Friday, November 13, 2020

CURMUDGUCATION: Charter Fans Dislike This Part of Biden's Plan

Charter Fans Dislike This Part of Biden's Plan

The charter advocacy Twitterverse is unhappy about this part of the Biden plan, as described here by Biden staffer Stef Feldman talking to the Education Writers Association:

And we’ll require every charter school, including online schools, to be authorized and held accountable by democratically-elected bodies like school boards and also held to the same standards of transparency and accountability as all public schools. That means things like regular public board meetings and meeting all the same civil rights, employment, health, labor, safety and educator requirements that public schools must.

In Twitterland yesterday, that quote prompted some conversations like this one

But one has to ask (and one did, but Twitter being Twitter I haven't heard an answer yet)-- exactly how does having an elected board "hamstring" a charter school? How does a requirement for transparency and accountability "paralyze" a charter school?

The mantra for charter schools has been the idea of trading autonomy for accountability. Did charter fans really mean to say "accountability, but only in the ways we choose to the people we choose?"

After all, a major criticism of public schools in the modern reform era is that they are not held accountable enough, hence the need for state standards backed up by Big Standardized Tests, the results of which are supposed to be used in a very public way to hold the schools accountable. When teachers push back against measures like the BS Tests and VAM as inaccurate, invalid, and unfair, reformsters charge that teachers just don't want to be held accountable.

So what is the issue here? Part of it likely comes down ownership. Public schools are owned by the CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: Charter Fans Dislike This Part of Biden's Plan

First professor: Jill Biden to make history as a first lady with a day job - POLITICO

First professor: Jill Biden to make history as a first lady with a day job

She will be an emissary to teachers unions disgusted with the Trump administration and press policy changes including free community college tuition.

Jill Biden would scramble into cocktail dresses in a bathroom at Northern Virginia Community College before rushing to White House receptions when her husband was vice president. She graded papers at night in a tiny nook on Air Force Two. Her Secret Service agents dressed like college students and carried backpacks to blend in when she was on campus.

Now “Dr. B,” as her students call her, plans to continue teaching English and writing at the college when she moves into the White House in January. She will be the first president’s wife to continue her professional career as first lady, after becoming the first second lady to do so. She will also be part of a small group of union members to hold the title, including Eleanor Roosevelt and Nancy Reagan.

AFT's Weingarten Not Ruling Out Becoming Education Secretary | News of the Week | thechiefleader.com

AFT's Weingarten Not Ruling Out Becoming Education Secretary

American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, considered a leading candidate to become Secretary of Education when President-elect Joe Biden takes office next Jan. 20, said Nov. 11 that she looked forward to working with the administration in her current job—but stopped short of a Shermanesque declaration that she would turn down the cabinet post if it were offered.

"I'm honored by the mention, and I'm very, very happy to be working with the Biden Administration as president of the AFT," she said in a phone interview. "I love my job and I'm happy that we'll be dealing with an administration that's pro-worker, pro-family, pro-opportunity, pro-equality, pro-justice and pro-education."

Ex-NEA Leader Lily Eskelsen Garcia in Running?

The New York Times had identified Ms. Weingarten and Lily Eskelsen Garcia, who earlier this year stepped down as president of the National Education Association, as the two leading contenders to replace Trump Administration Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, whose policies have been harshly criticized by both women. The NEA is the nation's largest union of educators, with 2.29-million members, and the AFT represents 1.7 million.

"There's lots of things to do, with the needed cleaning-up of the mess DeVos created on school loans, dealing with COVID, a real review of what accountability should look like that's about more than testing, and securing resources for social and emotional learning," Ms. Weingarten said.

Referring to Jill Biden's pledge that she will continue to teach after moving into the White House, the CONTINUE READING: AFT's Weingarten Not Ruling Out Becoming Education Secretary | News of the Week | thechiefleader.com

Why Biden's free childcare plan is a worthy feminist reform | Salon.com

Why Biden's free childcare plan is a worthy feminist reform

Beyond the social element, there's a strong economic argument to be made for such a policy

Joe Biden wasn't the first choice for many women during the Democratic presidential primaries, yet the president-elect's social agenda has proven to be surprisingly feminist in its orientation. Nowhere is this clearer than in his proposal for subsidizing toddler-age childcare, a progressive platform that has earned plaudits from feminists and which has been a local success story in local jurisdictions in which it has been implemented.

According to the Biden-Harris transition website, the administration plans to make it "far easier to afford child care and to ensure aging relatives and people with disabilities have better access to home and community-based care." The new administration also promises to "elevate the pay, benefits, and professional opportunities for caregivers and educators; to create millions of good-paying new jobs in these areas with a choice to join a union; and to free up millions of people to join the labor force and grow a stronger economy in return."

