School offers ‘incentives’ to get kids to take Common Core standardized test - The Washington Post

School offers ‘incentives’ to get kids to take Common Core standardized test - The Washington Post:

School offers ‘incentives’ to get kids to take Common Core standardized test

We’ve seen in years past pep rallies, parties, raffles and other sorts of enticements — which some might call bribes — for students before they take high-stakes standardized tests.  In spring 2016, for example, Washington Redskins cheerleaders surprised students at an assembly for students at a Washington elementary school to cheer them on for their Common Core tests.

Now, as school districts around the country get ready to launch into their annual spring testing season, it’s starting to  happen again.

A notice was just sent to families with children attending Jewell Elementary School in Aurora Public Schools, a school with some 530 students in pre-K through fifth grades, most of them minority. The memo actually includes the phrase “PARCC incentives,” with PARCC referring to the Partnership for the Assessment of Readiness for College and Career, a Common Core test created by a multistate consortium funded by the former Obama administration.

[The testing opt-out movement is growing, despite government efforts to kill it]

Other schools are also offering incentives in Colorado, one of the states with the largest opt-out movements. New York has had the most opt-outs, with at least 20 percent of students statewide refusing to take accountability tests for the past few years, and officials expecting big numbers again this year.

Jewell’s particular incentives: a raffle and a party in which kids can participate only if they have shown up to school on all PARCC testing days and “who have tried their hardest. (See the full memo below.) Asked about the memo, Nadine Ritchotte, Jewell Elementary’s principal, provided this statement:

“It is important to recognize and celebrate students for their hard work and learning throughout the school year. This is simply another opportunity for Jewell Elementary staff to recognize our students and thank them for their efforts.”

One of the reasons schools take steps they think will help test participation is because of a School offers ‘incentives’ to get kids to take Common Core standardized test - The Washington Post:

CURMUDGUCATION: Why School Choice Is Not A Thing

CURMUDGUCATION: Why School Choice Is Not A Thing:

Why School Choice Is Not A Thing

The promise, the dream of school choice is a system in which every family can choose from a wide range of schools, selecting the one that best fits their own child. If we would just break the public school "monopoly," the reasoning goes, even poor families would have the same wide range of choices available to upper and middle class families.

This is not a true thing. It is not even an accurate portrayal of what the choice debate is really about.

First, we know that even in a choice system, choices would be limited. Chris may want to go to a school with a strong left-handed underwater basket weaving program, but if Chris is the only student in a few hundred miles who wants such a program, no school is going to emerge to meet that too-small market demand.

The market is going to include many students and families with many desires or preferences for programs and schools, but the market is only going to respond to some of that market. The range of available choices will also be limited.

In a traditional public system, the range of choices is handled under one roof. The public school picks and chooses and offers a variety of options based both on what students sign up for and what the school can afford. This can actual serve a student like Chris well-- the school may still not have enough students to run a left-handed underwater basket weaving program, but there might be broad CURMUDGUCATION: Why School Choice Is Not A Thing:

California Schools Join Sanctuary Movement To Protect Students From Deportation - BuzzFeed News

California Schools Join Sanctuary Movement To Protect Students From Deportation - BuzzFeed News:

California Schools Join Sanctuary Movement To Protect Students From Deportation

Two school districts in California are launching campaigns to help protect undocumented students and their families from deportation.

Two California school districts are moving forward with plans to make their campuses safe havens for undocumented students and their families, while also offering information on how to deal with immigration authorities.

One of the districts, Sacramento City Unified, launched its “Safe Haven” campaign on Tuesday, pledging to support and help protect undocumented students from immigration authorities. As part of the campaign, the school district started covering all of its campuses with banners and signs welcoming all students.

“Our Safe Haven policy was the first step we took to protect our kids,” said district Vice-President Jessie Ryan. “Today, we are taking an even bigger step by launching a full campaign to make sure every undocumented student and parent in our school district knows their rights if approached by immigration officials.”

The Voice of OC reported that the high school board in Anaheim, California, on Tuesday also voted to declare the district a safe haven for students regardless of their immigration status.

Reports of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents arresting at least two men who crossed the street after leaving a church hypothermia shelter in Virginia, as well as the arrest of an undocumented immigrant near a school in Los Angeles, have sent waves of concern among immigrant advocates.

 Since President Trump’s election — and executive orders vastly expanding the pool of those at risk of immediate deportation — a network of churches and schools have also declared themselves sanctuaries for the undocumented. However, some churches have taken it a step further with plans to use private homes and potentially creating a network to move undocumented immigrants to Canada.

The Sacramento school district, meanwhile, will also be coordinating with community organizations to provide legal resources in classrooms and distribute thousands of California Schools Join Sanctuary Movement To Protect Students From Deportation - BuzzFeed News: 

Gusty winds today in Chicago. Strike fever is in the air. | Fred Klonsky

Gusty winds today in Chicago. Strike fever is in the air. | Fred Klonsky:

Gusty winds today in Chicago. Strike fever is in the air.

The educators at Aspira announced plan to strike on March 17 if a #faircontract not reached before!

We are getting 50 mile an hour wind gusts in Chicago today.

The sky is blue. The air is clear.

And strike talk is all in the air.

If a deal isn’t worked out my March 17th teachers at the Chicago Aspira charter network will walk. If they do they will be the first union strike at a charter school anywhere.

Chicago is ground zero for charter school union organizing.

The ASPIRA charter network includes about 100 teachers and 1,500 predominantly low-income Latino students within three high schools and one middle school across the city. Last month, 92 of the union’s 93 participating bargaining unit members voted to authorize a strike. The teachers’ three-year contract expired last June.

Meanwhile the aldermen who make up the Chicago City Council’s Progressive Caucus (Hitting Left with the Klonsky Brothers will have Progressive Caucus member Alderman Sue Sadlowski Garza on the show for a full hour Friday at 11AM. 105.5 FM at LumpenRadio.com) has  voiced support for the union organizing efforts at the Noble Network of charter schools.

The council’s Progressive Reform Caucus said it “supports the efforts of all teachers to organize and to bargain collectively, to improve their working conditions and the Gusty winds today in Chicago. Strike fever is in the air. | Fred Klonsky:

“And so maybe rather than getting that new iPhone that they just love and they want to go spend hundreds of dollars on that, maybe they should invest in their own health care. They’ve got to make those decisions themselves.” – Congressman Jason Chaffetz

MARCH 8, 2017 / FRED KLONSKY

Download the podcast: Hitting Left with the Klonsky Brothers.

Private vo-tech schools can offer students dubious value

Private vo-tech schools can offer students dubious value:

Private vo-tech schools can offer students dubious value

What thought comes to mind when someone tells you they went to Harvard? How about the University of Oklahoma? Or Oklahoma State University? Or the University of Central Oklahoma? What about Vatterott College?

If the latter causes your mind to go blank or makes you feel like there is no comparison with the others, you’re probably not alone.

Whether it is Heritage College, Brown Mackie College, ITT Technical Institute or Wright Career College, people are familiar with the names of these private vo-tech schools. With ubiquitous commercials on daytime TV, they have robust marketing efforts and a moderate standing in the public consciousness. What these four have in common beyond name recognition, however, is that they have all closed their doors for good. Now, Vatterott College is showing signs of potential problems, and students are looking for answers.

The vo-tech appeal is real …

Many of these for-profit vo-tech schools — and nonprofit vo-techs, as is the case with some of them — started off as alternatives for prospective students who didn’t want to spend four to 12 years of their lives attending class for the possibility of an interview at a mid-level company that may or may not be interested in hiring them. Alternatively, vo-tech institutions carry appeal asPrivate vo-tech schools can offer students dubious value:

A Tale of Two Betsy DeVoses - The Atlantic

A Tale of Two Betsy DeVoses - The Atlantic:

A Tale of Two Betsy DeVoses
The generous Grand Rapids resident and the tone-deaf Trump official

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich.—Residents of this western Michigan town are having trouble reconciling the Betsy DeVos they know with the Betsy DeVos who serves as President Donald Trump’s controversial education secretary.  

