Can You Teach Us? | Blue Cereal Education

Can You Teach Us? | Blue Cereal Education

Can You Teach Us?

Public education has been overlooking – or worse, neglecting – a golden opportunity to improve. It’s not only been right in front of us all along, it’s been kicking us and taking our lunch money! And yet, somehow, where we should have recognized an opportunity, all we’ve seen is a competitor. In some cases, maybe even a threat.  

It’s like we don’t actually WANT to teach gooder. I assume this is largely due to the various teachers’ unions and Hillary Clinton’s personal email server.  

We’ve been told for several decades now that “school choice,” vouchers, educational “savings” accounts, etc., are essential for students to have access to a truly quality education, and that a little healthy competition will make us all better. I, for one, have been guilty of pushing back against this rhetoric. I’ve even been so cynical as to suggest ulterior motives by many of those involved (for which I assure you I now have all sorts of lingering guilt). But as Indiana dramatically expands their various “choice” initiatives and other red states do the same, I believe it’s time to change our approach.  

It’s time to seek the guidance of the masters. It's time to admit our own shortcomings and failures and learn from those who’ve accomplished so much. It’s not selling out, CONTINUE READING: Can You Teach Us? | Blue Cereal Education

How Does Forbes Select Its “30 Under 30,” Who Are Considered Leaders in Education? | Diane Ravitch's blog

How Does Forbes Select Its “30 Under 30,” Who Are Considered Leaders in Education? | Diane Ravitch's blog

How Does Forbes Select Its “30 Under 30,” Who Are Considered Leaders in Education?

This is a fascinating paper published in the peer-reviewed Education Policy Analysis and Archives in 2018. It explores the question of how Forbes magazine selects the “edu-preneurs” who are recognized as education leaders. It is quite a plum to receive this recognition, as it supposedly confers recognition on those young people who are “the best hope for revolutionizing and reforming education.” This recognition sets them apart as “experts,” despite their youth and meager experience.

The authors are T. Jameson Brewer, Nicholas D. Hartlep, and Ian M. Scott.

They see this selection process as a means of advancing privatization and the market-orientation of education, given the composition of the judges and the winners.

The marketization of public education in the era of neoliberalism elevates buzzwords like “innovation,” “investments,” “return on investments,” and “technology integration.” Moreover,  within the context of education and schooling, the professional status of educators is challenged in an effort to exalt the logic and norms of the CONTINUE READING: How Does Forbes Select Its “30 Under 30,” Who Are Considered Leaders in Education? | Diane Ravitch's blog

Andrea Gabor: How Big Philanthropy Captured Media Coverage of Their Education Investments | Diane Ravitch's blog

Andrea Gabor: How Big Philanthropy Captured Media Coverage of Their Education Investments | Diane Ravitch's blog

Andrea Gabor: How Big Philanthropy Captured Media Coverage of Their Education Investments

Andrea Gabor is the Bloomberg Professor of Business Journalism at Baruch College, which is part of the City University of New York. Gabor has written insightful articles about education in the New York Times and at Bloomberg.com. She is the author of After the Education Wars: How Smart Schools Upend the Business of Education Reform.

The following is a summary of a chapter in her forthcoming book, MEDIA CAPTURE: HOW MONEY, DIGITAL PLATFORMS, AND GOVERNMENTS CONTROL THE NEWS, which will be published by Columbia University Press in June. She prepared this excerpt for this blog.

She writes:

For the past twenty years, American K-12 education has been on the receiving end of Big Philanthropy’s efforts to reengineer public schools based on free-market ideas, with foundation-funded private operators taking over large swaths of school districts in cities like Los Angeles and New Orleans.

Between 2000 and 2005 alone, three foundations—the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation and the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation—quadrupled their spending on K–12 education to $400 million. By 2010, the top 15 foundations had spent $844 million on public education.

Moreover, these Big Philanthropies coordinated their CONTINUE READING: Andrea Gabor: How Big Philanthropy Captured Media Coverage of Their Education Investments | Diane Ravitch's blog

8 to 3 parent newsletter about kids, school and education - Los Angeles Times

8 to 3 parent newsletter about kids, school and education - Los Angeles Times

Introducing 8 to 3, a newsletter for parents about kids, school and education

A new chapter is opening for families of school-age children and teenagers. Campuses throughout California are finally opening after a year of coronavirus-forced closures — and for parents who have navigated distance learning alongside their children, their connection to education has been rewired.

Newsletter

The perils of parenting through a pandemic

What’s going on with school? What do kids need? Get 8 to 3, a newsletter dedicated to the questions that keep California families up at night.

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You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.

The shared frustrations, struggles, empathy and resilience between parent and child has reshaped engagement in schooling. With a new newsletter called 8 to 3, The Times aims to be a part of the back-in-school life of parents and guardians as we recover from a year like no other and move forward.

We begin this endeavor painfully aware of how the pandemic has upended education and exposed the depth of inequities families face. Our foremost mission is to help navigate new challenges with powerful storytelling, useful guides, vital data and personal stories — whether on campus in a classroom or in front of a laptop in the living room. The Times’ coverage of COVID-19-era schooling places considerable attention on systemic inequities, which we will continue to explore in depth.

The newsletter, sent every Monday evening, is written by Sonja Sharp and edited by Mitchell Landsberg, with support from Education Editor Stephanie Chavez and education reporters Nina Agrawal, Howard Blume, Paloma Esquivel, Melissa Gomez, Laura Newberry and Teresa Watanabe.

A veteran journalist, Sharp joined the education team during the pandemic to cover the crisis in early childhood education and day care. She will draw on her experience as a reporter, the mother of a 5-year-old and a kindergarten-through-UC-Berkeley graduate of California public schools to help readers navigate everything from daily struggles of parenting school-age children to coping with thorny policy issues.

The name of the newsletter refers to the traditional school day — but we know that education never really stops, and that parents, above all, are their children’s primary teachers. We are ready to answer your questions, aiming to give you insight into both emerging and ongoing issues while offering a forum for dialogue. And we will also point readers to the best stories in California education, both our own and those from other publications.

Schooling these days is already overwhelming, but we are here to help. We hope you will add 8 to 3 to your reading list. Sign up here or on our newsletters page.

8 to 3 parent newsletter about kids, school and education - Los Angeles Times

ARGUING OVER MARKETING TERMS – Dad Gone Wild

ARGUING OVER MARKETING TERMS – Dad Gone Wild

ARGUING OVER MARKETING TERMS

“If I were going to tell one of my sons how to possess the world, I would simply bring him into my house, show him that solid wall of books, and say to him: ‘the secret is in there somewhere, and even if you never find out what it is, you will still have come closer.”
― James Dickey

 

Some of you may notice the Spotify header. From here on out, you can listen to Dad Gone Wild as a podcast or read it traditionally. The podcast is obviously in its beginning stages, so it’s going to be a little rough for a while, but the option is available for those who so chose.

I’ve also started distributing posts via Substack. Substack allows you to sign up to receive posts via email. Currently, subscriptions are free, but there is an opportunity to help support my work as well. It’s my hope that Substack provides a means to decrease my social media footprint. As much as I once loved Twitter and found it to be an irreplaceable source of information, over the years its toxicity has only grown and it continually regresses into something that strangely brings forth recollections of high school.

People have retreated to their individual tribes and honest discourse seems to occur with increasing infrequency. Rare is the Tweet that says, “Hmmm…I never considered that. You’ve given me more to think about”, or, “I concede your point and I appreciate the thoughtful argument.” Instead, it’s personal attacks when someone voices an opinion that runs counter, disparaging terms, like “boomer” and “Karen”, are tossed around as if they aren’t the latest tool to dismiss and marginalize people.

The only thing that does hold me to social media is old friends and the positive voices of people like Hume-Fogge librarian Amanda Smithfield, Cresswell Middle Arts, and Matt Taibbi. There are others, but today these 3 people standout, for always keeping the bar high, even when I don’t agree with CONTINUE READING: ARGUING OVER MARKETING TERMS – Dad Gone Wild

Mike Klonsky's Blog: Capitalism 2.0. Is the lion really lying down with the lamb?

Mike Klonsky's Blog: Capitalism 2.0. Is the lion really lying down with the lamb?

Capitalism 2.0. Is the lion really lying down with the lamb?

What's going on here? Corporate America, Hollywood, and NFL owners all rebranding and advertising Black Lives Matter themes, doling out billions in philanthropic grants to left and progressive organizations, and even heaping faint praise on socialists. 

