Get To Know The BATS: Teachers Fighting Privatization | PopularResistance.Org

Get To Know The BATS: Teachers Fighting Privatization | PopularResistance.Org:

Get To Know The BATS: Teachers Fighting Privatization

Above photo: New York teachers and parents took to the streets in protest of an education budget they say furthers free market education reforms. (United Federation of Teachers / Instagram)  

Editor’s Note: With the appointment of billionaire school privatization advocate Betsy DeVos to US Secretary of Education, the fight for education justice has stepped into hyper speed. We have never needed solidarity like we do now. Get to know one network of teachers who are partnering with others and taking things into their own hands.  - Simon Davis-Cohen

Chris Christie once told a Badass Teacher that he was “sick”of people like her. It was his response to the question posed by her sign: Schools in NJ are among the top 3 in the country. Why does Governor Christie portray our schools as failure factories?“You know what,”he said, “I’m tired of this. I’m so sick of you people. What do you want?”He pointed his finger in her face, “just go do your job.”

It was 2014, seven years into Melissa Tomlinson’s career as a public middle school special education teacher in Buena, NJ—and six months after the founding of the Badass Teachers Association (BATs) network.

Some might know BATs for their online activism and role in the campaign against Betsy DeVos. Organized horizontally through committees, we have chapters in every state, but all are autonomous to account for unique obstacles and local culture. For example, in Tennessee, BATs have to be able to work with Republican candidates while fighting against Achievement School District models, whereas California BATs focus more on Democrats in their campaigns to resist charters and privatization.

In the fight against charter schools, and cuts to public education and teacher pensions, in New Jersey, Tomlinson and other teachers are fighting for community control of education and against state takeovers of elected school districts.

We do more than tweet and post memes. After the bell rings, we can be found running for union and political office, spearheading campaigns against pro-charter school companies like Pearson and the Gates Foundation or testifying at school board meetings in cities and towns across the country.

Washington BATs have been working on a campaign to fully fund the public school system while conscientiously objecting to standardized tests. As an organization, BATs support any teacher that is willing to stand up and refuse to administer standardized tests by connecting them with others that have taken a stand and publicly praising their actions. New Jersey and New York BATs are also working on campaigns to refuse standardized testing and in Ohio there is a campaign against the state’s new graduation testing requirements.

On the national level, BATs in the National Education Association (NEA) and American Federation of Teachers (AFT) have caucused to hold the unions accountable and to push them to do better. For example, each year the NEA BATs work on business items that are debated on the NEA Convention floor and which set NEA policy for the coming year. In the past, NEA BAT caucus members pushed business items that lead to an updated climate change curriculum and which pushed forth revisions to NEA’s charter school policy. This year the NEA Convention is in Boston. The BAT Quality of Worklife Team, composed of BATs from across the country, worked with the AFT to produce a groundbreaking study on teacher stress, which resulted in an amendment (Section 2301 N of Title II) into the new ESSA federal education law that allowed Title II money to be used to study teacher workplace conditions.

The BAT network mobilized with protest, testimony and an Amicus Brief against the Supreme Court’s Friedrichs vs. California Teachers Association (2016), which could have gutted teacher and other public unions’power to collect agency fees and opened the door to national “Right to Work.” The decision ended in a 4-4 tie.

Teachers across the country are under attack. In Jersey, teachers have mandated contributions to a pension system that is not being funded by the state and NJ schools have lost billions in funding since governor Christie took office. Beyond the cuts, teachers’are Get To Know The BATS: Teachers Fighting Privatization | PopularResistance.Org:

Badass Teacher (BAT) Association

Badass Teacher Association Web Site

BATs (@badassteachersa) • Instagram photos and videos http://bit.ly/1VE7ljA

John Kuhn: Vouchers Serve Adults at Children's Expense - Living in Dialogue

John Kuhn: Vouchers Serve Adults at Children's Expense - Living in Dialogue:

John Kuhn: Vouchers Serve Adults at Children's Expense

By John Kuhn.

The following is a speech delivered on March 5, 2017, to the Association of Texas Professional Educators Legislative Action Weekend. 

I have three older sisters who are all teachers. When I became a teacher too in 1997, the first advice they gave me was, “You need go join ATPE.” And they never spent a year teaching without the legal protection and other benefits of ATPE. So I’m really happy to be able to be here and be a part.

Before I left this morning I told my wife I was nervous. I’m going to speak to this huge crowd of accomplished educators from all over the state. She gave me some advice. She said, “Don’t try to be funny or smart or charming. Just be yourself.”

So there are a number of vital issues facing professional educators in the 85th Legislature, and your engagement is going to be so important. They are wanting to prohibit organizations like ATPE from having your dues payroll deducted. Why would they want to do that? Political reasons only. The members of our legislature want to make it harder for teacher associations to unite teachers as a political bloc that might oppose their agenda. Whether this bill passes or not, you need to respond by recruiting every teacher you know to join an association and every retired teacher you know to join an association. Your freedom to associate and engage politically is under direct threat and this isn’t a one-time deal. You have to see this bill for what it is: they are telegraphing their intentions. They are like that gremlins on the wing of the plane in the old Twilight Zone movie, ripping the wires out of the engine. They want to silence teacher voice in the political arena until there’s no one left to defend the public education system from the privatization schemes that have gripped the nation.

The sense of urgency must increase, and increase quickly, if you and I are to save public schools in the state of Texas. And not just in Texas, but in this nation. The great American experiment of free public schools, open to all children and overseen by locally-elected citizens—this bold vision is being challenged by an army of wealthy and interested parties who are dead set on dismantling the public education system and trading it for a voucher system.

But before we get to vouchers, I want to note that there are other challenges facing us this session. The Texas Supreme Court called our school funding system Byzantine and called on the legislature to fix it. Just yesterday, two former state commissioners said at a Symposium that the state is badly underfunding education and that it is negatively impacting student learning. On testing, STAAR was a rolling disaster last year, we still give more tests than the federal law requires, and we still ship millions of tax dollars to ETS and John Kuhn: Vouchers Serve Adults at Children's Expense - Living in Dialogue:

The Self-Fulfilling Prophesy: Failing Public Schools | radical eyes for equity

The Self-Fulfilling Prophesy: Failing Public Schools | radical eyes for equity:

The Self-Fulfilling Prophesy: Failing Public Schools

Everything you need to know about the post-truth demonizing of public schools and false promises of charter schools is in these two paragraphs from Education Week, the queen of misinforming edujournalism:

At their best, the most innovative charter schools provide convincing evidence that there are better ways to educate students (especially disadvantaged ones) than now prevail in most traditional district schools. In fact, these pioneering schools bring together most of the innovative policies and practices needed to transform the nation’s traditional schools into the most successful in the world.

And yet, most traditional school districts either ignore or actively resist innovation. And their processes are so ingrained that one significant alteration would inevitably lead to systemic change or even a total redesign. Few public educators can imagine, let alone undertake, such dramatic change.

Edujournalism has been for decades a harbinger of the current threats to democracy posed by, not fake news, but post-truth journalism, the sort of enduring but false claims that drive mainstream media and remain unchecked by the public.

I recently detailed eight post-truth claims about public education that have fueled over three decades of baseless and harmful education reform; we are now poised for a resurgence of school choice schemes as the next wave of more unwarranted policies unsupported by research and not grounded in credible analyses of education failures.

The paragraphs above traffic in very predictable nonsense—”innovative charter schools” and public schools and educators who actively resist change—that resonates only with those who have no real experience in public education.

This nonsense is driven by the self-proclaimed innovators, few of whom are actual educators, and embraced by the public, most of whom have been students in public schools, and thus, believe they know the system.

Let’s here, then, unpack the nonsense.

First, I can offer a perspective that includes gaining my teaching certificate in a traditional program in the early 1980s before teaching public high The Self-Fulfilling Prophesy: Failing Public Schools | radical eyes for equity:

“Can’t We All Just Get Along”? – redqueeninla

“Can’t We All Just Get Along”? – redqueeninla:

“Can’t We All Just Get Along”?

A plaintive parent declares that with “one kid in a regular public district school and another in a charter school”, we should all just “get along”.

Here’s the formula for getting along: (1) You have to tolerate me and (2) I have to tolerate you; (3) Your existence cannot impinge on mine and (4) my existence cannot impinge on yours.

Charters and regular public district schools do not operate independently from one another, because two commodities are shared: (i) money (aka “resources”) and (ii) pupils.

These commodities are not infinite; both entities (charters and “regular district schools” – let’s call them “RDS”) essentially compete for the same “fixed” (amount of) commodity. This is what’s known as a zero-sum setup; the “margins are fixed”, the amount of available education dollars is more-or-less invariant, the amount of available pupils will not change (not appreciably, cities swell and drain a little but basically, babies have been born to this cohort already and we’ve got who we’ve got present now to educate). The only change these commodities can see therefore, is to “rearrange the deck chairs” – the ship is still going down the same way, but the chairs might be clustered differently. Pupils might congregate inside different schoolyards; monies might get distributed differently.

To make matters worse, the needs of both entities is not reciprocal, nor is the distribution of these commodities without impact on the other entity. That is, the cost to educate every pupil is not equivalent, some are costlier than others. And where you cluster funds is not a matter of +$1 here means -$1 there because the impact of a dollar matters depending where it is. There are economies of scale, for example, to be gained or it is long-acknowledged that severely disadvantaged communities require more money to come to equity (this is what Federal Title 1 dollars provide, it is why the new “LCFF” uses a formula to assign more money per capita to poorer schools than to relatively richer ones).

Therefore while it’s possible for both entities to tolerate one another, it’s not possible for their existence not to impact the other.

That’s where the fallacy lies. Folks who wonder ingenuously why we can’t all “just get along”, seem not to understand the pernicious consequences of charter schools on the totality of a public education system.

The underlying game-plan of charters is to rarefy its pupil-population, by hook or by crook. Sometimes in the past, this has been done illegally through fixing lotteries or selections processes. Sometimes the lottery process has been weighted through a sanctioned, if questionable, process. Empirical reports of “counseling out” already admitted kids are easy to come by; discouraging “Can’t We All Just Get Along”? – redqueeninla:

CURMUDGUCATION: Can Choice Return To Its Roots? + Real Performance Based Education

CURMUDGUCATION: Can Choice Return To Its Roots?:

Can Choice Return To Its Roots?

Deborah Meier wrote in Education Week recently wit an interesting question.

"Can school choice return to its progressive roots?" she asked. She goes back to the days in which she became involved in starting charter schools, to get out from under the heavy hand of regulation and red tape and start a school run by educators who would focus on the stuff that really matters, serving students who has been largely ignored by the system. In those early days, school choice could be seen as a progressive cause. And yet, with the growth in the charter movement came misgivings:

It was the proliferation of charters that made me pause and worry about how choice could work against the values I was presumably promoting. Small schools of choice soon became a way of resegregating where integration had begun to be practiced. It also pitted teachers and parents against each other as they were asked to share limited space. And, soon it began to seem as though it was also a way of dividing a community's efforts at improving all their schools. Bus trips to Albany were conducted by competing groups with competing external sponsors—serving however the same community. And, of course, sometimes families were attending schools in districts where they didn't live and in the process, some districts lost valuable parent leaders and activists who solved their personal interests without tackling the larger dilemmas facing their neighbors.

Meier's question is on the surface pretty simple. Can the progressive impulse be put back in the CURMUDGUCATION: Can Choice Return To Its Roots?:

Real Performance Based Education

2by Peter Greene / 2h

This afternoon the set was struck and the stage swept clean. We've come to the end of this year's spring musical. As always it was one of the highlights of my year, and as always, it reminded me of how inadequate so many of our educational models are. There are weeks of rehearsal, learning music,

Los Angeles Rocked by Another Charter School Scandal: State Awards Two New Schools to Ethically Challenged Charter Chain | Diane Ravitch's blog

Los Angeles Rocked by Another Charter School Scandal: State Awards Two New Schools to Ethically Challenged Charter Chain | Diane Ravitch's blog:

Los Angeles Rocked by Another Charter School Scandal: State Awards Two New Schools to Ethically Challenged Charter Chain

The Los Angeles Times ran a first-page story about the latest charter school scandal, only a day before the school board election that will decide whether charter advocates will take control of the Los Angeles school board.

There will likely be a low voter turnout for this special election, and the question is turnout: Will enough parents vote to save their public schools, or will the profligate spending of the charter industry on propaganda and false attacks ads enable them to privatize the schools of half the students in the district? If the charter billionaires win, look for more privately run charters that produce incompetence, plunder, profit, and power for the elite.

The big story today is about Celerity Education Group, a charter chain that is thriving with public money. Its CEO is Vielka McFarlane.

In 2013, she earned $471,842, about 35% more than Michelle King, the superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, makes today.

McFarlane was prospering, and it showed. She wore Armani suits, ate at expensive restaurants and used a black car service.

Financial records obtained by The Times show that, as Celerity’s CEO, she paid for many of these expenses with a credit card belonging to her charter schools, which receive the bulk of their funding from the state.

It could not be determined whether McFarlane, 54, ever reimbursed the charter schools for her credit card purchases. Neither she nor a lawyer hired by Celerity responded to requests for comment about the transactions.

At a time when charter school advocates are determined to increase the number of such schools in L.A., the story of McFarlane and the Celerity schools offers a case study of the growing difficulty of regulating them. The task of spotting and stamping out risky financial practices in charters largely falls to the school district’s charter schools division, which employs about a dozen people dedicated to monitoring the schools’ fiscal health.

But as the number of L.A. charter schools has grown to more than 220, enrolling about 111,000 students, oversight has become a challenge for district officials, who are at once competitors and regulators.

In 2012, L.A. Unified’s charter schools division made a routine request for financial records from the Celerity Educational Group.

When the school network’s credit card statements arrived that fall, many of the transactions had been blacked out. One page was nearly all black.

Concerned school district staff grew even more alarmed when they received the full records, which showed that McFarlane had paid for lavish meals and out-of-state travel on the nonprofit’s credit card.

In one month in 2013, she had spent $914 at the Arroyo Chop House in Pasadena, $425 at The Lobster, a seafood restaurant in Santa Monica, and $355 at Paiche, a now-closed Peruvian restaurant in Marina del Rey.

From the arrival of the credit card statements until 2015, when it refused to allow Celerity to open two new schools, L.A. Unified took a gentle approach to the charter group’s unorthodox practices. It sent notices urging the organization to institute tighter financial controls, but continued to renew the schools’ charters when they came before the school board.

L.A. Unified officials referred Celerity’s credit card transactions to the district’s inspector general, who eventually opened an investigation into the group’s finances. Then, in late January, federal agents from the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI and other agencies raided Celerity’s offices, as well as the headquarters of a related nonprofit, Celerity Global Development, and McFarlane’s home. The focus of the federal investigation is unclear, and the district’s inquiry is ongoing…

While the district investigated, Celerity went national, expanding into Ohio, Florida and Louisiana, where it operates four schools in addition to the seven it runs in Southern California. McFarlane launched Celerity Global Development, the parent company of the schools in her growing empire, and began offering herself as a consultant to other charter school leaders.

In 2015, McFarlane became the CEO of Celerity Global, an organization that took in millions of dollars in management fees from Celerity’s Los Angeles Rocked by Another Charter School Scandal: State Awards Two New Schools to Ethically Challenged Charter Chain | Diane Ravitch's blog:

Mercedes Schneider on the State Blaine Amendments That Block Vouchers

21by dianeravitch / 1h

Mercedes Schneider offers a history lesson on the Blaine amendments found in most state constitutions, which require that public money go only to public schools. Some states–like Indiana–have found creative ways to interpret the Blaine amendment, by saying that the public money goes to parents, not to religious schools, but most states continue to interpret the amendments as they were written in

Peter Greene: Corporate Reformers Launch Three New Websites

6by dianeravitch / 2h

Are you missing Arne Duncan and John King? There are some nostalgia websites created just for you. Just in case you don’t have enough to do, Peter Greene tells us about three new education-related websites launched by corporate reformers. Remember the good old days of Race to the Top, VAM, teacher-bashing, Central Falls, and lectures about bad teachers? They are preserved on these websites. One i

Should We Protect the Environment?

10by dianeravitch / 3h

This post is about pollution and the environment. Please don’t say it is unrelated to education or children. Many children have asthma or other illnesses that are caused or aggravated by pollution. This damages their health, their well-being, even their performance in school. It wasn’t so long ago that the idea of protecting the environment was considered absurd or too expensive. Smoke came pouri

Lousiana Voucher School Program Graded D by the State

20by dianeravitch / 4h

Students who wanted to sign up for the Louisiana Voucher Program had to make their decision by February 24. But that was before the state released the grades for the participating schools. Overall, the voucher schools performed very poorly, as reported by Danielle Dreilinger writing in the New Orleans Times-Picayune. Please open the story for the links and for the data charts. Louisiana parents i

Psychiatrists: How Should Trump Be Assessed?

12by dianeravitch / 5h

Every day brings new surprises and new tweets from the president. Most recently, he tweeted that President Obama was tapping his phone lines during the campaign without offering any evidence. Then he tweeted that Arnold Schwarzenegger was a very poor host of “Celebrity Apprentice.” No end to th

jobsanger: School Vouchers Do NOT Improve Student Achievement

jobsanger: School Vouchers Do NOT Improve Student Achievement:

School Vouchers Do NOT Improve Student Achievement

(These charts, from the Economic Policy Institute, show that cities invested heavily in vouchers, like Milwaukee and Detroit, still lag far behind cities that aren't heavily invested in a voucher system.)

The following summary of a study of school vouchers is by Martin Canroy, professor of education and economics at Stanford University:

Betsy DeVos, the new U.S. secretary of education, is a strong proponent of allowing public education dollars to go to private schools through vouchers, which enable parents to use public school money to enroll their children in private schools, including religious ones. Vouchers are advanced under the rubric of “school choice”—the theory that giving parents more choices regarding where to educate their children creates competition and thus improves low-performing schools. (Charter schools, though technically funded and regulated similarly to public schools, are another key private school component of the choice argument and another top policy priority for DeVos.) DeVos’s nomination and confirmation have heightened the debate over using privatization, versus other school improvement strategies, to enhance educational outcomes for students and their schools.

This report seeks to inform that debate by summarizing the evidence base on vouchers. Studies of voucher programs in several U.S. cities, the states of Florida, Indiana, Louisiana, and in Chile and India, find limited improvements at best in student achievement and school district performance from even large-scale programs. In the few cases in which test scores increased, other factors, namely increased public accountability, not private school competition, seem to be more likely drivers. And high rates of attrition from private schools among voucher users in several studies raises concerns. The second largest and longest-standing U.S. voucher program, in Milwaukee, offers no solid evidence of student gains in either private or public schools.

In the only area in which there is evidence of small improvements in voucher schools—in high school graduation and college enrollment rates—there are no data to show whether the gains are the result of schools shedding lower-performing students or engaging in positive practices. Also, high school graduation rates have risen sharply in public schools across the board in the last 10 years, with those increases much larger than the small effect jobsanger: School Vouchers Do NOT Improve Student Achievement:

Charter groups and unions spend millions for control of LA Unified school board | EdSource

Charter groups and unions spend millions for control of LA Unified school board | EdSource:

Charter groups and unions spend millions for control of LA Unified school board

Alliances of charter school groups and labor unions are competing for control of California’s largest school district, raising most of the $6.6 million contributed to date to benefit candidates in three school board races.

The “big battle in L.A. has been whether or not to approve charter applications, and the current board has been slowing down the rate of approval of charter schools and demanding greater oversight and accountability,” said Raphael J. Sonenshein, executive director of the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs at CSU Los Angeles.

Los Angeles naturally commands outsized interest from advocacy groups, both in California and nationally. It’s home to the state’s largest school district, the Los Angeles United School District, and home to 279 charters, the most of any district in the country. A plan in 2015 to create 260 charters over eight years won the support of philanthropists and wealthy donors.  It also deepened the rancor between charter supporters and critics.

As a result, the three school board seats up for grabs Tuesday in the Los Angeles primary elections are attracting a who’s who of major donors and well-heeled organizations trying to shape the agenda of the seven-member school board. If candidates backed by charter allies win all three seats on Tuesday, L.A.’s board will have a majority of members who received significant contributions from charter political groups.

An EdSource analysis of Los Angeles City Ethics Commission campaign finance data shows that groups aligned with charter schools have contributed most of the $5.37 million in marketing and get-out-the-vote efforts on behalf of the candidates by outside groups– roughly $3.34 million to labor’s $2 million. Another $1.3 million were raised by the candidates themselves through March 1. Candidates are able to raise money directly, though those donations are capped at $1,100. Outside groups can spend unlimited sums.

If no candidate receives more than 50 percent of the vote, the top two finishers in each district will square off in a May 16 runoff. Elected board members receive an annual salary of $45,000.Charter groups and unions spend millions for control of LA Unified school board | EdSource:

What can Betsy DeVos really do? - The Hechinger Report

What can Betsy DeVos really do? - The Hechinger Report:

What can Betsy DeVos really do?
Experts on left and right assess possibilities for expanding school choice and limiting the work of the Office for Civil Rights

A month into Betsy DeVos’ tenure as the new Secretary of Education, there is still a big question on the minds of many Americans: How much can she really change the nation’s schools?

Her nomination was controversial from the start, because DeVos and her husband have spent decades pushing to give families more of a say in where their children are educated. They have used their own wealth and a robust fundraising apparatus to push lawmakers to approve school choice proposals that even some proponents of choice question: namely, public charter schools run by for-profit companies, and the use of taxpayer funds to pay private school tuition through vouchers.

By appointing DeVos, President Donald Trump signaled that he was serious about his campaign promise to use $20 billion in federal funds to significantly expand school choice programs.

But that’s not all that worries DeVos’ critics. There is also widespread concern about the fate of the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. Her detractors particularly fear that she might roll back protections for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) students and that the federal government may walk away from its recent regulations meant to stem sexual assaults on college campuses.

So far, DeVos has largely remained silent on her plans for any major policy shifts, but we asked a group of experts across the ideological spectrum to discuss what changes might be in store for federal school choice policy and for the Office for Civil Rights.

Neal McCluskey, director of the Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom, said that advocates on the left side of the political spectrum can thank themselves for any major school choice push that does come down the pike.

“Secretary DeVos is, in a sense, the left’s Frankenstein’s monster,” McCluskey wrote in an opinion piece for The Hechinger Report. “They pushed for more and more federal involvement — though certainly with help from some conservatives such as President George W. Bush — and now their creation may be poised to turn on them. They fear Washington might impose school choice everywhere.”

But McCluskey doesn’t see Trump’s vision for a massive federal expansion of choice becoming a reality: “DeVos cannot impose choice herself, and it is hardly a slam-dunk What can Betsy DeVos really do? - The Hechinger Report: