march in Richmond - The Washington Post

‘It’s every educator standing up’: Virginia teachers march in Richmond


 Hundreds of Virginia teachers descended on the state Capitol on Monday, following in the footsteps of educators nationwide who have launched a wave of activism highlighting the plight of public education.
They protested low wages that force educators into second jobs, decrepit school buildings that sometimes leave students shivering and a dearth of school support staff — issues that have animated protests in Los Angeles, West Virginia, Oklahoma and elsewhere.
“We’ve got kids in crumbling school buildings. We’ve got students with textbooks 15 years old. We’ve got teachers and support staff paid far below the national average. We’ve got technology that either doesn’t work or doesn’t exist,” said Jim Livingston, president of the Virginia Education Association, the state’s largest teachers union. “It’s time to fund our future.”
They were clad in red, the color worn in teacher protests that began last year in Republican-led states, as they marched through downtown streets flanked by police. They spanned several city blocks, halting traffic as people watched and captured video from balconies and stoops, the public library and a YMCA.

They carried signs that declared “Education is a right” and chanted “Fund our schools!”
They marched until they crowded the steps of the Capitol, where speakers including Virginia Teacher of the Year Rodney Robinson waited.
Educators demonstrate for better pay and working conditions in Virginia. (Julia Rendleman for The Washington Post)
Unlike the demonstrations in other states, the Virginia march wasn’t expected to evolve into a days-long walkout or strike. Sarah Pedersen, a march organizer, described the march as a first step to put the General Assembly “on notice.”
Public school enrollment has grown 5 percent in the past decade, while the amount of money the state spends on each student has fallen, according to the Commonwealth Institute for Fiscal Analysis, a Richmond think tank. That has forced school systems to CONTINUE READING: ‘It’s every educator standing up’: Virginia teachers march in Richmond - The Washington Post



The Science of the Human Brain – Sam Chaltain

The Science of the Human Brain – Sam Chaltain

THE SCIENCE OF THE HUMAN BRAIN


It is the most complex living system in the known universe, built of hundreds of billions of cells, each as complicated as a city.
It is the primary author of the deeply personal story we tell ourselves about who we are and why we are here.
And it never, ever, shows us the world as it truly is — only as we need it to be.
This is the conundrum of the human brain, which is why understanding its peculiar science is a prerequisite towards our ability to imagine, and then build, a better world.
Consider this: Human beings — or, for that matter, any other life form on earth — see only what has helped them survive in the past. The way we make sense of the present is still being shaped by the innovations, fears and assumptions our ancestors made hundreds, thousands, even millions of years ago. And yet our success as a species has occurred not in spite of our inability to see reality, but because of it.
As neuroscientist Beau Lotto puts it, human beings didn’t evolve to see the world objectively; they evolved to “not die.”  And all living things have managed to “not die” thus far by developing different perceptual overlays on the same planetary backdrop. Bats developed echolocation. Cephalopods learned to change colors. Birds got GPS. And we developed a wet computer with a parallel processor — otherwise known as a bi-hemispheric brain.
Why did our brains evolve that way, with a singular blueprint stamped out twice? No one knows for sure, although psychiatrist Iain McGlichrist believes it happened to help us “attend to the world in two completely different ways, and in so doing to bring two different worlds into being,” and two different ways of surviving life’s slings and arrows.  
“In the one,” he explains, “we experience — the live, complex, embodied, world of individual, always unique beings, forever in flux, a net of interdependencies, forming and reforming wholes, a world in which we are deeply connected. In the other we ‘experience’ our experience in a special way: a ‘re-presented’ version of it, containing now static, separable, bounded, but essentially fragmented entities, grouped into classes, on which predictions can be based.
“These are not different ways of thinking about the world,” McGilchrist claims. “They are different ways of beingin the world. If the left hemisphere is the hemisphere of ‘what’, the right hemisphere, with its preoccupation with context, the relational aspects of experience, emotion and the nuances of expression, could be said to be the hemisphere of ‘how.’”
Who we perceive ourselves to be is a mashup of these different perceptual overlays — ostensibly equal parts logic and emotion. And yet the reality of the modern world, says McGilchrist, is that our way of seeing has gotten out of balance.
For a number of reasons, we have become left-hemisphere heavy.
“My thesis is that for us as human beings there are two fundamentally opposed realities, two different modes of CONTINUE READING: The Science of the Human Brain – Sam Chaltain

Teacher Strikes Shift Politics of Charter School Agenda | OurFuture.org by People's Action

Teacher Strikes Shift Politics of Charter School Agenda | OurFuture.org by People's Action

Teacher Strikes Shift Politics of Charter School Agenda


The emergence of charter schools as an important consideration in teacher collective bargaining agreements, and the recognition of charters as a form of privatization, are two major developments in the education policy and politics of choice.
Republican lawmakers held a press conference on Capitol Hill to kick off National School Choice Week, an annual event that began in 2011 under President Obama who proclaimed it as a time to “recognize the role public charter schools play in providing America’s daughters and sons with a chance to reach their fullest potential.” This year, Democratic lawmakers took a pass on the celebration. You can thank striking teachers for that.

In the latest teacher strike in Los Angeles, the nation’s second-largest school system, some 30,000 teachers walked off the job saying unchecked growth of charter schools and charters’ lack of transparency and accountability have become an unsustainable drain on the public system’s financials. The teachers have included in their demands a cap on charter school growth, along with other demands, such as increased teacher pay, reduced class sizes, less testing, and more counselors, nurses, librarians, and psychologists.
The L.A. teachers’ opposition to charter schools is just the latest voice in a growing chorus of public school teachers calling on politicians to do more to support the public schools we have rather than piling more dollars and accolades onto a competitive charter school industry. And CONTINUE READING: Teacher Strikes Shift Politics of Charter School Agenda | OurFuture.org by People's Action


What Do We Want? – redqueeninla

What Do We Want? – redqueeninla

What Do We Want? 



When Do We Want Her?
When The Vote-By-Mail ballots drop next week.
Or At-The-Polls on March 5, 2019
Marches aren’t particularly reasoned or reasoning affairs. There’s a lot of shouting and assertions amidst a dearth of nuance.


Why should voters in a school district that’s approximately 3/4 Latino vote for a grey-haired, white-skinned, LGBTQ, retired State Legislator?  That is:
Why Do We Want Her?
Because: (1) Experience (2) Competence (3) Fearsomeness (4) Integrity
Jackie Goldberg has a prodigious knowledge of Education Politics. She can talk just about anybody under the table with State bill numbers and legislative strategies and nuanced understanding of where education legislation helps and who is opposed to it and why and how to move things along. That goes for locally as well as in Sacramento. She understands what underlies esoteric funding schemes and shortfalls.  She comprehends what drives and motivates teachers and students and communities. And Unions. And Union members.

It is critical to flip the open LAUSD5 seat away from Charter interests and back to the Public’s. There is no way that had Jackie Goldberg been appointedto fill Board District’s 5’s disgraced charter-representative Rodriguez’s seat that the Kabuki of January’s historic strike would have been fully enacted. The tremendous and valuable gains for public education that were assuredly won, CONTINUE READING: What Do We Want? – redqueeninla




Basic Dilemma Teachers, Principals, Superintendents Face: Supervising Others While Seeking Approval | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Basic Dilemma Teachers, Principals, Superintendents Face: Supervising Others While Seeking Approval | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Basic Dilemma Teachers, Principals, Superintendents Face: Supervising Others While Seeking Approval 


In the second week of my superintendency in the mid-1970s–I came from outside the district and had no entourage–the head of the principals group (there were 35 schools in the district), met me in the stairwell of the Administration building and we chatted a few moments about the weather and the beginning of the school year. He leaned toward me and whispered whether I would like to join a Friday night poker game with a small group of veteran principals. He added that my predecessor and key district office administrators had played weekly for years. I paused and said: “Let me think about it.”
After dinner when the kids had gone upstairs to do their homework, I told my wife about the invitation and we discussed it thoroughly. My wife pointed out that the invitation was a very important gesture on the part of veteran administrators who had been clearly unenthusiastic when the School Board appointed me. I was an outsider and first-time superintendent who had worked across the river in the largely black D.C. schools for nearly a decade as a high school teacher and district administrator. She pointed out that it was a splendid opportunity for me to satisfy a strong personal need that we had discussed prior to taking the post. That is, I wanted to secure the respect and approval–and eventually trust–of those I am expected to lead and who report to me. We had talked about the tension between seeking approval of subordinates who I depended upon while at the same time being in a position where I would have to judge their performance annually. She and I chewed on that dilemma for a long time.
Then she reminded me that Friday nights were supposed to be set aside for the family’s Sabbath meal. In offering me the job, I had asked the Board to keep Fridays clear of any meetings or assignments. They had agreed. So after further discussion, my wife and I decided that I would the forego Friday night poker games. I called the head of the principals’ group, thanked him for the invitation and told him I would not be able to join the group.
In the seven years that I served the district, 30 of those 35 principals retired, transferred to other posts, left the district, or I fired. I never regretted that CONTINUE READING: Basic Dilemma Teachers, Principals, Superintendents Face: Supervising Others While Seeking Approval | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice



Here’s how to check your student’s school-issued GSuite account. | Parent Coalition for Student Privacy

Here’s how to check your student’s school-issued GSuite account. | Parent Coalition for Student Privacy

HERE’S HOW TO CHECK YOUR STUDENT’S SCHOOL-ISSUED GSUITE ACCOUNT.



Google defends Gmail data sharing, gives few details on violations-Reuters

With mounting concerns about school safety, screen addiction,  screen time’s known health and brain effects, increase in internet crimes against children, along with hyper focused national attention on data misuselocation trackingbreachesGmail data sharing, and data privacy–what about schoolchildren?
As this Google Transparency Project explains, Google is promoting itself via GSuite products and Apps into many classrooms across America (and the globe).  What is Google doing with student data?  Why is Google allowed to track Location, Voice Activity, Web & App Activity, Device Information, YouTube videos Searched and Watched of K-12 school children? How are these data being used and shared?
What data are being collected and stored (and shared?) via your child’s school issued Google GSuite account? We’ll show you how to start checking.
In August of 2018 Missouri Education Watchdog wrote this articledetailing how one Springfield, Missouri family, discovered that their school district’s Google’s GSuite platform was collecting and storing surprising amounts of personal data about students and, apparently even storing information from parents’ and family members’ personal accounts (family members’ passwords to banking, work, shopping, bills).  Others reported on this issue here and here.
Missouri Education Watchdog recently followed up with a story highlighting a group of parents and educators asking to stop online advertisements to students.  The blog documents many pop ads(some very inappropriate) that students are receiving when logged into their school accounts, including recommendations from CONTINUE READING: Here’s how to check your student’s school-issued GSuite account. | Parent Coalition for Student Privacy



Seattle Schools Community Forum: City IS Going to Give K-12 Education Dollars to Charter Schools

Seattle Schools Community Forum: City IS Going to Give K-12 Education Dollars to Charter Schools

Seattle Schools Community Forum: City IS Going to Give K-12 Education Dollars to Charter Schools 




I will be writing more about this in the coming days but for now, I told you so.

I attended the press conference about the Mayor signing the City Council's resolution of support for the SPS levies.  I asked the Mayor directly whether the City's oversight committee for its education levy had voted to share levy dollars with charter schools.  She waved the question off and said we could talk "offline."

I had asked Dwane Chappelle before the press conference and he told me we could talk afterwards.

Both of them exited the room before I could talk to either of them.  Here's what I was later told in an email:

Dwane Chappelle, Director of the Department of Education and Early Learning. 


“The Families, Education, Preschool, and Promise plan invests to close the opportunity gap across our City.  The Department of Education and Early Learning will allow all public schools and all public school students to apply for levy funds. This decision includes public charter schools in Seattle, which represent approximately 800 students at public charter schools,  and the more than 54,000 students at Seattle Public Schools. This decision was made after consulting with the City’s lawyers and is consistent with past precedent which allowed a preschool organization affiliated with the public charter school to apply for Levy funding and ultimately receive funds. We look forward to continuing our critical work through a strong partnership with the City and District’s to advance our shared vision and values.”
On background for your other questions. This decision is part of the of the Implementation and Evaluation Plan for the Families, Education, Preschool and Promise Levy which will be transmitted to Council for approval in the coming weeks.
So my thought for now is to write the City Council and say no to this.  Council@seattle.gov.
Some of them are running for office again - maybe it should be pointed out to  CONTINUE READING: 
Seattle Schools Community Forum: City IS Going to Give K-12 Education Dollars to Charter Schools

CURMUDGUCATION: The Truth About Davos, AI, and Firing All the Humans

CURMUDGUCATION: The Truth About Davos, AI, and Firing All the Humans

The Truth About Davos, AI, and Firing All the Humans


This article ran last week, and it made my ICYMI list Sunday, but you really, really need to see this.

Kevin Roos went to Davos for the New York Times to see what the masters of the universe are up to, and his most striking discoveries was "The Hidden Automation Agenda of the Davos Elite."

The short version is simple. In public, they are going to talk about how much Artificial Intelligence will improve the workplace. In private, they talk about how AI will let them slash the human workforce to the bone. From the article:

All over the world, executives are spending billions of dollars to transform their businesses into lean, digitized, highly automated operations. They crave the fat profit margins automation can deliver, and they see A.I. as a golden ticket to savings, perhaps by letting them whittle departments with thousands of workers down to just a few dozen.

“People are looking to achieve very big numbers,” said Mohit Joshi, the president of Infosys, a technology and consulting firm that helps other businesses automate their operations. “Earlier they had incremental, 5 to 10 percent goals in reducing their work force. Now they’re saying, ‘Why can’t we do it with 1 percent of the people we have?’”



Is there any reason to think the advent of AI in education is different? Of course not-- education is a field where the single greatest expense is personnel. If your goal is to bust free some of that sweet sweet public education money, getting rid of live, trained teachers and replace them with a couple of cheap mentors.

Look at it this way. Since the beginning of the modern ed reform era, the dream has been to cut staff costs.

We were going to "teacher proof" classrooms with instruction in a box, complete with scripts, so CONTINUE READING: 
CURMUDGUCATION: The Truth About Davos, AI, and Firing All the Humans




Linda Darling-Hammond Disappoints in Cleveland City Club Address | janresseger

Linda Darling-Hammond Disappoints in Cleveland City Club Address | janresseger

Linda Darling-Hammond Disappoints in Cleveland City Club Address


Linda Darling-Hammond is a national figure in the field of education policy.  She is the President and CEO of the Learning Policy Institute at Stanford University, where she is an emeritus professor of education, and she headed up President Obama’s transition team for education. She is the author of several books including The Flat World and Education, in which she declares: “One wonders what we might accomplish as a nation if we could finally set aside what appears to be our de facto commitment to inequality so profoundly at odds with our rhetoric of equity, and put the millions of dollars spent continually arguing and litigating into building a high quality education system for all children.” (p. 164)
Last Friday, Darling-Hammond delivered the weekly address at the Cleveland City Club.  I was disappointed.
Darling-Hammond declared that “we have left No Child Left Behind (NCLB) behind” and implied that its 2015 replacement, the federal Every Student Succeeds Act, has erased the punitive philosophy of its NCLB predecessor.  Darling-Hammond then devoted most of her prepared remarks to Ohio’s adoption of one of her own research priorities—social-emotional learning—into the state’s new five-year strategic plan for education.  Darling-Hammond chaired the Aspen Institute’s National Commission on Social, Emotional, and Academic Development, which on January 15, 2019 published its final report, From a Nation at Risk to a Nation at Hope.
Of course one cannot blame an academic for focusing a major policy address on her own particular research interest. But I was disappointed nonetheless, because Darling-Hammond’s remarks so completely neglected what I and many others believe are alarming realities today CONTINUE READING: Linda Darling-Hammond Disappoints in Cleveland City Club Address | janresseger