Schools That Hinder Opt Outs Are Participating in Their Own Demise | gadflyonthewallblog

Schools That Hinder Opt Outs Are Participating in Their Own Demise | gadflyonthewallblog

Schools That Hinder Opt Outs Are Participating in Their Own Demise

You can’t be a public school and still ignore the will of the people.

That’s the problem at too many districts across the country where narrow-minded administrators are waging an all out war on parents opting their children out of standardized testing.

The federal government still requires all states to give high stakes tests to public school students in grades 3-8 and once in high school. So states require their districts to give the tests – despite increasing criticism over the assessments’ validity, age appropriateness, racial and economic bias and the very manner in which the scores are used to justify narrowing the curriculum, school privatization, funding cuts, teacher firings and closing buildings serving the most underprivileged children.

In response, parents from coast to coast continue to fight the havoc being forced upon their communities by refusing the tests for their children.

Yet instead of welcoming this rush of familial interest, at some schools we find principals, superintendents and every level of functionary in between doing whatever they can to impede parental will.

Most administrators don’t actually go so far as out right refusal of a parent’s demand to opt out their children.

That’s especially true in states where the right to opt out is codified in the law.

Three states – California, Utah, and Wisconsin – have enacted legislation permitting CONTINUE READING: Schools That Hinder Opt Outs Are Participating in Their Own Demise | gadflyonthewallblog

Peter Cunningham Leaves EdPost CEO Position to… Citizen Stewart(?) | deutsch29

Peter Cunningham Leaves EdPost CEO Position to… Citizen Stewart(?) | deutsch29

Peter Cunningham Leaves EdPost CEO Position to… Citizen Stewart(?)

In 2014, billionaire Eli Broad approached former US ed sec Arne Duncan crony and assistant, Peter Cunningham, to create a multi-million-dollar-funded blog, Education Post.

New Orleans-based ed reformer, Christ Stewart (known as Citizen Stewart), was a founding member of EdPost; according to EdPost’s 2014, 2015, and 2016 tax forms (note that EdPost’s formal name is Results in Education Foundation, or RIEF), Stewart was compensated a total of $422,925 for 30 months at 40 hrs/wk in his role as “outreach and external affairs director.”

That is some blog.

Chris Stewart

In October 2018, Cunningham became campaign manager for Chicago mayoral candidate, Bill Daley. There was a runoff, and Daley wasn’t part of it.

So, now what for Cunningham?

Not the CEO position of EdPost. Cunningham plans to remain on the EdPost board even as Chris Stewart becomes CEO.

In researching Chris Stewart’s EdPost history for this post, I compared his current EdPost bio with his EdPost bio from March 30, 2019.

One difference caught my attention: The current, “new EdPost CEO” bio omits CONTINUE READING: Peter Cunningham Leaves EdPost CEO Position to… Citizen Stewart(?) | deutsch29

CURMUDGUCATION: Why DeVos Doesn't Care About Charter Closings

CURMUDGUCATION: Why DeVos Doesn't Care About Charter Closings

Why DeVos Doesn't Care About Charter Closings

During the recent House hearings, Betsy DeVos was confronted with some of the results of the Network for Public Education study of federal dollars going to charters, a huge number of which have closed or never even opened. She was unmoved:

Let me first comment on the study you’re referring to. I’m not sure you can even call it a study. We’re looking more closely at it of course, and anything that is truly waste, fraud, or abuse we will certainly address. But the reality is that the study was really funded by and promoted by those who have a political agenda against charter schools. And the other reality is that there are currently over one million students on wait lists for charter schools in the country. So, we want to see more charter schools, not fewer. More students that can access options that are right for them, not fewer.

