10-6-13 Perdido Street School

Perdido Street School:

Stupid Shit Education Reformers Say: Education Nation Edition

There are two ways to improve our schools. Hire better people and improve the ones we have. Everything else is just noise. #EducationNation— Todd (@ToddWhitaker) October 6, 2013Gotta love the motivational speaker/education professor/car salesman Todd Whitaker weighing in on complex issues like public education, poverty and teaching with so pithy and ignorant a tweet.But what else can you expect fr

by reality-based edu... / 12min 

Murdoch/Klein Amplify Tablet Chargers Melt, Suffer Multitude Of Other Problems

There has been such a heavy sell of the Amplify tablet in the media lately, including a long Times Magazine piece a few weeks ago.Turns out Joel Klein and Rupert Murdoch should expend less effort on the p.r. around Amplify tablets and more on the safety and workability issues: A North Carolina school district has suspended the use of 15,000 tablets after reports of multiple hardware issues, includ

by reality-based edu... / 14min 

Chris Christie Lies Over NJ Transit/Sandy Story

Chris Christie loves to blame stuff on others: A report by The Record is contradicting Governor Chris Christie's recent account of why NJ Transit moved hundreds of pieces of rail equipment into a flood zone prior to Sandy. The Governor this week blamed that decision on a low-level employee, whom he said made the call with no input or oversight from top managers. But a Record examination of agenc

by reality-based edu... / 25min 

Education Reform Elites Hate Democractic Processes

It's so much easier to impose, threaten and punish:When we put this draconian treatment of those questioning test policies side by side with the takeover of whole school districts by state governments, the imposition of Mayoral control of public schools, and the mass closing of public schools over the protests of community residents in cities like New York and Chicago, we see that when it come to

by reality-based edu... / 10min 

Maybe They Can Use The Post And Daily News For The Third Grade MOSL Tests?

"If you can read the @nydailynews or the @nypost, you can do college level work," says @joelhota, lamenting many kids graduate hs unready to— Erin Durkin (@erinmdurkin) October 3, 2013You can be successful at college if you can read the Post or Daily News?Try you can be successful at the fourth or fifth grades if you can read the Post and the Daily News.Not too much complex text in these

by reality-based edu... / 1min 

Bryant High School Confines "Crazy" Students To Outside Trailer That Funcations Like A Jail Cell

I remember a time when Bryant High School was a decent school.But then Bloomberg took over autocratic control of the school system and began his systematic plan to destroy all the large schools.And that brought us stuff like this:This school treats its most troubled students like trailer trash, whistleblowers say.  The principal of William Cullen Bryant HS in Long Island City, Queens, has rounded

by reality-based edu... / 4min 

Science Teacher Complains Common Core Turns Him Into Literacy Teacher, But He Still Supports The CCSS

A common complain with the Common Core - no matter what subject a teacher teaches, he/she must become an ELA teacher and teach informational texts:At the beginning of the school year, I start off my class with a quote. In my best orator voice, I exclaim, “We need to teach our kids that it’s not just the winner of the Super Bowl who deserves to be celebrated but the winner of the science fair. We n

by reality-based edu... / 4h 

10-5-13 Perdido Street School

Perdido Street School: Perdido Street SchoolOff Duty And Undercover NYPD Cops Took Part In The Biker Chase Of Man In SUVThe Daily News reports: A pair of NYPD detectives rode last weekend with the motorcycle mob that battered a Manhattan dad as his terrified family watched, a source told the Daily News. The two cops apparently waited several days after Sunday’s brutal assault before informing supe

1 by mike simpson / 9h 

10-6-13 @ THE CHALK FACE

@ THE CHALK FACE:

