THE EMAIL DUMP OF KEITH YANOV — Formerly General Counsel For Green Dot Charter Schools - Michael Kohlhaas dot org

Keith Yanov — Formerly General Counsel For Green Dot Charter Schools — Has “Transitioned To Private Practice”  Michael Kohlhaas dot org

THE EMAIL DUMP OF KEITH YANOV

KEITH YANOV — FORMERLY GENERAL COUNSEL FOR GREEN DOT CHARTER SCHOOLS — HAS “TRANSITIONED TO PRIVATE PRACTICE” — WHICH MEANS HE QUIT OR WAS FIRED — AND GIVEN THAT IT WAS ALMOST CERTAINLY HIS DECISION TO FOLLOW THE LAW AND RELEASE THAT MASSIVE SET OF EMAILS TO ME IN JUNE — REVEALING THE APPALLING INNER WORKINGS OF THE CALIFORNIA CHARTER SCHOOL ASSOCIATION — THE WORLD-SHAKING MAGNITUDE OF WHICH IS STILL ONLY BARELY KNOWN — I WOULD VENTURE A GUESS THAT THE LATTER IS NOT IMPOSSIBLE — FIRING SOMEONE FOR FOLLOWING THE LAW CERTAINLY WOULDN’T BE OUT OF CHARACTER OVER THERE AT GREEN DOT — OR ANY OF THESE CHARTER SCHOOL CRIMINAL CONSPIRACIES FOR THAT MATTER

On June 28, 2019, via the California Public Records Act, I received a massive set of emails1 from Green Dot Charter Schools. The release includes thousands of emails between Green Dot CEO Cristina de Jesus and various elite Los Angeles Area charter school thought leaders2 and their propaganda unit over at the California Charter School Association. And the staffer I had been dealing with for the few months prior to the release was Green Dot general counsel Keith Yanov.

Who was, as you can see by the fact that he actually handed over the records, very reasonable about the whole process. Take a look, if you’re interested, at the actual email in which he sent me the material. Yeah, true, it’s got some copypasta legalese, but he actually gave over, and as long as they do that I don’t care what kind of legalicious word salad they serve up as a side dish.

And then things really blew up, as you may already know. Howard Blume of the Los Angeles Times published two separate articles based on this material, the first one and the second one. The material revealed that Austin Beutner was letting the CCSA write his speeches for him and Nick Melvoin was letting them write actual  CONTINUE READING: Keith Yanov — Formerly General Counsel For Green Dot Charter Schools — Has “Transitioned To Private Practice”  Michael Kohlhaas dot org

We Need To Stop Talking About The Teacher Shortage

We Need To Stop Talking About The Teacher Shortage

We Need To Stop Talking About The Teacher Shortage

News of a teacher shortage across the nation has been pummeling us for years now, right up through a story yesterday in the Panama City News Herald about an “extreme” teacher shortage.

Fewer students in teacher prep programs. Thousands of unfilled teacher vacancies in state after state.

But we need to stop calling it a teacher shortage.

You can’t solve a problem starting with the wrong diagnosis. If I can’t buy a Porsche for $1.98, that doesn’t mean there’s an automobile shortage. If I can’t get a fine dining meal for a buck, that doesn’t mean there’s a food shortage. And if appropriately skilled humans don’t want to work for me under the conditions I’ve set, that doesn’t mean there’s a human shortage.

Calling the situation a “teacher shortage” suggests something like a crop failure or a hijacker grabbing truckloads before they can get to market. It suggests that there simply aren’t enough people out there who could do the job.

There is no reason to believe that is true. But pretending that it is true sets up justification for a variety of bad “solutions” to the CONTINUE READING: We Need To Stop Talking About The Teacher Shortage

The Mixed Realty Commute: Education for the Telepresence Gig Economy – Wrench in the Gears

The Mixed Realty Commute: Education for the Telepresence Gig Economy – Wrench in the Gears

The Mixed Realty Commute: Education for the Telepresence Gig Economy

First there were remote-operation robots for nuclear waste clean up, then remote-operation drone warfare. Now we’ve moved on to the rather more mundane task of remote-operation fast food delivery. I was motivated to finally sit down and start to write the back-story to defense department simulations and workforce-aligned project based learning after seeing a tweet about Kiwibots.

It’s a complex story, so this will be the first of a multi-part series.

Here I will touch on robotics, mixed reality, and Blockchain within the context of a globalized service-sector workforce. I then plan to discuss:

1) How Executive Order 13111, signed by Bill Clinton in 1999, set up a national training advisory committee whose members linked the work-based education model described in Marc Tucker’s “Dear Hillary Letter” to technology and debt finance.

2) The military origins of competency based education and “intelligent” digital tutoring systems.

3) How the entertainment industry teamed up with the Defense Department in the mid 1990s to develop mixed reality training environments using games and simulations, which resulted in the creation of USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies.

4) How global philanthropies and video game developers plan to using CONTINUE READING:  Mixed Realty Commute: Education for the Telepresence Gig Economy – Wrench in the Gears

Los Angeles: Astroturf “Parent” Group Pressures Beutner to Rate Schools by Their Test Scores | Diane Ravitch's blog

Los Angeles: Astroturf “Parent” Group Pressures Beutner to Rate Schools by Their Test Scores | Diane Ravitch's blog

Los Angeles: Astroturf “Parent” Group Pressures Beutner to Rate Schools by Their Test Scores

With so much billionaire cash sloshing around California to promote charter schools and to disparage public schools, it can be difficult to know which groups are real and which are Memorex.

Here is one that definitely is not a real parents’ group. It is called Speak Up and it is populated with people who are embedded in the charter sector. It recently chastised L.A. Superintendent Austin Beutner for not moving swiftly enough to clamp ratings on every school, the better to close them with and set them up for privatization. How will parents know how to choose a school if the district doesn’t give it a grade or a rating? They say he is in danger of “breaking a promise” to the parents of Los Angeles, who are longing to have their schools rated.

Schools should be evaluated based on such issues as their class size; the experience of their teachers; the resources invested by the district, such as: does the school have a library with a librarian? Does it have a school nurse? Does it have classes in the arts for all students?

But Speak Up seems to be interested mostly in test scores. Are they going up or down? Most people these days recognize that test scores measure the CONTINUE READING: Los Angeles: Astroturf “Parent” Group Pressures Beutner to Rate Schools by Their Test Scores | Diane Ravitch's blog

How big a mess is Pennsylvania’s charter school sector? This big. - Network For Public Education

How big a mess is Pennsylvania’s charter school sector? This big. - Network For Public Education

How big a mess is Pennsylvania’s charter school sector? This big.

Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf horrified the charter school lobby with eight words — “the privatization of education in our public schools.” He used that phrase during a July news conference in which he was bemoaning the state of cyber charter schools in Pennsylvania.

Ana Meyers, executive director of the Pennsylvania Coalition of Public Charter Schools, quickly expressed outrage and dismay. “I am shocked that you and your staff are unaware that none of Pennsylvania’s charter schools [bricks-and-mortar or cyber] are private or for-profit institutions,” stated Meyers in a letter to the governor.

As shocked as she may claim to be, Meyer’s response was entirely predictable. Denying that the state’s charters are connected from profiteering is part of the narrative that the charter lobby spins, confusing the public.

You can read Carol’s entire piece on the Washington Post’s Answer Sheet blog here.

How big a mess is Pennsylvania’s charter school sector? This big. - Network For Public Education

Parents Sue Minnesota School District Saying It Did Nothing to Protect Their Kids From Rampant Racism

Parents Sue Minnesota School District Saying It Did Nothing to Protect Their Kids From Rampant Racism

Parents Sue Minnesota School District Saying It Did Nothing to Protect Their Kids From Rampant Racism

A group of parents have hit their almost lily-white school district with a civil rights lawsuit, charging it turned a blind eye to rampant instances of egregious racist abuse and bullying of their children.

According to the Daily Beast, the abusive behavior alleged includes:

• a 6-year-old black child being punched in the face by a classmate twice and told he “didn’t belong”
• white students posting on Snapchat that students who attended a forum on race relations would be shot, and, in a separate incident, posting the faces of black students on Snapchat and locating them at “Negro Hill.”
• a middle-school student whose T-shirt was vandalized with the words “nigger” and “leave now” after it was stolen from his locker
• white students tormenting the same middle-schooler by destroying his computer and calling his dad a “drug dealer or rapper” like “all black dads are.”

Jquan Fuller-Rueschman, a black former high school student in the district who is another one of the plaintiffs, also charged, per the Daily Beast:

that he was punched in the face by a white student, repeatedly called the n-word, accused of being stupid and dumb, had food thrown at him, and had his car egged. He was labeled “aggressive” and suspended after confronting a student who repeatedly called him the n-word, the complaint states.

But, according to the suit, no matter how many times parents and the students CONTINUE READING: Parents Sue Minnesota School District Saying It Did Nothing to Protect Their Kids From Rampant Racism

A Very Busy Day Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day... | The latest news and resources in education since 2007

Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day... | The latest news and resources in education since 2007

A Very Busy Day Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day... 

The latest news and resources in education since 2007

“Q&A Collections: The Inclusive Classroom”

by Larry Ferlazzo / 6h

Q&A Collections: The Inclusive Classroom is the headline of my latest Education Week Teacher column. All Classroom Q&A posts offering advice on The Inclusive Classroom (from the past eight years!) are described and linked to in this compilation post. Here’s an excerpt from one of them:

Video: “The Life Of An Unaccompanied Minor In L.A.”

by Larry Ferlazzo / 6h

OpenClipart-Vectors / Pixabay Lauren Skeen shared this three-year-old L.A. Times video on Leading ELLs Facebook Group:

YESTERDAY

Do’s & Don’ts Of Working With An Aide In An ELL Classroom – Please Add Your Own Suggestions

by Larry Ferlazzo / 12h

geralt / Pixabay We’re getting a new bilingual aide at our school sometime in the next week or two, and I thought I write up some “dos and don’ts” for my colleagues who are newer at teaching ELLs and at working with aides. I also thought it would be a good opportunity for me to reflect on my own experience, especially considering that I consider the biggest mistake I have made (so far) in my teac

World War II Began Eighty Years Ago This Week – Here Are Related Teaching & Learning Resources

by Larry Ferlazzo / 13h

skeeze / Pixabay Germany invaded Poland eighty years ago. You might be interested in: The Best Online Resources For Teaching & Learning About World War II (Part One) The Best Online Resources For Teaching & Learning About World War II (Part Two) The Best Resources On Japanese-American Internment In World War II The Best Sites For Learning About The Holocaust The Best Sites For Learning About The

Pins Of The Week

by Larry Ferlazzo / 13h

I’m fairly active on Pinterest and, in fact, have curated 19,000 resources there that I haven’t shared on this blog. I thought readers might find it useful if I began sharing a handful of my most recent “pins” each week (I’m not sure if you can see them through an RSS Reader – you might have to click through to the original post). You might also be interested in My Seven Most Popular Pins In 2018

New Study Shows Active Learning More Effective Than Lectures – DUH!

by Larry Ferlazzo / 15h

There is no shortage of research finding that active learning is more effective than lectures (see The Best Research Demonstrating That Lectures Are Not The Best Instructional Strategy ). However, I was surprised to read in a report on a new study that many students, however, think they learn more from lectures. That same report, fortunately, debunks that belief. Perhaps it can soon go the way of

“How Do You Respond to a Teacher Who Says, ‘I Don’t See Color’?”

by Larry Ferlazzo / 16h

How Do You Respond to a Teacher Who Says, ‘I Don’t See Color’? is the headline of my latest Education Week Teacher column. The new question-of-the-week is: What are the best ways to respond to educators who say they “don’t see color” when they teach? Guest-host Shannon R. Waite introduces the upcoming series. Feel free to leave responses in the comments there or here….

This Week’s “Round-Up” Of Useful Posts & Articles On Ed Policy Issues

by Larry Ferlazzo / 1d

Here are some recent useful posts and articles on educational policy issues (You might also be interested in THE BEST ARTICLES, VIDEOS & POSTS ON EDUCATION POLICY IN 2019 – PART ONE ): Big news about charters here in California: Charter school compromise could intensify L.A.’s school board 

Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day... | The latest news and resources in education since 2007

New Orleans Will Close Failing Charter Schools In The District : NPR

New Orleans Will Close Failing Charter Schools In The District : NPR

Closing A Failing School Is Normal, But Not Easy, In Charters-Only New Orleans

On a clear morning in late August, 9-year-old Alongkorn Lafargue hops in the back seat of his father's car. He's wearing his school uniform: neatly ironed khakis and a bright blue polo shirt embroidered with the logo of his new charter school, IDEA Oscar Dunn. Alongkorn has been going there only a few weeks, and his dad, Alex Lafargue, says he has struggled to get his son to talk about what it's like.

A Look At New Orleans

NPR ED

Is Bigger Always Better? The Case For Starting Small With New Learning Ideas

"He was anxious," Lafargue says. "And [its] his third week there now. He's starting to open up."

Alongkorn is going to a new school because New Orleans' school district shut down his old one, Medard H. Nelson Charter School, for its students' poor performance on standardized tests.

Alongkorn went to Nelson for five years. Lafargue acknowledged that the school had problems — most notably, a revolving door of leadership. The school had three different principals in its last four years of operation. But the Lafargues built a community at Nelson. And the school was just down the street — a six-minute walk door to door.

"This was a great school," Lafargue said. "Orleans Parish School Board [NOLA Public Schools] surely has not allowed me the choice to let him stay with family, to let him stay in the neighborhood, to let him stay within a rich environment that he has pulled from since pre-K."

Lafargue said many students, including his son, were confused and upset when they CONTINUE READING: New Orleans Will Close Failing Charter Schools In The District : NPR