CURMUDGUCATION: Gates Says Some Stuff

CURMUDGUCATION: Gates Says Some Stuff:

Gates Says Some Stuff

Like many teachers, I could not tune in to Bill and Melinda Gates' trip down Ed Reform Memory Lane because I was busy doing my actual job. This seems metaphorically perfect-- Gates talks about schools while meanwhile, teachers are in schools doing actual work. However, I've scanned someaccounts of the speech from this afternoon, and I think I've piece together the general drift of his gist. So let me channel my faux Gates voice to summarize what you, I and all of use missed today.

So, hey there.

It's been fifteen years since we started trying to beat public education into submission with giant stacks of money, and it turns out that it's a hell of a lot harder than curing major diseases. Turns out teachers are not nearly as compliant as bacteria. Who knew?

Actually, there's a whole long list of things that came as a surprise to us. Teachers and politicians and parents all had ideas about what ought or ought not to be happening in schools, and damned if they would just not shut up about it. At first stuff was going great and we were getting everyone to do just what we wanted them to, but then it was like they finally noticed that a bunch of clueless amateurs were trying to run the whole system, and the freaked out.

I have to tell you. Right now as I'm sitting here, it still doesn't occur to me that all the pushback might be related to the fact that I have no educational expertise at all, and yet I want to rewrite the whole US school system to my own specs. Why should that be a problem? I still don't understand why I shouldn't be able to just redo the whole mess without having to deal with unions or professional employees or elected officials. Of course nobody elected me to do this! I don't mind, CURMUDGUCATION: Gates Says Some Stuff:

The Education Reform Oligarchy: How They Used Us - The Crucial VoiceThe Crucial Voice

The Education Reform Oligarchy: How They Used Us - The Crucial VoiceThe Crucial Voice:

The Education Reform Oligarchy: How They Used Us

The education reform oligarchy set an agenda, carefully selected their mode of operations, and agreed upon the bait. They developed a vision, knew what they needed to do, how to do it, and they had the monetary and political support to move a nation to do their bidding. They used us to advance their plan.

NOTE: Published in 1983.

With wisely selected words, they tapped into our frustration with bureaucracies and BIG government while marketing their wares, following their map, and sticking to their strategies — repeatedly and relentlessly.

They used mass messaging, mass media, and massively powerful organizations to launch and continue to float THEIR mass movement.To succeed with their plan, the oligarchy needed to undermine what was a strong public institution.

There was never any dispute that schools need to constantly be improving themselves and that unequal access to quality education exists because of socioeconomic factors.

And the oligarchy always claimed their plan wasThe Education Reform Oligarchy: How They Used Us - The Crucial VoiceThe Crucial Voice:

The Ugly Charter School Scandal Arne Duncan Is Leaving Behind

The Ugly Charter School Scandal Arne Duncan Is Leaving Behind:

The Ugly Charter School Scandal Arne Duncan Is Leaving Behind

US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s surprise announcement to leave his position in December is making headlines and driving lots of commentary, but an important story lost in the media clutter happened three days before he gave notice.

On that day, Duncan rattled the education policy world with news of a controversial grant of $249 million ($157 the first year) to the charter school industry. This announcement was controversial because, as The Washington Post reports, an audit by his department’s own inspector general found “that the agency has done a poor job of overseeing federal dollars sent to charter schools.”

Post reporter Lynsey Layton notes, “The agency’s inspector general issued a scathing report in 2012 that found deficiencies in how the department handled federal grants to charter schools between 2008 and 2011″ – in other words, during Duncan’s watch.

Even more perplexing is that the largest grant of $71 million ($32.5 the first year) is going to Ohio, the state that has the worst reputation for allowing low-performing charter schools to divert tax money away from educational purposes and do little to raise the achievement of students.

A number of Ohio officials were shocked by the news.

As a different article from The Post reports, Democratic Party Representative Tim Ryan “was alarmed” by the Education Department’s decision. Ryan called his state’s charter school sector “broken and dysfunctional.”

Ted Strickland, an ex-Governor and now Democratic candidate for a US Senate seat in Ohio, wrote Duncan a letter telling him to reconsider the Ohio grant. “Too many of Ohio’s charter schools are an embarrassment,” he states. Strickland quotes from a recent study showing charters in his state perform significantly worse than public schools. He points to a The Ugly Charter School Scandal Arne Duncan Is Leaving Behind:

Improving U.S. schools tougher than global health, Gates says - The Washington Post

Improving U.S. schools tougher than global health, Gates says - The Washington Post:

Improving U.S. schools tougher than global health, Gates says

Bill Gates, whose foundation has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into K-12 education and influenced state and federal policy to embrace charter schools, teacher evaluation and the Common Core academic standards, said Thursday that trying to improve education is harder than work on global health.

“When we come up with a new malaria vaccine, nobody votes to undo our malaria vaccine,” Gates said in a speech at his foundation’s Seattle headquarters. “So it’s pretty

steady progress. Every year is better than the last.”