This refers to the $775 billion plan Biden announced while campaigning in Delaware in July, when Biden proposed a national pre-K for all children ages 3 and 4. In that proposal, families earning less than $125,000 a year would receive an $8,000 child care tax credit per child, up to $16,000. Parents earning less than 1.5 times the median income in their state could subsidize child care and would pay no more than 7 percent of their income. Those with a very low income would pay nothing.

Notably, the pandemic's economic affects are seriously setting back gender equality, as I've previously written. Large swaths of women in America left the workforce or cut down their hours to be a stay at home caregiver during the pandemic. As of May 2020, women account for 54 percent of initial coronavirus-related job losses. According to the Women in the Workplace report, Black women said they were more likely to consider stepping away from their careers due to the pandemic. One in four women are thinking of either leaving the workforce of downshifting their careers—a move that would have been dubbed CONTINUE READING: Why Biden's free childcare plan is a worthy feminist reform | Salon.com

L.A. schools could face hard shutdown if COVID-19 worsens - Los Angeles Times

Schools could face a hard shutdown if the COVID-19 surge worsens, officials warn

Campuses at public and private schools in Los Angeles County could once again be forced to shut down completely for in-person instruction if the current COVID-19 spike continues to worsen, health officials warned school leaders Thursday.

Officials in the county’s 80 public school districts, which serve more than 1.43 million students, had hoped to open campuses for general instruction by January, if not sooner. Even in the best-case scenario, it would be extremely unlikely that campuses could reopen to all students for at least six weeks, based on state health guidelines, said Los Angeles County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer.

The schools discussion took place on a day when coronavirus infections in California surpassed 1 million cases, with county rates surging and hospitalizations climbing.

School leaders are being asked to prepare for the worst, even while they ready reopening plans.

“I need to ask that every school be prepared for virtual learning, distance learning, in January,” Ferrer said in a call. “I hope we never get to the point where our healthcare system is so compromised and so threatened that we have to look backwards in time to severe restrictions and additional closures, but I don’t want to rule it out.”

L.A. County’s health data place it firmly in the state’s purple tier — the worst category — which means that community transmission of the coronavirus is widespread. Campuses cannot reopen for all students until a county has entered and remained in the next — or red tier — for two weeks.

In response to skyrocketing infections nationwide, many school districts, including in Wichita, Kan., have imposed new limits on reopening campuses or have shut down again, as in Minneapolis and Boston. Others, including Philadelphia’s school system, have delayed reopening campuses — indefinitely in some instances. Other school systems, including in Florida, remain open or are reopening gradually.

Neither the federal government nor California is collecting comprehensive reopening CONTINUE READING: L.A. schools could face hard shutdown if COVID-19 worsens - Los Angeles Times

Teacher Tom: This Could Be the Best Educated Generation in History

This Could Be the Best Educated Generation in History

Before the start of my freshman year at university, I was required to sit down with my advisor, a professor in my chosen field of study who was there to help me navigate my academic life. I rarely spoke with him over the course of the next four years. I don't even remember his name, but among the tips he gave me during that first meeting was to consider enrolling in a course called Use of the Library. It sounded like an easy A.

As it turns out, it was by far the most useful class I ever took. The internet was a decade away, so if we needed answers beyond the encyclopedia sets on our parent's bookshelves, libraries were our only option. Of course, I'd been to my local library to pick out books, but now I had access to a major university library. The class was taught by a librarian who taught us how to ask and then answer our own questions, something I didn't know I didn't know. We spent most of our time amongst the reference shelves, a place I'd never been, digging through indexes, tracking down academic articles, tracing trains of thought through esoteric books and journals that were either kept bound, organized by volume numbers, or, in the case of older material, compressed onto what was called microfiche, a flat piece of film that we read using a special light box type machine.

Few things in my previous educational experience had prepared me for this. Yes, I'd occasionally used my high school library to write papers, but that had typically involved CONTINUE READING: Teacher Tom: This Could Be the Best Educated Generation in History

The best way to improve schools? Invest in teachers. - Vox

The best way to improve schools? Invest in teachers.

A study of 150 interventions in developing countries finds that many education programs don’t work — but some do.

How do we improve schools so that kids learn more?

It’s a straightforward question — deceptively so, because improving schools, measuring whether you have improved schools, and writing down a recipe for school improvements that can be successfully used elsewhere is an astonishingly hard problem.