The former is widely seen as pragmatic and generous, even by those who dislike her political leanings and devotion to charter schools. The latter? “Unprepared,” “tone deaf,” and “insulated” were phrases that came up more than once during interviews with people who either know DeVos or her family or are familiar with her dealings in this part of the state.

 Born into the wealthy, conservative Prince family in 1958, DeVos was raised in the Christian Reformed Church in Holland, Michigan, a largely Dutch community near the shores of Lake Michigan. She attended Calvin College, a Christian school in nearby Grand Rapids, before marrying Dick DeVos, whose family co-founded Amway and who ran unsuccessfully for governor a decade ago. (A former classmate recalled lusting after the Mercedes Dick arrived in to pick her up for dates.) The couple, who celebrated their wedding anniversary recently and were back in Grand Rapids for a private celebration of her confirmation with friends, have four grown children. (A request to interview DeVos while she was in town went unanswered, as did a follow-up request for comment to the Education Department.) Over the years, the billionaire couple have contributed to various conservative religious and political causes. DeVos, in particular, has pushed to expand charter schools and the use of vouchers, which let students use public funding to pay for private, sometimes religious, schooling.


DeVos’s educational convictions aren’t necessarily surprising considering her hometown’s ethnic, religious, and cultural ties to the Netherlands. Back in the late 1800s, there was debate about what public education should look like in the Netherlands, with liberal politicians successfully pushing for increasingly secular public schools. Religious schools, they argued, didn’t deserve equal public funding. This angered Catholic and Reformed groups, which allied to campaign for what would become an early and enduring version of school choice. According to The Challenge of Pluralism, a book by several Calvin and Pepperdine University scholars, the framework is this: “religiously based schools of various types and public schools espousing a ‘neutral,’ consensual philosophy all sharing fully and equally in public funding.” That was a concept Abraham Kuyper, a theologian who significantly influenced Calvin College, believed in deeply, and A Tale of Two Betsy DeVoses - The Atlantic:

The White Choice – Have You Heard

The White Choice – Have You Heard:

The White Choice

The push for school vouchers is spreading across the South, even as the legacy of private schools as *segregation academies* lives on…

Today begins our school choice tour, reader, and judging from the speed with which various choice choices are popping up across the land, the tour will be of some duration. We’re starting in Arkansas, because it begins with ‘A’ and also it because it represents a less-palatable part of the school choice *conversation.* Before school choice became the *civil rights issue of our time,* it was the chosen choice of white parents who were fleeing newly desegregated schools for private schools. In fact, the legacy of that ugly history hangs heavy enough over Arkansas’ private schools today that the Walton family, America’s first family of all things school choice, chose not to push for private school vouchers in its home state. Here’s an excerpt from an interview I did in 2015 with Walton Family Foundation senior program officer Kathy Smith, who oversees the foundation’s Arkansas portfolio:

There are some differences in what you can do in a rural state and what’s appropriate to do, frankly, in a rural state vs a larger urban environment. And so some of the things we do in terms of policy support in some of our larger urban environments are not even appropriate in Arkansas. For example, I know in some other jurisdictions where we work we’re very very keen about school choice, perhaps in regards to a voucher program or education savings accounts. In Arkansas we don’t even have an adequate supply of private school options to where it would have the same impact. And many of our private schools, for example in the Delta, were originally formed to be academies that would segregate. Many of them probably today wouldn’t accept scholarship kids.   

Fast forward two years and the Waltons are backing a controversial bill that combines two new school choice faves—1) *tax credit scholarships* that would let well-heeled Arkansans and corporations claim hefty state and federal tax deductions for donating to a nonprofit, which then disperses funds to choice-seeking parents in the form of 2) an education savings account, which lets parents pay for private school tuition using a *backpack full of cash.* So what’s changed? Not the number of private schools. Arkansas has just 230 of them, and that’s before you cross off the schools that charge The White Choice – Have You Heard:

Dutch Treat: Detsy DeVos and the Christian Schools Movement - LA Progressive

Dutch Treat: Detsy DeVos and the Christian Schools Movement - LA Progressive:

Dutch Treat: Detsy DeVos and the Christian Schools Movement

Betsy DeVos, then Elizabeth Dee Prince, from her 1975 Holland Christian High School yearbook. “She played percussion in the symphony, instruments such as snare and tenor drums, cymbals, wood blocks, triangle and chimes. Betsy was also a member of the Ski and German clubs, on the swim team and a Dutch Dancer during Holland’s annual Tulip Time Festival…”

Perhaps Betsy DeVos can be forgiven for imagining that America’s Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) were “real pioneers when it comes to school choice.” I mean, she wasn’t there in the middle of the 19th century, so how could she know?

