WATCH THE VIDEO: Strong Public Schools Presidential Forum #REDFORED #CTA #StrongPublicSchools #ra19 #nea #neara19 #houston

Strong Public Schools Presidential Forum

Strong Public Schools Presidential Forum

Join NEA President Lily Eskelsen García as she hosts the Strong Public Schools 2020 Presidential Forum on Friday, July 5!
We’ll be sitting down with former Vice President Joe Biden, Former HUD Secretary Julián Castro, Mayor Bill DeBlasio, Sen. Kamala Harris, Gov. Jay Inslee, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, former Rep. Beto O’Rourke, Rep. Tim Ryan, Sen. Bernie Sanders, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren.
Educators are poised to play a major role in choosing the president of the United States, and we can’t wait to sit down with these candidates to discuss the public schools our students and educators deserve.

WHERE TO WATCH the #StrongPublicSchools forum can be found here: http://bit.ly/SPS2020Forum

America’s largest labor union, the National Education Association, will host 2020 presidential candidates at its annual Representative Assembly in Houston. Educators are poised to play a major role in choosing the president of the United States. And now we are taking this energy to the 2020 campaign where we will lead a conversation about the schools our students deserve.

Strong Public Schools Presidential Forum

The strike that brought teachers unions back from the dead - Vox

The strike that brought teachers unions back from the dead - Vox

The strike that brought teachers unions back from the dead
When these Chicagoans walked off the job in 2012, they changed the future of organizing.

On the morning of September 10, 2012, the bells rang to open Chicago’s public schools, but there were no teachers in the classrooms.

The night before, negotiations with Chicago’s reform-minded mayor, Rahm Emanuel, had gone south, and the new activist leaders of the city’s 25,000-member teachers union, clad all in red, walked out. Surrounded by a throng of cameras, they declared that their members would go on strike for the first time in 25 years.

“It looks like a sure bet in hindsight, but at the time, not so much,” recalls Jesse Sharkey, a former high school social studies teacher and chess-team coach who was part of a new guard that took over the Chicago Teachers Union in 2010. “I can remember hearing, ‘They can’t do that!’”

City leaders had been closing schools for years as part of an education reform platform; teachers were becoming easier to fire under new accountability rules. But the strike was a risk they felt they had to take. “We were okay with it,” says Stacy Davis-Gates, who was one of the many black educators to walk out that day (she is now the Chicago union’s vice president). “We had no other choice.”

The teachers needed a new contract, and the two sides were at odds; Emanuel, who’d served as President Barack Obama’s chief of staff and was a year into his job as Chicago’s mayor, wanted to pair raises with layoffs, and the new union leadership wouldn’t accept. They went on strike to demand not only better compensation but also that officials deemphasize standardized tests in determining teacher pay. They wanted smaller class sizes too. They adopted a simple slogan: The Schools Students Deserve.

The strike — the first walkout in a major city since Detroit teachers sought better pay in 2006 — ended nine days later, but not before Emanuel would pursue a court order to try to force teachers back to school. (He failed.) The union won concessions on many of the issues it cared most about: a 16 percent raise over four years, less emphasis on test scores in evaluating teachers, the right for laid-off teachers to get first dibs on new job openings at CONTINUE READING: The strike that brought teachers unions back from the dead - Vox

5 Effective Techniques For Improving Student Performance With the Help Of Psychology + 10 Things Every New Teacher Should Know Teacher Habits

5 Effective Techniques For Improving Student Performance With the Help Of Psychology - Teacher Habits

5 Effective Techniques For Improving Student Performance With the Help Of Psychology

Guest Writer: Michael Gorman

5 EFFECTIVE TECHNIQUES FOR IMPROVING STUDENT PERFORMANCE WITH THE HELP OF PSYCHOLOGY

There are many different methodologies that exist today that claim to improve learning for the student. They promise to improve the way students learn as well as the way teachers teach. Having worked with services like EssaysOnTime.com, and also running an essay service, I can confidently say that I am firmly in the education industry. I have attended tons of seminars, team meetings, conferences, and watched a lot of media on the matter and all I see is a plethora of different methodologies by well-meaning speakers that claim they will work. 

