Jake Jacobs Reviewed Hillary’s Dreadful Education Plan | Diane Ravitch's blog

Jake Jacobs Reviewed Hillary’s Dreadful Education Plan | Diane Ravitch's blog

Jake Jacobs Reviewed Hillary’s Dreadful Education Plan

Jake Jacobs, an art teacher in New York City, a leader of New York BadAss Teachers, and a writer for The Progressive, read and reviewed Hillary Clinton’s policy briefing book in 2017 and reviewed the education section for Alternet. I missed his article, but it’s worth reading now to understand how advocates of privatization have inserted themselves into both political parties and use their vast wealth to control public policy and undermine public schools.

Jacobs points out that Laurene Powell Jobs “has been close with the Clintons since the late ’90s, also sat with Betsy DeVos on the board of Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Excellence in Education. She set up billionaire “roundtables” with Clinton’s campaign advisors through 2015 while donating millions to Priorities USA, Clinton’s main PAC.”

Jacobs notes:

Notes taken by Clinton aide Ann O’Leary were made in interviews with Powell Jobs and Bruce Reed, President of The Broad Foundation (and former chief of staff to Joe Biden). According to the notes, the “experts” were calling for new federal controls, more for-profit companies and more technology in public schools — but first on the menu was a bold remake of the teaching “profession…” CONTINUE READING: Jake Jacobs Reviewed Hillary’s Dreadful Education Plan | Diane Ravitch's blog

What the Congressional Deal Means for Education | Diane Ravitch's blog

What the Congressional Deal Means for Education | Diane Ravitch's blog

What the Congressional Deal Means for Education

Phyllis W. Jordan of Future-Ed, a D.C. think tank, explains here what the latest Congressional agreement on COVID aid means for education and compares it to last spring’s CARES Act as well as to the HEROES Act passed in May by the House of Representatives. The agreement does not include any aid for cities or states. President-Elect Joe Biden has pledged another relief package after he takes office.

She writes:

The $900 billion package builds on a $908 billion stimulus bill introduced Dec. 14 and would include stimulus checks, small business relief, unemployment benefits, and support for vaccine distribution, among other things. The measure includes $82 billion for education, with $2.7 billion specifically for private and parochial schools. A detailed proposal has not been publicly released yet, but the Dec. 14 bill included the $82 billion figure and broke it down like this:

• $54 billion of that for K-12 schools, largely delivered through Title I funding. That’s about four times what schools received in the CARES Act approved in March.
• $20 billion for higher education with dollars set aside for minority-serving institutions
• $7.5 billion for governors to spend at their discretion, including on private schools.

School meal programs and child care. and expand the CONTINUE READING: What the Congressional Deal Means for Education | Diane Ravitch's blog

Whatever Happened to the Winnetka Plan? | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Whatever Happened to the Winnetka Plan? | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Whatever Happened to the Winnetka Plan?

When and how did the Winnetka Plan begin and grow to become a nationally known lighthouse for Progressivism?

A small wealthy suburb of Chicago in the late-19th and early 20th centuries, Winnteka leaders embraced the ideas of John Dewey and the “New Education,” an off-shoot of the then spreading Progressive movement. As the authors of a history of the Winnetka schools put it:.

In May, 1919, they hired Carleton W. Washburne as the superintendent of schools. It was this 29-year old educator who would bring their ambitious dreams for their schools to a reality. As the architect of “The Winnetka Plan,” Washburne’s innovations – individualized instruction, hands-on learning, attention to the development of the whole child, a focus on research and development of curriculum materials, and a thoughtful and comprehensive program of staff development – were the pillars of his philosophy of progressive education and continue to be cornerstones of today’s Winnetka Public Schools.

