As School Moves Online, Many Students Stay Logged Out - The New York Times

As School Moves Online, Many Students Stay Logged Out - The New York Times

As School Moves Online, Many Students Stay Logged Out
Teachers at some schools across the country report that less than half of their students are participating in online learning.

Chronic absenteeism is a problem in American education during the best of times, but now, with the vast majority of the nation’s school buildings closed and lessons being conducted remotely, more students than ever are missing class — not logging on, not checking in or not completing assignments.

The absence rate appears particularly high in schools with many low-income students, whose access to home computers and internet connections can be spotty. Some teachers report that less than half their students are regularly participating.

The trend is leading to widespread concern among educators, with talk of a potential need for summer sessions, an early start in the fall, or perhaps having some or even all students repeat a grade once Americans are able to return to classrooms.

Students are struggling to connect in districts large and small. Los Angeles said last week that about a third of its high school students were not logging in for classes. And there are daunting challenges for rural communities like Minford, Ohio, where many students live in remote wooded areas unserved by internet providers.

Educators say that a subset of students and their parents have dropped out of touch with schools completely — unavailable by phone, email or any other form of communication — as families struggle with the broader economic and health effects of the coronavirus outbreak.

Even before the outbreak, chronic absenteeism was a problem in many schools, especially those with a lot of low-income students. Many obstacles can prevent children who live in poverty from making it to class: a parent’s broken-down car or a teenager’s need to babysit siblings, for example. But online learning presents new obstacles, particularly with uneven levels of technology and adult supervision. CONTINUE READING: As School Moves Online, Many Students Stay Logged Out - The New York Times

NANCY BAILEY: Betsy DeVos and The Quest to End Public School Disability Services

Betsy DeVos and The Quest to End Public School Disability Services

Betsy DeVos and The Quest to End Public School Disability Services

There will be beautiful tulips next spring in 2021, if we correctly and lovingly plant the bulbs this coming fall.

Betsy DeVos

During this unprecedented and perilous time, The New York Times report “DeVos Weighs Waivers for Special Education. Parents Are Worried.” The $2 trillion coronavirus law gives the Queen of School Privatization unparalleled power to waive disability rights of students.

Administrators and educators say without the waivers they would be forced to meet unrealistic expectations and face costly lawsuits. Avoiding those consequences could mean that districts decide not to offer any education at all to students in the next two months.

In the meantime, parents and teachers struggle to help children learn in these difficult times, described well in “Why online learning is hard on students with special needs,” by Megan Reeves.

Parents have watched disability services dwindle for years. Is this the death knell for student disability rights in public schools?

DeVos is not reevaluating the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) for CONTINUE READING: Betsy DeVos and The Quest to End Public School Disability Services

If Technology Can’t Save Us, What Will? | Teacher in a strange land

If Technology Can’t Save Us, What Will? | Teacher in a strange land

If Technology Can’t Save Us, What Will?

All the ed bloggers during this pandemic are consumed with whatever we’re calling our frantic attempts to reach out to our students–to ‘keep them on track’—or (more realistically) provide whatever educational succor can be squeezed out of phone calls, emails and glitchy electronic platforms. Or, God forbid, packets.

The academic show, it seems, must go on–and the in-the-trenches edu-commentariat has done some great work, asking the right questions, sharing their tools and materials and philosophies, and warning us off predatory data capture and greedy education commerce. There’s also been a fair amount of righteous bitching. All of this is justified—and welcome.

It turns out that technology cannot, will not replace the human touch, when it comes to learning that is worthwhile and sticks in our students’ brains and hearts. We already knew that, of course. But it’s gratifying to know that school—bricks and mortar, white paste and whiteboards, textbooks and senior proms—is deeply missed.

Public education is part of who we are, as a representative democracy. We’ve never gotten it right—we’ve let down millions of kids over the past century or two and done lots of flailing. There are curriculum wars that never end and bitter battles over equity, the teacher pipeline and funding streams.

 But still. We need school.

It is at school where a kid who might otherwise be looking at a series of low-paying jobs gets interested in science when looking through a microscope for the first time. It CONTINUE READING: If Technology Can’t Save Us, What Will? | Teacher in a strange land

Shame in the Time of Covid-19 – radical eyes for equity

Shame in the Time of Covid-19 – radical eyes for equity

Shame in the Time of Covid-19

Almost immediately, I noticed some disturbing patterns on social media when the U.S. began directly responding to the Covid-19 pandemic several weeks ago.

The “Covid-19 is a hoax” and “Covid-19 is no worse than the flu” posts on Facebook immediately appeared (and have mostly disappeared), but what is more concerning is that very garbled and oversimplified posts also appeared and continue to flourish.

Ground Zero of garbled and oversimplified social media posts, I think, was arguments over the danger of Covid-19 that focused on death rates (percentage of deaths among those testing positive for the virus). Focusing on this one stat (a complicated data point because it is skewed by if and when people are tested, a serious failure of this pandemic event) greatly misrepresented the why of the unique danger Covid-19 presents.

Most people missed the “novel” terminology (many corona viruses exist, but a “novel,” thus new, version distinguishes Covid-19) and subsequently rushed past the very complex set of reasons this pandemic is not like the flu or other reasons people die daily in the U.S. and throughout the world.

The real threats posed by Covid-19 include the unknown (death rates, who is CONTINUE READING: Shame in the Time of Covid-19 – radical eyes for equity

Schools of more than 90 percent of the world’s students closed during this pandemic. This graphic shows how fast it happened. - The Washington Post

Schools of more than 90 percent of the world’s students closed during this pandemic. This graphic shows how fast it happened. - The Washington Post

Schools of more than 90 percent of the world’s students closed during this pandemic. This graphic shows how fast it happened.

The schools of more than 90 percent of the world’s enrolled students have closed because of the coronavirus pandemic — and it happened over the space of only a few weeks, a United Nations agency said.

Schools in 188 countries had shuttered by March 4, affecting 91.3 percent of students from the earliest years through college and vocational school, the Paris-based U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, reported.

The total number of students affected was 1,576,021,818 — and it is girls who will suffer the most from the closures, the agency known as UNESCO said.

On Feb. 16, only 0.1 percent of the world’s students had been affected, amounting to a little more than 1 million, with China the only country that had shut down schools nationwide. As the novel coronavirus spread from country to country, continent to continent, governments quickly began to take action, ordering nationwide shutdowns of schools and most other aspects of public life.

The Washington Post reported that more than 1.2 million cases of the coronavirus have been confirmed worldwide, although the number could be significantly higher because of the lack of adequate testing in many countries. The United States has the most reported cases, with at least 333,000 people testing positive for the virus, and 9,516 have died in the country.

According to UNESCO, girls will suffer the most from school closure around the world.

Sign up for our Coronavirus Updates newsletter to track the outbreak. All stories linked in the newsletter are free to access.

What countries are doing to keep kids learning during pandemic

Stefania Giannini, UNESCO’s assistant director general for education, and Anne-Birgitte Albrectsen, chief executive for Plan International, a development and humanitarian organization, wrote that of the students out of school, more than 111 million of them are girls living in the world’s least developed CONTINUE READING: Schools of more than 90 percent of the world’s students closed during this pandemic. This graphic shows how fast it happened. - The Washington Post

Teacher Tom: Intelligence is More than Mere Knowing

Teacher Tom: Intelligence is More than Mere Knowing

Intelligence is More than Mere Knowing

It's in the nature of living to wake up each morning into the unknown. There is nothing like a world wide pandemic lockdown to bring that truth into stark relief. Oh sure, there are things we already know — my spouse takes cream in her coffee, my kids won't each cold oatmeal, E=mc² — but when it comes to applying our brains, to thinking, it is upon the unknown that we apply ourselves. I mean, we may appreciate the simple things, the routines, the familiar, the established facts of life, but if we're going to engage in intelligent thought, and we must or else expire of boredom and stupidity, it's the unknown that gets our attention.

What will today bring and what will we do about it? That is what stands at the center of our intellectual lives. It's what gives life relish. Astonishment, confusion, struggle, puzzlement, surprise, eagerness, anticipation, anxiety, excitement, passion: this is the stuff of critical thought, of intelligence.

I have, for instance, been awaking each morning lately faced with the unknown of how I'm going to pay my bills. Up until a few weeks ago, I earned my living primarily as a public speaker, but now, in a flash, I find myself scrambling from sun up to sun down trying to figure out how to fill in that suddenly opened maw in my immediate economic prospects. And I'm not the only one. Every one of us is experiencing the CONTINUE READING: Teacher Tom: Intelligence is More than Mere Knowing

“The Prom Will Not Be Webcast” | Diane Ravitch's blog

“The Prom Will Not Be Webcast” | Diane Ravitch's blog

“The Prom Will Not Be Webcast”

Eighteen years ago, a far-sighted teacher in Los Angeles presciently warned that distance learning would never be an adequate substitute for human interaction between teachers and students.

Alan Warhaftig retired as a teacher in 2017. Education Week gave him permission to repost this article,and he in turn gave me permission to post it.

Educators may be pillars of the community, but their discourse is as mercurial as Paris fashion. Desperate to find a magic bullet to cure education’s woes, many are willing to embrace new curricula and unproven pedagogies, believing that anything different must necessarily be good. Educators’ current fascination with technology is a vivid example.

There was a time, not long ago, when advocates of educational technology gushed about the prospect of schoolchildren exchanging e-mails with world-class experts on everything. The idea was exciting, even if these world-class experts were hard-pressed to find time to reply to e-mails from each other, let alone from tens of millions of American schoolchildren. Eventually, that rosy vision receded into the distance.

Today, proponents of technology deride traditional schools as limited by a calendar determined by the requirements of agriculture and a delivery system CONTINUE READING: “The Prom Will Not Be Webcast” | Diane Ravitch's blog

Pandemic Exposes the Limitations of Online Education | janresseger

Pandemic Exposes the Limitations of Online Education | janresseger

Pandemic Exposes the Limitations of Online Education

Schools are closed for the rest of the school year in most places, and despite herculean efforts of school teachers to transform school activities online, there are widespread problems.  What are the challenges for the nation’s over 90,000 public schools and 50 million public school students?

Schools everywhere are trying to adapt but are handicapped by the limitations of online education and vastly unequal access to broadband internet.

Learning online, whatever the platform, isn’t the same going to school.  Spontaneity and personal connection are harder to achieve, however skilled and imaginative the teacher. The Washington Post‘s Valerie Strauss quotes Jack Schneider, Assistant Professor of Leadership in Education at the University of Massachusetts Lowell and Director of Research for the Massachusetts Consortium for Innovative Education, commenting on overall problems children have with remote learning: “Face-to-face interactions, personal relationships and human cues matter tremendously in the education of young people…. While virtual schools may be cheaper to operate—a major attraction for those looking to wring a profit out of public education—they are hardly an adequate replacement for their brick-and-mortar counterparts… Across time… the public has valued a broad range of outcomes—from the nurturing of creativity to the fostering of interracial friendships—that go well beyond content standards. Mindsets, dispositions, social skills and the like are simply much harder to teach online.”

Even more daunting is children’s unequal access to the technology that makes online schooling possible.  As online learning was launched in New York City two weeks ago, NY Times reporter Nikita Steward profiled a child discovering that she couldn’t use her iPad because the homeless shelter where she lives entirely lacks broadband access: “Shuttering the vast system, which includes 1,800 schools, was a serious challenge for the city, and the large- CONTINUE READING: Pandemic Exposes the Limitations of Online Education | janresseger

A Conversation Between Diane Ravitch and Rev. Charles Foster Johnson - Network For Public Education

A Conversation Between Diane Ravitch and Rev. Charles Foster Johnson - Network For Public Education

A Conversation Between Diane Ravitch and Rev. Charles Foster Johnson

Start: Tuesday, April 07, 2020 • 7:30 PM • Eastern Time (US & Canada) (GMT-05:00)

End: Tuesday, April 07, 2020 • 9:00 PM • Eastern Time (US & Canada) (GMT-05:00)

The Network for Public Education invites you to join us for a video conference with NPE President Diane Ravitch. Diane's guest will be the Reverend Charles Foster Johnson of Pastors for Texas Children who has been a leader in stopping vouchers in his state. The topic will be public school privatization. Listen to Diane and Charles talk about the threat that charter schools and vouchers pose to our system of public education.
A Conversation Between Diane Ravitch and Rev. Charles Foster Johnson - Network For Public Education

A Conspiracy Theory that turned out to be Real | Crazy Normal - the Classroom Exposé

A Conspiracy Theory that turned out to be Real | Crazy Normal - the Classroom Exposé

A Conspiracy Theory that turned out to be Real

On July 4, 1776, The Declaration of Independence said, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Read Slaying Goliath, and learn that some of the wealthiest and most powerful Americans are trying to take away our rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

I was a public school teacher in California from 1975 – 2005. During those thirty years, I worked 60 to 100 hours a week during the school year. I took work home seven days a week and couldn’t wait for the winter and spring breaks, not because of the time off from teaching, but because I’d have time to catch up correcting student work. After all, teachers have to sleep, too.