From watching the TV ads, one would think that the Fortune 500 corporations had all joined BLM, that the NFL had made things right with Colin Kaepernick, and that the Golden Globes weren't being awarded by a white-only board. 

In this vein, two recent articles in Crain's Chicago Business caught my attention this week. The first, "City Council's socialists see themselves as an antidote to the status quo", by reporter A.D. Quig, is surprisingly praiseful of a "socialist bloc" of aldermen, elected to the Council in the 2019 anti-machine wave that included the landslide election of Mayor Lori Lightfoot. 

Quig writes: 

Their legislative scoreboard isn't terribly impressive, and they've rankled some of CONTINUE READING: Mike Klonsky's Blog: Capitalism 2.0. Is the lion really lying down with the lamb?

CURMUDGUCATION: School Choice: Branding for an Open Market

CURMUDGUCATION: School Choice: Branding for an Open Market

School Choice: Branding for an Open Market

Coming up with the right name for a policy initiative is a critical step in framing a conversation and controlling the narrative. The classic example is the abortion debate, in which one side is "pro-choice" and the other is "pro-life," carefully selected terms that frame each side as champions of an undeniable good. Just watch supporters of "defund the police" get caught in an endless loop of "no, no, what we really mean is..." to understand how important this branding can be.

"School choice" is branding, and relatively new branding at that. You can watch it take off on the Google Ngram viewer to see how often the phrase has been used:

It starts its steep rise in the mnid-80s (Reagan, Nation at Risk), peaks in 2001, hits a trough again in 2013, and has been bouncing back since. 

But what is "school choice" the brand name for? I mean, if we were serious--really serious--about school choice, we would come up with a system that allowed families to choose any school in the state, and we would take the regulatory steps to make sure that every one of those schools met the requirements of a quality school that was part of the public good of public education. We would CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: School Choice: Branding for an Open Market

Shawgi Tell: Charter Schools Spend Millions On Advertising and Marketing | Dissident Voice

Charter Schools Spend Millions On Advertising and Marketing | Dissident Voice

Charter Schools Spend Millions On Advertising and Marketing

Unlike public schools, private businesses like charter schools spend millions of public dollars a year on advertising and marketing.

Putting aside widespread fraud and corruption in the segregated charter school sector, this is an enormous waste and abuse of public funds, especially at a time when public schools are being starved of much-needed public funds and struggling to meet the needs of students. This is money that can and should be invested in teaching and learning, where it is most needed.

Many are also wondering why privately-operated charter schools need to spend so much public money luring students and families through advertising and marketing if, as charter school proponents repeatedly claim, they are so good, so attractive, and so superior to public schools?

The situation is doubly absurd when it comes to cyber charter schools, also known as virtual charter schools. These privately-operated online charter schools have even fewer “costs” and less overhead than poor-performing brick-and-mortar charter schools, yet they feel comfortable diverting precious public dollars to lure parents and students. Perhaps the worst part is the bang-for-the-buck part: virtual charter schools are notorious for their abysmal academic record and very low graduation rates. Cyber charter schools CONTINUE READING: Charter Schools Spend Millions On Advertising and Marketing | Dissident Voice

CURMUDGUCATION: School Marketing Is A Thing-- But Not A Good One

CURMUDGUCATION: School Marketing Is A Thing-- But Not A Good One

School Marketing Is A Thing-- But Not A Good One

When school choice advocates tout their vision for the future, it has tended to be a picture of parents soberly examining hard data about possible schools in order to select the "best" or "most fitting." But if folks are going to great education like a commodity, then it's going to be sold like toasters or breakfast cereal or panty hose. And that means--

Marketing!

There is no sector of the free market where folks just make their product and let it speak for itself. The free market does not foster superior quality; the free market fosters superior marketing. But while schools are staffed with lots of people who know education, school marketing is mostly not their thing. And so school choice ignites a burgeoning industry--the school marketing companies.

I've been getting peppered on Facebook by ads from Schola Inbound Marketing. The company is run by Ralph Cochran, a "leading national Christian school growth marketing authority." He went to college at Grove City College, a private Christian-ish school just CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: School Marketing Is A Thing-- But Not A Good One