Colorado Parents See Wizard Behind the Curtain

Fantastic reporting from the front line and on the ground in Douglas County, CO by Chalkface radio roving reporters.   As your own community continues to follow the yellow brick road to for-profit corporate education reform and school privatization, show them the shortcut to the Wizard by listening to parents, teachers and concerned citizens in […]

by freetoteach / 22min 

Enemies of Public Education: ExxonMobil

Here at the Chalk Face, we’ve spent some time questioning and exposing the intentions behind the energy giant, ExxonMobil.  Their ad campaign in support of Common Core continues to take up space and spread lies on the network airwaves.  It’s well-known by now that Bill Gates is the top fund owner for Exxon, which somewhat […]

by Kris Nielsen / 0min 

A Message for Voters in Boston…and Beyond

http://theindignantteacher.wordpress.com/2013/10/06/what-john-connolly-marty-walsh-must-understand-about-charter-schools-and-ed-reform/  

by jillconroy / 7min 

U.S. Needs Moratorium on (Privileged) White Men Pontificating on Race, Class, Gender | the becoming radical

U.S. Needs Moratorium on (Privileged) White Men Pontificating on Race, Class, Gender | the becoming radical.

by plthomasedd / 46min 

All Week 10-4-13 @ THE CHALK FACE

@ THE CHALK FACE knows SCHOOLS MATTER: All Week @ THE CHALK FACE Live show from DougCo Colorado today, 4PM ESTTim and I are out here meeting with parent and teacher activists who are attempting to oust a school board that is rotten. This is actually a very interesting case study. You can understand at minimum the racism and bigotry that underscore inner city school reform. Even the white savior me

1 by mike simpson / 9h

With A Brooklyn Accent: When Coercion and Intimidation Dictate Education Policy-Democracy Withers

With A Brooklyn Accent: When Coercion and Intimidation Dictate Education Policy-Democracy Withers:

When Coercion and Intimidation Dictate Education Policy-Democracy Withers

OPT-OUT/REFUSAL GUIDES FOR EACH STATE

Opt-Out/Refusal Guides for each State | United Opt Out National: 

The rapid growth of the Opt-Out movement, and the accompanying growth of mass resistance to high stakes testing, has revealed the extraordinary levels of intimidation and coercion that have accompanied the implementation of current education policies. Not only have teachers and school administrators who question current levels of testing been threatened with termination, especially if they encourage parents to opt their children out of tests, but opting out families have been told that they risk consequences ranging from being reported to Child Services to having their children denied promotion, access to Special Needs services, placement in gifted programs, or ability go on school trips or participate in school sports and music programs. 

But it is not just school officials on the federal, state or local level, who are engaged in such intimidation, it is leaders of voluntary organizations. In several states, including New York, local PTA's are being told by their state PTA organizations that they are not allowed to have speakers at their events who recommend opting out of state 

UPDATE: American Exceptionalism, According to Oliver Stone | toteachornototeach

American Exceptionalism, According to Oliver Stone | toteachornototeach:


AWOL from the Classroom

AWOL from the classroom The best teachers and a new curriculum can’t help a student who isn’t there. It might be an exaggeration to say that California has a truancy crisis, but state Atty. Gen. Kamala Harris nonetheless made an important point last week about how schools mismanage troubling levels of absenteeism. Officials estimate that there are close to 1 million elementary school students in

by aristotlethewise / 6min 

American Exceptionalism, According to Oliver Stone

 American Exceptionalism,

According to Oliver Stone 

by Katrina vanden Heuvel

Oliver Stone’s 10-hour documentary series, The Untold History of The United States, which first appeared on Showtime in 2012, is about to be rereleased this month on DVD with three new episodes and a post-series conversation between Stone and his frequent collaborator, author and activist Tariq Ali.

The series, which is remarkably free of talking heads and offers a treasure trove of historical footage, kicks off with an alternative narrative of the Cold War. Like many historians, Stone believes that, had Franklin Roosevelt lived, he might have avoided the Cold War. If the Democrats had not dumped Vice President Henry Wallace in favor of Harry Truman in 1944, Stone contends, Wallace would have carried on FDR’s policies and “there might have been no atomic bombings, no nuclear arms race and no cold war.

