In Some Ways, This is Worse than 2016 | Teacher in a strange land

In Some Ways, This is Worse than 2016 | Teacher in a strange land

In Some Ways, This is Worse than 2016

My friends remember, vividly, waking up after Election Day in 2016. The shock. Their personal emotions, from disbelief to outrage, the sense of betrayal. Who voted this racist, sexist joker in? What can we do?

What was born that day, and later refined, by a vast web of progressive people, media and organizations, has been a big driver of my life for the last four years, beginning with the Women’s March in January of 2017. The Trump presidency daily impacts my beliefs and my actions—so much worrying about the country I love. Maybe it’s the retired teacher in me, but I want to help. I want to live in a more just and peaceful world.

I would have sworn, until yesterday, that all that Indivisble-ing and anti-gerrymandering and election challenging was going well in my state and in the country, in general. The Democratic listening tour, the inspired improvised campaigning during a pandemic, the fact that our candidate was mainstream and inoffensive—it all felt like it was going someplace.

A better place.

I’m writing on Thursday morning, so the election is No Sure Thing, although there’s reason to hope, and to be glad that Michigan shifted roughly 80,000 ballots—a paltry amount– in the right direction over four years. There may be other very modest but CONTINUE READING: In Some Ways, This is Worse than 2016 | Teacher in a strange land

Pastors for Texas Children on the Election Results | Diane Ravitch's blog

Pastors for Texas Children on the Election Results | Diane Ravitch's blog

Pastors for Texas Children on the Election Results

The Network for Public Education is allied with Pastors for Texas Children. PTC has been a courageous leader in the fight for our public schools and against privatization.

The leader of PTC wrote the following statement:

Statement from Reverend Charles Foster Johnson on the 2020 Elections

Pastors for Texas Children extends a hearty congratulations to all those elected and re-elected to serve our children in the 87th Texas Legislature! Both incumbents and challengers fought hard and often confrontational, contentious campaigns that produced untold stress on them and their families. This is the messy price we pay for open and free elections, and we honor all candidates for serving the public in this important and sacrificial way. We have held every candidate in our prayers, and will continue to do so. We note with profound gratification the emphasis on public education in this electoral cycle. Virtually every incumbent and challenger ran on a strong public education platform. It is clear that the people of Texas want their House of Representatives to be fully affirming of great public schools for all 5.4 million Texas children, promote policies that protect and provide for them, and oppose policies that harm them.  It is crystal clear what public education support means:

*Opposition to any voucher proposal, regardless of its name, that diverts funding away from our neighborhood public schools to underwrite private and home schools.

 Support for budget plans that adequately fund our children’s public education, for a comprehensive study that determines what that education actually costs in current dollars, and for new sources of state revenue to sustain HB3.  

Opposition to charter school expansion that drains money away from public schools.

Support for charter school transparency and accountability.

Opposition to burdensome standardized testing that teachers and parents clearly abhor.

Support for teacher authority and compensation.  

We will be working closely with all 150 House members and 31 Senate members to make sure these promises are put into action in the 87th Legislature. 

Universal education, provided and protected by the public, is an expression of God’s Common Good as well as a Texas constitutional mandate.  Our children are counting on us all to advocate for it.

Pastors for Texas Children on the Election Results | Diane Ravitch's blog

SSPI THURMOND NEWS UPDATE + Education to End Hate Grant Recipients - Year 2020 (CA Dept of Education)

Education to End Hate Grant Recipients - Year 2020 (CA Dept of Education)

State Superintendent Tony Thurmond Announces “Education to End Hate” Grant Recipients and Dates for First Three Virtual Classrooms

CA Dept of Education - What's New

Recommendations to the Ethnic Studies Curriculum

40min

State Superintendent Tony Thurmond announces forthcoming release of recommendations to the Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum.

CA State Board Approves Shorter Standardized Tests

1h

California State Board of Education approves shorter standardized tests to give schools flexibility amidst COVID-19 uncertainties.

USDA Nationwide Waiver Questions and Answers #3

9h

Questions and Answers relating to the Nationwide Waiver to allow Summer Food Service Program and Seamless Summer Option Operations during School Year 2020-2021.

Education to End Hate Grant Recipients

9h

State Superintendent Tony Thurmond announces “Education to End Hate” grant recipients and dates for first three virtual classrooms.

SACRAMENTO—State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond today announced that the California Department of Education (CDE) has selected recipients of mini grants totaling nearly $200,0000 that will fund educator trainings across the state to combat hate, bigotry, racism, and other forms of bias or prejudice in schools as part of the Education to End Hate initiative.