Variations of the Winnetka plan spread to other districts in the state and the nation eager to be viewed as Progressive. Washburne wrote in journals and authored books on the Plan. He spoke often about Winnetka schools at CONTINUE READING: Whatever Happened to the Winnetka Plan? | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Laura Chapman Reviews the Biden Transition Team for Education | Diane Ravitch's blog

Laura Chapman Reviews the Biden Transition Team for Education | Diane Ravitch's blog

Laura Chapman Reviews the Biden Transition Team for Education

The Biden campaign released the names of those who will serve on transition teams. Our reader, retired arts educator Laura Chapman, reviewed the members of the education transition team. According to the campaign (cited in Valerie Strauss’s article), the transition team will identify DeVos regulations that should be reversed, but the team will not set policy or staff. Chapman, like many readers of this blog, believes that President Obama’s Race to the Top was profoundly wrong because of its overemphasis on standardized testing (a fact acknowledged even by President Obama) and its advocacy for charter schools and evaluation of teachers by the test scores of their students. Biden promised a new vision and fresh policies for K-12 education, not more of the same failed policies.

Chapman writes:

Biden-Harris Transition teams are selected to review specific agencies. Volunteers are listed only by their “most recent employment.” Those serving in education CONTINUE READING: Laura Chapman Reviews the Biden Transition Team for Education | Diane Ravitch's blog

Top Biden Aide Talks Reopening Schools, Education Funding, Charters and More - Education Writers Association

Top Biden Aide Talks Reopening Schools, Education Funding, Charters and More - Education Writers Association

Top Biden Aide Talks Reopening Schools, Education Funding, Charters and More

Provides on-the-record comments in pre-election webinar

President-elect Joe Biden has a far-reaching education agenda that begins with actions to help schools reopen for in-person instruction, as well as plans to reverse key Trump administrative actions and more.

In a recent, on-the-record webinar, the Biden campaign’s national policy director, Stef Feldman, fielded questions from the Education Writers Association and its members from around the country.

Below are key excerpts from that wide-ranging, one-hour conversation on October 22, 2020. Journalists and others are welcome to quote from the transcript here, though we ask that you cite the EWA webinar as the source. You can also watch the full video.

On some issues, Feldman declined to make firm commitments. For example, she stopped short of saying whether a Biden administration would grant states a waiver for a second year of statewide testing required under the federal Every Student Succeeds Act. “This is an important question that a Biden/Harris transition team would have to look at,” she said. “In some ways, the answer to this question depends on how much CONTINUE READING: Top Biden Aide Talks Reopening Schools, Education Funding, Charters and More - Education Writers Association

President Elect Joe Biden’s Education Plan Is Designed to Expand the Opportunity to Learn | janresseger

President Elect Joe Biden’s Education Plan Is Designed to Expand the Opportunity to Learn | janresseger

President Elect Joe Biden’s Education Plan Is Designed to Expand the Opportunity to Learn

The education plan President Elect Joe Biden announced during his campaign for President reflects a public school, “opportunity to learn” agenda—a radical renunciation of the private school, radically individualistic policies of our current President, Donald Trump and his Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos. The plan Biden has promoted also differs significantly from the technocratic neoliberalism embodied in education policy during the Obama administration, when Biden served as Vice President.

Through the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations, public education policy rested on threatening public schools with sanctions if they were unable promptly to raise aggregate standardized test scores and close what were called achievement gaps. The No Child Left Behind/Race to the Top strategy punitively demanded ever-rising outcomes.  President Elect Biden instead emphasizes investing in inputs to expand public schools’ capacity to close opportunity gaps. Biden’s plan reflects his understanding that government is responsible for investing in programs and services necessary to ensure that all students can thrive.

Biden’s pledge to expand the opportunity to learn reflects an understanding of school achievement documented last year by Sean Reardon, a Stanford University education sociologist in Is Separate Still Unequal? New Evidence on School Segregation and Racial Academic Achievement Gaps. Here Reardon addresses specifically what has been called the black-white achievement gap: “We examine racial test score gaps because they reflect racial differences in access to educational opportunities. By ‘educational opportunities,’ we mean all experiences in a child’s life, from birth onward, that provide opportunities for her to learn, including experiences in children’s homes, child care settings, neighborhoods, peer groups, and their schools. This implies that test score gaps may result from unequal opportunities either in or out of school; they are not necessarily the result of differences in school quality, resources, or experience. Moreover, in saying that test score gaps reflect differences in opportunities, we also mean that they are not the result of innate group differences in CONTINUE READING: President Elect Joe Biden’s Education Plan Is Designed to Expand the Opportunity to Learn | janresseger