Monday, July 13, 2020

Educators, This is Our Call To Arms! by Dr. Michael Flanagan — Badass Teachers #tBATS

Educators, This is Our Call To Arms! by Dr. Michael Flanagan — Badass Teachers

Educators, This is Our Call To Arms! by Dr. Michael Flanagan

*Refuse To Return to schools until districts show fourteen days of no coronavirus cases, and until schools are funded adequately in order to open safely. 

In a campaign of hate, you have to constantly throw red meat to the dogs. 

Guess who’s the red meat? 

As a master of chaos, Trump knows full well that besides hate, division is the key to victory. Foment anger and direct violence against a targeted minority to avoid scrutiny of your own liability. Find a common target. 

Educators.

Instead of acknowledging the science of how coronavirus spreads, or analyzing the data that shows both an increase in cases, as well as a trend of younger people getting sicker in larger numbers, the political right has decided that the best thing to do is open up the schools in the fall...because Donald Trump wants to get re-elected. 

There is a political push to reopen schools before the November elections. Since there is still a deadly pandemic raging, opponents of that policy will have to be vilified in order to counter the protests. Educators will be the scapegoats.

During an election year that has seen economic collapse for the majority of Americans, record CONTINUE READING: Educators, This is Our Call To Arms! by Dr. Michael Flanagan — Badass Teachers

Russ on Reading: Independent Reading in a Pandemic

Independent Reading in a Pandemic

We need to get books into our student's homes and hands.

This tweet from the estimable Jennifer Serravallo appeared on my feed this morning. I believe she is right. Schools should not be forced to re-open and the likelihood that a forced re-opening will lead quickly to a renewed shutdown is high. Districts, school leaders and teachers should be preparing for more long-term distance learning. This situation, we know, is not ideal, but as my mother would say, if all you have is chopped meat, make meatloaf. In this case, if we can't meet with our students eye to eye, lets' make independent reading a priority. The one thing that the pandemic gives us is time. The one thing that all research shows is that time spent reading is the best way to improve reading. So we have a potentially winning formula in front of us. How do we make it happen?

Get Books in Children's Hands - Schools need to be working out ways to deliver books to children's homes so they have material to read. My daughter and son-in-law volunteered this spring to deliver lawn signs for graduates of the local high school. Schools need to CONTINUE READING: Russ on Reading: Independent Reading in a Pandemic

Weingarten: 'No way' schools open this fall without funding

Randi Weingarten: ‘No way’ schools can return this fall without more funding

Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, said there’s “no way” schools across the country could reopen this fall because of a lack of federal funding.

“There’s no way that you’re going to have full-time schools for all the kids and all the teachers the way we used to have it,” Weingarten told John Catsimatidis on his AM 770 WABC radio show on Sunday. “Once we have a vaccine, I hope we can get back to that.”

The School Superintendent Association estimated that it would cost an average of $1.8 million per school district to adhere to guidelines set by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to reopen this fall.

But, so far, the Trump administration hasn’t said whether additional funds would be available.

“And in doing this, not only is there a [need] for retrofitting, for ventilation systems, but also for buying the damned masks for the cleaning equipment, for the nurses that we’re going to need. That’s why we’ve been pushing really hard … To get the [federal] money that states need… to re-open schools,” Weingarten said. CONTINUE READING: Weingarten: 'No way' schools open this fall without funding

Parent Letter Template—We Demand Safe Schools! + SFUSD Fall Learning Plan Presentation - SF PUBLIC SCHOOL MOM

Parent Letter Template—We Demand Safe Schools! - SF PUBLIC SCHOOL MOM

Parent Letter Template—We Demand Safe Schools!

This weekend, I had the opportunity to work with teachers across the country, Stacey Shubitz, Julie Jee, and Sarah Gross, to create a letter that parents and caregivers can customize to contact their local school districts about reopening plans. (Click links to follow them on Twitter!)

These past few months, I’ve been listening to site-leaders, parents, and students across the country. I’m thankful to say that in SF the majority of folks I speak with agree, we cannot reopen schools this fall with a rampant pandemic raging in our communities. #KeepOurKidsSafe

On Tuesday, July 14th at 3 pm, during the Regular Board Meeting, SFUSD staff will present a plan with the recommendation that students resume learning on August 17th remotely, with the hope of reopening schools for focal students (littles, English Learners. students with disabilities, etc) as soon as it is safe to do so.

Rising cases in SF make schools unlikely to open any earlier than October. And the logistics necessary to pull this off (transportation, ventilation, and citywide testing, to name a few) will make even this very challenging.

This next meeting on Tuesday will be an opportunity for Board Members to hear directly from the public and inform the district’s proposed plan. The full plan will not officially be approved until July 28th. That said, it is highly unlikely we will approve any plans other than distance learning for the start of school. (Learn more about the meeting.)

In the meantime, educate yourself and especially those folks you know outside of SFUSD. Many counties across the country are being pressured to open by our president and current Secretary of Education.

This is a national fight, and San Franciscans can do their part by reaching out to friends and family members across the nation. Help them advocate for safe reopening and fully funding (not privatizing) our public education system.

Advocate for Safe Reopening of Schools

View this letter in GoogleDoc here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1UZ4Fb1w7KIVLMewrmPTrq2IPTkD0qdhpljD_cjul6Ic/mobilebasic

While the world deals with the COVID-19 pandemic, many are calling for schools to reopen as normal. However, it is clear to many parents and community members that opening schools will be unsafe for students, staff, and families. While we would all love nothing more than to return to normal, the current spread and transmission rates of COVID-19 make it clear that is not possible. How will districts, facing immense budget cuts, implement the CDC safety guidelines in any meaningful way without additional funding? Even the simplest safety changes will be onerous. For example, allowing for social distancing on school buses will CONTINUE READING: Parent Letter Template—We Demand Safe Schools! - SF PUBLIC SCHOOL MOM

SFUSD Fall Learning Plan Presentation - SF PUBLIC SCHOOL MOM - https://wp.me/p4ndvh-2sJ by @alimcollins

The Parent Trap

The Parent Trap

Covid-19 has exacerbated capitalism's impossible demands on mothers.

Having children is one of the great mysteries of life. Like having sex, or falling in love, or developing faith in a higher power, it’s an experience that falls short of any description.

Also like sex, love and religion, having children sucks about half the time, and it particularly sucks now, thanks to the coronavirus.

I’m in a best-case situation—two employed work-from-home parents, taking care of one relatively well-behaved 2-year-old—and still, parenting under lockdown is a gauntlet, a months-long Kobayashi Maru test in which the only way to win is to realize the game is unwinnable. School is out, and may or may not reopen in the fall. Many summer camps and day cares are shut down. Playgrounds are cordoned off. The only safe place is the house, and while you’re in that house, you’re expected to do your job. It is impossible to be both continually available to one’s boss and continually available to one’s child. The things that seem “cute” at first, like tiny toddler voices announcing their need to potty during a call, quickly become irritants. Emails go unanswered; basic tasks are forgotten; Screen Time, the parent’s nemesis, comes to dominate your child’s waking hours. I woke up a few weekends ago to hear my neighbor, whose toddler is the same age as mine, standing on his porch and screaming “I NEVER SHOULD HAVE HAD A KID.”

I have little sympathy for my neighbor, mostly because his wife was indoors, caring for the child he did have. Talking about “parenting” under COVID is a bit of a dodge. What we’re talking about, most of the time, is mothering. The amount of mothering being asked of women under coronavirus is triggering a generational reset in gender CONTINUE READING: The Parent Trap

What pediatricians’ group really said about opening schools - The Washington Post

Trump administration cites the American Academy of Pediatrics to make its case for school reopening. Here’s what the AAP really said.

The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) recently issued guidance saying that school districts should try to get students back to campuses this fall for their health — and the Trump administration has used it to bolster its new push to force public schools to open fully for the 2020-21 academic year.

But the initial statement never was an endorsement of the call by President Trump for all schools to fully reopen — and the organization has now attempted to directly distance itself from the administration’s belligerent stance on reopening.

All the ways the coronavirus will make this school year harder than the last, even if campuses reopen

In late June, the AAP issued what it called “Covid-19 Planning Considerations: Guidance for School Re-entry,” in which it said in part:

Schools are fundamental to child and adolescent development and well-being and provide our children and adolescents with academic instruction, social and emotional skills, safety, reliable nutrition, physical/speech and mental health therapy, and opportunities for physical activity, among other benefits. Beyond supporting the educational development of children and adolescents, schools play a critical role in addressing racial and social inequity. ...
With the above principles in mind, the AAP strongly advocates that all policy considerations for the coming school year should start with a goal of having students physically present in school. The importance of in-person learning is well-documented, and there is already evidence of the negative impacts on children because of school closures in the spring of 2020.