But when you’re dealing with 100,000 public schools, politics makes changes to K-12 education much less predictable, he said.

“Because of its complexity, the relationship to management, how labor is one, you can introduce a system ... and people say, ‘No, we’d rather have no system at all, completely leave us alone,’ ” he said. “That’s a real possibility, if you don’t nurture these systems and get it so there’s critical mass. That’s a level of uncertainty that we don’t have in most areas we work in.”

Gates and his wife, Melinda, who co-chair the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, reflected on the past 15 years and spoke about their plans for the future. They pledged to continue pumping resources into the Common Core State Standards in K-12 math and reading as well as efforts to improve teacher quality and personalize instruction.

Both Bill and Melinda spoke, and then answered questions from moderator Gwen Ifill of the PBS NewsHour.

The Gates Foundation has spent more than $200 million in a campaign to create the Common Core State Standards and get them adopted by 42 states as well as the District of Columbia. The Common Core State Standards spell out the skills and knowledge every student should possess by the end of each grade. They were designed to inject some consistency into the country’s public schools, where education has traditionally varied wildly across state borders.

[How Bill Gates pulled off the swift adoption of the Common Core ]

Bill Gates said he never anticipated the political pushback to the Common Improving U.S. schools tougher than global health, Gates says - The Washington Post:

L.A. charter school expansion could mean huge drop in unionized teaching jobs - LA Times

L.A. charter school expansion could mean huge drop in unionized teaching jobs - LA Times:

L.A. charter school expansion could mean huge drop in unionized teaching jobs

 If a proposal for a massive expansion of charter schools in Los Angeles moves forward, the casualties would likely include the jobs of thousands of teachers who currently work in the city’s traditional public schools.

As new charters open, regular schools would face declining enrollment — and would need fewer teachers.

Under the $490-million plan being spearheaded by the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, 260 new charters would be opened in the city in eight years. The goal is to more than double the number of students attending these schools, which are independently run and mostly non-union.

The “Great Public Schools Now” proposal makes no mention of recruiting instructors from the ranks of L.A. Unified — even though the foundation acknowledged this week that the charter growth would require about 5,000 instructors. The plan talks about hiring from an expanded Teach For America program and other groups that work with young, inexperienced instructors.

If the plan is carried out, “Los Angeles will have the strongest set of teacher and leader development programs of any city in the state of California,” according to the proposal.

The Broad Foundation said this week that teachers are key to the success of the proposal.

“We are in the process of listening to educators and community members to determine how best to support the dramatic growth of high-quality public schools in Los Angeles,” said spokeswoman Swati Pandey. “We know that without great teachers, there can be no great public schools. We’re eager to engage and support teachers as part of this work.”L.A. charter school expansion could mean huge drop in unionized teaching jobs - LA Times:

Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association : SCOTUSblog

Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association : SCOTUSblog:

Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association 

Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association

Docket No.	Op. Below	Argument	Opinion	Vote	Author	Term
14-915	9th Cir.	TBD	TBD	TBD	TBD	OT 2015

Issue: (1) Whether Abood v. Detroit Board of Education should be overruled and public-sector “agency shop” arrangements invalidated under the First Amendment; and (2) whether it violates the First Amendment to require that public employees affirmatively object to subsidizing nonchargeable speech by public-sector unions, rather than requiring that employees affirmatively consent to subsidizing such speech.

SCOTUSblog Coverage

• Symposium: Another battle in the war over union fees
• Symposium: Correcting the “historical accident” of opt-out requirements
• Symposium: The Friedrichs petition should be dismissed
• Symposium: Will the Court continue to recognize a distinction between bargaining with government and lobbying the government?
• Symposium: Public-sector unions, labor relations, and free speech
• Symposium: Overrule Abood to protect individual rights
• New challenge to public employee unions, made simple
• A new look at race and politics in redistricting
• New threat to public employee unionism
• Petition of the day

Sep 9 2015	Consent to the filing of amicus curiae briefs in support of either party or of neither party received from counsel for Elliott Duchon, Superintendent, Jurupa Unified School District.
Sep 10 2015	Brief amicus curiae of The Cato Institute filed.
Sep 10 2015	Brief amicus curiae of Susana Martinez, Governor of New Mexico filed.
Sep 10 2015	Brief amicus curiae of Mackinac Center for Public Policy filed.
Sep 11 2015	Brief amicus curiae of Buckeye Institute for Public Policy Solutions filed.
Sep 11 2015	Brief amicus curiae of Rutherford Institute filed.
Sep 11 2015	Brief amicus curiae of Becket Fund for Religious Liberty filed.
Sep 11 2015	Brief amicus curiae of National Federation of Independent Business Small Business Legal Center filed.
Sep 11 2015	Brief amicus curiae of National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, Inc. filed.
Sep 11 2015	Brief amici curiae of Center on National Labor Policy, Inc., et al. filed.
Sep 11 2015	Brief amici curiae of Bruce Rauner, Governor of Illinois, et al. filed.
Sep 11 2015	Brief amici curiae of Freedom Foundation and Dr. John Balz filed.
Sep 11 2015	Brief amici curiae of State Public Policy Research Organizations filed.
Sep 11 2015	Brief amicus curiae of Constitutional Law Professors, et al. filed.
Sep 11 2015	Brief amici curiae of Pacific Legal Foundation, et al. filed.
Sep 11 2015	Brief amici curiae of Former California Governor Pete Wilson, et al. filed.
Sep 11 2015	Brief amici curiae of Illinois State Workers filed.
Sep 11 2015	Brief amicus curiae of Daniel DiSalvo filed.
Sep 11 2015	Brief amicus curiae of Public School Teachers Who Favor School Choice filed.
Sep 11 2015	Brief amici curiae of Michigan and Seventeen Other States filed.
Sep 11 2015	Brief amicus curiae of Goldwater Institute filed.
Sep 11 2015	Brief amici curiae of Former California Senate Majority Leader Gloria Romero, et al. filed.
Sep 11 2015	Brief amicus curiae of Mountain States Legal Foundation filed.
Sep 11 2015	Brief amicus curiae of Atlantic Legal Foundation filed.
Sep 11 2015	Brief amicus curiae of Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, Inc. filed.
Sep 11 2015	Brief amici curiae of Glenn J. Schworak and James E. Mitchell filed.

CURMUDGUCATION: Common Schools vs. Diversity

CURMUDGUCATION: Common Schools vs. Diversity:

Common Schools vs. Diversity

Over at redefinED, a reliable source of reformy pro-school choice arguments, Patrick Gibbons (also a reliable source of pro-school choice arguments) has posted a pretty thoughtful response to the can of worms opened by the Washington state smackdown of charter schools.

In "Common schools and the feat of diversity," Gibbons takes a look back at the actual history of common schools in the US, in particular focusing on how many ways those schools have failed to live up to the promise of public education in this country.

Yet Mann’s common school concept remains a source of conflict today. The ethical and moral lessons of students in a one-size-fits all environment have created a battleground in the American culture wars, from book banning, to the fight against communism in the 1950s, to the fights over textbooksand the Common Core standards.

In this, and in shared criticism that common schools have to often (and still in some places today) reflect the racism and classism of their communities, Gibbons has a point.  

But in his suggestion that charters are the solution, he is indulging in a  fantasy far more reality-deficient that any "romantic vision of free, universal public education."

Gibbons repeatedly slides in the notion that public schools are one-size-fits-all. That's hugely CURMUDGUCATION: Common Schools vs. Diversity:

NYC Public School Parents: Video Interview: Leonie Haimson on why she started Class Size Matters

NYC Public School Parents: Video Interview: Leonie Haimson on why she started Class Size Matters:

Video Interview: Leonie Haimson on why she started Class Size Matters

Check out the short video below, filmed by Bob Greenburg, about how I got involved in the issue of class size, and why class size matters!

NYC Public School Parents: Video Interview: Leonie Haimson on why she started Class Size Matters:

Student Privacy Not Just About Identity Theft » Missouri Education Watchdog

Student Privacy Not Just About Identity Theft » Missouri Education Watchdog:

Student Privacy Not Just About Identity Theft

At the National Student Privacy Symposium two weeks ago in DC, (written about on MEW  here), Bill Fitzgerald of Common Sense Media, who writes the blog FunnyMonkey, was a panelist for the discussion of Potential Risks of Student Data Collection and Use. Up until that point in the symposium, most of the focus had been on student data collected and used by researchers, and the concern addressed was the identification of an individual student as if the only concern parents had was for identity theft. Fitzgerald mentioned other concerns parents had with the use of technology in the classroom and the Terms of Service agreements that students and/or teachers are asked to sign. Far more data can and is collected by the software used in the classroom and its use is much less well understood, but no less troubling.

Fitzgerald took on one of these Terms of Service (TOS) agreements for a product called Classroom Dojo, which offers a system where students’ behavior can be monitored throughout the day. Teachers can use an ipad, Smartphone, or computer and continuously adjust a student’s behavior points within the program.  If someone is off task, the teacher can take points away.  If they begin to focus, they get points and move up.  The points are collected by the software which can then beam an up to the minute status report of all students scores to a white board.

I will step aside from the TOS review for a moment to comment on the concept mentioned above, sharing individual student data with an entire class in real time. We didn’t used to share all the grades with other students in K-6. We didn’t make their student record available for other students to see and make fun of. The public shaming of the dunce cap was eliminated decades ago, but apparently the creator of Dojo, who was a teacher, thought it was a good idea to bring that back and arm students with information about their classmates that can be used to bully and intimidate. This is just one example of the misuse and risks of data collection.

A Brief Review of ClassDojo Privacy Policy and Terms of Service by Fitzgerald does a good job of taking the specific language of the TOS and Student Privacy Not Just About Identity Theft » Missouri Education Watchdog: