Bernie Sanders Has a Better Statement on Education than Before | Diane Ravitch's blog

Bernie Sanders Has a Better Statement on Education than Before | Diane Ravitch's blog

Bernie Sanders Has a Better Statement on Education than Before

Bernie Sanders’ website has a better statement on the importance of investing public education and teachers than any other Democratic candidate so far:

Today, more than 60 years after the historic Brown v. Board of Education decision ending legal segregation in our public schools, and 50 years after President Johnson signed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act into law, poor and minority students are still not afforded the same education as their wealthier, and often whiter counterparts. This is not only unjust and immoral, it endangers our democracy.

I’m running for president to restore the promise that every child, regardless of his or her background, has a right to a high-quality public education.

Growing inequality is both the cause and the effect of our nation’s desperately underfunded public school system. Many public schools are severely racially segregated—in some parts of the country, worse than before the Brown decision. With funding for public schools in steep decline, students in low-income areas are forced to learn in decrepit buildings and endure high rates of teacher turnover. Public school teachers are severely underpaid and lack critical resources, and their professional CONTINUE READING: Bernie Sanders Has a Better Statement on Education than Before | Diane Ravitch's blog

Things Didn’t Go Well When Betsy DeVos Was Confronted With Her Department’s Charter School Fraud

Things Didn’t Go Well When Betsy DeVos Was Confronted With Her Department’s Charter School Fraud

Things Didn’t Go Well When Betsy DeVos Was Confronted With Her Department’s Charter School Fraud
One billion awarded by the federal government’s Charter Schools Program (CSP) went to charter schools that never opened or opened for only brief periods

During a series of recent congressional hearings in Washington, D.C., U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos had to respond to a recent report finding the U.S. Department of Education has been scammed for hundreds of millions of dollars by fraudulent or mismanaged charter schools. Her responses reveal not only her inability to counter legitimate concerns over the spread of charter schools but also the charter school industry’s resistance to honestly address a chronic problem with its schools.

The report, which I co-authored with Network for Public Education Executive Director Carol Burris, found that up to $1 billion awarded by the federal government’s Charter Schools Program (CSP) went to charter schools that never opened or opened for only brief periods before being shut down for mismanagement, poor performance, lack of enrollment, and fraud. Our calculation was that a least a third of the $4.1 billion spent by the CSP was wasted.

Members of Congress repeatedly referred to these findings when questioning the secretary’s management of charter school grants and her proposal to increase funding for the program to $500 million annually. In response, DeVos first attempted to deny the problem, saying, “You are always going to have schools that don’t make it.”

When Democratic representatives continued their questions, DeVos then tried to distract attention from the problem, arguing there was a need for “more” charters, “not less.”

In the most recent exchange, DeVos pivoted to attacking the report authors personally rather than disproving their findings, saying, “The study was really funded by and promoted by those who have a political agenda against charter schools.”

That final exchange in particular raised the hackles of my coauthor Burris, who quickly delved deeper into the data to find that incidents of financial fraud, waste, and mismanagement in the charter school grant program are likely worse than our first CONTINUE READING: Things Didn’t Go Well When Betsy DeVos Was Confronted With Her Department’s Charter School Fraud

The Forgotten Disaster of America’s First Standardized Test | gadflyonthewallblog

The Forgotten Disaster of America’s First Standardized Test | gadflyonthewallblog

The Forgotten Disaster of America’s First Standardized Test

 “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”–George Santayana (1905)

The merry-go-round of history continues to spin because the riders forget they are free to get off at any time.

But we rarely do it. We keep to our seats and commit the same stupid mistakes over and over again.

Take high stakes standardized testing.

It was a disaster the very first time it was attempted in America – in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1845.

Yet we continue to prescribe the same error to students in schools today.

Judging learners, schools and teachers based on standardized assessments has the same problems now as it did 174 years ago. Yet we act as if it’s the only accurate way to assess knowledge, the only fair and equitable way to assign resources and judge the professionalism of our schools and teachers.

IT IS NONE OF THOSE THINGS.

If we simply remembered our history, we’d know that CONTINUE READING: The Forgotten Disaster of America’s First Standardized Test | gadflyonthewallblog

Badass Teachers Association Blog: Know your Rights – The Workplace Bullying You Face May Indeed be Unlawful Harassment

Badass Teachers Association Blog: Know your Rights – The Workplace Bullying You Face May Indeed be Unlawful Harassment

Know your Rights – The Workplace Bullying You Face May Indeed be Unlawful Harassment

In the United States there is no law that protects targets against workplace bullying. While we have seen some state and local laws addressing workplace bullying (i.e. Tennessee and Virginia parts of California), the reality is that for the most part there still are no legal protections for targets of workplace bullying. We also do not have any specific laws addressing workplace harassment. However, what we do have is over thirty years of recognition by the SCOTUS that harassment that is based on a protected status (race, color, national origin, religion, gender, age status over 40 or disability) is a form of discrimination under the Civil Rights Act, the Age Discrimination in Employment Act or the Americans with Disabilities Act. 

The complex system of laws around the US working relationship can cause a great deal of confusion. As a result, many working people believe they have more rights in the workplace than they do. For instance, many workers believe they have a right to only be fired for just cause (which is not the case for most non-unionized workers) or have a right to free speech in their place of work (again not the case for most workers). However, the complexity of the employment laws also leads many to think that certain rights that they do have, do not exist. The area of harassment and bullying often falls into this latter category. 

Unlawful workplace harassment is subset of workplace bullying. The behaviors and outcomes of both are often identical, but for the bullying behavior to be unlawful it must be based on a protected status. So we often differentiate the two based on whether the behavior is based on a protected status and thus is unlawful (harassment) or is not based on a protected status and thus not unlawful (bullying). In my own research, I have found that a definition of bullying that is built around the legal definition of harassment (but expands to include non-status-based behaviors) captures a larger amount and number of bullying incidents than do other definitions CONTINUE READING: Badass Teachers Association Blog: Know your Rights – The Workplace Bullying You Face May Indeed be Unlawful Harassment

Yes, we know what great teaching looks like — but we have an education system that ‘utterly fails to support it.’ What’s wrong and how to fix it. - The Washington Post

Yes, we know what great teaching looks like — but we have an education system that ‘utterly fails to support it.’ What’s wrong and how to fix it. - The Washington Post

Yes, we know what great teaching looks like — but we have an education system that ‘utterly fails to support it.’ What’s wrong and how to fix it.

You could be forgiven if you have gotten the impression that we are still trying to figure out exactly what great teaching looks like. In recent years, the teaching profession has been under assault by those who have sought to deprofessionalize it, and hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent on various projects and studies to find out the so-called “secret sauce” of great teaching.

Actually, we do know — and as this post explains, we also know that the education system doesn’t support it.

It was written by James Nehring, who taught middle and high school for two decades and is now an associate professor in the College of Education at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell.

Nehring has co-written a book coming out in June that looks at the complexities that go into great teaching and how to create a system that supports it. The book, written with Stacy Szczesiul and Megin Charner-Laird, is titled “Bridging the Progressive-Traditional Divide in Education Reform: A Unifying Vision for Teaching, Learning, and System Level Supports.” (Yes, it’s a mouthful.)

In 2013, he won a Fulbright award to work with and learn from schools in the United States and Britain that are doing great work with students in marginalized communities, particularly deeply sectarian neighborhoods in Northern Ireland.

Here is his piece, which tackles an issue as central as any to our great education debate: teaching.

[Bill Gates spent hundreds of millions of dollars to improve teaching. New report says it was a bust.]

By James Nehring

Good teaching is really complex. Anybody who’s been impacted by a special teacher will likely agree. The problem is that, in the sausage-making of regulatory policy, we act like teaching is simple. The result is a system that makes it just about impossible for good teachers to teach.

I’ve long suspected this was true, but it wasn’t until I teamed up with two other former teachers — Stacy CONTINUE READING: Yes, we know what great teaching looks like — but we have an education system that ‘utterly fails to support it.’ What’s wrong and how to fix it. - The Washington Post

Former teacher's powerful resignation letter goes viral

Former teacher's powerful resignation letter goes viral

Former teacher shares powerful resignation letter: ‘I won’t be in an abusive relationship with public education’

Elementary school teacher Sariah McCall was in her classroom every morning at 6:45 a.m., taught bell-to-bell classes, attended meetings during her planning period and worked assigned lunch and recess duties with little time to eat or go to the restroom. When the bell rang for the 2:15 p.m. student dismissal, she worked an assigned bus or hall duty, followed by lesson and classroom prep. Sometimes, she left school by 5 p.m. At home, McCall would work on more grading and paper work until 11 p.m. or midnight, then finally sleep — and repeat.

But the workload was not sustainable for McCall. Now, she’s sharing the powerful resignation letter she wrote explaining why she left teaching for good.

“The only things keeping me from resigning until now were the love I have for my students, the love I have for the act of teaching, and the heavy guilt I feel for my children being negatively impacted by this in any way: emotionally or academically,” McCall wrote to the Charleston County School District in November.

“However, I cannot set myself on fire to keep someone else warm,” McCall wrote as a slight to an “inspirational” teacher quote that likens teachers to candles that must “consume itself to light the way for others.”

South Carolina Teacher Sariah McCall wrote an emotional resignation letter to the Charleston County School District on Nov. 5, 2018. (Credit: Sariah McCall)

“I felt like I was running on a hamster while going nowhere. I was just working all the time and there was still more to do. The to-do-list was never-ending,” McCall tells Yahoo Lifestyle. “I just couldn't do it anymore.”

And McCall isn’t the only one — South Carolina has been dealing with a mass exodus of public teachers leaving their positions. According to the South Carolina Annual Educator Supply & Demand Report, over 7,300 public school teachers left their positions left during or at the end of the 2017 to 2018 school year. Nearly 73 percent of those educators are no longer teaching in any South Carolina public school.

“There’s mass teacher burnout in this state. We’re so overworked,” says 8th-grade math teacher Sanni Perry, a board member for an education advocacy group CONTINUE READING: Former teacher's powerful resignation letter goes viral

Civil Rights Groups On Opposite Sides Of California Charter School Debate - capradio.org

Civil Rights Groups On Opposite Sides Of California Charter School Debate - capradio.org

Civil Rights Groups On Opposite Sides Of California Charter School Debate

Two national civil rights organizations are at odds over a proposal in California to limit the number and increase oversight of charter schools.

The National Action Network, an organization founded by Rev. Al Sharpton in the early 1990s, opposes the legislation. The group claims putting a cap on charter schools would have a disproportionate impact on black communities, where students rely on them as an alternative to traditional public schools.

The NAACP supports the legislation and claims it would help black students by cracking down on failing charter schools. The organization argues the state’s charter school laws have not been substantially changed for more than 25 years and are overdue for revision.

The current proposal would establish a limit on charter schools in California, based on how many the state has by 2020. It would also grant local school districts more authority over their approval.

According to Ryan Anderson, a fiscal and policy analyst at the state Legislative Analyst’s Office, black students make up 8 percent of statewide enrollment at charter schools, compared to 5 percent at traditional public schools.

“There are a number of charter schools throughout the state that are specifically intended to serve predominantly black communities,” Anderson said.

Rev. Jonathan Moseley, the western regional director of the National Action Network, says traditional public schools may not be the best option for some students — especially in underserved areas.

“People should have the right to choose their children’s academics,” Moseley said.

He added that educational materials and resources are often higher quality at charter schools: “You don’t have to worry about getting hand me down products or even books that are CONTINUE READING: Civil Rights Groups On Opposite Sides Of California Charter School Debate - capradio.org

Indicators of School Crime and Safety: 2018

Indicators of School Crime and Safety: 2018

Indicators of School Crime and Safety: 2018

Title:	Indicators of School Crime and Safety: 2018
Description:	A joint effort by the National Center for Education Statistics and the Bureau of Justice Statistics, this annual report examines crime occurring in schools and colleges. This report presents data on crime at school from the perspectives of students, teachers, principals, and the general population from an array of sources—the National Crime Victimization Survey, the School Crime Supplement to the National Crime Victimization Survey, the Youth Risk Behavior Survey, the School Survey on Crime and Safety, the Schools and Staffing Survey, EDFacts, and the Campus Safety and Security Survey. The report covers topics such as victimization, bullying, school conditions, fights, weapons, the presence of security staff at school, availability and student use of drugs and alcohol, student perceptions of personal safety at school, and criminal incidents at postsecondary institutions.
Online Availability:	Browse this document. Download, view and print the report as a pdf file.  (4.6MB) Need Help Viewing PDF files?
Cover Date:	April 2019
Web Release:	April 17, 2019
Publication #:	NCES 2019047
Center/Program:	NCES
Authors:	Musu, Lauren; Zhang, Anlan; Wang, Ke; Zhang, Jizhi; Oudekerk, Barbara
Type of Product:	Compendium
Survey/Program Areas:	Crime and Safety Surveys (CSS) National Teacher and Principal Survey (NTPS) Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS) School Survey on Crime and Safety (SSOCS)
Questions:	For questions about the content of this Compendium, please contact: Thomas D. Snyder.

Indicators of School Crime and Safety: 2018

Federal Charter Schools Program Wasted Nearly $36 Million on Ohio Schools That Never Opened or Soon Closed | janresseger

Federal Charter Schools Program Wasted Nearly $36 Million on Ohio Schools That Never Opened or Soon Closed | janresseger

Federal Charter Schools Program Wasted Nearly $36 Million on Ohio Schools That Never Opened or Soon Closed

Several weeks ago the Network for Public Education (NPE) released Asleep at the Wheel, a major report on the lack of accountability and subsequent waste and fraud in the federal Charter Schools Program. At the end of last week as part of a letter addressed to Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos (and published by Valerie Strauss in the Washington Post), Carol Burris the executive director of NPE, and Diane Ravitch began releasing state-by-state lists of never-opened or eventually shut-down charter schools that received seed money between 2006 and 2014 from the federal Charter Schools Program (CSP). The numbers are shocking. In my state, Ohio, between 2006 and 2014, the amount of Charter Schools Program money spent on charter schools that never opened or eventually closed amounts to nearly $36 million.

Here is a brief review of the Network for Public Education’s findings in last month’s Asleep at the Wheel report.  A series of federal administrations—Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Trump have treated the Charter Schools Program (part of the Office of Innovation and Improvement in the U.S. Department of Education) as a kind of venture capital fund created and administered to stimulate social entrepreneurship—by individuals or big nonprofits or huge for-profits—as a substitute for public operation of the public schools. Since the program’s inception in 1994, the CSP has awarded $4 billion in federal tax dollars to start up or expand charter schools across 44 states and the District of Columbia, and has provided some of the funding for 40 percent of all the charter schools across the country. The CSP has lacked oversight since the beginning, and during the Obama and Trump administrations—when the Department of Education’s own Office of Inspector General released a series of scathing critiques of the program—grants have been made based on the application alone with little attempt by officials in the Department of Education to verify the information provided by applicants. The Network for Public Education found that the CSP has spent over a $1 billion on schools that never opened or were opened and subsequently shut down: “The CSP’s own analysis from 2006-2014 of its direct and state pass-through funded programs found that nearly one out of three awardees were not currently in operation by the end of 2015.”

I suppose the idea is that if you scatter hundreds of seeds across a state, they’ll grow and enrich the educational environment.  But as I examine Ohio’s list of failed or never-opened, CONTINUE READING: Federal Charter Schools Program Wasted Nearly $36 Million on Ohio Schools That Never Opened or Soon Closed | janresseger

Cartoons on the School Reform to Boost Student Self-Esteem | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Cartoons on the School Reform to Boost Student Self-Esteem | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Cartoons on the School Reform to Boost Student Self-Esteem

Beginning in the 1980s, a concerted effort by policymakers concerned about U.S. students performing low on international tests involved the idea of how students saw themselves. The thinking was that low self-esteem caused low test scores.

Solution? Raise students’ regard for themselves. The movement spread rapidly especially after a California legislator got his bill through both houses of the legislature and the governor signed the new law that assigned the state’s schools raise students’ self-esteem. Critics, of course, pointed out that the causal arrows that policymakers believed in, that is, if you raise students’ self-esteem, then achievement will rise as well–those arrows could just as well point the other way. That is, higher achievement using direct ways of helping students academically  could result in their higher self-regard.

Without knowing for sure which way the causation goes, cartoonists have had a field day with this school reform as it permeated through the rest of society.  So enjoy the cartoons on what started out as a school reform called the “self-esteem movement” and became a running joke for all aspects of human behavior.

MORE CARTOONS: Cartoons on the School Reform to Boost Student Self-Esteem | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

NYC Public School Parents: Success charters and Eva Moskowitz continue to violate children's rights as the US Department of Education rewards them with another ten million dollars

NYC Public School Parents: Success charters and Eva Moskowitz continue to violate children's rights as the US Department of Education rewards them with another ten million dollars

Success charters and Eva Moskowitz continue to violate children's rights as the US Department of Education rewards them with another ten million dollars

Today yet another lawsuit was filed against Success Academy charter schools today by Tanwa Omolade, a Brooklyn mom whose special needs son was repeatedly suspended, sent to the police station for misbehavior and who herself had the city's Administration for Children's Services (ACS) called on her by Success administrators in a “campaign of harassment” to convince her to pull her child out of the school. More on the lawsuit and the filings at Chalkbeat here.  As Chalkbeat writes,

The lawsuit makes a number of allegations that have popped up against Success and other charter networks before: that they have threatened parents with child welfare investigations, held students back from advancing to the next grade level for disciplinary reasons, and generally use harsh discipline practices that have a disproportionate effect on students with disabilities.

Success Academy has been repeatedly sued for abusing its students and violating their rights, as well as calling ACS on parents who complain;  here are just some of the previous and ongoing lawsuits against this chain of charter schools. 

Yet in its wisdom, the US Department of Education just awarded this serial violator of civil rights ten million dollars to add to the $43.4 million they had already given the Success chain.

In addition, Tufts has announced they will provide Eva Moskowitz an honorary degree, the head of Success Academy and a defendant in these lawsuits.  The former president of Tufts, Lawrence Bacow, who is the current president of Harvard is scheduled to speak at the Success high school's graduation, which last year only graduated 16 out of the 73 students who entered the school in Kindergarten  or first grade.  No doubt both occurrences were influenced by the fact that the head of the Success board, hedge funder Steve Galbreath, is also on the Tufts board of trustees and heads its investment committee. 


The chaotic and abusive treatment suffered by her high school students and which caused most of the teaching staff to quit in disgust last year was extensively chronicled, CONTINUE READING: NYC Public School Parents: Success charters and Eva Moskowitz continue to violate children's rights as the US Department of Education rewards them with another ten million dollars

McPherson KS students join the rebellion vs Summit and depersonalized learning and win the right to opt out | Parent Coalition for Student Privacy

McPherson KS students join the rebellion vs Summit and depersonalized learning and win the right to opt out | Parent Coalition for Student Privacy

MCPHERSON KS STUDENTS JOIN THE REBELLION VS SUMMIT AND DEPERSONALIZED LEARNING AND WIN THE RIGHT TO OPT OUT

Yesterday, in a NY Times front page story, the reporter Nellie Bowles explored the many problems experienced by Kansas students and parents when the online Summit Learning program was imposed on their schools, including health problems, poor curriculum and lax privacy. “It sounded great, what they sold us,” said one parent. “It was the worst lemon car that we’ve ever bought.”  Please read the article and if you’re a Summit parent anywhere in the country, share your experiences in the online portal at the end of the article.

I’ve written about the resistance to the Summit platform since 2016, here, here, here , here and here, including my visit to a Summit charter school here.  Though the NY Times article gives short shrift to the issue of privacy it does contain a quote from me about the tremendously intrusive wealth of personal data that Summit and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative are collecting. Mark Zuckerberg has repeatedly broken every promise he’s made about keeping personal data private and neither CZI nor the new nonprofit that will take over Summit headed by Zuckerberg’s wife have provided any reason that parents should trust them any more.

What’s particularly moving about the article is that while Summit and its funders, including Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and  the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative all claim Summit students are able to demonstrate ” “greater ownership of their learning activities,” the McPherson Kansas students are actually taking ownership of their education by walking out of school and engaging in sit-ins.  Though of a very different demographic, they resemble the remarkable Brooklyn students who earlier this year walked out of the Secondary School of Journalism in protest against Summit, and who followed up by writing an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg, saying “We refuse to allow ourselves to be experimented on in this way.“ 

This is a growing phenomenon.  Note the thousands of Ontario students who organized a mass walk-out earlier this month of schools throughout the province,  against rising class sizes and the requirement that all high school students  take online courses.  All of these students are showing courage and agency by resisting the CONTINUE READING: McPherson KS students join the rebellion vs Summit and depersonalized learning and win the right to opt out | Parent Coalition for Student Privacy

Mystery Machines or Master Teachers: Which Do You Prefer? | One Flew East

Mystery Machines or Master Teachers: Which Do You Prefer? | One Flew East

MYSTERY MACHINES OR MASTER TEACHERS: WHICH DO YOU PREFER?

What’s optimal for education, the teacher as adjunct to the machine—or the other way around?

Whatever the rest of us might decide, Silicon Valley has answered this question to its own satisfaction—one way for other people’s children, another for its own. While the kids of tech millionaires study in small groups led by expert teachers accompanied by minimal technology, these same parents peddle cheap educational “solutions” like the Summit program to cash-strapped schools across the country. Classic rich-folk attitude: what’s sufficient for the masses will never do for our precious babies.

In an unintentional parody of Fred Keller’s Personalized System of Instruction, the programs these millionaires are making more money on are lauded as also “personalizing” instruction.

Personalizing? Oh, come on.

They take the person out, both the student and the teacher. Their idea of personalizing is much like the auto industry’s of customizing. In both cases, an array of choices created by marketers and designers is claimed to make the options “personal” or “custom.” They are neither; all they really are is controlled variety.

Again, adapting machines from afar to individual ends isn’t “personalizing.” It’s “enfolding,” wrapping the individual so tightly in a commercial and/or mechanical web that the individual effectively disappears. Just look at Disney fans: They are so wrapped in product that you can’t see who they are.

Trying to “personalize” something for someone from a thousand miles away of necessity does the opposite. If you want to personalize something, you need to be right there with it. Look at the word: It involves a person.

But let’s get back to education: If you want to educate someone, it takes two. Two there in person. You can’t CONTINUE READING: Mystery Machines or Master Teachers: Which Do You Prefer? | One Flew East