Philanthropists in the US have spent hundreds of millions of dollars promoting massive overhauls of the education system, often without improving test scores even a bit. Investing in “small schools” didn’t produce the hoped-for gains; neither did pushes to video and evaluating teachers or personalized learning programs. Educators, meanwhile, have protested that test scores don’t even measure the thing we really care about, which is whether students are successfully learning.

Internationally, the situation is even worse. In many parts of the world, lots of kids don’t even get the chance to attend school — and the ones who do often attend profoundly inadequate schools. By age 10, 90 percent of children in low-income countries still cannot read with comprehension. Some schools combat extraordinary rates of teacher absenteeism. Kids can go years barely learning anything because of an inadequate educational environment.

Lots of things have been tried to improve education in the developing world. Nonprofits, governments, and researchers have bought students uniforms, paid their scholarships, bought CONTINUE READING: The best way to improve schools? Invest in teachers. - Vox

How Biden’s FCC could fix America’s internet - Vox

How Biden’s FCC could fix America’s internet

The FCC can bring back net neutrality and help Americans stay connected during the pandemic — if everything goes its way now.

When Joe Biden is inaugurated as president on January 20, he stands to oversee a Federal Communications Commission (FCC) that could do remarkable things. Among other things, the new FCC could bridge the digital divide, ensuring all Americans have access to the internet. But even though Biden’s victory is assured, the future of the FCC hangs in the balance.

The Trump administration’s FCC has had a particular agenda. Under the leadership of Chairman Ajit Pai, the agency has pushed to deregulate the industries under its purview and, in turn, to create a business-friendly environment with few rules, little accountability, and minimal oversight for some of the biggest and most powerful companies in the world. In the months and years to come, the FCC is likely to reverse some of those policies, especially Pai’s most controversial decision: repealing net neutrality, a policy that required internet service providers to treat all types of internet traffic the same. But getting broadband internet in as many homes as possible during the pandemic is many Democrats’ most urgent goal, and one they feel the Trump administration failed to accomplish.

“Because the Trump FCC failed to meaningfully address the digital divide, tens of millions of Americans still lack high-speed internet,” Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-CA) told Recode. “This worsens the impacts of the pandemic, and the Biden administration has to take this head-on.”

She added: “Every person in our country must have high-speed internet. Period. We’ve failed for too long to expand access to rural and tribal areas, and too many urban communities can’t afford broadband.”

The Biden administration’s FCC can and likely will aid this effort by making the internet CONTINUE READING: How Biden’s FCC could fix America’s internet - Vox

Dr. Linda Darling-Hammond is the Right Choice to Lead the Education Transition Team | Schott Foundation for Public Education

Dr. Linda Darling-Hammond is the Right Choice to Lead the Education Transition Team

The Schott Foundation applauds President-elect Biden's selection of Dr. Linda Darling-Hammond to lead the Department of Education transition team. Dr. Darling-Hammond is a highly-qualified leader who has a proven track record of success working with public schools, parents, educators and youth to provide all students a high quality education. As a professor at Stanford, founder of the Learning Policy Institute, and president of the California State Board of Education, her work has always been informed by a passion to tackle the root causes of racial and class inequities in public education.

Schott has worked with Dr. Darling-Hammond across her career, and awarded her a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2010. During her acceptance speech, she emphasized the importance of taking a systemic approach to educational justice: "we need to demand housing, healthcare and food security for all families. We need solid, equitable funding for every school."

Schott looks forward to the transition team integrating and engaging the voices of grassroots leaders in completing the transition and setting the agenda for Biden's Department of Education.

Dr. Linda Darling-Hammond is the Right Choice to Lead the Education Transition Team | Schott Foundation for Public Education

Valerie Strauss: What Does the Biden Transition Team Tell Us About His Education Agenda? | Diane Ravitch's blog

Valerie Strauss: What Does the Biden Transition Team Tell Us About His Education Agenda?

We have all been guessing about what President-Elect Joe Biden will do in education. Will he keep his campaign promises and set federal policy on a new direction, away from No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, ESSA, high-stakes testing, and school choice, or will he stick with the stale and destructive status quo?

No one knows for sure but many have tried to divine his intentions by the composition of his transition team for education. At first glance, it is worrisome that so many of its members come from the Race to the Top era. But Valerie Strauss offers a different perspective on the transition team’s purpose and significance.

She writes:

Now that President-elect Joe Biden has named a 20-person education transition team, the education world is trying to glean insight from its makeup as to what the next president will do to try to improve America’s public schools. 