More than 300 schools and districts across California applied for the grants funded by a contribution from philanthropic partner, the S.D. Bechtel, Jr. Foundation. Topics addressed by the first round of grantees include anti-racist pedagogy, implicit bias and its impact on students and families, privilege and systems of oppression, improving coursework on California and Native American Studies, and more.

“The overwhelming response to this grant program speaks volumes: California’s educators are more committed than ever to educational equity through the creation of safe, inclusive learning environments for all students, and they are hungry for more training and tools,” Thurmond said. “Congratulations to these school districts for showing their communities that education has the power to make meaningful, lasting change.”

The State Superintendent launched the Education to End Hate Initiative in September as a multifaceted effort to confront incidents of hate, bigotry, and racism rising across the state and nation, including anti-Semitic behavior, bullying of Asian American students, Islamophobia, LGBTQ discrimination, and violence directed at historically marginalized and oppressed peoples.

The first round of Education to End Hate mini grant recipients are:

• Eureka City Schools - $20,000
• Lucia Mar Unified School District - $14,600
• Madera Unified School District - $19,999
• Mountain Empire Unified School District - $15,000
• Ojai Unified School District - $20,000
• Petaluma City Schools District - $20,000
• San Lorenzo Unified School District - $20,000
• Union Elementary School District - $20,000
• Willits Elementary Charter School $6,200
• Wright Elementary School District - $20,000

Grant recipients indicated they are seeking workshops and training opportunities for both staff and teachers. Some applicants also indicated providing opportunities to students and parents. Recipients noted that training and professional development would support the improvement or development of curriculum and address systemic problems in policies and procedures.

Virtual classroom series dates announced: As part of the Education to End Hate Initiative, the CDE will also host a series of virtual classroom and educator professional development sessions broadcast live throughout the state that will be designed to engage students, educators, and families in a wide-ranging dialogue about the many forms of bias young people face across California—and ways schools can lead efforts to end discrimination.

The first three dates and topics in the webinar series will be:

• Week of November 16, 2020: Pedagogical Approaches to Teaching about Native Americans
• December 8: Countering anti-Semitism
• January 12, 2021: Countering Islamophobia

More details will be announced in advance of each virtual event.

All questions regarding the Education to End Hate Initiative can be directed to edtoendhate@cde.ca.gov.

# # # #

Tony Thurmond — State Superintendent of Public Instruction
Communications Division, Room 5602, 916-319-0818, Fax 916-319-0100

Education to End Hate Grant Recipients - Year 2020 (CA Dept of Education)

OPINION: U.S. public education should be federally funded

OPINION: U.S. public education should be federally funded

U.S. public schools should be federally funded

“The concept of ‘local control’ is grounded in and reflective of systemic racism”

How good are America’s public schools? It depends on where you live.

Education funding is like any other public infrastructure investment. School systems with sufficient funding tend to get better results. Schools that lack resources are less effective and resilient in the face of ordinary challenges, let alone unprecedented catastrophes like the coronavirus pandemic.

Even as distance-education removes the spatial component from public education — lessons no longer happen in a particular classroom, or at a particular school, but on the (ostensibly worldwide) web — these lines still separate children from one another. The endless Covid-19 crisis is revealing the primary weakness of decentralizing the funding of public services: Stark resource divides that fuel some of the deepest social inequities.

Related: “Kids wo have less, need more”: The fight over school funding

This starts with interstate funding gaps. In states like Kansas and Arizona, leaders have long underfunded their public education systems. This led to the spectacle, early in the pandemic, of Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey announcing that the state would “donate” 200 mobile hotpots to its public schools in an effort to kickstart private hotspot donations. We see even bigger disparities in public preschool spending: In 2019, the District of Columbia spent $18,669 per child, while North Dakota and Nebraska each spent less than $2,000 per child.

At the local level, these resource disparities regularly align with — and exacerbate — longstanding racial, socioeconomic, ethnic and linguistic divisions in American society. According to 2017 data from EdBuild, a nonprofit focused on inequitable education funding, schools in Pennsylvania’s Lower Merion School District were funded to the tune of $25,068 per student, while schools in neighboring Philadelphia received just $12,044. It’s bitterly unsurprising that Lower Merion schools are CONTINUE READING: 

When Jesus Needs A Visitor's Badge: Church-State Issues In Public Education | Blue Cereal Education

When Jesus Needs A Visitor's Badge: Church-State Issues In Public Education | Blue Cereal Education

When Jesus Needs A Visitor's Badge: Church-State Issues In Public Education

A “Hall of Separation”

That’s a horrible title and I wish I could stop thinking it’s not.

As you probably know, given that it’s pretty much all I talk about these days, I’ve been researching Supreme Court cases involving issues of church-state separation in relation to public education. My hope is to have something ready before the entire system collapses and any benefit one may derive from it is no longer relevant.