Untold History is full of such tantalizing what-ifs. What if Kennedy had lived? Would there have been a Vietnam War? What if George W. Bush had taken the advice of US intelligence operatives more seriously before the 9/11 attacks? Could the disasters in 

Lisa Nielsen: The Innovative Educator: Junk isn't only for mail.8 Types of posting #ConnectedEducators should avoid #CE13

Lisa Nielsen: The Innovative Educator: Junk isn't only for mail.8 Types of posting #ConnectedEducators should avoid #CE13:

Junk isn't only for mail.8 Types of posting #ConnectedEducators should avoid #CE13

Editor's note:  U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has named October as Connected Educator Month. The U.S. Department of Education’s Connected Educators initiative seeks to celebrate and encourage educators at all levels to collaborate and participate in online learning resources and communities. This piece was written to support this initiative.

If you're like most people, you're probably not a fan of junk mail. Whether it be digital or paper, getting something you didn't ask for can be an annoying waste of time cluttering physical and online mailboxes.

Today with the development of personal learning networks and professional learning communities junk doesn't only pertain to mail, it pertains to how we operate online. Here are 8 types of posting to avoid to lead you on the path to becoming a quality poster.

1-Useless sharerAll us fogies who still rely on email as our primary communication know the useless sharer well.  It is that person who forwards a joke, photo, video, or story to their entire email list without giving any context or personalization around why these people may be interested in reading it. The

Students Last: The Haunted School

Students Last: The Haunted School:

The Haunted School

The Michelle Rhee room proves scary
for both children and adults

New York City - Outside of P.S. 129 in the Bronx is a sign written in chalk on an old blackboard that invites children and adults to "Brave the haunted halls of education reform....if you dare." But if you plan on accepting the chilling invitation to enter, be prepared to wait a while because this modern take on a haunted house is so popular that getting inside can take as long as two hours.

The brainchild of PTA president Molly Shannon has been raking in thousands and thousands of dollars. "We do something like this every year to raise money for the school. But this year the response has just been incredible. We've made more money on our first weekend than we did all last year." The idea came to Shannon when she overheard a conversation between some teachers. "They were talking about how frightening all the changes in education were. Basically it just mushroomed from there."

Governor Cuomo is pro-death penalty for schools

So what exactly is so scary about the Haunted School? To find out, my husband, our two children and I decided to enter at our "own risk."

Upon entering the school, we were greeted by a robot-like coed sporting a Teach for America t-shirt and a forced smile. She promised to guide us through the house but one minute later she mysteriously disappeared and we entered the first leg of our tour without her. Jarring though that was, it was nothing compared to what awaited us. Without warning, "Michelle Rhee" leapt at our oldest child trying to tape his mouth shut. As my son cowered behind me, she threatened to remove my tenure while menacing me 

LA, iPads, Reinhold Niebuhr, and School reform | The IDEA Blog

LA, iPads, Reinhold Niebuhr, and School reform | The IDEA Blog:

LA, iPads, Reinhold Niebuhr, and School reform

by Scott Nine in Blog

4h mark as read  //  save

Global Sharing not Global Competition - A Story

by Dana Bennis in Blog

4h 

IDEA 3.0 Top Ten Countdown - Place-Based Organizing & One National Team

by Shawn Strader in Blog

4h 

Week of Action on School Pushout

by Dana Bennis in Blog

4h 

Pa. school test results woefully incomplete - Philly.com

Pa. school test results woefully incomplete - Philly.com:

Pa. school test results woefully incomplete

By Susan Snyder, Martha Woodall, and Dylan Purcell, Inquirer Staff Writers

POSTED: October 05, 2013

Pennsylvania's Department of Education released a massive new system Friday for evaluating public schools, but its own performance on how it executed that release was viewed as lackluster by some local school officials.

Newly defined performance scores were excluded for more than 600 of the state's 3,000 public schools, including charters, because of concerns about potential errors on one measure, the Keystone Exams. Coding problems prevented student growth from being calculated.

As a result, 20 percent of schools statewide received no overall score. Among those were 177 middle schools, high schools, and charter schools in the Philadelphia region, including all the high schools in the Philadelphia School District.

Also for that reason, the state delayed a feature on the website that would have allowed the public to compare schools.

"If the goal was to give parents a way to assess the quality of their schools, they certainly have missed the mark at this point," said Christopher McGinley, superintendent of the Lower Merion district. "The details of the system were not thought out and clearly were not ready for prime time today, or there wouldn't be all these holes."

No one could accuse him of sour grapes. Although Lower Merion's two middle schools could not be scored, the rest of the

By The Numbers

The Pennsylvania Department of Education has launched a new accountability system for public schools called the School Performance Profile. Schools were given a 0-100 score based on more than the standard requirements from No Child Left Behind.

8h 

Help Us Expose the Privatizers and Profiteers Selling out Our Democracy OutsourcingAmericaEXPOSED.org

Portal:Outsourcing America Exposed - SourceWatch:

Help Us Expose the Privatizers and Profiteers
Selling out Our Democracy

OutsourcingAmericaEXPOSED.org

Portal:Outsourcing America Exposed

The Outsourcing America Exposed Portal

Find the privatizers and profiteers atOutsourcingAmericaExposed.org.

When Wall Street collapsed the economy in 2008, one company eager to buy public assets from cash-strapped governments proclaimed, "Desperate governments are our best customer!” Across the country, for-profit companies are engaged in a hostile takeover of our schools, roads, prisons, drinking water, and even government itself. CMD's "Outsourcing America Exposed" project will give taxpayers the tools they need to identify these privatizers and profiteers, their eye-popping salaries, the "fine print follies" contained in their contracts that put taxpayers on the hook -- even for work not done -- and how taxpayers can take back control of public assets and public services.

Featured Outsourcing Company

K12 Inc. For-Profit Cyber Schools

K12 Inc. is a publicly-traded (NYSE: LRN) for-profit, online education company headquartered in Herndon, Virginia. As K12 Inc. notes in its most recent annual report, "most of (its) revenues depend on per pupil funding amounts and payment formulas" from government contracts for virtual public charter schools and "blended schools" (combining online with traditional instruction) among other products. In 2013, K12 Inc. took in $848.2 million from its business, with $730.8 million coming from its "managed public schools" and thus the U.S. taxpayer.^[1]

K12 Inc. was founded by former Goldman Sachsexecutive Ron Packard and former United States Secretary of Education and right-wing talk show host William Bennett in 1999.^[2][3] Packard was able to start K12 Inc. with $10 million from convicted junk-bond king Michael Milken and $30 million more from other Wall Street investors.^[4][5] For more on this, read the PRWatch investigation: "From Junk Bonds to Junk Schools: Cyber Schools Fleece Taxpayers for Phantom Students and Failing Grades", October 2013.

K12 Inc. on its own and as a member of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), has pushed a national agenda to replace bricks and mortar classrooms with computers and replace actual teachers with "virtual" teachers. K12 Inc. operated 58 full-time virtual schools and enrolled close to 77,000 students in the 2010-2011 school year, according to a May 2013 report by the National Education Policy Center (NEPC, a research organization at the University of Colorado at Boulder).^[6] Many have questioned the company's extraordinary revenue and profit levels, largely generated at taxpayers' expense.^[1][7]

Although K12 Inc. was born on Wall Street, some on Wall Street have turned against the model. As of September 2013, hedge fund manager Whitney Tilson announced he was shorting K12 Inc. stock, effectively betting that the company would fail with an unsustainable education model.^[8][9] Tilson said in a September 2013 presentation document that although average revenues per student are on the rise and the concept of online education has "strong political support, especially among Republicans" as well as "enormous buzz," "K12's aggressive student recruitment has led to dismal academic results by students and sky-high dropout rates, in some cases more than 50% annually" and "there have been so many regulatory issues and accusations of malfeasance that I'm convinced the problems are endemic."^[10]

The efficacy of the model has also been questioned by the company's shareholders in a lawsuit alleging that the firm violated securities law by making false statements to investors about students' performance on standardized tests and boosting its enrollment and revenues through "deceptive recruiting," according to the Washington Post(see below for more).^[11]

For many years, there was simply no data on virtual school performance. In 2012-13, state data became available indicating poor student achievement, as well as high student turnover, high student-teacher radios, uncertified teachers in some states (such as Florida),^[12] and a funding formula that often gives companies extended periods of public funds for a child when the child may only stay at the cyber school for a brief period of time.^[6] This new information has led some educators to call for a moratorium on the growth of full-time charter schools until policy-makers can assess the reasons for their significant failure to educate children.^[13] Educators also question the appropriateness of taking children as young as five out of a classroom of their peers and putting them in front of a computer screen.^[14][15] Low-paid teachers can be assigned as many as 250 students at a time -- as they were at Agora Cyber Charter School in Pennsylvania, according to the New York Times -- and they communicate with their pupils rarely, primarily online and sometimes by phone.^[7]

For more, see the full corporate rap sheet on the outsourcer K12 Inc. here.

Schooling in the Ownership Society: Power philanthropy undermines democracy

Schooling in the Ownership Society: Power philanthropy undermines democracy:

Power philanthropy undermines democracy

Joann Barkan has an excellent piece, "Plutocrats at Work: How Big Philanthropy Undermines Democracy", in the Fall Issue of Dissent.

She Writes:

Because they are mostly free to do what they want, mega-foundations threaten democratic governance and civil society (defined as the associational life of people outside the market and independent of the state). When a foundation project fails—when, say, high-yield seeds end up forcing farmers off the land or privately operated charter schools displace and then underperform traditional 

U.S. Needs Moratorium on (Privileged) White Men Pontificating on Race, Class, Gender | the becoming radical

U.S. Needs Moratorium on (Privileged) White Men Pontificating on Race, Class, Gender | the becoming radical:

U.S. NEEDS MORATORIUM ON (PRIVILEGED) WHITE MEN PONTIFICATING ON RACE, CLASS, GENDER

Most  (privileged) white men are wrong about race, class, and gender—and while Mike Petrilli isn’t unique, he does represent how and why:

Second, the reason the overwhelming majority of children are born poor is that they are born to young single mothers without much education or many job prospects. These mothers will struggle mightily to provide the kind of home environment that is necessary to help children get off to a good start in life and in school. To put it bluntly, they tend to be bad parents. (Not “bad” in a moral sense but “bad” as in “ineffective”; with their brains literally maxed out with basic survival, it’s easy to understand why.)

While it is embarrassing enough that Petrilli thinks putting “bad” in quote marks and offering a parenthetical qualification are enough to counter the essential condescension and marginalization in his mischaracterization of people who happen to be trapped in poverty, the larger problem is that Petrilli represents, speaks for, and speaks to a 

Engines of Change: Millennial ‘Precariat’ as Social Dynamite - Online University of the Left

Engines of Change: Millennial ‘Precariat’ as Social Dynamite - Online University of the Left:

Engines of Change: Millennial ‘Precariat’ as Social Dynamite

Posted by carl4davidson

30 Statistics About Americans Under The Age Of 30 That Will Blow Your Mind

By Michael Synder

Progressive America Rising via EconomicCollapseBlog.com

Oct 3, 2013 – Why are young people in America so frustrated these days?  You are about to find out.  Most young adults started out having faith in the system.  They worked hard, they got good grades, they stayed out of trouble and many of them went on to college.  But when their educations where over, they discovered that the good jobs that they had been promised were not waiting for them at the end of the rainbow.  Even in the midst of this so-called "economic recovery", the full-time employment rate for Americans under the age of 30 continues to fall.  And incomes for that age group continue to fall as well.  At the same time, young adults are dealing with record levels of student loan debt.  As a result, more young Americans than ever are putting off getting married and having families, and more of them than ever are moving back in with their parents.

It can be absolutely soul crushing when you discover that the "bright future" that the system had been promising you for so many years turns out to be a lie.  A lot of young people ultimately give up on the system and many of them end up just kind of drifting aimlessly through life.  The following is an example from a recent Wall Street Journal article…

James Roy, 26, has spent the past six years paying off $14,000 in student loans for two years of college by skating from job to job. Now working as a supervisor for a coffee shop in the Chicago suburb of St. Charles, Ill., Mr. Roy describes his outlook as "kind of grim."
"It seems to me that if you went to college and took on student debt, there used to be greater assurance that you could pay it off with a good job," said the Colorado native, who majored in English before dropping out. "But now, for people living in this economy and in our age group, it’s a rough deal."