Some progressives are worried that the list of members is heavy with former members of the Obama administration, whose controversial education policies ultimately alienated teachers’ unions, parents and members of CONTINUE READING: Valerie Strauss: What Does the Biden Transition Team Tell Us About His Education Agenda? | Diane Ravitch's blog

An Open Letter to President Elect Biden’s Department of Education Transition Team | janresseger

An Open Letter to President Elect Biden’s Department of Education Transition Team

I encourage you, as members of President Elect Biden’s Department of Education Transition Team, to recommend the appointment of Randi Weingarten or Lily Eskelsen Garcia as our next Secretary of Education. I believe that one of these women would provide the kind of leadership in public education policy that our nation and our children desperately need.

Randi Weingarten, President of the American Federation of Teachers, and Lily Eskelsen Garcia, the outgoing President of the National Education Association, have provided extraordinary leadership of efforts by the nation’s teachers significantly to change the long narrative of standardized test-based accountability as the primary driver of federal education policy. They are both public school educators who would turn away from Betsy DeVos’s obsession with vouchers. I believe their leadership helped shape the priorities embodied in the education plan President Elect Biden released during the campaign, an agenda designed to expand opportunity within the public schools serving our nation’s most vulnerable students. Biden’s plan, if implemented, will enhance educational equity and improve children’s experiences at school.

Here are three reasons either Eskelsen Garcia or Weingarten is the right choice to lead the U.S. Department of Education.

First: We all watched the Red4Ed strikes and walkouts during 2018 and 2019—walkouts that taught America about the devastation of state public school budgets over the decade that CONTINUE READING: An Open Letter to President Elect Biden’s Department of Education Transition Team | janresseger

Help Me Teach Your Kids in Person. Don’t Rent a Quarantine-Producing Party Bus. | deutsch29: Mercedes Schneider's Blog

Help Me Teach Your Kids in Person. Don’t Rent a Quarantine-Producing Party Bus.

My district just began our second quarter of the 2020-21 school year. For high schools, the first quarter entailed a hybrid schedule whereby approximately half of the student body attended on any given day.

We have almost finished the first week in which all students have returned to campus each day.

The first day, I had no students in quarantine.

The second day, I had one, and the third day, I had another, right at the end of the day.

Then today happened, by the end of which 16 more of my students had been assigned two weeks of quarantine. During the second class period, the remaining students were abuzz about the situation, and it was then that I heard the first one mention a “party bus.”

From what I have been able to determine, it seems that some adults tried to create a homecoming celebration for students, which apparently included a party bus and an improvised homecoming dance. As one might expect during this pandemic, COVID also attended these festivities, the result being number of students in quarantine.

Okay. The principal argument for our returning to full attendance is that These Kids Need CONTINUE READING: Help Me Teach Your Kids in Person. Don’t Rent a Quarantine-Producing Party Bus. | deutsch29: Mercedes Schneider's Blog

New Multilingual Education Publication Announced - Year 2020 (CA Dept of Education)

State Superintendent Tony Thurmond Announces New Publication: Improving Education for Multilingual and English Learner Students

SACRAMENTO—State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond announced today the release of the new California Department of California (CDE) publication, Improving Education for Multilingual and English Learner Students: Research to Practice. The publication is designed to support local educational agencies (LEAs) to implement the English Learner Roadmap Policy in schools and improve instruction for both English learners and other students learning multiple languages.

“This publication will serve as a valuable resource for teachers, administrators, and other educators who serve California’s 2.5 million multilingual and English learner students,” said Thurmond. “It highlights research-based practices implemented by districts and schools, grounded in the English Learner Roadmap principles. This book is a needed resource for continuing to improve the education of the diverse student population we serve.”

The publication is in response to requests from educators for successful evidence-based practices that lead to enhanced learning environments, implementation of the English Learner Roadmap Policy and its principles, and the continuous improvement of systems and conditions to support prekindergarten through grade twelve English learner students and students learning other languages.

The CDE Multilingual Support Division led the development of this publication with assistance from well-known and respected experts within their fields. The publication demonstrates how LEAs have implemented research-based practices that positively impact multilingual and English learner students as it relates to social emotional learning, early learning and care, integrated and designated English language development, multilingual education, systems improvement, teacher development, and parent engagement.

The publication is available for free download on the CDE Improving Education for Multilingual and English Learner Students: Research to Practice web page. Printed copies of the publication are available for purchase on the CDE Press Online Ordering web page.

# # # #

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

New Multilingual Education Publication Announced - Year 2020 (CA Dept of Education)

CURMUDGUCATION: Schooling For Democracy (Or What Is Education For)

Schooling For Democracy (Or What Is Education For)

I just read a piece that doesn't necessarily say anything new, but puts it all in a useful frame. Let me show you the first paragraph:

There’s no such thing as a “good school” in the abstract. Every school serves a particular community, in a particular time and place, with its own needs and desires. A good school in rural Montana might not be a good school in Midtown Manhattan, just as a good school in 1920 might not be a good school today. This doesn’t mean that we can’t define school quality. It does, however, mean that we can’t define quality without first considering the needs of a school’s time and place.

This is from the Phi Delta Kappan, a publication I don't always trust (hell, they give a platform to William Bennett), written by Jon Valant, a fellow at the Brooking Institution, a place that often demonstrates why economists should stay the heck away from education policy. "Good schools for a troubled democracy" has the hallmark of Brookings writings, a sort of odd atonality tied to the sensation that perhaps within Brookings they never actually read any of the mountains of prose about education policy.

Valant's thesis is that "the school system we have today in the United States--and our conception of a good school--is mismatched to the needs of our time." This will make more sense if you don't think of yourself as included in "we" and "our." His basic framing of modern education history is what makes this piece worthwhile.

Valant focuses on the 1983 report, A Nation at Risk, the infamous Reagan era hit job on public education. While Valant notes that the report did mention the needs for education to create better citizens, "the rhetoric of economic ruin and international competition drowned out the message."

According to the logic of the times, the nation’s most pressing need — and, consequently, the most urgent task for our public CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: Schooling For Democracy (Or What Is Education For)

A VERY BUSY DAY 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

A VERY BUSY DAY
Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day...
The latest news and resources in education since 2007

Big Education Ape: THIS WEEK IN EDUCATION Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day... The latest news and resources in education since 2007 - http://bigeducationape.blogspot.com/2020/11/this-week-in-education-larry-ferlazzos.html

Friday’s Must-Read Articles About School Reopenings

by Larry Ferlazzo / 4h

Victoria_Borodinova / Pixabay Here are new additions to THE BEST POSTS PREDICTING WHAT SCHOOLS WILL LOOK LIKE IN THE FALL : Lessons From Europe, Where Cases Are Rising But Schools Are Open is from NPR. N.Y.C. Schools May Close Again, a Grim Sign of a Global Dilemma is from The NY Times. Across the country, school districts are shutting down or canceling plans to reopen. is from The NY Times. How

‘Allow Time for Children to Read Whatever They Want’

by Larry Ferlazzo / 11h

is the headline of my latest Education Week Teacher column. Four educators share ideas for how teachers can create the conditions in which students are more intrinsically motivated to read, such as eliminating rewards and ensuring that students are represented in accessible books. Here are some excerpts:

Three Useful Resources On Creating Social Change

by Larry Ferlazzo / 12h

Alexas_Fotos / Pixabay Here are new additions to The Best Posts & Articles On Building Influence & Creating Change : 6 Black women organizers on what happened in Georgia — and what comes next is from Vox. Grassroots Organizers Flipped Georgia Blue. Here’s How They Did It. is from TruthOut. Here’s a new addition to The Best Ways To Talk With Someone Who Disagrees With You : What Conversations with

What A Surprise (Not!) – New Study Finds That Value-Added Approach To Teacher Evaluation Isn’t Accurate

by Larry Ferlazzo / 12h

To few the surprise of very few teachers, a new study questions the accuracy of Value-Added Models for evaluation purposes. Teacher quality scores change depending on students, school, PSU study finds from Eureka Alert is definitely worth checking out. I’m adding it to The Best Resources For Learning About The “Value-Added” Approach Towards Teacher Evaluation .

Ed Tech Digest

by Larry Ferlazzo / 12h

Nine years ago, in another somewhat futile attempt to reduce the backlog of resources I want to share, I began this occasional “” post where I share three or four links I think are particularly useful and related to…ed tech, including some Web 2.0 apps. You might also be interested in THE BEST ED TECH RESOURCES OF 2020 – PART TWO , as well as checking out all my edtech resources . Here are this w

A Look Back: Four Actions I’ve Taken That Seem To Have Both Helped Students In My Virtual Classrooms & Helped Me Maintain My Sanity

by Larry Ferlazzo / 12h

I thought that new – and veteran – readers might find it interesting if I began sharing my best posts from over the years. You can see the entire collection here . I’m starting with posts from earlier this year. Leunert / Pixabay As most teachers in the U.S., and many around the world, know, distance learning is

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

Friday, November 13, 2020

A VERY BUSY DAYLarry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day...The latest news and resources in education since 2007

A VERY BUSY DAY
Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day...
The latest news and resources in education since 2007