Granted, some of the information out there is actually helpful. However, some of the stuff that is being peddled to teachers really has no empirical data to back it up and turns out to have little to no utility in the classroom. 

I decided to go out and do some thorough research, and I came across a publication by the Coalition for Psychology in Schools and Education (CPSE). The whole idea behind the document was to outline 20 principles that are based on psychological science and seek to show what parts of a student’s psychology are the most instrumental to CONTINUE READING: 5 Effective Techniques For Improving Student Performance With the Help Of Psychology - Teacher Habits

10 Things Every New Teacher Should Know

Guest Writer: Kurt Walker

Being a teacher is a tough job, and the toughest part of it is usually the first year because it will be a completely new experience for you that comes with many unexpected factors and responsibilities.

In your first year as a teacher, you should accept and embrace your status of “the new teacher”; denying it would be pointless. This year you will learn a lot, so you might feel overwhelmed at some point.

Therefore, to help you make your first year a bit easier and less stressful, in today’s post we’re presenting our top 10 things every new teacher should know.

• Learn About Classroom Management

Even mothers have trouble managing their kids and they only have to deal with 2-4 of them, not a whole classroom. Therefore, you should learn about classroom management for your own good and peace of mind. Kids can be hard to manage, but with clear expectations, consistent followthrough, and mutual respect, your first year can be a success. For good advice on classroom management, check out CONTINUE READING: 10 Things Every New Teacher Should Know

Los Angeles: Did Austin Beutner Clear His Major Policy Speech with the Charter Lobby? | Diane Ravitch's blog

Los Angeles: Did Austin Beutner Clear His Major Policy Speech with the Charter Lobby? | Diane Ravitch's blog

Los Angeles: Did Austin Beutner Clear His Major Policy Speech with the Charter Lobby?

Blogger MIchael Kohnhaas says that Los Angeles Superintendent Austin Beutner precleared a major policy speech with charter lobbyists. He provides documentation. Critics feared that the charter majority was choosing Beutner to do their bidding.

This post suggests they chose well.

The story about the secret plan was reported by the Los Angeles Times here.

The Plan is to win control of the board, the Mayor’s office, Sue the district, fight the teachers’ union.

Ben Austin’s email to charter supporters is quoted. Austin, you may recall, founded the billionaire funded Parent Revolution. He likes to pawn himself off as a “liberal,” who just happens to love charters and win Walton funding. His Patent Revolution spent millions trying to persuade poor parents to sign petitions to turn their public schools over to charter chains. It was a bust. The Revolution never happened. But Ben has now moved on and has created another AstroTurf group called “The Kids’ New Deal.”

Howard Blume writes:

The overriding issue of the email is how to overcome setbacks at the hands of the teachers union. Leaders of the union had vilified charters in the lead-up to the strike, saying that rapid charter growth was undermining traditional public schools by siphoning away motivated students and their families — and the public funding that travels with them. One day during the walkout was devoted to a march on the local headquarters of the California Charter Schools Assn.

Meanwhile, at the state level, charter supporters had spent big on losing candidates in the 2018 race for governor as well as Tuck’s bid for state superintendent. A central concern was that the growth of charters would be halted or even reversed.

[Ben] Austin asserted in his email: “As Machiavelli says, it’s better to be feared than loved. Right now we are neither.”

Los Angeles: Did Austin Beutner Clear His Major Policy Speech with the Charter Lobby? | Diane Ravitch's blog

“Classrooms and Hope” — Mike Rose’s Reflection for the Holiday Weekend | janresseger

“Classrooms and Hope” — Mike Rose’s Reflection for the Holiday Weekend | janresseger

“Classrooms and Hope” — Mike Rose’s Reflection for the Holiday Weekend

If you care about children, it is pretty easy to get discouraged in a country where state budgets are shorting schools, where we celebrated the 4th of July yesterday with tanks, and where children are being warehoused at the southern border in unsanitary, unsafe, and frightening conditions.

It is the holiday weekend when we celebrate who we want to be as a nation.  Where is there something hopeful we can focus on in 2019?  The UCLA education professor and wonderful writer, Mike Rose contemplates this question in a blog post earlier this week: “What in our lives acts as a counterforce to the dulling and blunting effects of evil, helps us see the good, hold to it, and work toward it?”

Rose, the educator who wrote a book about a four year trip across the United States—a journey in which he visited hundreds of classrooms and observed teachers—answers his own question: “I realized that for me a longstanding source of hope, of what might be, is the classroom, or more exactly, all that the classroom represents at its best: a sanctioned space for growth, learning, discovery, thinking and thinking together,”

In this post Rose describes what his visits to public schools helped him realize: “These trips to Calexico, to Baltimore, to Eastern Kentucky, to a nation within a nation in northern Arizona brought forth new cultural practices, new languages, new gestures.  I was fortunate to have been escorted into so many classrooms, so many homes, to have been guided into the everyday events of the communities I visited, for the invitation eased the unfamiliarity and discomfort that could have been present on all sides. What I experienced was a kind of awe at our variety, yet an intimate regard, a handshake on the corner, a sense of shared humanity.”

Rose continues: “The journey was odd for me in another way, considering my own teaching history.  My work in the classroom has mostly been with people whom our schools, public and private, have failed: working-class and immigrant students, students from nonmainstream CONTINUE READING: “Classrooms and Hope” — Mike Rose’s Reflection for the Holiday Weekend | janresseger

The Politics of Art in a San Francisco High School (Bari Weiss) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

The Politics of Art in a San Francisco High School (Bari Weiss) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

The Politics of Art in a San Francisco High School (Bari Weiss)

This op-ed column appeared in the New York Times June 28, 2019.

Bari Weiss (@bariweiss), a staff writer and editor for the Opinion section, is the author of the forthcoming “How to Fight Anti-Semitism.”

More than $8,000. That was the amount John Ashcroft’s Justice Department spent on blue curtains to cover up the busty Spirit of Justice statue and her bare-chested male equivalent, the Majesty of Law, in the department’s Great Hall in 2002. The Victorian move against the Art Deco sculptures spurred a thousand lampoons. “A blue burqa for justice,” my colleague Maureen Dowd memorably called it. In The Harvard Crimson, a young Pete Buttigieg wrote, “It seems odd that an infant is supposed to feed on them, and a grown man is expected at some point to behold them, but for a period in between we feel the need to see to it that no child ever sees a breast.”

I wonder, then, what Mr. Buttigieg, now on the presidential campaign trail, would make of the San Francisco school board’s unanimous decision on Tuesday night to spend at least $600,000 of taxpayer money not just to shroud a historic work of art but to destroy it.

By now stories of progressive Puritanism (or perhaps the better word is Philistinism) are so commonplace — snowflakes seek safe space! — that it can feel tedious to track the details of the latest outrage. But this case is so absurd that it’s worth reviewing the specifics.

Victor Arnautoff, the Russian immigrant who made the paintings in question, was perhaps the most important muralist in the Bay Area during the Depression. Thanks to President Franklin Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration, he had the opportunity to make some enduring public artworks. Among them is “City Life” in Coit Tower, in which the artist painted himself standing in front of a newspaper rack conspicuously missing the mainstream San Francisco Chronicle and packed with publications like The Daily Worker.

Arnautoff, who had assisted Diego Rivera in Mexico, was a committed Communist. “‘Art for art’s sake’ or art as perfume have never appealed to me,” he said in 1935. “The artist is a critic of society.”

This is why his freshly banned work, “Life of Washington,” does not show the clichéd image of our first president kneeling in prayer at Valley Forge. Instead, the 13-panel, 1,600-square-foot mural, which was painted in 1936 in the just-built George Washington High School, depicts his slaves picking cotton in the fields of Mount Vernon and a group of colonizers walking past the corpse of a Native American.

“At the time, high school history classes typically ignored the incongruity that Washington and others among the nation’s founders subscribed to the declaration that ‘all men are created equal’ and yet owned other human beings as chattel,” Robert W. Cherny writes in “Victor Arnautoff and the Politics of Art.”

In other words, Arnautoff’s purpose was to unsettle the viewer, to provoke young people into looking at American history from a different, darker perspective. Over the past months, art historians, New Deal scholars and even a group called the Congress of Russian Americans have tried to make exactly that point.

“This is a radical and critical work of art,” the school’s alumni association argued. “There are many New Deal murals depicting the founding of our country; very few even acknowledge slavery or the Native genocide. The Arnautoff murals should be preserved for their artistic, historical and educational value. Whitewashing them will simply result in another ‘whitewash’ of the full truth CONTINUE READING: The Politics of Art in a San Francisco High School (Bari Weiss) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

NEA President: "Something Big Is About to Happen" - NEA Today #REDFORED #CTA #StrongPublicSchools #ra19 #nea #neara19 #houston

NEA President: "Something Big Is About to Happen" - NEA Today

NEA President: “Something Big Is About to Happen”

In her keynote address to the 2019 National Education Association Representative Assembly on Thursday, NEA President Lily Eskelsen García told the almost 7,000 delegates that the stakes in 2020 are too high for any educator to disengage from the political process.

Eskelsen García delivered her speech on July 4, usually a day to celebrate freedom and independence. Now, she said, everyone must stand up for something that is endangered.

“I’ve taken it for granted that in an open, democratic society, the moral arc of the universe would always bend towards justice,” she said. “That our country would keep finding ways to be more inclusive of folks who had been excluded; that we’d be looking for ways to give opportunities to folks who had so little; that we’d see more ways to appreciate our diversity of cultures and languages and races and our LGBT communities.”

Now more than ever, the nation needs its educators to take up the call. “The moral arc of the universe needs us now to put our backs into education justice,” Eskelsen García told delegates.

It’s already happening. In early 2018, West Virginia educators staged a historic walk-out sparking the national #RedforEd movement that quickly spread to states whose schools had buckled under a decade of extreme budget cuts.

Suddenly, politicians everywhere were listening.

“Even without a march, surprising doors were opened.  Politicians who usually said, ‘Talk to the hand,’ reached out to our leaders and said, ‘Let’s talk. We would so rather you not go all West Virginia on us,” Eskelsen García said.

Momentum carried over into the fall with the midterm elections. Educators delivered in spectacular fashion, helping sweep pro-education candidates—many of them former or current educators—into office at every level of government. Jahana Hayes, the 2016 National Teacher of the Year, was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives.

Educators should never apologize, never shy away from being “political,” Eskelsen García said.

“Political action isn’t subversive.  It’s the essence of democracy.  Showing up informed and engaged, prepared to make a difference is exactly what democracy looks like.”

And NEA is prepared to be powerfully engaged in the 2020 election.

NEA

✔@NEAToday

"Stand up and shout if you have personally marched, rallied, held a picket sign and been visible standing up for your students and your profession this year! You showed up, and it’s made a difference. You’ve changed the narrative."
@Lily_NEA #NEARA19 #RedforEd

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“I hope I’m not being too subtle.  I want to be clear,” Eskelsen García said. “The United States of America must have a new president. …Donald Trump is pushing our beautiful, imperfect nation towards authoritarianism and despotism. In the history of history, wherever authoritarian, anti-democratic despots took over, they had a common strategy. It’s about who you oppress, who you scapegoat, and the institutions you corrupt.”

To elect a new president—one who respects our democratic institutions, who has an inclusive vision for the country and strongly supports public education—NEA CONTINUE READING: NEA President: "Something Big Is About to Happen" - NEA Today