This week Diane Ravitch and Carol Burris of the NPE wrote an open letter to DeVos further detailing some of the fraud and waste. Here's a collection of 109 charters in Michigan that took federal grant money and closed, or never opened at all. They amount to over $20 million in federal money that is simply gone with nothing to show for it (remember, this is only looking at the charter grants issued by the Department of Education-- if we start looking at all charters funded through various state and philanthropic money, the list gets much longer). Ohio, California and Louisiana are other bad examples. Ohio flushed away over $35 million-- 40% of the federally funded charters failed.

None of this is likely to matter to DeVos. Like many free market true believers in the reformster world, she is going to view the closing and churning of charters as a feature, not a bug. This is how the market they envision is supposed to work-- schools are opened, some thrive, some fail, the failed ones close to be replaced by some other enterprising entrepreneur. It is, I think, one of the great ironies of hard right conservative Christians like DeVos-- on the one hand, they reject the notion of biological evolution, but on the other hand, they CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: Why DeVos Doesn't Care About Charter Closings

School Integration Over Compensatory Education - The Atlantic

School Integration Over Compensatory Education - The Atlantic

Segregation Is Preventable. Congress Just Isn’t Trying.
Again and again, federal efforts to promote integration have been whittled down almost to nothing.

When the Supreme Court struck down school segregation 65 years ago in Brown v. Board of Education, it overturned the doctrine that separate institutions for black and white people were constitutional so long as they were equally funded. Yet in the White House and in the halls of Congress, the old approach has shown enormous staying power. For decades, federal lawmakers have poured far more money into racially and economically segregated schools than they have invested in trying to integrate them. And the imbalance keeps getting worse.

Today the federal government’s main tool for promoting integration is the aid it provides to magnet schools, which offer specialized academic programs to attract a racially and economically diverse student body. In 1989, President Ronald Reagan proposed $115 million for the magnet-school-assistance program—and $4.6 billion for the Title I “compensatory education” program, which offers extra money to schools with a high concentration of poor children. In other words, the federal government was willing to spend 40 times as much on alleviating the effects of poverty and school segregation than on preventing segregation in the first place.

Since then, Democratic and Republican administrations alike have retreated on integration even further. In fiscal year 2019, the federal government provided $15.9 billion to Title I, compared with a paltry $105 million through the federal magnet-school-assistance program—a ratio of a staggering 151 to 1.

Read: The utter inadequacy of America’s efforts to desegregate schools

In no way do we quibble with Congress’s decision to set aside more for high-poverty schools under Title I. That money is essential. However, making integration little more than a rounding error in the nation’s education budget defies decades of research suggesting that socioeconomic and racial integration is one of the most effective strategies for improving outcomes for disadvantaged students.

In an important 2010 Century Foundation study of students in Montgomery County, Maryland, the researcher Heather Schwartz of the Rand Corporation looked at children whose families were randomly assigned to public-housing units in a way that allowed her to compare the relative impact of compensatory spending and integration strategies. Some students were assigned to public housing in relatively high-poverty areas where schools spent $2,000 extra per pupil for reduced class size in the early grades, better professional development CONTINUE READING: School Integration Over Compensatory Education - The Atlantic

Randi Weingarten on the #FreedomToTeach | Diane Ravitch's blog

Randi Weingarten on the Freedom to Teach | Diane Ravitch's blog

Randi Weingarten on the Freedom to Teach

Randi Weingarten delivered this speech this morning at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.

The Freedom to Teach

Consider what teachers have recently said about why they teach:

“I teach because I want to change the world, one child at a time, and to show them to have passion and wonder in their learning.”

“I teach so the next generation will question—everything. The classroom should be a place where we set children’s minds free.”

“I teach because our democracy cannot survive without citizens capable of critical analysis.”

Why I felt called to teach is best summed up by this poster I have moved from office to office since I taught in the 1990s: “Teachers inspire, encourage, empower, nurture, activate, motivate and change the world.”

Teaching is unlike any other profession in terms of mission, importance, complexity, impact and fulfillment. Teachers getthe importance of their work. So do parents and the public. But teachers know that some people don’tget it—whether it’s the empty platitudes, or the just plain dissing. And this has taken a huge toll.

Teachers and others who work in public schools are leaving the profession at the highest rate on record. There were 110,000 fewer teachers than were needed in the last school year, almost doubling the shortage of 2015. All 50 states started the last school year with teacher shortages.

This is a crisis, yet policymakers have largely ignored it.

And it’s getting worse. Enrollment in teacher preparation programs is plummeting—dropping 38 percent nationally between 2008 and 2015.

More than 100,000 classrooms across the country have an instructor who is not credentialed. How many operating rooms do you think are staffed by people without the necessary qualifications? Or airplane cockpits? We should be strengthening teacher preparation programs, not weakening teacher licensure requirements, leaving new teachers less and less prepared. Why are we doing this to our kids?

Teaching has become so devalued that, for the first time in 50 years, a majority of parents say they don’t want their children to become teachers.

The challenge is not just attracting people to teaching. The United States must do a much better job of keeping teachers in the profession. Every year, nearly 300,000 leave the profession; two-thirds before retirement age. Attrition in teaching is higher than in nursing, law, engineering or architecture. Schools serving majorities of students of color and students living in poverty experience the highest teacher turnover rates. Losing so much expertise has an enormous negative impact on students’ education. The financial consequences are also steep—more than $2 billion annually, and that’s a conservative estimate.

It is a failure of leadership to discard so much experience and so much potential—and to lose so much money—to this endless churn.

We are losing the teacher diversity battle as well. A new analysis by the Brookings Institution found America’s teaching workforce, which is overwhelmingly white, is CONTINUE READING: Randi Weingarten on the Freedom to Teach | Diane Ravitch's blog

How popular are charter schools in California? | The Sacramento Bee

How popular are charter schools in California? | The Sacramento Bee

Charter school growth slowing in Sacramento. What’s driving the statewide trend?

After years of vigorous growth, charter school enrollment is showing early signs of decline in Sacramento County just as state lawmakers zero in on ways to limit the industry’s swift expansion in California.

New enrollment figures show charter school enrollment grew by 2.6 percent this school year in Sacramento County – the slowest rate in at least the last decade – and climbed by 4 percent statewide.

Still, twice as many students are taught in charter school programs now than during the 2007-2008 school year, according to data from the California Department of Education. More than 33,000 Sacramento County students are now enrolled in charter programs, which includes virtual schooling and independent study, accounting for 13 percent of the student population.

The slowdown has not resulted in any boon for the county’s public schools, which have seen meager or negative growth since 2010, data shows. The trend lays bare a new reality in K-12 education where parents are exercising choice and privately-run and public schools are trying to accommodate them.

Although Anastasia Harrison lives walking distance from an Elk Grove public elementary school, she enrolled her children in the nearby California Montessori Project, which is home to 500 students. The school also has other campuses throughout the Sacramento region.

The school teaches children in block grades, so Harrison’s third-grade daughter is in a class with first- and second-graders. Entrance to the school is tight but she said the lottery and waitlist didn’t discourage her from applying.

“I was a little concerned about public schools. I told myself that if they didn’t get into the charter school, I was going to homeschool them,” Harrison said. “It’s not a traditional classroom where kids may get bored. My kids are able to work ahead, and when they help the younger kids, it reinforces what they already know.”

Many parents want specialized programs that emphasize different learning styles and second languages. Others feel a public education may not offer their children enough. Districts, perhaps in a race to keep up, have pivoted to charters, too, converting some of their traditional neighborhood schools.

That’s one of the reasons behind the seemingly explosive growth, said Willow Herrington, vice CONTINUE READING: How popular are charter schools in California? | The Sacramento Bee

How Charter Schools Became Such a Big Player in California's Education System | The California Report | KQED News - https://www.kqed.org/news/11729643/how-charter-schools-became-such-a-big-player-in-californias-education-system by @MGreenKQED on @kqed

Fueled by a large influx of outside funding from wealthy donors and a succession of charter-friendly district superintendents and city and state officials, new charter schools in Oakland proliferated, particularly in the decade after 2000, when the number of charter schools in the city more than tripled.

Graphic: A steady decrease in public school enrollment is matched by a similar steady increase in charter school enrollment. (Elena Lacey/KQED)

And while certainly not the sole cause of Oakland Unified’s perennial budget woes, the rise of charters is a factor that has undeniably contributed to the district's fiscal distress. Because OUSD receives per-pupil state funding, having fewer students means a lot less money for the district, even as its school building and administrative costs remain roughly the same. The Los Angeles and Oakland teachers unions frequently cite a 2018 report by the left-leaning Bay Area policy center, In The Public Interest, estimating that charter growth cost L.A. Unified more than $508 million in 2014-15 and Oakland Unified $57 million in 2016-17.

CONTINUE READING: https://www.kqed.org/news/11729643/how-charter-schools-became-such-a-big-player-in-californias-education-system

What Kids with Low Self-Esteem Say - Teacher Habits

What Kids with Low Self-Esteem Say - Teacher Habits

What Kids with Low Self-Esteem Say

A guest article from Chris, publisher of TeachingWoodwork.com

When the children in your class look in the mirror, do you think they like what they see?

What do they think about the world around them?

Do they think they are loved and valued or do they feel judged and inadequate?

It is normal for a youngster to lack confidence at times. However, if a child persistently struggles with feelings of worthlessness and incompetence, then there is a huge problem. They could be dealing with low self-esteem.

Low self-esteem is debilitating to young people. It makes them have a negative image of themselves that is completely removed from reality. They harbor harsh opinions and beliefs about themselves that when they persist long enough, cripple their lives.

Low self-esteem eats away at a child’s happiness. It creates fear and expects failure. Indeed, it can be physically, emotionally and psychologically debilitating.

While some signs of low self-esteem are easy to sport, others could be a bit obscure. However, the language that the youngster uses could be the clearest indication that they are suffering from low self-esteem.

Examples of Things young People say when suffering Low Self-esteem

‘I don’t deserve it.’ ‘I am not worth it.’ ‘I am stupid.’

Shame is a constant small voice at the back of the mind of a child who CONTINUE READING: What Kids with Low Self-Esteem Say - Teacher Habits

Read Robert Mueller’s Trump-Russia report: full text - Vox

Read Robert Mueller’s Trump-Russia report: full text - Vox

Read Robert Mueller’s Trump-Russia report: full text

Finally.

Special counsel Robert Mueller’s long-awaited report on potential collusion between Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and Russia is finally out — and time will tell if it will either help or hurt the president.

Roughly 450 pages, the document is the definitive account of whether Moscow and political operators around Trump worked together to win the White House. It also includes details about whether the president tried to obstruct justice by interfering with Mueller’s probe.

Attorney General William Barr released a four-page summary of the report on March 24 in which he stated that Mueller found no collusion, but added that the probe also didn’t exonerate Trump on the obstruction issue. That led to a major controversy between Democrats and Republicans, mainly because Barr’s brief summary didn’t explain how Mueller came to his results and offered scant other details.

Now, after two years, the public has a chance to see the report — with some redactions concerning information Barr deemed sensitive — for themselves.

You can read the full report here.

Read Robert Mueller’s Trump-Russia report: full text - Vox

Video: Watch the premiere of Wyatt Cenac’s HBO show “Problem Areas” for free–and truly understand the new educator uprising in America – I AM AN EDUCATOR

Video: Watch the premiere of Wyatt Cenac’s HBO show “Problem Areas” for free–and truly understand the new educator uprising in America – I AM AN EDUCATOR

Video: Watch the premiere of Wyatt Cenac’s HBO show “Problem Areas” for free–and truly understand the new educator uprising in America

School is fundamentally one of the greatest sources of humor.

