9-17-14 Schools Matter

Schools Matter:

Are Standardized Tests Helpful?

from the most recent PDK/Gallup poll:

2 by Jim Horn / 40min

New Group Forms PAC to Fight Charter Takeover in Nashville

From the Tennessean:Parents in East Nashville are moving quickly to fight Director of Schools Jesse Register’s far-reaching plan to close low-performing schools, hand others to charter operators and let families in that area choose where their children will attend.Their request: Start over.Since Register unveiled his intentions last week, parents and other East Nashville residents have organized a

1 by Jim Horn / 15min 

9-16-14 Schools Matter

Schools Matter: Here's What Standing Up Can Do!Are you, too, a heroine or hero waiting to act?by Jim Horn / 27min 9-15-14 Schools MatterSchools Matter: To Chris Barbic: There Will Be No Civility for Child Abusers and Corporate Profiteers2 by Jim Horn / 8min 9-14-14 Schools MatterSchools Matter: Indy's John Harris Loflin and José Evans' Big Gig at International ED ConferenceBy Doug MartinBelow is,

1 by mike simpson / 20h 

A snapshot you won't see in the media | New Politics

A snapshot you won't see in the media | New Politics:

A snapshot you won't see in the media

I’ve written about a new wave of reform in teachers unions  that’s still under the radar of the corporate media and much of the Left press.  It’s hard for these caucuses to get media attention, which is understandable when the outlets are owned by Rupert Murdoch or the like. They have no interest in publicizing teachers’ efforts to replace the tired, unsuccessful business unionism that dominates with a vibrant, democratic social movement.  The mainstream Left media’s confusion about education reform is another story, one I explain elsewhere.  One effect of the media ignoring these growing grassroots efforts is that activists can feel isolated.

         To illustrate what’s happening in many, many places, I’m posting a flyer being distributed in Philadelphia high school. In forming a caucus based on principles of social justice, committed to union democracy and a militant fight for the teaching profession and public education along with parent, student, and community allies, activists create the nucleus of a different kind of union.  They prepare themselves to be a different kind of leadership of a different kind of union. This kind of organizing is typical of what CORE (Caucus of Rank and File Educators) did - and does - in Chicago. It’s a model that has inspired teachers and labor activists around the world.  This process has to take on the union apparatus but it’s rooted in each school where teachers build trust and develop networks. This flyer gives us a snapshot of the process happening in Central High School and in Philadelphia. 

         Union officials are responding to this new movement by adopting a more militant tone in their speeches and taking positions on social justice concerns that were previously taboo.  These shifts show the new movement is having a significant impact on the unions, and we should welcome them - while realizing that a mobilized membership and a democratic union are the essentials we need to build the unions we must have, pronto. 

• Lois Weiner's blog
 

@TeachForAmerica Airlines: Fly Us! We Build Plane in Air | Cloaking Inequity

@TeachForAmerica Airlines: Fly Us! We Build Plane in Air | Cloaking Inequity:

@TeachForAmerica Airlines: Fly Us! We Build Plane in Air

“I fly a lot,” he says. “Let’s say you go to the airport and you have a choice of three different pilots. One has trained for 30 hours online, the second has five weeks in the summer, and the third has studied, become certified and has spent a year as an intern. Which airplane would you choose?”

From For Teachers, Many Paths Into The Classroom … Some Say Too Many at NPR.org

So I asked major airlines on Twitter if they would hire pilots without a license or experience, but who were very intelligent. Here is what they told me.

So there you have it. Could the airlines have said it any better? If I want to be a pilot for a major airline, well, being bright, uncertified and lacking training just won’t work out for me. Unless of course I want to fly for Teach For America Airlines.

So JCrew has apparently has a new t-shirt contest open only to students of Teach For America teachers. I know that I @TeachForAmerica Airlines: Fly Us! We Build Plane in Air | Cloaking Inequity:

Cali Education Headlines 9-17-14

Fiscal Crisis & Management Assistance Team | CSIS – California School Information Services:

Education Headlines

• Early literacy program expands in the Salinas Valley

  Just as in a library, students in the program check out a book each Monday and are expected to read to their siblings every day.

   September 17, 2014

• Hacienda La Puente Unified OKs design work on high school football fields

  The Hacienda La Puente Unified School Board has taken the first step toward getting new artificial turf at three high schools, as well as a new swimming pool at La Puente High.

   September 17, 2014

• Teacher shortage in Monterey County persists

  There are still so many openings for teachers at Monterey County schools that administrators with the Monterey County Office of Education decided another recruitment fair was in order to help districts close the gap.

   September 17, 2014

• Rialto Unified School Board recall attempt comes up short

  An attempt to recall two Rialto Unified school board members has failed, the group has announced.

   September 17, 2014

• Elk Grove school district names Hoffman as new superintendent

  Elk Grove Unified School District’s board voted unanimously Tuesday evening to hire a local resident and Valley High School graduate as its new superintendent.

   September 17, 2014

• Base schools to be demolished, rebuilt

  The Fallbrook Union Elementary School District has entered the first stage of replacing its two Camp Pendleton schools by hiring an architecture firm that will design the new campuses.

   September 17, 2014

Read more headlines

Note: FCMAT provides links to California K-12 news stories as a service to the industry. However, some stories may not be accessible because of newspapers' subscription policies.

Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: New school supplies from the Pentagon. Deasy in L.A. grabs some M16s and grenade launchers.

Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: New school supplies from the Pentagon. Deasy in L.A. grabs some M16s and grenade launchers.:

New school supplies from the Pentagon. Deasy in L.A. grabs some M16s and grenade launchers.

All San Diego schools got from the Pentagon was this one lousy armored vehicle.



But the Wall St. Journal reports that LAUSD on the other hand, did much better. Supt. John Deasy has stocked up on grenade launchers, M16 rifles and even a multi-ton armored vehicle.

But the district is getting rid of the grenade launchers, which it never intended to use to launch grenades or use in a school setting, said Steven Zipperman, chief of the Los Angeles Schools Police Department. The launchers, received in 2001, might have helped other police in the county disperse crowds by shooting rubber munitions, he said.

As for the massive MRAP armored vehicle. Mr. Zipperman said his department thought it could be useful for evacuations and to save lives in a "sustained incident." Maybe like a sharp decline in test scores.



In Texas, near the Mexican border, the sprawling Edinburg Consolidated Independent School District has 34,700 students and operates its own SWAT team, thanks in part to military gear it received in recent years from the federal program. The gear included two Humvees and a cargo truck, as well as power generators, said district Police Chief Ricardo Perez. The district applied for weapons, too, but wasn't given any, so instead purchased its own M4 and AR-15 assault-style rifles, he said.

Granite School Dist. Police Chief Randy Johnson checks out new school supplies. 

At the Granite School Dist. in Salt Lake County, Utah, spokesman Ben HorsleyMike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: New school supplies from the Pentagon. Deasy in L.A. grabs some M16s and grenade launchers.:

Hard Times, Our Times | Bill Ayers

Hard Times, Our Times | Bill Ayers:

Hard Times, Our Times

Charles Dickens published Hard Times in London in 1854, over 160 years ago. In the opening paragraphs, he describes – with raging fidelity – the first harsh lesson drummed into the heads of unsuspecting new teachers:

“’Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, Sir!’ …

“The speaker, and the schoolmaster … swept with their eyes the inclined plane of little vessels then and there arranged in order, ready to have imperial gallons of facts poured into them until they were full to the brim.”

This fraught description of 19th-century English schooling sounds weirdly resonant, curiously close at hand, quite a lot like the school-world we teachers face right here, right now. One would think that education and schooling in a modern contemporary “democracy” should look remarkably different from the tyrannical classrooms of Great Britain under the rule of Queen Victoria. Monarchies, after all, demand fealty first and foremost, while democracies, at least theoretically, are built on the active engagement and participation of a free and enlightened people. And since schools—no matter where or when—are always mirror and window into whatever social order that created and sustains them, we can easily imagine what society those “imperial gallons of facts” were meant to maintain and reproduce. What’s harder to reconcile is the oddly familiar feeling of that autocratic classroom picture—and the brute logic behind it—in our own contemporary classroom contexts.

Charles Dickens’ introduction of the severe schoolmaster in Hard Times appears in a chapter appropriately entitled “The Murder of Innocents,” Hard Times, Our Times | Bill Ayers:

9-17-14 Seattle Schools Community Forum

Seattle Schools Community Forum:

It's Constitution Day

Constitution Day commemorates the formation and signing of the U.S. Constitution by thirty-nine brave men on September 17, 1787, recognizing all who, are born in the U.S. or by naturalization, have become citizens.Our Constitution still stands as our country's guide.   I don't think that it's some kind of "in stone" document.  I believe our founding fathers meant for it to be a living, b

by Melissa Westbrook / 10min 

9-16-14 Seattle Schools Community Forum

Seattle Schools Community Forum: Tuesday Open ThreadYesterday, Google and Mayor Murray surprised Highland Park Elementary with a major announcement about their request via DonorsChoose.org. Google "flash-funded" classroom requests from every teacher in King, Pierce and Snohomish counties who had made a request at DonorsChoose.  From Seattle.gov:Google donated $338,000 for 388 projects re

1 by mike simpson / 22h 

9-17-14 LA School Report - What's Really Going on Inside LAUSD

LA School Report - What's Really Going on Inside LAUSD (Los Angeles Unified School District):

2 percent bonus arrives for school principals, plus others

2 percent bonus arrives for school principals, plus others More than 13,000 LA Unified employees of labor groups that struck new contract deals with the district are receiving a 2 percent lump sum payment this week. Among those that found the extra bump in their bank accounts are members of the Associated Administrators of Los Angeles (AALA), which includes school principals, assistant principals,

2 by Vanessa Romo / 14min 

Seven education bills await action by Gov. Brown

Seven education bills await action by Gov. Brown Gov. Jerry Brown Seven education bills are currently awaiting the signature or veto of Gov. Jerry Brown – and before too many more stack up, we thought a review was in order. For more check out Edsource’s EdTracker, a tool that follows the ins and outs of education legislation in Sacramento. “Willful defiance” bill AB 420 would limit the authority o

2 by Craig Clough / 8min 

What’s next *if* Deasy is out? Speculation abounds

What’s next *if* Deasy is out? Speculation abounds The possibility that LA Unified Superintendent John Deasy will no longer be at the helm of the nation’s second largest school district – whether by choice or by force – is looming ever larger as the deadline for his annual evaluation approaches, leaving some district officials to speculate over how to replace him. The seven-member elected school b

4 by Vanessa Romo / 7min 

Morning Read: Lawsuit challenges CTA’s power over dues

Morning Read: Lawsuit challenges CTA’s power over dues Lawsuit challenges teachers’ compulsory dues A lawsuit working its way through the courts is striking at the core of the CTA’s power: its authority to automatically deduct hundreds of millions of dollars a year in dues from the paychecks of both members and non-members. Edsource LAUSD police to give up some weaponry obtained in federal progra

2 38min 

9-16-14 LA School Report - What's Really Going on Inside LAUSD

LA School Report - What's Really Going on Inside LAUSD (Los Angeles Unified School District): Editorial: LA Unified schools won’t get better if leaders fightEditorial: LA Unified schools won’t get better if leaders fight Via LA Times | Editorial Board This would be a difficult period for Supt. John Deasy and the Los Angeles Unified School District even if he and the school board were intent on wor

1 by mike simpson / 20h 

10 Reasons why the city’s Preschool for All Proposition 1B is not a good idea | Seattle Education

10 Reasons why the city’s Preschool for All Proposition 1B is not a good idea | Seattle Education:

10 Reasons why the city’s Preschool for All Proposition 1B is not a good idea

On face value, Initiative 1B appears to be a proposal with great promise but it’s the details, or lack thereof, that is of greatest concern to me.

If Initiative 1B passes, then an implementation plan will be developed to create the program structure. There are many questions that will remain unanswered until this process begins and we will not see this until after we have voted.

Because we will not know the details until after we vote in November, I am providing a list of reasons based on what I know so far and the City of Seattle’s Preschool Program Action Plan which the implementation plan is to be based on.

One of the consultants hired to create this Action Plan was BERK Consulting. BERK was also the consulting firm used to develop “The Road Map Project/CCER Local Race to the Top Application Development”. For more on the Road Map Project as developed in conjunction with Community Center for Education Results (CCER) , see CCER, the Road Map Project and the loss of student privacy,  The Road Map Project, Race to the Top, Bill Gates and your student’s privacy and A Look at Race to the Top.

Now for the list

1.The city and its employees do not know enough to create such a program and then run it.

For example, the city has such a limited knowledge of how to establish and run a program that they have hired expensive consultants, rather than local “experts” who have had years of experience and training in this area, to come in and create the program for them. Unfortunately they don’t know who they have hired. See reason number 2 for an example.

2. One of the two consultants who was hired to create and implement the preschool program, Ellen Frede, is also an employee of Acelero, a for profit group that has taken over four Head Start programs in other cities where Universal preK has been established in a similar fashion by the city.

Ellen Frede is Senior Vice President of Education and Research, for Acelero. See A for-profit approach to Head Start and Seattle PreSchool for All Proposition 1B: Acelero, the 10 Reasons why the city’s Preschool for All Proposition 1B is not a good idea | Seattle Education:

19 STATES ALLOW CORPORAL PUNISHMENT IN SCHOOLS ? YIKES ! | Teachers Fight Back

19 STATES ALLOW CORPORAL PUNISHMENT IN SCHOOLS ? YIKES ! | Teachers Fight Back:

19 STATES ALLOW CORPORAL PUNISHMENT IN SCHOOLS ? YIKES !

leave a comment »

I just heard a report that said 19 states in the U.S. allow corporal punishment in their schools.  Wow!  Can this be true ?

All this came to light because of the media’s discussions about the Adrian Peterson situation.  Where are these 19 states ?  I would say that they must all be in the South, but there aren’t a total of 19 southern states.

Why aren’t the teacher unions in those states demanding the legislatures do something about this misguided policy of corporal punishment ?  Every teacher should be screaming out in repulsion at this nonsense.

I was raised in a generation when most families used spanking as a disciplinary measure, and I myself occasionally used it with my own children. Most experts would agree it is not an acceptable form of discipline. There are so many other ways to discipline children and most of them are far better and more affective than spanking .

I am just shocked that 19 states allow their schools to use corporal punishment. Once again we see the ineffectiveness of teacher unions. I can’t believe that teachers find this policy acceptable and don’t attempt to do anything to have it removed. Shame on the schools that use corporal punishment, even if it is only doled out by the principal when a child is brought to the office. There are so many other effective ways to discipline school children. Could we please start using some common sense and ditch the paddle in the principal’s office ?

I  assume that the corporal punishment is only done by the principal. In this day and age, any teacher who touches a child in anger should be immediately removed from the classroom. In fact, as many of you know, I always reminded every one of my student teachers to NEVER touch a child in any way, shape, or form;  and yes, sad to say, that includes hugging and patting on the back.19 STATES ALLOW CORPORAL PUNISHMENT IN SCHOOLS ? YIKES ! | Teachers Fight Back:

#WeCantWait Photo Campaign Shows What's Missing in Underfunded Schools | National Opportunity to Learn Campaign | Education Reform for Equity and Opportunity

#WeCantWait Photo Campaign Shows What's Missing in Underfunded Schools | National Opportunity to Learn Campaign | Education Reform for Equity and Opportunity:

#WeCantWait Photo Campaign Shows What's Missing in Underfunded Schools

Posted on: Wednesday September 17th, 2014

New York State owes its students billions in school funding it refuses to provide. Now, a powerful photo campaign from the Alliance for Quality Education (AQE) is showing exactly what's missing from schools as a result.

Taking pictures with hand written signs and posting them to Twitter with the hashtag #WeCantWait, the students, parents and teachers of New York are calling for common sense, day-to-day resources for their schools, things like pre-k, art and music classes, libraries, more ESL teachers, smaller class sizes and a desk for every student. There's a lot that students are forced to go without. It's time for Albany to provide the funding that the state's own constitution and Supreme Court say schools deserve. 

Check out some of the great pictures below, or view AQE's full photo gallery here. Join the #WeCantWait campaign by making your own sign and show why New York schools deserve full, fair school funding! 

#WeCantWait Photo Campaign Shows What's Missing in Underfunded Schools | National Opportunity to Learn Campaign | Education Reform for Equity and Opportunity:

NYC Public School Parents: NYC Schools, Kids, Parents and Teachers will march in historic demonstration for climate action Sept. 21

NYC Public School Parents: NYC Schools, Kids, Parents and Teachers will march in historic demonstration for climate action Sept. 21:

NYC Schools, Kids, Parents and Teachers will march in historic demonstration for climate action Sept. 21

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: Kate Finneran, Kate@Avaaz.org, 
801-634-8811 
DATE:  9/15/14                                                             

                                                                                                      

NYC Schools, Kids, Parents and Teachers to March

Local Schools to join the People’s Climate March this Sunday September 21st

New York – Upwards of 100,000 people are expected to join the People’s Climate March this Sunday, September 21 in what will be the largest demonstration for climate action in history. The People’s Climate March has been endorsed by over 1,200 organizations, including the nation’s largest environmental groups, 80 labor unions, faith-based groups, and social justice groups including environmental and climate justice groups in New York City.

We are expecting over 10,000 kids, parents, teachers, and high school students to march on

Sunday, September 21st

WHO:   10,000 NYC kids, parents, teachers, K-12 youth, college students

Upwards of 100,000 total marchers in Manhattan. 

WHERE:   Kids and Parents Meetup pre-march

66th and Central Park West, north to 68th

WHAT:   People’s Climate March

WHEN:   September 21st, assembling between 9-10 am

On September 23, President Obama and world leaders are coming to New York City for a historic UN summit on climate change. On Sunday, we’ll take to the streets to demand the world we know is within our reach: a world with an economy that works for people and the planet. A world safe from the ravages of climate change. A world with good jobs, clean air, and healthy communities for everyone.

As parents, grand-parents, teachers, and friends,  we have a historical responsibility to demand that our world leaders respond to the threat of climate change with real solutions. The Kids, Parents, and Teachers contingent of the march will feature activist and musician, Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul, and Mary, his daughter Bethany Yarrow, Cellist Rufus Cappadocia, and more.

This is a peaceful, permitted, family-friendly march.

More details available at: http://peoplesclimate.org/logistics/

Details about NYC Schools involvement at: http://peoplesclimate.org/schools/