In 1983, President Ronald Reagan released a report that was a lie. That report was called “A Nation at Risk,” and it painted the nation’s public schools as failures.  After that misleading report, teachers were called lazy and incompetent. The public schools were blamed for the prison population in the United States that was really caused by Presidents Nixon and Reagan’s war on recreational drugs like marijuana.

The critics of the public schools even came up with a misleading term that was also a lie. It was called “The school to prison pipeline.” There has never been a school to prison pipeline in the United States.

After “A Nation at Risk,” came the CONTINUE READING: A Conspiracy Theory that turned out to be Real | Crazy Normal - the Classroom Exposé

On Disaster Distance Learning in New York City | The Jose Vilson

On Disaster Distance Learning in New York City | The Jose Vilson

ON DISASTER DISTANCE LEARNING IN NEW YORK CITY

The New York Times recently did a study on confirmed coronavirus cases across the city and found that COVID-19 cases are hitting lower-income neighborhoods the hardest. Some people have taken it to mean that we need to make more concerted efforts to keep these neighborhoods at home. (In some cases, by martial force.) Others have taken it as a sign of indifference as if the denizens of these specific neighborhoods had an opportunity to voice their opinions on this matter. Others still have taken to yelling at pictures of crowded subways and grocery stores as evidence that these neighborhoods simply can’t be bothered with the death toll that’s sure to disproportionately affect their own neighborhoods.

This isn’t all that different from the pre-COVID era, either. Our country should have created policies – and can still create policies – that protect our citizens most directly affected by environmental racism. Those who live closest to pollutants and congestion, those who live in or near asbestos-ridden buildings, those more likely to work the jobs that offend middle-to-upper class sensibilities need help now more than ever. These “essential jobs” are often occupied by the very people who our government has deemed dispensable in their squalor. Should these people not go to work, their bosses and their government will dispose of their ability to survive.

Oh, and the politicians who pundits currently praise created this problem by pretending like these CONTINUE READING: On Disaster Distance Learning in New York City | The Jose Vilson

Why is the Milwaukee county executive race so important to Betsy DeVos? | Educate All Students, Support Public Education

Why is the Milwaukee county executive race so important to Betsy DeVos? | Educate All Students, Support Public Education

Why is the Milwaukee county executive race so important to Betsy DeVos?

By Marva Herndon -April 4, 2020 Wisconsin Examiner

U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos speaking at the 2018 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland

U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos speaking at the 2018 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland. By Gage Skidmore CC BY-SA 2.0

Betsy DeVos, President Trump’s Secretary of Education, has long funded politicians who support voucher and charter-school schemes through her group, the American Federation for Children. The same American Federation for Children has funded school privatization efforts all over the country. Betsy DeVos is partly responsible for one of the biggest school reform disasters in the country – the privatization of Detroit Public Schools.

Now comes the election on April 7, 2020 — the Milwaukee Perfect Storm. Throughout this country the coronavirus pandemic has disrupted education at all levels. Betsy DeVos and local allies including the Milwaukee Metropolitan Association of Commerce (MMAC) see this disruption as a perfect opportunity to push their takeover agenda to the Milwaukee Public Schools. That’s DeVos is pouring tens of thousands of dollars into the race.

What could be the takeover mechanism? The County Executive and the Opportunity Schools program!

Most Milwaukee residents may have forgotten the Opportunity Schools & Partnership Program (OSPP) established by Wisconsin Act 55, in the 2015-2017 biennial budget. This legislation is still waiting to be executed by the Milwaukee County Executive. Chris Abele explains in a letter at the end of the Legislative Audit Bureau report on the program why he did not carry out the implementation of this statute, which lacked both state funding and local political support.

Why is it that so many school privatization figures are interested in the County Executive race? The OSPP requires the Milwaukee County Executive to select a program commissioner to operate the new school district it creates. This new district is created by selecting up to five Milwaukee Public Schools deemed failing on the Wisconsin Report Card to be transferred over to the new opportunity district each year. The new district must turn over these schools to a currently operating charter or voucher school. With additional deals or maybe contracts even a new school operator can join in this financial feast on the children and taxpayers of Milwaukee.

What does the school operator receive in the OSPP?

The expectation that the students come with the school building, along with the current per-student dollar amount paid to charter operators – between $8100 and $8900 per student.

School buildings and all the contents – statute is unclear whether the desks, computers and other equipment transfer with the building CONTINUE READING: Why is the Milwaukee county executive race so important to Betsy DeVos? | Educate All Students, Support Public Education