Trump administration blocked consumer watchdog from public service loan forgiveness program: report | TheHill

Trump administration blocked consumer watchdog from public service loan forgiveness program: report | TheHill

Trump administration blocked consumer watchdog from public service loan forgiveness program: report

President Trump's Department of Education reportedly blocked the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's (CFPB) efforts to investigate high rejection rates among applicants for a student loan forgiveness program meant to aid firefighters, police officers and other public servants.

NPR reported Tuesday that Education Department officials blocked companies that operate student loan call centers from providing information to the CFPB investigators, effectively ending the bureau's efforts to probe why applicants for the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program are denied at such a high rate. The Education Department reports that just about 1 percent of applicants to the program are accepted.

Several sources familiar with the bureau's investigation efforts told NPR that the Education Department's interference directly contributed to the CFPB failing to adequately address issues with the loan forgiveness program.

"It's 100 percent clear that the Public Service Student Loan Forgiveness Program is badly broken; it needs to be fixed," Christopher Peterson, a CONTINUE READING: Trump administration blocked consumer watchdog from public service loan forgiveness program: report | TheHill

The Other Cost Of School Choice

The Other Cost Of School Choice

The Other Cost Of School Choice

When we discuss the cost of school choice–charters, vouchers, and even homeschooling–we usually focus on the economic impact, the loss of local control, or the policy impact on educational institutions. But on the classroom level, there is another real impact.

Robert Pondiscio touches on it in his new book about Success Academy charters schools, How The Other Half Learns:

“The most common objection to charter schools and publicly financed charter school initiatives is that schools of choice ‘siphon resources away’ from traditional public schools. One such ‘resource’ is engaged and invested parents.” 

And, one might add, engaged and invested students. Every classroom culture is shaped not just by teachers and building administration, but by the students in the classroom. Students can have a huge effect on the tone of the classroom–is there a steady pressure to achieve, or is acting smart just not cool? Particularly in high school, students learn about peer effects, about how to lead and how to elevate leaders. Strong students can raise a class’s achievement level in ways that a teacher can not.

Most of us have stories. I learned to play trombone in high school in large part from trying to keep pace with the upperclassman who was CONTINUE READING: The Other Cost Of School Choice

DeVos to Judge: “Don’t Lock Me Up” | Diane Ravitch's blog

DeVos to Judge: “Don’t Lock Me Up” | Diane Ravitch's blog

DeVos to Judge: “Don’t Lock Me Up”

Politico reports that the Trump administration is apologizing profusely for hounding students whose loans for attending the predatory (now closed) Corinthian Colleges should have been forgiven. The judge in the case had threatened to punish Betsy DeVos for violating her court order. This is a case of “accountability for thee, but not for me.”

MAKING THE CASE AGAINST CONTEMPT FINDING: The Trump administration, in a court filing on Tuesday night, outlined why the Education Department and DeVos shouldn’t be held in contempt or face fines for violating U.S. Magistrate Judge Sallie Kim’s May 2018 order to stop collecting the student loans of former Corinthian Colleges students.

— Justice Department attorneys wrote that the Education Department “has been working diligently and in good faith to correct the errors” that led to the agency collecting on the student loans of thousands of borrowers despite the order. Kim is now deciding whether to hold the department and DeVos in contempt and CONTINUE READING: DeVos to Judge: “Don’t Lock Me Up” | Diane Ravitch's blog

Suicide Attempts Among Black Teens on the Rise, According to New Report

Suicide Attempts Among Black Teens on the Rise, According to New Report

Report: Suicide Attempts Among Black Teens Increased by 73 Percent

According to a new report, attempted suicide is on the rise among a very specific demographic: black teenagers.

From CNN:

From 1991 to 2017, the rate of reported suicide attempts by African-American teens rose, especially the rate among black boys, according to a study published Monday in the medical journal Pediatrics. The rate for black youths grew even as the rate of suicide attempts by teens in other racial and ethnic groups fell.

 These findings were culled from data collected from nearly 199,000 high school students by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey.

Additional findings include the following:

• Suicide is the second-leading cause of death for teens from all demographics, second only to accidents, and the third-leading cause of death among black youth between the ages of 15 to 19 in 2017.
• In 2017, 2,200 teenagers between the ages of 15 to 19 completed suicide.
• Among high school students, 1 in 5 admitted to experiencing suicidal ideations and 1 in 10 admitted to devising a plan to carry it out despite intensified efforts to reduce youth suicide throughout the country.
• While reported suicide attempts among black teens increased between 1991 and 2017, boys were more apt to injuries related to their attempts—inferring that they utilized more lethal means.

“It is urgent that we get to the bottom of why the rate of suicide attempts CONTINUE READING: Suicide Attempts Among Black Teens on the Rise, According to New Report

NANCY BAILEY: Problematic “Scientific Based” Phonics: The Flawed National Reading Panel

Problematic “Scientific Based” Phonics: The Flawed National Reading Panel

Problematic “Scientific Based” Phonics: The Flawed National Reading Panel

It’s odd and detrimental that the National Reading Panel is highlighted in reports as science, used to promote phonics and criticize how teachers teach reading. It has become so intense that teachers are being advised to drop certain reading methods to focus solely on “systematic, explicit phonics!”

The NRP was discredited long ago. Why it’s resurfacing as scientific proof for a phonics-driven reading curriculum raises serious concerns.

In a recent Education Week report “How Do Kids Learn to Read? What the Science Says” the National Reading Panel is positively referenced six times! Similar reports repeatedly cite the NRP.

Primary teachers should know how to teach phonics. But phonics shouldn’t be taught in a vacuum, and the idea that scientific proof backs phonics based on the NRP is flawed.

Science based reading in reference to phonics started with the discredited National Reading Panel.

Some History

In 2002, Stephen Metcalf for The Nation wrote “Reading Between the Lines,” describing the excitement publishing companies had surrounding NCLB. The Bush administration had heralded in a new day for reading based on the NRP. The CONTINUE READING: Problematic “Scientific Based” Phonics: The Flawed National Reading Panel

Hidden Messages Your School Sends to Students | Teacher in a strange land

Hidden Messages Your School Sends to Students | Teacher in a strange land

Hidden Messages Your School Sends to Students

Once, at a staff meeting, my principal shared a short video he’d seen at an administrators’ conference.  It was an effort, I think, to talk about important things at mandated staff meetings, rather than simple announcements. Although there was a lot of eye-rolling when he cued it up, I thought it was worthwhile, with some apt observations about schooling.

One of those was a suggestion that if we wanted to assess what was most important to us, we should look at the times when the normal academic schedule was disrupted, and the student body gathered for an all-school assembly.

At that point in the school year, we’d had five assemblies:

• An assembly on the first day, where students were welcomed, then informed which teacher would be leading them to their first hour class and giving them schedules.
• An annual ‘rules’ assembly for each grade, where the assistant principal went through all the rules in the student handbook.
• An all-school assembly to introduce the annual fund-raiser, and a follow-up assembly, two weeks later, to reward all the students who sold enough sausage and cheese with an hour out of class to play in bouncy castles and batting cages.
• A fall sports assembly to recognize athletic teams.

I mentioned this to my principal, who asked tartly if I thought that our school was all about schedules, rules, fund-raising and sports? Why else would we be having CONTINUE READING: Hidden Messages Your School Sends to Students | Teacher in a strange land

Save The Date: Black Lives Matter at School Week, Feb. 3-7, 2020 – I AM AN EDUCATOR

Save The Date: Black Lives Matter at School Week, Feb. 3-7, 2020 – I AM AN EDUCATOR

Save The Date: Black Lives Matter at School Week, Feb. 3-7, 2020

Mark your calendar! The Black Lives Matter at School national week of action will be held from February 3-7th, 2020–and educators from coast to coast are organizing to make this the biggest coordinated uprising for racial justice in the schools yet.

Black Lives Matter At School is a national coalition educators, parents and students organizing for racial justice in education.  We encourage community organizations and unions to join our annual week of action during the first week of February each year. To learn more about how to participate in the week of action, please check out the BLM@School starter kit.

If you or your organization would like to support or endorse the week of action, please email us at: BlackLivesMatterAtSchool2@gmail.com.   

During the 2018-2019 school year, BLM@School held its second national week of action in some 30 different cities around the country. During the nationally organized week of action, thousands of educators around the U.S. wore Black Lives Matter shirts to school and taught lessons about the guiding principles of the Black Lives Matter Global Network, structural racism, intersectional black identities, black history, and anti-racist social movements.

In addition to centering Blackness in the classroom, BLM at School has these four demands:

1) End “zero tolerance” discipline, and implement restorative justice

2) Hire more black teachers

3) Mandate Black history and Ethnic Studies in K-12 curriculum

4) Fund counselors not cops

The lessons that educators teach during the week of action corresponded to the guiding principles of Black Lives Matter:

Monday: Restorative Justice, Empathy and Loving Engagement

Tuesday: Diversity and Globalism

Wednesday: Trans-Affirming, Queer Affirming and Collective Value

Thursday: Intergenerational, Black Families and Black Villages

Friday: Black Women and Unapologetically Black

With your help, this year’s BLM at School week of action can continue to grow and provide healing for Black students.  Learn more about how to participate by visiting our website, www.BlackLivesMatterAtSchool.com. Let us know what you are planning for BLM at School week this school year or ask us how to get involved with the action by emailing us at: BlackLivesMatterAtSchool2@gmail.com.

Save The Date: Black Lives Matter at School Week, Feb. 3-7, 2020 – I AM AN EDUCATOR

Chicago teachers poised to walk. – Fred Klonsky

Chicago teachers poised to walk. – Fred Klonsky

CHICAGO TEACHERS POISED TO WALK

If as expected, the Chicago Teachers Union’s House of Delegates votes to go ahead with the Thursday strike deadline, I will be heading over to my neighborhood school, Darwin, to walk the line.

I consider it part of my responsibility as a retired union teacher.

Over the past eight years since I retired from teaching I have walked on quite a few picket lines with striking teachers all over northern Illinois.

I encourage all retired teachers to do the same.

Michael Antonucci, the union basher who writes for The 74, thinks the CTU demand for full staffing of nurses, social workers, psychologists and librarians along with contractual class size limits is some kind of trick by the union to collect more dues.

“It is no coincidence that virtually all of these new employees would be eligible for union membership,” he writes.

Well, I would hope so!

I particularly resonate to the issue of putting class size limits in the contract and CONTINUE READING: Chicago teachers poised to walk. – Fred Klonsky

CTU strike, 2012. Photo: Fred Klonsky

The Delano Grape Strike: A Complete Visual History | Teen Vogue

The Delano Grape Strike: A Complete Visual History | Teen Vogue

The Complete History of the Famed Delano Grape Strike
This visual history details how Dolores Huerta and Cesar Chavez helped found the United Farm Workers and led one of the most successful union boycotts in American history.

SEE THE REST OF THE STORY: The Delano Grape Strike: A Complete Visual History | Teen Vogue

Court Injunctions Protect Immigrant Families from Imposition — Yesterday — of Trump’s Public Charge Rule | janresseger

Court Injunctions Protect Immigrant Families from Imposition — Yesterday — of Trump’s Public Charge Rule | janresseger

Court Injunctions Protect Immigrant Families from Imposition — Yesterday — of Trump’s Public Charge Rule

Last Friday, NPR reported the good news: “Federal judges in three states—New York, California and Washington—have issued temporary injunctions against the Trump administration’s ‘public charge’ rule, preventing it from taking effect on Oct. 15.”

For NBC News, Daniella Silva explains exactly how the Trump administration’s punitive rule—which DID NOT go into effect yesterday as planned—would have excluded legal immigrants and their families.  An old rule previously denied green cards to immigrants, “who depended on cash assistance or government-funded long-term institutional care.”  “The new rule expands the definition to include additional benefits such as food stamps, non-emergency Medicaid, certain prescription drug subsidies and housing vouchers.  And the rule would now define public charge as any immigrant who uses or is deemed likely to use at some point one public benefit for 12 months during a 36-month period. Receipt of two public benefits in one month counts as two months, the rule noted. Once labeled a ‘public charge’ immigrants could be denied green cards, visas and other forms of legal immigrant status.”

The judges’ injunctions issued last Friday will delay the imposition of the new rule, described by the NY Times‘ Miriam Jordan as “developed by Stephen Miller, the White House aide who is the architect of several of the government’s hard-line immigration policies.”

The Trump administration’s rule has not been permanently overturned.  However, the courts have blocked its implementation while the matter of its constitutionality moves through the court system.  Jordan quotes Steve Yale-Loehr, an immigration professor at Cornell Law School: “The court rulings today represent at least a temporary setback in the Trump administration’s attacks on both legal and illegal immigrants… Ultimately, I predict these CONTINUE READING: Court Injunctions Protect Immigrant Families from Imposition — Yesterday — of Trump’s Public Charge Rule | janresseger

The Koch network says it wants to remake public education. That means destroying it, says author of new book on billionaire brothers. - The Washington Post

The Koch network says it wants to remake public education. That means destroying it, says author of new book on billionaire brothers. - The Washington Post

The Koch network says it wants to remake public education. That means destroying it, says the author of a new book on the billionaire brothers

Early this year, the Koch network committed to starting an effort to transform public education. What would that look like?

The author of a new book on the billionaire Charles Koch and his late brother, David, says it would amount to the destruction of public education as we know it.

The Koch network is the influential assemblage of groups funded by billionaire industrialist Charles Koch and more than 600 wealthy individuals who share his pro-business, anti-regulation view of economics and positions on social policy, such as climate change denial.

The focus on K-12 education follows long involvement by the Koch brothers in higher education. As leaders of a conservative movement that believes U.S. higher education is controlled by liberals who indoctrinate young people, they spent as much as an estimated $100 million on programs at hundreds of colleges and universities that support their views.

Now the network says it is going to try to transform K-12 education, though the details are unclear. The Kochs and their allies have long supported the school choice movement — which seeks alternatives to traditional public school districts — as well as the use of public funds for private and religious school education, as does Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos.

In June, two Koch-related education initiatives were announced. One is a group called “Yes Every Kid,” which, its creators say, will bring together partisans in the education labor and funding debates to try to find solutions. The other is a project called 4.0 that commits the Charles Koch Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation to pledge $5 million each — along with $5 million from other donors — to support, according to a statement, “600 education entrepreneurs in incubating, testing and launching innovative approaches to education.” (The Walton foundation has long supported charter schools and other parts of the school choice movement.)

Informing the Koch view of change is a 704-page book, “Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America,” by Christopher Leonard, which shows readers how the CONTINUE READING: The Koch network says it wants to remake public education. That means destroying it, says author of new book on billionaire brothers. - The Washington Post

Little Rock Educators Fighting for Equity, Local Control - NEA Today

Little Rock Educators Fighting for Equity, Local Control - NEA Today

Little Rock Educators Fighting for Equity, Local Control

Thousands of Arkansas educators, students and community members held candles and sang in front of historic Little Rock Central High School last week, protesting a plan by the governor-appointed State Board of Education that would re-segregate the city’s students.

“Every single one of us, students, parents and teachers, should feel valued, heard and respected,” said state Teacher of the Year Stacey McAdoo, a Little Rock Education Association (LREA) member, as she stood in front of a banner that read, “Separate Is Not Equal.” “Nothing should be done to us or about us without us. Our voices matter and so do the things we say. Let us remember that this is personal.”

Educators were heard. And then, it seems, they were punished for speaking up for their students.

On Thursday, the board first backed off on its plan, at least somewhat, and then voted to eliminate recognition of the union. The Arkansas Education Association quickly responded: “For 150 years, our union has fought for students, and as long as children are being educated in our state, that will not change. We have never asked for or needed the blessing of the Governor or the state board to care for our students, and we will continue to fight for them now and going forward.”

“LREA is not going anywhere,” vowed LREA President Teresa Knapp Gordon. “We will continue to fight for our students. We will continue to fight for our educators.”

The state took over Little Rock schools in 2015. The original plan, which was CONTINUE READING: Little Rock Educators Fighting for Equity, Local Control - NEA Today

CURMUDGUCATION: Betsy DeVos, Polly Williams, Vouchers, And Selective Facts

CURMUDGUCATION: Betsy DeVos, Polly Williams, Vouchers, And Selective Facts

Betsy DeVos, Polly Williams, Vouchers, And Selective Facts

Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos kicked off her back to school tour at the Saint Marcus Lutheran School in Milwaukee a few weeks ago. This piece ran back then at Forbes, and I don't repost everything from there, but we've developed such goldfish memories under this administration, I'm going to trot this one out again here. Because we need to remember what the threat to public education is. 

The choice of location itself sent a message about what DeVos means by “freedom.” The school’s mission is “to disciple children for Christ, now and for all eternity, and to train them in excellence for their roles in their family, church, community, workplace and country,” and it is a longtime beneficiary of Wisconsin’s voucher program. Its core values are “Christ First, Biblical Discipleship, Sacrificial Love, and Radical Expectations.” It is not particularly unusual to find that a voucher-supported school is using public tax dollars in a private religious setting; in most voucher programs, the vast majority of taxpayers’ money is directed to religious schools. 

It’s not surprising that DeVos would support this. Years ago, she and her husband were clear that their hope for education was for “kingdom gain” and a return to the days when the church, and not the public school, was the center of the community.

Her speech on Monday is supportive of that vision, even as it elides some inconvenient facts.

Portions of the speech are simply allegations. She says that “too many students can’t read,” and she blames that on “the education cabal.” She discusses the average amount of money spent on CONTINUE READING; CURMUDGUCATION: Betsy DeVos, Polly Williams, Vouchers, And Selective Facts