The premise of mainstream schooling is that a lot of young people, at different developmental stages, are packed into a room with an adult who is trying to get them to do something they often have little idea why they should care about.  That basic set up produces all kinds of problems but it also produces a natural environment for sitcom. That’s why from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and the Breakfast Club, to Napoleon Dynamite and Freaks and Geeks, everyone has a favorite classroom comedy.

Now Wyatt Cenac, formerly a correspondent and write for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, has brought us season two of his HBO show “Problem Areas,” all about education.  The show has been described by Anne Branigin at The Root, as “among the most ambitious comedy shows on TV”….or by one viewer as, “a millennial, stoner version of ‘Mister Rogers’ [Neighborhood].”

Throughout season two, Wyatt travels to some ten cities around the country to explore the education system: From the mass strikes for education and teacher pay in West Virginia, to the struggle to redefine school safety in New York City, to school lunches in Minneapolis, to my home town of Seattle to examine powerful public school innovations, and beyond.

Problem Areas does something all too rare in conversations about education in mainstream media: It centers on the perspectives of educators, students, parents, and community members–rather than politicians and billionaire “education reformers.” I was amazed when I, a classroom teacher, got the call from Wyatt’s studio to join the CONTINUE READING: Video: Watch the premiere of Wyatt Cenac’s HBO show “Problem Areas” for free–and truly understand the new educator uprising in America – I AM AN EDUCATOR

Burris and Ravitch: An Open Letter to Betsy DeVos about the Failure of the Federal Charter Schools Program | Diane Ravitch's blog

Burris and Ravitch: An Open Letter to Betsy DeVos about the Failure of the Federal Charter Schools Program | Diane Ravitch's blog

Burris and Ravitch: An Open Letter to Betsy DeVos about the Failure of the Federal Charter Schools Program

In this post on Valerie Strauss’s Answer Sheet blog at the Washington Post, Carol Burris and I respond to Betsy DeVos’s putdown of the Network for Public Education’s meticulous documentation of the failure of the federal Charter Schools Program. Our report, “Asleep at the Wheel,” showed that the U.S. Department of Education had handed out hundreds of millions of dollars–close to a billion dollars–between 2006 and 2014, to nearly 1,000 charter schools that never opened or that closed soon after opening. DeVos, as you will see, dismissed the report out of hand, and we assume that she never read it. The report was carefully documented, with references drawn mainly from government sources, including the website of the U.S. Department of Education. And for an added bonus, we show that 42% of all charter schools in DeVos’s home state of Michigan that received federal funding either never opened or closed soon after opening. What will she do to correct the lack of oversight in her own department?

We write:

Here is a link to 109 Michigan charter schools, called “academies,” that were awarded Charter School Program (CSP) grants from 2006-2014 but either never opened or closed. That number represents 42 percent of all recipients. Those highlighted in maroon shut down. Those highlighted in tan are schools that received funds but never opened. You will find ample documentation for your staff to review our work.

As anxious as you are to open new charter schools, if nearly half of them do not make it, we suggest that something is wrong with the selection process.

In total, $20,272,078 was awarded to defunct Michigan charter schools. And yet, in 2018 you awarded the State of Michigan an additional $47,222,222.

Your home state is not alone. Posted here is a similar list from the state of Ohio showing the names of 117 charter CONTINUE READING: Burris and Ravitch: An Open Letter to Betsy DeVos about the Failure of the Federal Charter Schools Program | Diane Ravitch's blog

Unmaking the Ontario Model: Austerity Comes to Canada – Have You Heard

Unmaking the Ontario Model: Austerity Comes to Canada – Have You Heard

Unmaking the Ontario Model: Austerity Comes to Canada

Deep spending cuts and ballooning class sizes are coming to Ontario. Have You Heard talks to parents, students and teachers in Toronto about what controversial changes proposed by the new conservative government will mean for a public education system success story. Hint: nothing good… Full transcript available here.

And if you like what you hear, please consider supporting Have You Heard on Patreon!