The administration saw the detailed guidance as support and various members began citing it in remarks about the opening of schools. CONTINUE READING: What pediatricians’ group really said about opening schools - The Washington Post

No, Trump can’t unilaterally withhold funds from schools - The Washington Post

No, Trump and DeVos can’t withhold funding from schools whenever they want. Here’s what they can do.

President Trump and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos have told public school districts that they must open fully for the 2020-2021 school year during the coronavirus pandemic, and they threatened to withhold federal funding from school districts that don’t.

The threats, however, are largely just that: threats without real teeth behind them.

While presidents can in some cases legally withhold funding appropriated by Congress, they can’t do it without notifying Congress and in some cases getting approval. (Some have tried and been struck down by courts, and DeVos has been held in contempt of court as education secretary for refusing to stop collecting loans from former students of a chain of for-profit colleges that closed.)

Trump and DeVos — who often talk about the importance of local control of education — also have no authority to force schools to open at a particular time or in a specific way.

Those are state and local decisions, however much Trump and DeVos shout about it. AASA, the School Superintendents Association, said in a statement directed at Trump: “You don’t support local decision making if it’s conditional on only making choices you support."

Do what I want: Betsy DeVos tells school districts trying to open for 2020-2021

Trump raised the issue of reopening schools fully last week in a tweet in which he said that other countries had opened schools “with no problems." He named four European countries that had reopened schools but did not mention they had done so only after dramatically bringing down national coronavirus infection rates, which the United States has failed to do. And he ended the tweet with this: “May cut off funding if not open!”

Trump and DeVos want schools ‘fully’ open, but not many are listening

DeVos herself made several calls CONTINUE READING: No, Trump can’t unilaterally withhold funds from schools - The Washington Post

Canceled?: The Day Comedy Died – radical eyes for equity

Canceled?: The Day Comedy Died

Lenny Bruce is not afraid“Its the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine),” R.E.M.

Recently, when I watch standup specials through online services, I think about Don McLean’s “American Pie.”

As I have explained before, a foundational part of my critical Self was established during my teen years through listening to the comedy of George Carlin and Richard Pryor. Along with them, The Firesign Theater and Steve Martin also had a profound impact on me, but Carlin and Pryor led me to studying the life and comedy of Lenny Bruce.

Lenny Bruce's Obscenity Trial Challenged First Amendment Rights ... — Lenny Bruce took obscenity to court.

Bruce, Carlin, and Pryor were incredibly important voices for free speech and the power of words, including the power of offensive words and the sacredness of those words.

So there is more than a bit of nuanced irony to the evolution of standup comedy in the #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter era, an evolution that looks to me like the death of comedy.

Standup comedians—especially white male comedians—are quite predictable now; they turn immediately or eventually to the anti-cancel culture bandwagon that appears to be mandatory for a standup routine in 2020.

There’s a lot of “Don’t judge me because the line has moved” and “Comedy is a ‘joke,’ right?” kind of laziness in the routines. While contemporary comedians seem to be joining a tradition found in Bruce, Carlin, and Pryor, the ugly truth is that these routines are lazy and angry responses to a mostly mangled and even fabricated message about “cancel culture.”

Comedians have joined a backlash against cancel culture, and these CONTINUE READING: Canceled?: The Day Comedy Died – radical eyes for equity

Which Charter Schools Got Federal PPP $$ in Your State or Zipcode? | Diane Ravitch's blog

Which Charter Schools Got Federal PPP $$ in Your State or Zipcode?

Do you wonder which businesses, schools, and nonprofits in your neighborhood or state got a piece of the hundreds of billions of dollars handed out by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin in the Paycheck Protection Program? He tried to keep the names of the recipients secret but eventually released the list.

Now you can easily review the list.

ProPublica put all the awards into a search engine which anyone can use. Here it is.

You can satisfy your curiosity about who got the money. I looked at my zip code and was shocked to see some very wealthy institutions listed as well as some local businesses who probably thought they won the grand prize in the lottery. Those on the know cashed in. Many worthy small businesses and colleges never applied. They were not in the know.

Would you like to do some volunteer work for the Network for Public Education? We would love to have your help identifying the charter schools in your state that received PPP money.

Public schools were not eligible to participate in the PPP, but charter lobbyists made sure that charter schools were. Thus, they got money designated for public CONTINUE READING: Which Charter Schools Got Federal PPP $$ in Your State or Zipcode? | Diane Ravitch's blog

NYC Educator: De Blasio to UFT, CSA, DC37, and 1.1 Million Schoolchildren: Drop Dead

De Blasio to UFT, CSA, DC37, and 1.1 Million Schoolchildren: Drop Dead

It's really hard to outdo the outrageous lack of planning that went into the DOE's hybrid instruction plan. Nonetheless, Bill de Blasio and Richard Carranza have once again outdone themselves. I was interviewed for this piece in NY 1, suggesting that equity and excellence is yet another carefully orchestrated DOE mirage. I'm in one of the so-called outlier schools, and we'd need five cohorts rather than two or three to meet their recommendations.

That's pretty goshdarn inconvenient for City Hall. How can they defend a system that ignores the largest school in Queens? How can they face up to the fact that they've neglected us for so many years? Can they go any lower than meeting minimum standards, already so porous you can drive a Mac truck through them? Of course they can.

Our school has been fighting overcrowding for over a decade. In fact, we had an agreement with Tweed to lower enrollment. When I became chapter leader, I ran around like a madman making sure our outrageous overcrowding got press coverage. I wrote in the Daily News, and we were covered multiple times in the NY Post. We even got a feature in the NY Times. By the time we were covered on television, Joel Klein and Michael Bloomberg had to acknowledge us.

UFT arranged a meeting at Tweed along with CSA and our School Leadership Team. We agreed to multiple measures to lower enrollment. We went down from 4600 to 4000, and were on our way to go below 200% capacity for the first time in years. Bill de Blasio failed to observe our agreement, and we're now somewhere around 4500, back to square one. Thanks a lot.

How does the DOE deal with an issue like that now that they're hyping a hybrid plan? Evidently, they want to make minimum CONTINUE READING: NYC Educator: De Blasio to UFT, CSA, DC37, and 1.1 Million Schoolchildren: Drop Dead

Trump and DeVos Want Schools Open Full Time, Five Days A Week: The Realities Are Far More Difficult | janresseger

Trump and DeVos Want Schools Open Full Time, Five Days A Week: The Realities Are Far More Difficult

Now, in mid-July, America is suddenly waking up to the need to think about how COVID-19 will affect the institutions that serve children come August and September. The press is finally reporting that opening public schools for over 50 million young people is going to be complex, difficult and expensive, and that nobody is quite sure how to do it. Now that we are paying attention, we can see that the fall is going to be difficult in all sorts of ways—for children, for parents, for educators, and for the economy. But for President Donald Trump and his education secretary Betsy DeVos, it’s very simple: Schools should open on time, five days a week. The Trump administration has even threatened to punish schools that don’t reopen on time by withholding federal funds.

On Friday, NY Times columnist Michelle Goldberg described what she has learned in interviews with Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers: “Two weeks ago, I asked Randi Weingarten… what a functioning Department of Education would be doing to prepare the country to reopen schools in the fall. ‘A functioning Department of Education would have been getting groups of superintendents and principals and unions and others together from the middle of March,’ she told me… By mid-April it would have convened experts to figure out how to reopen schools safely, and offered grants to schools trying different models… ‘None of that has happened… Zero.’ When I spoke to Weingarten again on Thursday, she wasn’t worried that Trump and DeVos would be able to follow through on their threats; they can’t redirect the funds without Congress. But with their crude attempts at coercion, they’ve politicized school reopening just as Trump politicized mask-wearing and hydroxychloroquine. ‘The threats are empty, but the distrust they have caused is not,’ Weingarten said.”

Most of us don’t spend time considering the complexity of the daily operation of institutions CONTINUE READING: Trump and DeVos Want Schools Open Full Time, Five Days A Week: The Realities Are Far More Difficult | janresseger

CURMUDGUCATION: Biden's Education Platform

Biden's Education Platform

The Unity Task Force has been working hard ~~to convince Sanders supporters to back Biden~~ to come up with policy statements that will appeal to all wings of the party, thereby promoting Unity! Huzzah!

