US militarizes schools, day cares as gun violence spikes to war levels - Business Insider

US militarizes schools, day cares as gun violence spikes to war levels - Business Insider

The US is militarizing its schools and day cares because its gun violence rates are comparable to failed countries and war zones

• The US ranks within the 20 countries with the highest rates of gun-related deaths per 100,000 citizens, joining El Salvador, which is one of the world's most violent places, and Afghanistan, which the Global Peace Index named 2019's least peaceful country.
• Schools, police, and other institutions are increasingly militarizing their response to mass shootings to counter attackers carrying infantry-style, high-capacity weapons who may wear body armor.
• Active-shooter drills and armed guards in schools have been the response to mass shootings in public places, particularly schools and even day cares.
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Two more horrific mass shootings over the weekend again highlight the gun-related homicides plaguing the US. The problem is so severe, the data suggests, that US gun-violence rates are comparable with those in failed states and war zones.

Data compiled by the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation for 2016 shows that the US ranked second in the total number of firearm-related deaths — only Brazil had more. Rounding out the top six were Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia, and Guatemala, all of which have been plagued by drug- and gang-related violence or serious political instability. And the US ranks within the 20 countries with the highest rates of gun-related deaths, with 10.6 deaths per 100,000 citizens, joining El Salvador, which is one of the world's most violent places, and Afghanistan, which the Global Peace Index named 2019's least peaceful country.

While the US isn't engaged in active conflict on its own soil, the type of gun violence that causes so much angst and gets so much attention in the US — mass shootings in public places — resembles violent conflict in war zones and failed states, as does the response to it. CONTINUE READING: US militarizes schools, day cares as gun violence spikes to war levels - Business Insider

The Welcome Back Letter I’d Love to Give My Students – But Can’t | gadflyonthewallblog

The Welcome Back Letter I’d Love to Give My Students – But Can’t | gadflyonthewallblog

The Welcome Back Letter I’d Love to Give My Students – But Can’t

I’m a very lucky guy.

I get to teach language arts in an amazing urban middle school in Western Pennsylvania.

I have reasonable autonomy, opportunities to collaborate with my co-workers and strong union protections.

Even so, I know there are a lot of teachers out there who don’t have those things.

Yet even after counting all my blessings, I still can’t do whatever I want. I can’t even do everything that my years of academic training and experience tells me would be best for my students.

Every year I’m told that my worth as a professional is mainly defined by student test scores – that I should use those scores to drive my entire class, that my major goal should be increasing the scores and my every waking moment should be spent examining past scores.

Every year I have to watch out for this data metric and do that much more work because my district has lost even more funding to the vampire charter school in our CONTINUE READING: The Welcome Back Letter I’d Love to Give My Students – But Can’t | gadflyonthewallblog

2020 Candidates Views on Gun Control: A Voter’s Guide - POLITICO

2020 Candidates Views on Gun Control: A Voter’s Guide - POLITICO

2020 Candidates Views on Gun Control: A Voter’s Guide

The politics of gun control have played a role in decades of presidential elections, but advocates for the movement appear poised to make their greatest gains yet should a Democrat defeat Donald Trump in 2020.

The White House hopefuls are describing recent mass shootings as indicative of an urgent, uniquely American emergency — casting subsequent inaction as among the most glaring moral failings in recent U.S. history.

And national Democrats, united in a visceral opposition toward gun lobbies such as the National Rifle Association, remain galvanized by the wave of activism still emanating from last year’s tragedy at a high school in Parkland, Florida.

Gun Control

Assault Weapons

How should the government regulate the deadliest varieties of firearms?

17 candidates have declared a position

There are three policy positions outlined so far.

Gun Control

Background Checks

How should purchasers of lethal weapons be vetted in America?

16 candidates have declared a position

There is one policy position outlined so far.

CONTINUE READING: 2020 Candidates Views on Gun Control: A Voter’s Guide - POLITICO

A Guide To Discussing Race With Your Students - Teacher Habits

A Guide To Discussing Race With Your Students - Teacher Habits

A Guide To Discussing Race With Your Students

Guest Writer: Ali Andrews

The reluctance to discuss racism in American public schools actively harms students of color. 

While structural racism shapes their lives, the topic goes largely unaddressed in schools, often by educators who simultaneously enact discriminatory policies. Opening up discussions of race in the classroom is essential for engaging with students’ realities and enabling them to understand and cope with trauma.

Students of color deal with American racism on a daily basis, living “under a survival mentality” (PDF, 277 KB) that schools fail to acknowledge and support; this is described in the First Book Social Issues Impact Survey (PDF, 277 KB). According to the report, children most often initiate discussion in school on the topics of racism, immigration policies and police enforcement, all of which teachers feel ill-equipped to address. 

Additionally, students of color face active discrimination within school, with harsher discipline and disproportionately high suspension rates. According to the U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights (PDF, 2.1 MB), Black students account for 16 percent of the student population; however, they make up 32–42 percent of suspended or expelled students and are suspended and expelled at a rate three times greater than White students. 

Interventions are clearly required at a macro level. Public school teachers—who, according to the United States Department of CONTINUE READING: A Guide To Discussing Race With Your Students - Teacher Habits

Gov. Tom Wolf calls charter schools ‘private,’ draws heated response from their largest advocacy group - pennlive.com

Gov. Tom Wolf calls charter schools ‘private,’ draws heated response from their largest advocacy group - pennlive.com

Gov. Tom Wolf calls charter schools ‘private,’ draws heated response from their largest advocacy group

To say Gov. Tom Wolf struck a nerve with the charter school community when he recently referred to their schools as “private” is putting it mildly, but his administration is not backing away from that description.

An organization representing those schools sent Wolf a letter on Thursday voicing their “grave concerns” about his comments as well as his perception of charters, which are public schools that operate independently of school districts.

“I am shocked that you and your staff are unaware that none of Pennsylvanian’s charter schools [brick-and-mortar or cyber] are private or for-profit institutions,” states the letter signed by Ana Meyers, executive director of the Pennsylvania Coalition of Public Charter Schools, the state’s largest organization representing charter schools.

“I would have thought that a governor who has championed public education like you have over the past four-plus years would know better. I believe that you would have a much better understanding of how charter schools operate in Pennsylvania if you took the time to visit a few of them.”

Wolf referred to charter schools as “the privatization of education in our public schools” at a July news conference celebrating historic funding increases for public schools included in the 2019-20 budget. In a news release about that event, he lamented the “increasing amounts of school funding siphoned by private cyber and charter schools” and called for increased accountability of the public funds flowing to charter schools.

According to the Pennsylvania Association of School Business Officials, school districts paid charter schools more than $1.8 billion last year, CONTINUE READING: Gov. Tom Wolf calls charter schools ‘private,’ draws heated response from their largest advocacy group - pennlive.com

Parents reflect on case to be reviewed by U.S. Supreme Court - Daily Inter Lake

Daily Inter Lake - Front Page Slider, Parents reflect on case to be reviewed by U.S. Supreme Court

PARENTS REFLECT ON CASE TO BE REVIEWED BY U.S. SUPREME COURT

Kalispell parents Kendra Espinoza and Jeri Anderson and Bigfork parent Jaime Schaefer are the faces of a Montana case regarding religious schools and funding that will have its day in the United States Supreme Court.

What originated as a lawsuit in December 2015 (Espinoza versus the Montana Department of Revenue) now has school choice, separation of church and state, public and private school advocates across the nation weighing in and waiting for the Supreme Court to decide whether or not invalidating a religiously neutral student-aid program violates the U.S. Constitution’s religion clauses or equal protection clause.

The parents’ involvement in the case dates back to 2015 when the Montana Legislature passed an unprecedented law providing a tax credit, up to $150, for donors supporting scholarships for private schools.

The children of Espinoza, Anderson and Schaefer receive scholarships to help cover the cost of tuition to attend Stillwater Christian School in Kalispell.

The lawsuit was filed not long after the Montana Department of Revenue issued an administrative rule restricting tax credit eligibility to donations for scholarships that supported non-religious, private schools only. Nearly 90 percent of the otherwise eligible private schools in Montana have a religious affiliation.

The state contended that allowing those tax credits to incentivize donations to religious schools would violate the Montana Constitution’s prohibitions on funding religious organizations.

In December 2018, the Montana Supreme Court reversed a Flathead District Court ruling in favor of the three parents and invalidated the entire tax-credit scholarship program.

In June, the U.S. Supreme Court announced it would review the state court ruling.

About 7,000 to 8,000 cases are filed in the U.S. Supreme Court each term. The court reviews CONTINUE READING: Daily Inter Lake - Front Page Slider, Parents reflect on case to be reviewed by U.S. Supreme Court

Big Education Ape: If The Supreme Court Hears This Case, It Could Change The Face Of Public Education - http://bigeducationape.blogspot.com/2019/06/if-supreme-court-hears-this-case-it.html

How financially troubled colleges rip off veterans | Salon.com

How financially troubled colleges rip off veterans | Salon.com

How financially troubled colleges rip off veterans
How Betsy DeVos's Education Department makes it possible by propping up for-profit educational companies.

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’s move to reverse Obama-era restrictions on for-profit colleges and reinvigorate the shady industry has backfired spectacularly.

Since DeVos and team greenlighted the accreditation of one of the nation’s largest chains of for-profit colleges, Dream Center Education Holdings, and its purchase of schools, thousands of students have been affected by school closures and conversion to nonprofit status. One group of students that have been greatly affected are military veterans, who have racked up useless credits and massive debts that can become the burden of taxpayers and the federal government to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.

The deregulation efforts of the for-profit college sector began back in 2017, soon after Dream Center — a charity affiliated with a Los Angeles-based megachurch with no higher-education experience — acquired some colleges from a major for-profit player in bankruptcy. DeVos had made it a priority to bolster for-profit schools, according to an article by The New York Times. In addition to relaxing oversight on the sector, DeVos also allowed for-profit schools to convert to non-profit status by loosening the rules of that process.

"School closures also cost taxpayers and our federal government hundreds of millions of dollars in financial losses in discharged federal student loans."

It’s also come to light that a DeVos aide, Diane Auer Jones, a former lobbyist and executive for for-profit colleges, was granting personal favors to help Dream Center, which controls more than 100 campuses with 50,000 students, to help the company gain accreditation. DeVos, before becoming Education secretary, had invested in companies with ties to for-profit schools.

Back in 2016, Dream Center had its eyes on the failing ITT Technical Institutes but the Obama administration astutely blocked that acquisition as part of its crackdown on the for-profit college sector. And ITT ultimately shuttered its doors. But Dream Center found a new deal that would be blessed and moved forward by DeVos and team to purchase three large for-profit chains, the Art CONTINUE READING: How financially troubled colleges rip off veterans | Salon.com

The Right Remains Wrong about Teaching, Learning, and Critical Thinking | radical eyes for equity

The Right Remains Wrong about Teaching, Learning, and Critical Thinking | radical eyes for equity

The Right Remains Wrong about Teaching, Learning, and Critical Thinking

Everything about Williamson M. Evers is politically conservative, right-wing. Evers is a research fellow for the conservative Hoover Institution, explicitly dedicated to market economics and antagonistic to “government intrusion into the lives of individuals” (a libertarian strain of conservatism in the U.S.).

Evers has also been an appointee in a number of Republican state and federal administrations, often connected with education despite his academic background being entirely in the field of political science.

So let’s explore for a moment the great irony in Evers’ opinion/commentary piece for the Wall Street Journal—California Wants to Teach Your Kids That Capitalism Is Racist. Two elements of this screed are worth highlighting, in fact.

Over the course of about 770 inflammatory words that repeatedly misrepresent concepts and terminology in order to rush to his central arguments, Evers builds to these sweeping conclusions: “The curriculum is entirely wrongheaded when it comes to critical thinking” and “Teaching objective history clearly isn’t the goal.”

These claims are nested in the larger argument that the California curriculum Evers is criticizing is somehow a veiled left-wing agenda (while Evers carefully avoids making a case about the possibility of “objective” teaching and learning and is entirely uncritical himself in terms of his own conservative agenda).

Ultimately, Evers is resisting, ironically, a critical examination of capitalism CONTINUE READING: The Right Remains Wrong about Teaching, Learning, and Critical Thinking | radical eyes for equity

A study of Latino students reveals two sides of the segregation debate - The Hechinger Report

A study of Latino students reveals two sides of the segregation debate - The Hechinger Report

A study of Latino students reveals two sides of the segregation debate
Latino students are more isolated but also more evenly spread through schools, researchers say

The immediate coverage of an important July 2019 study on Latino children in America emphasized how they are increasingly “segregated” from white children at school. Reporters at both Politico and Education Week highlighted that the average Latino child doesn’t interact with white children at school as much as he or she used to. By 2010, the nation’s Latino children attended elementary schools where nearly 3 out of every 10 classmates were white, on average, down from 4 out of 10 in 1998.

In 12 years, that’s a big jump in ethnic isolation. For many Latino children, especially those who live in low-income Latino neighborhoods, the limited contact with white peers is more extreme. The nation’s 10 poorest districts, enrolling at least 50,000 students, were already quite segregated in 1998, and they backslid even further by 2010, the study found. (According to separate federal data, 17 percent of Latino students attended a school that was 90 percent or more Latino in 2010, up from 15 percent of Latino students in 1995.) CONTINUE READING: A study of Latino students reveals two sides of the segregation debate - The Hechinger Report

CURMUDGUCATION: Ed Reform Was Supposed To Crush Unions

CURMUDGUCATION: Ed Reform Was Supposed To Crush Unions

Ed Reform Was Supposed To Crush Unions

Every once in a while I stumble on an old article from back in the days when some reformsters would just say certain parts out loud instead of trying to be subtle or dog whistly.

Take this piece from April of 2014 by Terry M. Moe. It's an excerpt from his book What Lies Ahead for America's Children and Their Schools, and it's really, really clear what this Hoover Institute Fellow has in mind. Here's the subheading that pops up if you share a link to the article:

Real change won't come until we strip teachers unions of their power.

This frickin' guy

The arguments are familiar: Collective bargaining has forced schools to use inefficient organization. They block change in order to protect their vested interests (not, of course, because they are educational professionals who have some thoughts about what actually works in a classroom).

Moe talks about the "two great education reform movements" by which he means accountability and school choice. Choice progress has been slow, and Moe is very disappointed in accountability because even though students are taking the test, teachers aren't being fired or having their pay adjusted based on test results.

But Moe sees reason for hope, reason to believe that reformsters are going to turn it around thanks to two sets of factors.

One he calls endogenous change. These are politics within the education system, and he points to CONTINUE READING:  CURMUDGUCATION: Ed Reform Was Supposed To Crush Unions

Big Education Ape: Pre-Order Diane's New Book - Slaying Goliath - Network For Public Education - https://bigeducationape.blogspot.com/2019/06/pre-order-dianes-new-book-slaying.html

The Presidential Candidates and the Press: Missing What’s Important | janresseger

The Presidential Candidates and the Press: Missing What’s Important | janresseger

The Presidential Candidates and the Press: Missing What’s Important

The Washington Post‘s Valerie Strauss noticed something in the Democratic presidential candidates’ debates so far: “Now it’s getting ridiculous: four debates among Democratic presidential candidates, and no questions—or serious discussion about K-12 education.”  She notes that Michael Bennet alone made a plea to “fix our school system,” but beyond that imprecise declaration, explains Strauss: “Some candidates made passing references to universal preschool, and moderators did raise college affordability and student debt.  But when it comes to K-12 public education, which many believe is the most important civic institution in the country, nada.”  Strauss blames the moderators, and I encourage you to read her pointed speculation about what they might have been thinking when they ignored our public schools.

The school superintendent turned member of the Vermont State Board of Education and managing director of the National Education Policy Center, Bill Mathis also asks some tough questions of the press and policy makers, this time about the widespread and relatively unquestioned assumption that standardized test scores are a good measure for the quality of public schools.  While Mathis writes that parents, educators and students all seem to agree that other things matter at school more than test scores, he criticizes: “pundits and politicians who find it far easier to blame the schools than to confront our real problem… Poverty has a far greater influence on test scores than any other factor, including the schools. Poverty causes absenteeism, impaired attention, diminished social skills, lowered motivation and ambition, and increased depression… The state tests will not cure poverty but curing poverty will improve test scores.”

Lifelong professor of education and among our society’s finest writers about education, Mike Rose has also been worrying about the lack of a substantive conversation about what is happening in our public schools.  Rose has noticed the absence of the voice of professional educators in the traditional “high-and middlebrow media”—publications that “still have CONTINUE READING: The Presidential Candidates and the Press: Missing What’s Important | janresseger

Big Education Ape: Why I Like Steve Bullock as a Democratic Candidate | Diane Ravitch's blog - https://bigeducationape.blogspot.com/2019/08/why-i-like-steve-bullock-as-democratic.html

Why I Like Steve Bullock as a Democratic Candidate | Diane Ravitch's blog

Why I Like Steve Bullock as a Democratic Candidate | Diane Ravitch's blog

Why I Like Steve Bullock as a Democratic Candidate

Steve Bullock, governor of Montana, entered the Democratic primaries late, and to most people he is a complete unknown.

At NPE Action, we have been watching Steve Bullock with admiration, because he has been a stand-up guy for public schools in his state.

He has been governor of the state since 2012.

He beat a pro-privatization billionaire in 2016. 

Montana is a red state. Bullock is a pro-public school Democrat.

His children attend public schools.

He graduated from Helena High School. His mother was a school board member; his father was a teacher and administrator.

Bullock has frozen tuition at state colleges for four years to keep college affordable.

He has expanded Medicaid, with bipartisan support.

Montana has two charter schools, and they are both run CONTINUE READING: Why I Like Steve Bullock as a Democratic Candidate | Diane Ravitch's blog