California School Accountability Report: New data on the cost of charter schools | AB1505 passes |…

California School Accountability Report: New data on the cost of charter schools | AB1505 passes |…

California School Accountability Report: New data on the cost of charter schools | AB1505 passes | and more

In the Public Interest’s pick of recent news about the ongoing effort to privatize public education in California. Not an email subscriber? Sign up here.

New data on the cost of charter schools. Last week, In the Public Interest released a new report measuring the cost that charter schools create for West Contra Costa Unified in the Bay Area. Because some students that would’ve otherwise attended traditional public schools instead attend charter schools in the area, the district has $27.9 million less in funding to work with each year. That comes out to $978 less for each traditional public school student the district serves. Missed the press conference? Watch it here.

Students are paying the price. In the Public Interest’s Jeremy Mohler puts the new data out of West Contra Costa Unified into perspective:”Charter schools aren’t the only financial pressure that districts are facing. Regressive taxation, declining birth rates, and other forces are impacting districts from Los Angeles to Sacramento. But, so far, the cost of charter schools has gone unmeasured and ignored in California educational planning. That can’t go on — students are paying the price.”

Charter reform bill passes assembly. Last Wednesday, AB1505 narrowly passed the state Assembly and will now move to the Senate. The bill would allow districts to consider the potential negative financial impact of a charter CONTINUE READING: 

California School Accountability Report: New data on the cost of charter schools | AB1505 passes |…

Donald Cohen

Exec Director of In the Public Interest, a non profit promoting the democratic control of public assets and services. inthepublicinterest.org

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Transparency, and Accountability, an Example: The MMSD Interim Superintendent Search Process | AMPS

Transparency, and Accountability, an Example: The MMSD Interim Superintendent Search Process | AMPS

Transparency, and Accountability, an Example: The MMSD Interim Superintendent Search Process

From “The Glass Ballot Box and Political Transparency,” by Ellery Foutch

Television — “See No Evil” (click to listen/watch)

Transparency and accountability for government bodies depend on the public knowing the positions and actions of their elected officials, and at base that means knowing how they voted.  When decisions to act, to not act, or how to act are made without votes whether in open or private (and here) meetings, transparency and accountability are diminished.  The Madison Metropolitan School District Board of Education too often refrains from exercising their collective power via votes, instead only voicing individual opinions and giving feedback, like a focus group not a governing body.  This creates confusion, and limits transparency and the potential for accountability.  This is one manifestation of a district culture that seeks to control the flow of information, and only do the minimum in relation to transparency.  The recent meetings on the process for selecting an Interim Superintendent serve as examples of this.

There have been (at least) two meetings on the Interim selection process, no votes have been taken, yet decisions have been made (there are many reports that the Board illegally discussed an Interim selection in closed session on May 6).

The first noticed meeting was on May 13 where the initial legal notice included as a closed session item “Consideration of employment of a district administrator, pursuant to Wis. Stat. Sec. 19.85(1)(c),” but an amended notice changed it to an open session item on the “Interim Superintendent Hiring Process,” as a “discussion” (not an “action” or voting item), and with no materials attached.   A small step toward transparency.

The Board met again on May 20, 2019 in a Special “Workshop” (which generally CONTINUE READING: Transparency, and Accountability, an Example: The MMSD Interim Superintendent Search Process | AMPS

How much money do public school teachers, principals, employees make? - Business Insider

How much money do public school teachers, principals, employees make? - Business Insider

From cafeteria workers to principals, here's what everyone makes in a public school

• The Bureau of Labor Statistics provides data on wages and employment in local-government-owned public elementary and high schools.
• Public schools employ a wide variety of workers, and salaries range from well below the median wage to very high-paying.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Public schools employ a wide variety of workers, and salaries range from well below the median wage to very high-paying.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics' Occupational Employment Statistics program offers data on employment and wages across different occupations and industries.

According to that report, there were about 7.6 million Americans employed by public schools owned by local governments in May 2018, the most recent year for which data is available.

Public school jobs tend to be higher-paying than average. The median annual wage across all occupations in the sector was $47,120, well above the overall median wage of $38,640.

Here are all the occupations with at least 25,000 employees in the local-government-owned school sector ranked from lowest to highest wage, along with their median annual pay and the number of people in that job CONTINUE READING: How much money do public school teachers, principals, employees make? - Business Insider

Charter Schools: A Pig With Lipstick Is Still A Pig | Dissident Voice

Charter Schools: A Pig With Lipstick Is Still A Pig | Dissident Voice

Charter Schools: A Pig With Lipstick Is Still A Pig

Deregulated, deunionized, segregated, test-obsessed, privately-operated charter schools that lose employees regularly, manipulate student enrollment frequently, and funnel huge sums of public funds to the rich and their allies under the banner of high ideals cannot be prettified.

Engaging in all kinds of fraud and racketeering, including endless shady, if not illegal, real estate deals that greatly enrich charter school owners-operators at the expense of the public, and then turning around and saying we are “saving black kids,” offering “choices,” and “black families want charter schools” doesn’t wash.

Pay-the-rich schemes have no pro-social qualities.

Casually handing over billions in public dollars to the rich—for poor results and a whole new set of problems—is not the way forward. It is reckless and irresponsible. Pay-the-rich schemes prevent society from moving forward and exacerbate problems. Draining socially-produced wealth from the economy in order to line the pockets of wealthy private interests solves nothing.

As the long-standing and worsening problems in the unstable and unaccountable charter school sector are exposed with greater depth and regularity, and as more people stop tolerating charter schools and see them for what they really are, charter school advocates have grown more irresponsible, terrified, irrational, and belligerent.

A tragi-comedy is unfolding. Charter school promoters know the tide is slowly turning against them.

Watching charter school supporters defend the indefensible and sell a farce to the public, especially to poor, low-income, vulnerable minority families who CONTINUE READING: Charter Schools: A Pig With Lipstick Is Still A Pig | Dissident Voice

Schools Matter: Watch David Coleman, SAT CEO, Slither

Schools Matter: Watch David Coleman, SAT CEO, Slither

Watch David Coleman, SAT CEO, Slither

After David Coleman served the Gates Foundation's most effective Common Core flunky-developer-and-promo-man, he was given a most cushy gig as head the College Board, a "non-profit" corporation with a billion "non-profit" dollars in the bank and generosity to its CEO, who is paid more than $700,000 a year. Not bad work if you can get it. (Besides, Coleman's annual 700K plus perks is a bargain compared to the former College Board CEO's $1.3 million.)

While the College Board does a lot of testing, its meat and potatoes is the SAT. Without the SAT, the College Board that we have come to know and hate would disappear and, as E.M. Forster remarked when fantasizing about the death of standardized testing, "no one would be a penny the stupider."

Today the SAT follows its racist and classist trajectory that its been on from its inception, when eugenicists got together in the mid-1920s to rework the flawed IQ tests first given to GIs during WWI to determine which ones were the most fit to be gassed in the trenches of France.

Today the College Board claims to have eliminated the early SAT's class and race biases, even though all the evidence points to the SAT's continuing perfect record in identifying those unfit, by family income, for attending CONTINUE READING:Schools Matter: Watch David Coleman, SAT CEO, Slither

CURMUDGUCATION: Can Personalized Learning Deliver

CURMUDGUCATION: Can Personalized Learning Deliver

Can Personalized Learning Deliver

A new report published by the National Education Policy Center looks at the current state of K-12 personalized learning and finds that there are many reasons for school districts to think twice about embracing this hot new trend. “Personalized Learning and the Digital Privatization of Curriculum and Teaching” was written by Faith Boninger, Alex Molnar and Christopher M. Saldana of the University of Colorado Boulder, and it lays out several areas of concern. As the model spreads—and concerns spread with it—this report provides a clear view of the objections to modern personalized learning.

A History Lesson 

Imagine a technology “which gives tests and scores—and teaches.”  Or a call for a revolution in which science and technology would “combine to modernize the grossly inefficient and clumsy procedures of conventional education” as well as saving teachers time by freeing them from administering and scoring tests. All of that comes from Sidney L. Pressey, the inventor of the first real teaching machine, patented in 1928. Neither personalized learning nor the problems that come with it are new. In fact, the idea of personalizing learning through some sort of mass customization is almost 100 years old; ironically, one of the common pitches for current techno-privatized education is as an antidote to classrooms that supposedly have not changed in 100 years. 

 B. F. Skinner emerged in the 1950s with an alternative approach to Pressey’s, but as the authors note, the two both claimed that their approach would provide students immediate feedback, allow them to work at their own pace, and provide them more personal attention from teachers. “Both Pressey and Skinner also assumed that a student’s ability to provide the required response to a question demonstrated competency/mastery—and therefore ‘learning.’”

Modern personalized learning has not left any of this behind. 

The Modern Version 

You would assume that personalized learning meant something like “a humane school and classroom CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: Can Personalized Learning Deliver

Why Has the “School as Factory” Metaphor Persisted? | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Why Has the “School as Factory” Metaphor Persisted? | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Why Has the “School as Factory” Metaphor Persisted?

Why has the image of tax-supported public schools looking like and operating as factories stuck? 

In an earlier post, I traced the history of the metaphor since the early 1900s and its 180-degree switch from a positive to negative meaning. Over the past century, the metaphor of school-as-factory has served the interests of two sets of perennial reformers (yes there is a third group that borrows from each side but I will stick with the two major groupings).

The Incrementalists

There are reformers (e.g., policy elites, practitioners, parents, researchers, and donors) who see the age-graded school and its standardization of curriculum, instruction, and student behavior in need of improvement to make it work as it was intended, particularly for poor and minority students.Thepurpose of schooling is to prepare the young for a demanding and ever-changing workplace and future civic duties.

Former U.S. Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan made that point initially in 2010 and again in 2018:

About 100 years ago, America made secondary education in high school compulsory. That was almost unprecedented, a massive leap forward, and it drove a lot of our economic boom over the past 100 years. The problem is we haven’t moved past that and we haven’t adjusted the model. Obviously, the world is radically different from that time, but unfortunately education isn’t much different. And you see other nations out-educating, out-investing, out-innovating us. Not only have the skills needs changed dramatically, but we now have a globally competitive economy, a flat world. It’s no longer Iowa versus Indiana versus Montana CONTINUE READING: Why Has the “School as Factory” Metaphor Persisted? | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

The "X"odus Files: Accountability is the Problem. | BustED Pencils

The "X"odus Files: Accountability is the Problem. | BustED Pencils

The “X”odus Files: Accountability is the Problem.

t’s time to stop trying to rescue “accountability.” It’s a horrendous word and its application only results in blame based authoritarianism.

I have seen the attempts to “reclaim” accountability and I have taken my fair share of criticism for my critique of accountability. But why reclaim something that has nothing to do with empowering the human spirit? And why use language to appease? We gain nothing by reclaiming a toxic narrative and appeasing critics.

Accountability is forced compliance. It’s an out of date factory term and actually defines the moment we are all living quite well.

Teachers and public schools are shitty and can’t be trusted so forced compliance—accountability—will bring the system back in line.

The harsh reality is that forced compliance through accountability creates a system that forces teachers and public schools to be shitty. Accountability is the overseer in this upside down world where teachers are forced to enact harmful pedagogies that maintains our current socio-economic and political reality.

This has never been about test scores and failing schools and shitty teachers. No. The last CONTINUE READING: The "X"odus Files: Accountability is the Problem. | BustED Pencils

A Wise and Witty Review of The Wisdom and Wit of Diane Ravitch | tultican

A Wise and Witty Review of The Wisdom and Wit of Diane Ravitch | tultican

A Wise and Witty Review of The Wisdom and Wit of Diane Ravitch

By T. Ultican 5/27/2019

Maybe not as witty and wise as I had hoped but definitely positive and impressed. I admit; I am a Diane Ravitch fan-boy and this latest release from Garn Press reinforces that posture. Diane is a warrior of ideas who has stood courageously against lavishly financed purveyors of reactionary ideologies. Billionaires are calling for the privatization of democratically run public schools in America and she won’t have it. This book is a compilation of a decade of her winning arguments that have gone far toward stemming the tide of the theft of America’s public schools. They call it “reform”.

The Fundamental Argument

America’s super-wealthy espouse a position echoing the antebellum south. The scholar Johann N. Neem’s book Democracy’s Schools; The Rise of Public Education in America notes, “Because of their political power and the way the tax burden fell largely upon them, slaveholding elites spread an antitax gospel to convince ordinary whites that taxes were a bad thing.” That same gospel is embedded in the Tea Party and other Libertarian movements.

Franklin Roosevelt became President at the height of the Great Depression. In 1935, Roosevelt signed the Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance law more commonly known as Social Security. In 1965 President Lyndon Johnson signed the Medicare extension. In the Social Security administration’s history CONTINUE READING: A Wise and Witty Review of The Wisdom and Wit of Diane Ravitch | tultican

Thanks For Coming To My TED Talk (For The Culture) | The Jose Vilson

Thanks For Coming To My TED Talk (For The Culture) | The Jose Vilson

THANKS FOR COMING TO MY TED TALK (FOR THE CULTURE)

I’m so proud to share my most recent TED talk about teacher voice with the world for various reasons:

• I talked about my family (shouts to Luz and Alejandro!)
• I talked about my own classroom and students (shouts to last year’s 801-803 in the video)
• I shouted out #EduColor (We really outchea!)
• I concretized the definition of teacher voice (Please share it widely)
• I shared screen shots of my teacher evaluations with the world (“No weapon formed against me shall prosper,”)
• I did this in front of NYC Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza!

Imagine my shock when I found out that Carranza and I would appear as bookends to this event at TED HQ on the day of. I had prepared this talk for a month, mulling over every word, every slide, every GIF, and every salient point that I wanted to fit into this 10-minute talk. I had already given a TED talk that still gets watched in professional development sessions, but this felt different. The stakes were higher. I had more data points, including my own son in school.

When I finally had a product I liked, I asked a few friends and family to join me. Then it happened. “By the way, here’s the list of who’s in attendance.”

After I took a few seconds to inspect the list: “You sure this isn’t going to be awkward?” I told the CONTINUE READING: Thanks For Coming To My TED Talk (For The Culture) | The Jose Vilson

One Size Does Not Fit All | Live Long and Prosper

One Size Does Not Fit All | Live Long and Prosper

One Size Does Not Fit All

More than four dozen literacy experts have signed on to a letter expressing concern over the lack of balance in PBS Newshour’s segment about dyslexia.

Among the signers of the letter are Reading Hall of Fame members, Richard Allington, Pat Cunningham, Ken and Yetta Goodman, Michael Graves, Stephen Krashen, P. David Pearson, Gay Su Pinnell, David Reinking, and Barbara M. Taylor.

The entire letter can be found at Concern_letter_to_PBS.pdf and is listed with all signers.

One objection the signers have with the PBS episode is the assumption that there is only one way to teach reading that works for every child, and that other variables and individual characteristics of students are unimportant. The show also implies that America’s teachers don’t know how to teach reading, once again, misdirecting blame onto teachers for a lack of achievement among students.

There are a wide variety of out of school factors which could result in reading difficulties such as vision problems, lack of literacy experiences in the home, exposure to environmental toxins such as lead, and family trauma.

Dyslexia is defined differently in different places and by different people, so one single method of teaching reading is insufficient to cover all differences. Because of the confusion and differences in defining dyslexia, the American Psychiatric CONTINUE READING: One Size Does Not Fit All | Live Long and Prosper