I’m kidding, of course: it’s appalling to see such ignorance in someone who is leading the Education Department.

What’s vastly harder to forgive is the Education Secretary’s draping of the banner of civil rights over what is in fact a longstanding sectarian campaign to subvert public education and drain away public resources for decidedly religious purposes. She got the clueless Mr. Trump to mouth the preferred mantra both in his address to a joint session of Congress and later during his drive-by visit (with DeVos and daughter Ivanka) to a Florida parochial school. That new shibboleth: “School choice is the civil rights issue of our time.”

Much of the reporting on DeVos has centered on her enthusiasm for charter schools and her lavish spending to promote low-performing charters in Michigan and in Detroit in particular.

While billionaire fascination with charters is well worth exploring and exposing, the steady advance of state-level schemes to fund religious education using taxpayer funds barely breaks the surface of media attention.

While billionaire fascination with charters (and here the interventions of the Waltons and theBroads make the DeVos family look like pikers) is well worth exploring and exposing, the steady advance of state-level schemes to fund religious education using taxpayer funds barely breaks the surface of media attention.

State support for religious education takes many forms, the cleverest being the approach pioneered in Arizona ten years ago, whereby individuals get state tax credits for donating to intermediary nonprofits that in turn make tuition grants. Florida has a similar scheme. While relatively few states currently engage in such blatant dodging of the church-state separation principle, dozens offer indirect subsidies in the form of school transportation, textbooks, etc. With DeVos now “leading the charge” (Trump) on treating private education as a civil right, we can reasonably expect religious schools to be among the main beneficiaries in state after state.

In December Politico caused a minor stir when it reported on comments made by Betsy and Dick DeVos 15 years ago in the context of an interview they gave during “The Gathering,” a conclave of powerful Christian activists, to the effect that replacing public schools with religious schools will “advance God’s Kingdom.”

Betsy DeVos made waves of her own with this quote at last year’s annual meeting of the American Federation for Children (an organization that she helped to found):

We are winning in state after state. In the past six years, we’ve doubled the number of private school choice programs to 50, the number of private school choice states to 25, plus Dutch Treat: Detsy DeVos and the Christian Schools Movement - LA Progressive:

Tri-City ghosts: School vouchers raise the possibility of diverting money into abusive faith communities:

Tri-City ghosts: School vouchers raise the possibility of diverting money into abusive faith communities

The November election may prove to be a pivotal moment for the school-choice movement. President Donald Trump selected Betsy DeVos, a longtime supporter of school vouchers, as his secretary of education. Eric Greitens, Missouri’s new governor, has promoted education savings accounts, which public school educators say are vouchers in disguise.

The enthusiasm for vouchers does not match the results. Studies in states with the most extensive programs indicate that vouchers are not helping students. The most recent study, in Ohio, found that students who used vouchers to attend private schools actually fared worse on statewide tests than students who stayed in public schools.

In addition to questionable academic outcomes, vouchers in some instances divert public money into private, religious schools. The risks in this are evident in the experiences of former students at a now-closed conservative Christian school in the Kansas City area, who spoke to The Pitch about the spiritual, physical and sexual abuse they suffered.

---

Even among Christian schools in Kansas City, Tri-City Christian School was known to be strict. Students received demerits for listening to rock music. Movie theaters were off-limits. The cheerleaders wore turtlenecks and skirts that fell to their shins.

Tim Sears, who graduated from Tri-City Christian School in 1987, was troubled as a teenager. Later diagnosed with bipolar disorder, he would ask classmates to hit him. He was struggling to process abuse he experienced at home. His father beat his mother, who in turn beat him and his brothers. “I was a pretty screwed-up kid,” he says.

Sears, who is gay, was also experimenting sexually, a fact he kept hidden at home and at school.

Sears says his father, who worked at the post office and preached on Sundays at a storefront church, thought that he and his brothers would benefit from Tri-City’s emphasis on obedience. To Sears, though, the school’s leaders seemed more interested in enforcing rules than in meeting the students’ needs. During one interrogation in the school office, Sears admitted that he listened to rock music. He received 50 demerits and was told he would be expelled if he committed the sin again. 

“There was no counseling, no trying to understand what was going on in my life,” Sears says, “just a desire to punish and reprimand and fulfill the letter of the Tri-City law.”

Suzan Pearce, a classmate of Sears’, attended Tri-City through the seventh grade. Her mother Tri-City ghosts: School vouchers raise the possibility of diverting money into abusive faith communities:

Just TRY to Catch Diane Ravitch's blog | A site to discuss better education for all

Diane Ravitch's blog | A site to discuss better education for all:

Just TRY to Catch Diane Ravitch's blog

A site to discuss better education for all

GAO Report: U.S. Schools Are Resegregating, Kentucky About to Abandon Successful Program

by dianeravitch / 36min

This article was written a year ago, but there is no doubt that the trend lines towards resegregation are only getting worse. Just this week, we learned that the Republican legislature in Kentucky is about to eliminate one of the nation’s most successful programs of school desegregation. Last May, on the anniversary of the Brown decision, Emma Brown of the Washington Post wrote that public school

Alabama Has Its Own Tax Credit Program, Run by Floridians!

9by dianeravitch / 1h

Yesterday I ran a post about Florida’s tax credit program, which accepts contributions from corporations for vouchers; the corporations get tax credits. The Florida program has raised over $1 billion to provide vouchers for religious and private schools. This is money that the state did not spend on public schools. Call it a rightwing “starve the beast” strategy. Alabama has a similar program, ca

What Reformers Don’t Understand: “The Process of Little Things”

11by dianeravitch / 2h

Reformers have grand ideas for shaking up the system. Blowing it up. Changing everything. Blowing up teacher education. Imposing national standards overnight. Turning schools into teacher-proof institutions. Teaching children the habits of highly effective scholars (age 7). But, writes David Greene and Bernie Heller, teachers understand that real change is not in the Big Things. Real change happe

Kevin Carey Explains How Tax Credit Vouchers Enrich Their Sponsors

10by dianeravitch / 2h

Kevin Carey is doing a great job exposing the failure of vouchers to help the children who are allegedly supposed to be saved by them. In his latest article in the New York Times, he shows how slick politicians and entrepreneurs are cashing in to enrich themselves while administering tax credit programs. Trump and DeVos are likely to promote school choice through tax credits since it is the faste

Ohio: A Teacher Rebukes Governor Kasich: We Know What We Are Doing, Do You?

22by dianeravitch / 3h

Julie Rine, a teacher in Ohio, wrote a public letter to Governor John Kasich, rebuking him for his insulting proposal to require teachers to spend a day in a business to learn about how to prepare students. “Your proposal in the budget to require teachers to complete an “on-site work experience” with a local business as a condition of renewing our teaching licenses is baffling. Even the state leg

Los Angeles: Final Results of the Voting

12by dianeravitch / 4h

Final results are in for the LAUSD school board election , where the billionaires outspent everyone else in their attempt to grab control of the district and put at least half of the students into charter schools: Monica Garcia, chief charter cheerleader, defender of John Deasy and enabler of the $1 Billion iPad debacle, defeated Lisa Alva and Carl Petersen, with 57% of the vote. A big loss for p

Charter Advocates Slip Legislation Through Without Notice in Arkansas

20by dianeravitch / 4h

The Trump-DeVos privatization agenda is moving fast in the Deep South, where some people long for the good old days of segregated schools. In Arkansas, charter advocates said there would be no action on a bill to turn public facilities over to charters, then introduced the bill with no opponents present, and passed it without debate. Word is that the same legislation was introduced in Missouri, t

YESTERDAY

Mike Klonsky: How Chicago Preserves Inequality

11by dianeravitch / 14h

Mike Klonsky points out that the policies of Trump and DeVos will cement the segregation and inequality that is now baked into the two-tier system in Chicago. “Modern school reform has become nearly synonymous with racial re-segregation and two-tier education. There’s one tier for the elite and one big tier for the rest of us. Sociologists call it social-reproduction, wherein school systems becom

DeVos’ Official Who Shakes His Wife Resigns

29by dianeravitch / 18h

The leader of Betsy DeVos’ Great Lakes Education Project resigned after testifying that he wanted to “shake” a public official like he shakes his wife. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/news/answer-sheet/wp/2017/03/07/head-of-devos-founded-group-resigns-after-he-said-he-wanted-to-shake-an-official-like-i-like-to-shake-my-wife/

Young Catholic School Teachers Speak Out Against Trump Using Catholic School and Students as Props for His Agenda

41by dianeravitch / 21h

When I visited Notre Dame a few years ago, I had the pleasure of meeting with a class of students preparing to become teachers in a program called ACE (Alliance for Catholic Education). ACE is considered the Catholic version of TFA, but it is far more serious and demanding than TFA. It is not a stepping stone to a job in finance, but a commitment to teach in difficult circumstances at low pay on

Mercedes Schneider: Why Did Trump Move HBCU Funding from US Ed to White House?

20by dianeravitch / 22h

Mercedes Schneider writes that someone at the White House transferred the funding and oversight of the nation’s Historically Black Colleges and Universities from the U.S. Department of Education to the White House. When I first read this, I laughed out loud. First, because this happened the day after Betsy DeV pointed to HBCUs as a wonderful example of “choice,” when they were in fact created bec

SomeDAM Poet: Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss

6by dianeravitch / 1d

The Good Old Days Don’t you miss the good old days? The days of school deforming ways? When Arne ruled with iron hand With Common Core and test and VAM? And Cuomo plotted night and day The way to make the schools obey? And Rhee was riding on her broom And closing schools and spreading doom? And charter schools in neighborhoods Were popping up like shrooms in woods And billionaires were here and t

Russ Walsh: Vouchers Are for the Rich, the Racists, and the Religious Right

23by dianeravitch / 1d

Russ Walsh, literacy expert, describes the Three are of vouchers: They are for the Rich, the Racists, and the Religious Right. http://russonreading.blogspot.com/2017/03/school-vouchers-welfare-for-rich-racist.html Russ writes: “Our new Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, is rich, white, and a proselytizing supporter of the Christian religious right. DeVos is also an outspoken champion of school

Red Queen in LA: Why Can’t Public Schools and Charter Schools Get Along?

11by dianeravitch / 1d

Sara Roos, aka the Red Queen in LA, explains here why public schools and charter schools are bound to clash. To begin with, they are competing for a finite amount of public dollars and a finite number of students. It is a zero-sum competition. 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

The Florida Corporate Tax Credit Program: A Statewide Scam

29by dianeravitch / 1d

A nonprofit parent-led group called Fund Education Now created a fact sheet about Florida’s Corporate Tax Credit plan , which was designed to evade the state constitution’s explicit ban on using public money to fund religious or private education. In 2006, as governor, Jeb Bush pushed through a universal voucher plan, which was subsequently ruled unconstitutional by the Florida Supreme Court. In

Paul Thomas: Unpacking the Lies Behind the “Failing Schools” Narrative

50by dianeravitch / 1d

Paul Thomas of Furman University taught high school in rural South Carolina for 18 years before becoming a college professor. He happens to be one of the nation’s leading authorities on the effects of poverty on children and schooling. Recently, he has been writing about the flaws of education journalism. In this post , he unpacks the claim that public schools are “failing,” that (some) charter s

Mother Jones: Why Did Trump and DeVos Choose Florida as Their National Model for School Reform?

21by dianeravitch / 1d

Kristina Rizga, the veteran education journalist at Mother Jones, explains why Trump and DeVos love Florida. Although the state has a constitutional ban on the use of public money for private and religious schools, although the state’s 

Diane Ravitch's blog | A site to discuss better education for all: