School Shooting Tracker: Counting school shootings since 2013

School Shooting Tracker: Counting school shootings since 2013
School Shooting Tracker: Counting school shootings since 2013
NBC News is tracking school shootings. Here’s what we found.

Since 2013, 61 people have been killed and 98 injured in 38 school shootings, according to a school shooting tracker that NBC News is making public. As of February 11, 2019, it has been four days since the last school shooting.

This tracker will be an ongoing effort to identify and contextualize shootings in all types of schools from kindergarten to college, across the U.S.

The tracker focuses on the segment of school shootings where an active shooter, with intent to harm, injures or kills at least one student or faculty member during school or at a school event. Read the full NBC News criteria for school shootings, including the FBI’s definition of an active shooter, below.

SCHOOL SHOOTINGS IN  

2019201820172016201520142013

This year, zero people have been killed and one injured in one school shooting.

THIS YEAR'S SHOOTINGS

On February 7, there was a shooting at Frederick Douglass High Schoolin Baltimore, Md. The shooter was a relative of a student. Read the article about the shooting.

WHY WE ARE DOING THIS

Every time a major school shooting occurs in the United States, the national conversation that immediately follows recounts the number of similar incidents that have happened to date that year. The chilling statistics, broadcast over the airwaves, published in newsprint and shared on the internet, vary depending on the news organization and its definition of a school shooting.

Several organizations and databases track gun violence in schools, including Everytown for Gun Safety, the Washington Post school shooting database, and the U.S. Department of Education. These publishers contribute to the public’s understanding of the effect of gun violence even though each might provide different numbers for school shootings that have occurred in a particular time period.

Dr. Daniel Webster, a professor at the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research, said that part of the difficulty in studying gun violence is determining what counts as a school shooting.

“Let's say someone is shot on school grounds in the evening,” Webster said. “It has nothing to do with the school day and doesn't CONTINUE READING: School Shooting Tracker: Counting school shootings since 2013

KEEPING OUR SCHOOLS SAFE: A PLAN TO STOP MASS SHOOTINGS AND END GUN VIOLENCE IN AMERICAN SCHOOLS - https://everytownresearch.org/documents/2019/02/keeping-our-schools-safe.pdf

Oakland Strike: Support Students and Educators With Bread for Ed – California Educator #Unite4OaklandKids #WeAreOEA #WeAreCTA #strikeready

Oakland Strike: Support Students and Educators With Bread for Ed – California Educator

Oakland Strike: Support Students and Educators With Bread for Ed

Oakland teachers are set to go on strike soon in their fight for the education their students deserve and the resources educators need to do this. (See Oakland Education Association [OEA] for updates, and CTA’s information on how to support OEA members.)

Bread for Ed is an coalition effort to provide food for students and educators during the strike. Oakland Unified has 37,000 students, of which about 80 percent qualify for free and reduced lunches. OEA has about 3,000 members. If students do not have access to food, they may cross the picket lines to get food at school. Since one of the critical factors in winning the strike is to have an impact on district Average Daily Attendance funding, keeping students fed during this time is hugely important.

Bread for Ed ties directly into the radical, racial justice work started by the Black Panther Party in the late 1960s. The free breakfast the Panthers gave to children in Oakland spurred the government and school districts to beef up their in-school food programs. In addition, the fight for free public education dates back to the demand during the Reconstruction period to educate the children of free African Americans. 

Bread for Ed’s goal is to raise $50,000 to sustain students and educators during a strike. You can make a donation and find ways to volunteer at the site.

 SUPPORTING ORGANIZATIONS 

Oakland Education Association

Democratic Socialists of America, East Bay

California Educators Rising 

International Socialist Organization, Northern California

Agape Fellowship

Bay Rising 

Bay Resistance

A note to all supporters: Per OEA’s request, funds will be collected by East Bay DSA and paid out to our local food provider partners, and remaining funds will be sent to the OEA’s member assistance fund (strike fund). East Bay DSA is a 501c4 so your donations are not tax-deductible.

Oakland Strike: Support Students and Educators With Bread for Ed – California Educator

Educators stage mass teach-in to stop incarceration of immigrant children - Education Votes

Educators stage mass teach-in to stop incarceration of immigrant children - Education Votes
Educators stage mass teach-in to stop incarceration of immigrant children

Hundreds of teachers of the year and other educators from across the country are participating in a daylong teach-in Feb. 17 in El Paso, Texas, to draw the nation’s attention to the more than 10,000 immigrant children detained in overcrowded federal facilities and at risk of “significant psychological injury.”

Teachers Against Child Detention (TACD), a group of teachers led by Mandy Manning, the 2018 National Teacher of the Year, argues that the mass detention of children “violates their fundamental rights and can cause irreparable damage to their well-being and development.”

Mandy Manning

“I would hope that people wouldn’t see locking up children as ‘Republican’ or ‘Democrat.’ These are children, and I’m a teacher,” said Manning, who teaches high English in Spokane, Wash.

Organizers of the 10-hour Teach-in for Freedom, who aim to have at least one teacher from each state, have asked participating teachers to prepare a block of instruction on child incarceration, immigration or some other related topic.

For educators, concern for the well-being and safety of children and students has always been at the heart of who they are. “When children come to our country, they belong to us collectively as Americans. Every child in our care deserves that same safety and nurturing that I strive to give to my students,” said Michael Soskil, the 2017 Pennsylvania Teacher of the Year.

Soskil said educators “are uniquely positioned to speak for children in a way that cuts through the political polarization that we see in our country right now. . . Keeping children safe so that they can reach their potential is what we do. It’s time for us to use our voice to demand our government stop incarcerating children, not because it is a Democratic issue or a Republican issue, but because we are the protectors of children in this country.”

“As teachers, our life’s work is protecting and nurturing children,” explains TACD on its website. “TACD calls on all educators to act as mandatory reporters and speak out against the atrocities CONTINUE READING: Educators stage mass teach-in to stop incarceration of immigrant children - Education Votes

BLM@Schools in Solidarity with Denver Educators on Strike! – Black Lives Matter At School #DCTAstrong #RedforEd #edcolo #coleg #copolitics #FairPayForTeachers

BLM@Schools in Solidarity with Denver Educators on Strike! – Black Lives Matter At School

BLM@Schools in Solidarity with Denver Educators on Strike!

The Black Lives Matter at School Coalition stands in solidarity with all Denver educators and school support personnel who go on strike today, Monday, February 11th.

Teachers across the country have continued to demonstrate that they cannot be expected to serve children and their families well when they do not earn enough money to take care of themselves and their families. Denver Public Schools (DPS), like school districts across the country, refuse to acknowledge that teacher salaries are not enough to cover the cost of living, and many teachers are forced to work two or three jobs just to make ends meet. We know that low pay for teachers makes it impossible to hire and retain Black teachers that are desperately needed to meet the needs of Black students.

As the child poverty rate continues to grow in all major cities, it is imperative that we demand adequate investments in ensuring all children receive a high-quality education. To that end, we must pay teachers a livable wage and support their efforts to bring a culturally rich curriculum to the classroom.

The current use of ProComp to offer bonuses to some Denver teachers is unsustainable because of the unpredictable effect it has on retaining all teachers, especially teachers CONTINUE READING: BLM@Schools in Solidarity with Denver Educators on Strike! – Black Lives Matter At School

Failing Charter Schools and the LAUSD Board’s Choice

Failing Charter Schools and the LAUSD Board’s Choice

Failing Charter Schools and the LAUSD Board’s Choice

Data doesn’t close opportunity gaps. People have to do that, so we now need people to take action.

– Carrie Hahnel, EdTrust-West

It is easy to blame a public school for failing to successfully educate a child. Teachers and schools make easy scapegoats in a society that consistently fails at addressing generational poverty, fails to support children with disabilities, and fails at balancing the need to nurture children with the necessity of putting food on the table. In California, we defunded our schools with Proposition 13 and are still wondering why these same schools are not educating children to our expectations.

Instead of addressing the root cause of failure, the education “reform” movement held up privatization as the solution. The charter school industry was created, resulting in even more money being diverted from public schools. Lacking proper oversight, these schools provided an environment where the health and safety of students could be endangered, funds could be diverted into the pockets of administrators and the parents of poor children could be taken advantage of. Education “reformers” treated these conditions as acceptable prices to pay for better educational opportunities for our children, or at least those without special education needs.

Predictably, it turns out that the charterization of the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) did not provide the miracle that was promised. The District has the highest number of charter schools in the country, with approximately 18% of its students in these publicly funded private schools. In the just-released list of 110 underperforming schools in the LAUSD, 20% were independent charter schools. Are we diverting $591.7 million from our public schools to get basically the same results?

In requesting that the state initiate a charter school moratorium, the CONTINUE READING: Failing Charter Schools and the LAUSD Board’s Choice

Cliff notes for new students of CA’s byzantine school system :: K-12 Daily :: The Essential Resource for Superintendents and the Cabinet

Cliff notes for new students of CA’s byzantine school system :: K-12 Daily :: The Essential Resource for Superintendents and the Cabinet

Cliff notes for new students of CA’s byzantine school system

(Calif.) Last month, a new two-year legislative session began in earnest, which means a lot of new faces on key policy and fiscal committees, and even some in leadership positions.

To help ease the transition—at least as far as education goes—the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst has issued a new guide to the state’s sprawling and dynamic school system.

Delivered in bite-size factoids, the white paper includes chapters on early education, the K-12 system, and California colleges, as well as the complex school facilities program.

The effort appears to be intended as a general resource rather than an all-inclusive authority, although the LAO also seemed to take care in reporting some items that might surprise its audience.

“Given California’s education system has so many facets, even those who have been immersed in it for years can at times feel daunted trying to understand it and keep apprised of all that is changing within it,” authors of the report said. “For state policy makers who need to be familiar with this system and who make important decisions that shape and reshape it, this report is designed for you. It is intended to help you learn as much as possible about the system as quickly as possible.”

Most lawmakers are no doubt well aware that K-12 expenditures represent the largest share of general fund spending. The governor’s proposed budget would provide nearly $59 billion for those needs in 2019-20—which is just under 41 percent of all general fund dollars.

The next closest program is health care, which would receive close to $30 billion next year, or about 21 percent of general fund dollars.

But state general fund money is just one source of support. Close to a third of the operational and capital funding comes from local property taxes, with federal money and other local sources providing the balance.

The LAO noted that California schools rely more heavily on state help than the average district across the U.S.

In the long-running debate about where California ranks nationally in education spending, the LAO CONTINUE READING: Cliff notes for new students of CA’s byzantine school system :: K-12 Daily :: The Essential Resource for Superintendents and the Cabinet

Chicago Public Schools Monitored Social Media for Signs… — ProPublica

Chicago Public Schools Monitored Social Media for Signs… — ProPublica

Chicago Public Schools Monitored Social Media for Signs of Violence, Gang Membership
School officials say the monitoring was about keeping students safe, not punishing them. But critics say it expanded the role of police in schools and increased surveillance of children.

This is a collaboration between ProPublica Illinois and WBEZ Chicago.

In January 2017, after a social media analyst for the Chicago Public Schools reviewed the Facebook profile of a Roosevelt High School student and began to suspect he might be in a gang, a police officer was summoned to the school to conduct an intervention. There wasn’t any imminent threat of violence, but the officer and a school district security official met with the student. They asked if he was in a gang.

“That is my business,” the student replied, according to a report from the intervention.

The officer, a member of the Chicago Police Department’s Gang School Safety Team, told the student he needed to be more respectful. The student said he was not in a gang but did hang around gang members.

The officer asked for their names, but the student wouldn’t give them. The officer asked if the student was considering joining a gang. He said he wasn’t sure. The student, the report concludes, “seemed to not be motivated and provided very short answers.”

Over the past four school years, more than 700 CPS students have been called into interventions like this one based on social media activity that points to their possible gang involvement. The interventions are one result of a $2.2 million award the district received in 2014 through the U.S. Department of Justice’s Comprehensive School Safety Initiative, which provides grants for violence CONTINUE READING: Chicago Public Schools Monitored Social Media for Signs… — ProPublica

Press Release: New Report Card Grades Each State On How Well it Protects Student Privacy | Parent Coalition for Student Privacy - https://www.studentprivacymatters.org/?p=1885

Big Education Ape: 2018 Year in Review – The K-12 Cybersecurity Resource Center - https://bigeducationape.blogspot.com/2019/02/2018-year-in-review-k-12-cybersecurity.html

Denver teachers set to strike over better pay and working conditions | US news | The Guardian #DCTAstrong #RedforEd #edcolo #coleg #copolitics #FairPayForTeachers

Denver teachers set to strike over better pay and working conditions | US news | The Guardian

Denver teachers set to strike over better pay and working conditions
Colorado city educators would be the latest in a broad wave of strikes and protests across the country battling for funding

School teachers in Denver, Colorado, are set to strike on Monday in the latest of a wave of actions that has swept the sector in the past year as educators battle for better pay and working conditions.

In Denver, teacher salaries have been steadily decreasing, leading to high turnover in the district. Teachers are forced to financially rely on bonuses and incentives beyond their control as part of a system called ProComp, first enacted in 2005.

“The bonuses and the amounts change every year. This has led to a problem where teacher salaries are different every year, and teachers, including myself, have been getting paid less every year,” said Michelle Garrison, a teacher at Farrell B Howell Early Childhood Education-8th grade school “You don’t ever get a paycheck that’s the same. It makes it hard for budgeting.”

Tanessa Wilson, a teacher at John H Amesse Elementary in Denver cited an example that teachers at her school missed out on a $1,500 bonus this year because students who receive free and reduced lunches decreased by 0.2%.

“These incentives are based on factors that are out of our control and we don’t think that is fair,” said Wilson.

Some 93% of the Denver Classroom Teachers Association membership voted to authorize a strike last month in the midst of new contract negotiations.

“The current model isn’t working for teachers, it isn’t working for students,” CONTINUE READING: Denver teachers set to strike over better pay and working conditions | US news | The Guardian

Winning the War for Science Education | Live Long and Prosper

Winning the War for Science Education | Live Long and Prosper

Winning the War for Science Education

With about a dozen Democrats running for president (and a few more still “undecided”), there’s no doubt that the race for the 2020 presidency has begun. What are their goals for public education? What are their goals for returning us to science-based policies? Before we look to the future, however, let’s take a quick look at the past…

THE CAMPAIGN: 2016

During the last presidential election campaign, the candidates rarely discussed science and education beyond, a few topics; The Republican candidates were in favor of school choice and didn’t “believe in” climate change; The Democratic candidates were in favor of expanded early childhood education, ending the student debt crisis, and gave lip service to “doing something” about climate change. Once the candidates were chosen, however, this discussion effectively stopped, and we were treated to a daily media deluge of insults and invective.

SCIENCE AND EDUCATION: NO CHANGE

Just like in 2016, the positions of the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates on America’s public schools and climate change are vague, though supportive. The Republican incumbent, along with his party-mates, is continuing to call for school privatization and to take an anti-science position on nearly everything except the “space force.”

In his 2019 State of the Union Speech, the President was too concerned with investigations and with ignoring U.S. intelligence organizations to even mention climate change.

More Trump fantasyland as the world fries

Just as scientists are raising alarms about the disintegration of Antarctica’s massive ice shelves and ice sheets, Trump said nothing about global warming. Maybe that’s for the better: Whenever he addresses the issue, it is usually to mock those who care about the planet’s already well-documented, rapid environmental changes. Australia’s Great Barrier Reef is dying before the world’s eyes, and the leader of the Earth’s most powerful nation has nothing helpful to say about modern society’s complicity in the catastrophes to come, let alone how to lower climate risks.

He did, however, discuss education — for all of about 10 seconds. He spoke a CONTINUE READING: Winning the War for Science Education | Live Long and Prosper

Denver Teachers Strike Over Base Pay | 89.3 KPCC #DCTAstrong #RedforEd #edcolo #coleg #copolitics #FairPayForTeachers

Denver Teachers Strike Over Base Pay | 89.3 KPCC

Denver Teachers Strike Over Base Pay

Denver schoolteachers are going on strike today. The strike comes after more than a year of negotiations between the teachers union and the school district, that have focused on how to calculate base pay. The city hasn't experienced a teacher strike in 25 years.

The strike will affect 71,000 students across 147 schools, Colorado Public Radio reports. Most Denver Public Schools will remain open, and the district has readied hundreds of additional substitute teachers. It's unclear how many of the district's more than 5,000 teachers will actually walk out.

It will cost about $400,000 a day to keep the schools running during the strike, Gov. Jared Polis said. That's about 1-2 percent of the budget for the school year if the strike lasts a week, the Colorado Sun reports.

"We will strike Monday for our students and for our profession, and perhaps then DPS will get the message and return to the bargaining table with a serious proposal aimed at solving the teacher turnover crisis in Denver," said Henry Roman, president of the Denver Classroom Teachers Association, the AP reports.

The fundamental disagreement concerns how base pay is calculated. Twenty years ago, the district first piloted the "Professional Compensation System for Teachers," known by most as ProComp. According to the Denver Post, the system paid teachers CONTINUE READING: Denver Teachers Strike Over Base Pay | 89.3 KPCC

Betsy DeVos loves charter schools. But there’s little love lost in lots of places. What’s happening and why. - The Washington Post

Betsy DeVos loves charter schools. But there’s little love lost in lots of places. What’s happening and why. - The Washington Post

Betsy DeVos loves charter schools. But there’s little love lost in lots of places. What’s happening and why.

  

In the largest public school system in the country, New York City Chancellor Richard Carranza recently scolded charter school supporters for disparaging traditional public schools. The year before, he had struck a far friendlier tone.

In the second-largest public school district in the country, Los Angeles teachers ended a six-day strike in January with a key concession from pro-charter Superintendent Austin Beutner: a commitment to call for a statewide cap on new charters until their effect on district schools can be assessed.

In the third-largest school district in the country, Chicago teachers at several charter schools are on strike, the second time within a month it has happened in the city. The December strike there was the first in the charter sector, which is largely (and intentionally) non-unionized and pays most teachers far less than district schools.

This country is nearly 30 years into an experiment with charter schools, which are publicly financed but privately operated, sometimes by for-profit companies. Supporters first described charters as competitive vehicles to push traditional public schools to reform. Over time, that narrative changed and charters were wrapped into the zeitgeist of “choice” for families whose children wanted alternatives to troubled district schools.

Today, about 6 percent of America’s schoolchildren attend charter schools, with 44 states plus the District of Columbia, Guam and Puerto Rico having passed laws permitting them. Some states have only a few charters while some cities are saturated. In Los Angeles, 20 percent of children attend charters. In New York, it’s 10 percent. Charter backers say the movement is an important and sustainable feature of America’s education landscape and any problems it faces are expected growing pains.

Yet the movement, which has enjoyed Republican and Democratic support — including hundreds of millions of dollars from the Obama administration — seems to be at an inflection point as supporters and detractors recognize that charters are not the panacea backers had long suggested. CONTINUE READING: Betsy DeVos loves charter schools. But there’s little love lost in lots of places. What’s happening and why. - The Washington Post

Does TFA (Illegally) Take A Side On Recent Teacher Strikes? | Gary Rubinstein's Blog

Does TFA (Illegally) Take A Side On Recent Teacher Strikes? | Gary Rubinstein's Blog

Does TFA (Illegally) Take A Side On Recent Teacher Strikes?

When teachers in a school district decide to go on strike, Teach For America corps members who teach in public schools in that district have a decision to make.  This happened in the 2012 Chicago strike, the recent Los Angeles strike, and the upcoming Denver strike.

Teach For America says, and they have to as a non-profit, that they cannot take a position, one way or the other, on the strike.  They can neither encourage nor discourage their corps members from participating in these strikes, by law.

So it seems, then, to be a pretty easy decision for corps member.  Considering that they would be risking becoming pariahs in their own schools after the few days of the strike, it would not be worth it to cross the picket line.  But there is another caveat — Teach For America corps members are also part of something called AmeriCorps, which provides them additional money, I think $10,000 over the two years.  Now AmeriCorps has some additional rules and one of them says that you cannot participate in a strike when you are getting credit for AmeriCorps hours.

In 2012, during the Chicago teacher strike, Teach For America made it very clear that corps members who strike would not be penalized in their AmeriCorps grant because the number of hours that they teach is so far beyond what is required by AmeriCorps that they CONTINUE READING: Does TFA (Illegally) Take A Side On Recent Teacher Strikes? | Gary Rubinstein's Blog

You Don't Have To Lie (Hire More Black Teachers, Maybe) | The Jose Vilson

You Don't Have To Lie (Hire More Black Teachers, Maybe) | The Jose Vilson

YOU DON’T HAVE TO LIE (HIRE MORE BLACK TEACHERS, MAYBE)

n Friday, I had the honor and pleasure of speaking at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, NYC with student activists Xoya David and Joshua Brown and writer-friend-luminary Nikole Hannah-Jones. When I got the invite from Brian Jones, I was in the midst of finishing one of my more triumphant performances in service of the profession. I was also shaking off the uncertainties of having a teacher improvement plan the prior school year. I’m holding the tensions of being a “national education leader” with the constant disappointment in my school district and negation of my professional decisions. Even a week before this event, I had no idea what I’d have to say. I struggle with systemic issues outwardly and battle with personal issues inwardly. But I was given the opportunity to tell New York City about itself in a week dedicated to liberation of the African diaspora in a space dedicated to that effort.

When someone asks me whether only Black teachers should teach Black children, I said, “It depends.” The person seemed to mock my response and ran out of the event. I didn’t lie.

The pros are plentiful. There’s more research showing the positive effects of Black teachers on all children, but especially Black children. Of course, white teachers (and others) may feel agitated by inference, but Black teachers are one antidote to the proliferation of white supremacy in our classrooms through pedagogy, curriculum, and assessment. Having a teacher who wholeheartedly CONTINUE READING: You Don't Have To Lie (Hire More Black Teachers, Maybe) | The Jose Vilson

Jersey Jazzman: The Failure of State Control in Camden, NJ

Jersey Jazzman: The Failure of State Control in Camden, NJ
The Failure of State Control in Camden, NJ

In my last blog, I wrote about the NJ Auditor's report on Camden's "Renaissance" schools. These charter-district hybrids, run by three of the region's biggest charter operators -- Mastery, Uncommon, and KIPP -- were supposed to show definitively that charter schools could serve all of the children in a neighborhood. They weren't going to "skim the cream" any more; instead, they'd take every child, no matter their family background or educational need.

Well, it turns out the Renaissance promise was just a lot of hot air: according to the Auditor, fewer than half of neighborhood students are enrolled in their neighborhood renaissance school. Thanks to Camden's "universal enrollment" system, the Renaissance schools appear to be doing a completely different job than the public district schools.

How could this happen? Why didn't the Camden City Public Schools administration pick up on this problem? How could they have missed this? Weren't they paying attention?

As it so happens, the Auditor, Steven Eells, has been busy: not only did he and his staff examine the Renaissance schools -- they looked at the district as a whole. And what they found isn't very encouraging (all emphases below are mine):

The lack of continuity within and oversight of the district’s business office functions has resulted in a lack of control and accountability of the district’s finances. The lack of stability in administrative positions inhibited the development of long-term goals and the ability to establish and enforce internal CONTINUE READING: