What Even One Day Bears: Charters Scrimmage For Majority Control Of The LAUSD Board – Los Angeles Education Examiner

What Even One Day Bears: Charters Scrimmage For Majority Control Of The LAUSD Board – Los Angeles Education Examiner

What Even One Day Bears: Charters Scrimmage For Majority Control Of The LAUSD Board

In reports downloaded from LA City Ethics Commission records posted between 2/20/20 and 2/21/20 – just 24 hours – the California Charter School Association (CCSA) lobby anted up nearly ¾ of a million more dollars in the LAUSD board District 3 race. Despite being one of the most visible forces in school board lobbying and elections, CCSA has endorsed in only one of four school board races this year.

In all, over one million new dollars was recorded, with more than 80% spent by partisans intent on reclaiming the majority board they lost when their candidate Ref Rodriguez plead guilty to felony money laundering and Jackie Goldberg was elected to his seat.

For comparison, in contrast with large contributions we reported previously, free market ideologue Bill Bloomfield contributed a modest $61,000 in the same time. Meanwhile CCSA spent nearly $500,000 dollars on their singular candidate Koziatek, and just shy of another one-third million smearing her opponent.

Missing PDF "http://la-edex.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/comparison-of-IE-donations-DL-0219-022120-to-all-Mar20-elections.pdf".

Table 1 above compares independent expenditures reported in the past 24 hours (bottom), with those in the preceding five months (top) between 5/19/19 and 2/19/20.

An update of the chart published last week, 2/20/20, uses proportional CONTINUE READING: What Even One Day Bears: Charters Scrimmage For Majority Control Of The LAUSD Board – Los Angeles Education Examiner

Who’s Behind America’s Superintendents and School Transformation?

Who’s Behind America’s Superintendents and School Transformation?

Who’s Behind America’s Superintendents and School Transformation?

The School Superintendents Association (AASA) recently met in San Diego. Superintendents from around the country gathered to discuss what they saw as important to school leadership and public education. The future of education was a prominent theme of the meeting, with the overall focus on one word, transformation.

They saluted digital and futuristic learning, reflected in the meeting’s title, “The Personalization of Education.” Other titles might have been, Who Needs Teachers When You’ve Got Screens? Or How can We Help Your Company Make a Profit on Students?

Was the teacher shortage a hot topic? No. Finding college degreed, qualified teachers wasn’t high on the leadership radar screen. Some mentioned teacher recruitment. One session dealt with teachers’ strikes. They offered a session highlighting AmeriCorps (they support Teach for America) and the Senior Corps Resources to employ a pipeline of school volunteers. Another meeting showed-off the New Teacher Center, which makes its own brand of teacher. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is a funder.

Did discussions concerning the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act take place? No. Aside from a session or two about the worthy topic of underrepresented gifted CONTINUE READING: Who’s Behind America’s Superintendents and School Transformation?

Lessons for Americans, From a Chinese Classroom )Perri Klass, M.D.) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Lessons for Americans, From a Chinese Classroom )Perri Klass, M.D.) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Lessons for Americans, From a Chinese Classroom )Perri Klass, M.D.)

“Perri Klass is a pediatrician who writes fiction and non-fiction. She writes about children and families, about medicine, about food and travel, and about knitting. Her newest book is a novel, The Mercy Rule (Families! Children! Doctors! Pediatrics! Private schools! Crazy parents! Baseball!), and the book before that was a work of non-fiction, Treatment Kind and Fair: Letters to a Young Doctor, written in the form of letters to her older son as he starts medical school (Medical training! Scientific advances! Ethical dilemmas! Family!). She lives in New York City, where she is Professor of Journalism and Pediatrics at New York University, and she has three children of her own. She is also National Medical Director of Reach Out and Read, a national literacy organization which works through doctors and nurses to promote parents reading aloud to young children.”

She also writes periodically for the New York Times on children. This article appeared January 20, 2020

SHANGHAI — We sat in toddler-size wooden chairs around an orderly circle of Chinese 2-year-olds, busy with circle time. As a parent of three children who collectively spent 15 years in American day care, I am very familiar with circle time.

But I was in this Shanghai classroom as a professor, with college students from many different countries in a class I’m teaching here on children and childhood.

We were observing in a private kindergarten, designed to provide young children — starting at age 2 — with a carefully structured, fully bilingual curriculum, CONTINUE READING: Lessons for Americans, From a Chinese Classroom )Perri Klass, M.D.) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

The Education Reform Movement Has Failed America. We Need Common Sense Solutions That Work. - Network For Public Education

The Education Reform Movement Has Failed America. We Need Common Sense Solutions That Work. - Network For Public Education

The Education Reform Movement Has Failed America. We Need Common Sense Solutions That Work.

The education reform movement that started with George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind law is dead. It died because every strategy it imposed on the nation’s schools has failed. From Bush’s No Child Left Behind to Obama’s Race to the Top to Bill Gates’ Common Core State Standards to Trump’s push for school choice, the reformers have come up empty-handed.

The “reformers” relied on the business idea that disruption is a positive good. I call them “disruptors,” not reformers. Reformers have historically called for more funding, better trained teachers, desegregation, smaller class sizes. The disruptors, however, banked on a strategy of testing, competition, and punishment, which turned out to be ineffective and harmful.

Congress passed Bush’s No Child Left Behind law in 2001 based on his claim that there had been a “Texas miracle.” Test every child every year in grades 3-8, he said, reward the schools where scores went up, punish those where scores did not, and great things happen: scores rise, graduation rates increase, and the gaps between racial groups get smaller. We now know that it was empty talk: There was no Texas miracle. But every public school in the nation continues to be saddled with an expensive regime of annual standardized testing that is not found in any high-performing nation.

You can read Diane’s entire piece on Time magazine’s website here.

The Education Reform Movement Has Failed America. We Need Common Sense Solutions That Work. - Network For Public Education

Democratic candidates seek a big and unprecedented K-12 funding boost

Democratic candidates seek a big and unprecedented K-12 funding boost

Democratic candidates seek a big and unprecedented K-12 funding boost

Democratic presidential candidates are proposing new approaches to the federal government’s role in public education.

Former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders want to triple the US$15 billion spent annually on Title I, a program that sends extra federal dollars to school districts that educate a high percentage of poor children.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren wants to go further and quadruple funding for that same program.

Other candidates have similar proposals to substantially increase funding for public education, including Sen. Amy Klobuchar and former South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg. Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg hasn’t yet issued his education platform, or indicated where he stands on federal K-12 funding.

Funding increases of this scale would transform the federal role in education policy, making it easier for school districts to pay teachers higher wages while reducing class sizes. This focus on funding would mark a departure from previous administrations, which instead emphasized policies intended to increase accountability and strengthen teacher evaluation.

As a scholar of school finance, I study the role of resources in schools. The research is clear that spending more on students over the long haul would bring about long-term benefits.

Only 8%

The federal government spends a total of about $55 billion per year on K-12 education, in addition to outlays for early childhood and post-secondary programs like loans and grants for college tuition. This amounts to around $1,000 per K-12 student and just 8% of the total $700 billion it costs to run the nation’s CONTINUE READING: Democratic candidates seek a big and unprecedented K-12 funding boost

Will Bloomberg’s Municipal Technocrats Undermine A Progressive Presidency? – Wrench in the Gears

Will Bloomberg’s Municipal Technocrats Undermine A Progressive Presidency? – Wrench in the Gears

Will Bloomberg’s Municipal Technocrats Undermine A Progressive Presidency?

Pointed critiques of Bloomberg’s egregious behavior and the damaging policies he advanced as mayor of New York have filled media feeds for months. Many progressives are heartened by the results of the Nevada primary. Bernie Sanders’s star is rising, and Bloomberg, despite deep pockets and support from centrist insiders, seems less likely to be the Democratic nominee.

Even so, the power Bloomberg holds over national public policy should not be underestimated. It is vital to connect his past activities, ones that were incredibly harmful to the Black community and low-income people, to his current efforts that aim to transform government into an extension of transnational global capital using a combination of innovative municipal finance, data analytics, and smart city infrastructure.

In a recent MSNBC clip, Anand Giridharadas, said his book Winner Take All was written to expose “dance moves” executed by the super rich to distract people from what is actually happening. He noted Bloomberg made a fortune selling data terminals to global finance, whose activities have contributed to the economic misery of many, many people. Anyone who reads my blog knows poverty is THE raw material for pay for success finance. Bloomberg has been in on this market from the ground floor.

Bloomberg Philanthropies acted as guarantor for the first social impact bond in the United States at Riker’s Island. In 2012 he prepared a briefing paper titled “Bringing Social Impact Bonds to New York City.” In 2018, Tracy Palandjian at Social Finance lauded his “What Works Cities” certification program, noting her hopes that participating cities would be CONTINUE READING: Will Bloomberg’s Municipal Technocrats Undermine A Progressive Presidency? – Wrench in the Gears

New York Times: The Failure of Michael Bloomberg’s Choice Program in New York City | Diane Ravitch's blog

New York Times: The Failure of Michael Bloomberg’s Choice Program in New York City | Diane Ravitch's blog

New York Times: The Failure of Michael Bloomberg’s Choice Program in New York City

This article appeared in the New York Times in 2017. It evaluated Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s legacy in high school admission.

Mayor Bloomberg eliminated zoned high schools and instituted a policy of citywide choice. Students could apply to any high school in the city.

This was supposed to reduce racial segregation, but instead it increased it.

Bloomberg, who had sole control of the New York City school system, also increased the number of schools with selective admissions policies.

This too increased the segregation of schools.

Graduation rates are up, but graduation rates are always suspicious since they are easily manipulated and manufactured by devices such as “credit recovery.”

What is certain is that segregation has intensified.

Fourteen years into the system, black and Hispanic students are just as isolated in segregated high schools as they are in elementary schools — a situation that school choice was supposed to ease.

Within the system, there is a hierarchy of schools, each with different admissions requirements — a one-day high-stakes test, auditions, open houses. And getting into the best schools, where almost all students graduate and are ready to attend college, often requires top scores on the state’s annual math and English tests and a high CONTINUE READING: New York Times: The Failure of Michael Bloomberg’s Choice Program in New York City | Diane Ravitch's blog

DEMAND CHARTER TRANSPARENCY: Tell Your Representative to Cosponsor the COAT Act

DEMAND CHARTER TRANSPARENCY: Tell Your Representative to Cosponsor the COAT Act

DEMAND CHARTER TRANSPARENCY: Tell Your Representative to Cosponsor the COAT Act

The Network for Public Education's Asleep at the Wheel report has exposed the waste and fraud of the federal Charter Schools Program (CSP). Washington has taken note.

Michigan Representative Rashida Tlaib is introducing the Charter Oversight, Accountability, and Transparency (COAT) Act--"commonsense legislation that will increase transparency and accountability to ensure that charter schools provide necessary information to local, state, and federal agencies to detect and prevent fraud."

Under this legislation, states are ineligible for federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act funds unless they ensure that any contract between a charter school in the state and a PCMO includes basic transparency requirements including the following:

• The dollar amount and percentage breakdown of money being used by the PCMO on the operations of the school.
• The dollar amounts and percentage breakdown of money being used on the operations of the PCMO.
• The dollar amounts every executive is earning in salary from the PCMO.
• Public CMO Board meetings.
• Whether the PCMO is for-profit or non-profit.
• The identities of any limited liability corporations associated with the PCMO.

These are simple transparency obligations that every public school district must meet. PCMOs claim CONTINUE READING: DEMAND CHARTER TRANSPARENCY: Tell Your Representative to Cosponsor the COAT Act

Billionaire Power? Two Decades of Education Policy Are a Cautionary Tale | janresseger

Billionaire Power? Two Decades of Education Policy Are a Cautionary Tale | janresseger

Billionaire Power? Two Decades of Education Policy Are a Cautionary Tale

Anand Giridharadas’s NY Times analysis of the recent Democratic candidates’ debate is the week’s most provocative commentary.  Giridharadas, author of the recent best seller about the role of venture philanthropy, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, devotes his recent column to The Billionaire Election:

“The Democratic debate on Wednesday made it clearer than ever that November’s election has become the billionaire referendum, in which it will be impossible to vote without taking a stand on extreme wealth in a democracy. The word ‘billionaire’ came up more often than ‘China,’ America’s leading geopolitical competitor; ‘immigration,’ among its most contentious issues; and ‘climate,’ its gravest existential threat… With the debate careening between billionaire loathing and billionaire self-love, Mr. Buttigieg warned against making voters ‘choose between a socialist who thinks that capitalism is the root of all evil and a billionaire who thinks that money ought to be the root of all power.'”

As someone who has been watching billionaire-driven, disruptive education reform for over 20 years, I find it fascinating that the role of billionaire power has become a primary issue in presidential politics. If you haven’t been paying such close attention to the education wars, you might not realize that policy around education and the public schools has for two decades been the locus of experimentation with the power and reach of billionaire philanthropists seizing a giant public sector institution from the professionals who have been running the schools for generations.  The billionaires’ idea has been that strategic investment by data wonks and venture philanthropists can turn around school achievement among poor children.

All this fits right in with America’s belief in the enterprising individual, and an attack on public institutions by far-right ideologues.  Disruptive education reform also arose chronologically with the development of big data, which fed into the idea of management efficiency, once tech experts could manipulate the data and help entrepreneurs more efficiently “fix” institutions to raise achievement.

The other part of the story, of course, is that school teaching is not a glam job. You don’t CONTINUE READING: Billionaire Power? Two Decades of Education Policy Are a Cautionary Tale | janresseger

Jeff Bryant: Amazon Is Coming To A School Near You | OurFuture.org by People's Action

Amazon Is Coming To A School Near You | OurFuture.org by People's Action

Amazon Is Coming To A School Near You

This is the second of a two-part article by Jeff Bryant on Career and Technical Education (CTE). Click here to read part one.

The national discussion about the movement to privatize America’s public schools has mostly focused on the issues of charter schools and school voucher schemes. But a growing number of parents, teachers, and public school advocates, as well as experts in academia, are increasingly warning about another form of school privatization.

You don’t hear very much about this form of privatization in national forums and mainstream news outlets, but it’s being talked about in places like Chesterfield County, Virginia, which borders state capital Richmond.

At a public assembly in Chesterfield in September 2019, an audience gathered to view the movie “Backpack Full of Cash,” a feature-length documentary narrated by actor Matt Damon that exposes how charters and vouchers financially endanger public schools and redistribute resources and students in inequitable ways.

Yet the panel discussion that followed the film quickly veered away from talking about charters and vouchers when one of the panelists, middle school teacher Emma Clark, called the audience’s attention to “a different offshoot of the privatization movement. The privatization we’re seeing here in Chesterfield is through CTE.”

CTE, Career and Technical Education, is a rebranding of what has been traditionally called vocational education or voc-ed, only in CONTINUE READING: Amazon Is Coming To A School Near You | OurFuture.org by People's Action

Doing Too Much Is Not Enough | The Jose Vilson

Doing Too Much Is Not Enough | The Jose Vilson

DOING TOO MUCH IS NOT ENOUGH

Last week, I had the privilege of doing a mini-residency as part of the Las Vegas Public Education Foundation Teacher Leadership Academy. It’s a solid chunk of time where I get to flex my pedagogical skills while building community with educators who I might not otherwise have a chance to work with. It’s weirder when I’m usually the only “current classroom teacher” facilitating sessions like this because these workshops tend to be led by folks who’ve already left the classroom.

In these sessions, I leave lots of open space in my “plan” to allow for teachable moments among adults. I flourish in those uncertain spaces where I know where we need to get to, but no one has any idea how we’ll get there. In one of those moments, we were discussing the obstacles of teacher leadership. Most of the attendees shared how their roles differed based on who you asked: students, peers, or administrators.

Ursela Gavin, National Board Certified Black educator, revealed how she had often been told she was doing too much. By my count, she facilitates about seven clubs with a full teaching program. In the back of my mind, the easy – and hypocritical – thing to have done is tell her that her colleagues were right. She was doing too much and I rather she not burn herself out too quickly because she needs to stay around for the long haul.

Hypocritical because I flew across the country during one of my vacation breaks to spend a full two CONTINUE READING: Doing Too Much Is Not Enough | The Jose Vilson

Those Third-Grade Punishment Laws | Live Long and Prosper

Those Third-Grade Punishment Laws | Live Long and Prosper

Those Third-Grade Punishment Laws

STATES RETAIN THIRD-GRADERS

Michigan joined the Third-grade Punishment Club in 2016 during the administration of Rick, “let-them-drink-lead,” Snyder. The 2019-2020 school year is the first year that third graders can be retained-in-grade for failing a state reading test.

Fewer than half the states in the US have laws that force the retention of third-graders who can’t pass an arbitrary reading test. Louisiana, for example, did have a retention law, but has rescinded it because it didn’t work. Good for them.

On the other hand, Florida, Ohio, Arizona, Texas, and Indiana are among the several states which continue to punish students who don’t learn to read on the state’s timetable. They still retain students despite the fact that it doesn’t work.

In a study of the Florida retention law, students who were retained fared worse in the long term than if they hadn’t been retained.

1. How did state-mandated third grade retention policies, under the A+ Plan, impact standard diploma acquisition in retained students as compared to academically similar non-retained students?

• Students who were not retained were 14.7% more likely to receive a standard high school diploma.

2. How did the retained group compare to the similar non-retained group on the Grade 10 FCAT Reading?

• Both groups had difficulty catching up. In the retained group, 93% remained below proficient into their 10th grade year. In the non-retained group, 85.8% remained below proficient.

This is not the first piece of research showing that retention-in-grade doesn’t CONTINUE READING: Those Third-Grade Punishment Laws | Live Long and Prosper

Sen. Gillibrand’s press conference today about her bill to create a Data Protection Agency | Parent Coalition for Student Privacy

Sen. Gillibrand’s press conference today about her bill to create a Data Protection Agency | Parent Coalition for Student Privacy

SEN. GILLIBRAND’S PRESS CONFERENCE TODAY ABOUT HER BILL TO CREATE A DATA PROTECTION AGENCY

This afternoon I spoke at a press conference in NYC to support Sen. Gillibrand’s new bill to create a new federal agency specifically devoted toward protecting privacy, called the Data Protection Agency.  The bill is posted here; more about it is here.   

The statement I gave is below; and below that is the press release, with quotes from Sen. Gillibrand and the other two privacy experts pictured above, Caitriona Fitzgerald of EPIC and Prof. Ezra Waldman of NY Law School.

Hi, my name is Leonie Haimson, and I’m co-founder and co-chair of the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy.  We are one of the many organizations that have  submitted complaints to the FTC about the way companies like Facebook, Google and Google Play Apps have been illegally harvesting young children’s information and potentially using it for commercial purposes without parental consent in violation of COPPA.  And yet the FTC’s response to these complaints has been silence, or at best a mere slap on the wrist, a symbolic fine that barely touches the huge profits of these companies.

In addition, the FTC has put out a series of contradictory guidance documents about how COPPA applies to the collection of personal data from children in schools that has managed to confuse nearly everyone.  As a result, each school and district interprets their responsibilities differently about whether or not they even inform parents beforehand, no less ask for their consent, . when their children are assigned programs to use that require them to upload their personal information.

For example, Google Apps for Education, also called G-suite, is used in literally tens of thousands of schools across the country; and yet CONTINUE READING: Sen. Gillibrand’s press conference today about her bill to create a Data Protection Agency | Parent Coalition for Student Privacy