Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day...
Friday, March 1, 2019
Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day... | The latest news and resources in education since 2007
Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day... | The latest news and resources in education since 2007
Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day...
Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day...
CURMUDGUCATION: Teach For America: Now With Less Teaching
CURMUDGUCATION: Teach For America: Now With Less Teaching
Teach For America: Now With Less Teaching
Teach for America has always been a work in progress, an evolving enterprise in search of a reason to keep existing. Once upon a time it was all about teaching and plugging holes in the system. Then it was about supplanting traditional teachers (and trying not to say out loud that they needed to be supplanted because they sucked and the Best and the Brightest had better swoop in like a shining white cavalry to rescue the poor children). And then maybe were about building a resume and getting yourself prepped for your real career (their slogan at one point was literally "change and be changed"). And then, sensitive about that shining white cavalry thing, they decided to be a force for diversity in the teaching force.
But I recently was hanging about the TFA website and discovered that more morphing of a sort has occurred, and TFA is now leaning into what has always been one of their missions. It was just never a part of the mission that they expressed so directly.
Here's some copy from their front page:
Teach For America is looking for promising leaders to take on educational inequity.
The Challenge
In America today, the circumstances children are born into predict the opportunities they will have in life. Our education system was not designed to enable all children to realize their potential or achieve their dreams.
The Opportunity
While no single solution is enough to bring about an equitable and excellent education for all CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: Teach For America: Now With Less Teaching
Teach For America: Now With Less Teaching
Teach for America has always been a work in progress, an evolving enterprise in search of a reason to keep existing. Once upon a time it was all about teaching and plugging holes in the system. Then it was about supplanting traditional teachers (and trying not to say out loud that they needed to be supplanted because they sucked and the Best and the Brightest had better swoop in like a shining white cavalry to rescue the poor children). And then maybe were about building a resume and getting yourself prepped for your real career (their slogan at one point was literally "change and be changed"). And then, sensitive about that shining white cavalry thing, they decided to be a force for diversity in the teaching force.
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| Kudzu. |
But I recently was hanging about the TFA website and discovered that more morphing of a sort has occurred, and TFA is now leaning into what has always been one of their missions. It was just never a part of the mission that they expressed so directly.
Here's some copy from their front page:
Teach For America is looking for promising leaders to take on educational inequity.
The Challenge
In America today, the circumstances children are born into predict the opportunities they will have in life. Our education system was not designed to enable all children to realize their potential or achieve their dreams.
The Opportunity
While no single solution is enough to bring about an equitable and excellent education for all CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: Teach For America: Now With Less Teaching
Ohio Voucher Promoters Mislead: EdChoice Vouchers Eat Up Local Dollars and Ruin District Budgets | janresseger
Ohio Voucher Promoters Mislead: EdChoice Vouchers Eat Up Local Dollars and Ruin District Budgets | janresseger
Ohio Voucher Promoters Mislead: EdChoice Vouchers Eat Up Local Dollars and Ruin District Budgets
Ohio Voucher Promoters Mislead: EdChoice Vouchers Eat Up Local Dollars and Ruin District Budgets
On Tuesday evening, the Koch Brothers’ Americans for Prosperity, and the American Federation for Children—the group affiliated through the years with Betsy DeVos—sponsored a meeting at my local public library, where the speaker, representing School Choice Ohio,promoted Ohio’s taxpayer-funded, EdChoice school vouchers.
Ohio’s EdChoice Vouchers are available to students living in the attendance zones of what are considered “failing” schools. Ohio is emerging from a three year “safe harbor” period following a change in the high stakes test by which Ohio judges school quality. Next fall, the number of EdChoice voucher-eligible, so called “failing” schools will double—to 475 across the state—reports Patrick O’Donnell of the Cleveland Plain Dealer. The list of local public schools whose students will be able to qualify for the vouchers next fall is nearly 12 pages long and includes a mass of schools in every big city and a growing number of the state’s inner-ring suburbs. (Cleveland schools do not appear on this list, because the state maintains a separate voucher program in Cleveland.)
The meeting on Tuesday night at the Cleveland Heights Main Library offered coffee and donuts along with several packets about the voucher program and information for prospective voucher parents about School Choice Ohio’s counseling services to help parents qualify for a voucher. Alyson Miles was Tuesday’s primary speaker. She is not currently listed on the staff of School Choice Ohio but appears instead as the Deputy Director of Government Affairs at the Ohio office of the American Federation for Children. She is also, according to the website of School Choice Ohio, one of the three members of School Choice Ohio’s board of directors. The other board members are Rabbi Yitz Frank, the Ohio Director of Agudath Israel of America in Cleveland Ohio, and Ann Riddle, Executive Director of the Northwest Ohio Scholarship Fund, located in Sylvania, Ohio—a suburb of Toledo.
In Ohio, to qualify for an EdChoice Voucher, students must have been enrolled previously in a public school unless they are entering Kindergarten. Once a Kindergartner receives a CONTINUE READING: Ohio Voucher Promoters Mislead: EdChoice Vouchers Eat Up Local Dollars and Ruin District Budgets | janresseger
Guess which state spends the most public funds on private and religious school education. (Hint: Betsy DeVos has a house there.) - The Washington Post
Guess which state spends the most public funds on private and religious school education. (Hint: Betsy DeVos has a house there.) - The Washington Post
Guess which state spends the most public funds on private and religious school education. (Hint: Betsy DeVos has a house there.)
Guess which state spends the most public funds on private and religious school education. (Hint: Betsy DeVos has a house there.)
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos just announced she is backing Senate legislation that would create the first federally funded school tax credit, so it seems like a good time to see which states spend public money to send kids to private and religious schools — and how much.
To be clear, the new legislation has virtually no chance of passing Congress; Democrats now control the House and most of them wouldn’t support it. A similar idea couldn’t muster enough enthusiasm a few years ago when Republicans controlled the House and the Senate.
And it is worth noting that DeVos opposes federal involvement in education — she once said “government sucks” — and she believes that choice programs, like all education, are best at the state and local level. She couldn’t, of course, oppose a federal choice program. But she isn’t likely to appreciate federal restrictions that would necessarily be attached to the money.
Tax credits are just one of the programs that fall under the branch of the “school choice” movement that seeks to use public money to send children to private and religious schools — even when those schools can legally discriminate against LBGTQ students and other groups of students. There are, however, differences in how the programs work throughout the country, structured according to the laws of each state.
The issue is central to the national education debate. Supporters say families should have options for their children. Opponents say it is unconstitutional to use public funds for religious education and that these programs drain resources from public school districts that educate most of America’s children. The Supreme Court is expected to soon get a case that addresses the constitutionality of voucher programs.
Under tax credit scholarship programs, donors take tax deductions for contributions they make to a state-sanctioned entity that distributes those contributions to qualified students who then use the money for private and religious schools.
There are, according to the pro-choice nonprofit group EdChoice, 23 tax-credit scholarship programs in 18 states: Alabama, Arizona (4), Florida (2), Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Montana, New Hampshire, Nevada, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania (2), Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota and Virginia.
EdChoice is an Indiana-based nonprofit with a mission to privatize the public education system through a universal voucher system. (You can learn about its philosophy in this 1995 op-ed written for The Washington Post by Milton Friedman, who funded the predecessor organization that is now EdChoice. The headline: “Public Schools: Make Them Private.”) CONTINUE READING: Guess which state spends the most public funds on private and religious school education. (Hint: Betsy DeVos has a house there.) - The Washington Post
Louisiana’s Teach for America Contracts: Not As Lucrative as They Used to Be, But Still There. | deutsch29
Louisiana’s Teach for America Contracts: Not As Lucrative as They Used to Be, But Still There. | deutsch29
Louisiana’s Teach for America Contracts: Not As Lucrative as They Used to Be, But Still There.
Louisiana’s Teach for America Contracts: Not As Lucrative as They Used to Be, But Still There.
On February 22, 2019, I submitted a public records request for “all contracts between the Louisiana Department of Education (LDOE) and Teach for America (TFA) from 2016 to date.”
The result yielded four contracts between LDOE and TFA:
The objectives of these continuously-issued TFA contracts includes “sustaining a TFA presence across Louisiana.” From the 2015-16 contract:
Objectives:
- To place approximately 380 Teach for America corps members in high needs public schools serving low-income populations in Southen Louisiana and the Louisiana Delta, within the following Parishes: Ascension, Avoyelles, Concordia, East Baton Rouge, East Carroll, East Feliciana, Iberville, Jefferson, Madison, Orleans, Pointe Coupee, St. Bernard, St. Helena, and Tensas.
- To support these corps members, through ongoing professional development and support, to achieve ambitious and measurable results with students.
- To work with the Louisiana Department of Education to sustain Teach for America’s teacher and alumni presence across Louisiana.
In 2016-17, the same 14 parishes were listed, but the number of TFA recruits dropped to 285. However, in both 2015-16 and 2016-17, the contract amount CONTINUE READING: Louisiana’s Teach for America Contracts: Not As Lucrative as They Used to Be, But Still There. | deutsch29
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