Latest News and Comment from Education

Monday, May 25, 2020

Calling Bill Gates! Calling Mark Zuckerberg! Calling Jeff Bezos! | Diane Ravitch's blog

Calling Bill Gates! Calling Mark Zuckerberg! Calling Jeff Bezos! | Diane Ravitch's blog

Calling Bill Gates! Calling Mark Zuckerberg! Calling Jeff Bezos!


People have many times asked me if I had some good ideas for the billionaires who have been foisting terrible ideas on our public schools. What could they do instead of screwing up the nation’s public schools?
Like they have nothing better to do than to make students and teachers miserable with endless testing, pricey consultants, and mounds of paperwork. Like their best idea is to eliminate elected school boards and let clueless entrepreneurs play with other people’s lives. Like their best/worst idea is to give hundreds of millions of dollars to a bunch of guys—who have already failed at “school reform”—so they can do some more “reforming” without any accountability for the disruption they cause.
Friends, the billionaires need a new idea!
I found it!

Here is a problem they can solve just by spending money. If they do this, they won’t break anything. They won’t hurt any children or break up any communities.
Please, Bill. Mark. Jeff. You can do this!
John Arnold! Laurene Powell Jobs! You too!
Be a hero, not a villain!
Pay attention! Make someone happy.
Robin Wright wrote this story for the New Yorker.
In late March, an elegant four-year-old tiger named CONTINUE READING: Calling Bill Gates! Calling Mark Zuckerberg! Calling Jeff Bezos! | Diane Ravitch's blog

Schools Closed for Five Years: The Prince Edward County Story (Part 1) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Schools Closed for Five Years: The Prince Edward County Story (Part 1) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Schools Closed for Five Years: The Prince Edward County Story (Part 1)


Natural disasters have closed schools over the past century. Earthquakes and hurricanes destroyed Christchurch, New Zealand (2011) and New Orleans (2005). The Influenza pandemic in 1918-1919, polio epidemics in the 1940s, and currently the coronavirus-19 have achieved the same result in country after country across the globe.
In a nation were supreme faith in the power of schooling to produce individual success, where getting an “education” is the first item on the to-do list of native-born and immigrant families, sudden and sustained school closures carry huge psychic and social costs for both students and their families.
Short-term effects on children and youth range from “summer loss” in academic achievement to distaste for online instruction to angst and depression from prolonged lockdowns and absence of contact with friends. Effects on students and families are unrecorded for previous epidemics and are just now becoming apparent, particularly for single Moms and families with two working parents.
Long-term effects of these natural disasters remain unknown. And this is why the five year loss of public schooling for black students in Prince Edward County as a result of a man-made disaster–while far longer than school closures flowing from the pandemic–becomes relevant as a historical instance of learning what happens later to children and youth when they have lost five years of their schooling.
Background
In 1951, in rural Prince Edward County, Virginia, Robert Moton high school student Barbara Johns led a walkout of black students protesting the conditions in the overcrowded building (housing 450 students rather than less than the 200 it was built for). This neglected, racially segregated high school in Farmville–the County seat of about 8500 residents–was not only at double its capacity but also lacked a library, science labs, and cafeteria.
“We held two or three classes in the auditorium most of the time, one on the stage and two in the back,” former Moton principal M. Boyd Jones told journalist Bob Smith in 1961. “We even held some classes in a bus.” Some classes met in CONTINUE READING: Schools Closed for Five Years: The Prince Edward County Story (Part 1) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Sac City Unified struggles to contact hundreds of students since stay-at-home order

Sac City Unified struggles to contact hundreds of students since stay-at-home order

Sac City Unified struggles to contact hundreds of students since stay-at-home order




As the Sacramento City Unified School District is working to make sure students are learning, there are 600 students who they haven’t been able to reach since the day the schools closed more than two months ago.
There are 47,900 students in the district. When some sites closed, the district reached out to families to find out if they need resources, from food to laptops.
Two weeks ago, there were 1,600 children who they had not been able to reach.
Teachers and others tracked down about a thousand of them, but on Friday, Superintendent Jorge Aguilar said there are still 600 students they haven’t heard from in two months.
“We had people calling and checking in and making sure that we were capitalizing on relationships, teachers who have stronger relationships with our students in some cases, you know, for our population of vulnerable students, in Sacramento, schools are a safe haven for them,” Aguilar said.
There are two groups in particular that have been harder to reach. Homeless students are six times more likely not to be reachable, and Laotian students are three times more likely to fall into that group.

Trump tweets schools should open ‘ASAP.] Here are some responses. - The Washington Post

Trump tweets schools should open ‘ASAP.] Here are some responses. - The Washington Post

Trump tweets schools should open ‘ASAP’ (after a Fox News host said the same thing Sunday night). Here are some responses.



After a morning of golf, President Trump was up late Sunday night tweeting, this time about the reopening of America’s schools, most of which were closed in March during the covid-19 pandemic.
At 10:41 p.m., Trump tweeted: “Schools in our country should be opened ASAP. Much very good information now available. @SteveHiltonx @FoxNews
Shortly before Trump tweeted, Steve Hilton of Fox News happened to be talking about that very subject, urging schools to reopen “schools now before you do even more needless damage.” He said wearing masks was “fine” but compulsory temperature checks were “unscientific nonsense” and “totally pointless,” and social distancing rules were “over-prescriptive” and “arbitrary.”
Trump has been pushing the country to reopen swiftly despite warnings by health and infectious disease specialists that the novel coronavirus is still spreading in many areas. School districts around the country are making plans for the 2020-21 school year that will depend on the state of the pandemic in the late summer and fall, including contingencies for opening schools, or continuing with remote learning, or a hybrid plan. CONTINUE READING: Trump tweets schools should open ‘ASAP.] Here are some responses. - The Washington Post

Diane Ravitch on Pandemic School Privatization - Network For Public Education

Diane Ravitch on Pandemic School Privatization - Network For Public Education

Diane Ravitch on Pandemic School Privatization


COUNTERSPIN

This week on CounterSpin: One teacher described it as a “gut punch” hearing New York Governor (and current media crush) Andrew Cuomo talk about “re-imagining” education in the wake of the pandemic,  without what he called the “old model” emphasis on teachers and classrooms. Cuomo announced an initiative with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation—who’ve been behind decades of education interventions in this country—all of which have failed to deliver on their promises, but have drained funds from public schools and undermined public school teachers.
One Gates project that activists fought off was a cloud-based system called  “inBloom” that collected millions of students’ detailed personal information—a massive intrusion Cuomo called “necessary.” Maybe that could spur some questions, particularly now that Cuomo’s added Google head Eric Schmidt to the Re-Imagining team? 
Diane Ravitch is a historian of education at New York University and author of, most recently, Slaying Goliath: The Passionate Resistance to Privatization and the Fight to Save America’s Public Schools. We talk with her about the latest scheme for rich folks to decide what’s best for schools their children don’t attend.

You can listen to Diane on CounterSpin here.

Diane Ravitch on Pandemic School Privatization - Network For Public Education

Memorial Day 2020 | Teacher in a strange land

Memorial Day 2020 | Teacher in a strange land

Memorial Day 2020


On Memorial Day, I have often dusted off an old column I originally wrote a dozen years ago. It’s about how I never lost my love and appreciation for Memorial Day as an opportunity for school bands and community members to commemorate the sacrifices made so we could live peacefully.
It always seemed like a great lesson for public school children to learn: gratitude and civics.  
When parents would call, a few days before the parade, and say—hey, Jason won’t be at the parade Monday because we have company coming for a day at the lake, I never responded with anger or points-off punishments.
But I would feel sad about the missed opportunity for students and their families to take a couple of hours to honor our own history, our own heroes. Memorial Day services are one of the few chances we get to put our communal, democratic values on display, without glorifying war or violence.
When we moved up north, I joined a community band and chorus which have been at the heart of a Memorial Day service here for decades. No parade—most band and choir members are retirees. But we’ve played a service in a misty rain as well as blazing sun. It’s always the same: a few patriotic tunes, a speaker, a prayer. Then Taps.
This Memorial Day, there will be no traditional service at the Northport Cemetery. No inspiring message, no Scouts raising the flag, no Village Voices singing ‘The Last Full Measure of Devotion’–and no Community Band playing ‘National Emblem’. It is too risky to bring the town’s residents together to honor the military sacrifices made so we can enjoy life on our beautiful, peaceful peninsula.
Instead, the Northport Community Band will be offering a ‘Rolling Taps’ to those who live in Northport. Sixteen members of the band’s brass section will station themselves CONTINUE READING: Memorial Day 2020 | Teacher in a strange land

Laura Chapman: Why Does the Center for American Progress Support the DeVos Agenda? | Diane Ravitch's blog

Laura Chapman: Why Does the Center for American Progress Support the DeVos Agenda? | Diane Ravitch's blog

Why Does the Center for American Progress Support the DeVos Agenda?


The Center for American Progress is identified by the mainstream media as a “liberal think tank” and as the think tank of the Democratic establishment. It protects the Ibama legacy, including the toxic legacy of Arne Duncan’s failed Race to the Top. Billions were squandered for a program that was built on the foundation of George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind. Twenty years have been wasted by investing in high-stakes testing and charter schools. CAP refuses to acknowledge this education disaster and continues to peddle the same tired Bush-Obama remedies.
Our reader Laura Chapman writes here about CAP’s May 27 event, featuring charter school leaders, even the executive director of the hedge funders’ charter advocacy lobby, DFER.
Please read! Take her advice and send in your questions. Ask them why they support the DeVos agenda. Let’s hope that CAP and its neonservative allies do not influence Joe Biden.
Laura writes:
“DeVos has a long and notorious record of using agency guidance and regulatory action to undermine equity.”
Yes. And this power is why, in addition to getting rid of Trump and DeVos, voters who care about public education must pay attention to Biden and who he is courting for advice. We need to let him know that more attention must be paid to public schools, not charter schools
Charter schools have a non-stop campaign for money, with a major pitch that they are the only schools that care about black and brown children. That is non-sense. Charter schools originated in and perpetuate racially segregated schools.


Here is an example of that campaign pitch, from Center for American Progress, founded by Hillary Clinton’s John Podesta, and an outfit that also gets money from both CONTINUE READING: Laura Chapman: Why Does the Center for American Progress Support the DeVos Agenda? | Diane Ravitch's blog

In Press: How to End the Reading War and Serve the Literacy Needs of All Students: A Primer for Parents, Policy Makers, and People Who Care (IAP) – radical eyes for equity

In Press: How to End the Reading War and Serve the Literacy Needs of All Students: A Primer for Parents, Policy Makers, and People Who Care (IAP) – radical eyes for equity

In Press: How to End the Reading War and Serve the Literacy Needs of All Students: A Primer for Parents, Policy Makers, and People Who Care (IAP)


[excerpt from Introduction]
How to End the Reading War and Serve the Literacy Needs of All Students: An Overview
The chapters that follow are not intended to document how we should or can teach reading. In fact, there is abundant work that has existed since the early twentieth century to document the many and varied ways we know we should help foster students as readers from the first days of school to the last. As well, this entire book is working well outside being a how-to on teaching reading or a storehouse of research—even as I am advocating that test-driven reading policy and instruction are asking way too little of students and their teachers.
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Instead, this is an informative work, focusing on the historical and current Reading War, that builds to a framework for moving beyond that war, and as the subtitle states, serving the literacy needs of all students.
Chapter 1 (A Historical Perspective of the Reading War: 1940s and 1990s Editions) offers a historical overview of crisis responses to reading, focusing on the 1940s (WWII literacy rates of soldiers) and a 1990s report spurred by NAEP. This historical perspective is often missing from media coverage of reading and reading policy debates and decisions made at the federal and state levels.
In Chapter 2 (The Twenty-First Century Reading War: “The Science of Reading,” Dyslexia, and Misguided Reading Policy), I examine the current “science of reading” phenomenon in mainstream media driven by mainstream media, Emily Hanford and Education Week as key examples, but also fueled by dyslexia advocacy, all of which has manifested themselves in education policy such as adopting grade retention based on 3rd-grade test scores and training teachers in the “science of reading.”
Chapter 3 (Misreading Reading: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly) addresses key concepts and topics that are misunderstood but central to the media coverage of the recent Reading War, such as the following: The National Reading Panel (NRP), reading programs, balanced literacy (BL), whole language (WL), phonics, scientific research, grade retention, teacher education, and teacher autonomy.
Finally, in Chapter 4 (How to End the Reading War and Serve the Literacy Needs of All Students: Shifting Our Deficit Gaze, Asking Different Questions about Literacy), the following reforms needed to end the Reading war will be explored:
  • Social policy must be implemented to address inequity and the homes, communities, and lives of children; these socioeconomic reforms must be viewed as central to reading policy.
  • The mainstream media must abandon Christopher Columbus and both-sides journalism that addresses education/reading.
  • Reading policy must abandon ineffective and hurtful commitments that include standards, high-stakes testing, grade retention, etc.
  • Classroom and school practices must abandon reading programs and silver-bullet approaches to literacy; and teaching must be far more individualized and patient.
  • Evidence-based teaching of reading must expand the meaning of “scientific” and evidence.
In the Conclusion (The Science of Literacy: A 36-Year Journey and Counting), I challenge a narrow view of “science,” especially in terms of education and literacy.
As you read the following chapters, I want you to keep some big-picture concerns in mind: What do we ultimately mean when we talk about teaching children to read? And what does it mean for a student to be able to read?
I want you to consider this story from a high school ELA class discussion on capital punishment. As the teacher led a discussion on the death penalty, a student interjected that Texas currently uses decapitation for the death penalty. The teacher paused, and then suggested that this wasn’t true. The student hurriedly explained it was true, and that he had proof.
The student took out his smartphone, pulling up an article to show the teacher. The article was from The Onion.
Patiently, the teacher informed the student that The Onion is satire, to which the student replied, “No, it isn’t.” Keep in mind that this high school student can pronounce the words in the article; he had read the entire piece.
Are our reading standards, sacred high-stakes tests, and reading programs fostering the sort of students who are critical readers, capable of navigating a complex world better than the student above? Is this Reading War in any way addressing that problem?

