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Saturday, January 10, 2015

UNITED OPT OUT: The Movement to End Corporate Education Reform - United Opt Out National serves as a focused point of unyielding resistance to corporate ed. reform. We demand an equitably funded, democratically based, anti-racist, desegregated public school system for all Americans

UNITED OPT OUT: The Movement to End Corporate Education Reform - United Opt Out National serves as a focused point of unyielding resistance to corporate ed. reform. We demand an equitably funded, democratically based, anti-racist, desegregated public school system for all Americans that prepares students to exercise compassionate and critical decision making with civic virtue.:



UNITED OPT OUT: THE MOVEMENT TO END CORPORATE EDUCATION REFORM INFO [AT] UNITEDOPTOUT [DOT] COM

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UNCATEGORIZED
17 DEC, 2014

Time to Disrupt the “Disrupters”!!!

Post by Ceresta Smith Disruption! Teachers and support staffs are not typically characterized as people that engage in disruption.  By nature we strive to keep our classrooms and our academic intuitions running smoothly, as...
madeloni0
UNCATEGORIZED
10 DEC, 2014

Stand Up for Action with Barbara Madeloni

  Barbara Madeloni says : “The accountability regime has done too much damage for too long. Under the pretense of reform and civil rights, corporatists have exploited our children, undermined public schools as sites...
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Want your kids to opt out of standardized tests? The Constitution may be with you. - The Washington Post

Want your kids to opt out of standardized tests? The Constitution may be with you. - The Washington Post:



Want your kids to opt out of standardized tests? The Constitution may be with you.


Parents are finding constitutional arguments to support opting out of standardized tests, Anya Kamenetz writes, and in many cases they’re winning. (Michael Quirk/iStock)
By Anya Kamenetz January 9
Anya Kamenetz writes about education for NPR. This essay is adapted from her book“The Test: Why Our Schools Are Obsessed With Standardized Testing — but You Don’t Have to Be.”
When Jeanette Deutermann’s older son began third grade, he started crying and begging not to go to school. He developed stomachaches that a doctor said were stress-related. Deutermann, a stay-at-home mom in Nassau County, Long Island, was mystified. “In kindergarten, first, second grade, he wasn’t a kid who was like, ‘Please let me go to school,’ ” she recalled. “But he didn’t have issues.”
She eventually realized what was stressing him out: the advent in third grade of high-stakes standardized testing. On top of state-mandated annual exams, her school and district had imposed many more diagnostic, benchmark and practice tests. For Deutermann, the last straw came in February 2013, during her son’s fourth-grade year, when he brought home a notice that he’d been “selected” for something called “Sunrise Academy.” Based on their scores on the NWEA, a benchmark test, some fourth-graders — gifted as well as struggling kids — were asked to come in at 7:30 a.m. two mornings a week to prep for the state exam. “For me it was a total red flag,” Deutermann recalled. “I start asking: ‘What happens if he doesn’t do well? Will he be put on a lower track? What is the consequence?’ ” She was told the test would measure the school’s performance, not her son’s.
But Deutermann had had enough. So she founded a Facebook group, Long Island Opt-out Info, that February and started organizing other parents. The next spring, nearly 30,000 Long Island students skipped state-mandated tests — one of the biggest protests in what has become a national movement.
Parents and teachers across the country — determined to reclaim local control and opposed to market-based reforms, school closures and cutbacks — are losing their patience with standardized tests. Designed to assess students and hold teachers, schools, districts and states accountable for their performance, high-stakes exams have come to define education for many kids. The Council of Chief State School Officers has reported that, on average, students take 113 such tests between pre-kindergarten and 12th grade. Even President Obama has spoken in favor of cutting back.
The new national resistance holds that these exams do not provide useful or timely information; that they are unfair to minorities and otherdisadvantaged groups; and that tests and prep are crowding out arts, science, social studies and 21st-century skills. Officials are pushing back. Yet parents are finding constitutional arguments to support their approach, and in many cases they’re winning.
There are no hard numbers. But starting in 2013, changes to teacher evaluations related to Race to the Top, a federal incentive program, as well as the adoption of the Common Core standards, triggered a new wave of opt-out protests and boycotts led by parent groups and teachers unions. A reported 60,000 students opted out across New York state last year. Organizers in Denver and Chicago also recruited many defectors during the 2014 testing season, and protests made news in Kansas, Oklahoma, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Mexico and Pennsylvania. Bob Schaeffer of FairTest, an anti-testing group, calls the movement “unprecedented.”
This controversy goes back at least to the 19th century. In “Testing Wars in the Public Schools: A Forgotten History,” historian William J. Reese tells the story of what happened in 1845 in Boston, when reformers, led by the legendary Horace Mann, gave a very difficult surprise essay test to public Want your kids to opt out of standardized tests? The Constitution may be with you. - The Washington Post:

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Chart of the Day: Vaccinate Your Kids! | Mother Jones

Chart of the Day: Vaccinate Your Kids! | Mother Jones:



Chart of the Day: Vaccinate Your Kids!

—By 
| Sat Jan. 10, 2015 2:02 PM EST
Via the LA Times from a few months ago, here's the rise in "personal belief" exemptions from state-mandated vaccinations among kindergartners in California:
And here's where it's happening:
In Los Angeles County, the rise in personal belief exemptions is most prominent in wealthy coastal and mountain communities, The Timesanalysis shows. The more than 150 schools with exemption rates of 8% or higher for at least one vaccine were located in census tracts where the incomes averaged $94,500 — nearly 60% higher than the county median.
....At Santa Cruz Montessori in the small coastal community of Aptos, about 7% of kindergartners in 2007 got belief exemptions. Last fall, that rate was 22.6%. Principal Kathy Rideout said the school has tried different approaches to encourage parents to immunize children. They asked a doctor to talk with fellow parents. They produced handouts emphasizing the importance of immunizations and asked parents seeking belief exemptions to get counseling from a healthcare practitioner. A state law that went into effect this year makes this a requirement. But none of it made much difference, Rideout said.
...."We have schools in California where the percent of children who exercise the personal belief exemption is well above 50%," said Dr. Gil Chavez, deputy director of the California Department of Public Health's Center 
Chart of the Day: Vaccinate Your Kids! | Mother Jones:
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AFT’s Weingarten on Her Priorities for ESEA Reauthorization

AFT - American Federation of Teachers - A Union of Professionals:





AFT’s Weingarten on Her Priorities for ESEA Reauthorization





WASHINGTON— Statement from American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten on her hopes for the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. For an overview of the AFT’s policy priorities on the ESEA reauthorization, please click here.



"Fifty years ago, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act was signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson as part of the War on Poverty. It sought, as all federal policy regarding education should, to provide equal access to a high-quality education for all kids.



"Today, as Congress is gearing up to reauthorize ESEA, it is time to return to the law's moral and legal roots as a vehicle to ensure civil rights and equal opportunity for all children, particularly those most at risk. The factors that have undermined that goal—inequity, and the fixation on high-stakes tests that has eclipsed all other learning and accountability measures—must be fixed. To that end, we must expand the law with support for big ideas, such as community schools and wraparound services; project-based learning; service internships; and individual plans for over-age students, under-credited students and those who are not reading at grade level by third grade. These ideas will help address the fact that two-thirds of what affects student achievement occurs outside the classroom.



"Let's face it: Any law that doesn't address our biggest challenges—funding inequity, segregation, the effects of poverty—will fail to make the sweeping transformation our kids and our schools need. We're ready and willing to work with Congress; the White House; civil rights, education, business, community and civic organizations; parents; students; educators; and anyone else, to ensure that the reauthorization of ESEA moves us closer to the goal of reclaiming the promise of public education for each and every child."



AFT’s Weingarten on Her Priorities for ESEA Reauthorization
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Friday, January 9, 2015

Dissent from Obama Plan to Make Community College Free | Diane Ravitch's blog

Dissent from Obama Plan to Make Community College Free | Diane Ravitch's blog:



Dissent from Obama Plan to Make Community College Free

By dianeravitch



Earlier today I posted approvingly about President Obama’s proposal to make two years of community college free for all who work for it, meaning, “Students must attend community college at least half-time, maintain a 2.5 GPA, and make steady progress toward completing their program.” In the announcement, the White House said that his proposal is similar to one enacted in Tennessee by Republican Governor Haslam.
Dissenting readers feared this plan would be a means of imposing NCLB, Race to the Top, and VAM on higher education.
Here is an email I received with other concerns from a professor of mathematics at the University of Memphis:
Dear Professor,
Perhaps you are aware that President Obama is visiting Knoxville, TN, today to talk about his free community college program
http://wate.com/2015/01/08/pres-obama-to-propose-free-community-college-program/. Please see the short video in the bottom of the even shorter announcement.
I think there are many people who (should) have a less than enthusiastic take on this proposal, since it is just a manifestation of the national movement to privatize public education.
In my opinion, the idea behind this free community college proposal is to weaken high quality education (public universities), and then easily implement privatization in the form of outsourcing university/college functions (teaching, research) to private companies. Part of this future will be the wide spread use low quality forms of education, such as online courses.
Concrete example for transferring funds from high quality education to lower quality
Here is a concrete example from my university, The University of Memphis (UofM), that should give a pause to the celebration of free higher education. Last year, shortly after the announcement of a $20 million cut to UofM’s budget, came the announcement of Tennessee Promise that offers free education to all TN residents at public community colleges. In my opinion, TN Promise is a perfect example for taking money away from high quality education (UofM, in this case), and use the extra funds to invest in low quality education (community colleges). Then this lower quality education is offered to the masses as a solution to their educational needs.
To make the high-to-low quality education transformation explicit, I remark that we at UofM are now pressured to start accepting lower level courses to our major requirements to “ease the transition of students from community colleges to our university”.
This transformation to low quality education is, of course, quite similar to what’s happening in K-12 education. In Tennessee, the Achievement School District takes over schools, fires the teachers, then the teachers get replaced by young underpaid, undertrained teachers. This scheme is presented as a solution to the educational needs of the poor.
In other words, both in higher and K-12 education, low quality alternatives are offered to the poor with obvious social (and often racial) implications.
Weaken the opposition: eliminate the tenure system
The first step in the privatization movement is the weakening of the opposition. Community colleges have a much greater number of adjunct faculty than 4 year colleges. Adjuncts are much easier to control than tenured faculty. This is one of the reasons Gates is supporting community colleges instead of 4 year colleges. It’s “educational” to listen to him as he answers a question about why he focuses his efforts to community colleges and especially why he prefers adjunct professors over tenured ones; just watch this for, say, 3 minutes




At UofM, the total salary increase of all employees between 2009-2014 was $10 million. Most of this increase went to increase administration and temporary faculty. The total salary of tenured faculty during these 5 years not only didn’t increase but got reduced.
So again, the strategy of the privatizers seems clear: strengthen Dissent from Obama Plan to Make Community College Free | Diane Ravitch's blog:

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