Given the state of the 2020 elections as I post this, I’m probably way too late.

Nevertheless, I’ve been wrong before. Democracy may cough and bleed its way through another generation or so in some form, in which case I may sell as many as eleven copies of this lil’ liber sui generis. A few people may even find it helpful, enlightening – or at least mildly diverting.

Who am I kidding with all the humility? So far, it’s bloody brilliant and everyone will want seven copies just to show off.

In the meantime, I thought I’d share three of the books I’ve been reading as I continue researching my own. While the cases I’m including aren’t exactly obscure or difficult to document (most reached the Supreme Court, after all), the issues involved are often less universal than most “landmark” cases. Plus, as the subject suggests, most involve religion on some level. That means that while my trademark wit and brilliance will no CONTINUE READING: When Jesus Needs A Visitor's Badge: Church-State Issues In Public Education | Blue Cereal Education

DFER Names Its Candidates for Secretary of Education | Diane Ravitch's blog

DFER Names Its Candidates for Secretary of Education | Diane Ravitch's blog

DFER Names Its Candidates for Secretary of Education

Chalkbeat reports that the privatizers at “Democrats” for Education Reform have identified their candidates for Biden’s Secretary of Education. They are three big-city superintendents who have worked harmoniously with charter schools.

DFER is an organization of hedge fund managers and financiers who are supporters of charter schools, merit pay, high-stakes testing, and value-added evaluation of teachers. In 2008, DFER successfully advocated for the appointment of Arne Duncan, a supporter of their goals.

Democrats for Education Reform is coordinating a behind-the-scenes push for Chicago schools chief Janice Jackson, the head of Baltimore schools Sonja Brookins Santelises, or Philadelphia superintendent William Hite, according to an email sent to supporters Monday by the group’s president Shavar Jeffries and obtained by Chalkbeat. All three, Jeffries wrote, would represent a “‘big tent’ approach to education policy making….”

DFER was an influential actor in policy during the Obama CONTINUE READING: DFER Names Its Candidates for Secretary of Education | Diane Ravitch's blog

Teacher Tom: This Miracle of Creating a World

Teacher Tom: This Miracle of Creating a World

This Miracle of Creating a World

In their book The World of the Newborn, Daphne and Charles Maurer write:

"His world smells to him much as our world smells to us, but he does not perceive odors (as we do) . . . His world is a melee of pungent aromas -- and pungent sounds, and bitter-smelling sounds, and sweet-smelling sights, and sour-smelling pressures against the skin. If we could visit the newborn's world, we would think ourselves inside a hallucinogenic perfumery."

And it's not just the sense of smell. The human brain does not simply represent the information we receive through our senses, it constructs it. In fact babies are born perceiving the reality as it "really" is, meaning that their brains have not yet learned to assemble the photons and waves and particles that make up the universe into anything that we adults would recognize. As psychologist and researcher Mike Gazzaniga puts it: "This is what our brain does all day long. It takes input from various areas of our brain and from the CONTINUE READING: Teacher Tom: This Miracle of Creating a World

Chicago Public Schools to Reopen After Installing Air Purifiers | Diane Ravitch's blog

Chicago Public Schools to Reopen After Installing Air Purifiers | Diane Ravitch's blog

Chicago Public Schools to Reopen After Installing Air Purifiers

Chicago Public Schools are ready to open, according to officials.

CHICAGO — Chicago Public Schools said classrooms are ready for students and teachers to safely return Wednesday after the district installed air purifiers and took other measures to prevent the spread of COVID-19.

Last month, the Chicago Teachers Union said neither teachers nor students should return to class because school buildings are old and not designed to sufficiently ventilate and purify air during a pandemic.

CPS said it addressed those concerns by spending $8.5 million to put a HEPA air purifier in every classroom. District officials said the 20,000 purifiers are capable of removing “99.9% of ultrafine particles,” including airborne mold, bacteria and viruses like COVID-19. 

Additionally, CPS officials said the district implemented CONTINUE  READING: Chicago Public Schools to Reopen After Installing Air Purifiers | Diane Ravitch's blog

Labeling Students Then and Now (Part 1) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Labeling Students Then and Now (Part 1) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Labeling Students Then and Now (Part 1)

Twenty years ago, Sarah Deschenes, David Tyack and I wrote an article published in the Teachers College Record called: “Mismatch: Historical Perspectives on Schools and Students Who Don’t Fit Them.” 

Because of the pervasiveness of the age-graded school since the middle of the 19th century, “normal” students were those who satisfactorily acquired the slice of curriculum 1st, 5th, or 8th grade teachers distributed through lessons in their self-contained classrooms Those students who met their teachers expectations for grade-level academic achievement, behavior during lessons, and the school’s requirements for attendance and performance were “normal.” And “normal” students were the majority.

But a sizable fraction of students, for many reasons deviated from the “normal.” They didn’t fit. Since the mid-19th century until the present, these students have been given labels. They were (and are) “educational misfits.”

Examining the changes in the language of labels attached to students who strayed from the definition of “normal” required in age-graded schools offers reformers pause in considering the power of these labels over time. Especially now as the U.S. schools enter the fourth decade of the standards, testing, and accountability reform movement, surely an added template for judging “normal” performance.

Between the “normality” structured within the age-graded school and the state and federally driven standards movement since the mid- CONTINUE READING: Labeling Students Then and Now (Part 1) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Diane Ravitch in Conversation with Kevin Welner - Network For Public Education

Diane Ravitch in Conversation with Kevin Welner - Network For Public Education

Diane Ravitch in Conversation with Kevin Welner

Start: Thursday, November 12, 2020 • 7:30 PM • Eastern Daylight Time (US & Canada) (GMT-04:00)

End: Thursday, November 12, 2020 • 9:00 PM • Eastern Daylight Time (US & Canada) (GMT-04:00)

The Network for Public Education invites you to join us for a video conference with NPE President Diane Ravitch. Diane's guest will be author and University of Colorado Boulder professor, Kevin Welner. Join Diane and Kevin in conversation about Kevin's new book, Potential Grizzlies: Making the Nonsense Bearable.

Diane Ravitch in Conversation with Kevin Welner - Network For Public Education

USDA Nationwide Waiver Questions and Answers #3 - Nutrition (CA Dept of Education)

USDA Nationwide Waiver Questions and Answers #3 - Nutrition (CA Dept of Education)

USDA Nationwide Waiver Questions and Answers #3

Coronavirus (COVID-19) Main Web Page

On November 2, 2020, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) released Policy Memorandum SP 04-2021, CACFP 03-2021, SFSP 03-2021. This Policy Memorandum  includes questions and answers intended to provide clarification to State agencies and program operators of the National School Lunch Program (NSLP), School Breakfast Program (SBP), Seamless Summer Option (SSO), Summer Food Service Program (SFSP), and the Child and Adult Care Food Program (CACFP).

Questions and Answers

Expand All | Collapse All

SFSP and SSO

1. Can a School Food Authority (SFA) operating an open SFSP/SSO site with non-congregate meal service serve meals to children not enrolled in the school, such as preschoolers?

2. For SFSP or SSO sites that will be able to serve congregate meals to a limited number of participants under COVID-19 restrictions, will they also be able to serve non-congregate meals to the remainder of participants?

Child and Adult Care Food Program (CACFP)

3. For CACFP At-risk Afterschool Programs and NSLP Afterschool Snacks, if the educational or enrichment activity is electronic and a child does not have access to the required electronic device, is the activity still considered available to all?

4. May CACFP at-risk centers providing extended care during the day (both school hours and afterschool hours) claim reimbursement for a breakfast and/or lunch served in addition to the one meal and one snack allowed for at-risk?

5. Can current tier II family day care homes be moved to tier I with one month’s worth of income during COVID-19 due to lower attendance or income, even if this does not reflect the yearly average? Can a tier I home’s eligibility to claim their own child be re-determined during this time based on provider’s income from the past month?

6. As child care centers continue to open, they may have limited schedules and hours of operation. Can centers provide a combination of congregate and non-congregate meals?

School Meal Programs

7. What is the verification deadline for School Year (SY) 2020–2021?

8. May schools that were planning to conduct a Provision 2 base year during SY 2020–2021 and then elected to operate SFSP/SSO calculate their NSLP/SBP claiming percentages and still use SY 2020-2021 as their Provision 2 Base Year?

9. How will State agencies calculate eligibility for severe need breakfast and the extra 2 cent NSLP reimbursements?

10. Can residential child care institutions (RCCIs) operate SFSP/SSO under the Nationwide Waiver to Allow Summer Food Service Program and Seamless Summer Option Operations through School Year 2020–2021?

11. If an LEA is not currently providing meals through the NSLP is it still required to continue direct certification activities?

For more comprehensive COVID-19 Guidance, please visit the COVID-19 Guidance in the Child Nutrition Programs web page.

Contact Information

For any questions regarding these waivers, please contact your respective program’s County Specialist. The County Specialist for each program can be found in the following Form IDs in the CNIPS Download Forms section:

• SFSP—Form ID SFSP 01.
• NSLP, SBP, and SSO—Form ID Caseload.
• CACFP—Form ID CACFP 01

Questions:   Nutrition Services Division | 800-952-5609

USDA Nationwide Waiver Questions and Answers #3 - Nutrition (CA Dept of Education)