VALERIE JABLOW: Seeing Stars | educationdc

Seeing Stars | educationdc

Seeing Stars

Last week, on a broadcast of the local (and live!) radio show Education Town Hall, educators from Anacostia High School talked about the Black Lives Matter Week of Action in Schools and connected it to the school’s history and future. As Anacostia HS has only 1 star in our new STAR rating of DC’s publicly funded schools, part of that future includes working with DCPS on a plan of action.

Anacostia HS psychologist Dr. Byron McClure noted that the STAR rating is particularly difficult for his school, as some students read at a 5th grade level when they enter. Thus, no matter how well Anacostia educators work with those students over the course of four years, with no growth measure for high schools in the rating, student growth simply doesn’t exist unless and until those students score well on PARCC.

Despite public outcry, our STAR rating is mainly (70%) based on test scores. Like other public schools in DC, Anacostia HS also struggles with the other measures in that rating, mainly attendance, suspensions, and re-enrollment rates.

For instance, during a January 31 council hearing on attendance, council member CONTINUE READING: Seeing Stars | educationdc

FINALLY DESEGREGATED PUBLIC EDUCATION- THE BEST REPARATION - Perdaily.com

FINALLY DESEGREGATED PUBLIC EDUCATION- THE BEST REPARATION - Perdaily.com

FINALLY DESEGREGATED PUBLIC EDUCATION- THE BEST REPARATION

The Civil War ended in 1865 with the occupation of the South by Northern troops, which established a Reconstruction plan to try and dismantle the South's several centuries old culture founded on slavery and the institutionalized legal inferiority of African Americans. One of the proposed mechanisms to supposedly try and integrate Blacks into a reinvented Southern society was the proposal to give all ex-slaves 40 acres of land and a mule to make them econmically self sufficient. Regrettably, it never came to pass or things might be very different today.

In the presidential election of 1876, although Samuel J. Tilden, a Democrat from New York, beat Rutherford B. Hayes, a Republican from Ohio in the popular vote (50.9% to 47.9%), Hayes was nonetheless declared president in a shady deal memorialized by the Compromise of 1877, where Hayes was elected president by the electoral college through the key support of 4 Southern states. This Southern electoral college support was garnered by Hayes agreeing to support the Compromise of 1877, that called for the removal of all federal troops from the South. And with the removal of these troops came the re-institutionalization of Black second-class citizenship, which was given an anchronistic reprieve that even the civil rights movement of the much later 1960s and beyond has yet to dislodge from the South and elsewhere in the United States. Black Americans are still waiting to be given the equal opportunity that even immigrants, who came to this country hundreds of years after them, have been CONTINUE READING: FINALLY DESEGREGATED PUBLIC EDUCATION- THE BEST REPARATION - Perdaily.com

Charter School Advocates Try to Downplay Growing Opposition to Charter Schools | Dissident Voice

Charter School Advocates Try to Downplay Growing Opposition to Charter Schools | Dissident Voice

Charter School Advocates Try to Downplay Growing Opposition to Charter Schools

Prominent charter school advocates are understandably shaken and worried about the growing tide of opposition to privately-operated nonprofit and for-profit charter schools that have been wreaking havoc across the country for nearly 30 years. Charter school supporters are speaking out more in hopes of saving these deregulated and segregated schools that often perform poorly and foster corruption.

“We’ve seen this kind of resistance before, it’s no big deal” is the general refrain issued by worried charter school advocates. “Yes, we are experiencing some troubled times and blowback right now, but it is not unusual and it will eventually pass” is another variation of this revealing refrain.

Charter school promoters know that the charter school sector, which has never been grass-roots in any way, shape, or form, is in trouble. But advocates of pay-the-rich schemes like privately-operated charter schools are too dogmatic and profit-focused to see the wood for the trees. Objectively, they are unable and unwilling to come to terms with the fact that people do not want education privatized and turned into a consumer good subject to the chaos, anarchy, and violence of the “free market.” People want fully-funded public schools under public control, completely free of the destructive influence of wealthy private interests.

Opposition to privately-operated charter schools is real, strong, growing, and irreversible. Individuals, organizations, and states across the country are taking real steps to rein them in. Worn-out platitudes, one-liners, lies, and absurd statements about these “innovative” schools that treat education as a business increasingly hold less sway.

Shawgi Tell is author of the book Charter School Report Card. He can be reached at stell5@naz.edu.. Read other articles by Shawgi.

This article was posted on Wednesday, July 3rd, 2019 at 5:39am and is filed under Charter Schools, Education.

Charter School Advocates Try to Downplay Growing Opposition to Charter Schools | Dissident Voice

We asked every Democratic candidate for president about desegregating schools. Here’s what they told us.

We asked every Democratic candidate for president about desegregating schools. Here’s what they told us.

We asked every Democratic candidate for president about desegregating schools. Here’s what they told us.

When California Senator Kamala Harris challenged Joe Biden on his past opposition to school integration programs during a Democratic primary debate, she started a conversation few candidates seemed interested in having.

Although many of the 2020 field’s 25 Democratic candidates have put out some education policy ideas, few of them have emphasized integration. Harris, for her part, has focused on boosting teacher salaries and adding billions for teacher training.

The lack of emphasis on integration is not surprising, says Brett Gadsden, a Northwestern history professor who has written about three decades of school desegregation efforts in Delaware, including the role of former Vice President Biden.

“I think too often we are constructing him as a kind of anomaly in Democratic party politics in the 1970s forward, when I think there is a consensus among Democrats and liberals that school segregation is kind of a social fact,” he said. “No one has picked up the ball and attempted to advance a concerted challenge to that problem in American education today.”

So Chalkbeat asked the candidates where they stand on school desegregation and on the debate about busing. We compiled what they’ve said or done on the issue in the past, too.

Colorado Senator Michael Bennet told us that he believes busing for desegregation can be helpful, but isn’t sufficient. New Jersey Senator Cory Booker’s campaign said “we should consider every tool at our disposal” to desegregate schools. And a spokesperson for former Representative Beto O’Rourke said that he “absolutely believes that the federal government has a responsibility and a role to play” in desegregation efforts.

Few offered details, though. We’ve listed the candidates in the order of their recent CONTINUE READING: We asked every Democratic candidate for president about desegregating schools. Here’s what they told us.

Carol Burris Responds to Charter Industry Critique of NPE’s “Asleep At the Wheel” | Diane Ravitch's blog

Carol Burris Responds to Charter Industry Critique of NPE’s “Asleep At the Wheel” | Diane Ravitch's blog

Carol Burris Responds to Charter Industry Critique of NPE’s “Asleep At the Wheel”

Last March, the Network for Public Education released a report written and researched by Carol Burris and Jeff Bryant, titled Asleep At the Wheel. It reviewed grants awarded by the federal Charter Schools Program and found that about a third of the grants went to charters that either never opened or closed soon after opening. It also reported that the CSP administrators did not conduct due diligence reviews and were basically handing out money without careful review. The report was cited by members of Congress when questioning Betsy DeVos. Burris has continued to release state reports on federal CSP awards, and she has found several states where the failure rate was 40%.

As you can imagine, the rightwing charter supporters were not happy. They responded not by calling for greater accountability and transparency by the charters, but by attacking the report! The critique was written by an employee of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. This is the organization that just honored Fernando Zulueta, who runs a highly political for-Profit Charter empire in Florida and amassed a real estate portfolio of more than $100 million.

Carol Burris responds here. 

All the links are included.

Carol Burris Responds to Charter Industry Critique of NPE’s “Asleep At the Wheel” | Diane Ravitch's blog

Neoliberalism Undermines the Common Good by Promoting Vouchers and Charter Schools | janresseger

Neoliberalism Undermines the Common Good by Promoting Vouchers and Charter Schools | janresseger

Neoliberalism Undermines the Common Good by Promoting Vouchers and Charter Schools

When you read about “neoliberalism,” do you clearly understand the term and what people mean when they talk about neoliberal education reform?  It is confusing because “neoliberal” is used to describe policies we typically think of as politically conservative, while political liberals are the people we think of as supporting programs typified by Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.  How is it that we call the people who support school privatization through vouchers and charter schools “neoliberals?”

For those of us who are not political theorists, Robert Kuttner simply and clearly defines“neoliberalism.” Kuttner is the  co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect and a professor at Brandeis University’s Heller School. Kuttner hardly touches on the specific area of neoliberalism as it applies to public education, but his precise definition is invaluable for clarifying our thinking. “It’s worth taking a moment to unpack the term ‘neoliberalism.’ The coinage can be confusing to American ears because the ‘liberal’ part refers not to the word’s ordinary American usage, meaning moderately left-of-center, but to classical economic liberalism otherwise known as free-market economics. The ‘neo’ part refers to the reassertion of the claim that the laissez-faire model of the economy was basically correct after all. Few proponents of these views embraced the term neoliberal. Mostly, they called themselves free-market conservatives. ‘Neoliberal’ was a coinage used mainly by their critics, sometimes as a neutral descriptive term, sometimes as an epithet. The use became widespread in the era of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.”

Kuttner traces the history of neoliberalism: “Since the late 1970s. we’ve had a grand experiment to test the claim that free markets really do work best… (I)n the 1970s, libertarian economic theory got another turn at bat…  Neoliberalism’s premise is that free markets can regulate themselves; that government is inherently incompetent, captive to special interests, and an intrusion on the efficiency of the market; that in distributive terms, market outcomes CONTINUE READING: Neoliberalism Undermines the Common Good by Promoting Vouchers and Charter Schools | janresseger

Hostile Takeover 2.0 – redqueeninla

Hostile Takeover 2.0 – redqueeninla

Hostile Takeover 2.0

Charter schools in California band together as an embattled group, agitating for hostile takeover of the Public Commons. They serially convene, dissolve and reform a plethora of working groups to bombard public schools with “messaging” and disinformation.  The groups as well as charters themselves of course, drain resources from schools, necessitating capital (monetary and human) defending what should be protected by the people, for the people.

One of these itinerant ideologues is Ben Austin, founder of the “Parent Trigger”, who in 2014 resigned from his astroturf group to foment a new one, Kids Coalition. A collection of emails made public by the municipal-transparency site michaelkolhaas.org uncovered a set of strategies developed among this cabal, reported by Howard Blume at the LATimes here and here.

The collusion, as one of them explains elsewhere, is “all about the messaging”. And the message revealed in aggregate over 5000+ emails, lays out a very stark code-shift. The catchy phrase, “kids first”, is a logical fallacy. Iterated unceasingly by charter advocates, it simultaneously casts aspersions on a presumed alternative (‘a time or place when kids were not first’) even while kids in schools have always been “first”. But consistent with the ideology of long-standing and now charter-mega-funders Koch and Walton (among others), that term “kids first” effectively codes for “anti-union”. Because if formerly it were true that kids were not first, it would be the fault of the system that transposed their status, their teacher’s union. ‘If the proper order of kids is not upheld, it must be the fault of their teachers’ is the sly message.

Likewise there is a constant drum-beat against “bureaucracy” and “adult issues” CONTINUE READING: Hostile Takeover 2.0 – redqueeninla

Parent Sues over New Orleans Charter High School Grade-fixing Fiasco | deutsch29

Parent Sues over New Orleans Charter High School Grade-fixing Fiasco | deutsch29

Parent Sues over New Orleans Charter High School Grade-fixing Fiasco

A New Orleans charter high school operated by New Beginnings Schools, John F. Kennedy High School at Lake Area, is in the throes of a grade-fixing scandal that has resulted in at least 92 out of 177 (that’s 52 percent) of its Class of 2019 deemed ineligible to graduate after all.

One of the consequences of this collosal display of the ineptitude in overseeing New Orleans charter schools is that the Orleans Parish School Board (OPSB) superintendent Henderson Lewis has made the post-scandal decision to audit the student records of all New Orleans high schools.

Lewis has also asked the Louisiana’s inpector general to conduct a criminal investigation into Kennedy’s grade-fixing mess.

I wondered how long it would take for parents of Kennedy seniors to sue. Well, I need not wonder any more.

According to nola.com, on Monday, July 01, 2019, Darnette Daniels, the parent of a Kennedy senior who participated in Kennedy’s graduation ceremony then discovered she was not eligible to graduate, Tayler McClendon, did just that. On behalf of her daughter, Daniels is suing the State of Louisiana, the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE), OPSB, New Beginnings Schools Foundation, and TenSquare, LLC, a charter school support organization involved in the management of Kennedy.

One can view the 14-page lawsuit here: Daniels-v-New-Beginnings;

Daniels’ lawsuit details the chaos at Kennedy, including its impact on her CONTINUE READING: Parent Sues over New Orleans Charter High School Grade-fixing Fiasco | deutsch29

Success Academy (Again) Takes — And Bombs — The Algebra II Regents | Gary Rubinstein's Blog

Success Academy (Again) Takes — And Bombs — The Algebra II Regents | Gary Rubinstein's Blog

Success Academy (Again) Takes — And Bombs — The Algebra II Regents

Last year I wrote about how the top charter chain in New York City, Success Academy, only managed to have three students get between 52% and 72% of the questions correct on the Algebra II Regents.

In New York State, the standardized end of the year exams for high school are called ‘The Regents.’  In math there are three Regents:  Algebra I is for 9th graders (or advanced 8th graders), Geometry is for 10th graders (or advanced 9th graders), and Algebra II is for 11th graders (or advanced 10th graders).  To get a diploma you only have to pass Algebra I, but to be ‘college ready’ you generally take the other two courses and, depending on what year you complete Algebra II, you take precalculus and possibly AP Calculus.

Success Academy is known for their Grades 3-8 ELA and Math test scores, but up until recently they weren’t taking the Regents at all, for unknown reasons.

In today’s New York Post there was an article about how 100% of the eighth graders from Success Academy Bronx 2 scored a level 5 on the recent Algebra I regents.  As this has been celebrated by various charter cheerleaders on Twitter, I wanted to give my analysis of this event.

First of all, there is a generous curve on the Algebra I Regents where 31% correct curves up to a 65.  For the higher scores, it is less generous, but still to get an 85 which is a level 5, CONTINUE READING: Success Academy (Again) Takes — And Bombs — The Algebra II Regents | Gary Rubinstein's Blog

Bernie Sanders Takes a Sledgehammer to Student Debt

Bernie Sanders Takes a Sledgehammer to Student Debt

Bernie Sanders Takes a Sledgehammer to Student Debt

Bottom line is we should not be punishing people for getting a higher education. It is time to hit the reset button.”
– Bernie Sanders

Americans currently have about $1.6 Trillion in outstanding student loan debt. This has crushing consequences for our economy as some debtors struggle to pay off these loans in a job market where income growth barely keeps up with inflation. Unlike Trump’s businesses that were able to take advantage of bankruptcy six times, those with student loan debt cannot have their loans discharged. They tried to finance the American Dream and are now stuck in a nightmare that they cannot escape.

Bernie Sanders has become the latest Democratic presidential candidate to propose a plan to help those who are struggling with their student loan debt. Unfortunately, this plan overshoots the target by eliminating all debt. The relief is not subject to an income test so that everyone will be helped, regardless of need. It also makes no differentiation between debt incurred at a community college or at an overpriced private university. Without narrowing the focus, this plan is the financial equivalent of using a sledgehammer to swat a fly.

The other flaw in the plan is that it does not take into account those who made sacrifices to avoid the debt in the first place. Parents who CONTINUE READING: Bernie Sanders Takes a Sledgehammer to Student Debt