Unmaking the Ontario Model: Austerity Comes to Canada – Have You Heard

Melinda Gates and the Blindness of Privilege | janresseger

Melinda Gates and the Blindness of Privilege | janresseger

Melinda Gates and the Blindness of Privilege

Last Sunday, the New York Times Magazine published an interview—David Marchese talking with Melinda Gates—about the enormous power of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for shaping our lives.  Marchese asks Ms. Gates directly about the Gates Foundation’s role in driving today’s neoliberal public education policy. Doesn’t a giant foundation—“Its endowment at $50.7 billion… the largest in the world.”—have an outsized impact on social policy? “What about the notion that the foundation’s work on an issue like public education is inherently antidemocratic?  You’ve spent money in that area in a way that maybe seems like it’s crowding out people’s actual wants in that area. What’s your counter to that criticism?”

Ms. Gates cheerfully counters his critique: “Bill and I always go back to ‘What is philanthropy’s role?’ It is to be catalytic. It’s to try and put new ideas forward and test them and see if they work. If you can convince government to scale up, that is how you have success.  But philanthropic dollars are a tiny slice of the United States education budget. Even if we put a billion dollars in the State of California, that’s not going to do that much. So we experiment with things.”

Despite Melinda Gates’ protestations, as we look back, we can see that when the Gates Foundation has experimented with with reforming institutions like public schools, there have been no real consequences for Bill and Melinda and their staff at the Foundation when projects have failed. In the history of the Foundation’s projects with America’s public schools, however, there are many examples of negative consequences for the schools, our communities, and our children.  Here are two.

The first is local—situated in metropolitan Tampa, Florida.  In 2009, The Gates Foundation made a $100 million grant to the Hillsborough County School District in Florida.  The money was to pay for  a huge experiment in merit pay for teachers. Then in 2015, the Gates Foundation deemed the experiment a failure and walked away, leaving the school district to cover millions of dollars of sunk costs and the responsibility for undoing the damage. According to an extremely thorough and arresting report by Marlene Sokol for the Tampa Bay  CONTINUE READING: Melinda Gates and the Blindness of Privilege | janresseger

Destroying Public Education in St. Louis | tultican

Destroying Public Education in St. Louis | tultican

Destroying Public Education in St. Louis

By T. Ultican 4/18/2019

On April 2nd, St. Louis city voters picked Adam Layne and Tracee Miller to serve on their seven-member Public School Board. They appear to be the two least likely candidates out of seven to protect public schools. With the state poised to end twelve years of control over the city’s schools, this is not a happy result for public education advocates.

The Seven Board Candidates

1. Adam Layne is a former Teach for America (TFA) corps member assigned to a St. Louis charter school and is currently a board member of the Kairos Academy charter school.
2. Tracee Miller was a TFA corps member and is currently running a math tutoring program in St. Louis for the Gates Foundation supported Khan Academy.
3. Louis Cross boasts a long career with St. Louis Public Schools. He served as principal and interim superintendent of the now defunct Ethel Hedgemen charter school.
4. Bill Haas served on the school board from 1997 to 2005, and again from 2010 to 2018. He was one of two board members that stood in opposition to contracting with Alvarez and Marsal to run St. Louis schools in 2003.
5. David Merideth served on a special committee in 2017 that studied the school board’s role in future governance of the district when state control is relinquished.
6. Barbara Anderson is a graduate of St. Louis Public Schools who taught on the elementary, middle and university levels throughout her career.
7. Dan McCready is from Cincinnati, where he taught third and fifth grade math at a Cincinnati public school. He currently works at KIPP Victory Academy, a St. Louis charter school.

Dark Money Keys Election Results

Adam Layne and Tracee Miller

New board member Adam Layne appears to be a talented and idealistic young man. In 2011, he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in finance from George Washington University. Unfortunately, that youthful idealism was corrupted  CONTINUE READING: Destroying Public Education in St. Louis | tultican