Big Education Ape: Sep 5, 2019

Thursday, September 5, 2019

NYC Public School Parents: What both supporters and critics of the proposal to eliminated gifted programs are missing

NYC Public School Parents: What both supporters and critics of the proposal to eliminated gifted programs are missing

What both supporters and critics of the proposal to eliminated gifted programs are missing

There's been a tremendous amount of rhetoric from both sides and from the media about the recommendations in the second report from the School Diversity Advisory Group (SDAG), focusing primarily on its proposal to eliminate gifted programs in elementary schools.

See for example the hyperbolic headline of NY Times article saying these changes would create "seismic changes" and a tweet from the reporter, Eliza Shapiro, that it would "blow up the system." A headline in the NY Post claims, even more hysterically, that "De Blasio is out to destroy public schools."

The reality is that only about four percent of NYC public elementary grade children are attending gifted classes right now, and in many districts there are practically none.

See the chart below - showing there are only two districts, District 2 and 26, in which the share of elementary grade students in gifted classes are above ten percent. (We took out the citywide gifted programs for this district analysis -of which there are five: NEST, Anderson, TAG, BK School of Inquiry and Q300, the 30th Ave. School.)

It is true that the parents of these kids are an extremely vocal constituency - with political influence far beyond their numbers. Yet to eliminate these classes would hardly CONTINUE READING: NYC Public School Parents: What both supporters and critics of the proposal to eliminated gifted programs are missing

Deaning and the Education Profession | Cloaking Inequity

Deaning and the Education Profession

Was honored to join News Talk 590 WVLK today. I talked with Scott about everything from diversity and inclusiveness to research and the politicization of teachers and the future of the profession.

Please Facebook Like, Tweet, etc below and/or reblog to share this discussion with others.

Check out and follow my YouTube channel here.

Twitter: @ProfessorJVH

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Succeed or Surrender - Sacramento News & Review

Sacramento News & Review - Succeed or surrender - News - Local Stories - September 5, 2019

Succeed or Surrender
As Democratic presidential candidates debate school busing, Sac High’s graduation ceremony reveals the tricky role that charters play

From the rows on the floor to the near-nose bleed seats in the balcony, Memorial Auditorium was packed for Sacramento Charter High School’s 2019 graduation.

As with most graduations, the call to hold applause until the end was largely ignored. With my cousin next to be called, I figured self-restraint was unlikely.

“Summa cum laude,” a voice said. The man paused to let the screams and whistles simmer before continuing, “Amaya Rose-Hook.”

Like her fellow students, she belongs to one of many communities that has suffered from decades of racism, economic disinvestment and political disinterest—and then attended one of America’s charter schools dedicated to closing the education gap.

In that respect, Sacramento Charter High School is no different than other charter schools in the country, graduating upwards of 90% of its students and sending at least 85% to college.

But the school known to most as “Sac High” is unlike others in Sacramento. Of the 138 students who received their diplomas, none were white.

“One of the things that I could say that Sac High was good for is that I got to be around a whole bunch of black people,” my cousin told me the day before she left for San Diego State University.

The idea of a quasi-segregated public school normally sounds alarms at the state level, where lawmakers backed by a powerful teachers union are deciding bills to further regulate charter schools and halt their growth. And even at the national level where a Democratic presidential debate turned into an anecdotal history lesson about school busing and desegregation, the question of whether America has lived up to the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling remains bitterly contested.

Publicly funded but privately operated charter schools have largely benefited from bipartisan support over the years as an alternative to a traditional school system that has largely failed students from disadvantaged communities.

Sac High graduates are 90% black and Latinx, and most from Oak Park, a historically black and brown neighborhood undergoing rapid gentrification.

But as the state attempts to crack down on profiteering charter schools and questions linger about their effectiveness, do charters actually provide the best opportunity for underserved students—or just prove that America has surrendered its 65-year effort to provide equal education regardless of race?

Charter schools continue to grow at a rapid rate across the country, including in California, where nearly 10% of K-12 students are enrolled in charters.

According to financial records filed in July, the powerful California Teachers Association spent more than CONTINUE READING: Sacramento News & Review - Succeed or surrender - News - Local Stories - September 5, 2019

A Snapshot of the Status of African Americans Among School Principals in the United States : The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education

A Snapshot of the Status of African Americans Among School Principals in the United States : The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education

A Snapshot of the Status of African Americans Among School Principals in the United States

A new report from the U.S. Department of Education looks at the demographic characteristics of elementary and secondary school principals in the United States.

Overall, during the 2017-18 school year, 78 percent of school principals were non-Hispanic White, 11 percent were non-Hispanic Black or African American, 9 percent were Hispanic, and 3 percent were another race/ethnicity. Blacks were 16.3 percent of all principals at public charter schools.

Blacks made up slightly more than 20 percent of all principals in urban schools but only 9.4 percent of all principals in suburban schools and 4.5 percent of all principals at schools in rural areas.

African Americans were more than 20 percent of all principals at schools where 75 percent of all students qualified for federally financed school lunches. But Blacks were only 3.8 percent of the principals where less than 35 percent of all students qualified for free lunches.

Among private school principals, 86 percent were non-Hispanic White, 5 percent were non-Hispanic Black or African American, 5 percent were Hispanic, and 4 percent were another race/ethnicity.

The full 63-page report, Characteristics of Public and Private Elementary and Secondary School Principals in the United States: Results From the 2017–18 National Teacher and Principal Survey, can be downloaded by clicking here.

A Snapshot of the Status of African Americans Among School Principals in the United States : The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education

EDUCATION STARS WILL SHINE AT THE 2020 NETWORK FOR PUBLIC EDUCATION CONFERENCE: Conference Keynote Speakers #NPE2020

2020 Conference Keynote Speakers - Network For Public Education

EDUCATION STARS WILL SHINE AT THE 2020 NETWORK FOR PUBLIC EDUCATION CONFERENCE

Conference Keynote Speakers

Diane Ravitch

Diane Ravitch is a co-founder of the Network for Public Education. She is a historian of education and Research Professor of Education at New York University. She has written ten books and edited another 14. She is a graduate of the Houston public schools, Wellesley College (BA), Columbia University (Ph.D. in history of American education), and holds ten honorary doctorates.

She blogs at dianeravitch.net. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Noliwe Rooks
An interdisciplinary scholar, Noliwe Rooks’ work explores how race and gender both impact and are impacted by popular culture, social history and political life in the United States. Specifically, Rooks works on the cultural and racial implications of beauty, fashion and adornment; educational inequality; race, food and the politics of the city, and Black women’s studies.

Rooks’ most current book is Cutting School: Privatization, Segregation, and the End of Public Education, published by The New Press in 2017.

Nikhil Goyal
Nikhil Goyal is a sociologist who has taught as an adjunct professor in New York University’s Prison Education program. He is also the author of Schools on Trial (Doubleday, 2016). He has appeared on CNN, FOX, and MSNBC and written for the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, TIME, The Nation, and other publications.

Goyal is a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge, where he holds a Master of Philosophy (M.Phil) in Education. He lives in New York.

Jitu Brown
Jitu Brown is the national director for the Journey for Justice Alliance, a network of 30 grassroots community based organizations in 23 cities across the country organizing for community driven school improvement.

Born and raised in the Rosemoor neighborhood on the far south side of Chicago, Jitu Brown also teaches African-American history at St. Leonard’s Adult High School, the only accredited high school in the nation that exclusively serves people who have been formerly incarcerated.

Little Steven
In January of 2019, musician, actor and activist Little Steven was on the picket line in Los Angeles with striking teachers and Diane Ravitch. The two became fast friends – and Little Steven included Diane in his music video “Solidarity,” a video he created to bring attention to the teacher strikes across the world.

Little Steven is also shining a light on the dangers of privatization. In a Rolling Stone interview about his participation in the L.A. teachers’ strike, he said “The big-picture philosophical thing is privatization. It’s happening in every single town.”

2020 Conference - Network For Public Education

DoubleTree by Hilton Philadelphia – Center City

237 S Broad Street Philadelphia, PA 19107-5686

A BLOCK OF ROOMS HAVE BEEN RESERVED AT A DISCOUNTED PRICE FOR THE CONFERENCE HOTEL

Book Your Room

2020 Conference - Network For Public Education

Push for single rating of LA schools challenges state’s multi-dimensional accountability system | EdSource

Push for single rating of LA schools challenges state’s multi-dimensional accountability system | EdSource

Push for single rating of LA schools challenges state's multi-dimensional accountability system

There is a deeply rooted impulse in American society — perhaps any society — to rank everything from restaurants and refrigerators to athletes and colleges.

That may help explain why pressures continue in California to rank its schools based on a single score of some kind, despite a major thrust in the state to move in the opposite direction.

Great Schools, the hugely popular parent-oriented website, has combined several indicators to come up with score between 1 and 10 for every school in the state.

Another notable push is coming from Los Angeles, where the state’s largest school district has been working over the past year on a plan to rank schools on a numerical 1-to-5 scale, a number that would be reached by combining students’ improvement on test scores and other factors.

Underscoring the complexity and volatility of the issue, this week newly elected school board member Jackie Goldberg introduced a harshly critical resolution effectively calling on the district to abandon the idea in its current form. Among other CONTINUE READING: Push for single rating of LA schools challenges state’s multi-dimensional accountability system | EdSource

Seattle Schools Community Forum: Stories of HCC: You Failed Us: Students of Color Talk Seattle Schools

Seattle Schools Community Forum: Stories of HCC

Stories of HCC

Image result for You Failed Us: Students of Color Talk Seattle Schools

Crosscut has an article about a book that a 17-year-old trans person has written about their experience in HCC. The book is called, "You Failed Us."

It was two years ago that Azure Savage began writing their first book, the origins of which can be traced back to their kindergarten year at Seattle’s Thurgood Marshall Elementary. It was there, they said, that they first noticed inequities in how different students are treated.

In August of this year, Savage published You Failed Us: Students of Color Talk Seattle Schools. Part memoir and part collected oral history, You Failed Us interlaces Savage’s personal journey with the experiences of approximately 40 other school-aged youth in the Seattle area.

Through 11 chapters, Savage's literary debut candidly explores issues surrounding race, as well as gender identity, mental health and structural barriers facing students navigating the city’s K-12 education system.

I am trying to recall when Thurgood Marshall took on HCC students but was it more than 10 years ago? Maybe the book explains.

Brazile chooses to focus on Savage so we don't get a read on what the CONTINUE READING: Seattle Schools Community Forum: Stories of HCC

Why 2020 Dems Should Target the Nonprofit Charter School Industry - LA Progressive

Why 2020 Dems Should Target the Nonprofit Charter School Industry - LA Progressive

Why 2020 Dems Should Target the Nonprofit Charter School Industry

Charter schools, once the darling of politicians on the right and left, have become a hot potato in the Democratic Party 2020 presidential primary with nearly every candidate voicing some level of disapproval of the industry. A common refrain among the candidates is to express opposition to “for-profit charter schools.” Charter school proponents counter these pronouncements by pointing to industry data indicating only 12 percent of charter schools are run by overtly profit-minded entities, and that most charter schools are overseen by outfits that have a nonprofit, tax-exempt status.

But the singling out of for-profit charter schools is somewhat beside the point as residents of a St. Paul, Minnesota, neighborhood learned this summer when a treasured local landmark was threatened by an expanding charter school. The charter was decidedly nonprofit, but as families and preservation advocates would learn from their tenacious, but ultimately unsuccessful, battle to save a beloved, historic church, charter schools, regardless of their tax status, have become powerful players in a lucrative real estate market in urban areas where land values are high and empty lots or school-ready buildings are hard to find.

Tearing Down a Church to Make Way for a Charter

A battle over a beloved church building in the Twin Cities reveals how money can be made from charter school real estate deals.

In the tiny Warrendale neighborhood of St. Paul, St. Andrew’s Catholic Church has stood as a community centerpiece for nearly 100 years. In 1927, St. Andrew’s was designed in the Romanesque revival style by Charles Hauser, the son of German immigrants who became the first city architect of St. Paul at the age of 25.

Today, it’s gone. In 2013, the St. Andrew’s site, which included the church building, a rectory and a small, two-story school, was sold to Kathleen Padian, a charter school real estate developer based in New Orleans. At the time, Padian purchased the site for over $2 million through a nonprofit organization, Educational Properties, Inc., which then leased the CONTINUE READING: Why 2020 Dems Should Target the Nonprofit Charter School Industry - LA Progressive

Quality Counts 2019: Grading the States - Education Week

Quality Counts 2019: Grading the States - Education Week

QUALITY COUNTS 2019: GRADING THE STATES

The third and final installment of “Quality Counts 2019” offers a comprehensive report card on the nation’s K-12 system, including A-F grades and rankings for each of the states based on a wide range of academic, school finance, and socioeconomic factors.

The report, based on analysis by the Education Week Research Center, sums up how well the nation and the states do on assuring bright prospects for success over the course of a lifetime; how much they spend on schools and how fairly that money is distributed; and the outcomes reflected by indicators such as test scores and graduation rates.

To catch up on the first installment of Quality Counts 2019, click here. For the second installment, click here.