SPECIAL CORONAVIRUS UPDATE 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


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


Three Resources About Our World’s Different Cultures
Clker-Free-Vector-Images / Pixabay I’m adding these resources to The Best Sites For Learning About The World’s Different Cultures : What grocery hauls look like around the world right now is from The Washington Post. Pick a Card and Be Transported: 7 Board Games From Around the World is from The NY Times.

YESTERDAY

The Next Ten Days Are Big Ones For The Possibility Of Re-Opening Schools In The Fall
This week is a big one when it comes to the possible re-opening of schools in the fall. On Wednesday, the Los Angeles County Office of Education will unveil its “framework” for school re-opening. On June 1st, the Sacramento County Office of Education will release its reopening guidelines . I’m assuming there will be a flurry of other agencies doing the same, even though the best piece I’ve read o
Video: “Top 10 Beautiful Natural Wonders in the World 2021”
PublicDomainPictures / Pixabay I’m adding this new video to The Best Sites For Learning About Various “Seven Wonders” :
Video: Here’s How To Transfer Google Classroom Grades To Your Learning Management System
So many of us are using Google Classroom, but our districts use other Learning Management Systems (Infinite Campus for us). Grade Transferer will take care of it for you, and I’ve embedded a video showing how it works for Infinite Campus. I also hope we’re all being very flexible with grades, as I point out in this tweet: But in the midst of this, please continue to deduct points for missed assig
“Spreading ‘Poetry Love’ in the Classroom”
Spreading ‘Poetry Love’ in the Classroom is the headline of my latest Education Week Teacher column. Nine educators share instructional strategies they use to teach poetry, including through read-alouds and through studying and writing odes. Here are some excerpts: I’m adding it to The Best World Poetry Day Resources – Help Me Find More .
Resources For Teaching U.S. History Next Year
geralt / Pixabay Last week, I wrote a pos t sharing my preliminary thoughts about how I was going to teach U.S. History to English Language Learners – either online, in person, or a hybrid. It will be a combination class of both Newcomers and Intermediates. I usually use the two-volume America’s Story textbook and supplement it with activities on our U.S. History class blog , online activities fr
My Favorite Posts That Appeared In May
I regularly highlight my picks for the most useful posts for each month — not including “The Best…” lists. I also use some of them in a more extensive monthly newsletter I send-out. You can see older Best Posts of the Month at Websites Of The Month (more recent lists can be found here ). You can also see my all-time favorites here . I’ve also been doing “A Look Back” series reviewing old favorite

MAY 23

Most Popular Posts Of The Week
I’m making a change in the content of the regular feature. In addition to sharing the top five posts that have received the most “hits” in the preceding seven days (though they may have originally been published on an earlier date), I will also include the top five posts that have actually appeared in the past week. Often, these are different posts. You might also be interested in IT’S THE THIRTE
Here Are The Questions I’m Having Students Answer In My End-Of-Distance-Learning Evaluation
Alexas_Fotos / Pixabay I always learn a lot from the anonymous end-of-semester evaluations I have students complete (see Best Posts On Students Evaluating Classes (And Teachers) ) and always make the results public. The “making them public part can sometime lead to interesting situations, like last year’s Washington Post headline Teacher asks students to grade him. One wrote: ‘I give Mr. Ferlazzo
Great New Nike Video With LeBron James: “Never Too Far Down”
I’m adding this great new video to The Best Resources For Learning About “Grit” :
This Is The Best Piece Of Pandemic Teaching Advice That I’ve Heard….
7 Ways Educators Can Help Students Cope in a Pandemic is an excellent ASCD piece by school counselor Phyllis L. Fagell. I’d probably make a slight edit by putting “much of” in there, as in “they’re not going to remember much of what they learned,” but it’s a minor quibble. There is some similarity between this advice and The Best Piece Of Classroom Management Advice I Ever Read . I’m adding this
Guest Post On What The Next School Year Might Look Like: “There are not perfect decisions, and sometimes there are only really bad alternatives”
Alice Mercer teaches third grade at an elementary school in Sacramento, CA. She started her career in Oakland, Ca, and moved to Sacramento in 2001. She is the parent of a now-adult son with ASD, and is a caregiver to her 
Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day... | The latest news and resources in education since 2007