I almost didn't bother to look; this is a document that will be fed into the shredder that is the Official Platform Process, and it's pretty hard to compare about party platforms in a Presidential race. When was the last time that any President announced, "I am now going to push for this policy because even though I'm not all that invested in it, we did have it in my official party platform, so I'm totally going to pursue it." I'm pretty sure that is never.

But it's still worth tracking the thinking of the Democratic Party, a party which has not been a friend to public education in a very long time, and their identification of what the main issues are. And the Unity Gang has released their recommendations, and right here on page 22 we get to their education ideas. And since this comes mostly from the Sanders camp (which had a very good eduplan) and the Biden plan (which didn't have much of a discernible plan at all), it'll be interesting to see where they landed.

"Providing a world-class education in every zip code" is the header. From there we leap into a lead CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: Biden's Education Platform

Mr. G for District 3: Chris Guerrieri's Education Matters: Education and the pandemic, how our leaders, the people not in the classroom are failing and risking lives

Education and the pandemic, how our leaders, the people not in the classroom are failing and risking lives

Everyone's starting point, whether you are the President of the United States, the superintendent of the district, a teacher in a classroom, or a cafeteria worker, is we want to be back in school and that in school learning is by far the best method of educating children. That being said, it's only the teacher and the cafeteria worker who will be risking their lives.

District after the district is coming up with a plan after plan to return to school just as the nation is inarguably in much worse shape than when the country shut down. If you live in any other region besides the North East, you have seen an uptick in cases and deaths.

Let's take Florida for example, the state closed the schools when there were less than a thousand cases. Governor DeSantis, in a rambling interview, said children were fine with returning, while not mentioning teachers once. He did this while Florida was averaging over ten thousand cases a day, including a record-shattering 15,300 in one day.

To give you some scale, it took Florida 111 days to reach 100 thousand cases of the disease, and just 13 days to reach 200 thousand, we will be at 300 thousand in less ten days after that. At the height of the pandemic in New York, they had a little over 11,000 cases, and all of South Korea, a country with 59 million densely packed together citizens, haven't had 15 thousand cases total.

Given these facts, how does rushing to open our schools make sense? The answer is it doesn't, but that doesn't stop our leaders from making plans to open schools, and the main reason they give is distance learning just did not work for some, and you know what? I agree.

I think we have to admit that distance learning did not work for many of our easily distracted, English as a CONTINUE READING: Mr. G for District 3: Chris Guerrieri's Education Matters: Education and the pandemic, how our leaders, the people not in the classroom are failing and risking lives

The NYC Dept of Education Intends to Violate 65 Sq Ft Social Distancing Guideline | JD2718

The NYC Dept of Education Intends to Violate 65 Sq Ft Social Distancing Guideline | JD2718

The NYC Dept of Education Intends to Violate 65 Sq Ft Social Distancing Guideline

Strong language? No. The Department of Education intends to violate social distancing guidelines.

+ They made 6 foot social distancing a recommendation, not a requirement. Here’s the link. And here’s a screenshot:

+ They sent out revised capacity estimates with exaggerated room sizes. They got every single room in my school wrong. I’ve heard similar things from across the city.

+ They are treating 65 sq ft per person as the maximum allowable space. They should treat it as the minimum. What’s that mean?

Let’s look at where I teach. They think Room 133 in my school is 728 sq ft. And so 728 divided by 65 is 11. 2. So the capacity they claim is 11, right Nope. They claim the capacity is 11 – 15. They are telling my principal to go ahead and put 15 bodies in there.

Let’s see: 728 divided by 11 = 66.2 sq feet per person. Meets the 65 square foot guideline. 728 divided by 15 = 48.5. This does not come close to meeting the 65 square foot per person guideline.

Every room in my building – every room – they have set a lower limit between 45 and 50 square feet per person. As I am talking to chapter leaders and programmers (schedulers) in other schools, it appears CONTINUE READING: The NYC Dept of Education Intends to Violate 65 Sq Ft Social Distancing Guideline | JD2718

Social Distancing Room Space Calculator by Square Feet - https://www.banquettablespro.com/social-distancing-room-space-calculator?fbclid=IwAR0RwehaIB5QxK5iupkf_fnOjfKV-9PF1Xx8luSL6ayXYuq6DkQPXFStIJY

Latest News and Comment from Education